The Janis Joplin I Knew

The Janis Joplin I knew bore little resemblance to the iconic version of herself that ruthless exploiters compelled her to portray so that the pockets of their Dockers® bulged with money. She wasn’t brash and coarse and from Port Arthur, Texas, but from a leafy New Jersey suburb whose identity no biographer has ever been able to ascertain. She was educated in the expensive fictional private school in Manhattan at which the young man in The Undoing is a pupil. She didn’t listen to Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as a child, but to Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, and, later, Aimee Mann. She didn’t have unprotected sex with Pigpen of the Grateful Dead, and didn’t guzzle Southern Comfort. Indeed, on one unforgettable occasion, she told me Southern Comfort was what alcoholics who couldn’t get hold of any rubbing alcohol might settle for. She enjoyed the writing of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. She enjoyed sherry, in moderation, and relaxed by crocheting.

Janis in 1982

After she faked a fatal overdose in a squalid Hollywood motel room in 1970 to escape the pressures of fame, she lay low, crocheting prolifically, and having two kids — Brad and Brie, as in the cheese — with her former wardrobe master, Howie.

Howie and I once wondered together if blindness might have certain advantages for a man. It would enable him to choose life partners on the content of their character, rather than on their looks. Many men deny it, but we all want gorgeous gals on our arms, as they make other men think we must not be the wastes of space we know ourselves, deep down, to be.

In any event, the woman the world had known as Janet Joplin came back into public view in 1981, with her own cable television program, A Piece of My Heart, in Lupus, Texas, not that anyone noticed, as she had reverted to her original name — Naomi Ishizuka —and was barely recognizable. In her Big Brother & The Holding Company and Me and Bobby McGee days, hers had been the ugliest hair in popular entertainment, but she’d had it styled at the Vidal Sassoon salon in Milan in 1974, and begun using Pantene® conditioner. She’d taken to wearing pantsuits in pastel colours, and to employing a makeup and hair person.

She invited no rock stars onto her television show, but instead interviewed the authors of romance novels, Republican operatives, and “Christian rock” stars. Noam Chomsky was on so often that they joshed about his becoming her Ed McMahon-like sidekick, charged with guffawing with delight at her every quip. She made small, below-the-fold headlines in 1982 when she tried to get Nancy Reagan to rebrand her famous antidrug campaign, from Just Say No to Just Say No, Thank You.recenOne got the impression that only a tiny minority of her guests or viewers recognized her as a formerly fire-breathing hippie chick hitmaker. She huddled with a succession of movie producers who wanted to make biopics in which she would be played by everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Nicole Kidman, but politely declined in every case. 

Having had much cosmetic surgery, Janis today, at 97, looks much younger, but in that weird, sort of disturbing way of people who’ve had much cosmetic surgery. She dotes on her adult grandchildren Shanté, whose aspirations to a career as a white rapper she has bankrolled since 1997, and Mistee, and occasionally sings at Lupus’s African Methodist Church. She is friends on Facebook with LaToya Jackson, the late Michael’s ever tinier-nosed elder sister.

Invited to assess Miley Cyrus’s recent brutalization of Heart of Glass, in which some observers thought Cyrus was trying to evoke her, Janis told this blog, “She’s very talented, and I wish her every success.”

Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares

Superstar restaurateur Gordon Ramsey arrives at the restaurant he’ll be saving in tonight’s episode, and lets fly an incredulous, censorious wow at — what will it be this week, the restaurant name? The shape of its parking lot? He swaggers inside and, bouncing impatiently on his toes in the way he has, twitching like a St. Vitus dancer who’s been sedated, he breathlessly advises key personnel of the restaurant, “Good to see you,” as he grabs, shakes, and lets go their hands as though he’s got a plane to catch. The restaurant’s proprietor, about to Lose Everything because of the restaurant’s precipitously declining popularity, beams joyfully at having met a personage of Gordon’s stature. 

Gordon is seated and handed a menu, reading which, he remarks, “Wow,” not complimentarily. RP assures him that everything on it is delicious. Gordon orders a great many things, and pronounces each, in turn, disgusting, or, at best, unfit for a cat. In a particularly good episode, he will be so disgusted by something that he will reach into his mouth, home of his million-dollar palate, and remove the offending morsel, half-masticated though it may be. There is no disdain in the world comparable to that Gordon feels for something the server assures him is fresh, but which he recognises as frozen. 

An embarrassed server, who has admitted to Gordon that he or she thinks the restaurant’s fare awful and the proprietor a clueless idiot or tyrant, takes each disdained dish back to the kitchen, and there gleefully informs the increasingly incensed chef and restaurant proprietor — usually with a happy, vindictive smirk — that Gordon found the dish inedible. Gordon amuses himself while this is going on by finding chewing gum stuck to the bottom of the table at which he is seated, or a worn out patch of carpet. “Wow,” he says some more.

