Top Five Statement/Question that Could Have Prompted or Followed the Gesture Below, on the Right

5. "Finally and most fiendish in difficulty, to receive your Ph.D. in miming, show us two Fuji apples. Wa ha ha ha ha."

4. "You're right, that the more teats we milk at once, the more money we can ultimately make. I'm glad we hired you on this dairy farm, Robert."

3. "So, to recap, how many beige sweater vests do you own?"

2 . "There's no way I'm going to let you hold the world hostage with your diabolical nuclear plasmobeams. Its too much power for one man!!!"

1. "This would be such a huge upset. I wish someone would raise the roof to encourage our team."

Two pictures

The photographic art's great gift to the world was its ability to stare into men's souls, seared into silver halide.

Today, we bring you two pictures that allow you to do just that. Click, and stare into the eyes of these men, if you can.

late to the party, lampshade on head

Yeah, "Year of the Pig," the second installment in Canadian hardcore outfit Fucked Up's attempt to craft a 12" for every year in the Chinese zodiac, came out a few months ago. Yeah, it's 19 minutes long. And yeah, this inexplicably hipster-jocked band is more or less lame as shit now (not really), considering they've graced the glossy pages of spunk-receptacle Spin.

But you know what? Even though I paid my $9 for "Year of the Pig," I didn't think I had the mental wherewithal to actually sit down and listen to a 19-minute punk song. The last band to do this was NOFX, and that band is so weak ("Punk In Drublic" aside, that's got some undeniable bangers), they think clowning on Christian bands from the main stage of the fucking Warped Tour is somehow subversive.

But honestly, it's a shame I didn't sit down with "Year of the Pig" until now. Because it's really, really good. Like, good enough that, had they included it on 2006's excellent double LP "Hidden World," making it the first punk-rock triple LP since, like, "Sandinista," I would've still been stoked. I expected it to be cool simply because it's a 19-minute jam from Fucked Up, one of the best and most challenging bands in hardcore today. I just didn't really expect to like it as much as I do. From its head-scratching piano-shuffle intro, wispy female vocals and all, to a ripping halftime breakdown and speedy, dolphin's-asshole-tight final third, this shit slays. Vocalist Pink Eyes is in top form, whether he's spitting absolute venom or giving the captivating instrumental room to breathe. It's one of the finest hardcore songs to come out this year, and in a genre that prides itself on short-fast-loud, this'll probably end up being our generation's "My War," except it took everyone 15 years to get on Black Flag's nuts for that one. This time around, it was pretty much instantaneous. Except for me, late to the party but still drunk as fuck. Seriously, go buy this record now.

Rap Classics

MF Grimm surely doesn't know that he's the Hephaestus of rap, a crippled and proud master of his craft who sourly watched an ascendant (mic) Ares steal his prize bride--mainstream success. The fifth line of "Book of Daniel", his hammer blow to MF Doom's glossy-with-the-Dutch-beer-of-the-upper-middle-class war mask?

"MF Grimm is God of War".

Let's forgive him for missing the irony (as we can be sure Doom didn't) because Grimm doesn't do irony, Grimm does spitting harder than white trash at seed spitting contests (thanks Pharoahe, for that one). For sixty straight songs.

You see, "Book of Daniel" is the final track of his TRIPLE ALBUM American Hunger, which was released last year to the interest of no one in particular. Three and a half hours of no skit-hop (should be a new genre) from a wheelchair bound shooting victim with half a voice met with the fanfare usually reserved for the Florida Marlins.

Which is a shame, because the album is a classic. Buy it and put it on your shelf, and don't be surprised if, after he dies, rappers and writers install him at the top of the hip-hop (H)Olympus. Or if he wheels himself up there, tired of waiting.

Cherished Myths About San Francisco, Suplexed By Reality

Some early surprises.

1. Relative Dearth of Rice-A-Roni and Other -A-Roni Products

2. Cable Cars Not Most Popular Form of Public Transportation

3. Hippy and Gay Populations Don't Try to Make You a Hippy or Gay, Respectively; Intention of Gay Hippies Unknown

4. Sean Connery is a Dirty Scottish Liar: Winners Whine About Doing Their Best and Losers Go Home and Fuck the Prom Queen?!

Scheduling Conflict; Bear With Me

Bears, the hippos of terra firma, have struck again. A Serbian man was stripped naked and eaten by bears at the Belgrade Zoo's annual beer festival, which apparently conflicted with the bears' annual human eating festival at the same location. The bears "reacted angrily" to zookeeper attempts to retrieve the body; they were already incensed that beer festival-goers enjoyed a world-class selection of beers light and dark, while the goods at their, concurrent, festival were limited to beer-fed and hirsute Slavs.

"I’ve Never Seen a G-Unit Logo Tattooed on Someone’s Face"

The implication being, of course, that the Genius has in fact seen the "logo, a monument in hip-hop, carved in a landscape of broken rocks", or rather, drawn painfully with a tiny needle on the faces of a delightful subset of his fans.

8 FUCKING DIAGRAMS. You don't need a Wu-Tang face tat to shit your shorts with excitement from this preview. But you might need a Yale philosophy doctorate to parse the Zen-riddle RZA drops, Tiger-style, on our muddled heads:

"How can hip-hop be dead if Wu-Tang is forever?" Hold your face, Nas.

