Leopard Lady: A Tribute to Chicago's Chinatown

The time was two or three years ago and the place was a seedy little shop in the heart of Chicago's Chinatown.  My friend El Lobo and I stood in front of one of the most wonderfully absurd sights I have ever seen in my life: a holographic poster of a scantily clad J-Lo lounging with two feral felines.  The poster was encased in an over sized, elaborate frame.  A handwritten card next to the picture summed up all this weirdness succinctly, "Leopard Lady - $50."  The minute my eyes skimmed over this price tag was the moment I fell in love with Chicago's Chinatown.

When or if you look up info about Chinatown on the Internet, you'll see a ton of reviews and articles praising the authentic Chinese food joints that line the streets.  And honestly the restaurants are pretty awesome.  Heaping plates of rice, shrimp, chicken, and other assorted edibles await your consumption should you choose to step foot into one of Chinatown's many dining establishments.  Also it's a fact that any fruit smoothie you purchase in this town will be killer.  So yeah, by all means you foodies should check out Chinatown.  But with that out of the way I must confess that I don't love Chinatown for its food.  No, I love Chicago's Chinatown because its multitude of small shops provide an audio and visual experience of the highest order.

On Chinatown's main road you'll find dozens of these little shops that sell everything from posters of anonymous babies to pornographic VHS tapes to Hello Kitty memorabilia.  What makes these stores great is the sheer randomness contained within them.  One store contained more anime merchandise than a 14-year old's bedroom, whilst the store's next door neighbor sold antique trinkets and handbags.  In these stores American, Chinese, and Japanese cultures seem to mix and mingle in random and delightfully illogical ways.  One store sold picture frames, but they had inserted pictures of American celebrities into the frames.  Clipped images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sat inside dusty heart-shaped frames on the shelf.  Next to these frames sat glossy Chinese language magazines.

Perhaps the most delightful culture clash I witnessed in Chinatown came from a bin of $1 "surprise" items.  These items were wrapped in newspaper and the store patrons could pick up an item, take a gamble and buy it, and then unwrap it and see what they had wasted their hard-earned dough on.  In case you can't see where this is going, I was one of the suckers who reached into the dollar bin. Ultimately I don't regret the purchase because while I discarded the contents of the package (a small, stained cloth coin purse) I kept the newspaper it came in.  The newspaper was entirely in Chinese, but contained a large picture of Susan Boyle singing.  The juxtaposition of Chinese characters with a D-list English speaking celebrity cracked me up, and I have kept that newspaper clipping to this day.

With its weird mixing of cultures and illogical store layouts, Chicago's Chinatown is a delight for those who are willing to accept its eccentricities.

Youtube Cliches Part II: When They Cry

A few weeks ago in the comments of one of my posts, frequent Zombie Baby Nursery guest star Juan del Lobo pointed me in the direction of a Youtube video that is compiled of clips of Oprah yelling out celebrity names (click here to watch).  I found the video funny, partly because Oprah's odd vocal intonations are inherently humorous ("MARIAH CARE-EEEEEEEeeee!" being one of my favorites), but also because this video exemplifies a Youtube cliche.  The cliche I speak of, my friends, is what I refer to as the "celebrity tics video".  To assemble a video of this type you need to pick a famous person, find a relatively minor but consistent thing that they do or say, and assemble a video to highlight this verbal or physical tic.  In the case of the aforementioned Oprah video, it's her habit of wildly barking out the names of her famous guests that's being put on display.  Another video edits down Natalie Portman's Oscar speech to highlight her excessive use of filler words, whilst another focuses on Juno's habit of saying "you know".

But to me the crème de la crème of the celebrity tics genre is this gem, the Julianne Moore crying video.  Three plus minutes filled with sniffing, weeping, and face contortions.  It's that kind of stupidly brilliant video that makes me say, "God, I love the Internet."

For the sake of clarity let me try to break down why I love this crap.  First off, they epitomize online culture.  While the web can indeed be a dark cultural abyss filled with such depraved human creations as lolcats, there is something genuinely funny about videos of this type.  They are one part observational humor and another part absurdity.  The existence of these videos implies a certain type of obsessiveness in both the video's creators and audience.  And this kind of obsessiveness is a big part of the appeal to me.

Bill Gates Kills on Youtube

So I'm reading this book called Masters of Doom. It's basically about the rise and fall of the creative partnership between John Carmack and John Romero, the guys behind such computer game hits as Doom and Quake. It's pretty entertaining. I'll write a post about it later, of course, but for now I bring it up only because it pointed me in the direction of an awesome video. And I only bring the video up here and now because I know I won't have space for it later when I write my post on Masters of Doom.

The video in question (click here to watch it) is a short advertisement which was created for and screened at a Halloween party at Microsoft in 1995. As is detailed in the aforementioned book, Microsoft saw how much money computer games were raking in and wanted to grab a piece of the gaming pie. This video was created in an attempt to brand Microsoft as a viable and attractive platform for gaming.

That's the explanation as to why this vid exists. To watch it now though, on Youtube, makes for some true hilarity. From the video's corny Tron-like premise (Bill Gates running through the world of Doom...inside the game) to the terrible, wooden line delivery, this ancient piece of advertising should be unwatchable to modern eyes. But instead it's pretty awesome. How can you not love the pure surreality of Bill Gates selling his company whilst clutching a shotgun? How about the wonderfully gruesome title that starts off the video ("Microsoft: Who Do You Want to Execute Today?") And of course you can't forget about Bill exacting sweet vengeance on the video game character who dares to interrupt his speech!

Videos like this are the reason I love Youtube. I see the site as an awesomely expansive museum filled with the audio and video of our culture's past and present. And the weird, forgotten, or simply strange cultural images are the ones I gravitate toward the most.

Three Reasons Why Madonna Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

So a few days ago I was thinking about Zombieland. I don't know why, but I was. If you've never seen Zombieland there's a moment in the movie where Bill Murray shows up playing himself. He's survived the zombie apocalypse and is living in his mansion, relatively safe from the threat of the undead. This got me thinking about how the average celeb would fare in the event of a zombie apocalypse. On one hand, they've got plenty of resources and connections, but on the other hand they can be a bit pampered and soft. Of course any given celebrity's odds of surviving a zombie uprising would depend on their individual characteristics. Bear Grylls is significantly more equipped to deal with such a scenario than Ke$ha, for example. I had all this stuff running through the back of my head while I was reading my friend El Lobo's Madonna-heavy blog, which made me ask the question, "How would Madonna do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?" Well, I've done some thinking on the issue and I think that, given her disposition and attitude, Madonna could emerge victorious over her undead foes. Here are three concrete reasons why:

1. She is in prime zombie fighting shape
As she informed us via a rap in her song "American Life", Madonna is fond of doing yoga and Pilates in rooms filled with "hotties". While it is doubtful that there will be many hotties left alive come the zombie apocalypse, Madonna's training regimen should prepare her for life in a more hostile world. Plus, look at those arms. She's got zombie killing arms, my friends. With her special yoga training and muscle bound physique, one could picture Madonna engaging a horde of zombies in hand-to-hand combat, similar to the kung-fu priest in Dead Alive.

2. She has a strong personality
Don't get me wrong, strong and forceful personalities can sometimes be a detriment in situations like this. You push too many people around and sometimes they'll push back. So while I'll concede that Madonna's strong personality could lead to conflict in a zombie infested world, such a personality certainly has its advantages. Check out this classic Youtube video. See how she immediately starts barking out demands? That's totally a perfect demeanor for a leader of a group in a crisis situation to have. It may not be diplomatic, but you can't argue that such tactics get people moving and get stuff done. When Madonna demands that you find her a zombie killing shotgun, you do what she says because, well, who else are you going to turn to? Everybody else is a walking corpse at this point so you really have no other options.

3. She has the power of music!
If the Japanese movie Wild Zero taught us anything, it's that the power of rock 'n roll can be incredibly effective against a shambling horde of undead. And while Madonna's poppy dance songs may be a far cry from the distorted guitars of Wild Zero's Guitar Wolf, she's still got a musical soul nonetheless. They say that music soothes the savage beast, so perhaps Madonna's voice is really all that's needed to turn zombies away from human flesh.