I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca... more

I Am Love is a cinematic tour de force that explores the revolutionary power of love. The film is the result of a long-term collaboration between British actress Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Italian writer and director Luca Guadagnino, who first worked with Swinton when she took the lead role in his 1999 feature-length debut, The Protagonists.

At the center of I Am Love, is Emma Recchi, played by Swinton. She's a trophy wife acquired by her Russian art-loving husband on a foray into the former socialist republic. By marriage, Emma is part of an Italian industrial dynasty that is born of fascism but embracing capitalism. But having served her primary purpose, giving birth to and raising those that will carry on the Recchi lineage, Emma is searching for a place in life beyond that at the end of a well-laid dinner table. At a point where she's at a crossroads in her own life, Antonio Biscaglia crosses her path. As a chef, he's below stairs and below her status, but he proves to be irresistible to her, and their passion ignites a chain of events that rocks the stability of the Recchi patriarchy.

Though I Am Love is a work of fiction, there are distinct parallels to Swinton's own life. "You're always playing yourself," the actress told The Observer newspaper back in 2005 while promoting the film Thumbsucker. "It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself."

With luminous pale skin, Celtic coloring and disconcertingly vivid green eyes, Tilda is clearly not born of Italian capitalist / nouveau aristocratic stock. However she comes from one of the oldest feudal baronial families in the United Kingdom, and can trace her bloodline back to the ninth century, so understands what it is to be a woman in a grand family. The mother of twins by Scottish writer John Byrne, who is twenty years her senior, since 2004 Swinton has been in a much-speculated about relationship with German-born painter Sandro Kopp, who is her junior by 18 years. Though this love triangle has echoes of that in her latest film, ultimately the outcomes are very different. The choice Byrne made to give Swinton his blessing in order to preserve their love and family life for the sake of themselves and their children is as progressive as her partner's alternate choice in the film is archaic.

We sat down with Swinton at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to talk about her philosophies on filmmaking and love.

Nicole Powers: What originally drew you to this project?

Tilda Swinton: Well Luca [Guadagnino] and I have been friends for a very long time. I say that we've been talking about this particular film for about eleven years but we started developing the story about seven years ago. The reason I can date it is because we made a film eleven and a half years ago and, as tends to happen when you have a long-term working relationship with someone, you make a piece of work and then as that film is being cut you start talking about the next one and it's usually 180 degrees from the one you've just made.

NP: What was the initial concept behind the story?

TS: Seven years ago we made a film, it was an interview. Luca interviewed me and he made a film out of the close-up of me as I talked. It was called The Love Factory and it was basically us having a conversation about life in general, but at a certain point we were talking about love. At the end of the process of making that film we turned to each other and said let's make that idea - the idea of the revolutionary aspect of love - the germ in the heart of the narrative of the film we make.

We'd already been talking about a kind of film, what we call a sense-sational film. For many years we even talked about the possibility of it being a silent film. A film that does things one hopes that the films we adore from [Luchino] Visconti, from [Alfred] Hitchcock, from John Huston do, which is to get you feeling and smelling and luxuriating. We'd been thinking, how is it possible for modern cinema to be sense-sational in that way? To actually be involving in that way, rather than being satisfying as a story or interesting as a concept or maybe overwhelming as a special effects experience. How is it possible to make a modern film that's sense-sational like these classic language-of-cinema films? So that's what we've been discussing for eleven years.

But when we started thinking about the story, we started with this idea of love that we decided to place at the heart of the story, the concept of the revolutionary aspect of love. From that we sort of went outwards. So this love story would happen in the heart of a woman who I would play. She has to be an alien in an environment which is breakable by that love. It has to be able to actually disrupt the status quo. Then like detectives we started to [think] what's that status quo going to be? What is antipathetic to that kind of volcanic love? And then we worked our way through all the possibilities and very quickly ended up in Milan.

NP: Working in Milan, that must have been...

TS: Hot - especially in the winter scenes. Milan was the only [place]. Milan is the subject if you like. Milan is where those families live and go about being very discreet about their lives and their great industrial wealth. The architecture of Milan is everything. You'll walk down what looks like a perfectly normal business street but behind every single door will be a courtyard with some exquisite palazzo inside that's lived in by some great family that made most of their money during the fascist era.

NP: And you refer to that in the movie.

TS: The story in a way is a fable, it's like a fairy story really. It's not a documentary. It's about tendencies, but it's not about any particular family. But the reason why it felt most productive for us to set it in Milan is because we wanted to explore this idea of love and this idea of nature being set, human nature and the bred-in tooth and claw element of natural progress...

And it occurred to us that we're not talking about the feudal aristocracy of Visconti's Leopard, which has much, much more latitude within itself to change, to be organic. It's a much more robust phenomenon the aristocracy because it's a social project. However exploitative feudalism might have been, there's always this sense that it's necessary to keep morphing and evolving as a beast, the whole aristocratic principle. Whereas this kind of high capitalism, you know, it's pretty brutal. It's very anti-natural. It's all based on the idea of denial.

If you're going to spend your days operating a house like that, operating a business like that, ordering countless Diptyque candles and getting more and more fittings for your Jil Sander wardrobes, you're going to have to be in denial about where that money comes from. You can't sit in a corner and worry about the workers who are living in high rises - they're actually earning the money that is keeping you in these Ferragamo shoes - you have to operate a kind of blinker system, and that makes you very vulnerable. It makes you vulnerable to the idea of real natural evolution and change.

NP: Which leads us to the glorious love scene, which sows the seed of change within the Recchi family, which is set within nature - Emma and Antonio are just like animals in the grass.

TS: Well it's all so democratic.

NP: You're stripped of your designer clothes and your pearls.

TS: Completely, it's an animal and mortal business. And of course we then intercut it with what I call these Dallas letters - "LONDON" - and come straight into an industrial London landscape and go back into the concrete world, which is manageable, and again breakable. I mean it is as much about nature as anything.

NP: That scene is so real, so tangible and tactile, and you talk about how you wanted almost to make a silent movie that involves the senses. Obviously the use of food plays an important part in the execution of that in this film, but I also love the way that you used sound and silence. So often when there's a stressful scene in a movie, it's so shrill and high volume that I'm repelled from it. But in this film, when you had those highly emotional scenes you turned the volume down so it actually draws you in, which is such a powerful device to use. The silences speak volumes.

TS: It's a very honorable tradition, and it's something that we learned from Hitchcock. Hitchcock is always talking about the style of a film being the content and the dialogue just being atmosphere. We knew always that we wanted to make a film where what people actually said to each other was not really that important. For that reason we decided that the woman, Emma, would be out of her own language. She's not an articulate person. She's not somebody that uses language, possibly not even in Russian. The most she speaks is when she's talking about her past to Antonio. She's not someone who relies on expressing herself verbally.

And we wanted to show behavior more. I remember saying very early on to Luca that I wanted to make a film where the way in which a woman would roll up a ribbon off an unwrapped present would tell you more than some long speech about her life. Just those details, which you don't often see in modern cinema - you still are able to look for that kind of detail in modern novels but you can't really look for it in modern cinema very often - we wanted to recoup that possibility.

NP: Right, there's not the texture there anymore.

TS: The texture and the observation, for the camera to observe that. For there to be both in the direction but also in the cinematography the possibility to go there and catch it, and not always be there and be listening to what's being said. To look at body language and to feel the way in which people fill space. To try and work out what they're thinking and feeling rather than just listening to what they're saying.

NP: The film also explores the idea of happiness. There's an amazing line that your daughter says in the movie where she talks about how happy is a very sad word. In cinema and literature there's always a price to be paid for happiness. We're always told that about happiness, and made to feel guilty about it.

TS: Well I think the idea of love as some kind of antidote to pain, the myth of romantic love, particularly two people in a romantic situation being joined together in such a union that they will never feel pain again, and they will never really need to be alone again, and in fact they will never experience anything alone again either, this kind of bondage forever, is something that we talked about in that film The Love Factory that was the genesis of the idea of this film.

What I was talking about in The Love Factory was a different kind of concept of love, which is that at the very heart of a real proper concept of love is an idea of loneliness. That if one is really, really in proper collusion with one's own loneliness then one is really in a fit state to love another person. And that's something that I think parenting has the opportunity to teach you, which is why Emma is presented as a really quite advanced mother. I mean the way that she is able to embrace her daughter coming out and they way that she gracefully absorbs her daughter's liberation, and the way in which her daughter comes out to her, there is absolutely no feeling of there being any schism for Emma at all.

