On today’s front page of the Kansas City Star website (which has probably changed by the time you read this), the top headline (under a heading marked TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR) is “Puppet Show at Library.” We take you now inside the bustling offices of a major metropolitan newspaper:

“Henderson, what’s the word on the puppet show at the library?”

“I talked to a couple of the kids. Sounds like it was ‘Peter Rabbit,’ but I’m trying to get confirmation from another source. The librarian refused to be quoted on the record.”

“All right, we need that story by 6 pm for tomorrow’s edition. We can’t let the Smithfield Elementary School Gazette beat us to another scoop. Jenkins, what about that bake sale down at the Lutheran church?”

“It’s Tuesday at 7 pm, pies and cakes to be sold, sales to benefit the youth group’s trip to the Harry Truman museum.”

“How about baked goods? Muffins? Rice Krispie Squares?”

“Uh, I’m not sure, boss.”

“Goddammit! Our readers deserve to know the truth! You get that reverend’s wife on the phone this minute, understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Peterson, how about that German chocolate cake recipe?”

“I’ve got the cake recipe ready to print, just called a couple of sources to find out how many eggs go into the frosting.”

“Sounds good. I’ve got to run, I have an exclusive interview at 4 with the man with the fourth largest coin collection in Missouri. You don’t have a story like that fall into your lap every day, I tell you.”

Blog filler:

- I finally noticed last week that the much vaunted tax cut is now being reflected in my paycheck. Yes, now I’m taking home $7.28 more every two weeks. WOO-HOO, WE LIVIN’ NOW, DOG! THIS SURELY WAS WORTH DESTROYING THE BUDGET SURPLUS! MORE CAVIAR, M’LADY?

- Fast rocketing up the chart of Things That Really Fucking Irritate Me are the ads for that fucking “Puppetry of the Penis” show that’s incessantly advertising on cable here in DC. (No, I’m not linking to it. Find it yourself.) It’s apparently another curse on the world from Australia, clearly the worst continent on the planet (even Antarctica has inspired a few decent nature documentaries, at least). Personally, the only way I’m spending an evening looking at other dudes’ penises (or penii) is if all of the mysteries of the universe are revealed during the course of the show. Even then, it’s a 50/50 proposition at best.

- As part of my continuing quest to pattern my life after J. Henry Waugh, I've been simulating fictional baseball seasons in Out of the Park Baseball. I use fictional players, and the names generated by the computer for the players are alternately hilarious and weirdly cool. Here's a few of my favorites, suitable for use in your next novel or fake ID:

- Rabbit Armbruster
- Shigetoshi Sanchez
- Sparrow Studebaker
- Laddie Lemasters
- Bud Sepulveda
- Lee Gandhi
- Astyanax Garay
- Moxie DiGiacoma
- Johnny Mullet

- God, I don't even want to think about what ads Blogspot is going to give me after that "Puppetry of the Penis" rant.

What if the New York Post headline writers were assigned to write about classic movies? I think it would go…a little something…like this:

- MAN SNAPS AFTER MOM NAG
- CHIMP TO NEW YORK: DROP DEAD!
- PRINCESS/MIDGET SEX RING
- PUNK HELD IN SMALL TOWN STAB CASE
- SINGING, DANCING ERUPTS AT PR GANG FIGHT
- NEWS MOGUL CROAKS, LAST WORD PUZZLE
- LOVE TRIANGLE FOILED BY NAZIS
- THREE SUSPECTS FINGERED IN JAP MURDER
- COLLEGE GRAD, MOM IN SEX ROMP
- TOT NAB IN WITCH SLAY

MP3age. I've already posted more than enough about my obsession with early 80's post-punk, so let's move on to another one of my favorite things - 50's rock and roll. This is "Castle in the Sky" by the Bop-Chords, for my money the best doo wop song of all time - perfect soaring harmonies, a guitar/sax break that kicks the song into another level, and a general musical/lyrical vibe that captures awestruck adolescent love in a sweet but not too gloppy or sentimental manner.

A postscript to that last entry: I inexplicably googled Candlebox and found their official site. Man. Touting a new record coming out in 1998 and an appearance on the “Waterboy” soundtrack. No tour dates scheduled. That’s the internet equivalent of tumbleweeds blowing over some abandoned western street. Yet I have to admit that finding that site comforted me somewhat, because it made me realize that today’s annoying “modern rock” radio staples are tomorrow’s bizarre internet curiosities. So keep that website updated, Evanescence.

