It’s sweet how the law of returns can come back to fuck you. Take, for instance, that massive, soul-terror of a coal ash spill in Eastern Tennessee thanks to the Kingston Fossil Plant, which is now estimated to be 5.4 million cubic yards of nastiness, three times more intense than originally reported. Let’s go back and revisit Toxic West Virginia, where we learned that the fastest way to get your grubby hands on a pile of coal is to blow up mountains. And now the waste from coal has turned back into mountains… of fucking wet ash in people’s back yards that possibly contains dangerous levels of mercury and carcinogens and things that make your babies come out looking like fish. But don’t worry, says a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Valley Authority–probably the water is fine. Probably. Probably you’d have to actually ingest it to get sick. Oh, so like, you’d have to eat anything that comes from the contaminated ground? Or eat a product from an animal that ate what came from the contaminated ground? Good thing the state’s largest edible crop is soybeans. It’s not like anyone eats that shit.
Archive for December, 2008
NEW YORK - THE LAW OF RETURNS
CHICAGO - SSION TOUR PICS
I was in a bad mood when we arrived in Chicago because my friend Rita wouldn’t answer her phone. I was coming down from the night before and feeling really bloated. I was about to sever our friendship for good when she finally answered her phone and promised to take me out to Ruby Tuesday’s for dinner.
ZINE CREAMERS - KILROY SAVAGE
LONDON - THE WORST, WEIRDEST AND MOST USELESS CHRISTMAS PRESENTS I GOT THIS YEAR
Christmas gets worse for me each year. I think it stopped being fun when I was 11 and my mum forced me to spend Christmas day wearing a bright purple Power Rangers tracksuit (that was so big there was room inside for both me and Barney the dinosaur), which my aunt had bought and was very keen to see me wearing. Over a decade on and things are still pretty dire. Here are some of the, erm, special and heartfelt gifts I was given by loved ones this year. If you were given a worse selection of presents, you win whatever you want from the list below.
HAMILTON’S PHARMACOPIA - SPICE GOLD’S LAST CHRISTMAS
Wait… don’t take that gravity bong hit of mistletoe, there is another legal way to get high this holiday season. An herbal smoking blend called Spice Gold has made quite a name for itself since its 2007 debut on the legal highs market. Spice contains an assortment of completely natural herbs, which have been used traditionally by Native Americans since time immemorial, or so the packing states. Unfortunately the packaging is a lie, and in addition to mugwort, honey, and vanilla, Spice Gold was recently found to contain an untested synthetic drug called JWH-018. After smoking a bowl of Spice I had blood shot eyes, uncontrollable munchies, and dizzying psychedelic effects. In a blind smoke test between Spice and weed I’m sure nobody could tell the difference. And for that reason Spice was just banned in Switzerland, Austria, Canada, and is soon to be regulated in the UK.
NEW YORK - HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM VICE
Not to be all box of Patsy Cline tapes when you were ten and really wanted Paula Abdul and Neneh Cherry instead so you could roller skate in the driveway, but as we fade into the sunset of holiday festivities we’re going to offer up not your favoritest blog posts from throughout the year (we already did that during our last break, and wow was it depressing), but some that gave us a little chuckle. It’s called a gift so just say thank you and take it, even though we know you’ll tell us what we missed. Do you do that to your aunt when she gives you a present you don’t like, complain about what a fuck-up she is? Also, enjoy these wholesome photos from the Vice company holiday party, taken by Ben Ritter—who is not a party photographer so don’t even think that just because he took pics of our bash he is one—on a classy sit-down dinner and karaoke cruise ship around the city. Thanks for that, bosses. That was fun. (There, did that just buy me at least another month of good graces/guaranteed employment? Holy shit, this post is convoluted.) Anyway, click down there for your package of goodness. We’ll be gone a while so take your time…
SAN FRANCISCO - MERRY PSYCHEDELIC GOTH CHRISTMAS
Christmas music is the worst. We don’t even have to explain why because you already know, and actually its horribleness is such a given that even pointing it out is severely lame. So why bother with this post, then? Just to tell you that Mark Treise and Liza Thorn from Bridez managed to make a Christmas song (and video) that doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s quite good. Genre prefixes (punk rock, polka, whatever) never make Christmas music any better, but in this case it really does. May we present to you the world’s first psychedelic goth Christmas song. Enjoy.
NEW YORK - GUESS WHAT? WE FOUND ANOTHER ZINE WE LIKE
So this art zine Article showed up in the office, a strange and chubby little thing that’s packaged in a sweet double cassette case with a killer mix tape that spans Silent Barn’s lesser-known shows to Nigeria’s populist politics, each one dubbed by hand one at a time. And apparently all the art in the magazine is printed at size, meaning nothing is blown up or shrunk down (though come on! how about including some good writing, zine makers of today?), which makes this whole thing a laborious project that harkens back to the kind of shit that made the 90s an exciting time for publishing. Honcho Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor said he started Article because he’s tired of looking at art on a computer screen all day, which is funny because the zine actually kinda feels like the internet, like how you process the previous thing while looking at the next. It makes more sense by turning the page. What happens when you get to the last page then, you ask? The world stops making sense and you die, the end.
NEW YORK - A JAR FULL OF BLACKHEADS, A CORN COB, AND ASTROGLIDE WALK INTO A BAR: UNDER YOUR BED
I work in a dress boutique. I watch women wiggle and heave and bend and fold into and out of dresses all day. If I have learned anything from this job, it is that humans are sublime in all their imperfections. However, while watching women try on dresses, a lot of them bemoan certain spots they detest. A few abnormalities that are a huge bummer to hear:
NEW YORK - OTHER GARY PANTER PROJECTS BESIDES THAT ONE YOU REALLY WANT THAT’S OUT NOW
If you’re the type who buys presents and you’re still scrambling to find something for that niece/nephew/cousin you know could be intensely cool with a smidge of pushing in the direction of danger, why not be the person who they can say later introduced them to Gary Panter? Oh well, you can’t cough up $95 for that huge Gary Panter book Picturebox put out earlier this year (shit, we just checked to get that link and it’s down to $60 for the holidays so if you want this thing it’s now or never), but here are a two less costly options from the man who warped an entire generation’s supple young brains for the better.
LONDON - IAN MACKAYE ON… COMPUTERS
“It’s fascinating to think that people are spending enormous blocks of time, even without working, in front of these light boxes, tapping on plastic things. They get up after eight hours of intensive work and nothing has moved and nothing has changed but I could just spill some tea on this table and the stain would still be here. I don’t think there’s ever been a point in history where you could spend eight hours doing something and not a speck of dust gets moved. When you cook for eight hours you’ve got a lot of food, if you’ve been sweeping the floor is clean, if you are building something it gets built. Even if you are writing on paper you have paper that’s now been written on. There’s something fascinating about this idea that everything you do it doesn’t exist, it just exists in this temporal form. The information doesn’t exist. I mean, obviously I know that you are here because you wrote to me on the computer and I wrote back so there was a net effect and now we’re here. I’m not saying it’s a bad technology, I just think it’s an interesting idea. What will it do to people mentally? What will happen to our society if they feel like they can’t get anything done? I don’t know.”
OSCAR RICKETT
RIO - BLOODTHIRSTY GYPSY LESBIAN FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
My friend Tony was a green beret in the first Gulf War. Now he is a security specialist married to a Brazilian airline attendant named Constância and they have a baby. Constância keeps Tony on lockdown, discourages him from learning Portuguese, and leaves him to take care of the baby during her many flights abroad. The other night my wife and I were over at their apartment in Rio, smoking weed, drinking whiskey, and listening to New Romance music. When his wife came in he left her with the baby and invited my wife and me down onto the street for a pizza in a place that he says doubles as a cocaine delivery service.
LONDON - SHIT, MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE GONE TO UNI
When I was 18, while the rest of my friends were flocking off to various universities to enlarge their brains, I opted to move to London, live in a squat, do a lot of drugs, and just generally disappoint my parents. Now, four years later, I have a job (kind of), I no longer get bloody noses, and I don’t regret my decision not to go to university. However, there is the odd occasion when I feel like maybe I missed out on something that could have been a valuable life experience (particularly when I’m watching Legally Blonde). Here are some of the reasons why sometimes I kind-of sort-of feel like there might be a teeny tiny part of me that wishes I went to college.
