Weirdo turned pro.
Andrés 3000 from OutKast (and effectively a solo artist): enough with your primping razor commercials with professional squinter Adrian Brody and that cuddly Spanish actor. You’re so fresh and so clean, we GET IT, but we don’t like you for your grooming. We like you because you’re funny and funky in your music.
Get back in the studio and make another album. Take in Big Boi if possible, or not.
I have no idea whether Billy Joel has recorded an album in the last thirty years. The Billy Joel I know has a weird chip on his shoulder about being disrespected by critics in the late 70s and 80s for, I guess, not being Paul Simon?
New York already has a Paul Simon. It only needs the one Paul Simon. I don’t see Billy Joel falling into a sustained melancholy like Paul Simon, or at least ENJOYING the melancholy like Paul Simon. I would go eat pizza with Billy Joel without thinking. I’d have some hesitation about eating pizza with Paul Simon, though I have more of his music.
The Nylon Curtain is a favorite album. I haven’t listened to it all the way through since the 80s. The songs aren’t all great, but even as a kid listening to it on cassette what was appealing was Billy Joel making an effort to stretch. “Goodnight Saigon” is a moving song. “Pressure”, thinking about this right now, might have been inspired by Peter Gabriel. Especially the video. Oh shit. I may have to go on a walk after posting this.
“Allentown” is a hallmark song for Joel. Listening it today it’s still pretty great, and he marvelously adds seven or eight syllables in the first word of “restlessness was handed down”. He may STILL be in the studio in the middle of pronouncing “restlessness”. I remember reading in Rolling Stone mentioning the people in Allentown, PA not caring for the song. That saga is interesting.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a horrible fucking song. Not a horrible song for fucking (that too), but on the all-time list of awful songs. Bottom five on my list. Baby boomer apologia. If reading the mention of the song compels you to listen to it, you got a Google or iTunes, go for it. I won’t link to it. I love you way too goddamn much to be that conduit.
“You May Be Right” is a future karaoke song for me. Once done, I may expire fully content. Joel’s performance below gets cut off before the finish. He is a major dorkus malorkus here, unclear whether he knows that or if he thinks he’s being menacing. Whatever he’s doing, he’s OWNING it here, which deserves RESPECT, you mook, and you may laugh when you start viewing this, but when it ends abruptly you will feel blueballed/ovaried!
Part of the storytelling chocolate genre: this mediocre morsel packaged with a mini trading card about the Baorisa Moth, “arguably the most beautiful of the Noctuid moths, resembling an Art Deco, Piet Mondrian creation”. Even the Intelligent Designer is an art critic. No bug flavoring detected. Alarmingly, no ingredients listed, though cacao is referenced.
Dropped off maybe 40-50 pounds of clothes at Goodwill today. Part of the acceptance process that the 90s will not be coming back (my closet and personal history: “thank gawwwd!”).
1.) Several shirts I held onto for years because they were expensive and I liked the colors. There’s a difference between admiring colors from a distance and wearing something that makes you look like a pack of Fruit Stripe gum.
2.) My t-shirts breed like Tribbles. I’ve tagged the remaining t-shirts to track their movements and figure out what the heck they’re doing.
Seems like superstition is the only thing that makes objection to a work of art homocidal.
A few years ago, Danish cartoons skeptical about Islam and Muhammad led to death threats, attacks, and death. Now many people have lost their minds over a YouTube movie critical of Islam. Riots. People dead. For what? Superstitions.
On February 14, 1989 Iranian cleric and ruler Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeni ordered a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, author of the new book The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was a sentence of death. Khomeni offered the bounty out of his own pocket.
Did Khomeni actually read the book? Probably not. A mild book. A fatwa is not issued against non-believers. Rushdie, who grew up Muslim, was an apostate. THAT was worthy of death. Khomeni was also contending with a raft of shit for hundreds of thousands of Iranian deaths in an ongoing battle with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Wrestling with the ambiguities of war and fading public relations? Declare a holy war against a straw man!
Rushdie lived under death threats for many years. Publishers and translators of the book were attacked and left for dead. Why? Superstition.
And many significant figures in the West were of little help. Rather than defend the right to free expression, several thought Rushdie brought the misery and mortal peril upon himself for seeming to challenge superstitious beliefs. “Respect of faith” was deemed more importance than free expression. Examples:
“I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for.”
– Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury
“Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.”
– Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of Great Britain
Ecumenical attacks on free speech are not a solution. Superstitions make people think they are no longer bound by the social contract or the law. Superstitions cause people to believe that misbehavior in this life will lead to eternal reward in the next life. Misbehavior in this life can be a fine thing, but eternal bliss is false. Its touted rewards tend to be numbingly dull or tellingly revenge-driven and tawdry.
I’ll take bad art over sloppy books claiming magical powers any day.
But, hoo-boy, by this THIRTEEN MINUTE MOVIE TRAILER this movie looks like an unholy mess!
Bradley: His Book, 1896, by William Henry Bradley, NYC Metropolitan Museum of ArtHad a spare hour yesterday, spent it writing in a hospital cafeteria. My first productive period in a month and a half. Felt good to be in a hospital out of volition. No cause to visit anyone, or to get treatment. No vigil. Taking agency against amoral Nature. Did you feel the burn, there, physical entropy? Did ya? Sure, the eventual victory will be yours, but to rage, RAGE against the dying of the light, yesterday gave off a lovely light.
A couple lines of musty doggerel yesterday stuck in my head yesterday. In the gym today, I tried to find something to chase that away. Scanning my iPod, found “Seascape” by Stephen Spender. The catch? The track is named “Seascape” on the iPod, but it was “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great” that I listened to over and over. Let that be a warning about the integrity of bootleg poetry tracks downloaded during the Napster heyday of 2000-01.
I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great
Stephen Spender
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
Driving with the kids for about two hours today, we listened to Lady Gaga and Adele. Putting them on means the kids keep the headphones off. We shifted to ‘West Side Story’ in the last 20 minutes.
“Paparazzi” came on, and I visualized (while still driving safely) the three moments in the video I like the most.
1.) Malady-afflicted celebrity bravely and stylishly taking to the red (okay, lavender) carpet on crutches (2:54 mark):
2.) The Mickey Mouse ensemble with plastic/wax lips she has when poisoning her attempted murderer (5:45 mark):
3.) Dishevelled sass when getting her mugshots at the police station (7:16 mark):
The full video for your convenience (all about saving you the keystrokes in a search engine):
A fast entry because I’m tired of a squirrel carcass being the toppamost post. Here’s a photo of Marilyn Monroe reading ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. One may snort derisively. Remember Monroe was married to esteemed playwright Arthur Miller. She likely enjoyed the book. Also this photo is adorable and brainy and hot.
I’ll miss this guy. He was sometimes full of horseshit, but when others claimed he was full of horseshit often they were proven to be wrong. So allowance must be given.
He tended to bring out the worst in people who weren’t confident in themselves. Interviewers/journalists suffering from what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence got con-testy with Vidal, which he would detect and throw back. The best interviewers were fine in their own skin and ended up in decent conversations or giving him good setups for his lapidary phrases and tales.
He loved his country, his republic, with a deep love that meant always wanting better, and wanting to ward off its perceived decline by calling out when it had more pomp than substance. No, that’s way too buttery. He saw our country as a Miss Havisham, and described her past charms and decay in great and savage detail. If he had a magic wand to restore her vitality he would, but he knew woefully no such wand was available.
Feeling sore about both Vidal and Christopher Hitchens dying within a year of one another. I doubt I’ll be as deeply eager what any other public figure, or eager to be suprised by what any other public figure thinks.
Chronically elegiac with a zest lit from a core of hope.
The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then procees in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.
— Simon Schama
Sofonisba Anguissola was a famous female Renaissance painter. I hardly know anything about anything, and had never heard of her (or didn’t recall her). A book I’m reading about art and design went into a little detail about her life, and mentioned this portrait she did of herself as if painted by her mentor Bernadino Campi. I looked it up online. Though taking a painting in via computer monitor (actually, a smartphone) is awful with often terrible renditions of the colors and textures, this image made me laugh while eating in a restaurant. Then I felt really won over by the personality and wit of making us regard the painting as if we are Anguissola ourselves.
Self-Portrait with Bernadino Campi, by Sofonisba Anguissola
Sometimes when apprehending a work of art, it goes SPLAT on your consciousness and you can detect at that moment its effect will stay around with you. This was one of those moments.
Several months ago, I felt a need to dea with a portrait by John Singer Sargent by trying to write out a scenario that was part of a dream I had. During a hasty four-hour museum drive-by in the Art Institute of Chicago (airport layover) the painting held me in place in aesthetic arrest. Museum visits usually go way too quickly – wanting to witness everything in a compressed span of time. Taking mental (or camera) snapshots, but not having time to let the art in to be apprehended.
Good art is sticky.