Follows is a collection of some of my favorite videos on YouTube.
Dudes headbanging in the woods with no audible music. Pretty sure I found this video in high school. It's a classic. I've quite a fascination with headbanging, moshing, and generally just the way people behave at metal shows. My wife and I have frequented several such events in Portland, during which I coined the term "Bozie" to refer to headbangers who congregrate and walk in a chained circle, drooping their heads and languidly lurching forward, round and round.
The term "Bozie" I took from the German sci-fi show Tribes of Europa. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Europe where a bunch of German Goths are the preeminent tribe, and they've this hierarchical society wherein the lowest rung is the Bozie, entry-level thugs who wear their hair like pre-Columbians with shaved sides and a little knot at the top. Epic. Great show, too, by the way. I'm disappointed it was cancelled.
120 hunting dogs being fed in France. I love the cacophony of sound, and the patterns that emerge from all their tails wagging about when the handler lets them through the gate. If I lived in France, I would go watch this frequently - maybe a few times per week. When the handler has them line up, it looks like an ocean of dogs, emitting waves as they climb atop one another in rounds. The erratic movement once they begin eating reminds me of ant swarms, such as death spirals. That static movement of homogenous color. Rather hypnotic, really.
I've always enjoyed this video; it's one of the many I come back to at least once per year. I like how the guy goes through all this bullshit to get the bottle only to...well, watch it. And I love his expression when he reads the message! He looks so done. The way the scene has these rapid cuts as he breaks the bottle, as though to convey it's a passage of time that needs to be articulated - very odd, and it lends to the absurdity of this fantastic scene.
Spoilers for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Go watch it first.
A scene from a great film with a great score by Philip Glass. The film is a hybrid Yukio Mishima biopic and telling of his tetralogy and assorted short stories. Mishima is a beautiful and tragic character and exemplar of the life as art in a sort of corporeal way that reminds me of artists like Chris Burden. Mishima actually committed seppuku after a failed attempt to overthrow the Japanese government, mirroring with eerie uniformity the events of his novel Runaway Horses. His work is so interesting and beautiful. I highly recommend.
A four-way polyrhythm played on the drums. I have a large collection of polyrhythms - from the West African variety to selections of Jaki Liebezeit from Can. This is one of my all-time favorites.
The documentary Dirty Girls, an exemplary nineties cultural artifact. Recorded at this guy's high school, Dirty Girls follows a group of girls who seldom shower and give fuck-all about their appearances. It's a sobering take, too, spared the pathological "you do you" narcissism of the 2020s; this is an organic punk ethos appropriately accompanied by Liz Phair's Girly-Sound cassette recordings.
Stacking. This is one of my favorite phenomenons to emerge from the United States' gang culture. This video in particular is Crip staccing (technically, any ck is replaced with cc because ck is a Blood abbreviation for "crip killer"). Stacking is a means of story-telling; often gang members will congregate in a large circle and take turns stacking and telling their stories.
Why this fixture of gang culture hasn't received more attention eludes me; it's fascinating and rather artful. I've a decent collection of these videos and perhaps we'll do a dedicated post about them.
A deaf man and phone phreaker who can whistle at precisely 2600 Hz, the frequency used by analog phones with fully automatic switches in order to signal that a call has ended, leaving the carrier line open for exploitation.
When I was really into this around 2012, there was a guy who hosted his own phone lines for the purpose of analog phreaking. He sold blue box kits (both pre-assembled and parts plus schematics) that you could then use to phreak his lines.