Monday, September 16, 2024
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Friday, September 13, 2024
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
My Spotify Top 99 of 2023, Annotated, Part 2
12. "Everything's Alright" - original cast of Jesus Christ Superstar
13. "Black Parade" - Beyoncé
14. Born This Way - Lady Gaga
15. "Nobody Told Me" - John Lennon
16. "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl" - Nina Simone
As heard in Point of No Return (1993) starring Bridget Fonda and Gabriel Byrne
17. Too Much - Carly Rae Jepsen
18. "Red Right Hand" - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (the Peaky Blinders theme song)
19. "America Has a Problem" - Beyoncé with Kendrick Lamar
20. Rehab - Amy Winehouse
21. "Sappho" - Frankie Cosmos
22. "Material Girl" - Kris Bowers. From the Bridgerton soundtrack; I've neither read nor watched the Netflix Regency romance series, but I like these pop songs done in a chamber music style.
23. "Suerte" - Shakira
24. Annabel Lee/The Bells - Lou Reed
25. "Chromatica I" - Lady Gaga
26. Come on Eileen - Dexys Midnight Runners
27. "Gooey (Gilligan Moss remix)" - Glass Animals
28. Too Much (Acoustic) - Melanie Chisholm
29. "Chromatica II" - Lady Gaga
30. "Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)" - Elle King, Miranda Lambert
31. "Eames" - Polar Inc.
32. "Hung Up on Tokischa" - Madonna with Tokischa
33. You and I - Lady Gaga. The music video is a Frankenstein story. I had this idea the other day: Someone should write a novelization of the video.
34. "You'll Be Back" - Hamilton soundtrack, Jonathan Groff
35. "Celebrity Skin" - Doja Cat. Did anybody else use to sing this on Rock Band?
36. "The Raven" - Lou Reed
37. "Tik Tok" - Kesha
38. Paper Planes - M.I.A.
39. "Cain't Use My Phone (Suite)" - Erykah Badu
40. "I'm On Fire" - Bruce Springsteen
41. "This Is Me" - Keala Settle from the Greatest Showman soundtrack
42. "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" - Bananarama
43. "Inside Out" - Eve 6
44. "Heart of Gold" - Tanya Donelly
45. "Heart Shaped Box" - Nirvana
46. "Can't Help Falling In Love" - UB40
47. "Never Enough" - Loren Allred from the Greatest Show soundtrack
48. "911" - Lady Gaga
49. "Get Into It (Yuh)" - Doja Cat
50. "You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween" - Muse
51. "UMF" - Duran Duran
52. "Hold My Hand" - Lady Gaga
53. Love On the Brain - Rihanna
54. "Come As You Are" - Nirvana
55. "Into the Mystic" - The Wallflowers (cover of a Van Morrison song)
56. "Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)" - Elle King, Miranda Lambert - GOLDHOUSE Remix
57. "Shallow" - Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper
58. "Footloose" - Kenny Loggins. Remember, Tit Elingtin and I saw the musical live on stage in 2023.
59. Here With Me - Dido
60. "Creep" - Radiohead. The original; in the past I've been quite taken with the Scala & Kolacny Brothers cover that was used on The Simpsons (production code PABF04). Also used in Rock Band.
61. Paparazzi - Lady Gaga
62. "Mo Money, Mo Problems," The Notorious B.I.G., Mase, Diddy
63. "What's Up?" - 4 Non Blondes
64. "Our Love Is Done" - Hannah Juanita
65. "Do What You Want" - Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera
66. "Glory of the 80s" - Tori Amos
67. "The River of Dreams" - Billy Joel
68. "No Myth" - Michael Penn
69. "How Will I Know?" - Whitney Houston - Tit and I also saw The Bodyguard, the musical, live on stage in 2023.
70. "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here" - Bob Dylan
71. "Sirius" - The Alan Parsons Project. Which I believe was some kind of hovercraft. (That's a Simpsons reference, but in real life, this is the song that traditionally introduces the starting lineup of the Chicago Bulls.)
72. "Bitch I'm Madonna" - Madonna with Nicki Minaj
73. "Queen of the Night" - Whitney Houston
74. Trouble - P!nk
75. "Poor Me Israelites" - Desmond Dekker. I know this song from the soundtrack of Drugstore Cowboy.
