Classic Set of the Day:


Suri - Playful Pinup



Classic set of the Day nominated by Padam
She will get a 3 month subscription for having his classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

She nominated today's set because...

"I think this set should be 'Classic Set of the Day' as Suri is an absolute Goddess. Her vibrant personality, and her glorious body are the reason I joined the site in the first place, and this set screams pin-up redefined! With her doe-eyes and perfect red mouth, Suri is as elegant as she is sexy. The plain backdrop just goes to show that this girl knows exactly how to work those poses, and her facial expressions are just fantastic!"

I couldn't agree more - Suri is a bad ass breast cancer survivor and all around awesome lady.

xoxo
-missy

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

It’s December 25th 1986, and Nikki Sixx is alone in his mansion, crouched naked under his Christmas tree with a needle in his arm, scribbling in his diary about watching his “holiday spirit coagulate in a spoon.” He writes, “Merry Christmas…it’s just you and me, diary. Welcome to my life.” This... more

It’s December 25th 1986, and Nikki Sixx is alone in his mansion, crouched naked under his Christmas tree with a needle in his arm, scribbling in his diary about watching his “holiday spirit coagulate in a spoon.” He writes, “Merry Christmas…it’s just you and me, diary. Welcome to my life.”

This is just one scene from a particularly harrowing chapter in Motley Crue bassist and founder Nikki Sixx’s new memoir “The Heroin Diaries” -- a collection of riveting entries from his personal journals spanning one year from 1986 to 1987, a year he considers the height of his downward spiral into drug addiction. It’s a story about drugs, depression, and the train-wreck of self-destruction -- but ultimately it’s one man’s story about survival told with unflinching and unapologetic honesty.

Sober now for 6 years, Sixx is the founder of the charity Running Wild in the Night (a fundraising program for the Covenant House) and will donate part of the proceeds from the book to help troubled kids get off the streets and away from drugs.

SuicideGirls caught up with the original glam-metal bad boy to chat about his darker days and why the future looks so bright…

Erin Broadley: You’ve never really been shy about talking to people about your demons and your past. But at what point, if there is a point, do you ever worry about the risk of feeling overexposed?

Nikki Sixx: Well, no. This is a different thing. It’s me throwing myself under the wheels of the bus so that I can show what the outcome is. For me to be able to find the journals, get the commentary from everybody else and then write the overview kind of helped me to see my own past clearer, which would be great for people who read the book because they’ll experience that arch that goes from adolescence to adulthood…we all make mistakes. We all fuck up. We all do whatever we do in our lives but I can see where mine became a downward spiral. I’m not saying, “Don’t do drugs, don’t drink.” I’m not.

EB: You’re not up on any pedestal or soapbox, for sure.

NS: I am so against that. You know, my friends drink. I don’t care. My friends do lots of stuff that I don’t do. And I’m sure I do things that they don’t do. We’re all individuals on this planet. So you know, I’m just one guy [and I] happen to have a spotlight on me. If I can show that experience and it can help to sell the project, which will donate money for [the charity] Covenant House. This is for the at risk kids, you know, it’s one year of my life of giving back and I’ve had so many years of gifts.

EB: In your diaries, on February 13th, 1987 you wrote about heroes and whether or not people idolize others for their music or their lifestyles. You say for you it’s both. Do you think it’s part of the quandary the entertainment industry is in where heroes are built out of excess and fans end up falling into that themselves?

NS: You know it’s such a touchy subject for the fans. I would like to come out of this where a girl looks at me and goes, “That guy’s fuckable.”

EB: [Laughs]

NS: And a guy looks at me and goes, “That guy looks like he could kick some ass.” People in general would go, “Wow, like he’s not fucked up anymore. He’s even fucking better. He’s even a better musician.” If I can come out like that for people, maybe it’s setting a new model for what the tattooed, crazy, rock and roller can be like, you know, but I’m not straightedge.

EB: Right. Well that’s a whole other level of extreme that I find just completely alienating in its own right.

NS: Yeah. Oh yeah. You know, I’m very at ease and comfortable in my own skin. I just want people that are around me to go, “Wow, that guy’s just on his own journey. He doesn’t preach at us.” I’m really good if you want to ask me what my experience was with something like, “How did you deal with it?” Well this is how I dealt with it. I don’t tell them that’s how they should deal with it and that’s kind of like what the book’s about.

EB: The book reads very much more like a dialogue and a conversation than a manual of regret, especially with the outside commentary. Does that make sense?

NS: Yeah. I won’t apologize for any of the wrecked cars, destroyed hotel rooms or broken hearts.

EB: [Laughs]

NS: I don’t regret any tattoos. We are a combination of all the things that we’ve done. That experience is who you are today and I don’t know what I’ll be like five years from now. I’m sure I’ll be on a pretty similar path because this is the most comfortable path I’ve been on. I’ll still be a photographer, a musician, a producer, a writer and it’s just kind of where I’m at. I don’t think I would have ever got here if I hadn’t exorcised those demons. Not the addiction, we know that would kill me, we have proof.

EB: At one point, you know, in your diary you write, “I’ve been up to no good again but it’s given me a killer idea for a song.”

NS: [Laughs]

EB: I feel like it’s a really tricky situation when the things that are hurting you, are not healthy for you, also happen to be so intrinsically tied into what you’re getting paid for and the lifestyle you’re getting paid to live. You mentioned that a lot of people didn’t yell at you for fucking up because you were the cash flow.

NS: Right.

EB: Can art and stability co-exist?

NS: It is interesting because, you know, they say Dali was mentally insane.

EB: Right. His mustache sure was.

NS: Well, his mustache definitely was insane. They definitely should have committed that mustache.

EB: [Laughs]

NS: So, what would his artwork have been like if he’d been put on antidepressants and psychosis medications? I mean, nobody will ever know. You know, Johnny Thunders had to die to make it the end of that story and so did Sid Vicious and so did Bon Scott and some of these amazing painters and poets and guys like William Burroughs. They carried the needle right to the end. I don’t know where my story ends. I don’t know what a different soundtrack my life would have been if I would have done something different.

EB: At another point in the diary you write, “The drugs are ruining the show and we’re all scared to death”. At what point did that thought really first materialize for you with Motley Crue?

NS: You know, it’s interesting because there’s a part of me that knew I had a problem probably even before Motley Crue. It’s like I was destined for the outcome. It was just interesting. I looked back and I was so full on. I remember like 17, 16-years-old taking elephant tranquilizers. I mean, why? Why? I had to do much soul searching to try to find an answer. Part of it was just straight up being young and who I surrounded myself with. When you’re unhealthy, you don’t really surround yourself with healthy people. When you don’t have role models that are healthy, who are you going to get your feedback from?

EB: Another thing you wrote is, “Why can’t I do drugs like normal people?”

NS: I can’t do anything like normal people.

EB: [Laughs]

NS: It’s just not possible.

EB: Well, it’s part of your charm.

NS: I love too deep. It’s unbelievable how in love I get about anything or anybody. I’m so passionate about everything. I’ve actually learned a bit of balance. I mean, going through this divorce and being single for the last year and a half has been real interesting where I’ve re-evaluated a lot of the things, like where you’ve made the mistakes in relationships with the people that you thought would be lifelong partners.

EB: Uh-huh, like redefining your definition of what a life partner is.

NS: Yeah, exactly. You know, exactly. So, this whole thing is a journey, a very interesting journey and hopefully one that still smells and tastes rock and roll.

EB: You wrote in February 1987 that, “Everybody thinks I’m so tough as nails, if only they only knew.” A lot of times people have a hard time keeping a private diary because they’re always afraid that somebody’s going to read it. It’s like, “Oh what if I do die and everybody reads it finds out all these things going on in my head and my insecurities.” You know, the whole diary keeping process is kind of a lost art form today because everybody’s blogging.

NS: Right, right, everybody blogs it. They blog and they spell check.

EB: Right, it’s not a diary if you spell check, asshole!

NS: Exactly. Especially if you re-read it and go, “Well that doesn’t make me look good.” I mean, just that relationship with the pen and the paper and my own barricaded world -- it was freeing.

EB: Yeah, barricaded in your closet.

NS: In my closet. I still do it today, not the closet but the writing. I have this weird thing that I’m always on the floor. I always have to sit on the floor and it freaks people out. Not like in restaurants or businesses, but if I go to someone’s house, you know, and we’re flopping in the front room, I’m like the first one on the floor.

EB: I do that too. When people are over at my house I always sit on the floor. I think it stems from very young party, social situations where we were just camping out on the floor, drinking or doing our business. Like a floor powwow situation.

NS: Yeah, it is. It’s very much like a powwow.

EB: The only people on the couches are the ones that are passed out.

NS: Exactly, the couch is more like a gurney.

EB: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. In the editing process of the diaries, did you have any moments where you were like, “I just don’t want to include that in the published version?”

NS: No.

EB: No? There was no censorship after the fact?

NS: Nope, absolutely not. It’s forbidden in my world.

EB: That’s great…I think that’s needed. Censorship, especially self-censorship has become so prevalent. I mean it’s everywhere and we don’t even realize it anymore. You know the whole phrase, “Think before you speak,” well, stop it already. There is no kind of stream of consciousness.

NS: Well, are we going to get shit for it? Are you going to be publicly ridiculed for it? If it’s in a text message if you don’t put “ha, ha, ha” or “LOL”, are they going to know it was sarcasm? Oh Jesus, and I’m guilty of it. I mean, I live on text messages.

EB: Uh huh, I’ve definitely sent out a few “LOL-s” in my life.

NS: I’ve sent a few out, and a lot of “ha-ha-ha-s” because I’m very dry. I’ll say something and I’ll get back, “Are you pissed?” And I’ll send back, “LOL.”

EB: With other drug-based memoirs like, I don’t know, my problem with books like the Basketball Diaries is that they still had too much self-preservation going on in the writing process, you know?

NS: Right, right. I mean I read them and I was like, “Looks cool to me.” [Jim Carroll] never really looked bad. Everybody else looked bad and he was kind of like a victim.

EB: Right, the tortured artist. You don’t veil your Jeckyll-Hyde personality in the Heroin Diaries at all. I thought that was interesting to read, especially from somebody who is as in the public eye and has been in the public eye for a long time. You’re not afraid of not looking cool.

NS: No, after being in Motley Crue, you’re not afraid of that. I got over that a long time ago. This probably isn’t a good book to send to a girl before I date her.

EB: [Laughs] Right, or maybe it is… just to get it over with.

NS: Get it over with. It’s like a deterrent. It’s like when girls wear a fake wedding ring. I’ll just carry the book around with me and give it to girls.

EB: Speaking of the Basketball Diaries, I had issues with the way different characters were portrayed, especially the addict-dealer relationship in that book.

NS: Yeah, yeah.

EB: You’re very frank about how you both loved to hate each other and hated to love each other. It’s just a very interesting dynamic.

NS: It must be very frustrating for a guy who has the same habit as me to be going to a mansion and I’m throwing down $1,000 at a time. And there are just $20,000 Persian rugs and antiques that are just destroyed. From his point of view I would be like, “Fuck you, you spoiled piece of shit.”

EB: You’re throwing it all away, but at the same time --

NS: He’s no better. I mean it’s incestual, isn’t it? It’s very broken. I remember sitting down over the cocaine, talking about how bad cocaine was. I mean, you know, its like, “This is really bad. We shouldn’t be doing this. Pass me the mirror.” It’s a very interesting, very weird life.

EB: In the forward of the book you mention there were people that wouldn’t get involved in this because they were afraid of tarnishing their reputation. Was that unexpected?

NS: Well, from the get-go there was a charitable piece to the puzzle and that was the thing is to talk to people. I said, “You’ve got to be honest if you want to do something charitable.” We didn’t need another fluff piece out there on this subject, on any subject, to be honest with you, and I have such a thing about telling it how it is. I’ll be honest with you, I tell it how it is, and sometimes a year later it’s not how it is anymore. People change, thank God. Things change and people don’t always like it when you change. And you don’t always like it as an artist when you change. I was an asshole. I’m not anymore but sometimes I can be. Yeah, “I was a dick. That was then, this is now either accept my apology or not.” You want to know who people are when you look them in the eyes. My experience is that people want to do the right thing. It’s fear, everything is fear based. The more I look, everything in life is fear based. Fear of everything. Fear of writing the right thing in your blog or the fear of, “Is the song going to fit the format?” Or the fear of, “Is my hairstyle in?” Fear of, “How come we’re called a shit metal band, or how come we’re called crap-rock band.

EB: Crack rock?

NS: Crap-rock, like when it was rap-rock then it got turned into crap rock.

EB: [Laughs] I was going to say, that’s a weird genre, crack rock.

NS: Crack rock that would be the opposite of straight edge. We’re crack rock, we just do crack.

EB: [Laughs] We just do crack and sing about crack.

NS: Yeah, every song is about crack.

EB: Butt crack and cocaine crack.

NS: Both cracks.

EB: Oh God [laughs].

NS: Oh my God.


"The Heroin Diaries" is in stores September 18th. For more information go to www.theheroindiaries.net, www.myspace.com/nikkisixx and www.nikkisixx.net

Classic Set of the Day:


Nixon - Black Balloon



Classic set of the Day nominated by Ollethe
who will get a 3 month subscription for having this classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

Ollethe nominated today's set because...

"Why?: I think the Black Balloon by Nixon should be definitelly one of the classic sets, even only for NIxon is one of the classic Suicide Girls. She is a real exteriorization of SG motto: "What some people think make us strange or weird or fucked up we think is what makes us beautiful." And the best girls stay beautiful forever and Nixon is a living proof of neverending beauty.."

One more note about the set, when I arrived in the typical motel to shoot Nixon I was nervous that the room would look too standard. 15 minutes later it looked like Dexter had taken to the place. I love Nixon <3

xoxo
-missy

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

Having been harassed and arrested by agents of the United States' government as he perpetrated his graffiti art from coast to coast, Shepard Fairy has since earned the respect and gratitude of a future American president. Using the visual vocabulary of popular revolution, the humble DIY poster and... more

Having been harassed and arrested by agents of the United States' government as he perpetrated his graffiti art from coast to coast, Shepard Fairy has since earned the respect and gratitude of a future American president. Using the visual vocabulary of popular revolution, the humble DIY poster and sticker maker-cum-revered gallery and populist street artist used his graphic skill to transform Barack Obama from a presidential hopeful to a visionary icon.

But now that the future leader of our government is one of his choosing, Shepard Fairey is questioning his own message of dissent. In essence, what does a rebellious artist do when the central entity he was rebelling against is controlled by a commander-in-chief he helped elect? SuicideGirls called Shepard at his Los Angeles studio to find out.

In our interview the artist, who celebrates 20 years of street propaganda with a solo show at the The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in early 2009, also talks about his Obama images, the psychology behind them, how he had to make unique versions that hadn't previously been distributed by illegal means for use by the official presidential campaign, and how he self-funded his own campaign of "Hope," for which he printed up a staggering 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters.


