Despite the mutual hostility, Mr. Lydon was intrigued. “Her nose went 10 feet in the air in her ’40s film star outfit,” he said in the same Sunday Mail interview. “Long blond hair, padded shoulders — that entire femme fatale look, which I was a complete ham for.”
Eventually she softened. “I fell in love with John because he surprised me,” she said. “He had a sweet attitude. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group.”...
“One day he came up and asked why I had never invited him to my house,” she later said of Mr. Lydon. “I replied, ‘People told me you would destroy everything.’”
"His name was Malcolm McLaren: self-declared genius and godfather of punk.
So began one of Britain's great creative partnerships... His mother was a sex worker and he had been brought up by his eccentric grandmother, who lived by the motto 'to be bad is to be good and to be good is just boring.'... He took six days to visit her in hospital after the birth of their son, refused to be called 'Dad' and threatened to cart the child to Barnardo's when asked to pitch in. Westwood retreated to a caravan in Wales; hunting for wild vegetables while he ran riot in London and married another art student.
But attraction overcame everything.... Westwood rekindled the partnership, blossomed artistically and simply
ignored the abuse."
"Then came the Sex Pistols, snarling at the 1970s. McLaren embraced them
as an angry pot-shot at the hippy movement he hated. Westwood opened a
shop on the King's Road, conjuring the look the Pistols made famous. A
bewildered world gasped and named it Punk.
She called the shop, 'Let It Rock', then changed the name to 'Too Fast
To Live, Too Young To Die.' Finally, it was re-branded simply as 'SEX' -
the huge pink sign above the door meant only the brave went in...."
Lots more at the link, and the BBC has a nice photo collection here.
"... was surely meant to be barbecued chicken wings. Not (entirely) displeased with my catch, he introduced me to his production editor — the person in a publishing house in charge of hiring copy editors and proofreaders.... In my early days, I would sulk in my office with the door closed if I found out that one of my books included a typo. A sentence referring to 'geneology' once sent me into a blue funk for hours.... I’m occasionally asked whether I can make my way through the world without shivering under the constant bombardment of typos.... [O]nce, watching the movie 'My Week With Marilyn,' I elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs over a prescription bottle, visible on a night table for approximately a second and a half, whose label read 'Tunial' instead of 'Tuinal.'
'I think it must hurt sometimes to live in your brain,' my husband has said on occasion, not unkindly. But, as he also notes, in a kind of nursery rhyme mantra, 'Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.'"
I don't want to send Dreyer into a blue funk, but if I were writing an essay that had the line "passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs," I would not also have "elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs." It's a repetition of a distinctive image — ribs — for no recognizable reason. That's a language mistake. Make it your husband's arm. You're in a movie theater. It was more likely his arm that you elbowed anyway, wasn't it? You just liked "ribs," but your feeling of liking it came, I'll bet, from having seen it so recently.
And here's the Wikipedia entry for Tuinal, a Eli Lilly sleeping pill introduced in the late 1940s and now discontinued:
"... and the few that did had to have face masks on. It was very bad. But she’s absolutely fine at the moment. My family is with her now; we’ve got a nice little unity going. The whole thing is to never let her feel lonely."
"If you allow this to happen you are allowing people to alter and rewrite your history, thus making your real history a lie by the contradiction supporting that and accepting money for that, that's something I could never be a party to. I cannot compromise in selling my integrity. I know what's what and far too often it's the examples in the press and the media of history being rewritten that causes real damage to the truth.... The show's original offer was, well, it was a misuse of us completely."
"... and I’ll notice halfway through that she’s winking at me. Moments like that are so genius and rewarding because something in her has clicked and she’ll be teasing me like she’s always done when I’m being a bit saucy!"
Doctors, he says, insisted on medicating her, ‘and I really got fed up with the advice they were giving. A lot of them were suggesting narcotics of some kind to subdue her, but why would I want to do that? When someone’s coming towards their last few years, to then deny them the freedom and fun of running, jumping, being in the sun, chatting — why would I take that all away and have her be a comatose victim? It would be easier for myself but not for her, and that’s where my first concern lies.’
A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous....
"Where do I stand on Brexit? Well, here it goes: the working class have spoke, and I’m one of them, and I’m with them,” he said.
But he also talked about Trump. He's "a complicated fellow." And:
“As one journalist once said to me, is he the political Sex Pistol? In a way. What I dislike is the left wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist, and that’s completely not true. There are many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not that, and there just might be a chance something good will come out of this situation because it terrifies politicians. This is a joy to behold for me.”
When host Piers Morgan described Mr. Trump as “the archetypal anti-establishment figure”, Mr. Lydon said: “Dare I say, a possible friend.”
I like the way this story looked on Drudge:
Drudge arranged that great face along with other faces, including Trump's, diagonally and youngly:
A clickbait title good enough to get me — a staunch clickbait resister — to click through to The Atlantic, and I'm going to encourage you to click through because the illustration — by Diego Patiño — is really good.
The article is by James Parker, who regularly writes about music, so the Sex Pistols talk is more than just shallow goofiness. Parker begins by talking about the impression Stravinsky’s "Sacre du Printemps" made in Paris in 1913, then shifts to 1976, when The Sex Pistols went on British daytime TV live:
The beery drawl of Pistols guitarist Steve Jones filters louchely from the TV set: “You dirty fucker,” he says to the host, Bill Grundy. Then he reconsiders: “What a fucking rotter.”...
Wait. You don't need to rely on Parker's literary stylings — louchely, whatever — to visualize the occasion. It's on YouTube:
But what's Parker's point here? Is Donald Trump like The Sex Pistols because he goes on TV and talks to his interviewers in a way they're not used to and that busts up their game? Well, sort of. Parker says he's that and simultaneously the guy watching at home getting pissed off at the Pistols, because he's using a "transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque" style with respect to conservative things like "chaos in our communities" and "barbarians at the border."
It’s as if the Sex Pistols were singing about law and order instead of anarchy, as if their chart-busting (banned) single, “God Save the Queen,” were not a foamingly sarcastic diatribe but a sincere pledge of fealty to the monarch. Electrifying!
An amusing paradox, but Parker fails to acknowledge that it's a paradox made possible by the stodgy, humorless repression of the liberal side of American political culture. Parker continues with his good if purplish descriptions: Trump has a "big marmalade face and that dainty mobster thing he does with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand." Mobster? Or was that supposed to be "lobster"? Who knows? I know what he means about that hand gesture. (And did you know that Trump said his hand gestures count as a form of exercise?)
Parker says (among many other things): "Trump’s speaking style is from the future, from a time to come when human consciousness has broken down into little floating atavistic splinters of subjectivity and superstition and jokes that aren’t really jokes." Of course, Parker loathes Trump, but that reminded me of something I said about Trump as an exemplar of a new way of speaking:
I'm seeing something more positive about the speaking style of the future (and not just because I do cruel neutrality but because I think I'm speaking in the style of the future too).
"The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government."
Said Vivienne Westwood... who also says, about the First Lady, "It’s dreadful what she wears." Why does she say that? It's not terribly clear. Westwood seems very cranky (still channeling The Sex Pistols?). But it seems Ms. Obama is making the mistake of choosing clothes that make her "look more conservative." Clothes are supposed to make you "more glamorous." Back around 1970, you could put on "a pair of tight leopard-printed velvet trousers" and it would be amazing and rebellious, but that's not something that can happen anymore.
"It's coming! Get ready! All you fucking tea-party-baggers. It's coming. Get ready."
Meade visits the Wisconsin Capitol singalong — "Which side are you on?" — last Friday, August 26th.
R.A.A.N. = Red & Anarchist Action Network. I'll let you Google that yourself. It seems to be connected with a record label, and I can't help viewing this as mostly about promoting music. It's a tired old musical message at this point in punk history. But who knows? Maybe these people are coming to get us.
Piper in that shot looks like Grace, the elder daughter played by Ruby Jerins in Nurse Jackie....
My "sources" tell me is that a future stop on Palin's bus tour will at Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, Texas, the site of the Sex Pistols' infamous gig in 1978. Todd Palin intends to stand on the very spot where Sid Vicious staggered. I had no idea Todd was so "into" punk history, and wish I could be there when he explains to Piper what Sid and Johnny Rotten meant to America, and from there they'll all be heading to the Alamo to find the basement where Pee Wee Herman's bike is reputed to be.
I don't know what I was doing on April 7th that I missed this important story about John McCain:
The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop....
Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.
Oh, what do I care what pet names a husband and wife have for each other? Trollop... cunt... sounds a little British to me. Isn't that what the Sex Pistols called each other... trollop?
At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop... that suggests that McCain takes the "natural look" approach to applying his makeup.
But I got caught up on cuntgate when I saw this news story in the Des Moines Register today:
A Clive man drew gasps from fellow audience members at today’s presidential candidate forum by using a four-letter word in a question to Sen. John McCain.
A "Clive man" seems to be some sort of hominid.
[MARTY] PARRISH: This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I’ve been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a (expletive)?
MCCAIN: Now, now. You don’t want to … Um, you know that’s the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don’t, there’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language. So I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.
