What The Balls? - this isn't some kind of metaphor, god damn this is real! ----------------------------------- ****Also check out mediawave.blogspot.com
This is the best trailer for the best movie show that I've never seen. No one's seen it. But look, it's already amazing.
"Sammy Davis Jr. as Educated"
If you're interested, here is the first part of Johnny Cool with the theme song.
It's appropriately the best theme song ever. The rest of the episode is in Spanish, but just watch the theme song. Here are the lyrics to the theme song:
Here's the story of Johnny Cool, it tells the tale of his life they say Johnny was meant to be, and content to be, mixed up in sorrow and strife he lived by the gun and by the knife (Johnny Cool! Johnny Cool!) if you were friendly to Johnny Cool you were just playing the fool they say Johnny was friend to none, friend to only one he went by this simple rule, that his only friend was Johnny Cool (Johnny Cool! Johnny Cool!) because he thought life had abused him he went on a murderous fling but he didn't know that they used him, like any old puppet on a string love never mattered to Johnny Cool, each doll to him was the same till one babe blinked her eyes at him, sighed some sighs at him his icy heart turned to flame and Johnny was never quite the same (Johnny Cool! Johnny Cool!)
I know what you're thinking, it reads a lot like my own biography. The similarities are astounding, I'll admit.
Jobs - -Ballet Dancer and Sumo Wrestler needed -Sober Actors Needed -Copywriter who chooses "Dare," every time.
Barter - -huge collection of xxx vhs tapes description: about a regular draw string trash bag full what do you have to trade Missed Connections - -We live in the same apartment complex - m4m - 35 (this one i found strange because it would seem more likely that he'd run into her again at his apartment than her respond to a craigs list missed connection ad. and even if she did see it, that could be a deal breaker on its own). -You went to CVS tonight "You were walking with a CVS bag tonight...down Columbus onto Clarendon then Tremont...yeah i guess i was stalking you..hehe...nice ass..."
PS - i have a pretty awesome new myspace profile layout.
"The Armed Wing of Alethinos" wants to be my friend. And yet, deep in my heart, I know I'm not cool enough or dark enough to be his friend.
he's awesome. presumably that is satan in the painting behind him. and a sacrificial skull in his hand, that my deductive skills tell me he is going to use to go after hours death-bowling with later. so morbid.
So I haven't rapped much with the 905 Crew in a while, but I thought I'd post this most recent set of lyrics for you peoples who be cravin the flava. I had been trying to come up with a rap name to no avail, until I arrived at Labias Corpus, which i think is preeeettty bad ass. Don't ask me what it means. There will be many more names, but that one made it into the song.
Unfortunately, you should really be hearing the actual song, because the beat is incredible (or unbelievable, as you'll read). I'll post that when it's done. The beat was taken from - brace yourself for the best sample EVER - a part of the last episode of Gossip Girl. If you're like me, you don't watch that show, but you can check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJqE5xtu0OE
At the very end, the girl says "I killed someone" as a shocking reveal cliffhanger or something, and then this weird, crazy beat comes in right after. Our producer and 1 rap star Kenny took that and basically looped it. Simple. Genius. He normally makes his own phat beats, but just taking the line plus the music is perfect as it is. Listen to the clip and imagine how awesome that is.
Anyway, enjoy these songless lyrics. Most of us tried to have our rap centered around killing, murdering, and cool shit like that, as it is appropriate to the beat.
I'm rockin like a glock n spittin bullets like rhymes but murder is the smallest on my long list of crimes I got battery and robbery and larceny too but adultery is a favorite of the 905 Crew Like this one girl at a party, she asked my name I said my mom calls me Jordan, but you can call me insane cause when I'm done with your body they'll need someone to blame and I'd like to meet your husband so there's someone to frame
How many times can I rock it and for how many straight days? Like James Woods I rock The Hard Way I stalk in the night like a low riding vampire call me Lewis Carroll as I gymble and I gyre
The girlies like my style, they like my fly Adidas this beat is unbelievable, you just won't believe us Bryan Condon's at my side and the girls wanna please us cause we're bigger than the Beatles being bigger than Jesus
I wanna take a little second to set the record straight cause it's been scratchin' like a fork across my empty dinner plate I'm not here to talk it out, I don't wanna complain to ya Cause I'm wiser than potato chips and older than Wrestlemania
My name's Labias Corpus, I been arrested 7 times 1 count of stone cold murder, 6 counts of killer rhymes.
copyright 2008, boyee
PS the line "we're bigger than The Beatles being bigger than Jesus" is from my man Bryan Condon, another 905 rapper. Unless he stole it - er, sampled it - from somewhere else. PPS I realize that murder is the biggest of all the crimes listed as bigger. But you know how I do.
