emptyage

Yuka Ritty: Elevator

Via TOKYOMANGO.

Miss Teen South Carolina

I hate to say that we saw this live. But we did.

Miss Teen USA

Originally posted on mat.vox.com

Steal Your Face Right off of your Head

Station 12 - The Haight
Originally uploaded by honan.

It's interesting how different the culture is in different parts of the country.

I used to have a Grateful Dead sticker in the back window of my truck. I put it there my senior year in high school in Alabama, and immediately began getting pulled over. I suspected the sticker, but didn't know for sure.

But then one day one of my parents (I forget which one) was driving my car, and got pulled over. The cop, realizing it was a kid's car, more or less told my mom or dad that he had pulled him/her over because of the Dead sticker.

..........

One thing I miss about Alabama, and to a lesser extent a lot of the South, was the way that different people from different cliques would hang out together. My friends saw nothing wrong with listening to The Grateful Dead and the Dead Kennedys. Goths, deadheads, punks, skaters, and any other kind of outsider, all ran together, largely because we were all different and all aware of it. And there just weren't enough weirdos for us to divide ourselves up into camps.

In Atlanta, things were different. By and large, the deadheads didn't talk to the punks, who didn't talk to the skins who didn't talk to the goths who didn't talk to the ravers who didn't talk to the mods and on and on and so it goes. I think, to a real extent, growing up like that made me more accepting of different styles of music, and more broadly, different lifestyles. It was Us against Them: they told us so. I was just a kid with shaggy hair who didn't play football and didn't like the music on the radio. I never really thought of myself as opting out; I felt like I was forced out.

..........

I have digressed. But my point being: the act of putting a Grateful Dead sticker on my car--there were also Jane's, REM, Pixies, and other circa 1990 mainstay band stickers on there--made me an outsider, and suspect. It was oficially discouraged. Different is bad, you dumb fuck, and don't you forget it.

And so the other day, when we walked over to check out a housefire in our neighborhood, I noticed for the first time that all the firetrucks from our station have a certain familiar logo on them. These are city vehicles.

I wasn't born here in San Francisco. I miss my family; they are so very far away. I seldom listen to the Grateful Dead anymore (not out of animosity, I would if they recorded something new and it was good. I just get tired of listening to the same stuff over and over). But this made me really happy. When I see things like this, here in the city that I love, I feel like I'm at home. Finally, at home.

Flea Market Montgomery

I have never been prouder of my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, than I was when I first saw this video.

Found on Cameron Marlow's blog via Waxy links.

Free Snoop

Rapper Snoop Dogg Arrested, Again.

Borat!

My friend Elvis, who is from Ireland, introduced me to Ali G, or Sasha Baron Cohen, back when he was only on the BBC. I was immediatly addicted, both to downloading episodes from Usenet and, later, renting the few DVDs that would trickle into our local store. I was glad for him to get his own HBO series. Though I've only seen a few of the HBO episodes, they've been howlingly funny.

So I've been looking forward to the Borat movie for a long time. (Actually, I was a little discouraged by it at first, when I was under the mistaken impression that it was plotted.) But I've wondered how America at large will take to Borat. Borat is filthy. A disgusting and repulsive human being--yet you can't help but love him for his awkward grin and seeming good intentions.

But still. Good intentions or not, it's bound to be an extremely, extremely discomforting piece of work. And although it remains to be seen how American audiences will react, American critics are absolutely ga-ga:

New York Times Review.

That scene may inspire accusations that Mr. Baron Cohen is simply trading on cultural and regional stereotypes, and he is, just not simply. The brilliance of “Borat” is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy. Mr. Baron Cohen isn’t yet a total filmmaker like Jerry Lewis (the film was directed by Larry Charles, who has given it a suitably cheap video look), but the comic’s energy and timing inform every scene of “Borat,” which he wrote with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and his longtime writing and production partner, Dan Mazer. These guys push political buttons, but they also clear room for two hairy men to wrestle nude in a gaspingly raw interlude of physical slapstick that nearly blasts a hole in the film.

LA Times Review:

"Borat," or to give it its full title, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," is the brainchild of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a performer who is touched by a kind of genius so savage it makes you consider both the very nature of comedy and what makes us laugh.

(snipped)

We don't laugh at all of this, but we laugh at more of it than would seem possible, even if our laughter makes us uncomfortable enough to wonder why. For one of the unexpected things that seeing "Borat" underlines is that we don't laugh only because something strikes us as amusing. We laugh out of astonishment and disbelief, out of embarrassment for what the people on screen are going through, and because we simply can't figure out any other way to respond. "Borat" takes advantage of all these, and more.

We also laugh at situations that don't sound funny on the page because of Cohen's powerful comic presence. This is a very smart guy with the likability all comedians have to have, and he is very deft at what he does.

(snipped)

With his corrosive brand of take-no-prisoners humor that scalds on contact, Cohen is the most intentionally provocative comedian since Lenny Bruce and early Richard Pryor, with a difference. For unlike those predecessors, there is a mean-spiritedness, an every-man-for-himself coldness about his humor. The one kind of laughter you won't find in "Borat" is that which acknowledges shared humanity. Instead, there is that pitiless staple of reality TV, watching others humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure.

San Francisco Chronicle:

The first thing that must be said about "Borat" is that it's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive, so rich with comic moments, so outrageous, so shocking and unexpected, and so blithely willing to be offensive that it consistently leaves viewers off balance -- and howling. This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence.

(snipped)

Borat is ostensibly on a journey to find the real America, and ironically, Cohen ends up doing just that. It's the something extra that makes "Borat" more than just a laugh machine: The picture takes the country's temperature at a rather fraught period in our national life.

USA Today:

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is shockingly hilarious satire that knows no bounds. It is not hampered by concern for taste or convention, which is what makes Borat creator and star Sacha Baron Cohen the most fearless comedian around.

Some will no doubt be disgusted by over-the-top cringe-inducing segments: an extended nude chase and wrestling scene between Cohen and co-star Ken Davitian is unlike anything seen in mainstream movies. But in an era of stale, formulaic comedies, this uproarious and ribald faux documentary is like a hit of pure oxygen.

Cohen, already a star in his native England for his Da Ali G Show, expands his bumbling, inappropriate Kazakh character (one of three on the TV show) for the big screen. Converting a recurring comic sketch into a full-fledged film can be dicey. (Remember Coneheads?) But Cohen's genius lies in his ease with provocative material. What ends up on the screen feels almost revolutionary, even subversive, in its weird audacity.