“I Wanted to Control It…”
Saw this play out on last night’s episode of New York Noise and cannot get it out of my head. For some reason it’s added a glimmer of brightness to this gloomy Monday, even though the point of the song is that love gets away sometimes, no matter how hard you try to hold on…which is a bum out.
Fleeting love. Broken hearts. Quick! Travel the world with your other, before it’s too late.
Pic of the Week
I’m calling him Little Senior.
Had this colorful guy on my desktop for a while but figured he was in need of a proper tribute. Thanks to Amanda and Cleary for going to Spain and finding this tiny wonder.
Fun With Frank
Ze Frank is an innovative, interactive wizard. He created viral videos before the notion was ever commonplace, has won Webbys, spoken at TED and runs a constant dialog with a community of devoted online followers. Today his personal site gets millions of visitors and is filled with hundreds of games, flash toys, applications and multimedia projects.
One of my favorite recent finds is an app that allows you to draw a picture using your voice. You can hum, yell or whistle your way to an amazing masterpiece, or in my case, really pathetic doodle. Frank’s portrait creations are rather ambitious, as in…kind of impossible:
Here’s my first attempt, that’s totally a nose, right?
Instructions explain that lower volume curves the line counterclockwise, medium moves it straight and loud sounds turn it clockwise. While mentally for me that was hard to process while whistling like a spazz into my laptop microphone, perhaps it will help some. I still think my best creation came from accidentally leaving the app running while I watched tv:
“So abstract…so brilliant. I love it.”
And check out Frank’s site for more entertaining items.
Covered
I think everyone has a love/hate relationship with cover songs. There’s nothing worse than hearing your favorite track get butchered or remixed beyond recognition and in my opinion there are far more cringe-worthy attempts out there than success stories. Here are a few that beat the odds and got some repeat listens over the last few months.
Her Space Holiday – Wolf Parade’s I’ll Believe in Anything – The song Phoebe and I collectively listened to about a million times in 2007 gets some banjos and deep-thought intro/outros from child actors with husky voices…so weird but so good.
Lissy Trullie & Adam Green – Biz Markie’s Just a Friend – No tinkling piano or screaming rap giant here, and that’s clearly not a bad thing. Plus I think Lissy Trullie could sing the phonebook and make it sound poignant.
The Kooks – MGMT’s Kids – Simple, heartfelt acoustic guitars replace complex layers of synth and drums. Like apples and oranges, both are tasty for different reasons.
Awesome Jacket Backs
First in a new series. Spotted on my way to lunch near the corner of Spring and Broadway.
Has TLC Gone Too Far?
It recently dawned upon me that The Learning Channel is no longer the bastion of quality educational programming I once thought it was. Ok, I write that with more than a hint of sarcasm. But the Discovery/TLC partnership is definitely taking it to the next level in ‘reality’ terms, and I think I miss the more innocent days…
Days when my roommates and I would get lost in an early-morning Trading Spaces marathon, or chuckle at the hapless brides and grooms invariably throwing themselves into some ‘crazy’ Wedding Story scenario. Don’t even get me started on Baby Story. So I was both intrigued and a little disheartened the other day when, mid-way through a ‘Little People Big World’ family vacation episode was a promo for a new program called “Paralyzed and Pregnant.”
Really TLC?
Jesus, who will they spy on next? “The Girl Who Stopped Growing,” and “Born Without a Face” are also actual programs in a line-up clearly walking the fine line between entertainment and exploitation. Do viewers really come away ‘educated,’ or are they more likely to IM with friends the next day about the freakshow with no eyes or nose who is really 45 but has the voice of a 12-year old girl? I’m going to go with the freakshow commentary.
Ok, I’ll get off my high horse now and go back to watching a little person operate a backhoe.
The Peanut Butter Solution – aka – A Movie That Scars
There are certain movies you see as a child that leave indelible marks on your mind, usually because they manage to artfully scare you shitless while simultaneously tapping into some deep-seated, previously unrecognized childhood psychological terror.