The proprietor is summoned to rejoin Gordon at his table, and there is informed that he or she clearly knows nothing whatever about food. If a woman, she commonly bursts into tears of shame and hatred. Male proprietors commonly want to punch Gordon in his furrows, but Gordon’s big and pretty intimidating, maybe 6-3 and a former athlete, so many of them wind up settle for whimpering, or, in an especially enjoyable episode, bawling.

Gordon observes a dinner service. The kitchen staff is — surprise! — spectacularly inept. Customers are kept waiting interminably, and then sorely disappointed when their food is finally delivered. Many pronounce what they’ve ordered inedible, and ask their server to get it out of their sight. Gordon has never seen anything like it (at least since the previous episode of the show was shot), and covers his eyes in dismay. He goes back into the kitchen and implores the staff, “Come on!” in disgust. 

After a commercial, Gordon, now in his chef’s white jacket, is taken into the areas of the restaurant its patrons never glimpse. He finds many things that disgust him in the kitchen and in the refrigerator. Sometimes he retches, cinematically. Almost invariably he bellows at the proprietor, who is now four inches high, “Are you trying to fucking poison your customers?” At the top of his lungs, he orders that the restaurant be closed, and cleaned. He takes the proprietor aside and shames him or her mercilessly. There is no comparable sadism viewable anywhere on modern television, and no hatred in the world as great as the restaurant proprietor’s for Chef Ramsey.

But now, after more messages from our sponsors, they turn a corner together, as Chef Ramsey’s staff develops an Exciting New Menu for the restaurant. Featuring simple dishes that use wonderfully flavourful fresh ingredients. Gordon bounces manically on his toes as he reads the descriptions of the dishes his staff has given him. The restaurant’s staff samples the new dishes, and agrees that it’s never tasted anything more delicious. Gordon instructs the restaurant’s chefs in the preparation of a couple of dishes. They are awed by his prowess.

While the world sleeps, Gordon’s team remodels the restaurant’s interior. It rarely looks much better after the remodelling, but the viewer is meant to share the staff’s amazement and jubilation. Commonly the proprietor will burst into tears, having never imagined that his or her restaurant could be so beautiful, and embrace Gordon, who isn’t the monster he seemed. This part is always wonderfully sickening. 

Word has gotten around town that Chef Ramsey has transformed the restaurant, and it’s mobbed for its gala relaunch. One imagines everyone’s getting their meals free. The first served among them are delighted by what Gordon has taught the place’s chefs to cook, but then the kitchen, accustomed to sparse attendance, is overwhelmed. “Come on!” Gordon groans. The staff does so, under the direction of the formerly hapless diffident owner or manager, and gets the ship righted. The evening ends with everyone looking like the cat who ate the canary, canary’s absence from the Exciting New Menu notwithstanding. 

The restaurant’s proprietor has seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe he or she won’t have to declare bankruptcy, or ask the kids to start their higher educations at grubby little community colleges. Nothing in the world compares in immensity to his or her gratitude to Chef Ramsey. 

Who, now back in civilian attire, bounces on his toes, does his little St. Vitus Dance, and tells someone off-camera that the restaurant may have a chance, if the staff just continues to Work Together, and the proprietor doesn’t revert to being a feckless dickhead who knows nothing whatever about food. 

 

A Wonderful, Hilarious Joke You Can Tell People You Made Up Yourself!

A rabbi, the Pope, and a Muslim iman go into a bar. The bartender, who’s accustomed to serving people of faith, isn’t discombobulated, and says, “What can I pour you gents on this fine autumn afternoon?”

The rabbi says, “A glass of Manichewitz® pinto grigio I’ll have. Manichewitz® kosher wines have traditionally been almost undrinkably sweet, but there’s such a thing as cultural loyalty.”

The bartender says, “Coming right up,” and pours the rabbi’s wine. He slides the glass across the bar and asks the rabbi, “Do you know that Manichewitz®’s parent company since 1990 has been Bain Capital, the vulture capitalists that gave us Mitt Romney?”

“I didn’t,” the rabbi says, taking a sip of his wine and making the face people make when they drink something cloyingly sweet. “When he ran against Mr. Obama in 2012, I couldn’t stand him, but I’ve come to admire him as a result of his defiance of that gonif Trump.”

“Hear hear,” the Pope says, before informing the bartender that he’s going to have Scotch and holy water. The bartender says the bar’s supply of holy water won’t be replenished until Tuesday. The Pope chuckles and says, “Well, it’s a good thing I always bring my own!” He reaches into his raiments or whatever and produces a little vial of the referenced liquid. The bartender, relieved, mixes his drink for him.

The Muslim iman says, “Just ginger ale for me, my infidel friend, as the Koran forbids me to imbibe alcohol.”

The bartender pats his hand and says, “Not a problem, pally. We get a lot of adherents to Islam in here.”

The three men of God sip their drinks and watch the rain outside. The Pope, for the fun of it, proposes a blind taste test, with himself as judge, to determine whether the rabbi’s wine or the iman’s ginger ale is sweeter. The rabbi says, “Like fun that sounds,” but the iman, arching his eyebrow censoriously at the Pope, says, “I’ll pass.” 

