Category: Arts and Letters

Ryan Gosling – Gen Z Slang – Dialogue

@jeremylynch If Hollywood movies used Gen Z slang 😂 #ProjectHailMary ♬ original sound – JeremyLynch

Google AI:

“No cap” is a popular slang phrase meaning “no lie,” “for real,” or “truthfully,” used to emphasize that a statement is genuine or serious. Originating in Atlanta-based hip-hop and African American Vernacular English (AAVE), it spread to mainstream usage in the late 2010s to denote sincerity.Key Aspects of “No Cap”:Definition: “Cap” means a lie or exaggeration; therefore, “no cap” means the opposite—telling the truth.Usage: It is frequently added to the end of a statement for emphasis, e.g., “That food was great, no cap”.Origins: Rooted in early 2010s Southern hip-hop, often associated with rapper “NoCap” (Kobe Vidal Crawford Jr.), who is an American rapper known for his emotional style.

Lively Up Yourself – Bob Marley & The Wailers – Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London / 1977

via Google AI:

“Lively Up Yourself” by Bob Marley & The Wailers is a celebratory reggae anthem urging listeners to shake off negativity, energize their spirits, and embrace joy through dance and music. It encourages a vibrant, active, and positive life, serving as an invitation to “wake up” and dance (“skank”), freeing oneself from stress.

Lively up yourself and don’t be no drag
Lively up yourself, oh, Reggae is another bag
Lively up yourself and don’t say no
Lively up yourself, ’cause I said so

You, what you gon’ do?

You rock so, you rock so
Like you never did before
You dip so, you dip so
Till you can dip through my door
You skank so, you skank so, oh yeah

What you got that I don’t know?
I’m trying to wonder, wonder why you
Wonder, wonder why you act so (lively up yourself)
And don’t be no drag
Lively up yourself, oh, Reggae is another bag
(Lively up yourself)

(Lively up yourself) oh, keep livening up your woman in the evening time
And take it, take it, take it, take it
(Lively up yourself) I wanna be lively myself
Got no socks and no shirt (lively up yourself) I gotta lively up myself
(Lively up yourself)
(Lively up yourself) your woman in the morning time
(Lively up yourself) your woman in the evening too, now
Now! (lively up yourself)
(Lively up yourself)

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Dread#Content

Roses are Free – Ween – Live from Bonnaroo 2002

Take a piece of tinsel and put it on the tree
Cut a slab of melon and pretend that you still love me
Carve out a pumpkin and rely on your destiny
Get in your car and cruise the land of the brave and free

But don’t forget to understand exactly what you put on the tree
Don’t believe the florist when he tells you that the roses are free

Take a wrinkled raisin and do with it what you will
Push it into third if you know you’re gonna climb a hill
Eat plenty of lasagna ’til you know that you’ve had your fill
Resist all the urges that make you wanna go out and kill

But don’t forget to understand exactly what you put on the tree
Don’t believe the florist when he tells you that the roses are free

Throw that pumpkin at the tree
Unless you think that pumpkin holds your destiny
Cast it off into the sea
Bake that pie and eat it with me

Reddit discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ween/comments/sbeyb1/daily_song_discussion_85_roses_are_free/

Studio Version
From the comments:
@timusowski3065
12 years ago
Lots of solid advice in this song! Thanks, Ween!

Phish Cover

Phil Collins – Psychological Thriller Vibe of Songs

In ”One More Night,” Mr. Collins’s recent number-one hit, a ticking snare drum injects a whisper of lurking fear into a song that suggests a sweeter, tenderer reprise of ”Against All Odds.” And in the impassioned ”Don’t Lose My Number,” the singer offers solace to a criminal suspect- turned-fugitive. Like many of Mr. Collins’s songs, ”Don’t Lose My Number” is defiantly vague, sketching the outlines of a melodrama but withholding the full story. The album’s final song,”Take Me Home,” is another interior monologue, in which the protagonist may or may not be a discharged mental patient. ”I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” he sings. ”They can turn off my feeling like they’re turning off my light, but I don’t mind.” The singer wants only to be taken home ”because I don’t remember.”

Mr. Collins’s astringent voice, with its petulant undertones and grim, wound-up edge is as important as the drums in sustaining a mood of dramatic suspense. And by double-tracking and electronically phasing the vocals, Mr. Collins and his producer Hugh Padgham, accentuate the sense in his singing of ominous psychological submergence.

On the surface, ”No Jacket Required,” is an album bursting with soulful hooks and bright peppy tunes. But beneath its shiny exterior, Mr. Collins’s drums and his voice carry on a disjunctive, enigmatic dialogue between heart and mind, obsession and repression. The jacket that the album title assures us is not required may not be a tuxedo but a straitjacket.

PHIL COLLINS: POP MUSIC’S ANSWER TO ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Review of No Jacket Required by Stephen Holden

One night in a Dublin street I watched an extraordinary scene – Frank O’Connor on Potential Maupassant Story

One night in a Dublin street I watched an extraordinary scene between a tramp and a prostitute whose sad little affair had broken up – his hope of a home, hers of a husband. Bit by bit she stripped off the few garments he had bought for her, threw them at his feet, and stood in the cold night air shivering. Suddenly I looked around and saw a beautiful girl who was also watching the scene and realized that she was easily the most interesting figure in the little group. On her face was a look that I can describe only as one of exaltation. Maupassant would have followed that girl to her home.

