Context ruins everything

It was either post this or take a day off. I'm sorry.

JOLLY JOLLY JINGLEBEANS: THE MOVIE

This is so awesome. A brave group of film enthusiasts and thespians took a script I wrote a couple of months ago and totally did all sorts of moviemaking to it. I myself am a veteran of many kitchen-shot budget-free short films, so this strikes a particular chord in me (besides, y'know, the narcissism one).



They were surprisingly faithful to the script, down to the stage directions... When Jolly Jolly Jinglebeans appears in a fantastical burst of magic, you WILL believe in fantastical bursts of magic. Many thanks to Clav (possibly not his real name) and the rest of the crew.

If anyone would like to make any more movies for me, feel free. Suggestions: a film version of my unfinished play Robot Holocaust (up to you to finish it for me), a remake of Dr. Strangelove with puppets or cats, and old episodes of NewsRadio shot in the style of The Office.

Farting Babies (so many of them)

(Warning: some of these are probably more than farts)










The entirety of my infant videography is collected on a single VHS cassette (labeled "Family Tape #1"), currently residing on a shelf somewhere at my parents' house. These kids have had millions of strangers watch them fart and voice opinions ranging from "im gona dres my baby lik dat. how cute.:)" to "WHAT AN UGLY STUPID BABY!!!" before they turned one year old.

Hooray! It's the future! Hooray!

Public Access Television

I missed the "Golden Age of Public Access Television" (if there ever was such a thing), so I can't say that I've watched too much of it. The little I have been exposed to gives me the impression that it's about 90% bargain basement televangelists too broke-ass to hook up with the big-haired grin monsters on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, with the rest divided between prerecorded town hall meetings, Spanish-language hip-hop shows that can't get over the Green Screen effect, and college courses with a beardy professor talking to a half-empty room and a single camera.

Apparently it wasn't always like this. Apparently, back in "the day" you could catch all sorts of crazy shit that slipped through the cracks, things that weren't entertaining on the same level of other television programs so much as they were fascinating on the level of "what is this and why was this made." There is a lot of that sort of thing to be found in the world of low-budget video'd what-the-fucklery today, of course; that's about 90% of YouTube videos right there. But the difference is, with YouTube you've pretty much got to be looking for something to find it, or at least looking for something similar, and there's probably going to be a description next to it, and people commenting below to give it clarity, and a list of related videos to further frame it. In other words, even the most random and bizarre YouTube video is basically dripping with context. And as I've said before, context ruins everything.

Honestly, is homemade pseudo-Dada too much to ask for on the public airwaves in the 21st century? Basically I just wish I could have been aimlessly flipping through channels at two AM in a random bout of insomnia 20 years ago and come across something utterly bizarre and inexplicable, something untainted by logic or reason that would shake me out of my fog and then make me wonder for the rest of my days what on earth I had seen. Something like this:



If you're wondering? Yes, I did write this whole post just to have a reason to share that clip. The more I watch it the happier it makes me. I'm starting to worry myself.

Wikipedia: I hate you

If YouTube is the greatest thing about the 21st century thus far, Wikipedia is the worst. Both have similar effects on my tendency to follow any train of thought to whatever logical/illogical conclusion, which in my more formative years resulted mostly in a lot of daydreaming. Daydreaming, naturally, is only as entertaining as your imagination and/or lack of interest in whatever you're supposed to be paying attention to (school, church, relatives), and no matter how creative you are or how boring grandpa is, you're going to snap out of it sooner than later. YouTube and Wikipedia, on the other hand, take (advantage of) your idle, wandering mind and supply it with a virtually endless series of additional distractions, some directly relating to your initial train of though, some not even tangentially having to do with anything you give a half of a tenth of an ounce of a fuck of a shit about.

My attention span was shorter than that of a mosquito long before the internet. I never took Ritalin when I was a kid because I heard it made your nipples fall off, so I told my folks "please no" and we all suffered together. Now I'm in my 20s and my apartment's full of mosquitoes (I try to kill them or at least shoo them out, but they're just too focused). I'm a grown-ass man with shit to do, but not if YouTube and Wikipedia have anything to say about it.

Now: I love YouTube. Love the hell out of it. Best thing to happen to me in forever. Don't own a TV, don't need a TV. Wikipedia? To hell with it. Hate it on general principle (I'm not even going to get into how much I hate it for things like forever destroying the power of myth, or how much it creeps me out that there's already evidence of large corporations editing pages to suit their own needs (music-specific example here)), but for the purposes of this ramble I hate it for how much time I lose to it, reading about things that didn't used to matter to me, that still don't matter to me, and didn't really matter while I was reading about them. Both things are so similar in the time-waste regard, but here is the main difference:

YouTube is entertainment; Wikipedia is information.

If I'm going to be wasting my time on something in the manner of an idle daydream, I would rather it be entertaining than informative. Especially if it's information about the bullshit I tend to read, which is probably 5% science and nature, 15% history and politics, and the rest entirely meaningless and useless sub-trivia (tune in tomorrow-ish as I relate how I accidentally discovered they're making an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie and subsequently became so furious with pop culture I shit blood out my dick). Yeah, yeah, nobody puts a gun to my head and makes me read this stuff, but for chrissakes, I go and look something up (in the previous example, information about a David Cross standup special) and natural human curiosity makes me become an active participant in the downfall of my own evening. With YouTube, someone sends me a link to three guinea pigs fighting over a piece of cucumber (see: below) and shazam: I'm more than happy to give up control of my destiny to a series of cute li'l critter videos, because I'm relatively sure I'm not going to end up three hours later knowing which cast member of the 2001 Broadway revival of Caberet has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and five hours later forgetting which cast member of the 2001 Broadway revival of Caberet has obsessive-compulsive disorder.*

Look: if I want to watch an old music video or clips from a TV show I used to love or just kill some time, YouTube is incredible. If I want to know something very, very specific, I'll go to Wikipedia, but from now on I need to train myself to treat it like a mad dash into Home Depot to get something to fix a leaky sink; beyond my tendency to go "wow, I've never heard of THAT comic book!", I'm getting sick of how easy it is for us to treat an enormous chunk of the assembled collection of human knowledge as disposable and borderline meaningless.

And when I want to shake myself out of a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed stupor and go "wait, what? How did I get from thinking about my favorite Kinks songs to wondering how turtles have sex?", I want to know that I got there on my own. Just like I did when I was a kid.

*: This fact is make-believe. And no way in hell I am going to look it up on Wikipedia.

YouTube Comment Haikus

Discovering these, the most obtuse and useless form of found art imaginable, are enough to drive a man mad. YouTube comments are perhaps the lowest form of human communication, and the more of them you read the closer you are to going into a grocery store one day and walloping on people with a ball peen hammer at random.

Anyway, having said that, I now present YouTube Comment Haikus for one of today's featured videos, Jimi Hendrix on Fire (summary: man makes portrait of Jimi Hendrix out of matchsticks, then lights it on fire).

Via user Knobbsy, a teenage metal fan from the United Kingdom:

seems a shame to make
summit like that only to
burn it was great though!!

From madmonk66, a 40-year-old music afficionado (tastes veering from Venom to Soft Cell):

Wow. Is that Jimi's
schlong on fire? What is this -
Mississippi? LOL
(note: "LOL," of course, counts as one syllable ("lole") rather than three ("ell oh ell"). I made up the artform; I make up the rules)

There are probably more buried in here, but I'm slowly losing my mind looking for more so I'll stop at two for today.

After six hours of garbage, I have an internet connection at my home

I don't wanna talk about it any further. But anyway, at the risk of turning this blog into, well, a blog, here's a clip from youtube in lieu of actual, original content. These two minutes amount to one of the most profoundly affecting influences from my formative, toddling-oriented years; thank god for YouTube, and thank god for anyone and everyone who dropped acid and worked at PBS when I was a child.

This song is glorious.

Oh crud I was supposed to come back yesterday

Uh, sorry about that, internet. To be fair, returning to your side wasn't the only promise I failed to keep yesterday; I also neglected to make it into work, which meant I didn't have access to the internet save for a brief jaunt over to a friend's house (which mostly involved checking a couple email and MySpace accounts and searching YouTube for that video of the guy who programmed Showbiz Pizza robots to sing a Fergie song).

That's right. I don't have internet access at home. I also don't have cable TV, or even rabbit ears. Or a radio, now that I think about it... I'm actually starting to see a pattern emerge, but it's not like I live in a lean-to on Walden Pond or just make dolls out of corn cobs after I get off work; I'm terribly used to having the internet where I live, so much so that it has completely and totally taken the place of both television and radio as a form of passive entertainment in my life (and anyway if I wanted either one, I've got youtube, last.fm, bittorrent, and like a hundred kajillion other things). Or it had, until I moved a couple months ago and neglected to call Time Warner or Comcast or a third, theoretically/hopefully cheaper provider.

Anyway it's worked out alright so far, seeing as I work with a computer in a tiny room at a company where most people really don't seem to realize I do anything, or at least pay attention to it. But I will not be working here forever; I'm what you refer to as a "contract employee," and plus I don't seem to show up to work every day (see: yesterday) so it might even be shorter than I'm expecting.

So: sorry I balked on returning to writing on you, internet. I like you loads more than I like doing my job. Here's that Showbiz Pizza video... Someone emailed the link to me; I have yet to watch it a hundred times since YouTube videos won't play on my work computer (other things I can't do here: access MySpace; use AIM, AIM express, Yahoo Messenger or Meebo; look at pornography; not wear shoes; hit people; urinate OR defecate anywhere except a men's or unisex bathroom; make out with the cute girl in the room down the hall without probably at least asking her first*), but as far as I could tell it's the best thing that's ever happened anywhere ever.


*: I guess these last few things are pretty much true of most of society and not just where I work