"Bulletproof" by La Roux

I don't know why--there is no real reason to explain it--but this video sort of got me through working out this morning. I discovered La Roux as a Discovery Download one day on iTunes. I was so impressed with this single, "Bulletproof," that I ended up buying her album. [If you're worried that I relapsed LT, don't be. I bought this about two or three months ago.]

I really like her play with cubism and geometric shapes in the video. Also the color! Well, this video came on VH1, and after watching the video, I switched from my regular work out mix to her album. I had done a couple miles at the track listening to it. This morning it just sort of motivated me. I only wanted to do 30 minutes on the elliptical because that is the length that you can stay on the machines. Well, the CD kept me pumping, and I stayed on longer--against the rules of the UREC.

Here are the lyrics to the video above:

Been there, done that, messed around
I’m having fun don’t put me down,
I’ll never let you sweep me off my feet,
I won’t let you in again, the messages I’ve tried to send,
my informations’ just not going in,
burnin’ bridges shore to shore, I’ll break away from something more,
I’m not to not to love until it’s cheap,
been there, done that, messed around,
I’m having fun don’t put me down,
I’ll never let you sweep me off my feet,

Chorus:
This time maybe,
I’ll be,
Bulletproof x2

I won’t let you turn around,
and tell me now I’m much too proud,
to walk away from something when it’s dead,
do do do your dirty WORST come out to play when you are HURT,
there’s certain things that should be left unsaid,
tick tick tick tick on the watch and life’s too short for me to stop,
Oh baby, your time is running out,
I won’t let you turn around,
and tell me now I’m much too proud,
All you do is fill me up with doubt,

Chorus:
This time maybe I’ll be bulletproof x10

Artist of the Day: Willem De Kooning

We've just been reading Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight in my WGS course. That, coupled with my research on Grey Gardens, helped me to discover a new artists--Willem de Kooning. I had heard the name and seen a couple of his paintings. I was really interested in how his paintings really went along with our topical discussion of body images. I wish I had found him just a week or two earlier. This image to the left is Woman III.









I don't know why he started painting women. I couldn't find a detailed enough of an answer in the amount of time I devoted to researching this blog. The little bit wiki had to say was the following: "De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions were derived from objects found in the studio. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City) [and to the right], which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952."

Binary Thought in Disney

It's what makes the world go round.

My Territory

Kitty at the track.

Random Genius

My friend over at To Someone Likeminded posted this link on her blog the other day to Random Sentences from the Virtual Academic Lab.

Well, here was my FB responses:

Post #1: This is amazing. I can't stop creating sentences. I see a blog post coming soon.

Post #2 (seconds later): This kind of saddens me after being amazed briefly. Is this saying that all we really do is Mad Libs when we create new thoughts. That our work is nothing more than jest or game. ???

Well, I am still mulling over this idea. I do think that it is a neat site and generator of thoughtful discussion. But is it? I am still questioning all of this.

Can productive thought be produced by the random generator / mad-lib-esque-ness of the virtual world?

The epistemology of praxis invests itself in the systemization of the public sphere.
The emergence of normative value(s) may be parsed as the authentication of print culture.
The culture of consumption functions as the conceptual frame for the historicization of pedagogical institutions.
The fiction of the natural invests itself in the fantasy of agency.
The poetics of post-capitalist hegemony may be parsed as the systemization of power/knowledge.

You get the point.

I am trying to think about this more and more through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz's work, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, which I am reviewing for class. I wonder if there is this sense that the virtual allows us understand things more clearly, or blatantly. But one thing she returns to again and again is that we somehow tie the virtual with the technological, and we need to reconsider and (re-)understand how the virtual is part of the everyday. We occupy a virtual space in real space. It is not just something that is created in the world of the Internet.

I send you out into the ether.