The way she wanted it: Amy Winehouse, 14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011

I've been saying pretty regularly for years now that I hate music, and have since Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. More specifically, I hate what the music industry has done to music, which is essentially kill it. In the last twenty years, there's been about as much joy in music as there is in a Big Mac, which is plenty if you're morbidly obese and satisfied with whatever some inhuman conglomerate is willing to feed you.

Back in the '50s and 60's, there were hundreds of small labels that would discover and develop incredible artists whose work will outlive all of us. By the time Nirvana was signed there were six. Now there are basically two, both of whom are owned by multinational corporations whose primary business isn't music.

The guys who sell you music - which is supposed to feed your fucking soul - would be just as happy selling shoes or cheeseburgers. And you know what? The music reflects that. The days of a Ahmet Ertegun or Jerry Wexler bringing you Ray Charles are well and truly over. There isn't going to be a next Sam Philips. Ever. And that means that there's never going to be an Elvis or Roy Orbison or Johnny Cash, ever again. You'll get whatever some goddamn aspiring hedge fund manager gives you and he'll expect you to fucking well thank him for it.

But accidents do sometimes happen, which is where Amy Winehouse enters our little narrative. She was possessed of a fantastic voice, an uncanny sense of music history and the good sense to market something that should be unsellable in these most dastardly of modern musical times.

That made her brilliant, and it tells me that if some corporate A&R hack wasn't asleep at the switch or drunk to the point of derangement, she never should've been signed in the first place. If her signing was intentional, it was because the hacks figured that they had the next Celine Dion or Whitney Houston - girls who sell zillions of records to people who don't buy that many records.

Yet something incredible happened. Amy Winehouse was allowed to make records that Amy Winehouse wanted to make. And her sensibility made them unreally good records. I paid attention to Frank and Back to Black, which is a pretty impressive achievement, given my general disgust with anything with a beat these days. Amy was the industry's happiest accident in at least two decades. But make no mistake, it was an accident.

The only complicating factor is that she didn't enjoy living very much. I never got a sense that she felt the joy from her unmistakable gifts that everybody else did. It's been pretty clear for three years now that there would never be a fantastic follow up to Back to Black, if there was going to be a follow-up at all. Who knows that she even could recreate that magic? Micheal Jackson spent thirty years trying and couldn't pull it off.

After her disastrous gig in Belgrade last month, I listened to Kevin Smith spend nearly an hour on a podcast go on about how she never should've been allowed on stage. I think that he missed the point. If her people wouldn't put her out there, there's every reason that she'd fire them and find someone that would. The funny thing about delusionally suicidal addicts is that they're delusionally suicidal addicts and not all that prone to reason.

And no, drugs aren't likely what killed Amy Winehouse today. From what I understand, she was rather fond of opiates, which in and of themselves, aren't especially bad for you. The lifestyle doesn't do you any favors, and the illegality of it causes all manner of overdoses and toxic poisoning, but the drug itself is among the most physiologically harmless that you can take. Heroin, in controlled settings, is much better for you than cocaine, alcohol or tobacco could ever be.

This was a girl that lusted after her own demise. There's absolutely no indication that she was one of those moronic "life is for the living types."

After all is said and done, the signs were all there for Amy. And I have to assume that she was bright enough to recognize them. When no less an authority on the matter than Keith Richards calls you out and you don't listen, you just have to assume the presence of a death wish.

That little girl has been playing chicken with death for years now. And today, she won.

Amy Winehouse was, in the perfect rock star cliche, 27 years old. I hope that this she finally finds peace.

"Cars are crashing every night - I drink and drive, everything's in sight"

Yeah, I know. I haven't been writing very much. The fact is that I've been a pretty busy boy of late and I'm bored to fucking death of pretty much everything. You can deal or, y'know, not.

One thing that I have been doing is reviewing comments as they come in, and that remains as educational as always. Sometimes I tend to forget that a great percentage of the population is so goddamned stupid that they face every day with the imminent danger of forgetting to breathe.

I have no idea why, but one of my most popular posts - according to no fewer than three different referrers - is something I threw out there almost exactly a year ago about Motley Crue vocalist Vince Neil's most recent drunk driving arrest.

The post was called "Nikki Sixx is an understanding fellow."I'm not sure why so many folks continue to read it because it isn't blindingly original or particularly well written. And while Vince has a bigger set of tits than most of the starlets and porno whores that I so lovingly chronicle here, they're the result of excess, laziness and stupidity, unlike Lindsay Lohan's. I'm just left to suppose that a good number of blog readers are starfuckers of has-beens, and they'll blow Vince Neil because they can't distinguish the singer of REO Speedwagon from his roadies.

Remember, last year's adventure in Vegas wasn't the former Mr. Wharton's first trip to the DUI rodeo. He actually got hammered behind the wheel and killed the drummer of Hanoi Rocks back in December of 1984. The two people in the car ol' Vince's Pantera plowed into were grievously and permanently injured. For this, he was sentenced to less than month in the county jail, where he got blowjobs from groupies that the Sheriff's Department let into his cell.

Vince Neil killed his friend and crippled two innocent strangers simply because he's an irredeemable fuck-up. And he paid virtually no price for it, other a $2.5 million dollar settlement and a couple of weeks of getting head behind bars. He's still able to freely travel the world, too. I'm not aware of a single country that has barred his entry due to his criminal record. Trust me, you would have an ... interesting experience trying to enter, say, Japan after having killed someone.

So Vince, being Vince, goes on to buy a fucking bar, gets wasted in it, and drives drunk again. That caught my attention, just as I would hope that it catches yours. This guy is a potential slow-motion serial killer.

Given that background - the facts of which are uncontested - I'm nothing less than stunned that I get comments like the one I got this past Monday.

I think you should go fuck yourself, and keep your damn thoughts to yourself. Everyone should, its not like they don't know what you fucking said already. It's not like Neil actually tried to kill the fucking guy. Like common, it was 25 years ago, and you know what shit happens. Find something better to write about, what if it happened to you, and honestly calling the guy pathetic is just un called for. I think your the pathetic one, you could have said this in a much nicer way.

Wow. I would have a hard time believing that you're not as mystified by that comment as I was.

Lookee, I've spent the last sixteen years listening to the world freak the fuck over O.J Simpson, Casey Anthony or both. But both Simpson and Anthony spent years in the hoosegow just awaiting trial, whereas Vince Neil did less than a month after being convicted of actually killing someone and wrecking the bodies of two other people. And then he put himself in the position where he could do it again.

Saying that "It's not like Neil actually tried to kill the fucking guy" only goes to prove that my anonymous friend is either genetically dishonest or a pituitary retard. If a vehicular homicide - what Neil was actually charged with - is intentional, it ceases to be vehicular homicide. Then it's murder. The law actually does make distinctions about these things, you know.

And the fact that it was 25 years ago is meaningless. I trust that my anonymous buddy wouldn't feel the need to excuse O.J if he married another uppity blond or Casey Anthony announced her intention to breed again. Or if Germany started lusting for Polish real-estate again. Of course, I don't know that. It's just a gut instinct of mine. It might well be that my commenter is an utter sociopath. Who can say?

I have an enviable library of rock n' roll fuck-uppery on my bookshelves, and I cherish it the way that most folks cherish their useless fucking children. I love stories of idiot savants destroying everything in their paths, up to and including themselves. If I were to guess, I'd say that I've read hundreds of such books.

However, Vince Neil is in a category all by himself. Most rock assholes only ever really hurt themselves. And they tend to do it in the most entertaining ways. In only the rarest of circumstances does anyone get seriously hurt or dead. Fat, untalented Vince killed one guy and crippled two others when he was 23 years old and could very well have done it again when he was 49.

If my new best friend feels it necessary to excuse that, I hope to God that no one he ever cares about is snuffed by a recidivist drunk driver. Because if the skell happens to belt out an especially jaunty version of "Too Young to Fall in Love", our pal might have to decide that the lives of his loved ones just weren't worth that much after all.

And, yes, I suppose that there's a "nicer way" for me to have said that, but fuck you. I find myself growing less tolerant of starfucking stupidity as I get older.

Lessons Casey Anthony taught me. Okay, not really

You know, I really didn't expect to learn anything from the Casey Anthony trial except that I really want to fuck her, which I had already learned three years ago. I'll let you in on a deeply held personal secret: I sort of have a thing for slutty, cute girls with big tits. It's shocking, I know.

It doesn't matter to me if the slutty, cute girl with big tits has kids - as two of my slutty, cute exes with big tits did - and it doesn't matter all that much if they decide that they have to murder said kids. It's usually the other crazy shit they do that has me heading for the hills.

And yes, I did just say that I don't care if women murder their kids, so long as the mothers in question are cute and have big tits. You might think that's a horribly depraved and selfish attitude, but I prefer to think that it shows that I have my priorities together. By the way, fuck you.

Anyhow, I figured that the Casey Anthony case might be the least educational experience of my lifetime, but it turned out that I was wrong.

I got home from work last night to find everybody on the Internet - especially Facebook and Twitter - going apeshit with outrage. And I learned a lot from that. Specifically, I learned that everybody's stupid. More importantly, I learned that the more American you are, the stupider you're likely to be.

Most folks are of the opinion that Casey Anthony got away with murder because she's a slutty, cute girl with big tits. I'd respond to them by asking if they think they ever would have heard about this case if she wasn't a slutty, cute girl with big tits. And a dead white baby. Does anyone seriously think that CNN and Fox News would give this story balls-out coverage for three fucking years if Casey Anthony looked like, say, the broad in Precious?

