* * * * *
FUCK DEATH. LET’S DANCE.
Here are our favorite Prince songs. Send your lists.
Jessica Zafra
Anna Stesia
If I was your girlfriend
Sexy MF/Pope
When Doves Cry
Pop Life
Ricky Villabona
Raspberry Beret
I Would Die 4U
Cream
When Doves Cry
Strange Relationship
plus I Feel For You (Chaka Khan)
Nothing Compares 2U (Sinead O’Connor)
When You Were Mine (Cyndi Lauper)
(more…)
Reasons to watch Bastille Day
1. Idris Elba
2. Idris Elba
3. Idris Elba. Make him Bond already.
4. Efficient action geography and choreography, thrilling sequences. The director is James Watkins.
5. Richard Madden (Robb Stark, Cinderella’s Prince Charming) is a graceful pickpocket, but looks like a munchkin next to Elba.
6. The interaction between Elba and Madden is funny, but the movie doesn’t try to be a cute buddy comedy.
7. Idris Elba.
8. Montmartre, particularly Barbes
9. Not the plot, which will not make the French happy.
You wish you could point to the criminal scum and order them to be shot. Someone cuts ahead of you in traffic? Bang! You wish you could make rape jokes. They’re just words, right? Why don’t these wimps get how funny it is to say you want to violate a woman? Your mother, your wife, your sisters, your friends: why don’t they get it?
Clearly, Duterte has struck a vein in the Pinoy psyche. He is the figurehead of a genuine people’s movement. As a social scientist would put it, his rise is based not on a political machine, but on Keynes’s “animal spirits”. That this unpredictable outsider may soon be president of this republic speaks to how well the candidate and his campaign team understand the deepest, most primal fears and needs of the Pinoy.
Duterte’s words are not calculated to impress the voters. He doesn’t have to calculate. He’s just saying the words that are already in your head. He is your walking, talking, preening, strutting id. The id is the part of your personality that contains your most basic instincts. It is where your needs, wants, desires, impulses, sex drives, aggressive drives come from. It is not affected by reality, logic, right or wrong. It only has one master, and that is the pleasure principle. It wants immediate satisfaction, it does not care how.
I want one of those card catalog shelves. They’re the perfect size for keeping small things, like earrings and hairbands, even eyeglasses.
A couple of years ago, when Chus was in New York, I asked him to go to the New York Public Library and take a picture of the cards for my books. So he went to the library and could not find the card catalogs. He went up to a librarian and asked him where the card catalogs were. The librarian said the card catalog had been digitized. “You want the old card catalog? Go to an antique store.” (Ang taray. Sorry, Chus.)
The two-hour premiere is actually the newest film by Martin Scorsese, and it feels a lot like Goodfellas. A grisly murder is committed, a body is stuffed in the trunk and driven to the suburbs, and when the trunk is slammed you expect someone to look at the camera and say, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to have a record label.” Then the murder is mostly forgotten and we’re back in the music business in 1973.
What can we say about the Scorsese style that has not been said before? It’s all there: the restless camera, the rhythm of childhood asthma and cocaine, the all-consuming intensity. It can give you a bit of a headache, and the first time I saw the premiere I did not know what to make of it. It looks fantastic, the dialogue is hilarious and the attention to detail is insane, but why? What for? Then it occurred to me that it doesn’t have to mean anything. Do we look to “Jumping Jack Flash” for the meaning of life? No. We’re here for the feeling of being alive. Rock and roll!
Read our review of Vinyl in The Binge.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>More
