Vivienne Westwood Wallpaper
Really beautiful wallpaper designs and dresses from Vivienne Westwood and Cole & Son. From eccouterre:
Now your walls can look as fashion-forward as you do. Legendary British fashion designer?
Really beautiful wallpaper designs and dresses from Vivienne Westwood and Cole & Son. From eccouterre:
Now your walls can look as fashion-forward as you do. Legendary British fashion designer?
Rowan Atkinson as Marc Almond. YouTube just barfed this on my lap. Funny!
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The much-maligned Ed Hardy clothing company has simultaneously given the fashion-challenged, uh, idiot population a way to express their “uniqueness” to the world while giving the rest of us something to point at and laugh about (well “white people” at least, but I suspect it’s possible for persons of any race, creed or color to find the Technicolor vomit of Ed Hardy clothing absolutely insufferable). Now there are some new kids on the fashion block and they want to do for trust fund hipsters what Ed Hardy did for Jon Gosselin and the cast of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”
Yes indeed, the Grammy award-winning Kings of Leon pop group are coming out with a new line of expensive prefab hipster togs which will be for sale in just one store on London’s trendy King’s Road. Starting this month, if you are so inclined, you can spend your parents’ hard-earned dough on a dozen overpriced items of the ?
The Simpsons opening, re-imagined as taking place in Estonia by Estonia TV3.
Via Pandora Young/Fishbowl LA
Maybe David Letterman should retire his “Stupid Pet Tricks” segment in favor of a new one called “Stupid iPhone Apps.” Is it just me or are the below apps pointless time (and money) wasters? And a couple of them seem highly likely to cause actual damage to your iPhone. Apparently Apple sells 350 apps per minute from the iTunes app store—over 3 billion since it launched—but surely, soon, we’ll all be suffering from “cute” novelty burnout when the useful ideas have been used up ... or maybe not. Never underestimate the American consumer, eh?
Exhibit the first: Happy Dangy Diggy. This whimsical app allows you to blow virtual kisses to the object of your affection cyber-stalking. Although this might’ve come in handy were we in the midst of a full-blown H1N1 pandemic (you know, like the one that was supposed to happen), in the absence of a public health crisis, it’s just plain goofy. If you need an iPhone app to flirt, well, dude, you’re pathetic!
Next up: the iSteam app, which will fog up your iPhone with realistic digital fog. Someone showed me this at a party recently and I just shook my head in bored disbelief. You can simply breathe on your iPhone for free to fog it up, but at least that’s all that the app costs anyway. It’s gratis for now from the developer—which is about what it’s worth, if you ask me. Cute? Sure, but who cares?
Moving on, we have the iPhone Blower, which will push air out of your iPhone speaker. Enough to extinguish a candle. Big whoop. Watch the demo video:
If you don’t think this will cause damage to your iPhone ... then move on to the next two, the iHandWarmer (who thought that name up?) and Pocket Heat. The iHand Warmer actually kind of works by using up 100% of your CPU and draining the battery, but does it give off enough BTUs to really warm your hands? Doubtful. Pocket Heat, on the other hand, is admittedly mostly just a gimmick that’s meant to look like a space heater, rather than perform like one. Now that’s really pointless.
From Bldgblog:
In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself?
The disclaimer at the God’s Little Ones reads: “Warning if you have had an abortion or miscarriage this page may be hard to view. If you choose to proceed you may want a tissue box near by.” The site also feature dolls in various stages of “gestation.” The photo below shows dolls ranging from eight to eighteen weeks.
And while it might be true that we’re all created in His image, “creation” costs more for some of us than others: “Models available in pink, tan and brown skin tones others available upon request add $10.00 for brown as it is a more expensive pigment.”
(via AFC)
Pornography. Karaoke. Those worlds collide once a week in a bar in LA’s San Fernando Valley. Filmmaker Alex Jablonski and cinematographer Michael Totten were there to capture it one night as part of their ongoing Sparrow Songs Project which endeavors, once a month for a year, to make and exhibit a short documentary.
One male fan in the (vaguely NSFW-ish) clip below says that by singing good, he hopes to make the girls feel good about themselves. Well, by the clip’s end, I don’t think Bowie himself could make that happen.
