Swingin' Sounds for Hipsters vol. 8: Jet Set Jazz, Electro Swing, Fabulous Funk & Global Grooves.
1) Taboo (Jojo Effect Remix) ~ Les Baxter
2) Drive Anywhere ~ Urbs
3) Not With Me ~ Jojo Effect
4) Love Is In Town ~ Brenda Boykin
5) But Not For You ~ Alessandro Magnanini
6) Zoo Zizaro - Club des Belugas
7) In Style and Rhythm - Pumali Panthers
8) Black is the Night ~ DJ Vadim feat. Katherin DeBoer
9) The Others ~ Hardkandy
10) La Lucertola ~ De-Phazz
11) Samba 1000 (Nicola Conte Mix) - Ursula 1000
12) Pan Am 009 ~ Saint Privat
13) Moods ~ Beatrice Simpson
14) Rivoluzione (Butti 49 Con-fusion Mix) ~ Ennio Morricone
15) Say Yes ~ Wax Tailor
16) Here's Us ~ Nekta
17) Back Street Lust (Azaxx Remix) ~ Kinny
18) Bado Baijo ~ Jojo Effect
19) Un Grao De Areia ~ Club des Belugas
20) Too Old To Die ~ Troublemakers
21) All For You ~ RJD2
22) Et de Clarinete ~ Palov & Mishkin
23) What I Got ~ Torpedotrickser
24) Conmigo ~ Nickodemus & The Candela Allstars
25) Dancefloor Fight ~ Paikan
26) Sound of Everything ~ Quantic
27) Pepita ~ Vono Box
28) Tom's Song ~ Gare du Nord
29) The Incident ~ Urbs
30) Descend ~ Nighthawks
31) Kiss Me ~ Club des Belugas
32) The Id (Small World Mix) ~ Steinski
33) Stroker Ace ~ Lovage
34) Desire ~ Jojo Effect
35) Charleston Butterfly (feat. Gabriella Hänninen) ~ Parov Stelar
36) Clear As Water (Hidden Jazz Quartet Remix) [feat. Bajka] ~ Una Mas Trio
37) Soon ~ Gelka
38) Feat Feats ~ DJ Vadim featuring Emo & Syrus
39) Wonderful (JoJo Effect Remix) ~ Brenda Boykin
40) Some Like It Hot ~ Club Des Belugas Feat. Brenda Boykin
41) Princess Crocodile ~ Gry with FM Einheit and His Orchestra
42) Swing För Hyresgästföreningen ~ Movits
43) Ein kleines Wackeln mit dem Po ~ Jojo Effect
44) Green Eyed Love ~ Mayer Hawthorne
45) Be My Lover (Acoustic Bossa Remix) ~ Brenda Boykin
46) Silence ~ Concorde Music Club
47) It's a Beautiful Day ~ Club des Belugas
48) Mambo Tonight ~ Jojo Effect
49) 5 Giorni Di Carnevale ~ Rosalia de Souza
50) Venus ~ S-Tone Inc
51) Come and Get Me ~ The Five Corners Quintet feat. Mark Murphy
52) Wild is Love ~ Nat King Cole
53) Someway Still I Do (feat. Liam McKahey) ~ Alessandro Magnanini
54) My Hunger Hurts ~ Club des Belugas
55) Mademoiselle ~ Concorde Music Club
56) Secret Words ~ Ohm Guru
57) La Esquina ~ Federico Aubele
58) Vendendo Saude & Fe ~ Ocote Soul Sounds & Adrian Quesada
59) Cumbia Infierno (Toti & Andy Loop Fat Beat Remix) ~ La Troba Kung-Fú
60) Get a Move On ~ Mr Scruff
61) Dipso Calypso (feat. Lady Cath) ~ Buscemi
62) Satyam Shivam Sundaram ~ Thievery Corporation Feat. Gunjan
63) Ou est la Femme? ~ Louise Vertigo
64) Way Out ~ Lazy
65) Con Mi Sombra ~ S-Tone Inc
66) Wildcats Gotta Move ~ Club des Belugas
67) Exquis-it, Baby ~ Gare du Nord
68) Receptions in Brazil ~ Nighthawks
69) Endangered Species (Raeo Remix) ~ Nickodemus
70) Bonita (Dj Vadim Remix) ~ The Pimps of Joytime
71) L'estate e' qua (feat. Rosalia De Souza) ~ Alessandro Magnanini
72) Jazz Music ~ De-Phazz & The Radio Frankfurt Big Band
73) Too Late ~ Club des Belugas
74) Who Knows Featuring Kabir ~ The Quantic Soul Orchestra
