Summary: One day, I was looking for a song. I found something else. Or, why Ula La is so gosh darned intriguing...
Summary: One day, I was looking for a song. I found something else. Or, why Ula La is so gosh darned intriguing...
BLOT: (16 Feb 2014 - 08:18:36 PM)
It would have been late 2008. Prior to Christmas season but not too much prior. I was back in the mall for a few months, working at a bookstore/calendar kiosk while waiting to start grad school [I started in the Spring]. I was meant to enter to the job at a higher rate of pay than I had, and for more hours, but upon being granted less of both, I realized it was a good chance to relax and not take things too seriously.
While there, I had to put with mall music. Lots of it. Since I rode the bus in, this meant that I generally had to show up early and leave late for every shift. Prior to Christmas music, this was a mediocre melange of pop forty radio with soft classics blended into three or four hour loops, heard two or three times throughout a shift. There was one song, in particular, that I liked the sound of but could not hear enough of to identify. The song turned out to be Yael Naim's "New Soul". At the time, before knowing this, I was trying searches like, "that song with la la la in it". Seriously.1
How I found the song, I don't recall, I think I finally caught the song in a commercial or as part of show's soundtrack, etc, and was able to find the clip online with credits. What I found in the meantime, though, because of the "la la video" bit...
Just in case you passed over the video, Why Ula La is so Gosh Darn Cute!, the basic story goes like this: Ula La is giving her friend Tommy a "birthday" gift of nuts, except is not his birthday and she has done this joke already, the day before, and the exchange brings up a series of basic and varied Asian stereotypes. Many racist jokes all squeezed into one twee portrayal. There is both a level of offensiveness and something cute and endearing about it.
The unspoken rules of the short's universe oddly appeal to me—to the PBS-watcher in me, especially—as to who Tommy is and how he is a painter and how Ula La fits in. I mean, is this a house he has inherited and is touching up? Is he a house painter slash general repairs man? Is he a tortured artist? What does she do? Would it be wrong to imagine her as a wacky shop clerk? Do they go on adventures? Does the house have an awesome library where they drink tea and lemonade? Are there talking animals?
I can taste the show like a microcosm. I want to know more.
I remember sharing it with my sister-in-law that night, or somebody I was chatting with, and then I've shared it with others. I've watched it at least dozens of times and stuff like "NUTSERU!" has become a mild catch-phrase with my wife. It's kind of weird realizing that it has only about 1500 hits and of the four comments, two of them are mine [and technically comments I made to Google+ back before the YouTube integration]. I've made so many references to it that I forget nearly no one else has seen it, at least not via Youtube.
I'm a little surprised I've not blogged about it before. And maybe I have. I don't know. At any rate, it came up in conversation, tonight, and so I figured I'd share. Just in case I haven't. Some other fast-fun facts about it:
There you go. Now you know why I sometimes say shit like, "I aporogize, Tommy-san," and then immediately look guilty. I wonder if there is merchandise?
1: While neither my beard nor my pipe smoking are ironic, I do occasionally enjoy a good ironic search on Google. Hey, they are the ones who moved their search for something that was good at allowing lots of variables to something people that don't know how to search might use. They begged me to do it.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2014
Written by Doug Bolden
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The longer, fuller version of this text can be found on my FAQ: "Can I Use Something I Found on the Site?".
"The hidden is greater than the seen."