a cure for youthful longings

I'm listening to a copy of The Cure's old BBC sessions from 1979-1982. It contains all their moodiest, gloomiest, most introspective music. At the same time they kind of sound like a bunch of highschool kids banging away at guitars and keyboards in an auditorium somewhere, getting ready for a heavily chaperoned 'Talent Night'. Man, talk about glorious. Ever tried to imagine The Zit Remedy doing Seventeen Seconds?

synchronicity, prescience, or incontinence?

Today at work, The Lotus received the new Random House catalogue and found that the entry for the Emmanuelle Carrère reproduced the quotation that I used below, which, since I cribbed it from John Leonard, hardly comes as a surprise (it does lower my estimation of John Leonard a tad, but any guy who's willing to criticize Bob Dylan for being cruel to Joan Baez deserves a break now and then).



What I found creepy was that the catalogue copy promptly followed that up by talking about Dick's potassium tablet and Scotch diet.

that's not funny

In the latest issue of Harper's John Leonard quotes from Emmanuel Carrère's new book I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: "What [Dick] asked of culture, psychoanalysis, and even religion, was not that they educate him but that they hand over the password that would permit him to escape from the cave wherein we are shown not the real world but only its shadows". That pretty much sums up Dick's attitude toward the cosmos.



Bear in mind, though, that Dick was admitted to a hospital after completing his novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer because, he claimed in an interview, the pain of leaving his characters behind incurred physical illness. Then he mentioned that he lived on nothing but potassium tablets and Scotch while he was writing. Then he died.

my lands are where my latter day saints lie buried

It looks like I'll be heading to the Crazy Horse monument in June to do a segment for our "Big and Small" show. The show, unsurprisingly, is about big things and small things. I am preceded by an illustrious line of frivolous show hosts, chief among them Donny Osmond for the Travel Channel. I was supposed to travel to South Dakota last year, which would have put me within days of meeting that old Clean Pop LDS icon. Who knows, I might have gotten to hang out with D. Osmond! I believe he was a little bit rock and roll, no? I am deeply conflicted about my job sometimes.



Speaking of LDS, do you remember the scene in Star Trek IV in which Kirk tries to pass off Spock's Swami-esque behaviour and terrycloth outfit with the explanation that "in the sixties he did a little too much LDS"?



I wonder how many Mormons found that line funny? (Ha ha, he baptized too many previous generations &c.) Which makes me wonder: what constitutes Mormon humour? Hey, Jake, don't tip over that urn! C'mon, Zeke, you're such a moron...i! AH HAH HAH HAH. Snarf snarf.

appelation days

On the way home from work today two guys in an orange-and-black Corvette sped past me down 11th Avenue. The passenger leaned out the window and yelled "Faggot!" as they went by.



Oh yeah, I still got it.