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Unbelievable,” Audrey’s voice squeaked as I pushed past her. “Here we are, talking to you about your freaky little-boy encounter back in Breaux Bridge and how your caramel macchiato tasted like cardboard, and boom! You just zone out like one of the kids from Children of the Corn.” “Um, Aud, babe … I don’t think those kids zone out. They’re just freaky twenty-four-seven. It’s a year-round thing.” Gabe’s response drew a half-hearted laugh from me, but it was quickly reined in when I reached the Book of the Ancients. “Whatever, Gabriel,” Audrey said to him. “My point is, it’s freaky, okay? She gets this glazed-over look in her eyes, like she’s gonna whip out a butcher knife and go all Michael Myers on us or something.” I glanced over my shoulder to cock an eyebrow at her. “Oh, now you pay attention.” She cocked an eyebrow back. “What is it with you and the cheesy horror-movie references?” Gabe muttered. “Hey, now. Halloween is a classic,” Gavin scolded him. “Don’t go hating on the classics. ↗
#fantasy #halloween #michael-myers #resistance-trilogy #romance
If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. ↗
Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching. ↗
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. (writing about US President Warren G. Harding) ↗
ーEscribí algo para ti, ーla corrigió con una sonrisa y comenzó a tocar. Ella escuchó emocionada; comenzó lento, sencillo, su control sobre el arco producía un sonido armónico. La melodía la lleno tan fresca y dulce como el agua, tan esperanzadora y adorable como un amanecer. Miró a sus dedos fascinada por el movimiento tan exquisito que hacia que las notas salieran del violín. El sonido se volvió mas profundo conforme el arco se movía mas rápido, el antebrazo de Jem se desplazaba hacia adelante y atrás, su delgado cuerpo parecía difuminarse con el movimiento de su hombro. Sus dedos se deslizaban cuidadosamente arriba y abajo, el tono de la música profundizó, como nubes de tormenta reuniéndose en un horizonte brillante, un río que se convertía en torrente. Las notas se estrellaban a sus pies aumentando el sonido, el cuerpo entero de Jem parecía moverse en sintonía con los sonidos que emanaban del instrumento, a pesar de que ella sabia que sus pies se encontraban firmes en el suelo. Su corazón encontró la paz con la música, los ojos de Jem estaban cerrados, las comisuras de sus labios mostraban un gesto de dolor. Una parte de ella quería correr a sus pies, rodearlo con sus brazos; la otra otra parte no quería que se detuviera la música, el hermoso sonido de él. Era como si él hubiera tomado su arco utilizándolo como un pincel para pintar, creando un lienzo en el cual su alma se muestra claramente. Cuando las ultimas notas se alzaron más y más alto, llegando a tocar el paraíso, Tessa estuvo consciente de que su rostro estaba húmedo, pero no fue hasta que la ultima nota dejo de sonar y él bajo el violín cuando se dio que estaba llorando. ↗
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood County Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twientieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis! ↗
The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law. ↗
I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant. Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!" It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility. ↗
The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products. ↗
#capitalism #capitalist-realism #charity #consumerism #cultural-capitalism
For a time, the word Weltpolitik seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations. Weltpolitik meant the quest to expand foreign markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things, Weltpolitik never acquired a stable or precise meaning. Even Bernhard von Bulow, widely credited with establishing Weltpolitik as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the "free hand" with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. "We are supposed to be pursuing Weltpolitik," the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. "If only I knew what that was supposed to be. ↗
