WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Vintage Jeans Commercials: Fit For All

BY KRISTEN BIALIK

 

WATCH VIDEO: Collection - Vintage Jeans Commercials

 

“Once in a great while, a natural phenomenon occurs that is so beautiful, so dramatic, it overshadows everything else. Sergio Valente has created a phenomenon the whole world will be watching: Sergio Valente black denim jeans. They’re more than beautiful. They’re out of sight.” This is the narration for a Sergio Valente denim ad in the jeans collection. The voiceover is so deeply impassioned. The slowly-revolving pan shots around a backlit, denim-clad behind are so intensified. The tight shots of tight asses are so all encompassing. The ad is dramatic to the point that it must be hyperbole. But you can tell that it’s actually in earnest. And the funny thing is that behind the inflated language, there’s a grain of truth to the ad. Jeans have become an unstoppable phenomenon in the world of fashion and apparel. The ubiquity of jeans has become so universal that they are almost hidden in plain view. The phenomenon really is "out of sight."

Anthropologists Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward of the Global Denim Project consider the global denim phenomenon a perfect example of the “blindingly obvious.” The sheer scale of denim’s presence has made us take that presence for granted. In Miller and Woodward’s estimation, in the majority of countries in the world, the majority of people on any given day are wearing jeans. With the exception of rural areas in China and South Asia, Miller found that when he stopped and counted the first 100 people to walk by, about 50 percent of the population wore jeans everywhere from Brazil to India, from Turkey to the

A Desperate Masterpiece: Lars Von Trier's Riget (AKA The Kingdom)

BY THOMAS MICHALSKI

Watch the first episode of Riget (The Kingdom) here.

Watch the whole series here.

By the earlier 1990s, Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier was already an internationally well-known art-house auteur, fresh from winning a slew of awards, including the Palm d’Or at Cannes, with Europa, the final film in a trilogy of the same name. His increasing notoriety and the end of Europa had brought his career to a crossroads, but figuring out what he would do next was complicated by the fact that his personal life was falling apart all around him. There was the divorce from his first wife, the death of his father, or at least the man he thought to be his father until his mother, who passed away soon afterward, informed him otherwise, and if that wasn’t enough, he had his cash-strapped production company, Zentropa, to worry about. In an attempt to raise some money, while also keeping things low impact, Von Trier agreed to co-write and direct a miniseries, the supernatural hospital drama Riget (The Kingdom), for Danish TV in 1994. From the outside, it must have looked like a step backward, career-wise, but if it had inauspicious beginnings, Riget would turn out to be some of Von Trier’s best remembered work and have a profound effect on what came after it.

Riget borrows its title from the nickname of the real life Danish hospital where it takes place, Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, though if it’s anything like on the show, you probably wouldn’t want to be a patient there. For one thing, it’s haunted as fuck, with the ghastly cries of a young girl emanating from an

WHO’S GOING TO BELIEVE A TALKING HEAD?” 1985’S UNDEAD CLASSIC RE-ANIMATOR

BY ANTHONY GALLI

Watch the whole film + more HP Lovecraft related video on Network Awesome

Okay, so maybe there’s something to be said for not raising the dead. History seems to show that nothing good ever comes from it. Exhibit A: 1985’s Re-Animator.

Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West: Reanimator,” Re-Animator tells the story of a mad, young scientist who kills his mentor, an old mad scientist,while trying to bring him back to life. Dr. Herbert West is then, unsurprisingly, exiled from the University of Zurich to the now infamous Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts.

And yes, Lovecraft’s Arkham is the namesake of Batman’s notorious Arkham Asylum, home to such notorious reprobates as The Joker, The Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and Bane. Small world.

Herbert West was convinced that animal life could be reanimated successfully after death because life is no more than merely a cellular reflex function; animals are nothing more than electrical machines. Dr. West was convinced that “the so-called ‘soul’ is a myth.”

West’s Promethean hubris will prove to have dire and fatal consequences. Or, as one famous margarine commercial from the 1970’s reminded us, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

“Herbert West: Reanimator” is a modern-day re-telling (or, re-animation, if you will) of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Gothic novel Frankenstein. Mary Shelley, 21-years-old when Frankenstein was originally

KANETO SHINDO AND THE ATOMIC BOMB (KIND OF): ONIBABA

BY KOLLIN HOLTZ

Watch the whole film on Network Awesome

One word you should know when watching “Onibaba” is “bukufu.” The word is Japanese, but I promise if you search it you won’t have to clear your history. I’ll save you the trouble though (in case you’re afraid to look it up), and tell you that “bukufu” originally referred to the tent or housing of a military General or Shogunate. Later, during the Kamakura, very brief Kenmu and longer Muromachi period (the film takes place at the beginning of this period) “…it came to mean the seat of the Shogunal Military Government; later, all forms of military government.”

