Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance

Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance is a collection of three novellas by Irvine Welsh.

Stories

Lorraine Goes To Livingston

After suffering a stroke, Rebecca Navarro, a best-selling romance novelist, discovers the truth about her corrupt, pornography-loving husband. With the help of Lorraine, her sexually confused nurse, she plots her revenge.

Another nurse at the hospital, Glen, has been secretly admiring Lorraine but after a night at a club, decides to pursue her friend Yvonne instead. Meanwhile, Glen has been accepting money from Freddy Royle, a necrophiliac TV personality. The hospital trustees turn a blind eye to Freddy's nefarious pastime but have to do some fast talking when the new coroner begins asking questions.

Fortune's Always Hiding

Samantha Worthington, an angry and bitter 'Tenazedrine' (Thalidomide) victim, enlists a football hooligan, Dave, to help her seek revenge on the last man left alive who pushed the drug who caused her deformed arms, the drug's marketing director.

Ecstasy (play)

Ecstasy is a 1979 play by British playwright Mike Leigh with a six-character cast. It covers the life of four blue-collar friends living in a ratty area of London near Kilburn High Road and the drunken frustration in their lives, particularly that of the lead character Jean.

Jean is a suicidal garage attendant who sleeps with unsuitable men, like Roy, drinks heavily and has abortions. Her friend from Birmingham, Dawn, who has had three children, brings back her husband Mick, an Irish labourer, and his quiet friend, Len, to Jean's bleak Kilburn bedsitter, - 'their second act ensemble trumpets the dark night of the soul, in what is at once one of the best and gloomiest party scenes in contemporary drama.'

The play opened at the Hampstead Theatre on 26 September 1979. The production was designed by Alison Chitty, and the cast comprised Sheila Kelley as Jean, Ron Cook as Roy, Rachel Davies as Val, Julie Walters as Dawn, Stephen Rea as Mick, and Jim Broadbent as Len. For both Broadbent and Rea, this was the first of several collaborations with Leigh. A new production directed by Leigh, and starring Sian Brooke, Daniel Coonan, Claire Louise Cordwell, Allen Leech, Sinead Matthews, and Craig Parkinson opened on 10 March 2011 at the Hampstead Theatre, and transferred to the Duchess Theatre in Covent Garden on 12 April 2011.

Venus (Frankie Avalon song)

"Venus" is a song written by Ed Marshall and Peter DeAngelis. The most successful and best-known recording of the track was done by Frankie Avalon and released in 1959 (see 1959 in music).

Background

Venus became Avalon's first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it spent five weeks atop the survey. The song also reached number ten on the R&B chart. The song's lyrics detail a man's plea to Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, to send him a girl to love and one who will love him as well. Billboard ranked it as the No. 4 song for 1959.

The song was covered in the United Kingdom by Dickie Valentine who spent a week at number 20 in the Singles Chart in May 1959, the week before Frankie Avalon reached the Top 20 with his original version.

In 1976, Avalon released a new disco version of "Venus". This helped revive the singer's career, as his success had been waning prior to its release and was Avalon's last Billboard Hot 100 hit. The re-recording of "Venus" peaking at number forty-six and at number one on the Easy Listening chart. Avalon was quoted describing the remake: "It was all right, but I still prefer the original."

Venus (Sirius XM)

Venus is a Sirius XM Radio station playing rhythmic pop from the 2000s through today similar to Pop2K,

Details

Venus is a Rhythmic Top 40 station with an emphasis on current-based Rhythmic Pop/Dance hits from the 2000s and today with recurrents from the 2000s, all commercial-free. The channel replaces Top 20 on 20, which officially signed off on July 16, 2014 at 12:04 AM after 14 years. The first song to be played on Venus was "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas. With the launch of Venus, the move will also give Sirius XM two channels with a Rhythmic-focused format, joining The Heat, whose direction favors current-based R&B/Hip-Hop hits.

With the addition of Pitbull's Globalization Radio, which was launched in 2015, Venus has shifted to Rhythmic Pop, allowing Globalization Radio to take on the current Rhythmic/Dance fare, Venus was dropped from the satellites, allowing users can still hear Venus online.

References

External Links

Tannhäuser (opera)

Tannhäuser (full title Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg / Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle) is an 1845 opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on two German legends; Tannhäuser, the legendary medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centers on the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love, a theme running through much of Wagner's mature work.

Composition history

Sources

Wagner wove a variety of sources into the opera narrative. According to his autobiography, he was inspired by finding the story in "a Volksbuch (popular book) about the Venusberg", which he claimed "fell into his hands", although he admits knowing of the story from the Phantasus of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann's story, Der Kampf der Sänger (The Singer's Contest). Tieck's tale, which names the hero "Tannenhäuser", tells of the minstrel-knight's amorous adventures in the Venusberg, his travels to Rome as a Pilgrim, and his repudiation by the pope. To this Wagner added material from Hoffmann's story, from Serapions-Brüder (1819), describing a song contest at the Wartburg castle, a castle which featured prominently in Thuringian history. Heinrich Heine had provided Wagner with the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer and Wagner again drew on Heine for Tannhäuser. In Heine's sardonic essay Elementargeister (Elemental spirits), there appears a poem about Tannhäuser and the lure of the grotto of Venus, published in 1837 in the third volume of Der Salon. Other possible sources include Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's play Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1819).