The Residents, Fingerprince, Tourniquet of Roses video ideas from Garote 1992

Black screen. As drums fade in, we see in the distance of the left center of the screen a line of marching soldiers, walking towards us. The soldiers get close and then curve into the middle of the screen, so we see a profile of them walking by. They wear black pants with the silver stripe down the outside of the leg, and red coats, mettalic faces, and a tall black hats. The line continues to turn until they are facing away, and they disappear into the distance on the right side of the screen, as if we were viewing a U shaped procession from beheath, looking up at the bottom curve of the U.

The blatting horns come in as the continuing line of soldiers reaches the fading point in the distance, making colorful foglike explosions in reds and blues, that fade like the explosions you see when you look at a bright light and quickly shut your eyes.

When the lyrics "the onions and the fat..." begin, the head of a soldier appears slightly to the right, coming up from bottom of the screen at the neck, wearing a bright red helmet, a bit shorter then the soldiers black ones, with yellow buttons on it's front. The soldiers face is starch white, with a thick black moustache and circular glowing red eyes the color of his helmet. His helmet does not obscure the diminishing point of he line behind him, so the aurora-borealis like effects made by the horns can still mostly be seen.

This soldier says the lyrics, and upon mention of each item, several of each of the items float down from the top of the screen at the distance of the marching line of soldiers, staying in the confines of the center left of the screen so they do not pass behind or above the helmet of the soldier in the foreground. These items bounce off the marching line of soldiers as if they were underwater, hitting "walls" at the feet of the marching line, the top of the picture, almost at the left side of the screen, and on the left side of the large soldiers' helmet- as if they were in a cube of water through the middle of which passes the line of soldiers.

These objects bounce around, including a small painting (appearing at the mention of the word "picture") of the smiling Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland- And slowly the bumps against the "walls" and the soldiers break them into their seperate peices, eventually making a confined floating mess.

When the soldier has said his lyrics, the organ sound should kick in at about the time the "picture" has started floating down. An instant before the organ kicks in, there appears in the empty square of space under the marching soldiers and to the left of the large soldier's face a set of piano keys, seen from above-not very many, just enough so that the height of each key takes up the full vertical expanse of the open square, so the proportions needed to keep the keys the proper shape dictate the number of keys fitting horizontally. There should be enough room for about 10 keys, black included. Single keys press down in sync to the organ playing, but not actually matching the notes played so as to always keep the key that needs to be pressed within the confines of our "screen" keyboard. The picture of the keys changes with the warbling and distortion effects of the notes, so the keyboards will seem to waver, or vibrate, or scatter into a noise pattern and back again.

When the organ ends, the picture of the keys fades a bit and mixes itself up into a noise pattern. At the same time, a new segment of lyrics begins, whereupon the head of an old grey man appears, to the right of the soldiers head, but at a reduced size in proportion. His face is a scowling cross between Don Knotts and Jean-Luc Picard, and is turned partially towards the soldiers head. He is dressed in white, with a chef's cap whose top is horizontally between the knees and feet of the largest portion of the marching line in the background (though the largest portion should be to the left of him, in the middle of the screen, of course.) This old man grumbles out the lyrics, and new items are added to the mess floating around in the line, including several eggs, a disembodied leg, a dish, salt shaker, and silverware.

Upon completion of his lines the old man disappears, and the organ reconstructs itself, fades in again, and plays the next sequence of notes while the new items bounce around and fragment- the dish soon breaks, the eggs crack, spewing glop, and salt gets everywhere. The fork and knife bounce around but do not get damaged.

The soldiers continue to march, the colorful bursts continue to flare out according to the ferocity of the horns. The organ fades again, the soldier says another batch of lines. Upon "pharmacys" a huge bottle of pills floats down from the top of the screen like the other objects, spinning slowly, and upon the "-RIP" in "prescRIPtion", bounces off the "floor" of the cube on the level of the soldiers feet, sending the cap flying off and pills spraying everywhere (but still within the confines of the established "cube").

The keyboard fades as before, and at the point where we hear the clunking sounds of metal drums far to the right and left, we see gold and red flashes all along the left and right edges of the screen, faintly resembling dancing feet and a drum being struck. The color explosions flare up along with the horns, and upon the cymbal crashes three of the line of soldiers' helmets explode like cheap paper fireworks, spraying ribbons everywhere, which fade out- along with most of the fragments of the glass pill bottle, the dish, the picture, and the leg. The helmetless soldiers continue to march like the others, and are soon lost in the distance.

The organ recomposes itself and plays another sequence, but when the notes get loud and low near the end, the keys rapidly melt like cheap plastic and disappear off the bottom of the screen- but on the final slide up and down made by the kayboard, the remaining tip of the melting keyboard left visible detatches and flies up and then down off the screen in sync with the pitchbending.

On "So now" the soldier begins to speak, but an additional head, the exact same as the soldiers except upside-down, appears at the top of the screen directly above the first- a little space is left between the tops of their hats, through which we can still see the waists of the section of soldiers that they otherwise obscure.

Upon the sound effect following "ding-a-ling", the knife and the fork, which have drifted out of the normal "cube" space and between the tops of the two hats, clang rapidly together and disappear, creating gold sparks as they do so.

At mention of the word "rockets", several small white and red rockets fly erraticly up from the bottom of the "cube" space and collide with a large brown cylinder that has floated down from the top at mention of the word "lard", exploding outwards a mass of light brown glop which coats a good number of the soldiers, which continue marching off into the distance unpreturbed. Everything else floating around upon the explosion sticks to the lard coated soldiers, so when the coated series walks away, nothing is left floating about.

Upon "no more to say", the marching line of soldiers ends off in the distance, and eventually all the remaining soldiers walk into the distance and disappear.


