"Steal It!"

Trent gets sober and unlike Sid & Nancy, he is able to promote "healthy anarchy!"



From "Our World in Words"
October 8, 2007

"Even if you aren’t a Nine Inch Nails fan you have to respect Trent Reznor’s (NIN frontman) move to take the band independent. Reznor has been calling out against big labels in an attempt to separate music and big-business. This is important because NIN will now pave the way for other bands (both big-name and indy) to remain or become unaffiliated with a label. This means that there is less control over their music and they (the band) will reap much more profit for the product they created. The next ten years will be very interesting for music fans as more music moves out of brick-and-mortar or DRM’d sources (iTunes) and becomes available through E-music or directly through the band. This is ultimately a great service to fans and will make the music more accessible. NIN- 1, Evil Music Labels- 0."

-JEStacey
http://offedit.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/nin-and-reznor-label-free/

Maybe this is the call to arms I needed that will get me off my ass and into the new millennium.

Ghosts I-IV certain does much more than just rock, and Trent? --The Genius Still.

Is an I-phone in my future?

Will my I-pod replace my CD player?

Stay tuned to this same Bat Channel!

Mansinthe!

What every discerning Uber-Matrix-Kewl-Goth who is steadily on the tenure track or who has that tech job finally sewn up needs!

While living in Louisiana I once tried to order a bottle of wine for my parents and have it shipped to another southern state. http://wine.com/ informed me that was illegal. Yet again I am tempted to try and have something worse-than-wine shipped way down to Dixie, this time for personal gifting. After all, Manson provides a handy-dandy link (via http://www.marilynmanson.com/) to http://www.absinthe.de where for 36 euros, I can be Man-tastically smashed on the Green Fairy, just like my fave Shock Rocker (TM).

Since the company site gives us such useful facts like:
"This fine spirit is also enjoyed by the most discerning connoisseurs without sugar.
Do not:
- drink Absinthe pure
- light your Absinthe on fire
- think, Absinthe will make you hallucinate - it won’t!
Drink responsibly and with moderation!" (Did you get that memo, Mr. Manson?)

I will also provide Two Random Facts About Absinthe from My Life:

I have had my share of faux "Absinthe" in New Orleans. Pre-Katrina, down Pirates' Alley, behind the St. Louis Cathedral off Jackson Square there was a charming little cafe frequented by employed Goths who took their breaks from their shifts as tour guides for Haunted New Orleansor New Orleans After Dark. One evening I sat with a friend and watched a clearly-forty-year-old-plus Vampire hold court with an admiring androgynous pair of little Bat-kids while I sipped my green drink and thought seriously about a career change.

Supposedly a friend ordered the real thing, and his wife reported it arrived at their suburban pretty-princess- house in a box marked "Vase" and "Fragile." She reports also that the drink in fact, tasted like feet but soon they didn't care.

Well as Marilyn urges us on his Latest Album—"Drink Me!" Now with any major credit card we can!

Ah, when Art and Capitalism merge!

" . . . it's hard to believe it comes down to this"

"WELCOME TO http://REMIX.NIN.COM.
Hello there, we've noticed you're using Internet Explorer 6. This site has not yet been optimized for IE6, so it's not going to look very good, and you may have problems using it. We highly recommend that you upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, or better yet, download Firefox - a far superior FREE web browser that will give you a better experience on this and almost every other website. Go to www.mozilla.com to download it, or continue here with IE6 at your own risk."

Sigh.

Trent I love you but all this techno geek stuff—hidden web sites aside--is exhausting me because I have a real job. Not saying that you don't of course because, well, you're a Highly Innovative Artist (TM).

I've been with nin (in the fan sense of course) since 1990. First time I saw them (Trent & hired guns of the moment) was at the Masquerade Club. A friend of mine was in grad school (weren't we all?) and living in the Atlanta & Album 88 was the source for the non-lame music of the day. This is where he discovered nin in late '89.

That’s how it started, via cassette tape on the way down to Gulf Shores--Spring Break at the Atlanta friend’s mom's condo. We were driving down together to meet the rest of the post-high school crew, when we hit Radio Deadland. Having exhausted our own tunes, we stopped at a mall in the last town of civilization before the long stretch of nothing to the shore.

