i found this really wonderful website full of quirky, vintage, strange, whimsical, etc etc illustrations from all over the world, some in watercolour, some in black-and-white (or cream, as the pages have yellowed in time), some in stranger mediums like the airbrush (i never knew they had airbrushes back in 1930!), but they’re mostly a group of pictures from artists ranging from the well-known (van gogh) to the relatively arcane (dutch children’s picture books illustrators). there’s no real way to describe this website, but maybe if i could describe it in one word it would be “intimate”, as if you’re taking a peek into a book from a shelf of a person from the past. i love the ones of animals and plants! nobody really draws that anymore, which i think they should, at the rate all of those animals are becoming extinct. and also i love the details on the mushroom illustrations!! i never knew there were so many! (and they all somehow look delicious, even though they’re mostly poisonous. idk maybe that’s just me being ravenous at 4 in the morning) here are some examples that i liked a lot:

watercolour illustration of france

old but cool looking illustration of a town from the 15th century! (that’s jerusalem i believe) the blog calls it “travel literature”, how refined!

an artist in the 1930 imagines what life would be like in 2030, using airbrushes. love how art deco this is! and i don’t mean the modern type illustrators try to replicate with using computer software

check it out here!

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i wanted to type something else, but i changed my mind because i didn’t know how to go about expressing myself. and i don’t know what to say. see i just deleted the paragraph i typed. this is so frustrating. this is the first time in my life that words have failed me? hm. i shall sleep on this and hope it gets better tomorrow.

top five things i have learnt today in descending order:

5) red bull really does give you wings… but then it’s just crash and burn

4) what the fuck has happened to muse guys??! they’re going into america with their new album and turning into a disco-synth-disaster-of-blondie-proportions (not hating blondie or anything, they’re awesome in their own right, but they’re hardly alt rock!) oh well the album is awesome still, once you get past the whole blondie thing. haha. the instrumentals at the end are mmm mmm mmm! fantastic :)

3) madonna used to be sooo pretty when she was young. or at least prettier… comparatively. that’s before she became Madgenator AKA Cyborg with iron biceps filled with mercury veins

LOVE THIS PERFORMANCE:

2) lady gaga is teh shizz. period. her epic mtv vma perf last night is just too epic for words. it was like madonna’s 1990 rococo vouge performance all over again, except new and improved!!

“WHAT? taylor swift won best female video?? unacceptable! “

“I’M NUMBER ONE!”

1) have you ever had the experience where something that seems not so significant from the past comes back and hits you like WOAH, in the present? in lit it’s called a chehkov’s gun haha. oh man i just had such a moment. three words: never underestimate the powers of public transport. really. it’s shocking! it’s shock value even tops the whole lady gaga perf, haha that why it’s at number 1 on the list.

here’s to 40 years since woodstock ‘69: possibly one of my most favourite songs ever in the world, Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix. love the intro to bits and pieces! i wish i could invent a time machine just to go back to those three days and be a hippie for the weekend. and can you imagine? these people are probably the age of our parents. darn! what would i give to see hendrix live (my ib grades? hm…. PASS)

love peace and music sans the hating people. and of course no lsd, cuz drugs are bad for you

edit: and i just realised something! if hollywood is ever gonna make a jimi hendrix biopic, they MUST get will smith to act as him because they are just dead ringers for each other. especially from 00:38-00:45 seconds. it’s freakish, there are like doppelgangers

yesterday i went to watch dance venia! it was pretty dumb cos in the morning i realised that i had forgotten my ticket at home so i had to go all the way back to take it. but the foa was pretty awesome :D i liked the contemp piece, the syf dance, JAIHO and the broadway piece the best. i also thought cpac’s chinese drums item was cool (whoohoo laoshi!) tried to take some pics from my lousy handphone camera but well. it is only 2 megapixels and it’s bad in dim lighting but that’s good enough for me!

the taiwan ethnic dance-inspired piece by the y5s. during the middle of the dance, they did this clam-shell move(you know the move in hip hop music videos where some chick puts her arms behind her neck and pumps her elbows inward, much like an oyster) which made daryl yam exclaim “taiwan ethinc people got dance move liddat meh?!” LOL

macho half-naked guys in skirts and yakuza tattoos drumming

the syf piece! it was inspired by mongolia (not sure about that one) LOL the effect of the gold tights were slightly distracting but other than that it was awesome

this was one of the “highlights” of the show. this amazonian dance. their faces are in shadow… hmm, perhaps a symbolic manifestation of their internal monolouges? i.e. “wtf am i doing in leopard-print skirts and knee-length flesh-coloured tights”

on a non-dance related note: HEIGHT GRADIENT (i’m the shortest and i’m 170cm). LOOK AT DARLI! her heels were at least 7-inches tall. when i walked up to her to say hi i gave her a pat on the shoulder and she started wobbling around. btw shoban is tiptoeing (i think)

After that a bunch of us bummed around at the astro turf, then pam’s mom gave me a ride home! we talked about the astroham moment LOL that was pretty classic

corinne bailey rae has such a nice voice! i love it. her music makes me feel as if i’m lying on a golden carpet of fallen leaves on the bank of a river twinkling in the soft autumn sun. aaaah if only singapore had autumn-ish weather… or maybe even rained more often at night, then the weather will be so nice. it’ll be perfect; romantic city that only rains at night haha. but the actual scorching heat kills any cell of romance imo.

anw i found this the other day while watching stop-motion animation videos. i love these kinds of videos because they’re just so whimsical and otherworldly (in a sense they remind me of some other parallel universe) not to mention the pain-staking effort behind it all; it makes it all so ironic since they seem effortless in the first place

it helps that the song is really great too!

i was gonna talk about about generation kill (it’s a hbo mini-series about us recon marines in iraq) but it somehow doesn’t seem to fit into the tone of this post, lol.