Errors-To: owner-ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu From: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@athos.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@athos.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #178 ecto, Number 178 Thursday, 5 March 1992 Today's Topics: *-----------------* poetic justice Fluff (tm) catching up Dreams are... A few loose ends On the Midlist ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 12:02:00 GMT From: S.A..Ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org (S.A. Ezust) Subject: poetic justice Date: Thu Feb 20 12:02:33 1992 GMT+2 hmmmm. I was wondering why so many people were raving about the song "poetic justice" and how important it is that the song gets played by Happy during her live performances. I read over the messages and thought "now what does Poetic Justice sound like?" I just couldn't remember, so I figured that it was just one of those songs that was not memorable. Yesterday I actually searched through all my tapes to see if I could find it, and guess what... I don't have it on any of my Happy tapes! Woj warned me that about 10% of each tape got lost when he copied them for me. Well, guess what was in that 10%? That's right... So now I am really curious. I wonder if I can keep myself in suspense about how awesome this song is until the 1st4 come out on CD... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- S. Alan Ezust University of Zimbabwe, Harare ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org Faculty of Engineering CAL Project After March 31 please use this address: sae@cmpsci.suffolk.edu -- INTERNET: S.A..Ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 07:41:25 MST From: dbx@ventana.atmos.colostate.edu (Doug Burks) Subject: Fluff (tm) Greetings, Time is getting short, so I thought I'd post my plans for my Happy concert vacation. I will be flying into Philadelphia on March 16th (Monday) and flying out of Philadelphia on Sunday the 22nd. In between, my plans are completely wide open, waiting to be filled (outside of two obvious events). If anyone has some interesting plans or is willing to offer a place to sleep for a night, drop me some e-mail. I'm eagerly looking forward to meeting a host of you. By the way, are any plans underway for meeting before the Albany concert? Meredith wondered about odd conjunctions of albums squeezed onto a single cassette. As I thumbed through my pile of cassettes, I realized that my list list be very long. I also noted that even for very different albums, I usually could find something that the two albums shared. How about _Philosophy of the World_ by the Shaggs b/w _The Free-Wheeling Bob Dylan_? Both albums are concerned with more than the usual pop subjects and (very loosely) classifed as "folk". _Candy Apple Grey_ by Husker Du and _Ram_ by Paul and Linda McCartney both use rather basic production. _The Legendary Christine Perfect Album_ marks the rise of one prominent musical career, while _Double Fantasy_ by John Lennon/Yoko Ono marks the (premature) end of another. _Lemmings_ by the National Lampoon attacks much of what is now represented by Led Zeppelin's untitled album. _Give 'Em Enough Rope_ (by the Clash) even seems to answer the question _How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All_ posed by the Firesign Theatre. Yet even my fractured imagination has trouble linking the following albums, except for the fact that I thoroughly enjoy all of them. Hounds of Love - KaTe Bush b/w Quark, Strangeness, and Charm - Hawkwind Plastic Letters - Blondie b/w Dillard, Hartford, Dillard Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers - The Firesign Theatre b/w Rough Mix - Peter Townshend/Ronnie Lane Bookends - Simon & Garfunkel b/w Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols Doc at the Radar Station - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band b/w Freedom at Point Zero - Jefferson Starship Anyway, I could add probably another dozen, but that's enough silliness for now. I've listened to _Solace_ once, and on my own, I wouldn't have brought up the Sinead comparison, though I can see why people bring it up. The first listen leaves me hungry to dive in again, but I wanted to bring up another point. Has anyone else noticed how pieces of her lyrics directly bring other songs to mind. "Into the Fire" brings to mind Happy's "Feed the Fire", even including the phrase "I feed the fire", though in a completely different context. In "Home", her phrase "the child with the dream in her eyes" had a weird echo with KaTe's song of a similar name. In "Shelter", the title and even the chorus reminded me of Lone Justice's wonderful song of the same name. Of course, the music and most of the lyrics have little in common with the earlier songs, but my enjoyment of her album suffered a little bit because of the strong reminders of the songs which are among the best by their respective artists. ... or is it just me being strange again? Also, Gaffa had some discussion about the fact that the Canadian release had only ten songs, while the US release has eleven. Well, that eleventh is apparently "Wear Your Love Like Heaven", a cover of a Donovan song (something no one else has apparently mentioned). However, I have a question. Does anyone remember what that song was used as a commercial for? All my strained memory says is cosmetics. Martin, there's at least one Ectophile who understood your thesis abstract. A group in our department is using octrees for satellite image visualization, and my group is looking into them for radar data visualization. Mitch, the Jennifer and Ted Stanley I mentioned occasionally show up in the list of contributors for All Things Considered, part of a wonderfully bizarre list which includes the Nexus Lexus Research Group, the German Marshall Fund (for foreign reporting), the listeners of KCRW. I've always wondered if they make up that list, but it's too strange not to be true. Only a week and a half!! Doug Burks _O_ dbx@olympic.atmos.colostate.edu |< She really is!! ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 21 Feb 92 10:32:00 GMT From: S.A..Ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org (S.A. Ezust) Subject: catching up Date: Fri Feb 21 10:33:06 1992 GMT+2 Ok now I am up to Digest 158. My incoming mail feed seems to be down again, so I haven't received anything since Sunday, but I guess it's just as well as I am so far behind still... > From kIrI: > > Speaking of movies: everyone should see La Femme Nikita. It's brilliant. > It's twisted and bizarre, but so much fun to watch. Quasi feminists > will get a kick out of the womenly women Nikita, who kicks some major > male booty. Both my roommate and I were going bananas over this film, > i.e. making comments like "Yes!, allright, way to go" etc. thruout > ...I doublehighginormomassively recommend seeing this film if you haven't > already. I saw that one about 2 years ago, and it was an incredible visual experience on a big screen. The background music for most of the tension scenes is always the same, but it is always appropriate... The precussion and synth sounds are just so omnious, sometimes my eyes water in certain scenes - One incredible one is the one where she's walking out of the compound and seeing the city for the first time in 3 years - you almost feel like you've been locked inside that compound for the entire time as well, and your eyes widen with wonder at the beauty of the city, the open sky, the people in the streets, and so forth... Scenes like those are just so powerful. Cinematically the movie is brilliant. But the plot is cool too, the acting is excellent, and while the ending is a little anti-climactic, it is great all the same... Highly recommended. > Woj said: > i dunno -- like many french movies of the type, the accent is > on style over substance, but what style! (mm, the masterpiece of the > genre is still without the slightest doubt "Diva". if you haven't > seen it, rent it right away and rue the lack of a big screen and > surround-sound...) yeah, the movie had style, and there's nobody who can deny that! Diva was cool too; I saw it twice at the Coolidge Corner cinema in Brookline, MA... I dunno if that cinema still exists though... > From: justin@crim.ca (Justin Bur) > Subject: Re: Ecto Flag > > kIrI writes... > > Cathy asks about Heidi Barry > or rather Berry... a new 4AD-person whom I've heard very little > (a few minutes that Alan played for me). Someone else (hmm, Alan > once he gets back and reads his backlog? :-) will have to say more. I am two weeks behind, as you can see... I don't know Heidi Berry. Are you sure I played it for you? Perhaps you have her confused with someone else? Or maybe you have ME confused with someone else? > Motormouth Ecto-Mom sez: > Kate talk for a moment... > Martin, I didn't see an answer to your question, so here goes. In > "Watching You Without Me" Kate does some really strange things with > her voice near the end of the song. Not the choppy "help me baby help > me, listen to me listen to me, talk to me" but after that, when the > voice gets somewhat more melodical and sounds like backwards masking. I thought it _WAS_ backwards masking. Are you trying to tell me that she can do that just with her own voice? I don't believe it! > Meredith says: > > Speaking of whom, I was mentioning to a friend last night that I had to > remember to call the QEII in Albany and ask if the Happy show will be 21+ or > not. If it is, I'm screwed- but it was suggested that maybe I could try to > get Happy to somehow get me in- like I could join her tech crew for a night > or something. To which my friend replied, "Would that make you a Happy > Roadie?" Just don't call yourself a Happy Rhodie... That has different connotations, especially in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia)... Rhodies are odius creatures, all of them being white-supremacist homophobic racist chauvanist alcoholic pigs... I avoid them like the plague... > From: "Tom Keays" > > Clannad but their recent stuff is boring. However, for a band in a > similar Celtic/Rock vein, I WOULD recommend Moving Hearts; especially > their live album, The Storm. Great stuff. I have a mix tape that was made by an irish friend of mine. There is one song by Moving Hearts called "Irish Ways and Irish Laws" that is the most beautiful Irish folk song ever... I wasn't crazy over about 50% of their stuff simply because I don't like the happy hyper irish mode, but the slow romantic sad mode that IWAIL is dripping of.... The lead singer of Moving Hearts, Christy Moore, has lots of solo material out. In addition, his brother, Luka Bloom, has about 4 or 5 solo albums out as well. If you like one, you'll like the other two, guaranteed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- S. Alan Ezust University of Zimbabwe, Harare ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org Faculty of Engineering CAL Project After March 31 please use this address: sae@cmpsci.suffolk.edu "Lick the carpets, dust the dog, mow the windows, shine the socks... You've got to keep things CLEAN!" -Edward Ka-Spel -- INTERNET: S.A..Ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.fidonet.org ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 10:55:34 PST From: stevev@greylady.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender) Subject: Fluff (tm) First I discover you're a Gene Wolfe fan, and now a Firesign Theatre fan? (Not to mention a Kate fan and a Happy fan.) Is this some strange case of "Separated at Birth?" ======================================================================== From: kyrlidis@athena.mit.edu Subject: Dreams are... Date: Thu, 05 Mar 92 15:28:49 EST Hi, I can't believe it happened again. I almost ignored the first incident thinking it was unlike me, but last night it happened again. Two happy dreams in a month. WOW! I have vague recollections of the first one, it was at a pre-concert signing session, but I think Happy was sitting behind a window, like a cashier, and was asking me which songs I liked and why. The second one was definitely an Albany one. I was there before the show, and they had the CDs of the 1st4 out (when I asked how come so soon, they- Yes Kevin was also in this one- said they wanted to surprise us!), and I immediately bought them all including Warpaint. I asked if they had a boxed-set version of it, and they said they were thinking of a limited edition with lithographs made from Happys paintings. Then I looked at the covers. The only one I remember is Volume 2, which was not called Vol. 2 anymore but something like ARAM or something. It was the same monster only these letters were drawn on top of it. It looked very impressive. And then I woke up. I can't wait til the actual concert dream! :-) This is getting weird... Angelos ------------------------------------------------------- \ UP / )... I was above IT, now I'm in IT ...