Category Archives: Commentary
Same old song. Same old story. Let’s hear it all again.
“…I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45.”
Pushing 70 and still feelin’ the Satisfaction.
I used to wonder how singers could face running through their big hits night after night, year after year, over and over and over again. You know what I mean, Mick singing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Bowie busting out Young Americans, or The Beach Boys vamping on Surfin’ Safari. Well OK, I can see why these days The Beach Boys would perform virtually anything in almost any venue. After all, California’s a community property state, and rehab is really fracking expensive. Or so I have heard.
Anyways, I used to think it must just be the money that kept them in the game. How else to explain Bob Dylan doing one nighters for Microsoft or the Drifters showing up at virtually every Holiday Inn lounge in the midwest in any given year? Bills have to be paid, ex-wives subsidized, and entire circulatory systems emptied and replaced, and it all requires boatloads of the ready. For any musician born in the UK before 1980, the dental bills alone would be catastrophic. If you think Keith Richards’ new pearly whites came cheap, think again.
Baby, you’re much too fast.
Courtesy Warner Bros.
It has also crossed my mind that the adoration that rolls in while onstage is enough to entice even the most temperamental artiste — think Prince or Mariah Carey — to accept the inevitability of trotting out Little Red Corvette or whatever schlock Mariah is famous for (I can’t stand all that bleating and warbling so I never listen to her) as the cost of doing business. I once heard Nick Lowe say that when he’s attending a performance and the singer introduces something new from “the upcoming album,” a part of him dies just a little. Too right; you pay your dough and you expect to hear the hits. I mean, who wants to shell out $250 for the thrill of Bruce Springsteen running through his Tom Joad catalogue? Might as well stay home and chase your Quaaludes with Sazeracs while cleaning your ears with steel wool and eating Comet. Same experience. No, I want Bruce dancing on the piano covering Devil with the Blue Dress On and turning Born to Run into the New Jersey version of the goddamned Ring Cycle. I know I am not alone in this.
Though all of the above strike me as plausible, none really offer a completely satisfying explanation of how it is that creative people can bring themselves to repeat the same old songs day in and day out, often over the course of many, many years. (See Mr. Jagger above.) It’s a question that has baffled me for a long time, and recently I was giving it some considerable attention at, as it turns out, an Aimee Mann concert. You see, I have a soft spot for the former Til Tuesday singer, and when she’s in town Mr Slattern and I often make a point of dropping in on her shows. Sure the songs are a bit of a downer, but she herself is actually very funny, so you seldom leave a performance less happy — or more depressed depending on your pharmaceutical balance at the time — than you were when you arrived.
So there we were, hanging with Aimee and her band and about a thousand other people, enjoying the familiar strains of Freeway, and I was again wondering how singers manage to muster the enthusiasm to deliver the same songs ad nauseam without losing their minds or at the very least sliding into a deep creative funk. And that was when, as the say, the light dawned on Marble Head. I realized that like me, Ms. Mann probably never tires of her own work.
Now before you consign me to the scrap heap of failed writers with delusions of adequacy, hear me out. Frequently I find myself trolling around my site looking for something, or more often that not, killing time ’til cocktail hour. I start scrolling backward in time and before I know it I’ve lost two hours flipping through the archives and rereading last year’s posts about troublesome oldsters, the perils of driving in New Jersey ,or noble drunks of our time. It’s the same with my other work — short stories, satirical articles, and such. Make no mistake, I am acutely aware that I am no James Joyce, or even James Patterson for that matter, but somehow it doesn’t bother me all that much. Rather, it’s comforting to wallow in the products of my own mind, rather like trading an itchy bra for a comfortable old t-shirt, plopping down on the sofa and working your way through a bottle of Veuve Cliquot with a straw sliding into your own bed after a couple of weeks on the road.
Of course, I certainly don’t want to be reading this stuff when I’m 60. Although if someone wanted to hear it…..
New Feature: The Slattern’s Mind Probe
Image via curiousscience.com
There’s nothing like a good secret police interrogation. Or is there? Now, you’ve no doubt perused Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire, and have probably enjoyed Heidi Ellis’s The Early Bird Catches the SPaM feature. In truth, there isn’t anything new about the interview-as-blog-post format, but what the hey, I’m going to do it anyway. So even if The Slattern’s Mind Probe is not entirely innovative as a concept, what it lacks in originality, it will certainly more than make up for in quality by giving you the chance to peek inside some of the most interesting and funny brains I’ve had the pleasure to encounter since first sending up this little emotional distress signal one year ago.
