30 September 2007

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28 September 2007

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We're all getting old

Madonna, The Beastie Boys and John Cougar Mellencamp have been nominated for inductions into the RnR Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

The other random nominees are: Donna Summer, CHIC ("Good Times"/"Le Freak"), stupid Afrika Bambaataa, Leonard Cohen!, The Dave Clark Five and The Ventures ("Walk Don't Run"/"Hawaii 5-0")



No CHIC, no rap?

From CHIC's 1979 "Risqué" album, the lead track "Good Times" became one of the most important and influential songs ever.

The track formed the backbone of Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel" and the Sugarhill Gang's breakthrough hip-hop single, "Rapper's Delight", and has been endlessly sampled since by many dance and hip hop acts.

Sugarhill Gang's song inspired Blondie's 1980 hit, "Rapture" which is considered by some to be the second major hip-hop hit after "Rapper’s Delight" and also Queen's hit, "Another One Bites the Dust".

So basically: no CHIC, no hip-hop.

Fun Fact: CHIC's most famous song "Le Freak" features that famous chorus:
"Aaaaaaahh freak out!
Le Freak, c'est chic "
But it was supposed to go"Aaaaaaah FUCK OFF!".

The line was directed at Studio 54. It was New Years Eve 1977. CHIC was all dressed up and ready to party with Grace Jones. They get to the door, their names aren't on the list, doorman ain't having it and tells them to get lost. CHIC is pissed. They bought some cheap champagne from a bodega, went back to their flat and wrote "Fuck Off". It was later changed at the request of the label to "Freak out" and the song became "Le Freak".

"Le Freak" went on to become the highest selling record ever on Atlantic Records, and the highest-selling single ever for the Warner Music Group until it was displaced in 1990 by Madonna's "Vogue". And now they're both up for nomination to the Hall of Fame together.

Like how I tied that all up at the end? That's tight.

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Sufjan Stevens, YO!


Sufjan Stevens is coming to BAM in November...

"THE BQE" ...COMPOSED AND PERFORMED BY SUFJAN STEVENS
NOV 1—3 AT 8PM @ BAM HOWARD GILMAN OPERA HOUSE
RUNNING TIME: APPROX 90MIN
TICKETS: $20, 25, 35, 50

"A prolific singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer with a penchant for storytelling, Sufjan Stevens reveals the epic in the everyday in songs infusing the vernacular of Midwestern folk with a distinctly orchestral grandeur. Stevens pairs orchestrated selections of both new and old material with the 25th Next Wave Festival commission/world premiere of The BQE—a symphonic and cinematic exploration of one of New York's least celebrated monuments: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Robert Moses' controversial 11.7-mile roadway tears through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with the brute force of modern urban planning, and in Stevens' hands becomes an evocation of the intersection of intimate experience and the American Dream. Merging a virtual road trip shot on film with a live band and orchestral ensemble, The BQE discovers abstract patterns and stories in the snaking traffic, potholed pavement, billboards, badly marked exits, and beautiful city views, revealing what happens when Manifest Destiny converges with urban blight. "

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My boy Jose Gonzalez will be playing the new Music Hall of Williamsburg Saturday night. He's probably best known for his cover of that Knife song "Heartbeats" and that Sony advert, but he's got some other songs too. Anyway, thats Saturday @ 8pm @ Music Hall of Williamsburg - 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg. Tickets are $20

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Oh, Gina



Gina Gershon, widely recognized and beloved for her Broadway and film acting career, will debut music from her new recording In Search Of Cleo.

Anointed an "indie movie stalwart" by the LA Times, Gershon, together with a band of five and a dancing cast of three, will introduce the audiences at The Box to the true and unique story revealed in her songs.

In Search Of Cleo recalls the true story of the search and recovery of Gershon's lost cat Cleo.

Gershon wrote or co-wrote every song on the record, except for Linda Perry's "Watch Over Me". The album is Gershon's first for which each song was written entirely for her own voice and artistic expression.

The theme, woven among the album's 10 songs, focuses on the literal and metaphoric experience of the search, not just for Cleo, but for love. With biting humor, country, blues and jazz influenced singing and a splash of sexy, the show will reveal the desperation and beauty of the search. "Drinking theater, instead of dinner theater", says Gina. Oh, you!

Although Gershon began her career as a "song and dance girl" before turning her attention seriously to acting, In Search Of Cleo is her first recording. Sam Mendes brought her back into the world of musical theater by asking her to take the role of Sally Bowles in the Tony Award-winning Cabaret. Gershon has gone on to give unforgettable performances in several indie films including Showgirls, Bound, Face/Off, The Insider and most recently, Tom DiCillo's Delirious.

Ginaface will be at The Box every Sunday and Monday night for the month of October. The Box is a gorgeous little spot on the Lower East Side on Chrystie near Rivington. 212-982-9301

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When the sun shines, we’ll shine together
Told you I'll be here forever
Said I'll always be a friend
Took an oath I'ma stick it out till the end
Now that it's raining more than ever
Know that we'll still have each other
You can stand under my umbrella
You can stand under my umbrella
Ella ella a a a
Under my umbrella
Ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella a a a a a
Under my umbrella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella
Ella ella a a a a a a Ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella a a a Ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella
Under my umbrella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella a a a
Ella ella a a a a a a Under my a a a a a a a a Ella ella ella ella ella ella ella ella a a a Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella A A A A A A A A A A A A A

sorry, my CD is all scratched up

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The Best Things In Life Are Free...

Best Craigslist in ages:


Reply to: pers-431649184@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-09-25, 11:07AM EDT

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I'm tired of beating around the bush. I'm a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I'm articulate and classy. I'm not from New York. I'm looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don't think I'm overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that's where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won't get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she's not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:

- Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms

-What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won't hurt my feelings

-Is there an age range I should be targeting (I'm 25)?

- Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I've seen really 'plain jane' boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I've seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What's the story there?

- Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

- How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults - I'm putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I'm being up front about it. I wouldn't be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn't able to match them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.


But sweetheart, why would your queries stop there? I like a girl with ambition; don't you want to know the meaning of life and why the sky is blue?! and ew, why ever would you want to live on CPW?!

Also, the "Jobs I should look out for?" query, you've got it covered. No one else makes money like that, except maybe your drug dealers drug dealer.

Oh, and all the hedge fund people will be at my house tonight; eating domestic yellow American, Planters roasted peanuts and watching Howard TV. Come by; its the bottom bell. Yes, I rent.

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"Caaaaaaaaan Youuuuuu Dig It ??!!"

Your boy Obama thinks he's Cyrus; yesterday at Washington Square Park.






"Caaaaaaaaan Youuuuuu Dig It ??!!"



Sold out seats to hear Barack Obama speak last night in Washington Square. Loose joints anyone?

