The "BIG SALE" ads tell me today is Veterans' Day (observed), and I feel much as I did last year at this time: What bizarre creatures humans can be.
But this year I'm alerted to a new music video put together by Mike Coles -- the guy responsible for a lot of classic Killing Joke art (including the Fred Astaire/trench image from my 2006 Veterans' Day post), who now runs the Malicious Damage independent label. The video is for one of Malicious Damage's acts and their song, "Eleven Eleven," which probably needs no further description.
But it's a moving piece.
I'm reminded of the Nixonian complaints that TV news footage of the Vietnam War changed warfare and turned citizens against the war, which is one of the most hilarious examples of out-of-touch government I can think of:
You don't say?! You mean when people see what war is actually like -- instead of the G.I. Joe hero propaganda from "official" sources -- they think, just maybe, "boy, we ought to have a really ironclad reason to subject people to this" and turn them -- if they're lucky -- into veterans?!
One of the quotes in the video is from Wilfred Owen's haunting "Dulce et Decorum Est," which ends with:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.
So that's what that quote is from! I just got a remastered Killing Joke set from their "Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions" album, and it includes a cleaned-up old live bootleg of a performance of "Inside the Termite Mound."
The 1990 song, as one might imagine, foreshadows a sterile age of commercialized, zombified human consumers:
("By day we're dormant ... Because it's too hot outside now Nocturnal notions ... as we leave our cocoons Antennae tuned to ... inhuman vibrations Shading the cities ... of the world that's to come.")
Anyway, at the beginning of this old live bootleg version is a pre-recorded but interrupted quote that I could never quite harness or recall the source of. But by voice and content I knew it was one that catered to my sense of humor.
It goes: "--drug, will make you just like your mother and father."
Listening to the official version today got me searching for the answer after all these years, and a-ha! Of course: it's from Frank Zappa, who had a million such lines (e.g. "Most rock journalism is people who cannot write interviewing people who cannot talk." And "Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."
Anyway, the completed one they played before Termite Mound is:
"I would like to suggest that you not use speed, and here's why: it is going to mess up your heart, mess up your liver, your kidneys, rot out your mind. In general this drug will make you just like your mother and father."
I'm pretty sure I've even heard it in full before, but the context completely threw me. Relief!
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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put together by Mike Coles -- the guy responsible for a lot of classic Killing Joke art (including the 
February, 2008