Everyday's a mad tea party

MOOMBAHTON

Moombahton (pronounced "Moom-bah-TONE") is a genre of popular music that was created by American dj/producer Dave Nada [1] at a high school homecoming "skipping party" for his younger cousin in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2009.[2] The specific event that stimulated NADA's development of the Moombahton genre was his slowing the Afrojack remix of the Silvio Ecomo & DJ Chuckie song "Moombah" to 108 beats per minute. Because that tempo nears that of the reggaeton, Nada created the neologism "Moombahton" by combining the title of the track "Moombah" and the "ton" ending of the word "reggaeton" and applied it to his new genre.

In the period between the events of the homecoming party in Fall, 2009, and March, 2010, Nada perfected his vision of the new genre in the recording studio utilizing the intuitions and insights garnered from the "skipping party" experience to create a five track EP of newly-minted Moombahton tracks that dropped in March 2010 with the promotional assistance and support of DJ AYRES and DJ Tittsworth at T & A Records [3] The 5 tracks on the EP Moombahton are "Moombahton," "Riverside," a Moombahton version of the Sidney Sampson hit ,"Ruffcut Moombahton Dub," featuring a sample of the La Maluca hit song, "El Tigeraso," "Ruff Cut Moombaton Edit, and "Seductive Sound." The "5-pack" Moombaton sampler was uploaded to Soundcloud in early March 2010, where it garnered immediate attention and stimulated the creation of other Moombahton tracks by a handful of artists in the United States and Canada.[4]

Nada's "Moombahton" was more than simply "Dutch House pitched down to 108 BPMs." The original Moombahton tracks feature chopped vocals, layered acapellas, extended and enhanced build-ups, as well as the introduction of new drums and percussion elements.

In April influential cultural music blog Generation Bass posted a Moombhaton article that drew even more attention to the new Dave Nada-innovated genre.[5]

This helped spawn the genre's most innovative producer to date, Munchi from Rotterdam, Netherlands. The young gifted producer raised the bar in production quality and helped legitimize the sound of Moombahton. He self-released his "Moombahton Promo" EP on Munchi Productions as well as his collaborate efforts with dj/producer David Heartbreak from NC, entitled "Munbreakton" & "Fuck H&M" EP.

AND I WUZ ALL LIKE

February 24!

we'll see if this bitch is really all she's cracked up to be.

February 15!

Yann Tiersen

"With his whimsical, melancholy music, Yann Tiersen has become a sought-after composer, not only for his soundtrack work, but in his own right. Borrowing from French folk music, chanson, musette waltz, and street music, as well as rock, avant-garde, and classical and minimalist influences, Tiersen's deceptively simple style has been likened to Chopin, Erik Satie, Philip Glass, and Michael Nyman. The Paris-based composer became popular outside his native country for his score to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, but like most seemingly overnight successes, he had been working for years before the film's success brought him international acclaim. Born in Brest in Brittany on June 23, 1970, Tiersen was raised in Rennes and made a name for himself as one of the star pupils at his local conservatory (despite middling academic grades). Tiersen studied violin and piano from the ages of six to 14, and eventually trained to be a conductor. However, Tiersen rebelled against his classical training and, inspired by the likes of Joy Division and the Stooges, played guitar with several local post-punk-influenced bands during his later teenage years. At the same time, Tiersen was also composing soundtracks for short films and accompaniment for plays. Several of these pieces ended up on his first album, Valse des Monstres, in 1995 and introduced his delicate but deeply emotional style, and which also featured intricate arrangements incorporating instruments as varied as toy piano, banjo, harpsichord, melodica, and carillon, as well as piano and guitar. Tiersen played all of these instruments both in the studio and in concert, which gave his early one-man shows a theatrical appeal that earned him a spot performing in 1996's Avignon Festival. However, Valse des Monstres and its follow-up, 1996's Rue des Cascades, were largely ignored by the public and by critics. His third album, 1998's Phare, met a different fate; its single, "Monochrome," which was sung by French pop star Dominique A., was a radio hit and propelled the album, and Tiersen, to mainstream success in France. iersen spent the rest of the 2000s alternating between film and pop music, issuing the score to Les Retrouvailles and the collaboration Yann Tiersen and Shannon Wright in 2005. He also toured frequently, releasing a live album in 2006 and the Tabarly score in 2008. Dust Lane, an album focusing on mortality, arrived in 2010." - Heather Phares, AllMusicGuide

Witch Hazel

"Witch hazel" is a pun on the name of a North American shrub and the herbal medicine derived from it. Animator Chuck Jones, of his own admission, got the idea of Witch Hazel from the Disney cartoon Trick or Treat (1952), which featured a good-natured witch squaring off with Donald Duck. Enamored of the character's voice characterization, provided by June Foray, Jones developed his own Witch Hazel character for the Bugs Bunny short Bewitched Bunny (1954). The story retells the classic fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel", and Witch Hazel, naturally, plays the witch who tries to cook and eat the children. Bugs Bunny witnesses her coaxing the children inside and saves the youths from Witch Hazel's clutches. However, once the witch realizes that Bugs is a rabbit, she chases him to put him into her witch's brew. Bugs eventually uses Hazel's own magic against her and transforms her into a sexy female bunny, prompting the comment, "But aren't they all witches inside?" As Jones was unable to get Foray to play the role, Bea Benaderet supplied the witch's voice.

