Y Marks the Spot

The Designer’s Drugs: Foxy Shazam/Conspirator

Medium: Album

Stimulus: Foxy Shazam ‒ Church of Rock & Roll

The way I’ve described this album in my head is that Church of Rock & Roll is what would happen if Mindless Self Indulgence decided to become the Darkness. Sometimes Foxy Shazam throws out the Darkness milk jug and goes straight for the Queen cow’s tit, but as a whole this album isn’t grandiose or conceptual so much as it is a no bullshit, straight up amazing rock and roll album.

The only drawback to be found in this wailing tribute to the spirit of rock and roll is that Foxy seems to have chucked out most of its delightful weird in making a beeline for rock legitimacy. In contrast with its previous works of high quirk, the strangest thing to be found here comes in Foxy’s merger of ten pound ball rock swagger and Sir Mix-a-lot’s love of big butts in “I Like It,” a track which is far and away the album’s best. Yet for as much as Eric Sean Nally continues to wail like rock’s gospel diva (the track “Last Chance At Love” reads like triumphant Joan Jett Top 40), the words which accompany his frenetic tones and the music to surround it all is pretty straightforward even while it tears up the walls. No complaints from Nally about hipsters calling him gay here. Oh well. It’s a more than fair tradeoff.

Medium: Album

Stimulus: Conspirator ‒ Unlocked – Live from the Georgia Theatre

“Park Ave,” the track which kicks off this collection of electronic instrumentals filtered through rock instrumentation, is kind of a false start. As opposed to the rest of the album, which reads like a very workmanlike DJ set, this first song meanders and sways around, giving the impression that Conspirator is something of a jam band. Nothing that follows sounds anything like that first track, but for some reason I couldn’t shake that jammy first impression.

To call Unlocked a serviceable performance is no insult, especially since Conspirator proves here that it’s a hell of a band. There is a well-executed musical theme which runs throughout the set which makes a lot of its chapters sound quite similar both in sound and tempo. Even Conspirator’s appropriation of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” fits the style, chugging away with so much of the usual march that the end result is much less cover than sample contorted to fit the overlying musical agenda. In such a world, the final song, “Retrograde,” could have been notable for little more than bucking the formula and being a rock song with its own time signature. Luckily, it’s also a really good track in its own right, a concise conclusion that answers the album’s spaced out opening by being both unique and connected with everything prior.

It’s probably true that had the music of Unlocked been released as a studio album with the same structures, it wouldn’t have worked out as well. The fact that Conspirator released this as a live performance gives all its familiar themes and beats a legitimacy and excitement that would have had us music critics bitching about everything sounding the same had it come in the studio pill. In any event, the band sounds fantastic, rendering such distinctions pointless. Here, excitement trumps architecture.

April 24, 2012
Categories: Album, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: 2 Comments

Krangbang

Shredder! You lured me from Dimension X

With the promise of conquest and hot Foot Clan sex

Now my Technodrome’s home is in Earth’s molten magma,

And those turtles stay triumphant while I still haven’t shagged a

Single purple robo-ninja, shit, I’m still just a brain!

I wanna get mindfucked, but all you do is complain

Cause you can’t get your turtle soup, and the fights you always lose,

While I sit around here waiting for the secret of your ooze.

Shredder! Build me a body so you can bone it!

I wanna unzip your fly like it was Baxter Stockman

And then I’ll make you crumble like you were one of my rock men

I’ll keep your cock Rocksteady while I Bebop your balls

And gnaw like Rat King on your fat thing in the Technodrome halls

I’ll give you schizophrenia like it was VD

Then we can teabag the Neutrinos and drop deuce on Usagi

So go ninja go ninja go! Respect what I’m sayin’

Cause you ain’t Tatsu, bitch, and I ain’t goin’ or playin’.

Shredder! Build me a body so you can bone it!

Now is the Splinter of my discontent!

Yeah, I wanted a body, but this is where you went?

Great, you can finally can open my can

But it’s attached to a tubby rubber bald eunuch man!

I’m a galactic fucking warlord, no one’s running because

You dressed me like a go-go dancing punker from Zardoz!

