Def Leppard: Recyclemania
When I was a kid, I’d have given my right arm to be as cool as the drummer from Def Leppard. I remember watching the video for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” when I was 13 and my father walking through the living room and saying, “Oh, so this is the kind of music you like now.” And I really felt like I’d let the old man down; I was like, I’m sorry for rocking so hard — I won’t do it again. By contrast, my girlfriend wanted her parents to think she was a bad girl. Needless to say, Hysteria was a seminal album for us both during our coming of age.
Anyhow, we took a walk down memory lane by watching some Def Leppard videos on YouTube, and we noticed something odd about the videos for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Armageddon It”: They’re almost exactly the same. They’re both essentially performance videos with black-and-white pre- and post-show footage. It’s like, We’re going to rock, now we’re rocking, and we’re done with rocking and on to the drinking and whoring.
But worse yet, the boys don’t seem to even change their clothes. I was always focused more on his preposterously ripped jeans, but my girlfriend pointed out that lead singer Joe Elliott not only is wearing a Def Leppard shirt in both videos (how lame it is to wear a shirt for one’s own band is up for debate) but actually appears to be wearing the same shirt. My theory was that Elliott was too lazy or careless to actually pack a bag before setting out on a two-year-long tour and had to resort to doing his clothes shopping by just swiping stuff off the merchandise stands. This explains the condition of his jeans, too; for all I know, they were brand new at the start of the tour.
But here’s the topper: They actually recycle the exact same footage of the exact same attractive woman from video to video. Look at these screen captures:
3:53 of “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
So, what’s going on here? I have three theories:
- It’s just a symptom of the flagrant recycling of footage between videos, and, in rushing to put out the video for “Armageddon It” — no less than the sixth single from Hysteria —the video director picked the same clip either accidentally or on purpose. (Wikipedia seems to support the theory that “Armageddon It” was both a rush job and an attempt to improve upon “Pour Some Sugar on Me”.)
- The woman in this clip did someone some sort of very special favour in order to get into not one, but two videos.
- Someone in or affiliated with the band very badly wanted the woman in this clip to do him a very special favour, going so far as to put her in two different videos to gain her attention.
These are my three theories, but I leave open the possibility of something even more sinister here, because, for some reason, when I Googled both “woman from armageddon it video” and “girl from armageddon it video”, the search results returned links to bestiality porn sites. So maybe I don’t really want to know where the footage of that woman might have originally come from or what she might have done to get the band to put her in two videos after all.
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Michael Jackson gets enough, stops: Boogie blamed
Man, the media goes crazy whenever a young white woman dies under mysterious circumstances.
Michael Jackson died last night, his cause of death tentatively reported as cardiac arrest, to the despair of millions. Certainly they mourn his loss, but perhaps the greater disappointment is that it seems merely to have been heart failure. Wacko Jacko deserved to go out as weird as he lived.
That said, he’d long ago crossed over into what sportswriter Bill Simmons calls the Tyson Zone, where literally nothing you could have heard about him would have surprised you. Botched plastic surgery would have been the least eyebrow-raising cause of death, for example, even if the details were to leak that he was having tentacles attached to his face to make him resemble a mind flayer. If David Carradine hadn’t recently beaten him to the punch, autoerotic asphyxiation would have been the perfect way for him to go out, with its whiff of perversion, loneliness, and possible suicide. If he’d died in a treehouse collapse or been mauled by a tiger, it’d be easy to believe he’d put himself in a situation for that to happen. Even if it had been spontaneous combustion, you’d just think, Well, he had a history of that.
Of course, another possible cause of death may be having worked with Paul McCartney, who, after the deaths of John Lennon, Linda McCartney, and Jackson, has outlived just about all of his songwriting partners. Stevie Wonder had better watch himself — figuratively speaking, at least.
