Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (12 page)

She reads on and feels helpless when she sees that Harket has been beaten savagely and may be dead. As her tears fall, she sees him awaken to struggle against the boundaries of the comic book, a scene that also plays out in the hallway of her apartment. As Harket crashes against the walls, his body transforms from animation to real over and over again. As the song ends, Harket emerges, sweaty but flesh and blood, and the two embrace.

The video was partially shot on a soundstage and at a real restaurant, Kim’s Café, in the Wandsworth section of London. The woman in the video was played by Bunty Bailey, an actress, dancer, and model. Romance sparked for Bailey and Harket on the set, but it didn’t last. After dating Harket, Bailey appeared as a backup singer in the video for Billy Idol’s hit “To Be a Lover,” which reached #6 on the Billboard charts in 1986.

Things didn’t work out much better for the fictional lovers in “Take on Me,” either. The video for the follow-up song, “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” opened with the couple staring into each other’s eyes when Harket begins to switch back to his comic-book form. He doubles over in pain while Bailey helplessly watches, and then he runs off. A strong burst of light follows, and “The End” pops up on the scene.

For its animation, “Take on Me” relied entirely on rotoscoping, a process in which live-action film is projected onto a surface and traced by an animator. Barron asked the record company for three
months to work on the video (most were produced in a couple of days), and he got it. Lead animator Michael Patterson and 13 other illustrators embarked on the painstaking process involving more than 2,000 drawn images for the video.

The video’s tumultuous finale was an homage to the 1980 movie
Altered States
, which starred William Hurt as a man who evolves and devolves in an attempt to learn the meaning of life through sensory deprivation. The ending of the movie features Hurt violently switching between humanity and primordial sludge while his wife watches helplessly.

Shortly after the release of the new video for “Take on Me,” the song became a hit around the globe. It went to #1 in the United States and became the second best-selling single of 1985. (“We Are the World” took the top spot.) At the 1986 MTV Video Awards, a-ha won Best New Artist, and “Take on Me” won the following awards:

Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” which used state-of-the-art computer animation with some rotoscoping thrown in to tell the song’s story, won Video of the Year. Barron couldn’t have been too disappointed in that, though: he also directed the Dire Straits video.

“Buddy Holly”
by Weezer (1994)

The alternative rock band is seamlessly spliced into actual footage of
Happy Days
. In the clip, the band, dressed in 1950s sweaters and nerdy glasses, play at Arnold’s Diner as Fonzie wins a dance contest.

Jeans We Can Live Without

The Dongarii Fort in India gave birth to dungarees; the Genoese fabric industry gave birth to blue de Gênes (one theory for the original “blue jeans”), and textile work in Nîmes, France, led to a material that became known as “de Nîmes,” or denim. Then, in 1873, a tailor named Jacob Davis and a merchant named Levi Strauss teamed up and got a patent for their copper rivets sewed onto the stress points of denim dungarees. Popular blue jeans were born.

Once used exclusively by sailors, laborers, and cowboys, jeans have become universal outerwear. But lately, some new trends in denim have emerged that stink . . . and may even have some toxic side effects.

Jeans have been popular with everyone from California gold miners to today’s CEOs. One reason is that they continue to look clean for a long time between washings and don’t show dirt or stains as easily as other types of pants do. But one of the latest trends in blue jeans is “raw denim” jeans, which pushed the bounds of cleanliness. Raw denim is the fabric that comes right off the production line: it’s unwashed, untreated, stiff, and dark blue. The benefit of raw denim is that, if someone wears it long enough, it should completely conform to his or her body, creating a nearly custom fit. Some
raw jeans aficionados even put objects (wallets, pens, calculators) in their pockets so the outlines of the objects will remain visible in the denim as a style feature.

But even the most devoted dirty-denim fan might balk at the recommended care instructions on raw jeans: “Do not wash for six months.” One company that makes the jeans, A.P.C., actually encourages no washing for a whole year. At the end of 12 months, A.P.C. designers recommend that you take your unwashed jeans to the ocean, give them a good dip and scrubbing with sand, and then rinse with fresh water and dry them in the sun. As for cleanliness and odor control, one fan sprinkles his jeans with baking soda and puts them in a plastic bag in the freezer—the cold kills bacteria and the soda absorbs odors.

In Japan, the latest trend is custom-made jeans. Yoropiko Denim, designed by Martin Ksohoh, features tailor-made, decorated denim, complete with jeweled buttons (sometimes made of rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and sapphires) and large pieces of embroidery fashioned from ultra-soft kimono thread.

