Life, CityRail and Shovels and Rope

I am going to write an epic novel all about a man whose train is four minutes late. Just four minutes late. Not very late. Just the exact amount of lateness to FUCK EVERYTHING UP. AGAIN. Thereby driving the man to leap off the unbearably overcrowded platform and sit on the tracks and contemplate the meaning of life in the four remaining minutes before the train puts him out of his agony.

It has a happy ending — the train is actually SIX minutes late, giving him a full two minutes more of contemplation! And in those TWO EXTRA MINUTES he contemplates some of the MOST AMAZING THINGS ever contemplated in the ENTIRE HISTORY of HUMAN CONTEMPLATION! And (SPOILER ALERT) in a FINAL TWIST, just as he stood up on the tracks to impart his wisdom to the platform overcrowded with sad, desperate people hating everyone and everything around them, to FINALLY let them know the TRUE MEANING of life, the TRAIN CAME and they ALL CHEERED FOR *FINALLY* THEY COULD FUCKING GO HOME!

I think I'll call it "FUCK YOU CITYRAIL".

A rare sight: a CityRail train arriving.


In other news, I have decided not to bother following the news any more. Instead, when I wake up, I'll just get two large rusty nails and drive them straight into my eyeballs. It saves time, and efficiency is the new watchword according Our Overlord's Accountant Joe Hockey.

No longer can we can assume we are entitled to be depressed unspeakably by the news, we must take the initiative and stand on our own two feet and just imagine all the horrifically depressing things this bunch of neo-fascist reactionary racist misogynist poor-hating scum are getting up to.

Therefore I say thank christ for the likes of Shovels and Rope, the glorious husband-wife country duo from South Carolina. (I REFUSE TO USE TERMS LIKE "ALT. COUNTRY" AS THOUGH THIS KINDA SHIT IS SOMEHOW "ALTERNATIVE" AND NOT *REAL* COUNTRY! NOT PROPER OCUNTRY! JUST SOME SORT OF INDIE HIPSTER FEEBLE IRONIC STAB AT COUNTRY! BULLSHIT! THIS KINDA SHIT IS REAL COUNTRY! ALL THE POINTLESS CORPORATE-MANUFACTORED CRAP SHOULD BE CALLED "ALT. COUNTRY". I AM SORRY GARTH FUCKING BROOKS IS NOT COUNTRY! NOT COMPARED TO SHOVELS AND ROPE! NOT EVEN IN THE SAME FUCKING GALAXY!)

Here are a coupla tracks for ya all. No worries, buy me a beer sometime.




Well all this chasin after sunsets, all this shootin at the moon
Got us drinkin from the gutter pickin food out of the broom
Well it ain't hard to second guess yourself
When you're dressin up a wound
Ain't that the truth
That's the truth ...

So now there's grass, cocaine, alcohol, and pills
Yeah they might even drag you under or help supplement your bills
It just depends what you need worse, be it the money or the thrills
Well, I could use both ...

ALL THE FUCKING WORDS!





'And if that ones for the winner, this one must be for me...'

Yeah, here are ALL THE FUCKING WORDS.

Well I'm going through the motions
Seems it happens every night of every week
Well it's an ever running cycle
And the chance of breakin out of it seems weak
Well my mind becomes a freight train
And it never lets me get no decent sleep
Oh
Well my head starts a worrying about all the little things I cannot change
And my heart it starts a pounding
Messing up the way the blood goes through my veins
Oh
I never dream of nothin pleasant
I'm always lost or gettin booed off of the stage

Well the west coast was a desert
And New York City black
So I spent some time in Carolina
Make my money back
There's a trail of blood that trickles down from Denver to the sea
And if that ones for the winner, this one must be for me

Oh
Well there's this busy little corner
Half a mile down the road from where I live
Where all these beautiful women
Work the sidewalk for the little take and get
Oh it's like an escalator walkway
I just mind my own bus, make sure my money's here
Well I got this friend, he takes his money down there every day
When he gets done from work
He asks for Georgia cuz she's special,
She reminds him he's a man he has worth
Oh but I don't judge him cuz he's honest
Which is more'n I can say I've been since birth ...

