Definition: A tendency to express banal and obvious concepts pompously and loudly. Example: The practice of freedom, as for example on La Stampa, constitutes nothing more than the blasts of shareholder trombonism, by now reduced to a state of pure nostalgia, but hoisted as a club against dangerous and sulphurous revisionism. (Il Foglio; either my…
Slightly off-topic, but irresistible, from Henry Hiram Riley‘s pseudo-ethnography, Puddleford and its people (New York, 1854): Another amusement, frequent in the country, was the turn-out of the ‘Calathumpian Band.’ … No one knew exactly who its members were; but they were always on hand, soon after a wedding, in full uniform, with all their instruments…
I’m looking at setting up a pornohop group and found http://www.milkandcookies.com while looking for an MP3 of that classic, I wanna fuck you in the ass. Unfortunately the link doesn’t work. I originally had the song on a compilation of filthy hiphop given to me by some grubby French person, which may have been purged…
It’s not just texts in furrin languages that I sing without hearing the meaning. For some reason, from when we learnt it as kids as a function of some education director’s dawning multicultural flushblush to now, I’ve always sung “My heart is down,/my head is turning around,/I had to leave a little girl in Kingston…
A while later, some of us did a cameo somewhere else in a tranny cabaret show. As S observed, tranny shows here (at least the ones that appear in public theatres with subsidies) are all the same and have more to do with religious ritual–Easter in Seville, Castro speeches–than art, intellect or invention: men acquire…
The gig we got conned into yesterday was something calling itself Life Parade, basically a crackpot collective from the fascist-left fringe. As is usual in such cases, public numbers were significantly lower than those of the state-financed sponsoring entities which, for some reason, people refer to as non-governmental organisations. There was the usual hysterical anti-employment…
I first came across their memory in a squat listening to Christy Moore’s song, Viva la quinte brigada, on the Ride on album. Here (via El bibliómano and JM Collado, who appears to have copied a whole load of the archive without adding anything of interest) is a collection of photos. Paradoxically, none of the…
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s new organ sounds wonderful: It has 6,938 pipes, ranging from pencil-size to more than 40 feet, deployed in 125 ranks. In a demonstration and performance for the press, Jeffrey Brillhart, an organist from Bryn Mawr, Pa., coaxed out a high, thin, almost inaudible piping that was seemingly adrift in the hall (like…
I suspect Ian Fleming knew (Noel Coward, allegedly: “Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is no, no, no, no!”) the stereotypical Signor No in Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-ish):
Two Latino kids in the train singing while a third filmed: aunque digan que soy un bandolero donde voy le doy gracias a dios por hoy estar donde estoy y voy a seguir con mi tumbao y con mi ojos colorao con mis gatos activao ustedes to me lo han dao Google a line to…