For me the movies that best dredged up these fears tended to contain the following:
Witches who kidnap and kill children
Big metal cages (to keep kidnapped children in)
Dungeons/cellars (any dark setting below ground)
Demented toy makers who kidnap children
Escape-from-evil attempts gone horribly awry
Now the extra special movies were the ones that managed to take one of these fear/themes and really expand on it, take it to the next level of creepiness. One such movie is The Peanut Butter Solution. When casually mentioned in conversation, the only people who have ever known what I was talking about were my boyfriend (who apparently still owns his VHS copy), and recently a fellow coworker. Even my sisters, who were all definitely present for viewings, have no memory. Ahh, ignorance is truly bliss. Here is me attempting to describe the plot to the unknowing:
“Ok so there is this kid who’s hair won’t stop growing, and he gets kidnapped by this old man who straps him to a weaving loom or something…because the guy is making paintbrushes out of his hair, like harvesting the hair as it’s growing directly into this giant loom…and they’re special paintbrushes, they’re magical.”
Yeahhhhh. Nuts. So I finally decided after all these years to really ‘research’ the movie. Originally released in 1985, The Peanut Butter Solution is the story of a young boy Michael who wanders into a long abandoned, recently burned-down mansion and stumbles upon the ghosts of its homeless former inhabitants. Totally spooked, he passes out, sleeps through the night and wakes up the next morning completely bald – the result of his extreme fright. The hair doesn’t grow back, Michael becomes depressed, kids pull off the wig he tries to wear, etc, etc. Eventually one of the ghosts returns to tell Michael the secret to growing his hair back – it’s the peanut butter solution!
Here is young Michael applying the mixture. He doesn’t heed the ghost’s warning though, uses too much peanut butter and over the course of a day or two is transformed into Cousin It. Eventually Michael is suspended from school for becoming a class distraction:
What follows next is inexplicable and twisted, as the best/worst childhood film plots usually are. An art teacher at Michael’s school, “The Signor” – recently fired for being a TOTAL old man creep and not allowing children to use their imaginations – kidnaps Michael, along with fifty other children, dresses them all in pink scrubs and sets up what is essentially a giant paintbrush-making concentration camp, with Michael’s head as the source of the brush hairs. You see, Mike’s locks have become magical from the special powers of the mysterious peanut butter solution, and when placed on the end of a brush, they allow the holders to paint whatever is held in their imaginations. Whaaaa? Yeah, welcome to crazytown.
Here’s Michael, in an all-yogurt-diet-induced-perma-coma (I kid you not), with his head in the hair sorter.
The child slaves:
The mastermind:
Eventually Michael’s crackerjack older sister Suzy (a dead-ringer for Chunk from the Goonies) and friend Connie (who puts some of the solution on his private area in a botched attempt to grow pubes) crack the case and rescue Michael from a future of paintbrush manufacturing enslavement.
Genius. Scenes of the Signor and his freaky little child factory were by far the most disturbing (and lasting) images for me. There were coats made of hair and slave hammocks and who the heck knows what else. Bottom-line – creepfest.
In my YouTube search today I managed to find several versions of the original 1985 trailer. One is from Canada, where the movie was filmed and which actually hints at the film’s underlying disturbia. The other US version is all playful and family-friendly, which is no doubt why were allowed to watch it in the first place. Check them out for a walk down memory lane and a peek into my childhood nightmares.
Canadian Version – link only, those Canadians don’t like embedding I guess:
US Version:
Muppet Maker!
Rich sent me this link and brought so much joy to my afternoon. It’s FAO Schwarz’s Muppet Whatnot Workshop and for $90 you can get a custom-made muppet character delivered to your doorstep.
We both agreed the nose options leave something to be desired & ‘lady muppet’ hair options are sold out, but still…I was satisfied with my results.
Some Links for Looking
At my new job we LOVE to have a lot of meetings and pay personal visits to clients several times a week, so I feel like I’m always on the move. Today I managed to stay in my seat for the majority of the day, during which I got back some quality Internet trolling time. Thought I’d share what I’ve been looking at:
The Places We Know is a visually arresting, interactive site by photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen that explores four of worst slums in India, Kenya, Venezuela and Indonesia. Puts complaining in perspective.
Gregory Jacobs has a sick and twisted painting gallery up for perusing.
Travis Millard has some quirky zines, like The Little Things, along with lots of other random cool stuff up on his site, fudgefactorycomics.com.
“Stomp twice for Beyonce…”
Ahhhh, the Internet. So many wondrous hidden treasures just waiting to be dug-up and shared with others. Thanks to my friend Quirine I was introduced to the YouTube sensation and bedazzler extraordinaire Leslie Hall.
Apparently I’ve been living under a rock because this girl has been around for years, modeling her empire of handcrafted gem sweaters, getting featured in Vice and profiled in just about every online pub imaginable. So, if you’ve seen this, sorry it’s nothing new. If you haven’t just watch the video and take in the awkward magic.
