Worse than Arnold Rothstein ?

Today the LA Dodgers declared bankruptcy. The details are too long to go into here. Highlights include $100 haircuts, 5 homes in Bel Air and a divorce that includes the owner's wife handing out blow jobs to the chauffeur. A great LA story.

This sordid tale of a once proud franchise also represents another terrible chapter in the tenure of Bud Selig. His reign as Major League Baseball's commissioner has included:
1 A canceled World Series. The first ever. Previously neither World Wars had prevented a World Series.
2 The steroid scandal and the completely improbable claim that the commissioner, owners and GMs didn't know or facilitate it.
3 The BK of the Texas Rangers
4 The BK of the Dodgers
5 The revelation Mets' ownership is thick as thieves with Bernie Madoff.
6 The have and have-not MLB franchises and allowing the "national" sports media to present the game as an endless five-hour Yankees/Red Sox game.
7 Baseball's loss of African-Americans. It is now a "white boy and foreigner's game."
8 And locally, the catastrophe of the Oakland A's ownership. Co-owner Lew Wolfe is a shameless So Cal real estate speculator with no interest in baseball. He is also the former fraternity brother of you guessed it - Bud Selig.

So why does this matter to the non-baseball fan?  It is a prime example of how those in power are rarely held accountable. Bud makes the owners' money, and the good of the game has ceased being something a commissioner cares about since Bart Giamotti and Faye Vincent stopped running the show. Sure, baseball is a trifling thing compared to tyrants, terrorists and homegrown scum like Dick Cheney. But in his ability to shield himself from accountability and act in the most brazen compromised manner, Selig reflects our times.

Dueling Video Clips- Your Winner Appears Here

Winna

The Dog

Just cause he was so damn cool.

Jim Jones Revue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WtJ3RYlTo

Rock may be dead, but nobody told these guys. They've got all the cliches but god damn it they've got the old-time energy as well. I don't care how many Little Richard riffs they rip or how many times this lead singer watched Tex Perkins woo 'em in Berlin, these guys want the old gold. They want to sweat and scream and bleed and they want you to join them. I don't care if it's all been done before, because ironic detachment never got them dancing. Maybe it actually takes courage to be a Jerry Lee meets Beasts of Bourbon rocker in 2011, and the two records I have by these guys actually rock hard and change the dynamic of the room. I say go.

Outrageous Cherry

Around and around we go on the music obsessive merry-go-round, looking for satisfaction through price and medium and, oh yea, quality. My general pattern has been vinyl  >cassettes> cds> vinyl> soulseek> and vinyl again.  But we've had another quantum leap in record prices, and who wants to lay out 18 bucks for a new slab based on Internet raves when you've been burned so many times before?  So many folks have left the sterility of the Soulseek game, so it's harder to hear new music for free first to purchase later, which leads me back to the bargain cd bins, a place I thought I'd never return. These serve a couple of functions- they let you hunt for dollar nuggets, which are more fun to listen to than just throwing down plastic for brand new stuff (maybe because expectations are so low), veritably risk-free and make finding treasures far more likely (assuming you can call any cd a "treasure"). They also allow you to take chances without blowing cash that could be better spent getting really drunk.

So I snuck out of work recently and headed out to Concord Rasputin's to escape consciousness by flipping through hundreds of misfit cds, and lo and behold some are some purty darn good: Espers II (gorgeous female singing backed by bearded Pennyslvanian Renaissance reenactors), that Ministry record with "NWO" and "Jesus Built my Hot Rod" on it, a Jesus Lizard ep I'd never seen, and a number of others that will probably get a listen and then get shelved. The big winner, though, is Outrageous Cherry's Out There in the Dark, which is jam-packed with enormous hooks and inventive songwriting. I have one other record by these guys and it has some great tunes, but this one is just so relentlessly consistent that I wonder if I missed the hype boat when it sailed or if it (mixed metaphor and cliche alert) flew under the 1998 tastemakers' radars. I say get your 90s version of a 60s psych-pop freakout on and be fully prepared to press repeat and have these songs stuck in your head the rest of the week, a plight you really ought to thank me for in cash.

Apache Dropout

This is the best new record I've heard this year, but its oddness makes description a challenge. One song sounds like Thin White Rope, but that's the only one. Another sounds like a darker Modern Lovers, but that's the only one.  An ode to Johan Kugelberg  includes a spoken word break about fucking in the streets. The back cover has an intense Indian woman with a nuclear blast above her head. What does all this mean? Quality, sir. No easy category quality, but that indefinable stench of goodness keeps wafting from the speakers and it's been too long since I've had a whiff.  Rambling, shambling backyard yesirree quality time (fire up the barbecue and whip out the mushrooms, dad!), and we even get a singalong chorus for anthemheads ("Teenager"). Sneakily addictive and druggily pop, this wins the first half of the year for being- follow the circular logic- really, really good.