This one comes in solid second place.
This song is the best song on R. Kelly’s new album, for obvious reasons.
“Four letter words don’t make honesty alone, though they are often there in honest speech. You know that already.”
This is fucking beautiful.
Titles for Academic Critical Analyses of Steely Dan (As Proposed by Myself, My Friend Trevor, and Others in a Facebook Thread)
- "Rich and Nostalgic about Drugs and Women: The Economics of Smooth"
- "Why Sax Matters: Steely Dan and Buttery Saxophonics"
- "Why Katy Lied: Towards a New Hermeneutics of Suspicion"
- "Hey Nineteen, or, Neoliberal Erotics & the Death of the 1960s"
- "The Fez, and Other Prophylactic Euphemisms"
- "Echoes of Peg: A Michael McDonaldian Semiotics of Falsetto Background Harmonies"
- "When Black Friday Comes: The Biopolitics of Otherness in the American Jazz-Rock (re)Naissance, 1972-1981"
- "Five Names that I Can Hardly Stand to Hear: Homosocial Figurings of the Self and Their Anti-Feminist Implications"
- "Are You With Me, Dr. Wu?: Identity and Interracial Marriage in Asian Cultures"
- "Haitian Divorce: Diasporic Epistemes and Western Ethical Imperatives"
- "Pretzel Logics: The Figure of the Möbius Strip in the Work of Baudrillard, Jameson, Becker, and Fagen"
- "The Two Beckers: Human Capital and the Politics of Recognition of the Leisure Class"
If I were single and for some reason decided to start dating online, and on my hypothetical online dating profile there were a hyperbox dedicated to describing myself in some capacity, I would carefully type, “I like getting really fucked up by myself and watching art films on my laptop in the dark,” because, apparently, in those moments when I feel like I am in fact single, that is all that I really like to do.
“Dear East Village Eye: So far in your pages I have at different times learned that both Richard Hell and John Holmstrom invented punk, presumably also at different times. So I figured I might as well put my two cents’ worth in. I invented punk. Everybody knows that. But I stole it from Greg Shaw, who also invented power pop. And he stole it from Dave Marsh, who actually saw Question Mark and the Mysterians live once. But he stole it from John Sinclair. Who stole it from Rob Tyner. Who stole it from Iggy. Who stole it from Lou Reed. Who stole it from Gene Vincent. Who stole it from James Dean. Who stole it from Marlon Brando. Who stole it from Robert Mitchum. The look on his face in the photo when he got busted for grass. And he stole it from Humprey Bogart Who stole it from James Cagney. Who stole it from Pretty Boy Floyd. Who stole it from Harry Crosby. Who stole it from Teddy Roosevelt. Who stole it from Billy the Kid Who stole it from Mike Fink. Who stole it from Stonewall Jackson. Who stole it from Napoleon. Who stole it from Voltaire. Who stole it from an anonymous wino whose pocket he once picked while the man was lying comatose in a Paris gutter, you writers know how it gets when you’re waiting on those royalty checks. The wino stole it from his mother, a toothless hag who once turned tricks till she got too old and ugly whereupon she became a seamstress except she wasn’t very good, her palsied hands shook so bad all her seams were loosely threaded and dresses would fall of elegant Parisian women right in the middle of the street Which is how Lady Godiva happened Lady Godiva was a punk too, she stole it from the hag to get revenge. And Godiva’s horse stole it from her. Soon thereafter said horse was ridden off to battle where it died, but not before the Major astride the horse stole punk from it. The Major was a serious alcoholic given to extensive periods of blackout running into weeks and even months, so he forgot he stole it He forgot he ever had it Forgot what it ever was or meant Just like all of us. But one night in a drunken stupor he burbled out the age-old and Grail-priceless Secret of Punk to another alkie with a better memory. When the Major sobered up, the other alkie, a pickpocket and generalized petty thief, lied and told the Major that he, the pickpocket, had originally owned punk but that one night when he, the pickpocket, was in his cups the Major stole punk from him The Major believed this But later he got drunk and forgot all about punk again. So it might have been lost in one of the crevasses of history and John Holmstrom would be an aluminum-siding salesman door-to-door and Richard Hell would be pitching hay down from the loft of some midwestern farm where he was hired hand RIGHT AT THIS VERY MOMENT in which also I, creator of punk as I really shouldn’t have to remind you, would not be a rock critic and sometime musician to the irritation of many and pleasure of some enlightened folk but rather a senior poobah in the headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses over in Brooklyn Instead of reviewing Devo from the Voice I would be the author of the article “Springs—the Wonder Metal,” published in Awake! magazine sometime in 1978. And that too would be something to be proud of.”
As good a reason as any to do shit tons of drugs. The title says it all.
You’re welcome.
“Lou Reed is my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination.”
“As is well known, it was the Germans who invented methamphetamine, which of all accessible tools has brought human beings within the closest twitch of machinehood, and without methamphetamine we would never have had such high plasma marks of the counterculture as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’ Blue Cheer, Cream, and Creem, as well as all of the fine performances in Andy Warhol movies not inspired by heroin. So it can easily be seen that it was in reality the Germans who were responsible for Blonde on Blonde and On the Road; the Reich never died, it just reincarnated in American archetypes ground out by holloweyed jerkyfingered mannikins locked into their typewriters and guitars like rhinoceroses copulating.”
“Very early in our relationship, I detected in Girodias a marked disapproval of the style of dress of Alex and myself—a style that might best have been described as modest, if not indeed threadbare.
’In France,’ he said, ‘literary men dress correctly. Look at Camus and Sartre. You won’t see them without a necktie or a proper shirt.’
’Beckett and Genet don’t wear ties,’ I reminded him. ‘And neither does the great Hank Miller.’
He half closed his eyes and wearily tilted his head. ‘My dear boy,’ he lisped, ‘you have just named three of the most ne’er-do-well non gratas in all Paris.’
Although he admired and envied people as famous as those three, it suited his curious vanity to pretend that they were scruffy wastrels.
”
Books of Death →
So…who thinks that BHL has actually seen the movie?
There are books like that, said Paul Bowles; for me it was Tea in the Sahara, for him, On the Road, books of life that, in becoming cults, turn into books of death. Magical books that ultimately weigh you down, crush you, suffocate your desire to go on writing and living; books that damn…
Hey guys: it’s summer!
Last Tango in Paris, Part II →
With the end of every semester come new Andypants songs. I was going to call this first one “Text, Hugs, and Rock & Roll,” but I decided to change the title to “Last Tango in Paris, Part II” at the last minute. It is my first attempt at a jazz waltz in the style of Pet Sounds era Brian Wilson. Enjoy.
So…um…how did this happen?
Post prelim confusion.
(Note: this is perhaps one of the most emo songs ever written.)