No Longer A Fan Of Richard Cheese

I used to think Richard Cheese was a hoot.

I told lots of friends about him.

What he lacked in creativity he made up for in humor.

He must be out of material because now he’s started assaulting his fans. Both verbally and physically. Something tells me he’s having personal problems. And his handlers are cleaning up after him maybe.

So not even an hour ago there was a video of him grabbing a camcorder out of someone’s hands, and then throwing it at him, and when he realized someone else got his assault on camera he tried spitting half a drink all over him. Dozens got him on camera doing this because he was onstage in a “New Media” conference and no one was told they WEREN’T allowed to film.

Now he’s going after every single person who publishes about his tantrum at places like Youtube so he can force them to take down their journalism. Fascist bastard!

http://matthewebel.com/main/2008/08/20/how-not-to-treat-your-fans
http://averagesamaritan.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/post-27-controlling-your-identity-in-the-social-media-world-or-richard-cheese-is-an-asshole
http://twitter.com/atizine/statuses/893620306
http://twitter.com/atizine/statuses/893602214

As I look back I think about one thing. I’m really glad that the only CDs of his I ever purchased were about ten cents on the dollar at Tower Records’ going out of business sale two Christmas’s ago!

BLOGGING MY MAGICKAL GUITARS

I currently have 5 guitars I’ve kept all these years because of a certain “je-ne-sais-quois” they possess. 3 folk; one classic, 1 electric;

In all these years of playing, repairing, building, I have sold off, given away and thrown out each and every other guitar only to keep these. After all these years. I’m setting out to blog each one over time.

Here’s the first; my newest.

#5 Handmade bamboo guitar from the Phillipines.

Created by Jun Reputana.

So what’s so special about my bamboo guitar from the Phillipines? It’s loud. It’s sonorous, it’s bright, it’s bassy, it’s precise. What else can I say. It’s weird? It’s beautiful. It’s got sweet spots that go right to your heart.

Acoustically.

From far away even. The action will be easy with a little work, and it seems to be patterned after a fairly old Martin D-28 although I think it was made 2-5 years ago.

Bamboo neck, bamboo body, bamboo headstock. Bamboo almost every THING! The inlay spots are black pearl, from shells that the creator wanders around a beach to find on his own whenever he starts a new guitar.

And when I say handmade, I’m talking about standard, ancient and reliable but sturdy tools. Hand saws and stuff. Wow.

Are there more than 20,000 other guitars in history made that way? That’s only part of what I’m talking about when I say magic. You really have to hear it and feel it to see what I mean. So just take my word for it for now.

[GUITAR'S NAME HERE: Alma!]

So how did I acquire Alma?
I pointed it out in a coffee shop because of the strange hand made case. By shape you can tell it’s a guitar case, but it really looks more like a footlocker that has travelled the oceans. The handle is literally a drawer handle with phillips head screws keeping it fast. Three hasps keep the top secured. Wooden pegs or locks, your call.
“What’s that guitar all about?” I ask the owner.
“You like it?”
“It’s neat, but what kind of guitar is it? And what’s its story?”
“Open it, you like it?”
“Kinda,” I say opening it. “Nice. I do.” It’s odd looking because I’ve never seen a guitar entirely made out of bamboo before. (The fretboard *might* be jackfruit, but I’m pretty sure it too is heavily dyed bamboo woods)
“Take it home. I’m sick of looking at it every day. It’s been here since last fall,” he says. And then he proceeds to tell me everything he doesn’t like about it. The flaws, how the maker must be unskilled, etc.
“Sure, thanks.” I tell him I’ll string it up and if it works out ok make it work, and if not I’ll make artwork out of it like I’ve done so many other times. It was missing a bridge pin, and had not been strung in a while, but other than that was intact and serviceable.
So I got it home, put a bridge pin on it, and strung it up. And tuned it.

Oh my gawd!!!

It sounded awesome even working its way TOWARD in-tune. Let’s put it this way. No other guitar I’ve ever played has sounded good between 420 and 432 A. Most guitars only sound good between 440 and 455ish, and much higher than that you’ll watch the whole face cave in and become unrepairable. Well this one doesn’t need to even come up to concert pitch to sound exciting. I really hope I can share that with you some day. And that’s the rest of the magic that I’m not even going to describe in this blog. It’s there.
I’ll close with one last description of other peoples’ description of this magic and then a link or two about Jun Reputana who made this guitar.
I check 7 music stores working my way from far ones to the nearest ones before finding a gig bag I want to fit with this fine pony.

