My bday gift arrived yesterday for reals. What I was presented with on my bday was actually a set of LPs, even though Xopher ordered CDs and the box said CDs. I have a record player but it needs some attention, and I’m not really a vinyl nut. So, exchanged for digital.

I listened to 3 of the 4 CDs last night. The first is the album, the second is some unreleased tracks, and the last two are live from Wembley Stadium.

Tattoo You, along with High Tide & Green Grass, were my first two Stones albums, which I got in 1981 when I was 12 years old. I had two friends who were crazy for the Rolling Stones and frankly I just wanted to fit in at first. But a true fan I quickly became. Me and my best friend Tabitha listened to this album soooooooooo many times. I had it on cassette. She had a boom box. We did a lot of walking when we were kids, and always brought the boom box. I know every note on this album.

So I can’t be objective about it.

“[T]his melancholy feeling of forever-deferred clarity and calm… is often confusingly yoked to a kind of determination, the idea that with just a bit more effort, just the right tweaks this way or that, a sense of integration – …”bliss” or “oneness” or “transcendence” – will arrive. The cyclical nature of these two feelings – in which a person feels alternately broken and fixed, in a loop that never ends – constitutes the American religion of ‘self-improvement’.”

From a NYRB review of Alison Bechdel’s Secret to Superhuman Strength, which I did not think I wanted to read, as it has been billed as being all about Bechdel’s extreme commitment to physical fitness, and I cannot relate at all to people who want to work out all the time. But the review makes me think I might try it.