Two acquired tastes: British comedy, and the type of laughs that come within milliseconds of uttering the phrase “what did I just witness? That was so wrong.” If you’re allergic to either brand of humor, particularly the latter, stay back. Click away, because these clips will take you to a dark, dark place. To the rest of you assholes who think that dead babies are funny: welcome to the world of Jam, the most twisted sketch comedy series ever produced.
Jam is one of those great shows that’s been reduced to YouTube tatters due to music licensing issues. The episodes are interlaced with dreamy, ambient sounds by the likes of Low, Beta Band, Aphex Twin and Brian Eno. If you’ve never seen the show, let us begin at the beginning. Below is Episode 1, Part 1. It begins with “an invocation of sorts” (there was one of these at the beginning of every episode; here’s another opener), and leads right into “It’s About Ryan,” a sketch about two concerned parents asking their child’s godfather to gain the affections of a local pervert in order to keep him away from their boy (UPDATE: that video was removed by YouTube, so I’ve replaced it with a clip of “It’s About Ryan,” without the intro):
When dancing… lost in techno trance. Arms flailing, gawky Bez. Then find you snagged on frowns, and slowly dawns… you’re jazzing to the bleep-tone of a life support machine, that marks the steady fading of your day old baby daughter. And when midnight sirens lead to blue-flash road-mash. Stretchers, covered heads and slippy red macadam, and find you creeping ‘neath the blankets to snuggle close a mangled bird, hoping soon you too will be freezer drawered. Then welcome… blue chemotherapy wig, welcome. In Jam. Jaaam. Jaaaaaaam…
The show, written by Chris Morris (with occasional help from the cast) is a successor to Blue Jam, which ran on BBC Radio 1, and was described by the Beeb as “the funniest nightmare you never had.” In some ways, the radio show (which you can listen to here) went even further than the televised version. But since I love the look of the actors (particularly the crazy gleam in Mark Heap’s eye!), the TV version has always been my favorite.
Many of my most beloved Jam clips are now impossible to find online. They disappear, audio tracks get erased by YouTube. So watch these while you can! Type “Chris Morris Jam” into YouTube and enter a world stranger than you ever imagined. Below are some highlights:
Attention all New Yorkers! Looking for something to do this summer on Wednesday nights? Frequent Coilhouse contributor Agent Double Oh No, aka Jeff Wengrofsky, is teaching a course this summer at NYU. The course is titled “The Postwar Avant-Garde in Downtown New York.” The course sounds amazing – I wish I could visit NYC for the summer, just to take it. Check out the description:
In the period from 1950 to 1980, New York City’s downtown art world teemed with freewheeling vitality. From the musicians of the postwar jazz scene to 1970s punk musicians jamming at CBGB’s, neighborhoods comprising an area smaller than most American towns produced many significant contributions to music, film, theater, dance, the visual arts, and the written and spoken word. In this course, we explore the history of lower Manhattan, experience some of this art and music, discuss the social conditions that nurtured creativity, and hear from a few of the people who were prime movers in these creative communities.
Jeff is a wealth of knowledge and insight – this course is not to be missed. There will be films, slides, things to read and places to explore. Guest speakers include two living legends of the avant-garde: Judith Malina, founder of The Living Theater and direct theatrical descendant of Brecht, and Andy Warhol superstar Taylor Mead.
The course runs from June 3 – July 22, and takes place every Wednesday from 6:20pm-8:40pm. Click here to learn more. You do not need to be an NYU student to enroll.
Manhattan-based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding-edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio-electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, “we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.”
Since that clip, 1stAveMachine, helmed by Palep and Serge Patzak (the former turned down a job from Industrial Light & Magic to join the startup), has produced short commercials for the likes of MTV Japan, Samsung and HP. But no matter how corporate their clients roster becomes, 1stAvenue keeps it weird, inviting comparisons to Chris Cunningham and Patricia Piccinini. Consider the below ad for Saturn, which 1stAveMachine describes as “a haunting hyper-sexual and stylized vision for the future”:
Shown above is the director’s cut, which features a naked lady. NSFW!
There are many more clips to be seen on 1stAveMachine’s site. Some favorites clips and image stills, after the cut. [via Paul Komoda]
Top of the morning to you! Although it’s noon here in partly-cloudy Los Angeles, the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet, which can only mean one thing on a Monday: an installment of Better Than Coffee! This week, we have sexy Marlene on the musical saw. Whatever goofy shenanigans were taking place to elicit audience laughter when Marlene finally starts playing the saw at 1:25 have been lost to time, for only the audio survived in the clip above.
