6.30.2008

a good pipe...

sounds like: "hello/goodbye (uncool)" lupe fiasco and U.N.K.L.E.

"I love a good pipe... you can smoke on your back and the ashes won't fall on you."



Kiyoha from Sakuran. Kiyoha is NOT geisha, she is oiran.

This took me a week or so to do and I'm indifferent to it. I wish I was a bit better at mixing colors.

6.29.2008

plant!

sounds like: "the great escape" JUDY AND MARY



I HEART "WALL.E." I saw it last night and I want to go see it again!!! It is perhaps the best movie to come out this year. HANDS DOWN. It has a 97% fresh score on RottenTomatoes.com:



By Roger Ebert

Pixar’s “WALL•E” succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story. After “Kung Fu Panda,” I thought I had just about exhausted my emergency supply of childlike credulity, but here is a film, like “Finding Nemo,” that you can enjoy even if you’ve grown up. That it works largely without spoken dialogue is all the more astonishing; it can easily cross language barriers, which is all the better, considering that it tells a planetary story.

It is 700 years in the future. A city of skyscrapers rises up from the land. A closer view reveals that the skyscrapers are all constructed out of garbage, neatly compacted into squares or bales and piled on top of one another. In all the land, only one creature stirs. This is WALL•E, the last of the functioning solar-powered robots. He — the story leaves no doubt about gender — scoops up trash, shovels it into his belly, compresses it into a square and climbs on his tractor treads and heads up a winding road to the top of his latest skyscraper, to place it neatly on the pile...

The movie has a wonderful look. Like so many of the Pixar animated features, it finds a color palette that’s bright and cheerful, but not too pushy, and a tiny bit realistic at the same time. The drawing style is Comic Book Cool, as perfected in the funny comics more than in the superhero books: Everything has a stylistic twist to give it flair. And a lot of thought must have gone into the design of WALL•E, for whom I felt a curious affection... The movie draws on a tradition going back to the earliest days of Walt Disney, who reduced human expressions to their broadest components and found ways to translate them to animals, birds, bees, flowers, trains and everything else.

What’s more, I don’t think I’ve quite captured the film’s enchanting storytelling. Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” it involves ideas, not simply mindless scenarios involving characters karate-kicking each other into high-angle shots. It involves a little work on the part of the audience, and a little thought, and might be especially stimulating to younger viewers. This story told in a different style and with a realistic look could have been a great science-fiction film. For that matter, maybe it is.

Note: The movie is preceded by “Presto,” a new Pixar short about a disagreement over a carrot between a magician and his rabbit.

6.27.2008

swans

sounds like: "what is the light?" the flaming lips

tattoo design



katamari birthday!

sounds like: "green light: now begin" blackalicious

katamari birthday card

my boyfriend made me a king of the cosmos katamari birthday card. inside it says "for you i'd make the biggest star in the sky."

6.25.2008

pardon me?

sounds like: "crown of love" arcade fire

Cafferty on the Situation Room: George Bush plans to pardon himself from war crimes.

金魚

sounds like: "don't leave the light on baby" belle and sebastian

FLICKR FEATURE: GOLDFISH








bat for lashes

sounds like: "groove holmes" the beastie boys

BAT FOR LASHES

What's a Girl to Do?


Priscilla

6.24.2008

george carlin

sounds like: "the great london traffic warden massacre" morcheeba



How George Carlin Changed Comedy
By Richard Zoglin


When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early '60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a "hippy dippy weatherman." But as he watched the protest marches of the late '60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.

So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America's uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren't ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own "skinny ass"). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.

But by the early '70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce — whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent — Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truth-teller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society's outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the "drug problem" extends to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the injustice of Muhammad Ali's banishment from boxing for avoiding the draft — a man whose job was beating people up losing his livelihood because he wouldn't kill people: "He said, 'No, that's where I draw the line. I'll beat 'em up, but I don't want to kill 'em.' And the government said, 'Well, if you won't kill people, we won't let you beat 'em up.'"

Most famously, he talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cut-up and the scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating of the "dirty" words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the creation of the "family hour" on network television), his intention was not just to shock; it was to question our irrational fear of language "There are no bad words," said Carlin. "Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords."

Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin's favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence," and pointed out the social uses of euphemism: "When did toilet paper become 'bathroom tissue'? When did house trailers become 'mobile homes'?" He reminisced about his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all the taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be all-powerful, mused Carlin, since "everything he ever makes ... dies."

In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing bestselling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM, spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential series of "On Location" comedy concerts, Carlin was among its most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the network, the last just a few months ago.

Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-'70s that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in 1978, the start of heart problems that eventually killed him) and his career as well. "I really wasn't being as creative," Carlin admitted years later. "I lost years. I could have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind of like doing hurdles."

But in the early '80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore "observational" humor and an aphoristic style. Then, in the '90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material, railing against everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late 60s, Carlin could be as perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever: "I've been uplinked and downloaded. I've been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond..."

Carlin's material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for mass suicide and ecological disaster. "I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago," he said a couple of years ago. "Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don't think it's fixable."

But Carlin's career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the "observational" comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing — not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life — was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture. It has never left.

Richard Zoglin's book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.


Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1817192,00.html

6.12.2008

カタマリ

sounds like: "food, clothes, medicine" aesop rock

カタマリダマシイが大好きよ!

6.11.2008

css-distress

sounds like: "69/96 GIRL MEETS CASSETTE" Cornelius

i re-vamped my design with something self produced. however, in my CSS-tweaking travels, i seem to have created this large space between the top of the browser and the beginning of the content and i can't figure out how to fix it. i have a feeling it might be a blogger bug, but who knows... do you?

in other news... i've been watching movies lately:





6.10.2008

あついよ!

sounds like: "mr. bojangles" nina simone

right now it's 97 degrees.


6.04.2008

Yoshiz waKKKy zexperienzez

sounds like: "cotton handkerchief" ringo shiina

I'm not an avid erotic fan fiction enthusiast by any means. However, this one deserves recognition:

Yozhiz waKKKy zexperienzez

From The Mushroom Sex Kingdom

1 day wehn yozhi woz walkin down da ztreetz off muzhroom fagdome diz happend:
yozhi ztoppt n ztared @ the reznor zpinnin round on da plank.
"wtfz up?" he zaid
"nuffin" da reznor replied n gazed @ yozhiz boobz
yozhi notized dat da reznor woz gazin @ hiz boobz n zaid:
"u wanna tuch em?"
"omfg can i????" da reznor zaid n zmiled
"zure follo me hmoe n ill let u tuch em *wInK*"
zo da reznor followd yozhi home n he had a hard on all walk lol a rezno hardonn.....

wenn dey finlly reached yozhiz houze da reznor notized dat dere where more yhzhis their....
"woz goin on hea?" he azkt wile rubbin hiz peniz LOL
"ztfu!" yozhi zaid
"omg"
den da yozhiz jumpt reznor n tied him 2 toad......
"toad wtf r u doin hea???????????" reznor azkt
"yozhi zed i cud tuch hiz boobz zo i flowed him hea" cried toad wile rubbin hiz penizez
reznor gave toad a kizz n ztrated zukkin hiz peniz
"omfg ima cum" zed toad n cummed on reznor
"omg dat woz zo gr8" reznor zaid
denn da yozhiz raped dem..........4ever

the deviant subscriber

sounds like: "truest love" superdrag



I am now a deviant art member... which means... no ads, cooler gallery browsing and additional crap on my profile page. yay.

assassination nation

sounds like: "back seat dog" the pillows

‘Assassination’ Artist Is Questioned and Released
By Sewell Chan
The New York Times



This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level.

By 9:30 a.m., New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents had shut down the exhibition, and building workers had quickly covered over the inflammatory title with large sheets of brown paper and blue masking tape. The gallery is across the street from the southern entrance to The New York Times building.

The police officers declined to answer any questions, and at first would not permit reporters to speak with Mr. Arboleda, who was wearing a black T-shirt and making cellphone calls from inside the makeshift gallery.

Later, Mr. Arboleda, who is 27, said in an interview: “It’s art. It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media.” He added, “It’s about the media.”

Mr. Arboleda said the exhibition was to open on Thursday and run all day.

The interview was abruptly ended as Mr. Arboleda was led off to the Midtown South police precinct station for what he called an interrogation.

Reached by telephone this morning, Eric Joza, the building manager for the building at 264 West 40th Street, between Eighth and Seventh Avenues, said: “I had no idea what he was going to do. All I knew is that he was an artist and was going to use the store for two days: today and tomorrow.” There are offices above the storefront.

Mr. Joza would not identify the building’s owner, and he would not disclose the terms of the lease or the previous occupant of the storefront, beyond saying that the storefront had been vacant.

Mr. Arboleda has even set up elaborate Web sites, one for Mrs. Clinton and one for Mr. Obama.

Shortly after 11:30 a.m., Mr. Arboleda called reporters to let them know that he had been released.


more...

6.03.2008

CONFUSION

sounds like: "gin and juice" snoop doggy dogg

Inspired by SAKURAN: