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AFM 1st record/1st concert
When I was to start fourth grade, I was sent to a strict English-style boading school in Massachusetts. My parents were English and traveled a lot, so sought a school that most closely resembled the schools of their youth. In my case, this meant a school for boys only, with coat and tie at all times, and a rigorous class system of ratings that featured beatings with a razor strop for minor infractions...the highest rated students got to watch the administration of punishment. It struck me later that I spent this period of my childhood in the world of Dickens, while outside it was the world of cars, girls, and Rock'n'Roll. The one bright spot for me was a clandestine radio after lights out, and that record players were allowed.
This magical world of a new and exciting youth music was an incredible splash of color in a world that consisted of gray, dark blue, brown and black. The older students went to bed at later times, and many nights I lay awake listening to the sounds of their records from across a courtyard. I don't think I'll ever lose my affection for "Come Go With Me" by the Dell-Vikings for the way its infectious party mood brightened up a desolate and lonely existence. I didn't buy that record first but it was that kind of connection that formed my devotion to real Rock'n'Roll. I think I bought a 78 of "Bye Bye Love/ I Wonder If I Care As Much" by the Everly Brothers on Cadence to play on my formerly kiddie record player, but soon graduated to using my Dad's Webcor for my 45 of "Party Doll" by Buddy Knox on Roulette, complete with red and black roulette numbers around the outer label. I have some of my original records from shortly after that time, but unfortunately I don't have either original copy.
My first concert took place in the Adirondack mountains at my grade school, in Keene, NY, not too far from Lake Placid. Every so often we would have a square dance and I would enjoy the country music and the down-home calling of Les, an older gentleman in a big brown double-breasted jacket holding a large silver microphone as he worked his way through the dances. One I recall ended "when you have done, go back where you begun, and swing with your Honolulu Baby."
Anyhow at one of these dances a Rock'n'Roll band started setting up during one of the breaks. We were all excited as they brought in amps and drums....it's hard to realize now, but before the Beatles Rock'n'Roll bands were few and far between, and they were non-existent at our school gym...until that moment. Well it was Ricky Coyne and his Guitar Rockers and somehow they had magically appeared. I don't know how they came to be playing at a grade school gym in the middle of nowhere but boy was I glad!! My recollection is that one of them might have been kin to Les or to Torrance, the man who drove the bulldozer in the sugar bush and organized the mechanical end of our farm work. At any rate they went through our square dance like a bolt of lightning!! I can remember the sound of twanging rockabilly and the giddy feeling of hearing live drums playing with a Rock'n'Roll feel. I was hooked for life. It turns out that Ricky Coyne is now a known artist among record collectors and rockabillies, principally for "Rollin Pin Mim." I contacted him recently via the magic of the internet and he still performs occasionally. There is also a great picture on the cover of "Raging Teens Vol 2." featuring the band and what must be the same monogrammed drum head I was looking at in seventh or eighth grade!
Rip Masters - Rip Masters, whose latterday youth was (mis-)spent with the Rollin’ Rock rockabilly crowd, does concert tours of Europe and Asia, as well as the occasional stateside appearance. His latest recordings are available at ripmasters.com.
Another Fein Mess/
AF Stone’s Monthly
August 2005
Dork Sunglasses
I‘ve had a thousand sunglasses in my life1. As a kid I was fascinated with Polaroid sunglasses for the way they made the world look when you turned sideways. It was the late 50s and sunglasses, like cars, got cooler every year2. In the late 60s I bought an old pair of men’s rimless wire glasses and had custom-made glass-sandwich Polaroid lenses cut and installed (regular Polaroid lenses were always plastic which always -- by design -- scratched) for a hefty $22. They were fabulous, but I lost them within a month, climbing around Cripple Creek, Colorado.
I lost nearly every pair I owned. People who wear corrective glasses learned to guard their glasses as children because they were severely chastened for losing them. I, Mister Natural, shed them like skin particles.
Today’s sunglass designers share with designers of most things an unfamiliarity with the human predicament. Sunglasses today, when folded, create a bow shape. Instead of sliding neatly into your shirt pocket they fill the pocket; likewise they take up great space in a purse. And since they defy glass-cases, which are designed for flat-folding formerly-normal styled cheaters, their convex lenses accumulate scratches from all adjacent things, as in Polaroid’s master plan.
