This is the sort of thing that YouTube was seemingly made for. User knoertz takes the mid-nineties Quentin Tarantino, pop-culture touchstone Pulp Fiction and chops and slices, copies and pastes it into a rhythmic audio/visual magnum opus. A cut-up of a cut-up. William S. Burroughs would approve.
Those who only casually listen to the lyrical stylings of hip-hop scribe Eminem may not be aware of the many intricacies found therein. However, any serious scholar of the man’s oeuvre will inform you that, should one truly wish to understand the depth and sheer breadth of his work, one must listen to it in the original Klingon. Only then will one truly grasp his mastery of the language, the way in which he subverts and molds the guttural utterances, fashioning witty puns and subtle adianoetae — which are, more often than not, lost in the translation to English — making him very much the Nabokov of rap. To that end, I present his classic treatise and social indictment, Without Me performed in his native tongue.
Michael Doyle over at Burnlab reports, “I stumbled across this clip from The Year of Living Dangerously this morning while doing a search for Vangelis [the seminal electronic music composer responsible for the Blade Runner score]. Ripley and Mad Max making out to Vangelis = awesome.” Aww!
Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson in Peter Weir’s brilliant film The Year of Living Dangerously
Other purists may throw rocks at me for saying this, but… REALLY, REALLY WANT:
(Via Darla Teagarden.)
MMMNNGGHPH. Browns, why must you insist upon torturing a grubby, low-rent gal like me with that ridiculous price tag?!
Related anecdote: A snarky acquaintance of mine back in NYC used to enjoy cornering club-going trustifarians who dared to don the “Unknown Pleasures” tee and making them squirm by demanding that they explain the image they were wearing. If their answer wasn’t knowledgeable enough to his liking, he’d trap them against the DJ booth and deliver lengthy lectures on pulsar theory, the film Stroszeck, or cocaine-in-a-condom drug mule death statistics.
(Annoying as he was, I kinda miss that dude.)
Last week, after Coilhouse’s crushing loss to neonatal mush pushers among others, an impromptu battle began, based on the desire to unleash risque and tasteless content, which had theretofore been stifled in the hopes that Those Who Were Judging Us would not be horrified by our dribblings, which they may have been regardless of our self-censorship. I did not participate, for I am above such puerile displays of gross indecency.
Nadya’s wink to Bob Flanagan did, however, serve to bring to mind a formative event in the formation of my alt-culture understanding, which you see embedded above. The rumor of “the Broken movie” came into existence almost simultaneously with the release of the album and it was not long before its legend had grown into dark and monumental proportions. Chief amongst the details of these rumors was that the film was interspersed with scenes from a real, honest-to-god snuff film which, it was further postulated, was from Trent Reznor’s personal collection of snuff films which he most likely kept in a vault of some sort, no doubt situated in the catacombs under the abandoned warehouse in the industrial park that he called home. Or maybe just in a box under his bed in his L.A. mansion. Who knows. What we did know, my friends and I, was that we needed to find this movie.
It would be many years before that would actually come to pass and, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I would get to see The Broken Movie in its entirety, after having already seen most of it on the official release of Closure. Mr. Flanagan, of course, plays a significant role in the film, being as he is the centerpiece of the video for Happiness in Slavery. The Broken Movie did not disappoint and, while it was obvious that there was no way what I was watching was a snuff film, it was still rather shocking at the time. Years later, scarred from my time on the net, I suppose it holds less sway. Some of its imagery has, disturbingly, almost become mundane; but only some. Watching it again there is still plenty here that makes me wince. Time and knowledge have, thankfully, not managed to wash away completely the feeling of watching something, perhaps, taboo.
Author’s Note: Nothing linked in this post is safe for work. Some of it is not safe for life.
Popularized by singer/actor Kishore Kumar, “Eena Meena Deeka” is a highly addictive, nonsensical tune written for the 1957 film Aasha. It is noteworthy for being one of Hindi cinema’s very first rock n’ roll numbers. If something about the lyrics reminds you of the childhood limerick “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe”, it’s with good reason: the words of the song were inspired by kids playing outside composer C. Ramchandra’s music room. Via Wiki:
Ramchandra and his assistant John Gomes were inspired to create first line of the song, “Eena Meena Deeka, De Dai Damanika”. Gomes, a Goan, added the words “Maka naka” (Konkani for “I don’t want”), and they kept on adding more nonsense rhymes till they ended with “Rum pum po!”
I’d never heard this alternate, feminine version until the lovely Mme Darla Teagarden posted it on her Facebook. It’s just as faboo as the Kumar version:
Phonetic lyrics after the jump.
