2.) “The Ugly One With the Jewels”

The above is a title to an album by Laurie Anderson. It was released in 1995.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I revere this artist. Many of you are at least aware of her “hit”, the eerie and off-putting “O Superman (For Massenet)”, which unexpectedly made #2 on the UK Charts in 1981, thanks largely to its championing by the late, great John Peel.


While most of her albums will inevitably split a room of people in two camps, with either side feeling passionate of how her songs make them feel, “The Ugly One With the Jewels” is one of her most accessible and entertaining albums, and many people who would not otherwise appreciate her more “difficult music” will still enjoy this album.

It is not my favorite – for me, nothing trumps her epic work “United States” (which is available as a live performance album consisting of four compact discs). Still, “Ugly One” is magical to me; it’s like walking through a dream, awake.

The album consists almost entirely of spoken word; stories that are autobiographical. It was recorded live in London for what sounds like a perfect audience.

Anderson’s life is one worth hearing about. Few people have a taste for adventure like her, and her droll, dry style of story-telling on this record shows-off her comedic skill, something she values in herself that others rarely remark on, mostly due, I’m sure, to her being of the avant-garde.

It was on this day in 1962 that Marilyn Monroe took her own life. Or, if conspiracy theories are to be believed, it marks the day that the Kennedy Family hired Reticulians to invade the actress’ home, kill her, make it look like a suicide, and then use snippets of her DNA to… I dunno… revive Adolf Hitler’s dehydrating brain. (I’m not as well-read when it comes to American history as I should be.)

It’s also the day that the Manson Family first killed, fulfilling the only thing possible that Charles Manson could do that would actually be worse than his music.


It’s also the anniversary of the day that Paul Tibbets flew his airplane, named after his mom, Enola Gay, over to Hiroshima, where he performed an act that would later be re-enacted by every Thai food delivery service that gets inside my apartment building.


I could go on. In short, it’s a particularly dark day in history. So I’m sitting with my beloved in his favorite café, Stir Crazy (at La Brea & Melrose), asking myself to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative; I’m calling upon myself to remember things – music, movies, flavors of Method cleaning products – that remind me that it is a beautiful world after all, and that Norma Jean didn't have the right idea, forty-five years ago.

I just received my copy of Playboy Magazine in the mail. Stoked!

No, no… don’t get all shocked. I’m not a subscriber. Who can afford magazine subscriptions? Not me. And if I could afford a magazine subscription, I would choose National Geographic over Playboy. I mean, National G gets you way more pix of naked women for your money.

You just reacted one of three ways:

1.) You groaned a little. You don’t understand why this woman is famous; you don’t “get” her stand-up comedy and your knowledge of her is mostly confined to vague recollections of shenanigans with Madonna and, oh yeah, she was that lesbian character on “Roseanne.” You fall into the category of person we’ll term “Plebeian.”

Last Sunday, I was in the car with Corey and his parents. We stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank before our drive to Santa Barbara to eat tacos.

Corey knows where the cheapest gas is; unfortunately, so does everyone else, so the place was packed. There was one unused pump, but a woman had parked her car so that it took up two places. After waiting a bit and allowing her to notice that a car full of people were staring at her and sending her "vibes", I got out.

I approached. She was sitting in her front seat, rummaging through her ample purse.

"Pardon me, ma'am," I said in my least intimidating voice, "Would you please back up so we can reach the other pump?"

"I'm handicapped!" she yelled. And I mean she YELLED this, and started digging though her purse more frantically.

"Uh, if you could just move your car back, please, we could..."

"I'm too poor to pay for gas!" she cried.

"Okay, well, if you could just move your car back..."

"LEAVE ME ALONE IT'S AN EMERGENCY!!!" she screamed, and ran away from me.

Folks, she ran away from me.

By that time, another pump had opened up, so we pulled in there. The woman had run inside the mini-mart where she stayed.

It was an omen. While we did make it to Santa Barbara, we never made it to the tacos.