CageMatch 3/28/09

Another day, another CageMatch. View the video here.

First off, just a note of how annoying it was that twenty people showed up very late to the show. Like fifteen, twenty minutes after showtime. Incredibly inconsiderate and rude. If we had started the show already, all the commotion from the crowd arriving halfway through the first set would've interfered with the first group's performance. Drives me nuts when people show up late.

Anyway, that was the video. Couldn't really deam up a viable way to present a group called "Finding Emo" without making it depressing, let alone making it uberdramatic. Kit FitzSimons to the rescue! It was his idea to do a sort of Wizard-of-Oz sepia-to-colour thing to show the difference between the two teams. I flipped that around and had it go from colour to b&w, and actually used the Oz footage. The music at the beginning is the opening overture to the movie as well. The music then turns into My Chemical Romance as we go to black and white (also pulled down the gamma at the same time as the dsaturation, for that extra-gloomy look). Then finished it all off with a slapped-together mashup of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" with the opening drums from the Go-Go's "We Got The Beat".

Putting the heads on the characters at the end was amusing. The girls sent me shots taken for this express purpose; I used an old photo of Joe, but spent a long time touching it up with streaked magenta eyeliner, skull earring, lip ring, etc. Then I ended up making it black and white and small, so you don't really see any of that. Hilarious.

Probably the shortest CageMatch video ever. And the assholes who came late talked loudly through most of the video, so nobody heard the text. Ah well.

Zombie Marx Brothers

Here's a little something amusing I made at the prompting of a friend. It's the Marx Brothers, if they were zombies.

CageMatch 2/28/09

Did another CageMatch video for Saturday. I actually did this whole one in about four hours, from creating the identity screen for Baby Pranks, to editing the stills for the video, choosing and editing the audio, performing the voiceover, and editing the video. Whew! I had no time during the week to do the video, as I was busy producing a corporate show for DSI, including a last-minute video shoot and production for a Sham Wow parody (visible here). That one actually got some network news coverage, so that's cool.

Watch the current CageMatch video here.

Back in CageMatch land, I dreamed up the concept while showering that morning. Figuring that working backwards would be the best plan, I started brainstorming what the name "Baby Pranks" made me think of. Baby made me think of Child, so I thought, "what phrases use the word 'child'?" A child shall lead them, child's play, etc. Eventually I ended up with "man, woman, and child", and thought it might be fun to say Senior PGA were bragging about how they could beat anybody, man, woman, or child. That meant the video would have to set up PGa as becoming cocky, and the rest wrote itself.

No real big technical innovations here. I do want to point out that the material in the background of the Baby Pranks identity screen is from the old Johnson Smith novelties ad from comic books of old. And I liked the way I re-edited the Salt N Pepa song to go straight from the "baby baby" part to the "yoyoyoyo" part, fairly seamlessly.

That's it. We now return control to your regularly scheduled program.

Professional Regurgitator

So I have a lot of dvds I haven't watched yet. I'm one of those people that collects things and then never uses them. In the case of dvds, it simply never occurs to me to sit down and watch a movie. It never enters my mind. When I'm on my own, I gravitate to wandering through RSS feeds or YouTube or something, never simply sitting in front of the tv.

So the other day I decided to pop a dvd into the computer and watch it in a little window while I was working on Photoshopping some stuff for a DSI gig. The dvd in question was a documentary on vaudeville hosted by Ben Vereen. It was a good overview of the life of a vaudevillian and the history of the art form itself, with rare clips of footage from various vaudeville stars (and non-stars). I found one particularly intriguing act on YouTube, one of the clips that was on the dvd. This is Hadji Ali, who was what vaudevillians labelled a "professional regurgitator". His act consisted of him swallowing things and bringing them back up.

One of the reasons I'm so fascinated by this act is that it seems, at first blush, to be so ridiculous. Did people in the Depression really spend their hard-earned two bits to see a guy swallow stuff and then bring it back up again? Is that entertainment? The other reason I'm fascinated by this act is that, yes, it is entertainment. Hadji Ali has a great act, unusual though it is, and I kept my eyes glued to his performance, and was rewarded for my virtue with a stunning finale. Go watch Hadji Ali, you'll be glad you did.

