Entries from April 2008 ↓

Against nature: Children of the Unicorn’s idea of a hybrid

When it comes to hard rock with a so-bad-it’s-funny edge, Spinal Tap‘s David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls clearly broke the mold years ago. Couplets like these, from “Hell Hole”…

I rode the jetstream, I hit the top
I’m eating steak and lobster tails
The sauna’s drafty, the pool’s too hot
The kitchen stinks of boiling snails

…reach a stupid-is-as-stupid-takes-itself-too-seriously level that is rarely exceeded in pop music.

But Children of the Unicorn—Phil Costello, Dave Hill, Patrick Quade, Joel Frost, and Szuf Daddy—may be closing in.

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The first time I saw the trailer for 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the images that threw me most for a loop were those of the panoramic space battle over planet Coruscant, pictured below.

With its massive, mile-long cruisers, acres of explosions and laser bolts, and the shimmering, metal world below, I found myself overwhelmed by the realization that digital tools in filmmaking had created new possibilities in the artform, not merely for effects, but for outright visual density.

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Go no further: Snake-Eyes (Ray Park), from G.I. Joe (Summer 2009)

I wasn’t really a fan of the early ’80s cartoon series, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, on which an upcoming, live-action movie, above, will be based, but I loved the Hasbro action figures to death.

Lemme take that back: What I loved wasn’t the toys, per se, but the card art and copy. I would have happily collected the cards and given away the toys. If someone, today, sent me pristine copies of the cards from the early ’80’s, without the toys, I would rejoice. Continue reading →

Why, for the most part, have the ten children of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. never married?

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A funky minute of play from the video game Jedi Outcast. Here, Sariss, one of seven Dark Jedi, loses her cool over, and her noggin to, self-trained Jedi master and rebel operative Kyle Katarn. Yeah: Nerds rule.

The sole issue more amazing than the blatancy of VOGUE’s having mined crude racist imagery for their April 2008 LeBron James/Giselle Bündchen cover has been the whiteout of surrounding media on the issue.

Here, in New York, neither The New York Times, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Sun, or The Village Voice have cracked a word on this subject, online or off. Newsday wrote something, before the direct pairing of the cover and H.R. Hopps’s 1917 Destroy This Mad Brute—Enlist poster, right, was widely known. As for television, local and network, zero.

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Keith Sweat: Ready when you are…for the next 13 minutes, max

R&B singers are gonna need new choruses: Adding scientific imprimatur to what sane women have long known, a recent Penn State survey of North American sex therapists concluded that, on average, good couple’s sex lasts 3 to 13 minutes.

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Footage of a bird, directly above the shuttle. As its homeboy to the left watches in horror, the first bird, like a bug on a windshield, flies into the massive vehicle during liftoff, then falls down its side and vanishes into the ship’s paltry, 2,500-degree exhaust flame.

Bon appetit!

Former NYPD Blue star Garcelle Beauvais recently gave birth to healthy twin boys. She proudly appears with them on the cover of 57-year-old Black weekly, Jet, above.

According to Racialicious, however, the unusually light skin color of the Haitian-American actor’s offspring (her husband is white) seems to be annoying some people, to the site’s chagrin.

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