“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk.”
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations
Making sure their make-up’s straight
Crushing one another with colossal expectations
Dependent, undisciplined and sleeping late
I think this reblog is obligatory.
Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.
My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get back on that road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-by for a dime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
It’s important to keep this in context, because the whole thing is so Hold Steady anyways.
EMA - California (Past Life Martyred Saints, 2011)
“Fuck California, you made me boring.”
-Erika M. Anderson, “California,” Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
I know a place where the grass is really greener.
-Katy Perry, “California Gurls,” Teenage Dream (2010)
I loved the way she said “L.A.”; I love the way everybody says “L.A.” on the Coast; it’s their one and only golden town when all is said and done.
-Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
“We’ve been on the run, driving in the sun.”
-Phantom Planet, “California,” The Guest (2002)
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…”
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
“Now you’ve corrupted us all with your sexuality, tried to tell us love was free.”
-EMA, “California,” Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
“Sun-kissed skin, so hot we’ll melt your popsicle.”
-Katy Perry, “California Gurls,” Teenage Dream (2010)
“Perry’s ouevre is nasty, sticky and a little bit stupid; it’s a kind of Hello Kitty-themed update on Carry On; fruit-scented lube on a rather imposing black dildo. It works perfectly because the American ideal of the teenager - wholesome and optimistic - is of course at odds with its reality of unprotected sex and casual drug use. Teenage Dream takes American Graffiti and drives it through the front window of Toys R Us. In an age where we wring our hands about sexualising teens/tweens, this former Christian Contemporary artist’s fetishising (remember, she’s marrying a noted sexaholic) of teenagerdom, the great American invention, is arguably more subversive than any of Lady Gaga’s meat dresses.”
“Everything that happens in California seems to get down our way, sooner or later.”
-A Georgian police officer in Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
“Everything about Perry seems to hark back to some golden age of American triumph; she looks and dresses like she should be painted on the nose of a World War Two bomber, or an extra in an early-sixties beach movie, or framed as a piece of Pop Art. Her singles dominated much of this past summer, and the album that followed, Teenage Dream, made being young, drunk, and starry-eyed sound incredibly wholesome — as if Girls Gone Wild videos long ago joined baseball, apple pie, water parks, and early Mellencamp in the canon of Americana.”
“…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
-The United States Declaration of Independence (1776)
“California not über-alles but as über-America: the country heading west in pursuit of happiness until it strands itself teetering at the end of the continent like Wile E. Coyote overrunning a cliff’s edge.”
-Me on Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” The Singles Jukebox, June 3, 2010
“I can see that blue room in Fargo, North Dakota with an American flag draped over a basement window. It’s a soldier’s room; got sent away. We stayed up for days in the summer on Merezine, and Ephedrine, and Benedryl, Dramamine, and Ketamine, and Nyquil, and Dextromethorpin, and Hydrobromide. And the light shining in through the window was golden, and the days stretched out as far as the horizon and you could see the dust float like sparkles in the air.”
-Erika M. Anderson of Gowns, “Fargo,” Red State (2007)
“When you listen you can tell that it could have only been recorded in a shit-ass meat-packing city in the Midwest where people shoot crank mixed with grape Kool-Aid and the grocery checkers don’t even know what tofu is and all there is to do is get shit-faced at the bar and ask everyone how their kids are doing.”
-Erika M. Anderson on Red State, quoted in Mike Powell’s review of the album at Pitchfork.
“I’m sorry Stephen and Andrew that I ever left you; you never seen the ocean, you never been on a plane … What’s it like to be small town and gay?”
-EMA, “California,” Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
“At the end of the continent.”
-R.E.M. “I Remember California,” Green (1988)
“Crash and burn, all the stars explode tonight. How’d you get so desperate; how’d you stay alive?”
-Hole, “Malibu,” Celebrity Skin (1998)
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
“L.A. is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.”
-Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
“‘Cut their goddamn heads off,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’re doing in California.’”
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
“You’re beautiful and dying.”
-Hole, “Boys on the Radio,” Celebrity Skin (1998)
“Tombstone hand and a graveyard mind.”
-Bo Diddley, “Who Do You Love” (1957)
“I’m just 22 … I don’t mind dying.”
-Bo Diddley, “Who Do You Love” (1957) and EMA, “California,” Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
-Lawrence Walsh, Chinatown (1974)
Follow the brilliant career of Jonathan Bradley, noted iconoclast, libertine, and man of letters. When he's not blogging here, he blogs at The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Jonathan is the editor of American Review magazine's daily Blog Book section and a daily editor at the Singles Jukebox.
e-mail: saturdayclubproductions [at] gmail.com
twitter: @_jbradley
