A Touching Sentimentor You're STILL Wrong,Mykel's November 2022 Blog
by Mykel Board
They
injected a cold germ into people, and found that those who had more
hugs had a better immune response to the cold virus. And then studies
showed that if you get hugged before a stressful condition like
giving a speech or doing math problems, people do better. Performance
is better if you’ve been hugged before the stress. – JONATHAN
JONES (reporting on psychology experiment)
Physical
touching is one of the clearer types of sexual harassment. Many
courts have reasoned that physical touching is more offensive than
verbal harassment. – Kokozian Law Firm
Physical
touch is one of the main ways we express and receive love, and for
millions of people, this is their primary love language. – Pastor
Joe Wittwer
Don’t
touch me, I’m NEW WAVE. – Mykel Board
It’s
a tight squeeze. Post-Covid airlines… overbooked, lines from here
to eternity. I wait on one, my print-out in one hand… my Secure ID®
in
the other. In front of me is a white shirted blue sports jacketed
man… head bent down, thumbing away on his iPhone 14. Behind me is a
somewhat chubby man in his late thirties standing next to a somewhat
chubbier woman around the same age. With them is a boy about 10…
wild… running… chasing his younger sister. The children run very
close to my legs.
“HIYAAAH!”
yells the boy pushing the girl forward. She lands next to my right
leg. Her bright dress, sweeps the floor, picking up the shoe scrapes
of dozens of annoyed travelers.
“Jamie! Stop it!”
yells the man, calling my attention away from the prone girl.
Then
I feel it. A kind of pulling on my leg… first aware of it on my
belt, then the pantleg itself. I look down and see the little girl.
She’s using the cloth of my pants to hoist herself up to standing.
Then comes the voice. This time it’s the woman who speaks.
“Madison!”
she yells, “Never do that. Don’t ever touch a stranger.”
Mom
changes her focus to me.
Bringing
her eyebrows together, she looks like she’s going to cry.
“I’m
so sorry,” she says to me. “This is the first time in an airport
for the children… and the first time since Covid that they’ve
been around other people. They don’t know how to act.”
“No
problem,” I say, reaching down to help the little girl to her feet.
“No!”
shouts the man, sounding panicked, “I’ll help her. Thank you.”
And
he walks over to the little girl, picks her up, and walks her
gingerly to her mother.
When
I was in my 20s I penned the “song”
Ugly People With Fancy Hairdos,
for my first “band,” ART, THE ONLY BAND IN THE WORLD. One of the
lines was
Don’t
touch me, I’m NEW WAVE.
Now,
nearly 50 years later, I’m still fascinated by touching… how it
works in different cultures, and how people are dying from lack of
it.
When
I was a 20-something, I remember seeing a reprint from an information
booklet given by the US military to soldiers shipped to Vietnam. The
book talked about Vietnamese culture and what soldiers had to look
out for.
You’ll
often see Vietnamese men walking on the street holding hands with
other men. This is not a homosexual gesture. It is simply a way for
Vietnamese men to show friendship.
You
get the implication? If it WERE a sign of homotude, then it would be
perfectly logical to take offense… and you’ve got a gun, Buster.
It’s
one of the many things that got me interested in Japan. As a Jew, I
was used to being touched. Jews… and Italians… and even the
French... are all over each other. Hugging, back-slapping, poking in
emphasis…. It wasn’t strange at all that Andrew Cuomo used as his
defense I’m
not a pervert. I’m Italian.
It’s not only family, but strangers, new acquaintances. Sex --the
most involving kind of touching-- comes easier to us than to the
goyim. (I’m NOT including Italians among the goyim.)
OLD
JOKE:
Q. How do you get a Jewish American Princess to stop
fucking you?
A. Marry her.
NOTE:
The Hasidim (the Jews with the curly sideburns), do not like men
touching women who are not their wives. But even among the Hasidim,
same sex people will be touching all the time… and you’ll see men
dancing together, holding hands. Nothing sexual, just the joy of skin.
