Cat B

"On an aesthetic level, the uniforms haven't been nearly as warmly received as on a political one. Although Germany's Olympic athletes have spoken out in support of them — snowboarder Konstantin Schad told the daily Die Welt 'they look impressive' — the reaction on Twitter and elsewhere has been mostly negative. One Twitter user described it as a misguided homage to Apple's new iOS7 operating system, while Die Tageszeitung was more harsh: 'If this had been meant as a political protest, then it would have been okay, but if it's just a "fashionable jacket," and on top of that, a butt-ugly one?'"
—Are Germany's Olympic uniforms pro-gay?

The post Uniforms Allies appeared first on The Awl.

Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, CA.

The post Important Yoga Poses For The Rest Of Us appeared first on The Awl.

Photo: HBO

Back in the early days of The Ricky Gervais Show, when it was only a podcast and not an animated adaptation of a podcast, Stephen Merchant was the only part of it I could enjoy unreservedly. The titular host was too obnoxious, and third seat Karl Pilkington was, I'm still pretty sure, just a very good improviser who never broke character, but Stephen's interjections were always perfectly timed, his stories relatable and hilarious. I even appreciated the way he'd sometimes tell Ricky to shut up so that Karl could get through a thought (such as it was). When Extras came along, Merchant's Darren Lamb, useless talent agent/idiot, was my favourite character by far. Then, a couple of years ago, Dave and I went to see Merchant's standup show (also called Hello Ladies), and I realized something: Merchant is a born sidekick.

It's not that he's not funny. It's that his comic persona -- goofy, clueless, socially awkward -- is best deployed in small doses; a lot of him is...a lot, but also too little. The premise of the show -- computer programmer Stuart (still called "Stephen" on IMDb, as of this writing) tries and fails to find love at the clubs of Los Angeles when it's pretty obvious his perfect match is actually his tenant, Jessica (Christine Woods) -- is that the protagonist is a flailing beta male. So if all the supporting characters are, necessarily, subordinate to a character whose natural state is subordination, the show isn't really anchored by anyone. Because Merchant doesn't have the presence of a series lead, it feels like the show is just all sidekicks, searching vainly for a strong figure they can play off and comment on. (Say what you will about Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath -- I certainly have -- but at least she has conviction.)

But the real problem with Hello Ladies is male privilege. HEY, WHERE'S EVERYONE GOING?

I'll keep this short, I promise. I think there's a reason that America -- even the male half -- was okay with Sex & The City, Bridget Jones's Diary, Girls, and other fairly recent pop-cultural products that revolve around women pursuing men (sex) in frank, straightforward ways. Not to say that these shows and movies don't portray real female behaviour of a kind that has only started to be acknowledged in recent years (or decades, at least); it's exaggerated, but true. But underlying fictional stories in which women are sexual aggressors -- and celebrated for it -- is the fact that it's only relatively lately in human civilization that women have been able to exercise that kind of agency openly. So we root for female characters when they upend what was, for centuries, the natural order of human relations because doing so is still kind of revolutionary.

Shorter: it doesn't skeeve me to watch female characters trying to get laid because women are still underdogs in nearly every other respect. It does sometimes skeeve me to watch male characters trying to get laid because it can feel like nothing more than another boring iteration of male power.

COME BACK, EVERYBODY! It's just something I've noticed about shows that, over the years, tried to be the male Sex & The City, like Jake In Progress, The Mind Of The Married Man, Love Monkey, Men At Work, and the only one that actually hung on for a significant length of time: Entourage. (I guess there's also The Bachelor, but that one's not funny on purpose.) In addition to how hard it is to root for a man on the prowl -- no matter how carefully you calibrate, it can still end up rapey -- there's the fact that what made Sex & The City important (for all my problems with it) is that it wasn't "the female" anything. Trying to take one of the few gynocentric TV properties and give it a male spin...I mean, I don't know what it was like to live in Ceylon when it was colonized by the British, but I bet at least one person was like, "You already have everything else -- you need this too?!"

Back to Hello Ladies, which thinks it's the male Girls, crossed with Curb Your Enthusiasm. (The fact that Merchant's character is still called "Stephen" on IMDb makes me wonder how late in the development process the decision was made for him to play a computer programmer as opposed to "himself.") It's given us a protagonist who's inconsiderate, spineless, cheap, and weird. Am I actually supposed to be on his side as he tries to inflict all of this upon the women of Los Angeles, plus his penis? There's just no way.

Dork Entourage Is Still Entourage appeared first on Previously.TV

The delights of Neko Case combine with the delights of Pitchfork TV's Over-Under series to deliver the following quote: "I'm pretty much filled with venom for romantic comedies. Overrated. I saw a bit of He's Just Not That Into You in a hotel and I just wanted to burn my own genitals off. Like, if that is what it is to be a woman, I'm just gonna seal this off like a Ken doll." [Pitchfork]

Rape Joke

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.





Patricia Lockwood is the author of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012). Follow her on Twitter at @TriciaLockwood.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

What: The World is Fucked by Primitive Calculators.

When: November 1 through Chapter Music.

Key notes: First-ever studio album from synth-punk icons, 35 years after “they first crawled out of dark, suburban Springvale to spew their filth over Melbourne and beyond.” Recorded with Neil Thomason at Head Gap. Includes newly-recorded versions of the previously heard ‘Cunt Life’ and ‘Sick of Myself’ – shortened to ‘Cunt’ and ‘Sick’ to match the other one-word titles – as well as a cover of The Fugs’ ‘Nothing’ and the pulsating rage of ‘Dead’ (hear below). Cover art by band member David Light. Coming out on CD, digital and vinyl. Follows – after some decades – the debut 7” ‘I Can’t Stop It’/‘Do That Dance’ and 1981’s posthumous self-titled live album, both reissued on vinyl this year by French label Desire.

