Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

I wish I had, and feel I may have once, written this letter to Andrew Sullivan regarding the position liberals have found themselves in these past six years, angry at what Bush Etc. has done but unable to be taken seriously. Perhaps tarnished by extremists that became the face of the Left to some (incorrectly), but still correct then and now in as to what has become the Iraq War debacle. Sullivan does finally admit now what has been apparent for quite some time, that the betrayal of the Left and Right are no less of each other:

But many, many others on the left were right about these people in power; and I was wrong. I threw some smug invective their way and, in retrospect, I am ashamed of it. Sure, I recognized my error before the last election, but that doesn’t excuse it. Sure, some of it was just misunderstanding each other, in a climate of great fear, and some of it was just my arrogance that I was right. But that doesn’t excuse it all either.

I have not read Andrew’s book yet, but plan on it when I can once again afford something so luxurious as a new book. But even as I have struggled to understand someone so seemingly naive at times about these politicians who have brought this country to its current depths (in Iraq and in general), I still have read his blog regularly and respect his slow, lumbering turn-around to the good side.

His battles with religion and politics are fascinating to me because they don’t make any sense. That’s why he wrote a book, I would assume without having read it, to reclaim these parts that don’t fit right with each other: the Catholic church and Conservatism; Conservatism and homosexuality; homosexuality and the Catholic church. Talk about square pegs…

But he insists and implores, and so I certainly have no problem with that. I just wish people could maintain calm and perspective instead of jumping to instant conclusions, as the American Right did with the WMD claims. It was obvious from listening to smarter men like Hans Blix that this was all a farce, and yet so many were ready to believe, and so easy to mislead. They were all wrong. Now, as the dead U.S. soldiers nearly equals the dead on 9/11, they are still wrong. Everyone should be mad. But for some reason the anger of the liberal is reduced to an issue of patriotism instead of being given its proper venting. As Sullivan’s reader puts it:

Do I blame you for being mad? Not a bit. But keep in mind that those of us on the left who saw this coming – and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit – we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for – or ought to stand for.

Alright, what is the deal with The Killers? Are they the shittiest, most over-rated band ever? I feel like every time I watch a late night show lately they’re on there doing their awful schtick, the cheesy guitar licks and the cheesier mustachioed singer, and so I just want to get it out there that I think they suck. Really. Total shit.

And then there’s this garbage: The Killers offended by Green Day! Will this band’s 15 minutes end now? Thank you.

Written earlier, on the plane and after:

Coming home from D-Town on a Southwest flight to Midway with sore ribs and sore body, out of the Loser pool and out of my mind. I got the full treatment at the airport security check and no one even said happy birthday to me. They probed me and my bags and took all those tiny trial size lotions out and even made me throw away my $20 Crew hair shit, which was .5 ounces bigger than is allowed. My hair now falls limply on my head. Some fear-mongering government official should pay me back for that ridiculousness and his name is George Fucking Bush.

By the time I got to the gate it was three minutes to take-off and I was breathing heavy from my O.J. run through the Denver airport, but all was quiet at the desk. The plane had been delayed and I had time to kill, at least an hour, and so I tried to calm down and breathe a sigh of relief. Another crazy weekend in D-Town, who would have expected anything else?

We drove out on Wednesday night, three of us taking shifts at the wheel through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and into Colorado. I handled most of Nebraska, taking over at about 4 am near the edge of Iowa and flying at ninety mph through the seventy-five speed limit, never seeing a cop at all. There were a million stars in the sky above us and since we spent most of the drive in darkness it felt like the sun was never going to rise again, gaining an hour of night as we headed toward Colorado. The car had a temperature gauge that told us it was as cold as 26 degrees outside and I froze my ass off filling up the tank two or three times. I played the Afghan Whigs Gentleman in its entirety and listened to a classic rock station for most of my drive through flat, dark Nebraska.

We pulled into Denver around 11 am Thursday and everyone got set to finally sleep in a soft bed but I was wide awake and so I walked around the neighborhood and had a greasy cheeseburger. Back at the house I drank a couple of Moosehead beers, jumped onto the neighbor’s wireless for a bit, and finally forced myself to sleep for a few hours. Later we went out and saw some bands at the Hi-Dive with our D-Town gang and whooped it up. The next day we hit Red Rocks under perfect blue skies and took a tour of the Coors brewery, loading up on the free samples at the end (Molson, Killian’s, Blue Moon).

Friday night we passed by a marquee that said “Banyan� on it and we realized our man Watt was in town. Watt! The venue was a short walk from Denver Jim’s place, so we got fired up and decided to check it out. Banyan is a project by Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins and Watt wrestles the bass along with a trumpet player and guitarist (normally Nels Cline but not this night). I had no idea what to expect but it turned out to be a great show, with Perkins at center stage and Watt as a sidemouse, and an amazing guitar player whose name I don’t know. Oh, and a dude painting on a huge canvas too.

