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Capital of Nasty Vol. 06 Issue 07
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Volume VI, Issue 7, AD MMI
Monday, September 24th, 2001
ISSN 1482-0471
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Disney's Tarzan Untamed
Sounds like a porn movie.
"Hey Jane, baby. Bet you thought this was an elephant's trunk,
didn't you?"
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Goatboy 00:01: Somehow the conversation shifted in me saying "You've
got breasts that prove gravity exists" and her stating "Your butt is
gay, that's why you only get men to ask you out on the street".
Strange.
Jester 00:02: There is nothing wrong with your ass.
Goatboy 00:02: Apparently it's big. Hard to comment on that. I
can't see it.
Jester 00:02: Be proud of your ass. Go to the window right now,
shove it out and scream "I love myself, for I am beautiful!"
Goatboy 00:03: Do I beat my chest, while I do that, or my butt
cheeks?
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1. Editorial
2. I Nerdicus
3. CoN at the Movies
4. I've Never Seen Anything Like This
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This week's Golden Testicle award:
http://gard.scriba.org/page/333
She called me a racist!
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1. Editorial
By Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro
I'm beginning to think I should set up the Internet Fascist Police,
or INFAPO, for short. The INFAPO would have a very simple job.
Hunt down people that, armed with Internet access, demonstrate to
the world how stupid they are. Then beat them senselessly.
As some of you may be aware, on September 11th, the whole terrorist
thing popped up. The "War on Drugs" was quickly replaced with the
"War on Terrorism" and we had to endure long news reports sucking up
all the drama, making special reports and so on and so forth ad
nauseum. I'm sure the rescue workers found it real helpful to have
camera crews running around while they tried to do their job.
Fortunately some people caught this by the ball, and quickly found
ways to make money out of it. That same night, various religious
channels offered Prayer Hot Lines, where one could call and pray for
the victims of the World Trade Centre, for the humble cost of 95
cents per minute. Or in New York's Time Square, where people
immediately began selling "I survived the WTC" T-shirts. And of
course, students that had a room with a good view of the ruins of
the WTC, charged a modest $20 per person in order for people to take
photographs. I'm always glad to see that death never goes in vain
in this part of the world.
But here is where the INFAPO would come in: shortly after the news
events spread, and CNN bombarded us with the "dramatic" footage from
"ground zero", several dozen people began sending me the classic
examples of Internet stupidity:
1) I'd like to thank everyone that sent me the Nostradamus quote.
There are a few things I have to say about this:
- I find it amusing that some non-sense rambling referring to
"twins" and the "city of God" could be associated with New York.
Mind you, I always thought that God's city was Jerusalem.
- Most of Nostradamus' predictions have come true about 50 times
each already dating back about a zillion years. "When the City of
God is surrounded..." Jerusalem? Surrounded? That happens about 50
times a week.
- I did a quick search at the library in a Nostradamus book, and yo
and behold, I found no such quote. Now unless someone would be so
kind to point out to me where they got it, I could come to the
awesome conclusion that it doesn't even exist.
- I received it only 52 times.
2) This one is a classic already: "the day of birth for an aeroplane
is the day it is registered. And on the birthday of one Aeroplane
its fate was written in the registration no of that plane. Did you
know that a flight number from one of the planes that hit one of the
two towers was Q33NY. In MS Word, type in that flight number, Q33NY.
Enlarge the font size to 26 Change the font to Wingdings and there
is the future written by destiny which u will see".
Okay, let me burst this bubble from our Nostradamus Junior:
- The flight number is not something that a plane is born with and
keeps for the rest of its avionic life. It's the route the plane
takes. And chances are, since planes need maintenance and such
things to keep them in the air, that different planes may serve the
same routes at different times.
- There was no such flight number. The flights were Flight 11 and
Flight 175.
- I've got this one through e-mail and ICQ so many times I've lost
count. Fuck off already.
3) A letter it's making the rounds, thanks to those idiots that will
forward anything to everyone else without even reading it. To make
a long forward short, and sparing you the insultingly ignorant
comments, the e-mail rambles on about how we should be upset at
seeing "Egyptians rejoice on television" after the attack. The
letter, it goes on, should be printed and faxed to whichever
Senator, asking for "an end of American aids" to, I guess, Egypt.
- I can't confirm this at the moment, but as far as I know, Egypt is
not receiving any aids from America.
- The people seen celebrating in TV were actually Palestinians, most
likely from the Gaza strip.
- According to indymedia.org.il, this is old footage, showing the
happy Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait, during the
Gulf War (however the dates stated there collide with history). The
URL is:
http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/display.php3?article_id=6946
- I only received it twice to date. I guess it's not as exciting as
Nostradamus.
4) "Let's pray for the people in U.S.A plz keep forward...i didnt
start this msg...i also didnt stop it forward to everyone on your
list"
- Gee, thanks, had it not been for everyone that ICQed me this one,
I don't think I would've known what to do.
- What exactly is praying going to do? Sounds like a cheap way to
save yourself the trouble to contribute with something a little more
substantial.
- I did not forward the fucker. Oh, I know! I'm such a bastard!
The INFAPO is now taking membership. Apply today! Fight Internet
morons!
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2. I Nerdicus
By Rolo
Me Nerd. Yes I'm a nerd. Suffice to say I won't be the type to go
trekkie conventions with Spock ears, but I sure do love to ogle at
the Starships and read their specs. I guess I'm what you call a
Sleeper Latent Nerd. Or a Part-time nerd.
I do get out of the house, and I am active when I want to be. But
thinking back. Nerds are very special. Like a true nerd I will
never admit to it in public or in person. I in my spare time did
play Games Workshop games as well as Battletech and dabbled as a GM
in RPG's like Shadowrun and Earthdawn.
What really bothers me these days is the invasion of commercialism
into my little world. Playing fantasy miniature board games use to
be a really great past time for me. Unfortunately it kept me from
joining gangs, learning how to shoot a 9mm and spray paint gang
tags, but hey, at least it was fun. I learned at a very young age
to paint and mess around with miniatures. I think that's probably
why I ended up with glasses. But I digress. I use to like playing
these games. But now it's gotten' disgustingly commercial. Allow
me to elaborate.
Games-Workshop use to be a small nerdy operation based on Queen
Street in Toronto. It stemmed from the Dungeons and Dragons genre
of fantasy RPG's in that GWS made more detailed miniatures with a
whole line of supporting products.
It use to have a cheesy little cut n'paste magazine sporting gaunt
scrawny nerds and flubby big guys with plain black and white hand
drawings. Ahh, those were the days, miniatures and the fantasy
games had a underground feel to them. You were special for knowing
that there were more dice than a regular six-sided dice and its not
a die. It's a 1D6. Get it right bitch. I use to enjoy playing
these games because it involved an entire afternoon of coke and
pizza. We'd automatically throw out the rules and make up some
whacked out scenario. It was fun. It was loads of fun.
But now that's all changed. Yes, I'm pissed about it. I use to go
down to Games Workshop and play with the other nerds. We'd revel in
each others glamorously painted armies, virtually kick each others
asses and trudge off to paint our new "mini's", or work on a new
tactic to beat the other guy.
Since GWS has moved to the Eaton Centre all has changed. I quickly
realized this when I was dealing a nice beating (rare) to my friend
Joe. I looked around looking for that praise from my fellow gamers
only to find I was surrounded by tourists. I found myself beating
back and scolding the little throng of annoying children who were
deposited by their parents in the store. "Hands OFF!" I'd say to
the little gnat bastards who would frequently touch my precious
mini's. They would gleefully snap off the painstakingly detailed
weapons and parts and skitter away to their parents before I could
swat them. Then there was the uneducated throng of tourists who had
no idea of what this game was. The uninitiated. There was nothing
wrong with them. Unfortunately it was now a tourist attraction.
GWS had lost its nice grimy dark image with a commercial image.
Those creepy gothic pictures were replaced by well painted artistic
brilliant images. The old school gamers, the large twins Mat and
Jeff? The Army vet guy, The toolboxes full of mini's. Dwindling.
No longer do the ketchup stained T-shirt nerds exist in the store.
The Guru's of AD&D and fantasy are gone now. Now replaced by
plastic employees bred and trained to spew allegiance to Games
Workshop and call each other "Brother Marines". My younger friend
John is an amazing painter, he once tried to enter a Young Bloods
painting competition only to loose because his model's base wasn't
up to their standards of what Model Bases should look like.