Their pricing amuses me. Once my friend Paul said “How do you like my $200 sunglasses?” I looked. They looked like sunglasses. “My friend owns Fancy Goggles, the boutique. He gave them to me. They only cost him $5.”
Five is high wholesale3. That was for a custom order: Fancy Goggles had their own designers, whose creations were fulfilled by Chinese, Sri Lankans or Siberians.
I occasionally buy “good” ones, but because of their turnover I mainly buy inexpensive ones. Drugstores have turned from the 7.99 - 9.99 norm to somewhere around $15. Because they cost more to manufacture? Au contraire, made in fourth-world countries, they cost less and less, but the sellers know they can get the money. As when calling a plumber, people in need of sun-shielding pay.
My friend who manages a drugstore says many of the racks you find in gas stations, drugstores and such are “Vegas buys.” Vegas trade shows sell full spinning racks of a hundred for $100. The buyer then marks the price3. If they put it at $9.99, they make their money back on the first 10.1 sales.
Deep-cheap stores can be good. Ross’s Dress For Less, the home of no two items alike, was once good when they sold year-old sunglasses from major retailers for $5 to $10. However, as the retailers ratcheted up their prices into the $30 - $40 range, the knockdown prices went up to $15 and $20 (AT ROSS’S!), so I stopped scouting there.
Stores like the 99 Cent store get occasional bonanzas, but mainly their cheap stock is... cheap. Big Lots!, the inelegantly- and redundantly-named junk-house, gets some pretty good ones at $3.99. And then there’s my occasional resistance-weakened drug- or dept-store purchase, gift, or my wife’s acquisition of Ray-Bans.
Now as ever, my cup runneth over with shades.
1 This is an estimate. As are all the other figures herein. This is the internet, nothing is real.
2 Today sunglasses are still pretty cool. But cars look like shit.
3 At a gas station outside Disneyland, the fairly-old tags on the rack glasses were printed 10.00 in brown, then little black tails were drawn on the zeroes to make them nines. I get such a kick out of blatant greed.
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Shoe rack converted to sunglass rack, AF House |
Jessie Fein, AF in Sweeney Todd apron, Hollywood Bowl, 7/8/05
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Hold Your Razor High, Sweddy
I attended the Stephen Sondheim tribute show at the Hollywood Bowl. Daughter Jessie, 13, feared she’d be bored (she asked to bring her iPod), but the show was fast-moving, with some comedic breaks, and she enjoyed the songs she knew. (We’d once watched Sweeney Todd on video, she reminded me!)
I’m not a reviewer, I was there to enjoy myself. I thought Josh Groban, whom I know only from tv ads, was swell on “Johanna/Pretty Women” and the duet with Barbara Cook on “Move On.” I wondered whence Mandy Potempkin, and wished it was George Hearn rather than Len Cariou with Angela Lansbury, but that’s my narrow view, nobody else needs it4. But Mark Swed in the L.A. Times July 11... my, my, my he hurled thunder-bolts. He grumbled that one singer was not in top form, another was on the skids, the ork was unrehearsed and more.
I am at an impasse about this. Swed is an experienced concertgoer, maybe these things were true. But for a one-time show, which will not play again, what’s the point of all the mud-slinging? Bernardette Peters probably knows if she wasn’t at full throttle, why have to see it in print? If Barbara Cook has just a shadow of her former talent ... gee, why bring it up? I didn’t hear any clams from the ork, but if they were there the conductor heard them, and so did Sondheim.
If he should complain about anything, it should be that Barbra Streisand marched on at the end and proclaimed it was an honor to sing a Sondheim song and then didn’t sing one. Or that nobody, Cook especially, sang “Send In The Clowns.” But unlike Swed, I was just there to enjoy myself.
4 I don’t mean if you’re reading this you’re nobody. I mean this is a narrow self-interest site with slim readership.
Korporate Kindness
Office Depot gives you $2.50 credit for returning a printer ink cartridge. They re-fill and re-brand them for sale at a lower price.
Staples, the other mega office-chain, has a bin for your old ink cartridges which they offer to “recycle.” Nice of them.
American Heretic
I get American Heritage magazines long after their date. Periodically they run their “Overrated/Underrated” feature which yields them great feedback. People read the overrateds to feel good or get mad.
In the October 2003 installment, you learn that I Love Lucy is an overrated tv show5 and Gilligan’s Island is a pip. This from Karen Hornick, who teaches literature at NYU so she knows of what she speaks. (Teacher, New York = authority.)
In the same ish, the esteemed Glenn C. Altschuler tells us that Elvis’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show was overrated and Allen Freed’s exposure of the term rock’n’roll in the name of his radio show (in New York, where everything counts) was underrated.
That Altschuler, also a teacher, and also at an east coast college7, focuses on Presley’s 6th network tv appearance suggests he buys the widely-misheld view that Elvis debuted on Sullivan. You see this “fact” on tv quiz shows8 all the time.
The Sullivan shows (which he judges for their “sexual” impact!) are indeed subdued (though good) - COMPARED TO THE DORSEY SHOWS (which “broke“ him), THE BERLE SHOWS, AND THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW. Does he not know of them? He doesn’t say.
Altschuler’s championing of Freed is indeed nice, but to rate a word choice over a performance is just not rockin’.
5 She writes, as if under gas, “It was never as sublime as its contemporary, ‘The George Burns Show,’6 never as psychologically acute as ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ never as funny as ‘Sgt. Bilko.’ “
6 Apparently the Prof, who did not see “The George Burns Show” in its first run (and that, about her age, explains her fascination with Gilligan’s Island), has forgotten his wife, a rather large component of the “George Burns & Gracie Allen Show.” (Or did she see only the unheralded “George Burns Show” which ran 6 months between 1958 and 1959?)
7 Amer Heritage can only see the east. East of the Hudson, especially. When they ran an ish dedicated to Portland, Maine, the cover showed a fishing wharf and said simply “Portland,” not acknowledging, or perhaps knowing, there was another large Portland in faroff Oregon.
8 In 1973 I was a contestant on Split Second game show. One category was Famous Sullivans, and the answers, for the three contestants, were John L., Annie, and Ed. When after the show I pointed out that the question, “Elvis Presley’s first tv appearance,” was wrong, they freaked out. But I wasn’t complaining, I won that game. But I didn’t win the car.9
9 Just recently I learned that frequently-seen-herein Neal McCabe was a contestant on that same show and WON the car!
To The Stake!
The 7/3/05 NY Times Book Review section had two pages devoted to rock music books. I looked with trepidation at the Billy Joel bio review, knowing that “rock critters” disdained him, and sure enough it opened with “Say what you will about his body of work...”
Why don’t they hire book reviewers to review books, not rock reviewers? Reviewer David Itzikoff grudgingly allows that Joel has sold many albums and has many fans, but why? That is a given. What is missing here is the justification for Itzikoff’s ’tude; who are HIS fans, and how many of anything has he sold?
And if you say this is a neutral lede, inviting readers both friend and foe, then why on the two previous pages of reviews of Springsteen books did none begin “Say what you will about his body of work...”?
French Ticklers
Two french words are commonly misused by us.
- A Chais Longue is literally a long chair; longue means long. But we can’t make hide nor hair of a funny-spelled word like that so we say “lounge.”
(Chais, oddly, is pronounced ‘shezz.’)
- A guy profiled in a big french film journal called it “Cashier Du Cinema.” “Cahier,” the actual name, is a puzzler because ka-heer doesn’t sound right, nor ka-higher. Cahier is a notebook, pronounced like the Spanish word for street -- ka-yay.
Disneyland For Adulterers?
If you watch cable tv, you know that Las Vegas is the funnest place in the world. Roulette tables spin, people sip champagne in hot tubs, slot machines pour out money 24 hours a day. We know this bec at any time of day there is a show devoted to Vegas and its funness.
I’m not against vice, necessarily, but I was shocked at Las Vegas’s “What happens here stays here” ad campaign. Since gambling - er, gaming - is all over the country now, what, then, are they offering to conceal for you? Not murder, probably. It must be sex. You can meet your lover here and register as Mr & Mrs Jones. The ads have yet to run slugs saying “the women in these ads are registered Las Vegas hookers,” but maybe that’s the underlying thing. A new one shows a guy about to throw dice holding them to a girl who sticks her hand in her blouse, then puckers and blows, no dice in frame. This is not subliminal!
Another one really has me curious. Teenager busily cleaning up kitchen: maybe evidence of a party. Parents come home from Vegas trip and ask what happened while they were gone. Kid says, guiltily, “Nothing.” And what did you do?, he asks. Father freezes, mother turns away. “Nothing.”
What the hell did they do in Vegas? Engage in cannibalism? Dad had a male hooker? Mom mated with a donkey? The look they give suggests severe debauchery. But there’s only so much one can do, in Vegas or anywhere, isn’t there?
R&R Hall Of Fame
Todd Everett led me to the Sam Cooke biographical time-line on The R&R Hall OF Fame’s website. It goes somethin’ like this...
* In 1960, Cooke’s “gospel style” “Chain Gang” was “held back from the top spot from the abysmal novelty song ‘Mr. Custer’ by one Larry Verne.”
Wow. This is loaded. Overlooking from/from and the gospel designation, there’s the rock crit braying that “Mr. Custer’s” success was an injustice. The contention that chart positions were honest is funny, but “Mr. Custer’s” success probably WAS honest: Era Records did not have the graft capability of big labels, and so couldn’t ‘nudge’ it to the top. Era just culled promising titles, like “Mr. Custer,” from independent producers. The R&R HoF should honor Verne, and Era, as “indie-rock” pioneers.
* He’s once called “Sammy Cooke.”
* 1962 - Jimi Hendrix leaves the Army, begins working as musician.
This item was included just for ....?
* 1963, RCA records a Cooke show at the Harlem Square Club in NY.
* ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ “is considered” his greatest composition.
Because (sayeth elder rock crits) it was influenced by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind.’
* 1985, “ ‘Live At The Harlem Square Club’ is finally released, 22 years after it was recorded. The album reveals a raw, grittier side to Sam Cooke, prompting a critical reassessment.”
The record affects CRITICS, so that’s its significance! PEOPLE who saw Sam Cooke knew of his ‘grittiness’. The crit/writer is saying this quality lacked substance until crits heard it.
(P.S. I put “Louie Louie” in the R&RHoF “find” box and got -- “An Evening With Rock Journalist and Author Dave Marsh.” He wrote a book about the song, so its significance is -- a rock critic! The Kingsmen are not in the R&R H of F!!! As our own Bob Hilburn has previously sniffed about others, “Not a significant body of work.” Unlike him.)
Snearers
Prince Charles’ wedding allowed people to vent their feeling of superiority.
The L.A. Times snotty front page headline read that he’d wed his “longtime mistress.” If that isn’t loaded....
Unexplainedly, the paper sent heehawing Patt Morrison to England to issue pronouncements about herself. She also reported that the newspapers there -- those dignified British dailies -- took a “wink-and-nudge” attitude about the wedding. I could have told you that without flying there. She applied her own snear (and John Daniszewski’s, apparently a kindred spook) when they wrote an intro that Charles wed Camilla with a pledge to “be faithful to her and to forsake all others as long as they both shall live.” It’s the usual wedding vow, but she/they blasted it to remind you that he was unfaithful to his first wife. What crap.
When she came home after endless meaningless impressions of Blighty, she greeted us with this blast of fetid air: “Do you mean to tell me that in the time I’ve been away the pope dies and is laid away, the Dodgers win their home opener, Jane Fonda comes clean, the FDA yanks another as-seen-on-TV Rx off the market, Prince Charles finally marries the right girl -- and the L.A. mayor’s race is still not over?”
This “raises” two questions: Could this be more clumsy? Does she have compromising photos of someone high up at the paper?
I Cry At Weddings Too
Whenever I waver on clobbering crits, there are reminders anew.
In an old Mojo (maybe Q) interview with Lee Hazlewood, he felt terrible about a one-word review in the 1980s of his album, “Poet, Fool, Bum.” “It simply said ‘Bum’,“ he lamented. He wished the reviewer had given some more commentary, maybe saying what it was he disliked.
It was Hazlewood’s fault, putting “bum” in the title: He handed the crit a straight line. Surely the reviewer didn’t study the album; probably played one track, didn’t like it and saw his chance.
I dedicate myself to people like Hazlewood.
Kate Sullivan, L.A.’s Weekly Wacko
From Weezer interview:
Kate: One fear I have is that if I totally open up my creativity I’ll be blown away by what might come out, and lose my sense of who I am.
-- And the guy continued talking to her!
From interview with John Oates:
Kate: Setting aside your general soul roots, am I nuts or is there a serious and specific Hall & Oates vibe on the Chi-Lites’ “Oh Girl”?
-- There are two questions here. I can answer only the first.
Gene Sculatti: Letter for posting on Another Fein Mess:
The L.A. Weekly is the place to go for the arts, as
long as the arts display “edgy” concepts and content, invariably performed with “attitude” that’s “in
your face.”
