Spotlight on … Richard Meltzer A Whore Just Like The Rest: The Music Writings Of Richard Meltzer (2000)

‘While a great deal of arts criticism has appeared alongside the advent of its subject, it wasn’t until well after the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll that writers began to take the genre seriously. Rock music had been around a good 15 years when magazines such as Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Creem created a niche for themselves, announcing their arrival as counter-cultural forces by featuring such writers as Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer, and Lester Bangs. Partly inspired by the radical tenor of the late ’60s and partly out of pure adventure, these writers were making (and breaking) standards of traditional journalism as they went along. There was no money to be had and endless space to fill, so is it any wonder that early, barely professional rock publications (a host of one-offs and where-are-they-nows) attracted the kind of cranks you’d avoid on the subway? It’s striking how obnoxious and full of contempt the formative forays into rock criticism often are: Lester Bangs, for example, would write epic, narcissistic essays on bands such as The Guess Who, Black Sabbath, and The Stooges, with the music almost an afterthought.

‘More artful in their chaos, Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer (both of whom have been impressively anthologized by Da Capo) infused their writing with the free energy and pretension of the beat poets as much as the New Journalism movement. Considering the bile and bitter self-loathing in his collection, is it any wonder Tosches seemed in a hurry to escape rock writing? The Nick Tosches Reader contains hundreds of pieces, most with new introductions by the author, that flow chronologically from his music pieces to excerpts from his acclaimed biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin, through bits of fiction and poetry. While there’s much to admire throughout the book, some inclusions stand out, such as the long profile of George Jones rejected by the Tina Brown-era New Yorker but cherished by just about everyone who has ever read it. Richard Meltzer seems in an even greater rush to escape, but he’s still living life as a beyond-acerbic rock critic. His assaultive stream-of-consciousness pieces read like recorded rants, rarely addressing his subject directly and sometimes ignoring it altogether.

‘Meltzer is interested mostly in Meltzer, which actually makes for some fascinating reads: Not only did Meltzer help “invent” rock criticism and encourage Blue Öyster Cult to recklessly utilize umlauts, but he also eerily presaged the wild, unfocused slop of Internet newsgroups. It can be tough to read material written with such a terrible attitude (or, for that matter, written under the influence), but it can be exhilarating. These collections are hit-and-miss but always compelling, and that’s one of their pleasures: You get to see a new form, warts and all, shaping itself before any interlopers got their hands on it. The result is often closer to literature than criticism, but it frequently reads with the swagger of rock ‘n’ roll itself.’ — Joshua Klein

 

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Further

Richard Meltzer @ Wikipedia
The Richard Meltzer Fanclub @ Twitter
RICHARD MELTZER, NOISE BOY
RICHARD MELTZER INTERVIEW
RM @ goodreads
RM @ The Film-makers Cooperative
RM’s articles & essays @ San Diego Reader
Days of Beer and Daisies (Meltzer Remembers Nick Tosches)
RM’s reviews & essays @ Seattle Weekly
ichard Meltzer ‘Maple Leaf Cowpoop Round-Up’
The Rabbi of Rock Criticism
‘THIRD SPUD FROM THE SUN: CAMERON CROWE THEN AND NOW’
SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #34: EXCESSES OF PENIS
VOM AS IN VOMIT: RICHARD MELTZER’S MUSICAL TURD IN THE PUNCH BOWL
Richard Meltzer’s current feelings on the Doors (1970)
Greil Marcus’s introduction to Meltzer’s ‘THE AESTHETICS OF ROCK’

 

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Extras

Mike Watt (Stooges, Minutemen) on Richard Meltzer

Bogus Boxing Trash by Richard Meltzer (excerpt)

VOM – “Punk mobile” / “I’m in Love with your mom” / “Animalistic”

Richard Meltzer talks about art, artists and life.

Richard Meltzer Reads “Frankie” by Richard Meltzer & Nick Tosches

 

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Interview
from Perfect Sound Forever

PSF: I’ve noticed that throughout your writing, you’ve had an interesting preoccupation with Greek philosophers.

To say “preoccupation,” it’s like saying “having a preoccupation with words–or food.” Basically, I was a philosophy major. (laughs) So I absorbed that stuff and have retained enough of it though I haven’t read any of that stuff in 25 years. That stuff gave me a systematic orientation towards everything.. Reading all these people and as an undergraduate, I’d say around my sophomore, junior year, in ’64, ’65, I had professors who let me write papers about rock and roll. The content was referenced to current stuff in rock and roll. I’d have a chance to talk about Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit in terms of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun.” People would say to me those days, “Do you REALLY see that stuff in there or are you READING it in there?” My take was simply that it was so conspicuous. Something is there as opposed to something else. It’s not that these people read Hegel–they’re not referencing this stuff. Philosophers talk about BEING and so do silly musicians.

I also wrote about comic books and things like that, Pop Art. Rock and roll was certainly the “most exciting,” most relevant of all these elements of culture at the time. So I found myself writing after a while almost exclusively about that. Whenever I felt the need to lace a paper with current stuff, after a while, rock and roll was what it was.

PSF: Do you still see the connection today?

Absolutely. It’s like etched in stone. My favorite philosophers after a certain point were the pre-Socratics–Heraclitus, Parmenides, Thales, Anaximander. All these people who were not necessarily, or not entirely, systematic at all but had just left a bunch of aphorisms like “You can’t step in the same river twice,” “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” My sense of rock and roll, in the ’50’s and the ’60’s, was that there were some figures who were themselves very pre-Socratic in their spew.

PSF: What about that question you brought up before that someone like Little Richard wasn’t thinking of pre-Socratic philosophy when he did “Tutti Frutti”?

I don’t know that even philosophers thought as much as they evinced. There’s something very classist in saying that Little Richard never thought. Little Richard was wiser than Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten and Thurston Moore put together.

Charlie Parker never wrote lyrics. He was someone I listened to in the early ’60’s, when rock and roll was pretty much nonexistent–it had been dead since around 1958. Nothing came back in any sort of big way until the British Invasion. In between, I listened to jazz. Parker is greater than Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, and a hell of a lot “smarter.” But to deal with any of this stuff in a way that a readership could understand means you have to talk about lyrics. “A womp bomma a lu mop, balomp bam boom” is to me as important a statement as “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” It’s just a statement about primacy, from primacy. You had pre-Socratic philosophers who would say that we don’t speak about God, we speak from God, or we speak to God. (laughs) Rock and roll was about, essentially, once upon a time, this absolute union of I and Thou, object and subject and so forth. It’s hard to really articulate that stuff now that it’s just a bunch of product–here, there and everywhere. There was once something rare, precious and beautiful about the utterances of rock and roll people.

PSF: What happened that you think disconnected it then?

Record companies decided suddenly that they wanted to own and control it, all of it. By late 1967, it was all “product.” From 1965 to 1967, there were no more than 20 bands in the world that mattered. You had an audience that was immense already, that knew all 20 of these bands and had all the records. Then suddenly, about the time of the Monterey Pop Festival and Sgt. Pepper, record companies decided that there were mega-bucks to be made here. They put so much money down on the waters that it got to where…if record companies didn’t necessarily want band A, they didn’t want another company to own them, so they’d sign them anyway. Suddenly, you went from having 20 bands to having thousands, all with albums, not singles. The idea of an independent record company…well, accidents happen and so forth. But once you created a food-tube down from the record industry, you got not only the “debasement of art” but you had hundreds and hundreds of shills, rock writers, pretending to be innocent by-standers when they’re part of that food tube.

PSF: But ideally, wouldn’t you think that it would help music thrive to have a lot of bands instead of a few of them?

I don’t think that any time in any genre of American music could you have thrived with that kind of simultaneous spotlight put on so many things. For the last few years, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to old blues records. It seems to me that rock and roll has existed about five times. You had Delta blues in the ’20’s and ’30’s. You had some slightly blander Chicago version in the later ’20’s and the ’30’s. Post-War in Chicago, all these Mississippi people had moved there–Muddy Waters. A renewal of primitive. You had jump blues in the ’40’s, R&B in the early ’50’s. All of this was five times before rock and roll “as such” happened. You had the exact thing, though not on as mass a level. Instead of a spotlight it was candle light. It didn’t have so much of a white audience. Rock and roll has happened many times and it’s burned out many times. That’s part of what it’s about. It EXISTS to burn out.

The whole ’50’s with the white participation in it, Elvis, the Everly Brothers, was dead in the water by 1958. No matter what Happy Days or Bruce Springsteen would like to make you think. Rock and roll was never very continuous until all of a sudden in the ’60’s, the record companies decided “We will make this permanent. If there’s down-time, we’ll pretend there isn’t.” Rock as a massive THING IN THE WORLD was once quite liberating–mind, heart, body, soul, the whole thing. And without missing a beat, the record companies started orchestrating it, and it became a ring through your nose connected to master program central. And it seems to me it’s been that way since maybe 1970.

Punk was something outside of rock. It lasted about three years and then it circled back and rejoined the marketplace and became the same thing. But the thing is, as far as burning out on itself goes, in the ’60’s…every time Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks did an album, they were so conscious of dealing with new turf, innovation was so crucial to what they were doing. New material, new plagiarism, whatever you want to say. By about ’66, ’67, they had strip-mined every continent of source material, of available musical, y’know, concept, idiom. By the time the U.S. “Psychedelic ’60’s” kicked in, there really wasn’t much left to do except, well, stand still, perfect your shtick, score bigger budgets, get fussier about your mix and take six months to do an album. Like the Doors, who were a great, great, GREAT live band–I saw them about 40 times before their second album came out–I don’t think they did 1-1/2 good albums. It was very rare after about 1967 for a band to be capable of doing two or three decent albums. It just wasn’t do-able.

PSF: Most bands can’t even do one.

Right! Oh yeah. With CD’s, you have to do all these extra cuts.

PSF: When you were starting to write about rock, there was no real precedent for it. All there was out there was gooey writing from teen mags. What kind of context did you see yourself in when you started doing this?

The only mags there were around then were Hit Parader, and Tiger Beat later. Most of the text in these was reprints of press releases. It’s like the record companies dictated the text of these things. It was very nowhere, just hype. I was writing for Crawdaddy, which pre-dated Rolling Stone by about two years. Nobody got paid, so they couldn’t very well tell you what to write. You wrote what you wanted and there were three or four people writing the stuff- me, Sandy Pearlman, Jon Landau, Paul Williams. Everybody picked his own little niche. I remember doing a piece at the time of Between the Buttons and “Strawberry Fields”/”Penny Lane” that was 20 pages long, talking about just those two events. At the very least, it didn’t feel anything like journalism. If anything, it was like ringside coverage of the sun coming up. It felt like being nurtured, like being constantly invigorated, like the MAXIMUM hand you could expect to be dealt by Life Itself. It was such an occasion. The human race, it seemed to me, thrived for a moment. All those who were paying attention, at least. “Psychedelic,” which was defined as mind-manifesting…suddenly you had the manifestation of mind in a very conspicuous way that you’d have trouble believing was there in Elvis and Buddy Holly but was certainly there in the ’60s, in… The life-spew of the ’50’s was not so conspicuously mental, OK? But by the heart of the’60’s, the center of gravity, it certainly was.

To be writing about this stuff just felt so normal. It was the easiest thing in the world to just think about it and let ‘er fly. (laughs) Jimi Hendrix and others THANKED me for writing these things. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane. These people dealt with me as a co-conspirator. Imagine writing about rock and roll! Wow, far out! For about ten minutes, writers WERE considered co-conspirators. By the eleventh minute, writers were just the service trade. “What can you say about us?” It was over in a flash.

PSF: During the ’70’s, did you see your work as being confrontational to the artists?

Yes. But the artists were very secondary to what was going on. It was like…. it wasn’t MTV-ish already but the corporate mechanism was there. I would say that 99% of the people writing about it were owned, whether they knew it or not. In exchange for press parties and trips, free records and concert tickets. They could be had. Most people could be taken to lunch by a publicist and then go home and write on the dotted line what the publicist wanted. There were very, very few people… I have a section in my book called “Quid Pro Quo” which is five or six pieces done in direct exchange for things like that. But even in those pieces, I was certainly writhing around and refusing to do it on a dotted line.

Some people might have considered particular artists as worthy of contempt but I was more dealing with the whole mess. For one thing, it was rare that you could get an assignment writing about who you wanted to write about by, oh, about ’72. You took what the magazines wanted you to write about. “Would you review an album with a purple cover?” “Sure!” It felt like trench warfare. The people I was contending with were record people, publicists, and even more than that, the editors of the mags themselves. But I felt that I had the SPIRIT of rock in my soul.

The function, it seemed to me by then, the DUTY of the writer was to keep up the good fight. It meant refusing to accept any rules whatsoever from the “authorities,” the people who published and edited. I wrote intentional run-on sentences, misspelled everything on purpose, I would write a page of text and re-type it backwards. It just seemed to me that you had to do this. That if you didn’t do it and you accepted, well… The kinds of reviews that pre-dated the rock press, the model was jazz in Downbeat or film reviews. Some of us were really trying to break that mold, in the ’60’s at least. By the ’70’s, it had gone to where you had a ROCK-review style sheet and I refused to have anything to do with it. Because I was an asshole and a bad boy and all of that. Part of it was simply that to surrender to the style sheet was to die. It was that much a matter of life and death!

PSF: Many times during then, you’d abandon conventional reviews and go into personal narratives. Did you ever worry that it was something of a disservice to the reader to do this?

I felt it was a GIFT to the reader. At all times, I was ADDRESSING the reader. I wanted to help readers pull the ring from out of their nose and realize… Burroughs is always talking about Hassan I Sabbah, who said “Nothing is written, all is permitted.” That’s really what I was telling readers, that you do not have to accept the hand as dealt.

 

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Book

Richard Meltzer A Whore Just Like The Rest: The Music Writings Of Richard Meltzer
Da Capo Press

‘He is one of the inventors of rock criticism. His first book, The Aesthetics of Rock (acclaimed by Greil Marcus as “a disemboweling of rock’s soft white underbelly”), became an instant cult classic when published in 1970. And for the next thirty years he fearlessly expanded the boundaries of music writing. Now he has collected the best of his prodigious output into a gonzo sampler of the reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays that form the heart of his rockwriter legacy. Traveling from psychedelia to the “dinosaur-rot early ’70s” to the redeeming majesty of punk and the constant solace of jazz, this will stand as a remarkable document of an era by a singular voice in music writing.’ — Da Capo Press

Excerpt

Things we’ve saved and saved and SAVED. For all the stupid reasons you or I or anybody saves things. You can’t take them “with you,” not all, not any, but chances are what’s left is but a micro-fraction of the total heap of shit that in the course of a life has passed through your prehensile puppy paws. Gone is that copy of Zap Comix number three, and gone is the radium-dial Howdy Doody watch, and the actual puck Frank Mahovlich scored goal number 489 with against Toronto and gone gone GONE are all the silly goddam STAMPS you once fervidly “collected,” only a fool would hold onto that shit, and you’re no fool, neither am I.

But you’ve kept the tattered squirrel hanky, right?, that old snotrag your mom hand-painted for your sixth (or was it seventh?) birthday, and the yellow plastic space helmet from 1953, excellent plastic like they don’t make anymore—hard, not very flexible, like you think would be brittle, but ‘tain’t brittle—with a brim like on baseball caps—this is one dizzy helmet! Or if YOU haven’t kept ‘em, I know I have.

And oh, speaking of plastic: records.

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In his Metaphysics, or was it Physics?—‘s been so long since I read this crap — Aristotle speaks of four causes, none of which’re all that close to how we think of cause these days, something on the order of that which produces an effect, result, or consequence — they’re more like parameters of responsibility or even (in an old-fashioned legal sense) liability. Actually, one isn’t too far off: efficient cause, i.e., whatever the hell brings a thing or event into being (for ex.: a maker or parent). He’s also got formal cause (the form, shape, structure of the whatsit), final cause (the use or goal it embodies), and the most seemingly no-big-deal of the bunch, material cause (simply its matter).

Apply this bullticky to records, to the recorded music EXPERIENCE, pre CD, and the material component—grooved, sculpted vinyl—more than holds its own. So supremely vulnerable is this whatzostuff, so susceptible to further onslaughts of form—resculptings, regroovings, smirchings and encrustings—that a whole hot WAD of variations on theme is table-set and served from the getgo:

Stations of sonic show & tell, shown/told…all the skips, sticks, jumps, hisses, crackle-pops which document devotion, confirm get-off…”To love a record is to kill it” (the CD lobby speaking), but love or loathe, it’s abuse either way…flat black plastic as “interactive” as Silly Putty (or a slice of pizza)…wear-and-tear as index of both age and youth—the record’s age and the object management blunders of YOUR youth…ditches-cum-glitches fractionalizing, obliterating, rendering inaccessible even quasi-original sound, grave-marking its exit from this auditory life…(hey, I once got a used Sun Ra elpee, took it home and found a hole in it, not the spindle hole—a CRATER at the start of one track clear through to the other side)…books, by comparison, don’t suffer such wear/tear in finite time, or rather, their wear/tear doesn’t normally preclude continued full-bore interaction, doesn’t annihilate lines, pages, whole chapters (or render them especially unreadable) even in their DISPOSABILITY, a residuum of sonic potential: records as Frisbees—the adventitious sounds of flight and smackup…

All penultimate to the final outpost of vinyl irony: the unit record, irrespective of its health or welfare. DECOMMISSIONED…freed of sonic obligation…serving no ongoing material function but to give body to a cover and sleeve… silenter than a Cage silence piece…

SOUNDLESS MERE MATTER.

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The question is this: Have I saved the LP version of the Germs’ (GI) (Slash-SR103) as an “investment” or as the one Los Angeles punk-era thingy I might wanna ogle and caress someday: my designated L.A. Punk keepsake? To make the rent, sure, I’d probably sell it for 50 bucks, no it would hafta be at least 100 — 75? — but for now it’s a keeper, even though the CD reissue, Germs (MIA) (Slash/London 422-828 808-2), sounds pretty good, pretty close. Which is something you gotta consider with digitalized analog rock — if you’re thinking replacement — ‘cause all hype to the contrary, CDs do NOT sound better, and rarely anywhere as good. Even recordings not butchered in remix (eat shit, Paul McCartney!) tend to lose more in mere remastering intangibles like “presence” and “warmth,” in addition to simple aural data—(the forest and the trees) than decades of surface destruction can ever take away. The fact is: pre-digital rock ALWAYS sounds superior, even with all the destruction factored in — for moments anyway — enough to supply GLIMPSES, at least, of not only an imaginably better sonic world, but an actual preexistent one…

Anyway, PUNK as once upon a time actual…more than a metaphor…’79: a verrry good year. L.A., a worthless sucktown for just about everything else, has somehow become the locus for probably the vitalest, most interesting assortment of punk groups in the country…a small miracle. Three-four nights a week I went and saw ‘em play and on Saturdays I hosted an all-night FM punk hoot where one week, from the sweaty palm of my guest, Slash mag editor Kickboy Face, I received a copy of the first 12-incher pressed by Slash Records. It was also Darby and company’s first (and as it turned out, last): a perfectly executed knee to the groin of life-is-a-gift precept and practice which today, nearly 20 years later, appears to have been the highwater mark of L.A.—Anglo U.S.—make that WORLD punk recording…this is it.

I haven’t let the cover—shiny black w/ the famous Germs blue circle—go to seed, and even the taint of the woman then managing them, my v. worst ex-gal to that point of my life, worst as gal and just as bad as ex, one of the few exes I’ve never jerked off thinking about, whom in the wake of Justine Carr’s ignobling departure I’d on several occasions lain with, has been insufficient to indelibly sully this sacred object.

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Axis: Bold as Love (Reprise RS 6281). I peck and it says to me, smiling, Ah, shit, man. Nice artwork. I’ll admit it’s nice artwork: Hendrix as a Hindu god with many arms, surrounded by cobras and elephants and little Keystone Kop types with angry demons on their tongues. But not so terrific an album—his second—a big letdown after he first. Didja know I did the first American feature on Jimi Hendrix? For Crawdaddy! (Rolling Stone didn’t exist yet), which I’d started writing for while at Yale, but which a year-plus later still didn’t pay anything. Yes: having by then INVENTED rock criticism as we know it, I sought not only recognition but a mess of potage…a couple of bucks.

Out of academia almost a year, I had no job but was writing lyrics for, and sometimes living with, the Soft White Underbelly, a not-bad psychedelic combo who would eventually surface as the 2nd-rate pseudo-metal (though some would say metal) Blue Oyster Cult. Don the guitarist had a girlfriend named either Cindy of Debby who behind her back everybody called Ah Shit Man (rarely did she go ten words without saying it). A fond mem’ry, the time I went to piss and there she was on the floor, naked, hugging the toilet, trying to vomit—she was on mescaline. She turned her head just enough to recognize me—“Oh, hi,” then “Ah, shit, man, I sure do love Donald.” Three days later, they split. She had a great ass.

It turned out her father was the classical editor for the Sunday N.Y. Times, possibly music editor overall, this guy who’d been there 20 years. She set it up and we met at his office—grey hair, grey tie, immaculate, polite, an upper-middleclass square, a CUBE, who’d probably seen Tosca and Tannhauser 13 times each; I think I was wearing purple bell-bottoms, hair as long as, oh, George Harrison’s. We shook hands, exchanged nothings; yes he knew who Hendrix was. Was anyone scheduled to review Axis? (Back then, before they realized the killing to be made in record ads, newspapers ran the occasional rock review—it wasn’t compulsory.) Nobody was, but he wouldn’t assign it, it would have to be on spec. No kill fee. Whudde I know, I’m 22, a dumbass neophyte, I buy the record, play it a week, never quite get “into” it, but write the fucker anyway, waxing arcane for 300, 400 words which of course they pass on…like shit, man.

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When the cops arrived, the live version of “Means to an End” was spinning on the turntable, which I’d reconnected, and the footprint made for odd little chitters more like wheezes than pops or clicks. Don’t know why I bothered calling them—they were such abusive shits—it wasn’t “cost effective,” they said, to waste their time on so meager a burglary; they bummed me worse that the burgle itself, which I’d walked in on, but less than Kathleen’s betrayal. As I was entering my apartment this wide muther was standing there about to walk out. Dropping my equipment, he swung the door at me and jumped out the window he’d used to break in. There was hardly any new damage to the turntable, which was already pretty shot, but a big athletic shoeprint graced the disc, which had flopped off in the drop.

Joy Division’s Still (Factory FACT 40) was one of the last punktime waxings I actually bought, as opposed to scamming a promo of, which would’ve been tough since I no longer had a radio show, having been tossed for too much on-the-air obscenity (profanity?) (whatever). By the time it came out, Ian Curtis had suicided. The punch line to “Means” — “I put my trust in you”—gravely addressed, one assumes, to she over whom he would shortly hang himself — took on special meaning when my current amour wouldn’t come over, or even exactly talk to me (except to say she was, well, unavailable…preoccupied), while I was waiting for the fucking cops to show.

Which was indeed to be expected. Kathleen and I had barely been speaking since she caught me, or maybe didn’t catch but found out about me fucking so-and-so on the radio station floor, after which we’d split for a couple months, though technically we were again “together.” And this time: break in…break up?

