When I first heard the news about Corey Haim’s passing, my thought was I’ve got to post that video he made. But I didn’t. It seemed in bad taste. Upon a couple hours’ worth of reflection, however, I’ve changed my attitude: The taste might be bad, but it’s too good not to share. Behold Me, Myself and I, from 1989.
I will admit that I got a pang of guilt and sadness when Haim says he hopes in ten years to be watching dolphins from his mansion in Tahiti (he wasn’t). But between the dramatic pumping-up of the alligator float, the new Japanese Pop Funk demonstrations beginning around minute 3 — you know, that “funky hip pop jam thing” — the modeling and the earnest ramblings (professional goal: to go from being the younger brother to the older brother, or the only brother), the bad feelings just sort of melt away.
My favorite thing about a lazy Sunday is watching movies on basic cable. And my favorite thing about watching movies on basic cable is the overdubbing. Yesterday (like so many Sundays before it) the afternoon was inscribed by the first two Die Hards consecutively, punctuated, naturally, by a truncated “yippee ki yay, mother fucker.”
But it wasn’t until partway through Die Hard 2, in a control tower showdown between Bruce Willis and Dennis Franz that I got an earful of perhaps the worst, and therefore most entertaining, overdub I’ve ever had the pleasure to behold. Please pardon the budget recording and enjoy:
I mean, really, could they have found anyone that sounds less like John McClane? They might as well have had a woman do it. I guess when you’re trying to pull off changing “fat ass” to “fat feet” (is that what he says there? sounds like “fat geek”) it hardly matters who’s doing the VO.
This is on Tufts' undergrad admissions page. Who's jerking whom around here? Becoming a Jumbo is one giant Elephant Walk.
When I was in high school, the Brown University application included an essay that you had to write by hand. I thought it was stupid, but I also thought the college might accept me, so I went along with it. Later I heard about a girl who wrote her essay in a spiral that filled the page from the center out. I never would have thought of that. I realized that, no, I guess I wasn’t Brown material.
But I was Tufts material, which, I found out when I got there, didn’t really mean… anything. The school was liberal, but not lock-yourself-in-the-campus-center liberal. There was a conservative journal, too, though any association therewith was vilifying. It had artsy students, but they had their own house (I mean, “haus”), and enginerds and even a couple frats and sororities (shudder to think). And it boasted a degree of diversity, enrolling students from both the North and South shores of Long Island. It certainly never felt particularly progressive. (I heard Brown doesn’t even give grades!)
But according to the New York Times, Tufts is a beacon of collegiate innovation:
It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations — and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.
About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.
Tufts, which, like the University of Chicago, is known for its quirky applications, invited the YouTube videos. Along with the required essays, Tufts has for years offered applicants an array of optional essays — “Are we alone?” is one of this year’s topics — or a chance to “create something” out of a sheet of paper. So it was not too far a stretch, this year, to add the option of posting a one-minute video that “says something about you.”
Known for its quirky applications? I missed that one. I only applied to Tufts because it was on the common app. Digital video? I think not. Photocopy? Yes, ma’am.
You can scroll through some of the videos here. I’m fairly impressed by the stop motion stuff, but the rest of it makes me feel uncomfortable. There’s little more unsettling than teenage earnestness. If these YouTube applications are an indication of what to expect for the future of Tufts, I think it can be summed up in four words: Hebrew hip hop raves.
Yes, someone is trying to revive the integrity of modern music. And it so happens it’s my brother, in New York (fucking) City. Forget the shuffle at the front of the stage and the jostle at the bar. Sit in seats like grown ups and enjoy a half dozen of NYC’s most promising musical upstarts in a civilized setting that puts the focus on performance and artistry, where it rightly belongs. The Theater Shows, presented by CitizenMusic. Three nights only in March at the Players Theater on MacDougal.
Folks, this is what happens when Rock n Roll puts on a suit and tie:
Click here for tickets. (Or here, if you’re into the Facebook.) Twelve measly bones for a truly unique experience in the New York music scene. Something new? Who knew? Get ‘em while you can. I’ll see you there.
CNN’s really going all out to cover this Austin plane crash story. So all out, in fact, that they’re apparently Googling for anything they can find on the suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack. And, yes, of course they’re using to the fullest all the technology in the newsroom, from the shmancy big board to desktop PCs. Sometimes, though, when you’re toggling between windows, you might accidentally broadcast more than you meant to. Like search results that include music from the A-Team and the song title “Last Real Nigga Left.”
The broadcaster realized it and quickly opened a new window, but you can’t be too fast for my DVR.
