G.P.O. AND THE PTV CREW SHOULD BE MAKING THE MONNNEY NOW! WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?

Y'know, Genesis P-Orridge and the folks in Psychic TV have been rollin' around the backwaters long enough to deserve to have a song suddenly gain contemporary relevance, all retro like and shit. So what's the deal here? Why aren't I hearing more of their song Roman P being played nowadays? I mean, if I'm going to have a tune forced upon me in news soundtracks and at hip mall stores and wherever, at least let it be something that I already have on my player that I don't mind hearing involuntarily! C'mon, Establishment Media, get with the program!

Oh well. What the fuck ever happened to viral marketing anyway? Okay. I'll see if I can get the ball rolling.

Click Here, Pilgrim

THIS IS NOT THE BEST TWIN SOUP LINK ON THE BLOG. THIS IS THE TRIBUTE.

Today marks a very special anniversary observance here at Michael Psycho's Word Pollution, Pilgrim. No, it is not the anniversary of the blog itself. (Hell, I can't even remember when that was. I just know that it was sometime in 2001, and if it wasn't for that lame "Blogger 2.0" changeover and if the three years of posts weren't lost forever, I could tell you.)

One year ago today, the most controversial (and most visited and Google searched) post in this lil' ol' weblog's history made its debut. I almost got up to a dozen page hits for that one alone. Ahem, yeahrite, that's all, really. You do believe me, doncha? Heh.

In retrospect, I really don't see what the big deal was about. So the Campbell twins of twinsoup.com fame were picked as Playboy Cyber Girls back in 2002? So what? Why be so secretive about it? It's not like some dudebro (or probably in this case, it would be dudebros) had leaked nekkid pics of the twins online. It was a photo shoot for fuckin' Playboy, ferchrissakes!

No, all you need to understand is this. What really motivated me to post what I wrote (and what I linked) in the first place is the fact that nobody wants to discuss it. (Well, maybe a couple of people who posted comments on Heckasac). I have no animosity toward the Campbell sisters; it just happens to be a relevant part of their story and SOMEbody needed to report it.

Now, on the other hand, it has come to my attention that some fellow blogospherean had linked to my blog post which, in turn, links the naughty photo of the Campbells. Said party was contacted by one or both of the twins (well, there is a pic in Sacramento Magazine of one of them holding a mouse, and the other a keyboard, so it coulda happened...) and was persuaded to remove the link to my, erm, exposé. (Be not embarrassed, brave soul. You made the effort, and I salute you).

On the other hand, I'm not impressed, intimidated or swayed by fame, power or authority, attorney assisted or otherwise, when it comes to freedom of speech and the distribution of information, and would like to make it clear, right here, right now, that the day that I will remove any blog post from this blog is the day that they pry my cold, dead hand off the mouse, and probably while I'm signed in and updating, because you sure as Hell aren't getting my password.

I would like to add one more thing. I have made a slight improvement to the original post. Instead of the link to the bootleg photo site, I fixed it to go straight to the photo of the Campbells which is featured on playboy.com. After all, accuracy is a fundamental of journalism.

That said, the link to the post with the original link is below. Although there is a warning on the original item, I will also warn you here, beforehand, that the following link is definitely not safe for work, or minors, or certain members of the clergy, or people who prefer unshaven pubic hair in their softcore pornography.

Click Here, Pilgrim

GOOGLE SEARCHES CAN PULL UP THE DURNDEST THINGS.

So, a few days ago, I was doing some routine bullshit maintenance on my site.

I like to take a look at my stats to see generally where people are visiting from, how they find me and such. Something that kinda interests me concerns the search terms that people use.

During my latest check, I saw the following listed as one of the searches:

when he ejaculates real soon

What. The. Fuck?

When I Googled that exact phrase, here is what resulted:



The lyric page to my song, "What A Man'll Do", placed third in the search results.

Hey, they say music heals, and if I can help couples resolve their premature ejaculation issues, I'm more than happy to assist.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? DONCHA START ME TALKIN'.

For the sake of posterity, if nothing else, I’d like to share a charming tale with you, Pilgrim.

It’s the story of where and how I came up with the name that has become my pseudonym for nearly three decades.

In the days of my more carefree youth, I used to go to this club back in Boston called the 1270. It was located on Boylston Street (named after its address number) not a far hop and skip away from Fenway Park, and across the street from FM rock station WBCN. I was introduced to the place by a friend and became a semi-regular there for quite a while until I got married, and even afterward I can recall dropping in with my then bride a couple of times. It was one of Boston’s most now-legendary gay clubs, but attracted weird young outsider artist types (raising hand) and (trendy at the time) professed asexuals and just plain confused or unsure youngin's (raising my hand again, yeah I'll admit it, at least I thought about it a little for a while back then, but I got over it and back to full breeder status pretty quickly) and BU coeds with out of state boyfriends looking for a nice safe environment, all showing up for the cheap drink prices, the oozing stench of casual but neat alt-hipsterism, and, more importantly, its selective (and rumored to be intentional) laxity towards carding the underage, especially on Wednesdays when the crowd was most mixed.

It was the week of Halloween 1981. I was on Urban Camping Expedition One, having been evicted from what was my parents' place for trying to kick out some fuckups who in turn, fucked up the apartment to the point that the fire department condemned it. My mother was in the hospital dying of cirrhosis, my father was on his umpteenth stay in the Salvation Army detox, and I had just spent the night in a city jail a few nights before thanks to my former friends’ redecorating job. My brother, who used to be the radical left wing lunatic of the family, was paradoxically now the most normal, well adjusted one, pursuing his fanatic and never ending deconstruction of James Joyce 3000 miles away in grad school at UC Berkeley.

I was sleeping in the park, the subway, and, for one of those nights, in a dumpy flop hotel near the Combat Zone. At least I had a job, and more importantly, still enjoyed drinking, so the mid-autumn New England chill didn’t bother me at night so much as it could have.

I dropped by the “12” that night, and of course, there were plenty of patrons in costume. Not only did I get my 18-year-old ass in the door without getting carded, they were also nice enough to disregard my seriously dirty and disheveled appearance. What counts here is that I was let in.

The 1270, if anything, was a unique night spot. There were three levels and a roof deck. The basement had a pub like setup, complete with jukebox, pinball, a grill menu and occasionally a transvestite (or maybe TS) pianist singing show tunes. On this particular night she was singing:

I'm as corny as Kansas in August,
I'm as normal as blueberry pie.
No more a smart little girl with no heart,
I have found me a wonderful guy!

The ground level was more of a dance club setting, where the set could segue from, say, “Tainted Love” to “Holiday In Cambodia” to “Dreaming” to “Safe European Home” without anyone so much as blinking an eye and dancing right through them all. I didn’t get up to the upper floor or the rooftop much,if at all, and usually just stuck to the lower areas.

It was in the middle of the ground level dance floor, sort of early in the evening, that a monumental event in my life had occurred.

Sipping on my second or third Black Russian, I was in a circle with my friend from high school and a few folks I had not met yet. People began to introduce themselves each in turns, and I had noticed that some of them were using what can best be described as punk or otherwise underground tragically hip pseudonyms. “Hi, I’m Pogo.” “Hi, I’m Lily White (a toss to the DKs’ “Kill The Poor”)”.

My mind began to turn it into a game, like when I’d be in various drama classes and we’d play call-out “Telephone” like games to improve our improvisational skills and whatnot. Actually, I can’t recall exactly why the fuck we did those. Anyway, it was my turn, and I reached out and shook hands, trying to act as natural as possible:

“Hi, I’m Michael Psycho. How’s it goin'?”

And with that, a name was planted upon me for time immemorial. It wasn’t some well thought out scheme, it wasn’t conceived by a band manager, and it wasn’t brought to me in a dream by some angel with a fuckin’ flaming sword on a bronze tablet. It was spur of the moment, I decided after the fact that I liked it, and I have used it ever since.