Barack mentioned that he "used to hang out in Washington Square Park" and that he knew "a little something about Greenwich Village."

When one supporter yelled "We love you Obama", the senator from Illinois said, "I love you back." BARF.

An NYU freshman told the Washington Square News, "Barack Obama is the most gangster politician to ever come to Washington" and that "Hell yeah!" he would vote for him.

Many reports say that the crowd was around 25,000 people, but The Times said that the the number was "impossible to verify" but that the "audience was one of the largest [for Obama] of the year." The Post says the crowd was around 15,000 strong.

I was busy rummaging through panty drawers in the NYU CAS dorms at the time.

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Never, ever, feed them after midnight...


Animal rights activists are pissed... Someone has been setting domestic rabbits free all over the place out on Long Island; dropping rabbits on roadways, in parks and near school grounds on the South Shore of Long Island.

Earlier this month, a man was seen dumping 20 rabbits in a box at a train station and driving away! "Promise you'll write!"

Obviously domesticated rabbits can't fend for themselves in the wild and some end up starving to death or being killed by raccoons. Awww rabbits vs. raccoons!

The Nassau County SPCA is trying to figure out who is responsible for dumping thumper, and the Rabbit Rescue Group was offering a $5,000 reward. It sounds like someone is raising rabbits and trying to get out of the business. They should have an NQA rabbit drop off at your local police precinct or firehouse.

So, speaking of rabbits...

"Coney Island" comes from The Dutch name for the island "Conyne Eylandt" or Konijn Eiland which means Rabbit Island!

This name (Konijn Eiland) is found on the New Netherland map of 1639 by Johannes Vingboon where New York State and New York City are Dutch Settlements referred to as New Netherland and New Amsterdam respectively.

As with other Long Island barrier islands at the time, Coney Island was virtually overrun with rabbits, and rabbit hunting was common until the resorts were developed and most open space eliminated.

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Martin Scorsese making documentary about George Harrison

"Harrison's music and his search for spiritual meaning is a story that still resonates today and I'm looking forward to delving deeper," Scorsese said yesterday.

George Harrison's widow, Olivia, said, "It would have given George great joy to know that Martin Scorsese has agreed to tell his story."

Scorsese, who won his first Academy Award this year for directing "The Departed," has made other films focusing on music stars, including the 2005 documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" and of course 1978's classic "The Last Waltz" about The Band.



George Harrison was born in Liverpool, England, and was the youngest Beatle. He died in November of 2001 after battling lung cancer and a brain tumor. He was 58.

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I Heart Germany


All Hail Technoviking! - Watch more free videos

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27 September 2007

Jihad RSVP's Rosie

Muslim jihadist leaders being interviewed for some new book were ecstatic about statements from O'Donnell regarding the war in Iraq and the global war on terror.

So ecstatic that they've extended an invite to Rosie to come hang with them in their secret lair in the West Bank, anytime!

"We welcome Rosie O'Donnell to stay among us and to get to know the truth from being here, like many American peace activists are doing," said Ala Senakreh, West Bank chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist organisation.

Al Aqsa is a Palestinian outfit that claims to have killed hundreds of Israelis in multiple suicide bombings since 2000.

Rosie made serious waves when she told Elisabeth Hasselbeck and "The View" audience that people shouldn't "fear the terrorists" because they're "mothers and fathers," and has pushed the conspiracy theory that the collapse of WTC 7 was engineered by the government.

"When it comes from persons like Rosie... it takes a more serious significance. I guess she knows what she is saying," says Senakreh, the leader of the prolific Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist organisation.

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My new favourite band

The Broken Bottle Band
Live @ Washington Square Park


Music Nation has an interesting little article on some NYC street musicians and how much they claim to pull in per hour or per day. Some of these dudes are making more than me playing in the tube! At least, they claim they are.



The stupid Naked Cowboy says he makes about $1,000 in a 10 hour day; which is about $400,000 a year! Soloists in the NY Philharmonic only pull in about $100,000 a year!

Street Musicians {Music Nation}
Busking for the Big Bucks {Gothamist}

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Saddam said Lets Make A Deal: asked Bush for $1B to go into exile

It has been found Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq.

Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for $1 Billion.

The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar at the President's Texas ranch.

The White House has refused to comment.

But, if verified, it is certain to raise questions over whether the costly 4-year war could have been averted.

Only yesterday, the Bush administration asked Congress for another $200 Billion to finance the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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They even drink from the same fountains!
I mean, its just wonderful!

God, Bill O'Reilly is just so fucking racist; the more he defends and sees nothing wrong with what he said, the clearer it becomes; the man is a pig-headed demagogue floating in a delusional insulated warped zone where he has lost the concept of reality.

"Bill O'Reilly continued to claim that he wasn't being racist when expressing his surprise that a dinner at Harlem soul food restaurant Sylvia's was extremely pleasant. Media watchdog group Media Matters distributed text and clips of O'Reilly's radio show where the conservative talking head explained,

"I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

I smell a new show on FOX: "When Blacks Behave"!

"And when CNN's Rick Sanchez picked up the story, O'Reilly lashed out at both Media Matters and CNN and tried to stamp some of the fallout by having his Sylvia's dining partner, the Reverend Al Sharpton, on The O'Reilly Factor last night.

After first discussing the Jena 6 case, Sharpton said he hadn't heard the tape but "What I read was surprising and disturbing." Sharpton went onto say that his words had been distorted by the media before so "I will be as fair to you as you have been to me. I will listen to the tape, and I will give my judgment." He added that he and O'Reilly go to dinner in Harlem once a year and that O'Reilly has never said anything offensive. O'Reilly kept mentioning how he picked up the tab, but Sharpton said, "You should pick up the tab - you make more money!" O'Reilly spoke to the Washington Post about the point he was trying to make:

"Anyone who listens to the tape [of the radio show] and is fair-minded will tell you this was an intelligent conversation about race.... Aren't they supposed to be in the business of honesty over there" at CNN?

His point, he said, is that "some whites fear blacks based on irrational notions. They're afraid to go into Sylvia's, they're afraid to go to Harlem. But there's nothing different in Sylvia's than any other place in the U.S."
The NY Times says that Sylvia's president and CEO, Ken Woods, (son of restaurant founder Sylvia Woods), "seemed to take the publicity in stride": “I was surprised that after all these years in business he would have thought that he would’ve possibly seen something different. He’s welcome to come again.” But Assemblyman Keith Wright wondered, “In the year 2007, if he’s surprised that black folks can sit in a restaurant and have cordial conversations, where has he been all these years?” He's been attending klan rallies, thats where!

