Many years ago, at the dawn of my cafe-artist life, where I ceased actually making music and began talking about it and art while exploring new dimensions of inebriation, my art-fag crew and I were sitting around a going through pitcher after pitcher of beer (we had yet to discover the efficiency of brandy, gin, and whiskey) and there was a table full of art-school-fruityloops at the next table, discussing something about ... i'm not sure, but I would surmise modern dance ...

"The toe is trivial!" blurted out a another certified art-fag in a shrill, nasally whine that cut through the din ...

I ridiculed then the remark, the sentiment, and even the anonymous ass-clown who said it, and I do so again as I type these words almost 35 years later.

Berkeley is possibly the Cafe-Artist capital of the world. I say possibly only because I've not spent any time in New York, London, Paris, or any other boho-certified metropolis long enough to determine. San Francisco has a new breed of art-fag: the Burners (a derivation of Burning Man), but that is an essay for another day.

As a result of my experiences in the cafe-artist world and as a bonafied art-fag for many years, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie Art School Confidential.

by Knox Bronson (with props to "Actual Physical War on DJ's")and Nobody Cares That You Are a DJ")

Did you hear the one about the DJs?

One DJ said to another,"Do you want to go to a movie?"

And the other one replied,"I don't know ... who's the projectionist?"

In a just and fair world, DJs, if mentioned at all in the press, would be relegated to the business pages where they belong. But this is not a just and fair world and the marketers have taken over every aspect of culture. Therefore, there is no culture, only carefully crafted  messages or products targetted at a certain demographic niche.

And I have heard it so many times: "You don't know what you are talking about! There's Z-Trip and Q-Bert ... !" and God knows who else.

I watched the movie "Scratch," which was quite enlightening and made me much more conscious of the "art" of turntablism and I have come to realize that DJ's are, at best, modern pecussionists, drummers, for lack of a better word -  and, as anybody who knows about music will tell you ... drummers are the natural enemy of singers.

As an aside: I have loved the radio DJs, from the glory days of AM radio and the true underground FM in San Francisco - KMPX - where it started, up to the crews today at KCRW, KALX ... Steve Masters' reign as program director at Live105 in the 80's ... Steve Jones' Jonesie's Jukebox in LA today ... Nic Harcourt et al @ KCRW - for over 45 years! So they do not factor into this article in any way.

"The Grey Album," by Dangermouse, and the attendant media frenzy makes further silence about the decline of creativity in the world of popular music impossible.

I just got into a huge argument with my 20 year old son. I was listening to a RealAudio clip from an NPR website about the hoopla surrounding the mixtape/mashup release by Brian Burton, aka DJ Dangermouse, of the "Grey Album," wherein he has sliced the greatest pop album of all time (The Beatles "White Album") and mixed the resulting mishmash with the a capella raps of one of today's biggest stars, Jay-Z, from his recently released "Black Album." And I was cussing under my breath several feet away from him. He looked away from the MTV Hiphop Top 10 show to ask what the problem was.

We are in the process of building out this site, Sun Pop Blue, hub for music, writing, video, art, design, sculpture, of Knox Bronson and friends.    

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Imagine my chagrin—and chagrin is the perfect word: "disquietude or distress of mind caused by humiliation, disappointment, or failure"—upon reading of Hunter Thompson's suicide four days after my last post about his disintegration as a literary force thirty years ago due to drugs and booze.

In my youth, I loved and idolized the man. We saw eye to eye on the imperative to inebriate. He could write the fiercest prose, funny, profane, and wise all at once.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

And he hated Nixon.

Hunter Thompson and Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the second Hollywood iteration of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

A couple friends of mine were his handlers (babysitters) when he worked as a columnist at the SF Examiner in the eighties, during the reign of Will Hearst III. They carried his Wild Turkey and cocaine bindles for him, as well as sit up all night waiting in the Ex city room, while every hour or so the mojo wire would spew a page of rambling copy full of regurgitated Thompsonism's--allusions to the "sick, twisted, and depraved" stories he could never tell. Giving, according to my friends, a whole new meaning to the word "rewrite."

But we are in an era of Brand and this was/is the Hunter Thompson brand.

Hasn't written a new sentence in over thirty years.

The publishing world is full of vulturous enablers, number one being Jann Wenner, of course, who continue paying Thompson for the right to sell his byline to the aging believers who still show up at his booksignings. See: Defamer: Hunter S. Thompson Lives Up To Legend At Book Soup. It's perversely funny. There was a time when I thought this would be the greatest of all lives.

Like every other alkie on the earth, he wakes up in the Fear every single night. Booze and drugs have destroyed his writing, if not his career. And it is a shame, because we sure could use him right now, as new forces that make Nixon look like the Prince of Light gather across our beautiful land.