I don’t see what the big deal is with beautiful girls. I see beautiful girls every day, all over the place. It’s overwhelming. At the store, on the street, in other cars, near my house, sometimes in it, and it’s too much, really entirely too much.
I remember we saw one girl in high school. She was sitting at her desk crying and she was so beautiful, just so beautiful, that I fell down. We all fell down. We didn’t want her to stop so we all tried to lie very still there on the ground, peeking sometimes to see her. We tried not to let her notice because then she might have stopped and it would have been all our fault. If I had been more bold, I would have collected some of her tears. I would use them now to make tea, so that I could feel beautiful sometimes too.
At the time, though, she was so silent and we were all so silent and eventually she slid out of her desk and joined us on the floor. I’m not sure if she noticed we were there, we were trying very hard not to let her. After hours and hours, somebody got up to pee. The teacher coughed and said he had to go get coffee, and it was all ruined, nothing like this would ever happen again. The girl started to make sounds, not very loud ones, but she used her whole body. Our reverence seemed so grotesque then that it made me feel sick, like I was going to vomit. I started to cry too.
Everyone rushed to comfort me, and that is how I learned that I was not beautiful, and probably would never be so. That was the same year I learned to crochet but I don’t remember how to do that anymore.
On Wednesday night, riding a crashing wave of Joose and Bushmills, I joined some lovely folks and went to see Jonathan Richman play.
It. Ruled. He's so completely charming and sweet onstage. The Mint is a strange little venue - sort of an older crowd than I expected - but I felt a lot of togetherness. A lot of drunken togetherness.
After the show, I asked Mr. Richman if he, like John Waters, would sign my tits. Like the true gent he is he respectfully declined, so I asked him to sign my arms instead. He was much more into that. Outside we all hugged him and waved for an awkwardly long time as he hopped into the passenger side of a Subaru.
Later I called a number - I'm not sure who it belongs to, but we didn't talk for very long. MYSTERIES! It was probably Mr. Richman himself. "Oh, hey there Jonathan! Super fun meeting you tonight!" "Wow, it sure was nice to meet you too, Liz." "Gee, you're the best. Talk to you soon, Jon Jon." "Bye now, Lizzy-boo. Sweet dreams."
Here's Jonathan (we're friends now) when he was young and experimental:
Oh, how I love love love him...p.s. Tommy Larkin was on the skins on Wednesday as well:
Don't mind the creepy buzzing, just consider that the audio manifestation of all the effort Barbie's expending by beaming this to the present from the late 70s/early 80s. Barbie powers the internet - I don't know if you knew that. I particularly like the "Polynesian Stereotype" Barbie. She's pretty. I want one.
Last night I went to Spaceland and finally saw The Happy Hollows play live - love their new album Spells - and I was super excited about going. Unfortunately, although the company was top-notch, I was really not feeling their live show. They are great performers (that front-woman is an animal, y'all) and everything but...eh. The studio sound didn't really translate. They reminded me of a Rainer Maria retread, and much as I liked them back in the day, the world doesn't really need another. C'est la vie. Still, I'll probably give them at least one more shot. Maybe it was an off night.
But you know what really gets my goat?
This morning Tyler was taking our new puppy for a walk. We adopted her just about a week ago. The vet says she's a Pharaoh Hound. Look at how cute she is:
we are thinking of naming her, "Mama Cass"
or maybe, "Lady Anne"
or..."Janet Reno." Girl is a diva, that's all.
Anyway, this guy is standing in his yard watching his small children play on the sidewalk. As Tyler and sweet 'lil pup walk up he shouts, "Out of the way kids! There's a pit bull!" The kids pay him no mind and, then, as Tyler walks by, the man shouts at Tyler, "If you have a pit bull, and you see kids, you need to CROSS THE STREET!"
Tyler, quick-witted lad that he is, replied, "First of all, she's not a pit bull. And even if she were - your kids are playing on the sidewalk." And away he went.
So, all discussion of the whale-sized sense of entitlement some parents feel concerning public property and their precious little darlings aside, I think the real question is: What are some other ways to respond to this sort of asshole?*
- "If you have a pit bull, and you see kids, you need to CROSS THE STREET!"
- "If you have ugly kids, you need to keep them in the house."
- "If you have a pit bull, and you see kids, you need to CROSS THE STREET!" - "My dog never eats shit."
Eh...I can't think of any more right now. The more I think about it, I can understand why that guy was rude. He's worried about his kids - but, dude, you're the one who won't let them play on the 'pristine' grass in your yard. Get yer priorities in order, jeez.
ALSO I FINALLY SET UP MY RECORD PLAYER AGAIN! NOW THIS HOUSE IS A HOME!
*Obviously, all dogs should be under control when they are in a public place - and that doesn't just mean on a leash dragging a person along. Dogs can absolutely be dangerous, but walking calmly by is a very different thing from say, zig-zagging around, barking wildly, or frankly, even getting within the personal space of somebody who hasn't consented to pet the dog. Tyler actively made sure he had our girl on a short leash, so that she couldn't even sniff at the kids, because we don't entirely know what she's like yet. I know somebody who was attacked very seriously by a dog when he was a little boy. It was horrible, really scary. But it wasn't that the dog was walking by - it was out of control. Oh, shit, I don't know. I'm just saying, all dogs could be dangerous, not just PIT BULL SPAWNS OF SATAN, and so are cars, and so is the world - WHY YOU TALKIN SHIT ABOUT MY PRINCESS?
Last week, I let a friend of mine borrow my copy of Desperate Living - he recently told me he'd been in a play with Mink Stole (OMG!) and yet had never seen the movie. Well, I had to rectify that situation. Thing is, he really didn't like it. Said it felt like "some bad student film." Which isn't NOT true...but, at any rate, I responded in unexpectedly long-winded fashion. Before I get to what I said, let's have some context, shall we?
First off, no Divine here - she was on tour and couldn't be there for the shoot. So, that's unfortunate, but on the upside, we do get Liz Renay. I also just learned this from Wikipedia: "This was also Waters' first film without David Lochary, who bled to death after accidentally cutting himself whilst on PCP just before production." Sounds about right.
The film opens with Peggy (Mink Stole) going crazy:
"SODOMITES! CAUGHT RIGHT IN A SEX ORGY!" "NUDE, NUDE NUDE!" "OH GOD, THE CHILDREN ARE HAVING SEX!" Hilarious.
Then Peggy murders her husband (George Stover), and Grizelda (Jean Hill) goes on the lam with her:
"I DON'T WANT NO WHITE MAN LOOKING AT MY TAMPAX!" I love how Mink Stole is about five feet away from her husband's head when she "hits" him with the bottle.
So they go on the lam, some gross stuff happens, and they get a choice: prison or an outlaw town outside Baltimore known as Mortville. Good ol' Mortville. Home of our kind of people. Oh, who am I kidding, Wikipedia does a fine job with the rest of the plot: Most of Mortville's social outcasts — criminals, nudists, and sexual deviants — conspire to overthrow Queen Carlotta (the incomparable Edith Massey), who banishes her daughter Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) after she elopes with a garbage collector, who is later shot to death by the guards. Coo-Coo hides in Peggy and Grizelda's house with her dead lover. Peggy calls for the guards who fight with Grizelda, soon the house collapses and Grizelda dies. Peggy Gravel, however, joins the queen in terrorizing her subjects, even infecting them (and Princess Coo-Coo) with rabies.
Eventually, Mortville's denizens, led by Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), overthrow Queen Carlotta and execute Peggy Gravel by shooting a gun up her anus. To celebrate their freedom, the townsfolk roast Queen Carlotta on a spit and serve her, pig-like, on a platter with an apple in her mouth."
Filthy, filthy stuff. And wonderful. Here's the ending:
"Raaaaa-bieeees!" There's a very sweet little scene in here with Liz Renay preaching love and acceptance. She's a real crusader for goodness. And how 'bout that castle, huh? "Give 'er the chomp of life." All these Murrland accents are making me nostalgic. "We don't like social cuh-limbers innnnnn Mortville!"
Anyway, here's my argument for Desperate Living:
"Well, like I said before - Desperate Living is aggresively bad. What I mean is, I don't think Waters or anybody in the cast or crew set out to make anything like a "good" movie, at least not in any traditional sense. Their goal was more about making something grotesque and depraved and putting it on the silver screen, thereby subverting and probably literally shitting on concepts of beauty or glamor that had always left them out entirely. They were fighting a war on propriety, albeit in a sort of goofy and club-footed way, which is probably what I find so funny and charming about the films. Maybe charming is the wrong word.
In his HBO special (was that the one you'd watched?) Senor Waters tells a story about how he and Divine did a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination back in high school - way, way too soon. When Divine's mom found the bloodied Jackie outfit in the trunk of her car, Divine couldn't say, "Well, I like to wear women's clothes. I'm a big ol' drag queen, maybe even trans. Just not sure yet." Instead, she said, "I am Jackie Kennedy!" And I think that's the meat of what I like about Waters, and about Divine, and on down the line towards, I don't know, even Gwar or the Dead Milkmen - taking the exaggeration to a step beyond its logical conclusion is very funny to me.
The grotesque as just as compelling as the glamorous, right? Maybe it is even more so, if the obsession with Octomom and Jon & Kate (or, say, attendance at hangins' or dime museums back in the day) is any indication. I guess the appeal of Waters films, particularly his earlier, junkier work, is that of the freak show taking over and hacking away at the examples of normative influence, revealing it (and them) to be just as freakish and disgusting as the bottom-feeders we're usually rooting for in these films, that we (or I) find that we relate to. That the films are literally of poor quality sort of adds to that, to me.
Ha! Well, I had a lot more to say about that than I thought I did. Brevity is the soul of somebody else, certainly not me. In any case, Desperate Living is, in all honesty, a lot like a bad student film, but I sure like it a lot. So I don't blame you. To each his own and all that. " EDIT: It's actually really funny how earnest I am bout John Fucking Waters. SHIT IS MEANINGFUL, YOU KNOW?
After watching these clips, though, I just can't understand why anybody wouldn't love this little gem of a film. Fuckin' hilarious. As "B movies" go, I suppose John Waters is pretty pedestrian, and not so far underground. But who cares? This stuff was loony then, and it's still delightfully, decadently, grotesque. 5 stars.
Tyler made this for me, and I think it properly illustrates exactly how I feel when I think about this PIECE OF ART/SHIT
My very favorite movie (amongst many, many favorite movies) is probably High Society. Released in 1956, it was directed by Charles Walters (he won an Oscar for Lili - which I have, incidentally, never seen) and the score is by Cole "Muthafucka" Porter. It stars Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Celeste Holme and, of course, Louis Armstrong. I mean, what else do you really need to know? It's the bee's knees, y'all.
I was going to post the trailer here - but it's really, really long and boring, which is the opposite of what this movie is. I mean, dude, this is how the movie starts:
This is also a favorite number of mine, both in the movie, and in movies generally, in large part because these guys just look like they're having so much fun. It stands as perhaps the greatest dick-measuring contest ever caught on film.
Anyway, it's a great movie. I sure wish I owned it. So, now everybody knows what to get me for Christmas. Luckily, I have Funny Face to tide me over until then. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaffpKAYcw won't embed, but it is totally worth it. Wish I could get the "avant garde" number Kay Thompson and Fred Astaire do in the philosopher's loft...but we can't have EVERYTHING we want, now can we?
Mrs. Elvsted: No. And that's why I think it must have been that redheaded singer that at one time he --
Hedda: Yes, quite likely.
Mrs. Elvsted: I remember they used to say about her that she carried loaded weapons.
