I have been lurking for a while, unable to fathom the intricacies of your Earthling culture. Please take as read the standard apology for the fact that what I am about to say may not be interesting etc. I live in Berkeley, California, with my wife & 2-yr-old daughter & pug & 3-legged chihuahua-with-twee-sweater (truck/lorry, vet bills, amputation, knitting). I recently escaped from an unbelievably dull job writing computer manuals for a Sonoma County insurance company (cubicle, bottlenecks in review process, evil director of Compliance department). Note this offhand parenthesis-summary technique copied from the novel "Lolita". Now I need to get another job I guess. Never work for an insurance company -- if in doubt, see all of Kafka. More information about me: I once worked as a lollypop man, I find the new Radiohead album more catchy than the previous ones (List rules say I now have to explain why, but I can't really), I once spent a winter in Tullibody Clacks., last month I made my first ever purchase through eBay =3D a dbx 160 compressor/limiter, a cool thingummy. This afternoon I am worrying about the possibility that music is inherently more subjective than literature i.e. that what songs you like depends more on what music you happened to get into when you were growing up than what books you like depends on what you liked to read when you were growing up. Does anybody else think this? Or even follow my convoluted grammar/thought process? Maybe growing up in the first place was the mistake. Here is a Weimar film summary (excerpted from somewhere: Alraune (aka Unholy Love) Germany 1928, B/W, ca. 97 min. - This silent film is the best of the three versions of this film based on Hanns Heinz Ewer's popular novel about Alraune (Brigitte Helm, Metropolis), the offspring of a prostitute artificially inseminated by a mad doctor (Paul Wegener) with the semen of a hanged man. This Alraune has Brigitte Helm as a somnambulant vamp with seductive powers on her father, the scientist who created her. The film is suffused with a sense of enchanting perverse sexuality as she ruins all who are in love with her. Variety: Helm's appeal is rather to the morbid and unhealthy. She is eerie and at times almost unnatural.

And another, "The Hands of Orlac", 1925, Russian titles, Poor quality, this extremely rare film stars Veidt as Paul Orlac, a concertmaster of the grand piano. after his hands are crushed in a train accident, a surgeon repairs them. but there is some question as to whose hands they really are! A mysterious stranger claims that they once belonged to someone else. Hope I have not broken too many list rules yet, so will go read "Dr. Seuss's ABC" to my daughter for the 9,000,000th time "Big F, little F, what begins with F? Four fluffy feathers on a Fiffer-feffer-feff." Don't know about Shakespeare or Fraud W. Crook, but the worthy doctor was clearly in no risk of running short of cocaine. I am listening to Johnny Dowd's "Pictures from Life's Other Side", an album which I like so far as it has the songs-around-the-campfire-at-a-drunken-underwater-fairground feel that I am never able to resist (maybe my limbic brain just evolved that way at an earlier stage in my development, see theory above). Yrs. James w +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+