Book Review! In My Time by Dick Cheney

You know the whole phenomenon we saw with Alvin Greene winning the South Caroline primary is not entirely unprecedented in U.S politics. In dick Cheney’s book he writes about running against a fellow by the name of Jim Rogers who’d won the Wyoming democratic primaries. He was a bartender and was rumored to have checked in the wrong box in paperwork fillings to run for state legislature.
That was a fact that I found interesting in what is largely a very dull book. It starts out with a bang, goes into a very detailed account of what actually transpired in the White House on the morning of 9-11. However, reading the book which is nearly 600 pages long is like watching hours and hours of C-SPAN. He is not a gifted political writer like Ron Paul or a hilarious provocateur like Michael Savage. He is a former statesman, a little on the pompous side. Indeed, it is not as good a book as Where’s the Birth Certificate?” or nearly as engaging a read.
Occasionally I pick up some sort of intriguing tidbits. At the time that Saddam Hussein’s forces where entering Kuwait, apparently Chaney was sent to meet with that Mubark despot they just kicked out of power in Egypt, and Saddam’s diplomat’s and he were coming literally in and out of the same door, one right after the other. You do get these occasional tidbits like that only a figure in the very top positions would know. Apparently, during the same conflict the emir of Qatar was in a limo with Chaney, turned around and asked “So, are you going to nuke Saddam?”. Pretty funny and pretty intriguing, but I’m not sure they really save this book though. I have a feeling Chaney phoned this book into ghostwriters, to be honest. It is not entirely surprising or exciting to know that Dick spent a lot of time fishing and hunting with Halliburton employees during the Clinton years. A lot of things in his book are not at all surprising if you watch the news with any regularity. Chaney actually wrote the sentence “the attacks of 9/11 had a significant impact on the nation’s economy”.
Thanks guy.
What is somewhat revealing is that Dick Cheney points the finger in the Valerie Plane thing on Rich Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State. Apparently, there’s a tape of Rich Armitage mentioning the whole Valerie Plane is a spook to Bob Woodward four times.
Here’s the YouTube:

Cheney goes on at length to defend Scooter, his buddy, for quite some time.
Can you imagine that all this deal was made about Valerie Plaine by the left in this country and yet there are people in the American left who view Bradley Manning as a hero?

Film Review: Lady Magdelene’s! One of the Worst Films of All Time!!!!!!

I only know about this film because a film I was in is showing directly before this film at the one art-house theater in Las Vegas. Words cannot express how bad this film is. It’s a spy movie and a failed comedy about a brothel in Las Vegas made on a micro-budget. It apparently showed at a libertarian film festival. I’m one of the few people who has actually been a member of the Libertarian Party I’ve never heard of a libertarian film festival. Also, I don’t have any sense as to what this film has that expresses a libertarian viewpoint or any other form of ideology.
They made this film nearly two hours long on top of it. The plotline has to do with this federal agent gets transferred from working against terrorism to working on a brothel that has gone into default. It ends up being that the hookers at the brothel end up trying to thwart a terrorist attack.
It’s wretched. The hookers aren’t even that cute some of them.
It keeps going and going.
The acting is so worse then the acting in porn. It was made for five bucks in Las Vegas.
I was involved with the Libertarian Party and I was in a low budget film in Vegas and I had never heard of this piece of crap.
Osama bin Laden is in it. The jokes, however, are not at all funny.
It’s one of the worst films ever.
At the end there’s a lengthy out-take type real deal. It keeps going. They sing in it a few times.
It’s awful.

On the Making of Johnny Reaper

As you can see this is a film that has me in it. The world premier of this film is at Theater7 this evening in Las Vegas. It was directed by this film student Michael Zayas. I think Zayas was only 17 or something like that when we shot the thing. He’s only doing intro to film at a local school in Vegas, community college if I’m not mistaken. Even the level of professionalism for the trailer is something else considering how young Michael Zayas is. I think it’s very difficult for independent filmmakers to even get their films on a big screen. This guy Zayas he did it in his teens with his dad on the set. Get this, the actors that made the film had to correct Michael Zayas on details about drugs because Michael Zayas had no real experience with drugs- because he is so young.
Influenced by Chad Freeman over at PollyStaffle, Zayas made the decision to cast me as a homeless person that plays a small but pivotal role in the tragedy that transpires when a young man’s first drug deal goes array. I was told to look as crazy as I could, which I think I accomplished successfully. I was allowed to improvise my lines. I have not gotten the opportunity to see the finished version of the film.
It’s a bleak little piece of cinematography. Zayas is a weird little filmmaker. It was all very much local actors from Las Vegas that made the film. There was no “budget” really to speak of.
I think it’s good. There are some very abstract and odd qualities to it. Essentially though, it has hit the head on the hammer that when you get involved with drug dealers and such you may really have no idea what you are getting into.
A homeless derelict in Vegas is likely to tell you as much with conviction, whether or not you listen.