Not
growing up a Hasid, reading about boy-boy hand-holding in Vietnam was
a shock to me. As a kid, I saw Jewish guys with their arms around
each other… even tweaking a nipple in jockish play.
When
I first go to Japan, I have the feeling that the Japanese never
touched each other. Their greetings are bows, not handshakes. In
public places, it is taboo to touch another person, unless s/he is a
family member. Or so I thought.
Then,
I get drunk.
I’m
in an izakaya… a small Japanese bar, where strangers drink beer and
sake and eat food off of sticks. I’m out with the boss of the local
Toyota office, and several of my students… new employees of the
company.
A
couple beers and a couple more sakes into the night, I feel a hand
rub up my back to my left shoulder… then a squeeze.
“Sensei!”
comes a voice very close to my right ear. “Thank you for working
with us.”
I
look over. It’s the boss… half hugging me… half using my body
as a cane to support his drink-weakened knees. It startles me, but I
like it. I put my arm around his shoulder, lift my glass of sake and
say KAMPAI!
We drink.
Looking
around the room, I see people draped over each other like capes over
the arms of matadors. It’s just sooooo great!
When
I later ask my Japanese friends about it, they tell me about
skinship.
That’s the importance of having physical contact… not necessarily
sexual, but physical… for true friendship. The Urban Dictionary
defines it as: the
act of intimate, non-sexual touching between very close (usually
same-sex, but can include both genders) platonic friends. It involves
acts such as holding hands/arms, hugging, and kissing on the cheeks.
My
impression was just wrong. The Japanese lack of touching is not
because it’s a touchless society, but because it’s a society of
formality. Everything has a politeness level. If I’m speaking with
an important person on business, the word I
is watakshi.
If I’m speaking with someone I don’t know, I
is watashi.
If I’m speaking with casual acquaintances and every day pals, I
becomes boku.
If I’m with my close pals at a bar, I
is ore.
Just like the language shows degrees of formality, touching shows
degrees of formality.
But
wait! In Japan, there’s more. It’s hadaka
no tsukiai, aka
“naked
friendship.”
“Mykel,”
says the boss, “you have to join me in Hakone. Drink sake from a
floating bamboo boat. Stand naked in a hot spring, under the sun or
stars, feel the heat….” I don’t remember the rest... as the
image of being naked with the boss is somewhat unsettling. But it’s
not the first time I would have
uncomfortable nudity.
FLASH
TO FINLAND: 1986. I’m here
studying
the language. I’ve heard it’s the most difficult in the world…
I feel like a boxer… challenging a champ. (Finnish won, by the way.
I just couldn’t get it!) A friend in the town where I’m staying
invites me to visit his family. I walk into his house. He introduces
me to mom, dad, and his sister Enny.
The
house is toasty warm. My friend takes me into what looks like a small
bedroom. “You can leave your clothes here,” he says, taking off
his own clothes. Hmmm, this is a benefit I didn’t expect. But wait…
it’s not for wild sex. It’s for a sauna.
It’s
then that I find out that every Finnish family has a sauna. (Sauna
is, in fact, a Finnish word borrowed into English.) So you visit your
friend at home, take off your clothes, then sit naked in the sauna
with your friend, his siblings and his parents. It’s just like
shaking hands. Sitting there, I pretend it’s the most natural thing
in the world. Now I realize, it is.
FLASH
BACK TO JAPAN: Yes! Being naked together is the way to create deep
friendships. Touching… skinship…
is on the path to nakedness. Jeez, do I love Japan.
And
now I find that America is becoming what I THOUGHT
Japan was. The governor of New York is pushed out of office with
charges of forcible
touching.
Actor Kevin Spacey is charged… almost 40 years after the fact, with
touching
in a simulated sex-act.
Touching,
even in playfulness, is taboo enough to go to court.
What
touching do we have left? We used to have a slight sliver of touching
in the custom of handshaking… skinship in its meekest form. But
even that is in trouble in 2022.
One
of the great tragedies of COVID is the elbow bump greeting. Until
the plague, the only time strangers touch skin-to-skin in America is shaking hands… a very brief, but real, skin contact. To lose
that is to lose our humanity.
And
it’s not only touching, but humanity itself... physical presence…
that’s in danger. How can you NOT lose your humanity if your view
of humanity is through a cellphone screen. How can you care about
what you do in war… or in peace... if you’re just a drone away
from murder.
Joe
Biden sends non-humans to murder in the middle of civilian
populations. First a car filled with AID workers.
“Oh,
sorry about that one. We’ll try again.”
Then
a top leader of some rebel army group we don’t like. BINGO… we
got him. But let the Russians drone Ukrainians… How could they do
such a thing?
I’ll
tell you how. THEY isn’t people. Only the receivers of the souless
strikes are real people. Drones are machines… like computers or
cellphones. They can never experiences skinship.
When
the Japanese attacked American warships in
WWII,
it was PEOPLE who were fighting people. The
Wind of God (Kamikaze)
was a human being in an airplane... making a commitment... keenly
aware of what he, personally, was doing to “the enemy.” Me (us)
and them.
Today’s
war only has THEM.
The
world needs more nudity. More awareness that other people have
bodies… flesh… real skin. Humanity needs more touching, more
skinship. The way things are going, we’ll all become the drones.
See
you in hell.
Mykel
Board
ENDNOTES:
[You can contact me on facebook
or
by email at mykelboard@gmail.com.
Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music
or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137,
New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified
when anything new is available. Send
me an email with
SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at
https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
→
A
touching video dept:
The web reports
–with horror– Another video of Joe Biden touching a girl has
surfaced. The website says that Biden “has made a habit throughout
his political career of placing his hands on women.” I know. He is
NOT Italian… but still, come on! “Placing
your hands on” some is NOT a bad thing. In fact, until recently,
Christians thought of it as a kind of healing.
→Speaking
of Sex Dept: A
study
in
Indonesia found that Criminalizing
sex work in low-income settings like Indonesia decreases earnings of
the female sex workers and increases the prevalence of STI
infections.
The results should have been obvious before the study even
started. The anti sex work “feminists” actually hurt women and
other sex workers. You wanna talk human
trafficking?
Take a look at the farms, not the brothels.
→Speaking
of Drones Dept:
Mark Hamill, the original Luke Skywalker, has let the WARS part of
STAR WARS go to his head. He’s now pushing
for
Drones for Ukraine.
Says
Hamill, “Very simply, Ukraine needs drones. They define war
outcomes, they protect their land, their people, they monitor the
border, they’re eyes in the sky. I was really shocked because they
give me these updates at least two or three times a week about what’s
going on and they said they’ve received over 500 drones since I
started this.”
Now
there’s something to be proud of, right?
See
you in hell, redux,
MB
THE
NATION AGAIN
I’m
a long-time subscriber to the The
Nation.
It’s the only lefty publication that I find myself not only
agreeing with, but also getting inspiration from. Strangely,
when I post this stuff on facebook, no one looks at it. My “friends”
would just rather call me a “Trumpist” or a “Republican” for
all the times I don’t follow the party line. If it’s printed in
THE NATION, it should give me street cred, right? Yeah right.
One
article
is
about the return of polio. My friends tell me that it’s the
“anti-mask right” who make arguments about the dearth of natural
immunity. Liberals
know that masks
and isolation are really
good for people. This from the
article
I
just linked to.
It
was modernity that gave the polio virus a chance. As hygiene
improved, collective immunity faltered.
Another
article
talks
about big tech evils and how
tracking algorithms aid
anti-abortion efforts. My liberal friends, however, would rather have big
tech censor people they don’t like, than protect people they do
like.
LINK
TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I
read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice
to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook
me or email
me
if
you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you.
You add me.
