August 30, 2014

Literary Pick (*****)

SLAVE: My True Story
-Mende Nazer
and
-Damien Lewis





















My throat is filled with emotion. So deeply evocative.

Heart-wrenching, and unbelievable story. I spend 6 hours straight reading this book because it was simply impossible to put down. Possibly the best true story account I've ever had the honor of reading.

What I find even more inconceivable than the actual raid and kidnapping, if that's at all possible, is how Al Koronki and his bitch wife have not been extradited back to London where this crime was committed, so he could be tried and convicted. I'm not an attorney, but I can come up with at least a couple dozen questions asking him how exactly did he came about finding Mende, and how on hell was he able to even get a visa for her to enter the U.K. from Sudan when she obviously had no paperwork that proves her existence as a human being on this earth at all to begin with.

Also, if the Sudanese government denies any of these allegations of raiding and kidnapping, why haven't they gone to Rahabs house to see what Nanu is doing there? that girl, woman, person needs to be rescued, immediately, right this very minute! What the fuck is going on with people of power in London? It's like they have their heads up their asses.

Also why haven't they visited Abdul Azzim, and see what him and his wife are up to? I don't understand any of this. Why hasn't any of these people brought to trial, or even investigated?

I was relieved to find out through a google search that Mende was finally able to be re-united with her parents after all these years.


You are a remarkable woman, Mende. Keep up the wonderful work in helping stop this modern-day atrocity.

August 27, 2014

Literary Pick (***)

The Continual Condition: Poems
-Charles Bukowski





















Although not one of his best works, it's always comforting reading anything by Bukowksi.

August 26, 2014

Literary Pick (***)

A Grief Observed
-C.S. Lewis



















 

Although there were parts in this journal that were quite profound, and spiritually insightful, I didn't appreciate it as much as I thought I would. I was expecting to read more about his own personal heart-wrenching process through grief, and not so much about his wavering faith in God. I do, however, have the distinct feeling that this book will be of some solace to me down the road when time decides it is my turn to experience loss.

Literary Pick (*)

Naked Lunch
-William S. Burroughs 





















I don't have a review. I have questions.

First of all, I wish someone would've told me this wasn't a novel.

Second, why would you want to waste your time reading a book by a drug addict who claims he doesn't even remember writing it? especially a book that doesn't even make any fucking sense?
I'd like to know what made so many readers carelessly, and hypnotically relinquish their time so willingly to read this bizarre, idiotic, and pointless account of someone in a constant drug-induced state?

I'm not afraid to give this book one star. I fucking hate Jack Kerouac,  and William Borroughs too, and all the Beat generation assholes, and their soulless dreary, drab lives.

August 22, 2014

RIP

Lauren Bacall
Born: September 16, 1924, The Bronx, New York City, NY

















Actress Lauren Bacall, who paired with spouse Humphrey Bogart in films including The Big Sleep and Key Largo, has died at the age of 89, according to her family's estate.
As NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports, Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske, in the Bronx, to working class Jewish parents. As Lauren Bacall, she lived in New York City until the end. In her autobiography, Bacall describes becoming a fashion model as a teenager. She studied acting, begging for parts, even working as an usher just to get close to the stage.
"I always believed that the theater was the place to learn your craft," she told NPR in 2005. "... When I was a kid, when I wanted to be an actor, I only wanted to be on the stage."
In 1943, the wife of film director Howard Hawks spotted her modeling on the cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine. The director cast the 19-year-old actress opposite Humphrey Bogart, in To Have and Have Not. You've undoubtedly heard her most famous line: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."
Before the film came out, director Hawks renamed her Lauren Bacall, and she credits him with encouraging her to cultivate the low, sultry voice that became her trademark.
During filming, "Baby" and "Bogie" — as Bacall and Bogart called each other — fell in love. When they married in 1945, she was 20, and he was 45. She told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1994 that it was the most romantic experience of her life.
"When you are young and when it's your first love ... you are just carried away by it and ... that's all you can think about," she said. "You see, Bogie was the kind of man who believed in taking care of a marriage in taking care of a relationship. He believed you had to work at it and keep it fresh and fun and interesting — and he did."
In the 1950s, Bogart and Bacall spoke out against the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and they campaigned for Adlai Stevenson's presidential bid. Bacall's politics, her tendency to turn down roles and her commitment to her marriage may have limited her film career. She talked about it all in two candid autobiographies, says Alonso Duralde, film review editor of the Hollywood website .
"[These] very frank and forthcoming books solidified her reputation as a straight-shooter," Duralde says. She was "somebody who had made it through the Hollywood system and had seen it all and was very frank about who she was. And as she became an older actress she very much maintained her ... star status even as she was playing smaller roles.
Bacall and Bogart were married until his death in 1957. She was later married to actor Jason Robards from 1961 to 1969. She had two children with Bogart and one with Robards. She told NPR's Morning Edition in 2005 that being so closely connected to her first husband frustrated her.
"The only thing that I am not pleased about is when people only talk about 'Bogie' to me as though I had no other life at all," she said. "When I had, unfortunately, many, many more years without him than I did with him."
Bacall's numerous post-Bogart film roles included Murder on the Orient Express, Misery and The Mirror Has Two Faces, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.
"I mean, my feeling is that you've got to keep working," Bacall told Morning Edition. "And I still seem to have a kind of ambition. And I still love my profession and I still love working with these independent young directors who have completely different approaches to moviemaking. I just don't see any point in stopping unless I have to."
Reuters notes that she also won a pair of Tony Awards:
After her film career cooled, Bacall returned to the stage. She won best actress Tony Awards for "Applause" in 1970 and "Woman of the Year" in 1981. Over the years she had transformed her persona from a willowy temptress with a come-hither look to a shrewd and worldly woman.
Of her career and life, Bacall once said, "I traveled by roller coaster, a roller coaster on which the highs were as high as anyone could ever hope to go. And the lows! Oh, those lows were lower than anyone should ever have to go — 10 degrees below hell."
-NPR


