Tomorrow afternoon I get to head over to Warner Bros. in Burbank and check out the new Speed Racer pic. They usually make us sign a shhhhhh form or ask that we not give away too much of the plot but I figure it’s my duty to let you know whether its good or not. I know the hopes on it being good are pretty low compared to Iron Man. A lot of people have already said it’s going to be a flop and it isn’t even out yet. So check back tomorrow night or probably friday and see.
Also, there will be some contests coming up soon where you can win CDs, Lightey Discoball things and T-Shirts soon. So pay attention! I mean look at us lately, posting all regular and shit. C’mon!
Dr. Albert Hoffman, a Swiss scientist best known for synthesizing LSD, died yesterday at the age of 102.
He first discovered the effects after accidentally ingesting some of the drug through his fingertips, and argued for decades that it could be an effective treatment of mental illness.
Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul” and was frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that pushed it underground. “It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,” he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed.
Here’s a great article about him, written a couple years ago, about his feeligns over what he affectionately called his “problem child”. Thats cute. Acid is like a snot-nosed kid who gets bad grades.
How is it that I’ve been in Los Angeles for more than a year and have never been to the Vista Theater, I must have passed it a thousand times? The Vista in Los Feliz is a lovely place that normally shows some pretty good movies bordering on indie and/or typically the most watchable thing that you’d find in the Arclight down the street. The exterior resembles a Spanish mission with the interior more along the lines of Cleopatra’s bedroom. (inside joke: Joan in the north and Cleo in the south.)
So to fill this movie theater with concert-going patrons, a few of the rows of seats were removed and replaced with folding chairs. I guess that spaceland promotions figured that 2 rows of folding chairs could fit into 1 row of theater seats. This would have been all well and good if it didn’t mean that a certain percentage of said concert-going patrons wouldn’t be stuck in the seats right behind renegade rows of the aforementioned folding chairs. Needless to say, some of us instantly became very close friends with the strangers sitting next to us. (My neighbor was Anthony) The folding chairs were also at least an inch and a half taller, drag for me.
Obstructions and obstacles aside, The show was quite pleasant, very cute, but musically a bit under par. The venue’s sound seemed poorly mixed and hard to control. Neither those in charge of lighting nor live sound had much to work with as all of the sound came from a pair of speaker stacks on each side of the stage at the front of the house. The makeshift stage didn’t so much elevate the band as turn them into pinball machine bumpers for the PA and stage sound.
The openers Lavender Diamond bantered nicely with the crowd and were a complementary warm-up for She & Him; but the songs were far too simple to warrant the 6+ minutes that they seemed to drag on. Zooey joined the band for a song, but like I said lasted waaay too long.
To get it out of the way Zooey Deschanel is adorable. Quite literally one of the most beautiful people to walk the earth. M. Ward is nearly equally fantastic. But the show was very ok to pretty good in the grand scheme of things. It had some nicer moments, like the vocal breakdown in “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” and of course their beautiful cover of Smokey’s “You Really Gotta Hold On Me” but really, how could you fuck that up? Still the show fell very short in comparison to either the previous time i’d seen M.Ward perform or the maybe 2 dozen female fronted bands/singer-songwriters I saw last year working in the same style. The band seemed very loose. But to their defense the problem was probably that they couldn’t hear each other because of the room’s acoustics; which seemed to pit the bass and drums against each other in Mortal Kombat. Rough spots showed through especially in an uncomfortably hurried version of “I Was Made For You” which left Zooey stumbling on what should have been a very strong melody.
To toot my Nebraska horn I recognized the bassist as Stefanie Drootin from Tim Kasher’s Cursive side-project The Good Life. To my own credit, i knew who the bassist would be before she even took the stage when I saw Ward sound-checking her instrument. I’m that good.
Ultimately I feel a show like She & Him would have translated much better at a smaller venue such as Spaceland. That also would have spared me the pain of dishing out 8 bucks for a tiny whiskey drink. I know it’s L.A. but give me a break! I honestly didn’t think that the act as a whole had the confidence to pull of a show of that size, perhaps after a run of smaller shows they will be a much better live act. Not many bands in L.A. have paid their dues and on occasions like this, it shows. I don’t recommend paying $25 to see anything at the Vista, either.
