Anything to own one of Ms Bifano’s prints!
Holy poop! I’m almost at 10,000 followers, so to celebrate I want to give away some nice lil’ 8 x 10 prints!
My 10,000th follower will get three prints of their choice, and one print each will go to three randomly chosen people who reblog this post.
I’ll email the winners as soon as I hit 10,000!
Yea! Prints!
10 plays
Song I made years ago. Has words but I can’t sing, so no. Re-recorded and reinterpreted it. Garageband hiccups gave it a lot of interesting immediacy, since every time I closed it, all the tracks disappeared. If I were being pretentious, I’d do it in mono and say something about Phil Spectre, but in truth I want to make the guitars floatier.
I was absolutely fascinated the other day, when I was watching Sesame Street with my godson, and it occurred to me that they’re very free with the use of the word ‘monster’. Now, words are meant to be used in a number of different ways, and the crazier you get the more refreshing - provided you possess the mastery. Is there wrong usage of words? I believe yes, but clever breaking of rules is always great. Words are, at the end of the day, vessels or clouds of meaning. Associations vary with everyone’s personal experiences and what they’ve been taught. There are so many things going on in one’s brain when one reads or listens. So much data is accessed and processed in the background.
Let’s say my godson grows up on Sesame Street, and the edge of the word ‘monster’ is taken off for him. Maybe monster means anything that’s not humanoid or something that defies the biological norm. My godson might then also take in stride that just because something doesn’t fit the norm, it doesn’t necessarily have to have negative connotations attached to it. Maybe he might create parallels with this positive monster concept for anything he can’t understand at a first glance. I can’t help but see this as a wonderful thing.
As a student of myth, I can’t help but think about Marina Warner. She takes the example of the monstrous female archetypes in… well, pretty much everything. Myth is the vapour of human minds simmering in the sun throughout history. The monstrous female appears everywhere, an inversion of all that male-dominated families consider safe. The monstrous female is sexual liberated, unbound by convention and tradition, and rejects the maternal role. As an element of myth for centuries, this archetype is pretty firmly cemented in our minds.
Warner talks of personalities like Madonna as examples of those who fight this trend. Madonna embraced sexuality, touted it, and gave the same middle finger to convention. All right, so she might have lost her way at some point by giving into sensationalism, but that’s not the point. The point is that she wore all that had been considered negative like a badge, and she made it cool, changing the way people perceived it. Madonna (along with many others) was messing around with myth.
Is Sesame Street doing the same thing on a subtler level, though? I think it has the potential to do this. I’ve heard it being criticised for labelling things, putting ideas and concepts in boxes (words), impressing rigid negative connotations on children. The major example is Oscar the Grouch. He’s a grouch. It’s part of his name. So he has to be a grouch, right? By labelling him, they’ve done all sorts of things to how he sees himself, not to mention how others see him.
But this monster business - I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s an example of how altering myth can eventually change our outlook and the way we deal with concepts hardwired into us.
That said, what do I now use to talk about something that is monstrous?
See around 1:36 (‘monster you could be’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGohKgNOXnU
Look at how unassumingly Feist says the word:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ9WiuJPnNA&feature=relmfu
This is more just because I’m sad REM broke up:
Now that Lilith, she was hot stuff. She had her own philosophy, her own thing. When Adam bumbled her way she rode him like a horse. She had opinions. She had career goals.
So they got rid of her and made a sap out of her boyfriend’s ribs.
‘Oh, this girl,’ they said, ‘she’s not got the right stuff. She isn’t marriage material.’
And look what happened.
Mr Rice gazed at her. He was a heavy lumbering man, with so flat a face that it seemed to have been created by some sculptor who, experimenting in the art of low relief could go without disappearing altogether. Thousands of years of ice and blizzard, of scorching suns and withering sandstorms could not have reduced a marble face to anything like so featureless a thing as he had achieved by the simple means of being Mr Rice. His was the family face, and the rumour that he had had it trodden on by an elephant when young was quite untrue. All the Rices were the same. They had no profiles.
In this whirlwind of death and despair all we can really do is hold onto the little good things that are flung our way before we’re flung apart again.
Cartoonist draws a political strip criticizing the Syrian government.
Syrian government sends goons to snatch him out of his car, beat him and break his hands, set his beard on fire, put a bag over his head and dump his body in the street.
Cartoonist replies to said thugs with the above image.
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/08/26/ali-ferzat-syria-cartoonist-hands-broken/
rad dude alert
Most hardcore artist. EVER. Seriously, this guy is the tits.
What a BEAST!
(Source: pennicandies)
Youtube is great. It gives me great musical tangents to follow, rabbit hole style. Sleepless, happy, depressed, and generally fucked up, I remembered my chiptunes love Bit Shifter. Here’s how it went:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f44V2Hsy2ls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySU84st6irY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLdkuhxgd4o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r3papyrStY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJuWpS9RIz4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8IIl9B1vsI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFnIuLO9oA
The last one was so epic (a word I’ve come to hate but is nonetheless appropriate here) that I had to stop there.
It’s a bit nasty, waking up disoriented at 2am. That sort of shit does happen when you’ve stayed up for two nights, though. Also, getting doped on cetrizine doesn’t help.
It’s awfully quiet. There’s no one around. I don’t feel like calling anyone up at this hour. There is a horrible blankness to 2am. There are so many damned songs about this hour.
Charlie Brown’s tonic for my soul. I don’t have the books. The cartoon’s wonderful soundtrack makes up for the read-from-the-page delivery. It hits the right notes I want: sombre, melancholy, getting increasingly absurd.
Man, that kid has it rough.
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inspired by the work of SAUL BASS, ART GOODMAN and DAVE NAGATA.
hitchcock typeface by MATT TERICH. tumblr theme by MATTHEW BUCHANAN.