So stop the stomach skullfucking and give me some dread

Or I will toss your fucking salad with the fork on my head

March 20, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Poetry . . Author: Y . Comments: 1 Comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: Beavis and Butt-Head, Vol. 4

That Mike Judge has returned to where his bread was first buttered and resurrected Beavis and Butt-Head to self-satirize yet another MTV generation is cause for celebration. This collection of the show’s first revival season shows that this isn’t a mere retro-humping cash grab; in fact, Judge’s years of work on the more straight-laced King of the Hill has clearly made him a better storyteller, and the evidence is that these new stories of his bastard boys are some of the best Beavis and Butt-Head tales to date. Beavis and Butt-Head are the same chuckling, hopeless white trash they’ve always been, and their misadventures are no less pointless or destructive as before, but now there’s definitely a much smarter sense of comedic timing in their antics.

Watching Beavis spaz out into his caffeinated alter ego Cornholio and become a cult’s messiah may feel sort of inevitable, but the twist in which he gets bored and unknowingly sets his loser friend Stewart up for hot culty group sex is kind of a nice payoff. Showing Beavis and Butt-Head as unwitting pawns of the Intelligent Design and anti-Planned Parenthood movements makes for some bizarrely pointed social commentary. (In the latter, the pair take a Jesus fundie’s assertion that a women’s health clinic is a whorehouse seriously and enthusiastically, with delightfully painful results.) The episode in which Beavis and Butt-Head confuse a field trip to an old timey tourist village with time travel results in some hilariously dim-witted attempts at causing time paradox.

Yet the best episodes are the same now as before, featuring the idiots rambling around town with no agenda, warping their environments with their askew worldviews. Nothing in this collection was so delightful as the episode in which Beavis and Butt-Head reacting to a supposed apocalypse by raiding a 7-11, or the one when they simply wandered around the mall like gleeful teenage perverts, or Butt-Head making fun of Beavis for the rest of their lives because an onion made him cry.

If there is a problem with the revival of Beavis and Butt-Head, it’s that everyone is now in on the joke. Like the metal bands they revere, age has made these two moron savants respectable. Where once Beavis’ wide-eyed pyromania had to be hushed and up due to a kid supposedly self-immolating in imitation, and the pair’s destructive tendencies had to be preceded by a Don’t Do This At Home disclaimer, our twitchy friends are once more given free reign to smash shit and shout that fire is cool. (Beavis also makes a few references to being molested, which comes off as disturbingly comedic.) And today, I doubt that anyone howls that Beavis and Butt-Head is poisoning the youth of America. People have finally caught on that the show is at its core Looney Tunes in human form, giving it an aura of benign slapstick.

Where this becomes a problem is when Beavis and Butt-Head know they’re cool. Despite being from a time when MTV had total control over youth pop culture, the old series wasn’t big on name-dropping pop culture to prove its cred. Instead, they cheered for the awesome videos and verbally mauled everything that didn’t pass their standards of cool. As such, the show became something of a musical tastemaker in its own right.

Today’s Beavis and Butt-Head are much more with the times and behind the curve. They riff on Twilight. They reference Grand Theft Auto. They know the entire cast of Sex and the City. (Sure, that knowledge is only used to suggest a mash-up sequel to Sex and the City and The Human Centipede, but still). Worst of all, they watch a lot of Jersey Shore.

A few blessed music videos show up for Mystery Science Theater-style mockery in Volume 4, but far more often, the modern Beavis and Butt-Head watch a lot of shitty MTV shows. I know that between the old series and now, MTV all but killed off music videos ‒ which, by the way, isn’t to say that the art form no longer exists ‒ but having Beavis and Butt-head instead make fun of MTV’s post-video programming isn’t an adequate replacement. No matter how fine the ridicule, it’s not biting or edgy. It’s redundant advertisement.

Furthermore, flooding this show with clips from those shows ‒ even if it’s to burn them with some pretty genius wit ‒ makes this show secondary to those ones. The fifth time I heard Beavis and Butt-Head refer to The Jersey Shore’s “Smoosh room,” I began to wonder if I was watching a commercial for those guidos, juiceheads, and gorillas, if the true goal of reviving Beavis and Butt-Head was merely to raise the profile of all of MTV’s other shit.

