ghost writers in the sky

 

 smell o' napalm 20/4/08: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sorry there’s no track listing for this one- in all the excitement I left behind the piece of paper I was writing songs down on (that’s my problem right there I guess- i used PAPER and a PEN. it’s that olskool type buzz)
Rest assured we played some awesome shit, including a brand new WEEZER song, pork n’ beans, off their forthcoming album, a cover of ‘exit music (for a film)’ by Radiohead performed by Vampire Weekend, who I am still not sick of, and a whole bunch of other new stuff, including the by now almost obligatory MGMT song (shit they’re great), M83, Chromatics, Of Montreal, The Knife, Blikk Fang (who are one guy from MGMT and one guy from the almost universally ubiquitous Of Montreal, and they cover ‘where eagles dare’ by the Misfits! How Kool is that? you can download it -legally and for free-here), New Ying-Yang twins, the Holy Fuck entry into the radiohead ‘nude’ remix competition, (download all the entries here), the Glamour, and Bow Wow Wow-I Want Candy (the Kevin Shields remix!!!). There was a themed triple play, with a song each by Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, and Fuck Buttons, T-Bor did his regular, extremely popular weird sex newsbreaks (he is now a weekly feature), Mnaz said very little, and just brooded with all the rage he feels deep inside, I talked way too much rubbish about movies and comics and whatever else popped into my head, and we generally had a brilliant sunday morning, smokin cigrets, playin totall bad-ass tunes and talking shit. What are you waiting for? Get listening!!!11!!

casio :: Apr.22.2008 :: mp3, music, podcast, radio :: No Comments »

 Ok, so first up, Russel Crowe paid Nick Cave a whole bunch of money to write a script for a sequel to the epic, silly, Gladiator, and what he got back would have made the wildest hollywood sequel ever. It’s just totally berserk. Of course, the studio didn’t go for it, but you can read a synopsis of it here.

If jessica rabbit was a real woman (I would have sex with her*), created by a  photoshop wizard at pixeloo (follow link for more cartoon characters made flesh)

an addictive lego indiana jones web video game

A not so addictive iron man web video game

Frank Miller in talks to direct an adaptation of his own Hard Boiled.

so, uh, terminator II is real?

A bunch of new images and a review of indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull hit the internets!

and furthermore, are we excited yet about the vast amount of totally nerdgasmic films headed our way in the next couple of months? no? then watch the trailers linked below to get up to speed.

• Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull duh.
• Hellboy II- the golden army  omfg this really looks so FUCKING kewl!!
• The Dark Knight  yes please dead Heath Ledger
• Speed Racer The Wachowski brothers may just redeem themselves with this psychedelic brain-candy.
• Iron man ’Nuff said, true believers.
• The Incredible Hulk yes, they’ve got him looking angry enough.
• Wall-E Pixar could shit on a plate and it would be totally awesome
• Tropic Thunder Har! Robert Downey Jr is officially my favourite actor now.
• The Happening Hrm.. could be good? Kinda hate this guy’s movies. Guess it shouldn’t be on this list.
• hancock Looks (from the trailer) like it could be hilarious. I could be wrong here.
• Wanted adapted from a wukud Mark Millar comic book. Looks fantastic, although Angelina Jolie scares me. She’s kina like the real-life version of that Jessica Rabbit picture above. Her strong features mean her sexual appeal is equal to both women and men (which she consolidates by announcing as often as she can that she bones chicks as well as dudes). Her overwrought femme fatale beauty lulls you into a narcoleptic hot-chick trance, wherein you are unable to see clearly past the haze of infantile security generated by her huge boobs to notice that they’re attached to a weirdly ghoulish, anorexic frame with no ass at all. She smiles reassuringly at you through half-lidded bedroom eyes, and runs her long, sinuous tongue around her hyperinflated pout in a blatant allusion to greedy oral sex. Just as you’re about to slip between the silk sheets of mid-afternoon erotic daydreams with her, and allow her to do worryingly depraved things to you, possibly involving knives, the last vestige of your critical consciousness not given over to the anticipation of abandoned animalistic rutting, notices, , just before it slips beneath the waistband of your underwear…HER HAND….

 that is some freaky, veiny,  zombie-claw looking hand action. I thought Angelina was supposed to be all totally hot and stuff. This is not the hand of an airbrushed Hollywood sex-symbol. This is the hand of an evil demonic witch in disguise as a beautiful woman, a Brad-Pitt-castrating succubus. I guess her character in Beowulf really was the result of some inspired casting. The woman is exactly like a weird undead sex demon… which leads us tidily into, uh,  

Zombie Strippers What more could you ask for? How about a new George Romero zombie flick?

Ok, that’s all we’ve got time for, folks. Thanks, you’ve been great.

*It’s true, I totally have this strange attraction to strange-looking mutants and cripples. And there’s something about a woman on crutches that totally does it for me. I just wanna kick their crutches out from underneath them and then fuck them while they’re lying helplessly on the floor. I’m sorry. Really. I’m so sorry, It’s just the way I am.

casio :: Apr.21.2008 :: cool links, movies :: No Comments »

by David Troupes from  http://www.buttercupfestival.com/buttercupfestival.htm

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

from an article by ellen Rohr, entitled “how to charge for art and design” at http://www.1099.com/c/ar/ta/HowToCharge_t042.html

“Hergé’s work has what Barthes calls a ‘vanishing point’, a spot in which it ’seems to be keeping in reserve some ultimate meaning, one it does not express’. It could be that this spot holds the ultimate truth of the Tintin books, their secret. Or it could equally turn out that this spot lies at what Barthes calls ‘the degree zero of meaning’; that what it holds in store is not the treasure of the unexpressed but, borrowing Barthes’ words agin, ‘the signifier of the inexpressable’.”

From Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy. Granta, 2006 (p.29)

From the book of Kells at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_Book_of_Kells_pages

from Ben Samuels’ classic golden-age comic cover gallery at http://www.samuelsdesign.com/comics/

by Joshua Davis, flash genius, and curator of PRAYSTATION at http://www.joshuadavis.com/

by Shane Glines from http://www.shaneglines.net/

 \

By Siemon Allen Pictures & Words, 1998, Vita 98, Sandton Civic Gallery, Johannesburg, installation detail, cut-up comics & text, correction fluid.

from XKCD, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language by Randall Munroe at  http://xkcd.com/256/

casio :: Apr.08.2008 :: art :: No Comments »

 I deleted my older blog earlier tonight, and trashed everything I had written on it, except for this one piece, which I find endearing in some way, so I thought I’d re-post it here for posterity. It’s totally out of date, but whatevs, rite?Thursday, December 13, 2007…so I ended up going to see Midnight Juggernauts and Pig Out ! playing in britomart square last night. It was a promotional free (phew!) all-ages gig organised by some energy drink or something, and was New Zealand’s first chance to evaluate the juggernauts as a live band ‘cos that’s what they really want to be. Emerging out of a veritable shit-blizzard of circle-jerking internet hype they strode gamely on stage to face a largely underwhelmed crowd of spotty nu-rave/emo crossover kids jacked up on free energy drinks, and proceeded to, well, underwhelm.
Britomart square is the public face of Auckland city’s grand folly- the central public transport hub. Beneath it is the eye-wateringly expensive Britomart transport centre, where tardy and woefully antiquated trains disgorge dribs and drabs of disillusioned commuters into downtown Auckland. Built a couple of years ago, the place is, admittedly, rather magnificent- a confection of gleaming chrome escalators rising through modernist glasshouses- but the whole thing has been completely under-utilised by a public that refuses to be herded through an infuriating and draconian public-transport system that fails to adequately transport the public, and seems to lack any notion of what being a system involves. The commuters would much rather clog the motorways, thanks. Here in N.Z we like CARS.
So, in this gleaming showplace for a hopelessly antiquated ‘future’, we are given The Midnight Juggernauts, blogged far and wide as the next big thing, and offering up tired 1980’s synth-pop pastiche with faux-kraftwerk flourishes driven by a krautrocky ‘band’ aesthetic. All rather appropriate really. For three skinny hipster fags with scraggly justice-beards they certainly make a kinda big sound with stadium ambitions, but the weak indie vocals, and general cheap half assedness of their whole deal let me down considerably. I was all ready to like them on the merits of ‘Tombstone’, which I loved when it came out, and.. um… that they’re australian (?) (ok so I liked the video  for ‘into the galaxy’), but I was disappointed that Tombstone was by far the strongest track they played, and everything else sounded like a muddy bunch of arse. The Midnight Juggernauts came across not as a bunch of inspired futurists, but as a tired pastiche of everything that’s supposed to be cool right now, and as such, left a bad taste in my mouth (”other people who bought soulwax also bought the midnight juggernauts”). Oh yeah, and the singer kept shouting “Hey Auckland!, how you feeling out there?”, which made me want to throw the beer bottle I was trying to hide from the overzealous security monsters at him.

 pig out!
The gig’s saving grace was Pig Out!, our local indie/rave/techno mutant superheroes who have a huge amount of fun with a small amount of equipment. They’re a four-piece, some of whom are former members of recent DFA signings The Shocking Pinks , and they hark back to the early nineties Hacienda  scene with their endearingly garagey mash-up of flowered up and minimal chicago tech-house, which seems tailor-made to appeal to dancing Stevie. Unfortunately, as the picture shows, they were made to play while it was still light, which really didn’t help their cause much. Pig out are a proper rave band, far more suited to a grimy warehouse party at four a.m than a gig or a nightclub. They do have an album out, called club poems , which, in my opinion, isn’t as great as it could’ve been, although their newer recordings, I am assured, are set to rectify this. They have played quite a lot locally, so, of course we’re losing them overseas soon, where I’m sure the sweet-asm they generate with their epic live set will rock a few parties. They’re doing England and Europe in January, and I hope they blow up over there, because they’re nice people and hugely enjoyable to shuffle around drunkenly to.

I am not currently permitted to post the mp3’s that accompany this article on this site (boo!) but theres lots of Pig Out! stuff available on their myspace page here

casio :: Apr.08.2008 :: architecture, gig review, music, rant :: No Comments »

(k so this post is re/ some seriously 1337 hardc0re comicbook g33kc0re crue sheeits and is rife with <****MAJOR MARVEL SPOILERS*****>, but you should be all over this, boye, so get caught up, or you don’t ride !!!11!)
I read the best comic of the year so far today, and it was Secret Invasion issue number one, Brian Michael Bendis’ intricately planned assault on the marvel universe. For the last three or four years, Bendis has been writing a whole bunch of marvel titles that splintered out from the disparate Avengers as they coped with the fear, conflict and suspicion brought about by the civil war and its aftermath, and the attendant deaths of Captain America, Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and The Vision. Bendis has deconstructed the core political structures of the classic marvel universe, and has written some truly riveting comics in doing so (secret war, new avengers, alias, mighty avengers, avengers disassembled, the Illuminati, House of M).
Having never been much of a fan of the avengers and captain america et al, Bendis’ comics gave me that shiver of recognition, the headlong rush of true geek thrillpower. His writing is epic in scale, detailing world-changing events with Machiavellian intricacy, while simultaneously developing the beautifully human characterisations of a huge cast. He is a virtuoso of the almost imperceptibly self-depreciating tone that is the mark of a great superhero comic. To read a bendis comic is to L0L, and to also say ‘woaah’ under one’s breath occasionally (fuck why don’t I just marry him already). And then the aliens turned up.

                                    
        Turns out the skrulls (pictured above in figurine disguise),  were understandably seriously fucked off by Black Bolt, Stephen Strange, Reed Richards, Xavier, Namor, and Tony Stark   (the old-boy network of the marvel universe, also known- in a thinly veiled freemason reference- as the Illuminati)     attacking their throneworld in a misguided attempt to stop them invading earth (the ‘holy land’ and focus of their religious fervor) so they just went ahead and invaded earth. Secretly. Possessed of a new technology that enables them to shape-shift in order to undetectably mimic human beings, they assassinated or abducted a whole bunch of people and replaced them. Elektra was viciously killed,  and shape shifted back into a skrull, then Black Bolt turned out to be one too. Holy fuck the skrulls killed Black Bolt, king of the inhumans!  

(and elektra! she was freakin ’sweeet!)   . Faced with evidence of a skrull invasion, Iron man shits his shiny iron pants. 

Now, the next bit of the story is available free online as a 7-page digital comic and can be read here. It’s the ’secret invasion prologue’ wherein

 Dum-Dum Dugan, director of S.H.I.E.L.D, is assassinated and replaced too! Suddenly nobody can be trusted. Paranoia is rife. In rereading the last 3 years worth of Bendis’ comics, we realise that everything has been going very wrong for a long time. 

   Then!!!… in issue one of the 8-part Secret Invasion miniseries, the hidden skrulls activate, and the massive scale of their attack on earth begins to be revealed. This is epic, classic, jaw-dropping Marvel business with brilliant pencils by Lenil Yu, a huge reveal every two pages, and so many ‘wooaaaahh” moments that, as soon as I finished reading,  I flipped back to the first page and started again. This comic moves so fast that I missed stuff the first time.“A thing like this deserves the promise that all the answers will be revealed,” says Bendis. “This is a big story with a beginning, middle and an end. This will not drag on. This is an accumulation of all these ideas and threads that we’ve be planting for so long. So we came up with a story that we thought was a big, giant pay off for those who’ve been following ‘New Avengers’ and the other Avengers book and all these other things like Skrull fans from their appearances way back in ‘Fantastic Four.’ But if you haven’t been following those things and are just buying this particular thing, you’re getting a hell of a yarn as well. I think it works on both levels and I thought that was very important.” It’s pure guaranteed 100% uncut freebase geek crack, baby, and it goes on for seven more issues, right through the winter, .

