fourfour

Maybe my favorite thing of the year

 

I saw this during Everything is Festival at Cinefamily this summer and fell in love -- it's a highlights reel of a video sex advice column Heidi Fleiss and Victoria Sellers did years ago for Laugh.com. Their flippancy and tendency to give guidance that amounts to, "Get a hooker!" reminds me of...another duo of online advice dispensers that are not to be trusted. Mmmmm...who could I be talking about? (But really, seeing this was, in a warped, fun-house way, like looking in a mirror for the first time after having living life oblivious to the existence of mirrors.) Fleiss has never been more endearing and Sellers alternately hilarious and really sad (especially when she talks about her black outs)! (Also, the language is totally NSFW, if that's even a thing, and this does involve a life-life latex vagina being poked at, so BEWARE.)

Also, Cinefamily is doing this live streaming telethon starting Saturday at noon and its lineup is insane. It's a good cause, as they are an unending source of the weird shit that makes pop culture fun. Also, I love them. Please give.

You should probably see this

For work, I devised an alternate Christmas viewing canon, full of weird shit like Tim & Eric's Awesome Show Great Job! Chrimbus Special, The Anna Nicole Show holiday special (Cousin Shelly for life!), The Monster's Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2. I love all of these and look forward to watching them every year. One new addition to my perennial favorites is George King's Ten Thousand Points of Light. It's 30 minutes of tacky Christmas insanity (which is the best kind of Christmas insanity, in my experience), as it documents the final years that this family in suburban Atlanta named the Townsends crammed lights and Christmas shit in every corner of their house and then let people walk through it.

It's shot on VHS and better for it, as the blurred picture gives it a home-move vibe and gives you the strange sensation of remembering something you never experienced (weirdly, when B. of STFU, Parents introduced this to me, I initially felt like I'd heard of it before, but in actuality had not).

Anyway, here's the trailer.

 

I highly suggest you get on this this now, but I plead my case further after the jump.

America's Next Top Model isn't...

...Angelea.

A very important JCPenney denim fashion show

 

On Thanksgiving, yet another Dancin' on Air reunion/retrospective aired on Philadelphia's local PHL17. It was very much like the first one, so I won't get too deep into rehashing, but I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't share this fashion show of gorgeous denim goods from JC Penney with you. This is so cheesy that it'd make Sue Ellen from Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead say, "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!" Unfortunately, Suell wasn't quite the commentator as the dude who's announcing this stuff.

Sex and the shitty

"It just hurts 'cause I wanna be respected as a good model," said Laura about her elimination. From this show. America's Next Top Model. The one that has for years struggled for credibility as a circus, let alone a talent search. Is that to say Laura's been hurting this whole time, or does she just yearn for the respect from those whose respect is largely considered to be a hindrance? She's better off getting Wanda Sue to sew her together some respect than looking for it here.

Merry Jack-mas!

 

This may be one for the amuses-only-me file, but I've long wanted to replace the music from Poetic Justice's "I Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" scene with something more absurd. So I did. Very TV Carnage move, but I talked to TV Carnage's Derrick Beckles about it this weekend, and I think he's fine with it.

(Spoiler alert! Using this song has nothing to do with Janet Jackson's childhood nickname of "Dunk." At least, not consciously.)

Things I hate about the part of T.I.'s Vibe story about gay people

Man, I will say this, the funniest joke I ever heard Tracy [Morgan] say during a stand-up was, ‘C’mon man, I think gay people are too sensitive. If you can take a dick, you can take a joke.’ [Cracks up laughing.] That shit was funny to me. And it’s kind of true.’ While T.I. makes clear that he supports anyone’s sexual preference, he then connects, in his opinion, a current oversensitivity among gay people with a consequential and ironic offense of the First Amendment. “They’re like,‘If you have an opinion against us, we’re gonna shut you down.’ ... That’s not American. If you’re gay you should have the right to be gay in peace, and if you’re against it you should have the right to be against it in peace.’ [Vibe]

- That five days after first reading about it, I'm still thinking about it.

Sporadic reader

As before, a sampling of my recent day-job offerings:

Music

Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow review (In my opinion, this is the most overpraised album of the year)

Surkin USA review (Probably my favorite album of the year)

Switch & Andrea Martin "I Still Love You" single review (Probably my favorite track of the year)

Mary J. Blige My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) review (Definitely not my favorite album titled My Life)

Morgan Geist talks Storm Queen's "It Goes On"

Niki & the Dove "The Drummer" single review

A feature on disco revivalism (especially re: Escort)

2011 Christmas album roundup

Movies

Olivia Colman Tyrannosaur interview

The Immortals review

Rating the post-Henson, pre-The Muppets Muppets movies

Have you seen Zack Montana?

 

I was watching the local news at my mother's house Thanksgiving night (it's a Philadelphia station) and I just happened to catch a snatch of a child who supposedly performed at Philadelphia's kind of sad, definitely janky Thanksgiving Day Parade (CeCe Peniston, for example, lip synched the original, 20-year-old version of her "song that everyone knows," "Finally" -- no remix or anything!). Except, instead of performing, this child looked like he was batting out an invisible fire that apparently had a tenacious grip on his entire body. I soon discovered that he's a Radio Disney type named Zack Montana. I don't think he's related to Hannah, as she is a fictional character, but I do think that the last name is supposed to remind you of her and/or confuse you (especially if you are old and were previously used to Montana only being a state, a steamboat and a Slim).

I would have posted the video that introduced me to this wunderkind, but the quality of the clip posted on ABC 6's site is so poor, you can barely make out what's going on. That's jank on top of jank (spread jank, it's the Philly way). Luckily, Zack's act doesn't seem to change very much between performances, so I was able to find a much sharper, slightly older version of his up-to-the-syllable interpretive dancing on YouTube. It is above. This kid's got swagger like nothing I've ever experienced. It's like a drag show, except he's impersonating not a woman, but an adult, and since he's 13, Justin Bieber soooo qualifies as a grown-up.

(Am I wrong for kind of digging the song, though?)

The fourfour holiday shopping guide: All Gizmo everything

Over 50 different (mostly bootleg) Mogwai to choose from! I'm partial to the ones whose facial spacing makes them look like The Hills Have Mogwai. I'm not selling this hard, but these plush things are so fucked up, I don't feel like I have to.