An installation by Chris Burden just outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, photographed by me two weeks ago.

posted 22 May 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

My favorite blog on the planet this minute is Mightygodking, by Christopher Bird, who is a Canadian law student and a big-ass nerd. He’s got obsessions ranging from “So You Think You Can Dance?” to Photoshop: witness his modified versions of Archie comics and old fantasy novels. But he reached a new level last month, when he devoted every day of the month of April to another post on “Why I Should Write ‘Doctor Strange.'” I’ve pretty much stopped buying superhero comics, and I never much cared for the Sorcerer Supreme, but Bird’s ideas (a world missing the color blue, Odysseus wandering from one alternate Earth to another) are cool enough that if somebody at Marvel turned him loose, you’d find me in a comic-book store one Wednesday a month to get the new issue. To read the whole month, start here (scroll down to the bottom and work your way up), and continue here.

posted 20 May 2009 in Links. 1 comment

A short entry from the Andy Warhol diaries:

Friday, April 8, 1977
Went with Jed to see Sissy Spacek in Carrie (cab $2.50, tickets $3). Loved it. Finally somebody did slow motion right.

posted 19 May 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

MTV runs a top-of-the-hour promo: this is the slot that was once occupied by the astronaut rocking out. Here it’s a gyroscopic M that rotated various bits of random footage into place. (It’ll come up many more times–I’ll describe it in more detail before we finish the countdown.)

Debbie Gibson sits on her bed, or maybe the bed of somebody with a more typical teenage life, the sort of person who doesn’t have gold records on the wall. In the background, we can see lace curtains and teddy bears. Gibson has her hair up in a ponytail knot; she’s wearing a baggy sweater and there’s a hole in the left knee of her jeans. (There’s a stripe just below that knee–birthmark? bruise? magic marker message? tattoo? barcode of Satan?) She’s cute, but not a bombshell–she looks like a hundred girls I went to high school with. That was exactly Gibson’s appeal, of course: the wholesome band-club geek girl who somehow ended up on the pop charts. In 1987-88, she played “good girl” to Tiffany’s “bad girl.” Later in life, they would both pretend to have “successful comebacks.”

Gibson, seventeen when this video was filmed, starts looking through a photo album, and the pictures come to life. A child actress plays Gibson sitting on a swinging bench in a sepia-toned clip labeled “Me 6 Years Old”; she is then joined by an equally young “Jeff,” who gives her a flower. (I’m not sure where Jeff got the flower in the dead of winter–maybe he saved up his allowance and hit the florist shop.) Apparently, the technology to embed multiple video images in a single shot had become more affordable and flexible this year; Belinda Carlisle’s video also made heavy use of it.

“Whoa-oh-ah-oh!” Gibson sings, and turns the page of the photo album, revealing more recent shots of her: plaid dress, denim jacket, big black hat. Gibson wore a lot of hats, even though they were never particularly flattering. Either she had a lot of bad hair days or a chapeau-happy stylist. Gibson lip-syncs and bops around to her song like an awkward baby goat. The plaid dress foreshadows Britney’s school uniform, a decade later. This was an era where teenage girls weren’t as relentlessly sexualized, but even in 1988, Gibson seemed innocent to the point of cluelessness.

New page: Gibson in the “studio.” With an oversized white shirt and her hair up, Gibson looks like Victoria Jackson’s kid sister. We see Gibson standing at a Roland keyboard, playing the song; we scroll quickly past some backup singers and musicians. Even though the song sounds pretty thoroughly drum-machined, there is a drummer, and he’s excellently out of place: heavy, sweaty, wearing a scoop-neck T-shirt. He looks like they dragged him in from a Loverboy cover band that was playing the Long Island bar circuit and splashed some water on him to wake him up just before the camera started rolling.

Gibson turns the page again, and we see her on the same swinging bench she sat on with Jeff. She’s wearing a super-cute ensemble: big white coat, a red scarf, and the same black hat. Maybe it was just her lucky hat? She wore it the day she met George Michael and tried to never take it off again? There’s a winter scene behind her: trees in the snow. On closer inspection, it appears to be a large photo on the wall of the studio where the video is being filmed.

Back to the band. Sometimes when this video shows a double-page spread of the album, Gibson’s hands are in the frame, on her bedspread. Charmingly, she’s always beating out a rhythm or playing air piano. But I can’t stop watching the drummer. I want him to get his own sitcom.

We hit the guitar solo, and a new page labeled “Kirk’s Birthday.” Lots of pictures of the band around a table, with cake, streamers, and balloons. Gibson gives “Kirk” a wrapped-up stand-up bass. Kirk is cute enough to appear on the cover of Lisa Simpson’s Non-Threatening Boys magazine; I don’t know if he was actually a member of Gibson’s band or called in from the casting agency.

Back on her bed, Gibson smiles and rolls her eyes at the birthday-party antics. The subtext is that she has no friends other than the musicians in her band: that could be sad, or flipped around, you could say that Gibson found friends through music. The lyrics of “Out of the Blue” sound less like a fantasy about a boy and more like a wish for a pop career: “It’s like a dream come true.” Famously, Gibson had never dated when she wrote the songs on her debut album–she just distilled the sentiments she heard on the radio into her own music. Sometimes the results were hilarious: the unknowing handjob metaphor of “Shake Your Love,” the youthful pledge in “Foolish Beat” that “I could never love again.” Overall, Gibson was more interested in pop-music “love” than actual love, which is why I liked her. (That, and her genuine songwriting ability–twenty years later, the bubbling synths on “Out of the Blue” sound dated, and it’s not as sublime as “Only in My Dreams,” but this is still a catchy, well-crafted tune.)

We revisit the red scarf outfit and the bedroom, and then see a different plaid outfit. Gibson’s hair is blowing around: did somebody put on a wind machine? Not a good decision–it’s frizzing out her hair. Maybe that’s why she wears the hat–wind machine protection! There’s a pillow fight with “Denise” and “Monica” (each of those names is written in the album with a little bubble dotting the lower-case i–they didn’t want to go all the way and use hearts?).

The video ends with Gibson sitting on the swing, suddenly joined by “Jeff,” who grew up into a teenage hunk. He gives Gibson a flower; we cut to Gibson in her bedroom, who looks up from the photo album and gives the camera the “OK” symbol. Her image freeze-frames and becomes another picture on the album page, as the video achieves the Meta Self-Referential Death Spiral Event Horizon.

“Out of the Blue” hit #3 on the pop charts. You can watch the video here. As discussed previously, Gibson had an even bigger hit in 1988, the ballad “Foolish Beat,” which hit #1 and was in heavy MTV rotation. I’m fairly certain from my first viewing of this countdown two decades ago that “Foolish Beat” was left off it, either deliberately or accidentally.

posted 15 May 2009 in 1988. 4 comments

Rumor has it there might be a new Star Trek movie out. If you haven’t gotten enough of your Starfleet fix, you might want to take a look at this article I wrote for Wired on artificial languages, from Esperanto to Klingon and beyond (fans of Interlingua, Lojban, and Lincos, please raise your hands).

My article was written back in 1993; the world of artificial languages has not changed hugely since then, but I can nevertheless offer a few other links that might interest you. In 1996, I filed a short follow-up article on the efforts of Klingon linguist d’Armond Speers to teach the language to his toddler. Slate recently ran a good piece on Klingon, and you can find a mind-boggling number of artificial languages catalogued here.

posted 11 May 2009 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

I uploaded two more photos from the flipwalk project in higher resolution. Like so:

To see the larger version of this picture, click here. To see the original page for flipwalk #36, click here.

To see the larger version of this picture, click here. To see the original page for flipwalk #39, click here.

posted 8 May 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

Consider, if you will, the opening lines to Air Supply’s #2 hit from 1980, “All Out of Love”:

I’m lying alone, with my head on the phone / Thinking of you ’til it hurts

Dude, that pain isn’t from a broken heart–it’s because you’re trying to use a telephone as a pillow.

posted 5 May 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I don’t think the format of this site does justice to some of the flipwalk photos with a more horizontal orientation. So I’ve uploaded larger versions of some of the pictures and provided links to them from their respective pages. This is the first of two batches.

To see the larger version of this picture, click here. To see the original page for flipwalk #10, click here.

To see the larger version of this picture, click here. To see the original page for flipwalk #11, click here.

To see the larger version of this picture, click here. To see the original page for flipwalk #5, click here.

posted 1 May 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

Last year, while sorting through some mildewed videotapes in my garage, I discovered three VHS tapes that contained the complete year-end countdown of MTV’s top 100 videos of 1988, unwatched by me since they were broadcast over the last ten hours of that year. Since then, I’ve been working my way through the tapes, and analyzing the videos in more detail than would seem reasonable to anybody–including the artists starring in those videos and myself.

