Two weeks ago, I received an email from a woman who said her five-year-old daughter is obsessed with Winston. She said that found him via Cuteoverload and follow him mostly on YouTube, so any anxiety I had about corrupting a babe with my foul mouth and fouler mind was immediately quelled. Anyway, she said her daughter, Ramona (best name for a child ever!) wrote a book about Winston and she wanted to send it to him. So she did and oh my god, it's so amazing. First of all, here's the cover letter:
Lollipop-head cat! I don't even know what that means, but I love it! It makes me want to lick my cat's face! Anyway, full scans of this new literary masterpiece are after the jump:
So, I was going to do a show-and-tell of my favorite moments in autobiography of former porn power top turned Baptist minister (uh, yeah) Bobby Blake, a book ridiculous enough to read like a sort of nonfiction bildungsroman. It's a memoir cum tall tale cum cum rag of a tome, perfectly trashy for beach reading (I'm sure my heads-up will be well appreciated, now that summer's over and all). There are vividly hilarious descriptions (I've never heard anyone describe a penis as "flabby" before), anti-iconic moments (he slips in a Reba Fucking McEntire CD on his way to his first porn shoot), wonderful repetitions (he really, really loved his film Goldilocks and the Three Bi-Bears, he'll have you know on, like, practically every other page) bizarre contradictions (he describes attention has his Viagra, but just a few pages later says that doing porn in search of attention is unhealthy; likewise, he condemns the widespread practice of barebacking in porn and then later talks about repeatedly ejaculating in some woman that begged him to fuck her -- "I came so much she probably had my child: she's probably looking for me right now for child support!") and very dubious grammar ("determin-ation," "of whom more later," "it didn't please me over so much," "unquestion ably," "respon-sible"). There's the gayest use of the already gay semicolon that I've ever come across: "He wasn't that ambitious; he was just a man who happened to have a foot-long dick." I mean, this is a guy who had "well-hung arch rivals" (his words!). What's there not to be totally tickled by? Writing like a porn star might not win any awards (not even of the fakey AVN variety), but it is almost guaranteed to entertain.
There's, predictably, an unending stream of braggadocio from this self-described "strong physical specimen who is lusted after by so many men and women." He's paints himself as a superhero, never being so much as faced with homophobia while coming of age as an out "bisexual" in fucking Tennessee in the fucking early 70's. His church even accepted his non-secret relationship with his lover! Oh, and his very existence (and some throat-grabbing) opened up doors for aspiring black gay porn stars everywhere! It's all so over-the-top it had me squealing like someone he was sharing the screen with.
Blake comes as close to explaining the ease with which he's passed through his queer existence when he says that he's always carried himself "in a masculine way." Similarly, he expresses disdain for effeminate guys throughout the book ("The one thing I don't like is guys acting girly. It turns me off sexually, and I think it loses you the respect of the wider community.") Hmmm, you might say. That doesn't sound very altruistic, now does it? And you'd be right! See, when I lost my respect for Bobby Blake, when his book became something to put down and tell people to avoid was about 70 percent of the way through, when he talks about gay marriage. I'm typing this shit up verbatim so that you don't have to waste any time with further investigation:
...a lot of things, as you'll see in the video below. The video is probably just as much about my obsession as it is about her, as I went through hours and hours and hours of (mostly interview) footage in an attempt to capsulize why this woman is so amusing to me. This is my love story:
Oh, and the hours and hours and hours of watching yielded clips and clips and clips, most of which didn't even make it to this video. You know what that means, right? Leftovers for days! Just kidding. Maybe. (But really, I might make another one of these. Try to stop me!)
I'll go more into depth when the DVD is out and I can more easily provide concrete examples of its greatness (I find telling about intentional comedy virtually impossible; I'd rather just show it). But for now I'm just going to put it out there: Hamlet 2 directly speaks to the segment of the population that idealizes ridiculousness, theatricality and high-concept garbage (a blessed trinity if ever there were). This thing of hilarity is too dead-on to avoid building a cult (even if it takes a few years), and it is worth checking out if you have even the remotest of a craving for Kool-Aid. It's a reference-obsessed Waiting for Guffman. It's The Comeback on an infinitely more pathetic scale (yes, it's possible). It's a film in which the phrase "raped in the face" is uttered only to become the inspiration of a musical number. It's, above all things, cuckoo bananas.
Most hilariously, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Hamlet 2, the play within the movie, irreverently toys with the idea of Jesus Christ as a contemporary rock star, much to the disdain of the conservative citizens of Tucson. They are much like those on the Hamlet 2 IMDb board who are sad and seemingly outraged that the movie would portray this at all. Never mind that the film is satire that doesn't endorse its central character's conviction in commenting on Jesus' celebrity in a fucking sequel to Hamlet, but mocks it by merely exposing it. That it exists is all that's needed to explain its ridiculousness. "I do want you to think about this; why was it a religious figure of the Catholic denomination and not a Muslim figure? Why do you think this is?" goes a post by goodguy309. I know the answer and so does Hamlet 2: because watching people miss the point is a brilliant source of entertainment.
Steve Coogan is a revelation. Elisabeth Shue has a mind-blowing sense of humor about herself. I just can't say enough good stuff about this movie. But perhaps what I'm most appreciative of is that it alerted me to the existence of Joseph Julian Soria.
This kid is so beautiful, watching him on screen made me uncomfortable. Like just-pubescent-what-are-these-feelings-in-my-loins uncomfortable. Swoon. Swoooooooon. I expect global takeover. Go raid his MySpace before he makes it private.
Here's just a quick, albeit late-in-the-day rundown of all the T-shirts I devised up for the inaugural edition of Neighborhoodies' Think Ups series (as first mentioned here), starting with today's offerings, which are probably the most pertinent to readers of this blog:
As much as I love them both, I have to say that I'm partial to the Rudy design. They truly captured his essence. At last, Rudy wins at something!
The rest of the designs (Tyra, Jodeci, Stevie B and Swan Brooner) are after the jump...
I try to keep my day job as separate from my fourfour job as possible, which is hard considering the disproportionate about of time I spend thinking about I Love Money and all sorts of televised cleavage. Still, what happened last week was too exciting for me not to share here. And you already know what it is because you read the headline above.
The interview was much longer than this, and more of it is going to be rolled out in segments this week. I'll update this post with links, since the part above is the most VH1-centric part of our chat (it's set-up for her reality show, see), and not my favorite one (the best is the one that I think is going up Thursday, in which she tells me a story about how Sharon Stone was a total cunt when she met her during the height of Basic Instinct insanity). But since this is the first, and since I'm so excited, I thought it prudent to post ASAP.
I'm posting this not just because I'm proud of it and I don't expect people to follow what goes on in VH1 territory, but to convey how meaningful it was for me to talk with Margaret. I was 15 when her HBO comedy special first aired (the one in which she wore the black catsuit) and its effect on me went beyond fleeting laughter. As I told her when the interview was over: "Before I knew (like really knew) I was gay, I knew I loved Margaret Cho, and I don't think that's a coincidence." The road to self-acceptance seemed unending for so many of my formative years, and it was truly a thrill to meet someone who helped me on my way.
Update: The funniest of the videos, in which Margaret talks about her meeting with Sharon Stone has been posted:
Earlier this year, I attended a screening of the short film Tales of Times Square at the Museum of Sex. The movie is ostensibly a documentary weaving together the seedy and sad stories of three Times Square patrons of the early '80s - arguably the filthiest time period in the filthiest part of the filthiest city in this filthy world, when the streets were paved with whores, porn, drugs and exploitation as entertainment. Sounds like a party to me! The idea of a place that trashy has long had me salivating (if only I had Hepatitis, for more appropriately thematic salivating!). Also, it adds a layer of irony to my already ironic current relationship with Times Square: if I didn't have to go there everyday for work, I would never visit the overcrowded, overpriced ($5 a day...for coffee!) tourist trap. Unless, of course, I could travel simultaneously uptown and back in time.
Paul Stone, the director of Tales of Times Square, seemed to share my fetishization for the gory days, as he enthused in a post-film Q&A about his trips to the hotbed of hot mess as a kid. His film, it turns out, is not a documentary but a rather convincing recreation of events that kinda-sorta happened decades ago (it borrows from, but doesn't replicate, Josh Alan Friedman's collection of essays of the same name). Faking it is the only way to make it, according to Stone (and reinforced by Friedman, who also attended the screening), as pre-Disney Times Square went largely undocumented (lest someone be willing to go through thousands of hours of archival news footage to piece together a documentary...hey, hands off my fucking obsessive idea!). And though Friedman's book is a lot more conflicted about the place (on one hand, there were tons of vivid characters; on the other, there were tons of child pornography), the overarching mood is also one of enchantment with all of the area's debased charms.
But it turns out that Stone's lens might as well be rose-colored. Though there's little readily available footage specifically of the late-70's/early-80's grindhouse-era Times Square, there's plenty to take in that suggests that this virulently unpleasant area was, in fact, an unpleasant place to be. I know, typing it out like that makes me realize that I was an idiot for ever believing that it was anything but. But, I don't know, sometimes you're watching Cannibal Ferox on your couch and thinking about the anti-glamorization detailed in Sleaziod Express and how much more amazing the movie would be heard through blown-out speakers, watched in the company of men who smell like masturbation who would stab you as soon as they'd jerk you off.
Whatever. The point is that there are some artifacts that present pre-Disney Times Square as the indefensible hole I'm increasingly convinced that it was. One is the amazing documentary The Gods of Times Square, which profiles the pre-Disney tension of the religious nuts who polluted the place with incoherent noise in the late '80s (and also which probably deserves its own post). The second, which is much more to the point is Charlie Ahearn's Doin' Time in Times Square. In 1986, the Wild Style director set up camp at an apartment on 8th Avenue and 43rd, where he lived with his wife and toddler son. He was so enthralled by the action on the street below that he'd film from his window. That's basically all Doin' Time is - a series of soulless encounters that were never supposed to make it to film and thus are all the more enthralling. It's a plot-free parade of depraved humanity (intercut with actual home movies, like footage from his son's birthday) with as little self-consciousness as possible. Because those who dance to hip-hop, rob, assualt and and wail for God's help below had no idea they were being filmed, I'm more likely to trust Ahearn's vision of Times Square (note that it was filmed after crack hit, so it could very well have been a nastier time than that which Stone and Friedman rhapsodize). But still! "People who are nostalgic about this crack-infested spot that was Times Square in the '80s have to, you know, really examine their brains a little bit," says Ahearn in a supplemental extra on the DVD. Consider me examined!
Below is maybe the most shocking clip from the movie -- a guy gets knocked out and then robbed. Repeatedly. The pick-pockets swarm like roaches. Bleak, bleak shit. It's a nice place to visit but...no it isn't.
I'm really flattered to be able to announce this: Neighborhoodies approached me to contribute to their new Think Ups program. The way it works, per the press release, is that "the Neighborhoodies staff chooses one blogger, writer, artist, or all-around cool person a week, and asks them to come up with one pop culture-referencing t-shirt idea a day, for one week." And so, everyday this week, a new T-shirt concept born of my brain will be unveiled. (I'm not taking credit for the actual design work, btw -- that's all Neighborhoodies. I just came up with the ideas.)
I made each of them relevant to this blog (and, by extension my interests: seriously, the biggest reason I agreed to take part is that I'm brimming with T-shirt ideas and it's time I made some a reality). There's no one better, in my opinion to help launch this initiative than Swan Brooner. Here's the first design:
You can order it here in whatever color, on whatever color. And you can check back to the Think Ups fourfour page everyday this week for a new design. But don't worry if you can't keep up. I'll do a roundup of them all at the end of the week, because I'm annoying like that.
It's an animated student film by Guenever Goik that incorporates the sounds of Winston's whining (and Rudy's responses). Guenever says that having this film on her reel played a part in lading her current job at the Jim Henson Company, which is oddly cyclical since Winston is more Muppet than cat to me. Anyway, enjoy.
