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Next time you find yourself with a gun to your head, a suggestion: Slap on an outrageous grin and bust your best moves through undulating bolts of colorful fabric and a phalanx of
bhangra-ing backup dancers. If you know anything at all about
Bollywood movies, you'll know it works every time.
For Iram Parveen Bilal, a USC grad student and self-professed Bollywood nut, this was the last chance to join the school's Anjaane Hindi film dance team before receiving her degree. The lone Islamic member of the team -- she's from Islamabad, Pakistan -- Iram took full advantage...with a couple of costume alterations.
As enamored of the arts as I was when I was a teenager, like most of same, I sought the things I was interested in outside the home. It's too bad, because I missed out on what should have been more of a source of inspiration to me. Ken O'Brien, my dad.
Participants in Bollywood film dance troupe competitions are nothing if not serious about winning... Didrik and I studied the oeuvre extensively and came up with this plan for world domination. Watch and learn.
Bollywood film dance troupe competitions are the bomb: What college kid doesn't want to dress in outrageous costumes and undulate with enthusiastic members of the opposite sex? Arranged marriages can wait. Bring the bhangra!
To those rolling in flashy cars, a suggestion: Glue polyurethaned breakfast burritos, blowup dolls and slinky toys all over your precious rides; action-paint them in homage to Jackson Pollock; modify their bodies to resemble slabs of sashimi and shadow Kikkoman delivery trucks around town.
Tom Kennedy makes art car mash-ups the way Ben Cohen remixes ice cream: deliriously. Here, they combine their mix-and-mash-up magic to create their very own political machine--the Topsy-turvy Bus. Didrik and I caught up with them in Oakland a couple times during the course of the bus' building.
The pure spectacle of art cars often overshadows consideration of what's behind them: Who turned the Olds into a giant piece of sushi? What were they thinking? This vid explores the art car mind.
Didrik and I saw off this art caravan in San Francisco's East Bay then caught up again with them in Arizona for the last leg of their drive to the border town of Douglas, AZ. The art cars all attracted all kinds of attention, none more so than Rebecca Caldwell's Carthedral, which nearly sent several passing motorists motoring off the road.
Who doesn't find the idea of an event named Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships (LDRS) intoxicating? The moment I heard it, I was sold. I wouldn't have cared if the next thing I heard was that LDRS were held on a barren wasteland in the middle of nowhere. Which is a good thing, because that's the next thing I heard.
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