Badass 80’s Music Video Thursday: Puttin’ on the Ritz

Come let’s mix where Rockafellers
walk with sticks or umbrellas
in their mitts,
Puttin’ on the ritz.

Where art tho, 1983?

Reaganomics was hard at work concentrating debt-generated wealth in the hands of the richest 5% of the nation’s elite, while the rest of us were getting acquainted with our now-all-too-familiar habit of financing the latest Sony Walkman (or iPod, or plasma TV, or quarter-million-dollar “starter home,” etc) and thus invite into our lives the promised sense that everything is proceeding according to plan.

We did nuclear blast drills in school.

Back to the Future was just about ready for us all to ooh and ahh about.

And a horrifying looking one hit wonder musician by the name of “Taco” was all the rage on KISS FM. Here, from that glorious year of innocent moral and fiduciary decline, “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Finally, a discreet cure for your embarrassing flatulence odors!

Last night’s fun-filled trip to The Silk Elephant for Thai food, drinks, and revelry with friends led to a not-so-fun-filled wake-up this morning.  An abundance of spice made my belly ache terribly and the first two hours of the day were spent moaning and wishing for a magical cure for my pain.  Luckily for my girlfriend, but painfully for yours truly, there’s been no release/relief, and the search for an easing of the pain has yielded a hilarious – and potentially useful for you, dear reader – discovery.

Behold, Flatulence Deoderizer!  This handy youtube video will explain the “installation process,” which in and of itself landed it a spot on this blog.  Enjoy:

Bad Ass 80’s Music Video – A View To A Kill

Sometimes, when using the patently 80’s euphemism, “Bad Ass,” one struggles to map its constituent elements to the subject of its application in a way that praises.  Such is the case with Duran Duran’s video for “A View To A Kill,” the conceit of which is so conceited that one wonders whether it is more “bad” than “ass,” or vice versa.

Secret agents anyone?  Perhaps, but the euro-wave longhairs they ain’t.

24 fans out there

It’s the first, last LOLCat link I’ll ever post.  And only because I love 24.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/11/funny-pictures-previously-on-24/ 

Bad Ass 80’s Music Videos – The Great Commandment

Some people supress you, they parch you
and reap of disaster.
Reeducation, for the infants
who demanded for an innocent instant:
The great commandment – shows the content
between the world and their embarrassing pavement.
Believe the scholars. Read the readings.
Realize the man who says anything…

WTF is this thing prattling on about?? I never managed to decipher this one, despite listening to it incessantly over the stereo in my 1985 Honda Accord during my high school years (um, the 80’s). Like those of Abba and Nena before them (and the likes of Yael Naim today), Camouflage’s lyrics always seemed to me to have just barely survived translation from their original tongue, stumbling into English with more than casual wounds to both their poetry and substance.

That said, Camouflage imported for us at the time an otherwise inaccessible sense of the youth experience behind the Berlin Wall. It validated my belief that the likes of Depeche Mode were indeed on a cutting edge of globalism that cut through national lines, drawing the world’s kids into an inevitably shrinking circle. Did European New Wave and its irrepressible drive to break out of isolation in fact invent the Internet, shrinking and flattening the world ala Thomas Friedman? Good luck getting Al Gore to hand over credit, but the evidence is yours to evaluate. This week I give you “The Great Commandment,” by Camouflage.

Update:  Upon arrival at work today, my friend Andrew Ormerod was sporting a shirt so cosmically connected to the lyric above, I was at a loss to understand the mysterious universal forces that could have prompted its donning.  Here’s that shirt, with Andrew wearing it.

Love jewelry? This bracelet loves dummy types back.

Frequently find yourself searching for placeholder text, placeholder thoughts, placeholder feelings, placeholder excusese? How about placeholder jewelry?

Brian McNitt honors us by having found (lord only knows how) this sublime piece of jewelry for dummy types like you and me. The unscripted bracelet. Finally, jewelry that loves you back.

Knight Rider Rides Again

Knight Rider is back

I’ll admit I was a geek as a kid. I wanted to be cool, but I just wasn’t. End of story. But I sure did love Knight Rider and The A-Team. If the popular kids liked those shows as much as I did, I reasoned, then maybe I was cooler than I thought. But then, those cool shows went off the air. It wasn’t too long before people were making fun of my beloved cool barometers. Michael and Kitt, it started to seem, were to be ridiculed rather than venerated. I guessed my brush with cool hadn’t been as close as I’d hoped.

Life went on. I settled into a comfortable understanding of myself – that really, I’m just some guy. No more, no less. I’m one of billions. Decent with words on occasion, empathetic, a decent draftsman, and the potential to outlive my parents. Those were good years, and there were many of them.

Today, though, it all came to an end. Today, while I was at home working on a UX analysis for a friend, I happened across a link to — gasp! — the new Knight Rider. NEW, as in KNIGHT RIDER 2008.

Panic struck. Could it be, I wondered, that one of my old competitors for cool is behind its reprise? Could Keith Power or Mark Capasso, or even Jason Jordan, be responsible for this – the return of Kitt??? And if so, what would that mean? Maybe I lost faith in Kitt too soon. Maybe I was a wannabe, while here the real things labored in seclusion to bring about the return of the most amazing self-conscious car the world has ever seen. Maybe my dismissal of cool was premature! If only I had hung in there a little longer! If only I really had what it took to see a legend through to its inevitable revival!! If only!!!

Then again, maybe it’s just a friggin car that talks already.

Lagniappe Saturday – Sisters of Mercy: Dominion

Sitting at the 61C cafe in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  It’s Saturday.  If you’re a local, you know the quasifauxhipcoffeeshop I’m talking about.  Out of towners, every city’s got one.  …or 5.  …or 50.  61C is a nice enough place, but the chairs are a pain in my ass (and back and neck and forearms) and the tables are impossibly small.  They have free wireless, off of which roughly 22 other computers currently appear to be feeding.  I guess that’s why my connection is slow.  I’ve been waiting and waiting for this youtube video to load, and the wait just continues.  Ahhh if only I could switch to the AOLnets and achieve the orgiastic, orgasmic, screaming speeds up to 56kbps.

So rather than wait and wait for this thing to download, I think I’ll post the embed here.  At least if I can’t watch it right now, YOU CAN.  And I’ll have handy access to it later.

The Sisters of Mercy were a less popular (though totally badass) 80’s band than those of recent loremipsum fame.  Dominion, featured here, was one of their better-known singles, though to call Dominion well-known is in itself a stretch statement only meant for a tiny sliver of us who grew up in the 80’s.  Goth abounds.  Cold war residue chills the listener’s innards.  Mother Russia, rain down…

Badass 80’s Music Video Thursday: Safety Dance

So mainstream, so popular, it may rightly deserve to have been the first in this Thursday series.  So complain if you will that this one is a late addition.  But dudes and dudettes, no one can deny its power.  The very refrain grants freedom from codependence:  We can dance if we want to.

David Sedaris figures out how to pee himself

David Sedaris and I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at around the same time. We took writing workshops with James McManus (himself quite a writer, from whom Sedaris apparently learned where I did not), and were into the same embarrassing type of performance art.  Ahh, the early 90’s.  In response to Ariel Waldman’s post, Wine Rack, I recall Sedaris’ essay on the Stadium Pal, an absolutely terrible idea just for men.