“a gigolo is a professional dancer”
via Gunslinger
R.I.P. Don Cornelius (1936-2012)
Don Cornelius checked himself out, it would appear.
See him here — doin’ it to death — with Mary Wilson in the Soul Train line dance.
my current desktop
Offer: Elmo toy
Posted to the Dubuque Freecycle list:
Chicken Dance Elmo. A little dirty, but works.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless smartphone
The Mother Courage of Rock
She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany.
Springtime 1976, I was living in the cinderblock building on the glorified median strip there where they split Highway 13, and one day I went over to this one girl’s apartment, she lived right by the guy who dealt me speed, and she said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Patti Smith!”
Gave her a possum grin I’m still grinning.
Wim Wenders, Pina
I referenced this in the quotes out of context below, but the trailer for Wim Wenders 3-D tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch deserves its own post.
I simply let go of my feelings and cried unrestrainedly.
“Hit me!”
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)
Smell Them; You’ll Know.
Fade from black to black.
headline of the day
Miami’s Federal Prison Plagued By Strippers Posing As ‘Legal Assistants’
Les Twins
If I knew waking up early meant watching dance videos, I’d have gotten the coffee brewed earlier.
Cherchez La Femme — Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band [circa 1976]
on the “Tony Orlando & Dawn” show.
DISCLAIMER:
The intent of this post is anthropological and not to make profit. It is strictly to share with fans and the periodic visitors to this planet from other galaxies a part of the musical history of the aforementioned musical group.
Also:
During these times all the TV shows wanted us to mime the entire performance which we were reluctant to do. A compromise was reached with the shows we finally performed on.
Jian Sword Dancing
You are morally obliged to watch this if you haven’t yet. (via kottke)
Mrs. Fisher dreamed of Heaven.
And in Mrs. Fisher’s Heaven, Mr. Peanut was God, and his Son was a Spud. And the Son of God wore a bellboy’s cap upon His head, and He so loved the little children that He wrenched their arms from out the sockets and extended his sprouts unto them, and they danced in a ring. And the Son of God was merry, and the Son of God was ashamed.
Adriene Hughes, Said Alone
“Said Alone” is an experimental ballet sequence shot with TTV Kodak Duaflex (through the viewfinder) and a canon 5d mark II.
I first saw a video of hers after reading about her on The Fox is Black.
Sugar Von Tassels
I’m almost done with a process I started in January of evaluating all the footage I collected for a documentary I’ve been working on that started as an exploration of costume culture. This phase has been long, tedious, a real slog. I’ve been going back through each section of footage, evaluating clips, making notes, and roughing out speculative timelines. After nine months, I’ll just say I’ve gotten tired of evaluating, and wanted to make something. So, I dove into a section of footage that may or may not end up in the film (I ended up getting more footage of Sugar at a performance that may be more relavent to the larger themes of the movie), but I liked a lot of moments in this interview session, and like I said, I was tired of looking and wanted to make something. It’s still a little rough, but I hope you enjoy it.
Strut
Après lunch at the sub-urban lesbian bar. My dear friend Miss Mindy struts her stuff.
boxercising earthquake
A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions.
(thanks, David)
I can’t stop watching
Love Can Always Find You
We met today for a celebration, to mark the marriage of a mutual friend. She was just back from the beach. ”Marry me,” he said. ”And I accepted,” she told us. She wore a white halter top and a white wrap skirt, a two-piece bathing suit of the same shade underneath, no shoes. The groom had on casual attire, with flip flops. They went for dinner at a bayside restaurant, then back to the beach.
They had gone the long way around to find each other. She was born and raised in New York City, to Greek parents in the restaurant business. She had several careers, ending up in the news business in D.C. When I met her decades ago, she talked about Latin music, about salsa. The groom, born in Puerto Rico, is a longtime civil servant. He’s also a musician. He owns four guitars.
But I had to wonder about this hasty marriage to a man she’d been seeing for five months. Then, he came into the room. He was a stunner. She was glowing. They talked about moving by the end of the year, maybe to Spain. Her dream is to be on a plane, on New Year’s Eve, flying to Madrid, her new husband at her side.
The thing is, these aren’t babes. They are at or near the age when they can draw retirement. As in Social Security.
You would never know it. They’re sleek and fit, all that dancing. And one thing was so obvious it filled the room with sweet certainty: My long-time friend is with the love of her life. And the feeling is mutual.
You probably don’t need to watch this
Seriously, my apologies. (via Stellar Interesting)
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
spam name
Jubril Lord.
to dance
I have been going through some deep introspection of late, trying to untie an emotional knot. Perhaps the most interesting offshoot of my subconscious dives has been the insistent assertion of the beauty of dance.
I have always loved dance, but I suspect not in the way that most people who love dance experience it. I have little interest in choreographed productions. I can appreciate the precision and athleticism and grace that goes into, say, a ballet, but I am rarely drawn to watch one. What I love is the Personal Dance. The dance that rises up and must come out, spontaneously, without ego or self consciousness of any kind.
As much as I love this dance impulse in myself (and Daryl can affirm that I cannot hear certain music without dancing–usually in my chair), what I love most are the rare times I can witness it in someone else. At its best, such dance is the purest expression of Joy. What I have realized in the past week is that I am more moved by the sight of Personal Dance than by any other form of art or expression. It touches me at my very core. It makes me want to jump up and cry simultaneously.
I can think of one film example in which you might understand what I am referring to. It is in The Motorcycle Diaries, a film brilliant on many levels. But there is a scene (not available on YouTube except as a glimpse in the trailer) where the Alberto Granado character, beautifully portrayed by Rodrigo De la Serna, jumps onto the dance floor, smiling and dancing in the pure way I am trying to describe. It lifts me out of myself every time I see it.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
