Like it’s one word, the fans say “Fred’n’Ginger.” But it’s hardly the whole story. They made great movies together, and Ginger got a lot of mileage out of the line, “I did everything Fred did but backwards and in high heels.” Cute and memorable but not quite true.
Truth. Fred Astaire was a dancer of genius. Ginger Rogers was a hoofer. Thing is, he also worked with other very gifted dancers. The best are represented below.
Eleanor Powell.
Audrey Hepburn.
Cyd Charisse.
Leslie Caron.
Who wins? All of them.
AND A BONUS, COURTESY OF THE MAESTRO GEORGE GERSWIN:
All right. Come Monday, I’m going to the plastic surgery shop to git me the face of an old old country singer. Then I’ll be eloping with mah true love Hazel Dickens. Don’t she just beat all?
What? My wife just told she’s been done dead for a year or three. Or five. She shouldn’ be snickerin’ like that. Joke’s on her ain’t? Now she’ll have to fix on some other ways of gittin’ me gone. Dayumm.
I guess there’s a hormone called Endofthelineagen that explains why broads who are no longer young feel compelled to show off their T&A&P to the whole wide world. If you have a better explanation, let me know.
Classical music radio station WFLN said, “The greatest voice of them all, bar none. A shame what Hollywood did to him. They killed him, plain and simple.”
Obama references crusades, slavery at Prayer Breakfast.
“President Obama has never been one to go easy on America.
“As a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that Greeks think their country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America, he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle East.
“His latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be the ones who cast the first stone.
“‘Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.'”
“More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts…
“Even more troubling, is the fact that nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”
Ring wraiths are all basically good at heart.
If there’s anything wrong with Dementors, it’s that they just love people too much.
Ninjas aren’t really violent. They just think black is a powerful fashion statement, and they’re embarrassed about their teeth. A sad thing. More to be pitied than censured.
Once you get past the invincible exo-skeletons and glaring red eyes, Terminators are exactly like Aunt Bea. Off duty, they knit, listen to Hazel Dickens, and fry chicken.
And ISIS is really just the militant wing of overall Islamic pacifism.
Here. Ask their women. They’ll tell you what nice guys they all are when they come home after a long day’s work on behalf of Muhammad. You should see their undies.
Oops. How did that get in here? Well, she’s obviously one of those evil Christian Crusaders. Just unsee it. You never saw this, right? Right? Right? Right?
Feast your eyes on this instead. Repeat after me: Islam means peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. Right?
You thrilled to Olympus Has Fallen, if you knew which flick it was.
It was the good one with Gerard Butler, not the Jamie Farr one. Okay?
And then you thrilled 2 to the sequel London Has Fallen, which also starred Gerard Butler.
How cool is that?
Oops. My wife says I have to show you Gerard Butler.
She likes that Scottish beef. But she likes me a little too.
And NOW!!! you’re going to be thrilled 3 by the masterpiece of filmmaking called HILLARY HAS FALLEN!!!!!!
Which doesn’t star Gerard Butler because he was busy that day. But it IS directed by the potent team of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, who know a thing or two between them about women who just accidentally bang their heads on coffee tables. And then can’t, you know, get up.
This nerve-wracking thriller begins at a Hillary campaign rally.
Oh the irony! Life Alert!
Then she goes back to campaign HQ for the Victory Party. Where things start to go wrong. Trust Woody and Roman to find the right film reference when there’s no actual footage of THIS scene.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHLeVGVYOM
What Woody Roman came up with:
Old White Guy (vagina included just for fun) totally trashes the room because he lost. After which, he falls down and can’t get up. Where our story begins.
Is that the $12,000 Armani tent sweater?
Ya know, it’s actually more music video than an action thriller. Uncharacteristically, Woody resorts to the Stones to portray her crawl across the living room floor.
When she is temporarily unable to continue crawling, Roman fills in with this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nb1NeRghan0
But when she finally makes it to the doorway of the kitchen (why the kitchen? Oh. Knives.), Woody gives us this counter-intuitive bit of filmic genius:
When she realizes she can’t reach the knife rack, no way, Roman gives us this affecting song, in all its mediocre glory.
When he could have done this instead. Why they call genius “genius.”
Which is where the movie basically ends. Although the closing credits are kind of interesting.
Then Roman kicks in, inexplicably with this.
And when they’re rapidly scrolling the Special FX credits, the Stones end it all with this.
“Just in time for the holiday season, MTV News has issued a series of New Year’s resolutions exclusively for white males — because, the network says, white guys could “do a little better in 2017.”
“A video posted to MTV News’ Twitter account Monday afternoon features a group of millennials lecturing so-called “white guys” as to how they can improve themselves in the New Year.
“Suggestions include recognizing that America was never “great” for minorities, and to stop bragging about being “woke.”
More excerpts:
“Can we all just agree that ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t the opposite of ‘All Lives Matter?’” one of the people in the video says. “Black lives just matter. There’s no need to overcomplicate it.”
“Also, Blue Lives Matter isn’t a thing,” adds another. “Cops weren’t born with blue skin. Right? I mean, yeah. They weren’t born blue!”
One woman suggests white people learn what “mansplaining” is, and then stop doing it, while another says that “nobody who has black friends says they have black friends” to prove they’re not racist.
“We all love Beyoncé, and yes, she’s black, so of course she cares about black issues. I’m talking to you Fox News,” one man in the video says.
“Representatives for MTV News did not immediately respond when asked whether the network planned to produce New Year’s resolutions videos for other racial or ethnic groups.”
But this is a game we play by InstaPunk Rules, because we hold all the cards of education, experience, and accomplishment. So we have a set of Resolutions for the zombies at MTV.
Look at those eyes. Blank eyes. Dead eyes. Zombie eyes.
Yeah. Resolutions. Ours for you.
1. Quit being such a pussy. Whether you have one or not. But all you emasculated Beatles fans do. Your own curvy thing with a hole in the middle is gently weeping like they always are.
2. Try very hard to understand that burning down your neighborhoods to protest the plight of your neighborhoods is just really frickin’ dumb.
Very persuasive.
Hands up. Don’t arrest me for arson.
Yeah. Makes white guys all gooey inside when you burn your whole lives down. Not. Makes us sad and disgusted instead.
Hating cops while you’re protected by cops. Against serious threats. Cool? No.
3. Quit hating Jews. It makes you the Nazis.
You see them as rats?
Oh yeah. Stories from a house just like yours no doubt, victimization at the hands of the man. Only steeped, steeped in the fear of death.
Read the story. Everybody. Then whine about Palestinians.
4. Quit defending Sharia. Unless you secretly desire that all clits be cut off and all female bodies be hidden forever, and all rapes are the woman’s fault.
Funny how angry white guys might object to all of this. Maybe they know what it is to be a man, a forgotten virtue in our decadent culture.
5. Quit hating Trump. He’s far better educated than you will ever be, and if you condemn him for his hair and coarse language, look at your own idiotic coifs and even more foul mouthed tweets and tattoos.
A very smart man beats the system.at half the price. Tell me you don’t love that.
6. Think of all the grief and violence that could have been avoided if the slogan had been Black Lives Matter Too.
Yeah. We all love Beyonce’s camel toe.
LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 26: Singer Beyonce performs onstage during the 56th GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on January 26, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Do the high yella special/FX and hairdos do it for you?
7. Quit naked protesting. Guys do it hoping to get laid. Women do it because they really really really ALWAYS want to get naked in public. Not exactly a political platform on either side.
Nekkid Nuns with Germanic script. See the Snowflake Bible at Amazon.
8. About White Guys. Look at the commercials for all the dumb sitcoms and reality shows you watch. What do they want? A super patriarchy? No. To be left alone on the couch eating Fritos, drinking beer, watching hockey games on TV, and listening to metal.
Porn? Maybe. Because you don’t shave your armpits and you want a notarized permission slip for a kiss or a breast grope signed in triplicate. In case nobody told you, you’re not worth it, you third wave feminists. You don’t smell good, you don’t do anything well but bitch.
Been there, not done that.
And you’re fat, as well as hairy.
Not to mention gross and slutty.
And did we mention sweaty?
And crude to boot?
Why we white boys prefer the Fritos, the beer and the metal.
9. Millennial Boys. Number One Resolution. Look in the goddam mirror. Would you hire you? Would you listen to anything you had to say on any subject whatever? Would you fuck you? Unless you were another effeminate Millennial Boy? No. Why you’re so creepily obsessed with LGBT issues and the cascading nonsense of made up pronouns.
10. Hey. Learn how to read. Learn history from someone other than Howard Zinn. Sit up straight and discover the steel inside your spaghetti spine.
About the King James Bible, written by Shakespeare’s equal, William Tinsdale. Enormous genius.
Don’t tell us you know everything when you know nothing.
I’ve spent my whole life anticipating you, the Millennial Generation. Saw you coming 40 years ago. Wanted to save you. You can’t be saved. All I can do is document your pitiful plight. Do I still love you? Yes. As I loved the Zeezers before you. But I’ve been at it too long now. All that’s left to me is putting myself on record.
Find it at Amazon.
100 pages that explain everything about X-Gens and Millennials.
Not going to list them all for you and give you titles and chapter and page numbers. Just a few hints. I know, bait and switch, right? But switch to what? How about a brand new alphabetic bestiary just for you, the readers? Let’s do it. (Starting time is 9:59 am EDT.)
A is for the Audience, which might include you but not primarily. We want to be discovered when they start digging through the rubble to start rebuilding it all.
B is for Bibles. Four of them at last count. Only three at Amazon though. But in existence.
C is for comedy, cartoons, and comics. I’ve done quite a lot of these by now. They’re fun. And deadly in earnest.
D is for Dactylic Hexameter. The flip side of anapestic. The hardwired rhythm of epics. Why the ascendancy of iambs has killed nobility and meaning in literature.
E is for entertainment. I write because I find it so entertaining to turn my own mind inside out to see what’s in there.
F is for fiction, which we all think we know when we see it, or from the label at the bookstore anyway. The challenge is finding where fiction begins and where it ends. A chancy business with me.
G is for glossaries. Let’s see (using my fingers now), I’ve done 1, 2, 3, 4 of them, at least. Plus two or more gazetteers and a bunch of maps, a gang of alphabetic Who’s Who lists, an alphabetic Bible book that contains a kind of Bible glossary and a numeric/date listing. I’ve also done a dictionary and a book jacket describing a dictionary, the only one we need these days.
H is for Harry, the romantic tragic hero who still rules all my writing from Rio.
I is for I and what you and I make of it through the story we live and the line(s) we draw through that story. It can be a straight short segment if you like. It can be a complex shape with more facets and sides and dimensions than even the string theory cosmologists can draw. I’m entitled to have that opinion. So are you.
J is for the Jews, the indispensable pivot point of all recorded human history. Attempts to deny, evade, defeat, or destroy this pivot point are the most direct route to hellish narcissism yet devised. What Chosen really means.
K is for the Ka. Like gravity it’s a necessary aspect of physics, whether you can see, understand, or believe it or not.
L is for Lorenz transformations. Unless it’s for the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve designed more labyrinths than bestiaries. But there’s overlap there. As there usually is. Plenty of beasts in my labyrinths.
M is for Millennials and their so far unrealized Mission to pull the greatest Lazarus act ever by rising from the dead against all odds and rediscovering life.
N is for nihilism, the empty end of every empty soul. It’s a void that’s always hungry but never capable of being filled or sated. It kills what it consumes and seeks absence from being with every voracious bite. Everything here is the sworn enemy of this metaphysical black hole.
O is for Ontogeny, which Philogeny is recapitulated by. Discovered this watching a puppy organize a human household with one lick and one wag. Just such a puppy created the species of domestic dog.
P is for punk. If you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t be here. Of course many aren’t here. You can think of us as the dead tree righting itself in the forest when there’s no non-tree there to see it.
Qis for questions, which are the beginning point of every piece of writing from poetry to porn ads. What questions are you asking for your audience and what answer(s) are you offering to them?
R is for referring, the act of identifying, mapping, or plotting a relationship which enlarges both the referrer and the referred to.
S is for serendipity and synchronicity, which I combine via mutual reference to serendicity, which is how Johnny Dodge is created a shatterer of worlds in the seemingly doomed flight from one dead-end world to another.
T is for the Tarot. Buy one. The Arthur Waite deck. The drawings are cool and all the doorways are open.
U is for the Undernet in ST99. Now there’s a hint for you.
V is for Vade Mecum, what Eugene Field and Doctor Dream have in common, their own incarnation of the Zerone.
W is for wheels within wheels within wheels. In short, absolutely everything here.
X is for all kinds of exciting meanings, known and unknown. It is the fullback of symbolism in the letter team making up the alphabets of both language and mathematics. Always a signal to pay attention.
Y is for you. The stories embedded in my work exist only as you choose a path or even many discrepant paths through them.
Z is for Zerone, the infinite space between zero and one that contains absolutely everything in existence with no exceptions. The universal punk writer symbol is a Zerone. And so are you. How you define “one” is the definition of your soul.
Some Number Correspondences relevant to Shuteye Town 1999/2019
Shuteye Town 1999 was published 50 years after George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949.
[By an odd coincidence, 1984 was published 100 yrs after the death of Edgar Allan Poe, my principal American literary hero. By yet another coincidence, of course, author Eugene Field, who wrote the child’s poem “The Shut-Eye Train” I used as inspiration, was born in 1850, 1 yr after the death of Poe. And not that these accidents matter at all, but Lewis Carroll died in 1898, 100 yrs before I began creating my own drawings of his Wonderland characters for the “UnderNet” of ST99.]
1984 projected its action 35 years into the future.
