Links For December 22, 2013

Sir Mix-a-Lot ‘Baby Got Back’ Video Oral History

What really bothered me was that the main girl sitting on the pedestal at the beginning of the song had on a blonde wig, tiger shorts, a bunch of gold chains, a cheap-ass satin gown, and ugly lipstick: She looked like a ho! I thought, What the hell is this? … We ended up going to the mall with the wardrobe people to get other clothes, and they changed her hair, and shooting was held up for four hours. Her name was Almond, and she said, “Thank God, I didn’t want to wear this.” Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde. But the entire point of the song was the opposite. The lady who the white girls were looking at in the intro was supposed to be a queen that they saw as a ho, not an actual ho.


Conic Sections: An Interview With Sol Yurick

What’s interesting is that, wherever you go, the gangs develop their own cultures. What makes them alike is generally their structures—their hierarchical structures—and the necessity for their leadership, whether it’s male or female, to exhibit charisma, machismo or machisma. And I don’t care whether you see this in corporations, which are supposedly rational entities but that, really, are not—because, otherwise, why would people talk about the “culture” of a corporation as something that can drive it into bankruptcy or make it successful? And how is that culture different from another corporation? So, in gangs and corporations both, we’re seeing a kind of driven necessity—maybe biological—to make and sustain a culture. But each culture is different.


Final delivery: David X. Cohen on the end of ‘Futurama’

We always like it when the real world gives us ideas for episodes. Setting the show 1,000 years in the future does not mean you’re not going to comment on society today, it just makes it one step removed. Some good episodes have come out of it. The 3D-printing episode you mentioned was inspired directly by the fact that we got a 3D printer in our office that we were playing with. It was running basically 24 hours a day for several years, printing up little Benders and spaceships in our writers’ room. A), that gave us the inspiration for an episode about 3D printers and B), possibly the plastic fumes may have inspired some of the writing.


Teknolust, A Movie With Tilda Swinton As a Semen-Powered Robot