Skip to main content

Battle of the Bands

AP - A downtown concert promoter says he will be lucky if all he gets is fired tonight after police and riot squad officers were deployed to break up the violence that erupted at his music venue.  “It seemed like it was a great idea,” says the promoter, Jimmy.  “A battle of the bands where all the bands play the same song so that it’s more fair and easier for the audience to judge who’s the best band!”  The lights from different emergency vehicles paint contrasting strobes in the cool night air.  An ambulance carries away a young man who tried to kill himself by plummeting from the balcony.  Police in riot gear load handcuffed assailants into vans while other cuffed music-fan-turned-rioters sit on the pavement in a line against the outside brick wall of the club.  Many are bruised and bloodied.  Most of the band members have already been taken to the hospital with severe injuries.  “It turned into complete chaos and I’m to blame,” says Jimmy.  Staring down into nothing with wide lost eyes, he runs his shaking hand through his sweaty hair.  “I guess after hearing 5 different bands play ‘Wonderwall' 5 times in a row, something deep down just snaps in people…It was horrible...They were animals…”  Jimmy’s words trail off as he stands motionless, frozen in disbelief over the madness he inadvertently unleashed upon the world tonight.
---
Jesse Wattenbarger reported from his lonely studio apartment, Atlanta GA.  No one else contributed to this fake report.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automatic Nonsesnsors

Imagine if you and each of your friends wrote random things on index cards all day.  You then made copies of them and whenever you saw your friend or passed by your friend's desk, locker, mailbox, etc. you gave him a copy of the index cards you wrote on that day.  Each friend also gave you a copy of her cards.  After a few exchanges with a few friends, you had a stack of cards to go through, reading each individual card (and they wrote a lot of them).  And, since you wanted people to see your cards, and since trading cards became a social task in itself, you often started trading with just about anybody. Most of the messages were dumb and boring.  In fact, your friends knew that many other people would see these cards, so most were stripped of any kind of controversy or antagonism.  A number of the cards simply said "Here's something I like that I know many other people also like," and then other cards repeated the same thing and had things like, "Yeah!" ...
1 comment
Read more

The End of Story.

This is it.  The end of the movie.  The hero will have to use all of the cliched pithy wisdom that’s been spelled out for him by the older, wiser, less head-strong character who was surprisingly like him in his youth.  Older audience members can relate to both characters, and younger audience members are taxed to consider the wisdom of their elders more often.  All pretty much male-centric; the girl lead who seemed to completely be put off by the male lead has just about completely come around now, after the lull in the middle of the story where the hero’s sensitive side was exposed and he was vulnerable to change.  Finally embracing that change, in the apex of his final challenge, the young hero is compelled to apply the advice that was clearly and consistently broken down for him by the wise old male character and combine it with the sensitivity he’s learned from the female lead.  None of the base-line collateral characters believe in him.  The clear...
2 comments
Read more

Cage of Reason

During the Haitian Revolution against the French, The Haitians sung the soldiers' songs in their language and tense. The soldiers could all see the irony; their own rebel songs, their ideology. We can't invoke this story with our captors, They never heard it. We sacrificed stories for verdicts. We can't invoke the words of the poet. We sacrificed him to the Market. We can’t invoke the wisdom of the old books, We sacrificed them to stammering and doubtful looks. We can't invoke the Church's righteousness or reliance. We sacrificed it to Science. We can’t invoke empathy, We sacrificed it to individual agency. We can’t invoke the deeds of the old King. We sacrificed him to perennial voting. We can't invoke legacy, We sacrificed it to, “Everything I have was earned by me.” We can’t invoke a God’s reprisal. We sacrificed him to blunt denial. We can’t invoke romance. We sacrificed it to an enlightened stance. We can't invoke the r...
1 comment
Read more