Neato! It’s the isolated vocal track of “Under Pressure” — just the two voices, nothing else.
This song, in its original, familiar form, always gave me hives because it’s like one of those recipes where you combine two fantastic and expensive ingredients, but rather than blending and melding to make something new and great, they just fight with each other. I love Bowie and I love Freddie Mercury, but I never understood why everyone’s so ga ga about this song. This stripped down version is a different take on it, anyway, and if it doesn’t exactly make the song work, it’s fascinating to listen to. Holy cow, what talent. I forgot how powerful Bowie’s voice is, and how otherworldly Freddie Mercury can sound.
This isolated vocal track of “Under Pressure” is more of a curiosity, but I just found out that there is a stripped down version of The Beatles’ album “Let It Be,” and that is something that really needed doing. (I guess they had brought Phil Spector on board to produce it, and then the main reason they made “Abbey Road” (which was made mostly after “Let It Be,” but released first) was so they could leave the world with one final actual Beatles album, since “Let It Be” kinda wasn’t.)
I grew up listening to a lot of “oldies,” and I like the whole Wall of Sound thing a lot, but setting it up behind The Beatles is like covering the Parthenon in chrome. “The Long and Winding Road,” especially, was just screaming to be left alone, and they had to crap it up with six inches of schmaltz — unforgiveable. Here is the painful original:
and the stripped-down version, just vocals, guitar, and piano:
Whew! Much better.
A reader writes:
I’ve got a Catholic friend who is sorely in need of some good reading materials on the main concepts in Theology of the Body. She buys into very secular views of contraception, abortion, marriage, and sex in general, and has admitted a total lack of education regarding the Catholic teaching on the subjects, as well as a (reluctant) interest in obtaining said education.
I’m looking for something that’s intelligent, readable, down to earth, doesn’t assume that you already agree with the Church teaching, and hits all the main points without an angry polemical vibe. I checked out some stuff by Christopher West, but didn’t like it too much.
The book my sister, Devra Torres, helped translate and edit is now available from Scepter Books:
Encountering Christ: Homilies, Letters, and Addresses of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis)
Here is the short interview I did with her about the experience of translating Bergoglio’s words; and here is an entertaining post she wrote on her blog, giving a little preview of the riches to be found in our new pope’s words.
The book is available in paperback and Kindle. Looks like a great read, with lots of variety. Check it out!
We once had this cat who hated our guts.
The kids named her “Cleo.” We thought she was our pet; she thought we were her captors. She was an indoor cat because I couldn’t catch her long enough to put her in the chew-proof box we purchased after she chewed through the pet carrier we purchased to bring her to the vet to get her shots. I tried and tried to catch her, but we lived in a house with staircases on both ends, and I was pregnant — so around and around we would go. She would scamper up one set of stairs, sit at the top and watch me struggle and clamber halfway up, and then -whisk!- away she would go, across the house and down the other set of stairs.
At one point, Cleo chewed a hole in the wall of the laundry room and lived inside the empty space, haunting us like a furry black demon with her scuffling noises. The only time she wanted anything to do with me is when she went into heat, when she would follow me around the kitchen, backing up, gazing at me with pleading eyes, and emitting the most pitiful yowls.
Anyway, she had one particular trick to show us just how much she despised us for sheltering and feeding her. She would sit on the futon, waiting for me to come into the room. As soon as I made eye contact, she would pee. Then she would get up and leave the room, brushing past my ankles in a devastatingly ironic pantomime of normal feline affection, just to show me she could if she wanted to.
Don’t ask me why we kept this horrible animal around for as long as we did. She was our first real pet, and I guess we figured we should keep her for the kids’ sake — although what good it did them to have a pet who lived inside the walls, I don’t know. Anyway, while she was around, I got pretty good at getting pee out of things. I made many batches of this special cleanser, and it always worked:
Gently mix all ingredients in a non-metal container. Do not mix or shake vigorously. Saturate the stain with the liquid, and allow it to air dry (which might take 24 hours, I forget). It should smell fine once it’s dry, but you may have to do a second time. You can use this on any item or surface that can get wet — so, not wooden floors, but grout or concrete floors or just about anything else. It does leave a ghost of a mark on light fabrics, but it’s better than pee!
Oh, so one day, I ran out of kitty litter, and I had a moment of clarity about this “pet.” I opened the door and she took off like a streak. We never saw her again. Other creatures have left their mark on our house and belongings since then, but nothing ever smelled as bad as Cleo’s Anger Pee.
I love Mark Shea. I don’t agree with everything he says, and I don’t always agree with the way he says the things I agree with. But when he apologizes, he apologizes. Take note, everybody who’s ever sinned! I also know through personal experience that he is a generous man to the core. I understand that sometimes the Holy Spirit makes our sins stand out to us in high relief; but I hope that Mr. Shea will also have his merits shown to him. His clarity, honesty, and perseverence have converted my heart more than once.
Also very interesting was this passage in his mea culpa:
I mentioned things living under the rocks. One of the things that lives under the rocks in my heart has been a deep and abiding fear, a kind of heart conviction about the universe that long predates any conscious relationship with God I formed as an adult (recall that I was no raised Christian). I’m not saying it’s a truth about the universe. I’m saying it’s something more like a broken bone in my soul that never knit right. And what it comes down to is a pattern of assuming that I am, at best, a tool of God, not a son of God and certainly not somebody God loves. And with that has been a fear that, at the end of the day, once my utility to God is spent I would be tossed away like a candy bar wrapper.
Do you remember when “six word autobiographies” were all the rage? It can be either a lark or a searing experience to try to distill your life’s story into six words. I came up with a few that made me laugh, but it was a turning point for me when I came up with this one:
It wasn’t anger; it was fear.
That doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it does help explain it; and understanding why you do the things you do is a huge step toward starting to stop.
Anyway, whether you love Mark Shea or can’t stand him, check out his mea culpa, and say a prayer for this courageous and good-hearted man who has been put into an outrageously demanding field.
Even if your parish is doing a good job, it’s still mainly your job! And no, I am not above offering cash prizes to kids who memorize things.
Here are some of the books I recommended in my post. As always, if you want to buy any of these books through Amazon, I would be most grateful if you would do it through these links! I get a small percentage of each sale, which makes a huge difference in keeping our family afloat, especially during Birthday $ea$on. (If you get to Amazon through one of these links and buy something else besides what I recommended, I still get credit for that purchase.) Thank you!
St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism No. 1. There are many editions of the Baltimore Catechism, but I have found that the St. Joseph ones are the most solid without being dry and pedantic.
Faith and Life series by Ignatius Press. Our Heavenly Father is Book One; there are several in the series.
The Picture Bible – a cartoon version – by Iva Hoth
several by Tomie de Paola: St. Benedict and Scholastica, St. Francis, St. Christopher, The Miracles of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Bible Stories, etc.
My husband and I usually agree on movies. We don’t have exactly the same tastes, but when we find a movie we both want to see, we generally agree on whether it was bad or good, and why. Last night was an exception, though. We watched Django Unchained (2012), and he liked it, but I sure didn’t.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Disclaimer: I was only halfway paying attention for the first half of the movie. But that was actually one of the problems we both thought the movie had: the first half was a thousandfold more entertaining, even while I wasn’t even watching some of it, than the second half, which I saw all of. When King Schultz (Cristoph Waltz) died, the movie missed him sorely, and I think it lost any particular reason for going on, after that point.
I had a really, really hard time dealing with a hero who was indistinguishable from the villains: he had no more mercy, conscience, or humanity than the bad guys. When he got his revenge, was just as brutal and cruel as his captors, just as hungry to torture. (And it’s not as this is just one of those conscienceless gore and action movies. Schultz has clearly struggled, and has fashioned his own set of rules about what is and is not acceptable; and even still, he has those ghastly flashbacks. Django, however, is just a machine.)