Hachi, one of the three main characters, returns as a warrior deserter. He references the two warring sides in the battle for land and power. Kusunoki Masahige fought for Emperor Go-Daigo and his Court against Shogunate Ashikaga, who fought for the (as he felt, “marginalized”) warrior class. Both sides seemed to be hard up for fighters as Hachi says he was offered the opportunity to live after capture as long as he

Solar Records: The Sound of LA

by Tony Best

Watch the whole show on Network Awesome! (updated)

SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles Records) was THE hottest R&B label of the late 1970s and mid-‘80s. Rivaled only by NYC’s Salsoul Records, SOLAR successfully bridged the delicate gap between disco and funk during a period where both genres were struggling to find an identity in the post-Carter/pre-Reagan administrations. Buoyed by bouncy rhythm tracks and appregioed synths, SOLAR’s Jheri curl-slick music embodied L.A.’s hip (and stratified) cultural identity. From backyard boogies in Compton to roller-skating jams at WeHo’s Flippers, SOLAR kept the City of Angels – as well the world – dancing on sunshine.

SOLAR dawned in the mind of Dick Griffey. A music industry heavy with a keen interest in Black entrepreneurship, Griffey launched the label in the summer of ‘77 as an outlet to foster underrepresented talent in the record business. The early artist roster included Shalamar, The Whispers and Carrie Lucas,

Say It Ain't True: The Elvis Files

by Thomas Michalski

 

What's on Network Awesome today?

Occam’s Razor teaches us that the simplest answer is usually the correct one, but try telling that to a dedicated conspiracy theorist. It’s not that life isn’t complicated, or that crazy things don’t happen, but a simple explanation (Oswald Shot Kennedy, a weather balloon crashed at Roswell) is mathematically far more likely than one involving vast sinister cabals and little green men. The persistent tabloid-fueled belief that Elvis Presley did not in fact die on August 16, 1977 is no different. The simple explanation for what happened that day is that years of stress, health problems and raging pill addiction finally caught up with the iconic rock star in the form of a massive heart attack in his Memphis bathroom. The complicated explanation could, honestly, be just about anything (time-travelling ninjas), but the most commonly circulated is the one put forth in the amazing 1990 home video The Elvis Files, that Presley’s “death” was actually an elaborate hoax perpetrated, kind of half-assedly, by the United States government.

The hour-long special is hosted by none other than Bill Bixby, best remembered for playing Bruce Banner to Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk on the late 70s/early 80s TV series (technically, he played “David Banner”, they changed it because CBS thought “Bruce” was too gay). Bixby was a natural choice for the job since he had actually starred alongside Presley in two of his movies, 1967’s Clambake and1968’s Speedway, and

Awesome Tapes From Africa Weekend on Network Awesome

Live Music Show - Classic Sudanese Music on TV

We're thrilled to collaborate with Awesome Tapes From Africa this weekend to present the most interesting and inventive collection of African videos this side of Khartoum.  Guest curator Brian Shimkovitz culls from his deep knowledge of African music to deliver collections of African TV commercials, Pop Music of Pre-War Somalia, even the outrageous 2002 film, "Sharon Stone" - a classic Nollywood drama about an overly ambitious woman willing to do anything to make it to the top. 

Of course the mainstay of Awesome Tapes From Africa is incredible music and here's an ocean of amazing music captured on over-saturated film and video. He elaborates about the Live Music Show above:

"It doesn't get any better than this! The music of Sudan is as varied as the country is large (as Africa's largest country, it's about the size of America's Midwest). Over the years the traditional sounds have seeped into popular music, as shown by Sudan's many TV stations. Watch some classic gems from a small selection of Sudan's most revered artists. Explore the web using Google Translate to help with the Arabic names and discover tons more where this came from"

Playlist:

Zaidan Ibrahim

Al Balabil

Mustafa Sid Ahmed

Hanan Elnil

Eman & Amany (The Sudanese Twins)

Hanan

Zaidan Ibrahim

Hanan Elnil

The Turtle, Standing Defiant in Godzilla’s Shadow

by Robert Bellach

Part of "Rubber Monsters & Giant Heroes Weekend"!  What's on Network Awesome today?