My first guest is the fabulous Cristy Carrington Lewis, aka Miss Snarky Pants, my oldest blogging buddy and soulmate in snark. The Alt Mrs. Sedaris is a recovering lawyer and newbie vegan who writes one of the smartest, wickedest blogs this side of Hell. So let’s find out….
What’s really going on inside the mind of Cristy Carrington Lewis?
What’s your favorite dirty word, and why?
Fuck-a-doodle-doo. I’d like my voice to be the first thing people hear upon awakening.
Which kitchen utensil do you most resemble?
Okay, the kitchen is the room with the upright coffin, right?
You’re competing in the synchronized swimming event in the Olympics. Which song do you and your partner choose for your program?
Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack.” Nothing goes together better than chlorine and axes. Imagine the plaid flannel bikinis.
If you could do away with one national holiday, which one would it be?
Easter. I heard they found the body.
Bikinis, thongs or granny panties?
When your ass is as big as mine, all panties eventually become thongs.
Complete the following sentence. If I were an exotic dancer, my stage name would be
Miss Snarky Pantsless.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
An Oscar Meyer weiner. An adult one.
What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?
Rocky Mountain Oysters
Then why did you eat it?
The bull paid extra.
Caption this photo.
This is what a world with no Roe v. Wade looks like.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Interested in more self-revelatory shenanigans thinly disguised as blog awards? If your stomach can take it and your psyche is not too fragile by now, try these:
Tagged: Thank you, Sir. May I have another?
We don’t need no stinking Superbowl
The Guiltiest Pleasure
Reality TV scratches my id.
Who needs natural raspberry flavors?
via http://flickrhivemind.net
As even the occasional visitor to my well-appointed little lockdown ward knows by now, I indulge a fair few guilty pleasures. Some might even say I have more vices than virtues, though I think it just seems that way because I so often air my dirty laundry for your amusement, which is a compulsion of a different sort, but perhaps that’s a subject for another day. Among my filthy little secrets are insatiable appetites for swearing and the now-verboten Hostess Zinger (the sticky red coating over the Twinkie is pure bliss); my collection of Fleetwood Mac records; the admission that I like Grace Jones’s cover of La Vie en Rose better than the Little Sparrow’s original; and of course the fact that I have watched that dreadful 90s turkey Practical Magic about a hundred times. (I just love that scene where they all get trashed on midnight Margaritas and sing The Lime in the Coconut.)
Up until recently however, none of my little treats or crutches could really be classified as shameful (well maybe the Grace Jones business, but I’ll bet there’s at least one person on the planet who agrees with me on that score). I viewed them as the standard foibles of a reasonably functional member of the modern world. As guilty pleasures go, I reasoned, mine were all fairly tame. Now, however, I find I have finally given myself cause for concern, and that’s going some from a woman who whole heartedly exhorts others to serve ham salad finger rolls at parties.
Since I know the suspense is killing you, I’ll fess up. It’s reality TV. Though not a huge fan of the genre generally, I do follow Project Runway and Top Chef, and even occasionally look in on the Real Housewives. (New Jersey and Atlanta only — I can’t tell one California bleach job from the next, and the New Yorkers are all too familiar.) As a rule, I prefer the competitive formats to the biographical ones. I mean really, Kim Kardashian has marital problems and mother issues. Well who doesn’t? Eating bugs for money, modeling for morons or camping for cash? Who cares? No, my newest guilty pleasure takes reality TV well beyond the usual limits of both decorum and decency, into the territory I think of as Surreality TV, which is why, I suppose, it appeals to me. That’s right, you guessed it, I have developed a (borderline) obsession with Mob Wives of Chicago. Really, I just cannot get enough of this show. Look!
First of all, is it me, or do they all look like a bunch of cranked up trannies who just knocked over the make-up counter at Macy’s? Allegedly. The extensions, the Vegas makeup, the boob jobs and the sparkles all telegraph drag show to me. And who doesn’t love a man in a tiara? Whenever I’m watching the show, I’m also half expecting one of them to burst into “Son of a Preacher Man.”
I know it’s horrifying, and yet I cannot stop watching, so intense is the fascination. And before you go all violence-desensitizes-us-and-destroys-society on me, let me just say that it’s not like I’m watching Showtime for lord’s sake. This is on VH1, the regular cable channel that brings you a thousand hours of 80s music videos every week. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good indication that this show is in the right place in terms of its overall intellectual level.
Nora: “I’m gonna resume my father.”
Renée: “I think it’s exhume.”
Almost as tricky as spelling HUMILIATION.
