Great issue of Rolling Stone out right now.
I don’t get to say that often enough.
If the cover image of Rosario Dawson and Rose McGowan standing bottom-to-bottom wearing only a string of bullets doesn’t get you, just open the thing up.
There you’ll find the excellent cover story on the girls, their guns and the guts of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse — which you should see immediately. Why Kill Bill was a huge hit and this isn’t is really beyond me. Best I can figure martial arts fans don’t take themselves too seriously to enjoy someone remixing their genre but horror/exploitation fans aren’t coming out in the same number for this.
Also: A great interview with Iggy Pop.
My favorite part:
RS: What was your reaction when Royal Caribbean Cruises wanted to use ["Lust For Life"] in a TV ad? It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate song for selling romantic getaways.
I was thrilled. And the song sounds great in there. I always paid attention to advertising jingles when I started writing songs. The first commercial the Stooges were in was a radio ad for the Detroit Dragway. They used a loop of the riff from “Real Cool Time” [on The Stooges], while the guy’s going, “See the motherfucking death-defying funny car! Big Ed Son-of-a-Bitch and his nitro-burning. . . !” [Laughs] I was like, “Yes, yes!” We weren’t paid, but I didn’t even think about it. I was so proud.
Look, blood, sweat and tears never got me or my music a fair hearing in the totally fake, nauseating, entirely crapola commercial-radio system — which is thankfully in its death throes. I hung out with those guys for years, doing horrible promo tours where you’d have to sit there and listen to the program director insult you if he wanted. You’d do an acoustic performance for his station, but he’d never play your fucking record. And he’d be laughing about it as you drive out of the parking lot. So am I happy to hear my music anywhere? Yeah. I don’t like the art ghetto. I want a wider culture.
You can read and listen to audio from the interview here.
There’s also a really good Q&A with legendary journalist Sy Hersh. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s recent New Yorker pieces have been delving into what he says is the U.S. government’s secret plan for war with Iran.
The intro to the Q&A includes pieces from the infamous 1975 memo in which Dick Cheney suggests “Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt.”
At the time Hersh was a reporter for The New York Times and Cheney was an aide to Donald Rumsfeld.
Hersh is still a bee in Cheney’s bonnet, and it’s not hard to see why. The guy is relentless. American conservatives loved his book The Dark Side of Camelot which has been called “the second JFK assassination” but were not as wild about Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.
Not that this worries him much. He was breaking the story of the My Lai Massacre when the current president was still in the Texas Air National Guard.
If that isn’t enough there’s also a great piece on a group called BattleCry, which the author calls “The nation’s largest and most radical youth crusade.”
Think that’s a bit much? From the piece:
At Acquire the Fire, Luce tells the kids to make lists of secular pleasures they’ll sacrifice for the cause. Hanneh starts with Bow Wow and Usher, bites her pen, and then decides to go big: “Music,” she writes, then “Friends” — the nonfundamentalist ones — and “Party.” This, she explains, is a polite way of saying “sex.” Not that she’s had any, or knows anyone her age who has, but she’s learned from Luce that “the culture” wants to force it upon her at a young age. “The world,” he tells her, is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online.
Luce sometimes brings a garbage truck onto the floor to cart the lists away, but this is a relatively small event, so Hanneh and Mallory trot over to one of the trash bins stationed around the arena and drop theirs in. “I feel so much better,” Mallory tells Hanneh. Hanneh nods, smiling now. “I feel free,” she says.
Later, one of Luce’s PR reps takes me backstage to sift through the bins of rejected affections. Most kids mention music, movies, girlfriends and boyfriends, sex or, surprisingly often, just condoms, but a number of new warriors are oddly precise about their proposed abandonings. They cast into perdition Starbucks (multiple votes), Victoria’s Secret (ditto; Luce encourages kids to confront the managers of lingerie stores), cereal (Special K and Cap’n Crunch), hip-huggers, “smelling amazing,” “vengeance,” “medication” and A&W root beer. “I would say it’s ridiculous what they are doing to root beer,” wrote the boy who will drink A&W no more.
“This is a real war,” Luce preaches. When he talks like that, he growls. “This is not a metaphor!” In Cleveland, he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens. One of the most popular, “Casualties of War,” features an elegiac beat by a Christian rapper named KJ-52 laid over flickering pictures of kids holding signs declaring the collapse of Christendom: 1/2 OF US ARE NO LONGER VIRGINS, reads a poster board displayed by a pigtailed girl. 40% OF US HAVE INFLICTED SELF-INJURY, says a sign propped up over a sink in which we see the hands of a girl about to cut herself. 53% OF US BELIEVE JESUS SINNED, declares the placard of a young black man standing in a graffiti-filled alley.
You can see video of BattleCry rallies here.