The upside of Jackson’s death — besides the prospect of family spokesman Jermaine Jackson trying to hog the limelight at the post-mortem press conference by dismissing all Michael-related questions as “not germane to the discussion” — is that we get to see all the crazy stuff in the will. Dollars to donuts, he has himself buried in a pyramid like an Egyptian pharaoh. It may even be the one from the “Remember the Time” video, in which case his will might decree that Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson be killed and buried alongside him. Or his body might end up on display at a pilgrimage site like Lenin’s tomb, where millions may crowd around his glass casket to marvel at his miraculous lack of decomposition — which shouldn’t be surprising since he basically became his own Madame Tussaud’s wax effigy about ten years ago. On the other hand, his finances were in terrible shape. It’d be hilarious if the living relatives of Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, bought Jacko’s skeleton and put it on display.
But whatever happens, the fact remains that the King of Pop is dead and — barring some kind of zombie resurrection, which we can’t rule out because Lord knows we’ve seen Zombie Michael Jackson before — gone. And so, according to the rules of succession, congratulations are due to Michael Jackson’s son Prince Michael on his accession to the throne. All hail the new King Michael!
And better luck next time, Prince Michael II! Of course, this saves Jackson’s younger son from the headaches of trying to decide what to call the heirs to his royal line; might Jackson’s grandson have been called Prince Michael II II? Prince Michael II Jr? Prince Michael III? Blanket Jr? It’s impossible to decide.
And it’s also a tough break for Justin Timberlake, who had been speculated to be positioning himself to become the new King of Pop. Of course, just as Michael Jackson consolidated his own position by marrying Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King of Rock and Roll, Timberlake may now seek to strengthen his own claim by marrying Jackson’s daughter, Paris.
But this is for the rock royalty to work out. Meanwhile, the masses are reeling from the shock of Jackson’s death, which is already being compared to the untimely passing of icons such as Elvis and Princess Diana. It’s hard to dispute, however, that Diana’s death, at least, was more shocking, if only because she was still young and beautiful, and people still wanted to bone her. Some people still had to bone Michael Jackson, to be certain, but they were just kids.
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In the past, I’ve pointed out the unfortunate results when careless newspaper layout designers make poorly considered juxtapositions of headlines and/or photos.
Here’s a beauty of an example: the cover of today’s National Post, which has the headline MILLER TUMBLES IN POLL, which refers to sagging support for Toronto mayor David Miller, directly above the headline TECHNICIAN KILLED TRYING TO FREE 8 FROM ELEVATOR, which is about an Otis Elevators employee who fell down an elevator shaft to his death during a rescue operation.
Very tasteful, National Post. I only hope Miller didn’t tumble more than 40 stories in that poll.
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The Seeds — “Pushin’ Too Hard”
Coming from someone whose first three compact disc purchases were albums by Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai, it may surprise you that my favorite guitar solo of all time wasn’t performed by any of these fretboard-shredding virtuosi. It’s from “Pushin’ Too Hard” by The Seeds, one of the greatest and most inept garage bands of all time. It couldn’t be less technically adept, yet it couldn’t be more perfect for the song, and my love for it is as non-ironic as it is boundless. I post this video for three reasons: to share its brilliant incompetence with you, to provide evidence that the guitarist isn’t playing with his feet, and to honour The Seeds’ founder and lead singer, Sky Saxon, who died this morning in hospital in Austin, Texas.
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I dabbled in the genre of alternate history (or, more properly, alternative history) in a post a couple of years ago called Whatever happened to the Mirror Universe Beach Boys?
In their timeline, Mirror Universe Al Jardine never rejoined the Beach Boys after quitting the band to attend dentistry school. In fact, his not being in the band to push an agenda of dental hygiene may be why the chanted refrain of “Mama Says” — in our own timeline, “Eat a lot, sleep a lot, brush ’em like crazy” — became “Eat a lot, sleep a lot, never go crazy,” advice that the mentally stable Mirror Universe Brian Wilson himself took to heart.
This is, however, speculation. What is recorded as fact is this: Mirror Universe Jardine was cited with “… an additional footnote in pop music history when he repaired Shane MacGowan’s famous pearly whites after the Irish musician chipped a tooth while drinking a bottle of root beer during the Pogues’ 1993 US tour.”