75) It's On ~ Kylie Auldist
76) Queen of Boredness (feat. Diesler) ~ Kinny
77) Cleopatra In New York ~ Nickodemus
78) Hard Swing Travellin' Man ~ Brenda Boykin
79) Deja Morts ~ Concorde Music Club
80) Inverno ~ Bossa Nostra
81) Ai Mi Morena (Chocolate Restyle) ~ Mo'Horizons
82) More and More of Your Amor ~ Nat King Cole & Bitter:sweet
83) São Funky, Pt. 1 & 2 ~ Fort Knox Five
84) Sunset Break Up ~ Dr Rubberfunk
85) Le Fox ~ Owusu and Hannibal
86) Wild is My Love ~ Club des Belugas
87) Hurt So Bad ~ Nancy Holloway
88) Shadows of Ourselves ~ Thievery Corporation
89) La Lluvia ~ Nickodemus
90) Capoeira vai ~ Sabrina Malheiros
91) Return of the Panther Featuring Mustafa Akbar ~ Thunderball
92) Greenwood Groove ~ Greenwood Groove Coalition
93) The Model ~ Overproof Sound System
94) Hidden ~ Buscemi
95) This Is What You Are (Dim's Hipster Jazz Version By Dimitri from Paris) ~ Mario Biondi
96) You, Me and Jazz ~ Aaron Tesser & The New Jazz Affair
97) The Mambo Craze ~ De-Phazz & The Radio Frankfurt Big Band
98) I Just Fell In Love Again ~ Quantic & His Combo Barbaro
99) Oh Jeje ~ Bebo Best & The Super Lounge Orchestra
100)Locomotive ~ Mop Mop
101)Lounging at the Waldorf ~ Ron Sunshine & Full Swing
102)Cinnamon Girl (Club Edit) [feat. Boban I Marko Markovic Orkestar] ~ [dunkelbunt]
103)Fel del Av Gården ~ Movits
104)Guess Who (Parov Stelar Remix) ~ Nekta
105)Yuknowhathislifeez (Motorcity Mix) ~ Metropolitan Jazz Affair
106)Elevated States (Nicola Conte Remix) ~ Thunderball
107)Ciel bleu ~ Danilo Venturi
108)Kindergarten (Rube Remix) ~ Unkle Ho
109)Pick Up 52's ~ Mestizo & Mike Gao
110)San Francisco Bound (Dj Obah Remix) ~ The Pimps of Joytime
111)Azulee ~ Shantel
112)Seasons ~ Bobby Hughes Combination
113)Surfing the Silvatide (With Bajka) ~ Ancient Astronauts
114)Let Everything Be ~ Margo vs. Thunderball
115)No Jive ~ De-Phazz
116)I Love My Baby (My Baby Loves Jazz) Norman Cook Mix) ~ United Future Organization
117)Afro On the Rocks ~ Paikan
118)Latin Groove ~ Smoove & Turrell
119)Linda Morena ~ Quantic & His Combo Barbaro
120)The Rebirth of the Fat Lola ~ Club des Belugas
121)The More I Look At You ~ Timo Lassy (feat. José James)
122)Ponta de Pedra ~ S-Tone Inc
123)Livin' My Life (feat. Liam McKahey) ~ Alessandro Magnanini
124)Romeo & Juliet ~ Sabrina Starke
125)She Said No ~ Club des Belugas
126)Catgroove ~ Parov Stelar
127)Initials B.B ~ Louise Vertigo
128)Superflu ~ Saint Privat
129)Let Love Lead the Way ~ Club des Belugas
130)Be Lonely ~ Mario Biondi
131)Incident At Gate 7 ~ Thievery Corporation
132)You've Been Spiked ~ Chris Joss
133)Loose Gardener ~ Flevens
134)I Just Want to Make Love to You ~ Cold Blood
135)Have Love Will Travel ~ Lefties Soul Connection
136)Hold On ~ Mr. Scruff
137)Secret Lover (feat. Jenny B) ~ Alessandro Magnanini
138)Passing On The Screen ~ Club des Belugas
139)Déjà Morts (Remix By Patchworks) ~ Concorde Music Club
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
King of New York ~ Schooly D
From the soundtrack to Abel Ferrara's classic gangster movie "King of New York."
