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nostalgiaispeace · 3 years ago

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2232.

1. What is your favorite shade of blue? dark 2. When’s the last time you bought something just because? lol never 3. What Ozzy lyric describes you best? - 4. When was the last time you went for a walk without a specific destination in mind? idk 5. Do you daydream? always

6. What was your last daydream about? well i’m not telling thei nternet 7. Ever won the lottery? lol no 8. How much did you get for your high school graduation? i don’t remember 9. What was the most important decision you made that screwed up your life the most? idk 10. Do you know what your Chinese horoscope is? hmmm i might 11. What is love really about? nothing i can describe right now while i’m exhausted 12. What’s the most you ever made in a year? lol 13. Do you have an online diary? no 14. What’s the biggest pot you’ve won in poker? I’ve never played poker. 15. What’s your most prized possession? my frog 16. What Metallica lyric most describes your life? - 17. Ever been to Ozzfest? no 18. How many concerts have you been to? a lot 19. Which one was your favorite? lana del rey 20. What shade of purple most describes your feelings right now? none 21. Pick a shade of a color. Now describe it to me and name it. light 22. Sun tea or brewed tea? brewed 23. What’s the most illegal thing you’ve done? drugs 24. Ever get busted by the cops? What for? No. 25. What’s under your bed? my cat 26. Vacuum or dustbuster? Vacuum. 27. How many people are on your buddy list? lol 28. How many pairs of rollerblades do/did you own? none 29. Ever wear out a CD? What was it? yeah. britney spears 30. What’s your favorite card game? solitare 31. Who was the most annoying person you’ve talked to on the phone? idk 32. What’s your favorite fast food meal? chick fil a nuggets and mac and cheese 33. Where is the best restaurant you’ve ever eaten in at? idk 34. Lamb chops or pork chops? Neither. 35. How many roses have you received/given? idk 36. When’s the last time you mowed the lawn? years ago 37. Washed your car? years ago 38. Ever have a tornado in your town? not since i’ve lived here — 40. What state is your wardrobe in? fine 41. What’s the last article of clothing you bought? sweats 42. How many trash cans can you see right now? One. 43. If you HAD to pick ONE song to listen to for the rest of your life, and that would be the only song you ever heard, what would it be? I don’t know. 44. Ever heard of Shinedown? Yeah. 45. They rock, don’t they? sure 46. What size is your bed? queen 47. When’s the last time you had pigs in a blanket? not that long ago actually 48. Have you ever painted the ceilings in your home? no 49. What does your lawn furniture consist of? lawn chairs 50. Ever live off of canned soup and ramen noodles for weeks at a time? no 51. What flavor of jelly are you? strawberry 52. Ever take any of those online personality quizzes? yeah 53. What musical group/artist do you love, but hide from other people? none 54. What’s on the floor in your bedroom? Nothing. 55. What is the first meal you remember eating? idk 56. Ever been to a drive in? no 57. What was the first movie you ever saw? i don’t remember 56. What’s in your keepsake box/scrapbook? so many things 57. Describe your first date. idk 58. Would you recognize most of your classmates 5 years after graduation? sure 59. What percentile of your class were you in? I have no idea. 60. When was the last time it rained while the sun was shining? I don’t recall. 61. What did you score on your SATs? i don’t remember 62. When was the last time you saw a rainbow? it’s been a bit 63. Name your favorite artist/song from before 1990. zeppelin 64. Do you think there should be new genres of music to encompass some of the newer rock performers out now? no 65. What colors is your lava lamp? - 66. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever hung on the wall? I haven’t hung up anything strange. 67. When’s the last time you did laundry? todayy 68. How many hammers do you own? one 69. Can you name every place you’ve ever had sex? yes 70. How many speakers are in your bedroom? none 71. DVD or VHS? dvd 72. What’s the most important thing you ever lost and never found again? idk 73. What forms of birth control have you used? pill and implant 74. How many webpages have you created, and can you still find them all? no 75. You have .30 in two coins. One of them is not a nickel. What are they? uh 76. What’s your pet peeve when cleaning the house? um all of it 77. Do you use sponges or dishcloths when doing the dishes? sponges 78. How many people are in your family portrait? three 79. How many times have you moved? too many times 80. Handcuffs or rope :D? Neither. 81. What season best describes your temperament? winter 82. What’s the last thing you had to drink? diet coke 83. Ever been so drunk you blacked out? no 84. What’s your favorite song on the top twenty right now? idk. 85. What do your light fixtures look like? uh normal 86. How many jobs have you held for more than a month? 4 87. Ever punched a wall? yes 88. When’s the last time you really lost your temper? It’s been a long time. 89. How do you cope? i cry 90. What’s your antidrug? idk 91. Ever grown any plants before? What were they? Nope. 92. Ever own a director chair? No. 93. When was the last time you camped out? when i was a kid 94. Went swimming? years ago 95. Went fishing? lol 96. Oust or Glade and why? Glade. 97. Ever thought you (or a girlfriend) were pregnant, but it was a false alarm? yes 98. If 97 is yes, were you glad or sad? well i was pregnant so i was happy 99. Do you have a red-eye mouse or one with a ball? none 100. What do your doorstops look like? - 101. What was the last conversation you had with someone before they died? i don’t remember 102. What do your drinking glasses look like? they’re just solid colors 103. How many bottles/containers are in your medicine cabinet? a lot 104. How many funerals have you been to? a lot 105. How many states have you been to? a lot