Despite their common name, Jones's Witch Hazel is a much different beast from her counterpart in the earlier Disney film. The Looney Tunes character is highly stylized. Her rotund, green-skinned body is wrapped in plain, blue dress and supported by twig-like legs. She has wild black hair from which hairpins fly and spin in midair, whenever she zooms off on her broom, and she wears a crumpled black hat. Her nose and chin jut bulbously from her face, and her mouth sports a single tooth. She's a more villainous creature than Disney's witch, as well; the Looney Tunes Hazel lures children into her house to eat them. Nonetheless, she has a strong sense of humor; she frequently says things that cause her to break into hysterical, cackling laughter.

Jones finally succeeded in wooing Foray into taking on the role of Witch Hazel for the 1956 cartoon Broom-Stick Bunny. Foray had reservations about Jones "stealing" a character from Disney, but Jones knew that there was no way for Disney to establish ownership of the name since "witch hazel" is the name of an alcohol rub. Foray would perform the character for the final two cartoons in the series.

Broom-Stick Bunny is usually cited as Jones' funniest Witch Hazel outing. The cartoon begins with Hazel asking the genie of the magic mirror who is the ugliest (a plot similar to the one in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves). The scene cuts to Bugs trick-or-treating on Halloween as a witch. When he visits the isolated house of Witch Hazel, she mistakes Bugs-in-witch-costume for the genuine article. Jealous that this newcomer is uglier than she, Witch Hazel invites the "witch" inside her strange home (beautifully rendered by layout artists Ernest Nordli and Philip DeGuard) for some "Pretty Potion" disguised as tea. Bugs removes his mask to drink, sending Witch Hazel into a frenzy & mad dash; it seems that a rabbit is the missing ingredient for her witch's brew. Hazel soon chases Bugs and captures him by tricking him with a carrot. Hazel was about to kill Bugs, but when she looked into his big sad eyes, she cried and said that he reminded her of her pet tarantula Paul. Bugs tried to calm her down with a beverage (the Pretty Potion from earlier). In the end, Hazel takes the Pretty Potion, a fate worse than death for a woman who relishes her croneliness. The potion transformed her into a beautiful, pink-skinned redhead (with a hairdo that, according to Foray, matched her own in a tribute to the actress). Now with an hour glass figure, she was wearing a tight sea-green/teal dress that showed off her legs and the top of her cleavage. Horrified at her appearance, she runs to the magic mirror and (in a newly softened voice matching her beautiful appearance) meekly asks if she was still ugly. The genie took a surprised look at her and said "Growl! Growl!" The genie falls instantly in love with this new version of Witch Hazel and tries to grab her. Hazel went on her broom and flew off into the night sky with the genie chasing after her on his magic carpet. Bugs then calls "Air Raid Headquarters" about them. Critics have praised the film's witty dialogue, written by Tedd Pierce, such as Hazel's question to Bugs-in-costume, "Tell me, who undoes your hair? Why, it's absolutely hideous!"

Bugs Bunny was pitted against Witch Hazel in one final cartoon, A Witch's Tangled Hare (1959), a parody of Macbeth. This short was directed by Abe Levitow, as Jones was probably off sick during production. Rabbit is once again the missing ingredient to Witch Hazel's brew, and Bugs happens to be in the area. Meanwhile, a William Shakespeare look-alike observes the action in search of inspiration.

The 1963 Bugs Bunny short Transylvania 6-5000 features a brief, silent cameo appearance from Witch Hazel (or a character very similar to her), as Bugs transforms the cartoon's vampire antagonist into her through the use of a magic spell.

Once production shifted to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Witch Hazel appeared in the 1966 cartoon A-Haunting we will go (1966), which also starred Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales.

Witch Hazel has since appeared in cameos in various Warner Bros. productions, such as the movie Space Jam (1996), the video games Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time (in which she appears as a boss and also appears on the cover of the game) and Looney Tunes Collector: Alert! (2000), and one episode each of Animaniacs (where she was not voiced by Foray), The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, Pinky & The Brain, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Duck Dodgers (which references Broom-Stick Bunny). She was also featured as the lead antagonist in DC Comics' 3-issue Bugs Bunny mini-series from 1990 (though at the end of the storyline, her appearance there is actually revealed to be a disguised Wile E. Coyote). She even made a cameo in the deleted "pig head scene" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which she can be seen flying around on her broomstick before she gets struck by lightning. She was used as an enemy in Scott Lowenstein's Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 4 and her silhouette can be seen on the cover of the game. Witch Hazel has a cameo in the video game adaptation of Looney Tunes: Back in Action as a painting parodying the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum.

none of us

...none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemer’s how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

"In my dream, the world had suffered a terrible disaster. A black haze shut out the sun, and the darkness was alive with the moans and screams of wounded people. Suddenly, a small light glowed. A candle flickered into life, symbol of hope for millions. A single tiny candle, shining in the ugly dark. I laughed and blew it out."

