“Just a Girl” is a song by American band No Doubt from their third studio album, Tragic Kingdom (1995). Released as the record’s lead single in the United States on September 21, 1995, it was written by Gwen Stefani and Tom Dumont, and produced by Matthew Wilder. It has also made an appearance on their 2003 greatest hits album, The Singles 1992–2003. Lyrically, “Just a Girl” is about Stefani’s perspective of life as a woman and her struggles with having strict parents. “Just a Girl” was the first song Stefani wrote without the assistance of her brother Eric.
Category: Arts and Letters
Historians Point of View – David Blight Quote
I also like this little passage, to just put into your craw, about any History course, about any interpretation. And of course I’m going to have a point of view at times in this course; all historians do. Don’t even listen to a historian if he or she doesn’t have a point of view. None of us are blank slates. None of us can just tell it like it was–“stop interpreting, please.” But I always try to remember William James’ passage in one of his Pragmatism essays, an essay I think that should be required for U.S. citizenship. If I ruled the world you’d have to read this for U.S. citizenship. In it, James says, “The greatest enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths.” It’s as though James is saying, “damn, every time I think I really know something–that’s the truth–along comes some other possible truth and it screws it up.” Why can’t history just be settled? Enough already. If it was, it wouldn’t be any fun; if it was it wouldn’t be interesting; if it was it wouldn’t be good for business either.
HIST 119
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877: Lecture 1 Transcript
Professor David Blight
It’s Just the Day I’m Having
61. “It’s Just the Day I’m Having” . . . . . . the young brother said to me as the wind blew his glasses from the bill of his Burger King ball cap, probably on his way to work, looking exasperatedly at me as he bent over to pick them up, looking at the lenses and then to me and then back to the lenses, and I said, hoping it was not the wrong thing to say, “It’ll get better,” and he said, “Thank you.” (Apr. 9)
The Book of Delights: Essays
Ross Gay
from Amazon book description:
The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
5 Best Books of 2025
Selections mine, summary via Amazon. In order of publication date.
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994
Publication date: June 3, 2025
In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.
Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
Publication date: June 10, 2025
America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He’d instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”
The Jailhouse Lawyer
Publication date: July 8, 2025
Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Publication date: August 5, 2025
On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?
The Uncool: A Memoir
Publication date: October 28, 2025
The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—The Uncool is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, a chronicle of the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with music legends as you’ve never seen them before.
Why people talk when they’re not really talking about the thing they’re talking about. – ChatGPT on Chekhov
Uncle Vanya is one of the richest texts for understanding why people talk when they’re not really talking about the thing they’re talking about. Chekhov’s characters speak to avoid truth, ease loneliness, signal desire, maintain roles, fill silence, or relieve ache, far more than they speak to convey facts.
THE PATTERN IN UNCLE VANYA
Every major character uses talk not to convey information, but to perform one of a few deep needs:
Astrov: talks to avoid despair → identity performance
Yelena: talks to hide desire → polite deflection
Sonya: talks to console → emotional caretaking
Vanya: talks to be acknowledged → validation-seeking
Serebryakov: talks to maintain status → ego protection
Marina: talks to comfort → stable background warmthChekhov’s genius is that the real story always happens beneath the dialogue, in the gaps, in the evasions, in what’s being unspoken. The talk is camouflage, coping, performance — everything except direct communication.
Below is a structured breakdown, focusing on several key scenes with close paraphrases and line-level function analysis (no direct copyrighted text).
1. ASTROV’S FOREST SPEECHES — “Talking to Perform Identity / Avoid Pain”
Context: Astrov goes on long monologues about the forests, conservation, maps, logging, the future of the region. His speeches recur in Acts I and II.Paraphrased moment: Astrov unfurls a map and launches into an impassioned lecture about deforestation. He points out patches of green, lists the acreage lost, describes the peasant’s short-sightedness. No one asked for this level of detail.
What’s really going on beneath the words:
Self-soothing: He’s talking to stabilize himself, to escape his emotional drought and existential exhaustion.
Identity armor: He wants to be the idealist doctor who cares about something enduring.
Avoidance: Talking about forests is easier than talking about burnout, alcoholism, or loneliness.
A bid for admiration: Especially in front of Yelena, his speeches are a way of saying: See me. I’m noble, thoughtful, worthy.
Deflection: By talking about trees, he avoids talking about human suffering—his own included.
Function of the speech: Not information, but existential distraction + self-mythologizing.
Grease – Franki Valli
The opening credits theme to the 1978 movie adaptation of the 1971 musical of the same name, and one of the singles from the soundtrack album. Written by Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees, “Grease” is a disco song that sums up the central theme of the story, namely the idea of individuality in the face of those that want others to conform.
Being a disco song for a film/musical with a 1950s setting, some critics felt that this song doesn’t really fit with the rest of the soundtrack, either on the film itself or on the musical it’s based on.
https://genius.com/Frankie-valli-grease-lyrics#about
I saw my problems, and I’ll see the light
We got a lovin’ thing, we gotta feed it right
There ain’t no danger, we can go too far
We start believin’ now that we can be who we are
Grease is the word
They think our love is just a growin’ pain
Why don’t they understand? It’s just a cryin’ shame
Their lips are lyin’, only real is real
We stop the fight right now, we got to be what we feel
Grease is the word
Grease is the word, is the word that you heard
It’s got a groove, it’s got a meaning
Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling
We take the pressure and we throw away
Conventionality belongs to yesterday
There is a chance that we can make it so far
We start believin’ now that we can be who we are
Grease is the word
This is a life of illusion, wrapped up in trouble
Laced with confusion, what’re we doin’ here?
