The Constant, Underlying Drone of Chaos: A Playlist

Confusions, messes, things that should not be

Every day is chaos. Even those causing it don’t really understand what’s happening. It’s just a swirl of urge and instinct, spiraling madly toward the grave. I suspect this is what the world has always looked like, underneath the fictions and denials that obscure our view of the truth - and even so, what we’re seeing now isn’t quite the real thing, just a balder, less comforting fantasy than we’ve grown accustomed to. Its very starkness, though, fuels despair, as our fables - of fairness, of compassion, of stability - have the power to save lives, even if never enough of them. But the chaos is always hungry, and we’re doomed to be living in a moment when we behold its bottomless appetite more clearly than we’d like.

All of which is a grim prologue for a bunch of silly videos, but here we are. Something about each of these clips speaks to me of the many ways culture attempts - with laughable inadequacy - to harness or overcome the mad entropy that underscores our every waking moment. We try, we fail - success is surviving to laugh about it another day.

Enjoy!

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I heard about the impeccably named Fred Mogubgub through a recent appreciation from the great design critic and historian Steven Heller. Straddling the fuzzy border between uptown (TV ads for products like Life Savers) and downtown (daredevil cartooning for The East Village Other), Mogubgub seems to have been a uniquely adventurous creator. The riotous animated rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy he created for the School of Visual Arts - with a separate illustration for each of its 250+ words - is a case in point, perfectly setting the stage for our ongoing era of overload.

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This clip went viral back in the innocent final days of last year, but it feels tailor-made for 2025. Patti LaBelle was hired to sing at the 1996 National Tree Lighting, but with her backup singers missing and a slew of technical issues, it seems to take place in a postapocalyptic Washington much like our own. Patti takes the role of the American people, moving ahead as best she can while everything falls apart around her. God help us, every one.

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Of course, when the alternative to shaggy ineptitude is terrifying, wrong-headed competence, I’ll take the former any day. The Mike Curb Congregation appeared multiple times on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and I can think of few things more horrifying than this “colorblind” combination of psychedelic be-in abandon and wholesome gospel glee. Slavery and racism are over, folks! We’re all equal under the watchful eye of our capitalist overlords - dig it!

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The variety television genre had pretty much died by the time I spent my childhood glued to the screen, but its digital regurgitation on YouTube reveals countless oddities. In a sharp 180 from the previous clip, here’s Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson singing a no-frills rendition of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy.” From Mitzi Gaynor’s 1975 prime-time special Mitzi and a Hundred Guys(!). Albertson’s reading flirts with pathos just beneath the barrage of questions it inspires: Who came up with this pairing? How long ago did he screw this poor girl over? What would Charlie think? (Fun fact: I just learned that Manilow didn’t even write “Mandy” - and that wasn’t even the song’s original title! After first appearing in 1971 as “Brandy,” Manilow changed the name of his cover version to avoid confusion with Looking Glass’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” my all-time go-to karaoke song. The more you know!)

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Let’s follow this sad-salesman vibe into a different area. In 1966, IBM hired a pre-Sesame Street, pre-Muppet Show Jim Henson to make a training video for its sales team. Rowlf was probably Henson’s best-known creation at this point, after appearing in national ads for Purina and regular appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. Not yet the insouciant crooner of later years, Rowlf encounters every imaginable obstacle in his struggle to meet his quota for IBM’s pre-digital office hardware. As someone who works in the field of employee communications, I find it hard to imagine a major company today dwelling on such a downbeat learning narrative. Still, it wouldn’t be the last time the spectacular failure of a puppet dog would yield timely business lessons.

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More dogs and economics! This one’s a lot to chew on. I’m normally the one trying to introduce my family to obscure eastern European animation, but the other week Dash threw us for a loop by insisting we watch this trippy Soviet cartoon from 1976. It may or may not be a metaphor for the mainstream acceptance of homosexuality (apparently the title evokes Russian slang for “gay”), but the reason Dash brought it to us was the swordfish. He’s obsessed with the swordfish. “WATCH THE SWORDFISH” he told us several nights running, until we did. And he’s right! The Swordfish theme is a banger. It’s also a metaphor for labor - worker’s gotta work, regardless of the economic system, so might as well channel him into a system that creates equality for all rather than the more destructive one (said the corrupt communist empire on the verge of collapse). Anyway, the design is incredible too.

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Okay, I’ll leave you with this more sustained piece of failure, which you can read about at length on Trav SD’s blog. The capsule story is that Turn On was envisioned as a TV follow-up to the wildly successful Laugh-In, with an endless stream of quick gags and sketches. But its execution is novel and highly weird - a surprisingly diverse array of performers cavort on an infinite white set with no laugh track, just the bleeps and squonks of a Moog synthesizer. I can’t tell you that the show is gut-bustingly funny, but it’s deeply hypnotic. The soundtrack never lets up, and the credits appear at intervals throughout the entire show, giving an impression of a sisyphean broadcast with no beginning or ending, an eternal span of television that merely IS. In that sense, it is a harbinger of today’s video-centric social media, which never stops running unless you tear yourself away. The plug was pulled on Turn On after a single episode - in many markets during the premiere broadcast itself. It’s a story which surely contains a lesson, the nature of which we will be no doubt still be debating while roasting rats around campfires in the ruins of civilization - so around this time next year.