PicoBlog

No artist has done more to create — or, maybe I should say manufacture — the American identity than Norman Rockwell. Consider how wildly fragmented America’s immigrant identity was when the illustrator — as he described himself — began painting covers for the famed Saturday Evening Post in 1916. There was nothing to connect groups such as the Irish, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, or, in my family’s case, German and Polish with the English who had previously colonized much of the North American continent, the Mexicans who had become American with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the descendants of enslaved African peoples, or the Indigenous people whose land everyone else decided was suddenly theirs.

Sell Out by Reel Big Fish is not only the ultimate example of radio-friendly ska-punk; it's also quintessential 90s ska. An underground band signs to a major label and then releases their first single, which happens to be about…selling to a major label. How very 90s meta-ironic! Or was it? Was selling out even the point of the song? Not exactly. "People found their own meaning in the song. Some thought it was an anthem against selling out.

Everything has a story—even desserts. Even before my mom died this year, I’ve wanted to know the story behind everything she made, from her vinha dʻalhos (she modified a recipe she learned from my Portuguese grandma) to pie crust manju (her grandfather used to sell them in Kona—and the manju recipes are top secret, apparently). I’m fascinated with the story. (Which is why I’m a journalist. It’s definitely not for the money!

The Austin music community woke up on Aug. 27, 1990 with a piece of its soul gone. At close to 1 a.m., blues guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan perished in a helicopter crash in East Troy, Wis., after a concert. It was a foggy night, and the pilot took off from behind the stage at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre and flew into the side of a ski slope half a mile away.

Is there anything sweeter than walking down Virgil Avenue at golden hour when the trumpet trees are in full bloom? Their flowers, spot-lit by the sun’s orange light, swaying in the wind, casting dancing shadows on colorful storefronts. Or the way the Latino Discount store’s pink awning seems to have been made to match the flower’s color perfectly.  From afar, the street looks lined in bright pink clouds floating in place.

Welcome! It’s time for another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is our lineup: One tidbit before we start — check out this before-and-after comparison of an animation drawing from Sleeping Beauty. It comes from the blog of Disney legend Andreas Deja, who has intriguing thoughts on the changes between the two. With that, here we go! The series hit the air in 1991. It ran on MTV, and its title referenced a weird idea that Salvador Dalí liked to talk about: Liquid Television.

Imagine, if you will, a cinematic universe in which the act of buying groceries becomes something sacred. Away from the prying eyes of humans, the faces of the frozen-smiled mascots occupying the two-dimensional planes of flimsy plastic and thin cardboard packaging come alive and inhabit a bustling metropolis that exists only in empty supermarket aisles. Confined to a two-sentence description, this particular universe probably reads as a lazy conduit for blatant advertising, though not necessarily a brainless or moronic idea.

While Jimi Hendrix is often hailed as “rock’s greatest guitarist,” the music he most closely identified with was the blues. After all, this had been the soundtrack of his youth, the music he heard his paternal grandmother sing and his father play on their record player. “Jimi lived on blues around the house,” Al Hendrix remembered. “I had a lot of records by B.B. King and Louis Jordan and some of the downhome guys like Muddy Waters.

This year the jacaranda trees (ha-cah-RAHN-dah) began to bloom early, their violet colored blossoms gradually emerging. It happened subtly, in the way light begins to illuminate the day before the rising sun has actually broken the horizon. At first there’s just a blush of color and then, suddenly, it’s everywhere. Oaxaca doesn’t have a spring in the way other, colder places do, because Oaxaca doesn’t have a winter in the way other places do.