I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Korean Fried Chicken is amazing. It’s super amazingly delicious. It makes you do this:

Washington Post’s Peep Show 2

One Manga

I found this site back in January and started obsessively reading the most bizarre titles on the site (top picks: competitive makeover artists vs. a reluctant “Iron Beautician,” another good one is about a tough guy who’s face burns off in a bus crash and a mad “perverted” doctor gives him the face of the girl he has a crush on; sexual hijinx ensue). There’s a huge network of “fan translators” who do titles that no publishing house in the US would touch. Too weird. Too niche. Too old. Too Japanese.

Between this and the videos on crunchyroll.com (go there and watch Bartender if you haven’t) and episodes of The Bob Newhart Show on hulu.com), I will never pay for entertainment media again. (You hear that, all megaproducers of entertainment on the fence as to whether you will make a profit from putting things on the internet? I WILL NEVER pay you money or support your advertisers. Haw haw. Jokes on you!)

Connoisseurs of cable access may have caught at some point this incredibly bizarre romance movie/special (it doesn’t seem to be a series) where a very visibly retarded man attempts to woo the woman of his dreams (also very clearly mentally disabled) first through a series of daydreams done in the style of early silent cinema, then through the advice of group-home custodian David Johansen (Scrooged, The New York Dolls, “Hot Hot Hot,” etc.).

Like many of you, my thought process after seeing this was three stage:

#1. Is that really Buster Poindexter?

#2. Did I dream this or actually see it on TV for real?

#3. I wonder what Buster Poindexter did to get this community service.

Anyway, I saw it two other times on MNN in the past couple years, so it IS real. It’s title is something like “World’s Greatest Lover.” If you’re not patient enough to see this Flying Dutchman of amateur film making resurface at random, go see Be Kind, Rewind in theatres now.

Mr. Gondry has directed the entire cast to behave as if they were severely retarded for the entire movie. (Not act dumb or perform badly, I mean, but behave, move and speak as if they all are mentally challenged or have some kind of brain damage.) I hope the two hours I wasted on this movie can count against my community service

When I first started hanging out with (read: drinking heavily in bars with) Mitch Magee two years ago, he used to rally everyone into toasts which for a brief window of time changed from the usual vagueries of “to a brighter tomorrow” to “to Barack Obama.” Like most people with better things to worry about at the time, I had no idea who Barack Obama was but I enjoyed changing his name into other things. So, the idea for this doodle has been discussed for almost two years and now that I’ve actually executed it… probably not worth it.

I’m sure I’ll redo this at some point.

In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop….. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

(from Swilkes)

This is my current favorite song—

Totally charming. However, the first 1:20 are credits. Boo! Skip ‘em.

Despite the fact it may forward the curse, I watched the rest of Roadhouse this weekend, then followed it with The Great Moment (out-of-character Sturges heroic dentist biopic) and Real Life (showcasing Albert Brook’s horrifying shoulder fur)

My parents were in town, briefly, and I went to the Met (museum, not opera) with them. They’ve renovated the 19th/18th Century painting area (I can’t remember what the old gallery looked like… I probably could reconstruct the layout of the National Gallery in DC from memory, though). The three temporary shows were a parade of snooze and yuck though… Courbet,Poussin, and Jasper Johns: Gray.

However, on Sunday, I have found a new obsession. I’ve been a cranky snob about the last couple years about the revival schedules put up at Film Forum. They flipflop from being paint-dryingly dull retrospectives of the third-best forgotten masters of Japanese drawing room dramas where 2/3 of the movie is people emotionlessly staring at each other or, the UA screening coming up, so broad and mainstream that every movie on the ticket is available at your local blockbuster. Although, I really do applaud Film Forum’s ability to work my favorite movie “One, Two, Three” into EVERY series. Hooray!

Anyway, due to a listing in the New York Times (that I was only reading because my parents had a copy in their hotel room), I saw the New-York Historical Society (I don’t know why it’s hyphenated) was showing a double feature of silents. Turns out this group—Silent Clowns—has been showing extremely rare silents for the last 10 years. I finally found a film series nerdy/unpretenious enough to meet my specific film needs.

They seem to have a show once a month from fall through spring—there’s only two showings left this month. Next month is some guy with a mustache but the next one after that is Laurel & Hardy (meh) shorts AND a female slapstick duo and I’m intrigued. One is tall and one is short and in the promo picture they seemed to be tied together at the waist with a guilt look on their faces—that says “comedy” to me!

March 3rd

March 6th

Sam Elliot, Ben Gazzara, and Kelly Lynch should watch their backs! These things go in threes!

I’ve always liked the line-art “doodled in a notebook” style of Built-by-Wendy’s t-shirt series, usually showing scenes from cult movies (Birch Harms has the To Kill A Mockingbird one and someone else has the Bad News Bears dugout one, but I can’t remember who).

