Pribek

This is from the Boston Globe.

Bobby Kariotis discovered one of the challenges of being a DJ five years ago after a club gig in downtown Boston. Kariotis, known as DJ BK, says that at the end of the night the club owners refused to pay him, claiming they didn’t make enough money for the evening. According to Kariotis, the owners, whom he didn’t want to identify, told him they were doing him a favor by hiring him. Kariotis refused to back down; he argued that if no one at the club had been playing music, the owners wouldn’t have made any money at all.

“I made sure I got paid,” says Kariotis, now 22, who remembers getting about $150 for the night. “It wasn’t what I expected, but I got something.”

The most obvious irony, of course is, if there wasn’t a DJ there, undercutting and yet making money off of the creativity of others, there might have been some actual, lowly musicians scraping together a few bucks. Good Story, DJ BK…

….club owner tries to screw you out of some money because he hasn’t done his job in promoting the event and then acting like he’s doing you a favor. It’s a drag isn’t it? It’s the kind of story that musicians used to hear a lot more often before any swinging Richard with a $300.00 turntable set could make the case that it was more profitable to hire a DJ than a band.

They Tuk R Jhawwwbsss!

Yeah, whiny but true.

Anyway what’s this all about? The……..

Million DJ March!!??

Yeah, it’s for real.

On Saturday, DJs from all over the country will gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Million DJ March. The event will not only give them an opportunity to protest unfair compensation practices but will help DJs organize their businesses, sign up for health insurance, and learn about the legal issues mixtape DJs face.

Even more bizarre; they actually asked, and received permission to use the name from Louis Farrakhan.

Power to the people, DJs. I’d join you but, I actually do have to load up the gear and play a gig. I’ll be there in spirit. Keep fighting the good fight.

I pretty much live like a hermit. Maybe, I’m anti-social; I don’t know. I’ve been accused form time to time. It’s not that I don’t enjoy interacting or, I’m unfriendly; I just don’t feel the need to constantly be around people.

At some point, I realized that I was not the Master of the Universe. This wasn’t a sudden revelation rather, a gradual awareness. As my awareness increases, my ability to control decreases. I seem to be more of an observer than participant, in a lot of respects. Maybe, that is the natural order of things.

Tell you what though, I’m glad I’m not in control or even under the delusion of being in control because, the more I observe-things look strange.

I look at the news every day, probably more than most people do. And, even though I haven’t been writing about a lot of it, I’m aware of it.

Still having “morning” coffee right now, rock and roll hours, you know? So, I’m still in the introspective stage of my Sunday routine.

Then, give us a few few thoughts and observations please, Jack. Thank you, don’t mind if I do, voice inside my head.

The Economy:
How in the hell would a 44 year old songwriter/guitar player who has never had a pot to piss in and, if he did, there isn’t a window in the Winnebago big enough to throw it out of: How does that guy have the nerve to say anything about the economy? One thing I have is nerve.

In the news this morning, I saw that mortgage defaults are up 57% over last year.

I saw that some guy from the U.N. is accusing all of western civilization of murder because of, high food prices.

I paid $3.41 a gallon for gas yesterday.

Last night, driving home from the gig, I heard some guy on the radio saying that, at some point, maybe when diesel reaches $5.00 a gallon, the trucking industry will shut down, that this was a plot perpetrated by “globalist” corporate types, as a result, “the grid” will totally shut down for years and, we should all start raising chickens and growing hydroponic gardens, it’s the only way we will survive.

Yeah well, I’m not going to raise any chickens.

If you got into some variable rate mortgage that, some guy in a polo shirt with a receding hairline, sold you on and now, you can’t afford to pay for it-you can’t pay for it. That seems pretty simple. But, I keep seeing this stuff in the news that always has some greasy economist laying a collective guilt trip on home buyers for their irresponsibility. It’s a crock. The irresponsibility is the baggage of the lenders.

You and I aren’t killing people because the price of wheat is high. The price of wheat is high because oil was $117.00 a barrel yesterday.

I’m driving less, are you?

Politics:
I grow more and more apolitical every day. I don’t have a dog in the hunt. Here’s one I see a lot, “The growing number of the disaffected”. I have to say a big “blow me” to that one.

I don’t even know if I’m going to vote this time. Does that make me a bad person? No.

Maybe, I am “disaffected”, I don’t know. I would look it up but, I don’t care.

“Dancing With The Stars” is a better T.V. show than the ceaseless, ongoing election coverage. I would rather see Priscilla Presley do a jitterbug than watch another debate.

Here’s the thing, this election cycle already seems like it’s been going on for 20 years and it really hasn’t even kicked into gear yet. November is a long way away. When you are talking to me about November, you might as well be talking about the year 2052 when we all have robot maids and groovy personal space copters.

I don’t care about John McCain’s wife’s financial records, I don’t care what Bill Clinton says to a bunch of college students, I don’t care what Bill Maher thinks about the Pope and I don’t care that Jeremiah Wright has a $10 million line of credit and, I don’t care about analysis of how far Obama should have or, has, distanced himself from him. Get back to me on all of that around the third week of October and, I bet I can sort through all of it before noon. Then, I may have a dog in the hunt.

Speaking of Mr. Wright, here is what is important; When he says “God Damn America”, there is a room full of people hanging on every word. Further, I have been around a bit and I have met a lot of people that feel that way and even agree with the opinions of Louis Farrakhan. I don’t want Jeremiah Wright to shut up about it and, I don’t want anybody who feels or thinks that way to feel the need to keep quiet about it either. I want to know why they think or feel that way. We got to figure that out. See, I heard Sean Hannity, on the radio the other day, repeatedly calling Wright “crazy” and a “nut”. That kind of stuff isn’t helpful because, anybody who agrees with Wright is a “nut” by proxy. That is a type of suppression. I figured out a long time ago that if tell someone they are crazy, you aren’t going to change their mind. The best you can do is make them want to avoid the subject. We need to encourage these people to speak about this stuff.

The Weather:
I don’t know about you, but we sure have been having some screwy weather here in the Ozarks.

Global Warming or Not Global Warming? Tell you what; I don’t know, you don’t know, Al Gore doesn’t know, the U.N. doesn’t know, NASA doesn’t know; nobody knows for sure.

I can tell you this though, carbon offsets are a con game and whether or not you use those silly straw light bulbs isn’t going to tip the balance. If you feel like using them though, go right ahead on. If you want to buy carbon offsets, go ahead; I bear no ill will to people that send money to T.V. evangelists either. Whatever gets you through the night.

Might be best to drive a little less, just to be on the safe side-no Atheists in a foxhole you know? Might bring the price of oil down a little and get the U.N. off the back of the Western World and, at the same time, cut down on suburban chicken farming.

Once again, the whole deal comes back around to my continued, comprehensive gripe with the “news” media. The “news” media is hell bent on laying a not so subtle guilt trip on collective humanity while, at the same time metaphorically and collectively, stumbling around Central Park with a rope tied around it’s genitalia and a pocket full of crank.

That’s my rant for the day. Aside from all of the above, I feel pretty good.

I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn’t help from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee.

Bob Dylan “Thunder On The Mountain”

Good question Bob, what has Alicia Key been up to?

According to this, she’s been promoting conspiracy theories.

The 27-year-old – sporting a new gold AK-47 pendant “to symbolize strength, power and killing ‘em dead” – told her interviewer she believed Tupac Shakur and Nortorious B.I.G.’s murders were fuelled by the American government.

Keys, who revealed she’s been reading several Black Panther autobiographies, claimed Biggie and Tupac’s famous feud was in fact perpetuated “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing”.

She continued, “’Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”

Just another example of the man keeping us down, man.

Echoes of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan while, at the same time, Alicia appears to be one of those people that continues to cling to the 2nd amendment.