Nicole Powers:In the introduction of your new book, E Pluribus Venom, you talk about the "rush" doing street art gives you, and throughout the book you talk about your numerous brushes with the law. Graffiti really is the only form of art that combines the satisfaction of the work with the thrill of a joyride. It's quite a heady combination. Would you still do it without the rush factor?

Shepard Fairey: You know, I made art as a little kid but it was only when I was on restriction because I'd been throwing water balloons at cars or doing something else mischievous and I was stuck in my room. Then later I got into skateboarding and punk rock, the rebellious side of both of those things was very alluring to me, and then also the creativity. So when you look at my progression to becoming a street artist, it's basically the fusion of my desire to make pictures and then my love of rebellious activity all blended.

I think I would maybe make art as something to do for a living or as a hobby, but I don't think it would be something I was as passionate about if I didn't have this tension between the different stages. I have the experimentation of working on my computer or illustrating by hand. I need a bit of space to breathe and experiment, it's a very independent thing. I do a lot of my best work late at night. Then when it's resolved, then the thrill of going out and putting it up is the other side of it that's so important.

I think being an artist, you're trying to make things that are going to communicate with an audience, but when you make it you're not getting any of the feedback from the audience. Then when you put it out there, then you have the communication with the audience...I put it out there and even if it gets cleaned in two days, thousands and thousands of people are going to have seen it. So yes, it's a very, very important component, both philosophically, because my work's about accessibility and connecting with an audience without barriers, and then also just the purely, primal, hedonistic side of it, of just the pleasure of doing it.

NP: It's interesting that blurry line between graffiti artist and criminal — indeed many factions of society consider those words to be one and the same. Where do you draw your lines? For instance, I understand you draw one line at putting your art on private property

SF: Well, there's grey areas in everything, but my approach to street art is that public property is ideal because we're all taxpayers and we're all paying for it. We all own it. Then abandoned private property and dilapidated stuff that's not cared for, where I can at least feel like I'm not creating a drastic inconvenience to someone. I mean my main MO is just to try to integrate my work in a way that's visible but not unnecessarily destructive. I don't want to inconvenience people unnecessarily.

I just look at it like, would I want somebody to come tag on my house, my building, my car? And there's plenty of property around L.A., whether it's a blank billboard that's not in use or boarded up windows or a business that's out of business that has a blank sign on their roof, there's all sorts of spots like that that are great. Then there's the various concrete walls that have some tags and some posters already where adding my work to the mix is perfectly reasonable I think. But there's always people that are going to have their feathers ruffled that anything illegal is being done. But I'm very up front about who I am, therefore I feel like every poster I put up is something that I feel is justifiable and I'm willing to be accountable for.

NP: In the book you also talk about The Splasher who has vandalized yours and Banksy's street art. Playing devils advocate here, given the medium, since all such street art is illegal, and in found spaces which artists, such as yourself, neither have the rights to or ownership of, isn't he just expressing himself in a similar way to you? Isn't it part of a dialog of sorts?

SF: Sure. They are. The Splasher was two people. My complaint about The Splasher was that if you read any of their literature it's basically saying that any art that becomes commodified is part of the evil bourgeois machine. That to me is not really a valid critique. Of course I'm used to any number of critiques that I don't think are valid; the thing that disturbed me about The Splasher was that it was somebody that I felt was more of an insider to the world of street art, more of a peer. It was the Joe Lieberman of the street art world maybe.

What I said about The Splasher was that I don't think it's constructive, but, yes, it's getting a dialog going and I think the conversation's interesting. I've outlasted many people that have hated my work, and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and outlast them too. A lot of people were like, "No! This is it. They're getting all the best work. There's no point in putting anything up." Sure enough, they moved to Toledo, Ohio because they got caught at my art show trying to set off a smoke bomb last summer. Then they were so scared, because the guy's picture was all over the Internet, one of the two guys, that they both moved to Toledo.

In some ways I felt it was good for the street art scene because it was getting attention in New York magazine and The New York Times, and all these places where street art normally doesn't get exposed. But I was bummed that they were going after the people making the most beautiful work. I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Swoon, Faile, WK Interact, Banksy, anyone who'd had any success. And the thing that was so disappointing was that these were all artists where success was a byproduct of making good work. Success in a financial sense or a gallery sense was not their primary ambition, it was a peripheral benefit.

I think if you're going to live in a capitalist society, that understanding that things become commodified and value is assigned monetarily to things that have value culturally, that this is part of the natural arc of the life of something that has merit. It's unavoidable. So to me it was a very, very naive position that they were holding. But, all that aside, I still don't think it was bad for the scene.

NP: Isn't the nature of street art that it is a temporary thing, with one piece of art living out its life over layers of past art and blackout paint. Isn't that in essence the circle of life for street art?

SF: Oh, of course. I never get precious about my images on the street. Of course I'm bummed out if they get painted over in a couple of days, which happens sometimes, but, as a street artist, you know that if you go out and you put fifty things up in a city that in pretty short order half of them are going to be gone, and then maybe a small percentage of them will last more than a few months. That's just how it goes. I think the thing about The Splasher though, was they didn't have any answers, any alternative. They didn't say, "This is how art should work," or, "This is what we think." It was basically the graffiti version of, "The world is shit — kill yourself." But at the same time desperately screaming, "I'm alive and I want to be recognized."

NP: Talking of death, I loved your These Sunsets Are To Die For image. During the recent SoCal fires, the sunsets were hauntingly beautiful as the sun's rays were reflected by smoke particles. Much of your work illustrates how the world can be beautiful and ugly at the same time.

SF: Thanks. I'm glad that you picked up on that, not everybody does.

NP: Exploring such dichotomies is a theme throughout your work isn't it?

SF: It is, and I try to make it even more obvious with my new show I just did in San Francisco, by naming the show the Duality of Humanity. To me it's very important to see that there are multiple layers and angles to everything. I love making work that's striking and seductive, but being seduced by art, by propaganda is something that I'm also trying to encourage people to be a little less susceptible to, and a little more sensitive to how they're manipulated by images and slogans. So, I mean you nailed it, there's a duality, a yin and a yang, to the stuff.

It's like there's some people that say, "I just won't watch TV because it's all going to soften your brain and turn you into a mindless consumer." Well you know I can watch TV, I can watch Dexter and then I can watch CNN, and still be informed, and I can be entertained and not be turned into a mindless consumer. I think that these very black and white ways of looking at things aren't really healthy. So with a lot of my work, the work sort of participates in what it critiques.

NP: It's interesting that you talk about how you're participating in what you critique, 'cause in your previous book, Obey: Supply & Demand, you liken commercial billboards to graffiti, and question how one can be considered vandalism when the other is not. That's something that I relate too, since I think corporations have turned much of America's land and cityscapes into one giant eyesore.

SF: Well, yeah. So much of it is semantics and spin doctoring. People become very conditioned to accepting things that have an economic or commercial justification. With something that's categorized as illegal, street art, graffiti, versus legal billboards, the analysis seems to stop there on a very superficial level. So in trying to get people to see, whether it's paid for or not paid for, if one is an eyesore, the other should be considered an eyesore, and just raise these issues.

People think that I'm trying to say that capitalism is bad, or that all corporations are bad, it's not that it's that. There's some hypocrisy that needs to be looked at, but it doesn't mean that I want to rid the world of capitalism. I make T-shits and I make posters, and I sell stuff. I also would hope that somebody that buys my stuff would buy it because they like it, not because they're a consumer zombie that has been hypnotized by my work into buying it, and it's not something they actually want for themselves. These things can coexist right?

NP: Well you illustrate that very point in your Two Side of Capitalism dollar bill series, which you say, "demonstrate both the positive and negative aspects of capitalism." However I see far more of the negative in your work. Is it hard for you to find the positive?

SF: It has been under Bush. And I think that just my background; I grew up in South Carolina, and my parents were very conservative and we went to church every weekend. I went to a school where you had to wear a coat and tie, and I was unhappy and mean to other kids — and sadistic. I had no idea why. Then I discovered punk rock and skateboarding, and realized that you didn't have to be a jock, you didn't have wear polo shirts everyday and be a conformist.

I mean it's such a cliché, it sounds so pathetic...But my mom was head cheerleader and my dad was head captain of the football team, and I knew nothing else. I was very unhappy but I didn't know why. When I got into skateboarding and punk rock, those cultures were like: "Question the dominant paradigm. Question the mainstream. Don't be a mindless sheep." And I think that being suspicious was ingrained in me as a positive thing. It was better to be suspicious than submissive, and so, especially under Bush I think that there's been a lot of stuff to be negative about. But I just made this Obama image — it's pretty positive. There's something to be positive about so I made something positive...

I'm actually in a phase right now where I don't know really what I'm going to be making my new body of work about once Obama takes office. There's still going to be some issues that I'm concerned with that I can make art about. I'm worried about the environment, global warming I think is a real big problem. That's going to be there, and there's always going to be abuses of authority, whether Obama's in office or not.

But a lot of the images I've been making have been about a systemic abuse of power, and I'm going to be cautious about making images that suggest that's what I feel is going on until I've given Obama a chance. I'm not a hater just for the sake of being a hater like a lot of people are. I'd love it if the government functioned properly, and I didn't have to make stuff that criticized the government.

NP: Much of your work shows the flipside of American mythology. Do you think the phrase, "Land of the free and the home of the brave," now serves as an empty marketing slogan at best, and propaganda used to control us at worst.

SF: Absolutely — and the paradigm shift away from that that might be possible. I'm cautiously optimistic...For me it's a very, very sensitive time right now. Because I don't want to look like I've been brainwashed and I'm going to be 100% complicit with everything that's going on just because Obama's the president, but at the same time I think it's much easier for negativity to flourish. I kind of want to see what happens to see what topics I really need to make art about.

NP: The image of the woman with a brush and a gun (Revolutionary Woman with Brush), which has a flower in the barrel, is particularly poignant, since, to me, it shows the choices of expression we all have in fighting for the things we want. You have a lot of Middle Eastern imagery in the E Pluribus Venom collection. Obviously, these are sensitive times, but talk a little about that.

SF: What's going on in the Middle East or what went on in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, those people are just people, they're not all good or all bad. They've got a little of both. The way all Vietnamese people were looked at as, women and children might be seditionaries, they can't be trusted. There were so many civilians that were killed. Same thing in Iraq; all Arabs are fanatical Muslim potential terrorists who are not to be trusted. One of my feelings is that fear is what drives a lot of inhumanity...

So I'm just trying to make some work that shows the humanity, and that maybe there's a choice not to use a weapon — the flower and the gun. Or that the use of a weapon is sometimes a situation that people are forced into, they don't have much of a choice. Or that they're actually picking up a weapon to correct an injustice rather than to perpetuate one.

NP: And one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. The image of Obama, like much of your work, builds on images of black power and struggle from Emory Douglas and The Black Panther newspaper. In the 1960's these images were associated with people who were regarded by many as domestic terrorists, and you've turned that imagery on its head and helped elect a president with similar visuals.

SF: I think the Obama image is a triumph, in that, well, I think Obama's going to be a great president — so there's the triumph there. That's the basic thing I was trying to achieve and that's the number one most important aspect of it. But in terms of people being willing to embrace an image even if the historical context of the style might be something that opponents of the image would try and spin as sinister. To me the true function of the image, to make people curious about Obama and create an icon that was compelling, was something that a lot of people responded to. They saw through the attempts to say that the image looked like communist propaganda or, the one Los Angeles Times woman called it "third world dictator" and "idol worship."

The word propaganda has a sinister connotation, but the real definition of propaganda's just "images and words used to influence." And influence can be positive or negative. With the way I felt about Obama, if an image actually made someone go to Obama's website or watch him give a talk, it's him himself that's going to compel people not the image. The image then though becomes a symbol of people saying like, "I dig the guy. I believe in him." It's a very easy thing to replicate and symbolize. And there's a big difference in that happening in a grass roots way and that being a systematically government implemented image that's forced on people. There's a huge difference between Lenin or Mao and my Obama image.

People ask me, "Well if the U.S. government asked you to do a portrait and that was going to be how they were going to use it, would you do it?" And I say, "Well, no, because I'd be a little suspicious of how it was going to be used." With the Obama image, I'm the one that set it in motion — how it was going to be disseminated and put up on the streets. And there was this people's movement, this grass roots movement vibe to it that I think was really important.

But you know I like the Black Panthers, their ideas. I mean not everything about some of the violent aspects of it, but just the idea that they didn't feel like black people in Oakland were getting a fair deal and they set up their own crossing guards, their own breakfasts and school lunches, various other programs that they thought were a part of what the government should be taking care of. They would police the police whom they thought were harassing them. To me that's a very positive way to take matters into your own hands, and if you've got to do it yourself, do it yourself.

So the Obama thing, even though the Black Panthers were vilified, the Obama thing does have parallels to that because I wasn't hired by the Obama campaign to do that image, I just did it because I though he would be the best guy for president, and a lot of other people agreed and it just spread virally.

NP: It became almost an open source art project. You collaborated with other artists and musicians and it became this viral internet phenomenon.

SF: Yes, a lot of other people made images. There was an artist from Chicago named Ray Noland who had done that Go Tell Moma (To Vote For Obama) website, and he'd been doing some images. But I think it was because of my history that when I made my Obama image it really encouraged a lot of other people to go ahead and start making images. The thing that was unique about that was a lot of it was coming form a community that usually would never endorse a mainstream politician.

NP: So how did this all come about. Because in your next book you actually reprint a letter from Obama thanking you for your campaign art. What was your relationship with the campaign once the image was out there?

SF: I guess about about two and a half weeks before Super Tuesday I made the original image and started putting them up around L.A. I also, of course, posted on my website. Then a lot of other websites picked up on it, and news sites and blogs posted about it. A lot of people from Obama's campaign started using my image as their email signature or their MySpace or their Facebook [image], and then the Obama campaign hit me up and said, "Wow! This image has already caught on like crazy. Would you be willing to do an illustration for us if we gave you some photos to work from, and it'd be something that we could use officially for the campaign?" That was how my relationship with them started. I had no relationship with them prior to that.

I donated an image to them, which they used. It was the one that said "Change" underneath it. And then later on I did another one that said "Vote" underneath it, that had Obama smiling. But the image that I continued to put out there myself, they couldn't have any affiliation with it because it was being perpetuated illegally in a lot of ways, and so I just continued to do that on my own without any coordination with them, and that was the "Hope" image.

By the election I had made three hundred thousand of those posters and half a million stickers, a lot of T-shirts, done a lot of billboards, and large painted-in mural installations in different cities. It was all done grass roots and it was just funded by selling some posters and reinvesting the money. I did a couple of art pieces for some bigwigs; Russell Simmons commissioned an art piece and this guy from Universal Pictures got an art piece. I just put all that money back into making more stuff, so I didn't keep any of the Obama money.

NP: You've said in your book that, "People should not submit to any attempt to herd and manipulate them," but in your own work you've often exploited visual psychology. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, what psychological traits did you exploit in that Obama image?

SF: I think in the Obama image we the viewer are benefiting from several things. Obama had a relatively clean slate. A euphoric association with an image is definitely impossible if the person has a lot of negative baggage already; He didn't have that...

I think also that he seems wise in the image, or to have some sort of vision. I think that there are things that people respond to in a very intuitive way — confidence I think is important. People definitely respond to conviction, but the problem with that is if the conviction isn't justified. George Bush, I think had conviction about Iraq and he was completely wrong about it, there's a danger there.

Just turning someone into an icon, into a graphic icon, I think psychologically makes the viewer think that this person has already achieved a level of significance that would be something that maybe they as a viewer should be aware of, so that therefore they become curious. My reasons for wanting to know who Che Guevara was or Lenin or Mao, or Sid Vicious, who I saw on T-shirts before I listened to the Sex Pistols for that matter, was because this person had been a common icon and treated as such graphically; There must be a reason, they must have achieved a level of importance and status, and, whether that be for good or bad reasons, I should find out [why].

I think making a graphic illustration of someone achieves that. There's examples in my work where I've done that intentionally to manipulate. There's that "Nubian" series that I did. I've got Angela Davis and Jesse Jackson in that series, but then there's also people from 70s haircut books that are nobody important, and everyone assumes, "Oh, is that Che?" or "Is that Huey Newton?" because they're treated in that way — and that's a natural assumption.

NP: Well you definitely made Obama look like a visionary. Using that Black Panther imagery, I mean back in the 1960s Martin Luther King was viewed by many as a nuisance at best and a criminal at worst but now he's seen as a visionary, and it's a testament to how far we've come that such imagery is now associated with our president. I mean what you've actually done, whether your realize it or not, is history changing. When future generations look back at such imagery, they'll now associate it with hope rather than oppression. It's like you've changed the meaning of a word in our visual vocabulary.

SF: I hope so. But what I also fear; I've already been hit up by a bunch of people to make this political poster or that political poster, because people really want to capitalize on what that image achieved. But I won't do it because Obama was a really special case.

But to get back to what you're saying, what a lot of my work that used the propaganda aesthetic was actually about, you really just nailed it. If my work which was actually benevolent, in my opinion, was packaged in something sinister then hopefully the viewer would realize that conversely there were many things out there that are packaged as benevolent but the content is sinister. Whether it's fast food advertising or whatever miracle cure products, there's plenty shitty stuff out there that's packaged in pleasing Americana, almost in a way where as a consumer if you were to question or reject the advertising or the product it'd be like un-American to do so. What I'm hoping is people question that stuff.

And now, what you're saying, which I think is exciting, is that I created an image that hopefully will revise a little of the misconceptions of a lot of what I would consider these people's movements propaganda pieces, like the Black Panther stuff, that people would have an irrational fear of, and make them not so afraid of that aesthetic. But now that aesthetic is ripe for exploitation. [laughs]

NP: In defending yourself against those who say a white artist has no business using black imagery in his work, you've said that, "Distrust of those who have oppressed is only natural, but intentional isolation only fuels racial tension." I really agree with that statement, and it saddens me how segregated America's black and white communities still are decades after the laws that drove us apart were repealed. How do you think and hope Obama might bridge the divide?

SF: Well I think that the great thing about Obama for racial issues is that he's shattered a ceiling. I think there are genuine examples of racism out there, and then there's people who hold themselves back because they don't feel like something's possible. This isn't just [about] black people that think that aspiring to do a certain thing might not be possible for someone that's not white — it's true for people that come from every gender, race, walk of life.

I feel that a lot of the time people's fear of what they could or couldn't accomplish keeps them from trying, and I think that now there is an example of someone from the black community who's made it all the way to the presidency of the United States, that's very encouraging, and I like that it really removes any justification for complacency.

Obama, he's just a great role model for everybody, not just for black people. The guy's led a stellar life thus far. What Obama says, not literally, metaphorically, how Obama does things and what he's achieved, it's not good for a black guy, it's good for anybody.

There's people that are going to be racist no matter what. People find things to distinguish themselves from others, and race just happens to be a really convenient way to do it. To me it's a sign that there's just a lot of people out there that are basically trying to find ways to separate themselves from others. Race or gender or religion are convenient ways to delineate people...This sort of, "I define myself by who I am, who others are, and who I'm not," is a mentality that just needs to be combated in general I think. It's a much bigger thing.

Source.


Shepard Fairey will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of his seminal Obey Giant campaign with the opening of his first solo museum show. The retrospective, which opens on February 6, 2009 at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, will feature a collection of over 80 works. In addition, Fairey will create public art at sites around Boston. Click HERE for more info.

Classic Set of the Day:


Drake - Skellies



Classic set of the Day nominated by Adair
who will get a 3 month subscription for having this classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

Adair nominated today's set because...

There was obviously a huge amount of effort put into this set by Drake and Oryx to make the background and model interact they way that they do and it still stands out to be today as one of the sets that is obviously photoshopped- but in a way you love.

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

xoxo
-missy

by Brett Warner The first copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger I ever saw was an aged, ominous looking mass-market paperback sitting gravely at the top of my mother’s bookshelf. Its cover was a very solemn looking burgundy with gold font announcing its title and author. No picture on the... more

by Brett Warner

The first copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger I ever saw was an aged, ominous looking mass-market paperback sitting gravely at the top of my mother’s bookshelf. Its cover was a very solemn looking burgundy with gold font announcing its title and author. No picture on the front, no plot summary on the back – this book just simply existed. My mother, having passed on her uncanny hunger for books of all types and sorts, once shared the story of how my grandmother lost her shit when she found out her daughter was learning about this filth in school. I knew then I had to read this book right away.

For six decades, The Catcher in the Rye has been both the most ardently taught and fervently banned book in American literature. Along with James Dean and rock & roll, Salinger’s stream of conscious tale of angst and alienation invented the American teenager and, by extension, changed the way we create and market everything from clothes to music and movies. Its hero is a sixteen year-old, anti-social fuck up named Holden Caulfield, who has been kicked out of at least three private schools, has no qualms about going to New York for the weekend to have a few drinks and pick up some girls, and sees through all the insincere, “phony” bullshit that constitutes ninety-nine percent of our sad, pathetic adult lives.

Caulfield’s attitudes and viewpoints remain evocative of their time and place, when the ever-increasing gulf between childhood and adulthood had nearly imploded and the infuriating restraints of proper society threatened to strangle an entire generation. Yet, his anger and his fear resonate more than half a century later, those immortal words echoing through the dividing, massively constructed social schematas in which we live and breathe with little alternative. Is The Catcher in the Rye still meaningful in 2011? If anything, the book’s message is more imperative now than ever before.



Salinger himself was raised in post-WWI Manhattan by a working class Jewish family. A poor student, he dropped out of several schools before publishing “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” the story of a Manhattan teenager named Holden Caulfield. Drafted in 1942, Salinger’s regiment took part in the D-Day and Battle of the Bulge campaigns, with the author famously calling up Ernest Hemingway after Allied forces liberated Paris. Following the war, Salinger published several short stories in The New Yorker and elsewhere before The Catcher in the Rye appeared in hardcover during the summer of 1951. Despite mixed reviews, the novel was a popular success, especially amongst teenagers. Its then-blatant depictions of coarse language, substance abuse, and general miscreant behaviors and attitudes generated reoccurring waves of controversy and its rocky relationship with parents and teachers continues to this day.

Many have called the book “plotless,” which I suppose hinges on your personal definition. The story begins and ends in the rambling thoughts of young Holden Caulfield, recently expelled from the fictional Pencey Preparatory School in East Pennsylvania. Hoping to avoid the inevitable reunion with his upset parents, Caulfield leaves his dormitory in the middle of the night and takes a train to New York, where he spends the next three days in a lonely, often drunken stupor. He pays for a call girl, only to change his mind and decide he’d rather talk to the understandably baffled prostitute. Holden dances with a group of tourists, chats with a nun, visits a museum, and sneaks into his parents’ apartment in the middle of the night to visit his younger sister Phoebe, the only one who seems to value his particular set of morals.

The title is a reference to a nurtured fantasy of Holden’s in which he is the heroic savior of a group of children running through a rye field at the edge of a cliff. He equates adulthood and its vice-like social restraints with death, despite his penchants for drinking and fooling others into believing he is much older than sixteen. His hatred for all things “phony” and false stems from unrealized fears about life and death, likely culled from the tragic death of his younger brother, Allie. Holden Caulfield chooses genuine isolation over a false social life, and in the end it costs him his friends, his education, and (perhaps) his sanity. He moves from place to place, hoping to find some source of truth and honesty, but instead finds more structure, more sterility. More phonies.

Part of me feels that Twitter was created just for the Holden Caulfields of the world – their every waking thoughts and observations weaving together in some tightly wound manifesto of enlightened detachment. Still, I think were he around to see the phony shit we do today, he’d surely drown himself in the Central Park lagoon. The internet, once the great equalizer and enabler of humanity, has instead amplified all of our worst penchants: vanity, insecurity, and (most of all) loneliness. Words like “friend,” “favorite,” and “like” have been robbed of their simple, innate positivity and instead churn within us like cogs in a well-oiled machine. The desire to learn anything about one another is all but gone for good as we’ve boiled ourselves down to the barest of elements, genuinely believing that a handful of images and a well-rounded list of interests can accurately represent our hopes, dreams, fears, and desires. Who needs a Number of the Beast? We all have AIM screen names.

If Holden Caulfield can teach us anything today, it’s that isolation and inclusion are mutually exclusive, they cannot be successfully enmeshed the way our social media-driven lives are attempting to make them. We either have friends or we don’t. We’re lonely or we’re not. That struggle has only increased in severity since Salinger first wrote: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do you’ll start missing everybody.” Without genuine, in-person and unrestrained interaction with each other, we are all spiritually dead – lying mangled in a rocky trench below the golden, billowing rye fields. Perhaps what scared all those livid parents about The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t the cursing and the sex, but the notion that they had become so structured and disciplined as to be beyond saving.

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” – Mr. Antolini, The Catcher in the Rye.

Philip DeFranco is a next generation celeb. Known to many by his YouTube moniker, sxephil, since joining the video-based site on September 15, 2006, he's become one of the biggest stars of its pixelated small screens. DIY broadcasting from a ubiquitous eggshell and beige room in his home in Atlanta,... more

Philip DeFranco is a next generation celeb. Known to many by his YouTube moniker, sxephil, since joining the video-based site on September 15, 2006, he's become one of the biggest stars of its pixelated small screens.

DIY broadcasting from a ubiquitous eggshell and beige room in his home in Atlanta, Georgia, the fast-talking 23-year old self-confessed geek delivers often funny, always sarcastic and biting commentary on subjects as disparate as penis sniffing housewives and the mysterious and convenient (if you're a senior Republican who's into a little election tampering) death of Karl Rove's IT guy, Michael Connell (who was ready to spill his guts –– just not in a plane crash-y kind of way).

It has to be said, The Philip DeFranco Show is a cut above most made-for-YouTube fare. But as his salary begins to match his online status, DeFranco threw a curve ball into his satirical mix, announcing his retirement towards the end of 2009 in a recent show. In the meantime, he's enjoying a new wave of web-based notoriety, as one of Wired.com's Sexiest Geeks, as decided by an annual online reader poll, which he is topping at the time of writing by a very healthy margin.

SuicideGirls caught up with DeFranco while he was in Utah, not staying at his girlsfirend’s Dad’s house (the trip itself provided the subject for DeFranco's Dec 30th Douchebag of the Day), to find out more about the man behind The Philip Defranco Show and its companion PhillyD.tv blog.


Nicole Powers: Where did the inspiration for your show come from? And how did you start out?

Philip DeFranco: Honestly, it all really started just out of boredom. It was around finals, 'cause I was a junior at East Carolina University. I was stressed out, finished finals, and I realized over the course of finals and school that I didn't really do anything other than school and I needed to find something new. So I started making videos about being me, being opinionated and likeable or annoying depending on who you are.

NP: How many people are involved in the PhillyD TV operation now?

PDF: It's just me. I try and help produce smaller shows here and there, and I think that's where it's going to go in the future, but the Philip DeFranco Show is just me. It doesn't really have a script, it's just adlib –– I film it, I edit it, and I push it out.

NP: You've got a massive following online. What are the stats on that right now?

PDF: We have a core audience of about 300,000 people, and the show has been viewed about 135 million times.

NP: There's not much info about you online. While on Wikipedia, I noticed your entry is being "considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy." You're also scoring high on the Wikirage. What sparked this online ire?

PDF: There are people out there, when you make online video there's pretty much two worlds; there's YouTube and then the podcasters. The ones that consider it's their real job are podcasters, those are the shows like Diggnation, which I think defined the [podcast] back in the day. And a lot of people, when they look at YouTube, they don't consider us to be significant in any way. I mean that being said, we completely crush them in views, but there's still a lot of people out there who say we shouldn't really be recognized. But as more and more stuff comes out a lot of people are seeing this is the way that videos are being distributed, there's a huge audience, and, you know, it's a job.

NP: So YouTube is too mainstream for podcasters, is that what you're saying?

PDF: Well yeah. It's not even mainstream, it's just they don't take YouTube and the people on it seriously.

NP: There's some kind of snobbery there?

PDF: Kind of, yeah. I mean when you think podcaster, it's usually very professional. They have someone that does distributing, someone that does editing, someone that does the video. And a lot of YouTubers such as myself, Michael Buckley, Shaycarl, a lot of people, it's just 'I'm in my room talking,' and a lot of people don't think that means anything.

NP: Your broadcasts are very well informed. How do you get Philled in?

PDF: I started making videos based off of what I knew, and what I liked. Everyday since I was thirteen I'd pop on TV and I'd check stuff out. As I got out there more and technology advanced, I got broadband, I started checking out news websites, and I realized that a lot of media out there is kind of just BS, and you have to actually put in research and that's what's awesome about the internet. I mean Twitter, when that earthquake happened in California, it was up there, and there was in-depth and personal experiences. And I guess it's really finding a story, researching it down, and getting personal experiences to verify.

NP: You were one of a select group of net celebs that were sent a letter with a DVD and a key leading to a storage facility nearby. It was all very mysterious, and turned out to be an elaborate promotion for the game F.E.A.R. 2 Do you feel used?

PDF: It's weird. I feel used because usually the way it works is, promotion, it's kind of a paid thing. But the thing is, I'm such a geek that I was actually happy just to be a part of it because they only sent it out to eight people. I was like, "Oh! This is kind of cool." But obviously, they are using me, and I'm not getting anything except the experience.

