Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Antonyms
Although I learned the rules quite well
Is that some words like coup and through
Sound just like threw and flue and Who;
When oo is never spelled the same,
The duice becomes a guessing game;
And then I ponder over though,
Is it spelled so, or throw, or beau,
And bough is never bow, it's bow,
I mean the bow that sounds like plow,
And not the bow that sounds like row -
The row that is pronounced like roe.
I wonder, too, why rough and tough,
That sound the same as gruff and muff,
Are spelled like bough and though, for they
Are both pronounced a different way.
And why can't I spell trough and cough
The same as I do scoff and golf?
Why isn't drought spelled just like route,
or doubt or pout or sauerkraut?
When words all sound so much the same
To change the spelling seems a shame.
There is no sense - see sound like cents -
in making such a difference
Between the sight and sound of words;
Each spelling rule that undergirds
The way a word should look will fail
And often prove to no avail
Because exceptions will negate
The truth of what the rule may state;
So though I try, I still despair
And moan and mutter "It's not fair
That I'm held up to ridicule
And made to look like such a fool
When it's the spelling that's at fault.
Let's call this nonsense to a halt."
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
'Elegant Insults'
When Insults Had Class (no 4-letter words !!)
These glorious insults are from an era when cleverness with words was
still valued, before a great portion of the English language got boiled
down to 4-letter words, not to mention waving middle fingers.
The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my
husband I'd give you poison," and he said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink
it."
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the
gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, Sir," said
Disraeli, "on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -
Winston Churchill
"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston
Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure."
Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
reading it."
Moses Hadas
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved
of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar
Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is
one." - Winston Churchill, in response.
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -
Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
- Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." -
Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." - Jack
E. Leonard
"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." - Robert Redford
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human
knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?" - Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -
Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support
rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (18 44-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening But this wasn't it." - Groucho
Marx
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
This is Halloween Super DJ MIX (recorded live at the brande)
Munster MashWednesday, October 28, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
look how excited we areSunday, September 27, 2009
New Order Set List
1. New Order Temptation (repeated twice based on request)
2. ABC- The Look of Love
3. New Order- Bizarre Love Triangle (Hot Chip Remix)- (repeated three times based on request)
4. Book of Love- Boy
5. New Order- Round and Round
6. Tiga- Burning Down the House (talking heads cover)
7. New Order- Confusion (repeated twice based on request)
8. Cut Copy- Lights and Music vs. Black Ghosts- Any Way (Fake Blood Remix) (Repeated Twice)
9. New Order- Shell Shock
10. Pet Shop Boys- Always on my Mind
11. New Order- Touched by the Hand of God
12. Yazoo- Situation (’12 version)
13. Orgy- Blue Monday (New Order Cover) (Repeated Twice)
14. Kylie Minogue vs. New Order- Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of my Head (Repeated Twice)
15. New Order- Blue Monday (’12 Version)
16. The Similou- All This Love
17. New Order- Guilt is a Useless Emotion (Mac Quayle Remix)
18. The Human League- Don’t You Want Me (Eric Prydz Remix)
19. New Order- Everything’s Gone Green
20. Simple Minds- Don’t You Forget About Me
21. Prince- Kiss
22. New Order- Crystal
23. Madonna- Burning Up
24. Joy Division- Love Will Tear us Apart Again (Repeated Twice Based on Request)
25. Oingo Boingo- Dead Man’s Party
26. New Order- Ceremony
27. Berlin- The Metro
28. New Order- Procession
29. Cut Copy- Hearts on Fire (Joakim Remix)
30. Depeche Mode- Enjoy the Silence (Ewan Pearson Remix)
31. Delorean- Moonsoon
32. Empire of the Sun- Walking on a Dream
33. Erasure- Chains of Love
34. Duran Duran- My Own Way
35. The Fall- Hit the North
