Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

With apologies to Sarah McLachlan for stealing the title of one of her best albums, I want to say a few words about this new book slated for release 11/17/09. Going Rouge is the first release from the new O/R Books, a company formed earlier this year by two very experienced New York publishing icons, John Oakes and Colin Robinson. This new book of essays is edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed. The writers include Jim Hightower, Naomi Klein, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, Jane Hamsher, and many other recognizable names, all justly famous for sitting next to the windows on the left side of the airplane.

There is a reason why I chose the McLachlan title for this post. This is a book that deserves to be read by millions, but will it be? You currently cannot order it from either Amazon or B&N.com, so where can you get it? Today, absolutely nowhere, because the ordering system is down at the O/R website, and you cannot get the book from any source other than directly from the publisher! Why should you care? Go look at the ranking number of this book, and it is at least available through Amazon, if not directly from their warehouses with free shipping. Going Rouge: An American Nightmare is nowhere to be seen at Amazon; nor is it at B&N. The publishers have done a good job of bringing publicity attention to the book; however, most of it is negative, not positive! Check out this poll at NPR, of all places.

The price of Going Rouge is $16 from the publisher's website. Can you imagine how many sales are being missed right now because this book is not paired with Going Rogue at Amazon with free shipping? Sure, the Palinbots would go crazy in the reviews of either book, even before the books are available for anyone to read. They would also toss their cookies in the Amazon discussion pages at the bottom of both books' Amazon listings. What we have right now is the 'bots going crazy at NPR while no sales of the book are even happening! In the meantime, sales of Going (Pack of Lies) Rogue are putting that book in the #2 spot at Amazon.

Quit fumbling the ball, people! Going Rouge is written by a gang of very experienced writers. Going Rogue is written by a ghostwriter and an idiot. Why must we continue to let the opposing team win? By the time An American Nightmare is even available to order, An American Pack of Lies will already have sold thousands, if not millions. What's the matter with this picture? If you think you are going to waltz into your local B&N and see the two Goings side by side on a table just inside the front door, I am afraid you are sadly mistaken. Harper Collins will have paid thousands for whatever prime store placement they have secured for Going Rogue. Unless O/R Books is a lot richer than I expect, then the best they can ever hope for are a few copies of Going Rouge placed on an alphabetized shelf somewhere in the store. If they are lucky, they may find a few B&N managers who will put copies in the close vicinity of the Harper Collins book, but can you imagine the hissy-fit an HC representative would throw if he saw even a single copy of the O/R book actually sitting on his bought-and-paid-for Harper Collins shelf? All this is not even taking into account the returnable policy so beloved by the Barnes & Noble store chain. Without a return policy, as is the case with the great majority of POD books, the most O/R can hope for are a few books ordered by a few B&N stores, not the stacks and stacks of the HC book that will blanket the B&N's all across America!

The new publishers of Going Rouge obviously know a lot more about traditional publishing than I do. They obviously have everyday contact with many writers I would love to meet, if only once to shake their hands. My expertise comes from the school of hard knocks. I got involved in the POD industry a decade ago. If you have not yet watched the video put together by John Oakes and Colin Robinson, take a look at it. These two nice guys act as if they just discovered POD! If you have not been following my other blog at PODBRAM, go check out this article. Here is another one you may wish to read. If you want to get seriously deep into the subject of marketing a POD book, go to PODBRAM and start reading the articles listed down the left column under The POD Experience. Allow me to cut to the chase: 90% (or more) of all POD books are sold through Amazon. B&N online and all the rest add up to less than 10%! I know that sounds shocking, but it's true.

A similar situation applies to Kindle. The great majority of e-books sold are currently sold through Amazon for the Kindle format. Yes, Smashwords is another good source of e-book reading material, along with a number of others, and yes, I know the B&N Nook has just been released. We'll see where that goes. The O/R website states that Going Rouge will be available in e-book form, too. Where? The publishers will probably discover that $9.99 for the electronic version might hurt sales a bit, too. Put it on Kindle and halve the price: then you'll have a mover.

I have already been in contact with Mr. Oakes concerning these issues, and can only hope that he has taken my advice to heart. He may know all about the publishing and marketing processes involved in the traditional marketplace. I know what it takes to successfully market an unknown POD or Kindle book at Amazon. Do not look at my own pitiful sales numbers and judge my knowledge accordingly. I have been trying to sell books in various genres by an unknown author, all of which are particularly difficult to market successfully. I can't help it if I'm hard headed: I write what I know, not what I know will sell. An American Nightmare is a totally different story, one that millions of Americans should read, and written by authors already familiar to millions of Americans.

The American Concert Tour

Boys and girls, I have a plan to help some of the American citizens that need help the most. This is a plan that would boost President Obama's popularity, help solidify some of our current, rampant divisiveness, and inject an economic boost right where it's needed most. The American Concert Tour (TACT) is nothing if not an old idea. Even though I thought it up, I would like to see it developed into a far more original theme and layout. As a concert promoter from the early '70's and an Austin resident since 1980, I have had an up close and personal look at this proposition. Here is more or less what I propose.

TACT will be somewhat like Farm Aid and Live Aid, but it should be developed into something at least a little more akin to Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW). First of all, it should not be a direct charity event like the former two, but an overall, commercialized economic boost to the cities in which it would be held. SXSW is not one big concert event at all: it is a plethora of small music events, all combined under the SXSW umbrella. The City of Austin and many of its businesses make more money during the week of the events than at any other time of the year. Most importantly, the money is not concentrated into a few hands, or even the local music industry. The whole city benefits, as do small, unknown bands from all over the USA (and the world).

The photo shows the most obvious choice to be the ringleader underneath the concert big top, but many others are obvious shoo-ins to be major players, too. The secret of the event's success would not be to create one big, mega-concert, but one main event surrounded by a whole week of lesser events. You get the picture: the nobody bands begin playing all over the city at the opening of the week and the superstars play the big finale on Saturday. The more successful you make the overall festival, the more those lesser bands will want to start playing during the previous weekend.

Here is one of the most important components of this idea. TACT will only be scheduled in key, major American cities that most desperately need an economic shot in the arm. These might include Detroit, San Diego, Phoenix, Sacramento, Las Vegas, New Orleans, the most deserving city in Ohio, and a city in Florida. These events could be scattered in time, with the northern cities hosting during the heat of the summer and the warmer cities hosting during the cooler months. Depending on how long it would take for the long-range planning issues, these should begin as early as next spring and continue through 2010 and 2011.

Local color, both musically and otherwise, would be encouraged so that each week-long festival has its own unique flavor, from the Motown sound to the Latin influence of San Diego. However much appropriate non-musical entertainment could be added in each location would also determine the overall flavor of the event.

If these cities are economic cripples in the first place, how are they going to pay for all this fun? The federal government will guarantee much of the cost upfront. Yeah, that's just what we need right now, yet another government bailout! No, what we need is to put Americans to work. Of course a large percentage of the jobs created will be temporary, but many of them will not, and temporary is a whole lot better than no jobs at all. How will the government recoup its costs? Remember Woodstock? The theatrical release, the LP, cassette tape, CD, VHS, DVD, and probably even the Beta and 8-track paid for it. The live concert itself lost a ton of money. That does tend to happen when you let your audience crash the gate. Thanks to having corporations in charge, that doesn't happen anymore, so the main concert event itself stands to net at least some of the cost. I would call this idea an indirect charity event. The government will back the main expenses, just like the major record labels and beer and soft drink companies have always done. Most of the week's lesser events will be created by small and large businesses within each locale.

The magic that will make this thing work is the inclusion of a variety of draws for the crowds. Famous and local authors can do book signings for all the nerds. Local and rival sports teams could do exhibition games for the jockstrap crowd. Some localities may find movie screenings to be a big draw. Others might impress with the local cuisine. There might be well established local events that have already found themselves in deep financial poop and would love the opportunity for a health revival by becoming a part of TACT. Some locales are going to vary widely from others in their basic infrastructure available and necessary to host a TACT event, and this could broadly influence the flavors of various TACT weeks. Some city layouts and weather patterns will drive most of the activity indoors while others are held all but totally outside.

In case you have never thought of it this way, events such as this build a need for jobs long before and long after these single exciting weeks. The week itself is just the climax of the economic boost. Every city loves tourism and wants more of it. What I am proposing is a big week-long blast of it for the locations in the USA that need it most.

Zip Up That Chicken Suit!

The Top Ten Journalists Who Should Appear on Television Wearing a Chicken Suit for Knowing the Truth about Sarah Palin and Babygate, and Refusing to Publicly Say a Word About It!

10. Jeanne Devon (AK Mudflats)

9. Shannyn Moore (Just a Girl from Homer)

8. Chris Matthews (Hardball)

7. Keith Olbermann (Countdown)

6. Campbell Brown (Campbell Brown)

5. Wolf Blitzer (The Situation Room)

4. Rachel Maddow (The Rachel Maddow Show)

3. Meghan McCain (The Daily Beast)

2. Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post)

1. Greta Van Susteren (On the Record)

Feel free to vote for your favorites in the poll or add more chickens to the list in the comments!

Check Their Queen!

Doesn't this image remind you of someone? If you have ever played chess, you should be able to realize just how strongly the balance of the game can be shifted when one player's fighting men have all been dispatched by his competitor and his king has heard the inevitable, Check! It becomes a game of cat and mouse from that point onward. The player whose king is in check with only a queen for companionship is the player who is always on the defensive. There is no time left for offensive maneuvers when your precious queen is on the run. Your tactical plans have been laid to waste. The only strategy you have left to play is to protect that queen at all costs.

The Republicans have a queen. The Democrats are displaying something less than intestinal fortitude when they blatantly ignore opportunities to threaten the other team's queen. How far along would health care reform be if the elephants had been kept on defense these past weeks? How much less divisive would our nation be if the right-wing operatives were busy defending their queen instead of issuing rallying cries for hate speech?

How do you threaten a queen? You bring issues to light so the Foxes guarding the hen house have less time to spark attacks on our (and their) President. The recent eBay auction was a scam from the beginning. The Hong Kong audience members are a bunch of Communists. Who carries her baby like a sack of potatoes? I don't want the retarded baby... I want the other one.

Surrealistic Rapture

I used to think 2010 was finally going to be the big year that Americans wake up to the smell of strong coffee and population control. I have been thinking this since about 2003, if not long before. As a rational, thinking sort of person, I expected this sea change to occur decades ago, but some really bad people got in the way of progress. They did this solely to feed their own greed for truly insane amounts of money and power. They did it by very effectively recruiting the masses of Americans who were, deep in their hearts, as selfish and greedy as the puppeteers who would so willingly pull their strings, like P. T. Barnum herding suckers into his tent. Any con man worth his silver-tongued lies understands that the best way to reel in a mark is to utilize the mark's own personal greed to effectively carry out the con.

At midnight on Wednesday, September 2, 2009, I finally, finally threw in the towel on my long-standing hope that 2010 would bring the sea change America so desperately needs in order to save itself and, consequently, the world. What was so special about this time and date? That will be revealed later in this story. Don't cheat and scroll down the page! We have had quite enough of that lately. It is time for the USA to face the music once and for all. We owe it to the world.

My fellow Americans, this whole issue is and has always been about birth control. It's not about forced population control, forced sterilization, euthanasia, health care reform, race or eugenics. It is about the quality of life for all Americans and all Earthlings. It's about Mother Nature and science and what God intended. It is not about nationalism, the Pope and his uppity attitude, Mexicans, or Americans who were brought to this country on slave ships. This is about saving our own environment and our entire planet. It is not about how many Big Macs, Cokes, or Chevrolets we can sell. It is not about how rich we can make Wall Street or the corporate owners of the slave factories in China. It most certainly and completely is about the enslavement of the entire worldwide workforce. A few may want it, but the majority of the millions of us do not.

I watched Michael Moore's Sicko documentary a few days ago. My only criticism of this excellent, informative movie is that Mr. Moore did not spend nearly enough time discussing the concept of how much the irreparable connection of American health care to our employment is so effectively facilitating our corporate enslavement. He spent a few minutes on the topic, but I doubt that most viewers will perceive the real punch to the gut this fact brings to most working Americans. This all by itself is the best argument for a single payer program. Forget all that public option nonsense: a single payer arrangement is the only method that will really work over the long haul.