Ksohoh’s denim jeans and jackets have become favorites of hip-hop stars like S.A.S. (brothers Sean and Melvin Williams) and Dizzee Rascal. And each piece is a work of art that takes hours to create—and hours to earn. A pair of Yoropiko jeans costs anywhere from $475 (for plain denim with your choice of gems) to $995 (for embroidered denim) and up (for custom designs).

Raw denim and custom-made jeans may be extravagant, but recently a popular form of treating denim has come under fire for being environmentally unfriendly. Stonewashed jeans were really popular in the 1980s and 1990s, and many people still like them because the jeans are soft from the first wearing, look good, and can be customized with all sorts of frayed threads, holes, slashes, and worn bits. But some of the processes that make denim more comfortable for wearers are polluting land and rivers in central Mexico—specifically the Tehuacán valley, where more than 700 clothing manufacturers process jeans to sell to U.S. companies.

Once called the “city of health,” Tehuacán used to be best
known for mineral springs. Today, toxic runoff from the denim plants has poisoned the area. The water in Tehuacán’s irrigation canals has turned blue and is so full of toxins that it burns seedlings and sterilizes farmland. And much of the dirt along the canal’s banks is an ashy gray.

There are alternatives. Some smaller companies like Edun and Fair Indigo offer organic and fair-trade denim that’s processed in environmentally friendly ways.

Today’s denim often contains Lycra and other fibers, but it’s typically an all-cotton fabric. The natural fiber and the strong weave make leftover denim useful for all sorts of things:

At the BRI, we call these little extra tidbits at the end of articles “filler.” The Academy Awards has its own version: In the auditorium on Oscar night, the Academy enlists a few dozen “seat fillers”—volunteers whose job is to hang out in the wings during the four-hour ceremony, waiting for audience members to go the bathroom. Then the seat filler quietly runs in and occupies the vacant seat until its owner returns. The reason: Whenever the camera pans the audience, it must always appear to be a packed house. The seat fillers are under strict orders not to talk to or engage in any way with the movie stars they are sitting next to. (We now return you to your regularly scheduled Golden Plunger Awards.)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude describe themselves as “environmental artists” because they take an environment and work with it to make art. Urban or rural, land- or water-based, Christo installations take every element of a place into account.

For years, the artworks were signed and marketed under the name “Christo,” so people believed that he was the sole creator. Now, the pair refer to themselves as “the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.” Christo Javacheff was born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935—Jeanne-Claude was born on the same day in France. They met when Christo did a painting of Jeanne-Claude’s mother in 1958. Jeanne-Claude describes their collaboration as a “good cop, bad cop” dynamic—he focuses on the vision; she focuses on business logistics.

Christo has vowed never to repeat himself. He won’t wrap another bridge (as he did to Paris’s Pont Neuf) or surround another set of islands (as in the Bay of Biscayne). Every project is unique.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s six-decade career includes more than 18 completed installations. Here are some of their major works:

1.
Iron Curtain—Wall of Oil Barrels
:
On June 27, 1962, in protest of the Berlin Wall, the artists closed the Rue Visconti, one of the narrowest streets in Paris, for eight hours by blocking it with 240 industrial oil barrels.

2.
Wrapped Fountain & Tower
:
Completed in Spoleto, Italy, in 1968, this was Jeanne-Claude’s first work without Christo, who was working on #3, the Wrapped Kunsthalle, in Switzerland. Jeanne-Claude wrapped a medieval tower and a Baroque fountain in white polyethylene; it remained on display for three weeks.

3.
Wrapped Kunsthalle
:
Christo’s first installation without Jeanne-Claude, this was the first fully wrapped building that the artists conceived. It was installed in Bern, Switzerland, for the 50th anniversary of the city’s art museum.

4.
Museum of Contemporary Art Wrapped
:
The Bern Kunsthalle was wrapped in translucent plastic, but Christo chose to wrap Chicago’s boxy, anonymous Museum of Contemporary Art in greenish-brown tarpaulin to play up its industrial feel—and for a greater contrast with the January 1969 snow.

5.
Wrapped Coast
:
Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the rocky, cliff-lined shore of Little Bay in Sydney, Australia, in the fall of 1969. It required one million square feet of erosion-control fabric and 35 miles of polypropylene rope.

6.
Valley Curtain
:
Plagued by problems, including protests from environmentalists and financial shortfalls, this bright-orange curtain at Rifle Gap, Colorado, which required 142,000 square feet of cloth and 200 tons of concrete, had to come down just 28 hours after it was finished . . . because gale-force winds shredded it.