DREGUBLOG CATEGORY ARCHIVE: Egg-Hurling
Sunday, February 22, 2009
YES, WE HAVE NO OSCAR MELTDOWN
WELL, it's a sorry state of affairs, my Dear Fiends.
Salon.com, never all that financially stable to begin with, has finally slashed its A&E budget straight to the cutting-room floor. They will have an Oscar re-cap, but it will be written by someone on the staff, ending my annual tradition of a post-Oscar all-nighter that has endured, more or less, for over a decade.
Those of you outraged by the indecency of this have my blessing to complain to the editor, Joy Press.
On a brighter note, I was pleased to win Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match earlier this week, during which Opium Magazine's Todd Zuniga Twittered:
There is also a somewhat blurry but evocative picture.
(Actually, Todd, it was a switchblade... and I was only too glad not to have to use it on the beautiful and talented Andrew Sean Greer.)
I also wrote a nice article for the Times about Brooks Brothers Black Fleece, the line designed by the inspirationally uptight Thom Browne.
So all is not a total loss, even if I didn't get to wax rhapsodic about the long-anticipated comeback of the immortal Mickey Rourke I predicted several years ago in this article, below (which once appeared in an online magazine which shall be nameless).
Hollywood may rest easy tonight, knowing I've been unfairly crowbarred in the knees... but I shall return.
Cintra
MICKEY ROURKE - EXISTENTIAL FONZIE PUNCHES THE MIRROR
Phillip Andre Rourke, Jr. was born on September 16 in 1950, but some reports claim it was 1956. He was a tough kid from Schenectady: a boxer who studied acting at the Lee Strasberg school, then went back to boxing, and is presently trying to get back into acting. At his peak, women loved him because he was better than anybody at smirking in a way that looked like his hard-on gave him terrible emotional pain. Rourke's career is notable for the heady price he paid for his eccentricities, the most expensive of which being that his credibility as an actor was labeled with a scarlet question mark. But this, by and large, is a bad rap.
Good dramatic actors, who need to access a vast color-wheel of emotion, are often intolerably volatile, hypersensitive nut-jobs in real life. To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, it is also helpful if they aren't terribly smart. Rourke appears to have both of these drawbacks going for him; it is an equation that spells temporary magic onscreen and usually results in terrible suffering offscreen . The very same explosive emotionality which attracts Hollywood executives at the beginning of an actor's career are the seeds of the actor's own demise when he is inevitably labeled "difficult" by the unsympathetic corporate drones who run the movie business. Personal histrionics, a "difficult" reputation and a bad habit of ridiculously sleazy script choices have overwhelmed Rourke's public image to the point that nobody thinks of him as a serious actor with a wide dramatic range. Although many of his 43 movies are disposable, a look at the defining films of his career with an objective X-Ray eye reveals that his acting is a lot better than he got credit for.
Rourke broke through in 1981, Brad-Pitt-In-Thelma-And-Louise-esquely, as an arsonist in the sweaty erotic thriller Body Heat. His tough-guy posturing and glowering, pretty-boy menace made the Hollywood Beast think he might come in handy for a while.
Rourke hit his early Rourkish stride in 1982's Diner as "Boogie," the inveterate gambler-cum-playboy hairdresser. He doesn't fit in with the overall flavor of the film; all of the other actors are on a chatty 78 RPM and Rourke is on a self-consciously heavy 33. He seems to need to be too cool for the movie. As a result, he looks isolated, coming off like the one actor that wasn't dining with the other actors and demanded to eat in his own trailer. But he does have a certain gravity.
His pouty lower lip is used to great effect. There is an almost androgynous appeal to him here; he is wearing more eyeliner than Ellen Barkin. Female audiences went ape for him as a slimy, effeminate cockmaster, and so did the National Society of Film Critics, who gave him a trophy for the role.
When my friend and I were teens in 1983, we saw Rumble Fish. We had never seen a male movie star the compellingly enigmatic sexual equivalent of Mickey Rourke as "The Motorcycle Boy." We were angsty and thought we were sophisticated -- the commercial constructs of teen lust didn't work on us; we were immune to Matt Dillon. But Mickey Rourke pressed all the right teen heartache buttons - not the actor so much as the role: a soft spoken, self-loathing peer leader , poetically depressed, colorblind, half-deaf; a torturously sober and intellectual hipster, doomed to an ignominious small-town fate. Francis Ford Coppola was in his S.E. Hinton phase and nicely inspired; Rumble Fish is an art film for teenagers, and it works. Time-lapse photography skitters black and white clouds fast across the sky to vamping snare-drums, to suggest the overabundance of time in youth quickly becoming the lack of time in old age. The sad smile on Rourke's elvish, acne-scarred face reveals that the Motorcycle Boy, with his greasy hair and unfiltered cigarette, intimately knew the secrets of Man's Frailty, and it confined him to the hell of infinite pity. "That's a deep motherfucker, man," says the old black guy in the pool hall, of The Motorcycle Boy, (as we angry beatnik girls liquefied in the audience). "He's like... royalty in exile."
The role, now, is exemplary of the best use of the damaged charm of Mickey Rourke: Existential Fonzie. Sensitive, empathetic and sorrowful, with a junkie's whisper-soft voice during even the worst emotional violence.
Rourke's next big role, in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), is more of his tough cookie, sexy criminal schtick. The oily pompadour that is his hair in virtually every movie reaches its most outrageous elevation here.
Daryl Hannah is his dimwit aerobic instructor girlfriend whose role primarily consists of pulling her pants on and off. This film marks the beginning of a standard Rourke movie theme: a basic dislike for women, or at least the stupid female roles that always seem to disgrace his scripts. He has all the power: Daryl slaps him, he smiles that Fuck You smile, flips up the collar of his leather blazer, and walks away. She bleats "Charlie!" in her midriff leotard, he keeps walking. It seems that this role inspired Hollywood to cast Rourke whenever they needed a guy to casually and cruelly dominate whimpering, undressed females.
If any one sin could be said to be responsible for the downfall of Mickey Rourke, that sin would probably be Vanity. While managing, to his credit, not to fall into the single-character, one-dimensional tough-guy glue-trap that macho actors like DeNiro or Nicholson sunk into, Rourke suffered from a different kind of hubris: though essentially an emotionally fearless actor with commendable flair for vulnerability, naked despair and believable accents, he continually chose characters who were either fucking or fighting.
Rourke's credibility was most harmed, it seems, by his slide into mainstream softcore.
9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Rourke's recognized star-turn, features him as "John," a smirking Wall Street sadist.
He feeds Kim Basinger like a baby, he buys her toys and balloons and does cruel and nasty sex to her. The movie is grotesque; Basinger's character is shriekingly infantile, down to pigeon toes and white ankle socks, and absurdly obedient; Rourke is just creepy, and the role seems to tap into a dangerous reservoir of abject misanthropy and scumminess in the actor. It's not all his fault; Basinger comes off as so shrill, moronic and embarrassing, at a certain point you are rooting for Mickey to hit her with a belt (Basinger is said to have referred to her co-star, for unspecified reasons, as "the human ashtray.").
Rourke comes off as ugly and jaded in 91/2 Weeks in a way that suggests a deeper level of psychic disease than his character alone is responsible for. Perhaps he resented being the vehicle which brought S&M home to the office girls of America. Who could blame him.
1987 was, for kabalistic Hollywood reasons, the Year of the Rourke, with 3 of his better movies coming out one atop the other.
Angel Heart (1987) offered Rourke a meaty role and a healthy return to being 'actorly' - but his respectable performance was buried beneath the public's tittering shock at his willingness to enact "controversial," "X-rated" pumping-buttock sex shots with a thrashing Lisa Bonet.
Rourke pulls off an entirely believable Brooklyn accent, and has a very legitimate moment of bottomless despair as the Faustian plot is revealed. Angel Heart is a good example, among many, of Rourke's ability to pull off emotionally gymnastic roles; he never shrank from painful and weepy territory that fellow Tough but Pretty actors like Steve McQueen deliberately avoided. Sensationalism and soft porn robbed him, here, of what might have been real kudos for his skill.
