Rascal Flatts and Natasha Bedingfield
If we told you that country stars Rascal Flatts and pop starlet Natasha Bedinfield would do a song together, that’s one thing.
But for Risky Fuel operatives to talk them and write about it for something called, The Boot? Well, that’s an entirely different world altogether.
But that’s just what Sarah did. You can read her story by clicking here.
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion
Tasseomancy
Earlier this month, we told you that Aaron’s review of twin sister gloomy art rock duo Tasseomancy’s (née Ghost Bees) new album, Ulalume, had been published in the latest issue of Rue Morgue Magazine.
Now, we’re usually very supportive of each other’s writing endeavors, but I have to confess that I was a little disappointed with this particular review. Aaron likes to think that he’s some sort of expert on morbid young women because he’s listened to so many of their musical projects and because he married one.
But the only people who can truly understand and explain morbid young women are their fellow sisters of darkness. I tried to help Aaron when he was writing the review, but he refused to listen to me. Here are some of the ideas that he rejected:
– Sari and Romy Lightman are a pair of Emily Stranges for the non-dilletante.
– Imagine Wednesday Adams with a sister instead of that idiot Pugsly.
– Dead Ringers for girls.
– Something about Brian De Palma’s Sisters that I couldn’t fully formulate.
– Tasseomancy are the duo that Laura Palmer and Madeleine Ferguson would have formed if BOB hadn’t gotten to them first.
– Holy crap! The conjoined twins from Carnivàle traveled to the future and separated! Sadly, the surgery may have cost them their contortion skills.
– Ulalume sounds like it was crafted by people who spent many carefree childhood days memorizing the words to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells.”
– Ulalume sounds like a musical version of that episode of Night Gallery when the woman keeps having a dream that a stranger is coming to her door, and then, one time, she finally opens the door and realizes that the scary person is herself.
– It’s a little-known fact that Liv Ullmann’s character in The Hour Of The Wolf was actually pregnant with Sari and Romy Lightman.
– Imagine Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as a jam session.
– A Tasseomancy album is reminiscent of Black Swan, if you removed all six thousand of Vincent Cassel’s monologues about how the white swan is pure and the black swan is sexual and raw and Natalie Portman is really good at being the perfect and virginal white swan, but he doesn’t know if she can be the provocative black swan, because she’s so white and pure like the white swan and not at all like the sexually bold black swan.
The Walking Dead
Last week, I noticed that The Walking Dead had been added to Netflix Canada.
“Oh,” I thought, not the least bit excited. “I guess I should watch that.”
I’m usually all over fancy pants cable and premium TV shows. I’’m willing to watch almost anything that HBO, Showtime or AMC puts out, provided that it’s not called Entourage. HBO has seduced me with the wild west, vampires, Dust Bowl circus freak saviors who fight evil preachers, and prison spoon rape. Showtime has convinced me to laugh at cancer, and to care about a serial killer a lot longer than I really should have. I tried to resist AMC’s offerings at first, but I’ve been their bitch since Betty Draper shot the pigeons.
But I was looking forward to watching The Walking Dead the way that I look forward to scrubbing the toilet. I probably wouldn’t enjoy it, but it was a chore that needed to be done.
Here, the empty road represents my interest in the show.
We’re three episodes into the show now, and I’m not really sure what its purpose is. There are zombies, and a rag tag group of survivors. Guys beat the shit out of zombies (and each other) while women stand in the background and scream. A lot. There’s usually a bad monologue of some sort thrown in. And then there are more copious beatings with womenfolk in the background. There’s no greater purpose so far. The writers know how to provide viewers with zombie gore, but that’s about the extent of their talents. It’s like they’re constantly missing the point.
Imagine if Deadwood had been written by people who thought that the show was solely about Ian McShane saying the f word. That’s about the level that The Walking Dead is working on.
And yet it’s not the quality of the show that’s troubling me. I can watch the hell out of a shitty show like 24, or Lost. What really bothers me about The Walking Dead is, well, the walking dead themselves. I am just so over zombies.
