king ubu

Picky, Picky In the Outlet Mall of Love, Finding A Good Fit Can Mean Lots of Returns By Libby Copeland Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 6, 2006; C01 Falling in love has never had a reputation for making much sense. Dante glimpsed Beatrice a few times and wouldn't shut up about her for decades. Why should not-falling-in-love be any more rational? It comes down to the deterrent power of a Phil Collins CD in a woman's car. Or, a guy who habitually sticks his tongue out while eating, like a lapping dog. His girlfriend returns him to his cage, permanently. Centuries from now, scientists may point to this as the moment in time when the pickiness gene became dominant. In the end, it will come down to one really old, lonely guy and his list. "She must have blue eyes. She should like animals, but not in a weird way. No thin lips. No lawyers," he'll be writing, just before he keels over and the human race comes to an end. * * * As the measure of a relationship, the taquito is greasy and capricious. But there it was late one night, warmed over countless times, poised to destroy a budding romance. They'd been out with friends at a few bars. She was hungry. She wanted 7-Eleven. "She said, 'They've got the best taquitos in the world,' " says Joe Peters. "I said, 'Are you serious?' " Peters, 28, is not a 7-Eleven kind of guy. More of a distance-cycling, marathoning, healthy meals kind of guy. She insisted. He accompanied her in. "She even said, "Pick out any one, it's on me,' " Peters recalls of the incident, which wasn't even really a date, and acquired great meaning only afterward, after everything else had happened, with the mayonnaise and the brie. But anyway, there he was. "It's 3 o'clock in the morning. You can tell these taquitos have been the taquitos nobody wanted and they've been sitting out all day." He chooses one despite himself -- jalapeno and cream cheese, if memory serves. He takes a few bites and throws the thing away in disgust. She devours hers with evident relish. This was the beginning (and the beginning of the end) of Peters's brief romance with a woman who "just liked the worst food in the world." Then Peters, a program analyst for the federal government, took her out to dinner, and that's when things really deteriorated. She started talking about mayonnaise. "Some people are mayonnaise people, I completely understand it. But I. Hate. Mayonnaise," Peters says. He thinks it's a texture thing. "I just find it to be the most repulsive thing in the world. And she's just going on and on about how great mayonnaise is and how you can eat all these things and my stomach is just curdling." There was one more incident. They went to grab a quick bite and she got a roast beef and brie sandwich, heated up. The brie was "oozing." "I mean, when it's hot and running all over, it looked terrible, and in light of the taquito and mayonnaise stories, I was just like, I can't take it anymore," Peters says. He stopped calling her. He knows this sounds really bad. "Feel free to put in there what a shallow [bleep] I am," he says. But is it really so shallow? Or is it merely efficient, given all the available women in the world Peters might have to date to find someone perfect? It's like shoe shopping; you can't buy the first pair you try on. Besides, when you push Peters, you discover there was something else about the girl, something too "small-town," too "old-fashioned and motherlike" for him. You start to wonder if the taquito-and-mayonnaise-and-brie thing is just a convenient explanation for something too subtle for words. After all, Peters is perfectly willing to accept certain imperfections. "My ex-girlfriend loved Celine Dion," he says. * * * There is a difference between an obvious deterrent -- a problem that most people would condemn in a date, like bad breath -- and what we might call the Taquito Moment. A great many of us would agree on the following reasons for dismissal of a suitor: Excessive lateness. Excessive neck hair. Rudeness toward wait staff. Multiple mentions of an ex. Starting a sentence with, "Now, my third marriage wasn't my fault." The Taquito Moment is more interesting. It reveals as much about the person who despises taquitos as it does about the one who keeps them close to her heart. Often it reveals, in shorthand, something we can't quite pinpoint about the other person, or ourselves. It's a proxy for taboos, or regrets about past failed relationships. It's a proxy for class concerns or cultural differences, because most people want someone who looks and sounds and smells as they do. The Taquito Moment comes to represent a moment of clarity, the thing you fasten onto later when explaining why you could never go out with that person again. So you broke up with a girl because of her arm hair? Fine. Love, like mayonnaise, is a texture thing. But maybe, on some essential level, the girl just didn't do it for you, because if she had, those would have been the arms of the girl you loved. There is something peculiarly modern about this phenomenon, something aligned with our dark privilege of too much , this consumeriffic culture in which jeans and houses and breasts and ring tones are customizable. Consider it all: geographical dislocation, cities filled with singles, extended childhoods and postponed childbearing, speed-dating, the growing sense that the dating pool is as vast as the 454 men-seeking-women between the ages of 29 and 31 within five miles of your Zip code on Yahoo Personals. In a world of infinite possibilities, the notion of falling in love, of finding The One, seems itself like the taquito girl, small-town and old-fashioned. Once upon a time, The One would've lived in your village or another one like it. Now, she could be this sweet girl across from you at the dinner table, but she could also be someone you haven't yet met. What if there's another woman somewhere in the world, like this girl, but better? Someone who will snowboard with you, and doesn't do that strange throat-clearing thing? "When I was buying a computer, there were so many features that for six months I didn't buy a computer," says Jillian Straus, 33, whose book "Unhooked Generation," due out Feb. 8, chronicles why people her age have trouble deciding on mates. The people in their twenties and thirties who Straus interviewed "see commitment to one person as a narrowing of lifestyle choices." And through all of it, the prospect of happiness always just ahead, if only we could find the right person, the perfect person. Happiness, that sly, flitting creature we somehow convinced ourselves was ours to keep. Online, people attempt to custom-order mates with the awesome specificity of children at a Build-a-Bear Workshop. In the personal section of Craigslist, a man describes his dream woman: "you are very feminine but also a tad clumsy. you are short, but you love high heels . . . you have long dark hair and big eyes. you like to wear mascara and other eye make-up, and/or you have long lashes." TV writers lampoon our impossible standards. On "Sex and the City," Charlotte once broke up with a guy because she didn't like his taste in china. On his show, Jerry Seinfeld torpedoed a relationship because a woman had "man hands." On the MTV reality show "NEXT," one person is set up on five dates in rapid succession, dismissing each potential suitor with the word next . Thus, a young woman nexts a guy within nine seconds for having ugly teeth, and a young man nexts a date because she's vegetarian. He loves cheeseburgers too much, he says. The Taquito Moment is the test you didn't know you were giving until the other person failed. Sometimes, it's an impossible test. "I say, hurl," Wayne advises Garth in "Wayne's World." "If you blow chunks and she comes back, she's yours. But if you spew and she bolts, it was never meant to be." * * * So here follows, in no particular order, several lifetimes' worth of irritations and perceived warning signs -- a window into the modern limitation of extreme pickiness brought on by too much choice: Dates with bad grammar. Yankees fans. Actors. Indecisive dates. ("Where do you want to go?" "I dunno, you?") A man who wears a backpack, or socks with his sandals. A woman who can't give good directions to her house. A man who likes pink drinks. A woman who drives a black Pontiac Grand Am with gold rims. A man who kisses you and says, "Yummy!" A woman who wears a tight leopard-print top. "Any girl that orders a salad as her meal at dinner," says Koonal Gandhi, 27, who shares a place with Joe Peters in upper Northwest Washington. That's an indication she is "very self-conscious about either how she looks or eating in front of other people." "I do have one guy who I actually stopped dating 'cause he didn't know what paella was," says Jenn Lee, a pediatrician who used to live in New York and now lives in Sterling. The gap in knowledge was a sign to her, she says, "that the guy wasn't cultured. How could you live in New York for 10 years and not experience paella?" Denisa Canales has had a number of breakups; one because a guy was allergic to her cats, and one because she didn't trust a guy's pit bull. More recently, she left a guy over a crucial difference of opinion concerning her shoes. They'd been dating for two weeks, and the truth is, things weren't perfect. The guy could be kind of critical, she says, and he seemed to think he knew her better than he did. Anyway, they were out for lunch and she wore the shoes, gold mules with a little heel and lots of beading. She recalls that she'd paid $60 for them and had taken some time picking them out, choosing just exactly what she wanted. The perfect style, The One. "I call them my pixie shoes," says Canales, 23. "Those shoes exemplify everything that I am. . . . They're so, like, fun and they're kinda dangerous." She'd worn them to a job interview earlier in the day, and the guy had the audacity to remark that he didn't think they were quite right for an interview. She asked if he liked the shoes and he said in fact, he didn't. She finished her sushi and stood up. "Don't call me again," she said, and walked out. And, as a matter of fact, he never did. © 2006 The Washington Post Company Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0501139_pf.html

Exactly! Third that ! Accept no substitutes.. moldy figs! (oh, wait, I have a metre or two of vinyl, too... but I don't join in on your elitist British club mentality-drive thread )

Yes, I was just searching that one - seems to be gone, alas! Want to post this in there... Other than that one, for me it's - funny rat - return of the film corner nothing else that I check in regularly, though there are some artists thread (Barney Wilen, Prez...) that I occasionally look up again.

Oh sh*t! I've been laying eyes on the Bailey for a long time... got two of her (non Columbia) Classics and they're very enjoyable! Chubby Mildred and weird Red... what a fun pair!

It's that time of year, apparently... 99 cent season? Andreas Gursky: 99 Cent, 1999 c-print mounted on Plexiglas in artist's frame 81 1/2 x 132 5/8 inches

But yes, she will be allowed in!

ahem... brownie, brownie! I am not sure if I am willing to further mingle with you guys!

The problem is that the site that hosts the photo does not allow linking! Thus all I see is the fortune city logo

Is she allowed in? I'm sure she'll make great conversation with the Betties (Page and Bacall)... Sorry, but we can't see her!

Hey, you're still allowed to keep the music on your Ipod after scratching the CD itself beyond recognition, as long as you keep the unplayable - but genuine - CD! But to answer your question; no, (*cough*) I kept on playing my cassettes... ] Well sure, we all would, except for a few saintly characters... let's just not pretend to be a saint if you ain't! Gets pretty cold here with all them saints around!

And the singer on the closing cut *is* the same again as the one I identified, yes?

That Ortega is very nice, brownie! On #15, is that Brew Moore then on tenor?

Only if you send someone else joining us in the party!

Just a purely hypothetical question: earlier, in the days of vinyl and cassettes... if you made yourself a cassette of an LP, to play it in the car - I am absolutely sure when you sold the vinyl, or even when the vinyl got in such bad condition you no longer could play it, you trashed the cassettes, right?

Hey, count me in! And if you don't mind, I'll bring her to the party, too

If you ever feel like stealing an ipod, first you thing you have to delete the files on it... otherwise you'll be hunted by the music industry for stealing intellectual property (never mind the poor chap who lost his ipod...)

