Month: October 2006

“It’s hard to have street cred when you play the accordion.” – Weird Al Yankovic

From Slate:

The only “weird” thing about Weird Al Yankovic (and it’s not weird in the way he seems to want it to be weird) is that he insists on calling himself weird. The tag, at this point in his career, is like an appendix or a vestigial tail—a remnant of an earlier evolutionary phase, now a little misleading. It’s a spray-on, pseudo-zany veneer that manifests itself mainly as an unshakeable faith in the hilarity of Hawaiian shirts and hamsters; it’s incidental to the rigorous logic of his actual comedy….Unlike Salvador Dalí or Mel Gibson, Yankovic isn’t essentially weird—i.e., a figure with whom we have nothing in common. In fact, the opposite is true. Weird Al’s essential service is to point out that, from the perspective of the middle-class suburban lifeworld, pop culture itself is weird. This is the paradox of Weird Al’s weirdness: He’s actually Normal Al, a common-sensical, conservative force. He’s Everyman trapped on Neverland Ranch, exposing as many stylistic excesses and false profundities as he can.

Both links via Ed Champion.

Worst poem ever?

Yet one of Marzials’s claims to fugitive fame is authorship of reputedly the worst poem ever written. Called “A Tragedy”, it begins: “Death! / Plop. / The barges down in the river flop. / Flop, plop,” and it ends, “I can dare, I can dare! / And let myself all run away with my head, / And stop. / Drop / Dead. / Plop, flop. / Plop.”

Meh. It’s no “Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly”*. And anyway, I think we all know that the very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

* Hmm. I wonder if I could get away with using Fred L. Gruntbuggly as an occasional pseudonym…

Because the weather has been pretty lousy here all day, and because I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment, I just finished watching Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for the first time. (I’d seen bits and pieces over the years but never the whole thing.)

Man, that’s an awful movie. The experience was made bearable only by Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy’s very funny RiffTrax commentary. I’m looking forward to sampling some of the other tracks in their catalogue. Although with selections like Crossroads and Roadhouse, maybe “looking forward to” is a poor choice of words.

It would be interesting to see how their commentary on Top Gun stacks up the against the Mister Sinus Theater* commentary I saw live when I was last in Austin, four years ago. And I do own a copy of The Matrix, which Nelson and Murphy also riff on…

Right now, though, I need to go scrub out my eyeballs to try and remove the stain of Shatner.

* How was I not aware until now that they’d been sued by Best Brains in 2004 and subsequently changed their name to the Sinus Show? I guess if I actually read any of the e-mails they keep sending me…