My husband says that this is entirely typical of a spaghetti western. The hero is not expected to undergo any character development, or to have any evident interior life. He says that all the “splut, splat, gloosh” bullet wounds are an affectionate mocking ofSam Peckinpah,* and I can see that; but I don’t know how you tell the difference, in a Tarantino movie, between making an homage and just hopping on someone else’s train and riding it like a fool.
I get that it’s just telling a story, and doing a gorgeous, stylish recreation of a particular American genre of movie. Not my favorite kind of movie, but I am okay with that. All right, so if that’s all it’s trying to be, then how are we supposed to think about the fact that it’s a slavery revenge fantasy? How is it not racist and exploitative to take a black couple and drop them into a genre where they don’t belong? It’s like, “Hey, I’m going to re-tell the Iliad, except in my movie, the Trojans are all cats!” Why would you do that? American slavery is one of those things that, if you’re going to make it a major theme in your story, you absolutely have to address some of the issues around it: what does it mean to be free, what does it mean to be cruel, what does it mean to be something. This movie doesn’t do any of that. It simply takes the spaghetti western and jazzes it up by inserting black slaves into the narrative.
Tarantino did the same thing in Inglourious Basterds, which I reviewed here: he had Jews exacting a bloody revenge on the Nazis, but none of the Jews were discernibly Jewish. They didn’t look Jewish, they didn’t talk Jewish, they didn’t think Jewish, they didn’t respond Jewish. They were just Jews plopped into a revenge fantasy. I can’t decide if that’s offensive or just stupid. Either way, it’s lazy.
There is another problem with Django which is similar to a problem in Basterds: the lavish revenge fantasy is supposed to satisfy some deep desire in your soul for certain wrongs to be righted. So we watch the black man whip the white, and the slaves wrench their freedom away from their cruel captors, and the husband and wife reunited, and you see foulness and corruption getting what’s coming to them. But the whole time, I’m thinking, “And this is exactly the opposite of what happened.” Even the pagan and petty part of your soul is not satisfied by the fantasy playing out on the screen, because it’s so thoroughly false.
I think the vengeance could have been satisfying (again, to some primitive part of your psyche, at least) if there had been some attempt to make Django and Hilda into actual characters, who had some sort of individual story. But they don’t. What is their future supposed to be? They’re just going to ride off and buy a house in upstate New York or something, and everybody will just shrug off the burning rubble and heaps of torn up bodies?
That being said, there were some good scenes. The part where the posse can’t see through their white hoods, even though one guy’s wife spent all day making them, was pretty funny — almost worthy of Mel Brooks. I liked the fact that there was really no exploitation of women in the movie. They could have eroticized slavery, but they didn’t. And I enjoyed watching a movie where the man has to go rescue his wife, and he does, the end. When’s the last time any movie allowed itself to tell that story?
Probably what this comes down to is that I just don’t get this movie. I haven’t seen a lot of spaghetti westerns, and I suppose I wouldn’t get them, either. And I don’t feel that my life is especially impoverished because of that.
I’m still waiting for Tarantino to get it together. This movie didn’t have his pseud0-intellectual, tawdry, masturbatory quirks stinking the whole film up. He had a slightly more coherent vision than usual, and just told the damn story, and clearly let someone edit it for him. I guess I hope he still keeps making movies, because he’s getting closer to doing something great. But he ain’t there yet.
*My introduction to Sam Peckinpah came when my husband and I were first married, back when people still had to drive to the store to rent a movie. I was pregnant and queasy and way too tired to go out in the evening, so I asked my husband to go pick out something for us to watch. I said that I really didn’t care what it was, as long as it wasn’t too violent. He was gone a long, long time. And then he came home with The Wild Bunch.
I’m not saying I’m still mad at my husband for this, but I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Sam Peckinpah.
If the Mass is so great, then why don’t Catholics smile their way through it?
Also: here is a picture of me having a WONDERFUL TIME doing something worthwhile which I enjoy:
(And yes, I know that’s not a proper mallet grip. I was trying to gently tap a leg onto a trampoline, is why I was holding it that way.)
Now it’s stuck in your head, too! Ha ha!
