fourfour

Perfection

Chrisette Michelle posted this Ne-Yo penned track, "Epiphany," on her MySpace this week and I can't stop listening to it. The accompanying post she wrote is sort of hard to decipher, but it seems like Ne-Yo might have worked on her entire upcoming album, in which case: awesome. "Epiphany" fits somewhere between the sassy resolve of Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" and Erykah Badu's most recent trip through the country by way of spaceship. Sounds like a hit to me, but I've become increasingly terrible at calling such things. I know for sure that I love it very much, and having not understood the previous hype around Chrisette, this track more than lives up to its name.

Disrespectful, dismissive and dismeaning

If you didn't expect to see this in this space today...

 

...you clearly must not know 'bout me.

Now serving: Winston

You probably know that Elyse Sewell of ANTM Cycle 1 is one of the rare Top Model alumna to actually forge a real, live modeling career out of her time on the show. Crazy, I know! She works a lot in Asia, primarily Hong Kong and China. She chronicles her journeys with an awesome LiveJournal that often focuses on unfortunate translations of English language/American culture (here's my absolute favorite, but there are so many more examples all over her journal). Anyway, Elyse spotted one of these...blips on a menu in Shanghai, and she emailed it to me because of its pertinence...

 

Another funny thing besides seeing Winston on the menu (you can see part of the shot of the dish above -- the Winston looks stringy) is that my other cat was named Congxiangyazhang. He ran away, though. To China, I guess.

Two more only tangentially related finds after the jump:

If you like burgers, you'll LOVE penis

This guy is obviously hero material, but so much so that I didn't want to relegate him just to the sidebar. My boyfriend caught this last week, and I was actually going to upload it myself, but then I saw that someone already had in March. And it never went viral? WTF? Hamburgers coming in your mouth in an explosion while you're pleasuring yourself is what the Internet is all about!

Gabe and Rich watch a movie: Goodbye Uncle Tom

To cap this historic week, who's up for an examination of the most tasteless movie about the slave trade (and possibly race, period) of all time? No? Well, whatever, that's what's below anyway.

As a self-conscious (as in the talent talks to the camera) "documentary" of slavery's many aspects (from middle passage to breeding), 1971's Goodbye Uncle Tom is a movie I've long found fascinating. Why, you know? Just why? To make sense of this morbid interest, I asked my friend and eternal object of admiration Videogum's Gabe Delahaye to watch this garbage with me and put me in my place. We did this before with Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, though instead of chat format, we exchanged a series of emails (over a few months, actually...). What follows is long and maybe inconclusive, but getting it all out sure felt good! (And this isn't any normal catharsis: it's cross-posted catharsis.)

[Note that the English-language version is the one discussed here. Though the Italian version contains a variety of differences that give it a more Mondo and, paradoxically, balanced feel, the film was shot in English so watching it dubbed in Italian with English subtitles just feels weird.]

[Oh, also, there's a shot of a boob below and other NSFWish screenshots, so beware.]

In a good way, you're stupid

In a shocking twist, being gay, gayness, gay as in happy, gay as in "gray" as spoken by someone with a speech impediment and gaymosexuality weren't mentioned in this week's episode of The Real World. At least, not explicitly. Implicitly is a different matter.

 

I feel like I was born to make gifs of this guy. Move over, Tyra -- there's a new muse in town!

DO NOT give this woman your money or things. Repeat: NO.

I caught this ostensibly homeless woman (complete with her own portable velvet rope!) on an uptown R last week. Her message deserves to be shared.

Hey, how 'bout some Winston?

It's been a while. Here he is begging for scallops:

And here's a preview of what you maybe just watched:

Two quick things

1. Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about YouTube's wacko practice of muting music videos on his New Yorker blog. I emailed him, as I frequently do, running down the examples of this I've experienced regarding my videos in the past few months and it eventually turned into a post. Though I didn't intend to write about this in particular, bitching about YouTube and its arbitrary rules is something of a hobby of mine, so it's relevant enough to warrant a heads-up. Plus, it will explain why things don't sound like they once did in a few of the videos posted in the archives of this blog.

2. A reader named Alena K., alerted me to the existence of this, my favorite single of 2009 so far, Girls' Generation's "Gee":

I figure that paying it forward and sharing is the least I can do. There are nine (nine!) young Korean girls in Girls' Generation. They're more a cheerleading squad than a girl group! If you want further proof of that, check out this clip of them performing the song live. They boggle the mind like sugar shock.

Just a suggestion

If you enjoyed Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, a kind of That '70s Show meets The Hills Have Eyes meets the worst case of gonorrhea you've ever heard of in your life, check out Fear(s) of the Dark. It's a black-and-white French anthology of horror-ish animation. It's hit-or-miss as a whole, but Burns' 17-minute segment falls squarely in the former category. To explain it would be to give it all away (it is, after all, a short film), but I can tell you that it's pretty amazing seeing Burns' style translated to a sort of flat 3-D moving image (I think the technique is called cell-shading, and if it's not that, it's very close to that effect). Anyway, this played in, like, a theater in America, and I have no idea if it's coming out on DVD or what. I tried to upload the segment to YouTube, but I guess the subtitle file made my file wonky because it wouldn't convert. It's for the best: it would have gotten taken down and my secondary account would have been deleted. After all, that's what secondary YouTube accounts are for. Or at least, mine is.

Whatever. Fear(s) is available for your viewing ahem nonetheless.

More reasons to watch this (i.e. screen shots) are below, but beware: they're spoilery.