Last night in a “discount store” in Prospect Heights, I came across an amazing little item. See, not only have factories in China been producing unauthorized knockoffs of popular toys (which is nothing new)… it seems like they’re hitting the “shuffle” button with whatever figures they have left in stock, and coming up with new super-teams too! Case in point: the SENSE OF RIGHT ALLIANCE!
Apparently, a robot-armed Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, the yellow Power Ranger, The Thing, and a redheaded Reed Richards and have teamed up…
…to FENCE AGAINST THE EARTH!
And on top of this already delicious ridiculousness, when I took a closer look at their approximation of Superman:
A friend of mine, Schaffer The Darklord, who is very creative, asked one of our other creative friends, director Burke Heffner,  to help him do something very funny. Then they asked a bunch of other folks from the burlesque scene to lend a hand (including Cyndi and me – though I have a lens flare for a head, thank you Burke – Peter Aguero, Magdelena Fox, Jenny C’est Quoi, Boo Bess the Baroness, Rosie 151, Mary Cyn, Stormy Leather, Victoria Privates, Big Heath, and the list goes on.)
Anyway, they succeeded in making something very funny. It is an over the top parody of the life of a Nerdcore rapper who can’t decide if what lies before him is a slippery slope or a toboggan run. The result is goofy, fun, and not necessarily safe for work.
Our journey begins with Nelson Lugo and Hard Cory trying to get our protagonist home safely…
In preparation for the upcoming live show, I have decided to post something you won’t see from someone you will see. Because I take the direct route to nothing. Which is probably why my high school career went the way it did.
So at the live show, you will see a very talented magician and burlesque host. He will be performing magic. In this video I am posting, he is not. He is telling a story. His name is Nelson Lugo.
As part of Cyndi’s neverending quest to make burlesque performers tell a story and storytellers strip, we had Nelson over at Standard Issues in October.
He did a great job, because he is a charming man. However he did wear that hat. So this is more radio than video, in certain ways.
Oh, and you should drop by billyjoesboy.com. Because I am a brilliant literary mind who could desperately use the traffic bump.
I wear the coat that my dad wore on hunting trips with his dad back when a man could kill his dinner with his son for Thanksgiving. Dad never put any dead rabbits in the pocket in the back, and he never took me hunting, either. Consequently, that coat looks just about as good as new and doesn’t have a rabbit-sized scab stretching across the back.
We did plenty of dude stuff together when I was growing up — shot guns, chopped wood, built stuff, threw a baseball and salted slugs on hot afternoons when the A/C was busted and nothing was on TV.
Now I’m all grown and I live in Brooklyn and have a landlord who’s supposed to fix stuff at my house. Note that I said “supposed to.” I ended up getting into art and computers, stuff Dad wasn’t necessarily all that into before his eyes started giving out.
But the one thing we do together every chance we get: we watch some serious dude movies. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. “No Country for Old Men,” the first two “Godfather” flicks, any of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns are all religious canon in the Simmermon household. “A-Team” reruns will do, too.
I shot this on my iPhone the day after Thanksgiving while we were watching “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”
My old friend Eliza Skinner is a wizard at improv comedy, stand-up, and musical improv comedy. She performs with the musical improv comedy groups Diamond Lion and Baby Wants Candy, does stand-up all over New York and is the person who is personally responsible for getting me into The Moth and storytelling in general. I’m pretty much always going to be grateful for that.
A lot of New Yorkers keep a folded-up copy of the New Yorker poking out of their tote bag and talk all about Mad Men and This American Life all the time, then go home and gobble trashy pop culture like they have some kind of cultural eating disorder. Eliza doesn’t front like that — she loves what she loves and she loves it real hard. Like Tyler Perry movies, comic books and dance movies.
Here, she’s fused her love of both vampire movies and dance movies: “The only thing better than a dance movie is a vampire dance movie.”
Remember Kimba the White Lion? It was on at 1pm, and every day when I got home from kindergarten my friends and I would watch it. The episodes were full of hard lessons for Kimba and his animal pals.
Hard lessons that often dented my poor little 5 year old brain.
In one episode that I simply was never able to forget, a herd of antelope have gone crazy with some kind of brain fever. They are running wild and if they did not stop they would plunge into the sea and die. Kimba and his friends try to stop them every way they can, but in the end they fail and most of the antelope jump to their deaths in the sea. Kimba and friends do manage to save a few, and that in the end is the moral: Even if you can only save a few wild crazed suicidal antelope , it’s better then not trying at all.
As an adult I do not quite know what to do with that information. But if I ever meet a methed out antelope at least I’ll have food for thought. If you want to see the episode, some kind soul has uploaded it to YouTube!
Another fun tidbit — the show was created by the Godfather of anime Osamu Tezuka. And I found an awesome fan site with English translation covering his massive body of work!
As far as I’m concerned, Tumblr’s purpose on this Earth is to provide us with weird celebrity Photoshop memes.
(See Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, or its cousin Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza.)
Here now are selections from the most recent herd of pixel-mashings making their way across the internet landscape, leaving cognitive dissonance and sexual confusion in their wake… Pinup RDJ:
By way of explanation, their creator offers: “Vintage pinups are the pinnacle of art. Robert Downey Jr is the pinnacle of sexy. It’s not rocket science.”
