Just Capital

Chinese Democracy

"Romeo save me, I've been feeling so alone.
I keep waiting for you but you never come.
Is this in my head? I don't know what to think-
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said...
Marry me Juliet, you'll never have to be alone."

So I'm driving down the street yesterday, minding my own business, and (thanks to my malfunctioning cassette player iPod contraption) this fresh hell from Taylor Swift comes over the airwaves. I've been seeing her rodent face in the rags for a while now, so I decided to see what she was all about. Bad idea.

As a young'un, I definitely fed into the whole prince/princess romantic fantasy. Although, come to think of it, my fantasies were more dank medieval castle, giant fireplace, and luxurious furs than prince/princess...and I don't think "romantic" would really be the way to describe them...anyway.....

This "jam" just feeds the already fatty brains of young women, setting them up for a lifetime of sitting around waiting for a "prince" to come along to save them, complete them, impart meaning. The "Romeo & Juliet" theme is also troublesome, perpetuating that much-advertised lie that a romantic interest who raises the ire of friends and family is somehow even more desirable. Oh Lord, and the marriage talk! Isn't this girl 16 years old or something?

We need to sit the younger generation down and tell them that "Romeo" is just code for a bartender/musician with good hair and mother issues.

Verses

"Shattered Glass"

Britney Spears

Did I wake you?

Were you sleeping?

Were you still in the bed?

Or is a nightmare keeping you up instead?

Oh baby, are you feeling guilty

For what you did?

If you think you're hurtin'

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Was it really worth it?

Was she everything that you were looking for?

Feel like a man?

I hope you know

That you can't come back

'Cause all we had is broken

Like shattered glass.

You're gonna see me in you're dreams tonight.

My face is gonna haunt you all the time.

I promise

That you're gonna want me back

When your world falls apart

Like shattered glass.

Are you having trouble focusing throughout the day?

Do you find yourself still calling my name?

Do you wish you could rewind time

And take it back?

I bet you realize

That she ain't half the woman I am.

Was it really worth it?

Was she everything that you were looking for?

Feel like a man?

I hope you know 

That you can't come back

'Cause all we had is broken

Like shattered glass.

Bathroom Ham Party

Spiritual for Friday Evening

Mahalia Jackson, from the 1959 classic, Imitation of Life

Santa Baby

I want this Audobon print.

Santa Baby

I want this limited edition Gucci pocketbook from the "Tattoo Heart Collection" benefiting UNICEF. These are troubled times, and for the most part I disapprove of such branded foolery, but frankly, its hotness and Christmas spirit is catching. I've been sent into an NBA/NFL-wife costume frenzy.

Put a Ring on It

Snow Cream:

Snow

Milk or Cream

Sugar

Vanilla

Bourbon? 

ALL IS SENTIMENT

The time that Frank Sinatra spent with the swelling violins at Capitol Records was truly fruitful. No One Cares (1959) is among my most favorite albums (and album covers); its unabashed Romanticism, that poses Frank as some kind of White Plains young Werther, is suited-up, but not at all square (as, I'd imagine, the hepsters of the era would have it). The sheer cinema of the sound launches it far into the pop stratosphere, a pre-psychedelic trip, more transportative than any tired old lyric about rabbit holes. Here is the second track, "A Cottage for Sale," listen and enjoy--all is sentiment.

Video Store

Verses

"Wedding Vows"
Heidi Montag

From the moment I met you
I knew I wanted to marry you.
I never knew love isested like this.
You have opened my eyes
and shown me a new world.
Every moment with you is magical and amazing.
You are truly my prince charming
& dream guy.
I love you with all my heart & soul
& promise to be the best wife to you
Every day for the rest of our lives.
I can't wait to see what life brings us.
Donnie & Clide
I will always be by your side...

