George Kelly › Comments

"I thought I would get wonderful stories about infidelity, about people who were arguing until six in the morning or would not return their lover's or ex-lover's possessions," Gershon revealed to Spark host Nora Young. "Nothing of the sort. Everybody answered 'It was on Facebook. It was text.'" - George Kelly

We’re not in a broken-down car; we’re in a perfectly good car with a crazy person in the passenger seat recklessly grabbing the steering wheel at inopportune times. - George Kelly

k a lot of the performance aspect of what we do is about that sharp shock of just finding out that there are different levels of what’s going on. There’s a communal level, a literary level, a personal level. I feel like this kind of writing and performing at its best gets at something that’s normally found more in prose. Nobody reads a novel, and thinks, “The guy who wrote this must be a serial killer,” although maybe David Mamet has screwed that up. They know that the author is working to push ideas to extremes. We talk a lot about unreliable narrators and trying to push the point of view beyond just first person singular singer-songwriter stuff. It can be done. The popular song is not over. It’s not like all the good songs have been written and we’re just going to write some more because we like songs. There’s a future there. And if you really think about it, you can do some good stuff. - George Kelly

Handsome Furs aren’t just providing entertainment, they’re offering something more aspirational that you can keep close at hand. And that’s the dream, right? This notion of a pairing so potent that every exchange is charged with sex, a marriage that leads to brilliant progeny (though not necessarily of the human variety), a connection that allows you to collaboratively make sense of the world in ways that would otherwise be lost to you. Boeckner and Perry haven’t just joined forces to write simple songs as a performative PDA, they’ve teamed up to expand the horizons of their world(s). They look to one another to make these unfamiliar experiences less alien, and they come together to share their knowledge with us. I don’t know about you, but from where I’m standing, that’s a pretty amazing feat. - George Kelly

Art, unfortunately, doesn’t always function that way -- there is no vacuum. Authenticity does matter to fans, even when they’re smart enough to know better, and especially when it’s difficult to pinpoint why. We want to see real blood in exchange for our devotion, every time. The human reaction to music can be so crippling -- who hasn’t accidentally started whimpering in a drugstore, huddled and vulnerable by the cough drops, when a sappy ballad seeps out of the overhead speakers? -- that we need to believe the artist in question, the instigator, felt that pain, too. It becomes a question of solidarity, and to crack that trust -- to fake it -- feels like a smirking betrayal. And we feel stupid for believing so deeply. - George Kelly

I'm interested in trying to demystify as many things as possible. There's a prejudice against this in the arts community, the idea that if you poke around too much you'll burst the balloon and all the magic will be gone. My feeling is that if you can make the magic disappear, you should. It'll appear somewhere else - you can't get rid of it. "So when I'm working I'm always alternating between two frames of mind, and they are quite different. One is the delighted child wandering around gasping with pleasure, and the second one is the reflective person saying, 'Why am I excited by that?' "I don't just want to be the reactive child, which was so much the history of early rock'n'roll. It was so frightened of losing that feeling of delight and wonder that it just looked the other way when it came to adulthood." - George Kelly

"I don't have a relationship with my fans," he says. "I feel I am in dialogue with culture generally. I have a relationship with the work; they have a relationship with the work. It doesn't mean that we have a relationship." - George Kelly

So I was surprised to learn that you wrote the music for "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." I wrote a lot of those in those days. That's probably your biggest hit. Do you still get royalties on that? I got $500. They buy you out. And in those days I was happy to get the $500. - George Kelly

"This drove me into a state of panic and sorrow unlike anything I've ever experienced," she said. "That doesn't need to happen to other people. We need to be smart and educated. "Trust? We all want trust. But this virus is on the rise. We can't give ourselves to trust any more. That's shattered. We need to give ourselves to the medical community and get tested." - George Kelly

Every time I reread “Shadow Cities” I bring to it my own memories, and something new in the piece stands out. This time it is this sentence, which comes after Aciman has chronicled all the places he’s reminded of when he sits in Straus Park. He’s talking about Rome and Paris and Amsterdam, and then he writes: “This, I think, is when I started to love, if love is the word for it, New York.” We see the words “I love New York” a lot, but it’s a bumper-sticker sentence. It’s for tourists, for export. I love how Aciman’s sentence unfolds conditionally – how “love” is questioned, how it and New York are separated. It feels honest to love New York the way Aciman does, to call the defunct fountain in Straus Park a “septic sandbox” but sit by it day after day just the same and mourn it when you think it’s gone. - George Kelly

This is why Walt Whitman, or you, or I can cock our hats as we please indoors or out, because no matter who we are, we are just as good and just as necessary as everyone else. But for me it also offered a route out of my endless, self-constructed maze of Self. If there is no wall between I and you, if we are all one and the same, what’s the point of hiding one from the other? Why not acknowledge that part of myself that wanted to die? Why not tell someone that while I never wanted to drink again, I was afraid I might lose my mind if I didn’t? Why not tell my parents I wasn’t the perfect son I wanted them to think I was? Why not sit in a church basement full of strangers, as I did once toward the end of that summer, crying like a baby because a woman had left me and I couldn’t blame her? Why not, if only for this one day, dare to be fully and completely alive? - George Kelly

Your personal email address, especially if you've had it for a long time, could have all kinds of things tied to it that you'd rather an employer not see. Spend the nothing it costs to set up a dedicated job search email account, and list that one on your c.v. - George Kelly

Jeans makers say that manufacturing in the U.S., in addition to appealing to consumers, allows them to move quickly. When Jeff Rudes, founder and chief executive of J Brand, saw designer Jil Sander's electric colors in New York's Jeffrey boutique earlier this year, he asked his designers to come up with a hot pink and an emerald green color for jeans. Five days later, the first, small run of jeans were shipping into Barneys New York. Mr. Rudes says it typically takes his company six to eight weeks to make a pair of jeans in the U.S., compared with three to six months in China. - George Kelly

Despite a shaky economy, owners are expected to spend almost $51 billion on their pets in 2011, up from about $48 billion in 2010. Sixty-two percent of U.S. households, or 72.9 million homes, own a pet according to a survey by the America Pet Products Association. Numbers are not available on how much owners spend on pet burial services, but those in the industry say they have seen a jump. - George Kelly

The good news is I was right. It was a bad idea to use the word. The bad news is that I got a call from our editing desk saying that the Chronicle had an official policy not to use the term "twenty-something'' because it had become a cliche. The editor, who was sympathetic to my concerns, kicked some ideas around with me, but we couldn't really come up with a good alternative. (I know, "twenty-ish'' would have been fine, but somehow we missed that.) So we went with hipster. Some people didn't notice. But wow, those who did, really noticed. - George Kelly

"Patriotism is speaking up, working and fighting for the values that define our country. It includes the willingness to recognize that our leaders can be wrong and to speak out when we believe they are. Put another way, patriotism is love for this country, but not blind love. "We were born as a nation through the willingness of people to question existing authority," he says. "They wrote that right into the Constitution. I have no idea when was the first time I read the First Amendment – in a fourth-grade social studies class or 10th-grade American history. But the First Amendment says we have the right to gather, to think, to speak out. It doesn't use the word 'dissent,' but that is inherent in the notion." - George Kelly

“One size never fits all, and it isn’t just dividing between men and women and gay and straight. Monoga­my is not natural, nonmonogamy is not natural. Variation is what’s natural.” - George Kelly

For instance, all artists spend their formative years producing derivative work. Bob Dylan’s first album contained eleven cover songs. Richard Pryor began his stand-up career doing a not-very-good imitation of Bill Cosby. And Hunter S. Thompson re-typed The Great Gatsby just to get the feel of writing a great novel. Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that… things can get interesting. After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new through transformation. Taking an idea and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough. - George Kelly

In his much-cited 1989 book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg celebrated so-called third places, which he defined as "the core settings of informal public life." Not the home, not the office, the third place is a space like the Viennese coffee shop, the French cafe, or the British pub, a venue for "regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." You've probably heard Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz name-check this theory as a justification for his coffee empire. But it also helps explain why gay bars have been so vital to gay culture. Oldenburg valued these spots because the ease of association fosters community life and satisfies individuals' need for communion. This urge to find community is especially strong for gay people, who may be rejected by their families or shunned by their co-workers. The third place is even more precious when places one and two are hotbeds of homophobia. - George Kelly

For musicians, mining the 1980s has proven very fruitful on a sonic and stylistic level. Synth-pop's colonization of indie rock during the past decade occurred partly because of technology; making electronic music is now such an accessible and self-contained process that going the rock band route seems almost ecologically unsound. I also wonder if youthful fans of synth pop and New Wave style are looking for ways to be expressive but not overly earnest. To be a party person is to create a safe space for individual liberation and experimentation, and the 1980s model of a party person — crazily clothed, like some kind of exotic bird or Muppet — seems exceptionally well guarded from the risk of being taken too seriously. - George Kelly

