Monday, November 21, 2005

New Ultimate Best Fun: Band X is like Author Y

Image from Stuntkid, chosen arbitraily

Like the man says, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, so engage with the knowledge here, specifically, a list of bands, most fairly middle of the road, and the authors they most resemble. For those of you unwilling to leave my site: kudos, and here's the list reproduced in full:

AC/DC--Julia Child

Alice Cooper--Stephen King

Tori Amos--Alice Walker

Björk--Italo Calvino

Kate Bush--James Joyce

The Beatles--Roald Dahl

David Bowie--J.G Ballard

Jeff Buckley--Frank O’ Hara

Captain Beefheart--Allen Ginsburg

Johnny Cash--Carl Sandburg

Nick Cave--William Faulkner

The Clash --Hunter S. Thompson

Leonard Cohen--John Updike

Elvis Costello--William Shakespeare

Cream--Jane Auel

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young--John Steinbeck

The Cure--William Gibson

The Doors--Jack Kerouac

Bob Dylan--Ernest Hemingway

The Eagles--Tom Wolfe

Mark Eitzel--William Carlos Williams

The Flaming Lips--Shel Silverstein

Fleetwood Mac --J.K. Rowling

Peter Gabriel--Ray Bradbury

Marvin Gaye--Maya Angelou

Green Day--Dan Brown

Hall and Oates --Nick Hornby

P.J Harvey--Virginia Woolf

Jimi Hendrix--Kurt Vonnegut

Jewel--Danielle Steele

The Killers--Bret Easton Ellis

Led Zeppelin--Herman Hesse

Madonna--Anne Rice

Stephen Malkmus--Thomas Pynchon

Metallica--Clive Barker

Joni Mitchell--Margaret Atwood

Nirvana--William Burroughs

Notorious B.I.G.--Iceberg Slim

The Pixies--Paul Auster

Phish--Douglas Adams

Pink Floyd--J.D. Salinger

The Police--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Prince--Henry Miller

Public Enemy--Langston Hughes

Queen--Walt Whitman

Radiohead--Franz Kafka

Lou Reed--Truman Capote

Rolling Stones--Charles Dickens

Rush--J.R.R. Tolkien

Shudder To Think--Samuel Beckett

The Smiths--Agatha Christie

Bruce Springsteen--Norman Mailer

Steely Dan--Raymond Chandler

Sting--John Le Carre

Talking Heads--Eugene Ionesco

U2--C.S.Lewis

Van Halen--Cameron Crowe

Tom Waits--Charles Bukowski

Wilco--Mark Twain

The Who--Ian Fleming

Yes--H.P. Lovecraft
There's some smart stuff there, I think you will agree. There are some blasphemous abominations that should have been written with blood on a parchment of human flesh and filed under the Pentagon next to the Arc of the Covenant, never to see the light of day. I mean, Thomas Pynchon compared to Stephen freakin' 'Uh, I used to be in Pavement? Anybody remember Shady Lane?' Malkmus. HULK SMASH!
Anyway, I've hit the random function on Winamp a few times and came up with my own suggestions:

Big Black/The Icarus Line - Michael Houellebecq

Agorophobic Nosebleed - Peter Sotos

Godspeed You! Black Emporer - Mark Z. Danielewski

Slipknot* - R.L Stein

Evanescence* - Poppy Z Brite.

Faith No More - Dennis Cooper

Atari Teenage Riot - Robert Anton Wilson

Iron Maiden - Dennis Wheatley (I mean, come on)

Dinosaur Jnr. - Donna Tarrt

Dashboard Confessional* - Dave Pelzer

Acid Mothers Temple - Alan Moore

cLOUDDEAD - David Foster Wallace

A Perfect Circle - Neil Gaiman

John Coltrane - James Baldwin

Born Against - Chuck Pahlahniuk doing Fight Club and Survivor

Carnivourous Erection - Chuck Pahalahniuk doing Guts.

Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen

Interpol - Truman Capote

The Strokes - On their best day they barely scrape Jonathan Safran Foer, most of the time they're this

* Please note that I don't actually own a Slipknot, Dashboard Confessional or Evanescence album, nor any books by R.L Stein, Poppy Z. Brite or Dave Pelzer. I really can't stress this point enough.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

tEh h0rr0r, tEh h0rr0r: More tales of debauchery from other people's blogs


All this can be yours if you only betray your partner's trust!

Work is piling up, my social life is non-existant, I can't sleep at night nor stay awake during the day, nameless horrors haunt my everyday existance, so it can only be time for... Other people's blogs that suck!

Wife Swapping Stories

It is often said that there is someone out there for everyone. Our modern age of high-speed intermodemming has revealed a new aspect to this truism: When a person finds their special someone they invariably get tired and end up reading tiresome wife swapping stories on Literotica.com. That, or Lord of the Rings slash in which Aragon is impregnated by Legolas.
This is not one of those stories.
Wife Swapping Stories is something of a misnomer, since it only contains a fragment of a story, which contains no wife swapping. This would be a little like calling a movie 'The thirst of Dracula's boner' and showing fifteen minutes of An Officer and a Gentleman. This isn'
t really dissapointing, since I never expected to be -appointed by Wife Swapping Stories.

isildur's bane

Ah the lower-case, ever the friend of avant-garde hip-hop and those unwilling to wrestle with the nefarious 'caps lock' key.
The page promises both 'learning' and 'unlearning', and fails to deliver on both counts. Instead, we have several months of prose poetry. Again, the dissapointment I feel when reading this site is palpable.

Moves to Watch Stoned

I don't have a 'pet peev'. Pet peeves usually belong to that lady in the office with far too many cats and a festive sweater for all occasions and almost always include 'smokers'. If I had a pet peev, it would be stoners. Now, I've got nothing against smoking the Marijuana, but I fuckin' despise stoner culture as if it were Hitler raping my dog. This is why Movies to Watch Stoned is such a joy to behold, because it's the site I would have probably ended up making if I hadn't decided to stop 'smoking tha chronic' aged 19 (it made me scared to talk to girls).
As for the site, try this creative visualisation exercise: imagine somebody you genuinely don't care about, somebody who, should their violated and shaved corpse turn up in the woods, you would shrug your head and get on with your day. If they are female then imagine them as a guy for the purposes of this
exercise. Try to imagine them aged fifteen, stoned, and having a movie night in his parents' basement with some 'bud' and Fritos. Now imagine the films this nonperson watches: Eurotrip, Duece Bigalow, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Dodgeball. The experience is terrifying, like having H.P Lovecraft's nightmares shat onto your chest by Cerberus (guardian of the underworld or reactionary aardvark, whichever you find scarier).

Overall I give these sites my new lowest rating:

David Hyde Pierce.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

An explosion is like a kiss to God


Thanks to the always-fabulous Barbelith messageboard (the most smarterest place on teh Interweb), I now have videos of mankind's animated descent into divisiveness and hatred to rival my previous favorite, Fucking USA.
The first is this poorly animated Iranian cartoon about suicide bombing. It follows young Abd Al-Rahman's quest to avenge his family's death at the hands of a bloodthirsty Israeli officer, named Ariel. Like the Little Mermaid. The fact that Ariel was able to overcome this obvious handicap to advancement in the military, and the fact that is band of chuckling zionists are killing people as far away as Iran only attests to how evil this dude is. We follow young Al-Rahman (whose name means 'the instant noodle' in Iranianese) through his training, which appears to involve sitting on the floor and nodding his head (we infidels would assume that training in firearms and guerilla warfare would be best suited to the task, but what do we know?). Next is the emotional scene in which Al-Rahman's mother wishes him well on his suicide mission, presumably because she wants to knock through his wall and turn his room into a breakfast bar with track lighting (the home improvement aspect of this story will be covered in the sequel).
The sun rises on the last day of Al-Rahman's life, as his fearless leader explains that they will attack the enemy 'in accordance with our plan' and acknowledges that their mission is a difficult one, as nobody involved has any training and the plan (shoot and throw grenades at the enemy) has been rehearsed using the early level of Command and Conquer: Generals. But what is this? Al-Rahmad removes his shoelaces and uses them to fashion an omni-pin remover for his grenade belt. Clearly that day Allah had looked upon him, and selected 'Upgrade Grenadier>Suicide Bomber (100 credits)' from the upgrades menu. Allah then selects Al-Rahmad by left clicking and right-clicks the advancing enemy forces. I can't tell you what happens next because the video stream kind of fucks up at that point, though I imagine that Allah builds up some awesome defences around his base and builds a fuckload of refineries until he has enough ore to build as many tanks as he can select at one time, before clicking on the enemy's construction yard and letting the rudimentary AI take care of the rest. Although 'tank rushes' are frowned upon in online play, and tend to get one called a 'n00b' the following scene, after my connection sorts itself out, shows the dreadful aftermath of the attack, in which everyone, both Counter-Terrorist and Terrorist, lies dead. In a moving final scene, a young boy, previously a complete non-entity to the cartoon's plot, steals a bloodstained rag from one of the dead terrorists. For no reason.
The message here is simple and profound: suicide bombing is very, very retarded.
The second animation is from the good ol' BBC, my motherland's very own state-run television station that everybody pays for whether they want to or not (much like hospitals). Considering that it has the taxes of one of the world's wealthiest nations behind it, I really think that the Beeb could have done better than a grainy Realplayer clip, especially when the Iranian clip was in crisp fullscreen WMV, but I guess it's one of those Western decadance things. The clip, from Belgian TV, at first shows the lovable 'Smurfs' that inhabit Belgium dancing and singing, as is their heathen custom. They are then -not to mince words here- blown the fuck up for abso-fucking-lutely no reason at all. This further compounds the horrifying existential terror of being a Smurf, who, as Jean-Paul Sartre puts it 'are born for no reason, live through weakness, die by accident and have no dicks under those little white pants'.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Kids bringing gums to school


I'm listening to: Love and Rockets.
My enhappinessising continues apace, due in no small part to this site and it's sugary-sweet collection of bubblegum pop rarieties. Now, those of you with the misfortune to have met me, or those of you who have perused my Last.fm profile, will know that my tastes in music tend towards the dark side: Pig Destroyer, Electric Wizard, Low, Tom Waits, Converge. Sunshiny Happiness-core stuff like this brings balance to the Force. It's just volume 1, so if you like what you hear come back in a month or so for more.
Other reasons to be happy?

Jenna Haze, the 'adult entertainer', who has recently decided to go back to doing boy/girl scenes. Good for her.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Love Love Love Love



I'm Listening to: Heartattack and Vine, by Tom Waits.
Now, for most of you, getting a new Winamp skin that's actually pretty cool isn't a big deal, but finding this Super Famicom skin has got me all a-happinessed. So has Lowbrow art. And Sparkles. And Porno.