I usually do not deal in the trafficking of memery. It is an unsavory business, rife with dirty dealings and nonsense; a labyrinth of obtuse, Dadaist humor and Surrealist reasoning understood only by the hive-mind. The dank corners and fetid intricacies of such a world are no place for the upstanding lady or gentleman. No, this is the habitat of the unwashed; a city whose denizens walk the streets stinking and hunched.
Still, on occasion I have allowed myself to glimpse into this dreary plane of existence. Unable to contain my curiosity I have fallen prey to weakness of mind and spirit, like a common voyeur, hoping to glimpse the pale, smooth topography of a woman’s bare ankle.
One of the more recent memes to emerge has been that of Keyboard Cat, the now deceased feline Fatso, who appears appended to clips in order to accentuate the misfortunes of the individuals therein. It is, at the moment, a fairly popular meme, spawning dozens of videos, clogging the Intertubes like so much exuviated pubic hair.
With that in mind, I present the above clip to you as it offers a unique glimpse into the demise of such a meme. This is the ultimate, the crowning achievement in the brief career of Keyboard Cat. The day has been won, this particular contest is now over. With the help of Helen Hunt, a small dose of cocaine PCP, and the musical stylings of Hall & Oates a crescendo has been reached. The curtain can now close and the participants may now take their final bow. This show is over.
We’ve all seen the photo. Some of us have put it up on our wall. There are few more primal symbols of the power of individual rebellion than Jeff Widener’s single shot of one unidentified Chinese man standing in front of a line of tanks.
There had seemed so much right with their movement, their ideals, the spontaneous coming together across political creeds and backgrounds to demand freedom, to build a towering “Goddess of Democracy,” which they then brought forth to challenge Mao’s old, looming portrait.
For a shining moment, it seemed like she was winning.
It is 20 years since June 5, 1989. Twenty years since a peaceful uprising of students, intellectuals, rebels and working people that seem poised to set free the world’s most populous nation finally ended in blood and tragedy in Tiananmen square.
Below the fold are some photos that you may not have seen. Some are, to give fair warning, quite gruesome, but they reflect reality: over a thousand people that lost their lives trying to push their part of the world in a better direction.
In a time when most interest in China involves how much money can be squeezed from it, Tiananmen has faded into memory for far too many. It is more important than ever to remember the atrocities its government committed — and still commits — to keep its stranglehold on power. News of the Chinese government ramping up censorship before the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacres serve as a stark reminder of the things that have not changed.
The truth cannot die. Nothing will erase the reality of what was done. It is a reminder too, that there is nothing inscrutable about the East, that hundreds of thousands were willing to risk and sacrifice for the same goals sought around the world.
Some things should never be forgiven — or forgotten.
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:
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
-Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The late, great Thompson’s masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been a favorite of mine ever since my father gave me his battered, paperback copy to read in high school. All these years later its magical lunacy is still just as powerful as when I first found Duke and his attorney in the desert.
No surprise then that I am enamored of Jonathan Baldwin’s Rauol inspired, narcotics themed board game. A worthy display piece for anyone with a yen for H.S.T.’s particular brand of mayhem.
A young boy is trapped in an abusive home. As his parents become increasingly detached, demeaning, and violent he finds sanctuary in the attic. There, he plants magic seeds from which a grandmother grows.
David Lynch made Grandmother in 1970 on a total budget of $7,200. This incredible film [David’s third] was shot in Lynch’s house in Philadelphia, where he painted the walls black and the actors white. The lack of dialogue, with everything conveyed through guttural noises, barking, and a score from a local group, Tractor, compliments the stylized, stripped down atmosphere that’s since become the Lynch standard.
This depiction of childhood escapism yanks us away to that special place where everything is very, very WRONG. No one is better than David at evoking that sense of creeping dread, that beautiful paranoia! But there is love here too, unconditional and pure, as the grandmother provides everything the boy’s parents deny him. A dream, a nightmare and a slow attack on the psyche – watch all 5 parts below when you have a quiet hour to spare.
Go ahead. Read it. Just don’t send me your psychiatric bills.
-from the Analog review of Antibodies
Welcome back, dear Coilhaüsers, to All Tomorrows. This time we’re going a bit outside of our usual Deviant Era range to take a deep, long (yeah, you’ll never forgive me) look at David J. Skal’s 1988 novel Antibodies. A little later than the usual works, yes, but if anything gets captures the guts of Deviant Era’s transgressive glories, it’s this pitch-black wallow on the wrong side of Transhumanism.
Skal, mostly a horror historian, wrote only a handful of science fiction novels, and this was the last. It’s not hard to see why. Antibodies is a horror tale in future clothing: a detailed examination of how nasty it gets when humans try to permanently scrap flesh for metal, and how easily believing plebs are still led to the slaughter by their puppet-masters.
I’ve recommended a lot of disturbing books in this column and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon, but I will warn you right now: Antibodies is not for everyone. It is a deeply disturbing, brutally unsparing book. The anonymous reviewer from Analog wasn’t fucking around. This is a tale with no mercy and no illusions. You’ve been warned.
For those of you who have yet to “taste the unko“, Kago has produced some of the most disturbing manga imagery you’ll ever see short of Suehiro Maruo‘s or Keiji Nakazawa‘s… only his output is as likely to give you a bad case of The Totally Inappropriate Giggles as make you gag. These new animations, while crude in comparison to his more elaborate illustrated work, will likely do both.
Randy Now: We had this big on/off breaker switch that fed the power to the stage. It was gigantic; it looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie from the ’20s it was so huge. He’s yelling, “Pull the plug! Pull the plug!” And that thing just cut the power to the stage and so we pulled it.
Tony Rettman: Gibby set his arm on fire and he was waving it at people. When things got crazy, I was too young to be scared, I didn’t know enough to know that things like that aren’t supposed to happen.
Tim Hinely: Everyone realized the plug got pulled and was pissed. People were yelling, “Bouncers suck!”
Mickey Ween: And that set off a whole series of events. The lights came on and the PA went out, and the whole place was filled with smoke, either from a smoke machine or his burning arm, and when the house lights go up, you could see everyone for the first time. The two drummers kept going and Gibby had the bullhorn and it turned into this tribal hell. That’s what was so great about seeing the Buttholes, it was like you were in Hell, especially if you’re on drugs.
The entire transcript is fucking golden. It’s taken from the upcoming book No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving: How a Seedy New Jersey Club Defined an Era, “an oral history of ’80s and ’90s-era alternative/punk music told through the portal of one club-Trenton, New Jersey’s legendary City Gardens.” (Someone should really expand that Wiki stub!)
In sixth grade, my class visited a Long Island nursing home. The experience was supposed be uplifting; back in the classroom we’d been studying Ellis Island, and the teachers excitedly informed us that we’d have the opportunity to gather first-person accounts of the immigrant experience, from people who’d been there! When we arrived at the nursing home, we were ready with our little pencils and notebooks and mini-recorders. We broke up into pairs and made our way around the room, each team spending about 5-10 minutes with each of the home’s geriatric inhabitants.
When we got back to the classroom the next day, nobody talked about what had happened. The teachers never mentioned the field trip again, and we weren’t asked to write a report. We turned to a new chapter in the textbook, and teachers hastened on to tell us all about how the U.S. had won the war and saved the rest of the world in the 40s. But we learned a valuable lesson that day, even if no one acknowledged it aloud. When we tried to interview the people at the nursing home, most of them they stared right past us. They drooled. They moaned and mumbled absently. The few who were actually aware of our presence spoke a little, but it was gibberish; no conversation lasted more than 2 minutes before the train of thought evaporated. The lesson we learned that day, completely not intended by our teachers, was to dread and fear the process of losing our minds with age.
Granted, we saw the worst-case scenario. It was a very poor nursing home that we went to, the kind of place where people with no loving/living relatives eventually end up in storage. Still, that memory can’t be erased – not until the moment when all memories start to slip, as I learned the year my grandmother used Palmolive instead of olive oil when making eggs one morning. Within a couple of years, she didn’t remember who I was, and soon afterward forgot herself. The books she’d read, the places she’d been – they were all gone. Between that and the aforementioned school trip of doom, I developed what’s probably one of my biggest fears.
Then, there are people who give me hope, like Terry Pratchett, who got was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s last year. Well, he didn’t take that diagnosis lying down; he donates to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, cheerfully refers to his condition as The Embuggerance, participates in experimental programs to find a cure, and continues to work on Unseen Academicals, the thirty-seventh book in the Discworld series. It’s the opposite of how my grandmother approached it, and maybe the attitude makes all the difference. “My father always used to say you have to be philosophical about things, by which he meant stoical,” he joked in a Times interview last year. “The future is going to happen whether I’m scared of it or not so I do my best not to be. Around about five o’clock in the morning things might be different but you just have to face it.” He’s right, of course. I just hope that if the same condition strikes me, I’ll be just as brave. And keep my fingers crossed in hope that by that time, every old person’s home will have a Holodeck installed.
I do not have a confession to make. I do not have an abiding and utterly irrational love of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Not at all. Really, I don’t. Anything you may have heard to the contrary is the most vile and vicious slander. Again: I don’t like it. I sure as hell don’t crank up the volume when it comes on the radio. No Sirree. That’s only a repeated, annoying technical malfunction. I also, absolutely, 100% do not sing along in an overly dramatic fashion. Nope. Not me. Uh-uh.
The last thing I don’t do is lie awake at night, fearful that if my (non-existent) secret love of this power ballad came to light it would utterly ruin my reputation and any future rants of mine would be outright dismissed as they came up against the cold, hard brick wall of “Hey, Forbes is obviously wrong. The bastard likes Total Eclipse of the Heart. End of discussion.”
I mean, after all, it’s a terrible song: the gaudiest kind of syrupy ’80s excess. The video is even more awesome worse, so mind-numbingly ornate it provokes long, detailed thematic dissections. It has dancing greasers, sweaty fencers and dashing lads in suits wrecking elaborate dinners. And ninjas, of course, you can’t forget the frickin’ ninjas. Or the flying hive-mind of choir boys with radioactive eyes. Oh yeah, there’s also an angel. Really.
But all is not lost. If there is something I have no shame in adoring, hidden or otherwise, it’s the brilliant kitchen appliance battering, tracksuit-wearing Norwegian band Hurra Torpedo‘s cover of TEotH (my how I love that acronym. It sounds like an invocation to some grand hell-beast! Come, Great TEotH!). Minimalist and silly but surprisingly poignant, Hurra gives a whole new feel to this song-I-so-don’t-like.
See there? Doesn’t banging on kitchen appliances make everything better? Damnf’in rightitdoes!