I did, however, attach meaning to the name with time. Contrary to what most people may assume, it has nothing to do with the popular use of the slang term “psycho” to denote a crazy, violent or otherwise unstable person. My personal interpretation of my last name Psycho goes straight to its root, to suggest my preoccupation with matters of the mind or, as all of you romantic and metaphysical chic types out there might put it, the workings of the creative soul. Coincidentally, according to certain ancient legends, the Archangel Michael is considered a psychopomp, guiding the souls of the dead to the Great Beyond.

In time, my name has graced flyers, zine articles, and music releases, among a bunch of other stuff (and of course, a site address). Sure, folks have used variations and reverse applications of the name since then, among them being pro wrestlers, video game characters, radio personalities, and at least a couple of other musicians, one of them being a self-styled Satanic rapper who has the most interesting variation I’ve seen yet.

I’m not worried. I’ve lived with this name for so long that I’m completely confident that it (and I) will outlive anyone who tries to co-opt it in any form whatsoever. I’ve survived way too much bullshit to be convinced otherwise. But the thing that sets me out from the rest isn’t how I chose my last name. What closes the case for me is how my first name was chosen.

In late September of 1962, my brother came home from parochial school to a mild dispute between my folks. My dad wanted to name me after his late father, Albert. My mom, in the later stages of carrying me inside her, wasn’t having it, and insisted that they come up with a better name.

Enter my brother. The archaic Catholic semi-holiday of Michaelmas (September 29) was happening, and religion class that day was all about the Archangel Michael, and how cool he was for kicking Satan’s ass straight to Hell and a whole bunch of other superhero type stunts. He was not to be swayed. If this was to be a little brother, Michael was his name, and he wasn’t having it any other way. My parents, impressed by little Jackie’s rhetorical delivery, and from a kid only eight years old at that, were easily sold.

Later on, shortly after I had picked up my adopted last name, I was on a phone call with my brother and mentioned what I had done. He heartily approved of the name change, remarking that Michael was “the crazy angel” who “stood up to the old guard” when it tried to take everything selfishly for itself. Thus, the guy who gave me my first name condoned my choice of a last one. I can live with that.

So you see, Pilgrim? For me, it’s not just a stage name. It’s nothing short of who I am. No one can take that away from me.

IMPORTANT LIKE ANNOUNCEMENT RE: MY ONLINE MUSIC REPOSITORY.

I received a comment or two through the grapevine concerning the dogchokin' motherlode of free MP3s of my music that I posted online a while back as part of my main Internet headquarters, michaelpsycho.com.

Seems that some folks weren't able to access my complete list of songs, due to my 1997 style embedded frame. (Sorry, I'm into retro web design. It's a kind of fetish-y thing I have.) Seems that they couldn't make the side scroll bar for the song page inside the frame go down, and for all they knew, I've only written about 4 or 5 songs, and they all start with numbers or "A".

Anyway, long story short, I just decided to trash that shit and redesign the page to a leaner, meaner look, and you should be able to scroll directly down the page with no problem. Link is below.

Click Here, Pilgrim

And while we're on the subject, a lot of folks apparently have been able to use the former page layout, because there's been downloads pulled from all over the world. Not a huge amount, but enough to make me scratch my head and think to myself, "Where the Hell are these people coming from, and how do they know about me?" Special recognition goes to the handful of web surfers who each went in on one calculated raid over the past few months and pulled out every single one of them MP3s. Either you like me, or you like free music, and I can respect either sentiment. Thank you for the recognition, and I would champagne toast you if I still drank.

And while we're still on the subject, I'll be gradually adding more fucked up cover versions of some of my favorite tunes by other artists on my Cover Killers project page over at dmusic.com. Click Here. Pilgrim

LOOKS LIKE THE TEABAGGERS WEREN'T AS MUCH OF AN IN-CROWD AS THEY ANTICIPATED.

Note to Michelle Malkin:

Next time you want to relay information about crowd estimates at your beloved teabagger rallies, don't rely on tweets. Click Here, Pilgrim

And an added note: Republicans sort of have a history of bullshitting through photography. Click Here, Pilgrim

Update: Michelle, Michelle, Michelle. Getting pretty itchy with the "Post" trigger nowadays, aren't we? You really need to give yourself a two or three hour cooling off period, IMHO. Now you've even got Andrew Sullivan calling you on your shit. Click Here, Pilgrim.

FUNNIEST. GOOGLE NEWS HEADLINE LINK. EVER.

I have linked the article in question below. And before I publish this particular post, I would like to let anyone who is reading know something.

I Will Not Submit My Screenplay, Or CD, Or Rant About The Evils Of Technology And The Disaster Caused By The Industrial Revolution, Or Even A Link To My Blog, To Anyone Ever. Never. On The Other Hand, I Have Been Spammed For A Free Review CD, And Lived To Regret It, And Now Have Learned To Delete Such Emails. Also, I Have Never Seen Any Films With Screenplays Written By Josh Olson, And Have Never Even Heard Of Him, But His Arrogance Is Very Amusing Nonetheless.

Click Here, Pilgrim

A TRIBUTE TO THE DAYS WHEN PEOPLE REALLY DIDN'T MOURN, AND REALLY DID ORGANIZE.

So, I wanted to do something constructive with my forced vacation day (long story, convoluted situation, maybe we'll discuss it in front of a spinoccoli sometime).

Some folks pull weeds or do their laundry or sit in a fetal position on the recliner, tears streaming down their eyes in a blank, overly fatigued mental state while obliviously hearing Regis and Kelly blab to each other in the background.

I tend to, heh, think outside the box in these situations, and to show my appreciation for my one day of extra rest because a week or even two days in a row just ain't gonna happen, ever, I bumrushed a recording of the IWW Songbook classic, We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years. The next night, after putting in yet more overtime so's I can keep caught up on all of that rest I'm supposed to be getting, I culled together some old school labor footage. I'm proud to proclaim that this work is 100 percent public domain. So check. It. Out.



NOTE: If you find this particular rendition to be annoying, you may perhaps instead appreciate the version by the late great Utah Phillips. Here's a link to an audio file on last.fm: Click Here, Pilgrim

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY: TRAILERS

I'm feeling pretty sick and tired nowadays (well, that's been the story for a while, but this time it's actually physical and mental). Here are a couple of trailers for Michael Moore's new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. The film opens October 2, so I figure that, if I keel over from my underpaid overworked corporate white/blue collar IT sweatshop job, at least there will be something interesting posted for a while. Now excuse me while I sit like a lump of dead flesh and bones, mentally fatigued as all fuck and pretending that I'm giving my brain enough rest before going back for another round of abuse. Have A Nice Day.

PEEKSKILL: IT WAS 60 YEARS AGO TODAY, AND THE RACISTS SHOULD STILL BE DEFAMED.

Please study the above photo, dear Pilgrim. I scanned it from the most excellent Paul Robeson, a biography by Martin Bauml Duberman. It shows Robeson, the legendary athlete, singer, actor and activist performing at a concert just outside of a little town called Peekskill, New York, back in 1949.

Please be so kind as to study that photograph for a moment. Go ahead and click it and expand it if you like. I’ll wait.

OK, good. Let’s discuss this photo now.

People are surrounding Robeson up on that stage for a reason. They were protecting him from getting injured, or even possibly killed. A sniper nest (two men with high-powered rifles) was discovered by security forces and flushed out at a hill overlooking the concert. So obviously, this was not your typical outdoor music festival.

Paul Robeson was an influential African-American who spoke out against racism, poverty, and the exploitation of labor, along with other kinds of injustice. I consider him to be one of the bravest American citizens in history, who lived a life dedicated to the defense of human equality and dignity, regardless of any threat to his own life, career or well being.


