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 44 years.
See. When he was remaking counterculture history…
Then compounding, documenting it as a kind of scripture…
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 4-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, 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…
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly Horror Show Squared More ... More
Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in whic
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards. There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’. This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The original site
Cover of U.K. Edition, 1991 Manuscript Submission, The Boomer Bible It is time to republish The Boomer Bible. The book is more relevant to the body politic now than it was even when it was first published. Your instructions call for complete manuscript submission. Here that is, in three forms, plus a depth backgrounder: The Boomer Bible (Full screen view available, May load slowly) http://TheBoomerBible.com (Three testaments including LIVE Intercolumn Reference) The Boomer Bible (physical hard copy; Amazon sells them as they periodically acquire them) The Boomer Bible Website (The original archived background site, not originated by the author but by students of the book) The book also has its own Wikipedia Page . My cv . The Boomer Bible is officially out of print, no longer offered for sale by the original publisher, who offered the book for nearly 30 years, selling out the the original 88,000-copy print run before withdrawing the title. The rights have therefore reverted to
Funny as hell and deadly serious Let me begin on a note we can all agree on. There is a time in our teen lives when we imprint on popular music. What we were listening to during the dramatic changes in our bodies, social lives, and aspirational identities stays with us, regardless of what we come to value and treasure later in life. Everyone has those certain songs that are foundational chords in their lives, and they respond physically to even a few notes of the recordings that gave rise to their libidos and, well, self . Two not unrelated things. This is a constant and nothing new. There are Sinatra imprints, Elvis, Beach Boys, Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Stones, Who, Doors, Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Pink Floyd, James Taylor, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, James Brown, Rick James, Springsteen, Metallica, and on and on and on imprints. (Apologies to the imprinters in Country, Disco, Jazz, and Blondie/Madonna Pop, have my own chords there too.) I never judge those. We just all
There’s a Mighty Old Name on the Scene For the past half century or so, the University of Pennsylvania has not been treated as an equal in the Ivy League, let alone the CHYOS Club. Here’s a telling true story. At a recent Penn-Princeton basketball game, the Quakers had an insurmountable lead in the closing seconds, and the girlie-boys of Princeton started chanting, “Safety School…! Safety School…!” For many years, the preppy feeder schools for the Ivies with the toughest admissions standards had reliably used three schools as fallbacks (i.e., Safety Schools): the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Penn. A similar discrimination situation obtained with law schools. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and later Stanford got first pick, and Penn somehow occupied a lower rung. Here’s a direct quote from the website ‘wordhistories’ about the mutating epithet “Philadelphia Lawyer”: The proof of this evolving lack of respect can be found in the history of the Supr
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