Of course, the Thriller dance (which starts at 8:30 on this video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyJbIOZjS8
Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” hand gestures (the good bit starts at 1:38):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq–Nw
OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI
And Beyonce’s “Single Ladies – Put A Ring On It”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g
But first, I saw They Might Be Giants again! I wasn’t planning to, but they were playing near my home (Tarrytown Music Hall) and it was only $28.00 for the ticket, so I thought “wot the ‘ell” and went. B. told me they had rewritten “The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas” and sho’ nuff, TMBG performed the new version. Turns out they got all the facts for the song (song lyrics here) from one of those 1950s Golden Books everyone had as a kid. And, it also turns out, that in the 1950s, the scientists were wrong about a lot of their sun information. So the new song is sung as “The Sun Is A Miasma Of Incandescent Plasma”. I still like the original better, so even though the information is outdated and incorrect, I will continue to sing it and I hope TMBG will too. At least they have other informative songs, like “The Mesopotamians” and “Mammal” (where I learned the term ‘monotreme’ – Go Echidna!).
Yep, saw the Star Trek movie. In the IMAX, no less. And it was explosionalistical to the max. I was concerned when I went to go see it, because I am not a Star Trek fan of any kind. I know very basic rudimentary information on the show, and here is the length and breadth of it.
James T. Kirk is Captain of the Enterprise.
He’s got a doctor on board named Bones who says, “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a (something)!”
Kirk also has a guy on board named Scottie who’s an engineer or something, and says, “I’m givin’ it all she’s got!” in a heavy Scottish accent.
There’s a nice black lady named Uhura who Kirk kissed and it was the first interracial kiss on TV, I think.
Them there’s Spock, who’s a Vulcan and doesn’t have emotions and has pointy ears.
Also, tribbles.
Aaaaand that’s it. So when I went to go see the movie, I was justifiably wary. I think I caught all of it. Here are some things of note:
– Anybody else think the Romulan ship looks like a Bloomin’ Onion as interpreted by Geiger?
– Speaking of Romulans and They Might Be Giants, the actors playing Romulans has prosthetic foreheads on their real heads. Which caused me to sing the chunk of the song ‘We Want A Rock” by TMBG (Lyrics: Throw the crib door wide / Let the people crawl inside / Someone in this town / Is trying to burn the playhouse down / They want to stop the ones who want / Prosthetic foreheads on their heads / But everybody wants prosthetic / Foreheads on their real heads). See, I never got that song. Obviously it’s about Romulans coming and destroying your planet. I understand now.
– Kirk makes out with a chick who’s completely normal-looking, except she’s painted bright green from head to toe. COME ON. Really. She looks exactly like Elphaba in the musical Wicked. There’s no reason for her to look like that, it’s distracting and stupid. She could have at least had funky scales, like Mystique in X-Men.
– Uhura and Spock are clearly gettin’ jiggy with it, which doesn’t make sense for two reasons. One, why would you want to have intimate relations with someone who doesn’t really express emotions? And two, isn’t Kirk supposed to be romantically involved with Uhura?
– I LOVE that Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) played Scottie. Have you seen Shaun of the Dead? The first half is absolutely fabulous. So, yay, Simon Pegg.
That’s all I can think of. I don’t really get the whole Star Trek obsession, but it was a nice film that had lots of neat-o special effects, and that’s pretty much what I was looking for.
I was just doing work for, you know, work, and I had to find a map of the world that shows the continents clearly. So I typed in “world map” into Google and found what I was looking for (thank you Google). I also found this map from 450 B.C. of the world according to Herodotus.
This isn’t a regional map, people. This is the WHOLE WORLD. Look at Europe. It’s just a sort of, “Yeah, Europe, it’s *vague hand gesture* up there… somewhere.” It totally reminded me of that famous New Yorker cover of how New Yorkers see the world.
So, from 450 B.C. to 2009 A.D. = nothing has changed.
The title there pretty much describes it. The long story is that here at Publicis, there are window display units where worker bees can show off their talents and skills and one display space came up and I had the opportunity to fill it with my shtuff. The CCO has to approve all the content first, because, you know, you can’t have pieces that has a woman bending over showing you her goodies while simultaneously giving you the finger and killing a raccoon with a hatchet and a word bubble comes out of her mouth saying something about how advertising is the work of the devil or something like that. It has to be nice art. We’re not trying to rile people up as they walk to and from the copier. Luckily, all my work classifies as nice art, nothing upsetting or vulgar, so that worked out well for me. But the CCO said he liked my soda can mirror I made a few years back and he would like me to display that. Here’s a pic:
Unfortunately, it’s too big for the display space, but when the CCO says he likes something, you best produce that thing or something very close to it. So I had about a week and a half to make another one, which I did (clap clap clap for me). One this one I decided to go with one color family and focus more on the pattern. So I bought a case of Fresca cans (they have a nice pattern, go look at one one day and you’ll see) and made a pattern loosely based on an ornate faux-rococco frame I saw online. I hammered all the little bits of tin onto plywood, added a mirror, and poof! A mirror is born.
Now my bedroom is covered with little bits of sharp tin can, which is awful, and if I didn’t walk around barefoot all the time and have good callouses on my feet, would also be very painful. But the CCO came down from his pretty swanktastical office and saw the display and said he liked it, so it was all worth it.
