If you hate druggies, you’ll love NARC. It’s about the best 8-bit Nintendo game ever, and when it came out in 1988, I bet Nancy Reagan was so happy she had a twinkling tear in her left eye and ate a cream puff as a little self-reward for the day. In this awesome game, you can team up with a friend to portray two narcotics officers who “take it to the streets” and kill the shit out of every drug user and drug dealer they can get their hands on. It’s gritty, real-life, practically the 8-bit “The Wire.” Its villains are ultra-realistic portrayals of the heartbreak of urban living, as if they could be taken straight from the blood-splashed newspaper headlines of today. Among the “people” you eliminate for their wretched, spineless crimes against society are fiends such as:

?

I love Pop Art Machine. It’s the perfect way to make amazing low cost art to hang on your walls. Pop Art Machine has high resolution files of millions of images that you can download and print as posters or on canvas, tee-shirts, whatever you want to do, really. And it’s free.

Go there and poke around, see what you find. Earlier today I searched for William Burroughs and found several cool galleries of his book covers from around the world, like this Japanese cover of My Education. You could print this as big as a movie poster and the resolution would still be crisp and clear.

Pop Art Machine

William Burroughs book covers at Pop Art Machine

Naked Lunch cover archive

If you are a nerd, and under the age of 30, you know what Starcraft is. You have wasted countless hours of your life playing it, because it is one of the best video games ever created, and, along with Blizzard’s other titles Diablo and World of Warcraft, has probably disposed of more youthful potential than anything this side of the public school system. It’s a strategy game in which players portray one of three races?

 
Lending further merit to my sense that the shape of things to come will have “Ballardian” contours, London’s Heathrow Airport has just established Alain De Botton as its first “writer in residence.”  Leaving aside such notions as to how De Botton’s supposed to “reside” in an airport (he’s sleeping in an adjacent Sofitel), the author of The Art of Travel and How Proust Can Change Your Life starts his day like any other writer—at a desk, typing at his laptop.

De Botton’s desk just happens to be, though, in the middle of Terminal 5, and his typing appears in real time on a screen behind him.  What’s he writing about?  De Botton’s book title says it all: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary.  If you think this smells like a stunt, you’re right.  As Dan Glover, from Heathrow’s PR agency, says,

the campaign sought to stimulate ?

 
While my video game muscles have long since atrophied (I was always more a pinball man), and I reach for my Revolver only rarely these days, I read every word of the NYT’s While My Guitar Gently Beeps, which describes the enormous effort that went into pulling off The Beatles: Rock Band.  Beyond its account, though, of welcome, surviving Beatles-Yoko Ono-Giles Martin d?ɬ

From Wikipedia: “Versailles (known as Versailles Philharmonic Quintet in the United States) is a Japanese metal band formed in 2007. It is composed of several notable figures in the “visual kei” scene. Versailles’ key characteristics are their Renaissance-esque costumes, dueling guitar sounds and heavy but melodic arrangements.”

Take a gander at these guys! Versailles’ shredding guitarist, Hizaki, is a fetching tranny fan favorite who can put Eddie Van Halen to shame (at least in the hair and make-up departments):

Here’s one more music video by Versailles. This one is called The Revenant Choir:

Facebook fan page of Japanese Metal Princess Hizaki

Thank you John Bertram!

Supernatural investigators are a time-honored tradition in genre fiction. Sherlock Holmes, Randolph Carter, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Kolchak the Night-Stalker, Harry D’Amour, Harry Dresden, John Constantine, Fox Mulder. It’s as important of an archetype as, say, the cowboy.

Which explains why, as with cowboys, Italy has appropriated the tradition and made it vaguely more gay and better-dressed, specifically with Dylan Dog. I saw these comics for the first time in Rome in 2004, in Archie’s Digest-format, where they stack them at newsstands along with, well, the cowboy comics. The eponymous character is a macho detective in a black blazer and open-collared red shirt, with a sidekick who is, um, Groucho Marx. Literally. Why, I have no clue. (Also, his boss is named “Inspector Bloch” in an homage to Robert Bloch, Lovecraft protegee and author of Psycho.) All of the stories are pastiches of American movies or fiction, usually with more violence and boobs.

It all works well enough that apparently Hollywood is counter-appropriating it and making a film version, called “Dead of Night,” with Brandon Routh, directed by, um… the guy who did Snakes on a Plane. Actually, that might fit perfectly, now that I think about it…. Fun!

Here’s some old guy synthpop madness courtesy of Tim and Eric.  Kraftwerk’s got nothin’ on these dudes!

Minivan Highway EL Remix

Tim and Eric

Thanks Gord Fynes!

(via Nerdcore)

Actress/writer Sharon Horgan (right) is amongst the first ranks of British comedic talent. Up there with Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan and The League of Gentlemen. But I don’t mean to compare her solely to males, I’m merely comparing her to other writer-performers. Horgan’s so good that, like her closest contemporary Julia Davis, her work so thoroughly transcends the notion of “female comedy” or “comedy for women” that it would be ridiculous to insist upon it.

Still, Horgan does happen to be a female, and a very attractive one at that. The series she is best known for Pulling (the second series comes out today on DVD in America) follows the travails of three single women in dead-end jobs and even worse relationships. Her acting style is similar in many ways to Warren Beatty or Gary Shandling’s awkward hemming and hawing, half-finished sentence school of acting (ugh, there I go with male comparisons again). With creative partner, Dennis Kelly, she knows how to write for her strengths. Like Gervais and Larry David, Horgan is a master at finding uncomfortable truths in the in-between moments of life. It’s tempting to describe Pulling as Sex and The City meets Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Sadly, the suits at the BBC—for whatever DUMBASS reason—decided not to renew Pulling for a third series. They did commission a one-off ending to the series, so it was neatly tied-up, but boy did they drop the ball on this one… However, the BBC’s loss is America’s gain as Horgan has reportedly signed a deal with HBO (Great move, HBO!)

Here are two more scenes from Pulling, one where Horgan’s Donna meets an old friend on the street and a second clip featuring fan favorite Karen in a typically awkward encounter in the supermarket.

More Sharon Horgan brilliance: In this painfully observed scene from Horgan and Kelly’s ensemble comedy for Channel Five, Angelo’s, husband and wife police partners, Dave and Karen visit the fertility clinic.

The Awl’s Alex Balk likes Pulling, too

‘There’s no moral centre to Pulling because we don’t have one!’