HOT-FLOOR VOCALS
All I care about right now is something called HOT-FLOOR VOCALS, which is a term my friend dumped in my ear while I was annoyingly singing the theme song to The New Adventures of Wonder Woman in McCarren Park a few weekends ago. The concept is simple: to get those back-up singers to attack their lines with such urgency and power, the floors obvo had to be heated up under them. Enjoy this and agree and we will explore more of my fave HOT-FLOOR VOCALS as the week progresses. <END TRANSMITTAL>
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Day 23: Angela Lansbury as the old lush Mrs. Salome Otterbourne in Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1978). I saw this adaption for the first time last night, and could not get over the hilariousness that Angela Lansbury brought to every scene.
This was my favourite of her outfits.
For clips see here and here. Bette Davis & Maggie Smith were great as well.
digital
Totes getting this as a [temporary] tattoo.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly9467WahO1r954f2o1_r6_500.png)
Day 23: Angela Lansbury as the old lush Mrs. Salome Otterbourne in Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1978). I saw this adaption for the first time last night, and could not get over the hilariousness that Angela Lansbury brought to every scene.
This was my favourite of her outfits.
For clips see here and here. Bette Davis & Maggie Smith were great as well.
digital
Totes getting this as a [temporary] tattoo.
Source: 366portraits
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Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world; so that I could if I liked to take the trouble, write a great deal here not only about my mother and father but about uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. But I do not know how much of this, or what part of this, made me feel what I felt in the nursery at St Ives. I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer’s difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold—? Owing partly to the fact that I was never at school, never competed in any way with children of my own age, I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people’s. But of course there was one external reason for the intensity of this first impression: the impression of the waves and acorn on the blind; the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow—it was due partly to the many months we spent in London. The change of nursery was a great change. And there was the long train journey; and the excitement. I remember the dark; the lights; the stir of the going up to bed.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Nilsson, “Save the Last Dance for Me”
Infinite loop: all day, all night.
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Patton Oswalt.
Patton Oswalt.
This is correct.
Source: skeetonmischa
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New York City is eternally evolving. From its iconic skyline to its side alleys, the new is perpetually being built on the debris of the past. But a movement to preserve the city’s vanishing landscapes has emerged. For nearly 20 years, Frank Jump has been documenting the fading ads that are visible, but less often seen, all over New York. Disappearing from the sides of buildings or hidden by new construction, these signs are remnants of lost eras of New York’s life. They weave together the city’s unique history, culture, environment and society and tell the stories of the businesses, places and people whose lives transpired among them – the story of New York itself. Fading Ads is also a study of time and space, of mortality and living, as Jump’s campaign to capture the ads mirrors his own struggle with HIV. Experience the ads—shot with vintage Kodachrome film—and the meaning they carry through acclaimed photographer and urban documentarian Frank Jump’s lens.
Attending.
Source: wordbrooklyn
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Kate Bush, “Moments of Pleasure” (Director’s Cut)
The snow, the view of Manhattan across the river, the feeling wistful for nothing and no reason, et. al., have had me listening to both the original The Red Shoes and reworked Director’s Cut versions of this one today. I’ve rather successfully avoided playing favorites between the tracks on DC and their older counterparts, but I think I’m ready to say that I decidedly prefer “Moments of Pleasure” 2.0.
Aside from the obviously stripped-down arrangement (lush strings have been eliminated, the piano is played delicately), the lyrics of the chorus have been excised entirely. “Just being alive/it can really hurt/and these moments given/are a gift from time/Just let us try/to give these moments back/to those we love/to those who will survive.” That’s a lovely bit of writing, and I missed these lines on my first few listens of the new version.
But the music remains, and over it comes a warm (yet distant-sounding) swell of humming. While singing along, these passages inevitably trip me up; I don’t think of or intuit the notes as hums, but rather default to my memory of the removed lyrics. The problem is that the melody here is not analogous to the old chorus; the suggestion of those lyrics and their sentiment exists, but only as a vague astral, and a line can’t really be drawn between the two. By the second iteration of the hums, I don’t bother to sing along. Rather, I just give myself over to the sweep of their oaky timbre, so in harmony with the way Bush extends her phrasing and really allows herself to inhabit each line of lyric and bar of music. I’m never not reminded of Mass.
