Is Richard Simmons the new Liberace? It seems increasingly clear that he is. He’s a perennially popular mainstream entertainer beloved by Middle America whose sexuality is… a matter for speculation (his Wikipedia page indicates that he lives alone and has never discussed the matter publicly). Flamboyance, good humor and a willingness to do anything are his trademarks. He’s appeared on Letterman countless times as a human punchline—I didn’t know this until today, but there was a period of six years in which Simmons did not appear on the show because he was annoyed about an incident in which Letterman set off a fire extinguisher in his face on the air.
The endlessly energetic and enthusiastic weight-loss superstar put on the heavy metal makeup and exercise gear to leading a recent class at his Slimmons Studio in Beverly Hills. On Facebook, alongside the slogan “Sweat hugs and rock n roll!” Simmons posted the video linked below.
On a certain level, the idea of Richard Simmons wearing death metal face paint is hardly the most surprising thing in the world. And yet, when he does it, you just have to nod and say, “Damn, son.”
Bill Masen knew there was something seriously wrong from the moment he awoke in his hospital bed that fateful spring morning. He listened and heard only an eerie, disturbing quiet, occasionally infused with an unsteady shuffling. Last night the skies had been afire with comets burning up in beautiful, Day-Glo colors. Masen had missed this spectacle, his eyes bandaged, temporarily blinded after a near-fatal accident with a Triffid plant. Today his bandages were supposed to come off, but when he rang for a nurse, no one came; when he called for help, no one answered; the only response was a soft searching of movement somewhere outside in the corridor. He knew it was a Wednesday, but it felt, sounded, more like a Sunday. It may have been mid-week, but this day, May the 8th, became known as the day the world ended, for this was the day of the Triffids!
(Cue dramatic music. Shaggy and Scooby say ‘Zoiks!’)
So begins John Wyndham‘s classic science-fiction novel The Day of the Triffids, which is one of the best known and and most influential sci-fi books of the twentieth century. Published in 1951, Wyndham’s tale of a world made blind after a strange comet shower and the giant, mobile and highly venomous plants that slowly dominate the planet, has inspired small libraries of books, films, TV episodes and series, all based around stories of nature gone awry and the ensuing world devastation. The zombie genre, in particular, owes much to Wyndham’s book, where zombies are interchangeable for Triffids—take for example Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later, which is almost a direct lift of Wyndham’s story.
That’s not to say Wyndham’s book was wholly original, by his own admission the author had been inspired by H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which set the bar for apocalyptic fiction. Rather than killer extraterrestrials from Mars, Wyndham offered an enemy taken from a more worldly source, the Russian biologist, and agronomist, Trofim Lysenko. In a bid to feed the Soviet population, Lysenko developed a form of “agrobiology,” which mixed genetic modification with graft hybridization to produce new species capable of producing unlimited food supplies. Under Stalin, there was a lot of this dubious state sponsored science, including the notorious attempt to breed humans with apes to create a “humanzee” army. Wyndham picked-up on Lysenko’s theories and applied them to a fictional hybrid plant. Or, as Wyndham puts it in his book:
Russia, who shared with the rest of the world the problem of increasing food supplies, was known to have been intensively concerned with attempts to reclaim desert, steppe, and the northern tundra. In the days when information was still exchanged, she had reported some successes. Later, however, under a cleavage of methods and views caused biology there, under a man called Lysenko, to take a different course. It, too, then succumbed to the endemic secrecy. The lines it had taken were unknown, and thought to be unsound—but it was anybody’s guess whether very successful, very silly, or very queer things were happening there—if not all three at once.
It turns out, the Russians have created Triffids, which are capable of producing vegetable oil of such quality, it makes the “best fish-oils look like grease-box fillers.” Whether these plants are the product of genetic engineering or have come from outer space is never clear. Whatever their origin, a man called Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, an entrepreneurial crook-cum-businessman, steals a box of Triffid seeds from their heavily guarded nursery in the outer reaches of Siberia. The plane in which he absconds is shot down by the Russians leaving behind “something which looked at first like a white vapor.”
It was not a vapor. It was a cloud of seeds, floating, so infinitely light they were, even in the rarefied air. Millions of gossamer-slung Triffid seeds, free now to drift wherever the winds of the world should take them…
Soon, these plants grow and multiply like Star Trek‘s “Tribbles” or the monsters in Stephen King’s The Mist to gradually inhabit and take over the Earth’s surface.
But there’s a problem: Triffids are as dangerous as they are mobile, moving on three legs (like a man on crutches), and carry a deadly poison dispensed through a long “stinger” which is used to lash out at their victims. They are flesh-eaters and can also communicate with each other by tapping out a tattoo through small twigs on their lower trunk. They also respond to sound, moving towards any source of noise or vibration. At first, the Triffids are secured by having their “stingers” docked, and are kept tethered to stakes in factory farms and parklands. This all would have been fine if the Triffids had not been set free the night the sky erupted in color with a comet storm that rendered all humans and animals who witnessed this beautiful event blind.
Bill Masen escaped the fate of billions of others by sheer accident. Temporarily blinded after an incident with a Triffid, Masen missed the night show and was spared complete blindness. Along with hundreds of others, he has to begin a new and brutal stage in human history.
Masen is a bit of a plank, rather pompous, po-faced and often unable to see things that are apparently obvious to everyone else. He is incredulous when a colleague, Walter Lucknor suggests that Triffids have “intelligence,” are able to communicate with each other, and may prove to be a deadly threat to humanity, as Lucknor explains:
‘Of the fact that [Triffids] know what is the surest way to put a man out of action—in other words, they know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority—sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that—our position becomes inferior to theirs because they are adapted to a sightless existence, and we are not.’
Of course. Masen’s naivety is a narrative device to filter information to the reader, but there are several instances within the book when this naivety is quite unbelievable. For example, when the child Susan points out that the Triffids respond to sound to locate prey.
Wyndham was probably influenced by the devastation caused during the Second World War, and the recurrent theme of food and its provision relates to impoverishment of food supplies, and the level of food rationing that continued in Britain after the war (this is something also reflected in George Orwell’s 1984, a book Anthony Burgess argued was actually a re-imaging of Britain in 1948). Wyndham’s descriptions of a post-apocalyptic London and rural England reflect how easily human existence can descend to chaos.
My father once told me that before Hitler’s war he used to go around London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that he had never noticed before—saying goodbye to them. And now I had a similar feeling. But this was something far worse. Much more than anyone could have hoped for had survived that war—but this was an enemy they would not survive. It was not wanton smashing and willful burning that they had waited for this time: it was simply the long, slow, inevitable course of decay and collapse.
Standing there, and at that time, my heart still resisted what my head was telling me. Even yet I had the feeling that it was all something too big, too unnatural really to happen. Yet I knew that it was by no means the first time that it had happened. The corpses of other great cities are lying buried in deserts, and obliterated by the jungles of Asia. Some of them fell so long ago that even their names have gone with them. But to those who lived there their dissolution can have seemed no more probable or possible than the necrosis of a great modern city seemed to me…
The Day of the Triffids was one of those set texts for UK schools during the sixties, seventies and early eighties, and that’s when I first read it. Though thrilling and thought-provoking, I found Masen lacked dynamism and appeared to have no natural inquisitiveness to his surroundings or his engagement with others. He talks about how humans will have to evolve and think differently after the night of comet, but Masen himself hardly changes in his character (well, apart from falling in love) from the first page to the last. That said, I’d still recommend it.
The Day of the Triffids has been made into several below par TV series, and one enjoyable film, which depicted the Triffids as extraterrestrials that drifted through space, landed on Earth colonizing the planet. The film also suggests the comet show was part of the Triffids’ invasion plan, rather than a possible satellite accident as mentioned in the book. If you haven’t seen it, well, check the movie trailer below. Or, better still give someone the book to read but not the badly edited Kindle version!
“You know Fred, actually, staying in a city to help after an atomic attack is not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think. The danger of, well, lingering radiation is not really very serious. After an atomic air burst, the danger of radiation and falling debris is over within… a minute and a half.”
You don’t say?
The Federal Civil Defense Administration produced a glut of Cold War misinformation and propaganda, but 1951’s Our Cities Must Fight is among the most baffling. An attempt to discourage urbanites from abandoning their fair cities after nuclear attack, the film fictionalizes a conversation between two patriotic newspapermen bemoaning the “take to the hills fraternity.” The men go on to imply that leaving a nuked city would be “pretty close to treason,” and then pile on the insane justifications—you couldn’t get through the traffic anyway! We’ll need you to fight fires and keep going to work! Oh, and my favorite—radiation isn’t really that big a deal!
I’m not sure if there really was a totally unrealistic perception that a post-nuclear city could still function, but I can’t imagine most Americans would stick around to polish the brass on the Titanic after an atomic bomb hit it—assuming of course that there were any survivors. With the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh, it’s difficult to believe the FCDA ever thought anyone would stick around because of a silly government film!
David Bowie was blasted out of his mind on cocaine during the making of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. It was his first major feature film, but Bowie often didn’t know what was “being made at all.” He worked off his instinct, as he later told Rolling Stone magazine:
“I just learned the lines for that day and did them the way I was feeling. It wasn’t that far off. I actually was feeling as alienated as that character was. It was a pretty natural performance. ... a good exhibition of somebody literally falling apart in front of you. I was totally insecure with about 10 grams a day in me. I was stoned out of my mind from beginning to end.”
The film was adapted from Walter Tevis’ sci-fi novel of the same name, which told the story of a humanoid alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, who arrives on Earth, with hopes to build a spacecraft to help transport the remnant population of his home planet Anthea, which has been almost wiped out by a surface-wide drought.
Bowie starred as the extraterrestrial Newton, sharing the screen with American Graffiti‘s Candy Clark as his human lover, and gave a startling performance—edgy, strange, and slightly disconnected from those around him. Added to Roeg’s distinctive directorial vision, The Man Who Fell to Earth is a memorable and thought-provoking film about addiction, desire and the sometimes unbearable extremity of otherness.
More Bowie on the location from ‘The Man Who Fell to earth’ after the jump…
A goat has been born with eight legs, and both male and female reproductive organs on a farm in northeast Croatia.
Farmer Zoran Paparic’s goat Sarka gave birth to the kid at his farm in Kutjevo, along with two healthy goats. This maybe the kind of mutant birth one would expect to read about in a gory devil-worshiping horror novel, or the pages of some religious tome, the kind predicting the “End of Days” and all that, but according to local veterinarians, this poor little kid is the product of underdeveloped twin siblings.
“I counted his legs and I thought I was seeing things. Then I called my neighbour to make sure that I am not crazy”
Vets believe the “octogoat” is unlikely to live long, however, if it survives its first few weeks, it may live up to three years. The goat is trying to stand on its feet but lacks strength. Mr Paparic has said he would like to keep the goat as a pet if it does survive. He also added that a few years ago in a neighboring village, a friend’s goat gave birth to a kid with two heads.
Longtime afternoon TV talkshow host Mike Douglas was so square—and seemingly so self-aware of his basic squareness—that he ended up being one of the most unlikely “hip” people on American television in the 60s and 70s. Mike Douglas didn’t try to be “down” with John and Yoko, Malcolm X, The Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, The Vanilla Fudge, Angela Davis, Moby Grape or any of the other counterculture types who occasionally came on his normally staid Philadelphia talk show, but he was unfailingly friendly and cordial to them all and genuinely interested in what they had to say. That Patti Smith made a couple of early appearances on his show (she brought her mother, a huge fan of his, to one of the tapings) says much about how agreeable and open to new things the guy was, but he never pretended to be anything that he wasn’t. (Fun fact: Mike Douglas provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s Cinderella.)
A great example of the often incongruous people a viewer could tune in and see randomly assembled on a given day on The Mike Douglas Show occurred when Frank Zappa appeared to promote his Zoot Allures album on November 9th, 1976. The “Dy-no-mite!” co-host that week was Jimmie “J.J.” Walker star of Good Times and the other guest that day was Kenny Rogers. There’s a brief interview before Zappa, performing with the unseen house band, does a scorching “Black Napkins” one of his signature mid-period compositions. Then there’s more conversation before Frank shows an excerpt from A Token of His Extreme featuring Bruce Bickford’s freaky claymation.
Imagine how strange seeing this on TV after school was. But it wasn’t so much that it was strange as that it was the Seventies…
Exactly how many episodes of Full House did YouTuber “Sourfest” have to watch in order to make this? God bless ‘em I guess ‘cause I will never see Bob Saget’s character “Danny Tanner” in the same light again. Never.
This is perhaps the single most twisted re-edit of a family friendly sitcom I’ve ever seen. Takes these meme-ish re-edits to whole new level of artistry and wrong.
Danny Tanner filming the footsies. What the hell were they thinking? Certainly not that it would be used like this, I suppose… That would have been hard to anticipate back then.
An anonymous activist group activist group have taken it upon themselves to try to quash public urination in India. From the evidence presented in this video, I guess it’s a big stinky problem there. The activist group built what’s called The Pissing Tanker which “patrols” Mumbai and when someone is caught in the act of public urination—which is against the law there—the offender gets hosed-down by a strong stream of water. What you might call poetic justice…
The group which also has a twitter account, without a display picture of course, asks others to be aware of them as they will strike when least expected. Their motto is ‘You Stop. We Stop’ and fight public urination ‘one spray at a time’.
Seems like a mild form of vigilante justice. Frequent public pissers in Mumbai would be advised to immediately purchase waterproof iPhone cases…
So blah blah blah Nevermind, huh? It was an epochal album that experienced world-altering success, but in the early ‘90s underground, it was more like a harbinger of doom.
Once Nevermind hit radio, heavy indie-rock concert audiences began filling up with the types of hateful “normals” whom fans of weirdo music had spent their lives trying to avoid, so the more dedicated and tribal noise-ists, whose embrace of post-hardcore was less flannel-and-MTV-oriented, dove deeper. And when Sub-Pop band after Sub-Pop band kept shooting for the big time, “deeper” meant Amphetamine Reptile.
AmRep was in many ways like a ‘90s SST, a natural home for fearless disreputata to make the twisted and powerful music they needed to make. Tar’s Roundhouse, Helmet’s Strap It On, Cows’ Cunning Stunts, Surgery’s Nationwide, and Hammerhead’s masterpiece Into the Vortex were all crucial documents of this new noise from the Midwest and NYC, and all of them were on AmRep. The label stopped releasing new artists at the end of the ‘90s, but it never deactivated entirely, and it still occasionally releases material by its older acts—King Buzzo’s painfully limited 10” acoustic E.P. from earlier this year was an AmRep release.
The label was started in the ‘80s by the colorfully cranky Tom Hazelmyer, a USMC vet, printmaker, firearms enthusiast, and the leader of the vociferous Minneapolis trio Halo of Flies, whose collection Music for Insect Minds is a must-have if you go in for this kind of stuff. Hazelmyer is the subject of the forthcoming documentary The Color of Noise. Financed by a Kickstarter two years ago and directed by Eric Robel, the doc is set to debut at the end of this month in Nashville, in conjunction with an exhibit of Hazelmyer’s linocuts. It features archival concert footage and interviews with most of the above-mentioned, plus The Melvins, Today is The Day, Unsane, Helios Creed, and several noteworthy poster artists. Clips, outtakes and the official trailer made their way online this week. Here’s a snippet that looks at the label’s amazing R&D series of gorgeous 7” picture discs.
And here’s the trailer. If you’re going to be in Nashville around the end of the month, the debut screening is scheduled to be held at Third Man Records on May 30th. If you’re just dying to know more but can’t wait, an official blog has been documenting the process of making the film, and this Hazelmyer interview is top-notch.
Some Halo of Flies footage that didn’t make the final cut, after the jump…
These Russian bad boys identify their criminal status, loyalty to their clan, their addiction, or length of imprisonment by sporting a particular tattoo.
For example, a snake around the neck signifies drug addiction; stars on collar bones, or epaulettes on shoulders denotes rank and criminal authority; the Madonna and Child (one of the most common) can mean loyalty to a clan, a sign for good luck or to ward off evil, or that this particular gangster has been in jail for a very long time.
There are also those that are personal, names tattooed across knuckles, a ring on a forefinger means “rely on no one but yourself.” Tattoos on fingers can also denote speciality (the thieves cross on middle finger), a tattoo on third finger means has served full sentence from beginning to end, while one on the pinkie means “dark life,” someone who has spent a lot of time in solitary confinement. The skull and crossbones, gun, knife or the letter “K” mean killer.