Guns and Roses – Mexico City Poster
The End of an Era – Late 70’s Vibe Shift
The Sex Pistols finally invaded the territory of the ’70s rock titans and landed on the cover of Rolling Stone in the October 20, 1977, issue. The headline: “Rock Is Sick and Living in London.” It was the beginning of the end of the ’70s.
One fine spring day, a student in a big puffy jacket came into journalism class and announced his hero—Ronald Reagan. A new definition of cool was emerging, and it was a long way from the shaggy hippies I knew at the Door house. Now there was a new kind of teenager, a young Republican who savaged the perceived naïveté of liberalism but also really liked rock.
The Uncool: A Memoir
Cameron Crowe
NOTE: Highly recommended book.
From google AI:
A “vibe shift” refers to a significant change in prevailing cultural moods, aesthetics, and trends, coining the term for a major shift in collective feelings from one style or topic to another. It’s used to describe the evolution of popular culture, from the early 2000s’ “bling” era to the later “hipster/indie” trend, and even more recently to the idea of a shift back towards certain aesthetics like “indie sleaze” and nostalgia for the 2000s. The term was popularized by writer Sean Monahan, and can be used to describe everything from fashion and online culture to political and social attitudes.
Obama Discussing Current State of Affairs
Obama: They never miss a chance to scapegoat minorities and D.E.I. For every problem under the sun. You got a flat tire? D.E.I.. Wife mad at you? D.E.I..
Debaser – Pixies
“Debaser” is a song by American alternative rock band Pixies, released in April 1989 as the opening track on their album Doolittle and later as a promotional single following the dissolution of the band…
1929 short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film includes a scene in which a woman’s eye is apparently cut open by a razor, which is referenced in the lyric “slicin’ up eyeballs.” According to frontman and songwriter Black Francis:
I wish Buñuel were still alive. He made this film about nothing in particular. The title itself is a nonsense. With my stupid, pseudo-scholar, naive, enthusiast, avant-garde-ish, amateurish way to watch Un chien andalou (twice), I thought: “Yeah, I will make a song about it.” [He sings:] “Un chien andalou”… It sounds too French, so I will sing “un chien andalusia”, it sounds good, no?
The title “Debaser” references the fact that Un Chien Andalou “debases” contemporary morality and standards of art: “I guess it means: one who debases. A debaser. It was an attempt to introduce a new word into the lexicon, but I don’t think it’s been successful, else I would have heard about it.”
Blow Up the Outside World – Soundgarden
When asked if he really wanted to “blow up the outside world”, Cornell said, “All the time, so it doesn’t encroach on me—you can hibernate and not have to worry about it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blow_Up_the_Outside_World
Nothing seems to kill me no matter how hard I try
Nothing is closing my eyes
Nothing can beat me down for your pain or delight
And nothing seems to break me
No matter how hard I fall
Nothing can break me at all
Not one for giving up though not invincible I know
I’ve givin’ everything I need
I’d give you everything I own
I’d give in if it could at least be ours alone
I’ve given everything I could
To blow it to hell and gone
Burrow down in and blow up the outside
Blow up the outside
Blow up the outside world
Someone tried to tell me something
Don’t let the world bring you down?
Nothing will do me in before I do myself
So save it for your own and the ones you can help
I’ve givin’ everything I need
I’d give you everything I own
I’d give in if it could at least be ours alone
I’ve given everything I could
To blow it to hell and gone
Burrow down in and blow up the outside
Blow up the outside
Blow up the outside world
Want to make it understood
Wanting though I never would
Trying though I know it’s wrong
Blowing it to hell and gone
Wishing though I never could
Tracy Letts’s Criterion Closet Picks
Youthful Reading – Pros and Cons of, Italo Calvino
The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us.
Why read the classics?
In this republished article from 1986, Italian journalist and writer Italo Calvino explains why we continue to read and love the classics
Calling Dr. Love – Kiss – RIP Ace Frehley
RIP Ace Frehley
Ace Frehley, the original lead guitarist and founding member of the glam rock band Kiss, who captivated audiences with his elaborate galactic makeup and smoking guitar, died Thursday. He was 74.
Frehley died peacefully surrounded by family in Morristown, New Jersey, following a recent fall, according to his agent.
Ace Frehley, Kiss’ original lead guitarist and founding member, dies at 74
Ha!
They call me (Dr. Love)
They call me Dr. Love (Calling Dr. Love)
I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of (Calling Dr. Love)Ooh, they call me (Dr. Love)
I am the doctor of love (Calling Dr. Love)
I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of (Calling Dr. Love)
What Makes This Song Great? “Everlong” Foo Fighters – Rick Beato
@M2Mil7er
When a drum fill is so righteous, it makes a guitar instantly materialise in Rick’s hands.
@adamlewis5073
the female backing vocals – they were actually recorded over the phone, that’s why they sound lo-fi.
Sus (suspended) chords are chords where the third note is replaced by either a second or a fourth, creating a feeling of tension or unresolved sound that often leads back to a standard major or minor chord. The two main types are sus2 chords, which substitute the second note of the scale, and sus4 chords, which substitute the fourth note. They are used to add emotional tension and momentum to music, particularly in jazz, pop, and rock.
^ – Google AI overview