Rourke is most universally beloved for his portrayal of Charles Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski in Barfly. While a bit over-the-top, the role is funky, ugly and lovable in a way his other characters were not. Audiences must have breathed a collective sigh of relief to finally see Rourke in a role that wasn't consumed by self-loathing.
Barfly contains the closest Rourke comes, in his entire career, to is a moment of unqualified happiness, during the oft-quoted victory toast: "To my friends!"
Bukowski wrote about Rourke, giving him the name Jack Bledsoe in his roman-a-clef "Hollywood," a book about the making of Barfly. Bukowski liked Rourke, and was fairly dazzled by him. There is a good scene wherein Bledsoe (Rourke) has brought his obnoxiously fabulous Hollywood Harley Davidson crew to the set, and is introducing them to Bukowski:
"His buddies leaned against the bar, backs to the bar, facing the crowd. They each held a beer bottle, except for Jack who had a 7-Up. They were dressed in leather jackets, scarves, leather pants, boots....
Jack introduced us to each of his buddies.
'This is Blackjack Harry...'
'Hi, man...'
'This is The Scourge...'
'Hello there...'
'This is the Nightworm...'
'Hey, hey!'
'This is Dogcatcher...'
'Too much!'
'This is 3-Ball Eddie...'
'God damn...'
'This is FastFart...'
'Pleased to meet ya...'
'And Pussykiller...'
'Yeah...'
And that was it. They all seemed to be fine fellows but they looked a little on-stage..."
Starring in Prayer for the Dying (1987) gave Rourke a lifelong affection for the IRA - he bears a tattoo of their emblem.
Homeboy, 1988, which Rourke helped write, lands the actor close to himself; he plays dumb-ass, luckless boxer "Johnny Walker," a punchy, feral, kicked junkyard dog. One gets the feeling that this is a character Rourke really identifies with; turbulent, violent and rebellious in an ill-advisedly Quixotic way. He utilizes a Bill Murray, dislocated Caddyshack jaw, and a totally acceptable Southern accent. The scene with the most unctuous music involves Johnny Walker having an argument, and jumping out of a car on a bridge. He tries to beat up the car; he rails, he threatens traffic, and ends up walking drunk in driving rain in the middle of a busy road. One feels these raging moments of worthless self-sabotage are familiar Rourke territory. His co-star, flat-faced Deborah Feuer, became his wife for a little while - their chemistry seems lopsided and doomed, even onscreen.
Johnny Handsome, 1989 while a dumb movie, probably features Rourke's most moving performance. During a scene when the doctors take his bandages off, the man who was formerly a hydrocephalic monster with massive cranio-facial deformities is suddenly revealed in a post-surgery miracle as having Mickey Rourke's face. He cries with joy and gratitude. It is particularly moving when you consider that in Rourke's real life, shortly thereafter, he started out as a man with a beautiful face and ended up undergoing numerous surgeries and voluntary beatings to become unusually scary-looking. One imagines what he felt when his real bandages came off, after having lived this moment on film.
Francesco, 1989, wherein Rourke is cast in the unlikely role of St. Francis of Assisi, is notable only for a scene where the saint is rolling around naked in snow and his tattoo is visible.
Wild Orchid (1990 ) is a miserably stupid and sleazy wank film with the dubious distinction of being the place where the lives of Rourke and model Carré Otis collided head-on, like a big motorcycle accident.
Here, Rourke's outsides began to match his tumultuous insides.
His face-lift looks too fresh - he's having trouble moving his mouth, and his forehead, so expressive in Diner and Rumblefish, is way too smooth, motionless and shiny, like a balloon dipped in Clinique bronzer. He can't smirk anymore. His eyes seem pinched; his crow's feet are disturbingly gone. His eyebrows are too light, and they don't move. Eye jobs, for the first year at least, make the recipient's eyes appear smaller; they lose any roundness below during the surgical elimination of under-eye-bags. Rourke's black eyes lost their ability to transmit emotion.
The movie is wretched in that it isn't even viable as smut; there's way too much abysmally stupid "dialogue" and "plot." It boasts perhaps the worst script ever, not helped by the fact that Otis delivers lines like a one-armed UPS guy delivers aquarium tanks. The entire movie is one long wait for the smutty finish.
There is a whole lot of panting-foley, particularly during the "controversial" final scene wherein Rourke's box-browned abdominal muscles gnash and dilate while grinding into Otis' pornographically rectangular strip of pubic hair.
The legend that was "leaked" from the "set" was that the two "actors" couldn't "control themselves" during this big sex scene, and despite presence of the entire camera crew had "actual penetration." Yeh right.
What did happen was that Rourke and Otis ended up together, sharing, by all reports, a bloody kind of soul connection. "We were both really wounded kids," a now sober and "deliberately celibate" Otis recently explained to Christopher Goodwin of the London Times.
This is the period of time where Rourke stopped having anything effeminate about him at all. One wonders if the inevitable rumors that he was gay triggered some kind of barbaric, street-kid homophobia that made him kill off the sexily feminine, feline aspects of his persona.
Otis, around this time, was a Calvin Klein model, when the designer was going through his 'biker' phase; arguably inspired by the heavy Harley Davidson fetishizing-scene that was happening in Hollywood at the time, spearheaded by Rourke and Otis. I was unable to find any information on Rourke's artistic photography hobby, which flourished during this time, which primarily featured nude, black-and-white shots of Otis covered in motor oil.
In 1991, in addition to making the appalling (and double-appallingly popular) Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, the film where Rourke's abysmal tough-guy hubris came to roost and killed all of his artistic credibility, Rourke quit acting, which he derided for being "a womanly profession," and started boxing professionally again. Whatever his loutish comments, a closer investigation suggests that he was deeply hurt by the fact that Hollywood was not a meritocracy, and that the system, media and machine alike, never recognized that he really was a good actor.
Though he won several fights, he suffered a broken cheekbone, two broken ribs, a broken toe, four broken knuckles, and a split tongue and a mashed nose. By the time he stopped boxing in 1995, he was broke, and his Beverley Hills home was repossessed for failure to make payments. He had to go back to the movies.
Rourke and Otis were deeply in love, but really, really bad for each other. They married in 1992 and divorced in 1994, but reconciled shortly thereafter. He stalked her. There was a well-publicized incident of Otis being beaten black and blue that resulted in Rourke's arrest in 1994; previous to that there was an "accidental shooting" wherein Otis took a bullet while hanging around a film set with Rourke in Arizona. Otis now claims she was strung out on heroin a good deal of that time in response to Mickey's numerous infidelities. She is now a sober, rehabilitated Buddhist and in-demand plus-size model.
Rourke has spent a good deal of time over the years groveling to get her back.
I used to see them at Gold's Gym in Hollywood a few times a week, in '95; it was the general consensus that they looked like they'd been living on nothing but Ho Ho's and bourbon for the last 18 months, and in Mickey's case, steroids. Rourke became enraged at "China Beach" star Jeff Kober for speaking to Otis during this time, and gave him a black eye in front of the gym.
In 1997, Rourke was reduced to making Another 9 1/2 Weeks, wherein 'John', the same sadist, is looking for kicks, but rubbing blondes' nipples with a straightrazor just doesn't do it for him anymore.
His face is ruined. His upper lip is freakishly swollen, his nose puffy and flat, and one cheekbone protrudes like a purple walnut from a combination of boxing and ill-advised surgeries. Like a bad portrait tattoo of himself, Rourke, at this point, is only recognizable when you squint. His voice has a strangely alcoholic, gasping lilt to it, like Jan Michael Vincent's or Harry Dean Stanton's. The producers would have been wise to replace Rourke: he has no chi left. Angie Everhardt drags him around the screen like an arthritic dog. The worthless, if artsily-shot film is a horrifying document of how Rourke's inner demons defaced him. The French, apparently, had no problem with this devolved version of Rourke, and loved him more than ever at this point.
I saw him once in the Harry Cipriani restaurant at the Sherry Netherland in NYC in 1997. He looked like his head had been sculpted out of wet cat food. He was huge and red, his face looked minced and swollen; his hair had been aggressively re-blonded, and he resembled no one so much as the apocalyptic cartoon character RanXerox; almost wholly unrecognizable.