36. The Cure- Hot Hot Hot
37. New Order- Age of Consent
38. Orange Juice- Blue Boy
39. Pylon- Cool
40. Elvis Costello- Pump it Up
41. The Cure- Boys Don’t Cry (Based on Request)
42. New Order- the Village (Based on Request)
43. Gang of Four- I Love a Man in a Uniform
44. Siouxsie and the Banshees- Cities in the Dust
45. Blondie- Heart of Glass (Scuola Furano in Love 4 LYNCHXGUCCI) Remix
46. Yazoo- Don’t Go (Bailey and Rossko Remix)
47. Interpol- Slow Hands (Dan the Automator Remix)
Post New Order:
47. A-trak- Walk it Out Trizz
48. Teenagers- No Love (Delorean Remix)
49. Stevie Nixx- Edge of Seventeen (Thunderous Olympian Acid Rave-UP)
50. Solee- Different (Roman Salzger Remix)
51. Hot Chip- Ready For the Floor (L.A. Riots and Villain Remix)
52. T.V. on the Radio- Staring at the Sun (Bryan Hyde Remix)
53. Seal- Amazing (Thin White Duke Remix)
54. Rockaton- A1- Your Bmore- Singing Sunday
55. Queen- Pat Bottom Girls (Dave Nada Remix)
56. Gui Boratto- Beautiful Life
57. Avalanches- Ray of Zdarlight
58. B52’s- Funplex (CSS Extended Remix)
59. Vitalic- La Rock 01 (As Heard on the Radio Dub)
60. White Stripes- 7 Nation Army (DJ Klutch’s The Freaks the Creeps Remix)
Kicked off the stage at 1:10 A.M. BY SECURITY
Groundhog's Day/ American Beauty (the latter for Geller's Class)
8 p.m. sharp we will be projecting
Ground Hog's Day
100 minutes
ebert commentary:
Murray's journey has become a parable for our materialistic age; it embodies a view of human growth that, at its heart, reflects the same spiritual view of existence Murray explored in his very personal project "The Razor's Edge." He is bound to the wheel of time, and destined to revolve until he earns his promotion to the next level. A long article in the British newspaper the Independent says "Groundhog Day" is "hailed by religious leaders as the most spiritual film of all time." Perhaps not all religious leaders have seen anything by Bergman, Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, but never mind: They have a point, even about a film where the deepest theological observation is, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."
and then at 9:40:
Synopsis:
Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation for his daughter's attractive friend.
Come for one or come for both. It should be fun either way.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
11th Dimension
new song from strokes frontman julian casablancas= synth pop blissstream it at: http://www.myspace.com/juliancasablancas
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Great Dictator and Body Heat
Chaplin- The Great Dictator
Lawrence Kandan- Body Heat
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Dirk Free!
"The test, ordered July 24 by Dallas family court Associate Judge Randall Grubbs, was administered in Missouri. Hart on Friday received the documentation confirming that Taylor is not pregnant."
Saturday, August 29, 2009
City Lights/ Jules and Jim
Chaplin- City Lights
87 minutes.
Ebert description:
If only one of Charles Chaplin's films could be preserved, ``City Lights'' (1931) would come the closest to representing all the different notes of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp--the character said, at one time, to be the most famous image on earth.
Then next Sunday, 9/6:
Jules and Jim
Jules and Jim is the ultimate menage-a-trois, and certainly one of the most poetic films of the French New Wave. The film tells the story of a friendship between two artists- one Austrian (Oskar Werner), the other French (Henry Serre)- and their mutual love for the same woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Spanning two decades, this pure love affair between Jules, Jim and Catherine is temporarily interrupted by the Great War, but continues on into the 1930s when it ends suddenly and tragically.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Children of Paradise Wins the Crown
Movies I Watched this Summer, the further up on the list, the more recommended, although they’re all good
Children of Paradise
Modern Times
House of Games
Peeping Tom
Danielson: A Family movie
Rules of the Game
Grand Illusion
Small Change
Double Indemnity
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Trouble in Paradise
Bruno
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise
Belle de Jour
Fitzcarraldo
The Exterminating Angel
Chop Shop
Blow-Up
The Spanish Prisoner
Up
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
The Red Shoes
Open City
Touch of Evil
Platoon
Deathly Gravitas, Chilling Photographs
Peter van Agtmael recently did a photo project in Iraq and Afghanistan that really captures the vitriol. Maybe even too well for our own good.
and his photos from Uganda do just as much (via my friend Lawrence):
http://www.petervanagtmael.com/
A Warning to Swedish Girls
London is teeming with lovely Swedish girls, each one manning a post at some bogus internship while riding on their own nation’s largesse.
