Without ants picking up after us, our carpets and shelves would soon be littered with boogers.

L


ook, I'm going the extra mile to provide a forum for a robust discussion of the subject of whether or not hanging out on the Downtown Mall and beating people up all day is a noble civic activity. I'm attempting to mine a resource hitherto overlooked: the wisdom of skinheads.

On a somewhat related topic, have you ever noticed that when you flick a booger, you never think about where it will land? You just assume it disappears from the world as if sucked up by a black hole much like the one from which it was plucked. But I've had nights at Comet when every booger I flicked ended up in some place where I'd have to encounter it later. You know, people like to say ants are of no use, but it's my contention that without ants picking up after us, our carpets and shelves would soon be littered with boogers.

Back in 1992/93/94 when I was "involved" with Leslie Montalto (the cute little pottery girl I met in Oberlin), we used to call boogers "pizza toppings." I keep trying to revive this term at Kappa Mutha Fucka, to no avail.

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I


  awoke this afternoon at 3pm. About that time Matthew Hart and his redneck friend CJ were getting back from a miserable fishing trip to the Rivanna. They were drenched and covered with mud. It seems they'd been rained upon the whole time. The Summer had been so dry, but now suddenly it's the rainy season.

What they did is both marvelously juvenile and infuriatingly pastel.

There's a new bar/restaurant called Buddhist Biker opening soon on Elliewood Avenue. This morning Jamie Dyer told me that they needed someone to paint a mural of a pond on their upstairs ceiling. I went there around 5pm to inquire further and found the ceiling had already been painted. What can I say? What they did is both marvelously juvenile and infuriatingly pastel. I'm sure I would have done an equally unpretentious job, but I have confidence that my results would have been far more beautiful. Oh well, Charlottesville is again spared the trauma of real beauty.

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I


  bought four used CDs today: 4-Track Demos by P.J. Harvey, a compilation of "songs" released by GG Allin in 1993, REM's Fables of the Reconstruction (of the Fables), and Da Bomb by Kris Kross. Some of that was purely for its novelty value; the Kris Kross and GG Allin came dirt cheap from the special "fucked up used section" of Plan 9.

But the hint is already here of the pretense that would haunt them in later years, if only in the title of this CD.

I used to have Fables of the Reconstruction on tape until I inadvertantly recorded some alternative music over it. I'm not a nut about REM or anything, but I think they were one of the most innovative bands of the 80s, and in their early years, they were nothing short of miraculous. Back in 1985 when Fables of the Reconstruction came out, REM was still a young, vigourous band. They were insecure, they were unpretentious, their lyrics made no sense, their instrumentation was stripped down and dream-inducing. But the hint is already here of the pretense that would haunt them in later years, if only in the title of this CD. I especially like "Green Grow the Rushes," "Driver 8" and "Auctioneer."

The PJ Harvey 4 track lowfi reminds me of Elizabeth from the Dynashack. She used to play this CD all the time, especially when she was feeling like a pissed off feminist. It's all raw and grungy, and played by PJ herself. There's almost no percussion. Mostly it's just several tracks of her voice, a loud guitar, and assorted noise. This CD is one of the reasons I went out and bought a 4 track.

On stage, these sections give Allin an opportunity to assault audience members with shit, fists and his sex organs, but all of his stage presence is lost in recording.

GG Allin, meanwhile, is completely ridiculous. He's all about violence, hating the police, and basic body functions like shitting and fucking and eating what results therefrom. None of this appeals to me at all, and neither does the "music." I find the whole garish thing extremely boring. But GG was very popular at Big Fun, where we had a videotape of his appearance on a daytime talk show. I mostly bought this CD to whip out in moments of drunken friskiness at Kappa Mutha Fucka. The music is completely horrible: it features Allin bombastically reciting his bad, obscene, disgusting shock-"poetry" inaudibly while instruments create a repetitive wall of mostly dissonant or somewhat blues-based noise. It's like an inferiour version of what Aaron the SHARP did on Friday night. Sometimes the instruments or Allin's voice are caught in little tape loops and go on endlessly like bad industrial-music mantras. On stage, these sections give Allin an opportunity to assault audience members with shit, fists and his sex organs, but all of his stage presence is lost in recording. He's not a musician so much as a performance artist, and a bad one at that. Trying to be outrageous only goes so far; his big plan was to eventually commit suicide on stage, but a drug overdose several years ago cheated him out of it.

America was looking for its next kid band, and all they could see when they looked at Kris Kross was a couple of kids who should be getting real jobs.

Then there's Kris Kross. They're a couple of little pre-pubescent black kids doing rap music. Kid musicians are a recurring novelty in western popular music, just like transvestites, bad girls, and enigmatic loners. They do their thing, go through puberty, and are forgotten. What happened to Kris Kross? There's hardly any mention of them on the Web, but they were big in their day, circa 1992. By the time Da Bomb came out (1993), Kris Kross were already on the decline; their voices had changed, they were trying to be serious rappers, but their novelty had worn off. America was looking for its next kid band, and all they could see when they looked at Kris Kross was a couple of kids who should be getting real jobs. Again, this CD is a good one to slap in the CD player if only to add spice to the conversations in the room.

No guys, this is not default grey. I know what I'm doing.

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