I’m working more or less around the clock until I leave for New York on Thursday, so forgive me if I’m a little light with the posting this week. But I wanted to quickly point out that there’s a new track by Hungarian band The Unbending Trees featuring Tracey Thorn. It’s torchy and lovely, and streaming on her Myspace now.
In general, I think Thorn is a lady with pretty amazing taste, and I’m not just saying that because she’s recently covered the Magnetic Fields and the Pet Shop Boys. I remember back when I was fifteen and the Everything But The Girl website was just text laid over a pink leopard print .GIF. I used to avidly follow all of her book recommendations. Which is how I discovered Philip Roth, and A Very Long Engagement, and a lot of other things that I thought were very beautiful and deep, not to mention Ben Watt’s memoir about his crazy surgery.
Her Myspace is currently also streaming two covers, a version of the Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale from her 1982 solo album and a take on The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game (a different version of which was on last week’s Mixtape–oh, the synchronicity!!) that first appeared on, of all ungodly things, the Batman Forever soundtrack.
So, in that weird way that I have where I’m simultaneously hyper-aware and totally clueless, I didn’t realize when I posted the other day about Ryan McGinley that he did those new French wrangler ads that everybody’s so worked up about.
I for one don’t see what the big woo is. It’s just a vaguely gratuitous campaign by one of the world’s least interesting brands to remind people that they exist. And, as we all know, there’s no way to do that more successfully than with skinny white girls and ambiguous hints of violence. The company’s not even running the ads in this country, presumably because there would be much moral rallying by moral types, and confusion on the part of the cowfolk who actually wear Wrangler’s formless and unflattering products.
Anyway, I think the ads are sort of interesting-looking, though I tend to judge ads very differently when I see them in print then when I see them on a computer screen when I’m at work trying not to die of boredom.
But mostly I’d say they’re pretty decent, if not amazing or particularly worth twisting your panties about. Though I do agree with the Gawker commenter who said that they look like the inside of Tori Amos’s head.
So, in an attempt to erase this morning’s dreadful American Top 40 memories* and also alleviate the totally annoying work stress I’m going through right now, I decided to spend my afternoon listening to this old thing on repeat until I go to lunch:
(*Seriously, it’s pretty bad when Flo Rida is the best thing in an hour’s worth of music and you have to spend the rest of the time wondering why you’re supposed to care about whoever it is that Ryan Seacrest is interviewing…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
(Re: my post last night)
Today: phelps kavic, ruban viktor, phelps kavic fina, phelps and kavic, truckasaurus, truckasauras, phelps cock, phelps & kavic, kavic serbia swim 100m butterfly, “michael phelps” cock
Yesterday:michael phelps is a twat, karina pasian, sweaty artemisbell, “viktor ruban”, “michael phelps” douche, the brewster project orish, phelps butterfly kavic, tokio hotel, jamie hince, mike kavic swimmer
Filed under: music | Tags: 69 love songs, Stephin Merritt, the magnetic fields
This morning, I threw on the first disc of 69 Love Songs for the first time in a few months. And I’m still amazed that, even though I’ve probably listened to the whole collection hundreds of times it for the last nine years, there are still a few songs on it that I feel like I never noticed before.
Like today, when Parades Go By came on, I wasn’t even sure what it was at first. About twenty seconds in, before the singing started, I remembered the title, but then I didn’t know it enough to sing along. After the song was over, I looked at the lyric sheet and the written words didn’t even look familiar.
It’s definitely one of the slighter numbers on 69 Love Songs, especially in comparison with, say, The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side or Sweet-Lovin’ Man. But it’s nice, with Stephin Merritt’s melodramatic vocals laid over a surprisingly arty mix of spare-sounding synths.
Apparently talking about Michael Phelps and Tokio Hotel is a good way to make my site traffic go up.
That reminds me, did I tell you about the rumors I heard that Michael Phelps is gay, and that we was naked this one time with his cock out and everything and listening to some Tokio Hotel or whatever and then all of a sudden naked Michael Phelps was like “Hey world, I know I’m a big flaming douche, but don’t I just have the cutest ass? I mean, look at the way it jiggles while I listen to this Tokio Hotel song. You know, that song you’ve never heard because nobody listens to Tokio Hotel, no matter how many Video Music Awards (VMAs) they get nominated for?”
And then the world was like “Ummm, yeah. Whatever dude. You’re still a big flaming douche. I’d much rather be watching, say, that slammin’ Acquafresca dude from the Italian soccer team. Or football team, since nobody in the rest of the world calls it soccer. Kind of like how nobody in the rest of the world uses the metric system. See, look at this map of all the countries in the world that don’t use the metric system. It’s pretty much the US and Burma (Myanmar) and one of those countries that I always get wrong when I play African Geography Games.”
And then Michael Phelps was all like “Yeah, whatever.”
I got this via a porny Googlegroup that I belong to (because, yes, I’m an occasional peesex enthusiast), but these (straight, non-fetishy) people actually make a fairly convincing case for why you should do your business behind the nearest tree.
Consider:
It takes about three gallons of water to flush a toilet. If there’s two people in your house and you each go four times a day, that’s 24 gallons of water. Whereas if you (discreetly) pee outside, you’re not really using any water at all.
Plus, and they don’t really get into this part, but peeing outside is fun! I for one do it any chance I can which, in a smallish city that closes early, is all the damn time. I even like doing it in the middle of winter. It’s invigorating!
But if you can’t do your number ones in nature, I also like their advice to do it in the shower, but “only if you are doing something else at the same time.”
Karina, whose last name has apparently been dropped since the awesome 16 @ War came out earlier this year, will release her debut album, First Love, this coming Tuesday. (That’s the same day as the new Stereolab CD, and I’m excited because I’ve got a long car trip coming up next weekend.)
Here’s the (unembeddable) video for Can’t Find The Words, the second single. With a Bonita Applebaum sample, it’s a mid-tempo dance R&B number about teenage love that’s a lot more sincere-sounding than, say, Alicia Keys’ Natalie Cole-isms. The video’s not much to look at–her outfit choices are terrible, but in a mostly predictable way–but I like the song quite a bit.
PS–The album has a song feat. Lil Mama. Yay!!
Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty, starfucking | Tags: michael phelps, milorad cavic, the olympics
Seriously, if this man were coming to a civic center near you in an event sponsored by Discover, that event would be the Douche Capades. Or maybe the Ass Capades. (Although I always thought Ass Capades would be a good name for porn–I wonder if it’s been taken already? I can’t look, since I’m on a public computer right now….) Perhaps it would be the Boring Capades.
However, watching Phelps come in second in the qualifier today, I couldn’t help noticing how boring he was in comparison to the guy who actually won: Milorad Cavic, the Serbian (by way of Anaheim) swimmer who set an Olympic record in the 100m Butterfly.
For an Olympic swimmer, Cavic is pretty hot. (Although honestly, I can’t fully get behind any event where winning is contingent on shaving all your body hair. I just can’t.)
Of course, while the American commentators this morning were all voicing their wet dreams about Phelps, they didn’t mention that Kavic was suspended from swimming earlier this year for showing up in a t-shirt that said “Kosovo Is Serbia,” or even that he now lives in Florida. In fact, they didn’t really mention him at all, even though he was leading for pretty much the whole race.
Cavic is one of those athletes–like a lot of Olympians, really–who look really dumb in still photos but who are kinda smokin’ on film, even in boring interviews. (With Cavic, I think it’s the eyebrows and the general sense of size–he looks like a big guy.
It kinda bugs me that sports photography is so commercial, because there are some really amazing-looking people competing in these events. And I don’t just mean I want to get in their pants, but, you know, that too. Bit it seems like the only still photos that exist–at least of athletes who don’t make magazine covers–are silly video stills where their mouths are open or they look like they’re about to die. I liked what Ryan McGinley did with the 2004 US Swim Team, and I wish more stuff like that was allowed to happen, especially because there’s so much potential.
Is this some kind of sneaky ad by those crafty candy companies and/or deranged Tokio Hotel fans? Or is it something more than that? I don’t actually have an answer, since this is one of those Facebook things that I’ve never actually understood. Kind of like who this Tracy Anne Taylor woman is that is apparently my friend and who’s always drawing sunflowers for me despite the fact that I have no idea who she is and she lives in a different country than I do. Also, under what circumstances are “throwing celebrities at” and “doing something” the same? I ask you.
