1) So, I'm assuming Britney has a new album out. I don't know what it is called or anything about it; I only have a velleity to look it up. Even in writing this blog, I'm not going to do it. But I know a Gaysian that played me a song of hers I had never heard before (though for all intents and purposes, I have) and I'm pretty sure I might've read a headline or a song title somewhere on AOL.com or something. Anyway. He played me that song and it was a piece of crap. Like most of the music she's come out with lately. I use 'lately' loosely--I lost track somewhere around 'Circus' and that song about threesomes. Was that like a year ago or something? 6 months? 2 years? All okay songs, but nothing I know the verses to or, God forbid, would pay $1.29 for to appease the RIAA. Her music has stagnated. They all run together. But her image has not. This is my point. How fucking awesome and appropriate would it be if she released something more akin to...I don't know, Alanis Morissette...Fiona Apple...Florence Welch...or even Liz Phair circa the 90s before she got all that nasty plastic surgery and was still singing about penis. YOU KNOW? She's been through all this fucking crap (which I was able to minutely enjoy in 'Piece of Me', but that still fit the confines of the playlist at S(c)ummit), she's obviously pissed off about it, she has so much fucking material to work with and she's not doing it. If she were to release an album with some anger, with some 'fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me', without the autotune, with some harmony, with some rock roots, with an indie touch, with some mother-of-God violin, JESUS. Not only would it be the end of the world, but I, and I like to think many others, would wear our Britney flags proudly. Her demographic isn't the same anymore. If she stopped singing, "1-2-3, Peter, Paul and Mary, gettin' down with 3 P", and started singing, "boy, I kinda dig threesomes / Never thought I could write that / Chicks can be talented / for both sides I'll bat" or, "K-Fed wasn't that good in bed / I was drunk when I got pregnant / and my kids want him dead," or something (...I never claimed to be that one guy that writes all the pop music ever), the 12-year-olds might not like it, but the girls who were alive when Baby! One More Time came out would throw open their closets and break out their Britney keychains once again. Such potential for irony. Such potential for so many dichotomous feelings the end result would just have to be passionate. THERE IS STILL TIME, BRITNEY. You can still make your first concept album! I'm not asking you to release something solely on vinyl. I'm not asking you to get caught naked rolling joints and grilling hamburgers with Charlie Sheen. I'm not asking you to fake it till you make it. I'm asking you to stop pretending you get down in da club and to start writing songs about this one curious stretch mark of yours on your right thigh from your second, almost-terminated pregnancy. Something real! Go the JT route. Or maybe you just can't write your own music. That's fair, I suppose. I'll leave you alone, then. You'll hear from me again when you sell the rights to 'It's Britney, Bitch!: the New Musical'.
2) So, I left the sugar on the counter. There were a whole lot of ants in there in the morning. Ruined the sugar. I always think about how people are ants (and no other animal). We all want to go for the sugar. But if we do, we end up in the trash. If we wouldn't've gone for the sugar, our lives would've been longer and arguably more fulfilled. But we're fucking greedy. We want that sugar and we want that sugar now. Everyone else is doing it. What's wrong with the flour? Was the sugar worth it? Did we even think about the consequences of going for the sugar? Does it matter? Why didn't some of the ants go for the sugar? Were they too stupid? Were their noses operating on sub-par olfactory systems? Did they just not give a fuck? Do they not like sugar?
And now, another:
"Sipping a highball after dinner, hearing the rushing of water in the electric dishwasher in the kitchen, I brought up a question that had puzzled me. These were good, thoughtful, intelligent people. I said, "One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots, growing up rooted in some soil or some community." How did they feel about raising their children without roots? Was it good or bad? Would they miss it or not?
The father, a good-looking, fair-skinned man with dark eyes, answered me. "How many people today have what you are talking about? What roots are there in an apartment twelve floors up? What roots are in a housing development of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings almost exactly alike? My father came from Italy," he said. "He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That's roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings. They had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom where everybody slept, grandpa, father and all the kids, no place to read, no place to be alone, and never had had. Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice he'd cut his roots and live like this." He waved his hands at the comfortable room. "Fact is, he cut his roots away and came to America. Then he lived in a tenement in New York--just one room, walk-up, cold water and no heat. That's where I was born and I lived in the streets as a kid until my old man got a job upstate in New York in the grape country. You see, he knew about vines, that's about all he knew. Now you take my wife. She's Irish descent. Her people had roots too.""In a peat bog," the wife said. "And lived on potatoes." She gazed fondly through the door at her fine kitchen."Don't you miss some kind of permanence?""Who's got permanence? Factory closes down, you move on. Good times and things opening up, you move on where it's better. You got roots you sit and starve. You take the pioneers in the history books. They were movers. Take up land, sell it, move on. I read in a book how Lincoln's family came to Illinois on a raft. They had some barrels of whisky for a bank account. How many kids in America stay in the place where they were born, if they can get out?"
-- Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