If Imus was forced off the air for his remarks, than O'Reilly needs to go even more. Imus is/was an out of touch windbag trying to make a joke using young, urban street slang on a slow news week; whereas O'Reilly has shown his true colours yet again.

O'Reilly is fucking Archie Bunker; a senescent, intolerant, xenophobic relic. What he said was the indicium of a narrow minded segregationist and he needs to be outed once and for all.

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When words get in the way,
Bush gets phonetic on dat azz



I actually first learned of this story from the little news monitor on the elevator here; which is normally only good for the weather and the Cleveland Indians scores.

"So when Bush addressed the U.N. on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a
rare glimpse of the special guidance POTUS gets for major addresses.
"
When I saw the headline "President George W Bush's phonetic teleprompter revealed", instinctively I thought "Wow, this guy is a true buffoon" but then I read further and the things they'd sounded out for him were pretty justified.

"It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.

Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray)."

This is a great example of how bullshit travels and you've really gotta take everything with a grain of salt because just reading the headline "Bush's UN Speech Full of Fone-eh-tick ..." instantly evokes mental images of a teleprompter with words like "America" and "Iran" spelled out phonetically when in fact I take no issue with the words above and anyone that does is full of shit and just looking for another reason to bury Bush.

I'm not defending your boy Bush at all, at all; but sometimes I get sick of everyone burying the dude.

I believe in a united front; especially during a time of war. When it seems like an entire country hates their leader, a leader they elected into office, it just makes us look stupid to the rest of the world. This is the dude we put into office, never forget that, folks.

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Amy's new shirt


Looks like Amyhead got a new polo sweater for her 24th birthday a few weeks ago; her meth jeans look nice and clean but what the fuck are those things on her feet? Heels?! AMY! I guess her ballet flats are at the cobbler. Oh, Amy.

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Art imitating life imitating art:
Hedge Funds in Hollywood

Popular culture, which is created by some of the least business-savvy people on the planet, has always been slow to latch onto business and economic trends. The covers of large-circulation magazines are a good contrary indicator. And TV, movies, and books are even worse. Twelve to 15 months can elapse between the first formal pitch of a new sitcom and the debut of the pilot. With movies and books, the lead times are even longer. By the time the film hits the multiplex or the book shows up on Amazon, the business phenomenon it describes has frequently gone bust—which is why hedge-fund managers and their investment-banking cousins should be very worried about the onslaught of Wall Street-themed pop culture.

We've seen this before. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities timed the zeitgeist—and the market—perfectly, debuting in October 1987, the month the 1980s bull market came to a crashing end. But Oliver Stone's Wall Street didn't hit the theaters until December 1987 and tanked at the box office as a result. After a few punk years, Wall Street caught fire again in the mid-1990s. But programming executives didn't catch on to the new wave until much later. Darren Star, who had neatly captured a cultural moment with HBO's Sex and the City, rolled out The $treet on Fox in the fall of 2000. This show about the professional and personal lives of attractive employees at a New York brokerage firm arrived at a time when Wall Street was falling out of favor, and lasted just 12 episodes, one more than Bull, which was also about the professional and personal lives of attractive employees at a New York brokerage. The real-estate bubble produced the ABC sitcom Hot Properties, a bawdy sendup of the lives of four attractive real-estate brokers. It debuted in the fall of 2005, just as housing prices were about to peak, and went into foreclosure after 13 unfunny episodes.

Real estate has been replaced in the public's imagination by hedge funds, private-equity firms, and really rich people—who are enjoying record bonuses, a degree of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, and a popular-culture renaissance. For the last several months, analysts (and envious journalists) have been eager to call a top in the phenomenon of extreme wealth creation, pointing to phenomena like the explosion of hedge funds, or Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman's over-the-top birthday party, or this summer's credit crunch. But the best signals of the impending fall of the ultra-rich can be found in TV Guide.

The fall slate includes Dirty Sexy Money, an ABC drama about an insanely rich and charmingly dysfunctional American family based in New York ("they put the upper in Upper East Side"). And Big Shots, an ABC drama about four insanely rich and charmingly dysfunctional corporate hot shots based in New York. And Cashmere Mafia, an ABC drama about four insanely rich and charmingly dysfunctional female corporate hot shots based in New York. (Frances O'Connor plays Zoe, a "top investment banker.") The sidekick on CBS's new vampire show, Moonlight, is "eternally young, wealthy and mischievous Josef, a hedge fund trader who relishes his uniqueness."

And there's more to come. Doug Ellin, who developed Entourage for HBO, is making an HBO series based on a hedge fund. He hired writers this summer and hopes to launch the series next summer alongside Season 5 of Entourage. Ellin and his crew better hurry, though. If this fall's TV slate isn't enough to make you think big, New York-based money is overplayed, other news coming out of Hollywood should. Fortune reports that Michael Douglas has committed to reprise his role of Gordon Gekko in a sequel to Wall Street. By rights, the new Gekko should have evolved from a corporate raider into a hedge-fund manager or a private-equity honcho. But at least one Hollywood-type has learned from history. Cognizant of the fact that movies can be extremely poor market timers, screenwriter Stephen Schiff is hedging his bets. "I don't want to date the film," Schiff told Fortune when asked about Gekko's professional life. "With what's going on right now, the question is: Where will the unassailable money end up? It might not be hedge funds."

By Daniel Gross

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Wall of Sound Walks



The bizarre Phil Spector case has ended with a mistrial; the jury unable to decide whether he was guilty or innocent of murder.

"Simply put, there was rock 'n' roll before Phil Spector and then there was rock 'n' roll after Phil Spector," says Geoff Boucher, a writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Phil Spector was born into a Jewish family in the Bronx, 1939; but following his father's suicide in 1949, Spector and his mother and sister moved to Los Angeles in 1953, where he first became involved with music. Years later he'd reinvent rock 'n' roll; influencing everyone from The Beatles to Bruce Springsteen.

The originator of the famous "Wall of Sound" production technique, Spector pioneered the girl group sound of the 60's with his work with The Ronettes.

Spector produced everyone from Leonard Cohen to The Ramones to Ike and Tina to George Harrison.

Spector co-wrote "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" for The Righteous Brothers. This song held the title for most U.S. radio airplay in the 20th century!



Spector was already known as a temperamental and quirky personality with strong, often unconventional ideas about musical and recording techniques. Despite the trend towards multi-channel recording, Spector was vehemently opposed to stereo releases, claiming that it took control of the record's sound away from the producer in favour of the listener. Spector also greatly preferred singles to albums, describing LP's as, "two hits and ten pieces of junk".

Spector's trademark, the so-called Wall of Sound, was a production technique yielding a dense, layered effect that reproduced well on AM radios and jukeboxes. To attain this signature sound, Spector gathered large groups of musicians (playing some instruments not generally used for ensemble playing, such as electric and acoustic guitars) playing orchestrated parts — often doubling and tripling many instruments playing in unison — for a fuller sound.