NP: They weren't paying you, but other people have been. On your MySpace page you list your income as being "$250,000 and Higher." Is that for real, or just to up your sexy geek ante?

PDF: As of this year, that is real. It started out as a joke. It comes from a lot of sources, and a lot of different things, it's not just YouTube, it's all over the place on the internet. There's a lot of money to be made there.

NP: You've just been nominated as a contender in Wired.com's Sexiest Geeks of 2008 contest. Isn't sexy geek an oxymoron though? Playing devil's advocate here, if you're an 8 or above, aren't you just really a hot guy or chick using a computer?

PDF: [laughs] I mean, honestly, it's kind of cheesy. Someone sent it to me, and I was like, "Really?" And then I looked through, and it's all the same people like Olivia Munn. Essentially, like you say, it's a hot chick most of the time that was in a movie about a video game or she owns video games or she can use a computer. So I kind of just promoted it because I thought it'd be funny for a normal guy to be at the top of the list. I don't take it seriously. The voting movement I pushed my people to do was just kind of a joke.

NP: At the moment you're ranking higher than Rosario Dawson, Olivia Munn, Tina Fey, and even Stephen Colbert. I guess you're benefiting from the fact that Colbert's off air, otherwise he'd be looking for a Colbert Bump from his viewers.

PDF: When you compare those people, people that are mainstream on TV, and then you look at us online, that's our own field. In the past we've used it to our advantage, like with the Spore, a video game. Their promotion, they had TV and online people, and it was like whoever gets the most votes gets $15,000 for a charity. So I did that for PKD Cure and we completely obliterated everyone. [PKD or Polycystic kidney disease is genetic disorder and something DeFranco inherited from his father, who suffers from the disease.] I think we got 200,000 votes, and then the closest person was like 70,000 from the Sprouse Twins from Disney Channel, and then any other person that was on TV was like at 2,000.

NP: It's the power of the geek.

PDF: I don't want to say it's ours, because it sounds melodramatic, but it's where we are with life.

NP: You're YouTube user ID is sxephil. Obviously you signed up for your account prior to becaming the massive net celeb that you are today, but many of your online fans now know you by this name rather than your real world one. In retrospect, do you wish you'd have chosen a different online handle?

PDF: Yes. I actually used it because I just wanted to post a video of my friend doing something stupid and it said, "User Name?" and I was like, "OK? That must be like my email address." My email address was like from when I was fourteen...And now people come up to me on the street and are like, "Hey, sxephil!" And I'm like, "Oh, my God!"

NP: Following on from that, what advice would you give to those entering the world online with regard to choice of user names? I mean the MySpace and Facebook account you set up when you're eight is going to be the same account a potential boss or girlfriend scrutinizes before committing to you. Learning from your mistakes what would you suggest? I mean you're going to be sxephil when you're 84!

PDF: Oh, please don't say that. [laughs] I guess it's kind of like a tattoo. Think, OK, I'm going to get a tattoo right? I'm going to be, like you say, 84 with this tattoo. Do I want to be known as sxephil? Probably not. It'd probably be even more ironic than it is now. I guess it's really just like the tattoo.

NP: That's a very good analogy. It seems like you've just got started. But you've actually announced your retirement, a year from when you first revealed it, which was on your November 3rd, 2008 show. How will we get Philled in after November 3rd, 2009?

PDF: I don't know. I mean I've been trying to get behind a few shows doing different things –– not exactly The Philip DeFranco Show –– because I kind of just feel like that should die. I don't want to overrun my time because it'll mean a lot less to me. And so as far as where people will go...I don't know, I'm not sure where people will go. I mean I plan on ending The Philip DeFranco Show, but I definitely want to move on to something else non-Philip DeFranco Show-like.

NP: Aren't you just pulling a Cher, doing an endless farewell tour that you'll extend and extend?

PDF: I don't want to be like that rock band, no. When I say the show is over, I'm saying The Philip DeFranco Show. Will I make something online later? Possibly, but it's not like I'm planning on it, it's just The Philip DeFranco Show that's being done now is definitely going to end. Like you say, when I'm sXephil and I'm 84, I don't want to have that still on.

NP: I think a lot about living and dying online. We have Living Wills for those dying in the real world, but I think we also need to start addressing the issue of living wills for our online lives. I mean just because our real world brains and bodies expire, doesn't mean the plug should be pulled on our online beings. Would you want to set up a trust to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of sxephil, so geeks in a thousand years time can still find inspiration from you?

PDF: [laughs] I thought the world was ending in three years, and a day. I don't think what I have to say is that amazing that it should be cataloged and saved for the future. Like if people look back on my videos and are like, "Wow! This guy had problems growing up and decided to make videos everyday to somehow justify his existence." I don't know, I'll say "no" to that question.

NP: So you just want the plug pulled?

PDF: Yeah. I'm just not one of those people that's like, "I wanna leave my mark." What am I going to care?

by Shotgun Suicide Shotgun Suicide gets handy with a dipstick, showing you where to put it and how to keep it well oiled. (video)

Classic Set of the Day:


Bully - Silence



I chose this set as Classic set of the day because our movie "SuicideGirls Must Die!" is airing on Showtime this month!

Click here to find out the next time it is airing: http://www.sho.com/site/movies/movie.do?seriesid=0&seasonid=0&episodeid=136863

You can also download the movie now for only $5 by clicking here: https://secure.suicidegirls.com/mustdie/

Plus Bully is super hot even when she is dirty

xoxo
-missy

For a man capable of making so much noise, Gavin Rossdale is very soft-spoken, his somewhat guarded reticence being understandable given all that he's been through. The singer, songwriter and musician is currently enjoying his first Billboard Top 40 hit since the heady days when he fronted the post-grunge... more

For a man capable of making so much noise, Gavin Rossdale is very soft-spoken, his somewhat guarded reticence being understandable given all that he's been through.

The singer, songwriter and musician is currently enjoying his first Billboard Top 40 hit since the heady days when he fronted the post-grunge band Bush. For a while in the mid-nineties their singles ("Comedown" and "Glycerine") ruled the airwaves, and the band toured virtually non-stop -- with a quaint little Orange County band called No Doubt supporting them.

After the Bush's demise in 2002, Rossdale struggled to keep his identity in a strange La La Land amidst the turmoil of a lost band, a new marriage (to No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani), and the tabloid attention that came with it. Rossdale's 2004 release under the Institute moniker failed to make its mark. It was, "for all intents and purposes, a solo record, it was just a bad marketing decision to call it something else," says Rossdale, who picked himself up and came back with what he regards as his second solo album, Wanderlust, in June of this year.

The lead song, "Love Remains The Same," entered the Billboard Hot 100 at # 76, rising to #27 in October 2008. It remains on the chart for the twenty-fourth week at the time of writing. Rossdale describes the Bukowski-influenced track as a "drinking song -- my drowning of the sorrows song." And it would seem it has done just that, as its success allows him to sate his desire for the road with a full-scale tour scheduled for Spring 2009.

We caught up with Rossdale at his manager's offices in Westwood, CA, and chatted about the album, the song, and the feelings of isolation that inspired the rousing ode to friends, love and libations. But first, in the spirit of friendship, it seemed only polite that we formally thank him for counting SuicideGirls amongst his MySpace Top Friends.


Gavin Rossdale: I love SuicideGirls forever. Who doesn't? What's not to love?

Nicole Powers: So is that actually your MySpace? Do you keep it up, or is it someone else?

GR: I do it. I'm slightly obsessed about it. When I'm doing stuff in the day I always take time out. I keep up. There's a couple of pages now that I haven't answered, but generally I'm on it.

NP: So we're very flattered to be in your Top Friends then.

GR: Oh right, yes, you are!

NP: It's a very socially tricky thing, who's in your Top Friends and who isn't.

GR: It's a political statement. It's amazing, I see that over a million and a half people have watched my video on there. So there's a lot of traffic going through there. And I get some people who write to me and complain, like my guitar player who was like, "Why am I not in you Top Friends?" I mean he should be in my top friends, he's one of my best friends.

NP: It's worse than missing someone's name out during an award acceptance speech. At least now it's not restricted to just a Top 8. It's weird, I noticed one Christmas and New Year, not last year but the year before, that all the Brits were bored around the holidays and joined Facebook en masse. Everyone I knew.

GR: Yeah, I use Facebook, but I only really do it with people I know, whereas the MySpace is twenty thousand close friends who I'm not sure I know so well, but it's fun being friends with everyone. "Thanks for being my friend. Thanks for writing a comment." It's easy to do nice things for people.

NP: You've got a song called "Drive" on the new album. In the press notes you talk about the fact that it's about you being a Brit in L.A. and feeling alone.

GR: Alien, yeah. I've become reconciled, I really love living here. I don't have any problem with it, but at first I was a bit, you know, I didn't really know anyone, I was just here for love, and work, in that order -- because I could have worked somewhere else.

I think a lot about Soho in London, my old stomping ground, and going out in London. It's weird because I have a different life here. I moved here and my life is just different, it's a different style, you know. You kind of go to people's houses more here rather than actually really going out a lot.

NP: Well you can't go to bars, because you can't drink and drive, and you can't get cabs home very easily. It you're driving, a night out is two drinks and that's it.

GR: Designated driver -- or pregnant wife -- sometimes they're both the same person. [laughs]

NP: So you need to have another kid.

GR: No, no, no, I'm fine for now, thanks.

NP: You called the new album Wanderlust, and obviously, you spent a lot of your adult life on tour. Do you miss that? Do you have wanderlust right now?

GR: Yeah, I really miss it. Some people are born to be on tour and take it on, some people get done in by being on tour, and some people get done in by being on tour but love it. I think I'm the latter, you know. It's like it's a form of combat, with your body, with your mind, socially, you're ability to function with the same people in the same bubble. Do they drive you nuts? Do you drive them nuts? How you miss your friends and your family.

It's really tough. That's the reason why Bush isn't working right now, because one of the guys just doesn't want it anymore -- doesn't want the travel, doesn't want the fight. It reminded me of when I first started working on films. I was realizing that, God, it's such fucking hard work that even the crap ones deserve your respect. You've still got to slog it out and turn up for work everyday, and believe in what you do.

So being on tour, I love it, and totally miss it. I'll be going on tour soon. Now I've got a new complication because I'm so crazy about my son. I can take him for some of it but clearly not all of it, and that's a bit of a heartbreaker. When I was in Bush, it was all about leaving my dog. That was always the payback. I always used to think, "OK, you've got this unbelievable life, so everything has its cost." There's no free lunches right? That was the price. It was traumatic leaving my dog. It used to destroy me. I'd be silent, depressed, down for a couple of days and then I'd be, "Well, you're a musician, and things are looking up compared to where they were, and so you've got to deal with it and that's the price." So I'm sort of sensing that that's coming again.

It's a bit sad. I've been away on different trips, and I ring home and speak to him. He's just old enough now to speak to on the phone, and he says, "Daddy, get off the airplane." But yeah, I am looking forward to going and playing. I love playing. It's so fun to sing, it's such an ancient job. It's a minstrel. You wander in and you play -- it's just brilliant! The crowds...I mean basically, to be in a band, especially probably singers, you know, such needy people. This need for expression, and large gestures, and connection. 'Cause you're out on the stage, and even the most extreme form of performer, Johnny Lydon, being Richard III in the Sex Pistols, he wanted to hate everyone but at the same time he wanted to do it in front of everyone. It's the affirmation thing -- that you're worthy or something twisted like that.

NP: And being in a band, there's the constant camaraderie.

GR: Or not.

NP: You can hate these people, but you love them too -- it's like you often hurt the people that are closest to you.

GR: It is pretty testing to live at such close quarters with people, but I feel quite lucky. I mean some people you hear talk in bands about how, "Why would anybody be in a band when you could have the freedom?" If you can to be successful enough, you could have the freedom of not having to defer to someone else's opinions, no democracy, you know. But for me in Bush, you know, I really loved being with those guys, it felt very connected. We went through so much together, we didn't really wear it out. And if ever we wore it out between each other, it's pretty mutual and you'd just make it back up. I think if you start out as friends there's a pretty good chance you'll stay friends. So I feel pretty good about that.

NP: Do you still talk to the guys?

GR: Yeah, I mean I reached out to them. Two of the emails got sent back because I had the wrong emails in my Blackberry. But I heard from the drummer, Robin [Goodridge], he's on tour with someone and he's like... You know, I can't really work them out. They're English, you know, weird and a bit twisted -- you know, a lot of subterfuge. I mean they're not ringing me up. They probably know what's going on with my record but they wouldn't be ringing up saying, "That's' great!" Whereas the American friends I have are the kind of people that do that, but English people don't do stuff like that. It's way too nostalgic.

NP: English people tend to resent success rather than be supportive of it.

GR: Yeah, so, I haven't been hearing from them. The more the record does well the less I'm likely to hear from them. [laughs] But that's OK, I understand.

NP: With this record, in a way you've been able to create the best of both worlds, of being a band and being a solo artist. You recorded it almost as a band, in five days with five band members, hired guns like Josh Freeze. It's a choice situation, but you still have the control of a solo artist.

GR: I have and I love that. I've only ever made records actually playing as a band.

NP: In the notes for "Love Remains The Same," you reference Bukowski as an influence. Did you ever get to meet him?

GR: I didn't ever meet him, no. I would have loved to have met him, but never got the chance. When I first began to live in L.A. I'd be kind of [excited], you know, to see the areas he'd write about, and imagine the places he was.

NP: What were your favorite pieces of Bukowski's writing?

GR: My favorite book is one hundred percent You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense that was the one that really nailed it for me. And Play The Piano [Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument] Until the Fingers Begin To Bleed [a Bit]. There's obviously Post Office and Factotum, the novels, they were fun and irreverent, and like him as I got to know him through interviews and footage and stuff like that. But I mainly liked the poetry. I liked the brevity, and how succinct he was, and how he could put a whole world into a page.

It just has a way with it, which is weird, because I also liked [Allen] Ginsberg and Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes is a bit more flowery, like a proper poet, lyrical. "Lovesong" is probably my favorite poem of all time...Ginsberg is completely different, because he is super flowery, super stream of consciousness. I just thought if I had these disparate inspirations it would go to make a more interesting view. If you only had lyrical poets as a backdrop to stuff, like all the Beats, you were into all of them, it would be one-sided. Bukowski to me was so far removed from the Beats, he was much more alcohol and street and flop house and struggle and that side of life.

NP: Some of your Bush material, "Comedown" and "The Chemicals Between Us," referenced chemicals. Are they part of your life now?

GR: No, no, no, no. Just the fun follies of a life well lived.

NP: While you're having the fun and follies of life, when you're busy leading the life, you don't think about the fact that you might have kids, and they're going to read about that life. How will you explain that to them?