One wonders if Rourke might have been happier if he could have stomached more bad, cartoonish, Hollywood Stallone roles like Rambo, or Russell Crowe-type roles that called for more acting, fewer fisticuffs and less sexual boasting. His magazine portraits now, puckering in thuggy gymwear and stocking cap, suggest that he has become, in real life, a character much less complex and interesting than most of those he played onscreen. He consciously and aggressively gives off the impression that he is a dumbass tough-guy; this seems to underline that he is insecure and haplessly needy. The tougher a guy looks and act, as a general rule, the more frightened he is by life's searing personal confrontations.
The gym muscles, cosmetic surgeries and box-tanning that have become Rourke's armor only suggest how thin his skin really is. This is a man crucified by an emotional volume knob that is always on 11, who, I reckon, has done more than his share of crying. Ultimately, all the available information on Rourke paints a sad picture of an incurable pussy hound who stuck his pretty face in front of fists and butchers until it wasn't pretty anymore, who fucked up the biggest love of his life by having no self control, and screwed up his career by being unable to exact a mature compromise with the contemptible Hollywood status quo.
But for an actor superficially labeled with an idiotic "Bad Boy" image, he didn't spare himself by coasting by on a ridiculous image. His heart was full of bloody holes that he generously shared with audiences, much like a cat brings headless chipmunks to the door as an act of love. He worked hard, and turned out some pearls that the swine never picked up on.
I read one report of Rourke staggering down the street in LA with several Chihuahuas, talking to himself. He got kicked out of a coffee shop for bringing his little dogs in, and without argument, went staggering off, mumbling , unable to ungrip his little dog friends long enough to buy himself coffee. Men with torrential feelings invariably become lonely monsters. One can only hope that now that nobody wants to see Mickey Rourke's vigorously clenching white ass in flagrante anymore, Hollywood can begin to appreciate and nurture his genuinely interesting and flexible talent for a certain flavor of desperate truth.
(For more information on Mickey Rourke, I recommend an excellent article: "Call of the Mild" by Jessica Berens, available on the "Simply Mickey Rourke" website)
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Friday, January 9, 2009
A CONCERNED MESSAGE TO JOHN ZIEGLER
Dear Mr. Ziegler:
Congratulations on your new film, which posits Sarah Palin as the victim of an organized smear campaign by the liberal media (when in fact she was attacked on the basis of being an unqualified and inarticulate pinup-girl representing a hyper-conservative Christian fringe-contingent bent on antidisestablishmentarian social-engineering, and because, for progressive, sophisticated women, she represents a hypocritical and repressive cultural atavism nearly as frightening as the idea of life under the Taliban).
HIS MOTHER FAILED TO TEACH PROPER ETIQUETTE
But you're an attractive and principled man, so I feel compelled to give you a media tip.
Shouting over your TV interviewer, sneering insults and being generally sarcastic, uncivil, venomous, bellicose, hyper-defensive, obnoxiously loud and personally dismissive toward the host interviewing you -- in lieu of having actual, intelligent answers or properly thought-out argument points -- is not an ideal strategy for promoting your ideas.
Barking, tooth-baring snarls and chest-beating may make you look like a virile "Alpha" to the straggling dregs of your depleted and elderly neocon tribe -- but, in the context of a civilized TV news show, it makes the elite demographic group who are not in jail and who have completed schooling up to or beyond the third grade regard you with the same visceral horror and dismay you might arouse if you drew a swastika on your forehead in your own fecal matter.
Not a great look, John.
Sorry.
Hugs,
Cintra
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Sunday, January 4, 2009
American Artist and Arts Organizations Circa 2009: Get Over It and Adopt a New Paradigm
If you're anything like myself and millions of other Americans, 2009 heralds a new era of hope. With the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, great change for this country and the rest of the world seems possible, even imminent. This feeling has a special quality for American artists, who have become less visible and more downtrodden since the Bush administrations decided that art and culture were dangerous critical forces that should disappear.
Despite the pabulum being fed to us by museums, music, motion pictures, and the publishing industry, American art and culture has not completely disappeared, it has only been mortally wounded. And though the new political administration may offer hope on many fronts, culture will continue to take a back seat to the major issues of war and economic depression.
Artists, please do not sit around bemoaning that the National Endowment of the Arts, state councils on the arts, and other civic funding streams have all but disappeared. Reliance on public or corporate funding is going to be a lost cause for a long time to come, and there is no forgoing a day job. Trickle down capitalism, an interesting theory, never worked very well in a society steeped in greed. It is up to the artists and arts organizations themselves to adopt new paradigms if culture is going to continue to exist.
Making art your business is the only way to survive in this cultural climate. Yet many artists still feel that it is unfair to have to look outside of their artistic processes in order to produce work; art is inherently valuable on its own, and should not have to function on some kind of business model. A valid idea, but unfortunately outmoded in our present day reality. Do not be fooled into believing the notion that artists cannot be business-minded. Entrepreneurship is an endeavor that relies on creativity. Look around you and see if there are any partnerships to be formed that would promote your art. If you are a musician, choreographer, performance, or visual artist, how could you partner with your place of employment or local businesses? Bars, restaurants, community centers, and the like will sometimes sponsor art projects, even if only for commission and exposure. Are there for-profit venues, like clubs or cabarets, where you could perform? If you are a theatre artist or a writer, how could you teach a class or sponsor a workshop? What are the possibilities through your local public libraries, block associations, business improvement districts? Find other artists to collaborate with, either inside or outside of your discipline. Of course, a presence on the internet is essential. There are so many new ideas to try.
An entrepreneurial approach applies as much, if not more, to nonprofit arts organizations. These organizations have tended to operate in a meandering, catch-as-catch-can fashion. Waiting for the next big grant check to arrive is no longer a valid way to run a business. Organization, goal orientation, and outcomes must be the new way to function. Again, this approach is not something outside of an artist-run purview. If you regard it as "corporate" and below your creative energy, you will fail, if you haven't already. Like the individual artist, what are some of the ways that your organization can tap into new funding streams? One obvious way is to fashion your organization to fill gaps where education has failed. Better education is as sorely needed in this country as an infusion of culture. What are some of the educational institutions in your community where the arts have been eliminated from the curriculums? This won't be hard to identify, as this problem is endemic. Are there other ways that you could teach your particular area of artistic discipline? And though you may loathe corporate or business culture, find a way to partner with these enterprises, even if it is through in-kind services rather than through grants. You will be the first on the grant roster when philanthropy resumes. Create a staff and board that are lean and mean. Pay good employees a living wage for their work; they won't be difficult to find in this era of rampant unemployment, and the investment in your organization will be much greater than hiring underqualified staff for a pittance. Use your creativity to consistently find new ways that your organization can survive.
Clearly, one of the most essential things the arts community must do right now is to form networks and alliances. In numbers there is safety, validation, support. Organize meetings and salons where the cultural populace can socialize, brainstorm, and share work and strategies. This is one way in which people like Cintra and I have been fomenting an American cultural revolution. The old attitude of covetousness and exclusivity amongst artists no longer works.
Being an artist is a great gift, as it is a powerful means of communication. Art is also innately rooted in critique and confrontation. In a civilized society, culture informs government; government does not inform and control culture. We cannot give up.
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Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Failure of "Kids Lib"
Around the age of eight, I got sick of being an indentured servant and decided to go political. With the rights movements of other disenfranchised groups surrounding me, I reckoned that kids needed one too. I called my movement Kids Lib.
Myself and the other children in my family were raised in a work camp environment. The adults dictated a seemingly constant labor by the progeny. There were never ending dishes to wash, bathrooms to clean, weeds to pull, dirt to shovel, dog poop to pick up. I spent Saturdays cleaning house with my mother, a cleanliness nazi. My friends stopped asking if I could play. So the undemocratic situation of never having a vote in family affairs bothered me. When I asked for one, I was told that children existed to help their families, to mind adults, and to work hard in school; and when I was an adult, the reward for my kindertoil would be to impose the same noblesse oblige over my own offspring. But with my grandmother being a women's libber and my mother a lesbian feminist, I already possessed an awareness that my lesser statuses of age and sex were based on uncontrollable factors of biology, and were inherently unfair.
