Astrology Songs

The astrological interpretations of one Harvey Sid Fisher are another spectacular find courtesy of the guys over at The Found Footage Festival. A public access artist extraordinaire, Fisher, clad in a tuxedo, captured his collection of 12 zodiac songs (just try to get “Talkin’ bout the Taurus, talkin’ ’bout the bully bull bull” out of your head once it gets inside) back in 1989, setting each to an amazing interpretive dance.

So do enjoy and make sure to check out the compilations of The Found Footage Festival available on DVD (which we just picked up at Amoeba) for more gems, many of which have (or soon will) appear on this very blog.

Click here to see the rest of Harvey Sid Fisher

More Cursed Than Macbeth

This video of a Peter Pan production gone awry just makes me laugh… There’s something about disastrous amateur shows that always cracks me up; I vividly remember fleeing the Pike’s Peak Center in a fit of uncontrollable giggles when a chorus girl fell off the top riser (she was fine).

Of course, the video can’t help but remind me of another side-splitting Peter Pan fail wryly recalled by the always charming Jack Hitt at the beginning of the classic This American Life episode, Fiasco!

A Google image search turned up the awesome Captain Hook photo below; the video is below/after the jump.

Click here to see the rest of Peter Pan Fails

He Brings Crowds

I hope that if I ever spend twenty five years creating something that it is at least in the ball park of this man’s business card. This almost seems too crazy to be real, but I believe it’s legit and for obvious reasons it should be viewed in concert with Patrick Bateman’s inner ruminations on the subtleties of the perfect business card.

An Intense Songster

My friend Luke just introduced me to Mark Gromley, the internet musical sensation that is more Tim and Eric than Tim and Eric over on Rotating Corpse. Gormley is described most accurately at his own site:

“Behold the awesome power and glory of Mark Gormley!
…Amen
His music and songs touch souls in a profound way, while his music videos expand minds to possibilities never before dreamed. Mark Gormley is a man that his captivated the hearts and minds of a generation, and will so for generations to come.”

Airing weekly on SYFY

Let me just start off by making it clear that Ghost Hunters is a show that, unless you’ve seen it, you really can’t believe it. If you’ve seen clips on the Soup where a traditionally good looking guy is, in the parlance of McHale’s writers, “taunting the air”, that show is not Ghost Hunters but the free-wheeling, tongue-in-cheek Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures. Ghost Hunters, which airs on the newly branded SyFy, is a dour, sour, extremely self-serious program that follows the TAPS team (former RotoRooters – I kid you not, watch the animated intro) Jason and Grant as they travel the country proffering their special blend of dickish skepticism.

I’m not sure how to put this without sounding like a dick myself (I’d certainly like to suppose that I’m not without a base-level belief in the supernatural), but a television show about the (pseudo) science of ghost detection is, at its very core, problematic. I suppose what I have the biggest issue with is the way that a bunch of scowly douchebags have thoroughly stripped away the mystery and wonder of the spiritual realm and replaced it with a bunch of hard and fast rules they simply shat out over years and years of know-it-ally conversations. Ghost stories are always fundamentally people stories: once you’re dead, you can’t really do all that much – it’s the human element that makes tales of spookings and hauntings so compelling – and Ghost Hunters occasionally succeeds when it profiles individuals experiencing paranormal activity in their homes and places of business.

The interviews with the afflicted are always the most genuinely interesting parts of the show because, more often than not, the interview subjects cannot help but betray that the haunting is something that they’re kind of proud of, a fact that sparks a series of essential, and rather heavy, human experience questions: why do these people think they have ghosts in their lives, what’s going on psychologically? Why aren’t all of us affected by moving plates and dimming lights, bumps in the attic and visions of people not there? Ultimately: is there really an afterlife or are we doomed to haunt some tourist attraction for the rest of eternity?

After the interview and case history are established, a  bunch of DV cams, EMF detectors and rigid, jerky attitudes take center stage as the team tries to ’scientifically’ establish whether or not the place is actually haunted. This ‘evidence gathering’ phase of the show is always tedious, once it’s completed the team studies the A/V record they’ve made and looks for pieces of the tape where they can almost detect a voice straining to say something like, ‘Help me”.

But I filed this under Brittany’s Laughs category for a reason: this show is hilarious.

Click here to see the rest of Ghost Hunters Academy

At Your Local Mall

The Queens Mall offered up this gem of a crazy thing. Little did I know that the latest trend in mall kiosk portraiture technology utilizes lasers to create creepy three dimensional freak shows. Surely what Einstein envisioned when he established the theoretic foundations of the laser.

Even better than the idea of these photos is the examples on display. Rapist brothers next to Michael Jackson, rotten kids trapped in gleeful fear, and (my favorite) an odd older man wishing someone “good luck in college”. I should have gotten more photos, but the guy working the booth was as creepy as the product he was selling and aggressive in that way that only mall kiosk salesmen can be, so I had to run away.

Click here to see the rest of 3D Portraits at the Mall

The songs themselves (musical themes self written by a self deluded reality TV semi-star for self conceived programs he would star in)? CONCEPTUAL GENIUS!

“When you want to learn the mysteries of how things work
Weather, the planets, the whole universe.
Tune into the show, that's really effective
Watch Richard Heene – Science Detective!”

The fact that this is somebody's real dad? Just depressing.

Our good friend Ashleigh complied this image gallery of some of her favorite costume ideas. I hope you can find some inspiration.