Ivysgrandkid’s Neighborhood

I generally don't think much of mashups. Some of them are really creative--"The Ghosts That Feeds," combining Ray Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters" and Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds" is brilliant, as is the entire-musical-spectrum-raping insanity of Pittsburgh's Girl Talk--but for the most part, mashups are almost always poorly-thought-out, and even more poorly-executed exercises in the cut'n'paste aesthetic that Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network pioneered but few, few, can master as well.

WHA?! Studios latest mashup monsterpiece, Summer of Love 2008, proves that there are brilliant mashup artists Out There who can combine elements of various songs into mind-melting frankensongs that manage to transcend the mere sum of their parts. Yeah, it's cool to hear Jim Morrison's laconic vocals from "Rider On The Storm" synced up to Blondie's "Rapture," but are you prepared for the sheer musical chimerism of "Buffalo Springfield VS 808 State VS Deee-Lite VS Prince VS Duran Duran"? Because that's exactly what  "What's That Sound?" by World Famous Audio Hacker, on Summer of Love 2008 is.

The whole idea behind Summer of Love 2008 can be succinctly described in the words of WHA?!'s press-release for the comp: "[Summer of Love 2008] is our tribute to the second Summer of Love, the acid house and rave culture which started 20 years ago in the UK. It was just as important as the first Summer of Love in the late 60's. So we took songs from the Flower Power era and we took songs from the Acid House Revolution and mashed them together." And that's exactly what you get. Album opener, "Step Together," by the brilliantly-named Phil RetroSpector, combines the Happy Mondays with The Beatles, while "Pinball Wizard in the Drivers Seat" splices together elements from The Who, Dogtooth, and Cook's County. I'd have to say this is my favorite track, because it turns The Who's "Pinball Wizard," one of my alltime favorite Who tracks, into a synthpop dancefloor destroyer that sounds more like a strange, contemporary remake of the song rather than a traditional remix. Bobby Martini's "Here Comes the Sunscreem" is a seamless mercuric amalgamation of Sunscreem and The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun." Though sometimes the vocals don't quite match up with the music, it's still an incredibly ballsy track that will electrify hippies and britpop fans alike and will keep dancefloors rocking. Flying White Dots' shiversome "Land of Oz" is a beautiful, almost ambient space/dance/trance track built from pieces of Manuel Gottsching, Latino, Grace Jones, Pink Floyd, The Orb, Opus 3, Björk, Masters At Work, and The freakin' KLF to boot! We're talking ten minutes of space music so lush and mindblowing it proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt...this one track proves that music is better than acid for achieving altered states of mind. Yes. There. I said it. It's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Again, what makes this compilation work so well is that it's not a one-trick pony. Yes, it's built around a basic gimmick, combining music from two different eras, flowerchildren plus early rave culture, blah blah blah--but it only uses that gimmick as a starting point, not an endpoint. These individual tracks achieve much, much more than simply stitching together the familiar hooks from a bunch of random pop songs from the late '60s and the late '80s/early '90s. The combination of Summers of Love produces vibrant new music, not merely zombie tracks consisting of reanimated samples from old songs. A few of them, the first two tracks in particular, sound like remixes--but good remixes that do what remixes should do: create all new songs out of the components of previous tracks. But the other tracks...the other tracks are truly unique examples of, and triumphs of, the mashup genre.

Best of all...the entire EP is free! Free as Love! First, you can listen to all songs in streaming format at the album's homepage, then you can download the entire album here (Divshare link), or, even better, you can download it as a torrent. Plus, the torrent version contains a special extra: "The Caravan of Love Collection is the bonus gift of the Summer of Love 2008 compilation. Each artist from the album has designed a VW bus and you can find them in a handy print ready booklet feature in the zip file. Print them all and set up your very own Caravan of Love!" That's right, you get a collection of papercraft microbuses to print out, fold up, and display proudly in your cubicle while you blow your coworkers minds with the psycherobodelic sounds of Summer of Love 2008!

Links: whastudios.com apollozero.blogspot.com

This is Osamu. He's only 12 years old, but I think he's dying. He's lost a lot of weight, his fur has lost its glossiness, and he throws up almost every day. When I pick him up he feels like paper. But he's still got the handsomest little face, and he's as friendly as he's always bee. He's colored like baked bread and his little head always smells like sunshine. He lives at my mother's house, and I miss him.

This is Nori. She lives with Sam at my mother's house. She's chubby and stubby and even though she's only two years younger than samsonite, she still acts like a little baby.
This one is Seiji. He belongs to my little sister and he lives in my dad's house right now. He's a young man, he's rough and tough and loves to attack things.