Sometimes I like to jam on instruments I can't play with my roommates who can sing and play instruments to some degree. sometimes it turns out awesome. we did a bunch of experiments and jam seshes, and then meticulously edited some stuff together to make the brilliance you're about to experience. at least, I think it's awesome. We couldn't decide if we wanted to make it funny or something actually listenable, so we settled somewhere in between. at least we made it sexy.
... sorry for wasting your time. maybe a rap video will be posted next time.
Warning: this will be what could be considered a feminist rant. If me going on this rant is surprising to you, well, then, brace yourself. You might want to skip this one. I will only be touching the very tip of an iceberg here, but here we go...
I was set off on what is known as the Feminine Quotient in a recent look into Vanity Fair's publication of the controversial article "Why Women Aren't Funny" and then their follow up pro-woman response, "Who Says Women Aren't Funny". It wasn't so much these articles that made me think about so-called "femininity", but rather the pictures included in the "pro-woman" response. I am extremely bothered by the deeply ingrained tradition of gender role stereotyping that still goes on, and it happens more than I ever noticed before with comedy. There's nothing inherently wrong with this picture, except that it seems to be attempting, or suggesting a hint of an attempt at some kind of irony, but fails. Perhaps it fails only in the very serious context of the article. And if it wasn't even hinting at it, it should've been. Or maybe it was ironic, and I didn't get it. I'm not sure. The point being that as a man (in comedy, whether that's relevant or not) I find it troubling that even in an article that attempts to breakdown the widely held misconception that women are stereotypes, in terms of comedy or otherwise, there can't be a picture of trailblazing, stereotype-breaking female comedians that doesn't feature them in stereotypically objectifying gendered costumes, holding sexy poses and vapid faces, with typical signifiers for trivial materialistic vanity and sex appeal that saturates every picture of women that we seem to have. Maybe it's a purposeful statement playing on the Paris Hilton-types, the video girls, the media portrayal, etc. I'd be the first one to assume that this was a clever ironic statement made about those very issues, but I'm not sure. Not in Vanity Fair. But even if it is an ironic statement, is it effective? Or does it just reinforce stereotypes? It used to be that for a woman to be accepted as funny she had to be fat, ugly or gay. Now it's finally being accepted, even embraced, that "beautiful", or traditionally attractive women can also be funny, but the problem is that they can never just be funny, they have to also be beautiful - or rather, they have to be funny BUT beautiful. It remains, then, that their talent is trivialized to a concern first and foremost with their appearance. It reminds me of Esquire's common "Funny Jokes From Beautiful Women", which plays into the idea that such a thing is noteworthy because of how rare it is that a woman could possibly be both funny and beautiful. I realize that Esquire is a "men's magazine" while Vanity Fair is more of a culture magazine, but it's all the same in the end. I think Vanity Fair is giving off the very same impression.
Anyway, that's just the tip of the women in comedy iceberg. As for the Feminine Quotient, I saw a news item that I was able to connect with this issue of women needing to also be beautiful to be recognized and legitimized, and they both came to my attention as I was reading Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" in a particular chapter about this very thing happening... 60 years ago.
During World War II, "as women responded and undertook men's higher-paid work, a new sense of competence and confidence emboldened them. At the same time... advertisements 'attempted to preserve the socially acceptable feminine image of women war workers.' A Pond's cold cream ad of the time read: 'we like to feel we look feminine even though we are doing a man-sized job... so we tuck flowers and ribbons in our hair and try to keep our faces looking pretty as you please.' A cosmetics company's advertisement... admitted that while the war could not be won by lipstick, 'it symbolized one of the reasons why we are fighting... the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely.' " Magazine articles also "focused the ladies' attention on the need to keep their FQ (Feminine Quotient) high."
Now, this seems ridiculous to me. The statement that we're fighting for the "PRECIOUS" right (!) of women to be feminine and "LOVELY" is like a joke, a satire. But it is very real, and it speaks to the idea that if women do anything that isn't typically "feminine" (whatever that means - and for the record, I don't think it really means anything, and whatever meaning is assumed by it comes from socially constructed gender norms), they must increase their level of femininity - their feminine quotient - in order to compensate. In other words, the equivalent of saying "no homo".
Now here is a news item that I stole from feministing.com that is almost a perfect copy of this 1940s idea in today's treatment of women.
The WNBA has taken to giving their athletes make-overs in order to boost ticket sales:
"As part of the rookies' orientation into life as professional athletes, the WNBA for the first time offered them hour-long courses on makeup and fashion tips.
Susan Ziegler, a Cleveland State professor of sports psychology, said disparity in wages and media coverage between male and female athletes, along with a battle against perceived negative stereotypes, are factors in marketing female sports figures for their physicality rather than their athletic assets. Ziegler has done extensive research on female athletes being sexualized through the media. Even with something as common as applying lipstick, promoting physical appeal can take away from the athletes' legitimacy, she says.
"Once you begin to worry about how the person looks as opposed to how she plays, you've crossed the line into dangerous play," Ziegler said. "We're not really focused on marketing them as athletes but as feminine objects."
Renee Brown, the WNBA's vice president of player personnel, said the league aims to show its players as "mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces and entrepreneurs" and their "womanhood" is important to promote the league.
"You're a woman first," Brown said. "You just happen to play sports. They enjoy dressing up and trying on outfits, where back in the day, everyone just wore sweats.
"Call it what you want. We're just CELEBRATING THEIR WOMANHOOD."
"I find it interesting that a lot of players do not even know how to apply mascara," Brown said. "I think as they get into it, they love it. I don't think we can run from the fact that they're women. They're so much more than basketball players."
I find it interesting that she said "WE are just celebrating THEIR womanhood", not that THEY are celebrating THEIR womanhood.
So they weren't women before when they were just ball players who didn't know or care about wearing make-up, but like some kind of primitive culture "introduced" to civilization by imperialism, they seem to get used to it once it's forced. Just like the women who worked men's jobs during wartime, who had a newfound sense of pride in the value of their ability and work, they are being degraded and belittled as sexual objects with the primary importance and focus placed on their appearance and how attractive they are by traditional standards. Same goes for comedy. Same goes for anything. A woman can still not just be a person who is good at something. She must be a WOMAN who is (then unbelievably) good at something AND/BUT also beautiful. This is nothing knew. I apologize to anyone versed in even remedial feminist history or theory (like myself) if this is just an outrage 20 years too late. But for those that aren't - think about it. Women are locked in the beauty stereotype in ways that won't be broken for decades to come, if ever. What are the biggest days in a girls life(aside from giving birth)? Typically a girl dreams of Prom, and then Marriage. What is the first, and sometimes only compliment a girl receives? "You look beautiful," "she's a lovely girl," "she'll grow up to be so beautiful," "she looks so beautiful - it's her day to be beautiful, to be a princess." If other compliments follow, like ones about her intelligence, it's almost always qualified - "she's a bright, beautiful girl". I could go on and start quoting a survey of feminist authors on this, but I will spare you, because I'd only be doing it for myself.
I am not questioning or discrediting women who enjoy "dressing up" and wearing make up, nor do I doubt that some of, if not many of the WNBA players enjoy their so-called expression of womanhood. Perhaps the constraits of athletics even restrained them from expressing what they feel is their "femininity" before this new make-over program was introduced, I don't know. All I'm trying to address here is the cultural gender issues we have, even still, and how disturbingly similar they are to a time when there was no equality in the sexes at all and sexism was loud and proud, when sexism, like racism, wasn't so much a bad thing but an accurate way to describe the general opinion of the country. The more "masculine" her activity, the less traditionally female the thing that generates her self-worth, the higher her Feminine Quotient needs to be for her to be accepted in the mass culture. It's really sad to me that the advertising manipulation of the 1940s is so directly parallel in 2008, when so many advancements have been made. There is so much further to go, and the saddest thing is that most people have no idea. Sexism is the most subtle, least reflected upon and most acceptable form of discrimination and objectification in America.*
*That statement is debatable, but I'll say it anyway.
"I wanna do it cause it's fun. It's fun to do bad things... I wanted to do hood rat stuff for my friend"
can you blame him? that sounds like fun. it sounds like stuff i do while playing Grand Theft Auto. Maybe he's right, maybe he shouldn't be allowed to play video games for a whole weekend.
i really hope someone samples this clip in a song. "my friend come in, and he smokes with cigarettes" "i yanked it, i yanked it, i yanked the thing"
and i love how he did it cause he was mad at his mom, so he stole his grandma's car to punish his mom, and then in the end he's still mad at his mom and wants her to help pay for the damage.
I’m a semi-finalist in a national stand-up college competition.
It’s been a long hard road to get through one round, but here I am! First I want to thank Jesus, and then God, in that order, then my mama, then my baby mama, then my baby mama mama for makin an ass like that...
So yea, there’s a website called rooftopcomedy.com that is sponsoring a nation wide college comedy competition. It’s the Rooftopcomedy.com College Comedy Competition, or the RoToCoCoCoCoCo.
32 schools are chosen, and the first round the students compete for a place among 8 winners who then move on to the next round, then that school goes on to BATTLE another school’s 8 person "team", and from there only 1 out of 16 people wins and gets flown to Aspen, CO for mo’ money and, unfortunately, mo’ problems. And maybe mo’ bitches. Maybe also Mo’Nique, if we’re lucky. (So, it’s a RoToCoCoCoCoCo to get to CO for MoMoMoMo)
So now that I, in technical terms, totally powned at the Emerson round, I’ll be performing with Emerson against Brown, that school that recently got a 2.8 billion dollar endowment - I’ve got a 8.5 endowment for them right here! (In this case, I’m using the word "endowment" to mean both money provided to a school, and the size of my genitals for comic effect). Zing! I think I’m ready.
The competition is decided by a mix of votes from qualified judges and severely unqualified audience members. The judges votes count for more than the audience to make up the difference, but audience vote still plays a big role in it. One of the problems with Emerson having a tight knit comedy community is that my "fans" at the school are also the fans of the 7 other semi-finalists, and probably have loyalty to other people who have treated them like human beings over the last 2 years rather than immature queer street trash like I tend to treat everyone here.
In other words If anyone can make it up to Boston on TUESDAY (i know, esh) APRIL 8th at the Comedy Connection to support me in this competition that could be my ticket outta this queer factory of homos and into Hollywood!, that’d be awesome.
Let me know if you can, or even if you can’t or won’t, but still want to boost my ego by telling me I’ll definitely win even without friends in the audience.
So I was in Brooks Pharmacy and witnessed what I think is the funniest and saddest conversation that two co-workers could have, in the most perfect way. There were two women working, one at the register on one side of the store and one at the photo developing station on the other side of the room. They force conversation despite the distance.
Woman 1: So, Pam, how was your weekend? Woman 2: Same. Woman 1: Same old stuff, hm? Woman 2: Yep. It never changes ever, Donna. Woman 1: Huh? Who? Woman 2: Oh... sorry, Melanie.
I spent a lot of my time this weekend while at home at Starbucks because it somehow is the only place in Fairfield where I like doing work. The primary reason for not going to a hipper indie place like Las Vetas is because it’s constantly overrun by screaming, overconfident, endlessly annoying pre-teens and teens. Little did I realize, but really should have known, that Starbucks, being the hub for douchebags, would attract just as many undesirable study buddies. But I digress.
A few kids, after stomping their way up the stairs to the lounge section, and stomping their way through the lounge section, sat down in the area closest to me, continued stomping their feet while sitting down, until one kid said, "I wanna have sex in Starbucks!!" He said it in the kind of way that young teens always say stuff about sex, without acknowledgment that there should be any reason a square, adult onlooker would think it both improbable and immature that a young boy would be blurting things out about sex, and completely unaware that his overcompensating amount of effort to impress was painfully obvious. It was great because it seems to me to imply that he makes lists of places, public places that he would, as a 12-16 year old (it’s hard to tell), like to have sex. And it also implies that he’s had sex, that he has sex, and is experienced enough to need a fresh new location for a change of pace. I heard this, because he said it very loudly because he wanted it to be heard because he is overconfident in how mature and how funny he thinks he is, and I immediately took my headphones off to hear the rest of what they were going to say. Then one kid (who I recognize) said softly to his friends "that guy works at Media Wave!" and they stopped talking about sex and continued stomping their feet.
Also, the woman across from me was reading something from a book to her friend, and came across the word "dubious", and said "Dubious? What the hell is that?" her friend shrugged, and the woman looked in the back of the book for, I guess, a glossary. Then she said "it doesn’t say. Dubious. I don’t know. What the hell is that?"
now, I often don’t know the meaning of words, but it was the looking for a definition or a glossary, (assuming the word was so obscure it would require definition for enough people to need a glossary, or that a book such as the one she was reading would have a glossary at all,) that really got me.
Move over, R Kelly's Real Talk. We finally have the female side of the battle, articulated with the craft and precision expected from someone named Riskay
What The Balls? - this isn't some kind of metaphor, god damn this is real! ----------------------------------- ****Also check out mediawave.blogspot.com