I was told that my goofy dark eldar army was to "disgusting". Okay
fine. My Dark Eldar Army (Which GWS describes as a race of people
are suppose to be grotesque disgusting and pain loving) had goofy
little unit names like "Spawn of the Brown Portal" "Children of Self
Defication" "Protectors of Necrofilia" and "Enforcers of Bestiality"
with nifty little hand painted banners depicting this. And yes my
army did have a miniature goat as its mascot. (Leandro we salute
you!) The reaction from every single veteran gamer in that place
was absolutely fantastic. They loved it. It was hilarious. It was
even more fantastic when everyone realized that one of the figurines
was oddly posing in a "Who's your daddy" pose. The entire store had
its shits and giggles with that goat and that miniature. Until the
bloody tourists and kids with parents came along. Now my carefully
crafted Army of mini's offends GWS family sensibility.
Its silly really. Considering GWS owes its existance to such
underground dark beginnings. Not to say that GWS started with
bestiality, necrophilia or S&M. Its the fact that GWS has turned
commercial and professional, GWS was rooted in skulls, death, and
gothic Imperial undertones.
Everything has been simplified and prettied up to sell to the
parents, and the 5 year old artsy kids. Paying $60 bucks for a
decrepit piece of plastic that looks ugly is not my idea of a good
buy. Especially when I can make something entirely my own creation
that would suit my tastes. But wait, I can't show case or use my
scratch-built pride and joy, because its "not a Games Workshop
product."
My favourite game Battletech has mutated into a commercial half-bred
of "collectable miniatures" brought to us by Wiz-kid. Everything is
cheap plastic and quick spray painted by some sweatshop in Asian
now. I enjoyed the technical side of it. The detail made it real.
Now its over simplified and watered-down for the layman and the
commercial "I can't paint to save my life" fool. To all those
fantasy buffs out there. There is a difference.
To the purist the godfather of AD&D and fantasy as we know it is
J.R.R. Tolkien. To the nieve, its Magic the Gathering, Collectable
Trading Cards Game. It's like the original Star Wars versus the new
Jar-jar Binks Trilogy.
Or the original old school die-cast metal (Throw at someone and
cripple them) Transformers versus the new highly breakable
"Beasties". There is a clear difference between what fantasy gaming
was and what it is now.
Unfortunately its just one less thing I'll be doing in my spare
time. Is there nothing safe or sacred anymore?
--
Rolo likes to tromp naked around his room, looking important, while
singing "Blue Moon" and stroking his pussy.
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3. CoN at the Movies
By Jeff Wright
NOTE: The following article, is being written at gunpoint. Leo's
angry at me, cuz I was supposed to write this while he was on
vacation, but didn't. Because I have a gun up my nose, my writing
shall be brief.
Movies to Watch:
GHOST WORLD (A great little film. Go see it before it's out of
theatres. It's the best thing I've seen this summer aside from
MOULIN ROUGE, which is in its own league of awesome-ness.)
JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS (It's a dumb, fun, popcorn movie.
Enjoy the limb severings, and shut your mouth.)
A BETTER PLACE (It's now available as a great and feature loaded
DVD. It's a small independent film about teen violence, that's
worth seeking out. This is what you can do with $40,000 folks.)
LOVE ON A DIET (The new Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng comedy, in which
they play fatties. It's dumb, but really funny. Plus, Sammi gets
skinny and hot by the end, so who's to complain?)
KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTERSPACE (Just released on special edition DVD.
COTTON CANDY COCOONS!!!)
BATMAN: THE MOVIE (New DVD available as well. When I get some
money, I shall buy it, and be a much happier person.)
SHOGUN ASSASSIN (I think it's only available on an out of print VHS
tape, but search it out. Super cool re-edit of the first two LONE
WOLF AND CUB movies, dubbed into English, with a funky, funky
score.)
BROTHER (The latest Takeshi Kitano film. It's really not that
great, but if you see a VCD copy of it for cheap somewhere, it's a
decent time waster.)
Movies Not to Watch:
JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (I'm a big Kevin Smith fan, but this
was just a retarded piece of stoned nerd ass.)
RUSH HOUR 2 (Zhang Zi-Yi is hot as hell, but is that really a reason
to go see a movie? It's boring.)