On my way to and from getting a coffee this evening (and I wonder why I cannot sleep lol), the fountain in my neighborhood looked particularly pretty.  so I snapped a few and kept going.  When I returned, it was full dark plus and there was a nice treat hanging right over the fountain!

I've finally been able to complete my Harukachan shashinshuu collection as after months of searching I found a auction seller in Japan who had a copy of Harukachan's "Haru Card" trading card book which was published by Wani Books back in 2000 and has remained quite a rarity as far as availability. Her two earlier shashinshuus are also out of print but usually show up on auctions pretty regularly.

Harukachan's pb collection is a rather modest one as she only released four shashinshuus and "Haru Card" being a trading card book has only a little of its contents dedicated to photo shoot pages while a larger portion is actually a thick cardboard "page" which is hollowed with four pockets which house the trading card set. Her shashinshuu "3" is the most creative of the releases as it contains bonus items including 4 trading cards, message card, and photograph along with a 3 year span of Harukachan photos. Her shashinshuu "18" though is possibly the best shot and with a more mature Harukachan...the camera loves her even more it seems!  Suenaga Haruka nearly single handedly brought the world of the gravure idol to prominence and she's possibly even been on more idol magazine covers than Britney has been on less than flattering scandal rags front pages. :P....I'm afraid it's really close but while Harukachan is celebrated as one of idol's cutest, Britney is...well Britney. The moral to learn here is perhaps this...too much paparazzi = really bad things! :O Harukachan is also well known in the world of commercials, advertising, and has also appeared in dramas, movies, and the popular Go! Go Sentai Boukenger series where she starred as...appropriately, the Pink Ranger. ^-^ The complete "Haru Card" collection is comprised of a total of 60 cards and each card book came with four random trading card packs which contained 7 cards each. 9 special cards which feature golden colored signature writing are also part of the 60 card set and I'm not sure if it's just pure luck but all 28 cards that were included in my pb had no duplicates to my delight. ^-^ I've scanned all 28 cards below and on the backs of each card is either a portion of a larger photo which can be put together to form a larger image if one has enough consecutive card numbers in a section of the card collection while a few other cards feature an additional regular photo on their backs. The front two pages of the card book has a complete listing of every card in the set and while I see no real way of ever completing the 60 card set at least I know what the images look like but more or less I think I've gotten by pure luck the card images that I would've wanted had I actually been able to choose them myself instead of receiving them in the random manner which card sets are usually presented as such was the case here. Harukachan's so cute in all of these card photos and I'm sorry that the clarity may not be the best as these standard sized cards' images are a bit enlarged here. ^-^  

I thought I might miss the club and the girls and just being a hostess in general. But I don't. Just thinking about working again kind of makes me feel tired and nauseous. It's tough working a job where you have to deal with rejection all the time. And it's tough when it's YOU that's getting rejected. How attractive you are and stuff.

So now I wear no makeup, barely brush my hair, and my eyebrows are free and wild. And I haven't had any alcohol. It's awesome.

My mother was staying at my twin sister's apartment, and she cooked a big meal last night and we invited Kosuke and Yuka over. But today my dad was really upset because he wasn't invited. "I'm actually kind of appalled," he said. "I mean your mother didn't even want to see me, and I wasn't even invited to dinner, and you didn't bring me back any leftovers."

I didn't know what to say. Besides the obvious, which is "well you guys are divorced."

I probably should have brought some leftovers over though. Oops.

Gay heroes at a bus stop.

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Are we intrigued by the death of someone that we don't personally know. I think that we are. I know that I am both intrigued and deeply affected, sometimes for reasons that I cannot explain.

For example:

When Dale Earnhardt was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500 I was not a Nascar fan. This particularly redneck dude I was dating at the time called me up. "Are you watching this race?" "No!" I replied with disgusted dignity. He lived in a kind of bachelor pad/college dorm type house where several guys lived together. The other line beeped in continuously. All calls about Dale Earnhardt's untimely wreck and later to be discovered, death. That was Sunday. Early Monday morning I started reading about what had happened on the internet. I read article after article about this man who had died. Of course, living in Alabama I was aware of Nascar. I had even been to Talladega 3 times, but it was strictly to party in the infield and I was vaguely aware that a race was going on (definitely my loss because at that time, Big E was still on the track and I missed it all). The more I read, the more I was affected, it got into my blood and my heart and I'm still grieving the loss of a man that I knew nothing about when he was alive. I've missed very few races since then.