"You actually believed that all it would take is a few chemicals, a couple of days in drug-induced isolation and a cheap little nervous breakdown and you'd have me all figured out? Like there was some rabbit hole you could follow me down to understanding?"

leaves of music

She seemed to move everywhere dancing & music followed her like leaves on the wind.

thank you, wided, always

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. Lewis

from the God of Small Things

To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour." (page 230-1)

Tell Me

Tell me, Andrew, if you were to walk out of your home tomorrow morning, gaze upward into the heavens and see me there, in all my splendor, pacing, pining, and worrying; hoping, wishing, and yearning; and questioning whether or not my boldest dreams would ever come true, would you or would you not, wonder if I had gone stark raving mad?

Well then...?
The Universe

ancient choices

Be at peace, dear Andrew, rest easy, relax, coast and luxuriate to any degree that you can allow yourself, for the day will inevitably arrive when you'll understand all the "reasons" that now elude you, bless the darkness that now seems to separate you, and celebrate the ancient choices that once made you. Just as we do.

Trust me,
The Universe

http://bigfd.tumblr.com/post/2158377033

Beautiful Life

Hugues Cuenod, operatic tenor with six-decade career, dies at 108

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 7, 2010; 8:29 PM



Hugues Cuenod, who died Dec. 3 at age 108, was a Swiss-born tenor who won favorable reviews over more than six decades for his performances in concerts and operas. At age 84, he became the oldest singer to debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera, where his performance as a crotchety emperor in Puccini's "Turandot" won acclaim.

He insisted that he never lost his voice - a light tenor critics called "reedy and penetrating" and "high, dry and white" - because there hadn't been much of one to begin with.

"It's important not to take oneself too seriously," he said, "particularly when you are around people who do just that."

Mr. Cuenod first gained attention in the 1930s while working with the noted French conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger.

He was a featured singer on Boulanger's renowned 1937 recordings of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, which reintroduced the 16th-century composer to the world.

Such obscure work, Mr. Cuenod said, was his favorite.

"I leave Beethoven alone," he told the New York Times in 1987. "It always seemed such unnecessary music."

Six-foot-five and irrepressible in comic opera roles, Mr. Cuenod performed on both sides of the Atlantic. He was known for regular appearances at the British Glyndebourne Festival Opera, including what the New York Times described as "a delightful drag part as a bad-tempered nymph" in Cavalli's "La Calisto."

Mr. Cuenod's recording of lamentations by French Baroque composer Francois Couperin had impressed composer Igor Stravinsksy, who enlisted Mr. Cuenod to sing the role of the auctioneer Sellem in the 1951 world premiere of Stravinsksy's "The Rake's Progress."

Several years later, Mr. Cuenod was lauded for his interpretation of the music teacher in Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro."

"Towering over everyone else on the stage is the supremacy of Hugues Cuenod's Basilio," Washington Post critic Paul Hume wrote in 1964. "Here is a vibrant object lesson in the meaning of Mozart."

Hugues Adhemar Cuenod was born June 26, 1902, in the Swiss village of Corseaux-sur-Vevey, where his grandfather was mayor.

Mr. Cuenod said he became a singer mostly out of laziness while studying at a conservatory in Basel. "I was crazy about singing. I found it easier than the piano," he said. "The truth is, I never liked to work."

After graduating from the conservatory, he studied in Vienna and Paris and made his stage debut in 1928 in a production of Austrian composer Ernst Krenek's opera "Jonny Spielt Auf."

Mr. Cuenod then took a brief musical comedy turn in Noel Coward's operetta "Bitter Sweet" before finding wider fame with Boulanger.

Singing music from the Middle Ages to modern times in multiple languages, Mr. Cuenod was known for his clarity and diction. "One needs no printed text," wrote a critic in the American Record Guide, "to keep up with his medieval French."

As a member of Europe's aristocratic musical circles, Mr. Cuenod knew some of the great artists of the early 20th century. He heard soprano Elisabeth Schumann sing Richard Strauss recitals in the presence of Strauss himself and attended the 1928 German premiere of "Turandot."

Nearly six decades later, in 1987, when he made his Met debut in "Turandot," Mr. Cuenod's performance was hailed in the New York Times as "firmly and expressively sung."

Mr. Cuenod gave his last performance at 92, when he sang the role of Triquet in Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin." That final performance, according to a review in Opera News, was "in perfect style."

He died of undisclosed causes in Switzerland. He had lived in a centuries-old Swiss castle with his partner, Alfred Augustin, a retired civil servant 41 years his junior.

In 2007, after Swiss law was changed to allow same-sex couples most of the legal benefits of marriage, they registered their partnership in a civil union.

"Most people were happy for us," Mr. Cuenod told the arts publication Playbill, "though a few promised us 15,000 years in hell."