I cut this up from the VHS source Not Just Fun and Games. In it a Canadian Christian panel eviscerates all that was harming pop culture in the '90s like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and their damn teething biscuits, which I'm pretty sure didn't actually exist), The Simpsons, Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer. You know, everyone who ended up bringing down the civilization that I miss as I type this from a burning ember that used to be a computer.
I was on the boardwalk at Coney Island this weekend and something in the distance caught my eye. "It's a puppet show!" I said (fine: squealed) to my boyfriend. And then, upon approaching, "...and I think it's religious!!!!" It was:
I think this is a wonderful metaphor (or working example, even) of evangelism's burden in 2011. No one cares and the wind's blowing too hard to pay attention, anyway.
Though it was an obvious highlight, this was not the most surreal thing I experienced on Coney Island. The Coney Island beach is pretty gross (it's more dirt than sand), but a nice thing about it is that people walk by all day selling things. This makeshift dim sum set-up is very convenient if you want ice cold water or a Corona in a paper cup or a $1 blow-up beach ball. As part of this series of nomadic peddlers, an overweight, older man with a gray ponytail that was down to his ass approached our group and held up a seashell with a pot leaf laminated inside of it. "Would anyone like to buy an ashtray?" he asked. His intonation was somewhere between music and a child-beauty pageant announcer (really, he sounded like Mr. Tim in Living Dolls when he announces that Reed Hale's hobbies include "playing in the dirt and watching Unsolved Mysteries"). Of course we were like, "No." "It's made with a realllll leaf," sang-song the man, lingering. We ignored him and he slinked off. I realized that he was probably speaking in code: his Lynchian tone and behavior were either his way of signaling that he was selling marijuana or that he would be back to murder us later. We're all still alive, so I'm going with the former!
And thennnnnn, when we had left the beach and were standing on the boardwalk, waiting for people to finish using the bathroom, two guys approached our group of eight or so and asked, "What's a douchebag?" Someone started to explain exactly what it was, but the pair interrupted and clarified: they wanted to know whether "douchebag" was more frequently used to describe men or women. The more laid-back of the two was gently trying to convince his friend that "douchebag" was typically used for cocky, boorish guys. His more excitable friend (who had what I think was a Dominican accent) was insistent that you call women "douchebags" because "douchebag is the equivalent of scumbag" (literally, that is a quote). I calmly explained that, no, the laid-back guy was right and that men are typically called douchebags. Someone else in our group said that you could call anyone anything but typically the connotation is that men are douchebags. The excitable guy began pointing at each person in our group in an impromptu poll that got him nowhere except more insistent that he was right. Then a giant pitbull with a football in his mouth walked up and distracted them. We slipped away and I got ice cream.
The literary-level irony of this is that both of these guys were total douchebags! (I can only imagine the conversation that led to this debate – it almost certainly stemmed from shit-talking a stranger, probably a woman.) They didn't know it, but they were in the middle of an existential crisis.
Anyway, the larger point is that if you go to Coney Island, you should talk to people because everyone is fucking insane.
Here is a cut I did of a Jehovah's witness propaganda VHS called How Can I Make Real Friends? Spoiler: The actual video is as incoherent as my trash compactor (a term coined by Cinefamily that I learned at Everything Is Festival -- it describes videos that take crap and show the best of it without any of the aspirations of comprehensiveness or critique found in supercuts). Spoiler No. 2: The first, dubbed French girl is a lot more gangster than you are, I BET YOU A MILLION DOLLARS.
I don't believe that Marcia Griffiths' "Electric Boogie" and/or its accompanying dance, the Electric Slide, have been properly mocked in pop culture. While the above montage of many different people found on YouTube performing the fast-singing part of the song (whose lyrics may or may not be, "Jiggle-a-mesa-cara / She's a pumpin' like a matic / She's a movin' like electric / She sure got the boogie!") does not remedy the problem, at least it is a start.
One of the things that I've always loved about the very idea of America's Next Top Model is that as a reality show about the modeling industry, it is essentially a fun-house mirror held up to another fun-house mirror. The resulting distortion of the way the world really works is absurd (and the fact that next cycle will be something meta as an "all-stars" edition means that we're adding yet another mirror to the chain -- a reality show surveying a reality show surveying the modeling industry -- and that promises to be so futile and ridiculous that I don't think I'll be able to restrain myself from writing about it in some capacity).
