Geoff Cordner

Jesus wants you to have those shoes...

2007-12-22T05:45:24Z

Yes, kids, it's that time of year again -- the season when suicides and spousal abuse spike, when the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses becomes homicidally overwhelming...You're frantically propping up your kids' self esteem by buying 'em a grip of useless crap they feel they desperately need to feel whole 'cause their friends have it, or might get it...You've gottta arrange to get Ma out of the old folks home and let's just hope she doesn't get too blotto and cause a scene or just quietly wander off...you know they'll blame you...they always do...It's cold, America is broke and we're all feeling guilty and inadequate not just as citizens or providers but as human beings because we can't afford to buy buy buy...not when the house is under threat of foreclosure...this is the time of year specifically designed to show us what losers we are...

Oh, yeah, and the birth of Jesus. Go ahead...Jesus really wants you to have those shoes...and that's why God invented Mastercard, right?

Well, gang, there's one thing out there that's free!. Yessirree gang: you can help spread the holiday spirit as easily as spreading herpes by sending your friends a Holiday eCard! Just click here and follow the super easy instructions.

Oh, yeah, and merry Christmas. Seriously. Lurking under all the bullshit is a damn fine holiday, and I genuinely hope you all have a good one.>

Hotel Hopscotch at SF Docfest

2006-05-03T23:35:20Z

Hotel Hopscotch is screening at the SF Docfest Sunday May 14 at 5pm. This is a pretty big honor. I'll post more details later.

"Celebrated Photographer Geoff Cordner has created a testament to a slice of life that is both brutal and beautiful. A world-weary punk voice narrates Zora Von Burden's autobiographical story of growing up as an outsider, hotel hopping, and surviving on the streets. Using a moving collage of black and white photography, Hotel Hopscotch lays down the laws and personalities of desperate hotel cultures. The junky hotels, the HIV hotels, and the mentally ill hotels are compared and contrasted with a lovingly naked eye. With self effacing honesty and raw humor, moments in youth are remembered and captured as many in the tribes die young or disappear. Hotel Hopscotch is a meditation on a specific slice of punk life captured with love and honesty."

Tickets are $10.25 and can be purchased online at www.sfindie.com/docfest06/home/. (It's screening along with the feature "Cracked But Not Broken", which looks to be a pretty rad film). It would be great to see all the Bay Area peeps show up and say "Yo".

Salton Sea

2006-02-27T03:58:36Z

Toto, dude...

2005-12-08T03:13:05Z

We are so not in Kansas anymore.

Taking a smoke break outside of my job at the stockroom. Tearing down the sidewalk of Sunset Blvd on a skateboard pulling ollies is a super happy, super gym-buff tranny. She gives me a big smile as she passes and then pulls another ollie in front of the Thai massage joint.

I'd reckon you just don’t see that sort of thing in Kansas.

Last night I met a kid with the unlikely name of Ulysses Chinchilla. Ulysses is a little Hispanic guy who wears a yarmulke for some reason. His goal is to be “gay as in paris” He explained that this means happy as he already appears to have a pretty good handle on the other type of gay.

Updating the website at work I was mortified to discover that we were selling strap-on dildo harnesses in crotch sizes of up to 66 inches. 66 inches is 5 feet 6 inches. My old girlfriend was 5’3”. That means my entire ex girlfriend is smaller than the crotches of some women, and apparently these women are sporting strap-on dildos.

I've been informed that most of the gals with these enormous crotches are in the Midwest. Maybe even in Kansas. Perhaps as an act of aesthetic kindness, we are no longer offering strap-on harnesses that huge except by special order.

So, Toto – Ulysses Chinchilla who aspires to by gay as in Paris and the muscular and happy tranny skateboarder or women with crotches bigger than entire people sternly waddling around threatening to butt-fuck the populace?

I’ll take California.

I love my neighborhood.

