ListenUp: From The Flaming Lips’ “Turning Violent” to Jesse Woods’ “Lazerburn,” our look at music this week

ListenUp


The Flaming Lips: Turning Violent One of the Flaming Lips’ darkest works yet; the lyrics, instrumentation and video for “Turning Violent” are uncharacteristically reserved. Steven Drozd’s falsetto vocals and an oscillating bass synth lead you into…

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Goody Blue Shoes

Spring has officially sprung here in NYC, with blue skies on our mind and blue shoes on our feet. With shorts season just around the bend, now is a great time to find a pair of kicks that perfectly compliment your bright personality, as well as the warm weather. There’s always the go-to classics like Vans and Keds, but here are some shoes that excel both in design and style.

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A step up from average classic skate shoes, these Emerica Reynolds Cruisers manage to maintain an ultra-slim, low profile silhouette without sacrificing skateboard performance and padding. A perfect shade of blue kitted out with gold eyelits makes for a killer combination. Although these are from a past season, they’re still available from Active for $60.

An appealing blue-on-blue-on-blue color scheme, these Nikes tend to look as great on the ladies (including a CH editor who wears them constantly) as they do on men. The Quickstrike release might be hard to track down, but we found a pair here for around $90.

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Blue suede boots by A.P.C., need we say more? The ultimate blue suede shoes, these desert boots look as beautiful as they wear comfortably (and are another pair we own and love). The hue perfectly suits the material—bright enough to stand out but rich enough to maintain a subtle elegance. Grab them online here or from your local APC store for $330.

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While blue Chuck Taylors are a Converse classic, these kick it up a notch with their preppy skate shoes. The boat style of the Sea Star ($55) thoroughly embodies the spirit of the season while the simpler CVO ($50) promotes fresh vibes all year round.


Sita Sings the Blues

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Sita Sings the Blues weaves together Flash animation, original watercolor paintings and rotoscoping techniques in this colorful, modern-day take on an ancient Indian epic. This feature-length, computer-generated animated film was rendered entirely by a single animator – Nina Paley, working out of her home office.

This film tells two parallel stories: the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana and the breakup of Paley’s 21st-century marriage. It does so through four distinct styles of animation, a “greek chorus” of Indonesian shadow puppets and wildly imaginative musical interludes that use authentic 1920s blues recordings to link narratives 3,000 years apart.

Click here to read an interview with Nina Paley on the wired.com website