This week, the Weekly's top screen recommendation goes to Murderball,
the documentary about quadriplegic rugby players. The film’s presentation of these “trash-talking, shit-kicking, competitive” sportsmen, the paper assures us, never descends to the status of a “heart-wrenching, triumph-over-adversity weepie” (what,
do they pay by the hyphen at the Weekly?).
So, if the tale of wheelchair-bound guys playing an active game has nothing to
do with compassion or the indomitable spirit of life, what, uniquely, recommends
them to us? Why, these trash-talking, shit-kicking guys are crude, loud and “proud of their raging libidos” and “crash into each other with maximum force.” Reviewer Scott Foundas reveals their special qualities: “They're
the super-jocks who threw all the wildest parties and got all the hottest girls
back in high school, and who still do.”
In other words, these guys are identical to all the other alpha clods now clogging
up every corner and closet of American culture. Like the grimacing rockers, defiant
thug rappers, anti-social skateboarders (“They came from nowhere to change everything!” read
the ads for Dogtown and Z-Boys), like the SEALs and The Shield's bad cop Michael Chiklis (who simultaneously resembles Mussolini and a just-sprung infant), like the felonious boxers and ball players and the Bush administration's vocal chickenhawks, they're a rough bunch - and, the Weekly implies, we want to be just like them.
Aren't there any other games in town?
Recent encounters of the Art kind:
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Art Laboe, AF, at Ralphs market on La Brea. 7-09-05 |
AF, Joe Saraceno, producer of the Marketts, T-Bones, Ventures, and the Joiner Arkansas High School Marching Band. AFPP, 7-19-05
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Carlos Guitarlos and daughter Eloise, Trader Joe’s
Silver Lake, 8-1-05
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Rock Crits, Rolling Crits
I’ve been reading the weekly automotive writers in the L.A. Times and finding attitudinal and psychological parallels with rock crits.
The main guy, Dan Neil, writes like he’s got an attentiongetting-phrase resource book by his side: You look for “look at me” phrases every week, and they come. (In this he is differentiated from rock writing, which is all shades of grey.) He seems to be mimicking Tom McCahill, the colorful Mechanics Illustrated auto-essayist of the 1950s and 1960s. When McCahill used an expression like “slippery as deer guts on a doorknob” (maybe he did: his works aren’t anthologized, I remember them fondly but vaguely) you believed it came from his life. When Neil writes stuff like that, it’s like he left a space for “clever wordplay” and inserted it . But he’s got a Pulitzer and a weekly humor column, so what do I know.
Neil, in assassinating the characteristics of a dull (to him) American car, ridiculed its large trunk capacity as being suitable for a salesman to carry samples10. Contrarily, his zeal for excitement had him call a new Mercedes “dangerous,” a word not normally used to praise a car.
Then another car-reviewer, Newsday’s Tom Incantalupo, caught my eye, reviewing a Nissan SUV. He wrote, in effect, that it isn’t a pansy-mobile for soccer moms, it’s a rugged he-man machine that’ll climb mountains!
Never mind this disservice he does Nissan, elminating half, at least, their market (women) with his praise, or the arrogant masculist/idiotist dismissal of soccer-moms like they’re some disease. It’s the element of excitement: This car will thrill you, it will get in your blood.
Then it struck me: These are kids, really, who crave excitement. Vance Packard showed us 50 years ago that car companies advertised convertibles to lead men into showrooms, and then sold them station wagons. It was, and is, the way of the world: flashy things attract, then solid things deliver. Look at most of the cars on the road. Are they exciting? Hardly. Toyotas and Hondas that look like they were designed by blind men have a giant chunk of the U.S. market. People just want reliable transportation, while auto critics covet shiny things that lean hard in curves and screech their tires on takeoff.
This equates to rock-crits. Not to their discredit, they crave differentness. But they use this desire, this unique, narrow viewpoint, as as platform for ridiculing the ordinary. And most people are ordinary.
10 His gall is rampant. Recently he riduculed Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the home of a Mercedes plant, as a book-burning home of bigotry. Not a brave attitude, except as it reveals his shallowness11. It reminds me of Neil Young’s shockingly simpleminded “Southern Man,” issued in 1972, years after the Civil Rights movement in the south and years after it became evident by race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles and Newark and elsewhere that the entire United States was riven with racial problems.
