The Bimbo of Jazz and 10 Protected Pleasures
10 Ways to Big Your Life Up
I used to nickel and dime Now a nigga recline ~Payroll Giovanni, "Pay & Cardo"
Both virtuous people and people who want to seem virtuous have found common cause denigrating materialism but, if you accept that paradise is populated with anything resembling matter, it seems like you’re criticizing some of the very same incentives that motivate one’s stretch towards heaven in the first place. Fakecels will run up in my mentions with some screed from the 1400’s saying that I’m not interpreting materialism in a sufficiently historical way but I’m the one writing this thing, making the discussion about what I want while they equivocate and seethe.
While man ought not live for pleasure alone, certain pleasures should receive special status lest some unsophisticated brute dismiss them as mere hedonics.
I present to you a non-exhaustive list of protected pleasures I try to incorporate into most days, or at least most months:
Black coffee (sometimes espresso, sometimes cold)
I remember hearing how until coffee became widely available, most overnight work was saved for actual graveyards. A consumable technology enabling manic, euphoric spasms of energy but also anxiety, like an ancient goddess both responsible for positives like creative/technological breakthroughs and negatives like road rage and dodgy trigger fingers.
A true gentleman rises at 4:00 am just so he has an hour to sit alone with it. He saves another to get to work, turn the lights on, and set the place up.
It’s said that behind every great man is a woman half his size. But no one ever mentions what kind of hardware she’s armed with. In my wife’s case, it’s a coffee maker with showerhead-irrigation set the night before so it brews automatically about 10 minutes before I wake up and, for awhile, I can just sit with my cats, my coffee, Substack, and my trigger finger. After the first two cups, I normally have two more rounds, two cups each just to make sure I stay alert for the long day of paranoia and content-production ahead of me. I either make them myself or buy them from the bakery by my gym.
Baked Goods (from scratch)
Call it weak, effete, latently homosexual, but eating a hand-crafted pastry with a second round of coffee mid-morning is an extremely civilized move many fine cultures like the French and Italians respect. You can imagine tolerating a fair amount of homelessness and mental illness walking around 19th century Paris or Venice unfazed as marzipan, sanguinaccio, or pan au chocolate melts into your mouth. Perhaps a hunchback bludgeons a prostitute on your way to visit your mother (also a prostitute). Perhaps you chance upon a bearded lady busking “Brat” in its original Hungarian iteration as a pickpocket shanks a beggar. Surely a pastry could make you forget it all or care not enough to need to.
Being that many American zip codes now own all the same Old World charm that so blessed 19th century Paris and Venice, a little petit four in the morning ain’t never hurt no one. Let us eat cake.
Jazz, samba, tango, assorted vintage tunes
A lot of it sucks. Free jazz, a lot of bebop, even more from the cool era but not all of it. You don’t have to be a connoisseur or even pretend to be. You can be an airhead, a bimbo of jazz. No one else knows anything anyway and everyone else is annoying as hell.
You can listen to listen but you can also listen while you work. I listen while I walk. It’s good in the bath. You should own a bathtub or make one a priority so you have a place to listen to your samba.
Baths
Archimedes, an old pervert, it’s rumored liked water sports. Be that as it may, we don’t celebrate him for being an incredible moralist but for his handle on mathematics and a principle, which never may have come into consciousness without the attendant splish splash that comes from taking a bath. While I don’t always hang out in the tub, I try to soak once a week.
Walks
All the greats from Whitman to Franklin, Michelangelo to Godzilla. They all liked a good stroll. You don’t need a mission. Movement is the mission.
Birds fight, squirrels fuck, the unhoused joust like it’s 1899. Sunshine is ideal but overcast has its place. Droplets are just a dash of seasoning from when the climate feels cheeky.
Going for a walk won’t solve all your problems but it will change your life. You need at least 10 minutes for any effect to take place. 20 is better. 60 is even better. Grab your airpods and get your ass to Mars.
Reading
It’s easier if you have something interesting to read but you won’t know what’s interesting until you start. So, it’s important to let go of being titillated. Don’t pick up an article or book with the intention of loving it. Start with the intention of figuring out whether you want to read the rest of it at all and when you find something you like, home in on it.
If you think one is worth spending time on, invest in it.
Plants, gardens
I hate traveling but find resorts amazing. I’m fascinated by the artificiality of them. Tiled walkways, mosaics, fountains, and exotic plants kept tip-top by an army of indentured ninjas keeping the greens in the wee hours of the predawn morning, while doing The Lord’s work of keeping the staff vital, lithe, gainful, and lean.
It’s true: Much of the allure rests in the resort itself; its layout, the rooms, the linens, the gardens. And for some (who will swear otherwise), the sense there’s license to experience servility in its highest, most sophisticated, tidy forms—from bodywork to sex work, resorts have it all.
BUT, if you are a healthy, sexually satisfied individual such as myself, might I recommend gardens and gardening at home? I think I will.
Yes, there’s an antique satisfaction walking through gardens, sitting in them, reading, sunbathing, listening to samba, preening them. You can inseminate, pollinate, and do downright dastardly ornithology if only you can find a garden to get goofy in. The ideal is to bring the plants to you; although going for a walk through your neighborhood or a park will do the trick too.
Pros know there are lots of types, from meadows filled with wildflowers to formals filled with topiaries, from rigid brutalist mazes with sweeping hedges to triple canopy subtropical forests with variegated megaflora looking straight up Jurassic. You don’t need a passport or a time machine to feel good but surrounding yourself with plants inside and out can help, space and green thumbs permitting.
Art Deco
If you’re an American. If you love this country.
These are the pleas and canards one can make about Art Deco.
It’s preserved in many of the historical designations and material realities of Miami Beach and New York City, two philosemitic cities proud of their World War II mythos and hospitality industries.
It’s the aesthetic of Louis Prima, big bands, ass-kicking, and frogmen. It’s victory and optimism and smooching Stacey in traffic while an orchestra of horns honk the whole world over. Sinatra, blow jobs, steak, and sorbet sunsets, a history of optimism scrolled across an endless horizon.
In the next regime, no one will remember the flag but everyone will sweat the architecture.
Art glass
Stained glass is expensive and almost no one makes it anymore. But, if you can afford it, and you can find someone who can make it, you’d be crazy not to, as it is a rare and classy move that shows you committing to your place in the world instead of buying another house to flip. Very few people invest this way but it will separate your house from the pack and more importantly, you will get visual enjoyment out of your very house that neither your TV nor your utility providers could ever supply.
If you’ve ever been around the real deal with sun blasting through it, throwing prisms all over the place, you start to understand why so many people loved church for so many thousands of years and why so many still do. There’s a reason so many poems and texts use light as a positive force in the world. Plus, if your autistic like me, you have sensory issues that chill tf out when in contact with this blessed and ancient artform. If you can’t afford a window, you can always buy hanging pieces or other tchotchkes that approximate the same effect.
If you need to go church, or temple, or any other house of worship to get a taste, at least consider an aesthetic field trip. They aren’t using it because they think you’ll hate it or want to repel you. In fact, once you have it, people will want to come to your house for cocktails. Both will lift your spirits.
Real bulbs
Try to eliminate all the harsh lights in your house and substitute them for older, less eco friendly tech. Everyone looks bad in the new, bright white stuff, even when they look good. Better to embrace looking good. It’s the least we can do.
This was fantastic. The stained glass section was excellent. And the penultimate paragraph on Art Deco is itself a work of art.