Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Houston cops mistake band, clubgoers for New Orleanians

A Houston police officer allegedly went on a rampage at a popular music venue Friday night, attacking the band Two Gallants and numerous members of the audience.

Several persons were tasered and arrested at Walter's on Washington, including drummer Tyson Vogel of the San Francisco-based indie country-rock duo. A 14-year-old boy was among those stun-gunned.

You can read about it here, here, here and here.

All we're waiting for now is for upright Houstonians to "X" out "New Orleans Deadbeats" on their "Deport New Orleans Deadbeats NOW!" protest signs and write in "Hippie Freaks."

Looks like somebody down there needs to open up a can o' Virgil Tibbs on the Houston Police Department.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Ask not for whom the red light glows

Or . . . we turned tricks for the Republican Party and all we got was this lousy . . . .

HEY!!! What DID we get in return for, well, you know?

David Kuo is a brave, and exceptionally honest, man. Read about it here. No wonder all the talk-radio shills for the Party of Greed (d.b.a. The Party of God) had the long knives out this morning. (At least the Party of Lust also is d.b.a. The Party of Lust.)

Or, as Someone very famous once said:

When he saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.
2
He began to teach them, saying:
3
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4
Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5
Blessed are the
meek, for they will inherit the land.
6
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
8
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.
9

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.
12
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.


Matthew 5:1-12

I found nothin' to believe

On this week's Revolution 21 podcast, I play "Mother, I Climbed," written by the late Dave Carter and featured on Tracy Grammer's Flowers of Avalon album. The melody is absolutely beautiful; the lyrics, absolutely haunting.

It struck me as utterly appropriate in a week that saw a friend announcing he and his family had been scandalized right out of the Catholic Church. My church. A sampling of the lyrics illustrates the appropriateness:

on tomorrow’s painted wagon, in a yester-dreamin' day
i rode to heaven never thinkin' i’d be back this way
now i’m standin' at your doorstep with my halo turnin' grey
open up your gate, marianna

lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother i sought the chosen people, but i found no one to comfort me
lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother i climbed the highest steeple, i found nothin' to believe

when they called my faults against the wall, i took my place in line
and put my trust in priestly men to break the ties that bind
but their straight and narrow highway’s just a row of billboard signs
open up your gate, marianna

lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother i sang the sacred psalter but no savior came to comfort me
lay me down in the dark womb of your love
i went naked to the altar, i found nothin' to believe

so i set my feet to walkin' from the sidewalk to the sand
in search of any saint or sage who knew the master plan
yeah, i wandered every backroad in that broken promise land
open up your gate, marianna

lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother i kept the plain and simple, but no shepherd came to comfort me
lay me down in the dark womb of your love
i stood shiv’rin' in the temple, i found nothin' to believe

And I think of all the young people we run across at church, mainly in religious education and youth ministry. I think about how, yes, they're there . . . but still, they're not.

They may or may not actually go to Mass on Sunday. Many have so little knowledge of what the Church believes -- so little about even the basic nature of Who we worship -- they scarcely, in any objective manner, could be called Christian . . . at least in terms of actual belief.

They're there. They call themselves Catholic. But that has so little impact on how they live. I don't see that young Catholics drink, drug or (ahem!) at much different rates than committed secularist youth.

One youth-minister friend once told me he thinks there might be more drug abuse at Catholic high schools than at the (cue menacing organ music) eeeevvvillll public schools.

Yes, all of us -- even the most committed Christians -- screw up. We fall. We're, as Derek Webb sings, crooked deep down.

But increasingly, it seems to your Mighty Favog, there is a disconnect between professed faith and actual life. There is a meltdown in what we know -- what we care to know -- about what we say we believe.

That's nuts. But there we are. We've gone naked to the altar, we found nothin to believe.

And whose fault is that?

Not God's, I don't suspect. And not the kids', I don't reckon.

sticks and stones might break this body and words might wound my soul
and phantom visions fly me where the faithful fear to go
but when this story’s over and my sun is sinkin' low
open up your gate, marianna

lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother the years pass outta countin' but no prophet comes to comfort me
lay me down in the dark womb of your love
mother i climbed the holy mountain, i found nothin' to believe
mother i climbed the holy mountain, i found nothin' to believe

[Lyrics: Copyright 2000, Dave Carter/Dave Carter Music (BMI)]

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul . . . .


Yet another great American record-store chain is going under. Tower Records, RIP.

