Of all the Rock TVs our ministry ever put together, this one is probably our most requested. Whether it’s the silliness of the Buster Fonz character, the exuberant hyper-patriotism, or the glorification of meat, there’s just something about this video that works. One of my projects for the summer is to clean up copyright issues on some older videos to make them internet-friendly, and this was the first one I got to work on.
Like all our videos, this Rock TV has its weak points. I think that the Presidential Fitness Test requirement for a grillmaster is funny as a tossed-off line, but not necessarily as an extended gag. This also isn’t the most visually compelling thing we’ve ever done. Having said that, of the 70-something Rock TVs out there, this has got to be in my top five.
I received it as a Christmas gift from my parents back in 1992. The world was a simpler place back then - back before the Unabomber, before Y2K, before the Scary Movie films. It was on this little boom box that I listened to The White Album for the first time and thought to myself, “Wild Honey Pie is certainly the finest song ever composed.” During high school and college, I used this stereo to compile an estimated 300 mixtapes - some for myself, some for friends, but most for girls I liked who would most certainly return my romantic interests if I could only introduce them to a particular album cut by Collective Soul. As always, my reasoning was cogent and valid.
Well today, the romantic interest of my life told me that my old stereo is too big and ugly for our house, and told me I had to get rid of it. Bursting into tears, I pleaded for my old friend with haggard shouts of anguish and by holding my breath until I lost consciousness, but to no avail. It was time. Its CD player had long ceased working, and its cassette player ate tapes, basically rendering it an oversized AM radio used to listen to Vikings games and swear at.
It was time to take my sturdy old companion out back and mercilessly blast its head off with a shotgun, metaphorically speaking.
So I did. Upon returning, I sat down to write this post. Bitter, salty tears are dripping down my beard and into the heaping bowl of butterscotch pudding Bridgette prepared to help console me. Later today, we will go out and purchase a new stereo - a smaller one more suitable for the times we live in. I suppose I may grow to love this stereo, but it will never be the same as the one I had to leave behind.
Farewell, my old portable stereo. I hope you are being attended to by scores of virgins somewhere in home electronics heaven.
My wife was working this weekend, and I ended up spending all my time sitting in my sunroom engrossed in Thomas Craughwell’s excellent book Stealing Lincoln’s Body.
The text is a spare, compelling account of a bizarre 1876 attempt to hold Abraham Lincoln’s remains for ransom. The details of the heist itself aren’t enough to support a 200-page book, so Craughwell uses it to frame a vivid picture of America in the second half of the 19th century. He covers the crisis of counterfeited money following the Civil War, nativist Protestant resentment toward Irish Catholic immigrants, corrupt Chicago politics, and the development of the Secret Service. All these threads wind their way through the narrative of what happened to the remains of Abraham Lincoln. This is an eerie, haunted story that is sure to stick with me for a while. A fun read.
Here are some tidbits gleaned from the text. Do not bother to question them.
-The heist was a poor attempt by a ring of Chicago counterfeiters to secure a pardon for an imprisoned business partner, along with $200,000. They planned to break into Lincoln’s loosely-guarded monument in Springfield, IL, and remove his casket from the marble sarcophagas it had been placed in 11 years earlier. The grave-robbers managed to break in and had started to remove the casket from the sarcophagas when they were discovered. The entire endeavor had been amateurish and ill-advised; the kidnappers’ litany of mistakes would be more humorous if they hadn’t come so close to successfully desecrating Lincoln’s remains.
-A parallel scheme to kidnap the bones of Chex, Lincoln’s cat, failed when it was revealed that Chex was still alive, and was also not a cat at all, but Lincoln’s human son Robert.
-If Lincoln’s grave desecrators were alive today, they’d be blown away by our iPods and HDTVs. Then they’d go and desecrate Gerald Ford.
-The hero of Craughwell’s story is a man named John Carroll Power, the original custodian and self-appointed guardian of the Lincoln Monument in Springfield. Traumatized by the break-in, Power dedicated himself for the remainder of his life to protecting the remains of the Lincoln family.
-In a interesting historical curio, it is believed that President Andrew Jackson was never buried. Rather, he ascended into heaven on a cloud powered by Manifest Destiny where he punched St. Peter in the crotch to gain admission.
-Sometimes Abraham Lincoln watches me when I take baths.
-As a result the chaos following the break-in, and the ongoing structural problems of the monument itself, Lincoln’s coffin was kept in the corner of the monument’s basement under a pile of lumber for several years. Power and several trusted associates later secretly buried Lincoln’s remains in a shallow corner of the basement for several more years until a more suitable solution could be found.
-Barack Obama is also from Illinois, and is also good at giving speeches, and is also the greatest president since Lincoln or FDR, whichever one came later. I am an editor at Newsweek magazine.
-Troubled by fears that their efforts to protect Lincoln’s remains had failed, Power and several others took it upon themselves to actually open the coffin to positively identify the body in 1887. Later, in 1901, just before Lincoln was lowered to his final resting place, the coffin was opened for a final time. In both instances, onlookers were started at the remarkable preservation of Lincoln’s body (the result of the heavy embalming efforts utilized for the month-long funeral procession from Washington to Springfield back in 1865). His face was immediately recognizable, though the color of his skin had darkened as a result of the shattering of his skull. The men remarked that it was like looking at a bronze bust of Lincoln rather than the man itself. After the viewing in 1901, the lead coffin was sealed shut once again, placed in a cedar casket, and lowered into a concrete-sealed tomb below the monument where he has lain ever since.
-Dairy Queen’s Blizzard flavor of the month for July is Lincolndust.
At one point during in school last year I had a hard time explaining to my students how Michael Jackson could have been such a cool, universally beloved figure in the 80s - they had grown up with the absolutely bizarre behavior and child molestation charges surrounding him, and never got a chance to experience Michael Jackson as The Most Talented Man on the Planet.
As a kid in rural Minnesota, I idolized certain pop cultural figures like he and Kirby Puckett. Turns out both of them had their demons, but there weren’t any bigger in my world when I was young.
Well, now Michael Jackson is dead at age 50. He is survived by his children Blanket, Pickle, and Rainbow Bright.
Here is the bloated, but at times astounding video for Smooth Criminal:
I remember when this video came out, spending precious minutes at recess breaking down the dance moves and debating whether “the leaning” was real or doctored with special effects.
And here’s a lovely, haunting ballad from his later material - Stranger in Moscow:
R.I.P.
UPDATE: Over at the excellent Onion A.V. Club site, they put together a great collection of reflections on Jackson’s death. Here’s one that sums up my impressions particularly well:
Michael Jackson was the first celebrity I remember being aware of who wasn’t Han Solo or a Muppet. His stardom transcended music: At that age, I was far more interested in listening to storybook records than pop albums, so Jackson was less a famous musician to me than just this charmed entity who lived in an enviably magical world; I remember seeing that photo of him with E.T. and being very jealous that they were friends. A year later when I started kindergarten, Jackson was all anyone ever talked about, and it was never about, say, the merits of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” versus “P.Y.T.” For months after the Motown 25 special (which I would hazard a guess most of us didn’t even actually watch), all the boys tried to one-up each other moonwalking in the cafeteria, and the coolest kid in class was the guy who showed up one day wearing a replica of Jackson’s red patent leather, multi-zippered “Beat It” jacket—which he swore he got from the man himself because he was actually his nephew, and of course no one ever challenged him on it, and eventually everyone took to calling him “Michael” at his insistence (even though your name was really Dwayne, Dwayne). I remember going home and asking my mom for some parachute pants that very night, which she was smart enough not to buy me.
The thing is, liking Michael Jackson’s music was and is sort of beside the point—and hating his music is definitely beside the point. And all the crazy shit that just began to snowball not long after and never really let up (the Pepsi fire, the Elephant Man’s bones, hyperbaric chambers, the skin-bleaching, Macaulay Culkin, Neverland Ranch, and our seemingly inexhaustible repository of kiddy-diddler jokes), yes, that’s also beside the point. To dismiss the impact that he had on the cultural landscape, to deny the way his influence spread via osmosis through every facet of our existence—to where a little 5-year-old white kid in suburban Texas who didn’t even listen to music nevertheless wanted to dress like Michael Jackson—would be myopic. That we’ll see another artist in our lifetime who was that deeply entrenched in the national psyche, for better and for worse, and for so incredibly long seems unlikely. To me, it’s not just another pop-music star who died; in a way, it’s the notion of “pop” itself.
This regal beast is the property of my in-laws, the man and woman who tenderly bore and raised my beloved wife. The dog’s name is Mausi (or Mitsy, or Muffins, or something similarly inscrutable).
Anyway, my point is that I cleaned up its puke this weekend.
For those of you unacquainted with hot, yellowish-green German Shephard barf, I think it’s safe to say that it’s one of the grossest things in the universe. I watched the wretched creature spread its jaws wide and silently disgorge a massive pile of vomit on the floor. Alone with my wife, I knew that we would have to clean it up, so I went to fetch some cleaning supplies. When I had returned, I found a similarly revolting barf-mound in another corner of the room.
In all, we’re talking more than a half-gallon of thick, chunky heavings left behind for me by this bastard dog.
Bridgette was little help in cleaning up the mess. For one, she is 6 months pregnant, so bending over is not the easiest. Secondly, she got a case of the giggles when she saw the disgusting sludge-heaps, so her “help” came in the form of laughing while I was suppressing the gag reflex, scooping the warm, nauseating stomach contents of my in-laws’ German Shephard into the garbage.
Hooray for awfulness!
P.S. When Bridgette read this post, she got the giggles again.
Fresh from our oven of sadness, a piping hot pile of new Rock TV!
From the moment the writing team solidified the concept, this video was a lot of fun to produce. We enjoyed getting to riff on stale sitcom conventions and pay homage to some of the shows we grew up with. We also enjoyed watching Todd in a mullet wig.
At this point, I’m very happy with where this video ended up. There was some discussion among the editors as to whether the ending works - it’s fairly dark and disconnected from the rest of the video. My feeling is that I like it when Rock TV goes weird, and there’s enough solid material in the video otherwise to excuse an indulgent, alienating conclusion where I yell at Jordan once again
Some of my favorite bits from the video:
-The writing team’s satisfaction with Christine’s suggestion to steal ideas.
-Leroy’s performances during the sitcom’s opening sequence when he drops the boxes - it’s pure Dick Van Dyke.
-The Luck Dragon reference slays me.
-The entire character of Smetka is the single greatest Rock TV development of the past several years, in my opinion. Stay tuned for more Smetka appearances to come.
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