Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Doug Bradley (aka Pinhead) on his idea of Hell and his biggest fears

DOUG BRADLEY of HELLRAISER: His Vision of Hell, Biggest Fears, the Band GHOST

I watched Hellraiser for the first time a few weeks ago and fell down a very dark and sadistic rabbit hole as I watched the next two sequels (II was very good, III was not). But the common denominator from both films was Doug Bradley aka Pinhead (and, as a brilliant Freudian slip, I initially wrote that as demoninator).

The British actor spoke to Elliott Fullam of Little Punk People about his life, his roles as Pinhead, and what his vision of Hell was. I loved this interview because it cut out all the rubbish you often get with celebrity interviews. The questions were clear and interesting, and so were the answers. No bullshit.

Dom Griffin on Them: Covenant

The Problem With Them: Covenant...

My man Dom knocked it out of the park with his latest review of Them: Covenant, the newest Black torture porn horror series on Amazon Prime. As you can see from the above thumbnail, it’s trash. I’ve not watched it but I could tell it wasn’t for me just from the trailer and Dom confirmed many of my initial thoughts when he watched it for our sins.

It’s spoiler-heavy but I never planned to watch it so whatever. Even if you hadn’t planned to watch Them either, I implore you to watch the review anyway. Not least for its razor-sharp critiques on a lot of things regarding Black media and how some of it is made for white people to coax them out of their privileged world view (I guess?). As much as I loved Get Out and it helped me deal with a lot of personal demons, I fear that it has unintentionally awoken a beast that is white studios greenlighting Black horror because it’s seen as “diverse” to peddle Black torture narratives that just make Black people feel worse.

But those are my thoughts. Go listen to Dom’s and laugh your way through otherwise you’ll just cry. If you watched Them, what did you think? Let me (and Dom) know in the comments.

When São Paulo banned billboard advertising

In 2006, São Paulo’s mayor Gilberto Kassab proposed a law known as Lei Cidade Limpa (clean city law in Portuguese) which prohibited any form of billboard advertising or outdoor posters. 15,000 billboards were taken down and despite backlash from advertisers, citizens praised the move.

For New York’s WNYC, local São Paulo reporter Vinícius Queiroz Galvão described his experiences:

São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area. São Paulo is just like New York. It is a very multicultural, globalized city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants. And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers’ shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it is a big social problem that was uncovered, and the city was shocked by these news.

Check out Tony de Marco’s Flickr album, titled São Paulo No Logo, for a better look.

Islamic tartan of Scotland

The Islamic Tartan Concept weaves together the different strands of Scottish and Muslim heritage creating the fabric of the future.

The theological explanation of the design is as follows:

– Blue to represent the Scottish Flag
– Green to represent the colour of Islam
– Five white lines running through the pattern to represent the five pillars of Islam
– Six gold lines to represent the six articles of faith
– Black square to represent the Holy Kabah

A supercut of Murder, She Wrote jokes by PushingUpRoses

Hilarious Murder, She Wrote Supercut - My Favorite Jokes, Moments, and More!

At the end of last year, I discovered PushingUpRoses, a content creator who makes comedic introspective videos about various media including Murder, She Wrote, Golden Girls, Goosebumps, and the odd Let’s Play and retro PC game analysis. It gave me a lot of needed laughs and made me appreciate Murder, She Wrote all over again.

In the above video, PushingUpRoses made a supercut of jokes and moments from her series, That Time on Murder, She Wrote and it’s so funny. Subscribe to her channel and check out her Patreon too.

What year was Batman Returns set in?

As I got older, I started wondering “what period was Batman Returns set in?”. Its predecessor, Batman, seemed modern for the time (1989) but Returns felt a lot older. People wore clothes from the early 20th century, maybe 20s-30s and the architecture was very Art Deco.

The problem is, when you Google “What year was Batman Returns set in?”, you get the year the film was released: 1992. Not helpful. Then I found this on Quora about the first film:

It’s hard to tell. The architecture suggests that, but the technology suggests what was then the present day.

That was 1989, meaning that Thomas and Martha Wayne were probably killed around 1969 or so. So why, in the flashback to that scene, were they and little Bruce dressed like it’s the 1940s? Did somebody mess with the timestream? Does the Keaton Batmobile have a flux capacitor?

