Raleigh Hatchet

Update: The Raleigh Hatchet is still dead. I’d love to tell you otherwise, but the central figure behind this legendary altrag is keeping mum. Plus, I haven’t actually asked him.

He’s got a MySpace page that looks like it hasn’t been updated since everyone realized how useless MySpace was for anything except promoting your band (i.e., several years now). Perhaps the Raleigh Hatchet can be found slipping through the cracks between Twitter and Facebook?

Perhaps we should simply let the Hatchet grow rusty and eventually disintegrate into the constituent matter, stellar in origin, from which we all arise…to one day return to formlessness and meta-conscious oneness with the totality of the energy in the universe which some have called the ineffable realization of the divine?

Perhaps not. It’s hard enough just trying to find online casinos accepting Visa, especially when you’re playing from the United States. Ever since the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, part of the SAFE Port Act, just one of the many seriously-flawed pieces of legislation that came out of the GWB era), fewer and fewer of the best online casinos have been USA accepted.

I know, I know, given all of the crazy situations and severe problems facing the world, this is not such a huge issue. See, I got perspective…but it also happens to matter a little to me, and we all need to start by making small changes in minor areas before we gain confidence and move on to the big stuff (especially because if we mess up, we won’t necessarily mess things up for a lot of other people).

The Raleigh Hatchet, that altrag well-loved by a self-selected chosen few, is no more. It has ceased to be. It has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-altrag.

Or is it? Not being a resident of the Raleigh area, I have no firsthand evidence that there is no resurgent circulation, perhaps in hastily-mimeographed form akin to the much-mourned communist leaflets of this time, last century…or like the show flyers of classic ’77 punk rock (may as well unite, you have nothing to lose but your chops). Maybe the message has migrated to a more 21st Century medium, and the once-beloved Raleigh Hatchet now shares cyberspace with the glorious online casino usa and other such forward-thinking endeavors.

I assume that there is no more Raleigh Hatchet — because otherwise how could the domain have come to me (for all the world sliding through the night like a working girl with an appointment to keep)?

Well, I know my limits… there’s no way that I alone could live up to the ineffable majesty of the once-reigning king (or other non-gender-specific mythic royalty signifier of your choice) of alternative art and literary journalism. I’d just be one man who has never visited Raleigh talking about art and music and stuff. And do we really need another of THOSE people on teh Interwebz?

So while we await the second coming of the Raleigh Hatchet, in whatever form the demon may assume, pray allow me to be your guide to tweaking the noses of disinterested respectability with superficial and un-involving cultural subversion. You’ll regret it, I promise…unless you like to play online slots, in which case you’ll love it to pieces.

Music! Literature! Fashion! Events! Arts! Crafts! Television! (am I leaving anything out? Uh…) food travel leisure recreation et cetera…no subject will be threatened less equally here. By the time you’re finished digesting my synthetic additives of hipness, you’ll be so freaking cool that white rappers will be jealous and art school girls all over the world will put pinups of you in creative collages on their dorm room ceilings.

And that’s a money-back guarantee, baby.