76. "Unholy" - Sam Smith, Kim Petras
77. "Drugstore Rock N Roll" - Janis Martin
78. "Malibu" - Hole
79. "Ho-Down" - Paula Abdul
80. "Never Ever" - All Saints
81. "Crush With Eyeliner" - R.E.M.
82. "Can't Stop Lovin' You" - Van Halen
83. "Sleepwalker" - The Wallflowers
84. "20th Century Boy" - T. Rex
85. "Helena" - My Chemical Romance
86. "Party in the USA" - Miley Cyrus
87. "The Devil's Waltz" - The Wallflowers
88. "Rebel Rebel" - David Bowie
88. "Annabel Lee RIP" - MC Lars
90. I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song) - The Ikettes
91. "Dive Bar In My Heart" - The Wallflowers
92. "Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes
93. "Country Pie" - Bob Dylan
94. "Rock Your Baby" - Wanda Jackson. Goddess bless Wanda Jackson. She is 86 years old and recently put out a cover of Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts" with Leilah Safka. (Leilah's mother Melanie Safka, who performed under the mononym Melanie, had such hits as "Brand New Key.")
95. In the Air Tonight - Phil Collins
96. "Mysterious Ways" - U2
97. Invisible City - The Wallflowers
98. "Come on Eileen" - cover by Saving Ferris
99. "Toxic Pony" - Britney Spears/Ginuwine mashup
Monday, September 2, 2024
My Spotify Top 99 of 2023, Annotated, Part I
1. "Sex on Fire" - Cannons (cover)
2. "Batman, Wolfman, Frankenstein or Dracula" - The Diamonds
3. The Greatest Show - movie cast
4. A Place Above - Jehnny Beth, Cillian Murphy
5. "Binz" - Solange Knowles
6. "Goo Goo Muck" - The Cramps. From the soundtrack of Netflix's Wednesday, of course.
7. One Night in Bangkok - Murray Head
8. "Not Enough Time" - INXS
9. "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)" - Aretha Franklin. As I heard on a plane on Monday, June 12, 1995.
10. "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" - Moxy Fruvous
11. "Runaway Crush" by Stella Soleil [Part of a really long journal entry written on Thursday, July 29, 2021] Super deep dive into a Disney program here, but to return to Baron Zemo for a moment, someone on Tumblr translated the title of a book that Zemo is seen reading while on a plane with Sam and Bucky, the Falcon and the Winter Solder. The book is in German; the English translation is How to Say No to the One You Love: Demarcation and Devotion in the Erotic Relationship. Well, that is a weird book for Zemo, a widower who has been in prison for the last few years, to be reading. Apparently one shot shows where he is in the book, and he's reading a chapter called "Same Sex Fantasies in Heterosexuals."
Um, does Zemo think that the best approach to manipulating Bucky is to try to seduce him? Now that Bucky can't be manipulated with code words anymore? Or does he have a different love interest in mind? Or is he just genuinely attracted to Bucky? But you can't trust him because he's a master manipulator.
So, uh, yeah, I'm still a little hung up on Captain America and the Winter Soldier. And now we wait until November 24 for the Hawkeye series starring Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop.
One more thing about She by Theodora Siranian. [This is a poetry chapbook I'd found at Irvington Books & Vinyl.]
"Oh my god, Erin, you can't just sit around with a hardbound journal writing about poetry and media all day."
Oh, but can't I, though?
This is an excerpt from "Some Infinite Thing:"
"choosing to listen
to you die
through the telephone
while thinking
about fucking strange men,
in strange places, running
my tongue along
their bodies like some
desperate, wintered animal
to the salt lick,
pupils to the peripheral, always
the exit, the exit,
the exit."
[Note: "wintered animal" might be a typo. A Freudian slip. The text might actually read "wounded animal."]
Juxtaposition of death and sexual imagery to highlight the contrasts between life and death: a poetic technique as old as time. But the salt lick imagery is what's appealing to me. I've had salt and salt licks stuck in my head like a meme or earworm lately, for a number of reasons:
1. Possibly back on July 13th, I heard an episode of the podcast Cult or Just Weird. The episode was about Throwawaylien - that is a Reddit (online messaging board) user's name which is a play on "throw away" and "alien." Throwawaylien claims he gets abducted by aliens once every 7 years. His story is wild, but the one detail that sticks in my brain is that, he says, the aliens always give him a gift of salt when they return him, apparently because they recognize that we need electrolytes to live.
too long/didn't read: Salt is the typical gift given to humans by space aliens.
2. There's this on Tumblr by a native speaker of the Russian language about Daniel Brühl's bad Russian pronunciation in Captain America: Civil War. The original poster (op) says when Brühl, as Baron Zemo, says Bucky's trigger word "soldier," which is "soldat" in Russian, he sounds like he's either saying it in baby talk or asking Bucky "want some salt?" Apparently he's saying the L in "soldat" in a very German way and not the correct Russian way.
So now I think "want some salt?" is either something aliens say when they turn you from abduction or a thing you say to your kidnapped mind-controlled supersoldier to get him to comply.
3. This one's a much looser connection because it's a misheard song lyric, but I recently rediscovered the Stella Soleil song "Runaway Crush." Ugh, such a great song. According to online lyrics aggregators, the proper lyrics of a certain line are, "I'm kissing the soft of your skin/It's like a runaway sin." But I always mishear "soft of your skin" as "salt of your skin."
So...that's a rather random collection of salt images....
Yep, that's what goes on inside my mind: Poetry, salt, and horniness.
Sunday, September 1, 2024
Bummer September
This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer September post from 2022 with the update.
September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.
September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.
September 2, 2004: A fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, destroys 12,500 irreplaceable books and damages an additional 62,000 materials, including Friedrich Schiller's death mask and 35 oil paintings of historical significance.
September 2, 2018: An air conditioner short circuits, causing a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The museum loses an estimated 92.5% of its collection.
September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison.
September 4, 2006: Wildlife expert, zookeeper, and filmmaker Steve Irwin is filming a dive in shallow water near the Great Barrier Reef. He is struck in the chest by a stingray’s tale. The barb of the tale pierces his heart, killing him.
September 5, 1983: Canadian stunt performer Ken Carter is killed when the rocket car he’s using to jump over an Ontario pond overshoots the landing ramp, flips, and lands on its roof.
September 6, 1951: Joan Vollmer is shot and killed in an American-owned bar in Mexico City by her husband, William S. Burroughs. Both were intoxicated. Vollmer is alleged to have placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs was supposedly trying to shoot the glass off her head with a pistol. Instead he shot Vollmer in the head and killed her instantly.
This is portrayed in the film Beat (2000). Vollmer is played by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland.
September 7, 2018: Rapper Mac Miller, aged 26, dies of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine, and fentanyl.
September 8, 2016: 59-year-old performer The Lady Chablis, who’s featured prominently in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt and played herself in the 1997 film based on it, dies of pneumonia at Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia.
September 9, 1898: French poet and literary critic Stéphane Mallarmé dies suddenly while suffering from what had been a relatively mild case of tonsillitis. While being examined by his doctor, Mallarmé has a coughing fit so severe he dies of asphyxia. He is 56 years old.
September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.
September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.
September 12, 1977: Poet Robert Lowell dies of a heart attack in a taxi cab on his way to see his ex-wife, writer and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick.
September 13, 1996: Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur dies from gunshot wounds in Las Vegas.
September 14, 1899: Real estate developer Henry H. Bliss becomes the first person killed in the U.S. from a motor vehicle collision. The previous day, he had stepped off a trolley car and been struck by an electric taxi cab, knocking him to the ground and crushing his chest.
September 14, 1927: Dancer Isadora Duncan is killed in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle of the car she’s riding in, breaking her neck.
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| Photo of Isadora Duncan by Arnold Genthe (1869–1942), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
September 15, 1958: A commuter train traveling from Bay Head, New Jersey, to Jersey City ignores warning signals and falls into Newark Bay through an open bridge lift. The crash kills 48, including Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s brother-in-law James Carmalt Adams.
September 16, 1977: T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who never learned to drive, is the passenger in a Mini 1275GT automobile when it crashes into a fence post and then a tree, killing Bolan instantly.
September 16, 1985: Aerobatic pilot Arthur “Art” Scholl crashes his plane and is killed while filming spin footage for the movie Top Gun. He crashes into the Pacific Ocean; his aircraft is never recovered.
September 18, 1961: United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others die when their Transair Sweden DC-6 aircraft crashes in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld had been traveling to Katanga, a disputed state that broke off from the Congo after Congo gained its independence from Belgian colonial rule. The cause of the crash is disputed. It may have been caused by pilot error, although some have speculated that it was shot down to assassinate Hammarskjöld.
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September 18, 1970: 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix dies of asphyxiation at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He appears to have aspirated vomit after taking an overdose of barbiturates, presumably his girlfriend’s sleeping pills.
September 18, 1988: Poet/filmmaker Kathleen Collins dies of breast cancer at the age of 46.
September 19, 1902: One hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!”
September 20, 1989: The last fluent speaker of the Kamassian language, Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova-Andzhighatova, an approximately 105-year-old woman, dies. Kamassian is one of the Samoyed languages of the Ural Mountains. In fact, it was the last of the Samoyed languages to go extinct.
September 20, 1997: Musician Nick Traina, the son of author Danielle Steel, passes away from an overdose of the prescription medication lithium. He is 19 years old.
September 22, 1978: Stunt performer A.J. Bakunas dies from his injuries after a failed stunt fall from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kincaid Towers the previous day. Bakunas lands on the air bag as planned, which splits, allowing his body to hit the ground at approximately 115 miles per hour.
September 23, 965: Al-Mutanabbi, a courtly poet of the Abbasid Caliphate who wrote in Arabic, dies in what is now Iraq. His birth date is not known, but he was thought to be about 50 years old at the time of his death. He died in a fight with a group of assailants who were insulted by one of his poems.
September 23, 1939: Sigmund Freud dies of cancer of the jaw. He had been diagnosed with epithelioma of the mouth in 1923, and although the tumor had been surgically removed, the surgery was incomplete. By 1939, the cancer that had spread to his jawbone was so painful, and also inoperable, that Freud asked his personal physician to give him a life-ending dose of morphine.
September 23, 1973: Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and is in his fifth day of hospitalization. He calls his wife to let her know he isn’t feeling well and dies a few hours later, officially of heart failure.
Some have speculated that Neruda may have been poisoned in the hours before his death. Chile’s coup d’etat that ended the term of democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende had happened on September 11th. Neruda had been Allende’s ambassador to France and his home had already been searched by the military forces of coup leader General Augusto Pinochet. Neruda famously told Pinochet’s troops that the only dangerous thing they would find was poetry.
September 23, 1994: Psycho writer Robert Bloch dies of cancer of the esophagus and kidneys at the age of 77.
September 24, 2007: Camera operator Conway Wickliffe is killed while filming stunts for the movie The Dark Knight. He is the passenger in a pickup truck driving parallel to a stunt car; the driver misses a turn and the truck crashes into a tree.
September 26, 1937: Blues musician Bessie Smith dies of traumatic injuries she suffers in a car accident. She was the passenger in a car driven by her boyfriend Richard Morgan. Morgan, driving along U.S. Route 61 toward Clarksdale, Mississippi, misjudges the speed of a truck he’s coming up on and swerves at the last moment to avoid rear-ending the truck but sideswipes it instead. Since Smith is in the passenger seat and possibly has her hand and/or forearm sticking out of the passenger-side window, she sustains severe crush injuries to the right side of her body and a partially amputated arm. Surgeons at Clarksdale’s African-American hospital surgically amputate Smith’s arm. She never regains consciousness following surgery.
September 27, 1986: Metallica bassist Clifford (Cliff) Burton dies in a tour bus accident in Sweden. The bus skids off the road while members of the band are sleeping in their bunks. Burton is thrown out of his bunk and through the window; the bus falls on top of him.
September 29, 1902: French writer Émile Zola dies of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney flue in his home. The manner of his death may have been accident, assassination, or suicide. He’s 62 years old.
September 29, 2010: A 24-year-old man whose family says he suffers from mental illness pours gasoline on himself and sets himself on fire near the statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine. The man is critically injured but survives. Coincidentally, the date the statue was unveiled to the public was also September 29th, in 1888.
September 30, 1962: Paul Guihard, a journalist for France’s Agence France-Presse, is in the U.S. covering African-American student James Meredith’s attempt to enroll in the whites-only University of Mississippi. White students on the campus start a riot, during which Guihard is shot through the back, piercing his heart.
His shooting is never solved. Guihard is considered the only journalist to have been killed during the U.S. civil rights movement.
September 30, 1997: Post-modern writer Kathy Acker, age 50, dies of breast cancer while undergoing alternative treatment in Tijuana, Mexico.
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