Th' Baby Jeebiz Game

Yeah, we haven't played at Bargaining With The Creepster for way too long. Here's what we do: pick worthwhile people who died and offer baby Jeekers an alternative sacrifice. It's th' third stage of bereavement, man: bargaining.

This week I've got thirty-two names and it's going to be a spot of work so let's get on with it. I will put down the name of someone and the proposed switch.


Ross Abdallah Alameddine--------- Alberto Gonzalez

Christopher James Bishop------- Rush Limbaugh

Brian Bluhm--------- Donald Trump

Ryan Clark-------- Exxon CEO Lee Raymond

Austin Cloyd--------- Bill O'Reilly

Jocelyne Coutere-Nowak---------- Barbara Bush

Kevin Granata----------- Simon Cowell

Matthew Gwaltney---------- Paul Wolfowitz

Caitlin Hammaren--------- Katie Couric

Jeremy Herbstritt-------- John McCain

Rachael Elizabeth Hill---------- Anne Coulter

Emily Hilscher----------- Paris Hilton

Jarrett Lane------------ Dennis Hastert

Matthew J. La Porte------------ Dick Cheney

Henry Lee----------------- Ed Bennet, CEO of VH1

Don Ho----------------- Mark Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications

Liviu Librescu------------- that fucking ghoul Kissinger

G.V. Loganathan----------- Pat Dollard

Partahi Lumbantoruan------------ Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News

Lauren McCain----------------- Paris Hilton

Daniel O'Neil---------- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Juan Ramon Ortiz-------------- Silvio Berluscone

Minal Panchal----------- Josh Groban

Daniel Perez Cueva---------- Tony Blair

Erin Peterson------------ Regina Spektor

Mike Pohle------------- Karl Rove

Julia Pryde-------------- Avril Lavigne

Mary Read-------------- US House Representative Jean Schmidt

Reema Samaha----------- Richard fucking Perle

Waleed Shaalan----------- Toby Keith

Leslie Sherman------------ NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker

Maxine Turner------------- OJ Simpson

Nicole White------------ Condoleeza Rice


Whaddya say, Creepus? Come through for fucking once, nailhands.

To Whom It May Concern: I'm Still Not Fucking Scared.

I'm still not scared of it. You ain't fuckin' got me. I wasn't even scared that time in LA on th' 101 when the white truck blew a tire and came bouncing at me front over back taking out cars right and left. I was like you are NOT fucking getting me motherfucker you are NOT fucking getting me I am not a number in your fuckin' multiple fatality.

Not scared of th' smoking gun coming in th' form of a mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud can just smoke m'pole. Condoleeza Rice, Wolfowitz, Rove? Dribbleya? Ahmadinnerjacket? Iran? That's what you've got to scare us with?

It's like Blair Witch II, you know? You can't believe how unscary it is. You can't believe they went to all the fucking trouble, man.

And this latest one? With Who Flung Dung there at Virginia Tech? And HOW ARE WE GOING TO STOP IT? HOW ARE WE GOING TO STOP THIS SORT OF THING?

When I was a kid we was in th' Foreign Service and when we'd come to the States from Latin America or wherethefuckever it was always like coming inside to the air conditioning. It was all smooth surfaces and Star Wars trading cards and tree-lined boulevards with no beggars and no handless people thrusting their stumps at you. It was all no-corpses-floating-down-the-river. You could always count on th' corpse-floating-down-th'-river count to be negligible.

And now it's all this. But I'm not even remotely scared.

And here's how to Stop This Sort Of Thing: don't make the guy a motherfucking rock star, O.K.?

See, we keep giving them exactly what they want and not fucking doing that is How To Stop This Sort Of Thing. Motherfucking 9/11 was like this on a grand scale. Mourn your fucking dead and move on. Earlier Generations tought us the value and we dassen't listen, dassen't we?

Hey, if it bleeds it leads, man. Is it going to end up in this fucking country where every single minute of everyone's day is evaluated for profitability and if the shareholders aren't happy well that unproductive Comrade has to be soylent fucking greened?

Place makes me fucking sick. Really makes me sick. A lot of dirty little spiders feeding at a fucking turd. Bunch of fucking hags begging for a milkwhipping from th' royal dork. Just stop with the whole Let's Make All The Really Fucked Up Broken People Famous thing. Let's start there! Kooky! : ) : ) LOL!!

You take a dude like Wee Fuckim Yung and you salt the earth that is the footprint he left on the planet. You pour lye and scientifically formulated acid bleach and stuff on his memory. You throw him in a fucking hole and piss on him and cover him with fucking dirt. It's a MySpace Fame Dream Done Up Right, man. That fuckin' guy is going to be one of the 10 Faces Of '07, man. And that's why he did it. Obviously. Because he knew that it was just so fucking important to be the turd with all th' spiders feasting on it for just 21 seconds.

You stop and think, hey didn't like fucking 200 people die in Iraq today? Hmmmm.