10 Stupid Quotes by Tom Delay

2005-10-20T03:04:07Z

10 STUPID QUOTES BY TOM DELAY

1) "So many minority youths had volunteered; that there was literally
no room for patriotic folks like myself." --Tom DeLay, explaining at
the1988 GOP convention why he and vice presidential nominee Dan
Quayle did not fight in the Vietnam War

2) "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" Tom Delay, to
three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in
Houston, Sept. 9, 2005

3) "I AM the federal government." Tom DeLay, to the owner of Ruth's
Chris Steak House, after being told to put out his cigar because of federal
government regulations banning smoking in the building, May 14, 2003

4) "We're no longer a superpower. We're a super-duper power." Tom DeLay,
explaining why America must topple Saddam Hussein in 2002 interview
with Fox News

5) "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting
taxes." Tom DeLay, March 12, 2003

6) "Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The
causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into
daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working
mothers who take birth control pills." Tom DeLay, on causes of the
Columbine High School massacre, 1999

7) "A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide
structure. To provide stability. Not that a woman can't provide
stability, I'm not saying that... It does take a father, though." Tom
DeLay, in a radio interview, Feb. 10, 2004

8) "I don't believe there is a separation of church and state. I
think the Constitution is very clear. The only separation is that
there will not be a government church." Tom DeLay

9) "Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on
$4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist.
Fortunately, such families do not exist." Tom DeLay, during a debate
in Congress on increasing the minimum wage, April 23, 1996

10) "I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My
job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government
employee. I am in the Constitution." Tom DeLay, in a CNN interview,
Dec. 19, 1995

Bob Forrest - Louisiana video

2005-10-13T08:08:40Z

Thelonious Monster singer Bob Forrest is working on a new mostly acoustic solo album. One of the songs he's been playing for a few years now is Randy Newman's Louisiana, about a huge flood 100 years ago; something that seems awfully timely right now. Bob and producer Gregory Butler worked in a bunch of George Bush samples and they asked me to put together a video for it, which you can see here.

Bob is also one of the narrators in my film. I posted a link to his clip a couple of days ago; here's that link again.

Latest film news

2005-10-10T23:51:45Z

Here's the most recent clip from my film. This one is narrated by Thelonious Monster's Bob Forrest, talking about his childhood. You can see it here. This is a rough edit, and the music is temporary; Billy Pitman (of Jimmy Vaughn's band) is working on scoring the film and has come up with some beautiful stuff.

Hotel Hopscotch received an award at the Lucid Underground Media Film Festival last month, which was held in conjunction w/ the Kansas Intl. Film festival.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

2005-08-06T03:17:31Z

Seattle man dies after sex with horse
Police say death was accidental, investigate farm on cruelty suspicions

Updated: 9:12 p.m. ET July 15, 2005
SEATTLE - A Seattle man died after engaging in anal sex with a horse at a farm suspected of being a gathering place for people seeking to have sex with livestock, police said Friday.

The horse involved in the incident was not harmed, and an autopsy of the unnamed man concluded that “the manner of death was accidental ... due to perforation of the colon,” a police spokesman said.

“The information that we have is that people would find this place via chat rooms on the Web,” said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Department.

Although sex with animals is not illegal in Washington state, Urquhart said that investigators were looking into whether the farm, located in Enumclaw, 40 miles southeast of Seattle, allowed sex with smaller animals that resulted in animal cruelty, which is a crime.

“If you’re talking about sheep or goats, there could be some issues,” Urquhart said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8589349

Tragedy in Rio

2005-08-03T00:43:57Z

Yet another example of why Americans should never be allowed to leave the country. Luckily, the rest of the world will be spared two of these three characters. I found this in the "Taco Bell Rocks My Socks" Myspace group:

Posted by Tyler: Aug 1, 2005 8:50 AM

ya my name is tyler and i hav recently moved to rio de janeiro brazil where their is NO taco bell!! i need sum taco bell so if anyone is willin to send me a soft taco (my favorite taco bell food) email me at iliketacos666@xxx.com so i can giv u the information. Please help me, i cant go on much longer!!!

************************************

Posted by Lil One: Aug 1, 2005 12:29 PM

OMG...I feel so sorry for you. Thanks for the warning, I will make sure I never move there.

************************************

Posted by Swank: Aug 1, 2005 3:10 PM

Ya no doubt never going to Rio. Not to burst your bubble but i don't think even UPS or FedEx will take a package like that. And dude there is no way it would taste right once it got there.

************************************

Posted by Lil One: Aug 1, 2005 10:23 PM

I think you need to find a way to come back to America. Foreign countries W/ no Taco Bell suck ass. I love America even more now.

