Holy shitballs. New Yorkers, you lucky ducks, you get to have ALL the retro-badass fun! Via East Village Radio:
Kraftwerk –one of the most important groups in electronic music’s relatively short history– will be the focus of a retrospective taking place in April at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the New York Times reports. The band, featuring lone founding member Ralf Hütter, will be present and performing as part of the celebration named Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Starting April 10th [...] Kraftwerk will perform over eight consecutive nights, with each evening dedicated to one of the pioneering group’s albums in chronological order, starting with 1974’s Autobahn.
The concerts will be held MoMA’s (appropriately retrofuturetastic) Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Tickets go on sale at noon, February 22nd, $25 a pop. (Zounds, they’re gonna go fast!)
Can’t you folks create any campaigns that don’t hinge on some form of insipid, othering, sexist objectification? It shouldn’t be that difficult, considering your stated aims. Here’s an idea: rather than euthanizing a vast majority of your rescues, how about hiring ‘em to come up with some new marketing and promotional material for ya? Argh… I’m halfway serious. It’s entirely possible that a golden retriever could provide something more palatable than the dehumanizing dreck you keep churning out like, well, sausage.
Seattle Stranger commenter CrankyBacon puts it well: “This isn’t a sex-positive vs. prude situation. Women can be engaged in policy issues, make coherent arguments, be persuasive, protest, etc. They have more to offer than standing naked outside a butcher shop, or pretending to give a blow job to a cucumber and titty fuck a carrot.” Female activists have more to offer than going nudetotitillate for the cause. Women can aid your agenda in ways that don’t require them to be depicted as battered, pantsless-in-public, grocery-buying/fanny-flaunting fuckholes for ubersexed males. (Sure, naked men sometimes feature in your campaigns, but not nearly as often, and never presented in a remotely similar context.)
“Chicks Agree”? No, actually. Not this ”chick”. Not with the persistent, lazy, women-as-meat misogyny, anyway. C’mon, PETA, don’t you owe it to human beings and animals alike to try to encourage more responsible and respectful discourse?
Space Stallions, a bachelor film project from the 2012 Animation Workshop, plays like every Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood boiled down into one four minute concept. Created by Thorvaldur S. Gunnarsson, Jonatan Brüsch, Ágúst Kristinsson, Arna Snæbjørnsdottir, Esben J. Jespersen, Touraj Khosravi and Polina Bokhan, it appears to have everything: spaceships, spandex-clad heroes, rainbows, unicorn-shaped hoverbikes, moustaches, and laser eggs. It’s like someone put peyote in your Lucky Charms.
A deftly crafted satirical fauxmercial by Jesse Rosten sings the praises of an beauty industry secret known as “Fotoshop”:
“You don’t have to rely on a healthy body image or self respect anymore. [...] There’s only one way to look like a REAL cover girl: Fotoshop by Adobé.” OH SNAP.
Rosten’s piss-take nails the spooky Stepfordian tone and presentation of the average beauty commercial. He’s so crafty, in fact, it takes a few seconds for the “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE” to kick in. Just in case anyone’s confused, a statement beneath the Vimeo embed reads: “This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.”
Invasive, absurd digital manipulation’s not going anywhere. Still, it’s nice to know we’re at the point of not just openly discussing its ubiquity, but mocking it mercilessly!
Canada’s Hour Holiday Special of 2009 had a LOT going for it: Our Lady Peace, Metric (with the choir Carol of the Bells), Norah Jones, even Michael Bublé! *cough*
But best of all, it included this passionate rendition of “Hanukkah! Hanukkah!” by the Toronto-orignated heavy metal trio, ANVIL:
Sometimes I forget just how wonderful a thing this Internet is. Were it not for the internet, how many of us would have been able to experience the glory of this footage from some unnamed talk show, circa 1984? What a tragedy it would have been to not behold this man, with his perfectly groomed moustache, bouncing mullet, and Detroit Pistons sweatshirt. What fairness would there have been in the world if only those lucky members of the studio audience that day were able to gaze upon his hirsute visage, twisting and contorting with emotion or, perhaps, the effort of trying to keep from shitting himself, as he belted out the smoothest grooves ever heard?
None, I say. The people there that day, spellbound, their mouths agape, no doubt told stories about that day, but unable to properly convey the sublime magic of those few, short minutes, their words were most likely met with disbelief and skepticism. And really, who could blame them? Such accounts must have seemed ludicrous, the product of feeble minds. Now, though, we can see and hear for ourselves, and we too can be put under that same, powerful spell.
Yes, it truly is amazing, this internet. I will not take it for granted again.
Just a little afternoon delight, courtesy of Captain & Tennille…
Via Siege. (Of course.) Original song by Willis Alan Ramsey.
This aired on national television in the late 70s on The Captain & Tennille Show. Toni-T croons of the ardor between two semi-aquatic rodents named Suzie and Sam to the beige and incontinent bleep-bloops of the Captain’s keys. (Apparently, the 7″ single for this tune features an “endless loop” of synthesizer interpretations of muskrat fuck sounds, encoded into the end-groove of the vinyl. It’s the first known hit single to have a recorded locked groove.)
Good times!
Bonus weirdness: here’s a home karaoke video of a woman covering the same song while holding her rather shellshocked-looking guinea pig, Simon, aloft.
I must confess that, often, I associate Elton John with funny hats and glasses more than I do music and, as such, it’s good to watch clips like this one, if only to refresh my memory. Taken from 1997′s “An Audience With Elton John” (which was, apparently, a television special in which Elton John performed for an audience comprised of famous people) this particular segment features a challenge from actor Richard E. Grant who, having heard that John composes his music very quickly, asks if he could set the instructions for his conventional oven to music. The end result, while undeniably impressive, left me with a “chicken or the egg” question, namely: Can Elton John turn any group of words into a song or can any group of words be set to an Elton John song?
