While it’s true that here at “Video Video” central we do often tend to spend a sizeable portion of our allotted space giving the proverbial thumb-to-nose maneuver to various and sundry audio/visual travesties, it is nonetheless our pleasure this month to be able to move that thumb away from our face and into the straight up position since, for some reason or other—pure accident, most likely—a sizeable cluster of rather enjoyable clips have recently surfaced that we felt should be brought to your attention. (Those of you looking for the usual gripes, whines and wheezes are instructed to skip the page for now and come back next month, when the Beastle Boys will get their considerable due.)

Now, obviously, to make a good video it helps if you’ve got a good song to work with, because even the most perfunctory of “performance” clips will work if the song can go the distance, which brings us to our first spotlight clip, ’til tuesday’s “Coming Up Close.” Regular readers of this column know that I wasn’t much of a “Voices Carry” fan (‘‘Shut up/he said/shut up” isn’t exactly my idea of a great chorus), and the more videos they made in which they tried to make singer Aimee Mann look “alluring” in, the less I was liking them still. But this one does it for me because the video—a simple live-footagewit h-the-tune-synched-in— clears everything aside so that you can concentrate on Mann and crew as a band, doing a song that, lo and behold, already has such a strong story line and visual sense that it didn’t need the ucking up it all too likely would have gotten had it been handled differently (guess I didn’t say before that good songs can and do often get ruined by bad videos).