"Wedding Vows"
Spencer Pratt

Heidi -
From the moment you came into my life
I knew my life would never be the same without you.
You are the light in my life
Like the Sun to the Earth!
Your loving warmth makes me want to be a better person.
Being with you I feel complete.
I'm honored to even be able to call you my wife.
Your the most
Amazing
Loving
and caring thing...woman on this planet.
I will love you forever and always.

(Note: The above is a direct transcription. All typos and misspellings are those of the orignal authors)

Slay Me

Just found out that bad vampyr James (of Twilight fame) is portrayed by the same dude who gave us murderous surfer Volchok on The O.C. season 3. Considering the rate at which things are put out of mind these days, I wonder, are the little Twilightloonies even that familiar with the series?

Style Icon

When Lewis Hine photographed young South Carolinian, Roy Hammett, in 1912, he meant to expose the ills of child labor. I just can't get over the jacket and breezy short-pants (Alpha!!).

Love in this Club

Plaxico Burress is a stone fox (despite the Ying Yang Twin hairdo on his chin) whose mother seems to have named him after some bitchin' 1960s plastics corporation. As he currently faces jail time and the certain end of his career for accidentally shooting himself in the leg with an illegal handgun up at the clurrrb, methinks he needs some love from our clurrrb.

Plaxico, baby, remember, illegal firearms are for crooks and cowards; you should have put a ring on it (and by that I mean, had your gat registered). xo

Kindred Spirit: Endymion, Early Sloth

The Sleep of Endymion, 1791

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson

Irrational Exuberance

Thomas Cole
The Course of the Empire: Consummation of the Empire
1836

I sort of doubt that the foreign-born but Jingoistic Cole realized, as a bright young painter in a bright young democracy (as yet, unaware of its own limitations and mounting crimes), that by revisiting Rome at its gauchest, he painted an American future of festooned numbing, gilded pleasure barges and fat (now gained and lost, gained and lost, oft repeated). Perhaps he imagined the English as he worked, or perhaps only the remote Ancients of the picture plane.

click image to enlarge.

Wear Your Black Hats

A week after the criminal siege on Mumbai, it is still difficult to grasp how events unfurled. Here, the L.A. Times gives a sick-making, informative account of the slaughter at Chabad House.

She Works in Deutsche Radio

August Sander
Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne
1931
















I am not used to seeing such glamorous, indefinite characters among Sander's sitters. This picture drove me to verify my suspicions about the word secretary--

(sĕk'rĭ-tĕr'ē)
1387, "person entrusted with secrets," from M.L. secretarius "clerk, notary, confidential officer, confidant," from L. secretum "a secret" (see secret). Meaning "person who keeps records, write letters, etc.," originally for a king, first recorded c.1400. As title of ministers presiding over executive departments of state, it is from 1599. The word is used in both Fr. and Eng. to also mean "a private desk," sometimes in Fr. form secretaire (1818).

Verses

Excerpts from--

Runnin' Away: Behind the scenes at the Sly Stone show

By Gabe Meline - Oct. 22, 2008 - North Bay Bohemian

The insane circumstances surrounding Sly Stone’s appearance in Santa Rosa were told to me by several people.

Sly Stone is in Los Angeles. He fires his business manager. Sly tells the promoter that he’s his own boss now, that he’s the one who’s going to get paid at the show and that he needs $3,000 wired to the bank account of an Iranian BMW saleswoman before he’ll even get on the plane to San Francisco.

The plane was supposed to arrive from Los Angeles at 11:30am.

The limo waits at the airport. Sly’s next flight becomes 1:30pm, then 2:30pm, 3:30pm and 5:30pm.

The promoter drives to the airport in the slim hope that Sly might walk through one of the gates.

Finally, at 7:30pm, with his young Japanese girlfriend in tow, the 65-year-old Sly shows up at the airport. He’s an hour and a half away from the show—which starts in a half hour—and he demands to go to the hotel. The young girlfriend finally talks him out of it, and he agrees to go straight there, but he’s still talking about getting paid.

He sleeps all the way to Santa Rosa.