Which, in many ways, is correct. The new cut of “Moments of Pleasure” embodies the ceremony of memory, whereas the original had more to do with a pledge to it. Another lyric that has been dropped is “Here come the hills of time,” excised, I would posit, because those hills have come and gone in the eighteen years since the song was first recorded.
Appropriately, that line (and now its palpable absence) comes directly following the infamous “I can hear my mother saying/’Every old sock meets and old shoe.’” Popular opinion has it that “Moments of Pleasure” was, in part, written as an elegy to Bush’s mother. In interviews promoting Director’s Cut, though, Bush made clear that her mother was still alive when she wrote the song, and she only included the line because of her attachment to the sentiment. (The true elegiac song mourning her mother is “A Coral Room,” from Aerial.) In the reworked version, though, it’s clear that this line is doing the work now that so many thought it was originally, and it’s bracing.
The whole affair is bookended by touches that further suggest that this “Moments of Pleasure” is indeed the product of compulsive (rather than forceful) reverie. Before the first chords are played, there is the faint sound of a needle running across worn vinyl; quiet cracks of warped imperfection as memory marks, creating a psychic filter to enhance the production, rather than something technical.
At the song’s end, after Bush’s resume of dear ones in small, specific memories, another key lyric is dropped: “Hey, there, Bill, would you turn the lights up?” In the original, this line marks a definitive end to what’s preceded—Bush is stepping away from what she’s been considering. But on Director’s Cut, she instead progresses the penultimate lyrics (“Hey, there, Michael, do you really love me?”) with a reiterative adjustment: “Did you really love me?” The final syllable is held, plaintively, and the last pensive strokes of the piano resonate softly into silence. The change of tense in that question indicates that an answer will never come, and Bush (along with the listener) seems destined to be suspended in that state of unknowing indefinitely. The chords may resolve, but the mysteries that even memory can’t answer never do.
And, yes, the buildings of New York do look like mountains through the snow.
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VIBES is a movie starring Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum that I have seen, that I own, that I enjoy, and for which I have made a fake Criterion cover. Now I have said things about it on a website, which you can read by clicking this hyperlinked text. <End Transmittal>
Source: xojane.com
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Funny, because I heard your boss is super nice, and not remotely revengeful. Maybe that was misinformation.
Our new edition of Decameron just landed in the office, a lot of us have coughs, and the boss doesn’t like it when sick people come to the office and cough. All of this leads to a lot of thinking about the literature of disease and exile, obviously, so here’s a reading list—just in case you’re between the same rock and hard place we are.
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio One of the most influential works of literature ever published, here we have ten people (three men, seven women) taking refuge in the countryside from Black Plague-ridden Florence and regaling one another with tales of love, death, and deception.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Set in a sanitarium tucked away in the Swiss Alps, Mann’s magnum opus is an allegory for Europe’s terminal irrationality that begot the First World War.
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham Nothing like forcing your philandering wife to join you on a journey through cholera-ridden China to get even with her. Until that plan backfires, of course.
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe A fictional chronicle of the Great Plague that tore through London in 1665, purported to have been inspired by the author’s uncle’s journals.
Hotel-du-Lac by Anita Brookner The diseases here are love-sickness and ennui, experienced by Edith as she is forced by friends to leave London for a Swiss resort in the off-season after making a horrible error in judgement.The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag Told in the symphonic strands of dialogue between a group of friends, this short-story-turned-novella remains one of the most bracing works of fiction about the AIDS pandemic.
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus Marcus’s third novel explores the hypothetical horror of what happens when the vocalization of children becomes toxic for adults.Happy reading, if you’re inclined, and remember to push those fluids!
No one said it was specifically you, chief!
Source: vintageanchor
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