Two Lemonparty System

So the Times of London just used some sort of political mapping website thingie to grid all the presidential candidates out as pictured above. If there's anything that's wrong with this country, its that almost none of our politicians can make it out of that fucking blue box.

Also, for those of you who caught the title reference, yes, the American political system is akin to a picture of three flabby old men sucking each other off.

Geriatric Incest Porn

So Jon's latest post over at Drunkgirlsexyface mentioned the book of Genesis, which reminded me of a subject I had been meaning to post about for a while now.

I recently finished reading Robert Heinlein's sci-fi masterpiece Stranger in a Strange Land, which I highly recommend, despite its rampant misinterpretation by a legion of patchouli-smeared free-love demagogues. At one point in the book, a character goes on a little rant about all the fucked up stuff in the Bible (of which there is no shortage), and eventually gets to the story of Lot.

I was vaguely familiar with this story from Sunday school...Lot lives in Sodom (or is it Gomorrah), God smites the city, his wife gets turned into a pillar of salt, etc. etc.

So Lot and his two daughters go to live in a cave, and, well, they start to get some...shall we say, "ants in their pants:" "And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth." (Gen: 19:31)

What to do? Well, the genius solution that these two slatterns hit upon is to...get their father drunk and fuck him. Which they each do on consecutive nights. Pretty gross, huh? The kind of thing that you'd think Christians would rather just not bring up, right? Because God...pretty much condones this nasty incestual date-rape.

Well, you'd be wrong. Turns out depictions of Lot and his horny daughters are rife in the canon of Western art. Thanks to the wags at the Skeptics Annotated Bible, I stumbled upon this delightful image:


Go on...give it a click for a closer look. Now...picture 17th century Dutch painter Hendrick Goltzius laboring for hours, trying to capture the perfect expression of drunken, incestual, old-man lechery on that motherfucker's face.

Good show, Goltzius. Good show, God; Lot. And good show, Lot's daughters. I sure hope your kids had only ten fingers.

Update: I used the epithet "motherfucker," without really thinking of the context. If you think about it, that motherfucker is flanked by two...fatherfuckers.

David Duke Nukem

When Capcom America was first informed of the premise for the new Resident Evil/Biohazard game from their Japanese braintrust, I bet one or four people in the office first thought it was a joke, as in a contrived narrative story which comically defies expectations, and then thought it was a joke, like, you can't...be...serious...

An American, white police officer goes to small-village Africa to investigate a zombie virus, where he is attacked by its entire mouth-foaming, eye-rolling population.

Somewhere, Al Sharpton is theatrically clearing his throat.

The trailer, while brilliantly edited, plucks every string on the racially insensitive krar: the indistinguishable Africans, lazy and inscrutable until they form a murderous, pitchfork-toting mob, are mowed down by the square-jawed white hero.

I'm praying that this game has a Constant Gardener-like twist, whereby an evil Western drug company infects these poor Africans with the T-virus, for two reasons: one, so I can play it, because it looks amazing, and two, so that a major corporation did not actually approve a game solely about a white police officer going to Africa to kill crazed black people.

Die, motherfucker, die!

According to an article I just read, tank crewmen in the American armed forces are trained to say "Die, motherfucker, die!" under their breath when firing the tank's machine guns. Apparently, the time it takes to say this phrase approximates the time it takes the gun to fire the prescribed 8-10 round dosage of hot leaden death. Never has something been so simultaneously disturbing and awesome.

"What's Next, Marrying An Animal?"

Jon Berke is a lot like John Smoltz, only he's not as good at pitching, he has never publicly compared homosexuality to bestiality, and he has no need for an effeminate and pointless silent 'h' in his name. Also unlike Smoltz, he has the soul of a comedy writer and enough sarcasm to make Daria feel earnest. His new blog, drunkgirlsexyface, rules and hopefully he'll be writing for Horny Horny Hippos in the near future. Because lets face facts, the Cy Young is not gonna happen.

Oops! I Was Wrong...It Was Earth All Along!

Ian Parker's fantastic piece in this week's New Yorker really should have been published on Horny Horny Hippos first, but he forgot to ask. Anyways, turns out bonobo monkeys, everyone's favorite peaceful primate sex addicts, are actually vicious, finger-eating Fem-Nazis who leave their midget antelope prey alive as they eat their intestines. That's a giant middle finger to people who want their 'closest to human' animals either warlike or horny. All that time spent in a floppy ape imitation of the missionary position? They're bored too, just plotting horrible, digit-removing revenge.

Clouds!

Cross-posting here with an article I just did for the Boston Phoenix (my day job, so to speak). Its a review of a Pelican show here in Boston, but I'm posting here not to talk about them--Pelican gets plenty of press--but instead to plug one of their opening bands, Clouds. The two are labelmates on the eminently credible Hydrahead records, but Clouds eschews the experimental nature of a lot of the HH releases in favor of a bad-ass balls-to-the-wall-man bitches brew of Classic Rock, Stoner Metal, and no-frills hardcore. The band features Cave In axeman Adam McGrath on lead guitar, and he lays down some spicy blues licks over a hard-charging, head-banging rhythm section.

Fans of The Sword, Priestess, Valient Thorr, and really anyone who likes awesome rock should check out their relatively recent demo at LegendaryDemo.com, where it can be streamed in its ass-kicking entirety.

