Yeah. There’s going to be a precision bombing exercise at Fox News on August 6th. Silly people being low key for the sake of being not so bad candidates. Why?

What really happened 70 years ago.

Thursday, they’re telling us, August 6. Ten years ago on that date it was Harry’s 60th birthday. He offered two Psongs.

Now it’s his 70th. He offers one more.

PSONG 70

You passed beyond me. I was cold.
2 We had not spoken, I was cold.
3 Grey ladies came to make you old,
4 And I was angry you grew old.
5 But that was never what we do or did,
6 We never cared for what they did.
7 Our hatred and our love were not their ken,
8 Only seething awful fire of kin.
9 You died on me, last punch at love.
10 But die you couldn’t really, frightful love.
11 God eternal, beyond my sin.
12 My god, the truth, beyond my ken.
13 I hated you, you hated me.
14 You walked away, and I did too.

I told my wife I could write a Psong in a minute flat. Not a big deal. It’s always bottled up inside. It just needs letting out now and again.

From the Psongs Of Harry…

PSONG 59

Father,
2 I have broken you, ignored you, killed you,
3 But you do not fade away; you turn toward me in my dreams as you never did in fact,
4 And I am not shocked or shamed,
5 But matter of fact;
6 We are the same cup, drunk by different faces.
7 Some are poisoned, some are fed,
8 Some are, of course, indifferent or indignant.
9 I have looked into your cup, you into mine;
10 My liquor is older than yours, and younger.
11 What I see in its liquid skin is the world of me,
12 Me a transparent tattoo on its slippery flesh,
13 All evaporating, waiting to be consumed,
14 Pregnant intoxicant mirage.
15 But when I ask you to look,
16 You see you, the shimmering skin of a world ago,
17 And there I am only an unreflected memory of mine.
18 Why, then, do you smile in my dreams?
19 Is that my memory again, my wish, my punishment?
20 Or is it the blending, at last, of the dregs of our final draught?

PSONG 60

I could give up sleeping,
2 But for the alarm of morning,
3 Which wants to surprise us awake,
4 With a brand new ancient lesson.
5 Every morning is everywhere,
6 The center of being undraped and unafraid,
7 On display for its satellites.
8 When I was in Rio, I flung open the broad smiling horizon built upon my balcony,
9 And I squinted the darkness away.
10 Today I roll out under the roof of morning,
11 Trusting a sun I can’t see,
12 Imagining the boastful light above the trusses and timbers and shingles of our conceits,
13 But I do not dare to look at the blush of retreating night,
14 That pink behind we all must show,
15 In impotent flight.
16 Darkness always loses courage in the end,
17 And dawn wins every day.
18 So must I,
19 But more slowly now than then,
20 When I was young.

My boys. The ones who keep trying. My hand is out, but they’re frightened.

WILLIE.2.1-6. Many years have passed. I’m aware that for most of you the number 69 is itself magical. Brings back lost youth and all that. But when youth seems lost, it is lost. I know. I am Harry. I wrote the truth nearly ten years ago. Now you can read it again.

PSONG 59
Father,
2 I have broken you, ignored you, killed you,
3 But you do not fade away; you turn toward me in my dreams as you never did in fact,
4 And I am not shocked or shamed,
5 But matter of fact;
6 We are the same cup, drunk by different faces.
7 Some are poisoned, some are fed,
8 Some are, of course, indifferent or indignant.
9 I have looked into your cup, you into mine;
10 My liquor is older than yours, and younger.
11 What I see in its liquid skin is the world of me,
12 Me a transparent tattoo on its slippery flesh,
13 All evaporating, waiting to be consumed,
14 Pregnant intoxicant mirage.
15 But when I ask you to look,
16 You’d see you, the shimmering skin of a world ago,
17 And there I am only an unreflected memory of mine.
18 Why, then, do you smile in my dreams?
19 Is that my memory again, my wish, my punishment?
20 Or is it the blending, at last, of the dregs of our final draught?