Metalhit Free Download Series/Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls (SomaFM)

Impasse and Innovation:


This is a development on a train of thought I’ve written about elsewhere, but here I intend to specifically address the issue and fully develop the idea.
I have written elsewhere about a kind of impasse in modern music. I wrote about this in a review I was commissioned to do for the Jerry Magoo art blog of the latest single by the band Midnight and I commented something to the effect that metal and also goth or gothic/industrial music had reached a kind of impasse where the better newer or current bands actually sounded like re-creations of bands from the 80’s, in the case of Midnight they sounded like the 80’s metal band Venom. That is fairly apparent in a lot of what goes on.
Not really wanting to spend a lot of money on music, I’ve been listening to the Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls station on the Internet radio station SomaFM, which has existed for a few years. That’s the gothic/industrial station. I have to admit that I have trouble telling the difference on there between tracks by a more recent band like Collapsar and a track from an early 80’s artist like Legendary Pink Dots or Coil without looking at who’s playing and doing a web-search on that individual artist to see what the years are on them. I am a huge fan of the Metalhit Free Download Series of about a year ago, which was a release of 6 some hours of free music by underground metal bands that stretches from the 80’s to the present. Both Doomed and the Metalhit Free Download Series are full of music I was unfamiliar with, but truth to tell, it can be very difficult to tell modern bands on their from bands that started when I was a child. Occasionally on Doomed they play a track that I recognize like “Double Dare” by Bauhaus or “Last Remains” by Carcrash International, but there’s plenty of it that I have not heard, although a number of these bands are bands from the last 10 or so years that sound like college music of the 80’s. Doomed also does something which kind of annoys me which is they play sound bites from the movie Halloween over and over again. Metalhit Free Download series is much the same way with extreme metal. The bands on there are very good but more recent thrash metal, black metal, and death metal bands on their don’t sound racially unlike bands from the 80’s. In the case of the Folk Metal and Gothic Metal editions of the series bands of the last twenty years would be hard to distinguish in terms of the dates of the bands existence.
This new Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu that’s coming out in two months, though made by older musicians, may help to point away out. By the very fact Lou Reed is on that album it must radically re-configure metal for good or ill. The information released so far about the album would imply that this is the case, because the album has ten songs on it but is nearly 90 minutes long. The gossip webpage Heckler Spray reviewed the album claiming to have an advance copy and they panned it, but I checked back on them they’ve published positive statements about The Strokes, so they clearly don’t know or understand much about music.
That brings up another very basic notion that I have written about at length, which is the extent to which the Strokes and bands of the like represent an even deeper impasse within the human psyche. If you consider the amount of energy that the hipster culture in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn have spent on bands like the strokes taken into account considering the chord progressions that the Strokes and The White Stripes used did not differ greatly from those on early albums by the Kinks from the mid 60’s, that's dismal. It was a phenomenon that existed because American Apparel sent a paycheck to this and that publication; it’s a phenomenon that eclipsed other kinds of artistic expression in the arts oriented press for years. If you take a good long look at some of the things that indie rockers have deemed experimental, let’s say Sonic Youth for example- it remains fairly tame compared to some of the extremes you would find in a body of music like the Metalhit Free Download Series or the playlist for Doomed. That remains true even with the impasse that I’m talking about where bands on those seem to be indistinguishable from music from 20-30 years ago. The thing is that some of that material just was to abrasive to ever be absorbed into a culture for the masses. A lot of that kind of music is going to be of serious interest to, I don’t know, German art students or demographic groups like that. Doom metal has never been for the masses.
Or maybe there was just something magical about the 80’s musically. Certainly the early years of extreme metal and the emergence of gothic/industrial music have a certain kind of magic.

