four-thirty-three

Happy President’s Day.  Here’s a highly informative documentary about the Father of the Nation.

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“She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved.”
[Wm. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis]
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Ten years ago, the Magnetic Fields (a project by Stephin Merritt; the band is apparently named for Les Champs Magnetiqués, a Surrealist novel published in 1920) released 69 Love Songs, a three-part genre- (and gender-) bending collection of songs that are by [...]

This should have gone in yesterday’s post.  I totally forgot that Freddie Mercury channels Nijinsky’s Faune in the video for “I Want to Break Free.”  The video was banned for a long time by MTV… I only recall seeing it once or twice as a kid (but thought it was awesome, even though I hadn’t [...]

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Friedrich Nietzsche on the role/appeal of the satyr chorus in Greek tragedy:
[T]he satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveller, enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing [...]

The Schopenhauer-on-LSD-sounding title of this post is also the unlikeliest line to ever appear in a low-budget comedy film.  Ninja Bachelor Party, co-written and co-starring Bill Hicks, was filmed over the course of a decade and was completed in 1991.  I’d never seen it, but we have the youtubes now, so yay!
Bill Hicks is [...]

I’ve sort of gotten over my irrational zombie fear, but still would’ve been concerned about this construction sign spotted in Austin last night.

Internet speculation in 1969. “Fingertip shopping will be one of the many homemaker’s conveniences.” Let’s play “Where’s Waldo” with the misogyny!

More Internet speculation from 1969, this time in French (with a couple of subtitles). I don’t speak the universal language of surrender myself, o this is for those of you who do.

An amazing [...]

The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high that nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. (Tony Kushner, Angels In America)
Fuck “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  The all-time best “patriotic song” is Woody [...]

Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot when it was premiered in Paris in 1913, partly due to the dissonant music but also because of Vaslav Nijinsky’s unorthodox choreography.  In 1987 the Joffrey Ballet attempted to reconstruct the choreography, costumes and sets from notes, drawings and the personal reminiscences of the original dancers [...]

It’s the twelfth day of Christmas.  Here’s the fourth movement of Drumming by minimalist composer Steve Reich.