My friend Jim O’Grady is a Moth GrandSLAM contest winner — a great storyteller and a great guy. He’s been a reporter for the New York Times, and works for some mysterious think tank that he says is “physically located on Wall Street, but in no way associated with finance.”
The thing about these story shows is that they let anybody onstage, which gives the show its spirit and beauty. It keeps it from being the province of writers and actors and “who do you know” and lets the voice of the people come through. It also allows people to weep onstage and do some lame standup comedy from time to time. It’s always a crap shoot, and the surprises are the best part.
Jim’s reliably awesome — he has his nights when he kills, sure. But even when he’s not at his best, he’s still really really good, and whenever he gets picked to come to the stage the audience is in for a treat.
Here he is at a Moth StorySLAM this summer, on the theme of “Respect.”
Jesus’ teats blasting eight solid sunbeams, I am SO in love with this video. It’s got everything all together — lurching grinding trippy catchy electronic sounds and a montage of seriously strange video clips from the ’80s. There’s industrial instructional stuff here, infomercial clips, vintage exercise videos, people stepping in sticky stuff and sandwiches and just a little bit of cheesy porn.
That’s just a dildo, though, not an actual cock.
So yeah, this is probably NSFW, but I mean, really. The dongs in this thing are obviously phonies, and they’re just kind of waving around. Any boss with half a brain would see that they’re just comedy dongs, not used with any sort of intent here.
I can never tell what’s safe for work and what’s not, because I just can’t get my head around the fact that a disembodied rubber dildo could be at all offensive in anyone’s workplace, unless that workplace was like, an Amish barn-raising or something.
But somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Anyway.
This video is for the song “Truck Sweat,” directed by Tobacco, for music also by Tobacco from the album “Fucked Up Friends.” Tobacco, as some of you may know, is a member of the psychedelic super-group Black Moth Super Rainbow. On with the clip and let the dicks fall where they may:
A disgruntled Vietnam Vet with a foul mouth and a serious anger management problem is not the kind of guy I’d like to have running the country. Hell, I wouldn’t even want him on my bowling team.
John McCain and Walter Sobchak — John Goodman’s character in ‘The Big Lebowski’ — seem like they have a lot in common, once you think about it. David pointed this out to me the other day, and we got pretty obsessed. So we partnered up with Chad Williams of PBC Productions to mash together one of John Goodman’s titanic tantrums in “The Big Lebowski” with some images of John McCain’s face … hope it’s as fun for you as it is for us.
Jeff sent me a link to an awesome, fun, faux-vintage sci-fi short film a while back, and I mean to share it with y’all, but it slipped my mind… until I was flipping through a sketchbook and found this hastily scrawled list of cultural references that I saw while watching it for the first time:
She-Ra, Princess of Power. Lord of the Rings. American Apparel advertisements. The Neverending Story. Mario Bros. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. “The Clapper”. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Space Invaders. Silverhawks. Batman. Thundercats. Tron.
These things, in no particular order, sprung to mind immediately for me. Some of them are obviously intentional, others perhaps unintentional but likely to be seen by anyone who grew up when I did and watched the same stuff. Still others were triggered by a small detail or action in the video that other folks might not notice or associate in the same way. Anyway, here it is!
Sometimes a piece of poetry, prose, visual art or music manages to transcend the perceived boundaries that separate us. On those rare occasions, disparities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political affiliation are stripped away, and we stand bare-assed and grinning, basking in the blinding light of our common ridiculousness. Click away, and soak it in:
Every so often the universe conspires to bring together disparate awesome elements that combine into something so incredible that the brain’s pleasure centers hemorrhage with white, blinding joy. This video for Zombie Zombie’s “Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free” is a deep soul tickle from God’s favorite finger. It’s an homage to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” — both the movie AND the soundtrack — reenacted with G.I. Joe figures. The song is rocking, repetitive and minimalist earworm, and the video, well … have a look for yourselves.
In the Northernmost part of Greenpoint, just about as far up as you can go in Brooklyn without falling in Newtown Creek and drifting across the sludge-channel to Queens, there is an ever-changing graffiti mural on the corner of Clay and McGuinness, on the walls of the Power Brake Service shop. We’ve seen employees on site while artists are laying it down, and even saw an NYPD cruiser stop by for a short chat with a tagger before rolling along without so much as a finger-wagging, so we reckon the building owner either approves of the paint job, or at least isn’t bothered by it.