People here who don’t respect that kind of language....? Those people better learn to show some respect.
Turns out the guy is a Baptist minister, just trying to get a straight answer about whether McCain is too much of a hothead to be a good President. McCain didn't get pissed at him, so didn't he get an answer?
“Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and narcissistic and grandiose,” said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon. “But it’s not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did.”...
Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on the desire to forget, not to remember. “Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”
But he added that nostalgia could also have a “progressive aspect” that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to “remember that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn’t determine value, where competition wasn’t the nature of human relations.
“That imagination can be powerful,” he continued. “The dream is real. The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don’t want to do anything about it. That’s just narcissistic. That’s longing to feel important again. Baby boomers are very good at that.”
ADDED: I was a high school kid during the Summer of Love, and I was deeply affected by the hippie zeitgeist. But I never liked the people who wanted to appropriate the creativity and energy for political purposes, and I'm irked even now by those who say that the political activism was the good part and everything else was childish or narcissistic. I think what I thought then: They have no feeling for art and philosophy. The hippie thing was: Tune in, turn on, drop out. "Drop out" meant, among other things, leaving politics to the squares. Have you ever taken LSD? Did you think about politics at all when you were there? No, the political types like the Yippies were appropriating what they didn't create every bit as much as the advertising agency that made a Windex commercial out of "Let the Sun Shine In."
Oskar Eustis is 48. That means he was 8 years old in the Summer of Love. He's not talking about feeling what it was like first hand. I think Amba was saying a while back that what really imprints on you is what was happening when you were 17. That puts Eustis in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, Jimmy Carter, Patty Hearst, "The Gong Show," the Son of Sam, and the unification of North and South Vietnam into a communist country. For music, well, there was "Frampton Comes Alive," all that disco, KISS, and maybe you noticed the Sex Pistols. I can see how, stuck with that, you would look back on the previous decade as a source for ideas that fit you political preferences. But that wouldn't be nostalgic, would it? Because it's progressive, and progressive means looking forward.
Says John Lydon, expressing his hatred for the Sex Pistols fans who threw bottles at him: "If you're gonna pay money to go and blind someone you're the sort of person who needs to be put away for life."
He's saying why he will not tour, and that's just one of the reasons. The other is that he suffers terribly from stage fright:
"I miss the Pistols. I miss the lot of you, but when I came home from the last tour I couldn't get adjusted.
"I felt really out of place it took me a long time to get back to a real way of life.
"On tour, it was 12 hours of panic for an hour-and-a-half gig. I'm vomiting all day long with fear, stagefright, whatever it is."
"A real way of life" -- interesting. Don't the fans going to the shows feel that the band inspires a hatred of their own "real way of life" and offers some sort of hope of a way out?
The Sex Pistols decline to show up for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Frame. "Were (sic) not your monkey and so what?" Entirely fitting. And shouldn't The Sex Pistols be entirely fitting?
The first of these [episodes of "The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder: Punk & New Wave,"], a roundtable discussion whose participants include an 18-year-old Paul Weller and a baby-faced Joan Jett, does not bode well - Mr.Snyder is noticeably dismissive of the emerging new-wave scene and condescending to his young guests. Yet for reasons known only to Old Tom himself, he continues to invite the punks back to "Tomorrow," to provide them with a venue to perform music he clearly doesn't grasp, and to interview such emerging artists as Elvis Costello and Patti Smith no differently than if they were James A. Michener or Frank Capra. In his questioning, Mr. Snyder can come across as out-of-touch ("Is that a part of this punk thing, people hitting each other?"), overly intellectual ("How do you make certain that you don't become a member of what you now call the establishment?"), or superficial (to Iggy Pop: "Why are you bleeding?"), but he is never fawning or self-conscious, and his curiosity is sincere....
On his June 25, 1980, broadcast, Mr. Snyder spends half his program attempting to converse with the former Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, who was then fronting the band Public Image Limited under his given name, John Lydon. Four years earlier, Mr. Lydon had helped to bring down the British television presenter Bill Grundy with an especially raucous interview, and he seems to be spoiling for a rematch with Snyder: "Come on, prompt," the characteristically crabby singer goads his American host. "Do your business. Humor us."
But Mr. Snyder is either too professional to be flustered, or too naïve to know he's being insulted, because he keeps jabbing back at Mr. Lydon with simple, honest questions-"Is it a band? Is it a public relations firm?" "Let me try this: What do you like?" - before landing this unexpected uppercut on the ex-Pistol's chin: "It's unfortunate that we are all out of step except for you."
There's a clip of the Snyder/Lydon interview at the link. Quite hilarious. There is something about Snyder's face. I love the reaction shot of him at the end of the clip.
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