#george mann i love your writing i love it a lot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

piratewithvigor · 3 years

Text

My first thought in regard to every band that gets played on my radio station

ACDC: Every dad’s favourite band

Adams, Bryan: Every mom’s favourite singer until Michael Buble came along

Aerosmith: haha they thought Vince Neil was a lady

Alice Cooper: he’s a Game Of Thrones fanboy and I have proof

Alice In Chains: my sister doesn’t like them because she decided AC were Alice Cooper’s initials ONLY

Allman Brothers Band: good music for dropping acid to

Allman, Gregg: That’s too many Gs for one name

Animals: House Of The Rising Sun, or who even cares

Argent: Sometimes Hold Your Head Up is really catchy

Asia: Tuesdays

Autograph: one of the members went on to be a pharmacist

Bachman-Turner Overdrive: There are just so many pop culture jokes about Taking Care Of Business that whatever I say won’t be as funny

Bad Company: with their song; Bad Company, off their album; Bad Company

Benatar, Pat: Always getting her confused with Patti Smith

Black Crowes: I like them for Lickin, but it doesn’t seem to exist outside of one shoddy video on youtube and my old CD

Blackfoot: this band name feels kind of racy

Black Sabbath: Dio was not better or worse than Ozzy; just different

Blondie: I like Call Me, but Blondie confuses me stylistically

Blue Oyster Cult: MORE COWBELL

Bon Jovi: Hello, childhood trauma, I missed you

Boston: ONE GUY. ONE GUY DID IT ALL AND NO ONE KNOWS

Bowie, David: Don’t let your children watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, or David Bowie’s will end up being the third penis they see in life

Browne, Jackson: Another musician ruined by Supernatural

Buffalo Springfield: Jack Nicholson was at the riot they sing about

Burdon, Eric: no ideas, brain empty

Bush: ditto

Candlebox: ditto once more. Who are these people?

Cars: This band feels so gay and so straight at the same time, I can only assume they’re the poster children of bisexual panic

Cheap Trick: I played Dream Police on Guitar Hero so fucking much because it was the only song anyone who played with me could keep up with

Chicago: Chicago 30 exists, but they do not have 30 albums. Fucking riddle me that

Clapton, Eric: 6 discs in one Greatest Hits is too many. That’s called “re releasing your discography”

Cochrane, Tom: For some reason, everyone thinks Rascal Flats did it better

Cocker, Joe: Belushi did it right

Collective Soul: who?

Collins, Phil: If his biggest hits were done by MCR, they would be emo anthems, but because he’s 5′6″ and from the 80s, they’re not

Cream: *Vietnam flashbacks on the hippie side*

CCR: *Vietnam flashbacks on the war side*

CSNY: David Crosby; meh

Deep Purple: THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE THAN SMOKE ON THE WATER

Def Leppard: the only music for when you’re a heartbroken bitch but also a sexy one

Derek And The Dominos: Clapton and ‘Layla’ broke up

Derringer, Rick: Tom Petty if he was from the midwest

Dio: You thought it was an anime reference, but it was me, Dio

Dire Straits: You can tell how bigoted a radio station is based on how much of Money For Nothing they censor

Doobie Brothers: I have yet to smoke weed, but I listen to the Doobies, and I think that’s pretty close

Dylan, Bob: I take back everything I said about him in my youth

Eagles: Hotel California isn’t their best song, but the memes that come from it are second to none

Edgar Winter Group: @the--blackdahlia

Electric Light Orchestra: Actually an orchestra and sound a fuckton like George Harrison

ELO: I really hesitate to ask what happens with the 7 virgins and a mule

Essex, David: no prominent memories of him

Fabulous Thunderbirds: cannot spell

Faces: Who on earth thought that was a good album name?

Faith No More: I got nothing

Fixx: One Thing Leads To Another is a damn bop

Fleetwood Mac: I ain’t straight, but I’m simply not enough of a witch to enjoy them to full potential

Fogerty, John: He got sued cause he sounded like himself

Foghat: Slow Ride slowly becoming less coherent feels like a drug trip

Foo Fighters: He was just excited to buy a grill

Ford, Lita: deserved better

Foreigner: dramatically overplayed

Frampton, Peter: a masterful user of the talk box

Free: dramatically underplayed

Gabriel, Peter: leaving Genesis changed him a lot

Genesis: if someone likes Genesis, clarify the era, because yes, it does matter

Georgia Satellites: sing like you have a cactus in your ass

Golden Earring: Twilight Zone slaps, but it doesn’t slap as hard as this station thinks it does

Grand Funk Railroad: Funk

Grateful Dead: I like their aesthetic more than their music

Great White: there are so many fucking shark jokes

Greenbaum, Norman: makes me think of Subway for some reason

Green Day: the first of the emo revolution

Greg Kihn Band: RocKihnRoll is literally the most clever album name I’ve ever seen

Guns N Roses: They have more than three good songs, but radio stations never recognize that

Hagar, Sammy: I’m still trying to figure out where he lived to take 16 hours to get to LA driving 55 and how fucking fast was he driving beforehand?

Harrison, George: He went from religious to rock, and if he had continued rocking, he would have gotten too cool

Head East: I respect people who use breakfast foods as album names

Heart: Magic Man and Barracuda are played at least once every goddamn day. They’re not even the best songs!

Hendrix, Jimi: I have both a cousin and a sibling named after Hendrix references

Henley, Don: Dirty Laundry gives me too much inspiration

Hollies: Somehow sound like they’re both from the 60s and the 80s at the same time

Idol, Billy: he’s doing well for himself

INXS: Terminator vibes

Iris, Donnie: knockoff Roy Orbison

James Gang: too many funks

Jane’s Addiction: if TMNT had a grunge band representative

Jefferson Airplane: *assorted cheers*

Jefferson Starship: *assorted boos*

Jethro Tull: The only band to make you feel not cool enough to play the flute

Jett, Joan: icon

J. Geils Band: I requested them on the radio once and it got played

Joel, Billy: he really did just air everybody’s business like that

John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band: literally wtf is that name

John, Elton: yarn Elton sits in my basement, unstaring. Please someone take him from me

Joplin, Janis: Queen

Journey: Stop overplaying Don’t Stop Believing. It takes away from the rest of the repetoire

Judas Priest: literally started the gay leather aesthetic

Kansas: another fucking band Supernatural stole

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: the man confuses me to the point where he isn’t in the right place alphabetically

Kiss: Mick Mars and I will simply have to disagree on the subject

Kravitz, Lenny: runaway vibes

Led Zeppelin: Fucking fight me if you don’t think they’re the most talented band (maybe not the most talented individually, but collectively, no one comes close)

Lennon, John: My least favourite Beatle for reasons

Live: I got nothin

Living Colour: slap a decent amount

Loverboy: do you not get TURNT the fuck up to the big Loverboy hits? Who hurt you??

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama is a Neil Young diss track

Marshall Tucker Band: no opinion

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: VERY STRONG OPINIONS THAT THEY AREN’T GOOD

McCartney, Paul/Wings: Power couple

Meatloaf: I have nothing but respect for a man who willingly named himself Meatloaf

Mellencamp, John: voted cutest lesbian of 1987

Metallica: I liked their appearance on Jimmy Fallon

Midnight Oil: I get them confused for Talking Heads a lot

Modern English: who?

Molly Hatchet: Hollies vibes, but also Georgia Satellites vibes

Money, Eddie: DAN AVIDAN, IF YOU SEE THIS, COVER TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

Motley Crue: Stan Mick Mars and John Corabi. They’re the only ones who deserve it

Mott The Hoople: no one loves them except for David Bowie

Mountain: props for naming an album ‘Climbing’

Nazareth: I want to make a John Mulaney joke here, but I can never come up with one

Nicks, Stevie: witch queen

Night Ranger: I get them confused with Urge Overkill

Nirvana: Kurt Cobain was the ally grunge needed

Nova, Aldo: he’s Canadian, at least

Nugent, Ted: *serves a ghost as jerky*

Offspring: nothing here

Osbourne, Ozzy: this bitch crazy

Outfield: Your Love is kind of a sketchy song, but it slaps hard

Palmer, Robert: low quality Eddie Money

Pearl Jam: *grunts in Eddie Vedder*

Petty, Tom: I have so many feelings about Tom Petty and they are all good

Pink Floyd: which one is Pink?

Plant, Robert: solo career is a crapshoot, but his voice is unparalleled

Poison: I want them to write a song called ‘Alice Cooper’

Pretenders: I want to say good things, but I have nothing to say

Queen: A doctor of astrophysics, a screaming girl, a disco queen and a diva walk into a bar. It’s Queen; they’re there to play a gig

Queensryche: neutral opinion

Quiet Riot: they got big because of a song they hated. I love that

Rafferty, Gerry: the second-sexiest sax opening in all of music

Rainbow: Ritchie Blackmore created something very magnificent

Ram Jam: one good song and they didn’t even write it

Ratt: I’m sure they have more than Round And Round, but I don’t know it

RHCP: funky, but if you have paid money to hear them, you’re going to The Bad Place (I don’t make the rules)

Red Rider: basically Golden Earring

Reed, Lou: Walk On The Wild Side would be such a cool song if it wasn’t so dull

REM: American Tragically Hip

REO Speedwagon: Props for having a dad joke as an album title

Rolling Stones: Never in my life could I imagine the drummer being named anything but Charlie

Rush: How to make being uncool the coolest fucking shit

Santana: The world needs more Santana

Scandal: There’s something really funny about The Warrior being my brother’s “song” with his girlfriend

Scorpions: Was Wind Of Change written by the CIA? Only the spotify podcast I got an ad for once could say

Seger, Bob: A different variety of Eric Clapton (frankly a better variety, but that’s just me)

Simple Minds: we ALL forgot about you

Skid Row: Sebastian Bach is prettier than all of us

Soundgarden: music that makes you feel like you dunked your head underwater

Springsteen, Bruce: my arch-nemesis. Maybe someday, he’ll find out about it

Squeeze: according to my friends, the stupidest band name ever, but they’re theatre kids, so you know

Squier, Billy: If he can make it through 1984 alive, you can make it through whatever bad day you’re having

Stealers Wheel: Yet another band who I always mistake for George Harrison

Steely Dan: my house’s nickname for the Robber in Settlers Of Catan

Steppenwolf: Either makes me think of Jay & Silent Bob, Jack Nicholson, or that time I had to cut 6lbs of onions

Steve Miller Band: when you’re in the right mood, they slap hard

Stewart, Rod: my soundtrack to summer 2015

Stills, Stephen: Love The One You’re With Is Catchy, but the lyrics are questionable

Stone Temple Pilots: the only band to write a song about goo you smear on yourself

Stray Cats: an obscene amount of merch is available for them

Styx: Supernatural would have ruined them for me too if I hadn’t been into them previously.

Supertramp: I hunted for Breakfast In America for two years and it was worth every hunt

Sweet: I will never understand my two-month obsession with Ballroom Blitz when I was 15, but it was legit all I listened to

Talking Heads: you may find yourself in a pizza hut. And you may find yourself in a taco bell. And you may find yourself at the combination pizza hut and taco bell. And you may ask yourself; ‘how did I get here?’

Temple Of The Dog: I keep confusing them for Nazareth

Ten Years After: somehow still relevant

Tesla: not the car or the dude

The Beatles: Evokes a lot of opinions from people. Mine is that I love them

The Clash: I showed my sister the ‘Lock The Taskbar’ vine ONCE and it still kills her

The Doors: evokes teenage terror from deep within my soul

The Guess Who: Canada’s answer to confusing question-themed band names

The Kinks: kinky

The Police: wrote the theme of 2020 and everyone somehow forgot it was about a teacher resisting becoming a pedophile

The Ramones: playing all of their songs in a row wouldn’t take more than 2 hours

The Romantics: you don’t think you know them, but if you’ve seen Shrek 2, you have

The Who: If someone can explain Tommy to me, I’d be glad to hear it

The Zombies: I think they happened because of the 60s

Thin Lizzy: Could the boys maybe leave town?

Thorogood, George: blues, but make it modern

Toto: the most memed song behind All Star

Townshend, Pete: just makes me think of the end of Mr. Deeds

T-Rex: Mark Bolan is an icon

Triumph: The no-name brand of Rush

Tubes: like the yogurt

Twisted Sister: they did a christmas album and my mom does NOT hate it

U2: U2 Movers; we move in mysterious ways

Van Halen: RIP Eddie

Van Morrison: honestly, who’s named Van?

Vaughn, Stevie Ray: Steamy Ray Vaughn

Walsh, Joe: The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get

War: Foghat, but even groovier

Whitesnake: the most successful band to be named after a penis

Wright, Gary: the 90s thanks him for writing the song every movie used for the “guy sees cute girl and it’s love at first sight” scene

Yes: To Be Continued

Young, Neil: The best part of CSNY

Zevon, Warren: the album cover of Excitable Boy makes me deeply uncomfortable for reasons I don’t understand

ZZ Top: has been the same three guys since 1969. Lineup unchanged.

3 Doors Down: They feel a little modern to be on a classic rock station, but whatever

38 Special: Why 38?

#I made this instead of doing homework #Classic Rock #Meme

329 notes · View notes

drproximo · 3 years

Text

Original Versions of Songs You Didn’t Know were Covers

Originally published for Geeks and Beats, August 2017.

https://www.geeksandbeats.com/2017/08/songs-didnt-know-covers/

I love a well-done cover song, and I especially love a well-done cover that deviates from the original. There’s something endlessly fascinating about how two different people can arrange such dramatically different interpretations of the same source material. What makes this especially fun is when you discover that a song you’ve been enjoying for years is itself a reinterpretation. Sometimes it even goes a step further, and a song that you knew as a cover turns out to be a cover of a cover. Researching this list became a much more involved “rabbit hole” than I ever anticipated, and I am delighted to share my findings with you. I’m confident that, like me, you’ll have more than a few “whoa, I didn’t know that!” moments.

Bruce Springsteen – Blinded by the Light

youtube

When a WatchMojo video got me digging into this awhile back, this was the one that surprised me most. This is one of those songs that I feel like I’ve been aware of for as long as I’ve cared about music. So it was a bit of a shock to discover in my 40s that, not only is it a cover, but it was originally by The Boss. There are differences in the arrangement and the lyrics, but the Manfred Mann version is generally considered the definitive rendition.

Tina Turner – Don’t Turn Around

youtube

While “Blinded by the Light” was the big surprise on my first dive into this topic, this next one blew me away even moreso. Ace of Base’s third most successful single was originally a Tina Turner song, the B-side of her 1986 single “Typical Male”. Bonnie Tyler, whose repertoire of covers is expansive and impressive, also did her own interpretation on 1988’s Hide Your Heart.

I’ve Got My Mind Set On You – James Ray

youtube

Time for a little history about “Weird Al” Yankovic. In 1988, Al released his album Even Worse. The title had two meanings. First of all, the lead single was “Fat”, a parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”, and the album cover was also a direct parody of Jackson’s Bad cover. In other words, since Jackson was declaring himself to be “Bad”, Al decided he was “Even Worse”. Second, all of the other parodies were of covers that had recently been hit singles, by Tiffany, Billy Idol, Los Lobos, and George Harrison.

The last one was the one that surprised me. Harrison’s most solid 80s hit was actually a cover. I owned 45s of the originals of all the others, but I had never heard James Ray’s original of “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You” (which Al turned into “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long“).

The Tide is High – The Paragons

One of Blondie’s most distinctive qualities was, and still is, a blending of several sounds and moods. As such, this reggae ditty, which was their third #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, didn’t raise many eyebrows. So, few at the time knew that it was a cover of a 1966 rocksteady song by The Paragons. Although, the fact that the gender-swap screwed up the rhyme scheme could have been a clue.

Torn – Ednaswap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OoEdfB7l18

This one’s a little weird. Shortly after Natalie Imbruglia had her breakthrough hit with “Torn” in 1997, there was a short-lived minor controversy. Apparently, some people were upset when they found out that Imbruglia didn’t write the song. It was a cover of a 1995 song by a relatively unknown alternative act called Ednaswap. Nobody claimed had that she wrote the song, however, and there was nothing new about singers having a cover be their first hit. So the “controversy” was quickly reduced to a footnote, whose most prominent documentation is a mention on Pop-Up Video.

Adding to the weirdness, Ednaswap’s “original” wasn’t technically the first recording of the song. Two years before they got around to releasing it, a Danish translation,“Brændt” (“Burned”), was released by Lis Sørensen.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Robert Hazard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aLNwOxPsjg

I almost didn’t include this one because, quite frankly, the original is awful. And, let’s be real, there’s something creepy about a guy breathily singing about what girls want. Thankfully, Hazard’s recording never got past the demo stage, so I’ll choose to consider Lauper’s version “technically a cover but sort of not really”.

Downtown Train – Tom Waits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLtZKkCIVmI

If you asked a random sampling of people around you, there’s a good chance that many of them wouldn’t be able to name a Tom Waits song. On the other hand, it’s almost a guarantee that they’re familiar with at least one of his songs, but covered by someone else. The Eagles, Alison Krauss, Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Springsteen, and The Ramones are among the many big names to contribute to this. Heck, actress Scarlett Johansson recorded an entire album of Tom Waits songs (it was kind of awful, but I digress).

One of the most successful Waits covers is Rod Stewart’s “Downtown Train”. The original was a standout track and minorly-successful single from Waits’ 1985 masterpiece Rain Dogs. Stewart’s 1991 cover starts off with a similarly restrained sound, but gradually swells into a much “bigger”, almost celebratory sound.

Piece of My Heart – Erma Franklin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0QAxIKf8G4

First off, the more well-known recording, with Janis Joplin on vocals, is properly credited to her band Big Brother and the Holding Company. Second, covers generally draw from that 1968 version, but the original was by Erma Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s older sister). Faith Hill’s 1994 atrocity seemed to be an attempt to destroy the song’s legacy, but Melissa Etheridge managed to restore it a little bit in 2005, even though it was a clumsy attempt at a comeback for Etheridge.

The First Cut is the Deepest – P.P. Arnold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-g5VG2pWg

This is one of my favourites. With many of the entries on this list, it’s fun to play the original for someone and watch their face as they slowly realize what they’re hearing. P.P. Arnold’s original recording of “The First Cut is the Deepest” (written by Cat Stevens) also happens to be a fantastic song in its own right.

In 1977, Rod Stewart (him again?) released what most would consider the definitive version, and in 2003 Sheryl Crow covered it as one of two new songs recorded for her best-of collection.

Nothing Compares 2 U – The Family

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZlzN0Gtpp8

In the 80s, there were a lot of Prince side projects and spin-offs. Morris Day and The Time may be the most memorable, with their mega-hit “Jungle Love“. Wendy & Lisa, Vanity 6, and Apollonia 5 also enjoyed a little time in the spotlight. One of the lesser-known projects, however, was The Family. The Family was often tasked with bringing life to songs that Prince wrote but wasn’t interested in doing himself. So even if you knew that Prince wrote Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990 breakthrough hit “Nothing Compares 2 U“, you might not have known that The Family had recorded it 5 years prior.

Prince would eventually record a live version as a duet with Rosie Gaines, which was included on the various iterations of his 1993 compilation The Hits. Also included on this compilation were Prince’s originals of “I Feel 4 U” (covered by Chaka Khan in 1984), and “When U Were Mine” (covered by Cyndi Lauper in 1983).

Killing Me Softly – Lori Lieberman

youtube

In 1996, the Fugees released their breakthrough mega-hit, “Killing Me Softly“. Not everyone knew it was a cover of a 1973 Roberta Flack song, but many did. Even fewer knew, however, that Flack’s rendition was itself a cover. The original, by Lori Lieberman in 1972, was a soft acoustic rendition of a poem. “His song” was Don McLean’s “Empty Chairs”.

The first cover could have turned out quite differently; according to Wikipedia:

Helen Reddy has said she was sent the song, but “the demo… sat on my turntable for months without being played because I didn’t like the title”.

Roberta Flack’s successful 1973 cover is still soft, but with some defining chord changes, and a slightly more soulful sound.

Further mutating the tune, The Fugees laid down their hip-hop version in 1996, to much acclaim.

If you poke around YouTube looking for versions of this song, you’ll probably find about a dozen copies of a crooner version credited to Frank Sinatra. It does kind of sound like The Chairman, but he never actually recorded it. That’s Perry Como, from his 1973 album And I Love You So.

Some Guys Have All The Luck – Persuaders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3NWbvFsBVo

First released in 1973 by R&B group The Persuaders, Rod Stewart’s cover of “Some Guys Have All the Luck” served as one of the important hits of his 80s comeback (and his third time appearing on this list, what is it with this guy and covers?) In between those two versions, Robert Palmer also recorded his own version, with significantly altered lyrics and arrangement. Palmer’s version is probably the strangest, kind of a gritty new wave thing, reminiscent of Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien“.

There have been several other covers, including a gender swapped country version. Of special note is Maxi Priest’s 1987 rendition, which (mostly) returned to the original lyrics and arrangement, but with Maxi’s signature “reggae fusion” sound.

Tainted Love – Gloria Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSehtaY6k1U

When Marilyn Manson covered “Tainted Love” in 2001 for the Not Another Teen Movie soundtrack, it was fairly common knowledge that he was covering a Soft Cell song. Soft Cell’s 1981 arrangement, however, was not the original. American soul singer Gloria Jones’ Motown-influenced version was a B-side for “My Bad Boy’s Comin’ Home”, which failed to make a lasting impression domestically. Jones herself, however, had very much made an impression in England, where she was dubbed the “Northern Queen of Soul”.

Eventually the song entered the radar of the synth-pop duo Soft Cell. Their 1981 version became their only major hit in North America, and one of the defining songs of the 80s.

Side notes and honorable mentions:

You might already knew that The Isley Brothers recorded “Twist and Shout” a year before The Beatles, but did you know that a group called The Top Notes recorded it a year before that?

“I Love Rock n Roll” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, arguably one of the most ubiquitous and recognized songs of the modern era, was originally released by The Arrows in 1975.

Animotion’s “Obsession”, unofficial theme song of the fashion world for more than 30 years, was originally recorded by Michael Des Barres & Holly Knight.

Madonna’s “Ray of Light” was adapted from “Sepheryn” by Curtiss Maldoon, though it’s not a direct cover.

Led Zeppelin have a storied history of borrowing, adapting, and straight-up stealing. A cursory Google search will provide many articles and videos discussing this, but the two examples which I think best fit the theme are “Dazed and Confused”, originally by Jake Holmes, and “Stairway to Heaven”, adapted from “Taurus” by Spirit.

Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” was adapted from “Crescent City Blues“, written by Gordon Jenkins and sung by Beverly Mahr. Also, more than half the songs on Cash’s 5 American Recordings albums are reinterpretations of a diverse selection of songs.

#music #cover songs #madonna #weird al yankovic #tom waits #beatles #cyndi lauper #bruce springsteen #killing me softly #twist and shout #johnny cash

6 notes · View notes

secretradiobrooklyn · 3 years

Text

Radio Decameron |1.16.21 & 1.23.21

Secret Radio | 1.16.21 & 1.23.21 | Hear it here.

1. Sylvain Sylvain - “I’m So Sorry”

I never feel right saying “RIP” or “rest in peace” about an actual human being who is no longer with us. But I will say: I hope Sylvain Sylvain died content with the music he made and the life he lived.

2. The Honeydrippers - “Impeach the President”

And ideally, then we would never have to hear from or talk about that accursed criminal ever again. We recorded this section before the inauguration — may we never forget how ALL 50 STATE CAPITOLS plus the US Capitol itself were being guarded against attacks by American citizens on that day — and shit was tense there for many days. As of this writing, things are… unviolent. It feels like a lull to me, honestly, rather than, say, all that stuff being in the rearview. It is not.

But meanwhile, check that beat out!

I love how Roy Charles is trying to convince them to stop demanding, but they just keep insisting. This song is brilliant, and the playing is — c’mon now — unimpeachable.

3. Niagara - “Tchiki boum”

We heard this song in the film “Perdrix,” known as “The Bare Necessity” in the version we saw via SLIFF. They’re dancing in a club to this, and it’s just a really distractingly good song for the scene.

- C.K. Mann - “Mber Papa”

We just recently learned about Essiebons by learning that he passed just this August. He was a producer of legendary status to a lot of people. Listening around his music we came upon C.K. Mann and this righteous track, which Essiebons produced. I think this is a pretty ultra track, really. Every instrument really kicks it out. I hope Essiebons died happy.

4. Rocky Horror Picture Show - “Hot Patootie / Bless My Soul”

New president, feeling kinda upbeat and hopeful. Really just starting to feel the tips of my soul from where it’s been getting singed. It’s going to take a long time to scab over what happened to us all over the last four years. I’m so fucking glad he’s gone that it makes me really love that rock n roll!

5. Moon Unit & Frank Zappa - “Valley Girl”

Tell you what: we watched the movie “Zappa” recently as part of a film festival, and I highly recommend watching it at your earliest opportunity. It is absolutely for people who do, and for people who do not, love his music. He shows up as a really interesting character throughout his whole life. The film skips through his songs with amazing speed, which actually works really well in his case. This song is with his daughter Moon Unit, who actually slid a handwritten note under his door introducing herself by name and saying that she wanted to collaborate on a project. They did this, and while Zappa was in Europe, Moon Unit brought the acetates to KROC and the song became an instant hit for them. Meanwhile he was writing for multiple orchestras.

6. Jacques Dutronc - “Sur Une Nappe de Restaurant”

This is totally not how I tune my drums, but I love how Dutronc’s drums sound in every song. I mean, the whole band of course, but there is a physical space both in the drum part as written and in the recorded texture of the whole that is just deep and wide.

