Tricycle Christ and the Sunday Blowout

Hey, as of yesterday I have 100 posts here! Wowza! Let's celebrate with a still from the (near) titular movie of this blog:


NSFW?

This weekend I traveled down to Roseburg with a friend. What an amazing little shit-hole. I saw the giant pit in the ground where I was born. I was told by my parents that, long ago, Douglas County Hospital (now the pit) used bo be next to a hill where famous goats roamed free. (When I was in elementary school I told my class I was born "in a hospital by goats" and they all laughed). The hill, Mt. Nebo, no longer has its Mt. Nebo goats, which used to come down into the hospital grounds and predict whether it would rain or not with their very presence. My friend told me that they all fell into traffic or were killed off. This is just one of the changes that Roseburg has experienced since I left it 20.5 years ago.

As we tried to leave, the tire on my friend's car went flat an hour out of town, looking like it ran over a lawnmower blade. We didn't have any of the right tools, so we had to call roadside assistance, which took an hour. After they left we discovered the battery had gone dead and we had to wait for another thirty minutes. Then a woman with no teeth on her bottom jaw except for canines (reverse vampire!) told us that the tire department at the local Walmart had shut down thirty minutes before our arrival. We eased up the freeway on a spare until we got to Springfield.

Springfield is nothing like it looks in the Simpsons. At the Springfield Walmart, Jeff Spicoli told us that they had just closed up an hour early, but that the Walmart we had come from usually stayed open later. Of course, nobody else was open given that it's a Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but if he wanted to get somewhere I'll bet he would have wanted four tires (unless he rode a tricycle).

Since there was no other alternative in sight, we drove to Portland on the spare, never going above 45 mph. This meant hugging the guardrail with the hazard lights on while the world literally passed us by. It was kind of nice, because it slowed down the whole day (it took four hours to get from Springfield to Portland, 2x what it should have), and there was a distinct sense that something wanted us to take it slow. Whatever the cosmic reasoning, we missed the 10:20 showing of Coraline, and that's that.

Tomorrow mom and I begin moving our lives down to a Salem storage unit. My room looks like a hurricane came in and fucked it. It's emptier than it was yet dirtier than it was. I can't bring myself to pack up my CDs yet. There are mixes that need to be made!

Spreading the Gospel of Basil

Yesterday I put up a post about Toni Basil and how awesome she was. It has come to my attention in the past 24 hours that there is even more to Basil's awesomeness than evidenced by her videos alone. To save you the trouble of going to Wikipedia, I've done the hard work for you.

A list of other gifts from Toni's elvish heart:

• She choreographed the "Once in a Lifetime" video by the Talking Heads and showed David Byrne footage of epilepsy sufferers for inspiration

• She choreographed and directed the (admittedly kind of silly) video for the amazing "Cross-eyed and Painless." In so doing, she also invented the moonwalk before Michael Jackson!

• She choreographed David Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour.

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• She choreographed the Monkees' insane movie, Head, cowritten by Jack Nicholson, as well as other sweet movies like American Graffiti and Muppets from Space.
  

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• She appeared as one of the prostitutes who flips out in the acid trip scene from Easy Rider (she's the one with black hair), as well as a movie called Mother, Jugs and Speed with Bill Cosby and Raquel Welsh (Mother and Jugs, respectively) and the aforementioned Rockula alongside Thomas Dolby(!), among others. She was also on an episode of Baywatch Nights as a fortune teller.
  

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Ok, I actually thought that list was going to be longer, but that's still nothing to sneeze at. Plus she's six years older than my mom. Whoah!

On a related side note, did you know that in the '90s the Talking Heads reformed without David Byrne as The Heads and released an album called No Talking, Just Head? And it sucked? My goodness.

Toni Basil Wishes You a Happy Post-Thanksgiving

I said before that if I was living in any cartoon universe I'd like it to be that of Betty Boop. Well, if I could visit any music video universe I think it would be fun to visit that of Toni Basil. The only thing is that I know I couldn't hack it. They're wildly energetic; everything's moving all the time. Toni lives in a void surrounded by theater props and her multi-racial troupe of dancers. So cool!
Until tonight I only knew about "Mickey," her super-hit. I didn't know that, like the Obama family, Toni Basil was a pixie made out of pure joy.
My favorite videos:

You Got a Problem:
A Devo cover. Holy fucking shit.



Shopping From A-Z:
Dig how they call out all the groceries ("F: fish!") and for "X" they just yell "Nothing!"



Be Stiff:
Another Devo cover. Imagine if this was your band at prom. You wouldn't know what to do. Plus they'd out-dance you and you'd just stop trying.



The Night:
In 1990 Toni Basil was in a movie called Rockula about... well I don't know. The whole movie's on youtube, but I don't think I can bring myself to watch it.
This scene not only looks like it was awkwardly shoehorned into the flick, but it features: a guy in chainmail licking his lips and scratching with a victrola; Toni doing a really awkward rap; the actors trying to act with nothing to do; a golden piano. Oh, and the song's awesome.



Extra credit - videos not embedded here to save space:
Street Beat: I don't know what to say about this. It's over the top.
Street Life: Not to be confused with "Street Beat."

Bitching Post: Americans vs. Natural Beauty

Went to the Giant's Causeway today and dealt with terrible, terrible, terrible Americans on the bus. I had already complained about the people in my study abroad group, but little did I know that some of the kids who are studying the Republic would be 10x worse. They came up en masse this weekend to go on a catered trip around NI and I tagged along with some of the people in my group. It was awful. Things that I was subjected to listening to on the bus:

• The worst game of "Would You Rather" ever. Sample questions: would you rather fuck your mom or be fucked by your dad? Would you rather get AIDs or (something equally offensive and unclever).
• The fact that most of these college-age Americans don't know what "secession" means nor do they know who Robert E. Lee was ("Was he a poet?").
• Insensitive stupid shit about Northern Ireland like "There's no old buildings 'cause they've all been bombed." They also split their group into two teams for some drinking game they have planned for later, naming themselves the IRA and the Loyalists.
• Speaking of that drinking game, they talked about it for at least five fucking hours. How can you talk about a future drinking game for that long? Why? Are you trying to impress somebody? What is there to say? "You just gotta chug it, playa."
• "That's what she said."
• A long joke about the different connotations of the phrase "eating out."
• The fact that they are all simultaneously reading books in the Twilight series (you know, the one about vampires that the 7th-graders I taught this summer read?).
• "Tonight I'm gonna get as stoned as a witch in Salem." "Weren't they burned at the stake?" "Oh, then I'm gonna get blazed." (...kinda clever comeback)
• A couple making out and dry-humping in the seat in front of me.

Despite the awesome natural beauty of the Causeway (pictures later), this trip was just a cherry on top of a delightfully shitty reading week sundae. I really forget how specialized and marginalized they people that I really enjoy spending time with are in the whole scope of people my age. I also forget how awkward I am in general around people I don't know. Things to cheer me up:

First of all, courtesy of the Miami Sun Sentinel via the AV Club: a list of the worst football rap music videos of all time. A taste - you'll think you won't want to watch all five minutes of this, but I defy you not to:



Robots! Presented in the most casually snarky, British way possible:



Also, I got three movies from the library - Ran, Bande a part, and An American Werewolf in London (which I, ironically, have never seen).

Also, I'm going to eat chicken dinosaurs for dinner. Nothing can stop me from having fun!