Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
What Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story”
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MICK JAGGER & THE ROLLING STONES
I’ve written at least a book’s worth of posts about The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger in my own 55 year writing career. Done a lot of philosophizing and literary analysis about him. Tagged him as an unconscious genius based on all the tales of him writing what would become deathless lyrics in a limo to the studio on a recording day. Learned he was a voracious reader in his concert travels, couple books a week. Wanted to meet him, never wanted to meet him. (Kind of how I feel about Donald Trump. Both ostentatious sybarites, both recipients of a gift not entirely different from the one I received when I wrote The Boomer Bible.) But I met Jagger long before I met Trump. In a closet in the boarding school room I shared with my Russian Jewish roommate who was staying up all night reading Dostoyevsky while I was staying up all night reading Ayn Rand. Together we found an LP in our disastrous closet with obvious scratches and no album cover. It began our affiliation with the Rolling Stones. “Got Live If You Want It.”
The scratches were obvious on the surface. But the LP played on and on…
Decisions we make are important. We both became ardent Stones fans in 1968 and 1969. My Dostoevsky roommate preferred “Let It Bleed.” He inclined to “Gimme Shelter.” But I already knew “Beggar’s Banquet” was the most important album of the rock and roll era to date. For just one song. My roommate and closest friend ever was dead at the age of 40. He was the only one of my friends who recognized how important The Boomer Bible was. He volunteered to lend me large amounts of money to survive to the next book. I turned him down because I was too proud to accept help. Then he died.
The song? My only point here. Sympathy for the Devil. The titanically most prescient critique of where we were at that precise moment of time and where it would lead.
Fuck the Beatles. Jagger saw it all and told us who we were and where we were headed. The original recording…
The only one. He made history while he was mocking it. In fact, mocking history by making it. Fucking Evelyn Waugh in makeup..
Maybe you prefer it right in your face. And, yes,
that’s John Lennon in the audience, paying court
to the real King who’d outlast him by 50 years.
See. Back when he was remaking counterculture history and the only controversy was whether Mick Jagger was ugly or beautiful. Like Lucifer, he was both.
Then compounding, documenting it as a kind of scripture…
The original album title was “Who Killed the Kennedys?”
Answer buried till they spelled it above.”You’re to blame”
All of this a way of reminding you what you once knew and forgot. Lennon wrote a scripture of death called “Imagine” and died without its ever meaning anything other than superannuated teenage angst. I have seen Sympathy for the Devil as a theatrical barn burner half a dozen times in my life, and it is always a moving experience. A demigod on top of or underneath the stage in front of thousands of people challenging us to make sense — accept responsibility — for what is going on in our lives.
In the world I created, there was a band called the Shuteye Train, who woke up maybe 1,500 kids, turned them into warriors for civilization, and used their breakthrough quantum computer technology to escape into a hole they pulled in after them. They were even bigger than the Stones, but we can’t remember them because we have lost our ability to see through the multi-dimensions of time.
Am I sad about that? Only for the ones who don’t have the courage to seek and follow them into the 5-dimensional realm of time as it actually exists, not the frail plastic straw of a line that paraded as a tube when it was always so much more…
Parallel worlds exist. And most of them are funnier and more enlightening than you let yourselves see, hear, taste, smell, and feel…
Oh? Need a song? Try this one…
Yeah. The old ones, the ones who rely on wit and memory and learning, are gone. Now it’s up to the fighters. Because the enemy is implacable, ruthlessly monolithically female, and devoid of what any prior age would have called intelligence. Good night.
Still the single most important song in the rock era.50+ years later. Nobody but me can claim that…
It strikes me now and again. Can’t help it. Just try to control it… I’ve only done one thing: That’s all. I swear. Okay. Couldn’t help it. But’s that’s all. Really. I was working on my long postponed post about the best movies in the first 25 years of the 21st Century when this overpowering sense of ennui overcame me, and dissing the movies suddenly struck me as more important than debunking the big lies mass media tells about itself. Working my way through it… P.S. An old friend just checked in with an enhancement of my comic cover that blows mine out of the water. Couldn’t resist sharing it with you all. ________________________ Below the Fold What I had of the new/old post I was trying to finish: Keeping My Promise about the Best 21st Century Movies It’s that time of the year when movies are back in the news more than usual. The recent Oscars broadcast was chiefly notable for its record-low viewership, inane political rhetoric from the podium, and a crop of...
We, of course, were as offended as anyone by the President’s evident pleasure in being depicted as Creator of the Universe. His later insistence that it was just a plate of food that happened to have blond hair was disingenuous to say the least. There. That’s out of the way. Putting aside all the bluster about blasphemy by secular observers whose relation to religion is probably a checkbox item, I believe there is a real story lurking in all the feigned outrage. a neon flash of double standards. It’s a media story, probably meaningless to those who aren’t ancient enough to have witnessed Obama’s first year in office. He was kind of everywhere, on every news interview program, every newspaper headline, and every magazine cover. (For the youngsters in the audience, there used to be things called magazines with words and pictures in them. It was a big deal to be featured on their covers.) If you weren’t a big Obama fan — and maybe even if you were — this got to be kind of sickening a...
Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
*I’ve* never even had one of these. I’ll leave this one for one of you guys. Plenty of time to get this before Christmas. Here’s the EBay proffer for what’s called the ‘Pinback Button.’ The cute graphic treatment even includes the pin side. It you actually want to read a physical book that you can hold in your hands, put on your shelf, or give to some friend or family member who’d like to understand what happened to the Great American Experiment you can find a copy quite easily, still in time for Christmas, via the following retailers and others. Just search the ‘Shopping’ tab at Google for “The Boomer Bible” and you’ll find it. (If you’re viewing this on a tablet, you can read this graphic more easily by clicking on the pic and turning your device 90 deg counterclockwise.) I don’t make any money from your purchases obviously, but I feel like I’m doing a public service in showing you what’s out there. For example, here’s something that’s out there I hadn’t actually found till yesterday...
Today’s Hot Headlines: NY Daily News: Vaccinate All Kids—Rockland County Exposes a Weakness in NY Public Health Detroit News: Trump in Michigan—‘The Collusion Delusion is Over’ The Epoch Times: Spygate—The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump The Week: Joe Biden’s Endless Gaffe-Riddled Apology Tour Newsweek: John Brennan Spokesman Says Trump Defenders Are Failing to Accept Reality Washington Post: The Trump-Russia Collusion Hall of Shame Breitbart: Limbaugh—‘They’re Setting Up the Impeachment Now‘ New York Post: Mexico Warns, Mother of All Caravans Headed to United States CNN: Fact-Checking Trump’s Michigan Rally The Babylon Bee: Stopped Clock Named CNN’s Most Accurate Reporter
I first heard of Meidas Touch shortly after I joined ‘X’ in the wake of Musk’s takeover of the poisonous lefty site called Twitter. The lefties continue to be a dominating presence there, and even when freeloader Citizen Free Press links a decent post there, the first one or two replies at least are screeds by the kind of crayon-armed haters who want all Republicans assassinated. CFP loves to indicate that outrageous lefty posts are ‘buried’ or ‘destroyed’ by MAGA derision, but this is usually an overstatement. Why I was occasionally moved to reply to the worst of them. The Meidas Touch editor Filipkowski was one of the first to tempt me to. After a quick review of the MT site, I told him it was the most egregious pile of vile libel made up completely out of whole cloth I had ever seen. (A permanent sidebar there declared that there are over 20,000 pending lawsuits against Trump for a variety of sex crimes.) I told him he was a disgusting cancer on the corpse of journalism that was sti...
A good catch by my wife is what started all this. As is our usual habit, we were watching something on TV older than the foul-mouthed, stunt-casted contemporary dreck when it rolled over into another older show called Grimm . I had heard of the series, maybe even seen some of it when it ran originally, and so we gave it a go. In the opening sequence our protagonist sees a young blonde on the sidewalk and as he watches her pretty face changes momentarily into a twisted monster version of her. Then it disappears and she goes to her car and drives away. That’s the premise of a show that ran for six years starting in 2011. The man who sees the transformation is, unbeknownst to him, a descendant of the famous Brothers Grimm who hunted down the monsters found in fairy tales. Here’s the scene I was able to capture later: Clumsy screen grab. Sorry. Don’t tell anybody. When the blonde woman did her quick change and vanishing act, my wife laughed and said, “Who knew that Pam Bondi started ...
Hot Videos of the Week New York Post: Why Kentucky Derby Disqualified Maximum Security in Stunner CNN: Plane Skids off Runway into River News Busters: Medley—Blaming Trump for Terror Attack and Paving the Way for Pete and Joe PLUS: ABC Can Barely Speak of 50 Year Low in Unemployment Desmoines Register: Elizabeth Warren Campaign Even Disrupted by Animal Rights Protest C-Span: Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham Reacts to Barr Hearings ABC News: House Judiciary Chair Gives Ultimatum to A.G. Barr, Could Charge with Contempt Breitbart: MSNBC Panel—‘We Can Handcuff People Who Ignore Subpoenas Media Research Center: Tutorial on Media Bias [ bkgd ] CNN/Van Jones: Chelsea Handler—Trump Was a Personal Trigger for Me Power Line: This Week in Pictures—Close Down the Barr Edition VIDEO ARCHIVE BONUS: New York Daily News: Inside Old Abandoned City Hall Station _______________ Ed. Not...
Haven’t been here for a while. Cooling my heels on maybe half a dozen posts for which I have content materials assembled and the writing just awaiting the typing I don’t feel like doing against the relentless pass rush of AutoCorrect/AI. Stranded, I guess. My principal emotion is akin to what I felt back in 2019, when I took a year off from this site because who can write about dread every day? Like then, my mind is telling me the Dark Age is upon us because we don’t deserve to be saved from the fate our enemies intend for us. They’re brain-damaged sociopaths; a near majority of us are just brain-damaged. Good guys and bad guys both done in by appalling lack of education and undeveloped consciousness skills at foreseeing consequences from a Universe-of-One perspective. I don’t like gas prices at the pump, I don’t like the way Trump talks so mean, and the Iran thing I just don’t get, so I won’t vote this time. Fine. We get what we deserve as a nation. That’s the real American Way. No ot...
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