It shows that she actually is quite an advanced mother. She's prepared for her children to leave. She understands enough about love in relation to the love of her children to know that she is alone from them. They have left her now and they are going on to live their own lives, and she's kind of cool with that. So the idea that to truly love another, whether it's in a romantic situation...I mean her husband has the opportunity to love her at the end when she says to him, "You no longer know who I am. I love Antonio." He has the opportunity to say, "That's fine." And, "On you go, my love. I will support you." For him to love her conditionally, so conditionally that he actually says to her, "You don't exist," that's a very archaic and breakable kind of concept of love I think.

NP: Going back to this idea of love being a cure for loneliness, I always think you should work on being as complete of a human being as you can on your own, then you'll likely find and attract other complete souls. But if you consider yourself to be half of a being and are set on looking for another half, all you'll find is another incomplete soul. Even if you find a partner under those conditions, instead of ever being whole you're destined to walk through life as two incomplete or broken souls.

TS: Well the idea that loneliness is either something that should be healed or could be healed is completely ridiculous. I think it's a modern construct, and it's something by the way I think that capitalism has co-opted very successfully. The idea that the second you feel lonely you have to go out and buy more stuff, and that you can actually be cured of your loneliness by buying more stuff is one of the ways that capitalism actually works...

Lonely people make the best company it seems to me. And there's a difference between alone-ness and loneliness. But really that existential loneliness of knowing that at the end of the day you are the only one on your particular path means that you can really properly communicate with somebody else who knows the same thing about themselves.

I mean, what do you do with the idea that you have to cut parts off yourself in order to be in communion with somebody else? Whether they're a lover, or whether they're a child, or whether they're a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, or even a friend, to sort of go, "Well, we're very close but I used to love to go raving, and I can't go raving anymore because he doesn't like it" or "I can't go raving anymore because my children wouldn't approve," that's kind of a terrible waste of life.


I Am Love opens in theaters on June 18.

What really irks my nerve is when someone bashes another persons tattoos. I can understand if the artist did a crappy job. But if it isn't on your body shut the fuck up. Maybe by chance, more than likely, that tattoo has a meaning to them. Tattoos show what we've been through in life and what... more

What really irks my nerve is when someone bashes another persons tattoos. I can understand if the artist did a crappy job. But if it isn't on your body shut the fuck up. Maybe by chance, more than likely, that tattoo has a meaning to them. Tattoos show what we've been through in life and what we stand for. For what we love and admire. Everyone is different.

*image-only*

by Brad Warner Every once in a while I meet someone who says she became interested in Buddhism because Buddhists were never involved in religious persecution or holy wars. I always hate to break the news to them that this is, unfortunately, not entirely true. It is true that Buddhism has been largely... more

by Brad Warner

Every once in a while I meet someone who says she became interested in Buddhism because Buddhists were never involved in religious persecution or holy wars. I always hate to break the news to them that this is, unfortunately, not entirely true.

It is true that Buddhism has been largely free of really large scale wars and persecutions based directly on religion such as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the conflicts in Israel and Northern Ireland and so on. In fact, if you go to Wikipedia’s page on religious persecutions and religious wars, you find no major persecutions by Buddhists, and the only religious war listed involving Buddhists is an uprising of the Buddhist majority in Vietnam against the pro-Catholic policies of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1966. Not exactly a war in which one religion sought to conquer or convert another by force.

But that doesn’t mean that just because someone declares him or herself to be Buddhist that the person is free from ever behaving like a dick. Brian Victoria caused a lot of people to question their belief in perpetually peaceful Buddhists when he published Zen At War, a book that examined how Buddhist institutions in Japan were co-opted by the government to support the cause of nationalistic violence during World War II – much like the Catholic church was similarly co-opted by the Nazis. Even today similar stuff keeps happening.

The latest of those who would try to use Buddhism as a way of promoting intolerance and violence on a national level is U Wirathu, an ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk in Burma who has been accused of inciting violence against Muslims in his country as leader of the “969 movement.” He has become known as the “Buddhist bin Laden” for his activities. In Sri Lanka, Sinhalese Buddhists have formed what they call the “Buddhist Strength Force,” another group seeking to persecute Muslims in the name of Buddhism. Just last week three Bhutanese Buddhist monks were accused of raping a teenage girl in India. You can read about all of these incidents in detail here. I’m sure this won’t be the last we’ll see of violence and stupidity in the name of Buddhism.

The easiest response to all of this would be to say that those involved weren’t really Buddhists, even if they were legitimately ordained since they failed to understand the most basic teachings of Buddhism. Some people have argued that certain verses in the Qur’an or the Bible can be used to justify violence and religious intolerance. But it would take a lot of work to find anything similar among the Buddhist literature, although the Buddhist sutras far outnumber the canonical religious writings of Christianity or Islam, so I’m sure someone could dig something out of there if they tried hard enough. There’s nothing I’m aware of but there are mountains of sutras out there and you could probably find some little snippet that sounds nasty if you wanted to sift though a lot of stuff.

Even so, none of the reports I’ve seen have mentioned any of these Buddhist bully-boy organizations citing the scriptures and teachings of Buddhism as a justification for their actions the way other religions often do. The closest thing I’ve come across to that is that the Sri Lankan group apparently opposes the Muslim practice of halal butchering and meat preparation as being against the Buddhist teachings of non-violence toward animals. But this seems to me like a real reach for some kind of scriptural justification. And I don’t see how you can enforce non-violence against animals by engaging in violence against humans.

Some folks were getting upset over the fact that His Holiness the Dalai Lama was not speaking out more strongly against the Buddhist based violence in Burma and Sri Lanka. However, this is actually a smart move on his part. Most Buddhists in Burma and Sri Lanka don’t regard the Dalai Lama as their leader. Far from it. They regard him something like the way Irish Protestants view the Pope, as kind of an interloper who has no business telling them about their religion. It would only incite more violence if the Dalai Lama took a strong stand.

Generally we Americans and Europeans don’t know much about Buddhism, so we make a lot of incorrect assumptions. This is excusable because all we have to go on is what we get from our woefully ill-informed mass media and cartoonish references in pop culture.

But interestingly it’s we Westerners who seem to grasp the basics of Buddhism enough to see the innate absurdity of stuff like the Buddhist persecutions in Sri Lanka and Burma better than lots of the folks in those countries. While I’m sure there are plenty of Burmese and Sri Lankan Buddhists who know how ridiculous this is, this stuff wouldn’t be happening at all unless there were also plenty of people in those countries who consider themselves Buddhists but really have no clue at all what the whole point of Buddhism is.

That’s pretty sad. But it’s no sadder than Christians murdering Muslims in their quest to spread Jesus’ philosophy of love or Muslims murdering Christians to spread Mohammed’s message of brotherhood. Religions divide people. And when Buddhism is viewed as a religion, it can be used almost effectively as any other as an excuse for viciousness and just plain human foolishness. You have to stretch things a bit, but it can be done. Human beings are good at that. We’ll find a way.

But the rest of us don’t have to accept it. We can and should point out how ridiculous this is. If we can shame the assholes persecuting others on the basis of Buddhism by knowing their religion better than they do, then we ought to do just that. Not in a malicious way, mind you. But it might be useful to subtly make some of the folks over there who are participating in this kind of nonsense aware that there are people far away who actually take “their” religion more seriously than they apparently do.

It’s disappointing to discover that even those proclaiming themselves to be Buddhists can still act like real jerks. But people are what they are. Acting like a jerk, however, is definitely not what the Buddha taught.



***


Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.



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When Scissor Sisters first burst forth with their debut self-titled filthy gorgeous album in 2004 their brand of hedonistic dance was too hot for mainstream America to handle (the CD was even pulled from Wal-Mart's shelves). It was a different story across the Atlantic in the U.K. however, where... more

When Scissor Sisters first burst forth with their debut self-titled filthy gorgeous album in 2004 their brand of hedonistic dance was too hot for mainstream America to handle (the CD was even pulled from Wal-Mart's shelves). It was a different story across the Atlantic in the U.K. however, where the band were welcomed with open arms - and notable record sales. There the release spawned a total of five Top 20 singles, and became the country's top-selling album that year (and the 9th biggest seller of the decade). The band's follow up full-length, Ta-Dah, released in 2006, also fared much better outside of the U.S. It went straight to the top of the U.K. album charts, and the first single, "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'"(a collaboration with Elton John), also hit the number one spot - and stayed there for four consecutive weeks.

The wide chasm in reception and record sales between the two continents - the Scissor Sisters' first two albums each sold in excess of 3 million units across Europe - can easily be explained when looked at in the context of cultural attitudes. The more liberal Europeans have been dancing continuously since the '70s and dance-based music is ingrained in the fabric of European life. In America however, seizing on the opportunity afforded by AIDS, the disproportionately influential Christian right whipped up a frenzy of anti-dance "disco sucks" hysteria, stopping the party in its tracks and creating a deep-seated prejudice against the genre as a whole that remains prevalent to this day in significant pockets of society.

However mainstream America has started to loosen up, shake its collective booty and dance again. The success of European-produced tracks from the likes of Madonna (who enlisted William Orbit for Ray of Light and Stuart Price for Confessions on a Dance Floor) and Britney Spears (who prominently featured Bloodshy & Avant's production talents on her past two albums) has brought the dance aesthetic back to the mainstream, and paved the way for 100% domestic-raised spawn of disco to return to the fore.

So as Scissor Sisters prepare to step back on the dance floor with their much-anticipated third album, Night Work, the mirrored ball is at least proverbially spinning above middle-American heads. Though this bodes well in many respects, it does pose a new set of dilemmas for the band. Previously, against a background of overbearing earnestness as practiced by a generation of shoe-gazing indie bands, their tongue-in-cheek flamboyance seemed refreshing. Now, their once unique style has become de rigueur in pop culture thanks to the Scissor Sisters-influenced and much-imitated House of Gaga. Hence, to stay ahead of the pack, they’ve been forced to switch things up visually and musically.

SuicideGirls caught up with Scissor Sisters' frontman, founder and driving force, Jake Shears, to talk about Night Work, what inspired it, where his party is headed, and what he'll be wearing to it.

Nicole Powers: This album was quite a long time in the making. I know that you recorded a third album which you then shelved. It's actually something I really admire - that level of self-editing.

Jake Shears: It's true. It was about a year ago and it just felt like we'd been working on songs for about fourteen, eighteen months. We played some of them live and the shows were really fun. We'd play some tiny shows for friends, but I just wasn't feeling it. I didn't feel like the songs themselves were reason enough to come back out again. It was really important that we had something to say when we came back out, and had a record that was about something and meant something. It was a tough decision to make. I mean, I just wanted to go on tour and be out there again. It was going to be a lot longer if we were going to make a whole other album, but I knew in my heart that I wasn't going to regret it. In fact, now I'm happier than I've been in a long time. This whole last year, it's been amazing. From exactly about a year ago when we started making this record, it's just been a blast. It's been really fun and I feel super confident.

NP: At what point when you were recording this record, which I understand you started doing in June 2009, did you know that it was going to work? What track were you working on when you started feeling it again?

JS: This song called "Fire With Fire," which is our first official single. That's sort of what the song’s about. It's a very different song from the [rest of the] album, and it's a very different kind of song for us. It's very sincere and sweet and earnest. It meant a lot to me. It was really one of those moments where I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I realized we'd done something amazing, and that it was all going to be OK - that we could go forward with our heads high.

NP: Once you'd nailed "Fire With Fire" did other tracks start tumbling out?

JS: That was one of the last things we wrote. That really felt like the culmination of everything. Everything had sort of been tumbling out anyway. These songs really came quick, and it felt really inspired.

NP: This is the first time you’ve worked with an outside producer. What made you decide to do that?

JS: Well, we produced our first two albums ourselves. I'm so proud of our first two records and I'm really proud of how we made them. They're very kind of homemade and really have all our fingerprints all over the songs. But I knew that we had to have another set of hands working on this record with us. It was what we wanted. We really wanted a third person to make the music with us, to produce the music with us, but we just had no idea who that was going to be...

So it was Neil Tennant's idea, I was hanging out with Neil in Berlin. He's got a house there. It was his idea actually to call up Stuart [Price]. He was an old friend of the band. His band Zoot Woman was the first band we'd ever toured with in 2003 before our first record came out. So we'd known Stuart for a long time, and just his enthusiasm right away...We started working on the record three weeks later.

Working with Stuart, it's funny, because we'd always thought about it before, but it always just seemed too obvious. It sort of seemed like he'd be the most obvious person, and I sort of realized it was obvious because it was a really good match. It just made a world of difference for us. Just having somebody that could help us step outside the music a little bit and gain some perspective. His energy is so positive and infectious.

NP: Was he involved in the songwriting process, or were the songs already written by the time he came on board?

JS: No, we co-wrote tons of stuff together. Two thirds of this album we co-wrote with Stuart, and so he really became another member of the band and kind of feels like a member of the band now. He really became one of us. We have a huge amount of love and respect for each other so it was a blast. I can't wait to get started on the next one as soon as we possibly can. I can't imagine making a record now without him.

NP: You talk about wanting to come out with a record that means something. What does this record mean to you?

JS: When we shelved that last record I felt really fed up and lost, and so I left for Berlin for a couple of months by myself. I got an apartment there and just kind of reset my wiring a bit. I really just found a freedom again - and my youth. I had started feeling old. I'm 31 now, and it's just too young to be feeling old.

So the ideas for the record really started up in Berlin. I was doing a lot of clubbing and going out a lot and meeting a bunch of new friends and gay people and being out at some incredible gay parties. It got me thinking about New York in the late '70s / early '80s and the gay scene. How liberating that moment must have been, and the excitement, and how great the music was that everybody was so hedonistic. The dancing and the drugs and the sex, and how much fun that must have all been. But unfortunately, of course, AIDS came along and wiped a lot of people out - and a lot of creative people died.

I sort of asked myself the question, where was the party headed? Where was that whole world going? What would have happened if Sylvester hadn't of died? Or Patrick Cowley? Or just tons and tons of people. A whole world just kind of stopped - ended - and I think that we still feel those repercussions from that today. So this record as a whole is really dedicated to those people. I really want this album to carry the torch for all those who really didn't die in vain. And to pose a hypothesis of where that party was headed. Even though that's kind of a heavy sentiment, the record is infused with an insane joy.

NP: I think it's necessary to remember. I mean you look at the music industry in general today, and the club scene, and it's so sanitized and there's a lack of any real excitement or danger - it's all just been safely prepackaged for the masses. You have that combined with how the Christian Right in America was able to frame AIDS as some kind of retribution from god for a whole style of music, which also helped suppress it.

JS: Yes, of course. And just to think about how far back it set the gay movement - what a wrench into our future, our plans. Imagine how much further we would be today without the terror of what happened then.

NP: Well I know that you've spent a lot of time in Europe, and in most of the continent the whole gay marriage thing is such a non-issue. They've passed that and moved on. The fact that it's still a big discussion in America...

JS: Yeah, it's quite absurd I think, and in fifteen or twenty years we're going to look back at this moment. I find it really shocking. [But] look back fifty, sixty years ago - when was interracial marriage legalized? That wasn't that long ago. So it's slow going, but I have faith that it's going to happen here.

NP: It's a little terrifying living in California; It seems like such a cool and open society, but then with issues like Prop 8 you realize that there's a lot of hate bubbling under the surface.

JS: It feels like there's an impulse we have as humans - in probably all of us - that we feel this desire to control what everyone else is doing.

NP: And to judge, because by judging we make ourselves feel superior.

JS: Exactly. I believe in people's personal responsibility and the right to police themselves. That's what I really loved about being in Berlin, this amazing attitude of sort of be and let be.

NP: Well there is something about sitting in judgment that's really big in popular culture now. Judge Judy has taken over from Oprah as the queen of afternoon TV and in primetime we have American Idol and all these other similar shows that allow us all to be sofa judges.

JS: Well it's a humiliation culture. We love to humiliate one another, and that's become a real form of entertainment. That's what I think about red carpets. Red carpets are my least favorite thing in the world. I find them heinous. I would rather roll over in a pile of thumb tacks then walk down a red carpet 'cause it's pure humiliation.

NP: Right. The moment you set foot on a red carpet you're offering yourself up to be judged.

JS: Totally. It's like you're there for people to throw tomatoes at you. I think the red carpet is a real symbol for a blood bath. I don't even know how to end that statement but it's really a symbol to me of that kind of mentality.

NP: Talking of symbolism, you're known for your strong sense of style and your live shows, which are always pretty spectacular. What sort of imagery are you going to incorporate into your artwork and performances this time around?

JS: I think at this point in time it's interesting, because we've been gone for a few years and a lot's happened in pop culture. Gaga's come out and turned everything upside down. It's really made us rethink where we are and where we're going, and that's an exciting thing to have to sort of reconfigure. I don't want to keep doing the same things over and over again. I think overall stylistically, artistically, restraint means more to me now than anything. Restraint is more important now. I think it almost says more than coming out with a live lobster on your head.

NP: Well Lady Gaga has made what you were doing completely mainstream, so you have to react to that.

JS: Of course. And I think it's amazing. I think it's a really beautiful moment in pop culture right now. But once you've got everyone following that mould, it just seems like everything starts to become noise.

NP: So we're going to see a reserved Jake Shears?