 

 

 

Our New BLM and Antifa Neighbors Couldn't Be "Nicer"!

When me and Lurleen moved to [name withheld because: thanks anyway to death threats from libs!] last February, it was because the “sanctuary city” where we lived at had been overrun by Black Lives Matter extremists, Colin Kaepernick, and undocumented Mexican and Honduran drug dealers and rapists, abortionists, and re-apportionists. We thought a “leafy suburb”, as it was described in the glossy brochure, would be a much nicer place to raise the twins — Dukie, 7, and Darla, 6 — at.

We were right. For the first couple of years, our life out in Leafy, as I'll refer to it, was “idyllic”. The air was breathable and the water drinkable, and little Darla became a member of what we parents jokingly dubbed Hell’s Angelfood-Eaters, a group of 1^st and 2^nd grade girls with freckles who rode around on their bright pink Disney-branded bicycles selling little cartons of lemonade at a handsome markup and insisting on being allowed to help elderly “nursing home” shut-ins across the street, even if they wanted to stay inside staring catatonically at shrill television game shows and playing bingo on Thursday afternoons, after the local Girl Scout troop performed its program of Aimee Mann and Billie Eilish favorites for the umpteenth time. 

But then when the Dems “retook” the House of Representatives in 2018, and those four uppity non-white ones started “laying down the law” to everyone, a lot of what we had been told were undesirables started moving in. On one side of us, we suddenly had a Black Lives Matter family, the Joyners — dad LaRayshawn, mom Taniqu’ua, and son LaDemetrius — while on the other we had an Antifa family that wouldn’t tell us their names “for obvious reasons”, but who proudly flew their This Flag Kills Fascists flag where the former occupants of the home had proudly flown the “stara ‘n bars” and Old Glory on alternate days.

I’m here to tell you that we were “pleasantly surprised” by both sets of new neighbors. It turned out that LaRayshawn Joyner was our new chief of police, and that Taniqu’ua made the most delicious carrot cake any of us had ever tasted. She brought one over the day after they moved in, and  expressed the hope that our Dukie and her LaDemetrius might become “homies”, even though LaDemetrius is 13, and thus not likely to want to be seen playing with a seven-year-old. To our surprise, the first thing Name Withheld, the paterfamilias of the Antifa family, wanted to do was organize a vigilante group of neighborhood men and butch lesbians to ensure that pedophilia didn’t become fashionable in Leafy, as it has in so many Dem-dominated suburbs. “Our being anti-fascism doesn’t preclude our also being 125 percent against child molestation,” he explained. I was so impressed that he and me and Bud Logan from over on Wisteria Lane soon began carpooling to work together, though we all work from home.

President Trump hasn’t been wrong about many things, but BLMers and Antifa types being undesirable neighbors isn’t one of them. I hope my “saying so” doesn’t result in a lot of death threats, but if it does, Name Withheld has an “arsenal” of semiautomatic weapons he says I can borrow “in a pinch”, which I used to think was cocaine slang, but now I’m not so sure.  

Remembering Saul Steier

I took a Humanities class my first semester at UCLA, and the teaching assistant who conducted it scared me half to death. He wasn’t much older than I, I didn’t think, and wasn’t a rugby type, but he nearly blew the roof off the small auditorium in which he taught. He raged. He roared. He scoffed cinematically at the facile observations my bolder classmates (there must have been close to 60 of us) made about the works of literature we were discussing. He was terrifying, and spell-binding, and gorgeous, and dizzyingly arrogant. He was a rock star. 

He was Saul Steier, who I now learn died last year.

He’d been on my favourite TV programme of the early 1960s, Mr. Novak. He’d acted in several productions directed by the guy who “discovered” me as a writer, and started me, in the arts supplement of the UCLA Daily Bruin, on the path to universal fame and acclaim from which I have never strayed. For years, said discoverer, whose encouragement changed my life, didn’t dare confide his homosexuality, with every good reason. (At the time, one who didn’t, uh, present as homophobic risked being thought "queer" himself, and God knows I felt enough of an outsider already.) I found out years later that he’d ached for Saul without ever letting on, and it broke my heart a little bit.

A couple of months after I began writing, in my senior year, I spent part of a Saturday with Discoverer, Saul, and Saul’s breathtaking girlfriend, who looked to me like a combination of Brigitte Bardot and all of the Beatles’ wives. Remembering how Saul had loved eviscerating cocky little freshmen who a few months before had been the apples of their high school English teachers’ eyes, I barely dared speak. When the subject of my recent review of the Beatles’ White Album came up, and Saul bemoaned my not having explicated why "Blackbird" featured actual birds tweeting, in the pre-Twitter sense, I was nearly overcome with shame. At that point, having not yet interviewed Procol Harum, I’d never been in the presence of as luminous a star.