Batman Returns has a similar issue. It almost feels like the main characters are stuck in a period they aren’t from, as they appear modern and the rest of Gotham is still in a weird 20th century time warp. But let’s look at this logically. In the film, we start with Oswald Cobblepot’s birth and early days as a baby 33 years before what we believe is 1992, taking us to 1959. Are you telling me 33 years pass and people haven’t updated their clothes? And there are other suggestions about the time, as a commenter on this blog post mentions:

Some more timewarp craziness, this time form (sic) Batman Returns:

Ted Bundy exists and is a known serial killer. (Bruce Wayne dialogue to Selina)

And yet, only about 30-40 years earlier (whatever Penguin’s age is), Gotham was something out of circa early 1900s (judging by Penguin’s parents’ dress and house furnishings, Pee Wee and Simone)

Comment link

Bundy was alive between 1946–1989 and he admitted to murders committed between 1974 and 1978 so it definitely wasn’t set in the 20s or 30s. So maybe, like Batman, it was set in an alternate universe’s 1992 where Art Deco and German expressionism never died. Did I mention Tim Burton was the director and the film was criticised for being too dark?

So, to answer the question “what year was Batman Returns set in?”, my answer is: probably 1992 but not our 1992.

10 alternatives to Helvetica

Helvetica weights

Helvetica has been everywhere for decades. But it’s not free (or original) so you might want a different take on the classic sans serif. Extensis compiled a list of the 10 best Helvetica alternatives.

Most of these I’ve used or otherwise own but a few I’d not seen before, including:

Theinhardt is my #1 from the list. What’s yours? Let me know in the comments.

Where did Ruff & Mews go from Petco's new logo?

petco logos

Erastus Kingbolt wrote about Petco’s latest logo dissolution in his Systems Theory newsletter. Where once Ruff and Mews once sat, now we are left with a generic blue wordmark:

Cold and lifeless is a fair description, isn’t it? There are absolutely no friendly animals, the font is somehow even more sterile than it was beforeand in place of the already watered-down red there is the inanimate blue of Marshalls and USPS. The jokes about the health and wellness part write themselves, but I will say that even the CEO doesn’t seem to think that it’s true. “We’re transitioning from being a company that asks, ‘Can I help you put that big bag of dog food into your cart?’ into a full health and wellness company,” he told Fortune. “Today, Petco is the ONLY complete health and wellness company for pets,” he wrote in the opening letter of the IPO filing. A few more times and he’ll be convinced.

I love a wordmark logo but not as a progression from something that already works. Petco’s original logo with its jellied red text and happy-go-lucky pets was playful, fun, and engaging (you rarely see a cat and dog so chummy together). But now it’s just like any other logo. Before you knew Petco was for pets before you even saw the word—great for non-English speakers—but now you assume it’s for pets, despite the vague tagline underneath.

People showed disdain but I don’t see the new branding causing significant damage to Petco. It’s just a shame that another brand has fallen foul of the dreaded Minimalist Logo Syndrome.

Pet related: when pets wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic

The lost golden city of Luxor, Egypt

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old city in Luxor, Egypt.

The “lost golden city” dates back to the 18th-dynasty of King Amenhotep III (1391 to 1353 BC). Experts believe the city may have been used by Tutankhamun.

Dr Zahi Hawass, a former antiquities minister who lead the mission, said:

“Many foreign missions searched for this city and never found it. […] Within weeks, to the team’s great surprise, formations of mud bricks began to appear in all directions. What they unearthed was the site of a large city in a good condition of preservation, with almost complete walls, and with rooms filled with tools of daily life.”

via The Guardian

Amongst the discoveries were items of jewellery, pottery, scarab beetle amulets and mud bricks “bearing the seals of Amenhotep III”. Let’s hope none of this finds its way into the British Museum as they have enough stolen artefacts as it is.

La Soufrière's eruption: before and after photos

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured the above images of La Soufrière before and after its eruption on 9th April.

La Soufrière is an active stratovolcano on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A series of explosive events began in April 2021, forming a plume of volcanic ash reaching 8 km in height, and generating pyroclastic flows down the volcano’s south and southwest flanks.

According to the BBC, La Soufriere had been inactive for decades before it started erupting last week. No reported injuries but thousands have fled their homes.

(via SciTechDaily)

More on eruptions: Cumbre Vieja: an erupting volcano in 4K and NatGeo and social media on the Tonga eruption

The Brady-Nixon Connection

Before Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of adult programming, there was Nickelodeon’s Nick at Nite, launched in 1985. The programming block, which is still on the air today, caters for older audiences isn’t as loose as Adult Swim in terms of risqué content but it’s far from puritanical.

Back in 1999, there was a short called The Brady-Nixon Connection which looked at certain similarities between The Brady Bunch and President Nixon. In truth, there was no connection but it served as a unique way of promoting the show which aired in 1995, 1998–2003, and 2012.

(h/t Boing Boing)