JS: It's just going to be more sexy I think. I don't know if you've seen our press photo, but we're all in front of these blinds and it looks very formal. I've got a tie on but I'm pulling my coat back and you can see I'm wearing little panties. I think that says it all, where we're at at the moment.

NP: "Invisible Light" is such an epic track. How did the Ian McKellen vocal come about?

JS: We'd been working on the song for quite a while, and there's a two and a half minute build. We went over and over that with a fine toothcomb. The production on that moment I'm so proud of. If you turn it up real loud on a good set of speakers it'll make your face melt. We were talking about Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Trevor Horn and how great the whole "Pleasuredome" 12-inch was, and Michael Jackson had passed away and "Thriller" was on everybody's minds, and somebody said we need a really deep British man's voice right here.

Ian was the first thing that popped into my head. I've been acquainted with him for years. He's come to our shows. He's such a kind, amazing man. So we contacted him and two days later we took a bunch of recording equipment into his dressing room. He was doing Waiting For Godot with Patrick Stewart in the West End. It was pretty amazing, I'll never forget it. There was just dead silence in the room. We had all these mics hooked up and him reading this monologue that we wrote. Once you started hearing it come out of his mouth, it was just really cool. We were trying not to burst out laughing, it was so amazing.

NP: So who wrote the monologue?

JS: Babydaddy and myself. We wrote it the night before. The song is very kind of abstract. Somebody asked me if it was Shakespeare and I was really flattered.

NP: It does sound as if it could be, and Ian says it with such a level of conviction and theatricality so you feel like it must be some great speech of the theater.

JS: Totally.

NP: But you said Ian McKellen was performing with Patrick Stewart - I can't believe you didn't get some Patrick Stewart on tape too. Scissor Sisters and Star Trek would be my wet dream.

JS: Patrick Stewart intimidates me a lot more than Ian McKellen. He's poses a very formidable figure - I'd be scared to talk to him.

NP: Well I know you don't do requests, but that would be mine.

JS: [laughs] Alright, if I ever come across him in a sleazy nightclub I'll have to tell him.

NP: Well I'm sure Ian McKellen can introduce you. You've got connections.

JS: Oh, I'm sure. You always wonder though, if they even get along, you know, personalities that big. I'm always curious. Who knows how people feel about each other.

NP: Right, two big personalities together - is the stage big enough? I should ask about your tour. You've announced a bunch of European dates but nothing in America yet.

JS: No. We're going to be all over Europe, Japan and Australia 'til August. It looks like end of August / early September when it's going to shape up [that we’ll] be touring America. I'm sure we'll end up touring America multiple times in the next year and a half.

NP: You're just teasing us and making us wait.

JS: Yeah. But what's so great is we're going to be so practiced, and by the time August rolls around the show is going to sound amazing.

NP: Well I'm looking forward to seeing you again live. It's been way, way too long.

JS: I'm excited too. I love performing, so I'm very excited as well.



The Scissor Sisters' new album, Night Work, is released on June 29 via Downtown Records. The single "Invisible Light" is available now from iTunes. For more info go to ScissorSisters.com/ .

Hello SG Community. My name is Megan. I've been debating joining for months now and finally went forward with it. I'm looking forward to delving into all the juiciness that is Suicide Girls.

Ok so I did search for this but came up empty handed I think pictures from the female Point Of View (POV) are hot and so I'm starting a thread for such pictures. Post them here if you have them. I'll start if off (image) (image) (image) Pictures are from: *spoilers* I hope that's alright more

Ok so I did search for this but came up empty handed I think pictures from the female Point Of View (POV) are hot and so I'm starting a thread for such pictures. Post them here if you have them.
I'll start if off






Pictures are from:

I hope that's alright

by SG's Team Agony feat. Clio Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Clio in Born Into A Light] Q: My name is Giusuno Cornetto [real name redacted – continue on to understand why!] and if the name doesn't say it... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Clio

Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.



[Clio in Born Into A Light]

Q: My name is Giusuno Cornetto [real name redacted – continue on to understand why!] and if the name doesn't say it then I'll tell you; I'm a 100% bona-fide Italian from a large Italian family. I'm a 100% bona-fide Italian from a large Italian family. I don't discriminate and I love all women, but if I could marry an Italian and have little Italian babies it would be awesome.

Recently I began dating an au pair from Tuscany. She couldn’t be more perfect. She has beautiful tan skin, great looks from her face to her toes, and, most of all, she adores me. She is different from my usual type, which is someone like myself, tattoos, piercings, and dreadlocks, but it's great that she is not like that because most of the girls I've dated are either too immature, too wild, or are not on the same page. However, there is one problem in the bedroom and it's a big one. Her vagina is rank.

I'm sorry there's no other way to say it, but it's out of control even for a free spirit like myself. I loved my hippies, as in just a natural scent – sweaty, salty, with no desire to shave the kitty ¬ it turns me on. I don't know what to do or how to break the news to her. I love putting my mouth on everything especially her pussy, and without being able to lick her off the relationship has little hope. When she gets wet I can smell her even more and the worse part about it is she doesn't notice anything wrong which can only mean that she is used to it. What do I do?

A: Thanks for sharing this delicate dilemma. I hope your girlfriend/potential bambini-maker isn't a member of SuicideGirls and doesn't decide to Google your name because she's not going to be a happy signorina when she reads this about her farfallina. But anyway, from what you wrote it sounds like either she just has a very strong natural scent, or she could have a vaginal infection that's causing a funky odor.

If she has a vaginal infection she should see a medical specialist pronto! If that's not the case I suggest trying to get her fragrant figa under control by adopting a more serious approach to feminine hygiene. There's a lot of info about that online so I'm not going to bore you with details about how to keep your patatina clean.

However, you probably could use some advice on how to break the news to her that you'd rather eat a moldy cannoli than munch on her box. I would tell her delicately (do not use the word 'rank' unless you wanna get slapped) that her natural scent is a bit strong and that maybe she could wash before you engage in sexual activity. If you think that's too direct, you can suggest taking a shower together before having sex and see if that makes going down on her more palatable.

In bocca al lupo!


Clio
xoxo


***


Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then. His latest... more

It seems like every music video director turned flmmaker eventually makes a big studio action movie. Even Michel Gondry directed The Green Hornet. That big budget movie won't be out until December, thanks to the latest production delays, but we'll get to hear from Gondry before then.

His latest film takes you deeper into his personal world than you may want to go. The Thorn in the Heart is a documentary about Gondry's aunt Suzette and her son Jean-Yves. Filming discussions with them and other family members reveals the Gondry legacy in the film industry, but also some lifelong emotional conflicts. It's like when you're at someone's house for dinner and they start fighting, only you can't leave. Gondry's camera is still there.

The documentary played at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, where Gondry was surely the only person speaking broken English in a French accent. The echo in a large meeting room way too big for a single interview, and made him sound surreal. The subject of his film led to a discussion about his very artistic process, more about the meaning of film than its literal content.

That sort of discussion seems appropriate to Gondry's body of work. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep leave a lot open to interpretation. You could analyze the themes or just marvel at the handcrafted imagery. Even the high concept comedy Be Kind Rewind turned out to be a call to arms for people to pick up cameras and make their own films. The Thorn in the Heart may be a personal exercise or it may speak to everyone, but either way, here is some insight into all the films Gondry has and will make.


Question: Do you think film was in your blood?

Michel Gondry: Oh, in my genes? I think in a way yes. I mean, I never had the ambition to become a director because I didn't really think of it. I didn't think of the director when I was watching a movie, what it took to make the film, until I bought a camera. But, my father was doing a lot of Super8 and my cousin, as you've seen in the film. Being surrounded by this and photo, I was printing my own photo when I was really young, so the technical aspect of it really attracted me. The idea that you can imprint an image with a chemical element on a piece of paper was really magical to me.

Q: Do you think it's something you can be born with, even if you don't grow up around the technique?

MG: It's hard to answer that. I think it's always a combination because you can have it and then if you are exposed to it, then the fact that you have it in you, it captures it and then it reveals it. So you can have it in you and then you're not exposed and you never knew you had it in you. Or, you can not have it in you and then by a succession of coincidences, you end up doing it and being good at it so you do it. So it's very hard. I don't know how I could identify that. I tried to remember. I remember watching Chaplin movies and liking them but never in a sense of "That's what I want to do" until I was in my '20s.

Q: What makes people need to do what they need to do, like you make films and I need to write?

MG: Well, I think it's always a combination of things, coming from inside and coming from outside. As well, there is a great deal of privilege when you can be an artist and do your hobby for a living. You have to really appreciate that because I think if you're not born in the right place in the world, then you're fucked. It's going to be a million times harder. People always say, "Oh, it's amazing. You've worked with the guy I was at school with" and see the world as small. It sound corny, but I say it's small because I don't share it. In an artistic profession, there is a sense where people get really protective to maintain their privilege. They're not really trying to share it and share the creativity with other people. I think everybody should be entitled to express themselves or have creativity or do an activity that makes them happy when they wake up.

