$$ SOLD OUT $$
by Michael Scherer

Summer went out like a barbecue. See any good shows? Buy some good shoes?
Sitting on Main Street after the Warped tour I counted three different designs of Warped shopping bags dangling from the hands of returning revelers. In cool gray and relaxed blue hues, each plastic bag looked as daringly alternative as the bowling shirts and baseball caps contained within. On the street, I wondered how these Warped bands, which I once cataloged as outside the MTV/Modern Rock melee, had succumbed to easy check-out-line commercialism. Wasn't over-amplified rock once at odds with authority? I saw the future shimmering in the plastic glare of those shopping bags. Vans be damned. I envisioned a day when the Aquabats were sponsored by Aqua-Net, when the Rev. Horton Heat came courtesy of the christian coalition, when the Deftones sold hearing aides on the side.
A few weeks earlier, and in a different demographic, the Lilith Fair had come through the valley, loosening the collars and filling the wallets of the Starbucks and Biore marketing folks. Who could ask for a better crowd to hock pore-pulling nose tape at? Missy Elliot's face is aglow as Frappuccinos infiltrate the feminist underground. The further and Horde tours also came through the area, lumbering like dinosaurs. Even for me, a once dedicated head, these shows seem like parodies of themselves. With few exceptions, those forty minute solos that once stretched out into the cosmic ether sound as scripted as the lines dropped by the small industry of dealers and vendors in the parking lot.
Meanwhile on the west coast, even Burning Man, once San Francisco's pyro-anarchic answer to the corporate festival, was beaten further into submission by the powers that be. Instead of just kicking the apocalyptic cyber-revelers out of Nevada, the state decided to make a bit of cash and has started charging the organizers six figures for on-call fire fighters, just in case the desert tries to burn down. As a result, the (once free) entrance fee to this year's weekend in the Nevada bad-lands could buy you more than eighty large fries at McDonald's, maybe a slurpee for all your friends. Burning Man is quickly becoming a playground for the young, stock-optioned, Silicon Valley set. Rented Winnebagos and camera-toting voyeurs now outnumber the performance artists and face tatoos.
So what remains for the economically disinclined who still like the ritual of mass gatherings in celebration of good art, but can't handle the Madison Ave/Times Square get-up? What recourse have those who bother to care that bands like Rage Against the Machine work for the machine? Lemonwheel glowing like the northern lights adrift with pepsi sky writers?
In parts of Mexico, I've been told, political prisoners are tortured with American soft drinks. Different political parties control Coca-Cola and Pepsi distribution, so citizens can voice their dissent or support by drinking the appropriate soda. I wonder if political resistance in the U$ will one day depend on the cola wars, or on the choice between brand name shoes. Then again, I wonder if it already does.

Officer Rowell has just let me in on some disturbing news- some fuckin hoodlum tore the emblem off his girlfriends truck. Musta been the kids. No doubt about it. Apparently earlier that night he had spotted some teenagers congregating around the area- and now this! Good lord what is this world coming to? Teenagers running rampant in the streets ripping cars apart with their bare hands! Viscious children soon to be tearing limbs off their grandparents for christsakes. What shall we do? Rowell says we should kick them all off main street. If you cant see em then they cant hurt ya. Throw em all into the gutter. Thats where they belong- them lazy punks! Wheres our law banning kids from standing around? Holy Jesus the kids are back!!! Whatever shall we do? I say use the pepper spray. That'll learn em. Teach you to stand there and look at me. I know what you're thinking. You wanna rape my daughter, don't ya. I'll have you know shes in private school and would never stand around the streets with the likes of you. I tell ya, the kids these days. They're all out worshipping satan and tatooing their bodies and murdering helpless sheep- the poor things. I have to say I agree with Rowell on this one. AT ALL COST- GET RID OF THOSE DAMN KIDS!!

PASSION
I am filled with an intense passionate anger
But an intense passion towards one thing
Inevitably results in an intense passion towards all others
So I find myself ready to explode with intense hatred
Or ready to grasp the world with a passionate love
I am life
I am alive and lively
While some dull out their pain
I broaden my world with emotion
I have a passion for wisdom
I want to consume all the knowledge of the world
To suppress emotion is both dangerous and dull
As long as I accept my anger as part of me
And passionately grasp my emotions
It will lead me straight into the heart of my goals
And I will passionately leap from one Achievement to the next

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Every year the U$ government shells out $125 billion in corporate welfare, equivalent to all the income tax paid by 60 million individuals and families.

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The world's 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. -UN Human Development Report 1997

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"The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people."
-E.B. White

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