Getting Crap Under The Radar

Slowly starting to recover a little.  Getting all kinds of ideas for posts I could write and maybe I might write some of them.  Thoughts about the early history of Star Trek slash, which to me is the story of women fighting for their place in a fandom which systematically excluded them.  I was going to do another one on Evil Twins in Doctor Who, I thought that might be a fun thing to write about.  The problem is I keep getting sidetracked, I'm trying to balance Delve Mode with Create Mode and Delve Mode keeps winning.  At the same time I'm writing I'm furiously opening tabs trying to find old videos of the Raincoats so I can make a joke about Sedric's personal interests, and then I run across the video I'm talking to you about today

So this is one of the places where several of my shared interests meet in the same place, which happens more often than I expect it to.  I've made posts about old sesame street videos, and I make posts about old post-punk bands, and well, here is an animation made for Sesame Street by a lady named Merrill Aldighieri.  Merrill promotes herself as "the first VJ".  The claim is disputed - other people credit Rick Moranis(!) as the first VJ, but nitpicking the claim, I think, does a disservice to Merrill's work.  First, second, third, who cares?  She worked at a New York night club called Hurrah and made video installations.  She filmed a lot of the bands who came through.  Missio of Burma, Colin Newman, The Bush Tetras, Young Marble Giants, Bound & Gagged, a bunch of bands I don't know.  In 1990 she filmed a conversation between Douglas Adams and physicist Michio Kaku.

And she made a computer-animated cartoon for Sesame Street.

https://youtu.be/2Fw_kKs6SCs

This is great because it's one of those things where there are multiple points of intersection.  I start looking up things so I can contribute to a discussion about raincoat fetish porn, burn through a dozen or so increasingly interesting post-punk videos, and finally find my way to a video which, in typical Youtube fashion, has exponentially more views than the creator's other videos.  (This phenomenon is weird to me; I'm always surprised at how little _effort_ people put into their media consumption.  For all the talk of "influencer culture", it's really only an incredibly minute fraction of viewers of any particular video who will take the time to look at what else they're sharing.  I guess it's healthy as that's what's kept me in delve mode all day, but my God, I've found so much amazing stuff this way!)  And the video opens up with a shot of a person in a raincoat with an umbrella.

Or, for those of you who have dirty minds, a penis.

Don't try to tell me it's just me.  I've seen penises before.  That's what they look like.  I mean it's a Simpsons-colored penis, admittedly, but it's pretty hard to mistake that curve.  Merrill, you're a brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating woman, and you totally put a cartoon that opens with an animation of a penis on the popular children's program Sesame Street.