Rosenbush Cafe

“To play is to conquer.”

I play with words and they excite me to continue for another year. There will be much excitement ahead for as always I am inspired by my muse and the goddesses have blessed me with continuing support from beyond the glimmering light of the computer screen. Thanks again to Kalliope Amorphous for her artistry and friendship and I look forward to her success, too.

There is no greater desire of an artist to paint a portrait that elicits emotional response and writing is an art form designed to pry open the mind, let dopamine seep into the pores and shake the fucking apples off the tree.

It worked for Sir Issac Newton so shall it for all the lonely and unknown talented souls trapped in the ether.

Awaken tomorrow with renewal of spirit and the flames of desire burning within.

See you next year, which in the central time zone is two minutes from…

Paper or Plastic?

Neo-Noir Meets the Ghost of Truman Capote in Cellophane from the Sarah Plastic Saran Wrap Collection, 1994. This lithograph from the late Sarah Plastic (1899-1997) collection sold recently for $1.5 million in Barcelona, Spain, birthplace of the artist. After losing a sports bet, Mr. Capote was wrapped in 100 feet of saran wrap for Ms. Plastic, whose real name was Sara Lenore Radcliff Plastique Fortune, an early Dadaist, later Surrealist who dabbled in Cubism and finally cellophane, under the tutelage of Andy Warhol, was a self-proclaimed “late blooming lesbian, feminist and opium addict” who rumors persist had love affairs with Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Ernest Hemingway. Her collection, totalling 669, is on view at the Guggenheim, through December, 2012.

Tadream’s life performance 30 minutes; other tracks, varying lengths

WARNINGS: The music may come across loud, which is the way it should, but be ready to adjust your volume control and The Fuggs song contains my favorite Dutch word repeatedly.

By now anyone following my musical posts knows my tastes in music is wide-ranging and offbeat and that I have a special place between my ears for anything avant-garde, psychedelic or bizarrely groundbreaking. If you disinterested in music that transcends the usual boundaries of ordinary you should probably leave…now. Otherwise, sit back, take off your shoes, light incense, and turn on a black light to illuminate your poster of Captain America from “Easy Rider” and if you have a bong, pack the bowl tightly.

Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Crow and The Fuggs will give you a wide array of non traditional and non holiday themed treats to expand your headband. The 1983 Tangerine Dream concert from Warsaw - “Poland” - was a double-LP which has always been a favorite among their live performances; and Popol Vuh was a 1970s psychedelic group in the tradition of early Tadream and Amon Düül (one of the founders of the German rock scene).

Looking through my 8-Track Collection one can still find Crow, a rock group who produced a short list of top forty hits, but had several non hits that didn’t receive airplay outside KAAY’s “Beaker Street” (which ran from 1966-77 on the Little Rock, Arkansas 50,000 watt AM radio station. This was the first underground music station on AM, before FM stations followed the album-oriented format, with deejay Clyde Clifford. I can thank Clyde for introducing me to Vander Graf Generator’s “Pawn Hearts” in 1973 and being patient enough to explain about five times the name of the album, title and track name that caused me to call the station: “Man Erg” and yes, I was stoned to the bats). Thanks to record shows I finally got their three albums and fourth greatest hits compilation on vinyl.

The Fuggs were a mid 1960s rock group today considered a hybrid radical garage band with punk overtones. Their selection is unedited here although when it received airplay you can imagine the word fuck was excised. When I heard the unexpurgated version forty plus years ago I was at first shocked but quickly realized it you were going to sing about the Central Intelligence Agency and their nefarious doings at home and abroad, fuck was appropriate –the obsessive collector

Next Week: Rosenbush Cafe’s Special New Year’s Eve Obsessive Collector will grab you by your ears and stretch your reality so wide don’t be surprised if your brains slide down your chest and get hooked on your belt buckle. Dress casual, come naked or cross-dress, we don’t mind as long as you come prepared to let us rock your roll.

It is nice to think of oneself as enlightened and upstanding and brave in the face of tyranny so put yourself in the minds and bodies of everyone else and maybe you’ll realize that are all unique and different but all the same simultaneously. A sperm and egg meet and there you are. Be fortunate the sperm that meet the egg leading to your existence didn’t have preconceived notions about what you would be in fifty years. “Oh, I don’t like that egg” or the sperm was the wrong color. “Oh you’ll be a fat balding man” or “I don’t like your gender.”

Fortunately, for you and I, the molecular structure doesn’t judge your race, sexuality, gender or temperament types, for if it did the vast number of carbon based life forms would be significantly less than the billions dotting the global landscape.

We have come a long way to have not traveled; there will most likely always be someone somewhere who holds others in disdain: too short or tall, lean or robust, lighter or darker in skin tone, feminine or masculine for the opposite gender or lest I say, just different?

Until the human race considers itself one race of human beings and not find fault or disagreement with fellow citizens of the planet earth there will continue to be hatred, racism, xenophobia, murder, rape, genocide, child abuse, addiction, abuse of power and personal freedoms.

Take time from your alcohol-spiked eggnog too reflect on 2009 and think really deeply about how many people you wronged or hurt. Did you make someone cry or angry for no reason other than that you could do it? Were you wronged and instead of making better the situation by moving forward and out-living your enemies did you seek revenge and allow your base meanness rip open the fabric of decency for personal aggrandizement?

