* Bain Capital bought and gutted Guitar Center, turning it into a financially complex, debt-riddled zombie that exists to float high-risk junk bonds to fill out the portfolios of the hyper-rich, without any connection to the real world of guitars, amplifiers and musicians.
* An article about Yugoslav “Spomeniki” monuments that actually explains who built them and why, instead of continually freaking-out about how alien and goofy they seem nowadays.
* Have you seen the Guitar Wolf movie?
* Now you can use Google Street View to walk around inside Angkor Wat.
* “He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part, live in the control room through an SM57. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills.”
* Another thing you can do is dress like a Japanese farmer.
* A little more on ruin porn.
* “I just ended (eight months ago) a seven year methamphetamine bender which was fucking great, and fucking fun, but I wanted to live and stay out of jail for me, my loved ones, my fans and my spirit. We all know that drug is hard as hell, but I loved it.” Wino!
* pastel-colored pictures of Singapore.
* “In the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, no golf courses, no subdivisions. We thought of the place as a free city, where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter. Downtown we were proud of this, naturally.”
The Fuzz : I Love You For All Seasons ( Instrumental )
The Fuzz : I Love You For All Seasons ( Instrumental )
I just like this because listening to it makes me feel like I’m in a 1970s movie.
Mexico City : last November, I was walking through the Zócalo : hold up, now – imagine a village square, like in a little town somewhere, and now imagine the square if it’s sized for a city of 20 million — okay, yeah, right? Massive, thousands of people walking around, selling stuff, trying to get work. There’s always some giant exhibition or festival going on there, and it’s amazing, and you should see it. But also there’s the Metropolitan Cathedral, which is the main church of all of Mexico, which is a country with like 96 million Catholics in it, so that’ll be a gigantic and imposing ( and ancient, and sinking into the swampy ground ) church. Also, the entire thing is built directly over the ruins of Aztec temples and the palace of Montezuma. There are often Aztec dance troupes performing, and people in full headdresses and feathers and sandals and the whole bit, performing purification rituals, and this is an amazing thing : they are Mexican Catholics who speak Spanish, but they are also Aztecs, who are preserving their culture. Can you imagine any other place where people would be allowed to perform pagan rituals in front of a grand Catholic cathedral? That’s the dual-nature magic of Mexico : the priests are descended from Aztecs too.
I was walking across this giant square, and the bells were ringing, and, who knows how old the bells are, but they sounded old. So many frequencies in the air, atoms colliding with atoms, humming – I recorded some of it on my phone, which, very low bit-rate, doesn’t do that day a lot of justice, but you can hear what I’m talking about.
Zocalo Bells
Mercy : Fire Ball
My copy actually has a crack in it, but, you know, so?