GR: Oh, evasive. Evasive, really evasive, really slippery. Just like poker-faced and slippery.

NP: That's your guide to parenting, poker-faced and slippery.

GR: I guess, on that subject. Because anyone I've ever known would have a very shaky leg to stand on if they're trying to sort of pontificate to their children. People I've seen in various states of entertainment. So it's a very tricky point. In fact that's the biggest thing that you've touched on. It's very perceptive, because it's like, it's the one area, it used to be that when you do interviews that would be the one area you didn't give a shit about. You'd let it rip because you want to be just as wild as Jim Morrison, and just as wild as the band next door. You know, if Liam's mad for it, everyone's mad for it, you know, all that stuff. And now it's like, "Whoa! Err? Hmm!" I got asked that the other day and got super slippery about it. Super slippy. Born Slippy. Now there's a great band.

NP: Parents have the stock phase, "Do as I say, not as I do." What do you think was the issue your parents were slippy about?

GR: My parents were evasive in a different kind of way -- busy -- and so that never really came to pass. The generations were so distinctly different. My version of fun and their version of fun, I think, were so separate. I don't think there was ever a case of like finding my dad's stash, or something like that. That never really happened, more the other way around, you know.

NP: You have a song called "Happiness." What's happiness for you?

GR: Happiness. [thinks] Happiness, well, it takes many forms. I mean I take that line of Spalding Grey, the great Spalding Grey. He talks about perfect moments. I don't know whether you've seen Swimming to Cambodia, he's an amazing actor. He's no longer with us but you should see Swimming to Cambodia. It's all about perfect moments. Life is just a series of perfect moments perforated by the fucking drag of the rest of it.

So happiness can be anything from, you know, I experienced happiness this morning when I was on a step at 8 a.m. helping my son crayon on the pavement, and eating toast and drinking coffee. I was really happy. Then I was also really happy last night. I was at a dinner for twenty-two people, drinking in a private room, eating amazing food, laughing and just having a really great time. And when I'm on stage, or when I finish a show; I played three nights ago. I played this party in Santa Monica, and it was so intense because there were acrobats, there were trapeze artists, there were flame-throwers, and all these stalls. I did this acoustic show, and the audience was like this close to me, all the way up. It was a party, it was packed, and I sang a bunch of songs, and it was just magic. I just thought it was one of the most funnest nights. And so I find happiness everywhere.

NP: You seem to have done really well staying focused on the important things: your family and your creativity. And you have been surrounded by a lot of tabloid shit. You got shit with Bush because you were either too much or too little like Nirvana, just by virtue of the fact you hit around the time everyone was obsessed with searching for the next big grunge thing, and obviously the elephant in the room is your marriage to Gwen, and there's that whole tabloid monster, but you seem to have done really well at just keeping your head down and staying focused. How have you done that?

GR: Because I realized that everything is so fleeting, and there's not enough time for the great things, let alone the crappy things. And clearly they'll be times when those outside elements begin to crush you, and the claustrophobia sets in, the shrinking wall of a Terry Gilliam film. As soon as you feel that way I just know the only way out is through, you know. So suddenly, if I realize it's really getting me down, I consider that that's all winning, and I'm losing. I'm just too English or Scottish –– I'm half English and half Scottish –– I can't stay down. I get hit down, and then I just get up. I just have to find a way through you know because what else is there to do? What other way is there?

And then the other one is to appreciate what you have. For every positive of course there's a balancing thing that is not as good and is taxing, but I just think that you can't expect to always have it your way. My life is so extreme, that when it's amazing it's shocking, and then when it's painful it's equally as shocking, so I just try to keep away from the pain.

NP: So have there been times when it's been too much?

GR: Yeah, but there is no such thing as too much. The only thing which is too much is death. So it's never too much. You may think it's too much. I always think, let the calendar flip and in a few days with a few nights' sleep...We're durable, we're all durable.

_______

Classic Set of the Day:


Dot - Distressed



Classic set of the Day nominated by lovelovelove
who will get a 3 month subscription for having this classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

lovelovelove nominated today's set because...

I think Dot's set "Distressed" should be considered for the classic set of the day. She's absolutely gorgeous - the girl that got me into Suicide Girls, in fact. The set is really creative, sexy, and classy. I loved it even more when I found out she did everything herself. So talented! I wish there were more sets like this one.

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

xoxo
-missy

by Blogbot (image) (image) Kingston the German Shepherd/Labrador/Rottweiler (pictured with his mistress Luana Suicide) INTO: Playing. NOT INTO: Not playing. MAKES ME HAPPPY: Killing squirrels. MAKES ME SAD: Being home alone. HOBBIES: Running after the ball and bringing it back, sleeping on top of mom... more

by Blogbot







Kingston the German Shepherd/Labrador/Rottweiler (pictured with his mistress Luana Suicide)

• INTO: Playing.


• NOT INTO: Not playing.


• MAKES ME HAPPPY: Killing squirrels.


• MAKES ME SAD: Being home alone.


• HOBBIES: Running after the ball and bringing it back, sleeping on top of mom and suffocating her, swimming in circles and eating bubbles I make with my nose, drinking out of the toilet.


• 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Bone, bed, water, Dreidel toy, rope toy.


• VICES: Leaving slobber on everyone I meet.


• I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Wanting to play, pooping and sleeping.

Get to know Kingston’s mistress, Luana Suicide, over at SuicideGirls.com!

Today's Blog is Brought to You by the Word: RETROSPECTION! (image) Well as I just hit 100k, I decided to post this blog to kind of reflect on my time here. *sigh* I have been on this site for very close to 8 years now. When I joined, I was 19 years old. When I first joined the site my username... more

Today's Blog is Brought to You by the Word: RETROSPECTION!



Well as I just hit 100k, I decided to post this blog to kind of reflect on my time here.

*sigh*

I have been on this site for very close to 8 years now. When I joined, I was 19 years old.

When I first joined the site my username was: AliceCat. That was also my log in until of course they changed that.

And oh how the site has changed.

In my time here, I even made it to the front page once and I didn't even have to get naked!


I started the site as AliceCat named after my cat, Alice, of course. But Alice, also became my favorite SG.

She is beyond adorable.

Over the years though, I have had many names. AliceCat, Boo, Assassin, Octogroupus (more on that in a moment), Mathilda, and of course Niobe.

Octogroupus was a name that was given to me by another member.....I want to guess Chazstrummer, but it might have been jonnytrrrash7 or RadioFrank. It came about, because at the time, I owned the most groups on the site. (See even back than I had to have the most of something ) The groups I owned were: Anne Rice, Ani DiFraco, ER, Linkin Park, Nine Inch Nails, Seinfeld, and Tool. Only two of those groups even still exist. Currently I own four: Brew Crew, Educators, Mixed Martial Arts, and of course, my baby, the first group I ever owned and created....Nine Inch Nails.

I have started countless threads. Some that are still going today. Most of them deal with my crush of the time. And I have had a great deal of them over the years. Trent to Josh to Keanu to Anderson to Mike to Edward and of course to Noah. My crushes are fleeting usually, but if I am going to be known for something it might as well be for crushing on hot dudes. D

There are so many old terms that no one uses anymore. Zot, Going Grey, Journals, okay maybe not so many, because those are the only ones I can think of.

It's amazing how many people have come and gone from the site over the years. I have met so many incredible people. I still have only met 3 members offsite. I always wanted to meet more, but living where I live it's not exactly boomin' with SG activity. But through this site I have met some incredible people that have been kind, generous and truly outstanding human beings. This site is so much more than a porn site. It's so much more than just tits and ass. It's about community. And anyone that comes to this site only looking to jack off, then they are surely missing out. I can not express in words what you all have meant to me.

From the time I got robbed and a bunch of you sent me CDs to replace the ones that got stolen. To Repus, who recorded an outstanding version of Footsteps by Pearl Jam for me. To Kosomot who sent me a fucking computer monitor when mine was wack. To Mildots, for all the wonderful cards over the years for different occasions. To Spacelola, Cosmo, and others that have bought me gift accounts to keep me around the site. Really, I simply can not express how much so many of you have helped me in some of my darkest times. It's amazing. You all rock!

I guess that is really all I can say. This site is more than a site, it's a place to call home. If you find that pathetic of me to say, then go ask the couples that have become a couple because of this site. Go tell that to a hopeful who suddenly became an SG. This site is not the be all end all of my life, but it is a part of it. And I am proud of that. I really am!

"I didn't quite know what to expect from this interview," confesses Jason Reitman. The multi-award winning 32-year old writer and director may be secure in his ability to produce great movies, but he admits to being "scared" at the prospect of being interrogated by SuicideGirls. more

"I didn't quite know what to expect from this interview," confesses Jason Reitman. The multi-award winning 32-year old writer and director may be secure in his ability to produce great movies, but he admits to being "scared" at the prospect of being interrogated by SuicideGirls.

It's taken us over a month to tie Jason down, during which time we've been communicating directly by Twitter and via his film and personal publicists. He's very much in demand right now. His first two movies, Thank You For Smoking, a satire about the inner machinations of the tobacco industry, and Juno, a dark comedy about teen pregnancy written by longtime friend of SG Diablo Cody, left indelible marks on the moviemaking landscape. Both films were unabashedly quirky, yet each achieved mainstream critical and commercial acclaim -- and more importantly sparked a dialog about their respective subjects that reached far beyond the confines of the entertainment world. It's perhaps this capacity to make us think and to spark meaningful discussion that is Jason's greatest gift.

Though Jason grew up very much within the Hollywood machine (Jason's dad Ivan Reitman produced and/or directed an impressively long list of titles which includes the beloved Animal House, Ghostbusters and Beethoven franchises), creatively he's always preferred to walk the less traveled path. Intelligent and idiosyncratic, his latest comedy, Up In The Air, is no exception. Starring George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer who chooses air-miles over attachment and celebrates his solitary existence, the film (which features real-world characters cast from the ranks of the recently downsized) ultimately takes flight on a path that our Hollywood-trained brains may instinctively resist. However, with a nod to Jason's libertarian leanings, the choice is right for Ryan Bingham, and that's what counts.

Though Up In The Air has just gone on wide release today, it's already been nominated for six Golden Globes, more than any other film in the class of 2009. Consequently Jason's press commitments have just got a whole lot crazier. To compound the pressure on his already over-filled schedule, he's just returned from a trip to his Canadian homeland, where he and his dad (who co-produced Up In The Air) were honored with turns carrying the Winter Olympic flame.

We finally caught up with Jason mid-afternoon on Monday as he was heading over to a satellite studio for a live remote appearance on the Faux News show Happy Hour. Once on the phone, Jason was beyond generous with his time, and over the course of two phone calls, one before and one after his TV appearance, we talked about the new movie, his affinity with its leading character, and a few other topics that only SG would dare to bring up.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Jason Reitman: I am in Los Angeles, calling from my car. I'm sorry that I'm calling in from my car.

NP: That is quite alright. I'm happy to be taking with you. I know that you've been a bit of a busy boy. I've been following your Twitter account, all the places you've been flying to and from. You also tweeted about SuicideGirls covering the movie, and you wrote about how you always wondered what happened behind our door.

JR: Yeah. My trailer company is across the hall from that door with the skull and crossbones on it, if indeed that is your guys' office.

NP: It was. We've actually just moved, but up until November it was our office.

JR: Fair enough. It always kind of was a curiosity.

NP: I'm just wondering what was going on in your imagination behind that door. What was the movie in your mind like?

JR: That's interesting. Let me think about that for a second. That's an excellent question. Well obviously there's a lot of tattoo and piercing appreciation happening, and I imagine heavy satirical dialog being passed back and forth, and probably things that I don't even want to say out loud.

NP: In one of your tweets on the subject you somehow thought we'd be chastising you for being "a VERY bad director."

JR: Yes, yes. Well I can't help but in my mind create linkage between -- I'm like blushing -- between the whole SuicideGirls' culture and perhaps the S&M crowd.

NP: And somehow, in the movie that's going on in your mind, Jason Reitman is in the naughty boy punishment room?

JR: Yes, exactly. Well, I'm under the impression there is a naughty boy room. It's a large closet sized room within the SuicideGirls headquarters and that's where these girls take very conservative boys and chastise them. I would imagine my fear going into a meeting within the SuicideGirls headquarters would be similar to the fear I had meeting Diablo Cody for the first time.

NP: So there's no need to ask if you've been naughty or nice this Christmas, you're just expecting a lump of coal in your stocking?

JR: No. I'm nice. But I guess that would go along with the mythology for me, that no matter what I would say I would be perceived as naughty by the Suicide Girl...

[Break so Jason can go live on Faux News' Happy Hour.]

JR: Sorry about that.

NP: That's quite alright. How was Happy Hour for you?

JR: Really strange. Did you actually watch that?

NP: I just saw a brief clip of it then had to run back upstairs because the TV's in another room.

JR: It's strange to do those live interviews where you're talking directly to a camera. You don't see who you're talking to and it's hard to build a rhythm because you're working with a little earpiece in your ear. And then you get asked a question about healthcare reform and it's like there's no good way to answer this question. I'm not going to weigh in on healthcare.

NP: Especially on a show called Happy Hour that's based in a bar.

JR: Right. Exactly. I mean look, I applaud them for trying to take politics down to a low-key kind of conversation. We have too little of that. We have too much arguing and too little conversation, so that's kind of cool. But, you know, there's something dark and insidious about all the cable news networks.

[Returning to our previous topic of conversation.]

I though about it a little more. I'm trying to imagine what's going on behind the doors of the SuicideGirls. And yeah, I think it's girls dressed like an American Apparel ad billboard gone wrong, intermittently having political conversations and making out with each other.

NP: Which is exactly how it is.

JR: See!!! Fuck!!!

NP: When I worked in that old office I'd be sat in a corner with my head down transcribing an interview. And because my office was the only room with a white wall, they'd do a lot of photography in there. I'd be completely involved in my own little world transcribing a heavy political interview with someone like Greg Palast, and then I'd look up and there'd be a naked girl standing on a box.

JR: [laughs]

NP: I don't know if you've seen that Flip Strip iPhone app where the girls are clothed and then you flip your iPhone upside down and their clothes fall off, well that was shot in my office.

JR: I'm going to make a very revealing admission here. I have both SuicideGirls' applications on my iPhone, although I've never played the second one, that one called Seduce [A SuicideGirl]. Because it's actually like a racy game and I find the only time I play my iPhone apps is on a plane and it doesn't seem like I can play that game on a plane...I think I would probably get in trouble, a marshal might actually tap me on the shoulder.

I remember David Cross used to do a whole bit about why do they sell pornographic magazines at the airport. Like is someone really buying Club Magazine, then bringing it on a plane and then leafing through it casually mid-flight?

NP: I think they could be going to the toilet mid-flight.

JR: Ooooh! Do you think that happens on planes?

