While "Sex Therapy" is more than halfway decent and Robin Thicke can give Justin Timberlake a good run for his money, there's a lot to be said for a little less telling and a lot more showing. Thicke's voice is as smooth and buttery as icing on a delicious cake, but his over-emphasis on phallic imagery and frequent use of "daddy" is enough to give me an Oedius Rex complex...honey, Robin, please...remember less is more when it comes to describing sex. The sensuality in the music and his voice is pitch perfect, but the lyrics...well, they are, at times (on songs such as "Shakin' It 4 Daddy") just a tad cringe-worthy!

Still, this is a rather appealing album with some nice soul grooves, some strong dance beats and a slew of great guest appearances by artists such as Snoop Dog, Estelle and Kid Cudi. Given the album's title, I don't really think it's necessary for me to say "consider yourself warned!" But I will anyway...because the former Catholic school girl in me is feeling SO guilty for listening to this!:)

 

Sometimes I feel like one of those really out-of-touch people with an  insane need for nostalgia and its warped way of making you think everything was wonderful back in the day...but sometimes I also feel like I would bring those "real" days back in a flash...

I'm listening to Snow Patrol's "Cartwheels" (it's absolutely gorgeous and deceptively easy-going  like most of their songs are!)

 

and being lulled into this sense of "other" worldliness, something that often comes over me when I'm lost in a really really good song. And I can't believe there was a time when I was free enough with my body to not only want to do cartwheels, but to be able to actually do them...

Childhood is truly a remarkable time in our lives and no matter what kind we have it seems to me that most of us have this incredible talent for making ourselves totally believe anything...Maybe what we need as adults is a (occasionally, of course) strong dose of make believe...because keeping your eyes open all the time kind of hurts...

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