Late Boomer's Den

  • Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hipster

    Choosing sides in the Patton vs. Keidis feud

    I swear I’m a music lover, not a music snob. All snobs do is turn people off. Sure it feels lonesome being the only one who knows or likes a band and having no one to discuss it with, but taste is subjective. If you wanna listen to K-pop, listen to K-pop.

    Mr. Bungle – Air Conditioned Nightmare

    Unfortunately there’s a little asshole in my brain I call Mr. Hipster. He’s one of the Jungian shadows I try to ignore. Every now and then he comes out like Mr. Hyde and sneers at somebody for liking something “objectively bad.”

    “You have a right to your wrong opinion,” he says to my wife, who just rolls her eyes. (She doesn’t like The Beatles, which doesn’t compute for Mr. Hipster.)

    He’s usually right, but he’s damn annoying. He made dating so difficult.

    Mr. Bungle – California, full album. Listen to it however.

    I was listening to Mr. Bungle a little bit ago and wanted to make sure my friend knew how awesome their album California was in case I forgot to mention it, and nag him until he listened to it. I do that to people (in my defense, he does it too).

    I decided to look up something about the feud between Mike Patton and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I found the craziest article in Far Out: The surreal feud between Mike Patton and Anthony Kiedis.

    That article killed me. For one thing, the feud was way more ridiculous than I remembered.

    For another, Greg Gutfeld at Fox going off on the Chili Peppers because he was a rabid Faith No More fan, was just too much.

    If you’re gonna have a strong opinion about something, better it be about an ancient feud between musicians.

    Mr. Bungle cover Under the Bridge while pretending to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers – to mock them. Note how many comments sound just like Gutfeld and Mr. Hipster.

    “Nothing personal,” says Mr. Hipster. “But how anyone could listen to Mr. Bungle’s California album and still give a shit about the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a legitimate question.” That’s how he talks.

    Oh, and he would also like to add, “Flea is still awesome.”

    If I’m serious, Mr. Bungle is an acquired taste. If you want to acquire it, start with California.

    Their albums Disco Volante and the self-titled debut were kinda rough to listen to at first, though now I can’t figure out why I had a problem with them.

    There are a couple of fan-made Mr. Bungle videos I wanted to include, for “Pink Cigarette” and “Retrovertigo,” but they’re really violent. They’re also really creative and kind of funny in a dark way. I think the guy who made them has Hollywood Horror movie potential.

    Secret Chiefs 3 – Exodus

    Incidentally, I may be MORE of a fan of Mr. Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance’, after discovering’s band Secret Chiefs 3. It’s as unique as Mr. Bungle.

    They rock with a Sufi/Bollywood vibe, but they’ll throw in any style including death metal. They’ve made some incredible albums and they’ll come up again on this blog. Mr. Hipster insists.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppxvzzF3oCA

    Definitely going to check this podcast out. I have a ton of respect for this guy. He’s actually a damn great bass player and a real intellectual.

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  • That time I looked forward to the End of the World

    Judee Sill – Enchanted Sky Machines (live)

    “I wasn’t even supposed to be here!” I thought on the first day of the lockdown, and I laughed and laughed, because because I fully expected to be Raptured as a teenager on Jan. 1, 1984.

    Now here I was in my late 50s, waiting for a plague that had everyone emptying shelves and crowding into gun stores. I felt like the guy in Clerks who came in on his day off, only to face one disaster after another.

    If I got left behind, so did y’all

    Daniel Knox – Armageddonsong

    My little Baptist church was having a New Year’s Eve party (no alcohol) on Dec. 31, 1983. We’d had a good potluck in the Fellowship Hall and were holding hands, standing in a circle. We had finished singing “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds” and someone began counting down from 10.

    I hadn’t told anyone, but I knew the Rapture was going to happen at the stroke of midnight. I had pieced it together after reading Revelation and listening to radio preachers. I couldn’t possibly have been influenced by the title of a famous book…

    Five, four, three, two, one, aaaaand… Nothing.

    The Handsome Family – When That Helicopter Comes

    Time to pack up dishes and say our goodbyes. I thought about waiting, in case Jesus was on Mountain or Pacific, but I knew there was no point. I felt like a complete fool.