35 years after the year 1984 is the year 2019, the year of the restored, enhanced, and farther ranging Shuteye Town Release 2.0, which now encompasses a larger realm called UnderLand.
2019 is also a round number anniversary of multiple historical events. Shuteye Town 2019 be live on the Internet…
100 years after the doughboys came home and the Influenza epidemic killed half a million Americans,
100 yrs after Prohibition was enacted via Constitutional Amendment,
100 years after the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution — the 19th — was passed by Congress, and
100 years after This Side of Paradise, written by my second favorite American literary hero, was bought by Scribner’s Publishing.
On a final personal note, the drop dead publication date for ST2019 is June 2019, which will be the 6th month of my 66th year. I’m no Antichrist, but I did write down the Gospel of Harry.
Leaving out the truly most shocking, like the Human Centipede. Nobody anywhere should ever watch that or its sequels. This is about movies that hurt to watch, knowing that others watching might still have souls.
I saw this. Am convinced I wrote about it and reviewed it. Can’t find it. It’s unspeakable, unprintable. Nordic trailer trash, replete with rape, incest, incestuous rape, family hatred beyond belief. All utterly Icelandic.
I saw this. Am convinced I wrote about it and reviewed it. Can’t find it. It’s unspeakable, unprintable. Nazi fascist trash, replete with rape, incest, incestuous rape, family hatred beyond belief. All utterly German.
Terrible terrible spiraling down the drain drug story. German but universal. Asking the age-old question, with no candy coatings, you are young and beautiful and so why do you want so very much to die?
No good answers to the questions asked by any of these movies.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “I never know what you are thinking. Think.” I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions…
“Who will make an end?”
“He who delights in subduing evil thoughts, who meditates on the impurities and is ever mindful – it is he who will make an end of craving…”
P.S. Quotes are not mine. Extra credit for those who identify the two different works by the same author that account for the captions, and the same for those who identify the author of the final quote.
Trump has been as good as one can be to John McCain, however McCain by no means [reciprocates], making an attempt to Derail the Trump [Transition].
Most mainstream media reported Saturday that John McCain has gone offensive in opposition to Trump’s reported nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state.
That is the report from The Blaze [sic throughout]:
Sen. John McCain blasted the probably secretary of state nominee of President-elect Courageous Donald Trump Saturday, saying he’s involved about Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s shut ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I don’t know what Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with Vladimir Putin was, however I’ll let you know it’s a matter of concern to me,” McCain mentioned Saturday throughout an interview with Fox Information.
“You wish to give the president of the USA the advantage of the doubt as a result of the individuals have spoken. However Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully and a assassin, and anyone else who describes him as the rest is mendacity,” he added.
McCain. You like him? You can have him.
The word ‘hero’ used to mean something. Now it’s just an advertising label, used to sell maniacally narcissistic creeps.
When you want to know what it’s like to be French, and I mean really French, cast your mind if you have one back to Erik Satie. He played his music and never wrote it down. A musician friend transcribed it on the sly and published it later.
So here are some of his compositions. Which, if you wanted, you could still play on your iPhone at Les Deux Maggots.
“Satie was the son of Alfred Satie and his wife Jane Leslie (née Anton), who was born in London to Scottish parents. Erik was born at Honfleur in Normandy; his home there is open to the public. When Satie was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father having been offered a translator’s job in the capital. After his mother’s death in 1872, he was sent (at age 6), together with his younger brother, Conrad, back to Honfleur to live with his paternal grandparents. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist. In 1878, when he was 12 years old, his grandmother died, and the two brothers were reunited in Paris with their father, who remarried (a piano teacher) shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Satie started publishing salon compositions by his step-mother and himself, among others.
“In 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. Georges Mathias, his professor of piano at the Conservatoire, described his pupil’s piano technique in flatly negative terms, “insignificant and laborious” and “worthless”.[4] Émile Decombes called him “the laziest student in the Conservatoire”.[5] Years later, Satie related that Mathias, with great insistence, told him that his real talent lay in composing. After being sent home for two and a half years, he was readmitted to the Conservatoire at the end of 1885 (age 19), but was unable to make a much more favourable impression on his teachers than he had before, and, as a result, resolved to take up military service a year later. However, Satie’s military career did not last very long; within a few months he was discharged after deliberately infecting himself with bronchitis.”
And here’s what ESPN loves to call “a body of work,” as if a bunch of jocks know what that means.
How many of us would trade everything for an hour of deathless music as our gift to the universe?
The Millennials stomp on the “Angry White Guys.”
Oh yeah. Stories from a house just like yours no doubt, victimization at the hands of the man. Only steeped, steeped in the fear of death.
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