I'd like to thank the Sunday afternoon Grateful Dead/jam band show on KPFK radio (90,7 FM in L.A.) for turning me on to this song in the early 2000's. The single best band name and song title combo I've ever heard of. The Ominous Seapods with "Bong Hits and Porn." They seriously do ROCK, by the way.
This blog post it NSFA (Not Safe For Anybody)
You have been warned...
No long ramble. Here are some songs I've heard of that are weird, sometimes funny as well. At least to my warped sense of humor.
Censorship? Pretty much everyone who checks out this list would want to censor some of these songs, but everyone would pick different songs. That's the whole point of free speech. Ponder that for a bit.
I do most of my writing on Substack these days, check it out. But it's not near as funny as these songs.
Dave Van Ronk with "Dink's Song" in the early 1960's.
I just picked up a new book at the library, Talkin' Greenwich Village, by David Browne. It's an incredibly well researched look at the folk singing scene that emerged out of Greenwich Village, in New York City, from the late 1950's, through the 1960's. This scene was full of young singers and guitar players, enamored by the earlier folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, and the folk musician tradition in the U.S. that went back 100 years or more before then. From public singalongs at the fountain in Washington Square Park, these young musicians began to perform the songs they heard from Guthrie, The Kingston Trio, and a whole slew of the folk and blues players of the early 20th century.
By 1957, when the book dives into the scene, the Greenwich Village district in New York City had a history as home to several prominent writers, going back decades. At the time, the small clubs and coffee houses of the Village were where jazz greats like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk performed in small clubs while in NYC. The coffee shops were the stompin' and reading grounds of the beat poets, Jack Kerouac being the best known to most of us now. The young folk singers began to play gigs at these clubs and coffee houses, which were often hassled by police and city officials, because of neighbors complaining about the noise.
A legendary scene evolved, as more young folk singers were drawn to the scene. They all played music, drank, argued, worked odd jobs, fell in love, broke up, marched in protests, and got followed by the J.Edgar Hoover FBI in some cases. Most of them were on the far Left side of the political spectrum, often socialists and in some cases, actual communists. I'm more interested in the music scene, but the politics of the time was a part of it all.
In the early 1960's, with Village newcomer Bob Dylan being one of the first, they began writing their own folk songs, in addition to singing the classics. Ever heard of Dave Van Ronk? Neither had I. But he was an early and constant part of the scene, and taught several others to play guitar when they showed up on the scene, as well as writing many songs. The book marches through the happenings, and Van Zonk is a major thread in much of it. Browne chronicles the comings, goings, interactions, and key events of the main musicians in this scene, year by year.
I picked up the book for a couple of reasons. As a goofy, young kid in Ohio, I was a fan of guitar playing singer/songwriters. The first album I asked my parents to buy me as a gift (Christmas or birthday, can't remember), was John Denver's Greatest Hits, Volume 2. Our family had moved to a farmhouse outside the tiny burg of Shiloh, Ohio. Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" became my theme song. OK, we didn't actually work the farm, we just rented the house, but I wandered that farm, the creek, and woods every day. I did have to help chase the cows back into the pasture two or three times, when they got out. That was the extent of my actual farm life.
At 8 or 9 years old, I was a fan of bluegrass that I heard on Hee Haw, like Grandpa Jones,Roy Clark, and Glen Campbell. While I didn't like most of the country music coming out of my mom's radio in the kitchen, I did really like the music of Johnny Cash. So acoustic guitars, folk music were my favorites in my grade school years.
The other reason for picking up Talking Greenwich Village is because as a BMX freestyler in the 1980's, I developed an interest in what I call "Creative Scenes." To me, a Creative Scene is any group of people who come together on a regular basis to do something creative. That can range from a couple of skateboarders at a skatepark, to people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak creating Apple Computers in the 1970's. Art, music, creative businesses, action sports, there are creative scenes in all these things. I witnessed the early scenes of the BMX freestyle world, when there were little pockets of riders in different locations, promoting our weird, new, little sport. Since I moved around, and became a part of several different BMX and skateboard scenes, I saw how they helped riders and skaters progress, and how these scenes ultimately influenced many other people, and helped the sports grow and evolve overall. Over several years, I realized there are all kinds of different Creative Scenes, and that most of the progress in society comes from various Creative Scenes that spring up and thrive for a while.
The Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960's was one of the most influential musical scenes in the history of the United States, and that influence continues to ripple outward, in today's young singer/songwriters, like Alice Phoebe Lou, Jenn Fiorentino, and many more, covering the songs they grew up on, and then writing and performing their own. Generations of singer/songwriters in the U.S., and around the world, were influenced and inspired by the 1960's Greenwich Village folk scene.
I'm only about halfway through the book, but it has already turned me on to a whole bunch of singers and musicians I had never heard of. First, here are several of the people who inspired the early Greenwich Village folk music scene, people who were in and around the Village, coming out of the 1950's. Then I've linked a whole bunch of the early musicians that were part of the Village folk music scene in that era. If you have an interest in folk music, Greenwich Village, U.S. music history, or guitar picking, Talkin' Greenwich Village is well worth the read.
Once upon a time, there was this guy named Gerard who lived in Hermosa Beach and ran a small surf video distribution company. Gerard was a kind of shady salesman guy, but he sold A TON of videos for all the independent video surf film producers, so they loved him. He also sold a lot for the bigger companies, like Vision Skateboards and Sims Snowboards. Because he sold so many videos for other people, he would call them up and say, "Hey, I'm making a compilation video, can I use a clip from your new video in it?" They'd always say, "Sure, go for it." He would say as many of his compilation videos as he did their videos, and he made twice as much money per video on the compilation videos. Shady... but it worked out for everyone involved, including me. Gerard hired me to edit and work for him for a while, and he sold 500 copies of my BMX video,The Ultimate Weekend, in the fall of 1990, in the U.S., and a bunch overseas as well.
As skateboarding and snowboarding took off in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Gerard's little distribution company also sold a ton of skateboard and snowboard videos, as well as surf flicks. After I left Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in 1990, I met Gerard, and wound up editing three videos for him. We did two issues of Skateboarder's Quarterly Video Magazine, and that was nearly three years before411 (skateboard) video magazine came out. I also edited this first issue of Snowboarder's Quarterly.
Most of these video clips are from other people's videos, edited with the mini-interviews Gerard and I did at the Action Sports Retailer trade show in San Diego, in the fall of 1990, as I recall. The Snowboarder's in Exile premier was great. There were maybe 100 to 150 people in the room watching the premier, and nearly every top snowboarder in the world was there. I watched that video probably 100 times over the next few years. In Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, above, you can see our quick interviews with the future 1992 Penthouse Pet of the Year (and Damian Sanders' then girlfriend) Brandy Ledford at 18: 12, and Sims Snowboards team rider Chris Roach at 35:12, among others.
At the beginning, you see ski/snowboard fimmaker Bruce Benedict, and producer Laura Mickelson, my former co-worker at Unreel, talking about their snowboard video, 20 Tricks. Laura Mickelson is now a working artist here in SoCal (which I just found out), as well as a long time video/TV/documentary filmmaker. Damian Sanders, one of the main guys in Snowboarders in Exile, did a ton of snowboarding, some motocross freeriding. He went on to start the Pimp N Ho Ball and the bi-weekly Club Rubber, with business partner Jon Huntington, in Costa Mesa, California, which turned incredibly profitable. Both the night club and the ball got so popular that they moved to Las Vegas. Check out this interview for a deeper look at Damian.
Damian and Brandy lived in Huntington Beach in the early 1990's, and even next door to the P.O.W. BMX House, in Westminster, for a little while. One night in 1992 or so, I was riding my BMX bike down Beach Boulevard in H.B., and got pulled over by the cops, since I didn't have a light on my bike. For some fucking reason, they called for back-up. The second pair of cops walked up, as the first pair was checking my ID. One of them said, "Last night we pulled over some crazy kid right here, driving a hearse, and he had "666" shaved in the back of his head." I said, "You guys pulled over Damian? I saw him and Brandy around downtown H.B. sometimes, and I knew Damian was driving a hearse then. The cops said, "You know that guy?" I said, "Everyone in H.B. knows who he is, that's Damian Sanders, he's one of the best snowboarders in the world." The cop just shook his head. I never actually met Damian, but I'd see him around town over the years, through the 1990's and into the 2000's, when I was a taxi driver and picked up lots of fares from Club Rubber. I think I got another ticket for riding my bike without a light, but I can't remember for sure. I got a few of them back in those days, but usually got off with just a warning.
This morning, I went digging into YouTube looking for Skateboarder's Quarterly #2, which is pretty hard to find. I haven't found it yet, but I ran into this Snowboarder's Quarterly video instead ( Finally found it later, fuckin' algos these days!) I haven't seen this video since probably 1991. I was the cameraman for all the little, in between interview and trade show footage, and I edited this video together, using big blocks from Snowboarders in Exile,20 Tricks, New Kids on the Twock, and a couple other videos that came out at the beginning of the 1990-1991 snowboard season.
The actual Lincoln Navigator promo that I originally put in this post was taken down. So here's some guys driving on a slippery bank with a Navi. Lincoln makes the Navigator and the Aviator, so I had some ideas for other cars in that line. (Since the Trump presidencies have shown us that there are tens of millions of complete fucking morons in this country, this is a parody post people. A joke. Just for entertainment purposes).
Here are some potential ideas for new Lincoln SUV's...
The Lincoln Gator- A affordable, family-centric SUV that comes with a small wet well in the back, and every SUV comes with your very own pet baby alligator. Oh... they're so cute! Watch it grow as the kids grow up. Take it to the park in the summer for picnics! When it gets too big to handle, you can kill it and cook it up, or haul it out to the Everglades to live out its golden years.*
The Lincoln Instigator- A large SUV made for the urban wannabe baller. It comes with 28 inch rims, and a boomin' sound system that randomly shouts insults wherever you go. Get out, act tough, get your ass knocked out, all in the new Lincoln Instigator.
The Lincoln Masturbator- This is a self-driving, classy SUV aimed at the upscale women's market. It has incredibly comfortable seats, plenty of cup holders, five different places to put your cell phone so you can text, a wine glass holder, and outlets in the center console so you can plug in your sex toys. Oh yes! OH YES! This is the SUV the discerning woman NEEDS. Every SUV comes with her choice of one of the latest rabbit vibrators.
* Alligators are wild reptiles, and they will eat you if given half a chance. This post is a joke, in case you haven't figured that out yet.
While Amanda Palmer has been working as a solo artist for years, she teamed up with former Dresden Dolls drummer, Brian Viglione, during the pandemic for this digital show. They're performing a cover of "Science Fiction/Double Feature" from the Rocky Horror Show. No that's not a typo, Rocky Horror was a stage play before it became the Rocky Horror Picture Show movie that most of us know.
The internet. Some people swear it's the best thing that ever happened to human communication. Other people see it as evil, a horrible abomination. Some see it as a mind killing collection of porn, cat videos, and "Liberal" propaganda, promoting terrible things like equality, human rights, and transgender people. They think the internet is ruining society.
The internet and social media are indifferent platforms, not inherently good or evil. Those effects come depending on how we use these communication platforms. One of my many odd jobs was working as a porn store clerk way back in the 1990's. Do you know what the most popular form of porn was (and probably still is)? Transexuals. Or transgender, using today's term. That really surprised me back then. Chicks with dicks, cocks in frocks, hoes with hose, and "summer girls" videos, because some 'r girls and some are not. Those were actual video titles in the 1990's, by the way. In 2023, Porn hub was getting 2 billion views per month. During any given week, tens of millions of people are watching trans porn (mostly Baby Boomers). There's a ton of trans porn because people watch it. And there are a ton of cat videos because people watch them. The 2 million+ cat videos on YouTube have over 26 billion views. People watch tens of millions of cat videos per week, as well.
Trans porn and cat videos are two HUGE categories of content on the internet. But you don't have to watch either of those kinds of videos, and neither do I. I've never been a big fan of either of those, but a lot of people are. A LOT. I used to rent VHS videos to them back in the 1990's. The trans smut fans, that is, not cat videos. Nobody was renting cat videos on VHS back then that I know of. That would have been weird.
The point here is, there are all kinds of things that are popular on the internet, but none of us has to watch those categories.