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Faux Friendship
By William Deresiewicz
From Chronicle.com
We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.
Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.
....
And so we return to Facebook. With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004—the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
More here
From Chronicle.com
We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.
Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.
....
And so we return to Facebook. With the social-networking sites of the new century—Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004—the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
More here
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Dark Side of the Bright Side
From In These Times
In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.
Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership.
This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders—assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers—made very bad decisions.
In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism.
Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance?
If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.”
It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.
So this picks up more in the early ’80s and even more so in the ’90s when globalization really took off?
I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the ’80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people.
Couldn’t this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational?
That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, “It’s got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line.” Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis.
But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is “leadership.” The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there’s no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on “vision quests” to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for.
The same things are happening in foreign policy. We’ve abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire?
In the ’80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God’s chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader—which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security.
Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief?
I haven’t sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I’d rather not hear about “hope,” I’d rather hear about “plans.” Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives.
You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It’s amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students.
That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country—courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn’t matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don’t think that’s what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.
Anis Shivani
More here
In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.
Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership.
This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders—assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers—made very bad decisions.
In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism.
Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance?
If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven’t had a positive enough attitude? However, I don’t think that there is a central committee that sits there saying, “This is what we want to get people to believe.”
It took hold in the United States because in the ’80s and ’90s it became a business. You could write a book like Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a classic about accepting layoffs with a positive attitude. And then you could count on employers to buy them up and distribute them free to employees.
So this picks up more in the early ’80s and even more so in the ’90s when globalization really took off?
I was looking at the age of layoffs, which begins in the ’80s and accelerates. How do you manage a workforce when there is no job security? When there is no reward for doing a good job? When you might be laid off and it might not have anything to do with performance? As that began to happen, companies began to hire motivational speakers to come in and speak to their people.
Couldn’t this positive thinking be what corporate culture wants everyone to believe, but at the top, people are still totally rational?
That is what I was assuming when I started this research. I thought, “It’s got to be rational at the top. Someone has to keep an eye on the bottom line.” Historically, the science of management was that in a rational enterprise, we have spreadsheets, we have decision-trees and we base decisions on careful analysis.
But then all that was swept aside for a new notion of what management is about. The word they use is “leadership.” The CEO and the top people are not there so much to analyze and plan but to inspire people. They claimed to have this uncanny ability to sense opportunities. It was a shock, to find the extent to which corporate culture has been infiltrated not only by positive thinking, but by mysticism. The idea is that now things are moving so fast in this era of globalization, that there’s no time to think anymore. So you increasingly find CEOs gathering in sweat lodges or drumming circles or going on “vision quests” to get in touch with their inner-Genghis Khan or whatever they were looking for.
The same things are happening in foreign policy. We’ve abandoned a sense of realism. You had this with Bush and also with Obama, although he is more realistic. Is there a connection between optimism and the growth of empire?
In the ’80s, Reagan promoted the idea that America is special and that Americans were God’s chosen people, destined to prosper, much to the envy of everybody else in the world. Similarly, Bush thought of himself as the optimist-in-chief, as the cheerleader—which had been his job once in college. This is very similar to how CEOs are coming to think of themselves: as people whose job is to inspire others to work harder for less pay and no job security.
Would you say that Obama is our cheerleader-in-chief?
I haven’t sorted it out. He talks a lot about hope. And as a citizen I’d rather not hear about “hope,” I’d rather hear about “plans.” Yet he does strike me as a rational person, who thinks through all possibilities and alternatives.
You write about the science of positive thinking having taken root at Ivy League universities. It’s amazing to me that a course in happiness at Harvard would draw almost 900 students.
That was in 2006. And these courses have spread all over the country—courses in positive psychology where you spend time writing letters of gratitude to people in your family, letters of forgiveness (whether or not you send them doesn’t matter), getting in touch with your happy feelings, and I don’t think that’s what higher education should be about. People go to universities to learn critical thinking, and positive thinking is antithetical to critical thinking.
Anis Shivani
More here
Friday, November 13, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Random Transmissions 14 ~ S.J. Perelman
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin .. it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
Their the waiters' eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet - pâté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, filet mignon, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.
A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.
Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
On director Ernst Lubitsch:
(he was) "smoking a cucumber and looking cool as a cigar."
A case of the tail dogging the wag.
There is such a thing as too much couth.
I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartettes, chamber music, and cantatas.
I have Bright's disease and he has mine.
The main obligation is to amuse yourself.
The whistle shrilled and in a moment I was chugging out of Grand Central’s dreaming spires followed only by the anguished cries of relatives who would now have to go to work. I had chugged only a few feet when I realized that I had left without the train, so I had to run back and wait for it to start.
Nature, it appears, has been rather more bountiful to Paul’s body and purse than to his intellect; above the ears, speaking bluntly, the boy is strictly tapioca.
I’ve always taken my liquor mixed and my peril neat, and I see no reason to switch now.
“I love people from the East,” she went on. “There’s so much more to them.” Uncertain whether I was supposed to hail from Jubbulpore or Newark, I decided to play it safe and adopted an inscrutable global expression.
The moment Audrey’s tongue touched bourbon, it began wagging in a key just resonant enough to drown out the music.
“In France,” Marcel said with wintry dignity, “accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."
The showing (of the movie Foolish Wives) roused me to neither vandalism nor affection; in fact, it begot such lassitude that I had to be given artificial respiration and sent home in a wheelbarrow.
As for consulting a dentist regularly, my punctuality practically amounted to a fetish. Every twelve years I would drop whatever I was doing and allow wild Caucasian ponies to drag me to a reputable orthodontist.
"Great-grandfather died under strange circumstances. He opened a vein in his bath."
"I never knew baths had veins," protested Gabrilowitsch."
"I never knew his great-grandfather had a ba—" began Falcovsky derisively.
Before they made S.J. Perelman they broke the mold.
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
"Oh, son, I wish you hadn’t become a scenario writer!" she sniffled.
"Aw, now, Moms," I comforted her, "it’s no worse than playing the piano in a call house."
And finally, a quote from Groucho Marx on Perelman:
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
That Old Feeling: Perelmania
from time.com
Am I alone these days in regarding S.J. Perelman as a formative font of 20th century wit?
...summon his name on Google, and you will find only about a third as many references for him as for his brother-in-law, Nathanael West, who published only four short novels in a six-year career, compared to 20-some volumes in Perelman's public half-century. Ransacking the Internet, I could discover no Perelman parties, no memorial readings from the canon, no revivals of the Broadway shows he worked on, no retrospectives of the films he helped write. I think of the Perelman story, "Who Stole My Golden Metaphor?" and wonder: who buried my Perelman beyond price?
