“I’m speechless. I just don’t know what to say.”

At some point during the 1980s, it made sense that MTV would try do something to take advantage of the pop culture juggernaut that was the World Wrestling Federation and some perceived rock/wrestling crossover that probably just boiled down to Cyndi Lauper’s dad being played by Captain Lou Albano in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and little else.

“The War to Settle the Score” was a series of WWF matches with a storyline that involved Albano, Lauper and her manager David Wolff (I won’t bother to explain it in detail, but Albano was a manager and Wolff and Lauper are trying to steal clients.) “Rowdy” Roddy Piper got pissed off about the whole MTV connection and this brought another “feud” into the storyline, but also in real life.

Piper was disqualified from the championship match against Hulk Hogan and a brawl erupted.  At one point, Cyndi Lauper, who had rushed the ring with Mr. T to support Hogan, was kicked in the head.

Since the event was live, MTV had cameras set up backstage to interview Hogan, Lauper, Mr T and Albano afterwards, but Andy Warhol apparently opened the wrong door and was pulled into an impromptu interview with “Mean Gene” Okerlund.

You’ll notice that Okerlund refers to the Pope of Pop as a “one of the greatest wrestling fans” at the end.
 

 
I’ve been listening to a lot of Korean music lately, and rather enjoying The Kim Sisters (Sook-ja, Ai-ja, and Mia—though Mia was actually the sisters’ cousin): a trio of multi-talented singers and musicians (“Who rate amongst the most versatile entertainers in the business. They not only sing, they play about 20 instruments” was how they were introduced on American TV). The Kim Sisters went from Korean post-war poverty to Las Vegas success in the 1960s.

Sook Ja and Ai-Ja’s mother was the Korean singer Lee Nan Young, and their father was Kim Hae Song, a respected classical conductor. Their father died during the Korean War, and the family home was destroyed. To support her family Lee Nan performed in shows to American troops stationed in the country. It was during one of these shows that Lee Nan introduced her two daughters and their cousin, Mia, as The Kim Sisters. Their singing and musical act proved a hit, and encouraged by their initial success, the girls started regularly appearing on the bill of GI shows.

They often sang just for food, as the family, like most Koreans during and after the war, were in direst poverty. They began singing American show songs, learning the lyrics phonetically. This increased The Kim Sisters popularity, and in 1959, they were helped by a talent manager to perform in the US at Las Vegas’ Thunderbird Hotel. So, began The Kim Sisters American career.
 

 
From being paid beer, fruit and chocolate for their singing, the trio of girls were soon earning $400 a week. From the Thunderbird, they were quickly booked to play the Stardust Hotel, where they developed their act by learning to play an incredible selection of instruments.

Eventually TV came a knockin’ and by the time The Kim Sisters appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dean Martin Show they were bringing in around $12,000 a week. When Ed Sullivan heard that Lee Nan Young was still in Korea for lack of a visa, he intervened, but with the understanding that she would appear on his show with the Kim Sisters.
 

 
Their success made them a mainstay of Las Vegas, and LA nightclubs, and The Kim Sisters continued to perform through the sixties and seventies. Their musical style was a mix of the Andrews Sisters meets The Supremes, moving from Tin Pan Alley hits to pop songs. This small selection of videos will give you an idea of The Kim Sisters’ appeal. First up is a clip of The Kim Sisters on The Hollywood Palace television show. Stay with it for when they all three start playing the xylophone together (or go directly to about 3:22 in). It’s pretty cool:
 

 
More after the jump…

So this guy is running…
 

“I did kill a wolf, while it was still on the endangered species.”

These are the words of Walt Bayes, who is running for Governor of Idaho on the Republican ticket. His primary political goal is “to stop abortion.” The other crazy onstage is biker Harley Brown, whose charming website contains carefully curated list of “Harleyisms.” A sampling:

I was preparing my income tax and thought “thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for!”

Burn up all of the gas - That’s the American way - God Bless America

Register Communists, not firearms. That means domestic enemies of the United States Constitution such as Bloomberg, Schumer and Pelosi

A while back I visited Israel and discovered the REAL reason Jewish men get circumcised - Because Jewish women won’t touch anything that is not at least 20% off

Loud pipes save lives

Gun control means hitting your target. (Editor’s note: I recommend “Gun control is accomplished by a firm grip with both hands”)

Democrats piss me off

The difference between the IRS and a whore is that a whore will quit screwing you after your dead

Why wasn’t Jesus born in Poland? They couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin.

And my personal favorite:

Riding a Jap bike is like f_cking a faggot I guess it feels OK until somebody sees you doing it & you sure as hell don’t tell your buddies about it the next day.

In the words of Harley Brown, “you have your choice folks—a cowboy, a curmudgeon, a biker, or a normal guy.” Choose wisely, Idaho. Choose wisely.
 

 
Meet your new favorite musical powerhouse group The Plastics! The Plastics are made up of 33-year-old Toby Sheldon (who spent over $100k in plastic surgery to look like Justin Beiber, but ended up looking more like Bruce Jenner), 30-year-old Kitty Jay (who spent over $25k in surgeries to look like Jennifer Lawrence) and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Venus D’Lite (who spent thousands in surgeries to look like Madonna).

Their song is called “The Plastics,” natch, and it is perhaps the worst shitshow that I’ve ever seen. Certainly it wins the prize for 2014 so far. You know those knock-off perfumes they sell in TJ Maxx? (“If you like Calvin, you’ll love Kevin!”) These three are the human equivalent of that.

How much do you want to bet TLC gives them their own reality show after this mess? Perhaps that was the goal from the beginning? Be afraid, be very very afraid. You can contact their management GR Media to hire these plastic people for “events.” This video is filed under “Comedy,” but I am guessing that this is only because YouTube lacks an “Ostentatious Mental Illness” category.
 

 
Via Daily Dot

 
I wish more of the discussion that takes place about Sonic Youth would bring that band’s collective sense of humor to bear. Yes, they are of course very very important, so talk of their innovative early days is all alternate tunings, noise, and no-wave nihilism. Their later days, it’s all blah blah blah elder statesmen of alternative rock—which, again, yeah, they absolutely were, but they’ve done some funny, funny shit that’s every bit as praiseworthy. Last fall, we showed you their preposterous video “Lou Believers,” but there’s much more to share, so let’s get on with it, shall we?
 

 
In 1986, Sonic Youth teamed up with Minutemen/fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt for a Madonna covers 7”. Having temporarily re-dubbed the band “Ciccone Youth” in a nod to Madonna’s disused surname, they recorded ridiculous travesties of the pop icon’s hits “Burnin’ Up” and “Into The Groove” (renamed “Into the Groovy”), with the latter introduced by way of “Tuff Titty Rap,” which gave Thurston Moore a fine forum in which to be a complete fucking goofball for 40 seconds.
 

 

 
The band was giving vent to a bizarre Madonna obsession in other ways at the time—on their EVOL LP, released the same year, they listed the song “Expressway to Yr Skull” as “Madonna, Sean and Me” on the album cover, and as “The Crucifixion of Sean Penn” on the lyric sheet. Two years later, Ciccone Youth expanded the gag to a full album’s worth of, um, stuff. The Whitey Album included all three tracks from the single, plus a mix of the inane (“Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to NEU!,” “Silence,” both of which are exactly as stated by the titles), some material that recalled SY’s experimental early days before they fully embraced pop song structures, a bit of spoken word, and a version of “Addicted to Love” (about which, previously on DM, enjoy all the Robert Palmer white-knights in the comments). Check out Dave Markey’s video for the Whitey cut “Macbeth.”
 

 
The Whitey Album is singular in the Sonic Youth catalog—the only other SY release I can think of that approaches its pure diverse weirdness is the Master=Dik E.P., released six months earlier, the title track of which just happens to be laden with “Ciccone” references. Six months later and the goofing off would be over. In October of 1988, Sonic Youth would release their 2XLP masterwork Daydream Nation, which left zero room for doubt that the band belonged in the pantheon of art-rock’s greats. Enjoy a bonus video of that album’s “Silver Rocket,” from a STUNNING network TV performance on the far too short-lived Night Music.
 

