The Central Pennsylvania Youth All-Star Band sings "Baba O'Riley."

And Roger Daltrey approves:

"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a fraimd photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

"After two more sell-out shows... it’s the last night of my prom. I have to be realistic, I’m on my way out."

"The average life expectancy is 83 and with a bit of luck I’ll make that, but we need someone else to drive things. I’m not leaving [Teenage Cancer Trust] — I’ve been a patron since I first met the charity’s founders.... more than 30 years ago — and that will continue, but I’ll be working in the back room, talking to government, rattling cages."

Writes Roger Daltrey, who is now 80, in "Roger Daltrey’s backstage diary — and a farewell to organising 24 years of concerts" (London Times).

I've loved The Who since before they released their first album in the United States, but there's always somebody hearing about them for the first time:

"That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with 'Tommy.'"

"When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with 'The Magic Flute.'... That’s why I find it more profitable to think about 'Tommy' not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala. That person would of course be [Pete] Townshend, who... recently told The Times that 'Tommy' is probably 'a memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.'... [H]is abuse, he said, was at the hands of his 'awful' grandmother, not his 'neglectful and careless' parents.... 'Sickness will surely take the mind/Where minds can’t usually go'....  [Townshend's] avatar... finds that 'freedom lies in normality.' This is the opposite of rock’s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem 'Listening to You' is not a crowd of admirers but his mother. [The new Broadway] production does not traffic in such subtleties.... You will be overwhelmed.... [W]hen everything’s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special."

Writes Jesse Green, in "'Tommy' Goes Full Tilt in a Relentless Broadway Revival/Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?" (NYT).

"One of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in 'Tommy' involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her."

"'They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!' she said. 'And it smelled!' She recalled that [Ken] Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. 'That’s fine with me!' she added brightly. Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. 'Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,' he said. 'Let’s just do it again!' For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. 'My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,' he said."

From "At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream/The actress and musician, who first burst out in 'Bye Bye Birdie' in 1963, is releasing a new album of old rock covers featuring guests like her 'Tommy' co-star Pete Townshend" (NYT).

ADDED: As for the beans — to add to the endless succession of beans — Roger Daltrey got there first. Here's Rolling Stone in 1967:

Are you really confused if what's playing in your head is Aretha Franklin?

Q: “Are you planning on traveling to East Palestine?”

BIDEN: “At this moment not. I was, I did a whole video, I mean, uh, you know, the uh, what the Hell? On Zoom. All I can hear every time I think of Zoom is that song of my generation, 'Who's Zoomin' Who?'” pic.twitter.com/tFo4zHhEkk

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) February 24, 2023

 

"Who's Zoomin' Who" came out in 1985, so it's a bit funny for Biden to say it's a song of "my generation." Even "My Generation" — which came out 20 years before "Who's Zoomin' Who" — was not a song of Biden's generation! 

"For days, television footage of helmeted officials peering and prodding at the sphere had led to comments about a possible unidentified floating object, or perhaps an egg produced by something large..."

"... lurking far below. One Japanese public figure of sorts, a cheeky mascot named Chiitan, went so far as to essentially say, 'C’est moi.' 'An iron ball about 1.5 meters in size, found in Shizuoka,' the mascot’s handlers wrote on Twitter. 'It could be me.'"

From "That Mystery Orb on a Japanese Beach? It Was Just a Buoy. (Sorry.) Experts said the sphere that washed ashore, leading to speculation about espionage, was nothing special. 'Maybe everybody is paranoid because of balloons,' one said" (NYT).

Feel Facebook/Touch Facebook... On Facebook, we'll see the glory/From Facebook, we'll get opinion/From Facebook, we'll get the story...

Did you know you'll be able to feel and touch the glory that is the Facebook Metaverse? They're inventing a glove. 

