Tag: music

The News From Someplace Else

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The Paisley Park Cafe was that spot every town has. The place where faces got fixed to the names and all manner of business was conducted. Liz Austin was the proprietor of the bookstore/coffee shop/city hall. A runaway bride from New York City who skipped out on her adulterous stockbroker husband for the wide open road. She left the only city she’d ever known with thirty grand in a savings account, a suitcase and a New York Yankees baseball cap. After retrieving her ’66 midnight blue Mustang convertible out of storage, she left behind a Dear John note in the form of divorce papers and went Sally Ride.

She settled in Vegas, working as a dealer at the Bellagio and almost getting married more times than she was comfortable admitting. She made a small fortune by investing in Apple stock and then doubled down on Microsoft. With her first million in the bank, she went looking for peace of mind and found it in the kitschy little town of Magic Dance, Arizona. It had been ten years to the day that she’d bought a two story brick home in the center of town and converted it into a retail space on the first floor with a living area upstairs.

Every bit as frugal as the college girl who’d dined nightly on Ramen, she was cursing herself for it now as she slapped her Goldstar upside its faux wood paneling and muttered her most crude Japanese when the 13″ inch color television didn’t respond positively.

“Kuso . . .”

“What kind of nonsense you fixing that pretty little head on now?”

It was Chantal Du Bois, the comely middle aged widower whose reputation in Magic Dance was the stuff of legend. She’d made the scene five years earlier, circa a small town in St. Anne Jamaica by the name of Moneague. The forty fifth official resident of the town was also the first black resident in its fifty seven year history. No sooner had her heels touched down than she was rumored to be canoodling with the unhappily married Sheriff, making short work of the failing marriage and thus becoming the unofficial deputy.

“Queen Bee!” Liz smiled. Everyone called Chantal by this sugary royal moniker which spoke to her matronly presence.

“I’m trying to wake up this lazy ass thing,” Liz complained.

“Maybe it’s time to upgrade. What year is that old thing anyways?” Asked David Rockfield, between sips of his Cafe con Leche.

“1983 . . . first thing I bought when I moved away. After which I ignored it while collecting broken hearts,”

“Yours or theirs?”

“It was a close call,” Liz replied.

“Well, age doesn’t do us many favors and I’m fairly certain TV sets share this regrettable shortcoming,” David opined.

“You would think it could accommodate me when there’s news being made someplace else, yanno?”

“What does that mean? Kuso?”

“It means shit in Japanese,”

“Excuse you very much, girlfriend. Ya gonna cut ya mouth on all those sharp words,” Chantal said.

“I know mama, but it’s my home remedy for when the fates conspire to go pee pee on my Oui Oui,”

“Pretty young thing like you cursing? It’s like taking a crayon to da Mona Lisa,”

“Uh, what part of Liz have you been willing to overlook all these years?” David laughed.

“She’s too beautiful for that kinda language . . .” Chantal winked.

“Liz, the goddamned paper!” David whined, pointing to the September 10th date on The Arizona Republic.

“Excuse me, young man?” Chantal frowned.

“Sorry baby, but I like my news to be served up with an umbilical cord, thank you very much,” David said before leaning in for a kiss.

“Oh Sheriff, ya make my knees do the crazy little thing . .”

Chantal’s laugh filled the room with music. Liz often joked that having Chantal as a regular did more for her business than advertising ever could.

“Alright ladies, I’m off to see the Wizard,”

“When you see him, ask him for a new television set for me, will you?” Liz asked.

“So what is this business about something going on someplace else? Honey, there’s a whole lot of something going on someplace else, no mattah where you standing,”

“It was a plane crash in New York, what a horrible thing. It got me thinking about how long it’s been since I left. Eighteen years . . .”

“Well then, you might have to find ya way back. Don’t let dat man be an excuse for not going back,”

“I don’t think he mattered to me. When I left it was kinda like Thomas Wolfe was riding shotgun in my head. I never looked back.” Liz explained.