I’m totally sickened that I’m even writing about this. Then again, I am pretty sick. And quite frankly, after the VaginaCam post, I needed a bit of fluff. Oooh, Miley Cyrus and her jailbait-y goodness! Her poor parents, they seem to be rivaling the Lohans in the “selling out our kids at the risk of their dignity/sanity for a buck” contest. Actually, I don’t think said picture is really worth all the controversy.
Now, the risque ones she took of her and her friends that have been popping up on the internet left and right-those are naughty. In all fairness, what 15 year old girl didn’t take naughty pics with her friends? (or was that just me?) But then again, I wasn’t Disney’s cash cow at the time.
Many people in the public eye felt the need to weigh in on the situation-Bill O’Reilly, Ellen, the ladies from The View…I didn’t give a shit until Stephen Colbert said his piece on it. Oh Stephen Colbert, never again will you win a gem of a role like the closeted history teacher on Strangers With Candy. I miss that show. Best after-school special ever. Anywhoo, this pretty much sums up how I feel about it:
The cliffsnote’s version of Colbert’s viewpoint: Who gives a shit? Am I right? I guess it’s a little hypocritical that I am writing about it, a fault of mine, I admit it. But the poor girl, being a teenager is hard enough without the media scrutinizing every move you make, innocent or otherwise. Oh wait, she’s worth a billion dollars, therefore I am physically unable to have sympathy for her.
Oh yeah, here you go, sickos. You know you want to.
I admit it, I enjoy porn. I don’t buy it, I don’t rent it, I don’t keep a stash of it, but I watch it. I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff. Mostly because one of my former roommates (you know who you are) used to ask us, “Hey wanna see something fucked up…” And whether we wanted to or not, our curiosity would get the better of us and we would watch. And what would usually follow would indeed be very fucked up depending on how JAPANESE or GERMAN it was. The kind of thing that you wish you could CNTL + Z and UNDO out of your brain. What is it about the axis powers anyway that makes their porn so crazy now? Is it maybe that after seeing the Holocaust and Atomic Bombs that everything else is completely tame and harmless in comparison? Well it seems that it has taken the British to trump them both with THIS EXCERPT from “A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century Sex” where apparently when thinking outside of the box they did the opposite. I warn you now, THIS VIDEO is Very Educational and VERY NSFW.
Its sad that using these words is going to spike my daily visitors. I’ll throw in another one for good measure, Bukakke. Good luck erasing this from your brain, suckers.
The dude who runs pixeloo says untooned but I guess being around music forever makes me think that someone saying untuned is just trying to say detuned. So the 3rd in his series after Mario and Homer is Jessica Rabbit. I already know 2 girls in L.A. who, minus the disproportionately large tits, look exactly like Jessica Rabbit. I think he should have done a full body shot in this case. The people commenting on his site seem to think that Stewie from Family Guy is his next victim. I think he should do something a bit more expressive, like someone evil.
And perhaps a bit more interesting is watching him do it. Can you imagine having to work on photoshop like that everyday for like 10 hours? Man that would be hell…oh wait.
I’ve been in Los Angeles for 1 year, 2 months, 12 days and 5 hours now and I have a very small group of friends to show for my time here. I have come to the conclusion that I must be a total asshole with absolutely no social skills whatsoever otherwise I’d actually be doing something at 11pm on a Friday night. Its not that I didn’t have plans. Someone asked me if I wanted to meet them at a bar. Knowing that people flake like mad around here I made backup plans to meet someone else at the same bar JUST IN CASE person #1 flaked.
I understand that sometimes it can’t be avoided. Sometimes you get REALLY tired or something, it was hot as hell today so if you were outside you are probably destroyed right now. I did some balcony gardening and had to put shoes on because my feet were melting. So I could see calling in flake for that… sometimes. I can also see that if you’ve been in traffic all day (which is like slow moving prison) that you don’t want to drive around and things are really spread out around here (20 minutes to everywhere my ass!) so I can see not wanting to drive… but even the distance flake has its limits… like the fact that I ALWAYS HAVE TO DRIVE.