    The Summer Camp Preacher

    Jill Tracy – Doomsday Serenade

    My Rapture obsession started on the last night of my last year of church camp. I was sitting in the tabernacle with a bunch of other kids my age and younger. A thunderstorm was brewing and the air was still and humid.

    The preacher told us we’d better be ready. Stores were installing equipment to read Number of the Beast barcode tats. Rock music and Dungeons and Dragons were preparing children for the Antichrist. There was trouble in the Middle East and America and Russia were ready to fight that final battle.

    The Rapture was coming. You would either meet Jesus in the air or be left behind to live through the Time of Tribulation. “Do not miss the Rapture,” he said, preparing for the Invitation. “But if you do, don’t say we didn’t warn you!”

    Bob Marley and the Wailers – Midnight Ravers

    You could try being one of the 144,000 martyrs who defied the Beast, but your suffering would be horrific. At least there was a loophole, I thought, but he had me rattled. What if I had only fooled myself and I wasn’t saved?

    We held hands as the pianist played, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” I liked holding hands with the girl next to me. She was cute. Which worried me even more. Thinking about girls at a time like this?

    Suddenly there was a loud crack of thunder, and rain pounded the metal roof. The cute girl let go of my hand and headed to the front. Others followed and I joined them. I said the right words, prayed with a counselor and filled out a card.

    I don’t think my hometown preacher liked the sermon. He asked a lot of questions. But I knew what to say. A week later, I had my third baptism – or was it the fourth? (Pro-tip: Always check your pockets before you get baptized. Lost a good wallet.)

    So over it…

    Meat Beat Manifesto – Paradise Now

    When the Rapture failed to happen on the night I’d chosen, my end of the world mania stopped. I quit accepting everything the preachers said. I didn’t want to hear any more theories about the End Times. It would happen or it wouldn’t.

    I resented the summer camp preacher. That was a shitty way to treat children. I bet he created a lot of future atheists. It was over the top, but it worked for a reason. I grew up surrounded by that kind of talk.

    We watched films where people vanished, leaving only clothes and shocked sinners If something scary happened in the world, people would shake their heads and go, “Wars and rumors of wars.” They’d talk about their theories in Sunday School. Would the Time of Tribulation come before or after the Rapture?

    But the verse about how “no one knows the day or the hour” (Matthew 24:36) kept it from getting out of hand. You didn’t have to figure it out. It was just “soon.” They didn’t sell their shit and kept going to work like regular people.

    Beam me up Scotty

    I could have done without that particular religious trauma, but I understand why Christians get excited about the Rapture. You know the saying, “Everybody wants go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Wouldn’t you rather go to heaven in a whirlwind like Elijah than die of cancer?

    I know why I fell for it. It wasn’t just the camp preacher if I’m honest. I was stressed out, worried about the future. The Cold War was stressful. Everyone had a nuke with his name on it.

    Even worse, I was about to graduate high school and had no idea who I was or what to do with my life. If the world ended, I would be off the hook. Too bad though, I had to figure it out.

    Now the world is in a bigger mess than it was in ’84. Lots of man-made apocalypses coming down the pike – climate change, political and economic instability and out of control AI.

    I don’t know how the hell I’m going to deal with all that. I’d like nothing more than to have Scotty beam me up, but I learned my lesson. The earth will always be my home, like it or not. I have to figure it out. We all do.

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  • Why they should teach physics early

    Ash – Evel Knievel

    When I was a little kid I had a bad habit of being an asshole by mistake. Like the time someone left their locker door open and I kicked it shut — right on the finger of a little girl I had a crush on. The teacher looked at me like I was evil incarnate. No chance to explain.

    Or the time I convinced my friend to do a trick on his new bike.

    We rode our bikes all over town. They were like hot rods to us. As long as you were home for dinner you could spend the whole day exploring, riding down steep hills and checking out other neighborhoods.

    Our hero was Evel Knievel. He always said don’t try this at home, but we all knew he really meant. Do crazy stuff.