Several weeks later, I encountered Saul’s girlfriend on campus and was of course tongue-tied and shy, and made a fool of myself. Discoverer soon thereafter informed me that she and Saul had split up, and that Girlfriend had fancied me. I was beside myself with self-recrimination for weeks. No, hold that thought. I think I still am.

Owning a Libtard

VARICOSE, MS — Since the publication of a photograph of senior presidential advisor Ivanka Trump holding up a can of the company’s frijoles as proudly as her brothers Junior and Dumberer hold up the carcasses of exotic animals they have killed, the local Walmart has been unable to keep Goya products in stock. “They been flying off the shelf’s,” affirms assistant manager Jerry Jeff Jeffers, who oversees the store’s furrin food aisle.

But that, Real News has discovered, doesn’t mean the hard-working, God-fearing people of Chlamydia County are actually eating the Goya products. “I’d do just about anything for President Trump,” methamphetamine marketer Ross Ewidge tells Real News. “I tried a spoonful of the frijoles, which turned out to be beans with a weird name, and you know what they tasted like? Drugs, disease, and rape! I tried feeding them to my dog, but he wouldn’t touch them.”

In other news, both Jeffers and Ewidge have come to own libtards in July. “They had a bunch of them in the markdown aisle last week, and I thought  to myself, ‘For $12.99, how can I go wrong?’ Maybe he'll like the frijoles."

Pence Out, Kanye In! Trump's New Running Mate!

The White House this morning announced that President Donald J. Trump has decided to replace Vice President Michael R. Pence with Kanye West as his running mate in November’s election, should he allow it to take place.

The rapper, clothing designer, bipolar disorder sufferer, and musical genius, who briefly flirted with the idea of running for president himself as the leader of the Delusional Egomaniac party, will undergo gender-reassignment surgery in September, with the same surgical team that transformed his wife’s former brother-in-law Bruce Jenner into Vanity Fair cover girl Kaitlyn Jenner.

“The president and Sean Hannity,” explained White House press secretary Kayleigh McNincompoop, whose name may not be spelled that way, “believe that Mr. West's replacement of Vice President Pence will make the Republican team irresistible both to voters of color and to the transgendered, as well as to Mr. West’s fellow sufferers of bipolar disorder. Biden's going to nominate as his own running mate a woman of color? Well, you snooze, you lose, Sleepy Joe! We beat you to it!"

“The president believes Mr. West’s abdication of his birth gender to be the supreme act of patriotism, one he wouldn’t have asked even of pardoned Navy SEAL and war criminal Eddie Gallagher.

"Our market research suggests that voters love the idea of a Trump/The Artist Formerly Known as Kanye ticket."

Kim(berleigh) Kardashian, West’s wife, and the mother of the couple’s four children — North, South, Nathaniel, and Victoria Beckham, has said, “I don’t think of myself as losing a husband, but of gaining another girlfriend with whom I can chat about new diet and fitness regimens, and boys, and makeup techniques, and boys.”

About Mr. Pence, whom a team of surgeons supervised by alcoholic former White House physician turned Texas congressperson Ronny Jackson will extricate from Mr. Trump’s rectum next Wednesday, Ms. McNincompoop read this statement from the president: “As America’s Hypocrite the past three and a half years, and more recently the leader of our incredible, phenomenal Coronavirus Task Force team, except when I got tired of standing in the background, and commandeered the microphone, Mike Pence has inspired a whole generation of shameless toadies. We thank him for his service, and warn him that if he’s contemplating writing a tell-all memoir about his years up my rectum, he might wish to reconsider.”

A spokesman for the Council of White Supremacists said that his group would have preferred Lindsay Graham — who’s said to have shapely legs, and on whose behalf Hannity is thought to have lobbied implacably — but that “whatever the president wants is what the CWS wants too.” Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling did not respond to numerous emails and text messages.

The Worst Record Review in the History of Recorded Music

Since his precipitous creative decline at the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan has inspired much of the worst rock criticism ever composed. I recall Ralph J. Gleason’s 1970 review of the not-quite-lacklustre (not quite that good, you see) New Morning, about which RJG exulted like some small-town pastor in whose shabby little church Jesus Himself has just sauntered. But now I feel I have heard the apotheosis of horrible rock criticism — (NPR’s) Fresh Air’s Ken Tucker’s review of Dylan’s inexpressibly awful new 477^th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Behold!” When Bob Dylan commences his new album singing [sic] "I Contain Multitudes," the most important thing to realize in this invocation of Walt Whitman is that Dylan is also saying you do, too. He's insisting that we each contain multitudes, that we shouldn't limit ourselves to one identity, one ideology, one set of facts about our lives. Dylan isn't looking within himself here. He's looking outward, and not at an audience. He's looking at you.” 

At me, Ken — at me? I find that so...inspiring! Indeed, this might be the most excited I’ve been since Gary Brooker congratulated me on the Christopher Milk record deal from the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium!

