Depending on who you are, there’s the definite possibility that this picture-”Danzig in a Danzig shirt buying cat supplies”-will make your morning. The rest of you will still derive at least some enjoyment from it.

by Sean McTiernan

In honor of the approach of Halloween, I’m going to be showing bits from a horror movie each day throughout October. I’m a big fan of horror movies and even if they’re terrible there’s usually something of interest going on… even if it isn’t intentional. As the month goes on, the movies will get better and better; we’re starting with camp and trash, pretty much, and moving into the wonderful. A note: I know you’re a grown-up and you know what’s going on but sometimes people can think they’re a lot more ready for violence and offensiveness than they actually are. A lot of these entries are going to have descriptions of graphic violence, homophobia, sexual violence and stuff of that ilk that is so native to the genre.

I’m not going to be overly lurid or go into too much detail but I wouldn’t want someone to read this and get truly skeeved out. Oh and also, you should consider all of links from these articles to be NSFW and likely to contain gore (or, because it’s me, hip hop). Don’t worry, this is going to be a blast, I just want to make sure you’re ready. And trust me, this first movie’s always been a trial by fire for any sensibilities.

It’s also important to note that my opinions may differ from The Awl’s resident horror expert Melissa Lafsky, and she makes no endorsement, implied or explicit, into perpetuity, for all your heirs and assigns, in any state, etc., etc.

Anyway!

I don’t know what’s on your resume. Mine has some stuff about my time making sandwiches and some writing that people let me do. What my resume doesn’t feature, and hopefully I’ll be able to say the same for yours, is melting homeless men, nude corpses and people playing catch with a severed penis. That’s just some of what J. Micheal Muro, a Bafta-nominated cinematographer who work closely with James Cameron for the 80s and 90s, included in “Street Trash,” the movie he made to show his technical chops to the world.

Upon first glance, “Street Trash” is a standard video nasty with an admittedly great premise: there is a cheap liquor going around that’s melting those who drink it. But far from being the focal point, these deaths actually are just the backdrop for several interlocking stories taking place in a particularly grisly junkyard. I would say that “Street Trash” is Altman-esque but I don’t need people coming around and punching me in the face later on.

Even more than the melting hobos, the thing that really holds “Street Trash” together is that every single character in the movie is a scumbag. There’s no guarantee something in “Street Trash” won’t seriously offend you. That’s probably because that would conflict with the guarantee something in it definitely will seriously offend you. The writer, Roy Frumkes, has said he wrote it “to democratically offend every group on the planet” and he succeeds pretty well.

What’s more, all of the stories in this, from the mob boss’ raped and murdered girlfriend to the junkyard owner contracting VD from her body are all played for laughs. I’ve been raised on the Internet and 4chan (I consider 4chan to be a separate sovereign state) and am immune to pretty much most types of offense. Yet the casual racism, chauvanism and homophobia still made me uncomfortable at times. The rape scene is inexcusably awful (no matter what cut of the movie you watch) and serves no purpose other than to go “Hey guys: Rape! Pretty edgy right?”

“But if it’s so awful…” you ask with your questioning nose and frowning eyes “… why should someone watch it?”

Well, aside from just appreciating the pure audacity and weirdness of the thing, it’s hard not to appreciate just how incredible it looks.

Yes, despite all the gore and the unrelentingly mean-spirited characters, the most shocking thing about “Street Trash” is how well put-together it is. J. Michela Muro wanted people to know how good a cinematographer he was and pulls out all the stops here. The Steadicam work is so dynamic and interesting, it’s almost jarring. It’s odd to watch so a proudly low-rent peice of work being presented with such care and quality. The kind of things happening on screen should really be filmed by a locked-off security camera not with dynamic camera moves and intersting cutting techniques. It makes for odd viewing. For instance, look how colourful and dynamic this scene where the inhabitants of the junkyward play catch with a man’s severed penis. (You totally don’t have to watch this if you’re squeamish, I’m on your side.)

Especially worthy of mention are the Vietnam flashbacks of Bronson, the leader of the homeless folk. These were obvioulsy filmed with very little in the way of appropriate props or time but still manage to be wonderfully hallucinogenic and brilliantly lit. Bronson comits some of the more egreiously unplesant acts in the movie but his character also seems to be an attempt to make a serious point about homelessness and Vietnam Vets. This was done in a similar style but to much starker and greater effect in a Troma movie called “Combat Shock.”

But the most obvious stand-out of all is still the exploding victims of the toxic liqour. Oozing with multi-coloured gore from the Sam Rami school of splatter, most of these meltings happen and the harsh light of day but the expertly made practical effects still make them look damn impressive. One of them even manages to make flushing his own remains down the toliet his last act on planet earth.

