As I’ve said before, if heavy metal were supposed to be taken seriously, Rob Zombie wouldn’t be doing it. It’s easy to get bogged down in the grinding riffs and ripping solos when you’re mid-pit and covered in Emo blood, but it’s always nice to take a step back every now and then to fully appreciate metal for what it is, in-between gut-punching hippies.
I don’t watch SA Idols. I consider this a character strength. Any good it may have once represented has been dead for so long that the fellow currently holding the whip is simply flogging mushy ground and bone chips.
As far as soulless, moneymaking schemes go, it’s frigging genius. As a magnifying glass held up to the face of South African popular culture, however, it illuminates every pockmark, blister and cruddy scab carefully concealed by the corpse-white, harlot’s base lathered on by the pimps and pit bosses of the SA popular music scene.
This here is the music vid for a song called Control by Spoek Mathambo and it’s been shot and directed by local photographers Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary.
The story goes that Piet was rocking his way through some local albums when he was suddenly confronted with a familiar image gracing the cover of Spoek’s Mshiniwam album – one of his own.
So this is a little old, but I got a chuckle out of it and thought I’d post it anyway.
Cape Town traffic officers pulled over a Bishop Lavis man on Potsdam Road on Friday morning to discover that the man was driving without a valid drivers license, and sans his left leg.
So, I’ll be the first to admit that I sit on the bottom rung when it comes to mobile gadgetry. Shiny things entice me, but my need to reaffirm my existence and temporarily stave off those pesky thanatic impulses via the wanton purchases of things that go ‘beep’ is constantly at odds with my more basic and all-together more irritating need for constant sustenance. And since bread is so expensive these days, my desire for upper echelon mobile devices is repeatedly snubbed in favour of a yummy pint at Rafiki’s and maybe some chips.
So this may not SOUND like the most exiting news ever, but for all those people, such as myself, who are growing sick of Vodacom but don’t feel there’s a viable alternative, this is a candle in the dark.
MTN has just announced the trial launch of their faster LTE (Long Term Evolution) network. Such networks support hi-speed wireless services, and the move represents a major attempt to pull thumb on behalf of MTN in order to meet the growing demands of smartphone users.
This is how you make a fucking ad! Granted, if pressed, I could nuzzle a couple of holes in their strategy, but how do you beat a thirty-foot tall transformer with the head of Danny McBride, complete with chaingun and giant robo-dong, gunning down a building full of terrorists?
This is why the Internet is just super fantastic. No company would ever be allowed to flight this ad on English television (the Germans and Dutch are a whole other story). Thanks to online, viral marketing, however, coupled with our wanton lust for violence, perversion and explosions, we get gems like this flickering to life on our computer screens.
Entertainment is king, and advertising is its grubby, unscrupulous little brother, riding his sibling’s coat tails on to money, women and song.
Well, it seems our politicians are being as articulate as ever.
Do you know what simply screams professionalism, control, restraint and maturity? Telling a reporter to fuck off.
You disagree? Well, so do I. ANC Youth League spokesperson Floyd Shivambu, however, seems to feel differently, as he demonstrates in this highly amusing phone call with a Media24 reporter requesting a comment from our esteemed Julius.
So Scream 4 went on circuit last week, and Deathly Hallows Part 2 graces our local screens this Friday. The latter is apparently very exciting.
Every fibre of my questionable being is telling me not to watch these movies. Each will be a disappointment, of that I have very little doubt. They are sequels of sequels, and any Sci-fi nerd worth his tribbles will tell you that making a copy of a copy is an awful, awful idea, virtually guaranteed to end in bloodshed. Likely they will then proceed to describe to you, in graphic detail, exactly how your character is most likely to die, before carefully explaining how their escape plan from whatever terrifying situation they have concocted is full-proof. They will tell you how they have considered every eventuality and evaluated every risk. They will probably then stab themselves in the eye with a pencil.
True story; as of 5.30pm today (American time) the era of manned space expeditions will essentially come to an end, along with the hopes and dreams of virtually every single man, woman and child who ever watched Star Trek, read Issac Assimov or, you know, had an imagination.
Ok, so it’s been a busy two days, hence the dearth of posts. When I found this, however, I couldn’t let it slip by without a mention.
Yesterday morning, the RAW superstars were treated to an honest South African welcome when, after arriving at Cape Town International Airport, they discovered that their luggage had been broken into and a multitude of valuables stolen. After body-slamming several airport employees, bludgeoning an apologetic manager with carousel four and RKOing an elderly woman for good measure, the WWE stars were lured away with chunks of raw meat to a private waiting room while airport authorities began investigating the crime and attending to the injured.
Concept designs are always tricky. Watching a designer with free conceptual rein is like watching a kid muck around in the garden. Every crooked stick is a laser-beam. So as you can imagine, there is a lot of ridiculous crap out there. But there are also some gems.
Here are six of my favourite conceptual cellphone designs, all for different reason, all incomparably rad.
So anyone who has perused my longer articles may be aware of my heartfelt respect and deep admiration for the monarch of horror, the unparalleled wordsmith Stephen King. There is barely a novel or short story by this man that has not been turned into a feature film, and it is widely agreed that the most successful translation of his words from print to silver screen is courtesy of Stanly Kubrick via his sterling ode to ‘The Shining’.
Shia LaBeouf has called it quits, saying, “I’m done,” with the Transformers franchise. Apparently, he feels that his character, Sam Witwicky, the wise-cracking, nerd-next-door that has systematically made living up to the nerd stereotype a fucking nightmare for all of us real nerds out there, has nothing left to offer the series.
When I heard that almost half a million Rands worth of heroin had been seized in a raid in Goodwood last night, I was imagining the sort of take that would have Keith Richards doing back-flips. Images of Maynard James Keenan building intricate sandcastle on a beach of China White while Amy Winehouse cartwheeled across the background flickered through my head. Then I completed the article and reality struck home. 1,5kgs. Drugs are stupid.
