As you might know, this site posts to Facebook every time I write something. Fun. Anyway, a friend of mine Matt left this comment:
Hey bro if you go past the event horizon you are fucked, whether by gravity or your inside-out crew — doesn’t matter.
That reminded me of this amazing video that describes what it would be like to be killed by a black hole. Enjoy. Science is awesome.
Sometimes the internet is a marvelous thing. What we were discovering just weeks ago has since completely blown up and spread virally. I’m, of course, talking about Die Antwoord, South Africa’s finest art. And even the stodgiest of the old guard, The New Yorker, has hit on their magnificence. Check it.
If authenticity is a vampire threatening to suck the fun out of pop music, the South African band Die Antwoord (“The Answer,” in Afrikaans) is a fistful of garlic. Go to the band’s well-designed Web site and you will find a goofy, vibrant ball of confusion. Die Antwoord was founded by a South African music-biz veteran named Waddy Jones (Ninja, here) who celebrates zef, which translates roughly as “common” or “redneck,” but which Jones claims is a synonym for “the ultimate style.” This dicey language game will be refereed by South Africans; everyone else can unravel the band’s musical preference for the nineties. (Vanilla Ice and Technotronic come to mind.) The band is better at generating questions than answers. What’s with the post-Keith Haring illustrations? Why does the band member Yo-landi Vi$$er look like both a model and a normal teen-ager? Is Die Antwoord a celebration or a sendup? Get ready for a fight about the legitimacy of the group and, hopefully, for an influx of more South African pop culture.
What’s next? The Wall Street journal reviewing The Behemoth’s next record? A four page article on Detroit Ghettotech in the Conservative Chronicle? An editorial in The Economist on the best places in Brooklyn to drink on a Saturday afternoon? Will the wonders never cease?!
Check the original here.
Thanks for the heads-up, Sarah!
I first saw Event Horizon theatrically way back in the late 90s (remember those?). I was with some friends, probably Deegan, and I remember walking out after the film thinking that it was the biggest piece of shit I’d ever endured. But time eases such pains and since 1997 I’ve heard from someone whose opinion I trusted that it’s actually an all right film. I thought that perhaps I’d judged the film too harshly. Perhaps I had missed the obvious brilliance within the film. Perhaps some of the subtext had flown right over my 15 year old head.
I threw the film onto my Netflix queue and it arrived yesterday in the mail. After doing the dishes while listening to Hall & Oates and making myself a sensible dinner, I sat down to give Event Horizon a second shot. I am nothing if not a giving man. I placed the blu-ray disc into the PS3 and waited for my mind to be blown.
Well, if you have taken anything from the title of this post, my mind was not blown. I mean, the movie blew, but my mind remained entirely unblown. Event Horizon has to be one of the most formulaic pieces of crap I’ve ever had the extreme misfortune of forcing upon myself. If you haven’t seen the movie, let me ruin it for you.
It’s the future! People live in space! A few years ago the government sent a super secret spaceship to the far reaches of outer space and it disappeared! Zip forward to now, which is still the future, and a small, rag tag group of ethnically-diverse soldiers are on a spaceship going to investigate a distress beacon on the far side of the solar system! A scientist rides along with them! Uh-oh! After they get out of hypersleep or whatever they call it, the scientist tells them, in a feat of unrivaled expository pseudo-science, that the distress beacon belongs to the Event Horizon! The ship was a super secret experiment in faster-than-light travel and on its first trip out, it disappeared! What happened to it?! The rescue crew boards the ship and all sorts of really spooky things start to happen! Hallucinations! The lights flash on and off! Bloooooooodddddd! Soon after boarding things start going to hell—literally! Turns out when the ship’s experimental drive punctured the fabric of the universe it went to hell and came back alive and evil! Really! That’s the actual plot point! The original crew is all dead! Scary! The scientist along for the ride who, coincidentally built the fancy engine thing, gets pulled into the evil will of the ship and then starts to sabotage their efforts to escape! Oooooh! Then the captain and the scientist have a stand off and the scientist gets sucked into space! But the ship brings him back to life! Convenient! Then they have another stand off and end up traveling through the darkness dimension but we never find out what happens to them! The end! It actually says “the end”!
I think I can sum up the whole film and my feelings about it with one photo and a related caption.
Indulging in every stupid horror cliche, Event Horizon is so mired in banality that I couldn’t even see through to the positives that it does have. It’s a well designed film, to be sure, but that’s not enough for me to get past just how fucking awful the script is. Every single word made me cringe. And I LOVE bad science fiction. It’s great. But this is bad science fiction trying to be GOOD science fiction and GOOD horror and it just doesn’t have the chops to do either. It just plain sucks. Every time there was a dramatic pause before one of the characters revealed something…. dramatic, I wanted to punch the TV in the face. I wanted to fly to England, grab Paul W. S. Anderson, and punch him in the face over and over and over. And then I want to punch him in the face for the Resident Evil films, for Mortal Kombat, and for the rest of his fucking trash body of work. It’s like he’s taking other, better films, distilling them to their common beats, making those beats dumber, and then making the movie over again ineptly. Just terrible.
