Last week I posted something on this website entitled “Slightly drunken late night ramblings”, which was basically just a treatise about what was on my mind…mostly about how bored I am with underground culture lately, and how assimilated into the mainstream all the good underground art movements have become. Then, buried in the fifth paragraph of the blog, I said that one way to fight back against the hegemony of our modern society would be “To put as many bricks as possible through the windows of the Whiskey Tavern and Carl Mumpower’s house.”

I then hit �Submit� without much after-thought. The Cakalak Munitions Website hasn�t been publicized too heavily, and doesn�t have a whole lot of readership. I mostly wrote the thing just to get down some of the stuff that was on my mind before I forgot it.
Well, about a week later, Mumpower apparently was googling his own name, and came across the post. Apparently, worrying for the safety of himself and his windows, he sent the blog to the authorities. Well, I�d like to clear this up.
THIS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY!

It was meant as a joke, an expression, like �Someone ought to smack that guy!� People say this stuff out of frustration and anger. Smacking people and breaking windows, however, doesn�t get a lot of long-term results. I didn�t think anyone would really see this as a threat of violence. Like when Garfield says, �”When Garfield says that the guy who invented Mondays should be drug out into the street and shot”, I don’t think people who like Mondays call the cops on Garfield.

I picked Dr. Mumpower and that fratboy-aquarium known as the Whiskey Tavern as symbols of the homogenization that I feel is ruining Asheville. Asheville is in the midst a culture war, with art and heart against the powers of capitol and development. Mumpower is an active participant in that war. His micromanagerial style of politics that focuses on small-time drug users and graffiti artists is just the sort of �Quality of Life� campaign that Giulliani and his predecessors used in New York to pound all of the character out of New York, which is what is being done now in Asheville (and I�m not saying that drug use=character, I�m saying that people smoking weed and doing other drugs are the tiny end of a huge drug problem, and cracking down on these people, who are already victims of drugs, is like blaming smokers for the evils of the tobacco industry. And it�s this �from the bottom up� type of politics that crushes the energies of the working class and the artist class. This affects the personality and character of a town.)

I�M NOT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE.

Or even destruction of property, I was just trying to cite these people as part of a bigger issue. It�s funny that my quickly scrawled and typo-filled treatise about how we need to shake things up really shook things up. So, Dr. Mumpower, to you�don�t worry about your windows or your personal safety, at least from me. If you keep ripping off crack dealers, you know, they might hurt you, and I can�t vouch for them. This goes for the Whiskey Tavern as well, I won�t be smashing your windows. I don�t like your place, but I�ll stick to writing about things and trying to express ideas and opinions, not randomly breaking stuff. That doesn�t create real change. Maybe words can�t either, but apparently they can cause quite a tizzy when shout out over the ether, so maybe they can.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Ear to the Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.