Merry Christmas!

Pink Christmas!

Pink Stage Lighting...THE SADIES!!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ME!

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

The only quality audio I could find...LOVE these guys.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

"Every Night I Die at Miyagi's"

Pink Elephants on Parade

Pink Champagne

Champagne is made from four different grapes. These are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Gris. Usually it's the first two grapes that are used in the most volume.
Chardonnay is a white wine grape - but pinot noir is a red wine grape. So why is it that all Champagne is not pink?

The answer is in the way a grape works.

Grapes are all white on the inside. It's only the outside skin that has any color. You can make a white wine out of a red grape. You would just remove the skins immediately so that there was no red color added to the wine liquid. An example is white zinfandel. Zinfandel is a red grape. To make a white zinfandel, they just let the skins stay on the liquid for a short while. That lets a small amount of the tint from the red skin color the wine liquid, giving it a nice blush color.
So normally when they make a Champagne, even though they use "red grapes", they take the skin away immediately so that none of the red color from the skin affects the overall color of the Champagne liquid. In order to make a Champagne a pink Champagne, all they have to do is let the skins sit with the liquid for a short while. The longer it sits together, the more pink the liquid becomes.

Champagnes can be sweet, musty, fruity, nutty, and any variety of other flavors. Pink Champagnes tend to taste a little fruity, but they can be sweet or non-sweet depending on the maker.

Pink Shins

James Mercer is by far my favorite lyricist......just beautiful.


Pink Bullets

I was just bony hands as cold as a winter pole
You held a warm stone out new flowing blood to hold
Oh what a contrast you were
To the brutes in the halls
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass
We fell in a field it seems now a thousand summers passed
When our kite lines first crossed
We tied them into knots
And to finally fly apart
We had to cut them off.

Since then it's been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkardly cast
That even I could be the star.

I don't look back as much as a rule
And all this way before murder was cool
But your memory is here and I'd like it to stay
Warm light on a winter day.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days go slowly by
Two loose kites falling from the sky
Drawn to the ground and an end to flight.

~The Shins (J Mercer)

Pink Tornado

So....after posting a smattering of random topics or pictorials that share the commonality of the colour pink, it's time to come clean.

To do this, I have to gaze back into my earliest years (cue the hazy fog).

Obviously, growing up as a girl, 'pink' was saturated into my wardrobe, toys, room decor, birthday cards and decorations, hair accessories, and not surprisingly...that of the majority of my same sex playmates.

We did not choose it. It seemed, in fact, to have chosen us. I did not pay it much mind, and because of that, I never questioned it.

That is, until the birth of my younger sister. She was born less than a week before my sixth birthday...completely eclipsing the event in every way. I was thrilled. I thought she was an early gift for me...a living doll. Unlike the small army of dolls I had who each could perform some task: one that cried, one that walked, one that wet it's diapers...this one would do it all!

Of course, her nursery was pink.

That was where the similarities ended. Where I was fair haired, pale with blue eyes....she was dark of hair with a warm french Canadian complexion and huge brown eyes. I was quiet and reserved....shy and obedient. She was curious and willful...outspoken and strong.

As a toddler, she either rejected my feminine hand me down apparel or my parents realized that blush coloured dresses and ribbons were not conducive to playing with trucks in the dirt. She did not play Barbies with me nor fall into the familiar category of younger siblings who took them and snipped off their hair or drew on their faces with marker. She paid them no mind. Instead she turned her attention on the neighbor's child for a near scalping that even though forced to apologize for....still looked most proud of her work.

Over time I began to observe her from a safe distance. We shared vaguely similar features from our same parents. Same household.

We were both girls.

That was when it hit me. She was no less feminine in her overalls and tangled wavy curls than I was in my fushcia sweater and hair ribbon. She did not seem at all masculine sitting among the little boys in the sandbox. Her movements, the way in which she approached play, her diminutive fingers and turn of her wrist even entrenched in dirt pushing the same toy bulldozers through the silt was definitively that of a girl.

