Love, Paranoid Style

Fall in love all over again with the teen idols who made your heart skip a beat!

Good night, Irene, if it isn’t Valentine’s Day! It really does just creep up on you, like a mugger in moccasins. Forgive me a moment while I free associate. Here are a couple of my favorite Valentine’s Day related phenomena:

1951 - Sugar Ray Robinson defeats Jake LaMotta in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre

This was the sixth time Robinson and LaMotta fought, this time for LaMotta’s middleweight championship. Robinson -- for my money still the greatest boxer to ever lace up the gloves -- was 4-1 against LaMotta going into the match, but their fights up until this point had been competitive. This contest in Chicago was not. Drained from the effort to make weight LaMotta ran into an absolute buzzsaw, and was steadily pounded on by the astonishingly skilled Robinson until the referee mercifully stepped in and stopped the fight during the 13th round. This was what is known in boxing’s ugly parlance as a “paint job”- just a slow, senseless beating that LaMotta endured with an even larger than usual dose of his accustomed, quasi-masochistic stoicism. It is terrible, brutal stuff, but it may also be the highwater mark for Robinson’s artistry which was as sublime in its way as any artist of the 20th century. You can watch the whole thing here or just skip to the last round if it makes you queasy. You’re not wrong. 

1987 - Bruce Springsteen “Valentine’s Day” from Tunnel Of Love

There are times I think this is my favorite Springsteen song. Having invested his very soul in the gloriously ludicrous invention of his greaser everyman character, here he has finally hit an emotional iceberg that he can’t navigate around no matter how much he soups up his muscle car. He is broken, and this is good, because he must break so he can rebuild himself. But my God, the pain. This is so terribly sad:

It wasn't the cold river bottom I felt rushing over me

It wasn't the bitterness of a dream that didn't come true

It wasn't the wind in the gray fields I felt rushing through my arms

No no baby it was you

Tunnel Of Love is kind of a divorce record, I guess, but I think what it really captures is that moment when it becomes beyond incontrovertible that you have almost quite literally tried every avenue to avoid acknowledging the private shame and agony that lingers in your heart and nothing has worked: fame, sex, fortune, driving, Telecasters, some drinking, some therapy. Nothing takes and everything rushes through your arms like trying to catch a waterfall. It’s so sad, I think, because it is such a fully sane rejoinder to his own carefully constructed, deeply delusional, profoundly intoxicating mythos. All the packed stadiums in the world were never going to be able to stave off this day. It’s high noon and he stands facing the one nemesis he truly dreads. He looks exactly like Bruce Springsteen. 

But enough of my yakking! C’mon Beth, what are we doing here?? Oh right -- it’s the newest edition of my unapologetically sporadic and haphazard newsletter Please Take My Advice! I very nearly forgot. Let's take care of the small print and then jump on this bucking bronco and see where it takes us. 

*Disclaimer

Please Take My Advice is unaffiliated with any regional library, community center, Chamber Of Commerce, public clinic, dedicated green space, housing board, co-op market or senior activity hub. Anyone claiming such affiliations is either genuinely mistaken or actively engaged in the deliberate distortion of truth. Please Take My Advice neither hosts nor endorses  be-ins, love-ins, sit-ins or any other activity associated with the so-called “counterculture". Any associations of this kind are made in error. Unconstrained by bourgeois expectations, Please Take My Advice will color outside the lines, or anywhere else it pleases.  Please do not ask Please Take My Advice for its views on alien life, jet skiing or rock slides: it has none. 

God! Finally that’s over. Paperwork and the regulatory menace, am I right? Alright let's get cooking.

What’s up with you Elizabeth? Did I see the Paranoid Style was in the studio?