Make no mistake about it. The transition from our once strong economy to the vast wasteland that most of our middle class faces in the near future is going to be a long haul indeed. The big secret, the super-big, super-secret secret that our leaders are never even whispering to us is that the bulk of our massive loss of quality employment is the result of technology! Of course rampant illegal immigration, greedy corporate behavior, outsourcing, downsizing, and all those other scapegoats are, in truth, much more than just scapegoats. Along with all the really bad deregulatory laws the Republicans have rammed down our throats in the past decade or so, all of these things, and a few I didn't even bother to mention because you know them by heart, have contributed to the demise of our very special and precious middle class. The obvious elephant in the room is that technology always creates less, not more, labor needs. Isn't that the whole point, not to have to do the dirty work that we used to?

The elephants always want to advance technology. The jackasses always want to slap-fight over who called whom a racist and who really is a racist or not - while Rome burns. If you cannot force technology to reverse its very nature by increasing, rather than decreasing, the value of labor, there is only one other solution. You must increase the value of labor by making less of it. Anyone with a brain that actually works already knows this is the truth. No one wants to talk about it because no one wants to stick his neck out politically. Everyone figures that he'll be dead before the chickenshit he has been helping to create hits the big environmental warming fan. It's always been easier to just kick the can down the road to the rapture. Thinking and acting responsibly at the same time is just too hard!

Like the great majority of Americans, I am an economic conservative and a social liberal. Anyone watching our cable news would never grasp this reality, simply because they don't want you to see it. They work harder for more money every year making certain that you never awake from your slumber of madness. The way to improve the future of practically every nightmare currently facing our nation and the rest of the world is to promote the use of the items shown in the picture above. Promote it everywhere and every time there is an opportunity. Promote it religiously. Drop condoms out of airplanes like confetti. Replace the Ambien and Big Mac ads with examples of these products. Give them out to anyone who asks, anytime and anywhere. Teach our children all about them at as early an age as is reasonable. Put on seminars, special classes, and television specials during prime time. Support all methods of birth control worldwide. Tell the anti-you-know-whatists to sit down and shut up. It's just a stinking shame they were not all aborted in the first place!

I gave up a couple of weeks ago. All you idiots can just rapture your stupid, moronic butts into oblivion, for all I care. You had a million chances to wise up and you failed every test. It's just a wretched shame that you are going to wreck the whole world for the rest of us just to verify your own selfishness. What happened on that fateful night? Levi Johnston's expose of the biggest liar and fraud in American political history had been released at about 9 a.m. that morning. I thought maybe that the chickenshit was finally exploding out of the bag. I read versions of the story and comments and opinions on the story all day long. I'm sure I must have read hundreds of them, at the very least, throughout that fifteen-hour marathon session at my computer. I never left my chair to turn on the TV to see what was being said because I learned most of it from the net, anyway. By midnight, I was fully convinced that the media was hell-bent on shooting the messenger rather than carrying the message. Even if parts of the story were not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, any thoughtful, questioning person would understand that at least most of it was true, and it was incredibly damning. The situation could be described differently if the politician exposed therein had previously been known to be squeaky clean, but most of us know that concept is preposterous. If scandals and questions of impropriety were people lined up in an amusement park, this would be the line for the biggest, newest roller coaster! No politician in all American history has deserved to be publicly humiliated out of office and out of the running for any potential future office as much as this one. Neither Bush nor Nixon displayed this level of stupidity, selfishness, greed, narcissism, divisiveness, or incompetence to serve the American citizenry.

Every one of our leaders at the top knows the truth. How could they not? Just how blind and stupid could they possibly be? They are fully aware of the rabid madness that has overtaken our once intelligent nation. They relentlessly promote it for nothing more substantial or lasting than greed and profit. They willfully tell any lie necessary to keep their personal gravy train chugging along. We have the best political team on television to control our primaries and choose our candidates for us. Christian Mafia, what Christian Mafia?

