Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super Pac!

If you are reading this in the UK, the above sentence probably flew over your head higher than anything even Superman himself could manage. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault – unless you are one of the executives at digital channel FX who decided to drop The Colbert Report from its schedule.

So a quick recap: The Colbert Report (pronounced ‘Rap-por’) is the funniest satirical show on television anywhere in the world. (Caveat: probably the best – you can’t seriously expect us to have seen every satirical show on every channel in the world!). It is fronted by comedian Steven Colbert (pronounced: ‘Col-bear’) playing a character called Steven Colbert, an egotistical, right-wing, god-fearing zealot of the type usually found fronting a Fox News show.

Yet this is not just the kind of satire that wags its finger at the insanity of modern politics from a safe distance, has a chuckle and then goes home to count its money. No, this is satire that gets down and dirty (not literally) in the trenches of realpolitik. Afterall, Colbert is the man who eviscerated (not literally) George W. Bush  at a Whitehouse Correspondent’s dinner in 2006.

Last June we reported on Colbert’s successful application to the US Federal Election Commission to set up his own Super PAC (political action committee) in order to the highlight the absurdity of the US Supreme Court’s ruling that corporate funding of independent political adverts during elections cannot be limited. In other words, political donors, whoever they may be, can spend as much money as they want promoting or trashing a candidate in any given election, behind the guise of an independent PAC and able to remain anonymous until well after the election they are seeking to engineer is over.

With thousands of fans heeding a call to donate to the new Colbert Super PAC, at first it ran a couple of ads asking to voters in last August’s Iowa Straw Poll (a poll held for Republican presidential candidates to test their support before the primaries begin) to vote for “Rick Parry – with an ‘A’”, in obvious attempt to lampoon former Republican frontrunner Rick Perry. But since then Colbert Super PAC has been a little quiet.

Not any more. Last week a poll in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary showed that Colbert (who has not put himself forward as a candidate) had five per cent of the state’s vote – one per cent more than genuine candidate John Huntsman. Aside from causing Huntsman to withdraw his candidacy, it also led Colbert to ponder a genuine run at the primary.

There was just one catch however: Super PACs cannot coordinate directly with candidates, making the Colbert Super PAC somewhat of an issue. The solution: to hand Colbert Super PAC over to The Daily Show host (and Colbert Report producer) Jon Stewart and rename it (yes, we said it in the first sentence) The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super PAC!

Although Colbert is still teasing us as to whether he will actually put his name forward or not, the new PAC has just released its first advert. Voiced by actor John Lithgow and entitled ‘Attack In B Minor For Strings’, it paints current frontrunning Republican robot, sorry, candidate Mitt Romney as an asset-stripping serial killer. No, we are not making this up – see the advert below.

So on this side of the Atlantic we say: come on Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee, Chris Morris, Charlie Brooker et al, enough with the finger wagging and the chuckling – let’s get together and actually tackle our own politibots head-on too!

Having made the enforced switch from his beloved marathon to the 200 metres look easy, Paralympian Richard Whitehead is heading to London 2012 as a contender for gold. But more than any medal, he hopes the Games will encourage a new generation of athletes, disabled and able-bodied, to get involved in sport.

There is a tendency for sport stars who move into a discipline significantly different from the one in which they made their name to find the going tougher than expected. Think of basketball legend Michael Jordan’s excursion into minor league baseball during his first retirement, or British sprinter Dwayne Chamber’s forays into American football and rugby league: after failing to set their new sports alight, both men swiftly returned from whence they came.

So when double-knee amputee and world-record breaking marathon runner Richard Whitehead switched from the Olympics and Paralympic Games’ longest distance to the second shortest, he might have expected to experience similar ignominy.

But at the International Paralympic Committee World Championships in New Zealand at the start of last year he cast aside any doubts, taking the gold medal and setting a championship record in the process. Not a bad start for someone who had never run a 200 metres race before, he admits: “I knew I had a good run in me and I just put everything on the line. I showed a lot of people that I’m not just an athlete but I’m an elite athlete in whatever sport I take part in.”

As good as his word, at a Diamond League meeting at Crystal Palace in August 2011 Whitehead, who runs on prosthetic carbon fibre ‘blades’, added the T42 (the IPC’s classification for knee amputees) 200 metre world record to his world champion status. In between, he also managed to break the T42 400 metre world record at the Paralympic World Cup in Manchester.