The jobs, which consist of sitting around in some minimally furnished office at a gallery or agency, require only that they act very continental and look trendy. By day they capitalize on their phlegmatic Nordic drawl. By night they prowl the putrid clubs of the city and mechanically gyrate with their anemic English counterparts. The Swedish government foots the bill for the girls’ adventures abroad.
Swedish girls are the most sought-after of all girls, not because of their supposed beauty and blondness but because of the maternal nature of their nation’s welfare state. This has an enormous psychic impact on infantilized modern man’s desire for security which, due to barren self-awareness, is displaced as imagined carnal longing.
Their country’s neutrality and its wealth also makes them very hot. And their nonchalance about sex, born of Lutheran frigidity combined with an early immersion in clinical pornography, makes them seem non-threatening.
The Swedish girls in London’s free labor pool create a snare for other Europeans looking for Swedish girls. A domino effect has resulted in a city lousy with the most licentious scam artists Europe can vomit forth, making it a vibrant capitalist locus. The Swedish girls have made London the indisputable center of Europe, with former contenders Rome, Berlin, and Paris left far behind.
The aforementioned counterfeit jobs aren’t the reason for London’s allure, of course. Each Swedish girl is actually there in hopes of snaring an English boy: a Damon Albarn or Jarvis Cocker of her very own. The Swedish girls’ self-perceived northern isolation has given them an inferiority complex that makes them feel positively provincial. Therefore they are obsessed with being chic. Since all of the continent is transfixed by the newest machination of the English fashion/pop factory, the English boyfriend like any other chic accouterment, is a must have.
The manhood of England, immersed in pools of Swedish flesh, must be beholden to their cunning music press which has facilitated the myth of their interminable swinging modernity. They need only get a bowl hairdo or some fey contemporary equivalent and they’re awash in nubile Nords, thanks to a savvy and deceitful media organ.
The Beatles are ultimately responsible, for without them and their psychedelic phenomenon, the country would be revealed as a chilly version of Portugal- a conservative backwater left only with distant memories of imperial glory.
Indeed, before the Fab Four, England was drab and bowler-hatted; their parliament wore wigs, the food was bad, and the morality stultifying. No Swedish girl would have set foot on its soil. In the innocent days preceding “Beatle mania,” Anita Ekberg and Ingrid Bergman were in Italy, almost certainly making love to their respective directors.
This, because Fellini’s Rome had been the great city of Europe, with its convertibles, scooters, scarves, and cigarette holders. Paris was a close second with art and Sartre and existentialist superstars.
The English were only an aberrant, half-Teutonic curiosity without any major contribution to painting, cinema, ballet, opera, or symphony. And they were conservative: the art movements that transformed aesthetics through Modernism, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Cubism, et a., didn’t include any notable Englishmen. When revolution swept the continent in 1830, 1848, 1870, and 11918, England was placid. Only the Futurists approved. In Marnetti’s 1910 “Speech of the English” he upbraided his audience for closeting their homosexuality but lauded their capacity for killing on the high seas.
With The Beatles, the Englishman was, for the first time ever, desirable. He displaced the “Latin Lover” who had been the mainstay of Western feminine romantic fantasy since the high middle ages when the French and Italians had compiled the Roman de la Rose and the Art of Courtly Love and proposed the modern concept of love. The Beatles also sparked interest in English fashion and film, and very soon Richard Lester was a bigger name than Rosselini, Bunuel, or Truffaut.
The British music trade papers capitalized on this windfall with a cunningly crafted political regime, transforming a theretofore teeny-bop world of pop into a mop-top court of Versailles. Ever since, they’ve held the continent transfixed with the lateast wind change, folly or foible. The soap opera they created (Beatles vs. Stones, Clash vs. Jam, Judas Priest vs. Queen, etc.) endures to this day.
The Englishman’s newfound attractiveness was simultaneously buoyed by their film industry which fomented their snobbish ideal internationally. Through the stereotype effete mannered ruling-class toffee nose exists now only in the Merchant Ivory films which are sold to Americans, the effect of this proliferated archetype had been enormous in persuading the globe of the Britisher’s inherent dashing and “cricket” moral compass.
Due to this nefarious propaganda, the English-man has enjoyed a position of sexual dominance for forty years now.