Hence, Kids Lib. It started with a series of scrapbooks where I created an alternative reality for women and children using reconfigured cutouts from magazines. A running satiric commentary on chauvinism would appear below each collage, narrated by a buffoonish character I called Guy Machopig. I shared these with my friends, hoping to elicit a response to the inequity that shackled us. I was mainly met with blank stares, and "Do you want to play Barbies now?" Where was their consciousness? I decided I needed stronger tactics: takin' it to the streets. I devised a homemade pamphlet with crayons and construction paper attempting a call to action. Kids Lib appeared boldly on the front page, and inside the poorly stapled pages were slogans like "Act now against adult chauvinist pigs," and "Oppose ageism." I canvassed the homes of the neighborhood children, making what I thought was a persuasive arrival on the "Chariot of the Dogs," a vehicle which involved standing on my skateboard and lashing my jump rope to my dog, who would pull me around, and named after my favorite movie, Chariots of the Gods. I advertised upcoming Kids Lib meetings to take place in my clubhouse, a sort of bivouac made of rotting boards propped up in some weeds in the vacant lot across the street from my apartment building. Again, blank stares. These people were obviously not ready for the radical action I was suggesting, one that would free us from these lives of age-imposed slavery. I waited in my clubhouse for the Kids Lib meetings to commence, alone.
Why wasn't everyone outraged, as I was, by the lack of a voice? With my childish reasoning abilities, I was forced to examine the failure of Kids Lib. Maybe they just weren't governed by a life of drudgery; most seemed to have chores that fit their juvenile status, or had a full-time mom who would do the housework. Or was it because I was a weirdo with a dyke mom whose clothes came from Salvation Army? Or are people with the privileges of ruling race and economic status desensitized from the struggles of others, a docile complacency that sets in early on?
Would Kids Lib work in America today?
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Saturday, September 27, 2008
Vote, Or Else
The United States has one of the most pathetic voter turnouts of any country in the world. This seems astonishing if one considers that this country is supposed to represent the model of freedom and modern democracy, and if one considers how easy it is to vote: you can register online, or fill out a form at the post office. Our process may not be ideal, but frequently it's all we've got in order that some kind of change in political policies may be made.
Voting is a privilege that people in many other countries do not have, and sometimes suffer and die for. Americans have dozens of reasons for why they choose not to vote. Upon examination, do some of the most common reasons hold up?
One vote isn't going to change anything.
You are one of 305 million people in the United States, a great percentage of which has the right to vote. These numbers add up quickly when people go to the polls. There have been many instances in history when one person's actions and decisions have made a significant difference. Remember that it was a difference of a mere, greatly contested 500 votes over Al Gore that made George W. Bush president.
The politicians don't represent my interests.
The candidates are all jerks, you say, who don't represent myself or my concerns. But the job of elected officials is to represent their constituents, not just their personal interests. If you voted and vocally supported your interests, by calling and emailing your elected officials, for example, wouldn't there be a better chance that they would represent you than if you sat around complaining? Great strides in policy have been made in the past fifty years in terms of traditionally marginalized people, including minorities, women, and gays. It's still far from ideal, but how is it going to get better if we don't raise our voices politically? Sometimes you have to work with the system at hand in order to change it.
I've voted before, and it never works.
One reason that voting often doesn't seem like it's working in your favor is because many governmental seats, such as those of Supreme Court judges, are appointed, not obtained by public vote. The people who appointed them, in our current history, were primarily Reagan or the Bushes. But if we start voting against the right wing cowboys and their ultraconservative spawn, we may still see a change in the future. Are we going to let the next generation pick up the pieces of apathy, like we've had to do? Is that how we want to go down in history?
I live in one of the western states, and the votes are decided by the time I can go to the polls.
Besides the Northeast, the West is the most populated region of the United States. All the states of the west coast, except Alaska, are heavily blue, and some of the red western states ride the line between red and blue. You have an additional three to six hours for your vote to change what you think has already been decided.
I don't want to do jury duty.
It's true, if you are registered to vote, you could be called to do jury duty. You think, what could be more boring and a waste of my time? Until you go to jury duty, and see what a shambles our judicial system is in, often because our citizens are not participating in civic life. You see how cops have the most influence on what is occurring judicially, because the citizens aren't there to represent the people. You see how socially skewed juries have become, and do not represent a cross section of the citizenry. If your job does not continue to pay you while you serve on a jury, you have a legitimate excuse to postpone. Otherwise, is your job so great that you'd rather be hunched over your desk than involved in a process in which it is your right and social expectation to exert some influence over the judicial system?
I don't believe in capitalism.
You may think that because you don't believe in the system of capitalism, that you will have no choice among the candidates, who all represent this ideology. It's true, the United States is a bi-partisan political system where both the Democratic and Republican parties represent different approaches to this one doctrine. It irks me to no end that we live in a supposed democracy, yet only one choice of ideology. But there are other parties represented on nearly every ballot, from Working Families, to Green, to, gasp, Communist. Be an individualist and vote for a candidate in which you truly embrace their political views. You do not have to adhere to "the lesser of two evils" voting every time. In other countries it is typical to have cabinets of mixed ideologies.
Voting is boring and I have other stuff to do.
Great. You've taken the proverbial land of the free and home of the brave and helped make it into the land of the lazy and home of the entitled.
Cut the crap, Americans, and roll out of your complacent sloth. This country desperately needs some change. You may not like the voting system, but even that in itself will never change if we don't utilize the tools offered to us. If you've never voted before, this upcoming presidential election is the time to start.
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
SARAH PALIN: WHITE HOUSE BUNNY
PRO-LIFERS, this one is for you. *SMACK*.
Here's the big difference between pro-life and pro-choice:
As someone who is pro-choice, I don't want to prevent anyone who is pro-life from making decisions about their own bodies. I want to protect their right to act in a manner befitting their convictions. This is the ideological freedom upon which America was founded.
Pro-lifers seek to prevent me from making my own decisions about my body. This makes pro-lifers, by their own tacit admission, incapable of making seasoned, moral adult decisions for themselves, and incapable of tolerating the decisions and convictions of other people that are different than theirs.
Critics (pro-lifers and feminists alike!) have been deriding me for using profanity, but personally, I think their trying to force a crucifix up the collective female fanny is rude, insulting, and an intense violation of our humanity.
Pro-life women, if you were on the verge of being raped (not to mention impregnated by rape or incest, and then criminalized for getting an abortion) -- the ones among you not brain-damaged from huffing feminine deodorant spray might use a few choice four-letter words yourselves.
Squeal all you like, just stay out my underpants. You're not my type.
Here's the text of my Sarah Palin article on Salon.com, which seems to be arousing the ire of backwater, atavistic, evangelical Christian Taliban zealots everywhere.
Pro-Lifers, if I've made any of you finally see the light, your next abortion is on me.
Love, Cintra
| Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain't no woman.
I confess, it was pretty riveting when John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin for the first time. Like many people, I thought, "Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume -- as a vice president? That's a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right. Karl Rove must be behind it."
Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP (and according to an ABC/Washington Post poll she has created a boost in McCain's standing among white women to a 53 over Obama's 41). But ideologically, she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread, revealing the ugliest underside of Republican ambitions -- their insanely zealous and cynical drive to win power by any means necessary, even at the cost of actual leadership.
Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women.
I don't want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters.
As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House -- in the Cheney chair, no less -- is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else.
I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime. I thought it was like polio, or witch burning -- an inhumane error that had already been corrected. But after eight years of Republican hegemony, and now the potential ascendance of this sheep in ewe's clothing, I am so mortally offended I feel like it is really time for women to be angry, hardcore and disgusted again. Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies whose ambitions and eagerness to please the powerful males of their tribe are so desperate that they would sell out their sovereignty over their own bodies. And yours too.
