Y’all got any recommendations for Russian composers that aren’t awful and aren’t Tschaikovsky?
ETA: ARTEMYEV!
Shostakovich! Shos! ta! ko! vich!
rachmaninoff.
(via inothernews)
I haven’t seen the film, but that doesn’t sound familiar. Most of the common and really dirty Russian swears have some form of “yohb” or “yehb” (meaning “to fuck,” but way more offensive). It may be using a form of the verb “myat’,” meaning “to fuck” (more literally “to crush; to wrinkle” - not so much with the sex positivity, you see). This old article from the New Yorker on the Russian swearing system - and it is indeed an entire system - may help. If nothing else, it’s fascinating.
oh you people. he’s saying “ё мoё,” pronounced roughly “yo mayo,” with short Os.
it’s a shortened, mitigated version of the russian word for fuck, and so, meaningless on its own. it’s like saying ssssshhhhh….ugar. or ffffff….udge.
D and Converses? I must be dreaming.
Oooo, Akunin’s Piter FM. (As in “St. Petersburg” and FM/Fyodor Mikhailovich.)
I’ve been looking for a copy in English. The main character is Nicholas Fandorin, grandson of Erast Fandorin, the Bond-ish, Holmes-ian hotttness from Akunin’s earlier series of detective/adventure novels. This one’s sort of a postmodern treatment of Crime and Punishment - dual plot lines, parallel characters, etc.
it isn’t as great as the original series, but it’s pretty fucking great.
The ambivalence of the retarded listeners has its most extreme expression in the fact that individuals, not yet fully reified, want to extricate themselves from the mechanism of musical reification to which they have been handed over, but that their revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it. Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and “activate” themselves, they succumb to pseudoactivity. Types rise up from the mass of the retarded who differentiate themselves by pseudoactivity and nevertheless make the regression more strikingly visible.
Adorno, On The Fetish-Character etc.
(via chuffedlittlemuffin)
What babe?
The babe with the power.
What power?
The power of voodoo.
Who do?
you do!
(via kellyoxford)
Anne Hill, in “The Three Most Important Words in Any Relationship”
This essay isn’t very long and it’s completely genius in its simplicity.
It suggests that you can find out all you need to know about the health of a relationship by asking the other person, when they get up from the table or couch, “While you’re up, can you…?”
This comes down to a lot of what I feel is lacking in many serious romantic relationships—that sense of selflessness that turns this potentially loaded question into a non-issue.
Can you cook me dinner while you’re up?
Just kidding. :)
(via jaclynday)
Of the people I associate with in any sort of frequency, I can’t really come up with a single one with whom a question like this would be anything but a nonissue. Seems kind of uselessly trivial as a guage for a relationship’s health - kind of like, make sure your partner doesn’t unapologetically drop shit on your feet!
my roommate in Paris last winter.
i’m saving the photo for an ad campaign, as soon as they come out with a perfume that’s classy enough.
To hold her, to keep her - just as she was - with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul.
your daily Nabokov; Pnin.
such a beautiful little book. still wrecks me a little bit.
oh my god. book soulmates. bookmates?
To hold her, to keep her - just as she was - with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul.
your daily Nabokov; Pnin.
such a beautiful little book. still wrecks me a little bit.
I dunno, this just speaks to my condition today.
the greedy the people
(as if as can yes)
they sell and they buy
and they die for because
though the bell in the steeple
says Why
the chary the wary
(as all as can each)
they don’t and they do
and they turn to a which
though the moon in her glory
says Who
the busy the millions
(as you’re as can i’m)
they flock and they flee
through a thunder of seem
though the stars in their silence
say Be
the cunning the craven
(as think as can feel)
they when and they how
and they live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now
the timid the tender
(as doubt as can trust)
they work and they pray
and they bow to a must
though the earth in her splendor
says May
I vacillate wildly re: e.e. cummings, but this one is just technically fantastic.
