50 shades of making whoopey on a pile of money

I'm not much of a novel reader. I missed the boat on
50 shades of Grey. I did notice how its mention
made chicks all squirmy. i love vulnerability.

Anyway, it turns out this book is about making
love to yourself, with your greed muscle. It's
not about sex as much as about money.
The sex, except for some expletives,
wouldn't shock your grandfather. In fact, it
would put him to sleep.
It just goes to prove my mantra about novels,
they're designed to control minds with just
enough sizzle to keep people from having
their own lives.

see 4:06


Here, the baffler kicks the shit out of 50SoG.
Get the whole piece.

checkit: Baffler
Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism
Heather Havrilesky
[from The Baffler No. 22, 2013]
While we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly disguises her essential self in order to win the heart of a prince (The Little Mermaid). In another, a hooker with a heart of gold navigates her way to a happy ending by offering some happy endings of her own (Pretty Woman). Or there’s the sassy secretary who shakes her moneymaker all the way to the corner office (Working Girl).
Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper. Forget that E. L. James’s three-book series captures the intricacies of BDSM about as effectively as a “Whip Me!” Barbie doll decked out in a ball gag, dog collar, and assless leather chaps. Although admirers of the series sometimes credit it with liberating female desire by reimagining pornography for ordinary women (and introducing them to the unmatched thrills of leather riding crops and hard spankings), the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names. No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs. Just as magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ultimate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.
So Brazen
The fantasy life of Fifty Shades certainly isn’t focused on the sublime erotic encounter. The sex becomes hopelessly repetitive sometime around the third or fourth of the novels’ countless, monotonously naughty encounters. Each dalliance begins with the same provocative come-on: the naive college graduate Anastasia and the dashing mogul Christian describe their desire to each other with all of the charmless unpredictability of servers mouthing their prescribed scripts at an Australian-themed steakhouse. Awkward openers (“I think we’ve done enough talking for now,” “Now let’s get you inside and naked”) conjure the raw provocation of “How about a Bloomin’ Onion to get you started?” Even tougher to take are the coy responses (“Oh my!” “Why, Mrs. Grey, you have a dirty, dirty mouth!” “You’re insatiable and so brazen”), repeated with gusto despite a total lack of shock value in evidence. Readerly expectations tick up ever so slightly as Grey issues some bossy commands—Stand here! Undress! Bend over! Spread your legs!—which seem at first blush to foretell a curve in the carnal road. But no such luck. Give or take a blindfold here or a butt plug there, the same hands explore the same places in the same ways with the same results. After the fifteenth or sixteenth time Anastasia and Christian “find [their] release together,” they start to resemble tourists with no short-term memory, repeating the same docented visit to Graceland over and over again, drooling over the claustrophobic upholstered pool room and the mirrored wall and the fourteen-foot-long white leather couch afresh each time. By the third volume in the series, as every word out of Christian’s mouth (“I see you’re very wet, Anastasia”) still triggers an overheated response from his paramour (“Holy shit!”), readers may find themselves hissing, “Mix it up a little, for fuck’s sake!”[have you ever had a chick scream holy shit in the heat of the moment? me neither. that's a guy talking through a female character- Cos67]
What Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs.
But let’s not mistake sex for the main event. The endless manual jimmying and ripped foil packets and escalating rhythms and release-findings are just foreplay for the real climax, in which Anastasia recognizes that she’s destined to abandon her ordinary, middle-class life in favor of the rarefied veal pen of the modern power elite. Until then, like a swooning female contestant on The Bachelor, Anastasia is offered breathtaking helicopter and glider rides, heady spins in luxury sports cars, and windswept passages on swift catamarans. She is made to gasp at Christian’s plush office, with its sandstone desk and white leather chairs and its stunning vista, or his spacious, immaculate penthouse apartment, with its endless rooms filled with pricey furniture. She is treated to Bollinger pink champagne and grilled sea bass. She is offered a brand new wardrobe replete with stylish heels and gorgeous gowns and designer bras. She is lavished with diamond jewelry and flowers and a new luxury car of her own....

when your teacher says the word "cool"

that's when you wrap your arms around
your ears, like an autistic having a fit.

I've just been exorcising those demons
from the past. I think I already had
a story about other aspects of this,
but I'll check.

