The Edinburgh Empress and her boys are back with Bleed Like Me, Garbage’s first release in almost four years and what a long, shitty four years it has been for Garbage.

While touring in 2002 lead singer Shirley Manson lost her voice and had to have a cyst removed from her vocal chords leaving her unable to speak for a brief period of time. Manson then reportedly separated from her husband though the details have understandably been kept private. As if Shirley’s issues weren’t enough for the band to deal with, Garbage mastermind Butch Vig slipped into a coma due to undiagnosed, Pamela Anderson-grade Type A Hepatitis. When he finally got back on his feet, Vig soon checked back into the hospital, this time for Bell’s Palsy. With its release being a year later than expected, that Bleed Like Me ever got made is nothing short of a miracle.

Bleed Like Me, (originally titled Hands On A Hard Body), is the much anticipated follow up to the band’s third album Beautiful Garbage. Beautiful Garbage wasn’t as widely received as their previous two albums, partly because of its unfortunate release date of September, 2001 and partly because the album lacked a coherent sound. Garbage’s signature sonic blitzkrieg at times got lost within the schizophrenic mix of The Shirelles / DMX / New Wave trappings and though each song worked individually, as a whole the album felt disconnected. Beautiful Garbage sold so poorly in the U.S. that in addition to their own tour, Garbage opened for No Doubt and U2 to help boost sales. Then along came the previously mentioned medical troubles and the usual band squabbling.

This time out Garbage has stripped away most of their layered high-tech guitars and super-samples and what is left at its core is garage rock. Opening Bleed Like Me is “Bad Boyfriend,” with Foo Fighters front man / ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl making an appearance on drums. Manson doesn’t waste any time getting in your face lyrically, right from the start she flaunts her girl-on-top / no-strings-attached approach to dating, “So ripe so sweet come suck it and see / But watch out Daddy I sting like a bee / I know some tricks I swear will give you the bends / C'mon baby be my bad boyfriend.” It’s this sexual bravado that makes straight men drool and gay men raise Manson to icon status. “Run Baby Run” could be an outtake from Version 2.0 with Manson, at times, sounding like Chrissy Hynde. It’s perfect the perfect pop song and should be listened to several times before moving on with the rest of the album.

The title track, “Bleed Like Me,” is evocative of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in which Manson tells the damaged tales of a chosen few who are anorexic, sexually confused, socially inept, or cutting themselves to relieve their inner demons. At the end of this haunted therapy, Manson reveals that she herself has a past with self inflicted pain as she whispers, “You should see my scars / Try to comprehend that which you’ll never comprehend.”

Bleed Like Me isn’t the force to be reckoned with that Version 2.0 was, but it doesn’t need to be. The worst thing any band could do is find a formula and stick with it and that’s never been Garbage’s MO. Aerosmith lost their edge the second Diane Warren started writing the same syrupy love songs for them over and over and over again knowing they could separate girls with bad perms from their cash. And U2 would not be where they are today if they stopped their constant sound experimentation, broadening their fan base while expanding the minds of their older fans on their quest for world domination. Pay no attention to Gwen Stefani and her Missing Persons identity crisis, watch Shirley as she is well on her way to becoming the next Annie Lennox. With each album she gains confidence both vocally and with her lyrics. If Garbage can manage to not kill each other, they will be one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.

On The Web | www.garbage.com

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June 22, 2005

Friends Don't Let Friends Surf Naked

Actually, I don't care if you are naked, but please don't expose your poor, innocent unprotected computer to the Evil Internet.

I keep hearing crazy insane user stories about spyware and viruses. The ghostly machine that reboots itself silently at 3 a.m., the parents of one friend who confess to having thrown away "3 or 4" laptops this year because they just "stopped working", or the elderly parents of another friend whose cable internet service was cut off after their computer morphed into a spambot sending 100K e-mails an hour.

Even if you think you are knowledgeable and careful, you are vulnerable. One of my company's web servers was hacked into by spammers last summer-even after we shut the server down, it left us feeling all nasty and dirty. (We weren't running Microsoft, btw, this was a weak password issue)

So every month I will update my suggestions for safe PC based co-existance with the Evil Internet. This month's recommendations are based on my experiences over the past 6 months. I haven't focused on re-evaluating these practices recently, and things change quickly on the frontier of the Evil Internet, thus my intention to revisit the topic monthly.

These recommendations are specifically for computers running Windows-I wish Mac people the best of luck and all that but I am not allowed to join any more cults.

Briefly, for this month:

1) Run an up to date operating system. Windows 98 will be seven years old on June 25th. The threat universe of the Evil Internet was very different back then. You can secure your W98 system but....why make yourself crazy? I advise any one who asks that the cost of paying someone to work on your old computer is probably greater than the cost of a new entry level machine that will blow your old one away in performance anyway.

2) Make sure you are running a firewall. Windows XP has a built in firewall-turn it on. Download and install a firewall if you are running Windows 98, ME, NT (I hope not!), or 2000. If you on XP and you prefer to use another firewall instead of the Windows firewall, turn the built in firewall off. Both Zone Alarm and Sygate have free versions of their firewalls.

3) Learn how your firewall works. You won't do yourself any good if you don't see the alerts from your firewall because they irritated you and you turned them off. You can read some useful general information about firewalls at How Stuff Works

4) Keep your antivirus protection up to date. Suck it up and pay for it. Buy a license for each computer. I don't care which anti-virus solution you use and I don't want to play anti-virus program wars so just do it and stop whining.

5) Run an anti-spyware program. Or two. Or three. Apparently no one program catches all threats. I have had good luck running only the Microsoft Anti Spyware beta, but I advise periodically checking computers with SpyBot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware.

6) Don't click on that. You know who you are, and what it is, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Don't click on it, you will be sorry. He or she is not that hot anyway.

7) Don't believe that e-mail about your compromised Citibank account, your PalPal account, or the one from the customer service people at AOL who want to confirm your password. For one thing, you don't have a Citibank account. If you are even tempted to wonder if any of these e-mails are for real, call me. I have LOTS of better ways we can spend your money.

8) Lastly, don't believe everything you hear or read about Internet threats and PC security. Don't take what I am saying for granted (actually you can trust me), spend a few minutes reading what the people who build your operating systems and and your computers (Dell) (Gateway) have to say about the subject.

9) Oh yeah, and don't use weak passwords. Don't use your name, your birthdate, the birthdates of your loved ones, or other easily guessable information. DO NOT use the same password everywhere for every site and every secure application. I know it's hideously difficult to keep track of a lot of passwords, but we have to accept the burden of secure passwords like we accept the burden of keys. I would no more use triggertech as a password than I would walk out of my NYC apartment without locking the door. Secure passwords seem to be more trouble than they are worth up until the day you really do get that Visa bill for someone else's European vacation. Microsoft has some good non-technical information on passwords for the general user. You can use a program to manage your passwords. I bought into SplashID a few years ago, our Publisher swears by Keepass (free!)

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June 21, 2005

Safety Backfires

Sunday Our Publisher called us in a panic. Something's wrong with my laptop! There's no space left on my hard drive, and I've deleted everything I can! I wasn't in the mood for a house call, so Mr Laptop came over for a visit.

Experience has led me to be a little skeptical about people's description of their computer problems, but Our Publisher is a pretty geeky guy, and it turned out that his description was accurate. He had less than 200MB free on a 40GB hard drive. This was just BAD. I investigated the usual suspects, C:/Windows/Temp, C:/Documents and Settings/UserName/Local Settings/Temp, My Documents/My Music and My Documents/My Pictures, but nothing looked odd. I tried to install my favorite disk space usage utility but it failed to install, so we downloaded FolderSizes and took advantage of the free trial.

The program installed without any fuss, and told us that the Windows folder was consuming 20 GB of disk space. Hmmm....something was frelled for sure. Even on my constantly modified system, loaded down with the remnants of many failed and tested software goodies, the Windows folder only uses 4 GB. Foldersizes told us that the real culprit was the Internet Logs folder. A little googling turned up a number of references to Zone Alarm, a personal firewall product I have used and advocated for years but which has been getting on my nerves lately. Zone Alarm logs intrusions by default and keeps 30 days worth of logs. We found over 4,000 Zone Alarm log files in the Internet Folder, most of them created in the past 3 days, most of them over the span of a few hours, seconds apart. Ouch!

A few things made this seem very odd. Our Publisher connects to the internet via a wireless network secured via Mac address. In other words, only computers that have explicitly been allowed access can use the connection. This meant that whatever was causing Zone Alarm to go mad was happening inside his network, and there are only two computers on that that network, Our Publisher's and His Partner's, which we spent New Year's Eve reformatting. (A sacrifice indicative of true friendship IMHO). Our Publisher reported that Zone Alarm on his partner's machine had been requesting access to the Internet for a program he hadn't recognized, and also that Real Player on his laptop was constantly asking if it could update itself.

I made one mistake-in my zeal to rid the laptop of 18.5 GB of log files so that we could go "Oooooh...Aaah...that's better" I opted to delete the files without analyzing any of them, so we don't know what happened. We are monitoring the situation to see if we see any future mad log growth.

Final Thoughts: A few

1) Our Publisher is running the Windows built in firewall, Norton Internet Security, and Zone Alarm. This is unnecessary and over kill. We need to decide which programs to keep. This reminds me of a visit I paid to a friend in the far distant country of New Jersey recently. She had a laptop which would not boot, and had been advised by CompUSA that the motherboard was dead. I played with it and found it would not boot because someone had improperly installed a wireless card driver. I was able to boot once I removed the card, upon which no less than 5 anti-spyware programs launched. The laptop barely crawled under the weight of unnecessary software. I chided her, but she was truly afraid of "Internet Attacks" and probably has reinstalled the software I removed.

2) Why did we have to download a program to view folder sizes? Why isn't this in the operating system? What programmer thought Eh, folder sizes, not important? when designing the Windows UI? Raymond Chen probably knows.

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June 20, 2005

We're Back

After a lengthy absence, Trigger Tech is returning. We aren't going to make any of the usual excuses for the long absence of posts....we were lazy, pure and simple.

ON the other hand, as our publisher remarked on a visit to Trigger Tech Central the other day, we are surrounded by toys, toys, toys and more toys, so we have a lot to share.

We have a real RSS feed now, since in this incarnation we are actually using blog software.

See you!

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June 19, 2005

Foetus: Love

by William Cate

Over the years Foetus, Jim Thirlwell, Clint Ruin, what ever name he is working under, has experimented musically with everything from catastrophic noise to big band, so on his new release Love it’s no surprise that elements of Sci-Fi film scoring would find their way into the mix.

Disturbed string arrangements normally associated with slasher films accompanied by French-style jazz vocals and his usual orchestra-from-hell arrangements make this one of the best Foetus albums in years.

To appreciate Love you need to understand where this man came from. In the 80’s his various incarnations and musical experimentation have paved the way for what we now know as industrial music. Thirlwell, along with Al Jorgenson of Ministry were doing challenging work, mixing computers with noise, big band with hardcore way before the likes of Marilyn Manson or Trent Reznor knew how to push play on a drum machine. Where as Ministry went for a hardcore, speed metal sound, Foetus was far more experimental, incorporating dysfunctional jazz and sing along choruses. Thirlwell also spent a fair amount of time collaborating with fellow ‘No Wave’ musician and sexual terrorist, Lydia Lunch. Together the two recorded albums like Stinkfist and The Crumb, both of which pushed the limits of their medium and at times, tested the patience of their fans. Just the way we like it.