    Our bikes had the kind of brakes where you push down on the pedal. My friends and I loved to get a little speed ride up the driveway and eeerrrrrrt! Leave black skid marks on the concrete. That made us feel like badasses. Probably from all the Starsky and Hutch we watched.

    One day my friend Mike turned up with a new bike. “It’s got front AND back brakes!” he said. He rode around in the street a few times and showed me how it worked. Back brakes worked like normal, with the pedal, so he rode around a bit and then made a skid mark in his driveway.

    “What happens if you do a skid with your front brakes?” I asked.

    “I don’t know, I never tried it,” he said. He rode to the corner, turned around and started pedaling. I waited in his driveway to see what would happen. I honestly had no idea.

    It was pretty spectacular all right. He got about halfway up the driveway, locked up the front brakes, did a somersault, smashing his ribs against the handlebars.

    He said, “Um. I. Need to go inside for a minute.” He stumbled inside, slammed the door and I heard, “Waaaaaaaaah!”

    Then his mom came to the door. “Sorry, Mike can’t play right now.”

    Lesson learned. Sort of. I had plenty of bike crashes of my own, but not the same way as Mike.

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  • No one explains race like Baldwin

    James Baldwin changed my life. Reading “Another Country” taught me more about America than anything I learned in college. If they taught this book in high school civics classes, we would iron this country out in no time.

    And I got in on a whim. I thought, I am such a voracious reader why haven’t I read any black literature? I couldn’t think of a reason, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

    Mainly because I was a sci fi nerd. I loved literature, but I was more likely to read a Peter Hamilton space opera if given a chance. But I wanted to know what I was missing.

    I had heard Baldwin’s name thrown around a lot. Apparently respected for speaking out in the ’60s.

    The book I started with was Another Country. Since then, I’ve come to depend on him for perspective on race in America.

    Another Country taught me how the systems of power really work in America. The system of white supremacy that is invisible to us white people. This is true in both our liberal and conservative classes.

    As sharp as his critiques are, I love Baldwin because he actually gave a shit about us white folks, when he had plenty of reason not to.

    Some of the lessons I took from Another Country:

    A white woman can always use race to get her way in an argument. You know the “Karen” thing that recently switched from “I’m calling the manager” to, “Do you have your papers?” Excuse me, “Do you live in this neighborhood?”

    A woman, including a black woman, can try to use sex to obtain power over a man, but if that man is white and rich, he’s usually going to win in the end.

    That honesty with yourself may be painful, but it’s still the best policy. Things tend to go better if you’re honest with yourself and others.

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  • Match made in the ’60s

    The Match – A New Light LP (individual songs are linked)

    Suddenly I feel like I’m 6. A New Light by The Match is streamable via YouTube and Spotify. (I may have to track down the CD in case it one day isn’t.)

    I’ve tried to hunt this album down for years. I couldn’t find anything about them going back decades. I wondered if I imagined them. But these songs were down on my gray matter somewhere. I remember them.

    Listening to this album reminds me of old TV themes, ’60s movies set in Europe and of course Mom and Dad. They used to play this all the time. At home and in the car (on a homemade cassette – this was early ’70s).

    This is soft rock, very of its time (1969), with lush music and beautiful harmonies.

    They remind me of The Association and The Carpenters – especially “Saturday Night,” the one hit where Richard sang lead.

    A New Light is The Match’s only album, and there isn’t much information about the members. I’m not the only one who has had trouble finding out about the group.

    https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/7mCZ1O8x3mRYXibvRPQsMy?utm_source=generator
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  • Hussies 4 Life

    Thomas Dolby – Hot Sauce

    It happened again. Rubbed my eye after handling hot peppers. A jar of jalapenos just fell out of the fridge and splashed all over the floor. Now the whole kitchen smells like vinegar and my eye is on fire.

    You’d think I would have learned by now.

    It’s part of the reason I call my wife “my hussy” as a term of endearment. She thinks it’s hilarious, as do I – Victorian insults, LOL.

    It’s mostly in-joke, pillow talk material. Not as amusing without the backstory.