7. Nyame Bekyere - “Medley: Broken Heart / Aunty Yaa / Omo Yaba (Nzema)”

This is another discovery via Essebiens, who released it on Essiebons Enterprises. It’s such an intense track! The cover artwork is by K. Frimpong, who plays a crazy Cuban guitar style on his own albums.

8. Ros Serey Sothea - “Tngai Neas Kyom Yam Sra (Today I Drink Wine)”

This is a voice, and a cast of characters, I can’t stop thinking about. This is from “Cambodian Rocks Vol 1,” which is full of great recordings. Her voice could shatter glass, and it’s so skillfully wielded — I’d love to hear her in a face-off with Frankie Valli.

- There’s a moment from Paige’s phone archives of a little George and Isabelle aching to ride rides at the Millstadt homecoming.

9. Les Poppys - “Isabelle je t’aime”

These young boys singing collectively about their — collective? 17 individual? — love(s) for Isabelle is even more innocent in video format:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o618mlIaR7E

- more C.K. Mann - “Mber Papa”

10. The Jam - “In the City”

This song makes me miss the city so much! It sounds like everything we really can’t get up to right now. I feel like this song helps me feel like I’m walking fast under streetlights.

11. Bruno Leys - “Maintenant je suis un voyou”

This 7” from Born Bad is so incredible! Bruno Leys worked on just a few songs with a band that included a guy named Emmanuel Pairault who plays parts on an instrument called the ondes Martenot, a super early, very eclectic and ungainly electronic instrument. The fact that he could actually compose music of any kind on it was considered remarkable. The fact that he was able to write such incredibly expressive parts to thoroughly filigree the choruses is what amazes me.

This band recorded four songs, then Bruno Leys left for his military service, and when he came back it was all completely over — the catalog was sold, everyone was scattered. Four songs.

12. Sleepy Kitty - “Nothing = You”

I’m pretty sure this song was essentially our response to our own growing fascination with French pop. To me it sounds more French than American in texture. We played this song with the Incurables once at The Pageant in STL and it was especially glorious. I think of that moment — Kevin Bachmann harmonizing flawlessly with Paige, four different guitars ringing through the chords — every time I hear this track.

13. Plastic Bertrand - “Pogo Pogo”

I don’t know why or when “Ça Plane Pour Moi” became the one French pop song that Americans are likely to know, but it’s a total banger so I have no complaints. It turns out that pretty much all of his songs sound very similar — one-note melodies in the verse, cool vocalese hooks in the chorus, and super-driving guitar parts throughout. Turns out that’s a formula we totally dig!

14. Os K-rrascos & Vanessinha Do Picatchu - “Bochecha Ardendo”

For whatever reason, a variety of Brazilian music seemed to be the very hottest stuff to be found in Chicago’s art-school party nights, and I remember losing my mind to some heavy Brazilian rhythms that just kept folding over and over on themselves while staying so impossibly funky that the whole night just turned into a deep-green-and-dark orange smear of a late-night winter warehouse dancing and sweating and then way, way later, walking home steaming along a cold sidewalk on a tree-lined street.

- Eric Dolphy - “Hat and Beard”

15. Von Südenfed - “The Rhinohead”

I feel like no one in my zone talks enough about how awesome Von Südenfed is. I mean, we only know this one album, but it’s so fascinating — a band where Mark E. Smith is contributing but not in control, and on purpose. He shows off his pop chops and gets to be a whole different character in this one place, while the Mouse on Mars guys get to play new characters themselves. It feels like it’s related to “Extricate” in how it’s constructed, but the music doesn’t sound like something any version of the Fall has made.

16. Fischer-Spooner - “The 15th”

A friend of Wire is a friend of ours.

p.s. Paige here, they went to SAIC (before I arrived) but they were super famous to all of us in the dorms.

17. T.P. Orchestre - “Pourquoi Pas?”

The depths of this band just continue to amaze us. We’re waiting on some T.P.O.C. vinyl right now, featuring mostly songs we’ve never heard, and the everlovin’ post office is misdelivering it BACK to France even as I write this. It’s driving us totally nuts.

18. Nina Simone - “Mississippi Goddam”

The hardness of her voice, the hardness of her experience, the hardness of her words.

19. Fanny - “Blind Alley”

I don’t know who first put this in front of my eyes, but it was a few years ago. The video is so basic — they’re performing in front of a video-psych effect — but the performers themselves are just so absorbing. And the production is so heavy, it feels legendary.

20. Manmadha Leela soundtrack - “Kushalamena”

I think we first saw a colorful glimpse of this song before we heard it. Paige automatically starts dancing a little dance as soon as “Kushalamena” comes on.

This I think came from the “Now Playing” group I’m in on FB: a guy was holding out a picture of the cover of this album and said he’d bought 40 more like it and he LOVED EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. He just wanted to see if anyone knew anything more about them. I did my best to hear the album he was showing. I think this is it. I think he’s right to be super jazzed about it, we just want to hang out with him and listen to all those records.

21. Francis Bebey - “Je vous aime zaime zaime”

Paige was working on her pronunciation and when to use the ellision — the z sound for the s letter, depending on what comes next — and he said something about, “Unless you’re Francis Bebey and you’re singing ‘Je vous aime zaime zaime.” And she said, “Francis Bebey? I know Francis Bebey!” and he said, “No, you’re thinking of another Francis.” But we all know the truth. This was our introduction to the song though.

- Jack Teagarden - “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan”

Paige was looking for the Fred Astaire & Jack Buchanan version from “The Bandwagon,” but found this great instrumental trombone-forward version instead.

22. Pono AM - "Good Vibes"

This is one of those things you see every once in a great while when you’re playing clubs in a music scene — a band hits a natural home run. They just have an undeniably appealing crowdpleaser of a song that they wrote, and everyone flips out when they hear it. We salute Pono AM for writing this perfect song. They enrich the STL music world. My only advice to them was to never get tired of it or take it for granted.

Paige: We took their band photos at our space on Cherokee Street, for an RFT article. I was impressed because they arrived with matching shirts that still had the tags on them, and it was really exciting to see a new band on the scene who was really good and also putting in the effort to be graphically interesting. We believe that stuff counts. All of their shows, if you got there early, you’d see all of the band members blowing up as many balloons as they could, so there would be balloons bouncing around their set for the whole show, and it made it even better.

23. Sir Victor Uwaifo And His Titibitis - "Iranm Iran"

Analog Africa has a new album! It’s called “Edo International,” and it shows off a whole other side of Beninese music that isn’t T.P. Orchestre. I think of T.P. Orchestre as just a giant force in Beninese music, but then this comp comes out showing so many other roots of Benin City’s highlife-funk scene. Victor Uwaifo was a Nigerian guitarist who returned to his hometown in Benin City and built Joromi Studio. The sound he put together at that place, via his own bands and others’, came to be called Edo Funk.

24. Laughing Man - "Brilliant Colors"

This is a tape of one of the artists of one of the group houses that we always would stay at in DC. Benjamin Schurr runs a tape label and it was always such a treat getting the new batch of Blight. releases for the van soundsystem when we’d roll through town, or one of his bands would tour through St. Louis. They were always interesting stuff and a wide range of sounds and styles.

We first met Brandon Moses when he was on tour with Paperhaus in St. Louis. I think it was his birthday, too. He didn’t tour a ton with them. Laughing Man was our first time hearing him front songs. We always enjoyed staying with Erik and Benjamin and Brandon and enjoyed sharing that green power juice that Brandon gave us — really powered us up for the next drive.

- Bembeya Jazz - “Petit Sokou”

I have felt love for this song for awhile, but Josh Weinstein recently sent a video of the band actually performing this song and WOW, it is hypnotizing. The outfits, the instruments, and the expressiveness of the guitar playing are all so vivid in black and white: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpZVF_kKUJ4

25. Maxime le Forestier - “San Francisco”

Our thanks to Paige’s French instructor for showing us this song. Paige’s version is well worth hearing too, I must say: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKhJfqDDe2q/

p.s. Paige again, if you want to see the dragon birthday card that Evan made, here it is!

2 notes · View notes

oosteven-universe · 4 years

Text

Engineward #1

Engineward #1 Vault Comics 2020 Written by George Mann Illustrated by Joe Eisma Coloured by Michael Garland Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou Earth is an ancient myth, long forgotten. Now, the word of the god-like Celestials is absolute, and they rule with brutal efficiency. When Joss, an Engineward, discovers and reactivates the head of an ancient ghoulem, she finds all is not as intended. Her destiny—and that of her world—lies somewhere far beyond the borders of her shantytown. Oh This is going to be on your Christmas List, Christmas in July that is. Science Fiction is alive and well at Vault Comics and i have to say that this really is some cutting edge stuff and it’s only the introduction to the series. What really impresses me about this thus far is how we see the fall of civilisation and what happens with the kids that grow up afterward. Oral storytelling that gets passed down through the generations tends to change words without changing the meaning of them. Plus localised dialects play a huge role in how they learn to speak as well since phonetics is really pronounced in a world where the population doesn’t normally write. Now I am making assumptions about that but it's safe considering and then to see Joss being an Engineward and knowing how electronics work, that is in a class all of it’s own and I am greatly intrigued by it. I am loving the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information keeps this moving forward beautifully. The character development is sensational to see. How we meet the characters, where we meet them and how they act and react to the situations and circumstances placed before them tell us a lot about them. Ichabod for example we get this great look at him and then when we see him again he’s noticeably different and we all know the reason why even if it’s not spoken aloud by them. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the world and it’s inhabitants we can see just how well this is structured, not to mention how it all works together to create the books ebb & flow. There is something fresh and new about this which flows right alongside that feeling of déjà vu. It is that unshakable feeling you’ve seen this done before but then by the same token it’s never been done like this. So it will excite you and engage your mind as you work things out as you move through these pages. I have got to say that if I hadn’t known this was Joe’s work beforehand then I wouldn’t have guessed it. This is his strong linework and he does utilise the varying weights and techniques to bring out this great attention to detail and yet it feels different, more mature. I still want to see more backgrounds from him though because when he utilises them, oh baby does it look spectacular! Also if we can see boobs we should see peen, its 2020 after all show some dangling bits! I do appreciate the men kissing, that was nice to see. I love the creativity and imagination that we see throughout the book. People, creatures and ghoulems all have these different feels to them that grab your attention and bring joy to the eyes. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show such a magnificent eye for storytelling. The colour work is phenomenal! I like how the hues and tones within the colours are utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work. I really appreciate seeing the flesh tones being utilised to add musculature to bodies without the aid of linework. It brings the work to another level. This is why Vault Comics is in my Top 5 favourite publishing houses. You can’t soar sitting on the ground, you need to take that leap off the ledge to really fly, which is what we see these creators doing right here.

#Comic Books #Comics Reviews #Vault Comics #George Mann #Joe Eisma #Michael Garland #Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

2 notes · View notes

momodomoromo · 5 years

Text

So, I watched Black Mirror’s “Shut up and dance” yesterday. An episode discussion.

Now I'm thinking about, you know, how much do we need to respect everybody's privacy, the weight of justice and the way it's applied. And who has the right to serve it.

I saw the first minutes of an Screen Prism video about Black Mirror's plot twist. I was interested because I have predicted some of them in the past, like the endings for The Entire History of You and Be Right Back, while some in the likes of White Bear had surprised me completely. There has been some that are 50/50, like White Christmas and The Waldo Moment.

The first plot twist revealed was that, in Shut up and dance, Kenny, our teenage protagonist, was doing the things he was forced to by blackmailers who had a video of him masturbating because Kenny was watching child pornografy. I immediatly stoped the video and decided to watch the episode that moment. Allow me to say, the episode is way more tense, and like every Black Mirror, worse for the viewer once that you know what Kenny was doing.

Kenny in the episode is a teenager, so he is not legaly a pedophile yet, but he knows that what he is doing is wrong, and takes some precautions for his family not to discover it. He downloads his porn online after searching it in a browser, and while we don't know if he pays for it or not, we know that his process was quick. This makes me ponder the next questions:

Is someone who knows that he is doing something wrong and is ashamed of it, and may or may not be contributing to the sickness (in Kenny's case, by paying for it), who is not techincaly punished by law yet, and has the oportunity to change (because of the knowledge of the wrongness of it) deserves the punishment that Kenny is subjected to?