 
Big hat tip to Rust Belt Hammer for inspiring this post.

 
The smart feminists over at Vagenda Magazine (slogan: “Like King Lear, but for girls”) asked their Twitter followers to fix the reflexively, egregiously, hyperbolically, breathlessly sexist tabloid headlines by creating new ones that seem to adhere to the actually humdrum events that happened. The celebrity press can’t exist without maintaining a continuous state of hysteria or high dudgeon over what is really nothing, and we certainly appreciate the corrective measures.

There’s no hashtag, apparently, but just go to the Vagenda twitter feed and you’ll see a bunch of them mixed in with other things.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via HUH.

 
I feel like it’s my duty to announce every time Internet K-Hole publishes a new round of photos because they’re so few and far between. Each photo collection is a chock full of nostalgic insanity. They make you pine for the days of hairspray, hanging out in malls, pegged acid washed jeans, scrunchy socks, feathered hair, shitty metal bands, sour beer, black eyeliner, hair crimpers and so on. You get the picture. It’s excellent.

Sometimes it’s even pictures of people that you actually know!

The whole thing’s just inexplicable. It’s uncannily WEIRD. As always, some of the photos are NSFW.

 
Midi-Minuit Fantastique was a French cineaste magazine dedicated to fantasy, horror and science fiction films of the 1960s to early 70s. It was one of the first “serious” publications to explore genre films. Later on, Midi-Minuit Fantastique dealt with more mainstream culture and subject matters with profiles on directors like Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger or Federico Fellini.

But honestly, who cares what Midi-Minuit Fantastique wrote about. Just look at these incredible covers! They’re up there with Girls & Corpses (NSFW) magazine!
 

 

 

 

 

 
More covers after the jump…
 

 
Meet 64-year-old Ayano Tsukimi from Nagoro—a small village in eastern Iya, Japan. Tsukimi passes her time by making life-size dolls in the likeness of the deceased from her village or of the people who have moved away. When the dolls are finished, Tsukimi strategically poses them “in places that were important to them.” Beyond just posing them in important places, she also creates and decorates their background settings.

Tsukimi is married, but her husband and daughter live away from her in Osaka. She lives with her 83-year-old father in her family’s house.

 
Here’s Tsukimi’s “Valley of the Dolls”:

 
The World’s Best Ever

“Sometimes pro football is like the Bermuda Triangle…. strange and unusual things happen that can’t be explained.”

Although it tries to come off like the Mondo Cane of NFL football or something, the Vincent Price-hosted Strange But True: Football Stories, a direct to VHS home video release from 1987 is basically just tales of uncanny victories, player superstitions and dumb luck. A few stories are more amusing than others, but all in all, one has to wonder just how desperate Vincent Price was for a paycheck at this stage of his career by agreeing to host this In Search Of meets the NFL lameness. I want to believe he shot this piece of crap in a day to underwrite the purchase of an expensive painting or a bottle of fine wine. It’s basically stories of unlikely wins with scary music and Price showing up every once in a while. He doesn’t come off as much of a football fan, does he?

From the back of the VHS box:

Travel off the beaten path with Vincent Price as he unearths the strange plays and bizarre players who have inhabited the NFL for the past half century.

Step right up and see for yourself the one-eyed quarterback who led the NFL in passing one year. Meet the player whose diet consisted of blood and raw meat. See weird team rituals. The strangest games. Discover the fattest achievers who ever played. And relive such out-of-this-world plays as “the Holy Roller,” “The Immaculate Reception” and “The Miracle of the Meadowlands.

So enter, if you dare, into the weird, wild and wacky world of the NFL. This is one fantastic voyage you won’t want to miss.”

That’s pretty debatable unless you’re a glutton for punishment. But it tries so hard…
 

 
More supernatural sports with Vincent Price after the jump…