Stories of Phil Spector's gunplay mounted over the years, including his discharging a firearm while in the studio with John Lennon during the recording of his cover album Rock 'n' Roll, placing a loaded pistol at Leonard Cohen's head during the sessions for Death of a Ladies' Man, and forcing Dee Dee Ramone to play bass guitar to Spector's specifications at gunpoint. Cohen told "Rolling Stone" magazine in 1978 that,
"Phil couldn't resist annihilating me. I don't think he can tolerate any other shadows in his darkness."
The Ramones reportedly had to play the opening chord to the song, "Rock and Roll High School", for eight hours straight; years later, Johnny Ramone described Spector as "a little man with lifts in his shoes, the wig on top of his head and four guns". But he also described the session philosophically: "It was a positive learning experience. And that chord does sound really good." Marky Ramone said, "A lot of these things were overblown, and a lot of these things were alcohol-induced."

In 1970, Allen Klein, manager of The Beatles, brought Spector to England. While producing John Lennon's hit solo single "Instant Karma!", which went to #3, Spector was invited by Lennon and George Harrison to take on the task of turning the Beatles abandoned "Get Back" recording sessions into a usable album.

Spector went to work using many of his production techniques, making significant changes to the arrangements and sound of some songs. The resulting album, Let It Be, was a massive commercial success and yielded a #1 single, "The Long and Winding Road". Although viewed as a major creative comeback for Spector, it may also have contributed to the contentious Beatles breakup, as Spector added what some considered inappropriate choir and orchestral arrangements to Lennon's "Across the Universe", and Harrison's "I Me Mine". His overdubbing of "The Long and Winding Road", infuriated its composer, Paul McCartney, especially since the work was allegedly completed without his knowledge and without any opportunity for him to assess the results. In 2003, McCartney spearheaded the release of Let It Be... Naked, which stripped the songs of Spector's input.

Many producers have tried to emulate the Wall of Sound, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys—a fellow adherent of mono recording—considered Spector his main competition as a studio artist. Bruce Springsteen emulated the Wall of Sound technique in his recording of "Born to Run".

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26 September 2007

KMFBO

















I fucking hate Bill O'Reilly. And if Imus got yanked off the air for his comments a few months ago then O'Reilly should go too. In fact, O'Reilly had better fucking go or there are some serious double standards going on.

Imus was fired for calling some girls on the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed ho's". It was a dead slow news week; the story was contagious; Rev. Al got involved and by weeks end under pressure from every corner, CBS fired Imus after 700 years on the air.

And now O'Reilly made a comment about a recent trip to Sylvia’s, a famous soul food restaurant.
After eating dinner at the famed Harlem restaurant recently, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly told a radio audience he "couldn't get over the fact" that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia's and other restaurants. Here's the quote:

"I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

"It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun," he said. "And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."


O'Reilly also noted that he went to an Anita Baker concert recently where the audience was evenly mixed between blacks and whites. I wonder if they were drinking from the same fountains and leaving through the same exits! GASP!

"The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedos, and this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans," he said. "They think the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg."
Rev. Al, you'd better get out their and call for your boys head right now just like you did Don Imus. This is NO different; in fact, its WORSE!

O'Reilly is way out of line, totally obtuse, being totally sincere, ignorant and racist. So racist he sees nothing wrong with what he's saying; so inherently racist he thinks what he said was fucking complimentary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello? Is this fucking thing on???!?!

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Space junk: threat to earth



"she was walking all alone / down the street in the alley
her name was sally
she never saw it / when she was hit by space junk
in new york / miami beach
heavy metal fell in cuba
angola saudi arabia
on xmas eve
said norad
a soviet sputnik hit africa
india venezuela (in texas/ kansas)
it's falling fast peru too
it keeps coming
and now i'm mad about space junk
i'm all burned out about space junk
oooh walk & talk about space junk
it smashed my baby's head
and now my sally's dead"


Space junk, comets crashing through our atmosphere, extra-terrestrial micro-organisms that survive in appalling cold or searing heat, bacteria that grow more virulent in the gravity-free vacuum of space. What happens when fate conspires to bring such creatures and creations to earth?

We've all seen the B-grade 1950's sci-fi flicks, the Roswell and X-Files conspiracies, wild Chariots of the Gods alien theories, the mysterious Peruvian meteorite illnesses. There's no shortage of speculation of what the future might hold, what with holes in the ozone admitting cosmic radiation and comets, meteorites, space junks and all the microscopic hitchhikers they might be carrying hurtling towards us at mind-boggling speeds. Agggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Now there's a new kid on the inter-planetary catastrophist's block: superbugs. Super spacebugs.
Scientists working on and with the space shuttle have found certain bugs, dangerous enough when earth-bound, will grow more powerful in space. Like salmonella, which acts differently, genetically, in space, making it stronger, more deadly.

Arizona's Centre for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology has found space salmonella, after 12 days, killed mice more swiftly and exhibited genetic variations. Space evidently triggers a different response in the bacterium even if scientists insist it's nothing it can't do on earth given the right circumstances.

They cite an influence called "fluid shear", the effect fluids have have passing over a bacterium. In space, like in the human body's intestines, it assists the bug's virulence. It simply takes lots of movement, lots of shaking the flasks containing the bug that are sent aloft into space.

It's just salmonella, nasty enough in its own right, and hardly what you might think is going to slaughter the human race ahead of the asteroid 99942 Apophis due to arrive between earth and the moon on April 13, 2029 or perhaps climate change-driven tidal waves a non-Kyoto future holds for us. But what of the bugs that might be attached to all the space junk, the old satellites, rockets, probes, missiles constantly falling back to earth?

There's no shortage of outdated, second-hand space trash orbiting the earth while harbouring who knows what kind of mutating space bugs in the weightless environment so conducive to extraordinary growth and genetic variation. Do stories like Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain really give us an idea of what we might face as we dabble with space discovery and scientific experiments ostensibly aimed at furthering medicine and mankind's advancement as a civilisation?

BBC reports that even here on earth we have French scientists trying to discover what secrets lie within Antarctic ice where tiny bubbles of ancient air going back 800,000 years through the ice ages are to be found up to three kilometres beneath the surface. In Spain's red-running Rio Tinto are metals dissolved by water made highly acidic by bacteria living underground. The latest results from rovers on the planet Mars suggests that planet may once have run with similar acid waters.



Does the mysterious Peru asteroid _ which made 600 people ill after crashing into the earth and leaving behind a 39-metre wide crater and some evil-smelling gasses _ hold a clue to what the future holds? And who needs super-tech military weapons or global warming to wipe us out when our headlong pursuits of curiosity can do it all by accident?


the earth with dandruff

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Wine Moon



No matter where you live, the moon will look round and full tonight as it rises in the east around sunset. This is the full Harvest Moon for us in the northern hemisphere.

Every month has a full moon, and all the full moons have names.

The Harvest Moon is the name for the full moon closest to the September equinox, which came this year on September 23. This is the first full moon of autumn for us in this hemisphere. For the southern hemisphere, it’s the first full moon of spring.


Its known as the "Harvest Moon" because the moon once provided extra light for harvesting crops. The Harvest Moon is also known as the Wine Moon, the Singing Moon and the Elk Call Moon.



In myth and folklore the full moon of each month is given a name. There are many variations but the following list gives the most widely known names:
January - Wolf moon
February - Ice moon
March - Storm moon
April - Growing moon
May - Hare moon
June - Mead moon
July - Hay moon
August - Corn moon
September - Harvest moon
October - Hunter's moon
November - Snow moon
December - Winter moon

In some cultures, individuals whose birthdays fall on or near a harvest moon must provide a feast for the rest of the community.

To see the Harvest Moon, look to the east at sunset tonight.




The reason for the shorter-than-usual rising time between successive moon rises around the time of the Harvest and Hunter's Moon is that the ecliptic - or plane of Earth's orbit around the sun - makes a narrow angle with respect to the horizon in the evening in autumn.

The Harvest Moon can come before or after the autumnal equinox. It is simply the full moon closest to that equinox. About once every four years it occurs in October, depending on the cycles of the moon. Currently, the latest the Harvest Moon can occur is on October 8. Between 1900 and 2010 the Harvest Moon falls on October 7 in 1930, 1949, 1987, 2006, and on October 8 in 1911.

Many cultures celebrate with gatherings, festivals, and rituals that are intricately attuned to the Harvest Moon or Hunter's Moon.

It is claimed by some that the Harvest Moon seems to be somehow bigger or brighter or yellower in color than other full moons. This is an illusion. The yellow or golden or orange or reddish color of the moon shortly after it rises is a physical effect, which stems from the fact that, when you see the moon low in the sky, you are looking at it through a greater amount of atmosphere than when the moon is overhead. The atmosphere scatters the bluish component of white moonlight (which is really reflected sunlight) but allows the reddish component of the light to travel a straighter path to your eyes. Hence all moons (and stars and planets) look reddish when they are low in the sky.

As for the large size of a full moon when seen low in the sky, it is true that the human eye sees a low hanging moon as being larger than one that rides high in the sky. This is known as a Moon Illusion and can be seen with any full moon. It can also be seen with constellations; in other words, a constellation viewed low in the sky will appear bigger than when it is high in the sky.

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222 West 23rd Street


222 West 23rd between 7th & 8th Ave

Dylan Thomas died there in 1953 and Sid killed Nancy there in 1978.

The twelve-story red-brick building that now houses the Hotel Chelsea was built in 1883 as a private apartment co-op that opened in 1884; it was the tallest building in New York until 1899.


the lobby

At the time Chelsea, and particularly the street on which the hotel was located, was the center of New York's Theater District. However, within a few years the combination of economic worries and the relocation of the theaters bankrupted the Chelsea cooperative.

In 1905, the building was purchased and opened as a hotel.

And since 1946, the hotel has been managed by the Bard family, and until recently was run by 72-year-old Stanley Bard who took over as managing director from his father in 1955.



But on June 18, 2007 the hotel's board of directors ousted Bard as the hotel's manager. Marlene Krauss, a doctor who is the chief executive of KBL Healthcare Ventures, and David Elder, one of the heirs of an original owner who lives in California, replaced Stanley Bard with management company BD Hotels NY, L.L.C.


room #603

No two rooms in the hotel are the same.

Owing to its long list of famous guests and residents, the hotel has an ornate history, both as a birth place of creative modern art and punctuated by tragedy catching the public eye.

Sir Arthur Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the Chelsea.

The hotel has always been a center of artistic and bohemian activity and it houses artwork created by many of the artists who have visited. The hotel was the first building to be listed by New York City as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note.




People who live/have lived at the Hotel Chelsea:

During its lifetime Hotel Chelsea has provided a home to many great writers and thinkers including Mark Twain, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas lived & died there, Sir Arthur Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying there, William Burroughs, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Bukowski and René Ricard. Charles R. Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, committed suicide in his room on September 21, 1968.


The hotel has been a home to actors and film directors too, such as Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Clarke, comedian Mitch Hedberg, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Uma Thurman, Elliot Gould, Jane Fonda, and Gaby Hoffmann and her mother, the Warhol film star Viva.


Room #822

Much of Hotel Chelsea's history has been colored by the musicians who have resided there. Some of the most prominent names include Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, Henri Chopin, John Cale, Édith Piaf, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Richard Hell, Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright, Leonard Cohen and Anthony Kiedis.





Songs about the Chelsea: "Sara" by Bob Dylan, which refers to "Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you", "Chelsea Hotel #2" by Leonard Cohen from New Skin for the Old Ceremony is about his relationship with Janis Joplin there,



Room 324

"Only thanks to the imigration of artists, creative and critical spirits to the Village around the turn of the century, its charm could have been preserved. In the fifties, the Village became attractive for the beatnicks. In the sixties, the hippies came. In the seventies and eightees, it was the Rock'n'Rollers and everybody who wanted to be hip who made Greenwich Village and neighboring Chelsea symbols of the New York way of life. One of the particular spots is the Chelsea Hotel, meanwhile under national protection. This place is talking more about popular culture and its artists than any other spot in the Village.

The Chelsea was famous even back at a time when Mark Twain was living in one of its rooms. Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller have been living and writing there. Miller, who stayed six years at the Chelsea described the famous artist's hotel like this: This hotel does not belong to America. There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and shame...it's the high spot of the surreal. Cautiously, I lifted my feet to move across bloodstained winos passing out on the sidewalks--and I was happy. I witnessed how a new time, the sixties, stumbled into the Chelsea with young, bloodshot eyes.

Until 1884, the Chelsea Hotel was the highest building in New York City. Today it is burried somewhere in the suburbia of Manhattan. The glamor of ancient time has been nagged away by the destruction done by the years. Only the main entrance with its memorial plates is reminding us of the great past of the hotel. The lobby is resembling an art gallery consisting of objects that sometimes were kept by the hotel management in lieu of payment for a rent long overdue.

The reception desk looks like straight out of an old black & white Hollywood movie. Both lifts seem to move in slow motion up and down the ten-story building. Sometimes, the inside of the hotel looks like a barracs. But holes in the floors, sqeeking waterpipes or breathing heatpipes only add to the ambiente of the hotel. Nonchalance is being cultivated in this place. Luxury is unwanted. Usefulness, atmosphere and non-conformism are dominating.

