Got to thinking about the Stones for some reason

Haven’t looked at them for a long time now, closing on two years. Mick’s too old to be a sex god anymore. #metoo. Though I heard somebody’s missing. But memories fade away anymore these days. The red circle is Charlie Watts. Best rock drummer ever. He should phone home. Not nice to keep loved ones waiting.

Great story about this record. Showed up in my prep school closet.
Played for years with plenty of scratches but not a skip. Providence.
How I met The Rolling Stones, the only satirists good as me in 1968.

Brings tears to my eyes. Kind of. That unfortunate Beatles phase did no credit to no one. Oh well. Why does this face keep swimming into my ken?


I know. They’re saying he’s dead. Join the Club, Charlie. Three of your best Stones efforts:





Had his own jazz band. Also beat out this Stones rap.

He wasn’t handsome. Sharp, clean face. More like a red eft (ferret) than a porcupine. 


My private name for him was Sredni Vashtar. But I’m old and failing myself. Just watch him.



The last time Charlie was a Rolling Stone.

Where Charlie is, I’m sure.

Something to finish with.

So don’t pay. Try this instead.

Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.

Then there’s this. Sorry. I didn’t bring up the Stones. Monica did. Now everything goes to hell in the Postscript:

P.S. I’m still getting over Bowie dying. He wasn’t allowed. Even if he reminded me of me.


I get confused. Sometimes I’m Jagger. Sometimes I’m Bowie. The girls used to think I was David. Imagine the identity crisis with this:


At one moment I’m this, all finessed and polite…


And then I’m all up in her face…


Feel compelled to show this one:

30 years later, I even have a website.


Getting  to the down-and-dirty family stuff.


Little TG, little Rap, what’s not to like before everything went to hell.

Because all families are dysfunctional these days, and here’s the thing about me.

 I can be Tee-Gee 
For fun and bonhomie 
But that ain’t me.
I a he-man writer be.

Truth is, I remember the night Elvis died. Almost 50 years ago. Stayed up all night to listen. Thought I should have done the same for Charlie. Thought better of it, then did it by accident. 

 
Stayed yo all night when he died. Like I just did, again.

Good night, Charlie.




Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

My World and Welcome to It

Image
     This post was last updated at 10:45 AM., Sunday, September 21. Latest entries are “A Comparison Not made,“ “An American Turning Point,” “A Mission from Gahd,” and “For Those in Hell,”  The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses. .. Undernet Black was updated September 21. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I m...
Read more

For those in Hell

Image
  Yes, I’m writing this because of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He was a good and brave man and I admired him. He was 31. Now he’s eternal. Since I am Christian and do believe in an afterlife, I am confident Charlie’s life has entered a new realm with new opportunities awaiting him. It is this to which I subscribe, as I believe many faithful do, not as susceptible as children to a constant heaven made of clouds and angels and long trumpets and hosannas to the One who cannot really be seen. If this makes me a blasphemer to some, I don’t care. Heaven as a gated community with a good view seems a limited and boring retirement from the excitements of life. To me anyway. Most of the problems people have with the concept of divinity are similarly small-minded and short-sighted. It’s human to keep trying to cut God and his domain down to size in ways that make him open to dealmaking or derision if that’s your preference.  Imagine that Heaven might be a roll your own kind of tr...
Read more

An American Turning Point, Part 1

Image
  This is not a subject we’ll be talking about every day. That’s why this post today. It’s a marker. You can come back here later to remember where things stood before Charlie Kirk was laid to rest. Everything will be different from now on, and this moment will be part of the subtext of what happens in other arenas where it’s not mentioned or regarded as relevant. As needed there will be Parts 2, 3, etc, but we’ll go on doing what we’ve always done here, talk about whatever we feel like talking about, by turns seriously and satirically, and when this particular subtext is relevant it will be noted by hyperlink, not renewed sermonizing. Yesterday, I posted the following at Facebook: The one big question that matters now... where exactly is the faultline in American conscience? How many to the left of the crack in our national soul and how many to the right? It was never going to be the case that the assassination of a major conservative political figure would meet with universal c...
Read more

The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

Image
This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...
Read more

With my fortuneteller hat on…

Image
  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
Read more

Hands Across the Water, Hands Across the Sea

Image
  People say the left has no heart. This is very far from the truth. They are full of love and empathy for everybody but the evil ones among us, and they are very Old Testament in their conceptions of Justice. They believe absolutely in the Death Penalty and Hell forever after, except for the ones who get oppressed by the evil ones for their color, ethnicity, gender choices, sexual promiscuity and perversity, body odors, excretory preferences, criminal propensities and other mental illnesses, and every form of weakness except being too small to live anywhere but inside a woman’s body, to which they have no right at all. With the exceptions noted, they love absolutely everybody equally, especially people who work for the government and famous rich people who agree with them about all of the above. Everybody acts like this is so hard to understand. It isn’t. It’s simple. You just have to have an eye for it. Know how to look for their heart and when they’re wearing it prominently on t...
Read more

Into the 9th Month of Trump 2.0…

Image
  The normal term of gestation is almost done. Apologies to Kubrick. What have we got to go on so far? What kind of President is 2.0 going to be? The 1.0 version was naïve about the extent of corruption and poison in Washington, DC. He got stabbed in the back a lot. Like most of us, he was not nearly suspicious enough of the massive healthcare/pharmaceutical complex and learned the hard way that their “science” is just as fraudulent and mercenary as the Climate Change Mafia. He got a lot done in the first term, but they were successful in removing him from power. What can we expect now. How different is 2.0? Here’s an assessment of who Trump has been since January 20. He is boldly but carefully revolutionary. I say carefully because he is playing the long game and when he drops a big rock in the water he lets the system absorb the shock and respond. People stung by his second term tweets overlook the fact that tweets these days are a frequent substitute for ignoring the law and for...
Read more

The DNC Response to the Kirk Memorial

Image
This is only a thought starter, because there are still a lot of balls in the air on this thing, but time’s a’wasting. The funeral is today, but the Memorial Event yesterday at Arizona U. Stadium is simply not something the out-of-power party can ignore or pretend never happened. This is what it looked like: This wasn’t a Trump campaign rally at some basketball arena. This was a double decker football stadium, every seat filled, plus an arena across the street watching the proceedings on a Jumbotron, with still others  lined up outside. Many speakers and one brand new star in the firmament, Charlie Kirk’s widow, who is no retiring house mouse. Except that she brought down the house in Phoenix and promised to keep going from here on forever. No two ways about it. She stole the show, and the thunder, from everyone, including  Donald Trump. Which makes people believe, maybe for the first time, that MAGA  won’t end  with him. That should scare Dems from here to Ireland ...
Read more

A Mission from Gahd

Image
  If you were to wake me at 3 am and ask, Who’s the star of the Blues Brothers  movie?, I’d say “It’s the Bluesmobile.” It’s 3 am in the morning now. Years ago I made up a list of the best American movies about America and ran it as a series on the original Instapunk website. I subsequently published it in 2018 as a Kindle book under an assumed name, because I didn’t want people to pass it up on the basis of their prejudices against me and my abrasive approach to things. It’s still available at Amazon. Illustrated and with a provocative concluding essay about Stephen Spielberg. It’s a good book and I recommend it. At about a hundred pages covering 35+ great movies for five bucks, it’s a cost-effective antidote for the dreck that’s being made and shown on the streaming services these days. One problem that’s been bothering me the past few days, though, is that it’s missing one very important milestone in American cinema. One that’s grown steadily in relevance as we have stumbl...
Read more

The CHYOS Superscript

Image
 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 ...
Read more