This sexual dominance has resulted in the ultimate reward by the standards of Western sexual commerce today: Swedish girls. The Englishman reaps the dual prize of erotic liberalism and maternal Euro-Communism. However, the Swedish girls would do well to remember that their prized, pouty Englishman may seem to swing and represent all things chic but, in reality, he is the gouty father of the ugly American.
Indeed, this modern culture of awful food, industrial blight, and soft-core imperialism which the Europeans love to decay traces its ancestry directly to Old Blighty. The Americans merely took the baton from their lime-gnawing spiritual matters. It could be argued even that the oft-mentioned “American hegemony” is an Ameri-English once: US dominance on the world stage began at Great Britain’s behest with their imperial contraction at the end of World War I. US policies are really US-UK ones, drawing mutual orders from Trans-Atlantic corporations. Their perpetual alliance in wars like Iraq and the Falklands are carried over into diplomacy, with both nations working to undermine the EU, the UN, and the Euro currency.
England, because of the enduring myth of charm and chivalry born of its artistic export, is excused from a history of genocidal crimes, despite offenses that rival Nixon, Himmler, and Tarlamane. Its troops marched every indigenous inhabitant of Tasmania into the ocean, for example. The reason for Europe’s pathetic general complaisance with Hitler during WWII? A nearly unanimous hatred of England. Quisling was, for example, first and foremost an Anglophobe.
This antagonism was a result of English dominance of the world via trade and sea power. “Control the sea and you control the world” was the Englishman’s boast at the time, a conceit at the heart of modern US strategy. Belgium was an English invention, created to castrate French naval power after Napoleon. Belgium became (like Poland later) an English “protectorate” giving Britain the right to enter into continental politics at will. Israel is the modern analogy, a state that was initially sponsored by England in order to maintain access to the highly strategic Holy Land. All the contrived states in the Middle East are likewise English Frankensteins, gerrymandered by Churchill to ensure their future economic and/or military helplessness (e.g., Kuwait).
How did the English pull off these fiendish stunts? With the race of violent chauvinists who roam their still.
The English pub on a Monday afternoon is scarier than a Detroit drug war or a Mississippi cross burning, and its tribal rituals more bizarre. The “Chelsea smile,” inflicted by Chelsea FC fans on their randomly chosen foes, consists of knifing the sides of the victim’s mouth into a grotesque, oversized “grin.” The Britons throw darts and bricks at their athletes during football matches, sometimes hitting them in their eyes, causing public prostration and misery. Meanwhile, gangs of feral youth conduct their “war on the terraces” with office knives and other awful, ordinary implements. And then there are the English “skinheads” who, for entertainment, “put in the boot.” The English sports enthusiast is feared and reviled the world over for his primitive, unreconstructed behavior.
Their nightclubs are little better. When the “lad” spies the “bird” he desired to “shag,” he need only bark five words: “grab your coat; you’re pulled.” She obediently complies. Is this the world you’re prepared for, Swedish girls? I hear your protest now: about the Englishman’s innate bravery and the chivalry of the Round Table with its noble Hobbits, and Jarvis heroically kicking “Jacko” at the awards ceremony. Well, perhaps that was funny, but Michael Jackson is just a demure child molester with a magnetic nose, hardly the Black Knight.
Of course, it’s true that the aesthetic presented by the great English music groups (Kinks, Beatles, Stones, Clash, Smiths, etc.) was not necessarily chauvinist or hooligan… but the key to this paradox was gay management. All the aforementioned groups were simple yobs that had theater connected modish homosexuals pulling the strings and informing the work. These managers whispered conceptual tidbits into the ears of their dashing young pupils, who would have otherwise been exposed as crazed brutalists. And a gay rock manager may not make an ideal boyfriend.
Perhaps the answer would be if this character would be convinced to manage their relationship. The guy will look good with the hair and anemia while the manager, on his way to constructing the perfect art-school rock combo, will suppress the Swedish girls’ man’s ultra-violence by teaching him about Bunuel.
The affair could have the aplomb and pretense of the Who, the “mania” and “love” ideology of The Beatles, the dialectic tension of The Class, etc.
Unfortunately, a manger is expensive… Swedish girls: you’ll have to give up 20% of your boyfriend. I suppose the Swedish Government could fit the bill…