by Tamara Palmer
“Rockers are pussies.”
– Al Jourgensen
He’s been variously known under monikers such as Buck Satan, Alien Dog Star and Alien Jourgensen and is the brain trust behind such thought-provoking band names as Ministry, Revolting Cocks and 1000 Homo DJs. But Al Jourgensen, who cut a frightening figure with these bands’ even more provocative industrial music when they emerged in the late eighties and early nineties, is a surprisingly friendly and relatable guy. Once the picture of cocaine and heroin rock star excess, the six-years sober Jourgensen is far more likely to be found at the opera than at an arena concert these days.
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by Blogbot
La Senza is putting some festive cheer into their stockings with their latest advertising campaign. The Canadian-based lingerie company has assembled a special “choir” featuring scantily clad models of varying proportions who each sing notes that correspond to their cup size.
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by Jay Hathaway
“It’s volatile.”
– Maynard James Keenan
Maynard James Keenan thrives on the unpredictable. He’s famous as the lead singer of two hugely successful, yet almost completely different bands: Tool and A Perfect Circle. His current band, Puscifer, released its first album, “V” Is For Vagina, in 2007, and followed it up with a remix album in 2008.
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by Tamara Palmer
“Onward and upward.”
– Brody Dalle
While fans of the Distillers and other next-generation punk bands should ultimately find this transition natural and easy to follow, Spinnerette — the new vehicle for former Distillers lead Brody Dalle — has a decidedly more gentle rock edge as debuted on their first release, the “Ghetto Love EP.”
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by Nicole Powers
“We’ve had 18 years of climate conferences…”
– Ondi Timoner
In her latest documentary, Cool It!, two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning director Ondi Timoner (We Live In Public and Dig!) sets forth the case for lowering the temperature of the global warming debate, and offers pragmatic solutions to what former Vice President and preeminent environmentalist Al Gore considers a moral issue.
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by Brad Warner
I first got interested in spiritual practice when I was a teenager and my parents sat me down and told me about the horrible disease that runs in our family. It was, at the time, killing two of my aunts. This disease, they told me, usually begins to manifest when a person gets to be in his mid-thirties. The symptoms get progressively worse and after a while you lose your ability to physically function, your brain deteriorates, you go crazy and then you die.
As if my life weren’t already shitty enough, being an uncoordinated nerd who couldn’t play sports, was shy around girls, and had zits and braces. Now I was going to die a horrendous death before I had time enough to get over this stuff.
Wonderful. Just super.
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by Fred Topel
“I do think there’s a real world parallel.”
– Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood became a political filmmaker with his very first movie. In Tsotsi he attempted to redeem a fictional criminal teen in South Africa, Hood’s country of origin. He tackled American foreign policy, for better or worse, in his follow-up film, Rendition. The ensemble drama about our government’s often overlooked policy of taking terror suspects to foreign countries where torture could be conducted legally, was not a hit financially or critically, but it asked the questions Hood wanted to ask.
The X-Men series has always kept politics in the metaphorical forefront. The comic books portrayed mutants as a persecuted minority. The films featured politicians proposing policy to round up mutants, exterminate them or even try to “cure” them, raising the moral question of who decides what needs to be fixed.
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