Joe's sensitive ears are safe . . . for now

In HHH's ongoing half-assed coverage of dreadlocked wunderkind Lil' Wayne, resident Weezy-hater Joe will be pleased to find out that the rapper may not be annoying him for long: he's been arrested on gun charges.

Does this mean a temporary end to Wayne's prolific mixtape output? Hopefully, he'll take a cue from the late, great Mac Dre and record his output via prison pay phone. Readers may rest easy, though, knowing that, for now, the rift that tore the nascent brilliance of Horny Horny Hippos apart has been, for the time being, sutured, if not healed.

Space Jockeying, Ctd.

I’ll confess that the universe of “Alien” and its attendant sequels are based around a creation that scares me more than anything in any other movie I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the gigantic larval vaginae dentatae that devour the Gollum dude in the recent “King Kong”). The titular creature, or “xenomorph,” as it is properly and awesomely called, is the Geigerian specter that lurks in the dark corners of my life, ready to turn my skull into a tongue ring. That being said, I love all four of the “Alien” movies-- AVP I have avoided, as it can but cheapen the majesty of the version of that story that exists in my imagination. I love them for their manifold achievements in a wide array of cinematic ass-kickery, which I trust will be well enumerated by my blogging cohort.

Because our purpose here is to discuss the peripheral qualities of the films’ surrounding sci-fi universe, rather than the not infrequently gory details, I want to hone in on a couple of bio-mechanically intertwined aspects of scene-setting mythology. The first is the shadowy Weyland-Yutani corporation, an inscrutable and all-powerful military-industrial behemoth that looms over the Alien universe like a greedy thundercloud. In the films, it is mostly referred to as “The Company,” because it employs most of the main characters. The ending of “Alien” reveals Weyland-Yutani's sinister plot to use a ship’s crew as bait in order to capture a living xenomorph, setting the bar for high-stakes interstellar skullduggery pretty goddamn high. Throughout the series, representatives of The Company conceal hidden agendas and, in a couple of cases, evil android anatomies that appear to be lubricated by semen. The vague, unexplained malaise of a vastly powerful conglomerate puppeteering everything in the galaxy is just fucking cool, and gels perfectly with the film’s dystopic take on a space-traveling society. Paul Reiser is spot on as a Company apparatchik in the first sequel, James Cameron's "Aliens," with a goofy smile that camouflages his cutthroat allegiance. The fact that Weyland-Yutani also has a hard-on for keeping 8-foot man-slaughtering pets that bleed acid is just an added bonus. Don’t believe me about the hard-on? Check out Brad Dourif’s uber-creepy performance in “Alien: Resurrection.”

Connected to the corporate-horror theme is a …resurrection of what I will term “Merchant Marine Fiction,” a genre that I associate with only one other artist: fin-de-siecle Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad, colloquially known as "Heart of Darkness Guy." The correlation has to do with the fact that the movie is about the crew of a freighter, contracted to haul a large cargo (which they do not own) across a time-consumingly vast distance, a situation effectively analogous to the travails of Conrad’s characters in The Shadow Line, Lord Jim, and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', and a number of his other works. While many other space-traveling sci-fi fictions have attuned themselves to the inherent parallels between antiquated seafaring and futuristic space-faring (cf. underrated animated adventure “Treasure Planet"), none of them do it quite as well as “Alien.” This is principally because the film adapts the remunerative concept of the crew’s “shares” in the cargo and the journey, a crucial element of many of Conrad’s stories. The characters in “Alien,” like the characters in Conrad, are paid a set fraction of the cargo’s worth once they complete their journey. “Alien,” like Conrad at his best, places the character’s conflicted loyalties to their jobs, their cargo, and their lives in constant competition, ratcheting up the tension of their dire situation and provoking pervasive distrust and mercenary rivalry. The moviemakers seem to have adapted this dramatic catalyst knowingly, given that the spaceship in which the movie takes place is named “Nostromo,” after Conrad’s 1904 novel. Nostromo is a lengthy chronicle of an eventually disastrous attempt to colonize a fictionally untamed part of South America, and treats with the conflicting loyalties and fate of various corporate actors and their subordinates. It is a setting that the geologically extractive space-colonizing of the Alien series maps onto effortlessly.

Space Jockeying

A new, weekly series, wherein two HHH writers wax inconsequentially on the finer details of a science fiction universe. For our intial foray into the Outer Rim of hamhanded symbolism and three-breasted prostitutes, we have chosen Ridley Scott's Alien.

Joe:

If the Star Wars movies are a cornfed Kansan sorority sister sloppily proffering her tits on Girls Gone Wild, the Aliens movies are a single raised Natalie Portman eyebrow. The former anxiously shows us everything she’s got, not quite sexy, fully aware that in 15 years she’ll be obese and her husband will trade her wedding zirconia for two Oxycontin (BURN Lucasarts cash-ins). The latter connotes wild and confident possibility; you’ll still be thinking about her 20 years later. Exhibit A: the Space Jockey. Probably the all-time sweetest unexplained filmic extraterrestrial, the pictured-above Space Jockey actually makes its appearance long before H.R. Geiger’s titular creation, as crew members of the Nostromo explore a derelict alien spacecraft after crash landing on LV-426 (no I didn’t have to look that up, losers). Long dead, and with a hole in its chest the size of some serious foreshadowing, the Space Jockey is also absolutely enormous and seated, pilot-like, at the base of some massive dark phallus of technology. Is it a canon? A telescope? A rudder? Is this Space Jockey the only one of its kind? What do they eat? Does each one get his (or her!?) own boomerang shaped spacecraft? Can they love? Why does the ship have an endless grotto full of facehugger eggs? Are the Space Jockeys using them as biological weapons in a galaxy-spanning megawar which makes World War Two look like a nonfatal knife fight? I don’t know, you don’t know; everybody wins.

Don't Jerk Me Around, Square

Square-Enix, whose game localizations have improved in recent years by Bangaa leaps and Chocobo bounds, need somone to localize their press conference humor, immediately. At the recent Tokyo Playstation Premiere press conference, the company announced that Final Fantasy XIII is 13, or XIII percent done. I'm not even XXVI percent amused. Companion game Final Fantasy Versus XIII, well, thats only 1.3 percent done. Cruel and unusual punishment, that; akin to dangling bags of heroin above the outstretched arms of the shambling lines at a methadone clinic. What a cruel drug lord Square has become: they only give you a hit of smack once every six years (which, it must be said, lasts for forty magical hours) and tease you good and hard in the interim. [Shakes fist and sobs towards the heavens]

Cheating Death

These miscreant whippersnappers don't know just how lucky they are.

"Teens Allegedly Taunt Hippos and Survive"

Morrissey somehow rendered even less masculine

Mark Ronson and Daniel Merriweather - "Stop Me"



After seeing this video on MTV Hits a couple nights ago, I've realized that Mark Ronson and Daniel Merriweather have retroactively ruined my teen years almost as much as listening to the Smiths did. Their blue-eyed-soul bastardization of the Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" patently offends in a myriad of ways.

First is Merriweather's dentist-office-approved croon, a G-rated attempt at soulful grit that makes James Blunt sound like Tom Araya. Turning Morrissey's tale of preening, drunken misery from a soundtrack to my preening, drunken teenage virginity (itself more than likely a result of listening to the Smiths) into a Starbucks-ready shitbrick, this embarassment should come with a grande Frappucino al cyanide.

Second is Merriweather. Goofy, black A/X leather jacket. Blown-up guido hair. And a James Joyce t-shirt?! I guarantee this guy hates books and thinks "Dubliners" is a totally sweet Flogging Molly cover band. He looks like he should be yelling "Faaaaaaaaaaag!" at a kid in a Smiths shirt, not braying a shit version of one of their best singles. Rule of thumb: no one with a goatee should be able to cover the Smiths. Or be on MTV. Or live.

Even more offensive is Ronson's re-working of one of the band's most engaging instrumentals. Gone are Johnny Marr's minor-key guitar chimes, or the rhythm section's lithe blend of propulsions and idlings; instead, we get whitewashed neo-soul horns and nth-era trip-hop beats that belong in the chill-out room of Phreakphest circa 1997.

Lastly, the video. A river of tears. In a video for a Smiths cover. Get. A. Fucking. Job.

Black Republicans

Olive branch accepted, head bowed in contrition. Now lets make like Nas and J-Hova, or Weezy and Juelz (whichever you prefer), and get this money.

P.S. I call not Jimmy Carter.

Hippobole

But Joe...the Strokes are the greatest rock band alive..I mean....just look at them...they smoke. During photoshoots!

Also, I hear that Alex used to bulls-eye rhetorical womprats in his T-16 back home, and they're not much bigger than two meters. So lets cut him some slack.

As to Princess Leia being a whore and a liar, lets take a look at the cover of "The Courtship of Princess Leia," shall we?

Get a load of those bedroom eyes! Those lasciviously parted Alderaanian lips! The heaving decotellage of interstellar lust! We've been had! Swindled! Her Hussifullness has played us both for fools! Now I know how Lando felt when he lost the Falcon to Han in a Sabacc game--except instead of missing the ability to go point-five past light speed, I'll miss using her cinnamon-buns as fellatial handlebars.

An Olive Branch to my co-HHH'ers

Dear Joe,
From a casual hip-hop listener to a die-hard defender and scholar of it, might we just agree to disagree? Clearly, our defintions of a hot verse differ, and as I'd hate to see this wonderfully-conceived online paean to making fun of those who have either slept wth more women than us (the Georgetown sex article) or way more women than us (Lil' Wayne) fall divided, I apologize for calling out your co-opting of urban culture, and all the irony in which I knowingly drenched my own piece. And while I feel my description of Wayne's "buildup, climax, resolution" marks it as a legitimately stand-out verse, what the fuck do I know? Most of my college papers have been on, you know, writers and stuff. Yours was on an obscure RZA side-project. And while I can't pretend to be able to describe that juh nuh say kwah we call "charisma," can we both agree that Lil' Wayne is at least cooler than Jesus? Or that we're both dumb white toolbags whenever we talk, write or discuss hip-hop? I think that's fair. I still love you.


Dear Ben,
I hope you're not talking about "The Courtship of Princess Leia," because if so, then she's a whore and a liar.

Warmest regards,

Alex

Hip-Hop Style Beef Breaks Up Horny Horny Hippos Before It Starts; Is Named Tyrese

Not unlike the converted explaining their belief in God through "faith", or for that matter, Luke (Skywalker, not Skyywalker) removing his targeting computers and using the force to guide his missiles home (well, probably Uncle Luke too), Alex has chosen to make the case for Lil' Wayne by pointing to a document which he wholeheartedly feels expresses Wayne's status as the "hottest" rapper alive.

A poor choice. Its as if Ann Coulter showed me a picture of Jesus and proclaimed triumphantly, arms akimbo, "Look, you're wrong". What for Coulter, and Alex, is self-evident, for Jews, and me, only confirms everything I dislike about Lil Wayne and everything I resent about the hype (yes I just did call Christianity hype) surrounding his ill-defined "charisma" and every other amorphous buzzword attached to the pretender. He actually manages to sound bad after BIRDMAN.

But, the verse has a "build-up, climax, and resolution"! So does every decent rap verse in the history of the form, and apparently, some godawful ones. Its like calling the Strokes the greatest rock band alive because some of their songs go 'verse-chorus-verse'.

Now, on the subject of throwing stones in glass houses: my friend repping Lil Wayne has accused me of participating in "suburban co-opting of urban culture". You know what? I'm going to turn my targeting computers off and let this statement of perfect, nearly religious irony do its own work.

Hard Contact

So, let me get this straight: Weezy's verse is like fucking. Weezy's verse is also like Star Wars novels. By the transitive property of "shit x" being like "shit y," doesn't that necessarily imply that "Star Wars novels are like fucking?" Bearing this in mind, it turns out I lost my virginity at 11. Lied Luke.

Update: Doesn't "Karen Traviss," the author of the book on the left, sound like a character in SW? Did she pick an intentionally sci-fi pseudonym? Or...was she destined from birth...to chronicle...Hard...Contact.

Update #2: When you describe "fucking" as comprised of "build-up, climax, resolution," I assume that instead of resolution, you meant "falling asleep," amIrite?

Incontrovertible evidence that Joe is wrong about Lil' Wayne

Yes, Lil' Wayne was that indecipherable 15-year-old "drop it like it's hot" ankle-biter in the "Back That Azz Up" video. Yes, Lil' Wayne has the Internet swinging from his nuts like scabies in an Edgar Rice Borroughs novel. Yes, Lil' Wayne has multiple face tattoos, which, unless you've killed someone, only belong on drunk, Carhartt-wearing crust-punks (or, if it's a butterfly, on the Game). And yes, Lil' Wayne looks like the alien from "Predator" crossed with the cop from "Predator 2." Believe me, I'm the last person who'd back a dude with all these minuses on their scorecard. Or an overhyped Miami "DJ" who barely produces the tracks on his album and could possibly be in league with someone as douchey as Scott Storch.

Yet Weezy's verse on DJ Khaled's inescapable "We Takin' Over" proves Joe entirely wrong, as it's hotter than anything he's ever listened to, pretended to understand via suburban co-opting of urban culture, or ponderously ruminated upon in any number of online diatribes. To wit, four minutes and seventeen seconds into the video:



Build-up, climax, resolution. It's like fucking, or a Star Wars novel, but somehow cooler. Quota era demonstrata. Maybe not the best rapper alive in terms of skill, or clever punchlines, or whatever else pencil-pushing backpackers look for in hip-hop, but trying to say that Lil' Wayne isn't the hottest, most charismatic mainstream MC alive. . . well, I'll knock you in your medulla.

Eldritch Hippo-Horror

I've just realized that Cthulu has come up in two posts so far. Which is as good an excuse as any to post my favorite Cthulu-related thing of all time. Without further ado:



P.S. I fucking hate The Family Circus. The comic's suckage has been addressed at length on teh intarwebs, but maybe someday I'll sit down and provide a little context on the subject of why I find Mommy tentacling the fuck out of Billy's (or is it Jeffy's) little face so goddamn funny.

Monster Mash

According to Blabbermouth.net, a new feud is brewing between the world's premeir pair of latex-costumed monster-impersonating metal bands. GWAR, a thrash-punk crossover spectacle from Richmond, began regaling audiences with sensitive singer-songwriter fare like "Meat Sandwich" and "Fuckin' an Animal" in 1985. The band has carved out a seemingly unkillable niche and an army of dedicated GWARriors by sticking to its gimmick: Gigantic, cartoonish monster costumes and stage props, (including the above-pictured yard-long prosthetic penis known as the "cuttlefish of Cthulu" that earned the band's singer, "Oderus Urungus" an overnight stint in a North Carolina jail cell) as well as a feverish dedication to showering its fans in a lovingly concocted mixture of faux blood, semen, and pus. GWAR is possibly the only metal band in the world to screen-print its tour designs onto white t-shirts, which enable its ardent supporters to emerge from the pit sporting an unholy tie-dye of facsimile bodily fluid.

The band's costumed counterpart, Lordi, rose to fame in 2006 after winning the Eurovision song contest, which I'm assuming ranks only third behind the World Cup and "a vast history of internecine warfare" in the European National Pride Litmi Compendium. Lordi somehow managed to wow the judges and the voters with their devastatingly original admixture of monster costumes, ham-handed hard-rock songwriting, and the brandishing of cartoonishly oversized medieval weaponry. Sound familiar?

