Lets put this in the new to me category. If you didn’t know, Liza from BRIDEZ was in this other band called So So Many White White Tigers and they were a train wreck. A spectacle. A wall of noise. A scary fucking storm. They ruled. And apparently they did a music video which I’ve never seen before. Its doesn’t exactly capture the live show, but I like it:

Mark and Liza made you a youtube christmas card:

So the internet has brought snuff films into our living rooms. This is far more extraordinary than the internet’s spreading of porn. Watching sex is a life-affirming experience- especially the amateur sex films that populate the internet.

Watching people getting butchered though is a whole different experience. It is not artful or beautiful- these are not the gore-spectacles of horror movies. The bodies are clumsy- the murderers and the murdered. There is no drama- the bodies lie there, flopping a little. The feeling I am left with after the three I’ve viewed is a coldness. In these movies, we are just sacks of flesh.

I know that this is extraordinary: snuff films were an urban myth, and now they are everywhere. It’s a testament to the web and what an extraordinarily free place it is that these movies are available.  Anyone can know what death looks like.

For whatever reason, all of the murder-movies that I’ve seen (three of them) have been from the former Soviet Union. The least disturbing was the one by Chechan rebels who kidnapped and murdered Russian conscripts. They shot them in the back of the head. It was fast, and the context is in it’s way comforting: it’s war, and war is awful. It’s sad but is within the realm of ordinary life. Men go to war, and they die in war, often in awful ways.

The other two are equally sick; ranking them against each other is a waste of time. One is a neo-nazi beheading in a park in Moscow- they are beheading a central Asian they kidnapped. The problem they run into is that beheading someone is not easy to do; they end up sawing off his head.

The final was a film taken in Ukraine by three friend who went on a murder spree- they killed 20 people before being arrested. They also cell-phone-video’d there murders (i know, what?). One that ended up on the web involves them beating a guy with a hammer in a yellow plastic bag, then sticking him with a screwdriver. It’s a grinding video to watch.

So what do you all think? Do you think that it’s good that this stuff is available? do you think it should be censored? Have any of you seen these videos? what does it make you feel?

Like Frosty, or Rudolf, Hard Place’s XXX-MAS Kitten is fast becoming something the whole family watches together every year:

Check out the comments over at youtube, for real. People are watching this every year!

The Passionistas promised to make a video for each of the songs on their split seven inch with Hard Place (which you should totally buy because copies are going fast). Here’s the first one, for the song “Ashlee Simpson”:

Download the song! The Passionistas – Ashlee Simpson

12/16/2008
THINGNITE @ AUNT CHARLISE (133 Turk @ Taylor)
djs TEENBEAT & Myles Cyrus (aka Myles from The Passionistas)

I guarantee this is going to be at least as much fun as it was getting drunk at happy hour at Aunt Charlies and coloring these flyers. Probably more! Come join the tribal bootie bass diva jam session! Walk on hot coals @ midnight on turk street! Listen to Ethiopian Funk! For real, because I know Myles there will (probably) be tons of ironic diva house and (hopefully) he’ll bring some of the music his sister sent him from Africa. Plus, its Aunt Charlies. The drinks are strong and the times are good kids, come on out!!!

I dunno how I feel about this…I mean I made out with the bride once when we were teenagers and then she rejected me hardcore so there’s always a twinge of unresolved jealousy…but there’s also a sense of relief that I never got involved with anyone like this…and then there’s the fact that I find wedding ceremonies so emotional that no matter how lolzy you try to make them, i still tear up a little.

I received an e-mail from Spicy Carrot about a party: the subject line was ‘Drink Yourself (almost) to Death’ party. The e-mail promised:

” a gigantic lofty startup office space with bamboo, a hammock, and dark corners for you to do naughty things.”

and

“our coping mechanism at Joby is partying like there is no fucking tomorrow (because there might not be), so this party should be sufficiently ridiculous.”

So I went to it, and here is the real: there was a hammock, but it was for coats. Strike one- I love hammocks, and any opportunity to lay in one is a boon for me. Unfortunately unless I wanted to lay on ITdiot’s jacket at the front of the party, this was impossible.

Second, lets discuss those “dark corners for you to do naughty things”. A more accurate description of the space would have been “panoptic office space to make you feel watched”. Any naughtiness would have been a performance.

Third, the music was lame!!! Like srsly, it was like the non-sense they used to spin at the Tenderloft, only that was…seven years ago.

Which I guess gets to the core of what was lame about this party: these people who threw this party obviously don’t party very often. The e-mail was the best part of the party- as a concept it sounds fun. But the execution was thoughtless- it was basically one big room, with no privacy, no clear rules about where you could and could not go, nowhere to sit and meet others (all you could do was stand around- there was no chairs, no couch-couch-chair set ups) and a DJ who was playing ‘drinking at Medjool music’ not jams that make you want to DANCE.

A good party is ultimately about three things: who you invite, the refreshments you serve and the way you organize the space. A significant enough failure in any of these areas can doom a party to wackness. In terms of the first, I have no idea about the quality of the people: they were not my people, but some of them may have been perfectly charming- I did not meet them. In terms of the second, the food was obviously purchased at Cost-Co. I know this because they were still in the Kirkland containers. They had medium to good liquor- Makers Mark being the peak. The party failed most significantly in the third respect- they did nothing to organize a space that facilitated socialization- rather it was set-up in a way to fight socialization, because there was nowhere to relax.

Imagine if they had not been so lazy, but rather tried to do something that would have been remembered: imagine if they had filled the room with hammocks, rows and rows of them like banana’s with walkways in-between. Suddenly, instead of no privacy, you would have had many individuals cells of privacy. The hammock would have provided a place to be intimate with a stranger; you could ask someone pretty if you might lie next to them for a moment, like a dance. The organization of the space would have helped us organize ourselves, told us to pair up and to circulate our pairs. Instead of a nervous mass, we would have been divided and individualized, and allowed to meet other individuals.

Don’t you dare miss…

RAW footage of Gary Fembot’s utopian/dystopian “aidsploitation” super 8/16mm flick…

Utopian/dystopian bake sale…

Reenactments of deleted scenes with sinister scantily clad strippers…

contest with prizes: Guess the AIDS victim

-This from the great local film maker Gary Fembot, director of the sweet, funny, sexy “Mondo Bottomless”. A benefit for his upcoming film, “AIDS Camp – or Survival in the 21st Century”. Director Fembot has proved to be an unique voice in Gay cinema possessing the uncanny ability to inject the joy of being alive with a visual eye rooted in the nostalgic, a sort of homosexual Roger Corman. Come support Gary in his determination to take on his toughest film subject yet. From what I know most of this film has been shot and is in the editing stages, stayed tuned for updates!