Well I’m sick of it. I must have no friends at all. Usually I drive and never complain about doing so. Then when it comes to going out and I ask if people want to carpool… they don’t. Awesome, not only are people being assholes to me we can fuck up the environment together! I feel special.
I had a nice Lazy Saturday or Caturday (because I get to be as lazy as Zero). I watched movies [Wristcutters: A Love Story(2006) EuroTrip(2004) and Cutie Honey(2004)] and still managed to make eggs for breakfast, clean up my apartment, repot a plant, do the dishes, wash the cat, make cheesy broccoli and cod for dinner and play guitar all day. So it was all good and productive and I expected a nice night out… that i very much need and deserve considering I WORKED ALL THE WAY THROUGH LAST WEEKEND. But sure enough I started getting messages saying… “Sorry we tired, another time”, no problem I thought, Thats why I made a backup plan yesterday, so I texted my backup and… “Sorry, take a rain check?” Well, I thought this was the raincheck. Seems it never rains in southern California.
I propose a limitation on flaking. You get 2 per month. Seriously, is there no standard anymore? I have a DRASTIC problem with trusting in what others say or KEEPING plans. I don’t claim to NEVER flake but I do claim A VERY LOW FLAKE RATIO. Maybe its just because I have nothing better to do…see no friends.
Everytime I go out, I have a great time. I drink (surprisingly in moderation lately), I dance, I make merriment. So its pretty hard to make friends when I never make it out of the apartment. The double edge of Hollywood is that there are so many people here, so much to do; yet almost everyone you meet is a total flake. (Looking out for #1 much?)
If you plan on moving out here, don’t stay somewhere trustworthy like the midwest for too long. You’ll only be disappointed in the flakedness of others.
I haven’t been posting all that much lately because I’ve been really busy at work. Lame I know. We worked through last weekend and I nearly went crazy on Monday but we finished the 2nd round of Comps (Different proposed versions of the artwork used for COMParison) for the complete boxed set of HBO’s Amazing Series The Wire.
At the beginning of this week it felt as if I was going stir-crazy from work; time had slowed to a crawl and each moment was complete agony. I just wanted a big womb to crawl into and sleep for a week. But I trudged through and we finished it and sent it off to New York last night so we’ll hear back next week sometime on who’s comp they are going with. But mine fucking rules. We also sent in comps for a movie produced by Tyrannasaurus Banks called The Clique. Its about vapid, conniving, spoiled rich tweenage lobotomies on the east coast who get anything they want. Its almost exactly like Heathers and Mean Girls… but its 15-17 year old melodrama for 13 year olds. Kinda weird how we can go from designing for THE ABSOLUTE BEST POLICE DRAMA EVER to total fluff.
Speaking of fluff, we have been doing a lot of work for a gay network. At first we were only designing their ads but another company we do work for bought a bunch of their movies to distribute (its a gaynopoly I tell ya) now we are designing their key art (the original artwork for posters and dvd covers) for something like 10 films. All of the movies are like PG-13 gay. Whats the point? It might as well be straight if you aren’t swinging wieners around. All thats left of these movies are ridiculous plots, bad acting and obviously very tiny budgets. I think they should just start making porn. The movie I had to screen today “starred” Tracey Gold from Growing Pains and a hot straight girl who played a lesbian on The L Word (and she was in Jason Goes to Hell I think). The plot was ludicrous and involved a boy genius who predicts sunspots that will wipe out technology and break down life as we know it… and his hot lesbian strip club bouncer mom. And Tracey Gold kisses a girl at the end, a slight peck, no tongue, less than a second. It was so not gay that it was gay. The biggest plot hole was how a single parent who worked at a strip club could afford a brand new Ford Explorer and own her own home in Los Angeles. And a full sized train passing Hollywood and Highland and crashing into Union Station. Sunspots. The last one we worked on was actually worse. It was based on an Edgar Allan Poe story (none that I’d ever heard of though), it was about a house that was alive and claimed buff manservants in order to stay in one piece. And of course it only had man-kissing, sensuous rubbing nowhere erogenous and the dudes would undo their pants and leave their wangs in… but they’d pull down the back of their underwear! Are there really dudes out there getting hot to this stuff? Being queer must give you an amazing imagination! It must be like drinking a bottle of cough syrup or something. No wonder all of those trannies on Santa Monica Blvd look like they are having such a good time.