Hey guys, remember our big “Vote for Coilhouse” effort from about week ago? Well, the three finalists have been announced, and unfortunately, we weren’t selected, despite your incredible feat of getting us into the top 10 out of over 4,000 nominees in under 24 hours with your votes. The finalists are Sacred Wind Communications (a telecom company), Beacon Paint & Hardware (I was excited when I originally misread this as “BACON PAINT”) and Happybaby organic baby foods. We wish them all the best during the remainder of the competition.
Actually, this is a huge relief. For the past week, we’ve all been kind of second-guessing ourselves every time we made a blog post, asking: “is this too risqué? Should we go easy with the gross/weird stuff, just this week, to avoid scaring the judges away from picking us as a finalist?” For some, the pressure was too great: Ross kept writing and deleting draft after draft until he just snapped, covering the walls of his office with writing in feces.
Now that all the suspense is over, it’s a huge relief to feel like we can write about anything we want (which most of us ended up doing last week anyway) without feeling any apprehension or guilt. Anything I personally might’ve felt too cautious to blog about last week, I will blog about in my next few posts, with interest! I kick off this trend with a song by one of our great heroes, Bob Flanagan, from Kirby Dick’s documentary Sick. If you don’t know who Mr. Flanagan was, the song explains it all. Much more about Bob Flanagan at a later date.
In the end, grant or no grant, we’ll make it. It would’ve been easier and faster with that funding, but we learned through this “Vote for Coilhouse” experience that we have something more valuable than any amount money that any large company could bestow upon us: a caring, kind, loyal group of friends & readers that was willing to support us when we asked for help. Also, we got a brief taste of what it’s like to feel beholden to a large company for any kind of support, and we did not like that feeling at all. We don’t need them to make it; we just need you guys. Thank you, all, from the bottom of our hearts.
My voice has a quiver.
A quiver is where you keep arrows until you shoot them.
–Jim Carroll, “The Child Within”
Punk rock poet and memoirist Jim Carroll, best know for The Basketball Diaries and his band’s morbid 1982 hit single “People Who Died” just died of a heart attack in his Manhattan home on September 11th.
He was a prolific talent who led a fascinating life, and a true NYC iconoclast. The body of work he leaves behind is a bristling brew of passion and nihilism, low-balling humor and highbrow intelligence.
You gotta admit, sixty full years of life yielding an illustrious career in writing and music ain’t a bad inning for a scrappy juvenile delinquent who got hooked on heroin at 13. I’m glad he made it. Rest in peace, Catholic Boy.
This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. This may seem like hyperbole, especially when one considers my posting history on these internets, but I assure you it is not. This may be due to the fact that I am old enough to remember when the news that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide was A Big Deal. I knew some people who may have shed a tear or more upon hearing this proclamation. Those people will, no doubt, deny the veracity of that statement, but we both know it to be true. Maybe, on the other hand, it is simply due to my curmudgeonly nature, that wizened, frowning, disapproving aspect of my personality given to bemoaning the state of modern music and remonstrating youths for loitering on my well manicured lawn.
Whatever the reason, Chilean singer Abigail’s version of the Nirvana classic Smells Like Teen Spirit remains a stupendous atrocity; a pop-techno re-imagining devoid of irony but instead recorded with what seems to be a complete lack of understanding. I’m no great fan of the band but, really, I think they deserve better than this. Of course, I could be completely wrong. This could, in actuality, be an exquisitely orchestrated trolling a thoughtful deconstruction of Grunge; ruthlessly exposing its teen existential angst as petulant whinging and bubblegum philosophy.
Only Abigail knows for sure.
Have I mentioned lately that Archive.org is the sh…
…aving cream? It really is. You could stand to spend more time over there, trust me.
Avid listeners of Dr. Demento will recognize this song by Benny Bell. I’m too young to boast that I listened to Dr. D back in the day, when he first brought about the Jewish-American singer/songwriter’s revival. However, I was lucky enough to live down the block from one Mister Goodman, a charming alcoholic widower with a portable record player. On balmy late summer afternoons, he’d sit on his front porch nursing a tall glass of “ice water” and playing old LPs. Naturally, Benny Bell’s relentlessly juvenile double-entendres were a huge hit with the neighborhood kids.
Mr Goodman was more than happy to play us classic Bell ditties like “Without Pants”, “A Goose For My Girl” and “My Grandfather Had a Long One” over and over again, provided we promised never to sing them in front of our parents. We were more than happy to hang out on his lawn for hours, sipping cans of 7-UP and shouting “SSSSSHHHHHAVING CREAM” at appropriate (and inappropriate) intervals until Mr. Goodman fell too far into his cups and started muttering darkly about Korea. At which time we’d all claim we heard our mothers calling and head home for dinner.
Anyhoo. Archive.org’s got a ton of Bell’s material available for legal download, for free. Cheers.
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