Black Swan

I'm shallow enough to admit that my interest in this movie is mostly because of Rodarte's hand in designing the costumes. Sort of like how I'm desperately searching for Le silence est d'or because, well, Victorian costumes designed by Christian Dior himself.

Can't get away / Tarots of our lives part the second

This morning, I fell asleep at 2AM and woke up at 7AM. Thinking I could go back to sleep, I went onto the computer to check some stuff. Two hours later and I was wide awake. I decided to put some music on and plugged in my earbuds. But then the strangest thing happened. I could hear someone saying my name. I assumed it wasn't for me and went on my merry way.

I heard my name again. I wondered if it was my roommate. I looked outside the windows; not seeing anything, I went back upstairs.

About a half hour later I went down to get breakfast. I could still hear the calling.

Looking outside, I saw an old neighbor from my previous apartment.

It really is a small world (town), isn't it? I had thought I had left everything from the old place, terrible, dirty kitchen and all.

And now for a sudden segue: the second part of my tarot thing. Continuing off of the previous post, here's another set of video game tarots, this time from Persona 2. Since there were about six years between the two games, that gave them enough time to revamp much of the art style and design, and this meant that they brought a very different style to their tarot cards. The heavy use of gold and black give the cards an appearance of shadow puppets bred with Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Images from rpgclassics.

Ah! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan

I can't believe someone made this video before I.

Last minutes

It's the day before school and I'm blasting through four days worth of backlogged webcomics and blogs via the library internet. This will be the last of my lazy summer days. I'll be entering my last year of college and will be applying to grad schools. I'll also be helping TA a class, an experience I've only had once way back in my last year of high school. I'll be one of several TAs, but I'm also, as far as I can tell, the only one not working towards a career in education. We'll see how that goes.

Dior Fall 2000 Couture

It's almost impossible for me to find anything about this show except for a few scattered images, reports, and one short clip. And it pains me so much because this show is almost made for me. Galliano took his inspiration from Freud, Jung, fetishism, and sadomasochism, the clothes reflecting the sexual secrets, fantasies, and childhood nightmares of an Edwardian, probably Austrian, family.

Some lovely images here and there.

The Rejected

I haven't done any Mad Men posts because there really isn't anything I can say that no one else has. So have some pictures with pithy comments.

Somehow, right from the get-go, I knew Joyce would be crushing on Peggy Sappho-style. I think it's the hair and the eyebrows and the suit and the styling; all of it screams lesbian.

Dorothy is my new favorite secretary-who-appears-for-one-episode. It's the hair. Maybe she'll come back? Why not? I barely remember any of Allison's scenes before season four, and she got her own mini-arc, which seems to have come to an unhappy conclusion in this episode.

Ceiling Peggy is watching you destroy your life.

MW

Osamu Tezuka. You generally associate him with Astro Boy and, less frequently, Kimba the White Lion. So it often comes as a surprise to find out that he did more than kid-friendly fare (I got that experience when I was a teenager and picked up one of his more dramatic works titled Adolf; it's about Nazis).

MW pretty much sounds like the prototype for Naoki Urusawa's Monster: pretty boy sociopath strings along an idealistic man, only MW has more gay sex. And women getting killed through poison-injected orgasms.

The real reason for this post: I was flipping through a copy and saw a pastiche of Aubrey Beardsley's art (well, pastiche would imply that he didn't nearly completely copy the images). And since Aubrey Beardsley is one of my favorite artists, I knew I had to do a post.

I think it's more than a little depressing that I can name most of the works referenced except one. From left to right, up to down: panel border from Le Morte d'Arthur and curtains from The Rape of the Lock, the ambassadors from The Lysistrata, Salome and Iokanaan's head from Salome/J'ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, an illustration I can't place, probably from Bon Mots or Lucian's A True History, and finally the famous Peacock Skirt from Salome.

The things we pass

Today I visited my grandparents.

When I was young, I used to spend a week out of the summer at my grandparents (back then, I wasn't nearly as easily distracted as I am now, so I could handle spending a week without internet and decent television). There used to be a boy who lived way down the hall. For whatever reason, we became friends and he helped me pass the time.

I thought he was super cool, especially since he had a SNES, a magical console I didn't have that had all sorts of magical, legendary games on it. We'd (sit and I'd watch him) play Ghosts 'n Goblins, the game that solidified my fear of haunted houses and my hatred of games that require reflexes.

I remember that we'd hang out a few more times afterwards, but I eventually stopped going to my grandparents' every summer and we never saw or talked to each other again.

I wonder how many experiences like that we have; meeting people, forming brief connections, and then parting, neither harmed nor enriched by the experience.

"I'm just one stomach flu away from my goal weight."

Just got back from LA. I visited a few museums and hope to post some of my shitty, low quality, awkwardly angled pictures later. But for now, let's chronicle my favorite part of the trip: my inability to eat.

On the first day, I should have known what was going to happen. The uncle I was staying with wanted to treat me to homemade sushi and I, in my cravings for cuisine of the Far East, was very excited and ate much sushi and sashimi. This was a mistake.

The next morning it felt like someone had sewn a baby into my belly.

We had been invited to dim sum at the horrible early hours of 8AM. Wanting to get at least some food in, I had a few dumplings. This was another mistake.

By the end of the second day I decided I would only eat a little bit and would avoid as much rice and rice-products as possible under the assumption that my stomach problems were caused by the rice part of the sushi.

By the third day I was feeling pretty constipated. No amount of eating as little as possible and drinking lots of water was helping me. But by some miracle, I became well again on the fourth and penultimate day.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if my stomach problems weren't caused by LA pollution. The Bay Area has generally good weather and air, and several years of living in Northern California, with its trees and close proximity to the ocean, has probably cleaned at least some of my system. I wouldn't be surprised if LA's smog was the cause of this. I hate almost everything else about LA, anyways; why not add the air to my list?

I said I became well near the end of our trip, but that's not quite true. My stomach stopped hurting so much, but my appetite hadn't quite returned. In fact, it still hasn't fully recovered.For now, I'm going to look on the bright side. If this means that I can be satisfied by eating kids' sized meals, maybe I'll slim down a bit.

And really, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

So...

...is it a bad thing that I now really want to see Burlesque?

Hurricane Venus

Caution: song may cause spontaneous dancing and autotune poisoning.