Book Review: Troublemaker by Christine O’Donell

Christine O’Donell is…she’s weird. If you’re not familiar with her she’s that senate candidate from Delaware that did the weird ad where she denied being a witch- meaning literally that she did not practice witchcraft. Her book is not as bad as I would have thought, but she’s a terrible face for the right.
She’ll never get over that stupid witch commercial. Her book explains at great length what actually happened there, but it doesn’t come off as any less strange after she goes through explaining it. There was something about her going on a date with a goth boy in high school which came up on a Bill Maher show years ago and re-surfaced during her 2010 campaign. Apparently, her advisors came up with it thinking it was a great idea, but in fact, it looks to have killed a campaign that was otherwise going well. It killed her.
Her new book, Troublemaker, is an autobiographical account of that same campaign written in a very inspirational speaker/self-help sort of tone. It has some political tidbits I wasn’t aware of, including the feud between O’Donell and Karl Rove, in which O’Donnell calls Karl Rove a RINO (Republican in Name Only). She calls Rove a liberal in the book. That’s great. Somebody has to bring her to a Manhattan art gallery opening or a Judith Butler lecture to say things like that. That would be amazing! They wouldn’t think she was a witch, they’d think she was Satan himself! That I would pay to see!
Christine O’Donell, that whole bit about her being a witch- that is extremely bad politics that those older statements came up and the ad responding to the old statement from the Bill Maher show were laugh out loud funny. Then by writing a book that goes into the backstory behind the TV ad at great length, she’s dug herself even further in the ditch. People don’t want their leaders to be kooks that make strange comments about witchcraft in public. They want leaders that appear stable. A little bit earlier, the New York City Councilmen Dan Halloran admitted to practicing the Neo-Norse religion of Theodism during his campaign for office. In fact, what this demonstrates I think is that if Christine O’Donell had actually practiced witchcraft and freely admitted it, she might have done just fine. Instead she just made some very odd statement about dabbling in the occult years and years ago, it resurfaced, and she made a hilariously funny video denying she was a witch. If your running for public office, if you’re someone like Sarah Palin, you’ve got to know that anything you say is going to be subject to the usages of the liberal media and by comedians, talk show hosts and the like. She faltered completely.
She’s weird. She could do very well for herself and I think has done very well for herself on the conservative speaking circuit. I think she was dead in the water for public office with the witch thing.

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick

When I worked as a reporter on the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano in Los Angeles, there were these long dull parts of the trial that had to do with technically how the actual wiretaps where performed with the half cats and the phone boxes and such. Kevin Mitnick is so into that exact same crap that he’s gone to jail many times for screwing around with it. He didn’t make any money off it, either. It is completely inexplicable to me.
Kevin Mitnick is one of the world’s better known computer hackers, his autobiography Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker is an account of this very phenomena that still doesn’t clarify why he did what he did. The book does give a lot of insight into how he did what he did, which was as much through “social engineering”- or lying to get information out of people working at computer and phone companies, as it was through actual physical hacking. Alas, it was much like Pellicano- you had some very, very gullible people at the phone companies.
Actually, a lot of it was the exact same crap that tended to put me to sleep in Pellicano. Mitnick was into getting information out of the DMV which was a lot of what Pellicano went down for.
When he gets out of jail in the end he gets a happy ending because he makes a fortune in speaking engagements, but he could not have seen this coming and he was in prison for years.
Are phone systems that interesting to you, guy? I’m telling you man, I was nearly asleep when they did the whole bit about the phone boxes in Pellicano. My dad does consulting work for the utilities that gets into some fairly dry stuff, but he gets paid to do it. I’m a certified firearms instructor my grandfather did the M14, even the engineering in guns is more interesting.
WTF?
Don’t get it.
Fairly readable book though.

More Wretched Music! Wilco!

This wretched band started in 1994 but was highly influential on a bunch of wretched bands at my college Bard in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Members of those bands later ended up in Company and the band the Damnwells. They were worthless, but beyond that Wilco is worthless. Wilco is best known for creating a kind of indie country rock. What a bad idea that was. It’s pretty intriguing that a bunch of hipsters own the music of blue collar rural America.
Wilco have a new album coming out. Hurray. Going to line up and buy that record since they aren't completely boring and irritating at all. If you spend time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn I’m sure some hipster will be more than happy to put it on for you while your waiting for your chai tea.
Well, 17 years of Wilco was not enough so they have a new album out. Here is the aging Wilco playing a track for you.
In a related note. I was writing about the Garbage Pail Kids Movie on here. You know how the plotline of Human Centipede 2 is that the guy finds Human Centipede 1 and becomes sexually aroused by it? I think they should apply the same premise to making a Garbage Pail Kids Movie 2….