From the presser: “The ultimate statement of ageing despair and futility. Surprisingly, it’s really fun to listen to.”

Tracklisting:

No
Why
Pain
Love
God
Cunt
Dead
Sick
Nothing

Back in January we premiered ‘Do Me A Favour’, the first single off the second album from cathartic punk-gospel wailers Harmony.

Now comes ‘Cut Myself Clean’, another harrowing journey made beautiful by singers Amanda Roff, Quinn Veldhuis and Erica Dunn.

It’s another huge reason to anticipate the album, Carpetbombing, due early next year through increasingly ubiquitous Melbourne punk label Poison City. It follows up 2011’s On Rotation self-titled debut.

Led by Tom Lyngcoln (The Nation Blue) along with Jon Chapple (Mclusky) and Alex Lyngcoln, Harmony are about to tour nationally with The Drones, who invited them to play February’s ATP. M+N writer Aaron Curran described them as “an emotive amalgam of gospel, blues and urban clamour.”

Lyngcoln, meanwhile, describes the home-recorded ‘Cut Myself Clean’ as “a blood psalm about an endless flow. Self-harm open-wound downer-scene bad dream and the subsequent forced clean-up after council decree. Tides of Type O rising on high. Starting with a slight nick, the voices swell into an undulating sea and end in torrential crescendo and shift into some kind of shanty.”

In other words, it won’t heal your election-result blues, but feel free to join arm in arm in commiseration and see if the song doesn’t give a bit of power to your pain.

America was originally a spinoff of the long-running England. Airing from the 1776-77 season through today, America focuses on a small ensemble of white people using things in the ground to become rich or kill brown people. A sprawling dramedy, it combines all of the loose plot points of a Tyler Perry sitcom with all the fun of being white.

It has widely focused on the themes of war, freedom, sitting, Fenway Park, maps, the one true Christian god, rugs, pregnancy tits, Vice magazine, butterfaces, coal, butterdicks, “Where’s the Beef?,” Chicago, Larry Flynt, colonialism, Terri Schiavo, NBC single-camera sitcoms, toddlers, suicide pacts, Atari, penny farthing bicycles, SpaghettiO’s (Cool Ranch flavor), tiny dolls, the TLC show Sister Wives, H1N1, television, and genocide. It has some unique perspective every once in awhile, but honestly, America can be super derivative. Most of the stories have already been on The Simpsons.

Over at McSweeney's, Megan Amram reviews America, the series.

---

See more posts by Emma Carmichael

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Word on the street is that Rihanna is being tapped to play Josephine Baker in an upcoming film version of the play “Josephine and I.” That’s cool! I love Josephine Baker! And there was that one HBO movie about her 20 years ago starring Lynn Whitfield and Louis Gossett, Jr, but I can always handle another one. I think Josephine Baker happens to have been an exceptionally interesting and badass lady and nothing could make me happier than for other people to know about her.

So, I was really disappointed when I kept seeing all these articles today referring to her as a “seductress” with a “troubled life.”  Articles with titles like “Rihanna to play seductress” and crap. With absolutely no mention of her talent, her incredible success in Vaudeville and in France, or the fact that she was a spy for the French Resistance during WWII, or her contributions to the Civil Rights movement.

Did she have a troubled life? Yeah, when she was a kid, she definitely did. She was married off at 13. She was homeless as a teenager and used to dance for her supper– which is how she ended up getting discovered in the first place. After that, she did damn well for herself.

Was she a seductress? Well, not really. She was beautiful, for sure. But she wasn’t going around doing it like it was her job. She was a dancer, a singer, an actress and an activist.

I find it incredibly disappointing that anyone would refer to a woman like Josephine Baker in these terms and in these terms alone. The only reference I have seen to her actual work and life was a small blurb on how she “became notorious for dancing naked apart for a tutu of fake bananas in the 1920s.” Yeah. That’s really nice.

Let me tell you some things about Miss Josephine Baker. She was one of the best, most highly paid dancers in Vaudeville. She went on tour to France and ended up staying there, since at the time it was a hell of a lot less racist than the US was. Yes, at this time, she did perform her famous banana dance, but this was not a scandalous thing in France at the time. It wasn’t the US where everyone was all Puritanically terrified of boobs and black people.

Baker was hugely popular in France– in fact, she was the most popular entertainer of her time there. Her popularity didn’t translate to the US, because, once again, crazy ass racists. People freaked out when she returned home to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies and she was soon replaces with white burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee.

She went back to France and, being so disgusted with the way her home country treated her, renounced her citizenship and became a citizen of France after marrying a Frenchman. Then the WWII broke out.

Instead of flitting around and being a fabulous celebrity, Josephine Baker used her celebrity to help her new adopted country, and her ability to travel around, and hobnob with high ranking officials from Japan and Germany without looking suspect made her an ideal spy for the French Resistance. She would return with secrets printed on invisible ink on her sheet music.

She helped people who were in danger from the Nazis get the paperwork and VISAs they needed to get out. That is freaking amazing. For her service, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal.

After the war, Baker adopted 12 children of mixed ethnicity and heritage, calling them her “Rainbow Tribe.” It was a part of her effort to combat racism, and to do what she could with her riches to help the world. When visiting the US, she refused to perform in segregated theaters.

Though she lived in France, she was still heavily involved in the US Civil Rights movement. She was, in fact, the only woman originally on the roster to speak at the March on Washington, although she notably brought Rosa Parks right up there to give a speech as well. After Dr. King died, Coretta Scott King asked her if she could take over as the unofficial leader of the Civil Rights Movement– but after giving it some thought, she regretfully declined, citing her need for time to take care of her children.

This is the kind of woman Josephine Baker was. To reduce her to merely a “seductress with a troubled life” makes me so ill I cannot even tell you. It is detrimental to all women when a woman as accomplished as she was is dismissed as being nothing more than a sex object, or as having been some kind of jazz age celebrity trainwreck. It’s also disturbing in its similarity to the way she was treated by this country in her lifetime.

I am sure that the movie itself will be more respectful of Baker’s legacy, and hopefully, sometime between then and now, people will bother to find out who she was before going and writing bullshit like this.

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Volkan T is the man.

Who knows how he pulled the stunt that he pulled, but kudos to the Turkish bodybuilder with the coolest name of all time for his antics at Cologne Airport on the night of July 25.

According to an eight-page police report that was leaked to German media, the 24-year-old Volkan somehow managed to breach security in a section of the airport that was closed off by military personnel. No one knows how. What is confirmed, however, is that stealthy Volkan managed to sneak onto German chancellor Angela Merkel’s private airbus for several hours of amazing by-myself-dance-meeting on ecstasy and marijuana.

I’ve included highlights from a German report below. He sounds like a pretty cool guy who knows how to have a good time.

From Der Spiegel:

Reports said he stripped down to his underpants, sprayed fire extinguisher foam around the elegant cream and beige interior, pushed buttons in the cockpit, released an inflatable emergency slide and danced on the wing of the Airbus 319.

… It took police, private security guards and members of the Bundeswehr army almost four hours to get the intruder off the plan.

… While playing with the cockpit buttons, he inadvertently triggered an alarm that was logged by military personnel at 8:40 p.m. But the man wasn’t arrested until 12:23 a.m. when a police dog bit him in the leg.

… His antics put the plane out of action for several weeks and caused an estimated [$133,720] in damage. The jet needed new carpet, a new coat of paint on its wing and a new emergency slide.

It’s unclear if Merkel had chartered a flight for the evening, as she was in attendance at “The Flying Dutchman” opera. (Your favorite.) Luckily, the plane is back in operation this week, which might explain in part why this rager has only now made world news. Oh, and also, this has created something of a shitstorm among German politicos on the topic of ratcheting up national security.

Volkan, meanwhile, remains in a psychiatric hospital with dog bites on his leg.

sources: IBTimes and Der Spiegel/top image via Colorado Newsday

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Oh man. What the hell is wrong with sharks? Why are they such mean bastards?

Scientists at the University of Delaware‘s Ocean Exploration, Remote Sensing, Biogeography (ORB) Lab were trying fishing for a sand tiger shark that they’d previously tagged for studying in Delaware Bay. But a small, three-foot dogfish shark bit the bait first. Before they had time to unhook the small dogfish shark and try again, the bigger 10-foot sand tiger shark they were looking for came up and and ate the goddamn dogfish shark whole. It didn’t even chew the thing, creating what scientists called a “turducken of the sea.”

We thought the fisherman climbing inside the shark and sticking his arms out through the gills was the most insane picture of 2013, but this might top it psychological terror factor. Seriously—cannibalism? What is wrong with these assholes?

Image: NBC
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It’s been four years since the great alt-country wailer Neko Case posed with the sword on the car hood on her Middle Cyclone album cover, and she hasn’t released a solo album since. That changes next week, when Case drops her new LP The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. Decemberists producer Tucker Martine helmed the album, and Case’s contributors this time around included Kelly Hogan, M. Ward, and New Pornographers frontman A.C. Newman. We’ve already posted her songs “Man” and “Night Still Comes,” and now the whole album is streaming at NPR.

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is out 9/3 on Anti-.

I have been on the Internet for years now. Ever since I was a kid and my parents signed us up for Prodigy. However, it’s always been a little uncomfortable. I mean, I try to go and look at news sites, but then get these flashing pop-ups demanding that I immediately prove I have a penis in order to look at them. Even those that let me on, I hardly understand because they’re all full of manly stories on current events and never tell me which BB Cream I’m supposed to buy.

THANK GOODNESS, a man has finally stepped up to change all of this. Bryan Goldberg, who previously launched Bleacher Report, has now launched Bustle, a ladies website named after a hideously uncomfortable mid-19th Century undergarment. The name is also oddly close to “BUST” the name of a popular feminist magazine that has been around since 1993.

It is also going to cost $6.5 million dollars. None of which seems like it will be spent on what Goldberg refers to as its “large roster of writers out of top-ranked colleges” — who will be paid a whopping $300 a week for their services. Yay college!

Goldberg considers this an opportunity to “completely reform women’s publishing,” because he seemingly believes that all the women’s sites actually launched by women are just not doing it right.

“Isn’t it time for a women’s publication that puts world news and politics alongside beauty tips? What about a site that takes an introspective look at the celebrity world, while also having a lot of fun covering it? How about a site that offers career advice and book reviews, while also reporting on fashion trends and popular memes?”

He also includes a long list of sites that cater exclusively to men, such as “Politico, Bleacher Report, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Mashable, Grantland, TheVerge, Break, College Humor, IGN, Thrillist and Gawker.”

You know, because those sites are all way too complicated for the womens to understand. I know I don’t want to read about Edward Snowden unless it’s tempered with what kind of nail polish I should buy and a picture of a kitty cat.

To be fair, Jezebel was launched by Nick Denton, also a man. To continue being fair, Bustle actually did a great job of covering #solidarityisforwhitewomen, and gets bonus points for actually mentioning Mikki Kendall (@Karynthia), who started the hashtag in the first place.

However, the problem is not with the writers, who are probably good people just trying to get their work out there in the first place. I know for a fact how difficult it is. The problem is with Goldberg trying to mansplain lady things to ladies, and act like he is the first person to ever come up with a website that appeals to women. Because, obviously, there’s The Toast, The Hairpin, Jezebel, XOJane, The Frisky, The Crunk Feminist Collective, Feministe, Feministing, Bitch Magazine, et al.