casio :: Apr.06.2008 :: comics :: No Comments »

http://audio.substep.com/fleetfm/smellofnapalm060408.mp3

 Holy Fuck- Lovely Allen
Chromatics- Running up that hill
Radiohead- killer cars
Girl Talk- smash your head
Holy Fuck- the pulse
John Lennon and the dirty mac- Yer blues
The Velvet Underground- I found a reason
Otis Redding- Try a little tenderness
PRGzz- ‘Bama get money (diplo rmx)
Naughty by Nature- Everything’s gonna be alright
MGMT- electric feel
Ladytron- Black cat
Soul Coughing- casiotone nation
Justice- D.V.N.O (justice rmx)
Eddie Floyd- good love/bad love
Ruby Suns- morning sun
MOtley Crue- Dr Feelgood
Kate Nash- Dickhead
White Stripes- Jolene
AC/DC- ride on
Edwin Birdsong- cola bottle baby
Dave dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch- Hold tight
Link Wray (??)- Batman theme
The Ramones- Sheena is a punk rocker
Girl Talk- Cleveland shake
Mc Chris- the tussin
M.I.A- 10 dollar (poj’s cut price rmx)
Vampire Weekend- Bryn
Dizzee Rascal/New order- blue monday

 

 podcast 06/04/08: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

casio :: Apr.06.2008 :: music, podcast, radio :: No Comments »

uhh.. ok. Hi everyone. This here’s the first (kindof a test) entry for my blog on our new and improved super Fleetfm site. My name is Casio, and I do a show called ‘the smell of napalm’ on fleet on sunday mornings between 10 and 12 with my dear friend Mnaz, and our hilarious newsreader T-bor(alis). This blog will hopefully serve as a repository for music, culture, political, and , of course, comicbook related issues that I can’t rant enough about on the show owing to constraints of time and taste. Hopefully there’s enough interesting shit going on in my head to provide the hungry wordpress with regular content (there usually is) …and we’re all desperate for content right? That’s what modern life is all about- navigating the polluted waters of the piratebay, salvaging meaningful infobits, avoiding the shoals of boredom, and skirting the patrolships of our crapulent corporate overmasters- just in order to avoid having to dwell on anything.

And to that end.. For those of you nerdy enough to be fans of MC Chris, the brooklyn-based rapper whose lyrical preoccupations are generally zombies, star wars, comics, weed, and other beloved geek tropes, there’s a new track up and available for download at his myspace page, and also playable at youtube, which gleefully and totally illegally samples large chunks from Danny Elfman’s score from Tim Burton’s (arguably) best film.

 (sigh…winona in the 90’s)

Mc Chris is pretty much the future of hip hop, imho, and rocks his white and nerdy steez with the kind of balls-out fuck-you insouciance that lesser Mcs bring to their tired Drugs and guns bullshit (has anyone anywhere even seen a pimp in the last ten years?). While the new beetlejuice track isn’t the greatest thing he’s ever done (that would be: ‘toothpick spliffs’ or ‘Fett’s Vette’), it’s a great taster for his new album, which came out on April the first.

The following lyrics were posted by MC himself on the MC Chris forums and YouTube.

im deathly pale bad breath bad teeth
hate the sand and the sun never see me at the beach
i’ll stick with goth chicks transfixed on death
that wear black britches i insist on nice breasts

i sleep in a grave lived through the black plague
actually that’s all my fault but dont wiki that k?
green hair downstairs boogers farts and phlegm
that’s my stock in trade see me startin trends

black and white striped suit or a blood red tux
got jack on my hat in japan it’s a must

i can change shapes do pranks and disguises
bioexorcist im the best in a cirisis

parents wanted me to clean up like my brother
boss used to say i didnt work well with others
now im independent and my methods are effective
say my name three times if you want to get connected

beetlejuice beetlejuice one two three
i like a little lady name lydia deetz
her demeanor is depressed i confess that’s sweet
dont try to deny she’s my bride to be

hey kmart shoppers there’s a sale on my services
im here to help there’s no need for your nervousness
i’ll eat what u wanna eat swallow what u say
relieve you of your living that are ruining your day

have you read the handbook for the recently deceased
it’s too thick like my dick when i think of little deetz
she’s the key to my release from this model existence
coffin lining’s confining and i want out this instant

me and the dragster of doom we’re the baddest of dudes
we hit the inferno room where the ladies get nude
but we’re eternally screwed so i become a bridegroom
and get lovely lydia to lip synch an i do

i must move the maitlands out of my way
give’m zipperlips pitch a plate on their face
say hello to hammer hands say goodbye to goulet
and then off to fla where my review drew raves

shrimp glove face plant
we like cassettes not 8 track
clown face much like
the one you’ll see in dark knight
being dead kinda sucks
the afterlife’s no fun to us
im the name that people trust
the juice that comes from beetleguts                                                                                   awesome.

casio :: Apr.02.2008 :: music :: No Comments »