more on "allegory"

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Thu Feb 4 15:43:20 UTC 2010


Wilson, you're missing the allegory!  The torturer isn't black, he's Iraqi.
He just likes Michael Jackson *and* Saddam Hussein!

He's complex!

For an unusually interesting review of the same earnest mess of a movie,
see:
http://www.cinemonkey.com/reviews/kingsholm/threekingholm.html. You may not
be sorry!

JL

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: more on "allegory"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 11:38 PM -0500 2/3/10, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >You got that right! I'm still trying figure out what we're supposed
> >get out of the fact the torturer is a black American: to borrow from
> >an old R&B song, "The tables turned and now it's your turn to cry," so
> >to speak? Meant as an on-the-qui-vive directed to the Aryan
> >Brotherhood?
> >
> And here I always thought it was the Stones.  Go know. I am indebted
> Wilson, with a chorus from Wikipedia, for setting me straight.  It
> was the Valentinos (or more accurately, the Womacks, written by Bobby
> and Shirley W.) who wrote and first cut the song.  Nice anecdote
> about it, though, featuring the intercession of none other than
> Murray the K:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_Over_Now
> The Valentinos' original version of the song was played to the
> Rolling Stones during their first North American tour in June 1964 by
> a New York radio DJ named Murray the K. After the band heard the song
> they recorded it nine days later at Chess Studios in Chicago. Years
> later Bobby Womack said in an interview that he told his manager that
> he did not want the Rolling Stones to record their version of the
> song, that he told Mick Jagger to get his own song. His manager
> convinced him to let the Rolling Stones record a version of the song.
> Six months later when he received the royalty check for the song he
> told his manager that Mick Jagger can have any song he wants. The
> Rolling Stones' version of "It's All Over Now" is the most famous
> version ever cut of the song. It was the band's third single released
> in America, and stayed in the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks,
> peaking at #26. Months later it appeared on their second American
> album 12 X 5. It was first released as a single in Great Britain,
> where it peaked at # 1 on the Disc Weekly charts, giving the Rolling
> Stones their first number one hit ever.
>
> ObADS:  There's a line in the song I had always heard as
>
> "[Well, she used to run around
> With every man in town]
> -->She spent all my money, playing her half-assed game(s)"
>
> and it always struck me as surprising that they were able to get away
> with it in the mid-60s, but according to the posted lyrics, that's
> just a "kiss-this-guy"/"bathroom-on-the-right" type reanalysis on my
> part for the actual line:
>
> Well, she used to run around with every man in town
> She spent all my money, playing her high class game
>
> LH
>
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