( / DOWN \ ------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== Date: 5 March 1992 14:17:26 CST From: Subject: A few loose ends In response to Doug's first open ended question: Some time in the '60s or '70s, Love Cosmetics used "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" as a jingle. For those with shorter memories than me, Love Cosmetics was a line of apparently low-end cosmetics made by the same outfit that puts out Contac (what does this imply about how the stuff impacted the health of the nasal passages? :-) ). I be- lieve it was aimed principally at adolescent girls. I seem to recall that one of their commercials used Ali MacGraw as a pitchperson (this was not too long after the film _Love Story_ came out). Ali presumably has not used these cheapo face-paints since at least the time they went off the market, and now looks great in her 50's (which should, in principle, give me some sort of reassurance with respect to the prospects for my own rate of decay :-) ). Let that be a lesson to younger readers of these pages, in any event :-). In response to Doug's second open-ended question, it is quite possible that Jennifer and Ted have no particular claim to fame other than underwriting _All Things Considered_. In Chicago, WBEZ acknowledges many of its larger- amount private individual donors on the air; it may be that the same thing happens at the network level. In response to no open-ended question of Doug's, but in the realm of interesting indirect connections between things, I found out last week while perusing some of my favorite newsgroups on the net, that gypsy, a regular contributor to several groups in the gender/intimacy/sexuality genre, has just installed a new .sig with an epigraph from archy the cock- roach, from the _archy and mehitabel_ stories written early in this century. Encountering this reminded that some years ago in _Chicago_ magazine, the resident company of anonymous restaurant critics signed their reviews with such pseudonyms as archy, Athos (a name familiar to ectoians everywhere), and Barnabus Barph (which evokes no net-related associations for me whatso- ever). What has all this to do with anything that matters, you ask. The answer is that I don't know either, but still... Mitch Pravatiner (trying mightily to come in under 35KB) ______________________________________ This post is dedicated to the memory of John Belushi (d. March 5, 1982) ======================================================================== Date: 5 March 1992 14:50:19 CST From: Subject: On the Midlist Several months ago, the _Chicago Tribune_ carried an article on the pub- lishing industry, concerned principally with how it is paying progressively less attention to books and authors not at the blockbuster bestseller level. It reported that _midlist_ is the common industry term for that portion of the printed word that ranks below the sales figures of a Steven King, e.g. (sorry, Vickie :-) ), and that the income to the publishing houses from such works is often considered insignificant, while the income to the authors in this sector was often even lower. But not being altogether value-free, the reporter went on to point out that the midlist is where many of the works of the greatest literary merit--those not driven primarily by the commercial machine--are to be found. It seems to me that many of the artists we Ectoians have come to know and love--Happy, Jane Siberry, Sara McLachlan, Loreena McKennit, and--in the States, at least--even Kate to some degree--occupy proud niches in the midlist of contemporary music. It strains credulity to envision any of them, or others of their ilk, closing out this year on the Billboard Hot 100 with bull- ets by their numbers. Yet it strains credulity just as much to imagine us, as people of independent tastes, waxing anywhere near as rhapsodic over the high-concept artists of the charts, bullets and all, as we do about Happy Rhodes, Midlister. If--and it can be a big if--an artist can realize a comfortable living from the music and directly related activities alone, the midlist can be a very nice place to be indeed. With the pressure of commercialism off, artists enjoy the maximum latitude to be themselves from a creative standpoint, and esthetic excellence has its best hope of flowering. But quite apart from that, the social environment of the midlist--specifically the relations between artists and their fans--seems far more salutary than its counterpart among the megastars. Intuitively, at least, the quality of life seems better unen- cumbered by entourages, stalkers, tabloid stories, etc. One is freer to be oneself in everyday life, as well as artistically. What is more, not only are the artists and fans likely to be more accessible to one another, but the conversations themselves are likely to be more intelligent. (Imagine a fan of Michael Jackson or Madonna holding periodic, lengthy conversations with the Great One over the kitchen telephone in their small apartment :-) .) All in all, it would seem that a place on the musical midlist, as well as its literary counterpart, is often a mark of quality, for both producers and consumers of the art form in question. Power to the Midlist! :-) Mitch Pravatiner ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is a README file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me (or leave in the incoming directory, just let me know) things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@athos.rutgers.edu)