all you are is mean

 

You, with your words like knives -

        OK, you know the song.

On You Tube, video titled:

Taylor Swift - Mean (Taylor's Version) (Lyric Video)

uploader / channel:  Taylor Swift

...and all you're ever gonna be is mean...

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Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

 

Well, if you - ever plan to motor West,

Jack, take my way,

That's the highway that's the best

Get your kicks -

On Route Sixty-Six

Well it winds - from Chicago to L.A.

More than two thousand miles all the way

Get your kicks - on Route 66

Now, you go through St. Louis

Joplin, Missouri

And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

You'll see Amarillo

Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona

Don't forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino -

Won't you - get hip to this timely tip?

When you take that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66...

--------------------- On You Tube, the video titled:

The Rolling Stones - Route 66  1964 (best sound)

uploader / channel:  Anthony R.

and play.

        A little of a Keith Richards interview, at the start, then the song.  You can hear a 1964 audience welcome the band.

(There are other videos, too, by the Stones and by other artists.  The song has been covered a lot.  So good.  Take your pick.)

----------------------------------------------------------

{"Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" - written by American songwriter Bobby Troup.  Composed in 1946}

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rollin' on the river

 

John Fogerty, the man who wrote the song "Proud Mary"

On You Tube, go to the video titled

Ike & Tina Turner - Proud Mary live on Italian TV 1971

uploader /channel:  Storchengerippe

...and play!

Ike Turner, the musician who created the new arrangement of the song "Proud Mary"

..."two - three - four...!!..."

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he asks you with a grin, if you're havin' a good time

 ...I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more

I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more -

Well, he puts his cigar - out in your face just for kicks

His bedroom window, it is made out of bricks

The National Guard - stands around his door --

Oh! - I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more...

On You Tube, the video titled:

Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm (Official Audio)

uploader / channel:  Bob Dylan

Listen and enjoy, today, the day before Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for the music of Bob Dylan.

I'm thankful for Bob.

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now I have a hammer, and I've got a bell...

 on You Tube, video titled:

Peter, Paul and Mary - If I Had A Hammer (1963 performance)

uploader / channel:  Johns1948Ten

It's like a hurricane of song on your mind...

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let it get good now

 On You Tube, go to this video:

Bobby Darin - Mack the Knife (1970)

uploader / channel:  Oldies Zone

        and watch.

        I know I recently "played" this song here on this blog, but we're playing it again because it's a live performance.

When the song starts to build, in the early part, he tosses off an aside:  "Aaaah, let it get good now..."

At 1:17 he does a little moonwalk step - also an "aside"...

Celebrating Thanksgiving Week with music that I adore.

-30-

ok, wait a minute

 Something I took from watching the Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart was that when she took some of her ideas to big companies, wanting them to invest in her enterprise, she was turned down.

Conde Nast; TIME Inc. - and then eventually TIME did decide to back her project - I didn't memorize all the details... but the point that stayed with me was, she did not get an automatic "Yes."

I live with a fear that when I try to get published, I will get the same result as I got with writing screenplays - no one wants what you have, and they don't even read it.

Rejection.

Blah-blah-blah.

Right?

        But look at Martha Stewart, how successful she is.  And she did not let her enthusiasm be dampened by rejection.

I guess before I watched the documentary, it had never occurred to me that Martha Stewart would have ever been turned down for anything, in the business world.

I live with fear and doubt, but my enthusiasm is not dampened.

I guess the executives in big companies who have the power to say Yes or No to investing in projects and enterprises live with fear, too.  Repercussions on them may be unpleasant if they say Yes to something and it loses money.

If they say No - poof! - like magic, No Repercussions.

"No" is the safe choice.

(Conde Nast)

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just to be in her presence

 In the early 2000s when Martha Stewart was charged with insider trading, I was kind of shocked and thought the prosecutors were picking on her because she was successful.

There are layers to that:

were they picking on her because she's a "Successful Woman"?

because she's famous and by "going after" her, they could become fame-adjacent?

because she built her success on home-keeping, which is traditionally a "Woman's Area"? - (the old term, "women's work") - and that was irritating to the men who were bringing the action against her?

...Or - is James Comey just a grandstanding dolt?

        Snoop Dog has the intelligence to know that "just to be in her presence" would be "an upgrade" for him.  The same is true for "Detective" Comey, but did he have the brains to see that?

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Martha Stewart and me

 After watching / listening to the Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart I kind of got on a roll of listening to interviews with Martha, on You Tube.  There are a bunch of them!  They're good!

Have I "mastered the art of French cooking" yet?

No!

Do I love listening to her speak about things?

Yes!

        When I typed a post on here yesterday, I had to laugh because I realized that after listening to a certain amount of Martha, I had sort of taken on some of her style - without thinking about it, I just went ahead and typed here that you should, when making your list of what you're going to do next, "get a legal pad and a good ballpoint pen"

hahaha - without the recent 'Stewart immersion' I would not have said that, I would have just said, 'get paper & pen and make a list.'

        After spending time with Martha, I got specific and a little bit commanding:  "a good ballpoint pen."

In the Netflix documentary, Snoop Dogg said, "I thought it would be an upgrade, for me, just to be in her presence."

I felt a little like that, too.  Like - listening to her, I was learning things and being inspired.

        "just to be in her presence"

        I thought that was kind of a beautiful phrase; I liked it.

Martha and Andy Stewart on their wedding day, 1961

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hanging out with Hugh Grant

 "Actually, the world hates actors, quite rightly."

The movie actor Hugh Grant said this during an interview on You Tube.  I was listening to it a little, last night, trying to feel better.

        "The world hates actors - quite rightly" - that's the typical British self-deprecating humor that always makes them sound so pleasantly sophisticated.

I have found that when something bad happens and you feel temporarily hopeless, it's helpful to take a legal pad and a good ballpoint pen and write down the things you are going to do - just really small things - and then do them, in any order you want to, and when one is finished, check-mark it off at the left, and scribble it off.

- glass of ice water

- make Writing List

- pick up

- dishes

...etc.

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order and beauty

 

Viewing the Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart was kind of a transformative experience. 

Just - interesting.

        On You Tube there are videos showing the trailer for the documentary.  One Viewer Comment said,

"I sort of felt bad vibes from the whole documentary."

        (Woody Allen:  "I was at an Alice Cooper concert once, six people were rushed to the hospital with bad vibes!")

Another viewer Commented:

--  She did a lot to give value to the important work of caring for a home at a time when mainstream feminism was really focused on achieving masculine ideals.  

But household management is extremely important - to care for each other, avoid waste, and surround ourselves with order and beauty, these are noble goals.  

        And a lot of knowledge was in the process of being lost, which she then captured and documented.  I think it's so interesting that in the process, she also managed to be the first woman to achieve one of the ultimate masculine ideals of being a billionaire CEO.

----------------------------------------------

        "Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high."

        - Martha S.

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"I have a dream, today..."

 -------------------- [excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper. Copyright, 1990.  Harper Perennial.] ------------------ 

"My theory is this," said Jon Carroll, one of Wenner's early associate editors.  "The reason that Rolling Stone was successful is the same reason that Playboy and New York succeeded:  each was the complete encapsulation of a single person's fantasy.  

Hugh Hefner wanted to be a playboy, and Clay Felker wanted to live on the Upper East Side of New York City.  

Jann wanted to be with rock stars.  

And it turns out that each fantasy was shared by enough people to create a successful circulation."

Hugh Hefner, back in the day...

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in the company of greatness

 ----------------- [excerpt from Rolliing Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper] ----------------------- Instead of defining rock & roll, or deifying it, Rolling Stone covered it - a truly revolutionary idea.  Its writers interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton with the sense of purpose a Time reporter would bring to an interview with Henry Kissinger.  

Musicians were worthy news figures, proclaimed Rolling Stone, and their music was worthy of analysis.  Readers often disagreed, sometimes vehemently with the magazine's seminal critics:  Jon Landau, Greil Marcus, Langdon Winner, Jim Miller, Paul Nelson, John Morthland, Lester Bangs, Ed Ward and Dave Marsh.  

        In the end, however, these disputes were always welcome, for they upheld Jann Wenner's larger argument:  The music matters.

Jann Wenner was...desperate for acceptance and affection.  His distinctiveness forever completed with his primal longings.  From his adolescent days onward, Jann Wenner sought connections.  His greatest goal in life was to be where the action was....

        ...His own stature never preoccupied him as his surroundings did.  Jann Wenner yearned to be in the company of greatness.

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strawberry fields forever

 -------------- [excerpts from Rolling Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper] ---------------------------- By the end of 1969, Jann Wenner's two-year-old Rolling Stone - or simply Stone, as many affectionately called it in those days - was generally accepted as the most authoritative rock & roll magazine in the land.  

By 1971, Rolling Stone was what Esquire had been in the sixties and the New York Herald Tribune a decade before that:  the breeding ground of explosive New Journalists like Hunter Thompson, David Felton, Grover Lewis and Joe Eszterhas.

        [The magazine's] very nature was to avoid the set positions assumed by its psychedelic and left-wing counterparts in the underground press.

---------------------------------------

        The magazine seemed to understand exactly how important pop music was.  Teen magazines trivialized it; Crawdaddy!, the first American rock magazine, placed it on high with the utterances of Plato and Aristotle; and the straight press scorned or ignored it.

-------------------------------- [end / excerpts]

I think, sometimes, that humans suffer from a poverty of imagination.  The above passages from Draper's book tend to confirm this idea.

        All this revolutionarily fantastic music is emerging around them, and these people writing in the magazines that already existed before Jann Wenner started R. S. can't respond to it in any kind of coherent, thoughtful way.

("The Beatles?  Let's just ignore 'em.")

lol

A slight lack of vision...?

-30-

a righteous cat

 Reading a book about the history of Rolling Stone magazine, I came across a reference to the publication's editor and founder, Jann Wenner, calling George McGovern "a righteous cat."

McGovern was a U.S. Senator from the state of South Dakota in the 1960s and '70s.  

"a righteous cat."

LOL

"Hippie" - talk

I hope the senator heard about that remark at the time - a gentle, taciturn son of a minister (Methodist, I think...), he would have been surprised and amused (or perhaps bemused) to hear himself spoken of that way by a member of that "long-haired younger generation."

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it can't happen here

 

comments from You Tube, after Trump's election win:

-  As a person from mainland China, I was always surprised to see there are so many Americans who are willing to throw themselves into a dictatorship.  It boggles my mind to see so many of y'all just throw your freedom away when so many people in the world still don't have it.

-  Celebrity culture gets you Trump.  The cult of celebrity he built up in pop culture transferred directly into the cult of personality he built up in politics.  

It's not talked about enough.

-  I've always been interested how people that go on about "freedom" are also so willing to prostrate themselves in worship to their "master."

            -  Also, freedom to  them means them having the freedom to take away the freedom of others.

[end / comments]

--------------------------------------------------------

That first comment, by the guy from China - it "boggles" my mind somewhat to see a person from across the world using "y'all" - like, when he learns English, he learns English, even the regional slang!

Funny.

        Recently, here, we were contemplating how sometimes when a person is bashing away on the words "family" and "Christian", they're really just trying to put something over on you.

They use them as "bamboozle words."

Or - "buzzwords."

Bzzzzzzzzz ... and the audience is supposed to react.

Maybe the word freedom gets added to that list.  When they start yelling about, "family!", "Christian!", "freedom!" - look out.

Get skeptical.

mainland China

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a voice full of money

 This week, when "Trump" "won" again, I had the Internet at home, so I could go on there & see what was happening.

When he "won" in 2016, I came home from work and couldn't get any information, because I didn't have TV, or the Internet.

Then, I thought, I could find out information by calling someone.  

I thought, I could call my friends, but they will be asleep, and I don't want to wake them up.

And then I thought I could call out to the state capital, because there are always people up and awake at motels and hotels, overnight.  People on the desk, there to answer the phone.  

So I called - any motel that I could think of.

And I asked, "Have you heard who won the presidential election tonight?"

A couple of seconds went by, and he kind of drawled, with a tone vaguely suggestive of flamboyant excess, "I have absolutely no idea"...

It was kind of like - Daisy Buchanan's voice may have been "full of money," - but this guy's voice was - full of nightclubs...

-30-

make a new plan

 People discussing the election on the New York Times site:

" "    One lesson I take from this election is that it's a really good idea to pick your party's candidate in a competitive process.  

One has to look back on the 2016 Republican primary contest as a remarkably successful exercise in figuring out what voters wanted.  

        Democrats, by contrast, cleared the way for Biden to run for a second term and, when that became impossible, they cleared the way for his vice president to run in his place.  

Maybe next time, they should try asking voters what they want.

" "    Hate makes Trump's story appealing.  

In general, stories that appeal to our people's worst selves play well.  

        But so do stories that appeal to our best selves.  We haven't seen Democrats try to tell that kind of story - a "We can be a great, generous, kind nation" type of story.  

Instead, they traffic in some version of "Things are fine the way they are," when that is just not what most people feel.

" "    I have spent my career covering places with really existential problems like hunger extreme poverty, uncontrolled disease, civil war.  

I think Americans are suffering from problems that are primarily psychological rather than material.  

That does not make them less real.  

If anything, it makes them even more powerful and more resistant to material solutions.

-------------------------------------------------------

        I want to play this song to mark the 2024 presidential election:

Paul Simon - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Official Audio)

uploader / channel:  Paul Simon

(OK baby, hit it!)

-30-

poison elegance

 

I went on You Tube to listen to some videos and see what other people think of Martha, the documentary about Martha Stewart.

One guy was talking about her shows and her style and it sounded like he said "poison elegance" but that was an Enunciation Malfunction:  he was saying "poise and elegance."   

        Why do some people get mad at Martha Stewart?  I can remember sitting at a table for supper during a convention in the late '90s, and the subject of Martha S. came up for some reason - several women just erupted in anger.

LOL - I was a little scared!

"You can't do all that!"

 "Regular people don't have the money or the time to do all that stuff perfectly!"

"She just has servants and employees to do everything and then she talks and poses for pictures!" 

"Rahr rahr rahr!"

"Aaaaauuuuggghhhh!"

        This topic was addressed in the documentary - someone said the impression some people come away with is that Martha Stewart is doing things with her home and yard and lifestyle that theoretically we could all be doing, and then some people get really aggravated, feeling like they should be doing "all those things" as well, and as beautifully, as Martha is doing them, but - they aren't.

        And then they feel "less than."

        And that makes them mad.

Early in the film she talks about her time during the 1960s working as a stockbroker on Wall Street.  She says, "That's where I learned how to behave around billionaires."

        She didn't elaborate, so I was left wondering:  how should one behave around billionaires, and why and in what way is it different from the way one behaves around anyone else...?

But see, that fits in with Martha's philosophy and way of looking at the world:  that there's - "a right way and a wrong way," as the saying goes, and she wants to study that, and interpret it, and discuss it and demonstrate it for her audience.  She says she's "a teacher."

        Even earlier in the documentary, before the stockbroker part, Martha's modeling career is covered - she did that when she was a teenager in high school.  

(The filmmakers put in some music at this point - some kind of bouncy, sassy pop-type-1950s song, it reminded me so much of some of the music used in the Hugh Hefner documentary, American Playboy, on Amazon Prime.)

Another point that reminded me of the Hefner film was when Martha got charged with insider trading and her lawyers advised her to not speak in public about it.  She felt it was not a good strategy because then other people set the narrative about her.

        Hugh Hefner said the same thing about a situation he had in the '70s where one of his employees was charged with transporting illegal drugs.  He said he never spoke out because of advice he received, and he felt afterwards it was a bad decision.

When Martha Kostyra got married to Andy Stewart in 1961, they took a five-month honeymoon in Europe.

(Five months?  That what it says.)

It sounded like the European experience was transformative for Martha.  Absorbing the culture, she said, "This is what I would like to spend my life thinking about."

        This aspect reminded me of Jacqueline Bouvier's Parisian experience - it kind of "re-set her dial" in some kind of way.

Snoop Dogg; Martha Stewart

-30-

a good thing

 

        There's a documentary about Martha Stewart on Netflix.  It's called Martha.  (When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about Martha Mitchell.)

This film says Martha Stewart was "the original influencer."

It says, "American women needed to be re-directed from opening cans of cream-of-mushroom soup and pouring it on top of broccoli and boiled chicken."

        (What?  That's wrong?  It sounds good, to me.  I'd eat it. ...)

-30-

could it be our boy's done - something rash?

 

Go on You Tube and listen to Bobby Darin's rendition of the song, "Mack The Knife."

That song is such a mood.

It starts out with one level of energy and then builds to another level of energy.

The drama is built into the arrangement.

        "The line forms on the right, babe!"...

video title:

Mack the Knife

uploader / channel:  Bobby Darin

        I love at 2:04 how he goes, "Hup! - Hup!"

-30-