PSONG 60
I could give up sleeping,
2 But for the alarm of morning,
3 Which wants to surprise us awake,
4 With a brand new ancient lesson.
5 Every morning is everywhere,
6 The center of being undraped and unafraid,
7 On display for its satellites.
8 When I was in Rio, I flung open the broad smiling horizon built upon my balcony,
9 And I squinted the darkness away.
10 Today I roll out under the roof of morning,
11 Trusting a sun I can’t see,
12 Imagining the boastful light above the trusses and timbers and shingles of our conceits,
13 But I do not dare to look at the blush of retreating night,
14 That pink behind we all must show,
15 In impotent flight.
16 Darkness always loses courage in the end,
17 And dawn wins every day.
18 So must I,
19 But more slowly now than then,
20 When I was young.

I am still not who you think I am.

You think you can win. Nobody does. All you can hope for is a close fly-by. Which I watch for every day from my balcony. In Rio. Only a handful have the guts. And most of those who do crash.

Don’t send me a card. Send yourselves one instead. Be kind.

Created a complete literary movement from scratch.

The Epistle Dedicatory and signatories of The Boomer Bible.

Wrote the first infinitely hyper-linked novel.

Links from a single verse of The Boomer Bible, which has 2001 chapters, exactly, and 20 times that number of verses. 2001 becomes relevant later.

Reconfigured the physics of time.

Three Dimensions of Time

Wrote a sonnet in 60 seconds, against a stopwatch.

Harry’s 70th Birthday Sonnet.

I’ve been told it’s good. Innovative even.

Beat the Turing Test.

Non-Sequiturs Rule.

Predicted 9/11.

From a database of just 312 characters (about 2 1/2 tweets), my book’s Table of Harrier Days literally drew a picture of the 9/11 attacks.

Not going to list them all for you and give you titles and chapter and page numbers. Just a few hints. I know, bait and switch, right? But switch to what? How about a brand new alphabetic bestiary just for you, the readers? Let’s do it. (Starting time is 9:59 am EDT.)

A is for the Audience, which might include you but not primarily. We want to be discovered when they start digging through the rubble to start rebuilding it all.

B is for Bibles. Four of them at last count. Only three at Amazon though. But in existence.

C is for comedy, cartoons, and comics. I’ve done quite a lot of these by now. They’re fun. And deadly in earnest.

D is for Dactylic Hexameter. The flip side of anapestic. The hardwired rhythm of epics. Why the ascendancy of iambs has killed nobility and meaning in literature.

E is for entertainment. I write because I find it so entertaining to turn my own mind inside out to see what’s in there.

F is for fiction, which we all think we know when we see it, or from the label at the bookstore anyway. The challenge is finding where fiction begins and where it ends. A chancy business with me.

G is for glossaries. Let’s see (using my fingers now), I’ve done 1, 2, 3, 4 of them, at least. Plus two or more gazetteers and a bunch of maps, a gang of alphabetic Who’s Who lists, an alphabetic Bible book that contains a kind of Bible glossary and a numeric/date listing. I’ve also done a dictionary and a book jacket describing a dictionary, the only one we need these days.

H is for Harry, the romantic tragic hero who still rules all my writing from Rio.

I is for I and what you and I make of it through the story we live and the line(s) we draw through that story. It can be a straight short segment if you like. It can be a complex shape with more facets and sides and dimensions than even the string theory cosmologists can draw. I’m entitled to have that opinion. So are you.

J is for the Jews, the indispensable pivot point of all recorded human history. Attempts to deny, evade, defeat, or destroy this pivot point are the most direct route to hellish narcissism yet devised. What Chosen really means.

K is for the Ka. Like gravity it’s a necessary aspect of physics, whether you can see, understand, or believe it or not.

L is for Lorenz transformations. Unless it’s for the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve designed more labyrinths than bestiaries. But there’s overlap there. As there usually is. Plenty of beasts in my labyrinths.

M is for Millennials and their so far unrealized Mission to pull the greatest Lazarus act ever by rising from the dead against all odds and rediscovering life.

N is for nihilism, the empty end of every empty soul. It’s a void that’s always hungry but never capable of being filled or sated. It kills what it consumes and seeks absence from being with every voracious bite. Everything here is the sworn enemy of this metaphysical black hole.

O is for Ontogeny, which Philogeny is recapitulated by. Discovered this watching a puppy organize a human household with one lick and one wag. Just such a puppy created the species of domestic dog.

P is for punk. If you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t be here. Of course many aren’t here. You can think of us as the dead tree righting itself in the forest when there’s no non-tree there to see it.

Qis for questions, which are the beginning point of every piece of writing from poetry to porn ads. What questions are you asking for your audience and what answer(s) are you offering to them?

R is for referring, the act of identifying, mapping, or plotting a relationship which enlarges both the referrer and the referred to.

S is for serendipity and synchronicity, which I combine via mutual reference to serendicity, which is how Johnny Dodge is created a shatterer of worlds in the seemingly doomed flight from one dead-end world to another.

T is for the Tarot. Buy one. The Arthur Waite deck. The drawings are cool and all the doorways are open.

U is for the Undernet in ST99. Now there’s a hint for you.

V is for Vade Mecum, what Eugene Field and Doctor Dream have in common, their own incarnation of the Zerone.

W is for wheels within wheels within wheels. In short, absolutely everything here.

X is for all kinds of exciting meanings, known and unknown. It is the fullback of symbolism in the letter team making up the alphabets of both language and mathematics. Always a signal to pay attention.

Y is for you. The stories embedded in my work exist only as you choose a path or even many discrepant paths through them.

Z is for Zerone, the infinite space between zero and one that contains absolutely everything in existence with no exceptions. The universal punk writer symbol is a Zerone. And so are you. How you define “one” is the definition of your soul.

Some Number Correspondences relevant to Shuteye Town 1999/2019

Shuteye Town 1999 was published 50 years after George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949.

[By an odd coincidence, 1984 was published 100 yrs after the death of Edgar Allan Poe, my principal American literary hero. By yet another coincidence, of course, author Eugene Field, who wrote the child’s poem “The Shut-Eye Train” I used as inspiration, was born in 1850, 1 yr after the death of Poe. And not that these accidents matter at all, but Lewis Carroll died in 1898, 100 yrs before I began creating my own drawings of his Wonderland characters for the “UnderNet” of ST99.]

1984 projected its action 35 years into the future.

35 years after the year 1984 is the year 2019, the year of the restored, enhanced, and farther ranging Shuteye Town Release 2.0, which now encompasses a larger realm called UnderLand.

2019 is also a round number anniversary of multiple historical events. Shuteye Town 2019 be live on the Internet…

100 years after the doughboys came home and the Influenza epidemic killed half a million Americans,
100 yrs after Prohibition was enacted via Constitutional Amendment,
100 years after the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution — the 19th — was passed by Congress, and
100 years after This Side of Paradise, written by my second favorite American literary hero, was bought by Scribner’s Publishing.

On a final personal note, the drop dead publication date for ST2019 is June 2019, which will be the 6th month of my 66th year. I’m no Antichrist, but I did write down the Gospel of Harry.

Today btw is the 19th of December.

John Facenda. My aunt, who moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, said, “The only thing I really miss from Philly is John Facenda and that soothing Italian gangster voice.”

Few people realize that the glory of the NFL originated in New Jersey, where an entrepreneur named Sabol made the young league mythic by setting game films to music and literate voiceover narration. The keystone was a man named John Facenda, a Philadelphia news anchorman who had, gasp, talent for looking at film, reading a script, and turning those things into poetry.

Why this post? My wife mentioned him when I showed a pic of the hottest weather girl in Philadelphia. So, yeah, I’m old. But I’d rather have Facenda back (or his NFL Films successor Harry Kalas) than a ninny in a skintight dress.

But I grant you she IS hot.

Millionaires just hate billionaires.

Yes, the woman who wrote a series of goofy children’s books while on the dole in the U.K. has an ax to grind with The Donald.