Among items taken: TV, cassette player, car keys, binoculars, trench coat — but no records.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Tea, Hi. I’m not savvy with emulators. I have to ask friends to help me do the simplest computer things. Guess I’ll have to wait for remake and hope. But thank you! There are lots of great new films, and games too, but they’re usually only findable on the outskirts. But I suppose that’s not really new, come to think of it. Ridiculous, for sure, but so charmingly so in the best instances, I guess. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! You’re back! Or back here, at least. Amazing! Try to remember the strangeness of not feeling at home because soon you’ll be walking in your neighborhood automatically and not paying that much attention to its particulars anymore. Anyway, so great! At long last! And you sound kind of sweetly disoriented. I’m good. I’m just editing the film all day every day and almost nothing else. It’s going really well. It’s very exciting. It does seem like ages. That’s nice. Not a bad escort batch this month, I agree. Love with a great laugh and a squirty dick ahahahaha, G. ** alex, Hi, alex. So nice to see you! I’m good, really just almost non-stop editing, and it’s good. SimCity/Sims gifs … just here and there. Yeah, a post of exclusively them sounds nice. I’ll look into the possibilities. I hope the life/work busyness was the feeding type. You sound good. And the weekend is … well, either today or tomorrow depending on how you define it. ** Dee Kilroy, Caffiend, fair enough. You know, it sort seems like you should write a book about Burroughs, no? It seems like an idea that must’ve crossed your mind? The film that Zac Farley and I are currently editing is about a family who turns their home into a haunted house attraction, so that’s the connection. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I hate Djokovic, but hearing he’s vegan does give him a little shine. People should eat whatever they want to eat, I just think for me my having the diet I’ve had since my early teens is in some way key to why I’m still in pretty solid shape. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, RIP Glenda Jackson indeed! What an absolutely incredible actor and seemingly very admirable politician as well. She was great in ‘The Maids’, and no one except you is mentioning that one. I saw live onstage in London decades ago in a Shakespeare play where she got killed by having a sword shoved up her vagina. That was something. I plan to hunt down ‘Cease and Resist’ this weekend when I’ll have a little free time. Thank you, Ben. ** Darbz 👨‍🚀🐕, Big congratulations on the graduation! That’s huge! Doll sewing, nice, I like that. Do it! I assume nature figured out a way for giraffes not to have neck pain when it built them? Thanks for the ‘Frisk’ discovery story. Very cool. The covers of ‘Closer’, ‘Frisk’, and ‘Try’ are by this photographer/artist named Robert Flynt. Goodbye from a Soviet insect who’s crawling inside that spacecraft and doesn’t know that death exists or what it is. ** Steve Erickson, Well, I obviously hope you get all the sleep you need tonight. I had a good therapist back in the mid-90s but she wasn’t affordable. Everyone, Here are your Steve Erickson authored and readable entities for today: His review of the new Killer Mike album, and his June roundup with Janelle Monae and Dream Wife. No, we’re being as meticulous as we can with the second draft and trying to get the film as far along as possible, so I don’t think it’ll be finished until until maybe late next week. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Yeah, nice little batch of wordsmiths this month. I’ll find your email and get back to you today. I did not hear that about Jeremy Davies and Coffeehouse Press. That’s really great news! Wow, cool! ** Nick., Hi. Eyes really are the key. It’s kind of obvious to say, but truth is truth. No, we won’t do a trailer until much later. We’re still figuring out what the film is going to be. Having enough income to write is obviously important but being rich really doesn’t seem like it’s worth compromising your life to get. ‘Cause why not indeed! Cake and eat it too and all of that stuff. I’m really so bereft of interesting anything right now. There’s interesting stuff in the editing but it would take paragraphs to set up why the stuff is interesting. Movie recommendation … I really liked ‘Skinamarink’, but a lot of people hated it, so proceed with caution. ** Okay. I’ve turned the blog’s spotlight onto the work of the pioneering gonzo ultra-lively rock writer/critic Richard Meltzer today. See if it’s something you could like or love or the opposite. See you tomorrow.