Dreams -Woodstock '94

Was 1994 the coolest year ever? Possibly.

I have a VHS tape of Woodstock '94 and I must say some of the best viewing experiences of any movie ever have been - a 12 pack of beer, a best friend, a boyfriend, and the Woodstock '94 tape.

This clip of The Cranberries' set is a great example of the awesomeness.
Dolores O'Riordan rocks it with those strong Irish pipes of hers.


Also featured in this clip are two of my favorite summer looks. The long black dress with awesome necklaces on Dolores and the cut-offs with work boots on the female crowd surfer. Also if you stick with it till the end you can see some dudes re-define the term crowd surfing with one long haired hottie standing on another's stomach as he crowd surfs.

Rejuvenique- For That Feminine Serial Killer Look

This is scary! In so many different ways!

Ophelia Gets Her Groove Back With Help From Sassy Gay Friend

Second City (the infamous LA comedy club) has these funny videos out called Sassy Gay Friend. They kind of remind me of the great Thats Gay bit that Brian Safi did called Gayngels. I'm not sure if this is a modern day myth of the gay bff who can wash away all your troubles - or has it been with us all along?

However, the Sassy Gay Friend's run-ins with Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona did remind me of my original Unconscious and Irrational idea. Taking the tragic female lead back to Shakespearean times does prove that reason and consciousness have been escaping female leads for quite some time. It also proves that Freud may have drawn attention to the idea of women as "insane by design" but he didn't exactly invent it. One of the books that first inspired me to get into this idea was Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler. I really recommend getting a copy - in many ways it helped me redefine what I thought of as both mental illness and what its is to be female.
So yea, now that I'm totally getting off topic - here is Sassy Gay Friend.

24 Hours Of Love

Do you guys remember back in the 90s when Trent Reznor was being a jerk to Courtney Love and she was all like "Don't call your band Nine Inch Nails if you only have a three-inch one." Ah that was rich.

I just read this great quote where she tries to justify it by saying:

"My band's called Hole. It's not called Little Hole, it's not called Big Hole. It's not called Flopping Nonie, it's not called Tiny Rosebud, it's not called Barbie Pussy, it's called Hole. He's still mad at me about it. Dude, that was the '90s, what the fuck?"





Here is a recent video of her dispelling some hard won words of wisdom.


So of course that sent me into a Courtney Love K-hole of you-tubing. Do you remember 24 Hours Of Love when Courtney took over MTV for 24 hours? That was back when they played music videos, good music videos!
So its starts off all sweet and innocent.....or not.


And then this is the last few hours. This actually doesn't even convey how crazy things got.


This is kind of a "best of" of that 24 hours. I actually love the depressed Courtney segment at 23 hours. I get like that when I'm hungry or tired. "All I really wanted was to be an evil genius"

The Swiveling Sixties

This is totally how I fry my eggs at 1:40 minutes. Screw being queen of the house that bleach blond is having way more fun.


"I only intend to have one little gin, why do I always end up on the tiger skin"


Joi Lansing created Sexy Face


What Roger Sterling dreams about at night

Lick The Star

WHY, have I not seen this before? Lick The Star is Sophia Coppola's deput short film and it is AMAZING.

Bathing Beauties

The woman in the photo to the left was a Geisha named Miss Koman. She was known for her long flowing hair and this photo was taken in 1905. This and the other images are all photos from the early 1900s during the Meiji and Taisho Eras of Old Japan. The models are Geisha and Maiko (Geisha apprentices) posing in the latest styles of bathing suits. I've been feeling really obsessed with these images lately -partially cause I want a bathing suit like that, but also because they are such beautiful images. If you want to see more amazing old photos from Asia, Africa, and more check out this guy's flickr account.

Lung Leg in Death Valley '69

The music video for Death Valley '69 is kinda the Bermuda triangle of coolness. Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, and Richard Kern unite to create some total bad-assness. And then Lung Leg jumps in and sinks your ship with cool! Also thematically and stuff- is it weird that this makes me think of White Zombie. Did you know that White Zombie was originally a noise rock band that met at Parsons? Anyhow, anytime Sean Yseult, Lung Leg, Lydia Lunch, and Kim Gordon wanna get together and have a mosh pit with me- I'm in!

Baby Doll

Baby Doll- By Tessa Hughes- Freeland (1982- Cinema of Transgression)

Our Love Is Heavenly

Heavenly- Our Love Is Heavenly

Something a little twee for a beautiful spring day.

The Swimsuit Issue

Get Ready! Here are the good, the bad, and the overexposed of this season's hottest beachwear looks.








InfoMania's new segment (which replaced Target Women) is called Modern Lady. Host Erin Gibson covers the bullshit that is Bikini Season. I like that she points out that absolutely no one can win bikini season, even Heidi Montag.



And now for the best looks of the season!



The three images below are from Brigitewear, and their website is AMAZING. They may be responsible for that Borat bathingsuit, but really their own website is far more epic in a subtle way.












Okay, this woman below, I thought that her bathingsuit had just split open in the front, but actually its on backwards. She is having so much fun! High five to you awesome lady!

Make Homosexuals Marry

Two of my favorite guys, Mike White and Justin Long have made this video as part of the campaign to make people remember Prop 8 and hopefully some day overturn it.

Laurie Anderson's Concert For Dogs

Today in Sydney, Australia, Laurie Anderson and her band performed a 20 minute concert for dogs. The majority of the concert was inaudible to human ears but a crowd of dogs and their owners gathered around and took in the music.