106. What was the last bug you killed and what did you use? a wasp 107. What does your country need right now? sanity 108. Are you creative? not really 109. How so? – 110. How many computers in your household? Two. 111. Ever help to solve a crime? No. 112. Who is in the picture frame on your bedside table? - 113. How many CDs does your player hold? - 114. What is one thing you’d like to do before you die? go to england 115. Do the good die young or do they die before they have a chance to be bad? um both suck 116. What’s your favorite totally cliche’ saying? everything happens for a reason 117. Ever go out of your way to exact revenge on someone? no 118. Was it worth it? - 119. Ever get pulled over by the cops and get away without a ticket? no 120. What’s the weather like right now? HOT 121. What was your first legal alcoholic drink? vodka 122. Do you have a door/doorknob to your room? Yes. 123. Name one thing you regret? lol so many 124. Ever get published by one of those poetry groups? no 125. What’s the furthest distance you’ve moved? states away 126. How many friends from high school/college do you still talk to? a few

127. Where is your home/heart right now? here 128. What’s the most expensive things your parents ever bought you? idk 129. What’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought? my car 130. How many hangers are in your closet? a lot 131. If you died right now, would you feel cheated or happy? happy 132. How many times did you intentionally start to commit suicide? a few 133. Ever spent the night in the “loony bin?” yes 134. What’s wrong with society? lol so much 135. How many crazy ice cream trucks are in your area? none really 136. What is your favorite cover song? i have a lot 137. Does the weather ever seem to reflect your mood eerily? no 138. Are you more psychic than most people? lol no 139. What’s your inspiration? my daughter 140. What’s the longest relationship you’ve been in? the one i’m in now for 8 years 141. Did you ever drop out of school? college 142. Ever raise a child that wasn’t your own for more than 3 months? No. 143. What is your favorite piece of jewelry? wedding band 144. Ever help someone cheat on someone else? ew no 145. Are you a cheater too? No. 146. What was the last dessert type food you’ve eaten? candy 147. Fill in the blank: I’m a ________aholic. Coffeeholic. 148. When’s the last time you went to a hairdresser/salon? february 149. Strangest medical procedure ever performed on you? nothing strange 150. Do you own any appliances? yes 151. Do you have an “egg crate” on your bed? no 153. Last time you went to the laundromat? idk 154. How many hinges are on your front door? I’m not sure. 155. Can I be done yet? yes

#me #survey

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lovemesomesurveys · 4 years ago

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1. What is your favorite shade of blue? Pastel blue, teal, Tiffany blue, baby blue, powder blue, sky blue, turquoise. 2. When's the last time you bought something just because? I bought some room sprays and hand sanitizers from this place that makes Disneyland/World scented things because I was missing Disney and wanted to bring some of it to my house. 3. What Ozzy lyric describes you best? I only know Crazy Train and I mean, I do feel like I’m on a crazy train. 4. When was the last time you went for a walk without a specific destination in mind? I don’t do that. 5. Do you daydream? Yeah. My mind wanders and I zone out a lot.

