When I lent the producing apprentice Skiffleboom my Hitchcock/Truffaut book, I shoulda known he’d return the favor. He e-mailed me the link to If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, who kindly put online the original audio recordings of the most essential of film interviews.

The above performance showcases Michael Jackson as a mere star, on the cusp of world super-stardom, a time before his lunatic antics superseded his manifold talents. There’s something otherworldy in Jackson’s combination of kung fu stylings and marionette gesticulations, as if his actions were not his own.

A fan of Jackson’s, one Abeja Mariposa Jr, has created a trio of shorts worth watching. In Smooth Criminal, he re-choreographs Fred Astaire at his zaniest to a Jackson hit. Jackson was obviously influenced by Astaire, often paying him homage. The respect was mutual. Astaire called up Jackson to congratulate him after he first performed the moonwalk.

Which brings us to the second of Mariposa’s triology, Origins of the Moonwalk. I have little interest in actually understanding the historical lineage of the lunar lindyhop, but the toe tapping and foot frenzy showcased in this short is exhilirating.

I first heard about the latter videos through boing boing, who also kindly supply links to Michael Jackson’s patented dancing shoes and a very creepy Drew Friedman portrait. The Billie Jean video was posted on aquarium drunkard.

Blip.TV is hosting classic episodes of the fantastic Weird TV, a comedy series aired in 1995 on Canadian television (and in some of Los Angeles). It’s sort of a post-modern surrealist satire of the landscape of television, a grand skewering of modern culture. It’s absurdist comedy at its best, utterly inventive and joyful and its frenetic pacing insures that if you’re not into one piece, the next is sure to soon follow.

A decent synopsis from the Toronto Star circa 1995 (to be read with in the guise of Rod Serling):

Imagine it’s late night and you’re home alone. In a sudden fit of gluttony you order a pepperoni pizza and wolf it down while reading the National Enquirer. Then, overcome with lethargy, you nod off. Before long, you’re roaming through a splintered, hallucinatory universe where nightmares are studded with shards of reality. In this realm, freakish people eagerly describe the most cockeyed aspects of their fractured lives. Random sounds drone in your ears. Locales shift with abrupt and frenzied urgency. Your view is periodically assaulted by haphazard images plucked from newscasts, home movies and cartoons. Now the strangest thing of all: What you’re experiencing is not some dream but an actual weekly exercise in video surrealism – A Sort of 60 Minutes on Acid called Weird TV.

The drug metaphor is apt, but only small segments feel like 60 minutes. A more felicitous comparison might be to early MTV crossed with Comedy Central, but then there are segments with crude muppets or recreations of lo-budget sixties sci-fi. You just have to see it.

As with most great Internet finds, I stumbled upon Weird TV by clicking on a link embedded in another story, in this case Laughing Squid’s obituary of San Francisco “car activist teacher prankster” Tom Kennedy. Weird TV’s homepage provides a decent sampling of many of their decent segments, but be warned that not all of the links are active. And then there are the episodes at Blip.TV.

His website describes him as

a writer and speaker on subjects as varied as conjuring literature, con games, sense perception and unusual entertainments.

He is perhaps best known as an actor, in Deadwood and perhaps in all of the con films directed by David Mamet (who directs this show, and on whose films Jay is often credited as a “consultant.”) But he is world-renowned as a manipulator of cards. Mark Singer, in his excellent New Yorker article writes,

Studying videotapes of him and observing at first hand some of his serendipitous microbursts of legerdemain have taught me how inappropriate it is to say that “Ricky Jay does card tricks”-a characteri- zation as inadequate as “Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone” or “Darci Kistler dances.” None of my scrutinizing has yielded a shred of insight into how he does what he does. Every routine appears seamless, unparsable, sim- ply magical.

A former carnival barker, he has garnered as much envy for his skills with his hands as he has of his aural dexterity, evidenced by his performance and patter, somehow both anachronistic and fresh. To pick a couple more accomplishments out of the proverbial hat — in his case surely a 10-gallon — he once held the Guinness Book of World Records for card throwing, a subject upon which he based his first book. His last media release was a CD compendium celebrating “the history, the art and the music of poker,” for which he was nominated for a Grammy.

There’s plenty of good Youtube clips to choose from, from his talk show appearances in the eighties on Letterman and Arsinio, from his network special Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (inspired by his second book), but below are a couple of film clips that bespeak many of his charms.

The Hands Of Ricky Jay

Ricky Jay’s website is here. From his homepage, you’ll find links to the stellar New Yorker profile (as good a profile as I’ve ever read, on anyone), and about a year’s worth of radio essays Jay recorded for KCRW.