Be it impossible heels, rib-crushing corsets or extremely tight pants, many beautiful items leave us suffering for fashion. While sadistic sartorial contraptions are a thing of the past for most, those of us from thee Darque Side continue to shun comfort and reason in favor of looking really fucking hot. Sadly, “really fucking hot” takes on a sinister literal meaning with the onset of summer. Only the very brave manage to find the strength to maintain their look in the face of nature’s merciless opposition, and Goths In Hot Weather – a new blog dedicated to “celebrating the Sunshine Goth” has noticed.
With events like Bats Day and costumed picnics popping up across the globe, goths are being continuously lured out and into the cruel, cruel sunshine. Alas, what to do but proudly brandish that parasol, cake on the SPF 75 and face the season in all its scorching ice cream and surfboard glory. I’m currently wishing I had a bit of extra time to dig through my photos for a worthy submission. If your moments of summer fashion victory [or defeat] get posted on Goths In Hot Weather, please link to them in the comments section here!
(Via Gala Darling. Bear with the janky visuals and audio! It’s worth it.)
Confession: I am a terrible dancer. Really, truly awful. Nothing graceful, mysterious, strong or sexy about me on a disco floor. More like a capuchin monkey being electrocuted. Once, in my early twenties, partying at a club in downtown NYC (land of folded arms, reserved weight-shifting and ambivalent head-nodding) a friend pulled me aside and frankly informed me “sweetie, you look like a twat out there.” For one immensely painful split second, I was deeply wounded. But the bullet passed through non-vital tissue. No permanent damage.
“I know. So what?” I pinched my friend’s cheek, went right back out there and recommenced shakin’ my monkeymaker.
Yes, many of us are terrified of making asses out of ourselves for all eternity. Me too. But when it comes to dancing for the sheer joy of it, all bets are off. All of you cool coordinated kids in the peanut gallery can point and laugh, but babies, you’re the ones missing out. Mark Twain knew his shit, and like Maude once said, “everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can’t let the world judge you too much.”
Who knows? Maybe the world just wants to join in the fun.
California-born dancer/singer Heather Parisi isn’t a household name in the US, but some of our Mediterranean readers might recognize her. Back in the late 70s, an Italian producer discovered the flexible 19-year-old sunning on a beach in Rimini. Parisi was set up with the best thrustiest jazz choreographer liras could buy, pimped out in one seriously bedazzlicious wardrobe, and became an Italian TV pop sensation overnight.
There are so many transcendentally Stupid/Awesome aspects to this video for her song “Crilù”, it’s hard to know where to start. Just… enjoy.
Gyrations atop a giant Rubik’s cube? Check. Uber groiny, hardbodied ballet dancers in metallic bowler shoes? Check. Intimated BJ three-way with male Moschino models? Check. Glittering Mickey Mouse butt cleavage? OKAY NOW THAT’S JUST GOING TOO FAR.
Clip via DJ Dead Billy, thanks. More Parisi videos after the jump. Additionally, if you appreciate this level of Stupid/Awesome 80s kitsch, you may also like:
Murder Rock (Italian horror director Lucio Fulci’s answer to Flashdance)
Fellow Angel City residents! If you love love music and obscure video, tonight – Thursday April 30 – holds a very special treat. Joe of Target Video, a legendary San Francisco-based punk video archive, has gathered some rarities from the past which The Silent Movie Theater will screen tonight only. On the menu, from Target Video’s newsletter:
Unlike our “Underground Forces” series, this show is more MTV style so that we could get in as many bands as possible. This stuff is direct from the library, and unrefined.
Need I convince you further? Well, I’m afraid I can’t because finding all those band links has rendered me incapable. However, here’s Castration Squad, rocking their way into your hearts straight from Hollywood, 1980.
“Jack is 53, doesn’t look any more dead than me” Ahh, yess.
Whether this will be a roaring trip down memory lane or an introductory crash course depends on you, but one thing is certain: this night is not to be missed! I’ll be there honing my knowledge and toasting the event with cheap champagne, if my last visit to this theater is any indication.
The Silent Movie Theater is located 611 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036, 323-655-2510
The show starts at 7:30.
[Of course there will be sound]
This was a student film made by Sundance filmmaker Madeleine Olnek about Leni Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday. If you take it literally, it could be a little mean-spirited towards the old lady. I mean, Leni wasn’t that obviously smug in the interviews that served as reference. There’s a little more depth to her. I mean, she never said that shit about Helen Keller in real life. Poor little Leni. What an unfair portrayal.
But if you take this short film as satirical commentary on artists who contribute to certain regimes and then try to pull that “I didn’t know there were politics going on!” shit later, which is how I think this film is meant to be taken, it’s fucking hilarious. My favorite real-life moment on par with the absurdity in this clip comes from a famous 1979 interview with (utterly homoerotic) Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, whose work was hailed by Hitler as the antithesis to all so-called degenerate art. Journalist Andre Müller, considered one of the hardest interviewers of his generation, described the scene thus:
When he mentioned the tragic consequences of his professional activities under Hitler, his isolation and desperation, his wife trembled with laughter. When I asked her what she found so amusing, she replied that normally her husband spoke in a completely different way. During a stroll around the garden, where several sculptures dating from the National Socialist period were on display, she told me: “I don’t listen when he tries to discuss politics, it bores me.”
A macabre incident occurred when I asked the sculptor about his attitude toward the gassing of the Jews. Precisely at that moment, [Breker’s art dealer] inserted a new tape into his recorder and mistakenly pressed the play button, so that my words were accompanied by a few bars of dance music.
And no. I can’t read the words “Nazi” and “dance music” in such close proximity to each other without bopping my head to this song. It’s funny. It’s not funny.
Howdy! How about a lively morning cartoon to go with your fruity pebbles? Zoetica’s recent post on the lamentable declension of MTV’s programming reminded me of this little gem:
Created as a senior project by animator and RISD legend, Christy Karacas, “Space Wars” aired internationally on a charming, offbeat MTV show called Cartoon Sushi back in 1997. The content and mood of Cartoon Sushi was sort of a cross between Liquid Television and Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. Sadly, it barely lasted a year on the air. Suprise, surprise.
A couple of years later, Karacas joined forces with Stephen Warbick to unleash BAR FIGHT upon an unsuspecting world. The film “was rejected from every festival it was ever entered in” and it’s a bit… well, let’s just say it’s more a Better Than Beer experience –or possibly Better Than Dimethyltryptamine– than anything else. Still, it’s under the cut if you think you’re feeling up to graphic, color-saturated gore and toilet humor this early in the morning.
Nowadays, we have no shortage of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness mindbuggery from Karacas/Warbick; their show Superjail! premiered on Adult Swim last year. (Bless you, Cartoon Network, for picking up where Liquid Television left off.)
“Raquel Welch is the rudest, most unprofessional actress I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with, and if I could, I would spank her from here to Aswan.” -James Mason, on working with Welch in the murder mystery flick The Last of Sheila.
Well, good MORNING. James Mason quote, meet Stroke Material tag! Go ahead and take a minute to visualize the sexily sinister three-time Academy Award winner taking Welch, undisputed Bikini Queen of the 20th Century, over his knee… preferably while you watch a few of Welch’s most VA VA VOOM performances available on YouTube. We’ll start things off with this 1970 clip of the astronomically hot Ms. Welch and two swishy spacemen dancing in the Ruta de la Amistad public sculpture project of Mexico City:
Moog-a-licious, no? The clip originally aired in Raquel Welch’s 1970 television special. Added bonus to the Barbarella bikini action: her killer Parisian Red Riding Hood steez in that latter number!
Apocalypse Meow is the Americanized title of Cat Shit One, a dark and befuddling manga series by Motofumi Kobayashi. Published in the late 90s, the book features a team of fuzzy wuzzy widdle bunny wabbits in an American special ops team battling the forces of cutesy wootsy wily Viet Cong kitty cats on a wide variety of historically accurate, often graphically violent recon missions. Characters are depicted as different species according to nationality; Yankees as rabbits, the Vietnamese as cats, Frenchmen as pigs, Koreans as dogs, Australians as koala bears, etc.
Yyyyeah. Cute Overload it ain’t. Or Watership Down, for that matter. And now, it would seem that Anima Studio has produced an equally gory animated trailer/short based off the manga. Only this time, special ops team Cat Shit One is in the Middle East, fighting… Taliban camels? Taliban camels wearing… turbans?
Oh god. Oh my god. Ohmygodwhatthefuckbarbeque, even.
Replete with M4A1 annihilation and bargain basement Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-soundalike ululations. Keepin’ it classy.
Clip via Sean Dicken. Thanks for the nightmares, Sean.
Once again, we’re in editorial lockdown for the print magazine. Can you tell? I was going to upload a clever animated gif of a tumbleweed to momentarily distract all of us, then recalled something far more entertaining, courtesy of RAINBOWPUKE.COM:
Weeeee!
Their mission statement:
RainbowPuke exists so that fans of puking rainbows have a place to make their collective voices heard. In this celebration of the greatest dichotomy, you don’t have to be an artist to join in the wave of multi-colored vomit that’s sweeping the world. Simply email us your best attempt at a drawing of a rainbow puking up a rainbow of colors and we’ll post it here on RainbowPuke.com for the everybody to see.
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!)
