- Gorillaz will ride again. Jamie Hewlett, co-founder of the virtual
band, has announced plans for a return after four years away – as much as a
band comprised of cartoon characters can actually go away given that they don’t
exist in a physical form anyway. Hewlett, a comic book artist and designer when
he’s not conjuring up animated rock bands, revealed the news in an Instagram
post that featured new drawings of fictional band members Murdoc and Noodle. A
fan asked him about what the post meant and he replied, "Yes Gorillaz
Returns.” Hewlett didn’t offer up any further details, but any new release
would be Gorillaz’s first since they dropped “The Fall” back in 2011, even
though they also tried the same lame-ass tactic that real bands try when
looking to make money without making new music by releasing a “singles
collecytion” unimaginatively titled “The Singles Collection 2001-2011” later
that same year. Hewlett's fellow Gorillaz co-creator, Damon Alban, has remained
active over the past four years, albeit not exactly at the forefront of the
rock and roll world. Instead, he’s been slaving away at his laptop writing the
music for a new musical that will be shown at Manchester's Palace Theatre in
July as part of Manchester International Festival. That show, grammatically
botched title-wise with the moniker wonder.land,
is inspired by Lewis Carroll's classic novel Alice In Wonderland and is directed by Rufus Norris.
Then again, writing songs to be performed by actual human beings instead of
cartoons has to be a nice and welcome change of pace for any musical mind………
- Don’t bag on Macedonian Social Democratic Union party
leader Zoran Zaev (a.k.a. Z-Squared) for doing what he’s supposed to do. He’s
the leader of an opposition party and by definition, that means he’s trying to
affect change and alter the status quo. So what if he allegedly plotted a
violent overthrow of the country’s current government to make that happen?
Peaceful means don’t always work and you may not have time to negotiate or
politick your way to a mutually agreeable solution, meaning occasionally it’s
going to be time to revolt. Macedonian authorities don’t agree and they’ve
charged Zev with plotting a coup and banning him from fleeing, er, leaving the
country. He’s been charged with "violence against representatives of the
highest state authorities,” which sounds really bad, but he was also freed
after being questioned by an investigative judge. He wasn’t arrested even
though he was ordered to hand over his passport, with Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski
accusing Zaev of trying to blackmail him into resigning and giving way to a
government of technicians by threatening to publish compromising phone
conversations. Hey Nicky, if you don’t want those conversations being used
against you, then don’t have them on a phone that can be bugged and hacked, my
man. This case has been building for a while now and last weekend, authorities
arrested former intelligence chief Zoran Verusevski, his wife and one other man
in connection with the case. All of this stems from Zaev's party accusing the
ruling conservatives of fraud in the April 2014 election and boycotting
parliament, so a violent coup is the next logical step……….
- Soccer is boring as hell. Even the players know it and no
one more so than Ukrainian player Volodymyr Kozlenko, whose attention wasn’t exactly on
the pitch when his third-tier team Energiya Nova Kakhova took on Premier League
outfit Olimpik Donetsk during a friendly tournament near Kyiv. While the game
was going on and his attention should have been on running around aimlessly on
a five-acre chunk of grass kicking a ball in random directions but rarely in
the general direction of the goal, Kozlenko had other priorities. Specifically,
he was caught on camera talking on his smartphone during the game, which is
both an impressive feat of multitasking and a display that definitely upset
Ukrainian soccer officials. He his the phone in his short and while on the
pitch, “got it out from time to time, called someone and conversed,” Olimpik
said in a statement. The team than got all incendiary with it, labeling
Kozlenk’s actions “anti-football” and “clownery.” First off, it’s soccer, not
football. Secondly, clownish? Maybe if you dropped giant red foam noses and
rainbow wigs on your players, your sport would be much more entertaining.
Unfortunately, the Kyiv Region Football Federation said on its website that
Kozlenko had been suspended for the rest of the tournament and banned referee
Oleksiy Drachov for failing to discipline him during the game. Instead of
banning this innovator, why not encourage him? Put charging stations around the
field so he can stay powered up during the game and drop a few selfie sticks at
strategic points on the pitch in case he wants to Instagram out something good
in the middle of the second half. Besides, Kozlenko’s team lost the game and
unless someone called and let him know about it, he may not realize what
happened……….
- This is why people buy art – other than arrogant,
spoiled rich people who like to collect it to show off to/hold over the heads
of their fellow 1 percenters when those people visit their 6,000-square-foot
third vacation home. Many of those less fortunate buy art with the hope that
they can some day turn that investment into a nice profit. The formula worked out
extremely well for one fortunate soul who bought a work known as “Salisbury
Cathedral from the Meadows” for $5,212 at auction house Christie’s in 2013 and
has flipped the painting less than two years later for a 98,536-percent profit
at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. How did the price soar so much in a mere 569 days?
Probably because the painting was discovered to be an oil landscape by John
Constable that was painted over by restorers. According to Sotheby’s, experts
thought it was painted by fans of the English Romantic artist, but after the
2013 purchase it was found that Constable painted the work in preparation for
his 1831 masterpiece of the same name, now owned by the Tate museum in London.
That was enough to drive the price up to a cool $5.2 million for the
unidentified buyer, who purchased it from an unidentified seller in a
transaction that left auction attendees musing that someone at Christie’s was
going to lose their job over the error. The painting was “heavily retouched
with a dark and opaque pigment which probably dated to the late 19th or early
20th century in a misguided attempt to ‘finish’ the painting,” Sotheby’s wrote
on its website. “The retouchings on the present painting were readily soluble
in the course of its recent cleaning.” In response to their epic fail, Christie’s
officials issued a pointless statement reasserting its erroneous viewpoint and
claiming there is “no clear consensus of expertise on the new attribution.”
Whatever makes you pompous tools feel better………
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