Generally, I hate it when people (usually baby boomers) say things like "I can't believe it was x years since..." It's a stupid denial of the fact that time moves inexorably onward no matter how we try to pretend that we're going to be young forever and nothing's ever going to change. So forgive me for saying this:

I can't believe it's been almost ten years since the Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen was released. I was in high school, listening to the local "modern rock" station, when I first heard "Gentlemen." That song stood out among the Candleboxes and Stone Temple Pilots and the other dime store nihilists littering the scene for the sheer commitment and agonizing detail Greg Dulli applied to his self-loathing. Sure, maybe it was a pose just like everyone else's, but Dulli’s vocal ability and over-the-top dedication put the Whigs on a different plane than nearly everyone else at the time. In his prime, Dulli was sort of the rock version of Al Pacino - an inveterate scene chewer who nevertheless managed to put forward vivid and vital performances.

Gentlemen is one of the great concept albums of all time - a song cycle that captures the intense pain and stifling atmosphere of an abusive and codependent relationship in all of its fucked up glory. The lyrics (which alternate naked emotion, surgically precise psychological observations and clever one-liners) are perfectly intertwined with the music - this is a smothering, tense, seething howl of an album. The Whigs never quite matched that moment again. The followup, Black Love, is an attempt to do the same concept thing on the subject of lies and jealousy. While it’s an underrated album, it doesn’t quite cohere as well as Gentlemen, and Dulli’s penchant for over emoting backfires on a few tracks. But one great album is better than most artists manage, and I can only hope that the Whigs eventually get their historical due instead of being lumped into the mid-90’s modern rock one hit wonder woodpile.

Attention struggling musicians!

Tired of playing to small, indifferent crowds for beer money? Sick of having that demo tape ignored by each and every record label’s A&R department? It’s time to sign up with the Connecticut School of Singer/Songwriters and join the exciting field of adult album alternative radio! Yes, you could be the next John Mayer or Jack Johnson or Pete Yorn or Howie Day with our proven course. Here’s just some of the many courses we offer:

- Minor Chords - The Musical Equivalent of a Heavy Sigh

- How to Walk the Line Between “Sensitive” and “Total Pussy” (The Leo Sayer Paradox)

- Hair Care and Maintenance: Keeping that Uncombed Yet Carefully Maintained Look (special classes available for bang trimming)

- Songwriting 101 - How to Avoid Writing About Anything Besides Your Own Feelings

- Forces of Nature, Works of Art, and Other Things of Beauty to Compare Women To

- And for established performers with critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful bands, our intensive three day seminar will teach you how to smooth out any eccentricities in your sound, shoot a video that’s VH1-worthy and dump your long-suffering girlfriend for a b-list celebrity or model!

So, what are you waiting for? A major label deal and some of that sweet college undergraduate poontang is just a phonecall away!

New empythree - "Murder or a Heart Attack" by the Old 97s, off of 1999's Fight Songs. The chorus to this song never fails to get stuck in my head each time I hear it. I can only hope that the Old 97s are on temporary hiatus, because Rhett Miller's last solo album was disappointingly bland in a last-decade-of-Paul-Westerberg's-career sort of fashion.

I recently went into a K-Mart in the town of my birth. Normally, I try to steer clear of shopping at large discount retail stores, and this visit confirmed all of my reasons for avoiding such places. There’s no way to say this without sounding elitist or arrogant, so let’s just spell it out: Discount retailers combine some of the worst aspects of humanity with some of the most worthless detritus that the capitalist system has to offer, creating a uniquely depressing and soul-crushing experience.

When I was in business school, we were often given case studies on the decline of K-Mart (and Ames, Roses, etc. etc.) relative to Wal-Mart. We would earnestly try to figure out ways for K-Mart to remarket itself, refocus its product line strategies, and various other ideas that all amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or reediting the director‘s cut of The Brown Bunny. What’s really necessary to remake K-Mart into a place that wouldn’t inspire so much shame and self-loathing is an exorcism. There’s just something about a K-Mart that inspires ennui, boredom and the sadness that comes from crushed dreams and unmet expectations - the distinctive mix of off-brand merchandise, surly, woefully inept employees, and the sadly dazed clientele, earnestly slogging through the muck hoping to find something worthwhile. And this particular K-Mart is even worse - the only store left in a dead strip mall in the unfashionable side of town. (Which would presuppose that there was a fashionable side of Salisbury, so let’s just say “even more unfashionable.” But I digress.) This scene is like the film negative version of all of those yupscale IKEAs and Targets and Nordstroms that dot the well-to-do suburbs in major metropolitan areas.

At least shopping at Wal-Mart, while not socially acceptable in some circles, doesn’t quite create the same effect. Shopping at K-Mart is a lot like wearing sweatpants in public or abstaining from showering and shaving on a regular basis - an admission that you can’t quite cut it in civilized and polite society, that this is as good as it’s going to get and you’ve decided to accept your low station in life. Whatever you may think about Wal-Mart (I personally loathe them for destroying whatever was left of smalltown America and helping in the continuing drive to turn us all into wage-shift serfs), at least they’re clean, feature merchandise that you wouldn’t be ashamed to purchase and use, and employ people who at least pretend that their souls haven’t been crushed by the weight of the world.

Next week on the Vitamin B Glandular Show: “Dollar Stores: Dear God in Heaven, Why?”

In lieu of a semi-substantive entry, here are a few lists.

Words and phrases that have permanently remained lodged in my brain, for one reason or another:

- endemic to the system
- nascent Sammy Glick
- chestnut stew
- Kurt Waldheim’s ghost
- The Telltale Duodenum
- the luck of design
- modern agribusiness
- nitro burning funny cars
- Pierre "Pete" DuPont

Best lines from Glengarry Glen Ross:

- "What's your name?" "Fuck you, that's my name."
- "There’s an absolute morality? Hah. Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing. Bad people go to hell. I don’t think so. You think that. Act that way. Hell exists on earth. Yes. I won’t live in it. That’s me."
- "Fuck the machine. FUCK THE MACHINE!"
- "Will you go to lunch? I'm trying to run an office here. Will you go to lunch?"
- "It's not a world of men, Machine. It's a world of clockwatchers, bureaucrats, officeholders, what it is. No adventure to it. That's why we've got to stick together - we're members of a dying breed."

Best failed 90’s pop culture items that weren’t as bad as people made them out to be:

- Crystal Pepsi
- McDonald’s Arch Deluxe
- R.E.M.’s Monster album
- those sandwich bags with the yellow/blue close seal thingy

Why I like lists:

- Blank space makes blog entries look larger than they really are.
- Writing all of those words to connect sentences into paragraphs is too hard.
- By listmaking, I can avoid all of that annoying "crafting an effective argument" shit.
- It's important to reduce everything I like or enjoy into easily definable categories.
- I'm a pathetic geek.

MP3 du jour of the week - "We Are Time" by the Pop Group, which I already blathered about in the previous entry. It's kind of a large file (7.5 MB), but it's a great song, and trust me, you don't have anything better to do today anyway.

88 lines (OK, considerably less) about 5 albums:

The Pop Group, Y. One of the least remembered of the great late 70’s English post-punk bands (their entire catalog is out of print at the moment), the Pop Group offered up a mix of dissonant funk, overeducated experimentalism of the Beefheart/Zappa school and left wing political screeds. Mark Stewart is a rather overbearing front man, and Y is the kind of album that’s hard to listen to in one sitting. But when their mishmash of influences cohered into a memorable groove like “Thief of Fire” or “She is Beyond Good and Evil,” the effect is undeniably powerful. And the epic “We Are Time” is a striking masterpiece - the band locks upon a insistent bass-and-guitar riff, while Stewart’s impassioned exhortations sound liberating instead of hectoring.

Steely Dan, Everything Must Go. While I should probably give this one a few more listens, my initial impression is that there’s too many songs stuck in the same midtempo autopilot groove without the memorable lyrics and arrangements of classic Steely Dan. I’d rank it a few notches below Two Against Nature, which had a similar sound but several songs that stood out from the pack. A solid album, though, and I’m probably judging it more harshly than I would otherwise because of just how brilliant the Dan’s output was in the 70’s.

Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music. I lost interest in the Jayhawks when Marc Olson left the group; the flat Midwestern harmonies of Olson and Gary Louris lifted them above much of the Americana pack, and without Olson the Jayhawks fell back into the pleasant but forgettable second tier. Rainy Day Music isn’t quite a return to form, but it has a couple of dead solid perfect country rock gems - “Save it for a Rainy Day” and “Eyes of Sarahjane.”

Godz, Contact High. Most famous for being hailed by Lester Bangs as one of the keepers of the rock and roll flame during the psychedelic/progressive era, the Godz haven’t quite gotten the same critical renaissance that’s been accorded to other Bangs favorites like the Stooges and the 60’s garage rock bands. The Godz were a little folkier and less reliant on loud guitars and straight ahead 4:4 beats than those aforementioned groups; at times, Contact High is reminiscent of a weirder and much less instrumentally and vocally adept version of Red Krayola or ESP labelmates Pearls Before Swine. It’s an interesting listen and they had their moments (particularly on the oddly affective “White Cat Heat” and Hank Williams cover “May You Never Be Alone Like Me”), but it’s not quite as timeless as the other stuff that Bangs championed.

Jerry Yester/Judy Henske, Farewell Aldebaran. I admit it, I’m a sucker for this folk hippie shit, and Farewell Aldebaran is one of the great lost classics of the genre. (Lost, that is, unless you‘re a colossal record geek, because it‘s never even been released on CD.) Enough has been said about the beauty of Judy Henske’s voice by Andrew Vachss alone, so I’ll just add that Farewell Aldebaran combines ageless folk melodies (“Raider” and “Charity”) with the melodic adventurousness that typifies the best psychedelia (“Farewell Aldebaran”). And “Snowblind” is the best Humble Pie song that Humble Pie never wrote. (Yes, I actually mean that as a compliment.)

I usually don't do the post-link-and-comment thing, but I wanted to share this inspirational tale of a man who overcame physical adversity to achieve his dreams. (Plus, I'd like to publicly announce my interest in joining the Hawk's entourage, preferably as the guy who folds the dollar bills lengthwise.)

Shameless self-promotage alert: I have a guest column in today's Ludic Log. (And if you're not reading the Ludic Log every day, what the hell is wrong with you, anyway? It's only one of the most consistently smart and funny sites on the whole damned World Global Interweb. And I'm not just saying that because of all the sweet, sweet guest columnist lucre I received.)

And for those of you wondering just what the hell that was all about, anyway, it's a scene from "Guttersnipe," my never to be finished novel about a wouldbe beatnik poet who likes bowling. (Ha, ha, funny pun there. I'm a genius.) It was intended to be a Bukowski parody of sorts, but I haven't read any Bukowski in six years, so I probably missed some of the nuances.

I’m currently rereading "One Market Under God" by Tom Frank. The book was written in 2000, before the Bush regime and 9/11 and the recession, and I thought it would be interesting to revisit a cynical view of the Greatest Economy Ever Where Everyone Gets Ice Cream!!!! now that the economy is in the shitter and the naïve predictions about how technology and globalization were going to create a Perfect Economy Forever look more than a little ridiculous.

Frank’s central thesis concerned “market populism,” the prolonged media and political campaign that reached its zenith in the late 1990s. This PR blitz was designed to convince the American public that deregulation and globalization would benefit everyone. The market populists argued that since people choose what they want to purchase in the marketplace, that automatically implies consent of the current economic system. And if something went out of whack, people would automatically punish it by altering their purchasing decisions, thus eliminating the need for democracy or regulations or government. The market populists charged the government with being an large, elitist institution standing in the way of the People’s Market, and by eliminating this burden, we would have prosperity and everyone would get an IPO and get to go to work in their jeans and buy ergonomic chairs and be happy all the time forever. Forward progress (ie, the market‘s domination of every aspect of life) was inevitable. (Does this sound like old fashioned 30’s style Marxism in reverse? That’s the point.)

Since the economic downturn, the nation’s PR and media monoliths haven’t changed their script too much. Sure, the pie in the sky stock market bubble inflation has been toned down somewhat, and there was a brief, perfunctory public flogging of a few corrupt execs after Enron imploded, but the central theme is clear: the market will solve everything, if that darn pesky government will just get out of its way. Despite the fact that the liberal/left critiques of the "New Economy" (that it wasn't the job-creating engine it made itself out to be, that it was based on ridiculous, hyper-inflated views of stock prices and the potential of technology, that almost all of the wealth went to a handful at the top) have been proven to be pretty accurate, no one outside of those same liberal/left circles is proposing any sort of structural change.

The depressing thing is that despite the fact that the marketeers’ gospel has proven to be massively flawed, at best, not much has changed about the American political or social landscape in the past three years. Unlike other times in this country’s history, the American public has sort of placidly accepted their fate. There’s no public outcry, no calls for massive change. Whether this is due to the 9/11 aftershocks (and the Bush regime’s subsequent FLAG = US campaign) or whether it’s been caused by the public internalization of the market populist mindset, it’s a massive change from prior, similar incidences. Most people are okay with the idea of tax cuts that will only benefit people who own massive amounts of stock. The hue and cry over criminal CEOs has mostly evaporated, except for petty thieves who portray cold, patrician bitches on national TV. American liberals are rallying around Howard Dean, a guy who labels himself a "fiscal conservative". The national economic debate is embarrassingly shallow, centering as it does around tax cuts for wealthy people versus “stimulus packages” of little import that are too small and significant to make a dent in the current situation. It’s embarrassing to think that a country which once had long and intensive struggles for worker’s rights, which became righteously pissed off when a recession happened (even as recently as ten years ago) has lowered its expectations to this point, where during economic hard times we just sort of sit around hoping not to get laid off and voting in people who shower cash on the people who need it least.

Loose ends tying department:

- New MP3 - "4th of July" by X. Yeah, obvious choice for the holiday, and you've probably heard it already, but go listen to it again - it's a great, bittersweet little slice of life story that could've been written by Raymond Carver, if he was a songwriter for a cult midlevel rock and roll band instead of a internationally acclaimed author.

- My official position on the White Sox trades of the past week: unsure about the Alomar trade, but at least Kenny Williams didn't give away the store like he usually does; dislike releasing D'Angelo Jiminez, who is an underrated player unfairly maligned because of some glaringly boneheaded decisionmaking at times; like the Everett trade, since Cotts/Honel/Rauch apparently weren't dealt, but he's a brutal centerfielder so I hope they stick him in left or DH.

I'm working on some other projects right now, so at the moment I can't come up with any of the moderately-amusing-to-me-and-no-one-else hijinx that have made this blog so beloved. So I thought I'd post about my day.

6:45 - wake up 15 minutes before alarm goes off, think up self-serving justification to set alarm back 15 more minutes (I'll take an alternate route to save time, take a really short shower, work 10 minutes later, etc.)

6:48 - set alarm back 15 minutes. Fail to go back to sleep, stay in bed until alarm goes off anyway.

7:15 - get up/shower/dress/etc. Fail to do any of the bullshit rationalizations I came up with for moving the alarm back.

7:45 - leave for work. Amount of expletives used during commute: 26.

8:40 - show up 10 minutes late for work. No one notices or cares. Start to wonder how long I could disappear before my employer would quit paying me.

8:40-10:40 - work. I'm on autopilot. Don't remember anything.

10:40 - painfully awkward conversation with person at client's office, reminding me why I never talk to anyone. Start fantasizing about becoming creepy loner living in a backwoods shack. Realize I'm at least halfway there already, but I lack the ability to grow the really scraggly kind of facial hair I'd need to pull that lifestyle off.

10:40-11:30 - work. Keep self sane by playing Buzzcocks' "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" over and over again in head. Realize this is probably not the best way to retain one's sanity.

11:30-12:00 - lunch, sammich/chips/etc., eating for subsistence only, don't really enjoy it.

12:00-5:00 - work. On autopilot again, while fantasizing about having another job (pretty much anything else) or faking my own death and assuming a new identity.

5:00 - commute back home. Expletives used on commute home: 19.

6:13 - attempt to put faking-death plan into action. Realize that I don't have anything to use for a fake corpse except for a bag of Fritos Flavor Twists and the cushions of my couch, abandon plan. Realize that I could have it much worse and I should be grateful for my relatively fortunate station in life. Hate self for settling for so little.

6:18 - Realize that 99% of my thoughts for the day have centered around myself. Try to think about someone or something else for a change. Get bored and resume self-absorption.