Personally, I see the internet as the greatest collection of human information ever compiled, in human history (with the possible exception of Atlantis). All of this information and creative work, 181 zettabytes worth (that's 181 trillion gigabytes, kids!), was collected, compiled, created, cataloged, posted, and mashed up, mostly by amateurs, and largely for free. All of that was done in roughly thirty years. The Library of Congress? The Encyclopedia Britannica? Even the legendary lost Library of Alexandria in the ancient world? They don't even begin to compare to the vast array of cool stuff and legit information and creative work available on the internet. Yes, there is a lot of bad information, misinformation, and disinformation, too. But we don't have to watch it.
But the good info and really interesting content is out there. Stop whining about the lame stuff, and look at the good stuff. You don't have to watch trans sex videos or cat videos. You can learn about quantum mechanics, triangle numbers*,(Pythagorus loved these things), the odd ancestry of aardvarks, French Canadian slang, how to start a home cupcake business, and a few billion other things. There has never been a better time to learn more kinds of information in all of human history. But you're sitting on the couch smoking weed and playing GTA5. Lame.
Among all the great content on the interwebs, there is an amazing collection of songs covered by other artists. Here are a bunch of my favorites.
Here's Val Kilmer as Tom Van Allen, who is living as Danny Parker, in the Pooh Bear breakfast scene in the little known movie, The Salton Sea. Danny is trying to get Pooh Bear on tape agreeing to a big drug deal for some crank. But this isn't Pooh Bear's first rodeo. This is an incredibly well made movie, chock full of really memorable characters. You should watch this movie. If you're in recovery from meth, crank, or coke, this movie will probably knock you off the wagon. So people in recovery from hard drugs should probably avoid this movie. Luckily, I'm a pizza addict, drugs aren't my thing, so I can watch this movie with reckless abandon. After you watch The Salton Sea movie, look up the actual place, the Salton Sea, it's story is just as crazy as the movie.
"The greatest words on written page
Only come to life when you're on stage"
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excerpt from "Actress," a poem I wrote about 1990. I wrote the poem for my sister's best friend, who's been a dedicated actress since a young age. I lost all copies of this poem years ago, and have forgotten the rest of the poem, unfortunately.
I'm really sorry to hear about the death of actor Val Kilmer. He just died at age 65. I'm generally not huge a fan of specific actors, male or female, but some actors would just keep showing up in movies that became my personal favorites. Val Kilmer was one of those.
Of course, the Hollywood press, like in this Entertainment Tonight tribute, reminds everyone of his best known roles, Iceman in Top Gun, Bruce Wayne and Batman in Batman Forever, Jim Morrison in The Doors, and Doc Holiday in Tombstone. All great roles. But none of those roles are why I've been a fan of Val Kilmer's work since the late 1980's.
It's easy to talk shit about actors in general. People say they're all shallow, self-absorbed, and narcissistic. People say actors just want to be movie or TV stars, and live as glamorous prima Donna's. People say that the top actors make way too much money. These things are true for some actors. But then there are the hardcore, devoted actors. They take a writer's characters, described only in words, or maybe simple drawings in some cases. The great actors flesh out and literally become those fictional characters, taking the rest of us on a believable journey, for an hour, two hours, or maybe through a whole TV series. That's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do well. Val Kilmer was one of the greatest at this. Rest in Peace, Mr. Kilmer, in whatever realm the greatest move into after an inspiring journey here on planet Earth.
Here are the main roles that made me a big fan of Val Kilmer's work.
This is definitely not my taste in interior design, but I love her creativity and way of making this place uniquely her own. DIY content creator Mariane Plaisance and her boyfriend live in an old bank building in Montreal, Canada, which she has completely redecorated inside. We have a growing number of commercial buildings now losing money, and many standing vacant or fully abandoned. In addition, there's a major affordability crisis in housing across the U.S., Canada, and some other countries. Is living in a remodeled commercial building an answer to these problems? Maybe.
What would your dream house look like? Think about it for a moment. Where would it be? What color would it be? How many bedrooms and bathrooms would it have? If money was no object, would you have a gigantic mansion on a hilltop? Would it be way out in the country? In the mountains? In the middle of a city where the urban action is? Would you have a home theater?A huge swimming pool? Would you have droids to wait on you? The ultimate open kitchen? A slide? A fire pole between floors? Would your master bedroom be underwater? When it comes to customizing a living space, there have been all kinds of amazing and ridiculous homes built throughout history, particularly for people with more money than they knew what to do with.
Today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are decades into a long transition period in society. The late futurist Alvin Toffler called it The Third Wave, in his 1980 book with that title. He and his wife believed we were leaving the industrial-based society of the last 350 or so years, and moving into an information-based society. He wrote several books explaining how this massive transition in society might play out, as he explains in this interview from 2007.
Forty-five years after Toffler published The Third Wave, I believe we are now reaching the point of peak change in the transition the Tofflers wrote about. In 2025 we have a major housing affordability crisis in the U.S., Canada, and several other countries. Here in the U.S., we also have a major homeless problem that has grown exponentially in the last 20 or 25 years. At the same time, because of the Industrial Age to Information Age transition Toffler wrote about, we have tens of thousands of commercial buildings that are no longer viable for their original purposes. Thousands of these structures, ranging from small houses to entire sports stadiums, have been abandoned. First there were abandoned factories and some warehouses, then came houses in those cities, then retail storefronts in small towns, larger abandoned stores, dead malls, and now a growing number of abandoned older office buildings, in nearly every city in the U.S..
I've been writing about this issue of empty buildings on my Substack site, in a series of pieces called Simulpocalypse. One of my main reasons for writing this series is to dive into this topic is to try and figure out how we could actually put many of these buildings to new, cool, viable uses for today's world.
That's where Mariane, in the video up top, and her renovated bank turned into a work and living space, comes in. This is a great example of how someone turned a vacant commercial building into a cool, funky, whimsical, and YouTube studio and unique home. I think this type of thing can be done in many, many more instances, if we can get through the issues of evaluating a building's current true value, local red tape, outdated zoning laws, and the other things keeping thousands of other under used and vacant buildings from finding new uses for today's world.
Mariane and her boyfriend bought the old bank for about $500,000 U.S. dollars, in Montreal, where the median home price is about $600,000. So they held out, as the price dropped, and made an offer, so they got the property for less than the median price of a home there. The bank has about 3,500 square feet, which I bet is much larger than the average house size. At half a million U.S. dollars, this isn't a super cheap place to live. But it is less than an average house there. Now imagine if you had a somewhat larger building, and had several people sharing it, two or three couples or several single people, each creating their own living space (and work space) in the building. You could bring everyone's living expenses down quite a bit.
I've been writing about "the coming recession" for several years now, since some long term trends suggested this next recession would bring a huge level of change throughout society. Here in the U.S., we have a major housing affordability problem, particularly for Millennials and young Generation Z, just entering their working life. At the same time, we have what I'm now calling the "Simulpocalypse," a growing number of vacant commercial buildings across the U.S..
There are a handful of people living in commercial buildings who have videos here on YouTube. Not many. As this recession deepens, and as commercial real estate continues to tank in retail and office particularly, some people will figure out how to live in some of these spaces. I'm not talking about the large adaptive reuse projects that cost tens of millions of dollars, but average people realizing that if they have a small business of some kind, they can rent an old store front or industrial unit for half as much money as a decent apartment.
Yes, zoning is an issue, but vacant properties getting tagged, vandalized, invaded by drug addicts or other homeless people, and possibly catching fire are other, often bigger issues. There will inevitably be property owners willing to lease to people who run a small business and live in their vacant stores, warehouses, or office buildings, just to get some income. Other people will be desperately trying to get out of buildings, and will take some weird offers to sell these properties. While I don't see this as the biggest answer to housing affordability, I think this is likely to be a quiet trend over the next several years. Time will tell if I'm right about that or not.
Did you check out the video embedded at the top? Mariane is French Canadian, if you haven't figured that out yet by her accent, and her DIY YouTube channel is in French, and it's called 2e peau.Her work as a DIY content creator led both to how the couple could afford to buy this building, and to the nature of her amazing renovations and redecorating of this building. As millions of people struggle to afford decent places to live, will more people start renting or buying commercial building to live in, or create live/work places tapped into today's internet-based business world? I think it's definitely a possibility.
If you read my blog or Substack, you know that I've been living homeless for many years now. So why am I so interested in abandoned commercial buildings? Well, for one, let's just say I've become much more sensitized to today's housing issues, because of my own struggles to make a decent living and find housing, starting with my taxi driving days, about 25 years ago. But there's more to it than that. I've had this weird dream of living in a converted industrial building since I was a kid. It started with a womanizing TV detective when I was about 12-years-old.
At 20:46 in this episode of the 1978 TV show Vegas, we see private eye Dan Tanna drive his classic Ford Thunderbird into his apartment, with a flat tire. This clip leads into a long scene in his "apartment." In the show, Tanna lived in an industrial building out near the Las Vegas airport, and he would drive his car right into the living room. Like pretty much every 1970's private detective on TV, Dan Tanna was a hero every week, and a consummate ladies man, in the James Bond tradition. But it was that cool apartment in the old industrial building that I always thought was the coolest part of the show.
In the 1986 bicycle messenger movie Quicksliver, starring Kevin Bacon, Jack and his ballet dancer girlfriend live in a spacious loft, the quintessential artist's loft. In this corny road bike freestyle/dance scene, he's riding around their apartment, trying to distract his girlfriend from her ballet practice. Yes, it's a stereotypical, 1980's, corny, romantic, movie montage. But this is one really cool loft apartment. By the time Quicksilver came out, I was a hardcore BMX freestyler, and this cool loft built on the dream I had, started by Dan Tanna's industrial building apartment Vegas. The dream of living in a funky, cool, industrial building someday, where I could ride my bike or park my car in my "living room," kept growing in my head. I'll be honest, that dream still exists. I'm probably not the only one who has imagined living in some old industrial building transformed into my own cool, personal live/work space.
My dream actually happened, sort of, back in 2005. I was working as a taxi driver, scraping by week to week, paying about $600 every week to lease my cab, and putting another $300 or more in the gas tank, every week. After paying my expenses, I didn't have enough money to rent a decent room or apartment. So I lived in my taxi, 6 1/2 years total, and took showers at the gym. I got a cheap motel room once a week, usually on Sunday nights, because business was slow. I'd watch a little TV, eat a cheap pizza, and get 10 or 11 hours of good sleep. After working 70-80 hours a week, all seven days, one night of good sleep did wonders.
Another taxi driver, a guy named Richard, had an indie art gallery in an industrial unit in Anaheim, the AAA Electra 99 Art Gallery and Co-op. He made me an offer one day. The deal was that he would let me live in the art gallery during the week, and I would drive his taxi all weekend, from Friday afternoon until early Monday morning. I took the deal. I moved into the gallery, and suddenly had 4 days off. I worked long hours on the weekend, and lived with a mama cat and her six kittens in the gallery Monday through Friday afternoon. It was in that place that I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style of drawing and shading with markers. That drawing technique now provides most of what little income I earn now. I lived in the gallery for 8 or 9 months, then went back to full time driving in the cab, hoping to rent an apartment at some point.
Living in an indie art gallery was pretty damn cool, and jump started my creativity, which was non-existent, for about three years, when I moved in. I became a visual artist in that crazy little gallery. I've now sold over 100 large drawings, in the last ten years. I didn't see that coming when I moved into the gallery, in the late summer of 2005. I didn't have a BMX bike, and I was really out of shape then. So I didn't do any freestyling in my "living room." I didn't have a car then, either. Electra did have a big roll-up door in the back, but the stage was right there, where garage bands played on the weekends. So I couldn't pull my car into the living room.
So in my weird head, the dream of a really cool live/work art studio/gallery/apartment housed in a commercial building still lives on. Personally, I need to sell my drawings for a lot more money to make that happen. But who knows? Maybe someday the dream will come true... again. As for the millions of people looking for a reasonable place to live, I think we will see more people figuring out ways to live in vacant commercial buildings since there are thousands of them sitting vacant or underused across North America. If this idea appeals to you, check out some of the links in this post for further ideas.
I'm doing most of my writing on Substack these days, though I still do a post here on the blog once in a while. Check out the whole Simulpocalypse series on Substack, all about the growing number of struggling and abandoned homes and buildings in the U.S..