Those sides of Jim Thirlwell and a few others are present on his new release, a collection of his most ambitious and dramatic work in years. Love should not disappoint any old fans but once again, he may be too experimental and intelligent for a mainstream audience. Love is challenging, smart, aggressive music in a time when we are dominated by pointless, mindless music products.

The album's opener, (Not Adam), is characteristic of Thirlwell’s genius. The song mixes Psycho-esque violin elements with a drum beat reminiscent of Blondie’s Atomic in a way that only Thirlwell can pull off. By far the most impressive song on the album is Aladin Reverse which begins slowly, baiting the listener with its woozy, synth-harpsichord only to unexpectedly build up to what sounds like a death-march to Auschwitz, (and you know that Trent Reznor is bullshit he didn’t write it first). This album offers many dark corners that you will just have to explore on your own.

Twenty years into his career, Foetus still sounds fresh. Like most great artists the problem he faces is that mainstream audiences are blinded by the banal, sugar coated, punk rock they have been force fed. MTV hasn’t yet explained to their privileged punks how to appreciate someone like Jim Thirlwell and they probably won’t anytime soon. They will never know Jim Thirlwell exists and he couldn’t give a flying fuck.

On The Web | www.foetus.org

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June 5, 2005

Tiffany Bozic

by Liberation Iannillo

Tiffany Bozic works with contradictions, reality and illusion, natural and unnatural. Disproportionate women, seductive flowers and distressed birds fill the landscapes of the world she creates, a world that is neither dangerous nor entirely safe.

Working with acrylic paint and wood, Tiffany lets her materials dictate what their fate should be. “I have always had an immense and probably very bizarre admiration for wood. I always felt like I relate to the currents and movements of the grain. When I look at a blank piece of wood, I see something swimming around in the grain already, it isn’t so conscious,” she explains. “I am following something inside me that finds a resolution only after going through a physical transformation by bringing it into existence. This is a slow process for me, I really don’t have any control over it. Whatever it is, it’s much more intelligent than I am.” Bozic says the experience is very intense and that she only “follows the orders” to fully understand what shape these visions will take on.

Having grown up on a farm, Bozic looked for ways to articulate her background in her new urban settings of California. She welcomed the challenge of describing herself “to herself” using “the greatest contradiction I could find.” She does this by using two very separate mediums, “one being very natural like the old barns I grew up with and the other being acrylic which is very unnatural like steel office buildings.” Tiffany found the experience enlightening. “Now I see an airplane is just as much a part of nature as a flying bird,” says Bozic.

Nature and music are Tiffany’s greatest influences. “Bjork and the late Dr. Nina Simone have been a great source of inspiration for me,” says Bozic. “Not only musically, but also in the way they have completely dedicated their lives to passion and freedom for others to soak up. I have many things to live for, but I believe in some ways these artists and many more, gave me a sonic blueprint to create by.”

Not unlike Frida Kahlo, Bozic tries to make sense of complex and personal subject matter such as femininity, life and death. “I have one painting, Open Heart, that I have kept for myself. It was an amazing gift that came to me at a very dark, complicated part of my life,” she says. “A couple years ago, this vision took over me, completely removed me from my perspective, and changed the way I viewed myself and everyone else, with simplicity and compassion.” Another painting, The Offer, was the product of Tiffany’s feelings of guilt and sexuality. “The Offer then became the resting place of those feelings because I realized it was just a part of being a woman, and there is nothing wrong with sensuality, it is one of the most beautiful traits that we possess.”

Tiffany finds great accomplishment every time she picks up her brush. “Along with many of the workers of the arts, I carry this deep seeded instinct or need to communicate my perspective to society,” says Bozic. “I do not think this is necessarily a choice in all people, and it remains within the human condition throughout time. This is just as natural as worker bees pollinating flowers. Most of the time I love being a part of this cycle in nature, and I show my work because it wants to bloom out of other peoples’ hands as well, feeding creation – like homage to life”

On The Web | www.tiffanybozic.net

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