Just some rambling …
A recent thread about the Fugs reminded me that Tuli Kupferberg, in one of his last interviews, said something like:
Nobody who lived in the 50s could have predicted the 60s, so there is always hope.
Rebuttal from Graham Greene
“I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being’s capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.”
The Tuli quote is from me. He was an old friend and I interviewed him for a Fugs profile for MOJO magazine. When he died I wrote his obit for MOJO and ended with that quote.
Whether wholly accurate or not, it gives me a boost during bad times, which has been always as of late. I’ve lost count of the folks who’ve referenced it.
Thanks for sharing.
Great tribute.
Thank you. I enjoy your site — nothing like attractive dames to pick up one’s spirits! Your uncoverage — as well as your Covid and other coverage — is well-done.
This probably should go in the COVID-19 posting but the comments seem to be closed there. Disturbing news that COVID-19 is widespread and asymptomatic in non-human species. Preliminary evidence suggests transmission from some non-human species to human, with intervening mutations, is possible.
Basically no hope of eradicating the virus if there are so many reservoirs available, and with multiple hosts, always the potential for a new mutation to really mess us up.
This takes a bit of shoe-horning, but hear me out. Around this time last year, I had ripped a Who show and I was listening to it for the first time on my way into work. They play a few songs, then Townsend goes well OK, we’re doing Tommy now – the whole fucking thing so buckle up. A few minutes later they get to the song “1921”, with its chorus “I think ’21’s gonna be a good year” and it was pitch black and raining a little but I was just “FUCK YEAH!!”. I had this moment where I felt like the best I’d felt with my pants on in thirty-some years.
My point, to the extent I have one, is: watch for those moments. Ride them like a surfer riding a wave. OK, not as erudite as Graham Green, let alone Tuli Kupferberg. But anyone who lived through ’20 has earned ’21.
LOL. When I heard them in late 71 in SF (was stationed there), they had gotten tired of doing the whole thing. Their ’70 shows were 2 hours plus (how in the hell did Moon do it?). So they did maybe ten songs or so, introduced by Moon announcing they were going to do some of the opera, “the choice cuts” ‘, doing a thing with his fingers like a butcher displaying his best wares.
Best show I ever heard. And the best live band I ever heard with the possible exception of George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra on an average night.
I saw Tommy on Broadway in or around 1993. I had a CD of the Who performing all the songs from Tommy, but I found the Broadway version to be much more enjoyable. The Who’s performance of Acid Queen wasn’t even close. Tina Turner’s version from the film was just as good though. It’s just hard for any band to compete with a Broadway cast with a full orchestra. But Pete Townshend deserves all the credit in the world for writing most of it. The rest of the band deserves tremendous credit for going along with the idea of creating a rock opera.
Why do so many people complain so often about so many things? We all have different lots in life and we all deal with difficulty, despair, unique challenges, and experiences. Nobody wants to hear about it and I don’t want to hear from the government unless they are here to fix a pothole or arrest a criminal. Fix your own lives and stop blaming others for all your problems. It’s on you. Nothing has changed in the last 200 years. Opportunity is there to be seized and failures will find scapegoats to blame.
People complain because it’ s a more measured response than choking out your fellow man. Doesn’t mean you have to listen.
steverino’s post reminds me of Craig T. Nelson’s classic wail: “Nobody helped ME when I was on food stamps”!
Jeebus, I’m starting to think he’s actually Tucker Carlson.
Ask him about Ukraine. You’ll find out fast.
Nothing has changed?
A war was fought over slavery. The evil side lost.
An insane man was screwed over by an a rich evil man. The rest of us got electricity in our houses.
Rich assholes started a big war.
Women got the right to vote.
Booze was outlawed. Then inlawed.
Rich assholes fucked the economy.
A crippled adulterer fixed the economy.
A bunch of crazy assholes started an even bigger war.
Fixed a horrible disease. A little too late for the crippled adulterer.
Desegregated the US. Sort of.
Greatest American Frank Zappa releases Freak Out! in 1965.
Greatest Briton Tony Iommi slices off his finger tips in an accident and figures out the guitar does sound better when played loud with a lower tuning.
Man walked on the Moon. Later lived in space. With a bunch of useful appliances.
Fixed another horrible disease. This time time stomping it out of existence. Sometimes genocide isn’t a bad thing.
Al Gore invents the internet. Other people make it better to distribute dirty pictures.
Greatest American Frank Zappa releases The Yellow Shark in 1992 and then dies because he smoked too many vegetables.
A black man is elected POTUS. America follows him with an incompetent racist.
Tried fixing another horrible disease. Still a work in progress.
I might be missing a few things. Others can fill in the gaps if they wish.
PS Opportunity is there to be seized is a horrible life philosophy. I think we can do a little better than Fuck You Got Mine.
There are infinite permutations of how to get where we are, yet here we are. I don’t believe in Fuck you, got mine. I believe in “we all have our own fucking shit, don’t let it get in the way of getting yours”. You don’t need the governments help unless you are intellectually disabled, physically disabled, or a child.
That is so fucking stupid it makes me think you might fall in your first category of those who need help.
Rereading The Best and the Brightest at the moment (first time was 48 years ago) and the Greene quote was along the lines of several relating to Indochina.
Am up to spring of 65 when an 80,000-troop level is being discussed and George Ball is telling everyone that even 500,000 wouldn’t cut it. I’m guessing this doesn’t end well.
Military industrial complex aside, LBJ knew the war was not winnable in ’64. 😮 And the dichotomy of Vietnam/NASA space program happening at the same time. America, what a country!
Multitasking is the key …
You might be a little early on when you have that lightbulb going on in Lyndon’s brain.
“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Oct, 21, 1964. at Akron U, no less (I lived 12 or so miles away then) miles.
A quote I never quite forgot as I was getting closer to draft age – and actually did wind up in the Army between 69 and 72.
Well yes.
Here’s a thought experiment. If you were the pre-eminent European political scientist and you’d sat down in January 1914 to predict how the the world wa going to look fifty years hence, what would you have predicted?
Really?
Unfortunately, the march of history is not only unpredictable, but it cannot even be relied on to move forward. When we placed a man on the moon in 1969, who could have dreamed that no human would venture past low earth orbit from 1973 to 2021?
Well wasn’t it obvious that a bank robber from the other Georgia and an opera-crazed failed artist from Vienna would be running Russia and Germany and tearing up half the globe in the process.