You've probably heard this already but I liked Madeleine Peyroux's cover of a Randy Newman song.
Excellent use of brass for punctuation! The state she describes is neither anhedonia nor alexithymia, precisely, but I'm grasping for the label. I suppose "melancholy", in its broad definition, would do.
The word "alexithymia" is new to me and I like it! I especially like that the wikipedia article notes that it is constructed not using a privative alpha but using an "alpha privative". Yeah, I'm the ALPHA privative 'round these parts. When I show up you'd better express some negation or absence PRONTO.
I've got your torch song right here, sheeple.
I watched all of 4. It's weirdly captivating. Dystopia seems pretty reasonable.
5 -- I know. Just pay your fair contribution to the Development Party, you whiner!
4 is so spectacular I had to stop watching it. Here's your antidote: Sturgill Simpson covers Nirvana.
One torch singer that I don't think gets much recognition, but was pretty amazing, is Helen Merrill.
Her first album with Clifford Brown, when she was in her early 20s, arranged by Quincy Jones, who was even younger, is great. She did a great album with Gil Evans not long after, too. She has just the right level of jazzy/mannered versus pure song. Amazing vocal technique, too.
From her first album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VGkV719HTc
[Don't Explain]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y91ocJ5k7Bg
[Born to be Blue]
And from the Gil Evans album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkAHEG3518
[I'm a fool to want you]
I actually have this CD, but I haven't listened to it in ages. I should remedy that.
Also, I saw Annette Peacock perform live in Paris in the late 1980s.
</brag>
And fuck it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCaD6GAQmjA
Bleeding Gums Murphy* and Leonard Cohen, with Was (Not Was).**
* Sonny Rollins.
** linked before, but still, it's great. Cohen is on great voice, and Rollins solo, after the singing ...
Why aren't we all talking about how good this Peacock tune is?
It is very good, and I note that you also didn't have much to say beyond noting its goodness.
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NMM to Gary Shandling.
Damn.
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Wait, nosflow, you think you know someone and then it turns out "alpha privative" is a new term? Mind blown.
It is very good, and I note that you also didn't have much to say beyond noting its goodness.
I put it before you, is that not service enough? And I called it a torch song; would you have had the insight or creativity to do so? Pah! Ich bin mehrmal wegen begangener Fehler getadelt worden, die mein Tadler nicht Kraft oder Witz genug hatte, zu begehen. (Aber im diesen Fall gibt's keinen Fehler.)
17: I knew what the thing itself was but I'd never heard that precise term, ok? Sheee-eeesh.
Just watched the "Comedians, in cars,..." with him last night
16: 66 is really young now? We *have* been here a long time.
I thought he was younger than that. Besides, Abe Vigoda is my standard of reference for human life expectancy.
Working for Hydra isn't good for your long-term health.
A longish article about Garry Shandling
Never watched enough of him, but yeah, I was fucking impressed. Honest and brave and fucking smarter than I could handle. Longish detailed story in there about Shandling freaking Gervais the fuck out. Was he on? Was it real? Was Shandling really mad, really an asshole? Does it matter?
Shandling says it's all right not to know whether when how it's comedy.
Is it the Buddhism?
PS:Everybody knows Jeffrey Tambor is great, but reading the article helped me remember how much I loved Rip Torn. Terrific freak.
26.1 good article.
I endorse the whole of 26.last. Also coolest name in show biz ever.
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Okay Here I come
1) Charles Shiro Inouye's (Tufts) Evanescence and Form looks like a pretty good intro to Japanese Culture
2) Now. Boku Dake ga Inai Machi has finished to mostly popular acclaim, but with some strong criticism.
Trigger: The show is largely about the fight against a serial killer of young children. It also has a heavy subplot about parent-child abuse, with fairly graphic beatings of an elementary school girl.
Plot: A 29 year old failed manga writer delivers pizza. Completely unexplained, he time-travels, more than once, back into his 11 year old body, given the opportunity to save classmates who were killed by a serial killer.
Criticism: A respected Youtube critic gives it a 2 of 10.
He found the symbolism garish, the melodrama painful, and the gimmicks unbelievable and unexplained. For instance the director uses bright red in the scene every time there is a threat or danger. This is not, on the surface, a subtle show.
One way to look at this is that this is an average director exceeding himself, and although the material is beyond his reach, his attention to detail and obvious care shows itself. It is a beautiful show, with terrific cinematography, smart and clever editing, great backgrounds and animation. In service of perhaps gross sentimentality and maudlin content. Heart very much on its sleeve.
Another way to look at it is that none of it is real. I am not even sure what this means, but let's say the show is about a mangaka creating a fictional biography in order to get past a block and write heroism sincerely. That mangaka being the one writing Bokudake beside the lead of the manga/anime.
Is there evidence for this in the text? Well, not much and it is subtle, but I might claim the crude symbolism and the melodramatic form and the lack of verisimilitude is evidence. There is also evidence of rewrites, of repeating the past in order to get it emotionally right. Because the narrative justifies itself emotionally, not logically. Because some of the most obcious elements, from the child-in-danger tear jerking to the moustache-twirling bad guy, should make the audience question its expectations.
After 75 years, and tens of thousands of publications, remember, all manga and anime are meta, allusive, and self-referential anymore. Deconstruction is what Japanese culture does, everyday.
Here ya go, for an example of my question:
If I say here that Bob McManus in his home town in 1963, flew over and picked the schoolbus of drowning students from the river...or if I say Clark Kent as Superman did it...what is the emotional or psychological difference? What do we do when we depersonalize, either as writers of readers, our fantasies and romances? Why do we need an Other on which to project our narcissism?
Why do we ask that our fiction have verisimilitude, internal coherence, believability in plot and character, certain kinds of narrative logic and sense? Why can't a dinosaur cross the street in an episode of Mad Men? We did have a ghost.
What is magic realism, anyway?
Anyway, in sum, Boku Dake ga is probably a masterpiece. If you can handle the material, it is recommended. The surface will make you cry, repeatedly. The surface might also make you think.
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