tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52648909499241880492024-02-02T02:26:14.051-05:00Mendel Illness The online magazine of nearly unendurable despair. Read it 'n' weep. To his consternation, John Mendelssohn used to be a famous rock critic.John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.comBlogger886125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-63846682472677313642022-12-23T04:34:00.002-05:002022-12-23T04:34:23.937-05:00Same Thing, Different Bottles<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">I’ve always wanted to be up on stage, being applauded, rather than in the audience, applauding, and have consequently made a great many decisions based on what the heart wanted rather than what the head said was feasible. As a teenager, I didn’t allow my uncle to mentor me, as he’d read that his idol, Thomas Wolfe, had mentored young writers because I was too intent on a career as a professional athlete. Never mind that my adoration of sports never came close to compensating for the fact that I played them dreadfully. Then I saw A Hard Day’s Night and decided I wanted to be the Beatles, even though my musical aptitude at the time was ltitle greater than my athletic aptitude.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When it became ever more excruciatingly apparent in the late 1970s that.I wasn’t likely to regain my earlier (wholly unwarranted) prominence as a writer, I turned to graphic design, in which I had reason to beileve I had real aptitude. Had I not, as a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>17-year-old Santa Monica High School inmate, won a hideous senior sweater that to this day I’ve never worn by designing its logo? In junior high school, I’d been comically, disastrously inept in wood, metal, and auto shops, but had enjoyed every second of print shop. As I saw it, the world was full of horrid graphic design, but I, by gum, would put things right.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I talked the proprietor of one of LA’s leading New Wave boutiques, the Village Mews, to let me design a catalogue for him, and felt for the month and half the job required as though I’d died and gone to Heaven, as I did again a dozen years later when I bought my first Macintosh with Quark XPress desktop publishing software. Purest bliss! That first day with Quark, I literally forgot to eat or drink or pee. I was The Wind in the Willows’ Mr. Toad at the moment he first glimpsed a motorcar.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">My first proper design job was at Destiny Telecomm (I thought the doubled M was a nice touch!), a pyramid scheme in the East (San Francisco) Bay run by a cadre of sanctimonious Christians who’d apparently missed the bit in the Bible about the rich not getting into Heaven. When I signed on, their signature product was phone cards that enabled the bearer to do something or other. Over the course of a week they jettisoned the phone cards, and took to selling skincare products and salad dressings. (One of my colleagues theorised they were the same thing, in different bottles.)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Mama, can we have some of that delicious Destiny Telecomm ranch dressing on our crudites tonight?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The boss was a hyperneurotic, tennis ball-shaped little gay fellow who played the accordion at the company’s big Xmas party and believed that creating futuristic landscapes in a called KPT Bryce attested. vividly to his creativity. My immediate overseer was a hyperactive Christian who looked exactly like Homer Simpson, and whose saving grace was that you could tease him, except not about abortion, and — can you guess? — tease him I did. He’d forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ve yet to learn, all these years later, and was a talented sketcher, but a horrid designer. There was a luridly (and artificially) blond young female hipster, the poster girl for depression, iirrevocably morose. I actually enjoyed the idea of coming to work and seeing the pair of them. There’s something uniquely gratifying about making someone as staunchly morose as Andrea laugh. In that sense, it was the best job I ever had.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But then lots of new suckers gave the company money, and the over-men’s-fragranced pastor’s son who ran the show encouraged the little fat accordionist to hire lots more designers, only one of them even a little bit talented. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and not nearly enough work to keep everyone busy. The obvious solution was another hire — a black guy from actual Oakland who had the Christians-in-charge eating out of his hand within about 48 hours. He would invite one of them to come down to the graphics room to confer about something he was working on, and show them how to draw a straight line in Adobe Illustrator.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He would shake his head in awe and say, ‘I think you’ve really got a knack for this stuff.” You should have seen their faces! One morning, I heard one of them proudly confide to another, “Do you know what Dre called me yesterday? ‘Homey’!” It was hilairous, and a little nauseating.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The one guy with real talent was a Motley Crue fan from Taiwan. He was so good that he inspired me to get a lot better, quick. We went to lunch together, and he ordered in Mandarin.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">One afternoon I was openly exasperated with the little know-nothing nincompoop the fat accordionist had appointed Studio Manager. (There wasn’t enough work to keep two designers busy, but we had seven designers and a Studio Manager to oversee ‘em.) I was avidly urged to find employment elsewhere, and began freelancing for Chris Isaak’s girlfriend’s design talent agency. That ended in tears too, but you may like some of the things I’ve designed since this past autumn for Acerbia Designs.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A couple of days after I left, Destiny Telcomm, with two M’s, was busted for being a pyramid scheme. Where your Christ-child now, spawn-of-the-pastor?</p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-815990963193728712022-12-21T10:00:00.000-05:002022-12-21T10:00:06.180-05:00Lunch With 'Lor Swift<p><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;"><br />Taylor Swift and I had been talking about having lunch together for almost a decade before it finally happened last week. In 2012, I wrote her an email complimenting her gracious acquiescence to that ghastly Kanye person at the NAACP Video Awards. A couple of years later (she gets an average of 23,650 emails and text messages every week!) she wrote back to thank me and to ask if I might want to “grab some sushi” the next time she was in Poughkeepsie, though I actually lived in Beacon at the time, and then moved back to London, and then back to Los Angeles, and then back to London again, while she became America’s Sweetheart.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But as I foreshadowed earlier in this paragraph, the constellations finally aligned this week, and we met<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She had only 18 minutes, so a place with table service was out of the question. It would have to be one of the two big sushi chains, Itsu or Wasabi, where one doesn’t have to wait for some bright young thing to come over and gush, “How you guys [London servers are trained to address gender-mixed groups as “guys”] doing today? I’m Tristan, and I’ll be your server.” You just choose a boxed set, if you will, from a big refrigerator and then go up to the till, where a not-so-bright young thing snarls if you ask for an extra eyedropperful of soy sauce.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">We sat down, Taylor in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses to keep people from recognising her, and began mixing soy sauce and wasabi in little plastic tubs. I asked if I should address her as Tay, She giggled winsomely and confided that her closest friends actually call her ‘Lor, with an apostrophe. I was reminded of my old friend Hugh M. Hefner, with whom I used to play backgammon and kiss absurdly gorgeous young blonde women. Most people seemed to call him Hef, but he told me that those nearest and dearest to him called him Ner, apostrophe optional. I told ‘Lor that I had briefly conspired to call The Romanovs, my 2015 Los Angeles band Sailor Twit. She smirked obilgingly.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">\</div><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">As seldom-Trumpers, we agreed that the prospect of her old antagonist, recently rebranded as Ye, becoming president and Herschel Walker vice president was thrilling. I admitted to ‘Lor that I find her music pretty insipid, and that, as a lapsed music critic, I recognise many critics having put her recent More Slanders About Past Boyfriends album on their Albums of the Year list not because they liked it, or had even heard it, but because they didn’t want to seem hopelessly out of step with the general public. She wasn’t very pleased, and summoned one of her aides over for a whispered little conference, at the conclusions of which ‘Lor said, “Harsh words coming from someone who’s been writing and recording since 1971, and whose new stuff is lucky to get 20 listeners on Soundcloud.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Touché, I said, rakishly, and we moved onto the collapse of the United Kingdom, as most recently evidenced by ambulance drivers and nurses going out on a strike and millions having to skip meals to be able to afford to heat their homes, on which their mortgages have skyrocketed. “I do find the accent adorable, though,” she said. I of course knew, through her confessional/accusatory songs, that she has dated Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellan, Andrew Lloyd Pierce, Ricky Gervais, Jeremy Corbyn, and, during a brief fling with bisexuality, Home Secretary Cruella Braverman.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">“Time’s up!” one of ‘Lor’s aids chirped eagerly, and the next thing I knew I was alone with my thoughts and the nine pieces of sushi Taylor Swift’s fame hadn’t allowed her time to consume. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-74456188135431237302022-12-19T04:55:00.002-05:002022-12-19T04:55:15.003-05:00<p> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">My first few months inside, my OCD served me well. All I would listen to — and, by extension, all I would allow my cellmates to listen to — were Miles, Mingus, Monk, Mahler, and Eminem. My cellmates kept requesting transfers, so I’d have the whole cell to myself for as long as four days at a time. One of my new cellmates, formerly a guitarist in a Brazilian bistro in Bermondsey, suggested we form a yacht rock duo with him playing and me singing. Bossa nova and yacht rock can be nearly indistinguishable in the wrong hands.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When the warden hosted a big muckety-muck from the Department of Corrections, he would have me and Justin entertain. But then my vocal cords were injured in the big inadequate blankets riot of my second winter inside, and I had to think of another way not to be subjected to erotic indignities in the showers and other areas where there were no, or out-of-service, closed-circuit TV cameras. Noting my lovely mocha skin, soulful brown eyes, and soft, melodic speaking voice, one of the other members of the Floral Arrangement club suggested I apply for the prison sissy position that would open up when RL-6881 got paroled, and I thought to myself, “Why not?” The warden was worryingly enthusiastic about my decision, and supplied me with the Agent Provocateur for Men catalogue from which I ordered my first outfits.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I was an immediate hit with both fellow inmates and the prison staff. The first week of every month, I would service the warden and the highest-ranking correctional officers. The second would be the Aryan Brotherhood, and the third the Crips, Bloods, and Mexican Mafia. The prisoners of colour were my favourite. Their hygiene was far superior to the others’ and they never showed up empty-handed. Sometimes my cell would become almost impassable with bouquets, making my cellmates openly resentful to the point of threatening me, but I had many protectors among the three groups I serviced —Lt. “Lefty” Latham from the correctional officers, Feekle Inbrede from the Aryans, and LaShu’juandray Cooper from the Blips, as the African-American inmates called themselves after the Bloods and Crips realised they had common oppressors, and merged.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Everything was fine until the Blips and Mexicans demanded an additional week with me at the end of every month because they outnumbered the guards and Aryans combined by around six to one. In the resulting riot, which made the blankets brouhaha look in comparison like a slapping contest at a parochial girls’ school, one of the prison’s three Sons of Isis, who spent most of their time in solitary confinement, tried to behead me. I survived, obviously, but with an unsightly neck scar that allowed that little tramp Rodolfo Gomez to overtake me as the prison’s No. 1 object of desire.