The Flicker of the Idiot Box

I’d like to use this video review to tell you a little something about the charming asshole responsible for this zine and web site. As you’ll read in “Karoshi,” (coming in Negative Capability #4) I used to work at Toys ‘R’ Us and would often steal (allegedly, says my lawyer) tons of merchandise just because I could. I would even have my friends come in, take a ton of stuff and then we’d return it for cash to a different store as a way to supplement the $3.35 an hour they paid me to clean ashtrays and take abuse from spoiled Long Island JAPs. One of the things my sister got was Lurky, though none of us knew anything about the character. When my sister left home and went to college, she left Lurky behind. I identified with Lurky—and by extension with all abandoned monkeys and misfit toys—because my parents were divorced and we moved around a lot.

I rescued Lurky from my sister’s room and he’s been my friend ever since. Recently, a friend told me about a bunch of Lurkies she had seen for sale on eBay. I was shocked, surprised and very excited. Lurky has always been pestering me to get him a woman, or even a friend who is on his level, and not having friends on your level is yet another thing Lurky and I have in common. So I went to eBay and found that there were a lot of people selling Lurkies, and a friend of his called Murky. The more I read, the more I learned. Apparently, Lurky was a character on the girlie cartoon Rainbow Brite and was the bad guy’s henchman. According to the stuff I read, Murky always had big plans to dominate the world, just like Lurky does now, and in the cartoons it always worked out that Lurky did something wrong that screwed up the plan and left Rainbow Brite and her friends safe. I finally realized why Lurky was the way he was, and most shockingly, I came to understand Lurky’s true nature. See, Lurky, as I’ve created and instilled a personality into him, is greedy, selfish, rude, brilliant and very difficult to please. In essence, he represents my own Id and it’s through him that I’m able to indulge my own worst instincts. I know that’s not really all that difficult to figure out, but the point is that I have enough self-awareness to see what Lurky is and why I treasure him as a friend.

I did a number of searches online and found tons of info and web pages dedicated to Rainbow Brite. Each one said that Lurky was an idiot, a buffoon, a toady to the evil Murky who always managed to screw up Murky’s diabolical plans. But my own interpretation of the story was that Lurky really liked Rainbow Brite, but because he’s not pretty like all of her other insipid friends, he had no choice but to take up with whoever would have him, namely Murky. He would go along with Murky’s plan because he needed to have friends, but my theory is that he would secretly and intentionally sabotage Murky’s plans because that would keep Murky busy working on new plans and give Lurky a purpose to his life. Okay, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

I realized that there were probably some Rainbow Brite videos still out there, so I went to the local indie video store and found that they not only had a few episodes on tape, but they even had a full-length movie. We rented one of them and took it home, waiting to see Lurky’s reaction when he came up on screen. As soon as the name came on, he hemmed and hawed and explained that he was just acting, the voice was a put-on, and that he really needed the money. After we saw all of the licensed Lurky-related merchandise out there, we realized that Lurky was a complete sellout and in order to justify his avarice, he must have convinced himself that he needed the money for some operation that he never got around to actually getting.

The premise of Rainbow Brite is that a young girl named Rainbow, her horse Starlite, her beautiful friends and a cast of colorful little Sprites all live in a magical place called Rainbowland where everything is just fucking peachy. Their magical little world is full of color, joy and good cheer and the charming little ladies of Rainbowland spend all of their time singing gay fucking songs, talking about how great they are, rubbing their little clits against the saddles and congratulating themselves for being shallow enough to be featured in InStyle magazine.

In the dark, gross, colorless Pits on the outside of town live Murky Dismal (his full name) and his wacky henchman, Lurky. Rainbow Brite has the “power of rainbows” and Murky wants to drain the world of color because he and Lurky are brown. That’s the premise.