NP: I'm sure it does. I had friends who worked as air hostesses and they would talk about that stuff all the time. They would just roll their eyes at the people who attempted to join the Mile High Club and would forget to do things like lock the bathroom door when they went in. And they'd laugh at how people would surreptitiously sneak up the isle one by one -- because obviously two people can't just troop into a toilet together, one person has to go in and then the other person has to sneak in. So they would watch these people and it would just be like comedy to them.

JR: You can't really sneak in. I think at this point if you wanna join the Mile High Club -- which I'm not a member of -- you probably just have to be ready for the admission that everyone's going to know exactly what you're doing.

You know it's funny, the scene in the movie where George and [his love/lust interest] Vera talk about that was a completely improvised scene. I realized that I needed to get them from this flirty conversation about their mileage cards up to the bedroom, and there just didn't seem to be enough connective tissue. They just didn't seem to have reached that flirtatious point in the conversation where they could just go up to the room. On the day of I said, "Hey, do you think we could do a little improv about how you need to join the Mile High Club?" We had a quick conversation about it, we set up two cameras looking at each of them so we could inter-cut the same shot, and they just went for it. It was just kind of amazing.

NP: From what I understand, the key is to do it in the toilets at the back of the plane because then at least people's heads are facing forward. Then you have to wait for the hostesses to be doing trolley service so there's none at the back of the plane watching the bathroom doors.

JR: Yeah, but the big question then is how do you leave to room? I guess once you're done you don't care. What are they going to do? Kick you off the plane at that point? So the point is, as long as you can get into the bathroom then you're fine.

NP: Yeah.

JR: And if you're really wealthy they now have these rooms, like Singapore Airlines and Emirates Airlines, they have actual rooms that you can have in first class. But then I guess there's no joy to that right? If you just buy your way in.

NP: Exactly. There's absolutely no sport to it.

It's funny, I was at the JPL open house [with my pal Heathervescent], and they were talking about Virgin Galactic's commercial flights into space. Some JPL scientist was saying he couldn't understand why folks would want to pay a fortune for the flights since they'll only allow time for about 15 minutes of weightlessness. He said it'd take 5 minutes to get up there and out of your harness, during which time approximately half of the tourists would get space sick, and that you'd only have about five minutes in zero gravity before you'd have to get back in your harness for re-entry. I explained to him that it was all about people wanting to join the 60-Mile High Club and have sex in space. The Mile High Club is not exclusive enough, it's all about the 60-Mile High Club.

JR: But what if you have performance anxiety and you only have five minutes?

NP: It'd be an expensive place to get performance anxiety.

JR: [laughs] You'd definitely want to pop a blue pill. You can't have any accidents up there.

NP: So Jason's tip for gravity-free flight is to remember to pack the blue pill?

JR: Pop a blue pill and pack the lube.

NP: [laughs] So I also noticed in an image you posted via Twitter that you conveniently condensed all the questions from your LA Up In The Air junket into an easy to use pie chart. I'm all about visual aids, and, since you've gone to the trouble of creating it, it'd be churlish of me not to make use of it. I therefore thought we should rattle through the top ten seemingly obligatory question topics with quick-fire word association-style responses so we can then move on to fresher ground. Does that work for you?

JR: That's fine. I mean it's actually a pie chart from all of my interviews, not just the LA junket. I've been doing interviews for about three months on this film, and it's a culmination of everything. So it's not only what the press of Los Angeles are interested in, but the press of the world.

NP: So the first one would be Clooney.

JR: Charm machine.

NP: Economy.

JR: Heartbreaking.

NP: Real people.

JR: This makes no sense, but what popped into my head was, "even better than the real thing."

NP: Project.

JR: What brought me to this project? Self-examination.

NP: Interesting, that goes into a question I have down the line. But back to the list, "Book."

JR: What attracted me to the book? Sitting right in front of me.

NP: Dad

JR: My hero.

NP: Anna / Vera.

JR: Two sides of the same coin.

NP: What's next?

JR: Labor Day.

NP: Miles.

JR: Embarrassing obsession.

NP: Technology.

JR: Love it / hate it.

NP: Going back to this idea of self examination, this film is very much in the same vein as Thank You For Smoking. Both films explore the dichotomy of how their respective super smart central characters justify their morally questionable career choices -- to themselves, their family, and the audience. They use their intellect and humor as a weapon against that which fundamentally is indefensible. I guess my first question is what draws you to these characters?

JR: Well I guess I don't find what they do fundamentally indefensible. I don't view these issues with levels of morality, I kind of feel they're just choices. I'm interested in the less favorably viewed choice. I like to take characters who have an open-minded point of view on an otherwise polarizing issue. And so issues like cigarettes, and teen pregnancy and abortion, and, not only corporate termination, but, even more so, the idea of living alone, are ideas where people have dead-set points of views. That really interests me, why people often think that they should tell other people what to think and how to act. I'm attracted to characters who kind of fight the party line.

NP: In interviews you've said that you see a lot of yourself in George Clooney's character. On the surface you've spoken about how it's because you fly a lot, but I guess underneath that there is something deeper than that going on....George's character, and the character in Thank You For Not Smoking, they do have morally questionable careers. Is there a part of you that sees being a Hollywood director as something less than noble?

JR: No. I think you're on the right track but the wrong road. At the end of the day I actually don't see anything wrong with what those guys do for a living. For me it's more a question of how do you simultaneously have those values and be that open-minded, but also be a parent or a member of a community. For Thank You For Smoking, the big question for me was how do you be a libertarian -- I consider myself a libertarian -- and a father at the same time. It's hard to have a heart and be a libertarian, and yet that's exactly how I consider myself. I consider myself to be tentative and have a big heart but also to have fairly cold libertarian views, so they just kind of clash.

Juno for me dealt with the idea [of] when do you decide to grow up? So hidden within this film that seems to be about teen pregnancy and adoption for me is a movie about the moment that you decide to grow up. And me, as the guy who directed it, I think I was 29 or 30 when I directed it and I had just become a father, that was kind of a big deal.

With this new one, hidden within a film that seems to be about corporate termination and the economy is a movie about the decision whether to be alone or not. Being alone is kind of a controversial idea in this society, and it's certainly something I deal with all the time. Even though I'm certainly a rooted person by Hollywood standards -- I'm a father, I'm a husband earlier than most in this industry, I have kind of a close-knit family -- I still daydream about waking up in a city where I know nobody and have nothing, and I consider that to be a fairly dark side of me.

I supposed that's the beauty of making films. I get to explore different lives and that's one of the reasons I do it for a living. Every two years I get to make a new movie and I get to put on a new set of clothes. I get to see what it would be like to be a libertarian lobbyist living in DC. I get to see what it would be like to be not only Juno, but one of the Lorings in Juno. In this movie I get to see what it would be like if I actually never settled down. If I just lived by my daily itinerary what would happen. And in that I get to almost apologize for the darkest parts of my psyche.

It's funny, I watched Nine the musical last night and there's a great scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis [who plays Guido Contini, a character which is based on the Italian playboy / director Federico Fellini] and Marion Cotillard [who plays Guido's wife, Luisa Contini] have a great conversation about this exact thing; That as a director you strangely get to apologize for the darker parts of your brain through your movies, and I think I do that.

NP: Also, and this is what Nine explores too, the world excuses you because you're an artist. The world excuses you for your darker behavior and peccadilloes because it's acceptable as an artist.

JR: Right. And for me it's not, you know, for being a roving philanderer or alcoholic. For me it's more for the deep recesses of my mind, and the sheer amount of being absent that happens because of my passion for filmmaking.

NP: You talk about Juno being about the point the character decides to grow up, but the crux of this movie is that moment when you finally think Clooney's character is going to choose the emotionally mature option. He has a choice of growing up and becoming an emotional adult or continuing on his previous course. Is there a part of that which applies to you in that Hollywood allows you to be a permanent child?

JR: Yeah, certainly. That kind of permeates the industry. Although strangely, even though my films seem to across the board examine this behavior, I am kind of a notable exception to the rule. I was born an old man, and that's something that everyone seems to know about me. That would be the wonderful juxtaposition between Diablo and I, that she will die a young soul and I was born an old man.

NP: You talk about the film being a reflection of the guilt that you feel being absent from your family because of your filmmaking...For me, one of pleasures I feel being up in the air is that it's the one time you can have your phone switched off guilt-free and for the most part you're disconnected from the internet. It's the one place you can switch off and disconnect from the world. I can imagine you have such a high-pressure career, and the pressure of being a family man too, so airports and airplanes must be somewhat of a sanctuary for you.

JR: Yeah, it's funny, that's originally the reason I started going to movie theaters. I started going to the movies because that was one of the few places I could disconnect from the world. At a certain point, because of cell phones, they stopped being that way, but airplanes continue to be that way. It is the one place in the world where you can break free of everything and live un-tethered, where no one can reach you, and you can kind of be whomever you want. You sit next to a stranger and you have the kind of conversation that you would never have with someone you knew well. You learn about professions and ways of life that you otherwise would never hear about, and you sometimes open up and say things that you wouldn't say to someone you know well.

NP: I'm not looking forward to the time when all economy seats have web access as standard. That's just going to make an airplane an extension of the office, and that's going to change flying.

JR: That's happened. It's done. I mean, this is the last year of flying without internet that's pervasive. You know, half the flights at this point have it, within a year all of them will. And you're right, it will be a sad moment because it is the last place where you talk to strangers. And there's something exciting about talking to strangers. I love being surrounded by strangers. I love going to Coachella alone and walking amongst strangers. I like sitting on planes and starting conversations with people I know nothing about, knowing that there's sort of a strange time limit on our relationship, and that's going to go away. It's almost done.

NP: When I interviewed Diablo Cody, she spoke about how at some point she'd like to see "an extreme directors cut" of Jennifer's Body [a film which Reitman co-produced but didn't direct]. She said the movie was originally "longer, looser, weirder, more ambiguous." Are there any scenes in Up In The Air you regret losing that you had to cut for whatever reason?

JR: On Up In The Air I had final cut, and even on the previous two films I basically had final cut. I'm a big believer in tight movies. I don't like any extra fat on them. I don't like anything that breaks up the rhythm or the tone. I think the best directors cut of all time is the Cohen brother's Blood Simple where they actually made the movie shorter.

The Up In The Air DVD will have all the extra scenes and it has the directors commentary on why I deleted those scenes. I think perhaps there is one moment, and it's four lines of dialog that I really questioned whether or not I should take out, and that's the only one. It was a little personal character moment. But no, I don't think you'll see two and a half hour director's cuts of my movies. That's just not how I think as a director.

NP: Out of interest, what were the four lines?

JR: It was George Clooney talking to his sister Kara, played by Amy Morton. They had just gone to the rehearsal dinner of their younger sister, played by Melanie Lynskey, and they're about to go to sleep. They're just about to walk into their hotel rooms when George says to Amy, "Can you believe she's getting married, she's just a kid." And Amy goes, "Actually she's 37-years old. She's just squeaking by." And that was it. I loved that line. I thought it was unusual and ballsy, and the kind of thing you don't see in other movies. It spoke to the pressure on women in their late thirties, the kind of identity crisis that women go through. It was the kind of line that enough people asked me [about] when they read the script that it was just dangerous enough to be great. The only reason I lost it was that we were just in that wedding sequence a little too long, that was about it.

NP: If looking back on this movie that's the only area that you have ambiguous thoughts about, you must be pretty damn pleased with this movie.

JR: [laughs] Well you know I make very quick decisions and I don't really re-think them much. I make a decision and I move on. I think that's part of what makes me a good director. I don't over think things, at least on films. I may over think in real life, but on my films I make quick decisions and I move on, and I don't regret them.

NP: You're Canadian. Are you still a green carder or have you done the U.S. citizenship thing?

JR: I'm a green card. I will give up the right to vote as long as I don't have to do jury duty.

NP: Is that due to your libertarian leanings or about the inconvenience factor?

JR: Pure inconvenience. I work every day of the year and the idea of not being able to work for a week is just terrifying to me. And honestly, I think as a voter I would just get frustrated.

NP: I hear you. One final question, you carried the torch in the pre-Olympics ceremony, and indeed it was your director father that passed the torch on to you, which has all sorts of metaphorical connotations. If that was a scene in a movie my eyes would be rolling with the clumsiness of the heavy symbolism.

JR: Yeah, and I'm asked so much about it and there really is nothing I can say more than it is what it is. My father's passed the torch to me in life and he's passed the torch now literally and there's no metaphor, there's nothing I can add that will bring any more relevance to that.

NP: Did it spark any internal thoughts, or any kind of discussion between you and your dad?

JR: No. It didn't create any conversation about torch-passing. All it really created was a conversation about how fortunate we are to be sharing this moment together. So often fathers and sons just don't even get along, whereas he's my hero. That we get to share this moment in our work life together, and after decades of having exhaustive conversations about filmmaking to actually make a movie together, for it to be successful and then in that same year for us to carry the torch for our country and feel that Canadian simultaneously, it was a moment that left us both in tears. There's no words to describe how prideful I think we both felt.

NP: Well congratulations to both of you.

JR: Hey, thank you very much. Have a very happy and healthy 2010, and let the rest of the folks at SuicideGirls know that I continue to be a big fan.


Up In The Air opens on wide release in theaters today.

For Ville Valo, life as a musician is very surreal, or very "Dali-esque" as he might say, and he's not referring to the painter's infamous mustache. In some ways Valo is still waiting for the day when he wakes up and finds out it's all been a giant LSD experiment in the Finnish... more

For Ville Valo, life as a musician is very surreal, or very "Dali-esque" as he might say, and he's not referring to the painter's infamous mustache. In some ways Valo is still waiting for the day when he wakes up and finds out it's all been a giant LSD experiment in the Finnish military, where institutional illusions of grandeur and dreamlike oddities smash artistic ambition through the looking glass of fame, personal casualties be damned. "It’s like 'Alice in Wonderland'," he says. "Because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time...surrealism actually exists in your everyday life...you’re there 'in the looking glass' so to speak."

At 30-years-old, the singer has spent half his life in the limelight, fronting a handful of local bands in Helsinki, Finland before forming HIM in the early '90s and almost instantly being hurled towards star status in Europe and soon after, worldwide. It's a surreal succession of events that began with Valo as a teenager working in his father's sex shop, to now fronting one of the most popular rock bands around. His has been a life where time seems to run backward, then forward, faces come, go and change shape, and record labels push and pull in a laissez-faire game of chess where a hit single is king and the artist merely a pawn. "It is a little weird," Valo adds. "But that's life, isn't it?"

