Logging into a Starbucks WiFi presented this ad of Oprah with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz talking about a “Business with Soul”. I know what they mean (probably “still liking humanity at the end of the shift” and “nourishing” used in a slightly retch-worthy way) , and I guess “soul” shouldn’t be such a culturally-laden word. But as a child of the 70s, to me this evokes Don Cornelius wishing viewers “Peace, love. and soul.” on Soul Train and an entire genre of music with deep feeling. And, to be honest, “Funk Soul Brother” by Fatboy Slim. It does not evoke Starbucks’ couture, maybe simply milieu, of various shades of brown and a single shade of green and the sense that the more imported something is the better.
I buy Kanye West albums and enjoy them. I have seen clips of the porno Kim Kardashian made with Ray J. Didn’t think we’d be mashing up Kanye music videos with the pneumatic Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, but here we are, United States of America.
The motorcycle has more personality than Kardashian. To give the video more depth, take it as a story about West loving his bike, but a woman keeps intruding AND RUINING IT:
What this video needs, what keeps it from being genius instead of studiously obnoxious, is a cut scene of Kardashian & West riding through the forest moon of Endor on the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. Imagine how awesome it would be to have Kim pressing her bubbies against West as they pass by Luke & Leia evading Storm Troopers! Play the song while watching the video below:
Since West’s Late Registration (2005), an album I’ve listened to a lot, I haven’t listened more than a few times to each album that followed. Since the media labeled him an egomaniac, and a lot of his songs afterward have been his ownership of being an egomaniac, the songs don’t stick with me as much. Meaning, as a fellow egomaniac, I hear Kanye West songs and the thoughts don’t seem to be that much different than my usual waking, self-aggrandizing thoughts. His music does not provide me a significantly different human experience. People go: “Wow, Kanye West is an over-the-top and daring asshole.” I go: “Uh, this is pretty much me strutting in the grocery store and glancing over magazine covers.”
I have never watched an episode of any of the Kardashian shows. I do see clips of them mocked on The Soup. Kim Kardashian seems vapid. I’m a little mystified by West & Kardashian as a couple. Like the rest of the world, I try contemplating them while NOT evoking West’s song “Gold digger”. I do have an admiration for Kardashian shaping her porn-driven notoriety into a huge industry over her toddling around in outfits while doing nothing at all of artistic or cultural consequence. She is a lucrative success with a longevity greater than Paris Hilton, who took the same path to less effect. West and Kardashian both have ambition, like the Macbeths, and impressive media savvy. Is that enough to sustain their relationship & parenthood? I won’t pay money for magazines or go beyond my usual trash culture grazing for updates. But when the zeitgeist membrane flicks along a milestone update, I will probably nod and go “Ah!”
As a palate-cleanser, here’s Seth Rogen and James Franco paying homage to Kanye & Kim in their video “Broken 3”:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) ran an ad in satirical news website The Onion. This ad is legit, but out of place, given Mormons are frequently criticized for not being “real” Christians.
It could be Mormons are marketing to demi-“ironic” hipsters (waving my hand at the screen) to lure them in. Like the paired Mormon missionairies patrolling outside shows of “The Book of Mormon” musical.
I loved, loved, LOVED TLC and eagerly watched the CORNY VH-1 docudrama “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story” that came out this year.
How corny is it? Within 60 seconds T-Boz and Left Eye get signed at LaFace Records, step out from the LaFace building and go to the phone booth where Left Eye calls her dad to share the good news. Left Eye immediately learns that her dad has been shot and killed. The next shot is Left Eye drinking her pain away from a brown paper bag. It starts at the 8:35 mark.
No, really, HOW CORNY IS IT? So corny that Pebbles is setup as the main villain. You know, Pebbles who had the hit with “Mercedes Boy”? She’s married to L.A. Reid, co-owner of LaFace Records and auditioned, formed, then signed TLC and proceeded to pretty much take all their money for the first tens of millions of albums and massive tours. That’s not the corniest part. The corniest part is when she nods in commiseration at T-Boz and Chilli at the funeral for Left Eye. All is forgiven!
The performances are good, the recreations of the videos are really impressive. And if you ever want to see Atlanta Falcons’ Andre Rison wear a HUGE white fur coat while picking up on Left Eye THIS IS YOUR TIME! Your dream = manifested!
This is the fifth and final year of Trek in the Park, an annual live re-enactment of an episode of the original Star Trek show put on by Atomic Arts. It started out small with a few people having a good time over a lark. It has become massive, moving from a cramped corner of a small park to a vaster space in a larger park, but STILL packing ’em in. Attendance is easily in the thousands now.
Panoramic shot of “The Trouble With Tribbles” in Portland’s Cathedral Park. (click for close-up)
The comedy climax, Kirk piled on with Tribbles. As on the original show,
throughout Kirk’s dialog he gets bonked by descending Tribbles.Vulcan ear sets aside an area for those wanting an easy view of the provided American Sign Language interpreters.
While there are wry laughs to be had, it’s a communal vibe with a great fondness for the material by both audience and crew. Over the last five years, the audience has palpable warmth toward the developing and ambitious Atomic Arts group.
Trek in the Park is worth checking out in clips on YouTube. It’s across the internet and has been featured in a Portlandia skit. At the end of this year, Adam Rosko (who plays Kirk and started Trek in the Park with his sister) said that Atomic Arts would be performing on its own original work. He emphasized the importance of ending things on a high note, and while they were still fun and within control. Atomic Arts has done that. Keeping eyes open for their next project will be worthwhile.
