MELBOURNE - A SPOT OF LIFE DRAWING

Last week, The Rapture were in town to play Park Life. Wary of subjecting them to yet another of what must be hundreds and hundreds of tiresome interviews, we got our lawyer/life drawing model friend KK to do the questioning. In the end, neither of the guys needed us to tell them to keep their day jobs, but it's fair to say that while Vito was much more forthcoming as a conversationalist, Gabe was probably the better drawer.

TAKE THIS BLOG TO WORK - A MASCOT FOR THE WNBA IS A DOG, BUT ONLY ON THE OUTSIDE

You remember that last guy we interviewed, Greg, who had a lifetime of killer jobs rolled into one existence? We were hoping that finding one successful, super nice, multi-talented dude was just a fluke, and we could rely on the rest of the world to be like us, losers hardly working. Turns out, maybe the world is full of these success stories because we found another one. His name is Joe and besides owing a successful hardware store and creating a blossoming urban garden center, he runs around sidelines of WNBA games wearing a gigantic dog costume, pumping up crowds and turning on furries around the world!

NETHERLANDS - RUTGER HAUER THINKS HE TWIRLS TOO MUCH

You know who Rutger Hauer is. He's a badass. He's played in over 100 movies, and here's a list of our favourites: Blind Fury, Wedlock, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Sin City and Blade Runner. That's right, Blade fucking Runner. Luckily for film as a genre, Rutger's now spreading his awesomeness around by giving yearly master classes for groups of professionals and students of film at the same time. They're held in the city of Rotterdam, in Rutger's home country the Netherlands. If you're one of the Chosen Ones to attend, you'll not only make a short movie under Rutger Hauer's tutelage, you'll also be given lectures by people like Paul Verhoeven and Roberto Rodriguez, and in the past, Chris Nolan as well. All right, enough name dropping, here's the interview. 

JAPAN - THE RELUCTANT NORTH KOREAN FILM STAR

On January 4th, 1965, a confused young sergeant in the US military named Charles Jenkins drank ten beers before setting off on his nightly patrol duty along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where he had been serving for the past year. Having previously been shuffled back and forth between South Korea and US outposts across Europe, he feared his next deployment would be in war-torn Vietnam. Replaying in his mind the horror stories he’d heard of the battles going on in south-east Asia and afraid of dying in the jungle, in his boozy haze he made a snap decision. Drunkenly he stumbled over the border into North Korea with his hands in the air, giving himself up to his communist enemies. He would remain there for 40 years before escaping.

A FIST IN THE FACE OF GOD - IMMORTAL'S APOLLYON AND I HAVE A BEER AND A CHAT

Immortal bassist Apollyon took time out from organizing festivals (sorry to mention Aura Noir again), touring, teaching kids music, and playing in six or seven different bands (he's lost count) to come to London and meet me for an interview. Here's some of what we talked about over a few beers (and a lot of Pantera) in The Hobgoblin in Camden last week. By the way, did you know that he played bass for Gorgoroth at the now infamous Krakow show? Well, now you do.

LONDON - HE WHO CREATES DRUG CULTURE MUST HATE IT

As 1989 moves back into journalists’ crosshairs and we’re treated to one more round of documentaries on the roots of British club culture – as the familiar who’s who zoo of Mike Pickering, Carl Cox, Danny Rampling, The Hartnolls, Mr C, Tony Coulston-Hayter, and so on all traipse across our screens to tell us again how “mental” it was at Shoom – James Palumbo, founder of Ministry of Sound, is one key figure of the period who won’t be grinning a mouthful of ground-down molars back at the world. In fact, you won’t see him at all.

AUSTRALIA - A CRUSH ON ANNA BILLER

Anna Biller makes movies about sex and sexy women who are smart, which is a super weird coincidence because she's exactly the same way. Take, for example, VIVA, essentially an ode to the swinging 70s that encapsulates all the best bits of Playboy, Russ Meyer and John Waters films, and lonely-heart love letters written by housewives in need of satisfaction. It was directed, written, produced, and edited by one Miss Anna Biller, and it was her first film. She also stars in the movie, which is lucky because she's awesome.

AUSTRIA - VOLKER GERLING FLIPS PEOPLE OFF

Volker Gerling journeys from town to town, carrying a hawker’s tray full of flipbooks, reviving the tradition of hobo craftsman in his own way. A film academy graduate turned self-proclaimed flip-bibliopegist, he entertains people with a one-man motion-picture theater. Remember that photography was a gateway drug into motion pictures--and when you take it back to flipbooks, time can actually flow through your fingers, he says, and he’s fascinated with the gaps.

LOS ANGELES - DESTROYING THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY WITH FILM

When I was scanning the shelves in the video store two summers ago I was shocked to see that Transformers had made it to DVD so fast. It had come out in theaters like two days before, yet there it... ohhhh, shit. That's not Transformers. That's Transmorphers. Months passed, and more kept popping up. The Da Vinci Treasure. The Day The Earth Stopped. Snakes on a Train. The Terminators. AVH: Alien vs. Hunter. Sunday School Musical. Every big-ticket movie that comes out gets scooped by some fuckers who rush out a straight-to-DVD Weird Al version first.

LOS ANGELES - THE PROCESS OF THE PROCESS

Throughout the 40-minute ceremony at the Silent Movie Theater recreating a mass by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, people wearing dark robes (of course!) and carrying lit candles (no doubt!) spend time extolling the virtues of both Christ and Satan (“May the water give me life, Jesus Christ; Purify me with fire, Satan”) when they’re not singing Jefferson Airplane-like songs played by a four-piece band of hippies.