World-class bullshit, and make no mistake!

Is it my imagination, or was Bob understood in "My Back Pages" to waive his right to make others recognise, for instance, that they "shouldn't limit [them]selves to one identity, one ideology, one set of facts about [their] lives"?

Elsewhere, Ken describes RARW as "an album that breathes, that expands and contracts as you listen to it. The good songs inflate with interest. The mediocre songs start to shrink and slink away.” Unlike every other album you’ve ever owned, you see.

(While we're here, can someone explain to me why "Murder Most Foul" is a work of sublime genius, while Billy Joel’s similar, but globally superior "We Didn’t Start the Fire" is one of the most reviled tracks in the history of popular music?)

Critical insight, thy name is Ken!

[The best thing ever written about Bob Dylan was the glorious Scott Spencer's novel The Rich Man's Table. You read that here first.]

What Jesus Looked Like

[ Compulsory listening ]

I was thrilled this morning to discover in my emailbox a message from none other than Eric Trump, the tallest of the Trumps, and the ones whose looks would have doomed him to failure in the business world if he weren’t the second son of the most brilliant businessman in the history of commerce. Eric wanted to make me aware of the new voguishness of toppling or defacing statues of Jesus H. Christ, and hoped I might be able to contribute a few bucks to the campaign to re-elect his father, who — unbeknownst to the Fake News media, spends most of the time he’s supposedly watching Fox News reading the Bible, and being inspired by it.

Will the real Jesus please stand up?

For millennia, folks (I’m doing my Barack Obama imitation!) have been wondering both aloud and silently if JHC had flowing auburn hair, a tiny sniffer and sensuous lips, and alabaster skin, as a succession of Renaissance and later painters have traditionally depicted him. In 2003, shortly after I repatriated to the United Kingdom, the BBC produced a program in which anthropologists, forensic scientists (whatever they are!), and top makeup artists from the worlds of stage, screen, and transvestism examined much, much data and decided that, being a Middle Eastern Jew right around the time of his own birth, Jesus probably looked a lot more like Izzy Schnorkelbaum, Brooklyn’s most feared hummus wholesaler in the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, a number of BBC executives were subsequently dragged screaming from their fashionable Mayfair apartments and burned at the stake for apostasy in St. James’s Park.

Marcus Welby, MD

Now Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Her Majesty the Queen’s personal spiritual advisor, reveals that three of the least attractive statues surrounding the Canterbury Cathedral cricket pitch will be removed to try to keep the Church of England on Black Lives Matter’s good side. Seemingly imitating President Trump, His Grace told BBC and other reporters, “Some names will have to change. I mean, the church, goodness me, you know, you just go around Canterbury Cathedral, there’s monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey, and we’re looking at all that, and some will have to come down. But yes, there can be forgiveness, I hope and pray as we come together, but only if there’s justice.”

[I’ve made up a fair amount of this essay, but the above quote is genuine.]

As I believe everyone should, I try to set aside half an hour each week to talk to God. In our most recent chat, I asked what She thinks of these goings-on. She laughed that lovely, melodic laugh of hers and replied, “Well, I think anyone with two brain cells to rub together can probably surmise that, being a Middle Eastern Jew 2020 years ago, he [being God, God doesn’t have to capitalize her son’s pronouns] certainly didn’t have flowing auburn hair, a tiny Michael Jackson-ish sniffer, and alabaster skin. But he was much hotter than the BBC asked its viewers to believe, and a very nice boy in the bargain, devoted to the needy and downtrodden and so on."

Does LGBTQ Make You Feel Unheard?

Like tens of millions of other right-thinking Americans, I was greatly heartened by the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding workplace discrimination against the LGBTQ folk. But I remain bewitched, bothered, and bewildered about what the acronym means. I’m fine up to and including T, but what’s with the Q? One school of thought is that it stands for questioning, while another holds that it stands for queer. Doesn’t B, for bisexual, implicitly welcome those not entirely sure about their eroticism? And don’t those in the queer camp feel adequately acknowledged by L and G?

 If we’re going to stick a Q at the end for homosexuals who wish to express that “queer”, traditionally a vicious pejorative, doesn’t ruffle their feathers even a little — that is, if we’re going to take pains to accommodate both defiant gays and lesbians whose credo is Hit me with your best shot, homophobe and more demure gays and lesbians whose credo is I would much prefer that you don’t use that ugly word in my hearing — shouldn’t we ensure that other subgroups be recognized?

How about LGBTQTwBe, which would acknowledge the gay male subsets twink and bear? But let’s not short-sheet their female counterparts. LGBTQTwBeBuF would ensure that butch and femme lesbians felt, you know, unexcluded?

Too cumbersome, you say? Too reminiscent of high school chemistry? Well, fair enough. But I continue to believe that the maddeningly (and, if you're in the questioning camp, appropriately) ambiguous Q’s got to go. How about, if we’re acknowledging and validating erotic minorities, we replace the Q with K, for kinky? The problem being that Ks are exactly the opposite of (questioning)  Qs, in the sense that we have a very clear sense of what makes us hard or wet. Fetishists, in fact, don’t get fully turned on absent a particular inanimate object, like a high-heeled shoe.

