Feb27
THE BLACK HOLE-AN AWESOME SHORT VIDEO
Tag Archives: cool
Feb11
20 reasons why Bill Murray is the coolest human being alive
Feb4
3 COOL SUPERBOWL ADS 2014
FUNNY SUPERBOWL AUDI AD. 2014
CRYSLER COMMERCIAL WITH BOB DYLAN
ARNOLD’S BUD LIGHT AD
RADIO SHACK BRINGS BACK THE 80’S
Jan27
the San Francisco Oracle
Underground News
San Francisco Oracle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cover of the sixth issue, February 1967
The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city.[1] Allen Cohen (1940–2004), the editor during the paper’s most vibrant period, and Michael Bowen, the art director, were among the founders of the publication. The Oracle was an early member of the Underground Press Syndicate.
The Oracle combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury. It was arguably the outstanding example of psychedelia within the countercultural “underground” press, noted for experimental multicolored design. Oracle contributors included many significant San Francisco–area artists of the time, including Bruce Conner and Rick Griffin. It featured such beat writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure.
Every movement creates its own primary sources, and the hippies of 1967 San Francisco had a psychedelic one: The San Francisco Oracle. Published in 12 fantastic issues from 1966 to 1968, the Oracle is a fascinating artifact of the times.
With theme issues like “Youth Quake,” “The Aquarian Age,” “Psychedelics, Flowers, and War,” and “The Politics of Ecstasy,” the newspaper spoke directly to young people’s imaginations and concerns. Whimsical, hand-drawn ads touted bookstores, concerts, health food stores, coffeehouses, shops selling hippie fashions, and music sellers. And the publication’s wild page layouts, drawings, photo-collages and other graphics became icons of hippie culture.
Hippies sold the Oracle on Bay Area streets to support themselves, and the newspaper made its way around the world by subscription. Print runs grew to nearly 125,000 by issue #7. The editors estimated their circulation topped half a million when taking into account the number of people who shared each copy.
The Oracle’s articles, interviews, letters, commentary, and poems explored hippie consciousness in a variety of ways. For example, in issue #6, Tom Law wrote a piece called “The Community of the Tribe” that obliquely referred to Fifties consumer culture, the Cold War and the war in Vietnam, contexts in which hippie attitudes had emerged:
“We are all — squares and the psychedelically enlightened alike — involved in our world of now. To take up the call, to respond to the cosmic forces, we must be the hard-working, harmonious, respectful, honest, diligent, co-operative family of man. Our words are inspired. Our feeling is deep and complete. Our devotion is strong. The precious revelations which have come through us with increasing magnitude must be fathomed until we are one with each other and can extend our awareness beyond the tribe to our entire planet.
What is the natural karmic duty of a generation whose brothers, neighbors, and childhood friends now promote hate by killing innocent human beings around the world? It is to balance their jive and immature actions with the light of intelligent goodness; fearlessly to deal with the money-mad machine in order to release its hold on our bowels — the bowels of mankind.
Practically, this means that all excess profit is turned back into the community. That means all money, material things, food, etc., which are beyond the basic necessities of a happy, healthy, human existence…”
Read this reminiscience by Oracle co-founder Allen Cohen about how he first imagined a “rainbow newspaper,” or go to Regent Press to learn more about the Oracle (both links are to pages not on PBS.org).
Many thanks to Regent Press for the use of some of the original Oracle graphics on this Web site. Others provided by Ana Christy.
Jan10
BEST SCENES AND QUOTES OF NICOLAS CAGE
50 Nicolas Cage Facts for the 50th Birthday of This National Treasure
Everything you need to know about the actor who has eaten a live cockroach, gotten teeth pulled, and been “waterboarded”––all to get into character.
