Bernie Worrell on UBM-TV

A day without Bernie is like a day without orange juice. So check out my Video Bar for clips of Mr. Worrell live onstage. Courtesy of YouTube poster “Funkamedic.”

(You’ll have to double-click the ones where Bernie backs up George Clinton; they are non-embeddable.)

Kid Creole & the Coconuts on UBM-TV

Yeah, I’m still gettin’ my Kid on...

Cheers to YouTube poster andyr12345 in Ireland.

Playtex bras on UBM-TV

A few weeks ago, the marketing geniuses at Hanesbrands Inc. established a beachhead on YouTube for their Playtex brand bras.

You might wonder: Who the hell wants to watch commercials on YouTube?

Well, when those commercials feature curvy, half-naked womens cavorting and joking and talking ’bout their tits, the answer is: Plenty of people.

Exactly how many people is the question. There are eight videos on YouTube as part of Playtex’s multimillion-dollar “Girl Talk” campaign. Most of those videos have viewership numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands.

But one so-called “bloopers” video has allegedly been viewed 4 million times.

Yeah, right. Four million in about one month. Four million views and only 174 comments.

I’m sorry, but that’s a figure with no visible means of support. There must be some kind of shenanigans afoot. Can anyone hip me to the tricks of how YouTube viewership numbers get pumped up or inflated?

Four million views would constitute a cultural phenomenon. When “Chocolate Rain” racked up 4 million views, Tay Zonday got on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” and CNN.

In any case, this campaign is a clever way to commercialize YouTube without pissing anybody off. Because women are like, “Hey, I wear bras too!” And dudes are like, “More breasteses please.”

It’s win-win.

Taking the cleverness a step further, Playtex is inviting real women to video themselves... and become unpaid spokesmodels in the “Girl Talk” campaign. Here’s what it says on Playtex’s YouTube channel:

“Do you have a funny Playtex bra moment or story you want to share? Upload your video to our Brastory ‘group’, and then vote on your favorites here – just click on the link below and you’re on your way! (limit videos to :30 max each, please? thanks)”

Hey... I’ve got a funny Playtex bra moment to share. But I don’t think they wanna hear about me getting caught jerking off at JC Penney’s.

P.S. My favorite Playtex “Girl Talk” girl is the Lauren-Ambrose-looking redheaded one (pictured above). You might be interested to know that she has nicknamed her breasts “Lacey” and “Casey”... because it “kinda rhymes and they’re kinda, you know, my friends.”

‘Amos ’n’ Andy’ on UBM-TV

Ahhh... they don’t make TV shows like this anymore. Not since “Steve Harvey” went off the air.

Cephas & Wiggins on UBM-TV

Bringing up Cephas & Wiggins the other day got me in a mood to check out the D.C. bluesmen on YouTube. There’s quite a bit of fan-shot video from events like the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

The clips I’ve pulled up on my Video Bar come from a fan known as ibchilln.

‘30 Rock’ on UBM-TV

Cheers to Tina Fey and the rest of her “30 Rock” team for winning the big Emmy on Sunday night. It was an absolutely cool surprise. Nice to see the good guys win one.

Nona Hendryx on UBM-TV

“... I think that we as a people discard what we have too quickly and don’t sustain it. And if it’s good, you can’t blame somebody else for picking it up. ... You leave a good-looking woman laying around, somebody gonna pick that up!”

That’s Nona Hendryx talking about rock ’n’ roll and race.

My thanks to a commenter named George, who pointed me to the BoldasLIVE webpage, which is a spinoff of Rob Fields’s black-rock blog, Bold As Love.

Two months ago in New York, BoldasLIVE presented a conversation with Ms. Hendryx; the video is on YouTube (and on my Video Bar for the time being).

This is absolutely what the Internet should be about: free cultural knowledge, to inform and inspire. Rock on, Rob Fields.