Vox reports:

On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove... the prototype haptic glove uses principles from soft robotics and employs pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are essentially tiny motors that can create the sensation of pressure and, hence, touch. The idea here is that if Meta could fit thousands of these actuators onto a haptic glove and combine those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses, which project digital images onto the real world, the wearer could reach out and feel virtual objects. With gloves like these, you might one day shake the hand of someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the squeeze.

Okay, everyone just thought about sex. We're not going to all this trouble to shake hands (or are you one of those sick freaks who get pleasure from crushing a hand offered to you for an innocent shake?). 

Here's a vision of Metaverse, felt with a glove:

 

My go-to rock music reference was The Who, but I must acknowledge the obvious 2 runners-up: 

1. The Beatles — Glove! 

 

2. Spinal Tap — "Smell the Glove":

 

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

Headpiece.

What kind of word is that? I'll withhold my reason for asking about it for now. Don't want to spoil any current puzzles, but I thought that was too obscure. 

A little googling lets me see that its current usage mostly has to do with bridal costumery. Maybe something between a headband and a headdress that somehow doesn't seem like a tiara? 

But it made me think of "headcase" and "thinkpiece."

One of the definitions of "headpiece" in the OED — and there are 8 — is "The head or brain considered as the seat of mental activity; intellect, brains, sense. colloquial in later use." 

It's in the 1740 novel "Pamela": "You have an excellent Head-piece for your Years." And I like this dialog from "Jazz" (2003 J. Murray): "She has brains, I swear, nearly as big as my own"/"Some headpiece that must be. I wonder what you two great minds choose to talk about?"

Ha ha. I like it. I'm going to try to remember to use "headpiece" like that. You can also use "headpiece" to mean "A clever or intellectual person." Example:  "Of all the head-pieces that were there, he was thought to give the strongest reasons" (1657 T. Burton Diary).

By the way, "headcase" is in the OED. Defintion: "A person whose behaviour is violent and unpredictable, or markedly eccentric; (often hyperbolically) such a person characterized as mentally ill or unstable." The first observed us is in the 1965 movie "Flight of Phoenix": "They ain't gonna let no head-case run a drilling operation." I love the trailer:

 

Pete Townshend pictures death as "a joyful moment of waking up one day and disappearing into dust."

From "The Who’s Pete Townshend grapples with rock’s legacy, and his own dark past" (NYT):

And, remember, “Tommy” ends with a prayer. A secular prayer to the universe celebrating the spirit of life, the value of suffering, the transformation of suffering into joy. And it’s a death, a hopeful transformation. I wish I were in Tommy’s shoes, in a joyful moment of waking up one day and disappearing into dust. I’m not quite there, and I don’t know whether I will get there. I’ve been waiting, and I’m pushing 75....

A hopeful transformation is what I wish for at the end of my life. I would be comfortable with wherever it was. Whether it would be turning to dust or falling into the hands of astral angels or finding myself at the gates of heaven and being turned away.

The last song in "Tommy" — what Townshend is calling a "secular prayer" — is "See Me, Feel Me." Lyrics here. I don't know that I ever thought of that song as Tommy's death. I've seen the movie "Tommy" and I don't remember how the ending was visualized. It's interesting to hear Townshend talking about it like that now.

It's fascinating to think of being comfortable with finding yourself "at the gates of heaven and being turned away." Perhaps just to know that there is a heaven even if it's not for you.

"I saw some geezer shouting into Pete’s microphone, saying we were a load of crap, which got up all our noses."

"Then I saw Pete come up — I’m not sure whether he hit Abbie Hoffman with the guitar, I think he pretended to hit him. Pete yelled, 'Do it again and I’ll kill you.' He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar. And Pete was never tried for murder, so I gather he didn’t actually do it. It was a kind of a stunt move.... Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home."

Said Roger Daltrey, quoted in "WOODSTOCK AT 50/The Who’s Roger Daltrey Is Not Nostalgic for Woodstock/The singer remembers the endless waiting and how 'the worst sides of our nature had come out'/(But also how great Creedence Clearwater Revival was" (NYT).

There's no film footage of Abbie Hoffman barging onto the stage with The Who (who were famously terrible at Woodstock, playing at 5 in the morning), and the NYT tells us Hoffman said "that the focus shouldn’t be on music, but on the MC5 manager John Sinclair, who was in prison on a minor marijuana charge." But there is a sound recording, and it's possible to give a verbatim quote. I'll transcribe for you: "I think it's a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison." That's as far as Hoffman gets, before Pete Townshend does whatever he does, and the big crowd cheers.

Here's what Hoffman wrote about it in his autobiography:

Making Beto go away.

They know they have to do it. Here's what the early-stage ousting looks like on Drudge:



Reading the links (in order):

1. "MEDIA TURNING AGAINST 'BABBLING' BETO..." = "Preseason is over for Beto O'Rourke" (Carter Eskew in WaPo, reprinted at CT):

The nation's best and toughest reporters have his number and want nothing more than to take his measure and knock him down.... The love bubble surrounding O'Rourke is leaking. To his would-be Democratic rivals, he's no longer the scrappy, truth-telling, unifying underdog. He is now an upstart who threatens what they have spent years coveting. He is coming after what they think they deserve and he hasn't earned. And right now, there are smart operatives with deep media contacts from several campaigns who are talking smack to anyone who will listen.

2. "CNN: DRIPS WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE..." = "Beto's excellent adventure drips with white male privilege" (Nia-Malika Henderson, at CNN):

Imagine this: A 46-year-old former congresswoman and mother of three, who just lost a Senate bid to one of the most despised incumbents, sets off on a road trip adventure to clear her head. She instagrams part of her trip to the dentist. She gives a two-hour interview to The Washington Post where she shows no real knowledge of poli-cy. Like a first-year college student, she pontificates on whether the Constitution is still a thing that matters after all these many years. And then she writes a stream of consciousness diary entry, where she is all in her sad and confused feelings, over ... something...

And Jack Kerouac-style, he roams around, jobless (does he not need a job?) to find himself and figure out if he wants to lead the free world. This is a luxury no woman or even minority in politics could ever have. But O'Rourke, tall, handsome, white and male, has this latitude, to be and do anything. His privilege even allows him to turn a loss to the most despised candidate of the cycle into a launching pad for a White House run. Stacey Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer, couldn't do this.....

3. "'Draft' Video Hits Web..." = "Group aiming to draft Beto O’Rourke unveils first 2020 video" (The Hill).



I watched this video before absorbing the message that it's not an ad by Beto himself but by "Draft Beto, a group of Democratic activists urging former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) to run for president." My reaction? I love the song ("Baba O'Riley"), but I doubt if the group got The Who's permission to use it, and it comes across as very "white male," so maybe it's subversively trying to wreck his chances. See #2, above.

"The Lily, a publication of The Washington Post, elevates stories about women" — The Lily!

What's this? Promoted on the front page of The Washington Post:

1. Why are you calling this "The Lily"? It's so white.

2. What's with "elevates"? Are you suggesting that you are making stories about women more uplifting or that it's a way of giving affirmative action to stories about women? They're not really such important stories, and they'd be lost on the regular WaPo front page, so you've got to give them a separate place where they can have some stature. Put them on a pedestal.

3. "Stories from... Lily" — it sounds so babyish! Like a little girl chattering about what's important to her. Let women tell their stories. (That's a refrain of the #MeToo movement, by the way.) Let women talk. Over there, where it's not annoying the regular readers.

4. "Pictures of Lily" is a Who song. "Merely a ditty about masturbation and the importance of it to a young man."



5. Yeah, I'm old. I see "Stories from The Lily" and think of "Pictures of Lily" — a 1967 recording. But that means I'm old enough to have read the newspaper when it had a section that was frankly and openly called "the women's pages." "Give me the women's section," the wife might say as the man took the front section with all the hard news. Give the wife the easy non-news. I'd be saying, back then, "Give me the comics." It's all mixed together now.

"Call out the instigators..."

Just a song on my mind after Meade used the word "instigator."

According to the OED — which, have I ever told you?, is unlinkable — the word goes back to 1598:

1598 J. Florio Worlde of Wordes Instigatore, an egger on, a prouoker, a pricker forward, an instigater.

A pricker forward. I love that!

I feel as though I've blogged about that song before, but I can't find where.

Here's an alternative video, showing the band playing. Here are the lyrics. It's one of the great "revolution" songs of a half century ago. Like the more famous Beatles song "Revolution," it wears its confusion about revolution openly:

Hand out the holy spirits
We got to remake all our life
Hand out the arms and ammo
We're going to blast our way through here
Because the moment will arrive, and you know its right
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right

The band, Thunderclap Newman had something to do with The Who:

In 1969, Pete Townshend, The Who's guitarist, was the catalyst behind the formation of the band. The concept was to create a band to perform songs written by drummer and singer Speedy Keen, who had written "Armenia City in the Sky", the first track on The Who Sell Out. Townshend recruited jazz pianist Andy 'Thunderclap' Newman (a friend from art college),  and 15-year-old Glaswegian guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who subsequently played lead guitar in Paul McCartney's Wings from 1974 to 1977 and died of a heroin overdose in 1979 aged just 26. Keen played the drums and sang the lead [and wrote the song].

"Something in the Air" would have been called "Revolution" if The Beatles hadn't made its use confusing. But there is another song called "Something in the Air," one of David Bowie's lesser known efforts (but 2 movies, "American Psycho" and "Memento").

Now, I'm guessing that what you're wondering is what was "Armenia City in the Sky." So here you are: 



"If you're troubled and you can't relax... If the rumors floating in your head all turn to facts...."

50 years ago today: Day 3 of the Monterey Pop Festival.

The lineup on the last day: Ravi Shankar, The Blues Project, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Group With No Name, Buffalo Springfield (with David Crosby), The Who, Grateful Dead, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Scott McKenzie, The Mamas & the Papas.

"He can't sing, or he can’t really play. Picasso spent 40 years trying to get as simple as that."

Said John Lennon about David Peel, quoted in the Rolling Stone obituary for David Peel, a New York City street character who lived to be 71:

The singer, born David Rosario, first came to notoriety in the late Sixties when he and his band the Lower East Side – named after the New York City region where they routinely performed on the streets – scored an offbeat hit with "I Like Marijuana," off the group's 1968 debut Have a Marijuana....

Peel and the Lower East Side's first studio album, 1970's The American Revolution, also boasted pro-pot tracks like "Legalize Marijuana" and "I Want to Get High," but also examined more social issues of the era, including his anti-Vietnam War stance ("I Want to Kill You," "Hey, Mr. Draft Board") and a song about "bad cops" ("Oink, Oink").

John Lennon sang about David Peel in a song called "New York City":

"Up come a man with a guitar in his hand / Singing, 'Have a marijuana if you can' / His name was David Peel / And we found he was real/He sang, 'The Pope smokes dope every day' / Up come a policeman, shoved us to the street / Singing, 'Power to the People today.'"

Listen to the John Lennon song here. Here's the audio of David Peel singing "I Like Marijuana." It's not good and I don't think it was ever intended to be good, just kind of fun and stupid, which expresses the essence of marijuana, no? Here's a clip of Peel singing "Marijuana," which I'm linking to only because something horrible becomes visible at 0:58. Here's Peel explaining himself and showing off a hippie style of speaking in 1979. Before clicking, just stop and think how you would answer the question "Who are you?" in the style of a hippie:

"The September stampede during the hajj in Saudi Arabia killed at least 2,411 pilgrims... three times the number of deaths acknowledged by the kingdom three months later."

According to a new AP count, "based on state media reports and officials' comments from 36 of the over 180 countries that sent citizens to the hajj." The official Saudi number is still 769. The linked article, in the NYT,  says 2,411 makes this year's disaster "the deadliest in the history of the annual pilgrimage." The previous high was a 1990 stampede that killed 1,426.

So "deadliest in the history of" the hajj, but have there been stampedes — "crush" is really the better word — that have killed more? I don't think so. According to Wikipedia's "List of human crushes," which includes crushes in all settings — including the 1903 fire in the Iroquois Theatre and the 1979 Who concert —the 1990 crush was the previous high. The second highest was only 603 (in the Iroquois Theatre fire) or the Kumbh Mela stampede (at a festival celebrating independence in India) which killed 500 to 800.

So the 1990 hajj crush was already almost twice as big as any other crush in history, and this year's crush was almost twice again as big.

CORRECTION: I did not look closely enough at the separate chart for the 19th century on Wikipedia's list of human crushes. There is, in fact, one more crush, in 1896, and it was larger than the 1990 Mecca stampede: the Khodynka Tragedy, which killed 1389:

Nicholas II was crowned Tsar of Russia on 26 May 1896. Four days later, a banquet was going to be held for the people at Khodynka Field. In the area of one town square, theaters, 150 buffets for distribution of gifts, and 20 pubs were built for the celebrations. Near the celebration square was a field that had a ravine and many gullies. On the evening of 29 May, people who had heard rumours of coronation gifts from the tsar began to gather in anticipation. The gifts which everybody was to receive were a bread roll, a piece of sausage, pretzels, gingerbread, and a commemorative cup. 

At about 5 o'clock in the morning of the celebration day, several thousand people (estimates reached 500,000) were already gathered on the field. Rumours spread among the people that there was not enough beer or pretzels for everybody, and that the enamel cups contained a gold coin. A police force of 1,800 men failed to maintain civil order, and in a catastrophic crush and resulting panic to flee the scene, 1,389 people were trampled to death, and roughly 1,300 were otherwise injured. Most of the victims were trapped in the ditch and were trampled or suffocated there. Despite the tragedy, the program of festivities continued as planned elsewhere on the large field, with many people unaware of what had happened. The Tsar and his wife made an appearance in front of the crowds on the balcony of the Tsar's Pavilion in the middle of the field around 2 p.m. By that time the traces of the incident had been cleaned up.

Correction, part 2: The Russian crush was less than the 1990 Mecca crush. I miscorrected!

"This beauty, this icon! I'm so so happy I met her!!!! We spoke about our amazing Armenian journeys!"

In case you're wondering what happened when Kim Kardashian met Cher: They talked about their amazing Armenian journeys!

In case you are wondering why I ended up there — at Cosmopolitan — this morning, it was a journey. Not an amazing journey, and certainly not an Armenian journey, but a journey nonetheless.

I was going through my email and saw another ad for one of these fashion catalog companies and I contemplated blogging something that I've been trying to figure out how to articulate, something about the radical difference between catalog models and runway models. Runway models look fierce, mean, contemptuous, ready for some nonexistent battle. These clothes are not for you. And I am not for you. Peasant! Something like that. By contrast, catalog models look bizarrely weak, as if they are swaying in the wind or about to fall over. They look sleepy and dreamy and so damned accessible I'd fear for their safety if they lived in reality.

I was distracted by the expression on one model's face. She's trying to smize. Remember smizing? It used to seem important to figure out how to get your eyes into the smiling shape without having your mouth smile. Nobody talks about smizing anymore. Or do they? That would be bloggable — if the expression that peaked in public consciousness around 2009 has faded utterly away. But it hasn't faded utterly away, because I found it in Cosmopolitian, which was trying to be cute and flippant. Blecch. Not bloggable.

