Jacuzzi Boys - Glazin' (CENSORED) from Jacuzzi Gals on Vimeo.
Too good. Watch the uncensored version here.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Yay, Vaginas.
Jacuzzi Boys - Glazin' (CENSORED) from Jacuzzi Gals on Vimeo.
Too good. Watch the uncensored version here.
Friday, 6 January 2012
As the essence of daylight dissipates
And here is something else that my friend ChiBo sent me, enjoy...
And so as the essence of daylight dissipates into the mist of night, fate's words guide the pen of a servant, loyal in his being, true to his intent, he binds together pages of the book, each word a declaration to the promise of virtue, a pledge to the absolute. As the last seeds of form take root in the nest of this novel, he squeezes the hand of his love ...
Ta Lovies
This song has been one of the few things capable of cheering me up from the depths of this down-in-the-dumps-and-essay-hell day. Thanks Lykke and Bonneh, love you dearly and forever.
So, how was your New Years Eve?
I asked this question to a friend of mine, "ChiBo", today - this was his somewhat beautiful if excruciating response.
After spending a few hours at a house party and dancing the night away with cheery sentiments and vague musings on champagne vs. beer, I was pulled aside by a guy with a wild look in his eyes "DO YOU WANT A LINE?" he asked, "Um... yeah sure" I replied. He then went about racking up a line that was about the length and width of a pencil... After injesting this devilish powderous substance, I noticed a bitterness in the back of my throat "um . . what exactly is that?" I asked "ITS KETAMINAAA" said the wild eyed gentlemen "YOU ONLY SPOSED TO DO A LITTLE" he advised. I then knew that I had 1 or 2 choices: I could a) lie down on the floor and ask for my guardian angel to stroke my hair and cradle my soon to be vegitated state until it was daytime, or I could b) crawl on my hands and knees to the kingdom of bathroom and offer my soul to the toilet. The result was a mixture of the two, I navigated my way to the toilet through misty head and confused eyes and planted myself firmly in the bathroom, I can then remember somebody coming in and playing the harmonica for what seemed like 4 hours until I was "normal" again. I still to this time never found out if that person was actually at the party...
After spending a few hours at a house party and dancing the night away with cheery sentiments and vague musings on champagne vs. beer, I was pulled aside by a guy with a wild look in his eyes "DO YOU WANT A LINE?" he asked, "Um... yeah sure" I replied. He then went about racking up a line that was about the length and width of a pencil... After injesting this devilish powderous substance, I noticed a bitterness in the back of my throat "um . . what exactly is that?" I asked "ITS KETAMINAAA" said the wild eyed gentlemen "YOU ONLY SPOSED TO DO A LITTLE" he advised. I then knew that I had 1 or 2 choices: I could a) lie down on the floor and ask for my guardian angel to stroke my hair and cradle my soon to be vegitated state until it was daytime, or I could b) crawl on my hands and knees to the kingdom of bathroom and offer my soul to the toilet. The result was a mixture of the two, I navigated my way to the toilet through misty head and confused eyes and planted myself firmly in the bathroom, I can then remember somebody coming in and playing the harmonica for what seemed like 4 hours until I was "normal" again. I still to this time never found out if that person was actually at the party...
Smooth
Ma and Pa got me a Kenwood Smoothie Maker for Christmas and it is fucking divine. Best smoothie I've ever drunk, though I say it myself...
Thursday, 5 January 2012
Body
Found this one too. These cords keep on striking.
... This primacy of the body as object of negotiation and representation... also readily calls forth the question whether there is a body outside language or whether our knowledge of the body depends on the highly diverse and differentiated images of it that come to be constructed in accordance with particular social contexts and questions of normalcy relevant at specific historical moments. Is the body always already cultured or does the body pose as the measure and demarcation point of culture, as the site of trust, authenticity and inevitability? Is the body perhaps such a privileged object of our cultural image repertoire as well as such a pressing category in cultural criticism precisely because it quite literally embodies the fact that the incommensurability between the real and its representations can never fully be resolved?
... This primacy of the body as object of negotiation and representation... also readily calls forth the question whether there is a body outside language or whether our knowledge of the body depends on the highly diverse and differentiated images of it that come to be constructed in accordance with particular social contexts and questions of normalcy relevant at specific historical moments. Is the body always already cultured or does the body pose as the measure and demarcation point of culture, as the site of trust, authenticity and inevitability? Is the body perhaps such a privileged object of our cultural image repertoire as well as such a pressing category in cultural criticism precisely because it quite literally embodies the fact that the incommensurability between the real and its representations can never fully be resolved?
Judgement
I found this statement today when researching for an essay I should probably doing rather than posting this, but, anyway, it really struck a cord.
...And since the trust, as Nietzsche teaches, mainly operates on a moral register, the demand to say what's what is inevitably a demand for judgement, for affirming a correct morality - even in the absence of a language explicitly couched in the rhetoric of judgement...
...And since the trust, as Nietzsche teaches, mainly operates on a moral register, the demand to say what's what is inevitably a demand for judgement, for affirming a correct morality - even in the absence of a language explicitly couched in the rhetoric of judgement...
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
I was chasing shadows
I was chasing shadows in the shape of your kisses.
I was chasing shadows in the shape of your kisses.
I was chasing shadows in the shape of your kisses.
I chased the shadows until they led to your kiss.
But now, not even the shadows appear to exist.
I was chasing shadows in the shape of your kisses.
I was chasing shadows in the shape of your kisses.
I chased the shadows until they led to your kiss.
But now, not even the shadows appear to exist.
Another Earth
It was not an intentional omission but I forgot to blog about a film I saw recently that really left a mark on me. Said film was Another Earth directed by Mike Cahill which stars the stunningly beautiful and enchanting Brit Marling and veteran of our TV screens, William Mapother. It won Sundance and was rather well received by critics.
I, myself, loved every second, especially the elongated moments of silent and subtle flutters of emotion that exuded from Brit's character every time she was caught on screen.
The story is a tragedy with a purpose. And it's a film you should watch if you've not already become a fan.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Is this reality? Or just a dream?
So I'll admit that this track kinda starts out like The Clangers vs Morph but soon becomes something entirely entrancing and hypnotic. Very good stuff.
Migrationings
I just read this article in a copy of The Independent a few days ago. I feel it's well worth sharing. And I want this woman's new book, badly.
Beyond all our Christmas homecomings beckons the hope of turning a new page. The New Year is a vision –muzzy, perhaps, but still a vision - of new life. We'll give up smoking and go to the gym every day.
It's not surprising that these resolutions follow our seasonal migrations back to the family hearth, for that's what migration is all about - new life. The word "migrate" comes from the Latin migrare, to move from one place to another. It embraces many different activities, human and biological, and is related to the English "mutable" and the Greek ameibein, "to change". It comes in two basic forms - Go-and-Stay, and Go-and-Come-Back.
Go-and-Stay is what we do when we emigrate, immigrate or colonise someone else's home. It is what refugees and asylum-seekers have to do, but the process also operates at the micro-biological level: our own cells migrate in our bodies. Cells migrate in us for two reasons, to heal infection – the immune system is based on cell migration - and to form a foetus. To repair existing tissue, in other words, or to create new life.
No one knows how the first cell arrived on earth, but once here, whether formed in a deep-sea biochemical accident or blown in from outer space, that cell changed everything. Cells of blue-green algae set off into new life and the adventure of self-replication as if they heard God say on the fifth day of creation, "Go forth and multiply".
The beginning of life was the beginning of migration. What we come from is the Go-and-Stay of primeval slime. Go-and-Come-Back, the more evolved form, is a response to the spinning of the globe. Life is on the move all the time. As our tilted sphere spins, temperatures rise and fall in different places, food comes and goes, and life follows it. Migrant workers follow seasonal work, and thousands of life-forms, from whales to toads aiming to breed, migrate to raise their young.
Some migrations are breathtaking feats of endurance. Bar-headed geese nest in Central Asia but winter the other side of the Himalayas. They fly over Everest to get there. If a storm sweeps in and a youngster drops to snow-shrouded crags below, the mother must keep going, or she'll die too.
Migration is very wasteful but, every spring and autumn, most get through. How? The oxygen a bird needs to fly is 20 times what it needs on the ground. At 33,000 feet, there's only a quarter of the oxygen available at sea level. But their haemoglobin absorbs oxygen faster, and their capillary veins penetrate especially deep into their muscle. So oxygen reaches further quicker and they get more from each breath. Over millennia, they have adapted their bodies.
They and their route are older than the Himalayas. When rocks blocked their flight-path, they didn't go round. They flew over, changing their haemoglobin and capillaries to cope with the increasing altitude.
The biggest-scale Go-and-Come-Back migration is vertical. It happens every night and morning in the sea. At dusk, billions of jellyfish rise to the surface to graze on surface phytoplankton, which have been processing sunlight all day. Other life-forms follow, like sea butterflies, lantern-fish and squid, feeding off and depending on each other, then sinking back down at dawn.
This vast marine respiration, up and down, night and morning, is not that different from human commuting. Jellyfish go up and down for phytoplankton. We, morning and evening, go in and out of cities for work: which we convert, as phytoplankton convert sunlight into energy, into nourishment for our families and warmth from the fuel bills we pay.