The plot of the first episode is both stupid and convoluted and concerns itself with a big horse race between Rainbow Brite (an annoyingly chirpy little bitch who never stops congratulating herself for being so wonderful) and some of her friends. Right before the race begins Murky rides in on a robot horse and starts spewing smoke all over the place, which somehow blocks RB’s rainbow powers. It also makes everyone slow, cranky and kinda dumb. Then Lurky and Murky steal the other kids’ horses and bring them back to the Pits. The highlight of the tape, for me, was a perfect Lurky moment. Lurky sees himself in a bunch of angled mirrors and says, “Look at all the Lurkies! They’re so handsome!” Then a bunch of dumb shit happens, the bitch gets her horse back and Murky and Lurky are run out of town on a rail. The second episode, “Queen of the Sprites,” was about this mean bitch who comes to Rainbowland with a vendetta against RB and her dopey friends. Her henchman is a green lizard-like dude and after he said a few words, I recognized the voice as the guy who played Dr. Smith on the old Lost in Space TV show, oh, dear! More incredibly lame shit happens and RB makes everything great again. Who cares? The best part was when Lurky got to drive this cool little dune buggy with a roll bar and Murky in a sidecar. That made all of us get up and cheer! This fucking show needs more Lurky and less insipid bitches with rainbow hair. Lurky’s Grade: A++++++, Jøsh’s Grade: C, though it’s an A if you want to see Lurky, because he is featured prominently in both episodes and is charming and very funny.

Atomic TV Vol. 10 [the Porn Episode]
(120 Min., SP; www.atomicbooks.com; $10, free with $50 purchase)

When Atomic Books first picked up my zine, I was a very happy zine-doin’ dude (my one inside joke, sorry). When a bunch of douchebags on the alt.zines newsgroup bad-mouthed me and my zine, Scott Huffines from Atomic Books chimed in and said that Negative Capability was the best new zine he’d seen in ages. At that point, I felt like I finally had a friend in the zine business.

I wrote to Atomic some months later saying that I was planning to review more videos and a short time later, I got some tapes in the mail. At first I got nervous, thinking that if they sucked, I’d be in an awkward position. Atomic TV is their public access show on Baltimore’s cable system, and it’s a damn fine program. Even though they’ve been lovely to me personally, I have to tell the truth to my audience about the video and about my relationship with Atomic, and giving this background is my attempt at full disclosure.

Volume 10 brings dickbag Scott Huffines and Tom Warner out to the East Coast Video Show in disgusting Atlantic City, NJ in October of 1997. According to the packaging and introduction, most of the hardcore footage is just for the video, since they can’t show porn on public access. I can’t imagine watching this tape without the interludes of hardcore porn because they hold the whole thing together, thematically, that is. I was also delighted to see that the entire episode was sponsored by the letter X, which as you should fucking know by now, is my favorite letter and illicit drug. After they get to the show, we’re treated to a wonderful and disturbing montage of hardcore pornography.

Like any other convention, this one is full of cheap hucksters, weird products and lots of tacky, creepy old perverts. Unlike most conventions, this one has lots of porn stars, more silicone than Dow Corning and the kind of public nudity that only seems to happen on TV. Next, Scott and Tom interview a whore named Ray Veness (sounds like “Raveness”), who is at the show hawking, among other things, a plastic mold of her vagina with a built-in vibrator. Unfortunately the bunghole doesn’t function, and if you flip it over, it’s a lot less appealing. For the sake of amusing an obviously jaded audience, Scott and Tom fuck the fake twat with a banana while Ray makes moaning sounds like they’re really giving it to her. Ray says that even though the toy has no functioning bung, she does like anal in her movies, and then they cut to a clip of Ray getting her temperature taken anally.

In later porn clips, they do a voiceover commentary a la Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is a funny idea. Porn takes itself a little too seriously sometimes and it was nice to see it get deconstructed. Of the many products displayed for the camera, my favorite was a jerkoff machine with a reservoir tip that works on batteries, so you can take it in the car! I mean, what guy hasn’t wanted head in the car? And this way, you don’t have to listen to that gross slurping sound when the girl starts choking because you’ve given her too much mouthmeat. Well, that’s my complaint, anyway.

