Maison Fleury

I first heard this song waiting for carpool pick-up in my Volvo SUV☺ Not very nice to mothers are you Bowling For Soup ? In cheesy recent pop, we much prefer Fountains of Wayne ’s “Stacy’s Mom (has got it going on)” thank you very much. While I did (and still do) enjoy a lot of 80s music, I was also happy to put that decade behind me—no snakeskin miniskirt, boyfriend, or Duran Duran concerts to wax nostalgic about there. My memories of the high school in the 80s have a lot more in common with Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep than “The Breakfast Club” or “Sixteen Candles.” So it is not without irony that I find myself shopping for an 80’s theme party at H&M, where clothes from that decade seem to have made a comeback. They are playing “Blister in the Sun,” a female-vocalist, Euro-pop version that lacks all the angst of the Violent Femmes original. I score a pair of leatherette leggings, fuchsia satin top and black Members Only-style jacket. Paying for these clothes, wearing rather conse...

I have been palling around with Marxists. I know, I shouldn't. I feel like the odd duck... a multi-millionaire, reading modern marxist utopias. The Marxists underground still exists, it is even experiencing a bit of a revival . They feel even emboldened by the current soiled diaper mess western ultra-liberal capitalism has created. Obviously choosing to be a Marxist economist wasn't a fast pace track to academic success. Truth be told, the main reason I relate, is that they are the only ones modeling banks and modern fiat money in a way that makes any sense to me. (Main conclusions basically state that interest bearing instruments, a la bonds, are detrimental to a society's economy when said economy is not growing at a brisk pace) But mostly I think some old Marxist conclusions, such as "Banks are pigs that are detrimental to society", are worth dusting off. They should be revisited in light of the current abuses of ultra-liberalism and the banking disgrace it...

My husband and his friend both assume that another friend of theirs is quite a hit among the ladies. Apparently high school and college were good times for X. “Can you imagine that they used to call him the 'Devastator'." The irony is that neither my husband, nor his friend, bothered to ask actual women, including their own wives, what they think of X. The man in question is nice enough looking, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about him. The truth is that all above-average looking people are simple abstractions to me, unless they’ve written, said or done something that particularly piques my interest. I don’t relate too well to the (outward) absence of obvious flaws in other people—like being too nice or too beautiful. No doubt this stems from an instinct to preserve dignity. One wonders if the unnaturally beautiful or virtuous might be applying their own (higher) standards to us: aka “could use an extra hour of treadmill every day,” or “needs to use more age-defyi...

Detroit Techno by marcf999 I don't know if it is because it is autumn but I always seem to go back to the deep techno sound when October weather hits. Something about the melody and hard beats. I have always loved Detroit Techno. It is funny how little most americans know about Detroit Techno. To them Detroit is a city living in 3rd world squalor. To me and most europeans of my age (40) Detroit is the birthplace of electronic music. When mop-rock was still all the rage in most inland US, the Detroit DJ's were touring european clubs and were blown away at 3000 kids dancing to inner-city black techno music. I remember sharing a cab with a journalist that was going to take pictures of Derrick May at his club, I was headed to the club myself for an afterparty during the Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2003. He asked "who is he?", I explained just how influential he had been to the world electronic music scene and bla bla bla... the guy seemed genuinely...