These stellar performances secured Whitehead UK Athletics funding, enabling him to become a full-time athlete, and most importantly of all, gained him a place in the squad for this summer’s Paralympic Games in London. Despite the switch from road endurance to track sprinting bringing such high rewards, however, it is the former that retains his greatest affection.

“I love athletics as a sport, but I’ll always be a marathon runner, whether I win gold in London or not,” he says. “I probably would swap the 200m place for a marathon start, even though I’m much higher ranked in the 200m than I am in the marathon. Unfortunately I’m not with the marathon but another door opened with the 200m. I can’t really be too bitter about it as it’s opened so many doors for me, but I want to be known as a marathon and a track runner, not just as the latter.”

Whitehead’s loyalty to the marathon is no surprise. Taking up the sport in 2004, he went on to set world records for both the half and full marathon for leg amputees in 2010, and had been targeting a top five finish at last January’s IPC World Championships.

That ambition was dashed by an IPC regulation stating that leg amputees cannot compete alongside arm amputees. To compound Whitehead’s disappointment, the IPC then announced that the only two races on offer to double amputees above the knee at London 2012 would be the 100 and 200 metres, a decision he says was “a real shock to the system”.

With the determination he has displayed as a sprinter since then, on September 1 Whitehead will take to the blocks as favourite for the T42 200 metre gold medal. Describing the World Championship-winning run as “kamikaze”, he has added a sprint coach and a strength and conditioning coach to his team and undertaken a full programme of winter and warm weather training, with a timetable that includes 16 sessions in the gym and on the track every week.

Embodying the kind of Corinthian spirit all too rare in sport today, Whitehead reveals it is a desire to reach individual goals and keep pushing barriers, not medals or prestige, that keeps him motivated. It is an approach he would like to see others adopt for the Games this summer: “I struggle with the attitude of some athletes who think it’s all about them and their performance. It’s not: it’s about what they can offer and give back to society and how they can inspire a new generation of athletes.”

Whitehead himself has already given quite a lot back to society. Before becoming a full-time athlete, he was a sports development officer for Nottingham City Council, and still visits the city’s schools to talk to pupils and encourage them to exercise. “To have that kind of impact is an honour,” he says. “Sport is more than going out for a run and getting sweating, it is about participation, making new friendship groups and experiencing new life skills. There a certain groups of youngsters that don’t necessarily want to participate in sport, so you have to engage them in different ways.”

He also travels regularly to the US to work with Achilles International, a New York-based foundation that helps people with disabilities participate in mainstream athletics. Achilles supplied Whitehead with a pace runner for his world-record time (2:42:53) in the 2010 Chicago Marathon, and he now returns the favour by coaching the US military’s wounded veterans.

“Those guys have come back wounded from action and have never walked or run on prosthetics, so I help support that transition,” he explains. “Some people just need face time with me to understand the challenges in front of them and realise that by accepting them they can become a better person. That’s what sport is all about.”

It is this ethos that Whitehead hopes will be London 2012′s lasting achievement: “In this country, there are so many people who are excluded socially a lot of the time because they have a disability. People need realise that sport is bigger than bronze, silver or gold medals, it’s about the impact they can have, whether it is inspiring that next generation of athletes or changing society’s attitudes to disabled people.”

“2012 provides a massive platform to do that,” he adds. “The legacy that I see for the Olympics and the Paralympics is about the athletes spreading that message to all corners of the country, placing it in the heart of the communities who will be coming to watch or following us on television.”

That’s right, OnlyForKoolKids is going on strike. Before the collective weeping and wailing begins, hold that thought: this does not mean we are going to stop bringing you our own peculiar brand of music, movie and television coverage.

No; tomorrow (November 30) OnlyForKoolKids will pursue something far less frivolous by reporting on the biggest day of national public sector walkouts the UK has seen for decades. As many as two million teachers, firefighters, dustbinmen, border control staff and other public sector workers will join the 24-hour strike, called to oppose the coalition government’s plans to reform pensions, forming picket lines and closing schools, council offices and other services across the country (click here for the BBC’s excellent table of who is involved and what will be effected).

The unions say the proposal would see their members having to pay more in contributions and working for longer, but getting less in their retirement. That may sound unfair to most normal people, but not the government, which says that because too many of us now have the audacity to live for longer, and because it in no way wants to upset the financiers, investment bankers and hedge funds who helped give this country its biggest ever budget deficit (and who account for over half the donations the Conservative Party receives) by asking them to contribute a larger percentage of their multi-million pound bonuses, it must instead plunder from the public sector.

Arrrrrrr, or, as pirate Captain David ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’ Cameron would say: “We are all in this together…”

Whether you agree with us or not, the day’s events are going to be the lead story of every newspaper, website and news broadcast you see tomorrow and Friday, which is why we are going to use our shiny new tumblr. blog to bring you live coverage of the strikes and picket lines in Brighton. Up to 10,000 people are expected to march through the city, and OnlyForKoolKids will be at the heart of the action, posting up live pictures, video and commentary as it all happens.

Unfortunately we couldn’t think of an exciting clip to go with this post, so instead please excuse our rather clichéd attempt to invoke the spirit of protest with this classic track from the fantastic Public Enemy:

Last night OnlyForKoolKids’ short, tender life reached what will probably be its pinnacle: it met global (if you count internet potential) broadcasting legend Alan Partridge. Hundreds of people queued around the block to get the chance to encounter the great man at Brighton’s branch of Waterstones, but not OnlyForKoolKids, oh no – we had official press accreditation to be right by Alan’s side from the beginning and pap him as he entered to the masculine tones of the Brighton and Hove Gay Men’s Chorus and posed with a copy of his devastating(ly good) autobiography/memoir, I, Partridge.

We will publish a full report of the evening in our (non) professional capacity for news website Brighton Lite, but for now here’s what Alan had to say about his affection for England’s premier seaside city (and if you can’t be bothered to read any further, simply watch the video we shot below):

“I come here many times to enjoy the wit wisdom and tolerance of a place which has so many colourful characters.

“Only the other day I saw a mixed-race race transvestite wearing flip-flops with an afro-wig on. It’s the only place where you can use a skateboard and be over 40-years-old. That’s why I love it.”

Since winning the President of the Jury Special Award at Cannes this year, Australian real-life crime film Snowtown has been heralded by critics the world over. OnlyForKoolKids caught up with its star, Daniel Henshall, on his recent visit to Brighton.

In the flesh, Daniel Henshall is one of the nicest people you could hope to encounter. Snowtown, in which he makes his feature film debut, has just left most of the audience in Brighton’s Duke Of Yorks cinema stunned and speechless, but Henshall is still smiling and chatty, keen to share an experience that has already gained him global critical acclaim.

On screen, he plays the sort of man who you hope you’ll never ever come across in your lifetime, and as he sits in front of me, post-screening, the difference between the two is stark. Snowtown is based in part on Debi Marshall’s book Killing For Pleasure, an in-depth analysis of Australia’s infamous ‘Bodies in the Barrels’ murders that claimed 12 lives across the 1990s. Henshall plays John Bunting, the man identified as being principally responsible for the slayings, several of which were preceded by the horrendous torture of his victims.

To Henshall’s horror, his mother still saw aspects of her son in his portrayal of Bunting. “When my mum saw the film for the first time the other day she was like, ‘I know that guy’. It scared the shit out of me,” he reveals. “She qualified that by saying that she knew bits of him [Bunting] in the film, but she said to me ‘it’s nice to talk to you now’, as she thought I gotten so into the character at the time.”

For the role Henshall gained 20 kilos, kept his hair hair unkempt and his beard uneven, appearing every bit the working class South Australian that Bunting is. Today his hair is short and neatly cut beneath a fashionable cap, his moustache and beard are both precisely trimmed and physically he is slim and healthy in appearance.

One thing that Henshall and his character on-screen do share are Henshall’s cherubic features. It is a combination of these and his instantly likeable demeanour that make it possible to see why he was given the part (and why his mother had been slightly confused when watching Snowtown), for John Bunting was not the stereotypical loner serial killer, but an affable, sociable man who ingratiated himself with the community he lived (and killed) in. So ingratiated, in fact, that Bunting was able to convince six other locals to help him carry out what he sold to them as the cleansing of the area of predatory homosexuals and paedophiles.