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In recognition of past services rendered, even if with the utmost reluctance, the warden arranged for me to be paroled prematurely, whereupon I became the social media influencer and composer as which you know me.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">[I’ve written a whole novel in this vein. Advise by private message if you’d like to read it.]</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wjDdUvyb2SI" width="320" youtube-src-id="wjDdUvyb2SI"></iframe></div><br /><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-24736855135570346342022-12-12T03:32:00.003-05:002022-12-12T03:32:49.874-05:00A Dweeb No Longer!<p> <span style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It could have been the beginning of the perfect late-‘60s romance. I knew Annie in the sense of our recognizing each from living in the same student dormitory, but met her for keeps at one of those noontime rallies at which furious fellow students in proletarian clothing and glasses held together precariously by Scotch® tape (I guess they all patronised the same optician) would seethe about something, and then recite 10 non-negotiable demands, accession to which might calm them down. She’d had a boyfriend in the dorm, and was too pretty for the likes of me, but I was giddy from the latest recitation of demands, or something, and somehow ignited a conversation. The next thing I knew, we were up in the research library, all over each other like cheap suits in what had moments before been a corner occupied only by serious scholars, at least a couple of us urged us to shut the fuck up.</span></p><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="an455-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="an455-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="an455-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="3cuke-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3cuke-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="3cuke-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I was just beginning to freelance for the Los Angeles Times, and took her to several concerts. She always wore the same leather miniskirt, with which I’d no beef whatever, and always remarked on the instrumental soloists and singer either being on the same page, or not being on it. It was she who inspired me, in my review of the first Joe Cocker album for Rolling Stone, to note that the solo Jimmy Page played on one track seemed emotionally discordant with both the song and Joe’s singing. I was advised that producer Denny Cordell was very unhappy about that, as it might make Jimmy hesitant to play on future Cocker sessions. “Probably too much to hope for,” I quipped. BAM!</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="7mq0h-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7mq0h-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="7mq0h-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="5q90o-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="5q90o-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="5q90o-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Annie had been living down in Venice, but I don’t think she liked her roommates any more than I liked Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. She accepted my invitation to move in with me on ugly, soulless Federal Avenue. She made dinner, and I was ecstatic to be able to think of her as my old lady, as heterosexual male hipsters did in those days. At night, she was a server at the Oar House on Main Street in southernmost Santa Monica, later all chic and gentrified, but at the time a favourite place for local alcoholics to catch a few winks in their own puke. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="973br-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="973br-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="973br-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="2goh5-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="2goh5-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="2goh5-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">The night I woke up at around two to find myself alone in bed was one of the most horrible of my first 22 years. There were no cell phones then, so I couldn’t contact her. No one answered at the Oar House. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="1n7uh-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1n7uh-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="1n7uh-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="cebvp-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="cebvp-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="cebvp-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">She finally called late the following afternoon to say she needed to get her head together— a lot of that was going around at the time — and would be over in an hour to pick up the few things she’d brought to Federal Avenue in preparation for returning to her native Marin County. The harder I tried to change her mind, the more intent she got on leaving. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="782cf-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="782cf-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="782cf-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="875ie-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="875ie-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="875ie-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Glimpse the one known photograph of the two of us, and cease to wonder why she fled. Could I have been more of an embarrassment? The wire-rim glasses! The pathetic attempt at a mustache! The white undershirt peeking out from beneath the shitkicker shirt the country rock scare had inspired me to buy! The extremely heavy buckskin fringe jacket! The humanity! I was the son of a mother who’d been the reigning fashionista of North High School (in Minneapolis). I’d had a knack for matters of the cuff. What had become of me?</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="fglvc-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fglvc-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="fglvc-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="a9qft-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="a9qft-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="a9qft-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I was so distraught by Annie’s defection that I fumbled the ball the universe had given me. While other recent graduates were delivering pizza and wondering when Uncle Sam would advise them he needed their help in the jungles of southeast Asia, I, from the first Monday after my last Friday of formal education, had a glamorous, well-paying job in the music business, Warner Bros. having hired me as a writer on noting how enthusiastically I’d reviewed the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society in the campus newspaper. I lasted two months before they got fed up with my moping and invited me to spare myself the daily drive from Venice (where I’d rented a place of my own) to Burbank. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="futk1-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="futk1-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="futk1-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="bla4v-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bla4v-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="bla4v-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I wrote Annie letters imploring her to reconsider. In the one she deigned to answer, she informed me that she was no longer Annie, but Anne. I was presumably to see this as evidence of her having gotten her head together. All that she felt was guilt. At least I was able to work that into my song Brokenhearted Reggae, a few years later. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="3ulme-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3ulme-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="3ulme-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="40uo7-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="40uo7-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="40uo7-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">She says it's too hard. She’d rather discard </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="1llee-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1llee-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="1llee-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">everything that we’ve built. </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="adu1l-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="adu1l-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="adu1l-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">When I feel the same, how can she claim </span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="tms9-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="tms9-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="tms9-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">all that she feels is guilt?</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="5jcc7-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="5jcc7-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="5jcc7-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="8vc4v-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="8vc4v-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="8vc4v-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">By and by, I recovered. Warner Bros. had wanted me out of their sight, but kept paying me a weekly retainer, and I spent a lot of it on the sort of clothing my favourite British pop stars were wearing, and on a $15 dollar haircut. (We’re talking 1971 dollars. That haircut today would cost around $120, before tip.) Two gorgeous tellers in false eyelashes (in an era when they represented extraordinary effort) and pushup bras at the Security First bank in the 8000 Sunset building jostled each other for the privilege of serving me. A dweeb no longer, Johnny!</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="31ej8-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="31ej8-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="31ej8-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="bles4-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bles4-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="bles4-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Six years after Annie broke my heart, I went up to Marin on a record company’s dime to interview someone or other, and decided to pop into the little bistro in Fairfax I’d heard Annie had worked at not long after she returned to Marin. It turned out she worked there still. Her jaw dropped in the most gratifying way when she realised I was the new improved version of the dweeb she’d left behind, and we made plans to convene in my hotel room in San Francisco’s Japantown for heterosexual hi-jinx that night. Oh, was I pleased with myself! But when she asked me to sit at the bar while she attended to her diners, the former Mr. Zimmerman’s Positively Fourth Street began to play. “When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’.: Our sex back in the day hadn’t been terrific — her fault, I think, and I’m not one to say it hasn’t been my fault in several cases — and it occurred to me that it would be more fun to do her as she’d done me those six years before than to have her over. I winked at her mysteriously and left the place. She called after me, in vain. Payback’s a bitch.</span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="6pj7r-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="6pj7r-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="6pj7r-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2f05l" data-offset-key="bloa4-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; color: #e4e6eb; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 12px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bloa4-0-0" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="bloa4-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I cut off my nose. My face felt spited. (That too would wind up in a song.)</span></div></div>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-17303512416451234082022-12-06T05:36:00.000-05:002022-12-06T05:36:00.502-05:00Biopsychology<p><span style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;">Biopsychologists believe the circuitry of a child’s brain is profoundly influenced by the child’s experiences as an infant who senses the primary caregiver’s emotional state at every turn. This could explains a great deal. I think Mama was at least mildly depressed throughout her life, and know for sure that she very timid, very ill at ease in the world. I remember being around four years old and walking from our apartment down to the communal garage. Mama was very disturbed by my singing, and not for the reason those few I am able to strongarm into listening to my music these days are disturbed, but because of her all-purpose dread. When I asked what was wrong,</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;">she hissed, “Someone’s going to hear us!” as though that were a terrifying prospect. I suspect this was a carryover from her own childhood, when her very poor family had to abandon rented premises under cover of darkness to avoid being hassled for overdue rent. Whatever it was, it made a real impression on me, and I went into the world pretty sure that someone or something was intent on doing me harm.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQc7_JhgI86cxaqFbYjQ68zZlENSo7h023y5a6LInBe5fjxDd7WVNlLKZ_uHSoHfPC2QVGCmQSjagw_84BcUvkkM-7oRd_vY2s7E8T6rcTVTEt7QYTiJwF5HibXgeoKZ_xNJs8UkrhUS-iw9J7bGFT5qZKScWOYenEcY4LNEk7ffqcoFFioCOcWLxAdQ/s720/palisadePark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="659" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQc7_JhgI86cxaqFbYjQ68zZlENSo7h023y5a6LInBe5fjxDd7WVNlLKZ_uHSoHfPC2QVGCmQSjagw_84BcUvkkM-7oRd_vY2s7E8T6rcTVTEt7QYTiJwF5HibXgeoKZ_xNJs8UkrhUS-iw9J7bGFT5qZKScWOYenEcY4LNEk7ffqcoFFioCOcWLxAdQ/s320/palisadePark.jpg" width="293" /></a></div><br />My being weak and vulnerable worked well for her, as it made me more dependent on, and thus closer to her. Not for a millisecond do I doubt that she adored me, nor do I imagine that it even occurred to her that she was grooming me to be a weakling. I didn’t realise myself until I was two decades and more into adulthood. Pop had a stroke, and Mama. had exiled him (with the tacit complicity that was his iconic trait in their marriage) to a convalescent hospital from which she and I picked him up for a day out one Sunday when I was visiting from northern California. Reaching our destination, I went to get his wheelchair out of the trunk. Mama was aghast. “Get someone to help you with that!” she implored me. I wasn’t a healthy 45-year-old man who worked out on Nautlius machines six days a week, but a helpless little boy, perpetually dependent on the kindness of strangers.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><p></p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">That long-delayed realisation felt like a hard punch in the face. The floodgates opened as I realised what she’d (unwittingly!) done to me, as it occurred to me that a million humiliations I’d suffered as a reflexively submissive schoolboy were traceable back to her parenting. I began treating her as disdainfully as she’d always treated my dad. To my eternal shame, I did so in front of my little girl. And by reflexively refusing to exercise not only due caution, but also the hypercaution I’d grown up being told were necessary for my survival, I put her, myself, and my little girl in jeopardy on one horrible occasion.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Mama had invited me and my daughter to accompany her Back East to visit my sister, then living in Rhode Island and working in Boston. I did all the driving. One afternoon, determined not to stop and ask for directions, as Mama kept imploring me to do, I had to drive us across tracks in the middle of Boston down which a train was coming. If our rental car had stalled, we and who knows how many train passengers would have been killed or injured horribly. Twenty-five years after the fact, I continue to have nightmares about that. You’re the first person I’ve ever told about it.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Some months later, Mama came up to San Francisco to see me and her granddaughter, and I was late to SFO to pick her up. I can picture Mama, who was intimidated by everyone and everything, being absolutely terrified, imagining we wouldn’t turn up for her. And then what would she do, 400 miles from home, surrounded by complete strangers? (There were no mere strangers in Mama’s world, just as there was no darkness. There were complete strangers and pitch darkness.) I’ve been late around three times in my life. Most psychologists believe that such mistakes are instances of the subconscious grabbing the steering wheel for a minute.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">What a perfect little bastard I was.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Of course, I was just warming up at that point. I persuaded Mama to get a computer, thinking she might enjoy looking up old classmates and relatives. She had no aptitude for it, and I made no secret of my exasperation, this in front of my daughter, until Mama insisted on my daughter having it. Shame on me. She would take us to dinner on Friday evenings when I drove up to Santa Rosa to pick my daughter up after school. I was snide at my best and contemptuous at my worst, as far from gracious as Mercury is from Neptune. Shame on me.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">After my first marriage disssolved, and I left my wonderful job as a word processor at San Francisco’s biggest ultraconsrvative law firm for fear that either I or one of the self-delighted young dickhead attorneys whose words it was my onus to process would go out a 21st story window some afternoon. Dr. Steven B. Jacobson, who’d treated me at Kaiser when I had medical insurance, kindly consented to keep seeing me in spite of my having ceased to have insurance, and living hand to mouth. He was an adult child of alcoholics, and specialised in the treatment of others like himself. He believed that my childhood would have been distinguishable from his other patients’ only by virtue of Mama and Pop being teetotal. He told me that I wouldn’t begin to truly heal until I had confronted both my parents<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and told them how I’d come to realise they’d damaged me.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Years before, when I signed up for free psychotherapy at the university I attended, my dad had been horrified. Men of his generation scorned psychotherapy. And yet when I bared my soul to and raged at him, he apologised immediately, from the heart, not glibly, astonishing me. Mama, who believed psychotherapy to be a great thing, was the one who couldn’t bear to hear what I had to say, and then tried to refute it. How could I have had the tortured childhood I was claiming when I’d always received such good grades at school? I was speechless.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">One Friday evening when my daughter and I arrived to pick Mama up at her assisted living residence, at which I never dined with her, even though it would have made her proud (go figure!), she greeted. us in slacks that were, as ever, meticulously pressed, but also noticeably stained. In 49 years, I’d never seen Mama with a hair out of place, let alone stained clothing. That her dementia was accelerating was unmistakable.</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Did I turn over a new leaf and replace the snideness and contempt with kindness and patience? Of course, I didn’t. I became more monstrous. “What do you mean?” I would roar at her, “you didn’t take your fucking [oh, yes, that] medication?” Brave Johnny terrorising a cowering 80-year-old woman to get back at her from crimes she didn’t realise she’d committed 55 years before. No statute of limitations for brave Johnny!</p><p class="p2" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="color: #535353; font-family: "Arial Narrow"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">My sister acknowledged it was her turn to deal with Mama, who prepared to relocate to the Midwest, where Sis had moved. I drove them to the airport. Mama looked at me with bruised incredulity. Was I going to play the heartless, sneering bastard until her and my sister’s flight was called? You bet I was, being pretty sure if I didn’t, I’d disintegrate. If I started to cry at the prospect of never seeing her again, and in acknowledgment of the monster I’d been, how would I ever manage to stop?</p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-86707673326966892582022-12-05T06:18:00.001-05:002022-12-05T06:18:43.969-05:00Celia <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sZ2I3siAFrVpLlFw4uy1TTInlOebSJn9vcy70iKj9TBLopVX3ho9m2ee3uPCk-HRMCFWkt-43PZr8ah-2XRI-imfDjI7IVL8PzOEZIokvT-PFen44yUy25UQ484H73RdT8qW-9UN0SKwoRAkXIX-xBWwXKrA5yqRxcaVi_Ufkb-vPzDjt7PST-U0JQ/s1920/rockNDrollStory.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="bt5ig-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="bt5ig-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="bt5ig-0-0"><span data-text="true">In the first months of my life, my parents and I lived in DC with Pop’s parents. Mama quickly came to loathe her mother-in-law, a native of Riga, Latvia, who made spaghetti by emptying a bottle of ketchup into a big bowl of what at the time were called noodles, stirring, and serving. At the dinner table of my dad’s early years, anyone who wanted a second helping of something just reached in with the fork he or she had been putting food into his own mouth with. Mama found this disgusting, and during her and Pop’s marriage, she would shrike loudly enough to be heard back in her native Minneapolis when Pop reverted to the ways of his own childhood home and helped himself to more of something with his own fork. I would be forbidden to have any more of whatever it was. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="9seaa-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="9seaa-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="9seaa-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="8plkp-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="8plkp-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="8plkp-0-0"><span data-text="true">Where Mama’s hypergentility came from was anyone’s guess, in her own childhood, her family had been so poor that they’d had to sneak out of rented premises they couldn’t afford to pay for under cover of darkness, and Mama couldn’t bathe as biology might have preferred. One of the defining moments of her childhood was of being sent home from school for smelling. In adulthood, she would become fascistically fastidious. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="9eei9-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="9eei9-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="9eei9-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="60cnk-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="60cnk-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="60cnk-0-0"><span data-text="true">Her mother, whom I knew as Gram and the world knew as Celia Kaufman, had grown up in Odessa, Ukraine, which her family had fled for fear of being raped or incinerated in a pogrom. For reasons that I’d love to know, and will never find out, she and her young husband, a fellow refugee from Ukraine, relocated to Minneapolis, where Hubby took to being carried home drunk and bloodied. They had four children — my mother, her sister Doris, her brother Marty, and a little boy whose death at a few months old was another defining moment of Mama’s early years. Gramps — John Ned Kaufman — was apparently an inattentive or even abusive dad, and the three siblings grew up as damaged emotionally as they were gorgeous. My grandparents came out to Los Angeles briefly when the air still smelled of oranges, and opened a cafe in Boyle Heights. It went bust, and they returned to the upper Midwest, where John Ned resumed being carried home half-dead until a year or two after the repeal of Prohibition, when he got rich as a liquor wholesaler. A year or two later, he died at 42 a year or two before my own arrival. Gram returned to Los Angeles, and Mama, having had enough of Riga-born Grandma Rose’s coarseness and ketchup spaghetti, informed Pop they’d be following her. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="9ovjq-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="9ovjq-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="9ovjq-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="ae192-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="ae192-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="ae192-0-0"><span data-text="true">Her three surviving children remained very, unhealthily, close to Gram all their lives, Doris because she was incapacitated by a disease whose name I never knew, a disease that killed her before she was 35, and Marty because the world terrified him. I saw a great deal of Gram. I would go over to her home either with Mama alone or with both my parents. While Gram listened in silence and I, precocious little sod that I was, read the latest issue of Readers Digest, to which Gram subscribed, Mama would rail at the world and everyone in it, especially those to whom we were related, by blood or marriage, without taking a breath. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="7jabi-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="7jabi-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="7jabi-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="d171a-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="d171a-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="d171a-0-0"><span data-text="true">Under the influence of powerful, primitive antidepressants, Marty had an automobile accident which left him slightly less gorgeous, and too self-conscious ever to venture into public in daylight again. He persuaded Gram to relocate to Quartz Hill, in the Antelope Valley, where no one was likely to be horrified by his (imagined) ugliness. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="f99l6-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="f99l6-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="f99l6-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="1r6kk-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="1r6kk-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="1r6kk-0-0"><span data-text="true">For around 36 hours after my almost-unattended bar mitzvah, I aspired to become a rabbi. Everyone was delighted, none more than Gram, who I don’t think was ever glimpsed in a synagogue, but who remembered the pogroms well enough not to be very comfortable around gentiles. Then I resumed planning to play second bass for the Los Angeles Dodgers even though I was an awful baseball (and everything else) player. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="9tkb0-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="9tkb0-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="9tkb0-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div></span></a><span style="color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="fi49i-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sZ2I3siAFrVpLlFw4uy1TTInlOebSJn9vcy70iKj9TBLopVX3ho9m2ee3uPCk-HRMCFWkt-43PZr8ah-2XRI-imfDjI7IVL8PzOEZIokvT-PFen44yUy25UQ484H73RdT8qW-9UN0SKwoRAkXIX-xBWwXKrA5yqRxcaVi_Ufkb-vPzDjt7PST-U0JQ/s1920/rockNDrollStory.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="fi49i-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sZ2I3siAFrVpLlFw4uy1TTInlOebSJn9vcy70iKj9TBLopVX3ho9m2ee3uPCk-HRMCFWkt-43PZr8ah-2XRI-imfDjI7IVL8PzOEZIokvT-PFen44yUy25UQ484H73RdT8qW-9UN0SKwoRAkXIX-xBWwXKrA5yqRxcaVi_Ufkb-vPzDjt7PST-U0JQ/s1920/rockNDrollStory.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span data-offset-key="fi49i-0-0"><span data-text="true">Marty and I got close as I entered adolescence. He murdered me at chess and let me marvel at the textbook from the abnormal psychology class at Loyola College he’d been on his way to the afternoon of his accident. He idolized Thomas Wolfe, and, when he learned I’d won the creative writing award at my junior high school, appointed himself my mentor, intending to agonise over every syllable, as he’d read that Wolfe’s mentor had done. I wasn’t having it. He tried to kill himself (in part, I can’t</span></span></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9sZ2I3siAFrVpLlFw4uy1TTInlOebSJn9vcy70iKj9TBLopVX3ho9m2ee3uPCk-HRMCFWkt-43PZr8ah-2XRI-imfDjI7IVL8PzOEZIokvT-PFen44yUy25UQ484H73RdT8qW-9UN0SKwoRAkXIX-xBWwXKrA5yqRxcaVi_Ufkb-vPzDjt7PST-U0JQ/s1920/rockNDrollStory.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: white;"><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="a69un-0-0" style="display: inline !important;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="a69un-0-0" style="direction: ltr; display: inline !important; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="a69un-0-0"><span data-text="true">t help but think, because of my disinclination to be mentored), and failed, and tried again, and succeeded. Having lost two children in three years, Gram and her little dog moved back to West Los Angeles. </span></span></div></div></span></a></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="ovag-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="ovag-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="ovag-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="d59tm-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="d59tm-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="d59tm-0-0"><span data-text="true">She was delighted when, as a university freshman, i took to coming over to her apartment on Sepulveda Blvd. to study. I’ve never completely trusted anyone delighted by my presence. I got older and less dweebish, with a red Porsche and a trophy girlfriend. People perceived me as rockstar-like in both dress and affect. I was too cool to spend much time with Gram, and when I did visit, I would make no secret of my exasperation at, for instance, her having conflated Jane Fonda with Vanessa Redgrave, who’d famously said something or other vaguely antisemitic. Utter asshole though I was, Gram never failed to give me a bagful of spectacularly delicious homemade blintzes and knishes before I left. I will never cease to be ashamed of rarely embracing or kissing her on parting. I was too cool for such behaviour. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="auv82-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="auv82-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="auv82-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="3f2hg-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="3f2hg-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="3f2hg-0-0"><span data-text="true">She got dementia, and Mama put her in a “convalescent hospital” in Santa Monica where she died at around 84 without my being able to say goodbye, or to thank her for her implacable. kindness and generosity, or to ask her about her childhood in Odessa, and her marriage, and a thousand other thing. But the wonderful news for her is that she’s on my prayer list, one of the half-dozen to whom I apologise every night before drifting away. </span></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="79ee9-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="79ee9-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><span data-offset-key="79ee9-0-0"><br data-text="true" /></span></div></div><div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dd68j" data-offset-key="6pl4u-0-0" style="background-color: #242526; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="6pl4u-0-0" style="direction: ltr; position: relative;"><br /></div></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><br /><br /></div><br /></span></div><span style="color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><br /><p></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-33711397657799254192022-11-26T03:04:00.001-05:002022-11-26T03:04:20.305-05:00I'm Here for You, Mr. President (in-Exile)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN3P9rdvcLxIRjbqT0wFimflUAuCdZGW4vEhoy2lTKTXVuDkXeBbwLDaE8fGjxvGzsUOhGKB1mM_Yd4bSYSEB-s_ugPYxHcniG5683bSRkD6-ofh_qMTKLnJEwkjlxFG-U_INFsFycnNL-LeHSkxdf4r_GMLyNM3I1H_w_ktbzHaGZRcVJXFTCC58zbw/s1422/countryCalling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1422" data-original-width="800" height="1212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN3P9rdvcLxIRjbqT0wFimflUAuCdZGW4vEhoy2lTKTXVuDkXeBbwLDaE8fGjxvGzsUOhGKB1mM_Yd4bSYSEB-s_ugPYxHcniG5683bSRkD6-ofh_qMTKLnJEwkjlxFG-U_INFsFycnNL-LeHSkxdf4r_GMLyNM3I1H_w_ktbzHaGZRcVJXFTCC58zbw/w683-h1212/countryCalling.jpg" width="683" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-82063389000618492192022-11-25T11:18:00.002-05:002022-11-25T11:18:54.725-05:00Ernie K. Doe, If You See What I Mean<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">My first de facto mother-in-law was a sweet person I didn’t know how to address (Betty seemed disrespectful, and Mrs. W</span><span class="s1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">—</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"> a little stiff) but she didn’t grouse when I went with stiff. I didn’t know quite how to act around her, in large part because I was supposed to pretend that her daughter and I weren’t living together. At one point, in 1973, she put a lot of time and effort into making the sequined outfit I wore on stage at Christopher Milk’s last performances. In approximately 2018, it occurred to me that I should have bought her a thank-you gift. That’s the kind of guy I am! Just give me a few decades, and I’ll either do the right thing, or realise I failed to yet again.</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">When her daughter Patti left me, I started seeing a lot of Betty, which involved driving all the way out to Orange County. She was sympathetic, and very kind, especially in view of my being an entitled little dickhead who hadn’t thought to give her a thank-you gift. It was her impression that Patti had left me not because I was an insufferable dickhead, but because I’d declined to have a child with her (she’d been envious of her best pal bearing the son Stephen Stills refused to acknowledge as his), and not having asked her to marry me. This seemed highly unlikely, but I had no trace of pride left, and was grasping frantically at every straw, and hightailed it back to Hollywood to pop the question. To which Patti replied, approximately, “Well, uh, no.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">First Wife’s parents were like my own in that Mom’s dominance over Pop, who was painfully shy, and giggled nervously a lot, was total. Mom seemed to tell him when and how deeply he could breathe, and it occurred to me that if he had a crest designed for himself, what it should say at the bottom in Latin was “Yes, dear.” Early in our marriage, when I’d tried to instill the idea that punctuality was a nice way to show respect and consideration for The Other, she’d snapped, “I’ve already got a father.” Not once did I yield to the temptation to ask, “Why haven’t I met him?” Boy, did he and I not bond! But better him than Mom! She and I detested each other from Moment 1. When she and Mr. Giggles arrived (from Miami) to meet their newborn granddaughter in 1984. I took NBG out to meet them. The first words out of Mom’s mouth were, “Give me my baby!”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I won’t for a millisecond deny that they were generous with me. They’d taken both First Wife and me to Spain some months before, and then offered to guy an investment property in northern California, to which I’d come to long to relocate, in which First Wife and daughter and I could live, and in which they could stay when they came out to visit. No one said their visits would last six months at a time. In their presence, First Wife ceased to be my life partner, and instead reverted to being their spoiled teen daughter. I would drag myself home at almost 7 p.m. after having spent four hours commuting back and forth to the soul-destroying word processing job I’d taken in San Francisco to Support My Family and find her in their suite draining a bottle of Freixenent and smoking cigarettes. I’d gently ask if she’d given any thought to dinner. Mom would glare at me, Pop would giggle nervously, and First Wife would marvel, “God, you’re so controlling!”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4mtwD97HK9Lkr-AHIEhu5HdwI8yMCmEmbyz0mr1eBOpypoxNttEb5ESFYVY0bsWDQ6fkUBraJpnax3jw24dMHGjHcO_BbAuAPubljo_pnS8dY880wxdn2E6h-D5icvFTXABKgJ1VZvyYDtmX8aPYyCd4WpSKcGchC6bZJ4rTma0e4re4LZGL2fm6ZA/s777/annieHall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="777" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4mtwD97HK9Lkr-AHIEhu5HdwI8yMCmEmbyz0mr1eBOpypoxNttEb5ESFYVY0bsWDQ6fkUBraJpnax3jw24dMHGjHcO_BbAuAPubljo_pnS8dY880wxdn2E6h-D5icvFTXABKgJ1VZvyYDtmX8aPYyCd4WpSKcGchC6bZJ4rTma0e4re4LZGL2fm6ZA/s320/annieHall.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I’m of course ashamed (my default mode!) of how I behaved with the family of Koala Gal, with whom I lived for 10 years after recovering from the breakup of First Marriage. I was reminded of the scene in Annie Hall in which Annie’s family’s wholesomeness makes Woody Allen feel as though in danger of hyperventilating. Mom was sweet, wise, and tolerant, and Older Brother one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Older Sister and I weren’t allergic to each other. But Younger Brother was a witless loudmouth, and Older Sister’s and Older Brother’s wife’s detesting each other, though they kept up appearances, made me jumpy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The family was big on propriety. Mom was a well-bred New Englander, so no one was allowed to so much touch as touch their fork until she’d picked up her own. Koala Gal, who fancied herself quite the rebel (and expressed her rebelliousness by being even less punctual than First Wife had been) became a zealous enforcer of such nonsense when around them.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A little side road. Koala Gal’s fucking pathological need to demonstrate herself an indefatigable feminist, or something, by never, ever being on time for anything inspired one of my moments of greatest comedic inventiveness. We were going to a matinee of Dances With Wolves on Polk Street. The screening began at 2. It would take us around half an hour to drive there from the foggy Sunset and park. At around 1:15, I began saying, “We’d better go now, hon,” every 90 seconds. We finally left at around 1:43. As we encountered a traffic snarl at the Panhandle, I shrieked, “What did you think, that it was getting earlier?” We both had a good laugh at that. And missed the first 15 minutes of the movie.