Where America Still Wins
“Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever, puts it this way: ‘I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.’ It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal husbandry to mathematics to architecture to manufacturing to information technology, have all crescendoed with the Crunchwrap Supreme, delivered via the pick-up window.” [Via]
See You Later, Week!
So stuff happened this week. AGAIN. What did you miss? Maybe one of these!
• The First Israeli Slasher Flick
Photo by Andrey Upadyshev, from Flickr.
Scarlett Johansson: Do You Like Mayo? Sean Penn: Not Really
Scarlett Johansson: I just can’t get into “The Help.” I don’t know, I sort of take issue with a white woman writing in dialect, but I feel like I should read the book before I see the movie.
Sean Penn: What?
Scarlett Johansson: Nothing, go back to sleep.
— Some of Many Imagined Conversations Between Scarlett Johansson and Sean Penn.
The Skorpion Show on Lady Gaga's "Judas"
The plot recount of Lady Gaga’s “Judas” video begins at 2’44”, which is really all you need: “The video starts off with Gaga on a motorcycle with her motorcycle gang and her behind Jesus and Judas behind her and she’s looking behind her shoulder looking at Judas and everything and then Judas gets in front of everybody and Gaga starts singing ‘Oh I’m in love with Judas’ and, you know, I’m not even looking at Gaga no more, I’m looking at Jesus on the motorcycle and I shouldn’t even be looking at Jesus like that.” This is true.
"The young Ivy League adherents of the Lehman Brothers Credit Brigades came nearer to toppling the...
“The young Ivy League adherents of the Lehman Brothers Credit Brigades came nearer to toppling the American Empire than bin Laden ever dreamed.”
Should you still be in the market for some thoughts on the legacy of Osama bin Ladan, Awl pal Dana Vachon offers a few here.
Four Poems By Jake Kennedy
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
On Safety (Bricks)
Fuck it. The smartest pig resolves to brick-up the doorway, damn the windows, and stuff the chimney with mortar. Goodbye, remarkable tree: the ten-hut of the trunk, the leaves’ sustained fireworks. So long, apple rotating just so into the sunlight. It’s usually up to the moon (farewell) to spike the wolf’s fur while it sleeps. That’s desire, too, isn’t it? … any thrill — good or bad! — from elsewhere? Well, adios bear shit versus lilac perfume. No more goosebumps, then. The trowel labors against tensions and harmonies — until the bricks make a crypt of unreadable books.
On Difference (Knots)
Study, Executioner, the halyard, reef, bowline, sheep shank, and the succession of slips. This impersonation of nothings (droop and wilt and limp) gets tautened into the finality — a togethered snapping-to. Amazing or ehn [shrug]. Then? To unite, like this. And when the mother saws the rope from the son’s neck then knife, neck, and rope are also past, present, and future. According to the blood, none of these objects are unique. Once the knife breathed in and out, the rope cut itself, and the throat tied its own noose.
On Denial (Junebug)
Hunkered gestapo, Tollund toenail — waiting for one word to activate the big transformation: bloom it out of char and back into fire again. Only some chants are permissible, contingent on the experience of the town cryer. Like the bellow: run. The news is usually ‘don’t tell us.’ The news is ‘let pleasure reign.’ In two fields separated by a concrete wall, the body that splits itself in half is highly moral but practically screwed. And this thing is a machine, muttering with that classified information. It hurtles down and it never resolves — a burnt satellite, sizzling in the grass.
On Mischief (Masks)
If it deepens, it’s mise en abyme; as when spreading the deck of cards diagonally across the table creates Muybridge photographs. If the gag keeps going then ‘identity’ is proved false in Scooby Doo. The cellar as an order of darkness; the cedar chest in the cellar as a deeper order of darkness. Then the cut-out eyes equal ‘and so on.’ As if too true to be suffered, the mask is ripped off and dashed to the ground. There it is. So in the environment of the newspaper cartoon, it’s traditional to mount human heads above the mantle while, below, the deer sip sherry and read the funnies.
Jake Kennedy is the author of The Lateral (Snare Books) Light & Char (Greenboathouse Press), and Hazard (BookThug). His work has received Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2010 and the 2006 bpnichol Chapbook Award. Poems have appeared in or on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, CBC Radio, Drunken Boat and Diagram.
For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.
Elvis Costello Covers
Would you like to hear some folk music covers of the songs of Elvis Costello? Why not, what else are you doing? Step this way.