Mos Def on UBM-TV

Bill Maher’s HBO talk show “Real Time” is one of the best things on TV. (One of the few shows I regularly watch, actually.) Last Friday, Maher had on Cornel West and Mos Def – an intellectual trying to be an entertainer, and an entertainer trying to be an intellectual.

Fun to watch, but dayum... I quickly got fed up with Mos Def, whom I used to think was smart. He was popping plenty shit about how he doesn’t believe al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center... and he don’t believe O.J. killed nobody neither.

Mos Def would probably be cool to have in the car on a four-hour road trip... never a dull moment. But he can’t be taken seriously as a social critic, not when he’s that disconnected from reality. Or else that determined to define himself entirely by his oppositional stance against white America, common sense and honesty be damned.

It was good to see Maher challenge Mos on his wildest shit. And it was hilarious when Mos Def flipped it around and said he does believe in Bigfoot.

Only today did I discover the rap video “Tell the Truth” on YouTube – a track featuring Mos Def and Eminem but mainly a revolutionary-left firespitter known as Immortal Technique. “Bush knocked down the towers” is one of the lines repeated in the chorus.

Let me embed it right here, so you can see what I’m talking about:



The video is real slick in terms of design and graphics... but the politics is bullshit masquerading as courage. “Tell the Truth” should’ve been part of my “9/11 insanity mix.”

Anyway... if you missed “Real Time with Bill Maher,” check out some clips I pulled up on the Video Bar. (Ralph Nader appeared via satellite.) Any day now, this entire episode will be downloadable for free via iTunes. Not yet, though.

Mos Def on “Real Time” was one of the topics this morning during the bloggers’ roundtable on NPR’s “News & Notes,” where I was a guest. Follow this link if you’d like to check out that 14-minute segment (in streaming audio) at NPR’s website.

Asexual healing on UBM-TV

Back around the turn of the century, when I was going wild with Napster like everybody else, I downloaded a few tunes from collegiate a cappella groups.

Collegiate a cappella... what an odd little subculture that is. Groups with goofy names like the MIT Logarhythms, Brandeis VoiceMale and the University of Michigan Compulsive Lyres.

What tickled me was, some of these groups would do contemporary R&B songs like “No Diggity” or Prince hits like “When Doves Cry,” in that corny group-harmony style. (Actually, I kinda dug “Thieves in the Temple” by the UNC Loreleis. It’s not quite so corny when girls do it.)

For some reason, Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” has become a collegiate a cappella standard, as illustrated by the clips I’ve pulled up on my Video Bar.

Pam Grier on UBM-TV

Pam Grier, y’all. She’s not much of an actor, but her titties deserve a Lifetime Achievement Award.

A YouTube poster known as “kodirico” has put together clips from Pam’s most popular ’70s exploitation movies. So I pulled them up on my Video Bar. Because sex and violence go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

‘Nazi Pop Twins’ on UBM-TV

Two months ago, when last we spoke about Prussian Blue – the white-power kiddie-pop twin-sister singing act – S.O.L. commented compassionately: “The only brainwashing that’s been done is to those poor, cute kids. Someone had to raise them to think the way they do and that’s just tragic. I feel sorry for them.”

S.O.L. nailed that one. In July, a TV documentary titled “Nazi Pop Twins” debuted in Britain. Filmmaker James Quinn got up-close and personal with the girls – Lamb and Lynx Gaede – and their neo-Nazi stage mom, April. (And their grandfather, who brands his cattle with swastikas.)

The surprising theme (or maybe not so surprising) is that Lamb and Lynx, as they’ve grown into adolescence, are starting to rebel against their controlling mother. They want to write songs about love and other normal human stuff... not Aryan supremacy. And mom ain’t having it. The tension between them is remarkable to witness.

“Nazi Pop Twins” is up on YouTube in bite-sized segments. I’ve pulled a few segments onto my Video Bar. Or you can watch the complete 50-minute documentary in one sitting by following this link. (Hat-tip: the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch.)

Regardless of where the Gaede twins end up politically or spiritually, they’ll never be pop stars. Poor things... they just can't fuckin’ sing. But I do wish them good mental health.

Hurricane Katrina on UBM-TV

Let’s continue our remembrance of New Orleans and the victims of Hurricane Katrina...

On my Video Bar I’ve pulled up some YouTube clips by “bnvn1,” a.k.a. Douglas Kiesling, a.k.a. The Weather Paparazzi. He shot video in New Orleans from August 28 through August 30, 2005 – before, during and after Katrina’s landfall.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kiesling doesn’t allow embedding. To watch these videos, you’ll have to double-click through to YouTube.com.

Even with the Weather Paparazzi logo watermarked across the screen, there’s something unsettling about this raw footage. Including the fact that Kiesling, from Minnesota, traveled to New Orleans to document the destruction like some thrill-seeking (and money-chasing) ghoul. I guess that’s what a professional storm-chaser has to be. But still...

Alexyss K. Tylor on UBM-TV

A tip of my hat to justjudith, who is having a ball with the Google Video Bar on her blog. She recently pulled up some clips of Alexyss K. Tylor, the Georgia sex lecturer and public-access cable guru who has become a mini-phenomenon on YouTube.

Ms. Tylor’s ridiculously frank disquisitions on “penis power” and “vagina power” will blow your mind, or crack you up, or squick you out. Either way, she’s never boring.

Max Roach on UBM-TV

Thanks to a music collector in Brazil named Pedro Mendes, there are some marvelous Max Roach clips on YouTube. Check out my Video Bar if you doubt me.

You especially need to see the two clips with Abbey Lincoln – live performances of Roach’s legendary “Freedom Now Suite.”

UPDATE (08/22/07): Here you’ll find part one and part two of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing the “Freedom Now Suite.”

‘New way vogue’ on UBM-TV

This one’s for Thordaddy. Just glance over at my Video Bar in the right-hand column...

I make it a point to be gay-friendly on this blog, for the same reason that, in real life, I’m tree-friendly and cloud-friendly (i.e., because trees and clouds exist as a fact of nature).

But wow, hey... gay guys are still vogueing, huh? I wrote an article about vogueing, like, 18 years ago for the Washington Times (of all papers). And even then it wasn’t new.

Turns out there’s a style these days called “new way vogue,” which highlights double-jointedness. Fellows bending a leg behind their head, pulling a shoulder out of its socket, etc. My Video Bar has pulled up some new-way-vogue “battles.” Interesting stuff.

‘American Pimp’ on UBM-TV

Let me tip my rabbit-fur fedora to Invisible Woman, who found on YouTube the 1999 Hughes Brothers documentary “American Pimp.”

It’s a humane study of an inhumane hustle... a window onto a hidden world. Albert and Allen Hughes showcase some real-life characters (such as Bishop Don Magic Juan, pictured) who, by the nature of their game, glisten and glide across the screen.

I got four slices of “American Pimp” now showing on my Video Bar.

Watch it as sociology, or listen to it as folklore – as vernacular poetry. You can hate it for the way of life it records. Or you can appreciate it as a skillful piece of filmmaking.

Or all of the above.

Fela Kuti on UBM-TV

Ten years ago this month, Fela Anikulapo Kuti died of complications from AIDS. Fela was Nigeria’s Bob Marley... the James Brown of Afrobeat.

On YouTube you can find “Music is the Weapon,” the 1982 French documentary about Fela’s art, politics and spirituality. It’s a wonderful thing. (To see Part 1, click here.)

In 1986, Fela talked with Len Brown of the British magazine New Musical Express. Here is a small piece of Brown’s article, dealing with Fela’s famously polygamous lifestyle:

LEN BROWN: “Sex is life,” says Fela, profoundly. “That’s why I don’t understand those spiritualists, those monks who say they don’t fuck women. Women are the source of power in the kind of spiritualism I understand. You cannot have power without women’s participation. Sex is the main source of power. When people say that sex makes you weak, sex makes you older, that’s bullshit. Much more sex, much more energy, much more everything.”