11 This just in: In July, a jury member from the recent Missisippi trial of a Klan member wrote an article in the L.A. Times about the decision process and its limitations. He said that he knew there were bigots in Mississippi, but that there also were intelligent people like himself. But this was probably not in response to Neal -- he said he’s intelligent.
Historical Bits
Neal McCabe gave me a BBC Radio docu on T-Rex. It said that Marc Bolan was in a band in 1959 when he was 13. Two things stood out.
1. The band was called Susie & The Hula Hoops. That sounds so cool it is nearly impossible to believe it happened then -- it’s more like something someone would make up today.
2. Susie was Helen Shapiro!
You Read It Here First
With the success of updated old tv shows, why didn’t they call “Fear Factor” what it really is, “Extreme Beat The Clock”?
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Letters
From Todd Everett:
My friend Judy's mother -- who must be 90 -- pronounces her name "HER-me-own." Only time I've ever heard it, but evidently there is more than one correct way to pronounce "Hermione."
Kinda like Bette, as in Davis/Midler.
From Bryan Thomas:
You wrote:
"I told fr Rip to bring his VCR to my guy for repair. He said "I'll bring it with, as you Chicago guys say." I couldn't hear anything wrong. "With" as a sentence-finisher sounds perfectly logical, like "bring it along." Doesn't it?"
I always refer to this as dropping the pronoun -- "I'll come with" is actually "I'll come with you" but lazily dropping the last word, which is easily understood.
But this always bugs me...why drop the pronoun? It's there for a reason -- I think ending a sentence with "I'll bring it with" and leaving off the "me" sounds unfinished. To me anyway.
From Bob Nafius
...but Artie, a "batman" is an aide to an officer in the British Army, and the derivation is the French word "bat," which means "packsaddle." The cricket connection you cited is understandable but wrong.
From Neal McCabe, re the L.A. Times’ out-of-town reporting:
Gosh, I'm so-o-o-o excited! It's really super cool that we have a new $100 million concert hall, don't you think? Oh, wait a second - it's in Maryland. But millions of LA Times subscribers were no doubt thrilled to read about it. And maybe fifty of them will eventually go there. Mark Swed strikes again...
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The Last Out:
FOR MEN ONLY:
NO GALS ALLOWED
GIRLS GO AWAY
MAN-TALK
DISTAFFS EXIT NOW
SCRAMOLA
FAIR WARNING
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U.S. Male
A friend around the same age (in the vanguard of the post-war baby boom) and straits (prostate out) wrote this interesting letter:
I enjoy your “masculism.” You may be onto a movement. I had sexual reduction around the time I had my prostate out. I couldn’t come, pass fluid. Pump as I may it stayed inside. To this day I don’t know if it was because of the microscopic cancer in the prostate, or natural, from age. Now when I come, there’s action in my dick, but at climax when the dick mimics ejaculation, a shock wave spreads all down my body, especially my legs, which stiffen very very hard. (I could pull a muscle!) Come to think of it, that transferance, from dick to legs, came before the operation: sometimes right at the peak when I expected a lava flow, a little came out but the main energy went to the legs. (This was usually during solo sex.) Since I had juice to burn (I thought) I experimented with this alternate release method, and found it oddly satisfactory. Like now. Some women have said I was coming like a woman.
But something else has happened for which I am very grateful: I am less sex-driven than before. From the age of 16 to 30 I wanted sex every waking hour. At 30 it dropped to 80%, by 50 about 60%. If this sounds like I was all sexed up, that is true, but that’s hardly bragging. I was troubled by it. I could not resist the slightest opportunity to have, or peak at, sex. I had no choice. It controlled me.
I have heard the term sex-addict and laughed, because it has overtones of bragging, like I’m such a fucker. What it means is that I was addicted to sex, had to have it -- and didn’t. Not enough. Not every day. And not with every woman I saw. So I spent most of those 16-57 years unhappy. I’m sure I could have accomplished more if I hadn’t had sex on the brain, up front, all that time.
And another good thing is that I’m less dick-centered. Since my goal is not to come, exactly - the climax, while good, is something more akin to a trauma than before - I am more interested in, you know, crawling around the gal, going slow, exploring. It’s what women want, they tell me.
In “Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards” Al Kooper relates meeting Milton Berle on an airplane. Berle, who was well-known as a lover, told Kooper “Let me tell ya, Al, -- you don’t know how to fuck till you get to be my age.” Which was eighty.
Now that’s some cheery news
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