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 Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2004 8:31 am Post subject: The American South |
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The American South:
Gone with the Wind
Based on the book by Margaret Mitchell
DVD
| Quote: | | Kings and traes, huh? Too good for me, major. You know, it's a pity we couldn't have fought the war out in a poker game. You have done better than General Grant and with far less effort. -- Captain Rhett Butler in a card game with his northern captors during his brief incarceration as a Confederate captain and prisoner of war, from the movie version. |
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., when discussing film versions of novels, wrote that there were only two good ones: Slaughterhouse Five, a movie of his own work, and David O. Selznick's masterpiece based on Mitchell's epic story 20 years in the making, which remains, in our view, the greatest chronicle of life in the Old South during the American Civil War. (When will it end?) Rarely, if ever, has a movie enjoyed such a symphony of perfect casting, scripting, scoring and filming. Nor has the silver screen anywhere again found a male lead equal in sheer animal magnetism to 1939 Hollywood legend Clark Gable, the King.
Click on the art.com poster here.
Broadway Melody of 1938
VHS
Judy, you were just
a kid but you said a mouthful.
You tell 'im, Judy!
Slaughterhouse-Five
DVD
| Quote: | | More on Slaughterhouse-Five at the Roll & Shuffle's NEW! ESL forum. |
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| Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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Land of the free, home of the brave
The November Coin-Toss
Far be it from us to influence voting among the American people this fall, but here's what a few Americans had to say about the southern incumbent:
| Quote: | Sorry Everybody
An Apology to the World for the Re-election of
George W. Bush
Hardcover
By James Zetlen
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| Quote: | Unprecedented - Election 2000
Special 2004 Campaign Edition
DVD
Gripping exposee of the Busher's presidential win in 2000 granted by the U.S. Supreme Court, not the electorate. |
Yes, and
Rock Against Bush - Vol. I
CD
and
Rock Against Bush - Vol. II
CD
Yes, and then there's this - from his mother!
| Quote: | Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Editor's Letter
The Measure of the Man (or Woman)
By Graydon Carter
February, 2007
| Quote: | I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards. Former president Bill Clinton was famous for taking a mulligan, or an extra try, on almost every shot, then playing the ball that had landed in the better spot. He essentially plays a two-man, two-ball "scramble" - but solo. A former employer of mine ensured that he won in tennis against family and underlings by always calling line shots in his own favor. And so it is with our current president, who will scratch, claw, kick, scream, move the goalposts - pretty much do anything to effect a win. He is a sore winner. And a horrible loser. (emphasis added)
...When Barbara Bush took her 13-year-old son and his best friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf at her Houston club, George would start cursing if he didn't tee off well. His mother would tell him to quit it. By the third or fourth hole he would be yelling "Fuck this" until he had ensured that his mother would send him to the car.
"It fit his needs," says Hannah. "He couldn't lose."
Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, "That boy is going to have optical rectosis." What did that mean? "She said, 'A shitty outlook on life.'"
Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off...It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that."...
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite side of the net. "There was only one problem - my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "OK, then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you - he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.
It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you that extra mile or tyhat extra point...you go to a whole new point...you go to a whole new level."
Inasmuch as I'm writing this the week before Christmas, any sort of prediction is a dicey proposition, but *my guess is that Bush will double-down on Iraq. He has lost, but his past would indicate that he will figure that he can just keep the game going a little longer. (Excerpts refer to Gail Sheehy's article, The Accidental Candidate, in the magazine's October, 2000 issue, at p. 52) |
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| Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2004 12:42 pm Post subject: |
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Hey Rube
Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness
Hardcover
By Hunter S. Thompson
| Quote: | | Nashville is a river town with a long and sleazy history. It was a capital of commerce before the Civil War, when it became a vicious war zone and a swollen mecca for gamblers and prostitutes. The population doubled during the War, and most of the newcomers had Syphilis...But that was before Football was invented, and Nashville today is a thriving city of of 520,000 relatively healthy sports fans who don't mind admitting that they gamble a lot of money on many football games. (-- p. 84) |
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 1:46 pm Post subject: |
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Tishomingo Blues
CD Audo
By Elmore Leonard
Read by Paul Rudd
Once again, the cover art is the second best thing about this latest third-rate novel by money-maker Leonard. The first is the fact that it takes place at the Tishomingo Lodge and Casino in Mississippi, though we found no fault at all with narrator Paul Rudd's performance as all of the characters. A distinguished performance on his part, though apparently it didn't even yield a walk-on at the movie set. Why not, we wonder?
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| Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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Life on the Mississippi
Hardcover
By Mark Twain
With b/w illustrations by Walter Stewart
| Quote: | A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside. The cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called, they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated. The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit. Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting some little time, I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment - to warm back the perishing life perhaps; I do not know. Then, being set down again, the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more.
I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endure it as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight; so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired. We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last.
Evidently there is abundant fascination about this "sport" for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw people enjoy anthing more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The "cocking-main" is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting - for the cocks like lit; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not the fox's case. (From Chapter XLV, Southern Sports, at pgs. 366-367) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 2:58 pm Post subject: |
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Bahamarama
Hardcover
By Bob Morris
| Quote: | | The way it works at Baypoint Federal Country Club for Wayward Males, guys sometimes throw a going-away party for their buddies who are checking out, and invite the D.O.'s to join in. Everyone acts all chummy, guzzling Dom, firing up the Cohibas, playing Texas hold 'em for real hard-on money, and letting the good times roll. (Opening page) |
Aside from the opening poker reference, this is a book so trashy the editor (Marc Resnick of St. Martin's Press) who elicits a mention in the Acknowledgments for "his astute skills and gentle tweakings" should sue for libel.
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| Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Letter from Mississippi
Gone with the Surge
An always anomalous section of the
South prepares to reinvent itself.
By Peter J. Boyer
| Quote: | | The casinos that followed [Hurricane Camille] were an unmistakable indication of the coast's willingness to distinguish its particular character from the state's Bible belt mores. In the past decade and a half, gambling has transformed the area, mainly through the seemingly quixotic efforts of a man named Rick Carter, who is a client of Billy's and was a schoolmate of mine in Gulfport. After an early career in the clothing business, Carter and two partners, Terry Green and William (Si) Redd, a Nevada slot machine tycoon, bought a small forty-year-old cruise ship and renamed it the Pride of Mississippi, in the hope of conducting "cruises to nowhere" -- gambling excursions into international waters beyond the Mississippi Sound. In 1989, the men persuaded the Mississippi legislature to allow gambling on boats cruising along the shore. It had been an audacious quest, given that Mississippi's politics were (and are) so deeply influenced by religious conservatives. (Mississippi was the last state to vote to repeal Prohibition, in 1966, and some counties are still dry.) Lottery initiatives were regularly defeated. In the late eighties, though, the unemployment rate was high, and prospects for a turnaround in shrimping and the other principal industry, timber were low. (-- at pgs. 81-83, all of them gold) |
How can a magazine with writing like this and writers like this include such gawdawful fiction so often?
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| Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2005 1:42 pm Post subject: |
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Business 2.0
Magazine Subscription
The next real estate boom
In the coming 25 years, the biggest
wave of development since World
War II will turn America's major metro
areas into giant "megapolitans" teeming
with opportunity. Want to get in?
We've found some strategies that are
already paying dividends.
By Paul Kaihla
November, 2005
| Quote: | Building a New New Orleans
Long-term growth depends on rehabbing not just the physical infrastructure, but also the economic.
