Monday, July 20, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
What's in the Kitchen?
Welcome to Sound Kitchen. This is one of what will hopefully be a series of personal attempts (by myself and others) to voice our opinions on various topics that we deem important. While we do respect the views of others (even if those others do not respect our views or our souls) and welcome open debate, we are aligned more or less with the conservatives and the libertarians in this country as well as in other countries, though they may go under different titles. I have said this to many friends of mine before and I will make it very clear to those of you in the blogosphere: I have never been more politically active as I am now. For most of my adolescent and now adult life the only things I deemed necessary to further investigate were music and food. My deep connection to the music scenes of the cities of Houston, Austin, and Waco as well as writing, recording, and touring with bands kept most of my conscious brain occupied. My personal conquest over an otherwise "incurable" ailment through healthy living occupied the rest of it.But starting around 2004, during the Presidential elections, I had become friends with another contributor to this page. Through many open conversations that often turned into debates, I discovered that many of my views on certain political, economic, social, and religious issues were either ignorant, incorrect, or simply regurgitated talking points I had heard in the coffee houses around my university campus. Among these topics we discussed included gun control, Israeli/Palestine relations, global warming, social justice, counterfeit gospels, big oil, ethnomusicology, and many more. Through these late night discussions, aided with a good stiff drink and a fine cigar, we hashed through the dozens of issues that we believed were screwing up our otherwise successful experiment in democracy. However it wasn't until the 2008 Presidential elections and the impending economic recession that I had reached the limit of my inactive political life. During this past year, I watched as former President Bush foolishly attempted to stimulate our failing economy with a needless injection of soon to be worthless paper. To add insult to injury, our current President Obama followed suit with his own custom tailored masterpiece; the absence of any tangible positive results came as no surprise. During the debates between John McCain and Barack Obama I became increasingly aware and even more increasingly bored with the non-debating that was dominating the "debates". While each candidate was given ample time to cross examine the other, they simply filled up their time slots with rhetoric and political jargon, hardly befitting what could have potentially been an exciting television event.What was even more upsetting was the mainstream media's lop sided coverage and vicious attacks during the campaigns. If there was ever a time when the social elite in this country showed their true colors, it was then, and it continues on to this day though their candidate won. The idea of fair and balanced journalism was thoroughly defenestrated in favor of angry diatribes spoken by ignorant pundits who fancy themselves intellectuals. Throughout the campaign I was inundated with the same words and phrases everywhere I went. I would go to downtown Austin and see signs telling me to believe in "change". Posters on bathroom walls would tell me of the "hope" their candidate was to bring. I remember trying on a shirt at Target and saw that even this chain of yuppie department stores had adopted their own "yes we can" slogan and posted plaques bearing the same phrase in every dressing room. I didn't venture into the ladies' rooms so I can't exactly say it was every dressing room. The year is now 2009 and while many of our President's constituents are still carrying the campaign banners selling change and hope, I am experiencing my own change and hope. I still believe that there is hope for our dying economy, though the end of this recession may not be in site just yet. I believe that there is hope for struggling artists who have been black balled by their progressive circles of so called friends. I believe there is a change in how people of my generation are viewing mainstream media and the importance of the truth and liberty; I have seen it in my own friends renouncing their old progressive beliefs. Yes we can express our thoughts clearly, yes we can defend our beliefs, and yes we can stand up to the immature attacks the self proclaimed intellectuals will no doubt hurl on us. This is Sound Kitchen: a collection of thoughts reverberating in what is arguably the most sociable room in the house. It is not a place for hatred against the left, nor is it a place for radical ideologues to post doctrines of insurrection. It is a collection of people talking about pop culture, politics, religion, food, and anything else that is important to us. On this site you will find editorials, links to other sites we deem credible or humorous, interesting videos or pictures, interviews, movie reviews, a little of everything. I hope you will enjoy our site, be patient with us as we are still building it. And to those of you who stumble upon Sound Kitchen and find yourselves utterly offended and brimming with anger, I am still glad you came. I think of what comedian Andy Kaufman said once, and I am butchering it here: "If people come to my shows and leave laughing, then I've done my job, but if people come to my shows and leave angry, then I've still done my job."
Enjoy
ELL
Enjoy
ELL
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