YouTube rabbit holes to tumble down together
“YouTube videos meant to be shared like sacred texts with loved ones”
There often comes a time, whether on a good date that neither party can seem to end, a rainy night of bonding with a new roommate, or as the last dregs of a party devolve into collective phone time, when an ostensibly social occasion lapses into the time-honored ritual of trying to wow each other with YouTube videos.
To impress with cultural acumen, to fill an existentially barren pause in conversation, to build upon the giddiness that comes with the intimacy of sharing something important or unhinged or beautiful… All these and more are reasons to keep a host of YouTube rabbit holes in your arsenal. The Orpheus to your companions’ Eurydices, don’t look back as you forge ahead with the following videos that are excellent entry points into worlds of hilarity, intrigue, esotericism, and more. If your partners in journeying through Hades are typically blissfully offline, never underestimate the power of a classic (our founder Clémence wants to make sure you’ve seen this one as well).
Chopper Of Doom
Recommended by clémence polès
This video is probably best presented sans preamble. If you like Eric Andre, John Wilson, and other such purveyors of laughs and groans, you might really like this vintage (read: 90s) excerpt from The Day Today, a British comedy show that pushes buttons most of the world didn’t even know existed back when Nathan Fielder was but a twinkle in some mad scientist’s eye. Watch this for the first time together with your victim lucky friend or date and change the courses of your lives, entwining them together forever.
The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo
Recommended by em seely-katz
With a nonexistent budget and one of the best eyes and ears for comedic timing in contemporary media, Brian Jordan Alvarez created this short series that bests most blockbuster comedies in sheer delightful funniness. The show’s pacing, storyline, and script are all flawless, but its characters are what make Caleb Gallo the most re-watchable series on the web. From a man named Lenjamin who decides to “go bi” to increase his likelihood of succeeding in business as per an article in Forbes, to the inimitable, iridescent, gender-fluid apparition Freckle (who delivers one of the most iconic monologues in Internet video history), each character is both believable and utterly unhinged in subtle ways that smooth out the show’s Dada-ish wrinkles into a fleshed-out narrative. Caleb Gallo brims with truly interesting and unique scenarios, relationship dynamics, and never-preachy meditations on sexuality. This one is movie night-worthy.
Anything by The Nerdwriter
Recommended by @kcocke
The Nerdwriter is a channel that produces condensed but compelling video essays on cultural figures and concepts, sometimes broadly focused and sometimes zeroing in on a specific work or period of a life. Start with this short video essay on Gordon Parks, photographer, director, writer, composer, part-founder of the Blaxploitation genre, and so much more (watch the video!). It’s impeccably, poignantly edited and showcases Parks’ vantage point as both inherently political and extremely, uniquely personal. His photos and video clips Nerdwriter sets to brilliantly-chosen music are gasp-inducingly good, Parks’ story is gripping, and the seven-minute video is short enough to pull out on a dime, giving Parks the prolific recognition he deserves while exposing the lucky person watching with you to an undervalued (in the mainstream) artistic virtuoso and likely spawning a strong desire to rewatch Shaft — which, yes, Parks directed, helping to save the entire Hollywood studio system from bankruptcy in the 70s.
Whitney Houston — Saving All My Love for You (Live on Wogan 1985)
Recommended by @eva.schnrrbrgr
This one’s for the lovers. You could, technically, watch this under-five-minute performance with a “platonic friend,” but the majesty and unflagging sensuality of a young Whitney Houston’s voice might have you looking at each other a little differently by her final note. Tread carefully if showing this video to an enemy, lest the two of you become caught up in a screwball rom-com based off a classic Jane Austen novel. Not a recommended video for deployment at a family reunion. This is a chemical weapon loaded with dopamine and norepinephrine-producing frequencies.
Hilary Duff's awkward Disney commercial outtakes
Recommended by @whatdotcd
Only share this rich text with those of your loved ones blessed with impeccable taste. In the video, a young Hilary Duff repeatedly performs the classic Disney Channel wand-wave of yore, seemingly in a quiet agony as she tries to flick the prop rod in the precise way necessary to form the trademark mouse ears, the only sounds her quavering voice and an unnerving amount of extremely human sniffles, lip smacks, and subtle sighs of ennui. It’s a mesmerizing clip.
Attenborough: the amazing Lyre Bird sings like a chainsaw!
Recommended by clémence polès
David Attenborough, whose dulcet voice is always a soothing joy to listen to, is simply a palate-whetter for the crux of this video, which it slowly and steadily builds towards, then delivers in spades. Sure, the video’s title doesn’t leave much of an element of surprise — at least, THAT’S WHAT YOU’D THINK, but the little Lyre bird overcomes this adversity to deliver the performance of a lifetime. Having expectations almost makes the payoff of this video better.