There are lots of great interviews with porn stars throughout the tape, and they seem like the dumbest, most deranged losers in the world. And yet, I want to have sex with them because they seem very good at it. There was one who bragged with a straight face that she “stars” in Strap-on Sally 9 AND 10, and if she has her way, she is willing to commit to the next two sequels, without even seeing a script! Now that’s dedication to craft, right? Another slut says that she got into porno because she saw an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael about porn and it made it seem so attractive that she had to give it a shot.

Other highlights of the tape include a heinous implant montage, and quite frankly, some of the doctors that are performing these surgeries ought to have their licenses revoked. And here’s my tip for anyone out there considering plastic surgery, especially breast implants: 1) You get what you pay for, so if you’re cheap, the bad work will remind you of your cheapness forever; 2) The best doctors go where the money is, so just because your doctor in Pittsburgh has a nice “before and after” book does NOT mean he’s the best quack for the job and 3) Your breasts should never be bigger than your head, and it’s always important to remember that you want to look like a more attractive person, not a freak. Remember the Bride of Wildenstein!!

Later there’s a funny sequence where all these hot, half-naked porn stars gather around a window and start getting sexually aroused by what they’re watching through the window. You think it’s gonna be some buff dude, but it’s the hairy hedgehog of filmed rape, Ron Jeremy, shirtless and eating a foul-looking sandwich.

No review of this video would be complete without mentioning what Juli and I call, “The Gaping Bung.” One of the porn whores is really into anal, and to demonstrate her abilities, they show a clip of her getting fucked in the ass, hard, and then the dude pulls out so she can do this little a-hole dance. It’s so fucking ill because she can literally open her sphincter at least an inch and a half in diameter, and you can literally see her last meal and a few feet of intestine. It’s really nauseating and we were not surprised to see the footage reprised at the close of the tape.

There really is a ton of great stuff on this tape, including a totally bizarre stop-motion animation of incestuous, interracial and intergalactic group sex with dolls that ends with an alien turning a person into a giant vagina, which is then fucked by a creepy peeping Tom. Confused? Then there’s all the fucking motivation you need to get this tape, and it could be FREE if you spend $50 at Atomic Books. Grade: A

¡Arriba! The Parkdale Wrestler! (Soundtrack by the Tijuana Bibles [http://www.tijuanabibles.com]; Parkdale Wrestler, Box 477, Station C, Toronto, ON, Canada M5V 1P2; $US15 or $CN18, cash or MO’s to Stacey Case)

A man named Stacey sent me this tape because he’d read some of my other reviews and thought I’d be able to give him a real and honest opinion. He’s right about that and even though I’m no fan of either real amateur filmmaking or wrestling, I did enjoy his tape. Stacey wrote and directed the short films that make up this collection and he’s certainly got style, flair and an infectious enthusiasm that comes through to the viewing audience. The star of the films is Arriba, who is known as the Parkdale Wrestler, and he’s got charisma to spare. He’s chubby, hairy and likes to walk around in very small panties.

All the films are short, but when viewed together, they make a good, if not completely satisfying, story. Shot in 16mm black and white and featuring some really good mood music which is provided by the Tijuana Bibles, these films are all without dialogue; all the words are put up as titles like they used to do in the silent film era.

Most of the shorts have Arriba getting involved in some dispute or another, and of course, there’s only one way to resolve a dispute with a wrestler! So, let’s say in one short that Arriba goes into a restaurant and steps on some other dude’s toes. The other guy gets mad, Arriba opens up a can of Mexican X-Large Whupass and much furniture is wrecked. Arriba is no superhero because sometimes he looks like he’s losing the battle, but all the fight sequences have great energy, good editing and are a lot of fun to watch. Arriba even has a cool chopper-style bicycle to ride around on! I know that this film is not for everyone, but if you’re into wrestling, super-indie films or just want to see a film that is truly different from the more mundance video fare, this is a fine choice, especially since NAFTA makes it tariff-free! Grade: B+

Pranks TV!If you are like me, and I hope to fucking hell you are by now, every once in a while you’ll encounter something that changes the way you see everything. Many years ago I saw the RE/Search book Pranks! on the shelves of local alternative emporiums but I didn’t get it because I didn’t want to shell out the bucks. I’m an asshole, okay? Like you didn’t know that already. It seemed like I was seeing it everywhere I went, but I didn’t want to buy it. Some time later I was in Australia for a few months with the junkie and I was really homesick. I saw Pranks! in Red Eye Records in Sydney and bought it, hoping it might remind me of home. I also thought I was getting a deal because while the Australian price was slightly higher, with the exchange rate, it was much cheaper.

I bought the book and spent the next few weeks in our small apartment near King’s Cross smoking pot and reading this book. Pranks!, and the ideas inside, were hugely influential on me as a person and as a writer. I loved the idea of fucking with people’s perception of their own reality, not so much for the purpose of destroying the world, but in order to shock regular people into seeing their overly-familiar world as it really is. I think almost everyone is numb to the world around them and goes through their small, narrow path in life because they never stop to think that it all could be different. I was one of those people until I saw Pranks! If you’ve never seen the book, or never heard of it, please, put down this zine and go buy it now. It’s that good.

Anyway, some years after I got the book, I saw a video companion and because the book was so hugely influential, and because I’d never seen anyone from the book interviewed, I was very curious to see them. Pranks! introduced me to Alan Abel (who hoaxed his way onto Private Dicks: Men Exposed, a documentary about cocks on HBO), Boyd Rice, Frank Discussion and Jeffrey Vallance, and naturally, I had a voice, mannerisms and a character interpolated in my head. So I jumped at the chance to see these freaks in the flesh. Goddamn, what a fucking disappointment.

In this essay I will compare and contrast my expectations and the actual video. Bwa ha ha. The premise of the book and the video is that people commit pranks against society, employers and strangers because it’s the only way they can express their dissatisfaction with the world around them. Joe Coleman is a fucking wacko who likes to go to clubs and blow himself with fireworks strapped to his chest. Often, he’ll bite the heads off live mice and then blow himself up. God, that’s clever. Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories modifies billboards in the ultimate form of ad parody. It’s really cool, too, because he’s missing a few fingers, which I noticed early on, and it reminded me of Gary Burghoff, the guy that played Radar on the TV show M*A*S*H. I watched that show for years without realizing he was missing fingers, and when someone told me, I spent all my time during reruns searching, forever searching, for a glimpse of his hand. So, I watched Mark with a kind of stunned fascination. I assume he had an accident with one of his toys. He explained the concept of pranks best by saying, “You feel like you’ve done something [with pranks] that will galvanize other people will similar feelings.” I dig that, hard.

Frank Discussion’s idea of fun is to play a concert with his band the Feederz with a dead cat on a noose around his neck and a dead dog draped over his shoulders like a shawl. Some cool punk chicks hop up on stage and tell him that he’s a fucking sicko asshole, he calls them “Carebear punks” and I started to fast-forward. Bad music and dead animals are hardly entertaining for a jaded consumer like me in 1999. He gets an article written up about him in the Weekly World News and pats himself on the back. Dude, they’ve had the fucking Loch Ness monster in there, and that’s bullshit too, right? Karen Finley is a dull loser who spent NEA grants to foster her art. Let me ask you, is the only thing that ever comes to your mind about her “art” is the word “yam”? That’s odd, because that’s all I think of, too. She also likes to fake epileptic seizures in public places, just for a laugh. It was cool when she talked about stripping in a club where the law was you can’t sell alcohol AND show pubes. I don’t what the fuck that’s all about. But as a workaround for the law, the chicks would shave their muffs and wear a merkin, which is essentially a pubic wig. I think that’s a cool idea, but she’s a fucking idiot, as I said.

Boyd Rice is also charming, but he’s also kinda creepy in a weird Nazi way. I liked his pictures in the book version, and I realized that many of the interviews were basically transcripts of these tapes, so there was really nothing new there, either. Boyd also enjoys doing evil shit with animals, in this case, offering Betty Ford a skinned sheep’s head on a silver platter at a public appearance. Luckily, he didn’t get close to the old alcoholic first lady and was intercepted and detained by the Secret Cervix. I’m bored talking about this video because it kinda sucked. Grade: C-