“British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling unloaded on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in an essay posted to her website this week, calling the candidate a ‘fascist’ who possesses ‘the temperament of an unstable nightclub bouncer.”

We’re supposed to believe her because some clothheads think the Harry Potter books amount to some kind of social satire. Like, she really really hates Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the number of freeloaders living on the dole. Get tough on the lower classes and they’ll man up or some such thing Rowling really hates. Her not so subtle avatar for Thatcher is Dolores Umbridge.

You know. Disciplinarians are mean, mean, mean.

Except that Dolores Umbridge is actually more a symbol of the socialist welfare state than a stand-in for Thatcher.

And it’s all crap, even in her own terms. The Potter story has nothing to do with politics. She has nothing whatever to say about politics. Rowling’s books are harmless children’s fare, mostly. She is harmless as a spokesperson for anything. Yet another woman who can’t think. Why children’s books are children’s books. Written by children who haven’t ever gotten over their mommy and daddy issues and have to keep inflicting them on the rest of us.

Dolores uses magic but insists that her students don’t. Gun control, anyone? She is not the voice of liberty and individual responsibility. Harry Potter is. Harry is more Thatcherite than most in Britain are today. Though we’ll see, won’t we, if the state succeeds in snuffing out the Brexists?

It’s not politics that’s driving Rowling’s antipathy to Thatcher. It’s the domineering mother figure. Just as her male nightmare, the phantom Voldemort, the abusive father who might still return, is the exemplification of her other terror: the absent abusive father who might yet return.

So Rowling hated her parents. Fine. Her response is to conflate them into a conception called the Dementor. Who steals the life from children.

There’s fictional life and there’s real life. In fictional life, Rowling wants to set the kids free from their oppressive abusive parents. In real life, she aspires to be the Dementor-in-Chief. Taking control of the state and everybody’s lives until there are no lives left worth living.

Good thing we can dismiss it all as a children’s yarn, eh?

There is No Security. I am and will always be Instapunk. Before I was Harry.

I have been playing around with Facebook for a few months now. In which time I have learned a lot about the social network phenomenon.

I spent ten years in the blog universe, which was a lot like Fight Club, bruising battles in the comment sections, no quarter asked or given. Lots of insults, bad language, idiots, and the occasional bright light that makes it all worthwhile. But the world changes on a dime these days. And so it has once again.

The Facebook universe is not centered as blogs were on ideas. It’s all about me, me, me, and the poses I can assume to make me look smart, important, or more attractive than I actually am. So there are lots of reposts of the posts of others, which endow me with a noblesse and erudition I’ve done nothing to prove.

That’s why I’ve adventured into the realm of comment threads, which look similar to blog comment threads but are markedly different.

Number One rule of FB comment threads. Do not take issue with the leading comment offered by the poster. No matter how logical your disagreement, how witty, how charitable, how polite, all disagreement with the poster and his or her “friends” will immediately be construed as personal and a signal of the absolute evil your disagreement represents. Fail to go away when the poster and his friends give you warning of your transgression, and the name callers appear at once to characterize your evil, stupid, idiot lifestyle, and threaten you as if you were on the doorstep with a shotgun.

I used plenty of bad language at Instapunk. See for yourself. Had plenty of bad language used on me.

http://www.instapunk.com/archives/IPLArchive.php3

Never in ten years banned but two. But what I find at Facebook is ever so much more offensive than what I’ve experienced in blogging. (With many notable exceptions by the way.) Nothing bruising about FB comments. Just lots and lots of fancied bruises by people who never learned to defend themselves with words. These are people who don’t know the difference between disagreement and ad hominem assaults which are to be countered immediately by nuclear means or inferences that there’s something about you which no good person could ever countenance.

Facebook is a world of thin-skinned narcissists, poseurs, and preening fakers. One who declares himself a poet and isn’t. One who declares himself a cultural critic and shows no sign of having noticed anything prior to his recent date of birth. One who declares his political acuity and has never studied history prior to the 21st century. To oppose such people instantly inspires them to accuse the skeptic of everything wrong with themselves. Everything is personal, and you are every wrong name in the book. Everything they say in their rants is self revelation. And none of them has anything remotely resembling a sense of humor. The ultimate victory of political correctness. Even the self-appointed “Defenders of the Faith” can’t recognize a joke without an attached emoticon.

