And Now for Something Completely Different

The original idea behind restarting this blog was to talk about a bunch of stuff, not simply things related to religion.  So far, all of the content has had something to do with religion, so I would like to broaden things up a little bit.  Since it's Friday, I figured it's also time to lighten the mood a bit.  Thus, the first of our Friday Fun posts.  The topic (until I get tired of it)?  Classic music videos of the 80s and 90s, and how weird many of them were.

We'll start with one of my favorites--Heaven is a Place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle (1987).




I love this video, because the process of its creation is so transparent.  I am pretty sure it went down something like this:

Producer:  All right everyone, we need to make a video for the new Belinda Carlisle single.  Ideas?
Director:  I have a vision for this video.  Since the song is entitled "Heaven is a Place on Earth," I want to make a statement about how children are the future, so I want them to be carrying around globes to make that point blinding obvious and literal.  Oh, and I want the kids to wear creepy masks.  Because, why not?
Producer: Hmm.
A&R Guy:  You know, Belinda Carlisle is really, really attractive.  Why don't we have her just move around in a loose sweater looking hot?
Producer:  Let's do both!

 Needless to say, the video is entirely incoherent.  But, I appreciate the video because it kind of embodies the excess of the 80s.  Why have one concept for a video when you can have two entirely different concepts?  More is always better, right?

Plus, Belinda Carlisle looks really, really hot in this video.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Read more

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
Read more