I watch the old series for the video mockery first and the cartoon episodes second, and in the new series my preferences are somewhat reversed. Nonetheless, the new series is a much more clever, focused, and polished animal than its wild beast predecessor. Take that for what it’s worth to you, but there is a great humor in noting that a show once hailed as a sign of pop culture’s apocalypse is now one of pop culture’s best shows.

March 20, 2012
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

The Designer’s Drugs: Chuck Palahniuk – Damned

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Chuch Palahniuk ‒ Damned

In Chuck Palahniuk’s new world, Hell is Hollywood. Hell is also Hell, full of the typical wailing, gnashing teeth, and rising lakes of wasted jizz that serve as Hell’s equivalent of global warming. But if we’re stacking up the hierarchy of the awful, consider this ‒ even Palahniuk’s Satan has a script he’s trying to sell.

Damned promotes itself as The Breakfast Club in Hell, and if Madison, its pudgy, oft-neglected hero, resembles any member of that Saturday morning detention crowd, it’s the Ally Sheedy neurotic girl. (In discussing that 80s film classic, our girl notes that she howls with terror when the popular cheerleader gives said outcast a condescending makeover.) Madison’s quite a bit more than that dark, mousy type, however. In true Palahniuk fashion, this preteen is quick to assert that she knows middle of the road words like gender, excrement, tenacious, and feign ‒ yet in casual moments she nonchalantly drops bigger words and phrases like colonoscopies, biological imperatives, vivandiers, and coals-to-Newcastle. I have no idea what that last phrase even means.

This newly lost soul spent life as an unloved prop to her vapid Hollywood parents, the sort of people who adopt kids from around the world shortly before shipping them off to boarding school, the sort of people who fly their kids via private jet to ecology retreats. I get the impression that there’s a healthy portion of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in these absurdly cosmopolitan celebrity caricatures.

After dying from a marijuana overdose, Madison meets up with the requisite Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Judd Nelson characters, and this infernal Breakfast Club goes traipsing around the hoary netherworld in search of misadventure. As time goes by, Madison gets kind of awesome. She preaches the joys of damnation in her telemarketing job, beats up Hitler in grand, hilarious style, and goes on a spew-soaked revenge haunting.

The last book of Chuck’s that I picked up before this one was Snuff, whose porno gangbang setting was the most obvious and inevitable thing an author inclined toward burying his readers in freakshows and trivia could have produced. That book was so over the top as to become really, really boring. In contrast, Damned is kind of delightful. Perhaps the choice of setting absorbs some of that stereotypical shock. Sure, Palahniuk’s paintbrush colors up a pretty disturbing landscape of the inferno, but it’s Hell, so that’s kind of expected. With the need to shock sort of canceled out, the story ends up relying on wit and characterization, and Palahniuk, perhaps having no choice, ended up writing a book combining the scope and cleverness of Robert Olen Butler’s Hell with the innocent charm of Judy Blume, right down to beginning each chapter with “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison.” Damned seems to be a reworking ‒ if not total subversion ‒ of Chuck Palahniuk’s established formula, and as such, it made me a fan again.

March 6, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Death of Conservative Pundit Andrew Breitbart Convinces Liberals that There Is a God

Yesterday, churches of all denominations across the country saw a stunning rise in attendance of church services. The new parishioners were hundreds of thousands of left-wing Americans, some of whom had never set foot in a church before. When asked why they were attending the church services, these new members of their congregations replied, almost to a person, that the death of right wing pundit Andrew Breitbart had convinced them that there was a God who loved us all.

Breitbart, often characterized as the right wing’s political assassin, has spent the last few years serving as one of the greatest thorns in the side of the liberal viewpoint. One of his last marks was New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose sexting scandal, exposed in grandstanding style by Breitbart, caused him to resign. Such was the ire he drew from American liberals that, upon his sudden death at the relatively young age of 43, his detractors immediately declared his demise to be an act of God.

