I witnessed a bit of the “Voice of Gollum” contest while visiting friends at Weta’s Comic Con booth last summer. Imagine trying to work in the middle of this madness! No idea how anyone managed to keep a straight face. Vote for your favorite Gollum impersonator here. It’s a tough call, but my money’s on Piotr:
I’d like to give a shout out to all my English major peeps with this “Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett” a short film so rife with literary gravitas and pretentious humor that it nearly succumbs under its own weight. So load up your Calabash, ease into your favorite chair, and chuckle at each and every joke, satisfied that you are only one of a minority who could possibly grasp the humour found therein. Just don’t think about all the time you had to waste reading Finnegans Wake.
This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. This may seem like hyperbole, especially when one considers my posting history on these internets, but I assure you it is not. This may be due to the fact that I am old enough to remember when the news that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide was A Big Deal. I knew some people who may have shed a tear or more upon hearing this proclamation. Those people will, no doubt, deny the veracity of that statement, but we both know it to be true. Maybe, on the other hand, it is simply due to my curmudgeonly nature, that wizened, frowning, disapproving aspect of my personality given to bemoaning the state of modern music and remonstrating youths for loitering on my well manicured lawn.
Whatever the reason, Chilean singer Abigail’s version of the Nirvana classic Smells Like Teen Spirit remains a stupendous atrocity; a pop-techno re-imagining devoid of irony but instead recorded with what seems to be a complete lack of understanding. I’m no great fan of the band but, really, I think they deserve better than this. Of course, I could be completely wrong. This could, in actuality, be an exquisitely orchestrated trolling a thoughtful deconstruction of Grunge; ruthlessly exposing its teen existential angst as petulant whinging and bubblegum philosophy.
Only Abigail knows for sure.
Have you been following the story of Caster Semenya? The South African teenage runner, who won the gold in the women’s 800-meter competition at the World Championships in Berlin, was recently asked to take a gender examination by the event’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations. According to the IAAS, the concern is not that that Semenya lied or cheated, but that she may have some sort of undiagnosed chromosomal condition that may have endowed her with an unfair athletic advantage. Depending on the outcome of the test, Semenya could be stripped of her medal and her title.
Yesterday was a tipping point for the way that Semenya’s gender has been discussed in the media. Until this moment, both Semenya’s self-confidence and her country’s support for her just the way she is have been refreshingly unapologetic. When she arrived in Johannesburg after the gender allegations hit the press, she was greeted by cheering fans, with men shouting “marry me!” and “Caster is hot.” The Young Communist League of South Africa issued a statement condemning the IAAS for requesting a gender test based on notions that “[feed] into the commercial stereotypes of how a woman should look, their facial and physical appearance, as perpetuated by backward Eurocentric definition of beauty.” And the general sentiment issued by Semenya’s inner circle, defending her gender identity in the press, has been unanimously supportive of her unconventional choices. So what, ask her friends and family, if she doesn’t wear dresses or want to date boys?
Well, it was nice while it lasted. Today, Semenya fell victim to the same phenomenon as Susan Boyle some months before her: the softening magazine makeover. Anna North at Jezebel posted a sensitive, incisive analysis of Semenya’s girly magazine shoot for the cover of South Africa’s YOU under the title “How Not to Solve a Gender Dispute.” My favorite bit:
From Susan Boyle to Semenya, magazine “makeovers” send the message that there’s one way for women to look good, and the closer you get to it the happier you’ll be. I’d rather live in a world where Caster Semenya can wear pants if she feels like it, rather than one where she needs a team of stylists to be considered “feminine.”
Like North, I too hope that the day of dress-up and makeup was actually fun for the teenage track star, and can’t help but wonder uneasily to what extent Semenya is now being goaded by the adults who’ve suddenly swarmed around her to push their own agendas.
Have I mentioned lately that Archive.org is the sh…
…aving cream? It really is. You could stand to spend more time over there, trust me.
Avid listeners of Dr. Demento will recognize this song by Benny Bell. I’m too young to boast that I listened to Dr. D back in the day, when he first brought about the Jewish-American singer/songwriter’s revival. However, I was lucky enough to live down the block from one Mister Goodman, a charming alcoholic widower with a portable record player. On balmy late summer afternoons, he’d sit on his front porch nursing a tall glass of “ice water” and playing old LPs. Naturally, Benny Bell’s relentlessly juvenile double-entendres were a huge hit with the neighborhood kids.
Mr Goodman was more than happy to play us classic Bell ditties like “Without Pants”, “A Goose For My Girl” and “My Grandfather Had a Long One” over and over again, provided we promised never to sing them in front of our parents. We were more than happy to hang out on his lawn for hours, sipping cans of 7-UP and shouting “SSSSSHHHHHAVING CREAM” at appropriate (and inappropriate) intervals until Mr. Goodman fell too far into his cups and started muttering darkly about Korea. At which time we’d all claim we heard our mothers calling and head home for dinner.
Anyhoo. Archive.org’s got a ton of Bell’s material available for legal download, for free. Cheers.
Coilhäusers, I’ll be in D.C. much of this week and will hopefully have a little free time. I’d love to meet some of you dear readers in person. Contact me at ampersandpilcrow [at] hotmail [dot] com.
Reich tore out of Personnel and over to Sales-city. The same unpleasant information was waiting for him. Monarch Utilities & Resources was losing the gut-fight with the D’Courtney Cartel. There was no escaping the certainty of defeat. Reich knew his back was to the wall.
He returned to his own office and paced in a fury for five minutes. “It’s no use,” he muttered. “I know I’ll have to kill him. He won’t accept merger. Why should he? He’s licked me and he knows it. I’ll have to kill him and I need help. Peeper help.
It’s a story old as a thousand distinguished corpses in a thousand drawing rooms: murder.
Alfred Bester’s futuristic murder tale The Demolished Man won the first Hugo award in 1953. At the time, that may have come as something of a surprise, seeing as the novel isn’t an operatic space epic. But then, it’s no typical whodunit, either. Bester has set his story in a World of Tomorrow (!) where rockets can get you anywhere and telepaths have so suffused society, there hasn’t been a murder in over 70 years.
That’s not going to stop Ben Reich, though. Oh, no. The business mogul happens to be a wee bit of a sociopath, to put it mildly. He’s decided his similarly insane rival must be done away with. The novel opens with Reich plotting his crime and focuses not on whodunit, but on the mind-reading investigator Lincoln Powell’s cat-and-mouse game with Reich, as well as the unraveling of more complex reasons behind the crime.
Many, many once highly-regarded tales from sci-fi’s earlier eras haven’t held up well over time. But with this book, Bester took a quantum leap ahead of his. Building from pulp foundations, he stirred in a heaping helping of noir, innovative style, vicious humor and, for kicks, topped it all off with help from the gravitational pull of Sigmund Freud’s looming, dinosauric cigar. The resulting book was written a decade before sci-fi’s Deviant Age came roaring to life, but it’s deviant in all the best ways, and has only gotten better with age.
Hey, Jean
This is Henry McClean
And I’ve finished my beautiful flying machine…
Via xplanes: The Magnus Spherical Airship prototype, 1982.
Don’t let anybody steer you different; Andrew B’s x planes Tumblr is straight-up anachro-airship porn. Andrew has been posting scores of “weird and wonderful aircraft pictures and stories found both on the web, and in print” over there for the better part of a year now. You can get lost in the archives for days:
“experimental aircraft. exotic aeromachines. oddities. sleek silver cigars. pedal-o-trons. soviet hive-mind bombers. aerial joy. the olden days. action shots. propaganda posters. etc.”
Where’s your fucking jet pack? You don’ need no steenkin’ jet pack when you’ve got a Gyrodyne Model GCA-55. While you’re dreaming, have some Convertawings. How about a Switchblade jet? Check out the wingless jet WASP, the Bat-Winged Cantaliver jet plane, the steam-powered Giffard. MmmnnggmpfffssSPLOOOOOGE.
Some more choice excerpts from x planes after the jump, but seriously, if you have a few minutes (or a few hours) to spare, just get over there and explore. Motherload.
Today has not been a good day. Not. At. All. Usually, you would join your other co-workers around the photocopier, placing bets on which intern can make the most copies of their face without blinking, but you’re in no mood for such frivolities. Today you can only stare at your desk in despair. How much longer can you go on working this soul-sucking job; planted in front of your computer inside the thin, blank walls of your cubicle? What does it even matter? How can you, a single, lowly person, possibly prevail in the face of the worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy? What’s to be done?
The answer, of course, is nothing. Take it from me, an insider who types these words on a golden keyboard while sitting atop a pile of money, sipping from a tall glass of still-warm Christian baby’s blood. Don’t get too down on yourself though. After all it’s Friday. That’s a good thing, right? Sure it is. So why don’t you just ignore the screams of Jessica as her retinas are seared with ultraviolet light and watch some documentaries about a few of the people who may or may not control the world.
That’s right, this week we offer you Secret Rulers of the World, Jon Ronson’s series detailing the puppet masters who work behind the scenes and the lovable loons who strive to expose them. The highlight for me has to be Episode 2, which focuses on David Icke, a man so crazy, it turns out that when he talks about the world being run by “a race of 12 foot, blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizards” he is not making a coded reference to Jews but actually means a race of 12 foot, blood drinking, shape-shifting lizard men. You don’t run into that kind of batshit insanity everyday; especially unaccompanied by an orderly. So enjoy all five episodes; hours of New World entertainment.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my baby’s blood is getting cold.
For anyone who has ever visited an Ikea store the video above should come as no great leap of logic. Wandering through the various furnished rooms, as meticulously arranged as any stage set, one is almost overpowered by the urge to simply set up camp in a disembodied kitchen and pretend to inhabit it. How many times have I lounged on a severe, uncomfortable sofa and resisted the urge to yell at passers-by to stop blocking my view of the fake plastic television in the press-board entertainment unit? How often have I managed to restrain myself from sitting down at a cheaply veneered computer table in front of a hollow, faux-monitor, and begin masturbating furiously, stopping only occasionally to remonstrate gawking shoppers for “not knocking first”?
Don’t you judge me.
The people at Channel 101 know these desires. They have seen the potential of the Ikea model of retail stores and they have taken full advantage, using the ready-made rooms as the backdrop for their melodrama Ikea Heights, which details the scandalous goings-on in the living-room, kitchen, office, and bath sections. It’s a tale of murder, deception, sex, and greed. Also, polyester.
Originally I wrote off Score For a Hole in the Ground as another one of ex-Pogues member Jem Finer’s conspicuous musical stunts, much like his Longplayer and its thousand year composition. Score is in much the same vein. A musical sculpture with a score composed by nature (opposed to the computer of Longplayer), it is based on the Japanese, ceremonial suikinkutsu (literally translated “water harp chamber”) and uses dripping water falling on resonant discs. In order to amplify the sounds Finer created a giant horn, based on the horn of a gramophone. The horn also channels sounds from outside the chamber, such as airplanes and birds, allowing them to meld with the sound of the water droplets.
It’s this that elevated the work for me, I think, specifically the picture above. It’s a ghostly scene, something out of an Edward Gorey illustration or an early Terry Gilliam film, this giant gramophone horn standing menacingly in the fog. It’s in this that Finer’s vision coalesces. Wandering through the forest one hears faint, metallic clangs. Following the sound, slowly becoming louder while remaining just as distant, a towering structure comes into view, emerging from the depths of Kingswood Forest. The real art here is in the discovery.
