Remember when I told you "Don't forget that real loss is not in things"?* Jesus Fucking God, that was asking for it.



Dear NastyEvilMotherFuckingPeopleWhoSteal,

It might not have occurred to you on Saturday night as you were smashing our car windows that I had already had a pretty bad day. I'll forgive you for not knowing that I had been to a wake, and a rather unpleasant appointment (that shall remain nameless) immediately following that, earlier in the day. I'll also forgive you for not knowing that even though we currently live in a pretty nice neighborhood, we have absolutely no money now thanks to the recent turn of events in the financial markets. How could you possibly know that, afterall?

HOWEVER, it strikes me as completely inexcusable that someone of any persuasion (and by that I mean politically, socially, racially, financially, ethnically, etc.) could possibly think that stealing our car, right from behind our apartment, is a truly righteous thing to do. Maybe if I had been careless and left it overnight down by the lake, or in a dark alley near some abandoned warehouses, then --- sure, it might seem up for the taking! But right behind our house? We paid good money to actually purchase that fucking parking spot, we even pay PROPERTY TAX on our fucking, goddamned parking spot. That's how much our car belongs there, motherfucker! You really deserve castration for such a heinous act, and how do I even know you have a penis? I don't believe a woman does this kind of thing regardless what Hollywood would try to sell us. Read on for my logic on this one.

AS for the damage done to our one remaining car, that was just completely gratuitous on your part. In fact, you're an awfully stupid nastyevilmotherfuckingthief because breaking the window to only take my gym bag was a real waste of time and only cost me $115.00 to replace (the window, not the damn bag.) You didn't even bother to take the bottles of extremely expensive hair products, you ignorant fools! Do your homework next time and learn to recognize high end packaging. This, I take as proof you're a man or gang of underdeveloped, wanna-be men who will never feel anyone's gorgeous locks of hair in their hands because they're simply TOO STUPID to be allowed that close to people, even their own kind. Go back to wanking into your dirty socks and leave people's cars alone. Or keep stealing cars and face the knife,... you choose.

BUT most importantly I want you to know just how incredibly idiotic you are because you took one car (the one that's not paid off, thanks for that, no really... we actually LIKE debt here in Chez Tart, we eat debt for BREAKFAST you fucktwit) but you didn't even realize that inside that car you stole is the key to the car YOU LEFT!!! Yep, both cars were ours! Didn't you notice the license plates were off by only one number?? No woman would be so stupid. I'm waiting with my cleaver, come on back to steal my remaining car, I dare ya! Ha! (ok, I exaggerate here male readers but I'm so extremely pissed off, just rant at me in the comments and I'll play nice again, I promise.)

YEAH that's right! We're laughing our asses off at you and your unmatched level of collective ineptitude because the car you left would get you a whole lot more money on the black market, weenies! Not to mention the incredible sounding BOSE stereo you left in it, mmmwwwaaaahhhhhhaaaaahhhhhhaaaaaa!!!!!!! Fucktards, you lose!!!!

SO peoplewhosteal, you suck. You deserve to sit in a really filthy Burger King restaurant on a Sunday morning listening to your wife's ineffective attempts to cheer you, drowned out by the cries of small children and the endless soundtrack of Kenny Rogers, Neil Diamond, and Celine Fucking Dion. I hope you get to one day share in my joy of hearing that re-keying a car with a really great stereo will cost you almost as much as parking it in a garage for the past three nights did. I really do.

And for you out there who took my cellphone three weeks ago, please make sure to use it while driving. Get into a really good fight with your sweetheart, maybe she'll even dump you as you're driving on Lake Shore Drive and you'll be distracted and drive right off the road and into it. Just don't take anyone else out with ya, ok? The same goes for the person who stole my previous cellphone a month before that too, just in case you were wondering...and my wallet that one time in the Tucson airport, my bike in 1989, my dog when I was 9, and my lunch money every day of my life in 6th grade, YOU ALL ARE NASTYEVILMOTHERFUCKINGPEOPLE.

xoxo,
Tart

*well ok, I can't let it go at that, because deep down I do still believe that real loss isn't in things. At least we weren't in the damn car when they wanted it. More music tomorrow I promise, and I've got a surprise for you all. Two, yep, two bands wrote us and want us to review their music! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

I'm loving this track by Dropsonic, it's odd how you find cool stuff when looking for something else, eh? Anyone heard of them?