John Franklin, a small business owner from Spokane, Washington, displayed a typical attitude among these new converts. “Holy crap! I thought we were gonna have that bastard around for at least another 20 years! I wasn’t sure that God existed until he smote that son of a bitch to smithereens. Now I’m a believer!”

Kyra Archer works for Planned Parenthood in Omaha, Nebraska. As such, she has had a number of run-ins with religious authorities. Despite this, she chose to attend a local church service in order to pay her respects.

“You know, God’s a patriarchal, close-minded, jingoistic tyrant,” Archer said. “But he really did us a solid on this one. I just stopped by to tell God thanks ‒ thanks for scraping that pompous, hateful human sewage off the face of the earth.”

It’s not only the Christian faiths that saw a surge in numbers. Salim al-Ameen is one of thousands of lapsed American Muslims who attended mosque services in the wake of Breitbart’s death. al-Ameen broke with his religion after coming out as a gay man in his teenage years, yet yesterday he attended a mosque in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in celebration. There, he found no issue with his well-known homosexuality, the communal jubilation over Breitbart’s demise washing away all other distinctions.

“The prick is dead!” al-Ameen cheered after prayer. “Allah frickin’ rules, baby!”

Buddhist temples reported no new conversions on Thursday, as Buddhism does not have a god who could take personal interest in Andrew Breitbart’s downfall. Conversely, liberal American Hindus weren’t sure whom within their expansive pantheon to thank for the death of Breitbart.

Neopagans of many different stripes held celebrations in American forests and public parks to give thanks to their myriad gods and goddesses, yet these conclaves reported few new members. The Venerable Bear Mule Moon, head of the Pan-American Association of Pan Worshippers and Panhandlers, explained the Neopagans’ failure to capitalize on Breitbart’s death as being due to their gatherings being held in secret, their only neighbors being errant Frisbee Golfers.

“Man, we really need to start having these things in community centers,” he said.

As a response to these mass conversions, the Catholic Church has been said to be quietly looking into having God take out right wing hidden camera con artist James O’Keefe as a means to restore its prestige in America. An anonymous source within the Boston Archdiocese has also suggested that the church is exploring the option of having God take out “certain members of Fox News,” though the source refused to name names.

When asked about this rumor of God being used as a political assassin, Archer responded with strange aplomb. “Hell, if God bumps off everyone at Fox News, I’ll start protesting Planned Parenthood myself!”

March 2, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Fake News, Satire . . Author: Y . Comments: 1 Comment

Whitney Houston Mourner Gets Her Body of Work Wrong

In case you need help remembering, this is Whitney Houston.

GARY, INDIANA (AP) ‒ Like many other people stunned by Whitney Houston’s sudden death last week, Lavonne Pierce reacted to the singer’s demise with an outpouring of emotion.

“Whitney has meant so much to me over the years,” Pierce said as she fought off tears. “Her music has touched my life so deeply, I can’t go a single day without it coming through me in some way. And now she’s gone. I just don’t know how I’m gonna deal with it.”

When asked about her favorite Whitney moments, Pierce, a grade school substitute teacher in the Gary School District, took a deep breath and composed herself. After a moment, a wistful, peaceful look came to her face, accompanied with a hint of a smile.

“I suppose my favorite thing of Whitney’s is the same as a lot of people’s,” she answered, “I mean, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ is such an iconic song, it’s hard to name anything better. Whitney really knocked it out of the park on that one.”

As she continued to discuss the fallen pop icon, it became clear that Lavonne Pierce had confused Whitney Houston with Celene Dion.

This reporter attempted to clarify the error, but Pierce refused to listen. “No! Whitney starred in Titanic, and she sang the theme song, too! Kevin Costner had to save her from an iceberg that was stalking her and sneaking into her ship’s quarters on the Titanic while she was out singing! Billy Zane tried to shoot her with a gun hidden in a videocamera, the jerk!”

“That rendition of ‘I’m Every Woman’ that Whitney sang with the iceberg, wow!” she added. “What a scorcher!”

Pierce went on to misremember other highlights in Houston’s career, crediting the achievements of many prominent female singers to her. “Those pet adoption commercials she made were really heartbreaking, but they really opened my eyes to the suffering of animals. That song she sang about partying on Friday was a real hoot, too! And that book she made with Anne Geddes and all those sleeping babies was a Total Cute Overload!”

When asked if she had learned any lessons from Whitney’s troubled times, Pierce nodded solemnly. “Yeah. She never should have dated that Lance Armstrong. He was no good to her. I don’t care how many times he’s won the Tour de France; if you don’t have love in your heart, it ain’t gonna work out!”

This Friday, Pierce plans to mourn privately with a few girlfriends. During the gathering she plans to play Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” to commemorate the life of Whitney Houston. “I know that Elton wrote this song right after Princess Diana died,” Pierce noted, “but it’s so touching and timeless that I don’t think he’ll mind.”

February 17, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Fake News, Satire . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Y Marks the Spot: The Old Man

Appropriately enough, the first time I wondered if I had gotten old happened because of MTV, an institution that is barely younger than I am. On the night and early morning in question, I entered the scene feeling drunk and joyful, connected with the world from the backseat of my roommate’s truck as it wound into the sticks and to an acquaintance’s place.

I followed two of my roommates through a blacked out garage and into a living room that was only blacked out mentally. While some cool mom hovered around them, a spatter of clearly underage kids splayed on a couch, blankly watching some Jackass-aping prank show on MTV2 featuring hosts who were trying waaaay too hard to act coked out and cool for the camera. The surge of loathing I felt for the show and its audience was about equal in strength to the frightening question that popped into my head shortly afterwards. Was I into such stupid crap when I was that age? The answer is, of course, yes ‒ though I’ve since discovered and loved the MTV self-satire that permeates my beloved Beavis and Butt-head.

Unfortunately, that first question led to another uncomfortable one: had I been a stupid teenager?

This moment in the cool mom’s living room was the first time I remember feeling smarter than another person for no other reason than age, which likely makes it the first time I remember identifying with the people who thought I was an idiot when I was a programmed teen rebel consumer. That’s kind of a scary moment. It can lead to zealous, born again past-disowning and delusions of present-tense brilliance. Gee, I was such a moron back then, but I’m a goddamn Socrates now!

We say these disclaimers in ignorance of the possibility that the versions of us ten years from now could look back and laugh about the so-called stupid people we are right now.

There’s a weird contradiction in this, being that people tend to venerate the past and anticipate the future at the expense of their present tenses. Man, being sixteen years old was awesome! Holy crap, I can’t wait until the new Frank Sinatra album comes out and I’m old enough to buy beer! And yet when the future becomes the now, the anticipation tends not to yield equal parts fulfillment. If time travel were possible, we’d probably be just as disappointed with a tangible past. We tend to like living theoretically, but don’t we like to bitch about the actual process of existing.

Back to the cool kids and my old man dilemma. I reacted to that moment of elderly paranoia well, deciding that the question of me being a stupid teenager was one of degrees, not absolutes. Sure, I wasn’t as wise as I am now, but it’s not as though I’m complacently fully formed today. In any event, my age fears became irrelevant when a group of us left the couch kids and cool mom to wander into the neighboring rock quarry and hurl ourselves from the tops of pebble mountains. Very childish. Very fun.

Still, this lingering worry that I had in fact gotten old stayed with me for months afterwards, further inflamed due to my living in the dining room of a house without a scrap of privacy and five roommates in their mid-20s. Half of those people were in a band which practiced often and took the rest of us along whether we wanted to go or not. Also, most of my roommates’ musical tastes weren’t like mine. Again, I didn’t have an enclosed room of my own to filter that out.

What ended up happening was that I spent that year flat broke and doing little more than lying around that dining room, getting pissed at the noise of the band and the songs played ad nauseum in between those live practices. And I began to feel very old. It felt as though I’d have been more okay with loud noise and contrasting tastes if I was younger. The phrase “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” swam through my head like a sanctimonious goldfish that year.

Those thoughts, of course, were bullshit. Since moving into a place of my own and building up my own little sanctuary, I’ve been able to put everything into its proper theoretical, past-tense perspective. The answer I’ve come up with to that second, uncomfortable question is this: if I am truly old, then I’ve always been old. I’ve always needed privacy and space like a sanctimonious goldfish needs purified water. I’ve always needed the ability to filter other people out. And I’ve never liked the styles of music that my roommates were into, and it’s not as though they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. Hell, I’ve always been annoyed by teenagers, even ‒ especially! ‒ when I was one.

In contrast, I’m pretty okay with getting older. Aging has to me been a process of getting over unimportant shit and getting better at being myself. I used to idealize the irresponsible life I had when I was sixteen; now I’d be hard pressed to take that life back for anything. Worrying about fitting in? Being horribly damaged by real and desired romance? Waking up at 6:30 in the morning, five days a week? The hell with that.

When I actually do become an old man, I’m going to be amazing. Unless I’m not.

Two additional points bear mentioning. The first is that last weekend I went back to my old place, hung out with my old roommates, and enjoyed a night full of loud music and drunken frivolity. I had a great time. The ability to leave and not have to clean up, combined with the ability to afford to drink, both helped immensely.

The second thing is this: every time I tell somebody that I’m in my early thirties, they act incredibly surprised. Apparently people think that I’m five. Which I am.

Growing up and growing old are two different things.

February 14, 2012
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

This picture pretty much sums up the whole movie.

Film: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

Director: Jack Sholder

Starring: Robert Englund, Mark Patton, Clu Gulager

Written by: David Chaskin

In discussions about the Nightmare on Elm Street series, this gem invariably gets brought up and described as the queer one. That label is absolutely correct. Even the creators of the film have gone on record to marvel at how they ended up making a gay Freddy movie. I don’t know how all the blatant gay innuendo in Freddy’s Revenge got past them, though; there’s so much that the viewer starts seeing such metaphors and subtext that might not exist. Look! That clock on the stairway is rather phallic! The teacher’s giving a lecture on the colon! There’s a cardboard box in the guy’s closet that says Probe! Uh huh huh huh huh.

Beyond all those grasping connections, however, is a lot of very real manly subtext. Our hero Jesse has an awesome dance number to the sultry tune of “Touch Me (All Night Long)” in which he prances about in gold lightning bolt shades, closes a dresser drawer with his swiveling, supple ass, and gyrates around with some wooden popgun thing thrusting from his crotch. He also ends up shirtless and sweaty a whole lot, with the film offering many loving shots of his bird chest and tighty whities. He finds his best friend after the other doofus depantses him during a game of baseball and the two roll around the diamond locked in buttcrack mortal combat.

The issue of Jesse being possessed by a mass murdering child killer always seems to be mentioned in the most pervy ways possible. “Something is trying to get inside my body,” our hero moans to his doofus buddy as he pleads for Doofus to watch over him as he sleeps. Doofus, being obliviously awesome, responds: “Yeah, and she’s female, and she’s waiting for you in the cabana, and you wanna sleep with me.” Said female, a Meryl Streep-looking ginger who serves as the film’s real hero, usually comes off as kind of a beard in the midst of all this machismo.

Yet the easiest thing to bring up is the sadistic gym teacher who hangs out at “queer s&m joints downtown” and operates as the Casey Affleck-meets-Mark Hamill-looking hero’s authority figure nemesis. Oh, and the film makes it pretty clear that Teach plans to rape our hero as well. Yeah.

He seemed like such a nice guy.

Following one of our hero’s midnight freakouts, he heads to the local queer bar in question ‒ which is really more of a punker bar for freaks of all orientations. He’s looking for a beer but finds the leather-clad gym teacher, who busts him with an unwholesome gleam in his eye. Teach drags Jesse to the gym in the dead of night and makes him run laps, after which our hero is pushed into a stack of folding chairs and told to hit the showers. While Jesse is gamboling around naked and weepy in the dark, steamy shower room, our heroic gym teacher lurks in his office, amassing physical education paraphernalia by which he obviously plans to tie up our hero and have his way with him.

Unfortunately, Teach runs afoul of a Freddy Krueger poltergeist, who hurls all the balls in the office at his face (uh huh huh huh huh). After this, Teach finds his bondage jump ropes turned against him, and he is dragged into the shower room and tied splaying to a pair of faucets. After that, he’s stripped naked, and then the Freddy poltergeist grabs a towel and whips that gym teacher’s ass till it’s lobster red. After all this degradation, the real Freddy emerges from the shower room steam and gives Teach a few razor-claw swipes, but at this point the quick death feels a bit anticlimactic.

Like most of the franchise films which followed the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy’s Revenge runs the risk of losing all its horror cred and becoming a campy, Adam West’s Batman sort of slasher film. This flick is certainly in the running to be named the main offender of the bunch, but coupled with all the dude on dude silliness are some pretty sweet horror moments.

It’s clear that the creators of this film didn’t quite have the Freddy Krueger formula down yet. Besides looking like more of a shadowy, melting Hindu instead of the stock bright burned hawk he’d later become, Freddy isn’t his usual wisecracking ghost of the subconscious who murders people in their dreams. In fact, he doesn’t kill anyone who isn’t fully awake, and he’s not much for quips here. Instead, he becomes a rampaging real-world monster who has real-world supernatural powers, and when he Caesarian Sections himself out of Jesse and busts up a pool party with claws and fire, he actually gets pretty terrifying.

There was one moment, however, which makes no sense. Bookending the rest of the film are two scenes featuring Jesse on a haunted schoolbus that goes off the rails. Watching the film, I blankly accepted these scenes, but my girlfriend saw the flaw in the logic. “Doesn’t he drive a car?” she asked. “Why would he be on a bus?” Why, indeed; our hero drives a beaten up old clunker known as the Deadly Dinosaur, rendering mass transit unnecessary. Sure, you don’t know that at the beginning of the film, but you do at the end. Maybe Freddy’s just an idiot.

February 14, 2012
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: 2 Comments

The Designer’s Drugs: Resident Evil: Revelations

Medium: Game ‒ Nintendo 3DS

Stimulus: Resident Evil: Revelations

Resident Evil 4 was the last time I remember feeling unadulterated joy toward a video game. The action was fantastic, the enemies were intelligent, and the role playing and treasure hunting elements made for a lot of replay value. I positively beamed the first night I played it. For me it was easily the best game of the past decade. As such, it serves as the measuring stick by which I’ve judged the Resident Evil games that followed, and like its fellow 3DS game The Mercenaries 3D, Revelations doesn’t measure up. It’s an okay game on its own merits, but I expected a portable version of Resident Evil 4, and this isn’t it.

The biggest issue I have with Revelations is that there are two, count em, two zombie-type creatures in the entire game ‒ and they’re easily the best adversaries. For a series that has built its entire reputation on zombie hunting ‒ to say nothing about the awesomeness found as the series progressed and the infected became intelligent ‒ this is unacceptable. Instead, the player fights clawed, shambling, dumb sea humanoids that seem like they’d belong more in Dead Space than here. There’s even a big hulking hellbeast with a functioning chainsaw arm with functioning chainsaw sounds, which made me wonder how it keeps its gas tank filled. More annoying, these twitchy inhumans shudder around like mental patients and always seem to twist out of the way of the player’s shots at just the right moment. There’s a rifle in this game for long distance shots, but considering these jerky movements and the fact that the monsters rarely show up until they’re right in your face, using it is pretty pointless.

The point is that I really, really missed smart zombies.

There are two game modes: a story mode and a stripped down, more minigame version of the story mode called Raid Mode. The weird thing is that Raid mode feels more fleshed out than the main campaign, which switches perspectives far too much, forcing the player to operate as different characters instead of advancing the abilities of a single one. Campaign Mode also forces the player to run around with a scanner separate from one’s weapons, scanning all surroundings with it to find extra items and secrets, Metroid Prime-style, while one hopes not to run into any monsters while so unarmed. This is really clunky and annoying. In contrast, Raid Mode features actual character levels and offers far more weapon customization. The scanner doesn’t even make an appearance. Campaign Mode feels like something to be endured; Raid Mode feels like something to be enjoyed.

The 3DS Resident Evil games have been the only 3DS games I’ve played so far which made me question the technical limits of the system. In The Mercenaries, the glitches were limited to shaky movements of far-off enemies; in Revelations, the limitations seem to result in a very stripped-down world where you’re herded from Point A to Point B, which is just as well because it’s not that much fun to explore anyway.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that there are swimming stages in Revelations, the bane of all video gamers’ existences! Joy.

Yeah, I’m bitter that Revelations isn’t as good as Resident Evil 4, but you know what? That game is, what, eight years old now? Why shouldn’t this game have been able to blow that one out of the water instead of being a half-hearted clone?

February 14, 2012
Categories: Game, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day News Hell, 2012

BUY ME.

Single Man Refuses to Support Valentine’s Day Industry, Purchases Many Anti-Valentine’s Day Products to Show It

A Bangor man, Reggie Hobbes of 713 Cat Food Factory Lane, has had enough of the commercialization of Valentine’s Day ‒ and he has bought the merchandise to let you know it.

“I’m always disgusted at this time of year,” Hobbes, age 43, said. “The greeting card industry, the out of season flower dealers, and the chocolate robber barons like to turn up the heat on the common man on the 14th of February, telling him that if he doesn’t buy a lot of meaningless crap for his girl, then he’s a failure as a guy. I’m done with all that.”

To show his contempt, Hobbes has purchased a multitude of banners, clothing, yard decorations, candy, and greeting cards which malign and deride Valentine’s Day. Wearing a black t-shirt which reads “Love is for Losers,” he showed us around his home, which was festooned with pictures of broken hearts. He plans to distribute heart-shaped candies to his friends and coworkers which bear such messages as “Get Bent” and “You Suck.” He plans on sending hateful off-Hallmark greeting cards to all his ex-girlfriends, including one with a front which reads “I miss you…” and an inside featuring a crosshairs and reading “…but my aim is improving.” There is a paper-maché sculpture of a cherubic Cupid, pincushioned with arrows, dangling from a tree in his front yard.

When asked how much all this cost, Hobbes skirted a direct number, saying only that “The cost was totally worth it.”

What’s strangest about this tale of anti-commercial commercialism is that Reggie Hobbes isn’t some loveless malcontent rebelling against Valentine’s Day out of loneliness. His wife of 13 years, Marjorie Hobbes, is supportive of his Valentine’s disdain, and their son, 10 year old Marty, helped decorate the house.

“I think hating a holiday based on love has really brought our family together,” Marjorie said.

Valentine’s Day ≠ VD, Study Shows

Dissenters of the usual Valentine’s Day traditions refer to the romantic holiday by many names, including the Hallmark Holiday and the Night of 1,000,000 Faked Orgasms. Yet according to a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, one name that is inaccurate for these romance critics to use is VD.

This study, designed to measure which holidays saw the most spread of sexually transmitted diseases, collected case data from hundreds of clinics across the country. “In terms of STD proliferation, Valentine’s Day is surprisingly small potatoes,” noted project lead Byron Torrance. “You’re actually much more likely to get the clap on Flag Day than on Valentine’s Day.”

While the report lists greater transmission rates during predictable holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve, there are other holidays which see a surprisingly greater rate of disease spread as well. Columbus Day sees 45% more transmission of Chlamydia and 27% more syphilis, President’s Day sees 37% more cases of genital warts, Father’s Day sees 41% more gonorrhea, and Purim sees an astonishing 65% more crabs.

The main offender? “May Day,” Torrance responded. “It’s a veritable cesspool of disease. I wouldn’t touch a doorknob on that day without cleaning my hands with sanitizer afterwards. It must be something about dancing around a large phallic object that gets the blood up.”

When asked why Valentine’s Day’s rates of STD spread are so low, Torrance was at a loss. “I can’t declare with any finality,” he said, “but my best guess is that, with all the effort put into the day’s grand romantic gestures, it’s all rehearsal and no show.”

February 11, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Fake News, Satire . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Third I

Y Marks the Spot

Different Names for the Same Thing

Of the Moment