    We were at our workplaces, texting/sexting/flirting after our second date. Somehow the subject of chili peppers came up. I told her about the spicy stir fry I’d made the night before. I love peppers. She does not.

    I mentioned the part I don’t enjoy: burning the shit out of my eye after cutting jalapenos.

    “You don’t want that getting on your fingers if you’re planning to have sex.” She told me how bad it hurt when she accidentally got some of that on her bits.

    “Like last night,” I said.

    “I didn’t have sex last night…” sounding concerned.

    “That’s good you hussy!” said. “I was talking about my eye. I got pepper in my eye last night.”

    I really had gotten pepper in my eye. And I wasn’t a bit worried.

    That was over a decade ago and we still get tickled when we use that word. She’s my hussy and I’m proud to be hers.

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  • The machines are coming

    Chemical Brothers – Believe

    When I was an editor at small town papers, you could always get a feature story in a pinch by asking for a tour of a local factory. I could fill a lot of column inches in a hurry. I knew they would hook me up.

    I didn’t really mind, to be honest. I got to geek out. Factories have a lot of science-y stuff in them. You just asked how everything worked, took a lot of notes and wrote up your story. Easy peasy.

    I learned what the Venturi effect was in one of those, a factory that made gizmos for moving material around in factories. They also made a device that fired confetti at football games.

    At another factory, I learned that a wedge of Styrofoam inside a box of wine will help you get every drop. I had a curious mind and it was all very interesting.

    And these factories hired a lot of people in town. It felt like a public service. Anything to help your local companies succeed, and not un-coincidentally – advertise. I still believed in Trickle Down theory back then and I thought: company does good, local economy does good.

    The towns I worked in tended to be at or just above broke. There were honest to God poor people in my coverage area and there’s no poor like country poor – no services, no nothing.

    I developed a really Chamber of Commerce-y attitude. If it brought in jobs, I was for it. I didn’t know what else to dol I saw some of the pressures these towns were under. If a company closed up shop, people had to work in the city and commute. They spent their money elsewhere and everyone lost.

    Amon Tobin – Esther’s

    If a town depends on a company – especially if it advertises – the newspaper will be a friend of that company.

    One of my favorites was a tour of a brick factory. It was a long building with lots of coal burning inside long kilns. The ovens were black on the outside smelled like a fresh-baked bread. The men at the plant carried on around us, working very hard. Many were immigrants, all of them were poor.

    I saw them working the assembly lines, moving huge loads of around, sweat pouring off, and I respected them. I couldn’t lift a fraction of that weight, even once. They had to do it all day. It was obviously a hard life, but what other work was there?

    After I saw the whole process of clay to brick, the guys in management pointed at the “new” factory in the field next door. Everything would be automated. I wondered how those hard-working men felt, seeing the new factory spring up next door at the place that paid their rent.

    I couldn’t help but think that company owed those men something. Still the company also had a side. They were automating because their competitors were automating. They’re caught up in the machine like everybody else.

    I did what I always did, filled up all the white space, got the paper out, started working on the next one. But that brick plant gave me an eerie feeling. It wasn’t going to stop with factories. I was online constantly, but I knew the internet was about to eat my lunch. Technology was coming for us.

    The Sisters of Mercy – Lucretia My Reflection

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  • Open letter to HQ: Am I doing this right?

    I am an alien. I don’t know how I got here. I arrived when a mousetrap snapped my 2-year-old finger.

    Humans laughed at me. This made me very angry, but that’s when I became a human.

    I don’t remember what I was before. But I knew my mission: learn how to be human.

    Who the hell is this weirdo?

    Sometimes I think I understand, I know what being human is, then I realize I don’t get it at all. Like I said, I’m an alien.

    Joe Satriani – Surfing with the Alien

    I report my findings often. I do it by thinking and words, as I did not arrive with a better method.

    Many of my reports have been inaccurate and inconclusive, but I have found many clues. I update with corrections when I can.

    Patti Smith – Birdland

    This will be an open letter. Please cc the HR department.

    To whom it may concern,

    Humans have a practice called Yelling At Clouds. They yell by yelling and they yell by writing. They do it to complain about their mission. I believe they have the same mission as mine, but I could be wrong.

