Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Sunday, January 18, 2004
19:48 - LOLOLOL Bush iz st000pid LOL1!!11	(top)
In the hotel at South Lake Tahoe, trapped by the inevitable odd lineup of cable channels far from home, I caught a show that I've never seen before: VH1 Illustrated. Ever wonder what became of those guys who did the Napster BAD! short? Well, they're on VH1 now. The show featured a long series of short animated skits, usually centered upon one pop star or another. (They have noses now.) Michael Jackson, for instance, moonwalks and flails through his latest video, only to have his bionic face fly off repeatedly. Ho ho ho. Arnold Schwartzenegger campaigns for the California governor's office on a platform of being a robotic monster from the future who will crush crime and budget problems. And Moby makes advertising jingles while dancing ridiculously behind his keyboard. And Steve Tyler answers the door for a bunch of talking drugs, and his lips-- some three times wider than his face-- flap wildly down to waist level. Sheer genius, I'm sure. Which was all brought home to me by a recurring skit about George W. Bush, who appears-- surprise!-- as a gibbering buffoon. He tapes pictures of naked celebrities to his monitor and calls Cheney in to show him his new "website". He tapes letters (in envelopes) to the screen and phones Cheney to ask if his e-mail arrived yet. He becomes incensed at hearing that the Europeans think he's "stupid", and decides to write his own speech about world hunger, instead of the one prepared for him. He delivers the speech before the UN. It consists of admonishments for parents around the world to pack their kids' lunches better. With juice boxes and sandwiches and pasketti. Just as Bush is about to demonstrate how to make pasketti, he's gonged by Kofi Annan and yanked offstage. The next day, Bush reads the world's papers, the headlines of which all consist of variations on BUSH: EVEN STUPIDER THAN WE THOUGHT. There was a French one, a Spanish one, and several others. And the very last one they showed was in German. It said, and I quote, letter for letter: BUSH IST EIN DUMKAUPF. Don't you just love it? Anyway, maybe I'm demanding too much from shows like this. But I think it demonstrates that I've been spoiled by South Park, which-- when it mocks things that are easily mockable-- doesn't merely make fun of the most obvious and easy targets it can find. No stupid visual gags about Steve Tyler's lips or Bj�rk's surreal spaciness or Michael Jackson's plastic face come out of Trey & Matt's factory. Instead, South Park tackles difficult and often complex issues, usually by taking an unexpected or unpopular tactic, and wrenching the audience out of what may likely be its accustomed and barely-thought-out position on the issue. (Just think about that Mormon one. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum!) VH1 Illustrated, it seems, is just a long string of dull and predictable cheap-shots, brought to life in frenetic Flash animation with eyebrows that wiggle epileptically with almost every frame. And it's brought to you by the illustrious producers of a film that's "More subversive than Bowling for Columbine!". Gee. I never thought the artsy-fartsy Left would settle for this kind of stuff. Aren't they usually more demanding of artistic insight? Aren't they the superintelligent ones, who would never, say, misspell a word in a popular foreign language when making fun of someone they allege is stupider and less literate than they are? Aren't they the ones with the evolved sense of taste and intellect? Or is this kind of stuff really what turns them on?