So if you're led into a wasteland or made to stumble through the dark
You leave the cartoon color legacy or a common watermark
We always back the underdog because he's the only one we trust
And if that ones for the winner, this one must be for us

Well, this is one fucked-up place... so here's five great live performances

It is near impossible to capture just how fucked up shit is in this country, let alone world. Great Barrier Reef? Oh well... well it was only getting in the way of exporting coal. Asylum seekers? Well, obviously we are concerned that they are being encouraged to take "dangerous journeys"... so we'll throw the desperate people that come here on small life boats, send them off the Indonesia to fend for themselves even though at least three people have died as a result. We had to do that otherwise they might have died.

Fuck civil liberties, fuck unions, fuck public education, , fuck the disabled, fuck working mothers, fuck the ABC, fuck the Tasmania's forests, fuck marine life, ... fuck any hope of any kind of civilised life on a fucking planet capable of hosting civilised life.

And may the Good Lord have mercy on your poor, pitiful soul should all of this make you want a MOTHERFUCKING DRINK in this goddamn state of NSW.

And the rest of this goddamn motherfucking world ... well, what is there left to say? I could point out that 85 people control half the world's wealth while much of the rest are condemned to Hell.

But... I mean, I made my case some time ago that we serioiusly needed to find a decent sized wall for these fucking pricks, but did you goddamn aresholes *listen*? HUH? I even *tried to find a wall*. Goddamn you.

I even fucking suggested this wall for the goddamn pricks, you useless motherfuckers.

Well fuck. This is why God in His infinite mercy gave us music. There is not much better than live music done well, when a song swells with emotion and power until it seems it will explode. It is self-evident that such things are best actually experienced live. But, I have spent far too many evenings getting drunk and surfing YouTube to not know that there are some truly great, even breathtaking, life performances captured on film and uploaded there for our enjoyment.

So here are five great live clips. Trying to actually pick a "best five" would be impossible. This is a long way from that (among other things, I avoided Tom Waits coz once you go down that path, every single song will be Waits. You want some great Waits' clips, and who doesn't, I suggest my blog post Tom Waits' Top 20 Tearjerkers Of All Time.)

I simply chose five great live clips that I could think of right now -- and I can already think of some other great clips with no less claim to be on this list. These ones are great for different reasons -- the Springsteen clip is set on fire by Tom Morello's guitar solo; Janpis Joplin's astonoshing brilliant-but-raw vocal performance is out of this world; the Dubliners clip, as befits a folk song, brigns the story to life; and Kurt Cobain's shrieking is horrifying and spine-tingling in equal measures.

Anyway, the clips are below and, as ever, in a YouTube playlist.

* * *



'He was a sick man, he had murder in his heart...' Weddings Parties Anything were a glorious folk rock band that toured one end of this country to the other -- the type of band the closing of so many live msic venues has seemingly condemned the hiustory books. They developed a reputation for one of the great live acts of their day -- and this clips helps show why. The song is about the infamous case from 19th century Tasmania, in which escaped convict Alexander Pearce turned to cannibalism... and developed a taste for human flesh.

'Now history is a pack of lies, as any fool can tell.
So when I got down to hobart Town I told my story well.
But do you think they would believe a word I said?'

'The highway is alive tonight. Where it's headed everybody knows...' Tom Morello's guitar solo alone would be enough to make this re-imagined version of Springsteen's originally accustic tale of the "new world order", with its old world poverty and suffering, utterly electrifying. Add to that... well everything else about this performance, and you've got yourself a gem.





'Honey I know she told you she loved you much, much more than I did....' Well, really, this is how you sing a song. An incredible vocal performance in which Janis Joplin inhabits the song entirely. Every line is delivered like her entire future happiness depends on it.





'With their tanks and their guns, oh my God, what have they done...' This version by the Dubliners of a song written by Phil Coulter about his home town of Derry is a great example of how you perform a track about war and oppression. Coulter's autobiographical words capture the tragedy of British occupation of Ireland's north and the violence it wrought by capturing the way it actually affected people's lives. Luke Kelly sings it with real emotional power so that each line is a fresh heartbreak.





'I will shiver the whole night through...' This raw, hard-edged cover of the traditional song made popular by Lead Belly as "In the Pines", is haunting and unsettling until Kurt Cobain starts shreiking, at which point it becomes like a knife in guts. It is a very potent performance that is a fitting conclusion to Nirvana's groudbreaking MTV Unplugged acoustic set.

It is also, in popular mind, inevitably bound up with the fact the Unplugged album was released after Cobain committed suicide -- it seems to add extra gavitas to the performance and make a track like this even more haunting. But it is worth keeping in mind Cobain was not suicidal while he performs this. If he was, he'd have killed himself there and then, not spent a few hours in front of a crowd to record a show in which he did some of his finest live work.

What it is, rather than some inevitable swansong or pointer to the tragedy that was to come, is a sign of Cobain's talent and most of all, his potential. It is a sign of why his premature death was such a loss -- it showed what he was capable of. We can only imagine what he could have given the world had he lived.

* * *

BONUS TRACK!!!



'We're hanging here in an inch of our lives, from the day we're born till the day we die...' Shovels and Rope!!! Christ I love the glorious country folk duo that are wife and husband Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent.. Let no one accuse me of being *purely* negative... I end on this fucking heartfelt call to action to fucking DO SOMETHIG OF VALUE WITH OUR LIFES. Like you know.. finding a decent wall for all the motherfuckers...

The United States can get fucked -- By Oscar Wilde, preemptively.

Their criminal "justice" system killed Troy Davis. Fuck them.

Let us ignore all the huge flaws in Davis' case, including eyewitnesses later saying they lied under police pressure and absence of any weapon tying Davis to the murder of a police officer. The death penalty in horrific. It always has been and always will be.

Let Oscar Wilde explain it in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written about a real case of a man who was sentenced to death and hanged for murder during Wilde's two years in Reading Gaol for "crimes of gross indecency".




They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.

MURDERED







"Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." These days they use lethal injections, rather than nooses from poplar trees. The point remains.

Could this be the wall?

“Can this be the wall we put the coal barons up against?”, is the thought provoking question from Fitzroy, Melbourne. It poses a very important question indeed.

Too often, the great mass of the oppressed go into a mass insurrection, driven by hatred of an outmoded social system that condemns their lives to utter hell, without fully thinking such questions through.

Too often, essential questions such as that posed by this piece of graffiti are not answered in advance. The result is ad hoc solutions are found.

Well, no need this time.

We know who is responsible for the coming eco-holocaust. And we know what needs to be done.

And we have concerned citizens thinking ahead and putting in their bid.

So, to the question posed: *Should* this, indeed, be the wall?

Well, I decided to investigate for myself. I went down to Melbourne, took the 86 tram to Fitzroy and found the wall in question in order to carry out a thorough study.

The conclusions drawn from my investigation are mixed.

In short: the wall is adequate. It is definitely high enough and has a reasonable length, so as to ensure a relatively efficient process

However, I would caution against any rushed conclusion that views this particular wall as *the* wall.

For a start, while relatively long, it is far from *long enough* to line up all the coal barons and associated hangers on — such as the entire parliamentary grouping of the NSW ALP, to say nothing of the editorial board of various Murdoch tabloids.

If this is the *only* wall, it may take some time to get through them all.

It seems to me, if this is to be done in a relatively short period of time (and climate scientists keep emphasising that the time in which to act is short), then more than one wall is required.

This wall may well prove useful for those traitors to humanity as can be rounded up in Victoria, but further walls should be investigated for use in other key regional areas.

Those of us in Sydney have a particular responsibility, I feel. Even more so those in Newcastle.

In short, Carlo Sands wishes to congratulate those in Melbourne who have thought ahead and found a wall *before* the mass insurrection that condemns this fucking insane fucking system — that fucking threatens fucking destruction of all fucking life on fucking earth so a few fucking corporations can fucking earn some fucking unimaginable fucking profits — to the fucking dustbin of fucking history.

But, the rest of us should not take this as a signal to rest on laurels.

This wall is merely a good start. Many more will be needed. Time to get scouting.



"You can crush us, you can bruise us. But you'll have to answer to... the guns of Brixton."

'Drink motherfucker, drink!'; or an alternative way forward for the NSW Labor government

Nathan Rees is a desperate man.

For reasons entirely outside his control, he has somehow ended up premier of New South Wales. It must have come as quite a shock.

He got the gig because he is basically the last NSW Labor politician still standing who hasn't been been charged with corruption, assault or child sex offences.

Actually, there was a small number of others, but they are hated for attempting to force electricity privatisation on the state in the face of overwhelming opposition, including the NSW ALP's own state conference.

Then there is the trains, the schools, the hospitals, the push to privatise ferries, the selling of the state to developers, the refusal to pay essential service workers a decent wage and severe attacks on civil liberties.

All of which have created a crisis so deep for the Labor government, that they handed the reins to some guy no one had ever heard of in the vain hope we wont notice he is from the same gang as the rest of the bastards that have made our lives a nightmare since the mid '90s.

This government has only survived recent elections by running a campaign amounting to "But have you seen the opposition?"

Poor Premier Rees.

With Labor having copped unprecedented hidings in by-elections, how does he respond?

Naturally he goes after drinkers.

Premier Rees "could not believe what he saw on Sydney's streets when he headed home late on Saturday night after his Labor Government's thumping at the ballot box".

Really?

He said: "The exhibitions of public drunkenness that I saw were mind-boggling … it's getting silly, binge-drinking".

Oh dear.

The article, which reports that Rees is "known to enjoy a drink", notes that "not everyone involved in the debate was convinced by his sudden discovery of the issue of alcohol-related violence".

Gee, is that so? Could it really be a cynical manoeuvre by a desperate politician to jump on the latest moral hysteria bandwagon that costs nothing in a desperate attempt to save a rapidly sinking government?

Surely not.

Let's face it, Rees has to do something and its either bash binge drinking or fix the trains and schools.

No governments' AAA credit rating has ever been threatened by a press conference called to condemn excessive drinking. (If only because no one is ever going to heed a morality lecture from a member of the NSW Labor Party, thus ensuring the government's badly needed tax revenue from alcoholic beverages remains perfectly safe.)

Now, I have had my say on this question of binge drinking hysteria. I wont repeat myself here.

What I will say is this.

Premier Rees, you are wrong. The evidence is not on your side.

You may be satisfied with a few smug headlines for the cheapest of political stunts bashing the easiest of victims (drunks, who can't even stand up to fight back).

However, if you want to save your stinking government, you may want to consider a strategy reversal.

How about doing something radical and promoting policies aimed at increasing citizen's happiness?

I know that isn't the style of the NSW Labor government, believe me, I catch trains. But how about a clean break with the past? It's the only way you'll save your skin.

So here is my radical plan.

Instead of bashing drinkers, how about going out of your way to promote alcohol consumption?

That's right, a new study has shown that the happiest people are those that drink every day.

"The index, based on a survey of 2,000 Australians in April, found that those who drink up to three drinks a day are far happier than those who never drink.

"And the wellbeing of 18- to 25-year-olds - the key binge drinking demographic - remains high regardless of how many drinks they have."

The unhappiest? Apparently, "people who did not drink at all had the lowest wellbeing of all".

What a shock.

Now I would have thought this was pretty fucking obvious, but in this day and age, so low have we sunk, that it actually requires some poor bastard to go around with a clip board and ask people to discover the bleeding obvious.

Yes, shocking as it may sound to the crypto-prohibitionists in the government and media, people consume alcohol because it makes them happy.

If you really want to survive, Premier Rees, may I suggest a change of tact.

In the interests of our collective well-being, how about, rather than lectures on the evils of some newly discovered binge drinking culture, getting out there and touring the state's pubs and bars — sticking your head in each one and shouting "Drink motherfucker, drink motherfucker, drink!".

Or, perhaps for the higher class wine bars, jumping in to shout "Scull, scull, scull! Yeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!"

You could even invest in an advertising campaign to raise public awareness. I have a few suggested TV ads below, utilising some good ol' drinking shanties by the Poxy Boggards.

First up, and straight to the point, here is one whose central message is the apt "I'd rather have lager than life". And who wouldn't, with public services the way they are in this state?





"For life without liquor is to no avail/so bring me lager for life!" could be Rees's re-election slogan.

A second option is this one below, which hammers the crucial issue: "Bring us more beer!" This one has the advantage of its chorus featuring a long list of various types of beers that people can order, one after the other.





A third option (below) goes for the tried and tested "shock" option. Like those horrific smoking ads featuring blocked arteries and tarry sponges, it brings home to the average citizen the terrible consequences that face "That strange motherfucker who doesn't like beer".

Among other things, his own dad disowns him, his wife divorces him and his son changes his name. And why wouldn't they?





And finally, my personal favourite: "I wear no pants". I include this one if only because, as close observers of this blog will note, I often don't.





Such a re-election strategy beats the hell out of the now quite weary "But have you seen the opposition?"

Because the answer is we have. That's why we drink.