For the past few weeks I’ve been obsessed with these videos on YouTube made by The Possum Posse. They’re called (you guessed it) Guy On A Buffalo. The videos are clipped from a 1978 film named Buffalo Rider, which has recently been released to the public domain. So The Possum Posse takes sections from this wicked awesome movie and sets music to it that will surely get stuck in your head. It may not be as catchy as the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell song, but it will stick with ya. I guarantee it.
I think that we all need to get together and screen this film. It won’t have the infectious tunes, but it will have a guy on a buffalo. And that’s pretty damn cool.
Hope you’re having a happy Monday.
P.S. My posts will not all be videos I’ve found on the Internet. My next post will be more intellectually stimulating, I promise.
So writes my sister on Facebook, on the picture of her friend’s new tattoo, which includes the word “solemly.” It’s a fairly large tattoo, easy to read from feet away, on the girl’s shoulder blade.
“yea,” the girl responds, and I assume this means my sister isn’t the first person to point this out to her in the days since she got this lovely body art text. (In further irony, the girl “liked” my sister’s comment.)
“I love it, you so rock it! And I love how it’s spelled,” writes a third girl.
This is the point where a little piece of me dies inside. Honestly. Who loves having a permanent misspelling on their body? I don’t like having even a temporary misspelling in my writing. And besides, with siteslikethese in abundance, who doesn’t spell check their tattoo?
My sister is a singer. She’s taken years and years of voice lessons, been in musicals, had solos, and even spent some time as a vocal performance major before deciding on anthropology instead. And a few days ago, she showed me the following video.
For those of you that don’t have 15 minutes of spare time in which to watch the entire thing, this composer videotaped himself conducting one of his own pieces and then asked singers from around the globe to record themselves singing it. The videos were then combined to form a virtual choir. The video is the talk he gave at the TED conference describing how he came up with the idea and how he implemented it. Check it out, and see if it doesn’t inspire you to look at the intersection of technology and art in a new way.
I know that compared to the winter they’re having in places like New York and Boston we don’t have all that much to complain about here in Michigan, but what can I say? Anything below 65 degrees is enough to make me forlorn; anything below 45 is going to make me downright cranky. And this weekend was by far the coldest we’ve had all year, not to mention we got more snow, more wind…yeah. You get the picture. What I’m trying to say is that I spent the past 72-ish hours wrapped up enchilada style inside 3 blankets and made myself as unproductive a human being as possible (except for the three hours during which I felt that a hockey game would be a good way to warm up). So today I’ve got a motley collection of links that I’ve been randomly amassing over the last while. Enjoy! And may spring arrive quickly.
This is apparently old, old news, but I only just found out about it. Apparently an artist was commissioned to create a sidewalk mural out front of a public library in California a few year back. The artwork included a large number of tiles, many (all?) of which bore names and associated images of famous thinkers. Except that, once finished, people began to notice that many of the names were misspelled. Einstein was Eistein, Shakespeare was Shakespere, etc. When asked to correct the work, the artist, a former teacher, threw what essentially amounts to a temper tantrum, defending her mistakes as part of the art.
Want to know what books were bestsellers the week you were born? I know this has kept me personally up at night. Well wonder no more. Read more »
Five minutes ago I went onto iTunes and bought Love the Way you Lie, Eminem’s duet with Rihanna about domestic violence. I’ve spent the last few weeks flipping through the radio stations in my car hoping to come across this song, resisting the temptation to buy it, because something feels sort of wrong about buying a song whose average listener is probably too young to drive. But I’m trying to get past this idea of having a guilty pleasure—if I enjoy something I enjoy it, end of story—so I bought it. And now I’m telling the Internet, which I guess is some sort of step two on this road to guilty pleasure recovery.
But anyway, this song has had me (and many others) thinking. For those that don’t know, last year Rihanna was involved in a very public episode of domestic violence with her then-boyfriend Chris Brown. She was attacked, her pictures leaked to the media, and then months of scrutiny followed, during which no few voices wondered what she had done to deserve it, because clearly, she must have deserved it. Anyway, I won’t go into the many details of the months that followed, of the back and forth in the situation and their relationship; there’s Google for that. It died down eventually, but then word broke that she was doing this duet with Eminem, and it all came back to the surface.
Though many do question whether or not Rihanna should have done such a song, I see no reason to condemn her decision to use her voice in this way, to tell this story. The concern I have seen repeated in feminist circles, however, is whether or not the song actually does make a statement against domestic violence, and whether or not the song’s main audience is mature enough to get any anti-violence argument or whether they will only see domestic violence as sexy and glorified. However, this discussion leaves out one very important factor, and ultimately sets out to control the parameters of Rihanna’s art based on what others prescribe to her as her social views. Read more »
I have two things to admit: First, that I read fantasy. And second, that I feel no shame in this. I believe firmly that there is something to be learned from any book, be it good or bad, literary or otherwise; I’ve banished the phrase guilty pleasure from those I use to describe different aspects of my reading habits. For example, while I know that world description is a huge thing for some readers, reading fantasy, more than any other genre, has taught me how much I hate long-winded descriptions, and so I leave this out of my own stories, because I don’t want my readers skimming entire pages.
But while I enjoy some fantasy (yes, certain works are horribly formulaic, and I don’t like that in any type of writing), I despise most fantasy book covers. With few exceptions, they seem to me childish, to play into fantasy archetypes rather than to break them, and to have too many design elements competing for attention. Not to mention I hate having a character’s cover image fighting against the one I develop in my own mind. These complaints, of course, go for any genre of books, but I tend to see these problems most in the fantasy books, where simplicity is almost always discarded in favor of chaos and where the cover seems to be more interested in making the book fit into the fantasy genre rather than making it stand out.
So I went to the Louvre this morning and saw the Mona Lisa (or, as the French call it, La Joconde). I wasn’t particularly interested in going out of my way to find it, but my sister wanted to, and so we battled the massive crowds so that eventually, we could view the small painting from about ten feet away (you aren’t allowed any closer). I stood, trying for a look of reverence, while my sister snapped a picture (no flash), and then we fought our way back out of the room (apparently there’s no better place to stop and have a long conversation with someone). We continued through the hall of Italien painteurs, looking at the paintings, but not stopping to stare. We had discussed earlier how we are each more impressed by the sculptures and ancient artifacts (like the mummified cat) than we are by paintings, and so maybe this is why, but neither of us can understand what makes the Mona Lisa so special. I assume that many people there saw it for the same reason we did—because if you’re in Paris, and you’re in the Louvre, you are sort of supposed to see it—but why? We even saw a large-ish group of people clustered around a similar looking painting (we think they were confused), so even with our relatively high level of painting ignorance, we were by no means the worst off—but how special can something be if you mistake it for another painting? Read more »
I spent most of my time at AWP walking the bookfair or staffing the Willow Springs table (where I met four of the fiction writers we’re published since issue 63, which was awesome), but I also made some time to go to a few of the panel sessions offered. My Smart Girls and Ambition panel was interesting but not all that useful, and the Pleasures and Peculiarities of Literary Editing was a few steps beneath my skill level (though it inspired an idea for a panel for next year), but the one that stood out to me was All-Around Bitch: The Challenges of Writing Unlikable Female Protagonists.
Take a piece like “Hunters in the Snow,” said the presenters, and try to picture those characters as female instead of male. Often, strong female characters are labeled as unbelievable, and fewer people want to read stories about bitches than they do assholes. Now, the presenters recognized some books that have succeeded with “bitch” characters, but there is still a bit of a double standard in literature (which I’d guess stems from the double standards in real life, but that’s a post for another time and another blog). Read more »
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