read the paper
rearrange the lies

Hey--Smallfry here, listening to Psychedelic Furs and feeling grumpy about the govt. Richard Butler's voice makes me think of trains at night and highway traffic on the overpass echoing downstream to my childhood shack by the river. Maybe it has the same timbre, same harsh melancholy. But also a bit like the "wanh-WANH" adult voices on Charlie Brown. However, I was nine years old when this album came out and it would be four more years before I would hear my first Furs song. There were no cool older brothers or neighbors to show me the way so my introduction to "not your parents music" was all-radio all the time. And like a phantom one day "The Ghost in You" appeared on my crappy fake-silver one speaker radio. Not a life altering event, but that song and Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" stand out as oddly exciting 1984 middle-of-nowhere radio moments. No hardcore-boy, me.

make a god of politics
make a god of police
worship it with automobiles
worship it with screams

Healthy Forests, my ass! Everytime I start to think that HATE isn't what I'm feeling for the Bushies, President Gas you might say given my choice of music this week, President Douche, tHEy go dragging out some new travesty, we know what's best for you crap. So the timber industry gets to log protected areas in the name of fire prevention. We get to pay them to cut down healthy old-growth trees and then they get to sell it as lumber. There's a reason this didn't pass Congress last year. There's a reason the timber industry has pumped millions into Republican campaigns and lobbying. I wouldn't be surprised to find them behind the fires that pushed this ahead.

Why not send in a group of experts with no industry ties to cut out the dead and diseased trees, to perform the proscribed burning and thinning of non-native trees, to help get forests back to the natural rhythm of smaller necessary fires. Must everything carry a profit beyond a reasonable, well-earned paycheck?

I know my friend DJ Hoodoo is shaking her head reading this. She says there's nothing we can do about this stuff anyway so why get riled? And I have to agree sometimes it does feel so very Kafka-futile.

we will be a part of structure
you will have a face of structure