Dear gawd, this man has done exactly what I’ve dreamt of doing one million times while driving around Los Angeles. Totally feels awesome to watch this. Kinda like popping a nasty pimple. Catharsis! Satisfaction.
Apparently (well look at it) a driver was texting while driving and veered into oncoming traffic.
Via Jezebel
Silent film star Rudolph Valentino died suddenly August 23, 1926 at age 31. The Italian actor was practically single-handedly responsible for the exoticization of the “Latin lover” and had starred in movies like Blood and Sand and The Sheik. He had gone into the hospital for surgery for appendicitis and stomach ulcers and died of peritonitis shortly afterward. (Irish punk band Valentino is Dead took their name from the many banner newspaper headlines making the announcement.)
The hysterical grief that greeted the news was intense: attempted and successful suicides, women sobbing and fainting outside the hospital where he died and around 100,000 people swarming and rioting outside the Frank Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan, where Valentino’s body lay in state.
After a first funeral mass at St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church in New York City, his body was shipped across the U.S. to California. Fans waited in train stations across the country just to see the train containing his body go by, while radio stations played the hastily recorded “There’s a New Star in Heaven Tonight, Rudolph Valentino” by singer Rudy Vallée.
Celebrity deaths are not a new thing for our generation. We’ve lived through massive spectacles following the demise of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, Whitney Houston and Frederico Fellini, but before 1926 public mourning following a celebrity’s death hadn’t happened before on that scale. It was a huge deal. My own paternal grandmother, who was a rather cold, inexpressive, emotionally distant woman (e.g., kind of a bitch), would actually get teary-eyed talking about Valentino and how sexy he was.
Valentino in The Son of the Sheik, released posthumously in 1926
After a second requiem mass at the Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, Valentino’s friend June Mathis allowed his body to be interred, supposedly temporarily, in one of the two plots she and her husband owned in the Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios.
Beginning on the first anniversary of his death, every August 23rd a veiled woman dressed in black has shown up at his crypt and placed red roses there. Photographers hung around the mausoleum trying to get a photo of the lady and identify her. Skeptics dismissed the Lady in Black story as a publicity stunt invented by a studio press agent to keep Valentino’s mystique alive and keep reissues of his films profitable.
The identity of the original “official” woman in black may have been actress Pola Negri, who claimed to be engaged to Valentino and showed up at his L.A. funeral in full mourning regalia, making an outrageous scene wailing, sobbing, and fainting over his coffin. At least she insisted that she was the original mourner. Other weepy ladies included Estrellita de Rejil, who took the job over from her mother (purportedly one of Valentino’s love interests), a Ziegfeld showgirl, and Ditra Flame, who claimed that Valentino was a friend of her mother’s and had visited Ditra in the hospital when she was ill as a child. Ditra said that Valentino had told her that she would get well and outlive him by many years. He asked her to promise to visit his grave and talk to him, so that he would not be alone in death.
Phil Reeves reported in The Independent in 1992:
At least one anniversary has been marred by a fight, in which roses were stomped under foot. Perhaps the most tense gathering was in 1988 when an aspiring actress marched in, escorted by a photographer, and began relating her ‘intimate experience’ with Valentino’s ghost. Ms de Rejil, restrained two years earlier after laying into a rival, confined herself to grumbling loudly about fakes.
Even though the original series of mourners seen in the 1920’s and 1930’s are long gone, dozens of other official (the current one being actress Vicki Callahan) and unofficial dueling young ladies in black, including transgendered women, transvestites, and disembodied spirits, have kept up the macabre tradition.
The original Pathe News reel reporting Valentino’s death and funerals, 1926, below:
To get a handle on who Dan Harmon is, the following facts are relevant. He grew up in Wisconsin, which gave him access to, simultaneously, a healthy dose of anti-elitism, a taste for brusque humor, and an enduring respect for hard work. As a child growing up, he had the early verbal gifts and a doting mother and a psychologically absent father; the household was an untidy one. In his teen years (to place him generationally, Harmon turned 40 recently) he feasted on the dork’s trinity of comics, sci-fi, and D&D. He’s probably on “the Spectrum” but had the wit and/or the guts to try improv at his early adulthood (before it was trendy, too); the improv seems to have taught him to be fearless—for what is there to fear in experimentation and self-revelation?—and gave his writerly, Spectrum-y brain an extrovert’s outlet. He may have had that performative spark all along, but the improv instilled habits that would prove very, very useful and make him, almost incidentally, rather wealthy. In any case he’s a writer’s writer with just enough sketch chops to pass as a real performer, and this sets him apart. He’s imbibed the performative instinct; onstage, he inhabits “bits.” The improv probably saved him from becoming an inveterate crafter of dreary and well-written novels, and thank god for that.
Even though he has a formal education he qualifies as an autodidact, the telltale sign of which is his wholesale adoption of Joseph Campbell as his hero. He has the necessary verbal gifts and fearlessness to be a writer (which he is)—one wonders if he ever really reads books; books never enter into his stories, and this is a guy who shares everything. But then again, his job is TV, and what he “reads” is pop culture most of all—for pop culture tropes are what an improv artist most requires, and the same is true for the creator and showrunner of Community.
Everyone who writes about him mentions his intelligence, and I’m no exception. He’s given to frenzied, flustered, and eloquent rants, he sometimes bullies his interlocutors in argument (he admits as much), and the scalpel of his highly intuitive intellect occasionally runs ashore on the shoals of insufficient command of fact and, very occasionally, of common sense. But that’s fine, I like messy and bold thinkers, and Harmon is nothing if not that.
Harmon’s the only guy I can think of who can feature as an authoritarian and a Trotskyite in the same breath. In a recent episode of Harmontown, he argued with his co-presenters for many minutes about the agrarian worker’s paradise of perhaps a hundred people he would set up on the moon, given the opportunity. In effect he was bellowing, “No no no, I’m decreeing that there won’t be any hierarchy here!!”—and he was scarcely aware of the contradiction. What was truly transmitted in the whole debate was his honest and devout desire for such a world.
His penchant for abject self-revelation functions like an onion onstage, there are always more layers. His very sharp and ostentatiously “needy” (note the quotation marks) girlfriend Erin McGathy, who has a podcast about relationships of her own called This Feels Terrible is also a weekly presence on Harmontown, and on several occasions the two of them have engaged in ostensibly gut-wrenching arguments onstage that left audience members gaping (the Pittsburgh episode of their tour last winter was a standout in this regard). But when the metaphorical curtain drops, they all take their metaphorical bows, and it emerges that in some sense these battles function as still more “bits.” But underneath those “bits” are, it seems, real pain at times, and so on indefinitely. The improv performer’s ethic allows them to pass off their actual emotional tumult as entertainment, but one is left wondering just how protected they really are. Apparently they’re all “strong” enough in the right ways to deal with it, or else simply crave that which an audience alone can supply them. It wouldn’t be unfair in this context to observe that Harmon, with his messianic fervor, does hanker after the Christlike. In some indefinable way he crucifies himself every week (some weeks) in order to confer beneficent lessons onto his Asberger’s-y flock.
Unmentioned so far is a key part of the dynamic—Dan Harmon is the mayor of Harmontown, but the always nattily dressed Jeff Davis, an authentic improv actor often seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, serves as its comptroller. Harmon and Davis, who are dear friends in real life (it would have to be so in order to work), are something like the Ernie and Bert of grown-up verbal horseplay, but that metaphor misses the dapperness and bon esprit and general air of specialness Davis involuntarily imparts, and the analogy of Cameron and Ferris misses it on the other side; Harmon’s too self-actualized for Cameron (even if he has the angst).
I “discovered” Harmon as an object of interest of his own (as distinct from Community) last year, and I’ve been calling him “the thinking person’s Bill Murray” ever since. The trouble is, I’m not sure what that gets him. There’s a real chance he could emerge as something like this generation’s—what? Andy Kaufman? No. George Plimpton? Also no. (John Hodgman is that.) Hunter S. Thompson may be the closest we can get, the intellectual’s daredevil icon. The fact is that we haven’t seen a gregarious intellect-but-not-intellectual like this in the public sphere in living memory. It just isn’t usual for people as smart and greedily cerebral as Harmon to have enough common touch to become even remotely famous. All the good comps are literary writers (David Foster Wallace? Truman Capote?), and Harmon isn’t that.
While showrunning Harmontown, Harmon first took serious notice of the Spectrum, and he has become something like the Spectrum-inhabitant’s especial hero par excellence. The tribe that has coalesced around Harmontown meets in the back of a comic book store in Hollywood, and Harmon frequently references the likelihood of a Harmontown fan to be, variously, male, bearded, shy, obsessively honest, able to cite Star Wars: A New Hope chapter and verse, and so on. We all know the type (hell, I’m one too, albeit not so strong on the Lucas interest). I attended his triumphant return from “HarmonCountry” at the Egyptian Theater last February, and the line awaiting the passes at the entry table certainly confirmed any stereotypes one might have harbored about his audience.
All of this is to say that Harmontown is the best comedy podcast currently being distributed, period. Harmon has a talent for spawning projects, and Harmontown appears to be #2 on his docket at the moment (he is running Community again, after all). The number of tweets and photos and videos and paintings he and his audience have generated is positively daunting; Harmontown is a cult of sorts. Harmon is reflexively technophilic, and both he and his audience are entirely comfortable in what used to be called cyberspace.
What else do you have to know about the show? True to its democratic intentions, audience participation is a usual thing; Harmon and Davis are as likely to haul up an audience member onstage as anything else, and a fair number of the audience members are known as semi-regulars. I attended three episodes when I was visiting LA last February, and what do you know, Harmon ended one of the episodes by pulling me into the action; he actually sang me a little song in which he professed to love me as a symbol of his love for all humanity (go to the 98:00 mark).
Harmontown started out as an hour-long show but rapidly ratcheted up to roughly two hours a week. A D&D game has been in effect since the early weeks; Harmon recruited a marvelous fellow named Spencer Crittenden from the audience one night to serve as dungeonmaster, a decision that has reaped rewards wildly beyond anyone’s expectations (Crittenden now works as Harmon’s assistant on the set of Community). The D&D game takes up about a third of every episode, and the in-game characters are by now as familiar to the audience as Harmon, Davis, et al. themselves. Harmon’s character is Sharpie Buttsalot for amusing reasons revealed in episode 6; Davis is for arbitrary reasons known as Quark Pffffffffft; and so on.
After a few months of the podcast, Harmon took the whole clan on the road for several weeks in order to meet his audience outside of LA; these segments are collectively known as “HarmonCountry.” The road episodes are wildly entertaining (each one is also obscurely sui generis), and they also served to cement his relationship (hitherto a presumptive one) to his audience in interesting ways. Harmon being Harmon, there was no lack of grandiosity in it all, but his essential good nature and good intentions keep shining through. A documentary about the tour is currently in the process of being edited.
In a landscape in which even very sharp podcasts have a thudding air of dude-ness about them, Harmontown is an oasis for that rarest of things—wit, even Wildean wit in the purest sense. Harmontown is an arena in which what is prized above all is verbal play, and that isn’t something that is actually true of any other comedy podcast I can think of; in other podcasts, all of the comedians ultimately hew very closely to a comparatively restricted set of tropes that (let’s face it) substitutes for wit. Paul F. Tompkins might be the guy one would use to counter the above statement about Harmontown‘s wit, but Tompkins and Harmon are completely different types. Tompkins is a trained professional who is as fussy about his wardrobe as Davis himself; Harmon is a wild man by comparison, perfectly willing to play a gorilla in the wild for an hour a week, wading into inchoate territory that would leave Tompkins feeling more than a little exposed. What makes Harmontown special is that they nail the wit thing again and again even under such unpromising, i.e. primal conditions.
The truly revolutionary aspect of the show is that it is truly, truly unscripted. Many episodes start with a (completely sincere) avowal from Harmon that he hasn’t any idea if there’s anything to talk about this week, and damned if every week they don’t come up with a fruitful tangent to follow. The shared history of Harmon and Davis (and satellite characters like his sometime writing and business partner, Rob Schrab) enables this, because there’s no shortage of crazy anecdotes to dredge up, for Harmon and his friends live to be casually, playfully brutal to one another as only good friends can, a stance one finds oneself envying—we return to Harmontown’s missionary aspect. The show derives its energy from the sheer confidence Harmon has in himself to be interesting, and you can feel the other participants’ confidence in the exact same thing. As long as Harmon has a burr up his butt about something, the show will be dazzlingly entertaining, period.
It’s smart and fun and evinces a real sense of community. You never know what to expect from an episode of Harmontown, and there’s a subreddit dedicated to sifting through the ashes every week. Harmon and his buddies really know pop culture, and they have a perspective (more than one perspective), and a lot of shared in-references, and, I don’t know, if you’re a verbal type, it generates an oxytocin hit in the brain that no other podcast can touch.
Here’s some video! Harmontown is a podcast, hence there isn’t video of it. Instead, here’s Harmon in an extended interview with Kevin Pollak from the summer of 2012 and a weird training video Harmon performed in for Cousins Subs chain in 1995.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Bugle is the goddamn funniest satirical podcast you’ll ever hear
Dangerous Finds: Hostage-taking pit bull; Douglas Rushkoff on Marc Maron podcast, Daft Punk unmasked
The accomplishments of Los Saicos, a rock band from the district of Lince, Peru—it’s in the country’s capital, Lima—are mighty impressive. They were together only from 1964 to 1966 in their initial run—they released only six singles and never put out an album, but their “Demolición” was the biggest hit in Peru in 1965, and they had their own national TV show while they were still active.
They had a raw, garage-y sound, apparently achieved without ever hearing any authentic garage rock from America—they did, however, know about all the big British Invasion bands. Plenty of people have claimed that they really invented punk—I’m not so sure about that, see below. Legs McNeil says they did, and The Cramps’ Lux Interior adored them.
There’s little doubt that a big heaping of credit ought to be heading in their direction. How unsung are the Saicos? Even the exhaustive Allmusic.com doesn’t bother with a bio or any other context-setting before listing their discography.
A huge part of the Los Saicos (yep, pronounced “Psychos”) aesthetic derives from the balls-to-the-wall shouting of frontman Erwin Flores. Without that, they’re not all that much different from other garage-y bands—except for their nihilistic lyrics, of course. According to Flores, their first show in front of a posh audience was initially met with stunned silence—and then, after a pause, rapturous applause. You can get a vicarious thrill just by reading those bleak song titles—like “Salvaje” (Wild), “Camisa de Fuerza (Straitjacket), “Fugitivo de Alcatraz” (Fugitive of Alcatraz).
Everyone agrees that “Demolición,” a faint cousin to “Surfin’ Bird,” is the standout. What’s it all about? Why, blowing up the train station, of course! “El entierro de los gatos” is a terse ode to the act of killing and burying cats. These guys do not mess around.
“Demolición”
“El entierro de los gatos”
In 1966 they broke up. It appears that they compressed the whole unfortunate arc of being in a great rock band into just a couple of years. After two years or so of close proximity, the four members had gotten sick of each other, and after breaking up they weren’t in contact with each other for decades. (It appears that there was no great conflict, in truth—just fatigue and a desire to move on to other matters.) Their great shouter Erwin Flores ended up moving to the Washington, DC, area, where he got a job at NASA; he currently works for a pharma company. (Whatever happened to blowing up the train station??)
The claim that Los Saicos invented punk has the unfortunate effect of emptying punk of political content—at least arguably. Those Saicos guys must have been alienated and frustrated enough to write “Demolición,” sure, but playing an early gig for “the Emmys of Peru” with an audience full of media contacts doesn’t sound all that punk—unless your definition of punk begins and ends with Malcolm McLaren.
And say what you will about McLaren, that guy understood the context he was working in and who the enemies were. The Ramones may not have been quite as angry as the Sex Pistols, but to say they saw their project through to the bitter end would be putting it mildly. The thing that punks don’t do is quit the band before Year 3 is out and then get hired as a technician for the U.S. government.
It seems to me that what Los Saicos actually invented, roughly, was a form for punk rock. They cracked that code, they understood that simple chords played with vigor and anger could resonate, was valid. The content was a different matter—even if Los Saicos did tune into the destructive ethos as well. That part would have to wait until a disgust and alienation (and media reverb) that could only be found in the desultory, dingy London and New York of 1975 with a little Situationist pixie dust sprinkled on top.
I wouldn’t say they invented punk because you can’t invent a genre in a vacuum and then spend forty years in obscurity. With inventing comes the territory of influence, and Los Saicos didn’t have that much influence north of the Equator. But they’re close enough to merit the discussion, for sure. I think of them as the Godfathers of Punk.
Curiously, Flores himself perhaps has the best perspective on this. In the documentary linked below he says, “Never in my life would it have occurred to me to call our music punk. We were proto-punk, not exactly punk. … We were predecessors to punk.”
I highly recommend this charming and deftly produced 13-minute documentary. I don’t know if there’s material for a feature-length documentary here, but I could watch those fellas talk all day long.
Vidiot was a really cool project. In the early 1980’s, as video games moved from niche interest into legitimate subculture, the publishers of Creem had the cutting edge idea to start a really well-rounded gamer mag. In addition to more technical articles about the latest games, systems, and technology, Vidiot published topical personal essays by gamers, and covered video game history, in addition to a lot of general audiovisual topics. They reviewed movies and television that tended to appeal to the gamer crowd (think Monty Python, Tron, and Krull), and peppered each issue with relevant music articles, including an interesting review of a Beatles’ documentary from the perspective of a fan and AV enthusiast.
In an effort to appeal to the diverse interests of serious gamers as well as your average arcade rat, they used their Creem connections to get pictures of rock stars playing games. Everyone from Debbie Harry to Mick Ronson to Ted Nugent (they can’t all be winners) graced their pages, posing in front of their favorite consoles. Below you can see a picture of The New York Dolls’ David Johansen, who appeared in a retrospective article on pinball machines, the original arcade game.
Even though only five issues were published between September of 1982 and September of 1983, Vidiot was a really insightful look at an emerging generation of pre-Internet nerd culture. Nowadays, it could be argued that there’s really no such thing as an esoteric interest, since a quick Google search is all it takes to find peers. Back then? Probably harder to sniff out fellow enthusiasts.
Of course, this being a magazine primarily consumed by young, most likely nerdy dudes, there were also sexy pin-ups of girls playing Centipede. Vidiot was quite aware that its readership was not primarily comprised of “alpha” males, but instead of shying away from the topic, it cannily took the piss out of the virile macho man archetype with satire.
Check out that charming caption!
Below is the transcript from the hilarious article, “Arcade Macho: Pick Up or Shut Up.” The tone is angsty and snide, but the rejection of macho bullshit is a really intelligent, mature, feminist critique. Plus, who can’t relate to a little mockery of meatheads?
Ever got into a fight over a girl? Sure you have! As a red-blooded American guy, would you stoop to wimpdom by allowing some geek to steal your girl without a bloodletting fight? Of course not! Whether on the dance floor, football field, street or arcade we are fighting for but one thing: Women!
Women are the only motivational factor in a Man’s life. Next to videogaming, cars, whiskey, football, fishing, soldiering, hunting and sailing, that is. And, pray tell, if there were no women to show off to, then what’s the point?
Therefore you won’t want to set foot in an arcade without a few lessons in manly comportment of the videogaming kind. Obviously, the breed of woman you’ll find common in these garbage disposals for quarters play for keeps. And obviously, there ore other “men” who claim our sex as theirs. Despite their prowess at these interesting and undoubtedly manly games, many fit the definition of “wimp”—which is to be avoided at any cost, no matter how ridiculous. Would you do bottle with the L.A. Raiders in a punk rock hair-do (not cut) and a pocket calculator strapped to you imitation leather belt that holds up you spandex pants? Of course not! Take your pick: Manhood or wimpdom.
Read Sylvia Plath, Judith Krantz or W.H. Auden? Over Robert Mitchum’s dead body! Drink pina coladas? Seek the Duke’s stomach and burp it! Cry over a dead rock star? To quote Josie Cotton, “Johnny Are You Queer?” As far as Men are concerned. Charles Olson is a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, right?
Fact.- all women love the smell of success. The more money you’ve got—or the higher the score—the better. Wonder never again why you see ugly old men with ungodly beautiful, sexy, voluptuous women. The deck is stacked—and if you’re on the winning side, so are the women.
The only reason to go to the arcade, of course, is to meet girls. Can you honestly admit you enjoy spending every cent you’ve got at the arcade when, by applying a few rules of business horsesense, you can own your fave game for home use? No, you can’t. Say it loud, say it proud: Girls Are Great!!
All right, men, the first lesson commences… let’s discuss what Real Men Do Not Wear To Arcades . Real men do not wear:
1) Pink Lacoste shirts. If you’re a preppie, that’s entirely your own problem. Remember pink = Wimp. Any other color’s acceptable. But if you really want to be a sex symbol—and what Man doesn’t?—buy a VIDIOT t-shirt.
2) Designer jeans. Would John Wayne wear ‘em? Naw, the Duke’d don nuthin’ fancier than Levi’s. And his word’s law, right?
3) Top siders. Hey, you can’t even run in the damn things. Any sort of tennis, basketball, jogging, all-around athletic shoe is In, Converse All-Stars being the coolest. All boots are manly (except the kind that feature the bags-at-the-ankle look which is strictly new wave/punk rock jerk-like), and cowboy boots are obviously the best way to get your point across. Or up.
Before heading out for an afternoon of hopeful arcade fun, take a gander in front of the mirror. Any of your lunch still between your teeth? Scrub ‘em again, sailor. There’s nothing on earth that’ll turn off all the little women quicker than mungmouth. Take a quick whiff o’ the pits to make sure they’re just so. Also, remove any gold chains, punk rock t-shirts and scarves. They aren’t manly.
When entering the arcade, strut around the joint with your hands thrust deep m your pockets with an impervious scowl on your face. No, you don’t own the place, but remember the law of Supply and Demand: I demand that you supply me with as many women as I desire! You gotta let the girls know who’s boss, plain and direct.
Before playing your first round of, say, Robotron, you might want to buy a soft drink. How you drink the soda is far more important than what brand. Grasp the can firmly in the palm of your hand, fingers wrapped completely around it. Before taking the first swig, catch the eye of the hottest babe. As you lift the can to your lips (elbow bent 90°) propose a toast in her honor- Here’s lookin’ “at” you! Eyes locked in, throw your head back and empty half the contents down your gullet. Lowering the can, smile at her, then burp loudly. This is essential for your initial introduction. She’ll feel that inner glow of security knowing that a Real Man is present. Then…
Walk away. There’s plenty o’ fish in the video sea. Besides, it’ll be at least an hour before that girl will be coherent enough to start worshiping you . Always remember it’s your moral obligation as an American Man to hit on as many females as possible.
One popular method of picking up girls at the arcade is by zeroing in on a filly having difficulty on your favorite game. Stride over after she’s blown the game a few times and say “Havin’ a rough go at it, dollface? Lemme show ya the ropes.” Proceed to explain the intricacies and finer points of the game. Be polite but firm. After explaining, drop a token into the slot, and then “coach” her. After she triples her original score, you can bet it’ll be Suckface City from there on in!
Let’s reiterate a fact: good women are worth fighting for. If you spot some Elmo employing the aforementioned method, sidle up next to the non-couple, tap the jerk on the shoulder and say “Excuse me, cupcake, your mother says it’s time for your Ovaltine and beddie-bye!” The idea, manly reader, is to simply embarrass the worm enough so he’ll be forced to crawl back under the rock from whence he come. Use your lurid imagination Occasionally, however, the breezebrain will miss the point: stronger medicine must be administered. This doctor prescribes (delivered in the loudest voice possible): “When did they let YOU out of the TERMINAL HERPES WARD!?!” Once he’s on all fours, headed for the door, it’s a mere skate to the desired goal. It’s not really all that fair, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
In some instances, you may even be able to play fair. Let’s assume there’s a lustful lovely gazing on some dope racking up points on a game you know you can stomp the snot out of him on. Walk over, tap Percy on the shoulder and challenge him to a duel, winner (nod toward the babe) take all . The girl will be flattered that two men are going to duel over her — it’s an old trick that works every time. The only trick here’s not only do you have to beat the sap, ya gotta beat him bad. Show what a worthless sleazebag he really is.
If you’re really smart, before even challenging the bozo, hip your buddies to what you’re gonna do. Tell them that after you demolish the sucker at the game, you want one guy to approach the Big Loser and say, “Let meeee be the first to kick you when you’re down: maybe you need a pair o’ granny glasses!” Have your second pal say, “Don’t worry — I hear they’re making a braille version of that game!” Your third and final friend should say something like, “Please don’t cry out here — go in the little girls’ room!” And you, the Cool Winner, should turn to your new prize and ask, “Wanna hop in my van and listen to the new Rush album?”
Guaranteed to work every time!!
Musicians and Noise Artists, Elizabeth Veldon and Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt have recorded and released For Chelsea Manning, a 40-minute experimental, Avant-Garde album, in support of the recently convicted soldier.
Chelsea Manning is a queer hero, she is a role model for socially and politically engaged queer people.
The album is the first release from Veldon‘s new, political label Queering the Black Circle:
A record label for and by queer artists. Sometimes the music may be about queer issues, sometimes it may not but the motto of the label stands: queer artists, queer music.
For Chelsea Manning is available for download here.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
An introduction to the world of Noise Artist: Elizabeth Veldon
The ‘Accidental Guitar Music’ of Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt
I have often said there is nothing more consistent across geography, culture, or religion than the tacky-ass aesthetics of the nouveau riche. (Okay, so I haven’t always said that, but it’s clearly totally true.)
Whether they be the Texan Baptist oil baroness with her hair to the sky (the higher the hair, the closer to heaven, darlin’!), or the Long Island Catholic mogul’s wife with the face fulla’ slap, certain looks just transcend, and there’s nothing like seeing an Islam promo featuring what appears to be the cast members from “Real Housewives of Dubai” to really drive that home. (By the way, I would watch the hell out of a “Real Housewives of Dubai,” so why doesn’t it exist yet?)
These primped and coiffed (and glittered, glossed, nipped, and tucked) folks’ particular interpretation of Islam discourages Darwinism (as many religions do), atheism (as most religions do), and communism (well of course you’re going to say that- we can’t have the working class cutting in to your Botox money!) The only thing that really seems off is when they claim they’re against “materialism.” Come on dudes, I’m looking right at you! Own it!
Back around 1985, the Lifetime Network, which had not yet branded itself as a channel dedicated to angsty women’s dramas, decided to dedicate an hour a week to a prime-time talk show called Hot Properties, featuring as its host a standup comedian named Richard Belzer. Of course it was many years before Belzer would cement his identity as the ubiquitous Detective John Munch, and anyone who’s seen his live act knows that Belzer, whatever his gifts and flaws, was not your typical standup comedian. His New York City edge, his rapid patter, his Reagan impersonation (which he used incessantly), and his affinity for conspiracy theories made him something like a cut-rate George Carlin for the cable TV era.
In effect, Hot Properties was a version of Late Night with David Letterman, except with no audience to speak of. The most interesting thing about it, really, was that it ran at 8pm on Wednesdays—the edge that Belzer brought to the proceedings seemed entirely out of place on the prime-time lineup. I tuned in whenever I could, but the show didn’t last very long. Detailed TV listings from the mid-1980s are hard to come by, but according to the Retrojunk website, the guest on September 18, 1985, was Quentin Crisp—pretty interesting guest! I can’t say for sure, but I think the show may have broadcast live. Anybody know?
There’s virtually no information out there about Hot Properties, but I cherished it (briefly) as an offbeat source of interesting programming. Insofar as the show is remembered at all, it’s for an incident that happened on the telecast of March 27, 1985.
Belzer’s guests that night, there to promote the first-ever Wrestlemania on March 31 of the same year, were Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. After a few minutes Belzer asked Hogan to show him a few wrestling moves; Hogan put Belzer in a kind of awkward headlock and Belzer fell to the floor; he had apparently passed out. The two crazy things about the footage are that just before Hogan tries his move, Belzer actually falls to the floor on purpose, as a joke, the idea being that the merest movement from Hogan would be enough to make a pencil-necked New Yorker like Belzer faint dead away. The other thing that’s weird is that after blacking out for perhaps five seconds, Belzer immediately bounds up and, quite full of energy, offers up a fairly professional bumper to the commercial. On the show a week later, Belzer would explain, quite plausibly, that he was in shock at the time.
Belzer ended up getting nine stitches. Belzer sued Hogan and the World Wrestling Federation (as it was then known), and the parties eventually settled out of court. There were rumors that Belzer received $5 million, but in a 2008 interview on Howard Stern he said that the number was a lot closer to $400,000.
In March 2012, I attended a birthday party for Jerry Lewis at the Friars’ Club in New York. Belzer, who’s close to Lewis, served as the MC. As I was leaving the party I happened to find myself walking next to Belzer—I took a moment to tell him how much I’d liked Hot Properties back in the day—certainly a fan testimonial he doesn’t hear every day. Belzer had hardly been listening but that got his attention; his head whipped around and he said something like “Boy, you remember that, huh?”
Hulk and “the Belz” tussle:
A week later, Belzer shows his stitches:
In a column in late 1943, George Orwell vented a bit about anti-British sentiment in the U.S.:
We ought to face the fact that large numbers of Americans are brought up to dislike and despise us. ... The typical Englishman is represented as a chinless ass with a title, a monocle and a habit of saying “Haw, haw.” This legend is believed in by relatively responsible Americans, for example by the veteran novelist Theodore Dreiser, who remarks in a public speech that “the British are horse-riding aristocratic snobs.” (Forty-six million horse-riding snobs!)
Orwell was quite right, of course, there is a marked tendency for Americans to think of the English as erudite, upper-crust people with accents you could sharpen diamonds on.
Nothing, but nothing, will disabuse you of that tendency (should you have it) more quickly and more thoroughly than ten seconds’ exposure to an astonishing character named Mr. Blobby, a British media sensation of the early to mid-1990s.
Mr. Blobby started as a recurring prank on a Saturday night TV show called Noel’s House Party—his pranks are in the tradition of Candid Camera, but in truth Mr. Blobby was also an obvious precursor to the shenanigans of Sasha Baron Cohen (who, you’ll recall, is also British). The idea was that Mr. Blobby would be inserted into this or that professional context on the pretense of filming a children’s TV show, but would then merely be excruciatingly clumsy, knock all manner of objects down to the floor, fall over, and incessantly intone the single word that existed in his vocabulary, which (of course) was “blobby.”
I grope for an American analogy—if Barney the Dinosaur worked for Howard Stern? If Triumph the Insult Dog made nothing but farting noises? Perhaps someone else can hit upon just the right equation here.
Lest you suspect that I’m abusing the term “media sensation” above, note that in the winter of 1993-94, the entity/corporation known as Mr. Blobby released a song, predictably entitled “Mr. Blobby,” that hit #1 on the U.K. charts for three weeks—additionally, it became the first song in more than twenty years to be bumped from the #1 slot and then secure it again.
Tom Ewing, in his (extremely good) “Popular” blog covering every #1 hit in the U.K. since 1952, explained the success of the “Mr. Blobby” single thus:
[The single is] just slapstick, corporate Dada, highly merchandised nonsense. It’s true that Blobby struck an awful lot of nerves – he was a lodestone for a wider debate about “dumbing down,” … a lurid, shambling “why we can’t have nice things” symbol for a vaguer sense of cultural decline.
But he was also a man in a rubber suit who fell over a lot. And this is his single, coming on like a megamix of previous novelties – the tinny Casio rush of Bombalurina, a chorus of kids a la St Winifreds, three-line-whip jollity (not quite as gritted-teeth as The Stonk), and plenty of parping and farting because, er, Britain.
One thing about Mr. Blobby though—as much as I hate to admit it, he is pretty funny. For the most part Mr. Blobby positively makes me itch, but the video’s two explicit spoofs feature extremely well-chosen targets that had elevated sleek, pompous popcraft over any ordinary human emotion (Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” and Genesis’ “We Can’t Dance”) at the end of both of which Mr. Blobby falls down all over everything. Ha! And there’s another bit I like where he kicks some footballer in the shin for no reason. So even if he is repulsive and sub-moronic, there’s something in him that appeals to virtually all of us.
Mr. Blobby is still around, too: He has a Facebook feed and a Twitter presence. He lives on in the well-publicized prank, perpetrated just a few months ago, in which, inspired by Mr. Blobby, an Essex man painted his brother’s house bright pink with yellow spots without bothering to inform him. Mr. Blobby’s Twitter account evinces some kind of minimalist genius, in that he’s permitted to use but a single word, as for instance:
@Actual_Miku blobby, blob?
— Mr Blobby (@mr_blobby) August 12, 2013
Below you will find the video. Be warned, this video is NSFW unless you don’t mind your co-workers thinking you have an IQ of about 75.
After the jump, if you can stand it, a BBC movie featuring 70 solid minutes of Mr. Blobby’s pratfalls…
Der Musikladen was a West German television program running from 1972 to 1984, and one of the most diverse music-performance shows ever to grace the international boob-tube. It showcased an incredible array of artists, from Motörhead to Pat Boone to Ray Charles to Blondie. There’s a kind of low budget “fuck it” attitude that goes along with European variety TV that tends to promote a very pluralistic consumption of pop culture (plus it looks like, in the 70s and 80s at least, that they took what they could get).
However, in my opinion, the true legacy of Der Musikladen has nothing to do with their varied musical line-ups. No, the absolute best part of any episode was the go-go dancers, who simply cannot dance for shit. Yes, these Teutonic beauties are captivating, enthusiastic and totally charismatic, but their total lack of skill is mesmerizing. A dearth of coordination, the absence of any semblance of a symmetrical chorus line, and a general awkwardness is the essence of their charm. They literally appear to just be fun girls in skimpy outfits who maybe had a bit of schnapps before the show. Here are some of my favorite segments:
Above is a 1984 performance, and one of the last episodes ever broadcast. The ladies are dancing to Patto’s “Black and White.” Not to be confused with the English jazz-rock band from the 70s, this Patto is a duet of a white German and a black American rapper and the song is a sort of ham-fisted attempt at a rap-version of “Ebony and Ivory,” (which was already pretty ham-fisted to begin with). Needless to say, the track and the dancing are both pretty damning indictments of Germany’s ability to interpret hip-hop in a way that doesn’t make you shudder. But look how cute and happy the girls look in their leotards!
Admittedly, this 1978 segment is a much better use of their talents. First of all, the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant” is a disco track, which is kind of their wheelhouse. Second of all, at least this particular line-up of women has some moves… or at least one move, anyway. Before you get too excited about the brunette knowing a step or two, notice they’re using those bitchen’ video effects to disguise the fact that they’re literally using the same footage over and over again. It’s maybe 20 seconds of dancing that they used weird zooms to stretch over an entire song. But who cares! Look at that hilarious weird shimmy the blonde woman does at 1:30!
And here we have some of the most incongruous choreography and costume choices known to god or man. This 1981 performance of Status Quo’s “Lies” suffers from somewhat the same problem as before: weird visual effects does nothing to disguise the fact that there are basically three poorly performed moves in the entire routine. The difference here is that the song is a Nick Lowe-style country influenced rocker, and it’s three and a half minutes long. That is two minutes longer than any go-go dancing segment should be, with the added confusion of a song that really doesn’t take well to go go dancers.
Let’s go out with a bang, shall we? Talk about, talk about, talk about CRAZY EYES, a confusing outfit, lip-syncing, and at 2:12, she even does “The Robot.” I’m out.