If I were making a Buffy Sainte-Marie best of compilation...

...it would most likely include anywhere from one to three songs from each of her first five albums, maybe four songs total from her career after 1970, and the entirety of Illuminations. If you haven't heard that album yet, fix that problem you have.

Looking over my list of albums I have that came out in its year (yes, I keep lists of my albums by year), I have no problem naming it by far the best of all of them. And we're not talking, say, 1987 here. This is 1969. I have over seventy albums from 1969. It's the year of The Beatles' Abbey Road, Can's Monster Movie, Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking, John & Yoko's Life With the Lions, Nico's The Marble Index, Pharoah Sanders' Karma, Silver Apples' Contact, Skip Spence's Oar, Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, the full version of Stockhausen's Hymnen, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground's self-titled, two great Scott Walker albums, and Marva Whitney's It's My Thing, and if I had to I'd give them all up in order to keep Illuminations.

This thought just struck me with urgency for some reason on the verge of going to bed. I hopefully will elaborate later, but if anyone in the dire position of not having heard this album stumbles across this post, for the love of god, listen to Illuminations as soon as possible.

Despicable

I'm pretty sure that if Martin Luther King, Jr. had known that, forty-one years after he died, his words would be quoted alongside those of such other fighters for human dignity and equality as Sam Walton and B.C. Forbes in inspirational speeches given by corporate managers to their wage slaves, he probably would have inserted really vulgar words into everything he said. Anyway, when are they going to start quoting lines like "A riot is the language of the unheard" or, even better, when are they going to break out the Malcolm X quotebook?

The radio redeems itself

My "local" top 40 radio station just broadcast a Veteran's Day-themed station identification where that vaguely sinister radio-announcer-guy voice said "92 PRO FM supports our troops all around the world. Thank you."

Looking beyond the surface inanity of this, I find two things of value:

1. They acknowledge that we have troops all over the fucking world. Maybe--just maybe--one person will say, "Do we really have troops all around the world? Why would that be?" And that one person is a victory. Of course, that one person is probably 100% imaginary, but I can dream, can't I?

2. The "Thank you" sounded really sarcastic. Which of course it should be.

Everything is terrible

I just heard a commercial on the radio with a HYSTERICAL WOMAN FREAKING OUT because her son should go to college RIGHT NOW but she HEARD he's talking to a recruiter, and then her jocularly sensible husband sets her straight--actually, what HE the son is doing makes a LOT OF SENSE! He's joining the NATIONAL GUARD! And then the WOMAN, who has NO HEAD FOR FIGURES, starts FREAKING OUT ABOUT HOW ARE THEY GOING TO PAY FOR ALL THIS, and the smart sensible (condescendingly chuckling) husband SETS HER STRAIGHT ABOUT THAT TOO.

Ha ha ha! Women are stupid and your sons should want to kill people right out of high school!

In other sad news, the new Amerie album is a huge letdown. The best few songs are stale retreads of her older, greater work, and the rest sound like they're jockeying for position in the bottom half of AT40.

I should check my spam filter more often

From: dr.dave
Subject: your marks
Body: obama died of heart stroke

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month starts today. I'm giving it a shot this year. I don't know if that means that my already meager blog offerings (blofferings) will dry up even farther or if procrastination will push me to post more, but it seems like it'll certainly have an impact on my bloggy activities (blogtivities*), and I know that all of my fans are just drooling for an update on those, so...I oblige (bloguesse oblige).

Oh, and if you want to follow my NaNoWriMo word count and place bets on when I become a quitter, here's the link to my profile.

*Blactivities sounds racialismical.

Work dumb

My new job gives me internet access but blocks Blogspot, Wordpress, and Twitter, and who knows what else. What's the point of internet?!?!?

I will, incidentally, have more to say about this job. It's awfully wacky in some ways.

Dear Mr. David Guetta and Mr. Akon,

If you really are trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful, I would suggest you keep searching. "Damn, you's a sexy bitch" really didn't cut it, and your more recent attempt, "Damn, you's a sexy chick," is only an extremely minor improvement.

