X – "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" (1983)

I must not think bad thoughts!

I must not think bad thoughts!

I must not think bad thoughts!

Have you met my landlord, Mr. Macbeth?

From act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Scottish play:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast . . .

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Signs that read as follow were posted all over my apartment building yesterday:

Please be aware that the fire alarm will be sounding off 4/4/2024 between 9 AM to 5 PM.

I’ve been going to bed too late and waking up too early the last few days, but I was sleeping soundly this morning when the fire alarm went off at 8:55 AM – a slightly premature start.  My landlord – let's call him “Mr. Macbeth,” shall we? – couldn’t have waited until 9:00 AM to begin the testing?

There’s a speaker directly over my bed, so the fire warning came through loud and clear.  Click here to hear it.

I would have thought three or four repetitions of the recorded message would have been plenty to test the system.  But I swear they played the warning at least a hundred times.  

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The rest of the day was just as bad.

I spent the next hour on the phone trying to figure out how to file my federal income tax return without also filing my state return.  (TurboTax wants me to pay $64 to file a state return, but my state has a free website that I’ve used for years – it works very well.  I thought about saying the hell with it and just paying the damn $64, but after wasting half an hour on the phone with them, there was no f*cking way I was going to give another penny to TurboTax.)  

The next half hour was spent on the phone with my online brokerage.  I was trying to do an online transaction so I would have enough cash to pay my income taxes, but I kept getting error messages.  So I had to call a rep and do the transaction over the phone.

It’s been a l-o-n-g time since I’ve been in a fouler mood than I was in at the end of that call.  (Like maybe two or three days?)  

Winning at trivia would have cleansed my palate of the bad taste the first half of the day had left in my mouth.  My team got off to a great start – we had a perfect score and a decent lead at the halfway point – but we inexplicably screwed up a relatively easy question about the Liberty Bell, and ended up out of the money.  Poopy!

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Upon my return home from trivia, I found this e-mail from my landlord in my inbox:

Good morning. 

I hope this finds everyone well.  We were informed today that, as part of the fire alarm testing, we need to enter each apartment.  Originally, they thought they could perform the test without.  They will only crack your door open.  Confirm they can hear the alarm sounding.  Then they will close the door. 

Apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please reach out to the office with any questions or concerns. 

Sincerely, 

[Mr. Macbeth] 

That e-mail didn’t specify what time this will all take place, but I’m betting on 8:55 AM.

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I can assure you that there is no need for the maintenance staff to open the apartment doors to hear the alarm – that motherf*cker is plenty loud enough to hear through the door.  

I can only imagine how long it will take the maintenance staff to go to each and every one of the several hundred apartments in my 18-story building, unlock each door, open it, stick their head in to verify that the speakers in each apartment are working, and then close the door and lock it before moving on to the next unit.  (Hopefully they’ll use the stairs to go from floor to floor rather than waiting for an elevator, WHICH CAN TAKE FOREVER.)

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“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” was released in 1983 on X’s fourth studio album, More Fun in the New World.  That album was produced by Ray Manzarek, who is best known as the co-founder and keyboard player of the Doors.

Click here to listen to “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Julian Cope – "World Shut Your Mouth" (1987)

Shut your mouth, shut your mouth

Put your head back in the clouds

And shut your mouth

The critics loved Bull Durham.  

No fewer than 70 of the 72 reviews assembled on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, which translates to a 97% score on the Tomatometer – the highest rating ever earned by a sports movie.  

“Is Bull Durham the greatest sports movie ever made?” one critic asked rhetorically.  “Hey, no argument from me.” 

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The movie’s three stars – Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins – got plenty of kudos for their performances, but the real star of Bull Durham was Ron Shelton’s screenplay, which was praised as “witty and insightful” and “honest, simple, [and] funny.”  It was named as the best screenplay of the year by the Writers Guild of America and the National Society of Film Critics, and was nominated for the “Best Original Screenplay” Oscar.

A lesser man might be hesitant to swim upstream against such a powerful critical current.  But not 2 or 3 lines – no siree, Bob!  When someone is so full of sh*t that their eyes are brown, you can count on 2 or 3 lines to call a spade a spade.  

Which is exactly what I’m doing today.

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I’m not going to spend a lot of time trashing Bull Durham and its screenplay.  After all, you’re busy and I’m busy – right? – and I can prove my point by quoting one paragraph from the script. 

The following lines are spoken by Kevin Costner (in his role as a worldly-wise veteran minor-league catcher) to Susan Sarandon (who plays a kinky but philosophical veteran baseball groupie) when she asks him exactly what he believes in:

I believe in the soul, the c*ck, the p*ssy, the small of a woman’s back, the hangin’ curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent over-rated crap.  I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter.  I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve . . . and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.

Click here to watch Costner deliver those lines.

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That paragraph is without a doubt the leader in the clubhouse when it comes to being the worst paragraph ever written.

And I am willing to bet the farm that no future writer of bad paragraphs will ever top it.

Surely there’s no need for me for beat a dead horse by going through that paragraph phrase by phrase to explain why it is so very, very bad.  (It’s a matter of ipso facto.  Not to mention res ipsa loquitur.)

But that last phrase – “I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days” – deserves a special shout-out.  If that line doesn’t give you douche chills and make you throw up a little in your own mouth, something’s seriously wrong with you.

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Julian Cope’s first solo album was titled World Shut Your Mouth.  But today’s featured song – which is also titled “World Shut Your Mouth” – wasn’t released on that album.  Instead, it was released on Cope’s third album, Saint Julian.

That may seem a little odd, but everything about Julian Cope – who a particular favorite of 2 or 3 lines – is at least a little odd.

Click here to watch the official “World Shut Your Mouth” music video.

Click here to order that recording from Amazon.

Sonic Youth – "100%" (1992)

I’ve been around the world

A million times

And all you men are slime

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film, Poor Things, is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the late writer and artist Alasdair Gray. 

It is undoubtedly the most abhorrent movie I’ve ever watched.  (Before I settled on “abhorrent” to describe Poor Things, I thought about describing it as “abominable,” “atrocious,” “loathsome,” “nauseating,” “repugnant,” or “vile.”  But I chose “abhorrent” because I thought it was the strongest of all those words.)

After watching Poor Things, I fired up my trusty computer and researched whether the movie is true to the book – which I haven’t read – or whether screenwriter Tony McNamara took significant liberties with the novel’s plot.  I needed to know the answer to that question so I could assign the blame for this deplorable piece of crap.

It turns out that while the movie follows the book pretty closely, the most disgraceful single element of the film is the responsibility of screenwriter McNamara.  Apparently he didn’t think the shameful Poor Things book was quite shameful enough, so he wrote a really shameful new ending for it.

That truly depraved denouement was the final nail in the coffin for me.

(My thanks to Oxford Languages for their excellent online dictionary – without it, I probably couldn’t have written the previous paragraph without repeating myself.) 

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[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Poor Things, you should really read the rest of the post despite the fact that it contains a number of spoilers.  Unless you’re a truly depraved weirdo, you’ll be so appalled that you’ll choose to eschew viewing the film.  (Trust me, you’ll be glad that you did.)]

The heroine of Poor Things is a young woman named Bella, who throws herself off a London bridge and drowns in the Thames.  Dr. Godwin Baxter, a demented genius, fishes her out only moments after her death and takes her to his laboratory.  (Accent on the second syllable, please!) 

Emma Stone as Bella Baxter

Bella was great with child when she jumped from the bridge, and Baxter was able to deliver her unborn baby alive.  But instead of nurturing the baby, Baxter decides to transplant his brain into Bella’s body in order to restore her to life.   

The procedure is successful.  Bella is mentally an infant, of course, but physically she is a growed woman – which results in some rather shocking behavior on Bella’s part.  In one scene, she joins Dr. Baxter in his laboratory – where she diddles the penis of a male corpse before inexplicably grabbing a spare scalpel and gleefully stabbing it into the corpse’s eyes and face.   

[NOTE: Emma Stone, who won the “Best Actress” Oscar for her portrayal of Bella, had this to say about the character: “She was the most joyous character in the world to play, because she has no shame about anything. . . . It was an extremely freeing experience to be her.”]  

Baxter is the survivor of a number of gruesome medical experiments at the hands of his father, who was an even more demented genius – the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  I won’t tell you what was done to young Baxter by his dear old dad because you may be eating your lunch, but suffice it to say that Dr. Mengele’s monstrous experiments on concentration camp prisoners pale in comparison.

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Screenwriter McNamara apparently decided that one odious brain transplant wasn’t enough, so he added a sequence involving  a second such operation.

Near the end of the movie, her husband – and the father of the unborn child whose brain was transplanted into Bella’s skull – makes an unexpected appearance.  (It’s a real deus ex machina moment.)

The husband is convinced that Bella’s unhappiness results from an excess of libido, and he decides to take care of that surgically.  But Bella manages to turn the tables on him before he can execute his extremely nasty plan.

Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter

Dr. Baxter – Bella’s creator and surrogate father – is dying of cancer at this point in the movie, and I thought Bella might take care of two birds with one stone by transplanting his brain into her husband’s healthy body.

Silly me!  Bella removes and discards her evil husband’s brain and gives him a goat’s brain instead.  As the movie ends, Bella is sipping champagne in the garden with her friends while her goat-brained husband contentedly grazes on the shrubbery.

So much for saving Dr. Baxter – Bella apparently decided it was more important to punish her husband in this particularly horrific fashion.  

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Most of the critics l-o-v-e-d Poor Things, calling it “an insanely enjoyable fairy tale,” “a virtuoso comic epic,” and “a brilliant tour de force.”

Here’s an excerpt from a fairly typical review: 

[The movie] is at once daring, funny, beautiful and surreal.  Poor Things is a staggering accomplishment of a movie, a film . . . with a heart and a shocking amount of joy . . . . Poor Things is a visionary delight [and] potentially the best film of 2023.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Poor Things is the most heartless and joyless movie I’ve ever seen.  Did something terrible happen to the director and screenwriter when they were children?   They must hate their fellow human beings very deeply.  How else can you explain their seeming delight in a movie that so glibly depicts such unspeakable tortures?

Or maybe they’re unfeeling and utterly cynical people who are capable of intellectually distancing themselves from the on-screen horrors they have wrought.

In any event, they had the last laugh.  Poor Things was nominated for eleven Academy Awards – and won four.  

The folks who give out the Golden Globes one-upped the Oscar voters.  They awarded Poor Things the Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.”

Poor Things was certainly not a musical – so the Golden Globe voters must have thought it was a comedy.

You have GOT to be kidding me.  

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Not everyone loved Poor Things.  One reviewer said the film was “a 141-minute mistake,” while another called it “a seriously misguided take on female empowerment.”  

The New York Times critic wrote that the movie’s “design is rich, [but] its ideas [are] thin. . . . It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a film that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.”

My favorite “review” of Poor Things was a post in Reddit:

I feel like critics are complete bullsh*tters after I watched Poor Things.

Midway through the film I almost walked out of the theatre.  [NOTE: She’s not alone – a story in Variety reported that a stream of moviegoers had “bolted for the exit” during one Los Angeles showing of Poor Things.]

The theme of a baby being inside of its own mother’s head, and how she basically followed the path the men in her life wanted her to follow made me uneasy – how she was having relationships with men who knew that she was a baby technically. . . . It felt like honest to God pedophilia.

I found it weird how people where hyping up how “bad” Saltburn was . . . People online kept talking about how disturbing it was [but] they’ve clearly not seen the shit show that is Poor Things. . . .

I wanted to vomit at the end.

Amen to that.

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, I promised you more Sonic Youth – and what 2 or 3 lines promises, 2 or 3 lines delivers!

The Dirty album cover

Click here to listen to “100%,” which was released on the band’s 1992 album, Dirty.

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.