August 13, 2014

Literary Pick (****)

Blindness
-José Saramago





















Nearly flawless.

August 12, 2014

RIP

Robin Williams
Born: July 21, 1951
Died: August 11, 2014


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robin Williams, Oscar-Winning Comedian, Dies at 63 in Suspected Suicide

Robin Williams, the comedian who evolved into the surprisingly nuanced, Academy Award-winning actor, imbuing his performances with wild inventiveness and a kind of manic energy, died on Monday at his home in Tiburon, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 63.
The Marin County sheriff’s office said in a statement that it “suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.” An investigation was underway.
The statement said that the office received a 911 call at 11:55 a.m. Pacific time, saying that a man had been found “unconscious and not breathing inside his residence.” Emergency personnel sent to the scene identified him as Mr. Williams and pronounced him dead at 12:02 p.m.
Mr. Williams’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, said in a statement that Mr. Williams “has been battling severe depression.”
His wife, Susan Schneider, said in a statement, “This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings.” She added: “As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.”
The privileged son of a Detroit auto executive who grew up chubby and lonesome, playing by himself with 2,000 toy soldiers in an empty room of a suburban mansion, Mr. Williams, as a boy, hardly fit the stereotype of someone who would grow to become a brainy comedian, or a goofy one, but he was both. Onstage he was known for ricochet riffs on politics, social issues and cultural matters both high and low; tales of drug and alcohol abuse; lewd commentaries on relations between the sexes; and lightning-like improvisations on anything an audience member might toss at him. His gigs were always rife with frenetic, spot-on impersonations that included Hollywood stars, presidents, princes, prime ministers, popes and anonymous citizens of the world. His irreverence was legendary and uncurtailable.
“Chuck, Cam, great to see you,” he once called out from a London stage at Charles, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. “Yo yo, wussup Wales, House of Windsor, keepin’ it real!”
And yet he never seemed to offend.
Almost from the moment that he first uttered the greeting “Nanoo, nanoo” as Mork from Ork, an alien who befriends a wholesome young Colorado woman (Pam Dawber), on the sitcom “Mork and Mindy,” Mr. Williams was a comedy celebrity. “Mork and Mindy” made its debut on ABC in September 1978, and within two weeks had reached No. 7 in the Nielsen ratings. By the spring of 1979, 60 million viewers were tuning in to “Mork and Mindy” each week to watch Mr. Williams drink water through his finger, stand on his head when told to sit down, speak gibberish words like “shazbot” and “nimnul” that came to have meaning when he used them, and misinterpret, in startlingly literal fashion, the ordinary idioms of modern life.
He went on to earn Academy Award nominations for his roles in films like “Good Morning, Vietnam,” in which he played a loquacious radio D.J.; “Dead Poets Society,” playing a mentor to students in need of inspiration; and “The Fisher King,” as a homeless man whose life has been struck by tragedy. He won an Oscar in 1998 for “Good Will Hunting,” playing a therapist who works with a troubled prodigy played by Matt Damon.
In a statement, President Obama said of Mr. Williams, “He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most — from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets.”
Robin McLaurin Williams was born in Chicago on July 21, 1951, and was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Marin County. He studied acting at the Juilliard School.
He is survived by a son, Zak, from his marriage to Valerie Velardi, and a daughter, Zelda, and a son, Cody, from his marriage to Marsha Garces.
Beginning with roles in the 1977 sex farce “Can I Do It ‘Til I Need Glasses?” and “The Richard Pryor Show,” a variety series hosted by one of his comedy mentors, Mr. Williams rapidly ascended the entertainment industry’s ladder.
Soon after “Mork and Mindy” made him a star, Mr. Williams graduated into movie roles that included the title characters in “Popeye,” Robert Altman’s 1980 live-action musical about that spinach-gulping cartoon sailor, and “The World According to Garp,” the director George Roy Hill’s 1982 adaptation of the John Irving novel.
He also continued to appear in raucous stand-up comedy specials like “Robin Williams: An Evening at the Met,” which showcased his garrulous performance style and his indefatigable ability to free-associate without the apparent benefit of prepared material. Alongside his friends and fellow actors Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg, Mr. Williams appeared in an annual series of HBO telethons for Comic Relief, a charity organization that helps homeless people and others in need.
Mr. Williams’s acting career reached a new height in 1987 with his performance in Barry Levinson’s film “Good Morning, Vietnam,” in which he played Adrian Cronauer, a nonconformist Armed Forces Radio host working in Saigon in the 1960s. It earned Mr. Williams his first Oscar nomination. He earned another, two years later, for “Dead Poets Society,” directed by Peter Weir and released in 1989, in which he played an unconventional English teacher at a 1950s boarding school who inspires his students to tear up their textbooks and seize the day. (Or, as Mr. Williams’s character famously put it in the original Latin, “Carpe diem.”)
