PETA Proposes a Porn Site / Plus, Pretentious Picks of the Week (Road To Nowhere, Infinite Jest Video, Busy Monsters)

We're well-known supporters of cute fuzzy animals, so we always pay close attention to the tactics of PETA. Known for their controversies, PETA is poised for their biggest one yet, as they have planned to launch a new pornographic website that will also serve to educate people about animal abuse:

"PETA's sexy side displayed in galleries and videos will quickly give way to the sinister world of animal mistreatment uncovered by the group’s hidden camera investigations in a very different kind of graphic content." (via Huffington Post).

Chip: "So you're telling me that I'm going to be pleasantly rubbing one out and all of a sudden I'll be rudely interrupted by chickens being treated poorly? I like to think I'll quit masturbating at that point."

Our feminist readers: "Can someone explain why it's okay to exploit women in the service of saving animals? And look at how this ad equates the woman with an animal. We fear the new site will probably end up increasing bestiality rates."
















And speaking of cute fuzzy animals, it's been too long since we've offered up some local animal photos for you to "Ooh" and "Ahh" over. So we offer this one (via LJ-World) of a cute local animal at yesterday's "Pooch Plunge" at the closing day of the public pool (and since when does the pool close before Labor Day?). Are those legs about to get humped?


















And have you seen this pooch zipping around town in a sidecar lately? It's the talk of Twitter this morning, and @oxfordist snapped this recent bad-ass photo.


















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We're always on the lookout for pretentious (usually meta) stuff we can expound upon and today we offer up these picks to view and read. Thank us later when your knowledge gets you laid.

1) Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere.

If you're a true movie buff, you no doubt have a copy of Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop on Criterion and, if you're truly hip, an out-of-print copy of Cockfighter on Anchor Bay (in which the great genius Warren Oates is a cockfighter who's taken a vow of silence). But did you know Hellman was back with a noir-y new film that looks (too) similar to Lynch's Mulholland Drive ?

These excerpts from the NY-Times should let you know pretty quickly if this is your kind of thing:

"The portentous attitude of “Road to Nowhere” is amplified by its incorporation of excerpts from three classic films: “The Lady Eve” from Preston Sturges, “The Seventh Seal” by Ingmar Bergman and Víctor Erice’s “Spirit of the Beehive.”

At one point the new film’s protagonist... recites George Santayana’s poem “As in the Midst of Battle There Is Room.”

"...long static shots of the characters barely moving."

Richard: "I'll be renting it this afternoon.

Chip: "Me too, but ONLY because I have a Shannon Sossamon boner."




















2) Infinite Jest-inspired video of Decemberists' "Calamity Song."

Since spending an entire summer (and part of a fall) a few years ago working our way methodically through every single interminable fucking endnote of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest with an on-line book club called "Infinite Summer" we've felt a little protective of the frustrating masterpiece. So we were skeptical at best when we learned of the Decemberists' new video, which depicts the novel's game of Eschaton (which occupies a crazy amount of pages in the book):

"Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal. All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.” (New York Times).

Since the band's Colin Meloy also took part in the "Infinite Summer" reading project, and since "Calamity Song" contains a nice little homage to the novel in the line "The year of the chewable Ambien tab" (and since the director of the video, Michael Schur, is a professed Wallace superfan who also, frighteningly, owns the film rights to the novel), we'll give the video a reluctant pass even though we think the tone is all wrong.

Read an article and see the video here .



3) William Giraldi's Busy Monsters.

Should you read this new novel? Some of us need look no further than this blurb from Sven Birkerts:

"Take the amped-up lyrical braggadocio of the American South and join it to a sly, at times Nabokovian celebration of psychological obsession. Add a pinch of O'Connor, a dash of Hannah, heat with an imagination reared in both the canon and its rock & roll antipodes. Busy Monsters is an unforgettable achievement by one of our most important young chroniclers of anguish and bliss."

As if Nabokov and O'Connor didn't seal the deal, we were completely sold at the mention of "Hannah," since one of our great literary moments occurred when (an almost certainly drunk) Barry Hannah visited a long-ago creative writing class down south that we were taking. He proceeded to alienate most of the women with a few choice remarks then read the opening story of his legendary collection Airships, called "Water Liars," which begins with this line that is better than anything most of us will ever likely write:

"When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another."

And ends with this line:


"We were both crucified by the truth."

We have a feeling that Giraldi's Busy Monsters is no Airships, but time will tell, we suppose.