Some bonkers choreography with Heather Parisi, from the 80s Italian variety show Fantastico. Firstly, Frankie Goes to Hollywood never seemed so… confusing? It looks a bit like a toned down, bowdlerised high school production of Cruising. Still molto gay, though. If Heather’s dance partner is thinking about relaxing, doing it or coming, I very much doubt it involves her. Put some trousers on Heather, love. You’ll catch your death of cold.
Even better, here’s Heather again doing some way-ahead-of-their-time Gangnam Style ridiculous dressage pony moves and gurning to Tullio De Piscopo’s nail in Italo Disco’s coffin, Stop Bajon (Primavera). The smoke in these bubbles must be what the choreographer was inhaling when they came up with this number.
Watch out for a random, drunken, camp fellow enjoying his big acting break at 11:48, a bit of very irresponsible chiropraxy at 12.49, some very unsexy from 13.35, and– saints preserve us!– pierrots throughout.
I hope the Japanese never learn that in English “let’s” doesn’t just go directly with any verb you can think of. It’s such a charming error.
Maracas de Popcorn is a Japanese product for making popcorn with maracas. Who hasn’t, at some point in their life, wanted to make popcorn with a special pair of maracas? I daresay the company conducted extensive research and discovered to their horror that a commercial void existed, a howling abysmal hellscape in which maracas are just a Latin American hand instrument and nobody can ever make popcorn inside them. Coming soon: Xylophone de Toast, Bassoon de Pancakes, and Bongos de Beefburger. I think at this point the Japanese are being deliberately random and weird to save face because the rest of the world would be so terribly disappointed if they just made popcorn without measuring it in a golden crown then microwaving it in a globular vinyl king’s head, attended by two little girls with moustaches. It always blows my mind how many people must have signed off on a thing like this as it went from concept to manufacture and sale.
Knowing what real kids are like, this product is certainly inviting– at best– popcorn being flung all over the house because they didn’t close the maracas properly. At worst, flaming maize and molten plastic fires because they had the microwave on for 20 minutes instead of 2. But who cares? Let’s cooking and dancing and burning house fun now!
Incidentally, “When moustached Japanese children make popcorn with maracas” was the original title of Prince’s 1984 hit single, but he couldn’t ever get it to scan or rhyme. Henceforth is became When Doves Cry instead.
While we’re on the subject of things that shouldn’t go together but do, because Japan… BABYMETAL. I don’t even ironically like BABYMETAL or regard listening to them as a guilty pleasure. It’s all pleasure, no guilt. Helium-voiced Japanese J-Pop teenaged idoru + actual metal backing band (although sometimes it’s just some guys in skeleton costumes miming) + bedroom headbanging session + a very sensible, safety conscious and Japanese precaution of a neck brace = ヘドバンギャー！！[ Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!! ]
They also occasionally have little outbursts of ska, rap and dubstep. I’d like to think it’s with the intention of pissing off purists who are into those genres, too.
A postwar ‘Golden Bat’ serial. Nazo, the Emperor of the Universe, is apparently an overweight heterochromial cat with a black bag over his head. Sort of like a cross between David Bowie, the Baader Meinhof gang, and Bagpuss. Actually this sounds fabulous, but who knew? The expression of Nazo’s captive says it all: OH REALLY?
‘Mystery Train’, late 1940s or early 1950s. Mystery Train? I’ll say. Why did somebody in a man-sized glove costume just get on? Quick, put your bag down so he doesn’t sit next to you.
Some inadvertent cross-cultural comedy thanks to Japan’s Tempura Kidz– seen previously in The Rite of Spring (Onions)– who are the terrifyingly talented group who started out as the child backing dancers for autotuned über-kawaii lunatic Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
Yes, I am obsessed with J-pop. Thanks for asking. I’m so square that genuinely enjoying Japanese pop is what passes for a secret vice in my case.
Seriously, all joking and Japan-you-so-weird aside, the choreography by the surnameless Maiko for the group is great and the way the kids themselves snap through the moves is truly brilliant. You need to be really talented and work bloody hard to dance this well and still have it look like fun. Incidentally the dancer seen front and centre through most of the video below is P→★ (try pronouncing that, English speakers); he’s a boy, he definitely knows how to rock a wig and tutu, and let’s all hope he always stays that way. The girls are called (or at least go by the names of) Karin, NaNaHo, Yu-Ka and Ao.
This song is called Cider Cider and, as you could probably guess, it’s about how nice it is to have a wee drink of cider now and then. Which is true. Unfortunately cider to a British person like me is also probably best known as the illegal alcoholic drink of choice for adolescents about thirteen or fourteen years old, i.e. like the Tempura Kidz. Cider is also infamously favoured by Britain’s most abject alcoholics because super-strong, cheap ciders are easily available in large containers from supermarkets here. In Asia the beverage they call cider is an innocent soft drink that has nothing to do with sitting on the swings in the park and boozing until you’re suddenly, explosively sick on your own shoes. Nor does it conjure up to a Japanese person images of a man with hollow eyes and something you’d rather not identify stuck in his beard asking you if you’ve got 50 pence towards his so-called “bus fare”. If you’ve got as much time on your hands as some Wikipedians evidently have, you can read an extensive explanation of international differences between the various drinks that are labelled as cider.
So while you watch, please remember that the children in this video may be covered in fluorescent paint and they may be wearing the disembowelled remnants of stuffed toys like they’re in a depraved mashup of Monsters Inc and Mad Max 2, but they are not totally crunk.
Note also the total abandonment of any pretence that it matters what their voices sound like, or indeed whether they appear on the recording at all. It could be a totally synthetic vocal, like Hatsune Miku. Or a 45 year old man. Who knows?
Another experiment in re-soundtracking J-pop videos with highbrow Modernist composers: see also The Rite of Spring (Onions). By the way, I’m officially staking my claim as the originator of the J-pop video/Modernist orchestral soundtrack mashup genre, OK? Not that I imagine many other people would want to lay claim to it.
Anyway, this time it’s Perfume’s Spending All My Time (directed by Tanaka Yuusuke), in which the scarily wholesome autotuned J-pop robo-idoru appear to have been locked in a room where they amuse themselves with OCD hand rituals and by complacently shattering ornaments with telekinesis, like chirpy Harajuku versions of Sadako from the Ringu series, versus György Ligeti’s Lontano, best known from the immensely effective and creepy soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining.
Instructions:
1. Mute the audio of Spending All My Time.
2. Press play on Lontano. I suggest starting about two minutes in.
5. Not really. You may have screaming nightmares about the young ladies from Perfume exploding your head like an egg in a microwave, though.
PS: On Youtube there are re-enactments of this video by three overweight Mexicans and by a man with three copies of himself. Because, you know, of course.
Know your camel walk, boogaloo and funky chicken. One day it may save your life. Also, tangerine doesn’t suit anybody and try to avoid taking this much cocaine.
It’s 2013, my computer is over five years old and that means the hard drive is full of crap. During a recent attempt to clean up and rationalise I’ve found a number of things that interested me at some point, or were research materials for writing, art or film projects that never came to anything (i.e. most of them), or that I otherwise downloaded for reasons now lost to posterity. Sometimes I had the foresight to rename them so I could tell what they were, sometimes not. All posts involving this material will be filed under HD detritus; if anyone knows what any of these things are, where they come from or to whom they should be credited, please let me know in the comments.
Let’s start the recycling with this interesting/inexplicable collection of Chinese Communist LP covers, because I think we all need more of those in 2013. I last interacted with them in December of 2007; I lived in China at that time, but I definitely didn’t do these scans. Some of this stuff– and its modern equivalent– is still available on CD in Chinese shops and let me assure you there’s nothing good about any of it, not even kitsch value. If anybody owns up to having these LPs then we’ll all know what to say when she or he asks us if we’d like to hear a few records.
In this lady’s house, simple requests for a cup of tea often end with a trip to the Accident & Emergency department.
Is she balancing tea on her arm? Good trick, maybe a bit dangerous, but they’re not big on health and safety regulations in China. The woman on the right seems to agree with me, if her expression is anything to judge by. I think this one is attempting to suck up to Hua Guofeng, who briefly took the place of Mao after the latter’s death. Despite remaining a hardline Maoist, Hua deserves some credit for curbing the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution and for ousting Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, who were far worse than him. Despite this looking like something from the 1960s or even the 1950s, this record can only be from late 1976 to mid 1981– disco era in the West!– because Hua was ousted in his turn by Deng Xiaoping in 1981. Continue Reading
Last week a friend of mine said “Hold on, you can’t just say you made a video for an Icelandic black metal band and then carry on with the conversation as if that’s normal.”
Yes I can.
Birgir from the band asked me, because he particularly liked the video mixes I did for my live show Magickal Realism. And he was open to the idea of giant rabbits and cardboard skeletons being totally metal. Kontinuum’s allbum is getting good reviews and I’ve already been described (approvingly) as bonkers by a German metal website, so I’d say that’s a pretty good result all round.
… like a startled moose, about to be hit by a truck, in which there is a considerably more startled driver? … like a disco Nefertiti luchador? …. like somebody’s making a transgender blacksploitation biopic of Aleister Crowley? … like I really need to stop taking so much coke and agreeing to these completely mental photo shoots?
This ridiculous picture comes to you courtesy of the fact that I am still researching my disco show for next year. I will bus stop, hustle, YMCA, roller disco, etc. and so will you. Be afraid.
Semi-related note/semi-related eulogy
When Donna Summer died earlier this year, (Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch) Chaka Khan (… Chaka Khan… Chaka Khan) offered this non sequitur tribute to her late friend:
Tausend dank, Chaka! You should get yourself over to Germany, love. There’s loads of women who speak German over there, even with the weird stipulation that they have to be black. What about Boney M, why don’t you give them a call?