It was then that 'pink' began to bother me.

I looked around my room. It was as if someone had coated it in a healthy dose of pepto bismol. It felt suddenly suffocating. As far back as I could remember it was the colour of my life. Many good memories attached to it, I could not easily reject it....but I tried.

Every year, with our birthdays so close together and family Christmas celebrations we shared in simultaneously opening presents. Ones that brought us, as sisters, neigh identical gifts save the age difference. It may have been the same ritual from the beginning, but suddenly I was aware that my sister's gifts of clothing arrived in soft blues, whites and greens.....mine...in pink.

Not wanting to be ungrateful, I began to devise a plan to rid myself of this rosy identity. I would begin months before any gift bearing with specific requests for items in any and every colour but pink. To no avail.

When I was thirteen, I took my first part time job after school and on weekends at an ice cream parlour famous for it's 31wonderful flavours. Of course....the uniform was pink. I sucked it up for my $3.15 per hour because I knew that every two weeks, liberation would come in the form of a cheque. A cheque I cashed and promptly spent on clothing. Mostly black.

Black became my new armour. It seemed to be the antithesis of pink. Nothing girly or frivolous about it. My parents had a mild reaction to it, thinking it a bit "harsh"...but I continued to swath myself in it. There are those who regard fashion as superficial. there is, of course an element of that to it. However, since most of us do not live in nudist colonies...it is our "outward show", our calling card, a presentation and representation of our tastes and personalities. It is also a benchmark moment in our lives when we not only begin to reject what our parents dress us in, but adopt our own identity and make conscious choices about how we will be seen to the rest of the world. Where we decide who we are, how we want to be perceived and where we shake off blindly accepting what others believe we are or want us to be. Our choice.

Mine was black. I can honestly say there was a palpable difference in how people related to me dressed in dark colours. I was taken more seriously on some level. It is difficult to describe unless you have experienced it firsthand.

Yet, every Christmas, my sister and I would unwrap our Christmas eve 'gift' ( a pair of pajamas each that we were told to promptly put on and go to bed)...mine...always pink. As we got older, my sister actually began to find it amusing and would laugh and taunt me a bit with it. One year in my early teens, I asked my relatives at our hosted holiday feast what I thought at the time was a most Barbara Walters-esque question "If I was a colour....what colour would I be?"...hoping to find that general perception would deem me something more neutral. I was gutted. My Mother, Aunt, Sister, Uncle....all of them said "pink". Traitors. Even my black wardrobe had betrayed me. Only my Father answered "Brown"...which to this day I still am slightly unsure of it's meaning as both an offering to appease and represent me, in general.

I began to think my 'pink' curse was following me through life. Like a very pretty, but deadly pink tornado.

So....I ignored it.

Through my late teens and twenties I avoided it. Never purchased anything tinted with it. Almost as in a class war, I turned my nose up at it and paid it no regard. I understood it was all around me...I just regarded it as beneath me.

In recent years, an odd thing happened. Pink began to reveal itself to me through photography, art, fashion, decor in odd and surprising ways. When I began to 'see' it once again, instead of looking past it...it actually appealed to me. It was comforting. There is an actual psychology associated with the colour as it has shown to have a calming affect...tranquilizing.

So...I have slowly adopted it. It no longer offends or defines me. It still feels quite blatantly feminine, but I have realized that so do I. It is a 'part' of who I am...not all of who I am.

In the end...it is just a colour. One of many.

I cannot pretend that as such, it has not been a very large metaphor in my life. No one can deny it has certain and specific immediate connotations in general perception. It does.

For me....it represents a full circle journey on the path to figuring out who I am on the inside...regardless of anything else. Rejecting social norms, then accepting them and making them your own after much life experience.

Pink.

Pink Sole

Tickled Pink

Pink Tank

The monument, originally in Štefánik square in the Smíchov district, was dedicated on 29 July 1945. The audience, including Soviet General Ivan Konev and top municipal representatives, admired a tank on a massive five-metre stone pedestal with a barrel pointing menacingly westwards. The monument was built to commemorate the arrival of Konev's First Ukrainian Front, namely the Fourth Tank Brigade led by Lelyushenko on 9 May 1945.

The monument was intended to represent Lt I.G. Goncharenko's T-34-85 medium tank of the 63rd Guards Tank Brigade, 10th Guards Tank Corps, the first Soviet tank to enter Prague in May 1945 and subsequently knocked out in the street fighting. Unfortunately, the actual monument bore an IS-2m heavy tank instead of the famous T-34, with its turret mislabelled 23 (Goncharenko's tank had actually borne the tactical marking I-24).

Following the communist coup in 1948, the monument was raised to the status of National Cultural Monument, commemorating the liberation of Prague by the Red Army, and the square was renamed to Square of Soviet Tank Crews.

After the 1989 Velvet revolution and the abolition of censorship, the legacy of the tank was openly discussed. The major force that saved the Prague uprising was the Russian Liberation Army led by Andrey Vlasov. Vlasov's soldiers captured the Ruzyně airport, where German Me 262 jets were deployed, and took the left bank of the Vltava including Smíchov. On May 9, the only aim of Wehrmacht military leaders was to get safely to the American occupation zone. For many citizens, the tank symbolised the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968 and the following permanent deployment of Soviet military units, rather than the events in World War II—a popular local legend was that the number 23 painted on the tank's turret foresaw the Soviet invasion (1945 + 23 = 1968). In February 1991, historian Pavel Bělina noted that there were "neither moral nor historical grounds" for preserving the monument.


"Pink" Soviet tank "Joseph Stalin" formerly as No.23 now in Lešany military muzeum. On the night from 27 to 28 April 1991, art student David Černý with his friends painted the tank pink and erected a huge finger in an obscene gesture on its turret roof, signing their work "David Černý and the Neostunners". Černý was arrested under an often-abused law concerning "public disturbances", and after an official protest by the Russian government, the tank was re-painted green. However, fifteen members of the newly elected parliament took advantage of their official immunity and re-painted the tank pink in protest against the arrest. The national monument status was abolished, Černý released, and the tank removed. The tank is currently located in Military museum Lešany by Týnec nad Sázavou.

Černý, who finished his studies and became an enfant terrible of Czech visual art, later proposed a new statue, a pink tank digging into the ground. Following a fierce opposition from Prime Minister Miloš Zeman and Russian Ambassador Vasil Yakovlev, the municipality representatives abolished the project. The statue was finally installed in the spa resort, Lázně Bohdaneč, where the occupying Soviet army was deployed until the early 1990s (located at 50°4′9.426″N 15°40′58.421″E / 50.069285°N 15.68289472°E / 50.069285; 15.68289472).


Cow No. 23On 17 October 2002, a fountain "Propadliště času" was installed on the spot. The spurting water should have purified everything and let the people forget. However, the people did not forget. In 2004, a CowParade was held in Prague. One of the fiberglass cows was painted khaki and provided with five-pointed red stars and white numbers 23 on both flanks, with the intention to paint it publicly pink later on. The cow was vandalised, and the happening did not take place.

On 8 May 2005, when the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War was celebrated, Communist party leader Miroslav Grebeníček organised a gathering there. His supporters, mostly pensioners, put lilacs on the spot of the former monument and sung The Internationale.


Pink tank hull with a white invasion stripe on Kinsky SquareOn 21 August 2008 the pink hull of a tank by David Černý was illegaly installed on the spot. It has a white invasion stripe, the same as Soviet tanks that entered Czechoslovakia in 1968. According to Černý, the statue should draw

attention to contemporary politics of Russia.

Pink Monroe