6. What was your last daydream about? Random stuff. 7. Ever won the lottery? No, I wish. 8. How much did you get for your high school graduation? I think around $300 and my parents my threw me a nice graduation party. 9. What was the most important decision you made that screwed up your life the most? Not taking care of/putting off some things and neglecting myself. 10. Do you know what your Chinese horoscope is? Nope. 11. What is love really about? Encouragement, support, growth. 12. What's the most you ever made in a year? I’ve never had a job. 13. Do you have an online diary? You’re lookin’ at it. 14. What's the biggest pot you've won in poker? I’ve never played poker. 15. What's your most prized possession? I love all my things. 16. What Metallica lyric most describes your life? I don’t listen to Metallica. 17. Ever been to Ozzfest? No. I take it you’re an Ozzy fan. 18. How many concerts have you been to? I think I’ve been to 7. 19. Which one was your favorite? All of them were fun, but the Jonas Brothers concerts and the Green Day concert were my favorites. 20. What shade of purple most describes your feelings right now? I don’t know. 21. Pick a shade of a color. Now describe it to me and name it. Nah. 22. Sun tea or brewed tea? My mom used to make sun tea during the summers growing up, which I liked. I haven’t had that since then. Nowadays I just throw a tea bag in a cup of hot water and let it steep for a few minutes. 23. What's the most illegal thing you've done? I haven’t done anything serious. 24. Ever get busted by the cops? What for? No. 25. What's under your bed? Nothing. 26. Vacuum or dustbuster? Vacuum. 27. How many people are on your buddy list? Aw, the days of AIM. 28. How many pairs of rollerblades do/did you own? I’ve never owned a pair of rollerblades. 29. Ever wear out a CD? What was it? No. 30. What's your favorite card game? I like card games like Uno, Apples to Apples, and Cards Against Humanity. 31. Who was the most annoying person you've talked to on the phone? I’m not a fan of talking on the phone in general. 32. What's your favorite fast food meal? Wingstop’s boneless garlic parm and lemon pepper wings with their ranch and a a side of lemon pepper sauce. 33. Where is the best restaurant you've ever eaten in at? This Mongolian BBQ place was my favorite back when I could eat spicy food. 34. Lamb chops or pork chops? Neither. 35. How many roses have you received/given? I’ve never received or given roses. 36. When's the last time you mowed the lawn? Never. 37. Washed your car? I’ve never had a car since I don’t drive. I have participated in several car wash fundraising events for Girl Scouts and the psych club I was in in community college, though. 38. Ever have a tornado in your town? No, thankfully we don’t get tornadoes. --- 40. What state is your wardrobe in? Uh, it’s fine? 41. What's the last article of clothing you bought? A cute Valentine’s Day themed Baby Yoda shirt from Boxlunch. 42. How many trash cans can you see right now? One. 43. If you HAD to pick ONE song to listen to for the rest of your life, and that would be the only song you ever heard, what would it be? Ah, I don’t know. 44. Ever heard of Shinedown? Yeah. 45. They rock, don't they? I only know one of their songs and I don’t really care for it much. 46. What size is your bed? It’s a full. 47. When's the last time you had pigs in a blanket? I have no idea. It’s been several years. I don’t particularly care for those. 48. Have you ever painted the ceilings in your home? No. We haven’t painted anywhere in this house. 49. What does your lawn furniture consist of? We just have a bench in the backyard. 50. Ever live off of canned soup and ramen noodles for weeks at a time? I do have my nightly bowl of ramen, but it’s not the only thing I eat. 51. What flavor of jelly are you? *shrug* 52. Ever take any of those online personality quizzes? I’ve taken several. 53. What musical group/artist do you love, but hide from other people? I don’t hide any of the musical artists or bands that I’m into. 54. What's on the floor in your bedroom? Nothing. 55. What is the first meal you remember eating? Pfft, I have no idea. 56. Ever been to a drive in? Yeah, a few times. I wish those would make a big comeback. 57. What was the first movie you ever saw? I don’t remember. 56. What's in your keepsake box/scrapbook? I don’t have like a designated box and I don’t have a scrapbook, but I’ve kept a lot of things throughout my life and a ton of photos all stored away in various places. 57. Describe your first date. It was dinner and a movie. 58. Would you recognize most of your classmates 5 years after graduation? Not from my college graduations. 59. What percentile of your class were you in? I have no idea. 60. When was the last time it rained while the sun was shining? I don’t recall. 61. What did you score on your SATs? I never took the SATs. 62. When was the last time you saw a rainbow? It’s been several years. 63. Name your favorite artist/song from before 1990. I have many favorites. 64. Do you think there should be new genres of music to encompass some of the newer rock performers out now? I don’t know, man. 65. What colors is your lava lamp? I don’t have a lava lamp. I did have one as a kid, though. I think it was blue. 66. What's the strangest thing you've ever hung on the wall? I haven’t hung up anything strange. 67. When's the last time you did laundry? My laundry was done a few days ago. 68. How many hammers do you own? I don’t personally have any hammers, but my dad does. I could use one of his if I needed to. 69. Can you name every place you've ever had sex? Yeah, nowhere. 70. How many speakers are in your bedroom? My laptop, TV, iPhone, and my Nintendo Switch. 71. DVD or VHS? I just watch movies through a streaming service. 72. What's the most important thing you ever lost and never found again? Myself? Lost her a few years ago...still haven’t found her. 73. What forms of birth control have you used? Abstinence (I’m a virgin). 74. How many webpages have you created, and can you still find them all? I’ve made a few back in the day, but no I don’t remember any of them. 75. You have .30 in two coins. One of them is not a nickel. What are they? One of them is not a nickel, but the other one is. 76. What's your pet peeve when cleaning the house? I don’t enjoy cleaning in general. 77. Do you use sponges or dishcloths when doing the dishes? We use a dish washing brush. 78. How many people are in your family portrait? Four. 79. How many times have you moved? A few, but only once that I’m old enough to remember. 80. Handcuffs or rope :D? Neither. 81. What season best describes your temperament? Whatever one best goes along with irritability and moodiness. 82. What's the last thing you had to drink? Starbucks Doubleshot energy drink. 83. Ever been so drunk you blacked out? No, but parts of my memory from one night when I got too drunk are spotty. 84. What's your favorite song on the top twenty right now? I don’t even know what the top 20 is right now. I haven’t been listening to music. 85. What do your light fixtures look like? I have a ceiling lamp and a floor lamp. 86. How many jobs have you held for more than a month? I haven’t had a job. 87. Ever punched a wall? No. 88. When's the last time you really lost your temper? It’s been a long time. 89. How do you cope? Good question. 90. What's your antidrug? My go-to distractions ASMR, watching YouTube videos, scrolling through Tumblr, checking my social medias, doing surveys, reading, watching TV, coloring, sleeping... 91. Ever grown any plants before? What were they? Nope. 92. Ever own a director chair? No. 93. When was the last time you camped out? Never. I have no interest in camping. 94. Went swimming? It’s been like 7 years now since I last went swimming. 95. Went fishing? I’ve only done it once and very briefly. 96. Oust or Glade and why? Glade. 97. Ever thought you (or a girlfriend) were pregnant, but it was a false alarm? Nope. 98. If 97 is yes, were you glad or sad? -- 99. Do you have a red-eye mouse or one with a ball? I don’t have a mouse, I use the trackpad on my laptop. 100. What do your doorstops look like? Uhh those springy ones. I don’t know how else to describe it. The ones that make a lot of noise if you accidentally bump into it. 101. What was the last conversation you had with someone before they died? I was by my grandpa’s side when he died and I was just telling him how much I loved him, thanked him for everything, and comforted him; letting him know it was okay to go. 102. What do your drinking glasses look like? We have various glasses and mugs. 103. How many bottles/containers are in your medicine cabinet? We don’t have a medicine cabinet, but we have a medicine drawer full of various medications. 104. How many funerals have you been to? Three. 105. How many states have you been to? Five, including my own.

106. What was the last bug you killed and what did you use? A gnat. I just swatted it. 107. What does your country need right now? Unity. 108. Are you creative? I wish I was. I don’t have any creativity, artistic abilities, or good ideas. 109. How so? -- 110. How many computers in your household? Two. 111. Ever help to solve a crime? No. 112. Who is in the picture frame on your bedside table? I don’t have any photos on my bedside table. 113. How many CDs does your player hold? I don’t have a CD player. I haven’t had one in many years. 114. What is one thing you'd like to do before you die? Get my shit together and do something with my life. 115. Do the good die young or do they die before they have a chance to be bad? That seems to imply that everyone ends up bad. 116. What's your favorite totally cliche' saying? Blah. 117. Ever go out of your way to exact revenge on someone? No. I’m not a vengeful person. 118. Was it worth it? I don’t think it would ever be worth it. 119. Ever get pulled over by the cops and get away without a ticket? I don’t even drive, so no. 120. What's the weather like right now? It’s currently 50F. 121. What was your first legal alcoholic drink? Tequila shots. 122. Do you have a door/doorknob to your room? Yes. 123. Name one thing you regret? I have a few regrets. :/ 124. Ever get published by one of those poetry groups? No. I don’t even write poetry. 125. What's the furthest distance you've moved? Across town. 126. How many friends from high school/college do you still talk to? None anymore... 127. Where is your home/heart right now? Right here. 128. What's the most expensive things your parents ever bought you? Many things throughout my life and even still. 129. What's the most expensive thing you've bought? My first MacBook back in 2009. 130. How many hangers are in your closet? Uh, a lot. I’m not counting. 131. If you died right now, would you feel cheated or happy? I haven’t accomplished anything. :/ 132. How many times did you intentionally start to commit suicide? Zero. 133. Ever spent the night in the "loony bin?" Don’t call it that, first of all, and no. 134. What's wrong with society? Ignorance, close-mindedness, greed, hate, violence... 135. How many crazy ice cream trucks are in your area? Uh, I’ve never considered any of them to be crazy. Anyway, lately there’s been an ice cream truck coming through my neighborhood, which is is the first in many years. What a random time, though. 136. What is your favorite cover song? I love the cover of George Michael’s, Fast Love, that Adele performed at an award show after he died in honor of him. I always describe it as hauntingly beautiful. It was just so good. I wish she would have released a studio version of it. 137. Does the weather ever seem to reflect your mood eerily? I’m always moody, so when it’s rainy and gloomy it does. 138. Are you more psychic than most people? I don’t believe in psychic abilities. 139. What's your inspiration? I don’t know. :/ 140. What's the longest relationship you've been in? Whatever it was Joseph and I had lasted 3 years, which is longer than technically the only relationship I had that lasted just a few months. What I had with Joseph felt more like one as well in a lot of ways. 141. Did you ever drop out of school? No. 142. Ever raise a child that wasn't your own for more than 3 months? No. 143. What is your favorite piece of jewelry? Probably the stuff I have with birthstone. 144. Ever help someone cheat on someone else? Absolutely not. 145. Are you a cheater too? No. 146. What was the last dessert type food you've eaten? I had some mini funfetti muffins yesterday. 147. Fill in the blank: I'm a ________aholic. Coffeeholic. 148. When's the last time you went to a hairdresser/salon? Last February. I’ve over a year due now. 149. Strangest medical procedure ever performed on you? I had to wear this thing called a halo, which is a weird thing that gets drilled into the front of your head (I have two tiny circular scars above each eyebrow from that) and on the back are some weights attached to it that hang down. It was put on after my spinal fusion surgery and is meant to keep your back straight and things in place. It was awful. And heavy. When it was removed I had to wear a neck brace for a bit because my neck was weak. 150. Do you own any appliances? Yeah, we have several appliances. 151. Do you have an "egg crate" on your bed? Yes. 153. Last time you went to the laundromat? I remember tagging along as a kid with my grandma before. 154. How many hinges are on your front door? I’m not sure. 155. Can I be done yet? Yeah, I think you’re good.

#personal #text #survey #surveys #long survey

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babettepress · 7 years ago

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Bobby “O”, Hi-NRG and the expression of queer desire

A few months ago, someone at a party asked me what song I would choose to have played at my funeral. I answered without hesitation: ‘Passion’, by The Flirts. This response was met with wide eyes of incredulity by the heterosexual man who had posed the question, and debate spilled out around us about why I should (or should not) choose something with more meaning, more depth, more substance. But I believe meaning can be found in the shallowest of places.

Hi-NRG is generally considered to be a shallow place. Peaking between 1982 and 1989, Hi-NRG rose like a phoenix from the embers of disco – an inferno which, by the late-1970s, was not so much petering out as being stomped out by a critical backlash epitomised by events like 1979’s Disco Demolition Night. The origin of Hi-NRG is fabled to be in Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ (1977), with its rolling arpeggiators and what Summer described in interviews as its ‘high energy vibe’.[1] Like disco before it, Hi-NRG uses predominantly electronic sounds, and was produced and consumed largely by marginalised communities, including queer African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Latinos. It was music for nighttime and nite-clubs, for dancing to, escaping to, for fostering inclusivity.

“You could think of early disco as the music of outsiders”, says curator, DJ and Hi-NRG enthusiast Pádraic E. Moore, who points out that Hi-NRG also furthered disco’s vital contribution to “the formation of gay identities, promotion of queer culture and disruption of gender norms”.[2] Moore cites Hi-NRG tracks like Patrick Cowley’s ‘Menergie’ (1981) and Modern Rocketry’s ‘Homosexuality’ (1985) as daring and provocative expressions of queer desire. Cowley and his ‘Menergie’ collaborator Sylvester were both early pioneers of the Hi-NRG genre, associated with San Francisco’s Megatone Records, and both of them would be killed by AIDs by the end of the decade. (Indeed, records like ‘Homosexuality’ seem even more radical and defiant given the backdrop of the AIDs crisis, and the accompanying discriminatory culture of the US mainstream.)

Moore stresses the DIY aesthetic of Hi-NRG in this initial, more underground phase, made possible by the increased availability and affordability of electronic music equipment, including Roland’s 808 drum machine and later, Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser. By the middle of the 1980s, the genre would find mainstream success, with Stock Aitken Waterman producing a number of Hi-NRG hits by Divine, Dead or Alive, Hazell Dean and Bananarama; Moore also points out the Hi-NRG influence on queer artists such as Bronski Beat (in particular their 1984 track ‘Why?’) and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (‘Relax’). Though some great Hi-NRG tracks came from this period, the mainstream’s co-option of the genre would eventually lead to Hi-NRG’s dilution and demise – what Moore derides as the “vanilla cul-de-sac”[3] most radical art forms ultimately end up in. At its peak, though, Hi-NRG was a radical expression of queer desire, fuelled by the burgeoning LGBT club culture in the UK and the US.

