Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"

But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.

The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:

There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:

I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.

I think the 4:30 Movie week long series - Japanese monster movies, WWII week, etc - is where I learned there was such a thing as curating.

I mostly remember this as where I learned to appreciate black & white Hollywood movies from the 30s and 40s, largely for their endless stock of tough-talking, sharp-witted dames.

My pals and I would stay up late (on either Friday or Saturday?) for the Channel 5 movie, which came a built-in aura of "quality" and served as a kind of gateway art-house drug. I distinctly recall two life (or at least 10-year-old mind) altering nights with the Channel 5 Late Movie, one spent with 2001, the other with a moderately edited cut of Straw Dogs. No wonder my cohort of boys grew up a little bent!

see you in the morning.

h/t Jerome

Can someone put McCain's head on this guy below for me? Thanks!

Random, but: speaking of pauses...

Context:

Earlier this week Carly Fiorina, one of his most accomplished surrogate liars, brought up how many insurance plans cover Viagra but not birth control. McCain, of course, voted against legislation that would have mandated birth control to be part of insurance coverage. When he was asked for comment, deer in headlights[:]

Q: Earlier this week Carly Fiorina was meeting with a bunch of reporters and talked about it being unfair that insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. And -

McCain: I certainly do not want to discuss that issue. (uneasy laughter)

Q: But apparently you’ve voted against (McCain laughter continues)

McCain: I don’t know what I voted -

Q: Voted against coverage of birth control, forcing health insurance companies to cover birth control in the past. Is that still your position?

McCain: I’ll look at my voting record on it, but I have, uh, (5 second pause) , I don’t recall the vote right now. But I’ll be glad to look at it and get back to you as to why, I don’t -

Q: I guess her statement was that it was unfair that health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. Do you have an opinion on that?

McCain: (after 8 second pause) I don’t know enough about it to give you an informed answer because I don’t recall the vote, I’ve cast thousands of votes in the Senate. I will respond to - it’s a, it’s a (nervous) [full context]

I completely slept on the tracking-shot echo in BSG's mid-season finale until I read this very neat post by Chauncey De Vega at We Are Respectable Negroes:

h/t Oliver Willis on the youtubery. Also:

bumpity

I'm late to this party, but:

Malcolm X would have been 83 today. h/t Bomani Jones for doing the math for me.

Filmmaker Althea Wasow, likely in response to my saying in The Root that I couldn't think of any pro-Hillary Clinton viral videos, sent me this in the emails:

I thought we were buds, Althea?

The bumper for the New York State Education Department's Bureau of Mass Communications, creators of one my favorite shows "Vegetable Soup." Of course I grew up completely in love with bleeps and blips.

Couldn't much on the wonderfully named "Bureau of Mass communications," but did find this bit in history of the NYS Ed Dept:

Starting in 1886 the Department of Public Instruction loaned glass lantern slides to teacher training institutions, school districts, and adult learning groups. This popular service supported instruction in geography, history, and science, and continued until 1939. Thereafter a small unit promoted school use of audio-visual aids, including the new media of film, radio, and television. The Education Department fostered the development of educational and public television services in New York. In 1953 the Regents obtained seven FCC permits for UHF channels; under a law passed the next year the Regents chartered educational television (ETV) councils to operate the stations. After successful closed-circuit and broadcast ETV experiments, state aid authorized in 1961 helped over a thousand schools purchase and use ETV equipment during the decade. The Department acquired or produced educational video programs (such as the popular "Vegetable Soup" series on inter-racial relations) and distributed them to schools. In recent years the ETV program has promoted interactive video-computer networks and remote learning systems. Statutes passed in 1961 and 1978 authorized a continuing program of state aid for New York's non-commercial public television (and also radio) stations, which provide educational programming to schools, institutions, and the general public.

From glass lantern slides to trippy shows on "inter-racial" relations.

On the news that the Electric Company is coming back, Caro over at Sound Taste recalls "a bicultural childhood, spent mostly in the DR, but with yearly visits to Queens, where I gorged on Cocoa Pebbles and Underdog. For learning English, Sesame Street and other "educational programs" were key." [full post]

I have to confess that, owing to my lifelong habit of picking oddball also-rans, my favorite show was actually the thoroughly bizarre Vegetable Soup:

Someone just IM'd to ask me why I didn't include nutcase Harlem preacher and youtube star James David Manning in my Root article on viral video and Obama. You guys have nothing to do all day except wait for your RSS feeds to update or something?

First off, I was on the high volume James Manning beat long before you were, so back the fuck up off me. (I would turn your speakers down before clicking the link above.)

Second of all, my piece is about viral video, not foul-mouthed Kooks from the Outer Limits of Human Belief. (That's one of my favorite books, BTW. I lent it to someone and never got it back.)

But the latest Reverend Manning clip - TRINITY OF HELL! - is above for my faithful ebogites. I should say that my naturally pervy (as in media pervy) inclinations make me a bad go-to guy on topics like Manning, not bad so much as unstrategic. I find him kind of fascinating because I find the aesthetics and rhetoric of American kookery fascinating in general. Manning is actually an amateur in terms of his kook-kung fu, being mostly just funny as opposed to crystal-bullet-through-the-forehead novel like, say, the Nuwaubians.

Speaking of which:

But the thing about Manning is that the somewhat smug amusement he inspires in me likely keeps me from understanding his use value in transmitting smears about Obama. (Too much irony is worse than none at all, to misquote Machine.) For example, Manning takes the stillborn "Obama=gay" meme and tries to revive it by casting the Wright-Obama fracaso as a lovers quarrel, and then piggybacks that on the already well-circulated "Oprah=lesbian" meme. It's completely bananas (like Manning) but not a bad example of kook electoracial psy-ops. If a version of that story pops up again on, say, FOX, we know who to blame.

...me for embedding that video and context-shifting it so that it seems less crazy? Doh!

A piece on viral video, Mumbo Jumbo and Barack Obama in TheRoot.com:

Whether it's the Vote Different ad that kicked off the primary season's viral warfare, or a completely loopy set of videos called Barack in 74 that imagine our next president as a resolutely nerdy stoner at Occidental College, this has been the best campaign ever for ads and videos. It's also been a completely one-sided campaign. Whoever first said "there is joy in the struggle" likely wasn't thinking of viral video, but if the muses of humor, visual intelligence and mashed-up insight could vote, they would clearly be voting Obama. (A tip of the hat to Media Assassin Harry Allen for bringing "Barack in 74" to my attention.) [full story]

The Root doesn't embed video, so here are some of the clips I mention:

Hillary Clinton sits down with Marsellus Wallace. From illdoctrine. h/t Jack & Jill Politics.

This is the opening sequence from Say Brother. Not sure when the clip is from, but Say Brother debuted in 1968 on Boston's WGBH and is now called Basic Black, making it longest running black public affairs program in history. [Hat-tip that non-blog-having (and Boston-bred) Jones Kid.]