Caruso’s in Downtown New London, CT has a new line of cases by a British company called Ritter. They specialize in Yoga equipment, upscale luggage and guitar cases.
I purchase one and open my other case to carefully move my guitar into it and see if they fit together.
“Wow, what is that?” says John the drum guy at that store asking what kind of wood it has.
“Bamboo I say, wanna play it?” I hand it to him.
He strums it once and yells, “Oh my gawd! Hey, Rich,” he shouts across the room to one of the owners. “You have to hear this guitar.”
Rich signals that he’s on the phone and will deal with it later. Another salesman I never met before asks to play it while we’re waiting together for Rich to get off the fone.
He loves it too. Rich has seen it all. Been running music stores since I was a little kid. Plays it more nonchalant than the others at first. I watch him strum some of those “show off a guitar in a salesroom” jazz chords with the occasional sweet licks in between and I can see that he’s really excited about it.
“Not bad” is all we get out of him verbally, but you should’ve seen the look on his face.

So I go to my favorite coffeeshop to hang out and use wifi and stuff, and the salesman I hadn’t met before comes in. (never did get his name) He tells me that after my guitar and I left the shop he googled it and got blown away by what he found.

Open Letter To Mika Brzezinski

Enjoyed watching you check Rick Davis for making a “bad call.” (Attacking Obama on the Troops issue at the end of his trip.) Joe had to “hold you back.” That was fun.

Here’s the deal. A couple of months ago I mentioned to Obama Girl and a bunch of my personal friends that we all should start a bogus 527 corporation, make a few attack ads that seem moderately edgy and let the GOP send us a ton of contracts. And once the first large check cleared we’d launch our first real ad.

A venomous attack on Obama that was so stupid, so over the top, so out of it and ignorant that everyone would know it can’t be anything else but a huge fanboy ad FOR Obama.

Well now I’m watching this “Obama Hates The Troops” meme spread across the land faster than a seven-year itch and realizing something.

Why waste money OR time. The GOP’s doing it for free!

Cheers, and happy Tuesday.

marco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6p5KTOGsDs

We MUST Stop Our Military From Raping

With heavy heart and a great sadness I must republish this piece I wrote in GI Special magazine a while back.

————————————————————–

Fellow military men.
I say this with the heaviest friggin’ heart I can ever have.
Rape in the military is out of control.
It has been out of control for a very long time.

Until all women have learned Aikido and made themselves capable of kicking our asses if/when they need to, it will remain OUR role to stop other men from raping them.
It is our burden to find out it is happening, and to stop it when we find out — before it happens if/when that is ever possible.
And it will forever remain our guilt whenever we know something is up and choose to STAY un-involved or worse yet, complicitous.

Why do I say this?
Let me put it this way.

It was 1988. I was stationed in South Carolina.
I was invited to a famous hotel near an even more famous golf course. I was told I could join a “train” if I wanted to.
YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. It is time to discuss these issues head on. A train is when a drunk woman lays there and allows many different men she doesn’t even know jump her bones and rape her limp and lifeless body.
I was very young, and I was curious.

I looked ahead of the line I was invited to join, into the room to the open door and saw perhaps one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen in my life.
A woman about my age was a zombie with half open eyes. Buck naked and bruised all over her body. She was in the middle of having sex with perhaps the 20th soldier in this past hour. There was a line of a dozen or more people ahead of where I could have chosen to join in.

She was too drunk to have any idea what was continuing on. I have no idea if she consented to any part of this at all. I will never know that; and I will never know who she was. I’ll never even know if she was OK afterward. I left instead of joining that line; but I also did not do anything to stop it, or tell anyone about it for a few years.

When I finally did mention this to a few people many were not surprised, and some seemed to wonder why I even cared. Why it even bothered me
Many confided in me that they had seen these events as a fairly common weekend thing in the military.

Blame the victim, etc.

Anyhow, I’ll close just saying that I’ve reflected on that and so many other issues a lot over the years, and for whatever reasons, our United States society is perhaps the most violent in the world; and U.S. military society seems to be the worst of the worst, especially when you take into account what a young female soldier must go through day in and day out, BEFORE YOU FACTOR IN THESE TRAINS even.
So again I say, we need to figure out how and when we can help put a stop to this kind of bullshit.

I say this now AFTER Lance Corporal (goddamned it, she was the same rank as me!!!) Maria Lauterbach has been brutally murdered, and after Suzanne Swift has tried to get the Army to let her go home, and after Janis Karpinski testified to Congress, but hopefully BEFORE another rape occurs.

http://www.lavenajohnson.com

Publishing Over At AngryJournalist.com

I haven’t sent anything in to angryjourno in a long time.

Perhaps because I haven’t been angry enough lately.

Here’s what I submitted. Maybe they’ll keep it, maybe they won’t. It cuts deeper than many of us want to feel really…

Why does CSJ (ChristopherColumbus School Of Journalism still carry the most power toward Pulitzers each year???

This is at least the third “new wave” of the “new journalism” not to mention that the Hunter S Thompsons and Ernest Hemingways of the world have come and gone.

And so should CSJ’s power have come and gone.

Nepotism and corruption should have no place in journalism; most notably when journalism’s main role since the 1500’s has been to out and illuminate that very greed and avarice.

Shame on the entire profession. Shame on each and every one of us for not spending enough of our every waking hours (and some of the sleeptime as well!) working on our own eternal vigilance.

Mac Users Can’t Hear My Music???

People with Macbooks are having trouble hearing the songs on my Myspace page. If you want those and more, just download the heck out of the following 2 albums at:

http://frucht.org/MarcoPlaysClassicalGuitar/MarcoPlaysClassicalGuitar.html

and:

http://frucht.org/letsstopthenextwar/letsstopthenextwar.html

(…and U can print the JewelCase right from the HTML. :))

CBS Failing At MindControlling Each Of Us.

Two important things we should never forget about Janet Jackson’s “accidental” wardrobe malfunction.

1) Justin Timberlake singing “I’ll have you naked by the end of this song”

2) Companion cable channel’s simulcast of a full contact bikini-clad touch football game where someone almost lost her bottom at the same exact time as Janet’s nipple slip.

We,

the viewers:

Are being played…

like a Wagner “Rienzi” at a WWII rally.

Fox Unethical Again Handling The Miley Cyrus Hack.

So, just when you think Fox sNooze has stooped to the lowest low they can go:

..they drop even deeper in it.

This time they’ve disrespected some hackerkids bigtime.

Follow this:

On July 12, 2008, a hacker known by the pseudonym TrainReq posted several racy photographs of Miley on the website Digital Gangster. TrainReq claimed he obtained the photos from Cyrus’ camera phone.^[52] On July 14, 2008, FOX News aired the story, claiming that the photographs had been leaked by an “anonymous” source. ^[53] Soon after the story was aired, a discovery was made that FOX News had displayed images which had been clearly altered to remove the original watermarks left by TrainReq. ^[54]

[ref]=[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus]

(No, I’m not going to post the pix in here. (With OR without watermarks!))

Tony Snow Was A Hatchet Man For Fox News’ Fascism

Tony Snow has died.

He deserves our respect and good vibes but NOT our pandering. His adult career was spent in abuse of journalism on behalf of fascism through violations of the First and Fourth Ammendments, and he was a lifelong apologist for wars and genocide.

If now is not the time to expose FOX “news” channel for what it is, when???

So The Other Day I Was A Turnstile Jumper

I jumped turnstiles the other day. First time since my teen years. It was 9july. My card expires the 10th. So it still should be good. Nope. Coded wrong or something. MBTA authorities just kept scanning me through but none of them were willing to fix my card for me. One of the times I was in quite a hurry. I stood there waiting while the MBTA authority tended to the needs of someone who couldn’t get her credit card to work. More and more I waited so I finally just gave up and turned around looked for the fastest walker and stood behind her. She swiped her card, and walked on through. I walked on through right behind her. No one seemed to care. Me either. I figured if they saw me on camera and tried to freak out, maybe then they’ll fix my card! So I was a turnstile jumper for a day and a half.