Books: Please please me – by ending this ceaseless flood of zombie crap.

According to the UK Gaurdian, publishers are poised to run the monster-mash up formula that proved so popular for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies into the ground. What's next from the pop-horror factory floor? Zombie Beatles.

From the Guardian:

Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison are starring as zombies and Ringo Starr as a ninja in the latest addition to the publishing's hottest, and oddest, new craze: the monster mash-up.

Alan Goldsher's Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion has been snapped by US publisher Pocket Books for publication in June next year, following in the footsteps of the surprise hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was published this spring, and the forthcoming Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter and I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas, all out this autumn.

Goldsher's story starts in a Liverpool maternity ward in 1940, as a newborn Lennon is bitten by a zombie and doomed to wander the Earth for eternity. When he meets McCartney in 1957 he "bites off Paul's ear and sucks out his mate's grey matter, after which he spits a healthy amount of his own brain into Paul's carotid artery - and thus is born the greatest songwriting team in rock history," according to Goldsher's version of the encounter.

Harrison is quickly zombified, and "seventh level Ninja Lord Ringo Starr" is then welcomed into the fold. The Beatles enslave "hundreds of lusty teenage girls", invade the US where they mind-meld millions, releasing albums with hidden messages such as "Please please me by biting your young", "Dear sir or madam, won't you eat your neighbour", and "All you need is eternal life".

Their world begins to crumble when Lennon starts to date eighth level Ninja Lord Yoko Ono, and a band called the Zombies – whose members, Goldsher says, are not actually zombies - seeks revenge.

While it is nice to see that the criminally underappreciated Zombies get a little face time, it’s a shame to see the book hangs its plot on the old, crypto-racist "dragon lady that broke up the band" canard. Though, even that nod to yellow peril anxieties is forgivable next to the fact that it just keeps this interminable zombie moment dragging on.

Perhaps the irony here is that what made the Beatles so great – arguably the single greatest rock band to ever exist – was their originality.

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Music: Meat the Beatles.

Today's link is flagrantly, flamboyantly NSFW – in the truest and most sincere meaning of the acronym.

The Gigwise music site presents a slideshow of 20 disgusting album covers, including the infamously short-lived "butcher cover" of the Beatles' in1966 US only Yesterday and Today LP shown above. This is actually one of the less repulsive covers in the lot. The site's commentary informs us, to nobody's surprise, that it was "John Lennon who pushed for the photo to be used." We didn't think it was Ringo's idea.

Given the tiny sample size, it's a little presumptuous to make generalizations . . . but, hell, I say, let's do it, let's be presumptuous.

Among "genres" of foul ideas, violence – usually depicted as potential or in its aftermath – makes up the largest proportion of the covers. But, curiously, second place goes to poop. Word hounds Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea have pointed out that the English language, "tongue of Shakespeare, Bryon, and Mellville" contains "a puzzling number of words that mean 'to spray with shit.'" This cultural obsession with human waste seems to have carried over into the American cultural innovation of rock and roll. Defecation – human, animal, and human-from-an-animal (deathgrind unit Cattle Decapitation's oh so tasteful Humanure album cover) – is an oddly popular topic for album covers.

Also, there's not one, but two covers (and the commentary mentions a third) featuring the taboo of bestiality. How this subject, which is hardly a major theme of rock, ends up on even a single cover is mystery best answered by minds smarter (or more twisted) than my own.

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Art: Modern art is dead. Or is it the other way around?

Finally, a Beatles reunion! The above untitled 1968 group portrait comes from the brush of underground filmmaker Curt McDowell, the man behind such porn-tastic provocations as 1975's Thundercrack, 1974's Stinkybutt (billed somewhat cryptically as "The film that caused Sheri Milbradt to lose 40 pounds"), and the unforgettable 1972 classic Siamese Twin Pinheads. A long-time collaborator with rebel film icon George Kuchar, Mr. McDowell died of AIDS in 1987.

These two works are poster-sized obits of punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren and actress Nicole Kidman by the NYC-based artist Adam McEwen. Here's the artist discussing the fauxbituaries with Interview magazine:

I'm not really interested in celebrities so much-the works are more homages. But the person must be famous so the reader knows that the person is still alive. I'm interested in that brief second when you aren't sure whether Bill Clinton is alive or dead. I only need that moment in order to disorient them enough to sneak through to some other part of the brain-to achieve that split second of turning the world upside down. The obituaries aren't about celebrity. They are more mournful, more melancholy. In a way, they are accounts of certain people's actions taken in an attempt to make their lives better. My first more McEwen one was Malcolm McLaren. I still had a job writing obituaries for The Daily Telegraph then.

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