AfterPunk

I’ve had this photo comparison in mind for two or three years, since I bought the Converse hightops my mother and dad said I couldn’t ever have when I was a kid, because what you have to have instead are tennis shoes, preferably Slazengers or Dunlops. Gorey’s artwork gave me permission. And, yeah, I always loved his Steampunk work. Before Steampunk was a word. They’ve been languishing, I admit. Didn’t want to wear them new; they’d look like I’d never had any. Fished them out from under the bureau last night. They’re not new any more, and neither am I. The comp above is me and Edward Gorey. Right away, I’ll say I have never posed as any other writer (though I’ve got a killer FSF sport coat I’ve never worn. A vanity buy. I’m too old to dress or pose like “This Side of Paradise.”) The mink coat was my mother’s, dead 15 years ago.  I’m not gay. Just the way things are. But I’m not too old to talk about how gays have done themselves no favors in the last 30 years...

As close as I can get to how they feel. Don’t want to know the intimacies. That was always my sticking point. Never wanted to imagine the acts. But in this clip you really can see the romance of the love, and you are simultaneously repelled and understanding of the yen if not the act. So. I was telling you earlier that I was president of a Harvard Final Club other clubs regarded as a repository of homosexuals. Out of 30 members we had two that I knew of, and I was close friends with one. He’s dead now, as is the other one, for reasons you can guess. The other one is where the story starts to get complicated, because he was a graduate of Middlesex, youngest member of the Grottlesex prep school league. My three year roommate, PE as I will call him, remarked one day, “You guys took in Philip Core.” “Yes, we did.” “Nice guy,” PE said. “A bit strange.” (Yes he was. Always dressed in black. His fashion inspiration was Edward Gorey, deliberately, unobtrusively provocative.) Wh...

I was always in love when she was singing.1972. In Cambridge there was a movie theater and bar called Casablanca. First place in town I ever got served alcohol outside the Phoenix. It was a place to go when you needed to get away. This song was always playing. Loved it. I saw Casablanca in the theater. Black-and-white is spectacular in wide screen. I saw Night of the Hunter there too. The cinematography is like 3-D. Charles Laughton was a genius. Saddest scene I’ve ever seen in the movies. Shirley underwater with her throat cut, all because she believed the preacher who told her she would be free if she joined him.  I wonder. I remember the gifted men who let me into their secret enclave, not for sex but for esthetic and intellectual pleasures mostly lost on others. Are they happy now? Every TV show on the air or cable now has its own troubled male romance. Tongue deep kisses. Waking up drunk and hungover like mortal people. Make them feel normal, accepted, free...

The Luckiest Man in the World I used to have a grandma who said, often, while I was cradled on her ample lap, “You must think I’m terrible.” I did. For a very long time I thought she was terrible. She was mean to my saintly Grandpa, she did not disguise her distaste for my father, and she was in many ways the bane of my mother’s existence, fretful, complaining, always unhappy about no longer being in Ohio. She refused medical treatment for an eye that could have been treated but finally exploded, leaving her more than half blind. She outlived Grandpa and made herself unwelcome in her daughter’s house by repeatedly banging her bedroom floor with the cane she used for the arthritis her doctors later said she never had. She was consigned to a nursing home at some point, and I did not visit her, because the one time I did they had left her sprawled fat and half naked on a bed, barely conscious and totally ignored. It’s damaging to a young man to see his grandmother’s genitals posed ...

Let the ritual wailing begin. The United States killed about 300,000 people in four days. Atrocity. Evil nation. No. In World War II, the Americans were dragged in against their will to fight a kind of evil never seen before. We all (most of us, anyway) know about the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Less well known are the genocidal acts of Imperial Japan during the same period.  Well, take a look . Even that account understates for purposes of abbreviation. Personal diaries about the Japanese invasion of Manila, for example, describe quite vividly the Japanese soldiers grabbing newborns in the hospital nursery and bashing their brains out against the walls. Hardly ever noted is the fact that Japan did not surrender after Hiroshima. The vaporizing of 100,000 of their own people was not enough to make them yield their dreams of empire. Only another 100,000 at Nagasaki a few days later, and the promise of more to come, finally forced their hand. Why t...

  Reprinted from a July 26, 2006 post at Instapunk.com: Happy Birthday, Mick. ROCK ON. Mick Jagger is 63 years old today. Does that fact strike anyone as remarkable, interesting or ironic? Yes, he's old and a strutting anachronism, as the following complaint from a June 4 essay in the Toronto Star makes clear: The injustice of it all. "I've seen the Stones many times," complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. "I don't feel they play as good as we do. You've got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing." He could be speaking for members of Guns N' Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree. A bit harsh, really. I've seen both Aerosmith and the Stones in recent years, and they...

I’m not planning on being 86.

Letter to a Longtime Jewish FB Friend: This is hard but it has to be said. If you’ve read me at all over the years, you know that I have been a stout champion of Jews. Now I watch as self-absorbed New Yorkers and other elite “victims” are ready to cave on Trump because he has had to fight the bureaucratic Swamp to a standoff with COVID, and are prepared to ignore the terroristic torching of Manhattan as if it didn’t matter. Harry Lewis said — and you posted his rant — that COVID is the only issue of the 2020 campaign. No context, no analysis, no nothing but New York whining. Which pisses me off to the heights of piss-offed-ness. COVID is not an issue, except in the sense that it’s been an act of Mother Nature weaponized against a president who has had to endure endless hateful attacks by an irrational cabal of enemies who ceased thinking anything sane five years ago. Just between you and me*,  understand. More than any goyim you know, I grew up with Jews. Competed...