Excerpts from Electric Degeneration, Degenerate Press' semi-weekly e-zine, free and ad-free. A full episode contains sections for music reviews, upcoming events, blasphemy, classifieds, and anything else we feel like saying. If you'd like to subscribe just contact us.
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5/27/2005
BACK, JACK, DO IT AGAIN
Sorry for the lack of reporting lately but we’ve been in Puerto Rico for a week.
I meant to send off a missive before I left but things got busy and suddenly it
was time to jump on the plane.
A full report will appear probably the first of next month. Apparently
Degenerate Press’ web site has gotten so much traffic I’ve been exceeding my
monthly bandwidth and Earthlink is charging me an arm and a leg for the few bits
of overflow. I HAD been happy with them but when I called customer service they
didn’t have a convenient and cost-affordable solution, and I’m pretty sure
they’ve outsourced their customer service to India or Malaysia or something, so
I’m going to have to move degeneratepress.com to another host. I’m a little
tempted to stuff the whole mess onto a CD for backup, kill the live version and
go back to writing for actual publication. (Note that it is not April 1.) But my
complaints about the paper publication world have not changed. If anything,
they’ve gotten worse these last couple of years. So the DP site may get pulled
down for a couple of days when I find a new place to park it and have to move
the whole disaster.
Meanwhile, here’s our groggy, post-vacation episode of Electric Degeneration.
Enjoy!
EAR PLUGS
We got this from Danny “Mudcat” Dudek:
“Two of my greatest friends and teachers passed this spring - Cootie Stark and
Neal Pattman. These men shared their knowledge of music, faith, and life with
me. I take these seeds and pillars with me wherever I travel.”
FILM FLAM/BLASPHEMY
Degenerate RVI sent us his take on the Star Wars phenomenon:
I have, as usual, my own theory about the downward spiral of the Star Wars
movies: Back when the original first SW came out (Episode IV or whatever), Lucas
was, of course a different and younger man. He was the genius who made American
Graphitti and if you want to see his vision, at that time, of his generation,
Graphitti is the thing to go look at to get clues. Star Wars, at Episode IV, is
also a fantasy tale of Lucas' generation -- another coming of age story, a young
man finding his path in a time of war, opposing the forces of decrepitude and
darkness; and in Episode VI, by which time we've discovered Vader is Luke's
father, his shadow and alter ego, Luke redeems his father and sets all the
wrongs he did aright by doing what he could not do, resisting the temptations he
did not. The parallel to Lucas' generations' dominant vision of itself is fairly
clear to me -- the Boom saw itself in the 60s and 70s as perfecting the mistakes
of its parents. By the 80s through the 90s, though, something went sideways, as
we well know, and the Evil Empire of Lucas' parents' generation did not die and
was not replaced; in 1980, Lucas' generation went out and re-elected their
parents' idea of The Emperor -- Luke Skywalker did not arrive to save the day
except on movie screens and even he was reduced to little more than an excuse
for capitalist merchandising, co-opted into The Empire. So by the time Lucas
gets around to deciding to "finish" his tale, which ironically is about how the
Empire comes into being and Anakin Skywalker loses his humanity and becomes a
killing machine, in the real world our right-wing Empire has developed further
and Lucas' generation has become, not Luke Skywalker, but his failure of a
father, Darth Vader... worse, maybe, than their parents' generation. For Lucas,
it's an easy story to tell now, because the last 3 episodes are closer to the
truth about his generation than the pure and beautiful fantasy of the first 3
episodes which were about the dreams and hopes of a youthful generation, who
they wanted to be. The story of Darth Vader is about who they actually became --
which, on some level, has probably affected Lucas' ability to tell the story
with any gusto. It would be like finding out the Richard Dryfus character in
American Graphitti, a few decades after the time period of the movie, had used
the profits from the writing of his life story and bought his home town, had
Wolfman Jack imprisoned for being too suggestive, had the cops arrest all
suspected drag racers on sight (profiling them), turned the Drive-In burger
place into a Holy Roller church that condemns waitresses in tight pants who
roller skate, had the vice squad patrol and raid the necking spots, sent all the
underaged kids who tried to buy a quart of liquor to boot camp, called the local
gangs terrorists and allowed them to be detained under laws no one intended to
cover gangs... in other words, it would be like finding out the Boom generation
became exactly what they became. It's Luke, not Anakin, who became Darth Vader,
sold his soul for Pepsi Co., played it "safe."
The Dark Side is colored red, white, and blue if you look at it right.
Degenerate RVI
He and others have been sending us email about changes at PBS:
Please join me in an effort to save PBS from meddling by partisan bureaucrats.
This top-down political interference goes against the very nature of PBS and the
local stations we trust. Let the people speak and decide the future of PBS:
www.freepress.net/action/pbs
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