The problem is that he thinks he knows what women want better than women do. The problem is that he is a man, cynically trying to make a living for himself off of feminism. And that sucks, and we all know how that turns out.

To be entirely frank, there are probably enough “women’s sites” that cater to the “news and also gossip and also hair advice!” shtick. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — but the thing that’s missing in most of these sites is an intersectional approach to women’s issues and feminism that includes and publishes the perspectives of more WOC, queer and transwomen. That’s what’s missing. Not someone explaining, as Goldberg so deftly puts it, “the difference between eyeliner, mascara and concealer.”

image: Business Insider

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The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

Ever heard of North Sentinel Island? Probably not …even thought's one of the most unusual places on Earth. What makes it so odd? The people -they've been there a long time, completely cut off from the rest of the world.

MAROONED

Late on the night of August 2, 1981, a Hong Kong freighter navigating the choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal ran aground on a submerged coral reef. The ship, called the Primrose, was hopelessly stuck. But there was no danger of it sinking, so after radioing for assistance, the captain and crew settled in for a few days' wait until help arrived.

The following morning, as it became light, the sailors saw an island a few hundred yards beyond the reef. It was uninhabited, as far as anyone could tell: There were no buildings, roads, or other signs of civilization there -just a pristine, sandy beach and behind it, dense jungle. The beach must have seemed like an ideal spot to wait for a rescue, but the captain ordered the crew to remain aboard the Primrose. It was monsoon season, and he may have concerned about lowering the men into the rough sea in tiny lifeboats. Or perhaps he'd figured out just which tiny island lay beyond the reef: It was North Sentinel -the deadliest of the 200 islands in the Andaman Island chain.

SOME WELCOME

A few days later, a lookout aboard the Primrose spotted a group of dark-skinned men emerging from the jungle, making their way toward the ship. Was it the rescue party? It seemed possible …until the men came a little closer and the lookout could see that every one of them was naked.

Naked …and armed, but not with guns. Each man carried either a spear, a bow and arrows, or some other primitive weapon. The captain made another radio distress call, this one much more urgent: "Wild men! Estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats. Worrying they will board us at sunset."

A WORLD APART

(Image credit: Captain Robert Fore)

After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the Primrose were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind. Anthropologists believe the men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years. That's 35,000 years before the last ice age, 55,000 years before the great woolly mammoths disappeared from North America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants of the first humans out of Africa.

The outside world has known about North Sentinel Island for centuries, but the islanders have been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world all that time, and they fiercely maintain their isolation to this day. No one knows what language they speak or what they call themselves -they have never allowed anyone to get close enough to find out. The outside world calls them the "Sentineli" or the "Sentinelese," after the island. It's estimated the the 28-square-mile island (slightly larger than Manhattan) is capable of supporting as many as 400 hunter-gatherers, but no one knows how many people live there.

HOME ALONE

North Sentinel Island is amazingly well suited to both support and isolate a tribe like the Sentinelese. It's too small to interest settlers or colonial powers, especially when there are bigger, better islands within a few hours' sailing time. And unlike many of those islands, North Sentinel has no natural harbors, so there's no good place for a ship to take shelter from a storm. Furthermore, the island is surrounded by a ring of submerged coral reefs that prevent large ships from approaching. This was especially true during the age of sail, when ships had no way of quickly maneuvering out of harm's way once they realized that the reefs were there. Narrow openings in these reefs allow small boats to slip through and land on the beach, but these are passable only in good weather and calm seas, which occur as infrequently as two months out of the year. For the remaining ten months, the island cannot be safely approached from the sea.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

(Image credit: Flickr user Christian Caron)

At the same time that they keep strangers out, the coral reefs help keep the Sentinelese in, because the reefs create several shallow lagoons that are teeming with sea life. The food provided by these lagoons is so plentiful that the Sentinelese have never needed to fish in the deep sea waters beyond the coral reefs. They propel their dugout canoes through the shallow lagoons by poling along the bottom, but they cannot navigate in water deeper than the length of the poles. They've never invented oars, without which they cannot leave the island.

The Andaman Islands, North Sentinel included, sit at the crossroads of ancient trade routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Ironically, this may have further encouraged the isolationist tendencies of the Sentinelese, because their dark skin and African appearance would have made them the targets of any slave traders who might have tried to land on the island over the centuries. Periodic contact with such outsiders would have only intensified the tribe's hostility toward the outside world and their desire to be left alone.

WHO ARE YOU WEARING?

One more thing that has protected the Sentinelese from outsiders: the age-old belief that all Andaman Island tribes were cannibals. There is no evidence that any of them were, except that some tribes wore the bones of their ancestors as jewelry (including the skulls), which they wore strapped to their backs. It would have been easy to mistake such people for cannibals. Who'd stick around long enough to find out that they weren't?

By the time the Greek astronomer Ptolemy wrote of an "Island of Cannibals" somewhere in the Bay of Bengal in the second century AD, sailors were already giving the Andamans a wide berth. Marco Polo didn't help matters in the 1290s when he described the Andamanese as "a brutish and savage race… [who] kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon." Claims like these certainly did help to keep strangers away. And considering how fiercely the Sentinelese and other Andaman tribes defended their islands, it's probably a lucky thing they did.

STRANGERS BEARING GIFTS

(Image credit: Flickr user Christian Caron)

The first real threat to the natives of North Sentinel Island appeared in 1858, when the British established a penal colony at Port Blair on nearby South Andaman Island, and set out trying to pacify the local tribes -the Great Andamese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and eventually the Sentinelese. One technique the British used was to kidnap a member of an unfriendly tribe, hold him for a short period, treat him well, and then shower him with gifts and let him return to his people. In doing so, the British hoped to demonstrate their friendliness. If the first attempt didn't work, they'd repeat the process with as many tribesmen as it took to turn an unfriendly tribe into a friendly one.

In 1880 a large, heavily-armed party led by 20-year-old Maurice Vidal Portman, the British colonial administrator, landed on North Sentinel and made what is believed to be the first exploration of the island by outsiders. Several days passed before they made contact with any Sentinelese, because tribe members disappeared into the jungle whenever strangers approached.

Finally, after several days on the island, the party stumbled across an elderly couple who were too old to run away, and several small children. Portman brought the two adults and four of the children back to Port Blair. But the man and the woman soon started to get sick and then died, probably from exposure to Western diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which they would have had little or no resistance. So Portman returned the four children to North Sentinel Island and released them with gifts for the rest of the tribe. The children disappeared into the jungle and were never seen again.

INDIA'S TURN

After this experience, the British left the Sentinelese more or less alone, and focused their pacification efforts on the other tribes. When India won its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the Andaman Islands were handed over to India, but the Indians ignored the Sentinelese, too, for about 20 years.

Then in 1967, the Indian government launched its own large-scale expedition to North Sentinel Island, complete with plenty of armed policemen and naval officers for protection. The visit was less aggressive than the British had been 87 years earlier (no kidnapping), and it was more scientific (an anthropologist named T.N. Pandit was a member of the party). But they never made contact with a single Sentinelese soul -once again, the tribe members vanished deeper into the jungle whenever the outsiders approached.

RE-GIFTING

That began a decades-long policy of "contact visits" by the Indian government to North Sentinel Island. From time to time during the short calm-weather season, an Indian naval vessel would anchor outside the coral reefs and dispatch small boats through the openings in the reefs to approach the beaches. Approach the beaches, but not land. The boats had to be sure not to come within an arrow's flight of the beach or risk being attacked by the Sentinelese.

These strangers, like the British before them, came bearing gifts -usually bananas and coconuts, which do not grow on the islands, and sometimes other gifts, including bead necklaces, rubber balls, plastic buckets, and pots and pans. Once the visitors approached as closely as they felt was safe, they would toss the items overboard to wash upon the beach. Or, if the party were large enough to frighten the Sentinelese into retreating into the jungle, it might even land on the beach, but only long enough to drop off the gifts and beat it out of there before the Sentinelese attacked. When a National Geographic film crew lingered too long during one such visit in 1975, a Sentinelese warrior with a bow and arrow shot the director in the thigh, and then stood there on the beach laughing at his accomplishment.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

It wasn't until the early 1990s, after more than 20 years of such visits, that the Sentinelese finally relaxed their guard -just a bit- and allowed the boats to come closer. Sometimes unarmed tribesmen stood on the beach while the people on the boats tossed the coconuts overboard. A few times, they even waded out in the water to collect the coconuts in person. Even so, they did not allow the visitors to stay long. After just a few minutes, the Sentinelese would signal with menacing gestures or "warning shots" -arrows fired with no arrowheads attached- that the visit was over.

LEAVE 'EM ALONE

That was about as close as the Sentinelese ever came to opening up to the outside world. In the mid-1990s, the Indian government decided that its policy of forcing contact with the Sentinelese made no sense, and it ended the visits in 1996.

(Image credit: Indian Coast Guard)

The visits made no sense to India, but they were actually dangerous for the Sentinelese. With so little resistance to Western diseases, the islanders risked not just the death of individuals with each contact with outsiders, but the extinction of the entire tribe. That was the experience with other Andaman Island tribes: When the British established their penal colony on South Andaman Island in 1858, the native population of the Andaman Islands was nearly 7,000 people. But the British arrival was followed by a succession of epidemics, including pneumonia, measles, mumps, and the Russian flu, which decimated the tribes. After more than 150 years of exposure to Western diseases, their numbers have dropped to fewer than 300 people, and continue to decline. Some tribes have gone completely extinct. The Sentinelese, by refusing contact with the outside world, are the only tribe that has avoided this fate.

WAVE GOODBYE

The Sentinelese even survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the deadliest in recorded history, with few or no casualties. Thought the tsunami killed more than 230,000 people in surrounding countries, it appears that the Sentinelese were able to sense the coming of the tsunami and escape to higher ground before it arrived. When an Indian Navy helicopter arrived three days after to check on their well-being and drop food parcels on the beach, a Sentinelese warrior came out of the jungle and warned the helicopter off with a bow and arrow, a clear sign that the Sentinelese did not want help from outsiders.

(Image credit: Indian Navy)

KEEP OUT

Today the Indian government enforces a three-mile exclusion zone around North Sentinel Island with regular sea and air patrols. Heavy fines and jail time await anyone caught trespassing in the zone. And if that isn't enough of a deterrent, the Sentinelese continue to defend their island as fiercely as ever. In 2006 two poachers who'd spent the day fishing illegally inside the exclusion zone dropped anchor near the island and went to sleep, apparently after a night of heavy drinking. Sometime during the night the anchor came loose and the boat drifted onto the coral reefs. The Sentinelese killed both men and buried their bodies on the beach. At last report the bodies are still there; when an Indian Navy helicopter tried to recover them from the beach, the Sentinelese fought it off with bows and arrows.

EYE IN THE SKY

Today anyone with a laptop and internet access can use Google Earth to spy on places that are not meant to be seen by outsiders. You can look at satellite photos of Area 51, the secret military air base in the Navada desert. You can look at Mount Weather, a secret facility in Virginia that is rumored to be the place that members of Congress are evacuated in times of national emergency. You can even peer down on secret watersides on the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea, that are the playground of that country's Communist Party elite.

(Google location found by commenter bismuth83)

But when you look down on North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, all you can make out is the wreck of the Primrose, still stuck on the reef where it ran aground in 1981. You can't see the Sentinelese, their dwellings, or anything else that might shed light on how many people there are on the island, or how they live their lives. The dense jungle canopy that covers every inch of the island except the beaches conceals everything: Even when viewed from outer space, the Sentinelese remain free from prying eyes.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

In 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie – whose mother Zelda is rumored to have said, like Daisy Buchanan, that she hoped her daughter would be a "beautiful little fool" – and ended it with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and think about.

Fitzgerald's things to worry about are short: courage, cleanliness, efficiency, horsemanship. And then:

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Don't worry about the past, the future, or mosquitoes/flies/insects in general. Either Fitzgerald was writing this in the midst of a cicada swarm or Scottie was deathly afraid of bugs. Also: Scottie.

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As "Doctor Who" went into the crapper this season (barely redeemed by a pretty good season finale) and "Game of Thrones" marched boldly on into mayhem and... wow, that was terrible: so where was the nerd's heart to turn this spring?

For a rather tiny number of us, our lonely geek minds took to "Orphan Black," a BBC America show that had its first season finale this weekend. How tiny a number? Well, episode eight of the ten-episode season had 170,000 viewers in the 18-49 demo. (The population of Jackson, Mississippi or Fort Lauderdale, Florida!)

Our tiny loyal contingent is enough to bring the show back for a second season, which is wonderful. But now we want more.

"Orphan Black" is about an English orphan, who is white. (Well?) In episode one, she comes back to... the non-English city in which the story takes place (an unnamed bizarre hybrid of New York and Toronto, where the currency clearly isn't dollars but the NYPD definitely patrols), and discovers she has a twin! No wait, she's a triplet! Uh oh, there's... quite a few of her.

She's played by Tatiana Maslany. Who? Yes. She's Canadian. That's not important right now. What is important is that she plays seven actual characters in the course of the show, which is about unraveling this mystery of clones cl-clone-clone-clones. And then sometimes she plays those characters playing each other. Which is insane to watch. Insane! The show shot from October through February, and she got about one day off, sometimes playing three roles in a single day.

Let's hear from Professional TV Critics!

• "What dazzled me most about 'Orphan Black' this season was Maslany’s performance. If I had an Emmy ballot, she’d be on the Best Actress list, or at least three of the Best Supporting Actress spots. Or both. She never phoned in any of her clones," says Jeff Jensen of EW.

• "It's a great performance not just because you can tell each character from each other, but because several of the characters are so compelling that Maslany would be a knockout even if she was only playing one of them," wrote Alan Sepinwall of HitFix.

• "Maslany is giving one of TV’s two or three best performances, a daring tightrope walk between being over-the-top and gimmicky and incredibly naturalistic while playing seven or eight different characters, at least four of them 'regulars,'" wrote some dude at Grantland.

Etc. "An acting tour de force," wrote Variety yesterday.

IT GOES ON. "Many professional men say lady is really good," so it must be true! (No but seriously!)

And then, despite this TELEVISUAL MAGICKING, Claire Danes will get the Emmy for best actressing for most plastic face-moving. Or Julianna Marguiles, or whoever; Connie Britton's hair, or that fun lady who is secretly Russian who is married on TV to that incredibly hot dude. Why is that guy so hot? He's Welsh, did you know that?

Anyway. That would be unfair. The age of the big networks is over! We expect our American awards shows to honor the truly best, not just the "oh that TV lady was nice to me in the Ralph's" or "Oh we have the same agent" or "my nanny loves that show." We deserve more from our Los Angeles taste makers and awards voters. We demand the recognition of the actually groundbreaking. Claire Danes WILL BE FINE, she's been through worse.

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Remember the Russian family that lived for 40 years in isolation in the Siberian wilderness? Vice caught up with the last living Lykov, Agafia, for an episode of their "Far Out" series. Publisher (and, in this instance, narrator) John Martin also wrote about the experience for Vice's website, where he mentions that "One of the more peculiar notions she’s picked up" — from the Old Believer newspapers that visitors occasionally leave behind — "is that bar codes are marks of the devil. 'It’s the stamp of the Antichrist,' she said. 'People bring me bags of seeds with bar codes on them. I take the seeds out and burn the bags right away and then plant the seeds. The Antichrist stamp will bring the end to the world,' she said. 'God won’t save everyone.' "

I emailed John a few more questions.

What were some things you learned from Agafia?

I learned, or perhaps it was reinforced in my mind, that people can live off-grid and mostly alone with minimal intrusion and help from the 'outside.' It's not an impossible lifestyle, and, especially in the case of the former, it's how all our ancestors lived. It blew my mind that there was a 70-year-old woman doing it in the middle of the mountains of Siberia, of all places. She projects this grandmotherly warmth, and almost frailty, but then will just march up a steep-ass snow-covered hill and start sawing logs while the young crew of soft New Yorkers are all winded from just walking there. It also made me sure that all hermits are running from something — in the case of Agafia, well, her father's case, it was Communists. I just like the idea that most of the world is so in touch with modern amenities, and then there's this isolated old lady in Siberia who has almost none of them, and she's seemingly happier than anyone else I've met.

And from being in Siberia in general?

Russia is a fucked up place. There's definitely vestiges of Soviet mentality and state-run bureaucracy that permeate everything from simple things like ordering dinner at a restaurant to exchanging money, to doing more complicated things like getting permits, renting helicopters, and in general just getting things done. Going through layers of permission was very frustrating and … Russian doll-like. Siberia is almost a world apart from Western Russia, however, in both distance and sense of place. It almost seems folly that any one government could ever try to rule this place. It's wild, untamed. It's just so vast that when you think of it in context of the Old Believers, it makes sense that this is where they've fled to for centuries to escape persecution. There's so few people, and so much land, and so much of it inhospitable by our standards, which makes it ever more impressive when you meet the people who live there.

Did you eat anything interesting?

Oh yes! While I very much wanted to sample the potato dumplings Agafia was making, she wouldn't eat with us (Old Believer religion rules). We ate well with with our Siberian fixers, who were these hardcore burly Russian dudes who were kind of like the Three Stooges meets Bear Grylls or something. And they brought salt pork, which I developed an addiction to. It's basically slabs of cured pork fat with a little meat. Like bacon, but less meat. Salty as hell, usually eaten in small bits on bread for breakfast. Very common in Russia but for some reason it just felt like the food you needed to eat after sleeping outside in -30 weather. And in restaurants in town we had something called a Taiga Salad, which is some sort of pheasant salad that I became fond of. We also shot an episode of our food show "Munchies in Moscow" on our night off. We went out with Alexei Zimin of the restaurant Ragout, and he took us around the new and amazing Moscow eating and drinking establishments. There's a lot of good places there that have sprung up in the last couple years — a real food scene for sure. It ended with one of his chef buddies knocking out our producer with one punch. Moscow is a wild ride.

Do you think Agafia would want to participate in The Hairpin's "Alone In" series? Alone in Siberia for 70 Years? Ha ... ehh, okay that's probably in poor taste. And she wasn't alone the whole time... 

At this point she's media-savvy, so I think she would definitely be game to participate, although it might be a little tough to get her on the phone. I could definitely get you on the phone with Heimo and Edna Korth who live alone (together) above the Arctic Circle in an area as remote as Agafia.

Is there anything you wish you'd asked her but didn't?

I'm really interested in the survival aspect of it, because she's so anathema to the stereotype of a mountain man hermit, I wanted her to teach me her secrets. I wanted to know more about her day to day and the skills she learned growing up. We tried asking her, but she has this circular way of answering questions that made interviewing her rather challenging. If we would ask her if her way of life is difficult, for instance, she'd answer with a "difficult? this is just how I live." Also the fact that I don't speak Russian wasn't helping, and everyone on the crew was a Godless heathen, so Agafia's Biblical allusions were lost on us for the most part. The one thing that we didn't get to explore, which we would have liked to, was the living situation when her family was still alive. Due to inclement weather, our time with her was cut short by a day, which was when we were supposed to put on skin skis and go six miles or so to a cabin that her brothers lived in, away from the father and daughters. While there's no explanation for why they lived there, there is some speculation that it was the father wanting to keep the genders separate.

Oh, I should mention that when we left that she gave me a bag of cats "for Obama." Two kittens in a burlap sack.

Oh my god, what did you do with them?!

Told her I would get them to Obama then tossed them out of the helicopter at 2,000 feet.

Kidding. Gave them to the parks dept who were apparently going to auction them off. "Agafia and Yerofei's Cats!" I can only imagine the riches it brought them.

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(F) flourine (U) uranium (C) carbon (K) potassium (Bi) bismuth (Tc) technetium (He) helium (S) sulfur (Ge) germanium (Tm) thulium (O) oxygen (Ne) neon (Y) yttrium.

Read more: Color Lines

Last week when we asked readers to share their favorite ways to pack food for a trip, one reader tip stuck out:

I can't vouch for the vintage or provenance of this video but whatever, it is TOTALLY AWESOME and all I can say is that even if it were staged I would still be making a big doody in my pants if I were starring in it. (As the guy, not the bear. Bears don't wear pants, usually.) [Via]

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I.

Once upon a time a woman never got married, but had many fulfilling relationships, a job that kept her comfortable, an apartment that she got to decorate just for her, and hobbies that stimulated her mind.

The End.

II. 

Once upon a time a woman and a man tried having babies, but it didn’t work, so when they were past the age of trying, they decided that they had enough disposable income to travel the world, and so they did, and it was awesome, and both of them felt okay about it, and no one gave them any grief over it, either.

The End.

III.

Once upon a time a woman was approached by a drunk guy in a dark alley, but he was very polite, and explained that he had driven to the bar, but because he was responsible, he didn’t want to drive home, but his cell phone was dead, so he asked the lady to call him a cab. She did, and he was grateful, and they said pleasant goodbyes before going their separate ways.

The End.

IV.

Once upon a time a woman was very good at her job, and she knew she had added value to the company she worked for, so even though she was nervous, she talked to her boss, and asked for a raise, and she got it.

The End.

V.

Once upon a time a woman grew up in a land-locked state, and continued to live there because she had married her high school sweetheart, and his job was tied to the area, and she wanted to stay close to her parents, but she had always wished she had learned to surf. So when she turned 65 she used some of the money from her savings account, took her first ever solo vacation to the coast, and took a week’s worth of surfing lessons, and had a very nice time.

The End.

VI.

Once upon a time a young girl grew up reading magazines about beauty products and consequently felt very self-conscious about her acne. She tried a bunch of treatments that had varying degrees of success, and never left the house without a full face of makeup. She started using anti-aging products when she was 20, thinking that prevention would work better than a cure. But when she turned 30 she still had acne that she had hoped to outgrow, but somehow it just didn’t seem to matter as much. She would sometimes run errands without any makeup at all. And despite the preventative care she had tried to do in her early twenties, she started developing some wrinkles on her forehead in her late twenties. But again, somehow, it just didn’t seem to bother her as much as the prospect had when she was younger. When she was in her forties her skin had continued to wrinkle, but she cared even less, and was please to see that the wrinkles around her eyes made it look like she smiled a lot, which made her smile more, and she cared even less, and she only wore makeup when she wanted to, and never felt obligated to do so. When she was 80 her skin was thinner and delicate, but reminded her of really beautiful tissue paper, and she was happier, and felt more confident as a person than she ever had.

The End.

Renee Lupica recently received a BFA in New Media. She recently began sleeping on two mattresses stacked on top of one another, and is beginning to understand how it might escalate, à la The Princess & The Pea. You can follow her on Twitter @rmlupica.