If you answer in the affirmative, I would suggest that you know even less about yourself than you do about the Goddamned Liberal Media. If it were up to me, Congress would currently debating a bill to legally prohibit you from having an opinion at all.  If Casey looked like Precious, this would not only be a two-day story, it would be a two-day local story.

Lookee, I don't even blame the Goddamned Liberal Media all that much. They know their business, and their business just happens to be knowing how sleazy and debauched you are. As it happens, you're plenty sleazy and debauched, as evidenced by the fact that the Casey Anthony story ran for three fucking years to enormous ratings. And you know what? There are going to be at least two TV movies about it before this mess is done.

Do you assholes really think that news outlets aren't spending a giant pile of money on market research? When you think about it, it's as easy as checking their fucking ratings for a five minute block. They know as a matter of absolute mathematical certainty that you live for bodacious whores with dead white babies, and flip the channel to Jerry Springer when they broadcast something about the deficit. That's not a goddamned crazy theory of mine, that's a fucking fact.

If there's one thing that binds North Americans, along with most Europeans and Australians together racially, it's that we love loose-cunted Caucasian infanticide almost as much as we love our own stupid fucking outrage over same. If Ms. Anthony were convicted, the story would have been the joyous dancing in the streets, but the narrative would have been pretty much the same.

Here's another really interesting, if really overlooked way of looking at these stories. When you get played by the media in a criminal trial, you're really getting played by the government. Do you really think that all the tawdry details that wind up on the news before trial are being leaked to the press by the fucking defense? If you do, start asking yourself how favorably those details usually reflect on the defendant. Then punch yourself in the side of the skull because you're a moron. And for Christ's sakes, DON'T BREED!

If you want to see some hardcore institutional sleaziness, look at the twisted relationships between prosecutors and the press. Defense lawyers come and go, but prosecutors are usually elected in the United States and media companies need ratings and readership to make a living. How much access do you suppose a paper's political team would get to a prosecutor's campaign if their crime team is skull-fucking that prosecutor during a criminal trial?

I went to bed listening to everyone screeching about how the system is fucked because everyday duplicitous and craven tactics in the media-justice system failed yesterday, as opposed to 98% of the time that they usually work. And I woke up to more of the fucking same.

Then I noticed how much of the professional outrage is coming from the "Give us constitutional government and ignore the lamestream media" crowd. That's when I realized that pretty much everybody but me is an asshole.

The only reason that I know anything at all about the Casey Anthony trial is that I want to fuck Casey Anthony. The only difference between you and me is that I'm willing to admit it. Then ask yourself which of us is really more selfish and depraved.

In related news: Rush Limbaugh continues to be 312 pounds of stoned, cynical stupidity in a 9 pound bag.

I'd buy that for a dollar! More likely, though, I'd download the BitTorrent.

Marcia Who?

Michael Ignatieff's self-pity party

You know, after the final humiliation of Michael Ignatieff on May 2, I thought that I would never have to write about him again. And you know what? I was pretty goddamned pleased at the prospect of it.

Unlike most folks, I don't blame Iggy for the final ruination of the Liberal Party of Canada. They were singing the Song of the Doomed well before he came along. You need always remember that the Grits were only ever a cohesive political unit because they loved winning elections more than they hated each other. But that started to change about 35 years ago. Even if Christ himself was the Liberal leader in May, eight out ten Canadians would still be practicing Satanists today.

The leadership wars that started in 1975 never really stopped. Sure, the party benefited enormously from the fracture of the Mulroney coalition, but in their almost operatic hubris, they overlooked the fact that it was the only thing that kept them alive. Chretien, almost by accident, prospered but the cancer that finally felled his party began to  metastasize a generation earlier. The Götterdämmerung of the Liberal Party was actually authored by Pierre Trudeau and John Turner. It accelerated downward under the momentous political incompetence of Ignatieff and Stephane Dion but I have serious doubts that anyone could have halted it.

Actually that's not true. Stephen Harper could have. If you look at the electoral history of this country over the last sixty years, you very quickly come to realize that Liberals didn't win federal elections as much as Conservatives had fucked up so horribly that voters had no other choice but to pick Ignatieff;'s much-ballyhooed "Red Door." When Conservatives have had a clean shot, with a united party and competent leader, they've taken it each and every time. And then they made a mess of everything.

But the Right Honourable Mr. Harper isn't the kind of cat that just throws power away, like, say, John Diefenbaker was. No, Harper is a cross between Dick Cheney and some of the higher life forms from the reptile kingdom. Regardless of how little warm blood seems to flow through their any of their veins; Harper, Cheney and lizards never seem to die. All three enjoy the closest thing that you'll ever recognize as eternal life outside of a fucking horror movie.

A combination of the Sponsorship Scandal, savage infighting and general incompetence made the Grits radioactive to the overwhelming majority of Canadian voters to the point that they'd probably lose a federal election to NAMBLA. And it might have been the most joyous thing I've ever witnessed. I'm not going to lie to you about that. I've actually been dreaming about it since childhood and now everyday really is Christmas, despite how shitty every other facet of my life is.

But very little of it was actually Ignatieff's fault. If he was a brave, smart or decent man, he'd go back to Harvard with his head held high, secure in the knowledge that he did the best he could with what he was given to work with. In fact, he turned out to be much better on the stump than anyone could have imagined.

Sadly, he insists on continuing to be Michael Ignatieff, whose tenure as leader can be defined as whatever the opposite of brave, smart and decent is. So he's re-litigating the attacks against him in the hallowed pages of The Globe and Mail, CSI style. The only problem with that is that all the victims on CSI are fucking dead.

According to a report from the Asia Pacific Foundation, Canada has become a nation of expatriates. Nearly three million Canadians – 9 per cent of our population – live and work overseas.

Most of these expatriates are in the United States, but you can find Canadians everywhere: on oil rigs offshore in Ghana, in NGOs in African villages, hunkered down at United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and in brokerage houses in Frankfurt, London and Beijing. Increasing numbers of our expatriates were born outside Canada, came to this country and now have moved on, taking their citizenship with them.

Canadians who stay at home are having trouble figuring out whether these expatriates qualify as “real” Canadians or just as “Canadians of convenience.” Should they be able to vote in our elections? Shouldn’t we make them pay taxes? And if they come back, do we welcome them home or wish they went back where we think “they belong”?

You know what? I follow politics and culture pretty closely, and I've never heard anyone ever bothering to figure out these things, let alone have trouble doing so. Not once.

I was away a long time in Britain and the States, it’s true, but I kept coming back, writing for Canadian newspapers, broadcasting on the CBC, summers teaching at Banff, lectures everywhere, writing several books on Canadian themes. I kept my Canadian identity up to date, just as I kept renewing my passport.

It was when I decided to go into politics that coming home turned into a war. All politics is local, and the question then became, “Are you one of us?” I spent five years fighting to prove I belonged, while my opponents stopped at nothing to prove I didn’t. Just in it for myself. Just visiting. Not here for you.

There was a weird insinuation: Why would anyone come home, unless you were in it just for your self?

That is such an adorable interpretation of what happened that I wish that I currently had a woman in my life that could crochet it onto a throw pillow for me. It's just so ... precious!

As ugly and mean as the "Just Visiting" ads were (which I say because there was hardly a shortage of other, issues-based fronts to attack Iggy on), they were effective because they established a narrative. And that narrative wasn't "expatriates are bad or somehow foreign", although Michael Ignatieff did self-identify as both British and American when he was in those countries, and he did so on television, which is known to be videotaped from time to time.

Ignatieff's communications team did try to spin it that way, comparing him to, among others, Neil Young and Jim Carrey, both of whom had found fame and fortune abroad. But all they managed to prove was that Ignatieff had the worst communications staff in the history of politics. When he finally got around to firing them in the fall of 2009, he was seen as weak for not actually having them murdered, and all he got for his trouble was a ramping up of the Liberal civil wars.

Neil Young left Canada in 1966 - and actually became the world's first undocumented rock star, not having a passport until after his first solo album came out - but he pointedly did not come back in 2005 with the idea in his head that we should turn the keys to the country over to him. And that's pretty much what happened in Ignatieff's case.

The loser trioka that came a-calling to Harvard to entice young Iggy away did so because they sensed that Paul Martin's leadership was on its last legs. That turned out to be the last correct political calculation they ever made. Once he had visions of being the next Trudeau placed in his head, Ignatieff cut the legs out from under a sitting Liberal MP in Etobicoke-Lakeshore and, within a mere year of his coming home, declared for the Liberal leadership. It should be noted that in the 140 some-odd years prior to 2005, only one Liberal leader had failed to become prime minister of Canada.

Just Visiting wasn't about xenophobia, it was about opportunism.That's why it was so effective, irrespective of how low-brow and silly it was. But it was an inescapable conclusion, and I think that Iggy knows it. Never once does he mention the political opportunism, real or perceived, that was the driving factor in the effectiveness of those ads. In ignoring that, he seems to think that anyone who would believe it is just stupid, or even bigoted. And I have yet to see anyone redeem themselves in they eyes of those that have repudiated them by calling them stupid or bigoted.

Worse, he's trying to do so based on the talking points of a communications team that so poorly served him that they were were all fired nearly two years ago.

It's almost as if he wants to be the University of Toronto professor that hopes his students forget their own immediate history. Let a thousand flowers bloom, indeed.