17 hours ago
I suck at self promotion
LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!
For one weekend only, Albert ‘SeoulBrother’ McMurry, will be in Austin, Tex. for South by Southwest where he’ll be a contestant in Battledecks 2010 in Room 18ABCD, Friday, March 13th at 3:30 with Avery Edison, Colleen Wainright, Mike Monteiro, Jeffrey Zeldman and others*.
You may know the Mullenville Chili Champion for his work here or here, here, here and here. Or maybe you watched this, this, this, this or this.
He took this really popular picture and is in this other popular picture.
These are his parents! 
This is his wife, Sweetness! She’ll be there too! 
He loves an Old Fashioned and a whiskey smash and once bought shoes.
* He really doesn’t belong there.
George Lois Tells the Stories Behind His Twelve Favorite Classic Esquire Covers — Vulture
Ali As Saint Sebastian, April 1968
“It was 1968, and Ali was waiting for an appeal for draft evasion to reach the Supreme Court. I said to Hayes, ‘I want to do a cover with Ali, I want to depict him as the famous martyr Saint Sebastian.’ And I called up Ali, told him I needed him and his pretty white trunks and shoes. I showed him a postcard of a painting by Castagno, with Sebastian’s body relaxed, but his head back in agony. And he says, ‘Hey, George, this cat’s a Christian? I can’t pose as a Christian, I’m a Muslim.’ I tried to explain that it’s symbology, but he said no, and I asked if I could talk to Elijah Muhammad, who was the head of the Muslim community at the time. He calls him up, puts me on the phone, and there I am talking to Elijah Muhammad about religion, imagery, symobolgy, etc., and finally he said, ‘Okay, sounds good to me.’ And Ali did it. It really became a rallying cry, the anti-war poster at that time. It was a combo of race, religion, and war in one image.”
via kottke
Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a zombie?
Yeah, I was hanging outside the gate to the house of a former bad guy in Gonaives, Haiti, B.S.ing with a bunch of kids. Billy Badass (Vladimir), a 14 year old punk with the smile of a shark, turned and started yelling at this woman across the street. Starling-like, the kids shifted from the jokes and games we were playing to taunting. Some ran across the street directly in front of the woman and some just started yelling “Go home, zombie!” in Creole.
I looked across the street. “Why is everyone calling her a zombie?” I asked. Billy laughed and looked up at me. “Because she a zombie.”
My orders were explicit when we entered country: Don’t mess with anything of religious significance, including and especially zombies. So I watched. To be honest, that was all I could do.
The zombie walked slowly, like her feet were asleep. You know when you get the needles but have to get up to answer the phone or something? Like that but slower and with purpose. She was dressed like any other Haitian woman— a shirt, a cotton dress down to about mid-calf and an orange and white striped scarf tied around her hair— except she was filthy and her clothes were ripped.
It was difficult to determine her age because she was coated in dirt, ash and soot. Her nappy hair was dusty and covered in twigs and what looked like maggots nestled in each disgusting lock. Tear-trails went from her wide, unblinking eyes, down her face and neck. The open sores on her knees, elbows and hands glistened.
Years later, after the World Trade Center fell and the images of New Yorkers walking around stunned, covered in dirt, ash and soot hit the air, I thought of the zombies again.
As the zombie walked past, the kids broke into a chant about a bloodthirsty general named Badagri, the spirit of war, keeper of the storm and sender of thunder and lightning.
Sitting there, in front of the gate as the zombie kept walking and the children chanted to a war spirit, I, for the first time as an adult, truly appreciated the power of religion and began to question my own beliefs.
And it was bad ass.
Sleep tight.
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2 days ago
Twitter: The Criterion Collection
What if Twitter… came to life?
We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.
This is what they gave us.
We hope you enjoy it.
This is the kind of shit I want to do with my life. @poeks, @sween
, great job!
via atsween
3 days ago
Yeah. Last night. So fucked up.
4 days ago
On adulthood
Being an adult is filled with ah-ha moments. Like the first time you paid attention to international news or understood compound interest or like me, tonight, figured out that two airplane bottles of Rumple Minze were clogging the ice machine in the fridge. In other words: Drink.
5 days ago
Working on the clip for Criterion, my son walked by, saw this image and asked, ‘Dad, how did you get Monkey to think?’
HEYSAM REAL ORIGINAL USE OF STOP ANIMATION AND THE MAPLE LEAF RAG !
Great minds think alike, Shmessie. Great minds. I claim complete ignorance of that film, but it is lovely and very well made. Only problem now that you’ve made the connection is that I will forever associate Delicious Monster with handjobs. Kind of gives new meaning to the name.
From now on, whenever I hear this song, I will call it The Handjob Rag. Thanks you two.
via samhey
6 days ago
Themes of the iPad Announcement
Many smart, wonderful people have written volumes about the iPad since the announcement. I keep replaying Apple’s January 27th iPad presentation in my head. Not because I’m interested in what multi-touch gestures were used or what this means to the future of Apple, human-computer interaction (HCI), software distribution or any number of things about the device itself. While interesting, we’ll have answers for that as the iPad SDK matures and when the iPad actually ships.
No, what I keep going back to are the broad themes of the iPad demo which are arguably the device’s killer features: Consumption, Presentation and the Future.
I ended up having to work the weekend I was supposed to do my Criterion Collection video (which is awesome, btw) so I turned mine in late. Or, it was just too crappy to make the cut. Either way, this is MY blog, so, here it is!
Watch this.
via jimray
1 week ago
Do you remember last October when I wrote about how Walmart sells sneakily smaller packages for their “lower prices,” so that they often actually cost MORE while bragging that they cost less? I used the example of Luvs diapers, which Walmart packages 70 to a box while Target puts 80 in a box: it SEEMS like the Walmart box costs less—-if you don’t happen to notice there are fewer diapers. WELL. Reader Christine sent me another example: I thought you would get a kick out of this one, please see the attached picture. I bought packs of Quilted Northern, 12 rolls each with identical packaging, one from each store. The roll on the left is Target, the one on the right is Wal Mart. Pretty funny huh? (via Swistle: Sneaky Sneaky SNAKY)
Wal*Mart is evil.
1 week ago
1 week ago
For its part, Adobe would like to portray Flash as some noble gift that it has graciously bestowed upon the world, leading to a utopia of ubiquitous porn clips, time-wasting tower defense games, and artsy “web sites” where you can’t link to anything specific. But it’s really about them trying to be the content gatekeeper instead of the content being in an open format.
Unlike Dowdell, the Macalope’s not going to issue a manifesto asking anyone at Adobe to talk about that.
»The Macalope Weekly: The Jerk Store
