SCREW MADE YOU

Thank JayCrayCray the 70's were so sleazy, fun, and depraved. If you've ever tried to grab a quick minute and shamelessly rummage through poor old mom and dad's stuff, chances are you have been gifted with at least one gloriously lewd, hairy, drugged-out sex artifact. You might find a decrepit half-joint in a John Denver album or one of those really giant, really loud-ass old vibrators that (compared to my glittery jelly purple device from Spencer's gifts) looks like a scary white truncheon made of a whale jaw. But thanks to my Dad's healthy sexual Scorpio curiosity, ransacking his attic recently was a historical adventure into the 70's when almost everybody was attending viewings of Deep Throat. I exhumed a dusty treasure stack of disintegrating Screw newsprint magazines that totally made the Playboy stack nearby look like a bunch of Newport News catalogs!

GERMANY - CRACKLING SCULPTURES

If it’s possible to make some humans look like grotesque pigs with the help of plastic surgery, why shouldn’t we do it the other way around and turn pigs into grotesque humans? Brazilian artist Zé Carlos Garcia constructs such things, along with super-insects, four-legged animals with wings, Carnival trucks, and a whole bunch of other things.

CANBERRA - PARLIAMENT HOUSE GETS A MASS EXORCISM

Very, very, very strange things were afoot in Australia's capital city this weekend. Allow us to set the scene... A few weeks ago, we saw photos of a blood stained pillar on the top of a hill overlooking Parliament House and heard associated rumours of satanic rituals and animal sacrifices being performed by members of what is apparently a large Wiccan population there. It turns out that national Christian organisation, Catch the Fire Ministries, heard about it also and took this as further evidence to support their belief that Satan is at work in and around our policy-determining hub. In order to combat this evil, they organised a mass "prayer offensive" at the site with the triple-barreled intention of 1. reversing any spells cast by the witches, 2. hopefully changing politicians minds about things they disagree with such as abortion and gay people and 3. sending out good vibes to ensure a bushfire-victim free summer. Really, what on earth could go wrong?

MASANOBU SATO IS A WORLD CLASS WANKER

Who cares about the Olympics anyway? People who go on about adrenalin rushes and the "natural" high brought on from running ten kilometers a day are invariably boring assholes. What about taking part in a competitive sport which is actually fun and doesn't leave your legs feeling like they've been twatted with a pool ball in a sock for five hours? We're talking about San Francisco's annual Masturbate-a-thon, which is a bit like those telethons that they used to do on TV in the 80s to raise money for charity but with jerking off instead of dumb-ass celebrity dance routines and teddy bear mascots. There are prizes in different categories, from "Longest Squirt" to "Most Orgasms," but the real sportsmen are found in the "longest time spent masturbating" event. Fuck long distance running, this is a solid-gold endurance event. Holder of the title for the last two years is Masanobu Sato, a worker at Japanese sex toy manufacturer Tenga, who this year beat his previous record, coming in (ha) at NINE HOURS AND FIFTY EIGHT MINUTES. We got in touch with Masanobu to find out exactly how he lasted so long.  

FOUR BOOKS THAT WILL MESS UP YOUR CHILDREN

Sexual education books are hardly necessary anymore: the internet will teach kids everything they need to know, and usually even more (DVDA, look it up!). But the funny thing is that some sex-ed books that were published in the last century can’t have helped any children at all to grow into sexually healthy adults. We know this because we met Jasper Smit recently, a Dutch comedian with one of the biggest collections of sex-ed books in Holland. And because we’re a bunch of rotten dirtbags, we immediately asked him for the nastiest things in his possession. “Most of the books we have are neet and sweet and give you decent advice, like that you shouldn’t have sex with someone if you don’t like the other person”, Jasper said. “But then I also have these books that will make them scared to death of masturbation and fill them with a lifelong repulsion of everything that has to do with sex.” We yelled at him to show us. And he did. Kids, shield your eyes--some stuff's ahead.

MALE-ON-MALE BLOWJOBS ARE NO LONGER GAY

It used to be my one and only holy idol of all times was John Galliano, the charismatic, long-haired Ultra Gay with spray tanned fashion pecks. I cut every single photo of his shows out of the stacks of fashion magazines my mum got me and stuck them on my wall and in my scrapbooks. I thought it all looked "absolutely fabulous!" However, having seen his latest collection on the last Paris fashion week, I found myself just plain saddened and disappointed.

JESSE EDWARDS DRIVES A PARTY BUS BUT PREFERS CERAMICS

Before Jesse Edwards got his start in oil painting and ceramics, he was running wild in the streets of Seattle, terrorizing all paintable surfaces. I have known of Jesse for some time but never really knew too much about him other than that he had a huge personality, scared the shit out of most people, and ran with the gnarliest graffiti crew in the city. But it turns out he's rather chill--besides painting landscapes of Central Park for your grandparents' living room, he also is working on a pilot for an informative Bob Ross-style how-to-paint show that will air in the next few months. We talked about that and other things as we went for a bike ride when he came to visit New York.

SMILE, YOUR PHOTO'S ON RADAR

Photo radar tickets are a multi-billion industry in the US, and at $181.00 per pop, more than a $100 million business in Arizona. From December 2008 to March 2009 over 471,000 photo radar citations were mailed to drivers in our great state. (If you can’t do the math that’s over 5,000 photo tickets per day.) They have virtually nothing to do with highway safety, but they have everything to do with banking coin. If you can wrap your head around the full magnitude of the public and private interests that depend on ripping off drivers through photo radar traffic tickets in Arizona you begin to understand why this unethical (and probably illegal) system continues to grow every year, and why vigilante groups have emerged to fight a different type of outlaw in the new west.

STAN BUSH IS AN INCREDIBLY EASYGOING MAN

I love stupid action movies-- the stupider, the better. I love needlessly ripped millionaires slurring their way through lines written for children by hacks. I love weapon-arming montages and questions answered with explosions and painfully tacked-on love side plots and guns that always slide just out of reach. But most of all, I love the songs in these movies--particularly the uplifting hard rock jams that play during the credits or montages of the really cheesy movies. Thus, it follows that I love Stan Bush, and worship him as my king.

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.