He had performed at Peekskill previously, but things were going to be different this time for certain significant reasons. He had not only testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee against making Communists register as foreign agents, he had also been quoted as saying at the World Peace Conference in Paris, in an Associated Press dispatch, “it is unthinkable that American Negroes will go to war in behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations... against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”

Robeson never said those words at the Paris conference. No one fact checked them either. When the remarks were carried in the media, they were perceived by many to be anti-American, and local newspaper The Peekskill Evening Star fanned the flames of sentiment against Robeson, encouraging protests at the concert site.

Apparently, many of the Evening Star’s readers were either actual or wannabe Klansmen, as the protests featured a burning cross and lynched effigies of Robeson. VFW and American Legion members, in tandem with a loose group of boneheads, threw rocks at concertgoers and beat them with baseball bats, effectively shutting down the first attempt at a concert, planned for August 27. Looks like somebody forgot all about the First Amendment and the right to freely assemble.

The concert was postponed to September 4, and this time the concert itself went off without any incidents of violence. However, it was the transit for performers and audience in and out of the concert that was a different story altogether.

Robeson was literally tucked into the rear floor of a car to be shuttled out, which must have been quite a feat since the man was the size of your average modern day NFL offensive tackle. People were dragged out of vehicles and attacked, and those who weren’t had windows taken out from rocks and other objects courtesy of what must have seemed like a miles-long gauntlet of racist rioters. If you were black, you were serenaded with screams of the n-word; if you were a white concertgoer, you were labeled as a “white n-word”. Pete Seeger, who also performed that day, had so many rocks tossed into the car which he, Woody Guthrie and others were riding in, that he built a chimney at his cabin to remind people of the riots.

The police did nothing as far as even trying to stop the riots. Some of the cops even joined the anti-Robeson crowd and assisted them in beating those exiting the concert site. The Westchester County District Attorney, George M. Fanelli, later congratulated the police for doing “a magnificent job”.

Learn all you can about the Peekskill Riots, and take all that you will learn into serious consideration when witnessing certain events that are occurring today. Next time you see a town hall meeting on health care reform, or one of those lame ass right wing teabagger rallies, with all of these Angry White Men and Angry White Women out of the Dittohead Textbook a-yellin’ and a-screamin’, remember that those guys and gals engaging in such behavior are the cultural descendants of the white, male, xenophobic rock throwers and bat wielders at Peekskill in 1949, who not only beat people like Eugene Bullard, an African American WWI aviator for France who was awarded the Croix de Guerre, but were the same people who had also attacked people who were white, simply because they supported racial equality for those who were not.

Times may have changed since the Peekskill Riots, but nothing has been entirely eliminated. That environment of ignorant, stupid hate has simply been tamed, and driven down to a social sublevel of relative impotence. Unfortunately, in recent times with the election of our nation’s first African-American President, the symptoms of the disease called racism are starting to re-appear. We need to never let up our guard when it comes to keeping that sort of mentality from ever re-entering our national psyche. That’s why, sooner or later, Americans of tolerance are going to need to step up and counter attack the re-emerging actions of the intolerant. In the same way that we should feel about the Holocaust, we must be determined that the Peekskill Riots never happen again.

"[W]e can make clear what peaceful coexistence means. It means living in peace and friendship with another kind of society--a fully integrated society where the people control their destinies, where poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated, and where new kinds of human beings develop in the framework of a new level of social living."
-Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks, p. 338

PFIZER APPRECIATION POST

To celebrate Pfizer’s record-breaking achievement (the largest criminal fine ever – way to go, Pfizer), I decided to call an assortment of all-star musicians for a little jam session at this week’s undisclosed location housing the Black Hole Media Co. Mobile Unit . Behold the one take wonder that was a popular live tune for the three or four times when I actually played it. I wrote this lil' number some years back after reading reports about how Pfizer would discharge cyanide into the river by their plant in Groton, Connecticut. Here is “Pfizer”, presented to you, dear Pilgrim, with a special lyrical aid, in case you’re inspired to sing along.