I checked their site recently, and they’re totally pandering to comedy nerds (or suddenly hipsters are all really into cusp-of-70s/80s comedy). Not only do they have a Gene Wilder/Gilda Radner shirt, but also a Bob & Doug MacKenzie shirt.

Oh, so many reasons to buy giant chess pieces!

Like, pretending you’re in an episode of the Avengers (or an Avengers-themed XTC video).

Even better—Plastic Chess Hats, particularly with the WARNING: ...these products may cause neck injury in the natural course of child play. Constant adult supervision is required. “So, how DID your son end up a quadrapalegic.”

A friend comments that the pawn hat looks like “a condom full of whale jizz”

I think it’s strange that the price of the chess hats bought individually scales upwards with the piece’s status in the game. I mean, the hats are all made of the same stuff… why is a queen hat $50 and a pawn $13?

(Site found by thebighonkin.com; they used a black knight for “Dark Horse” in Defenders of Stan #12)

First, watch the 3rd Mister Glasses, I edited the middle part.

Second item, I want to make a new show. I like making shows, but I’ve had a two-ton, cake-frosted albatross around my neck for the last year. I have a bunch of semi-developed ideas (many of these are really old), but I can’t tell if any of them have merit.

The more the trend towards really short one-off sketches continues on the internet, the more I want to make complicated, multi-scene, involved shows. I don’t care what they end up on, though I like seeing them live with an audience. These shows could be for any venue online or off.

Here are the top candidates, to keep a record of them for my sake as well as the handful of peeping peteys who read this blog (both of you).

Sui-slider
Main character is a overly-sensitive Poetry grad student who after a series of disheartening encounters with his advising professor, therapist, and ex-girlfriend; commits suicide. What he soon realizes that rather than find a tidy end to his put-upon life, he has become a sui-slider cursed to jump between alternate realities with each attempt to end it all.

Pro:

Bowling Noir
The one hack move that pisses me off more than anything is badly done Noir parodies… sketches, videos, whatever. It’s always the same stock shit off a detective in his office and the dame comes in, voice over…zzzzz. The detective in his office shit is like less than 5% of the genre, and it’s 99% of the parody. I’d do a show that’s the rest of the genre, poor suckers getting pulled into schemes they don’t know how to get out of, insurance fraud, lots of night driving.

And the main character is the world’s greatest bowler, continually suckered into doing illegal things, played by Matt DeCoster

Pro:

I found myself thinking about scientists who spend their lives teaching animals to talk, like Koko the Gorilla and the recently deceased Alex the Parrot. A lot of skeptics say the supposed teaching and logic on display that the researchers say is the breakthrough, is operant conditioning… rehearsed performances (usual name-check-dismissed with an eyeroll to “Hans the Wonder Horse“)

I found, through cross-references in Wikipedia, a current parrot subject who’s being taught through “conversational” methods. And just to throw some sand under the wheels of scientific legitimacy, Nkisi can not only speak and understand English… he’s psychic too.

Nkisi Speaks
I could listen to this for hours. Nkisi sounds like a teenaged girl from LaJolla.

AV and I went to see Violent Saturday at Film Forum yesterday.

It had a lot of “dumb” and “ridiculous” in it, but at least five moments of perfection. One was Ernest Borgnine (as an Amish farmer) stabbing Lee Marvin (as Lee Marvin) in the back with a pitchfork. It made a resounding “THUD” and the whole audience—mostly elderly upper class lunatics and a minority of college nerds—“UGH!”ed out loud.

During a bank heist a little kid shouts “BANG!” at one of the armed robbers (previously established as the coldest of the bunch), and he shoves some hard candies in his mitt and delivers this masterwork—” Now go over there, stick those in your kisser and suck on ‘em.”

For some reason it’s running for a week, despite being a pretty forgettable, sloppy, soapy mess of a movie. It’s not bad, mind you, just kind of silly and middle of the road.

I Saw These at a deli—Hot Kid brand Baby Mum-Mum 100% Selected Superior Rice Rusks

Here is a poem/cheer I wrote in collaboration with the words on the front of the box (all capitalization and repetitions theirs):

Baby Mum-Mums! 100% selected superior rice rusks.
Baby Mum-Mums! A Wholesome Source of Food Energy.
Baby Mum-Mums! Soft and safe for biting.
Baby Mum-Mums! Packed in stay fresh packs.
Baby Mum-Mums! Low in salt.
Baby Mum-Mums! Wholesome source of food energy.
Baby Mum-Mums! Specially prepared for 4 months onwards.
—-

Edited to add: “Baby Mum-Mum is a division of Want-Want Holdings, a manufacturer of healthy snack foods, beverages and related products since 1962.”