Nice work if you can get it, and keep it up. Trouble is, particularly in the West, it’s regarded as evil, dangerous to the establishment.

“People who start all these moralistic trends and shit they could be impotent. For me, I see with my eyes, I walk with my legs, I work with my hands, my stomach takes my food, and I need my prick. It’s just as important as any other part of my body. For me, sex is everything clean.”

Yeah, but what about sexually transmitted diseases? How does AIDS fit into your spiritual scheme of things?

“It gets to the point now where they say that there’s AIDS all over the world, so because there’s AIDS I must not fuck? Okay, very soon people will not fuck. But I will fuck because I do not believe that I use my sex wrongfully, so I do not think I will be the victim of sexual disease.

“Sex disease is a spiritually influenced happening. When you die, everything that you do in this world, you are going to get your judgement for every evil. So when you are reincarnated and you have been using sex for evil purposes you’ll be reincarnated as a homosexual.”

World Saxophone Quartet on UBM-TV

I missed the Central Avenue Jazz Fest over the weekend. So I decided to jazz out on YouTube instead. Found something quite nice, too, and there it is on my Video Bar:

The World Saxophone Quartet, performing last October at a high school in Lovejoy, Ill. (bari man Hamiet Bluiett’s home town).

WSQ, with varying personnel, has been creating remarkable art for the last 30 years. I’ve been digging them for about 23.

The school kids in the video look a little bored as the band blows and honks through “Hattie Wall,” its rollicking theme song. But the young’uns got to swinging when WSQ worked out on “For the Love of Money” (part 3).

This configuration of the quartet includes original member Oliver Lake, plus young lions James Carter and Greg Osby. The amateur videography is a drag, but the sounds are superb.

bell hooks on UBM-TV

I intend to shine more of a spotlight on black scholars and public intellectuals on this blog. Well-known leftist ones like Cornel West, prominent Afrocentrists like Molefi Asante, and some hard-toiling researchers whose names you won’t find on Wikipedia, like Gerald Horne and Michael Hanchard.

What’s being written, what’s being said by the brightest black minds in America?

Let’s start with bell hooks – English professor, cultural critic, activist against “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

On my Google Video Bar, you’ll see segments of her 1997 video, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation,” in which she makes trenchant observations about rap music, Madonna and the documentary film “Hoop Dreams.”

bell hooks also dishes out lots of hard-left agitprop – about “mounting fascism in the United States,” et cetera – which begs for as much of a rigorous critique as the stuff she’s talking about.

But bell hooks’ style of engagement with pop culture, in a society where 99.99 percent of the population doesn’t think seriously about pop culture at all... I really admire that.

UPDATE (07/31/07): Here is Professor hooks on rap music. Here she is on Madonna. Here she is on Spike Lee. And here she is on “Hoop Dreams.”

Hot Latino weather girl on UBM-TV

In the timesucking wonderland of YouTube, you can find plenty of everything on video... especially hot Latino weather girls.

Hot Latino weather girls are hot.

The hottest hot Latino weather girl of them all is Mary Gamarra of Telemundo. Geek-tested and nerd-approved, she’s the tops.

Watch Ms. Gamarra do her thing on my Video Bar, and I think you’ll find yourself wondering: Why don’t all female weathercasters wear push-up bras and mid-thigh miniskirts?

The five-day forecast is HOT... with a 90-percent chance of SEXAYY!

Now, some people might prefer Univision’s Jackie Guerrido. That’s her picture over there to the left. Good-looking woman, definitely. But I still gotta stick with Mary Gamarra...

Uh-oh. There’s a high-pressure ridge developing in my pants...

Perhaps this matter requires further study.

Meanwhile, check out how the weather girls roll South of the Border.

UPDATE (07/31/07): In case you missed her on my Google Video Bar, here and here you can see “weather chica” Mary Gamarra wearing mid-thigh minis.