And perhaps to the delight of his 60 Minutes audience. But honestly, Andy, you have so heard of these people. You may not know any of their songs, but you couldn’t talk about not knowing them unless you did. So there.

It just so happens that this week, neither Justin Bieber nor Lady Gaga is in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, but Usher, also mentioned on 60 Minutes, is #1 this week. The song is called OMG and features will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas. I have never consciously heard this song, and may never have heard it at all. But I’m sure I hate it, and probably more virulently than Andy Rooney, even though I’m less than half as ancient as him.

You can say I’m old and I just don’t get it, but the problem is that I do get it. I got it the first time around, when Madonna created the first musical product that was based more around the personality and visual style of the singer than their voice or their songs. Madonna has made a splendid fortune selling her image, with her records as a sort of aural souvenir, a way to conjure her up before the next film or CD or book or magazine or ad campaign dose. On the way, she also (I believe) helped bring gay culture into the mainstream, warming up the populace by giving them a glimpse into her club-kid, fashiony world. Her very public, ambiguous sexuality challenged the popular notion of the unattractive lesbian who “couldn’t get a man”, mainstreaming the 90s lipstick lesbian underground scene fomenting in storefronts and basements since at least the mid 80s. But I find most of Madonna’s records almost unlistenable almost all the time.

I watched and listened to Bad Romance, and I found it derivative and poseury, full of fake masochism and pop cliches.Contrasted with, say, the banned video for Nine Inch Nails’ Happiness in Slavery.

Anyway, my point is that as the tidal wave of information sweeps over us in the post-modern age, we’ve forgotten how great the Top 40 used to be. Today, please consider this song, which peaked at #4 in both the US and the UK in April 1971:

Co-written and arranged by George Harrison, this is the kind of song that was mainstream at the time. David Bowie was still an up-and-coming underground star pre-Ziggy, Lou Reed hadn’t yet released Transformer and Iggy Pop was still in the Stooges. Other top 40 artists included James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Marvin Gaye… and not one lick of that accursed autotune.

I probably couldn’t afford so much as a button off a McQueen gown, but this makes me so, so sad.

Time for a little rant to ring in the New Year:

Notice I say “New Year”  and not “New Decade”. Who ever said it was okay to count to 10 this way?

All you culture vultures, pundits and wags who are preparing to sign off on the first decade of the 21st century- not so fast! Let’s be serious about this from now on and count properly. All you party goers who are preparing for your big, decade-ending night on the town- I got sour news for you, Jack- you’re a year early!

Ask any first grader  to count to 10, and she will start at 1 and finish at 10.

No one, in fact, ever counts to 10 by starting at 0 and working their way up to 9. It’s just wrong.

Listen to the Tattooed Lady, and enjoy the last year of the decade. Decade. From the root deca. It means 10.

Maybe I’ll even make my own Top 10 of the Decade list. Next year.

But why end the year on such a curmudgeonly note?

Even though my natural inclination is to pray for the endless 80s nostalgia to be over, I have to admit it produced some very amazing works. This is one of them. Ladies and gentlemen, Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, live ‘84 extended version:

The song is charming (posted with permission):

So I went to take a look at today’s headlines when I noticed an item on the T Magazine Style Blog titled Notes from the Velvet Underground. “Oh, goody,” I said to myself. “I wonder what the style news is on the great VU.” I thought it might be a guide on where to buy great striped sailor shirts- I saw a girl looking hot in one on the street in the freezing cold last night in Soho. But I was horrified by what I read. Horrified!

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So crazily enough, just the other day I found myself trying to remember the words to “She’s Just 14“, the Rolling Stones-produced John Phillips song about his daughter Mackenzie. Readers who are paying attention will notice that the title of Mackenzie’s new book, High On Arrival, is taken from these very lyrics. And even though I’ve long thought the song was a) an excellent example of the prodigious talent of John Phillips; and b) a testament to terrible rock ‘n’ roll parenting, it only occurred to me the other day, as I struggled to remember the lyrics: John Phillips had sex with his daughter.

So imagine my stunned surprise when Mackenzie announced that exact shocker on Oprah a couple of days later.

Although the track was recorded in the mid 70s, and the alleged incestuous rape and subsequent “relationship” didn’t happen until the end of that decade, you can already hear how Phillips idealized and romanticized his little girl. It’s terrifying to think of her, surrounded by her father’s entourage, with no one to really look out for her except a man who had, it seems from his own words, concocted a dangerous and narcissistic fantasy about and around her.

While it may be true that the timing of these very public pronouncements is calculated to sell as many of Mackenzie’s books as possible, it’s very easy to imagine the impossible position Phillips put his firstborn child in.

And even moreso because Mackenzie Phillips is not the first celebrity daughter of a celebrity father to confess to this kind of situation.

Although it was never  revealed publicly during her lifetime, Anais Nin wrote about her own adult sexual relationship with her father in her journals, published as Incest after her husband’s death in 1985. Like Mackenzie Phillips, Anais Nin was the firstborn child of a charismatic, famous musician. Joaquin Nin y Castellanos was a concert pianist and composer, and quite a ladykiller, a man who slept with thousands of women. He abandoned Anais’ mother when his daughter was just a young girl, but as the eldest child, she had a more vivid and personal memory of him than her younger brothers. Her famous lifelong diary began as a letter to him in 1914.

In the unexpurgated diary, the June 23, 1933 entry describes Anais’ seduction by her father and her mixed feelings about their subsequent year-long affair, during which Anais was alternately guilty and compliant, writing about her revulsion and desire to flee, but also the tremendous feelings he aroused in her. She finally writes of being free from his spell on June 10, 1934, after she started an affair with psychoanalyst Otto Rank. She could recognize her father’s narcissism, and described to some extent the power he had over her as the critical, glamorous, remote parent for whom she needed to be perfect, beautiful and lovable.

Blood-curdling.

I know I shouldn’t say so myself, but I have the coolest birthdate. Ever. No sh*t.

What makes it so much cooler than, say, your birthday?

Well, I will tell you.

My birthday is 6/23/1966. I was born at 11:23pm- which I only recently (yeah, at my advanced age!) realized is also known as 23:23.

That’s 6/23/66 23:23 for those of you just tuning in. Two days before Rosemary’s baby; 3 6s, 3 23s.

3 is my all-time favorite number, the only one whose multiples always add up to a number divisible by 3. In other words, if you can divide a number by 3, you can also add up that number’s integers and the sum of those integers will also be a number divisible by 3. 3 is always 3! Once I told a good friend of mine that 3 was my favorite number, to which he replied that he preferred pi. Dude, pi is also 3, just with some extra sauce.

The photo, though it’s hard to tell, is a Chocolate Bomb, my chosen birthday dessert indulgence. It is comprised of chocolate sponge cake, milk chocolate pudding and dark chocolate pudding, combined in an unholy, decadent combo that is comforting and silky and almost a religious experience. I was indirectly involved in the creation of the Chocolate Bomb when I gave a friend a Chocolate Trifle as a birthday present. He suggested the lovely folks at Sugar Sweet Sunshine make something similar. And now they do, every day.

There was also champagne, dinner…  and a perfect, delectable Loved One. 43, yum!

Basically, we decided to crochet flowers out of plastic bags and attach them to  motors hooked up to little solar panels. In the morning, when sunshine falls on the panels, the flowers spin around. If you block them with your shadow, they stop.

Many people have been asking about purchasing the flowers, and I’m making some more and putting pins on them. The ones in  the window were made by me and an amazing crew of volunteers. The window display itself was made and installed with the indispensable help of Desiree Lee.

I’m looking at some other patterns and will be making more flowers in the coming months. Maybe this will even develop into something TuraLura? Stay tuned…

It’s kind of an odd thing, but I love Valentine’s Day. I did not always love it, and even now, I don’t love everything about it. I don’t love greeting cards, baby’s breath or teddy bears. I’m rather indifferent to roses, especially when the price is jacked up. There have been times when I’ve barely noticed it or cared, and times when I’ve dropped a wad of cash or a torrent of tears. (more…)

I was in the bank waiting on a very long line when the bank manager walked up to me and said:
Would you please take off your sunglasses and your hood?

I was wearing sunglasses and a hood because it was
a. sunny
b. cold
although I also like to wear sunglasses in the rain. And snow.

This is what I looked like:

I was not excited to do so but I complied with his request, perplexed, until he said:
There have been a lot of bank robberies. Nearby.

And I felt a welling up inside me, of pain as my weak eyes blinked in the fluorescent light, and of outrage on account of the assault on my Cultural Privilege, one of the most glaring features of which is the presumption of innocence. Because I am a white, middle class, heterosexual female with acceptable gender expression.

A typically passive feminine power, this power of presumed innocence, perhaps, but powerful nonetheless. I have long been fascinated by the power of helplessness, the power that panicky, unreasonable or psychotic people have over everyone around them. I believe a lot of the cultural power invested in femininity is the same: the power of being unpowerful, of being the last suspect. I have gotten away with a lot because of this sex-class-and-race-based privilege. And I kind of enjoy being reminded that that’s what I’m enjoying- Cultural Privilege, not just the fruits of my sparkling, warm personality, when people are nice or make allowances for me for no reason.

So I very quickly got over my (unexpressed) outrage; after all, the man was just doing his job. Although baseball caps seem to be the disguise of choice for the modern-day bank robber.

But what about getaway cars? I am not a bank robber, and I don’t ever intend to become one, but if I ever have to have a getaway car, I hope it looks like this: