I think it’s possible–nay, probable–naw, it is a nigh-certainty that you have not seen one of the best music videos ever made, quite randomly for French electronica duo Justice (they aren’t even, they’re sort of a rock band. But not.) It stars a young Snake Plissken (presumably before he is inserted into, and subsequently [SPOILER ALERT] escapes from, New York, in the movie “Escape From New York.” I strongly encourage everyone to go on and click full screen and listen to the song and everything. Dudes this is so fucking awesome. C’mon. Did they actually program a computer from the 1980s to make some of the “high-definition” graphics?
My best friend from middle school and I once wrote a program like that which, by displaying a series of screens on which we had drawn the lines point to point, created the image of a rotating green wire cube on a black screen on her Apple II c. It took us like four hours or something. More? Her family’s cook made killer shrimp tempura, though, so that was sustaining. And then coffee milkshakes and chocolate cookies for afters. Actually she would ask you egg preferences the night before and bring us breakfast in bed every morning that I ever slept over, which was a billion. With fresh-squeezed OJ. With sugar in the coffee already how she knew you liked it. Mrs. Hong was the shit, but she was prone to get angry and would not let anyone go in the kitchen and make a peanut butter sandwich or anything. Or even a bowl of cereal. Eventually Sacha’s mom had to fire her when Mrs. Hong threw a huge-ass knife at her during an argument over menu planning and it stuck, quivering, embedded a good two inches in the plaster of sloping ceiling of the back stairs. Even then it was a struggle (internally, for her mom). Mrs. Hong claimed it was a “warning shot” and hadn’t gone that close to Sacha’s mom’s head, which was kind of true but kind of not super-relevant. Anyway, A ROTATING CUBE YOU GUYS RLY! We were siced. Just like how siced I am about this video right now.
ETA: sometimes the frame isn’t quite wide enough, so watch on YouTube if not.
{ 31 comments }
garymar 12.03.13 at 5:30 am
Why are cooks always angry? Must be the heat in the kitchen.
Substance McGravitas 12.03.13 at 5:48 am
Well if THAT’s what Jon Anderson’s gotten up to he’s cooler than I thought.
Belle Waring 12.03.13 at 6:40 am
1: I don’t know. I understand the fanatical control element, but beyond that… You can imagine how excellent a cook she was when you consider that this was only the final tempestuous battle in an ongoing, years-long war, AND that Sacha’s mom thought seriously about retaining Mrs. Hong’s services after the knife-throwing incident. She could make dinner for 20 people, with appetizers before made of those tiny wossnames of puff pastry with various fillings baked in them. She made the puff pastry! I’ve done it, but once, literally, only once. She was using those tiny fluted cutters back there so much–they looked like my biscuit cutter does! Her unwillingness to let you even make a peanut-butter fold-over was entirely offset by her willingness to make you pretty much any damn other thing right then. After-school tempura: very popular–partly because it was so fast, I guess. Mostly because it’s so fried? Mmmm, fried. But a properly made fried thing that’s well drained and that you eat right then is not so greasy as all that. She made the panko! In truly wonderful Victorian fashion, TWO of my friend’s mom’s friends had tried to steal Mrs. Hong. Yes. They tried to lure her away with the promise of more money and stuff. What would be the protocol, would you stay friends with someone who did that? Would you go eat at their house? Awk.
Insert name here 12.03.13 at 6:40 am
While the Alabama-Auburn ending was great, it will pale in comparison to our dystopian future football-baseball-roller derby hybrid bloodsport, where players will not be concerned with concussions, but rather survival.
Also, if murder is legal, what the hell was the white team penalized for? Evidently officiating does not improve in the future.
NomadUK 12.03.13 at 7:26 am
Snake Plissken makes a pretty good Jonathan E.
Peter T 12.03.13 at 8:36 am
I hear the bidding war for Snake between Carlton and St Kilda Aussie Rules teams is fierce.
garymar 12.03.13 at 9:05 am
My God, shades of Aunt Dahlia and Anatole!
Belle Waring 12.03.13 at 9:41 am
4: I am way ready to see Auburn and Alabama lose some future baseball roller-derby moto-lacrosse football game to one another at the very last second in whatever way will cause the most unhappiness for the greatest number of future fans. So ready. It appears that while a robot pitcher is the norm, robot…well, I don’t know if he’s an defensive lineman or what, but anyway, those dudes aren’t supposed to be robots. There are so many wonderful things about this video, but maybe my favorite thing is that Snake Plissken is smoking in the hospital and throws his cigarette down all angry. When my grandmother was in the hospital near the end of her life, she had a prescription to smoke. YES! A single room, and it said on her chart that her (really quite awesome specialist at Georgetown) had written her a PRESCRIPTION for three packs of Kool light menthols a day. Suck it, health-oriented bitchez! At the…ah…well, to be perfectly fair, hospital. This was just before 2000; obviously there’s no way anyone could pull that off today. So my mom, brother and sister totally smoked in there too, what the fuck.
Belle Waring 12.03.13 at 9:48 am
garymar: I know, right! They approached her on her day off, I guess. But it was difficult because she had a nice room–a little suite really at the back of my friend’s house on “O” Street, on the second floor, and she often didn’t go much of anywhere, except to church, and then maybe meet up with…friends? There is no reason she shouldn’t have had friends, I just found her a rather forbidding figure. She was an immigrant from Korea, and most of her family was still there. So the covetous chef-stealing friends…what, did they stake out the church? Pass messages to her at dinner parties? She didn’t usually also wait on the table, unless there were only a few people. I should ask my friend.
Khan 12.03.13 at 10:48 am
Chefs do that, don’cha know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B02dsLGLw4E
kate 12.03.13 at 11:37 am
Belle, I love you too. You are just unfortunately, no matter how I look at it, a much cooler version of me. Move over blogcrush Dsquared, Belle is now my favourite intertubes poster.
Belle Waring 12.03.13 at 11:51 am
^/////^ [blushes]
yabonn 12.03.13 at 12:03 pm
Rollerball, and I think Gunnm’s Motorball too – along with Generic Hollywood Sport Movie, of course.
Forse 12.03.13 at 12:53 pm
Came across a Snake Plissken game, though, to be sure, not as cool as the vid.
Excuse me if this is a glipmse of the obvious. I’ve only this very moment, courtesy Belle, heard of the dude…
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-28-witness-what-namcos-canned-snake-plissken-game-looked-like
Alex 12.03.13 at 12:55 pm
I see your pitiful effort at 1980s French music and video, and I raise you this:
oldster 12.03.13 at 1:04 pm
This story is an excellent illustration of the unreliability of plaster-depth as a gauge of vehemence.
Was it old-fashioned, hand-applied lath&plaster using wooden lath covered with three layers of plaster (scratch coat, brown coat, finish coat)? Then two inches of penetration with a kitchen knife indicates significant anger, boiling wratch.
Was it a 20th century wall with three layers over expanded steel mesh? Then two inches of penetration with a hand-held knife indicates homicidal rage, and the depth is practically impossible with a thrown knife.
Or is it (most likely) mere plasterboard, aka sheetrock? In this case, two inches of penetration indicates that the thrower is merely miffed, nose at most one or two degrees out of joint. A toddler with a crayon can drive it two inches through a plasterboard wall.
And yet we call all of these things “plaster”! The lack of standardization is shocking.
And don’t even get me started on “kitchen knife”–I have been assuming she was using a French-pattern chef’s knife, but if it was a santoku then all of the anger-measurements should be tripled.
QS 12.03.13 at 1:16 pm
The next time I teach a unit on postmodernity, I’m showing this video.
Ronan(rf) 12.03.13 at 1:52 pm
This seems to be the prequel to the Justice video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_x11lrxLj8
before X happened (insert story)
Elf M Sternberg 12.03.13 at 2:11 pm
It’s still not as good as my favorite Jusitce video, DVNO, which is like a flashback to every TV and movie corp logo from the 80s. An instant lesson in 80s branding and typography in one 4 minute session.
Anon 12.03.13 at 2:38 pm
Relieved to know, after 25 years of looking, that someone else owned an Apple IIc (or is it //c?). I figured they’d made just the one.
Barely any software for it, only some IIe software was compatible, and always looked worse. It’s a very sad world when you’re jealous of a IIe or a Commodore.
Also a reminder that Apple has made some real honest to god crap in its time.
JanieM 12.03.13 at 2:42 pm
Relieved to know, after 25 years of looking, that someone else owned an Apple IIc (or is it //c?). I figured they’d made just the one.
I had one, given to me by a friend who wanted us to go into business writing software together. For my own obscure purposes, I decided to try to write a Stratego-playing program — got as far as making the graphics for the playing pieces, then got too busy with other things (also daunted by the magnitude of the task).
There was a game for that machine called Snakebite, very simple, (to me) very very addicting. My first experience with serious time-wasting in front of a computer screen.
BigHank53 12.03.13 at 2:46 pm
I’m trying to figure out how a one-eyed guy with the attendant depth perception issues is making a living hitting, throwing, and catching flying objects. That’s the eighties for you…
Anon 12.03.13 at 3:00 pm
JanieM,
“got as far as making the graphics for the playing pieces”
Probably a chore, since it had rectangular pixels! Why on earth rectangular? I don’t think competing computers did.
am80256 12.03.13 at 4:29 pm
On the point of angry cooks – I definitely think it’s an existing phenomenon.
Temperamentally, I’m phlegmatic to the point of complete emotional detachment from the actual happenings on this planet. But I enjoy cooking and once I’m in the kitchen, I tend to turn into a raging territorial dictator, complete with bulging bloodshot eyes, horrid growls and angry spittle flying about.
I think it’s the mixture of sever time constraints (there is just no place for shenanigans and folly when it comes to soufflé), need for precision and iteration and the very real responsibility for feeding others. Making a posh four-course dinner for just 5 people is like a devilish combo of an art performance, military logistics operation and advanced chemistry project. SO GET OUT OF MY WAY!
Belle Waring 12.04.13 at 2:24 am
oldster: I assume it was the first, since the house is quite old. I guess it could have been built as early as 1910 but I don’t think so. They don’t live there anymore so it doesn’t matter, it’s 3715 “O” st N.W., you can look at it on google. My mom chanced to be good friends with the family who lived there when she was in middle and high school also. The craziest things was that the two-times previous owners had turned most of the basement into a French café, with swinging doors and a zinc bar and exposed brick and fake Toulouse-Latrec painted on the walls and that’s all well and good BUT THEN they made an OUTSIDE to the café with a small sidewalk and striped awning, and cobblestones, and a mural of a rainy street in Paris with a, sort of 1930s, car driving towards you, and the headlights protruded from the wall and really lit up! The knife was like two inches wide. You could spatchcock a chicken with it.
Belle Waring 12.04.13 at 5:12 am
Alex-sama: somehow my comment from last night didn’t go through. I GOT A LITTLE BIT PREGNANT FROM THAT VIDEO! +10,000. I bow to your superior French 80s video posting skills. (Though, to be fair, my video is from 2009 or something so perhaps the makers are handicapped and should be considered with that in mind–maybe your video should spot me a rook? You’ll still totally crush, though.)
JakeB 12.04.13 at 9:40 pm
I do recall once shouting, in the course of preparing Thanksgiving dinner for 12 people a few years ago, when 9 of these people had gathered in the kitchen, drinking wine and chatting, while I was simultaneously monitoring the turkey, cooking potatoes and preparing brussel sprouts, “Get out of the kitchen or I’ll kill you all!” As it happens I already had a reputation for being generally irascible so it did not cast much of a pall on the meal.
While New Lands must rank very high, my favorite music video of all remains Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.
Layman 12.04.13 at 10:22 pm
“… BUT THEN they made an OUTSIDE to the café with a small sidewalk and striped awning, and cobblestones, and a mural of a rainy street in Paris with a, sort of 1930s, car driving towards you, and the headlights protruded from the wall and really lit up! ”
Perfect! If you want the full Paris experience, there’s got to be an alley where the natural results of wine-drinking can play themselves out. Though did the housekeeper have knives as well…?
Belle Waring 12.05.13 at 5:46 am
I LOVE YOU JAKE B AND ELF M. STERNBERG! LOVE YOU! Yes, I too have prepared many massive multi-course meals that necessitated kicking people out of the kitchen but have always found “y’all better move or I’m going to burn the shit out of you with this roasting pan/cast-iron dutch-oven full of boiling oil” works fine. I guess I appoint, like, a “second”, and have them roust people about? God, no, I’m lying, I’m the most “GRAARRFGD” what me yelling at you? person ever.
bogey5 12.05.13 at 11:22 pm
“siced (?)” Isn’t is supposed to by “psyched?” Or is that something else?
Belle Waring 12.06.13 at 4:20 am
bogey: siced is a Washington, D.C.-specific slang term for ‘psyched’ but it only means excited;
sice someone outis malformed. If you listen to the end of this go-go track Body Moves by Rare Essence (which you should on general principles because RARE ESSENCE DUDE!!!) you’ll learn that they’re “gonna sice’em on up, sice’em on up, sice’em on up.”Comments on this entry are closed.