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[Feb. 8th, 2012|03:02 pm] |
A really awesome guy I was friends with in high school died last week. He was a musician, actor, improviser, poet, slam poet and all around talented dude and incredible person. In the wake of his passing his friends and colleagues have been finding and posting clips of various things he's performed over the last few years and this was one of my favorites:
Rest in Peace, Phil. |
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| May the odds be ever in your favor |
[Nov. 14th, 2011|09:02 am] |
omgggggggggggggggggggggggg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-5ANq4sAL0
omggggggg
All the things I want to talk about:
- RUE'S SONG. Still literally gives me chills.
- KATNISS
- EFFIE
- CINNA
- CINNA'S OUTFITS (va-va-voom, the Girl on Fire dress! Although I hope there is something spectacular on the skirt that we can't see yet)
- um, Haymitch's hair? :\
- The big jumbotron and everyone in District 12 watching her!
- the clips of the Tributes training (mostly this makes me SUPER excited for the Catching Fire training scenes? FINNICK)
- How I am Team Peeta for the books but Team Gale for this trailer?
- Okay, I am Team Cinna. For EVERYTHING.
- CINNA
Can I get in line yet? |
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| The "Book of Bunny Suicides" was banned, though. |
[Sep. 16th, 2011|01:59 pm] |
So the ACLU of Texas released the 2011 Banned Books Report. It lists all of the books that were challenged in every school and the disposition of the challenge - so, whether the school retained the book, banned it, censored it in some way, or whatever. A parent challenged Hunger Games which was assigned to their kid in class (understandably, maybe? I know it's technically YA but it's SO violent, especially to assign in a Middle School.), and that kid read an alternate book instead.
Anyway, this is my favorite disposition of any of the challenges.
KIRBYVILLE CISD
School: Kirbyville Jr. High School
Book: Stay Out of the Basement, R. L. Stine
Reason Cited: Violence or horror
Action Taken: Restricted
Note: Only student of parent who challenged is restricted; no others
are restricted. |
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| Why I'm so mad about this Joe and Chris Brown thing. |
[Apr. 16th, 2011|10:34 am] |
Okay I’m going to make this post so that hopefully I stop whining about it everywhere. I can just set out all of my thoughts once and then I don’t have to waste time engaging in a discourse with people who won’t ever agree with me.
For a little background: Joe Jonas has recorded a song with Chris Brown and it’s going to be on his solo album, which is due out sometime this summer. This news has kind of trickled out slowly, and an interview with a producer about what it was like working with Joe and Chris together came out yesterday.
First, contextualizing what’s going on with Joe: Joe wants to break away from his clean-cut Disney Channel image. That’s understandable, it’s normal, every Disney star does it or they end up like Jason Earles, 33 years old and playing “Sensei Rudy” in a show called Wasabi Warriors on a Disney satellite channel. The problem comes in with the fact that the last professional thing he did was a Camp Rock 2 tour 5 months ago. This wasn’t just part of his same old clean-cut image, the demographic for it skewed significantly younger than the previous Jonas Brothers tour in 2009. He was being actively marketed towards girls younger than 13. So the fact that Joe wants to break away from his old image is pretty irrelevant in light of the fact that the only people who are guaranteed to buy this album are a bunch of 10 year old girls who think Joe can do no wrong and take all kinds of social cues from him.
(I should note that Miley’s long, painful process of breaking free of her Disney image has received intense scrutiny. Not just for smoking salvia, but for the way she dressed, danced, and generally presented herself for the last year and a half. No media outlet said word one when Joe started dressing and acting like a New Jersey guido, and every article about Joe associating himself with Chris Brown has been written in a positive, “here’s-the-buzz” kind of tone.)
Second, Chris Brown. I assume most people have a basic understanding of what Chris Brown did, but apparently that’s not enough to dissuade them from defending him at every turn. In case you aren’t aware of the extent of his assault on Rihanna, here’s a fairly detailed description (trigger warning, obviously.) I have some misgivings about even linking that, but I think it’s important to understand the extent of the assault and that by all accounts he might have actually killed her if someone in the neighborhood hadn’t heard her screams. Particularly when I’ve consistently been hearing people respond with crap like the following.
