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…
This post was last updated at 12:00 PM., Thursday, November 6. Latest entries are “The Blobfish Boomlet,” “Is there a curse in New York City,” and “A Big Missing Piece.” The Instapunk Times is hot of the presses [ NOV 6 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 6. 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 ...
Click the graphic above to watch the Rumble video Why this post? The last 48 hours or so have defined the beginning of a new phase in the adventure of Trump 2.0. Phase 1 was fixing the border, addressing the hot wars in foreign climes, and launching a new trade strategy based on tariffs. Phase 2 was not a restart but a new layer, the beginning of calling the criminals of Trump 1.0 to account, ramping up the deportation campaign in Sanctuary locations, and fighting back against the locally based judicial insurrection against the 2024 election of Trump and his Americans First policies. Phase 3 is another new layer, the immediate aftermath of the death of the Democrat Party in last night’s election results. I’m calling it the Blobfish Boomlet, because the outstanding feature of the Blobfish is that it is ugly and shapeless, flaccid inertness disguising itself with inflated media presence. Pundits insist we are looking at an ideological divide, a collision between two diametric...
I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
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It’s Halloween! The funnest day of all for a certain sort of dreadly person. The music is just to set the mood. Feel free to come back to it in between the videos below. We’re all about masks today, and looking underneath them to see what’s going on with the elite saviors we’re depending on. Take a look and have some fun yourselves. Predicted this predatory new strategy back in February 2021 The Trump comeback victory in 2024 flattened the exhausted patriarchy of the Democrat leadership. Young eunuchs seeking to replace the Bidens and Schumers and Durbins are out of luck, whether they know it or not. Schiff, Buttigieg, Jeffries, Walz, Booker, and the fashion mannequin Newsom are doing nothing but give the male sex an even worse image than it already had. He’s slim and lithe enough. Just not us enough. Who’s left? What’s left of the old matriarchy reluctantly giving way to the new blood, which is raising the pitch of the public debate to ear-shattering levels. Sad to see pioneers ...
Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ. Just asking the question. Because there is historical background, evidence, And repeated rumblings from our Jungian subconscious that’s afflicted with uncannily relevant visions. Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story. The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people: The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves. The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it. The Quak...
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