Generic Cats Traffic Slideshow [PHOTOS] [CATS]
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A cat. [PICTURE]
TAGS: CATS, CAST, CSAT, TACS, SCAT, SACT, CATS AND THE CITY, SEX AND THE CATS, CATS AND TORNADOES, OSAMA CAT LADEN, KITTENS, FELINES, SEXY CATS, HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, CATS FOR SALE
Next: CATS (MORE CATS) (CLICK)
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Related: ALL ABOUT CATS
UP NEXT: CLICK FOR MORE CATS (CATS)
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THAT IS ALSO A CAT.
Related: LOTS AND LOTS OF DOGS
NEXT: ANOTHER CAT
“Cats is a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. It introduced the song standard “Memory”. Cats first opened in the West End in 1981 and then on Broadway in 1982, each time directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne; it won numerous awards, including both the Laurence Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Musical.” WIKIPEDIA.
Related: RACISM
OOPS THAT’S THE SAME CAT SORRY.
THERE’S MORE: CATS (PICTURES) (GALLERY)
[HERE IS WHERE YOU START PUTTING THE FILLER BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON’T CLICK THIS FAR, ONCE THEY REALIZE THEY’RE BEING SUCKERED INTO MINDLESSLY CLICKING THROUGH A SLIDESHOW.]
See more: CATS, KITTENS, KITTENS WITH CATS, ALSO CATS WITH DOLPHINS
CATS ON VIDEO, DOING THINGS, BEING CATS, JUST PLAIN CATS. MORE: CATS.
RELATED POSTS: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CATS
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Men Too Tired, Hungry To Think About Sex
“It’s often said men think about sex every seven seconds. But a study shows that they daydream about sleep and food just as much — if not more.”
Let's Talk 'Hammer Of The Gods': Quaaludes, Sharks And Baked-Bean Baths
Full disclosure, my darlings! Not only am I reading Stephen Davis’ SHOCKINGLY RAD Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga for the very first time (at the behest/demand of the dissipated-yet-charming Alex Balk), but my initial Led Zeppelin knowledge base was as follows: they are not the same people as Def Leppard, whose music was featured in the recent art film Balls of Fury. (I also have “Kashmir” and “Whole Lotta Love” on my iPod, and, although I would have been unwilling to swear to it in a court of law prior to reading this book, I could probably have identified them as the “Stairway To Heaven” guys.) I’m not bragging about this kind of profound ignorance; I’m just saying that if Stephen Davis had written a book about Graham Nash sticking a dead shark into Joni Mitchell at a picnic in Laurel Canyon, I would have been better equipped to take it on.
BUT HERE WE ARE, you’re stuck with me, and I did go ahead and buy a tremendous amount of Led Zeppelin to listen to while reading. Who loves you, baby? (I mean, if you’re a woman, and you look kind of trashy, probably the members of Led Zeppelin.) I also called my dad, noted audiophile and retired-druggie, to ask HIS thoughts on Led Zeppelin, which were as follows: “Oh, women really, really love that stuff. [awkward pause] And Page was a very serviceable musician from a technical point of view.” This is extremely high praise from my father, who, when someone references the Beatles, tends to say, “Well, at least George Harrison did eventually learn to play the guitar, more or less.”
My very first reaction to the book, other than, oh, this should be super entertaining for all of us, arose from Davis’s luuuuurid account of the wilder rumors that started to circulate after the band’s 1969 tour of America, most particularly: “… about how Led Zeppelin sustained itself on the road by drinking vaginal secretions direct from the source.” Because, you know, my immediate thought was, um, well, doesn’t everyone do that? It would actually be a MUCH better rumor if people claimed they were drinking vaginal secretions that had first been, like, delicately piped into a beaker of some kind, or stirred into a roux. I NEED MORE DIRT. But, happily, basically the next phrase involves “tumescent girls immersed in tubs of warm baked beans before coitus,” to which my response was, okay, now we’re talking.
Because this book is only strictly trashy by virtue of being a) way too much fun, and b) full of strung-out groupies, you do find yourself reading An Actual Rock Biography, which means the interminable (although obviously edifying) mandatory stock opening chapters on “the blues were born a verrrrrry long time ago in the Mississippi Delta, blah blah, and all of these people were in different bands/had Jew-ier names/shorter hair before they became awesome and famous.” But it also involves fun asides with Moon and Entwistle complaining about how much they hated Townsend and Daltrey, and that sort of “the Yardbirds were paid one hundred and eighteen pounds apiece to do a five-week American tour” thing where you say, oh, right, this is why Robert Plant has to make random albums with Alison Krauss now… because no one ever has anyone decent in charge of their money in the music industry. (That’s not really fair, it sounds like they managed to really gouge the American tour promoters by the early 1970s. But, you know, you buy enough castles with moats, you’re gonna need to make some serious bank.)
They Sold Their Souls To The Devil!
Isn’t that cute? No, I mean, really, it’s a little cute. Davis describes this as the most “sinister” of the various legends surrounding Led Zeppelin, which is perhaps true from an etymological point of view, but, really? That’s worse than fucking a drunk girl with a dead shark? So retro! I mean, I guess if you’re the West Memphis Three, you’re all, “yeah, that’s what we’ve been saying,” but that’s Satanic paranoia for you. Honestly, you know, Led Zeppelin did rock prettttty hard; they may not have needed the help. If someone came to me and said, “Hey, did you hear that the Jonas Brothers sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for success and fame?” I would say, oh, okay, that makes total sense to me.
The Devil-y stuff is made even funnier by Davis’ forays into Jimmy Page’s obsession with Aleister Crowley and the occult; which will somehow get mixed up in your head with the adorably lame faux-medieval lyrics that wind up plastered all over “Stairway to Heaven” and the tarot cards and the inexplicable covers of Scottish battle songs and the Viking anthems and all the other completely rando rockstar obsessions that will eventually lead us to Spinal Tap and “Stonehenge.” But we digress! This isn’t about serious musical criticism!
They Fucked A Girl With A Shark!
So, obviously, this is the big one. And I have no interest in harshing anyone’s mellow with “it was apparently just a red snapper, and it was actually their road manager Richard Cole, and it was, you know, ‘just the tip,’ and the chick seemed pretty into it.” It’s on Snopes — whatever, be lame and cynical on your own time. Let’s just leave this as written: Led Zeppelin fucked a girl with a shark!
Usually at this point I ask, “Well, is it any good?” But it may be more fruitful, with Hammer of the Gods, which is so OBVIOUSLY good, to instead ask, “Is it true?” To which the answer appears to be, uhhhhh, not so much? At least, people seem to feel like Richard Cole, who provided Davis with the vast majority of his information, was an unreliable junkie-type who tended to put an unnecessarily gloomy spin on the more standard “let’s all do drugs and have a lot of consequence-free sex with ladies who think we’re deities” sort of rock narrative. But, you know, Page was certainly a serious heroin addict, and Bonham didn’t exactly die of old age, and Jones is pretty open about his substance abuse, and Plant claims to have just used pot and Quaaludes, which reminds you, whatever happened to Quaaludes? Like, when was the last time someone offered you a Quaalude? Think about it. (Apparently, they’re still pretty big in South Africa, so if someone in South Africa says they have “smarties,” go for it!)
Context-Free Excerpts From Hammer of the Gods
• “….the boys were particularly attracted to an institution for young girls with sexual problems, such as compulsive masturbation. One day Jimmy and his friends showed up and tried to pull a couple of girls our of the place, to great merriment but to no avail.”
• “On one visit to Birmingham he set fire to his hotel room when he tried to stew a rabbit in a coffee percolator.”
• “Mother hen, field pimp, hit man, Richard Cole was dearly loved by every band he worked for. Cole was the ultimate sergeant — big, nasty, a natural leader, an Anglo-Irish pirate who would have been at home with the notorious White Companies, looting France during the Hundred Years War.”
• “When the band got back to London, the a was taken out of lead so the thick Americans wouldn’t mispronounce it leed.”
• “Still the dog wouldn’t go for it.”
• “It expressed an ineffable yearning for spiritual transformation deep in the hearts of the generation for which it was intended.”
• “I always thought that Jimmy liked me because I happened to say ‘Rimbaud’ at the right time.”
• “They were concerned because somebody warned them that if Jimmy was discovered with a fourteen-year-old girl, he’d be deported immediately. Both Peter Grant and Richard Cole insisted that I be kept locked up.”
Okay, now it’s your turn! Some discussion questions to get us started:
• Why are rock bands so lame now?
• Do you have fond memories of Quaaludes?
• Can drinking vaginal secretions directly from the source be held responsible for your power and charisma?
• Why did everyone in the Yardbirds become so awesome?
• How many attempted rapes did you count in Hammer of the Gods? More than three?
Let’s do this! And, afterwards, let’s meet back here in two weeks to discuss the now SUPER-RELEVANT I’m With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres. Foreword by Dave Navarro! Love you.
Nicole Cliffe is the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.