“…I’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday…”
It’s my birthday. I’m 26. I’m feeling strangely okay about this.
The server has almost fully recovered from last week’s attack. My e-mail is back up and running, so I’m once again receiving all those helpful e-mails about Rolex watches, bigger penises, larger cumloads and moms I’d like to fuck (all of which, coincidentally, can be found on my birthday present wish list).
Actually, there are two new spams I’ve gotten that are pretty amusing. One is some sort of spray can that promises to make your license plate invisible to those traffic cameras that catch you running red lights. It’s the sort of product that causes one to marvel at the ingenuity of capitalism. The other is software that will help you vote as many times as you want for “American Idol.” I, for one, am encouraged by the youth of today’s zeal for participatory democracy.
I’ll be at Botanica (Houston and Mulberry) tonight, “celebrating.” Please, no autographs.
To Insure Proper Service
Is it bad manners, bad breeding or consumer alienation in our service economy that makes your typical New York Times reader so fucking stupid?
For the second time in recent memory, the Times’ Dining and Wine section has published an article on obvious tipping etiquette. The gist of the message?
At the end of the day New York’s delivery rules are pretty basic: Watch your dog. Have your money ready. Tip well, and do it in cash.
No fucking duh. Earlier in the year, the Times wrote about a couple of websites where waitstaff complain about bad patrons and reveal (gasp!) that customers who are rude and don’t tip will get a little extra spit in their meal. Have these uppity twits never heard the term “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you?” Is it only we socialists who think that working people deserve respect and decent pay?
I’m a picky eater, so I’m a even more careful about pissing off the waitstaff. In a hectic restaurant, every deviation from the menu is a pain in the ass. I know that, but I really can’t stand “goo” (i.e. mayo, mustard, salad dressing, etc.), so in the nicest, politest way possible, I request that it be left out of my meal…and I make sure to tip generously. I actually make a point of being a regular at most places that I eat. It’s just easier. It only takes two or three meals with a pleasant request to abstain from goo and a handsome tip at the end of the meal before the waitress can predict my idiosyncrasies.
“Pineapple fried rice, salad – no dressing – right?” they ask with a smile at 9th and 46th’s Yum Yum Bangkok whenever I eat there. In fact, once I nearly broke up with my girlfriend while dining there. It took forever to get the check. When it came, the waitress was very concerned and said that the chef had noticed that I hardly touched my meal and wanted to know if anything was wrong. It was touching that they cared, and certainly preferable to a little spit. I don’t need to feel like Lord of the Manor when I eat out, and I don’t understand why anybody else does.
So, if you’re one of those twits who doesn’t know how to tip, the rules are pretty basic: Tip your waitstaff at least 20% (if the service is bad, you can tip 15%). Tip your delivery guy 20% no matter how long you’ve waited and cough up more dough if the weather sucks. Tip your bartender a buck or two for every drink; if you’re buying expensive stuff, tip more. Tip anyone who comes to your home to perform a service. Just fucking be ready to tip. Consulting with others with how large a tip you should give is fine, as long as you begin with the belief that people in the service sector deserve extra compensation. They’re not your serfs. They’re just working stiffs whose low wages are the result of the low prices you’re paying. That’s right, the lower prices are just a cheap come-on since you’re expected to make up the difference with your tip. Think that’s unfair? What about your waitress who is trying to make a living on crappy wages and tips that are subject to situations that are beyond her control? Mentally adjust the advertised price and tip accordingly.
Hear You Been To College?
I’ve been hiding a secret. I applied to grad school. When I graduated from Queens College, I was pretty sure that I was done with school. I felt like the higher up you go in higher education, the less actual education there is and the more image-conscious bullshit there is (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ward Churchill). Besides you can only “study” the labor movement for so long before you become an armchair academic critic. It’s much more of an education to go to work for a union. Get in there and get your hands dirty. You’ll do some amazing work, but you won’t stay ideologically pure, and you’ll be better off for it.
I’ve counseled lots of people to stay away from grad school. Hell, I’ve counseled people to drop out of college if the right gig came along. “Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time?” I’m frustrated that too many people go from high school to undergrad to grad, all in succession, and find themselves in their mid-to-late-twenties, deeply in debt and knowing lots about little.
Given my attitude, which is well-known among friends and family, you can understand why I decided to keep this under my hat. I applied to the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, but I didn’t just apply to any old grad school program. Through my comrade Matt Andrews, I learned about a special program of the university’s Labor Center, its Union Leadership and Administration Master’s of Science in Labor. It’s a limited residency program for active union staff. The idea is to go through the program while continuing your full-time (and then some) job in labor. You do the assigned readings during your own time, go to Amherst for ten days of instruction a semester and then return home to write your papers. That’s a workable schedule.
The UMass Labor Studies department has a great reputation for being hard-working, down-to-earth and pro-labor. The course listing looks awesome. Besides the core required courses in law, history and research, it looks like there’s some really nitty-gritty administration training in here, like “Union Financial Analysis” and “Human Resources Management for Union Leaders” (a lot of us could use that course!).
One thing that I’ve missed the last few years is a feeling of connection to a broader movement for social change. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in one’s work and miss for the forest for the trees. I think I need to make this sort of commitment to myself in order to maintain links between my work and my union and the larger movement.
Of course, I’m not currently “active union staff,” though I’m working on it. I hesitated before applying. I do so hate rejection. Well, today I officially received the good news that I’ve known for two weeks. I’ve been accepted to the program. My reading assignments come in April, and my classes begin in July. I promise you will hear more about my experience in this program in the coming months and years.
