Hurry down my chimney

My Auntie Lupe has so many knicknacks that even the bottle of wine has
a sexy outfit!

Movie Watchin'

For weeks before Xmas vacation, I joked that I was going to take my parents to see "It's Complicated" on Xmas Day, and it turned out to be not so much of a joke because my cousin Lindsy Donahue (the reason I started going by my middle name) also wanted to see it, and so she, my mom, and I went to the 11 am showing of the movie and it was HILARIOUS. I was extra glad that the sex scenes were all Implied and not too much time was spent on Alec Baldwin's hairy 50+ body, and most of their nudity is like, covered in blankets or from the shoulders up, etc. No awkwardness of watching retirement aged folks doin it with mom sittin next to me, PHEW!

The only really awkward part was the first time Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin do it, she is like immediately regretting it and he does this really awkward thing where he grabs her crotch and says "HOME SWEET HOME!" which super grossed me out, but I think that was the idea because a very hungover Meryl Streep proceeds to puke in the nightstand right after he says that. [this moment pictured above]

This all being said, it's a total chick flick and whatever else, so you know, if this sort of movie's not your thing, then you might not like it, but if anyone is tugging at your sleeve to go see it, it's not that bad and it will not bore you to tears. Oh yeah, and John Krasinski (from NBC's 'The Office') pretty much makes the movie watchable for younger folks.

Build your own bamboo bike

NPR most emailed stories emailed me a bamboo bike thing that I am about to listen to...you should too...they're only ever a few minutes long.

[LISTEN AND READ]

CA über alles

1) dropped my phone and this is what my pictures look like now...sort
of cool, if I didn't take as many iPhone pics as I do. :( it's already
cramping my style, I'm

2) just finished waiting for my brother in his girlfriend's apartment
complex, pictured, sort of. It's by the community college I went to
(go Orange Coast College Pirates!) and it's bigger than my university
by farrrrr (but I can't say I miss the class sizes or how hard it is
to add a class thats popular (got a funny story about that, I'll tell
it later, it'll be better when I'm not typing with my thumbs) which in
a way bums me out, but at least I'll graduate with more than an
associate's degree this way. Also, brother's gf totally works at
American apparel (score!) so thats super rad! Her name is LeeAr and I
already made that joke (not to her yet) from the great Steve Martin
movie "LA Story" where he gets Sarah Jessica Parker's number and she
writes how to spell her name on his hand: "big S, little a, big N, big
D, little e, big E and then there's a star at the end." I hope she's
seen that movie.

3) I'm in a restaurant with a lot of funny signs and I'm totally
bummin about my cameraphone now.

4) I'm almost guilty that I'm enjoying such nice weather. All these
pussies last night that were trying to spit game at me (new slang
learned from my brother's friends) were bitching about how "cold" it
is and they totally got why I was laughing at them, and it wasn't from
their dr phil impression.

Something weird is happening with my iPhone camera

My mom looks like she's possessed. Are you the gatekeeper?

Kinda like Santa

Got my picture taken with the grinch at Gus' Pretzels before I left STL.

LANDED

So last night I flew to OC, CA. John Wayne airport.

I flew from STL to Vegas, and saved a seat for a friend that I ran into because I asked her to plug in my laptop for me and she recognized me from when I went to her going away party at my neighbor's house last summer, so we sat and chatted and she told me about her life since she moved to Oakland. We got free bloody marys from the sweetest of flight attendants (I almost would say I should draw a picture of him but it might end up weird and I've got stuff to do this afternoon so I'mma skip it and just post the picture we took of our note with our free drinks) and then we sat together and talked about her photo site and I looked at the html in her photo blog because she said she wanted bigger pictures or something, and then I looked at it and she had a fine already altered template, so we just drank 2 (very very very expensive--wtf airports?!) dirty martinis instead and then we both went to our respective connecting flights and it was pretty cool.

I got on my next flight and had the usual Southwest Airlines maybe panic attack game of what kind of stranger do I sit next to...an elderly couple? NO Way. Single looking middle aged dudes? No thank you! Then I saw a kid that was dressed like a little skater/surfer in a middle seat and immediately asked if I could sit by him, then said "are you sure you want the middle?" and he scooted over to the window seat. He had a zebra cover on his sidekick that he was furiously texting on until pretty much the moment we took off, and oh yeah this guy sat next to us that was all tattooed up and was reading a Ultimate Fighting Champion magazine he said his friend wrote for. He asked if I was into UFC and I was like "no, I just see it on tv in public all the time"...I didn't mention that I think it's like the most homoerotic Greco-Roman wrestling shit I've ever seen, so instead I just said something about how it's cool to read things your friends are published in.

I started talking to the kid and the story was that his name is Wade and his mom lives in Vegas and his dad in Huntington Beach, and yes he surfs and his dad was the one who taught him how, and he is in the 7th grade, and yadda yadda regular smalltalk... Then I ask him what he asked for for Xmas and he said, "a new surfboard and a go kart."

Halfway laughing under my breath, I go, "so do you think you're gonna get the go kart?" and he totally surprises/impresses me in the most adorable bad kid way with like this guilty side smirk and thinks for a minute and goes, "well, I dunno, cuz I had another one and I wrecked it in the street and it kind of generally got me into a lot of trouble..."

Such a good answer. Then we start to descend and we see the waves glowing when they crash, which is my favorite thing in marine science...it was a diatom bloom (red tide, why you don't eat shellfish in certain months) and they exhibit bioluminescence when disturbed, so it makes the waves glow! Super cool thing to see from a plane!

So then we land and this other kid with a more clean cut haircut and like a button up plaid shirt kind of pops up and makes a face at our row, so I almost nudge the kid next to me and go like "what a dork!" but it was a really good thing that I didn't because it totally turned out to be his brother and that would've felt like the ultimate bad adult FAIL because that's just a meanness that is only reserved for other kids, not people who were picked on as kids and should know better that a kid was making a face at his brother, not glaring at me. He was probably jealous that his brother got to sit with someone who talked to him about surfing and go karts.

Their dad was waiting for him at the gate and my brother Ryan and cousin Desiree and new cousin (by his dad marrying my dad's only sister Kathy) Erik were all waiting for me, so we waited for baggage claim and then afterwards my brother offered to take us all to either a hip hop show or a dub step or drum and bass show, and I totally was not having it, so I just said why not take us to a bar in Costa Mesa where we might run into some people we know.
There we all are drinking a beer in the parking lot:

He followed suit and I totally ran into a bunch of people that were in my bowling class in high school. One of them invited me to "jam" at the recording studios that he works at in Anaheim and when I told him I do not play guitar, he didn't really seem to care. He also told me that his older sister got he and a few of our other friends from bowling class into Heroin and then he went to prison for it (I can't remember if it was 9 months or 18 months, either way it was long enough to be a significant stay) and then I was like, "Did you have the nicest teeth there?" and he answered, "YEAH-How'd you know??!"

Now we're pretty much up to speed, more stories another time. Check ya later!

People in CA are so weird about their bath fixtures

My ancient little ewok is drinking out of a beday. I forgot she did
that.

Running Behind on Life

Not just on my blog. I leave for CA this evening for Two weeks and I'll try to be good about posting, they might just be boring iphone pics though. Catchya on the flipside!

THIS IS MY LIFE

It's as if my tag cloud came to life in picture form

Napkin Bra

Stephen and adela made a napkin bra at the deacon

Brunch

Taylor's Foussie

Tonight at white flag projects

It's free and there will most certainly be refreshments of some sort. I'll be there late, I hope I can catch Ronnie Bass's performance, I'm really looking fwd to meeting him because I really like his video which you can see in a post from a few days ago!
[RFT wrote about it better than I have time to HERE]

[here's an article on Ronnie Bass in ARTFORUM]

This Reminded me of That

Taylor sent me this really awkward video that her study abroad coordinator/advisor in London from when she went to Central St Martins that makes me want to separate my toothbrush and my toothpaste tube. It also makes me feel awkward that it was a group project, like those 16 people had to agree on that concept and work on this together....makes me nervous thinking about how many creative differences there were in the room before they landed on this bizarre video.

I think another reason it made me slightly skirmish is because of this video I saw on Tosh.0 a while back...if you can believe what I searched for to try to remember where I saw this video, you can understand why I first was directed to this page and this page. Don't worry, they are both SFW, the second one is just blinding to read because it's in red comic sans bold on like 80's plastic electronics casing grey....yuck!

Forgot to mention this when it was relevant

But my brother went to high school at Newport Harbor High School, of the MTV reality series...he was only a few years older than the kids on the show so he knew of all of them and my mom said whenever it was running that he'd be all pissed watching it and say stuff like "man, those two people would never go out with one another in real life, this is so fake!" (I read a blog entry where someone agrees with him too) which I think would be funny to see. I just remembered that I also went there for summer school when I was 15. Fancy that.

What made me think of it was that I was looking at this screen shot I took of the area on google maps and noticed that Newport Harbor High wasn't listed as such, and then I figured out why...oh yeah, because they don't want random creeps turning up on a school's campus just because some kids that went there were on MTV...duh.

I saw the first episode but it was boring so I never watched it again. This is the sort of thing that's making me a little anxious to be in the OC for two weeks starting one week from today.

TA DA!

Going through old photos, I discovered that not only do a freakish amount of pictures of me take place at Disneyland (in Anaheim, CA, Disneyworld is in FL) talking to people in mascot character furry suits, but also there are a number of photos that (I think?) everyone's parents takes of them, where they make them pose in front of some sort of set or cutout thing or interact with inanimate objects in some unnatural looking way.

At my grandma's house I found something even more frightening (but actually useful to me in a recent project) where she and I went around together (in several of the houses we lived in, not just one) taking pictures of every room, sometimes involving me doing some sort of motion or skit or something that implies the sorts of activities that might take place in that room-- with several costume changes. There is one outfit where I am wearing a really horrific hat that I wish I could go back in time and stomp on, but instead of showing you that now, I just went for the best combination of awesome outfit + awkward Vanna White gesture. TA-DA!

The scariest part about this picture is that I'm most embarrassed that they happened to spring for the fancy poster sized picture while I still skiied and had a perm, while my brother gets to permanently look awesome with his snowboard with graphics of a hangman game on yellow ruled legal pad. :( At least I know how to do both.

Anyways, moving on-- below is what I'm talking about with this awkward interacting with statues of people...I mean, did they tell us to pretend like I was in love with these creepy old man statues? I'm hugging them!

Also, the first picture is an understandable photo op...it's at Knott's Berry Farm, an amusement park (with excellent chicken dinner with strawberry rhubarb soup and biscuits and boysenberry jam mmmmmm I'm not joking, people wait in longer lines for the restaurant than you do for the rollercoasters) but in the second one we are randomly posing with a sign directing us to more shops that are open! I mean, it's most likely at a touristy destination, but I'm guessing we weren't on vacation.

I've never been arrested, but if I ever am, I don't think I'll be as happy as I am in Mickey's Toon Town Jail complete with rubber bars and matching fanny packs!
I guess my brother and I walked away thinking it was still funny to do this unprompted by cheesy parents, because here we are on Hawaiian vacation, ages 12 and 14, our parents out on a romantic day date, and left to our own devices we still choose to pose with the gecko mannequins. I specifically remember that when these pictures were taken, we kept referring to the respective masculine/feminine anthropomorphized gecko mannequins as our "dates"....We'll never learn.

PARADISE

I found this picture among some old pictures and I can't remember who took it or if I took it or what/when/where it is from or even who is in it, but isn't it a rad photo? I had to scan it in right away.

Boogeyboarding doesn't get enough cool points for how much fun it is. There is this surf video that I randomly saw on Fuel channel's Sunday movies that happens to have my friend Alex in it (I've mentioned him a few times on my blog before recently and also here) and is so rad and artistically and sentimentally produced that I ended up buying the DVD called Sprout; and it has this whole segment in it where this Aussie dude is narrating and they are on a boat on some leisurely surf trip just meditatively waxing their boards and jumping into the water to go paddle out into where the waves break (so nice--the hardest part of surfing for me is paddling out, it would be the best day if I could go surfing and paddle with the waves instead of into them where they keep breaking in your face and making your weak little arms tired and you can't breathe...ugh) and generally having a good time, and then he breaks out these like inflatable things that you can boogeyboard on, and he says something about how it's carefree fun because no one has to pay attention or give a care about running into one another because instead of riding something that's hard and made of fiberglass/wood and can really hurt someone when you run into them, it's no big deal if you run into one another on the inflatable thing, and he also says something like "just try to ride this without the hugest smile on your face" and you really can't imagine a world where you wouldn't have the hugest smile on your face, it's super rad. If anyone wants to borrow it, lemme know and I just might hook you up.

FINALLY

I feel like I've tried to explain this particular episode of This American Life to several avid listeners, noting the concept of it as a favorite, or at least any time anyone mentions a murder mystery dinner or haunted houses (the latter of which actually has nothing to do with the episode itself, it just reminds me of general eeriness) et al, and NOT ONCE has the person known what I was talking about. NOT ONCE. I will admit that half the time (or maybe more) I am horrible at recounting stories, jokes, how songs go...HORRIBLE, so I guess in the end, I only have myself to blame.

Low and behold, this week they reaired it on the podcast! OH THANK HEAVEN! Their website and intro spiel is so much better at explaining things than I am.

[HERE YOU GO]

PS- I think maybe it was because I only ever talked about how people who've had family members murdered don't like to go to murder mystery parties. In theory it sounds fun, but it's probably because I've never been to one. I have also never attended a bar/bat mitzfah...If anyone wants to invite me to either of those things, I'm totally game.

Ronnie Bass coming to White Flag Dec 17

See/RSVP/invite on fb [HERE]
This is his super rad video that's in our current exhibition:

I really like his work, it sits so comfortably between music video and video art and entertaining, that I want to fall asleep in its hand like a kitten. I'm really excited to meet him, but also a little nervous that I have my last final that night, which we've all been emailed that we "don't have to stay for" so I guess I am going to email back that I'm gonna turn in my stuff and book it back to the gallery, and anyone who wants to come is welcome to.