This rules beyond belief

2005-07-29T22:23:36Z

Rubber Johnny

Sneak preview

2005-01-18T01:59:24Z

Here's a very rough, work-in-progress glimpse at one of the segments for this new project of mine. Just click on the picture to see it:

Infant Morality

2004-10-30T22:22:36Z

Diggin' through old negs still...here are a coupla scans from about 5 years ago (in fact, almost exactly 5 years ago). The one behind the cut tag is one that seems to really bum people out...it seems blood and gore is great when it's all posed & staged, makes the viewer seem like they're part of some hip new underground and way cooler than their neighbors, but the real thing really upsets people...fake death is trendy but real birth is frightening...poseurs is the word that so frequently springs to mind...

An unpleasant story

2004-10-28T22:56:51Z

I had a roommate some years ago.

We did not exactly enjoy each other's company. She had taken a sort of proprietary approach to everything in the house, including the roommates, including me; I'd find her in my room often just going through stuff, seeing which things of mine she reckoned she owned and intended to take possession of, collecting evidence.

At some point that summer she'd gone too far. I don't remember what set me off exactly, but something had, and I was seething. I was also drunk and/or high 24-7 back then so I wasn't exactly thinking clearly, and perhaps had hit an ethical low of my own.

She imagined herself the Queen of LA, and had a favorite coat she wore when she was out on the town shmoozing at some fancy model or actor party, holding imaginary court. Every afternoon that she was gone that summer I would go into her room, dig the coat out of the closet and piss in the lining. I must've emptied my bladder 20 times in that thing.

She didn't smell particularly good--who would on a diet like that?--and her bedroom upstairs reeked enough that I figured a little extra smell would likely go unnoticed.

I moved out that fall, before the weather got cold, and we didn't really run in the same circles, so I never got a chance to actually see the self proclaimed Queen of LA believing herself the pinnacle of style and imagining she was holding court at some party surrounded by models and actors who wouldn't give her the time of day, wrapped up in her "stylish" coat, wrapped up in my urine. But I savored the thought.

House Party

2004-10-11T21:43:25Z

By around '82 or'83 it seemed like there wasn't a club left in Austin willing to book punk bands. The schism had happened between punk and new wave, and new wave bands had no problem except that there really weren't any…It seemed like maybe that was the case all across the country; I really don't know.

So a band like the Offenders might have an album or two out and be pretty "highly regarded” but the only place they could play in town was at house parties.

I remember getting a press clipping in the mail from bass player Mikey Offender (who also played in MDC, and still does) when they were off on tour, from the newspaper in some Midwestern town, quoting the Sheriff: "Well, they were doin' this new dance they call the slam dunk, where they line up aginst the wall and then run at each other as fast as they can and crash in the middle, see, which is dangerous for the kids, so we had no choice but ta shut 'em down." And shut 'em down he did.

If I remember right, this party, like most of 'em, was at someone's house out in East Austin—the barrio—(how come the wrong side of the tracks is always the east side of the tracks?), and the cops had a tendency to leave the folks in the barrio alone, reckoning they're not really worthy of attention as long as they stick to their part of town…

I think this party was around Halloween. I have some recollection of Spot and I endeavoring to use an electric drill and assorted other power tools on a pumpkin in order to make a jack'o'lantern. I remember the drill flinging pumpkin flesh all over everybody who was in the kitchen, and I remember little Felix Griffin the 14-year-old drummer of Crotch Rot lighting his farts on fire, which was something I'd never actually seen done before that night. (Felix later went on to become the drummer for D.R.I.)

Felix of Crotch Rot

The cops finally did show up. Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" was playing loud while we threw everything goopy and sticky we could find at their squad car, dumped beer and garbage in it and then all took off running before they ever knew what hit 'em, the cops standing there flabbergasted, covered in goop and garbage and pumpkin innards looking like something from a wet-and-messy fetishist's love-a-man-in-a-uniform fantasy…

Check out the sign behind the stoner in the kinks t-shirt: it says "No skating inside". Somehow I'm not totally sure that anyone paid much attention to that sign.

Surferin' Safari

2004-09-27T23:29:39Z

The Butthole Surfers were out of San Antonio. Gibby Hayes and Paul Leary were a couple of accounting students at trinity University. They’d managed to get a little notoriety already, and had done some recordings for New Alliance (the Minutemen’s record label) that Spot had produced. The sound was almost poppy, nothing like what they were about to become. I don’t know if they actually moved to Austin or if they just hung out there all the time. Gibby was the son of a popular 60s TV clown outta Dallas, which explains a lot, and maybe even forgives some of it, because Gibby was a fairly reprehensible guy. All of life was a big dada-ist experiment for him, which is fine if it’s just your life you’re experimenting with, but the experiment became increasingly mean-spirited over the years and he’d drag anyone and everyone into it, just to see what would happen, especially if the other person was weak or somehow off kilter, and this was often to their detriment. Kurt Cobain and Daniel Johnston would be two of those people who suffered from Gibby’s experiments.

The Butthole Surfers in San Antonio, (1982? 1983?), shot w/ a borrowed instamatic. King Coffee, Teresa Nervosa, Paul Leary & Gibby Hayes.
Note the newspaper. The headline on the left says "Town won't rest until killer is caught." The headline on the right "Repulsive" is an article about them.

Drummer Teresa Nervosa was aptly named, since she was just about the shyest and most nervous person I knew; the mere fact that I knew here was a notable accomplishment. When I met her she was playing in a sort of lesbian folk punk band called Meat Joy, and if I remember right the way I hooked up with Meat Joy was because they were curious to find out who this guy was that Teresa actually talked to.

King Coffee was the other drummer. He might’ve been Teresa’s brother (I’ve heard stories to that effect). He was outta Dallas and had played in the legendary Hugh Beaumont Experience. I’m not sure why the Hugh Beaumont Experience was legendary. I think it was because they didn’t last very long and had done an EP that was pressed but never released, allegedly due to some falling out between the singer and his girlfriend who’d paid for the recording and pressing. Punk was extremely underground and because of that was extremely local. Bands did records that weren’t distributed outside of a couple of record stores in their town, and then they fell apart, and so you’d know about them (because we had a helluva grapevine) but you’d never have heard them or even seen the record, although maybe you knew someone whose friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s buddy’s girlfriend supposedly had a copy…and so we’d go to great lengths to try and track this shit down, and the harder it was to find, the more legendary the band seemed to become, until they started to enter the realm of myth, which was right about where the Hugh Beaumont Experience was. I remember talking to Thurston Moore on the phone—somehow we’d hooked up by phone although we’d never met—and he was giving me some info on one of those friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s buddy’s girlfriend (except there were a few more people involved to stretch the trail out to New York City) who was pals with the ex-girlfriend chick who supposedly paid for the record and was now making sure it didn’t come out. I tried following the trail back to this chick but only got about halfway before the trail went cold, and King, who was a buddy, wouldn’t talk about it.

Teresa Nervosa in San Antonio with t-shirt or poster art.

I talked to the Buttholes about doing their album. Gibby’s plan was they were gonna rent a house, hole up in there and do tons of acid, record stuff and see what happened. Their plan for me was that I was either gonna pay for this experiment or else be a part of it, probably both, and I wasn’t really down for any of those things in the end. I reckoned it would cost more money than I was prepared to spend, it sounded suspiciously hippie to me (and I was mortally and morally opposed to that hippie bullshit) and, most importantly, I was truly not a fan of mind expanding drugs. As far as I could tell, my mind was sufficiently expanded already, thank you very much, and the main goal of my drug use was to shut it down or at least contain it before it expanded any further. Alcohol would take the edge off, heroin was better if what you wanted was a truly quiet night, and if there was no heroin to bring the noise level in my head into balance with the noise level outside of it, than shooting up speed would do ‘cause it would bring the noise level outside into balance with the white noise in my brain. It was an equilibrium thing I was shooting for. Equilibrium was nearly impossible to attain and very difficult to hold on to if I did manage to get a finger on it, and Gibby’s plan was not gonna work with all that.

These pictures were done down in San Antonio with a borrowed instamatic camera, one of those things that’s designed to take pictures of the mountains or something, where the focus is permanently set on infinity--a really abstract concept when you stop and think about it but perhaps conceptually well suited to the subject matter when the subject matter happens to be the Butthole Surfers, especially at this point in their career. I’m guessing these shots are from 1982 or ’83.

