First, inhale this Surreal vision of Full House-era “fun,” ritualistic/orgiastic mastication, overconsumption, and, uh, mozzarella:

Tasty.

Now—with no pants on but plenty of flow, Die Antwoord are everyone’s favorite post-genre quasi-hip hop sex-obsessed musical… act? Are they an act a la bunraku? (The “real man” behind the Ninja is visibly, ironically puppet-mastering the Ninja—floppy cartoon penis, mullet/fade, and all?) Or are they more like Andy Kaufmann? (The “real” comedy act will begin as soon as I’m done reading the entire Great Gatsby out loud; the “real” Die Antwoord are always at the edges of themselves, of being-what-you-thought-they-would-be?) Who knows. The end result is fokken rad music, not to mention the awesome, wild, aesthetics-defying, sexuality-trumping, eye-bombing video:

Just as the erotic flees into the unknown, the obscured, and the secret, so does it return like a flood (”of what,” he asks, with a wink) at the call of the maximal and the cartoonishly intimate (sexy with a wink, “sexy,” the Robert Coover version of sex, sex as joke, as game). This maximal return is elegantly and hilariously incarnated (pun intended) in “Evil Boy.” Good show. Or, should I say, good “show?”—

The erotic, like the violent, like the gastro-orgiastic, defies simulation: Cartoonish, silly, ironic/self-aware “sex” or “pizza orgy” still produces in us the desire for sex, for pizza. No matter how silly the pizza obliteration party becomes, the pizza cannot be obliterated and in fact expands, conceptually, to consume the song, the obliteration. Or:

The Pizza Song (original and screwed) always effectively generates hunger, especially for junk food. It obliterates not “pizza,” some noble Italian culinary art, but “the obliteration of pizza.” It negates its own joke, the way that “sex” in “Evil Boy” negates the idea that “we’re going to have a larf with all these wooden cocks and this eyelash-less bird in a silly fur coat.” These videos are both so maximal, they overcome themselves.

Here the erotic finds and joins the gastro-orgiastic (and the violent—see: Tarantino, Oliver Stone…) and becomes simply the Beyond, that which lies beyond our ability to taxonomize, be really aware of, hold in our thoughts abstractly.

For to truly contemplate desire or hunger is to feel horny or want to eat: Any other “knowledge” of this animal non-knowledge is exactly what it wants least to be, a joke. The joke in supra-maximal art is that it is both actually funny and “funny,” or deadly serious—the last laugh of the corpse; the pizza-stuffed buffoon, off to a nap; the mid-coitus man and woman who have traded the sign of sex for sex, and then traded sex for the ultimate erotic (the unknown), which leaves them with nothing else, only laughter…

Are discussed vividly and concisely today in the New York Times. I suggest you indulge (both by reading the article and eating something spicy). The highlights, for me:

“Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” [Dr. Paul Rozin] said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.”

…As Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

At least according to Beach House ’s phenomenal “Walk in the Park,” by Allen Cordell, on Vimeo:

Recently I saw Steve Asma talk about monsters; soonafter, my friend Steve Aubrey, editor of the Suspicious Anatomy, sent me the above wolfboy/zombie-esque bully video. I find the action of it mesmerizing. Perhaps all good stories end in sandwiches, metaphorical or otherwise…

In any event, fur and psychedelia are here to stay, as chimerical monsters and taxidermy and vampires and werewolves all make comebacks—and the truly monstrous (per Asma’s excellent On Monsters) recede into the cold and psychological, the realm of Arendt and To Catch a Predator.

In lighter news, the monstrous unconscious comes forward in art… and liquor. Behold! The truly chimerical—the not-alive/not-dead/not-human/not-beast—the zombierific—is now available as a seven-hundred-dollar craft beer with a button nose and a tuxedo:

Aww, thanks, BrewDog… a pet-koozie. I guess I have always wanted a stuffed dog to hold my hair of the dog*. (*There’s a “yo dawg” iteration in there somewhere, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.)