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But back to the leadup to my apology to my de facto in-laws. Such was my disgruntlement with the Swedish delicacies (like head cheese — yum!) they had to honour of Mom’s being a Swedish-American, that I began making a lasagna to bring to their annual Xmas dinner. The smiles on the faces of those who managed a smile looked pretty strained. At non-holiday get-togethers at Younger Brother’s home, I would excuse myself to play his upright piano with relish and no discernible ability while he told us (even the two of us who’d been there and done that) with his trademark loud boorishness about diaper-changing, for instance. I wrote a satirical poem about Younger Brother’s marriage in which I mentioned no names, but which inspired Older Brother to drive down to San Francisco (from Marin) to ask, with his characteristic gentleness, and in different words, how I could be such an asshole. Later, after Koala Gal and I had split up, he and I actually became friends, though his wife forbade him to invite me over.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">My bad, Koala Gal’s family.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-20147964250525145582022-11-24T05:28:00.002-05:002022-11-24T05:28:43.627-05:00Europa '87<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">To ask either of my parents to spend money on their own pleasure would have been like asking them to walk fly-like upside down on the ceiling, inconceivable. Having retired, my dad seemed intent on dying of boredom. He enjoyed pottery, but refused to get himself a potter’s wheel. His huge-hearted son vaguely conspired to get him one, but Mama of course had a whole litany of reasons why I should not, just as, during my childhood, she’d eloquently argued against my having a dog, or the family having a Christmas tree. (Her objection wasn’t based on our being zealously non-observant Jews, but on the likelihood of the tree losing some of its needles, in so doing compromising our happy home’s fascistic tidiness.)</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I gave up on the pottery idea, and urged them implacably to go see a bit of the world. Because Pop was sure to have a medical emergency in a country whose principal language she didn’t speak, Mama would consider a trip to Europe only if I came along. My marriage had just disintegrated, I loathed my job (word processing at a huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm), and the only reservation I had was that I wouldn’t see my three-year-old daughter for 10 days. I went.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAFw3U84WJwDki2ZAUmsgUL7jAZKMkrt8QkmHXOP_JkN2ltFfTYJ1nOCtrMWnAo9Qj4yAor4bIdCimeZ0X9IUOYav5V0RbvnWmXQhyD_FCvgQKAG2nXzl4qDx6RSMqFfPE_TwqtmVDQdmYkwZWfP11qNFhdX6ahdkUCFFgrYYIEvB8Zax8y-9eSEISwA/s828/family1948.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="655" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAFw3U84WJwDki2ZAUmsgUL7jAZKMkrt8QkmHXOP_JkN2ltFfTYJ1nOCtrMWnAo9Qj4yAor4bIdCimeZ0X9IUOYav5V0RbvnWmXQhyD_FCvgQKAG2nXzl4qDx6RSMqFfPE_TwqtmVDQdmYkwZWfP11qNFhdX6ahdkUCFFgrYYIEvB8Zax8y-9eSEISwA/s320/family1948.jpg" width="253" /></a></div><br />I had a complicated relationship with my folks. That they both loved me hadn’t been in question for a millisecond, but there were some major things about them I couldn’t stand. Mama, having not been valued in her own girlhood, and frantically insecure as a result, had been telling me since I began to understand speech that Pop wasn’t very interested in me, and he’d given me scant reason to doubt her. I hated how she made no secret of her contempt for him, as I hated his abiding it. Mama was always delighted by my expressions of love for her, but similar expressions discombobulated and embarrassed Pop, he of a generation of men who thought it unmanly to express themselves emotionally.<p></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">(We swing briefly onto a side road here, as we think about my dad’s discomfort with expressions of affection. My sister’s first two marriages took place at my parents’ house. At the second one, that at which she married a Lebanese mama’s-boy in a fashionably baggy suit, I went downstairs into the garage for some reason, and found my dad weeping, I guess because he and my sister had been much closer than he and I had ever been, and she would live with her new husband on Long Island. A better man that I would have taken Dad in his arms, and comforted him. The man that I was was embarrassed and disapproving.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A side road off the side road. That wasn’t the first time I impersonated the sort of taciturn hardass I loathe. In the spring of 1964, my uncle’s second suicide attempt proved more successful than its antecedent. (Maybe my flippancy is born of the shame I feel for not having been nearly as good a friend to him as he’d been to me.) My sister, then seven, greeted me at the front door as I arrived home from school. “Marty died,” she said. “Yeah?” her 16-year-old tough guy brother replied. “So?”)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But back to 1986, and the Mendels(s)ohn”s European tour. My parents drove up from Los Angeles to pick me up at the huge, ultraconservative San Francisco law firm at the end of a workday during which I’d been advised that our flight had been put forward 24 hours, so we had to head for the airport as soon as I’d dashed into Ross Dress for Less and bought a change of underwear and a toothbrush.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Inexperienced — no, novice! — travellers as they were, they’d prepared for our trip as compulsively as13-year-olds preparing for their first day of middle school. They’d put all their documents in special plastic folios they’d bought for the occasion, and apparently checked<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a thousand times to ensure that they had everything they needed. When I asked if they had their passports, they both eagerly reached for their folios, and produced ‘em. They were adorably proud of themselves, like a pair of little kids, and I nearly burst into tears of love. But no, we couldn’t have that, so I hid my adoration behind a mask of snideness and condescension that I didn’t take off the whole trip.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In London, I’d managed to book us into a bed-’n’-breakfast that provided a stack of gay porn mags with stuck-together pages in every room. They didn’t give me a hard time about it, bless them. When I bought myself a pair of (engagingly) ludicrous Stop-Making-Sense suits in lurid colours in Oxford Street, they pretended not to be aghast, and in fact professed amused delight. In Jersey, which a neighbour had encouraged them to visit, we had an alfresco lunch at a place that Mama just loved. It wasn’t like her to (dare to) express great enthusiasm. I found her joyfulness disorienting and snarled softly at her. Shame on me. It turned out that I’d screwed up our hotel reservation in Barcelona (I made all the reservations), and my parents (who didn’t once let me reach for my waller) were charged for a night we weren’t there. Shame on me. I apologised effusively, but they, who had agonised over every dime spent since I’d met them, told me — superhumanly lovingly —not to give it a second thought. And the sweeter they were to me, the surlier and more snide I became. Arriving in new places, I would point them in one direction, and hurry off in the opposite one.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Shame on me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I intended throughout to stop being a complete fucking asshole at some point, and to tell them how much I loved them, and how much I appreciated their taking me to Europe. That I never quite got around to it will still pain me as I take my last breath.</p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-52239987647037456292022-11-23T04:43:00.006-05:002022-11-23T04:43:59.863-05:00The First Time I Saw Patti<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgsrbhJfkqfKUF1w3ZhezsNbHhXfUATcHJOTldFeLfGEVVARcDWutwKkLnzpNQi5S9Mfax1s0aPaodkbjfFsaaUrPQAsdrvAqVs0Isy5mGC0YPCrT3yKBIxxAQql1lOO5azyzPWFhVIUgEfRP7-6JUlWC16k2DT7wqxf3QsOKFFZo8ld-QJfbNze0I3Q" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1210" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgsrbhJfkqfKUF1w3ZhezsNbHhXfUATcHJOTldFeLfGEVVARcDWutwKkLnzpNQi5S9Mfax1s0aPaodkbjfFsaaUrPQAsdrvAqVs0Isy5mGC0YPCrT3yKBIxxAQql1lOO5azyzPWFhVIUgEfRP7-6JUlWC16k2DT7wqxf3QsOKFFZo8ld-QJfbNze0I3Q=w265-h400" width="265" /></a></div>The first time I saw Patti, in the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, my mouth dropped open. Such was her beauty that she seemed to glow. It was lust at first sight, and I thought I had about as much chance with her as with Raquel Welch, for whom all heterosexual American men were contractually compelled at that time to yearn.<span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px;"> </span><p></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">She took a job working for an old school showbiz publicist who would later become famous for having himself surgically attached to Elton John, or at least for bouncing around Elton’s famous Troubadour debut shouting, “Far out” into the face of every journalist on the premises. My dear friend and mentor Lewis S— got a job working for the guy, and I had an excuse to drop by and marvel at Big Patti. The first time I did so, Hot pants had just become fashionable, and I am able to promise you that no one on earth was wearing better than she was wearing her purple ones, with purple boots. OMG. I became Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners(, incapable of intelligible speech. <i>Homina homina homina!</i></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The day after the record company I was working dispatched me to NYC to make Procol Harum feel loved on their behalf, Lewis S— related that Patti had lost her shared house in Laurel Canyon, and was driving back and forth every evening to Mama’s place in very distant Buena Park. I graciously (you bet!) asked him to ask Patti if she might like to stay at my apartment just down the hill from Chateau Marmont (around 200 yards from Old School Publicist’s office) in my absence. She would.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">She picked me up at LAX on my return home, in different hot pants. <i>Humina humina humina. </i>By the time we ‘d reached West Hollywood, I had regained my power of speech and was able to suggest she stay the night rather than drive all the way to Orange County. She agreed. I felt as though dreaming. We made love, during which I thought to myself, “No one will ever be able to take this away from me.” I’d won the lottery.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I’d won a dozen lotteries. At last, I was demonstrably someone to be reckoned with— one at whom the world looked and thought, “Well, he must have something major going for him.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">For one who grows up loathing himself as fervently as I did, such ecstasy is short-lived. It was remarkable how quickly I first began taking Patti’s love— she was the one who said, “I love you,” first — for granted, and then, I’ve come to realise in the intervening decades, actually coming to disdain her. Must there not have been something…missing in anyone who’d want to be my life partner? Could she not see who I was? What was wrong with her?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Having been raised in a joyless household — Mama loathed Papa with all her might I couldn’t reasonably have been expected to be happy being happy. I was surly and brutish and selfish and demanding with this remarkable woman, whose kindness and patience and generosity were a match for her outward beauty. I cheated on her with groupies not fit to fold her laundry, and lied to her about doing so.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But you ain’t seen nothing yet. When, after three and a half years, she’d had enough and informed me that she wasn’t in love with me anymore, I actually managed to feel wronged. How <i>could</i> she!</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">For about six months, I could barely catch my breath, as I couldn’t imagine getting through the next 10 minutes. In my agony, I irrevocably fumbled a major career opportunity. Every day I felt as though pulling myself across a parking lot covered with broken glass to endure the pain of my life until four o’clock, when I could self-medicate with Cutty Sark.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Lewis S— got me through it, he and Mama, who, in her finest hour, seemed to revel in being my most reliable source of reassurance. And then, after five months, Patti phoned. She wanted to come over.