It’s not all fun and games for my wife’s retarded Uncle Lonzie. Nope. Lonald has a very rare disease that only afflicts ogres and giants that make it difficult for him to rock out too hard or too often. He never had this problem before. It only started when he came down the beanstalk to get his goose back; he’s never been the same since. That’s why events like Beatles Cover Bands can’t be a regular occurrence. Lonzie gets too psyched and ends up in the Emergency Room.
Back in March, when we were trying to get some stories together for the Brazil Issue, I thought a feature on Brazil's golden age of metal would make an interesting feature. I contacted every legendary 80s Brazilian black/death/thrash band I could think of, hoping to score some interviews. I got email addresses from the official sites, went through their official MySpaces, and even emailed a university in Belo Horizonte, as Sarcófago'sWagner Lamounier is a professor of economic science there. But it was all for shit. Either they didn't speak English, didn't get the email, thought I was a waste of time, or are just plain Brazilian and don't care about deadlines. One dark hero, Vulcano's Zhema Rodero, did finally respond though, and I got as far as sending him a list of questions (back in April), but he disappeared again and never replied. Until last night.
You know that warm, bubbly, oozing red stuff that squirts out of the slit throat of an animal while it dies a slow and painful death? Swedes make soups, puddings, and pancakes with it, and it’s totally legit. Fair enough that the practice of eating blood is held over from the days of starving peasants having to use every part of their recently-slaughtered animal, but—and running the risk of sounding like a backwards-ass Christian—where I grew up in Sacramento, California, and in most other places, the act of eating blood is looked upon as a total sin. To quote the bible, Genesis 9:3: “Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.” In other words: it is FUCKING GROSS to pig out on blood.
My girlfriend Kristen and I moved from the "dangerous" streets of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn and the East Village of New York City to the seemingly safe and tony neighbourhood of Darlinghurst, Sydney. Our new home was at the tip of the dick of Darlinghurst, where the girls walking the streets at night cross over to girls that are really boys that ply their trade in the aptly nicknamed Ten Buck Alley. Its real name is Premier Lane; and from what we've heard at night, as the sounds of slurping and sucking blow up to our balcony, those are some premier ten-buck blow jobs. It warms the heart that in these times of recession and inflation that the price of a blow job remains steady and true.
Just when it’s nearing that time where it would probably be a good idea to stop talking about Michael Jackson, I wanna talk about it. You know how in other countries or cultures that may seem foreign to you, people do different things to mourn or dispose of their dead? Like they put them on wooden planks, set fire to them, and push them off into water. Or they maybe wrap them in grape leaves and bury them under a pot of gold or something. Apparently in the US the thing to do with dead people is first make fun of them nearly their whole lives, and then when they finally do die, throw their haggard bones into a gold casket, roll it onto a stage under bright lights, and sing songs to it. If you were not able to sing songs to Michael Jackson’s corpse in person yesterday, you can do so here. I don't even care about long-distance charges, I’ve done it four times today and now I feel super American. OK, now it's really time to shut up about him.
Ever since Tim and Eric shone a spotlight onto tiny hats, they have apparently become a sizable thing. In fact the little devils are sprouting up like good-time mushrooms under a big pine tree. People on the street look like reasonable, intelligent folk from one
side- then WHAM! - the flip side shows a Jekyllesque disaster.
I always regale you with stories of death, disease, sexual perversity, and self-destruction, which is pretty much what I deal with on a day-to-day basis in A&E. But sometimes there is a fleeting reprieve in the otherwise grim monotony of bodily failure. Last week I delivered my first baby, which, to be fair, was just as gruesome and proved humanity to be just as pitiless.
Sybille Bergemann was a female icon of GDR fashion photography when Germany was still a divided nation. Before you even ask, yeah, there was fashion photography in the GDR. Although there wasn't really any fashion. Sound like a paradox? It is. Anyway, she hung out with Helmut Newton, invented clothes the Stasi wouldn't let you buy, became the world's leading street fashion photographer before street fashion even existed, and later became the founder of the Ostkreuz photo agency. We talked with her about DIY fashion, the Berlin Wall, and plastic dresses.
Last week Andrew WK and The Evaporators launched their split 7-inch, A Wild Pear, in Vancouver. Andrew WK was actually supposed to interview Nardwuar about the new record but Nardwuar kept accidentally grabbing the microphone and asking all the questions himself. Oh well: a leopard can't change its spots. Or is it that you can't change a leopard's spots? Anyway, something about leopard spots.
When we talked to Dutch artist Tinkebell a couple years ago about her “Save the Males” campaign, a project that involved throwing baby chicks through a woodchipper at a flea market, that piece garnered a lot of angry comments by anonymous blog commenters. So imagine the shitstorm of hate mail she received when she made a handbag out of her cat and posted a how-to manual about it online. After that flood of hate mail, she teamed with Coralie Vogelaar and looked up as much personal information about those people they could possibly find. Together they made a book out of it. A lot of people who thought they sent anonymous hate mails lost their anonymity that day…
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