July 11th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Housekeeping
Hey bitches! You may have noticed that I cleaned up my layout quite a bit. It’ll change over the next few days once I figure out what I want the header image to be, but I’m already happy with the way things are turning out right now. I also learned some things about WordPress that make my life a lot easier, like that you can have themes based on other themes so that one serves as a template.
My parents bought our cats a new “cat tree” recently, so Igby’s been all over it. I saw an unsuccessful attempt by him to jump from the bottom to the top yesterday. He almost seemed embarrassed when he fell down because he immediately walked in the other direction, but I know that assigning him with a human emotion is relatively foolish. I take too many pictures of him.
Working at UCLA has been good, especially since I only need to go in once or twice a week. It still requires a lot of work at home though. I finished laying out a lesson plan, but I have another one to complete soon as well as two cover designs. I’m just happy that I have another thing to put on my resume. In addition, I’ve been learning far more things about using InDesign than I did when I worked on EyeCandy. (Primarily because I only dealt with a two-page spread in EyeCandy as opposed to a fifty-page booklet.) I impressed my boss the other day with my ability to quickly convert the National Center for History in the Schools logo into a vector object. Nerdery pays off, sometimes.
I’m seeing my friend Elizabeth tomorrow afternoon and then Troy (exboyfriend) in the evening. It’ll be comforting to feel like less of a recluse. There have been things happening in my life lately that haven’t been very conducive to making me feel like a rational human being, at least in terms of intransigence. I don’t know. I never know.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to M.I.A.’s latest album sporadically over the last two days, but not because I think it sounds good. I’m actually really creeped out by it. I talked to my friend James about it and we agreed that “overstimulation” was a good term to assign to 2010. There’s definitely a lot self-parody in MAYA (yeah I’m not even going to bother with the punctuation) that extends beyond the kitschy album art, in that she’s singing about things a lot of musicians loftily push aside. The tracks are an electronic clusterfuck of memes with lyrics that praise the internet, Twitter, texting, and whatever other mediums we as a society have willingly plugged into. I’m still not sure what to make of “Born Free” (and its ginger genocide music video)–I still can’t listen to it without being constantly aware of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” looped in the background–but I thought this blog post on Lady Gaga brought up a lot of interesting points about the inherent hypocrisy of preaching individuality to the masses. To me, the most striking similarity between Lady Gaga and M.I.A. is that they’re both accused of being “edgy” for the sake of creating buzz for themselves, of putting on some crazy front so that we can talk about them all the time, even if it’s just to say that they’re insane. Lady Gaga, however, has a career that very obviously mimics Madonna’s. Inverted crosses and melodramatic performances will probably soon lose their novelty (again). M.I.A., on the other hand, seems to embody all that weird [seemingly omnipresent] self-referencing shit that I sift through when I’m browsing the internet, and sings about detachment as a result of our twinkling gadgets. Which is precisely what leaves me so horrified.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Igby
My favorite model.