Stepping into the role of list-mummy for a minute, if I may, I would like to say that the few flames here are only mildly disturbing. (FYI, nobody has been beaten to death in NYC. We have three daily newspapers and not one of them has reported anything but minor harassments, regretable but understandable, and some spate of random disorganized slurs, same, with an attendant rise of fear amongst the muslim and arabic communities.) But even the other remarks, qualifying their compassion with criticism of US foreign policy, are as easy to dismiss. "Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature---to empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is half and suggests another to make it whole; as spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; motion rest." That’s what Emerson had to say on compensation. And an event of this magnitude really demands that we all react, or deny our common humanity. So I prefer to read between the lines and see frustration and anger coming out in some intense, if peculiar, manners. After getting a nice note from the Duke regarding my letter, I thought to add one more thing before returning into lurkerdom. I still have 700 unread messages on my hard drive; I cannot keep up with the amount of articulate, funny, intelligent and generally amazing posts here. I have often thought about deleting them and just going on from there, or hitting "unsubscribe" altogether. But Sinister is like this soap opera you just can’t stop watching; no matter how many heroes and villains show up and go down, you really can’t just walk away. Or, to get back to Emerson and nature analogies, the stories intertwine and weave like vines crawling up the side of a building and you realize that what may be a nuisance has become part of the landscape. And right now, we are compensating, big time. Yeah, I realized something else too. My letter was not that much different from our old Ink Polaroids. Those are great. We should get back to that very soon. I’m not here to wave the red flag in front of a bull (or a red bull in front of a flag, Ken). Or wave any flag at all, really. If Emerson has anything right, then maybe there is a lesson here about an impossibly awful act suggesting something equally good. I don’t claim to know what it is, but I’ll tell you what I hope will come out of this. I want a song. I want some effectively potent cheap music. I want "A Day In The Life." I want "Wouldn’t It Be Nice." I want "Sugar Mountain." I want "The State That I Am In." +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+