It’s Getting Sadder All the Time
It was the dawn of a new age - filled with long hair, bell-bottoms, tie dye T-shirts, new music, and new attitudes.
Hello Folks!
Shadows are falling. The darkness encroaches. Do you feel the chest-tightening dread of Winter lurking? Isn't it just awful? Oh well! Welcome to the latest edition of the newsletter I sometimes write called Please Take My Advice!!
*DISCLAIMER*
Please Take My Advice is not drunk on its own power. Stop saying that. Please Take My Advice is sober as a judge. The patented "winning formula" of Please Take My Advice does not guarantee victory. The formula is foolproof, but there are variables that even I cannot control. We are rocketing through the firmament cold and alone, assured of only one thing: grim death. That is not the fault of Please Take My Advice. Lodge any and all complaints, existential or otherwise, to Bar/None Records in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Finally! Done with the damned legalese. Now that we’ve satiated the bloodless bureaucrats, let's jump into the arena. We’ve got a stacked agenda.
Jesus, Beth, it’s been like six weeks since the last edition of Please Take My Advice! What in the world have you been doing??
Great question. I appreciate you asking, though I think the tone is a touch abrasive. Look, it’s been busy! Earlier this month, my band the Paranoid Style had the extraordinary privilege of playing the 1000th episode of NPR’s Mountain Stage. What a staggering experience. West Virginia is as beautiful and welcoming a place as I can conceivably imagine, and the collected talent on the bill was thrilling and daunting. Did I get to stand alongside the legendary Cindy Cashdollar while participating in a group finale singalong of a Bill Withers tune? Did I get to listen to Larry Groce tell me behind-the-scenes stories about Loudon Wainwright, III? Did I?? You’ll see when the footage comes out (though not the backstage part with Larry Groce.) The point is, it was an unbelievable honor and one of the great thrills in my life in music.
Wow! I had forgotten you were doing that. Congratulations.
I appreciate that. And thanks to my AMAZING band: William Corrin, Jon Langmead, Timothy Bracy and the Morgantown legend William Matheny most of all. He was the engine that made this whole experience go.
Very cool. So, you still in the journalism racket?
Yeah, I’m still in the game. I had a lot of fun writing this essay for the New York Times magazine about Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Albert Pujols, Johnny Unitas, Willie Mays and the strange admiration I feel for athletes who stick around a little longer than they should.
“For the aging athlete to continue grinding away, even as their physical prowess begins to fail them, is in some ways a noble act of self-effacement, an abandonment of personal vanity, a repayment of the karmic debt of their natural abilities. We as a society currently stand at the intersection of modern medicine, baby-boomer vivacity and magical thinking, indulging in adult-adolescent fantasies of eternal youth, waving away the menacing creep of time.”
Anyway, read the whole piece here if you like conversations about the menacing creep of time! Or read it in print this coming Sunday.
Great! I am definitely into these kinds of meditations and will look forward to feeling lightly sad but also strangely bemused when I am through reading it.
Word.
Hey, you write about movies sometimes, don’t you?
Sometimes! Oh, you mean recently. Well, as it happens I did publish a piece on Fast Times At Ridgemont High a couple weeks ago in Downtime Magazine. The picture is a personal favorite of mine, a film with real working class overtones.
“The splendor of the mall aside, the fictionalized Southern California town Ridgemont is unglamorous. All of the kids have jobs and it doesn’t feel like an option. They live in modest, unlavish houses—although, the Hamilton siblings' backyard pool is the source of unending complications and shenanigans. These are the American suburbs of the early ’80s, before Reagan’s great upward-wealth redistribution would induce the investor class to bulldoze modest family homes and replace them with garish monuments to their endless vanity.”
Check out the whole thing here.
Oh believe you me, I’ll be reading every last line of your Fast Times piece. Couple more things. Did you talk to the New Yorker’s Zach Helfand for his recent profile on the weird Saudi-backed, start-up LIV golf tour in his amazing recent profile?
Yes -- and I’m glad you brought that up. Thank you, questions in bold! I did speak to Zach Helfand for his tremendous New Yorker profile on the sinister LIV. I insist you read the whole thing, but here is what I said when asked to characterize the war between the PGA Tour and it’s creepy new rival.
Nelson, the golf writer, told me that, if LIV embodied Trumpism, “the P.G.A. Tour is not Abraham Lincoln, it’s Mitch McConnell—the power structure that says, Well, I don’t disapprove of élitist destructive behavior, but this is bad for business.”
There may also have been an invocation of the phrase “rogue’s gallery of assholes”. Whether you’re a golf fan or not, you will want to read this piece and you will be highly entertained and a little unnerved.
That’s rad! I’m going to read all about golf and geopolitics. But back to the Paranoid Style for a minute. Did I hear a rumor about a brand new CD pressing of your 2016 LP Rolling Disclosure? You know, the one that Brian Paulson produced and where you kind of sound like X and you tried to warn everybody about Trump and nobody cared because we were all feeling pretty god damned complacent? I love that record.
Oh thanks! I love it too. And yes!! There is a beautiful new CD pressing and enthusiasts would be well served to grab one over at the Paranoid Style’s online emporium. And while you’re there, it might well be convenient to pick up a few other items. Do you have your copy of For Executive Meeting yet??
Great point. Maybe I’ll grab a tee shirt too. And a copy of A God Damned Impossible Way Of Life. Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Anything more before we wrap this thing?
You know, smarter people than I have already been telling you this, but there truly are not enough adjectives to describe the consequences for the upcoming midterm elections on November, 8th. Look, I’ll tell you something about me you might not know: I’m a certified inside-the-Beltway-DC-insider. I have those wretched credentials. And part of that is that I have friends, including some close friends, who are Republicans. That’s how we “do it.” So, you know, I don’t tend to indulge in ideological litmus tests. That said, reasonable Republicans have quite obviously lost control of their party and the people running that show at this juncture are transparently fucking insane. They cannot be ignored and they cannot be reasoned with and there is a very, very real chance that they will fully transform our society in unimaginably demented ways if they continue to gain influence. Indeed that process has already begun in earnest. We have to hold the line against this threat. Listen -- I get distracted too. I have three fantasy football teams! Do you understand that I am a reprobate when it comes to gambling on pretend football?? The investment of time and emotion into my unscalable thirst for fantasy sports is fathoms deep. And yet -- I will vote! I will vote. This is the agreement I am asking you to enter into with me. Get acquainted with your candidates and vote for the ones who aren’t crazy on November 8th, and then we can all get back to dicking around on social media. I will if you will.
Love,
Elizabeth
