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rusty_haloSunday was going to be my day to relax and catch up on sleep, LJ, fic, and school. Instead, I got a call from my friend Mike announcing that my friend Joe was in town. They're friends from high school; I've only seen them a handful of times since high school ended three and a half years ago.
So, they came to visit. Joe moved to Las Vegas shortly after school ended, became a marine, and spent the past several months in Iraq. Mike still lives in his parents' house and is in his fourth year of a two-year community college program. It amazes me what different paths our lives have taken.
Joe told us about his experience in Iraq; he was there before, during, and after the way. Everything he told me was horribly disturbing, and I'm not going to repeat any of it because the US military scares the hell out of me. More now than ever.
So, mostly we just chatted and reminisced. We looked through some old photo albums; hard to believe that Joe used to be a dead-ringer for Marilyn Manson. He had long black hair, cats eye contacts, specially fitted fangs, a lip ring, black nails, makeup, etc. Now he looks like, y'know, a bulky blond sunburned crew-cut marine. Wow. I found the pictures where we first dyed his hair, way back when, and my friend Danielle and I did his makeup for the very first time. (I was the first in our little group to dye my hair black, and then I peer-pressured Joe into doing it too. Once Joe followed, our friend Chris let us dye his hair the next weekend. That may well be the only trend I've ever started in my life.)
We also watched some of the old videos that we made. We've got one that we made for history class that's just hilarious. It's a re-enactment of some civil war battle. It's got captions explaining the location of the battle and who fought, but the actual video is of seven of our friends wearing civil war colors and pretending to beat the crap out of each other with supersoakers and hockey sticks. Then we show the aftermath of the battle, which is Mike having his arm amputated. The video consists of about a minute of Mike shrieking incoherently and someone pouring "wine" (water in a wine bottle) down his throat, which he gargles and spits all over himself as he screams. Then the most fake amputation ever, which is basically a cut away, then cut back to a fake hand lying on a red cloth. Clearly we didn't take this project very seriously, but we did get an A. Heh.
There's also a video we made for psychology class, which is horribly depressing because I'm actually in it (it's the only video I was ever in; I greatly preferred editing and filming, and I hate being onscreen). It is kind of funny though, minus those awful moments when I'm onscreen. It's a parody of a game show, where this girl (me, ugh) has to choose from four dates. One's a pedophile, one's drunk and passes out onscreen, one's a stoner who spends all his time getting high, and one seems like a polite, respectable businessman. She chooses the respectable one, of course, but the date turns out horribly. He's two and half hours late, he starts a food fight by throwing food at her, his mother shows up at the restaurant to berate him for not taking her to Bingo night and he beats her up, he entertains his date by rambling on about how cannibalism is the solution to world hunger, he steals the restaurant silverware and makes her run out without paying, and then she finds the body of one of the other guests in the trunk of his car. Plus, it's intercut with all these weird commercials like "Diet Coke: it tastes better than regular Coke, and now it doesn't give you cancer anymore!" and "Remember kids, drugs are bad. If you use drugs, hell fire will rain down upon us and destroy the world. So don't use drugs." Somehow, this was supposed to explore human psychology; again, we got an A.
We've also got one that we didn't watch, because no one seems to have a copy of it. I'm very sad about this, because I'd love to see it again. It was for some anti-smoking week at school. The video consists of Joe strutting down the sidewalk to the tune of "Staying Alive," smoking. He breathes smoke into the face of our friend Chris as he passes by, and Chris makes a face and coughs. Then, as Joe turns the corner, he finds that Chris has returned with a group of angry friends. They beat the crap out of Joe, and we show in slow motion the cigarette falling from his lips, hitting the ground, and being ground out by someone's boot. Then Mike comes onscreen and announces in one of those patronizing public-service voices "Remember kids, smoking is bad." In the background, you can still see Joe getting beaten to death. I think we did this because it was mocking the demonization of smoking by taking it to an extreme (kid gets beaten to death for smoking), but the teachers couldn't complain because the explicit message ("smoking is bad") was very clear. Unfortunately we handed it in and never saw it again; I can't believe I didn't keep a back-up copy.
