Archive for 2008

Paul Kinsey Throws a Mad Men Hipster Shindig

Paul Kinsey Throws a Mad Men Hipster Shindig

by Amelia G : August 7th, 2008

Paul Kinsey Michael Gladis Mad MenIn this week’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the Paul Kinsey character, ably played by Michael Gladis, throws a party in his hipster Montclair loft. I’m not sure what Montclair is like today, but, when I was in school in Connecticut, I recall Montclair being mostly nice suburban homes. Definitely no longer hip and outlying. In the 1962 time of Mad Men, however, it is a transitional neighborhood which is home to its original have-nots and the adventurous vanguard of hipsters who are the frontline shock troops in any gentrification.

Paul Kinsey has invited people from all different areas of his life, hoping they will mingle with one another happily, and think better of him for throwing such a fabulous interesting party. It is a bit scandalous that, as an aspiring writer, Paul has snarfed a typewriter from work and left it on display where his guests can all see it. Some of the people from the Sterling-Cooper advertising office where he works feel uncomfortable, uneasy and unsafe in his neighborhood. Some just feel threatened by the strangeness and feel compelled to assert their alleged superiority. Paul’s ex-girlfriend, the sexually predatory office manager Joan Holloway, refuses to acknowledge that his new girlfriend is an assistant manager at a supermarket, calls her a checkout girl, makes a thing of her being black, and accuses Paul of basically trying to hard to be interesting. One of Paul’s collegiate chums fails to close the Peggy Olson character because he can’t wrap his head around the notion that a woman is a copywriter like his friend and not a secretary or receptionist. It is a very satisfying moment when she tells him that she is not going home with him because she . . .

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Ice Cold

I want a fucking iced soy latte right now. Only I have no ice, due to lack of refrigeration. And I can’t leave to buy ice or an iced latte because I have to be here for the new refrigerator delivery. I guess if I did this on a weekday, I could have sent someone to get some caffeine.

Eating all remaining key lime pie tofutti ice cream sandwiches as part of defrosting old fridge process. Also cooking sausages & tortellini

Back from after hours hopping. Need to defrost old broken fridge in time for new one delivery in as little as three hours.

Friday is Failday

Failed to either purchase a working fridge or go to baby shower today. Finished some paperwork and looked at appliances.

Blue Blood HQ Fridge is Broken

Refrigerator is broken. I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought a fridge before. Always had cast-offs or they came with places I got. In Los Angeles, a fridge is not included in anything. Off to the store.

The Day After

Lately, I seem to feel sorta down the day after I achieve any big accomplishment. I think this is what one might call inappropriate affect, but I still feel melancholy.

Blue Blood Contest Sponsored by Squishable and Lost Boys 2 The Tribe

Blue Blood Contest Sponsored by Squishable and Lost Boys 2 The Tribe

by Amelia G : July 30th, 2008

Squishable Alligator Clint Rexx HollywoodCONTEST CONTEST CONTEST! Win cool stuffed critters, DVDs, and clothing! Contest rules after the jump below.

Sponsored by Squishable, Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, and Blue Blood Boutique

It has been a while since we had a contest, so here is a new one.

About our beloved sponsors:

Squishable
A couple years ago Zoe and Aaron were backpacking around Southeast Asia doing some volunteering and being bums. They ran into their first fat, fuzzy piggy in Hong Kong and bought it as a tribute to gothic comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez. When they got back to the United States, their huggable pig was immediately kidnapped by rabid fans. And so the Squishable company was born. Their stuffed octopus just wants to be friends, so we’ve got their extra-friendly alligator for one lucky winner.

Lost Boys 2 The Tribe
The movie Lost Boys 2: The Tribe is out on DVD this week. Somewhere between a sequel and an homage to the original 1987 Lost Boys movie where Kiefer Sutherland’s character led a band of vampires, his half brother Angus Sutherland takes up the vamp responsibilities this time around and the flick features references to and cameos from many of the characters from the original. Lost Boys 2 The TribeThe piping hot fresh DVD has one of those nifty multi-picture hologram covers, a featurette about the movie’s stunts, alternate endings, and music videos.

Blue Blood Boutique
The Blue Blood Boutique features a growing variety of Blue Blood branded swag, including plush hoodies, high quality pins, and large waterproof stickers. The primary hoodie designs were conceptualized by Blue Blood art director Forrest Black. Forrest tapped longtime Blue Blood contributor Ed Mironiuk for the store launch to do a redesign on the traditional Blue Blood royal skull. Previous Blue Blood swag has featured work by James O’Barr, Trevor Brown, Slash, Jeb Huffman, and of course yours truly and Forrest Black. Perfect attire for all your club-hopping, con touring, coffeehouse lounging, and before and after sex needs.

Contest rules and prize details after the jump below.