Kenny works at a familiar restaurant, and in the beggining of the episode we see him being kind with a child (his toughts are unkown) and being fascinated with a drawing that one left behind. (I interpret this as the writers and director showing us that he, in fact, has tendencies for it and wasn't or wouldn't be the first time that he has been aroused with the idea of childhood or what he percieves as "innocence". Now, every country has its own rules, and most of the time each state has its owns, so your perception of what constitudes a pedophile may vary for each of you. If someone has amoral thoughts and commits amoral actions while not hurting anyone personaly (we don't know if Kenny has molested someone before or if he wil), is her or him entitled to their own privacy? Death in Venice has a man falling in love with a teenager, not having sexual thoughts for a child, but still someone who is way more inexperienced than him. Thomas Mann writes that if he doesn't act on his impulses, he should be left alone. The point of Lolita by Nabokov is that no thought of an ammoral crime can be excused, especialy if you are making believe the affected that your intentions are good (because the younger you are does not mean you're stupid, but you can be taken advantage of in any aspect by someone who's waiting for the oportunity. And the movies Nymphomaniac and American Beauty make two point regarding paedophilia: the first one has the main character say that those who think of something they now is wrong and refrain of it (ommition that is portraid as a struggle) should be respected; the second has the main character realize that said impulses should refrain from it because it's common sense, therefore, it would be stupid just desiring for it. What do you think is the correct opinion reagarding thoughtcrime? (Yes, thoughtcrime. The Newspeak word. I will explain my choice of word later).

Kenny is forced to kill a man by people who think of themselves as moraly superior to them. The killed man watched child pornografy too. Is this an addecuate punishment for either of them, or is it as despicable as their crimes? (Keep in mind that the fight was transmited and watched by others online).

The blackmailers hacked multiple people's devices and forced them to do their bidding, (including a bank robbery). One is a CEO who sent a racist e-mail, and the other a married man who wanted to hire a prostitute. How amoral are their crimes? Do you think the blackmailers are doing this for justice or their own enjoyment?

Everybody has their information linked in the end. CEO is featured in new websites, married man will be divorced and lose custody of his kids (and probably commit suicide), a peadophile is killed, bot Kenny and the delivery man have their families informed of their actions and Kenny is arrested for the bank robbery he was forced to do. Did they deserved it?

And lastly, the blackmailers posed as a free anti virus software to decieve their victims. They probably spy on anyone until they find out which one of them has broken the law, and take extreme actions to punish them. Is the invation of someone's privacy worth the security of others? Can common people decide the punishment for those who had commited crimes, thought about it or have done so when they thought they were safe? (Racist CEO reminds me of a footbal player who by all acounts is an douchebag, but had said some things in his private home that others were trying to turn into evidence for his judgement at court. I do not remember if it was his lawyer, a periodist or the judge himself who said that there should not be presented the private coments of others as legal procedures*).

And finally, what the blackmailers did is, in my opinion comparable to the Thought Police in the George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four (one of my favourite books and probably an inspiration for Black Mirror, I believe): they observe people at all times, play with them as puppets by what could be called cyber terrorism and, eventualy, destroy them regardless of what they do just because they believe they have a higher moral ground. So, does the punishment of the criminals measured by the belief that said people are subhuman and said belief make the punishers subhuman too?

Thank you for reading my post. I am already thinking a lot about it since yesterday, because, while is not illegal, I do things that could be used against me in blackmail, like any of us: the fetishes we have, our political opinions, the things we have done when drunk... All of them in different levels in the moral scale, which is, in turned, molded by all of us and the times we live in. All of them can be used against us. I'm wondering now what truly makes someone reprihensible, and if it's okay for some of us to invade others privacy in order to "mantain order", like regimens of the past and present have done.

I know that this post may not be expressing my questions as well as I would like, but I really want to be able to talk about it with others, for I believe introspection is the purpose of art, and the intention of Black Mirror is not to tell us what's correct, but rather have us think about it and engage in dialogue.

Thanks again. I can't wait to read your opinnions.

*While I am very well versed in english, it is not my first language. I can't remember the exact frasing used, but in spanish it's worded this way: Si bien los comentarios hechos por él están mal, no debemos sentar el precedente en el que lo que alguien dice en la privacidad de su hogar pueda ser llevado a la corte.

#Black Mirror #Shut up and dance #Episode discussion #Spoilers

11 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Why The Forever Purge Is the Series’ Most Relevant Movie Yet

https://ift.tt/3hq3TvP

In The Forever Purge, the fifth movie in the dystopian action-horror franchise which began in 2013 with writer-director James DeMonaco’s The Purge, the totalitarian regime known as the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) are back in power after having been booted out of office in 2016’s The Purge: Election Year. Right off the bat, they’ve reinstated Purge Night, the annual event in which all crime — up to and including murder — is legal for 12 hours from dusk to dawn, with no consequences.

But something goes awry in The Forever Purge: a breakaway movement using terms like “Forever After Purge” intends to keep the violence going after the 12 hours are up, instituting a permanent Purge with which they intend to “cleanse” the United States of those they deem not fit to be Americans. Immigrants are, of course, at the top of their list, but so are the wealthy — and the NFFA themselves may be in the line of fire as well.

“This is the first Purge movie where there are no rules,” says producer Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions has been a producing partner on all five Purge films as well as a spin-off 2018-2019 TV series. “All the rules go out the window. It’s just total anarchy. I think [the film] says that you can try and control anarchy for a certain amount of time, but eventually anarchy controls you and that’s what happens in this movie.”

The parallels with real life, always lurking near the surface of the Purge films, are even more eerily prescient in The Forever Purge. The scenes of “Purge Purification” militants battling the Army and running wild through the streets of American cities are a little too close to the horrifying footage from last January 6, when hundreds of traitors and seditionists stormed the U.S. Capitol and killed cops in an effort to overthrow American democracy in favor of a lunatic cult leader.

Incredibly, James DeMonaco — who has written all five Purges and directed the first three — envisioned all this for The Forever Purge a couple of years before the events of January 6 even took place (the movie, directed by Everardo Valerio Gout, was completed in early 2020 and was set to arrive last summer until the pandemic delayed all film releases).

“James says that for a bunch of these movies, he’s kind of seeing the future,” says Blum. “The movie was wrapped a long time ago, before the pandemic. It was supposed to come out last summer. We chose to hold it because of the pandemic. I think James has really seen the future a bunch of times in these movies. I was asked in an earlier interview if he made changes based on current events. He did not. He has this unique ability to kind of see the future that he exercises in The Purge franchise.”

“I get so many calls from Jason, [saying], ‘How did you predict all this?’” says DeMonaco. “I’m like, ‘Listen, I’m not happy I did it.’ It’s a combination of shock and sadness that these grotesque things I wrote two years ago are kind of coming true in an odd way. Not fully true, but some permutation of it. I wish these films didn’t have any resemblance to our current society at all. That would make me much happier if we lived in complete harmony and the Purge films were not relevant to society.”

DeMonaco says he first “saw the seeds of discord” two and a half years ago, and that — coupled with the ongoing news about a border crisis and his desire to work a love story into a Purge film — gave him the initial ideas for The Forever Purge.

“The current political climate always seeps its way into the writing because it’s a political conceit to purge,” he explains. “I mean, first and foremost, they need to be bad-ass horror action films. Then the socio-political underpinnings can seep in underneath that.”

Although DeMonaco says that it’s “unavoidable” that current events have found their way into all five theatrical entries in the Purge franchise, Blum maintains that filmmakers don’t necessarily have an obligation to comment on real-life developments in their films, even when working in a genre like science fiction or horror that can indirectly touch on such subjects.

Movies

The Forever Purge Review: Insurrectionists in Horror Movie Makeup

By Don Kaye

Movies

Best Sci-Fi Movies on Netflix Right Now

By Alec Bojalad

“I don’t know if they have an obligation to do anything,” says the producer of such long-running franchises as Insidious, Paranormal Activity, and others. “I hope their obligation is to make great, entertaining, interesting movies. That said, if they have something they want to say about the world we live in, horror is a great way to say it because it means people will actually listen.”

Blum continues, “[If] you make a movie about a lesson, no one’s going to watch it. But…if you think of a clever conceit for a horror movie and you want to kind of ‘Trojan horse’ an idea about society into that movie, that’s a great way to get your idea forward. But we also make a lot of scary movies that have nothing to say besides the fact they’re fun and scary.”

DeMonaco agrees that it’s easier to get a message into a movie hidden inside the tropes of horror, sci-fi, or dystopian fiction, which is the way he approaches each of the Purge entries. “I read a lot of sci-fi growing up — Dune, Ringworld, all the great stuff,” he says. “Even watching the movies, from Soylent Green to all the John Carpenter stuff, they did it amazingly. John’s the master at sneaking socio-political content into a genre piece. [George A.] Romero too.”

According to DeMonaco, director Martin Scorsese coined the term “smuggler’s cinema” when speaking about the great directors of the 1940s and ‘50s, like Anthony Mann or John Ford, who were contracted by the studios to make nothing but war movies or Westerns.

To keep themselves interested, they would “smuggle” ideas into the pictures: “[Scorsese] says, if you watch these movies closely, they’re incredibly political because the directors were smuggling the ideas,” says DeMonaco. “I always say with The Purge we’re doing the same thing.”

But DeMonaco is quick to add with a laugh that the Purge films “aren’t all that subtle.” He elaborates, “The new one especially is not the most subtle thing, but it still has the trappings of the genre. There are some people who just watch it and find it to be incredibly fun, and horrific, and a crazy conceit.”

It’s hard to believe that the “crazy conceit” behind the movies — the first four of which have grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide combined — first took root in DeMonaco’s imagination back in the early 2000s, following an incident in which he and his wife were nearly taken out by a drunk driver. His wife, enraged by the occurrence and the person, remarked, “I wish we all had one free one.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The idea sat with DeMonaco for several years after that, until he found himself living in Paris, where the New York City native noticed something: “No one I met had a gun,” he recalls. “None of the French friends I made in Paris over the year I was there had a gun. I started thinking back to Staten Island, Brooklyn, New York, LA, seven out of 10 people I could probably name, even people that you wouldn’t think had a gun, had a gun in the home.”

DeMonaco says that led him to become “very curious about America’s relationship to weaponry and violence,” adding, “Coupling that with my wife’s idea, that’s where the initial idea of the Purge was spawned.”

But DeMonaco admits that even he didn’t see the commercial appeal of the concept until Blum came along: “We were having trouble getting financing. Jason saw the potential commercial success that it could be. So it’s been the strangest journey, man. We never thought we’d be five movies in, thinking about a sixth, with a TV show in the can. It’s been a strange time.”

The Forever Purge is out in theaters Friday (July 2).

The post Why The Forever Purge Is the Series’ Most Relevant Movie Yet appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3x8zglg

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

alovevigilante · 3 years

Text

Setting and time: Somewhere, somehow, I dunno.

Kari: Hey George!

George Lopez: yes ma’am!

Kari: listen, I like you. But I need you to put out your stogie, cause I got the asthma, and also before the stink gets so bad that the raccoons take a shit on the back porch cause they were mad because fooled that there was no garbage there to rummage through, cause that’s what your cigar smells like.. stinky garbage that would fool a family of raccoons that need to take a shit….

George Burns (mumbles): listen pal, you better do what she says, otherwise she’ll shove a celery stick with peanut butter and raisins in your mouth. I still can’t completely open mine due to the cement reaction of the sticky peanut butter to the roof of my mouth there, and that was a few weeks ago…

Kari: it’s called, “Ants on a log” and it’s delicious and a better alternative to smoking a cigar that makes the surrounding area smell like someone is taking a crap in a forest fire.

George Lopez: Lots if shit takers because of cigars around here…

George Burns: I’m still smacking away…

Kari: you were smacking before I was born!

George Lopez: um, sure. I can put it out…

Kari: Thank you kindly.

George Lopez: I hate to bring up the obvious here, but George Burns… you’re dead.

George Burns: I might be dead, but I’m still here discussing all those strings of fiber that are now jammed in between my teeth from that piece of celery she shoved inbetween my dentures there…

George Lopez: um, yeah… I didn’t hear that part… sounds uncomfortable, but on the bright side, maybe you don’t need your daily dose of Metamucil now.

Carol Channing: (real slurpy like smiling so huge the Cheshire Cat would be disconcerted) jjeee-ust use polident, Georgie! It’ll help with those awful tar stains on your teeth over there from all those big ole nasty cigars you smoked for all those long years, and it’ll keep your breath minty fresh! Smell mine! Suuuuper dee duper polident!

(Carol Channing smiles and snuggles the polident box next to her face, and does a bunny nose..)

George Lopez: what does that have to do with fiber?

Martha (big mouth) ray: um, carol? that was me in the polident commercials.

Carol Channing: are you ssssshure it wasn’t meee?! I think I remember myself smiling really widely like this:

Martha ray: no.

Carol Channing: are you positive?! Because I would’ve shown all of my teeth… that would’ve made sense that I did those commercials…

Florence Henderson as Carol Brady: and me…. Don’t forget me!!! I did the commercials too! I’m carol brady! Remember that?! I am the mom on the Brady bunch! My husband Mike didn’t want to do the variety show, but we did it anyway. The kids were insistent that we do it… I wasn’t. I’m a wall flower really…

Kari: you were in a band with bob dylan’s son?!

Carol Brady: no, I wasn’t. How do they perform if they’re so shy?!

Martha ray: oyyyyy…

George Lopez: can I ask what the hell I just walked in on here?

George Carlin: don’t…

Kari: look! There’s 3 Georges!!!! There’s gotta be a joke in this somewhere…

George Carlin: not so far, unfortunately… but how about this? a smoker, a joker, and a midnight poker… player… (Keillor, I would never say this shit… )

Kari: you love manfred Mann!

George Carlin: I guess I do now…

Kari I have no clue how we lucked out, but George Lopez here was in a huge poker tournament! He lost to a girl.

Gracie Allen: oh George, you didn’t! When I was alive women were not allowed to participate in such masculine things… remember honey?! I tried playing with you one time in one if our shows and I won by accident cause I didn’t know how to play and I was shuffling a deck that had been sewn together and I dressed like a card shark! Oh! was I funny…

George Burns: um, Gracie dear,.. they was Lucille Ball in an episode of, “I love Lucy.”

Gracie Allen: oh dear… that wasn’t me then?!

Desi arnaz: not unless you were my wife.

Gracie Allen: oh no…. I could never eat Cuban… too spicy…

George Lopez: holy shit…

George Carlin: look George, here’s the deal; We aren’t the people you may have known personally or met one time at a celebrity golf tournament or a celebrity roast…

Gracie Allen: mr. Lopez, you’ll have to forgive me, but are you in tournaments for a living? Is that a career now?

George Burns: here Gracie, have an “ant on a log” it’s delicious..,

(George Burns shoves the celery stick with peanut butter and raisins in Gracie’s mouth)

George Carlin: As I was saying… we are facsimiles that this woman Kari keillor, an unknown and fine that way but would prefer to get paid highly cause who wouldn’t for her writing, and stay relatively incognito like most writers do or don’t depending, cobbles together to entertain herself and maybe like 4 other people. So, don’t freak.

George Lopez: I’ve dealt with creepier… after all, I was on network television for years…. (1)

Kari: ok, this scene is going south fast… So, I’m gonna end it with a fruity observation.

George Lopez: ok….

Kari: George, your last name implies you’re low on…. Pez.

Richard Pryor: it doesn’t imply it, it straight up says it. Hey… listen man… if your body was a pez dispenser, does your dick come out your neck?

George x 3: scene.

(1) network execs not reading this, please don’t blame George Lopez, or any other person for this terrible display of writing… it’s just that Kari’s pen, Bill Murray, wrote this, so, if you’re going to blame anyone, please put all blame on, Bill Murray. Thank you. 🥸🙈🤷‍♀️💕🤣

The Steve Miller band wrote and sang, “the joker”. (Mentioned above) Manfred Mann, did not. But, if you are blinded by the light, be sure to check him out, as he is the resident expert in that department…

#no tags

1 note · View note

snickerl · 6 years

Text

11 Questions

I was tagged by @carrie11 and @therobbinsnest to answer 11 questions - thank you, ladies! I couldn’t respond earlier because I was on vacation.

Here are the rules :

1. Post the rules. 2. Answer the questions given to you by the tagger. 3. Write 11 questions of your own. 4. And tag other people.

Questions from @carrie11

1. What is your favorite X-Files episode? What is your least favorite? Favorite: Milagro, least favorite: 3

2. Do you prefer salty or sweet? Definitely sweet

3. If you had the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, where would you go? Argentina

4. What is your favorite type of weather? Sunny and warm but not too hot and not too humid

5. What is the one movie you never get tired of watching? There are some: Some Like it Hot, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis - and since I’m German, there are three more German ones: Schtonk, Der bewegte Mann, Alles auf Zucker

6. What is the best book you’ve recently read? It’s also a German one called ‘Das Lavendelzimmer’ (The Lavender Room) by Nina George

7. What is a misconception people have about you? People think I’m arrogant when they first meet me when I don’t socialize with them instantly. The truth is, I’m only shy.

8. Other than your phone, what is one thing you always carry with you? Pictures of my loved ones. 9. When you look in your closet, what color is most prominent? Blue, in all its different shades 10. Lipstick, lip gloss, or chapstick? Chapstick, chaptstick and once again chapstick - I’m addicted to chapstick (or Labello, the German equivalent) 11. What is your favorite time of day & why? After dinner before bedtime because all the work is done and I can just relax and be.

Questions from @therobbinsnest

Do you believe in ghosts? I have to say no.

What is the weirdest scar you have and how did you get it? I have a tiny scar next to my left eyebrow. I got when I was a kid an ran into a door.

Where is your favorite place to go on a weekday afternoon when you have no plans or obligations? To a friend’s house for a cup of coffee and a nice chat.

Who is a character from a TV show or a book that you’ve always resonated with? No one comes to mind really. There are a lot of characters I loved or admired but resonated ....

Would you rather trade some intelligence for looks or looks for intelligence? The latter. Intelligence is beautiful.

What would be your dream car? A Ford Mustang.

If you could steal one thing without consequence what would it be? I have no idea.

Is the glass half full or half empty? Half full. Always.

Whats the most unusual thing you’ve ever eaten? Crocodile steak.

you can go back into any x file episode and change one plot twist.. which do you alter? Nothing Important Happened Today (1) - I would have allowed Mulder and Scully more than 48 hours together with newborn William.

Here are my questions:

1. What makes you really happy? 2. What makes you really sad? 3. What makes you really angry? 4. What language would you like to be able to speak? Why? 5. Have you ever been to Germany? If yes, where. If no, where would you want to go? 6. Would you like to be younger than you actually are? 7. What would you do if you won a miilion in the lottery? 8. Do you like to cook and/or bake? 9. What’s your favorite sport to watch? To do yourself? 10. What’s your favorite season? 11. Do you prefer to spend your vacation in your home country or abroad? I’m not very well connected here, so I might tag people who have already been tagged, sorry for that in advance:

@baronessblixen @luvlucy7 @amorfati3215 @lunenn @sunshinetoday

#aboutme #11questions

2 notes · View notes

thesecretgayhistory · 7 years

Link

Ninety years ago, future screen legend Cary Grant shared a Greenwich Village love nest with an Australian man who went on to win three Oscars.

That’s the provocative claim in “Women He’s Undressed,’’ a new documentary about celebrated costume designer Orry-Kelly (released Aug. 9 on DVD and video on demand) that adds a tantalizing new chapter to decades of speculation about Grant’s sexuality.

Between the film and Kelly’s recently published, long-suppressed memoir “Women I’ve Undressed,’’ a vivid portrait emerges of Grant as an ambitious young immigrant vaudevillian who reinvented himself so thoroughly, he ended up denying his true self in a homophobic industry.

“There was such a pressure to conform to what was considered an ordinary, normal life,’’ the documentary’s noted Australian director, Gillian Armstrong, told Out Magazine last year, referring to Grant’s four failed marriages to women. “Orry refused to hide his sexuality with a fake marriage. He had such a great sense of personal integrity, and we wanted to capture that sense of bravery in the film.’’

Kelly, who was seven years older, writes in his memoir that he met the struggling performer Archibald Leach — who would change his name to Cary Grant in 1931 — just before his 21st birthday in January 1925.

Leach had been evicted from a boarding house for nonpayment, and had turned up at Kelly’s artist’s studio at 21 Commerce St. in the West Village with a tin box containing all his worldly possessions. He promptly moved in with Kelly.

“It was a city of bachelors,’’ film historian William J. Mann says in the documentary, arguing that Kelly and Leach were definitely a couple. “You were surrounded by men who were openly living in ways you couldn’t imagine back home.’’

Kelly says in his book that Leach was suffering from an unspecified illness during their first few months of cohabitation, and he paid the younger man’s doctor bills. The “devastatingly handsome” Leach, who had come to America from his native England as a teenager as part of a stilt-walking troupe, was barely scraping by, working occasionally as a carnival barker in Coney Island and donning a threadbare suit as a paid escort for women while seeking work in vaudeville.

Kelly, who was painting murals for speakeasies and trying to break into show business as a set designer, had developed a lucrative sideline of hand-made ties — and Leach volunteered to stencil on designs and sell them backstage at vaudeville houses for a cut of the action.

Branching out a couple of years later, the two men briefly ran their own speakeasy in Manhattan — and had an even more short-lived casino in Nevada before they were shut down by gangsters who demanded money to spare their lives.

Kelly’s memoirs, and the documentary, chronicle his volatile, on-and-off relationship with the actor over three decades. While Kelly stops short of claiming that Leach was his boyfriend — something the documentary states outright — Kelly leaves a clear impression of someone whose heart was broken many times.

He was clearly annoyed with Leach’s obsession with blond women, “though he always comes home to me.’’ And Kelly describes being knocked out cold by Archie “for three hours’’ when he criticized his roommate for ignoring his vaudeville guests (including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen) at a party while trying to persuade Charlie Chaplin’s sister-in-law to help him arrange a screen test.

“The physical violence between the men [was] not uncommon between homosexual men of the period,’’ Katherine Thompson, the documentary’s writer, told The Post. “A combination of self-loathing and confusion was manifested in a punch-up or, on another occasion, Grant throwing Kelly out of a moving vehicle.’’

By 1931, both men were pursuing their destiny in Hollywood — the newly renamed Cary Grant had been signed to a $350-a-week contract by Paramount, while Kelly had begun a 12-year tenure as the head of the Warner Bros. costume department, eventually designing Ingrid Bergman’s famous wardrobe for “Casablanca.” They shared quarters again for a few weeks in Tinseltown, enjoying 65-cent drugstore dinners every night.

But there were an increasing number of arguments over the newly christened Grant’s women — and the actor’s demand that Kelly reimburse him $365 for meals and boxing-match tickets that he kept track of in a little red book. Kelly paid off the bills and suggested that Grant move in with another handsome young Paramount contractee, Randolph Scott.

The debate over whether the former Archie Leach was gay, bi or straight has centered for decades around his on-and-off cohabitation with Scott in a beach house in Malibu, which was documented in a famous series of still photographs of them in domestic poses.

When Grant married actress Virginia Cherrill in 1934, Mann says in the documentary, Scott attempted suicide. They were living together again after the end of Grant’s marriage in 1935, and re-reunited once more after Scott’s first marriage (1936-1939) to a duPont heiress ended. (Grant’s 1942 application for US citizenship lists him and Scott — who signs as a witness — as living at the same address.) Around this time, Grant threatened to sue gossip columnist Hedda Hopper for implying he wasn’t “normal.’’ (And in 1980, he actually brought a defamation suit against comedian Chevy Chase, who was forced to issue a retraction of his joking reference to Grant as a “homo.’’)

Grant and Kelly, meanwhile, had drifted apart. “He was adjusting to the mask of Cary Grant,’’ Kelly writes. “A mask that became his career, a career that became Grant.’’

The two crossed paths in 1941, when Grant made “Arsenic and Old Lace’’ at Warner Bros.

“There was quite a bit of tension between the two,’’ Mann says in the documentary. “One day, the radio show ‘Queen for a Day’ had sent a limousine to the studio lot with [its title] emblazoned on its side. Cary turned to Orry and said, ‘Orry, your limo has arrived.’ This was a real low blow from Cary Grant, with whom he had an intimate personal relationship.’’

Kelly had a drinking problem that eventually cost him his job at Warner and landed him in rehab — but he made a remarkable comeback that netted him Oscars for “An American in Paris’’ (1951), “Les Girls’’ (1957) and “Some Like it Hot’’ (1959), for which he designed unforgettable dresses for Marilyn Monroe.

Grant re-entered Kelly’s life in the late 1950s, when he asked if he could visit Kelly’s studio to purchase some paintings as gifts.

Kelly’s book implies that Grant (who Kelly says visited on multiple occasions) was more interested in discouraging Kelly from writing about their relationship — and the film says Grant may have used his influence to block the publication of Kelly’s memoir. (The manuscript was discovered in a pillow case at an Australian relative’s home in 2014 while the documentary was in production; it is available only as an audio book in the US.)

“Cary always told me, ‘Tell them nothing,’ ” Kelly writes. “I don’t know why. There was never really anything to hide.’’

But the cheeky Aussie ends his book with a devastating anecdote about the notoriously cheap Grant. At the time of their final reunion, Kelly was designing costumes for “Auntie Mame’’ (1957) starring Rosalind Russell, Grant’s co-star in “His Girl Friday’’ (1940) and a close friend.

After he and Grant lunched together, they drove over to Russell’s dressing room on the Warner Bros. lot.

“I mentioned his beautiful Rolls Royce outside, and Cary remarked that he had another, just like it, in London. ‘By the way, aren’t you going to London?’ he asked [Russell].

“Roz said, ‘Yes, I’m going over in ten days.’ ‘Why don’t you use my Rolls,’ Cary said.”

Russell was thrilled until Grant added: “I tell you what to do Roz, when you arrive in London, call … my agents. They will give you the rental fee and the cost of the chauffeur.’’

Kelly says there are “too many instances where Cary Grant’s old friends had been disappointed by him.’’ He quotes Russell as saying, “He flits around, hiding from his own shadow, hoping nobody will notice, or [worries] that his shadow may expose the image he has created for himself.’’

