Movie Coma

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1140918947-hr-2541.jpg\”

Before I was so rudely interrupted yesterday, I was describing the movie coma I was planning to put myself into this week and my accquisitive nature. In any event, I\’ve been gorging myself this week and will gorge myself even more next week.

It began with St. Valentines Day. My long suffering girlfriend got me another Looney Tunes DVD box set–which makes all three of them. I\’ve been working my way through the second box since Christmas, so the THIRD box was just more fuel for the fire. The third box is a more diverse set than the first two. The first two seem to favor Chuck Jones over all of the other Warners directors. Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, and Tex Avery really got the shaft in these two sets, while Friz Freling and Bob McKimson got a token nod. Not so the third box. They dug deep into the vaults for this one. In addition to some absolute rarities, it includes three of my favorite Warner cartoons: \”Steal Wool\”, in which Ralph the Wolf duels with Sam the Sheepdog over a flock of sheep–all on the timeclock; \”Hillbilly Hare,\” which features Bugs calling a square dance while dressed as white-trash jailbait (this is one of the most censored of Warner\’s cartoons; and \”Birds Anonymous,\” in which Sylvester enters a twelve step program to kick his canary habit. Still among the missing on dvd is \”Ali Baba Bunny,\” featuring Daffy Duck\’s absolute best line (\”Consequences, schmonsequences, so long as I\’m rich\”). I guess they have to save something for the future. And even at 60 cartoons a pop, the DVD boxes will be coming out for the next decade or so. In addition, get a load of this back cover , in which Bugs, Daffy, and Porky are done up to the nines as dance-hall girls. It warms the hackles of my crossdressing little heart.

But that was just the beginning, because I had an unusual (for me) amount of success on eBay last week, too. Won at auction at ridiculously low prices were Shoot the Piano Player, L\’Avventura, Black Narcissus, and Manji. The first three were won as a single lot on laserdisc. The last was won individually on DVD. Average price? $4.

Laserdisc? Oh yes. I\’m a slave to obsolete technologies. I still have vinyl records, too. Laserdisc provides a picture quality at least as good as DVD (it\’s sometimes better) and it\’s a buyer\’s market for laserdiscs. People are dumping them in favor of DVD, which is great for me. The first three movies are Criterion discs, which would run me to $90 on DVD. One of these days I need to transfer my laserdisc collection to DVD, but for now, my player works and I have a spare.

Which raises the question: why buy a movie when I could rent it instead? One might ask a bibliophile why he buys books instead of checking them out of the library (To quote Erasmus: \”When I have a little money, I buy books. If I have any left over, I buy food and clothing\”). As I said at the beginning of this post, I\’m accquisitive by nature, but there\’s more to it than that: I have a pretty good video store near me. They carry foreign films, art films, indies, documentaries, etc. But they don\’t have everything. They don\’t have Manji, for example. I could rent from Netflix, I suppose, but I prefer to give my local store the business (Netflix, by the by, doesn\’t have everything, either–I\’ll come back to this). Here\’s a quick rundown of what these films are:

Shoot the Piano Player is a film by Francois Truffaut from the French New Wave of the 1960s. It\’s a send-up of sorts of American gangster films, shot through with the editing innovations of the movement (The French New Wave was intent on breaking the hold of Griffith-ian \”invisible\” editing). It\’s probably Truffaut\’s most entertaining film.

L\’Avventura is an Italian film by Michaelangelo Antonioni. It\’s an epistemological murk; also a crime film of sorts; and vaguely resembles the Italian giallo mysteries that would come along a decade later. It\’s a quintessential \”slow\” movie, in which the camera lingers over the shot compositions a long, long time. Fortunately, it\’s a beautiful movie, so one doesn\’t mind looking at it even when nothing is happening.

Black Narcissus is the film that sold me the lot. It\’s a film by the English directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who followed no school of filmmaking but their own. This story of nuns in the Himalayas is a fabulous color experiment, shot by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Deborah Kerr is superb in the lead. Of the nature of the film, actress Kathryn Byron said: \”He (Michael Powell) gave me half of my performance with the lighting.\” The film works best as an abstraction. As such, it\’s a joy to look at.