Sly doesn’t hit the stage at the Wells Fargo Center until 10:30pm, during the fifth song of the set. He walks off the stage 25 minutes later, in the middle of “I Wanna Take You Higher,” telling the crowd, “I gotta go take a piss. I’ll be right back.”

But Sly never comes back. The band continues on without him, killing time for 30 minutes. During the last song, a man appears on the stage, whispering into band members’ ears.

Meanwhile, backstage, Sly is demanding to be paid.

Sly is out in the parking lot, still in his white suit, trying to get into the promoter’s car. All the doors are plainly locked, but he keeps trying. Finally, a woman drives by, picks him and his Japanese girlfriend up, and they whiz away. Word of his departure gets inside.

Sly’s making a getaway? Sly’s driving off right now? You’d better chase after him if you want to get paid?

The band members pile in their cars and find Sly precisely where they thought he’d be: the Fountaingrove Hilton. He’s not in his room. All the rooms are reserved under the business manager’s name, whom Sly fired that morning.

“Get me out of here,” he’s heard telling his driver, and they peel out.

It is not an uncommon sight to see cars racing down Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa on a Friday night.

The lead car giving chase contains a funk music legend, pursued by five more cars driven by band members, some of whom have played with him for 40 years. Six cars race down the street, weaving in and out of lanes.The young Japanese girl cries hysterically in the car.

Folk Art for 10:18 A.M.

Nowadays, the kids have Twilight, but, for better or worse, in 1999, we kids had Varsity Blues.

Fire Drill!

Cell Phone Numbers Go Public today.

REMINDER.... all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies tomorrow and you will start to receive sale calls.

.... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS.

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS. It takes about 20 seconds.

I'm OK? You're OK?

It's funny and on-point, but this is meant to get through to people who aren't necessarily gay/fag-hag stoners who love Jack Black and NPH . . . right???

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Love in This Club

Chinese Democracy

Folk Art for Midnight

Santa Baby

I want Catherine the Great's sleigh.

habitual linesteppers who habitually linestep

Enquirer—

back in 2006, you published beautiful photographs of Whitney's crack-den, rife with self-help books and Newport 100's and tabloids and beer cans fashioned into pipes, and for that, I am forever grateful. However, I do not endorse your dragging The Mr. and Mrs. Kelly Ripas through the fictioned muck. Some things are sacred.

Child at the Dump

Our beloved (silent) partner in blog, Petrova, hails from Staten (Drama) Island. Long ago, when we were first friends and roommates, I would beg her to regale me with tales of the Motherland, tales of car bombings and rotating marble observatories and men at the medi-spa. Perhaps the most poignant, were her descriptions of the dump at Fresh Kills (what a name for a neighborhood!) and the peculiar psychosis of the borough assigned the unsavory task of receiving and processing our fair city's waste. The story arc was fascinating--young families escape the turmoil and otherness (diversity) of Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx in search of suburban sameness, something a bit more in step with the rest of the country, yonder over the Verrazano; instead, they build a colony of Guido strangeness, a true New York stepchild to which all dust and rot is exiled, a bitter grave for the remains of the Twin Towers. The dump (and all of the failings and seeming punishments it signified) became fodder for nueroses among Staten's settlers. Sometimes, fed-up and a tinge manic, Petrova would throw our detritus out of the window and into the quad, anything to get the garbage out of sight and mind.

When I first played "There But for the Grace of God (Go I)," the socially conscious, narrative disco song produced by August Darnell (of the incomparable Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band), she was thrilled. It is esentially the story of the Island presented in its favored medium, the club anthem, top full of the dynamic intermingling of tragedy and synthesizer. Fresh Kills may be in the midst of a spectacular transformation, a return to Staten's state of nature, a haven for Unami Indians and Transcendentalism, but within the six minutes of a song, we can still recall the kamp and struggle of the last quarter century:

Song for You

You know that asshole who you hate wholly, but who also, sometimes, makes you cry hysterically with wishing he were still flailing around in bed next to you?

Santa Baby

I want this English tudor (imported to the Hudson River Valley).

Dare We Say It?

Don't Play with My Heart

Despite the recent release of his much anticipated record, Chinese Democracy, Axl Rose is MIA. With his record label and his bandmates having seen neither hide nor hair of him in the last two months, something smells a little rotten. But perhaps we confuse rotten with oh-so-sweet, as Hollywood Rag reports that Mr. Rose may be otherwise occupied with a slew of clandestine meetings taking place in order to set into motion a reunion of the original G n' R lineup.

Satin Dolls: Maybe it's the Philadelphia sunshine, but methinks this man is made of gold.

Let's Get Over Ourselves Already, OK Jezebel?

The ladies over at Jezebel are having a shitfit about Maureen Dowd's profile of Tina Fey in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Intern Margaret laments:

"So much of the lengthy profile is devoted to marveling at the weight loss and makeover that transformed the 'very mousy' Fey into everyone's favorite 'brainy glamour-puss' that we almost wish Fey would revert to her 'quite round' physique and dig out the thrift-store sweaters that she used to sport."

Staffers and commenters continue to whine about how Fey couldn't make it on her humor and intelligence alone, and, in order to be in front of the camera, "had" to drop a few, grow out her early-nineties smart-girl hair, and get some better clothes. I'm going to be controversial here for a second: I'm getting a sense of, "No! Pretty girls can't be smart and funny TOO! That's reserved for us festively plump plain janes! Waahhhhhh!!" coming from the Jezzie section.

Edwardian Windbags

This here vintage review (from the Atlantic in 1903) of Alcott's seminal volumes, Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, is the most despicable swill I've ever read. Let me know if you can even figure out what the pompous baboon is saying; I haven't the foggiest (outside of a notion that it's overwritten and misinformed as hell).

Video Store

I'm OK? You're OK? (Let's cast some doubt on our romance con los nineties.)

Rolf's French-Bavarian Brasserie

A bit more from my Tuesday Gawker browse:

"The Waverly Inn was crawling with Condé Nast insiders earlier tonight, some of whom had been waiting as long as 20 years for the appetizer: The hot, delicious rumor that Si Newhouse was meeting in Paris with Carine Roitfeld to work out the final details of the French Vogue editor's move to New York, where she is expected to take over flagship Vogue from Anna Wintour immediately after New Year's. It did not go unnoticed when Condé Nast overlord Newhouse departed early for his annual three-week December vacation in Vienna; it turns out he needed time for his meeting with uptight Wintour's chic Parisian counterpart."

I'm pretty non-plussed about the whole tiresome/vile speculation about "good ole' pater" Si replacing a powerful woman with another younger and (gasp!) Gaulish powerful woman. It makes these accomplished persons sound like bitchy pawns, not to mention, thinly veiled caricatures from a certain piece of chick-lit disaster turned criminally watchable cinema. But also--Si Newhouse spends three weeks of the year in Vienna?!!

Ho-mez Did It Again

Srsly, this Richard Lawson character over at the Gawker is our very own T.V.-addled, aughtsy Wodehouse. This is the second time I've posted a link to his weekly Gossip Girl recap, a series of essays so fine that they hardly require a fondness for the show itself. Enjoi.

Verses

Good! (fragment Ch. 14)
Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1927

Over those
whom sleep eternal claimed
that lean,
harsh winter
spread
a pall.
What are words!
Words
are lame!
On the Volga shores
I refuse
to dwell.
Of a string of days
I choose
to speak,
akin
to a thousand others,
bleak,
pushed on
by the years,
oarsmen eager,
not over-fat
nor
over-meagre.
If ever
something of worth
I wrote
it was all
the fault
of a pair
of eyes-
bottomless skies,
my beloved's eyes.
Huge they are,
round,
dark brown,
with a speck
of hazel,
coal-hot,
blazing.
The phone's gone
stark-raving mad,
an axe's
blunt edge
striking the ear:
wham!
Round the huge brown eyes -
pads:
hunger's
to blame.
Doctor's orders:
for the eyes
to be able
to eye
the world,

heat the place,
put greens
on the table.
By their curly green tails -
behold!-
I'm holding
two carrots
crunchy.
They're not
for my stew:
I'm taking them to
my sweetheart,
for her
to munch.
Boxes of sweets
and flowers
freely
I handed out,
but
I recall
that those carrots
plus firewood
(half a billet)
were
the most precious
gift
of all.
Thrust under my arm
are
damp pieces of wood:
knobby sticks,
eyebrow-thick.
Face puffy,
eyes-splits:
it's
malnutrition.
Greens and care -
eyes clear.
Bigger than saucers,
they eye
the Revolution.
Easier for me
than for most
(it's no boast!)
Because I'm
Mayakovsky.

I sit and chew
a fresh
piece of horse flesh.
The door whines.
My kid sister.
"Hullo!"
"Hullo!"
"Volodya, listen,
it's New Year's tomorrow.
Got some salt
I could borrow?"
"A pinch,
Wet too.
Here,
let's divide it in two."
Wading through snow,
fighting fear,
with an
"Oh, dear,
how'll I keep on my feet!"
Olga stumbles along
the icy,
three-mile long
Presnya Street.
Home
to salt her potatoes
she hastens.
Frost
walks
beside her,
grows fierce,
inches
closer,
tickles
and pinches.
"Gimme it!
Isn't that salt
you're hiding?"
Home at last,
and didn't lose it.
But how use it?
To her fingers
it's frozen fast.
Behind the wall
shuffling feet.
"Here, wife,
we gotta eat.
Trade my coat
for millet,
will ye?"
Look through the pane-
it's snowing again.
The snow falls,
covering all.
Soft its step,
yes,
and light.
Moscow's
a cliff,
bare
and white.
Snow lies
in banks
and drifts.
Of forests
the skeleton clings
to the cliff.
Daybreak.
Into the sky's thick shawl
the sun,
a louse,
crawls.
December's late dawn,
worn out,
shivery,
hangs
over Moscow
like typhus fever.
Storm clouds vagrant
to fat lands migrate.
Wrapped in haze,
its chest sticking out,
America lies.
What is it doing? -
Lapping up
coffee
and cocoa
by the cup.
Into your face,
thick as the snout
of a good-sized pig,
than a round tray rounder,
from this hungering land of ours
I shout:
My love
for my land
is boundless!

You can forget
when
and where
you stuffed
your craw
and your belly,
but
the land
you hungered with
you can never
as long as you live and breathe
forget!

Bless This Day

On this day, 27 years ago, the world became a little bit brighter. Happy birthday Britney Jean, I hope it's a good one. One love.

Tengo Una Pregunta—

When did white teeth happen?

Founding Fathers

Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau—now, I don't wear her clothes, but I've always had a soft spot for Palm Beach (I like its seedy, crack-rocked underbelly and its embroidered velvet slippers) and I love her distinctly American breed of dotty gentry eccentricity.

Woop Woop!

Monsoon Season

Here's a tragic little ditty from the Weekly Telegraph, outlining the demise of the surprisingly non-recession-proof local pub. As our dear friend Marsh Gibson quipped, "What's next?! Lloyd's?"

Song for Monday Afternoon

The implications of this video set are tremendous!

Love in this Club

Champion boxer, violent dreamboat, Wladimir Klitschko.

Santa Baby

I want a coonhound.

Santa Baby

I want a recording studio.

Founding Fathers

Shelly Sprague: Breakout star of "Celebrity Rehab", replacement addiction inspiration, recovering junkette, all around angel.

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It's coming...

I'm really excited/anxious about the A&P staff each giving their own personal review of Her Majesty's new album come Tuesday/Wednesday this week (oh yeah, Able, by the way... !!!). But for now, this little sneak peak has been blowing my discreetly gay mind. God willing, the video will be released soon...