The former Archie Leach never publicly acknowledged his relationship with Kelly — but when his old friend died of liver cancer in 1964, Grant was one of the pallbearers. He retired from acting two years later, when his only child was born from his fourth marriage to actress Dyan Cannon.

The enigmatic superstar was five years into his fifth and final marriage when he died, 30 years ago this November. Randolph Scott, whose second marriage endured 43 years and produced two children, died two months later.

#cary grant #Golden Age of Hollywood #hollywood #gay #secret #lovers

2 notes · View notes

instituteiflac-blog · 5 years

Text

Never too old to learn a new language | IFLAC

Three years ago Anuradha came to our institute to learn German. That time she had just retired from her job as a banker at the State Bank of India and was very excited to now be able to dedicate her free time to learning a new language. By now she has completed three levels of German and just joined our faculty of teachers. We asked her to share her experience in learning the language and what her motivation was.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself

I am Anuradha and at present I am a 63 years old retired Banker. After graduating in the commerce stream, I worked for about 40 years in Bank of India, specializing in Foreign Exchange. I have always been very much interested in literature, philosophy and in learning different languages. Due to my love for Rabindranath Tagore’s work, I learned Bengali, to be able to appreciate the beauty of his writing in the original and to sing Rabindra Sangeet with authenticity. My hobbies are music, painting and trekking to exotic places, like Valley of Flowers. I love to travel a lot and I can never resist the call from mountains and oceans. My last favourite expedition was the island hopping cruise in Greece, exploring the archaeological wonders of many of the idyllic Greek islands. My future plans include Norwegian Fiords and Antarctic.

2. What motivated you to learn German?

In the pre-internet days having pen-friends was the most favourite hobby. And I used to have many pen-friends scattered throughout the world. My interest in German was sparked by a very close friend in Stamburg and my early foray into the language was during my college days. The rich cultural heritage of Germany and its profound contributions in the artistic, musical, literary and philosophical fields drew me into its magnetic folds. Learning German allows me access to the works of these great writers in the original language and fully experience the cultural ethos. Germans have also been in the forefront as innovators in scientific research and development and learning German helps me in expanding the horizon of my knowledge.

3. Who are your favourite German authors? And why?

Philosophy and the sciences have had remarkable contribution from German thinkers. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche have been path breaking in the field of human thought and have always remained my favourite. The literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse have always been cherished by me for their depth and profound intensity. The world of classical music is enriched by the exquisite contributions of such well-known German composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Richard Wagner and Johannes Brams. My favourite also includes the Austrians Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert. I also love the paintings of such famous Germans artists like Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Matthias Grünewald and Paul Klee (a Swiss German).

4. What advice would you give people of your age who would like to learn a foreign language?

Each new language is like an open window with a new outlook on the world and expands the horizon of our knowledge. As we explore through its enchanting maze, it gently unveils its splendour, treasures and of course its mysteries too. Learning a new language, sets free a spirit in us, that was hitherto bound and lends wings to our soul. And it is never ‘too old’ to learn a foreign language. Research has shown that learning a foreign language in old age avoids cognitive decline, stimulates the brain functions and delays significantly dementia and other mind-related diseases. It allows us above all to experience the ethos of an exotic land even without having to travel there in person.

5. Now that you are teaching German, how are you enjoying the experience?

As ‘German’ is my passion, teaching it to eager, receptive minds is extremely satisfying and every moment is an ever enjoyable experience. This also helps me in furthering my own knowledge as the famous quote of Benjamin Whichcote “There is no better way to learn than to teach.”!

6. Having learnt German do you understand the books better?

Ja, the knowledge of German has enabled me to savour the words of such great writers like Kant and Hesse after understanding them in the original and appreciate their beauty as there is no incidence of anything being “lost in translation”! As quoted by the famous Robert Frost “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”…

#language school #best language school #language school in bangalore #language learning center #Foreign language courses #Corporate training #Exam centres and preparation institute #Translation services #Foreign language centre #Foreign language exam centre #Foreign language training institute

0 notes

fantasmagoricx · 7 years

Photo

1. Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora? SoundCloud….

4. Do you like your name? Why? I adore my name. I know that no one else will have my name ever (unless,,,, mayb,,, if i ever got famous for some inane reason,,,). I also really like the meaning of my name, and that it’s a gender-neutral name in its original language. I like that it is spelt one way and pronounced another. I love the sentence it spells. I love that it’s tied to family history. I really really REALLy love my name.

6. Describe your personality in 3 words or less. Uuuuhhhh this is hard,,,,, bookish, encouraging, giggly

10. How would you describe your style? Oh mann… It’s a mish mash of everything tbh. One day I’ll be looking like a 20th century aviator and the next I’ll look like some futuristic techno space navigator… It’s very eclectic. I guess I like to compare myself to Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus though.

14. If you can live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Why? I’d love to try living in Ireland, Mexico, and Chicago. I have ancestry from Ireland and it just really intrigues me as a place to live. The culture seems very lovely. I’ve actually been to both Mexico and Chicago. I’d love to see more of mexico. Food’s delish, sights are beautiful, the ART is GORGEOUS, the Spanish is lovely. Chicago has a huuuuge puertorrican community so that’d be cool + I’d maybe be able to go to the Art Institute a lot. They bay looks p great at least from a distance and the people were very friendly. The architecture was also very inspiring. 15. Favorite snapchat filter? FLOWERCROWN!! It’s so cute??

16. Favorite makeup brand(s)? Dude I am the Worst person to ask. I buy at Walgreens and I just choose whichever has my skin tone because it is frustratingly hard to match. I guess the only “brand” things I really like are the Wet n Wild kohl eyeliners and the Revlon Ultra HD matte lipcolors.

20. How tall are you? I’m a hobbit at 5'0.

23. Describe your dream date. This is,,,, a really cute question,,, thanks ghostie. I’m really low maintenance so honestly you could tell me our date’s just crashing in my bed for a snooze and I’d be ecstatic. But that’s not my dream date. I really like stuff that has to do with nature or animals, so stuff like roadtrips with historical landmarks (lighthouses, old railway tracks, sugar mills), or driving out of the city until we find a spot remote enough we can see the stars while w a star chart, or volunteering at an aquatic animal rescue organization, really appeal to me. I also love night drives and museums a lot.

26. How many pillows do you sleep with? Four!

30. What’s your favorite candle scent? Don’t use candles often, but Lavender for incense.

32. 3 favorite girl names: Soledad Priyanka Estella-Marie

37. Do you read a lot? What’s your favorite book? I read all the time. More fanfiction than books, because of accessibility in the last three years or so, but I’m practically always reading. I have a great many favorite books. All of David Mitchell’s literary work is a joy to read and I can’t wait until he releases new stuff so I can read more. By far he is my favorite author. My fave of his books is the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Other favorites by other authors include: the Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley, the Charioteer by Mary Renault, Nightswimmer by Joseph Olshan, Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice, Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin, the Robot Series by Isaac Asimov, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, and the Once and Future King by T. H. White.

39. Do you have a nickname? What is it? I do! I have three! Wen, Wenmi (both shortened versions of my name), and Mimi!

48. Who is your role model? David Mitchell, in all honesty. I’ve just fallen in love with the man through his writing. Either that or Sidney Paget and J. C. Leyendecker.

70. What was the last concert you saw? I have no fuckening clue my dude. It was, no doubt, classical music since the last time I went to a pop concert was Elton John back in 2009.

94. Favorite lyrics right now. I’ll always love the lyrics to Act Your Age by Mimicking Birds, but right now I’m really feeling Youth by Glass Animals.

98. Favorite month? October or November…things start to cool down.

uhhhhHHHHHH I LOVE YOU!!!! @theghostchronicles mwah mwah

#tysm for asking sweetie!!!#wen answers

2 notes · View notes

thecounterplan · 7 years

Text

The Trump Era and the Death of Hypocrisy

by Brice Ezell

Politicians are a lot like lawyers: even though we know that they’re important to society, the invocation of their job title usually comes with a host of negative adjectives. Just as lawyers are slimy and deceitful, politicians are power-hungry and manipulative. Where once television shows like The West Wing depicted politics as a noble enterprise maintained by flawed if aspirational people, now the hit political show du jour is House of Cards, where Machiavelli is filtered through a questionable Southern accent. The vision of politics illustrated by House of Cards puts a von Clausewitzian spin on the enterprise of governance: politics is a continuation of scamming by other means.

Of the many negative attributes given to politicians, “hypocrite” is perhaps one of the most common. One need only look to the most recent presidential administrations in the United States to see examples of this. Barack Obama ran on a campaign of repudiating the militarism of George W. Bush, only to then maintain interventionist foreign policy through the increased use of drone strikes. The Republicans claim to be fiscal conservatives, but their new president just proposed the building of a border wall -- whose efficacy is dubious at best -- that will cost the US taxpayers (not Mexico) billions of dollars. George W. Bush was also supposed to be fiscally conservative, yet his spending decisions look far from conservative. In fact, as Derek Thompson notes for the Atlantic, compared to Reagan and Bush, Obama looks like a fiscal conservative, despite Republican claims that he represented a new era of government lavishness and excess.

These are just three examples, and it is not difficult to find more in both of the major political parties in the United States. Hypocrisy, it seems, is just a part of the game: “it’s only wrong when the other guy does it” is a common critique of both parties.

What is disheartening about the frequency of hypocrisy accusations is that they have inevitably lead to normalization. If both parties accuse each other of hypocrisy regularly enough, the accusation loses any force. Hypocrisy is so rampant in Washington DC that it has diminished the moral charge of hypocrisy, which should be no small accusation. Because being morally inconsistent is the norm, inconsistency is the new consistency.

Tracing the extent of hypocrisy in DC could (and, I think, should) be the subject of a doctoral dissertation, research grant, or book-length study. I couldn’t hope to cover the breadth of that subject in this single post. What I will claim is that in 2017, beginning with the presidency of Donald Trump, we have reached peak hypocrisy, meaning that hypocrisy no longer has any moral charge in US politics. Calling someone a hypocrite is no different than calling him a congressman.

On his own, Trump is a major problem for US governance. He has zero political experience, and his incompetence has already begun to show just weeks into his presidency. During 15 February press conference -- a spectacle of ineptitude -- Trump was asked about a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the US, to which he gave a non-answer mostly about how substantial his Electoral College victory was. (Predictably, his comments about that substantiality were false.) He has refused to disclose his tax returns, which if revealed would help make apparent his numerous conflicts of interest that should render him ineligible for the office he holds. Trump’s unrepentant mendaciousness, as evinced by his repeated lies about voter fraud and attendance at his inauguration, is a disgrace to the office of the presidency. Tellingly, those two lies aren’t in the realm of truth-stretching so commonly occupied by politicians, such as lies told to exaggerate the benefits or harms of a particular policy. (E.g. “The rollout of Healthcare.gov was great!” “Tax cuts are always good for business!”) Those lies of Trump’s are only about making him look good, and making him appear loved by his population even though he faces bleak approval ratings in the polls. That kind of lying cribs more from the tactics of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un than it does the spin doctoring that goes on in Congress.

The follies of Trump have been widely acknowledged by individuals all across the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to be a Democrat or a lefty to find Trump’s behavior abhorrent. But, shockingly enough, Trump isn’t the biggest problem in DC at the moment. The real problem is the party that has leveraged him -- despite all the ways in which Trump clearly clashes with its (supposed) ideology -- for the benefit of majority power. The real problem is the Republican Party.

David Brooks, a famous conservative commentator for The New York Times, recently wrote, “The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.” Like Norman Orenstein and Thomas E. Mann did during the end of Obama’s first term, Brooks has made a clear break with the (ostensibly) conservative party of his country. In his words, “Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.”

Brooks accurately explains the position Republicans found themselves in with Trump. Despite Trump being targeted by many of the Republican candidates for president in the 2016 primary -- among them Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Rick Perry (who now works for Trump) -- the Republicans didn’t work at all to counteract the Trumpish rise, and for an obvious reason. The party’s strategy, Brooks writes, “was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.”

“Tolerate a Trumpian circus” is an understatement on Brooks’ part. In order to embrace Trump for the strategic benefit he provides, the Republican party has to accept the following, among many other things:

1. Trump has been married three times, has openly bragged about past infidelity and sexual assault (the “grab her by the pussy” comment). This, despite the fact that the party treated Bill Clinton like the worst human being in the ‘90s for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

2. Trump’s “bring jobs back to America” plan involves giving government deals to companies like Carrier in order to save US jobs (even though the money Carrier saved on its “deal” with Trump will go in part to automation, which will render future US jobs obsolete). This, despite the fact that a repeated line of Republican criticism throughout Obama’s presidency was that the government shouldn’t “pick and choose favorites.”

3. Trump, when asked anything about the Bible, gives answers that wouldn’t fly in a second grade level Sunday School class. This, despite the fact that the Republican party claims to be the party of religion and Christianity.