The thing that really got me was
when our teachers tried to use
music to "connect" with us.
They used tunes that were
5 to 10 years out of date, and
ones that we kids did not go
anywhere near.
I was like most kids, pretty
sensitive to musical heresy,
and this is what we were put
through rather regularly.

The teachers were cleaned up
and nicely dressed, but something
tells me that during Woodstock
they would have been unrecognisable.

So, they gave us a bunch of
Woodstock , like Jonie Mitchell
and some post-Woodstock scary
vaudevillian stuff or cumbaya
stuff from the Hispanic world.

Here they are :
Captain and Tennille


and Paloma Blanca


fyeh. puke.

Rush was copying FM

I used to be a big fan of Rush,
and still am, but I was really
disappointed as a teen by
Rush's Signals album.
That's when music meant something
to me. It doesn't anymore, but
I think I've solved a big mystery.
It's about how bands can take a face plant
when copying other bands.

After the HUUUUGE album called

Moving Pictures

even the video was cool, with the snow and all
at Le Studio, Morin Heights, Quebec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Pictures_%28Rush_album%29
How can you even compare this with the screaming
four-bar blues rock crap of that day?

It was both prog rock and yet it 

had a soul, unlike British prog

which was really long winded and technical:

Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, etc.

vs. Freewill

Anyway, after that big album, I was looking

forward to the next one, only to get a synth album called 

Signals

check this "song":

Subdivisions

[the hydrant symbolises their Signals album]

Cold, passion-less, synth-dominated drudgery.
It's as if somebody abducted their guitarist and
replaced him with C3PO.

Now, with the death of Nash the Slash, I had
 a chance to revisit Nash's old band, FM.
on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_%28Canadian_band%29

They were a decent synth band with a bit of
creativity. Their Phasors on Stun song was
big for a while. Here it is. 1978


Nash was on the mandolin. Pretty good schtick.

But, back to Rush. I believe that Rush was trying to copy
the feel of this music. As with every copy, you try to
get the essence, but Rush did a really shitty job, IMO.
Clue #1: (wiki) "In June, Ben Mink from the band FM was invited
 to play electric violin on "Losing It" "

Rush had just stopped writing 10-minute songs about Xanadu,
and had become a solid prog rock band, with two astounding
albums, and then the song above broke my heart.
Wiki says:
"The band underwent another radical stylistic transmutation
with the recording of Signals in 1982." Ya, and lost their mojo.

I can't even bring myself to put up New World Man. stinko
The only song that had any guts was Digital Man.
(now that I've read wiki, this song is heavily Police-influenced,
but is at least a decent job.)
-side note: the ___ Man titles. unoriginal. navel-gazing. sexist

It took Rush years to get their Mojo back. witness:

Red Sector A

A good song, but I had long since moved on to Heavy metal.
what can I say. I was 16. I was looking elsewhere for
meaning and passion in music.

Also, check this frenetic song:

Animate 1993

perhaps their best tune

that's my thesis.
I'll do a story later about how this and other bands
all decided, in the early 80s, to f^*k with their
models for success.
The thing I learned was that bands are just humans,
and humans f&*(k a good thing, just because.
I also learned that bands have good songs, and good albums
even, but no one band is consistent. Some bands are best
right out of the box, while others mature.

 some bands journey through some shit and
come back rejuvenated.

my task was to find righteous tunes. no more no less.

On to the next story.

Newsreaders are just brain-dead automatons

this is particular to the US, but most everywhere
because of the fact that the News are decided
by others, and then spun.
But, when somebody wants to lampoon
the newsreader, all he has to do is
give her some idiot stuff to read.

Watch as this newsreader barely slows
down while reading some

cod-Chinese names

Ho Lee Fuk

that doesn't excuse the racism of the 

joker, but it was probably some 

disgruntled staff member in the 

production room.

Nash the Slash can slash no more

I've been very busy the last few months, and
I have missed writing on this blog.

One of the things that happened while I was
busy was the death of a musician that I was
really impressed with as a young man.

NASH the SLASH

Once you get past the mummy tape,

there was something unique about

the guy. 

He wore the disguise because of 

shyness, and because it worked for his fans.

here's a hint of his personality,  

whooping it up 

with none other than Iggy Pop

I think Igg might have been 

under the influence of 

some pills.

They toured  together!
this show must have been on community tv
in Western Canada, maybe Calgary.
They go ape-shit. nuts

you'll see from this next video that he was
into synths and fiddles. Here's one of his original songs:


I'll add more later