The residents, Goosebump, Farmers video sketched out by Garote 1995:

0:00: Weird phlanged noise is a dancing orange-white mass that rolls over itself.

0:35: The mass resolves into a couch. For "ee-ii-ee-ii-oo", little white pegs appear on the couch, like golf tees. Each peg has a black hole near the top like a mouth. The lyricist is a fat white near-bald man with a bulging neck in blue overalls. Looks kind of like curly except dirtier. He rises up erraticly from the bottom, slightly off to the left, and is profiled facing right and slightly away, as if addressing the flying couch.

2:20: The mice are each represented by two flashing green dots each, one slightly smaller than the other. The two green dots are close together but not overlaid, and they stay a uniform distance apart.

2:45: Lyrics are sung by several dancing spiders in the lower left corner, who descend from silvery strands at the left-top. These spiders have slanted yellow eyes like the "Kith" in Ultima VIII. A pair of female legs, not visible above the knee and encased in extemely thick stockings, step rapidly around the green "mice" as they turn figure eights and make loops. On "carving knife" we see an arc of flashing steel for a second near the middle of the screen and one of the "mice" is cut in half (i.e. the two dots separate). The stockinged feet half walked off the screen a bit before this. One spider breaks away and begins chasing down one of the scampering pairs of dots.

3:09: On the repetition of the lyrics, one spider leans close and dances about even more frantically (spitting saliva about), as the spider chasing the mice catches one and sucks it completely into it's body with a little green probiscus. Eventually the spider catches all but one of them, which flashes lonesomely in the middle of the screen to the chirping noises and eventually fades away.

3:30: Couch dances away to the left, the pops are represented by little yellow circles that "pop" into existence and fade into donut shapes and disappear.

3:44: Unclear here. Dancing masses of yellow darting halfway 'round a short red ractangular stick to the rythm of the lyrics. A wavering green farmhouse in the background, and little arcs of bright yellow, pinstripe thin and clumped together, sprout here and there on the screen like hay.

4:15: The lyricist rises back up, but appears to be convulsing a bit as he shouts his lyrics. He melts into a red waxy mass shortly after and goes careening around the screen.

4:25: The pegs jump off the couch, which fades away. They turn into little dancing indian icons. The icons are profiles of a dancing indian cheif, cartoony. They are two-dimensional, so when they turn around they become thin as if two-dimensional. Like the paper props in a shooting gallery.

4:33: The red mass becomes a two dimensional "leprechaun"ish figure, like the "Fighting Irish" logo viewed form the front and extremely squashed. It is wearing simple black glasses and is behind the prancing indians. As this figure counts, the indians line up one at a time in a straight row runs in a repeating loop over itself, as if in a shooting gallery. The background pulses a low orange, spackled with purple, to the drums.

4:47: As soon as the squat figure begins the word "boys", he slides up and dives headfirst over the "row" of indians, in one smooth curve. He, too, is two-dimensional, but the apex of his curving dive is not visible (off the top of the screen) so we don't get so see him turn "invisible." As he descends in front of the curve and quickly off the bottom of the screen, headfirst, he becomes slightly transparent so we can see the indians behind him.

4:48: Instantly he pops up, right side up, still slightly transparent. He is holding a brown stick leveled at the row of indians, and his hands grasp it so that even though we are seeing his translucent "face", we can tell he is facing the other way (towards the looping row of indians.) He counts backwards and blows away an indian on each count with the brown stick which we now see is a shotgun. As each indian shatters like cheap glass, the background flares a bright, aggressive orange-red and the purple spackles (which change location on each shot) are now dark red, trailing spackles resembling blood.

5:03: After blowing away the indians, the gun drops and the translucent figure rushes towards us so only it's eyes and mouth fit in the picture. At the end of this zoom, it completed the word "boys", and then breaks up into soft-edged framgents that fade rapidly away with a frying action like butter on a skillet.


The Residents, Goosebump, Twinkle, brought to you at nearly the same time as Farmers by Garote.

0:00: This one contains many camera angles that are hard to explain, but the setting is simple. Fade and focus in to a miniscule valley at night, surrounded by threatening, lifeless gray mountains with elaborate, pointy spires. There is blackness behind the initial peaks of the mountains, as if this valley were the only location in the universe. In the center of the valley, occupying almost all of the open space, is a densely packed cluster of wooden buildings. All the windows are dark. One triangular wooden spire juts up from the center of this extremely "cozy" town.

0:20: The camera moves in on the town, which appears to be deserted, and slides down one of the narrow streets. The ground is light brown, covered in little pebbles like one would see looking closely at the beach. Everything is very very slightly out of focus, to hint at the possibility that this whole scene may be immersed in water, may in fact be in a glass snow-globe.

0:42: The camera tilts slowly up and we see in the blackness above the edges of the buildings a thick scattering of stars. I don't care to describe the elaborate tilts and pans of the camera at this time, but the points is that eventually we fly up to the group of stars, that is splayed accross the sky as if the edge of the sky arced down to connect with the upper spires of the mountains. We get right up next to one, which is a fuzzy white mass like a cotton ball, but shifting about like a huge ball of tissue paper in a toilet. We go above it, as if standing on it, and look down over its edge and see the town spread out disectly below. Only visible against the shifting mass of the star is a tiny black thread, that we see snap in the middle. The "star" begins to fall, and re ride it for a fraction of a second and then tear away from it at a 90 degree angle to its desecent line. We curve down around the inside of the "globe", seeing the floor of the valley tilt and expand due to the effect. Because of our angle, everything is upside down as we zoom through the town and up to the base of the "church" (the building with the spire). From here we tilt up and see the white "star" approaching fast. It grows too big for the size ratio to be correct, and drowns the entire view (perhaps the entire town) in soft white light before everything fades away.