(via Coilhouse)
Instructables has a DIY step-by-step tutorial on HOWTO make a duck-footed mouse. Here’s a taste:
Step 1 Obtain and dry duck feet
Find yourself some fresh duck feet. If you or your friends hunt or raise ducks, you’re all set. Otherwise you could visit your local asian grocery, butcher shop, or live poultry source and ask for the leftovers. These feet came from a green-winged teal I shot myself. I ate the rest.
Fascinating article from today’s Los Angeles Times about an unusual new role-playing pop psychology craze that’s sweeping South Korea: participants, seeking deeper meaning in their lives, experience their own death and funeral.
Jung runs a seminar called the Coffin Academy, where, for $25 each, South Koreans can get a glimpse into the abyss. Over four hours, groups of a dozen or more tearfully write their letters of goodbye and tombstone epitaphs. Finally, they attend their own funerals and try the coffin on for size.
In a candle-lighted chapel, each climbs into one of the austere wooden caskets laid side by side on the floor. Lying face up, their arms crossed over their chests, they close their eyes. And there they rest, for 10 excruciating minutes.
“It’s a way to let go of certain things,” says Jung, a former insurance company lecturer. “Afterward, you feel refreshed. You’re ready to start your life all over again, this time with a clean slate.”
Across South Korea, a few entrepreneurs are conducting controversial forums designed to teach clients how to better appreciate life by simulating death. Equal parts Vincent Price and Dale Carnegie, they use mortality as a personal motivator for a variety of behaviors, from a healthier attitude toward work to getting along with family members.
Many firms here see the sessions as an inventive way to stimulate productivity. The Kyobo insurance company, for example, has required all 4,000 of its employees to attend fake funerals like those offered by Jung.
Read the entire article: South Koreans experience what it’s like to die—and live again (Los Angeles Times)
Michel Chion’s 1973 composition “Requiem” is a noisy and surreal deconstruction/recreation of the Funeral Mass. In retrospect it sounds positively pre-industrial and is jam packed with grating, annoy-the-dog high pitched frequencies, snatches of actual church music and some genuinely scary uses of the human voice. Listen loudly in the dark if you dare.
from Modern Illusions:
Chion’s Requiem probably represents one of the defining moments of the musique concrete canon, a work all other pieces must be judged by and one of the few absolute masterpieces of the genre. Things begin with a high pitched tone soon joined by an electro-acoustic, echoing wind and then just after 40 seconds, silence, a man narrating a few lines in French and the start of a slow buzzing, chant-like humming, dripping water, echoes, reverbs and more French vocals repeating the words ‘Requiem Aeternam’. And all of this is only two and half minutes into this labyrinthine construction which comes close to nearly annihilating the standard structure of a requiem. Traces of the traditional Funeral Mass remain (largely through the titles of the various movements), but have been so brutally deconstructed that it’s very difficult to know exactly at which point in the proceedings you are experiencing. In fact, it’s almost as if Chion wants to create all moments at once, stopping time so that everything and anything can happen simultaneously, purposefully disorientating and confusing the listener.
listen to the opening piece here
And here are two more excerpts with great sound quality but not great (mostly lifted) visuals added by the kind fan that uploaded them.
Apparently Warren Beatty slept with 12,775 women between the age of 19 and when he got married. How do people get this job?
Wilt Chamberlain is the current ranking champ, having claimed to have slept with 20,000 women (enough that his personal life merits its own Wikipedia article). In his autobiography, he urges the reader to realize that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “It’s better to have one woman 20,000 times than 20,000 women one time.” Crikey. I wonder if Mr. Beatty feels the same way?
It may not be one of the great remaining mysteries, on a par with the nature of dark matter or the origins of the universe, but the question of how many women Warren Beatty, 72, has slept with certainly seems to have got New York’s media-land in a froth.
Peter Biskind, Beatty’s new biographer, estimates that the famously seductive star of Bonnie and Clyde and Reds has notched up 12,775 sexual conquests, including Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton and Madonna. If true, that is impressive. Don Giovanni could only claim a lacklustre 2,065, according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Biskind writes in his book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, that he arrived at the figure by “simple arithmetic”. He appears to have worked out the number of days between Beatty losing his virginity at 19 and the date in 1991 when he met Annette Bening on the set of Bugsy and fell into monogamy, and applied the questionable logic that during that entire period Beatty slept with an average of one woman a day. Biskind, an accomplished writer on Hollywood and author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, adds that for these purposes he ruled out “daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on”.
(The Guardian: Warren Beatty’s Sexual Conquests)
(Update: Apparently Warren Beatty debunked this.)
“Magic: The Gathering” was a popular teenage contraceptive device in the 1990s. Unfortunately, despite its pronounced effect in curbing premarital sex, it led its frustrated users directly to the occult. This edit of an instructional video demonstrates its use.
U.S. growth prospects deemed bleak in new decade. A dismal job market, a crippled real estate sector and hobbled banks will keep a lid on U.S. economic growth over the coming decade, some of the nation’s leading economists said on Sunday.
And by leading economists, they mean Joseph Stiglitz, he of the Nobel prize, and people of that rarefied caliber. Here, have some more:
Many predicted U.S. gross domestic product would expand less than 2 percent per year over the next 10 years. That stands in sharp contrast to the immediate aftermath of other steep economic downturns, which have usually elicited a growth surge in their wake.
“It will be difficult to have a robust recovery while housing and commercial real estate are depressed,” said Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University professor and former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Housing was at the heart of the nation’s worst recession since the 1930s, with median home values falling over 30 percent from their 2005 peaks, and even more sharply in heavily affected states like California and Nevada.
The decline has sapped a principal source of wealth for U.S. consumers, whose spending is the key driver of the country’s growth pattern. The steep drop in home prices has also boosted their propensity to save.
“It’s very hard to see what will replace it,” said Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Columbia University. “It’s going to take a number of years.”
And blah, blah, fucking blah. I’ve read so many articles on America’s decline in the past three years that I’m getting bored to tears with them. I think this will be my last post on the economy for some time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as convinced as the next guy that everything is in a hell of a mess, believe you me. I’m just sick and tired of reading about it. How many different ways can the media parse the main event: things suck, “the system” has run out of gas and it’s likely to stay that way for a long, long time unless something unforeseen happens.
And like what? What would prompt economic growth in America today? See any likely industrial contenders? Ones that none of the rest of us have heard of?
But I’m done with it. I get it and I am over it. I want to start reading reading about what we’re going to DO about it. I mean how will we live? This is what the next conversation needs to be about. While capitalism isn’t exactly finito yet, it’s running on fumes and anyone with half a brain can see that it will be a greatly diminished capitalism moving forward, with the world’s largest economy, run as it is on consumer spending, rampant, unbridled debt and obese greed, now a reluctant mare, unable to drag the rest of the world behind it. Maybe for good this time. We don’t know yet.
And when I read about how the “new” Republican party and these knucklehead teabaggers clamoring for a return to the ideological conservative purity of the Reagan era where all it took was a whopping good tax cut to to right all of our wrongs, I gotta say it, these people seem as dumb as shit to me. Are they living in the same country that the rest of us are living in?
It’s about time America turns off the FOX News and gets used to the idea of Socialism and get used to the idea quickly. Because we can all agree to agree on something—like we’rel doomed—and get organized—fast—or people are going to get hurt, and go hungry and lack health care. How much longer can the government wait before they start to at least make plans to make plans about all these stubbornly unemployed people?!?!
Here is a handful of articles from recent weeks that are coming at it from different angles, but they all agree that things suck and we better get used to it:
U.S. growth prospects deemed bleak in new decade (Reuters)
A Decade of Self-Delusion (Pat Buchanan writing in Human Events)
An Empire at Risk: How Economic Weakness Endangers the U.S. and The U.S.-China Economic Partnership is Through (both by Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek)
So there you have it. Case closed. Happy New Decade and probably at least part of the one beyond that barring some sort of unexpected miracle.
What are we going to do next? How are we going to live? This is what we need to be asking each other.
Talk amongst yourselves. And play nice.
David Tennant’s tenure as The Doctor has ended and now Matt Smith’s has begun.
Via Minds Delight