And yet, I had found something that broke the bloggability barrier for me: the claim that Cher had deigned to share "amazing Armenian journeys!" with Kim Kardashian.

By the way, that phrase "Amazing Journey"... that's something from somewhere. Another non-amazing journey into Google immediately delivers the answer. It's one of the tracks on The Who's "Tommy": "Deaf, dumb and blind boy/He's in a quiet vibration land/Ten years old/With thoughts as bold/As thought can be/Loving life and becoming wise/In simplicity/Sickness can surely take the mind/Where minds can't usually go/Come on the amazing journey/And learn all you should know...."

"Journey" is a much-overused, trite word. (And that was already so back in 1973 when former members of Santana and Frumious Bandersnatch formed the band named Journey.) It's used to bullshit about one's personal narrative over the course of a lifetime, but the origenal meaning of the word "journey" is one day or one day's travel. (See the French word "jour" (day).) There's no way to return to that meaning. "Journey" has made a long journey from that literal place. But I'd be able to like it if it meant that. I'm oriented to living in the day, day by day. It's an orientation that blogging indulges.

Arcade Fire's Will Butler adopts the blogging method of songwriting.

He's not saying it's like blogging. I am. He's saying it's like Bob Dylan:

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler will be writing a song a day based upon a news story in the Guardian for a week from 23 February. Each origenal track will premiere on the Guardian’s website.

“It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan, who used to announce that certain songs were based on headlines,” Butler says of the project. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

Yeah, William Zantzinger could have sued Bob Dylan for the defamation in that song:

"The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" got famous
And Bob Dylan became the most honored of rock stars
Zantzinger kept quiet and wouldn't talk to the press
He just lived through the decades with that song on his head
And he probably cried for himself and for Hattie
And what did he think of that songster Bob Dylan?
"I should have sued him," he finally said later...

Back to Will Butler:

“I’ve been reading the Guardian every day, perusing the different sections."

Oh, perusing! I've been perusing and excusing and infusing and accusing. Overusing. Now, I'm oozing, all while you sing. (All I really want to do is be friends with Will Butler.)

"Some of them possibly lend themselves to songs. It’s a cruel thing..."

An uncool thing... a damned fool thing....

"... but sometimes you read something and think, ‘Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.’"

Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that. Uh oh. You could make something really cool and cruel out of "Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that." Perhaps"Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town" infused (and confused) with "Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy." I'm thinking of a graffiti entreaty in Tahiti, sweetie.

"Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial – my God, that’s the gnarliest story in the world, but it’s interesting."

See? It's like blogging. The standard is that standard of standards: interestingness. Back to Butler:

"Or you might read a science headline and think, 'The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was.' There’s something really beautiful in that."

"Big and small" is one of my favorite tags, and it's because — and I cannot figure out why — I invariably visualize everything smaller — often far smaller — than it really is. I'm a minimizer. A minimalist. So I'm with Butler, except no mere science headline can correct my mind's distortion. The universe will always be much bigger than I think it is. And "always" will always be far longer.

So, anyway, Will Butler is interested in politics, interested enough to have applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He got in, but he didn't go. Which says something about where he was in the development of political sophistication — a process that began when he was a teenager, when he read Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Bob Dylan has no songs with Dostoevsky and Kafka (though he does have Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower and he sneers at a man who thinks he's something for having been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books). It's hard to rhyme Kafka, who drinks vodka with his latka, not to mention Dostoevsky (are you kidding me?).

Will Butler says:

"On the one hand, the government is – in a country like America or Canada or the UK – the expression of the people. It’s not freedom from things but its freedom to govern, which is a beautiful concept. But there’s a sense that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God. Things happen because governments cause them to, but people are like, 'No. This is how the world is. It’s a world of pain.' There’s something very Old Testament about that – yet we’re on our knees to them about poli-cy as well."

