You can't beat people up and have them say, "I love you."

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"You can't beat people up and have them say, "I love you."
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Just wanted to say this is a truly terrific lp. It represents a sort of '50s hipster take on hippies, but like his contemporary George Carlin, this is pot-smoking humor at its stoniest. This is actually a very weird cut-up album that includes a Roman stage performance collaged into a lot of stoney sounds and cool r&b. A real find, dig it.

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You Can't Beat People Up was the first album to be released on the Tetragrammaton label, a wildly ambitious concern formed by the managerial minds behind Tiny Tim and Bill Cosby (and later to hit paydirt with early Deep Purple); and Murray Roman was Keith Moon's favorite comedian, a celebrity endorsement that his brand of rapid-fire rudeness was surely born to revel in. And it did.

Today, Roman's distinctly Lenny Bruce-esque dismantling of Vietnam-era Americana resonates more for its shock value than for its original humor. Revived for a modern audience, several of his routines would probably result in him getting stoned, and decidedly not in the manner that his own jokes proscribe. Sex, drugs, rock & roll, war, and schlock all fall into the Roman mill, to be ground up and rapid-fired back at the live onlookers and, if his topics do occasionally seem dated, at the time they slipped effortlessly into the countercultural milieu.

Bart hits puberty

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Bart: Dad, I need to borrow your shaver.
Homer: Oh, my boy's growing up! Wait a minute... I don't see any whiskers.
Bart: It's not whiskers. I've got...
Marge: Chest hair. You don't shave that, Bart.
Bart: [Groans] Nooo, ooooh, I've got...
Lisa: Bart's got pubes. Bart's got pubes!
Maggie: Squeak-koo!!
Homer: Pubes? Is that like a water slide? Woo hoo!!
Bart: I wish I'd never been drawn.

The drugged-out sixties recalled

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I remember those days... when Frank Zappa was not only completely intelligible, but was speaking to me directly during the six o'clock news.

"There was a trolley-car accident today in Saigon," he melted.

Babwa on Babawa

Streisand writes: “I am fearful that this Republican opposition is really about pushing back on the Obama administration and testing the waters for future judicial confirmation fights…

"Babawa Stweisand we-veauhed some new powiticaw swogans today. She intwohduced "pushing back" and "testing the watuhs" to a new genuhwation.
Seecwit insiduhs specuwate she is getting weady to spwing "weaching out" on us soon. And that's today's Babawa Watch; I'm youh host, Babwa Wawters."

And that's the name of that tune.

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"It's a moot point. The Republicans haven't been listening to me, anyway." -- Rush Limbaugh

"Can I have a goldfish, now?" --- Carol Anne, Poltergeist

Joe Biden -- Coal Miner's Daughter

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The thing I love about Vice President Joe Biden crystalized with the realization that when he assumed the coal-miner biography of Neil Kinnock, he wasn't lying so much as misremembering. That's totally awesome.

Existential Rhythms

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Existential Rhythms

The question first occurred to me when I was maybe four,
Playing toy Injuns on our Diné hogan floor.
"Momma how did we get here? I don't understand."
She said to talk to Wolf-eye Joe, the village med'cine man.

But Wolf-eye's stories cannot be:
I laughed until I cried.

In later years I wandered off to Flagstaff on a whim
And asked a pale-face friend named Bob what tales had come to him.
The white man's magic litany of woe and ancient grace
Looked a lot like wishful thought, I told Bob to his face.

And he took up my search with me:
We laughed, we thought we'd die.

So Bob and I made steep ascent up yonder distant slope,
And happened by the real old guy who works the telescope.
He let us look eons away, to every time and whence.
"There you be," says he and I've been scared stiff ever since.

But there's no going back, you see.
We laughed until we pryed.

Even a Single Raindrop

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Even a single raindrop
Assembled on some parched mote,
Jazzing with orphaned electrons,
Shrugging a dewy coat,
Buffeted barely coherent,
Grasping molecular staves,
Even a single rain
                             dro
                                 p

                                 m

                                 a

                                 k

                                 e

                                 s

 waves               waves          waves       

Continuity

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Continuity

Now, Binky was a problem chick
Who hatched when the lice were low.
She flopped right out of the nest that night;
Her mom ne'er saw her go.

She managed to grow up free of louse,
A shocking turn of fate,
But got back in the itch of things
From Chip, her lousy mate.

Sometimes, though, when the flock hangs out
And sings of bug and tree,
Binky regales her chirpy pals
With tales they scarce believe.

"There's a way of life -- of lice bereft,"
She tells them, hopelessly,
For most infected in the nest
Think itching's meant to be.

And thus do wild unlikely things
Endure to grip the mind.
Our kids shall have our parasites
And theirs they'll have in kind.

The Declaration of Dependence

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It's generational theft.
But we've come to believe that we have
consequenceless rights,
among them the rights to life (comfortable),
liberty (to succeed, but not fail),
and the pursuit of happiness (subsidized).

It's the Declaration of Dependence.

Choked on a chick pea

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Ever watch a birkenstocker with the flu? Perfectly meticulous, carefully dosing the prescribed medication at the prescribed intervals with a gimlet eye on the latest in thermometer technology.

Later, at the smoke-in, gobbling down shrooms, Mexican 'ludes, and the contents of the host's medicine cabinet, testing for effect, medical acumen sacrificed for treatment by whatever-you-got.

How different is that from a nation electing a president who shrouds his academic trail in secrecy while his job-critical birth certificate remains under lock and lei? We gobble all that down then come up lame because the oath of office got hiccuped, not malapropped into the Hudson River.

We'd swallow a turkey while choking on a chick pea.

A few words about balls

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We, as a nation, should not view the inaugural festivities as high school musical for ugly people but rather let us rejoice in what it is ... the peaceful transfer of talking points.

Afro-Africans --- not black enough?

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Obama, to his credit, has never fed into this. He wants to be judged on his socialistic policies not on his color.

I wonder how much of it has to do with not being reared in the victim-mongering culture of black America. Obama's life experience is not ghetto-class, but truly foreign. He has a different baggage. I imagine Michelle tried to bring him up to whitey-hating code and Rev Wright certainly laid the woe-is-us on him, but it doesn't seem to have stuck.

Obama Believer

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To the tune of I'm a Believer.

Obama Believer

I thought life was sleeping on a waterbed,
Tattooed, pierced and studded like a freak.
Bush was out to get me,
Fired from the boutique,
Unemployed and living week to week.

Then I saw his face, now I'm a believer
Hope and change is my attitude.
I'm in love, Oooh---bama-believer!
Underachiever? No more, dude.

ACORN helped me vote about a dozen times,
You'd think the more you vote, the more you'd get.
I ended up with Hill'ry!
Foggy Bottom that!
Centrist cab'net picking with no vet!

So don't buy the farm, Obama-believers,
Barack's no diamond in the rough.
Savor your love, Oooh---bama-believers!
You could be grieving soon enough.

First snow

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First snow

What stuff is this? the pony called,
that whites me up to turn me bald,
that tickles, trickles down warm ears?
that rides the wind as cold as fear.

The fence that kept the wolves at bay
I'd faith leap o'er to get away
now binds me here in my alarm.
There's no cold comfort on this farm.

Canadians out of tune with the times

An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.

Canadians see Ayers as a terrorist, something his own country declines to acknowledge.

Ah, but that was long ago,
And now our inclinations
Define terrorism down.

Who's your mammy?

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African-Americans may be surprised when they find that Obama is a Kenyan-Indo-American who shares neither their plantation mentality nor, as do not the successful Haitian communities in Florida, their sense of entitlement. This could get very interesting ... and painful for Obama who sleeps, after all, with a rich victim of god-damned America.

The Government We Deserve

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Literary elite dazzled by their own creation
The Australian

Hertzberg recalled one half of Lincoln's old saying, to the effect that you can fool some of the people all of the time. "We now know how many 'some' is," he added, "27 per cent. That's the proportion of Americans who cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job.

[...]

Never mind that Barack Obama makes no claims to academic excellence or that his eloquence was drilled into him, not in ivy-clad college debating chambers, but out of the tempestuous sermons of his Chicago pastor. People will invent for themselves the politicians they want to have (or to hate).

Aye, Poppy

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¶And the Lord spake, saying, "Why punisheth thou my vegetation so?"

¶And the people said, "Yea, Lord, some guy might get high."

¶And the Lord said, "Is it worth all the caterwauling? We're trying to sleep up here."

¶And the people were sore perplexed... the ones that weren't high, anyway.

On the matter of a paparazzi presidency

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The danger here for Obama is close and at hand. Presidential celebrity becomes parody the instant his 'fans' are traduced. Disappointing the enamored is the nature of presidency, and the spin-around from worship to mockery is done on a dime. It leverages down as quickly as it leveraged up. All the king's horses and all the king's media will struggle mightily, only making matters worse. Have popcorn handy.

Emulate help, not hope

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Obama: Americans must emulate courage of founders

I love that, in a cringing yet metamessage way. Emulations, of course, are reasonable facsimiles of other goods. What we have here is a variation on the peculiar tendency of liberals to sap meaning from concepts for fear, I'm snidely assuming, that what is below the surface is too unsavory to expose all at once.

Remember the 1996 Democratic convention mantra of "Hope is on the way?" Examined for what it is, "Hope is on the way," means that somewhere down the road, as Clarence Darrow told the judge at the Scope monkey trials when the judge said he hoped Darrow wasn't impugning the honor of the court, "one is entitled to hope."

It's not even a thin gruel; it's hope of gruel to come. Thus do expectations get lowered and agendae covered with mush.

In the case at hand, we are asked to pretend-up the courage of people whose problems were several degrees from ours, people whose worldview we so dilute with the paralysis of dependence, down looks like up.

We need our own version of courage, a version of return to individualism, liberty, and making-do without benefit of our neighbor's pocket (or, even more despicable his credit card, or -- the height of self-indulgence -- the already maxed-out credit cards of generations unborn). Too big to fail? Don't assume the US government is, because the assumption alone can lead to the fall.

Emulate, not the founders, but the pioneers. They learned how to survive without bailouts.

Chauncey had it

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It's astonishing. While the potted plants for Bush, if not to say 'bots', remain rooted in intransigent manichean fury that anything Obama does must, by nature, be sinful and unclean because Bush 'kept us safe,' ergo, anythlng he did was, by nature, immaculately conceived, if not always ascension-worthy, the rest of the electorate sees that beyond the blight at the end of the funnel, per Chauncey Gardener in Being There, things might not be all that bad in the garden. It's too early to know, but from where I sit, "I like to watch."

MoDo wraps Dick

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"Even on his way out, Vice is still on top."

The elderly schoolgirl,
having constructed a straw man,
has very dry sex with it,
tells it she's not that kind of girl,
later complains that it
never calls,
never writes.

Elmer Gantry adds to the flock

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With 'Guilty', Coulter Is the Rush Limbaugh of Conservative Authors---Human Events

Ann Coulter is a master of over-the-top bombastic huckstery which, if it's coming from the starboard side of the political spectrum, Human Events is inclined to swallow as uncritically as hippies sharing prescriptions. The ever-trusting sluggard meets his guiding star. "Tell me again about the rabbits, George."

It's a Gas!

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Some silly co-worker of mine (obviously female) asked if a manly fart were the sign of stomach problems. I explained to her the meaning of "recreation."

The Socon Manifesto -- No-fault divorce? Internet? Not for you.

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Those who cast their ballots last November on the basis of "moral values" may have had more in mind than just same-sex marriage, which is neither the only threat to marriage nor even the most serious. To truly reverse the decline of the family, the momentum must be carried forward to confront the others. And eventually we must grasp a painful nettle: The most direct threat to the family is divorce on demand. Sooner or later, if civilization is to endure, it must be brought under control.

[...]

While no-fault divorce laws are certainly the catalyst for the destruction of the family, I believe that the internet is the next biggest enemy of the family, if it is not already here. P*rn online, on demand, meeting people online to have affairs with, on and on...sure these things always existed, but now there are no barriers against them.

Pop a what?

A trail of popcorn on New Year's Day led Sacramento police to a man wanted on a warrant, authorities said.

"Hey, yo, baby-momma! I be here to pop a corn in yo' ass."
"It's not 'pop a corn' you nappy-headed idiot, it's 'pop a cap.'"
"What? Sheeit. It look like most o' the popcorn done spilled out anyway."
"Does this mean I'm safe?"
"Until I be stealing some caps, I s'pose so. Get de door, will ya?"