Q: So people who work mundane jobs, like offices or factory, is that because they didn't have an interest or didn't know about it?

MG: I think most of them didn't have the opportunity. It's a social class thing. We still work on the same principal where some people have the luck to be born in the right place and some people don't have this luck. The people who are born in a place that makes their life easy, most of them don't try really to help the others or to see the unfairness. On the contrary, they try to maintain their privilege or oppress people who are already oppressed. It's just a system that's always been there and it's sort of terrible. It's what we should think of now instead of thinking how to make more automobiles because for the capitalist world, it thinks the only way that society can function is if you make more things then people buy more stuff and there are more jobs and more money to spend. It doesn't work like that anymore. We're going to have more and more crap. I'm talking a little bit above my head because I'm not really a specialist but I really feel people should look at other activities. People need to have activities I think but the production and fabrication of objects, finding an excuse, creating the desire for the buyer to buy them, it's wrong. Now we're exhausted. We're exhausted this way and should think of that.

Q: Is documentary a truer form of filmmaking to you than fiction narrative?

MG: Yeah, if not more. Some of my favorite filmmakers are making documentaries. I don't see that any lesser than a feature film. It is just amazing. The creation lays in other places. It's in the moment, not as much in the preparation, but in the moment and also the editing of course is very important. I watch mostly documentaries on my TV. I don't like to watch fiction, to be honest.

Q: Have you seen the documentary competition at SXSW?

MG: No, but you know when you go to festivals as a filmmaker, you never watch anything because I'm here doing these interviews. Lately I've seen this documentary that was amazing. It was called 51 Birch Street about this guy that puts a camera on his family and reveals all the story of his mom after she passed away and her father. It was just amazing. I watched it twice and I couldn't believe how enriching it was.

Q: Do you think it's the place of drama, whether fiction or documentary, to ask questions rather than provide answers?

MG: Well, it's not ask questions like you would ask a question to get an answer. You find more of the answer in the question in the sense that I think first of all, you don't want to ask a question if you know the answer. I think it's very important. It's like in science, if you hope too much for a result, then you're going to be biased. Your observation won't be really objective. The real discovery, and there is some intuition or truth that can be found and then proven, but a lot of discoveries are made as side effects. Somebody is looking for some experiment and then discover another property. Like they invented the transistor by complete randomness. I think that's interesting to be in a state of being observant to a point that you're going to capture something you were not looking for.

Q: In journalism they say you should know the answers to the questions you're asking.

MG: I think it's totally wrong. I cannot disagree more with that. I think if you're pressing for an answer, sometimes some journalists are trying to get me to say something and I can tell it right away. Either I'm going to tell it just to make them at peace or I'm not going to do it at all because it pisses me off. I think you go on an interview or an investigation like a conversation. You have to be curious of the person you're talking to. If you're not ready to be surprised then what's the point? You could write your article and not ask the person. Maybe you're hoping to go into some territory and discover something but you have to be ready to be completely surprised or taken by surprise. That's the beauty of it.

Q: Is that the difference between journalism and drama, that you can be more inquisitive in drama?

MG: Yeah, but you work with a screenplay. Or it depends, because some people like Mike Leigh who is one of my favorite directors, doesn't write a screenplay. He has a structure and he builds a character with his actor. A lot happening in front of the camera is not planned. There are some other directors who do a movie that's great and everything is carefully planned, but you have to have a lot of time to be able to write all the details of something that must look like life because it's very complex.

Q: I'm including documentary as drama, as a dramatic way to portray real life.

MG: Yeah, well, but when you say dramatic, it's some way to provoke emotion when you watch it for instance? I think if you connect with it, if people reveal things that they were not necessarily willing to say, not by manipulation but just by asking questions and asking what you would be shy to ask, I think that may be embarrassing a little bit but things you really wonder. I think if you do that then people reveal themselves in a way that's dramatic, meaning that's going to interest people.

Q: Has your family always known that they could be the inspiration for your personal films?

MG: Maybe not. It's hard to tell how they think. They encountered so much. Of course by doing that, I show it to them so it's sort of comforting probably. If I have any success, they are sort of part of it because they've been supportive all the time, so they're a part of it anyway but to show it, to officialize it probably gives them some pride.

Q: You weathered a lot of problems on The Green Hornet. Why was was it so hard to make?

MG: It's a little bit cursed. Even the one with Bruce Lee had just one season and was cancelled, so it doesn't have a history of success, which could be scary to say but it's challenging. It's interesting. That was what was proposed to me and I was interested in doing it, so I had a choice. I could have done it or done something else. It has not been a straight road. It's been very windy.

Q: Is it a relief to be done principal photography?

MG: Yeah, of course. Now I see all the problem. I see, "Oh, I should have shot it this way." I wish I had known, but it's always like that.

Q: Do you look at the comic book movies like The Dark Knight and Watchmen to see where the style is going?

MG: It doesn't fit very much in that style. I respect it but it's sort of a caricature of filmmaking. I always thought comic book being a much lighter art form should not be depending on film but should be leading film and be more creative. I see more of those comic books as overly filmic. Dark Knights and these serious knights are not my cup of tea. I like comic books but more like Crumb or the independent ones. I don't like genres that have so many codes. I don't like zomie movies, I don't like vampire movies. I know a lot of people like that because they're sort of in control of society with rules. Really it's not for me. I don't like for instance games that you play like Monopoly and such, because it's not creative to me to have so many rules.

Q: We're wondering what the Michel Gondry take on an action movie would be.

MG: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good I think.

The Thorn in the Heart is now playing in select theaters.

Setting an appointment to get my throat piece done... Ahh I'm so stoked

by Brad Warner My friend John Graves sent me a photo of a billboard that's been appearing all over Los Angeles. The one he took a picture of was right near The Grove, in one of the highest rent districts in one of the highest rent cities in the whole world. The billboard says: "The Bible Guarantees... more

by Brad Warner

My friend John Graves sent me a photo of a billboard that's been appearing all over Los Angeles. The one he took a picture of was right near The Grove, in one of the highest rent districts in one of the highest rent cities in the whole world. The billboard says: "The Bible Guarantees Judgment Day May 21, 2011, ...Cry mightily unto God - Jonah 3:8, Mon-Fri 5:30 - 7PM, 1280 AM Radio FamilyRadio." Next to these words is a photo of a guy who is either kneeling to pray or in the throes of a painful bout of constipation.




According to friends of mine these billboards have also been spotted in the San Francisco Bay area, Minneapolis, Dallas and even here in Akron, Ohio. For those who want to know exactly how they worked this date out, there is a convenient website that explains it all. Frankly, I couldn't get past the second paragraph.

A little bit of research on the Internets reveals that the billboards are based upon the work of a Christian broadcaster by the name of Harold Camping, president of something called Family Stations, Inc. a religious broadcasting outfit based in California. Back in 1992, Camping published a book called 1994? in which he claimed that the End Times, in which the world will undergo severe tribulations in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming, would start in ’94.

He and his followers stood outside the Alameda Veteran's Memorial Building on September 6th of that year with their Bibles open heavenward to await Jesus' return. Jesus never showed up. Camping said he may have made a mathematical error. Now he says his new calculations are certain beyond a shadow of doubt. The folks at a website called The Thinking Atheist have produced this video explaining some more about Camping from their perspective.

All of these billboards had me wondering if the whole thing might be some kind of elaborate hoax, a promo for some big budget end-of-the-world thriller. I'm still a little skeptical. But unless whoever is behind the hoax is able to manipulate Wikipedia and Amazon with an impressive degree of skill, as well as post a whole lot of other stuff on the web that corroborates the existence of Camping and his church, this would appear to be for real.

Christianity is in part an apocalyptic religion. Some scholars have argued that Jesus himself was a preacher whose main stock in trade was predicting the coming end of the world. This seems to be borne out by the New Testament as it has come down to us.

One of the biggest problems the early church had was how to deal with Christ's prediction recorded in Luke 9:27 that "there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God." The "some standing here" would appear to refer to his original 12 apostles. When those apostles started dying off, guys who came along slightly later like St. Paul had a hard time explaining themselves since the kingdom of God had yet to appear.

And yet, somehow, they persevered and made their case quite successfully. Christianity has lasted for over 2000 years predicting that the end of the world is coming soon. This they have done mainly by making the definition of "soon" more and more vague. And although many mainstream Christians have switched over to viewing Christ's apocalyptic statements as some kind of metaphor, there are still some who take it literally and try to work out the exact day it's all supposed to happen.

The Jehovah's Witnesses famously predicted the end of time to begin in 1917, which they then revised to 1918, then to 1925, and finally to 1975. Yet although the Rapture did not come on any of those dates, the Jehovah's Witnesses continue to thrive and ring doorbells all over the world.

One would assume that if somebody prophesized the end of the world on a given date and that given date came and went without major incident, everyone who had once believed in the prophecy would lose interest and whoever made the prophesy wouldn't be listened to anymore. But this has not been the case. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true. Prophecies of the end of the world do not have to work out for them to have power.

Camping has obviously got some money behind him. That billboard near The Grove in Los Angeles alone must have set him back a load of cash. This would indicate that he has a healthy following. I would not expect that following to decrease markedly after May 22nd. I'm sure they'll be just fine. I predict that Camping will come up with a justification for his seeming failure and the troops will rally behind him to await the next prophesy. Maybe he's working on that even now. It's a time-honored pattern and I see no reason why this one will be any different.

I'll assume most of you reading this probably share the belief of most people who have studied the New Testament. The consensus of contemporary scholars is that the New Testament is cobbled together from various sources. Many of its writers were not even who they claimed to be according to Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman in his new book Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Most of us here, then, don't even give a second thought to the notion that Camping or any of the others who prophesize the destruction of the world based on Biblical calculations are correct. Yet obviously quite a few people believe it and maybe quite a few more, though not believers, still wonder if it just might be true.

Like you, I am at a loss to understand why anyone at all believes this stuff or even gives it a second thought. It's been pointed out by those who study organizations like this that their members are often people who would otherwise be regarded as having a high degree of intelligence. Although I know of no studies of Camping's group, I've seen studies of other religious organizations that believe similarly bat-shit crazy things and who have many members that are highly educated and seemingly sane. So one can't simply write off those who believe this stuff as merely stupid. Well, I would say that they're stupid to believe such things, but many of them are not stupid according to our usual methods of judging people's intelligence or lack thereof. They may well be college educated, socially adept and so forth.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Matters of belief, whatever those beliefs may be, are things by which we define our sense of self. Most of us hold our sense of self as the most precious thing we possess. We'll go to any lengths to defend it. We'll lie, we'll steal, we'll sometimes even kill to protect this sense of self.

Holding on to a set of beliefs is a great way to reinforce the sense of self. If that set of beliefs is an unpopular one, this can work even better. It really sets us off against everybody else. It's a tremendous way to establish your unique ego.

Plus, organizations like this often offer a tremendous sense of community to their membership. This is one of the things our contemporary society really has trouble with. I know I often feel alone and alienated. It's hard to find a community in the world we live in these days. But we so desperately want that sense of belonging that if it means believing in bat-shit crazy ideas, the trade-off doesn't seem so bad.

I just wonder what these guys are going to do on May 22nd.


***

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

Now I know that the title of the topic will instantly make many of you roll your eyes, but hear me out, cause I think this will be interesting reading. First of all, my nationality is Puerto Rican born and raised. I have lived most of my life there, in the town of Caguas, about 20 minutes from San Juan. more

Now I know that the title of the topic will instantly make many of you roll your eyes, but hear me out, cause I think this will be interesting reading.

First of all, my nationality is Puerto Rican born and raised. I have lived most of my life there, in the town of Caguas, about 20 minutes from San Juan. I was an art major in college, but the way things were going I was gonna end up starving, so I eventually joined the Army National Guard. My ASVAB score was thankfully very high, so I ended up as a combat medic, and I honestly love my job. It is fulfilling and important.

Here's the thing: I hate Puerto Rico and I hate Puerto Ricans.

The island is undergoing a massive crisis right now. It is undergoing the worst crimewave in its history, facing both corporate and political corruption, awful infrastructure and, what's worst, a crisis of values. Not values like the Republicans like to chant about, but just common human decency. Puerto Ricans have become crude, hostile, selfish human beings. Culturally, the island's a void. There's no support for the arts, no decent music scene, no film industry whatsoever... hell, there's no BOOKSHOPS on the island! If I want to buy a book, I have to buy it online!

Well, with time, I've basically become an outsider in my own country. The local favorite music is the abomination known as Reggaeton, a musical rhythm which glorifies violence, drug trade and objectification of women(think circa 1991 Gangst Rap, but even more reprehensible and with no actual artistic value), while I've always been more of a rocker. Because of my musical tastes, I'm considered weird. Hell, I've been accused of Satanism for liking rock music. I am a huge bibliophile, reading is one of my absolute greatest passions. I am mocked for liking books. It is considered the height of lameness to enjoy reading here. I not only know English, but actually speak it fluently and with ease, and many times I prefer speaking it depending of who I'm with. In Puerto Rico, it's considered a waste of time to learn ANY other language.

So with time, I've become a very bitter person, but most of all, kind of a lost one. I have no idea where I belong. I'm actually currently working on moving out of the island and starting anew somewhere else.

So there you have it, and I ask you, out of curiosity, have any of you gone through this? Have you ever felt marginalized to the point you just cannot fit into your current place and need to get the hell out?

by Laurelin (image) Throughout my life I have prided myself in being an individual. I know most people think that of themselves and it is true. There are also those who change with their surroundings, chameleons in the light of day who will adapt and like what you like for the sake of being agreeable. more

by Laurelin



Throughout my life I have prided myself in being an individual. I know most people think that of themselves and it is true. There are also those who change with their surroundings, chameleons in the light of day who will adapt and like what you like for the sake of being agreeable. These people have a mind of their own, buried somewhere beneath the need to fit in. I tend to scoff at these people, because even with their blending they stand out simply for being… lost. I see myself in these people sometimes, and it makes me want to cry.

In high school Zack rode BMX bikes and my girlfriends and I decided that we wanted to do that too. I saved up $200 and bought a Gary Fischer bike, and we would ride with the boys after school. I wasn’t good at it, but it made him happy and I wanted that. I fell and bruised my tailbone going down a half pipe once, mainly because I had no business even attempting that shit. Zack rode bikes down half pipes, not me.

After him it was John. John loved house and trance music. I didn’t really get it in the beginning, but when he held my hand and kissed me for the first time at Crobar in New York City at a Tiesto show I was hooked. I listened to everything I could get my hands on, and even after he was long gone I still craved that beat, breathing in the music like it was a drug. I’ve got Tiesto lyrics painted in ink and needles on my left ankle, so I never forget that the music was beautiful, the best thing to come out of what John and I had.

John also wore a lot of black. He had spiked black bracelets on his right wrist and black jelly bracelets on his left. He had metal 10-gauged earrings that clinked together when I touched his face, and for years after him I wore the same bracelets. To this day my 10 gauged metal earrings clink when anyone touches my face.

JC and Ryan both played the drums and they were gone I took a few drums lessons. I wore a skirt to my first one and my teacher laughed and laughed. We made it work and as the weeks went on, I realized I couldn’t hold a steady beat to save my life.

Then there was Dave…he loved professional wrestling. We watched Monday Night Raw every week and I would sit with his roommate’s girlfriend staring blankly at the TV, not quite understanding what was going on. As time went on, I started figuring it out. I started recognizing people week to week, learning their entrance music and being able to say, “I like that guy! He does flips.” Dave struggled to get me to like it, and by the end I would admit to only tolerating it mildly.

However, that mild tolerating came in handy when I met a guy who actually does that stuff — I wound up being able to catch a live pro wrestling event while visiting some friends from college in Washington DC and I was hooked. The crowd, the bright lights, I was just captivated. When Dave found out what I was getting into he couldn’t hide his annoyance: “I tried to get you into this for years and you wouldn’t have it: you meet one guy who DOES it and you change your tune?”

In my defense, it’s a lot cooler up close and way more fun when you can cheer for someone you know is a good dude who loves his job.

I also wasn’t aware of how much athleticism is involved, and as someone who is constantly looking for ways to make working out interesting, this fascinated me. This was a whole world I had never even really been open to, but all of a sudden it was all consuming. A local women’s wrestling group took me in almost immediately, saying they had had their eye on me through a friend of a friend for a while and I could just start coming to practice. After my first one, I was hooked.

A few months later I was approached by a local independent men’s wrestling group who wanted to start having women wrestle for them; I was familiar with them and immediately said yes. I start training at their pro-wrestling facility next week. I couldn’t be any more excited, but I can’t help but look back and wonder whose life it belongs to. If you were to have asked me last year if I’d consider taking up wrestling, I would have laughed and called you crazy. Now I’m wearing shiny gold spandex, body slamming and dropping microphones. And I’m not bad at it!

I guess I’ve always been a little wild, a little boy crazy. When these boys leave I have parts of them with me even if I don’t mean to and that’s a hard thing to admit. I wonder if they carry any pieces of me with them. And I wonder if they ever feel lost…




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Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious... more

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore

Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series, Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?

CM: Yeah. You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.

AD: What would fourth have been?

CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title, Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.

AD: Each of the three books are very different

CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.

AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?

CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.

AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.

CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.

AD: When she first appeared in A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?

CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and A Dirty Job foresees that You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that Bite Me became her book.

I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.

AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?

CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.

Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.

AD: My major complaint about Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.

CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.

AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.

CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.

AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?

CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.

Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is. A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.

AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.

CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.

AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?

CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.

AD: How much of say, Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?

CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.

That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.

AD: Do you do a lot of research?

CM: I actually do. For Fool I spent a month in England and France. For Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.

I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.

AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.

CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.

As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.

AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.

CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.

As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.

AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.

CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)

So new city.....new job....new grad program....new bank....new apartment....new bike (well fixed)....new girl....new......life.

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking: RagleGumm said: (image) (image) But also (especially in the eyes): (image) (image) i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i... more

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking:

RagleGumm said:




But also (especially in the eyes):




i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i definitely see the resemblance above.

anyways, anyone else notice resemblances between any of the girls and particular celebrities?

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck... more

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck Eisner) unleashed a kind of government-caused-outbreak paranoia that was the antecedent of what Stephen King would later exploit in The Stand. Romero and King would collaborate on a celebration of 1950s EC comics horror publications in Creepshow. He totally rewrote the vampire myth as a young man's psychosis in Martin. Outside of horror, Romero made the intensely personal Arthurian parable Knightriders. SG talked to Romero in Boston, while he was promoting his latest zombie movie Survival of the Dead. Survival of the Dead, available now on Video on Demand and opening theatrically on May 28, concerns a rag-tag band of survivors of the zombie holocaust who find themselves on an island off the coast of Delaware, embroiled in an intergenerational feud between two clans of Irish settlers.

Michael Marano: You used zombies as a critique of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead. In the years since then, zombies have themselves become commercial commodities. There are scores of video games, movies, and Simon and Schuster has a line devoted specifically to apocalyptic zombie novels. Any thoughts on the ways that zombies have become the very kinds of consumerist products that you used zombies that you poked fun at thirty years ago?

George Romero: Well, it's surprising. First of all, I do think it was video games that popularized the creature. I guess they [zombies] are perfect targets for first-person shooters. And I really think it was the video games, and after that the graphic novels, that have made them popular. I don't think it was so much the movies, because if you think about it, Zombieland is the only one that really was a blockbuster, or any kind of huge hit. As far as this question about them becoming a consumer item, I don't know how popular it [the zombie genre] is. I guess they're popular enough! (Laughs.) It's hard for me to even get a sense of that. I'm sort of still doing my own thing. My zombies are still sort of shuffling around slowly and they're almost just a minor annoyance. My stories have always been about people, and how they deal with the problem, how they fail to deal with the problem, and how stupidly they deal with it. To me, it has been a perfect vehicle for socio-political criticism. It's just been fun that way! So, that's the way I think of them (zombies). And people say, 'Jeeze! You created all of this!' And maybe I did, somehow! I didn't even call them 'zombies' in the first film. They were 'flesh eaters' or 'ghouls.' I never thought of them as 'zombies,' because when we made that film (1968's Night of the Living Dead), 'zombies' to me were still the guys in the Caribbean doing wetwork for Lugosi (in White Zombie). I just wanted some sort of strange phenomenon that would be a game changer so that people, my characters, would fail observe that and hoist themselves on their own petard.


MM: I want to talk about "game changers" and sort of "society changers." You started out cutting news footage, back in the Medium Cool days when they still used motorcycle couriers and actual--what that stuff they used to use?

GR: Film?

MM: Yeah! That's the stuff! Film! It was like YouTube with sprockets.

GR: It had little holes in it! They never let me actually cut it. I was a courier. I was Haskell Wexler!

MM: You were?

GR: Yeah, I just ran the stuff around. I learned how to edit at one of those labs. But they never actually let me work on the news footage. It was too precious!

MM: That sort of news-based reality behind how you cut your teeth learning how to cut film, did that news paradigm affect the way that you chose to depict societies falling apart?

GR: I think it more affected stylistically the original film [Night of the Living Dead] than anything else. And even though it's only in the last 20 minutes of the film, people always write about that film and how it's got this 'vérité style' when really it doesn't. I mean we were shooting with a sound blimp. It's just very static. Until I can finally get the camera out of the blimp in the last twenty minutes of the film and the camera, once out of the blimp, was really portable, and I intentionally tried to make that stuff look like news footage and tried to cut it with that same sort of chop that the guys used to use back in the lab. From Dawn of the Dead on, I guess, I've had this conceit that if there's something I wanna talk about, or whatever, I can bring zombies out of the closet and get to make a film, and get it financed.

MM: Now, with using zombies as social commentary and always having them on hand for that, I couldn't help but notice that with Survival of the Dead you seem to be reapplying your satire not just to society, but you seem to be taking on other genres. Like, a little bit of western...

GR: Oh, yeah! [Laughs]

MM: ... and little bit of the "Irish land dramas," like The Field. I kept thinking of Ryan's Daughter.

GR: Really?!

MM: Yeah. I wanted Sarah Miles to be eaten. I wanted that. And I know from Creepshow that you're an old school EC Comics fan. Did old Mad Magazine (originally an EC comic book) approaches to critiquing films and film genres inform how you approached satirizing other movies in Survival of the Dead?

GR: I think it probably does! It's waaaay in the background, somewhere in here (gesturing to his medulla) in the bottom part of my brain. I wanted to do something stylistically different with (Survival of the Dead). I knew I was going to do some Looney Tunes kind of moments with it, and that comes from old comics I guess. I'll go to see horror film with a friend, I'll go to see a horror film with Steve King, and we're sittin' there, the only ones giggling and everyone else is hiding their eyes or running to gag. And we chuckle! And for anybody who grew up on the old EC comics, they were just filled with bad puns and terrible jokes. And it was humor all the way, and it just made you chuckle. So, I just can't resist that! And then I just wanted to completely change (my approach to zombies in Survival). It's a lot more fun to me, for me, to say, 'Hey, man! Let's just do something completely different!' And once I had the idea of the feud, I remembered the old William Wyler film called The Big Country, and I said, 'Let's model it after that! And let's have fun! And let's sort of make a quasi-western out of this.' We went with 2.35 [aspect ratio]. We didn't mute the colors. It was just a choice. All of a sudden, all the department heads got together and said, 'Wow! That would be really fun, to do that!' So that was just, 'Hey! Let's have a picnic, here!'

MM: To me, a lot of the headshots in Survival of the Dead really reminded me of (EC Comics artists known for their ghoulish humor) Jolly Jack Davis and Ghastly Graham Ingles.

GR: Yeah! Those boys!

MM: Now, I don't want to ruin anything for people who haven't seen Survival of the Dead yet, so I'll just speak a

MM: I want to jump back to what you were talking about earlier about using zombies as a template to create character-based drama. You tend to create apocalypses, not just in your zombie movies, that are very small scale. A farmhouse (in Night of the Living Dead). A TV Station where order is breaking down (in the opening of Dawn of the Dead). A bunker (Day of the Dead). In your 1973 movie The Crazies the enemy seemed to be Ma Bell, the phone company. Even Martin, Bruiser and Knightriders, seem to be about intensely personal apocalypses. Do you want to comment on that? Maybe in comparison to large scale apocalypses, like Michael Bay's and Roland Emmerich's?

GR: Well, first of all, I would never tackle one of those! I wouldn't know how! And I don't quite know what's the purpose. Because... it's much more likely that we'll face these little more minor apocalypses, be it family, or school or a job or whatever. And that's always just connected to me, somehow. Just was my characters don't deal with the looming threat of the zombies, they continue to just deal with each other on a superficial and a ridiculous level. And they create their own problems.

MM: In the Cold War days, your zombie apocalypses were total and complete breakdowns of world order. There's no TV, no communication. It's all just done. In your post-9/11 zombie movies, the end of the world seems like a chore. Just another goddam thing to deal with. Was this conscious on your part?