Republicans have -- in a P.T. Barnum, sucker-born-every-minute kind of way -- successfully framed themselves as the custodians of Christian ethics and conservative family values. This stance successfully masks their wholesale class war against the majority of their supporters, who continue to vote blatantly against their own economic interests in thrall to this deliberate emotional manipulation. It was the media critic Douglas Rushkoff who pointed out, several years ago, that Republican politicians were employing marketing techniques perfected by Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille, broadly paraphrased, introduced a theory that approximately 80 percent of all decision making is done at the level of the limbic system -- our lowest, most colorless, reptilian emotional level. Republican strategies are consistent with a belief that the voting process, for most people, is full of feelings -- but devoid of reason.
Sarah Palin, in this light, makes so little sense that she makes perfect sense. She speciously represents a new power paradigm of the Nice Mommy: the opposite of Hillary (the Mean Mommy), the opposite of Oprah (black, and therefore foreign), the opposite of Martha Stewart (another Mean Mommy). In her support for women on women's issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles -- like Old Testament-style old. Her morality is fixed, predictable and inflexible. There are those who will find comfort in the fact that they will know exactly what can be expected from Palin: Free will subordinated to obedience of an airtight, evangelical interpretation of the demands of God, country and Republican men.
The choice of Palin represents what the Christian right is really saying to the women of America. The subtext: It's a Faustian bargain, girls. To elevate your sex to power and respectability, you must first give us the keys to your chastity belt.
It is unsurprising that the morally compromised fraternity of corruption-infested Republican robber barons and war profiteers came up with this stunt, but we must regard it in the same light as the rest of their treasonous, criminal behavior. We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP -- an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.
It is a kind of eerie coincidence that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as the bimbo/frat-boy titty comedy "House Bunny," which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her.
Sarah Palin is the White House bunny -- the most nauseating novelty confection of the evangelical mind-set since Southern "chastity balls," wherein teen girls pledge abstinence from premarital sex by ceremonially faux-marrying their own fathers.
Sarah Palin is the sexual front of the culture war and the embodiment of the bold social engineering stance of the new authoritarianism that Republicans have been employing ever since they stole the election in 2000. As a result of conservative Republican policies, America has proved itself to be too rife with fraud, bureaucratic constipation, self-inflicted economic calamity, cronyism and incompetence to effect any positive movement anywhere at all, even at home.
But, the Republicans seem to be saying, at least we can offer you the hope of putting women back in their place.
Bristol Palin will no doubt be a fine example as a first teen, particularly now that her mother is inflicting an old-fashioned shotgun wedding on the hapless, horny, condomless youth who impregnated her.
The Republicans are, in effect, saying: We're not going to win this race on the basis of being the better candidates. Barack Obama is going to make you think. You don't like thinking. Here's an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes, you stodgy old white baby boomer. She's like a grown-up version of Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island." She embodies the raw conviction that everything the Republicans have ever done has been right. She'll make you feel better about yourself for voting for Bush. Twice.
Relax: The war is God's plan. (Or whatever.) Women, even if they are vice president, can always look pretty, worship their husbands in the fear of God and never, ever resist invasions from unwanted sperm.
Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.
She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.
She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.
We've been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America's women don't need to do the same.
If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.
It's McCain's world, girls: You'd just live in it.
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Saturday, November 17, 2007
MARK MORFORD COLUMN: BUSH DEATH WATCH COUNTDOWN!
Mark Morford, excellent columnist from SF Gate, wrote this excellent column, informing those of us scarred and demented by loathing of this infernal administration how we can best prepare ourselves for the glorious expunging of it.
Sock it to 'em, Morford. I'll be hurling my clogs with you and the rest of the citoyens sans culottes.
It's just that kind of feeling, that sense of hesitant, embryonic optimism, the sense that says, oh my God, we as a culture and a smash-mouthed, war-hammered society really are fast approaching something possibly, potentially, heart-achingly new and different and -- because it cannot get any worse -- just a little bit better.
Here is my suggestion: Mark your calendars, set your watch, program a celebratory ringtone well in advance, because the countdown has officially begun.
It is now less than one calendar year until the next presidential election. It is less than one year until the country finally takes a deep breath and flexes its atrophied muscles and opens its bloody, Cheney-punched mouth and lets it be known to the world, to the universe, to its own numb and dejected soul just exactly how unwell it has felt, how much pain has raked its heart, lo, these past seven (eight, by then) years, by ushering in an entirely new political era, as we all exhale a massive sigh of long overdue relief that -- praise Jesus, Allah, Buddha and the devil all at once -- the long national nightmare of George W. Bush is finally over.
It is now safe to imagine. It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year's time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a "Mission Accomplished!" sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history.
You think maybe it's too soon? Too early to let the tingle of positivism and hope take hold? Far from it. After all, the signs of decay and utter GOP desperation keep pouring in. For example, it has now been officially recorded in history what everyone already knows: Bush is nearly exactly as unpopular as Richard Nixon was at his lowest point, and no president in history has had as long a streak at the bottom of the job-approval rankings as Dubya. Heckuva job, Bushie!
What's more, the glorious collapse of the evangelical Christian right marches on apace, as Pat Robertson, now a dejected, lonely widower after the death of secret boy-toy husband Jerry Falwell, has officially endorsed pro-choice, pro-gay, thrice-married, massively unbalanced moral pit bull Rudy Giuliani for president, which is a bit like a militant vegan endorsing Hot Dog on a Stick for the title of Lord of the Food Court. Desperate times indeed.
But wait, it gets better. While it's easy to focus on Shrub and Cheney and to gleefully, achingly imagine their dreary march out of office on that happy day, it is also vital and heartwarming to note that this time next year will also mark the demise of an entire army of toxic leaders, federal department heads, gay-bashing appointees and misogynist directors of every stripe and scandal and spittle, a simply huge array of right-wing Bushies who are still entrenched in all manner of powerful federal bureaus and organizations and policy-making bodies.
It's true. Despite how a huge hunk of hideous GOP policymakers lost their seats during the last congressional election, plenty more appointees are still around to poison the well. From Kevin Martin, the lackey who oversees the FCC, to noxious Idahoan and rabid anti-environmentalist Dick Kempthorne of the Department of the Interior, to anti-choice Republican Mormon knucklehead charity scammer and Department of Health and Human Services overseer Mike Leavitt, and on and on -- in a year, all on their way out.
Oh, and one more deserves special attention. Because one year from now will also be the glorious political end of one Dr. David W. Hager, the rabid evangelical Christian gynecologist (I know, so wrong) who currently advises the FDA on women's health issues and who was largely responsible for delaying the approval of Plan B, opposed RU-486, is in fact against all contraception, stem-cell research, premarital sex, and (quite naturally) women's choice, and whose own ex-wife claims he anally raped her, over and over again, in her sleep.
Intelligent women nationwide still shudder that this man is allowed anywhere near a living vagina, much less permitted to touch and probe and offer advice. But there is one noteworthy aspect to Hager; he is the perfect incarnation of the Christian right's view of women as subordinate, lesser-intelligent sluts who cannot control their own bodies and therefore need men, God, and the government to do it for them. Hager is a deep shame to the male gender, and his return to the private practice of ruining the sex lives of unfortunate women in Kentucky cannot come soon enough.
But why write this column now, so far in advance of Bush's limp-tailed departure? Simple enough: Because it will take a full year to get ready.
It will take every month and every week and every single day from the moment you read this until November 2008 to compile, to gather, to list all the names and all the horrors and all the deeply entrenched policies that are still clawing at the face of America as a result of Bush's reign, to fully get your mind around just how deep is the disease and how widely it has spread, so we may begin to excise the policies one by one like the malignant tumors they so very much are.
What, too strong? Not even close. Go read up on Hager, and get back to me.
Ah, but perhaps you are one of the jaded ones, the non-believers, that certain type of political bitterball who says, oh please, what does it matter, they're all criminals and cretins and powermongers anyway, no matter which party or president they work for? Get rid of BushCo and a new slew of cronies and cretins take their place, and who can tell the difference?
To which I say, well, yes. But also, no. Sure, the system is corrupt and lopsided and full of backstabbing and backslapping and backroom deal-making. So what? Has been since the first cavemen voted to see who gets to run the mammoth hunt.