I need this:

Faith Collapsing mp3, Ministry, The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste

Ashes In The Fall mp3, Rage Against The Machine, The Battle For Los Angeles

fuck it, buy the damn music folks!


There's a time and place for being really pissed off about politics and economies and newscasters and pundits and television. And today I'm deciding that time is now and that place is here. So scoot off to another happy blog if you want some cheery trip down memory lane about a great pop song from the 90s cause it ain't gonna be here folks.

See, the thing that gets me about this mess is that it's nothing new. It's nothing that no one with their eye on the financial markets didn't see coming. It's nothing that your average real estate broker didn't know about two or five years ago. It's nothing that anyone in the business of predicting retail sales didn't know, in the business of advising college students on future careers didn't know, many of us knew that we were living in a bubble. And without blame, we forgot. Like the wife with the cheating husband who brought home a great bouquet of flowers every Friday night and remembered all the kids' birthdays and was there for every holiday, we "forgot" about the indiscretions. We see what we want to when times are good folks, admit it. We see what we want to when we live lives that are privileged enough to allow us to do so.

Now, those of us who don't have that privilege, (I can't truthfully count myself in that class any longer, I have been fortunate and have benefited from others' wealth) can't choose to see life the way we want. And it becomes impossible to turn the other way when that husband cheats or it becomes impossible a lot sooner for us than for those who live in privilege. So, who's noticing that $700 Billion right now? Students whose loans aren't going through, people who soon won't get food stamps, folks who need to move to take a job in another locale and can't get a mortgage or can't get a buyer who can get one, or find their house devalued so much that they take a serious hit. That cheating husband becomes a real bastard mighty quick.

And that cheating husband is us. It's all of us who have lived with clean drinking water and free elementary and secondary public education, and a relatively safe air traffic control system, and an expectation that the food we eat won't kill us... while at the same time AND AT THE EXPENSE OF other countries (whose labor we import to maintain our privilege) who live without these standards of living. Did I lose you there? Do you feel blamed? I'm sorry, but I mean it. It's my rant, remember? We live with these standards of living because we make them live without them. Yeah, I'm making it be that simple. Politically, economically, morally, it's a zero sum game on the big capitalistic scorecard because individual competition mandates that I win at your expense. Collaboration reduces profit.

Yes, our politicians have done it to us, for us. No, it's not just an American (no -- strike that, make that US because ya know what? There's a whole continent down there that's called Central and South AMERICA and we're just the United States up here), problem/issue. It's all of the industrialized world who live at the expense of the "emerging" countries. Well they've emerged to some extent now.

This "crisis" is in most ways a realignment of financial and economic and credit markets that simply reflects the fact that we can no longer enjoy our position as a buyer of credit and a buyer of imported labor and goods at a cheap rate. We are jockeying for position and have little to no capital spend. The masses are beginning to realize that we are now in the passenger seat, we're the sellers and what product will we offer?

McCain, and his flying monkey, Caribou Barbie, hopes to sell the public on our patriotic duty of "rooting out terrorism and killing the enemy" which is an age-0ld trope, using nationalism to unify and strengthen morale and thereby increase consumer confidence as well as confidence abroad in our markets. Too bad it's a 20th century strategy in a 21th century world. And every poll (from 2005 to today) shows that the majority of people in the US want out of the war business.

Obama and Biden hopes to sell the public on our technological ability to transform our world ecologically and industrially in order to become independent of oil, and to preserve our environment. Perhaps with our country's resources they will enable us to sell that technology to the world. I support the Democratic party in this, it's the lesser of two evils right now. And I've put my money and my time where my mouth is on this. I encourage you to do the same.

At the moment, President Bush is selling our nuclear capabilities to India. That sentence alone frightens me.

As you might have guessed, I'm no Democrat, I'm no supporter of the capitalist system, and what I see happening right now is a whole lot of economists running about trying to figure out how to run most wisely, head long, into a long dark tunnel and that's all they know -- it's a long dark tunnel. Look to Social Scientists for help here, see what historians, Political Scientists, Sociologists and other people who read and study how Japan and Sweden and Russian dealt with and are dealing with financial crises. Consider why England has nationalized 8 major banks yesterday and why Russia's RTS index is down 67% year-to-date. China is also cutting interest rates on one year loans and yet the average Joe thinks Russia and China will bail us out? I'm mystified. No one will put money in our market when there's no hope of getting something back, no matter how many times McCain bellows "The American workers are the best in the world!"

The theme of this rant: people get educated. Ask some fucking questions. Don't pull your money out of the market if you are lucky enough to have any. Sit tight, and ask why these supposed answers are answers in the first place?

Oh, and have a good day, xoxo
regular Tart posting resumes tomorrow, rant over. That Ministry track has been going through my head for about two weeks, I hope this exorcism helps, it's pure, industrial genius, let it seep into your psyche and then let Rage take over ;)

Rol, at Sunset Over Slawit posted last week about a book that is going right on my xmas list this year, Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City. One question that Rol takes from the book, is the mystery of why some girls (and women) actually like metal, or more specifically what Rol calls "glam metal" such as KISS, Poison, Thin Lizzy, Bon Jovi, etc... and I stumbled into the middle of a conversation on whether or not a particular Whitesnake video with a hot female model "having sex with a car" (as Rol describes) was sexist or not. Go see it here. I replied that some of us girls wanted to be the girl on the car, some of us wanted to have the girl on the car, and more importantly some of us knew exactly how to get the metalmen, namely by liking the music they liked regardless of the videos. So, sexist or not, we didn't really care. Scheming bitches aren't we?! Oh and thanks Rol, for a really thought provoking post! I'm not criticizing it in any way hun!

But seriously, what's so mysterious about metal? Or about any genre for that matter? Why divide the world so neatly so that The Carpenters are girly and Ozzy's for the boys? I admit, I started out listening to metal to piss off my parents like all you guys did :p Yeah, it worked for me too. Punk worked even better, I just couldn't do the satanic head trip on my poor christian mother that metal afforded me!

Now, this got me thinking, why have all the people in my life, who knew anything at all about music, been men? It's not just that certain genres of music are roped off for women, even musical knowledge is considered "a manly sport." Yeah, I know I lost some of ya there. You can smell a feminist rant coming, right? I'll try and take it easy on ya, I promise I won't go all Camille Paglia here. Just tell me when's the last time you had a real conversation about a band -- not a song, with a woman? When you go to gigs, look around? I was seriously the only woman at the Duke Spirit show the other week not wearing makeup and a low-cut fashionable blouse/dress, and I was one of maybe 5 single women there (probably the only one who wasn't "working" that night, lol!). Yeah, I'm odd that way sometimes, but this was a pretty scuzzy venue. I was there for the music (not that they weren't, of course, of course).

There's an ad in my local coffeehouse for an all women punk rock collective, they do gigs that spotlight local women's music. I usually avoid that crap like the plague. Maybe I just spent too many years in the dyke community, it was a fine place to visit but nobody wants to live in the ghetto, ya know? And yes, I understand that women don't have as much money to spend on entertainment as men, that women don't want to play by the rules of "the system" or "the man" etc... I got it. But I also see how "the industry" funnels us band after band that sounds the same, that has no female voices in the foreground and that sucks too, cause damn I love me some girly punk. Most of all, (and this is what was missing from the whole riot grrl phenomenon, in my memory) I love to see women having FUN with music and FUN with sexuality in music, for a change. Maybe I'll surprise you with a review of that local collective thing one day, who knows? ;)

Blender mp3 Amy Ray from Prom commentary on the industry
Buy it

More Rock More Talk mp3 The Butchies from Population 1975 Amy's queercore backup band for her first two solo projects, and an entity onto themselves, also known as Team Dresch
Buy it

I like Fucking mp3 Bikini Kill from The Singles great song, but honest to god, this doesn't sound like a woman who likes to fuck!
Buy it

Slide mp3 L7 from Bricks are Heavy: not a happy camper either :(
Buy it

O Bondage, Up Yours! X-Ray Spex from: The Rolling Stone Women In Rock Collection [Disc 2] mp3 * now there's a reason this is my all time favorite girly punk song! I'm just so unevolved xoxox
Buy it

*also available on Germ Free Adolescence (2005) expanded version