OK, three years of updating this post and I'm still tired of the same old X-mas rut. Perhaps even more so this year as advertisers broke the Halloween Barrier and started with the forced cheer and jingly bells mid-October. As Louis Black put it, "How long does it take you people to shop?" This year's…
What did Vlad the Impaler say about the word "reality?" That it should always appear in quotation marks? Burke pulled a Miller Lite from the fridge and thought, "Add 'realism,' 'representational,' 'ripped from today's headlines,' 'lifelike,' et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." He walked over to the turntable and dropped the needle on "Partytime" by…
I just learned that Ari Up, front woman for the all-girl punk band The Slits, died on October 20. Always a sad occasion when someone from rock's last gasp passes on. A year older than me, she was Johnny Lydon's stepdaughter, a fact I find hard to get my head around. Condolences to John and…
Picking up on my last post, I have to highlight The Cramps, whose amazing singer and founder, Lux Interior, left this mortal coil this very year, 2009. RIP LUX. Here we have The Cramps performing "Call of the Wighat," one of the best rock'n'roll numbers of all time. My momma had twin babies on one…
It's that spectral time of year, so I thought I'd highlight my two favorite Halloween numbers from the punk era. Though they both share the same title, "Halloween," the two diverge wildly in their treatment of the subject. The first "Halloween," by The Dead Kennedys, sneeringly asks that musical question, "What's so special about Halloween…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 