Accordion pleats are a type of fine, narrow, regular pleating created by sewing or pressing minute darts into the fabric of dresses and skirts, usually from the waistband towards the hem. Accordion pleating was used in the construction of ball gowns during the late 19th century. By the turn of the century it was an integral part of many styles and became especially popular during the 1920s and 1950s.
Siouxsie is one of the best performers I've ever seen live. I would also be at the record store before they opened to get any of her new albums and I would buy everything, EP's (which is such a funny archaic term now) and import prints of her music. Her record albums were also always gorgeous with all kinds of art history references like Klimt, DuBuffet, Cecil Beaton, and occult, gnostic, kabbalah references in her lyrics. (Below is a remix of the song "Kiss Them For Me" with Robert Anton Wilson speaking) Of course, Siouxsie is on my top Female Rock Singers List
Siouxsie & the Banshees were a British rock band formed in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bassist Steven Severin, the only constant members.
Initially associated with the British punk rock scene, Siouxsie & the Banshees quickly evolved to create "a form of post-punk discord full of daring rhythmic and sonic experimentation"." The Times cited Siouxsie & the Banshees as "one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era."
The group also became inspirational in the creation and development of gothic rock and their style also combined elements of pop and avant-garde.
Following a lengthy break, the band recruited keyboards player Martin McCarrick and the ex-Specimen guitarist Jon Klein and recorded the 1988's Peepshow with non-traditional rock instrumentation including cello and accordion. Q magazine praised the album in its five-star review : "Peepshow takes place in some distorted fairground of the mind where weird and wonderful shapes loom." The first single "Peek-a-Boo" used abrasive sounds over a pop texture : it was their first real breakthrough in the United States.
In 1991, the Banshees returned with the single "Kiss Them for Me", mixing strings over a dance rhythm. This single peaked in the U.S. singles charts at number 23, allowing them to reach a new audience
Siouxsie Sioux in 1980.
Siouxsie & the Banshees influenced many musicians of different genres. The Banshees had a strong impact on two main trip hop acts. Tricky covered the b-side "Tattoo" to open his second album Nearly God; the original version of that song helped Tricky in the creation of his style. Another trip hop group Massive Attack sampled "Metal Postcard" prior to record Mezzanine : one of their leaders 3D also explained that for this album, his band "let the sounds of the new wave acts like Siouxsie get in their music". Popular solo musician Morrissey stated in 1994 that "none [...] are as good as Siouxsie and the Banshees at full pelt. That's not dusty nostalgia, that's fact." Another ex-member of The Smiths, Johnny Marr mentioned his liking for Banshees'guitarist John McGeoch. Shirley Manson of Garbage wrote in the foreword to Paytress's Banshees biography, "I learned how to sing listening to The Scream and Kaleidoscope. Today, I can see and hear the Banshees' influence all over the place." She also stated that her all-time favourite singers are Siouxsie and Frank Sinatra. Guitarist Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction also made a parallel between his band and the Banshees in Siouxsie's official biography: "There are so many similar threads : melody, use of sound, attitude, sex-appeal. I always saw Jane's Addiction as the masculine Siouxsie & the Banshees." The Cure leader Robert Smith declared in 2003 in Mark Paytress's Siouxsie biography : "Siouxsie and The Banshees and Wire were the two bands I really admired. They meant something." He also pinpointed what the Join Hands tour brought him musically. "On stage that first night with the Banshees, I was blown away by how powerful I felt playing that kind of music. It was so different to what we were doing with The Cure. Before that, I'd wanted us to be like The Buzzcocks or Elvis Costello, the punk Beatles. Being a Banshee really changed my attitude to what I was doing." Other famous acts named the Banshees. Radiohead cited John McGeoch'era Siouxsie records when mentioning the recording of the song "There There". U2 selected "Christine" for a Mojo'compilation and The Edge was the presenter of an award given to Siouxsie at the Mojo ceremony'2005 .
Siouxsie & the Banshees's music still continues to be an influence in modern music today. LCD Soundsystem leader James Murphy was marked by certain Banshees albums during his childhood. Later in 2005, his band LCD Soundsystem LCD Soundsystem covered "Slowdive" as a B-side to the single "Disco Infiltrator". Santogold based one of her songs on the music of "Red Light". "'My Superman' is an interpolation of a Siouxsie Sioux song, 'Red Light,'" she explained. "The only reason I'm calling it an interpolation is because we have to." "I have no problem with it because I love her song and I love this song." The Beta Band sampled "Painted Bird" on their track "Liquid Bird" from the Heroes to Zeros album. Devotchka covered "The Last Beat of My Heart" on the suggestion of Arcade Fire singer Win Butler : it was released on "The Curse Your Little Heart" EP. The Mars Volta covered "Pulled to Bits", b-side of "Playground Twist" single, on their single "Wax Simulacra" (released on November 18, 2007). From here
Siouxsie made an amazing recording with a cover of the Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit
Several pensioners (from different backgrounds) meet every day at chess field in a park (somewhere in Europe). One of them is Mile. He plays a round of chess with his best friend Halid. The atmosphere is cheerful, until after a few moves a young man approaches Mile. It is his son Nikola, whom Mile has not seen for a long time. Nikola wishes for his father to come home. But where is his home now?
Really...one of my all time favourite directors and one of my favourite movies of his...but can you really pick a favourite Herzog film? And Herzog just seems to be getting more and more interesting in the last few years...
She is at home high-fiving because she's been knocked off the tabloids for the other family with lots of kids...Jon and Kate + 8.
I love studying the fascination and the trend of worshipping at the Church of Moral Outrage that is so popular in the United States. Of course British tabloids are terribly catty and gossipy but they don't have the same tone of moral judgement. The web site "Stuff White People Like" says that white people love being offendedread here... It seems to be true and one can really see this acted out on the internet and on web boards. I find there is a very short wick for sarcasm, or joking. I've lost a couple pals by having opinions or styles of arguing they didn't like, took umbrage with, and they got offended. Stagg says people are more touchy here than in Canada. I wonder if Stagg is right? Canada is a self-depricating and sarcastic kind of citizenship...that is for sure. And Canadians are too busy worrying about hockey, donuts to mind other peoples business too much. We're a boring country really. I love the drama of the U.S. tabloid culture. It's hilarious! Anyways, check out the web site Stuff White People Like...it's very very funny.
Just remember we're all different and we all have different perspectives and we all get stubborn and believe we are "right" or "correct". Our egos can be too stubborn and full of pride to be open-minded to other peoples ideas and perspectives. And if this blog or my opinions offend you ....well go fuck yourself!
Published in 1996, E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes traces the origins of the United States through the narratives of a series of families, whose stories are all bound together by a green button accordion. Proulx describes the accordion’s origins in Sicily and charts its travels to New Orleans and beyond through the hands of other generations – black, white, French, German, Mexican, Polish – showing the disparate backgrounds of each but connecting them all through the instrument’s versatility to their various musical styles.
From Publisher's Weekly:
"America's ethnic minorities have rarely been rendered with the insight, intuition and unsentimental candor that Proulx brings to the large canvas of characters and reaches of landscape in this ambitious new work. The narrative has eight parts, each composed of short vignettes that depict the cultural baggage the attitudes, behaviors and social conditioning that immigrants brought with them, and the ways in which they joined, yet held aloof from, American society. Beginning in the late 1800s and ending 100 years later, the novel follows a vividly realized cast of characters, whose names are as colorful as their stories: Ludwig Messermacher, Abelardo Relampago Salazar, Dolor Gagnon, Onesiphore Malefoot, Hieronim Przybysz. Their common bond is ownership of a green button accordion, which was brought to these shores by a Sicilian immigrant and, after his death at the hands of a lynch mob, was transported back and forth across the continent by various combinations of inheritance, violence and bad luck. With mesmerizing skill, Proulx summons up the attitudes and speech of her characters, vigorously detailing a formidable number of settings, including New Orleans, Hornet, Texas, Random, Maine, Prank, Iowa, and Old Glory, Minnesota. She can evoke a teeming, fetid slum as clearly as she can a Montana ranch. An invariable characteristic of these immigrants and their families is the tendency to think of others as "Americans." In their own minds, they are still Italians or Germans or Norwegians or Poles or French Canadian or Cajuns. Almost without exception, they express ancient prejudices and newfound racism: the New Orleans natives hate the Italians, who hate the blacks; Iowa's Germans hate the Irish. What makes all this so spectacular is that Proulx is a master at incorporating potentially numbing detail and specificity from the components of an accordion to the bloodlines of Appaloosas and the stages of a Polish funeral into her vigorous prose. Traditional ethnic music played by various characters during their brief ownership of the increasingly derelict accordion is conveyed with impressive authority. The range of scenes, from a drunken birthday party that resembles an animated Booth cartoon to a brutal reaction to a civil rights sit-in at a lunch counter, bespeaks a brilliant imagination. Proulx makes grotesque accidents, bloody catastrophes and bizarre events seem an inescapable part of human existence. If eventually some sameness of mood occurs, and a resultant diminution of tension, this is balanced by the reader's interest in the accordion's odyssey and in the lives it touches en route. For this is a cautionary tale in which pride and greed and self-delusion vie with basic human needs for love, comfort and spiritual sustenance."