GR: With these last two (Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead) I sort of went back to the beginning of (the zombie plague). I didn't know where to go after Land of the Dead. I didn't want to go Beyond Thunderdome. But that was a pretty apocalyptic world. I didn't want to go further than that. I just didn't know where to go. Do the zombies take over? I'm not interested in that. There was another reason for us starting over [bringing the narrative back to the start of the zombie apocalypse]. I always wanted to sort of do what Steve King does with the town of Castle Rock. You know, create this sort of collage. This is happening here, while this is happening here, and this character recurs. I've never been able to do that, because the copyrights on the first four films are all owned by different people, and I can't get 'em to come together on a deal, here! So, that was another reason why my current partner and I wanted to start over with this, and start fresh. These two (recent zombie movies) actually connect; Survival uses a minor character from Diary. I actually have two more ideas (for further zombie movies). This movie wouldn't exist if Diary hadn't made a lot of dough. I mean, it cost so little that, even with a limited theatrical release it made a lot of money for the producers. If the same thing happens with this film, I'm standing by! I got two more minor characters from Diary, and I would love it to have this little set of movies that go together.

MM: Do you have any non-zombie movies planned?

GR: I'm working on one! I don't know if it will happen. At my age, man, I don't want to go out and do the pitch again. Peter Grunwald (my business partner) and I--we were out there for almost six and a half years almost and never made a movie. We got all these huge development deals. And I made more money than I've ever made in my life, but I never made a movie. For one reason or another, all the deals blew up. And I just don't want to do that anymore. And I found a lovely place to work, in Canada. And I work with now, again, the same family of people. The guy that shot my first movie up there shot this movie. The same wardrobe people and everything. I love the collaborative process of making films. And I hate the deal making. We have an idea that we would love to do. If it gets too nuts, the development aspect of it, then I don't know. I do have another horror movie idea, which is non-zombie. Which I'm sure we can finance. But if this film does well, I think I'll do another one of these (zombie movies). Hey, I'd be happy if did two more of these that that was it. I love doing them!

You know what makes me wet? (image) Philosophy.

Greeting sugars! Today is the day I move to London... so I will keep this short and sweet My new set "Sheep go to Heaven" will be up tonight at 10pm! Sadly, due to the fact I have no internet in my new place yet, I will not get to see your reactions! I hope you guys like it, and don't... more

Greeting sugars!

Today is the day I move to London... so I will keep this short and sweet

My new set "Sheep go to Heaven" will be up tonight at 10pm! Sadly, due to the fact I have no internet in my new place yet, I will not get to see your reactions! I hope you guys like it, and don't forget to leave those nice comments

I've done so much packing the last couple of days, I don't think I ever want to move again! However, when I get to my new home, I get to read my new copy of the Silent Hill omnibus, which is very exciting!

As I was packing the other day, I discovered my dog had beheaded one of my sheep, and was very distraught! I will leave you guys with the picture.

I hope you are all doing well, and I'll try to get back on as soon as possible!

Stay sweet my sugars!

SailorV

What is rocking your world at the precise moment you read this? Don't lie to look cool cuz that would be mean. I'm listening to can't hold focus by operation make-out

Who wants to drink great wine and listen to Led Zeppelin? Show of hands please. If you have a soul, you just put your hands up. I've talked about pairing music and booze before in this column and it's something I think about on a regular basis, as they are two of my favorite things in life. more

Who wants to drink great wine and listen to Led Zeppelin?

Show of hands please.

If you have a soul, you just put your hands up.

I've talked about pairing music and booze before in this column and it's something I think about on a regular basis, as they are two of my favorite things in life. It's what I do, it's who I am and the two go together like nerds and Lost theorizing. Hey wait, that's me too.

A few months ago I was at dinner in LA with Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali and it turned into (as they always do) a late night Amaro session. It was a Friday night and I realized that the best Zeppelin cover band in the world, Six Foot Nurse was playing at Molly Malone's. I rousted a bunch of the crew out of their liquid-herb induced haze with promises of "I swear if you close your eyes IT IS Led Zeppelin." Now I'm going to have to ask you, the reader to take me at my word on this and if you ever have the chance to see the Nurse, take it.

We made it to Molly's in time to catch the last twenty minutes of the set and if memory serves, three seconds into The Ocean Joe turned around to me with huge eyes and said "Holy shit."

The rest of the evening was just piling on more wood to the already raging fire and before Joe left he said to me, "We have to do something with these guys, have to bring them to NYC and do something."

Joe being the man of his word that he is called me the next day and asked me if I thought the band would be interested in coming to NYC to do a show where he would pair wines with specific Zeppelin songs. He didn't have any other details other than the most important one, which was, let's do this.

Of course the band was excited about the opportunity to go to NYC and we worked it out where I would play a few songs with them as well. I was nervous about this because as strange as it may sound, other then "Rock N Roll," I didn't know any Zeppelin songs on guitar. Or, I didn't know any Zeppelin songs on guitar correctly. I've never sat around and learned Zeppelin. Crazy right? Well Nalle Colt (guitar player for The Nurse as well as Pearl) knows it all note for note so on one hand I knew that if I learned something wrong he could show me the right way to play it and on the other hand I was stressed because he knows it all note for note and I didn't want to come in to rehearsal like an idiot.

I woodshedded and learned "The Ocean," "Rock N Roll," "The Rover," "Whole Lotta Love" and "Heartbreaker." At rehearsal I learned "Good Times Bad Times" and then day of show learned "Tangerine" and "Since I've Been Loving You." After rehearsal I felt really good about where I was at with the songs and after Nalle showed me a couple of little Page-isms, I was ready to rock. The band sounded sick with the rhythm guitar.

We had a pre-show meeting at the Spotted Pig the night before, where we ate and drank for five hours and discussed how the show would run for fifteen minutes. That's pretty much how the whole week in NY went. Pearl and I would make one plan, like, "Let's stay in and be mellow tonight because we're super hungover" and that would turn into Joe texting me and saying, "Come into Del Posto for dinner. Please let me feed you. Pasta will heal your soul." How do you say no to that? So we go for dinner and that turns into Pearl and I and the Nurse guys in the private room at Del Posto drinking all night with Joe, Mario, Jay McInerney and NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. Weird, random and totally in context with my life. Jay and Jimmie were both really cool and Jay had some great Michael J. Fox stories (but those are for the book my friends, sorry). Jimmie said he'd take me out on the track and I plan on taking him up on it.

Anyway, I digress.

Show time at the City Winery, a killer new venue from the people that started the Knitting Factory. Live music, food and a wine program where you can make your own wine with help from an expert and with grapes flown in from the worlds best regions.

The show was oversold. Four hundred and change packed around tables. Six glasses in front of each person with a place mat explaining what each wine was and why it was paired with the accompanying song.

The show was being hosted by Joe and his buddies Mike Edison (ex-editor of High Times and Screw magazines) and David Lynch (a wine expert, not the Blue Velvet guy). If anyone can make the unlikely coupling of fine wine and rock music work, it would be these three eclectic mofo's. They all took turns on the mic explaining as best they could to the crowd how this evening came to be and even had the band kick into short five to ten second bits of songs to whet their appetites. I could tell the evening was going to be a success. Besides the obvious fact that the place was sold out, as soon as the band played the first five-second tease, the place went nuts. These people were starving for rock!! Lot's of mid to late 30's white whiteys that have the cash to drink well and would never go out to a rock show. They didn't even know they wanted this night and we gave it to them.

After Mike Edison described Zeppelin as like "the moment right before penetration" they introduced the first wine, Henriot Blanc de Blanc Champagne that was paired with "Immigrant Song." Try and think about the acidity of Champagne and then think of Plant wailing and Page's biting riff and it makes sense. Or it doesn't and it doesn't matter because you're drinking killer booze and getting your ass kicked by the Nurse. I can't remember all of the pairings as I was getting ready to play (I was to get up for the last pairing, Bordeaux and "Whole Lotta Love") and then I would stay up and we would play all the rest of the songs. There was a Chablis with "Misty Mountain Hop" which worked as the edgier notes of the Chablis (compared to the Champagne) matched Page's deliberate phrasing in Hop. Kashmir was paired with a Barolo and the wine, like the song both took their time to unfold their epic bodies.

By the time the six glasses of wine were finished the crowd was well oiled and when we kicked into "The Ocean," spontaneous dancing broke out all over the room. Amazingly, as buzzed as I was I didn't fuck up once. The energy got better and better with each song and "Rock N Roll" closed it out in true bombastic Zeppelin style. The reaction to the band was so overwhelming you would think these people really saw Led Zeppelin. Maybe it was all the great wine? We came back and encored with "Since I've Been Loving You" and said goodnight. After the show we "helped" Joe finish off some triple magnums of fine Bastianich vino.

It was an insanely decadent week. Being fed by Joe and Mario everyday is amazing and brutal at the same time. I swear I gained 190 pounds. I've been on tuna with oil and vinegar since.

Cheers,

Scott

PS The new Anthrax album, Worship Music, is currently being mixed by Dave Fortman.

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Scott Ian is SuicideGirls' monthly Food Coma columnist. Click HERE for more of his musing on sustenance and libations. He plays guitar for revolutionary metal band Anthrax and also for Pearl.