But truth is, as they say, stranger than alternate history. It turns out that there really is a real-world connection between Shane MacGowan and the Beach Boys, as I learned today while reading an interview with MacGowan’s long-time girlfriend, Victoria Clarke:
Being a rock wife is a little like being an arctic explorer, in that it’s not necessarily something you do for the good of your health. It’s not a sensible thing to be. I first realised the enormity of the gulf between what is considered normal in a relationship and what I had always taken for granted in mine when I was called from my bed, one night many years ago, by the landlady of my boyfriend, Shane MacGowan. She had heard strange noises coming from his flat at the top floor of her respectable town house. On attempting to gain entry, she was forced to retreat by Shane, who stood at the top of the stairs — blood gushing from his mouth, teeth akimbo — and hurled an acoustic guitar at her.
Shane is a well-known musician with a reputation for drug and alcohol-fuelled impropriety, so his landlady was, in fact, prepared for a certain amount of unsociable disturbance when she took him on as a tenant. The blood, however, alarmed her, along with the fact that in one hand he had been holding a half-eaten Beach Boys record, their Greatest Hits, Volume Three.
When I arrived, in my capacity as the girlfriend, to sort things out, Shane calmed down enough to explain to me that he had taken 15 or 20 tabs of acid earlier in the evening, and had become convinced that the third world war was taking place and that he, as the leader of the Irish republic, was holding a summit meeting in his kitchen between the heads of state of the world superpowers, Russia, China, America and Ireland. In order to demonstrate the cultural inferiority of the United States, he was eating a Beach Boys album.
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Out of the closet and flaming
Maybe she’s a pyromaniac, maybe she wanted to smoke out the hated next-door neighbors, maybe she really loves the taste of a wiener roasted on a stick, or maybe she just had one too many glasses of wine with dinner, but my girlfriend’s mother insisted we have a bonfire when we visited their place out in the country this weekend. And, anticipating her desire and knowing how I’d throw myself into the project, her husband had amassed a great amount of things for me to throw onto the fire, including a large amount of dry brush, an old flower box, and a snake that dropped out the armload of fuel in which it had been hiding and wriggled away just as it was about to be thrown into the flames. Before long, we were all drunk and the flames had reached ten feet in height. By the next morning, everything in the yard had been covered in a layer of ash, just like the end of that Tommy Lee Jones movie about the volcano, except without the heavy-handed message about racial harmony and how black people and white people look exactly the same when covered by a thick coating of grey volcanic ash.
Not that our bonfire was racially divisive, of course, although it did appear to upset an appalled-looking chipmunk that had apparently been making its home in the stone fire pit and thus may have inflamed human-chipmunk tensions. But it did remind me of another fire of similar magnitude some years ago.
It was actually about fifteen years ago, around this time of year. My second year of university was just ending, and Colin Stein was throwing a party at his house on Alfred Street. Stein wrote for the same campus rag that I did, though he was, and likely still is, older and cooler than me. He was in fact old enough to be graduating and moving out of town, and this is why he was inclined to throw a huge party without much concern as to whether the house was left habitable at the end of it.
In the back yard, in flagrant contravention of local fire codes and Kingston city bylaws, burned a bonfire whose flames blazed about twenty feet into the night sky. Each time the flames ebbed, more wood was thrown on, until, as the night wore on, the fuel supply ran low. Eventually, Stein disappeared into his house, in search of fuel for the flames.
Eventually, he emerged triumphant, struggling with an unwieldy set of closet doors he’d ripped out of his bedroom, which he tossed onto the bonfire to a roar of approval from the crowd ringing the fire.
So, anyway, great party.
Here’s the interesting part: Around the same time a couple of years later, I was at another party in a house on the same street. I had this unshakable sense of what I thought might be déjà vu but was probably just mild alcohol poisoning. Eventually, I happened to be standing with a few people in the bedroom of one of the girls hosting the party (although my girlfriend tells me now that I’m not allowed to be in strange women’s bedrooms, not even before she met me).