Once added to the fold, it’s entirely conceivable that K people will want to be seen as non-monolithic, in the same way that gays and lesbians who are just fine with “queer” insist on being acknowledged as distinct from the fainter-hearted. This would lead to such subsets as Bo, for bondage, and F, for fetishists. LGBTKBoF, you see. And how long would it be before various different sorts of fetishists started clamoring for, for instance, LGBTKFRhGb, with Rh standing for red hair (the musician Richard Thompson admits to a red hair fetish in his famous song 1952 “Vincent Black Lightning”) and Gb for garter belts?  

Just try to tell me you wouldn’t enjoy hearing a television news anchor, on a day when the Supreme Court has done the right thing again, say, for instance, “Good news for the LGBTQTwBeBuFKFRhGb today…” Just try!

My Moral Integrity As a Human Being Is Called Into Question

Several weeks ago, not too long after the ghastly video of George Floyd’s virtual execution, another video appeared on line. It had been shot by one of a quartet of young black entrepreneurs being hassled by a white venture capitalist, Tom Austin, who wondered if they were genuinely entitled, by virtue of having leased offices in a building in Minneapolis, to use of the building’s apparently posh gym.

For all I know, Tom Austin might secretly be the Grand Wizard of the Upper Midwest Ku Klux Klan, the most virulent white supremacist in all of America.

And he may not be.

From the video, it’s impossible to know whether he would have challenged four unfamiliar white guys trying to get into the gym in exactly the same way that he challenged the young black men. But in the eyes of at least a few people, I betrayed myself as Mr. White Privilege by pointing that out. What I was apparently meant to do was reflexively conclude that Austin was indeed a racist (one of those with whom I tussled on the social media asserted that his racism was obvious), and go into a frenzy of self-flagellation because Austin and I are roughly the same colour.

No sale, I’m afraid. I’m not exactly a stranger to self-flagellation, but I think I’ll continue to do self-flagellate because of awful things I’ve done personally, and not awful things others of comparable pigmentation have done.

One of the key features of fascism is the suppression of dissent. There’s a wonderful essay by the excellent Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine about how fascistic some “woke” thinking can be. “Question any significant part of [the argument that…individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings have always always been  falsehood to cover for and justify racism],” he observes — quite accurately, I think — “and your moral integrity as a human being is called into question. There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration. In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole.

“In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. 

Tom Austin, by the way, has said that he was having a rotten day, and “was oblivious to the perception that my actions could be perceived as racist." He nonetheless offered to wear a hair shirt, and to make "[a] public apology for stupid behavior (but not for racism), but nobody has responded and most of the public seems [unable] to care less”.

If you ask me, that sucks. And if, in response to my saying so, you come back with, “Yeah, well, it doesn’t suck as bad as George Floyd having been murdered in broad daylight,” I’ll spit in your eye, not because I think what happened to Austin was a billionth as shameful, but because you’re stifling dissent.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President!

Yesterday was President Trump’s 74^th birthday, though, looking at him — noting how spry and vigorous and, yes, sexy he is — few would imagine him to be even two-thirds that age. As every other day, he got up at a few minutes after five in the morning and, with the help of his Marine valet personal trainer Emilio, read briefings for half an hour while working out on the Sportstech RSX600 rowing machine in the presidential gym in the Northeast Wing. Then it was over to the Sportstech SX500 exercycle for 20 minutes and more briefings, and finally onto the Sportstech LCX800 crosstrainer for 28 minutes. (Usually on Sundays, he’ll do “only” 20 minutes, but he prides himself on reading every syllable of the briefings his staff prepares for him every day, and wanted to finish the white paper on the economic re-opening Dr.Anthony Fauci’s team of epidemiologists had put together for him.) After a 20-minute game of half-court basketball with several former NBA reserve players (the President scored only four points, considerably below his average of 7.2, but had  three assists and the steal that led to his team to its last-minute victory.

After a rejuvenating hot shower and a few minutes with White House hairdresser Mr. Kenneth, the President enjoyed a vegan burrito, washed down with a jackfruit smoothie, while reading the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald, the president hurried out to the White House to continue instructing son Bannon, whose name I might be misspelling, in the manly art of fly fishing. (Over the course of his presidency, Mr. Trump has also found time to teach the lad how to hunt, sail, whittle, and replace the alternator in a wide range of GM, Ford, and Chrysler sedans, and throw a treacherous curveball). Then it was up to the First Lady’s quarters, where the first couple enjoyed tantric lovemaking until 8:45, when President Trump has his daily yoga session. En route down to presidential limousine the U.S.S American Hegemony, he accepted on his iPhone the birthday felicitations of a succession of world leaders, artists, and intellectuals, ranging from “Bibi” Netanyahu to former rock girlfriend-to-the-superstars Bebe Buell, to Burma’s Aug San Suu Kyi.

