JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Ernie and Grungella are sitting in a coffee shop late Saturday night when they sense a disturbance in The Force. As if magnetized, they turn to the next table, where they behold a stunning sight: an extremely good-looking teenage boy, a Young Clooney, having a latte with his friends.

Grungella: Extraordinary.
Ernie: Spectacular.
Grungella: Ach, pedophilia.
Ernie: Too old to attract pedophiles they are.

The Young Clooney’s table is joined by another extremely good-looking teenage boy hobbling on crutches, probably a sports injury.

Ernie: Consider Young Pitt joining Young Clooney.
Grungella: Consider not. Gawk. Or gawk not. There is no consider.
Ernie: More handsome is Young Clooney, yet sympathy Young Pitt generates.
Grungella: Are the crutches an equalizer?
Ernie: Oh yes. I sprained my arm once. Never got so many pick-up lines as when I was wearing a sling.

A quarter of an hour later, Young Clooney and Company leave, and the table is taken over by yet another good-looking teenage boy and his friends.

Grungella: In another galaxy we definitely are.
Ernie: Not nearly as handsome as the earlier ones is this new arrival, yet totally confident he is.
Grungella: Just an ass he would be if ugly he were.
Ernie: Fair life is not.

Saffy is reading. . ., originally uploaded by 160507.

1. Stalin the Soviet dictator had many pseudonyms, including “K. Safin”. Saffy’s full name is Saffron Sassafras Safin.
2. Saffy answers to Stalin’s nicknames “Koba” and “Soso”.
3. Saffy constantly claims territory of her fellow cats Koosi and Mat.
4. Saffy very suspicious of Mat the aristocrat, accuses him of oppressing her.
5. Saffy is a terror.
6. Saffy believes she owns the means of production; sits on my keyboard while I am working.
7. Extreme charm alternating with extreme nuttiness.
8. Loves books, curls up on them.
9. Constantly plotting.
10. Likes poetry, especially if all the words are replaced with “meow”.

“In Errol Morris’s documentary “Standard Operating Procedure‚” an American soldier talks about employing music as a means of breaking down the resistance of enemy combatants during interrogations. They can withstand “Hip Hop Hooray” and “Enter Sandman‚” he says, but not country music. Most audiences will laugh at the line, but may check themselves mid-chuckle, wondering what it means that Americans are deploying their favorite music as a way of tormenting people of another culture. . .” Alex Ross on the use of music in psychological warfare.

Carlo believes that the reason things are so screwed up in our country is because the music is so loud. What is supposed to be background or ambient music in shopping malls and restaurants is turned up so high that it not only makes conversation difficult, it disrupts our thought processes. The mall has its muzak, each store in the mall has its own muzak, it becomes a competition to see who will make the shoppers run amok first. We have to yell at each other to be heard, which does not help interpersonal relationships. We literally cannot hear ourselves think.

Maybe we’re afraid of silence. Maybe we turn up the music for fear that if we had to listen to ourselves, we would hear. . .Nothing.

Survey: What piece of music, which musician would break your resistance?

Meanwhile: Good review of new Journey album featuring their new Pinoy vocalist, Arnel Pineda.

Pannonica and Monk, originally uploaded by 160507.
The scene is a dark, smoky club in Greenwich Village, New York in 1958. Onstage a quartet is performing a complicated piece of music. Everyone is smoking and drinking; it’s the Fifties and cigarettes and alcohol are socially-acceptable substances. It’s the music that is not quite acceptable—that Jazz and the men who play it. They are African-American musicians in the time before the civil rights movement. Many of them are known drug users.

A murmur goes through the crowd, and the musicians acknowledge the new arrival. “Hi, Nica,” they call out, “Hey, Baroness.” The woman they’re addressing is wearing a leopard-skin coat and a patrician air. She carries the formidable name of Baroness Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter. She’s aristocratic and white, and she is the Jazz musicians’ patron and fierce protector.

My article on Pannonica in The National, Abu Dhabi.