This queer history of Hi-NRG is not without contention, though, and this essay will focus on the work of Bobby Orlando, a pioneer of the genre who I’m drawn towards not only because I love his music, but also because he is a problematic figure who in many ways troubles this reading of Hi-NRG. Orlando has been accused of plagiarism, homophobia, sexism and exploitation, and was characterised by a 1987 profile in The Face Magazine as “the self-styled master of classic techno trash” who aspired to be “the Ronald McDonald of the music industry”.[4] But Babette loves a problem child and in this essay I will argue why Orlando’s music is nonetheless worthy of our attention, and can still be celebrated within a queer history of late 20th-century dance music.

Bobby Orlando grew up in New York State, a teenage boxing sensation who could allegedly do one-finger push-ups. Not wanting to ruin his pretty face, he quit fighting sports and took up music instead, initially dipping his toe into the ‘glitter rock’ scene, attracted by its flamboyant masculinity and its taste for excess. In 1977, the year Giorgio Moroder released Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, Orlando ditched the guitar and swapped glam rock for disco. He set up his own label, “O” Records, in 1980 – in the midst of the disco backlash. Contemporaneously to the aforementioned Cowley, Orlando carved out his own niche of fast-paced, synth-laden, campy staccato disco that would become known as Hi-NRG.

An almost exclusively electronic genre, Hi-NRG is defined by its synthetic sounds (Moore points out its eschewal more orchestral disco elements such as layered strings[5]) and Orlando’s music in particular makes use of gratuitous patches and samples. Compare his amped-up early version of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ (1984) to the more stripped back and definitive ‘hit’ version (1985) to see what I mean. Orlando’s penchant for artifice extends beyond the sounds he made, however, and into the broader aesthetic and practice of his music-making. The Flirts, arguably Orlando’s biggest musical legacy, were girl group of sheer artifice. Session musicians recorded the vocals, then a rotating roster of models, dancers and actresses lip-synced the song live: one blonde, one redhead, one brunette. Different tours and albums had different line-ups, with Orlando himself the only consistent factor.

One blonde, one redhead, one brunette: The Flirts performing live in 1983

Capitalising on this line-up of leggy, preened and pouting models, Orlando opted for a ‘sex sells’ approach to The Flirts’ song-writing. ‘Passion’, their biggest hit, opens with the zingy line “I’m waiting for you baby, it’s time for show and tell”, before going on to literally spell out sexual desire in a refrain of “P–A–SS–ION!”. In another track, ‘Calling All Boys’, The Flirts send out a signal of sexual invitation not to one specific boy/man, but to ALL boys/men. With its interchangeable frontwomen, hypersexualised performance of femininity and non-specific objects of desire, The Flirts are ostensibly meant to represent all or any women (or at least all or any white women since, gallingly by today’s standards, the group’s diversity is limited only to hair colour). With one or two exceptions, The Flirts’ performers are known only by one name – Hope, Holly, Sandy – and they serve only as vessels for Orlando’s expression.

This use of female bodies as two-dimensional, interchangeable marionettes is, of course, deeply exploitative, even if its symptomatic of the music industry’s attitude towards women as a whole. It should be noted that Orlando’s relations with many of his key performers, including Divine and Roni Griffiths, would turn sour after a couple of years’ collaboration. I don’t mean to underplay this problematic aspect of Orlando’s music-making, but to play devil’s advocate, I personally think his layering and obfuscation of authorship, and outright subversion of authenticity, is precisely what is fascinating about Orlando’s music.

Alongside the mirage of constructed femininity that was The Flirts, Orlando released and produced music under dozens of other names and self-invented bands, most of which had no members other than Orlando himself (except for the odd session vocalist). Wikipedia lists over 70 Orlando ‘acts’, and their camped-up, flamboyant names are a joy to read through: Barbie & The Kens, Hotline, the New York Models, Hippies With Haircuts, The He Man Band, The Fem-Spies, Girls Have Fun, Lilly & the Pink, The Bang Gang, Bubba and the Jack Attack …

The act of naming, and its transformative potential, was clearly not lost on Orlando. The adoption of constructed personas, fictitious identities and assumed names is a practise widely adopted within the queer community. It is a form of expression used not only by drag performers, but artists and activists (Rosa von Praunheim, Gluck, Claude Cahun, Tom of Finland, to name but a few). Orlando’s adoption of playful pseudonyms, many of which seem centred on gender/sexuality, seems to fit squarely within this practice, except for one rather large problem: Orlando identified as heterosexual and was reportedly homophobic. Rumour has it that after his music career fizzled out, Orlando became a religious zealot and wrote a book on creationism. I warned you he was problematic.

A 1942 self-portrait by Hannah Gluckstein, aka ‘Gluck’, recently included in Tate Britain’s exhibition of ‘Queer British Art 1861–1967′. The work is included in the collection of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery

Orlando’s music is throbbing with heterosexual desire and pumped-up machismo – “Let a man like me make a woman out of you”, promises one track, its cover art decorated with an illustration of a chiselled man lifting a barbell. In a rare interview with The Face Magazine in 1987, Orlando spoke of channelling the controlled aggression of his early boxing career into his music: “The only difference is that with records you take the aggression you would normally use beating the hell out of a guy by punching beats. It’s the same punch, the same drive.”[6]

One suspects that driving this male bravado and hetero-peacocking was an over-compensation of sorts, or even internalised homophobia. It’s not the place of this blog to speculate on Orlando’s sexuality, but whether or not the man himself was (is) queer, I think it’s fair to say that despite all the above, his music certainly was. Orlando’s performative take on masculinity is as artificial as The Flirts’ performance of femininity. Both expressions of gender identity chime with Susan Sontag’s definition of camp. In her still-relevant ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964), Sontag cites “the exaggerated he-man-ness” of bodybuilder Steve Reeves and Samson and Delilah actor Victor Mature as well as the “corny flamboyant femaleness” of Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell.[7]

There is also a strong tradition of ostensibly ‘heterosexual’ anthems performed by women for a largely gay audience: Miguel Brown’s Hi-NRG hit ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’; Sinitta’s ‘So Macho’; Eartha Kitt’s ‘I Love Men’; The Weathergirls ‘It’s Raining Men’, etc. Seen in this context, tracks like The Flirts’ ‘Calling All Boys’ can take on a new meaning. And besides – that problematic Flirts paradigm of women as vessels becomes less straightforward when one views it through the kaleidoscope of queer identity: this is a song about this is desire for MEN, written by a MAN, performed by WOMEN miming WOMEN. Ironically, by adhering to uphold strict gender binaries, Orlando’s acts only serve to reveal how constructed and performative they are.

The exception, of course, is Divine – the only Orlando act to gender-bend in the more literal way. Unlike the majority of Orlando acts, Divine was not a persona of Orlando’s invention. An actor and drag queen, Divine had developed both a strong public identity and large fanbase by the time he began to collaborate with Orlando in 1981, having starred in several cult hits by filmmaker John Waters, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). As such, his sizeable impact on the history of queer identity in the late twentieth century extends beyond the scope of this essay and indeed deserves one in its own right. One point worth touching on, though, is that Divine’s expression of femininity – all grit, fighting talk and disobedient body – is, to me, a truer expression of womanhood (or at least my experience of it) than any of Orlando’s nameless models provide. Once more, there is realness to be found in artifice.

The expression of desire in Orlando’s records, whether read as queer or hetero, is as performative and artificial as the gender identities he constructs. In the Bobby “O” track ‘I’m So Hot For You’ (1982), Orlando croons, “I saw you at the party so I thought I’d play the game / Two strangers in a lonely room, I asked you your name”, before bursting into its infectious chorus of “I’m so hot for you and you’re so hot for me … what are we waiting for?”. (“Pass the poppers, please”, read the top YouTube comment when I listened to it). This is typical of Orlando tracks – eyes lock across a crowded party, a lonely lothario asks a girl her name and everyone’s fantasies come true. These plotlines are so cliché, though – so artificial and oversexed – that they almost stop being sexy. The scenario is too cinematic to be believable. The beats are too fast to bump ‘n’ grind to. This is music for taking pills and dancing euphorically to, not slow-jamming to before taking someone home. It’s burning passion with no fulfilment.

In his extensive survey of post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds points out that the “non-funkiness” of Hi-NRG is one of the defining traits of the genre. It is “slamming rather than swinging”, he writes. Reynolds discusses Hi-NRG only as a footnote to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, which though not ‘pure’ Hi-NRG itself, adopted many its its stylistic traits. He mentions Hi-NRG’s “orgiastic vibe”, but argues that ‘Relax’ was only sexy “in the exhibitionist sense of the Amsterdam leather bars [frontman] Holly [Johnson] visited, where the sex acts had an element of ‘theatre and performance’ … ‘Relax’ was driven by something far stronger than sensuality: an idea of sex as a weapon, shock tactic, threat”.[8]

Screenshot from the banned version of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, showing BDSM/leather bars. “You can really see how deviant this must have seemed in 1983″, says Moore[9]

The same could be said of Orlando’s sexploitation disco classics – the notion of sex as a dancefloor statement of intent, rather than a sensual act carried out behind closed doors. Orlando’s heroes and heroines know exactly what they want, as exemplified by 1982’s ‘She Has a Way’ (“She knows what she wants from you / You’ll do things you’d never do”). That’s not to say it’s always a happy ending, though. Much of the desire expressed in Orlando’s Hi-NRG pop songs is one-way – take Girly’s ‘Working Girl (One-Way Love Affair)’ or The Flirts’ ‘Helpless’ (“I can see you in the arms of another girl … you shattered my world”). These thwarted expectations of love are pure, swooping, teenage-style catastrophes of the heart. The sentimentality of such Orlando tracks, just like the directness of his more erotic numbers, give us permission to feel the most untempered emotions.

In 1978, the queer, socialist British journal Gay Left published an essay by Richard Dyer titled ‘In Defence of Disco’. In it, Dyer argues that there are three main characteristics of the disco genre: eroticism, romanticism and materialism. Dyer points out that almost all popular music is arguably erotic, but unlike the disembodied eroticism of pop music (admittedly more chaste in 1978 than it is today) and the ‘phallic’ grind of rock, disco’s eroticism is a full-bodied experience, making it open to all genders and sexualities. Then on the romanticism of disco, he argues that its “passion and intensity embody or create an experience that negates the dreariness of the mundane and everyday”. This flight from the banality of the everyday experience, and its accompanying structural sexism/racism, “can be seen as a flight from capitalism and patriarchy as lived experiences”.[10]

Though Dyer is, of course, discussing disco, I feel his points are equally relevant to its descendent Hi-NRG (“if not more so”, adds Moore, who brought my attention to the essay[11]). The full-bodied eroticism that Dyer describes is certainly a key component of Hi-NRG, alongside the euphoric escape from the conditions of late capitalism. Though both disco and Hi-NRG can be characterised by their excessive appetites (for drumbeats and cowbells, for flamboyant get-ups, for drugs, for sex), both offer a moment of respite from and alternative to the grind of day-to-day life, particularly for oppressed groups such as the queer community which, as pointed out at the beginning of this essay, made up large swathes of Hi-NRG’s audience.

Like most great pop/dance tracks, Orlando’s songs do not promise to deliver anything but a few minutes of punchy, sexy euphoria. But in my eyes, this is precisely what makes them so transcendental. To those of a certain bent, they deliver a pure hit of serotonin to the brain, and their artifice and ephemerality only serve to heighten this connection. I return, once again, to the wise words of Susan Sontag: “One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.”[12]

Whether or not I’m permitted my wish of having a camp, sexy Hi-NRG track sang by three anonymous models played at my funeral, no hell or wild horses could stop me from enjoying it in the meantime.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Alan Jones & Jussi Kantonen, Saturday Night Fever: The Story of Disco (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 1999), cited on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-NRG, accessed July 2017

[2] Pádraic E. Moore, personal communication, July 2017

[3] ibid.

[4] Kimberley Leston, ‘The Story of O’, The Face, 1987, accessed online at http://www.italo-disco.net/HTML/HTML%20Interviews/Bobby%20Orlando%20Interview.html, July 2017

[5] Moore, ibid.

[6] Leston, ibid.

[7] Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), p. 279

[8] Simon Reynolds, Rip it up and Start Again, p. 504

[9] Moore, ibid.

[10] Richard Dyer, ‘In Defence of Disco’, Gay Left, Summer 1979, pp. 20–23, accessed via http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/gay.left_issue.08.pdf, July 2017

[11] Moore, ibid.

[12] Sontag, ibid.

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The film and TV industries go to extreme lengths to protect the details of their stories, from shoving NDAs up everyone's ass to literally locking scenes inside vaults. So it's hilarious when their biggest plot twists are revealed not by master hackers or corporate spies, but by random jackasses making off-the-cuff jokes. But how often could that happen? All the time, it turns out ...

WARNING: This is an article about plot twists. Expect some!

Fans Joke About Hodor, Spoil A Major Game Of Thrones Twist Years In Advance

There have been a lot of shocking twists throughout the course of Game Of Thrones; from the Red Wedding stabbings, to Jon Snow getting stabbed a bunch of times, to the stabbing of- You know what, they're mostly stabbings. One twist no one could have seen coming (because the books haven't even gotten to that part yet) had to do with Hodor, the loveable manservant who serves as young Bran Stark's personal piggyback service.

HBO Apparently, the people in Westeros are too busy sword-fighting and getting naked to invent the goddamn wheelchair.

But why is his name Hodor? Did he have annoying, Gwyneth Paltrow-esque celebrity parents? The answer is far more complicated. Basically, Bran's time-travelling melted poor Hodor's brain -- as his future self is being commanded to "hold the door" to block a horde of White Walkers, his past self starts muttering "Hold the door" over and over, eventually morphing into "Hodor" (a transition that caused headaches for the show's international translators). So, people just started calling him that.

HBO

HBO If the same rule applied to 12-year-old boys in this universe, there'd probably be a hell of a lot more kids named "Boobs Pokemon."

That's a pretty intricate twist, but a few people actually predicted this outcome. How the hell? By doing what we do for a living: making dumb-ass pop culture jokes. Way back in 2008, before the TV show even started, a fan of the books posted this on a message board:

Not all commenters were receptive to the idea:

This poster wasn't the only fan to randomly stumble onto this bad pun, either. Writer Michael A. Ventrella blogged in 2014 about an encounter with GOT creator George R.R. Martin at a convention, where Martin mentioned an interest in being an elevator operator. When Ventrella ran into him again, this happened:

So a terrible pun that people balked at actually became one of the most poignant moments in the show. What we're saying is maybe now's the time for HBO's gritty Bazooka Joe reboot.

Darth Vader's Actor Randomly Guessed He Was Luke's Father

David Prowse was the guy who acted inside of the original Darth Vader suit, and who will one day be wiped from all historical records and replaced with Hayden Christensen. We've talked before about how he publicly spoiled the twist of The Empire Strikes Back years before the movie came out, during a 1978 appearance at Berkeley:

That's not all. He also blabbed to Little Shoppe Of Horrors magazine that same year:

But here's the weird thing: He shouldn't have been able to spoil this, because he didn't know. No one did. This was back around the same time Leigh Brackett was writing the early drafts of Empire, which included scenes where Luke's dad is a decidedly non-evil ghost:

And Vader even refers to Luke's dad in their final confrontation:

A recent documentary focusing on Prowse delves into this mystery, but somehow Prowse doesn't remember blowing the twist. The director literally has to pull up the old newspaper clipping on an iPad and show Prowse that he totally ruined the ending for people. In fact, because the line "I am your father" wasn't even recorded on set, Prowse recalls being surprised by the reveal at the premiere.

The documentarians also interview Gary Kurtz, the producer of A New Hope and Empire, who claims it was just an amazingly lucky guess. So either Prowse's random bullshitting stumbled upon one of the biggest moments in movie history, or George Lucas was pulling story ideas from magazine interviews given by his non-speaking supporting cast.

Similarly soothsaying the future of the franchise was a 1982 Mad Magazine bit about Lucas' Star Wars plans. It was just a bunch of ridiculous jokes -- and in a testament to just how silly the series got, some actually came pretty close to reality. For starters, they predicted 50 percent of Episode II's title:

And that Episode III would feature the Wookiees fighting the Empire:

One prediction jokingly states that Darth Vader is Han Solo's father, which is crazy. It also says that Vader will turn out to be C3PO's dad which is ... no, wait, that's exactly what fucking happened.

Another throwaway joke says that Luke's real father is "The Force" -- which sounds stupid as all hell, until you realize that "The Force" is actually his grandfather. Then it sounds stupider.

Someone Wrote An Erotic Novella About Taylor Swift And Tom Hiddleston (Before They Actually Dated)

We're switching it up to talk about a real-life twist: the announcement in 2016 that pop-star Taylor Swift was dating actor Tom Hiddleston. You know, the guy who has played Loki so many times he apparently just started wearing the costume in everyday life.

