Mammy Rock

Ruth Flowers is not your average DJ. Coming up to her 70th birthday, when many are well settled into retirement, the grandmother from Bristol has become an international sensation, in demand in clubs throughout Europe.

With spiky silver hair and scarlet lipstick, gold bomber jacket, baggy tracksuit bottoms, bling jewellery, and trademark giant black sunglasses, Flowers plays down the new-found fame of her twilight years.

"I'm not a superstar DJ," she said, before donning her diamante-encrusted headphones and starting her set. "I'm just a DJ."

Mamy Rock, as she is known on the circuit, came to the wheels of steel later than most. She fell in love with dance music after accompanying her grandson to a London nightclub.

"The bouncers didn't want to let me in at first, I was quite a lot older than the usual clientele, but once I got inside I hugely enjoyed it. I thought 'I can do this.' My husband had died, I was retired, I had the time, so why not?"

Entire article can be read at Guardian UK

How wonderful is this?!  She reminds me of the rapping grandma from The Wedding Singer.

I just found some more styled photos of Mammy Rock on Advanced Style.

"Our Song"

I've never had an "our song" with anyone I've ever dated--it never came naturally.  I envisioned that it would be necessary to sit down over dinner and say, "Baby, it has come to my attention that we don't have a song.  Do you know how that makes me feel?  Wretched, it makes me feel wretched.  We simply have to choose one this evening before this gets any further."

So, I've never had a couples' song.

It made me think about all the other songs that couples claim and the list doesn't seem that long.  

 1. At Last - Etta James
2. Unforgettable - Nat King Cole
3. When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge
4. Have I Told You Lately - Rod Stewart
5. We've Just Only Begun - The Carpenters
6. Fields Of Gold - Sting
7. Everything I Do - Bryan Adams
8. Only You - Roy Orbison
9. Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper
10. This I Promise You - NSync
11, You Are So Beautiful - Joe Cocker
12. Can You Feel The Love Tonight - Elton John
13. My Boo - Usher and Alisha Keys
14. Crazy In Love - Beyonce
15. Hopelessly Devoted To You - Olivia Newton John
16. I Just Called To Say I Love You - Stevie Wonder
17. The Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Middler
18. Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton
19. I Will Always Love You- Whitney Houston
20. Maybe I'm Amazed - Paul McCartney
21. Baby, I Love Your Way - Peter Frampton
22. Our Song- Elton John

Frankly, there's not one on that list of songs that I would claim for myself.  They were all written for someone else and it just feels disingenuous to say that it's ours.  Frankly, I would throw the whole list away and say, "Babe, if we really gotta have song then let's grab 'Fishin' Blues' cuz darlin, that's what I wanna do with you...grow old and go fishin with you although, after we get good bait of course."

Les Triplettes De Belleville

Several years ago I got into the habit of requesting friends and acquaintances to make me a mixed tape of their favorite songs.  I had the idea that this excersize would be the musical equilvalent to looking through their trash--a very telling way to get to know someone in a flash with a bi-product of enhancing my musical library 10-fold.

This is how I discovered M.  A French musican who is hugely popular among coissants and brie but who is virtually unknown in our land of milkshakes and hamburgers.  He even worked on the soundtrack for The Triplettes of Belleville which leans heavily on the gypsy swing music of Django Rheinhardt with a super cute music video.


In fact, I quite like French music.  I like world music in general because when the words are in a language I can't understand, I focus on the music as a whole while the voice becomes simply another instrument and less a vehicle for some deeper message.  However, of all world music, French is my favorite.

Jacques Dutronc-Les Cactus (1967)

This American Life

  

I love This American Life.  Words cannot express how much I adore the idiosyncratic stories that make up the hour-long radio show.  It often comes up in dinner conversation by saying, "I was listening to This American Life the other day and I heard that..."  There's one episode in particular that I just love called Numbers.

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes."

The thing about both experiments is that the artwork resulting from what people want is completely weak and uninteresting; like a Thomas Kinkaid painting.  However, the painting and song that were created out of everything that annoys people ended up being different and amazing.  You can go to Melamid and Komar's website and buy the songs or you can listen to the streaming episode for free.

The experiment reminds me of an ancient Greek sculptor that allowed fellow Grecians to critique his sculpture of an ideal feminine beauty and he would make changes as requested.  The resulting sculpture was considered grotesque.

It also reminds me of a contemporary French performance artist named Orlan who has been undergoing multiple plastic surgeries to combine the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, eyes of French School of Fountainbleau's Diana, and the forehead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  Entitled The Reincarnation Of Saint Orlan, the project began in 1990 to morph herself into an ideal beauty as suggested by men who paint woman.  She even makes the act of plastic surgery into performance art by staying awake and reciting poetry while filming the procedure. A few stills of the operations can be seen on her website.  I love her.  She's extreme but fascinating.  By combining all of these various elements of feminine beauty she's making herself look rather disturbing, but in a very feminist way...there's lots of articles about the whole thing.

Darwin As An Opera

Swedish rock group The Knife, who's Heartbeats was repopularized by Jose Gonzalez, has recently gone is a wholly new direction.  They've been commissioned by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma to write the music for their opera based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species.  In collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, they will release the studio version of the opera entitled Tomorrow, In A Year, on March 1, 2010.  A streaming version of "Colouring Of Pigeons" can be heard here.

Chladni Plates

Invented by German physicist Ernst Chladni in the late 1700's to illustrate the patterns of two  dimensional sound waves.  They are created by stroking a bow against the edge of a steel plate that is covered with a thin layer of sand.  The plates' unique vibrations will cause the sand to move and settle in various nodal patterns; nodes are the points of absolutle zero vibrations.  The more complex the vibration is, the more elaborate the resulting pattern will be.  Chladni Plate techniques are commonly used to aide in the design of acoustic instruments such as violins, guitars, and cellos. 

I love that when I'm searching for something in Google Images, I often stumble upon something wholly unrelated yet amazing.  Chladni plates are one of these.  They have a couple videos online showing the technique in motion which are pretty cool.

Happy New Years!

We went and did it again.

My best friend Kat, my boyfriend Conner, his brother Dan, and I wish you all a Happy New Year! 

I don't know what everyone else has planned for their New Years resolution however, I've finally decided to ditch my eternal resolution of "getting buff" for something a little more practical...I've decided that it's time I try to learn a little something about the stock market.  Haha, not exactly my idea of a good time, but I might as well get the bandwagon.

Love and kisses!

Rachel