Pompousness is looked down upon, nonetheless there is tidyness all over the place. In the last five years, a lot of money has been spend upon the restauration of the victorian-gothic building with its many oriels.

Even today, only 100 of the Chelsea's 400 'units' are available to 'normal' New York visitors, the rest of them is occupied by permanent residents. The most beautiful of all (# 600) is a luxury suite which has a marble floor and a bronze fireplace and is currently rented to the gay couple writing love stories under the moniker "Judith Gould". If you want to stay at the Chelsea, you'd be better adviced to book at least two months ahead, even if it's only a ordinary room. You rather pay for the famousness of the hotel than for the rooms themselves. You can get a room facing the street at about $ 140 and the Chelsea is highly recommended for people who love something special.

Every room at the Chelsea tells its own story. In # 205, welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who reputedly inspired young Zimmerman to change his name to Bob Dylan, fell into a fatal coma after having 18 whiskies in a row. # 100 was once occupied by Sid Vicious, bass player with The Sex Pistols, and his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. On the morning of October 11, 1978 Spungeon was found in the bathroom, stabbed to death. Viscious, arrested under suspicion of murder, died shortly thereafter of a heroin overdose. Jimi Hendrix lived, loved and experimented here, with drugs and other things. Janis Joplin did not only have a love affair with Southern Comfort but also had a short liaison with Leonard Cohen. The canadian rock poet, too, loved the hotel: It's one of those hotels that have everything that I love so well about hotels. I love hotels to which, at four a.m., you can bring along a midget, a bear and four ladies, drag them to your room and no one cares about it at all.

His song Chelsea Hotel is not only a remembrance of past loves with the likes of Janis Joplin or Nico, it's also a declaration of love towards the hotel: I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/ You were taking so brave and so free/ Giving me head on the
unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street/ Those were the reasons and that was New York/ I was running for the money and the flesh/ That was called love for the workers in song/ Probably still is for those of us left.

The list of Big Names of literature, music or the arts scene who stayed at the Chelsea is seemingly bottomless: Jane Fonda, Jackson Pollock, Brendan Behan, Sarah Bernhardt to name but a few. They all encountered tragedies and comedies. They wrote short stories, movie scripts and novels and painted their pictures. They completed their movies within their heads, long before the actual shooting took place. Some of them had fatal endings...

For many, the Chelsea was a hideout or regular adress for many years, remembers Stanley Bard, who's been the hotel manager for almost 40 years now. Some of them lived here over decades. It was only recently that punk-icon Patti Smith moved out.

Stanley Bard appears to be friendly but keeps distance, on the other hand he's happy about reminicing every once in a while and he points out the bookcase in his office. I'm collecting every book that has been written in my hotel, he says taking out Thomas Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home. Many things have happened here, he continues. Jim Morrison, Hendrix and Janis Joplin were having their drug parties here. Today, there's a 'No Smoking' sign in the hotel lobby.

For many years, Bob Dylan used to live in suite # 2011, # 411 was Janis Joplin's suite. Over the years, Leonard Cohen has lived in many rooms. I like to think of him, back then. He was one of the very few calm ones in these tumultous times. But perhaps his restlessness was better hidden than that of the others. Most of his time in New York in the sixties he was living at # 424.

But Bard refuses to talk about the mysterious Viscious/Spungeon murder case. That's a different story, he says but he's proud of Andy Warhol's love for the hotel. In the 60s, Warhol and Nico have done a movie, Chelsea Girl, at the hotel. All in all it has been a turbulent time back then, Stanley Bard resumes and wistfully finishes, I don't want to have missed any moment in the life of the Chelsea Hotel.

There's hardly been an artist who has lived in the Chelsea that was not in some way captured by its flair, says Patti Smith. Of course, Leonard Cohen is amongst them and with his song Chelsea Hotel No.2 he not only remembers his former lover Janis Joplin but also puts up a monument to his former hunting trails.



Nonetheless, the song has not been written at the Chelsea. I wrote this for an American singer who died a while ago. She used to stay at the Chelsea, too. I began it at a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami in 1971 and finished it in Asmara, Ethiopia just before the throne was overturned. Ron Cornelius helped me with a chord change in an ealier version, Cohen remarks in the liner notes 'Some Notes On The Songs' of his 1975 Greatest Hits compilation "


Check out Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

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Cousin Brucie Staying on Satellite



Don’t look for Cousin Brucie on the radio any time soon — not on terrestrial radio, anyway. Cousin Brucie (a/k/a Bruce Morrow) the longtime New York DJ has signed an exclusive, multi-year contract to remain at Sirius and he will not return to his old station, WCBS-FM.

Despite the station’s recent return to the oldies format it abandoned two years ago, Cousin Brucie criticised it for changing its focus by emphasising music from the 70's and 80's. “The music of the 50’s and 60’s, specifically, deserves to have exposure, not be locked in a vault,” he said.

Brucie will continue his Wednesday and Saturday night shows on Sirius, as well as handle special segments and live broadcasts.

I don't give a fuck honestly, Al Meredith is back and that's all that matters. Now if only Ron Lundy and Harry Harrison weren't 105 years old we'd be all set. "HELLO LOVE!"

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Evolution of Dat Azz



Last month photos of Jennifer Lopez's dimpled dump seemed to have dimmed the fashion focus on the female backside. And isn't it about time to shift elsewhere—to kneecaps or pinky toes, for example? After all, it's been a full decade since designer Alexander McQueen's low-cut jeans ushered in the era of derrière décolletage and the ensuing onslaught of thongs, fanny facials, Brazilian butt lifts, and tramp-stamp tattoos.

But now comes the October 2007 issue of King, with backdoor queen Kim KardASShian on the cover. Will she prove the fashion fulcrum for a new wave of ASSentuation?



Why exactly is Kim Kardashian famous, anyway? She is the daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, once O.J. Simpson's attorney and lap dog; stepdaughter of plastic surgery aficionado Bruce Jenner; ex-girlfriend of Ray J; and human accessory to fellow celebutant Paris Hilton.

But Kardashian seems to owe her fame quotient mainly to her ass—or, more precisely, speculation about the origin of its size.

Is it due to steatopygia—the genetic overdevelopment of subcutaneous fat covering a woman's hind parts? Has she simply bought some off-the-shelf strap-on silicone enhancers from eBay? Or has she benefited from a Brazilian butt lift, famously pioneered by David Matlock, Dr. 90210 star plastic surgeon?

Her ass is like a medical mystery.

Putative high-school photos circulating on the Internet purport to show that Kardashian was born with a more pedestrian figure. Kim says otherwise in the new ish of King:

"I'm Armenian; you should see all the women in my family. The women have bigger breasts and bigger butts. That's how I was born."
Yeah, my ass!