As Henshall explains, the film’s depiction of Bunting as a paternal “knight in shining armour” was deliberate. “The way I saw it was that here’s a man who thinks he’s loving these people, who gets off on protecting these people through killing,” he says. “I found that idea was quite easy to connect to – I have family, I have people I care for. He (John) doesn’t do it in a way that I agree with, of course, but there is that commonality.”

In addition to putting on weight, Henshall, who is from Sydney, spent three months before the cameras rolled living in the same economically depressed suburbs of Adelaide where all but one of the killings took place, and which also provide the backdrop for most of Snowtown. “I lived in the area and got to experience it and become part of the community, so I was immersed in that world for 12 weeks before shooting.”

It also gave him the chance to get to know the rest of the cast, all first time actors from the suburbs, including Lucas Pittaway, who plays Jamie Vlassakis, the son of the family that Bunting ‘adopts’. It is the development of the relationship between Bunting and Vlassakis, who gradually becomes complicit in the murders, that forms the film’s powerful emotional core.

Having just witnessed Snowtown, which, although featuring very few moments of actual violence, is incredibly intense from start to finish (and has reportedly caused walkouts at several screenings), I wonder if the six-week shoot had any profound effect on Henshall? At first, he says not. “I was ok. Any time we felt disturbed with what we were doing on set, it was such a tight gang that we formed on it with the amazing crew and cast, we would talk about it and debrief in the moment or afterwards go and have a few beers and discuss it.”

But just as his mother had noticed, taking on the mantle of Australia’s most reviled serial killer did take its toll. “A friend of mine talked to me during the filming process and then talked to me three months later, and he said it’s nice to actually talk to me now, as I at the time I had been projecting what I was doing. I had no idea I was so much in it. It took me about six months, to be honest.”

As Henshall observes, Pittaway (who he quite accurately describes as looking like the lovechild of James Franco and Heath Ledger) bares much of the brunt of the film’s anger, playing the victim of acts of paedophilia and incest and of Bunting’s malevolent fathering. “Lucas went through the wringer for those six weeks,” he reveals. “We were facillitating that performance as well, we brought that out of him. He went through the absolute fucking wringer, but he was fine. I looked at him and I was fine, and I thought ‘you’re going through something a lot worse than I am’.”

While Henshall says that getting into the mindset of the twisted pater familias that Bunting is gradually revealed to be was not as difficult as might be imagined, once again he makes it clear he didn’t emerge the other side completely unscathed. “In the film I’m the guy with all the power, and I think everyone can agree that you feel confident when you feel like you are in power, and I got to access that time and time again. It was only difficult when we relived actual events, so the torture scene was the hardest scene in the film because it was the first time we physicallised an actual event. That was really really depressing because we were doing it so closely.”

Given the nature of what we have just been discussing, when Henshall tells me what his next project will be I half suspect he is pulling my leg: “I’m doing a romantic comedy called Any Questions For Ben? It’s coming out in Australia in January and it’s made by the same director and production team behind The Castle and The Dish [two Australian films that have also had success further afield]. I play a lycra-wearing, amateur triathlete lawyer.”

The laughter that ensues is almost cathartic. As I leave the Duke Of Yorks I look back over my shoulder to see Henshall standing outside the foyer, beer in hand, talking amiably with his PR rep and other filmgoers, and it is still hard to reconcile this image with the power of his performance in Snowtown. Perhaps the idea of a romantic comedy was manna from heaven in the aftermath of making such any incredibly powerful study of sociopathic inhumanity; a chance to cleanse and extract his soul from the dark place the film takes us all to. One thing’s for sure: Henshall has already avoided the thing that many actors fear most – the awful reality of being typecast.

Shameless plug alert! OnlyForKoolKids has been getting out and about a bit recently – last night we interviewed Snowtown star Daniel Henshall and tonight we were at the opening night of Brighton’s CINECITY film festival. So what we really needed was a microblogging site that would allow us to bring you a whole host of media, besides words, that we capture live at these events.

Hallelujah, tumblr. be thy name! Yes, OnlyForKoolKids now has its own tumblr. page, which enables us to do just that. So check it out and take a look at our CINECITY first night coverage, complete with professional grade photos ‘n all: http://onlyforkoolkids.tumblr.com/

Over the next two and a half weeks the fantastic CINECITY film festival returns to Brighton for its ninth edition, bringing with it a host of premières, previews, exhibitions and installations. It all kicks off tomorrow night at the Duke Of Yorks cinema (the UK’s oldest purpose-built cinema, no less) with an advanced screening of Steve McQueen’s hotly-anticipated Shame.