But, kids, before you consign one of my favorite comedy writers to Corliss' mausoleum of lost causes, take a moment to roll naked in some Perelman prose. I choose, almost at random, a few verses from the "Acres and Pains," his magnum opus — or minimum opus, for it consumes fewer than 40 pages when reprinted. The book is Perelman's account of a city boy who, in 1932, acquired and tried to run a rural property in Bucks County, Pa.:
"A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bound by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city."
"I began my career as a country squire with nothing but a high heart, a flask of citronella, and a fork for toasting marshmallows in case supplies ran low. In a scant fifteen years I have acquired a superb library of mortgages, mostly first editions, and the finest case of sacroiliac known to science.... I also learned that to lock horns with Nature, the only equipment you really need is the constitution of Paul Bunyan and the basic training of a commando."
"When I first settled down on a heap of shale in the Delaware Valley, I too had a romantic picture of myself. For about a month I was a spare, sinewy frontiersman in fringed buckskin, with crinkly little lines about the eyes and a slow laconic drawl.... After I almost blew off a toe cleaning an air rifle, though, I decided I was more the honest rural type. I started wearing patched blue jeans [and] mopped my forehead with a red banana (I found out later it should have been a red bandanna).... One day, while stretched out on the porch, I realized I needed only a mint julep to become a real dyed-in-the-wool, Seagram's V.V.O. Southern planter.... I sent to New York for a broad-brimmed hat and a string tie, and at enormous expense trained the local idiot to fan me with a palmetto leaf."
"Today, thanks to unremitting study, I can change a fuse so deftly that it plunges the entire county into darkness.... The power company has offered me as high as fifteen thousand dollars a year to stay out of my own cellar."
I don't see today's kids busting their allowance to find buy Perelman books on ebay; in fact, the name name retrieves only 12 items, and four of them are other Perelmans. I think I know why the writer's short comic pieces, so influential in the last century, have little resonance in this one. It's because they are written in a dead language: English.
I should refer to it as Perelman English: a cocktail of Victorian and Edwardian sentence structure, Jazz Age slang whose sell-by date had long since expired, and a veritable Mount Meron of Yiddishisms. "Sid commands a vocabulary that is the despair (and joy) of every writing man," proclaimed his New Yorker colleague E.B. White. "He is like a Roxy organ that has three decks, 50 stops and a pride of petals under the bench. When he wants a word it's there.... His ears are as busy as an ant's feelers. No word ever gets by him." The language was, for Perelman, a gentleman's orgy, and he was Petronius, knowing which wench to peel, which grace to savor.
His stock of references could have filled the Great Library of Alexandria, if that august edifice had housed every copy of Cap'n Billy's Whizbang. Even those introduced to Perelman in his prime had to cram for antique references. The man was an instant anachronist, peppering his stories with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, vaudeville dialect comics like Gallagher and Shean (Al Shean was the Marx Brothers' uncle), silent movies, and "the exact method of quarrying peat out of a bog at the time of the Irish Corn Laws." Add 50 years to these arcana, toss them at a collegiate today and he�ll expect a translation on the recto. (Buck up, young scholar. That's what Google's for.)
In his time, though — and why shouldn't that time be now, again? — Perelman was called America's foremost humorist, a comic genius, mein Yiddishe Aristophanes, a gift from Providence (he was reared in Rhode Island), but Perelman preferred the simple designation "writer." Even when his feuilletons don't stir a Gorgon to chuckle, they educe awe for the Wallenda grace of his prose, his solving of sentences. Attend to the choice of verbs in this relatively simple description: "Struggling into a robe, he reeled across the room, fumbled with the chain latch, and wrenched open the door." Action words, picture words, funny words.
Perelman's free-associative style spun fantasias out of girdle ads, tabloid tattle, sleazy pulp fiction and recipe prose. He was a Charlie Parker on tenor Underwood, running bizarre and beautiful variations on the tritest themes. With a difference: Perelman's prose was improv with agony. He perspired platelets to make it read cucumber-cool.