For swallows, jellyfish or human beings, migration is going where the thing is which you need and don't have; it is reaching whatever helps you and your children to survive. It was how we began. We walked out of Africa looking for food, safety, water, shelter, a better climate, new territory. Like blue-green algae, we spread over the globe. Migration made the world biologically, but also created human civilisation.
Maybe this is why the idea of Homo viator - man on the road, human life as a pilgrimage - is deep-grained in Western thought. "The soul is a wanderer and fugitive," the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles said, "driven by decrees and laws of gods".
The Fall gave that idea a new depth. Medieval Christianity said we were strangers in this world, searching for the spiritual homeland to which we originally belonged. We weren't meant to be here; we were put in a garden and this went wrong, so now we are wanderers between two worlds, wayfarers on the via, the way, of life: looking for, or trying to regain, our true home. In theology, psychology and society, home, homelessness and migration belong together, two sides of the same ancient coin. Home is where you start from and what you are looking for. But you must travel to find it.
Home is also what you make, as the whelk makes its shell, throughout your life. It is the housing of your particular self, your individual wicker-work of defences, impulses and memories. Then that word "mutable" strikes. Things change - in yourself through age and disease, and in the world. Rivers dry, invaders grab your land, you lose your home and have to go elsewhere.
Human history is the story of the nomad giving way to the settler, but when people are unsettled they have to migrate. So there are always two factors behind migration: the push and the pull. Birds that nest in the Arctic to feed on summer insects leave, when the cold comes, not only because the insects have gone but because they would freeze to death if they stayed. Need and escape, hope and new life, are names for the same God.
Of all the push factors behind human migration, war is one of the biggest. The Second World War created 40 million refugees. Goya's painting The Colossus, of refugees fleeing from a giant roaming the Spanish countryside, sums up these push factors. If your home is destroyed, or something terrible has entered it, all you can do is run.
Environmental destruction is another Colossus. Outside the Senegalese capital Dakar is the suburb of Thiaroye, once a fishing village. The seas have been fished out by European trawlers so now Thiaroye is the starting-point for thousands of West Africans desperate to get to Europe for work. The traffickers send them across the Sahara and out from Libya in open boats.
In March 2009, 400 people from Lagos, Accra, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Yaounde, Banjul; from Egypt, Somalia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Gambia and Cameroon; from Bangladesh, Syria and Pakistan, sitting packed into three small fishing boats, drowned in one night. They were hoping, said one of the few survivors, now in a Libyan prison, for a better life.
Thousands more land up in the Canary Islands, often too weak to walk. When a boat approaches, the harbour fills with tents, police, wheelchairs and helicopters. Littering the harbour are piles of skiffs in which a hundred people have sat for many days. Sometimes dead bodies are found in them. Others arrive in Sicily, Lampedusa or Malta hoping to reach Europe and that dream of new life.
They face the same hostile planet as the birds - desert and sea, mountain and storm. If you super-imposed human and avian journeys on the map, the lines would mesh. Long-winged birds cannot flap over the sea because they rise on thermals of hot air and there are no thermals over an ocean, so they seek out the shortest sea crossing and do it in one long glide. Shortest crossings are what human migrants try for, too.
In 1992, the Brazilian photo-journalist Sebastiao Salgado began a project of photographing, through 47 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, hundreds of millions of people doing what that Latin verb migrare stands for: moving from place to place, displaced like this by war, by environmental ruin (from multi-nationals investing in vast-scale agriculture and mining), by "natural" disasters like drought and famine brought on by what we are doing to the planet, and by the widening gap between the rich and poor. Twenty years on, with seven billion of us in the world, this means unprecedented levels of migration and demographic change. Animal or human, the point of migration is survival.
Nous voulons de l'air pour nos enfants, said graffiti in the detention centre of Sangatte outside Calais. Stories of endurance matching the bar-headed geese lie behind all migrants discovered in lorries at Dover, and the 16-year-old Vietnamese girl recently found by the UK Border Agency, curled up behind the dashboard of a car in sweltering conditions, surrounded by electrical wiring and clutching a stuffed rabbit.
But cells also migrate, let's not forget, to heal living tissue and create new life. As Hungary criminalises homelessness and Britain worries whether its Border Agency is keeping out enough migrants, maybe the New Year is a good time to apply this idea to society, too.
'The Mara Crossing' , Ruth Padel's book of poems and prose on migration, animal and human, is published by Chatto &Windus next week
Blinded by you
How have I not discovered this until tonight?? It sounds like the inner workings of my mind plastered all over a stunningly beautiful acoustic/aural platform. Fuck me, it's good.
It's a waste of time from the perfect start to the finish line
And if you're still breathing you're the lucky one.
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