My favorite illegal activities are subversive. If you're consciously doing something illegal its nice to make it known and make a statement by it, then the illegal status of whatever you're doing highlights the point you're trying to make. It raises questions like why is this illegal? What is the purpose of the law? Do I really have the elbow room in free speech I think I have? Banksy's art is like that, or the guy from that documentary "Man On Wire." Less serious, but one of my favorites is the Red Hot Chili Peppers taking a dump in a pizza box and delivering it to their record label.

No problem, glad to hear you like them. Check out their album Tago Mago. Here's a documentary about their era of music.

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

Try out CAN, one of the founding Krautrock bands. They're pretty strange, but if they click with you they bang.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAv0-TAE1UE "Mushroom Head"

I couldn't find "Future Days" on youtube, but that's another good one for an initial impression.

Their story is one of my favorites, too. Basically it was post WWII Germany, and a group of musicians decided they had a blank slate of culture to work with, so they took a bunch of drugs and played what came out. They needed a frontman, and one day they found a skinny Asian dude tripping out on his back in the street. They all agreed that they had found their singer.

Yo La Tengo is amaaaazing. Ira isn't aware of the world on the stage. I'm going to see them in a few months, and I can't help but tell everyone I know how I excited I am. It's really incredible how much depth they play such a wide variety of music with- they've opened me up to so many different genres. Their noise stuff is especially good for headphones, for Ira's noises.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYF4wbyrNyY live, but still wouldn't listen to this without running to find my headphones.

Love this song. Similar theme with a heavier vibe in "Magazine"

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

dem druuuumms

Great! Thanks for the read. Happy to follow you on here.

I was trained as a teacher, and the basis of this story is the reason I quit- at least from the lens I read it from. I'm not sure if Vonnegut was writing about modern education, but the similarities are striking. We've been prescribing the same blanket subjects to kids for years, despite any talents that stand out, aside from exceptional cases. You love music, but you can't work grammar or remember math equations? Failed. You're a chemistry fanatic, but when you get into college your personal tastes don't mesh with the prescribed course load of maths and basic lab courses? Too bad. You're head jumps around too much to focus on this novel? Take these meds, or drop out. Today you have to satisfy a certain mold in order to gain the recognition needed to receive outside help for your interests. Most of our education system will only benefit students if they're perceived as "good students", which means kissing ass when it comes to grades, standardized tests, and moving along through the prescribed course loads. The extra burdens, and the time wasted on things students will never think of again after the test, are handicaps for students who have wishes beyond what schools promise them.

That's true. Each place could have its own quality of arrogance. The way Vonnegut uses hyperbole highlights the absurdly unique quality of arrogance in the American dream.

Awesome! Made me think of the trend of arrogance in the U.S. - overzealous patriotism and all that... codpieces, jizzum, rockets. When he shows the effect of our trust in our modern world on the discarded natural world, it makes us seem like babies raised in test tubes that we've learned to love. We love things like Tang and Clorox and technology, and we love man-made labels of prestige like Composer and Senator and Sheriff. We're so great, why wouldn't the other galaxies want our come, so they can be just as great as us?! Vonnegut sure has a unique and entertaining way to show us the shadow of ignorance beneath our arrogance.

Yeah! It's always at least an undercurrent. If you think about the usual aspirations for a modern man or woman... career, family, big house, nice car, ect. There seems to always be an element of trying to attract the opposite sex. It's a shame it isn't talked about more explicitly or in-depth, because sex is so intensely confusing for so many people. In the U.S. all we get is a basic run-down of mostly obvious things... what goes where and how to not get sick. What about how to please your partner? Or awareness of self-esteem issues rooted in sexual insecurity? Why don't we hear about pioneers in sexuality, even politicians like Harvey Milk, in school? Sexuality only receives negative examples in most medias... perverts (whatever that means) and rapists. We get reinforced to believe that sex is kept in a dark corner of our lives, when really it's all around us all the time. Think about how many people watch porn! The porn industry makes more money than Hollywood! A huge percentage of the U.S. population watches porn, and who even pays for porn?! We're sexual creatures, but nobody wants to talk about it. Sexuality is a huge part of a person's individuality, and it seems like it would do everyone a lot of good to be familiar and comfortable with themselves. End rant.

I've read her diaries, and they were great! Too long winded for a modern audience, but with so few people writing seriously about sex it was great to find someone who has done something similar in the past and learn by her example. Thanks for the tip.

I make a modest living writing erotica. At first I wrote smut, for the money, and then when I started finding a method of story around the action of sex I started getting into more interesting things, which led me to erotica. The turn into better material cut my income big-time, so now I wash dishes, too =) I'd like to write for a living, and make pornography that isn't so vapid and demeaning, and raises sex in fiction to the place it is in our real lives: a huge cause of many motivations, and one of the most potent experiences we can have.

Nice part at the very end when he's talking about listening to his bandmates. I always wonder what people give their attention to while they're playing.

The first song of theirs that caught my ear and has lasted since I first heard them about five years ago has been "At Least That's What You Said", the opening track on "A Ghost is Born". I'm a sucker for a big guitar sound, and the solo that last most of the song carries a dissonance between the huge, angry tone and melodies that explore a range of anger, panic, and insecurity that defines what some of Wilco's music means to me, and it opened up a lot of music in the noise genre for me. Tweedy said the solo was a musical representation of one of his panic attacks.

At Least That's What You Said

I've been an erotic writer for the last year. Writing was one of my dream jobs, so when my stuff started selling on Amazon I quit my dayjob and pursued it full-time. For a year I wrote every day, traveled, partied, and lived through my laptop. The self-published ebook market became saturated, so now I'm lining up a job to wash dishes. I'm not too bummed, because I improved my writing skills a ton, had some unique life experiences, and came out of it looking like only somewhat of a weirdo to my friends. I have a few more ideas that will last me about 4 months, and then I might try writing about other things.