Buster thinks I belong to him.

Just to set the context. This all happened tonight. I don’t have a picture of the brand new magnetee, Mel, who threw away his mom in favor of me and lolled and purred until I made him stop.

Then there was Kiki, who’s a nasty little girl until she decides my lap belongs to her and her alone.

And Mr. Elliott, who patiently waits his turn because he’s always known my lap belongs ultimately to him.

Not to mention Eloise, who thinks my right hip is exclusively hers.

Iris too. The perfect white cat. What does she do? Waits till I’m sound asleep and occupies my lap till I wake. Not kidding. The missus will back all this up.

What should I say about all this? Nothing obviously. what life is like.

Thursday, January 22, 2009 [recovered from Archived Instapunk.com]

What its YouTube author is calling the ‘Post Barackalyptic Wasteland.’

JUST A BAD DREAM. Everybody copes in his own way. IP decided to think about other stuff and so generated his list of 25 movies about America. I chose another route, opting to find what media I could that was not all about the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln. No cable news. No newspapers. No newsweekly magazines. No women’s magazines (They’re just The View on slick paperstock if you want to know.). In fact, I thought, here was a golden opportunity to catch up on the specialized periodicals that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a change in the political leadership in the United States. Was I right? Judge for yourselves.

For example, everyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a motorhead. Years ago, I was a huge fan of Car and Driver Magazine, which once scandalized the automotive world by conducting a performance test of the Ferrari GTO and the Pontiac GTO — and preferring the Pontiac. I lost contact with C&D; for a few years during a sojourn in the midwest. When I left the east coast, they were vociferous opponents of airbags. When I returned, they were among the most fervent advocates of same. Apparently, the possibility that airbags could flat-out kill small women and children by functioning normally had ceased to bother them. But let bygones be begones, I thought. Maybe they’d be a palliative in the new age of messianic politics.

Not so much, really. Even the Obama article was disappointing. Apparently, the president doesn’t know how to drive a stick, and he has an anxiety attack whenever the highway speed tops 55 mph. Oh, and he positively loathes “Detroit Iron.” Who knew? But the editors found him charming, brilliant, and well-versed on the topic of hydrocarbons. They’re bad.

So I turned instead to Scientific-American. Surely they wouldn’t give a fig about the tsunami of rhetoric that was sweeping the ignoramus commoners of the nation.

When I read the cover article, I could hardly blame them. It turns out that Barack Obama does practically everything at an expert level (except, possibly, drive with a manual transmission). He can play five games of chess simultaneously and stalemate them all, while hitting the highest number of triple-word scores in Scrabble ever registered, and extemporize on the bleak philosophical implications of quantum physics as he’s writing a record third doleful autobiography and cleverly losing a game of dominoes to his two children and their fashion advisers. No wonder the magazine had to dedicate three-quarters of the current issue to his cerebral feats of derring-do.

That’s when I remembered National Geographic. The magazine that taught all American boys whose fathers didn’t subscribe to Playboy about breasts.

I’m not saying the cover article was uninteresting. But there were no breasts in it. And what does it mean exactly that a forensic reconstruction of Tutankhamen’s face from his shattered mummy looks exactly Barack Obama? There’s no particular indication that the boy king was an exceptionally able pharaoh. For all we know, the accomplishments of his administration were largely the work of the exceptionally able Speaker of the Egyptian House, Pel Osi, whose remains are on display at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum.

NOTE: Silicone implants don’t age well.

Besides, National Geographic isn’t what you’d call serious. You’d be hard pressed to find any teenage boys who subscribe to the Journal of the Amercan Medical Association, which always puts high art on its covers with absolutely no indication of what the content inside might be.

I suppose I should have taken a cue from the fact that JAMA’s post inaugural issue started all over at Issue 1, Volume I, signifying the beginning of the new era in free healthcare we could all look forward to from now on. But I didn’t. I tried to read the cover article. Which was all about how Hippocrates and Galen and Salk and DeBakey were just redneck asshole plumbers compared to the astonishing medical genius of the new president of the United States. I stopped reading when they claimed he could drive a manual transmission.

If you can’t trust anyone else, you can trust Popular Mechanics. Hardheaded realists all. Right?

Wrong.

So I figured there was one periodical so high toned, so snooty, so divorced from everyday reality that the very worst I might encounter would be Donald Trump’s latest makeover of his largest Manhattan penthouse. Architectural Digest does not care about the stray zephyrs of political fashion.

Which is when I gave up on periodicals. I turned on the TV again, but this time with an eye to the imperturbably irrelevant channels, the ones that couldn’t be topical if they tried. Like Nickelodeon. They do reruns of Star Trek, the real one, for God’s sake.

Something to do with warp drive. I know it is.

There had to be some safety somewhere. After all, what could anybody do to the Honeymooners?

He’s the president of the Raccoons or something. Something bad.

And so, before I even looked, I knew that the gush had reached I Love Lucy too. Which I never even liked in the first place.

She just LOVES him. Doesn’t she?

By then I knew. The TOON channel:

Spongebob has ALWAYS believed in hope and change.

And HGTV.

Bob Vila can feel the love, too. Obama is very handy with power tools. They say.

And even the Food Channel.

He can whip up an omelet or devise a masterly fruit compote. Paula Deen thinks he’s the best thing since chicken dumplings.

Drudge says the Obama inauguration got 35 times the worldwide coverage of the Bush inaugural. I’m pretty sure he’s misunderstimated the total by a bunch.

But I don’t mind. There’s only one icon that will send a chill to my bones. And we may be months and months away from that.

How does the line go? “Build it and they will come.”

Like a dead man.

posted at 2:40 pm by CountryPunk Permalink

Monday, January 26, 2009

OBAMATRIX REDUCTIO. Well. The short answer is that he hasn’t been tested yet. Maybe that’s what Biden was talking about when he warned of dire international challenges early in the Obama administration.I looked around for old-fashioned, low-tech gif animations just to be fair in my comparison. Here is the most popular one I could find that featured the new POTUS.

Yes, he’s having fun, but it’s not a One-ish type thing, is it?

And then there’s the inevitable dancing…

Which, I suppose, is cool, but does it really hold a candle to this?

Be honest. Don’t you miss the old (lowercase) one just a little bit already?

posted at 12:58 am by CountryPunk Permalink

Toward the end of 2018, I wrote a Facebook post on the concern I feel about the new popularity and availability of marijuana. I had been there in the sixties when it rolled out of the closet into the middle class, and I had firsthand knowledge of the fact that, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, “weed” was and is absolutely a gateway drug. I went on to identify a phenomenon that has been quite invisible in American culture, in terms of media coverage and general public awareness. Call it a dog that didn’t bark in the night, in this case the striking absence of Baby Boomers from the list of great creative achievers in writing, music, fine art, and film. A body of momentous work that should have been there and just isn’t. I wrote:

<<…and I’m asking myself a big question… what have they [the Baby Boomers] accomplished in the creative arts over two generations? From where I sit, not much.

Fine arts like museum quality paintings, forget it. Since Picasso dismantled the shapes and forms of art and Matisse proved only a few simple lines is all that’s necessary in drawing, Dali finished things off by proving a crazy artist is the key to the city. So there was Warhol and then no one.

Certainly nothing to write home about in writing either. The novel has been dead since the last drunken old fool typewriter-jockey passed away. But they managed to leave a lot behind… Faulkner, Waugh, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Hara, Cheever, Thurber, Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Raymond Chandler, et cetera. Where are the creative writers of today? Self indulgent and often sleazy autobiographical tripe, bad sci fi, cliched detective stories, graphic novels, and truly awful, incoherent, unwatchable movie scripts… well, nothing really. Want to hang your hats on Hunter S. Thompson, Quentin Tarantino, or Marvel Comics? Be my guest.

It’s a similar story with music. Most of you don’t know that the real creative burst in sixties and seventies rock, pop, and soul came from musicians born before the Baby Boom, before blacked out teenage bedrooms smelling of incense and fat kids with munchies. The impact of the great initiators has faded as they have died away through time. We all really know there’s no music left. No sense of adventure or real romance, nothing breakthrough or life-changing. Just auto-tune and scummy lyrics. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot — What people used to talk about when they were being bad with substances they weren’t supposed to have. Drinkers used to talk about all the wild stuff they’d done drunk and would be doing later tonight. Apparently a good many of them went on to write about such adventures and their consequences. Potheads talked, still do I suspect, about how good the weed is and how stoned they are. Then they do it all over again. Where are the Cheetos? I think that’s where the creativity of youth disappeared down the rabbit hole. I think that’s why people below a certain age really don’t have much to talk about, and they don’t know how to talk about it anyway. Never really did the talking thing. Or the doing thing. Or the damn-the-torpedos breakthrough thing. They had more Cheetos instead. And then dribbled out a Piss Christ or two on the way to the john.

Thinking all this has something to do with why people don’t read, can’t spell, can’t frame an argument in favor of some worthwhile objective… in fact, they think an argument is always about tearing down someone else’s stated opinion, like a good lawyer would, only they weren’t so hot at the LSATs either and so they have to argue by calling everyone they disagree with vile names.

I’ll stop there. I’m well aware of the span of attention issue. Have a great and relaxing evening. Ciao.>>

It was an observation by an eyewitness to the turbulent years that led to our own turbulent era. An observation that’s difficult to prove in factual terms. But data do exist, and it is fair to examine the data and draw personal conclusions from them. That’s why, with some prompting, I compiled the following list. Some will see only critical omissions and cherry-picked selections in the list. But a couple of hard facts I do want to stress. The Baby Boom is a very specific, dateable phenomenon. It begins precisely at the end of World War II in August 1945, in the United States specifically, when American troops started coming home to resume their lives, marry, have children, and launch an amazing new generation of American prosperity. The Boom officially ended in 1964 when birth rates returned to normal levels. The children of the boom were so numerous that they constituted, and still do, a bubble in the census timeframe. Theirs was a generation widely praised as the healthiest, most favored, most talented, most promising ever. They had all the advantages and their parents, members of the so-called Greatest Generation that survived the Great Depression and won WWII, were proud to death of them. Now let’s take a look at what they accomplished over 60-some Years in the creative realms where all that talent should have shone like gold.

The List

Dates shown are birthdates. Obviously more names can be included. Tried to focus on those who were especially brilliant, pioneering, innovative, and/or trend-setting. Left out the interpretive arts like acting, singing, musicianship, etc, which are in this context secondary in terms of creative contribution. No Denyce Graves, no Tom Hanks, no Joshua Bell. Necessary omissions.

Writing
– Novelists
– Narrative Journalists
– Playwrights
– Screenwriters
– Poets

Not much to be said here, really. These were the famous ones, the celebrated ones whose works topped the bestseller lists, as well as the ones who drew the warmest praise in The New York Review Of Books. Only two problems. 1) All those celebrated ones, fifty years worth weren’t Baby Boomers. The dinosaurs managed to kill both the novel and serious drama without their help. Even the most popular popular thrillers sold by the millions with no Baby Boomer contribution; and 2) Not even these guys came close to equalling the achievement of George Orwell, whose 1984 — published a year before his death in 1950 — was the most important book published in the first half of the century. It’s all been downhill ever since, which I believe he was warning us about in a book called 1984.

J. D. Salinger (1919)
Jack Kerouac (1922)
Kurt Vonnegut (1922)
Joseph Heller (1923)
Tom Wolfe (1930)
John Barth (1930)
Donald Barthelme (1931)
John Updike (1932)
Hunter Thompson (1937)
Thomas Pynchon (1937)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938)
Charles Bukowski (1920, Germany)
Alan Ginsberg (1926)
Langston Hughes (1926)
Maya Angelou (1928)
Sylvia Plath (1932)
Toni Morrison (1931)
Alice Walker (1944)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919)
Saul Bellow (1915)
Norman Mailer (1923)
ee cummings (1894)
Susan Sontag (1933)
Truman Capote (1924)
William Styron (1925)
Philip Roth (1933)
Samuel Beckett (1906)
Arthur Miller (1915)
Thornton Wilder (1897)
Harold Pinter (1930)
Mickey Spillane (1918)
John D. McDonald (1916)
Ross McDonald (1915)
Sue Grafton (1940)
Ann Rice (1941)
————————————————-
David Mamet (1947)
Stephen King (1947)
Patricia Cornwall (1956)

Music (Composition/Songwriting)
– Classical Composers
– Rock and Roll
– Country/Western
– Soul
– Jazz
– Movie Scores

Probably the most important category for our purposes. It’s the one the most people will be familiar with. The Baby Boomers have loudly and long taken credit for the creative music explosion that got underway in the late 1960s. Rock and Roll. Rhythm & Blues. Soul. Country Western ‘outlaws.’ Folk/Rock. Not much in Jazz, of course, because everyone knows heroin killed Jazz stone cold dead, and that wasn’t the Baby Boomers’ fault. Problem with this little thumbnail history is that the most important part of it isn’t true. You can’t avoid seeing the cluster of music star births in the years 1939-1944. These are not Boomers. They’re War Babies. And despite their much smaller numbers (dads away at war and all), they generated the Sixties Music Revolution almost all by themselves. And an incredibly high percentage of them were not Americans but Brits (marked * below)). The Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Animals, Led Zeppelin, and others shaped everything that happened afterwards in Rock and Roll. Which is extinct now as a medium that still produces great works. Like musical theater, rhythm & blues, classical music (including opera and ballet), and the aforementioned Jazz. Movie scores. All the greats that scored the big movies we watched are also out of commission and not being replaced except by derivative pop music bands. John Williams, Henry Mancini, and Ennio Morricone. Seen their heirs anywhere? What can the Baby Boomers legitimately lay claim to in terms of their contribution to music in the last 60 years? Maybe 15 pop musicians who will either be remembered or worth remembering.

Philip Glass (1937)
*Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948)
Stephen Sondheim (1930)
John Williams (1932)
Miles Davis (1926)
Chuck Berry (1926)
Bob Dylan (1941)
*John Lennon/Paul McCartney (1940/1942)
*Mick Jagger/Keith Richards (1943/1943)
*Roger Waters/David Gilmour (1943/1946)
*Jimmy Page/Robert Plant(1944/1947)
*Ray Davies (1944)
*Pete Townshend (May 1945)
*Eric Burden (1941)
*Eric Clapton (March 1945)
Jimi Hendrix (1942)
Elvis Presley(1935)
Roy Orbison (1936)
Johnny Cash (1932)
Leonard+ Cohen (1934)
Janis Joplin(?)(1943)
Joni Mitchell (1943)
Judy Collins (1939)
Carole King (1942)
Lou Reed (1942)
Jim Morrison (1943)
Jack Bruce (1943)
Grace Slick (1939)
John Denver (1943)
John Fogerty (1945, May)
Jerry Garcia(1942)
Nina Simone (1933)
Smokey Robinson (1940)
Marvin Gaye (1939)
Ray Charles (1930)
James Brown (1933)
Phil Spector (1939)
Otis Redding (1941)
*Freddie Mercury (1946)
*David Bowie (1947, Brit)
*Elton John (1947)
*Ozzy Osborne (1948)
*Bono (1960, Irish)
*Amy Winehouse (1983)
—————————————————-
Jackson Browne (1948)
Stevie Tyler (1948)
Tom Waits (1949)
Bruce Springsteen (1949)
Billy Joel (1949)
Tom Petty (1950)
Pat Benetar (1953)
Prince (1958)
Michael Jackson (1958)
Madonna (1958)
Jay Z (1969)
Tupac Shakur (1971)
Eminem (1972)
Lady Gaga (1986)

Fine art

Pathetic. Fine art is dead too. And no Baby Boomers anywhere near the scene of the crime.

David Hockney (1937)
Andy Warhol (1928)
Christo (1935)

Film

We all know movies suck, have sucked for decades. Why? The real talents retired or died. All pre-Boomer generation.

Gene Roddenberry (1921)
Sidney Lumet (1924)
Sidney Kramer (1925)
Robert Altman (1925)
Bob Fosse (1927)
*Stanley Kubrick (1928)
Francis Ford Coppola (1939)
Brian dePalma (1940)
Martin Scorsese (1942)
George Lucas (1944)
—————————————————-
Steven Spielberg (1946)
Oliver Stone (1946)
Edward Zwick (1952)
James Cameron (1954)
Quentin Tarantino (1963)

Afterword

The Boomers didn’t kill all the creative arts. In most cases they simply left them to die, with never an impulse or inspiration to pick up the fallen standard and raise the corpses back to life. They get participation trophies in the history of late 20th century popular music, but they offered nothing new, uniquely powerful, or vital for their peers and children. That’s the deal. However you mark it, their performance deserves a massively failing grade. Did marijuana play a significant role in that? Yeah. I think so.