I especially love the hapless therapist who clearly wants to run from the room and looks like she’d probably rather be counseling a rabid civet than a woman who routinely gets into extension-yanking, bitch-slapping, knock-down, drag-out fights with her “friends.” I may be wrong, but I’d be willing to wager Dr. Thing pops a little vitamin V before Christina’s sessions. I know I would.
Dr. Thing: “How are you planning to work that out?”
Christina: “With a BLEEP shovel.”
Sometimes, the wives are very funny — on purpose — as when Pia the stripper comments on Nora’s obsession with digging up her father’s body to prove that it is actually he (“The German,” who died in stir) and not some hapless hobo that the feds sent to the cemetery. Pia, who is clearly practical-minded, says, “It’s not like the man dug himself up and went to 7-11 and got a sandwich and a Coke.” No argument there.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What is the possible appeal of something this grotesque? I’d say that there’s such a sideshow feeling to it that it is entirely irresistible, especially to those of us who grew up in more emotionally-restrained environments. Take me, for example. As the product of a New England culture that looks upon anything more than a handshake as an intimate act, I find these women mesmerizing. Among my people, the only time anyone gets whacked is when Bitsy agrees to Binky’s request that she wear a saddle over her flannel nightgown on a Saturday night, but these ladies threaten to kill one another on a daily basis. With shovels.
What can I say, it gives my id a workout. And everybody knows how important a limber id is. If you don’t believe me, just ask Big Ang.
Big Ang via Reality Nation.
The Bridge to Hell
What’s the worst pop song ever?
So last night Mr. Slattern and I were having a rollicking game of Scrabble while working our way through a bottle or two of something or other. Since I was knocking the slop out of him (for a change), we decided to lighten the mood (his anyway) by adding a bit of music to the evening’s festivities. Not wanting to interrupt the flow of things, we just picked a random satellite channel and got on with the smackdown contest.
Courtesy fleetowner.com
The name of the station was, I believe, “The Bridge.” I tell you this out of the goodness of my heart and to save you a world of hurt. Should someone you love, or you yourself, ever stumble upon this house of musical horror, turn around and return to the preceding station, or any other you can find, even if it’s the one with the all-Grateful Dead format, because let me tell you that spending the next few minutes with Jerry’s kids will be infinitely less painful than being subjected to the playlist of The Bridge, whose format is described on its website as follows:
Cross The Bridge to the softer side of rock. Stress-free music from Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison and Elton John. Nothing too hard, just great mellow rock.
Here’s how I’d describe it: A trip to hell featuring extended layovers in a string of audio re-education camps with entertainment provided by a mopey, poetry-writing high-school girl circa 1975. Listening to this station is about as pleasant as spending the second full day of your summer diet hungover and trying on woolen underwear at the Barney’s warehouse sale — with Barry Manilow singing Copacabana on an endless loop on the sound system.
Anyways, being rather absorbed in the game, we weren’t really paying close attention to the music, so when we heard the opening lurch of The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald we chuckled because Gordon Lightfoot in general, and this song in particular, have both become running jokes in our house. Listening to this stinker always makes me feel a bit queas-Y, like I’m barreling along with the God forsaken crew when the gales of November come ear-LY. Just thinking about this song makes me seasick. And always I ask myself the same question, Does anyone know where the love of God goes when this song turns the minutes to hou-ERS?
I find this performance particularly irritating because Gord sings it in Canadian instead of the regular English he used on the record. Maybe his jaw’s tired from all that emoting, or it could be he’s just too lazy to open up his mouth. Hard to know. Harder still to care.
“Ah know you’re in there, Vicki Lawrence!”
Via Huffington Post.
Too lazy to get up and reset the radio, we were both hoping this song would be the musical equivalent of a long overdue belch that clears the line and makes way for a cleaner, purer flow of sound. How wrong we were; what followed was one or another of Billy Joel’s nasty mid-career hits, all of which are putrid, but none more so than Piano Man. This was not the selection chosen by The Bridge; however, we changed the station immediately anyway, sensing a trend that could only lead to something far worse, along the lines of Billy Don’t Be a Hero or Brandy You’re a Fine Girl. Just the mention of one of those songs will create an immediate, soul destroying earworm that can last days, or even weeks. Many good people have cracked under less pressure than that. You remember what happened to Britney, who, I have it on good authority, was heard listening to The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia over and over right before she took a golf umbrella to that car.
