MTV at Zuccotti Park: the channel will premiere “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” on Nov. 5 (a Saturday).Mon Oct 24 15:41:09 via Twitter for iPhone

Brian Stelter
brianstelter

The revolution will not be… something something.

by Abe Sauer

On Tuesday, October 18th, just two days before he was executed, Time suggested Muammar Gaddafi as one of its “10 Best (Topical) Halloween Costumes for 2011.” “You’ll need,” Time suggested, “An unruly black wig (or this mask).”

Time linked to the “Daffy Gaddafi Mask.” But while it is certainly daffy, it’s hardly the only Gaddafi mask available. It’s also not the only assassinated terrorist leader costume this Halloween.

“Muammar Gaddafi is just another kook to come out of the Middle East. The Libyan leader is known for turning his country into a terrorist nation, complete with public executions of his own countryman who oppose his ways. How democratic of him! In the US where we have freedom of speech, if we don’t like something, we can protest it, or make fun of it, In this case, The men’s Daffy Gaddafi Mask is a great way to poke fun at this nut job.”

That’s the description for the gilded “Daffy Gaddafi” mask. Prices vary ($18.97; $16.97).

But for those scared of turning up at the party looking like every other slain African “King of Kings,” there is Yiwu Senyi Craft Work Co., Ltd.

Located in Zhejiang, China Yiwu Senyi will supply you with a Colonel Muammar Gaddafi mask unlike that worn by every Tom, Dick and Harry at the party. At a bulk rate, the price drops from $85.37 to just $77.61.

Priced for the Gaddafi costumer on a budget, the “Muammar Gaddafi Man” mask helps you “transform into a life in the Muammar Gaddafi Mask! Includes: One latex mask which features the facial features of the Libyan dictator. Full face mask, followed by an Elastic rope.”
Just $12.99.

Now, for the hipster who was into dressing up as Gadaffi back before it was cool, here is a vintage Colonel Gaddafi mask: “purchased in about 1990 and was used one time.” Bidding starts at $1.00. “Reserve not yet met.”

For those going as a couple, a convincing Ronald Reagan mask is just $21. (Recommended only for use at parties Gen X and older.)

In any case, you’ll need to finish off the costume. Colonel Gaddafi was a fastidious dresser, leveling sanctions against boring attire. Time even recommended its “Emperor has some Crazy Clothes” slideshow gallery for inspiration. This “Prince Charming Elite” costume would probably work just fine.

When it comes to finishing off the details of your Gaddafi, be sure to pick up a costume pistol and spray paint it gold. Alternatively, for just $2,995,, you could buy a real working gold-plated Browning Hi-Power, nearly identical to the 2825i Browning J.P. Vigilant Renaissance Gold model with which Gaddafi was captured.

A tube of fake blood can be picked up for $2 to $3. Apply liberally.

For those worried that the Dead Gaddafi costume will be overplayed, don’t fret. The Halloween is a boom year for dressing up as a dead Arab sponsor of terrorism.

Clearance priced at just half its original $79.99, this “Bin Laden with USA missile through his head” has all you need to transform into the terrorist leader everyone already forgot about.

Interested in going as drone-slain Yemen-based terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki? Just wear the Bin Laden costume, nobody will know.

Still want to go with the terrorist theme but uncomfortable even pretending to be Arab? Then the “Navy Seal Adult Costume” is for you: “You’ll look like a part of a proud moment in America’s history in the Navy Seal Adult Costume which includes: A camoflage [sic] bodysuit with attached knee pad details, black hood and a faux armor vest with American flag patch on the chest.”

Note: “Does not include gun, fake head or shoes.”

Want to add a bit of political commentary to your Navy Seal-dead Bin laden costume? Pair with an Obama mask (high end only, please). Looking to severely meta-enable that Navy Seal costume? Pair with a Charlie Sheen mask. (Sleep with anyone who gets this.)

Forward-looking fans of Halloween and doomed Arab leaders are going to discover that finding a good Bashar al-Assad mask is as difficult as enacting political reforms and reinstating civil rights in a Middle East nation under the thumb of a single family for decades. But the Brooklyn-based makeup effects artist that runs ABFX Studio is probably a good start, seeing as it created this.