It wasn’t always this way. I must have been cool with zombies at some point. I like The Zombies. I like “Thriller.” I dug that Cranberries song when I was 12, even though I thought she was actually singing “Tommy” for a few months.
I appreciated the Night Of The Living Dead when I was a teenager. I’m still a big fan of the opening scene and often think of Barbara’s jackass brother biting it when I run through cemeteries, content that I would be able to outrun a traditional zombie if it ever came to that. And I admire the crisp and unapologetic nihilism of the ending.
As an old school David Cronenberg devotee, I’m also pretty partial to Shivers. But I don’t even know if his crazed sex zombies count as actual zombies, anyway, because everything that Cronenberg did before the turn of the century was in its own world and so much more awesome than the rest of pop culture.
This is how sex zombies are made.
28 Days Later was cool enough. I laughed at Shaun Of The Dead. I even went to see Juan Of The Dead, a Cuban zombie comedy, at TIFF this year. It had its moments, although watching the young PR interns try to figure out the communism jokes was funnier.
But I just can’t deal with this shit anymore. I am so over zombies, and here are 10 reasons why:
1. They’re ugly.
And yet I'm completely cool with this.
This is a dumb and superficial reason, I know. It doesn’t even make sense, given that Slobulus is my third favourite MadBall, but I have a visceral reaction to melting flesh that drapes off of a skull. Or at least a skull that is not ball-shaped. In the abstract, I admire what people can do with makeup and prosthetics, but actually looking at those accomplishments makes me want to vomit.
And what is with their posture? Am I really supposed to believe that some sort of magic or scientific experiment gone wrong is capable of reanimating every single part of the body except the erector spinae muscles? That’s absurd.
Stand up straight, young dead man!
2. They’re annoying.
Sometimes, when I’m watching a zombie movie, I just want to tell the zombies to shut up. If I wanted to watch two hours of pointless, unintelligible droning, I’d go to a Coldplay concert.
Sadly, Coldplay's quest for brains remained unfulfilled, because no one who has any would attend one of their shows.
3. They’re eerily reminiscent of past trauma.
If I wanted to be surrounded by a terrifying horde of mindless monsters hellbent of my annihilation, I’d go back to high school.
4. They’re not glamourous in any way.
In other words, zombies don't do this.
I’m sick of vampires, too, but at least I get that obsession. Vampires are sexy and dangerous, when they’re not written by Stephenie Meyer. They play on our Freudian fixation with death. Zombies seem to speak to some bizarre survivalist fantasy that I have never experienced in any way.
5. They’re unbearably tired as a counterculture icon
Look at all these special snowflakes.
Oh, you’re having a zombie walk? I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I just zombie walked this morning, and I’ve got another one scheduled for tomorrow.
Wake me up when someone organizes a Bene Gesserit walk.
The flash mob must flow.
By the way, adding zombies to any work of fiction does not immediately make you a creative genius.
6. Zombie ______ costumes are just the nerdy kid’s answer to Sexy ______ costumes.
At least there’s still a tiniest bit of potential in ironic sexy costumes (like Sexy Oil Spill, or Sexy Steve Jobs) but if you’re dressing up as Zombie Anything, you are an unimaginative ass.
Speaking of which….
7. The zombie mythology is not conducive to a whole lot of creativity.
There’s a zombie outbreak! A rag tag group of people who would otherwise never associate with each other are going to have to learn how to cooperate and survive! And maybe find some sort of promised land! Which leads me to….
8. Zombie stories remind me of Ayn Rand stories.
On a whim, I did a google image search for "Ayn Rand zombie." This is what I got.
Let’s go live in the mountains, far away from the horrible leeches who are trying to feed off of us!
9. Survival in a zombie apocalypse isn’t really that appealing.
If I woke up tomorrow to discover that zombies had destroyed everyone and everything I knew and loved, and that my only option for survival was to join a rag tag group of people who would otherwise never associate with each other, like I was joining the worst season of The Real World ever, I would probably be all “So… there’s no Chipotle anymore? Fuck this, I’m going to let the zombies eat me.”
"Seriously, God. No more burrito bowls."
10. Why do we always assume that they have no internal life?
Has anyone ever tried to meet the zombies halfway? Are we really just concluding that they’re brain-dead because they’re nonverbal? Maybe they don’t know that it’s not nice to try to eat us and they just need it to be explained to them in terms they understand. And maybe they’re only fighting back because we’re trying to shoot all of them in the head.
You know who else doesn’t know how to talk and wants to eat me?
My cat.
And we’ve managed to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, so I don’t understand why we shouldn’t try harder with zombies.
You know, upon further reflection, my real issue might be with people.
Filed under Culture, Films, Television
The peculiar panty tree
This is the Peculiar Panty Tree Of Broadway Avenue.
I found it on the morning of Friday, Aug. 26 in front of my neighbour’s door and it’s been haunting me ever since.
First, “tree” might not do it justice. It’s almost an “installation.” Anyway, whatever, it was weird.
The base was a stack of grocery store flyers of the sort that get left in every lobby of every building in the city. On top of that was an orange pylon. Then, inserted into the hole at the top of the pylon was a tree branch. And on the branch? Multiple pairs of women’s panties. There were also some panties on the doorknob as well as a ribbon dangling from the top of the door.
It was all very mysterious and I still don’t quite have my head around it.
The building I live in has one very long, narrow hallway. We’re close to the very isolated furthest end away from the elevator and this apartment, along with the one right beside it are at the very end. It’s quiet back here, so if anyone’s having a party or watching porn, or getting up to shenanigans the rest of us in the back 40 hear it.
But we didn’t hear anything. I had played baseball the night before and was out late. When I got home from the bar there was nothing in the hallway. When I got up early the next morning and went into the hall there it was.
So, I figure the Peculiar Panty Tree’s creation happened somewhere between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. and would’ve been done with at least a certain amount of stealth.
[Note: The reason why the photo’s so crap is because my cat bolted into the hall when I opened our door first thing in the morning. She then immediately ran right towards the Tree and it was all I could do to shush a meowing cat as quickly and quietly as possible while taking a stealth camera phone photo at the same time. By the time I had the cat back inside, the landlord and his wife had arrived and were banging on the Panty Tree beneficiary’s door, looking all serious business, so I couldn’t get another shot.]
It would seem like a multi-person job. After all, I’ve drunkenly hauled around a pylon or two in my day and that’s probably a single person task right there. The branch and the paper stack? Well, those are easily attainable, if not cumbersome, and probably confirmation there were at least two others in on this. At least I hope so. The scariest thought in all this is that this unique shrine was built in the twilight hours by some panty carting weirdo shuffling through my building Quasimodo style, painstakingly piecing together their sculpture. But the panties? Where does someone get a half dozen pairs of women’s panties at 3 a.m.? And if you’re the sort of person that can find stacks of girly gitch in the wee hours, would your first instinct really be, “I know! I’ve got all these underwear. Let’s use them to make some art!”
So as you can see, there are many questions.
What does the Panty Tree symbolize? Is it a courting ritual? A drunken prank? The best breakup message ever? Was this a new, twisted bachelorette party ritual? Banksy’s next phase? And why a tree branch?!
I fear I might never get the answer. I don’t know this neighbour (we’ve been in this building six months and have met everybody else around us — except whoever’s in that apartment) and Sarah thinks they might have actually moved out. If that’s the case they certainly left an interesting parting gift.
Filed under Art, The Misadventures Of
Honeymoon Suite
That’s right, Honeymoon Suite, Gino Vannelli and Spirit Of The West came together in one beautiful rainbow of remembered songs from the past when Sarah wrote about their participation in the CBC show Cover Me Canada for the AOL Music Blog.
Anyone remember “Wave Babies”? That was a song, wasn’t it?
You can read Sarah’s story by clicking here.
“Wave Babies”
Filed under Music, Shameless Promotion, Television
I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
Risky Fuel 