The band's founder, "Mr. Lordi" (what a badass metal moniker! Oderus Urungus, take note) has protested that he had never heard of GWAR until he had already come up with the brilliant idea of wearing foam-latex monster costumes on stage and playing shock rock all on his own--in fact, just read the description from the Lordi Wikipedia, its a treat: "After 'Inferno' [an early Lordi album], Putaansuu had a dream. In the dream he was at a concert and there was a skeleton on stage playing. When he woke up, he knew that Lordi should be a band full of monsters. The monster in the dream would eventually become the bassist Kalma."

GWAR, understandably, is a little pissed that someone sky-rocketed to the top of the European charts and the Ozzfest main stage by shamelessly ripping off their act, the Finns' denials notwithstanding. This from Blabbermouth's account, which ends the description with commendable pith:

------------------------------
"After GWAR's opening song, Oderus asks the crowd, "Oh, were you expecting LORDI?" and proceeds to take a replica of Mr. Lordi's head out on a stick. As expected, the crowd then gets covered in blood."
------------------------------

As far as HornyHornyHippos is concerned, GWAR is pretty much the only way we can satisfy our all-consuming desire to see fake-blood-soaked men on stage in thongs, fishnets, and 6-inch-high cloven-hoof platform boots (and theref0re rules), and Lordi is a bunch of eurotrash plagiarists, bowdlerizing the mighty GWAR to turn shock into shlock and sell it to the masses. But there's a fascinating irony here. GWAR has always been about over-the-top, tongue in cheek performance art. The fans have been in on the joke, from the beginning. Lordi, on the other hand, has couched their shtick in terms of utter early-Kiss-like seriousness; Mr. Lordi has berated European tabloids who ran photos of him without his costume on for attempting to destroy his "monster image." There's something eminently fucked up about the fact that the band thats just really good at joking around about being monsters has been confined to the fringe for more than two decades (where they presumably like it, to be fair), whereas a band that is more or less dead serious about being monsters rocketed to the top of a European pop song competition, and consequently the European charts.

And now, a pictorial comparison between the two bands.
Gwar:

Lordi:

Wow, its almost as if the band on the botom is a shitty, less-awesome version of the band on the top. Oh wait...

Pucker Up Motherfucker

I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about Lil' Wayne or his ouvre, but a quick perusal of his Wikipedia page turned up this picture of him smooching Brian "Baby" Williams (a.k.a. Birdman).

Weezy hilariously claimed that it was a "black variation" of a Mafia greeting. The two guys on the right of the picture must not be down with "La Cosa Negra," because they look pretty put out...then again, maybe they just grimace like that all the time. They're pretty gangsta, after all.

Joe: If Ben had taken the time to listen to rap Jackson Pollock "We Takin Over" on Da Drought 3, he would know that Wayne comprehensively addresses the smoochtroversy. To quote the rapstract expressionist himself, "Damn right I kiss my daddy". Of course.

Update: I couldn't decide which explanation of The Kiss (being Wayne, I might as well describe it as Klimtian) struck me as funnier, that Wayne would kiss his surrogate rap-father on the mouth, or that he would kiss his pathetic-Mafia-posturing Godfather on the mouth. Nevertheless, the kissing candid situation does represent a bizarre kind of intersection between rap and tabloid journalism...whats next, CHAMILLIONAIRE TANS TOPLESS IN THE BAHAMAS? WAYNE FORGETS UNDERWEAR, BARES ALL EXITING LIMO? (alllllleeeyyy-oop!)

When I Get Mad I Put It Down On A Pad

Let me take ya’ll back to 1999. I was 15, pubertal, and felt that if I tried hard enough—well, just bought enough shit—I could somehow be sublimated (or solidified?) into Blackness. A picture of my room dated from the period would reveal Garnetts (metallic blue high tops that won’t be worn ironically for at least 50 years) next to my bed, Wu-Wear hung from every conceivable door handle and chair back, and a stack of rap CDs ranging in quality from decent to aural rape on top of my stereo. The objective best of these CDs was probably Black Rob’s Life Story, which is by no stretch of the ear compelling hip-hop, and the one in most frequent rotation was Irv Gotti Presents: The Murderers, a “supergroup” whose best rapper was…Ja Rule.

I worshipped awful music. And so, with ten dollars of bar mitzvah money in my left sock and my jean shorts rolled up crisp, I thumbed through the rap section of Sam Goody less picky than a pedophile in an unsupervised IKEA ball room. I truly believe that I could have taken almost any CD home that day and loved it the same, whether it was Paid in Full or …And Then There Was X. Yet I settled on a CD called Tha Block is Hot by Lil’ Wayne—it had helicopters and fire on the front!—and on the interminable Windstar ride home, daydreamt about the ATV tricks I would employ to wow the Ruff Ryders into respect, and then friendship.

It was the first CD I ever hated. It had no positive qualities: Wayne had no flow, his tiny, raspy voice lacked any charisma or authority, he had no punchlines, his stories went nowhere, and the Mannie Fresh sound was so stale by that point that even my small brain knew it. Wayne sounded like he was drowning under the beat—couldn’t even tread in the 808 for a few bars—drowning in a rap kiddie pool. The CD went in the trash and I had finally developed a lower threshold for hip-hop shittiness which, it must be stated, is generous and has been met on more than one occasion by homeless MCs handing out free promo jams in greater Chicagoland.

So imagine my disbelief after eight years, a thorough education in terrific, vital hip-hop, a modicum of taste, a college education, and a final acceptance of my Jewishness, when tastemakers, hipsters, critics, and especially THE INTERNET jumped on Wayne’s dick faster than Superhead, who probably knows in her heart, or vagina, that the guy really has no talent. Was this some kind of cosmic joke? Did these people not remember Tha Block is Hot? The praise for the newly –eezeed ‘Weezy’ approached hyperbole and then spilled into unintentional parody:
“Open your ears. Wayne has become, before us, and on this very mix tape, an abstract expressionist, flinging the true genetics of poetry around like globs of primary color, turning gangster tropes and dissociative tendencies into rap Rothkos and Motherwells”

Really, Evan McGarvey of stylusmagazine.com? To extend your absurd and specious inter-media analogy a step further, did Mark Rothko break into the art world through fucking finger painting? Earlier in the review McGarvey tells us traditional rap fans to get off of our high horses: Wayne is “not cerebral” and never will be. Instead, you see, he raps from “the belly”. So, as Evan here would have us believe, rapping from the “belly” is avant-garde (remembering that Robert Motherwell, a one-time doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard, was definitely painting from the belly), elemental, no fancy-thinkin’ required. Meanwhile, all of the traditional, “cerebral” rappers are a relic (sorry guys) to be anthologized and featured on “I Love the 90s”. Remember Cop Rock, Mr. Ridenhour?

I downloaded Da Drought 3, because none of this near-propaganda is Wayne’s fault per se. Maybe there was something to the hype, and the bin-worthy “rapper” of 1999 had pupated through the years into competence; maybe even skill and relevance. I listened to the free download, a two-sider Tom Breihan of The Village Voice called “so fucking good I almost can't talk about it”, and came to the immediate conclusion that every single person who reviewed it had taken Wayne at his word, “I’m the best rapper alive”, and never actually played it. Its so fucking bad I almost can’t talk about it. Wait, no, I can. Wayne’s miniscule voice somehow, impossibly, comes through lower in the mix than ever before. Breihan lauds the rapper for “figuring out everything that can be done with a truly bizarre voice”, which is not unlike extolling a band who has figured out everything that can be done with a Fisher-Price guitar. Wayne’s [bad-connotation] destruction of some occasionally great beats negates the welcome absence of Mannie Fresh from the boards. You can’t ruin shit, but you can sure as shit ruin “Dead Presidents II” and “I Luv It”. And what about the amazing, stupendous free-association of Weezy’s that represents a quantum leap forward in rap, the bleeding edge that we ought worship lest we miss out on, in Breihan’s words “something we'll be talking about decades from now”? Well, there was a little trend in rap that some of us have noticed for the past few decades called freestyling that runs along the same lines. And if you want to hear a real rapper perform these same feats of avant-gardism, check out Ghostface’s entire back catalogue.

It appears that I’ll never be able to ignore the worst rapper alive—a claim no more outrageous than Wayne’s own—again. He has a new LP out in the fall/winter, Tha Carter III, and enough forthcoming mixtape projects to gift us all rap Hockneys and Hirsts before the end of the year. Philistine that I am, I’ll probably just dust off Venni Vetti Vicci; “Holla Holla” was always a banger.

"Oh, and yes, by the way, the sex is much better when you are well born and attractive."

10:12 PM
Georgetown, Washington D.C.

It is night, bathed in the warm glow of streetlights and alcohol. Against the venerable brick, flips flop and stilettos tattoo a intoxicated two-step towards the brass bar rails of the capital's de-docked Potomac port. They converge in the night, light glinting off pearls and tangling up in the plaid symphony of madras, ricocheting off the filigreed brass-button Brooks Brothers coat-of arms down the luscious cerulean luge-track of creased seersucker...

There are many human pathologies, many elemental idiocies in the writhing mass of personality that peoples this world. Many of them are facilely and effortlessly mocked, but few present such a juicy panoply of derisory bulls-eyes than the archetypal frat-boy douchebag. To dredge out the rote and tired routine of a rant against them would seem poor form, in the second post of a recently germinated blog--nothing's worse than a joke everyone's heard a million times.

Occaisonally, though, these over-privilged, over-pastelled idiots can put their empty heads together and spawn something so magnificently stupid--and abundantly hilarious--that the humorists pen must be familiarly but not quite ruefully be hefted to blot the fronts of a thousand polo shirts with the ink of mockery. The joking sport welcomes like the arms of an old lover, albeit with none of the post-coital guilt.

Returning to our Georgetown scene, the fun begins. D.C. is well-known to its citizens and visitors as harboring a vast panoply of rich frat-boy douchebags and their (mostly) blond distaff coterie, who swarm to the capital's sweaty teat of lobbying, I-banking, and general establishment- whoring like so many suckling sucklings.

In 2006, this squealing battalion of bar-hopping, influence-peddling assholes decided to band together on a social-networking site called "Late Night Shots," an invitation-only cesspool of lechery, misogyny, and racism, leavened with lacrosse-playing frat-pledging dollop of shit-yeast. The site promised an opportunity to wax fucking retarded on the D.C. bars its members frequented, regale their fellow WASP princelings with cringe-inducing tales of alcohol-fueled triumph and tragedy, and become "drinking buddies" (the site's version of facebook or myspace's "friends")

The Washington City Paper recently ran a priceless expose on the site, which chronicles pretty effectively of all the naseauting idiocy perpetrated by mouse-wielding, mouth-breathing collection of beer-bonging dipshits. The full effect, however, is reserved for the comments section, where various "LNS" members flailingly defend their breached honor, breathlessly threatening lawsuits and flinging about comparisons to Al-Qaeda.

It turns out that D.C. gossip blog Wonkette has been on the case for a while, occasionally compiling the best (or rather, worst) of the LNS forums and exposing the fleshy, cable-knit underbelly of assholes anonymous. They've got snark in oil-drum volumes on the comments here, and the reaction to the City Paper article on the LNS forums here.

I want to point out that this is really mind-boggling to me. I've been out in Georgetown, and I was fully aware that the areas nightlife is, as Wonkette so aptly describes it, "that special mix of date rape, shitty beer, and racial homogeneity." But I would have never in a million years have suspected that the assholes that plopped their khaki shorts and denim mini-skirts onto the bar stools around me were actually reaching out through the internet to each other with the Cthonic tentacles of laughably misguided exclusivity? That the douchebags one inevitably encounters in Georgetown have organized into a kind of street gang?

On the other hand, however, the fact that these hive-minded hard-ons in boat shoes and their over-tanned bitch-brigade have managed to translate their pathetically insecure version of social reality into computer code isn't as impossible as it sounds. This kind of culture has always thrived on an inbred and self-obsessive scene-policing, constantly seeking to purge itself of the unworthy to preserve the fragile sense of privilege-through-exclusivity that its remaining members so desperately crave. Think of Stalinist Russia, or, if you like, The House of Mirth with keg stands and Red Bull. Late Night Shots has simply managed to create a vast country club locker room on the internet, a place for cretins to guffaw about all the people they think they're keeping out.

I, for one, am hoping that a lawsuit comes out of this, or at least a firing, so the utter humiliation of these rank idiots is complete. I leave you with this gem from the LNS forums:

-------------------------------
Breakage
Posted By: Plan B on 11-29-2006 10:00 am Report as shockingly offensive


Last night, after a few too many glasses of wine at Milano, I dropped my date off at her apartment. She asked me up for a drink. I was not into it, but Tuesday night takedowns only happen ever so often so I proceeded. She made me wear a condom because she was not on the pill for some reason. Deed done, I went into the bathroom to dispose of said condom and discovered it had long since broken. In a panic, I went back into her room, chatted for a few minutes and then departed gracefully. She also mentioned she was glad we slept together because she was getting her period in a few days. I failed to mention whatsoever that I may have impregnated her. Do I have to say something or just leave it be and hope she won’t get pregnant? Maybe she knew? I never want to see or talk to her again. She was a boring conversationalist and the sex was bad.

RE: Breakage
Posted By: oh god on 11-29-2006 12:00 pm Report as shockingly offensive

wait, plan b? im kind of freaking out. were you at a table in the front room of milano with me at milano and did we stop at the cvs in gtown before going back to my place to buy durex ultra thin condoms? i tried calling but you wont pick up.

RE: Breakage
Posted By: Plan B on 11-29-2006 12:16 pm Report as shockingly offensive

oh god: I probably should have searched for your profile on here first. That’s us. Check your gmail and tell me what you want to do. Sorry.

RE: Breakage
Posted By: oh god on 11-29-2006 1:16 pm Report as shockingly offensive

this is unbelievable. how could you not tell m? i could have taken plan b this morning instead of having to run all the way to cvs sobbing.
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Doesn't it just warm your heart? Last dose of Last Week's Shots from Wonkette here.

Look Closer...

Submersion. Hemingway wrote that seven-eighths of any work of fiction should remain, like the bulk of an iceberg, unseen. Freud believed that conscious thoughts and perceptions are buoyed, like an iceberg tip, by our vast and submerged unconscious. Yet for all of the former’s legendary safaris, and all of the latter’s giant-cock worship, each man missed the master metaphor, against which all other placid-surface-concealing-turbulent-depths metaphors must now be measured. Hippo sex.

“Hippos swimming together” reads the original—naive—Flickr caption for the above picture. Well, literally, yes, these two smiling monsters are swimming together. Mind you Anne Anthropomorphizer, they are not together in any sense of aww-shucks cooperative hippopotaplay, but rather in the way they are fused by a furious, feet-long hippopotapenis. Africarulez684, like Ernest Hemingway before him, was completely misled by the bull’s charming—and, dare I say, smug—grin and the lack of aggressive hippo yawning. An underwater snapshot would simply crush both men’s belief systems: raw hippo tonnage whipped back and forth in cloudy Nile water; paws flailing this way and that; sun-baked genitalia engorged to the point of biological farce. Iceberg? Come on Ernest, Sigmund. Lets get real.

The case for hippo sex as an all-encompassing and flawlessly accurate metaphor for human society is, therefore, airtight. Given this truism, our new blog, hornyhornyhornyhippos!, seeks to dive underwater (into society) with our underwater cameras (laptops) and capture all the horrible and conflicted hippopotapenetration below the surface (?). Enjoy.