Jesus fucking Christ I'm going to have to wake up tomorrow and I'll have to know that this fuckweed psycho will be burning from every TV screen in this fucking prison of a country. This fucked-up shell of a fucking banana republic where you walk amongst the ruins and think about Europe and visas.

It rubs me somewhat wrong, man. A lot of it is that when I was a bounder I wanted to be famous too. Or at least to have a cool career. But I fucking languished in smelly vans and stumbled over bad stages for however many fucking decades only to realize that somewhere the formula had changed and what I really needed to be doing was opening up on crowds of young people and parading my violent psychosis across th' national stage for every one to masturbate and buy products to.

And yeah, that shook the old bloomeroney off the fucking rose right quick.

It's speeding up, man. See how it's all speeding up? It's getting harder to hide. 9/11 brought all the cornfed ignorant peasant pissant fat fascist gobblers up out from under the rocks and into my fucking lap. And the combination of them and this voracious, fucked-up, empty, bottom-feeding pursuit of Fear For Profit just makes me want to drink a pickle jar of LSD. Place gives me fucking hives. Love it or leave it, you say?

Dude, back that shit up with some airfare.

I'm not scared of what you've got, man. Gotta do better, man.

Bobby Sings Rufus

Yeah, there's our boy genius with the big burns.

Man, it's hard to do a Rufus Wainwright song but I'm not scared. I'm never scared of music. They can't make me be.

"Poses" Dig it. Full-on Red Lady.

The challenge of this song, as with a lot of Rufus stuff, is making the unique perspective of the lyric fly for me. It's not because he's flameriffic but rather because when you're somewhat estrogen-challenged like me lines like "all these poses, such beautiful poses/make any boy feel like picking up roses..." can be hard to deliver. I'm much more of a linebacker than a Rimbaud, unfortunately.

Hell with it. I'll just go a little mumbly when I do the nancying lines live. The music is too good, the room for interpretation is too wide and too generous to ignore. "Poses" is the title track from Wainwright's vinegary, autumnal '02 record that got me hooked on the guy. The song, as with much of his stuff, is about a half-step removed from an opera ballad. The main instrumental rhythm figure, an ostinato I-X-V-X-V in the bass, is a classic opera comp that we've all heard in "Carmen" and "Barber Of Seville".

The detailed orchestra-pit classicism of his chamber-pop arrangement is a bear to encapsulate on a keyboard. This took a solid week of rote before I could even track this rudimentary version. Just achieving the manual independence to get the main two-handed rhythm figure going was seizure-inducing, never mind mastering all the subtle variations of it that move us through the various I's, IV's and V's.

I should have done it on a piano but I don't happen to own one and my samples just never seem to cut it. Tracking it on th' Rhodes pulls it into another sphere and gives it a music-boxy vintageness that appealed to me. I try to never adjust my Rhodes too perfectly. I love the way the harp support buzzes on the B above middle C and how some notes are rounder than others and how some of the low notes pull sharp as the tine stops vibrating from the hammer strike. Damn thing's noisy, too, isn't it? I bet Rufus would dig it, though- he's no stranger to the Black Lady.

Anyway, as I try to build my repertoire as a catholic-lower-c lounge lizard I'm excruciatingly aware of the need to have material that forces a little virtuosity out of my sorry fingers every now and then on some level. I can't hustle crap. I don't have that skill. If I'm not feeling it I can't sell it. Nine times out of ten I find solo performances pretty damn boring. It's asking a lot and I hate to ask too much. I come from a discipline where you assume you have someone's attention for about 5 seconds and if you don't give them something crazy they're going to flip on over to South Park. I don't need a lot of skill and flash but I need to feel a lot of confidence from a performer in order to get with the suspended disbelief.

"Poses" by Rufus Wainwright. Let's kick this fucker over.

Excellent Haiku Week #2: "Transitions" with Robert Lightfoot

The excellent mid-century screenwriter Robert Sherwood










CIVICS:

There is a reason
Why gun sales establishments
Have only one clerk

SEX:

Sex is what you do
When you relax all of your
Non-fucking muscles


DEATH:

At last you are here
I'm not surprised that you look
Sort of like Don Ho

LIFE:

Look, there is a light
I'm not sure I like this shit
Stop hitting my ass

HAIKUS:

Haikus in English
Are like trying to make a
Boat out of tampons.

Haikus From Th' Road

Can we not argue
About what you're paying me
It is 4 AM.

I regret to in
Form you that the song you want
Will not be played now.

The patrol cars there
In the parking lot, my friend
Let's load out slowly.

I will tell your wife
If you go in there with her
I do not like lies.





No, we will not play
Anything by Depeche Mode
Put your drugs away.

I have cut my hand
Upon the side of my Rhodes
Quick- apply Patrone.

There is nothing I
Would not give right now to be
Away from this place

The dream of music
A perfect chord struck firmly
The smell of urine.

It is not my fault
That you have drunk so freely
And have made nothing.

I feel just like Sting
When you vomit your dinner
During the chorus