While that bit of news may have caught you off guard, it wouldn't have if you'd read Wildest Dreams -- a 58,000-word piece of erotic fan fiction by online author Jennifer Stanley. Stanley's story imagined a (sexy) world in which Hiddleston and Swift were a couple back in 2014. Before they even met.

That's a pretty random guess. Other than the fact that they often have the same haircut, what do these two celebs have in common? Loki's not even the Marvel villain you'd expect a music superstar to end up with -- young Magneto's handsome as hell, not to mention that pruny hunk Thanos and his blinged-out Michael Jackson glove.

Furthering the theory that Stanley is a god and our entire universe exists only as the backdrop for a sex-filled internet story, she predicted that Hiddleston and Swift would meet at the Met Gala, and, yup, that's what happened. She explains that she guessed that by doing good old-fashioned research and finding out which type of event they'd both be likely to attend -- because how will anyone masturbate to this if it isn't completely realistic?

Of course, a lot of the book is just straight-up celebrity doing it. (If a mustachioed Tom Hanks showed up delivering a pizza it wouldn't feel out of place.) And when Stanley first saw the pictures of the couple at the Met Gala, her first thought was: "Oh my god, what have I done?" Presumably her second thought was "I should never have bought that typewriter at Stephen King's garage sale."

Kevin Smith Called Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes Ending Years Earlier

We all remember Tim Burton's remake of the classic Planet Of The Apes, the one that scrapped the classic Statue Of Liberty twist, ending instead with the apes and humans putting aside their petty differences to chill out at a suburban mall's Sears Portrait Studio.

Actually, Burton added his own bizarre twist to the movie. After returning to Earth, Marky Mark is shocked to discover that the Lincoln Memorial statue is an ape -- which is a way more dramatic way of revealing this than if Wahlberg simply found a penny on the ground, or rented a DVD of the Daniel Ape Lewis biopic.

It was a startling, utterly unpredictable twist ... unless you were a Kevin Smith fan. A few years earlier, Smith (who, as a reminder, didn't do drugs at this time) released a Jay And Silent Bob comic that riffed on Planet Of The Apes, and there is a strikingly similar image:

At first, Smith seemed to accuse Burton of plagiarism, saying "I think I got robbed and I'm talking with my lawyers about possibly suing." Then, later, he claimed he was only joking -- either because he genuinely was, or because he soon realized no one should want to take credit for that monkey turd of an ending. Burton defensively claimed that he wasn't an avid reader of Jay And Silent Bob comics, and that "anybody that knows me knows I do not read comic books." He's gonna flip his shit when he finds out where Batman came from.

A Random Comedy Sketch Calls The Insane Direction Lost Was Going

Back when Lost was on TV, a good chunk of the internet consisted of just people trying to figure out where the show was going. Amid all that rampant speculation, one sketch troupe actually got one key detail right, but in the most random way possible. The internet comedy group Olde English had a sketch that made the rounds back in 2007 about how ridiculous the Lost writers' room must have been. They're just frantically coming up with ideas like polar bears, four-toed statues, and, say, how about a magic turtle?

The ideas get more and more ludicrous, and that's the joke. However, in throwing out the craziest possible suggestions, they actually anticipated a real storyline. Look at the cue cards on the back wall:

See how two of the cards are about Locke?

They read "Locke Dies" and "Locke Becomes a Zombie" -- which sounded completely ludicrous. Come on, not even this show would go as far as to kill a fan-favorite character and then bring him back to life as some sort of evil force, bent on destruction. Right?

Around the same time this sketch came out, on the Season 3 finale, we saw Jack moping over someone's casket in a funeral parlor. Because this show was infuriating, it took them a whole year to show us who was in the freaking casket: it was fan-favorite Locke! Gasp!

Locke then promptly comes back to life, but with a grumpier, more murder-y attitude. It turns out his dead body had actually been reanimated/possessed by the Smoke Monster -- as in, an evil force, bent on destruction. Maybe if we examine the magic numbers some more, that whole all-powerful top-hatted turtle theory will pan out too.

Austin Powers Had The Exact Same Twist As Spectre, 13 Years Earlier

Spectre is that James Bond movie that works way better if you assume it mostly takes place inside the inane imaginings of 007's lobotomized brain. Otherwise, eh. The movie is packed with twists that don't really add much to Bond's mystique. For instance, there was the reveal that the head of the evil organization Spectre, Franz Oberhauser, was actually ... Ernst Blofeld, who was the head of Spectre in every other James Bond movie! Wait, how was this a twist? The movie was literally called Spectre. That's like trying to make it a surprise that Jim Morrison is a character in The Doors.

Anyway, early in the movie, we see a photo of Bond with his adoptive dad, and another kid whose face has been burned off:

Then, towards the end, Blofeld reveals that it was his father who took Bond in. He was the little boy in the photo ...

... which makes Bond and Blofeld brothers! Bond didn't remember this because, again, martinis.

While that's certainly a shocking development, if you got the sense that it was strangely familiar, you weren't alone. Over a decade earlier, the Bond parody Austin Powers In Goldmember had an extremely similar third-act twist. It ends with Powers' father admitting that Dr. Evil (the blatant Blofeld ripoff character) was actually Austin's brother.

The plot twist actually works better in Goldmember, probably because Michael Caine and Beyonce are there, while the Bond producers apparently wouldn't pony up the cash. Also, Goldmember was just going for a silly ending, not trying to predict where the Bond franchise was actually headed. Still, we can't wait for the sequel where Bond finds out his other brothers are Shrek and the Love Guru.

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter, or check out the podcast Rewatchability.

For more twists we all should've seen coming, check out The 5 Most Ridiculous Ways Studios Spoiled Their Own Movies and 6 Movie Characters Whose Names Spoiled Huge Plot Twists.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Sherlock Holmes Is Based On A Real Guy (Who Was Even Cooler), and other videos you won't see on the site!

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