PLANET OF THE APES (But you knew that already, didn't you? We all
learn the hard way.)
JURASSIC PARK 3 (It was free. Shut up!)
Canadian Music to Buy:
MASS ROMANTIC by The New Pornographers
GIRL VERSIONS by Emm Gryner
LAST NIGHT WE WERE THE DELICIOUS WOLVES by Hawksley Workman
That's it for now.
Tune in next time for Toronto Film Fest coolness, including a review
of ICHI THE KILLER, the new film from Japanese director Takashi
Miike. WOOHOO!!!
---
Jeff is gonna be in the same room as David Lynch on September 10th.
How cool is that?!
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4. I've Never Seen Anything Like This
By Eric Rosenfield
I am holding in my hands a piece of paper from the World Trade
Center that I found lying on the ground in the financial district.
It is an expense report from a company called "Cantor Fitzgerald",
written by a man named David R. Meyer.
The Cantor Fitzgerald Web Site is down, but according to a cached
Google page it is "historically known as one of the largest third
market firms", and according to another cached google page it was
located in the World Trade Center. There are names of people on this
document and on these web pages who are probably dead now. How this
piece of paper, along with the many hundreds I saw with it in the
very heart of the disaster area, are in such good condition, I can
only speculate.
We had to jump a fence to get that close to the sight. It was
Benjamin, two friends of his and myself, all of us determined to see
how close we could get to the carnage. At Houston street I was very
gung ho about it; I was thinking of myself as real investigative
journalist, going to do some real investigative journalistic
coverage of the greatest man-made disaster of my lifetime. A
disaster I had happened to see out my own window.
So that those of you outside of New York can get some idea of the
geography, Times Square is at 42nd street. At 15th street there was
a police barricade preventing cars from going through, and the all
the subways end there now. At Houston street (which is essentially
1st street) there is another police barricade, preventing anyone
from going further south without identification proving that they
were residents of the streets below there. The World Trade Center is
about 40 blocks south of Houston street, near Manhattan Island's
southern tip.
In other words, about half of the city's main borough is in total
lockdown right now. You can't avoid seeing police; there're
everywhere, twice as prevalent as the firemen, or the ambulances, or
the civilians wearing dust masks, though all those things are common
sights as well.
Everywhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn there is an acrid scent, the
scent of burning - putrid and ubiquitous, and the fire and smoke
still billow from the horizon more then a day later. In Manhattan
the smoke cloud dwarfs the skyscrapers, a monstrous Godzilla in gray
and white.
We got to Houston street and saw the Police checking
identifications, so we walked west along the barricade line, to see
if any of the streets were unblocked. None were, but an entrance
into the courtyard of a housing project was wide open in the middle
of a block, so we ducked in. We walked through the courtyard, past
people milling about, children playing, and what seemed like an
abnormal number of security guards, to the parking lot, the gate of
which was securely locked up.
Benjamin said "This is insane" every 15 minutes or so.
The fence on the other side of the parking lot was about 15 feet
high, and we ducked behind some dumpsters and scaled it.
The other side was a completely different New York. There were no
moving cars that weren't police or ambulances or fire trucks or
construction vehicles or army units. Everything was eerily quiet.
Mostly, the streets were empty except for the few locals we'd see
walking about and talking, perhaps with a fearful glint in their
eyes and an angsty gate in their step, though that might only be my
own inference. In truth I couldn't tell what these people were
thinking as they went about their lives in a suddenly protected and
isolated part of the city. As we walked south the streets were
gradually occupied by more and more police and the smell of the
smoke got progressively stronger, until there were police on every
block and the air was thick like a mild fog. Soon we were stopped.
"Where are you going?" Asked an officer.
"To see our Uncle on Warren Street." We lied, bold faced, "Do you
know how to get there?"
"I don't know, you should ask those guys over there." He waved
toward some officers down the block.
"Do you know if it's safe to smoke?" I asked, "I heard something
about gas lines." I was genuinely concerned.
The cop smiled, "You can smoke everywhere."
I was about to make some crack about Mayor Guiliani but thought
better of it.
We headed under an overpass that led to the Brooklyn Bridge, and up
a roadway. This was the point when I started noticing the thin layer
of dust on everything. Everything was coated with it, and in the
light of the dim New York street lamps it looked orange and brown. I
looked down at my feet and my shoes were wading in it, and I started
noticing pieces of paper littering the ground. And just as I was
taking that in we saw the first car.