A similar R-rated misstep took place last night during NBC’s Olympic coverage. It had just become clear that Shaun White had won the gold, and the cameras were rolling at the top of the hill as the news set in and he prepared for a victory run down the pipe. You could clearly hear White say “I can’t ride right now!” and wonder aloud if he should just ride through the middle. You could also hear his coach, once White decided to showcase his crazy McTwist, tell him to “stomp the shit out of it.”
A Real Quack-Up: Late 1870s Collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in.
Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is a truly fascinating, often hilarious look into a funny facet of aristocratic recreation you most certainly didn’t know was there. Whoda thunk that in the parlors and drawing rooms of 19th Century England, women were cutting up pictures of the social elite and gluing them onto water colors of ducks and toadstools?
Remember that in the 1860s and ’70s, not everyone was toting around a cheap point and shoot. Photography was still a relatively formal art/science, making the levity and wit of these creations that much more outstanding. Moreover, the folks in these pictures were no plain shlubs; only the cream of high society were skewered so. And, my, were some of these images awesomely creepy.
In case you missed it this weekend, the Times did a great piece in the Arts section chronicling the cinematic history of the werewolf genre. Witty and informative. Notably quotable, in the section of potential weaknesses of Benicio Del Toro’s new flick Wolfman:
…the unlikelihood that adding layers of latex to Mr. Del Toro’s face and putting fang-filled dentures in his mouth will make him more intelligible.
The story also gives ups to Teen Wolf, one of my all time favorite movies. Be sure to check out the online interactive feature, too, which includes videos such as the Teen Wolf trailer:
Um, in the liquor store scene they totally changed the voice over. Just sayin.
CNN reports today that women in Haiti have barred men from food aide sites. Seems the not-so-gentle men were pushing and fighting and causing unruly scenes, and are no longer allowed to collect emergency relief rations.
If you’ve studied the Classics, or are a freelance tech writer with too much time on your hands, perhaps you’re familiar with Lysistrata, by Greek dramatist Aristophanes. In the play, a bawdy, excessively double-entendre’d, proto-Benny Hill political comedy, women are fed up with their men’s propensity for war, which is tearing the country asunder. So, led by a loudmouth named Lysistrata, they take over the Acropolis and citadel and promise only to relinquish them once a peace accord is assured.
Lysistrata
…the women have taken the Acropolis. Athene’s Citadel is ours!…
Let’s hurry inside the Acropolis and help the others shoot the bolts.
Kleonike
Don’t you think the men will send reinforcements against us as soon as they can?
Lysistrata
So where’s the worry?
The men can’t burn their way in or frighten us out.
The gates are ours — they’re proof against fire and fear — and they open only on our conditions.
Kleonike
Yes! That’s the spirit — let’s deserve our reputations:
Up the sluts!
Way for the old impregnables!
In truth, their strategic position is not the real bargaining chip. The ladies achieve leverage through sex, and the withholding thereof until an agreement is reached. (To be sure, it’s not easy on them, either; Aristophanes’ women are as horny as they are Hellenic.)
Men in Haiti can certainly empathize to some extent with the leader of the men’s chorus in Aristophanes’ play:
I won’t be played to revise, re-do,
amend, extend, or bring to an end
my irreversible credo: Misogyny Forever! –The answer’s never.
[Above translation by William Arrowsmith and Douglass Parker. Sometimes the translation feels fatuously over-the-top. For a free download of the work by other translators (I assume) try Gutenberg, or EServer.]
Logic leads to advancements, which in turn dictate logic. Why call someone when you can Facebook them? Why scan the street for an address when you can check the location on your iPhone? You could pick up a book on a subject of interest, but instead you’ll search for a few sufficient snippets online. Could you plan a trip without Orbitz or Kayak or Google Maps?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” in 1841, praising the strength of the individual, the value of unadulterated opinion, and revealing the folly of blind following. In it Emerson provides a poignant vision of technology’s subtle and subversive shifting of priorities and perceptions. More than a century and a half later it is still a vital reminder that whatever our tools and acquired facilities, we must rely, ultimately, on ourselves.
This passage may as well have been written today, about the Internet and cell phones. The message hasn’t lost a bit of relevance — OK, maybe a bit; Kiwis are, today, largely clothed, I reckon:
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber whether we have not lost by refinements some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
We kneel at the altar of information on atrophied legs. Occasionally it would behoove us to get up and walk around.
The real news here? Ladies, we’ve obliterated the latex ceiling.
But seriously, is that graphic blow up of a diseased snatch really necessary? And reported where, AVN? (Don’t open that at work. FYI: AVN Magazine is described by its publisher as the Bible of the adult industry.)
