Saturday, March 15, 2003
(Oh, God, how I hated, truly hated Emp-TV)
I Hate MTV, Part II some of my random thoughts on the topic (you’re in my brain now, so be careful and be sure to take off your shoes for the full effect ... )
I saw a band on MTV a couple of times and they weren’t too interesting even for 1984. The first time, they were singing a song about being hungry like a wolf. Wow, what a metaphor. Like a stagnation’s leap of imagination. That one really forced me to break out the polevault. Could it be they were referring to their appetites. Then came another. Could there ever be something as single leveled, paperthin, and obvious as that first one? Ooh, ooh, say tootie, I got a good idea.
The only people who could buy into that form of technicolor simple bimbledom are the somebody has to do it to me because nature says it’s time to do it and I just gotta and I know you just gotta so let’s just gotta.
Or the hormone-and-alcohol-soaked and out-of-control and crazy like a bad seed bunch.
Or the remains of human beings suffering from some form of brainstem detachment from which higher functions decay from longterm neglect leaving only the nerve endings quivering for some kind of continuation of prolonged electrical or self-stimulation.
Or some shambling rapidly disappearing shadow of humanity which after a long coke binge has been reduced merely to basic limbic system surges. Such are things that most sane people eventually grow up and out of or die from.
Or worse, they’re on a natch! Quick, bring me the laughing gas!
Then they continued with their Vap Attack and began drawing video image material from stuff that old pooped out queerball pastyfaced slouching junkie verse-drained William Burroughs was writing about back in 1971. That old vampiric geezer! I couldn’t figure out why English “trendies” in 1971 were so attracted to what was such a limited expression of what was dark and aberrant in America back in 1963 before he put even himself to sleep. Burroughs, the snarling somnabulist who can barely squeeze out one thought even with the help an eyedropper! You saw his Junkie title on the bookstands, hundreds of copies spreading out like a virus that just would
invade, replicate, and destroy. Invade, replicate, destroy. Burroughs was old stinking bone dust in 1971.
Much less 1984! I thought, what? Ooh, some big Orwellian message trying to go on here, straight from the glossy lips of these teentanged foreign fashion hounds? It’s been done and said before, blinky and nod. You people are the xerox machine of musical notes. No wonder you worship your small dim princeling of darkness. Burroughs? What’s with this puffy graspy little boy band with their name taken from a bad bloated bald wicked evil villain dude from a Space Bondage flick? How old were you when your mommy took you to see that? Nine? And you decided on that name because your mommy didn’t like it? Ooh, Bad Boy!
What were these people trying to say? They think it’s a tough, scary world when they come to visit? (How the hell would they know? Those prissy strutting neo-fascist wussy wimps just fly around first class before soiling the very best hotels. Thank heavens it’s under phony names.)
Or tell us about Burroughs again? (How the hell would they know what he was trying to say or not say, he didn’t know anymore himself. Fact is, he was using razor blades to shred his poetry on a page. My cat shreds more artistic statements on my couch. But he hadn’t been saying anything for twenty years, and now they were trying to translate it back to us? And even given their current ages, they’d probably have to have it read out loud to them.) They want to communicate “something” to the American public by spewing out as their own these predigested, repeated, ugly, tired, old, dark, degrading, fascist, loser images from a guy who couldn’t cope with the world even with a razor blade. He wasn’t even a poet anymore, now he was the barest skeleton of a writer draped in a black coat fluttering on the fringes of NY gallery alleys. He was a rags and bones man now, the king and subject in his small realm. And still he needed to be flatout unconscious to do it. Did you twitwits mean you have to be dead to deal with the world as you
want to make it for us?
What were you people singing about?
“Let me take you to Icky-Poo Park
We can pretend we’re the Beatles
(Coo-coo, ca-choke! Coo-coo, ca-choke)
Oh, the Red Coats are coming!
(Smirk to yourself, that’s a double entendre)
It’s howdy Deja vu
It’s Deja Vu time dudes
Said it once, so say it again, the Red Coats are coming!
We’ll ride our painted carousel horsies straight smack down
Into the Valley of the Whoopie Cushion Dolls
And take you on a voyage through the
Recycled shipping excelsior of our minds.”
