In 1998, shortly after his feature length directorial debut, Gummo, Harmony Korine published a novel called A Crackup At the Race Riots. The book is built from an insane collage of images and thoughts, including lists of ideas for movies; titles for novels; suicide notes; joke routines; celebrity rumors; and strange short scenes and dialogues involving rapists, amputees, dogs, vaudeville performers, and manic-depressives.
The cover story of this month’s Esquire is an interview with Megan Fox by Stephen Marche. And though I haven’t read every single thing that has ever been written, I can say, with confidence, that it is the worst thing that anybody has ever written. Ever.
Papua New Guinea’s street gangs, the Raskols, make the gangster claims of US rappers look ridiculous. A Raskols idea of gang banging doesn’t involve bouncing on hydraulics in vintage Lincolns or wearing designer threads. These guys tote their own homemade weapons—from knives to guns.
There’s a certain amount of irony when you’re accused of being pro-Taliban, only to find half a kilo of explosives under your car, which have been put there by the Taliban. But that situation is something that Hamid Mir, Pakistan’s most well-known TV presenter, has had to deal with recently.
If you’ve ever heard the music of TNGHT, aka the project of Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke and Canadian beat-thumper Lunice, it’s completely fucking insane. Imagine Waka Flocka’s rowdy mechanocrunk, but filtered through every move about the future except for Blade Runner, with a dash of post-industrial wasteland thrown in, and that’s almost the sound of TNGHT.
What would we do without the internet? We’d probably be in better shape and know how to interact with strangers in the supermarket. Of course without the web, we also would’ve never had the exquisite pleasures of seeing that monkey piss in its own mouth or the chance to cultivate crops on FarmVille…
Sadie (9), Neighbor Girl (8), and Eva (10) all like to prank Wolf (17) together. Wolf loves the attention of the pranks his sister and her friends constantly pull on him, he always laughs and remembers it fondly after the initial screaming. Because he has such profound differences physically and mentally, to be pranked and bothered like a normal big brother, and not handled delicately as someone disabled, is refreshing to him. But when it came to his interview on regrets, things turned serious.
Here are four things I am going to tell you before this interview with 50 Cent. One: Get Rich Or Die Trying is basically the closest our generation will ever get to our very own The Chronic, so regardless of whether or not he has not had a true “smash hit” in years, he will always be important. Two: 50 Cent is a human brand, one whose holdings extend into film, energy drinks, headphones, a record label, books, and amusement parks (okay, not really), and if I bottled his breath I could sell it on ebay and pay my rent for a couple months. Three: 50 Cent is basically a weird dude at heart, and he does not look at things the way you or I look at them. This is okay. Four: 50 Cent will, at the end of this interview, start saying moderately misogynistic things. This is not okay, but this is also probably something that 50 Cent has done for a lot of his life. If I had called him on it, he just would have laughed at me not cared, or worse, hit me across the room because I have heard he does things like that.
So Cannes is going on. One person who isn’t there right now, and who is probably never likely to discuss the merits of Up The Bracketon an expensive boat, is Frank Henenlotter, director of such sexploitation classics as Basket Case, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker. I saw the first couple a while back, and though I was impressed, it wasn’t until my eyes feasted on the majestic latter that I came well and truly under his spell.
We all know that pumping heroin into your veins turns you into a phenomenal artist. Basquiat? Cobain? Burroughs? Have you seen the shit they were putting out before they started using? Of course you have, because it was put on your high school syllabus to teach you that you’ll never be able to create real art without a smack habit. But one group of artists your school books might not have mentioned are the dealers who use their own graphics to beautify their heroin baggies. Kind of like acid tab art, I guess, only more sinister and likely to kill you.
Read the rest: Saluting the People Who Make Heroin Look Pretty
