Tag Archives: J.D. Salinger

Apropos Of Nothing: I Like My Bon Mots Shaken, Not Stirred

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It should all be about whose nuke button is bigger these days.
And whose hands are thankfully smaller.
Thus, I should be writing to you from the (highly probable) end of the world, like Pablo Neruda. Instead, I’ll write you long time about petty and juvenile things that got my striped tail ruffled. I’ll write to you about kerfuffles–one of my favorite toppings, so spare me the nuts with the sprinkles on top.

It’s been forever and a day and a half.
But it’s 10:00 p.m. and do you know where my bon mots are?
Without giving any of it away, let me just say that imitation is the greatest form of pilfering. As if as if, in the great scheme of new things?! Hmmm.

To one of my fave recappers–who shall remain Dameless–my words are meant to be shaken, not stirred.

If the other one of you two see any of these running amok anywhere else in the vast and shallowest end of the internets, please return them to yours truly:

1. As two of you may know
2. Apropos of nothing
3. Continue-to-continue
4. Sucks a hard boiled egg through a straw (TM/LOL)
5. Back in the day when we had more days (TM/LOL)
6. Easy breezing (Cover Girling)
7. HoWos (housewives)
8. Loathe/hate others more than ourselves for loving them (usually referring to Housewives–Real or imagined)
9. Instituents (Hapless addicts who choose to mainline deadly Bravo TV shows on the steps of a fictitious Institute dedicated to this type of sociopathic anthropological loitering–and loathe others more than themselves for loving it. Note: Yours truly not only fits that coveted red soled shoe, but is teetering on the edge of perdition in it, while chewing gum. Here’s looking at you, Mike Pence! Wish you were here with Chump and the ghost of Gerald Ford).
10. If as if
10.5 As if as if
11. Tenebrous (although I didn’t coin it, all Instituents know that I own it as Lisar only could wish and fucking dream of truly owning any goddamned thing in this bankrupt world made for people with teeny tiny hands and simple girls with butt-implant-dreams in this more cruel and punishing Joan Riverless world,sigh ).
12. Uncle Pa (a litmus test meant to identify those whose hands are teeniest, generationally speaking).
13. Yikes squared
14. Mainlining (can be substituted for “It’s raining men” or “Fetch is never going to happen”, in hapless situations. Other than that, it should be strictly used to describe an uncontrollable urge to watch depraved Bravo TV while distractedly fiddling or going to the fridge as Rome burns, so to speak).
15. Real Housewives Of All Perdition (the pettiest of Pettyfleurs that bring us all here and for whom we loathe others more than our Soggy Flicking selves for loving, mmk?!).
15.5. You can find my trademark slogans and original emoticon writing out there in the shallowest depths of the tundras or in the booniest backwater outbacks where only the tumbleweeds and the best of the HoWos blow.
15.75. Imitation is the greatest form of pilfering.

“And that is a fact. And that is that.”

I did learn from the best: Mr. Bowie, for whom I and all the Stars remain ever different each and every mournful day…
Here are my faves–still untoppable:

1. Leper Messiah (taught me Everything about Every Thing literally, literarily, figuratively, unilaterally, perpendicularly, elliptically, isosceles or merely imagined).
2. The shrieking of nothing was killing me (made me runaway to join a circus that still claims me–music–and never lets go. Fuck you Trump and your little hands, too! Have not written anything since this fascist Uncle Pa has taken our world hostage. So fuck you and the white supremacist horse of the apocalypse you ride on, you misogynist pig, you!).

3. Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis

4. Paris or maybe hell (I’m waiting)….

5. I bless you madly, sadly as I tie my shoes

6. The entire lyrics to the song Aladdin Sane (as I just discovered yesterday to be the source of all literary aspirational pilfering and envy–or just merely wanting to ponder if any writer can challenge one’s humble self to graze such grace and effortless brilliance, where that bar is raised as high as the firmament. Pondering that, while I ask myself am I a two-bit writer worthy of pilfering? And why does it piss me off, instead of flatter me as I strive to graze this high? Without drugs, ’cause I was always persnicketily averse to them!? And where did it get me? Hahahaha.

I’d also like to thank the inimitable Mr. Salinger for teaching me the unrepentant joy of Italicizing half a word–a lowest-down honor reserved for the most pompously vapid, shallowest characters (the kind that may otherwise find reason to whine between syllables if not sternly made to sit in a corner without their cell phone, instead). And least but never last, I’d like to thank Mr. Richard Lawson for the most sublime yet triumphantly literary, inspiring, wistful and legendary Real Housewives Of All Perdition Recap endings of ye olde Gawker dayes of yore. And I’d like to thank the up and coming somebody who thankfully saw fit to follow that lead in print and not let them die with Gawker’s demise.