Truth is, it's just far too easy to let the ennui wash over and not give a damn, to lump all politics into a phlegmball of nasty negativity and be done with it, thus entirely disregarding the efficacious issues, the things that truly effect change and affect lives and improve or degrade the health of the planet. Outrage fatigue is simply unacceptable. Intellectual apathy is the refuge of the lazy and the spiritually malnourished. Do not let it happen to you.
Now is the time. The coming year will slide by rather quickly and the feeling of urgent change and upheaval will only build and it doesn't really matter if it's Hillary or Obama or Edwards leading the shift, because no matter who gets the nod, they will require -- from me, from you, from anyone who professes to care -- a roiling tidal wave of progressive momentum behind them to help them cleanse and haul away the overwhelming mountain of moral fecal matter Bush has left behind.
Mark your calendar. Set your ringtone. Take a deep breath, feel the wave build, and then dive the hell in. Right now, it's the only option that really matters.
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Friday, November 16, 2007
DAMON? REALLY? I MEAN....REALLY?
Not while Benicio has an ounce of horrible life left in his body, thank you very much. Or, hell, Johnny Depp, even with the added handicap of his parasitic grandfather, Keith Richards.
Is That All There Is?
Call it a Bourne Conspiracy theory, but i say it just goes to show you that the "Sexiest Man Alive Competition" is just yet another bureaucracy that is completely owned and operated by white men. Namely, the cast of "Ocean's 13."
I say those boys have bought that award as their personal ego-jacuzzi.
Matt Good-Will-Mother-Huffing Damon. Please. The Osmond family called, and they want all 4,578 of their children's teeth back.
In the meantime, I'm going to get the butter and watch Diddy's "Unforgivable" ad on YouTube another 17 times.
Now, Diddy is a man who knows his way around stretch-lace. Damon would probably just use it to strain vegetable juice, and then complain that the rosettes let in too much pulp.
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Sunday, June 24, 2007
Preventative Reading
My apologies to TotalFarker joshik72 for lifting his work, but it's so perfect. It needs to be plastered on every library wall to warn teenagers who are checking out Ayn Rand for the first time.
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Sunday, June 10, 2007
Vacation Pictures
Dear Leader was recently in Rome, which in February of 2003 was the site of the largest anti-war demonstration ever recorded. Depending on the route Bush took through Rome to meet with the Pope, I imagine he passed by several examples of this common Roman graffiti, a charming relic of the run up to Bush's failed War in Iraq.
Too late, but thanks for trying!
Or this, my personal favorite. I tend to overlook the sloppy work on this one, because who has time to tag when you're in a mass of three million protesters?
Not even with Condoleeza's Dick!
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Huge Flare-Up in Hell as Blob of Fat Hits Fire
Burn In The Hell of Your Own Invention
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Saturday, May 5, 2007
weekend indigestibles VI
Honestly, these things write themselves. I get a little less sleep, forgo the coffee; my IQ drops and my mind is protected from the nightmares that our Pop Culture vomits onto the page.
Donald Trump is expanding the Trump brand. Coming soon to the Sharper Image catalog: Trump Steaks. Our own Ian Ransom may be onto something, instead of "writing" a book when he (thankfully) leaves office maybe George Bush can come out with tubs of frozen "Commander Guy" BBQ Pulled Pork? "I'm the Decider and I decided you need to pull my pork for dinner."
In a video that Luis Buñuel would have appreciated, David Hasslehoff was taped eating a hamburger while incredibly intoxicated by one of his daughters. The shirtless and slurring Hoff sort of reminded me of the commercial that Paris Hilton did for Carl's Junior, only more appealing.
Coincidentally, Paris Hilton was sentenced to 45 days in jail yesterday for parole violation and driving on a suspended license, she won't be allowed to spend her time in a private jail or a work release center; instead she will report to a County facility on June 5th for a month and a half of starchy food and harsh lowest bid-supplied personal hygiene products. She will emerge from jail fat, pale and frizzy. No doubt an ambulance will whisk her off to a spa.
I almost feel bad for Paris, I was in a similar situation and jail is a drag. I had a "job" polishing floors eight hours a day and in the evenings, I would write and read letters for fellow inmates who were illiterate. I even managed to teach my cellmate the rudiments of reading and writing. To this day, my floors are spotless. I hope that a kind inmate will teach Paris to read and play spades. (and not cut off all her hair with a homemade knife.)
Speaking of assholes, in what is surely a sign of The Apocalypse, I bring you the Chocolate Anus, an amusingly transgressive bit of food porn that is sure to be a hit with the kids next Halloween.
I see all sorts of crossover promotion here: David Hasslehoff and Paris Hilton writhing on a Hilton Hotel room floor, Paris looks into the camera (and simultaneously somewhere off frame, damn that wonky eye) and sighs "Oh David, stick your Trump Meat in my Chocolate Anus! That's Hot!" Chocolate Anuses on Hilton Hotel pillows. The horror.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2007
ON THIS IMPORTANT AMERICAN ANNIVERSARY
Just goes to show ye: a Texas-size helping of morbid narcissism can suck all the proper magnetic balance out of the world, and kill thousands of innocent people.
And to think that fear of gay marriage got 'Top Gump' here elected to a second term.
I'm sorry, but gay marriage was NEVER this perverse. This photo is like opening your Dad's sock drawer and finding a stash of amyl nitrate next to a black latex fist:
Click for larger AMERICAN BUTCH REALNESS
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
HECTORING ADMONISHMENTS OF SHERYL CROW SAVE WORLD
After bravely failing to improve the mind of Karl Rove with either her charm, sex-appeal, celebrity, rehearsed sound bites or even snarling reprimands, Subaru Outback spokes-songstress Sheryl Crow has decided to focus her ability to transform hearts and minds on the persons most likely to do what she tells them to do: her fans and sycophants.
BECAUSE I TOLD YOU TO
Ms. Crow recently told us what we should be doing in our most intimate moments of personal hygiene in order to help connect her own career image to the inarguably chic and popular fight against Global Warming. Sayeth Ms. Crow:
"I have spent the better part of this tour trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming," she wrote in her blog.
"I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting," she continued. "I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required."
I suggest that we all take Ms. Crow's valuable suggestions, employ this wise technique, and mail all of the valuable excess squares of toilet tissue saved in this daily operation directly to Ms. Crow's longtime representative, Stephen "Scooter" Weintraub: 266 Elizabeth Street - 1A, New York, NY 10012.
Let's hope she likes us more, afterward.
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Saturday, April 21, 2007
weekend indigestibles V
We've been a little grim and serious around here lately and rightly so, but that doesn't mean our Culture Of Dunces is idle. Oh no, never.
The twin Goddesses of Negative Attention, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan have both decided that their stays in rehab were all for naught. Lindsay says "I don't know that I'm necessarily an addict." and adds that her stay at Wonderland was about "taking care of her personal health". A final nugget of wisdom, "It's so weird that I went to rehab. I always said I would die before I went to rehab," (voice of a Park Slope Mom reasoning with a fussy toddler) "Lindsay sweetie, a lot of people who really need help can't afford the luxury of month long stays in rehab to regenerate their liver, so shut your yap before Mommy explodes. Oh no, Mommy is so sorry she got angry. Look out the window sweetie, it's Jonathan Safran Foer, remember your flash cards?"
Britney has taken a different tack and has declared war on her manager Larry Rudolph, blaming him for her stay at Promises and sent him packing. Not content to lash out at just her manager, Britney fired a volley at her family and ex-husband after her Father defended Rudolph for encouraging Spears to enter rehab. " "I am praying for my father. We have never had a good relationship. It's sad that all the men that have been in my life do not know how to accept a real woman's love. I am concentrating on my work and my life right now." Newly rehired flak Leslie Sloane-Zelnick has her work cut out for her. Britney is also taking a barge down denial and is claiming she was drug-free when she entered Promises and was suffering from Post-Partum Depression. The head-shaving was a reaction to her Aunt's death. Park Slope Mommy doesn't even know who this Britney Spears is and goes back to browsing the selection of Sex Pistols onesies.