Gamera was both a reaction to, and a reflection of, the genre Godzilla¹ created. For better or worse, Gamera also helped shape the future of giant monsters (or kaiju²). The character was supposedly created from a vision of a turtle in the clouds on an airplane flight by Daiei Motion Picture Company president Masaichi Nagata. But, it is just as likely an attempt by Daiei to get on the bandwagon created by Toho’s giant monster over a decade earlier. Nonetheless, “whether or not you think Godzilla is better, you simply cannot deny that Gamera has successfully survived…to arrive at the point that he is at today.”³ However crass and commercial the intentions may have been in its creation, Gamera carved out its own niche as a unique, unusual cultural icon.

Daiei studios first attempt at a giant monster movie was a rear-projection based, Bert I. Gordon-esque, giant rat movie called “A Swarm of Beasts,” which was scrapped. Nagata’s turtle idea was taken up, and the decision was made to go with the Godzilla-like method of a man in a suit, certainly helped by “the fact that men in suits are infinitely easier to control than live rats.”⁴

The first Gamera film in 1965 is very much like the original 1954 Godzilla: a serious reflection on the toll nature can take when provoked by man. “But even here, at the beginning, we can see his creators at Daiei

Star Children: Heaven’s Gate and the Self-Destructive Family

by Joe DeMartino

Watch the whole video on Network Awesome

If we’re very, very lucky -- and I’m talking here about the kind of luck that would get you rudely expelled from even the highest-class Las Vegas casino -- the star Betelgeuse, located 640 light years away from us in the top-left corner of the constellation Orion, will die within our lifetimes. Betelgeuse is much larger than our sun, which means that its lifespan is correspondingly shorter. Its death throes will manifest in a supernova -- a stellar explosion of such magnitude that it will put out apocalyptic amounts of light and energy. Stars operate on eonic timelines, so Betelgeuse could erupt in the next ten seconds, or the next hundred thousand years. If our luck holds, we’ll see it almost as a second sun -- it’ll rival the moon in the night sky. We’ll be able to read by its light. For a few brief months, Betelgeuse will put on an inspiring show.

Most of us will stare at it and see something gorgeous. Others will be quietly terrified -- the heavens rarely speak unless to say something, and nothing good can come of a message sent through the death of another solar system. Still others will marvel for a day, until the wonder of the thing recedes into banality, long before the star itself dims.

For at least one person -- and I don’t yet know who that is, but I’ll near-guarantee he or she exists -- the supernova won’t be inspiring, or terrifying, or banal. It’ll be an excuse. Time to go. Time for everyone to go.

Marshall Applewhite -- slight, wide-eyed, with the calm conviction of an airline pilot -- saw his excuse in the comet Hale-Bopp, whose passing was perhaps the most widely-observed celestial event in human history. Applewhite’s cult, Heaven’s Gate, counted among its beliefs the idea that the Earth was

Deathly Stills: The Dark Dark World of Guy Bourdin

by Jessie Brown - The Films Of Guy Bourdin

Part of Network Awesome's Fashion Week, Sept 14-18th!

Flick through any glossy fashion magazine today and more-than-likely, you’ll be faced with the legacy of Guy Bourdin. This maverick French photographer was no stranger to controversy both in his work and private life, and he singlehandedly changed the face of fashion advertising due to his uncompromising and highly innovative style.

Freaked: The 90's for Better or Worse

by Jake Goldman - Movie - Freaked (1993)

The early 90s in America will not, I believe it is safe to say, go down in history as a particularly tumultuous time. We had wriggled our way out of the Cold War with nary a scratch, and save for blood briefly drawn in desert storm, things remained relatively stable in the US of A, the country feasting on the remains of the prosperous late 80s. And so, looking back at the 90s, one tends to associate the period with a certain lightness and, well, “fun.”

Daffy’s Inferno: An American World War II Propaganda Revue in Seven Chapters

by Joe DeMartino - Collection: US WWII Cartoons

What's on Network Awesome today?

Beyond a few broad, core truths (the Nazis are Evil, the Axis are a Threat), propaganda is by its very nature filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and lies. It reveals far more about the country that created it than its actual target. In the following cartoons, which cast the most popular animated characters of the time into situations both comic and nightmarish, the concerns of World War II America are laid bare: it's scared, defiant, and strangely obsessed. 

Wrath

During a parable about the idiocy of signing a non-aggression pact with a man who is a wolf AND a Nazi, the Three Little Pigs run into the eldest pig’s house, which is made out of bricks and heavy cannons. There’s a sign on the door which says: “No Dogs Allowed”, except “Dogs” has been crossed out and

A Treasure Trove Of Classic R&B: The Rhythm and Blues Revue

by Scott Marlowe

The Rhythm & Blues Revue (Apollo Theatre Harlem, 1955)

What's on Network Awesome today?

These days, contemporary R&B seems to be a genre of music with specific attributes and qualities that are easily identifiable—things like slow grooves, smooth production values, and lush vocal arrangements. And, depending on the singer’s gender, the listener is treated to either a Diva or Lothario begging their beloved, earnestly trying to convince the apple of their eye that they need to consummate their love immediately.

While some of these elements can be found throughout the history of the genre, the scope of R&B used to be much larger, encompassing many different, and often disparate, musical styles.

Rhythm and Blues was initially a catchall term; coined after World War II, it was used to describe music made predominately for, and by, urban African-Americans. Under the Rhythm and Blues heading, different

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

by Gabriella Arrigoni

TV Party (Debut Episode, Dec, 1978)

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

On air for one hour every Tuesday night from 1978 to 1982, TV Party was a piece of DIY experimental broadcasting hosted and conceived by Glenn O’Brien. It pioneered an alternative use of the medium, breaking its rules by looking deliberately amateur and shattering the traditional distinction between the

Evel Knievel: Above and Beyond

by Casey Dewey

Dean Martin Celebrity Roast: Evel Knievel

What's on Network Awesome today?

 

Brave - 1. Willing to face danger, pain, or trouble; not afraid; having courage 2. showing to good effect; having a fine appearance 3. fine, grand, or splendid.

Daredevil - bold and reckless.

“America is a willingness of the heart” - F Scott Fitzgerald

Only in America could a man like Robert “Evel” Knievel exist. Brash, brave and bold, Evel Knievel is as American as apple pie, fireworks and the Las Vegas strip. Ceremoniously draped in his red, white and blue leather jumpsuit, he captivated the world with his jaw-dropping and death-defying motorcycle stunts. Flying over (or crashing and burning over) stacked cars, buses, semi trucks, deadly animals and deep chasms in the earth, he symbolized America’s core values and ideals: be true to yourself, don’t be afraid, suck in your gut and make it a BIG SHOW. If you succeed - great, you’ve done your job. If you don’t succeed - brush it off and and do it again, and most importantly - keep your word.

The call of the wild came early to a young Knievel kicking around in Butte, Montana. Apparently working in a copper mine is as exciting as it sounds, so the restless teenager decided to kick it up a notch. Driving

Vibraphone Hero: Lionel Hampton

by Thomas Michalski

Live Music Show - Lionel Hampton

What's on Network Awesome today?

In the pop music pantheon, guitar gods are a dime a dozen, ditto great sax-men, drummers, or trumpet players, but if you’re looking for someone to sit in on the vibraphone in your ideal, hypothetical all-star band, there’s really no other choice than jazz legend Lionel Hampton. In part, that’s because he’s one of the only widely known musicians to be closely associated with the instrument, that there’s just not the same competition for the title as there is with others, the guitar in particular, and in part because he was the first to push the vibraphone’s unique, ringing sound to the fore, but it’s mostly because when he played it, he did so with the same joyful, unfettered, borderline obsessive love of music and performing that also defined every other aspect of his varied, trail-blazing career.

First, a bit of background on the man: After his birth in Louisville, Kentucky in 1908 (or thereabouts, his birth certificate was lost to the ages), Hampton’s family bounced briefly to Birmingham, Alabama before heading north, first to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Dominican nun at the Holy Rosary Academy gave

Joy Division: Tragedy and Synth

by Alex Schab

Live Music Show - Joy Division

11 videos showing Manchester's post-punk pioneers at their finest.

What's on Network Awesome today?

Years ago, while I was still stuck in that “why can't I just fall down a flight of stairs” phase of high school which most of us seem to go through, I put on Joy Division while driving with my brother. After a few minutes of music, he said something along the lines of “What the fuck is this? This guy sounds like he wants to kill himself.” To which I replied “Well, funny story."

In reality, of course, the 1980 suicide of 23-year-old Ian Curtis, vocalist and occasional guitarist of Joy Division, is not a funny story at all. It's actually a really fucking sad story, one that revolves around Curtis's epilepsy, a love triangle between his wife, Deborah, and Annik Honoré, a Belgian reporter, and the pressures of being in a popular band. Worse, Curtis's often intensely autobiographic lyrics tend to plot out the depths and causes of his depression. “Existence, well what does it matter/I exist on the best terms I can,” he moans in “Heart and Soul,”while “Isolation” has him pleading “Mother I tired please believe me/I'm doing the best that I can.”

Even “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a track which featured a music video and peaked at number 13 on the

A History of Soul: Otis Redding

by Thomas Michalski

Live Music Show - Otis Redding

14 video clips of raw power with the ultimate soul-punk backed up by tightness from The Bar Kays, The Mar Keys and Booker T. & The MGs. Also includes his Monterey '67 concert.

What's on Network Awesome today?

Watching an Otis Redding performance is like witnessing a force of nature, as if he’s channeling directly that very powerful, ineffable thing that gives soul music its name. The voice that pours out of him doesn’t describe an emotion, it is an emotion, a raw transference of yearning loneliness or excited passion, whatever the song calls for. It’s so organic, so unfettered, like a man possessed, that it hides another aspect of Redding’s live show, which is that a lot of thought and preparation and work went into it. It’s not contrived by any means, the feeling in he brought to the stage is 100% real, it’s palpable in every breath and every jerky movement, but it took years of consciously honing his craft to be able translate it to an audience in a way that they could understand.

Like so many of his peers, Redding’s first experience with singing and playing music came from the church, specifically the Vineville Baptist church, where his father was a preacher. He sang in the choir and a gospel quartet as a teenager, but not all of his influences were so clean cut growing up in a rough-and-tumble

La Belle Verte and the Big Brained Beautiful

by Kristen Bialik

Movie - La Belle Verte / The Green Beautiful (1996)

What's on Network Awesome today?

“But people like that can’t get hold of weapons now, and they’re easy to swim away from. Even if they found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?'' -Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

La Belle Verte is as close to a hippie commune as a sci-fi movie can get. Granted, it has some essential sci-fi prerequisites to make us comfortable: aliens, space travel, advanced programs, a critical eye on humanity. But there are some fitting absences. This is not the sci-fi of Starship Enterprises, high-tech gadgets made of shiny steel, or intergalactic battles with deadly rays of the shrink and/or freeze variety. In fact, there’s really no “science” involved at all.

The basic premise of the movie is this: a race of advanced human beings from a distant planet holds a community meeting on the summit of a mountain and decides they need to send someone to check in on Earth, as it’s been 200 years since their last visit. This is a problem because no one wants to go to Earth. It’s a gross and dangerous planet. People have archaic things there like cars and monetary systems. But at last, a woman named Mila steps up and says she’d like to go to Earth. The community gives her two programs to use (a kind of software for the mind). One activates whenever she talks with an earthling, and gives the listener a light jolt in the direction of a social and environmental consciousness. The second,

Bloody Aliens And The Future Of Mankind: An Technocratic Education

by Gabriella Arrigoni

Vampires of Geona & The Masters of Geona (Gennady Tishchenko)

What's on Network Awesome today?

The Red Star (1908) is a Russian science-fiction novel describing the coming into being of a perfect Communist society on Mars, where the principle of egalitarianism is pushed to the point where even blood is a common good and must be constantly re-distributed and shared in equal parts among the whole extraterrestrial population. This process of transfusion also allows the communist Martians to overcome death and set up the basis of an immortal, omnipotent empire. In the Vampires of Geona (1991), the pterodactyl-esque blood suckers that gave the title to the cartoon are the bad guys and certainly not an incarnation of socialism, but it is not unlikely that their creator Gennady Tishchenko got to know the novel and the theories of its author, Aleksandr Bogdanov. He was one of the major representatives of that weird assemblage of science, philosophy and occultism which comes under the name of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism's ideas about the possibility of a new man and a new society based on the technological triumph of man over nature to gain the resurrection of the forefathers, immortality and the progressive colonisation of the universe seems to fit rather well with the declaration we find in Tishchenko’s website about his own