The game ended and as we repaired to the living room for a nightcap, a lively debate about the worst pop song ever committed to vinyl soon began: Piano Man or The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald? Mr. Slattern, who is actually musical and therefore entitled to an opinion, takes the position that Billy Joel is the worse offender. He feels the faux Irishness, pretensions to crappy poetry (“a real estate novelist”) and limerick-y midline rhymes (“They sit at the BAR and put bread in my JAR”) make this song the worst one ever written. Further, he maintains, the instrumentation is insane and makes the cheesy lyrics and overwrought delivery indescribably worse, with a harmonica and an accordion locked in a fight to the death in the arrangement. Then of course there’s the wholly undeserved, smug, self-aggrandizing message (“Man, what are YOU doing here?”).
Listen, if you can bear it.
Now there are those who would not agree with Mr. Slattern that Piano Man is the worst song ever written. They might point to other notable entries in the oeuvre of the pride of Long Island, and they might be right. Look:
Courtesy Fighting the Youth
In truth, I can’t find much to argue with here, but I still have to give the edge to old Gordon Lightfoot in the worst song sweepstakes. Of course, now I’m in the lowest level of music hell. Not only am I hungover and sleep deprived after staying up all night watching bad music videos on YouTube, but I’ve now got the lyrics to Piano Man running through my brain to the tune of The Wreck of the Edmond Fitz-GERALD. Both are in waltz time, you see. And really, what is a pop song doing in three-quarter time anyway? It doesn’t make sense.
Kitchen Slattern 
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Parents
Dec 7
Posted by WSW
The Slattern’s guide to surviving the childrearing years.
Once upon a time, I had a real career. I got up early, put on outfits that came out of dry cleaning bags, showed up somewhere and did reasonably important stuff for which I was fairly well compensated. When I spoke at meetings, colleagues actually listened to what I had to say, and occasionally I even bossed other people around. You may not believe it, but I was corporate, folks.
At that time, the Stephen Covey
cult of mind controlconsulting juggernaut was really taking off. His Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was already a perpetual bestseller, big firms showered him in krugerrands just to come and sip a cup of decaf at their corporate retreats, and we were all so busy realigning our paradigms and trying to find our true north it was a wonder anything at all got done in the workplace.Behold the onset of the maternal urge.
Via electsister777.
Then quite suddenly, at age 32, the urge to have a baby hit me like a freight train that had skipped its tracks and was careening along an icy road in the middle of nowhere. Just like that, I was done with the nine to five grind.
After 42 weeks of pregnancy I was looking forward not only to tying my own shoes, but also to finally having the time to throw stylish dinner parties, get involved with charitable and good works, and write that murder mystery I’d been planning in my head during countless hours of boring operations meetings, ridiculous team-building exercises and hellish corporate travel. I was staying home, suckers!
There was, of course, one small detail I had overlooked, an unexpected fly in the ointment if you will, namely that taking care of an infant is a 24/7 life commitment that supersedes all other obligations, priorities and desires. Like many first timers, I thought it was all over after labor and delivery, that life would return to normal as soon as our gorgeous agglomeration of DNA found her way into the light of day so that I could dress her in all manner of cute baby things, immediately start making mother-daughter trips to Lord and Taylor and marvel at the self sufficiency and composure that would be our shining light of a daughter. I also expected my stomach to snap back to pre-natal flatness. I think we all know how that turned out.
During the 17 hours of induced labor followed by a C-section, an unidentifiable infection and a stay in the neonatal unit, I got very real very quickly. Lacking as I did close relatives in the area to help in the months and years that followed, I turned to a network of friends in the same situation, and somehow we all made it through. Now, as I look back at the past 18 years, I realize how nice it would have been if someone had offered me some practical advice about raising a child generally, and specifically how to do it without losing your mind. I tried Dr. Spock and Penelope Leach and all the other baby busybodies, but they just made it harder rather than easier, as none seemed ever to have actually raised a child while trying to maintain a marriage, keep the house from becoming a cholera vector point and get rid of that most tenacious of fat, the baby roll.
Against all odds, however, the Little Slattern has turned out magnificently. So it’s possible that I might have some pearls of wisdom to help others just starting down the road of parenthood. Of course it could also be that the I’ve finally found the perfect balance of pharmaceuticals and wine spritzers and this makes me think I’ve got all the answers. Hard to know.
For what it’s worth, then, here are the Slattern’s seven habits of highly effective parents:
1. Be proactive, or better yet be hyperactive. There is absolutely no need to be exhausted. After six cups of coffee and a lunchtime dose of Ritalin you’ll find it’s a breeze to clean the house, make dinner, fold ten loads of laundry and paint the garage all in the time it takes your child to have an afternoon nap! Of course, until the baby is weaned, this is out of the question, so mothers are advised to abandon all hope of accomplishing anything whatsoever until such time as mammaries return to their ornamental rather than utilitarian function. All you dads and nonlactating partners, however, can get with the stimulant program any old time.
