been working at the airport bar, its like Christmas in a submarine


purple haze, by fiona rae, 2004

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

4. The Bush Administration

"Speaking of honesty and straightforwardness, here's an extremely rare display of it from a Bush Administration official. Last week Douglas Feith, chief policy adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, admitted that "the Bush administration erred by building its public case for war against Saddam Hussein mainly on the claim that he possessed banned weapons," according to the Associated Press.

"Feith backed up the assertions made in the Downing Street Memo that facts were being fixed around the policy saying, "I don't think there is any question that we as an administration, instead of giving proper emphasis to all major elements of the rationale for war, overemphasized the WMD aspect." Well, yes... but considering the other rationales were "Saddam Hussein gassed his own people in the 1980s with weapons we gave him" and "We really want the Iraqi soccer team to play in the World Cup," you can understand why.

"So there you have it - they wanted the war, they lied about the reasons, and they got the war. And now the world is a much safer place - provided you aren't an American soldier, or an Iraqi civilian, or just someone who happens to live in a major city anywhere in the world. Good job."

* From an interview of Patty Smith in the July 2005 edition of the sun. excerpt:

TS: How are you handling President Bush's reelection?

PS: I conduct myself in the same manner no matter who is president, but those who opose the policies of the Bush Administration need to be more vocal now than ever. We must work harder to protect our environment and to develop a strong and visable anti-war movement. The way to handle Bush's reelection is not to be defeated by it. The Declaration of Independence, our great organic law, calls for us to speak out against our government if we do not feel it represents our ideals.

TS: How did you end up in rock-and-roll?

PS: ...By the early 70s rock-and-roll seemed very materialistic, glamorous, stadiumized, and pyrotechnical, and I was concerned about that. At that time I was performing poetry, but performing poetry had become a dead game, really boring to me. There were a few performance poets I loved: Jim Carroll, Gregory Corso, Steve Williams, Allen Ginsberg. But it was lacking new blood. I wanted to infuse a little energy into that circuit, and I thought, it needs to be electrified. So I asked Lenny Kaye to play electric guitar while I was reading poetry, to make it more present.

TS: But would you agree that speaking out against the establishment in the U.S. today can cause the speaker some harm?

PS: It depends on one's definition of harm. If one is willing to accept certain degrees of harassment and censorship, one should proceed. This does not seem too great a proce to pay in order to be upright and speak one's open mind.

TS: In 1998 you said, "Art is by nature optimistic." How so?

PS: In order to create art, one must be alive and focused and envision the future. We create work not only to experience the process, but also to inspire and incite our fellow man. A work such as Picasso's Guernica, for instance, though it deals with the horror or war, instructs us. An entire antiwar movement could flower from one such work of art. Art is optimistic because it is alive.

* Kid in Syracuse, New York, handcuffed and arrested for having "impeach Bush" sign at Parade.