#173 "Let's Rock" - Olmec

I feel like I've taken a lot of photos of myself with a helmet on for this blog. Not sure what that says about me or the quality of content that appears on this thing. I mean, look at the look on my face. Even I know that I look like the kid that eats all the paste and ruins art time.

TANGENTS. Anywho, I got this shirt from MyPartyShirt.com. Seriously, just the best site for shirts that encapsulate my childhood.

Legends of the Hidden Temple is maybe the best game show ever produced. I mean that Temple was just one of the coolest sets I've ever seen. How fun must that have been to run through.

During the first year of my friendship with Jaime there was a period of time where we fell into this rhythm of I'd go to class and then afterward I'd make it back to her dorm to watch Legends of the Hidden Temple and The Joy of Painting. We'd sit there riveted and her roommate would judge us and our life choices. (note that I'm probably remembering this wrong) Then that Halloween we decided to dress up as the Green Monkeys team and Brandon begrudgingly agreed to be our temple guard. Brandon's costume was made up of a colorful feather headdress from the cowboys and indians section of the costume store and bits from a little girl's Cleopatra costume (not exaggerating even at all). He drove alone to our friend Bob's annual Halloween party straight from work and he rather conveniently forgot to bring his costume along with him when he had left. So sadly there was never a public debut to his ramshackle costume.

#169 MORE Rhinestones!

Not a great picture of the shirt or a particularly good picture of me but it's the best picture of the costume I think.

It was part of my costume for the annual UCI Anteater Band trip up to UC Davis for their Picnic Day Battle of the Bands. This year's theme was Disneyland so I decided to go for the mega obscure (as per usual when it comes to costumed events) and dressed as Captain EO, aka Michael Jackson as an intergalactic sailor on a mission of peace, music, and epic dance moves. This was produced in the 80s, a time when it was apparently generally assumed that music had the power to change the physical properties of things (relevant portion starts at the 1:28 mark). Michael's moves are so fly that they are able to keep his ass from being beaten by evil space robots and transform an evil witch (that looks to be about half-hentai-tentacle-monster and half Eddie Munster) into Anjelica Huston (eh, you can't win 'em all).

BUY: Me and my love of specificity, I bought the official (and relatively pricey) shirt from Disneyland. It does have a very old school soft feel to the material though so it's super comfy.

#168 "You're a loser, Tony. A loser with a skinny weiner!"

Heavyweights was maybe my favorite movie when I was a kid. It's just hilarious and weird and a total classic. Fun fact time: this movie is co-written by Judd Apatow aka the man behind practically every money-making, critically-lauded comedy of the past few years.

This shirt is one of the ones that the kids wear once Ben Stiller's character (Tony Perkis) takes over the camp. By far though, the breakout star of the movie is Lars, one of Uncle Tony's henchmen/camp counselors. Every line he has is pretty much comedy gold.

BUY: I got this one from mypartyshirt.com. They also have the counselor shirts (which are the same but in black).

Shirt # 83 Bum Ba Da Da Dum Superman!

Needs More Zippers

I wish I had time to be funny, but I don't. Let's pretend I said something clever and call it a day.

Friendly Neighborhood Shirt Blog

This is a shirt featuring my childhood favorite comic book superhero, Spiderman. I used to watch the cartoon fairly religiously and I had a few of the action figures. As you can see, I had a little fun with the photos today.

That's kind of a poor disguise there, Allison

If I were better at photo manipulation, I'd have pixelated my face. If you didn't happen to watch reruns of this on cartoon network or avoided movie theaters the summers of '07 and '09 this is a Transformers shirt, specifically the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime. This shirt by the way has the thickest screen printing I've ever encountered on a shirt. There is also a lot of it. It makes it about twice as warm as a normal shirt on a sunny day.

Sufjan Stevens in concert report: That was certainly way, way cooler and more involved than I was expecting. The tickets ended up being pretty expensive after ticketmaster fees but after the fact it seems well worth it. There were lots of crazy lighting effects and lasers and a projections and a scrim that would descend that would also be projected upon. There were dancers and discoballs and a few bits of choreography and headbands and flourescent visors and a light up wand...it was madness. Also here's a list of the various musicians/random instruments I saw onstage; two drummers, two trombones (and another one that added in occasionally), two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboard/synth player, a piano player, a Casio SK1, a banjo, sleighbells, some sort of flute or pipes, two background dancers/backup singers, and a moog. I might be forgetting some stuff. But it was pretty darn amazing. He comes off as a very eccentric, thoughtful, emotional, sensitive, reclusive artist. Here's some of the fun stuff I remember him saying:

"That song was about heartbreak and the apocalypse. Which are kind of the same thing. The end of the world is a broken heart...I'm sorry, I'm kind of a drama queen."

"Nothing says 'I love you' like a Casio SK1" after a Casio SK1 solo

"Thank you for joining us on this journey of love, loss, heartbreak, and the end of the world."

It also kind of looked like he might have been crying after singing "Casimir Pulaski Day" (which admittedly is the SADDEST SONG IN THE WORLD, don't even try to dispute me on this), but he also could have just been sweaty. Also during his quiet acoustic songs, the entire sold out audience was silent. I've never had that happen before. The entire crowd was just completely riveted. It was pretty fascinating.

I look like Telly from Sesame Street.

Today's shirt is from Theadless.com (they've apparently had handy dandy html codes to aid me in blogging about their shirts all along. Also in theory my streetteam info is already attached to the link. They're so clever.). The reason for this shirt today (other than to continue my streak of wearing shirts that could also be cheap costumes) is that I'm having lunch with my good friend Kaylene. Why does this matter, you say? Who on God's balls is Kaylene? Well, Kaylene is awesome and she's going to med school to become a surgeon one day (Ohhhh). Also, Scrubs (which happens to be one of her favorite shows) featured this shirt as well as Turk the surgeon wore it in an ep.



Tonight is the night of the Sufjan Stevens concert that I'm going to with Janice and Hannah. Perhaps tomorrow or sometime soon I'll feature a cool shirt that I got from the show. I'm pretty excited about the concert. As far as I know he probably hasn't been on tour since around 2004 so I jumped at the chance to get tickets for this tour. I view it as sort of an indie kid pilgrimage. I'm not super into his new CD, but "Come On Feel The Illinoise" is one of my favorite albums of all time. It's very mellow music with lots of interesting arrangements.

P.S. threadless is doing a deal until November 1st that all of their scary tees are on sale for 10 bucks. They've got a decent amount of like zombie and monster shirts to check out if you are so inclined.

faux-to booth.

This is the closest thing I have to a tuxedo t-shirt. It's sort of got like a punk schoolboy thing going on with the funky tie and random pins (which say things like 2 cool 4 school and ACE). My most vivid memory of wearing it was at the barn party at Davis the year that we went as rockstars. Actually, that then makes sense in context because I went that year as Angus Young who pretty much always dresses like a punky British schoolboy.

In honor of Halloween coming up, I think I'll end up doing a string of posts about shirts that are either somewhat costume-y or have monsters on them.

Ma-Ti Suuuuuucks

Another homemade shirt today folks. This one is from Halloween 2006 when I dressed up as a Planeteer from Captain Planet. I wasn't any specific planeteer. Truth be told, were any of them particularly likeable or memorable? Wheeler was a dick, Linka was a bitch, Kwame and Gi were just kind of there, and don't even get me started on Ma-Ti. Fuck Ma-Ti. He's like the Aquaman of the Planeteers; and not like the badass, hook-for-a-hand Justice League Aquaman; but like the wimpy, pretty boy Aquaman from the Superfriends, except more useless. I just want to punch him in the face and take his lunch money and I don't even know why. (I'm having a very Dylan moment right now)

I really don't know why I liked Captain Planet. I can't remember liking any of the characters, Captain Planet was only ever in like 28 seconds of each episode, and even then he had a mullet and a half shirt so he sucks. I'm thinking the majority of my love for that show was just the theme song. That catchy mofo is stuck in my head right now.