Viva Las Vegas: Remodeling the city after family-friendly Las Vegas - with casinos, luxury malls and hotels, and five-star restaurants - could spark a renaissance for New Orleans's convention trade, lure more tourists, and get them to spend more. "You can build a big metro economy purely our of high-level services," (Virginia Tech urban planning prof Robert) Lang says. "You get people there with gambling, then rope them into consuming other things." (bottom of p. 94) |
Swell, but could we get it right this time and please! use this best practice manual as our construction guide:
| Quote: | Universal Design Handbook
Hardcover (and weighs so much you need a mobility
device to hoist it!)
Edited by Wolfgang Preiser
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| Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
A Short Novel and Three Short Stories
Hardcover
By Truman Capote
| Quote: | | But before these purchases can be made, there is the question of money. Neither of us has any. Except for skinflint sums persons in the house occasionally provide (a dime is considered very big money); or what we earn ourselves from various activities: holding rummage sales, selling buckets of hand-picked blacberries, jars of homemade jam and apple jelly and peach preserves, rounding up flowers fro funerals and weddings. Once we won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not that we know a fool thing about football. It's just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment our hopes are centred on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a new brand of coffee (we suggested "A.M."; and, after some hesitation, for my friend thought it perhaps sacrilegious, the slogan "A.M.! Amen!")...(From A Christmas Memory at p. 162) |
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| Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:42 pm Post subject: |
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
A Short Novel and Three Short Stories
Hardcover
By southerner Truman Capote
| Quote: | "Well," she said, with a mouthful of apple, "you may have read about him in the papers. His name is Sally Tomato, and I speak Yiddish better than he speaks English; but he's a darling old man, terribly pious. He'd look like a monk if it weren't for the gold teeth; he says he prays for me every night. Of course he was never my lover; as far as that goes, I never knew him until he was already in jail. But I adore him now, after all I've been going to see him every Thursday for seven months, and I think I'd go even if he didn't pay me. This one's mushy," she said, and aimed the rest of the apple out the window. "By the way, I did know Sally by sight. He used to come to Joe Bell's bar, the one around the corner: never talked to anybody, just stand there, like the kind of man who lives in hotel rooms. But it's funny to remember back and realize how closely he must have been watching me, because right after they sent him up (Joe Bell showed me his picture in the paper. Blackhand. Mafia. All that mumbo jumbo: but they gave him five years) along came this telegram from a lawyer. It said to contact him immediately for information to my advantage."
"You thought somebody had left you a million?"
"Not at all. I figured Bergdorf was trying to collect. But I took the gamble and went to see this lawyer (if he is a lawyer, which I doubt, since he doesn't seem to have an office, just an answering service, and he always wants to meet you in Hambug Heaven: that's because he's fat, he can eat ten hamburgers and two bowls of relish and a whole lemon meringue pie). He asked me how I'd like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him look, darling, you've got the wrong Miss Golightly, I'm not a nurse that does tricks on the side. I wasn't impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl's john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that's another fifty. But then held me his client was Sally Tomato. He said dear old Sally had long admired me a la distance, so wouldn't it be a good deed if I went to visit him once a week. Well, I couldn't say no: it was too romantic." (From the title novel at pgs. 25-26) |
Filmmakers who have run out of story lines - and they have! - are warmly invited to re-make this New York classic. Poor Capote reviled the first effort mostly for its inept casting with the exception of Buddy Ebsen as Doc Golightly, but the usual Hollywood sugar coating also managed to devastate both character and plot. Hit Re-try someone. Please.
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| Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 11:11 am Post subject: |
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Monster
Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos
With Christopher Berry-Dee
Hardcover
| Quote: | When Richard Mallory didn't show up to open his shop on Monday, 3 December 1989, his staff and clients didn't think much of it. As far as friends went, there was no one close enough to him to notice he was gone. Frankly, no one even cared. It wasn't until the cops turned up at his business saying they had found his abandoned Cadillac outside Daytona that anyone knew anything was amiss. No one 'gave a rat's ass,' as one officer dryly observed.
