Tag: intimidation
"Be afraid, the threat is real, fear fear fear"
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theory wacko but something is really starting to bug the shit out of me with everything at current…
I wasn’t going to write a blog post about this concern up until I put on Bay News 9 here in the Tampa Bay area and their nightly news anchor, Al Rueschel, presented the latest piece that broke the camels back for me.
9-1-1 calls from the World Trade Center on 9-11.
You have the terrorist bust in the UK and airline rule changes in the aftermath, you have suspected bombs showing up on airplanes, in airport terminals and in ports…
Is it a heightened sense of awareness by the public or is someone screwing with us?
Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) said in the first Lethal Weapon film that the evidence was “too thin” regarding the death of a hooker. Though I’d like to believe we’re just being more vigilant right now, with everyone trying to scare the shit out of each other every time you turn on the news – I just don’t see this as a case of vigilance. I see this as timing things appropriately for political gain. The 9-11 tapes sealed my suspicion… Playing a taped recording of a woman crying that she is going to die is just the last raw emphasis that tells the public “you should be afraid – this can happen to you unless you do what we say.”
Light My Fire — no, put it out. Please.
It’s been a while since I decided to read any non-ficiton. Usually it’s biographical works on icons of the Entertainment industry (ie: Beatles or the Doors). Keeping with that trend, I decided to pick up Ray Manzarek’s Light My Fire, it’s a Doors autobiography I’ve been meanign to read for some time.
And yet, as I’m still in the early areas of the book, I’m trying to understand why I thought it was a must read? Probably because of all the positive reviews of the book when it originally was released. Can’t be bad at all then, can it?
From a writing standpoint, it can be all that bad. And worse. Though Manzarek has a unique perspective on his tail…. He’s not a writer.
The book comes off much like a personal journal would, I guess… Reporting the mundane as well as the gripping, life-altering events of Ray’s life… But Manzarek loses focus and direction on any given topic quite easily. At one moment he’s about to discuss finding a live performance of the Blues in the south side o fChicago, and the next moment he’s rambling about attire he wore to graduation from the 8th grade…. One moment he’s about to get into his first exposure to Beat poetry, the next he’s laying the smackdown on facism and intimidation of the California Highway Patrol. He goes off on the broadest tangents and does not focus on the event that inspires the tangent thought.
Another instance of Ray veering wildly is a recounting of Jim Morrison’s UCLA film school student film… While trying to detail Jim’s non-linear movie that Rya found “poetic”, he begins recounting Oliver Stone’s version of the student film that he made as part of his feature film on the Doors. Ray goes off on Oliver for makign an innocent film into something with anti-semitism and Nazi inneundo. He attacks Stone (as he has since the film came out in the early 1990’s) and lets the UCLA film school experience vanish from the story.
It almost comes off like a conversation — one that varies wildly as those who partake in the conversation ramble on into the night. Yet, having to read this conversation is painful… Especially with gramatical errors of repeated run-on sentences, short sentences that woudl be better combined, repetition of adjectives, etc….
Ray’s book, while from the heart, has nothing on John Densemore’s Riders on the Storm autobiography.,
