Canada’s greatest export (if you don’t count Molson’s Golden, Rush or Pamela Anderson), the Trailer Park Boys, will be performing in Los Angeles for the first time on Feb. 25 at the Wiltern Theatre, with “The Ricky, Julian and Bubbles’ Community Service Variety Show.”
We caught up to Sunnyvale’s favorite residents and asked a few questions about their upcoming performance:
What in the world did you do that you have to do this community service tour?
Bubbles: I was with Ricky and Julian when they hijacked a truck that was supposed to be full of liquor that they wanted to give to Ray for his birthday. Instead, it was full of Rubik’s Cubes and Sham Wows. We got nailed selling them at the flea market.
I hear that you’re doing an anti-drugs-and-drinking puppet show. Isn’t that a bit hypocritical since drugs and drinking have made you the men you are today?
Bubbles: Ricky and Julian say there’s no way they’re gonna make it through the show without getting drunk and high, but I’m gonna make sure they don’t, because if we do, the three of us are gonna end up back in jail, and I hate jail.
Do you really believe one single solitary word of this anti-drugs stuff or is it just a big put-on for your parole officer and the courts?
Ricky: I love drugs, and I think this whole thing is stupid. I’m only doing it for Bubbles because he doesn’t like jail. I’d rather go to jail; I love jail.
How will you even get into the country? Aren’t you guys on some kind of no-fly list or something?
Julian: We are on a list, but we have two parole officers traveling with us that will get us in to the country.
Why come to America now?
Bubbles: I’ve been trying to talk Ricky and Julian into going for years, but they watch too much TV and thought American jails were too scary.
Have you been to Los Angeles before?
Julian: No, and we’re really looking forward to it. I might try and audition for a Clint Eastwood movie while we’re there and meet some hot strippers, see if they wanna come back to Sunnyvale with me.
I suppose you boys have heard that marijuana is legal in California. Any plans to visit any of our world famous pot dispensaries while you’re here?
Ricky: I plan on checking out every single one of them, maybe buy some seeds, start growing, open up a shop of my own and live down there forever.
Any messages for the ladies of Los Angeles?
Bubbles: L.A. ladies are the hottest in the world, and I’m hoping the show turns into a festival of toplessness. Prizes will be awarded to any ladies who show up in bikinis.
The Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., www.trailerparkboys.com
Cross posting this from Brand X
Well, he’s actually purchasing LA’s New Beverly Cinema, which was once a grindhouse, but is now one of the city’s finest revival theaters:
“As long as I’m alive, and as long as I’m rich, the New Beverly will be there, showing double features in 35mm,” Quentin Tarantino told the Hollywood Reporter. He’s bought the 200 seat Fairfax District theater that has shown second-run double features since 1978 (Before that it was, appropriately, a grindhouse with live nude dancers, although it was built in 1929 and once showed first-run movies). In the mid aughts, hearing operator Sherman Torgan was having trouble keeping the doors open, Tarantino started paying the monthly expenses. After Torgan’s death in 2007, his son Michael took over operations, but the landlord had a buyer almost immediately. Since the Torgans had the right of first refusal, Tarantino stepped in, and after some extensive haggling made a deal to buy the theater.
Well, that’s great news for LA, but if the New Bev can find its white knight in Tarantino, surely someone else both “alive and rich” can step in and save the Bodhi Tree?
(via Curbed)
Thanks to Inner Traditions, who sent me this copy of surrealist critic Annie Le Brun’s book The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm. The book makes the very salient point (one of those ones that seems so obvious in retrospect that I wonder why I didn’t make the connection before—a mark of something being truly important, that it slaps you on the head that hard) that we can link the degradation of the physical world with the degradation of the imaginal one.
A Situationist critique of our current Internet culture, The Reality Overload suggests that we are imagination-impoverished, lost in the endless distraction and meaninglessness of electronic media. That critique has been made before, but linking it to the degradation of the material world is a stroke of genius. What we think, of course, creates the reality we live in. And we tend to think we’re going to get on Facebook after we’re done watching CSI.
Recently I was reading about the Inklings, the discussion group that spawned C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who would gather in a pub and create fantasy worlds out of the air. Is there any room for this kind of sustained imagination in our world? Hell, even kids these days are playing World of Warcraft instead of Dungeons and Dragons, let alone coming up with their own fantasy worlds. A tailspin of mental stultification… when you have all the information and entertainment you could ever need, the parts of the brain needed for creating those things out of nothing tend to atrophy. Diminishing returns…
An excellent book that makes a much-needed connection. Imagine a world in which we “green” the realm of meaning and fantasy in addition to just the material world!
From the jacket copy:
What underlies the many problems of the modern world—from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual—is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.
Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.
(The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm)
You Philly kids being spied on by your own school-issued laptops, this one’s for you:
We are looking for high school students and teachers across America to participate. Photograph A Recruiter is an online photography project that invites high school students to photograph the military recruiters posted within their schools. Through the act of looking back at the system that is looking at them, the project empowers students to consider the role of the government for which they will soon have the right to vote for.
(via Arthur)
Via the Lifeboat Foundation, here’s a good list of things we can do to make sure the human race survives. (Hint: Make sure the Hadron Collider doesn’t shit itself!)
1. Create the book “Guide to the restoration of civilization”, which describe all the necessary knowledge of hunting, industry, mining, and all the warnings about the risks for the case of civilization collapse.Test its different sections on volunteers. Print the book in stone / metal / other solid media in many copies throughout the world. Bury treasure with the tools / books / seeds in different parts of the world. 1-100 million USD. Reduction of probability of extinction (assuming that real prior probability is 50% in XXI century): 0.1%.
2. Collect money for the work of Singularity Institute in creating a Friendly AI. They need 3 million dollars. This project has a maximum ratio of the cost-impact. That is, it can really increase the chances of survival of humanity at about 1 percent. (This is determined by the product of estimates of the probabilities of events – the possibility of AI, what SIAI will solve this problem, the fact that it chooses the problem first, and that it solves the problem of friendliness, and the fact that the money they have will be enough.)
3. Krisave in the ice of Antarctica (the temperature of -57 C, in addition, you can create a stable region of lower temperature by use of liquid nitrogen which would be pumped and cooled it) a few people, so that if on earth there another advanced civilization, it could revive them. cost is several million dollars. Another project on the preservation of human knowledge in the spirit of the proposed fund by LongNow titanium discs with recorded information.
4. Send human DNA on the moon in the stable time capsule. Several tens of millions of dollars. You can also send the criopreserved human brain. The idea here is that if mankind would perish, then someday the aliens arrive and revive people based on these data. Expenses is 20-50 million dollars, the probability of success of 0.001%. Send human DNA in space in other ways.
Seen via Osocio, guerilla signs that have been sprouting up around the U.S. Nice work!
These signs are spotted in the streets of Manhattan, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Williamsburg USA. They are made by TrustoCorp, but who the people are behind this name is unknown. Very clever, some are hardhitting, others are hilarious. At least it will give passers something to think about.
Wired picked up on the Hexayurt—a $100 stable housing solution that can help put Haiti back on the rails far quicker than disposable disaster tents. (Hexayurts previously covered at Dangerous Minds here.)
With just $100 worth of plywood and screws, almost anyone can build a shelter known as a Hexayurt that can last three years and possibly even withstand a hurricane. The simple DIY structure could be a critical temporary solution for some of the estimated 1 million or more people left homeless in quake-torn Haiti.
Aid agencies have distributed around 10,000 tents to Haiti so far, according to to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), one of the dozens of charity groups in Haiti focused on emergency shelter. But 200,000 are needed, and even then, the tents won’t stand up to the weather.
“Tents are a three to five month option in the midst of the dry season,” said Vincent Houver, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti, in a recent press release. “But emergency and transitional shelter solutions sufficiently durable to last at least two years need to be found before the heavy rains arrive in a few months.”
Tents do have the benefit of a supply chain already in place that makes it easy to ramp up production when disaster strikes, and they can be transported to remote sites and set up relatively quickly. But they run around $300 to $400 and only last about a year, in good weather.