Finally, there is Manji, a strange psychodrama from Japan. Its director is one of the great unsung masters of Japanese filmmaking, Yasuzo Masamura, who was part of a Japanese \”New Wave\” dedicated to breaking the hegemony of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi on the conventions and style of Japanese filmmaking. Mind you, like most Japanese movies, it\’s impeccably composed, but it has a nervous energy one would not find in classic Japanese movies. In any event, the movie is about two women, married to other people, who fall in love with each other, precipitating a spiralling decent into madness and suicide for themselves and their spouses.

If that wasn\’t enough, Deep Discount DVD is having a sale on selected titles from Universal Studios right now. It\’s a fairly limited selection, but I picked up six discs: Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Psycho II, Psycho III, The Palm Beach Story, and the recent version of Peter Pan. The Eastwoods are two of my favorites, with Two Mules pairing Clint with a strong leading lady in Shirley Maclaine, and The Beguiled being the weirdest movie he ever made. The two sequels to Psycho have virtues that most Hitchcockian purists deny, but I quite like them, especially the third movie. Both The Palm Beach Story and Peter Pan are just fun.

And as if that weren\’t enough…

Let me back up a bit. My cinematic appetites aren\’t being well-served by American distribution these days. I could suggest that NOBODY is being well served by the American film industry these days. They make it so damned difficult to get around them, too. Fortunately, the Internet is doing an endaround to circumvent the problem. Mind you, I\’m not talking about illegal downloading. I\’ve never downloaded a movie in my life and I gave up on buying bootlegs many years ago, but I\’m not shy about going out and getting the movies I want to see. Remember what I said about Netflix not having everything? Well, they only carry movies released in Region 1. There are vast numbers of movies that aren\’t released in Region 1. Many of these are movies I want to see. If you have any kind of serious interest in Asian film, for instance, you almost HAVE to become a collector. That\’s where www.yesasia.com comes in, and THEY were having a sale last week too. Among the movies I bought: a few movies by ace Hong Kong crime film director Johnny To, a couple of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, and several Korean movies, including two of my favorite Korean dramas of the last few years: The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors and The Good Lawyer\’s Wife.� Oh, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is one of the best movies you didn\’t see last year. You might have seen director Chanwook Park\’s previous movie, Oldboy, last year–and if you haven\’t, why not?–but this film is better. A LOT better. Like its predecessors (including Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), this is a movie that takes an aluminum baseball bat to an audience. Lord, it\’s a thing of beauty. This is a movie that WILL be released in the US–it already played the festival circuit, which is where I saw it in November–but I didn\’t feel like waiting for it to be released on DVD domestically. I was putting in an order and they had it available. A simple principle of business: if the competition feeds the customer\’s needs, then they\’ll get the business.

And to top it all off, this weekend was Columbia\’s annual True/False documentary film festival.

I don\’t think I ever watched this many movies in so short a time when it was my business to do so. I just hope this doesn\’t start to work like aversion therapy.

Cheers.

Movie Coma

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1140918947-hr-254.jpg\”

Before I was so rudely interrupted yesterday, I was describing the movie coma I was planning to put myself into this week and my accquisitive nature. In any event, I\’ve been gorging myself this week and will gorge myself even more next week.

It began with St. Valentines Day. My long suffering girlfriend got me another Looney Tunes DVD box set–which makes all three of them. I\’ve been working my way through the second box since Christmas, so the THIRD box was just more fuel for the fire. The third box is a more diverse set than the first two. The first two seem to favor Chuck Jones over all of the other Warners directors. Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, and Tex Avery really got the shaft in these two sets, while Friz Freling and Bob McKimson got a token nod. Not so the third box. They dug deep into the vaults for this one. In addition to some absolute rarities, it includes three of my favorite Warner cartoons: \”Steal Wool\”, in which Ralph the Wolf duels with Sam the Sheepdog over a flock of sheep–all on the timeclock; \”Hillbilly Hare,\” which features Bugs calling a square dance while dressed as white-trash jailbait (this is one of the most censored of Warner\’s cartoons; and \”Birds Anonymous,\” in which Sylvester enters a twelve step program to kick his canary habit. Still among the missing on dvd is \”Ali Baba Bunny,\” featuring Daffy Duck\’s absolute best line (\”Consequences, schmonsequences, so long as I\’m rich\”). I guess they have to save something for the future. And even at 60 cartoons a pop, the DVD boxes will be coming out for the next decade or so. In addition, get a load of this back cover , in which Bugs, Daffy, and Porky are done up to the nines as dance-hall girls. It warms the hackles of my crossdressing little heart.

But that was just the beginning, because I had an unusual (for me) amount of success on eBay last week, too. Won at auction at ridiculously low prices were Shoot the Piano Player, L\’Avventura, Black Narcissus, and Manji. The first three were won as a single lot on laserdisc. The last was won individually on DVD. Average price? $4.

Laserdisc? Oh yes. I\’m a slave to obsolete technologies. I still have vinyl records, too. Laserdisc provides a picture quality at least as good as DVD (it\’s sometimes better) and it\’s a buyer\’s market for laserdiscs. People are dumping them in favor of DVD, which is great for me. The first three movies are Criterion discs, which would run me to $90 on DVD. One of these days I need to transfer my laserdisc collection to DVD, but for now, my player works and I have a spare.

Which raises the question: why buy a movie when I could rent it instead? One might ask a bibliophile why he buys books instead of checking them out of the library (To quote Erasmus: \”When I have a little money, I buy books. If I have any left over, I buy food and clothing\”). As I said at the beginning of this post, I\’m accquisitive by nature, but there\’s more to it than that: I have a pretty good video store near me. They carry foreign films, art films, indies, documentaries, etc. But they don\’t have everything. They don\’t have Manji, for example. I could rent from Netflix, I suppose, but I prefer to give my local store the business (Netflix, by the by, doesn\’t have everything, either–I\’ll come back to this). Here\’s a quick rundown of what these films are:

Shoot the Piano Player is a film by Francois Truffaut from the French New Wave of the 1960s. It\’s a send-up of sorts of American gangster films, shot through with the editing innovations of the movement (The French New Wave was intent on breaking the hold of Griffith-ian \”invisible\” editing). It\’s probably Truffaut\’s most entertaining film.

L\’Avventura is an Italian film by Michaelangelo Antonioni. It\’s an epistemological murk; also a crime film of sorts; and vaguely resembles the Italian giallo mysteries that would come along a decade later. It\’s a quintessential \”slow\” movie, in which the camera lingers over the shot compositions a long, long time. Fortunately, it\’s a beautiful movie, so one doesn\’t mind looking at it even when nothing is happening.

Black Narcissus is the film that sold me the lot. It\’s a film by the English directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who followed no school of filmmaking but their own. This story of nuns in the Himalayas is a fabulous color experiment, shot by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Deborah Kerr is superb in the lead. Of the nature of the film, actress Kathryn Byron said: \”He (Michael Powell) gave me half of my performance with the lighting.\” The film works best as an abstraction. As such, it\’s a joy to look at.

Finally, there is Manji, a strange psychodrama from Japan. Its director is one of the great unsung masters of Japanese filmmaking, Yasuzo Masamura, who was part of a Japanese \”New Wave\” dedicated to breaking the hegemony of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi on the conventions and style of Japanese filmmaking. Mind you, like most Japanese movies, it\’s impeccably composed, but it has a nervous energy one would not find in classic Japanese movies. In any event, the movie is about two women, married to other people, who fall in love with each other, precipitating a spiralling decent into madness and suicide for themselves and their spouses.

If that wasn\’t enough, Deep Discount DVD is having a sale on selected titles from Universal Studios right now. It\’s a fairly limited selection, but I picked up six discs: Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Psycho II, Psycho III, The Palm Beach Story, and the recent version of Peter Pan. The Eastwoods are two of my favorites, with Two Mules pairing Clint with a strong leading lady in Shirley Maclaine, and The Beguiled being the weirdest movie he ever made. The two sequels to Psycho have virtues that most Hitchcockian purists deny, but I quite like them, especially the third movie. Both The Palm Beach Story and Peter Pan are just fun.

