Arken

13 posts
Arken takes care of his daughter for a living and is one of the only white people in South Gate, California for some reason.

Animonday: The Big Snit

Hello, welcome to the re-branded Found Footage Friday as Animonday, now dedicated to animation, especially animated shorts. FFF didn’t really work out, there were never more than 10 comments not counting my own, but everyone loves cartoons, right? This will be a showcase for cartoons slightly outside the mainstream, animation you might not otherwise have seen.

I’ll start out with one of my personal favorites from Canadian animator Richard Condie. You might know him from his hilarious The Cat Came Back cartoon, but The Big Snit from 1985 is his masterpiece. A 10-minute Oscar-nominated film about Scrabble, sawing, marital strife and nuclear Armageddon. Enjoy!

Found Footage Friday: Fetch My Cigarettes

You may or may not have heard of the semi-underground art rock band Negativland. I was first introduced to them through their album Escape from Noise featuring weird songs using samples from old industrial films and shortwave radio clips. There’s an especially controversial track called Christianity is Stupid but I prefer the bit of cold war paranoia, Yellow, Black and Rectangular. A few years later, their U2 EP was famously recalled by the record company after a lawsuit from DJ Casey Kasem. The EP featured outtakes of Kasem swearing and being a general ass about having to read a long-distance dedication to a deceased dog. Here is the original outtake.

David “The Weatherman” Willis, Negativland’s main source of weird samples and general absurdity, was also a budding filmmaker of the weirdness variety. Here is his masterwork, “Fetch My Cigarettes,” starring his mother and himself. It was included as part of their VHS compilation, No Other Possibility, but was an independent work. It’s only 4 1/2 minutes long, and the first minute is skippable.

Word Game – Famous Name Chain

I like word games, do you? Here’s one I invented years ago that we can all play called Famous Name Chain which is very simple and a lot of fun. You simply chain together names of famous people so that you can separate any two names at any point and they still are a famous name. The names can be factual or fictional and the people must be known by two names, not three (a la Sally Jesse Raphael or Martin Luther King) Confused? Here’s a very simple one:

Jerry Lewis Black

That’s a three-name chain which can be separated into the names of comedians Jerry Lewis and Lewis Black.

Here are a few more in increasing complexity:

4-Name Chain: Spencer Tracy Morgan Fairchild

(Spencer Tracy – Actor, Tracy Morgan – Actor/Comedian, Morgan Fairchild – Actor)

5-Name Chain: Ayn Rand Paul Simon Cowell

(Ayn Rand – Writer, Rand Paul – Politician, Paul Simon – Singer/Songwriter, Simon Cowell – Professional Asshole)

6-Name Chain: Raggedy Ann Frank James Joyce Brothers

(Raggedy Ann – Doll, Ann Frank – Holocaust Victim/Diarist, Frank James – Outlaw, James Joyce – Writer, Joyce Brothers – Columnist/Psychiatrist)

7-Name Chain: Jessica Walter Scott Walker Percy Shelley Long

(Jessica Walter – Actress, Walter Scott – Poet, Scott Walker – Governor, Walker Percy – Writer, Percy Shelley – Poet, Shelley Long – Actress)

9-Name Chain: Lionel Richie Rich Little Richard Benjamin Franklin Pierce Brosnan

(Lionel Richie – Singer, Richie Rich – Cartoon Character, Little Richard – Singer, Richard Benjamin – Actor, Benjamin Franklin – Founding Father, Franklin Pierce – President, Pierce Brosnan – Actor)

How long can you make a chain?

Found Footage Friday: The “Weird Al” “Interviews”

“Weird Al” Yankovic has long established himself as the King of Pop Parody with songs ranging from hilariously funny to kind of mediocre to described as the band he’s parodying as better than any of their own songs.

For many years (and possibly still, but I doubt it), he did specials on MTV to promote his albums which were called AlTV, wherein he’d turn MTV into his own personal channel. While the majority of the show was Al presenting unusual and surreal videos, both his own and by others, these were interspersed with parodies of other MTV segments (back when they were primarily a music video channel), including interviews with rock stars. Al interviewed the same rock stars by brilliantly mashing up footage from real MTV interviews (sometimes using bits that would normally be edited out) with his own bizarre and sometimes even audacious questions, including asking them their, often very negative, opinions of his own albums and regularly bringing up his pet, Harvey the Wonder Hamster.

There is a Youtube playlist of over 30 interviews you can watch, but I’ll just put up a few of my favorites.

The best, and probably most audacious, one is his ‘interview’ with George Harrison:

There’s also his sexually-charged interview with Paula Abdul:

He gets up-close and personal with James Brown:

Tries to understand Keith Richards:

And starts a collaboration with Snoop Dogg:

Al appears to still be doing them on YouTube, but the classic ones will always be my favorites.

Found Footage Friday: V Trinadcatom Chasu Nochi

Today’s found footage post is about a film I stumbled upon accidentally (it’s in the public domain and has never been commercially released) and it may be one of my favorite movies because it’s just out-and-out bizarre. The whole thing is in Russian and even though I don’t speak Russian and there are no subtitles, it’s just so damn insane that I love every minute of it. The title in Russian is V Trinadcatom Chasu Nochi. In English, that translates as In The Thirteenth Hour of the Night, but more prosaically, it would be 13 p.m.

The pedigree of the director doesn’t seem to lend itself to such a crazy movie. Larisa Shepitko was an acclaimed female Soviet director noted for her heavy dramatic subjects. However, for some reason, she directed this film. The following is a totally fictional account of what happened and why, but I like to believe it’s true even though I made it up:

In 1969, a Commissar in charge of television discovered that there was a famous film director named Larisa Shepitko that he could force to make a film. So, he came to her and said, “you make TV movie for New Year’s Eve. Here are pop music acts. Do it in three days or we send you to gulag.” And so, this was the result.

It’s really a variety show with a thin veneer of outside storyline and while the pop acts are pretty odd themselves, the real action is the wrapper story involving a cross-dressing patriarch (matriarch?) of the Russian equivalent of a hillbilly family watching TV in their hut on fowl’s legs (a traditional Russian folk motif), joined by a mermaid and a dwarf. As I said, I speak no Russian, but from what I’ve been told, even if you do speak Russian, it doesn’t make much more sense.

As the movie is in the public domain, I uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, but for those of you who don’t want to sit through it, here are two of my favorite bits. First, a moment of cinematic insanity-

watch?v=jovmenwr7ug

And then a musical number (not one of the pop acts), a parody of Louis Armstrong singing Hello, Dolly… except the only lyrics are Hello, Dolly.

watch?v=yTpNNVnbRsw

And finally, the entire film.

watch?v=Oheg-LMFzGk

I’d say that this is best seen under the influence, but I think that would actually make it worse.

The Atheist Affirmation

With the religious threads lately and I think there should be a counterbalance. I don’t want to step on any toes, so I’m not suggesting the religious posts stop, but I think there needs to be posts here for those of us with no faith at all, and that’s what this is. Let me say that I am an atheist, not an anti-theist. If you believe that there is a god and you are bound for heaven (or whatever), good for you and I sincerely hope that makes you happy. I simply don’t agree.

This column is intended as a positive space for atheists, agnostics and freethinkers.

So now, without further ado, I present the first semi-regular (as in I will do it when I feel like it, but others are welcome to step up to the plate) atheist affirmation.

I’m going to start with each of these affirmations with a quote from Positive Atheism’s big list of quotations and I can think of no better person to start with than the late, great Douglas Adams:

A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”

 

And then I will feature a famous atheist or agnostic. We’ll start off with the (sometimes) world’s wealthiest man, Bill Gates.

From a 1996 issue of Time Magazine:

“Isn’t there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?” interviewer Walter Isaacson asks Gates “His face suddenly becomes expressionless,” writes Isaacson, “his squeaky voice turns toneless, and he folds his arms across his belly and vigorously rocks back and forth in a mannerism that has become so mimicked at MICROSOFT that a meeting there can resemble a round table of ecstatic rabbis.”

“I don’t have any evidence on that,” answers Gates. “I don’t have any evidence of that.”

He later states, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

 

And finally, something to think about and discuss- A lot of people say they want to believe because they don’t think a universe so complex could have come about by chance. To me, that the universe in all of its vastness and complexity does indeed work without anyone at the wheel is what makes it so amazing.

Found Footage Saturday (whoops)- The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show

Due to my personally bringing Crasstalk down last week. That’s right, I did it. Me. Muahahahahahaha!

Ahem.

Where was I?

Right, we were down last Friday, so my planned post about this didn’t go up then. Anyway, we’re still in the realm of cable access with a staple of Los Angeles community access television for years (it ended in 2008). It will be one of the weirdest things you’ve ever seen. Opinions are divided about whether or not it’s genuine or some sort of very dedicated performance art. The man behind it, David Nkrumah Liebe Unger Hart, is quite a story unto himself and a well known L.A. personality who may or may not be pretty nuts. There are terrible puppets, awful songs, women going in long, untranslated speeches in German and, of course, Jesus. I present… the Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show!

There are many clips on YouTube, so I’ll just post a couple and you can find more for yourselves. I would give more commentary, but really, they just speak for themselves.


Infographic: If U.S. Cities had Kept Their Original Names [Map Updated]

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This began when I found out that the original name of Los Angeles was Porciuncula and spiraled out from there. Some liberties have been taken, but generally, this map shows what the cities in the U.S. would be named if they had kept the names they began with. Cities that did not change their names have been left off the map. Click on it to see a full-size version.

Edit: Updated the map based on some suggestions

Found Footage Friday – The Movie that Scared a Generation (in one small Indiana town)

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Hello and welcome to the first Found Footage Friday, where I present all sorts of video footage you may find surprising and entertaining. I’m going to start with something very close to home.

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1980s. Home of Indiana University and its esteemed folklore department and a small but thriving public access cable channel. I don’t know if it was a student’s folklore project or something the department decided to do, but if you say “Haunted Indiana” to any Bloomington child of the ’80s, they will tell you how it totally scared the hell out of them when they were kids. We now look back on it with great fondness and, thanks to the internet, it is something I can share with all of you.

It’s a collection of short horror stories based on Indiana folklore, shot on a budget of two buttons and a shoelace with a soundtrack stolen from Hitchcock’s Psycho and narrated by local TV personality Mike White. Here it is in all its glory. There is not much for me to tell you about it, just watch it (it’s less than an hour long) and discover the frightening horror that is Haunted Indiana-

Haunted Indiana Part 1 – Intro

Haunted Indiana Part 2 – Haunted Woods

Haunted Indiana Part 3 – The Cable Line Monster

Haunted Indiana Part 4 – The Campers

Haunted Indiana Part 5 – Burnt (a.k.a. the boring one before the really scary one)

Haunted Indiana part 6 – Monster in the Bedroom

That last one gave hundreds of children nightmares about never waking up the next morning. I hope you enjoyed the movie that was the stuff of nightmares for one midwestern town with a population (at the time) of less than 50,000 people. The world may never known the horror of Haunted Indiana, but now you do. Welcome to our nightmare.