Punk rock: The story of the Germs

(Sound of History) The Germs: the most explosive punk band

The Germs: Bassist Lorna Doom; guitarist Pat Smear; drummer Don Bolles; singer Darby Crash

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Darby Crash, April 1980, L.A.

The most interesting thing about Irish American singer and lead vocalist for the Germs Darby Crash (Jan Paul Beahm) is that he was a Buddhist in 1970s Los Angeles. He alludes to it in the song "The Slave."

THE SLAVE: It starts in your head/ And moves to your hands/ Your body starts shakin'/ 'Cause you're in demand/ You do the slave to the beat/ Of the neuro-sutra can-can/ You're lashed 'twixt the stars/ With your ice and motor cars/ You do the slave to the beat/ Of the neuro-sutra can-can/ Oh yea! Yea! Pull out the Zen/ I've got a Buddhist principle in my hand

The Sound of One Hand Clapping | Medium

Your life seems wasted, your bodies laced in/ Don't stop now, you've got to trace it/ You put your hands together/ Writhe in the shackle/ You twist your body round/ 'Til it starts to crackle/ You do the slave to the beat/ Of the neuro-sutra can-can/ You're lashed 'twixt the stars/ With your ice and motor cars/ You do the slave to the beat/ Of the neuro-sutra can-can/ Oh yea! Yea! Pull out the Zen/ I've got a Buddhist principle in my hand/ Your life seems wasted, your bodies laced in/ Don't stop now, you've got to trace it// Right here right now, shake it in and out now/ Lights on, off now, make it spin and fight now.

So long before there was a Nirvana, long before Darby's guitarist and best friend Pat Smear began playing for Nirvana, there was already interest in bringing about "the end of all suffering," which is the literal meaning of the Sanskrit term Nirvana. Female bassist Lorna Doom went off into oblivion or obscurity, but drummer Don Bolles went on to local greatness with Goth punk 45 Grave. Of course, Darby was a troubled teen in Hollywood, California, so he had bigger things to worry about than ending suffering. He had addictions to develop, dysfunctional coping mechanisms, and remembering to use the microphone near his mouth during live performances on his mind.

Lorna, why won't Darby sing into the mic? - And what became of Pap Smear? We mean Pat

(egi alams) The Germs vs. TSOL punk culture, mischief, chaos of fans

He was clearly a very talented wordsmith on his way to a fabulous career if everything hadn't come crashing down around him. Drugs and drunkenness. They'll be the ruin of most rockers who think they'll be different and go untouched by the predictable three-stage tragedy of use, abuse, and demise. Good thing Joan Jett recorded and produced them so well before it was too late.

Germs original lineup #GoGos #Nirvana #FooFighters - Germs album influenced Flea (RHCP)

(GI) by the Germs is f*ckin classic hardcore

The Germs "What We Do is Secret" (G.I. full album)

Don Bolles went on to play fastest song in world till then: "Black Cross"

(well, there was the lightning fast "Red Tape" by Circle Jerks, too)

(45 Grave) "Black Cross" (Only the Good Die Young)

The Germs reunite without Darby after What We Do is Secret, Sala Boite, Madrid Dec. 2009

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Truth about Rock 'n Roll industry: fake

I inspired Nirvana and played with and for Kurt

(Rock N' Roll True Stories) Melvins' King Buzzo (Buzz Osborne): Rock's most brutal truth-teller?

Fecal Matter was a punk rock band from Aberdeen, Washington state. FM was formed in 1985 by Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's future frontman, along with Dale Crover of the Melvins and drummer Greg Hokanson. Melvins members Buzz Osborne (also known as "King Buzzo") and Mike Dillard appeared in a later version of the band during rehearsals the following year. The band was short-lived, disbanding in 1986. Songs from the group's sole recording session were issued as the Illiteracy Will Prevail demo tape.

(Aggressive Tendencies) The Melvins' King Buzzo says Nirvana

doc "Montage of Heck" is B.S., defends Kurt Cobain

• Her one and only wish #adoption #orphan #fosterchild

addiction, band, corporate, drugs, ego, exposed, grunge, heavy metal, KISS, music, nirvana, profit motive, rock n' roll, selling out, sex industry

Floods 'n Fires: Nepal, Hawaii, Europe, LA

Nepal suffers devastating flash floods from Himalayan glacial lake outburst | Diginode

Nepal Flood News Today LIVE | Roads, Bridges, Power Projects Hit | Rasuwa Flash Flood Fury

Nepal flooding LIVE | Roads, bridges, power projects hit | Rasuwa Flash Flood Fury

(CNN-News18) Started streaming Aug. 26, 2026: A powerful flash flood is unleashing widespread destruction in Nepal’s Rasuwa district near its border with Tibet, with roads, bridges, and major infrastructure being hit as floodwaters surge through the region.

The flooding along the Bhote Koshi River has disrupted connectivity and affected power infrastructure, including hydropower projects. Villages and homes are also being impacted as authorities and rescue teams assess the full scale of the destruction.

The disaster has once again highlighted the vulnerability of Himalayan communities and critical infrastructure to sudden floods, torrential rain, and extreme weather events. With damaged roads and bridges complicating access, rescue and relief operations face major challenges.

#NepalFloods #NepalFlashFlood #Rasuwa #BhoteKoshi #NepalNews #FloodDisaster #Hydropower #BreakingNews #cnnnews18. n18oc_live CNN-News18 is a trusted source for breaking news, updates, and in-depth analysis from around the world. CNN-News18 is dedicated to bringing the latest news, trends, and insights, helping viewers stay informed and up-to-date. Subscribe now and join our community of informed and engaged viewers. Follow every breaking story LIVE 🔴: here

Underreported rainstorms, waves, disastrous flooding in Hawaii

Why is Europe suddenly overheated and underprepared?

Hottest week of the year in Los Angeles

Summer ends: Just Like Heaven (8/22)

Just Like Heaven 2026 PLAYLIST

Stereotypical Southern California summer

When does summer really begin? It's not an astronomical question, as the people into genes insist gender is as easy to assign as reading x's and y's. It is easy if we make it that easy, but it is not so easy when we do not all agree to that as the objective measure.

What is "social summer"?

Mandatory: All Americans must visit a beach.

There's a kind of social summer, which runs between Memorial Day and Labor Day, just an approximation. The seasons do not always cooperate even in parts of the US where four distinct seasons make themselves obvious. There is "Indian summer," which is just a way of saying a long hot spell after official calendrical summer should have ended.

Another example of social summer is the one set by the local school district: When school ends, that's summer. Just ask Alice Cooper! When school begins again, that resumption is the end, even if the weather is still great and drives to the beach are worth the traffic.

"Summer" = School's out!

Alice Cooper "School's Out" (from Alice Cooper: Trashes the World)

There did not used to be a "universal time" but rather many different times depending on the place. They were not simultaneous but more dependent on the sun circling (not revolving) overhead chased by the moon. Those were Tartarian (Tartary) times, and that's all been erased now. A universal measure imposes a definition that does not make sense for everybody on the ground.

Another social summer measure is determined by the concert calendar. The end comes to Pasadena, Los Angeles with the Just Like Heaven Festival this Saturday (Aug. 22, 2026).

New weekend, same party

(justlikeheavenfest.com)

New for 2026: Updated clubhouse amenities, enhanced VIP experiences, plus new shade sails, cooling misters, expanded shaded seating, and additional water refill stations throughout the festival grounds, giving concertgoers even more ways to stay cool and recharge between musical sets. For even more convenience, spend the day in VIP for a lot more money. Spend the day dancing in the expansive VIP viewing areas and lounging in shaded spaces between acts, all while enjoying exclusive food and drink options and air-conditioned restrooms. Buy Now Just Like Heaven | August 22, 2026

Overpaying cops for police state

(The Jimmy Dore Show) The salaries of San Francisco police are shocking

Will there be enough cops to stop trouble?

You will respect my authority...or else.

"Defund the police" was a deception to provoke public outrage. Congress funds new secret police forces and pays them much more now. If police officers want to scam the system, overseers look the other way. Let's make THE PURGE legal for a little while, and then we can use the predictable mayhem and disorder as a pretext to implement some Orwellian policies for "public safety" and a smiley face police state. 

Ekaterina Sky: send stories, vote SXSW

“I think I should start making art again”

The intentions and prayers for the Earth were embedded here then covered with gold leaf.

Altadena Fire Mural Project, 2026, with golden prayers and us circled in red (Ekaterina Sky)

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Channeled inspiration for artful beauty

Six months after the Los Angeles fires, we built an art wall in Altadena. There were not many walls left to paint on, so we built one on the empty lot where the vegan cafe Oh Happy Days used to be.

Over four days the foothill neighborhood came and wrote their prayers and intentions to be sealed into the golden sphere at the center of the mural, some in English, some in Spanish, some in many other languages. One was a single name. One asked for the soil to become clean again. Then we sealed every one of those prayers under gold leaf.

A gold embedded Prayer for the Earth

They are still under there, and nobody can read them. On the final Sunday of our public art project, a woman came over to tell me about her friend: Her friend had lost her home in the Eaton Fire and had not smiled once in the six months since.

Her friend was at the wall right then, with a glistening brush in her hand. She was smiling. She had just said, “I think I should start making art again.” I did not go over to her. That moment was hers.

I thought, “She has every fact about what she lost. The facts do nothing for her. A wall, a brush, and her neighbors gave her somewhere to put it, and she picked the brush back up.” That is what I've been trying to say for 20 years! To put it plainly:

“Data hands us the truth.

Beauty is what lets us carry it.”

Knowing is not the hard part. Holding it is. Beauty is what makes the weight bearable enough to keep holding and acting on.

Vote for this talk at SXSW 2027

Save the forest, save the animals

I want to argue for that position in front of a room full of people who build things rather than a room of those who already agree with me. So I proposed a talk at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, next March (2027) I am calling, “Why Beauty Moves Us When Data Doesn’t.”

DESCRIPTION: Two decades of painting murals converges on one idea: Shared beauty can hold what words cannot yet reach, a shift that decides what people go on to protect.

After the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, survivors gathered at a community mural to write their intentions and prayers into the paint. A woman who had not smiled since losing her home picked up a brush. This talk lays out the method behind the shift and how to build it into a strategy that moves people.

SESSION TAKEAWAYS:

1. 

   Art show LA Climate Week '26

   Why aesthetic experience shifts emotional orientation faster than data or logical arguments, and what that means for building a movement or campaign.
2. A repeatable method for designing beauty and participation into engagement strategy, instead of attaching them as decoration afterward.
3. Real, working examples, a reforestation partnership, a global soil movement, a wildfire recovery mural, proof the method produces outcomes. More

• VOTE NOW: SXSW PanelPicker® Community Voting

Indigenous protest: Marcha Global Pelo Clima (COP30-2025 UN Climate Change Conference)

COP30: 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, July 11, 2025

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UN Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil

It is about how that Sunday afternoon of the art project actually worked. Read it HERE. It is accompanied on the page by a two-minute film of me speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil.

Send me your stories!

REQUEST: If a moment like that has ever happened to you, I would love to hear it. I am collecting them to inspire others.

(Ekaterina Sky) COP30: Why transformation feels like dying first

Warmly,

Ekaterina Sky, visual artist (ekaterina-sky.com)

Organizer, Life Force Art LLC

• How art can inspire climate action and ocean conservation | Barbara Veiga
• One human species ruled Earth for 2 million years, and it wasn't us
• Let's stop cruel factory farming (action.foe.org)

Dr. Jane Goodall promoted a vegan plant-based diet for all humans to save our world.

• Ekaterina Sky, Aug. 12, 2026; Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Jen B. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Where are all of China's homeless?

(Expat Adventuring in Asia) Where are China's homeless? The TRUTH America hides from us

Nude Poetry with Füde, NY to LA (8/7)

Now I'd like to bring out Leehee Bee, a hot piece of asymptote on our stage for the first time.

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Reading my poetry is a new kind of "naked"

What performing poetry reveals about language, vulnerability, the fear of being (mis)understood

 

Could I stand in front of people fully nude?

A few months ago, I [Lihi Be] stood on a stage in New York City and performed slam poetry for the first time. The scene was hosted by Nuyorican Poets' Cafe at the Bowery Poetry Club, a small, legendary room where decades of poets have stepped up to a microphone and turned their inner worlds into sound.

It's the kind of place where language has history, where words have weight, where the air feels charged from voices that came before.

Enough with old white male writers! Sit down!

Gigi luxury nightwear (Schweitzer Linen)

lihi be, the i in mi, this breath and body

I remember standing there, waiting my turn, feeling my heart beating in my throat, which surprised me. I’ve spoken in front of rooms before. I’ve guided workshops, taught movement, led breathwork journeys where people open parts of themselves that are tender and alive.

Holding space for others doesn’t scare me. But this was different. This time, I wasn’t holding material space; I was the material. A poem I wrote alone earlier that morning was about to leave the page and hit the stage, entering a room full of strangers, not through dead ink, but through my living breath, my voice, my body.

• The New Naked Poetry | Academy of American Poets
• Why are we obsessed with forbidden nudity, Holli?✨
• Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms

New York City as seen from high above Central Park, a kind of Griffith Park, Los Angeles

New York City's famous spoken word space at the Bowery Poetry Club (wiki)

(Married with Children) American skin: Al Bundy's high school girlfriend shows up at the beach

White men can't dance, but women can (KP)

And now for our first nude, I mean POET of the evening, Russian Pole Heaven

What is The Füde Experience? Naked eating, social bonding, courageous self-inquiry together

The Füde Experience: naked eating with Lihi Be at FÜDE LA (thefudeexperience.com)

Does anyone here need a bath to wash away dirty thoughts of body image negativity?

Holiday hosting: rosemary ritual cleanse (The Füde Experience)

We said nobody wants to see it, Shake Spear! OK, a quick flash then sit down and shut it!

Lihi Benisty poetry: Self

Until that moment, "poetry" was something I wrote, never something I performed. When I published my book, The Self, Reframed, it felt like a big step outward. Suddenly the poems were technically "public." Someone, anyone, could order the book, underline a passage, carry a piece of it into her own life.

 

Butt even then, there was still distance. The page protected me. Readers meet a poem alone. They can pause, reread, close the book, throw it in the garbage disposal, flip the switch, make acid-free wood pulp that washes out to sea... That meeting happens quietly, inside their own interior worlds.

Shame? We refuse to limit ourselves

Slam poetry is different: Spoken word removes the distance. When one performs a poem, there is no safe distance, no page between the room and the I performing. My breath carries my language. My nervous system becomes part of the delivery. My voice, my pauses, my trembling chest -- all of it becomes part of my poem.

In some ways, it feels easier to be naked than to perform one's own poem, in the woods, with someone you love, in front of Mother Nature, playing pretend it's Adam and Eve in a Sumerian garden.

Holy Adam and Eve had no shame

Look, it's the real me!

I was in New York for a series of gatherings -- one of them a nude experience I was hosting with the Füde Experience: a roomful of naked people exploring embodiment, mindful presence, the simplicity of being in our bodies without the usual layers of social armor.

Standing naked in a room with others didn’t feel nearly as vulnerable as standing on this stage. In fact, being naked felt surprisingly simple. Source: a poem is a different kind of naked (seeds of the self)

We're bringing it to Los Angeles

• Have the experience in Los Angeles with Dharma Buddhist Meditation (Aug. 7, 2026)
• RSVP: Naked Vegan Food Experience, Meditation, Poetry, Healing, Friday, Aug. 7, 2026, 7:00 PM | Meetup

"No bikinis! Cover up those shameful bodies...or you are headed for hell!" - Loving Christian

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Lihi Be (Benisty)

AUTHOR: Lihi Be (Benisty), teacher of somatic self-inquiry, breathwork, movement, teacher, mentorship, poetry, summer retreat leader, author of The Self, Reframed. She leads a dynamic blend of somatic practices to navigate emotional landscapes. She is profoundly committed to the poetic art of self-inquiry through breathwork and movement. Her teaching is distinguished by her ability to weave these elements into a cohesive practice that respects the complexity of the human experience. Her poetry serves as a reflective mirror, deepening the themes she navigates in her somatic work and offering an additional avenue for connection and self-discovery. She lives in Los Angeles, California. (Substack, Instagram, FÜDE in LA, Amazon, Facebook, Omega Institute, lihibe.com)

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  Put yer clothes on 'n get the Hades outta here!

  Building community through resonance: The Füde Experience is a reader-supported publication for free and paid subscribers; to receive new posts and support, see: fudeexperience.substack.com (Website: thefudeexperience.com)

Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Poetry Slam at the Bowery Poetry Club Mondays (@bowerypoetry

We'd ride our bikes in the nude to see someone get on stage and really get naked with poetry.

• Lihi Bi (seeds of the self), March 4th, 2026; Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Jen B. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly