The Underground – Culture Guide
Everything you need to know about in this weekly series: The full trailer of one of the most anticipated movies of the year, a book full of the best short stories, what happens to the body after you die, the new host of The Daily Show, how to pair wine and impress your dinner guests, and an augmented reality game that will make you look at your surroundings differently.
At Social Underground we go beyond the mainstream stuff and see what’s underneath the surface. What should we get into, listen to, read, eat or watch? If there is something in our culture that needs attention that’s our job: Show you the underground things that you need to know about: Books, music, television, movies, comedians, art, and whatever else we can find to get you into something you never knew about. That’s The Underground.
1. The official trailer for Mad Max is absolutely stunning and mad. I’ve been a fan of all the Mad Max films and when I heard that Mel Gibson was being replaced by some guy named Tom Hardy, I was a bit taken aback. A few years down the line has led to Tom Hardy being one of my favorite actors and then a trailer like this hits.
The trailer looks like one big chase scene of bad guys trying to get back their female property. It seems Max is stuck in the middle of it all, and it all looks like I will be spending all my money this year watching this on IMAX (but not 3D, I don’t like headaches and blurry screens).
Check out the new trailer below and clear your schedules:
2. The World’s Greatest Short Stories is a book full of… well, the world’s greatest stories.
Let’s face it, some people brag about how much they don’t read. It’s getting to be the point where the movie Idiocracy is becoming a reality, and we’ll all be watering our plants with Gatorade.
Wonderfully wide-ranging and enjoyable, this outstanding collection features short stories by great 19- and 20th-century writers from America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Western Europe.
Included are Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters and a lonely customer in a Spanish cafe confront the concept of nothingness; “A & P,” John Updike’s most anthologized story and one of his most popular; “Borges and I,” typical Jorge Luis Borges — imaginative, philosophical, and mysterious; as well as short masterpieces by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, D. H. Lawrence, and ten other great writers.
These stories are great and perfect for the guy or gal with a short attention span. It’s sometimes difficult to read something without being distracted by a video of a dog and a cat cuddling or something. Go over to Amazon and buy this one up and expand your knowledge on some fine storytelling by the world’s best authors.
3. This is what happens when you die. No no, not all the theological and philosophical stuff that will lead to people yelling on the forum! I’m talking about what actually happens to the body from the moment of death. If you’ve ever watched anything on television, you’ll hear a lot of the terms mentioned in the video like “Rigor Mortis.”
Basically after about 4 weeks, your body is a pile of goo and bones. This puts of kibosh on that whole zombie apocalypse thing over the course of years. A zombie isn’t going to be walking around the heat of an Arizona Summer for months without being eaten by flies. Sorry guys, that’s why my book starts at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.
Check out all the grossness of what happens to the body after death, or just go and watch Bones.
4. Get to know The Daily Show’s future host Trevor Noah. I remember seeing him a few times on television, on YouTube, and of course, as a correspondent on The Daily Show. The moment he was announced, the Internet was collectively like,” Trevor who? HOW DARE THEY PICK SOMEONE I DON’T KNOW!”
Well, Noah is absolutely hilarious, and since he has worldly experience of growing up during the Apartheid in South Africa as a mixed race kid, he can take anything thrown at him. Check out his comedy set at the Apollo where he drops knowledge on his formative stage and what it’s like coming to America.
5. How exactly do you pair food with wine so you can impress your friends? A few years ago, I went to a house party at a fairly ritzy place with rich people everywhere. A lot of talk was bragging about being rich, stuff about taxes, complaining about taxes, offering no solutions to anything they’re complaining about, and what they’re serving for dinner.
We all sat down, got our options of food, and all I heard was people talking about pairing wines with different foods. I come from a fairly limited background of wine. There is the red wine, the white wine, and the “Is that $6.99? Okay, I’ll take that” wine. So I tried to broaden my horizons by reading up on what all of this meant. But, it’s much easier to use an infographic. Pictures make everything easier.
Learn how to pair wine, cheese, and other food with this simple guide:
6. Ingress is an augmented reality game for your phone that you can play in real-time. I just recently changed phone carriers and got a new phone after months of putting it off. I was looking through the menu and saw this thing called Ingress. I clicked it and it introduced me to this entire open world multiplayer game that used the GPS on my phone. It literally showed the layout of my house and the interesting stuff going on that I can interact with.
What is it about?
The game makers’ framing device for the game is as follows: Alongside the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the physicists at CERN in 2012, it has also been discovered that the Earth has been seeded with “Exotic Matter,” or XM. This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race which is neither described nor seen (and which thus functions as a MacGuffin). The in-universe motivation for the Enlightened faction is their belief that the Shapers are working toward a powerful enlightenment which will uplift all mankind. The Resistance believes that it is protecting humanity from Shaper ingression. The factions have, however, been occasionally observed to ignore the back-story and to co-operate for the sake of real-life gameplay and game balance, for example by establishing neutral zones and rules of engagement.
I’ve become obsessed with the game. Everywhere I go, I open the game up and see if there is anything I can interact with. It really makes going to the gas station a little more interesting.
FOLLOW JEFF SORENSEN ON TWITTER
Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com