You have to go back 100 years for the last time Western women devoted so much energy to festooning their derrières. In the 1870's, some ladies sported bustles robust enough to support an entire tea service.

As Bernard Rudofsky first noted in his book The Unfashionable Human Body: "If female dress were designed to follow a woman's contours, the bustle dress would fit the Hottentot woman like a glove. Yet although the women's silhouettes are identical, the American's majestic posterior is but a sartorial illusion."



The bustle of the 19th century made sitting a challenge. Thus the genius of the spring-loaded Langtry bustle. It collapsed, accordionlike, when a lady sat. When she stood back up, the bustle automatically sprang back into place, inspiring James Laver to declare it "one of the most extraordinary inventions in the whole history of fashion."

For today's women with silicone buttock implants, the sitability question is just as pressing. How does one sit when one has silicone appendages on her backside? Very carefully, apparently. As one poster on a blog about plastic surgery recently observed, the prudent implantee should be cautious around cacti.



Bettie Page was Miss Pin-Up Girl of the World in 1955. Her measurements: 36-23-37. Cheesecake entrepreneur Irving Klaw featured her derrière prominently in the peekaboo short films Varietease and Striporama. And yet at the time, the average American woman's derrière was hiding behind acres of poodle skirt.

In the 1970's and 80's, Catwoman Julie Newmar marketed her own brand of pantyhose, "Nudemar," which featured her own patented buttocks-shaping technology. The point was to mold the butt cheeks, rather than accentuate them.



When he patented a "doll with independently articulated buttocks" in 1966, inventor Robert K. Ostrander was a man before his time. Mattel executives would eschew such shaping for nearly three decades, preferring that Barbie—like Playboy centerfolds of the era—sport boyish hips under her famously cantilevered breasts.



Ken would unequivocally remain a breast man until 1998, when Mattel redistributed Barbie's proportions from 39-18-33 to what was hailed as a more politically correct 36-27-38. Cynics, however, concluded that Mattel was merely following new trends in the female physique.



Queen sang, "Fat bottomed girls, you made the rockin' world go round" back in 1978. Yet slim-hippedness reigned until hip-hop and rap brought us Sir Mix-a-Lot's seminal music video line "I like big butts and I can not lie" in 1992, later amplified by Sisqó's "Thong Song" and Lil' Kim's "Shake Ya Bum Bum."

Last week, photos started circulating of Nicole Austin—a/k/a Coco, the hyperBarbie doll wife of rapper Ice-T—displaying haunches that make Kim Kardashian's derrière look positively demur. If buttock implants get any larger, will plastic-surgery devotees have to budget for a retinue to hold up their backsides?

Coco aside, other evidence indicates that the pendulum may be swinging back to the small-if-perky behind. According to a recent survey, women asked what they'd want if they could have any beauty treatment were three times more likely to choose vaginal lip trimming over buttock implants and 50 times more likely to prefer the permanent removal of body hair.

Earlier this year, inventor Eric R. First received a patent for applying Botox to the buttocks. The patent is licensed to breast-implant powerhouse Allergan (which once sponsored a talk I gave). While the company has thus far made no announcements about an impending product launch, the marketing potential speaks for itself. Can Buttox parties be far behind?

By Teresa Riordan

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Gordon Gekko was supposed to be a villain.
Instead, he became a folk hero

Ten years ago in The New Yorker, Kurt Andersen suggested that maybe the 1980's never really ended. Or rather, that maybe the greedy, tawdry era imagined in Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street had merely gone on hiatus during the early-90's recession before roaring back on the momentum of a resurgent stock market.

The 90's version of the 80's expired in the dot-com bust, but that High Reagan feeling is liable to come rushing back when lightly taxed hedgehog riches push the New York art and real estate markets into obscene overdrive, or whenever Steve Schwarzman throws himself a birthday party. Leveraged-buyout king Henry Kravis and all-around vulgarian Donald Trump, both 80's axioms, remain as ubiquitous now as then, and the new boss looks a lot like the old boss: Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group, has invited comparisons to Gordon Gekko, the suave and ruthless finance titan played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

In fact, Schwarzman made a clever inside joke of sorts earlier this month when Blackstone announced it was investing $600 million in a Chinese company called BlueStar, which just happens to share a name with the spunky mom-and-pop airline that Gekko attempts to liquidate in the movie. Enhancing the sense of déjà vu, Douglas and Wall Street producer Edward Pressman are in the early stages of a Gekko sequel called Money Never Sleeps (albeit without the participation of Stone or Charlie Sheen, the first film's nominal protagonist), and Fox has just released a two-disc "20th anniversary edition" of Wall Street on DVD.

Then as now, the movie had good timing. Sporting power suspenders, pomaded hair, and no-mercy machismo, Gordon Gekko epitomized Wolfe's "Masters of the Universe"—only Gekko made a more attractive villain for being a self-made man, lacking the WASP pedigree and Ivy League credentials of Bonfire's Sherman McCoy.

Released in December 1987, two months after the Black Monday stock market crash and just one week before Ivan Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison for securities fraud, Wall Street appeared like the indignant coda to an era that had suddenly self-destructed. (Parts of Gekko's famous "Greed is good" speech are freely paraphrased from comments Boesky made in 1985.)

"The eighties are over," Newsweek announced in its first issue of 1988, adding, "Maybe the best pop-culture indicator of the post-'80s spirit is the respectful reception given to Oliver Stone's dreadfully ham-handed Wall Street." Audiences are "predisposed to despise stockbrokers," Newsweek explained, and would therefore welcome any movie, no matter how awful, that put them in their place.

Viewed with two decades' hindsight, Wall Street remains a slick diversion as a time-capsule artifact and whenever the very quotable Gekko is hogging the screen. In other respects, though, Stone's morality play stands up about as well as many a notion held dear by some in the 80's—that furniture design could emulate Julian Schnabel's broken-crockery aesthetic, say, or that Daryl Hannah could act. At the film's outset, our protagonist, the not-quite-despicable stockbroker Bud Fox (Sheen), is ambitious and venal but still bumming cash off his salt-of-the-earth dad (Martin Sheen), a union rep at Bluestar Airlines. The youngster's luck turns when he wins an audience with Gekko and nervously blurts out an inside tip on Bluestar, which earns Gekko a tidy profit and a place for Bud beside his throne. (The perks of proximity include broken-crockery furniture and Daryl Hannah.)