The car probably hadn't been damaged where it was sitting, as the
cars next to it were in reasonable condition, but this one car was a
blackened hulk of twisted metal, hardly recognizable as a car at all
except for the landmarks of the hood and tires.
"This is insane." Said Benjamin.
We took some pictures of the car and continued to walk. Then we saw
another car, and then another, and another, black contorted
creatures lining the sides of the roadway. There were tons of papers
everywhere now, just dozens of them all over the place, and at this
point I picked up the expense report from Cantor Fitzgerald and put
it in my backpack.
The enormity of what we were witnessing hadn't struck yet. My
emotions were somewhere else, some other realm that hadn't quite
caught up the real world, and I was running on auto-pilot.
I started rifling through the papers trying to find the best ones.
This sort of horrifies me now, that I was doing this, but it's what
I did. I wanted to find one that said "World Trade Center" on it.
We found a pile of neck ties in perfect condition, that looked like
they had been thrown there by some worker. Benjamin and I each
grabbed one.
"You shouldn't do that." One of Benjamin's friends kept saying as we
were taking things, and sure enough, a police officer started
shouting at us.
"What are you doing?! Put that down, have some respect!" He said,
and we put the ties and papers down.
We emerged from the roadway into a major intersection, where a ramp
led directly to the Brooklyn Bridge, several City Government City
buildings stood, and City Hall was fully visible a block away. This
was the "Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall" 1-9 subway stop.
When I first came to New York City almost four years ago, I had come
to this very spot to take pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of
the pictures I took of the bridge that day still hangs on my wall.
It was a spot that the World Trade Center once towered over, only
maybe 5 or 10 blocks away.
I'm going to try and describe the scene I saw there now. The air was
foggy and small particles hung in it like they were waiting for
someone to tell them to fall. The entire square was caked in orange-
ish dust and dirt, everything dyed monochromatic on the street.
Papers, debris, glass and small shards were everywhere, and on
everything. The place teemed with workers, police and firemen, and
almost everyone was wearing a dust mask or a gas mask. Just behind
City Hall and the tall, Romanesque City Government buildings, the
fire-cloud clung to the sky like a white specter. The fire-cloud was
bigger, by far, then the World Trade Center ever had been. The
wasteland that I had talked about in my previous article, the one
that we had all seen on television, was now here, right in front of
my
eyes; here was the disaster area; here was the war zone.
To my relief, there were no body parts.
The cops began to notice we were there.
"Where are you going?"
"To visit our Uncle on Warren street."
"Down HERE? What are you, tourists? You better get out of here, if
we catch you back here we'll lock you up."
We started back north. Benjamin's friends had seen enough, and
seemly justifiably shaken. They left, and Benjamin tried to convince
me to go back in, west and then south this time. I sat on a stairway
in front of a bank covered in so much dust that you couldn't read
it's name, and decided to call it quits.
"I'm going back in." Said Benjamin, and he headed west, while I
headed north, walking past yet another long caravan of police, army
and construction vehicles.
Benjamin told me later that he actually made it to the Trade
Center's remains, right in front of the rubble, and that he
volunteered to hand out water and was given a white paper disposable
suit. He said that he saw the morgue. He said the police kept
hassling him, even with the suit.
"This was the most unreal thing in my life. It was just surreal. It
was like a movie, I felt like I was on a Universal Studios set.
That's all I can say." He told me.
I'm sort of astounded that he had the constitution to go that far
with it, and I wonder if we are bad people for doing what we did.
I'm still in shock from what I saw. I look down at my dust caked
shoes and pants and can only think of the Walt Whitman poem, "This
Dust was Once the Man". I look over at the Cantor Fitzgerald expense
report and think of it being pushed out the window by the air
pressure of a collapsing Twin Tower.
What does any of this mean?
--
This article is courtesy of Eric Rosenfield, and appeared in Yank
The Chain.
http://www.yankthechain.com
-------------------------------------------
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Published every second Monday (or when we get around it)
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http://www.capnasty.org ISSN 1482-0471
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ZimID 708EC8D1 1994/09/14 EC B0 97 59 1D FE 7C 32 7E 04 2C 66 47 41 FB 7D
