And make it scrappy: Brodzik’s Internet TV can kick your TV’s ass.

A&E Feature

Tune in and Drop Out

by Steven Wells

He’s all, “The revolution will be Balkanized, digitized, compartmentalized, YouTubed-to-buggery-and-back and … I’m sorry, what was the question again?”

You may remember Fishtown-based pop-artist Brodzik from “Godco,” an art project that pulled back the bow at consumerism, advertising and religion. Or Hard Coal, a sober documentary about the feds harassing the last remaining anthracite coal miners in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Now he’s buckling up to launch Scrapple.TV, a Philly-centric Internet TV site showcasing 27 shows across four channels.

The idea of Scrapple.TV, says Brodzik, is to create a sort of three-dimensional multimedia monster alt-weekly and to wage jihad against “lazy retarded fucking shit.” He describes it as, “kinda this Andy Warhol Factory thing.”

Facts about Brodzik: You don’t want to get him going on conspiracy theories. He doesn’t believe 9/11 went down the way “the corporate media” say it did. He meditates and flirts with self-help schemes. He recently got married “John and Yoko style, in our underwear,” in a bed in the honeymoon suite in the MGM Grand in Vegas.

In Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel, a hyper-intelligent superhero named Ozymandias sits in front of a hundred TVs all tuned to different channels to distill the zeitgeist. In Moore’s Arkham Asylum graphic novel, the Joker is diagnosed as insane from mass bombardment of bite-sized gobbets of pop-factoidal noninformation.

Brodzik occupies the no-man’s land between the Joker and Ozymandias.

Brodzik, a big bugger, sits and swivels a chair in his enormous Woodshop Films studio at 420 Green St. The studio’s a mental DIY punk-art workspace. Walls are festooned with scarlet-and-white Mexican wrestler masks and mock-commie propaganda posters of his own design.

He’s 41 years old, stands 6-foot-1, weighs 270 pounds, sports a Grizzly Adams beard and wears mutant banjo player dungarees and size-13 triple-E Fluevog boots. He owns five identical pairs.

Brodzik says he has numerous attention deficit disorders. He’ll contemplate the first three or four words of your question then gently but firmly lean across and seize that question with his King Kong-sized superhands and debone it like a leg of lamb, gnaw on it like a crazy caveman and subject it to increasingly rapid and ever-crazier verbal origami before handing it back to you, as beautifully misshapen and mangled as this metaphor.

By that time, you’ve both forgotten the question.

Scrapple.TV as it exists at the moment is a virtual pirate TV commune featuring every badass art bastard and stared-at-in-the-street crazy Philly street culture freak around. It’s launching loaded up with scores of sometimes disjointed, sometimes mind-bendingly short and often life-threateningly funny videos.

The homeless reviewing movies. In Breakfast at Sulimay’s, already a YouTube hit, old folks review the latest records in Sulimay’s on East Girard Avenue. In Darren’s Basement, an incoherent Darren “Hoppy the Frog” Finizio, Philly pop legend, hosts a chat show from behind a bar in his parents’ basement. In one episode, he’s ripped to the tits on codeine and vodka asking alterna-burlesque performers questions so crude they walk out in disgust.

A spoof ’70s fitness show. Almost certainly virginal punk-metal teenage dudes carrying on about the smell of “raw, fresh pussy” (Wayne’s World with Tourette’s). Philly dandy Lord Whimsy invites you to tour his home in the kick-off episode of Mein Haus.

There’s a mini-doc about a Scrapple.TV film crew getting thrown out of Wing Bowl “for getting too close to Wingador.” A hypnotic mock J-pop-culture show featuring Philly drag king Wang Newton firing on all five surreal cylinders. In Collateral News, a professor pontificates on the possibility that the CIA is spying on antiwar radicals with remote-controlled cockroaches. It’s punk rock for television.

There’s a great documentary-in-progress about tribute bands. “Paying tribute to bands who play tribute,” says Brodzik, a whiz at slogans. “For those who salute rock, we salute.” It’s kinda like having a conversation with a TV that’s remote-controlled by an ADD-addled crack-toddler. Which is definitely fun.

If you don’t leave Brodzik’s company energized and bubbling with ideas and angry with yourself for not already being part of the pirate punk rock psycho-mental DIY empowerment-storm that is Scrapple.TV (and the tidal wave of Web craziness it heralds), then you’re already dead.

Brodzik is walking CPR for the gut, brain, heart and soul.

Some Scrapple.TV films still have a Philebrity TV logo in the corner. When asked about it, Brodzik sighs, rolls his eyes and speaks of Philly blog-god Joey Sweeney (formerly of the PW parish) with a mixture of love, frustration and sadness.

“Musical differences,” they call it in the pop biz. Why oh why can’t people just get along?

So he moved on with his own vision. Brodzik is adamant that now’s the right moment to carpe diem. Brodzik can get Christlike on your ass as he beseeches you to join the chain-busting TV 3.0 revolution. “Right now,” he says, “there’s a gap. Right now there’s no control of the airwaves.”

The Scrapple.TV logo is a smug and smart lookin’ cartoon pig smirking over the legend “unprocessed television.” One imagines pirate chieftains of the old Caribbean used similar language to wrench seamen away from the conventional, rule-ridden world of the Royal Navy and into a world of sudden violence, primitive communism, brute democracy, unfettered gay sex and potentially unlimited booty.

Actually Brodzik says nothing about sex or violence, even as he brutally bends me over the swivel chair and gives me one up the jacksie. Molested by Moses. Buggered by Blackbeard. Cream-pied by Philadelphia’s numero-uno new media guru and punk TV shaman. No, wait. I almost certainly dreamt that. I was not buggered by Marc Brodzik. Not physically, at least. But Brodzik fucks with your mind.

Let’s dip a cautious toe into Brodzik’s stream of consciousness: “Corporate control of the media … click … unfiltered … negative budget … corporate agenda … ultra-niche TV … giant dog costumes … click … trippers ball … genuine fucking good shit … click … socialized medicine doesn’t really work, capitalism is goddamn awful … click … I’m a big fan of the fake-flag theory … Anne Dicker smear video … genetically altered remote-control insects … click click pause … My kids aren’t going to be watching TV.”

What was the question?