As we mentioned last month, the film reunites former Turner Prize-winner McQueen with the dashing Michael Fassbinder, who scored a breakthrough performance as Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands in McQueen’s debut feature, Hunger. Shame has already garnered considerable critical acclaim for its intense depiction of sexual compulsion, need and desire, with a good deal of praise directed at the central performances of Fassbinder and fellow A-Lister Carey Mulligan.

OnlyForKoolKids (@OnlyForKoolKids) will be tweeting live coverage from CINECITY’s opening night from 6pm tomorrow, with reaction and a full review of Shame, which doesn’t hit UK screens until January 13, following shortly after the film. In the meantime, here’s the trailer for Shame again to whet your appetite…

The soundtrack to the best 1970s sci-fi film never made, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal was one of the best unheralded records of 2010. With Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Lopotin’s alter-ego falling into the same avant-garde electronica niche as contemporaries including The Field and former labelmate Emeralds, few may have heard Returnal, but its synthesis of music simultaneously artificial and organic ranged magnificently from jarring post-industrial glitch to other-world future electro and blissed-out transcendence.

Its luscious compositions won a raft of new converts who may not previously have considered the genre, including Antony and the Johnsons’ Antony Hegarty, and if YouTube hits are a reliable measure, most of those have stayed on-board for the release this week of Oneohtrix Point Never’s sixth studio album, Replica. More abstract but no less entrancing than its predecessor, it is the increasingly rare kind of record that demands to be listened to with your full attention, rather than played as mere background noise.

As Replica‘s cover art (see above) hints at, Lopatin’s focus has shifted from far-away star gazing to a more close-up meditation on human mortality and the ephemeral nature of memory. Much of it is based around audio sliced from compilations of old television commercials, embodying pop culture’s most trusted technique of recycling what has come before to create something new and revitalised

Less pop art and more art installation, Replica is ultimately an album fashioned from shards of a broken past and pieces of a culture discombobulated by the infinite loop of media imagery and white noise that it continuously projects into the ether. Scouring this bottomless landfill of discarded and disposable memories, Lopatin has taken a selection disparate off-casts and refracted them through his own unique prism to produce an urgent, evocative and essential piece of work.

Behold the mournful beauty of its title track, complete with an accompanying video that contains imagery taken from the Soviet Union’s cheap (and ever so slightly trippy) Tom and Jerry rip-off, Nu, Pogodi!:

As cautious as we are about recommending trailers these days, OnlyForKoolKids advises you to take a look at the teaser for forthcoming apocalyptic-esque horror Grim Night. We say ‘forthcoming’ as the film hasn’t actually been made yet –  the (rather excellent) promo footage was put together to entice a studio to buy the full length feature, and on the back of it Universal has duly obliged.

Presenting a similar vérité style to that seen in director Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Grim Night appears to be the tale of an annual event where, for one night only, creatures known as ‘Grims’ appear and kill anyone who isn’t safely behind closed doors. Whether the Grims are supernatural spectres or alien invaders is not clear yet, but presumably all will be revealed once the cameras start to roll proper.

A word of warning: don’t watch the trailer too many times, or it starts to look like a film about a gaggle of itinerant crack addicts who forgot to take their witches costumes off after a particularly intoxicated Halloween night. With that in mind, check it out:

Last year OnlyForKoolKids dropped the ball when we failed to tell you about one of the most beautiful ambient/dubstep hybrids we have ever heard: Unquote’s remix of Bop’s Enjoy The Moment. Employing the same deep bass, somber synths and clipped vocal samples as much of Burial’s work, it is the perfect antidote to the frenzy of urban existence – we really cannot stress how utterly gorgeous this track is, so please do listen by clicking here.

Determined not to balls up again, let us swiftly bring to your attention the magnificence that is Unquote‘s Cold Tenderness. Taken from new album Reverberation Box, released last week on Hospital Records’ sister label Med School, Cold Tenderness is another evocative work; simultaneously contemplative, mournful and sublime. Music to calm the soul, indeed – and you can quote us on that!