One of the hottest flames I’ve ever seen, and I was a flame warrior for quite a few years. Not a surprising opinion, but it’s all in the expression.
But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived [Louis Armstrong] by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril.
One thing that divides Man from the animals is our ability to perform useless actions in a graceful and beautiful way. That’s the only explanation for Balanchine, or Van Beethoven, or this bloke fucking about on his bike.
Most of your actions are useless, I suspect. Does it even occur to you to do them gracefully?
In a hotel room too hot, with foamy unsupportive pillows, I dreamed you were gone off with some man who seemed to have enchanted you. You were far from me, and I felt an immeasurable distance between us. I awoke at 4am with a feeling of melancholy, that the last of something had happened, without my awareness.
All of which is true, of course, except that the man in reality is not a sinister figure. He's just a guy. But the distance and the finality are utterly real.
Oh my God, a Hollywood movie that romanticises the sacking of thousands of American workers. You don’t have to be Barbara Ehrenreich to find that utterly repellent.
People send you links to videos, thinking they’re the first. But they found the link via someone else. What is wrong with this picture?
I think we need to have badges according to the amount we use the net. Then a badge no. 2 would know not to send me, a badge no. 7, anything at all. Everyone lower than 7 would have to leave me alone, and I’d only have to take links from Sal Towse and Jason Kottke.
One of the main problems about letting your beard grow, is that sooner or later you begin to ingurgitate your own hairs. Unlike other foreign-body hairs, your own seem to be less readily rejected by your body.
I guess this is a problem only men have. I’ve seen old women with facial hair, but none with hair like I’ve grown since last September. Now we know there’s a price to pay.
I have a grey horse, who shares my bed with me. He’s about one hand to the shoulder, and in fact you can hold him in one hand. My children gave him to me one Fathers’ Day; they’d been looking for a donkey, my beast of choice, but this would have to suffice. They may have been unsure, or even imagined I wouldn’t spot a ringer.
He’s pretty useless for snuggling (and he’s indifferent to my philosophising and snowman-building) but I keep him in my bed anyway, so that the children will see him from time to time, and know that he’s still close to me.
You think you're being polite when at the end of an email you go, "Thanks in advance". In fact you're being insufferably presumptuous. Thanks in advance means, Get it done, bitch.
There's a very effective, Hitchcock-like moment in The Lovely Bones, involving a creaky floorboard, a desperate sister and a serial killer. Watching it, I was not only reminding myself that I already knew the outcome, I was also admiring Hitch's definition of suspense, and director Peter Jackson's willingness to wring every last drop from the scene.
But please OMG, don't hope for anything else from this dreadful, bungled movie.
Alice Sebold's novel may not be great literature, but her description of how a family reacts to the death of one of its members was, for me, utterly convincing, and I've been in the situation. It's terribly hackneyed to claim the film wasn't as good as the book, but all film adaptations are better than this one. It failed not only to capture the narrator, who without spoiling is a murdered girl. It also failed to capture the father, who goes a bit nuts; the mother, who bolts; the sister, who becomes an avenging angel; the brother, who doesn't understand anything, until he does; and the detective, played by Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos, and getting less to do than if he were the guest on an episode of Extras.
Oh yeah, and it fails to develop the Indian boy, the clairvoyant girl, the Indian boy's mother -- all of whom were characters in the book, all well-developed.
How could a film miss so much? Partly it's in the nature of film, as we all know. That doesn't excuse why things went so wrong. Maybe Peter Jackson is just a crap director. He's famous for Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Maybe he's out of his depth when doing things on a human scale.
I remember I was aware of Rod Argent (Hold Your Head Up, very prog-rock) before I ever heard of Colin Blunstone, his band's vocalist by that time, whose version of Russ Ballard's song I don't Believe in Miracles put Argent out of our minds forever. biggest hit.
Blunstone had, and may well still have, one of the most beautiful male voices in rock music. As a man, as a former vocalist, as a singer still, I can only dream of singing like this. He is, I suppose, a lyric tenor. I think singing the way he does, on a song like this, he reaches far beyond what most operatic tenors ever get to sing.
The lyrics themselves are not much to write home about. The first two lines could hardly be more mundane:
I walk along the road and past your door Then I remember things you said
The story is a very ordinary one. What matters is what he makes of it. While making it clear she's vanished without trace, he's in no doubt it's because she's no good:
I don't believe in miracles But I thought you might show your face Or have the grace to tell me where you are
He then goes on to explain how manipulative she is:
I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball) If you tossed me up then I would fall And so you've won again, ah, you win them all
Before making it clear that he's the victim, a knowing victim, and a willing victim after all:
But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call
That is, of you do the research, an unexpectedly common sentiment in pop songs -- much more common, in my experience (though these things are tinted by our own life-experiences) that the view that the victim was somehow a dupe.
That ambivalence continues in the next verse:
I believe that somewhere there's someone Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong The bullet that shot me down came from your gun The words that turned me round were from your song
And that's all. He was treated bad, got dumped, would go back in a heartbeat. I think a lot more pop sings than you think would fit that description.
Here are the full lyrics:
I walk along the road and past your door Then I remember things you said I know in time we could've been so much more But if you wanna come back home, go right ahead
But I don't believe in miracles I don't believe in miracles But I thought you might show your face Or have the grace to tell me where you are
I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball) If you tossed me up then I would fall And so you've won again, ah, you win them all But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call
But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) But I thought you might show your face Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)
I believe that somewhere there's someone Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong The bullet that shot me down came from your gun The words that turned me round were from your song
But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) But I thought you might show your face Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)
But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles) But I thought you might show your face Or have the grace to tell me where you are
And the video performance:
It appears Argent and Blunstone are still touring to the faithful. They were once at the top of the pile, and one of them -- Blunstone -- has an unusual talent. You can see the band's performance of their most well-known song here, on the incomparable Old Grey Whistle Test from 1973. The singer here is Russ Ballard, composer of I don't believe, and no mean singer in his own right. So much more of a compliment to Blunstone that he was allowed to sing Ballard's classic.
I've posted the short, shameful confession meme to this blog 20 times. And I'm not particularly ashamed about any of the things I confessed. All the really shameful stuff stays hidden.
Meanwhile this blog has now moved up to third place in a Google Search for "short shameful confession".
I got lucky by being in a great Brabant landscape, in the first place, and a heavy rain in the second. Because I only have a point and shoot Cybershot thingy, the way to make a long exposure is to push the film-speed (there is no film, I know, but we can recreate the conditions) down to ASA400. The point of that was to catch something of the rain, but it also had the secondary effect of blurring everything slightly, since the grass was blowing in the wind, and since I was holding a camera no heavier than a slice of toast and honey in my unhandy German bands.
But being in the right place was half the battle. That's what all art is about, after all. That's what you're seeing when the trees in the distance seem to fade away. That's called aerial perspective, and it was an effect artists like Leonardo were at pains to reproduce in works like the Mona Lisa. But in real life, it's all a question of where you're standing. Painters use it to try to fake an effect which our eyes see by themselves.
Click on the image to biggify, and feel free to d/l to zoom right in and get that Impressionist feel, where every plant and nettle looks like a brush-stroke.
And since it's all about photography and painting, I'm dedicating it to nn, snapper of my tattoo ordeal, who has a painting jury later today. G'luck, kid.
