Category Archives: Friday Morning Videos

Friday Morning Videos: She Blinded Me With Science

Posted on November 9, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Hey, remember what happened on Tuesday? There was this big thing, and a bunch of people won, and a bunch of other people lost, and a bunch of OTHER people were really happy. Or sad. Or angry. And elated.

But in my opinion, the greatest winners of the original American Idol? Nerds. You got it: science, math, and all the beauty therein. Because while all the talking heads were talking with their heads, and the fighters were fighting, and the whiners whining, and the happy people happying, there was one nerd who calmly sat before his computer, staring into the blue pixelated light like a witch into a cauldron, running the same command over and over, reaching out and grabbing polls and opinions and multiplying and subtracting and weighing and balancing, adding newt’s eyes and a pinch of hair from a baby lemur born at 7 AM EST, until he came out with a full list of which states would vote how, and who would win.

His name is Nate Silver, and he is the latest, greatest example of that thing our parents told us over and over in the 80s: Oh, nerd of my loins, taker of abuse and spitballs and rolled eyes and scorn, you of the eyes and legs weakened by reading on the couch all day long, you lovers of Thomas Dolby and They Might Be Giants and Weird Al Yankovic,  you who gets picked last in everything but Quiz Bowl: your day will come. Some day, these people who spit on you and scorn you, they will be looking back at these days as the best of their lives, and you: you, my weird offspring, will rule the world. You will be celebrated. And all this will be distant memory.

Yes, ladies and geekmen, our day has come. If looking good is the sweetest revenge, then Nate Silver is the king of the Tri-Lambs, because he looks amazing. He got every state right–every state–and called the game months ago, and never blinked at the detractors, because he had confidence in his algorithims. He depends upon his math, loves his puzzles, and I imagine that every time some new factor enters the equation–a hurricane, say–his eyes light up brighter than his flatscreens, and he calculates its impact, derives its derivations, and, I’d like to think, feeds it into a punchcard slot before a new roll of paper results comes pouring out. And the numbers add up, and he proves that math, and its slightly wackier cousin, science, aren’t just cold scratches on a chalkboard, soulless columns of numbers. They’re cold scratches on a chalkboard, and they have the soul and beauty of a Van Gogh.

And that, my friends, is poetry in motion.

(My only comment on the video is that I hope in future we are kinder to the mad scientists of today.)

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Friday Morning Videos: See a Little Light

Posted on November 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I wouldn’t normally post this for a Friday Morning Video–I wasn’t much of a Hüsker Dü fan back in the day–but I was inspired this morning. We’ve had constant rain for six days–and when I say constant, I mean rain has not stopped falling from the sky in six days. Monday morning I came downstairs with my daughter, who protested, “Mommy, it’s not day yet!” That’s what it’s been like around here. Not just gray, but dark.

So imagine my delight this morning when I awoke to an almost-dry sidewalk–it hasn’t rained in six hours, at least!–and from my current vantage point, I can see bright clouds over the neighborhood of Munhall. Not sunshine or anything, mind you. Just brighter clouds. In fact, they’re the light yellow that an old bruise gets. Yesterday, the whole sky was a fresh black-and-blue mess. Today? more of a sickly ivory.

In celebration of this almost-break in the weather, I share this song, which you might recognize from my Unfathomably Good Music mix tape. Seeing as how the bright spots are over his neighborhood, I choose to thank the late, great Drew Martin for this little bit o’light brightening up our morning.

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Back Before We Could Watch a Werewolf Transform. (It wasn’t that long ago.)

Posted on October 31, 2012 by | 1 comment

For the love of Zombie Choreography! How could I post anything but Thriller on Halloween? This was groundbreaking stuff. Dancing Zombies, moving make-up, Vincent Price saying “y’alls”. It all started when The King of Pop went to see an American Werewolf in London and decided that he liked it  and wanted his next video to resemble it. So he called up the director, John Landis, and asked him what he was doing.

He’s not like other guys.

 

AWiL was groundbreaking itself because before 1981 movies did not actually show the werewolf transformation. You would see a guy acting like red hot hair follicles were about to burst out of his face, then he stepped behind a curtain or something and when stepped out, he was much hairier. Then he covered his face and screamed. This scared a passing squirrel so completely that the camera guy just had to cut away from the werewolf action to get a close-up of the horrified look on the little nut-nibbler’s furry little face. By the time he cut back, the terrifyingly hirsute transformation was complete, and the man-beast was celebrating with an arched-backed howl straight at the moon that started all this trouble to begin with.

