Being mettul is hard on the joints, and no one understands our needs better than German agricultural marketing firms.
Number of the beast (er, cow?)
With a tag-line like “Hard types need hard bones… drink milk!”, beer is now officially relegated to Trivium fans, folks. The campaign was developed by Hamburg Technical Art School, who will hopefully not besuedbyMetallica for using their font.
Advertisers are becoming increasingly metal-friendly, although admittedly the genre is used largely as a vehicle for some ill-conceived punch line. But who can blame them? Metallers look like wankers and write shittier lyrics than Mariah Carey. Everything they touch turns into comedy GOLD:
From the made-for-TV anthology, Spine Chillers, comes this short comedy Goths, starring Mackenzie Crook (The Office) and Mark Heap (Jam, Big Train). Our pathetic heroes, struggling to find a flat in London, think they’ve finally found the perfect gaff from the perfect landlord, when they discover they may have bought into more than they’ve bargained for:
You may recognize the pub in the first scene as being that of the iconic Devonshire Arms; you can even spot some of their current staff in amongst the punters.
Womens’ correctional facilities are the ultimate sleep-over party with all the trappings: pajamas, bunk beds, in-fighting, sloppy joes, getting touched up under the covers, and being told when to go to bed. Some prisons even let the girls play dress-up. Miss America, meet Miss Demeanor:
To be fair, it’s primarily inmates who organize these shows. It’s an increasingly popular phenomenon, with womens’ prisons hosting beauty pageants in Russia, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Angola and the Philippines, amongst others, with working titles like Miss Captivity. The idea is to ‘boost’ the self-esteem of (at least the better looking portion of) the prison population.
There is arguably an obvious exploitative angle in this, one which perpetuates gender and class divisions in a place where women are their most vulnerable. The media is only too happy to join in, throwing the spotlight on the tragedy of a pretty young woman in distress, putting herself on display. A beauty contest under these conditions probably does next to nothing for the self esteem or prospects of the contestants in any meaningful way.
It’s almost a perverse caricature of a parole board hearing in a Van Halen video, an effort to charm your way into garnering favour from you captors and respite from your situation by any measure necessary. Having said that, spending years trapped like an animal in a gray, clinical dorm framed in razor wire, any warm-blooded woman would thirst for anything beautiful in her world. Participation in these productions transiently refashions the contestant from a shoplifter or drug addict into a graceful, sophisticated and beautiful person of seeming worth, if only for one evening. Who could condemn the contestants for their humble aspirations and for enjoying an event which breaks up the tedium of Gilligan’s Island re-runs on prison TV?
Cat is coming home. No criminal record, his name cleared, and he’s a free man. A poor man, but free! We expecting him on a plane back to London within twenty-four hours. The BBC went to Dubai to cover this story, and interviewed key officials in the case. The reporter and our attorney are saying that damage control is underway: many prisoners are about to be released, and they’re promising reforms which could reduce these sorts of arrests happening to future travelers. Not holding my breath, but if this does transpire, then we’ve basically achieved everything we set out to do from the beginning, and that’s a fair bit of awesome.
You guys have a fucking lot to be proud of. The media attention we’ve drawn from our collective efforts has resulted in not only Cat’s release, but that of other prisoners and the subsequent changes that are under review. That’s a pretty serious accomplishment. Today you can look in the mirror and know you’ve made the world a better place, and I sincerely hope karma gives you the reach-around for your efforts. You guys rock.
I never thought I’d see the day where I said the internet restored my faith in humanity. This is the geek equivalent of an ’80s movie ending. Who’s throwing the prom, then?
Researchers in a US laboratory created the darkest ever substance, said to absorb light ‘perfectly’ from every angle and reflect nothing. In fact, scientists claim that it’s so fucking black that it’s 30 times blacker than the current benchmark of blackness. That’s right, there’s a benchmark for blackness. You heard it here first.
According to the Houston Chronicle, it “reflects 0.045 percent light, making it 100 times darker than a black-painted Corvette.”
Here is an exclusive preview of the darkest matter in the universe:
Amazing.
Scientist expect that this discovery will be applied in the fields of electricity, solar energy and next season’s Lip Service collection.
Have you ever been filled with the burning desire to see your favourite ’80s rocker step out of a massive, glowing vag and use his tongue to make sweet love to another man’s eyeball?
I knew it. You people disgust me.
I give to you the 1993 tour-de-force of homo-erotic gluttony that is Seth et Holth. Set to the backdrop of some actually rather wicked industrial rock, the 43 minutes of beautiful confusion that follows is staged by one Hide (X-Japan) and Tusk (Zi:Kill) as Angels who communicate with their blood, struggling after being cast out of heaven and eventually executed by earthlings. It’s kinda like a less pretentious Cremaster Cycle done in the style of a New Wave music video but with cooler-looking dudes.
Don’t make too much of an effort to ‘get’ this movie — seriously, it would make David Lynch cry — as it presents itself to be more of a visual and musical experiment. It’s worth a look as an unusual piece of rock nostalgia alone.
I’m making a post on Christmas day, which if nothing else should indicate the degree of reverence I have for the holiday season.
Christmas, and the train-wreck of bad taste that ensues, is not entirely without its benefits, particularly the unquestionably awful effect it has on rock music. Artists struggling to maintain their hair-flicking, could-give-a-fuck bad-assery through a three-and-a-half minute ditty about magic always makes for priceless entertainment. So without further ado….To the YouTube!
“They can say that I couldn’t sing, but they can never say that I didn’t sing!” – One of Florence Foster Jenkins’ releases
Ah, the glory days before computer software, when only the very talented, or wealthy eccentrics such as Florence Foster Jenkins could have access to recording facilities.
At sixty years of age, and a lifetime of fantasizing about becoming a singer, Miss Jenkins struck gold when her mother croaked and left her a free woman with a small fortune. In 1930 she set about making her mark in history, albeit inadvertently, as one of the worst recording artists in history.
She was almost an instant comedy sensation. Sporting a sensationally flamboyant wardrobe of her own design and accompanied by a hapless pianist who hilariously compensated for her tone-deaf-ness, her live performances were so coveted that scalpers would sometimes fetch ten times the price for a ticket. For what she absolutely lacked in pitch, rhythm, tone, or what is otherwise known in this dimension as ‘singing talent’, she made up for in stubborn confidence, insisting until the very end that she was a master. That end came a month after a sell-out show at Carnegie Hall in 1944, topping off a paradoxical career.
Behold, the genius of Florence Foster Jenkins in the form of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ‘Queen of the Night’ aria from The Magic Flute:
Florence Foster Jenkins, beyond being the subject of popular ridicule, actually leaves us with a unique legacy. She set out to do the very difficult, with very little ability, very late in life and wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. There’s also a nod to be given to the concept of contentment, a state of zen rejected by most true artists, regardless of their achievements. Her bewildering success lies as much in primitive hilarity as it does her balls to look inevitable failure in the face and say ‘I don’t give a fuck, I’m having this’.
When they’re not busy getting butthurt by cartoons or teddy bears, radical Muslim-types rather like spending their time suing employers into compliance with their totally voluntary dress-code. Case in point:
Left: Bushra Noah. Right: Sarah Des Rosiers and Wedge staff.
Sarah Des Rosiers, owner of alternative hair salon Wedge, has been ambushed with a frivolous lawsuit by one Bushra Noah on grounds of religious discrimination, after dismissing Noah from a trial position at her hair salon. You see, Noah, a self-described ‘devout’ Muslim, didn’t think it was important to mention in her telephone interview that she wore a headscarf, even though she admits that this is the reason she believes she had been turned down for hair-styling jobs in the past. Needless to say, when she rocked up to work she was requested to uncover her hair while at the salon, but she refused on grounds that it was ‘immodest’.
That’s right. A hairdresser who finds uncovered hair immoral.
Having been turned down by no less than twenty-five other salons, presumably for the same reason, Noah decided she’s had enough and set about destroying the business that Des Rosiers had poured her soul into.
The nineties cultural vacuum had barely kicked off when Eerie, Indiana adopted the corn-fed TV formula of the day and injected it with a healthy dose of DARQUE. What resulted was something along the lines of Blossom meets Twilight Zone.
This television artifact was first aired in 1991, and quickly won its place in cult history, despite it’s brief life on the air. For an example of what you’re in for look no further than the first episode, featuring man-size Tupperware put to unnatural use:
