Let The Music Play

THERE IS NOTHING FINER than meeting up with long lost friends, people from your past who were there for the glory years, specifically the heyday of the 80’s and 90’s, a collaborative mishmash of cultural cataclysm expressed in music (PUNK ROCK, NEW WAVE, ELECTRONIC DANCE outrageous fashion (once again, PUNK; FIORUCCI and rocker/teddy…INDUSTRIAL chic…) and many many more manifestations of a planetary explosion of creativity, built off the creative vibes of the 60’s and 70’s with a touch of the avant-garde found in classical and jazz music of the era. Art for art sake, money for God’s sake…piercings erupted, vinyl receded, color faded, goth had risen, drugs like MDA and MDMA and SHROOMS and yes COKE fed the desires of the coffin creatures and 

Klub Kids and dealers, oh my! The birth of Techno at the Hacienda and Chicago house ruling supreme…Peter Gatien‘s audacious nightclub kingdom, always a refuge from sanity. There were the times that tried men’s and women’s soles, when we were clad in brutal shoes and danced for hours, sometimes days…Wordy Rappinghood, It’s Raining Men, Pride, A Deeper Love, Let The Music Play, Relax …and through it all DEPECHE MODE bridging every genre without compromise, like the Cure and the Smiths, iconic originals incapable of impure thought…ah, to have lived through those years, and to have survived, unlike Klaus Nomi and the other so-called Gods of our time, though Gods they were…

Rejoice! Hail the 80’s!!!

Money Ain’t Half What It Used To Be

Money Money Money…

According to the Levine Report: 

45 PERCENT OF WORLD’S WEALTH DESTROYED: Blackstone CEO: Private equity company Blackstone Group LP (BX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. “Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,” Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. “This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime.”

NOW I don’t feel so bad about giving away so much to charity. I have helped a dozen kids get cleft palate surgery, seeded micro funding on three continents, contributed to rain forest purchase through preservation, given to Servicemen’s Legal Defense Network, Union of Concerned Scientists and many other causes.  Now, money well spent and not lost in a 401K or stocks.

I also spent my money on travel, to visit friends and family, to see a familiar face and hear a known and loved voice speak out in person, not over skype. Great joy has come of this. My carbon footprint has been offset many times over. I fly coach and drive a hybrid, have for years. (Finally, paid for!).

Am I lauding myself here? Perhaps. All I know is my rich rich friends have lost much of their fortune. Nancy Silverton lost five million, almost all her wealth. Others are being mum, but it’s lots: even mega mansions are a third of their value. Wish they’d handed me a fat check for a million for being fabulous a year ago. I’d split it with them now. 70-30 my favor.  Still a deal!

My Roth IRA is down twelve bucks. I’ll live.

FIRST, HANG ALL THE MULLAHS

What to do with Saudi Arabia? We hear of the KINGDOM (!) loosening its absurd and abusive restrictions on women. They can actually drive a car, if alone or with other related women…progress?? Do they hang young gay men still, a la Iran? Is this religious intolerance waning or still sickeningly prevalent? What do the people say, even the Wahibbists? 

This story: SAUDIS ORDER 40 LASHES FOR ELDERLY WOMAN FOR MINGLING: A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports. According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, began last year when a member of the religious police entered her house in the city of Al-Chamli and found her with two unrelated men, “Fahd” and “Hadian.” Fahd told the policeman he had the right to be there, because Sawadi had breast-fed him as a baby and was therefore considered to be a son to her in Islam, according to Al-Watan. Fahd, 24, added that his friend Hadian was escorting him as he delivered bread for the elderly woman. The policeman then arrested both men.

That’s messed up. The LEFT side of me wants us to focus all of our efforts to engage these twisted regimes in a dialog that might influence them to actually come out of the stone age and into the light…
The RIGHT side of me, the overshadowed, partially pathetic postage stamp of square centimetres that pass for my right, anyway, wants to send assassin drones over their governing, fatwah dispensing disgusting old men and take them out one by one.

Certainly, there can be a rational justification for this, right? Gawd, someone talk me out of this line of thinking… Indelibly burned into my psyche is the photo of the two young boys in Tehran hanged by edict and a brute assassin for the transgression of homosexuality. Every leader who ended these boys’ short lives and had a hand in that decision should suffer the same fate at least. Monsters. Humans masquerading as monsters.

This is not what Islam is supposed to be about. It always had a questionable bent toward violence to the infidel, easily pounced upon by hatemongerers, and the Muslim world sat stoney faced while we lamented 9-11, but really, can we not get the large secular group of Arab and Indonesian and Indian Muslims to rise up and rebel against this jihad idiocy? Can we not get Israel to stop giving them ammo? If I don’t get a two state solution soon, I may have to spend the rest of my life decrying the stupidity and suffering caused by a people who have themselves suffered so much. 

Surely, they should know better. 

Shame all around.