I made this from a bad video capture off youtube plus photoshopping to look like an inspirational bumper sticker. It probably helps to have seen the movie Ju-on 2. If you can handle horror, it’s a terribly spooky good time. The ending is mean-spirited to the point of hilarity.
Image from Ju-on 2 of ghost boy Toshio taking the wheel.
Remember these guys?
Autograph – Turn up the Radio
“Autograph” as far as I recall were a one-hit wonder from my childhood / the 80s, who performed this crowd-pleasing jam:
I was just perusing the good old days on youtube when my eyes beheld a surprising sight.
Autograph – Turn up the Radio
Mechanical Pencils – Papermate
This video was paid for by Papermate mechanical pencils. Because as my partner quipped, “Graphite is forever.” While that is a pretty cool pencil, I just can’t handle it right now. I bid you good day.
EDIT TO ADD: Seven years after this post, Todd in the Shadows released a video on the same subject. It’s a hoot.
I will occasionally be posting for my guest blogger. He doesn’t want a wordpress account so he won’t be making these directly, but I’ll label them as “Guest Post” and put his blurb at the bottom.
Don’t hold out on me, Bruh. (art by Al Columbia)
I told G.A.S tonight that I shouldn’t be allowed to listen to the Pixies with my headphones on. Invariably, I will slowly turn up the volume until it’s maxed out and my brains are dribbling out my ears. This is something unique to this band, and whatever hearing loss I have now I blame entirely on them. It must be some arcane musical wizardry, along with the way their songs always seem to end too early, no matter how many times you listen to them. I liken this phenomena to that of Carmex lip balm.
Once in middle school an outbreak of Carmex addiction hit the seventh graders hard, I among their sad, chapped numbers. If you were unfortunate enough to leave your denim jacket on the back of a chair, you’d come back to parched junkies digging through your pockets for a dip into that little yellow pot. Many the Trapper Keeper and Peechee were edged in medicinal grease after a tube released all over the bottom of a backpack.
I went cold turkey, and to this day I yearn to feel that uncanny burn on my lips. Snopes claims this is a hoax, but they’re obviously in the pocket of big balm. So, I say that the Pixies are the Carmex of music, damaging to your physical health but delicious and addictive. But I ain’t giving that shit up, and they never ruined any stationery.
G.A.S. told me to write this as a blog entry, so here it is as introduction to me, the Beast from Seattle. I’m a big-time lurker so I normally never comment anywhere or even as much as write on Facebook. I wrote a term paper defending lurkerdom, but I will fight my natural tendencies and write something here once in a while. About me: I was born in the ’80s, am a big queer goth weirdo, and the kind of person who’ll break their keyboard trying to get every last cat hair out of it.
What Else Is There? – Röyksopp ft. Karin Dreijer
This is a repost from my writing elsewhere.
Trigger warnings? Things that could bother people: the dark mood, time lapse photography of mold (eww), depiction of dead ducks that may or may not have been real, images of buildings falling apart in stormy weather.
This spooky jam is sung by Karin, who is not the lip-syncing floaty model in the video, but rather the tight-lipped weirdo in the ruff collar. You probably know her from The Knife and Fever Ray. Music is by Röyksopp.
I’m posting this because levitation. People sometimes experience a feeling of floating in altered mental states. Whether you’ve experienced that or not, there’s something about the feeling of it that resonates with a primal part of the mind. It shows up in a lot of art – song, visual depictions, writing. I found the use of it in The Lost Boys especially evocative.
I feel like the way an animal learns to move is by willing itself in the desired direction and flailing its body that way until muscle learning catches up to desire. In order to want to move the body at all, there has to be an inherent feeling in the mind that movement is possible, which exists before any knowledge of how to make movement happen. (As always, I could be very wrong.)
Essentially, we’re all natural born levitators. The only thing keeping us from being able to float towards our desires is physical constraints. That’s no small limitation – psychic levitation isn’t real or possible, as far as anyone knows. But the feeling is there. And maybe the limits of our bodies are the reason evoking that feeling can be so eerie, melancholy, or abstractly powerful.
And on an entirely different note,
Float On – The Floaters
This song is the equivalent of a video personal ad for the singers.
I challenge you to invent your own additional verse for the tune.
What’s the moral of the story? It’s a question you probably left behind in high school, sometimes because the morals are obvious (“well I’m all broken up about that man’s rights“), more often because that’s not why you came to the story in question (“there is no spoon“). I didn’t pay it much mind for years, but recently it’s been getting my attention. I’ll just lay out the thoughts in their own paragraphs, whether they reach a conclusion or not…
[Read more…]