The wounded romantic turned rock surrealist endures it all with a wink and a healthy laugh, of course. With six studio albums, numerous hit singles and a devout fan base, the musicians in HIM are not want for false accolade or sympathy. For the band, it's a life filled with adventure and all the humor one could imagine. Completed by bassist Mige, guitarist Linde, drummer Gas and keyboardist Burton, the band dubbed it's Sabbath-meets-Depeche Mode sound as "Love Metal" long ago, though HIM's newest album, Venus Doom (Sire/Warner), ventures away from the band's pop sensibilities and leans more towards its Scandinavian melancholia roots. It's an album Valo wrote while holed up in a cabin in Lapland, far away from the hustle of the city and even further away from the pains of a troubled relationship, a friend's suicide and the throws of alcohol abuse that would later land him in rehab.

Sober now for months, Ville Valo took some time after browsing antique sofas to chat with SuicideGirls. In between fits of tongue-in-cheek laughter we somehow managed to talk about the new album, sobriety, and his mission in life, which is, fittingly, to have his own definition of love in Webster's Dictionary.

Erin Broadley: Hello. How are you ?

Ville Valo: Hello there. I’m doing fairly okay, thanks for asking. I’ve had three Red Bulls and eight cups of coffee. I’m like a Duracell [Energizer] Bunny, just hopping around the house.

EB: Hopping around, beating your drum.

VV: Just short of being beamed up by UFOs.

EB: What was that Michael Jackson movie where he morphs into a bunny?

VV: Moonwalker. [Laughs] I don’t know what that was.

EB: [Laughs] Some horrible thing with a claymation bunny.

VV: Well, Michael Jackson is one of those characters that you hope your brain will be like a hard drive you can just defragment and, like, erase the files you don’t want to have in there.

EB: Right, right. He’s had some memorable moments.

VV: Indeed. But you know, R. Kelly is taking care of that now.

EB: Oh man, have you seen the Trapped in the Closet DVD?

VV: Not the new one, but the first one. Bits and pieces. To be honest with you, it was so psychologically demanding I wasn’t able to watch the whole thing through.

EB: It’s pretty intense, [laughs] there’s a lot of hidden meaning in all its layers.

VV: Yeah, it’s very, very deep, [laughs] very deep soaked in urine. There’s nothing wrong with taking a leak but at times people do, you know, take their leaks in places that are not appropriate.

EB: Yeah, just don’t pee on the wrong person.

VV: That’s very well put.

EB: Alright, well, on that note, how are things going so far with the release of the new record?

VV: [Laughs] Everything seems to be going well. The band’s happy and we can’t wait to get back on tour. I had a really shitty last year and it’s been kind of tough on me. I went to fucking rehab and shit. I had nearly both of my feet in the grave. You know, I’m not the only one and I’m not so self-centered that I’d be sitting in a corner cursing God, “Why me? Why me?” It’s just that I found myself in a funny position like R. Kelly [laughs] but…

EB: [Laughs] But you handled it a little differently.

VV: [Laughs] Very differently. I had my meltdown, but I kept all the liquids inside of me. But everything is fine, it’s all good.

EB: So things have kind of balanced out for you?

VV: Well, everything is kind of new and kind of weird. I had a long-term relationship, we were engaged and we broke up. We were recording the album at the same time and me battling with the booze…a lot of shit hitting the fan in all directions, at the same time. A lot of it was caused by myself, nobody else. I just didn’t have the time to decompress and have quality time with myself [laughs].

EB: Right, light some candles and have “me time” [laughs].

VV: Oh my God, I hate that term “me time”. I love the fact that I had somebody say, “I’m really sorry I have to get going because I’m missing myself.” It sounds corny. It sounds like a sailor sitting on his hands just to make them numb just to be able to jerk off. But yeah, things are looking pretty good. It’s kind of cool after a year of traveling to be able to be home for a week and a half and actually buy that toilet paper and do laundry and do the dishes.

EB: Right. Do the normal, day-to-day things.

VV: You can do even normal things in a very abnormal way. So it’s always a challenge and it’s always an adventure if you make it one.

EB: Well, being in bands since you were a teenager, your whole development of what normal life is has definitely been a different challenge than for the average person.

VV: It’s different, it’s not better, it’s not worse. It’s a lot of traveling. I’m really glad that I’m blessed with the opportunity of traveling and having this way of life, spending all this time with my band mates who I grew up with. That’s a luxury a lot of bands don’t have.

EB: You’ve said before that writing albums can be really disastrous, emotionally. How do you pull yourself up and stay grounded after making a record? It’s a very intense way to live and it can be very manic. No wonder it destroys so many young artists, both personally and in their relationships with other people.

VV: Well, you know, I’m not a quitter. So when you wake up and you’re walking out and it’s raining and feels like R. Kelly sitting on top of a cloud and peeing on you…

EB: [Laughs]

VV: When you feel miserable and all that, you feel vengeful. I do feel that life is a challenge. It is a pain in the ass and if you’re fucked up it makes it easier. I’m not fucked up anymore so I feel very challenged about everything now.

EB: Alcohol is an amazing filter.

VV: Yeah it is. It kind of happened with me not thinking about it. There’s just a tremendous amount of partying available. When you’re touring in a band there’s always a cause for celebrating after a good gig, or if you fucked up a gig there’s always a reason to get shit-faced because you feel bad about it. There’s always a reason, so it was perfect for me to be in a position where I was shitting and vomiting blood. But now I’ve gone through that and now even thinking about a pint of beer makes me feel nauseous. I had to walk that line. I went to the doctors and they said I had to go to the ER. I said, “No I can’t because I’ve got to do a couple of interviews” [laughs]. So I was that, before I got the blood tests and everything back.

EB: Literally, the press was becoming the death of you, you can’t do that.

VV: Fuck no, man. I tried.

EB: If you throw up after this interview I’m going to be really, really upset.

VV: [Laughs] Fair enough, fair enough. They said I’ve got either I’ve got to stop drinking and calm myself down or it’s going to be heart failure next. You know, it’s a lonely life being sober, missing all my bar friends and everything, here on my own playing acoustic guitar, playing forlorn love songs, trying to pray to the Devil to get myself a new loved one to write some songs for. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to drink or party in moderation. My last bender lasted more than two years, getting fucked up every single day. It’s not healthy but obviously it’s a way of life. You get a different social scene and you care about different things, based on the idea that you’re not happy with yourself or you’re not feeling comfortable with yourself so you just want to numb the pain by using something whether it’s legal or illegal. I just had vengeance in me and was pointing my middle finger up toward the cloud where R. Kelly was pissing on top of me [laughs].

EB: [Laughs] Take that, R. Kelly!

VV: That’s the reason why I turned out to be a proper Scandinavian satanist. [Laughs] Yeah, but everybody’s got to find their own way. I’m still getting used to it. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been actually alone in a house.

EB: With yourself and your “me time”.

VV: Yeah, with the “me time”. It’s “me and my guitar time”.

EB: Exactly, which is be a more satisfying relationship than most, probably.

VV: Well, they never stay in tune and they’re fucking downright bastards.

EB: Well, at least you don’t have to kick them out of the house the next day.

VV: Yeah, you don’t have to saw your own arm off when you wake up in the morning.

EB: One thing we’ve talked about before is that it’s really hard for you to separate fantasy from reality in music, mainly because you live your life in the music that you write. That seems like something that could trigger the emotional fallout that happens when you write a record.

VV: It is emotionally devastating but that’s how I like it. Let’s say it’s good to be a white boy dancing badly on the razor’s edge, if you know what I’m saying. You know, it’s not necessarily the white boy thing. I’m just a shitty dancer that’s all. Just the fact that I’m not purposefully trying to find myself in tough situations, but the world in itself it is a pretty tough place. Turn on the TV and watch the news. I just can’t do that anymore. It just makes me so sad.

EB: You said recently in another interview that life as a musician is a very [Salvador] Dali-esque experience.

VV: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m living my life the best way I can and I don’t know the perception of the band or me as a person outside of myself. It’s not like I’m sitting up in the morning, sitting in a fucking Gothic chair.

EB: Or having midgets bring you morning tea.

VV: Yeah, with trays of cocaine on the top of their heads.

EB: Oh God. Rise and shine.

VV: Yeah, oh my God, ooh, I don’t even want to think about that.

EB: Yeah, let’s not. Because we don’t want to throw up, right?

VV: Why not? They have phone sex, why can’t you have phone vomiting sessions?

EB: We could, we could throw up in tandem over the phone. It’ll be really romantic [laughs].


VV: Exactly. Purge on beautifully, my dear [laughs]. But, you know, at the end of the day you are one with your art and everybody’s an artist. Everybody’s a piece of art. Everybody’s got a story to tell. Everybody tells it in different ways, some people tell it the way they walk, some people tell it the way they talk or the way they smile. You’ve just got to have some imagination. [Being a musician] is surreal and it is very surprising that you never know what’s around the corner. It’s weird because phone calls happen, all of a sudden an album is on the charts, and all of a sudden you’ve got to fly tomorrow somewhere to meet somebody, like, let’s say a video director whose videos you watched since you were a teen. Things like that, it’s very surreal so in that sense it is an adventure. It’s like Alice in Wonderland because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time. The surrealism actually exists in your everyday life. So you’re there 'in the looking glass' so to speak. It is a little weird. But that’s life, isn’t it. It can make you feel like, “Whoa, what the hell is going on right now?” But it’s also really beautiful. It’s more of a laugh when you’re sober. There’s a great comedy in me coming out one day. I wish that it would be like The Truman Show, there would be somebody secretly recording.

EB: All of a sudden you wake up and you find out that the whole thing has been this big experiment. They tap you on the shoulder and say, “And… scene. That’s a wrap, guys” You’re like, “What?”

VV: I’d fucking love it. It’d be so fun. I’m waiting for that to happen. With the surrealism in everyday life, that’s something that actually could happen.

EB: Exactly, well, if that ever does happen to you…

VV: I will call and let you know.

EB: Let me know. I didn’t sign any release forms.

VV: [Laughs]

EB: [Laughs] Well, your music definitely has a wickedly humorous side to it as well. Would you mind telling me how humor plays a factor in your music? A lot of people would consider it really emotional and melancholy.

VV: There is humor in melancholy as well, you know. It’s like existential humor. It’s funny that single individuals and billions of people are sitting alone in a chair and all sad about the fact that he or she lost a relationship or whatever. It’s a weird thing. We’re like fucking ants, building up our own den and house, to do what? To live there and maybe procreate someday? I am a miserable bastard in the most positive sense of that term. So let’s say the stuff I’m writing about at times is so demanding that humor is the only thing that helps me through the day and night, and the mornings with the ridiculous amounts of coffee I drink. We were talking about the surreal, the Dali-esqueness of life being in a rock band or my life in general. You know it’s just nice that it is like a cluster fuck that you can’t separate the humor from the sadness. And I don’t want to. It’s nice to find yourself laughing at the wrong spot.

EB: You told me once that the best way to express emotions is through music and not through lyrics. That’s something I find really interesting because a lot of your fans really connect with the particular words you use in your lyrics and the emotions they convey.

VV: What I’m trying to do, my mission in life is to get thirty different definitions of love into Webster’s Dictionary. That’s my mission in life. [Definitions] that really, really do explain the emotion. To be able to verbally explain how people really do feel. That’s what I do and that’s my new challenge. My first challenge was to be able to express myself through music and now I’ve learned it and I’m really happy with it because it makes me more of a whole person. That would be an interesting thing to do in life, to concentrate on emotion so much and to be able to verbalize it so well that it would make the dictionary.

EB: That would be nice.

VV: At the end of the day I just want to be happy.


SuicideGirls has teamed up with HIM and is giving away a Fender Squier Stratocaster autographed by the band. Leave a comment, and be entered to win. HIM will look over the comments left by members and choose a winner. For more info go here.

HIM is currently on tour. Go to www.heartagram.com for more information

Classic Set of the Day:


Silvi and Sweetness - Aquamatrix



Classic set of the Day nominated by eezv
He will get a 3 month subscription for having his classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

He nominated another Silvi set, Strikes Back but also brought up Aquamatrix and honestly how can you not love this set?

He says: " I’m a newbie but I think that my subscription has already paid out."

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

xoxo
-missy

In the past few months I’ve spoken with a number of incredibly talented and iconic musicians including Mike Patton, Les Claypool and Page Hamilton. All three of these men have made their nut and name with super cool yet somehow popular music, oftentimes carving out their niche by paying for their music... more

In the past few months I’ve spoken with a number of incredibly talented and iconic musicians including Mike Patton, Les Claypool and Page Hamilton. All three of these men have made their nut and name with super cool yet somehow popular music, oftentimes carving out their niche by paying for their music themselves. Frank Black definitely ranks right up there with these unique performers. Black first cracked the music scene wide open with his preeminent band, The Pixies. In addition to making music with The Pixies, Black has had a exceptional solo career. His newest album, Fast Man Raider Man, is a bit more chill than previous endeavors, but it is certainly no less dynamic.

Buy Fast Man Raider Man

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up?

Frank Black: I’m just driving my son Julian to camp.

DRE: How old is he?

FB: He’s eight.

DRE: Does he know how cool you are?

FB: Yeah he does [laughs]. He likes to be around sometimes when the press is involved especially photographers. I think he might have ambitions of his own.

DRE: Does he play music yet?

FB: No, we’re going to drama camp today just to give you an idea. He dances and stuff but he is in the Pixies movie.

DRE: I was really surprised when I popped your new album in and found out how mellow it is.

FB: What do you mean? I’ve done mellow before.

DRE: Sure, but I was just surprised that every track seemed mellow. Not in a bad way or anything.

FB: I don’t know, I mean, I’m just, I just feel that you. Well you know…you’re right, it’s mellow. It’s mellow [laughs].

DRE: Did you just not want to put something on there that wouldn’t be as recognizable as a Frank Black song?

FB: No, it doesn’t really work like that. I just write a bunch of songs. The Nashville guys rock more like the Rolling Stones than they realize. But the difference is that they’re all of the same vintage, the same generation. Heck we had Ian McLagan who was almost a Rolling Stone himself. But a lot of these guys, especially the American guys, play with a certain amount of restraint. It’s just the way they play rock music as opposed to people like the Rolling Stones who play things a little more blown out, a little more amped up. So if I like something a bit more restrained or a bit on the mellower side, I think of that situation as extra restrained or extra mellow. But to generalize what they’re actually playing I don’t think it’s dainty or anything like that.

DRE: Right, it is not going to be played on any soft rock stations if that’s what you thought I was saying [laughs].

FB: It is that end of the palette. It has a certain je ne se quoi. Pick something from the really rock end of my career like the record Doolittle. In reference to those records, yes there are songs that are played in an up tempo aggressive style but mixed in among those songs are also mellow songs and songs that are downright silly. So your observation is right, there are not any heavy rock songs on this album. Maybe except a song like Johnny Barleycorn or something but to me a song like End of The Summer is more of a Leonard Cohen-y vibe. Those kinds of songs are truly the heaviest of all. Leonard Cohen doesn’t have to yell at you to get his point across. He just has to say it very calmly and very coolly. It’s macho in a much different way.

