State of Shock
Oct. 30th, 2018 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatWe attended two events at the Alamo Drafthouse last week. On Thursday, we saw something from VCR Party, with Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher of the Found Footage Festival.
It was basically a collection of weird stuff found on old video tapes. There was sort of a Halloween theme, as with some discussions of Satanic panic, but there were unrelated bits as well. One home movie had a family singing songs from Phantom of the Opera, then footage of a house being demolished while someone yelled at the cameraman for no reason, apparently a common occurrence in Queens. A cheap but funny edit of a whelping video focused on how often they said "bitch," then they ran with that idea for one about horses and carriages (the repeated word there was "shaft"), and another about Dutch ovens. Another video was made by a guy who, by his own admission, stole a camera and microphone from a local CBS affiliate to tape a heavy metal concert. Then there were selections from really dull videos of a business meeting and training for church lectors.
On Friday, it was the latest Kevin Geeks Out, this time about shock rock, which is I guess is sort of a Halloween-related topic. One argued that Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the guy who originally sang "I Put a Spell on You," was the first shock rocker. He was a talented musician who came to embrace a witch doctor image. It was something white performers couldn't really imitate without coming across as really racist, but eventually they came up with the idea of spooky theatricality without the African tribal associations. And we saw footage of Hawkins meeting Emo Philips on Arsenio Hall. Tenebrous Kate, who had discussed a ridiculously noisy Japanese punk band at an earlier show, this time talked about the death rock band Radio Werewolf, who mixed Nazi imagery with other tasteless subjects. Another presentation focused on the band Impaler, whose lead singer had sort of an ongoing feud with some preachers of the "music is corrupting the youth" ilk. He pointed out how hypocritical they were, and as if to prove it, they paid him to appear in a promotional picture for one of their sermons or something. There was a bit of a chat with the guy who wrote the Scooby-Doo/KISS crossover; and a cut-down version of Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, a movie about a fictional Marilyn Manson rip-off called Slade Craven who had to land a plane. The edits concentrated on how many times people in the film said Craven's name. I'm still not sure what we're doing on Halloween itself, although Beth is considering going to see the new Halloween movie. We've watched a few sorta-horror movies recently, and I should be writing some reviews soon.
I enjoyed Nadia Oxford's look back at a Super Mario Bros. 3 fanfic she wrote when she was ten. I think I'm in much the same boat (Doomship?) in being heavily influenced by the Mario cartoons. They were not, strictly speaking, good; but they contributed to how I thought and still do think about the workings of the Mushroom World. I'm still pretty intent on Mario and Luigi coming from Brooklyn, even if it's canon that they were at least born in the Mushroom Kingdom. I've never written a complete Mario fanfic, although I remember starting one when I was in junior high, and I've had a Mario/Oz crossover in the works since about that time as well. I'm not really sure the Mario universe lends itself that well to prose, though. Speaking of which, I've been checking out the work of Nintendrawer on DeviantArt, who's been doing Mario fanart for over a decade. She's done a comic retelling of the original SMB (which hasn't been completed), a story with the Marios' and Princess Daisy's parents, and some stuff with Mario and Luigi's own kids. And yes, there are some references to the cartoons and other spin-off media.
My last temp job ended at the end of September, and while I had plenty of warning, it had been extended so many times before that I'm kind of surprised it wasn't again. It was actually pretty good timing, as I was focused on moving around then. Today, I started doing essentially the same job in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan. I worked with one of those computers with two monitors for the first time, since I was copying information from one application into another.
It was basically a collection of weird stuff found on old video tapes. There was sort of a Halloween theme, as with some discussions of Satanic panic, but there were unrelated bits as well. One home movie had a family singing songs from Phantom of the Opera, then footage of a house being demolished while someone yelled at the cameraman for no reason, apparently a common occurrence in Queens. A cheap but funny edit of a whelping video focused on how often they said "bitch," then they ran with that idea for one about horses and carriages (the repeated word there was "shaft"), and another about Dutch ovens. Another video was made by a guy who, by his own admission, stole a camera and microphone from a local CBS affiliate to tape a heavy metal concert. Then there were selections from really dull videos of a business meeting and training for church lectors.
On Friday, it was the latest Kevin Geeks Out, this time about shock rock, which is I guess is sort of a Halloween-related topic. One argued that Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the guy who originally sang "I Put a Spell on You," was the first shock rocker. He was a talented musician who came to embrace a witch doctor image. It was something white performers couldn't really imitate without coming across as really racist, but eventually they came up with the idea of spooky theatricality without the African tribal associations. And we saw footage of Hawkins meeting Emo Philips on Arsenio Hall. Tenebrous Kate, who had discussed a ridiculously noisy Japanese punk band at an earlier show, this time talked about the death rock band Radio Werewolf, who mixed Nazi imagery with other tasteless subjects. Another presentation focused on the band Impaler, whose lead singer had sort of an ongoing feud with some preachers of the "music is corrupting the youth" ilk. He pointed out how hypocritical they were, and as if to prove it, they paid him to appear in a promotional picture for one of their sermons or something. There was a bit of a chat with the guy who wrote the Scooby-Doo/KISS crossover; and a cut-down version of Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, a movie about a fictional Marilyn Manson rip-off called Slade Craven who had to land a plane. The edits concentrated on how many times people in the film said Craven's name. I'm still not sure what we're doing on Halloween itself, although Beth is considering going to see the new Halloween movie. We've watched a few sorta-horror movies recently, and I should be writing some reviews soon.
I enjoyed Nadia Oxford's look back at a Super Mario Bros. 3 fanfic she wrote when she was ten. I think I'm in much the same boat (Doomship?) in being heavily influenced by the Mario cartoons. They were not, strictly speaking, good; but they contributed to how I thought and still do think about the workings of the Mushroom World. I'm still pretty intent on Mario and Luigi coming from Brooklyn, even if it's canon that they were at least born in the Mushroom Kingdom. I've never written a complete Mario fanfic, although I remember starting one when I was in junior high, and I've had a Mario/Oz crossover in the works since about that time as well. I'm not really sure the Mario universe lends itself that well to prose, though. Speaking of which, I've been checking out the work of Nintendrawer on DeviantArt, who's been doing Mario fanart for over a decade. She's done a comic retelling of the original SMB (which hasn't been completed), a story with the Marios' and Princess Daisy's parents, and some stuff with Mario and Luigi's own kids. And yes, there are some references to the cartoons and other spin-off media.
My last temp job ended at the end of September, and while I had plenty of warning, it had been extended so many times before that I'm kind of surprised it wasn't again. It was actually pretty good timing, as I was focused on moving around then. Today, I started doing essentially the same job in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan. I worked with one of those computers with two monitors for the first time, since I was copying information from one application into another.
