BAD TV Culture Test

You're cool. That's why you're here.

Maybe you're hungry. Your appetite for another type of entertainment has led you here, to BadTV? You don't care what CBS and ABC and NBC and FOX think of the world? You loathe swimming in the mainstream puke? Had enough of the Scorsese violence and Eastwood pablum?

If you think you already know it all, we've got a test of your culture. This test is for you. If you know more than two of the artists or phenomena in the 10 links below, you're cool. If you know 4 or 5 of these people or phenomena, then we think you're cool. If you are familiar with 6 or more, then we want you to tell us what to do with our lives and energy.


  • ANTONY, singer - Antony is a genius. If you don't know him, there's a whole world of wonder and pleasure you're missing out on. Go ahead and laugh at him and call him a freak, but be careful: ignorance is an ugly mirror, and every insult you hurl is a nasty twist of your reflection. It is beautiful, beautiful, to be different and distinct, and here is living proof. We dare you to watch and enjoy this video.
  • GREGORY COLBERT, fotografer - There is Colbert, and then the rest of the amateurs beating the bush. Peter Beard might have blazed this trail, but he could never have imagined his work leading to the majesty of Gregory Colbert's art pieces. Colbert makes Cirque du Soleil look like lowbrow trash for plump tourists.
  • LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR, filmmakers - They only made one thing. Very hard to find on DVD without paying a lot. Actually four movies, filmed thirty years ago by two broke brothers traveling around Indonesia. Looking for magic, they found miracles. Their arduous probing of unknown and unmapped parts of the country takes them to insect-filled forests and an island of dragons. An utterly amazing film.
  • MATT RIDLEY, writer - His book "Genome" will change the way you look at the future. He is lucid as well as collegial, a hard combination to find. The topics he addresses are among the deepest and most difficult concepts to grasp: Is it possible that every memory going back to Adam (80,000 years ago) and Eve (150,000 years ago) are locked in the furthest recesses of your memory? After reading or listening to him, you'll think it's possible.
  • The SELFISH GENE, Chapter One - You don't have to read all of Richard Dawkins' book to experience a sea change in your concept of existence and your place in it. Just the first chapter. Twenty years after its publication the book is still called "controversial," as in the Wikipedia link here, but it is anything but: Understanding the motivation behind the stupid decisions we make (like having a career, and getting married) is directly tied to knowing how simple genetic evolution is. This book was the first clear explanation of genetic evolution, and to this day the best explanation. Dawkins himself has become a bit of an oddity, but this book is still quoted in nearly every science publication today when the subject is evolutionary biology. And for any artist this new science looms tall over everything else in the science disciplines: evolutionary biology is young, powerful and ambitious, with the ultimate goal of discovering why . . . we . . .are. Just the first chapter.
  • CHABA ZAHOUANIA singer - Okay, we'll give you a point if you know about RAI music from North Africa. Originally from Algeria, that festering center of misogyny: Chaba is a woman, and cannot be allowed even a photograph of herself to help sell her records. She's got a rough voice tinted with frustration and anger, and we like to think it's caused by a woman's desire to reveal herself to the world on her terms, but we might be wrong. To listen top this music while drinking mint tea in the shadows of the dunes is a moment of pleasure every life should know, repeatedly, in every cycle of our home around the Sun.
  • PEN-EK RATANARUANG, film director - Asian cinema is the bomb, and has been ever since "Cyclo" came out two decades ago. But this director from Thailand has a delicate sense of image and poetry, and the utter lack of pretension that goes well with making great movies; you could say Ratanaruang is the anti-Coppola (both pere et daughter). His movie "Last Life in the Universe" is a two-hour pleasure which requires phones to be shut off, lights dimmed, volume increased, and a total immersion into escape from everyday life. And "Last Life in the Universe" will lead you inexorably to Kim Ki-Duck (Korea) and "Coast Guard", Ming-liang Tsai (Malaysia) and "What Time Is It There?", and to Hirokazu Koreeda (Japan) and his brilliant "Maborosi" or "Nobody Knows". These people make the U.S. cinema look pathetically derivative, one Tarantino or Scorsese wannabe after another.
  • ANDY GOLDSWORTHY, artist - Very few people you can watch for hours and feel inspired every minute, and Andy Goldsworthy is one of them. Jaw-dropping imagery in this movie, balanced with his soft determination to play in the mud or turn back the waves, or pick up sticks. Why are you working like a dog, when you should be playing like a puppy? Rent "Rivers & Tides," a German documentary about this very cool human being.
  • Jean-Pierre & Luc DARDENNE, filmmakers - Their movie "La Promesse" is another nail into the heart of American cinema. Why can't the U.S. produce a movie like this? Racism, love, betrayal, commitment, are these topics only permitted in American movies if they are dumbed down to a third grade audience? The movies made by the Dardennes are real. Real. People grappling with problems worth thousands of dollars, not billion-dollar heists from Vegas. What idiots we are being made to be when we judge movies by the cars they blow up, the buildings they destroy. The only American movie released this year which depicted real lives in an honest way was "Down to the Bone." That's it. Pathetic. Rent "La Promesse," or "Rosetta," or "The Son," or even the new "L'Enfant," and you'll start seeing movies with a new eye.
  • Museo Robert BRADY, museum - It's hard not to include Peter Beard's traveling exhibit as our museum piece, and it would be terrible to include the Guggenheim in Bilbao, since it is more its own attraction as the building that saved a city than an actual collection of art. For those of us who live in Lalaland, there is the Getty, but nothing quite compares with the Museo Robert Brady in Cuernavaca, Mexico. This is his own house, immaculately kept up with his mementoes from Frida Khalo to Josephine Baker, and it is a sort of ultimate eye candy. Worth traveling to Mexico City just to get to this city of eternal spring and visit the museum.