'The best beach in Florida! A perfect destination for honeymooners and couples! Vacation values that won't bust your budget! So scream the tourist brochures. But Daytona is no different from many cities: along the star-spangled sidewalks, lined with laundromats, strip joints and seedy hotels, Joe Public can get his 'round the world' (everything) for 80 bucks, or a straight 'ho strip' (where the hooker strips for oral sex only) for 20. Richard was a sufficiently regular customer at the topless bars in the Tampa, Clearwater and Daytona areas that the strippers, go-go dancers and hookers mostly knew him by sight, if not by name. When he latched on to them, he was like a rigged fruit machine - guaranteed to pay out nearly every time. (From Chapter Four at pg. 51) |
Dickensian story of America's first named female serial killer, who confessed to having killed seven men in what she claimed was self-defence, looting from her victims anything she found of value to augment the usually paltry amounts of cash in their wallets. Information withheld at trial, including the record of Mallory, her first victim, a convicted armed sex offender who did 11 years, provides further evidence of the disparities between rich and poor in the U.S. criminal justice system - if more was required.
Monster
DVD
Far grittier lesbian S&M serial killer film:
Butterfly Kiss
with Honey Bunny - gulp! - in the lead
DVD
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| Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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Will the Circle Be Unbroken - The Trilogy
CD Audio
Featuring the Tennessee Stud sung by legendary
guitar picker Doc Watson
| Quote: | Tennessee Stud
By celebrated Arkansan Jimmie Driftwood
Along about eighteen twenty-five,
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never would have got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee Stud.
I had some trouble with my sweetheart's pa,
And one of her brothers was a bad outlaw.
I sent her a letter by my Uncle Bud,
And I rode away on the Tennessee Stud.
The Tennessee Stud was long and lean,
The color of the sun, and his eyes were green.
He had the nerve and he had the blood,
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee Stud.
One day I was riding in a beautiful land
I run smack into an Indian band
They jumped their nags with a whoop and a yell
And away we rode like a bat out of hell.
I circled their camp for a time or two,
Just to show what a Tennessee horse can do.
The redskin boys couldn't get my blood,
'Cause I was a-riding on the Tennessee Stud.
We drifted on down into no man's land,
We crossed that river called the Rio Grande.
I raced my horse with the Spaniard's foal
'Til I got me a skin full of silver and gold.
Me and a gambler, we couldn't agree,
We got in a fight over Tennessee.
We jerked our guns, and he fell with a thud,
And I got away on the Tennessee Stud.
I got just as lonesome as a man can be,
Dreamin' of my girl in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Stud's green eyes turned blue
'Cause he was a-dreamin' of a sweetheart, too,
We loped right back across Arkansas;
I whupped her brother and I whupped her pa.
I found that girl with the golden hair,
And she was a-riding on the Tennessee Mare.
Stirrup to stirrup and side by side,
We crossed the mountains and the valleys wide.
We came to Big Muddy, then we forded the flood
On the Tennessee Mare and the Tennessee Stud.
A pretty little baby on the cabin floor,
A little horse colt playing 'round the door,
I love that girl with the golden hair,
And the Tennessee Stud loves the Tennessee Mare. |
Anyone remember parties filled with competent musicians like the ones featured on these classic albums? Anyone still hosting those parties? If so, move it on over to Canada's Left Coast. Look us up. Play us a couple train songs and we'll take you way up the Blue Mountain and show you all the best fishing holes.
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:38 am Post subject: |
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A Few Quick Ones
Paperback
By the incomparable Prune Gnasher Steelschack at his finest
| Quote: | In a corner of the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest a rather heated dispute had arisen between a Small Bass and a Light Lager. Their voices rose angrily.
"Old," said the Small Bass.
"Ol'," said the Light Lager.
"Bet you a million pounds it's Old."
"Bet you a million trillion pounds it's Ol'."
Mr. Mulliner looked up indulgently from his hot Scotch and lemon. On occasions like this he is usually called in to arbitrate.
"What is the argument, gentlemen?"
"It's about that song Old Man River," said the Small Bass.