Oh hell yes. This past week we jumped into Overdub Lane in Durham, NC to record the follow up to last year’s artistic and ethical triumph For Executive Meeting. The nice thing about the band doing so well is that we had a slightly bigger budget than in the past, which gave us an extra day to procrastinate before full-blown panic set in. I love to procrastinate, and what’s more I’m good at it. I don’t think it’s over-bragging to say I’ve got a pretty diverse skill set. I can write compelling songs, I’m a good hand as a journalist, I know a fair amount about public policy, I can act a little, my distance running thing is pretty impressive in its OCD way. But I don’t think there is any one single thing I am better at than procrastinating. Quick: try and think of some reason to not do the thing you're supposed to be doing. Too late. I’ve already thought of ten. I am to procrastination what Tommy is to pinball. 

That’s terrific. But you did record something?

Yes! That’s the thing. Once you’re done procrastinating that awful, nauseous feeling sets in and it’s time to get down to bizness. And boy did we ever. Twelve songs in a manic rush of inspiration that surely registered on local Richter scales. Stalwart performances from my usual band of knuckleheads -- Jon Langmead, William Corrin, that guy I married -- but if this session had a hero it was the one and only Peter Fuckin’ Holsapple. The man who brazenly accepted my invitation to guest on the sessions and proceeded to rip the pea out of the pod on piano, lead guitar, dobro, lap steel and whatever the hell else he felt like exerting his genius over. 

Wait- Peter Holsapple from the dB’s?!?

The very same. 

How did you get him???

The same way I got a prom date -- by pretending to be lost outside his house. No, I just asked him! Some decades into life I’ve found that is the best way.

Wow! What kind of details can you give us about the new LP?

Not so many at this juncture, but let's just say I am very, very pleased. A few song titles: “Bad Day For The Group Chat,” “The Return Of The Molly Maguires,” “I Love The Sound Of Structured Class.” That oughta hold you for now.

But you will keep us up to date?

Certainly. Communication is my medium.

This is exhilarating news. What else is going on? Checked out the new “Night Court”?

Funny you should ask -- I have! It is… well look. I wrote a whole article about this in the New York Times magazine this past weekend, which addresses new “Night Court,” “Velma,” “That ’90s Show” and the increasingly baroque and weird raft of reboots currently metastasizing all over the airwaves. 

Intriguing! Do you have an excerpt handy?

Sure!

“Velma” sits in a lineage of dorm-room pop-culture deconstruction that became popular, during the 1990s, among a generation seized by the misapprehension that it was the first to discover irony. (This was my generation; in my early 20s, I briefly thought I was a genius for recognizing subtext in the cartoon “He-Man” that was actually just text.) The core of this aesthetic position is condescension — a belief that you, the astute modern viewer, are equipped with a sophisticated grasp of the medium, and the world, that eluded the credulous rubes who came before you. Programs that pander to this fantasy often skew mean, and “Velma” is meaner than most. 

Terrific. That is stout. If you provide a link I will certainly click and read. 

Here you go.

I take it you were saddened by the passage of Tom Verlaine?

Very saddened. A towering figure whose music bound together romance, mystery and  menace in a manner I’m not sure has been done before or since. You might find this interesting: a piece I wrote for The Ringer last year about the 45th anniversary of the peerless Marquee Moon.

Great! Hey Beth, is this newsletter running long?

I mean, arguably. Are you asking me to wrap up?

I guess I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to condense your sentiments.

Very well. Listen folks, I want to hit on one more thing here. My buddy Owen King emailed something intriguing to me a couple weeks back. He said the following: “What if we just decided to kick ass all the time?” Now obviously this is bold -- even hubristic if you squint a little. But goddammit if he isn’t right. Why volitionally limit how much we can kick ass? I’ve always known Owen to be a man of wise counsel, but this is like bursting through to a whole new level of consciousness. I mention this, because that self same Owen King’s new novel The Curator is an act of absolute genius. Do you like murder, magic, ghost ships, cats, and two act plays in which the devil persuades various family members to saw each other’s heads off? Of course you do! This is the kind of fucking action I’m talking about here. And that’s just for starters. Get yourself a copy of The Curator or get one for a loved one. It’s the perfect Valentine’s Day gift.

Alright people, that’s a wrap! Thanks for reading and I will surface with more news and opinions soon. Stay well, look lively, and remember to take care of one another. I will if you will.

Love,

Elizabeth