DRE: Do you feel like you’re less aggressive personally?

FB: One would hope. One would hope that as a person when you’re 40 years old that you don’t have the same knee jerk spontaneous stupid reactions that you had when you were 25. So hopefully you gain some worldly wisdom and that’s why when you meet an older person and when I say older I mean someone 50 years old and they’re flying off the handle and aggressive and intense, it’s extra awkward [laughs]. You just go “Wow, what’s up with that dude?” If you’re at the mall and you run into some older person who has got all this aggression it feels wrong. As opposed to some younger doofus who belongs to a fraternity. You cut him a lot of slack because you just go, “There’s a guy who doesn’t know a thing about life.”

DRE: For your next project will you swing the other way and do something more aggressive?

FB: Well I don’t have a lot of vision. I just write songs and they come out the way they come out. But I suppose that there might be something in the air before I start to make a record. I might go, “Yeah, I think it’s time to rock out a little bit” or “I think it’s time to not worry about whether or not it’s going to rock and let these dudes play what they’re going to play.” But you don’t necessarily just sit around and make a concentrated effort. You don’t analyze everything that far, you just do it. It’s still rigid and music is still rubbing the muse so you don’t want to pigeonhole the muse.

DRE: I read that you recorded this album in Nashville. Was that important to get certain people to play on the album or did you want a Nashville mindset?

FB: Certainly the engineers and the studios itself have a certain atmosphere which is different than say, LA, London or New York. It is not so much about city but it’s indirectly about the city. Making records is not about ambience. You’re in a room that has four walls and a roof. Frequently it’s an industrial space. In the case of Nashville there are studios in other people’s homes, which is not that uncommon these days, but whatever ambience is at Cowboy Jack’s place is because of Cowboy Jack not because it’s downtown Nashville. Maybe it would be different if I were in New Orleans or something. For me, making records is very much about work. Sometimes the studio will be prepare for your arrival and the assistants will roll out the oriental rugs and start lighting incense and be burning Jesus candles to try to create a vibe, an atmosphere. Some people like working in atmospheres like that but as soon as I arrive, I go “What the heck is going on here? Blow out all these candles and turn on some frigging lights.” I don’t want ambience, I want the ambience to be in my record and I need to see what I’m doing here so I can capture it with my microphone plus the incense dries out your throat. The mood is on the record. It is in the way the people play. It’s not external stimuli, in fact, the less external stimuli you have the better. The less drugs and alcohol the better, maybe some coffee but you don’t want to have lots of stimuli. The muse is a mysterious thing, but then there is also all the practical mechanics of using all of your muscle memory and your knowledge about the way that you play, about the way that the other people play and keeping that heightened. Long gone are the days where the band sits around and says, “Hold on we need another five minutes with the bong here before we can get in the mood to play our art.” That’s just a crock of shit.

So you start to have a more serious approach. A lot of people say, “Oh yeah, you’ve been recording in Paris. There must be something about that city that really helps it be creative.” I would want it to be that way like it is in the movies but truly when you arrive you could be anywhere. There’s the tape machine, there’s the bathroom, there’s the drum room, there’s the control booth so it’s got nothing to do with Paris. You got to be tuned into the record.

DRE: I read that you did the last Pixies tour to pay for Faster Man, is that true?

FB: No. well I guess in a literal sense, maybe. I make money from a variety of sources but I can’t say I’ve ever done a tour to pay for something specifically. You just try to run around and make as much as you can. Sometimes you have good years and sometimes you have bad years.

DRE: You mentioned the Rolling Stones before and very often it seems they will record a new album just to get out there on tour.

FB: They go through a tour to make money and they don’t necessarily need to make a new record. But if the Rolling Stones don’t put out a new record that maybe just a 100,000 people are going to go buy it’s symbolically bad because you’re not a viable premium band, you’re county fair. That’s what The Pixies have to do at this point, we’re at that junction where we’ve got to decide if we a creative viable force now or are we county fair. Right now we’re still getting away with playing a few gigs under the guise of a reunion. That’s worked great but it can only last so long.

DRE: Can you clarify whether or not The Pixies are doing any new work?

FB: The thing is, I can say things and people can interpret what I say however they usually have some preconceived notion that they want to be confirmed. So if I say “Gee, I don’t know if we’re going to make a record.” Then, The Pixies Will Never Record Again is the headline. If I say we might record then the headline is Pixies to Record a New Album. I’m not a politician or Kofi Annan but you guys or your editors, if you’re in the mood, will just make stuff up. Even if it’s not in the interview. It happens to me all the time.

DRE: I’m sure it does.

FB: The British are the worst of all. The other day I did an interview and they even had the nerve to print the interview in a question and answer format to give the illusion that this is what I said verbatim. They actually printed all my responses verbatim, which would be fine, but the clever part was they didn’t change what I said; they changed what the questions were. That cast my answers in a whole different light. I had been thinking about writing to the editor saying “Shame on you! I know I’m just some rock dude and you’re just some goofy rock magazine, but you’re giving everyone the impression that I’m responding to question x but you didn’t give me question x you gave me question y. You’re deceiving everybody. You could have just asked me the question and now you’ll never know the real answer.”

It could be termed as a “juicy question” but they didn’t say it to me in a really juicy way, they phrased it to me in a dull way. So I gave them a little answer when they could have had the juicy answer to the juicy question. Now they’ll never know because they didn’t have the guts to just ask me the question because they assumed that I would get all thrown in a tizzy and hang the phone up or something. That isn’t true. I’ve only hung a phone up once in my life on a journalist and I’ve never restricted a journalist ever from asking me anything.

DRE: Would you like to do more Pixies material?

FB: I would love to.

DRE: What do the other people in the band want to do?

FB: The main thing the band is wrestling with is that we haven’t put out a record in 12 years but the records that we did put out are held in fairly high esteem. They’re all still in print and you don’t want to mess with that necessarily. You don’t want to screw it up by putting out a bad record or even a record that’s really great but everyone says it’s bad. So there’s a lot of hesitation, if there weren’t a lot of hesitation maybe we would have made a record three years ago. But here it is three years into the reunion and we’re going “Yeah, I think I’d like to make a new record. Should we?” We haven’t had any reason to make a new record until about now.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Classic Set of the Day:


Elly - Dark Roast



Classic set of the Day nominated by Miri
She will get a 3 month subscription for having his classic set chosen as classic set of the day.

She nominated today's set because...

Elly is gorgeous and an amazing model. Her poses and expressions are incredible and she takes a simple idea such as coffee beans and makes a sexy set out of it! I love the fishnet body suit as well.

If you are interested in nominating a set as classic set of the day, e-mail: classic@suicidegirls.com

xoxo
-missy

For five years, Hugh Laurie has had to defend the character he plays on television. As the star of Fox's House, Laurie still finds viewers, be they fans or critics, asking him questions about Dr. Gregory House's often unpleasant demeanor. Why does he have to be so mean? Are you saying it's... more

For five years, Hugh Laurie has had to defend the character he plays on television. As the star of Fox's House, Laurie still finds viewers, be they fans or critics, asking him questions about Dr. Gregory House's often unpleasant demeanor. Why does he have to be so mean? Are you saying it's okay to be rude if you save lives? But despite his questionable bedside manner, House continues to be a ratings winner -- one of the reasons perhaps being that his obnoxiousness is administered with an equal dose of humor.

This is no surprise for those who know where Laurie comes from. An education in comedy at Cambridge University's Footlights lead to a hugely popular BBC sketch show, A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The show co-starred Laurie's longtime comedy partner Stephen Fry, and ran for four seasons in the U.K., though, unlike Monty Python, which was also spawned by the Footlights, it never made the leap over the pond. Still mining the comedic vein, Laurie played an archetypal upper-class twit called George opposite Rowan Atkinson's exceedingly evil Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth. Laurie's breakthrough role as Mr. Fredrick Little in Columbia Pictures' family-friendly film Stewart Little gave Laurie his first mainstream hit in the U.S. as a leading man, and also proved that he could pull off the American accent he would later call on with House.

This year, Fox is rearranging the furniture, moving House, which is now half-way through its fifth season, to Monday nights. 2008's final episode had House make the uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture of buying the object of his "affection" -- Dr. Cuddy (played by Lisa Edelstein) -- her old medical school desk for her new office. Expect that to pay off with more romantic tension in the upcoming weeks.

With the show midway through production, Laurie is still dressed like House for our interview in jeans and a sport coat, with stubble perfectly maintained by Hollywood stylists. Off duty, however, Laurie's real voice and posture make him a distinctly different person; The abrasive voice is replaced by a calming lull, and those listening to it find themselves looking up constantly during conversation, since there's no camera bringing the viewer up to Laurie's rather elevated eye level.

Question: Why do people care if House is nice? If he can save their life, can't he be as mean as he wants?

Hugh Laurie: I don't know the answer to that. I suppose because doctors, holding as they do the power of life and death, patients are already sufficiently unnerved...To then be in that relationship with a human being who doesn't appear to treat his responsibilities with any great sense of delicacy is I suppose unsettling. It frightens people. Here is a guy with this power to save lives and he is not subject to the normal social niceties. Maybe that's rather threatening.

Q: Does it surprise you that five years in, we're still discussing this?

HL: It's surprised me every step of the way: five shows in, five days in. I'm constantly surprised.

Q: Forget about all the medicine. House is the funniest show on television. How do you approach the comedy?

HL: I shouldn't be saying this. I'm going to let you say this, but I agree with you. I love it. Every script I find hilariously funny. Some of the wittiest things I've ever read. I just relish it. It's part of what makes House to some degree forgivable. I think his wit and his playfulness go some way towards mitigating his frankly clumsy social skills.

Q: It shows respect that he thinks you're smart enough to understand what he's insinuating.

HL: Right, that's true. That's true. You can never accuse him of patronizing anyone. He's gloves off right from the start. He's not going to go gently on anybody. That's true.

Q: Do you get more positive fanfare for Dr. House or negative?

HL: Well, because Dr. House's moral failings, or his social failings anyway, are all mitigated by his skills as a doctor. If he was even one percent less skillful, he would be simply intolerable. So really I think a lot of people are saying, "I wish there were someone there who I could count on to get to the answer, no matter what that person is like. They could be nice or not nice, but if they get to the answer, the answer's everything." When you're staring death in the face obviously, you want the best, irrespective of his nature.

Q: In the entertainment industry, have you seen brilliance as an excuse for bad behavior?

HL: Boy, that's a good question. Yes. I have. Not that often. I have more commonly seen bad behavior and thought, "Oh, you're not good enough to get away with that." But yes, I have. It's actually pretty rare. Oddly enough, my general experience is that most people on both sides of the camera are a pretty congenial and collaborative bunch. Prima donnas, I know there's this sort of popular picture of prima donnas stamping in and out of their trailers and refusing to do this, that and the other. I've actually not seen a lot of that. A couple of times but they're rare. I will of course give you their names directly after this.

Q: Is it excusable when they have the goods?

HL: It would not be excusable if you were, let's say, married to them or if you were trying to do business with them in some way. But as an audience member, yes, I have seen performances and thought to myself, "I don't really care what it cost that person or the people around that person to achieve that performance. That's a wonderful thing. That's a wonderful piece of music, or acting, or whatever it is." I have thought that was worth it. But of course I'm not the one who's had to pay the price for it.

Q: What is your level of interest between the case of the week and the overall story arcs?

HL: That's the awful challenge for these guys, the writers, to have those things in perfect balance, because the case every week must be a sufficiently intriguing and satisfying mystery, a structure on which they can hang everything else. And yet it can't be everything because that's not what the show is. The show is about much more than that, but that sort of central spine has to be there. It's very, very difficult, I imagine, to get the balance. It's incredible how frequently they manage to pull it off.

Q: You know, it's never the first thing they think it's going to be. Why don't they just rule out the first thing and save 10 minutes?

HL: Because we've got to fill 43 minutes. We could I suppose get it right the first time and then play cards for the rest of the show. Maybe we'll do that one day.

Q: What is going to happen with House and Cuddy?

HL: I honestly can't tell you very much because they don't tell me. I look about 10 minutes ahead in my life. That's usually the way I operate. It's partly a function of having so many problems to solve right that second that I actually have very little energy to project into the future and very little memory of what happened. Honestly, someone asked me just what happened in the last show and I honestly can't remember. I think I may be permanently brain damaged.

Q: How would you like it to go?

HL: Well, of course as fictional characters, as a viewer, I would want those characters to find some sort of peace. They're two lonely characters I would want to find some sort of peace. But as an actor, in some ways, I'm sort of less interested in what happens than in how it happens, because that seems to be David Shore's genius -- in the way of executing something. Someone once said, "Ideas are 10 a penny. It's all in the execution." It's all how it's done. For example, that kiss [earlier in the season] was just a beautifully written scene. It was an unconventional, unanticipated and rather beautiful moment. That's his skill so that's what I look for. I look for the how, not the what.

Q: Talking about House's voice, it's more than just an accent right? He doesn't just sound like you speaking American.

HL: I am only partially conscious. I had no plan. It wasn't a calculated plan. When I started doing the pilot and the first few shows I was sort of experimenting. The voice that I settled on, I just thought it was right. I can't really say why. It just came out that way. To begin with you are experimenting with fast, or slow, or high, or low. What sort of pitch? What sort of rhythm and volume? Is he a shouter or is he a whisperer? This is where I wound up, I can't really explain it.

Q: Is that a lot to think about because you also have the limp to focus on?

HL: There are days when it does slightly get on top of me, I must admit it. The peculiar thing about it is that it doesn't get any easier. This is what astonishes me because everything else you do in life, everything from making omelets or playing violin, get easier the more you do it. Not putting on an accent and I don't know why that is. There is something in ones brain that must resist it.

Q: Have you ever read anything in one of the scripts that is so outrageous even you have a hard time, like "How am I going to get away with this?"

HL: No. I think I never have read anything that was un-actable. I've read things that I thought, "Wow, this is going to be tough. We are going to have to get this right because if we don't this whole thing isn't going to work at all." But no, David Shore is just simply too smart a writer, as are his co-writers. They are just too smart to really hang anybody out to dry, as it were.

Q: Has anything ever made you hate him as a person?

HL: No, no. I completely agree that House is not an easy proposition. He may not even be morally a good man. But then, the truth is we don't only like the people who are morally good. Of all the friends we have, are they the 10 morally best people we ever met? No, of course they are not. That is not how we choose our friends. Thank God, because it would be a weird universe if we did.

Clearly this is a troubled character. There was an episode, one of my favorite moments in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, "Somewhere out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language." Of course you heart sinks and you think it's going to be, "I love you" or whatever. He says, "Please help me." What a philosophically fantastic idea, that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing. Actually, House is a character in need of human contact and some kind of redemption. That "Please help me" aspect I think is an important element in the show.