Addiction is a pathetic state

Watch as they scramble through all those empty bags, trying to scrape together enough for another hit. Where's the next one gonna come from? No one knows, but that's part of addiction - you don't think about it. Just right now.

Street by street, block by block...

A ninja storm to purify? This pretty much rules, until they threatened a sixteen-year-old girl.

Commando

This dude does not roll in a joking manner:

"This month, a Florida man was arrested and charged with threatening to assassinate Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Raymond Hunter Geisel was arrested after classmates at a training seminar he attended told authorities Geisel told them that 'if he [Obama] gets elected, I'll assassinate him myself.'

A classmate also reported that Geisel said he hated President Bush and wanted to put a bullet in his head.

A search of Geisel's vehicle and a hotel room in Miami, Florida, where Geisel was attending a bail bondsman training class turned up a 9 mm handgun, ammunition that included armor-piercing and rifle bullets, police-style emergency lights, body armor, a machete and two canisters of tear gas, among other military-style items, according to the affidavit."

A bail bondsman. Is he gonna hack bail jumpers to death when he catches them? Fuck. Actually, if he gets convicted, he won't be catching anyone for upwards of five years.

On grammar...

I fully support these men in their efforts to correct some of the most long-standing and oft-viewed public grammatical errors. It is not hard for me to imagine myself in the same position. However, I am fairly certain I would not write about it on the internet, and definitely not with my identity in the open. Nonetheless, these two men are warriors for a cause in which I wholly believe (it seems that people are becoming more reckless with apostrophes by the day) and I applaud them.

Sunny Day Real Estate on 120 Minutes

MTV doesn't seem too friendly to embedding these videos, so I'll just put up the links. Fucking fantastic. 1994. From Diary.

"In Circles."
"Seven."

$44 billion

Is a lot of blood.

CIRCA SURVIVE HAS LEFT EQUAL VISION

Who the fuck cares?

Probably not.

"'This is for America. This is for NATO. This is for Bush.'

These were the phrases that the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvilli, told me were on Russian bombs falling before, during and after the numerous cease-fires that have come and gone since the Georgian-Russian conflict began." - from this sappy write up on CNN's site.

Not really sure how one on the receiving end of ordinance marked as such could know this.

Man. This was said:

"In Washington, President Bush on Friday chided Russia for Cold War-style behavior, saying, 'Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.'"

I wonder if people who say shit like this laugh about it later.

Over forty thousand people died from driving in this country last year.

"Total deaths in motor vehicle crashes in 2007 declined to 41,059, a drop of 3.9 percent compared with 2006."

That's 112 people a day.

There is no such thing as eco terrorism

End of story.

Verse - Aggression

Verse. Fuck. I wasn't expecting this from them. I have such a love for Rebuild. That record came at the right time in my life. I, too, wanted to rebuild a sense of community. Finally, a straight up American-style hardcore band (with emo parts!!) that cared about stuff and said so - "I give a fuck about the world, so why the fuck don't you?" Still, I got the impression that they (Sean) didn't want to go too far with their lyrics and alienate all the hardcore bros. Cause, for real, the music on that record is dead fucking on and def drew a lot of people in. So, so good. And Sean's voice, goddamn. "Saying Goodbye" is one of the more wrenching songs I have heard in a long time. It still gets me. A lot. It's so real.

Two years down the line, they put out From Anger and Rage, which I found to be musically disappointing, overall. I certainly appreciated the more explicitly social/political tack Sean was taking with the lyrics, but they seemed to be lacking; not as compelling or honest as Rebuild. I felt that this was a band that was coming undone, separating from itself. From Anger and Rage definitely has its moments, but it just doesn't cut it when held up to its predecessor.

So here we are, another two years later. I heard that Aggression was coming out soon. I checked the song "The New Fury" on their myspace. Sounded pretty good, better than expected. Then Punknews or some other site was streaming the whole record for a bit before it came out. I listened to it once through and felt it. I immediately ordered the LP. When it came, I opened it up, put it on and sat down with the insert, reading the lyrics along with the record. I was so moved, touched and impressed. He doesn't give a fuck about catering to the bros anymore, if he did in the first place. He wants to reach them. He wants them to learn.

Sean's voice, somehow, is more emotive than ever. The "No more control" during the drum break in "The New Fury" is so intense; it packs so much feeling, earnestness and meaning into three words. At that time, three words they are not any more, but a litany of stories and experiences that converge to produce that tone from a man's body. That's the thing about Verse, especially when seeing them - it becomes clear that Sean has this visceral earnestness about him, something that is preciously rare in my world.

The music is fucking brutal in ways that Verse never has been before. Overall, it's not nearly as fast or as punky as Rebuild. But that's totally fine. It's just different. It's definitely still Verse. They are taking parts of what they have done before, things they have always done, and bringing them to new levels. Fuck, half of "The New Fury" sounds like a mid-90s emo song, with its octave chords going this way and that. They have really done well with the pretty parts on this record, as well as the crushing chug. The last thirty seconds or so of "Suffering to Live, Scared of Love" (starting with "Right!!") demonstrate both of these points, as well as the band's deft execution of merging them, excellently. It all comes together so well. Every song is excellent. There are no throwaways or boring passages here.

And as for the lyrics, fucking christ. Everything. All over the damn record. Gone are the songs about hardcore or "the scene." It's all social and political now. Here are some of my favorites: "All of my heroes have been ruined or written out of history" ("Scream") - "New wars, new kings, the pigs came here to take everything", "I've read about Hampton's murder by the state while he slept" ("Old Guards, New Methods") - "You're raised for profit and you were born to fail" ("Sons and Daughters") - "Sleep one night under this bridge in this man's shoes and you'll learn there is no god" - ("Story of a Free Man: Chapter One"). There are so many other lines and parts of songs that I could not possibly contextualize adequately in this medium. They need to be heard in their original state to be appreciated. This is particularly so with the several songs which are stories, some even replete with quotes. This works really well, and not just with the three-part "Story of a Free Man." Accordingly, they do not lend themselves to quoting individual lines without losing a whole lot of meaning.

AND the band put together a reading list for the insert of progressive and revolutionary books that cover a variety of topics and perspectives, touching on America's rise to global dominance, veganism, the "war on terror," domestic resistance to state oppression, such as the Black Panther Party and the Weathermen/Weather Underground Organization and more. And they made a documentary list. This doesn't happen with this kind of hardcore. I love it. I never thought Bridge 9 would put out a record "dedicated to the revolutionary spirit and radical thought of oppressed people worldwide." Listen up, white kids. You NEED this shit. Throw out the Dunks.

Eco Greenies

So awesome!! Watch at what goes on when people try to make laws!! Incredible. Who knows what else lies out there, what kinds of brutal ignorance become justifications for laws that control our lives. At least the speaker challenged him and tried to make him look like a jackass.



It's funny, right? Like it's funny that Representative Frank Nicely is so poorly spoken and knows very little about his topics of choice. On the other hand, he proposes and votes on laws that legislate people's lives. He gets paid to do this. People chose this man. They have chosen him (House member of the 96th, 97th, 104th and 105th General Assemblies) and there is no particular reason why they will not again. Enough people identify with this man, what he does, what he says and what he votes for that they have repeatedly propelled him to a position of substantial power. A cursory search of his name will reveal that he stands for all the kinds of things you would expect from a man of such intellectual stature.

And all this bullshit he talks, do people really know it's bullshit? Perhaps more importantly, would people really care that it's bullshit were they to find out? Finding out is the hard part. Cause Frank Nicely, his colleagues at all levels and all the corporations for which he works, those are the people who define the terms of our society. They construct our realities. We let them. Every day, we choose to live within the boundaries they have set. Some may step out from time to time, but not too far. They will be pulled back in or expelled. These people who have installed themselves above us, they make the rules, they teach us what is what. Lots of individuals and groups can make statements and push for all sorts of things, but in the end, the limits of what can be achieved are dictated by those who control the laws, as long as they are allowed to do so.

As long as they are permitted to control us, people who think like I do and then proceed to act upon those thoughts and beliefs in ways that have been smeared as undesirable, illegal and immoral (all of which mean "effective") will forever be terrorists. No governing body in an industrial society will ever support freedom for the land on which it exists, nor for any of the life that inhabits that land.

Free the fucking land by any means necessary.