Now that the show has been around for more than forty years, the talent intake process at Saturday Night Live surely approximates an efficient, well-oiled machine, albeit one always tempered by Lorne Michaels’ inexplicable idiosyncrasies. But in those key first few years, the spirit of the place was so much more informed by actual generational rebellion against actual old-guard fuddy-duddies like Bob Hope. The continent (careful to include Canada for this part) was brimming with youthful comedic talent, to the point that anyone that would be likely to wander into 30 Rockefeller Plaza looking for a gig probably was a genius of some description or other.

Point being, in 1975, as the writing staff and cast was being assembled, NBC didn’t have a process in place, as much as a loose constellation of people who fit with their sensibility and could be relied upon to deliver bankably weird and resonant and funny material. Andy Kaufman, who was never a full cast member but was certainly part of the first crew in a general way, famously never fit any of the regular categories that existed for “entertainer” or “comedian,” even though he clearly was both, and as he matured into the key years of the mid- to late 1970s, his delicious bits tended to define a useful boundary between those who “got it” and those who never would.

Here is an impression of Kaufman in the context of the preparations for the very first show, which happened on October 11, 1975, from Bill Zehme’s 1999 book Lost in the Funhouse:
 

He became a fixture around the shows seventeenth-floor production offices in the weeks before the October premiere. He did not fraternize so much as lurk. Relatively few staff or cast members knew who he was or what he was or what he was supposed to do—although John Belushi had become an early true believer after having seen the conga-crying in clubs. Anne Beatts, a newly recruited writer, first encountered him slumping in Lorne’s antechamber—“I thought, Oh, man, is this the kind of person they’re hiring? I don’t know if I want to be part of this! He was so twitchy and weird and had bad skin. He looked very nerdy and geeky. I had severe doubts about the show from the beginning and my initial impression of Andy was the first of them.” Very late on the Friday night before the broadcast, however, her opinion changed when she saw him rehearse, which he almost didn’t because rehearsals dragged on interminably and he had yet to perform a run-through of Mighty Mouse for the crew and finally he said he had to leave. “And it was like––‘Wait, you can’t leave!” Beatts would recall. “And he said, ‘No, I have to go if I’m going to make the last train back to Great Neck.’ Lorne told him, “No Andy, we need you here.’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess I could get my mother to come pick me up….’”

On October 11, he meditated twice, locking himself in the office of Herb Sargent—once before dress rehearsal and again before the live broadcast. Both times he taped a note on the door—Please do not disturb me while I meditate, Andy Kaufman. All around him, panic and mayhem swirled as would become customary Saturday Night crucible.

 
Recently Netflix released a documentary with a gratuitously long title about Jim Carrey’s immersive process of pretty much “becoming” Andy Kaufman during the months in which he was shooting Man on the Moon, which is quite worth the time it takes to watch it. During the course of the movie the viewer gets a brief glimpse of Kaufman’s audition reel for Saturday Night Live, which I had never seen before.

In those early days, one of the staples of Kaufman’s act was a reading of the lyrics of “MacArthur Park,” the 1968 song that was first recorded by the actor Richard Harris…. except Kaufman did it as an elderly Jewish man from New York City. To understand why this is funny it might be necessary to see some of the impossibly winsome or lachrymose lyrics of the song. They are certainly distinctive:
 

Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love’s hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!

 
It’s worth noting that the word “striped” is pronounced with two syllables, as a reader of, ahem, poetry might do.

Continues after the jump…

 
The other evening round at DM Towers, Glasgow, as I lay reclining on the chaise longue in my plus fours, smoking jacket, and fez, quietly puffing on my Meerschaum and idly fingering Roget’s Thesaurus, an unholy apparition appeared at the library door. It was my girlfriend. Yet, I would never have recognized her, as her whole countenance had vanished into a grotesque black hole from hairline to chin.

“What infernal magic is this?” quoth I (we do a lot of quothing round our house) in my best quivering voice from behind the chaise longue.

“Why it is only I,” rejoined my girlfriend.

And it was. But that face—what had happened to it?