The Feminist Headbanger

My BF just turned me on to this cool blog called Feminist Headbanger because they had a really great post about why Periods Are Metal.

To quote the posts' author "Morla, the ancient one" :

"I happen to think that bleeding each month and not dying is probably one of the most “metal” things one could do. "

and also

"Periods are fucking metal. Even more metal are periods that are painful beyond the norm. Periods experienced by women with fibroids, endometriosis and other disorders of the reproductive system. With these conditions, the monthly visitor is a terror; a demon to be reckoned with that cannot be conquered except through pharmaceuticals, beer or extreme rage. A combination of all three, plus a hot bath that surrounds you with clots, amounts to an image that’s as unsettling as a Mayhem cover."

Anyhow, Feminist Headbanger is awesome and you should go check it out.

The post also reminded me of this old Margaret Cho bit about if guys got periods. I've posted it before but its so good it deserves re-posting.

Ayshay

Check out the new music video by Ayshay, an accapella project by Fatima Al Qadiri.
For more info go here.















Warn- U
by Ayshay


Also her performance at the Tate Modern on May 15th.

Jodie

This 1998 art piece by artist Dara Friedman is titled "Jodie", featuring model Jodie Kidd. For those of you also from the MTV generation - it takes about 3 minutes in for it to get going.

"Friedman documents a model during a fashion shoot, the exaggerated, staccato rhythms of her camera punctuated by machine-gun like bursts of fireworks and the chiming of bells. The model veers wildly between states of calm and hair-wringing distress in a short, hyper-kinetic sequence bookended by image fields of solid color; a slow approach to an intense, intimate proximity"

Q'orinka Kilcher Arrested For Civil Disobediance At The White House

Q'orianka Kilcher, best known for her role as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's 2005 movie The New World, has been arrested this morning at the White House. Kilcher tied herself to the White House fence while her mother poured black paint symbolizing oil all over her. The women were protesting, along with a big crowd of people, in light of President Obama's morning meeting with the President of Peru. You can read more about that on my post here - but the simplified version is that the Peruvian government has been approving for years the vast destruction of the Peruvian Amazon at the hands of oil companies who are destroying the land and native people with enormous oil and mining projects. Not only are they hiding the deaths of tons of native Peruvians who have no say in the project, but the government has also killed many of the protesters.
Kilcher, whose father is Peruvian, has stated in the past that she wished President Obama would get involved and take action. After all part of this disastrous situation is due to the U.S.'s free trade agreement with Peru, and as Kilcher stated on Democracy Now...

"I started trying to highlight the over-thirty-five-year-long struggle that the Achuar community was facing with Occidental Petroleum, a Los Angeles-based company, you know, drilling there, using practices outlawed in the United States, pumping an average of 850,000 barrels of toxic waste in one day on one block alone, and dumping it into the rivers, not using reinjection."

Its sadly an old story, wherein the U.S. doesn't follow its own laws when on someone else's soil.

Both women were arrested - Q'orianka for disorderly conduct and her mother for defacing government property. For those of you unfamiliar with civil disobedience this is a good thing. No one would even know there was a protest at the white house today if Q'orianka and her mother had not been there getting arrested. News reporters need star power to bother writing about things.













Its also interesting to think about this story in the context of her role as Pocahontas. My generation grew up generally understanding that Columbus was a bad guy for slaughtering the Native Americans, but as Kilcher puts it - that's just called Globalization these days. The world loves seeing 14 year old Pocahontas getting Stockholm syndrome for her captors and dieing a tragic and beautiful death.

Yet, the now 20 year old Q'orianka is part of my generation and she's not going to go with the flow. She brought intelligence and respectability to her role as the naive Pocahontas and she continues to bring a level of substance to her career as actress and activist.













Here's a video of one of her trips to Peru. It shows some of the damages to the land.

From Your Front Porch To My Front Seat

Ooo-eee, it has been warm out lately. Makes ya just wanna wear your birthday attire as Ms. Nina Simone is doing in the photo at left. So I've got a lazy summer mix for you. I was feeling inspired by this post of Patti Smith where she covers "You Light Up My Life" so I thought I'd do a post of all covered songs.











Here Patti Smith does Gloria. I love both the original by Van Morrison and this cover so much I wanted to name my first born daughter Gloria, but pretty much everyone I know isn't into that name so I don't think its gonna work out. Anyhow, enjoy.


I was also inspired by this version of Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road that I heard on Studio 360 last week performed by the actress Martha Plimpton. Ya know what, Martha Plimpton is cool. And this song is completely epic. Because this was meant for radio I suggest closing your eyes and listening to the lyrics. It does The Boss some serious justice.


The ultimate summer song aptly titled Summertime. The original is written by George Gershwin, but this version by Janis Joplin is my favorite song of hers.


Here Kate Bush takes Elton John's Rocket Man and makes it her own. Its just pretty cool until the reggae beats kick in and it gets even better and becomes totally moving. "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid.."


Sorry not much of a video for this one, but Mr. Bojangles written by Jerry Jeff Walker who wrote the song not about the famed Bill "Bojangles" Robinson but about a guy he met in jail when he was arrested on the 4th of July. Which officially makes it a great summer song. Here is Nina Simone's version which she infuses with much more meaning.


St. Etienne covers Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart. They surely arise to the occasion.


And since its Memorial Day and we're doing covers who could miss this.