The Wrestler, The Game

This is exactly the article I hoped exist. Simple-minded and nostalgic that I am, it answers the first question that popped into my mind after seeing "The Wrestler".

Ted Needs 2

Okay, I did this once before, but saw Jennifer had done it recently, and as an experiment, typed "ted needs" into Google once again, and was amused enough to make this post. I should be editing video right this minute, but I'm giving myself five minutes to write this up.

Type in your name and "needs" into Google and then write down the first 10 coherent things that come up.

1. "Ted needs someone to be there 100% of the time." So true.

2. "Ted needs a 24 hour staffed program which can assist him with taking his medications." Well damn, that might help, actually.

3. "Ted needs a shower." Really? How did I get so filthy in two hours? (Wait, don't answer that.)

4. "Handsome Ted needs a home." I actually have one, but thanks for the complimentary adjective.

5. "Ted needs to step down. And he needs to step down immediately." A compliment followed by an insult. Thanks a lot, internet.

6. "Uncle Ted needs you." Heh. I like pervy roleplaying.

7. "Theodore needs a date!" How did that come up when I searched for "Ted needs"? Google must be psychic about my real needs.

8. "Ted needs a home." I guess I'm no longer handsome.

9. "Ted needs to sleep." Occasionally, yes.

10. "Ted needs some nads." Aww...that's not nice.

Well, that's not a good note to end on. Let's do a bonus one.

11. "Ted needs to be appreciated a little more." Aww, that's sweet. Thanks, Google!

(BTW, the image in this post was on the first page I got on Google Images when searching for "Ted Needs". Back to video editing!)

George & Gracie

You might know I'm a fan of oldtime radio comedy and vaudeville. So a couple of weeks ago, I had been bidding on a hard-to-find book by George Burns, written about his wife Gracie and entitled "I Love Her, That's Why". I forgot that the auction was ending soon, and got sniped by some last-minute bastard. I love the way Burns writes, and particularly love hearing him talk about his wife (the easy-to-find "Gracie: A Love Story" by Burns is the most romantic book ever and will make you cry, guaranteed) so I was a bit irked that I hadn't won the auction for "I Love Her, That's Why".

Well, another one came up for auction, and once AGAIN I forgot to check on the auction as it was ending. But guess what? For some weird reason, nobody else bid on it, and I won! And as a bonus, this copy is autographed by George Burns himself! Hurrah!

Poisoned Frankensteiner & Backdrop Driver

Koji Kanemoto caves in his opponents skull (El Samurai, perhaps?) with the Poisoned Frankensteiner.

Then Steve Williams attempts to give Kenta Kobashi several concussions with his Backdrop Driver (aka Dangerous Backdrop, which is a damn good name for it.)

I have the latter match on VHS somewhere; just about the best wrestling match I've ever seen in my life.

Made With Olive Oy-el

This weekend I made my second hot sauce. Jason likes Jewish food, so I found a recipe in his sauces book that told how to make zehug, a hot sauce favoured by Yemenite Jews. I pan-roasted tomatoes for the first time in my life, a skin removal method that adds flavour to the dish, or so the text read. There's also a bunch of cilantro in there, extra virgin olive oil, jalepneos, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and coriander. Oh, and a single lemon's worth of juicings. Turned out pretty good. A little mild, perhaps. I toasted up some pita bread for dipping purposes, not realizing one is supposed to cut the bread into triangles before putting them in the oven. Look at the glory here and here.

Oh, and pardon my filthy thumbnail; that was a bit of burned tomato skin.

BUHNING HAMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Wristo clutchoski, wristo clutchoski, wristo clutchoski. Hamburger.

CageMatch Report x2

I suddenly realized that I never blogged about the CageMatch from two weeks ago, so you get a twofer here.

Last time, we had Banana Breakup defending against 4DDI. The video is here. Check it out and return for discussion.

Didn't really have a genius idea for this one. Couldn't figure out what to do with a name like "Senior PGA", until I tripped over the "senior vs junior" idea, and then decided to fill space by showing the "experience" of the senior team, and their Photoshopped wins around the world. I did like ending it with the "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" song.

This week had Senior PGA against 4DDI. Watch it here.