And as if that weren\’t enough…

Let me back up a bit. My cinematic appetites aren\’t being well-served by American distribution these days. I could suggest that NOBODY is being well served by the American film industry these days. They make it so damned difficult to get around them, too. Fortunately, the Internet is doing an endaround to circumvent the problem. Mind you, I\’m not talking about illegal downloading. I\’ve never downloaded a movie in my life and I gave up on buying bootlegs many years ago, but I\’m not shy about going out and getting the movies I want to see. Remember what I said about Netflix not having everything? Well, they only carry movies released in Region 1. There are vast numbers of movies that aren\’t released in Region 1. Many of these are movies I want to see. If you have any kind of serious interest in Asian film, for instance, you almost HAVE to become a collector. That\’s where www.yesasia.com comes in, and THEY were having a sale last week too. Among the movies I bought: a few movies by ace Hong Kong crime film director Johnny To, a couple of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, and several Korean movies, including two of my favorite Korean dramas of the last few years: The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors and The Good Lawyer\’s Wife.� Oh, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is one of the best movies you didn\’t see last year. You might have seen director Chanwook Park\’s previous movie, Oldboy, last year–and if you haven\’t, why not?–but this film is better. A LOT better. Like its predecessors (including Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), this is a movie that takes an aluminum baseball bat to an audience. Lord, it\’s a thing of beauty. This is a movie that WILL be released in the US–it already played the festival circuit, which is where I saw it in November–but I didn\’t feel like waiting for it to be released on DVD domestically. I was putting in an order and they had it available. A simple principle of business: if the competition feeds the customer\’s needs, then they\’ll get the business.

And to top it all off, this weekend was Columbia\’s annual True/False documentary film festival.

I don\’t think I ever watched this many movies in so short a time when it was my business to do so. I just hope this doesn\’t start to work like aversion therapy.

Cheers.

Apparently, I Should Be Talking About Sex…

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1140808059-hr-2421.jpg\”

So, I\’m writing a long post about the movie-induced coma I\’ll be in at the end of the weekend, when my browser crashes and takes all of what I\’ve written with it. I\’ll spare you a recap, but I suspect the universe is telling me something. I can\’t complain too much about the response I\’ve gotten to my blog. I wish it were better, but it\’s not as bad as it could be. Then I cruise around the pages on 360 and notice that there are blogs getting hits left right and center at a rate higher than my own by an order of magnitude. Many of these blogs have very little content. What do those blogs have that mine doesn\’t?

Sex, apparently.*

So let\’s talk about sex. I like sex. Everyone likes sex in one form or another. I like sex with cute men and cute girls and cute in betweens (mainly, I like sex with men). I like kinky sex. I like vanilla sex. Sex, sex, sex!

Ahem…

I\’m even willing to admit that–gasp!–I dress like a girl because it provides me with sexual satisfaction. Which brings me to the real subject of this blog. Many people in the gender community dance around this impulse. Crossdressing for sexual satisfaction is something of a no no. If you dress up for sexual satisfaction, you aren\’t REALLY transgendered, you\’re a fetishist. Or so the thinking goes. Sex and gender identity aren\’t the same thing, after all. But to hear some T-people say it, they aren\’t related, either, which is screwy.

Unless one is totally asexual, one\’s gender identity DOES have an influence on one\’s sexual preferences, even if that influence is just a feeding of self-loathing over what one likes. If one\’s gender dysphoria is so strong that it creates an aversion to one\’s body and sexuality–and I\’ve met people who are like that–then that\’s an influence, isn\’t it?

My own transgenderism began longer ago than I can remember. I ALWAYS wanted to be a girl, even before I had an inkling of what sex was. Once I knew what sex was, my desire to be a girl became sexualized. It\’s almost inevitable. Dressing like a girl was bound up with wanting to behave sexually like a girl, so OF COURSE dressing like a girl became an element of my sexual satisfaction. Oh, I can function sexually as a male, either with women or men, but I don\’t enjoy it nearly as much as filling a female role during sex–it requires a strong dose of fantasy, but I can do it. I guess that makes me versatile. But I digress…

The stigma placed by some sectors of the transgendered community on dressing for sexual satisfaction confounds me, especially since we know that some women derive sexual satisfaction from dressing sexy. There is, after all, an entire industry dedicated to dressing women in sexy clothes for sexual purposes. I can\’t write ALL of that industry\’s success off on the imposition of the patriarchy or the sexual subjugation of women to men\’s desires. It makes ME feel good to dress sexy for a partner. I enjoy it. I know there are women who feel this way, too (I know some of them, so it\’s not a theoretical viewpoint).

If we are to recognize that a transgenderist or transexual has the right to inhabit the gender role of their choosing, shouldn\’t that include the right to pick the variation of that role? I think so. Lord knows, if I were required to wear the \”matronly\” clothing I see some T-people wear, I would almost prefer to go nude. Not for me, thanks.

So, I guess you could say I have a fetish for sexy women\’s clothing. It\’s true! I get off on it. But that\’s not the whole story, because I don\’t always get aroused by what I\’m wearing. The key here is that I don\’t dress as a girl solely for sexual purposes. If that were the case, I wouldn\’t be able to get out the door. It\’s hard to keep one\’s eye on the road when one is very aroused.

As a final note: I have a post-op TS friend–I won\’t embarass her by naming her–who once said to me that there were two kinds of T-girls: those who admit to being sexually aroused by dressing up at some point during their lives, and liars. A broad brush, true. But one with a ring of truth? Maybe. But to each his or her own…

————————–
*Sex isn\’t the only driver of page hits on 360. The number of friends in a network is also an influence. I have about a hundred people in my network right now. I would expect that if I had a full list, my traffic would grow geometrically rather than arithmetically. A geometric growth would put me over that order of magnitude of difference. I say this knowing full well that this may only be of interest to me.

Apparently, I Should Be Talking About Sex…

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1140808059-hr-242.jpg\”

So, I\’m writing a long post about the movie-induced coma I\’ll be in at the end of the weekend, when my browser crashes and takes all of what I\’ve written with it. I\’ll spare you a recap, but I suspect the universe is telling me something. I can\’t complain too much about the response I\’ve gotten to my blog. I wish it were better, but it\’s not as bad as it could be. Then I cruise around the pages on 360 and notice that there are blogs getting hits left right and center at a rate higher than my own by an order of magnitude. Many of these blogs have very little content. What do those blogs have that mine doesn\’t?

Sex, apparently.*

So let\’s talk about sex. I like sex. Everyone likes sex in one form or another. I like sex with cute men and cute girls and cute in betweens (mainly, I like sex with men). I like kinky sex. I like vanilla sex. Sex, sex, sex!

Ahem…

I\’m even willing to admit that–gasp!–I dress like a girl because it provides me with sexual satisfaction. Which brings me to the real subject of this blog. Many people in the gender community dance around this impulse. Crossdressing for sexual satisfaction is something of a no no. If you dress up for sexual satisfaction, you aren\’t REALLY transgendered, you\’re a fetishist. Or so the thinking goes. Sex and gender identity aren\’t the same thing, after all. But to hear some T-people say it, they aren\’t related, either, which is screwy.

Unless one is totally asexual, one\’s gender identity DOES have an influence on one\’s sexual preferences, even if that influence is just a feeding of self-loathing over what one likes. If one\’s gender dysphoria is so strong that it creates an aversion to one\’s body and sexuality–and I\’ve met people who are like that–then that\’s an influence, isn\’t it?

My own transgenderism began longer ago than I can remember. I ALWAYS wanted to be a girl, even before I had an inkling of what sex was. Once I knew what sex was, my desire to be a girl became sexualized. It\’s almost inevitable. Dressing like a girl was bound up with wanting to behave sexually like a girl, so OF COURSE dressing like a girl became an element of my sexual satisfaction. Oh, I can function sexually as a male, either with women or men, but I don\’t enjoy it nearly as much as filling a female role during sex–it requires a strong dose of fantasy, but I can do it. I guess that makes me versatile. But I digress…

The stigma placed by some sectors of the transgendered community on dressing for sexual satisfaction confounds me, especially since we know that some women derive sexual satisfaction from dressing sexy. There is, after all, an entire industry dedicated to dressing women in sexy clothes for sexual purposes. I can\’t write ALL of that industry\’s success off on the imposition of the patriarchy or the sexual subjugation of women to men\’s desires. It makes ME feel good to dress sexy for a partner. I enjoy it. I know there are women who feel this way, too (I know some of them, so it\’s not a theoretical viewpoint).

If we are to recognize that a transgenderist or transexual has the right to inhabit the gender role of their choosing, shouldn\’t that include the right to pick the variation of that role? I think so. Lord knows, if I were required to wear the \”matronly\” clothing I see some T-people wear, I would almost prefer to go nude. Not for me, thanks.

So, I guess you could say I have a fetish for sexy women\’s clothing. It\’s true! I get off on it. But that\’s not the whole story, because I don\’t always get aroused by what I\’m wearing. The key here is that I don\’t dress as a girl solely for sexual purposes. If that were the case, I wouldn\’t be able to get out the door. It\’s hard to keep one\’s eye on the road when one is very aroused.

As a final note: I have a post-op TS friend–I won\’t embarass her by naming her–who once said to me that there were two kinds of T-girls: those who admit to being sexually aroused by dressing up at some point during their lives, and liars. A broad brush, true. But one with a ring of truth? Maybe. But to each his or her own…

————————–
*Sex isn\’t the only driver of page hits on 360. The number of friends in a network is also an influence. I have about a hundred people in my network right now. I would expect that if I had a full list, my traffic would grow geometrically rather than arithmetically. A geometric growth would put me over that order of magnitude of difference. I say this knowing full well that this may only be of interest to me.

What, Me Worry?

I used to think of myself as a moderate. The seismic shift in the political spectrum over the last six years has placed me firmly on the “left” side of politics these days. In some ways, I’m an old-style conservative, in so far as I don’t trust the government and I value basic competence in public service and elsewhere. But, as we see on a day to day basis, that’s not part of the lexicon of the “conservatives” in charge of things right now. The news on the economy this week, if you believe the numbers, is “good.” Good, that is, if you own stock. If you don’t, you’re shit out of luck. The true story of the economy, one that jibes with the reality I see around me every day, alarms the the hell out of me.

Apparently, I’m not alone.

Paul Craig Roberts has conservative bona fides: Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, associate editor for the Wall Street Journal, editor for the National Review. Hardly a hysterical anti-Bush liberal. And yet…here’s an article he titles “Nuking the Economy,”� the first paragraph reading as follows:

“Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don’t know what worry is.”

One of his more cheerful statements:

“No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year’s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau’s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7,9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)”

And another:

On February 10 the Commerce Department released a record US trade deficit in goods and services for 2005–$726 billion. The US deficit in Advanced Technology Products reached a new high. Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the US highly dependent on foreign provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the US economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade.

Economics is often called “The Dismal Science.” Even by that standard, this kind of analysis is disturbing.

I wonder if it’s too late to start learning to speak Mandarin. Lesson one: “Huan ying guang lin Wal-Mart” is “Welcome to Wal-Mart”

Enjoy

Top o\’ the Shuffle, remixed

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1139935435-sc-2221.jpg\”

I did this a while ago, but here\’s another installment. For your pleasure, the top of my iTunes shuffle:

“Think Of Me” by Buck Owens
“Catapult” by R.E.M.
“Gayaneh – Sabre Dance” by Aram Kachaturian
“Has He Got a Friend for Me?” by Maria McKee
“Flutter” by Eleventh Dream Day
“This Wheel\’s On Fire” by Bob Dylan & The Band
“Play In The Sunshine” by Prince
“Keep A Dollar In Your Pocket” by Roy Milton & His Solid Senders
“Sorry” by The Easybeats
“Connection” by The Rolling Stones
“Mgb-Gt” by Richard Thompson
“Snibor” by Duke Ellington
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” by Elvis Presley
“Country Honk” by The Rolling Stones
“Water” by The Who
“Little Bitty Pretty One” by Thurston Harris
“Standing At The Crossroads” by Elmore James
“Dark End of the Street” by The Flying Burrito Bros
“The Bewlay Brothers” by David Bowie
“Goon Squad (Live)” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
“Harlem Nocturne” by Viscounts
“Ooby Dooby” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Loudmouth” by The Ramones
“You\’re No Rock \’n Roll Fun” by Sleater-Kinney
“Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” by The Clash

I was mentioning to someone last week that technology changes behavior. Here, then, is another example. I don\’t listen to the same things I listened to when I was younger. Or rather, the breadth of what I listen to is not as narrow as it was back then. The variety of music that I listen to is broader than it has ever been. Why? Life experience is one answer. Unless one is an arrested adolescent, tastes mature and become refined. Access is another answer. That is the internet\’s great gift. It gives you access, should you choose to use it, to every conceivable cultural viewpoint, to a vast river of art and information, to a veritable cataract of human expression. Looking at this list, it occurs to me that even twenty-five slots on random selection aren\’t enough to encompass a representative selection of the music I program. A cursory glance reveals that it\’s missing swing, jump blues, sixties girl groups, post-punk pop (as opposed to \”New Wave\”), psychedelic pop, garage rock,� seventies art rock, and a dozen or more other genres. Some redundancy in artists is inevitable, I suppose: I have my favorites just like anyone, and have the deck stacked with them.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

Enjoy.

Top o\’ the Shuffle, remixed

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1139935435-sc-222.jpg\”

I did this a while ago, but here\’s another installment. For your pleasure, the top of my iTunes shuffle:

“Think Of Me” by Buck Owens
“Catapult” by R.E.M.
“Gayaneh – Sabre Dance” by Aram Kachaturian
“Has He Got a Friend for Me?” by Maria McKee
“Flutter” by Eleventh Dream Day
“This Wheel\’s On Fire” by Bob Dylan & The Band
“Play In The Sunshine” by Prince
“Keep A Dollar In Your Pocket” by Roy Milton & His Solid Senders
“Sorry” by The Easybeats
“Connection” by The Rolling Stones
“Mgb-Gt” by Richard Thompson
“Snibor” by Duke Ellington
“Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” by Elvis Presley
“Country Honk” by The Rolling Stones
“Water” by The Who
“Little Bitty Pretty One” by Thurston Harris
“Standing At The Crossroads” by Elmore James
“Dark End of the Street” by The Flying Burrito Bros
“The Bewlay Brothers” by David Bowie
“Goon Squad (Live)” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
“Harlem Nocturne” by Viscounts
“Ooby Dooby” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Loudmouth” by The Ramones
“You\’re No Rock \’n Roll Fun” by Sleater-Kinney
“Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” by The Clash

I was mentioning to someone last week that technology changes behavior. Here, then, is another example. I don\’t listen to the same things I listened to when I was younger. Or rather, the breadth of what I listen to is not as narrow as it was back then. The variety of music that I listen to is broader than it has ever been. Why? Life experience is one answer. Unless one is an arrested adolescent, tastes mature and become refined. Access is another answer. That is the internet\’s great gift. It gives you access, should you choose to use it, to every conceivable cultural viewpoint, to a vast river of art and information, to a veritable cataract of human expression. Looking at this list, it occurs to me that even twenty-five slots on random selection aren\’t enough to encompass a representative selection of the music I program. A cursory glance reveals that it\’s missing swing, jump blues, sixties girl groups, post-punk pop (as opposed to \”New Wave\”), psychedelic pop, garage rock,� seventies art rock, and a dozen or more other genres. Some redundancy in artists is inevitable, I suppose: I have my favorites just like anyone, and have the deck stacked with them.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

Enjoy.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow…

Well, I got my first haircut of the millennium on Friday. Prior to Friday, my real hair was down to my ass. Much as I like long hair, I was plain sick of taking care of it. It was becoming particularly prone to tangles, and the shower in our house is currently out of order (the upstairs bath works fine), making hair care more difficult than it usually is. So off it came. I haven’t had hair this short in well over a decade. I’m not used to it. My hair isn’t used to it, either. It’s been sticking up from the shock and is as unruly as I remember it being. Ah, well…

And, no, I’m not going to post a picture.

As a means of soothing my feminine vanity, I went wig shopping on Saturday. A friend of mine gave me a gift certificate to a wig store for Christmas and I thought it was high time I cashed it in. The store in question was having a sale, too (woohoo!), so I got two new wigs. Now I need to find an excuse to wear them out this weekend. Valentines day is possible, I guess, but that day is usually devoted to watching gangster movies. I’m a romantic at heart, I know…

Binging and Purging

I’m thinking about purging my “friends” list. I was fairly laissez faire about letting folks join, but there’s too much clutter right now. Anyone without  a reasonable amount of actual content is fair game for the axe.

Not only that, but I’m thinking–hard–about ditching anyone whose updates are feeds rather than blog entries (unless their feeds are from their own blogs elsewhere on the net). One of the things that’s driving me nuts is that a lot of the people on my list are subscribed to the same damned feeds, so they all update at the same time.

Oh…but I’m sure that some of you might have thought that I was going to “purge” my closet and give up crossdressing and all this transgendered bric-a-brac. Absolutely not. Ain’t gonna happen. Many crossdressers purge once or twice during their lives, but I never have. I’ve always known that this hobby (or “fetish,” if you’re feeling nasty) was more than that for me. I’ve had periods of self-loathing, but never over my gender identity. Besides, realistically, I know that I’ve sunk too damned much money into it. I’m married to my wardrobe now, for better or worse, until death do us part. They’ll bury me in my wedding dress, dammit, even if I never actually get married.

My advice to anyone who is thinking of purging is to give their stuff to a trusted friend (emphasis on trusted) for safe-keeping. The urge will come back, so save yourself some time and money.

But back to the subject at hand . . . some of the profiles at the bottom of my “friends” list are going to get whacked. Tony Soprano has nothing on me!