In dozens of film roles that followed, Mr. Williams could be warm and zany, whether providing the voice of an irrepressible magic genie in “Aladdin,” the 1992 animated Walt Disney feature, or playing a man who cross-dresses as a British housekeeper in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” a 1993 family comedy, or a doctor struggling to treat patients with an unknown neurological malady in “Awakenings,” the 1990 Penny Marshall drama adapted from the Oliver Sacks memoir.
Some of Mr. Williams’s performances were criticized for a mawkish sentimentality, like “Patch Adams,” a 1998 film that once again cast him as a good-hearted doctor, and “Bicentennial Man,” a 1999 science-fiction feature in which he played an android.
But Mr. Williams continued to keep audiences guessing. In addition to his Oscar-winning role in “Good Will Hunting,” which saw him play a gently humorous therapist, his résumé included roles as a villainous crime writer in “Insomnia,” Christopher Nolan’s 2002 thriller; Teddy Roosevelt in the “Night at the Museum” movies; and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 2013 drama “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
Mr. Williams made his acting debut on Broadway in 2011 in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” a play written by Rajiv Joseph and set amid the American invasion of Iraq. (He had starred with Steve Martin in an Off Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot” in 1988.) In 2013, Mr. Williams returned to series television in “The Crazy Ones,” a CBS comedy that cast him as an idiosyncratic advertising executive, but it was canceled after one season.
Mr. Williams had completed work on several films that have not yet been released, including a third installment of the “Night at the Museum” franchise that Fox has scheduled for December, and “Merry Friggin’ Christmas,” an independent comedy about a dysfunctional family. He also provided the voice of an animated character called Dennis the Dog in a British comedy, “Absolutely Anything,” that is planned for release next year, and appeared in “Boulevard,” an independent movie that was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival but does not yet have theatrical distribution.
Mr. Williams was an admitted abuser of cocaine — which he also referred to as “Peruvian marching powder” and “the devil’s dandruff” — in the 1970s and ‘80s, and addressed his drug habit in his comedy act. “What a wonderful drug,” he said in a sardonic routine from “Live at the Met.” “Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that.”
In 2006, he checked himself into the Hazelden center in Springbrook, Ore., to be treated for an addiction to alcohol, having fallen off the wagon after some 20 years of sobriety.
He later explained in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that this addiction had not been “caused by anything, it’s just there.”
“It waits,” Mr. Williams continued. “It lays in wait for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now, I’m O.K.’ Then, the next thing you know, it’s not O.K. Then you realize, ‘Where am I? I didn’t realize I was in Cleveland.’ ”
In 2009, he underwent heart surgery for an aortic valve replacement at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, an event that Mr. Williams said caused him to take stock of his life.
“You appreciate little things,” he said in an interview in The New York Times, “like walks on the beach with a defibrillator.”
More seriously, Mr. Williams said he had reassessed himself as a performer. “How much more can you give?” he told The Times. “Other than, literally, open-heart surgery onstage? Not much. But the only cure you have right now is the honesty of going, this is who you are. I know who I am.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Williams checked himself into a rehab facility. His publicist told People magazine that he was “taking the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud.”
Correction: August 12, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the name and title of Prince Charles’s wife, with whom the prince once attended a London performance by Mr. Williams. She is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall — not Lady Camilla Bowles.

-New York Times

August 3, 2014

Lyrics

 Que Lio
-Hector Lavoe

Que problema caballero
En el que me encuentro yo
Decia Ramon Puntilla
Cuando a su mama llamo
Tengo un pollo sabrosito
Con el que quiero casarme
Pero acaban de informarme
Que no, que no me puedo casar
Porque es novia de mi amigo
Y eso si da que pensar
Odio a todos los que aman
Y que felices estan
Porque yo no puedo tener
Un amorcito que me comprenda
Y que me diga papi
Y que me quiera bien
Dios mio ayudame
Quiero olvidar
Ayudame, ayudame
Ayudame a olvidarla te lo pido, ayudame
Ay que yo la quiero tanto
Y no, y no la quiero perder
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana
Y yo que me la pasaba gozando
De la noche a la maana
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana
Ramon Puntilla la quera
Ramon Puntilla gritaba
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana
Ayudame, ayudame
Ayudame, ayudame a olvidarla
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana
Y se pasaba prendiendo velitas
Toditita la maana
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana
Que lio es, chico, chico, chico
Que lio es, chico, chico, chico
Que lio es, chico, chico, chico
Que lio es, chico, chico, chico
Que problema con Mariana
El que se encontr mi pana