Anyway, that mirror/mirror/mirror effect is going on in this child's karaoke-style style performance of DC Talk's "Nu Thang," in which the Christian hip-hop-ish collective's divine wackness is filtered through the inherent wackness of a prepubescent child. This is way too special for me to just file away in the lefthand gutter of this blog under "My Hero" -- at last, someone on Earth has the capacity to make DC Talk look cool by comparison. A momentous occasion! (via Paul M., and America's Next Top Tumblr, Christian Nightmares)
I always like to post something religious in advance of Easter (also, I like to post something religious in advance of everything), so I started to cut up this 50-minute Christian propaganda flick Rock: It's Your Decision. It's about a kid named Jeff and his struggle with negotiating the morals of rock and roll with his own Christianity. It has a little bit of a cult following, which is ironic on multiple levels. Perhaps you've already laughed at it. Anyway, Rock's porno-level line delivery and all-around melodrama are pretty amusing (watch some of that in the movie's trailer) until the film's last nine minutes, when it blossoms into an indictment of pop music as a whole in church. What you see above is Jeff's epiphany in its beautiful entirety.
You know, the movie almost convinced me of its moral soundness up to this point. Yes, it's awfully concerned and all up in everybody's business, but at least it verbalized the often-mystifying philosophy (and self-imposed squareness) of those who listen to only religious music (people who kept these guys in business). But by the time Jeff gets around to whining about the dangerous pull of a "really good, get-down beat," and the dangerousness of Captain & Tenille, it was over for me. (I even tolerated the casual gay jab!) (Just kidding. It was always over for me.) Leave Barry Manilow out of it, Jeff! He really is mild! There's a willful ignorance of diversity and how it is, at the very least, interesting from a cultural perspective. I'm coming from the opposite end of the spectrum ("Pass the sex! A second serving of Satan, please!") as Jeff, and I didn't catch the proselytizing bug from this movie. (Then again, this movie was short on beats to drive away my bad mood.) I'm one-man proof that we can all coexist and at least be amused by each other!
And laugh I did. "I think you better look at your albums. If three or four or even if only one song promotes sin, then that's what the author is promoting. And if we buy those albums, every album we buy encourages that artist to keep putting out that kind of music!" That is exactly the kind of logic that Strangers with Candy was made to lampoon. Beautiful. (For more on Jeff's speech, check out Agony Booth's lengthy review, which runs down the factual inaccuracies spewed regarding the secular, really not Satanic music Jeff condemns.)
All that is to say, Happy Easter, you devil-sympathizing heathens!
After DC Talk and the Westboro Baptist Church, here's something more general to round things out: the Christian Nightmares Tumblr. This collection of outrageousness for Christ is so up my alley, I love it like my only son. Just when I thought Ridiculous Pictures of Céline Dion had solved the Internet, along comes something to rival it. That is the power of religion.
(Also, just when you thought a teen couldn't be more awkward than Rebecca Black, along comes an evangelist like Sadie B, in the "Friday" parody "Sunday" above. Way to resurrect an Internet sensation whose time was drawing to a close. Very Christian of you guys!)
Keeping with Monday's religious theme, here's a recommendation that you check out Louis Theroux's latest Westboro Baptist Church doc, America's Most Hated Family in Crisis, which recently on the BBC. Watch while it's still up on YouTube in its entirety (that is, if you haven't already). It's so brilliant and more hilarious than you probably expect. More than ever, the WBC is a carnival freak show. Its entire angle for attention is exploiting how its members' beliefs differ from the rest of the world, while said members piss on the very idea of diversity. They seem simultaneously hyper-aware of what they're doing, and clueless of its ridiculousness. For this reason (and also because of their several Weird Al-esque reinterpretations of Lady Gaga songs), the WBC have crossed over from outwardly threatening to campy. They have jumped the Sinai.
America's Most Hated Family in Crisis is embedded below, with a few additional thoughts a bit further down...
I didn't grow up with DC Talk (Evangelism's answer to, oh, I don't know, TLC and second-hand embarrassment), but after watching their VHS DC Talk: Rap, Rock & Soul, which I then re-edited, I wish I had. I would have known during my insecure teenage years that at least someone was wacker than I was. The contents of this video are so gay (and not "gay" as lame, because I don't say that, but actually homoerotic) and Christian that the only way it could speak to me on a more basic level would be to address me by name.
Note: This video marks the start of a kinda-sorta syndication partnership between fourfour and Everything Is Terrible, which I have long considered my cult away from cult. Practically, it means little (probably just some more links back and forth), but spiritually, it means the world to me.
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