Here's
a start:
Sid Yiddish! There’s
a great interview with him on YouTube. You can check it out here.
Here’s
Richard Goldberg:
goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry
and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The
Latency
And
my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He
cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's
Recipes.
And
here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour
diary of
sorts.
Andy
Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage
Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing
for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains
that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris
Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS.
You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue
soon.
George
Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books
featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it
temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And
my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas
Master Blog.
And
connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL
PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Here
are a couple video links.
This
from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And
this
one from
my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.
Jim
Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere
awhile back. You can read it here.
Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t
see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera.
You can stream the album here.
Kyle
Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped
by the secret police… I think. I post his
blog
for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise
metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or
repulse you… or both.
My
long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out
his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here
it is.
Oh
yeah, then there’s me.
I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You
might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let
me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and
want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already
seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
They injected a cold germ into people, and found that those who had more hugs had a better immune response to the cold virus. And then studies showed that if you get hugged before a stressful condition like giving a speech or doing math problems, people do better. Performance is better if you’ve been hugged before the stress. – JONATHAN JONES (reporting on psychology experiment)
Physical touching is one of the clearer types of sexual harassment. Many courts have reasoned that physical touching is more offensive than verbal harassment. – Kokozian Law Firm
Physical touch is one of the main ways we express and receive love, and for millions of people, this is their primary love language. – Pastor Joe Wittwer
Don’t touch me, I’m NEW WAVE. – Mykel Board
It’s a tight squeeze. Post-Covid airlines… overbooked, lines from here to eternity. I wait on one, my print-out in one hand… my Secure ID® in the other. In front of me is a white shirted blue sports jacketed man… head bent down, thumbing away on his iPhone 14. Behind me is a somewhat chubby man in his late thirties standing next to a somewhat chubbier woman around the same age. With them is a boy about 10… wild… running… chasing his younger sister. The children run very close to my legs.
“HIYAAAH!” yells the boy pushing the girl forward. She lands next to my right leg. Her bright dress, sweeps the floor, picking up the shoe scrapes of dozens of annoyed travelers.
“Jamie! Stop it!” yells the man, calling my attention away from the prone girl.
Then I feel it. A kind of pulling on my leg… first aware of it on my belt, then the pantleg itself. I look down and see the little girl. She’s using the cloth of my pants to hoist herself up to standing. Then comes the voice. This time it’s the woman who speaks.
“Madison!” she yells, “Never do that. Don’t ever touch a stranger.”
Mom changes her focus to me.
Bringing her eyebrows together, she looks like she’s going to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she says to me. “This is the first time in an airport for the children… and the first time since Covid that they’ve been around other people. They don’t know how to act.”
“No problem,” I say, reaching down to help the little girl to her feet.
“No!” shouts the man, sounding panicked, “I’ll help her. Thank you.”
And he walks over to the little girl, picks her up, and walks her gingerly to her mother.
When I was in my 20s I penned the “song” Ugly People With Fancy Hairdos, for my first “band,” ART, THE ONLY BAND IN THE WORLD. One of the lines was
Don’t touch me, I’m NEW WAVE.
Now, nearly 50 years later, I’m still fascinated by touching… how it works in different cultures, and how people are dying from lack of it.
When I was a 20-something, I remember seeing a reprint from an information booklet given by the US military to soldiers shipped to Vietnam. The book talked about Vietnamese culture and what soldiers had to look out for.
You’ll often see Vietnamese men walking on the street holding hands with other men. This is not a homosexual gesture. It is simply a way for Vietnamese men to show friendship.
You get the implication? If it WERE a sign of homotude, then it would be perfectly logical to take offense… and you’ve got a gun, Buster.
It’s one of the many things that got me interested in Japan. As a Jew, I was used to being touched. Jews… and Italians… and even the French... are all over each other. Hugging, back-slapping, poking in emphasis…. It wasn’t strange at all that Andrew Cuomo used as his defense I’m not a pervert. I’m Italian. It’s not only family, but strangers, new acquaintances. Sex --the most involving kind of touching-- comes easier to us than to the goyim. (I’m NOT including Italians among the goyim.)
OLD JOKE:
Q. How do you get a Jewish American Princess to stop
fucking you?
A. Marry her.
NOTE: The Hasidim (the Jews with the curly sideburns), do not like men touching women who are not their wives. But even among the Hasidim, same sex people will be touching all the time… and you’ll see men dancing together, holding hands. Nothing sexual, just the joy of skin.
Not growing up a Hasid, reading about boy-boy hand-holding in Vietnam was a shock to me. As a kid, I saw Jewish guys with their arms around each other… even tweaking a nipple in jockish play.
When I first go to Japan, I have the feeling that the Japanese never touched each other. Their greetings are bows, not handshakes. In public places, it is taboo to touch another person, unless s/he is a family member. Or so I thought.
Then, I get drunk.
I’m in an izakaya… a small Japanese bar, where strangers drink beer and sake and eat food off of sticks. I’m out with the boss of the local Toyota office, and several of my students… new employees of the company.
A couple beers and a couple more sakes into the night, I feel a hand rub up my back to my left shoulder… then a squeeze.
“Sensei!” comes a voice very close to my right ear. “Thank you for working with us.”
I look over. It’s the boss… half hugging me… half using my body as a cane to support his drink-weakened knees. It startles me, but I like it. I put my arm around his shoulder, lift my glass of sake and say KAMPAI! We drink.
Looking around the room, I see people draped over each other like capes over the arms of matadors. It’s just sooooo great!
When I later ask my Japanese friends about it, they tell me about skinship. That’s the importance of having physical contact… not necessarily sexual, but physical… for true friendship. The Urban Dictionary defines it as: the act of intimate, non-sexual touching between very close (usually same-sex, but can include both genders) platonic friends. It involves acts such as holding hands/arms, hugging, and kissing on the cheeks.
My impression was just wrong. The Japanese lack of touching is not because it’s a touchless society, but because it’s a society of formality. Everything has a politeness level. If I’m speaking with an important person on business, the word I is watakshi. If I’m speaking with someone I don’t know, I is watashi. If I’m speaking with casual acquaintances and every day pals, I becomes boku. If I’m with my close pals at a bar, I is ore. Just like the language shows degrees of formality, touching shows degrees of formality.
But wait! In Japan, there’s more. It’s hadaka no tsukiai, aka “naked friendship.”
“Mykel,” says the boss, “you have to join me in Hakone. Drink sake from a floating bamboo boat. Stand naked in a hot spring, under the sun or stars, feel the heat….” I don’t remember the rest... as the image of being naked with the boss is somewhat unsettling. But it’s not the first time I would have uncomfortable nudity.
FLASH TO FINLAND: 1986. I’m here studying the language. I’ve heard it’s the most difficult in the world… I feel like a boxer… challenging a champ. (Finnish won, by the way. I just couldn’t get it!) A friend in the town where I’m staying invites me to visit his family. I walk into his house. He introduces me to mom, dad, and his sister Enny.
The house is toasty warm. My friend takes me into what looks like a small bedroom. “You can leave your clothes here,” he says, taking off his own clothes. Hmmm, this is a benefit I didn’t expect. But wait… it’s not for wild sex. It’s for a sauna.
It’s then that I find out that every Finnish family has a sauna. (Sauna is, in fact, a Finnish word borrowed into English.) So you visit your friend at home, take off your clothes, then sit naked in the sauna with your friend, his siblings and his parents. It’s just like shaking hands. Sitting there, I pretend it’s the most natural thing in the world. Now I realize, it is.
FLASH BACK TO JAPAN: Yes! Being naked together is the way to create deep friendships. Touching… skinship… is on the path to nakedness. Jeez, do I love Japan.