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Blue Blood Contest Sponsored by Squishable and Lost Boys 2 The Tribe

Blue Blood Contest Sponsored by Squishable and Lost Boys 2 The Tribe announcement from Amelia G

Australian DJ Clint Rexx models Squishable Alligator in Hollywood exclusive Blue Blood photo gallery, photographed by Amelia G and Forrest Black, shot on location at Mann’s Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame

Blue Blood
(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)

April Flores on the cover of Bizarre Magazine

April Flores on the cover of Bizarre

by Amelia G : July 30th, 2008

April Flores BizarreBlue Blood hottie April Flores is on the cover of the new issue of Bizarre. First, Topco does a mold of her to make a lovedoll and now this! The curvaceous cutie writes in her blog:

“I woke up to wonderful news that I am on the cover of the latest issue of Bizarre Magazine!!! What a wonderful honor it is especially since I’ve been a fan of that magazine for the past 7 years. 🙂

I can’t wait to see the pictures inside. Bizarre was wonderful to me! They flew me out to Montreal to shoot with photographer Martin Perreault. The theme of the shoot was all things sweet. I loved it! They had various candies and lollipops for me to suck on and play with. There was a wall of pink and blue balloons, and another set up with bubbles flying all around me. My favorite set up was with me laying on the floor with 6000 candies covering and surrounding my body! It was like a little girl’s dream come true and I kept getting distracted by the cuteness of it all.

I’ve been waiting to see this issue for months now and I am just bursting with excitement. I am off to my local newstand to buy a copy….. YAY!!!”

One thing I have to admit I am troubled by, however, is what a big deal so many people make about April’s weight. It doesn’t take an open-minded person to find April Flores hot. She is hot. So I am kind of sick of folks congratulating themselves for finding her hot even though she is plus-sized. It just still strikes me as prejudiced for someone who is not particularly kinked for big girls to make a gigantic . . .

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Internet coming in sporadically. Photoshop batch processing. Can’t hit email server. Getting off computer now.

Earthquake Magic

Earthquake Magic

by Amelia G : July 29th, 2008

Chino Hills EarthquakeAlthough I have lived in California now for longer than I have lived anywhere else, I am not originally from here. Earthquakes still seem like magic to me. Like an amusement park ride or some other thing where what you feel is interesting but without consequences. When some of the East Coast portions of my family first started going West, my maternal grandmother was certain every New Yorker who defected to California was going to fall into a crevasse and die. Eight feet of snow, she felt safe in. But earthquakes seemed horrific beyond all measure.

Native Californian Forrest Black tells me that a 6.0 earthquake is when buildings start falling down. The earthquake I just experienced was, at most recent estimate, a 5.8 in Chino Hills. That places the epicenter at around twenty some odd miles from where I am in Hollywood. This quake was so strong that, according to my twitter friends and my pals on the internet professional forums, the shaking was felt as far away as Las Vegas.

My mother was stationed in Israel during the Lebanon War. Then too, I had Stateside friends and family who thought it must be terrifying and dangerous to live in a warring part of the world. At the time, my only awareness that anything unusual was going on was that I had to set bric-a-brac away from the edge of countertops or it could be knocked off by the sonic booms of war planes flying overhead. I never saw an injured person or an explosion.

In much the same way, I have never seen the earth in California open up and start swallowing humans or their homes. I have never seen anything more than a crack in plaster, items . . .

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Whoa! Crazy earthquake!

Eep.

The Disappearance of Midlist Bands or My Chemical Romance has 54 Million Views

The Disappearance of Midlist Bands or My Chemical Romance has 54 Million Views

by Amelia G : July 18th, 2008

Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.

When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?

Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.

Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, . . .

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Mad Men New Season and Pain from an Old Wound

Mad Men New Season and Pain from an Old Wound

by Amelia G : July 27th, 2008

Don Draper Mad MenI think Mad Men was probably my favorite television show last season. The show name Mad Men is derived from the ad men who worked on Madison Avenue in New York. The first season of the show revolved around the lives of people who work at a fictional ad agency called Sterling-Cooper in 1960. Despite the fictional nature of the agency depicted, the modern ad industry trade magazine Advertising Age put together a whole fictional issue with news bites, interviews, and profiles of fictional industry professionals. That is some mighty creative marketing.

Don Draper, the primary character on the show, is always quick with a clever word and a creative approach to marketing at work and coming up with the best personal presentation personally. In describing him, one of the his coworkers says, “nobody has ever turned over that rock; he could be Batman.” So his carefully-constructed persona has worked for getting his dream job and dream house and dream woman and dream family and a number of spare dream women, but the people he knows both professionally and personally sense that Don Draper is holding back to the point where he is somewhat unknowable.

Show creator Matthew Weiner also wrote a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and produced thirty-three episodes of The Sopranos, so it should come as no surprise that his baby Mad Men is about a lot of things with interlocking multiple storylines and complex and deep characterizations. It is always difficult to make a period piece come across as both convincing and relevant, but Mad Men succeeds brilliantly. In addition the the snappy dialog and strong set design, Katherine Jane Bryant’s costume design is nothing short of amazing in its variety, beauty, and . . .

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