Ok, I'll stick my head out early for a change... I greatly enjoyed your disc, Guy, without being able to pin down anything else fore sure, after the opening track... -_- #1 Terrific opener! Absolutely haunting melody, performed by K.D.-esque frog-eating trumpet Love this one! What you miscalculated here, Guy, was how this melody sticks once one has heard it! It’s such a nice melancholy line, with those punctuations giving more hooks, and then that bitter-sweet trumpet on top… He’s on trumpet, he wrote the tune and he arranged it. #2 Very nice bass intro! Nice tenor… hmmm, does not ring a bell but I’d be astonished if this weren’t a bunch of guys I didn’t know! It all sounds very familiar, but I know I don’t know it… #3 Nice! Sounds somewhat European? Again very nice bass, though the bottom end is a bit lowly recorded? I like this track a lot! Piano trio in the tradition of Bill Evans, I guess, but somewhat more swinging, in a very lyrical way. But except for the Evans influence (which is probably obvious with 95% of the piano trio music done after…) I am clueless. #4 Monkish intro (reminds me of that tune, Little Rootie Tootie), but goes into a more standard straight ahead theme. I am again pretty clueless… but I like this arrangement quite a bit. Some Mingus in there? Could this be Martial Solal? Not quite sure – repeating! Alto is very nice. Phil Woods? No, not fat enough sound, and some small things in there that are too… modern for him? I remain clueless but I like it! #5 Slightly generic, no? Oh, but there’s a bridge, too… nice hardbop… I assume I have this and should know it, but of late I have not played a lot of Blue Note albums, in fact it’s been years since I played any Sonny Clark or Horace Silver… tenor sounds familiar from the entrance on. Is this Kenny Dorham now? I am not quite sure… drummer sounds softer and much more relaxed than usual, which is good. #6 “My Romance” – very nice. Out of the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh gang… is that Lee on alto? Very nice tenor, full but soft sound, very clear. Same for alto. But definitely not Lee – it just could have been him during the ensemble… those embellishments and all. Very nice track! #7 Whoah! Or rather WHOAH!!! This is *it*! Great one! I have a feeling I should know at least all the horns, but I won’t stick my head out and make this even more embarrassing… Charlie Shavers? #8 More classy stuff! Tune sounds familiar again… not “Flamingo”, is it? Piano is great here! So far, this BFT has been a class act! I guess my comment on #5 wasn’t fair, since this only sounded slightly generic in the context of the great tracks surrounding it. In the middle of a Blue Note compilation, it could sound sophistiqué… Is that Guy Lafitte on #8? #9 Ooooh… what to say? The guy’s voice and his half-talking singing reminds me a bit of Joao Gilberto on those sixties sides with Getz. Very nice! Repeating and googling… Ok, as I thought… same chap who wrote #1… is it really him singing? I don’t have any of his discs yet… Pan! Pan! The song, maybe the album? #10 Tenor is good, but piano gets into some almost classical stuff that I don’t find that great, to be frank. Oh, nice brass entrance, but still in a near-classical way. I like the tenor most here. #211 Great trumpet solo! But sound has some warble… not exactly hi-fi… trombone entrance is fantastic! So smooth! Who could that be? Slide Hampton? Just a wild guess… Klook? No… this gets better and better! Lateef on tenor? Got to play this again! Fantastic track! That theme is so neat, and the playing then goes places! #12 Nice one. Google tells me it’s Irving Berlin’s “How About Me” – never heard this song before, I think. Like it! Pianist accompanies very good! #13 Ooooooh! Suave groove! All falls together her, guitar with very nice sound, drums shuffling without ever getting loud or banging… sort of a low-fi groove, and a great one! This is somewhere in between the urban funk of Horace Silver and the rural folk-funk of Jimmy Giuffre – great! #14 Oh, I have this… what is it again? Hmm, organ? Maybe I know some other version of this tune? First tenor is nice, second goes a bit too much into virtuoso runs for some time. Organ is rather perfunctory… #15 Old stuff… more west coasty music? Very nice! Probably one of those Prez followers on tenor? #16 Ok, one more to go that I won’t know sh*t about… oh, same singer again as before? Great choice to end a classy disc!

some animals are more multiple animals than other animals...

well well well, Evan is that one, don't you know?

I have most of these, too, but I also need to get the Solal. How's the Rushing? Worth some pennies?

Anyone? I have it, but not being home I go from memory: I think it's not stated anywhere who remastered it... not the best of signs... my guess would be McMaster, but I really don't know. And no, the liners etc. do not make the set essential to have. I got it before the RVGs came out, and maybe today I'd get the RVGs instead.

Happy Birthday!

yes... and I did play it once back then, but cannot remember if I liked it or not... was just background music for something else then...

Oh, I'd wonder about that, too! Only that I have the disc, but not played it yet... I think this and "Love Song" may be the only Winstone things I got.

Mike, I totally agree with you on Grolnick! I picked up his 2CD BN set long after it had been OOP (it was on my radar, but I became aware of it only after it went OOP, and of course it was the sidemen that made me put it on the search list...) I immensely enjoy the two albums whenever I play them (not nearly as often as I should, though), and it's indeed a loss that he died so early. The Mingus influence I heard, too, but then he does streamline it a bit (who wonders, with those sidemen...), but that makes for all the greater effect, since there's plenty of soul in this music, only it's not always noticeable on the outside. Great choice, that one, Randy!