As I stood there, I noticed that all her clothing was hung and folded neatly in her closet, which didn’t have any doors. I asked her what had happened to her closet doors. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’ve never been there.”
And then I realized it: I actually did know what had happened to those closet doors. I was in Colin Stein’s house.
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Like many of you, I enjoy a good celebrity fistfight. Happily, the last couple of days have provided a couple of news stories involving celebrities brawling for my amusement.
Today, the news broke that Brian Blair, a former commissioner of Florida’s Hillsborough County, spent Father’s Day in jail after allegedly punching his two sons. Brian Blair is of course also known for punching many other people’s sons as one half of the Killer Bees, a wrestling tag team active during the 1980s in the World Wrestling Federation, where they were fan favorites, not least because of their willingness to generously take time out of their day to field calls from young fans like me willing to drop a dime on the Wrestling Hotline.
Now, I’m as shocked as anyone — save, perhaps, the Iron Sheik, who has carried a long-simmering and inexplicable grudge against him — that my childhood hero B. Brian Blair would abuse his children. But the thing is, I’m not sure that he did.
Just say, for the sake of argument, that Blair put on a mask and then walked into his kitchen. And then let’s say that his former tag-team partner, “Jumping” Jim Brunzell, came out of the kitchen under an identical mask and beat up Blair’s kids. With the Killer Bees being well-known for this old switcharoo routine, if I were Blair’s defense attorney, this would be the version of events I’d be presenting, and I think it creates enough reasonable doubt here that these charges won’t stick.
In other news, karmic justice apparently asserted itself in hilarious fashion right here in Toronto when celebrity gossip blogger/insipid manchild Perez Hilton was allegedly punched out by Polo Molina, manager of Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am. After receiving a black eye presumably necessitating the application of a bag of frozen peas, an inconsolable Hilton wept, whined, and swore like a crybaby in a video post that made me laugh, laugh, and laugh.
Of course, there are a couple of things about Hilton’s story that don’t add up. For example, Hilton claims that no one ever deserves to be the subject of violence. Yet he is clearly simply getting what he deserves for gaining so much notoriety as a media whore and parasite by incessantly talking smack about celebrities that he himself became a big enough semi-celebrity that he was bound to run into some of his targets at clubs and backstage parties and have to face the consequences of his actions. So he’s wrong there. Obviously Perez Hilton deserves to be punched in the face. Seldom has anyone deserved more to be punched in the face.
But this is obvious. Another thing about Hilton’s story that doesn’t make sense is how will.i.am apparently is able to teleport at will. First, will.i.am was in a nightclub with Hilton. Then Hilton fled the club only to find will.i.am already outside. How can this be? How can will.i.am suddenly appear and reappear all over the place?
Fortunately, it’s easy to explain these oddities in Hilton’s story when you recall that he’s had access to hologram technology since his appearance with Anderson Cooper during CNN’s 2008 presidential election coverage. Obviously, what Hilton actually saw was not will.i.am himself, but merely a projected image of will.i.am, one able to instantanously disappear and reappear in various locations. It also explains why someone else was needed to punch out Hilton on will.i.am’s behalf, since this would be impossible for an intangible hologram to accomplish.
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The Banter Report
Location
In the car, listening to Michael Jackson: Number Ones.
Banter
Michael Jackson: I’m bad! I’m bad! Really, really bad!
My girlfriend: You know, none of us believed it at the time, but he really was bad.
Me: He was a child molester.
My girlfriend: That’s really, really bad. This song was like his confessional.
Michael Jackson: And the whole world has to answer right now, just to tell you once again — who’s bad?
My girlfriend: You are, Michael.
Outcome
I make up new lyrics to the next track on the Michael Jackson compilation on the spot: The way you make me feel / You really turn me on / You knock me off of my feet / You’re only seven years old.
* * *
Location
At home, in front of the TV news.
Banter
Me: Wait — Silvio Berlusconi is having an affair with an 18-year-old? How old is he?
My girlfriend: Gross. He is gross years old.
Outcome
My respect for septuagenarian Italian president Silvio Berlusconi silently grows.
* * *
Location
At home, again.
Banter
Me: My friend asked how you got to be so witty. I said the same way people on TV do: I hired you a team of writers.
My girlfriend: See? I can be your replacement for Toula.
Me: Ugh. Don’t be gross.
My girlfriend: I mean, on the blog. You won’t have any more Toula stories. But you’ll have plenty of Candace stories. [sips wine]
Me: Except your brain damage will be voluntary.
Outcome
More wine-drinking takes place, eventually resulting in this post.
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Incredibly, after rereading this, my girlfriend still wanted to dictate another blog post. Blame the influence of that plonk Fuzion.
You should wear a scarf!
Like who? Who’s Émile?*
Oh! Toula’s boyfriend! Yes, like that! Just not like Kill Bill. Bill Carradine. David Carradine, I mean. Don’t wear a scarf like that. Or like Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hutchence?
Michael Hutchence. Him! Oh, you should download that! [singing] “Two worlds colliding! They could never … tell us … apart!”
It is? Well, it could be “never tell us apart”. We look alike. Just, I’m the one with the hair. You’re the one with the penis.
* We ran into my former housemate Toula on the Danforth yesterday, and she was with this guy named Émile who was wearing a scarf tied around his neck. There are three ways one can tie a scarf around his neck: like a cowboy, like a boy scout, and like a Frenchman. Émile, perhaps not without some justification, had opted to wear it like a stinking Frenchman.
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Plonk!
This morning, my girlfriend and I walked down to her favourite fruit stand to buy and subsequently crush a box of raspberries. That wasn’t exactly the plan; when we discovered that I’d accidentally mashed them, she was as emotionally crushed as the berries were physically, though I was sort of excited that I’d learned how to make jam. But I’m the optimist. When life hands you crushed raspberries, make raspberry lemonade, I always say.
Anyhow, while we were down there, we decided to pop into the LCBO to get a bottle of wine. For the benefit of non-Ontarians, the LCBO — pronounced “Lick-bo” — is a government-run store where we have to go to buy wine and liquor. For beer, we go to The Beer Store; this used to be called Brewers Retail until the government evidently decided that beer drinkers were much less intellectual and needed a much more literal name to avoid any confusion. It seems a little like calling a supermarket The Food Store, but it appears to have worked out fine. Meanwhile, more highbrow wine drinkers have made do with their more inscrutably named establishment.
Not that we were going in for a bottle of anything hoity-toity, mind you. We were looking for a bottle of Fuzion, an Argentinean wine that we’d heard about on the CBC. (This is what my girlfriend has done to me: She has me doing things like drinking wine and listening to CBC Radio and eating fruits and vegetables.) Despite the obvious spelling mistake on its label, Fuzion is apparently flying off shelves due to its seven-dollar price point and not-horrible taste. Of course, we’re usually box wine drinkers, but Fuzion is decent for what it is; put to the Pepsi Challenge in blind taste tests, it frequently edges out more upscale wines among even confirmed wine snobs and blows Pepsi right out of the water.
We walked in and then stopped to scan the shelves. “Where would the Argentinean wines be?” I wondered.
“Over here,” piped up a bottle of Argentinean wine from a couple of aisles over — or so it appeared. We walked over to discover a shortish LCBO employee bent over, stocking shelves. “Which kind are you looking for?” he asked. I said we were looking for Fuzion.
“Oh,” he sneered. “We have that plonk over here.” He held up his hand by the side of his mouth somewhat conspiratorially, evidently so the wine wouldn’t hear that it was being insulted.
Now, despite having dated the daughter of one of Canada’s leading vintners for a while, I’m no wine expert. I’m not even British or Australian. But I do know that “plonk” is an insult in those countries, having recently learned what it meant from my friend Malcolm, whom I call Frasier Crane because he drinks wine and puts phlegm into his pronunciation of the surname of the painter Vincent Van Gogh. (From what Malcolm says, if he’d pronounced it as “Van Go” in his household while growing up, his father would have horsewhipped him or maybe even chopped his ear off.)
Before Malcolm explained it to me, I thought “plonk” was just onomatopoeic Usenet jargon describing the sound of a troll being dropped into a kill file. But it’s also a term for low-quality wine. Yet, while Malcolm may agree that Fuzion is plonk, he doesn’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Who can afford the good stuff all the time, after all? As both an experienced wine drinker and a struggling writer, Malcolm finds Fuzion to be an acceptable compromise between price and quality, and as a neophyte wine drinker and a struggling writer, I bow to his superior judgment.
But to our LCBO employee, plonk like Fuzion is very much indeed a bad thing and not fit for an Argentinean pig to drink, let alone human consumption. He barely even drinks the beloved vintage wines that he collects, preferring to shelve them and practice his pronunciation of “Côte du Rhône”. So he would definitely not drink any plonk. In fact, he hadn’t actually tried the Fuzion, but that didn’t stop him from launching into a raving jeremiad about how terrible it must be.
How could a seven-dollar bottle of wine be any good? He’d even heard of people having the nerve to show up at dinner parties with seven-dollar bottles of Fuzion! “If someone gave me a seven-dollar bottle of wine, I’d throw it back in his face!” he declared. I thought that was a little extreme, but I do agree that if someone were to throw wine at me, I’d at least want it thrown near the general vicinity of my mouth.
Now, it’s important to understand that he wasn’t insulting us — just the wine. I was a little surprised that he’d insult his own stock like that, since it doesn’t seem like good salesmanship, but he is a government employee after all. It’s not like he really cares about the LCBO’s profits, but my lord, did he care about the quality of wine. His tirade became so impassioned that he was literally foaming at the mouth. I mean that — a large fleck of spittle gathered at the corner of his mouth. We couldn’t take our eyes off it, wondering if he’d notice and wipe it away, which he never did.
“Well,” I finally said, “We think it’s an acceptable compromise between price and quality. After all, who can afford the good stuff all the time?”
“Oh!” he said, rushing off to answer the telephone, which had begun to ring. “You’re my favorite customers — drunkards!”
Frankly, this isn’t even the closest LCBO location to us anymore since we moved, but we have to go back, just to see how wound up we can get this guy. For one thing, I wish I’d mentioned that we’d heard on CBC Radio that Fuzion was good, just to see what kind of cognitive dissonance that might cause him as both a wine snob and a cultural snob.
We imagined all kinds of things we could say to provoke him. “You know what’s good?” my girlfriend imagined saying. “French Cross wine from the box!” (That’s actually true. It’s our usual plonk.)
Or I might argue that Fuzion is actually better than vintage wine. “You don’t have to stick it in some cellar and wait for it to become good,” I’d say. “You can just unscrew the cap and drink it right away!”
Or I might engage him in a discussion of how one can make one’s own wine. “What they do in prison is put some fruit and some moldy bread in a sock. Then you put that in a plastic bag, and you leave it in your toilet for about a month,” I’d explain. “You have to pee in somebody else’s cell until it’s ready, but then you’ve got prison wine. Or, you can leave out the sock and make prison sangria.” (I might even actually try this. I’ve got a bunch of crushed raspberries, after all. When life gives you crushed raspberries, make prison wine, I always say.)
Or I might just walk in with a big jug of Allen’s white vinegar and ask, “Is this a good wine?” There’s really a lot of ways we could go about this.
The point is to get him worked into such a lathery fit of spittle-spraying invective that he goes into some kind of epic harangue about how it’s because of ignorant, uncultured philistines like us dumbing down the wine trade that the LCBO is eventually going to have to do what Brewer’s Retail did and cave in and rename itself The Liquor Store. And frankly, isn’t it time someone raised that idea?
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