When my daughter was 1 year old, on the day after Thanksgiving my boyfriend and I took her to the mall to go shopping. Afterwards we drove home. No big deal right? After arriving home I received a phone call from my sister who wanted to make sure Hailey was OK. "Of course she is why?" I said. There had been a little girl shot and killed riding in a truck with her parents. She was in her car seat between her parents when her body suddenly went limp. It was determined that it was a stray bullet from a deer hunter in the area, the bullet had come through the back window and into her head. I soon learned that this family lived very close to us, that the little girl was within one month of Hailey's exact age, AND they had gone the same route that we had gone to the same mall and the parents had bought the little girl some cowboy boots (she was wearing them when she died). This totally freaked me out for a very long time.

I somehow happened upon a story online about a woman who was pregnant with twins. It was a rather late in life pregnancy with the woman's second husband. She already had two grown daughters from a previous marriage but she was healthy and her pregnancy was uneventful; however she died delivering the second baby. Out of curiosity I found this woman's myspace page and I found progressive photos of her growing belly, photos of the developing nursery and photos of the children she left behnd. It deeply affected me for some reason. I guess because this woman was so excited about the birth of these babies and, from what I read, she only got to see one of them before she lost consciousness. These kind of things really make you scratch your head and wonder "Why"?

I have also been affected by the death of certain other celebrities. When I heard that Heath Ledger had died, at first I didn't know exactly who it was but I soon found out. I had watched 10 Things I Hate About You many times and loved the movie. I loved him most of all. I immediately went out and bought the movie for Hailey to watch and I also bought Brokeback Mountain (although I have not watched it yet). I read and read about Heath, his life, his history, his daughter, his family. Such a beautiful, talented young man who had so much more life ahead.  The debut of The Dark Knight has broken box-office records and from what I hear and read, a lot of that has to do with not only Heath's performance, but also the fact that he is no longer with us. It is a very sad and intriguing story and for some unknown reason, I am deeply effected. Heath Ledger was such an attractive young man and one of those who is so good-looking that I can hardly bear to look at photos where his eyes bore into me. Here are a few that I snagged from TMZ.

Note: These photos did not have a copyright or watermark on them and right-click was not disabled so, to me that means they are free for the taking. I'm just posting this because I know how sleazy TMZ can be and I want to make sure I'm covered. RIP Heath.

 

 

 

 

PS: My son went to see The Dark Knight last night and he said it was absolutely amazing and Heath's portrayal of The Joker was chilling and demented and downright astounding. Hailey and I may go see it tomorrow.

3rd person, in as many days, asked that today. VERY strange. Well, not this one since it was a dealer trying to get me to trade in. But the other 2 were strange. My car has 130k miles and lots of body damage (I put off cosmetic repairs because as soon as they're done, I get hit again)... why the sudden interest?

So... major tuneup and "best as we could" re-attachment of the front bumper = $562. Actually less than I expected. Brakes didn't need replacement so I don't know why I had it in my head that they did. I asked about a random interior part - a little door for a little compartment (the hinge broke off one side of the door and it sits all wonky & drives me nuts)... $47!! No thanks! Afterward I drove over to PepBoys and picked up a new super-dooper $21 driver-side wiper ($21 for ONE blade and, puhleeeze, it's gonna streak right at eye line - they ALL do!) and window sunshade (who else was looking for the ones that fold up into a little circle? I found them at PepBoys.).

On the way home, I decided to stop for an impulse purchase of my fav pumpkin shampoo (which made my hair feel great but I ran out of ages ago) and misc hair accessories. I also found a new drycleaners/alterations shop. And, pissed that my last 3 pedi's have chipped or broken, tried out a new salon. I finally got to try OPI's "Pompeii Purple" and I LOVE it!

I should have run home to water the front yard but wasn't in the mood to deal with it (and resulting ants climbing all over the house) so I ran errands at Walgreens (cause lord knows I don't already have waaaay toooo much eyeshadow) then came home and let the cats out front for awhile (while I watch over them).
I really need to water the backyard (next legal day is Monday) before it gets too late (9p now). Then on to putting away clean laundry (it's been hanging, outside the closet, for 3 weeks now - cause that extra 5" to get it IN the closet is just...so... far...) and, dare I say it?... maybe do some VACUUMING (we'll see if that really comes to pass tonight - I wouldn't count on it).

Do you have toaster ovens at home or office? Some office having pantry that allowed staff to have their breakfast there. I always want to know about toaster oven . I mean like how they function, I know that we can read on the guide book but sometimes you need to know more than just reading it.

This site I found is not only about toaster ovens in general but also buying guide. Now I know that toaster ovens can do a lot more than what I have in mind.