Slake the street’s thirst with your finest booze, cuz today is the 406th anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ execution at the hands of the English Crown. The ex-soldier and demolitionist suffered several days of torture and interrogation before greeting the gallows in connection with a failed attempt to blow up Parliament. The plot would have taken out King James I, his entire royal family, and both Houses had the cops not sniffed it out first.

Whether you know it or not, this near-revolutionary’s legacy has stood the test of time: Fawkes is the Original Guy whose annual burning in effigy gave us the generic term ‘guy,’ forever placing him in the company of Dude Ferguson and Fool Williams. His stylized likeness also graces the face of the hero in Alan Moore’s comic book series V for Vendetta.

And if that’s too heavy an occasion for you to celebrate, take a dip into the absurd with National Gorilla Suit Day. The self-explanatory holiday has yet to die a slow, hairy death…

What do you call two fiery MC/producers who’ve joined their DJ-ing and instrument-playing experience to drop an intellectual hip-hop album on the masses? Eschewing the phrase ‘multi-talented,’ DT and AmDex (short for AmbiDextrous) prefer to call themselves Clan Destined and their debut Abbracadamn!!!

Solid rhymes laden with highbrow vocabulary reign over the LP while betraying Clan D’s college background and origin. Fate set DT and AmDex on parallel paths of down- home North Carolina upbringing before colliding them on Atlanta’s battle circuit frequented by other MCs and Morehouse students.

Atypical of standard Dirty South fare, the result is production rich with live keyboard and guitar work that hearkens back to the funkier days of Wattstock in the 60’s. As for skills on the mic, expect these two to alternately string together unheard-of rhymes by pairing words like “panacea” with “that-breeds-a”, “skeptic” with “septic”, and “saboteurs” with “settle scores”. Their message swings like a pendulum between setting your soul free with an ass-shaking crowd, and awaiting the societal change that’s gonna come for the young black man.

Whether or not Clan Destined’s music brings about that change, the world has been put on notice: DT and AmDex have alot to say and are damn good at spitting it.

*Peep stand-out track “The Monkey,” where DT inverts this derogatory colonial metaphor for African descendants to empower his people as kings and queens of the urban jungle

The folks in the genetics lab at the University of Utah bring you what, at first glance, looks like a bunch of animated mice strung out in a terrarium and high on a smorgasbord of drugs.

Dig deeper, though, and you’ll see it’s an interactive video schooling us on how certain substances alter the mind on a neuro-chemical level. Party on, mice!

We get so much good content  for every issue that we can’t possibly fit it all in the book. So to coincide with the release of the French issue, here’s a photo gallery of some must see French made gangster films curated by the Grim Team.

Are you afflicted by the absence of animation in your life?  Do you play the same Beavis and Butthead or Celebrity Deathmatch reruns over and over again?  Well fear not, Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt have put together a serious line up of animated short films for their 3rd annual Animation Show.  This mix of Academy Award nominees and film fest winners feature some of the best animations from animators around the world.  Some high points were Run Wrake’s gory fairy tale Rabbit, and of course Bill Plimpton (aka the Michael Jordan of animation) with Guide Dog.  He even showed up for a Q&A afterwards.  And all this for just 2 dollars more than a New York movie ticket, gollee.  However, all you New York cats were caught sleepin cause the last showing was yesterday, but for everybody else check the schedule.

In a move reinforcing the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s hustle, entrepreneur Wang Ming has flipped countless sets of discarded novelty lederhosen into the centerpieces of an original board game. A brainchild of the Chinese manufacturer-by-trade, ‘Smack the Lion!’ seems like a cross between Monopoly’s Chance cards and medieval warfare. The rules are simple: each member of the family straps on the traditional Dutch yodeling garment, deep orange and accented by a lion’s tail, before trying his or her damndest to avoid death.

Where did the pants in question come from? The stands of a German soccer stadium, in case you’re curious. Looking to cash in on free ad space while supporting the Netherlands’ national soccer team, Dutch brewing company Bavaria doled out the lederhosen to spectators of World Cup ‘06 who bought enough of their beer. At the game, officials told these fans to drop trou if they wanted to stay since the offending pants featured the logo of a non-sponsor company.

Feel free to add your own dubbing as you watch the commercial, as well as a more thorough explanation of the game’s rules.

*props to blog Scary Toy Clown for not only unearthing, but following up on the above story

Technicolor guts splatter in slow motion against the walls of the bandit hideout, and the government police close in. Just in the nick of time, The Black Tiger, that famous Thai bandit, appears on the horizon and blasts everyone away with a bazooka. This pretty much sums up Tears Of The Black Tiger, the latest and greatest and only Thai movie now playing in New York City.

The plot is a love story and a throwback to classic Cowboy Westerns, but this is secondary to how the film looks. The color scheme is crazy, think of a 1970s Caribbean casino palette on acid. The entire movie was filmed on location in rural Thailand and shot on old film stock, so it has that soulful and grainy quality. Check it out if you need to get a foreign film fix. It’s playing at The Film Forum now through February 1st.

Woop Woop! Big things this weekend. Frank famalam and creative minded dudes Ducksworth are teaming up with Takeover Theory to blow the roof off of 87 Ludlow tomorrow, Friday, January 26th at 10pm. Festivities include two free open vodka bars from 10-11pm and 1-2am with rsvp to mastro@takeovertheory.com. DJ Iron Lyon will be rocking the onesies and twosies all night long. Don’t miss this. 

Shout out to two good friends of ours - Saigon and Alexander Richter for coming through and popping off some photos in the Chop Shop! Peep the entire photo shoot in the upcoming issue of  the UK based magazine, HIP HOP CONNECTION. Also see more of Alexander’s work at   www.alexanderrichterphoto.com

Longtime Frank friend Livingroom Johnston’s live jazz drawing entitled, "Dinner with two Elephants balancing atop medicine balls." What can we say? The man’s got style.