Well – it was a LOOOOOOOONG weekend and the Brothel Bangers seemed to keep it relatively tame… but here’s what you missed

* food comas galore

* ONE OF US rules at scrabble. The other one could use some more spelling lessons.

* bed sores don’t rest… not even for holidays

* We are now 3/3 for people in the apartment having eaten chicken feet

* shopping on Thanksgiving can be fun at Michaels

* “It smells like someone is making a steak”

* ONE OF US got lazy and didn’t make Thanksgiving dinner

* ONE OF US turned into a house wife waiting and cleaning until the others returned

* Babybones McGee took comedy classes while the other Brothel Bangers were away

* Thanks to Twitter cloud tag we can now confirm that Lindsay likes to laugh. a lot.

* Giving of Thanks abound for Thanksgiving y’all.

* Beyonce in a dramatic movie role? No thank you.

* Katherine Heigl in anymore rom coms? No thank you.

Playing scrabble is fun!

#160 – Joan Osborne – “One of Us” – (1995)

A nice religious song about God… right?… from the girl with the nose ring? I love the somewhat terrifying Dr. Caligari-like sequence at the beginning of the music video.

This is going to be a quickie (that’s what HE said!) but I gotta run and catch a bus thats taking me and the tranny to celebrate thanksgiving in PA. Have a bangin’ thanksgiving y’all.

ONE OF US has a theme song called hippie boyfriend

I know you’re all eagerly awaiting your Monday Brothel Banger SHAKE ‘N BAKE… so here it is:

* Special Guest update: Lindsay 2, Snow 1, Jane… gurl is still BTGing it

* Bedsores were in full effect for ONE OF US

* Have you ordered your “happy family” yet? The Brothel Bangers got theirs on Saturday

* Seriously, who vows to stay in ALL weekend only to actually be out ALL weekend? Definitely not the same ONE OF US who gets bedsores.

* Pretty sure there was a Law and Order: SVU marathon on this weekend titled: KILLER BLONDES!!!

* In case you were wondering… 6 floor walk ups blow.

Have a great week y’all. It’s only 3 days long! Gobble Gobble Gobble!

…and because of that, i am without a burger today.

1. Should you encounter God, it probably isn’t a good idea to “call it to his face,” lest you face his wrath.

2.If you’re going to ask God one question don’t waste in on a really stupid one like “What did I have for breakfast?” or “If you google ‘google’ would that make the Internet crash?”

3. Like any good boss, God would probably make a good example of himself by dressing up at least in smart casual instead of looking like “a slob like one of us.”

4.God’s phone probably rings like crazy with calls from other religious leaders, both major and minor, not just the “Pope maybe in Rome.”

5. If God were a person, wouldn’t it be easier for him to ask the angels to pick him up in a flying limo instead of “Trying to make his way home/Back up to heaven all alone”? (edg)

And by love I mean LOVE this party.

ONE OF US met a man at a bar the other night. He was in all Yankees gear and he was complaining about his job. Not only was he complaining his job he apparently complains at his job, TO HIS BOSS. “I don’t give a GOD DAMN. And you KNOW this.”

He was bluntly told to stop being such a baby and take the high road and look for a new job if he didn’t like what he was doing. However, the mistake was made of exchanging numbers with him. Blame it on the vodka soda’s y’all.

Anyways – in about 1 week, ONE OF US has received 7 unanswered text messages and 6 unanswered calls. The last of which said “I would realy love to here from U!!!!!”

So, the question to you is what’s the best way to proceed?

It was a very eventful weekend for the brothel bangers. All were in different cities doing very different activites.

* Jane was in Philly where she got rid of her flu/AIDS/the clap – by working it to death and out of her body

* Jane lost her 3rd unlimited metro card, gurl’s gotta get her life together

* Lindsay was in Florida in a wedding at a ranch.

* Lindsay got dirty feet at the ranch, thus no man can commit to her.

* A father of a 17 year old boy was giving him pointers on how to hit on Lindsay. Stay classy Okeechobee.

* Lindsay is no longer the whitest. Gurl got a spray tan!

* Lindsay found out there are lots of baby mamas in Okeechobee

* Snow was all alone this weekend except for the mosquito party she apparently had in Lindsay’s room

Well, sorry… Monday morning shake n bake turned into Monday night shake and bake. Stupid work gets in the way of all of our fun.

So… here’s what happened this weekend

* Jane, Snow and Lindsay because estranged for 3 days.

* It took Lindsay 1:15 minutes to go from 8th Ave to Bedford on Friday night.

* Jane was not in NYC. Can anyone guess where she was?

* Lindsay put a number in her name for a guy named Tyrone, except she spelled it Tyrobe.

* Hello Autumn.

* Weekend Visitors – Snow: 1, Jane and Lindsay 0

In other words, this weekend was kinda boring. HA

Have a good week tranny prancers.

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Poor Lindsay, in between forming bedsores and hoarding plastic water  bottles in her room, the girl has NOT won an polls yet on this highly esteemed blog…soo……this week….vote for WHO IS THE WHITEST!

ONE OF US sounds the whitest

ONE OF US acts the whitest

ONE OF US looks the whitest

It’s Friday y’all! Happy voting!

Yesterday made it official. I’ve been livin la vida loca as a single lady for five years. This isn’t an easy accomplishment if you think that’s what i’m trying to say. Seriously, with all the first dates i’ve been on in the big apple and all the eligible assholes i’ve had the pleasure of meeting that have yet to return my call…it’s been a challenging feat to accomplish. But I digress. There have been difficult times warding off engagement proposals one after the other, but somehow i did it. I’ve easily managed to spend extra money on myself during important gift giving holidays. I stuffed my face with steak and chocolate covered strawberries every feb 14 and laugh at couples still trying to impress each other with lame roses and nasty lingerie.  There have been times that I’ve given my number to dudes who most of the time prove to be super lame. I’ve had success stories, i’ve experienced horror stories and I even once found myself left at a brothel. I did it before and i’ll do it again because guess what, there is no dude there to tell me what to do, what not to wear and I can resume dancing  like a psychotic crazy person when ‘Single Ladies’ comes on.

So what’s the secret to being outrageously attractive, successful, hilarious and still stay unattached in a city filled with single men? I don’t know and I don’t give a damn (and you KNOW this.) But I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing til I’m really old, saggy and desperate and finally ready to settle for second best. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to eat my body weight in cheeseburgers.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
—Walter Pater[1]

The point of concentrating on hooks in music is to glory in the self-sufficiency of radiant moments.  But that self-sufficiency is illusory.  No hook is an island.  Every highlight has a setting and a history.

All right, says pop music, but I will push against that necessity.  I will effloresce, erupt, slash free of the cobwebs of time.  I will choose sounds so compelling you will forget they were chosen for reasons.  Even when I take up the tools of language, I will speak words of raw presence and affirmation, summative words that say it all.  I will say—quoting here the Isley Brothers in “Shout”—“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”  When I say yeah, I’m saying it all in the best way possible.  When I unroll a chain of yeahs, I’m saying it endlessly.

But words, so far from being purely present, always come with arrows attached.  They have about-ness—even the self-absorbed “ooh” points (barely) to something going on in the world—and they have to-ness as well, pointing to someone.  The affirmation “yeah” gives something and someone a green light.  True, the something and someone are sucked into a blast of presence, but we still have to be mindful of a certain distribution of things to get the sense of a given yeah.   This means that I, alone, cannot ever be saying it all by saying yeah; but you and I together could come much closer to a completeness if we make a call and response, yeah/yeah, and better still on and on, yeah/yeah / yeah/yeah.  It’s nicely done this way in Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” (1961).

In “Shout” (1959), however, the Isley Brothers short-circuit the call and response structure.  There is plenty of convivial back and forth between voices in the track, but the main “yeah yeah” line is taken by just one voice, both arrogating and sharing the power of achieving this effect by oneself.  Unlike the alternation yeah/yeah, the line yeah-yeah becomes a unit of utterance, a button of excitement to push, a phrase of romantic enthusiasm—which is how the Beatles use it in their epochal “She Loves You” (1963).  (Lennon and McCartney originally intended to throw in some “yeahs” as a response to the thesis statement “She loves you,” but they ended up putting in a yeah-yeah-yeah to complete the statement line.)[2]

So the meaning of yeah, yeah has a history.  We shouldn’t have to date and sequence songs to explain their hooks, but for this hook we do.  It sounds like a revivalist stunt when Tommy James and the Shondells use the old back-and-forth yeah/yeah in “Mony, Mony” (1968).  When the Clash confronts the “phoney Beatlemania” heritage of rock’n’roll in the punk revolution of the 1970’s, one of the choicest gibes they shoot in that direction is Joe Strummer’s mocking “yeah, yeah” in the middle of  “Clash City Rockers” (1978).[3] Once the acute punk phase passes, it’s fine to use any rock value any way one likes, post-ironically.  In 1995, yeah, yeah becomes a massively popular stairway to God (Joan Osborne, “One of Us”).  Still cool in the 21^st century, yeah, yeah is now high concept for a band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (listen in particular to “Bang,” 2001).  But there can never again be the ingenuous surge of “She Loves You” or the pointed criticism of “Clash City Rockers.”

We have to hold all this in mind to appreciate the greatest yeah, yeah, which, I contend, is Strummer’s.  What we have heard through the years has made us realize that one of the supreme verbal gestures of immediacy cannot be as free as it wants to be.  It has to drag historical baggage with it.  Strummer’s is the yeah, yeah that does this lucidly.  He makes a peak moment of a burden of awareness.  In a song suffused with anger and scorn, following a chorus that tells us “Don’t complain” and “Shut your mouth and pretend you enjoy it” (your life prospects in Thatcher Britain, that is),[4] he underlines the message by twirling us about an axis of joy—we are rocking, this is fun, no pretending about it—with a wickedly buoyant delivery of yeah, yeah that doesn’t kill it or even dampen it, but lets its feathers flutter in the sarcastic gale; and then, like a smirking MC, the yeah, yeah bounces us right over to the next battered institution of joy, the lead guitar solo.

It’s over! —a quick thing that you’re lucky to hear, the very opposite of the million-dollar hook in “She Loves You” that you can’t escape.  But it’s the pivotal midpoint of the whole history of yeah, yeah.

If you don’t like the freighted yeah, yeah of the Clash, you can go back to the exuberant “Shout” (or, earlier still, the swing band jive of Louis Prima’s “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” circa 1950) or forward to the overheated “Bang”—yeah, your choice.

See the Yeah, Yeah mix

[2] “She Loves You,” The Beatles Ultimate Experience:  Songwriting and Recording Database.

[3] “Phoney Beatlemania” is a phrase from “London Calling” (1979).

[4] But see Comment 1—Thatcher came to power in 1979 (thanks, Tim).

Boy do we have a spitfire for you! Brothel Babe of the week – Erin McGinn – is prime for the picking. You WANT to win a date with her… why?? Because she’s CRAZY FUN! Be prepared for a whirlwind wild night of vodka sodas, salads with feta, gouda and gorgonzola cheeses and a sweaty dance inferno. She will in town just a short amount of time so your date will be on this Saturday, the all fantastic Halloween night.

How do you win a date? Well, write us a note at brothelbangers@gmail.com and tell us your wildest Vegas story. The best one wins a date with Ms. McGinn. The more sex, drugs and partying you have, the better.

Can’t wait to hear what an ass you made of yourself on the strip.

Thanks for playing!

Oh – and if you don’t have big arm muscles – you need NOT apply. We don’t care how good your story is. Skinny dudes are SO out this year. Well, for SOME OF US.

Returning home on the bus after my infusion, I met a woman who used a walker, who asked me if I had MS.  I asked her how she knew and she said she had it herself and saw my cane next to me on Winston.  Aha.

It turns out she’d seen my current neurologist, but when he left the hospital for a private practice, she remained with the hospital and saw the specialist I’d seen for over a year, whom I’d liked very much.  She said she preferred the latter doctor since she was able to see her whenever an issue came up, whereas with my doctor, she’d have to wait a month or two.

“Oh, really?  I can always see him the next day,” I blurted out, before realizing my gaffe.  But then, it was always clear he treated patients differently depending on how much he liked them.  I’m just glad he likes Frank as much, if not more, than he does me (I’m not jealous, just very, very relieved).

The woman was telling me of another doctor she’d been encouraged to see and I’d been told about him by another person as well (is it a cult?).  The thing is, the doctor, whose office is amazingly near us, doesn’t accept insurance!  What kind of patient does he cater to?  The wealthiest and most keen on unconditional pampering?  What does he provide that the specialist at the hospital can’t?  (Pain killers?)

An initial consultation with him costs $1500.  The woman wondered aloud, “What does a regular appointment with him cost?”  Good question. . . . And what kind of MS specialist doesn’t accept insurance when the medications alone cost thousands per month?

The woman happened to have the same insurance as I do (Empire BC/BS), but because her husband doesn’t work for the public sector, as my mom does, they pay $2200 a month when my family has to pay only about $5000 a year.  Now that’s inspired another WTF reaction from me: “What the fuck?”  It’s ridiculous.

Thankfully, my former doctor at the hospital is excellent and accepts insurance and provides quality and compassionate care to everyone she sees, regardless of income or background, and makes sure they do their exercises and look after their mental health as well.
So I respect her tremendously and always will.