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The sun came out. I was still beside myself, but now with elation. I tidied up my apartment, full of the hideous furniture we’d had to grab when the showroom owner whose place from whom Patti had ordered some much nicer stuff lost everything in Las Vegas. I blowdried my hair with especial care. I put on the tight patchwork jeans she’d told me she thought I looked sexy in. (“My beautiful man,” she’d marveled, nearly making me faint!) Whatever happened, I would be calm and charming, unrecognisable from the emotionally 14 asshole she’d ceased to be in love with.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It didn’t work. Having apparently verified that she could no longer love me as she had, she made up an excuse to leave after maybe 20 minutes. And now, my own finest hour, as I somehow didn’t lose my temper, and in fact remained my most charming as I walked her to the elevator.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">As the doors of which closed, she was three times as gorgeous as the night she glowed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, more beautiful than any woman I’d ever laid eyes on. And done with me. I’m not sure how I lived through it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">She managed the publicity for Monty Python’s Hollywood Bowl show, and then disappeared. But then, 10 years ago, someone who’d known her from the record biz somehow secured her email address. She’d married a guy with whom she operates a sport fishing business in Marina del Rey. She informed a mutual acquaintance that she had desire to hear from me. I wrote her a letter — by hand, to demonstrate my sincerity — assuring her I hadn’t the slightest intention of trying to disrupt her marriage and wanted only to be a good and loyal friend to her in our last years to make up for the person I’d been when we were as one.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">No reply.</p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-32900328120995230042022-11-22T04:22:00.004-05:002022-11-22T04:22:49.819-05:00Kim Paternoster<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10px; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0beq3YnaoFEfIX-x6wqBHsJPJYYbsnS2ZuyOpMnqKLo02CxPSYhwrNyaQFiuxThOgkoAT2tn_ITEjweBTWDTG0vNS0ifRD2NyTrfFC7O2MbFaMMVLeBmDH3fYy0iy4i2nY-iJY8VErr50-ObSQa5vUYOqCMHfUOXaTc1m8wdjeJrEqqI_WD6PkMPtgQ/s700/mari.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="345" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0beq3YnaoFEfIX-x6wqBHsJPJYYbsnS2ZuyOpMnqKLo02CxPSYhwrNyaQFiuxThOgkoAT2tn_ITEjweBTWDTG0vNS0ifRD2NyTrfFC7O2MbFaMMVLeBmDH3fYy0iy4i2nY-iJY8VErr50-ObSQa5vUYOqCMHfUOXaTc1m8wdjeJrEqqI_WD6PkMPtgQ/s320/mari.jpg" width="158" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Second Girlfriend</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: georgia;">At the time I felt mightily aggrieved, but over the many, many years since, I have come to redognise, with almost unendurable shame, that I richly deserved my first major live-togehter girlfriend’s leaving me. I hadn’t been a teenaged horror story, but God knows I was an early and mid-20s one — duplicitous, demanding, volatile, intolerant, utterly insufferable.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">But anyway. I found being alone in the house we’d shared way up in Laurel Canyon excruciating, and got away from it all. My Porsche was in disrepair (after a couple of years of neglect and mistreatment), so I borrowed Mama’s car to drive up to San Francisco to visit Second Girlfriend, who’d broken my heart seven years before, with far less cause. I’d become considerably less dweebish in those seven years, to the point of strangers routinely stopping me to ask, “You are somebody, aincha?” Second Girlfriend commended me on my hugely improved lovemaking (I’d had no way to go but up!), and I was briefly able to pretend I wasn’t in severe emotional disarray. But then she decided that maybe she wouldn’t leave her boyfriend for me after all, and suggested I not stay with her on her little apartment at the foot of Pacific Heights after Boyfriend got home from his business trip. I could stay a couple of nights at her sister’s up in Novato.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I repaired to <a href="http://www.woeyloygoey.com/"><span class="s1">Woey Loy Goey</span></a>, in Chinatown, which I’d discovered as a university student years before, and liked so much that I’d taken David Bowie to it during his pre-Hunky Dory first visit to San Francisco three years before. An attractive young brunette came in, and I was able, as I was so infrequently, to suppress my paralyzing shyness, and to ask if she might wish to dine with me. I was at the time someone strangers routinely imagined must…be someone, and she agreed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’m good with names.Hers was Kim Paternoster.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Within a couple of hours, we were up in Novato, discovering that we were remarkably in tune sexually. I thought she might take my mind off my Pattilessness, and asked her to come live with me in Laurel Canyon. She accepted, and we headed south. Stopping for gas in San Jose, she incredulously declined my offer of a cold canned soft drink. “You actually drink that stuff?” she marveled, censoriously. That and the sex are the two things I remember best about her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">No, that’s not true. I remember the look of irate incredulity on her face when, a couple of miles north of Santa Cruz, I decided that, instead of taking her home with me, I’d continue to hope that I could change Patti’s mind.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Understandably disgusted with me, Kim didn’t ask me to drive her back to San Francisco, and I, a black hole gallantry-wise, didn’t insist on doing so. That was the last I ever saw or spoke to her.</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sorry, Kim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I couldn’t change Patti's mind.</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-23305787327438192022-11-21T05:18:00.002-05:002022-11-22T04:02:09.689-05:00The Girl in the Fred Slatten Shoes<p><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxgjKu_KuK-dhrSMXXHSN3DnfXR2EdE_sUmU81CoCh-UndKxosW1Ze-ll3Z2dAFJmHtCqO4bah6e-GOYSkbA52U9kBMYYtt9rXiSemjxZtaQqoh_SG3SDuUbO2no7qah8u6qP5pm6rDbuW0hx-VWdJZ8HWNJfSGqvl2NsEuIquX3HjA4SUCrz29DNB6Q/s762/fredSlatten.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="762" data-original-width="582" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxgjKu_KuK-dhrSMXXHSN3DnfXR2EdE_sUmU81CoCh-UndKxosW1Ze-ll3Z2dAFJmHtCqO4bah6e-GOYSkbA52U9kBMYYtt9rXiSemjxZtaQqoh_SG3SDuUbO2no7qah8u6qP5pm6rDbuW0hx-VWdJZ8HWNJfSGqvl2NsEuIquX3HjA4SUCrz29DNB6Q/w305-h400/fredSlatten.jpg" width="305" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">I was in Halfnelson with a pair of brothers I knew from university until they suggested I join a band other than theirs either because I was an awful drummer or because I was vocal about my distaste for their cuteness, as exemplified by the singer’s mock-operatic falsetto and their intention to perform little skits between songs, or even during them. I formed my own band. We and Halfnelson attended each other’s ultra-sporadic gigs, and were sometimes each other’s whole audiences. Their changing their name to Sparks (because they reminded their manager, Albert Grossman, of the Marx brothers!) hadn’t made them much more popular.</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Four years after they banished me from their band, the brothers relocated to England and became the flavour of the month. Their breakthrough UK hit, featuring the singer’s frantic falsetto, got lots of airplay on the West Coast. The new, improved, 60-percent British Sparks was booked to headline at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, at which I’d dreamed of playing since the summer of 1966, when the Inrhodes, composed in significant part of former members of my own first band, opened shows for the Yardbirds and other notables. I wasn’t pleased that the brothers had beaten me to it, and as headliners, and hoped to hate their performance.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I didn’t. They were terrific.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I was standing in the Civic’s entrance, gnashing my teeth, grumbling, trying to decide whether or not to subject myself to the humiliation of their after-party at — cuteness alert! — Marie Callender Pies up on the Miracle Mile, when a tall (very) young woman introduced herself as Olivia R— and made clear that she might be interested in a private guitar lesson. I don’t actually play the guitar, and her height owed to her remarkable Fred Slatten shoes, platform skyscrapers of the sort favoured by the jailbaitettes of Rodney’s English Disco. Saved by the belle, whose name was Olivia R—!</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I drove us back to my apartment on actual Sunset Blvd. Waiting for the elevator on my building’s garage level, Olivia removed her shoes. I encouraged her to put them back on. I’ve always found high heels arousing. I had faint (these were very different times) misgivings about her age, but then learned that she’d been seeing a lot of a celebrated Hollywood photographer a lot older than I. How could I be reasonably accused of depriving her of her innocence? Did I note that these were very different times?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I didn’t see her as a replacement for She Who’d Broken My Heart six months before, but was pretty sure I’d made the right choice in not attending the Sparks after-party. We made plans for her to visit again, and to be sure to wear her Fred Slattens and hold-up (by garters!) stockings.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the meantime, I discovered that a woman with a remarkable honey-coloured Afro I’d lusted after at work reciprocated my interest. I encountered her upstairs at the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill, and danced with her to Sparks’ breakthrough hit. Lust can inspire great feats of graciousness. She left her husband and effectively moved in with me almost immediately.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Such was my delight that I’d forgotten my and Olivia’s plans to reconvene. A few days after The Nib, she of the remarkable hair, had brought her toothbrush over,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Olivia phoned to say she was in the lobby, in the attire I’’d requested, and I had to tell her my heart had been claimed by another. Having come all the way from some godforsaken corner of the San Fernando Valley, Olivia wasn’t delighted with me.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I have owed her an apology for 47 years.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Here it is.</p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-1853742135127288452022-03-17T05:13:00.001-04:002022-03-17T05:14:01.727-04:00A While On the Nile<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPUEam5r8lyCKBD-jRH4nBV1ToIu0CFFRYRL7AJiYv7apHLyVz3VNHkgCWMxOmggykRZb8D1iKgMYYAJl_EV7N_OmbI7BpGziUIHzwqdqwAtzVW33yBF8-duTPnEy4SFvDQX7oik3emsjFJrjysLx4gUtgiHAnAT0AHPx0Iy_xj_PN1OUGujVgjI-Knw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2226" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPUEam5r8lyCKBD-jRH4nBV1ToIu0CFFRYRL7AJiYv7apHLyVz3VNHkgCWMxOmggykRZb8D1iKgMYYAJl_EV7N_OmbI7BpGziUIHzwqdqwAtzVW33yBF8-duTPnEy4SFvDQX7oik3emsjFJrjysLx4gUtgiHAnAT0AHPx0Iy_xj_PN1OUGujVgjI-Knw=w344-h640" width="344" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">When i was 16, I worked briefly at the Zuma Beach snack bar,</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px;">hitchhiking to and from my home near where Sunset Blvd meets the sea,16 miles to the south. One bright Sunday afternoon after work I accepted a ride home with three young men. To my infinite horror, they decided a few miles shy of Paradise Cover that it would be fun, even though there was considerable traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, to see if they could make their 56 Ford go 100 miles an hour. The driver thought nothing of pulling onto the northbound side of the road to overtake those of his fellow motorists who were observing the 45mph speed limits. As the speedometer inched past 90 miles per hour, I somehow regained my power of speech and asked to be let out of the car. I had never experienced comparable terror.</span><p></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">And never experienced it again until two weeks ago, when Dame Zelda and six of our fellow British holidaymakers hurtled toward Luxor in a Toyota people carrier. On a two-way highway filled with motorcyclists (not a few of whom seemed to have both their entire families as passengers, with no helmet in sight) and donkey-drawn carts, our driver seemed intent on ramming the vehicle in front of us at the highest speed possible, only to swing either left or — very much more terrifyingly — right (cart passengers, beware!) at the last millisecond with maybe a millimeter’s clearance.