skywriting by word of mouth

John Lennon was a paradox. Underneath the hard living celebrity persona lurked a totally different individual. His writings in Skywriting by Word of Mouth reflect the transition period during which he met Yoko Ono and realized that he wanted to leave the Beatles. He is honest about personal mistakes and his abuse of drugs. His writings are candid, witty, enlightened, and sarcastic. This book will eradicate previous perceptions since it erases the facade of John Lennon and shows his real soul. While language in certain passages may offend some readers, mature readers should benefit from Lennon's honest evaluation of his self image and his public image.

walking on thin ice

It is a metaphor for coming dangerously close to failing, becoming trapped in something, being unsuccessful, getting in trouble, etc. There are any number of people who have poor anger management skills or a hair trigger temper. Even the slightest offense or deviation from routine may be enough to trigger an explosive emotional outburst or physical reaction. This volatility may be enough to cause others to modify their own behavior and actions to maintain a tense but workable work or social environment. Walking on eggshells around a known rageaholic or temperamental person may be viewed as a form of self-preservation, although often accompanied by feelings of anxiety or dread. Failure to maintain such a non-confrontational atmosphere may end badly.

phoenix rising from the ashes

Only Umno can lose Bagan Pinang, they say. In other words, the party can only be beaten by itself - by intrigue, infighting, internal sabotage. But not by the opposition...

a momantary lapse of reason

i need to take a break.. most probably it would be on the 19th and 20th.. got to get out of these mess.. the next two weeks will be of upmost importance to me..

dr.m's reaction to "garland of slippers"

" The MIC should remember that there is not a single constituency with a predominantly Indian population. The MIC, a race-based party cannot contest in any constituency in Malaysia. But to ensure the Indians get a say in the Government the BN had to allocate predominantly Malay constituencies to the MIC and then persuade the Malay voters to support the MIC candidate. The Malay voters did not like it but the Umno leaders had to persuade them. When the MIC does things which would make it difficult for Malay voters to support its candidates, I think it is fair for a Malay to criticise. This could be done quietly by the leaders of BN. Others, including ex-leaders do not have that closed door access. They have to shout out aloud. So I shouted. "

splendour in the grass

My first introduction to Splendour in the Grass was on a day when I was home from SAS, foolishly proud of myself. I passed the day watching movies on the television. Though I was only in my midteen, the film really resonated. And who can forget Natalie Wood struggling to control her emotions upon meeting Warren Beatty in the final scene of the movie, then hearing her recite this poem at the end of the movie...

What though the radiance

which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

apocalypse now

We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army. And they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them.

neo

I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world... without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries; a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you...

stupid gadgets...

It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.

one flew over the cuckoo's nest

You're just a young kid. What are you doing here? You ought to be out in a convertible, why... bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver. What are you doing here, for heaven's sake? What's funny about that? I mean, you guys do nothing but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out!

facey tweet

here's a second outlook of the new fads, facebook and tweeter. viewed my sites today and i still couldnt figure our how it works. sure you can find lots of pals through the facey, but then is that all it can do? and the tweet, just forget it. maybe i'm naive, but i did my homework. either i'm too old or that thing is a coy, your pick.

Who can it be now ?

Reminds me of SAS way back in '83 when all the juniors were singing Down Under and dressed like stupid punks...

sifu ainul's jagiellonian

„(…)Niechże więc tam będzie nauk przemożnych perła, aby wydawała męże, dojrzałością rady znakomite, ozdobą cnót świetne, i w różnych umiejętnościach biegłe; niechaj otworzy się orzeźwiające źródło, a z jego pełności niech czerpią wszyscy naukami napoić się pragnący. Do tego miasta Krakowa niechaj zjeżdżają się swobodnie i bezpiecznie wszyscy mieszkańcy, nie tylko królestwa naszego i kra­jów przyległych, ale i inni, z różnych części świata, którzy pragną nabyć tę przesławną perłę wiedzy.”
Kazimierz III Wielki, założyciel Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego

bon voyage sifu ainul

suddenly everybody is tweeting and boasting about their facebook. i for once havent found any rational explaination why them two are so stylo these days. my point about them are ; facebook.. i dont need that many friends, tweeter.. microblogging is a waste of time. so here i am sticking to this old blogspot thing.

sifu ainul is flying to poland the day after tomorrow. maybe one day if god allows i might go there for a visit.. with my mary and chain. i'll take a flight to london, transit at dubai. might be staying with fatiha at manchester for a week or so. then i'll fly to warsaw and drive to cracow. way back i'll take a direct flight from frankfurt. hehe, bon voyage ainul... explore your world.

insane bolt

9.59 / 19.19 ...

