Nakadate and Silva

Let's take a look at a few things today:

1) New background image = new mood. Thus, I will be changing the background image of this blog weekly (or more often) from now on. All original photos, or course.

2) My pal Bobby and I are on the verge of getting some major DJ hustle on in Seoul. We've become obsessed with everything booty/ghetto/bmore/808/bass/baile/rap and soon we'll be putting together a miXXXtape with dancefloor destruction in mind.

3) Here's a poster I designed a couple years ago for a DJ night I was doing:



and another:




4) I want to talk about two people that I find particularly interesting at the moment:

a) Laurel Nakadate



Laurel Nakadate is an American video artist from Iowa, based in NYC. She's famous and turbo-successful. She's been featured in the New York Times, The Believer and in Vice, but more significantly, major art critics are comparing her to the recent greats (who you've also never heard of).

Basically, her thing is this: She convinces lonely, desperate men to come to her (or their) apartment, hangs around with them in raunchy and ridiculous ways and videotapes the whole mess. Finger painting, posing, dancing to Britney Spears and so on. The men are bracingly sad and old, and she is beautiful, young, and hideously manipulative. The rub lies in a sort of blur between sadness and joy, between exploitation and the sincere. Watching one of her videos creates a feeling of simultaneous disgust/repulsion and attraction/intrigue. Like a mangled car on the side of the highway?

Lets watch a clip from VBS.TVs Art Talk!:


Why do I hate her yet I can't stop thinking about her?


b) Anderson "The Spider" Silva

This is the guy, right here.


Anderson Silva is a well accomplished fighter. He's had an illustrious career with strings of major wins in multiple realms of ass-kick, and he's only just beginning. So since when do I care about fighting sports? Since I watched UFC for five days straight in my former apartment (*cough*고시원). All of the fighters were good, of course, but Silva stood out for me for a number of reasons: a) his style. It's totally unlike everyone else fighting in MMA today - they call him the Spider because he uses his legs as much as his arms, as I would have assumed should be normal in mixed marshal-arts . b) he's Brazilian and everything about Brazil is balls-out awesome, duh. c) his hilarious disposition. He is known to dance around like a retard before fights and when he inevitably wins fights. His voice is high-pitched and his whole manner is gentler than a lamb made of clouds. This delicate lilting way is well contrasted in the ring, however, when he decimates anyone and everyone in his path.

Fan video? Why not?