Everything Dies, Baby, That's a Fact Thursday, May 27, 2004

Late-model Sinatra before bed--"She Shot Me Down," which is apparently his last good record before he went where the goblins go. (Name the song this comes from and win my first-born child!) Spent the day cutting twenty inches from a story, read a lot of Kingsley Amis on the way home, got home blind tired and made fun of cooking shows for half an hour with Mrs. WTJ. There's no way to present a peach festival that isn't risible.

Enough already. Frankie sounds like a lifetime of midnights, and I'm fading fast. Tomorrow: Trying to make forty minutes' worth of tweaks last eight hours. Suggestions welcome.

(Oh, I know what I meant to say: I've gotten some good-natured flak for knocking Jimmy Webb. I think his good stuff is very good indeed--in the existential gospel record I keep putting together in my head, the song for Dismas and Gestas is "Wichita Lineman." But to me most of his stuff is just lazy and undifferentiated, or the worst kind of bourgeois hippie bombast, e.g. "MacArthur Park." I wouldn't care if he weren't held up by critics and record-store clerks as an icon of something or other...undiscovered genius? Craftsman? I dunno. I got peer-pressured into Burt Bacharach and Lee Hazlewood that way, and it still bugs me. Box sets are expensive!)

G'nite for real.

@ 10:37:00 PM, ,

The Milk Truck Hauls the Sun Up Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Descending further into faux fatherhood. I'm into the 300s on Dr. Spock's list of talking points, most of which advise me to ignore received wisdom and be sensible. I don't think Dr. Spock knows who he's dealing with. But things are good. Mrs. WTJ is serene and I think I'm slowly becoming a human being again, after a yearlong absence from the planet. As Gore Vidal said of J.D. Salinger: "It is very cold where he lives..."

Stray thought: Listened to a friend's copy of Randy Newman's "Faust" the other night. I have a few of Newman's records but on the whole am not blown away. "Faust" helped me nail down what I dislike about him, and his spiritual successors, such as Graham Parker and Joe Jackson. We all know the world can be a terrible place; we all know that bad things happen to good people; but Newman et al want to be congratulated for pointing that stuff out. It's easy to be mordant and wittily sarcastic if you stop the discussion at that point; but a much more interesting argument lies just beyond it, as does real wisdom.

Philip K. Dick, who I haven't mentioned in an unsconsionably long time, had a great example of this in his autobiographical novel "Valis." Kevin, a friend of the narrator(s), refuses to believe in God because his (Kevin's) cat got smashed by a truck. What did the cat do wrong? Why did it have to die? He goes on with this village-atheist argument until someone gets exasperated and says (I paraphrase): "You know why your cat died? Because it was too fucking stupid to know better than to run into the street."

That, I think, is the proper response to Newman, Parker, Jackson and all the rest of them. Yup, people cheat, murder and hypocritize. You nailed that. So when are you gonna stop pouting and come on up to the grown-up table already?

@ 3:16:00 PM, ,