Wednesday, May 18, 2011

90s Rave Flyers Part One

90s Rave Flyers Part One

I iwsh he would have had ones from the time period of 1994-1998 when the clubs at South Miami Beach had 24 hour liquor licenses and we would wander out into the streets at 11 in the morning scaring the residences. LOL But the last one for the Zen festival is one I went to with my friend Jenn and it was the year of the mud rave. You had to be there to understand it. That was also the rave where BT played just before sunrise and mixed in The Beatles "Here Comes the Sun" as the sun rose behind him and then threw on his track "Blue Skies". God, I miss the music........

Friday, January 14, 2011

Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar

I think Pat Benatar confused a lot of young prostitutes in the 80s. Yes, Ms. Benatar, love IS a battlefield but you know damn well your pimp is not going to let you walk away with all his girls just because you won the dance off.

Monday, January 10, 2011

This explains my love of music!

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It's active in particular circuits of the brain.
The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.
The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.
Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.
PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases happened.
Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived.
Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain's limbic system, which is involved in emotion.
The study volunteers chose a wide range of music — from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber's Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Debussy's Claire de Lune.
Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn't possible to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under study, too.
Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical School, called the study "remarkable" for the combination of techniques it used.
While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work "really nails it."
Music isn't the only cultural experience that affects the brain's reward circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied artwork.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Happy Mondays: 24 Hour Party People

If you have never seen 24 Hour Party People, I highly advise watching it if you ever had any desire to understand the start of raves.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

She's all growns up...

That's it, it's official.  My once little girl who will be 11 on the 28th of this month is officially a pre-teen.  She has her first school dance coming up tomorrow.  My sister bought her an early birthday present which is an adorable little black dress with gold polka dots.  She has been trying it on for days now, trying to decide how a little dark gold sweater will look with it, if she should wear her glasses or not for the dance, how her hair should be, etc, etc.  The one thing I noticed is her paying attention to her legs because she had not been allowed to shave yet.  With her birthday days away, I informed her that if she wanted to shave her legs for the first time for the dance.  She first tells me that it's okay, she doesn't need to.  Then, last night before she jumped in the shower, she asked if I could show her how to do it because she thought it would look better with her dress.  As I sat with her in the bathroom going over everything she needs and how to do it, I wanted to cry.  Not because I was sad but because as innocent as she still is with life and the world around her, she's growing up.  I feel like it was yesterday that I was sitting outside her 1st school when she started kindergarten crying in my car because she was growing up so fast and here I am 5 years later having a moment.  After she was done, she came and sat with me on the couch to watch some TV and she hugged me and told me that I'm such as awesome mom.  Let's hope I can stay in the awesome mom category as long as possible.

Monday, December 13, 2010

HISTÓRIA DO NATAL DIGITAL

THE STRANGER

THE STRANGER

These photos were taken by my friend Tanya. Love them, love them, love them! For as creepy as they are, they are all haunting images.