Technology, man. It must be the future. Here’s a nintendo shunk down to the size of a NES cartridge. Click the image for the google translation. Those crazy French-Japanese.
Hippie New Year everybody. I missed 4:20 today. Cause I was working… on a Sunday. I’m in California, it should be a state holiday. This makes weed nun very unhappy.
Here is a link to a previous Weekly Trashing about Pot. I’ll spoil it for you. It should be legal.
It’s coming soon. I can feel it. I’ve noticed more and more that I’m no longer fucking broke. I have debt, sure, but I’m starting to turn into an adult that can go out and buy shit to better my surroundings. I’ve asked myself “what home furnishings and home accessories should I buy?” And god has answered my prayers with one gentle word: KNIVES!!!
God started small by saying, “Hey, how about you have some knives in the kitchen… and how about they be going through a little guy?” That’s when I asked God if he’d ever considered seeing a therapist. To which God replied, “Thats not covered by my health insurance.” “What is?” I responded. And we both chuckled. Then the almighty said unto me, “You know what? I was just fucking around about the little guy with the knives through him idea. Maybe we should just stab a bunch of knives into the wall and hang our coats on them?” To which I replied, “God, I love you.” And God curled up into my lap and started purring (cause he’s really a cat).
Then just because he likes being the guy who names things before people can invent them so he can claim that he had the idea first, God went kinda crazy and just started naming off shit around the house that could be made of knives, (Guy holding a Knife Outline Shadow Shower Curtain*, Knife 3-panel folding Room Divider, Knife Christmas Wreath, Knives for legs Coffee Table, Knife Mirror [drew up about 4 of these], Knife Bookshelf…) I kinda lost interest because it was Wednesday and South Park was on. Then it ended up not being a very good episode cause it kinda feels like the middle of the season so I watched an old one and it was a little better. Then there was a bunch of honking and bad driving outside because there was a show at the Hollywood Bowl a couple blocks away. I found out all of those bad, rude, loud drivers went to see Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige. There are too many J’s in the world. Then God told me about the Earthquake in April of 2009 and I said, “Wait, that hasn’t happened yet!” and he said, “Oh yeah, well nevermind, don’t worry about it, forget I said anything” And my attention span is short, so I did.
*I unfortunately found out this exists but compared to what I had in my head is WAAAAY poorly designed so I’m not even going to link it. and JUST SO YOU KNOW, I did sketches of about everything I mentioned and almost all of which can actually be made with a few quick welds and screws.
If Erotic Falconry didn’t get you sweaty enough. Here is some Erotic Dentistry. So sexy it eliminates 99.9% of the germs that cause the gum disease gingivitis. I’m totally switching back to Aquafresh.
Take 7 minutes out of your day and watch this adorable shit.
There’s no pride in the world like watching your 4-year old drop in like a big boy. That’s it-my kids are gonna have a guitar in one hand and a skateboard in the other. Straight outta the womb. Screw that. They can use my uterus as a half pipe.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what kind of parent I might be. Kinda weird, but my brother Jason just had his 4th, and my brother T.C. is about to have his 1st, so yeah, it’s on my mind a little more than usual. But that’s all, I have no clock ticking in my head or my fallopian tubes or anything. For a long time, I didn’t think I wanted kids. Now I think I only do in that vain “I wanna see a little version of myself running around someday” type of way.
I myself was kinda force-fed a lot of extracurricular activities starting in grade school. It could be pretty awful at times, but I also think I’m kinda better off for it. So I don’t know what kind of parent I’d be. Mine did a pretty good job, but then again, they had like 8 chances to practice getting it right before they got around to me. I’m actually pretty lucky that I have my parents to use as an example, a lot of people I know have at least one parent who are an example of how NOT to parent.
So here’s what I want in life:
-I want people to have to complete and pass an IQ test before being allowed to breed. (That kid is BACK on the escalator!)
-I want to be the ‘cool mom’, the one that all the neighborhood kids like and treat more like a friend than a parent, the one that some of the other parents are maybe a little freaked out by.
