#history

The song #Selfie by The Chainsmokers is the new Valley Girl.

 

That is all... 

 

Wait - Let me take a selfie.

 

 

Fear In the Unknown: Obscure Costume 2012

This Halloween was more awkward than usual. October 31st hasn't happened yet, but I'm calling it. Wednesday is a bad day for Halloween because if you're an adult and want to go to parties, they have to be held the weekend before. This means Halloween lasts nearly a week. It sounds good in theory, but the holiday starts with a bang and ends lack luster. To make things worse, we've got some severe weather with hurricane Sandy. The 31st might consist of cleaning up debris, not trick-or-treating.Thankfully the weekend was spared, that is if you weren't pre-panicking and sandbagging yourself in / your party guests out.

It was hard to not look Photoshopped.

Making things more delightfully awkward,
I wore another obscure costume this year. Despite knowing well that my costume would be lost on people for so many reasons, I make a costume based on my blog post about Ben Cooper Costumes. With inspiration from Brandon Bird's painting
 I Am The Night, I wanted to play on the idea that Ben Cooper seemingly made costumes for every imaginable character, however, all still within the scale of mainstream popularity. What would happen if his costumes still dared to be sold in stores? What characters would the company acknowledge for more modern TV series or movies? I chose to honor one of my favorite TV series Twin Peaks, and "dress" as the tragic Laura Palmer.

I used a plastic trash bag, with printed window decals that I designed in Photoshop. I tried to be as cheesy and literal as possible. But I could not for the life of me find a crappy generic mask anywhere! Standards are just too high these days. I wanted to wear a plain blond girl mask, a la Ben Cooper, but last minute I had to craft my own creepy and realistic Laura Palmer mask out of a photo. At least then I was more recognizable -- to those who even knew what Twin Peaks was. And if they did know Twin Peaks, they didn't necessarily know that Ben Cooper costumes existed. Explaining this was a chore and most people were too trashed to understand. I would try and start by explaining my costume was supposed to be bad, but sympathetic drunk girls would interject "No! No! It's ... nice." The pity imposed on me was neutralized by my prowess for obscure TV shows. The jokes on them! ha...
But like I said last year:

"Halloween is about enjoying yourself and being someone different for a night. It doesn't really matter if people know what my character is, I just know it will still creep people out. And it's not me, so that's step one of having a great costume."

One certain victory for this Halloween was my jello shot display. Last year I tried to make these awesome eye balls from Jelly Shot Test Kitchen, however, I didn't have the skillz then, and they weren't worth documenting. Learning from my mistakes, I used most of this  My Jello Americans recipe for the whites, added raspberry sauce for the bloodshot-ness, and mini M&Ms for the pupils.

Coconut Rum Eyeballs with Raspberry and Mini Brown M&Ms

My second batch was based on this neat Halloween science trick you can see on My Jello Americans here, and Jelly Shot Test Kitchen here. The Quinine in tonic water glows blue under a black light! I was also inspired by the use of pop rocks in this MJA post. I think my jello was too wet for the pop rocks to stick to the top as intended, but they added a nice sweetness to the tangy vodka tonic.

Vodka Tonic Radioactive Tubs with Pop Rocks.

All in all, despite the awkward set up, Halloween 2012 was a good one.
Happy Halloween!

Welcome Humans

Obviously people just do random things to each other. If they're lucky the action sticks, grows in popularity and becomes a trend - and not a really awkward moment they will never live down. A simple explanation like that can be the only answer to why passing a newborn baby through a rind of cheese was ever popular.

photo courtesy of buzzfeed.com

According to the Encyclopedia of Superstitions, during the middle ages women would make a "groaning cheese" upon becoming pregnant, which would age for 9 months. Once the baby was born, the family and friends of the mother would eat the wheel of cheese, leaving a rind behind at the time of Christening. On the Christening day, the baby would be passed through the rind of the cheese.

The encyclopedia of Superstitions could not answer why it was called a groaning cheese, and like most odd trends from that long ago, it is explained people thought it would bring good luck, (obvi) but did not further explain why they would believe such a silly thing. You know, prosperity, and wealth, and good health, and good... just good things, all the good things. Stuff the Christening didn't cover.

On that fateful first day the baby could have been passed through anything. I'm thinking watermelon rind, ribcage of a pig, dunked in a wine barrel, large hollowed out loaf of bread; any and all of the major food groups. Maybe somewhere else other foods were experimented with, but the cheese just stuck, and a ridiculous tradition gained some respect for a while.

I swear someone's uncle must have gotten really drunk and thought it would be funny to put the baby in the empty cheese rind after the party. To save embarrassment the family insisted to friends it was an important ritual. Then everyone else wanted to be cool.

Or maybe it was some kind of Pinterest-esq idea a woman had. Just the simple thought of a common denominator between things (9 months in this case), and you got an adorable rustic foodie craft project.

Nowadays she would have made a post explaining how she can make this cheese that takes 9 months to age, and omg how perfect is it that the pregnancy will be just as long! There would be a compelling time-lapse video of her belly growing and the cheese doing it's cheese thing. It would end with an Instagram shot of her and her wax moustachioed husband passing the baby through the cheese as everyone laughs and drinks cocktails out of mason jars.
Then everyone else wanted to be cool.

I'm going to Pin this photo on to a board titled "Newborn Craft Ideas"

Also people just do weird stuff to their kids. This photo above is not of a frozen fetus, though it is a sculpture of one. This is a recent development in pre-birth keepsakes. It's called "Shape of an Angel": you simply have an MRI, and a company in Japan will make a life-sized 3D resin print of your womb and fetus. By the way, I never knew the womb was that angular.
Do I wish my parents had the technology to do this for my birth? Yes. It is creepy, however, ultrasound photos are always pretty grainy, and all babies look the same right when they come out, so your first photo is relatively unremarkable. This though, is a completely accurate copy of yourself at a time you definitely wont remember, your parents otherwise could never envision, and therefore need to commemorate in the most vivid way possible. Right now it costs over $1000 to do, but this could possibly catch on and be just another bizarre tradition in welcoming new humans into this world.

Insert Animal, Insert Verb, I Swoon.

Hi-larious photographic viewdinggles of cats from the 1900s

Have you ever seen films and photos from the turn of the 20th century and scoffed at how simple-minded people must have been? Some stereoscopes of cats dressed in people clothes... hours of fun right? Pfft! What would you do, just look at a still photo and laugh to yourself or with friends, and just move onto the next image? What's that about? I bet after the ego stroking remarks you make, you almost feel like their innocence should be revered and respected, because feeling such hubris about your own young mind can only lead to some kind of big gotcha-moment in the near future where our brains melt from all the stimulation, and the ghosts of the past smirk at us beyond the grave, and then we feel so embarrassed...

Well, at the turn of the 21st century, with the progression of the world wide web, decades of Oscar-winning films, and the mores of comedy changing and advancing all the time, some of the most popular and enjoyable videos available are no more intricate or thought provoking than those of the previous century.

10 Pugs Who Look Like Things

Lately I've found myself on Buzzfeed.com at least five times a day. It's really too captivating.  The site is full of very quick, silly, insightful, bits of news and observations, owing much of their material to photos and videos of cute animals. While they have a section of their site dedicated to the squeezy-fuzzyuzums, those images sneak their way into most categories of news and information (much to my delight).

Time to time, as I watch a 5 minute long video of a duck chewing on grass, giggling like a 1 year old with keys dangling in front of them, I will remember my favorite movies: Magnolia, Rushmore, Blue Velvet. I do have a refined palate!  Don't I?

Why am I so enthralled with animals doing such banal things? Take for example the video below, Hamlet the Mini Pig - Goes Down the Stairs. On the very surface, this is a pig walking down the stairs. The dramatic theme is Hamlet's hunger (for that oatmeal) which drives him to defy all odds and go down the stairs. The nuts and bolts of this film, really, is a pig walking down the stairs.
It is one of the best things I have ever seen and it has over 1 million hits on YouTube.



If you liked that, then Baby Turtle eating a raspberry is for you. (Or the more risque, but equally endearing, Tortoise Having Sex With a Shoe, Squeaking).


What it comes down to is, amid all the fast-paced music videos and plot-twisting feature films, it is a timeless fact that humans want to relate to animals. We enjoy seeing animals do things that remind us of ourselves. We can't know what animals are thinking, so when they do something silly, we appreciate the moment as a fluke. That's why I can watch a pig attempt to walk down the stairs for a solid minute. Watching a tiny animal struggle to adapt to a household object humans have mastered is cute. It's cute because the animal has it's situational short-comings, which reminds us of our differences, but their determination is something we both share.
 It warms a place in everyone's heart to see animals living life and trying new things, not just hanging around like a lump. I could sit on my ass and watch that for hours.

Stand in the New Style

Remember when you could see something like this and not think anything of it? It was the 90s and it was all we knew. It may have even been considered cool. Looking to the future is what we always hope to do, but honestly, when you live in the present you think about it as the pinnacle of your time. This can be said of any decade and generation, but as someone born in the late 1980s, the 90s was the beginning of my reality.

It's no doubt Kids in the Hall were very aware of the ridiculous nature of the - then current - 90s style, and they made a cunning parody of it. However, when we lived the 1990s (or during anytime - even presently) you have to admit, it was difficult to imagine how life would ever be different in the future. We were at the top of our game as far as we were concerned. If the future would lead to differences in our culture it could only logically move from plaid shirts and scrunchies right to silver clothes and flying cars.   

circa 1997

Well... I guess we got some of that prediction right.

Of course we are 12 years deep into the 21st century, and it's pretty much just now-ish that I'm stepping back and looking at the 1990s, thinking, "Really? I can't believe I wore that." or "I can't believe we thought that was cool." In the early 2010s the 1990s have come back into fashion, in clothing at least. I have a feeling we're not going to see the 90s style in design and media come back en vogue for a little while longer.

It's really easy to ridicule the past. Hind sight is 20/20 right? Making fun of current cultural norms takes objectivity and an ability to step back and not take yourself too seriously. For instance, check out this music video Chris Rock made in 1997. He unabashedly pokes fun at rap and R&B from that era. He nails the excess, the money, the Lil' Kim inspired wigs, the trash bag outfit Missy Elliott wore in her video for The Rain (amazing song, and the video is also a perfect time capsule for the late 90s).




It was funny to me then, but it's even funnier now for two reasons. Rock has a valid point that the style from that era was over the top, and with hindsight being 20/20 it's not hard to laugh at it. Rock was also able to see it for what it was right then and there. I laugh at videos from the 90s but I laugh with Chris Rock's Champagne.

The best example of this in comedy today is Portlandia.  The sketch comedy show created by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein is my new favorite thing to watch. They get the characters so spot-on. Armisen is a genius with mannerisms, he doesn't miss a beat. I would just put all their video clips in this post because most of them prove my point, but I don't want to give you all carpal tunnel from scrolling, so here is one clip from the most recent episode.



We live in a culture of instant nostalgia, which means we are extremely aware of what is in, what is out, what is totally last week, and what becomes more and more attractive as it's pulled farther away from us. I can't speak for any decade's views before the 1990s, as far as awareness of collective cultural quirks, but it is clear this is a recent development in our culture. Generally we are savvy in knowing what we are like.