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…
How this post came to be. Saw this promo from the wrecked icon called the New Yorker and was reminded of a post put up here some months ago: Why didn’t I crop out the squatting woman? Truth in advertising. That’s not true, actually. In fact, it’s a lie. I wouldn’t have stumbled on this lovely screenshot if it weren’t for an image I’d used in a Facebook post some days before: You won’t believe this, but while Iwas posting the pic just above, my wife showed me her ROFL pic from the The Babylon Bee… …Which is obviously directly relevant to the rantings of the Glasser person who thinks everything Trump has ever done or will do is a mortal sin against the Manhattan scripture called The New Yorker. Don’t get me wrong. I used to love The New Yorker. Then they surrendered it to the Smart Women, under the subscription-shrinking stewardship of Tina Brown, whose legacy has led gradually to the dollar-a-copy pitch shown in the first graphic above. Today’s mag looks a like the old one, but tha...
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...
I’ve been at sixes and sevens about this post since I knew I had to do it. Even had a hard time picking the leadoff graphic. This one does convey the idea of questioning the decision by a great man of senior years. But this one introduces the notion that Philip Glass’s principled stand is one that has been sponsored by indolent dilettantes who didn’t give a fig about the Kennedy Center during the decades in which it has been literally falling down. Falling down. Along with all the forms of high art the Kennedy’s were trying to inspire with a facility for culturally significant performances by the nation’s most gifted artists. Interesting and ironic that they choose the 87 years Philip Glass to deliver their most stinging blow against the unspeakable privately financed renovation of the crumbling building and its wayward preoccupation with niche artistes. Am I getting ahead of myself here? Did you miss the story when it broke? Lawrence O’Donnell, the left’s fantasy Dean of Jeffersonian ...
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.
HINT: It’s more than flashy hair. President John F. Kennedy now resides in a curious limbo. He was briefly the face of the Democrat Party as it wanted to see itself in the post-WWII era. In hindsight he was an anomaly in the party’s history. Before JFK, the most prominent Democrat Presidential contenders teetered between the crude (Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Harry Truman, Al Smith) and the unashamedly elite (Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson). JFK was an interesting hybrid of both. Like Al Smith, he was a Roman Catholic, like FDR a graduate of Harvard College. His lineage also had its disreputable side, with a family fortune reputedly acquired by bootlegging during the Great Depression. Backed by that fortune, he became famous and successful at an early age but was criticized as callow and rumored to be a philanderer in his first years in the Senate. When he became a presidential candidate, he was a clear brea...
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...
R. F. Laird of Yardarm University “University of California-Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed the radical idea for a post-election commission to censor speech and name and shame every public figure who supported President Donald Trump’s rise to power. He wrote on Twitter over the weekend that “when this nightmare” — or Trump’s presidency — “is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” In response to the tweet, several Twitter followers agreed and even raised the stakes of his proposal. “I am thinking more of using the postwar Nuremberg Trials as a template,” one Twitter user wrote, speculating that criminal trials should be in order. “Felonies were committed as were treasonous behaviors. The guilty should be arrested, tried, convicted and f...
The Mark Hamill thing. A matter of puzzlement to many people. I have an idea about what’s going on with him, which I’ll explain because I’m thinking most people are just chalking it up to projected career disappointments. Which is part of it but not all of it. I know that the language issues surrounding the topics I’ll be touching on are prohibitive, since words no longer mean what they used to, but I’m just laying it out here and everyone is free to take it or leave it as they choose. There’s an easy answer and a deeper answer. The easy answer is just scratching the surface but should show the value of common sense in a long-distance analysis like this. Easy? For Hamill, Trump is a stand-in for Harrison Ford. Looked them up. Ford is 6’1”. Hamill’s bio claims 5’9” or 5’10” though the claim is challenged by those who say he’s more like 5’7” give or take. It’s not political, the Trump hatred. Not really. The TDS mania that pervades Hollywood was an attractive nuisance just waiting f...
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