Until mid-afternoon, the president, disguised as Galician potato farmer Ana Agramonte Suarez, delivered Meals on Wheels and read from the New Testament to shut-ins in the District of Columbia’s impoverished Ward 8. He washed the feet of lepers at the little-known Our Lady of Unassailable Sanctimony leper colony in Cascades, Virginia, and then, back at the White House, meditated on the West Lawn with his friend Mike Love, formerly of the Beach Boys, and longtime operative Corey Lewandowski.

You might imagine that the president would have devoted at least an hour or two to opening some of the thousands of gifts world leaders and ordinary Americans had sent him, but he left that pleasant task to new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, she of the whimsically spelled first name, and longtime apologista Kellyanne Conway, who is said to loathe Kayleigh for being younger and prettier than she, and not yet as widely loathed.

At half past four, the United States Marine Corps Mixed Chorus, Ms. Sha’Neeka Higgup’s third grade class from Emmett Till School in Ward 8, and the choir of the Exalt Him Daily African Methodist church of Baltimore squeezed into the Oval Office to sing both the familiar white folks'  “Happy Birthday”, for public performance of which Warner/Chappell Music is no longer able to collect licensing royalties, and Stevie Wonder’s rather hipper song of the same title. The president pronounced the performance “extraordinarily moving,” and asserted that he would never forget it, which, given that he was in the process of turning 74, may very well be true.

After an hour of overturning environmental regulations designed by previous administrations to thwart American economic growth, and to ensure the ongoing drinkability of its water, the president retired with the First Lady and son Bannon to the White House cinema to enjoy Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles Of A Summer Night” together though there is no trace of Jean-Claude van Damme in it.

Happy birthday, Mr. President!

Godwin's Law

Until about 30 seconds ago, I had been unaware of Godwin's Law, of which I am now an avid fan.

I've got a little law of my own, though it may not be nearly as good as Godwin's. No social media thread in which a particular recording artist or recording is mentioned in any way, however tangentially (for instance, "I was listening to Jack White while churning butter in the Lower 40 last Tuesday") will go more than a dozen comments without someone feeling called upon to let fly a completely irrelevant value judgment, such as, for instance, "I liked his/her/their/its [insert title] album best."

Of course, it can be even worse than that, as in someone feeling called upon to declare, “I can’t decide if I like [insert title or recording artist] or [insert title or recording artist] better.”

On the one hand, I find such declarations jaw-droppingly narcissistic. (What leads you to imagine that anyone cares, darling?) In a better mood, though, I find them sort of endearing, as I did when my then-11-year-old daughter informed me that she wasn’t content with making a mere cameo in one of my scripted sketch comedy revues in San Francisco, but wanted to become a full-fledged member of the troupe. I generally disdain passivity, and admire those who see something they like and want to try to do it themselves, though in many areas of life (sports, music, writing novels) this impulse has only put me on the path to tears.

It has long been my custom, when I encounter comments like “I can’t decide if I like [insert title or recording artist] or [insert title or recording artist] better” to reply, “Can you please notify us when you’ve reached a decision?” This works on two levels. First, it makes the commenter feel appreciated. What better feeling is there than that of others you haven’t even met wanting to know how you feel about things? On another level, it briefly satisfies my insatiable need to be sarcastic.

Another fun thing to do on Facebook, in particular: Insert this comment at random into almost any thread: White person's problem. You'll have hours of fun reading the Heated Responses!

The awful thing about using a photograph of Jack White to illustrate this little essay is that most people will read it solely because they’re Jack White fans. The wonderful thing is that someone will read it. I so enjoy feeling appreciated.

A Young Person's Guide to Race in America

There was only one black pupil in my elementary school, Sandra Lucas, and she claimed to be Spanish. She wasn’t given a hard time because she was gorgeous, desired by all the boys, envied by all the girls. There was one black pupil at my junior high school. His ticket to non-harassment was his athletic brilliance. I was a fervent fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who included John Roseboro, Junior Gilliam, Maury Wills, and the Davis non-brothers.

My parents weren’t hateful people, and, as Jews, knew what it was like to shunned for their ethnicity, but they weren’t exactly progressive in their thinking. My mother had briefly had a black girlfriend in high school in Minneapolis, but had worried that others might think less of her for it. My dad told me that black people had natural rhythm, but that property values plummeted in neighbourhoods lots of them moved into. He was uncomfortable with the thought of my little sister ever dating a black guy.

I think the first black person I actually spoke to was Charlie Neal, then the Los Angeles Dodgers’ second baseman, at an autograph event at a local department store. I like to imagine I addressed him as Mr. Neal. I admired a great many black ball players. At the time, the Los Angeles Times sportswriters always took care to point out when it was a rookie of colour about whom they were writing.

Two years later, I had more contact with black people when I worked as a busboy in Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, on Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu. The place employed two black dishwashers. The tiny, wizened, and inconceivably ancient (probably around 50) one invariably found something amiss with the tubfuls of dirty dishes I’d lug into him from the dining room. Twenty seconds after I’d placed a tubful in his work area, and hurried back out to keep my custies’ water glasses and butter dishes filled, his voice, full of rebuke, would ring through the restaurant. “Young man!”, with the second word pronounced MAY-un. During my entire career as a busboy, I don’t think I ever delivered the dirty dishes in a way that didn’t annoy him.

I actually became friendly with the other guy, Collins Hall, who, by dint of being conscientious and hard-working, was promoted to chef, to the infinite chagrin of the redneck asshole who presided over the kitchen. This was during the summer of Selma and the three civil rights volunteers being murdered in Mississippi. I thought myself ever so noble for assuring Collins that I didn’t hate him because he was black. He said, “Why, thank you, sir,” non-rhotically. It wasn’t until years later that it dawned on me that he was being sarcastic. We remained pretty friendly in spite of my being a clueless little dickhead.

I was fired from Ted’s for being a rotten busboy, and went to work selling admissions to the big parking lot at Zuma Beach, 16 miles up Pacific Coast Highway. I was surrounded at work by rednecks. There was much talk of Martin Luther Coon, and of how Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to force decent, fragrant white folk to live next door to malodorous Negroes, though my colleagues pronounced the word rather differently.

My first girlfriend’s family lived in north Malibu next door to a guy who tried to put together a group of vigilantes to go up into Watts, whose inhabitants were rioting, and shoot rioters dead. My first might-have-been father-in-law was a good guy, and declined the invitation.

At Santa Monica High School, classes were supposedly segregated according to academic aptitude. There were classes for those likely to go on to higher education, and classes for those who probably wouldn’t, and classes for those who required remediation. I was unmistakably higher education material. In my three years at Samohi (from which Donald Trump's Secretary of Xenophobia Stephen Miller would graduate decades later), I was in a grand total of one class for which a black kid was deemed sufficiently brilliant. One interacted with other ethnicities only in PE. 

A black family moved into my neighbourhood, a desolate semi-ritzy real estate development on the mesa up a very steep hill from Ted’s Rancho Restaurant. Its patriarch owned a pharmacy in Santa Monica. My impression was that property values didn’t plummet. I don’t think anyone spraypainted racist slogans on their garage door.

In adulthood, I had brief flings with two black women, and repudiated all forms of xenophobia, including, but not limited to, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. In 1988, Ed, the abstract expressionist friend who'd taken me in after the collapse of Marriage 1.0, was driving me and a work colleague acquaintance of his down to San Francisco when Other Acquaintance began spouting off about niggers. I demanded that Ed let me out of the car. We were on Highway 101 in Novato, and he wasn't pleased about having to get off the freeway.

Why thank you, suh.

Not One to Point Fingers

Witnessing the horror of the ongoing Donald Trump presidency, I feel the most fervent contempt for those who, in George Will’s wonderful words, “gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.” But once, long ago, when I was in a situation very much like theirs, I did no better.

‘Twas 1980, and I couldn’t make ends meet. My attempts at becoming an internationally adored rock star hadn’t quite panned out, and the world seemed to have changed its mind about my writing, which I’d come to be unable to give away. I lived in one room in a crumbling art hovel on the edge of LA’s Koreatown ordinarily occupied by a friend who’d gone to New York City in hopes of becoming an internationally acclaimed new wave star. I was so close to pennilessness that I didn’t buy myself the Los Angeles Times, but asked my sister to save hers for me. Each day, I would enjoy an edition from the previous week. My falling-apart Austin Marina was the farthest thing from a chick magnet in all of southern California, not that I could afford my insurance payment.

Larry Flynt Publications offered me a job. I would be the articles editor for Hustler’s much more respectable little sister, Chic. I would be paid $25,000 per year, over $70,000 in 2020 money.

The guy who called the shots at LFP, the late Bruce David, was living proof that cocaine could ruin a person’s personality. I’d never heard shriller screaming. At any moment, you thought he might start yanking out handfuls of his own hair — or handfuls of that of someone who’d inaccurately enacted one of his unintelligible editorial directives. Years later, when I saw Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hilter, I felt as though back in LFP’s conference room on the 37^th floor in Century City.

Given how everyone’s blood pressure soared at those meetings, it was a wonder everyone seemed to survive them, albeit slightly ashamed of themselves. None more than I, who never uttered a peep of protest. Instead, I sat as far from Bruce as I could, took care never to make eye contact with him, and tried to will myself into invisibility. He never laid into me, possibly because he didn’t know I was there, and I never defended anyone at whom he was shrieking. I wanted to keep my job, to be able to buy myself sushi for lunch, and to fill the little fuel tank of my new Renault Le Car with unleaded gasoline.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I’m in no position to condemn those in the Trump White House who abide his monstrousness.