Are you just looking to add a little of the dictator colonel’s characteristic brand of WTF to your ensemble?

Try this “Madman of the Middle East’s facial eppagy on inflatible Gaddafi football!. Throw it, kick it, flip it!” [sic] Sick. (Here and here.)

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is also on Twitter. His book How to be: NORTH DAKOTA is out next month.

Anthony Ciccone (not to be confused with the, uh… (*puts one finger aside nose*) other one) is the tabloid tale of the weekend, being 1. Madonna’s other brother (not the gay one who sold her out with that trashy memoir) and 2. homeless.

Anyway, it all sounds better in German: “Madonnas großer Bruder bettelt auf der Straße‎”! Or Italian: “Madonna lascia il fratello Anthony a vivere per strada”! Even French: “Le frère aîné de Madonna vit dans la rue.” Oooh, la rue. But the original story is actually pretty great, with this headline: “Traverse City becomes magnet for the homeless: Madonna’s brother tries to avoid frostbite.”

Above: Madonna, Marty, Melanie and Christopher in more homeful times. Not pictured: Paula and Anthony.

“Gannett is not the only big media enterprise where the consequences of bad decisions land on everyone except those who made them. The Tribune Company, a chain of newspapers and television stations run into the ground by Sam Zell after he bought it in 2007, is paying out tens of millions of dollars in bonuses as part of a deal in which it would exit bankruptcy. Over 4,000 people in the company lost their jobs, and the journalistic missions of formerly robust newspapers it operates — including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun — have been curtailed. And even though Randy Michaels and some of his corporate fraternity brothers who operated the company into bankruptcy are gone, more than 600 managers who were there while the company cratered remain. Not only do they have jobs while so many others were sent packing, but the remaining leadership will be eligible for a bonus pool from $26.4 million to $32.4 million under the current plan.”

— This delicious David Carr column in the Times addresses the obvious: how can news organizations pay big executive compensation while trashing their payroll and their newspapers? Most of them plead the old “talent retention” line, which, sure: who the hell wants to retain talent like those jokers at Tribune and Gannett?

“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”
 — Tomorrow is a day to celebrate, in that Tom Waits will release Bad As Me, his first new album in seven years.If you missed the interview with him in yesterday’s Times, it’s full of his inimitable charm

. The album apparently features a full six songs recorded with his old friend Keith Richards, including the wonderful, skeletal, one above — which was played on one of the 600 guitars Waits told Pitchfork Keith brought to the session, and is perfect perfect for this time of year. Metaphor or not, it’s a familiar theme for them both.

“If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs,” Waits said to Sasha Frere-Jones in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required, as usual.) “Last Leaf” is sort of a more defiant take on ideas Waits wrote about in a pair songs from his Black Rider album from 1993. The bone-chilling “November,” which whistles with theremin and ends with one of my all-time favorite insults, “Go away you rainsnout/Go away, blow your brains out.” And the very similarly titled, “The Last Rose of Summer.”

I liked how Waits chose roses, in the Pitchfork interview, as the hypothetical theme of a set list Bob Dylan might play on his Sirius radio show. Waits, like many songwriters, writes about roses a lot. But after that last rose of summer does finally die, who will put a rose on its grave?

Maybe Keith?

Here is an amazing video that I’d never seen before of Keith bringing Waits around backstage at a Stones concert (in what would seem to be the ‘90s?) It’s a little bit uncomfortable, in that Ron Wood seems to be very high, and somewhat aggressive, and appears to offer Waits cocaine, which he declines. And Joe Elliott from Def Leppard is there, too. And producer Don Was.

Keith and Waits first worked together on Waits’s Rain Dogs album in 1985. Their voices sound terrific together. (The video below shows a blank screen while the music plays. Which is maybe an intentional nod to the song’s title? God, it’s such a great song.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZGIK990m-A

And in the way that that stubborn last leaf they’re singing in the voice of nowadays hangs on like a vestigial tail, it’s much like “That Feel” from Waits’ 1992, which is, as they say, harder to get rid of than tattoos.

“Correction: October 22, 2011 An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the premise of ‘Angry Birds,’ a popular iPhone game. In the game, slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.”

• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lessons For Occupy D.C.

• Translating A Norwegian First Novel: A Q. & A. With Kerri Pierce

• The Dr. Phil-You-With-Horror-O’-Lantern

• Some Baseball Art To Enjoy With The World Series

• Why the Tea Party Hates Occupy Wall Street

• An Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality

Photo by Grim Santo., via Flickr

From Now On, You Have to Make Your Own Red Velvet Cupcakes

I make a mean red velvet cake and cupcake. It has more cocoa powder and less flour in it than the Paula Deen recipe I used the first time I tried my hand at red velvet, and it is super moist and crazy red. The cream cheese frosting is waaaay less sweet than the miserable dreck that so often sullies the good name of the best frosting in all of Frostingham. But I won’t make them for you. You have to make your own red velvet and here’s why: I despise red velvet cake.

First of all, it takes white vinegar. Which? You can’t see me right now but I’m making a face that my mother would scold me for because if I keep making it my face will freeze like that. Look, I am a great lover of white vinegar. But seriously, in baked goods? The same stuff that I demand my lady readers use to scrub their Boy Smell-y walls? A lil’ squicky. And then there’s the Buttermilk Factor.

You guys? Come on. Buttermilk is soooooooooo grossssssssssssss. That garbage is just a yeast infection in a carton as far as I’m concerned. I mean seriously so. fucking. gross. Just nasty, barfy GROSSNESS.

But if I’m being really honest, hating red velvet isn’t really the entire reason why you have to make your own from here on out. If it were, I wouldn’t have a great red velvet cake recipe in the first place, I guess?

Recently, I made a batch as a birthday treat. And it was truly my pleasure to make them because on one’s birthday one should be indulged. That’s just… right? Do you all not do that for people who you care about, give of yourself to make them feel special and loved? You don’t and I already know that and I’m getting to that part.

There were a dozen cupcakes, and one person can only eat so many and obviously I wasn’t going to ingest any, because BUTTERMILK, BLERRRRRRRG. So I took the leftover cupcakes to the office to foist them on my coworkers. One guy, who is “watching his waistline” and who should really just hang it up already, asked if he could have a half of one and would I like the other half? I declined, explaining that I fucking hate red velvet. He said, “And you made these? I would never make something for someone if I didn’t want to eat it myself.”

I stood there staring at him in the manner of a small simple child. It… it honestly never occurred to me not to make something for someone if they wanted it, regardless of how I felt about things. And maybe? Just maybe? That might be something I’ve gotten wrong. So this: I’m trying a new thing. And that new thing is that from now on, if you want red velvet, you’re going to make your own red velvet.

I’ll tell you how, of course; I’m not a total monster.

First things first, when it comes to cake: Dry ingredients. For this, you want to measure these things into a sifter that you’ve placed over a medium-sized bowl, and then sift sift sift sift sift:

2 ¼ cups flour
1 ½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder

In another bowl, beat up your wet ingredients:

The original recipe here calls for 1 ½ cups of vegetable oil, but, if you object to drinking, you know, one and a half cups of vegetable oil, you could use 2 sticks of softened butter. (That, by the by, is a HALF POUND of butter, but by all means you do you. It’s not like I’m gonna eat this garbage, so who cares?)
1 cup buttermilk (BLERRRRRG)
2 eggs
2 tablespoons red food coloring
1 teaspoon white vinegar
2 teaspoons vanilla

Now mix your dry ingredients into the wet ones, using a hand mixer or a spoon + the force of your giant muscles. When everything is smooth and gory (UGH THIS BATTER UGH UGH UGH SO GROSS BARF BARF BARF), start filling a cupcake tin that you’ve lined with paper liners so that each cup is about ¾ of the way full. Bake at 350 degrees for 20–22 minutes, checking at the 18 minute mark to make sure the tops aren’t getting too browned. You want a glistening, bloody-looking cupcake sans browning.

While the cupcakes are cooling — and you must let them cool completely before you frost them — wash up your hand mixer fronds and then beat together 8 oz. of cream cheese with 1 ½–2 cups of confectioners’ sugar and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT. Then frost!

Then, I dunno, throw them all in the trash.

Jolie Kerr doesn’t even want to hear it from the cream cheese frosting deniers.