“You nevah mind that news from someplace else for now okay?” Chantal said as she turned the set off. “And could you bring me some of that magic nectar of yours, sweetness?”

“On it!”

“Darlin, you are a direct line to the stars,”

“You’re my spiritual poetess, you know that?”

Liz shook off the ominous feeling that was working its way into her bones. She delivered a righteous spill to Chantal, fired up the turntable and laid the needle onto some Queen as the morning sun meandered up the walls. She stepped outside for a smoke, her eyes venturing into the cloudless sky above as her mind wandered back home as if by divined by cosmic wings. She closed her eyes and prayed that the day wasn’t as irretrievable as it seemed. And maybe it was the coffee tap dancing on her synapses and maybe it was the nicotine surfing through her blood stream, but her eyes were carrying her now. She flew across that cloudless sky, shouting at the world below to stop running away from her even though she knew it was hopeless. It was gone from her, the world she once knew.

Stolen by the news from someplace else.

 

The Rushmore Series- Crazy Little Thing Called Love

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A person’s taste in music is very much like their fingerprint, no two are the same.

So when me and Dale (Check out her femme finale here) decided to carve out a musical Rushmore, we knew such an undertaking would be met with plenty of Yeah, but what about? . . . But rather than deter, it made us that much more determined to deliver up our vision of what Rushmore would look like if it was set to music. The truth is, I would have had an easier time with just about any other Rushmore related exercise- from sports to art to superheroes.

Music is different, and so I had myriad decisions to make if I was going to whittle down to four. I took faces off and I put faces on and then I did it all over again. Until the finished product was left with Jackson, Bowie and Prince. Of those choices, the only slam dunk was the last choice. Until today, that is. Because this final installment had his face on it from the first conversation about a musical Rushmore.

It was late May of 1980 when me and a bunch of friends screamed our lungs out to a song that would pin itself to the rafters at Nassau Coliseum for years to come. The New York Islanders had just defeated the Flyers to clinch the Stanley Cup, ushering in a dynasty. It would be half a decade before a kid from Edmonton would begin re-writing history. But the song, it still brings me back to that time.

I had this idea that I was Romeo until a girl named Alisson showed me that love is never that easy to figure out. And damn if Main Ingredient hadn’t warned me that everybody plays the fool sometimes, even if I’d never planned on listening to that sage advice until it was too late. So thank God for Freddie, playing wingman as I ventured back in to that most dubious of romantic entanglements. The rebound.

Me and Shereen drove to Moon Lake with a couple of friends. A case of beer, a boombox and the idea that I was moving to Florida to be with her. Until I wasn’t. And it was just another song that played itself across the moon that night, or so I thought. But to this day, that song unspools itself into a photograph that collapses in a waterfall across my brain every time I hear it.

I’m possessed by love, but isn’t everybody?- Freddie Mercury

I was living with that girl who wore the raspberry beret. Her Venus was liberal and artistic and my Mars was not. My younger days felt as if they had happened inside another universe as I found myself far from the madding crowd of screamers and boomboxes playing “Thriller” and Queens logic.

November of ’91 was an unforgiving one for headlines. First came Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had HIV, and then a few weeks later with the news that Freddie Mercury had died. The first had proven damn near impossible to process while Freddie, well . . he’d always lived his life as if rocking chairs were a waste of time.

I made dinner for me and my girl on that last weekend of November, and we broke open a bottle of wine and had at it. We debated politics and then settled on music.

“Greatest band ever . .” I asked her.

“U2 . . .” She said.

“No way!” I laughed.

“Oh yeah? So what say you? Huh?” She said, sipping at her wine.

“Well, Bon Jovi . . of course,” I said, since it always got a rise out of her.

“Oh . . my God, you can’t be serious,” She said.

And then the wine started paying off and then the music started making all the sense in the world. It was as if Freddie was shaking his fist in triumph as two young lovers surrendered themselves to that magical drug called rock and roll, shouting his famous last words from the moon.

“You’re bloody fucking welcome,”

 

 

 

 

Raspberry Beret

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She sat on the park bench, freshly painted in mint with brass handles made handsome by the patina of weather and time. Her peach shaped lips hummed a song full of words with a mystical perch as she watched a squirrel negotiate the limb of a wise old oak tree whose stories travailed the living and the dead.

The sun lowered itself in a magnificent bow, an anguished daily cry playing out across a nervous jumble of clouds that very much resembled a pile of used laundry. The indigo spill of night began to drip across a canvas made of ocher, its theater of war spoke of seasons fighting for their chance at forever. As if on cue, a lonesome breeze brushed at her face with tiny pin pricks of invisible frost, chasing away the blanket of warmth that had been gifted her by the ancient sun moments earlier.

Poetry came easy to her most times, but not this one. She reckoned it was because her heart was too full and her body was too anxious and her soul was reaching . . recklessly, uncertainly, sublimely, reaching. Time was shedding itself to her now as a solitary tear held ransom on her ivory cheek, as if the vesper of a long forgotten star whose body was small but whose purpose was mightier than Venus itself.

Words of a poem that was busy never getting born presented themselves like splinters as her fingers shook in anticipation. She laughed at the thought that a boy could have this effect on her. But he did. The particulars of him, when broken down into a mathematical formula, did not equate with white picket fences, two and a half children and a hallway teeming with chronological snapshots. He was very much a here and now proposition, but it didn’t matter because to her way of thinking, tomorrows were too perfect to be interesting. She wanted, no . . she demanded to be spellbound by something, if only for a moment. And that, he supplied.

She checked the time. He would be here soon, riding up on his small change chariot built of chrome and curse words. He would set his eyes on her, and in the process thieve every last retrievable part of the girl she was walking away from. The language he would carry on his tongue would be equal parts Longfellow and fire. And then she would hop on and then they would take a ride up to old man Johnson’s farm, to the secret lair he had constructed inside a barn.

They would fall in love for a moment’s time, and no more than that. And really, what else was there to life but the moments? The ones you would not trade for all the promises of Solomon. The ones that made you feel as if the world made the most sense of all when served in small slices.

Some day, a million years from now, she imagined looking back on the moment they would paint across that loft and she would smile the smile of an innocent virgin girl; the one with pretty wishes in her painted fingernails and all those jukebox dreams in her restless bones. She would look back in fond remembrance of how determined she had been to make him remember her. In the wherever after of his future, he would buy time for her cranberry and red wine lips and the poetry they made. And he would paint a raging storm with that name.

Hers.

The Rushmore Series- Sign Of The Times

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As far back as I can remember there were fences that separated us.

The line for us was the Patio Deli on Linden Boulevard. This was the demarcation your sneakers needed to be on the friendly side of come night fall. There was an ‘us’ and a ‘them’; two uniquely compelling sides to this fiery equator that had been sewn by previous generations, and who were we to question it? All that we knew was that we had a side of the fence, and we had to own it.

Sports and music had no use for fences. In these worlds, black and white kids were teammates. We rooted for the Yankees and the Knicks. We spoke the same language. And perhaps no musical artist fused that gap better than Prince. His quixotically extravagant lyrics and moodily amorous melodies tore right through our restless spirits and pushed us to imagine the world differently.

Prince was the electrical storm that shattered the disparate entanglements of our black and white world with lyrics that riveted themselves to our wildest imaginations. It loosed us from stereotypes inside an abject bliss whose momentary lapse was full of reason and righteousness; all the things we somehow could not muster inside the day to day.

When you discovered Prince, you had arrived at the musical equivalent of a moon landing. He sang the words of Milton with an indefatigable funk, and you knew . . you just knew that you were listening to music that would book passage into history. And he existed, right there in the great big middle of disco jeans and bubble jackets and designer sneakers and multi-plexes.

I moved away in the fall of ’86, so I was almost a year removed from the place I had called home when it achieved notoriety for what would come to be known as the incident at Howard Beach. This nuanced reference provided the veneer for the worst case scenario of those fences when a bunch of white kids formed a lynch mob, with baseball bats in tow, chasing three black men from the neighborhood late one night. They put one of those men in the hospital and they chased another down onto the Belt Parkway, where he was struck and killed.

It would be several years before I went back to visit with my girlfriend. I showed her all my old hangouts and we grabbed lunch at New Park Pizza on the Boulevard- a place that had become famous for all the wrong reasons as it was where the chase had ensued on that horrible night years earlier. The sadness of the place stuck to my bones as we sat there and talked about better days and old friends, and ghosts.

And then I took her to the narrow little alley behind my old apartment building where me and my friends used to play stickball, pretending  it was Yankee Stadium because it felt that way to us. Back then. Before the fences ventured away from that field of play and into our real lives. Everything was different now, every single thing. And it was as if Thomas Wolf was busy telling me that maybe he was wrong . . maybe you really shouldn’t try going home again.

I took my girlfriend by the hand, holding tightly to whatever came next, chasing the ghosts to the other side of the fence. Her smile carried me home, to the one I’d found away from all this madness. And as if Prince had enlisted the lyrics to lift me from the rain of a melancholic afternoon, she was wearing a raspberry beret.

The very same kind you’d find in a second hand store.

(Check out Dale’s female choice over at A Dalectable Life. And no, Debbie Gibson didn’t make the cut.)

The Rushmore Series: What If?

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Yoko Ono | Biography, Art, & Facts | Britannica

New York City, December 1st 2020: 

John Lennon had just gotten back from a trip abroad. He was exhausted and exhilarated all at the same time. His celebrity benefit concert to aid victims of COVID-19 had proved to be a huge success, its outreach would hopefully stem the second wave of cases that had begun springing up across the globe in late summer. There had been no major outbreaks and the purpose of this fundraiser was to make certain it remained that way.

The first wave had been stanched to a great degree by the Kennedy administration’s quick response in answering the pleas for help by state governors across the country. A prompt two week shutdown of the country had proven most effective, during which the appreciable store of ventilators collected while President Obama had been in office helped to save countless lives. By May the country was open for business, with contingencies in place to help prevent an outbreak.

In late August, Paul McCartney and his former bandmate embarked on a three month tour across the globe. With the help of fellow musicians and entertainers, they had raised enough money to help wherever the need was greatest. The “Make America Sing Again” tour was greenlighted by allies and even several countries who had previously been at odds with the United States. Such had become the reach of John Kennedy Jr since sweeping into office in a landslide victory over GOP renegade candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

“Are we seeing John this weekend?” Yoko asked as their car came to a stop outside the Dakota. The two octogenarians stepped out hand in hand, canoodling as if lovesick high schoolers.

“Yes we are dahling . . we can’t miss this party,” He smiled. Kennedy had won re-election over former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, and he had promised his good pal John that the invite was not a “busman’s holiday” and that he would provide cover in the event there were any song requests. The night would be about cooling their jets before refocusing on the future.

As they stepped out into the December night, John shuddered. To think it had been forty years since a crazed gunman had made headlines standing right in this very spot. He had been taken down when an off duty police officer noticed he was carrying a firearm and that he fit the description of a suspect who had accosted the singer James Taylor outside the 72nd Street Station a day earlier. The Beatles “fan” had waited all afternoon and into the night for Lennon to return, with plans to assassinate him in order to collect his fifteen minutes of fame. When he was booked, all he had in his possession was the book Catcher in the Rye, a signed copy of John’s album Double Fantasy and a .38 Special.

John and Yoko had spent the evening at the Record Plant, making refinements to the song Walking on Thin Ice with producers Jack Douglas and David Geffen. Afterwards, the couple invited Robert “Big Bob” Manuel- a security guard at the Plant- to grab a bite to eat. The couple’s original plan to head straight home to say goodnight to their son Sean was scrapped when their sitter called to let them know the boy had come down with a stomach ache and had been sent off to sleep early. So it was when the couple arrived back at their apartment just before midnight on December 8, 1980, they were just in time to see the would be assassin as he was escorted off to jail by the NYPD.

“You alright?” Yoko asked as they stepped into the vestibule and out of the cold, dark night.

“Just thinking . . . if we had arrived back here a few minutes earlier on that night . . .”

“My love, it’s been forty years . .”

“Marry me,” John said.

“Again?” Yoko laughed, smiling that schoolgirl smile only one man on the face of the earth could elicit. “That would be what? . . .”

“The twenty eighth time, dahling . .” John said, bringing her in for a kiss.

“Yes, twenty eight times yes . . . forever yes,” Yoko laughed.

They made their way inside just as the clock struck midnight.

 

The Rushmore Series: The King of Pop

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I remember being on the phone with my pal David Miller as we mourned the loss of John Lennon one night in early December of 1980. The legendary singer/songwriter had been assassinated outside the Dakota, and it went against the unnatural order of society to my way of thinking. Musicians were meant to pass too soon thanks to bad trips or hedonistic entanglements with pills, but not this. Assassinations were the kind of thing that happened to world leaders and mob bosses.

“The music died, man . . the music is dead,” His voice trailed off as we were left to imagine a world where this kind of shit was possible. How could music, that thing we held onto for dear lives as we tried figuring out the world around us, survive?

Sure it had happened before. There was that story about a group of Hell’s Angels who had plotted to murder Mick Jagger. And Bob Marley did get shot before taking part in a benefit concert four years earler. But the former had been a business dealing gone wrong and the latter was political in nature. John Lennon’s politics consisted of making love over war and staying naked for days on end, but that’s what rock stars did. No, John Lennon was shot simply because he was John fucking Lennon, which was akin to adding kerosene to ambrosia.

I grew up in Howard Beach, New York, where guns and assassinations went with the territory. I thought the place was the center of the universe for good reason. John Gotti and his associates were the soldiers of our Roman Empire in suburbia. Where else could you run into a guy like that while waiting in line at a bakery? Or find tennis great Vitas Gerulitis working on his game at Charles Park? The boxer Vito Antuefermo was born and raised there. Joey Ramone lived there, as did Woody and Arlo Guthrie and music producer DJ Skribble and New York Giants linebacker George Martin.

David Miller was from Forest Hills, which felt like the other side of the moon to a boy like me. Lennon and the Beatles were one of the few things we agreed on. We argued politics and history, food and drugs and art and girls and of course, music. Perhaps nothing pissed him off more than my contention that Michael Jackson was changing the face of music as we knew it.

His professional opinion was to say “No fucking way, not a chance . .”. And I took this provocative rebuttal in stride, seeing as how this was the same guy who shaved his eyebrows after going to see Pink Floyd the movie. My musical fixes ran the gamut and so I wasn’t looking for agreement. From Deep Purple, Rush, Queen, Black Sabbath and Bowie to the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and N.W.A., I just wanted to plug into something that moved me.

Michael Jackson was different in that he was a Billboard pop star who deviated from my norm, and it didn’t matter because the sound worked. Holy shit how it worked. He was an odd misfit and he was outrageously talented and all I knew was that the stuff he was doing then . . it was going to stick around long after I was done cruising Cross Bay Boulevard.

Calling Michael Jackson a singer was like saying Jackie Robinson was a second baseman. It was much too simplistic a term for a mercurial talent that redefined history. He was polarizing, secretive and with time he became a modern day horror story we couldn’t look away from, as much as we wanted to. But to cancel out what he did inside arguably the greatest decade in the history of music (my humble opinion) is kind of like saying that Michelangelo never existed. You can’t do it.

From his iconic moonwalk to his transformation of the video music standard to his funky get ups to his mythical reputation for the absurd, Jackson was equal parts entertainer and phenomenon. His appeal was transcendent, his reach undeniable. People who loved him couldn’t stop talking about him and people who couldn’t stand the guy, they couldn’t stop talking about him either.

