Category Archives: YouTube

Monkees Psychedelia: Star Collector

Posted on by

This is what Nine Inch Nails‘s Starfuckers, Incorporated looked like in 1967, performed by The Monkees.

It looked pretty good, actually.

I have to say, the combination of YouTube pixillation and psychedelic staging is a marriage made in Heaven, or at least in Malibu. I actually have this album (Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd) on vinyl; picked it up at a garage sale, I believe, along with a couple of others when I was at boarding school, which means around the end of the Seventies.

And for those of you who may have, in some misguided and doubtless drunken stupor, expressed skepticism regarding the talent of the great Mike Nesmith, listen to this song: Mary, Mary, which Paul Butterfield called a great white soul song. He was right.

and yes, I know the video is out of synch with the audio.
Doesn’t mean your ears don’t work, right?

Brian Atene in Black and White

Posted on by

A little monologue for your Tuesday. I meant to post this yesterday for alliteration’s sake, but those pesky technical issues got in the way.

a history of violence

Posted on by

For those of you who’ve wondered if I ever sleep, of course I do, in the daytime. For those of you who’ve wondered how I’ve managed to survive everything that’s been thrown at me, perhaps this is a clue: I’m immortal.

Today was a lazy day for me, since I pre-posted all my paid blogging stuff for the weekend, so when someone on Gawker asked me about my past as an execution victim, I decided to type it out. Here, for what it’s worth, it is.

  • Image of raincoaster raincoaster at 03:00 AM

    I didn’t remember who did it the first time, it was early days; I got executed for being too “me-too” as in, twice in a week Gawker had posted something and I posted a “yes, and there’s this” in the comments, with a link to something related.

    It was most enlightening: people who’d been nicey-nicey to me before piled on. Little did they know…

    Then I got fished out of the graveyard by a kind intern, came back and posted. Mohney executed me again, citing a rather arbitrary “48-hour rule”.

    Then I got fished out of the graveyard again by someone who shall remain nameless.

    I got executed at Gawker again for something. Don’t remember what, actually, but probably dropping too many links to my blog.

    Not that I would ever do such a thing.

    Then Defamer brought commenter executions on and I said it was my goal to be executed by every Gawker site, so they executed me. Then came resurrection again…

    Then I posted that getting executed by every site would mean I’d have to actually GO to Kotaku and Gizmodo, so Kotaku and Gizmodo both executed me. Not sure if that counts as once or twice.

    Again, I rose on the third day.

I’m relatively sure I got executed on a different Gawker media site as well, but I can’t remember what it was. Ah, well.

If you’ve got ten or fifteen hours to kill, go to that thread and play all the YouTubes: it’s a compilation of the best movie speeches of all time, and it’s over 300 comments now, most of them pretty awesome. Here’s my contribution and for those of you who may be wondering,

YES I AM PMSING!!!!!!

ah, Ken.

Run away with me and we’ll have a hundred little Irish babies who’ll kick Hollywood’s ass.

Martian Sunset

Posted on by

A beautiful Martian sunset is pic o’ the day here at the ol’ raincoaster blog.

Martian Sunset

Click here for the whole gallery of Mars Phoenix images from NASA

And here is an entertaining video of the whole liftoff-to-landing process. Alas, unlike the last one (possibly the world’s coolest Mars probe simulation) there is no NIN soundtrack. Just sing Closer really, really loudly as you watch.

Developed in the summer of 2004, this animation visulaizes launch in August 2007 and entry, descent, and landing of the Phoenix Mars Mission in May 2008. Currently the animation is in the rough-cut phase and is being modified as the spacecraft develops. The animation was created by Maas Digital under the direction of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Solar System Visualization Project.

RIP YSL

Posted on by

Cross-posted from TeenyManolo

YSL and Catherine Deneuve

Yves Saint Laurent, one of the greatest forces in fashion history, has died at the age of 71. His career was a testament not only to beauty and to women but also to his tenacity and struggle with disabilities both physical and mental. That he created so much of enduring worth is an eloquent and astonishing legacy, entirely due to his unceasing battle with and sometimes-victory over those challenges, and culture itself has been enriched by his body of work.

Here is some of it: His second collection, from 1962.

I was never a Saint Laurent woman, nor ever will be, but the immaculate, sexy, unattainable, vaguely bondage-inclined goddess is an icon of the Twentieth Century and such women as Catherine Deneuve, Loulou de la Falaise, Gisele Bundchen, and Linda Evangelista owe a large part of their fame to their ability to inspire and collaborate with YSL. Whether he invented the archetype, or whether he simply discovered and dressed it is something for historians to debate. He changed the very possibilities of feminine identity, and he did it always from a perspective of deep respect and love.

The YSL Manifesto. Let his own work stand as his eulogy: