“It’s going to be the year of the sharp elbow and the quick tongue.” – George W. Bush
Marina, California – (August 29, 2009) – Somewhere, out on the morning breeze that flows out of the Pacific towards the impossibly green, rolling coastal strip just south of Point Arena, California, a long slab of fine American metal slides by. Shakey is inside, singing his latest batch of insightful, foresightful songs, in real time.
The term is emphasized several times in the video. Real Time.
Time for reality. Time for instant art, instant feedback, the growling, grungy stuff that Young has made a partial living cultivating like bacterial cultures growing in the gleaming works of his guitar apparatus.
The video that Shakey, better known as musician Neil Young, is filming of himself while cruising the California coast in his “Linc Volt”, a 1959 convertible Lincoln powered by innovative hybrid technology, and singing these new songs will make its way to his Garage, a website that has probably done more to budge the American psyche towards the high road than any other music-based site has.
Once posted, this new video will join in ethereal form with the rest of Today, where all manner of strange items await absorption for the curious news seeker.
Odd news items abound today in Real Time, such as the angry elbows of Superman, mild mannered Dwight Howard by day, sinus shattering terror by night. In minutes, he managed to take out two-fifths of the starting lineup for his NBA team, the Orlando Magic during a hotly contested playoff match up with the Philly side.
His first awful act came in the form of a vicious swipe at the prominent cheek structure of Sam Dalembert, who made like a duck and saved himself several months of painless smiles. Howard, whose physique represents the perfect male, had Michelangelo found a large enough slab of marble to carve, came down from a rebound attempt and wiped his diamond-tipped jackhammer elbow across the distressed bridge of Dalembert, who narrowly avoided facial reconstruction surgery.
Howard’s teammate, Courtney Lee was not so lucky. Minutes after the attempted manslaughter of Dalembert, Howard’s elbow caught his own teammate in the face as he fought for yet another rebound.
This was just a glancing blow, but the impact was enough to send Lee home in a facial cast, sounding strangely like an urban Willie Nelson when asked to describe the play that injured him, putting his participation in serious question for the rest of the series. Soon after, Superman was grounded, forced to wrap his pile driver arms in kryptonite for Game 6, which he was told to skip by NBA commissioner David Stern.
But if Superman could fly, it is doubtful that he would. No sir.
Flying is out these days, for a variety of reasons, first and foremost is the Swine Flu, which has grounded most business travel not just to the blue agave flats of Mexico, where the flu reportedly spontaneously combusted, but all over the United States, and the World. Not even Air Force One is in the air today, despite a perfectly clear spring day over the obviously gun-shy island town of Manhattan.
No, the flu has wiped out school tests, and sporting events, drug runs, and illegal immigration. The whole world is holding their breath, hoping not to catch “The Pig.”
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical stocks are strong, and so are those of 3M and other masking agents. Yet doctors are convinced that the masks are worthless, other than to give some semblance of confidence, a shred of hope to a doubly stunned populace that is still trying to figure out how to pay the cable bill with an unemployment check that has yet to arrive.
And on Capitol Hill, the swine are eating themselves, a rare side-effect of the H1N1 virus not seen anywhere other than Washington, D.C. Congressional Republicans are dizzy with welling venom towards their former partier Arlen Specter, who yesterday went full-Brutus on the GOP, switching to the Democratic Party. The Republicans are nearly insane with power-envy, forced to sit in the corner and pout as every hallmark of their failed worldview is dismantled by the “socialists” in charge now.
Rush Limbaugh, who has emerged from the Republican dung heap as the strongest pig standing, is reportedly so furious that he lined up a herd of small ponies outside of his Florida studio and forced himself to pet the whole herd until he could calm down enough to go live again and tell Specter “good riddance,” and to “take John McCain and his daughter Janet Reno” with him.
McCain shot back a Twitter, an astounding event unto itself, that said simply, “Red till I’m Dead baby!” which might have raised a few eyebrows back when McCain’s congressional career was just getting off the ground.
Fox News covered the news by convening a panel of youthful tyrants, including “writer/comedian” Alison Rosen, who, in attempting to criticize Janeane Garafalo for her comments linking Limbaugh to Hitler, told a worldwide Fox audience that “Hitler might have also been a tender lover, bad for the Jews, but…”
And this passes for news coverage these days, in Real Time. It is a magical time, a time when the Governor of the Great State of Texas declares publicly that he might just think it a good idea for Texas to spilt from the union, just two months after their Favorite Son nearly ruined it in just eight years of overt corporateering.
When protesters call themselves “Teabaggers” and see nothing wrong with the term, yet howl in ironic protest over racism allegations when someone suggests that they may as well call themselves “Dirty Sanchez’s.” They seethe with indignation, seeking to find some new way to go with every old way to blame anything at all on the socialists and communists who have taken over their country with the aid of the left-wing media, Sean Penn, and Paris Hilton, who the tittering Republicans seem fixated on for some reason.
Meanwhile the Yankees sit at 10-10. A rough start, punctuated by the foul discovery that their billion dollar stadium is both unfillable, due to the overpriced tickets, several thousand of which they attempt to sell for more than $500 per game, and also uncontrollable, witnessed by the flocks of fly balls that have gone for home runs due to the unprecedented wind-tunnel effect that the new stadium construction inadvertently, and karmically created.
The Yankee winds, which may indeed simply be the ghost of Lou Gehrig giving his opinion of the overwrought economical monstrosity that the Yanks now represent, have neutralized the effectiveness of their new, free-market pitching staff, which cost them over $300 million dollars this off season to build.
And that is on top of the $300 million dollars that they paid Alex Rodriguez last year, just before he was outed for being a steroid user. He countered those allegations by at first denying them firmly in a softly lit interview with Katie Couric on 60 minutes, and then attacking the reputation of the reporter that wrote the now-famous story about A-Rod’ alleged positive drug test in the 2003 season, Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, and finally by donning a Mr. Rogers sweater and tearfully admitting to Peter Gammons that he indeed had dabbled in the juice, but only in 2003.
Back in Real Time, Robert’s new book, A-rod is in the news today, along with Superman’s fearsome elbows, Shakey’s Lincoln, and the continued move to the far right by the Republican Party, as allegations pile up that Rodriguez not only continued to take steroids after coming over to the Yankee’s from the Texas Rangers, but that all the way back in high school he was suspected of doping.
Wherever the third-baseman actually is, Vail, or Tampa, or the Circus (where he was seen recently, narcissistically kissing himself in the workout mirror) “recovering from necessary surgery”, it is likely that Alex Rodriguez is feeling pretty exposed, trapped in the biggest shit storm of Real Time.