Richard Corliss
More here
Monday, November 09, 2009
The Bitter Tears of Johnny Cash
From salon.com
In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.
More here
Antonino D'Ambrosio
In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.
More here
Antonino D'Ambrosio
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Blood is a Rover ~ James Ellroy
From nybooks.com
Fever Dreams of Your FBI
By Norman Rush
James Ellroy's astonishing creation, the Underworld USA Trilogy, is complete. Its concluding volume, Blood's a Rover, has just been published. The three long thrillers that make up the trilogy (American Tabloid, 1995; The Cold Six Thousand, 2001; Blood's a Rover, 2009) present a brutal counterhistory of America in the 1960s and 1970s—the assassinations, the social convulsions, the power-elite plotting—through the lives of invented second- and third-echelon operatives in the great political crimes of the era. The trilogy is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.
Ellroy, who is in his early sixties, is the celebrated, prolific, and popular author of a body of genre crime fiction, crime journalism, and a forensic memoir dealing with his own dark family history. His work has been made into movies and television shows, and widely translated. There are Web sites devoted to Ellroy, and he connects with his fans through Facebook.
The Underworld USA Trilogy is generally regarded as Ellroy's magnum opus. It is unique in its ambitions, and proceeds at a level of art distinctly above that attained in his famously lurid and violent but more conventional books. It is a fiction unlike any other.
More here
From
washingtonpost.com
The Heart of Nixonian Darkness
By Bill Sheehan
"Blood's a Rover," like the volumes that precede it, is clearly not a conventional thriller. It is, rather, a rigorously constructed, idiosyncratic novel that uses the materials of crime fiction to examine the forces that have shaped -- and warped -- our recent history: racial tension, ideological warfare, greed, corruption and unbridled fanaticism in all its forms. Ellroy's bleak, brooding worldview, his dense, demanding style and his unflinching descriptions of extreme violence will almost certainly alienate large numbers of readers. But anyone who succumbs to the sheer tidal force of these novels will experience something darker, stranger and more compelling than almost anything else contemporary fiction has to offer.
More here
Fever Dreams of Your FBI
By Norman Rush
James Ellroy's astonishing creation, the Underworld USA Trilogy, is complete. Its concluding volume, Blood's a Rover, has just been published. The three long thrillers that make up the trilogy (American Tabloid, 1995; The Cold Six Thousand, 2001; Blood's a Rover, 2009) present a brutal counterhistory of America in the 1960s and 1970s—the assassinations, the social convulsions, the power-elite plotting—through the lives of invented second- and third-echelon operatives in the great political crimes of the era. The trilogy is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.
Ellroy, who is in his early sixties, is the celebrated, prolific, and popular author of a body of genre crime fiction, crime journalism, and a forensic memoir dealing with his own dark family history. His work has been made into movies and television shows, and widely translated. There are Web sites devoted to Ellroy, and he connects with his fans through Facebook.
The Underworld USA Trilogy is generally regarded as Ellroy's magnum opus. It is unique in its ambitions, and proceeds at a level of art distinctly above that attained in his famously lurid and violent but more conventional books. It is a fiction unlike any other.
More here
From
washingtonpost.com
The Heart of Nixonian Darkness
By Bill Sheehan
"Blood's a Rover," like the volumes that precede it, is clearly not a conventional thriller. It is, rather, a rigorously constructed, idiosyncratic novel that uses the materials of crime fiction to examine the forces that have shaped -- and warped -- our recent history: racial tension, ideological warfare, greed, corruption and unbridled fanaticism in all its forms. Ellroy's bleak, brooding worldview, his dense, demanding style and his unflinching descriptions of extreme violence will almost certainly alienate large numbers of readers. But anyone who succumbs to the sheer tidal force of these novels will experience something darker, stranger and more compelling than almost anything else contemporary fiction has to offer.
More here
The Age of the Informavore - A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher
From The Edge
We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning...
More here
We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning...
More here
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