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• • • Bad Company at the Love Club Afriend assures me that if I visit EPCOT Center in Florida, I can tour a science exhibit while being tortured by giant Mickey Mouses. This she calls "the second-best kitsch thing to do in America." And it sounds like a multimedia experience, too. But if I never get there, at least I have the Bad Music Videos option, now that the program has become a regular feature at the clubs and on cable TV. I mean it's an option if I want a taste of the weirdness out there that's passing for normal. Last Wednesday, Industrial Strength Productions came to The Love Club to tape the show's second episode. I arrived just in time for the Karen Carpenter tribute-a video "done to her after [pause] she croaked," Karen Finley explained. Carpenter died of anorexia, and Finley urged us to "look at her thin face." The camera crew panned from Finley and co-host Carlo McCormick to the large screen. Here the puppetlike Carpenter sang a medley of her hit, "Close to You," in a set built from all the colors of Jell-a. We in the studio audience hooted with pleasure. It was transcendently bad, spliced full of pix from the family album (Carpenter meets Miss Piggy, etc.). Cut back to the Jell-O where men in Beatle bangs and white suits-the "band," Iguess-swayed among the giant letters "Y," "0," "U." Carpenter herself sat in the crook of the "U," as though trapped already in the cutest circle of hell. Bad music video is a natural in the clubs, where so many performances have worked the post-television vein, mining the "ironic richness of banality." In contrast to the electronic product (which at least aspires to slickness) and the careful on-air packaging that usually surrounds it, veejays Finley and McCormick are appropriately crude and unrehearsed. 96 UNDERGROUND In her own shocking performances, Finley charges through the gross forbidden subtext of everyday life, spewing obscene detail about child molestation, turds, venereal warts, the rapist's desire. It's breathtaking , the way a kick to the gut is. Naturally Finley applies to bad video some of this penchant for telling the awfullest truth. For example, we watched Philip Michael Thomas journey through the Land of Cheap Special Effects, carried by women in bikinis. He wiggled his torso, lines radiating nimbuslike from his head. "Doh, he's God!" yelled Finley. When it was over, she concluded, "I think what he's talking about really is that he wants his nipples touched." Moving right along, we saw this stoo-pid Mink DeVille number, weighted with punky cliches. Willie DeVille, strangely unconvincing as a street tough, was kept from his girl by her brother. Finley suggested that they could have improved that tape by adding an incest scene. Comments like this are a public service, really-making visible what's there, like the graffitists who outline penises subliminally suggested on subway ads. John Cale had canceled out as the evening's Special Guest Star, and just as well. In "tribute," they were playing his bad video, a work so inept it looked like a parody. "There gonna be some changes made," growled the ex-Velvet-gone-Velveeta. He paced awkwardly among crudely choreographed dancers. Animated money fell down behind an animated car. A man's family disappeared from around him while they watched TV. Then three boys had a pillow fight. There's nothing worse than an impoverished surrealism. Substituting for Cale was performance artist John Kelly, "doing a bad music opera just for us," as Finley put it. Kelly sang an aria from La Gioconda in Italian gibberish and his startling soprano. In his own work, Kelly wrings subtlety from these overwrought opera moments, but in the evening's "bad" context the piece was rarified schmaltz. Seldom is the Bad taken seriously enough, given how much of it there is. A bit of good Bad, for example, rises above bad Bad with its sincerity, inappropriate emotion, and awkward execution. In their first program, Finley and McCormick presented a classic example of the form-David Bowie and Cher longing for each other through clouds of colored smoke. "Take it and ride," they sing. It's the midseventies. Bowie's familiar smugness and Cher's unfamiliar pageboy stroll through an atmosphere of pathos rendered even more absurd by the passage [18.222.22.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 20:42 GMT...

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