Standing in Camelot Records, my pal comes up and hands me Pretty Hate Machine.

"You like Echo & the Bunnymen, Bauhaus, The Cure, right?"
"I like anything that isn't Jacko or Paula Abdul."
"Then you'll like this."

My friend was only 1/2 right.

Hearing it for the first time, windows rolled down, the prospect of no class, just beer, sand, and my best friends, hearing PHM for the first time was like. . .

Getting Ziggy Stardust because a friend in middle school's Dad had brought it to her from a business trip, but she didn't like it b/c it was "weird," so she passed it on to me.

When I discovered Welcome to my Nightmare was what KISS was ripping off.

When I first heard Let It Bleed, bought for 50 cents, marked down from a dollar at a garage sale, scratchy but powerful, “The Midnight Rambler” throbbing in my speakers.

Pretty Hate Machine wasn't a crush. Like these others, it was The Real Thing.

So flash forward to post-grad school, the tenure track job, bought a house, got more responsibilities at work, friends are getting married, having babies, I'm thinking about my 401K and resolving growing conflicts at work, and maybe these are all the reasons why I'm too damned exhausted at the moment to download MP3s and even new versions of Explorer or Firefox just to get to my music, find a tour date, that I suspect will hit my state, oh, yeah, right, smack in the middle of a week of work meetings in August.

I respect Trent's desire for evolution, innovation, and yes, relevance. And yes, I still believe, but it's tinged with sadness.

Now my best friend, she tells me something I don’t want to hear. She’s been my partner in nin concerts since that September '90 club date when maybe 150 people had come out to hear a skinny Trent with dreadlocks!

That night I asked a huge biker guy to get me to the front of the stage, one of the only times I have plied feminine wiles in a concert setting. And he did, shoving me though the crowd to the front, where I wrapped my arms around a wooden horse near the stage and gladly felt the spray of sweat off the band and got bruises from the crowd shoving against me. My best friend lost bracelets that night, and her shoes.

So when I emailed concert dates to her last week, she said she wasn't sure she cared anymore. I know she wasn’t a fan of Year Zero, despite my urging her to “give it another chance,” and she is skeptical of the just-released instrumental Ghosts I-IV, I know these things, but damn--a nin concert nearby, and we don't go?

Maybe her increasingly complicated life has gotten in the way too.

Maybe responsibilities do have a way of draining off our energy.

So this is what nostalgia feels like.

Mrs. Robinson Contemplates Roles She'll Never Play

I would seriously contemplate a sex change if I could get a male role in Peter Shaffer’s Equus or Amadeus.

Hamlet, Laertes, Lear, or any guy in Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs . . . .

Wow, suddenly I’ve identified what’s at the core of my Tarantino Ambivalence! His best roles, the real people in his films, not the supporting females or their iconic manifestations (maybe Jackie Brown aside) are, well men. Sorry Honey Bunny; Sorry Jean Louis. There it is.

I’m jealous.

Tarantino, Shakespeare, Shaffer, just to name a few men who nail up a "No Girlz Allowed" sign on the Boyz Only Club House of Art.

OK you may say, “Hey, Bitter Actress! That's pure hyperbole when it comes to the Old Bard-- Lady Macbeth, Ophelia (when Branagh isn't shtooping her)--those are great roles!”

OK lunchtime poll: if you are going crazy, on your way out of sanity’s door would you rather

A) Give some louse "posies for [his] thoughts,"

B) Manifest your madness in OCD hand-washing, or

C) Throw yourself into your dead sister's grave, scream you're going to slit a throat or two in the nearest church, then avenge yourself in a climactic sword fight in which you die by your own poisoned sword meant for your former BFF, but not before you give this great speech confessing your sins, re-bonding with your BFF, and damning the real bad guy?

That’s what I thought.

Speaking of theatre and sex of a different sort--on the cusp of Danny Boy's American debut of the Equus reprisal, A emails me a review that includes photos, with a link to more photos.

Both the reviewer and I are more than a little distracted from the gravity of Shaffer’s play and Art by Harry Potter without his wizard robes.

Have the tables turned on exploitation?

Am I helping to flip them?

Oh what would Dumbledore think?

Oh wait . . . there was already press on that!