My sister gave me an Amazon MP3 music store gift card and "Meet Danny Wilson" is one of the albums I bought. I absolutely adored this album in college and had since lost my copy (in cassette) so it was the first thing I thought of when I went online to use my card.

Danny Wilson's most well-known song "Mary's Prayer" is so beautiful and magical that the very first time I heard it (in a record store that still sold records and way before digital music was even a gleam in someone's eye) I thought I might have to sit down for fear of fainting....Hyperbolic? maybe, but "Meet Danny Wilson" is full of wondrous moments, whether it's "Mary's Prayer," the smooth and jazzy "Nothing Ever Goes to Plan" or the very odd and cheeky "Five Friendly Aliens."

When I first saw "Moulin Rouge" in the theater it bizarrely bothered me how they could mix modern music with a previous turn of the century setting. I thought, "I'm going to HATE this movie. HATE it!"

But nine years later the soundtrack remains me one of my favorites, if for no other reason than Rufus Wainwright's painfully beautiful "Complainte de La Butte." Boy, can that man sing the Hell out of sad! And he sounds so old world weary, making this the only song that could easily fit in during Moulin's actual time.

And now, it makes perfect sense to me, that mashing of a kind of early 1900s decadence with the best of modern pop songs, with what the cast lacks in the original artist's talent more than making up for in earnestness:)...I mean, the sheer freakish of the "Like A Virgin" scene is more in spirit with Madonna's vision that you might first think...

...it's getting late and my thought process is slowing...sleep well!!:)

Oh Henry, you're not really the stick in the mud most people think you are...in fact, few writers (in my reading experience, at least) have captured the pain of broken hearts and being socially awkward the way you have.

I'll be circling the barn*with some of your most long-winded words ever and suddenly I feel caught off guard by how you manage to find little ticks and mean quirks smack dab in the middle of polite society. It's quite obvious that you and your equally famous brother William both had great insights into the human psyche...

And nothing has ever quite gotten to me the way Washington Square and Beast in the Jungle have...




*just a quick side note:

example of what seems like circling the barn, but in fact makes beautiful sense after more than one reading....see, the thing about Henry James is that you really need lots of patience to get through what he's saying, but the pay-off is very high:):


from the short story "Georgiana's Reasons":

1. 
   
   

   I.
   
   She was certainly a singular girl, and if he felt at the end that he
   did n't know her nor understand her, it is not surprising that he should
   have felt it at the beginning. But he felt at the beginning what he
   did not feel at the end, that her singularity took the form of a charm
   which--once circumstances had made them so intimate--it was impossible
   to resist or conjure away. He had a strange impression (it amounted
   at times to a positive distress, and shot through the sense of
   pleasure--morally speaking--with the acuteness of a sudden twinge of
   neuralgia) that it would be better for each of them that they should
   break off short and never see each other again. In later years he called
   this feeling a foreboding, and remembered two or th

I thought I was getting a cold yesterday so I did what I usually do when I'm home and too tired to read...I watched movies. The first one ("Tank Girl") I knew would be good because I'd already seen it and it's one of my favorites. It has a "bring it on" attitude I love and wild colors and kangeroo men and Naomi Watts so I'm happy...but the second movie "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" (or just "Angel" as it's more commonly called) was so bad it circled around and almost became good...but more on this film later...I'm still trying to figure out how I could spend two hours watching something so bad that wasn't the kind of campy bad that makes you laugh your ass off...

Normally I prefer pie over cake, but oh my gosh is Nina Persson's "Black Winged Bird" (off of The Cake Sale) one of the most beautiful and dreamy songs I've heard in recent years. Persson is from the Cardigans and more recently A Camp and she has so such a lovely voice I could listen to it for a long time...




You've got to hear this track (just click on the Cake Sale picture for a link to the sample!) and tell me if you don't start crying...

And her wicked duet with Tom Jones on their cover of "Burning Down the House" is also awesome...it's off of his Reloaded Hits album: