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…
T his post was last updated at 11:40 AM, Sunday, April 6. Latest post is “I think I might be a Grimm. ” NEW: Volume II of “ The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon ” has been added in to the original 2020 post. 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 made my own pilgrimage there once in my youth to have drink in t...
UPDATED MARCH 15, 2025, with the addition of Volume II below. 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 rea...
Most people don’t know that when I wrote The Boomer Bible , I wrote more books than I included in the final version. This is one of them. I dug it out because for some reason I’m starting to get Facebook notifications of provocative posts from objectivists (i.e., Randians) on my Friends(?) list, which is a little surprising to me. I don’t remember adding them as friends, but when I look at their Friends lists I see all kinds of names I don’t expect to see there, including people like Breitbart’s John Nolte and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. It’s okay by me that the Randians have friends in common with me, and I feel bad about banning them just because I think Rand is only valuable as a juvenile rite of passage in developing an individuated consciousness. Which is a kind way of saying that I believe she’s a writer good minds should outgrow in their early twenties at the latest. I’m sure she meant well, but her understandable underdog assertiveness has become an unpleasant ...
Click on the pic. It leads to a post describing a Tom Hanks skit on SNL. That’s what this post is about. More precisely, it’s about who this very fortunate man really is under the greasepaint. He’s not James Stewart. Have you clicked and read the story about Hanks pissing off half a country that’s always wanted to love him? The caption might be a little overstated, true as it is, but it’s only one of three things this post is about. Tom Hanks, sure. But also the fact that I’m thanking him at the moment for making me do some long overdue reclamation work on a piece that has been effectively lost for a couple years now. I’ll get to the third thing later. The stupid Hanks performance reminded me that I had written a satirical piece about him that got effectively lost when one of my biggest blogs suddenly lost all its formatting in some administrative change by its provider, who were still billing me but could not be reached for troubleshooting services. They’d been...
The spelling authority relied on here is from the U.S. Gazetteer in Shuteye Nation , which is also the source, by omission, that Rode Island doesn’t even exist. Not a Constitutional Crisis? What is it then? A judicial coup attempt launched by 6 shopped judges in 3 states, plus DC. Actually, only two states, since ‘Rode Island’ is just a Brahmin trick to give ‘Machusetts’ four senators. Of the judges, three are wymyn, three are myn, however these are defined anymore, three have Harvard law degrees, two have law degrees from anti-Christian formerly Catholic universities (one law degree doesn’t even count because it’s from Uhio), and all are left-wing Democrats. Two kinds of proof are offered here. One is derived from an ancient ritual practice called Logic, presently either unknown or odious to post-modern ‘Progressives,’ who need nothing more than the right drug regimen to arrive at the ephemera they describe as Truth and Justice. The other proof will be visual, wh...
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 orig...
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