"Just thought you might enjoy this singularly creepy tourism ad for the Barossa Valley in South Australia," writes a correspondent from Down Under. "The Barossa is a famous wine-growing and foodie area, so I can understand why someone thought 'Be consumed' was a killer line. Unfortunately when it's paired with Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' and South Australia's reputation as the serial killer state... well. 'You know you're never coming back', indeed." I kind of like this, but I am also of the opinion that pretty much anywhere you go in Australia you have even odds of ending up as the filling for a meat pie, so I guess I am responding to the perceived veracity. Local reaction is somewhat more equivocal.

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Last week, Neko Case announced in a trailer video that she’d soon release a new album and that the album would have the following goofy title: The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. Today, we learn a few of the particulars. The album is out in September, and first single “Man” is a headlong rush of Southern-fried power-pop melodies and hardbitten gender-flipped lyrical toughness. M. Ward plays guitar on the song, but Case’s overwhelming presence is clearly the center of attention. Also, I’m pretty sure that’s her in drag in the cover art, above. Listen to the song below.

Read More...

The soul-garage freakout warriors King Khan & The Shrines have been away for a while, but they’ll be back this fall with a new album called Idle No More, one that, according to Khan himself, is “about the state of the world we live in today.” The first song we’ve heard from the album is a fiery, charged-up number called “Born To Die,” and its horn-happy mayhem has nothing to do with Lana Del Rey. Also, the band’s wild live show is going on the road this fall. Listen to “Born To Die” and check out the band’s dates below.

Read More...

Isn't it great that there's a musician that almost literally everyone can agree on? From the punks to the hippies to the yuppies to the militants, from the people that buy one album a year at Starbucks to the people who buy zero albums a year through FilesTube, errybody reasonably loves Ms. Neko Case.

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The one and only KING KHAN chats about pizza, tarot cards, Black Panthers, Lindsay Lohan and his mighty ‘fourth eye’ with Geelong’s finest, THE FROWNING CLOUDS, ahead of an Australian tour this month.

Tarotly speaking, what kind of deck do you use and which card is your favourite?
The deck I was given by Alejandro Jodorowsky personally is the Tarot de Marseilles. It is considered the original deck; all other decks are imitations. My favourite card is The Devil. I don’t know why but it’s the card that speaks to me the most.

Is it true you will be working on German TV?
In an effort not to jinx anything I will simply say that I have been explained how the German pop industry works and lemme tell you, it’s about as complicated as a common crack house. I will be making my own brand of blue sunshine to sell to German sheep ... ‘nuff said.

How is Saba Lou, your daughter? Does she have any new records coming out?
My daughter is fine. She was recently very inspired by a visit from my niece Kitty [Durham] from Kitty, Daisy & Lewis and an incredible singer from Oz that I will be producing named Holiday Sidewinder [from Bridezilla]. With inspiring girls like that taking Saba Lou under their big black wings, I think her future as a doctor is guaranteed...

Have you spoken to Lou Reed since his festival, in which you played at – and were banned from Sydney Opera House?
Yes, I have. He invited me to dinner in London and I shared a seafood hotpot with him and Kim Catrall from Sex and the City.

What do you say in response to those who claim you’re just a black Elvis Presley?
Well that is a bunch of bullshit ... I love Elvis but I am cut from another cloth. I am trying to be the blackest Indian possible. I have gone so far as to become buddies with Bobby Seale, founding member of the Black Panthers (whom I contacted to ask a blessing to start a new Black Panthers in Oz to topple the Opera House). I also got handed the keys to the kingdom by founding member of The Invaders from Memphis, who asked me personally to provide the soundtrack to their upcoming documentary for which I was made music supervisor.

And yes I am black and I am proud to be an Indian!!!

Are you actually going to do a jazz remake of 36 Chambers?
Nein, danke!

There’s heaps of good pizza in Berlin. What’s the best?
Villa di Wow. See for yourself: I have captured their mystical pizza on film!!! Look up “Fire of Love” or “Pizza Di Wow” by King Khan ... these films will change the way you think about pizza.

You showed us a movie one night at Wowsville, a bar also in Berlin, about the downfall of some actor and you were saying he was like Heath Ledger. What was the movie and why should everyone see it?
The movie was called ABSTURZ and was made by Miron Zownir, one of the best photographers of our time. He let me make a collage of his photos on the new cover of the Shrines album, which will be released in September.

Are you still busy making movies?
Yes, always. I love making films.

Will you make another album with BBQ soon?
We are definitely gonna make a new album. We just have to find the bearded mushroom and make him our friend again. Also, the next album will be sponsored by rabies and scabies and ambidexterity.

Do you think Lindsay Lohan foresaw her tragic downfall when she came eye-to-eye with your butthole?
What she saw was the infinitude Maximus of my fourth eye. Lindsay was very kind but her downfall was caused by Tom Cruise and his magic hand. He is the Voldemort for my Harry Potter.

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The King Khan & BBQ Show tour Australia this month, followed by a short string of Mark Sultan/BBQ solo gigs. Dates below. The Frowning Clouds’ recent tour-only cassette can now be downloaded here.

Tues, June 11 – The Tote, Melbourne, VIC [w/The Frowning Clouds]
Wed, June 12 – The Tote, Melbourne, VIC [w/Mesa Cosa]
Thurs, June 13 – GoodGod, Sydney, NSW [early show from 7pm, w/Mesa Cosa]
Fri, June 14 – Deville’s, Perth, WA
Wed, June 26 – The LuWOW, Melbourne, VIC [Mark Sultan/BBQ solo]
Fri, June 28 – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane, QLD [Mark Sultan/BBQ solo]
Sun, June 30 – Sunset People @ Hollywood Hotel, Sydney, NSW [free, Mark Sultan/BBQ solo]