My gawd is this commercial funny for Zappies’ brand new battery operated Doctor Who Ride-in Dalek. £199.99 for your kid to ride around in a little car that says: “Exterminate all humans.” Seems worth it to me.
Brilliant bit of citizen editorializing—in song—by NYC drag legend, Lady Bunny. Sung to the tune of Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA.”
Huffington Post should pick up on this and take it viral. This is what I call political protest… with balls!
I’m perhaps a little bit late on this one, but this has to be the single funniest clip of a Tea bagger having his ass handed to him on a silver platter that I have ever seen. I snickered derisively throughout this as Hardball host Chris Matthews hangs Tea Party Express founder Sal Russo out to dry on a hook for the world to see. To be fair, Russo was cast in the unenviable role of having to intellectually defend gross misstatements of historical fact by Rep. Michele Bachman, who just makes shit up that sounds good, or that seems to bolster her other misstatements of fact, as she goes along. A tough act to follow. But he tried! What a fool he looks trying.
Russo keeps trying to maneuver it so he can repeat one of his Tea party talking points, but Matthews will have none of it. Bachmann, it’s obvious to almost anyone with an IQ over 50, is a complete buffoon and yet she is the de facto spokesperson for Sal’s organization. And he can’t make even a single valid point to defend her! It gets even funnier as it goes on and Joan Walsh really rips Russo a new one as well.
I like “Balloonhead” as a name for Bachmann, too. I hope it sticks!
Note to Russo: Matthews treated you with the respect that you deserved, which is to say: none. You might want to reconsider making TV appearances where you are called upon to defend something which is intellectually indefensible (and you even know it, beforehand!). This is what’s gonna happen anytime you venture out of the FOX News echo-chamber with your lame-o talking points, buddy. You got no game, Russo. None. Do you really need to see yourself on TV so badly that you’re willing to look this bad?
Can you imagine how Russo felt after this taping? Ouch. HIs ass must’ve hurt.
The Ultimate Collection Of Bad Michele Bachmann Quotes (BuzzFeed)
Via Joe.My.God.
When my friend and label-mate Michael Kentoff of the fine D.C. area band, The Caribbean posted some clips of local public-access phenomenon T.V. John Langworthy to his FB wall I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. I liked that the line between knowingly funny and genuinely disturbed was truly blurry. So I asked Michael to try to provide some regional context and personal testimony about this hitherto unknown (to me and probably anyone else not living in the greater D.C. area) outsider artiste.
Well, you asked for it.
To the long-time local, there’s something very suburban DC about TV John Langworthy: proudly small-town yahoo just miles from the power center of the universe. It’s difficult to explain, but there he is: TV John (who is a twin!) flaunting his big-headed goofiness involuntarily and in defiance. Suburban DC or not, his similarity to other people ends there. In truth, he’s from a suburban DC on another planet. Television host, songwriter, open mic night organizer, singer, and whatever he does for a living, TV John is both obscure and conspicuous in any place at any time because he is completely and functionally in his own world – and we’re all invited!
Like his legion of fans (the number is anywhere from 17 to 17,000, I’d imagine), I stumbled across the TV John Show, which played to countless carpet-scraping jaws in the early 1990s, on local cable access. His show immediately followed The Music Shoppe, a survey of local music that was morbidly fascinating on a whole different level. Over the course of 30 cable minutes, the TV John Show usually featured two here-today-gone-later-today local performers and, the real pay-off, two lip-synced originals by the towering, flailing, smiling, gyrating host himself. He called them and still calls them “dream songs,” which, he reports, literally wake him up at night and demand to be captured on the nearest magnetic tape tout suite. Sort of like McCartney with “Yesterday” if McCartney woke up restrained by straps and safety pins to a hospital bed. Or if he awoke in a ranch-style house in Montgomery County, Maryland.
I taped a few TV John Shows and would subject unprepared friends to the late-80s video graphics, the parade of oddly matched bands, and, most importantly, to TV John himself – the dream songs and, if we were lucky, a solo comedy sketch that could only be funny somewhere deep inside the cedar closet of John’s brain. Some friendships ended – as if we were laughing at a disturbed asylum escapee, but most people cringed with delight. I, for one, always figured John was in on the joke. He both meant it for real and meant it as a gag. That was his genre (my theory).
Years later, Dave Jones and I went to see him perform with his band at the venerable Galaxy Hut in Arlington. At first sight, John was just a big, dorky guy in his 50s, smiling, chatting, drinking a beer. The most conspicuous thing about him was his giant overly-colorful silk shirt that looked like something a clown might pull endlessly from his left sleeve. Then the music started and TV John emerged – hurling around and singing in poses that almost seemed right out of pro wrestling. The normal big dork did not appear the rest of the night – TV John held sway. It was pretty magical. Definitely entertaining to the extreme. Dave and I chatted him up and showed him some video Dave shot of his set. The three of us laughed. Dave said, “Hilarious, man!” TV John, enormous face, raised two large craggly eyebrows over a giant, toothy smile and nodded, “Sure is!” Knew it.
Many more inscrutable TV John clips after the jump…
Iggy’s notorious 1977 performance of “Lust For Life” on Dutch TV show TopPop was a media sensation. Frustrated by having to lipsynch with no band, Iggy went apeshit and tore up some scenery, knocked over some potted plants and body slammed a stagehand. It got him tons of press and record sales. “Lust For Life” was propelled into the Dutch Top Ten.
Iggy’s no fool, so when he returned to Holland the following year he was prepared for another bit of performance art and so were the press. As you can see in the sequence where he is lipsynching to “I Gotta Right” he’s surrounded by a ring of cameramen. While not as dramatic as the previous year’s telecast, Iggy still gave an intensely deranged performance.
Iggy made no attempt whatsoever to even pretend to be singing the songs. Instead he used his body as a diversion from the artificiality of the moment and made it real. Almost mocking the situation
As I watched these clips it hit me that Iggy is among a very small handful of artists who are keeping Antonin Artaud’s Theater Of Cruelty and Julian Beck’s Living Theater concepts alive. Can you a imagine a more inspired bit of casting than to have Iggy portray Artaud in a film of the French provocateurs life. “I Wanna Be Your Frog.” Or the Bunuel version: “I Wanna Be Your Andalusian Dog.”
Here’s Iggy being a very bad bad boy.
Bird brain.
Ozzy Osbourne, sporting his skinhead look, declares his admiration for Hitler in this 1982 interview aired on American TV show Night Flight.
Brain-addled does not begin to describe this idiot. Some people find his stupidity amusing. I find it pathetic. Proof of de-evolution. 34-years-old and he’s already senile.
“He killed all these people and whatever.”
And whatever!!
Druidic, droning space-rockers Lumerians perform a hoodoo-infused cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses” on San Francisco public access program Dance Party Revival.
Their debut album, Transmalinnia
“Hey hey I’m a Monkee.”
While Dangerous Minds’ co-founder Richard Metzger is in the thrall of Monkeemania, I’d thought I’d share something with you and him that I found quite charming. This is Patti Smith (who I am always in the thrall of) doing an acoustic version of “Daydream Believer” last week in Paris. Lenny Kaye on guitar. Enjoy.
A colorful assortment of antique cute postcards in Japan from the book Antique Cute Postcards in Japan (Nippon no kawaii ehagaki) by Hiroki Hayashi. The ones with Betty Boop are my favorite.
See more postcards after the jump…
You gotta love Charlie Brooker. He’s on a one man mission to tear television apart from the inside. Nowhere is that more clear than in the title of his new show, the first episode of which looks at how and why fear dominates the airwaves. His new series How TV Ruined Your Life debuted on the BBC on Tuesday, and some helpful person has gone and uploaded it to YouTube, in two parts. If you live in the UK you can see the full show, unbroken, on the BBC iPlayer for the next week.
In an age where dwindling ratings are forcing channels and shows to become more extreme, we need voices like Brooker’s more than ever. He seems like the only one left trying to fill a Chris Morris-shaped hole on mainstream UK TV (he and Morris worked together on 2005’s Nathan Barley series), speaking what seems a glaringly obvious truth to power. Most of the televisual references here are British, but it doesn’t really matter as it’s the same fundamental principles all over the globe. People are biologically trained to be alert to warnings, we find it hard to look away - fear sells, and Charlie helps us laugh at it.
On another level, this also gives non-British viewers a chance to see some of the terrible crap that has come out of the goggle box in the UK over the years. It’s not all as good as Fawlty Towers. .
Part Two of How TV Ruined Your Life after the jump…