Landis saw this whole hide-and-seek werewolf thing as a big problemwhen it came to suspension of disbelief, so he created a new kind of Werewolf transformation make-up. If you know how a squib works…you’ve got a basic idea. I know what you kids are thinking…why didn’t they just use CGI? Because, youngster, there was no CGI in 1981. That’s right. And before Landis came along, we had to pretend that werewolf transformations didn’t look stupid, but they really did…especially what with the frightened squirrel thing…and we liked it. No. Wait. We didn’t like it.

Speaking of not liking things…now that you can have real-time, non-squirrel-assisted werewolf transformations, where the heck are all your werewolf movies? And no, Wolverine does not count. Bah! Ungrateful kids! Just watch this video, and maybe I’ll tell you how Ola Ray got her pants so tight. (Hint–squibs were also used.)

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Friday Morning Videos: In the Air Tonight

Posted on October 26, 2012 by | 1 comment

Melinda’s been doing some warmups for Halloween, and while this isn’t specifically a monster song, it’s fricking spooky. Like spooky and also sexy, in the way that Phil Collins can somehow be sexy, especially when he’s grayscaled and soft-focused into a Michael Myers mask.

Also, like so many songs on this feature, it’s often inspired by what I happen to hear on the radio. I was driving during this particular song, and I’m not a terribly experienced driver; I tend to hold my hands tightly on the 2-and-10 positions most of the time. Except for when this came on, when I had to air drum. I had to. So do you. If you don’t believe me, hold your hands still while watching this, and try not to air drum at the 3:15 mark.

Try.

You can’t do it.

If you can, you’re clearly on Thorazine and stuck in one of those rooms in that hallway. Listen closely. Do you hear the doorknob jiggle? That’s Phil Collins. He’s looking for you.

P.S. This song also gets major bonus points for being the on the soundtrack to “Risky Business,” which will someday be covered as a Nomi’s Blue Book feature.

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Friday Morning Videos Almost Halloween Edition

Posted on October 19, 2012 by | 1 comment

The guy in the baby Stewie costume has been waiting for his Butterfinger for like 20 minutes.

Halloween is almost here, and what could be a more perfect Friday Morning Video than Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me? It has zombies, haunted paintings, dogs in masks, a dude who showers while wearing a towel and enough old-school Halloween decorations to make that one guy on your block who goes over-board every year and end up scaring the crap out of a bunch of small children super jealous. Not enough? Oh come on. This song is a classic…and just so weird in a Scooby-Doo Halloween special kind of way. At one point Rockwell sings in an affected accent that is surely meant to be Bela Lugosi. Or possibly Lou Costello. He blames his paranoia on Alfred Hitchcock*, and the IRS. What? Michael Jackson’s Thriller? A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Besides, who do you think that golden throated soulster singing to-the-front back-up on this track? Which leads me to the best part of this song. The story. I used to think that Rockwell was able to get Michael Jackson because his father was Berry Gordy, but then I read this from the song’s Wikipedia page:

At the time of the recording Rockwell was estranged from his father and living with Ray Singleton, his father’s ex-wife. Singleton served as executive producer on the project and would occasionally play some demo tracks to Berry Gordy. The elder Gordy was less than enthusiastic about Rockwell’s music until he heard the single with a familiar voice featured prominently on background vocals

Holy crap! If that story is true, I feel so bad for Rockwell. And that is why I say, “Back off with your Michael Jackson talk. It’s Rockwell’s turn to shine.”

 

* Rockwell included several nods to The Master. Can you spot them…before it’s too lat?! Mwa ha ha! Just kidding. Take your time.

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Friday Morning Videos: Special La Luna Edition

Posted on October 15, 2012 by | 3 comments

We bought an awesome phases-of-the-moon calendar back in March, and it’s nice to track when the full moon’s going to be high in the sky. Even better, though, is that last night, apropos of seemingly nothing, my husband began singing, “It’s a NEW MOON ON MONDAY!”

I knew he wasn’t singing it because the song popped randomly into his head and he was forced to loop it until another song purged the earworm like a toothpick through stuck glitter glue; no, I knew he’d consulted the calendar.

