NEW YORK - LOOK WHO STOPPED BY

Visiting NYC sometimes seems like more fun than living here. Like when photographer Jaimie Warren and designer Ari Fish and rapper Casey Guest just drop by the office with tales of how they met up recently in Berlin with their housemate Peggy Noland (all four of these girls live together—what a fucking insane dollhouse that must be) and they broke into spy stations and dilapidated geodesic domes. And how tonight Ari has to go to some Marie Claire red carpet event and watch that Project Runway thing she was immediately kicked off of (more on that coming soon) with that crazy hag Nina Garcia and a bunch of people would be watching her watch. Meanwhile, Jaimie will be at the New Museum for that party celebrating the release of Shoot we already told you about, to which she’s contributed. We asked Jaimie more about what she’s been up to.

FILM ISSUE EXTRA - THE VOICE BEHIND THE MYSTICAL TALKING FOX

I'll never understand film critics. How they can go on and on about some movie for like a million words and still manage to miss the main point of the film. Take Antichrist, for example: OK, yeah, it's pretty at the beginning, and then it's boring, and then Charlotte Gainsbourg snips off her clitoris. But the best bit, the truly great moment in this film, the bit that elevates Lars Von Trier in my eyes to where he already thinks he is, is the motherfucking talking fox. To use an adjective that isn't really an adjective but should be, it's totally Viking.

RUSSIA - TEA PARTY WITH SERGIY, THE SOVIET TERROR PRIEST

Look at big fat Father Sergiy with his big rosy cheeks, bathing smugly in the Lord's all-encompasing glory as he thinks about another chocolate biscuit, or maybe about reciting a psalm. But just because he looks like a hill in a cassock, don't be fooled, as Sergiy is Moscow's first Holy Father of Fury, and not someone to fuck with. In his teenage years, before God found him, Sergiy Rybko led a grassroots anti-Soviet terror unit against the old communist government, before being steered toward a hippie sect that sent him traipsing across the desert, where he was nearly massacred by the Muslim gurus he'd come to visit.

BERLIN - SONGS TO WEAR PANTS TO

So you’ve got an incredible song you made up stuck inside your head and unfortunately you have no idea how to get it out of there because you don't even know which way to hold a guitar. You should ask this guy Andrew what to do. Andrew is one of those very few people who's shamelessly talented, but still very, very nice. In fact, Andrew is so nice that he’s utilizing his talent to help poor idiots who have an idea, but without any know-how. For the last years he has been tirelessly writing songs on request on his home page.

NEW YORK - TRENT HARRIS IS SICK OF BEAVER AND SEAN PENN'S BIG, FAT STUPID FUCKING FACE BUT HE'LL TALK ABOUT THEM ANYWAY, AND OTHER THINGS TOO

In the late 70s, while testing a video camera for Salt Lake City TV station, Trent Harris shot a piece of footage that would define his entire film career. In the video, “Groovin’ Gary”—a bell-bottomed teen from the truck stop town of Beaver, Utah—is photographing the station’s helicopter. When he realizes Harris is filming him, he unleashes a flurry of celebrity impersonations, hamming it up as Sylvester Stallone, John Wayne, and Barry Manilow. There’s nothing extraordinary about the impressions, but the kid’s gusto and desire for fame make it engrossing even in an era of narcissistic video blogging. When Gary invited Harris to shoot a Beaver community talent show where Gary was to perform a Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting” in full drag, Harris couldn’t refuse. He edited the pieces of footage together and called it The Beaver Kid. You've probably seen or at least heard about this masterpiece.

LONDON - TUNA POISONING AND SENSORY DEPRIVATION

We told you last week that our buddy Ryan McGinley has a show at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London right now. Jamie Taete, one of McGinley’s scariest fans, grabbed him at the opening to talk about Gossip Girl and seat belts (and photography – there’s some talk of that as well). 

AUSTRALIA - OUR COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER TALKS WITH SASHA GREY

Writer's block is the journalistic equivalent of a soft cock. When doing something that is such an extreme combination of fear and excitement, it can make it difficult to come up with the goods required to complete the job at hand. This is exactly how I felt when I got a call from my editor asking if I "minded" interviewing one of the world's biggest porn stars while she was in Sydney to promote her first mainstream film--Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. Of course I was like, "Sure, no, that's fine I don't mind at all, think I can manage that." And cue 14-year-old school boy enthusiasm combined with what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do panic. After all, it's not very often you meet someone that you've seen in every sexual scenario imaginable before you have even shaken her hand. The following is my conversation with Sasha Grey, quite possibly the most exciting 20 minutes of my life.

BERLIN - THE BLOODY MISCARRIAGE OF GERMAN GORE

Back in the 80s you had to be the greasy-faced loser in the video store or lucky beyond your years in order to score an illegal copy of Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik. Owing to this, and the fact that he makes great films, Jörg has since become renowned as a talisman of German Gore. His sick masterpieces have faced so much censorship that today, it’s still neigh on impossible to lay your hands on hard copies—Nekromantik II: The Return of the Loving Dead, for example, was nationally confiscated and the legal case dragged on for two years before the movie finally went on limited release. 

FILM ISSUE EXTRA - CARTOON PORN THAT USED TO SEND PEOPLE SCREAMING FROM THE THEATER

While the film industry of today is flooded with reams of CGI Pixar blargey about fish that get lost in monster factories (or something like that), back in the 70s, animating films actually involved painting and drawing. Vince Collins made some of the most hallucinatory animations you can imagine back in those halcyon days. We had a word with him about turning one of the world’s favorite children's books into a trippy porno where a girl disappears up her own vagina.

NEW YORK - GIMME SOME BREAD WITH THAT CHICKEN SOUP

Child Abuse is a band that sounds like the reanimated corpse of Miles Davis hatefucked all the guys in Morbid Angel, moved to Brooklyn, and raised the resulting children on Bach, Nintendo, and methamphetamines. Drummer Oran Canfield has had quite the life. His dad is neither a dead jazz musician nor a crazy death metal dude, but someone even more intense: self-help guru and Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield. He split when little Oran was a toddler, leaving him and his brother with their itinerant therapist/hippie mom. By the time he was 13, Oran had done time at an anarchist private school, learned to juggle under Wavy Gravy, and spent two years in the circus while living at a San Francisco punk house. He later dropped out of art school, got addicted to heroin, played in a bunch of noise bands, and almost died on multiple occasions. If anyone's entitled to write a memoir at age 35, it's this guy. So he did. It's called Long Past Stopping, and it's coming out September 15. We talked to him about it.