That said, I can’t say I wouldn’t have my personal biases as well, like my neurologist, were I in his place, but it does suck to hear the stories of those who are told to see him only once a year or were treated as nuisances by him.  What to do?  If Frank himself didn’t need pro bono neurological care, I’d definitely have remained with my previous doctor, for ethical reasons.  How does she do it?  I wish I could ask her, so I could learn to be a better person myself.  But I forfeited that right, returning to my original neuro.  Why does it still make me feel guilty?  Where’s that oxygen-depriving sweat lodge when you need it?

That Spiritual Warrior garbage was certainly a wannabe cult.  The eeriest part of the article was when the leader Mr. Ray dressed up as god (how does god dress, do tell) and asked participants to enact their own suicide: were these the followers he didn’t like or the ones he felt would benefit most from this healing ritual? Did they get to enact his murder as well, to cleanse themselves of the manipulative con man?

Man’s need for a ritual, at $9000, Peruvian poncho not included ($250).  Native Americans, Peruvians, same thing.  But if he intended on maximizing his profits, why didn’t Mr. Ray sell Sikh kirpans (their curved knives) as well?  Or Eskimo seal clubs?  Or authentic Greek and Tibetan worry beads (made in China)?  The sales opportunities are limitless. . . .  My awareness of potential financial gain is increasing by the moment.  He must be god.

P.S. “What if god was one of us?” (Joan Osbourne – One of Us)

ONE OF US is in a wedding today. Although, I’m beginning to question the type of friends this person keeps… just take a look at the txt I got.

And until I get a picture confirmation, I’m going to assume ONE OF US looks something like this. Maybe, minus the veil.

* Jane was in corndog heaven all weekend

* Apparently, Jane only needs one outfit for 4 days of travel

* Sometimes it hurts when a lil old lady punches you in the back for no reason other than she is a sad, angry gremlin

* ONE OF US retired to bed at a record early time of 8:30p

* It took Snow 2.5 hours to get to Coney Island from Chelsea

* Lindsay learned how to make rice

* Crunch has re-confirmed itself as the lamest gym in NYC with the douchiest personal trainers. Yet I continue to be a member

* Mandatory coat check pretty much blows

* Snow broke the apartment record of partying by  coming home  at 11a on Sunday as well as getting in the most fights in one night: 3. One being with a little old lady with a body guard.

* Ppp does NOT equal poop. poop is NOT a reflection of boob: and they are BOTH reflections of dood.

* ONE OF US FINALLY got her period. No baby mama drama here!

* Sunday was all eating and sleeping for the ladies of the brothel. It is now being dubbed: Get Fat Day.

Have a great week!

I was listening to my Paste magazine music sampler today and came across this haunting song, “Cathedrals,” as sung by Joan Osborne. I looked this song up online to find out about it, and it turns out it was a minor hit in the late 1990s for a band I had never heard of, called “Jump, Little Children.” There are a lot of people covering this tune on YouTube (including the guy who reminds me of me, above, sitting at his piano, covering the Jump, Little Children version), and let me just say this is the exact kind of song I personally want to sing– it feels as if it’s a song I would have sat down at the piano and written myself.

Joan Osborne is known for her one smash hit, 1995’s “One Of Us,” that had us all asking, “What if God was one of us?” She has been actively making music since the mid-1990s, but she’s never had another big smash hit on the radio. I don’t know why “Cathedrals” doesn’t get to be a radio hit, because if I had any say in the marketing of the song, it would be all over adult alternative and adult contemporary radio.

No one’s quite sure exactly what this song is truly about, though it was commented on the web that the writer(s) of it might have been on drugs and/or it might have something to do with the idea that today’s old churches are empty– people have given up on religion, perhaps? I don’t know what to think of this song, except I love its haunting melody. I don’t usually pay attention to the words of a song; I am much more interested in its its groove, its rhythm and, most importantly, its feeling.

That said, this song is stuck in my head and I really want to figure out “what it means.” Anyone got any ideas?

So you think you want to to move. Well…

“Good luck finding a place to live that accepts your weird whore ways.”

Seriously.

What did the frog say to the prostitute?

a. you’re a whore

b. hop-in

c. rub-it, rub-it

Everyone needs to check out Mo’s bacon choco chip pancake mix. Maybe I should be putting this on http://thisiswhyyourefat.com but it seriously looks like one of the best meals I could possibly make myself. (note: pancakes are actually one thing I CAN make) Can someone get me this for Christmas, please?!

http://bit.ly/4xh860

ONE OF US is enjoying herself in the great state of Texas. Go Longhorns! This means, that she is gone yet ANOTHER weekend but it also means she is stuffing her face full of corndogs. Oh yum! The rest of us are jealous…