Sinister: Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 19:47:32 -0800

[James Warner]

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

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