And now I find that America is becoming what I THOUGHT Japan was. The governor of New York is pushed out of office with charges of forcible touching. Actor Kevin Spacey is charged… almost 40 years after the fact, with touching in a simulated sex-act.
Touching, even in playfulness, is taboo enough to go to court.
What touching do we have left? We used to have a slight sliver of touching in the custom of handshaking… skinship in its meekest form. But even that is in trouble in 2022.
One of the great tragedies of COVID is the elbow bump greeting. Until the plague, the only time strangers touch skin-to-skin in America is shaking hands… a very brief, but real, skin contact. To lose that is to lose our humanity.
And it’s not only touching, but humanity itself... physical presence… that’s in danger. How can you NOT lose your humanity if your view of humanity is through a cellphone screen. How can you care about what you do in war… or in peace... if you’re just a drone away from murder.
Joe Biden sends non-humans to murder in the middle of civilian populations. First a car filled with AID workers.
“Oh, sorry about that one. We’ll try again.”
Then a top leader of some rebel army group we don’t like. BINGO… we got him. But let the Russians drone Ukrainians… How could they do such a thing?
I’ll tell you how. THEY isn’t people. Only the receivers of the souless strikes are real people. Drones are machines… like computers or cellphones. They can never experiences skinship.
When the Japanese attacked American warships in WWII, it was PEOPLE who were fighting people. The Wind of God (Kamikaze) was a human being in an airplane... making a commitment... keenly aware of what he, personally, was doing to “the enemy.” Me (us) and them.
Today’s war only has THEM.
The world needs more nudity. More awareness that other people have bodies… flesh… real skin. Humanity needs more touching, more skinship. The way things are going, we’ll all become the drones.
See you in hell.
Mykel Board
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
→ A touching video dept: The web reports –with horror– Another video of Joe Biden touching a girl has surfaced. The website says that Biden “has made a habit throughout his political career of placing his hands on women.” I know. He is NOT Italian… but still, come on! “Placing your hands on” some is NOT a bad thing. In fact, until recently, Christians thought of it as a kind of healing.
→Speaking
of Sex Dept: A
study
in
Indonesia found that Criminalizing
sex work in low-income settings like Indonesia decreases earnings of
the female sex workers and increases the prevalence of STI
infections.
The results should have been obvious before the study even
started. The anti sex work “feminists” actually hurt women and
other sex workers. You wanna talk human
trafficking?
Take a look at the farms, not the brothels.
→Speaking
of Drones Dept:
Mark Hamill, the original Luke Skywalker, has let the WARS part of
STAR WARS go to his head. He’s now pushing
for
Drones for Ukraine.
Says
Hamill, “Very simply, Ukraine needs drones. They define war
outcomes, they protect their land, their people, they monitor the
border, they’re eyes in the sky. I was really shocked because they
give me these updates at least two or three times a week about what’s
going on and they said they’ve received over 500 drones since I
started this.”
Now
there’s something to be proud of, right?
See you in hell, redux,
MB
THE
NATION AGAIN
I’m
a long-time subscriber to the The
Nation.
It’s the only lefty publication that I find myself not only
agreeing with, but also getting inspiration from. Strangely,
when I post this stuff on facebook, no one looks at it. My “friends”
would just rather call me a “Trumpist” or a “Republican” for
all the times I don’t follow the party line. If it’s printed in
THE NATION, it should give me street cred, right? Yeah right.
One
article
is
about the return of polio. My friends tell me that it’s the
“anti-mask right” who make arguments about the dearth of natural
immunity. Liberals
know that masks
and isolation are really
good for people. This from the
article
I
just linked to.
It
was modernity that gave the polio virus a chance. As hygiene
improved, collective immunity faltered.
Another article talks about big tech evils and how tracking algorithms aid anti-abortion efforts. My liberal friends, however, would rather have big tech censor people they don’t like, than protect people they do like.
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
Sid Yiddish! There’s a great interview with him on YouTube. You can check it out here.
Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.
And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Here
are a couple video links.
This
from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.
Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.
Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.
My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
