AfterPunk

If you’re dyslexic, let me help. Spelled “Yardarm. ” It’s called the Pareto Principle. The 80-20 rule. Works differently by sex. 80 percent of women are decent, dutiful, and suitably dull. Dull. Oh so. The other 20 percent are sex workers. “Open wide, all night long.” Men are 80 percent dumb shits who think the Three Stooges are funny, 20 percent authors of everything great about civilization. Their 20 and our 20. Think about it. Well, let’s dig a little deeper. Of that 20 percent of men, most are losers. Say, 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent are the genius pool. Of which only 20 percent are responsible for everything great about Mankind. You do the math. It’s that first 20 percent (you know, the ones who knew the Stooges were never funny) that aspiring men cotton to in youth. We believe you could be great. Life is the process of discovering that you will never be great. Most of you, say 80 percent of the 20 percent, will be oafish sellouts to the first organization that asks for ...

  I find myself writing compulsively right now, these days. My wife asks why. I’ve already written it, she says, all of it. Now it’s just waiting for the final shoe to drop. But I can’t tear myself away. I’m staring into the abyss.  Written this already, narrated it in audio at Youtube, I really did stare into the abyss, physically, on board the ocean liner Leonardo Da Vinci in the fall of 1963. Crept away from the family group seated on the floor of the ship’s wrecked main lounge and made my way outside to the promenade deck as we listed oh so slowly toward another possible capsize moment. My hands on the glass as I looked below, where the trough was forming before the hundred foot waves behind. This was the hole that was waiting for the ship to fall into, a deepness we would not return from. The ship moved under me, behind me, pushing me at an ever greater angle into the vision of that hole, dark swirling water so far below, and I am staring almost vertically into it when th...

Flappers and Suffragettes of the 1920s. Never a time they didn’t want to be naked. Boobs, bush, and booty. All the weapons they ever needed. Brains not on the list.  Anybody out there thinking we got taken? Not all B-B-B’s are created equal? Meh. Simple. The death of the United States will be brought about by women. We gave them the vote. Very big, stupid fucking mistake. Probably a windfall for my most brilliant book, called " The Naked Woman ." Buy it on November 4th. They tried on the blue collar during WWI. Didn’t like it. Got the vote in 1920 and learned Democrats wanted  female input. With their help, moved from blue to pink collar and grew gradually more assertive in demanding a white collar. Which they secured in about 50 years. Pretty good going for a sex that hadn’t contributed much to science, engineering, or the arts for 5,000 years. Short apprenticeship. They’ll swear up and down the ride up the ladder didn’t involve boobs, bush, and booty. Okay. So now the blue...

An eminence grise named Thomas Sowell tells us there’s no such thing as systemic racism. He’s wrong. Let’s see. Today, Breitbart acknowledged Lewis Hamilton by griping about his Breonna Taylor Tee-shirt. (They’ve never noticed him before, greatest black living athlete that he is...) Limbaugh was eloquent about how many white Americans voted for Obama because they thought voting in a black President would put all the racial misery behind us. I said at the time it wouldn’t. Thing is, at a certain level, BLM is absolutely right. They’re just wrong about why and how it happened, and how to deal with it. Two things happened in the Sixties. Lyndon Johnson promised to fix it all with his Great Society. He bulldozed their neighborhoods, built faceless ghetto “projects” instead, paid women welfare based on the number of illegitimate kids they had, made abortion into a commodity akin to drive-thru liquor stores, and promoted the most damaging set of laws and conventions ever institu...

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...