December 18, 2004

• FRESH!
• GROOVIN'!
• The best part is the pigeon.
• Diesel dances about as well as he acts!
• Of these three, who needed to audition for their part in this movie: • the pigeon • the Yellow Pages guy • Vin Diesel
• Of course they get the geeky, portly, white guy to do the two easiest moves: "Yellow Pages" and "The Stalker". As a geeky, portly, white guy, colour me offended.
• The interesting thing to me about seeing Vin Diesel in the video was that I'd never thought about his ethnic background and/or race until I saw him with the very similar-looking "black" kid doing the double-breakdancing moves. The topic was on my mind after reading Ursula K. Le Guin's denunciation of the whitewashing of Earthsea in the Sci Fi Channel miniseries a couple of days ago, and realizing that Kristin Kreuk (whom I also hadn't really thought about) really does look Asian, as Le Guin mentions. Thinking without reference to race usually defaults to white in my mind, and I hadn't considered that until I saw a context in which Diesel's ethnicity (and Kreuk's) could be interpreted as non-white. I'll go back to navel-gazing about default assumptions in private now.
• I seem to remember reading a Rolling Stone interview with him a few years ago in which he refused to discuss his ethnic background. I assumed it was a professional choice to prevent him from being pidgeonholed by narrow-minded casting directors. I'm less surprised about his ethnicity in this context than I am blown away by how scrawny he looks in that video. Also, those are some scary 80's hootchies. I have a sudden urge to watch "Warriors".
• This was great - I love the crew of admiring women with their unfortunate 80s fashions. And the pigeon. But I don't think Diesel has anything to be ashamed about in this - after all, he seemed to be pretty good at it, as far as I can tell. imlass: the matter of Diesel's ethnicity did come up briefly when he was just starting to get bigger roles. He actually got his big break because he made a short - "Multi-facial" - about the difficulty of being a mixed race actor, which got the attention of Steven Spielberg. Personally, I don't think Diesel is a bad actor, though most of the movies he has been in do suck.
• The tracks: fresh! The ladies: fly! The moves: dope!!
• BTW, watching this again, it's pretty obvious that some of the footage is more recent - the pudgy white boy doing the "yellow pages" and the pudgy (east) indian guy. The fashions are completely different (basically late 90s/00s slacker.) I doubt the pigeon is contemporary either. Still a lot of fun though.
• That was wiggedy-wack, yo.
• I read that Vin has a twin that is blonde and blue-eyed, and that as kids they'd sometimes get roped into making appearances at university Genetics 101 classes to illustrate the degree of physical difference possible in fraternal rather than identical twins.
• I'm oddly fascinated with Vin Diesel. He seems like a pretty well-read, interesting guy in interviews, which goes against the action-star stereotype. Plus his favorite actor is Judi Dench.
• I'd tap it.
• Before he was famous, he made a short film called Multi-Facial. He plays an out-of-work actor trying to land gigs. He plays an italian, a latino, a black, I forget what else. He does an awesome job at playing each of these different races. You're left with the thought that his race isn't important, yet at the same time you now really want to know what it is. It's quite a mind trip to look at a person and have no fucking idea what their ethnicity might be. This is the film that got him noticed by Hollywood. Oh, and I hear he likes dungeons and dragons.
• You can find more of the work of "Jordy Bogguss" here, where this video is called Push It To Pop It!, has a different title page, and bears a watermark. The song mixed over everything is the title track to the epochal film Krush Groove.
• The women in the video - oh - my - God. The 80s were a scary time.
• I grew up in New Jersey back in the 80s and girls in my high school were dressing like those hootchie mommas. It killed me. I was listening to the Replacements and Husker Du in high school. Kids in my class picked a Bon Jovi song as the prom theme. I can proudly say I haven't been to a reunion or set foot on that high school since. I remember upper classmen coming back to visit. I remember cleaning out my locker and a classmate said to me, "Mike, you know it's over." It suddenlt hit me and we started laughing.