Don’t strike back angrily. We were once taught it takes more muscles to frown than smile and whether or not you subscribe to that notion it does take more strength to be kind, considerate, thoughtful and good.

Why bring this up today? It should be brought up ever millisecond of our existence and so for that reason, I remind us all today to think before you speech and let conscience make an effort to like or love of respect rather than the opposite.

Make yourself useful.

Graphic Profanity, Adult Themes and Food Stuffed into you gullet until you suffocate. Hmmm, good.

If the late Belgian Surrealist Painter René François Ghislain Magritte wanted to challenge preconceived ideas and perceptions of reality then as a devout eXisTenTiaLNihLisT, with degrees in Surrealistic Pragmatic Dadism, and minors in Esoteric Cross-Weaving and EFL (English as a Forgotten Language), then I am duty bound to destroy rational thinking in favor of the “Paradigm of Fundamentals of Foontasy Non Sequiturs and Temporal Warp Causality” (my thesis), from the University of Toronto at Las Vegas.

When I read recently that a rare first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was found in a family’s guest lavatory bookshelf in Oxford, southern England; one of nearly 1,250 copies first printed in 1859, I was struck with an epithany, or maybe it was that loose ceiling beam…Anyway, I envisioned the spirit of Darwin hovering over the bathroom while a cockney teenage boy masturbated to a copy of Brit Tits, the Parliamentary Procedures Issue, infamous for depicting a young and feisty Margaret Thatcher fondling the elderly Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill’s cigar while he waxed eloquently about the Second Boer War and how the press misunderstood the tragic miscalculations at Gallipoli, when thanks to his shuddering climax the book fell unto his head causing him to ejaculate on the preface, considerably lowering the resale value at Christie’s Auction by a few grand.

Darwin was pleased because it proved his theory of natural selection. Masturbators will always gum up the works.

Marshall McLuhan’s “The Global Village” Meets the Flintstones. So if we feel assuaged by “the medium is the message” it is only become the message was slipped into a bottle, thrown into the ocean and swallowed by the same whale swimming with Jonah and a shitload of tuna for all eternity. The message was intentionally lost like the secret ingredients in a perfume, or soft drink or soup.

Throw a bunch of ingredients into a can, put a fancy label on it, and tell us it is New, Improved, or Contains no Trans Fats and some schmuck will buy it.

Conjure imagery of a sexy co-ed or hunky dream doll guy sitting at home with a cat, or dog or roommate of equal gorgeousness eating soup. Why are they not at a club getting decadent? These commercial temperament types do not snort coke, binge drink until they are regurgitating tequila in a dank alley on the way to find their car and they certainly always have the nicest homes in which to sip the soup, usually curled up on a love seat or futon that would embarrass their targeted audience.

Schmucks.

I am a schmuck; likeable, honorable, occasionally cute but a schmuck nonetheless so I can attest to the taste of Campbell’s Select Three Cheese Mushroom Ravioli with Vegetables!

““Hmmm, Good.” I couldn’t just eat the soup without the jingle playing like a looped recording in my brain.

Mother fuck.

Worse than having a microchip inserted in my brain – don’t worry your children will have them implanted at birth – so they will remember every onomatopoeia- slogan streaming across my brain pans. As a reoccurring jingoistic message in the better than you’d expect “Demolition Man” with a thawed cryogenic cop played by Sylvester Stallone the future - you, know the one we’re living in now - posited an entire radio channel devoted to “mini-tunes” that were merely endless television jingles for Armour Hotdogs, Alka Seltzer and their ilk. John Carpenter’s “Escape From New York” sequel, the silly but, again, prescient future of “Escape From LA” presented a Beverly Hills community of denizens whose overuse of plastic surgery led to the need for continuous transplants as the botoxed bodies were deforming the formerly “beautiful people.”

At least Fred Flintstone lives on in vitamins. We’re lucky they don’t have Barney Rumble condoms; “rough when she wants it that way” or Quick Draw McGraw male enhancement that makes you shoot before you aim.

Fuck, Orwell was right. “Nineteen Eighty Four” can be any year from then until the end of year counting.

Huxley, fuck. He was right, too. So his “Brave New World” devolved into fat fucks trying to fit into sardine can pairs of Levis Jeans and trying to look slim without Weight Watchers Watching like the paramilitary; swallowing so many diet pills until they became so anorexic it made Twiggy look like Mama Cass.

McLuhan’s “Vast wasteland” is so immense the Grand Canyon now resembles a landfill and DirecTV offers a billion hours of programming so insidious that anyone watching is compelled to buy anything advertised and goddess forbid if they forget to TiVo their favorite episode of Dancing With Talentless American Idols. Hmm, didn’t earlier man pray to idols? If you believe Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” God was highly pissed at the idol worshipers but even more irate that Moses destroyed the tablets rather than just say, “You don’t want to follow the rules then you can’t play.”

Seems we only needed one commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Believe Anything Without First Being Blessed With Common Sense, A Degree of Spiritual Enlightenment, Intellectualism and the Freedom to Chose Between Good and Evil, Right and Wrong and Up or Down.”

McLuhan correctly postulated “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Was anyone listening?

No.

The assholes were already wearing headphones and listening to The Beatles albums backwards in the hope of karmic enlightenment, or at least a better buzz, but all was lost in a haze of bong smoke so thick today you’d think we all awoke in London and Jack the Ripper was the deejay.

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