By the mid eighties, Lennon’s death hadn’t signaled the end of the music, but rather, a brash new beginning whose might is still felt today. And deep inside that complicated time of nuclear fears and a new economy and music that colored outside of every imaginable line there came to us a sound unlike anything we’d heard before, or since.

All dressed up with somewhere to go.

(I don’t expect you to watch a fourteen minute music video, but I think it speaks to how Jackson turned the industry on its head. Who tells music executives, “I’m going to make a short movie when everyone else is putting out three minute videos. And you’ll fit the bill,”. He did.

I do expect you to visit Dale over at A Dalectable Life, whose dishing up her first choice for Rushmore.)

The Rushmore Series

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Now that Rushmore is safe from COVID-19 parties disguised as political rallies, Imma time share the national monument for a classic barstool debate. Nope, not the one about who the greatest basketball player of all time is (It’s Michael Jordan). Or the one about who the greatest football player of all time is (It’s Jim Brown). Or even the one about the greatest baseball player (Willie Mays). And before you ask . . yes, Wayne Gretzky . . of course!

What’s coming up next weekend is all about the music. It will be a four part series in which I will feature one musical artist a week to round out my Rushmore. Music is the soundtrack of our lives, and as such, the list is an entirely subjective endeavor. I’ll be choosing up male artists while the lovely Dale (Notorious Q) at A Dalectable Life will round up her top four female artists for Rushmore.

In order to gain the necessary reduction, we had to cut the lyrical fat by adding a few qualifiers. Because while fat most certainly means flavor, it also makes it damn near impossible to pare it down to four. So there’s that.

The Rushmore Rules . . .

1- The artist must have written their own songs
2- We’re only including artists from the last fifty years for this exercise
3- Influence that keeps on keeping on
4- Stage presence

If you’re wondering about the last fifty years rule, it’s either that or going back hundreds of years to the time of the classical composers. With only four spots on the mountain, it was best to keep things relatively current.

Welp, that about covers the what’s what of this Rushmore series. Next weekend will thus begin the big reveal with the first of our four faces of Rushmore. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you will probably even disagree.

How fun is that?

Pan Con Mantequilla

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I’ve always got a million loose thoughts chasing me around, so I’ve decided to let a few of the more tranquil ones roam the grounds for a spell. This post is for entertainment purposes only, so if you decide to wager based on these results, then you have a serious fucking problem.

  • Juan Soto of the Nacionales has a dreamy swing that seems plucked out of a Kinsella story, and I am very much in love with it.
  • The Cosmo is a really tasty swim and I’m almost jealous it’s a Ladies Night particular. But that’s life.
  • I saw where the McRib is back for a limited time and for a hot second, I contemplated digging into one since it’s been a while. And then I considered what a boneless piggy might look like and decided to make my own version of the McRib. Baby backs, smothered in Sticky Fingers’ Memphis Original and onions and slow cooked till they fell off the bone. Some raw onions on top and tucked into a sesame seed roll with hand cut fries. Much better . . .20191022_175223.jpg
  • As far as pizza goes, vegetarian remains my leader in the clubhouse.
  • I’m not going to see Joker until it comes out in home release. Not because of the prospect of getting shot up in a theater but because the movie is dark as fuck. And the idea of sitting in a dark theater and immersing myself in that darkness ain’t happening. 
  • So of course, I was asked how I can love Rob Zombie flicks so much. Well, because they’re seriously fucked up cartoons. Zombie’s vision of madness and mayhem is art, to me. His characters are equal parts Warhol and Romero. And while the scenarios are rooted in true life, their embellishments feel anomalous enough in comparison.
  • Peloton comes in at a cool sixty bucks a month, whereas I utilize a wholesale method that provides remedy for my girlish figure at pennies on that overrated dollar.
  • Why is there such a stigma to renting? We live in a world where half the population gets divorced and the other half of that half feels like it. We have a reality show President running diplomacy into the ground so hard that war(s) seems likely. And society as we know it teeters over a chasm where a signature event might topple us all. The old days are over, kids.
  • Dark chocolate is always a brilliant method.
  • I think I could play wide receiver for the Dolphins . . like right now.
  • Anyone who uses ‘happenstance’ while describing a situation to me is someone I want to talk to.
  • I mean . . that word is already longer and more substantial than most anything on Twitter. Just saying.
  • Hmmm . . . so not only are we fast food nation, but now we have services that bring the fast food to us so’s we never have to remove our asses from their reclined position? And we’re willing to pay basically the cost of the food in delivery fees to get it done? Sounds like the natural progression to me.
  • Go Simone Biles!