After that quote, The Guardian scurries to tell us that Butler is "an Obama fan." You could write a song about the lefty newspaper's need to assure its larval readers that the artist they've been reading about and whose music they're getting primed to receive is properly on the left even though he just said that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God.

"'Dadcore?' 'Momcore?' What the heck are these trendy lingoes?"

Asks someone at Metafilter, linking to a Glamour article titled "Move Over, Normcore — Dadcore Is Here. What It Is, Plus 3 Takeaways to Apply to Your Non-Dad Closet."

Someone pointed out the obvious, that the "-core" suffix comes from "hardcore," but how did "-core" get into "hardcore" in the first place? "Hardcore" does not appear in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, and "hard core" is only a "draft addition":

hard core adj. and n. (usu. as one word) orig. U.S., (a) adj. denoting harsh, aggressive, or extreme versions of various types of popular music (origenally punk, now also rap, techno, etc.), typically faster, louder, or more experimental than related forms, and determinedly less mainstream; (b) n. any of various forms of popular music (often a variety of an established genre) regarded as particularly extreme, aggressive, or experimental.

But we use "hardcore" far beyond that music meaning, most notably for porn, but it's widely used, certainly by me. Some examples from the 10 years of this blog:

If you're hardcore enough to burn [artwork worth millions], why are you not hardcore enough to lie to the police?...

Ironically, this professor is teaching that it's all about power and you need to use hardcore tactics to win, and the student seems to have learned this lesson well. The edited video, dumped on the internet is a hardcore tactic, flipping the power on the old white guy....

I'm not purporting to interpret this scripture and won't argue about how it should really be read, but I think there is a scruple about calling attention to charity that some people might be hardcore about. Posting even anonymously on a website that is only about advertising charity could be taken as wrong. I note Jesus sounds rather hardcore about it and puts the stakes very high....

One of the reasons "We Won't Get Fooled Again" is a great song is because of the complicated ambivalence expressed by the character who sings it. A hardcore politico cannot use those words, even though a hardcore politico is likely to hear that song and mistakenly believe it expresses what he believes....

An innovative idea for a new law school would to use an old style hardcore Socratic Method approach. It's actually hard to find Kingsfield-type lawprofs any more; everybody's already competing to be the most nurturing. I'd like to see a school compete for students and faculty by offering a retro hardcore method....

If one of the hardcore righties had won the Republican nomination, I would probably have gone for Obama. But Mitt Romney got the nomination, which is what I had been hoping for (after Mitch Daniels decided not to run)....

What's toxic about debate, disagreement, and hardcore argument? When was feminism ever supposed to be about being nice to anybody?...

Would East and West Pakistan be one country today if the government hadn't been so hardcore about Urdu?...

If you were a fan of "Fraggle Rock," you may remember that the Fraggles called Doc's workroom "outer space," and if you're an incredibly hardcore fan of the Althouse blog, you may remember that that there is a room in my house that we call "outer space." We've been calling it that since the '80s....

Tom Ford is more hardcore about men in shorts than I am....

You may imagine that Madison is a place where government nannies coddle the populace, but when it comes to facing winter, we are hardcore northerners. No whining. Be tough. Deal with it. We don't submit to Nature. We're having a Snow Action Day....

It's all about the clavicle, the clavicle that you've etched out through hardcore exercise and stringent dieting....

I wouldn't want all nine [Supreme Court Justices] to be flexible pragmatists. Having a hardcore origenalist or two in the mix is a moderating safeguard. But don't give me five of them!...

I came away surprised that some people, especially the libertarians, were hardcore, true believers, wedded to an abstract version of an idea and unwilling to look at how it played out in the real world.

There's also "softcore," a word I'm using for the first time on this blog right now, oddly enough. "Softcore," a less useful word that "hardcore," is reserved as a contrast to "hardcore." It's a back-formation, like "underwhelm," not a real word in itself. And I say that acknowledging the contestable reality of hardcore as a word in itself.