Giant Ginkgo

After staying up intil a few minutes before 5 on Friday night, I slept pretty late and missed the first sessions. I took it pretty easy in the morning and the first real session I caught was Aaron McGruder's keynote. He is the creator of the Boondocks, a comic strip that is currently running in some 260 or so newspapers. During the few years that I have read the strip I have seen it censored a fair number of times by my local bastion of openness, the Chicago Tribune. It is one of the few current comics that I actually find intelligent, funny, and worth reading. I see it as being well grounded in the tradition brought about by Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, even if it doesn't quite reach the level of This Modern World.

The most amusing part of the speech happened at the end, during the question and answer section. Jello Biafra showed up, and grilled the poor guy about his belief in different conspiracies. Aaron was pretty much dissected by Jello. (Quite interestingly nobody else that I have seen or talked to seemed to notice that.)

After the session, I took the elevator down with Jello Biafra. After he stepped out, a women behind him did a little happy dance. I visited the network room for a while and watched what was floating through the air around me on the networks, before heading out for a long walk and a tasty pasta lunch at a little restaurant/greenhouse that had a live jazz band.

The Cult of the Dead Cow show was tragically terrible. I think they decided on what to do at about 4 in the morning after a solid drinking binge. Nothing worked right, the show started 40 minutes late and was just horrible. If that was their intention, it was a true work of art. They did have one interesting device that they didn't really show, though. It was a portable black box that could read standard building security cards from several feet away. Now that is an interesting piece of kit if it works as advertised. The best part was after the show, when I got to see them pay off the slinky girls and performers that they had hired. There was something particularly pathetic about that.

The last session was a blast. Jello Biafra was invited at the last minute to return and give a talk. He started off by telling the crowd about a recent conference he had been a keynote speaker at. It was a recording industry convention, and they had hired him because the normal big name artists they had come out and speak were apparently quite sleep inducing. I don't think his speech had the same effect as the others, because he stood up and reemed them for an hour about all of the shit they have been pulling on all of us. (He has his own indie label btw, Alternative Tentacles which has been through hell.)

The rights to the Dead Kennedys has been taken away from Alternative Tentacles and Jello. Back in 1998 he was given an offer from Levi's to use his favorite song, "Holiday in Cambodia" for a jeans commercial. He refused to accept it, keeping with the principles of the group and of punk in general. Unfortunately his former band members could only see green, and took him to court, where for the time being he has lost all control of his work.

Jello proceeded to talk about almost everything under the sun. The best part of it came at the end, when he played some of his latest records that he had recently started collecting. Apparently there is a small industry of albums produced for Corporate Conventions. Imagine the horror of musicals made for and about Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Exxon, General Electric and other fine and upstanding citizens. There were songs about how wonderful it would be for Coke if there wasn't any FDA, EPA, or other governmental institutions. A fine Pepsi number was imagining a 'Pepsi Universe,' where water had been replaced by Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Exxon sang about their wives, and how they were 'full service stations' for their men.