The central moral conflict of Wall Street is transposed from Stone's previous film, Platoon (1986), which also cast Sheen as the eager-to-please newcomer torn Skywalker-style between a Good Father and a Bad Father. The young actor is serviceable in the mode of awkward upstart who's out of his depth, but he's tense and unconvincing as the avenging son once Gekko decides to pulverize Dad's little airline that could. It's not Sheen's fault, though, that Bud has to wander onto his balcony late at night and ask the stars, "Who am I?" The script's hackneyed language only comes to life when it feels the thrill of the kill, when the characters are salivating about bagging the elephant or sheep getting slaughtered or when Gekko says of an irritant that he wants "every orifice in his fucking body bleeding red."

He's not exactly being hyperbolic, either. Gekko's business, of course, is to eviscerate entire organizations and profit from the steaming entrails, even though he insists, "I am not a destroyer of companies—I am a liberator of them!" (Despite the reptilian name, Douglas cannily plays the villain as a vaguely animatronic shark—as a well-lubricated death machine.) Carnivorous bravado is integral to the era's most memorable portraits of greed, whether in Bonfire (there's a telling moment when someone mishears the title of a book called Merger Mania as Murder Mania) or in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991), in which serial killer Patrick Bateman tells an acquaintance that he works in Murders & Executions.

The Draino-strength wit of Ellis' blackhearted satire might have been overshadowed by all those lovingly depicted M&Es, but American Psycho is a more incisive and efficient (not to mention funnier) summation of the era than Wall Street: It distills both the slash-and-burn frenzy required of Bateman/Gekko's professional milieu and the purgative effects that extreme wealth and power can have on the soul, and encapsulates them within one sharply dressed, vigorously exercised, homicidal maniac.

Given the excesses of the late '00s, we may be overdue for a maniac to call our own. On the Wall Street DVD, Stone reckons that his film made Hollywood more amenable to making movies about business, but if there was little evidence for that claim in 1987 (13 years passed before the release of Wall Street's closest descendant, Boiler Room), there's less so now—with the obvious exception of Money Never Sleeps, which nonetheless reanimates another era's icon rather than inventing one from scratch.

Money Never Sleeps promises a newly globalised milieu (Pressman has stated that the film's locations include London, the United Arab Emirates, and "an Asian country"), but it may also provide an opportunity for Douglas et al. to provide a corrective to one of the unexpected side effects of Wall Street: the cult of personality attached to Gordon Gekko.

Douglas says he's still stunned by the number of people who tell him that his Oscar-winning role was the reason they went to work on Wall Street. "It's so depressing and sad," Douglas says. Perhaps the actor's bemused remorse will result in a Gekko II that's a filthier piece of work, less glamourous, more pathetic. After all, nobody ever went into finance because of Patrick Bateman (or at least, no one would ever admit it), but there's no shame in naming Gekko as one's Bad Father. "I recall looking at that film and saying, 'That's what I want to be,' " recounts the late hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias in one of the Wall Street DVD featurettes. Somehow, an oleaginous villain meant to embody the worst excesses of his era became a folk hero and highly persuasive career counselor. Wall Street was intended as a cautionary tale, but oddly enough, it endures as a possibly timeless model for success.

By Jessica Winter

check out Washington's $7 Million Man by Mickey Kaus

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Swastika Mania!!

We've got big ones, small ones, we've got 'em on synagogues, we've got 'em on cars, we've got 'em on school buses, in hallways and staircases, we've got flyers stuffed on windshields; we've even got SS logos on Brownstones! You name it, we've got it here at Hal's Swastika Warehouse! Our prices simply can't be beat!

I dunno about all this swastika bullshit; bear with me; do I think its awful and callous and horrible? Of course, but I don't think theres some big conspiracy behind it; we certainly don't need to be paying 20 NYPD DETECTIVES to tackle this case! This seems to be the work of the recklessly callow; the temerarious and imbecilic youth a/k/a a few naive punks.

Some believe that Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence in NYC could have something to do with the incidents. Eh, I dunno. Whoever did this shit had no idea it was Yom Kippor either. I bet these prolific vandals haven't even taken a college history class yet.

This was most likely the work of a few idiot teenagers with no concept or clue of the depth and severity associated with that collapsed cross; an ancient good luck symbol that Hitler hijacked forever associating it with hatred and atrocity. I guarantee if the 20 detectives assigned to this case find the dudes that did this, they'll be pimple faced teens with no motive except boredom and no true hate in their hearts for anyone.

They know the swastika as this crude, evil, lowest common denominator form of rebellion. They have no idea what it truly represents to most everyone. It's awful that this sort of ignorance can exist, but obviously, and rather tragically, it does.

Theres no way this was the work of some racist group of adults. This is the work of adolescent confusion, listlessness, ignorant rebellion and simple stupidity; and I am not saying its justified or excusable because of this, but there isn't much more behind it than that; blissfully naive kids with no real idea what the swastika truly symbolises to people.

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The Outspoken Katie Couric

First CBS ships their baby Evening News anchor off to Iraq, hoping that dropping her in the line of fire will boost ratings and bolster her integrity as a reborn investigative journalist, no longer simply the ex-host of the Today Show; and now, still desperate for ratings, Katie's talking shit to whoever will listen just to get her name and face back in the public eye.



Speaking at the National Press Club yesterday evening, the unbridled, strident Katie Couric pulled back the curtain on her personal views of the war in Iraq, Dan Rather and your boy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake. “I’ve never understood why invading Iraq] was so high on the administration’s agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.”
Further, Katie said the Bush administration botched the war effort, calling it “accepted truths” that it erred by “disbanding the Iraq military, and leaving 100,000 Sunni men feeling marginalized and angry...[and] whether there were enough boots on the ground, the feeling that we’d be welcomed as liberators and didn’t need to focus as much on security.”

She added “I’d feel totally comfortable saying any of that at some point, if required, on television.” I bet you would, baby doll, I bet you would.
“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”
Oh, Katie; I'm not into you as this controversial outspoken news diva, can't we go back to making omelets with Al Roker and wearing funny hats in the summer?

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TMZ today, pit bullshit tomorrow



Yesterday we were excited when TMZ reported Brad and Angelinaface had adopted another kid, this time a pit bull named Lennie! "Finally", I thought, "they're done with children and moving on to a more sensible breed". Alas, now we're hearing the story is utter bullshit and we are heartbroken, leveled and forever scarred.

"Contrary to a report on celebrity gossip website TMZ, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have not adopted a pit bull puppy", so says The Celebrity Truth.

The barely-newsworthy story, in which TMZ accuses the couple of bad parenting, alleges that they "caught Brad in New York with Lennie, the Jolie-Pitt's brand new, white pit bull puppy. While the dog is certainly a cutie, adopting a juvenile pup may not be ideal for homes with young children… What on earth are they thinking?"

Celebrity Truth contacted Pitt's representative who confirmed that the story is "completely not true".

So, then who is Lennie? Bring him to me!

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