2. Accept that this is the beginning of the end of your mind. Outside of the office, you may not have an adult conversation concerning anything other than bowel movements, potty training, preschool admissions, coxsackie virus or whether it’s okay to dose your child with Benadryl before a flight (it is) for a very long time. If you’re a stay at home parent, abandon all hope of interesting adult conversation and be forewarned, you may never finish a sentence again.
3. Put first things first. Babysitters are paid before the mortgage. The child’s orthodontia trumps your crumbling crowns. And in-laws may visit only if they agree to feed your child, put him to bed and wash the dinner dishes while you go out to a movie and a well deserved night of heavy drinking at the local bar. (They should also be told where the cash for bail is kept, or better still, bring their own stash.)
Photo courtesy Bernd Vogel/Bernd Vogel/Corbis via the Guardian UK.
4. Think win-win, and if you can’t do that, learn to accept defeat as a daily occurrence and sleeplessness as your new reality. And since I’m on the subject, folks, I cannot urge you strongly enough to teach your kids to put themselves to sleep, in their own beds, from the earliest possible moment. When I was a child, parents were told to let their babies cry it out, which was hard on everyone and frequently resulted in having to go to plan B, namely rubbing babies’ gums with the whiskey from the highball that was keeping the parent from killing him or herself for being the kind of vile human being who lets a child cry until he either vomits or falls asleep. By the time the Little Slattern was tormenting us with ten wakings a night, there was the miracle of “Ferberizing” and it worked a charm. One night of brief crying followed by briefer comforting, and we were home free. The book has saved more marriages and lives than you can possibly imagine.
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Unless you have twins, in which case seek first to survive the day and secondly to hold off cocktail hour until they’re asleep.
6. Synergize, and if that doesn’t work anesthetize. There comes a moment in every parent’s life when it’s all just too much — the middle of a 48 hour bout of diarrhea, or along about the third week of a teething episode for example. In the first year of my daughter’s life, Mr. Slattern frequently returned home from work to find me standing three feet from the front door, holding our child at arm’s length and saying, “Here, take her. Just do it. Take her RIGHT NOW.” Being an obliging sort and possessed of a strong instinct for survival, he would drop his briefcase and coat and take over on the spot, at which point I retreated to the bathroom for a two-hour shower and sob-a-thon followed by a large drink. Not that my child was particularly difficult; she was quite easy as they go, but some days were more challenging than others. As such, it is vitally important to know when to hand over the con to whichever half of the domestic tag team happens to be more capable at the moment.
7. Sharpen the saw, to avoid using it on your spouse or partner. The great Covey is a big believer in taking time to renew your energy and personal resources to maximize workplace productivity. This applies equally to parents. When I was in the trenches, Mr. Slattern frequently paired up with other similarly outdoorsy dads and took the kids camping for several days. This allowed the other grateful moms and me to pursue our own paths to spiritual renewal, by which I mean we convened at one or another of our homes, drank ourselves blind, ate cake for dinner and danced to all our college favorites into the wee hours or until one of the neighbors called the cops. Whether you renew with a crafting binge, a poker night or a vodka-fueled solo dance party, just get the down time and make it count.
“I am in no way crazy and my children ADORE me.”
Erin Patrice O’Brien for The Wall Street Journal
And finally, a word on childrearing styles: Tiger mother or attachment parent?
Hard to say which is worse of course, since each approach is deeply disturbing in its own way. How does anyone have the energy to constantly ride herd over, nag and terrorize her kids as the Tiger Mom recommends? By the same token, I marvel at these women who “breastfeed” their five year olds and “co-sleep” until junior goes off to college. Who’s the needy one here, ladies?
And despite their differing approaches, I’ll bet neither type allows her kids to have have sleepovers. Which is crazy. That’s over twelve hours of free babysitting! Sure you’re expected to reciprocate, but you’re already staying in every night, so what’s the difference? Problem is you’re usually too tired to get up to much, but at least you know you could if you wanted to because your child is occupied and uninterested in you — until her overnight guest tries to take her “special” toy or refuses to share the coveted blue crayon anyway.
In the end, I suppose you’ll chart your own course. I myself chose the Third Way, as modeled by that rock of maternal warmth and stability, Shirley MacLaine. Who says the movies can’t teach us anything?
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Interested in more expert parenting tips? I’ll take your word for it.
Mother of the Year
Mother Knows Best
In Praise of the Bar: Bar cookies for bake sale emergencies
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Posted in Commentary, Friendly Advice
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Tags: Attachment parenting, Benadryl, Ferber method, Home, Humor, Parent, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Slattern, Stephen Covey, Synergy, Tiger mother