Here are some arguments (that I’ve actually seen) that I’m absolutely not interested in entertaining in response to any of this:
1) Rihanna’s “over it” and had her restraining order removed so everyone should forget about it.
2) Rihanna started it, he was only hitting her back.
3) Rihanna co-wrote and performed a song about domestic violence - “Love the Way You Lie” - so she’s glorifying it and/or capitalizing off of it.
4) Everything about this disgusting comment.
Brown was convicted of felony assault and got the puniest, most pathetic slap on the wrist ever: probation, community service, and an anger management class. The anger management class didn’t do anything, obviously, since he was asked about the Rihanna incident on Good Morning America a few weeks ago and put a chair through a window before storming out.
So, knowing all of that, here’s why it’s particularly reprehensible that Joe Jonas is working with Chris Brown: he’s intentionally choosing to expose a young, female, teenage demographic to Chris Brown’s music and Chris Brown as a person. Sure I disapprove of any artist who wants to work with Chris Brown. I disapprove of whoever decided to put him on Dancing With The Stars, but these things don’t have the same kind of impact as what Joe is doing.* He’s not working in a vacuum, he’s not just sending vague messages out into the ether. He’s aiming the celebrity of a man who’s known for brutally assaulting his girlfriend and continuing to be a violent person directly at the demographic which is most in need of positive messages about what a healthy and safe relationship is about.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) sarcasticpixie said it so well that I’m going to steal a quote from her comment here:
I'm not suggesting that listening to a Joe/Chris collaboration is going to mean that teenage girls are going to suddenly start letting their boyfriends hit them -- it's deeper and more subtle than that. It's the idea that, "Oh, Joe's worked with him, he can't be that bad." It leads to domestic violence apologism, it leads to victim-blaming, it leads to more album sales for someone who needs to be in treatment rather than on MTV, and it's just one more brick in the wall that stands between your average teenage girl and a complete understanding of how, exactly, current gender attitudes spell disaster for women.
Joe isn’t just breaking away from his clean-cut image, he’s taking part in a disgusting social exercise that legitimizes violence against women and endangers young women.
*Apparently Justin Bieber has also recorded a song with Chris Brown, and that’s pretty awful also. I’m not talking about him here because I’ve never been a Justin Bieber fan, and I haven’t ever been personally disappointed by him like I am with Joe. Plus, I think the fact that Joe is deliberately aligning himself with an actual violent abusive criminal as a way to break away from his “good boy” image adds a particular sheen of horror to it all.
I’m also not talking about Nick or Garbo because apart from one tweet of Garbo’s neither of them has discussed their work with Chris Brown and they aren’t trying to capitalize on it. As soon as they do I will be all up on that. |
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| free bitch |
[Apr. 7th, 2011|01:10 am] |
asafgdkglj
I WENT TO SEE LADY GAGA.
I want to write a whole long review post that will devolve into boring stuff and comparing it to a Jonas Brothers concert (lol, oh) and omg spoilers she kills the rapist in Monster and spends the rest of the concert covered in fake blood and lol at the part where she makes a jab about lip syncing etc. etc. but instead I will say:
someone threw a Barbie on stage and she picked it up and said something like "It's so beautiful, it makes me want to do this." and then bit its head off.
LADY GAGA.
BITING BARBIE'S HEAD OFF. |
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| Okay I know "Friday" is played out but... |
[Apr. 1st, 2011|02:29 pm] |
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"The choice between the front seat and the back seat is actually a metaphor for American foreign policy. Front seat Afghanistan, back seat Iraq. We gotta make our mind up."
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| Agent Mulder was my idea. |
[Mar. 19th, 2011|01:44 am] |
Went to see Paul! It was really good. The best way to recap this is to guess what liminalliz's top 5 favorite moments were, based on amount of lols I heard coming from her end of the row.
Spoilers, of course.
( Jenny Starpepper and the Spitting Worm )
Okay, so it was a movie comprised ALMOST ENTIRELY OF SCI-FI REFERENCES. You were expecting something else?
I've been awake for 20 hours and I'm too tired right now to go into more detail, or talk about Blueverse Lincoln Lee (HE DOES EXIST) (yes, you read that right. so tired I made a Christmas talking M&M commercial reference), or talk about Drive Angry 3D which I also saw this week and I also have guesses about Liz's favorite part of. Ideas for a later post. |
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