• He was born Nicolas Coppola and told The Huffington Post in 2012 that he decided to change his last name after actors on the set of his first movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) resented him because his uncle is the renowned director Francis Ford Coppola (and his aunt is actress Talia Shire). (Most of his role in that film ended up getting cut.) (The Huffington Post)
• To stand out from his famous relatives, he chose “Cage,” inspired by the African-American comic book superhero Luke Cage. (New York Times)
• A native of Long Beach, California, he dropped out of Beverly Hills High School after passing the GED, which boasts star alums Rob Reiner, Lenny Kravitz, and Betty White, to name a few. (Current Biography)
• When Late Show host David Letterman asked Cage whether he drank beer in high school in 2010, the movie star said one time he and his cat devoured “a bag of mushrooms” that had been in his refrigerator. (Gawker)
• When he was four, he would have this recurring dream in which “I was on the toilet and this giant blonde genie woman in a gold bikini would reach into the bathroom window like King Kong and pluck me off of the toilet seat and laugh at me.” (Playboy)
• He met his first wife, Patricia Arquette, at a deli in Los Angeles. During their courtship, she asked him to bring her J.D. Salinger’s signature on something to prove that he really loved her (he did). They divorced in 2001. (Playboy)
• Cage and Michael Jackson were both married to the same woman: Lisa Marie Presley. (TIME)
• Cage and Presley met at a birthday party for rock guitarist Johnny Ramone, and the Ramones star was the best man at their wedding. (Johnny Ramone’s memoir Commando)
• One of his favorite lines to deliver in a movie is ”Vive la fucking France, man!” in Deadfall (2012). (EmpireOnline.com)
• In Birdy (1984), he played a ladies man who was severely wounded in Vietnam, and during production, he decided to get his teeth pulled so that he could “connect with some kind of physical pain.” (Playboy)
• He ate a live cockroach for a scene in Vampire’s Kiss (1989). (Current Biography)
• …which is why his manager got him a birthday cake in the shape of a cockroach. (Playboy)
• The directors of The Croods (2013) essentially “waterboarded” Cage when they were shooting a scene in which the actor had to scream into a large tank of water. (BuzzFeed, Collider)
• On July 31, 1998, he was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Hollywood Chamber of Commerce)
• As of Oct. 2013, he is the “Best Global Actor in Motion Pictures” — at least in China, according to the judges of the Huading Awards. (TIME)
• The late renowned movie critic Roger Ebert has praised Cage’s acting, writing in a review of Adaptation (2002): “There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there.” Ebert has also described Cage as having “two speeds, intense and intenser” as well as ”a good actor in good movies, and an almost indispensable actor in bad ones.” (RogerEbert.com)
• Cage has said Jerry Lewis is one of his idols, as well as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, and Robert De Niro. (New York Times, Playboy)
• More recently, he told The Guardian that Anthony Hopkins is his hero at the moment because he is a “marvelous, magnificent classical composer” who delivers dialogue in a “musical” way, according to an interview published July 2013. (The Guardian)
• Cage has said Jim Carrey offered him a role in Dumb and Dumber, but that he turned it down for a part as an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), according to a 2012 interview with The Huffington Post. (The Huffington Post)
• In fact, his performance in that film earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1996, which includes a memorable, somber scene in which he dances in a liquor store. (Oscars.org)
• Cage helped launch Johnny Depp’s acting career by referring him to an agent, who connected him with his first film role in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The two met through Depp’s ex-wife Lori Allison, a makeup artist. (Current Biography)
• Actress Kathleen Turner, who acted with Cage in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), alleged in her 2008 memoir that he had been arrested for drunk-driving and had stolen a chihuahua. He sued her for libel, and she ended up apologizing, paying his legal fees, and making a donation to charity. (TIME)
• Cage donated $1 million to Hurricane Katrina victims. (People)
• He has served as a UN Goodwill Ambassador for Global Justice since 2010, recently calling for greater efforts to help human trafficking victims in Nov. 2013. (United Nations News Centre)
• And his extensive charity work in general landed him a spot on a Forbes list of the most generous celebrities in Hollywood. (Forbes)
• He is also on Forbes’s 2012 list of “Hollywood’s most overpaid stars.” (Forbes)
• He has reportedly owned castles in Germany and England. (New York Times)
• …and reportedly an island in the Bahamas. (Wall Street Journal)
• In 1997, he reportedly paid nearly $450,000 at auction for a rare 1971 Lamborghini Miura SVJ once owned by the late Shah of Iran — almost double its estimated worth. (Associated Press)
• A comic book buff, Cage once owned a copy of the first Superman comic Action Comics No. 1, which he called ”the single best investment I have ever made” in a March 2013 interview with Collider. The collectable was actually stolen in 2000 and reportedly found about a decade later in a storage locker in Southern California. (Collider, ABC News)
• He named one of his sons Kal-el, after Superman’s “Kryptonian name.” (TIME)
• The actor and his son Weston Cage also produced a comic book for Virgin Comics called Voodoo Child, which is partly set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (USA Today)
• TMZ photographed him wearing two pairs of sunglasses in June 2013 and claimed he was committing a fashion faux pas. (TMZ)
• His favorite sandwich is roast lamb on white bread with “a bit of mayonnaise and arugula,” he revealed in a 2012 web chat with fans on Empire magazine’s website. (EmpireOnline.com)
• He got a “large” back tattoo of a lizard in a top hat and cane to “claim my own body,” adding, “other cultures have initiations into manhood and that’s what the tattoo was for me,” he told reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994. (Philly.com)
• He reportedly has had a real lizard, too, an Asian water monitor, that he donated to the Wildlife Discovery Center in Lake Forest, Illinois, according to an interview with the museum’s curator in a May 2013 Pioneer Press article. (Sun-Times Media)
• He still loves reptiles, telling Vanity Fair in Sep. 2013 that he asked to hold a venomous snake to calm his nerves on the set of the movie Joe (2013). (Vanity Fair)
• But the feeling has not always been mutual. On Live With Kelly in March 2012, he said his Cobra “Sheba” hated him, and the way his character in Ghost Rider lunges at victims was inspired by the way the reptile would sway back and forth and leap towards him at home. (Perez Hilton)
• On The Late Show in Feb. 2012, Cage debunked rumors that he is a vampire after an eBay user uploaded a photo of a Tennessee man from the Civil War-era that bore a striking resemblance to the actor. “I don’t drink blood, and the last time I looked in the mirror, I had a reflection,” he told Letterman. (The Hollywood Reporter)
• A Fudgsicle-eating intruder once broke into his family’s home at 2 a.m. when he was living in Orange County, he told reporters at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, where he was promoting Trespass — incidentally, a movie about thieves who target a mansion. (TIME)
• Note: 2014 also marks the 10th anniversary of the release of National Treasure (2004), the blockbuster adventure flick in which Cage plays a researcher looking for the Declaration of Independence, on the back of which are invisible ink directions to treasure. A sequel came out in 2007. (Rotten Tomatoes)
• In the 2012 Empire web chat, he also told fans that he would love to do a third National Treasure film in South America. (EmpireOnline.com)
• Because of his “service to our country” in National Treasure, at least 3,526 people signed an Apr. 2013 “We The People” petition to give the Declaration of Independence to the actor at one point. While the movement did not receive the 100,000 signatures required for a White House response, its Facebook page is still active. (College Humor)
• Fans of Cage are so devoted that they have turned him into a meme, creating a viral GIF of a scene in The Wicker Man (2006) in which he screams “Not the bees!” as the insects swarm him. (Know Your Meme)
• …and compiled all of his freak-outs in movies into a YouTube super-cut that has been viewed more than 10 million times.
•…and created a website called “Feeling Cagey” that can replace Instagram selfies with a picture of the celebrity. (TIME)
• …and sport a bodysuit covered in photos of the actor. (TIME)
• …or curl up in a fleece blanket bearing his likeness. (Etsy)
• …and worship him on the Reddit thread “One True God.” (Reddit)
• In fact, a 20-year-old woman miraculously landed two job offers after accidentally emailing a photo of the star to a potential employer instead of her résumé. (TIME)
Read more: Nicolas Cage Turns 50: 50 Facts You Might Not Know About Him | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/06/50-nicolas-cage-facts-for-the-50th-birthday-of-this-national-treasure/#ixzz2pk0FMrN8
Nicolas Cage Facts for the 50th Birthday
Nov25
30 ALBUMS THAT DEFINE COOL
Any album “list” is going to be incomplete. It’s going to be filled with albums you agree with, artists you hate and some sort of commentary that you probably disagree with. This list is no different. However, rather than ranking these in order of importance or influence, we decided to pick 30 Albums that Define Cool. It’s not a “Best of XXXX” list by any stretch of the imagination (because honestly, that would be presumptuous), just thirty albums that we think are cool. These things tend to spark huge debates, so feel free to let us have it in the comments
30 albums that define cool
Nov14
countercuture heavyweights
Aug8
LET’S NOT FORGET THE HIPPIES!
Jul28
BEAT SLANG 1950’S
Beat Slang 1950s
The thing that’s really interesting about the Beat slang 1950s era is that of all the various times when slang was popular, then died out, it’s in this particular epoch that so much of the jargon is still in current use.
You sure can’t say that about the lingo of any other decade, all the way from the 1920s (“23 skidoo”) to the1960s (“groovy!”)
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Origin of Beat
The Beat generation harkens back to the late 1940s. The generation was sick of World War 2 and stunned by the sudden entry into the atomic age by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They had no place to go, and nothing from which to draw hope. They were the predecessors of the “turn on and tune out” hippies of the 1960s (although, it can be argued, the Beatniks – the followers of the Beat lifestyle – did it with more aplomb than the hippies.)
The term “beatnik” is derived from the slang term “beat,” which was popularized by famous writer Jack Kerouac after the war. “Beat” came to mean “beaten down,” but Kerouac said that wasn’t his intent.
The Beat Generation, as Kerouac saw it, were people who were “down and out, but who had intense conviction.”
Hipsters Loved Jazz
In some ways, the Beatniks’ music was way “cooler” (a very Beat word.)
“Hipster,” as Kerouac used it, is one of the lead slang terms of the generation. Hipsters were aficionados of jazz music, and the entire jazz lifestyle. That included a particular lingo, dress, and attitude, and probably the first systematic use of marijuana in an American subculture.
The word “hipster” ultimately replaced the slang “hepcat,” which was pretty much a jazz subculture follower of decades earlier.
Anyone who was a hipster was in constant pursuit of whatever was “cool,” a slang term that survives to this day. In the late 40s, that included a combination of jazz and bebop, or bop, music, a takeoff on jazz, but with a quicker beat and lots of improvisation.
Dating for the Beat Generation
Hipsters were also relaxed about other conventional social mores, including sex. Jazz musicians attracted their own followings; the hipsters were, in their day, a bit like groupies (band followers).
Let’s say you’re interested in a girl. The first looks translate into “eyeballing a doll” (that is, giving the potential date a good lookover.)
You envision what’d it be like to take her out. You anticipate it being an incredible amount of fun; or in Beat-speak, “a gas.”
But if the chick nixes the “back seat bingo” (a phrase devoted to the fine art of kissing, or making out, with a girl in a car), she’d be “bad news.” It’s important to note that it’s not the act of rejection, but the person themselves, who is the “bad news.”
About Beat Slang in the 1950s
State of Coolness
But how serious is this chick? Does she really have to be home early to “Big Daddy,” or is she just “copping a bit”?
In this usage, Big Daddy may indeed be the potential date’s father. But more likely, it’s an older person who isn’t hep to the Beat scene (and wants to put a damper on Beatnik fun.)
The date herself may very well be a closet square; that’s why she’s “copping a bit” (making up an act to delude the Beatnik.)
Squares are an abundant source for Beatniks of “the big tickle” (a laugh at the expense of the victim.) But hey, it’s not like they were cool to begin with! No big loss in Beat society.
Such a person is known as a “square” or “cube” in Beat slang in the 1950s.
The only major differences were the degree of “squareness.” A waitress, for example, might be square, but she probably wasn’t nearly as square as, say, a banker, an accountant, or – the worst yet! – a cop.
Anti-police Slang
Because of their “on the brink” lifestyle, and their engagement in activities that were either straight out or borderline illegal, the worst enemy a beatnik had was an officer of the law.
This may be the first time the use of the word “pig” as a slang slur against policemen had been used.
If a beatnik saw a bunch of cops heading toward a hipster hangout, he’d “haul ass” or “beat the gravel” (run like crazy to get away from them, since cops were never up to any good in Beatnik circles.)
More Cool Words
Beat culture had many ways of describing the ultimate amazing experience. Did you cats have a blast? That’s like saying the Daddy-o Beatniks were cookin’!
Both phrases have similar meanings. “Cats” and “Daddy-o” are variation on the Beatnik self-descriptive “hipster” word to describe, well, themselves! Beatniks are nothing if not self-referential.
A blast and cooking? No, it’s not the prelude to a Beatnik barbecue. A blast to the Beats is pretty much the same as it is to modern day partiers: a fun time. If you were cookin’, it’s a high compliment, indeed. It merely meant you were doing something well (as in a jazz musician, favorites of the Beats, playing a hot horn so much so that the patrons said he was “cooking
More Beat Slang
If you dig it, man, that’s crazy! (This is all a good thing among Beats.)
“Digging” is getting, or understanding, something, just like being “in orbit”; and “crazy,” like “boss!”, are both euphemisms for something that’s just plain old good.
Just don’t “go ape,” especially at “the flicks,” or your fellow movie patrons are apt to get “wigged out.” (That means don’t yell at the movies, or it’s apt to annoy the rest of the audience.)
Are you out to get your “kicks” by “making the scene”? The kicks is the thrill you get by doing something fun or incredible; and if you’re “making the scene,” you’re in the right place at the right time.
As you can see, there’s an art to Beat slang from the 1950s. It’s worth the effort to make the language scene, especially if your goal is to be a real hipster!
Jul25
LET’S NOT FORGET THE HIPPIES
BEATNIKHIWAY 