Semi-related Afrofuturist error of judgement made by the production team working on Doctor Who in 1979
Doctor What the Fuck?
I believe we were meant to take this look seriously. See also “Grandad, why was there a disco backlash?” In this story the Daleks take the “disco sucks” mentality to the Nth degree, devoting considerable effort to exterminating these Egyptian disco androids. Although the Movellans were armed only with spandex catsuits, a selection of dayglo sex toys and a limited repertoire of stilted dialogue, apparently they beat the Daleks in the end. Henceforth the Daleks grudgingly admitted that they’d been listening in secret to the Bee Gees, Sylvester and Gloria Gaynor all along and actually quite fancied having their head turrets refurbished to resemble disco balls.
(A linguistic examination of silly Youtube videos)
Paraphasia is a subset of general aphasia. The latter term can describe a number of impairments to language ability resulting from neurological trauma or illness, such as blows to the head, strokes or tumours. The former word, paraphasia, refers more specifically to speech being superficially coherent but still fundamentally wrong in some way to everyone but the speaker, because of partial or total mispronunciation (e.g. “mispornuntiacion”, or “window” for “widow”, or vice versa), or due to varying degrees of word substitution (e.g. quasi-homophonic errors like “beg” instead of “bed”, or massive and incomprehensible errors like “wrestler” instead of “library”). Obviously all of these paraphasias can blur into what would generally be considered “normal” linguistic mistakes, i.e. mistakes not resulting from a medical condition, of which there are quite a few widely recognised types:
An eggcorn, which was named by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003, is when a person creates a plausible (but wrong) interpretation of a word they know but don’t know how to pronounce, that they’ve misheard, or have heard more or less correctly but never seen written down. Pullum’s example is “egg corn” for “acorn”. These actually seem to be increasingly common on the internet. Wikipedia’s article on Eggcorns points out two that I’ve often seen myself online: “baited breath” and “ex-patriot”, which should be “bated breath” and “expatriate” respectively. Confusions of “bear” and “bare” are also very common, although these are probably for the most part spelling errors rather than full blown eggcorns, since I should imagine the majority of English speakers know that being bare and being a bear are different things even if they’re unsure of the correct spelling for each one.
Good examples of malapropisms come appropriately from the original Mrs Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s 18th century play The Rivals. Malaprop suggests that somebody be “illiterated” (obliterated) from memory, talks about “allegories” in the Nile (meaning alligators, although surely these would be crocodiles anyway…) and speaks of a “nice derangement” (arrangement).
Mondegreen is a less recent neologism, this time by Sylvia Wright in 1954, coined to describe a mishearing that completely changes the original phrase’s meaning. The internet has launched hundreds of these as comical videos and anecdotes, but the 1950s naming of it points to it being a longstanding phenomenon, as do near-universal mondegreens like Jimi Hendrix’s “excuse me while I kiss this guy”, when the real lyric is “excuse me while I kiss the sky”. This particular mondegreen also famously makes more sense than the original line, as do many of the popular mondegreens from Bohemian Rhapsody.
Mondegreens also work across different languages, but this is a thing that seems not to have a name in English. The Japanese name for it is soramimi (空耳). 空 is false or hollow; 耳 is an ear or hearing, one of the easier kanji to remember because it actually looks like an ear. In soramimi, a phrase in one language is coincidentally close enough to a coherent phrase in another language to at least form proper words, if not a coherent sentence. One example is the English language Beatles song I Want to Hold Your Hand, which transcribes phonetically to some Japanese ears as アホな放尿犯/Aho na hounyouhan, which means something like “idiotic public urination.” The Latin of Carl Orff’s O Fortuna can be almost entirely rendered as absurd but complete English words.
The tables flipped now we got all the coconuts bitch
OK, it’s taken a while but now I’m getting to the point. Recently I’ve been really enjyoing– if that’s the word– the new album by Death Grips, called The Money Store. I’ve been nigh on obsessed with one track in particular, Hacker. This is partly because it totally blows my head off sonically and I wish I was young enough and still had the kind of friends who’d go with me to a place where I could get on the floor and go completely mental dancing to it. Seriously, everyone, stop breeding and choosing furniture and working all the time and shit. I want to go out.
It’s also because MC Ride/Stefan Burnett’s lyrics and rhymes make absolutely no sense whatsoever in a way that I find completely brilliant, evoking some kind of severely aphasic but still fully functional individual who’s cornered you at a bus stop and either doesn’t realise or simply doesn’t care that his conversation is like a jumbled up but somehow self-organising magnetic fridge poetry kit.
If you like this blog and have been intrigued, titillated, surprised or disgusted by anything you've seen here then please consider sending a few £/€/$/¥ etc. my way by getting one of my books. They're written by the same person who writes this blog, so you will like them too. They're available in print, or as ebooks for every existing type of reader and tablet. You can also tip my films on Vimeo, if you want. Thanks.
ADOXOBLOG 