Diana Memorial Tartan, for sale at the United Kingdom land at Epcot in Walt Disney World, 2009.
The romance and swooning over the Windsor dynasty is disturbing. The family members have little to no merit given the amount of power they are born into. And almost to a person they seem miserable. Gross all the way around.
Was Lady Diana’s death a sad one? Sure. Did it warrant an entire hemisphere seemingly crippled with grief in 1997? No way.
Sympathies to her family and friends, but she was not a magical creature and I can’t recall any constructive thing she did other than take stands on issues like objecting to abandoned landmines blowing up children. Hardly daring stuff.
She was a crucial part of the big Royal Wedding industry that ramped up to her marriage to Prince Charles in the 1980s. Now we know Charles was in love with someone else at the time, Diana’s happiness was doomed (recall the “miserable” point made above).
Worst of all, as her family mourned and others projected their fantasies onto Diana’s blankness, Elton John reworked the lyrics to “Candle in the Wind” and made it WORSE than its original tribute to Marilyn Monroe. Sure, his longtime songwriting partner Bernie Taupin had a hand in it, but STILL. Is life better for anyone with words like “And your footsteps will always fall here
/ Along England’s greenest hills”? One imagines a gigantic Diana patrolling England, a colossal stomping wraith wandering a Emily Brontë heath.
The Robin Thicke song-of-the-summer “Blurred Lines” asked, with practiced super-produced fake-spontaneous laugh, “What rhymes with ‘hug me’?”. Let’s give it a whirl…
#Thicke. Get it? It’s a boast, and HIS NAME! Lol.
To start, here’s the clothed video to the song. I’ve linked to the “unrated” version in another post, but don’t want to shock people unfamiliar with the concept that we higher primates are attracted to attractive, naked members of our same species. The key lines at 1:33: “I feel so lucky. / You wanna hug me? / What rhymes with ‘hug me’? / Hey-ey-ey-ey.”
Going straight through the alphabet with single-letter replacements we get:
You wanna bug me. You wanna dug me. You wanna fug me. (“fug”, adjective, a stuffy or malodorous emanation) You wanna jug me. You wanna lug me. You wanna mug me. You wanna pug me. You wanna rug me. You wanna sug me. (“sug”, verb, to Sell Under the Guise of conducting market research) You wanna tug me. You wanna vug me. (“vug”, noun, a cavity in rock with mineral crystals) You wanna zug me. (“Zug”, noun, a German-speaking canton in Switzerland)
Some of these clearly won’t work and/or are bad grammar. Some work marvelously. Other possible choices, especially if sung at a quickened pace to stay within the measure:
You wanna chug-a-lug me. Bella Abzug and me. It’s ‘A Bug’s Life’ we’ll see. This tastes nougat-y.
I’ve got to go catch up on some recorded television, but your suggestions are heartily welcome here!
More ideas:
You wanna thug me. You wanna shrug me. Let’s do The Frug, G. You look like Pugsly. C’mon butt plug me. Butt butt butt butt me.
I rarely like albums on the first listen, but Fiona Apple’s “The Idler Wheel” is my favorite album from last year, and I liked it from the first.
I enjoyed her hit “Criminal”, but was bored by Jon Brion’s production style (foot on piano pedal for echo, pound and hold chord, repeat) and soon tuned her out. I also worried about her, getting a sense that by listening to her songs I was injuring her in some way.
After reading a review I got her album and listened to it on headphones during a long walk. Then listened to it again. An interview Apple gave on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast gave assurance that she was resilient and funny. She puts herself on her sleeve, and actually lets some of it get on you, or lets it fall to the floor with a laugh. But she has tenacity and creativity.
Her video for “Hot Knife” is directed by ex-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson, an excellent film director (“Boogie Nights”, “There Will Be Blood”) who also keeps knocking up Maya Rudolph. Respect.
I knew Alan Thicke’s kid was a singer. Hadn’t heard any song by him before (or at least connected any song with him). His photo would show up here and there, then his name. I’d think “Ah. Alan Thicke’s kid. Bet that’s a steep climb, or a career boost. Whatever. Looks like a dullard. Like an even-blander Enrique Iglesias.”
This week, I discovered the name of that song I’ve heard 300 times this summer (“Blurred Lines)”, and that it was Alan Thicke singing it. Great production. Not surprised Pharrell is involved. The video is causing a stir, due to the presence of naked female models (let’s all of us clothed primates gasp in horror). Even so, only Pharrell and T.I. come across like the only humans within worth hanging out with. Even better, though, is the parody video. Unfortunately, getting many of the jokes in the parody require seeing the original. Here you go [Not Safe For Work unless you work someplace awesome]:
The funnier, more personality-driven parody by Mod Carousel that swaps the genders:
Bet the group in the parody video had more fun than the pretend-fun in the first video.
The ads that come up on a web browser after logging off from Facebook are reliably off-target. And what, in my profile, is triggering these ads and for “Christian Singles”? While I’m sure these “single” women/models/sample profiles are all wonderful human beings within, seeing a mosaic like this feels like I’ve had too much frosting with a saccharine aftertaste AND a sugar headache. With an oily residue. I’m sure it’s not them, it’s me, but STILL.