The place slowly filled up but it wasn’t packed, and you could go right up to the front of the stage or the side where Watt was if you wanted. At one point I heard some familiar notes and Watt stepped up to the mic, speaking/singing “A love supreme…a love supreme…â€? and I went right up in front to witness Banyan’s take on one of the greatest songs ever, Coltrane’s classic jazz masterpiece. The whole thing was magic, just pure beauty, and I was so glad to be there for it. Later they tackled some Creedence too, “Born on the Bayou.”

After the show I hung around and talked to my old buddy Watt about the Stooges recording in Chicago (“it’s done!� he said) and some other shit. Very cool, awesome dude, Mike Watt. He was all bundled up in hat and gloves and so we walked outside to find a raging blizzard was upon us, crazy D-Town in all its glory!

The rest of the weekend was spent bikin’ and boardin’ and b-ballin’ and boozin,’ and right after Denver Jim broke my rib these two black kids came up and challenged us to a game of hoops. They were maybe ten years old and all talk, no game. I was in serious pain but still managed to score a few Jordan-like shots over the five-footers. We smoked ‘em and then hit the skate park, where kids younger than ten were doing loops around giant bowls and it was all too much for me. We tried to do the Flying Dog brewery, with Steadman’s artwork and the ghost of Thompson everywhere, but they were closed so we hit the bar next door.

The bartender diagnosed my rib situation and prescribed a Bloody Mary and a beer chaser, an amber ale from the brewery, and who was I to refuse? Another night on the town and Chicago connections everywhere, we met people who just moved from Wicker Park and the bartender at another place saw my Hinsdale Say No To Drugs shirt and said “Hinsdale, Illinois?” (No, I’m not from Hinsdale). Later that night we had a jam session that went til 5 am and came up with a couple of hot numbers that Billy Bob Thorton would be proud of.

Sunday was football and hangovers and the looming flight home, so my head was in a strange state and I just tried to get through it. Philly got a one-point lead with a minute left and then Tampa Bay hit a 62-yard field goal to knock me out of the Loser Pool. Who makes that kick? No one makes that kick!

On the plane it was seat yourself (nice, Southwest!), so I walked to the back and took the empty row in the left corner. It was a calm ride home in darkness, but for this laptop, and I drank water and ate pretzels and tried to come down. At Midway I walked to the L and found the doors locked. It was just after midnight and the sign clearly said that service goes until 12:51 am, but the place was empty and so I walked around trying to find some signs of life. Finally a CTA woman appeared and said that there were no more trains and that the sign needed to be changed, but they haven’t done it yet. Oh. Really.

Gentle reader, this is where I lose my temper. My relationship with the CTA has always been tenuous and pretty much a hate-hate situation: hate to ride it, hate the shitty service. It is a piece of shit. I stood at the bus stop for a while in the desolate area outside Midway and saw nothing. It was cold and I had two bags on my shoulders. I finally walked back into Midway and out to the cab stand where I jumped in a car and turned my $2 ride home into a $35 ride home. It’s magic! The CTA has that ability, to turn the end of any trip into a clusterfuck, it is really something else.

Pictures and more to come, if I remember it. My camera is broken but I managed to snap a few anyway, I just can’t tell if they’re keepers until I get them back into the computer, it’s just like the old days.

I walked into the bar at halftime after getting out of class and taking the train back toward home. Everyone had glum faces and the mood was sour. 20-0? Come on! That’s nothing! Everyone was like “you haven’t seen it, they look terrible.” Alright, but there’s still two quarters left. After they got a field goal the Cardinals came right back and got one of their own, so it was 23-3. One of our friends got up to leave and I said “you’re gonna miss one of the greatest comebacks ever!” He said to call him and wake him up if that happens.

We moved up to sit right at the bar so we could see the tv better and it all unfolded perfectly, just as I thought. I was waiting for it to happen the whole time, and then it did, I had never felt such certainty. Someone got up to go to the bathroom as the Cardinals punted and we yelled and screamed the whole time he was in there as they ran it back for the TD. 24-23! Then we all watched as Arizona gets to within field goal range and we’re down to the end, this is it, and I’m saying the whole time “he’s gonna miss it, you know he’s freaked, he can’t make it,” and what I really thought was that they would block it, but he missed it anyway and that was that. Bears win!

I called up my friend and he sounded half-asleep as I gave him the old “never had a doubt” routine and he grumbled and laughed a little. Sweet phone call to make.

We slipped out into the rain and headed home but I was up for hours afterward and now it’s Tuesday and I take off tomorrow on the road for D-Town, the Big D, Denver. Time for some Flaming Lips and the old Pompeii am Gotterdammerung!

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Pitchfork interviews Pete Townshend:

Pitchfork: The story of Wire & Glass appears to contain a lot of religious imagery and themes. How have your feelings on religion changed since Tommy, when religion (of the organized sort, at least) was largely portrayed in a negative light?

PT: I respect those who follow religious routes only if they seem to me to be morally proper and in accord with the modern world. Religion seems to me like vapour on the ocean that is my idea of who and what God is. Not bad vapour, just not very substantial.

I’m not one of those people who “got” The Darkness. In fact, I thought they sucked. Still do. Nonetheless, this story is funny. Dude was all coked up.

For the record, if it wears spandex it sucks. Golden rule.

Oh, this sounds so damn good. Pitchfork on the new Dulli/Lanegan Twilight Singers EP:

Pairing main man Greg Dulli with recently-added full-on band member Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees/Queens of the Stone Age/Isobel Campbell), it’s a typically creepy affair, with everything sounding like it was recorded in a smoky bar with a dead body in the bathroom.

I will be there on November 1 at Double Door.

Wow, I don’t know what or how that happened, but it’s back.  WOXY is alive!

Is that what it takes to get rid of the Republican party? A sex scandal? Forget that Iraq is a mess that never should have happened and Afghanistan is a mess that never should have been abandoned and forget that North Korea is a mess that happened while the other messes shouldn’t have happened…forget the bad policies that should have tossed George Bush out of office in 2004. Nope, says the brilliant base of conservative voters that stuck us with 6 years of ineptitude, the 51%, oops, the 33%, whatever it is today, let’s just call them the Mindless Majority and the Religious Wrong and the Loyalists and the Apologists, and let’s just call them Mind-Numblingly Stupid.

Everything has changed now. A sex scandal and a closeted gay man (not anymore!) and some creepiness for sure but nothing illegal as of yet and well, that’s just a little more than your average Christian mom in DuPage county can handle. Mark Foley likes boys and so that’s it, no vote for the GOP! Oh, the waterboarding by American troops at Gitmo, that was all fine and dandy, but a gay man IM-ing a page?

Jesus-fucking-Mel-Gibson-on-a-Passion-of-the-Christ-souvenir-cross-necklace, that is unacceptable!

Sorry, but as much as I love to see the Republican party flounder and flail about in the wake of this scandal, I don’t for one second feel the moral outrage toward Foley that some hypocrites might have. I don’t care about other people’s sex lives. It’s definitely weird, and if it’s illegal then it steps into a whole other realm, but I’m not sure that it is. No one seems to be sure of anything just yet. The age of consent is 16 in D.C., so he’s got that going for him. But it is the cover-up and the irony of Foley’s history as a lawmaker that is the real story. Even with all of that, I find it hard to care. This is what it takes? Not everything else before it? How stupid and childish (no pun intended) are we, to get worked up over a sex scandal while all along the real scandal has been right before our eyes? It’s called the Presidency of George W. Bush, the most disastrous we will hopefully ever see in our lifetimes.

For years I/we have been saying “Someone give Bush a blowjob,” the joke being that that is what it would take to bring him down, as opposed to Everything Else. It is too late for that, unfortunately, but how sad is it that this will ring true in the November elections for the rest of the Republican party? Still a nation of prudes unable to grasp the reality that lies beneath the surface: for all of the policies of this administration that have failed and failed again, it is a 52 year-old gay man that will put the GOP out of power, most likely. Oh, what a fucking horror.

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In “Jesus Camp,” the pastor, Becky Fischer, who seems like a well-meaning, funny, warm woman genuinely devoted to her ministry, talks about the importance of indoctrinating children in order to change our “sick” world, which is going to hell in a handbasket.

Explaining how important it is to “get ‘em young,” Fischer, who tells her young disciples that the “warlock” Harry Potter is “an enemy of God,” says, “I want to see these kids laying down their lives for the Gospel in the same way fundamentalist Muslims do.”

- Cathleen Falsani on “Jesus Camp”

An accident, of course, and surely there aren’t any Americans that stupid, right? Wait, don’t answer that. Fox News shows how it spreads disinformation to the ignorant masses:

Mark Foley is, of course, a Republican. An honest mistake, for sure.

Update: This was apparently shown three different times during the Bill O’Reilly show. O’Reilly currently holds the #1 spot on the NYT Best-seller list and the #1 spot on the cable news program ratings (according to Drudge). Out-Foxed again, America!