THE BEAK FELL OFF.
Thanks, Elizabeth!
The Black Laser
This is amazing. They shoved a fibre optic camera up this woman’s nose and down her throat to get these shots. Your throat looks like an alien when you’re singing. So great.
Thanks, Charles V!
Gardner, who I’ve discussed before on The Black Laser, loves pranks. Loves them. He also loves mischief making and bets with people to get them to do outrageous things. He’s a good natured troublemaker, and also a complete pain in the ass sometimes. For instance, I remember one night I was at work making copies of tapes or something and he calls me.
He says, “Hey dude, will you get a tattoo with me?”
I say, “I’m at working, but I’ll go with you, sure.”
“No,” he says, “we have to get the same tattoo.”
“Fuck you,” I say, “I’ll go with you, but I’m sure as hell not getting a tattoo with you. What are you getting tattooed?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
“Wait. You mean, you wanted me to get a matching secret tattoo with you of something you won’t even reveal to me?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“You’re fucking nuts. But I’ll still go with you.”
I meet him and this girl in Washington Square Park and we head over to one of the myriad tattoo parlors in the West Village. Along the way he refused to tell me what he was getting tattooed. When we had selected a fine establishment, the girl and I waited in the waiting area and Gardner went into the back. I convinced her to tell me what he was getting at about the same moment I could see but not hear him describe it to the guy doing the ink. The guy looked at him, laughed, shook his head and went to work.
You know what he got? He got this. Even more hilarious, he went swimming before it fully healed and half the tattoo washed off. Hah!
Anyway, this was all just a preamble to the real story here. Gardner called me last year and asked me to make the most horrifying Lucky Charms based image I could think of. He had challenged a girl at work that she couldn’t eat only Lucky Charms for 7 days. It doesn’t sound all that bad, but if you think about it, it’s terrible. I won’t even eat Lucky Charms for ONE meal, much less for an entire week. What happened was epic, but don’t let me ruin it for you. Instead, enjoy this video.
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!