New! The Weekly Bric-a-Brac

Hello! The Weekly Bric-a-Brac will be a new feature on here for paid subscribers. Some of you have told me you like my mental odds and ends, so I hope this will amuse you.

I’m collecting stray thoughts and recycling Twitter ideas throughout the week. One does not always have a fully formed topical essay ready to go, but we can still talk about interesting stuff.

The first Bric-a-Brac this week is free for everyone. From next week, it will be restricted to paid subscribers. Obviously, I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber. If you like this, see the bottom panel to help pay for it!

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The Real 1989 (suck it Swift)

My first gay pride in 1989, aged 15, Greenwich Village. Featuring anorexia, Aquanet hair, a Chevette, and my new friend Ralph.

Taken with a Kodak Disc camera.

I was too young to be there and doing what I was doing. Ralph died of AIDS; I'm lucky I got out of that era without contracting HIV.

But damn, was it glamorous and exciting. Madonna, hairspray, and neon colors ruled the world. And it looked like the whole exciting world was unfolding itself just for my generation.

The 80s were fantastic.

The Problem With Pop

A big part of the problem with modern music is the displacement of pop with rap/hard hip-hop. It is a-melodic to the point where much of it literally is not music. There's no tonal key, no melody. You're lucky to get the occasional drone on a notional tonic. It's hateful, aggressive, vulgar, and meant to threaten. I cannot figure out why our popular music culture went this way.

Most rap is consciously aggressive. It's meant to be an auditory and political assault. It has two main modes: narcissistic self-aggrandizement, and violence. This is a strikingly hostile stance for an "artist" or group to take toward its audience. It's very different from the days when pop stars at least pretended to like their audience.

I know how it sounds. I'm old, I'm a prude, I'm a censorious old person who hates obscenity in public and vulgarity in entertainment. Worse, I used to be a libertine. What a hypocrite! I know. All true. Yet I'm not wrong. And this isn't merely my old generation doing what every old generation does: complain about the young. It's more than that. Our fundamental cultural character has gone dark, and the shift is more extreme than any other generational transition.

Something is very wrong with us.

Eat This

I'm making my new favorite dish for the fourth time in 2 weeks.

1 head cabbage
1 pound kielbasas or similar sausage
1 onion
5 shit-tons of dill
four tablespoons butter
salt and pepper
lemon juice or vinegar to finish, just a bit

Cut sausage into pennies and brown. Slice vegetables and place in a large fryer pan over low heat in melted butter. Add dill and salt. Cover and cook slowly over low heat until veg is softened.

Add sausage and mix. Cook until heated through.

Serve with lemon juice or a yogurt/sour cream sauce like this one. Take equal parts mayonnaise and sour cream. Add minced garlic and salt, thin out with water or milk. Add a squeeze of lemon juice, then add herbs or hot sauce if you like.

Department of Cher

For decades I've dreamed of the perfect old school drag number. Picture it: A dark stage. A driving drum beat starts. Silhouettes of pilgrims with muskets and Indians with tomahawks dance across the curtain. Shadows of pilgrim ladies churn butter in time to the beat. The lights come up as the song swells, and the curtain rises to reveal me as Cher as the Land O' Lakes butter maiden singing:

♫ ‘My father married a pure Cherokee
My mother's people were ashamed of me’

Your New Drag Name

Human Nature

The people who spurned you, canceled you, abandoned you, took your job or your family and friends away from you, will never forgive you for not taking their abuse. They will never forgive you for wisely not taking a dangerous vaccine. They will hate you because their abuse did not silence you or kill you.

Your survival is an unbearable reminder of who and what they really are. Deep down, they know who they are.

Quality Decline-a short conversation with my friend “Jim”

Jim: I don’t think I told you but you know how my car’s windshield got smashed by some retarded illegal? Well my rental car windshield is also cracked. And the windshield my mechanic ordered to replace mine ALSO CRACKED.

Josh: oh my fucking god

Jim: I give up. AND I’m having to do it through my insurance and not theirs because they don’t speak English and the boss is a crook.

Josh: Jim, it's declining competence across the board. Seriously. Quality control is worse than I've ever seen it in my life, and I've been out in the world on my own since 16. It didn't used to be like this.

Jim: I know. I know. I long for the old days. I’m glad to know you and know that you see it too. I feel like I’m having a midlife crisis at 31 by longing for the 2000s so much. I remember when the world was competent. I was young, but I remember it.

Josh: My mother complained loudly about declining quality in household goods in the 80s. She said "made in America" used to mean you got the best, and she was right. Britain and America set the world standard in quality machines.

But it's much worse now.

Fashion Corner

When today's young women were advised to dress professionally, they mistakenly thought of the one profession whose sartorial standards should not be followed.

Das Racist

The reflexive "that's racist" hysteria I'm seeing from people watching the video of the students taunting each other at Ole Miss. "He's making monkey sounds at a BLACK WOMAN!!!!" That's not gonna wash anymore. People are going to be ugly to each other. She's not "more hurt" simply because someone said an ugly thing to her that's been used as a racial stereotype (maybe. It’s not even clear he was making monkey sounds).

Her middle finger at the boys isn't "less rude" "because she's not being racist." Can you see the obvious special pleading?

I'm unmoved. I wish more people would be unmoved. They certainly are unmoved by all the anti-white racism blacks are allowed to indulge in.

So the (alleged) monkey sounds are rude. Big deal. She didn't suffer a Great Harm From Down The Traumatized Generations. What hysteria.

Addendum: A realization that surprised me over the past few years—A huge percentage of white people actively enjoy anti-white racism. They like being insulted. They get a thrill out of it. It allows them to do performative penance for sins they didn't commit, a favorite of white libs.

Dis Also Racist

I have mixed feelings about the right turning the racist accusation back on the left; "they're the real racists." There's a lot of truth in that. And I recognize that tit for tat works as a strategy. Sometimes it's necessary.

Still, it irks me that the charge of racism is so supreme in our moral hierarchy. We should be able to talk about misbehavior, bad conduct, and foul play, without invoking the morally overburdened sacred category of race.

There are a lot of morally overburdened concepts, sacred castes of the left. Our society is morally organized around victimhood as a virtue. But race trumps them all, every time. Not even trans can win if it's a contest between the two.

Memory Rewritten

There are some things from childhood that I won't go back and "look up" online because I want to preserve my memory of experiencing them the way it is. Whether my memory is accurate or not.

Years ago I attended a Madonna concert. After the show, I watched every filmed version of it, scanned the magazines for candid audience shots. Then I discovered I couldn't remember the live experience of the show because it had been displaced by the filmed version in my mind.

I think about this in regard to "Disney Adults." I can't connect with them on any level (because they're immature). I wonder if they're replacing their childhood memories by going back.

One day in 1982, my parents put us all on the city bus on a route we'd never taken. They wouldn't tell us where we were going. The bus stopped in front of Disneyland and I about died of ecstatic joy. That was the best day of my childhood. The whirling teacups, the haunted mansion (my sister cried not to let me go in because the ghosts would eat me), the pirate ship, the steam train, the joke "can of peanuts" I got that a big sprung snake jumped out of. I won't go back to Disneyland. I want my memories intact.

Gospel a-Go-Go

“And the serpent said, ‘if you eat of the liquid eye-liner you will be as the e-hos are’.”

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