Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
4/5/2025
Anything goes #22
20 responses to “Anything goes #22”
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Sex
What matters more in life than sex or death
how much will you get before your last breath
Yes orgasm is the height of sensation
when you feel how life’s a dreamy vacation
Do these words feel like coming all over you
such is the reaction of the fake-outraged prude
The squares might say man don’t be gross
we’ll just have to save this for your roast
It’s actually pretty easy to go around shameless
takes mental masturbation to pretend I’m blameless
I’m not crazy it’s the world that’s messed up
though everyone insists I need a cat or a pup
So what’s going to happen, will there be a happy ending
or will a black hole swallow these words I’m sending
Everyone plays with herself but just don’t admit it
they’ll call you a perv and tell you to quit it
Life’s succulent pleasures are often taboo
when the natural joy is to simply do you
Talking about it means you’re not getting any
is she waiting out there in a wet shiny frenzy?
If you just tell the truth then it’s never offensive
well that’s my opinion does it make you defensive?-
I started smiling at the second line, when I figured out it’s a poem, and kept smiling all the way to the end. I’m smiling as I type this. What on earth have you done to this grouchy old man?
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ha, made ya smile…
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Some weeks “Anything” is a crowded place with a little more politics and sex than I feel comfortable joining in with. But it’s kinda quiet this week, and I rise to speak on behalf of reading. Until I was 10, I lived in a house with an actual library. It wasn’t a fancy house: my grandfather, who was a master brick mason built it himself, and finished raising my mother and her older brother there. My Uncle spent about 25 years getting his doctorate at the University of Washington, because neither he nor the family had any money during and after the Depression, and he would work for the Post Office for a couple of years, then attend lectures and work on his dissertation for a couple of years, then go back to the Post Office. He moved out of his bedroom on the main floor, finished a room in the basement, moved his furniture in there, and built bookcases in his old bedroom and started a library that was filled with many books on psychology, but also many other books. He never really moved the books out, so when he got his doctorate in 1950, my Dad kept the library going and started adding his own books. Thus, a house with a library.
My Uncle told me about a colleague who was writing a doctoral dissertation titled, “Reading Makes You Smarter”. Pretty clever, because that was the name of his dissertation, the name of the book he was writing, and the focus of his doctoral argument. He simply argued that, with a few modest exceptions like Mein Kampf, and much of the Disney crap, the actual act of reading made people smarter. Obviously, targeted reading made them smarter AND more informed and well-rounded, but reading almost anything made them smarter. I’m not here to defend his dissertation, but I think my uncle came to agree with him, and, over the years, I have too. Although I love movies, and believe they’re an important part of our culture, I’m a book guy more than a movie guy. I don’t think the movie guys are wrong, and I didn’t come here to argue or waste anybody’s time, I just came to get my brain from that dirty old mine.
By the way, my uncle was quite a guy. While he was getting his doctorate, he worked part time at Boeing and helped design the 707 instrument panel. The focus of his studies was perception and the processing of visual information, so Boeing was happy to have him. He spoke about 20 languages, and taught Esperanto in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and, of course, North America. And he never stopped reading. The house he lived in Monday through Friday in Seattle had a couple special reading chairs equipped with 200 watt lights. He had a pretty good reading setup at his wife’s house in Tacoma as well for weekend reading.
As the psychologist Janis Joplin said, “That’s it.”
jtb
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Damn, that whole story is beautiful. I want one of those chairs with a high-power bulb over my head.
Did your uncle finish writing the book, Reading Makes You Smarter, and get it published? It’s true on the face of it, judging the book by its title. And the flipside, YouTube makes people stupider. Well, except for the oldies music.
I’m a movie guy not because they’re better than books, fuckall they’re not, only because they’re quicker and easier than books. Western Civ has strangled my attention span, too. Even reading books these days, it’s a chapter or two or three at a time, never just hours and hours of reading like back when I was smarter.
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It was actually a colleague of my uncle, and he did submit his dissertation, but I don’t think it ever got published in book form. He got his doctorate, so I guess he convinced the judging team and his faculty advisor. I got to read pieces of it, but knowing how way leads onto way, I forgot about it until recently. They’re all dead now. Somewhere at the U of W, on a dusty shelf there’s a dissertation that might have been published in an obscure psychology journal in the early 50s. Not everything is on the Web.