I could go on. In accepting Trump to be the face of the party, despite all resistance to him throughout the primaries, the Republicans tacitly accepted his tactics as legitimate, as acceptable. There are contingents of #NeverTrump Republicans, or of non-GOP conservatives who are fighting against Trump -- 2016 independent candidate Evan McMullin being a key example. But the #NeverTrump faction is now the minority. By electing Trump, by supporting his cabinet picks, and by utilizing Trump’s demagoguery to its advantage, the Republican Party has made its allegiances firm: the GOP is the party of Trump. Conservatives who want to distance themselves from Trump either have to stage an inter-party coup or form a new conservative party. As many commentators have noted, despite Republican opposition to Trump in the primary, Trump is the natural consequence of Republican anti-governance during Obama’s term. The GOP spent years treating Obama like an illegitimate president, blocking his every move even when it confounded reason; should it be surprised that its newest president is someone who stubbornly refuses to accept the factual details of his own election?

The flagrant cases of hypocrisy listed above are but a small part of a now ever-growing catalogue. Since Trump has been elected, the duplicitousness of the GOP has swollen to almost comic proportions. The GOP arrived into the White House a shell of itself, and it is only getting more hollow with each passing day. In so doing, the party represents the culmination of the hypocrisy normalization trend that plagues DC. Hypocrisy is dead, and the Republicans -- who once, amazingly, were understood to be the party of a “Moral Majority” -- have killed it.

“Unprecedented” Obstruction: It is not controversial to call the Obama-era Republican party obstructionist. It is a fact. The party’s frothing at the mouth over Obamacare -- a policy that was initially conceived by Republican legislators in the ‘90s, and then utilized in Massachusetts by 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney -- is the focal point for its irrational anti-governance. Right now, the GOP is struggling to “repeal and replace” Obamacare without facing political blowback, and a key anti-Obamacare Republican, Paul Labrador of Idaho, asked the question that no Republican had the stones to ask during Obama’s term: “Something Republicans need to be concerned about is if we’re just going to replace Obamacare with Obamacare-lite, then it begs the question, ‘Were we just against Obamacare because it was proposed by Democrats?’”

In the face of the Trump administration’s many unqualified cabinet picks, the Democrats have at times postured toward obstruction, though by and large most Democrats have voted for Trump’s cabinet picks. (With respect to “unqualified,” one need only to Rex Tillerson, whose role as Secretary of State is being for oil what Dick Cheney was for military contractors, or Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon who turned down a post in Health and Human Services because he believed himself “unqualified” only to take a post in Housing and Urban Development, where he has zero experience.) The Democrats have also suggested potential obstruction of Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, who will fill the spot that should have gone to Merrick Garland, a widely recognized consensus pick by both parties, whose only fault is that he was nominated by Obama and had to be confirmed by an obstructionist, Republican-led senate.

Ideally, America could operate without obstruction. But in utilizing an obstructionist strategy during Obama’s presidency, the GOP legitimized obstruction. Mitch McConnell attempted to justify the reprehensible denial of Obama’s appointment of Garland on the nonsensical grounds that “the people should have a say,” even though they did have a say when they elected Obama for a four-year term, which included the year 2016. The GOP’s total contempt for democracy was made even more apparent when John McCain announced that if Hillary Clinton won, Senate Republicans would block any of her Supreme Court nominees. Did he not get McConnell’s memo about “the people having a say?”

Now that the Republicans are in charge of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, their tune on obstructionism has changed. McConnell claimed that the Democrats’ resistance against Trump’s cabinet picks -- milquetoast as it was, in many cases -- "has reached new extreme levels... [an] historic break with tradition.” This, as the BBC points out, is false, as thus far Trump doesn’t even come close to beating the timespan on Obama’s cabinet confirmations. But more importantly, even though the timeline argument McConnell made was false, the main issue is that Republicans have zero grounds to criticize obstruction. To the detriment of the country, obstruction was the GOP’s winning strategy in 2016. They can’t act surprised when others try to draw from that playbook.

youtube

Trump’s Benghazi: Imagine that, in 2016, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton conducted a hastily-planned raid on a group of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The result of the raid was the death of an elite Navy Seal, nearly 30 civilian casualties, and the destruction of a 90 million dollar plane. How would the GOP react? Would they calmly call for an investigation to see what could have been done better, and perhaps to see if anyone should be held accountable?

If you answer falls under the thesaurus entry for “no,” you are correct. The Jon Stewart clip above shows the failing of a conspiracy theory touted by the GOP in Obama’s second term: namely, that the 2012 tragic attack at at US government building in Benghazi, Libya -- which resulted in several American deaths -- was the result of a cover-up by Obama and Clinton, whose malevolence led to Americans dying at the hands of terrorists. Multiple Congressional hearings and reports later (reports, mind you, helmed by Republicans), it was revealed that while some things could have been done better with Benghazi, the event was not in any way caused by criminal negligence or conspiratorial maneuvers by Obama, Clinton, or anyone else in the executive branch.

So how did the GOP react to the not-so-hypothetical raid in Yemen I just mentioned, which Donald Trump greenlit? The White House reacted predictably, drawing from Trump’s Fisher-Price “My First Dictator” playbook, saying that any critique of the raid “emboldens the enemy.” Trump took special aim at McCain -- a decorated war veteran and former prisoner of war -- after McCain said, like a reasonable human being, “I would not describe any operation that results in the loss of American life as a success.”

Some Republicans have defended the raid. Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the raid “was worth the risk.” A select few Republicans, namely Rand Paul (of Kentucky) and Mike Lee (of Utah) have asked for a formal investigation into the matter, along with some Democratic senators. Yet while it’s too early to say that the raid was clearly Trump’s fault, as not enough evidence has come in, it’s worth asking why Benghazi -- an attack which had similarly ambiguous details -- gets ultra-politicized, and Yemen is treated with either hushed tones or a “wait and see” sensibility.

The answer is not so difficult. Brian Beutler, in an aptly titled article called “Never Believe the Republican’s B.S. Ever Again,” notes that

by Republican standards, [the Yemen raid] should be a major, impeachment-worthy scandal. Unless there’s some arbitrary minimum number of U.S. casualties (greater than one but less than four) above which administrative heads should roll, there’s no standard by which Benghazi should have become the subject of a vast, conspiratorial inquest, but the botched raid in Yemen should not.

“Draining” the Swamp: One of the better comedy sketches of this recent political season was performed on Saturday Night Live. The sketch features Bryan Cranston, who reprises his Breaking Bad role as Walter White. In the faux interview segment, White is revealed to be Donald Trump’s pick for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). “I like [Trump’s] style,” White says, “He acts first then asks questions later.”

To borrow a phrase from the short story author Justin Taylor, let that sketch serve as synecdoche for the rest of Trump’s cabinet. Like many ultra-wealthy GOP candidates before him -- Mitt Romney and all members of the Bush family especially -- Trump utilized the “blue-collar billionaire” narrative, which is anchored on the questionable premise that people who come from massive, dynastic wealth are first and foremost concerned about the plight of the working class. As far as con games go, it’s not subtle, but to Trump’s credit, it worked. But rather than try to keep the con up as he took office, Trump immediately raised taxes on middle-class homeowners on his first day in office, and then proceeded to pick a cabinet whose combined wealth is larger than the wealth owned by a third of American households.

As someone whose academic research in part deals with the confidence game and its manifestations in American culture, I’m fascinated by Trump, a con artist who makes his con obvious as he’s performing it, and then once he’s achieved his con he immediately starts undermining it. It’s a bit like imagining Ocean’s Eleven where the thieves tell the casino owner they’re going to rob him, and after successfully robbing him despite making the thievery obvious, they then dump the money in the casino pool and start swimming it Scrooge McDuck-style -- all the while never being held accountable. It’s not as fun a movie, but it is more baffling.

“Hypocrisy is a third-rate political crime,” writes Buetler. “But it isn’t just that conservatives apply different standards to different politicians on the basis of partisan affiliation; it’s that their appeals to like-minded voters are fraudulent. National security, rule of law, and religious faith are supposed to be central facets of conservative identity. Presumably some Republican voters around the country are genuinely motivated by conservative views on these issues.”

Buetler’s first sentence, calling hypocrisy a “third-rate political crime” is a predictable if sad proclamation. That hypocrisy is an expected feature of US politics -- and, perhaps, politics in Western liberal democracies more generally -- is a sorry statement about the way we get things done. I imagine some would read the title of this piece and think, “’The death of hypocrisy?’ Was hypocrisy ever a concept in the halls of Washington?”

I have no Sorkin-esque visions of a politics of grandeur based on sharp intellect and sound principle. “The good old days” never were. Graft has always existed, and politicians have always sold out their values. I also have no illusions about the other major party in the US. Although socially liberal on many issues, in terms of the major structural facets of the US government -- namely, neoliberal economics, imperial global influence -- the Democrats have a lot in common with the Republicans across the aisle. The Democrats try to make claims to being left, but contradict their own supposed values. My case here is not meant to suggest that hypocrisy is unique to one political party.

But never have I seen hypocrisy so cravenly embraced as it is by the Republican Party. It’s one thing to be hypocritical, as so many politicians are. It’s another to ostentatiously display how little one cares about being hypocritical. Consider the many lies told by the Trump administration: Trump only losing the popular vote because of “illegal voting,” supposedly widespread instances of voter fraud such as people “being bussed in to New Hampshire from other states,” the murder rate being the highest it’s been in 47 years, refugees from Middle Eastern countries being able to “just walk in” to the United States, refugees from the countries on the travel ban “posing a threat” to the United States, the Democrats are engaging in “unprecedented obstruction”.... I could go on, but it’s exhausting. And it’s only been just shy of a month.

The thing about all of those lies is that they are easily disprovable. Their untruth is so open that only those ideologically uncritical of Trump could accept them. There are none of the vagaries, equivalences, or obscurities that come with politicians trying to sell the public on a policy or on a candidate. These lies are just that: lies. Not “alternative facts.” Lies. It is one thing for Trump to deal in these lies: as a con artist, it is his purview. But for the Republican party -- supposedly principled, supposedly the party of values -- to embrace Trump and his lies in this way, is to admit that all the party really stands for is the pursuit of power. If principles get in the way of that, damn the principles. If a candidate conflicts with party ideology... well, as long as he gets the party a Supreme Court seat, all’s well in the end.

To say that politics is a pursuit of power at any cost is not a new claim on my part. As far back as Seneca, writers and thinkers have illustrated the follies of government, and how given over to so much power people can become grotesque versions of themselves, corrupted into the very thing they sought to avoid becoming. But with the election of Donald Trump, the Republican party took an especially precipitous moral fall, unlike anything in the past century of American politics.

I write this not as someone who belongs to a political party, or someone who ascribes to a particular political ideology. I write as someone who is concerned about what it means to be moral, what it means to live in a good society -- “good” here not just a practical but an ethical term. It’s one thing to joke and watch TV shows about scheming politicians and ominous negotiations in shadow-striped corridors; it’s another thing to, without any repentance or self-reflection, cast hypocrisy aside as an irrelevance. Fealty to principles doesn’t matter, as long as you get what you want. At least the Frank Underwoods of the world take to secret rooms to sell out everything they claim to believe. 2017 Republicans make no effort to hide the abandonment of their core platform, one on which they staked their entire opposition to Obama.

In response to this piece, I expect conservative supporters of Trump would say, that I’ve taken in too much “fake news”; I have a “liberal bias”; I’m not “hearing both sides.” There are no “two sides” to lies. They are just lies, and hypocrisy is hypocrisy. I don’t identify as a conservative, but everything I say in this piece could be argued by a conservative; many #NeverTrump critics have rejected lies, relativism, and the other moral failings of the Trump GOP. Can conservatives, who for so long have stressed that character matters in a politician (hence why someone like Bill Clinton can never be forgiven), honestly embrace a man who lies like it’s all he’s done his life? Can conservatives support a man whose idea of “bringing jobs back to America” involves the kind of government intervention and “picking favorites” that Republicans have decried for years? The damage Trump has done should matter greatly to conservatives, for his toxic politics have now permanently tarnished the conservative bonafides of the GOP.

If conservatives truly stand for the importance of character and the importance of being a good person, they cannot “Yes, but...” with Trump. No “Yes, Trump is a liar, but we at least got a Supreme Court seat out of it, and now Roe v. Wade might be overturned.” No “Yes, Trump has bragged about sexual assault and routinely disrespects women, but at least Obamacare might be repealed.” Statements like that can be translated thus: “Right and wrong do not matter, as long as I get X, Y, and Z goals.” What makes that statement even worse is that there is no guarantee those goals will come about. Although conservatives have been chomping at the bit to get a conservative majority court to overturn Roe v Wade, most forget that it was a conservative court that gave the Roe verdict, and it was a conservative court that upheld Planned Parenthood v. Casey. By playing the relativism game in backing Trump, the GOP sold its soul, all for only the possibility that it might get its way this time around. Perhaps the GOP will get what it wants. But like Faust, the party has forgotten that, eventually, the devil comes to get his due.