We also had a video following a day in the life of a new kid at our high school (which opens with the music of New Kids on the Block, heh). In it, the kid gets shown around to each of his classes, where he sees various scary things. The big macho psychology teacher is wearing a flowery dress (we bought it at a yard sale and actually got our teacher to wear it!!), everyone keeps making comments about the smell, and no they don't really do that in the bathrooms. A hall monitor yells at the kid who's showing the new kid around, orders her hall monitor ninja minions to drag him away, and then waves a whip in the air. He gets chased by scary goth kids, watches kids getting injured in gym class, sees the vice principal run screaming from a mouse, watchs his next guide get hydrochloric acid in her eye in chemistry class from a "hydrochloric acid fight," watches the shop teacher accidentally cut off his finger, etc. It was a decent idea, but the execution wasn't so great on that one.
And then there's our masterpiece, which is an 11-minute epic called "Night of the Living Impaired." It involves four students of different social groups (a popular cheerleader and her boyfriend--two popular kids we roped into being in the video--and two grungy losers--my friends Jeff and Danielle). We named them after Scooby Doo characters; Daphne and Fred, Velma and Shaggy. (And Shaggy fit Jeff perfectly; he didn't cut his hair once throughout high school, and rarely shaved). They've united to put a curse on their teacher, who's failing them all. (Except Daphne, who's there because she doesn't want Fred to fail, because if he fails he'll get kicked off the football team and then she won't be dating a football player). So, the video opens with the four of them going to a graveyard in the middle of the night (it was Shaggy's idea, but he needed the other three because the curse requires four people). They stand in the circle, each representing an 80s star (Simon LeBon, George Michael, Madonna, and Michael Jackson) and do the curse (which consists of Jeff reciting the names of all the Jackson children in Pig Latin several times, ending with "Ichael-May!") The ground shakes, and they wonder if the curse worked (it was supposed to make their teacher start mooing uncontrolably and never be able to stop). Then zombies (my friends covered in baby powder and black eye-makeup) start rising from their graves, and Shaggy realizes that he read the wrong spell. So the kids run as the zombies chase them (led by this charismatic zombie who keeps making faces for the camera, played by this kid named Keith, who we barely knew but who ended up with us because he was hanging out with Joe that day). The zombies corner the kids in an alley and Shaggy starts throwing things at them from his bag (a cross doesn't work, so he tries a star of David; he throws salt and they eat it; he tries "Evian Holy Water" and they drink it; he throws a telletubby and an elmo doll; nothing works). The kids mourn their impending deaths (Fred's upset that he never won a football championship, Daphne's upset because she never got to meet Leonardo DiCaprio, Velma's not upset because she never had any hopes and dreams anyway, Shaggy's upset because he never got to be prom queen--uh, date the prom the queen!). Then, Shaggy pulls out one final thing--he's got a boom box with a tape of Michael Jackson's Thriller. He presses play, and when Thriller comes on, the zombies are forced to dance. (Because, y'know, it's a rule of the universe that all zombies must dance when they hear Thriller). This is the best part of the movie; 10 or so of our friends, dressed as zombies, doing the Thriller dance. You have no idea how insanely difficult that was to choreograph, but it actually turned out pretty well. (With some creative camera work; they only memorized a fairly short segment, but we cut it together from different angles so it looks longer). The film ends with the zombies dancing, shows the credits, and then after the credits you hear the tape run out and the sounds of the zombies eating the kids.
We were weird.
So anyway, we reminisced about all that stuff. They stayed till around 2am, and Joe went back to Las Vegas the next day. Hopefully I'll see Mike again, though; he's only a few hours away in New Jersey.
I only got about three hours of sleep Sunday night, then worked all day Monday. Monday night was a KMFDM concert that I already had tickets to, otherwise I'd have just slept. So I dragged myself to KMFDM, where I mostly just tried to stay awake. It was good, though. They played a whole ton of classics; Flesh, Juke Joint Jezebel, Godlike, A Drug Against War, various others that I can't be bothered to remember. Flesh is my favorite so I really tried to get into that one, but I was just too tired. That was depressing; I was dancing and singing all night to the Cruxshadows and couldn't even work up the enthusiasm for one KMFDM song. I don't think it was their fault; I was just too tired. But ... yeah. If you get a chance, go see KMFDM. They're neat.
I've never been a huge KMFDM fan. I like Nihil a whole lot, but none of their other records have resonated the same way (although my favorite song is Anarchy, from the symbols record, which is also very good). So I was glad that they played songs from that. My main fascination with KMFDM comes from the fact that when I was in seventh grade, there were these awesome senior guys who I worshipped, and they always wore KMFDM t-shirts. (Our school system ran out of space and put the middle schoolers with the high schoolers when I was in middle school). This one guy had a great big orange mohawk, and another was so gorgeous, and looked exactly like Brandon Lee in The Crow. The whole hallway would part when they walked through, like they ruled the world. They had such presence. They also worked at Shoprite, but that was okay because they wore their KMFDM t-shirts under their Shoprite uniforms, and you could see the words coming through. They're the whole reason my friends and I took media arts class and started making videos; they made the most unbelievably cool videos. Our school had an assembly that year and we got to watch their videos; they were all dark and in black and white and fucked-up looking, with all these spirals and machine things and stuff; they had one to this Skinny Puppy song that was so cool. I couldn't get over how neat it was that the whole stupid boring conformity obsessed high school had to watch those fucked up subversive videos. (Of course, our stupid &^%$ of a principal cancelled the media arts program shortly after for just that reason). This was back when I was a little mini seventh grader and I thought daring to wear black nail polish was extreme.
So, they came to visit. Joe moved to Las Vegas shortly after school ended, became a marine, and spent the past several months in Iraq. Mike still lives in his parents' house and is in his fourth year of a two-year community college program. It amazes me what different paths our lives have taken.
Joe told us about his experience in Iraq; he was there before, during, and after the way. Everything he told me was horribly disturbing, and I'm not going to repeat any of it because the US military scares the hell out of me. More now than ever.
So, mostly we just chatted and reminisced. We looked through some old photo albums; hard to believe that Joe used to be a dead-ringer for Marilyn Manson. He had long black hair, cats eye contacts, specially fitted fangs, a lip ring, black nails, makeup, etc. Now he looks like, y'know, a bulky blond sunburned crew-cut marine. Wow. I found the pictures where we first dyed his hair, way back when, and my friend Danielle and I did his makeup for the very first time. (I was the first in our little group to dye my hair black, and then I peer-pressured Joe into doing it too. Once Joe followed, our friend Chris let us dye his hair the next weekend. That may well be the only trend I've ever started in my life.)
We also watched some of the old videos that we made. We've got one that we made for history class that's just hilarious. It's a re-enactment of some civil war battle. It's got captions explaining the location of the battle and who fought, but the actual video is of seven of our friends wearing civil war colors and pretending to beat the crap out of each other with supersoakers and hockey sticks. Then we show the aftermath of the battle, which is Mike having his arm amputated. The video consists of about a minute of Mike shrieking incoherently and someone pouring "wine" (water in a wine bottle) down his throat, which he gargles and spits all over himself as he screams. Then the most fake amputation ever, which is basically a cut away, then cut back to a fake hand lying on a red cloth. Clearly we didn't take this project very seriously, but we did get an A. Heh.
There's also a video we made for psychology class, which is horribly depressing because I'm actually in it (it's the only video I was ever in; I greatly preferred editing and filming, and I hate being onscreen). It is kind of funny though, minus those awful moments when I'm onscreen. It's a parody of a game show, where this girl (me, ugh) has to choose from four dates. One's a pedophile, one's drunk and passes out onscreen, one's a stoner who spends all his time getting high, and one seems like a polite, respectable businessman. She chooses the respectable one, of course, but the date turns out horribly. He's two and half hours late, he starts a food fight by throwing food at her, his mother shows up at the restaurant to berate him for not taking her to Bingo night and he beats her up, he entertains his date by rambling on about how cannibalism is the solution to world hunger, he steals the restaurant silverware and makes her run out without paying, and then she finds the body of one of the other guests in the trunk of his car. Plus, it's intercut with all these weird commercials like "Diet Coke: it tastes better than regular Coke, and now it doesn't give you cancer anymore!" and "Remember kids, drugs are bad. If you use drugs, hell fire will rain down upon us and destroy the world. So don't use drugs." Somehow, this was supposed to explore human psychology; again, we got an A.
We've also got one that we didn't watch, because no one seems to have a copy of it. I'm very sad about this, because I'd love to see it again. It was for some anti-smoking week at school. The video consists of Joe strutting down the sidewalk to the tune of "Staying Alive," smoking. He breathes smoke into the face of our friend Chris as he passes by, and Chris makes a face and coughs. Then, as Joe turns the corner, he finds that Chris has returned with a group of angry friends. They beat the crap out of Joe, and we show in slow motion the cigarette falling from his lips, hitting the ground, and being ground out by someone's boot. Then Mike comes onscreen and announces in one of those patronizing public-service voices "Remember kids, smoking is bad." In the background, you can still see Joe getting beaten to death. I think we did this because it was mocking the demonization of smoking by taking it to an extreme (kid gets beaten to death for smoking), but the teachers couldn't complain because the explicit message ("smoking is bad") was very clear. Unfortunately we handed it in and never saw it again; I can't believe I didn't keep a back-up copy.
We also had a video following a day in the life of a new kid at our high school (which opens with the music of New Kids on the Block, heh). In it, the kid gets shown around to each of his classes, where he sees various scary things. The big macho psychology teacher is wearing a flowery dress (we bought it at a yard sale and actually got our teacher to wear it!!), everyone keeps making comments about the smell, and no they don't really do that in the bathrooms. A hall monitor yells at the kid who's showing the new kid around, orders her hall monitor ninja minions to drag him away, and then waves a whip in the air. He gets chased by scary goth kids, watches kids getting injured in gym class, sees the vice principal run screaming from a mouse, watchs his next guide get hydrochloric acid in her eye in chemistry class from a "hydrochloric acid fight," watches the shop teacher accidentally cut off his finger, etc. It was a decent idea, but the execution wasn't so great on that one.
And then there's our masterpiece, which is an 11-minute epic called "Night of the Living Impaired." It involves four students of different social groups (a popular cheerleader and her boyfriend--two popular kids we roped into being in the video--and two grungy losers--my friends Jeff and Danielle). We named them after Scooby Doo characters; Daphne and Fred, Velma and Shaggy. (And Shaggy fit Jeff perfectly; he didn't cut his hair once throughout high school, and rarely shaved). They've united to put a curse on their teacher, who's failing them all. (Except Daphne, who's there because she doesn't want Fred to fail, because if he fails he'll get kicked off the football team and then she won't be dating a football player). So, the video opens with the four of them going to a graveyard in the middle of the night (it was Shaggy's idea, but he needed the other three because the curse requires four people). They stand in the circle, each representing an 80s star (Simon LeBon, George Michael, Madonna, and Michael Jackson) and do the curse (which consists of Jeff reciting the names of all the Jackson children in Pig Latin several times, ending with "Ichael-May!") The ground shakes, and they wonder if the curse worked (it was supposed to make their teacher start mooing uncontrolably and never be able to stop). Then zombies (my friends covered in baby powder and black eye-makeup) start rising from their graves, and Shaggy realizes that he read the wrong spell. So the kids run as the zombies chase them (led by this charismatic zombie who keeps making faces for the camera, played by this kid named Keith, who we barely knew but who ended up with us because he was hanging out with Joe that day). The zombies corner the kids in an alley and Shaggy starts throwing things at them from his bag (a cross doesn't work, so he tries a star of David; he throws salt and they eat it; he tries "Evian Holy Water" and they drink it; he throws a telletubby and an elmo doll; nothing works). The kids mourn their impending deaths (Fred's upset that he never won a football championship, Daphne's upset because she never got to meet Leonardo DiCaprio, Velma's not upset because she never had any hopes and dreams anyway, Shaggy's upset because he never got to be prom queen--uh, date the prom the queen!). Then, Shaggy pulls out one final thing--he's got a boom box with a tape of Michael Jackson's Thriller. He presses play, and when Thriller comes on, the zombies are forced to dance. (Because, y'know, it's a rule of the universe that all zombies must dance when they hear Thriller). This is the best part of the movie; 10 or so of our friends, dressed as zombies, doing the Thriller dance. You have no idea how insanely difficult that was to choreograph, but it actually turned out pretty well. (With some creative camera work; they only memorized a fairly short segment, but we cut it together from different angles so it looks longer). The film ends with the zombies dancing, shows the credits, and then after the credits you hear the tape run out and the sounds of the zombies eating the kids.
We were weird.
So anyway, we reminisced about all that stuff. They stayed till around 2am, and Joe went back to Las Vegas the next day. Hopefully I'll see Mike again, though; he's only a few hours away in New Jersey.
I only got about three hours of sleep Sunday night, then worked all day Monday. Monday night was a KMFDM concert that I already had tickets to, otherwise I'd have just slept. So I dragged myself to KMFDM, where I mostly just tried to stay awake. It was good, though. They played a whole ton of classics; Flesh, Juke Joint Jezebel, Godlike, A Drug Against War, various others that I can't be bothered to remember. Flesh is my favorite so I really tried to get into that one, but I was just too tired. That was depressing; I was dancing and singing all night to the Cruxshadows and couldn't even work up the enthusiasm for one KMFDM song. I don't think it was their fault; I was just too tired. But ... yeah. If you get a chance, go see KMFDM. They're neat.
I've never been a huge KMFDM fan. I like Nihil a whole lot, but none of their other records have resonated the same way (although my favorite song is Anarchy, from the symbols record, which is also very good). So I was glad that they played songs from that. My main fascination with KMFDM comes from the fact that when I was in seventh grade, there were these awesome senior guys who I worshipped, and they always wore KMFDM t-shirts. (Our school system ran out of space and put the middle schoolers with the high schoolers when I was in middle school). This one guy had a great big orange mohawk, and another was so gorgeous, and looked exactly like Brandon Lee in The Crow. The whole hallway would part when they walked through, like they ruled the world. They had such presence. They also worked at Shoprite, but that was okay because they wore their KMFDM t-shirts under their Shoprite uniforms, and you could see the words coming through. They're the whole reason my friends and I took media arts class and started making videos; they made the most unbelievably cool videos. Our school had an assembly that year and we got to watch their videos; they were all dark and in black and white and fucked-up looking, with all these spirals and machine things and stuff; they had one to this Skinny Puppy song that was so cool. I couldn't get over how neat it was that the whole stupid boring conformity obsessed high school had to watch those fucked up subversive videos. (Of course, our stupid &^%$ of a principal cancelled the media arts program shortly after for just that reason). This was back when I was a little mini seventh grader and I thought daring to wear black nail polish was extreme.
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 06:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 06:43 pm (UTC)Lucifer would like her. He's got a great big heart; he likes everyone. (Other cats tend to hate him though, because he betrays the whole "cats are supposed to be aloof and mysterious" mystique, plus he thinks he's a dog.)
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Date: 2003-11-05 06:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 07:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-05 07:16 pm (UTC)in one, I tried to film the explosion of Mount Pelée, which involved setting up a papier-maché cone on a table in my front yard and sending two 4th of July sparklers through the hole in the top to represent the tower of Pelé, while squirting flour at the same time for the ash clouds. As you can imagine, the resulting scene was somewhat... pathetic, and it looked as though the volcano had erectile disfunction. The all-too-spindly tower went crooked, and the puffs of flour were so pathetic as to be well nigh on non-existant. I can't watch the video without crying from laughter.
My other triumphs were: 1) a video of the Pardoner's Tale from Chaucer; I used my Wizard of Oz dolls to play the characters and made them move via high-class (ahem) stop-action technology, and I intercut it with scenes from the actual Wizard of Oz. I am so strange. 2) a dramatization of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice from Ovid, in which I used little clay figures and similar technology to the above, and actually, it was going quite well until I got to Orpheus' song and just made up a tune while I sang the Latin, and Orpheus just stood there for the approximately five hideously boring minutes of my random warbling.
So, you see? Your videos were cool. ;)