Once again, a name that's hard to build a storyline around, so in the Flaneur tradition, I used the name itself as the focus, namely the question of what "4DDI" stood for. It's fairly well-known around the theater that the guys in 4DDI intended it to be "Four Douchebags Doing Improv", but that Zach rightly thought that it wasn't the type of name you could market or advertise, so they were verboten from using "Douchebags", officially changing it to "Dudes". So I spent the bulk of the video playing with that, dreaming up various ways to censor the forbidden word, the punchline being that John Reitz would go ahead and say it anyway (if out of context). The boys of 4DDI were kind enough to participate in the pretaping, with special props to Kyle Chorpening for getting naked for CageMatch...again.

Oh, and the "POJ" thing was just some unexplored sexual maneuver that cropped up in Senior PGA's previous show, and amused me intensely, so I threw it in there as a sort of obscure inside joke.

Stills, as usual, are here.

Join us next time.

The Wrestler Review

Went to see The Wrestler with Tommy Dynamite today. Jennings had told me weeks ago to get in my car and drive however long it took to see it right away, but this was my first opportunity to attend it here in Chapel Hill. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

I liked it. I thought the portrayal of what it's like to be in the world of independent wrestling was amazing--they really did their homework, and were dead-on (except for three minor points that didn't really matter, namely that Marisa Tomei never would've gotten backstage so quickly/easily at a big event, nobody should ever make a gig that big, and I've never heard of anybody getting a solo dressing room at a small event.) They really did capture the thrilling/depressing feel of what it's like to be in front of a crowd at a high school card, and then wandering back to your car past kids' crayon drawings while dragging your rolling suitcase behind you long after the fans have left and the high has left you.

I thought that the Rourke's portrayal of The Ram was amazing. I've met guys like him; former big stars now on their way down, having lost the big bucks and their youth and now ready to sacrifice anything just to please the fans. I can identify with that as well; I think we were supposed to hope The Ram would agree to go with Cassidy at the end and not walk through that curtain, but maybe it's my own wrestling sickness that just made it obvious to me what had to be done at that moment: the crowd were there to see The Ram take on The Ayatollah, and when your music plays, you've got to hit the ring. I was also nodding my head when The Ram was mounting the top rope for his finisher, and looked over to the empty spot in the curtain where Cassidy had fled. She's gone, all you have for sure is the ring and the show, gotta dive off the top and let the heart attacks fall where they may. He had to do it.

The opening sequence with the historical clippings was amazing; somebody put in a lot of effort to replicate the look of Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its ilk. The Nintendo wrestling game moment was perfect. I could've done without the hardcore segment with Necro Butcher. Not that I don't like garbage wrestling, but I didn't think it advanced the plot in a useful fashion. If they had gone the route of showing that the former golden boy of wrestling had no choice but to take whatever booking he could, and was pressured into doing hardcore, that would've been good. Maybe in a director's cut?

I actually don't think I can judge whether this was an Oscar-level movie or not. I think I'm too close to the material myself. As far as replicating the real inner workings and atmosphere of smalltime wrestling, yeah, bang on, that was amazing. The story was touching, but I think I'm too close to that as well. Besides, I'm no movie artisan or supreme critic. But I did enjoy myself, and that's what's important.

Wrestling Moves

Hi there wrestling fans. A clip of Mascarita Dorada has been making the rounds lately. This guy's always been pretty amazing, but that was a really good clip. Lucha Libre generally presents its "minis" better than traditional American "midget wrestling" which tends to be shown as a freak comedy act. (Although ya gotta wonder what Monito was thinking when he agreed to this spot.) I've always been a particular fan of the amazing talents of Mascarita Sagrada. I mean, the guy's about four feet tall, and he dove off a cage, for chrissakes!

Anyway, while midget wrestling in the US has generally been a joke at best and an offensive act at worst, there are some independent presentations that seem to be pretty positive. This looks like an interesting portrayal of one such group.

This post wasn't supposed to be about minis or midget wrestling, actually. I meant to show off some of the amazing moves people are coming up with, so here they are:
The Double 450
Omega Driver
Rollback Driver
An Amazing Counter
The Space Flying Drop
Anything Takuya Sugi does
And, what I think we can all agree is The Greatest Wrestling Sequence Ever

addendum:
After posting this, I discovered a longer video that includes the Double 450 mentioned earlier. Turns out there were a lot of amazing tagteam maneuvers in that match, which make it a must see.

The Green Mist

So when I was a kid, I watched Mid-Atlantic Wrestling whilst living in the middle of North Carolina. One of my favourite wrestlers was a scary guy with his face painted, who went by the now-amusing name "The Great Kabuki". That's the equivalent of calling an American wrestler "The Fabulous Sitcom" or "The Wonderful Ballet" or something, but back then, I though "The Great Kabuki" was a great name for a badguy wrestler from Japan.

Anyway, I liked Kabuki because 1) he wore a cool piece of headgear that his manager would almost nonchalantly pull off slowly to reveal his "hideously scarred" face, 2) he worked them nunchucks somethin' fierce, and most importantly, 3) he could blind and even hospitalize his opponents by blowing a poisonous substance into their eyes, a mysterious weapon of the Orient known as "The Green Mist". To a kid, this was amazingly cool. How I wished I too could learn the secrets of the Japanese warriors and blow the Green Mist!

Years later, an amazingly talented wrestler by the name of Keiji Mutoh came over to America, where he became famous as The Great Muta. Muta was billed as Kabuki's son, and he learned the secrets of The Green Mist from his evil father. I would've loved Muta anyway, with his acrobatic moves and lightning-quick elbow drops, but blowing the mist made him my new favourite.

You can see two fun examples of The Green Mist from Muta here and here. The former has a nice wide spray, and Ric Flair sells it like he's dead. The latter has a nice bit of mist, and then Muta finishes off his opponent with a nice Shining Wizard. (BTW, I'm not sure, but I *think* that the guy who gets misted in the second clip is Kabuki himself!) You can see a nice little interview segment with Kabuki's manager Gary Hart (no, not that Gary Hart) here, followed by a dustup in the ring with Jimmy Valiant. "Get your Asian in the ring!"

And here's a weird little bonus. The Great Kabuki in a music video for a Japanese band???

Spock's Surprised Bread

Long ago when I had cable, I was addicted to the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway. It was always entertaining, had crazy games, and some wacky talent in the form of people like Paul Merton and Tony Slattery. There was one particular episode that has stuck in my head for all these years, featuring two comedians that *weren't* Whose Line regulars, and thus were hard to track down. Well, I finally found the particular clip I've remembered all these years, and it's right here. Enjoy it with me, won't you?

The segment has two guys being given a suggestion of an object that they have to build the scene around, and then Clive tells them they have to do it as the characters of Kirk and Spock. The guy doing Spock isn't particularly thrilling, but the guy playing Kirk, Jim Meskimen, is hilarious. He really nails the Shatner timing and sound. Ever since I originally saw this ten years ago, I still occasionally find myself wandering about and muttering, "Why Spock, I'm...surprised you eat bread."

Different Perspectives Project

Just after Christmas, Kit sent me an email that read thusly:

Since I know we all love wasting free time, I had an idea while looking at an art exhibit advertisement in South Carolina. The exhibit was somehow pairing the elderly with college kids to do some sort of photography thing (not sure what), and the exhibit was called "Different Perspectives, One Vision."

Oh, hells yeah, I said to myself.

The concept is this:
We pick a group of 4-8 related words, and we all spend the next week taking a photograph to fulfill each word. Then we each put our pictures together in a prearranged layout (for comparison purposes) and compare (post?) the results. I'd say the photos have to be taken by us THAT WEEK (i.e. not last spring). This will get us all looking around for awesome pictures as well as exercise our brains finding interesting ways to show the items.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE (we'll decide what to do with them next, but first, get this done by Sun Jan 4:
PlayStation Controller Buttons
1) Square
2) Triangle
3) Circle
4) X

Take four pictures (or take a lot and choose the best four), each depicting a different one of the four above buttons. Layout of the pictures is just like the side of the controller: in a diamond with square to the left, triangle on top, circle to the right, and X on the bottom.

So here we are on Sunday, Jan 4, and here is my submission.

Edit: Here are the submissions of Mr. FitzSimons and Mr. Scronce.

Good Eats

My buddy Jackson cooked up a particularly delicious meal for me on Friday. Here we have a pork chop in wine sauce, baked beans, mustard, and Potato Cakes a la Jerry Golliher. DEE-licious! Best meal I've had in months.

Dave "The Man" Weaver

Life is good. I've given away two big desks that were cluttering up my back room, and the room is spacious for the first time since I moved in six years ago. I've got a new computer/video-production desk in a box behind me that I plan on assembling today or tomorrow, and will spend the rest of the week starting to put together my new production studio. I feel good. I knew that I would. So nice. So nice.

Anyway, that revelation wasn't the reason for this post. What prompted me to whip out the scanner and upload some photos to Flickr was the discovery of this ancient printout. I found it in a random stack of papers somewhere in the depths of my cluttered back room. It happens to be a dot-matrix printout of a poem my old college buddy Dave Weaver wrote in November of 1986, and "emailed" me via the semi-proto-internet we had on campus. (see the end of this post for a transcript.) Dave was a card; a funny guy from Urbana, Illinois with a talent for learning Chinese and playing bass. Actually, he could play lots of instruments, and was always trying to play his music for his friends. Problem is, our crowd was into punk, hardcore, and rockin' out, and Dave tended to write heartfelt emotional music, so most people didn't really want to hear Dave's latest creation. I, on the other hand, loved Dave's music. So much so, that when Dave borrowed my old Fostex four-track and let me hear his demo songs, I pressed him to allow me to engineer an album of his original tunes, which we did during Oberlin's Winter Term one year.

Since I needed to have a pic of ol' Dave on this post, I dug up a few pics from my archives and scanned 'em in. If you really want to shudder, go check out a few of the others I found in my "Oberlin College In The 1980s" Flicker set. I know I wasn't a Don Juan back in those days, but I can't believe my friends actually allowed me to run around loose looking quite that bad. You can also see our old dining hall, and even a shot or three from the TIMARA studios, where I worked on getting my electronic music degree.

I've lost track of all my old Oberlin buddies. My original roommates and best pals were Roger "The Party Mutant" White (who was an ethnomusicology genius who introduced me to Motorhead, Judas Priest, and James Brown; I think he's married now), Jeremy "Jer-Bro" Tompkins (who was a Bio/Chem double-major, which is ridiculous at a top-rank school like Oberlin, I used to have great fun typing his papers for him as he dictated to me, and got me drunk for the first time, as well as many times afterwards.), and my good buddy Tom "Thomas C From Across The Sea/The Might Of One And The Libido Of Three" Manion (who always insisted Cleveland was America's North Coast, shared my love of surrealism, and loved The Floyd more than anybody. Last I heard he had packed two dufflebags and gone to seek his fame and fortune in the theater world of NYC). I also shared great times with Pat Wehner from West By God Virginia who drank and watched Twin Peaks with me, Jim "I'm An Actor" Thompson who would always be willing to stand up during poker games and recite horrendous paragraphs from porn novels I had clipped out for him, Jonathan "SuperJew" Silverman who was the life of every party and invented the rewording of the Run DMC lyric "not bad meaning bad but bad meaning HOBGOOD!" which he would scream out no matter where the song was playing, Kathy Thompson and Cathy Gale who I had massive crushes on, Matthew "Hello" White who was just the nicest guy you'd ever meet and was embarrassed at the birthday rap I wrote for him (he was born on 5-5, the fifth of May--as he liked to tell us), Larry "The Axe-Man" Axtell who cohosted a wrestling radio show with me and fled from Oberlin to join the Ringling Brothers Clown College, and Mike Soohoo who was head of the Asian American Alliance and taught me how important it was to not to overuse the word "hate". Two quick bits about Mike Soohoo: he made the mistake of telling us a story about how he had been teaching at a summer camp before the semester, and how the kids made fun of his name, calling him "Soo Who?" and "Soohoobaru". Oh, how we used that against him for the rest of the year! Mike and I also had an ongoing war over which of Prince's rejects were hotter: Appolonia or Vanity. (I was a big Vanity fan. I have all her records!) Oh, and so many others I'm forgetting: Casey, Terra, Jon Fine, Douglas, Jenny Seltzer, Marti, Kevin, Reid, Harm Farm, Bitch Magnet, Jenny Douglass (who I had a crush on in sixth grade, and then was surprised to discover at Oberlin!), and my brain can't cope with the hundreds of othes I knew and loved to be around.

For posterity, here's the text of the poem Dave Weaver wrote off the top of his head to amuse me:

Ted, Ted, he has no fear
Born and raised with a pack o' bears,
Bigger than you ever did see
Can eat his way through a factory,
Faster than the lightning strikes,
Slyer than the Devil's tikes,
Ted, Ted, he has no fear.

Ted, Ted, the ladies' man,
Got one in the closet and one in the van,
Take his cane and overcoat,
Show them gals the roundabout,
Don't look now, he's looking fine,
Big leather hat, he wines and dines,
Ted, Ted the ladies' man.

Ted, Ted, the master o' rap,
Can put you down better than tiger trap,
He knows the ins and out of the world,
The city stops when he says a word,
He can do the numchucks and the figure four too,
You better watch out when he's comin' after you,
Ted, Ted, the master o' rap.

For the record, I did tend to wear an overcoat and suede cowboy hat, and carry a cane as an affectation. What can I say, Oberlin was a pretty alternative college, and I was a big dork. I did literally sleep in a closet for a semester, as our dorm room had a huge walk in closet, and we converted it into a second bedroom. I never had a "lady" in there though. And I can "do the numchucks" as well as the figure four. Watch out, Chuck Norris.

Fisher-Price Barack Obama

My mom is great. As a gift for my sister for Christmas, she made a little shadowbox of the Obama family, as portrayed by Fisher-Price Little People. Genius!

The Michelle Obama figure is Susan from the Sesame Street set, the only FPLP character to have textured hair. The Barack figure actually came from my collection, and was a bald hospital figure all in white. Mom painted the suit on, and used puff paint to give a little texture to his hair as well. Click the links above to see more.

CageMatch 12/13/08

CageMatch time again. This happened last week, but I've been busy lately and forgot to blog about it. Here we go!

View video here first. Go now.

Now let's chat. The original idea for the video came from one Kit FitzSimons, who pointed out the lyrics in the Kate Perry song "Hot and Cold" and how they mirrored the up-and-down romance of the characters in Honkey Kong. Then Alyssa said she had a good idea for a video. I said, "sorry, but Kit already has an idea." "Let me tell you the idea anyway." She said she'd love to see something like the new Target commercial from Christina Aguilera. I took a look at it and loved the comic book-y Lichtenstein-y imagery, and decided we could combine both ideas into one.

This involved a lot of lugging lights and other equipment around for a video shoot at Alyssa's and one at Kit's. Unfortunately, my lighting skills are not up to the highest notch, and so the bluescreening I tried to do was a bit shoddy. I really need to get a real greenscreen and a crash course on lighting. Anyhoo, we had a lot of fun with Kyle and Alyssa being playful with each other and then hating each other. Highlights were the bit where Kyle throws the flowers at Alyssa from off-camera, and the impromptu bootydancin' bit. Banana Breakup was fun to film (as always). The fight scene amused me terribly, and the high-five bit made them look totally cool. I was happy that my coatrack idea worked okay. That amused me.

Back in The Studio, I drew up some comic panels in Photoshop and textured them with benday dots from a Lichtenstein painting. I also found some old comic book ads that I used for the opposing pages; you only see them for a moment, but I think they add to the feel of the video. If I had a bit more time and energy, I would've put some Adam West-esque "BAM!"s and "POW!"s in there, and maybe some explosions where Kyle and Alyssa are having the pointing war at the end, but I think it turned out generally okay.

Oh, forgot to mention that I wrote the entire voiceover script while attending my dad's Really Terrible Orchestra Of The Triangle concert earlier in the week. He provided colouring pages for people to amuse themselves with while the "bad" music was performed, and I took him at his word and scribbled down text while the music played, then rehearsed it during the reception afterwards while all the bigwigs hobnobbed and got drunk. Hah! (And I later noticed that I channelled the spirit of Jeremy Clarkson at the end there. Sweet.)

This was the first video in a long time that people wanted to watch again immediately after the show, so that felt good. We rescreened it both at the theater and back at Kit's place.

You can also see the comic book cover promo I made here, featuring the visages of Kyle, Alyssa, Kit, and Eitan. It's an adaptation from an old 1950s romance comic which you can see here. (Yes, I made Alyssa's cleavage more pronounced. Pervert.)