Yours,
Me

P.S. Also, Mr. Guetta, please get off the radio. You sound awful.

Actual Wall Street Journal headline

Colleagues Finger Billionaire

Hilarious facts about terrible songs

1. "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton.

So you throw your son out a window your son jumps falls out a window and you write a song about it. Deeply personal, right? I always thought it was in questionable taste to release it as a single, but, whatever works, Mr. Clapton, whatever works. Obviously the song is very important to you--

What? You only wrote the first verse and then couldn't be bothered to finish? So you hired the guy who wrote "Looks Like We Made It" and two whole albums for Jimmy Buffett to finish it? And then when he said "I don't know, Eric, that seems awfully personal, maybe you should write it yourself?" you forced him to write it over these objections? That is hilarious. As is the fact that you only were writing it in the first place because the people who were making the soundtrack for Rush decided as an afterthought to ask you for a second song.

2. "Jack and Diane" by John Snow Leopard Mellencamp

I have a short list of songs that, every time they start, just hearing the first few unmistakable seconds hurts me more deeply than I can easily express. It's like a little piece of my soul dies, and my faith in the essential goodness humanity is torn away and if you put a gun in my hands I might just turn it on myself at that moment. "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies is one of those songs. "Jack and Diane" is the other.

But, you know, working class hero! Mellencamp is a brave songwriter, representing the lower classes! The working man! The--

What's that you say, Wikipedia? "Mellencamp has stated in interviews that 'Jack and Diane' was originally about an interracial couple, but he realized that in the early '80s there could be backlash over such a song."

Oh, John Mellencamp. You cowardly twat!

Shakesville again

Melissa McEwan has a post about a satirical website called "Republicans for Rape" that's responding to some bit of legislative inanity that I can't be bothered to find out about because, really, anything coming out of Congress is going to be bad for me and you and anyone else who doesn't have money, so I have no patience for the details.

Anyway, basically her complaint is that these jokes aren't funny and just trigger rape survivors and are very painful for them. I tend to think that satire works best when its intended audience is horrified, but it's a complicated issue, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, so I won't take a position on that. But:

Republicans are just trying to protect their corporate sponsors, and if victims of rape are a casualty, so be it. The "Republicans for Rape" creators just hate Republicans, and if victims of rape are a casualty of hitting back at Republicans, so be it. What they share in common is that neither one of gives a fuck about rape survivors.

And you can't claim to be anti-rape if you don't give a fuck about rape survivors. It's really just. that. simple.

This, of course, comes from the woman who has posted about the Polanski case about nine million times in the past few weeks, whose group blog has posted about it more often, and who recently defended a post entitled "taking her side" equating being anti-Polanski with being pro-his victim. Which, judging from all of her public statements, the victim herself would disagree with. She has said that every time the case makes the news she feels victimized all over again. For McEwan this is irrelevant because, in her words, "justice doesn't operate on the principle of what's best for the victim; it operates on the principle of what's best for the community."

I realize, again, that this is a complicated issue, but I wish that McEwan would ever acknowledge that fact. In the world of her and her co-bloggers and her loyal readers (the comment sections there are creepy in their total agreement on everything), the world is entirely black and white, good and evil, and with the occasional recognized lapse (for which they will immediately apologize and "blub" and promise to learn from, because they are so self-righteously progressive in all things), they are 100% positive that they are on the good side.

For people who have bought into, for example, the lie that Hilary Clinton is a feminist force for good in the world and that any criticism of her can only be founded in misogyny, this is kind of a laugh riot. Of course, with that starting point, pretty much anything is gonna be a laugh riot. Or, as they would say in their twee internet talk, LOLsob.

OK, enough about Shakesville. I promise to leave them alone for a while.

(NOTE: It is solely in the interests of brevity that I ignored the Republicans vs. Democrats tribal/sport team aspects of the post, but, needless to say, oh my god how stupid can people continue to be?)