So yes, “Street Trash” isn’t pleasant, it makes no apologies and, yes, most of the acting is either silent movie mugging or just shouting. But you should still watch it, if only too see how ignorant and brutish a movie can be while still being incredibly creative and weird.

Sean Mc Tiernan is 21, his favorite rapper is E40 and he wants to assure you he does sometimes go outside. He has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum.You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.

Sure, you could drop twelve bucks to see The Social Network at some bedbug-infested movie theater, or you could watch the animated Taiwanese version for free from the comfort of your computer. It is also considerably shorter. I think the choice is pretty clear.

If you’ve got something to get done-or just want to sleep in a little bit-today’s probably a good day to do that, because the water falling from the sky has proved impossible for our modern-day technology to handle. You’re welcome!

by Ann Finkbeiner

Read enough astronomy press releases, and you’ll know that “habitable” is better than “earth-like,” which means a certain distance from a star, which is better than “earth-sized,” which could mean Venus which looks like pizza right out of the oven. So “Potentially Habitable,” this is good. The planet’s name is Gliese 581g, it’s around three earths, it’s probably not made of gas, it could conceivably hold on to an atmosphere, and it’s at the right distance from its star, Gliese 581, to have liquid water on the surface. Gliese 581g for some physics reason always faces Gliese 581, so half of it may or may not be always a 70°C degree daytime and the other half, a -35°C degree night (I’m not converting these to Farenheit, life is already short).

This means, said an optimistic astronomer at the NASA press conference, you could evolve for light and heat or dark and cold, take your pick, all niches filled. Astronomers say Gliese 581g is in the Goldilocks zone, and from that sentence alone you can divide astronomers into geeks and poets.

Exoplanets are scientifically hot these days. Around 30 years ago, astronomers didn’t see the point to them-what new do you learn about the universe? Not much-and any astronomer who looked for them pretended he didn’t. But technologies have gotten much more stable and sensitive, and at last count, astronomers had found 490 exoplanets. Most of the exoplanets are Jupiters, few have been in the Goldilocks zone, all the earth-sized ones are much bigger than Earth, and nobody knows yet what they’re made of or whether they have atmospheres that can protect life, let alone whether anyone could or would live there. So astronomers in universities and at NASA are using satellites and telescopes on the ground, and everyone has high hopes and great plans-the most breath-taking being Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer in space, you don’t even need to know what it does, all you have to do to get your breath taken is look at it.

I’m still not entirely sure why astronomers are looking for these things. Nevertheless, the exoplanet hunt isn’t all NASA-hype or astronomers-wangling-cash-from-Congress, because the normally-impassive National Academies of Science said it had the potential for making “the most profound discovery in the coming decade,” and even better, “one day, parents and children could gaze at the sky and know that a place somewhat like home exists around ‘THAT’ star.” And a usually-skeptical astronomer-blogger said that given the number of stars in the galaxies and the discovery of a relatively nearby planet “practically in our lap” makes him “extremely optimistic that earthlike planets are everywhere in our galaxy.”

Then he added, “I don’t want to extrapolate from a data set of two (us and them),” which he went on to do and you might want to ponder the statistical certainty of that. But I’m back 30 years ago, not quite seeing what new this says about the universe, I mean, we know planets support life, right? I’m more interested in the dark sector.

Ann Finkbeiner is a proprietor of The Last Word on Nothing, and is newly the author of A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery. She runs the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins in The Writing Seminars.

by Sarah Idzik

“Most white men either see me as the ‘me so horny’ girl or I’m ‘cute.’ My white girlfriends think, ‘He thinks you’re cute!’ And I think, ‘No, he wants me in a school girl outfit,’’ said my adopted Korean-American friend Rachel, who grew up in my small hometown.

Well, this isn’t new. Most Asian-American girls could probably tell you a similar story. Rebecca, a 23-year-old adoptee from Wisconsin, once had a guy tell her that it’s “every guy’s dream to have sex with an Asian girl.” Rachel knows that “when I go to a bar and there are 80 white girls, 19 black girls, and me, I’m not surprised that I’m a… novelty, I guess.”

But this old story comes in some new flavors for the 100,000 or so Koreans adopted into the U.S. since 1953.

Female Korean adoptees are, more often than not, largely attracted to white men. Most adoptees grew up in very white communities, often isolated from other Asians. “Overall, I’m not attracted to Asian men,” Rachel said. “I’ve seen attractive Asian men, but where I’m located, it’s very rare to see an Asian male in general, let alone one I’d like to hunt down.” When someone in high school asked why she doesn’t date Asian guys, she responded, “Well, try finding me one that isn’t my brother.”

Heather, an adoptee from Baltimore living in Chicago, said that with a handful of Asians in her 300-per-class high school, her school was more diverse than most, but though she has dated Asians before, “if we were going on physical looks alone, I tend to be more attracted to Caucasians.” She attributed this at least in part to the fact that she’s not attracted to men who are smaller than her.

And Rebecca guessed that she’s attracted to white guys over Asian guys about 75% of the time. Caroline, an adoptee from Oklahoma, wrote that before traveling to Korea, she was only ever attracted to Caucasian men, because “there were no Asian men where I grew up.” (Though now that she’s in Korea, she “now only find[s] Korean men attractive.”)

Growing up feeling more white than Asian, our attractions naturally leaned towards the cute boys we saw around us. It makes sense for a cultural whiteness to carry over in this way, but in doing so, it carries over all the same consequences of identity uncertainty. The same way many adoptees see themselves as just like everyone else, and wish-and often automatically expect-to be perceived that way, plenty of adoptees struggle to have members of the opposite sex like them for who they are, and not for their appearance.

“I wish I could wear a sign above my head,” Rachel said, “that reads, ‘I do not know kung fu, I don’t eat fish, I don’t know how to make sushi, I’m not a horrible driver, I have sex but I’m not a sex slave, I’m not submissive, I failed math, I don’t speak any Asian language, please get to know me for me.’”

In college, I was casually seeing a guy that I thought was pretty into me too, and my being Asian never even occurred to me as a potential reason for his attraction… until I read an interview about Asian fetishes in the inaugural issue of my school’s sex magazine. In the article, he openly admitted to having one. It was a jarring experience, instantly casting into doubt every moment of attraction between us-because I thought he had just, as Rachel put it, been getting to know me for me.

A more seemingly innocuous example is my sixth grade boyfriend, who, when my best friend IMed him for fun pretending to be a stranger and asked if he had a girlfriend and if she was pretty, said, “She’s Oriental but yeah, she is.”

Barry, an adoptee from central Illinois, told me about the time a woman told him she “liked foreign guys.”

“It stopped me in my tracks,” he said. “My drunken tracks. I realized that she saw me as something different than other guys because of my ethnicity.”

Moments like this make an adoptee suddenly realize that that’s a club he or she is just never going to be able to join. For each person for whom your ethnicity seems to be as much an afterthought as it is to you-and I have had a person or two affirm this perception of me-there are a half dozen others a moment away from blurting out how attracted they are to foreigners just like you.

And there’s not always an opportunity to get into the other club either. If an adoptee does find herself attracted to an Asian man, there’s the added hurdle of her not being culturally Asian herself. Rachel pointed out that adoptees are often seen as “too Asian for white guys to be [take us] seriously, and too western for Asians.” That can be a pretty unhappy predicament: “You’re bad for being Asian and you’re bad for being American,” she said. “You lose the game of life.”

Joy, an adoptee from the Chicago suburbs, told me that she had intentionally not married an Asian man; her parents had advised her not to because they told her Asian men don’t treat women well.

So there’s some received messages there, overt and covert. Rebecca wrote to me that while she’s attracted more often to white guys than Asian guys, she didn’t usually date them in the past because “I always thought that they were too good for me.” And the realization that men you previously thought were interested in you as a person are actually somehow into your Korean-ness can create some serious trust issues. “I always feel like even if I found this great guy, in the back of my head, I’d never know if he loved me for me,” Rachel wrote. “If it was a fetish or not.”

After a while, she added, she’d have to trust that he was into her personality, but even with the people in her life now, “[it goes] back to me being adopted, where while I know people love me, I never really believe them.” It’s not at all that she’s incapable of loving others, she wrote. “There are things I love, there are people that I [love]… but the way I feel about people loving me… sometimes I don’t buy it.”

She wrote: “As much as I know my birth mother gave me a better life by putting me up for adoption, and as much as I’m grateful for my adoptive parents for doing so much for me… Do you ever feel like no matter how much someone will love you, there may be a day where they’ll just leave?”

For men, there’s an added layer of complication. Barry said that because the vast majority of women he came into contact with were white, he’s “been mostly attracted to white women.” But, he added, “I had the stereotypical white guy experience at some point where I realized…. ‘Asian chicks are hot!’”

He added that this was “so predictable,” but really, it isn’t. I admitted right away that the thought had not even occurred to me-I hadn’t considered that the attitudes and intangible science of attraction would be so affected by men’s environment that they would also, like their white peers, experience the phase of the Asian fetish.

Steve, an adoptee from Nashville, told me that at one point in his life, he was almost determined to be attracted to and eventually marry a Korean American. Not anyone that he wouldn’t have been otherwise attracted to, but he said that while it wasn’t articulated as explicitly in his mind, this was “going to be my way to become Korean American.”

“So you were attracted to Asian girls?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “like most white men. Oh wait.”

Romantic attraction was exceptionally complex for Steve. “There was me, wanting to claim some sort of authentic Korean identity. And wanting to get it on with hot Korean ladies. And also… wanting that sense of a tie to the country that was real. Having in-laws who spoke Korean. Belonging.” So did he end up marrying a Korean American? “Of course not! I met a nice white lady,” Steve said. “But it wasn’t for lack of trying!”

So he’s married. Others are still second-guessing. While Rachel knows that all kinds of men do sometimes leave their wives, relationship security feels even more precarious to her. “I feel like in my situation, I’m almost worried that there’s two times more of a chance that they will [leave me],” she said. “I know it’s not scientific, but it feels like, ‘Do you really want me? Are you sure? How do you know?”

Previously: Part 1: What’s Your Name?
Part 2: When Adoption Became Visible

Sarah Idzik is a writer living in Chicago.

Fast food may not be heroin (oy!) but working in fast food sure will screw you up if you ever require basic medical treatment. Now McDonald’s says it “won’t” drop its meager health insurance for 30,000 hourly workers but it also then said that probably “we’re going to have to look for alternatives.”

by Lilit Marcus

We Jews are an enterprising people. Tell us we have to be moneylenders because the Bible forbids Christians from the practice, and we’ll make a ton of money at it. Tell us we aren’t allowed to keep our last names and we’ll make up pretty new ones like Rosenberg and Goldfarb. And if something in pop culture becomes a big phenomenon, you can guarantee we’ll find a way to make it our own. Sometimes, it’s easy: we get dibs on “Sex and the City” because SJP is one of the tribe. But if there’s not a Jewish angle on the next big thing, we’ll make our own kosher version of it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it will be any good. After all, a knockoff of a knockoff is still a knockoff. If you copy a copy of a key, it might not work well enough to open the door. And these terrible Jewish knockoffs of things that are often already terrible themselves force pop culture to turn in on itself, like one of those worms with a head at each end. I offer you the following examples.

50 Cent

50 Shekel

The most interesting part of this matchup isn’t, of course, the pure cheesiness of the latter song. No, it’s about how 50 Shekel watched The Passion of the Christ and became a Jew for Jesus under his real name, Aviad Cohen. So when you see him in the subway handing out leaflets to anyone who looks remotely Semitic, you can kick him for being annoying and for having once recorded a Jewish parody song.

Yosemite National Park

This Yo Semite T-shirt

I won’t lie: this was actually funny the first time I saw it. Not that a Jew would get any closer to nature than eating dinner in a sukkah, obviously.

2 Live Crew

2 Live Jews

When you parody something that is basically a parody to begin with, a part of the universe turns in on itself.

Silly Bandz

Meshuga Bands

One of the bracelets is shaped like a Birkin Bag. One is shaped like a shofar. How are we supposed to know the Jewish one from the non-Jewish one? Also, if you’re going to knock something off, try to choose something that has a slightly longer shelf life than this year’s equivalent of the Beanie Baby.

Lady Gaga — “Bad Romance”

Good thing this happened before the meat outfit, because a brisket dress would be fucking heavy.

Wine

Manischewitz

Now that I think about it, the first picture could have just as easily been cough syrup.

Baseball Trading Cards

Rabbi Trading Cards

The only thing that would make the rabbi trading cards better would be some stale bubble gum. Oh, and the inclusion of women.

Elvis

Jelvis

“Blue Suede Shoes” was totally a Jewish reference, you guys! Because Jews took out a copyright on the color blue! All this guy is missing is a peanut butter and banana sandwich, bacon on the side.

We won’t even talk about this.

Lilit Marcus, the former editor of Jewcy, is Editor in Chief of The Gloss.

Bartender sought in Chicago: Preferences include “established networker both in person and through social media.”

“Ten years ago Florida-resident Allen Rout posted a picture of his newborn son, Stephen, on the Internet. Then just two month ago, while googling his own name, he was shocked to discover that his son’s picture had become a sensation in Japan. It was on dolls, in game shows, and even in video games. It was essentially being used as an ‘open-source stock image.’”