WFMU Remixes the RNC 2004

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william eggleston has launched his own website.
via coincidences

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The Seductive Building The Disenfranchised: Donny and Marie, Goin' Coconuts and Penetration

Degeneration as Borderlines: Reclaiming Perverted Frustration in Donny and Marie's Goin' Coconuts

The Labial Constructing The Other: Donny and Marie, Goin' Coconuts and Appropriation

Figuring Gentility: Monologic (Author)ity in Donny and Marie's Goin' Coconuts

Colluding, Identifying, Speaking: Authority in Donny and Marie and the Suppressive Transgression of Diaspora in Goin' Coconuts

nyt: the cry of wild neighbor

NEW YORK'S apartment dwellers are often plagued by neighbors who sing like frogs, dance like bison or play the trumpet like antisocial mandrills...people of all descriptions often take drastic measures to cope with fellow tenants who impose a musical reign of terror upon their neighbors.

But an entirely different problem presents itself when these neighbors are gifted...

Goin' Coconuts

A short film produced in the 70's by Encyclopedia Brittanica took us behind the scenes of a hit tv show: the Donny and Marie show. Among the talking heads is a producer who earnestly tells the camera, "the show is about *ideas* ... and I try to convey that philisophy to our writers..." One idea is found in the recurring bit where Marie is in grave danger (there's a sequence of stills from different skits that have Marie tied up and screaming, baring those teeth for any would-be rescuers); Donny would sidle along and remain oblivious to his sibling's crisis of faith. In another piece, guest star Paul Lynde runs a refreshment stand in the middle of a desert, and refuses Donny a drink of water unless he coughs up the dough. Obviously, family entertainment and sadism are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Goin' Coconuts was the first and only feature film vehicle for Donny and Marie Osmond. By any standards, its a lousy movie. Jokes are badly timed or just bad: in a chase scene, one of the baddies hijacks a car with a little old lady in the passenger seat (reinforcing the subordination of women in the patriarchal society); the car takes a bad turn and rolls over, the little old lady peering out of a broken window with what one assumes are massive internal injuries. This and other chase scenes are shot at what look to be breakneck speeds upward of 20 mph. Editing is crude. As Donny sings a ballad to his love interest in the hotel lounge, the song is rudely interrupted with badguy cat-and-mouse scenes in hotel hallways. I got a kick out of this - the transition from song to action is so abrupt as to be aggressive, as if the editor was thinking, "I'd rather watch the most boring establishing shot than listen to any more of THIS pap."

Still, Coconuts is not without its charms - and provocations. The plot revolves around an airport incident. On her way to a tour stop in Hawaii, Marie encounters a priest who gives her an ugly necklace. Naturally (subversively?), the priest is really one of a group of badguys who try to gain control of this necklace (the virtue of a Mormon girl? the triangular shape of the necklace suggests a bejewelled vagina). Marie is painfully aware of the fight for her treasure, but neither Donny nor her agent take her concerns seriously. Marie sports a short coif that further infantilizes her; a key shot follows Marie through the halls of a hotel room; these touches cement one's suspicion that Goin' Coconuts takes inspiration from no less than Rosemary's Baby.

Like their tv show, the Osmonds' film projects a surprising hostility. Not just the old lady in a car crash, but racism, with stereotyped Asians, Hawaiaans, and Germans (Kenneth Mars, clumsily playing out the mind-body duality of Dr. Strangelove). Are we to be reassured that Donny tries to "get down" with the savage native dancers?

Coconuts was the last of four features directed by Howard Morris, perhaps best known as the actor behind the lunatic Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show. (He was also the voice of the Hamburglar.) The thing drags, and aside from a promising disco routine behind the opening credits, and the hit title theme behind the closing credits, the musical numbers fall flat. But despite it's badness the Polanski and Kubrick references indicate a *kind* of intelligence at work. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

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"long tall sally" in tagalog. by the reycard duet with tony maiquez and his ukelele gang, on specialty records. rock on.

highlights from little steven's underground garage festival

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Lisa Whelchel, actress and author of 'Creative Correction: Extraordinary Ideas for Everyday Discipline' (Focus On the Family/Tyndale House), defends the practice. 'A correction has to hurt a little,' she said. 'An effective deterrent has to touch the child in some way. I don't think Tabasco is such a bad thing.' Her book suggests a 'tiny' bit of hot sauce be used, and offers alternatives such as lemon juice and vinegar. Discipline involves 'drawing a line to protect the child,' Whelchel said, 'and if they cross that line, there will be pain.' Whelchel said she believes that disciplinary methods should be left up to parents -- who know their child best, are devoted to the child's well-being and can administer punishment with love.

it gets better ... via uggabugga

Cristian Stan Photography

Train-Surfing Dog Rides 500 Miles atop Coal Car

Last month, Jenny the Cairn Terrier decided to go spelunking in a coal shaft for 2 weeks (read 'Cairn in a Coalmine'), and now we've got a terrier who takes the Canadian Pacific Rail halfway across British Columbia, balancing precariously on a pile of coal the whole way.

via the new york subway riding dog, gothamist

by pat padua

Conjoin yourself

BBC News | ASIA-PACIFIC | Snap! It's the conjoined crocodiles

Staff at a Thailand crocodile farm are nursing an unusual new arrival: a pair of conjoined crocodiles.

and at the London review of books

On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body. Between them they have two legs and two arms, but above a single pair of shoulders there are two necks, two heads, two smiling faces. One of Us is about conjoined twins, and its starting point is the conviction that often such twins should be thought of as two people inhabiting one body, not as two people inhabiting two not-yet-separated bodies. Clearly Abigail and Brittany Hensel (the six-year-olds to whose photograph I keep returning) can never be separated (though they do have two hearts); nor need they be, for they have a fit and healthy body, in which they can do all the things people normally do, except, of course, get away from each other.

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Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:41:46 -0400
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Lots of William Eggleston links today at coincidences, incl. more from the Guardian:

Eggleston's pictures have been described as "anti-heroic", "vulgar" and "boring". He typically focuses on details of the everyday environment that go unnoticed: shoes and clutter underneath a bed; a naked lightbulb in a violently red ceiling; a dog drinking from a muddy roadside puddle. At first glance, they could be amateur snapshots, albeit brightly coloured. (Eggleston dye-transferred his prints for exhibition, achieving a degree of colour saturation no printing process can match.) On closer inspection, they're the opposite: precise compositions, graphically sophisticated and laden with implied narrative, sometimes even violence. There are rarely people in his pictures, but there is always evidence of human presence, and of the tension between the natural and artificial.

but i don't care on them - 'cause i am just a mops!

yo la tengo's live covers are hit and miss, but this is a hit:

yo la tengo - i am just a mops

via largehearted boy