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!
Born the same year, supermodel Christy Turlington and I share a certain kinship. We’re often mistaken for each other in public or at parties (I know, Christy. Hilarious, right?) but she lets me know she’s a few months wiser than me. Alla time.
Saw this magazine ad with the tagline “Her heart. Her soul. Her beauty. Her scent.” Thought it needed a few more lines.
Her heart. Her soul. Her beauty. Her scent.
She strolled. She sprinted. She stopped. She went:
“You gambol, you laugh, you eat, you write.”
I thought. I smirked. I held her. “That’s right.”
Saw a fracture on my Kindle case.
Pressed on it to make the crack longer because I could.
Ate lunch at Burgerville, reading ‘Vamps and Tramps: New Essays’ by Camille Paglia for the third time since 1994. So, the essays aren’t that “New”, but I like reading about pop culture and harangues against the political correctness of 90s-era academe.
Order was brought to my table by a tall beefy guy with great self-assurance. He had a serious look in his eye. As he set the tray down he said: “If you need anything more from here you let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.” No irony. This was a point of honor for him. Felt like being in a mobster movie but without the racial caricatures.
The meal was tasty, and made even more satisfying knowing that if I wanted a sportscar or someone snuffed out, it could happen.
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!
On the Amazon Trail in Eugene, I saw two caterpillars today. One alive, one dead. A poem:
A long wooly caterpillar slinked o’er a jogging trail.
Its steady undulations puffed “I cannot permit a fail.”
It focused its ambition on crossing to the low cool green,
And got there, relieved now to be beyond the human scene.
A shorter wooly, charged one-third the way, gasped, then upturned.
Feet to the sun, its plumpness biding pick up by a bird.
Drying, its spirit whispered as it passed our mortal sight:
‘I burned life’s candle at both ends, and gave a lovely light.”
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.