"Ol' Man River," insisted the Light Lager. "He says it's Old Man River, I say it's Ol' Man River. Who's right?"
"In my opinion," said Mr. Mulliner, "both of you. Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote that best of all lyrics, preferred Ol', but I believe the two readings are considered equally correct. My nephew sometimes employed one, sometimes the other, according to the whim of the moment."
(Thus opens the tale, Big Businessat p. 110) |
Listen to Paul Robeson make it his theme song in Showboat, the 1936 version of the hit musical celebrating, among other things, the riverboat gambler.
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:46 pm Post subject: |
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Light in August
The Corrected Text
Hardcover
By 1949 Nobel Prize Laureate William Faulkner
| Quote: | | Like Christmas, Brown came to work in the same clothes which he wore on the street. But unlike Christmas, he made no change in his costume for some time. "He'll win just enough in that crap game some Saturday night to buy a new suit and still have fifty cents in nickels to rattle in his pocket," Mooney said. "And next Monday morning we aint going to see him again." Meanwhile Brown continued to come to work in the same overalls and shirt in which he had arrived in Jefferson, losing his week's pay in the Saturday night dice game or perhaps winning a little, greeting either the one or the other with the same shouts of imbecile laughter, joking and chaffing with the very men who in all likelihood were periodically robbing him. Then one day they heard that he had won sixty dollars. "Well, that's the last we'll see of him," one said. (Chapter 2, p. 39) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:00 am Post subject: |
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Fortune
Magazine Subscription
Risky Business
Insurers see the Big Easy as a
big loser. Louisiana is hoping to
change their minds. Here's how.
By John Simons
Aug. 20/07
| Quote: | The problem is not what many people think. More than 99% of Katrina-related claims in Louisiana have been resolved, and insurance is widely available. Unlike in other coastal states, insurers haven't stopped doing business in Louisiana altogether. They can't. A 1992 law makes it difficult for a company to cancel a policy if a customer or an insurer have been doing bsuiness for three or more years. So while insurance providers are still doing business, they are responding to the perception of higher risks by offering fewer new policies and placing greater restrictions on existing coverage.
All of this, of course, comes at higher prices. Since Katrina struck two years ago, major insurers such as Allstate and State Farm have been hedging their risks in Louisiana, especially along the Gulf Coast. Those companies have raised rates by as much as 50% in New Orleans. They have also removed wind and hail protections from new and existing policies. State Farm, which has 32% of the homeowners market in the state, says the average premium on a $100,000 wood construction New Orleans home has risen almost 30% since Katrina, to $2,162 a year. "Our actuaries measure the cost of the promises we make to homeowners. And what they're telling us is that the cost of doing business in Louisiana - and other places along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard - is going up," says State Farm spokesman Dick Luedke.
... Convinced that fixing insurance will go a long way toward healing the state, (Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Jim) Donelon put together a package of proposals designed to attract and retain insurers. Last month the Louisiana state legislature passed nearly all of them. One measure abolished the Louisiana Insurance Rating Commission, an independent body of six government-appointed officials who pass judgment on insurance rate changes of more than 10 %. The insurance commissioner will now make that call; the idea is that it will be easier for insurers to increase rates. The centrepiece of Donelon's legislative package is an incentive program that offers $100 million in matching grants to companies that insure homes in riskier coastal parishes. Twenty-five percent of the new policies have to come off the books of Louisiana Citizens; the state does not want to be a big player in the insurance business. The reforms offer something for consumers too, with a new office of Consumer Advocacy to handle complaints. As a whole, the package, which passed with overwhelming support, is designed to lure back scared investors. The message: You can make money here. We want you. (From under the subhead, The fortified levees won't do much to mitigate flood risk. Why? Because they're sinking, too, at pgs. 77-78) |
Time
Hurricane Katrina
The Storm that Changed America
Hardcover
Typical Time cutting-edge photo essay of the devastation wrought by Katrina with trenchant cutlines by talented photographers, who carefully documented their paths through the carnage.
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