Here's a bit from the Associated Press story that sums it up pretty well, I think:

At the New York store, Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the Irish band Black 47, was scouring the rock bins and mourning Tower’s imminent loss.

“It’s a bad day for music,” Kirwan said. “It’s a bad day for independent bands. ... Right
from the beginning, even before we were signed with labels they carried us. They’ve been good to musicians.” Kirwan said taking music off the Internet is not the same as buying a vinyl LP or even a CD.

An LP or CD is “something real that’s not virtual,” he said. “It’s like music itself. I’m not sure music is virtual. It’s real and it’s powerful, and I don’t think you quite get the same thing from downloading.”

I have iTunes, and I download my share of stuff -- both for use on Revolution 21 and to fill in the occasional hole in my music collection. But it definitely isn't the same as putting a CD in the player and, for a Boomer like your Mighty Favog, it sure as hell doesn't equal the tactile pleasure of pulling an LP out of the sleeve and gently lowering stylus onto fresh vinyl.

And nothing equals the sheer coolness -- even today -- of a punk band on a 45 RPM single. Seven-inch vinyl ruuuuuuuuuules.

Or, as Dobie Gray sings on one of my favorite slabs of vintage wax (to you non-Boomers, that means really old 7-inch vinyl single), "Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul / I want to get lost in your rock 'n' roll and drift away . . . ."

So long, Tower. Miss 'ya, Wherehouse. You were the record store of my misspent college years, Leisure Landing. Please hang on, Homer's and Drastic Plastic.

Whine is fine, but (blaming) liquor is quicker

I wasn't aware that the Surgeon General had determined that Jack Daniels -- or Jose Cuervo -- makes you a crook . . . or an anti-Semite. Though it may help release the inner crook . . . or inner anti-Semite.

Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) is a convicted crook who drinks. Mel Gibson is an alcoholic who really, really, really needs to talk to a good therapist about his dad . . . the noted Holocaust denier.

When it comes to high-profile malefactors looking for cheap grace and a handy excuse, the whiskey ain't workin' anymore. Not in my book, at least.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

She'd Walk a Mile for a . . . OH MY GAWD!!!

We men used to could count on womenfolk to "sivilize" us.

We are now doomed. Enter the Red State world of the "Passion Party."

From MSNBC:

Reinertsen, a no-nonsense 30-year-old suburban mom from Shawnee, Kan., goes on to demonstrate “Gigi,” . . . (snip) . . . by squeezing a generous amount of lubricant into it, then sliding and twisting it up and down the . . . (snip -- you get the picture).

“This is going to make your job so much easier!” she says, sounding a lot like a vacuum salesman who’s just spread topsoil on the carpet.

At that, 15 women turn to look at me, as if to say, “Well?” It's then I realize that being the only man at a Passion Party can be uncomfortable.

But in this room, I'm the only one blushing, which is saying something because Cathy Pearson, 44, is here with her two daughters, 18 and 24. Not only is she not embarrassed, she regards the sex toy party as a chance for some mother-daughter bonding, a deliberate effort to change the sexual conversation she heard as a girl.

“I was so sheltered … I was very naïve,” she tells me. Like many in the area, she grew up Southern Baptist, got married out of high school and “all I knew was this little world. When I got divorced 10 years ago, I felt so stupid.” She doesn’t want her daughters to feel the same way.

Five things pop into my brain, in no particular order:

1) Where are the Babdiss now when we need 'em?

2) Where's my late Aunt Sybil when we need her? (That's jus' not right, dahlin'! Put that stuff away! You tell them young gals to get married.)

3) I have no polite word for a mother who sees a sex-toy party as a means of bonding with her daughters.

4) Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and at least one mortal sin.

5) If you need this crap, something's wrong.

Tacky, tacky, tacky.

Couldn't he just have called Frasier Crane?

If you make a name for yourself as an Inside Baseball critic of all that is wrong inside the Catholic Church, it makes people wonder when you up and leave. That's what Rod Dreher has done. After half a decade of chronicling sex scandals and rotten prelates, he's converted to Orthodoxy.

And that leaves folks wondering whether Catholicism is just so crooked deep down that it's irredeemable, whether Dreher had some Eureka! moment when he realized that what he had so enthusiastically embraced as a "Pre-Scandals" Catholic was just so much bunk, or whether he still thinks that what the Church proclaims is true . . . but just not "true enough" to stand and fight for.