The Dingbat Platform

The Top Ten Planks in the Dingbat Platform

10. People with too much of a suntan are not real Americans.

9. All cultural elites will be rounded up and sent to church camp without parole.

8. Greed is good, also, too, very, very good.

7. No Republican will ever be required to produce a birth certificate.

6. Hunting season will be open every day except Christmas, but you can bring your gun to church on that day if it makes you feel a little safer from godless terrorists.

5. All forms of birth control will be illegal for everyone except white, God-fearing Republicans.

4. Fox News will be the only channel allowed to be displayed in businesses and public places.

3. All government entitlement programs that benefit poor people will be repealed.

2. The IRS will have no jurisdiction over anyone who works on Wall Street.

1. Tort reform will be dramatically enacted as soon as we can figure out what that means.

Dylan Palin '66

I remember it as if was yesterday. I brought home my new copy of Blonde on Blonde and slapped it immediately on the turntable. I started in the middle with "(Most Likely) You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" because I was already familiar with "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" that opened Side 1. Before I got to the end of "You Go Your Way", I knew that this was the best album I had ever heard, and that opinion has never left. After the appearance of countless wonderful bands from the late '60's through the '70's, I still call Blonde on Blonde the best album ever recorded, and so do a lot of other people.

A few months later a Triumph motorcycle would alter the history of rock music forever. The creator of the 1966 masterpiece double album would hide out in Woodstock to recover and regroup his thoughts. The softly spoken, somewhat religious, bearded man that would later emerge would never be the angry speed freak again. Nor would he ever bring us another "Visions of Johanna". "One of Us Must Know", "Memphis Blues Again", or "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Instead he would continue to be one of the leading icons of the entire scope of baby boomer culture, and we would be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Bethel.

Please forgive me, Bob, for comparing you in any way to the most endearing symbol of American evil in my lifetime, but I feel I must explain this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon to those who may not see it as clearly as I do. When Bob Dylan developed his iconic persona in 1965-66, he was a product of marketing by his manager, just as are most all celebrities. His marketed persona may have been as a quiet recluse, but it sure as hell worked, didn't it? When he reappeared as a changed man a couple of years later, that worked, too, even though few will try to claim that any of his post '67 work truly rivals that of the previous two years. You could call the whole thing the Sixties Dylan Phenomenon. That was then and this is now.

Sarah Palin has been playing a dangerous game with the American public, and particularly the mainstream media, since early 2008. As with the Republicans' whole concept of socialism for the rich and screw everybody else, the danger is all ours, not hers. That was then and this is now. President Obama's inauguration will be remembered as the current generation's Woodstock. Did you really think it was some of the nonsense referred to as music being produced by this generation? We tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. They are saying yes we can! Bob Dylan rarely gave interviews to the press, and when he did, they almost never were the interviews the press actually wanted. They were obtuse little sound bites of nonsense. He pouted a lot and said very little, and the public's clamor for more just got louder and louder. Sound familiar?

The Wicked Witch of Wasilla wants to be coy, secretive, and manipulative with the press and public just as Dylan did back then. We bought it all the way to our trek to Bethel in 1969, but that was then and this is now. Bob Dylan had already produced the album that would not be topped. Dylan had preceded Wheels of Fire, Electric Ladyland, and The White Album. He had already made his mark on the music of our generation. Is this comparable to the accomplishments of the most despicable politician America has ever seen? Of course not, but the marketing strategy is bone-chillingly similar. The WWW is as likely as not to re-emerge as the MMM instead of the WWW. The Mistress of Massive Makeover could easily become massively threatening to the sanity and international image of our country.

The biggest problem we have with the then and now concept is our modern media. The media protected JFK from all the Marilyn Monroe rumors out of deference to good taste. They don't do that anymore, except for this particular bewitching politician. There was no Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Fox News, or hate AM back in the '60's, but we are inundated with them all now. We've come a long way from John Wesley Harding and Cronkite's removal of his black plastic glasses. The yes we can people do not have the luxury of remaining quiet in the face of a media so corrupted by money that they promote a lying quitter as if she was a treasured cultural icon.