I work in the costume jewelry district of New York, so on my way to work I pass a great deal of very large, very sparkly jewelry. I’ve grown quite accustomed to seeing a variety of stuff, but the other day I saw some pieces in a window that stopped me short. They were just SO big and SO sparkly… I mean, who buys this stuff? And wears it? And where is this place of the wearing of the mega-garish jewelry? It’s certainly nowhere I’ve ever been, and I’ve been to a variety of weird places, trust me.
This are some big honkin’ chunks of vividly colored crystal. Yep.
I finished the dung beetle and affixed it to the baobab surface, and voila! An ode to my trip to Africa. Now, I realize the dung beetle looks like he’s balancing on a meatball, but I figured I would leave a majority of the grassy bits and twiggy bits and seedy bits out of ball o’ dung. I figured most of my audience could figure it out.
I think it turned out pretty good. I especially like the beetle. I love drawing insects, I really do. Remember B.’s moth?
And my various other insect pieces in my portfolio… yeah, I definitely love the exoskeleton-ed.
I saw a program on Ed Gein last night, and they said aside from the killing and various other creepy things, Ed kept a box of severed noses in a box under his bed. (I immediately wondered if they smelled bad. HA! Get it? Because they’re noses! But I digress.) The part that intrigued me was that, after deliberation, a jury found him legally insane. Well, I would hope so. He pretty much sounds like the definition of insane. The Green River Killer, he just sounds grumpy next to Ed Gein. What did the jury deliberate about? Is there a number of noses that need to be in the box to qualify for legal insanity? Because I wouldn’t have to think about that choice for more than two, maybe three seconds.
My parents are on a theater kick right now, and I am more than happy to join them periodically. In the last two weeks, I saw Accent on Youth with David Hyde Pierce (not so great, bummer, still love DHP) and Impressionism with Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen (good play, amazing set design/lighting/music, go see it), and Wicked (seen it before, LOVED it, saw it again, loved it again) and at the end of the month I’m seeing Waiting for Godot with Nathan Lane, John Goodman and Bill Irwin. I had to write a paper on Waiting for Godot in college and I came to the important realization that I don’t like existential theater. Not even a little. Not even if it is known as “the most important English-speaking play of the twentieth-century.” But I’m always hoping that I’ll grow as a person and I’ll get the point of the show this time. Ironically, I recently saw a version from Sesame Street’s Monsterpiece Theater that pretty much summed my feelings about Waiting for Godot.
I was watching Best Week Ever a while back, and they had a clip of the “sing country songs” American Idol episode, where FallOutBoy Wannabe slash Unknown Sexual Orientation Guy sang “Ring of Fire”, but he sang it with an Indian twist. I’m sorry to say this, but it was kind of awesome. So I looked it up on YouTube, and indeedy, it is pretty cool, especially for Merkin Idol, which is not exactly cutting-edge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-NULFMky4s
And to keep my hard-earned street cred, here is a Ukrainian band covering “Hot ‘n’ Cold” by Katy Perry. With an accordion.
Sorry for the “not writing” thing. Nellie (my co-worker, it’s just the two of us in this department) went on vacation this week and everyone at work wanted a presentation or a book or a handout RIGHT NOW OMG CRAZYPANTS. So I’ve been running around with a watering can putting out fires. In the design sense. But on Friday night I got to see Cricket’s sister Mishi do her swingin’ thing with the trapeze. Mishi has been taking a class on the West Side Highway at The Trapeze School and you know how dance schools have their end-of-year recital? Well, the trapeze school does the same thing. It was free and she invited me, so I went. And it was so worth it. It’s in a big tent and one sits on mats on the floor. Then all the classes (who have dressed up in costumes, this recital’s theme was “Peter Pan,” so lots of pirates and fairies) take turns climbing the palpitation-inducing ladder and do a few swing-and-catch stuff while topic-related (in this case, “Peter Pan”) music plays in the background. It was great. The audience would cheer for everyone, even if they didn’t know them. You started rooting for complete strangers, so strong was the comraderie. Here’s some footage of Mishi practicing, so you can get an idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSnQ9GcYwi8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn8PfjFgOmg
This weekend I also had a chance to work on a little painting of a baobab with a dung beetle. I was hoping to share it when it was finished, but it’s taking longer than expected (it’s HARD to draw a dung beetle, I’m on my fourth attempt), so I’m going to show it to you in bits. First, the baobab:
The colors aren’t that vivid and saturated, my scanner scans that way. And here is the dung beetle in its incompleteness:
I’m going to glue the dung beetle half on the baobab and half on the dirt below the baobab. I’m thinking of moving the dung ball up and underneath the dung beetle so the whole drawing is more compact. Dung beetles back way up on their dung balls anyway, and right now this looks too much like an Egyptian scarab necklace. But this gives you an idea of where I’m heading.
Hooray and yay! New York has utter dogcrap winters, so when spring comes it truly is a delight. And the plants are a-blooming. I walked past Bryant Park (my favorite park in Manhattan) and saw these incredible tulips. Not just regular tulips, but big lush tulips with vague sunset hues. And there were tons of them all over the place. It soothes the soul, I tells ya.
However, I did notice something interesting. I happened to glance at the public bathroom on the rim of the park and noticed that there’s a pattern of animal skulls and ornate Grecian swastika-type designs.
That is fabulous. How did I not notice this before? And why aren’t goths and neo-Nazis and Georgia O’Keefe fans hanging around there? I totally would. It’s like a mausoleum… for bodily waste. AWESOME. This became one of my favorite New York buildings.