Given that the Church is a hospital for sinners, one can assume that goes for everyone in it, including its priests, bishops, cardinals and pope. Face it, in a family of more than a billion souls, there's enough true bastards in the bunch to do a lot of damage to the Body of Christ. And the clerics of that bunch can do much damage, indeed.

That's plenty justification for righteous anger. Lord knows, Rod -- and many others of us -- had plenty of that. Adding to that anger was the unfortunate tendency of many "clericalist" Catholics to put tribe above Truth and spend the past five years going "Neener, neener . . . cancel, cancel, cancel!" as they blamed the press (as opposed to Rampant Original Sin) for the Church's problems.

But there comes a time when righteous anger has to be transformed. It must become something positive, something that leads to greater love and commitment, or it will devolve into an all-consuming bile that will cause you to do exquisitely stupid things.

The Mighty Favog (who considers himself a friend of Mr. Dreher) does not know a lot of things, and he is in no position to judge Rod Dreher, despite the grave nature of walking away from what Catholics believe was founded by Christ and possesses the fullness of truth. The Mighty Favog has been tempted to that himself but has been stopped by two questions (raised by Rod himself once or twice):
Where then shall I go? If I believe Truth, and Christ, is here, how can I not be where Truth resides?

Even if I think some of the guys in red caps might be more justly attired in orange jumpsuits.

We, as Catholics, are called to Truth, not to where we're least pissed off. We are called to be faithful, not comfortable. We, as Catholics, are called to stand with Christ and His Church.

Even if the homilies suck and the music is lame.

Why? Because it's not all about you. Or me.

It's about Jesus, and it's about family. It's about the Body of Christ being diminished when any one of us careens off the tracks.

Sick of cursing the darkness in the Church? Try getting off your ass and lighting a few candles. Start at your parish.

Combat evil by striving to be holy. Even if, most days, it doesn't work out so good.

Fight your inner hopelessness by loving as if you had hope. Perhaps soon enough you will.

Let's pray that Rod and his family embrace what they believe to be true in the depths of their souls, not what they find most peaceful and pleasing. May the grace of God lead them back home and strengthen them to cheerfully cope with all the family's messiness, dysfunctionality . . . and occasional Crazy Aunt in the attic.


P.S.: Mark Shea says it all much better than I just did here.



Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Just another piece of asset to Abercrombie

I happen to think young people have pretty good BS detectors. That's why it puzzles me that they're so taken in by so much of our idiotic popular culture . . . but I guess our human need to "belong" is just that powerful.

Guess that's why so many adults are such lemmings, too.

But I will never cease to be amazed and dismayed by Catholic youth-group teens across the land decked out in -- to pick on the most flagrant offenders -- Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister garb. With a straight face and lacking the slightest sense of irony. Presumably, the kids are in youth groups because they have at least some small interest in living their lives as Catholic Christians.

Alternatively, they're there because their parents are forcing them to come. Presumably because Mom and Dad have at least some small interest in their kids living life as Catholic Christians.

So, if the kids are there because they want, on some level, to be disciples of Christ Crucified and Risen, why do they so willingly embrace what Christ would hate -- overpriced apparel sold solely on the basis of snobbery and sex? I mean, until recently, the Abercrombie catalog would have to be covered by a brown paper wrapper if it were sold at the corner Quickie Mart. (Sorry, unfortunate choice of words, considering.)

Meanwhile, Hollister -- owned by Abercrombie -- today is noted for selling such classy attire as "Bumper to Bump Her on the Threeway" T-shirts. And the website is, uh, shall we say "hormonally infused"?

St. Leo the Great, the fifth-century pope who famously turned back Attila the Hun from the gates of Rome, exhorts his flock still: “Christian, remember your dignity!” You have to wonder how a parent with enough clout to force a teen to come to youth group can't get in their kid's face with that eternal truth.

I mean, really.

I think it's because the more affluent America gets, the more schizo we get. We're culturally and morally deranged, if truth be told. Nutso. Whack. Gone. How else does one describe a people so compartmentalized that they see no disconnect between what they profess on Sunday and what they do Monday through Saturday?

The Mighty Favog does not wish to sound like a cranky old Favog here. But, alas, the Mighty Favog has been around the block a time or three. And the Mighty Favog knows that young people kind of like being treated like adults.

My children, I shall grant you your wish.

Gentlemen, do you know what most people would call a Favog-aged man who goes around in a "Grin If You're Not Wearing Any Panties" T-shirt? There are several possibilities (pick one):

* Dirty Old Man.

* Perv.

* Trashy.

* Pathetic.

* "Ohmygawd, Henry! Call the police! There's a pedophile going in there with the youth-group kids!"

And ladies, there's really only a few choice names for 40-something women dressed in an “I KNOW WHAT BOYS WANT” tee. I think you know what they are.

Outfits like Abercrombie and Hollister are marketing to you based upon one single, solitary, small part of who you are. It has you believing that infinitesimal part of your complete self is the totality of who you are.

What then do you do when you're 35? Or 45? Or 55? Or whenever the six-pack-abs and Anorexia Chic things just ain't cutting it anymore? (Age happens. So does flab.)

Who will you be then? Just asking.




Monday, October 09, 2006

The Sex Pistols, race relations and the Voice of Baton Rouge High

The previous post about Louisiana got me to thinking. Thinking about growing up blue collar in Baton Rouge and the world of possibility that, for the first time, blew wide open in a Technicolor frenzy of Dreaming Big for an oddball teen-ager at the Maggot School.

The Maggot School is what White Trash Nation called Baton Rouge Magnet High School throughout my tenure there from 1976-79. It was the place where all the geeks, brainiacs, musicians and thespians could be weirdos together in relative harmony and contentment. Hey, at BRHS it was good to be a Thespian.

If Student X had admitted to being a thespian at Broadmoor Junior High, I garon-damn-tee you someone would have beat that person up and administered an enthusiastic version of the Toilet Water Taste Test. And the boys would have been even more vicious.

Shiiiiiiiii podna, you just as well had put on an ascot and admitted to being a Homo sapiens. Or, better yet, called Junior Martinez (pronounced Marton-ez) a Homo sapiens.

Anyway, Baton Rouge High, by the 1975-76 school year, was a struggling inner-city school whose halcyon days had gone the way of poodle skirts, B-52s (the hairdo, not the band) and "separate but equal." Then someone had an idea.

First, take an inner-city school.

Add:

* Admission requirements.
* High grades required to stay.
* College-style declared majors.
* Diverse student body.
* Focus on academics and performing arts.
* College-prep curriculum.
* Policy to ship discipline problems back to High School Hell.

Then mix well. Let settle. Result: Damn fine school.

Nevertheless, my parents were leery (I'll bet you can guess why), but I got to go. Miracle of miracles!

Well, Baton Rouge High had -- and still has -- a radio station. A real, honest-to-God, student-operated, over-the-air FM radio station -- WBRH. And thus, the Mighty Favog learned everything he needed to know in high school.

But the college degree was nice nevertheless.

ANYWAY . . . let me tell you about when WBRH introduced Baton Rouge to punk rock in 1977.

I found out about the Sex Pistols on Weekend, the NBC newsmagazine that preempted Saturday Night Live once a month back in the day. In this case, "back in the day" was, I reckon, spring 1977. Anyway, it seemed that the Pistols were about as pissed at the world as my teen-age self, they could rock and -- best of all -- they terrified polite society as much as anything I had seen in my 16 years.

Unfortunately, they had no American releases. And their new British single, "God Save the Queen," had been banned by the BBC. "God save the queen, the fascist regime / They made you a moron, a potential H-bomb . . ." I can't understand why the BBC would do that. The ban had to have just killed the great BBC host John Peel.

I didn't care, I didn't know how, but I had to have the new Sex Pistols 45 (for those of you under 30, that's 45 vinyl record, not .45-caliber handgun). Today, you'd just go online and get it from Amazon.co.uk. Back then . . . no Internet.

For that matter, no PCs, either, unless you had money (lots) and electronics skills (lots).

But I did have an ace in the hole: Aunt Ailsa. The war bride (WWII) from England. Who was going back there on vacation. Who bought me the UK single of "God Save the Queen" (B-side: "Did You No Wrong"), possibly in a "Do you got the stuff?" transaction at some back-alley British record store. At least I'd like to think so.

That fall, I was enrolled in Radio I. I wasn't allowed an air shift yet; back then you first had to get a federal license -- by passing an exam. But I knew bunches of people in Radio II who were on-air. Soon, the Sex Pistols were on the Baton Rouge airwaves, via the 20-watt blowtorch signal at 90.1 FM.

One fall afternoon, I was sitting in with Charles, a junior, during the afternoon rock show. He was skeptical of the Sex Pistols, but played it and asked for listener feedback. What feedback you get from a high-school FM blowtorch (that is, not a bunch) was decidedly mixed.

After a week or so of playing Baton Rouge's one copy of a Sex Pistols record, we did get some strong feedback. It was from the licensee of WBRH, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. And it went something like this: We don't know what the hell that is you've been playing on the radio station, but we want you to cut it out. NOW!

The radio instructor and general manager, John Dobbs, liked his teaching gig. The 45 was confiscated, and the Sex Pistols faced the same fate at WBRH that the lads did at the BBC. Banned.

I did retrieve my record from The Iron Fist of the Oppressor, but only after I agreed never to bring it back. It sits, carefully preserved in its famous picture sleeve, right behind me in a plastic file box, along with all my other 45s from Back in the Day (and a few from Right Now).

Now, Charles was -- is? -- an interesting guy. Think of Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties a good five years before there was a Family Ties. Only African-American . . . or, as was the polite term then, black.

It was probably in the spring of '78 that I was again hanging out with Charles in the WBRH studio, playing the likes of David Gilmour, The Fabulous Poodles, Toto, the Cars, Journey and Queen. Maybe some Commodores -- Brick House, baby! -- and Parliament/Funkadelic.

Well, that day, obviously not enough "Brick House" or "P-Funk."

(Flash. Flash. Flash. Hey, radio-studio phones flash; they don't ring. OK?)

Charles: WBRH!

Caller: Hey, man, why don't you play some n****r music, man! ("N****r" = Not Polite Term for African-American -- then, now or ever.)

Charles: Uhhhhh, excuse me, but I happen to be black.

Caller: Oh, uhhh, oh . . . oh, I'm sorry, man! How about playin' some BLACK music for me, man!

Charles: I'll see what I can do. (Slams phone down.) Redneck son of a bitch!

I don't think the guy got his "n****r music" played, man.

I wonder whatever happened to Charles. Last I heard, he was living with a gal in Vegas. And Charles, a committed Objectivist and atheist, apparently had an almost-brother-in-law who was a Catholic priest.

Always thought I was a smart ass, I did. Seems God has me beat, though.

Now, I think there was a point to this post when I started it. But now it will have to do as a "slice of life" musing.

Maybe it's just like life, particularly the Christian life. The point -- and the fun -- isn't always in where we end up in this world, but rather in how we get there. Heaven, ah reckon, is the only "Don't miss!" destination out there.


P.S.: WBRH and its (relatively) new AM sister station, KBRH (the old 1260 WAIL), really, really need a decent website. And web streams. Then again, the school board really needs to make the women's room in the gym look Not Bombed Out, and to figure out it has a responsibility to buy the school such trivialities as, oh, I don't know . . . DESKS?!? The BRHS Alumni Association website has the damning pictures, as an inducement for alumni to pony up.

I wish it were more of an inducement for alumni to shame the EBR School Board into doing its job and shame Baton Rouge taxpayers into caring about public education.

But that's just me.


This is your brain. This is your brain on sin.


"Again you have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'Do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow.'

But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.

Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black.

Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the evil one."


-- Matthew 5:33-37



If you require proof that not even a hurricane of biblical proportions can provide an "attitude adjustment" for some people, let us coinsider this recent dispatch from the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

BATON ROUGE -- The process House members use to change their votes after a
bill passes or fails is lax and needs to be improved, House Clerk Alfred "Butch"
Speer told a legislative panel Wednesday.

Speer told the House Committee on House and Governmental Affairs, the panel
that oversees the daily mechanics of how the chamber operates, that he or his
staff received requests for "more than 500 vote changes" from House members at
the last legislative session. "That is remarkable," he said.

Speer, the House chief record-keeper and administrative officer, said some of
the requests for vote changes in the recent session were written on "little cube
pieces of paper. . . . It is too easy, in my opinion" to change a
vote.

Speer said one member approached him during this year's session with more
than a dozen recorded votes and asked him to change them to show the lawmaker
had voted for or against bills even though he was absent from the
chamber.

The practice of vote-changing has increased over the years. He said when he
became clerk 24 years ago, allowing a House member to change a vote was a
rarity.

Under existing procedure, a House member must inform Speer of a desire to
change a vote, get routine permission of the House to do it, and the vote is
changed. The Senate does not allow a member to change a vote after a final vote
is taken, but if a senator mistakenly votes a certain way, he or she can submit
a form to Senate officials to include in the official Senate journal attesting
to the error.

In theory, Speer said, a House member can cast a vote on the first day of a
session and ask to have it changed just before adjournment on the last day of
the same session.

Speer recommended that House members who want to change their votes submit a
signed form to him or his staff making the request, a document that would be a
public record. "We would formalize the process a little more this way," he
said.

Ah, but it gets better, my children! Again, from the Times-Picayune:

Rep. M.J. "Mert" Smiley, R-St. Amant, complained that the letters seeking
permission to change a vote could be used against a lawmaker by a campaign
opponent and would make it easier for reporters to follow who changes votes
and on which issues.

Rep. Smiley is either more of an honest man than his policy position -- such as it is -- would indicate, or he is dumb even by Louisiana Legislature standards.

Your benevolent Favog, however, was born and raised in Louisiana. Let me assure you; it's the latter. As we often said in the Gret Stet -- usually just before loading the U-Haul and aiming it toward the state line -- "Oy veh!"

With the accidental release of honesty emissions from Baton Rouge committee chambers nowadays, it is easy to see why the state ethics board put this on the agenda:

G30. Docket No. 06-699
Consideration of a request for an advisory opinion concerning the regulation of web-blogs (sic) and blog sites and the placement of political campaign signs.

What? And not newspapers and TV, too? If Louisiana public servants were as competent as they are venal, we'd have big problems "way down yonder." As in Saddam Bros. on the Bayou. (OK, not all Louisiana pols and bureaucrats are petty, ill-willed or crooked. But enough are, and Louisianians have a long history of not having a problem with that.)

George Bush would be trying to justify an invasion. And he'd probably be right this time.

Listen, Katrina was horrific. So was Hurricane Rita. That the feds can't build a decent levee is worse. (That FEMA is incompetent is par for the course.) And the Mighty Favog understands that it's a bitch being, basically, high-functioning Third World.

But if you're gonna take our tax money to build back what was laid waste, is it really too much to ask that you follow our Constitution? Particularly that whole First Amendment Thang.

Oy veh, indeed. It's true, there is no place like Nebraska . . . .

(Hat tip: The Dead Pelican, Emily Metzgar)

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Welcome to the Revolution


Greetings. The Mighty Favog here. Welcome to Revolution 21.

Let's get something straight right now, O huddled masses: Revolution 21 ain't your grandma's radio podcast. It ain't your typical Catholic radio thing, and it ain't your typical corporate, over-researched, same-boring-playlist rock radio thing, either.

But is it really useful to define Revolution 21 by what it's not? So sorry, my plebes! My bad.

Let's just say -- plainly -- what Revolution 21 is. Revolution 21 is radio that aims to reflect life as it is lived by screwed-up, struggling, inspired-yet-bumbling children of God sorely in need of His grace and forgiveness.

Revolution 21 realizes that Catholics like the Mighty Favog -- your host and the master of dysfunctionality -- live life with one foot in Heaven and the other in the gutter with all the other schmucks called Humanity. We strive for holiness, we occasionally achieve it, and sometimes the best we can muster is Holier Than Thou.

Oh, well. Blame it on Eve and that damned apple.

For his part, the Mighty Favog -- though a great and mighty Favog -- is a Bad Catholic. It is to be hoped, however, that he is capable of decent radio . . . and a stellar podcast.

And he's trying most mightily to become, at the least, a Mediocre Catholic.

So, like us believing schmucks, Revolution 21 is a mixture of the sacred and the secular. The serious and the foolish. Rock . . . and roll. And blues in the night.

But Revolution 21 has a problem with our oversecularized, materialist and ultimately shallow culture. We figure schizo is the only thing you get out of putting faith waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in one corner of your life and "real life" waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in another corner so the two never touch (probably out of fear of some Matter-Antimatter cataclysm).

Or something like that.

Well, Revolution 21 LIKES IT when things get blowed up good. We say put that Faith Thing and that Life Thing in a bag, shake it the hell up and see what happens.

I mean, ain't that a lot more fun than alienation, ennui and life in Schizo City? Or, if not always fun, at least always a lot more interesting and, ultimately, rewarding.

But then again, it's not All About Me -- or All About You -- is it, now?

Enough blather, proclaims the Mighty Favog, your potentate of New Media! Let us now proceed with trashing preconceived notions of radio formatting and stale bourgeois convention.

Let us now do radio like we ought to be living -- faith and life together, recognizing only two kinds of music. That would be Good and Bad.

The bad, we don't mess with.