One of my favorite artists, Bethalynne Bajema, has a new book out! The book is called Bajema’s Web Collection II: Etta Diem and features art and writing by Bajema’s new alter ego, Etta:
My second collection of work introduces my character Etta Diem with new artwork and writing all done in Miss Diem’s somewhat antique and eccentric style.
This collection includes Etta’s encyclopedia of Harmful Sensation, her mostly true stories of the strange and quirky (like the tale of the prostitute popular during the Jack the Ripper times, who was singled out by her chattering teeth… that didn’t happen to be in her mouth) and a variety of other dark humor tales from Victorian times. The collection also includes a new series of steampunk/dark fantasy styled art that had not been seen as of yet.
Bajema also has an Etsy store, where you can buy some gorgeous handmade prints from the book.
I found this image completely by accident on some car restoration site that was last updated in 2005. I don’t even remember how I got there; I think I was doing a Google image search on vintage hair dryers. The image above appears in the following context:
Any vintage automotive electrical system can be a real challenge, especially if it’s been partially burned up due to modifications that got ugly or a voltage regulator that went into fricasse mode. Just about every tatooed Isetta wiring harness we’ve seen had ignition problems of some form or fashion with the blue and green ignition wires vying for first place in the Meltdown Category.
Dude. I don’t know what any of the above means, but it’s pure poetry.
I know, I know. H1N1 is Serious Business! That fucking miniseries adaptation of The Stand terrified me when I was growing up, so I shouldn’t making light of this situation. OK, screw it: let’s reflect on how utterly surreal the official news coverage of this virus has been. I thought nothing could top SARS, but it’s like CNN, BBC, and even the Huffington Post have turned into one large gallery of Alt Photo Cliches. Case in point: cute surgical masks from Japan are to be expected, but I never thought I’d see this pop up on FOX NEWS.
I imagine the colorful swine flu parade coming from the news media to be the product of journalists/photographers bored to tears from framing recession-related stories. I mean, you can only stand covering so many Sad Guys on Trading Floors before you start to lose it a little bit. They’re excited to be reporting on something completely new, and I think that this giddy, liberated feeling is actually affecting the coverage. The best thing to come from all this is that news sites keep churning out photos of couples kissing in surgical masks, which is really sweet and romantic. Here’s my favorite new take on this theme, which has its roots in the following 50s image/erstwhile Torture Garden flyer photo (photographer unknown):
In the ad above, an elderly man pays a visit to a transgender hair salon owner in his small town. The man says to the woman, “[I wanted to] come and apologize to you for treating you badly all this time. For not knowing how to treat you.” Over at SocImages, where this was spotted, Gwen observes:
Often when I see companies touting their tolerance/eco-friendliness/good-neighborliness, I suspect it may be a marketing ploy with little change in actions or policies behind it–you can, for instance, celebrate Black History Month by putting up signs in your business and doing nothing else, and there’s little cost. It occurred to me after I watched the commercial that in this case the bank professed a type of tolerance that wasn’t risk-free to it. Saying your business is eco-friendly, or celebrates a civil rights hero from the past, or honors Carnival or Christmas or a local athletic team or the marching band, isn’t likely to make many people angry, which is why businesses usually stick to such safe issues. I’m by no means an expert on Argentinian culture and attitudes toward the transgender community; I’ve read that Argentinians are more accepting of people who are transgender, but I’ve also read that this acceptance is often over-exaggerated and that anti-gay and anti-transgender attitudes still exist, particularly outside of urban areas. Anyway, I assume that an Argentinian business might suffer some negative consequences from an ad like this that so openly and unequivocally advocates for acceptance, and I think it’s sort of fascinating that they decided to run it anyway.
For the most part, transgender people in advertising appear in hokey, stereotypical ways. Most frequently, you’ll find them shilling hair removal products and providing us with fine slapstick comedy. It’s not often that you see transgender people in finance/banking. The one other time that the two intersected was in this two-year-old Israeli AIG ad featuring Dana International. What makes the Argentinian ad above really special is that the PSA for acceptance is targeted towards a demographic that usually ends up ignored in the hip trend of transgender advertising: the elderly conservative.
Meanwhile, back in the US of A, Depends recently launched a charming new campaign to promote its new products for men and women. Sigh. You win some, you lose some.
Asha Beta is an ongoing multimedia project by Philadelphia-based artist Nicomis (“Nyx”) Blalock. Check out her brand-new website, blog and Flickr stream.
Though Nyx is New York City born and bred, these new sculptures (photographed by the talented Ben Harris) are pure Philly. Everything about them reminds me of my beloved dirty city: exploring condemned houses and finding strange trinkets under the floorboards, admiring a skyline of abandoned factories, chillin’ with the Soap Lady at the Mütter. Indeed, Philadelphia is a very strange place. Lynch cites the city as his biggest creative influence, and calls Eraserhead his “Philadelphia story.” The Brothers Quay spent their formative years there. Edgar Allen Poe started a magazine (ok, he tried to start a magazine) in Philly. It’s definitely the place to be if you like grime, texture and decay (that’s another way of saying “if you like Philly Cheese Steaks,” for all you out-of-towners).
Extant Axis, April 2009
In fact, these scultpures remind me of a very specific Philly/Lynch memory: my first day in the city, which was the first day of 1999. Not only was it my first day in the city, but it was my first time at an art gallery. My friends and I got talking to the gallery owner, and it turned out that David Lynch had worked at that gallery for many years. She started telling us obscure anecdotes about Lynch. For example, we learned that that the old lady in The Grandmother was actually her mom, and that she had a blast filming. She took us to the back room and showed us this early David Lynch fine art etching (or another one exactly like it, I can’t remember). But the best story she told us was about Lynch’s travel habits. Apparently, he had a habit of stuffing his suitcases with absolutely disgusting things: dead rodents, two-week-old, half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, worms, grubs. These were mixed in with his personal items: suits, toothpaste, a comb. He would travel like this through airports. Just ’cause. He sometimes lost his suitcases while traveling. Just… ’cause?
More gorgeous sculptures and my portrait of the artist, after the jump.
GeoCities – or GeoShitties, as we all oh-so-cleverly called it – began in 1994 as a community of themed “virtual cities.” There’s a list of all the GeoCities neighborhood names that ever existed on this page, which also offers an illuminating explanation of how the whole process worked:
When GeoCities first started offering free web pages to the public, they decided to create themed neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was then divided into blocks (each block was numbered between 1000 up to 9999). A user would then adopt a block and thus create their own pages within that block. Thus, a user would then have their own web pages located at a URL in this format: http://www.geocities.com/neighborhood/XXXX (“XXXX” would be a four digit number). The whole management of each Neighborhood was run by volunteers – known as ‘Community Leaders’ (CL’s), which is what made the GeoCities experience so special.
This whole process was known as “homesteading”, and each user had their own “homestead”. Community Leaders helped out each “homesteader”, and created a friendly atmosphere which contributed to the rapid explosion of personal web pages on the internet.
And though it’s probably been years since any of us have even looked at a GeoCities page (and that’s probably a good thing), to some of us, those pages, with “BourbonStreet” and “SoHo” in their URLs, represented a special time: the period in which audiovisual sharing first really took off on the web. Geocities, along with Angelfire and Tripod, were among the first wave of free personal self-expression sites for the masses. It was the first time that people who weren’t born-and-bred web geeks began to establish an earnest online presence, clumsily piecing together basic HTML (“hello! border = 0!” was the big insult to fling at someone whose page lacked a certain finesse). Sure, it contaminated the web with a lot of bad poetry, but it also brought us a plethora of wonder: band fan sites, zine reviews, scanned photos of interesting strangers from across the world.
GeoCities will completely cease to exist by the end of the year, and all its sites will be wiped from the face of the web forever. Feast your eyes on few of the relics that will be soon be gone [edit: But there’s hope! æon writes in the comments, “jason scott of bbs documentary fame and a team of volunteers are archiving the whole thing.” Click here to learn of their valiant efforts.]:
How to Dance Gothic (this and other sites like it are basically where Voltaire scraped all the jokes/lore for his “how to be goth” Hot Topic bestsellers from)
So… anyone here remember a beloved Geocities site that they’d like to share? Anyone here guilty of actually having ever made their own Geocities page? Let us take a moment to commiserate and recall our first memories of the web, our favorite haunts, the ways we discovered one another. Efnet. Dalnet. Undernet. Midgaard. Webrings. Guestbooks. X of the Y sites. ASCII-embellished sigs. BBSes. Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.
What was your first circle of friends on the web? Do you still keep in touch with them? Where did you get your first taste of this great series of tubes?