The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
Frank O’Connor
The Lonely Voice is the definitive work of Irish non-fiction on the art of writing short fiction, and has long been held up as one of the greatest works in global literature on the short form.

Desultory Blue Sky Posts – Movie Within Movie Double Feature – Online Dooming – Pot Dealer’s Movie Preferences

Y’know when the characters in a movie go to see a movie and it feels really meta? Well, with an “Ultimate Double Feature,” we play the first movie up until the point when they enter a cinema to watch a different film
 then we play that film
 then we go back to the first film to finish that story.

— The Brattle Theatre (@brattletheatre.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 4:03 PM

If you are anxious and sad about the state of the world, that’s fine, and there are plenty of strategies for dealing with that. But I think you already know that drive-by online dooming isn’t a strategy. It’s selfish and adolescent. It’s a contagion that only spreads the worst of you, not the best.

— Ken Jennings (@kenjennings.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 8:51 PM

BOONDOCK SAINTS was voted movie of the year by the American Association Of Pot Dealers Who Want You To Stay And Hang Out After You Buy Pot From Them seven years in a row

[image or embed]

— mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) January 16, 2026 at 11:22 PM

Acting and the Sense of Personal Identity

The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor’s life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality. In taking on and inhabiting the accoutrements of another’s being—where they are from, their accent, their clothes, their background—you realize that every element of your own personality is malleable. You can do it, you can wear the skin of another human being—and yet still you are you. This, in its own small way, feels profound because it illustrates that none of the things you point to as identity are intrinsic. You are something far more mysterious than a person who is funny, who is angry, who is hurt, who likes Marlboro cigarettes, who is Presbyterian, who is a playboy, who is Nigerian, who is a Real Madrid fan—all of that is dressing.

A Bright Ray of Darkness
Ethan Hawke

RIP – James Van Der Beek

Van Der Beek shot to fame in 1998 as Dawson Leery, the teenage film buff who was as obsessed with Steven Spielberg as he was with his neighbour and lifelong crush, Joey Potter (played by Katie Holmes). Later that year, he was voted one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People in the World. On the 25th anniversary of the show starting, Van Der Beek wrote: “Twenty-five years ago today, my life changed. Not gradually, not day-by-day 
 instantly. It was the culmination of five years of auditioning, hundreds of hours on stage, thousands of hours travelling, preparing, dreaming, hoping, hearing ‘no’ and making up reasons to keep going. But the shift was overnight.”

The intense pressures of celebrity proved difficult to cope with given his youth. After Dawson’s Creek became a smash hit, he said in an interview: “Walking around at that time was very tricky because one autograph could turn into a mob scene. So I walked around in fear of teenage girls.”

James Van Der Beek, star of Dawson’s Creek, dies aged 48
Actor who also starred in Varsity Blues and Rules of Attraction revealed in 2024 he had been diagnosed with cancer

From the last Dawson’s Creek recap on Television Without Pity:


which Dawson picks up at the office in Los Angeles. “It’s us!” Pacey and Joey squeal, offering him their congratulations. “I can’t wait until next season,” Joey says, and Dawson tells them that he can’t wait for the next day. Because he’s meeting Spielberg. Whatev. Pacey and Joey, like good friends (and unlike me), are thrilled for him. The three of the yammer about what he ought to wear to the meeting, as the camera pans to framed photo of Pacey, Joey, Dawson, and Jen, framed on Dawson’s desktop. “Say goodnight, not goodbye,” the soundtrack sings.

And that’s it. We’re out. Thanks for coming along for the ride. It was long and occasionally painful, but I don’t regret a second of it. See you around.

Eternity is the Eve of Something – Chesterton Quote

To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.

Heretics
Gilbert K Chesterton

Mass Market Paperbacks – End of

Rest in peace, mass market paperbacks.

As reported by Publishers Weekly, book distributor ReaderLink will “stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 
 the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years.”

There are several causes of death for the mass market paperback. One is the reduced cost of designing and producing books in the now ubiquitous trade market format. The cheaper price point for a mass market book is no advantage when it isn’t also cheaper to manufacture.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/27/biblioracle-mass-market-paperbacks/

Hypnagogic Creativity – Keith Richards on Writing Satisfaction When Asleep

GROSS: You have a great story in your book about how you co-wrote – well, how you got “Satisfaction” started. You co-wrote the song with Mick Jagger, but you originated it and you didn’t know you were doing it. Can you…

RICHARDS: I wish all the songs would come this way, you know, where you just dream them and then the next morning there they are presented to you. But “Satisfaction” was that sort of miracle that took place. I had a – I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco (inaudible) Philips – kind of the same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player, that you could actually just lay ideas down, you know, wherever you were. I set the machine up, and I put it in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape has run to the very end. And I think, well, I didn’t do anything, you know. I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play. And there in some sort of ghostly version is (vocalizing) I can’t get no satisfaction. And so there is a whole verse of it. I won’t bother you with it all. And after that, there’s – I don’t know – 40 minutes of me snoring.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/29/1119640101/fresh-airs-summer-music-interviews-keith-richards

Then came “Satisfaction,” the track that launched us into global fame. I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote “Satisfaction” in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I’d kept it.

Life
Keith Richards