Sticky Fingers
“Sticky Fingers” is a dark record that finds the Rolling Stones in the mother of all transitions. Freed from both their contract with Allen Klein and London Records and their rivalry with the Beatles, who, upon their break-up, left the Stones as “the World’s Greatest Rock-n-Roll Band.” The record features the official debut of their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, the young blonde blues virtuoso from the U.S.A. who replaced Brian Jones as lead guitarist before Ron Wood claimed that position as his birthright. It also features the debut of Rolling Stones Records, the tongue-and-lips logo and Mick Jagger as consummate businessman.
Fortunately, Keith Richards had not yet fully succumbed to the junk dependency that ultimately claimed Brian Jones and was able to keep Mick Jagger in check and ensure that the Stones remained musically vital and interesting (at least until “Goat’s Head Soup”). Nevertheless, “Sticky Fingers” is the druggiest record the Rolling Stones ever released. It’s one of the druggiest records of all time. In between the album’s opener, “Brown Sugar” (among other things, a euphemism for heroin) and its closer, “Moonlight Mile,” with the singer’s “head full of snow,” at least half of the record’s songs directly reference hard drugs. When they’re not singing about a drug overdose, as on “Sister Morphine,” or about getting over a heartbreak “with a needle and a spoon and another girl to take my pain away,” as on “Dead Flowers,” Jagger and Richards still don’t hide their (mostly Keith’s) drug problems too well.
The album’s second track, the bluesy, druggy “Sway” poetically says “It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway,” but it sounds an awful lot like “It’s just that needle, it’s got me in its sway.” And on “Bitch,” one of “Sticky Fingers'” two great riff rockers, they liken love to being “juiced up and sloppy.”
On its surface, “Bitch” seems like just another of Mich Jagger’s misogynistic songs, but the “bitch” here is not a woman but the feelings of love and lust that she conjures. It’s the man in the song who is reduced to an animal, a horse kicking the stall or one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs. Like “Satisfaction,” the song is built around a Keith Richards riff written for horns. Unlike “Satisfaction,” however, the Rolling Stones of 1971 can actually afford a horn section, which gives the song a lift and a majesty that earns that title of “the World’s Greatest Blah, Blah, Blah…”
The album’s other great riff rocker is its classic opener, “Brown Sugar.” Now here’s a song that employs classic Mick Jagger misogyny along with a distressing racism. Those of you who were too busy headbanging to Keef’s clarion guitar might not have noticed that the song’s lyrics are about an American plantation master having sex with his young slaves (the song, for those of you who are trivially-minded, was originally titled “Black Pussy;” at least Mick remembered some semblance of taste). What makes a good little Labour Party member go so bad? It has to be distance. It’s the same distance that compelled Prince Harry to wear that ridiculous Nazi uniform to a party recently. To the Brits, the Nazi’s were those guys who dropped bombs on London. Wearing their insignia has been a wonderful way to rebel since the earliest days of punk. The Holocaust, with its wholesale slaughter of Jews and European Gypsies, queers and commies has no immediacy to them because it wasn’t their people who were slaughtered. Likewise, the British outlawed slavery long before their rebel colonies, and their slavery was not so pervasive and hereditary. So, to Mick Jagger, it has no immediacy. It holds no immediate connection or shame. It’s camp.
Country music is also treated as camp by Jagger. By this time, Keith Richards had struck up a profound and influential friendship with Gram Parsons, the former Byrd and founder of “alternative country.” Rock-n-Roll’s basic chemistry is one part blues and one part country. The Stones had long embraced the former, but Parsons convinced Keef that country was beautiful and primordial. He had also influenced their earlier hit, “Honky Tonk Women,” but on “Sticky Fingers” the Stones turn in two bona-fide country ballads. One is “Dead Flowers,” which marries its drug references and spiteful lyrics about an ex-girlfriend who thinks she’s the “queen of the underground” with a steel pedal guitar and Mick’s sarcastic affected drawl. It is a touchstone for much of what is ironic and self-conscious about today’s “alternative country.”
Far more beautiful and sincere is “Wild Horses,” for which Mick plays it straight. The song was a rare instance (and perhaps the last) of Jagger and Richards allowing another artist, in this case Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers, to record one of their songs before the Stones. The Flying Burrito Brothers play the song straight-forward and sincerely, probably inspiring the Stones to do the same. It was a fitting gift to Gram Parsons. The only other gift he got from Keef was a taste of his super-human tolerance for drugs, which was too much for Parsons, who died three years later.
“Wild Horses” was a Jagger/Richards composition, although Marianne Faithful has recently claimed that she co-wrote the song. This is a plausible claim, since Faithful wrote “Sister Morphine” all by her lonesome, only to watch her own recorded version of the song make no dent in the charts and then have Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (by then, her ex-boyfriend) claim co-songwriting credit on the Stones’ rendition of the song, which has become a classic. However, it seems “Wild Horses” was composed by Keith Richards as a lullaby for his kids. Jagger sang it at Faithfull’s bedside after an overdose (perhaps the one that inspired “Sister Morphine”). When she awoke, she told Mick “wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” but this was just a sub-conscious memory from her coma.
The album’s cover artwork is classic Andy Warhol: a black-and-white close-up of a blue-jeans-clad crotch. Inside the album, the same crotch is stripped to the underwear, an erect cock evident. It makes explicit what Warhol’s cover to “The Velvet Underground and Nico” made implicit. Like the V.U.’s “peel slowly and see” banana, “Sticky Fingers'” cover was interactive: the original pressings of the l.p featured a fully functioning zipper. It’s artistic touches like this that we will miss when recorded music makes the final leap to digital downloads. We’ll also miss fully-realized albums like “Sticky Fingers,” which is an essential component for any argument in favor of rock-n-roll as a long-playing album medium.