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:
Once Upon A TimeTM and Long, Long Ago ® (1991 to be precise), a tiny enchanted prince came to rule over our dark and troubled kingdom. In this grand realm populated by porcelain damsels, excitable clowns, and shit-caked teddy bears with baleful button eyes, the omniscient Wee Potty Prince sees all, smells all.
Even as you read this, he’s waiting, perched on the rim of your bathtub in a jaunty red beret and suspenders. You might not see him, but he is there, I assure you. Swinging his legs, tooting on his maaaagic flute. Watching you.
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!
My parents tried so hard to protect me from the Internet. In my early years online, my dad installed CyberPatrol, a program that changed all my curse words to “****”. Fortunately, the program wasn’t too ASCII-savvy, and my exclamations of “shít!” and “fück!” echoed loud and clear across IRC. Then there was the time limit: after 2 hours online, a little dialog box would pop up and say to me, “Your Time is Up! Click OK to Sign Off” or something to that effect. Upon clicking OK, the net connection would shut down until the next day. But I found my way around that, too: I just never clicked OK, so the internet stayed on. And thank God, because otherwise I might’ve actually developed an interest in sunlight and fresh air in my teens. Fück that!
Sometime later, Bell picked up on the fears that compelled my dad to install that poorly-programmed piece of shít, and ran the ad above to promote its own version of a web-based parental control tool. You’ll note that the page that looks like the game board from Operation is actually an anatomical textbook, with the breasts, the ovaries, and – inexplicably – the stomach removed. What exactly is this ad saying – about women’s bodies, sex education, the intelligence of the parents they’re marketing to, and/or quality of the software?
Via the venerable SocImages, where commenter pcwhite notes: “I remember the controversy over this ad from several years ago. Bell trotted out the predictable non-apology stating that what they were really doing was *satirizing* the over-protective parents who would censor their kids’ anatomy illustrations. I think that’s a weasely batch of bullshit, but there you are. I also love how this ad is unintentionally truthful: filters routinely deny access to websites about sex education as well as porn.”
I thought I’d ease you guys into this post with a picture of a fluffy kitten, because I’m about to post the wrongest shit ever. Think of this intro image as a reverse unicorn chaser, because I’m sadistic like that.
So the image above and the images below come from a cozy little LiveJournal community called thrifthorror. The concept behind this community is simple:
Some things you can’t even give away … except to the church’s thrift store. Saw an abomination unto taste at the Salvation Army? Encountered pure terror – or Junior’s faintly suggestive third grade clay pot marked at $7.99- at Goodwill? Send a picture, tell the story. Maybe through our combined efforts, that pot can find a home.
Most of the images posted speak for themselves, but they get ten times better with contributors’ colorful commentary. Some select favorites, with comments from the journal, below:
Top Row
1. Leave the Wright brothers alone!! [source]
2. This is what happens when you scramble duck eggs that were nearly ready to hatch. Imagine standing over the stove, compulsively poking at your eggs with a spatula, when a little yellow head pops up from the congealing mass of rapidly denaturing proteins. Then another little head. Then another. [source]
3. Santa wants you to bend over now. [source]
Middle Row
1. Choking the Chicken? (I know, it’s a goose) [source]
2. I think, think, it’s supposed to be a humorous cover for a tissue box. [source]
3. No trip to the thrift store is complete without a pig orgy. [source]
Bottom Row
1. Take a picture, it lasts longer. [source]
2. Actually, I know where all those scuffs are from. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. This kid got beaten up. A lot. [source]
3. Everyone needs some thrift shop douche! [source]
The image (Sci-Fi Christmas, via AdsOfTheWorld) above came after I utterly failed to find pictures of Samuel Delany, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ or the late, great Octavia Butler in a festive and appropriately seasonal hat. If anyone can remedy this gaping, unforgivable hole in the historical record, please let me know. Until then, bah humbug.
All Tomorrows will be taking a special holiday intermission as I’ll be traveling for the holidays this week and I imagine many of you wonderful people will be similarly occupied. It will return, full force, on Dec. 30. We have many stunningly written worlds – weird, beautiful and hellish – in store for you lucky souls.
In the meantime, have the Star Wars Holiday Special. You’ll never want to do anything but read (far, far away from the moving images) ever again.
Diesel has quite a history of pushing the fashion ad boundaries, with mixed results. There was the creepy fat guy ads. The “let’s see how many ads we can get banned” phase (that one was banned). The flower ejaculate ad. And the global warming is fun campaign. They’ve even seriously pissed off dentists. Now, they’ve started a self-described “Dark” effort (here’s 1, 2 recent print examples). This effort includes the below four-minute web video “Pete The Meat Puppet.” The ad agency responsible for this edgy craziness is Sweden’s Farfar, who sport the spiffy tagline “the original in time-bandit advertising.” (How clever! [I don’t get it.]) It’s certainly well-produced, but well, sorry Farfar. It’s not funny, and it’s not weird or dark enough to be interesting. If you’re going get all non-selly with your advertising Diesel, you better leave me with something remarkably memorable. Pete’s stupid story continues here on Diesel’s website, if you’re for some reason intrigued. It features “beat the meat” and “sirloins” of my mother jokes. I didn’t make it through it.