The Buttholes achieved almost instant underground celebrity when their first EP came out, and by the time of their first album they’d achieved legendary status. Their sound preceded Ministry’s by at least 5 years and we’d never heard anything like it before they came around. Their insane stage show preceded Jane’s Addiction by 3 or 4 years, and we really hadn’t seen anything like it before they came around either, and a pretty strong case could be made for the argument that without the Butthole Surfers, there would never have been a Jane’s Addiction and Ministry would have faded into mid 80s obscurity as a poor man’s Duran Duran.

Paul Leary & Gibby Hayes plotting their next move.

Call it Democracy

2004-09-23T23:36:24Z

This is a website I just finished building for a new documentary called Call it Democracy. Right now it's just booked for festivals and screening on college campuses. Check the screening list and see if it's playing anywhere near you; if you're at all interested in the election process, the electoral college, the Supreme Court's rather astounding decision to contravene the constitution and declare Bush the winner of the last election, than it's worth seeing...especially as we are almost certain, by hook or by crook, to wind up with 4 more years of this abominable man.

www.callitdemocracy.com

Monkey See, Monkey Do...

2004-09-18T20:14:28Z

By this point in the early '80s, metal was pretty much dead. There were only a few hard-core headbangers, and most of 'em were Chicano kids from San Antonio & El Paso. I'd had this chicano neighbor whose body was all scarred up after his brother-in-law took after him with a linoleum knife during a dispute over a woman (what's wrong with that picture?), and he was really into Legs Diamond. I had no idea who Legs Diamond was, but I would find his albums at yard sales all the time, so I started buyin' em up for 50 cents a pop, managed to get crates of 'em, and would sell 'em at the Austin record convention. Everyone else had all this vintage blues and Elvis and shit that they were trying to unload for collector's prices, and I would have a few crates of Legs Diamond albums for $7 each plus some other assorted metal stuff and a long line of ecstatic Chicano headbangers throwing cash at me.

The headbangers were all mellow from sniffing glue, & really polite. I showed up to see Metallica who were opening for Raven, summer of '83 I think it was. Club Foot was sold out and all the kids got there early, so I was stuck in the back. The kid ahead of me noticed I had a camera, asked me if I was gonna take photos, and then whispered something to the guy in front of him who tapped the next guy on the shoulder and so on, and the whole row of kids took their fists out of the air so I had a clear view of the stage. That didn't last but a few songs though, 'cause pretty soon the excitement got the better of 'em and the fists went back up.

These are for you, alsana

Me circa 1980

2004-09-18T06:03:29Z

My girlfriend and I lived in this old house near campus that was divided into four apartments. Upstairs from us lived this dominatrix and her slave; she had a dominatrix friend named Serita who lived in the barrio and slept in a coffin, and when Serita would come visit they would torture the crap out of her slave and his screams would keep us up all night. Next to them lived some punk rock people who I don't remember anything about. Next door to us was this really cute girl who was totally into classical music & lived with her "brother" but they seemed to be a little too close in certain ways to be siblings.

Next to our house was a vacant lot. One night we came home late and found this weird "Liberate Rasta" sign someone had made out of a broken two by four, plywood, pieces of corregated metal and malt liquor cans. It was just planted in the middle of the dirt like a sign. So we took some pictures of it, stuck it back in the ground, and then walked over to the apartments on the next block, hopped the wall and went skinny dipping in their pool, which was what we did just about every summer night at 3am after getting back all sweaty from some show.

When we came back the sign was gone.

I have no idea whose dog that is.

Another Black Flag shot

2004-09-18T04:01:55Z

It's interesting looking at these old shots of mine. I didn't spend a lot of time photographing just the band; I often chose angles that would allow me to shoot the audience as well. They were important--the whole thing about the punk scene back then is that there wasn't a separation between the audience and the performers. We were all part of the same thing. You weren't baiting the audience by saying "If you don't like us, go start your own band" Instead, it was offered as practical advice, and a lot of bands were started that very way. There was none of that idolatry that so poisoned rock'n'roll. None of that Green Day playing to a stadium crowd, fans in the nosebleed seats dependent on seeing things on the giant video monitors, no helicopters and limos whisking the performers to and from the stage. These shots show Black Flag at the peak of their popularity, one of the biggest punk bands in America at the time. But the band and the audience here have almost literally merged; you nearly have to pick Rollins out in the crowd. And check out all the various faces and expressions of the kids around him. The mosh pits (a hesher phrase that we didn't use back then) were not these circles of violent jocks, everyone else excluded. Yeah, there were people constantly stage diving, and lots of what we then called slam dancing, but notice that there are a lot of girls up to the front of the stage, and there's not a big hole in the front with a bunch of drunken jocks marching around in a circle elbowing everybody, which is what a "mosh pit" is nowadays. A show was an experience we participated in nearly as much as did the performers; it was not something we were merely audience to.

I shot all this stuff with a Pentax K1000 and a 50mm lens, which means that I must've climbed up on stage & been pretty much right behind the band for most of the set--I had to have been really close.

Have you ever noticed when at a show that your attention tends to be drawn to one particular performer on the stage? From this photo's perspective, you can actually see that happening. Notice that the small throng of girls on the right of the shot are not looking at Henry but rather at guitarist Greg Ginn (who is not in the shot), but amongst them are a handful of individuals all looking over toward Henry, although macho shirtless he-man Henry is surrounded by slam dancing guys. There's also a small number of folks scattered on the right who appear to be making eye contact with me, which means that they are most likely looking at bassist Kira Roessler, since I was pretty much shooting right over her shoulder. The interesting thing is all these people are wedged up against one another, and kinda being knocked around by the surging crowd, but you can see how almost every individual's attention is individually focused on a different part of the stage.

Ooooold photos

2004-09-16T23:02:51Z

Sifting through negs today and came upon these that I'd completely forgotten about. This is Black Flag at the Skyline Club in Austin, Texas; I do not remember the year--1983?

I remember being really put off by Henry Rollins. The guy had a very severe case of angst--this was well documented--he made a point of letting everyone know. On this particular night he let folks know by pulling up a chair across from the ticket booth at the end of a long and very narrow hall, so that everyone entering the club had to spend several minutes rubbed up against his poor angst. This must have been especially difficult for the hefty folks among us, because there really wasn't much room to maneuver even without Henry's angst-ridden personage blocking the way as he held his head in his hands in a despairing display of torment. Personally, when I'm feeling particularly angst-ridden, I try to go someplace where I won't get claustrophobic and have to rub up against hundreds of kids, but not Henry. He wanted us to feel his pain. I remember thinking that it was pure Hollywood bullshit and that the guy was a total poseur. Twenty years later I've gotta amend that opinion simply because the guy is still around...for him to be stickin' to his guns after all these years means you really can't question his dedication; it wasn't just a phase he was goin' through...

Apparently I thought that bassist Kira Roessler was cute since she's in a lot more of my photos than Henry. And she was cute, too--she's got that total skater chick thing goin' on that what's-the-name-of-that-little-Canadian-chick-not-Celine-Dion-but-the-other-one tries so hard to do...

Feral Hogs!

2004-09-11T02:56:57Z

Hunting with the Women of the NRA is for every woman who hunts or wants to hunt. It answers questions about guns, game and field safety. In clear language it explains about firearms and ammunition, and basic hunter safety practices are demonstrated. Join the women of the NRA as they successfully pursue ducks, pheasants, turkeys, feral hogs and whitetail deer. Watch closely ... you might even come across a gator! Run time is 32 minutes. NRA Members -- to receive a discounted price, call 1-800-336-7402 and place your order over the phone.

Yippee!

2004-09-11T02:11:05Z

Woohoo! Now we can buy these nifty pre-ban rifles again and go deer hunting like the good ol' days:

Place your orders here:

http://www.armalite.com

Order now and get your free flash suppressor to make it easier to sneak up on those pesky deer! Go the extra step and add on a bayonet --great for hand to hand combat with deer!

"1. Beginning immediately, ArmaLite® 2003 rifles (with a pinned muzzle brake, or none installed) ship with a certificate that will provide customers a pin-on flash suppressor and installation instructions at no charge. Unless earlier legislation makes it illegal for customers to install the device, flash suppressors will ship in summer 2004 to allow time to get the rifle modified even if there’s an opportunity of only a few days.

Until the law changes, the flash suppressor will provide a reminder to every customer that it is essential to get out the vote in 2004.

2. For customers who wish to go an extra step and install a bayonet lug, ArmaLite® will continue to sell pin-on sight bases with bayonet lugs, and will provide installation instructions for gunsmiths. All ArmaLite® clamping front sight bases are easily removable, with no pin-holes in the barrel, so pin-on bases can be easily installed.

3. For customers who wish to be able to convert their rifle to a “Pre-Ban” configuration immediately upon expiration, ArmaLite® will produce and sell AR-10™ collapsing buttstocks (the AR-10™ requires a special collapsing buttstock). It is likely that prompt installation of such a buttstock will allow customers to make other changes at a more leisurely pace.

Mark A. Westrom
President
ArmaLite"

Don't forget to vote! Bush might be the Anti-Christ, but at least he doesn't flip-flop on the issues!

My Corrected Worldview

2004-09-03T03:00:26Z

So I just caught a few minutes of Bush on TV at the corner store while waiting to buy cigarettes and realized that I've been totally wrong in my perception of things. Now that I've been set straight on these important matters, my corrected worldview is as follows: We are winning the war against terrorists. Also, we are beating the terrorists. Oh, and our country is better defended against terrorists than it ever was before. Plus, we are kicking terrorist ass, not to mention close to defeating them and totally eradicating the threat of terrorism. On top of that, we can rest assured that great strides have been made in combating terrorism. However the threat of terrorism looms large and we must vigorously defend ourselves against terrorists who, despite having been throughly beaten, defeated, eradicated, humiliated and annihilated will surely terrorize us like never before if we elect a Democrat, because as anyone can see, the threat of terrorism looms largest when Democrats are in office which is why all terrorist attacks against the United States have taken place and been dealt with so throughly, convincingly and powerfully during the Bush administration, and the only reason we never had a chance to see how terribly the Democrats would respond to the threat of terrorism is because there wasn't one when they were in office.

Notable Pop Records by Insane People

2004-08-30T18:48:21Z

Insanity seems to be much more tolerated (and perhaps even sanctioned) in the world of music than it is in the other arts. Yes, there are some painters who may very well have been mad, but I can't think of any writers or film makers who were not functioning loony (suicidal doesn't count), and certainly outside of the world of the arts insanity is pretty much frowned upon.

Here's a small list of a few must-have recordings by certified nuts, all of which have this brilliant childike innocence.

1). MADCAP LAUGHS - SYD BARRET: this is an alltime classic. I bought this album when I was 14 and it took a while to sink in (I was too much of a kid myself to fully appreciate the childlike wonder of it) but it sounds great now.

2). DANIEL JOHNSON - Anything. I worked in a record store in Austin in the early 80s, when Daniel was making his first recordings with toy instruments on a portable cassette recorder. He worked at the McDonalds across the street and I took his tapes to sell on consignment. Had it not been me, someone else might have done it, but I nevertheless take credit for introducing the world to Daniel Johnson. Daniel finally lost it altogether in the late 80s.

3). ROKY ERICKSON - THE EVIL ONE The 13th Floor Elevators singer was busted for drugs in the late 60s in Texas and given a choice between a long prison term and being incarcerated in the State Hospital. He opted for the latter. He entered with a fragile psyche and emerged some years latter as a full blown nut. His first solo album, from the late 70s, is a total garage rock classic full of songs about zombies, vampires, two headed dogs, bloody hammers and other great stuff. Roky's sanity continued it's decline and his latter work was pretty hit and miss, although he had a great song on the Night of the Living Dead soundtrack.

4). SKIP SPENCE: OAR The original drummer for the Jefferson Airplane and later the front man for Moby Grape, Skip went bonkers and spent most of the rest of his life in the loony bin until his death at age 52. Oar is his solo album. It's a sort of American Syd Barret thing, and shows off his lunacy to great advantage.

It's worth noting that drugs were involved in the insanity of all of these guys.

I'm sure some of you have some great additions to this little list (Lenora and WrayB...), and I hope you'll post 'em.

Let's put the M in Sex

2004-08-29T04:50:11Z

These guys shook me all night wrong.
Mini Kiss
They Rule!