I haven’t used bad language in Facebook comments. But I have an inner clock that tells me with startling accuracy how quickly some millennial will run out of intellectual steam and start attacking me with obscenities.

But this isn’t just about millennials. It’s about people of all ages. Facebook is the woodwork the rest of the people crawled out of. They want approval. Of their faces, families, fatuities, food, and faux personae.

Maybe I won’t make more comments, hurt more feelings, deflate more inflated egos. But maybe I will.

For I am Instapunk, regardless of the terrain. Real life or video game version of reality, I am Instapunk. Which I, incidentally, can prove into the millions of words. As I said. No Security.

Well, it’s a choice don’t you know. If you don’t like that message, here’s the alternative.

Here endeth the lesson.

P.S. And I forgot. They always always always have to have the last word. As if that could make them somehow smart. Ignore them.

Surprise. I win.

Second Driveway (click all of these for bigger.)

Because he’s only eleven and has eleven times our energy, Rikki gets to go for a walk every night. We wait till the gun nuts are in bed because he looks exactly, completely, unbelievably like a deer.

When those ears pop up, you can hear every Elmer Fudd in the county cock his rifle. So we are careful.

So we march past the second driveway up top and barely even pause at our homestead’s cricket green.

Rikki will pee by the bamboos to the right (where the cobras are), but then he wants to go exploring.

We walk past the mysterious wood along the road.

Pretty sure Harry Potter’s in there. Or at least his owl is.

And then we arrive at the gates of Mordor.

Where the shadows lie.

And then, panting slightly, both of us, because even I am eleven in dog years, we turn around and go back home in our magical elven cloaks, which are proof against all the pickup truck headlights in the world.

That was arduous, sahib. Tikki-Tik-Tik-Tikki Tavi.

After which we have a cookie, and curl up for a good night’s sleep.

I guess it’s time for me to admit something. I’ve outgrown Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. No matter how much I love Cate Blanchette. I love something else. The possible connections between philosophers and music. Because music is the secret of philosophy. More meaning in what Denyce Graves sings than most of what I read or reason. So I’ve made a few tentative stabs at correlating philosophers with music. First up, Nietzche, who wrote his own. Not necessarily good but tactically consistent. Repetition is everything. He thought everything repeated repeatedly, exactly. Sometimes I agree. But I’m not as smart as he was. Nobody is.

I know nobody wants to hear this, but philosophy and music are the same thing. Not crappy lyrics but the music of the spheres. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were the greatest of philosophers. They just weren’t speaking in words. Still. There were philosophers who did relentlessly speak in words. What did they sound like? Kant, for example. The really really smart, rational one. Like this.

Music as logic, difficult, complicated, brilliant, unsatisfying, unfulfilling.

One could go back to Plato, who saw shadows in a cave. He had a vision. And a huge question about the shadows he saw. Somebody realized it.

Even the Romans had a philosopher. Marcus Aurelius. He was what is called a stoic. Whatever happens, you accept. I think that’s how it works.

Sure, it hurts. But when it’s time to die, you just die.

Obviously, we’re skipping around. The opposite of Plato was Rousseau, who inspired the Marquis de Sade, unless it was the other way around.

Much (if not much) earlier we get the much smarter than Rousseau Voltaire. Who was more like me.

Which brings us pretty much up to date in philosophy, unless you count the Babe Ruth of philosophy. Christ. Sorry. Didn’t mean to swear.

Well. Sure I do. The Babe is the Babe. Isn’t he?

She’s just us, to the third power.

Here’s what’s funny. All the people on the right with any political savvy are running around saying, “Shhhhhh! Don’t talk about impeachment. It just helps the Dems raise money.”

Dom the gaffemaster made that the opening platform of his WPHT show yesterday, echoing what we hear from National Review and Fox News pundits. Dom is way way superior to Sarah Palin. Like all reflexive conservatives, he was scornful of her call to impeach the Trojan horse in the White House. He beat up all the callers who thought otherwise.

Thing is, Obama should be impeached. Almost everybody knows he should be. As president, he’s become Hugo Chavez and a silent partner of Hamas and the plan for a global caliphate. But in strict political terms, it’s not the right time to make any such attempt. Granted. No trial in a Harry Reid senate could ever convict him.

But talking about why he should be impeached is a public service.

The perfect person to do that is Sarah, who has made no visible move toward future political office. She is a citizen. She is the equivalent of the first Roman Tribune, who was empowered to represent the people at the door of the Roman senate.

Even as I write this, I hear Rush Limbaugh beginning a parallel argument. So I’ll leave the details to him and move quickly to my close.

I’m just saying Sarah Palin has done right to put impeachment on the table. Talk to your friends. Make the case that Obama is not a president but a self-worshipping would-be emperor. We can’t go any farther down this road. And we’re the ones who have to depose him, the party that supports him, and the mass media who ignore his flat lawlessness. Pass it on.

Thank you, Sarah.

Keep talking. When you’re right, you’re right.

It’s obvious. So obvious that it’s taken a supreme act of will on almost everybody’s part to deny it. The only problem is, the racism in play isn’t white racism against blacks. It’s black racism against blacks.

A couple uncomfortable facts. White people don’t think about race all the time or even a lot of the time. People tended to believe Barack Obama’s line about ushering in a new post-racial age. Why they elected him president.

The people who think about race all the time are black people. And, sadly, what they think about race is deeply unhealthy. Not all, but many, have a profound inferiority complex. A feeling that people are pointing at them and laughing, or despising, or hating.

Which is a syndrome that distorts all communications, perspectives, and policies. Obama’s biracial status was supposed to free us from this particular hobgoblin. But people forgot that the most fanatical adherents to any faith are not those born into it but the converts.

Everything about this administration has been about race. Everyone who opposes any policy is indicted specifically or by implication as a racist. Eric Holder has run the Department of Justice as Reconstruction Part 2, an in your face dare-you-to-say-anything program of favoring everything black over everything not. Meanwhile, the president and his wife have done everything possible — almost to the point of parody — to fulfill every old-time white stereotype of black people. As if this isn’t a presidency at all but an eight year show of performance art.

Consider the evidence. The president is lazy, an inveterate liar, a man evidently more interested in basketball brackets than intelligence briefings, a coward, an anti-Semite, a go home early paranoid whiner. His wife is the ultimate nouveau riche freeloader, prancing through Paris on the taxpayer’s dime without the slightest hint of humility. Both of them bask in the borrowed glow of celebrity and exhibit absolutely no shame in doing so.

In fact, they are laughing. Because nobody has the nerve to call them on their outrageous behavior. Everything they do proclaims that they know they are the Affirmative Action administration, which means they have no real responsibilities other than to put their feet up on the desk in the Oval Office and jeer at their impotent opponents.

I urge you all to watch the video above. At its core it’s about the black racism against blacks I mentioned. It’s worth noting that with the sole exception of Obama’s trophy wife Michelle, the president’s black officials are light-skinned. Obama himself. Eric Holder. Valerie Jarrett. He’s friendly with Colin Powell. With dark girl Condoleeza Rice not at all. He can’t be bothered to discipline Harry Reid for calling the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision a travesty perpetrated by “five white men,” even though one of those white men is the very black Clarence Thomas.

No wonder the rumor mill has it that Michelle is fed up with him and wants a divorce. (I get to see National Enquirer headlines every time I go to the RiteAid.)

Is there a contradiction in here somewhere? Yes. Of course. Obama wants to use his blackness as an excuse for being a corrupt and inattentive president. Does he care about black people? Only insofar as he needs their continuing, unearned 84 percent approval rating, which prevents him from plummeting into the twenties, where he belongs. But in the cold light of day it’s evident he has nothing but contempt for the plight of black Americans. His policies have pushed their unemployment rate to historic highs, and he pursues an immigration policy that will leave another whole generation of African-Americans in the economic dustbin. He’s the worst president black people could ever have had.

It’s called having your cake and eating it too. He gets all the PC protections of being black. All the adulation and hysterical defensiveness. He has a one size fits all response to every criticism: you’re a racist. Minions like Holder actually believe it. And at the same time, he maintains a racist distance from the dark-skinned population he has manipulated as brutally and systematically as Bernie Madoff bilked his clients.

This is the biggest, longest running joke in the history of global politics. Try, try, try not to vomit when Obama turns his back on all the scandals and all the terrible human costs of the current border crisis he deliberately created and jets off to Martha’s Vineyard a month from now for a $12 million, 16-day vacation of the lily whitest variety.

N.B. Some of the “dark girls” specifically exempted white men from the charge of “colorism.” I think your own experience will bear that out. I am notoriously good at finding exactly what I want on the Internet, but the most galling failure — the one that sticks in my mind as prime example — is my search for a young black actress in a CSI episode about some high school murder. She was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever laid eyes on, and she was definitely the blackest. The contrast made her eyes utterly bewitching. They killed her off early on and I can’t find her. See, I’m mostly immune these days to Hollywood’s idea of pretty young things. But I like to have someone to root for. To give you some idea, she was much blacker than Grace Jones (always had a thing for her), and I have a feeling she may be a descendant of the Nuba tribe memorialized by the pariah Leni Riefenstahl.

Men without Bentleys respond to beauty, not skin tone.

OK. I’ll shut up now.

Yesterday I made a passing reference to Wendy O. It made me realize I’ve never mentioned her in ten years of blogging. But without her, I wouldn’t ever have conceived of the Queen of Punk City.

Her name was Alice Hate.

Alice is the sleeping beauty of the South Street punk mythology. A bow to Arthurian legend, as the best book I’ve ever read on the subject speculates. Guinevere, a Pictish warrior queen, dies long before the climax of Arthur’s reign but must be preserved. The wall of thorns surrounding her is a linguistic reference to where she was interred, a castle in Scotland whose name means thorn. It was the French, centuries later, who made up the scandal of her affair with Lancelot, whom they made French but was probably a Scot named Angus. Zut alors!

So I’m acknowledging my personal debt here. The bare breasted kickass queen of Punk City was absolutely inspired by a real life rock star named Wendy O. Williams.

But that’s only part of what I need to do today. I realize she is missing almost completely from the history of pop divas we have been taught and believe. Consider this a teaching moment.

Wendy O is dead, as she would have to be. As the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, herself a secret sybarite, wrote, “The candle burns at both ends, it cannot last the night. But ah my foes and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light.”

She’s not here now to lobby as Deborah Harry does that she’s the template for female pop stars. So I am here to speak for her.

Without Wendy O, there would be no Madonna, no Joan Jett, no Courtney Love, no Lady Gaga, no Mylie Cyrus. And in all likelihood you’d never have seen Janet Jackson’s tit at the Super Bowl or up Beyonce’s dress all the way to there.

Patti Smith survived her youth. She began as a groupie and plugged her way to record deals. Wendy O was just a Roman candle who burst on the scene and did things no woman had ever done on stage. In that respect she’s as important as Jimi Hendrix was to the evolution of the electric guitar. In both cases, there’s simply before… And after.

Why some of us old guys just shake our heads at the antics of youngsters who think they can shock us. You can’t. You’re just so ignorant you don’t know that when Gaga wears meat, we remember Wendy wearing nearly nothing. When Mylie twerks, we remember Wendy jacking off a phantom strap-on. You’ve got nothing left to shock us with. Why we yawn.

She died in 1998. She was not a nice girl. You can read about her here.

I’m not positioning her as some saint. But it’s become a habit with you young’uns to forget where you came from and who you owe for your manufactured poses. Mostly you’re not even aware of the important areas where you know nothing and care less. But if you’re a growly take-no-prisoners singer or a half naked caterwauling bitch on stage, then you should light a candle at both ends in honor of Wendy O.