As it, fortunately, turned out, my dearest was merely sporting an antique item of fashion called a vizard. That is a type of mask once worn by posh birds to avoid unsightly contact with the sun which could result in the unfortunate bronzing of the skin and the worrisome fear of being considered a lowly working-class woman who spent her days toiling in fields under the sun. (“Tanning” wasn’t considered a “thing” until beach vacations were invented for rich people.)

This was all rather serendipitous in a way, as I had, only that morning, been reading young Master Pepys’ diary about his visit to the Royal Theater where he had chanced upon Lord Falconbridge and Lady Mary Cromwell. As the public began to fill the house, Lady Cromwell “put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play”. Pepys said the vizard had “become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.” Meeting the fashionable Lady Cornwell encouraged Pepys to go to “the Exchange, to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself.”

Intrigued by my fair lady’s latest fashionable accessory, I decided to find some fine examples of the vizard from history with which to share. It would seem, the vizard was once very popular in England during the late 16th and most of the 17th centuries, roughly from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the Restoration. They were worn as sun protectors, and on occasion to keep a woman’s face wrapped from the biting chill of a winter’s wind. They were also a means to create coquettish mystery—just as the Venetians wore masks to flirt with each other. The vizard was large, spherical in shape, with a black velvet exterior and a silk lining. There was a small rectangular niche for the nose and two small oval openings for the eyes. The mask was held in by the wearer’s teeth, as it is described in The Academie of Armorie (1688):

A mask [is] a thing that in former times Gentlewomen used to put over their Faces when they travel to keep them from Sun burning… the Visard Mask, which covers the whole face, having holes for the eyes, a case for the nose, and a slit for the mouth, and to speak through; this kind of Mask is taken off and put in a moment of time, being only held in the Teeth by means of a round bead fastened on the inside over against the mouth.

Not everyone was so taken with the latest fashion, the writer Phillip Stubbes wrote in Anatomy of Abuses (1583):

When [women] use to ride abroad, they have visors made of velvet… wherewith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look so that if a man that knew not their guise before, should chance to meet one of them he would think he met a monster or a devil: for face he can see none, but two broad holes against her eyes, with glasses in them.

The playwright John Dryden was similarly droll in the prolog to one of his lesser-known plays, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards:

[W]hen Vizard Masque appears in Pit,
Straight every Man who thinks himself a Wit
Perks up; and, managing his Comb with grace,
With his white Wigg sets off his Nut-brown Face;
That done, bears up to th’ prize, and views each Limb,
To know her by her Rigging and her Trimm;
Then, the whole noise of Fops to wagers go,
Pox on her, ’t must be she; and Damm’ee no:

The vizard was fashionable among the higher classes until around early 1700s, when it became the preferred disguise for prostitutes to sell their wares.
 

‘A horseman with his wife in the saddle behind him’ circa 1581.
 

Pietro Longhi, ‘Rhinoceros,’ 1751.
 
More masked mystery ladies, after the jump…
 

 
LiarTown USA (or just LiarTown, for short) has been, since 2013, a consistent source of Internet comedy gold, all springing forth from the warped mind of graphic design humorist Sean Tejaratchi. If you are unfamiliar with the site (actually a Tumblr page located at liartownusa.tumblr.com), you have undoubtedly seen Tejaratchi’s work popping up in your social media feeds. Those Apple Cabin Foods circulars advertising “Peanut Mud”? LiarTown. The Hardy Boys Lose Their Shit paperback? That’s LiarTown. The Difficult To Strip To Hits CD compilation? Also LiarTown.

Tejaratchi first flew onto my radar in the 1990s with his brilliant clip art zine Crap Hound, but LiarTown’s “things that look like real things, but aren’t real things” humor is just completely next level.

Tejaratchi has a knack for taking the most mundane, everyday packaging and advertising design elements and twisting them just slightly to the point of hilarious absurdity. What truly sells Tejaratchi’s humor though, is his ability to flawlessly ape the fine details of the design work he is mocking (homaging?). His paperbacks look like real paperbacks. His 45 rpm record labels look like real 45 rpm record labels. Over the past four years, the LiarTown style has been widely imitated, but—as they say—never duplicated. Tejaratchi’s particular brand of subtle absurdity doesn’t have much pre-Internet precedent. It’s as “Internet Humor” as it gets, and I say that without meaning it as an insult. Tejaratchi describes LiarTown as a “duplicate world maintained by a moderately benevolent but not necessarily detail-oriented God.”

Feral House has just issued a hefty compendium of the first four years of LiarTown, cleverly titled LiarTown: The First Four Years. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is The Internet in book form. Honest to God, this is the funniest book I own and if I didn’t already have a copy, I’d have it on my Christmas list. (I do still have Tejaratchi’s Social Justice Kittens calendar on my list!)

Here’s a gallery of some of my personal favorite LiarTown images, but take my word for it, the hundreds of images in LiarTown: The First Four Years are ALL gold.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” on which John Carpenter based They Live, was first published in the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. But Carpenter first encountered the story 23 years later, in its comic book adaptation, “Nada.”

The seven-page story illustrated by Bill Wray ran in Alien Encounters #6. The comic follows Nelson’s story pretty closely, and there are strong resemblances between the stories of They Live and “Nada,” especially the “storming the reality studio” climax (of which Nelson’s acquaintance William S. Burroughs would surely have approved) common to all versions of the story. But there are differences. Only Wray’s includes a Circle Jerks poster.
 

The opening panels of ‘Nada’ (available in its entirety here)
 
More significantly, the famous Hofmann (i.e., LSD) sunglasses do not appear in Nelson’s story or in Wray’s comic. Nelson’s hero, George Nada, goes to the theater to watch a live hypnosis act, and when he hears the command to awake at the show’s end, he suddenly realizes that he’s surrounded by outer-space aliens. The Fascinators, “the rulers of Earth,” are reptilian beings with too many eyes who control human beings through suggestion. In Nelson’s story, Nada doesn’t just see their awful stomach-turning alien monstrosity after waking up from his trance, he hears the terrible croaking alien language they speak to one another, and a constant stream of subliminal commands delivered in “bird-like” voices. The aliens tell him to “obey,” “work,” and—now that he’s on to them—die:

Suddenly the phone rang.

George picked it up. It was one of the Fascinators.

“Hello,” it squawked. “This is your control, Chief of Police Robinson. You are an old man, George Nada. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, your heart will stop. Please repeat.”

“I am an old man,” said George. “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, my heart will stop.”

 

 
George Nada’s cruelty to his girlfriend (fiancee, in the comic), Lil, makes him an unsympathetic character and suggests that he might be seeing space reptiles everywhere because he is a delusional nutcase, not a possibility Carpenter’s movie entertains. When he sets out to “awaken” others, Nada first tries beating up the woman in his life. After violence doesn’t work, he steals her car, leaving her bound and gagged on the bed, alone in her apartment with a dead body, terrified. There is none of the comradely spirit or cheerful good-fellowship of the fight scene in They Live.

Ray Nelson’s bio is recommended reading. He claims to be the inventor of the propeller beanie and says that, as a young man, “he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling Henry Miller books out of France.”

And John Carpenter still has some They Live sunglasses left over from his bubblegum-lacking, ass-withering Anthology tour. He forcefully repudiated anti-Semitic interpretations of They Live on Twitter earlier this year:

THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.

— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) January 4, 2017

 
Read all of “Nada” at SAP Comics.
 

 
At long last, the surviving members of Hüsker Dü are asserting control over their work. In addition to the ongoing series of excellent Numero Group releases, there is the official Hüsker Dü online store, which is increasingly full of things to want, buy and have.

The design of the Hüsker Dü “festive holiday sweatshirt” is based on the artwork for “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” a 1986 promo cassette the Hüskers made for Warner Bros. At first, the image on the j-card appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, but on closer inspection it looks like it must be a shattered windowpane.

The 60-second track is embedded below. If you worry that Hüsker Dü‘s Christmas carol is “not punk,” you’re going to love what Discharge was playing in 1986. Ho, ho, ho!

The festive holiday sweatshirt is $29.99 at Hüsker Dü‘s official merch store. Festive holidays, everyone.
 

 
The Volkswagen Bug is one of the most familiar cars ever designed. More than 20 million have been produced, making it the most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made. The model managed to overcome its roots as an artifact of Nazi Germany (first year of production: 1938) to become a scruffy, sporty symbol of the Boomer generation.

