Constellation Funk

bigredrobot: nevver: Laurent Durieux WHOA.

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:21:10 -0400

Laurent Durieux

Laurent Durieux

nevver:

Laurent Durieux

WHOA.

newlevant: My friends at PSU are having a recital! If you live...

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:53:32 -0400

My friends at PSU are having a recital! If you live in the Portland area and like string quartets, choir, chamber ensembles, and cello, the event is free and open to the public. And I did the poster.

If anyone else would like to commission me to do a concert or event poster this summer, get in touch!

"We're The Kominas. Hi."

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:30:11 -0400

thepoliticalnotebook:

My piece for this issue of Somersault:

somersaultmag:

By Torie Rose DeGhett, who writes freelance about politics and music, and is a contributing arts writer at Aslan Media. (And is also one of Somersault’s two editors.)

This is from Somersault’s spring music issue. You can read it, along with other essays, in a lovely pdf magazine here!

“Sharia laaaawwww…” The opening track on The Kominas’ debut album Wild Nights in Guantánamo Bay hits hard at anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, a surreal flash of satire that pounds through your ears. The Kominas pull off being both alienating and alluring at the same time. They have incredible musical talent and lyrics that are harsh and gleeful, but well-chosen. ”Sharia Law in the U.S.A” mocks and ridicules profiling and institutional Islamophobia, jabbing at the radicalizing nature of security measures:

Cops chased me out of my mother’s womb
My crib was in state pen before age two
The cops had bugged my red toy phone
So I devised a plan for heads to roll…

Being Muslim in the US in the twenty-first century has meant an unrelenting scrutiny, a patchwork of stereotype and profiling including the ignorance of public assumption and the direct attack of authorities.

Challenging Islamophobia is a core tenet of the band’s musical purpose. They aim to overturn assumptions about Muslims, and impugn the legitimacy of institutional anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. Guitarist Sunny Ali says “We used the media’s Islamophobia to get attention the same way they used us and continue to use Islam for their headlines. We are also tapping into people’s stereotypes and turning it around on them for our own benefit. Turning a minus into a plus.”

Addressing the world’s myriad minuses with a punchy, invasive musical style has been a theme of theirs since the band’s beginning. (It should be noted that the current membership of the band has undergone lots of shifts since The Kominas started playing.) Among the songs on Wild Nights, their first full-length album, is “Rumi Was a Homo (But Wahhaj is a Fag),” written in response to homophobic comments by Imam Siraj Wahhaj. The logic of using such a slur to hit back at someone for being homophobic is an obvious question, but The Kominas (whose name roughly translates as “the bastards” or “the scumbags”) often make their way on insults and contrarian juxtapositions. This is the same band that sings “I want a handjob” in virtually the same breath as “Subhanallah (Glorious is Allah).” The lyrics from “Rumi Was a Homo,” “Conventional opinion is the ruin of souls/Bhai-jaan it’s my prose I can’t control,” feels like one of the best descriptions of the band itself and its members, using their witty, sarcastic lyrics to escape the ruination of conventionality.

The punk-meets-bhangra mix of sound that The Kominas produce is a jumble, each song shifting up the pace and the tone. Soundwise, they have a great deal of unpredictability. The changes from album to album might come from the membership changes the band has gone through since they first got in people’s faces by calling Rumi a homo, but from song to song they shift up, varying sounds and styles from jarring to smooth. When reached by email, Sunny Ali says that their musical influences are many and ever-changing, starting with a foundational mix of punk, hip-hop and Bollywood and moving on to the “endless crate” that is YouTube, which offers up everything from reggae to psychedelic African rock. It’s the lyrics that make a song one by The Kominas. Sunny Ali notes that in the process of writing, “the lyrics are usually what turns it into an actual song.”

Read More

seebytouch: “Tell me how you feel. If you care about me, tell...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:17:41 -0400

seebytouch:

“Tell me how you feel. If you care about me, tell me. Don’t assume that your actions communicate this.”—Z

highway62: Important page from DETECTIVE COMICS #416 by Frank...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:16:43 -0400

highway62:

Important page from DETECTIVE COMICS #416 by Frank Robbins.

Why is it important? Because comics. You could try to translate this to prose or cinema or cutscene or whatever, but it would only be an approximation of the power that comics gives us to dissect time and poke around it and choose what’s important (out of what the artists choose to present to us, the viewer.)

Everything matters on this page.

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:57:45 -0400

fotojournalismus: A boy throws a sheep into the waters of...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:53:37 -0400

fotojournalismus:

A boy throws a sheep into the waters of Jhelum river to wash it, in Srinagar on May 20, 2013.

[Credit : Danish Ismail/Reuters]

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:48:37 -0400

rude-mechanicals: CyberPunk by ~AdrianDadich

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:45:24 -0400

rude-mechanicals:

CyberPunk by ~AdrianDadich

davecmahler: Gang, I’m really super super proud of this one, I...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:38:19 -0400

davecmahler:

Gang, I’m really super super proud of this one, I hope you like it.

PS family, pls don’t show ama and apa, this isn’t for everyone |:-\ oy!

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:28:13 -0400

I like Mark Millar

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:47:25 -0400

davidlafuente:

Some readers don’t like his smart-ass attitude, and some creators don’t like… that his paychecks are bigger than theirs. All of which is absolute crap, but that’s another story.

Millar has all my respect for things like the text following. He posted this on his message board, discussing further the topic of Bill Finger’s story.

Decades on, my generation of creators is hyper-aware of what happened to the people who really built the industry. The very small handful of people who built pretty much everything that pays for all those big offices around the world for the major companies. But even then I still see this happening. One reasonably well-known and sleazy company, for example, has a deal where every new creator-owned series is owned entirely by the writer and the artist is work for hire. Thus, if a movie gets made and someone makes one, two or three million dollars from the proceeds, the artist gets nothing but a cut of publishing.

Other thing I’ve seen is new creations unevenly split. In rights terms, 50/50 is the only way to go, but I’ve seen this split on big projects 75/25 and even 90/10 among the writer and artist. This rarely gets reported because artists, even more than writers, tend to be gentle souls, crushed by their next deadline and never quite finding the time or the energy to make a fuss. But I see all sorts of stuff going on now like front-loading money from a movie deal into a writer’s first draft of a screenplay money too. That’s a particularly sneaky one. Say, for example, the rights to a movie is going for a million dollars. That should be half a million each. But some very dodgy deals can be cut where the screenplay is 500K and the rights are 500 between both, the artist just getting half of what he’s due and the screenplay binned immediately and always planned to be binned with the writer recouping 75% of the pot.

What I mean by all this is that people should keep their eyes open. This isn’t an industry where our work is worth pennies anymore. These ideas can be used in endless mediums and are the reason the Big Two have vast Manhattan and Los Angeles offices. At the same time, writers and artists have to be fair with each other. Anything that isn’t 50/50 isn’t such a good deal. I think it’s fair enough for a writer to exclusively take a producer fee in the same way that an artist could take a design fee because, for example, I spend easily 5-10 hours a week on producer calls, watching casting sessions or even disappearing for a week entirely for story meetings or early edit screenings. I still split my producer fees 50/50 with the artists as a personal choice, but don’t judge the others who don’t as it really is a distinct deal from the rights and a different job.

MM

Photo

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:34:58 -0400

v3l3nomortale: Lauren Marx

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:34:00 -0400

v3l3nomortale:

Lauren Marx

kierongillen: empartridge: don’t delete artist comments,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:31:32 -0400

kierongillen:

empartridge:

don’t delete artist comments, artist credits, blog sources, or save and repost images to your own blog, etc etc etc. just don’t, man.
I’m really tired of seeing my own work and ESPECIALLY the work of my friends stripped of credit. people are posting free content online for you to look at and enjoy, and if the thing they had to say about it or a link to them is too ugly for your dumb blog, don’t reblog it. I know this is the wild wild west of the internet, but try to respect creators.

luv u.

In YA5, the list of evil sins Loki did originally included removing art credits when reblogging. I deleted it for space, but still…

Don’t be like Loki.

masembe: Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) - Park...

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:23:57 -0400

masembe:

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) - Park Chan-wook

“People make mistakes. if you’ve committed a sin, you have to make atonement for that sin. Atonement, do you know what that means? Big Atonement for big sins. Small Atonement for small sins.”

mckelvie: We’ve all been there, Astrid. (Sequence from my 2008...

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:20:38 -0400

mckelvie:

We’ve all been there, Astrid.

(Sequence from my 2008 book Suburban Glamour, currently getting a second printing.)

atompunk: vivatvintage: 1964 fashion “Sulky young...

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:19:13 -0400

atompunk:

vivatvintage:

1964 fashion

“Sulky young colours”???

lucyknisley: Is that where we landed on that?

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:18:02 -0400

lucyknisley:

Is that where we landed on that?

Audio

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:36:05 -0400