Now Lighting up a Rave Near You: City Hall Cover-Up on Homeless Death
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CITY HALL COVER-UP ON HOMELESS DEATH | NOW LIGHTING UP A RAVE NEAR YOU: GLOVING JUNE 29-JULY 5 VOL. 34/ NO. 32 LAWEEKLY.COM ( 14 ) LA Weekly / June 29-July 5 2012 / laweekly.com | As online video celebrities and fans gather at Vidcon, we bring you a guide to the new secrets of entertainment stardom aniel Grimes, a high school student online videos — better than anyone else. began airing on Cartoon Network. from Ypsilanti, Mich., fl ew to Los We’ve always performed “covers” of As Boedigheimer’s success shows, not Angeles last July for the YouTube songs in our cars and showers, but the best all of YouTube is aimless; creators now convention Vidcon. He came to see ones, such as Walk O! the Earth’s quirky make six fi gures and secure Hollywood his favorite YouTubers, including version of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used deals. “With some of it there is an intended Toby Turner, a comedian known in to Know” (122 million views), now can fuel calculation,” Boedigheimer says. “Annoying part for his “literal trailers.” the popularity of the original song (263 Orange is to some degree me experiment- “He’ll take a video game trailer and million views). ing, hanging around, having fun, but there’s Dsing over it, describing everything that’s “Girls for millennia have been teaching always the hope of it taking o! .” happening in a painfully obvious but very each other makeup, passing along tips It’s fi tting that YouTubers are concentrat- funny way,” Grimes told me, as we sat in an through word-of-mouth — ‘I have a great ed in Los Angeles, which has always been audience of hundreds in a ballroom in the blush you should use,’"” says Will Hyde, an intersection of leisure and entertain- Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel . whose YouTube channel The Will of DC ment, says Lawrence Culver, a historian As I blogged at the time, Turner took the comments on YouTube. “Now it lives in and the author of The Frontier of Leisure: stage to perform his literal trailer for Assas- YouTube for billions.” Southern California and the Shaping of sin’s Creed: Brotherhood, playing the key- Household troublemaking extends to bi- Modern America. Like many YouTube board and singing exactly what everyone zarre subgenres. A wave of videos features trends, SoCal-infl uenced practices such as saw on the screen, e.g., “Mysterious hooded kids shooting o! homemade fl amethrow- surfi ng, skateboarding and bodybuilding man joined by other hooded people.” ers, often by fi lling Super Soakers with “started out as casual recreation done by I had a fl ashback to a family road trip lis- kerosene. While Miley Cyrus was acciden- a few, and then someone found out how to tening to my brothers spoofi ng the opening tally caught on video doing the hallucino- popularize it, whether it was the beach mov- song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: genic drug salvia, lots of people do the drug ies of the ’50s or someone making money “There goes the toilet cleaner with his and then intentionally fi lm themselves. One on swimwear companies.” plunger/The same old plunger as before.” such video, with 1.6 million views, is called It’s no coincidence that all of them are My family is weird. But as we’ve learned “Writing a Letter to Congress on Salvia” platforms for exhibitionism. “If you want from YouTube, a lot of people are weird — (the letter ends up mostly squiggles, the to show o! , this is the place to do it,” Culver GOOF OFF IN YOUR BASEMENT…ONLY BETTER How YouTube is turning leisure into entertainment By ZACHARY PINCUS-ROTH and don’t mind sharing the evidence. The says. sort of goofi ng o! that once took place in Plus, as the Pacifi c Standard Time exhib- the privacy of your car, basement or back- its of the last year reminded us, much of yard has become a form of entertainment, L.A. art history is about fi nding signifi cance even a profession, whose practitioners in haphazard putzing. L.A. is where Bruce will gather at Vidcon this weekend at the Nauman discovered that art could entail Anaheim Convention Center. walking in a square. It’s where Edward Kien- “These in-jokes and odd bits of media holz and his ilk made art out of assembling have always existed, but there wasn’t a clothes hangers or doll heads found in fl ea distribution mechanism for it,” says Tim markets or on the street. In 1971 in Santa Hwang, co-founder of ROFLCon, a confer- Ana, performance artist Chris Burden had ence on online comedy. “You’d share it with a friend shoot him in the left arm with a .22 your friends: ‘Remember when Tim did that long rifl e. Would that he’d tried that in the crazy thing?’"” Dane Boedigheimer’s Annoying Orange just made YouTube era. Kids have played video games for the transition from online series to cable TV. “I hear the expression all the time — ‘That decades, but now game-related videos — person has too much time on their hands.’ depicting, say, a person’s actual gameplay, guy cracks up uncontrollably, but it does It’s used as a pejorative,” says Kevin Alloc- or sketches featuring the games’ characters get mailed). “Everyone screws around in ca, trends manager at YouTube. “I think to — are a massive part of YouTube, via such di! erent ways, but now you can learn about myself: A lot of the cool things in the world companies as Machinima, whose network how other people do it,” Hwang says. were made by someone with too much time of channels had 1.6 billion views in April. Dane Boedigheimer’s Annoying Orange on their hands.” The channel Epic Meal Time is a pioneer series is a classic example. One night while In our YouTube issue, you’ll read about of gross-out food videos, a descendant of 2 lying in bed, he thought up the idea of an or- lots of people who convert all that time a.m. sleepover challenges to stu! 17 marsh- ange bothering an apple. “My girlfriend was on their hands into online video stardom. mallows in your mouth and say “chubby like, ‘What are you laughing at?’ and I was Their stories show how anyone can suc- bunny.” YouTube’s No. 1 channel is by Ray like, ‘It’s stupid to even explain,’ ” he recalls. ceed on YouTube — given talent, hard work It’s now a YouTube series with 2.4 million and a brilliant plan. Or maybe just boobs. PHOTO BY W.B. FONTENOT William Johnson, who does what people do now in their spare time — make fun of subscribers. A more elaborate version just As you’ll read in this issue, those work, too. | laweekly.com / June 29-July 5 2012 / LA Weekly ( 15 ) athan Barnatt wakes up each “OK, cool,” Keith said. “I like making my morning in Star Wars bedsheets. If PHOTO BY W.B. FONTENOT own rules.” the trap door in his bunk bed isn’t Barnatt in character He strapped on Virtual Boy goggles and buried under toys, he pops through as Keith Apicary a Nintendo power glove and danced with that to greet the day. For breakfast, the girls, fannypack fl opping. He busted he’ll have some candy, then go play out the no-bones and the sick cat. He threw video games. Or jump on a tram- in a backfl ip for good measure. “No one poline. Or crawl through a cardboard-box expected me to be able to dance,” he says Ntunnel maze he built with his brothers. now. “All these professional dancers were There’s only one big di! erence between like, ‘Holy crap, what’s happening?’ ” Barnatt and any other kid on summer vaca- Barnatt pulls up the video on his iPad. tion: He is 31. His brother, a frequent collaborator and Barnatt is an actor and a maker of online cameraman, fi lmed the scene on the sly. videos. And though he does not consider “The casting director asked if I had dance himself “a YouTube person,” per se, at training,” Barnatt says. “So I started listing the moment, this 6-foot-tall, lanky, dorky, video games from the ’90s that were dance- prematurely balding white guy with soulful related.” eyes and elastic body is one of the most By the end, girls were cheering. Guys popular people on the Internet. were pouting. A child’s sense of limitless wonder “He was messing everybody up,” one coupled with an adult’s creative capabilities male dancer complains on the video. “He is a powerful thing. Barnatt, for instance, was distracting everyone.” really liked the song “Que Veux-Tu,” by the Distracting doesn’t begin to cover it. Bar- French band Yelle. The band were already natt has rolled down entire staircases. He doing a music video for the song, but Bar- has dangled over escalators. He has jumped natt made his own video for it anyway. He (head fi rst) into trashcans and stumbled fi lmed himself dancing around his neigh- over shopping carts. He has fallen o! roofs, borhood — at the grocery, the pharmacy, a fallen o! bounce houses and fallen o! roofs tennis court, in a tree. The locations change, onto bounce houses. Fellow comedian but his position from the camera stays the Matthew Jay described these maneuvers same. as “some of the bravest (and possibly “I don’t really choreograph,” he says, stupidest) physical comedy I’ve ever seen perched like a tightly coiled spring on the someone do.” Most of it has been captured edge of the sofa in his Santa Monica apart- on video.