    When they believe others are impeding their mission, they Yell at Clouds. Like me, they must not have a better way of contacting mission headquarters.

    I am now Yelling at Clouds because I have struggled to complete the mission but have not received necessary support. Do I have to do all this by myself?

    My complaints are as follows:

    Impossible assignment: Learning to be human is exhausting and these units don’t function long enough to complete the mission!

    No instructions: Humans give very different instructions when I ask how to be a human. I hope I’ve chosen the right ones, but their instructions keep changing! Who is handing out these assignments?!

    No feedback: The mousetrap appears to have been a message from the team, but since then I’ve received nothing. My queries are never answered.

    Your inbox must be overflowing with complaints, but I would like a response. I am committed to the mission.

    I just want to know: Am I doing this right?

    #Aliens, #Humans, #Existence

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  • Getting my nature on: tired body, rested mind

    View from a trail in Franklin Mountains State Park – Blooming yucca, with a nice view of West El Paso in the background.

    After scrolling through my rectangle of doom, I had to get out of the house and the backyard would not do.

    I’ve been a city dweller for years now, but I grew up in the country. Concrete, asphalt and technology make me weary. Sometimes I just have to get my nature on.

    This one I couldn’t identify and Google Lens was no help. If anyone knows, please share.

    Greater Earless Lizard

    El Paso is built around Franklin Mountains State Park, a beautiful tract of West Texas desert.

    I’ve loved the desert ever since my Boy Scout troop took us to Big Bend National Park in 7th grade.

    The trail kicked my out of shape ass, but I found some of my favorite desert plants as well as a few I didn’t recognize. Also lost a race to a lizard. I wasn’t much of a challenge.

    Featherplume (aka Dalea Formosa)

    Southwestern Barrel Cactus in bloom.

    Blackfoot Daisies

    Sotol – kinda looks like a yucca, but it’s related to the Agave and they make a delicious spirit out of it.

    Creosote Bush – I love these plants. When it rains in the desert, the air fills with their perfume. To me it smells like ozone.

    Ocotillo – I saw some in the Franklin Mountains, but they weren’t in bloom.

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  • Dragging ideas into the material world

    Shriekback – Every Force Evolves a Form

    If there’s anything science fiction and fantasy have taught me it’s that magic forces are dangerous. Think of what happened in The Sandman when the wrong guy got hold of that ruby.

    Last night as I was drifting off, I had the weirdest vision. I was in a dark cavern with a ceiling so high and broad it looked like a sky. A dark red membrane of a sky. Above that ceiling, I knew, was the “real” world.

    Down from that ceiling flew a murmuration of blackbirds – or what looked like blackbirds, patterns shifting and disappearing into the dark. “This is where the ideas live before we catch them,” I thought sleepily.

    Bjork – All the Modern Things

    Where DO the ideas live before they take shape? Do we fill that realm with blackbirds or do we catch them and drag them into this one?

    Clarke’s Law is still true in the modern age. It takes mines and factories and communication networks, but ideas involving technology do kind of seem like magic.

    If you have the right math, science and materials, you can pluck computers, bombs, particle accelerators out of thin air. If you don’t look at the pollution, the illusion holds.

    When a powerful thought comes through that membrane, we always seem to turn it into a way to kill lots of people. The conjurers never seem to worry. “Look what it can do! Let’s give it to the world. Whee!”

    Michael Crichton used to annoy me. “There are some things man was never meant to know. Dun dun dunnnnn” seemed to be the theme of all his books. That was no fun. I wanted as many dinosaurs as I could get.

    But I’ve been coming around to his point of view. People who haven’t read Destination Void have unleashed technology that comes disturbingly close to passing the Turing Test. I was afraid of nuclear war, but I’m more afraid of this. At least they didn’t put a nuke in everybody’s pocket.

    The only thing that’s kept us from blowing up the world so far has been threatening to blow up the world. I don’t know how long that’s gonna hold.

    Why do the war monkeys known as humans have to turn every important idea into a way to kill one another? I wish we could put more resources into answering that question.

    Edgar Winter Group – Frankenstein

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