Hasselhoff vs. Boards of Canada

Posted by Sara Churchville May 7, 2007

So, in case you missed it, “The Hoff”—he whose musical career represents the squirming underbelly of globalization, the nagging reminder that there remain dark pockets of humanity whose tastes and preferences will never dovetail with those of the enlightened world—has been legally suspended from visiting his teenage daughters.

The offending forensic exhibit: a videotape of the former Baywatch star trying and largely failing to eat a fast-food hamburger. The shirtless singer mumbles and grunts as the sanctimonious and SAT-prepping seed of his loins grills him about his eating and, primarily, his drinking habits.

His singing and acting habits she touches upon only insofar as they are threatened by the aforementioned drinking habits.

The “performance,” as I choose to characterize it, is funny and shocking and pitiable in equal measures, and there’s also something seedily familiar about it. Ham tapes Noah as the Arkmeister fumbles with a hamburger, anyone?

Just another one to add to the growing list of “aging stud loses shizz in front of kid” moments, you might think, and I might be apt to agree with you were it not for another videotaped gem I found recently.

What you’re about to witness is something infinitely more inexplicable and far more frightening than a mere drunken fast-food sit-in on the floor of a rich man’s condo (fast food that, as a sad codicil to a sorry will, is not from Fatburger or In-N-Out Burger or even Jack in the Box…respectable places all, where a hard-partying L.A. celebrity need feel no shame at being photographed exiting the drive-through—but a Wendy’s in Las Vegas, where, we are somehow not surprised to learn, the Hoff now lives, apparently at considerable inconvenience to his children).

Click, if you dare, and open yourself to the possibilities of a counterfactual yet uncomfortably plausible universe where Sanjaya has won, Gliese 581c is the new Prague, and Alec Baldwin’s watch costs more than your car, aka KITT.

Messieurs/dames, je vous présente: David Hasselhoff’s rendition of “Blue Bayou” vs. Boards of Canada’s “An Eagle in Your Mind.”