Terence McKenna — The Alchemical Dream
Recommended by @_laceh_
If you and company are looking for a mind-bending long haul of a video, perhaps after partaking in some homespun “alchemy” yourselves, this loosely documentarian film by the great proponent of psychedelics, Terence McKenna, might be the right move as you wait for your pupils to retract to human dimensions. McKenna’s lackadaisical lilt will lull you into a trancelike state, compounded by baroque, trippy visuals, as he spins out the history of Eastern Europe’s lost secrets of alchemy. Not for the faint of heart or those on a “bad trip” — in that case, nothing beats this soothing video instructional on what to do if you get a “little too high” (no jump scares or bad vibes, simply the best possible tool to have in your trip-sitter [or taker]’s arsenal).
The Roches — Hammond Song
Recommended by em seely-katz
In the 80s, a trio of siblings, Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche, used their shared genetic proclivities towards flawless vocals to unfold an incredible three-part harmony, showcased bast in their Hammond Song, a transcendent hymn about a renegade sibling that is the aural equivalent of the sun at its most orange, cresting over an expanse of land sanctified by the light. One of the most moving musical moments captured on video crescendoes at around the 2:50 timestamp. After watching the video, with its special graininess and the earnest, trying faces of the three sisters shining like clean plates under studio lights, the studio version on Spotify makes for the perfect soundtrack to the end of an accidental all-nighter or sunrise on a road trip.
Anything by Jenny Nicholson
Recommended by @mollymollymomolly
For those of us with a soft spot for the Random Culture of the mid-to late-aughts minus its penchant for being as wildly offensive and edgy as possible, Jenny Nicholson’s movie-length video essays about anything from Christianized remakes of classic stories for church plays (think Jack Sparrow getting crucified as an audience member whispers “oh, no” in the background of a clip Nicholson shares) to a two-an-a-half-hour tour de force analysis of the intricacies of The Vampire Diaries are unimpeachably incredible. Nicholson’s two-to-three uploads a year are made for long nights of scraping at the underbelly of cultural consciousness for its most unhinged facets alongside a companion you’d like to trauma bond with over a deep dive into the agonizingly beyond-parody Dear Evan Hansen movie or a similarly harrowing, yet intelligent and never mean-spirited, watch.
Francis Bacon — The South Bank Show (Portrait 1985)
Recommended by @anakinsella
Trigger Warning: this recommendation contains relevant mentions of gore and body horror.
If you or your video-watching copilot have never seen Francis Bacon’s paintings, imagine a human body turned inside out, the spine of a cow dripping with its rent flesh, images that not even Cronenberg could conjure up, all hewn in oil and canvas with gorgeously fantastical stylism. This video takes a tour through his canon alongside the artist himself, sharing his thoughts: “What horror could I make to compete with what goes on in the world every single day?” Bacon insists his paintings aren’t creations of nightmares but rather affirmations of the inescapably disturbing facets of our society, physicalizing and objectifying the sensation of violence in order to reckon with its intrinsic presence in life.
If this line of artistic thinking piques your interest, travel further down the catacombs with this short video on Paul Thek, a tragically under-appreciated artist eulogized by the likes of Susan Sontag after his death from AIDS, whose most compelling works were waxen sculptures of humanlike cuts of mystery meat. Thek’s relationship to bloody, visceral imagery was not intended to shock, but to detach and re-contextualize: “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers” was Thek’s reaction when he visited the Capuchin catacombs, which are decorated with decaying corpses. He picked up what he’d thought was a piece of paper — it was a human thigh. Thek said “We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.” If the rabbit hole you want to go down is existential in character, these artists’ works and thoughts can truly be catalysts of joyful acceptance.
POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN (1983)
Recommended by em seely-katz
Created by artist Cecilia Condit, this extremely special short film is the obscure source of a prolific TikTok sound. Its loose plot follows friends Sharon and Janice as they are stalked out of a shopping mall by a phantasmic, morphing man. PG, but undeniably mind-melting scenes of violence and lust ensue. Its zero-budget, art house aspirations are heavy-handed, but impossible not to be drawn in by — everything from the uncanny voice-overs to the jarring, gritty cuts crawls under the skin and refuses to grant its host reprieve with unimpeachable quotability: “The three of them had two things in common: violence and perfume.” The 12-minute rollercoaster of a film also happens to be a para-musical. A true work of compelling, ambiguously feminist, unequivocally canon-worthy video art.
Words by em seely-katz