The Beetle (as it was also called) lasted until the early 2000s—the New Beetle lasted from 1997 to 2011. In a sense, Volkswagen was to 1970 as Apple is to, say, 2010…. a very big corporation that was mass-producing machinery that, largely through the miracle of design and advertising, was admired and even loved by enormous numbers of people. It’s one of the few car models that has a bunch of books dedicated to it, such as Edwin Baaske’s Volkswagen Beetle: Portrait of a Legend.

The Beetle was so well-loved and popular with students in the 1970s that special business opportunities arose around it that were not true of any other car. In our own era, marked by stagnant wages, the prospect of earning money by using your car as a billboard has come to seem a sign of the times, but the idea is not new. There was a company dedicated to that exact thing in the 1970s. The only car you could do it with was the Volkswagen Bug, and the company was called Beetleboard.
 

Charlie Bird with two of his Beetleboards
 
Beetleboard was the brainchild of a youthful marketing executive named Charlie Bird, who was not, in fact, Charlie Parker and also not Charlie Byrd. The company existed from 1971 to 1984 and was far from a flash in the pan. Bird himself is still around and actually has a Facebook page up about the Beetleboards; apparently he intends to release a book about the phenomenon soon.

The primary target audience for the Beetleboards was college students. Anyone willing to turn his or her VW jalopy into a platform for hawking Dr. Pepper or KOOL cigarettes or Dom Emilio Tequila would receive about $50 a month with the additional possibility of participating in promotional events. As a choice bit of R.J. Reynolds ad copy stated at the time, “Most importantly, KOOL Beetleboard drivers enjoy the constant excitement of becoming the instant center of attention whenever and wherever they drive their KOOL Beetleboard!”

Aside from Bird’s Facebook presence, there’s very little about the Beetleboards online. One of the main resources is a website called Kevmania, which ran a post about it in 2010. The comments section of that post brought a few former Beetleboard drivers and employees out of the woodwork. Such as this:
 

I represented Beetleboards of America in Hawaii back in the mid-70s. Recruited, got cars painted, put on the decals, and promoted the advertisers in Waikiki parades, gatherings, special events, etc. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was fun. We had Jack-in-the-Box cars, Kool cigs, El Charro Tequila, and Bank of Hawaii. It was great to see the cars on the highways and byways of Oahu and be a part of something special. The guy sitting on the bug is Charlie Bird, president and founder of the company–one of the most creative advertising men I’ve ever come across. I do have a bunch of pictures. Even one of a Time Magazine bug, Levi’s Jeans and a whole bunch of others.

 
An article from The Palm Beach Post dated December 1976 states that Bird was in his mid-twenties when he came up with the idea in 1971 while touring colleges giving lectures. In the article Bird is quoted saying, “It’s the greatest ice breaker with the kids because it’s kind of wacko.”
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Recently I had the extreme pleasure of attending a festival screening of one of the most over-the-top campy trashfests ever to skeet itself across the silver screen, the Australian-produced Fags in the Fast Lane.

Fags in the Fast Lane is violent, sexy, and an utterly absurd epic of completely anarchic cinema produced with spirit and passion by individuals devoted to off-the-wall storytelling and lysergic imagery.
 

 
Producer/Designer/Writer/Director Josh Sinbad Collins is a trash-auteur par excellence who has built a world of gay superheroes, cock-worshippers, elderly hookers, and mutant burlesque queens that defies comparison, though one could certainly start with John Waters, Ted V Mikels, the Kuchar brothers, and certainly Russ Meyer. In fact, after first viewing the film, I described it to a friend as “what you might get if Russ Meyer were gay and tried to make a film on ten hits of acid.”

The film is the whacked out tale of Sir Beauregard, the “Cockslinger,” and his companion, Lump, a sort of 19th Century Dandy prizefighter. The dynamic-duo of gay-basher-bashers fight the homophobes of Dullsville and kidnap the police chief’s son, Squirt, who eventually allows his repressed sexuality to blossom. When The Cockslinger’s mother, played by aging Russ Meyer vixen Kitten Natividad, has all of her jewelry and the magical “Golden Cock” stolen from her GILF bordello, it is up to the pair, with Squirt in tow, to track down the culprits. This leads them on a journey where they pick up Salome and Hijra (an ass-kicking drag queen and a eunuch assassin), the latter played by King Khan. El Vez and The Mummies also make appearances. The odyssey ends with an epic battle against mutated gogo dancers in Freakytown with some hilariously cheap special effects. The costumes, set designs, and art direction are jaw-droppingly fantastic.
 

Kitten Natividad stars as “Kitten.”
 
Fags in the Fast Lane is currently playing the festival circuit, but I suspect it won’t take long for this film to get distribution for an eventual DVD/BD release.
 

The Cockslinger and Squirt are on the case.
 
When it seems that certain factions in this country have made it their culture war mission to roll back the advancements of LGBT+ folks at every turn, Fags in the Fast Lane couldn’t have come along at a better time. The Cockslinger is the gay superhero we need.
 

King Khan as Hijra.
 

 

 
(Probably NSFW) Trailer for ‘Fags in the Fast Lane’:
 

Japanese VHS art.

I’ve seen a lot of crazy movies, but Mystics In Bali about takes the cake. Released in 1981, this low-budget Indonesian flick is one-of-a-kind, guaranteed to thrill horror movie fans the world over.

Based on the novel Leak Ngakak, the film follows Cathy Kean, a young American anthropologist, who comes to Bali to learn more about the Leyak. Part of Balinese folklore, Leyaks are demonic witches that can make themselves turn into animals, and detach their own heads, which then fly through the air. Leyaks feed on human flesh and blood. In Bali, Cathy meets a local who introduces her to one of these witches. Cathy grows interested in becoming a Leyak herself, and by way of black magic, she is transformed. Though the effects aren’t all that special, bizarre, grotesque sights like Cathy’s flying head—with some internal organs still attached—are unforgettable.
 

 
In addition to its cheap-looking special effects, the dubbing is poor, the acting ain’t the greatest, and the dialogue is often unintentionally hilarious (example: “Mmmm delicious, this blood is good!”)—all just part of what makes Mystics in Bali such a wild ride. The main draw for horror fans is its graphic depictions of gore and other outlandish imagery, but it’s also genuinely eerie.
 

 
In his book, Mondo Macabro : Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World, author Pete Tombs writes about how the film transcends its limitations. 

The film was cheaply and quickly made, yet its awkwardness and shooting style give it a kind of strange authenticity. The camera hardly ever moves; most scenes are filmed in one take, using medium or close shots. In the many night sequences there are no foregrounds. The characters are isolated against the vast, empty backdrop of black space. There’s a constant feeling of mystery, of tension, as though almost anything might emerge from the blackness.

 

 
Mystics in Bali is one of those movies that I don’t want to write too much about, for fear of spoiling it for those that haven’t seen it before. Trust me, if it at all seems like something you’d dig, you will not be disappointed.
 

 
Just one more thing that’s weird about the picture: The purpose of nearly all of the dialogue in the film—and this is no exaggeration—is to explain to the audience what is happening on screen. It’s odd, but not such a bad thing, considering all of the craziness thrown at the viewer.

Continues after the jump…

Bob Eggleton, “Hell-Kaiju”

Dangerous Minds has previously and previouslier told you about an ongoing series of Satanic art exhibits and books, all under the umbrella title “The Devil’s Reign.” The exhibits are put on and the books are published by Andy Howl, a tattoo artist with galleries in Fort Myers, FL, and they’re curated by no less an authority on LaVeyan Satanism than the Church of Satan’s High Priest, Peter H. Gilmore. Howl has told me that he intends the series to continue until it reaches ten exhibits and books—an ambitious goal, and the newest, Daikaiju, is the third, after “The Devil’s Reign” and “The Devils Reign II: Psychedelic Blasphemy.”

The valid question of what giant movie monsters have to do with Satanism inevitably arises, and naturally, the book addresses this matter, with essays by Gilmore and by Hugo Award winning fantasy illustrator Bob Eggleton (Greetings From Earth). Eggleton first:

Kaiju as a word actually means “mythical beast” in Japanese. The mystique of this kind of creature is the fact we don’t know from where it came, the forces that created it, or how, only that it exists. The Japanese have a long, rich history of creatures from the multi-headed Orochi to Yokai—ghosts which take on the form of strange, sometimes playful, sometimes terrifying creatures. All of them very colorful and bizarre, contrary to Western ideas of similar entities. Monsters of this size are not new, they permeate history of human kind. Even “Leviathan” from the Book of Revelations in the Bible is a giant, flame spewing monster, possibly part whale, and part deep sea life form. There has also been The Kraken, and The Mid-gard Serpent which Thor battled in Norse mythology, among many others. Kaiju have been with us from the very beginnings of human history, appearing even as cave paintings in the prehistoric record. In the early part of the 20th Century, writer H.P. Lovecraft concocted a plethora of weird and giant creatures. Foremost among them are Cthulhu, Dagon and his mythos of At The Mountains of Madness, and an abandoned prehistoric Antarctic city created by a race of aliens called “The Old Ones”. He had a gifted penchant for the appearance of demons and monsters to be, in fact, alien in origin from the dark places in the universe. Indeed, the Devils Reign.

And Gilmore:

Since the dawn of our species, humans have been awed by the power and mystery of the grand forces of nature under whose dominion we attempt to survive. Before science was able to explain the mechanisms behind storms, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, human beings personifed these vast and indifferent phenomena as best they could. The most mighty and terrifying aspects of the cosmos were deemed to arise from monstrous creatures. In Japanese, “daikaiju” specifically means giant monsters—ones with strange and fantastic characteristics—so the terrors of these ancient legends are embodied by this word.

Looking back through the myths of past cultures, we find the Babylonian Tiamat, a chaos dragon, who was transmuted into Leviathan in the Hebrew sacred texts. Behemoth, a vast elephantine monstrosity, and Ziz, a gigantic winged gryphon, were also mentioned in these scriptures, making a trio of biblical daikaiju. The northern peoples imagined Jormungandr as the world serpent, and the ancient Greeks were terrified by Typhon and Echidna, almost incomprehensibly gargantuan monstrosities who spawned a host of lesser hideous beasts. Fantastic giant monsters have thus been a primal aspect of the human imagination for millennia.

 

 

Richard “Tentacles and Teeth” Luong, “The Coming of Azathoth”
 

Peter Santa-Maria, “Giant Turtle”
 
More satanic mayhem after the jump…

 
The four-song EP Barnes & Barnes released in 1982 goes by the name of its best-known track, “I Had Sex with E.T.,” and is distinguished in Steven Spielberg’s biography as “perhaps the most egregious unauthorized product” related to the sci-fi blockbuster. Adding insult to injury, one half of the group that wrote and recorded the song was Bill Mumy, who had played Will Robinson on Lost in Space as a child actor. Had he no respect for the sacred fraternity of showfolk?

Barnes & Barnes’ erotic outer-space adventure in intellectual property rights was over almost as soon as it began. It is alleged that, when the duo had sold just 73 copies of the EP’s limited run of 200, they received a stern warning from Spielberg’s or Universal’s lawyers that compelled them to delete the release. (This Barnes & Barnes discography quotes Mumy’s allusion to “serious bigtime showbiz legal problems.”)

If Barnes & Barnes don’t sound familiar, their novelty hit “Fish Heads” will. As Art and Artie Barnes, Mumy and his partner Robert Haimer recorded a string of albums and singles for Rhino and their own Lumania label, and they collaborated on LPs with Wild Man Fischer and Crispin Glover. This number was just one in their series of kiss-and-tell songs, all of them set to the same one-minute-and-twenty-second backing track: “I Had Sex with Pac-Man” (on the same EP as “I Had Sex with E.T.”), “I Had Sex on TV,” “I Had Sex with Santa,” and the still-unreleased “I Had Sex with Madonna” and “I Had Sex with Your Mother.”

Speaking of the sacred fraternity of showbiz, Mumy and Haimer have a bunch of writing credits on records by the band America, and Mumy used to play with the late Miguel Ferrer of Twin Peaks fame in a blues band called the Jenerators. On the sole release by their previous band, Seduction of the Innocent, you can hear Ferrer sing “Sunshine Superman.”