Ooh, pip pip. Let’s have a smash party and ooh yummy! have jellied eels coming out the tummy of the dead bear we present as the center piece. Ooh, pip pip. Who dey, now? Dese widdle pack of tansy monster boys? Wow, dose naughty nookums kids, they’ve got natural functions? Anything else they got? Let’s get lower yet, rub our buttons on the wood and prepare to scarf even more of
what we stick our big long snooty snoots into, whatever sauce-riddled pig they’re serving up tonight down at the D.D. Diner. And their “tone” made me want to hold my nose and imitate Bland Frankie of the Avalon in his Pierre le Fleur voice trying to sing:
“Oh, D.D. Diner (D.D. Diner)
You look so finer, (D.D. Diner)
You’re on a whiner, D.D. Diner,
I’ve changed my minder, D.D. Diner
Oh, D.D. Diner (D.D. Diner)”
And what’s with this little fruitcup making snide longdistance videotaped remarks on MTV? That little bonedry twispy braindead besotted bewildered Le C’est C’est Bon of Mal Roulet Bow Wow Band peddled his little pink (blank) so much you can drive a truck through it! It’s a wonder that guy can see the microphrone past the dangling bangles of his dingle dangle ‘do. I’m surprised he can even breathe much less sing, he overdosed on a cloud of aerosol blowback from his latest trip to the hairdressers. What was it that little woofie rasped? He had a Wasp and Spider, too, way back then, and wished he could have had it so easy? Actually, he sort of lisped, “Wathp and Thpider” but you know how the communication-impaired are. He can barely get his tongue out of the way and back in his mouth where it belongs to say a single word anyone can understand. Ooh! Get down, Scary Teen Poppa!
You float on your own hot air. Take that little peppermint striped candy cane straw from what’s packed in your nostrils. That’s the only material you know except for the styrofoam pellets of what passes for your mind. What was it you were referring to when you used the words “music” and “art”? Certainly not what you do.
You’re a collection of neopreme notes and that’s all that helped you float when you lost your keel and your rudder (as well as your childish bladder) and steered on without direction in your sodden peagreen boat. What is this, S-Man, nearly lost you at sea? Got you an N.D.E.? Those are the only letters you’ll have after your name, nobrain, simple simon’s not just a rhyme, it’s your wellknown reality. No name, no face, get braced, you lost your twit race. Simon sez, simon sez, same old notes in the same old songs.
All flotsam and jetsom ebb in, the debris and the small bits mix in, they are soggy and bobbin, you’ve fogged out and hit bottom.
Quick, call the net, scoop, and removal squad and load this one on out of the hyperbaric chamber and carry him not home for resucitation but out, out, out for instant high temperature disposal at the on-your-way-out toxic waste station.
Slither thee away, Slimin Rhymin. Remove from the loops of your thin chalk-lined tailored trousers (those ridiculous dust striped, drape fitted pants that would only make a clarabell with bicycle horns want to dance) take your little snakeskin narrow trendy belt and twine it thee about thy throat and then per chance you’ll achieve a note. Stuff your head in a sack, Jack, you couldn’t sing your way out of a paper bag if your life depended on it.
Wind a narrow little rag about your head
Like you is some sweating sensei samurai warrior,
High and mighty rock and roller,
powderpuffin lock and loader
Canals of Venice (California)
limeball punting floater
“artistic” kind of guy.
Maybe if you stuff it just right,
Your swelled head just might
Have an expanded fit into your own headwound universe
So easily contained by the confines of your hieroglyphic headband
Stetch-o, change-o, switch-o, change-o, (Cosmic),
So big and small and the same time
Stuff what’s leftover flapping into your ears
The rag-bottomed logograms will soak up the remainders,
And keep the rest of your brains from draining out your ears.
You simple scion in the Land of the Rising Scum,
Dim Sum Dumpling Chicken Chunk Humping Chimpanzee Bad Monkey Boy.
You’re a dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip
And too dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb
To get a job.
Man, you couldn’t get a job holding a tin cup and dancing at the end of a chain for an organ grinder! Man, you are so dumb you’d watch Silk Stalkings for the miniskirts and think it’s really happening for real right there in the living room with you. You’re on a Pig-malion trip all right, Chunckbloat. Then it’s like you hear something you think is like Beatles music (ooh, listen to this one, his consciousness is expanding across the universe):
Little blobs of neopreme
Are floating like an upset boat
Reminding and annoying me ...
Take the rake and claw the sand
Scrape zen designs in litterclay
Your mental catbox needs a change
Your lyrics stink like kitty pee ...
Scarf-a-roo-hey-a
I’m outta here!
Nothin’s gonna change their world ...
Nothin’s gonna change their world ...
Push your sleeves up past the elbow like people did in the late fifties (they only did that for publicity poses, fool!) and walk towards the camera. That’s all you could ever push effectively. Wiggle those narrow shoulders that are skinnier than your tie and narrowier than your thinking. Such Bad boys!
Those spineless limeys! That’s the spineless limey band. Go suck a escargot, woofpunk, you is what you eats, and you leave a trail of snot behind you wherever you go. dog chow kal kan munchin horsemeat stuffin powderpuffin bow wow ungrateful whelp bad bad band.
And as for your old ladies .... they must be desperate! Why don’t they just go to the pound and buy one?
That band on tv in 1984,
the pancake foundation and mascara outlined
powderpuffin twitboys in turquoise
with spiky leather dogcollars woofing, whining, and whimpering
as they thumped their stumps along,
Their plastic repeating on the rotational playwheel
just spinning on the MTV wheel,
oh the music video windmill,
oh wow, just like “the windmills of their minds”
going down into the drink,
like poor little Micky Jagger
Was just a pore little “butterfly broken on the wheel.”
Is that what they were trying to say?
You call that ART? Quick, Henry, the flit! If you think that is ART, it is so bad, it’s potentially harmful to the viewer. You are Bad karma kids. Basta ya to youse!
(inspired by a line in the archives of silence: (The oft-quoted dictum, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" is valid enough, but perhaps poetry about either might be more successful.)
¶ 3/15/2003 09:14:00 AM
I Hate MTV, Part II some of my random thoughts on the topic (you’re in my brain now, so be careful and be sure to take off your shoes for the full effect ... )
I saw a band on MTV a couple of times and they weren’t too interesting even for 1984. The first time, they were singing a song about being hungry like a wolf. Wow, what a metaphor. Like a stagnation’s leap of imagination. That one really forced me to break out the polevault. Could it be they were referring to their appetites. Then came another. Could there ever be something as single leveled, paperthin, and obvious as that first one? Ooh, ooh, say tootie, I got a good idea.
The only people who could buy into that form of technicolor simple bimbledom are the somebody has to do it to me because nature says it’s time to do it and I just gotta and I know you just gotta so let’s just gotta.
Or the hormone-and-alcohol-soaked and out-of-control and crazy like a bad seed bunch.
Or the remains of human beings suffering from some form of brainstem detachment from which higher functions decay from longterm neglect leaving only the nerve endings quivering for some kind of continuation of prolonged electrical or self-stimulation.
Or some shambling rapidly disappearing shadow of humanity which after a long coke binge has been reduced merely to basic limbic system surges. Such are things that most sane people eventually grow up and out of or die from.
Or worse, they’re on a natch! Quick, bring me the laughing gas!
Then they continued with their Vap Attack and began drawing video image material from stuff that old pooped out queerball pastyfaced slouching junkie verse-drained William Burroughs was writing about back in 1971. That old vampiric geezer! I couldn’t figure out why English “trendies” in 1971 were so attracted to what was such a limited expression of what was dark and aberrant in America back in 1963 before he put even himself to sleep. Burroughs, the snarling somnabulist who can barely squeeze out one thought even with the help an eyedropper! You saw his Junkie title on the bookstands, hundreds of copies spreading out like a virus that just would
invade, replicate, and destroy. Invade, replicate, destroy. Burroughs was old stinking bone dust in 1971.
Much less 1984! I thought, what? Ooh, some big Orwellian message trying to go on here, straight from the glossy lips of these teentanged foreign fashion hounds? It’s been done and said before, blinky and nod. You people are the xerox machine of musical notes. No wonder you worship your small dim princeling of darkness. Burroughs? What’s with this puffy graspy little boy band with their name taken from a bad bloated bald wicked evil villain dude from a Space Bondage flick? How old were you when your mommy took you to see that? Nine? And you decided on that name because your mommy didn’t like it? Ooh, Bad Boy!
What were these people trying to say? They think it’s a tough, scary world when they come to visit? (How the hell would they know? Those prissy strutting neo-fascist wussy wimps just fly around first class before soiling the very best hotels. Thank heavens it’s under phony names.)
Or tell us about Burroughs again? (How the hell would they know what he was trying to say or not say, he didn’t know anymore himself. Fact is, he was using razor blades to shred his poetry on a page. My cat shreds more artistic statements on my couch. But he hadn’t been saying anything for twenty years, and now they were trying to translate it back to us? And even given their current ages, they’d probably have to have it read out loud to them.) They want to communicate “something” to the American public by spewing out as their own these predigested, repeated, ugly, tired, old, dark, degrading, fascist, loser images from a guy who couldn’t cope with the world even with a razor blade. He wasn’t even a poet anymore, now he was the barest skeleton of a writer draped in a black coat fluttering on the fringes of NY gallery alleys. He was a rags and bones man now, the king and subject in his small realm. And still he needed to be flatout unconscious to do it. Did you twitwits mean you have to be dead to deal with the world as you
want to make it for us?
What were you people singing about?
“Let me take you to Icky-Poo Park
We can pretend we’re the Beatles
(Coo-coo, ca-choke! Coo-coo, ca-choke)
Oh, the Red Coats are coming!
(Smirk to yourself, that’s a double entendre)
It’s howdy Deja vu
It’s Deja Vu time dudes
Said it once, so say it again, the Red Coats are coming!
We’ll ride our painted carousel horsies straight smack down
Into the Valley of the Whoopie Cushion Dolls
And take you on a voyage through the
Recycled shipping excelsior of our minds.”
Ooh, pip pip. Let’s have a smash party and ooh yummy! have jellied eels coming out the tummy of the dead bear we present as the center piece. Ooh, pip pip. Who dey, now? Dese widdle pack of tansy monster boys? Wow, dose naughty nookums kids, they’ve got natural functions? Anything else they got? Let’s get lower yet, rub our buttons on the wood and prepare to scarf even more of
what we stick our big long snooty snoots into, whatever sauce-riddled pig they’re serving up tonight down at the D.D. Diner. And their “tone” made me want to hold my nose and imitate Bland Frankie of the Avalon in his Pierre le Fleur voice trying to sing:
“Oh, D.D. Diner (D.D. Diner)
You look so finer, (D.D. Diner)
You’re on a whiner, D.D. Diner,
I’ve changed my minder, D.D. Diner
Oh, D.D. Diner (D.D. Diner)”
And what’s with this little fruitcup making snide longdistance videotaped remarks on MTV? That little bonedry twispy braindead besotted bewildered Le C’est C’est Bon of Mal Roulet Bow Wow Band peddled his little pink (blank) so much you can drive a truck through it! It’s a wonder that guy can see the microphrone past the dangling bangles of his dingle dangle ‘do. I’m surprised he can even breathe much less sing, he overdosed on a cloud of aerosol blowback from his latest trip to the hairdressers. What was it that little woofie rasped? He had a Wasp and Spider, too, way back then, and wished he could have had it so easy? Actually, he sort of lisped, “Wathp and Thpider” but you know how the communication-impaired are. He can barely get his tongue out of the way and back in his mouth where it belongs to say a single word anyone can understand. Ooh! Get down, Scary Teen Poppa!
You float on your own hot air. Take that little peppermint striped candy cane straw from what’s packed in your nostrils. That’s the only material you know except for the styrofoam pellets of what passes for your mind. What was it you were referring to when you used the words “music” and “art”? Certainly not what you do.
You’re a collection of neopreme notes and that’s all that helped you float when you lost your keel and your rudder (as well as your childish bladder) and steered on without direction in your sodden peagreen boat. What is this, S-Man, nearly lost you at sea? Got you an N.D.E.? Those are the only letters you’ll have after your name, nobrain, simple simon’s not just a rhyme, it’s your wellknown reality. No name, no face, get braced, you lost your twit race. Simon sez, simon sez, same old notes in the same old songs.
All flotsam and jetsom ebb in, the debris and the small bits mix in, they are soggy and bobbin, you’ve fogged out and hit bottom.
Quick, call the net, scoop, and removal squad and load this one on out of the hyperbaric chamber and carry him not home for resucitation but out, out, out for instant high temperature disposal at the on-your-way-out toxic waste station.
Slither thee away, Slimin Rhymin. Remove from the loops of your thin chalk-lined tailored trousers (those ridiculous dust striped, drape fitted pants that would only make a clarabell with bicycle horns want to dance) take your little snakeskin narrow trendy belt and twine it thee about thy throat and then per chance you’ll achieve a note. Stuff your head in a sack, Jack, you couldn’t sing your way out of a paper bag if your life depended on it.
Wind a narrow little rag about your head
Like you is some sweating sensei samurai warrior,
High and mighty rock and roller,
powderpuffin lock and loader
Canals of Venice (California)
limeball punting floater
“artistic” kind of guy.
Maybe if you stuff it just right,
Your swelled head just might
Have an expanded fit into your own headwound universe
So easily contained by the confines of your hieroglyphic headband
Stetch-o, change-o, switch-o, change-o, (Cosmic),
So big and small and the same time
Stuff what’s leftover flapping into your ears
The rag-bottomed logograms will soak up the remainders,
And keep the rest of your brains from draining out your ears.
You simple scion in the Land of the Rising Scum,
Dim Sum Dumpling Chicken Chunk Humping Chimpanzee Bad Monkey Boy.
You’re a dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip
And too dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb
To get a job.
Man, you couldn’t get a job holding a tin cup and dancing at the end of a chain for an organ grinder! Man, you are so dumb you’d watch Silk Stalkings for the miniskirts and think it’s really happening for real right there in the living room with you. You’re on a Pig-malion trip all right, Chunckbloat. Then it’s like you hear something you think is like Beatles music (ooh, listen to this one, his consciousness is expanding across the universe):
Little blobs of neopreme
Are floating like an upset boat
Reminding and annoying me ...
Take the rake and claw the sand
Scrape zen designs in litterclay
Your mental catbox needs a change
Your lyrics stink like kitty pee ...
Scarf-a-roo-hey-a
I’m outta here!
Nothin’s gonna change their world ...
Nothin’s gonna change their world ...
Push your sleeves up past the elbow like people did in the late fifties (they only did that for publicity poses, fool!) and walk towards the camera. That’s all you could ever push effectively. Wiggle those narrow shoulders that are skinnier than your tie and narrowier than your thinking. Such Bad boys!
Those spineless limeys! That’s the spineless limey band. Go suck a escargot, woofpunk, you is what you eats, and you leave a trail of snot behind you wherever you go. dog chow kal kan munchin horsemeat stuffin powderpuffin bow wow ungrateful whelp bad bad band.
And as for your old ladies .... they must be desperate! Why don’t they just go to the pound and buy one?
That band on tv in 1984,
the pancake foundation and mascara outlined
powderpuffin twitboys in turquoise
with spiky leather dogcollars woofing, whining, and whimpering
as they thumped their stumps along,
Their plastic repeating on the rotational playwheel
just spinning on the MTV wheel,
oh the music video windmill,
oh wow, just like “the windmills of their minds”
going down into the drink,
like poor little Micky Jagger
Was just a pore little “butterfly broken on the wheel.”
Is that what they were trying to say?
You call that ART? Quick, Henry, the flit! If you think that is ART, it is so bad, it’s potentially harmful to the viewer. You are Bad karma kids. Basta ya to youse!
(inspired by a line in the archives of silence: (The oft-quoted dictum, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" is valid enough, but perhaps poetry about either might be more successful.)
¶ 3/15/2003 09:14:00 AM