Oh… my. Wayne just memed my ass out with the most astonishing OMGWTFBBQ music video of the year. Imagine what might happen if the rennies spiked your mead with DMT at Medieval Times. It is Epic. It is Über.
Meet Chris Dane Owens. He is here to fuck you, amigo. Fuck you earnestly, somberly, savagely, without the courtesy of a reach-around. For he is Legolas on a meth binge. He is Limahl with brass balls. His “Shine on Me” video is the prodigious, tumescent, chain-mail-piercing, pirate-booty-plundering, Adobe After Effects-abusing, alligator-exploiting, stock footage-pillaging D&D Destructo Dildo to the insidious butt plug of Brokencyde’s “Freaxx”.
Keep watching. Don’t click away. Follow that sparkly green Gretsch all the way to the finish line. Take it to the hilt, paladin.
The images above and below are just a few from JeongSee Yoon’s Pink And Blue Project, an ongoing set of images dealing with gender, consumerism, and globalization. Dozens of surreal, hyperdetailed images of mostly Asian boys and girls with their blue and pink things appear on Yoon’s page. The girls’ images are what strike me the most. “It looks like these little princesses vomited fairy-floss all over themselves,” observes Katie Olson at Lifelounge, then adds: “Fabulous.” Indeed!
It wasn’t always this way. The color pink, Yoon notes, was once considered the color of masculinity, a watered-down version of the virile color red. He quotes a 1914 American newspaper that advises parents to “use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” The reversal of colors for boys and girls occurred only after World War II. Writes Yoon, “as modern society entered twentieth century political correctness, the concept of gender equality emerged and, as a result, reversed the perspective on the colors associated with each gender as well as the superficial connections that attached to them. Today, with the effects of advertising on consumer preferences, these color customs are a worldwide standard.” This is the first time I’ve ever heard the claim that the feminist movement is somehow even indirectly responsible for “pink for girls.” Some quick “say it ain’t so!” Internet research reveals that historians have been unable to pinpoint the reason for the post-WWII color reversal. Reasons for the reversal have been pinned on everything from the Nazis (who labeled the homosexuals in their camps with pink triangles) to a cultural desire on post-war America’s part to bury Rosie the Riveter and replace her with Susie Homemaker. A plausible theory – and I think I uncovered the missing link!
With stores like nANUFACTURE in Spain marketing to parents who wish to avoid the pink/blue dichotomy, it’s clear that color-coding your child’s life is increasingly being seen as unfashionable, even a bit creepy – though, as SocImages points out, this expensive store’s “Save the Babies” campaign may be “more about ‘saving’ kids from things these young, hip parents think are lame or uncool.” Even without the aid of hipster-kid clothing boutiques, parents have a myriad of choices for dressing their kids. As Yoon shows us, some skip out on the pink/blue thing altogether.
For parents of transgender children, on the other hand, the choices today are more complicated than ever. If your soninsists, every day, for years,since the moment he can talk, that he’s a girl and not a boy, what kind of clothing do you buy? What kind of toys do you give them? A fascinating article in the current Atlanticexamines this issue, focusing on the growing culture of parents who wish to honor their children’s wishes – and the difficulties that accompany such a decision. Delving into everything from children’s rights to Freudian therapy resembling scenes from But I’m a Cheerleader to the heartbreaking story of David Reimer (from the book As God Made Him), the article compassionately examines families on both sides of the fence, chronicling the paths of families who decide to go with their children’s wishes, and those who decide to fight against them.
Advertising copywriters and art directors are always looking for the never-before-seen visual twist to sell a product; it’s what we live for (well that, and the gifts/ass-sucking of media reps). But sometimes, in the holy quest to be Cannes Gold Lion original, ad creatives shutdown their left cerebral hemisphere and lose their fucking minds.
It’s easy to follow the creative brief thought process here: “Toilet Duck gets your shitter so clean…it (blankity blank blank blank).” It’s a perfectly acceptable toilet cleaner strategy. However, showing a woman using a hopper to wash her face is not an acceptable dramatization—I don’t care how long or bristly her toilet brush is. This image (click here for closer look) has to immediately turn off a large portion of potential buyers, yes? At best, she is getting harsh chemical residue in her eyes/mouth/nose. At worst… Now, I’d personally have no problem washing my face in my toilet, if I had no other choice. But remember, I’m obsessed with commodes…
This ad (click here for closer look), via Colombia, is…bizarre. It’s for Nutrecan senior dog food. And that is a blow-up sex dog doll, complete with blowjob mouth. I really don’t need/want to see the rear view. You can kinda feel your way to wtf the ad agency was thinking here: the sex dog doll is for “adult” dogs only, as is this dog food. But, throwing some logic into the dog pound for a sec, canines wouldn’t be interested in a sex dog doll. Only humans (and primates) stick their willies into plastic holes. Plus…why are you attempting to sell dog food with a SEX DOG DOLL? OK. So, which visual is wronger? Tell me, Coilhousers!
