Monday, March 25, 2013

The Customer



On regular intervals

The bulls go over the cliff

The leaders posture

The young react

The old articulate 
Most of the wise, (I believe) are in hiding

An irascible clue unfolds on any Tuesday.

My shopping cart has a wobbling wheel 
Counting the carts in front of me to be about twenty with nearly the same number guesstimated to be distributed throughout the lot and Supermarket ......discounting the odd theft, I give myself high odds of using this very same bastard cart again in the calender year and resolve to break the spell, abandoning it beside the newspaper racks outside the electric doors. 

The next cart is much better, I pretend not to notice the poor fellow who has taken up the wobbly cause left aside the traffic of it all 
 "grow your own fuckin' tomatoes" I says to myself......well? What about soap?....  Hmm. You got me there, 
I buy four "Heirloom" tomato plants with flowers on them and place them in the south facing window of the kitchen when I get home

While I was there, at the grocery, I noticed the motorcycle magazines are beginning to outnumber the gun publications. Well, It's something. 

I buy an issue of "Motorcycle Classics" to help with some collective message. 

 Other magazines feature movie stars like a sorry bill of health pinned to society's weakest links, the word "imposter" comes to mind.
  
If you can see a rat in a maze and not feel a twinge of recognition. Good for you. 

If you can stand in line with another human standing directly behind you. Hazah! and praise the big cheese. 

If you can get through high-school without a deep unresolvable despise for institutions. You is the cats meow and you fit right in there, like a key in a lock inspecting the tumblers with the expression of the deeply resigned. 

 furthermore

If you let someone convince you that you need medication to help get over your stress, you are going off to the slaughter house under your own steam. I am suggesting that a thorn in your foot is to be removed, not discussed. Sand in your eye needs washed out, not a prime time special featuring football greats with bad knees. When you are confined to a pine box, don't entertain the thoughts of a silk box lining and a scented pine tree dangling in your face as a solution. By all means.... Kick like hell and get the fuck out of there.

When the music in your ears is offensive and the lights make you feel like you are in surgery and the people resemble monsters you are not mistaken. The Twilight Zone ain't got nothin' on the grocery store.  

As an experiment. I put on my blackest sunglasses and pull up ABRAXIS on my IPOD

This is the proper way to handle a crisis of conformity

and when they inevitably ask if they can "help" me, I sent them for a forty pound bag of dog food. By the end of my shopping adventure the bag boys and girls are perplexed and the manager is curious about the nine bags of Pedigree blocking the exits

I do my part. 

B.E.B.   (self elected anti-social skills professional)

 
  

    

Saturday, March 23, 2013

My reply to Bob Lefsetz (Kelly and Clive)



                                             photo by Amber Lessing 

 I used to work for "a record company"  ( smooth jazz... yack.) A fly by night subsidiary of a much bigger fish. Maybe it was Virgin records...I forget...
  I was hired by a nice guy walking his dog who liked the drum beat I was playing inside my open garage door one day.  The whole company was situated cliffside on Birdview Ave. where the stars all live overlooking the ocean. (The neighborhood was not particularly happy about our presence.)

I was in for a serious education. In a nutshell, the acts are a product like a can of peas. I'm not being creative. Exactly equal too a can of friggin peas. 

And I am grateful for what I was on hand to witness. Being a musician / songwriter myself, what I wanted most on earth at that time was a record deal. 

1. Appearances are everything. In response to a bad financial year, what you do in Malibu to pull yourself up by the boot straps is wholly counter-intuitive. You fire 2 people, buy a new Beemer and start taking people out to dinner at an accelerated rate... 

2. All the artists coming in are suckers. They are wined and dined in order to have themselves on the Pitney Bowes mailing machine. It is all charged back to them with smiles, kisses and incense burning in front of a Buddha in a sand garden with the sun going down over the pacific. As soon as they were out of ear shot I heard with my own ears a proper gang of wolves snickering about how they would divide their next kill. A gotcha vibe overpowering the patchouli with little fragments of sentences that fell into my ears that I can never.... un-hear.  

 "We own the masters so fu%# em" 

After hearing a little gem like this one, I raised my eyebrows in shock, not saying a word. My expression was spied by a coworker on the higher end of this food chain. His response, leaning in close with one closed eye.... "and were the NICE record company" 

Long live the web. 


Brandon Earl Bristow 

P.S. I am now living happy and contract-free on bandcamp.com. It's FREE!  The new paradigm - I love it.