When you’re making a horror movie, the hard part is always human diversity — you have to trigger fear for the largest number of people, which is tough since we’re all a slightly different brand of crazy. Sometimes filmmakers go too specific — targeting agoraphobics, or those random people with papaphobia (uncontrollable fear of the Pope) or even the weirdos who shriek at the sight of wet bread. This tactic always fails. The trick is to find an element of the human psyche that’s ALWAYS ready to be freaked out. Which is what the Paranormal Activity series has done so effectively. No matter who you are, you have a bed that you go home to at night, and when you sleep you’re completely vulnerable to molestation by demons.

This concept — the universal fear of an unseen menace stalking us in our place of safety — has been the heart of the “PA” trilogy, the third installment of which opened this week (and is shown mostly at midnight, meaning you have to go to bed right after seeing it, get it??). All three PA films plunk in the same formula: one member of a suburban California couple installs cameras throughout their impossibly well-appointed two-bedroom house to document strange happenings during the night. Said strange happenings occur, everyone freaks out, and then we all go home and chug some Ambien.

Unfortunately, the trope is feeling heavy, and all the sameness can get tiresome — the “handmade home video” footage has a carbon-copy look and feel in all three movies, the scares are similar (if not identical), and even the title treatment is rote. Plus, by now, the plots are running a bit thin — the story always centers around the same two sisters (these chicks cannot get a demon-free break) and the various Bumps In the Night that pursue them wherever they go (and sleep).

This time around, we see protagonists Katie and Kristi in their late-80s childhood, tormented by yet another preternatural corps de ballet as their parents flounder to figure out what’s going on. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (remember “Catfish”?) come up with a few new gimmicks to expand on the original premise — a camera placed on a fan oscillator is a clever trick, enhancing spookiness by taking its time to show you a full view of the room. But for the most part, we’ve got a regurgitated hash-up of the previous two films in all their grainy, irradiated splendor.

None of this ruins the film’s effectiveness. The point is to hit that “creeped out” sweetspot that exists in all our brains, and that’s what these movies do. Whether they’re “good” or “bad” is irrelevant — what matters is that they’re effective. You could make the case that they’re monotonous on purpose — they know they have a Pavlovian audience that’s trained to scare on cue. There’s not much point in changing things up. We already know what’s coming: We’ll have an “oh shit something might be watching me” feeling delivered straight to our neocortex, where it will sit and germinate until we get home and turn off the lights.

The PA movies also get big fat bonus points for evicting Saw from its penthouse on the top floor of mainstream horror. The Era of Torture Porn was getting oppressive, threatening to drown us all in hematic flesh-soddering banality. When PA came along, with its piggy bank budget and $13,000 in profits-per-dollar-spent, the Saw series dissolved like skin in hydrochloric acid, social commentary and all. And thank God for that, since I wasn’t sure if I could sit through another one of those damn things, horror column or no.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl’s Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

When you finish a Neal Stephenson book, you feel like you’ve really accomplished something, except you also sometimes feel like you’ve taken a very long Greyhound bus ride and you’re mostly very tired. So, about 30 days after its release, I have finally gotten through the 1056 pages of Reamde, which is his novel about how a computer virus messed up a credit card scam and a video game, which upset the Russian mob which then intruded upon a terror cell, drawing everyone into a giant international mess. The great stuff is so terrific! Particularly the asides, the thoughts on how minds work, on how the modern world treats us, and all that very “now” stuff. For instance this, in Seattle.

Right?????

And then the action — and this book is 70% action with, as most have noted, great attention to the mechanisms of very specific firearms! — goes from exciting and scary and weird to fairly trudging. There is a really rather interminable part about 2/3rds of the way in, when time stops making sense, and everyone is on planes or containerships or flying back and forth senselessly across the Atlantic, and some amount of days or weeks go by, and he recounts this in methodical, exacting detail, and you have to ask: why? Is it a meta-commentary? Is it an exercise? Is it a comment on mundanity? Is it simple OCD? No idea! In the end, I still love Neal Stephenson, as always, and don’t totally understand why he does what he does, which is better than the alternative I suppose, and also kind of I’d really like a shower and a nap. Mostly I am saying this because: if anyone can fill me in on rationale for this sort of writing, I’d love it.