Sorry I've been Absent

This is what I've been doing instead:

(oh, and I have all these projects to turn in)

Overheard in the bathroom

I was in a stall and heard a few women come in, one of whom was crying, and their conversation went something like this:

Consoling Friend: "It's over a boy right?"

Crying Lady: "He's so young and I'm so old!" (more sobbing)

Consoling Friend: "Oh, honey, don't say that, you're not that old!"

Crying Lady: "I'll be forty two next week!"

Consoling Friend: "Well at least you have great hair?"

It was really really hard to keep a straight face while I washed my hands.

I think this is the most literal video ever

I tried singing this song at karaoke one time and it was a mess. I love this song though.

Tord Boontje holiday and wearables

love it.

I think this might be the most fucked up thing I've ever posted.

A friend put this on facebook today, and after watching part of it I had to go to youtube to see how many views it had. It was nearly 3.5 million views! HOLY SHIT.

All I can say is I don't think I've watched any short video ever where my jaw was dropped the whole time and eyes were bugging out of my head totally baffled and I can't even count how many times I said "What the fuck?" during this. I'm sorry in advance for posting this.



this one makes me uncomfortable on a whole separate level altogether.

There are totally more videos but I'm gonna let you guys do that on your own, I'm not into it. See ya!

Geeky Knuckles

[HERE] is a website of only pics of knuckle tattoos and their stories
[HERE]

[READ ABOUT THAT GLOW IN THE DARK INK HERE]

[LEARN HOW TO MAKE THESE GLOVES HERE]

Goodness gracious, great boobs of fire

I have kind of a fear/fascination relationship with the concept of large breasts, mostly because I don't have them, so I guess I find them curious, but I recently came across a few articles about this woman who is famous for having heavy knockers, appearing on America's Got Talent to crush cans with her breasts because they weigh a lot, but what I thought was of interest is that in Belleville, IL, just across the river from here, some guy filed a suit against PT's or some other strip club in the area because he got bruises from her breasts slamming into his neck!

[read more]

GEEK/AZN/LARP/PIXEL LOVE

I just really love this song. The video kinda makes me wanna throw a LAN sex party, jk.

RIDE YOUR BIKE ON THE FREEWAY TODAY

I AM GOING TO DO IT WITH MY A&M CYCLERY PALS.

This one goes out to my Squids

A ROOM FULL OF COOKIES

Stephen brought me to this party where there was an entire room with just cookies.

Werewolf Barmitzfah

SPOOKY SCARY

Missouri nondriver

My picture is pretty good!

Chilton's reaction shot to most vh1 reality shows

Except megan wants a millionaire, which the whole household is still
mourning the unfortunate cancellation of!

This word is starting to make me sad

I was only going to ask for a bowling ball for Xmas but I think I want
to add shoes and the right bag to that order as well.

Bowling against the team of friends that my team keeps switching off
first and second place with, on top of forgetting my team shirt is
making me surprisingly neurotic...defense mechanism to get drunk
faster is quickly kicking In.

SUNDAY- RIDE YOUR BIKE ON 1-64/40

before it opens to cars. DECEMBER SIXTH!
Quoted from my friend Jake:
Highway 40 / Interstate 64 officially reopens Monday, December 7...which means this Sunday, December 6 is your last chance (with a much much lower probability of death) to ride your bike on the interstate...or walk, but walking is retarded.

Eastbound lanes will be for bicyclists only from 12-4pm between Hanley & Kingshighway...you can apparently jump on at any interchange in between.

[DOWNLOAD THE PDF WITH DEETS]

MOST BORING MOVIE EVER

This movie sucked. The only reasonable adult was this reporter that identified with the mom and at the end she said something about being entitled to a childhood blah blah blah this movie was so defensive it was kind of like watching Jon and Kate plus Eight only even more boring plus art people who think they're doing something important and 60 minutes exploiting a family. Fuck this movie.
[website]

My picture was taken UPSIDE DOWN!

I did a post when I got my picture (by Ali on my iPhone) taken during the shoot while inverted...[HERE] And now the show is finally here, it's gonna be a fun party with DJ and fun extras, and it's likely that if you go you'll see pictures of several other people you know too:

BSS | Upside Downy Face Trailer from Bruton Stroube Studios on Vimeo.

Announcing the Upside Downy Face show opening!
Friday, December 4, 2009
Tin Can Tavern: Downtown (1909 Locust St.)
12 Upside Downy Images by Brandon Voges of Bruton Stroube Studios
Food, music, exquisite canned beverages, AND...
...The premiere of the full-length behind the scenes video.
for more information: www.brutonstroube.com/blog
©2009 www.brutonstroube.com

SO, will you be there?