Aladdin Sane
By David Bowie:

Watching him dash away, swinging an old bouquet (dead roses)
Sake and strange divine Uh-h-h-uh-h-uh you’ll make it
Passionate bright young things, takes him away to war (don’t fake it)
Sadden glissando strings
Uh-h-h-uh-h-uh, you’ll make it

Who’ll love Aladdin Sane
Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise
Who’ll love Aladdin Sane

Motor sensational, Paris or maybe hell (I’m waiting)
Clutches of sad remains
Waits for Aladdin Sane you’ll make it

Who’ll love Aladdin Sane
Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise
Who’ll love Aladdin Sane

We’ll love Aladdin Sane
Love Aladdin Sane

Who’ll love Aladdin Sane
Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise
Who’ll love Aladdin Sane

We’ll love Aladdin Sane
We’ll love Aladdin Sane

Songwriters: David Bowie
Aladdin Sane lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC, Tintoretto Music

The artist formerly known as Yours Truly takes her no longer ruffled, striped tail in her paw and bows deeply, madly, as she ties her imaginary red-soled shoes. I’ve been nowhere, she tells you. And you know. And it’s all merely words now. If as if themz was not fightin’ words, Uncle Pa.

Bowie Pulls a Salinger, aka, Disappearing Act Under Our Very Eyes

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Planet Earth is bluer— these days— and there’s nothing I can do, with Bowie nowhere to be seen. How did this all happen? Following his onstage heart attack during his 2004 Reality Tour in Germany, the Thin White Duke has made but a scant, highly select handful of appearances. A solid decade later, a whole wide world is realizing, in an inconsolably sobering way, that he’s pulled a J.D. Salinger. I ask myself, why does this keep happening with my truest of heroes?

Didn’t Bowie appear on a collective radar with “Space Oddity? And didn’t Salinger register most—particularly amongst the bookburners—with the iconic Catcher In The Rye? Sadly, didn’t the protagonist of either inescapably embraced phenomenon distinctly forewarn of this tendency—to pull their own plugs on society— within their own storyline? I’ve had to often explain that astronaut Major Tom chooses not to come back to Earth. What in the world does that mean? Well, it means, specifically, that he’s chosen to spin off into oblivion in his tin can. And whatever else could that mean but suicide amongst the stars? The unsettling image also conjures scenes of the film, My Life As A Dog, as its 12 year old protagonist admits that his life may be rough, but not nearly as horrible as the Russian cosmonaut dog, Laika, who was sent spinning into space without a return clause.

Alas, Holden Caufield, similarly and distinctly, describes wanting to go and live in a cabin in the woods. And so, his creator, did just that. For decades, I recall journalists’ plaintive cries that decreed landing a Salinger interview would be as newsworthy as establishing the existence of life on Mars. A Salinger interview was, arguably, the most sought-after coup on the planet, yet nobody was able to pull it off. There was the expose’ by Joyce Maynard, a young writer that admits to having shared his cabin in the woods in Cornish, New Hampshire, but I won’t go into the incendiary controversy that ensued, nor the chastising and blackballing that was unleashed upon her by the literary community as it struck out with vehemence in deference of Salinger’s reclusive integrity.

Both Bowie and Salinger, strangely, might have wanted to metaphorically go to Lhasa, so to speak. Stranger yet, there is anecdotal evidence that may hint that this hyperbole might not have been strictly metaphorical as these controversial and profoundly influential artists shared a definitive quest for Buddhist tenets inclusive of daily rituals of the most esoteric transcendental arts . That too, I sadly shared-in without fulfillment, ad infinitum. Last year, Bowie did produce an album that I’ve yet to fully explore. Don’t ask me why, for the answer may be as devastating as finding out, as a ten year old, that Tibet was under Chinese occupation and nobody could either get in nor out of it.

As Bowie remained a no-show at February’s Brit Awards, while Kate Moss claimed the coveted doohickey for Best British Male (artist) 2014 on his behalf, there has been rash and persistent speculation about the frailty of his body and mind. As for myself, the thought conjures what some of us can only speculate as being proof that Iman is keeping him in a dungeon—preferably a sex one—while sending her Ubermodel friend to the event on their behalf.

There continues to be a flurry of shrill speculation stirred by several photos that emerged wherein either the caption read something to the tune of: “Rare sighting of a frail Bowie in NYC shuffling about disoriented with lunch bag” or another such: “Unidentified woman seen with reclusive Bowie near his NYC residence”. I’m not going to play the game of outguessing anybody about the state of his hypothetical Alzheimer, possible strokes, nor the presumed maleficent intent in his looming absence. All I know is that I may be one of the few left who can laugh at the caption beneath the photo of the unidentified woman. So, I’ll ask in defiant jest, am I the only one who can identify Coco Schwab—his long time assistant and confidant—in and outside of a police lineup, if need be? Time wears bafflingly strange on us all, but I, more so, should have seen hints of this heart-wrenching disappearance as part of a plausible escape clause, laid out a long, long time ago.