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From The Office Of Jim Trainer With Love & Hate For The Week Of October 13-19

Austin may boast itself as the live music capital of the world, but this once homegrown concert series featured headliners Ben Harper and Pearl Jam at $185 for a 3-day pass.  With $8 beers and “dillo dirt” (a combination of compost and treated sewage used as fertilizer for the fresh laid grass in Zilker), ACL 2009 bore every hallmark of a corporately-curated music festival—over-hyped bands, over-inflated ticket price and mud.
—PISSING IN THE PRESS POOL: Fun Fun Fun Fest 2009

She needed every failure to be spun into a type of success; she needed every tragedy to be a moment of personal reckoning. 
—Fran Hoepfner

Your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.
—Noam Chomsky

The beer was cheap and cold in Austin in 2009, and I rode that honky tonk merry-go-round, traipsing from one sawdust place to the next. I stuck my tongue down Carmella’s throat outback Trophy’s, dreaming of gingerbread-pancakes at Magnolia but only flamed out burning down Shag as the lights went down at the Broken Spoke on a Thursday night. How different Austin is today from those sanguine and heady first-years in a “post racial America” isn’t hard to measure. It’s a lot different. Just ask Lawrence Wright. The X factor is how much I have changed and even then how much I’m willing to admit it. One thing that hasn’t changed and not even scooched a skosh is the minimum wage. What a drag it is getting old, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated and welcome to the Countdown…

“GET THEM THE FUCK OFF THE STAGE!” I yelled into Wertheimer’s face. I was strangely calm from days on the island but finely-tuned with my own rage. —PISSING IN THE PRESS POOL

Anger. Yes. A far cry from Philly-days of failed backflips and broken noses but I used to be charmed by this town. It was a place where the rockabilly rolled, girls said Hi to you and nobody got upset. A pedantic and woe-as-me complaint compared to the very real prospect of working 156 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Austin, only to suffer road dogs at Ginny’s who think Lynyrd Skynyrd is country.

“The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.” —Charles Bukowski

Ok, still angry, fair enough, but if somebody’s got to look alive might as well be your Writer since I am writing it down—otherwise these overarching corporate turns and 14-year-old day rate may go unheeded by the shrinking middle-class, and oligarchs continue to slide us greasily down the bloody chute of history.

FRIDAYS ON KOOP RADIO 91.7FM

KISS IT GOODBYE

Clear Channel’s strident takeover of terrestrial radio in the early aughts, for example, it didn’t make a damn to a war-inflamed America. I noticed, and in 2003 traveled to the campus of James Madison University to preach at ‘em, these punk rocking students of my generation, but ultimately to no avail. We never recovered from a deregulated media and suffer the death of free radio as much as the Citizens United decision and rescinding of the Fairness Doctrine before it.

S’ok, but when your time is up, and you’re at the mercy of a brushfire or flash-flood and anyway barricading yourself from a white supremacist in a supermarket, will you remember charlatans like John Wesley Coleman perpetrating fraud in the name of Rock And Roll? History will forget him but I won’t. Nathan Hamilton he is not. Punk’s not dead it just sucks now. Anyway, I’m in between gigs and the last thing I’d want from you is sympathy, unless it translates into cold hard cash. A culture critic’s got to eat and if there’s a silver lining to the end-of-the-world then it should be noted that it’s nice work if you can find it.

Help fund my 9th full-length collection and throw in for least factual, most accurate storytelling that, when history has all but whitewashed truth from its re-telling, we’ll recall our own lives, on streets vibrant and alive with so many colors and all of them red as blood.

Country simple, what will you recall when looking back on these strange and grisly final-days of the Anthropocene—will it be Bill Maher or a vampire show, reams of Sean King’s feeds of what the UN has determined to be ethnic-cleansing in Gaza, a memoir from a non-event Scientologist and member of the aristocracy of fame, or that a black man can’t headline at a historied music festival in the live music capital of the world? Selfishly, I’m hoping it’ll be your boy ok. I’m hoping you’ll remember me.

PISSING IN THE PRESS POOL, 3 Years Of Samizdat At Into The Void
is available for presale at 20% off until its hard announce on the corporate feeds. 

In Ham On Rye, when all Bukowski’s friends were rushed off to war, he, malfeasant and maladroit who couldn’t make the grade, suddenly realized that being a jerkoff saved his fucking life. He found something deeper than pride that night, alone at the arcade with enlisted men’s girlfriends and bums out on the street. My point is your boy ain’t making the news, but neither are you. Let’s unwrap a real mythology, Subscriber. Chaos puts me to sleep.

Sign on as a paid subscriber to Piss Pool weekly and receive a free broadside with your purchase. We’ll make it, baby, in the words of Papa, because without Art (and in the words of Cornbread), dude this sucks.

Fight war not wars,
TRAINER
AUSTIN TX

Imagine that you put a human being in a room and close the door and deprive them of food, of their freedom of movement, of medicine, of everything, violate them, and humiliate them time and time again. Then if they try to break the door, you say to the world, look they are a terrorist, barbaric, a “human animal.” This is exactly what Israel is doing, completely backed by the United States. They have put us in inhumane conditions, humiliated us, deprived us of everything.