John
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> They’re all dead now.
Ain’t that the truth. Story of everyone’s life.
Sounds like he was a fascinating character, and here we are years later talking about him, but pretty soon you and I will both be dead, and eventually everyone who knew him will be dead, and nobody will talk about him ever again.
That’s the story of everyone’s life who ever lived or ever will.
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Ah, hell, there should be at least one tune on “Anything Goes”. Here’s a seven minute live version of Steely Day playing Deacon Blues off their album Gaucho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nTMz1P09Uw
John
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I didn’t dig Steely Dan as much as I should’ve when they were big and I was young and stupid. All the assorted genres coming together, making a sound all their own.
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Don’t encourage him, Doug. He’ll just keep posting more music. And for fuck sakes, turn up the volume. . .
Here’s Mary Lou Lord who almost saved Kurt Cobain’s life, but he swam away and stopped treading water. . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIQgdGxPexI
John
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Still great. What’s Mary Lou Lord doing these days, and please don’t tell me she’s dead.
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Damn, misplaced the comment. One more time. . .
Mary Lou Lord is still singing at 60. She frequently performs with her daughter. I suppose he’s known for two things: being Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend before he met that floozy he married and busking on two continents. She should be known for her singing. Here she is singing Lights Are Changing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCWkRAdabA
John
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Knowing you’re such a fan of Courtney Love, I wish I’d better overheard the details of a conversation on the bus a week or so ago. Some old guy about ten years younger than me was saying that he’d gone to a party in the 1980s, and pre-fame pre-Nirvana Courtney crashed it and trashed the house and then vomited on the porch when they kicked her out. “I didn’t know who she was, some junkie,” until a few years later…”
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This is really worth a watch
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To avoid too many spoilers, I read only a few paragraphs. Unsure whether I’ll hate it or love it, but I’ll watch it.
Wikipedia says, “they all concede to Gannon’s demand that they turn off and hand over their cellphones so their location isn’t tracked by the cops.” I’m not a notorious criminal and my expertise is third-hand at best, but before protests we’re always told that some/most cells are trackable even when they’re powered down.
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There may be some technical anachronisms such as that, there’s also some questionable uses of CB/HAM radios, police scanners, et al for the purposes of the plot – I too don’t know enough about the subject to say for sure one way or another if accurate or believable (I can barely turn my phone on or off).
Suffice to say that people may not be who they say they are here, and what may or may not be getting done on screen may not be getting done in the reality of the film. And that the whole thing is essentially a look at shifting morality among two of the more noxious groups of our time: The pigfuck police and militias.
It’s an amazing film considering the budget (obvious but terrific use of extremely limited settings) with superb acting (many great “that guy” character actors here) that sells the film regardless of any illogic. Reminds me of Craig Zahler or Jeremy Saulnier (not quite there yet, but I’m eager to see this guy’s next flick).
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Sounds better and better. You usually steer me right, and I am hoping for some serious moral ambiguity. Not a fan of the militias, but just by raw body count the cops kill a hell of a lot more than any second amendment people.
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You still need to watch Dragged Across Concrete! What a flick, one of Mel’s best performances, especially *after* his public breakdown, knowledge of which adds to the complexity of his character and the themes of the film. It’s a button pushing film, but so much better than the crowd pleasing later Tarantino movies that also address race – Django Unchained and Hateful Eight – which I’d also love to read your reviews of.
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Actually, Hateful Eight and Standoff at Sparrow Creek would make an interesting double feature, as they’re both “locked room” whodunnits where it doesn’t matter who done what – but *why*.
Standoff is completely austere while Hateful Eight is flamboyant and theatrical, a more grandiose, self satisfied statement.
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Dragged and Hateful I’ve seen and liked. Never wrote a review of Django Unchained, but I saw it when it first came out, and remember it as pretty good except, of course, for the hole in the screen that is Leonardo DiCaprio.
Almost bedtime, and it’s been a hard day at the recliner. Toodles until tomorrow…
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