When Lindsay and Britney hit the hypothetical "rock bottom" and their celebrity is simmering at "Tara Reid" we can look forward to their infomercial collaboration, "Britney & Lindsay's Irrational Recovery: Personal Holocaust Denianetics"
Proving that you're never too senile, out of touch and just plain stupid to run for the highest office in the land, John McCain found more room in his already crowded mouth for more feet at an appearance in South Carolina. Answering a question from the audience about military action against Iran, McCain answered " ''That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran'', Then the demented old fool actually sang his ill thought out joke to the tune of "Barbara Anne". In times like these, this lame attempt at humor is inexcusable. The White House is fully stocked with glib and crazy already. Go home John.
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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Hyper Reality Disconnect
The decrepit five year-old desktop machine that functions as the hub of my home wireless network threw a shoe the other week and I was temporarily disconnected from the digital agoraphobiasphere. I suppose I could have perched myself in a lawn chair at the end of my driveway and leeched off the wireless from the hotel down the block. Likewise, I could have hoofed it over to the coffee place down the way, but the best spot for writing is smack-dab in front of a plasma teevee the size of a Diego Riviera mural that the owner keeps tuned to Fox News. The one decent place to get an espresso in my neighborhood is owned by a dittohead.
What I discovered when I was deprived of my fellow Pajama Pundits was that there were things I thought were important, that weren't. Anna Nicole Smith continued to break all records in breath-holding. Larry Birkhead is the Father of Dannilynn.... and I couldn't care less (although I'd suggest he change that trashy name since her genetic make-up predisposes her to clear heels and pole dancing). Don Imus it turns out, is a clueless old fuck.
Edging into the almost important column, John McCain managed to insert not only his own foot into his mouth, but the feet of an entire Army brigade and still had room for five helicopters. Whatever it takes to derail his candidacy, I'm for it. I lived through eight years of a senile republican as President and I'm not nostalgic for a return. (I'm always amazed by people who revere Reagan, but if anyone ever reveres Bush II, I suspect it's going to be some sort of tawdry shame-based sexual fetish involving flight suits.)
I've got CNN on right now. Someone managed to get a suicide bomber through The Pantheon-Knows how many layers of security into the cafeteria of the Iraqi Parliament Building, killing eight people.
OK: this is the sort of thing that matters. Far from being a democratic paradise where dryads and sylphs lead unicorns down mossy paths bordered with talking flowers, Iraq is a huge, dangerous clusterfuck, created by our present administration and the interference of a choice few (cough *Rumsfeld* cough), for over twenty years. I ask you, who cares about Bald Britney when Bald Faced Liar Douglas J. Feith isn't in a pillory near the Lincoln Memorial with angry crowds hurling filth at him?
Now that I'm reconnected to twenty four hours of dubiously sourced partisan infotainment it's only a matter of time before Perez Hilton recolonizes the part of my brain dedicated to fretting about Pervez Musharaff. So let me share a final lucid daydream: George Bush admits that Iraq is a horrible mistake and sells the country to a Private Equity firm who then fires all the Iraqis and replaces them with Mexican and Chinese immigrants and strips the country of it's assets.
The hinges on my aged laptop are giving out, my brain may be granted a reprieve.
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Monday, April 9, 2007
IMUS REMEMBER THIS: A SLIGHT IS STILL A SLIGHT
From the LA Times:
"NEW YORK -- CBS Radio and MSNBC are suspending the broadcast of Don Imus' radio program for two weeks in an effort to staunch the furor that erupted after the controversial talk show host called the Rutgers University women's basketball team 'nappy-headed ho's.'"
You know, having been one of the long-suffering champions of loose, rowdy, general offensiveness and 1970's, National Lampoon-era un-PC-ness and other unacceptably edgy forms of language, I would ordinarily be up in arms about any form of censorship in an increasingly sterile info-climate....
But really, Imus, what the fuck were you thinking, you brain-damaged old cracker? What happened? Somebody put too much mayonnaise in your breakfast bong that morning?
Imus, Mel, Michael Richards, Jason Wahler: all those brain-rotted xeonphobic alkys need a large, African-American women's basketball team to wash their mouths out with Clorox.
If that doens't work, maybe Sharpton could get the ladies to hold them down and give them what I like to call a Second Bris. That ought to bring them back to Jehovah. Morons.
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Wednesday, April 4, 2007
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY : THE TALENT OF PASSING DUNG THROUGH THE MOUTH
Ideological Neo-Consort Dana Perino just took over the thankless Faustian bargain of being White House Press Secretary, since Tony Snow's colon began to rot out from an excess of exposure to the molten, radioactive core of human Evil.
FEAR THE EELS
The first day I was in the Press Corps, in 2005, Dana Perino was there, sitting off to the side with a couple of other lockstepping, Blueshirt Bushies. I noticed her because she was unusually attractive for an ethical zombie.
I remember that then-Press Secretary Scott McLellan said something that was such an obvious, balls-to-the-blackboard, galloping Untruth that I involuntarily chuckled.
That was when all of Dana Perino's attractiveness rolled back like like an electric garage door, and the robotic Gila Monster chained in the vacant lot where her humanity should be tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with a hate-seething, napalm-eyed, Cheney Scowl.
It would have been frightening enough to make me wet my pants if I were....oh....six or seven years old. But, having done some time, I was familiar with the 30-yard stare, so I mad-dogged her.
The subtext of the five second staredown went a little something like this:
ME: What? You got a problem?
HER: Hissssssssss. Show submission to the Power of Darkness, insignificant filth! I will halt your oxygen with Rovian mind-needles!
ME: You want to take this outside and rumble 'round the Rose Garden, you Easy Spirit shoe-wearin' Bee-yotch?
HER: You are not worth the venom in my unholy green spores. Hssssss....
And then it stopped.
Dana Perino looks like a trophy blond, but she is actually just an advanced species of alien blow-up doll, housing a writhing cluster of giant, bloodsucking space-eels -- a Robo-Shrew suckled at the teat of Vice and groomed to birth Big Lies through her teeth without complaint. I bet she puts Polonium 210 in her Sanka every morning, and it only makes her stronger.
Seriously: I wouldn't want to get between her and a $7 inauguration party bag of Fritos. Beware.
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Friday, March 23, 2007
Weekend Indigestibles IV
Unlike Anna Nicole Smith, the Anna Nicole Smith story just won't die. The Coroner's report will be released Monday, but D-Listed -via The Star, says ANS died of an overdose of chloral hydrate complicated by a systemic infection from a dirty syringe. I'm going to give this a six out of ten on the plausibility scale and go one further. I've heard reports of prescriptions for valium and chloral hydrate and the only folks I've ever heard of on that particular combo were junkies trying to kick cold turkey. I have no joke for this, it's mind boggling.
Britney Spears completed the program at Promises in Malibu, California and the entire Los Angeles area is at a standstill. Crowds are lining the Pacific Coast Highway for the expected freak parade of relapse induced antics. In related news, Cheeto sales at gas stations near Spears' home have been flat for the past month, but spiked to all-time highs within hours of Britney's release. Demand cash guys, apparently Brit's going broke.
Wrapping it up, Mel Gibson suffered a minor rage-relapse at a speaking engagement this week. Alicia Estrada, an expert on Mayan Culture asked Gibson if he had done any research before shooting "Apocalypto" and stated that his depiction of The Maya was erroneous and rascist. Gibson countered with: "Fuck You lady! and "Make your own movie!." There were no mentions of "sugar tits" or Jewish Conspiracies.
Estrada was later seen in Malibu offering ecstasy to Britney Spears and after that at The Los Angeles Zoo poking various dangerous animals with a sharp stick.
When asked about "making her own movie", Estrada demurred; saying she was spending Sunday afternoon with her laptop making political campaign videos out of vintage television ads.
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Thursday, March 22, 2007
I, IDIOT
I wrote a really fantastic blog this morning concerning my batshit lunatic theory about how Phil de Vellis was just the Lee Harvey Oswald for a vast Hollywood conspiracy to reshape the world of political propaganda, own the election frame and embugger policy, Texas-style. I based this on the contention that the production values on that 1984 Hilary ad were so awesome, there's no way he could have created it in his living room on a Sunday afternoon.
