Christmas on Mars

Is there a better "mainstream" weird band than the Flaming Lips? Possibly not. And surely their long-awaited feature film Christmas on Mars will be excessively weird as well.

Here's the trailer. Despite the allusion therein to a 2003 release, the delayed film has not yet appeared, although it will have a showing this Halloween in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Oct 26, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category: Holidays, Movies, Music, Performance Art, Surrealism

Contortionists

I started thinking about contortionists again when I happened upon a feature on them in an old issue of Life. In my novel Spondulix I had a character who was an "enter-ologist," a great term I found in Ricky Jay's wonderful history of sideshows and freaks, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. Enter-ologists get into impossible places, rather than escape from impossible places.

In any case, a short search of the web turned up lots of online contortionist info, including the Contortion Home Page, which is where I found this pic of April Tatro. That's her in the video below as well.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Sep 12, 2008 - Comments (7)
Category: Body Modifications, Entertainment, Human Marvels, Literature, Books, Science Fiction, Performance Art

Giant Spider Roams Streets of Liverpool!

Posted By: Paul - Sun Sep 07, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category: Aliens, Art, Performance Art, Entertainment, Horror, Inventions, Parades and Festivals, Pets, Technology, Toys, Foreign Customs, Science Fiction

Slinky Dance

Why do I imagine this is how everyone dances in the universe of Jim Woodring's imagination...?

Posted By: Paul - Tue Aug 26, 2008 - Comments (4)
Category: Aliens, Art, Performance Art, Toys, Dance

The Virtual Museum of Car Crashes

So many, many incidents in our Weird Universe terminate in car crashes. Yet this Ballardian motif has had to wait until just recently to receive its proper grisly homage, in the form of Car Accidents dot com.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Aug 18, 2008 - Comments (2)
Category: Crime, Death, Performance Art, Cars

Invest in Literature—and a Piece of the Brooklyn Bridge

Do you have a spare $2000.00 lying around the house? Why not send it to this untested fiction writer and receive a share of his entirely hypothetical profits?

In fact, I'm a relatively penniless writer too!

Thanks to good pal Sandy Pearlman for discovering this one!

Posted By: Paul - Fri Aug 08, 2008 - Comments (4)
Category: Frauds, Cons and Scams, Literature, Books, Writers, Money, Charity, Self-help Schemes, Performance Art

Micronations

The concept of micronations is a fascinating idea. I utilized the notion in one of my recent stories, the title piece from The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories. But I hardly began to exhaust the narrative possibilities of the idea.










Here's a recent article on one such place, the Republic of Molossia.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Jul 28, 2008 - Comments (1)
Category: Art, Performance Art, Customs, Foreign Customs, Eccentrics, Government, Officials, Regulations, History, Law, Military, Obsessions, Patriotism, Politics, Travel

Rhode Island Roller Derby

All things old are new again, and the retro weirdness of yesteryear always resurfaces.

Read about Women's Roller Derby in Rhode Island here.

And then watch this brawl.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jul 15, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category: Art, Performance Art, Fads, Games, ShowBiz, Sports, Gender

The Horribles

As Thomas Pynchon preached, for every force, there is a counter-force. Thus it should come as no surprise that the state-sanctioned respectful and patriotic Fourth-of-July parade has a dark doppelganger, in the form of the Horribles Parade.

The origin of these mocking, satirical festivals goes back well over a century. In Rhode Island, my home state, the affair is called The Ancient and Horribles parade. You can read about our version here.

In nearby Massachusetts, the town of Beverly Farms staged one that recently generated some controversy, with a float dedicated to the teen-pregnancy pact that was recently all over the news.

Read about reactions to their float here.

You can see the float in this video at about the two-and-a-half-minute mark.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jul 08, 2008 - Comments (2)
Category: Art, Performance Art, Customs, Parades and Festivals, School, Sexuality