The Bleicher & Newton Newsletter #2
A live (virtual) reading, hyper-specific song themes, B-sides, and Twitter lowlights
Dearest subscribers,
We hope everyone out there is managing alright. Thank you for opening this, our second Bleicher & Newton newsletter.
Firstly, a little news. We will be participating in a live virtual event that Humorist Books is hosting in conjunction with SMOL Fair, a book festival for small presses that will take place March 3rd to 7th. Michael will read an excerpt from our forthcoming novel, The Carlyles, and Andy will be hosting in his capacity as Humorist Books editor. It will be the first time anyone outside of the two of us has seen or heard any part of what we’ve been working on these past couple years, so we’re understandably excited. See the EventBrite link below to register, or just click here.
And now for some sweet, sweet content.
Hyper-specific Song Themes
This is an idea we initially intended for a humorous, music-oriented podcast, but since we are charmless and lacking in technical know-how, it never progressed past the brainstorming phase…UNTIL NOW. We have a bunch more ideas for song themes, so if this is received well, we may turn it into a recurring segment. (Even if you don’t like it, we’ll probably just continue doing it, anyway.)
Feminine Taxonomies
These are songs in which past sexual conquests are broken down into discrete categories. First in the playlist, we have “Madamina, il catalogo è questo,” an aria from Mozart’s 1787 opera, Don Giovanni (libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte). In this number, the title character’s servant produces a literal catalog of his master’s sexual exploits, tallied and broken down by geography, social status, hair color, body type, age, and other miscellaneous physical and personal attributes (and to think, this is before the days of Microsoft Excel).
This aria is, in some ways, the archetype for feminine taxonomy songs. The singer exudes a characteristic masculine swagger in his accounting (I believe in our modern parlance, we refer to this as “toxic masculinity”), and the focus isn’t so much on ranking women, or even comparing them (at least, not in a way that places one category over another). Rather, the referenced women, reduced to tally marks on a scroll, are considered as menu items to be selected when the mood strikes or when circumstances are just so, like how one opts to eat soup on a cold day. In fact, there’s a striking lyrical parallel between this aria and the second song on our playlist, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”:
From Don Giovanni (translation from Wikipedia, though Andy knows Italian, and he says it looks right enough):
In winter he likes fat ones.
In summer he likes thin ones.
From “California Girls”:
And the northern girls with the way they kiss
They keep their boyfriends warm at night
There are significant differences, of course, between the two tunes. The Don Giovanni aria is not sung by the one who actually performed these sexual exploits, while the singer of “California Girls” comes from a place of personal experience:
I been all around this great big world
And I've seen all kind of girls
Yeah, but I couldn't wait to get back in the states
Back to the cutest girls in the world
Moreover, as has been stated, the servant in Don Giovanni does not rank one type of woman over another, whereas the singer in “California Girls,” while he finds merit in “all kind of girls,” states a clear preference for those from the state of California. Perhaps this difference is a factor of the songs’ respective points of view.
“Back in the U.S.S.R.”: Parody and Intertextuality
Much has been written on the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ good-natured creative rivalry and how they attempted to one-up each other through their songs and albums, but we contend that the third song on this playlist, the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” is not a retort to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” but is instead an outright parody. Both songs are playful, to be sure, but how they contrast reflect the essential differences in each band’s respective ethos. The Beach Boys, melancholic, yearning, nostalgic, even at the heights of joy and rambunctiousness; the Beatles, decidedly tongue-in-cheek and, at this point in their evolution, dabbling in intertextuality. The White album, on which, of course, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” appears, is notable for this:
From “Yer Blues”:
The eagle picks my eye
The worm he licks my bones
I feel so suicidal
Just like Dylan's Mr. Jones
From “Glass Onion,” references to their own oeuvre:
I told you about strawberry fields
You know the place where nothing is real
I told you about the walrus and me, man
You know we're as close as can be, man
Standing on the cast iron shore, yeah
Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah
I told you about the fool on the hill
I tell you man he's living there still
And from “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” already a Beach Boys parody, an oblique Ray Charles reference:
That Georgia's always on
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my mind
The Rolling Stones Ruin It for Everyone
The final song on this playlist, the Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls,” takes the form created with “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” and breaks it down to its crude elements. The Rolling Stones strip away all the coyness and boyish charm of the other feminine taxonomy songs and delivers instead pure, unadulterated vulgarity, sexism, and racism. We’re too shy and risk averse to quote the most memorable lyrics here, but the Cut article “unearthing” this song basically writes itself.
Longevity v. Potency: The Sexual Prowess Dichotomy
Yes, these hyper-specific themes are mostly sexual in nature, but in fairness, so are songs, generally.
These songs touch on the notion of sexual prowess, and the first two on the playlist present an interesting debate, one for which a definitive answer has long eluded scholars: Who is the more skilled lover, the one who can go all night or the one who can get you there fast?
The first song on the playlist, Billy Ward and his Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man,” of course, argues for the former. It begins with a bit of common braggadocio:
Look a here girls I'm telling you now
They call me "Lovin' Dan"
I rock 'em, roll 'em all night long
I'm a sixty-minute man
The singer is ostensibly so adept at lovemaking that he has not one, but two, epithets associating him with this unique ability (though “Lovin’ Dan” appears to be the proper nickname for the singer, while “sixty-minute man” seems to refer to the phylum or genus, perhaps, to which the singer belongs). The supposed “Lovin’ Dan” then proceeds to run through his typical hour-long lovemaking routine:
There'll be 15 minutes of kissing
Then you'll holler "Please don't stop" (Don't stop !)
There'll be 15 minutes of teasing
And 15 minutes of squeezing
And 15 minutes of blowing my top
Some would argue that such a lack of spontaneity and dependence on (pardon the pun) rigidity detracts from the inherent romance of the act. However, we posit that these lines do not constitute an itinerary but, in keeping with the song’s boastful format, a promise, a call, or a wager against oneself; like Babe Ruth pointing his bat (again, pardon the pun). After all, fifteen minutes of blowing one’s top would constitute quite a feat, indeed.
Whereas “Sixty Minute Man” focuses on longevity and reliability, Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” highlights the importance of potency and efficiency. The singer at one point declares:
The line I shoot
Will never miss
When I make love to a woman
She can’t resist
He elaborates later in the same verse, when he begins addressing one such potential woman directly:
All you little girls
Sittin’ out that line
I can make love to you, woman
In five minutes time
His stated focus being the woman and her ability, or lack thereof, to “resist,” the implication made by the so-called “Man-Child” of this song is not that he can climax within five minutes (a man’s climax being more or less a foregone conclusion in most cases and not in the least a matter of which to boast), but instead that he can bring the woman in question to fruition within the aforementioned timeframe.
“Can’t Do Sixty No More,” the follow-up by Billy Ward and his Dominoes to their previous, boastful track, is itself a sort of coda to this playlist. The singer seems to have ditched his “Lovin’ Dan” nickname, perhaps because his renown has resulted in the singer running himself ragged:
Look here girls my name is Dan
As I told you once before
Please excuse my blown out fuse
Because I can't do sixty no more
Dan, formerly Lovin’ Dan, appears to undercut his previous argument in this song. Longevity, it follows to reason, has its limits. In this understanding, one’s sexual prowess functions much like a battery. One spends their energy working to blow one’s top, then over a short time recharges for another go-around. However, with each successive cycle, one’s prowess degrades, until, as in Dan’s case, one is left insufficient.
On the other hand, with this added epilogue, of sorts, to Billy Ward and his Dominoes’ earlier song, both “Sixty Minute Man” and “Mannish Boy” indicate, to some extent, the importance of youth to sexual prowess. Lovemaking, it would seem, is a young man’s game.
(Was Spotify a good medium for these playlists? Let us know!)
B-sides
We so much enjoyed sharing some old writing of ours with you in the last newsletter that we decided to continue in that same vein with some previously published articles of ours we returned to recently.
Taylor Swift Q3 Town Hall Meeting
This is an article we wrote back in 2018 for the Weekly Humorist. A passage we’re particularly proud of:
Of course, Taylor is also long overdue for a new relationship. Tom Hiddleston, as we know—not going to sugarcoat this—he was our Gigli. Kirk has been reassigned to our Nordic territories team, where he won’t be making any more impactful decisions. Now, our B.E.A.R.D. committee has identified potential acquisition targets for Q4. If you flip to Appendix B in your handouts, you’ll find a list of Marvel and Star Wars franchise movies planned for release in Q1 of the 2018-2019 fiscal year, organized alphabetically by male lead. And our London office has given us a list of pleasingly androgynous blonde men in their early thirties who are slated to audition for the next Broadway revival of a Neil Simon play.
The One Where Everything’s 2018
Later that same year, we wrote this topical Friends parody for McSweeney’s. It remains our favorite thing we’ve written for that publication:
Episode 2 – “The One Where Everybody Ghosts Phoebe”
After finding Rachel on Hinge, Ross agonizes over what his opening line should be. He finally settles on “Hi.” Jezebel publishes an article detailing allegations of sexual misconduct against Joey made by a former understudy in a much-maligned off-Broadway play. Joey is fired from Days of Our Lives. Everybody ghosts Phoebe.
Twitter Lowlights
This is the correct manner in which to do Twitter, right? In case you missed it, here’s what we’ve been up to lately on the society-destroying platform.
Weekly Humorist Hashtag Games Contributions
The Weekly Humorist hosts a hashtag game Wednesday mornings at eleven, and typically on Tuesday afternoons, Marty Dundics, the publisher, reaches out to a handful of people to pitch Tweets for the Weekly Humorist’s account. It’s always heavy on wordplay and silliness. Here are two of ours that Marty selected for this week’s game.
Bon mots
That’s everything for now. How are we doing? Let us know by commenting or replying to this message. This is a learning experience for us, so we’re dying to know what’s working and what isn’t. Or if you just want to start a conversation with us, that would be nice, too.
Sincerely,
Michael Bleicher & Andy Newton