So here we are, opening our week with the second-best video from a band that became famous solely because of its videos, although if you say that’s proof that their songs suck, I’ll stab you with this freshly sharpened eyeliner pencil. I always carry it, in case someone disses Duran Duran.

Of course, not realizing the import of the lunar calendar, I decided to work in our downtown office today, instead of at home, where I’d have the luxury of watching the video and pointing out the especially fantastic parts. But I’ll leave the deep examination to Melinda, and point out, from memory, why this is one of the best videos of Duran Duran, and also ever.

  1. There are four versions. FOUR. They range in length from the one you saw on MTV to a 17-minute edition that can only be found through an Easter egg on their greatest hits DVD, after watching the video three times. This YouTube video is “extended,” but it’s only 6:08.
  2. The extended edition features Simon LeBon in a dressing room with a hot French spy, and at one point, he says, “It looks like you’ve already got my back against the wall,” at which point, any viewer must squeal giddily, take control of the remote, and rewind. Yes, rewind. Don’t skip back or run it back or any of those crazy newfangled things discs do; you must find a way to rewind.
  3. It features a semi-futuristic French revolution, I think. There are French-looking cobblestones and French-looking flags and soldiers on horseback, and also Simon LeBon.
  4. There’s also something about this time, la luna, and lighting one’s torch and waving it for a new moon on Monday, which I think is some kind of insignia, or possibly a rallying cry for la revolucion, I’m not really sure, but it rhymes really well, and Simon LeBon sounds really sexy saying it.
  5. At one point, late in the video, the soldiers on horseback–or it might just be palace guards on foot, I can’t remember and can’t watch it right now–chases the hot Frenchie spy down an alley, and she stops the charging horses (OK, maybe they ARE horses) by waving a giant flag and being very brave and revolutionary, totally like Tianamen Square, only without the grocery bag or actual fear of impending death. That act of bravery is not the important part, though. The important part–and the part that makes this video the most rewinded in the Handley house– is that Simon LeBon is watching her wave the flag from far away, and is totally charmed by it, and ducks his head and smiles and then sneaks another look at her because she’s so darn cute when she’s being all death-defying like that. Pick up remote. Rewind. Repeat. Feel funny in ways you don’t understand yet. Rewind. Repeat. Pause. Squeal.

Back to the salt mines. Or, as we like to say around here, back to feeding the capitalist pig dogs.

 

P.S. The first best Duran Duran video is View to a Kill, because it intersperses scenes from the James Bond movie seamlessly, and features the entire band in their natural habitats: Nick Rhodes as a fashion photographer, John Taylor shooting at Grace Jones, Roger Taylor as a gunner in the back of a van, Andy Taylor as an evil blind accordionist, and Simon LeBon as a terrible pun-teller.

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Friday Morning Videos: Baker Street

Posted on October 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

A few weeks, ago, I paid tribute to The Bangles, and in the process, apparently kicked AM Gold in the teeth a little. Specifially, I suggested that Simon & Garfunkel don’t rock. I stand by that statement: they don’t. I listen to them frequently and find the songs beautiful and melancholy, but it’s not the kind of thing I crank up during a long stretch on the turnpike, or in the shower.

Melinda, whose favorite bands are The Scissor Sisters and everything on AM Gold, called me out on it. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make it up to her, and then yesterday, on my way back from Lowe’s, new space heater in the passenger’s seat  (my home office has no heating vent, and I got tired of wearing gloves by the end of the day), 3WS, Pittsburgh’s home for oldies, kicked out with the most rocking tune ever to be played in a dentist’s office: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”

Here’s the funny thing about “Baker Street”: I’ve heard the song five thousand times, give or take a million, and I don’t think I ever knew the title. Or if I did, it was one of those things where I’d hear the title and think, “Oh, yeah, it’s ‘Baker Street.'” And then: “Oh, right, Gerry Rafferty.” And then I would forget the name and artist, because I would spend the next half hour trying to remember who had sex to the song in which movie.

And by George Michael’s yacht: someone did. Either that, or the saxophone conjures a false memory of having sex in an urban landscape, with a view of the wet pavement, silhouetted against louvered blinds. The sex partner is someone with whom you had an affair ten years ago, but he’s married and you’re engaged, and his marriage is failing and your fiance is in a coma, or drives a Camaro. Or else you’re a teacher and he’s a former student. Or you’re dating his best friend.

Which scenario was it? I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s right there, at the corner of waa-waa and do-do-doooo, but it keeps slipping away. Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy. Kim Basinger and Mickey O’Rourke.  Somebody had sex to this song, damn it, and the internet’s no help at all.

In any case, I knew I’d feature it this week, although there’s no video, since it was released in 1978. Just this live TV clip. And thank the heavens for the mid-morning DJ, because she said the name of the song, which I repeated five times, and then made my daughter repeat, for good measure. So I’ll never again forget that the name of this song is “Baker Street.”

One thing, though. Listening to it on the radio again, I realized something truly astounding: did you know this song has lyrics?

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Friday Morning Videos: The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun

Posted on October 5, 2012 by | 3 comments

Someday we’ll do a Tuesday Tribute to the hilarity that is Julie Brown (not Downtown Julie Brown, because she was the opposite of funny) but the Julie Brown who brought us “I’m a Blonde,” “Just Say Julie,” and a dozen other brilliant moments from when the M in MTV stood for music.

But not today, because it’s Friday and tomorrow is Homecoming, bitches. That’s right: I’m heading to my 15th college reunion. Like in 1-5, like in if I’d had a baby when I graduated from Bethany College, she’d be studying for PSATs and getting her learner’s permit. Fortunately, though, I postponed parenthood and the internet went viral, so here I am, sharing this gem with you.

What I really love about this particular YouTube clip is that it was recorded from “Just Say Julie”–and I think it might even have been the episode in which Julie has PMS and fires her entire crew, and spends the entire show eating Oreos and weeping. It’s also the episode in which she’s watching “Lost in Your Eyes,” and she says, “Debbie Gibson’s wearing a hat. I don’t have the CHEEKbones for a HAT!” a line which my sister and I still use when we have the opportunity to try on a fedora.

Of course, this song would never have been written today, because in the intervening years, too many kids actually HAVE gone Carrie on their classmates. So this tribute to psychopathic, gun-toting high school students, waging a massacre against their fellow partygoers, is really a swan song of a more innocent age. We miss you, Debbie.

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Workin’ 9 to 5

Posted on October 1, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Good morning, and happy Monday! May your job be not quite as horrible as Dolly’s. There’s a better life – you read about, don’t you?

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Friday Morning Videos: Hazy Shade of Winter

Posted on September 28, 2012 by | 4 comments

I returned from vacation this week to find that fall had fallen like Robert Downey Jr. down a K-hole. (Did they have K-holes in the 80s? No matter, he probably did it at some point.) So it’s no coincidence that all week I’ve been singing this spectacular song. No, the leaves aren’t brown yet, but the sky is most definitely a hazy shade of winter.

Unless it’s anything ever written and performed by Bob Dylan, I usually like original versions of songs better. “Hazy Shade of Winter” is an excellent example of a number that that started as a reasonably well-performed ditty by two of the greatest harmonizers in history; it rocks a little harder than most Simon & Garfunkel songs, but that’s like saying James Spader was slightly less douchey in “Pretty in Pink” than he was in “Less than Zero.” Enter The Bangles, who started off in the LA punk underground, but leaped into the 80s pop scene with all the energy of 99 luftballoons rising into the German sun. A few crocodiles and donuts later, and they had all the street cred of Justin Timberlake, pre-SNL.

Then they got hired to do a song for a soundtrack. “Less Than Zero,” for those that have forgotten, stars James Spader in the 80s with a twist (he’s a drug-dealing douchebag, instead of just a plain ol’ douchebag), Andrew McCarthy as a sensitive friend, Jami Gertz as the sensitive girlfriend, and Robert Downey Jr. as himself. The movie has cocaine and blowjobs for cocaine and sports cars and hot tubs, and it’s currently being used as a tutorial for speechwriters too young to know how fucking radical the Reagan years were.

But that’s aside from the fact that The Bangles took Simon and Garfunkel and turned that shit up to twelve. Rumor has it that Art Garfunkel’s hair straightened in response to the four-part harmony, driving guitar and pounding drums. No firm report on what happened to Paul Simon, but it’s said he disappeared into Africa for several years, wondering how four young lassies had managed to rock harder than the guy who actually was a rock.

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