There's only so much you can devote in any one day to reading. But you must read. That's why I feel I must read the newspapers first. Why? Because I really want to know what is going on. But I don't have more than one main paper that I can rely upon, and that is The Times. That is the paper of record and the paper of significance. It does the best job of any paper in the whole world of covering the world. And of covering the world of the artist, and of covering the world of the athlete, and of covering the world of the interior decorator, and the statesman, and the politician, and the politician that sends pictures of himself nude to some women who don't even know him. These worlds are reflected everyday by the writers and columnists, and shaped by editors who are top analyzers of the news. - George Kelly

When you exclude just Facebook from the rest of the Web, consumption in terms of minutes of use shrank by nearly nine percent between March 2010 and March 2011, according to data from comScore. And, even when you include Facebook usage, total non-mobile Internet consumption still dropped three percent over the same period. We’ve known that social is growing lightning fast — notably, Facebook consumption, which grew by 69 percent — but now it’s clear that Facebook is not growing in addition to the Web. Rather, it’s actually taking consumption away from the publishers who compete on the rest of the Web. And just what is the rest of the Web? I have been calling it the “document Web,” based on how Google and other Web architectures view its pages as documents, linked together. But increasingly, it might as well be called the “searchable Web” since it’s accessed predominantly as a reference, and navigated primarily via search. - George Kelly

While a good .com name is still worth a lot, it's not as crucial to success on the internet as it used to be. And the forces that have made it less important will continue to make it less important over time (especially the mobile-related ones). I'd still opt (and pay up) for a nice, clean .com if I could get one, but I wouldn't consider it a must have. - George Kelly

"The thing about user adoption and user departure is that it's not a steady flow," says Boyd. "Think of it as, you're knitting a beautiful scarf, and you're knitting and knitting, and you get a bigger and bigger scarf. Then someone pulls a loose thread at the bottom. And it all unravels." - George Kelly

Of course Mr. Clemons was the band’s abiding African-American musician, who kept the E Street Band multiracial after the early departure of a keyboardist, David Sancious, also African-American. Along with the sound his saxophone brought to the songs — of soul and R&B, of urban sophistication and wildness — Mr. Clemons’s imposing figure declared that the E Street Band was sharing rock ’n’ roll’s black heritage, not plundering it. In America’s long, vexed cultural history of race, his bond with Mr. Springsteen made Mr. Clemons a symbol of unity and reconciliation. - George Kelly

He was older than Mr. Springsteen and most of his future band mates, and he often commented on the oddity — even the liability — of being a racially integrated group in those days. “You had your black bands and you had your white bands,” he wrote in his memoir, “and if you mixed the two you found less places to play.” - George Kelly

I wish I could tell you that I had reached my own goals: getting my daughter outside more, taking walks in the woods together, playing sports, making art. Occasionally I have – and I advocate all of that – but mostly I have just got a lot more canny about how we participate in the consumer culture. At bedtime we continue to read legends, mythology, and fairytales – all of which teem with complex female characters that fire a child's imagination. The path to womanhood is strewn with enchantment, but it is also rife with thickets and thorns and a Big Bad Culture that threatens to consume them even as they consume it. The good news is, the choices we make for our toddlers can influence how they navigate life as teens. I'm not saying we can, or will, do everything "right," only that there is power – magic – in awareness. - George Kelly

"It's sad to see these old buildings go because they have so many memories, and it's a real personal kind of thing when you play these places. It's part of our history just gone. "But we're just creating new history in new places." - George Kelly

From the languid, strings and piano introduction to the gradual build-up (“As secret debts are paid / Contacts made, they vanish unseen), to the guitar solo (3.00 - 3.27), the tension, at once joyous and foreboding, builds and then, instead of crashing, it crests. Enter Clemons at 3.54: the solo. It is extended, totally in charge and almost indescribably affecting. He wails, establishes a groove and then (right around the 5.43 mark) goes to that other place. Finally, just as the strings and piano take over, that last gasp, like a light going out or a life being saved. It is his moment, and in addition to being the best thing he ever did, it ranks as one of the best things anyone has done in a rock song. - George Kelly

I'm not saying you have to keep up. But at the moment you choose to stop growing, your world will begin to shrink. You'll be able to communicate with fewer people, especially the young. You will only see reruns. You will not understand how to pay for things. The outside world will become a frightening and unpredictable place. As they say, the only constant is change. Each new generation builds on the work of the previous one, gaining new perspective. New verbs are introduced. We Google strange and dangerous places. We tweet mindlessly to the cosmos. We Facebook our own grandmothers. I, for one, don't want to be left behind. - George Kelly