Do yourself and favor and never see this movie. I’d ask for my two hours back, but I’d only waste them.
Tonight, on the train home from work, the man standing next to me was scratching his scratchers and reading this gem.
Awesome. I love New York. It is so great.
I’ve been listening to Pulp for, oh, about a million years. The This Is Hardcore/Different Class duo were some of my most listened-to records between ’98 and ’00. It was a period where heavy metal music was stagnating under the ridiculous weight of Nü-metal and I started to explore lighter music. I got way into the pop and other rock coming out of the British Isles, bands like Blur, Supergrass, Pulp, Gomez, Radiohead. These guys and girls were carrying the torch of classic British pop rock music in the vein of The Kinks or The Zombies or any number of other bands. They were writing catchy as hell tunes with a light-hearted sensibility that nevertheless held a tiny shade of darkness below all the major chords and joyful harmonies.
No band exemplified that light/dark condition like Pulp did on 1996’s Different Class. The record features a bunch of upbeat poppy tracks propelled by Cocker’s sharp, biting lyrics. The songs are filled longing and remorse and shame expressed with witty jabs, all bouncing along to a brisk, danceable beat.
Then they released This Is Hardcore in 1998 which is Different Class’s sleazier, darker, less poppy older brother. Lacking the supreme dancey-ness of its predecessor, it’s also a whole lot darker. No, that’s not exactly right. The darkness is a lot more apparent.
Neither record is better than the other. They’ve been in heavy rotation in my listening habits for a long time and I’m still not sick of them. What I think I really love is that the songs are like Jarvis Cocker having a conversation with the listener, like he’s telling us a story. He allows his thoughts to linger and spread and chooses the right word even if he doesn’t rhyme.
I could write a whole bunch of other stuff here, but I won’t. Just listen to the music.
Ok. So, I’m a fan. Doy. You would think that I would have seen all their music videos, right? Me too. But until yesterday I hadn’t seen a single one. What the hell is that about? At the very least, I guess it’s because when I became a fan of Pulp there was no place like YouTube to see all their videos. It was an age when MTV no longer played videos and there was no good way for me to see the videos a medium-sized British band were making.
Well, now I’ve got YouTube, so I can watch whatever I want! I present to you, dear reader, every decent Pulp video I can find.
Enjoy!
With all this talk of Kevin Smith being kicked off airplanes for being a portly fuck, it’s easy to get all pissed about the airlines being total dicks or whatever. But what about when the airline actually has a legitimate reason for kicking some bastards off the flight? I’m not talking about perceived threats to your safety in the air or some other terrorism bullshit, either. I’m referring to good old fashioned offensive sons of bitches trying to make your flight hell.
For example, one Canadian Airline kicked off a guy for smelling like crap. I think my favorite little tidbit of info from the article was this.
Another passenger described the smell as “brutal.”
Brutal? HAHAHAH. I’ve experienced some brutal stinks on the subway so I can only imagine how bad this guy must have stunk. Like what the fucking fuck, guy? Are you serious? Take a fucking shower.
And here it is.
A salesman is sitting in the reception area of a big corporation, waiting to give a presentation to some of the people there. He is kept waiting almost 40 minutes beyond the time of his appointment, and then he’s finally ushered into a conference room. He goes in, and sitting around a big table are two Jews, an African-American woman, and a gay guy of Chinese descent. The salesman goes into his pitch, for software or a phone system or something, and it’s pretty evident a couple minutes into it that these four people couldn’t care less, especially the younger Jew, who keeps checking his BlackBerry. But he plows through the presentation anyway, and when he finishes, everybody shakes his hand and thanks him. He goes out to his car and starts to drive home. On the road, his cell phone rings and he answers it. It’s his wife, and she asks him to pick up a couple of groceries on his way home. He says OK. She says, are you OK? And he says, yeah, I’m fine. She says OK. He hangs up, and this commercial for anti-itch powder comes on the radio, and it’s got all these country-sounding old people giving testimonials about how this powder completely improved the quality of their lives. And the salesman starts crying. Big choked sobs. He shades his eyes with his left hand so that the other drivers can’t see that he’s crying and says, “And I don’t even fucking care about this shit!”
Seriously, this really gets me for some reason. It comes from “Jokes” by Andy Richter on McSweeney’s. Check out the rest of them. His other 4 jokes in the article are similarly awkward and deliberately not jokey, but this salesman one is just miserable and makes me sad, not because it’s badly written, but because I feel for the pathetic salesman. Just horrible.
Funny how such a small bit of text can be so affective.
Thanks, Andy Richter. Real cool.
