*werner herzog, joaquin phoenix. true story
http://www.hollywood.com/news/Herzog_Helped_Phoenix_from_Car_Wreckage/3478562
December 23, 2010
December 22, 2010
December 20, 2010
shoes by eric
Wat’s Good Fam
Nike Dunk -High Heels
Sexiest sneakers I have ever seen taking applications for models to try them on!
Air Jordan Retro 11 “Cool Grey”
Always had a special place in my heart for the patent leather J’s, maybe cause they were the hottest thing when I was in HS! These will be dropping the 23rd if u stand in line to get a pair…Holla at ur boy!
Adidas Top Ten HI “Hiking” Boot
Won’t be too much hiking going on in these, but if u know me I will be rocking this with shorts! Gotta love Houston
December 16, 2010
December 15, 2010
Santa’s evil twin, the Krampus
via irezumi:
Every comic book hero worth his salt has an archenemy. Batman has the Joker, James Bond has Dr. No, Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader, Holmes has Moriarty, Red Sox have The Yankees, and Santa Claus has Krampus.
Wait a minute, Santa has an archenemy? Well, not maybe exactly an enemy.
Krampus is one of those quirky survivals of a pagan tradition that preceded Christianity. Much like Santa himself. Santa Claus is a Christianization of a handful of traditional winter solstice figures, who morphed into St. Nicholas after the Catholics swarmed into Austria.
Wait a minute, Santa has an archenemy? Well, not maybe exactly an enemy.
Krampus is one of those quirky survivals of a pagan tradition that preceded Christianity. Much like Santa himself. Santa Claus is a Christianization of a handful of traditional winter solstice figures, who morphed into St. Nicholas after the Catholics swarmed into Austria.
Santa was most heavily influenced by the Norse Thor, who had a long white beard and cheerfully rode a flying chariot. The enemy of good in Norse mythology was Loki, a figure usually depicted as falling somewhere in the range between Satan himself and Carrot Top.
Loki was a devil-trickster figure with big horns. (Of course, most Norse gods were wearing horns on their hats if they didn’t have them growing out of their heads.) While the noble Thor was a good candidate for transformation into a Christian saint, Loki was not so much. But old gods never die, they just fade away. The lingering afterimage of Loki became part of the template for Krampus.
Comprising features both human and beastial, the ghastly amalgam ensnares young waywards unwilling to relinquish their raucous behavior. They are then shackled, stuffed in the wood-stoved pail strapped across the Krampus’s back, and carted off to be flailed unmercifully with his notorious birth switch. In the clutches of the Krampus, even the most unruly child would spew forth a promise to turn from his wicked ways.
The tradition is primarily an Austrian thing, although it spread erratically around Europe. There are two takes on Krampus, one being a secular humanist approach and the other being a magic tradition angle. If you put any two Austrians in a room, they’ll soon get into an fistfight about which interpretation is correct.
As far back as the mid-seventeenth century, European history reveals that St. Nickolaus has traveled with an array of unsavory servants. The Dutch speak of Zwarte Piet
a black-faced menace in medieval dress who crams misbehavers into his Christmas bag and then spirits them off to Spain(!). In Czechoslovakia, children unable to recite their prayers to the austere saint are beaten by an evil spirit called Cert.
In northern Germany, Nick is served by Kneht Ruprecht
a disheveled, devilish looking lout who crams boisterous brats into his hefty cloth sack and totes them around town on his shoulder.
In the secular humanist approach, Krampus and the observation of Krampus traditions are pretty much just the antithesis of Santa Claus. On Dec. 5, the eve of the feast day of St. Nick, Austrians celebrate Krampus by running across the city in grotesque masks and generally scaring children. This is an extension of the good-cop, bad-cop theory. St. Nick makes his rounds on Dec. 6 rewarding all the good little children, a task which is made easy since Krampus has been out the night before, punishing pretty much the same children with a good switching.
In other variations on the theme (and there a lot of variations considering what a relatively small geographical area we’re talking about here), Krampus is one of Santa’s minions, who follows along obediently passing out presents or switches depending on the moral turpitude of the child in question. Presumably, this would make the pointy-eared Krampus kind of the template for Santa’s elves in later Rankin-Bass productions, but the jury is still out among the scholarly community on this subject.
Then, all the adults go out and gets drunk, and much hilarity ensues.
The other interpretation of Krampus is more mystical. Under this theory, people dress up in the hideous masks of Krampus in order to scare off evil spirits.
If so, this is in keeping with a pretty universal traditional use of masks in religious ritual; the concept of a fearsome visage that wards off cowardly evil spirits has a lot of pedigree, and not just in the snowy mountains of Germanic Europe where people get a little unbalanced in the winter (remember Krystallnacht?).
In Hindu mythology, Black Makhala fills the Krampus role, while the Japanese wore masks that were supposed to be lions, but frankly look more like Benji.
The Krampus masks benefit from being particularly grotesque, or to be more accurate, stupid-looking. Let’s just say Hindus have a better aesthetic sense than Austrians. Krampus masks suffer from the silliness of the whole Christian devil image, but occasionally he’s presented as passably scary looking. Especially if you’re eight years old.
Oh, did I forget to mention the fucking?
One of the relative benefits of paganism over Christianity is that paganism usually has holidays devoted to wild orgiastic excess. The Celts indulged in this behavior around Easter, which led to the adoption of the Easter bunny as mascot for the Christian version. Austrians liked to keep warm during those cold winter months, if you catch my drift.
Once the Christians criminalized orgiastic excess, the Krampus-fertility nexus evolved into more of a taboo-stalker kind of scenario, in which the devilish figure, traditionally depicted with a swollen foot-long red tongue, malevolently thrusts himself on nubile women who are eternally “protesting” his advances. But not protesting too much. After all, he had a foot-long red tongue.
A cottage industry in Austria from Victorian times through the present has been the production of Krampus postcards to commemorate the holiday season. These tend to feature Krampus and his prodigious tongue assailing various Betti Page-type pinup girls (or even pure-hearted Austrian housefraus) with his lecherous advances.
most text stolen liberally & shamelessly from rotten & Monte Beauchamp
most pics scanned from this book
diff but good:
martinis, bikinis, and lamborghinis. 