Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

You cannot shame the shameless.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

This fight is for everything.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

You are here: Home / Archives for Jewish Steel

Known as Jewish Steel on Balloon Juicel, Alex Smith wrote at Balloon Juice in 2018.

Jewish Steel

I’ll Hide My Shoe Somewhere Near Your Shirttail

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Here is a little gem that figured into a couple of mixtapes a friend made me way back when mixtapes were actually tapes. I remembered the words and the exuberant strumming style, but I’ll be damned if I could ever have pulled the un-bluesman-like name of Doug Quattlebaum (“Have you met my accountant?”) out of long-term storage.

But with scant information I found this quickly on YouTube. It’s funny to think how hard-won this kind of musical knowledge used to be. Hours of haunting out-of-the-way record stores, cultivating a collection of fellow-traveler weirdos, keeping an ever expanding inventory of lusted-for albums ready to mind. You might even have to read a book or two to get up to speed. And the only way to hear these hidden treasures was to be within earshot of a physical copy of a recording.

I would have to say I prefer, no, vastly prefer being able to hear virtually anything I can think of on demand. But, and I know this is a commonplace sentiment, I’m certain I don’t appreciate the triumph of discovery, the revelation of finding something really superior nearly as much as when it was a demanding and sometimes expensive quest.

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Now Be Thankful

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Warning! Flaming Hot Take Ahead: Thanksgiving is the least musical holiday. Apart from one very long “song” that I don’t think anyone under the age of 40 is aware of, when you think of Thanksgiving, no music springs to mind. Can you think of a song that even mentions Thanksgiving? If you say The Cranberries are a Thanksgiving band I will come to your house and make you pay for what you done said.

In order to satisfy my own curiosity I had to see if The Cranberries were a “the” band or just Cranberries. Some bands will try to pull that on you. I’m glad I did because otherwise I’d never know Google’s opinion on the matter. Burt Reynolds, huh?

And as long as we’re being bold, let me say that since I predicted a 40-seat net gain in Congress and came pretty close, I am back in the prognostication game: It’s going to be Beto.

 

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Roy Clark 1933-2018

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Hi, everybody! Jewish Steel here. How’ve you been?

By a strange coincidence I was just watching this the other day. I was expecting some virtuoso hillbilly guitar. What I was not expecting was Steve Martinesque anti-comedy. Where there aren’t jokes necessarily, but the humor is in the stupidity, surprising turns, and flashes of insight contained in the material itself. I was kind of shocked at the sophistication of it all.

 

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Let Me Tell You ‘Bout Your Blood, Bamboo Kid

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If I had been more on my game for Independence Day, I might have suggested Joe Strummer’s 1989 album Earthquake Weather. It was supposedly the product of a renewed sense of confidence in his powers which may indeed be true, but according to his biography by Chris Salewicz (a real ox-stunner at 600+ pages!) he was a habitual weed-smoker. While I am totally down to Legalize It, we can also be (ahem) clear-eyed about what it can do to one’s sense of motivation. Rock legends can work to whatever schedule pleases them, anyhow.

I would have recommended it because it is a very American-feeling album, in the same sense that Big Audio Dynamite feels European. It’s made with an all-American cast of musicians, apart from Joe, some of whom you might recognize from the film Repo Man. Strummer writes about American politics and cars and highways and diners and dive bars and jazz. The traditional stuff non-Americans gawk at. For someone with such a reputation of being a punk rock teller of hard truths, Strummer’s lyrics are quite dazzlingly poetic. They are beat-like, too, and don’t always make a lot of linear sense. Fine by me! They fit the music like a glove.

The music is Clash-level quality. It’s even got a reggae cover. Strummer’s later solo albums had great moments, but I don’t think he ever sustained as high a quality of songwriting subsequently. Every time I would teach a Jimmy Buffet song  to some grey-faced office worker, florescent-light-sick and lusting after some color, chaos, and sunshine, I would think of how Strummer’s Island Hopping captured everything Buffet had ever done more vividly and tunefully and in under three minutes. And the pity of the fact that, too late to cash in on Combat Rock and too early for Grunge which it resembles more than a little, this splendid album got overlooked.

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If I Find You Been Creepin’ ‘Round My Backstairs

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“I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.”

Christ almighty.

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Thousand Dollar Car

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I think it is uniquely American, what with our hostility to public transportation outside of the big cities, that we force the working poor to buy rotten old cars to shamble around in. My best thousand dollar car was a $500 canary yellow 1979 Pinto that I took all over the West in the summer of 1989. It was still running when I sold it in 1994.

On this Fourth of July let’s remember the tenuous grasp on Independence our less than reliable friends gave us long ago.

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