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Post by Shep on Jun 26, 2011 7:07:12 GMT -5
There's far too much to say, but I will mention:
Doug Kenney (and the early writers of "National Lampoon")
John Christopher's "White Mountain" trilogy (and the "Boy's Life" comic strip)
Lalla Ward as Romana on "Doctor Who"
"Three's Company" (the final three or four seasons)
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Torgo
Moderator Emeritus
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Post by Torgo on Jun 26, 2011 9:32:39 GMT -5
"Three's Company" (the final three or four seasons) Priscilla Barnes? Yum!
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jun 27, 2011 16:48:32 GMT -5
Thanks Shep.
Alos, I'm at the library and they have every Vonnegut book, including 2 copies of Breakfast.... except for Slaughterhouse. I see they have 2 copies at branches in outlaying counties, but nothing within the city libraries... weird. Ah well, I'll put a hold on it.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jun 27, 2011 17:37:14 GMT -5
Player Piano or Galapagos are good, too. And similar to Slaughterhouse 5 imo.
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Post by angilasman on Jun 27, 2011 20:51:01 GMT -5
I consider Vonnegut's peak period to be from the late '50s to the late '60s:
The Sirens of Titan Mother Night Cat's Cradle God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Slaughterhouse-Five
and his short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House
His other books are good, by I consider those to be his best - ironically all done while he was relatively unknown as it was with Slaughterhouse that he achieved fame.
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Post by Shep on Jun 29, 2011 7:18:25 GMT -5
"Three's Company" (the final three or four seasons) Priscilla Barnes? Yum! Gorgeous! Actually I'm pretty sure that show in general had a massive impact on my sexual devlopment: Lots of women in heels and stockings, jiggling breasts, etc. And I still recall being very moved when that show came to an end because I'd literally grown up with that series and I loved those characters.
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Torgo
Moderator Emeritus
-segment with Crow?
Posts: 15,420
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Post by Torgo on Jun 29, 2011 10:42:12 GMT -5
I was very big on the show when I was a teenager. At different times I found myself both attracted to both Janette and Terri. Oddly enough, even though she was supposed to be the sexy bimbo, I never had a thing for Chrissy. I think I found her character a little too out there. But when a Terri episode was on, she was so smart and sassy. That's the type of woman I could get into! I also enjoyed Don Knotts whenever he was on the show, so I guess the last few seasons are definitely my favorites as well. Not to knock the Roepers, who were very funny, but Mr. Furley is my boy. And I really liked that last moment between himself and Jack... Where Jack convinced him that Furley's masculinity was what turned him straight. And of course, the late, great John Ritter. Very few comedians could have performed that much physical comedy by themselves. He was a great talent, and it hit me hard when he died.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jul 1, 2011 4:40:08 GMT -5
Just wanted to note that picked up Slaughterhouse today and have read the first chapter.
He has a strange, matter of fact way of writing. For example, when the narrator calls a friend, Kurt writes...
"He was up. He was reading. Everybody else in the house was a sleep"
Each sentence clipped, straightforward without color - it relays basic information and nothing more.
I'm not saying that's bad, just different. 1 chapter in and I'm hooked.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 1, 2011 11:03:08 GMT -5
That's pronounced in Slaughterhouse. Other novels don't do it as much (although it's still partly his general style). But it's very much part of the character's mindset, as you'll figure out, and even part of his psychological self-defense.
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Post by inlovewithcrow on Jul 1, 2011 12:30:36 GMT -5
In genre order
1.Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Beethoven can't be overpraised, imo. As a pianist, I thrilled to playing his Pathetique Sonata, never growing bored with working at it, but the Fifth can make me cry over I know not what exactly. My heart just fills and spills over.
2,3. Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, sister and brother, bodies of work in music, as well as writing and art. I fell in love with Felix when I read his letters (in translation), published along with some of his paintings and sketches. At age 11, he was sent to live with Goethe for awhile and Goethe didn't want to give him back, he was so mesmerized with the boy's many geniuses. His sister Fanny had 5% of the opportunities and training and freedom he did, but still produced terrific Romantic-era music. Had she had his training and freedom and rights in the culture, we'd have had two marvelous composers with large bodies of work. Probably a significant percentage of people here have marched down the wedding aisle to Mendelssohn. When Fanny died, Felix followed soon thereafter, bereft.
4,5. George and Ira Gershwin, though George mostly. I'm a big fan of fusion music, and George was at heart a fusion guy, making classical music accessible and jazz and rag serious. In their lighter manifestation, Ira Gershwin lyrics are witty and memorable.
6. Tommy, Pete Townsend. Another composer who joined two theretofore seperate words, "rock" and "opera" and in so doing, opened receptive minds to new appreciations. Beyond that, this piece of music is terrific, with complex harmonic structures that are despite their complexity utterly listenable. I took it upon myself back in my late teens to do a complete harmonic analysis of the work and it deepened my appreciation for Townsend's genius.
7. Some movie, which I haven't selected yet. Maybe Days of Heaven. Maybe North by Northwest. Maybe documentaries Crumb or The Gleaners.
8. Roots (TV miniseries): art and politics met beautifully here at a critical point in our history. I wish I could tell you youngsters what life was like for blacks and women in the 60's...but I fear you wouldn't believe it or wouldn't get it or wouldn't appreciate how very far we've come. When black actors still had a hard time getting any roles but criminals and maids, this offered a chance for two dozen great African-American actors to shine. Ben Vereen as Chicken George, sobbing over that dead bird, John Amos as Toby, just great stuff there, and the whole of the series making a lot of white folks re-think the nation's history. When you can do art and help the world at the same time, that's a great accomplishment.
9, 10, 11.Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, bodies of research. Is sex an art? Done well, it certainly can be, and scientific research of how to do it well was not only influential in all our lives, it led millions of women from non-orgasmic dull sex to something much better. These were the technicians that helped everyone with the domestic but profoundly joyous art of good sex.
12. Eero Saarinen: I grew up watching the St. Louis Arch go up, walked into a Saarinen building to take my first airplane ride, but later I got to visit north christian church and the MIT chapel too. Try image-googling eero saarinen buildings. They speak much more more eloquently than I can about this great artist whose buildings were also scuptures.
13. Antoni Gaudi. Similarly, google images of Gaudi buildings or Gaudi Barcelona, worth much more than anything I can say about him. There is no architect like him, probably no mind like that in art before or since. When I die, you could spread my ashes in Guell Park and that'd be fine by me.
14. Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial. With a single exception (USS Arizona in Hawaii) I've never been to a memorial construction that felt like a memorial, like a serious thing, the architectural version of a dirge. I lived through that war, sat up with relatives gnawing nails as draft lottery numbers were read over the radio, welcomed back men missing legs and whole minds. What this monument says about that war, you could really say about any war, thousands upon thousands of men turned into only names, marching down into the earth, to dissolution, utterly unrecoverable.
if you look at images of the works of these three artists together, you see a pattern to my tastes, an organic shape sense, elemental with Gaudi, streamlined with Saarinen, that really does it for me. Buildings don't have to be square.
15. J.D. Salinger's 9 stories. Catcher in the Rye is often listed as one of the 25 best novels of last century, but it was in the short story form that Salinger excelled.
16. Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut. The best anti-war novel I've read, though it's about "the good war" that Vonnegut fought in. The scene where Billy Pilgrim is watching a movie and sees it in reverse, so that bombs get lifted off devastated cities and people are whole again, then are sucked up into the belly of the plane and returned to factories where women take them apart and then they get buried in the ground so that they can't hurt anyone ever again...so affeccting. Listen.
17. The Once and Future King, T.H. White. My favorite version of the Arthurian Legends, perhaps because this Merlin sounds so much like my favorite grandmother who also had little patience for fools. Entertainment, but also a very political book.
18. My Life and Hard Times, James Thurber. The funniest little book I've ever read ten times. Perhaps it takes a midwesterner with odd relatives to love it as I do, but if you've never tried it, please do yourself the favor. Don't skip the preface; it's brilliant writing: the dilemma of his nature and the nature of his dilemma.
19-22. My mystery quadrumvirate: Donald Westlake, funniest writer ever. Dortmunder trying to make it through a meeting of soldiers of fortune, the chase scene in Dancing Aztecs, clever hidden jokes that only obsessed readers will find. Michael Connelly, writing Bosch, full of pathos, most affecting in The Last Coyote but a treat with every novel. John Sanford, wonderful characters and a marvelous treatment of female sexuality. My favorite bad guy ever, the Ozarkian female hitman in two Prey novels. Sue Grafton, trailblazer, with the best one paragraph descriptions of characters I've seen in any genre, a textbook for writers on "the telling detail".
23. Nureyev. A function of my age, picking him. If I were young today, it'd be Costa. Males dance the ballet so much more powerfully than the females they currently train, and any great male dancer of his age is a joy to watch in his leaps.
24-25. gotta keep these open for now, as I haven't read everyone else's yet and may see something that triggers a new idea for me.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jul 2, 2011 4:28:08 GMT -5
Thanks for the list inlovewithcrow - I'll go google image right now.
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Post by angilasman on Jul 2, 2011 9:52:18 GMT -5
* MP - as to the subject art, most of the art of that type that I was exposed to came from Heavy Metal Magazine. I didn't feel the financial sting as much because I worked in a book store and would read them for free. Manara isn't as detailed, his is more fine lines, his women are lean and leggy. Here's a few (not naked) pages from Gullivera * lastly, I added a few more thoughts on Dali and memories of Letterman to my list. What a coincidence! I just finished my Usagi Yojimbo Special Edition hardcover (which collects the first 7 books) and there's a 1996 interview inside where Stan Sakai lists Manara as one of artistic influences - though he qualifies it with saying he prefers his earlier work.
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Post by BJ on Jul 2, 2011 13:51:04 GMT -5
12. Eero Saarinen: I grew up watching the St. Louis Arch go up, walked into a Saarinen building to take my first airplane ride, but later I got to visit north christian church and the MIT chapel too. Try image-googling eero saarinen buildings. They speak much more more eloquently than I can about this great artist whose buildings were also scuptures. I also have a great respect for Saarinen and the people that hired progressive architects like him. It's a shame that now, St. Louis is obsessed with saving old, run down buildings that have little or no historical value. All that progress in the 60's was replaced with uninspired, retro design and other boring architecture. The worst of this came with the destruction of the gorgeous, old Busch Stadium, replacing it with something that looks like an old, run down building. This is sort of relevant, something I made a couple years ago, combining the Arch with another Saarinen favorite, the old TWA Flight Center at Idlewild. I would love to have seen that in it's heyday, but I guess I'll have to settle for watching Catch Me if You Can.
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Post by inlovewithcrow on Jul 2, 2011 14:20:56 GMT -5
nice work, plissken--you capture the essence of him there.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jul 2, 2011 15:24:08 GMT -5
Thought I'd share another bit of art I liked. When I listed Dali, I could have easily done 'art that freaks me out' instead. The Scream is a favorite, also one by Albert Pinkham Ryder titled Death on a Pale Horse
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