It took me fully seven months to plow through the ten videos and four commercial breaks in the countdown’s third hour. Wow. That’s pathetic. I’ll try to pick up the pace a bit.

If you’re tuning in late, here’s what you missed.

#71: Terence Trent D’Arby, “Sign Your Name”

#72: Kenny Loggins, “Nobody’s Fool”

#73: Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

#74: Steve Winwood, “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?”

#75: Jody Watley, “Some Kind of Lover”

#76: Johnny Hates Jazz, “Shattered Dreams”

#77: Foreigner, “I Don’t Want to Live Without You”

#78: Pat Benatar, “All Fired Up”

#79: OMD, “Dreaming”

#80: Whitney Houston, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go”

Ad time: Commercial Break #9, Commercial Break #10, Commercial Break #11, Commercial Break #12.

And the countdown’s first hour, spanning #91 to #100, and its second hour, spanning #81 to #90.

posted 29 April 2009 in 1988. 4 comments

As previously mentioned, I visited the auction-house exhibition of Michael Jackson’s possessions from Neverland last week. The auction itself had already been cancelled by Jackson at the last minute. Pick your theory as to why: (1) He got a last-minute cash infusion (2) He never intended to actually sell his stuff, but wanted to (a) get the money from people paying $20/head to see his flotsam and jetsam (b) drum up interest for a Michael Jackson museum somewhere.

There weren’t many people there–maybe a dozen or so on a late Friday morning, although it got a bit busier as the day went on. As far as I could tell, nobody was a hyperventilating Jackson fanatic; everyone was just coming for the freak-show value. I’d say we all got our money’s worth.

Jackson bought lots and lots of crap. It’s been documented that he drops staggering sums in places like casino gift shops, and that’s what you see here: overpriced shiny tchotchkes. If Jackson wanted, he could have afforded, say, original Norman Rockwell paintings, but instead, he bought prints of second-rate Rockwell imitators. I’ve seen stores with a giant electric Swiss Army Knife in the window, but it never occurred to me that it might be possible to bring it home.

Oh, and there’s the absolutely insane original art featuring Jackson.

In the entrance hall, there were lots of platinum records and other mementoes of his performing career. A video screen played a Jackson concert on a loop: I watched “Beat It,” where the female guitarist (some web research suggests her name is Jennifer Batten) was wearing glowing antlers that reached a yard above her head. And the director kept cutting in footage of fainting fans being dragged out of the crowd, to demonstrate the primal power of Jackson grabbing his crotch live.

Further back, there were lots of furniture and other home furnishings, including a solid-gold Scrabble set, toy British soldiers, tricycles, saddles, and silverware. It did not appear to be a complete display of Jackson’s Neverland possessions–for example, I assume he owned a television set and kitchen equipment, but that wasn’t included here.

Another room was devoted to dozens of videogames and pinball machines, spanning the last three decades.

And yet another had all the Disney arcana, including a custom-made vitrine that had a scene from Pinocchio, which included a small doll of Jackson in his “Smooth Criminal” oufit; when Pinocchio comes to life, the Jackson doll does a little dance.

One of the stranger motifs was that in every room, there were lifesize mannequins of all descriptions, some cartoony, some realistic: chefs, security guards, old ladies, Darth Vader, Superman, Jackson himself. The realization gradually sank in that these were the closest thing Jackson had to friends.

Gradually, the goggling-at-the-bad taste part of my brain got overwhelmed and I just felt sad about the huge empty cavity in Jackson’s soul (and the terrible things that happened when he tried to compensate by bringing small children to Neverland). If he had just tried to fill it that void with overpriced junk, that would have been okay–even if he had worse taste than Elvis Presley. Oh, there was also a life-size bust of Elvis Presley. A slightly mangled version of the famous Sam Phillips quotation was written on his shoulder in magic marker.

The last thing I noticed, and possibly the creepiest, was an MJ jacket adorned with the toy license plates you give to children.

(If you want more pictures, you can make requests in the comments here, or check out BoingBoing for a link to Paul Sheer’s photos of the same exhibition.)

posted 27 April 2009 in Photos, Tasty Bits. 2 comments