Happy Birthday Pat Smear!

Can you believe the charming bastard, ex-guitarist of Nirvana/Foo Fighters and founding member of LA punks The Germs, is only 49!

I love The Germs; I wore out my old tape copy of GI and the covers anthology – A Small Circle of Friends with bands such as The Melvins and Courtney Love was also mindblowing.

There’s a really interesting piece about The Germs’ biopic What We Do Is Secret, which stars Shane West as Darby Crash and Bijou Phillips, in today’s IHT.

Darby Crash, singer of the Germs and the most polarizing figure on the 1970s Hollywood punk scene, would tell anyone within earshot that his days were numbered.

In 1975, at the age of 17, he devised a five-year plan for achieving immortality: form a band, collect a following, release one album, then commit suicide. The band started as a dare; T-shirts were made before any songs were learned. Its following expanded from a few hangers-on to members of the fast-rising hard-core scene from the nearby suburbs and beach communities.

The movie comes out in the US this week and is expected to air internationally before the end of the year.

International Herald Tribune

Monday Links

Trailer: 24: The Movie @ YouTube

Which major label will buy Napster? @ Wired

Profile: Elizabeth Moss on Mad Men + The West Wing @ NY Magazine

Macrumours.com: The Doctor and the blog @ NY Times

The Dark Knight vs Thrash Hits @ Thrash Hits

Charlie Brooker: Search engine optimization is SEX-Y @ Guardian

Why does the Daily Mail hating something, make me want to see it so much?

But Donkey Punch is no ordinary softporn slasher flick. Blackburn claims the characters in his tale are ‘socially realistic’ – typical of many young men and women of his generation. ‘Everything in the film is rooted in reality,’ says the 36-year-old director. ‘We just took the stuff that’s out there and made it into a story.’

In which case, I despair for the future of Britain.

The key thing to know about Donkey Punch is that the film takes its name from a potentially lethal and possibly mythical sado-masochistic act involving anal sex.

I apologise for being so explicit, but unless you understand the central premise of the film you cannot comprehend what a vile production it is.

Dunno what one is? Here’s our filthy-lipped wiki-friends from Urban Dictionary with a quick reminder…

Donkey Punch

Verb. Noun.
Whilst participating in either vaginal or anal ‘doggy style’ intercourse, during the instant before the male ejaculates, the penis is inserted (or kept) in the female’s anus, at which point he delivers a swift punch to the back of the female’s cranium. This results in the simultaneous contraction of the anal sphincter and various other muscles in the female, thus producing a tremendous sensation for the male. However, for the technique to render successful, the receiving party must be knocked utterly unconscious.
“I was banging this one night and I donkey punched the bitch so hard she passed out!”
“What happened after that?”
“I fell asleep. What else?”
“Hear hear! Bravo!”

It’s in cinema’s from today. Watch the trailer here, it actually looks awful, for reasons not involving an irrational fear of hoodies and boys wearing mascara:

Like High School Musical meets Spinal Tap

You’ve been warned!

Why I don’t care about Carrie Bradshaw

It warmed my cockles to read such an eloquent disdain for my second most hated show (the first being the numb-nut coffee cloning which-one-are-you factory that was Friends). Clearly, as a non-White Wine drinker, I’m not in it’s target audience, apart from the fact I’m often a viewer of prime time television shows but that doesn’t mean I can’t be riled by it.

Is it just me or has it done more harm to journalism than Clarissa Explains it All? People now think that being a writer is about living a ridiculous life and including yourself in the narrative of the rich and the fake tanned.

What sickened me most was the only thing of worth that any of them seemed to do was write a self-indulgent blog as a column in a magazine. Surely, the movie will go on to show that these women aren’t complete cluts who choose the wrong man and that there’s more to life (and modern feminism, celebrity and aspirational sofa culture) than shoes, cocktails and babies.

Says a lot for the modern world when something like this is seen as such a symbol of empowerment but it makes you wonder in increasingly fractured times whether we’ll ever find out exactly what women really really want.

Read the piece from theLipster here.

By S

Indiana Jones and the eternal wait for the Crystal Skull

There’s a boy wriggling with glee deep inside of me. He’s shuddering with excitement but fearful with far too much self-awareness that this could all end in tears. 

This is that eight year old boy who imagined that everytime he ran down a hill on the way home from school a giant boulder was following him. The same ten year old boy who lost an entire summer holiday to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The boy who hasn’t been excited about seeing a movie at the cinema, like, ever and now this boy-man is jittering at a keyboard like a meth-fiend, causing car accidents with excitement at billboards which simply say INDY in 20ft high, red font, complete with bull whip and flames and thee hat. This man-boy is not sure he can last three weeks longer and is being near stalked by teasing tidbits everywhere from packs of Snickers and M&M’s, to fact-ladled features in Portfolio (for further geekdom visit IMDB), to the cover feature from months back in Vanity Fair which is still sat, pristine, beside my bed… and now Expedia are suggesting I take myself, and my special Indiana Jones credit card, on an special Indy themed trip!?

I’m bored of being dunked in all this teasing, it’s front-loaded marketing gone mad and the movie, despite two of the greatest director-producers of all time, Harrison appearing alongside Cate Blanchett, the amazing looking trailer which started the foreplay back in December and the fact it’s Indiana-fricken-Jones, the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull can now only be a let down, surely?