There’s great if minor scene in the first season of Community between the characters Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) and Ian Duncan (John Oliver). Winger has returned to community college in order to earn a bachelor’s degree after having faked having a degree to be a lawyer. Disbarred and itching to get back into law at the earliest possible moment, Jeff believes he’s found an opportunity to skate by during his return to college: have Duncan, an old friend and professor at the college, steal the answers for all of his tests. Jeff and Duncan meet to discuss the possible theft:

DUNCAN: Suppose I was to say to you it was possible to get those test answers. JEFF: I would say go for that. And could have said so in a text. DUNCAN: I’m asking you if you know the difference between right and wrong. JEFF: (Beat) I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I could make anything right or wrong. So either I’m God, or truth is relative. And in either case, boo-yah. DUNCAN: Interesting. It’s just that the average person has a much harder time saying “boo-yah” to moral relativism.

I wish I had the faith that Duncan does in the average person. But for now, I live in Trump’s America. Boo-yah.

#Donald Trump #Republicans #GOP #Democrats #hypocrisy #politics

2 notes · View notes

williamlwolf89 · 4 years

Text

56 Writing Quotes to Motivate, Inspire, & Kick Your Butt in 2020

I love writing quotes.

A good quote can uplift you. It can encourage you when you feel like giving up. It can inspire you when you need a tiny lil’ spark to start writing.

In this simple, easy-to-read resource, I’ve compiled a list of positive quotes about writing, written by some of the world’s greatest literary minds, both past and present:

17 Inspirational Writing Quotes

24 Quotes About Writing

15 Writing Quotes of Encouragement

Let’s jump in.

17 Inspirational Writing Quotes (Or, Quotes to Kick You in the Rear)

1. You fail only if…

“You fail only if you stop writing.” (Click to Tweet) — Ray Bradbury

2. Type a little faster…

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” (Click to Tweet) — Isaac Asimov

3. Do it for joy…

“I’ve written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side — I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” (Click to Tweet) — Stephen King

4. You must write it…

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” (Click to Tweet) — Toni Morrison

5. Taste life…

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” (Click to Tweet) — Anaïs Nin

6. Don’t water it down…

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; (and) don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” (Click to Tweet) — Franz Kafka

7. Write every day of your life…

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” (Click to Tweet) — Ray Bradbury

8. Write something worth reading…

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” (Click to Tweet) — Benjamin Franklin

9. Cut it to the bone…

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” (Click to Tweet) — Stephen King

10. Everything in life is writable…

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (Click to Tweet) — Sylvia Plath

11. How vain is it…

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” (Click to Tweet) — Henry David Thoreau

12. What is written without effort…

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” (Click to Tweet) — Samuel Johnson

13. Change more lives…

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.” (Click to Tweet) — Jon Acuff

14. Don’t quit…

“You can’t fail if you don’t quit. You can’t succeed if you don’t start.” (Click to Tweet) — Michael Hyatt

15. That’s how you create art…

“Write something that’s worth fighting over. Because that’s how you change things. That’s how you create art.” (Click to Tweet) — Jeff Goins

16. Determination never does…

“Inspiration may sometimes fail to show up for work in the morning, but determination never does.” (Click to Tweet) — K.M. Weiland

17. No such thing as writer’s block…

“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.” (Click to Tweet) — Terry Pratchett

24 Quotes About Writing (Or, Writers on Writing)

1. No greater agony…

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” (Click to Tweet) — Maya Angelou

2. Every secret of a writer’s soul…

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” (Click to Tweet) — Virginia Woolf

3. Show me the glint of light…

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” (Click to Tweet) — Anton Chekhov

4. Surprise…

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost

5. The first draft…

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

6. One of the exquisite pleasures of writing…

“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

7. The difference between…

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” (Click to Tweet) — Mark Twain

8. The whooshing sound…

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” (Click to Tweet) — Douglas Adams

9. Write as clearly as I can…

“The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

10. Words can be like x-rays…

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

11. Do not use semicolons…

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. (…) All they do is show you’ve been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

12. Find the right words…

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

13. When I sit down to write…

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell

14. Only a great man can write it…

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

15. Leave out the parts…

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” — Elmore Leonard

16. Have something to say…

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

17. My courage is reborn…

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank

18. A person is a fool to become a writer…

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” (Click to Tweet) — Roald Dahl

19. No one knows…

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

20. To discover…

“I write to discover what I know.” — Flannery O’Connor

21. Wants to be written…

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L’Engle

22. Writing is easy…

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” (Click to Tweet) — Gene Fowler

23. Never have to change…

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” — Saul Bellow

24. Surviving the rollercoaster…

“Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.” (Click to Tweet) — Joanna Penn

15 Writing Quotes of Encouragement

1. Waited for perfection…

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” (Click to Tweet) — Margaret Atwood

2. A thousand story ideas…

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” (Click to Tweet) — Orson Scott Card

3. Start writing…

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” (Click to Tweet) — Louis L’Amour

4. A writer needs three things…

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” — William Faulkner

5. Didn’t quit…

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

6. One true sentence…

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway

7. Part of the learning process…

“You have to resign yourself to wasting lots of trees before you write anything really good. That’s just how it is. It’s like learning an instrument. You’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. That’s just part of the learning process.” (Click to Tweet) — J.K. Rowling

8. Road to achievement…

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

9. Writing is more difficult…

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

10. Tell it as best you can…

“(…) write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” (Click to Tweet) — Neil Gaiman

11. What you have to say…

“Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” — Barbara Kingsolver

12. Pouring yourself into your work…

“When you are pouring yourself into your work and bringing your unique perspective and skills to the table, then you are adding value that only you are capable of contributing.” (Click to Tweet) — Todd Henry

13. Like driving a car at night…

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” — E. L. Doctorow

14. Be brave…

“We were born to be brave.” (Click to Tweet) — Bob Goff

15. Start somewhere…

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” (Click to Tweet) — Anne Lamott

What are Your Favorite Writing Quotes?

There are thousands upon thousands of inspirational quotes about writing.

What’s your favorite?

Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author: When he’s not busy telling waitresses, baristas, and anyone else who crosses his path that Jon Morrow once said he was in the top 1% of bloggers, Kevin J. Duncan is Smart Blogger’s Editor in Chief.

The post 56 Writing Quotes to Motivate, Inspire, & Kick Your Butt in 2020 appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/writing-quotes/

1 note · View note

networkingdefinition · 4 years

Text

Chili Quotes

Official Website: Chili Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

• A little blue-eyed blonde in a red hot sweater, wants to spice my chili, I think I’ll let her. – Toby Keith • All this talkin’ about eatin’ is makin’ me awful hungry. I’ll have two chili burgers with an order of fries, onion rings and a chocolate milk shake. And a Strawberry Ice Cream Sundae-with pickles. – George Lindsey • Any man that eats Chili and Cornbread can’t be all bad – Carroll Shelby • Anything that improves people’s expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili’s or T.G.I. Friday’s is definitely a win for the good guys. – Anthony Bourdain • As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it’s laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe – we are happiest when we are creating. – Gary Hamel

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Chili', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_chili').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_chili img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Chili dogs, funnel cakes, fried bread, majorly greasy pizza, candy apples, ye gods. Evil food smells amazing — which is either proof that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn’t actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can’t decide. – Jim Butcher • Chili is much improved by having had a day to contemplate its fate. – John Steele Gordon • Chili is not so much food as a state of mind. Addictions to it are formed early in life and the victims never recover. On blue days in October, I get this passionate yearning for a bowl of chili, and I nearly lose my mind. – Margaret Cousins • Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter. – Rex Stout • Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder. – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni • Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff. – Kobe Bryant • Early readers assumed the Book of Mormon people ranged up and down North and South America from upstate New York to Chili. A close reading of the text reveals it cannot sustain such an expansive geography. – Richard Bushman • Embarrassment felt a lot like eating chili peppers. It burned in the back of your throat and there was nothing you could do to make it go away. You just had to take it, suffer from it, until it eased off. – Sarah Addison Allen • From 1973 to 1982 I ate the exact same lunch everyday . Turkey chili in a bowl made out of bread . Bread bowl George. First you eat the chili then you eat the bowl . There’s nothing more satisfying than looking down after lunch and seeing nothing but a table. – George Steinbrenner • I bet you a handful of Chili’s coupons that Jesus had a foot fetish. – Corey Taylor • I have my once-a-month nachos, but it’s soy cheese and turkey chili on it, so it’s somewhat safe. But it’s still a big vice for me, because I have a big bowl of it. – Jenny McCarthy • I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas. – Calvin Trillin • I love that whole princess mentality, but I also like throwing my hair in a ponytail and just wearing jeans, going on a hike and then eating a big chili-cheesebur ger. – Jennifer Love Hewitt • I love to cook. I make an award-winning turkey chili. – Joely Fisher • I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce. – Terry Pratchett • I set up stations, buy a big vat of chili, and then guests do what they want to do – and I still get to party. – Emily Henderson • I used to like eating frozen corn straight out of the bag. But I also love microwaving frozen corn and adding butter and sugar and garlic powder and chili powder to it. And sometimes I just like to microwave it and add a little bit of hot sauce to it. My friends always laugh at me when they catch me eating it. – Thu Tran • If I were a food, I’d be a Chili because you know.. I’m hot. – Louis Tomlinson • If the waitress has dirty ankles, the chili is good. – Al McGuire • If you are a bad putter, you will not make a putt. If you have a tendency to chili-dip wedges, you’ll be chili-dipping them all over the place for sure. Whatever your weakness, it will come up in spades during the Ryder Cup. – Johnny Miller • If you want to make a chili, you’re going to break some cows. – Merlin Mann • In the Chili Peppers I’m a part of that world in a pretty big world and that’s just the way it is. – John Frusciante • It stinks of trains and that chili with the chocolate in it. Ooooh, books!” he exclaimed suddenly, making a beeline for the small library. (Al) – Kim Harrison • It’s a cold bowl of chili when love lets you down. – Neil Young • I’ve been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue’s interesting, because it’s one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to – there’s tremendous traditions; there’s secrecy. – Nathan Myhrvold • Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind. – Jane Hirshfield • My dad gave me a haircut… and it wasn’t a very good one. When I went out of the house, my friends got on my case and said it looked like someone put a chili bowl over my head and cut around it. – Chili Davis • My music is rock. I listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers and I listen to one of my songs, and if I don’t give you the same emotion, then I go back and re-spit. – Kanye West • Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili. – Harry James • Oh God almighty, another Detroit monster is Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. Their music is intoxicating between Flea and Chad Smith. They’re contemporary because they’re still making good records, but I don’t think there’s anything new that has a groove and soulfulness. The Chili Peppers just stink of soul-and that’s the ultimate compliment. They continue what James Brown created. – Ted Nugent • On Bill Clinton: “If left to my own devices, I’d spend all my time pointing out that he’s weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal. – Molly Ivins • On Hillary Clinton, who was an ardent Goldwater supporter in 1964: ‘If he’d let his wife run business, I think he’d be better off. … I just like the way she acts. I’ve never met her, but I sent her a bag of chili, and she invited me to come to the White House some night and said she’d cook chili for me. Someday, maybe.’ – Barry Goldwater • One day, I’ll be listening to a bunch of Ray Charles, the next day it’s nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next day it might be Tupac all day. – J. Cole • Opening cans of chili in zero gravity to see how it looks, that’s something that went wrong. – Trish Sie • People were going to geometry class and I was swimming through vats of chili on ‘Even Stevens.’ It was like a dream! – Shia LaBeouf • Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it. FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl’s head. – P. J. O’Rourke • She looks uptown, but she ain’t really. She’s into football, she likes my chili. – John Anderson • Take me ham away, take away my eggs, even my Chili, but leave me my newspaper. – Will Rogers • Tension translates to your guests. They’ll have a much better time having chili and baked potatoes than they would if you did roast duck with a wild cherry sauce and then had to lie down and cry for a while. – Nigella Lawson • The chili I ate made for an explosive bathroom experience. I don’t know how to put this delicately, but I missed the toilet entirely. – Seth Green • The Chili Peppers have a real strict two-week on/two-week off policy – aside from me, everybody has families. – Josh Klinghoffer • The guy we want to get is the guy who did the Aerosmith album which is coming out in two days, and a Chili Peppers album, and a couple of Pearl Jam albums. We want to get someone that will sort of bring out the high energy aspect more than the dreaminess that was on the last album. – Mike Gordon • The suit was so clumsy, being pressurized, it was impossible to get two hands comfortably on the handle and it’s impossible to make any kind of a turn. It was kind of a one-handed chili-dip. – Alan Shepard • This is my dream. I ain’t giving up. I see a band like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and they’ve had their ups and downs, but they’ve continued with heart. We look up to that. I see Papa Roach being around for another 15 years. We’ve always wanted to be a career band. – Jacoby Shaddix • When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s. – Anthony Bourdain • When Lollapalooza started, and I was really into Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden. I went to that Lollapalooza tour twice, I think. – Adam Richman

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

0 notes