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Archive for the ‘Robin Thicke’ Category

Rina Ayuyang–Whirlwind Wonderland (2009)

Posted in "Weird Al" Yankovic, Football, Funny (ha ha), Gangsters, Graphic Novel, Parenting, Prince, Rina Ayuyang, Robin Thicke, Short Books on July 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »

whirliSOUNDTRACK: “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC-“Word Crimes” (2014)

wordcrimesRobin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was another super catchy and ubiquitous track from recent days (content notwithstanding).  Dozens of parodies have been made of it already (many of them mocking the terribly sexist nature of the song), so what is Al to do?  He goes for a personal pet peeve: bad grammar!

And he makes one of my favorite songs in years.  My goodness there’s some great lines in this song.  (B,C,R,U are words not letters; You should never write words with numbers, unless you’re 7. Or Prince).

This video is an animation which is very text heavy.  Typically I don’t care for this type of animation, but there’s so much going on, it’s really funny, both lyrically and visually.  This is one of my favorite Al songs of all time.

[READ: July 1, 2014] Whirlwind Wonderland

I’m continuing this recent spate of new and unheard of comics with Whirlwind Wonderland by Rina Ayuyang.  Ayuyang is from Pittsburgh and is of Filipino descent.  This piece of information informs some of the story-telling in interesting ways

Most of these stories are brief pieces that she wrote from 2001-2009 for with names like SPX 2005, A Girls Guide to Guys Stuff, Stripburger, #43 Do You Like TV? and issues of Namby Pamby.

There are too many single stories to try to explicate here, but some of the larger ones can be explored.  Like “Here and There” which talks about her childhood growing up in  town where it was obvious that they came from “Someplace Else.”  So she didn’t let her friends come over to see all of their weird cultural artifacts (until she finds out that her mom bought them from a local thrift store). (more…)

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Five Dials Number 30: A Stranger Again: The Camus Issue (16 December 2013)

Posted in Abba, Adele, Albert Camus, Biography, Books about writers, Carly Rae Jepsen, Cars, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Curtis Gillespie, Death, Deborah Levy, Essays, Fears, Five Dials, J.G. Ballard, Lorde, Psy, Robin Thicke, The Village People, Violence, Ylvis on December 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

fivedials_no30SOUNDTRACK: Random songs at the roller rink (December 29, 2013)

skateWe went rollerskating on Sunday and they played all kinds of pop hits.  They played “Dancing Queen” and “YMCA,” sure, but they also played a lot of recent big hits.  And I said to myself either I have grown more tolerant of pop songs or pop songs are simply better than they were in the 80s and 90s.

Because I thoroughly enjoyed hearing “Gangnam Style” (perhaps a pop song where you don’t know the words is really the way to go) and “What Does the Fox Say?” (or perhaps when the words are so preposterous).  “Blurred Lines” is incredibly catchy (although it would be better without the offensive lyrics).  I also enjoyed “Call Me Maybe” which is treacly sure, but the melody is super catchy and “Rolling in the Deep” because Adele kicks ass.

Of course when I looked at the list of #1 hits for 2013, I literally didn’t know any of them (except “Blurred Lines” and “Royals,”) so maybe pop is not what I think it is.  Maybe I just like YouTube sensations.

Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!  Happy New Year.

[READ: December 27, 2013] Five Dials #30

I was surprised to get this issue of Five Dials just as I was reading the other recent ones.  It allowed me to finish up Five Dials and the year at around the same time.  This issue introduces a new graphics editor: Antonio de Luca and he really changes the look of the magazine.  (He also used to work for The Walrus).  Rather than pictures being centered in the page, they spread from one page to another (which works well online but less so if you print it out).  The illustrations are also much bolder.

This is a short issue (which I appreciated).  And it does what I especially like about Five Dials–focusing tightly on one thing, in this case Albert Camus, who I like but who I have not read much.  It’s his centenary and many things have been said about him, so what else is there to say?  They find two things worth saying.

CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On Tony, On Dean, On Camus, On Algiers
Taylor talks about the illustrations of the issue–they were spray painted on walls by an Algerian-French collective known as the Zoo Project.  The new editor took photos and then Photoshopped away the extraneous stuff to leave us with just the graphics–giving them a permanence that they would normally not have.  Taylor also says goodbye to Dean Allen, the outgoing art director.  Then he gets to the heart of this issue: Albert Camus and Algiers (where Camus is from).  Curtis Gillespie decided to go to Algiers to find out how much the people there know and love Camus (and he found it to be a much more difficult trip than he imagined). (more…)

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Craig Davidson–“Firebugs” (The Walrus, June 2013)

Posted in Canadian Content, Craig Davidson, Death, Fire, Mystery, Robin Thicke, Short Story, The Walrus, Vampire Weekend on July 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

june 2013SOUNDTRACK: VAMPIRE WEEKEND-“Blurred Lines” (2013).

vampblurRobin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is a huge hit (with a NSFW video).  And I gotta say that I find it insanely catchy, too.  It’s pretty irresistible.  So why not cover it?

Vampire Weekend’s new album is less formal than their first two–relaxing styles and adding a bunch more humor to their sound.  And they make a surprisingly good cover of this song.  Their version is quite faithful to the original (even mimicking the sound a lot).  But at the same time, the band is having a lot of fun with the song as you can tell primarily from the backing vocals.

You can tell hear it’s Vampire Weekend, but it also doesn’t quite sound like them–a neat trick.

Check out their cover (which is not a live concert track, but was recorded for BBC’s Live Lounge (so it sounds good)) at Stereogum.

[READ: July 15, 2013] “Firebugs”

This was, I think, the longest story I’ve seen published in The Walrus.

It begins with several paragraphs describing fire–physical, psychological, intense descriptions.  Since I didn’t realize the story was so long, I actually wondered if the whole story would be like that–if there were going to be no characters in it.  But there are, and quite a few.  And the story is focused on two of them.

Blake Kennedy Jr was a firebug as a kid.  Then he became a fireman (seems this is not so uncommon of a history for firemen and may stem from the desire to control fire).  After many good years, he was injured during training and had to get a desk job. Now he investigates suspicious fires.  Perhaps coincidentally, there was a rash of arson during the year he was born.  Those fires were technologically set–the arsonist used the spark from a telephone to ignite a can of gasoline. Of course, the killer would place the call when he was far enough away.  And he was never found.

This year’s arsonist’s is much more simple–a milk jug of gasoline with a homemade wick left on the front porch.  It is a slow burn, with the gasoline not exploding.  It’s actually the fumes that catch fire, not the liquid.  So, when the wick burns down, the whole thing doesn’t ignite until the milk jug melts and the gas spills out.

Blake is investigating the death of Detta, an older woman who tried to run out during the fire (the state of her feet must have been incredible, he determined). (more…)

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Caleb Crain–”Outside T-Club” (Harper’s, July 2013)

Posted in Caleb Crain, Drinking, Excerpt, Harper's, Jenny Hval, Justin Timberlake, LGBTQ, Robin Thicke, Rockettothesky, Travel on July 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

julySOUNDTRACK: JENNY HVAL-“Innocence is Sexy” (2013).

hvalI saw this video on Stereogum.  I was actually intrigued by her last name: Hval.  Then I read a bit more about her–she’s an experimental Norwegian singer with four albums out (two under the name Rockettothesky).

I watched the video and was so mesmerized by it that I didn’t even really notice the music the first time through.  In the video, Jenny has her body filmed in all manner of unexpected angles and poses–she is shaving parts of her body, strategically positioning other parts of her body.  And pressing and squeezing her flesh in ways that are not often shown.  She is also jogging (both in a jogging outfit and in a dress–the juxtaposition is fascinating.  And then there’s the dress that appears to be made of latex.  At a time when men (Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke) are making videos of naked women, Jenny makes us question what we see and why.  It’s very cool.

It’s also interesting musically.  The first words of the song are: “That night I watched people fucking on my computer.”  The song has an interesting guitar riff playing behind her spoken words until she starts singing with a vaguely operatic Middle Eastern tonality.  After a more mellow verse, Jenny ends a with a fascinating little scale of notes.

The same confrontational style of singing occurs at the end when the music stops and she keeps singing “in and out and in and out” in a less then pleasing manner.

As I say I am fascinated by her.  Although I can’t help but wonder if this would be a case of more exposure being less satisfying.

[READ: July 11, 2013] ”Outside T-Club”

In this story, which an excerpt from a novel called Necessary Errors the narrator, Jacob, pulled out some significant pages about Eastern Europe from a travel guide. He hid the rest of the book in the garbage, keeping only the pages on gay life in Czechoslovakia.

He was living in Boston, but was heading to Prague.  This was after his boyfriend moved away to start a new job for a men’s magazine.  He had sent Jacob a postcard which tried to make it seem like Jacob would be on a  fun adventure, and he imagined Jacob hooking up with a tall dark Russian guy.

Turned out Czech men were neither tall nor dark. (more…)

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