“The curtain goes up and there’s nothing happening, it’s just me. I thought that was really frightening and then when it happened, I thought, actually, this is brilliant,” she said.
The role is Erda, in "Siegfried."
Erda is usually “frocked her up to the nines” in gossamer gowns, Linthwaite said, but Barrie Kosky, the director, wanted the octogenarian’s body to symbolise nature and remind the audience of their mortality....
That's the director's view — an old woman reminds you of death — not the old woman's. She thinks she's there to remind you of life:
She thinks her performance is something of a political act in a country she views as “spiritually arid” for its lack of empathy towards older people. Ultimately, she wants the audience to look at her and see the future not as a tragedy, but an adventure. She wants people to feel: “Hey, I’m looking forward to 80.”
I asked Grok: "If you saw Erda in 'Siegfried' portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?" [ADDED: The actual full question was "What views are attributed to the character Erda in 'Siegfried' and if you saw her portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?"
And he thought calling Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man” was "hilarious" and "brilliant":
Elton John on his reaction to Donald Trump calling Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man”: “I laughed, I thought that was brilliant... I’ve always been friendly toward him, and I thank him for his support. When he did that, I just thought it was hilarious.” https://t.co/QXV9VqAtuTpic.twitter.com/MNhsNzFwlR
".... reporters have already gathered, the sound system just briefly played a clip of Johnny Cash singing, 'Ghost Riders in the Sky.' The song, according to the website Ballad of America, is a 'cautionary tale warning a cowboy that if he doesn‘t change his ways, he will one day join the damned cowboys doomed to try to 'catch the Devil’s herd across these endless skies.'"
"At Bedminster, in the parallel universe that will serve as a political rally of sorts, club workers have set up bunting, American flags, roughly 150 white chairs for attendees and the type of blue podium that Trump used as president. The work is going on under blistering sunshine and to the dulcet tones of 'Bennie and the Jets,' by Elton John, over the speaker system."
Hey kids, plug into the faithless, maybe they're blinded, but Bennie makes them ageless... we fight our parents out in the streets to find who's right and who's wrong....
"In an effort to heal, he rushed to wrap himself around others in mourning. Like Steven Spielberg’s E.T., he seems to instinctually believe in the healing power of physical connection—even if that intimacy can sometimes feel a bit too close. As the Irish literary critic Fintan O’Toole has written of Biden’s grasp, 'There is something religious in this laying-on of hands. It is an act of communion.'
After the destruction of the Trump era, the nation is desperate for a parental figure to cultivate renewal amid ruin; shattered institutions will require an almost irrational faith in healing."
We learned of Ginsburg's death as we were watching Trump's Minnesota rally last night. Trump continued his speech, apparently without learning the news until he spoke with reporters afterwards. There must be a way to relay information to the President while he is doing a speech.
I thought he might learn the news during the rally and speak extemporaneously from the stage. Perhaps he did learn and merely pretended to be hearing the news for the first time as he spoke to reporters, but I'll assume it was genuine surprise when he said, "Wow. I didn’t know that. I just — you’re telling me now for the first time."
Those who think he's a narcissistic weirdo who blurts out inappropriate remarks should take note of the utter appropriateness of what he said with no time to think: "She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman. Whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that."
There was just a slight awkwardness to "Whether you agree or not," which in literal context could be taken to mean, whether you agree that she was an amazing woman. Clearly he meant, whether you agreed with her legal interpretations or not.
ADDED: Here's the video. So evocative, with "Tiny Dancer" just beginning and louder than that voices:
I discussed the "slight awkwardness" to "Whether you agree or not," but it's very clear in the video that he said "Whether you agreed or not," which is much less susceptible to the interpretation that the possible disagreement is over whether she was an amazing woman. He meant whether you agreed with her legal interpretations or not, which I had already thought was clear.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 5'1", so "Tiny Dancer" feels like a special tribute to her.
AND: The video is so cinematic. You couldn't have staged it, lit it, acted it, and scored it better. Trump's whole-body reaction, the pauses, the double hand gesture — uncannily right. The music is cued perfectly. The backlighting outlining the shoulder. He turns to lumber toward the plane and we see his wide back as the line plays "Ballerina, you must have seen her, dancing in the sand." It makes you cry!
... and I'm just seeing and being surprised that "weird and wonderful" is, officially (according to the OED) a colloquial phrase. A couple posts down, I got embroiled in the subject of what "weird" means and what's up with the people who overuse the word "weird," and I ran into this other subject that needed its own post.
The colloquial phrase "weird and wonderful" means — according to the unlinkable OED — "marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish. Frequently ironical or derogatory."
1886 O. Wilde in Pall Mall Gaz. 1 Feb. 5/1 There is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind.
1908 T. E. Lawrence Let. 9 Aug. in Home Lett. (1954) 70 Their food is weird and wonderful....
1978 S. Naipaul North of South ii. vi. 227 A weird and wonderful place is Jo'burg.
This is news to me. I don't think it's a colloquial phrase in America. Or maybe it is, and I just hadn't noticed.
From the NYT in just this past year: "a weird and wonderful coincidence," "her weird and wonderful new play," "Weird and wonderful plants are tumbling into gardens," "weird and wonderful obsession with her kids’ effluvia," "weird and wonderful supporting characters, including a sex-crazed elderly woman next-door neighbor," "an ordinary childhood that... could only come across as weird and wonderful," "a skin-contact, amphora-aged zibibbo from South Australia that’s as weird and wonderful as wine gets," etc.
That's how I tested colloquialness, and I guess the answer is... well, what makes a colloquial phrase? You can't have separate dictionary entries for every set of words that get put together with some frequency. Is "wild and wonderful" a colloquial phrase? Is "wonder of wonders"? Is "colloquial phrase" a colloquial phrase?
"'In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,' he read, deadpan. Trump, he went on, 'loves this country,' and 'he especially loves you.' The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the 'rule of law.' Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked 'rogue DA’s' and 'so-called social-justice reformers,' who are responsible for 'historic levels of homicide and other violent crime' in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer 'to help criminal aliens evade the law.'"
From a Dana Milbank column in The Washington Post with the somewhat strange headline "Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus." That headline focuses on something that appears at the top of the column, the news that a group called Hookers received a grant from the Justice Department for its work with victims of human trafficking. I know nothing about the group, but Milbank is simply expecting us to register instinctive contempt for prostitutes, but that's glaringly inconsistent with empathy for the victims of human trafficking.
The description of Milbank at the bottom of his column is: "He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics." So, in this case, it's Barr — jowly Barr, in his large round glasses — who I think bears a strong resemblance to Elton John at the Oscars — looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid...
It's pretty easy to mock someone for being fat and wearing glasses. It's the cheapest shot of all, perhaps even foolish, fallacious, and felonious.
And what about those Hookers for Jesus? Milbank links to this Reuters article, which says:
Hookers for Jesus, which received $530,190 over three years, is run by a born-again Christian trafficking survivor who has lobbied against decriminalizing prostitution.... Hookers for Jesus operates a safe house for female adult trafficking victims that, in 2010 and in 2018....
Hookers for Jesus founder Annie Lobert denied that her organization requires safe house residents to attend services at her church. “We are not going to discriminate toward anyone,” she said. “But,” she added, “we are Christian. And there is an understanding before they come in here that we are Christian.”...
Annie Lobert (born September 26, 1967) is an American former call girl and sex industry worker, who founded the international Christian ministry Hookers for Jesus.... Lobert worked as a prostitute in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Hawaii for 16 years. She left the sex industry with the support of Al Nakata, one of her regular customers, who had fallen in love with her....
In 2008, Hookers for Jesus established a safe house program in the Las Vegas area with one of The Church at South Las Vegas intern homes. The program, titled "Destiny House", is a safe haven for victims of sex trafficking and primarily serves prostitutes and local sex trade workers. Annie left CSLV (Church of South Las Vegas) and currently has a new Destiny House Estate.
What's wrong with giving this group a federal grant?
ADDED: From the comments over at WaPo:
Dana, once again, you've shown this President and his jackboots to be naked partisans, willing to sacrifice the good of our Nation for Trump's own personal gain....
That raises 2 questions: 1. Are you really naked if you're still wearing shoes/boots? and 2. If you read about victimized prostitutes and then you feel moved to talk in terms of nakedness, is your heart in the right place?
"It must be one of the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing helping himself to a drink. There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by the sound of Bob Halley’s voice: 'Elton, that’s not the fucking gardener. It’s Bob Dylan.'"
Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.
I don't know what really happened, but I'm stepping up to defend Bob Dylan. "How many syllables?" and "sounds like" are the dregs of charades. I'm going to say that Bob wanted to play the game at a higher level, where you had to get the real words across, not break them up into syllables and resort to other words that merely rhyme. They were mocking him, throwing oranges at him, because he wouldn't do it the easy way. But the easiest way is not to play charades at all. And I challenge you all to play charades the Bob Dylan way, with no "how many syllables?" and no "sounds like."
From Bob Dylan's "Tight Connection to My Heart":
I’ll go along with the charade
Until I can think my way out
I know it was all a big joke
Whatever it was about
Who knew Bob Dylan played charades?! That's what the rock stars do when they get together? Charades!
ADDED: Into the mix, let me throw the glorious "How many syllables, Mario?" sequence from "Putney Swope":
I'm interested in this because I actually watched the movie "Rocketman" last night. I rarely watch a movie — maybe once a month on TV and once a year in the theater — but I felt like seeing "Rocketman" because I'd blogged about Elton John's new autobiography yesterday and audiobooked 25% of it on a long walk. The book has much more depth about music and human relationships, and the movie has the visuals — all the expressive faces and, of course, the music itself, plus lots and lots of costumes. I know the movie got to me because:
1. It made me cry within the first 17 minutes. Later, I saw in the book that the very same thing made Elton John cry:
But I’d kept away from the set and tried to avoid looking at the rushes: the last thing you want is the person you’re playing gawping at you while you’re pretending to be him. But watching the film... I started sobbing during the scene set in my gran’s house in Pinner Hill Road, where my mum and dad and gran are singing ‘I Want Love’. That was a song Bernie had written about himself, a middle-aged man with a few failed marriages behind him, wondering if he’ll ever fall in love again. But it could have been written about the people who lived in that house....
What's so sad about that scene is that each character — his mum and dad and gran and he himself — are all in the same house, but each sings the song alone. They all want love, but they cannot give it to each other. Yes, that's corny and melodramatic, but there's a thorough and theatrical commitment to the melodrama, it does make some sense to say that even the cold, heartless bastards in your life, deep down, want love. You can know that and give them that and still understand that they're not going to give love to you and won't receive love from you.
2. That night, I had a dream — not the dream described below — that was something like a scene in the movie, which I won't describe because it's a bit of a spoiler. In my dream — and there's no movie spoiler here and no quote from the movie — I told some people off with the line: "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head." That seemed like an important idea to me in the dream and to me now that I'm awake. I'm not referring to the phenomenon of hearing voices in your head, which is a symptom of mental illness, but the very common experience of having your own thoughts and weaving in the imagined responses and interactions of another person. I don't think it would be possible or desirable to exclude everyone from your thoughts, but you might want to identify some individuals in your life who ought to be escorted out. You could still talk to them when they're actually there in real life talking to you. Just don't let them talk to you from inside your head. In the dream, the individuals I was talking to when I said "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head" were inside my head. That's what a dream is.
"We said hello. He stared at us and nodded. Then he sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ again. He said we should come upstairs and meet his kids. It turned out that his kids were asleep in bed. He woke them up. ‘This is Elton John!’ he enthused. His daughters looked understandably baffled. He sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ to them: ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind’. Then he sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ to us again. By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of ‘Your Song’ sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was beginning to wear a little thin. I was struck by the sinking feeling that we were in for quite a long and trying evening. I turned to Bernie and a certain look passed between us, that somehow managed to combine fear, confusion and the fact that we were both desperately trying not to laugh at the absolute preposterousness of the situation we found ourselves in, a look that said: what the fuck is happening?"
I'm picturing Brian Wilson singing "I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind" — just those words — on and on, a hundred times, and Elton John did mind, but he couldn't say so. Did he ever question the meaning of the song and begin to think the "you" to whom the song is addressed really would mind? I've heard the song hundreds of times, and I've never until now had the thought that "you" would hear the song and say, I actually do mind.
Toobin is on CNN, talking about Kavanaugh's interview, and guess what he calls "weird"?
According to Toobin, Kavanaugh disrupted the usual appearance of nonpartisanship for Supreme Court nominees by going on Fox News, AKA "Republican television." That's what's "weird"! "Go on the 'Today' show, go on '20/20'" he advised. I'd say what's weird is the pretense that anyplace is neutral.
What does "weird" mean anyway? Originally, "weird" was a noun that meant fate or destiny or someone with the power to control destiny. As an adjective, it meant having the power to control fate. Think of the "weird sisters" in "MacBeth."
In the 1800s, the meaning becomes "Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny" (OED). The poet Shelley wrote, "Some said, I was a fiend from my weird cave, Who had stolen human shape." And then it was "Out of the ordinary course, strange, unusual; hence, odd, fantastic." There was Charles Dickens writing, "He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them."
The OED recognizes the colloquial phrase "weird and wonderful" — meaning "marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish. Frequently ironical or derogatory." Oscar Wilde wrote, "There is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind." And T. E. Lawrence wrote, "Their food is weird and wonderful." This intrigued me. "Weird and wonderful" is a standard phrase. I'll never hear "Bennie and the Jets" the same way again:
Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful
Oh, Bennie, she's really keen
She's got electric boots
A mohair suit
You know I read it in a magazine
B-B-B-Bennie and the Jets
Oh, but he's weird and he's wonderful/Jeffrey Toobin is really keen/He's got electric news/Contemptuous boos/It's the best news I've ever seen....
Oh! The Trump haters are having a great time with this passage from Trump's Montana rally. One of the many, many topics Trump touched on and skittered across was that the elite media won't admit he's a great speaker — "They never say I’m a great speaker" — and "Why the hell do so many people come? It’s got to be something. I guess they like my policy?"
An ordinary person, speaking spontaneously, would take that idea and run with it. Just off the top of my head, here's what I'd say: The media cannot deny the size of these crowds, so if they don't say I'm a great speaker, the only other explanation is that the people must love my policies, but they won't say that either, which proves they won't give me any credit for anything, even when pure logic requires it. They're so biased and dishonest.
But Trump seems to trust that he's already got that point across. No need to belabor it. And he's got something more fun to leap to. Look, it's Elton John! He has a thing to say that includes Elton John, and he doesn't even use the idea that he called Kim Jong-Un "Rocket Man" as a segue. He just plunges into it with this:
I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.
If you hate Trump, that's a huge, insane word salad — especially if you go with the transcript and don't get into the flow of the performance. Here's the top-rated comment on that passage at Reddit:
I really would like to know what people get out of listening [to] him at these rallies. I mean, my brain hurt just trying to read that transcript. How can people listen to that? Do they even understand what he's talking about? Does he? Christ, he really needs to be psychologically evaluated because there's something seriously not right.
Note the assumption that a verbatim transcript should give more of a sense of coherence to spoken word. That's not true. On this issue, I always go back to this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book "The Journalist and the Murderer":
When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain* was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies** revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.
Quoting that passage in 2013 — before the ascendency of Trump — I said:
Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable....
I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature.
Reverse engineer that and you can see many things that could be true and appealing about Trump: He's talking straight from his head like me and my friends.
For someone who thinks like that, the mockery from Trump haters — like that " How can people listen to that?" at Reddit — is personally insulting, like being put in the "basket of deplorables." That only bonds Trump's fans more closely to Trump and makes them more likely to go to the next rally, where it's fun and funny and the stiffs can't laugh and don't understand.
Which brings me back to the subject of rock and roll. Let's look at the substance of the Elton John riff. I think that this is a riff he's done in private and he just can't do the whole thing in public. The pauses in the audio version makes this false start even more apparent.
I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ.
So that's a great set up for talking about male genitalia. There's no reason to bring up an organ unless that's where you want to go. Elton John does sometimes play the organ, like here, on my favorite Elton John song, "Daniel"...
... but he's far more closely associated with the piano. Trump chose to say organ because it's penis-y. In that view, it's hilarious to say "I don’t have... an organ. No organ." He pauses at that point. I laughed. Here's this man who was mocked during the presidential campaign for having a small penis (because, we were told by Marco Rubio, he has small hands), and now, he's riding so high he can have fun with saying he has no penis at all. This is a man who loves to have fun. And he talks like me and my friends. If only we could hang out with him, we'd hear a much, much funnier, dirtier version of the me-and-Elton riff.
Since he can't do the full "no organ" riff, after the pause, he adds another idea. It's just him and his mouth and his brain doing the whole act that the big crowd came to hear. There are no instruments and no other people doing the performance.
We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments.
Notice how fiercely he avoids saying "I." It's always "we," even when the point he's making is that he's alone on the stage, doing the entire performance:
This is the only musical: the mouth.
He's speaking so impetuously that he just says "musical" for "musical instrument." You know what he means. If you like him, that is. If you don't then it's ridiculous insanity: The only musical, The Mouth??? Now, opening on Broadway, the new musical — The Mouth!
I think Trump knew at this point that he was getting a little ridiculous. He couldn't follow through on that "organ" stuff and switched to nattering about the size of the room and all the people in it, so he finished off the topic with a little self-deprecation:
And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.
I'm sure that if Trump were in private and he could work blue, he'd have opened up the subject of the brain as an organ that's "more important" than the other organ, the one he would have joked about earlier, but he just can't do it here... because his connected-to-his-mouth brain is telling him he can't say that, but he can show us enough to get into our brain-connected-to-our-ears that we can imagine what it would be like to hang out with Trump after the show. And then we are groupies.
__________________________
* Malcolm refers to the famous line in the play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme": "My faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it, and I am the most obliged person in the world to you for telling me so."
The Chosunilbo reports that Kim Jong-Un had never understood that Trump's "Little Rocket Man" nickname as a reference to an Elton John song. When Trump and Kim met, "'Kim mentioned that Trump referred to him as "rocket man" when tensions ran high last year' after a series of nuclear tests and missile launches by the North. 'Trump then asked Kim if he knew the song and Kim said no.'
Trump remembered the conversation and told Pompeo to take a CD with the song for Kim. He reportedly wrote a message on it and signed it."
Kim could have been lying, but it's disturbing to think that he's so out of touch with our media that he didn't have people reading and interpreting what was being said about the President's statements about him. I'm not saying he or his people should already know the pop culture that might be referenced, just that he should be informed of what Americans are saying about things the President says.
And yet, if you google "little rocket man" and click to a mainstream media report on the President's insult, it might not mention Elton John. The first thing I clicked on (Newsweek, last September) didn't.
I have no idea what would work to reach Kim Jong-Un, but I'd like to think that it would help for the Secretary of State to present him with an Elton John CD, with Trump's Sharpied scrawl on it: To my favorite Little Rocket Man, love always, Trumpie.
In the comments to the first post of the day, we were talking about the line "We can try to understand/The New York Times' effect on man" which appears in a NYT video about people doing an exercise routine in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I said:
Here's a discussion of the line... [in the] book "Hot Stuff: Disco and The Remaking of American Culture"... "Presumably [the Bee Gees] were trying to fit in a reference to the city and convey something about upward mobility. But these are such inelegant, head-shaking lines that for years critic Dave Marsh, eager for more class-conscious lyrics, misheard them as 'We can try to understand / The New York Times don't make a man.'"
The author of the book observes that the movies shows the NYT delivered each morning to the female character. I would add — based on decades-old memory of ["Saturday Night Fever"] — that the NYT represented the NYC that the characters — who lived in seedy 70s Brooklyn — dreamed of reaching some day and the characters do make it to Manhattan in the end.
But is the word "magazine" hard to work with? Magazine is kind of a great set of syllables. And magazines stir up so many aspirations and desires. Why wouldn't you write a song with the word "magazine"?
2 songs that had popped into my head were not on the list: "Bennie and the Jets" ("She's got electric boots a mohair suit/You know I read it in a magazine"). And "Darling Nikki" — the song that upset Tipper Gore — rhymes "magazine" with "a sex fiend":
Then I found this Guardian article that for no apparent reason had already fixated on the topic and put together a playlist of 55 songs.
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