Melody

Two British first-year secondary school youngsters, Daniel Lattimer and Melody Perkins fall head over heels in love and announce to their parents that they want to get married. Not sometime in the future, but now. However, the adults, parents and teachers alike try to dissuade them. Along with the help of their friend, Ornshaw and their classmates the young couple are determined to go ahead with their plans. This romantic fantasy was unique in that it told the story through the viewpoint of the children in the story, the adults playing only supporting roles. Music by The Bee Gees. Sealed with a loving kiss.

cool hand luke

What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach... so you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it! Well, he gets it! And I don't like it any more than you men...

missed the comfort of feeling sad

nirvana unplugged is probably the best album the ever comes out from the mtv series. sure some may argue that mr clapton's session is much better and more emotional thanks to tears in heaven. but then watching kurt cobain sings his heart out enchanted you like no artist can. bowie's the man who sold the world was covered splendidly. other songs were sung with eyes closed and heart wide open ... oh whatever nevermind.

the piano man

my sis cocq brought this cassette back from adelaide way back in 1979... all for the sake of "honesty". there are also other well crafted songs in this album such as my life and big shot. years later i realise that mr. joel's best song is the way you are... from his earlier album.

dark side of the moon

dont really like their songs except for wish you were here and another brick of the wall... but then way back in early eighties liking them is a trend... so never mind about the music, just confess that you're a fan and you are considered stylo...

pour some sugar on me

Reminds me of the good ole days when glam rock rules... they sing like hard rockers, but they dress like poppers. but still sugar is one heck of a rock song.

writer's block

plastic ono band

Shaved Fish is a collection of singles, some of them hits, released during John Lennon's post-Beatles career. A typically mad collage of literal interpretations of the 11 tracks present an accurate overview of Lennon's confused career since leaving the Beatles. The best tracks are obsessed, as on Instant Karma, Cold Turkey, Mother, Give Peace a Chance and Power to the People. There is a cohesion of style present in these songs which dwindles in the later parts of the record: "Mind Games," "Whatever Gets You thru the Night" and "#9 Dream". This album is a convincing evidence, then, not only of John Lennon's genius but of his continuing career difficulty.

fedex

5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14
four hours eighteen minutes

quadrophenia

Quadrophenia is the Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening. Captained by Pete Townshend, they have put together a beautifully performed and magnificently recorded essay of a British youth mentality in which they played no little part, lushly endowed with black and white visuals and a heavy sensibility of the wet-suffused air of 1965.
Nonetheless, the album fails to generate a total impact because of its own internal paradox: Instead of the four-sided interaction implicit in the title and overriding concept, Quadrophenia is itself the product of a singular (albeit brilliant) consciousness. The result is a static quality which the work never succeeds in fully overcoming. Townshend has taken great pains with the record, has carried it within him for over a year, has laboriously fitted each piece of its grand scale in place. Yet in winning the battle, he's lost the war and more's the pity.
The hero of Quadrophenia is Jimmy, a young motor-scooted Mod in the throes of self-doubt and alienation. Unlike Tommy, to whom he's destined to be inevitably compared, Jimmy is no simplistic parable or convenient symbol. His loner qualities set him apart from both friends and foes, and though he's more than willing to be led, somehow even that security seems to elude him. Torn between identities, Townshend has gifted him with four, all competing for top seed in Jimmy's confused psyche. In one he is forceful and determined, a master of his fate; another finds him full of brazen daring and rollicking jingoism; yet another softens and romanticizes his nature, giving him a quiet inner strength; and still another reveals him as insecure, searching, the promise of salvation granted and hovering over the next hillrise.
Such is quadrophenia, schizophrenia times two, and Townshend maneuvers this conflict on several levels, each to noticeably good (if fairly evident) effect. Most important of these manifold hooks is the Mod generation out of which the Who sprang, and only secondary (though admittedly the most personally interesting) is the Who itself, four themes ("Helpless Dancer," "Bell Boy," "Is It Me?" and "Love Reign O'er Me") wrestling, congealing, splitting apart throughout the album. As for Jimmy, his frustration at being unable to resolve his separate selves suddenly overwhelms him, so that he smashes his scooter, flees to Brighton on the shore, finally putting to sea in a boat with the vague aim of suicide. This is where we find him at the beginning of side one, lost amidst his flashbacks and disjointed memories, and this is where we leave him, on a note of spiritual uplift and transcendence, at the end.
These are not new concerns for the Who, by any means. Whereas the Kinks always seemed preoccupied with the staid and comfortable middle class in an archetypal love-hate relationship, Townshend and Co. early on turned an affectionate camera eye to their contemporaries, culminating in such landmark classics as "Substitute," "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere" and a flailing "My Generation" yet to be equaled in definitive power.
Quadrophenia, in taking that time in retrospect and examining its implications, lingers over the artifacts of the period as if they might in themselves provide a clue. Tea kettles whistle over the ominous voicings of the BBC, hints of the Who in concert cut in and out of Jimmy's fragmented dreamings, slim and checked jackets mingle with seersucker and neatly cut hair. To the American mind, Quadrophenia might thus seem as strange as portions of American Graffiti could appear to English experience, but it's to be assured that the appeal of semi-nostalgic shared memories must perforce work as well for one as the other.
It is to Townshend's credit that his is not a disengaged overview, pious and self-righteous after all these years. In seeking to understand Jimmy, he apparently is also trying to understand the roots of the Who, its attraction as rallying point and its eventual rejection by such as Jimmy ("The Punk Meets the Godfather") and—more appropriately—himself. To set the stage for Jimmy's final leap to faith, Townshend must question why the religion of rock & roll (as well as GS scooters and purple hearts) had to be replaced by something less temporal and untrustworthy, detail the steps toward the higher goal, describe its draining holocaust.
The interior episodes where all this is hashed out are the most successful on Quadrophenia, impeccably outlined by Townshend and stunningly executed by the Who. Jimmy attempts to mesh with his family, his peer group, his girl, and yet remains an outsider, wondering why in his just-so clothes "the other tickets look much better/Without a penny to spend they dress to the letter." Meeting an old idol on the beach, now reduced to subserving as a local hotel bellboy, he is moved to remember: "Ain't you the guy who used to set the paces/Riding up in front of a hundred faces?"
An effective moment, yet when judged against the broader scope of Quadrophenia it seems as if all Townshend has constructed is a series of such effective moments. Pete, for better or worse, is possessed of a logic riveting in its linearity, and if in effect we are being placed in the mind of an emotionally distressed adolescent, neither the texture of the music nor the album's outlook is able to rise to this challenge of portraiture. Despite the varied themes, Jimmy is only seen through Townshend's eyes, geared through Townshend's perceptions, and the aftermath as carried through four sides becomes a crisis of concept, the album straining to break out of its enclosed boundaries and faltering badly.
This is reflected in the songs themselves, vastly similar in mode and construction, running together with little differential to separate them. Only a few stand on their own as among the best the Who have done ("The Real Me," "Is It in My Head?," "5:15," the Townshend theme of "Love Reign O'er Me"), and of those it's interesting to note that several are holdovers from the lost Who album Glyn Johns and the band worked on before the onset of Quadrophenia. Also, given the inordinately complex personalities that make up the group, little is sensed of any Moon, Entwhistle or Daltrey contributions to the whole. Their roles are subdued, backing tracks when they should rise to shoulder the lead, pressed on all fronts by the sweep of Townshend's imagination.
On other Who albums this might be acceptable, even welcome; surely Pete has been the Who's guiding force, their hindsight and hellbound inspiration. It is his mastermind that has created the tour-de-force recording breakthroughs of the album, the realistic and panoramic landscape of pre-Carnaby Street England, arranged the setting so that each member of the band could give full vent to his vaunted and highly unique instrumental prowess. Indeed, it might easily be said that the Who as a whole have never sounded better, both ensemble and solo, proving unalterable worth and relevance in an age that has long passed others of their band's generation into fragments of history.
But on its own terms, Quadrophenia falls short of the mark. Jimmy Livingston Seagull, adrift on a stormless sea, with only his shattered wings and sharded memories to keep him company—so close, and yet so far.