I’ve always defended Rolling Stone to detractors by saying that yes, it’s certainly had better days — but there’s always at least one really great feature that I think is worth the price of the issue (which, as a subscriber, is very little for me). This issue there are at least three.
10 Comments
April 17, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Grindhouse isn’t doing well because:
1. It’s three hours;
2. The marketing has been terrible.
When I went to see it the day after it opened, the kids behind the ticket counter were telling everyone how long the movie was. That’s typical at long movies; what isn’t typical, and what I noticed more than once just in my two-minute stay in a short line, were the people who said “Oh” and decided to see another movie.
There’s no excuse for something like that. The average person should know what they’re getting into when he goes to see a movie, and the problem with Grindhouse is that the advertising just wasn’t geared toward that average person; it basically namedropped Rodriguez and Tarantino, without explaining what the deal with the movies actually was, and assumed all the fanboys would show up.
All the fanboys did show up, judging from the showing I went to, but nobody else did.
April 17, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Well, there we got then.
What’d you think of the movie?
I’ve always been a little confused as to why some people can’t get past things like a movie being three hours. Three hours sitting in the comfortable dark with people you like, being entertained with delicious snack food…sounds like Hell, doesn’t it?
Similarly, I know someone who refused to go see Pan’s Labyrinth after she found out that it had subtitles.
I mean…come on. Does everything have to be Maid in Manhattan or it’s not worth seeing?
Certainly they should have prepared people for what they were getting into, or even get them excited about it being different…but I still sort of roll my eyes that something like this could fail because people think “Unconventional? Oh…let’s see something else…”
April 17, 2007 at 7:26 pm
“Grindhouse” was marketed poorly, that’s a fact.
When I saw the film, many people walked out after “Planet Terror” thinking that the movie had ended — they had no idea it was a double feature. What’s really sad is that with “Death Proof,” Tarantino made one of the most pro-female horror films ever made, and a lot of women are totally oblivious. The women in “Death Proof” were strong, well-defined, and a huge leap above the knife fodder found in most slasher films. The finale even caused most of the women in my theater to cheer.
As for the “Rolling Stone” article on “Aquire the Fire”, it was great. Contemporary youth evangelists make a shit-ton of money selling artificial rebellion to restless kids. They talk about how Christianity in America is on the ropes, and if that’s the case, it’s mainly because of the MTV-approach these jokers have been taking. The entire movement takes centuries-old traditions and beliefs, and tries to convert them into a teenage fad – musicians, clothing lines, etc., but did they ever consider what happens to these kids when they grow up and realize how stupid this stuff is? I mean Christian rock is awful, and you can only wear skater clothes for so long and let people take you seriously. If I had one complaint, however, it’s that the writer didn’t elaborate on the group’s anti-communism stance. He makes references to it, but never delves or gets any quotes. Would have been great to know what’s up with that.
April 17, 2007 at 7:37 pm
The strangest, most fascinating and frightening thing to me about the BattleCry piece was the description of the kids either voluntarily rejecting anything secular (down to breakfast cereal, pop music and perfume) or being told that these things are evil because they are, as one N&R letter writer recently said of Wiccans, not of God.
Anything “not of God” — which in this piece and in various conversations I’ve had with people like those in it seems to mean “not explicitly religious in a very narrow Christian sense” is “evil.”
This reminds me, eerily, of radical Madrassahs.
There is, in both radical fringe cultures, a rejection of and serious hatred of pluralism, even the idea of it. As that’s what this country’s founded on and its greatest strength this does, indeed, scare the hell out of me.
April 18, 2007 at 11:12 am
Speaking of religious nut-jobs, did you read about how the Westboro Baptist fucktards are planning a picket of the VT Massacre victims?
It would really make sense to me if I found out that church was funded by some extreme athiest group, because Westboro is the best reason in the world to stay the hell away from church.
April 18, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I wonder if that group of bikers will show up…
April 18, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Too bad we can’t just sick Cakalak Thunder on their asses. There’s a really great BBC documentary on Westboro Baptist on YouTube entitled “The Most Hated Family in America”. After seeing that, it was obvious to me that the real victims of their mindless demonstrations are their children, who are hated by all of their fellow classmates at school, get nailed by soda cups hurled by angry motorists, and, sadly, have no idea what their family’s hateful message means exactly. One kid didn’t even know what a “dyke” was – he just knew he was supposed to hate them. Sad.
April 26, 2007 at 2:54 am
All I can think about when I look at that cover is tracing the lines of where McGowan’s body really ends, as opposed to where the backlighting and Photoshop make it seem to end.
Also, she apparently loves Cute Overload.
April 26, 2007 at 3:15 am
I hadn’t thought about that – but I usually do, when I see some star half-naked.
I don’t want to see the version that isn’t airbrushed, though. It’s like when they show you the picture of the Big Mac and you want to believe it does really look that way. Then you unwrap it and…yeah.
July 25, 2009 at 4:49 am
Wow Sexy