Well, Steven called me up and schooled me on the fact that the ad was a re-conditioned old Apple commercial, so that blew my whole bonkers theory out of the water. In my defense, my ADD was so severe in 1984, I was unable to sit through an entire commercial.
So I yanked it. Christ. GAWKER would have been all over that boner like a fat girl bachelorette party at Chippendale's.
In the words of the immortal Emily Litella: "Oh!......Never mind."
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Tuesday, March 13, 2007
PETER PACE CONDEMNETH THE GAY, THE BI, AND THE POLYGLOT
Due to an extremely close personal relationship with His Lord Jesus Christ, General Peter Pace passed judgment on the immoral homosexuals of the armed services, and made it known that any man who lays with another man or woman that lays with another woman shall not be deemed agreeable to him.
PACE IS NO PANSY
Pace did not offer comment on the possibility of excluding from his wrath certain Cinemax offerings, such as those involving well-endowed young blonde women with gender confusion issues who seek comfort and affection from the fiery Latina who happens to work at the same car wash.
Gerbils, lodged somewhere in the six interconnected tennis-ball cans composing their habitat in Pace's lower intestine, could not be reached for comment, but insiders report that a choir of "Alvin & the Chipmunks"-style voices could be heard singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" near the vicinity of Pace's inviolable rectum.
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Saturday, March 10, 2007
Weekend Indigestibles II
Perhaps I spoke too soon last weekend regarding Vergie Arthur's fifteen minutes being up. Entertainment Tonight is partly to blame though, since they've been doling out the story like a tweaker on their last bag come Monday morning.
The funeral seems to have gone freakishly normal until the ceremonial dirt-sprinkling at the end when Vergie summoned the vast resevoirs of energy stored in her arm fat and tossed fifty-one shovel loads of earth into the grave. Vergie is welcome to visit me next winter as I have a very long driveway and the average snowfall is well over one hundred inches.
To further strain the crystal meth metaphor, the ANS funeral story is a limited thing, but no doubt Entertainment Tonight has some baggies they can scrape. By next Wednesday, they'll be interviewing Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne about their being unable to attend the funeral and why they sent a floral arrangement that looked like a bath mat made of chrysanthemums.
Variety, the entertainment industry paper has reported a deal with "artist" Thomas Kinkade to base a film on his "painting" The Christmas Cottage. Kinkade is infamous for his sappy renderings of cottages that are sold in mall "galleries". These "works of art" are prints that are retouched and over-painted by trained monkeys and a small amount of Kinkade's DNA is incorporated into the work. No word on whether Kinkade's DNA will be smeared on your theatre seat or if he will simply lick the rims of all the popcorn buckets.
In conclusion, President Bush is in South America following the continent's summer hit counter-culture festival "Protestapalooza" from country to country. Taxpayers should be comforted that we aren't footing the bill since Bush has been working a part-time job at Little Caesars and is selling peanut butter and bananna wraps in the parking lot for ticket money.
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Saturday, March 3, 2007
Weekend Indigestibles
Earlier this week the New York City Council voted on a non-binding resolution to ban use of the N-word . Panic swept the City as hip-hop fortunes collapsed and clueless white teenagers fumbled for something else transgressive to call each other.
Yesterday Anna Nicole Smith was laid to rest in the Bahamas in a suprisingly low key ceremony. In a move that surprises no one, Anna's Mother Vergie Arthur made a last ditch attempt to gain custody of the body which the Bahamian Supreme Court wisely denied, but the legal maneuver delayed the funeral cortege for fifteen minutes. Vergie was booed by the crowd as she entered the church and sensing that her fifteen minutes of fame were up, refrained from throwing herself on the coffin. Vergie was later overheard on her mobile phone cancelling orders for a rollercoaster and a concession stand.
One of Anna's requests was that the ashes of J. Howard Marshall, her deceased husband were to be buried with her. Members of her small entourage were visibly relieved that only one slave was required to serve Smith in the afterlife.
Finally, ABC has purchased a pilot based on the Geico Caveman commercials. Teevee shows have been fleshed out from flimsier premises. Famously, Miami Vice came from a two word memo by Brandon Tartikoff: "MTV Cops".
The show will probably never make it past the pilot, but in the four minutes of research I did on this I found the name of the song from the Geico Caveman Airport commercial; Royksopp's, Remind Me(Radio Edit) and downloaded it from iTunes. Oh Scandanavian Downtempo, you know me so much better than Smooth Jazz.
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Monday, February 5, 2007
Daddy’s Little Purity Balls: Female Circumcision with the Soft Razor
I am impressed by this trend in chastity-unto-marriage, and this whole new deal where wealthy families throw a whole mini-wedding for their aging virgin daughters, wherein the possessor of the intact hymen-in-question accepts a gold ring from her father in exchange for a promise to “stay pure” until actual marriage ( she and Daddy then consummate their chaste incest by slow-dancing to “Butterfly Kisses,” no doubt). Still, the whole deal kind of strikes me as incomplete. It's somehow beating around the bush.
I say: just go the whole hog and give Daddy your clitoris, girls. I think Norelco is coming out with a three-speed, easy-home clit-remover sometime before 2008. What a gift for Father’s Day.
If he’s nice, he’ll gold plate it, and you can wear it around your neck as a sign to everyone that Daddy loved you enough to ruin sex for you forever.
Personally, I think refusing to have sex before your wedding night is like refusing to read dictionaries before your spelling bee…. but then again I am a Fallen Woman and this is the eighteenth century.
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Sunday, January 28, 2007
PEOPLE FOR THE EGGING OF ZEALOTS [PEZ]
In recognition of a new era of peevish, abusive, holy-rolling obnoxiousness by anti-fur activists PETA, I would like to announce the formation of PEZ, a new organization of concerned, like-minded citizens who believe in the indiscriminate egging of all shrill, disruptive zealots who make boorish spectacles of themselves in attempt to bully others into embracing their inflexible viewpoints.
PEZ takes pleasure in officially hurling this inaugural egg at PETA representatives for being such shrieking, unfulfilled, cat-hair-covered twerds that they need to bully poor, backsliding J-Lo while she is already suffering the abject humiliation of promoting her noxious tween fragrance at a Macy’s in Downey [aka “Where?”], CA.
It is poor form to kick divae when they’ve so clearly got both shoulders on the mat. Such rudeness is no way to win friends and influence people to a worthy cause. In fact, many young women of Downey, CA, are probably sharpening their eyebrow-tweezers and preparing to go out and thrill-kill a bunch of chinchillas, right now, just because of PETA’s poor example. And then, they’ll probably force mountain lions to smoke cartons of Marlboro Menthol 100’s, and spray oven-cleaner in eyes of baby pandas.
In opposition to PETA for probably inspiring this terrible backlash with their unforgivable behavior, we hurl this egg…
…Splat!
Right in their Aztec-print polar-fleece gaucho pants.
Your Egg Here
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COMMENTS
Oh boo! Defamer has been gutted so there goes my Oscar Night live-blog fun and the Salon robs me of my breakfast reading (and the rabid Salon commentards baying for your head). What a sad day this is.
Posted by: angus angus at February 22, 2009 7:36 PM
Write the piece anyway. I will take up a collection to match Salon's price!
I can't go without!
Posted by: Sharif Sharif at February 22, 2009 8:04 PM
No Oscar recap?! Argh. It has been the single redeeming thing about the Oscars in recent years. I agree with Sharif. I'm in!
Posted by: Paula Paula at February 23, 2009 2:26 AM
No Oscar recap?! Argh. It has been the single redeeming thing about the Oscars in recent years. I agree with Sharif. I'm in!
Posted by: Paula Paula at February 23, 2009 2:28 AM
What a disappointment! I've loved those Oscar reviews since the beginning. I'm in for the collection as well. :)
Posted by: jean jean at February 23, 2009 9:10 AM
Salon's loss.
Posted by: MP MP at February 24, 2009 11:02 PM
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