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">While making a quick succession of life-or-death decisions of this kind, he was enjoying a spirited conversation with someone on his mobile phone, held to his ear with his left hand. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">You or I might have perceived the road as having had two lanes, one in each direction. At moments, though, it seemed to have five, as many as four northbound, one south. One second later, it would be reconfigured to four southbound and one northbound. It was a wonder to behold, and a terror beyond imagining. I seriously thought I might not survive the drive, and tried to find consolation that my death would probably be very fast.</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">On reflection, Egyptian drivers might be among the best in the world. They’re like jazz musicians, forever responding to each other’s impulses, making everything up as they go. If you were God, and observing from On High, you might imagine that the endless near-misses are painstakingly choreographed</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">A week later, we observed that the identical rules, or complete absence thereof, were in play in Congested, dusty, deafening, chaotic, dusty and dusty Cairo, which, with its 10 million inhabitants and 120 million cars, makes Tijuana look like Paris. The Pyramids being a couple of blocks up a hill from a busy, very ugly commercial street makes visiting them feel rather less momentous — that and the mounds of camel dung you’re forever just failing to step into, and armies of shrill schoolchildren.</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">48 hours before we visited the Pyramids, on the outskirts of Cairo, where a vengeful cold wind kept my contact lenses full of dust particles that felt like boulders, the heat in Aswan was such that the sloppily laid Astroturf on the deck of our cruise ship <i>Liberty</i>, felt as hot as any asphaltt I’d traversed as a macho teenager in southern California, where flip-slops or comparable protection was indicative of a deficiency of will. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">At our hotel in Hurghada, where we’d have spent much time sunbathing at the edge of the Red Sea if not for the 50mph arctic winds, there was an apparently Russian-themed program, <i>The Kafkas</i>, scheduled for one evening I dared imagine that the performers would transform themselves before our eyes into cockroaches, but this was apparently an entirely different breed of kafka. Presumably out of deference to Ukraine, the hotel replaced the scheduled program with a performance by a male/female vocal team. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">I understood Islam to encourage female modesty, lest men be inspired to think impure thoughts. I will confess that both the young woman’s attire and dancing inspired me to think exactly such thoughts. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">At its worst, the entertainment at the hotel far exceeded that offered during our week on Liberty, the highlight of which was the evening a group of young Cairenes took a break from their medical studies to don native dress and dance to indigenous music, which isn’t sung so much as ululated. What a spectacle! Once, on stage, the students paid no attention whatever to the horrified British oldsters who made up their audience, the young men dancing strictly with each other, the modestly attired young women only with their fellow coeds. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Silence is no more golden in Egypt than in Greece, Turkey, and other Mediterranean countries with resort-lined coasts. Those who come out to the beachfront or poolside to enjoy the sunshine are presumed to want to be bombarded with the world’s most aggressive dance music while they relax. One afternoon, while one nearby sound system blasted out <i>thud!-thud!-thud!</i> dance music and Ed Sheeran mewl in that excruciating inoffensive way at the snack bar, the next resort down saw fit to conduct a fitness class on its own stretch of beach, with <i>thud!-thud!-thud!</i> dance music of its own. How very relaxing the combination! </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">As in Greece, a great many Egyptian buildings are topped with ugly rebar bristles because completed buildings are taxed at a higher rate than those still under construction. In Hurghada, there are seemingly hundreds of derelict might-have-been luxury hotels and residences abandoned before they could welcome a single resident or guest in the face of the COVID pandemic. </p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">To walk down the Hurghada resort sector’s paved, sculpture-laden main drag after dinner was to be assaulted relentlessly by bored, desperate (because of no customers) local shopkeepers. “Hello!” the merchant shouts, “where are you from?” To acknowledge them in any way is to guarantee that they will insist that you come in and marvel at their glorious array of T-shirts, made-in-China <i>tcotchkes</i>, or essential oils. On the second day, though, I devised a strategy that seemed to work wonderfully. When a merchant called to me from en entrance of his shop, I would immediately whirl and ask, “Where are you from?” This would often confuse him long enough for me to get out of the range of his voice. When it did not, I would say,. “Have a great day!” From many of the desperate retailers, this elicited smiles and a cessation of hostilities, and I felt good doing it!</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In Luxor, Edfu, and Aswan, I was besieged by locals who made their counterparts in Hurghada seem shy in comparison, fervently insisting that one buy everything from scarves to hashish to transportation on horse-drawn carriages. “Just look!” they beseech you, thrusting an armful of whatever they’re selling, as you try to pass. God help you if you do glance at the merchandise.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">“How much?” you might occasionally, fatally, wonder, whereupon they will cite a price approximately five times that they’re actually willing to accept. “Harrumph!” you say, and try to move on. Fat chance! Now they become plaintive. You have shown yourself to be ungracious in rejecting their hospitality. Now they are now longer trying to sell you the merchandise, but to give it to you as a gift, albeit a gift for which, once accepted, only an unspeakable ingrate wouldn’t insist on conferring payment.</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The children are every bit as aggressive as their uncles and papas. One of my great achievements during the holiday was managing to get a young man in Edfu to stop trying to sell me something, and to converse. He didn’t identify himself as Bond…James Bond, but as Mohammed…Mohammed Salah. I was skeptical that he was actually Liverpool’s remarkable Egyptian-born center-forward. My skepticism made him giggle. How sweet the sound.</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The cruise ships, of which Liberty may have been the most dilapidated on the river, are commonly stacked three and four abreast along the shore, meaning that if you’re not on Ship 1’s starboard side or Ship 4’s port side, your view for the duration of the time you’re docked will be of the corresponding cabin in the next ship. The scenery you pass is pretty samey, so you’ll be grateful for the enterprising merchants who attach their rowboat to your ship and harangue those on deck no less fervently than their counterparts on dry land. They toss their wares up to prospective customers, whom they trust to toss it back if they don’t like what they see. Given that the little TVs in the cabins don’t work, and that WiFi’s a fortune, it’s the best entertainment available on many evenings.</p><p class="p2" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">You thought the AR15-toting MAGAt at Target buying XXXL T-shirts was well armed! His firepower didn’t exceed that of the tourism police you encounter every few feet or so on the commercial side of the Nile in places like Aswan, along the shore where the cruise ships dock. Tourism is one of the country’s biggest employers, and in the wake of the global pandemic, the country isn’t about to let a tourist be kidnapped or blown up. </p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-42942562247633423452020-11-24T11:33:00.007-05:002020-11-24T11:37:04.250-05:00The Janis Joplin I Knew<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">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 </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Undoing</i><span style="text-align: left;"> 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.</span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-US"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiugZ7sTohoZXx_T5AHJ7HH9R8hMtMDkeJlHyONbwOpEHZRT_rsMjHjgtuTi-4nHcSkca4x7pUzk7rY2Tn1gHSSw-M27k5xb_PHXKQvrX-uXvSvH1vpgG2DgjvF85lKM-YDOGcoBRruoXDc/s456/joplin.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="456" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiugZ7sTohoZXx_T5AHJ7HH9R8hMtMDkeJlHyONbwOpEHZRT_rsMjHjgtuTi-4nHcSkca4x7pUzk7rY2Tn1gHSSw-M27k5xb_PHXKQvrX-uXvSvH1vpgG2DgjvF85lKM-YDOGcoBRruoXDc/w200-h163/joplin.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Janis in 1982<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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.</div><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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, <i>A Piece of My Heart</i>, 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 <i>Me and Bobby McGee</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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. </span>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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Invited to assess
Miley Cyrus’s recent brutalization of <i>Heart of Glass</i>, 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.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<!--EndFragment--><p></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-5308692494970328352020-10-12T13:33:00.003-04:002020-10-12T13:33:48.517-04:00Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares<p><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VPyX7asikJ8OcDCz9FylCYhDkHR6PTxxZdaIVhMeVpFtnM8gw-NW2saCGah94tveMyi0No7nudOe3X5kndChsahk8y6D06dUA_3E6GTlt5G0nWx614hJgx0iTEfUslEkjNKC_CnWnxH0/s275/gordon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VPyX7asikJ8OcDCz9FylCYhDkHR6PTxxZdaIVhMeVpFtnM8gw-NW2saCGah94tveMyi0No7nudOe3X5kndChsahk8y6D06dUA_3E6GTlt5G0nWx614hJgx0iTEfUslEkjNKC_CnWnxH0/s0/gordon.jpg" /></a></div>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. <o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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 <i>on</i>!” in disgust. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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 <i>on</i>!” 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial Narrow", sans-serif;"> </span></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-20831485502403761902020-09-18T02:39:00.005-04:002020-09-18T03:16:51.609-04:00A Wonderful, Hilarious Joke You Can Tell People You Made Up Yourself!<p>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template>
<o:Revision>0</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Words>273</o:Words>
<o:Characters>1561</o:Characters>
<o:Company>ThamesPath Propaganda for Commerce</o:Company>
<o:Lines>13</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>3</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>1917</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>12.1</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
<w:UseFELayout/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0cm;
mso-para-margin-right:0cm;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVUO7YLTGzTy8MyUpaiV1ENpM67U0pUmSjPRWFLAQV1LcrFd4YJD3FT9MNZwIFFBiJQZmQldXkjM2Q9YONguoZn2abbQyB0lv9kGRlX0aLRqnK_KYsmY2aEdcrBytL5J1hK0aQQlga9F9D/s2048/pope.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVUO7YLTGzTy8MyUpaiV1ENpM67U0pUmSjPRWFLAQV1LcrFd4YJD3FT9MNZwIFFBiJQZmQldXkjM2Q9YONguoZn2abbQyB0lv9kGRlX0aLRqnK_KYsmY2aEdcrBytL5J1hK0aQQlga9F9D/s320/pope.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>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?”<p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">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.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">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?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gonif </i>Trump.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The Muslim
iman says, “Just ginger ale for me, my infidel friend, as the Koran forbids me
to imbibe alcohol.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The
bartender pats his hand and says, “Not a problem, pally. We get a lot of
adherents to Islam in here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">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.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<!--EndFragment--><br /><p></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-16974531719980739612020-09-11T03:27:00.001-04:002020-09-11T03:27:48.697-04:00Our New BLM and Antifa Neighbors Couldn't Be "Nicer"!<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXIXF5sPrKjeSUe9E06kNL5V6d060HDtODbfZw5XSJt1xbIJCl_vFjlk4thVt9oRsl3ZqRu0PczlDNaiDs_u03V2pYVYMqN9Z0PotFOVtOJxkqHB_N9zXF1MuaWOXc5hKQIEl4ToHVh3bA/s512/antifa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="512" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXIXF5sPrKjeSUe9E06kNL5V6d060HDtODbfZw5XSJt1xbIJCl_vFjlk4thVt9oRsl3ZqRu0PczlDNaiDs_u03V2pYVYMqN9Z0PotFOVtOJxkqHB_N9zXF1MuaWOXc5hKQIEl4ToHVh3bA/w205-h158/antifa.jpg" width="205" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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<sup>st</sup> and 2<sup>nd</sup> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-43721545570132617782020-08-27T06:05:00.002-04:002022-11-22T11:05:08.204-05:00Remembering Saul Steier<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">He was Saul Steier, who I now learn died last year.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="284" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv08DY2N5n9JZstOozPZSLHvGk-kNf9dzXVYcgZJJVR1Vm0dIfqrVIf9J9MkOKatSZyE0EmpHhwkcsSMl6dPoxpXOyz04bd0dfX-DK7Fooy6uYvjUh_3jEaTWCqrB9p63VFNhZMPQlU2Bc/w182-h170/saul.jpg" width="182" /></div><span lang="EN-US">He’d been on my favourite TV programme of the early 1960s, <i>Mr. Novak</i>. 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 <i>Daily Bruin,</i> 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.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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’ <i>White Album</i> 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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN-US">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.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><br /></p>John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-77406998949856524462020-07-16T03:33:00.000-04:002020-07-16T03:33:22.689-04:00Owning a Libtard<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPq2m8JFxpHfm4bg9awykpp6KvEx4b3zul2WGASlRS4lagZxcX3KPbPLuXjWdPWNFTfen75yjMLlq_SuDupLPS1JgisroSOqVQql90IsSzaRCVvZ0Zp3PWnEySH5AFYTR6bCXG3hWgjG7/s1600/lockHerUp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="1021" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPq2m8JFxpHfm4bg9awykpp6KvEx4b3zul2WGASlRS4lagZxcX3KPbPLuXjWdPWNFTfen75yjMLlq_SuDupLPS1JgisroSOqVQql90IsSzaRCVvZ0Zp3PWnEySH5AFYTR6bCXG3hWgjG7/s320/lockHerUp.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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 <i>he'll </i>like the frijoles."</span></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-22696182542430564352020-07-11T04:23:00.001-04:002020-07-11T04:26:19.074-04:00Pence Out, Kanye In! Trump's New Running Mate!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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 <i>Vanity Fair</i> cover girl Kaitlyn Jenner.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-XjPxd54dx3POiUUp-bioYTyf0QWvpDa76D8MGi9MdBgr-076ttUw8gnTFjWgoOuHNbP29wDJy3n-IGKbtlP7Rcw_rBAV4puGDxdknzt-6fFO3q2zg-XsXdTdrNWy54k6092M56_qoEM/s1600/trumpKanye.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="985" data-original-width="985" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5-XjPxd54dx3POiUUp-bioYTyf0QWvpDa76D8MGi9MdBgr-076ttUw8gnTFjWgoOuHNbP29wDJy3n-IGKbtlP7Rcw_rBAV4puGDxdknzt-6fFO3q2zg-XsXdTdrNWy54k6092M56_qoEM/s200/trumpKanye.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">“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</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> 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!"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">“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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">"Our market research suggests that voters love the idea of a Trump/The Artist Formerly Known as Kanye ticket."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.</span></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-28528420604899664692020-07-03T10:54:00.002-04:002022-11-22T04:24:49.602-05:00The Worst Record Review in the History of Recorded Music<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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) <i>New Morning</i>, 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) <i>Fresh Air</i>’s Ken Tucker’s review of Dylan’s inexpressibly awful new 477<sup>th</sup> album, <i>Rough and Rowdy Ways</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMjGm9iuLnkFLA3chUTDTY2YgyriqVFhm520dZs1w_GpHqpEa4s028zT9T3H7Gue6IOKpo3Ygxo2NfW8mTBL0xxpRVQV3uGqRCAQFD5EW3P2R_RztPcNorHXb-zC9diwko-V2bnHt1lAr-/s1600/dylan.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="913" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMjGm9iuLnkFLA3chUTDTY2YgyriqVFhm520dZs1w_GpHqpEa4s028zT9T3H7Gue6IOKpo3Ygxo2NfW8mTBL0xxpRVQV3uGqRCAQFD5EW3P2R_RztPcNorHXb-zC9diwko-V2bnHt1lAr-/s200/dylan.jpg" width="175" /></a><span lang="EN-US">Behold!”</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";"> </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">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.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">At me, Ken — at <i>me</i>? 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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">World-class bullshit, and make no mistake!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">Is it my imagination, or was Bob understood in "My Back Pages" to waive his right to make others recognise, for instance, that they "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">shouldn't limit [them]selves to one identity, one ideology, one set of facts about [their] lives"?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">Elsewhere, Ken describes <i>RARW</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">(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?)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">Critical insight, thy name is Ken!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia";">[The best thing ever written about Bob Dylan was the glorious Scott Spencer's novel <i><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Rich_Man_s_Table.html?id=Bgob1vkMYwoC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">The Rich Man's Table</a>. </i>You read that here first.</span><span style="background: white; color: #333333;">]</span></span></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-9445271431368260912020-06-27T04:42:00.001-04:002020-06-27T04:44:41.282-04:00What Jesus Looked Like<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;">[ </span><a href="https://soundcloud.com/john-ned-mendelssohn/05-the-jesus-who-loves-me" target="_blank"><i>Compulsory listening</i></a><span style="background-color: #f6f6f6;"> ]</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFd0GGSfA7T0heXdi0vDhGs75yZ0XoINhUqKym1Uidh3IFWdT_WAcd32Tqgl52kW-yVcxTqW3wLQEcS5IGeFr021_7Rnr8742p2bjo_6sxYxql7O5tRAaONqajgPNnTNOEHpBf1Y9DFYDB/s1600/jesus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="400" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFd0GGSfA7T0heXdi0vDhGs75yZ0XoINhUqKym1Uidh3IFWdT_WAcd32Tqgl52kW-yVcxTqW3wLQEcS5IGeFr021_7Rnr8742p2bjo_6sxYxql7O5tRAaONqajgPNnTNOEHpBf1Y9DFYDB/s200/jesus.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Will the real Jesus please stand up?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1hYDDNBJU9O5Jsk657_6V5h7ypZ4rekjUkDGGJxj4A_pki5RjAY563mhe2KxFXiZ87zrxJD0tFRHNgpOHf-A6a1dSc183sYHeYs-MDv0P-XmtKOQNTF_uOylvX701_p7rNjRZ1ZpCp-Z5/s1600/welby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="134" data-original-width="121" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1hYDDNBJU9O5Jsk657_6V5h7ypZ4rekjUkDGGJxj4A_pki5RjAY563mhe2KxFXiZ87zrxJD0tFRHNgpOHf-A6a1dSc183sYHeYs-MDv0P-XmtKOQNTF_uOylvX701_p7rNjRZ1ZpCp-Z5/s1600/welby.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marcus Welby, MD</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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 everywh<span style="background-color: transparent;">ere, 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.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
[<i>I’ve made up a fair amount of this essay, but the above quote is genuine.</i>]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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 <i>didn’t </i>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."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(246, 246, 246); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-30766756010850189642020-06-17T03:49:00.002-04:002020-06-17T03:49:40.874-04:00Does LGBTQ Make You Feel Unheard?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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?</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxBQNQGUoue1P_8EtTjua83nh2j08klPLPnXA8odhNTBG0dNY-dnB5QIjDy6qiosM7DYEf4cePJz9Ww_VnJnDIZ7oSgZEcH0YbLU5GEylHxbzmjTpKEYJMdbf4pyEx9d3X4lbSX0DajPh-/s1600/lgbt2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="259" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxBQNQGUoue1P_8EtTjua83nh2j08klPLPnXA8odhNTBG0dNY-dnB5QIjDy6qiosM7DYEf4cePJz9Ww_VnJnDIZ7oSgZEcH0YbLU5GEylHxbzmjTpKEYJMdbf4pyEx9d3X4lbSX0DajPh-/s200/lgbt2.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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 </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Hit me with your best shot, homophobe</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> and more demure gays and lesbians whose credo is </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">I would much prefer that you don’t use that ugly word in my hearing</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> — shouldn’t we ensure that other subgroups be recognized?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">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!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<br /></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-81440006008484084942020-06-15T05:56:00.001-04:002020-06-15T11:13:38.607-04:00My Moral Integrity As a Human Being Is Called Into Question<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWSh290yVxWKiYsJ5dcrHID1kDh1lzv5EPH6-lkluoabUM_D-xaTs3SOcuRU_q0kNANnuHSJPLijVziWW8xGuVehuUklGISv5U6XSjfzjxCzNF8ZdTWYs84AU4rCpkhqG7FQ6uVf7YOst/s1600/tomAustin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="271" data-original-width="303" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWSh290yVxWKiYsJ5dcrHID1kDh1lzv5EPH6-lkluoabUM_D-xaTs3SOcuRU_q0kNANnuHSJPLijVziWW8xGuVehuUklGISv5U6XSjfzjxCzNF8ZdTWYs84AU4rCpkhqG7FQ6uVf7YOst/s200/tomAustin.jpg" width="200" /></span></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And he may not be.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/george-floyd-protests-minneapolis-gym-video-police-tom-austin-a9536681.html" target="_blank">the video</a>, 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.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One of the key features of fascism is the suppression of dissent. There’s <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/andrew-sullivan-is-there-still-room-for-debate.html" target="_blank">a wonderful essay</a> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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 <i>not</i> for racism), but nobody has responded and most of the public seems [unable] to care less”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5264890949924188049.post-74406718261487226352020-06-15T04:16:00.001-04:002020-06-15T04:17:51.494-04:00Happy Birthday, Mr. President!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yesterday was President Trump’s 74<sup>th</sup> 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOK1ibwKiMoHhKSLtaKhMLHcgoMhCDeiRK7urlsdZh0xcP_vCOCAnUtycnuhf2DKIiu9R1npWFIsyy1lyampYXgfFf10ddGXNSC2WDMSTi3TuxFoQJ3OIkUVaYktFMmO1fpiKdzPhHTk0/s1600/bannon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOK1ibwKiMoHhKSLtaKhMLHcgoMhCDeiRK7urlsdZh0xcP_vCOCAnUtycnuhf2DKIiu9R1npWFIsyy1lyampYXgfFf10ddGXNSC2WDMSTi3TuxFoQJ3OIkUVaYktFMmO1fpiKdzPhHTk0/s200/bannon.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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 <i>Washington Post</i>, the <i>New York Times</i>, and the <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i>, 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 <i>American Hegemony</i>, 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-US">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 “</span><span style="background: white; border: 1pt none; color: #373737; font-size: 11.5pt; padding: 0cm;">Smiles Of A Summer Night</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">” together though there is no trace of Jean-Claude van Damme in it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Happy birthday, Mr. President!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<br /></div>
</div>
John Mendelssohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03955242924713935770noreply@blogger.com1