 

 

Speaking Of . . .

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The great Leonard Cohen once remarked that he felt no urgency as far as his writing was concerned. It was his opinion that mankind would not be damaged if he never put out another record or wrote another book.

Now here was a dude whose works could talk gravity into another million years worth of bubbles. And he’s speaking as if he’s a high school newspaper editor. His point, however, is inviolable. The best part of us, as writers, is the part that can never be taken away.

Speaking of . . .

Urgency, there seems to be a little more of the stuff when it comes to Bryce Harper and the Phillies. And I’m rooting like hell for them to ink the slugger before Brian Cashman sweeps in with a drunken sailor offering that ties the Yankees to a .240 hitter through a third Trump term (Spoiler Alert!). These “Till Meth Do Us Part” unions in sports are onerous for the fans more than anyone. Because in eight years, the fans will be paying Fabulous Bryce Hair prices for Bald Bryce production. Simple as that.

Speaking of . . .

Bald men, the Oscars are tonight. And I’m sorta/kinda excited for the first time in a while. If only because of Queen.

Speaking of . . .

Queens, they’re making a biopic about Elton John. Which is a little strange seeing as how he’s still alive.

Speaking of . . .

Bad jokes (such as the one I just made), Trump and Kim Jong (Pizzeria)-Un will be holding their second summit this week to discuss UN sanctions, nuclear disarmament and Adam Sandler’s curious lack of Oscar hardware.

Speaking of . . .

Oscar, I only saw one Best Picture nominee (Bohemian Rhapsody) and I am only halfway interested in seeing A Star Is Born. I definitely will see Black Klansman when it comes out on video.

Speaking Of . . .

Movies? I tend to gravitate to the flicks that have no blessed chance of winning gold. Take yesterday for example, when I went to see Happy Death Day 2 U. Not as good as the original, but man . . Jessica Rothe is going to win an Oscar for something, some day. And I do not plan on being wrong about that. Girl’s got game.

Speaking of . . .

Game . . I am rocking the Casbah after a two month hiatus from my Fitbit. A week and a half in, and the results are sweetly plucked juiciness. Lost a few pounds already, and am up to three and a half miles. I truly enjoyed my vacation from the the wrist candy, but the reunion is Peaches and Herb righteous.

Speaking of . . .

Righteous deeds, big props to the Ole Miss basketball players for taking a knee during the National Anthem. They knelt together in response to a confederacy rally near their home arena in Oxford, Mississippi. It was the right thing to do.

Speaking of . . .

The right thing, I’m down with Terrance Howard’s support of his former co-star Jussie Smollett. Howard isn’t taking the easy road by staying in Smollett’s corner, but it’s where he started out and it’s what he’s sticking to. Howard isn’t interested in the optics, and that’s commendable in a profession where too many peeps run for higher ground when the shit hits the fan. Come what may, Smollett has a corner man. Emphasis on man.

Speaking of . . .

Yesterday, I was turned onto this cat with the cool threads and the space age folk songs. He’s got a voice that could skate on the icy rings of Saturn and come back hotter than Fortuna’s pocketbook after a Vegas jaunt. His musical roam fits the proverbs of a lazy Sunday afternoon just fine.

And the hat, that’s just bonus round.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flame

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Coils prosper in hushed verses.

The filament . . .a constant plead,

of voids, fucking and smoke.

Worlds planted, graves unmarked,

lost to the ether. Found to the sunburst.

The flame dances alone,

because its partner always dies.