fourfour

Vanessa del Rio: Crazy porno cat lady

I've been really into Taschen's coffe-table bio of vintage porn icon Vanessa del Rio, subtitled Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior. The book was previously available in exorbitantly priced special editions but finally came out in a reasonably priced edition earlier this summer. I love the idea of context separating porn from art, as though these outrageously raunchy, almost sickly saturated images of a crazed self-appointed slut are elevated to higher culture because they're blown up and bound in a book that you can't hold with one hand. I don't think that there's a frame classy enough in the country to make a DP shot move your soul (rather than your pants), but hey, it's a fun thing to explore all the same. It's funny and outrageous like Vanessa herself.

Throughout the book is a biographical interview with Vanessa and she is awesome: unabashed to a near-mythic level (she says she's never had a bad sexual experience, which is somewhat hard to believe coming from an active porn star who also turned tricks), somewhat political (she calls herself the biggest feminist ever, not in reference to her giant boobs but her belief in freedom to do "whatever the fuck you want," especially sexually) and utterly outspoken (pious types, like the nuns she was terrorized by in Catholic school, are all "repressed whores"). The most shocking thing she talks about is how much she enjoys her enlarged clit that came as a result of steroid use during her period of body-building in the mid-'80s (she calls her thing-thing a plus compared to drawbacks like bacne and body hair). I would have clipped her rhapsodizing her small penis-like genitalia (no hypocrite, she embraces labels like "hermaphrodite" and "drag queen"), except that part's not on the 2-hour+ DVD of an interview interspersed with vintage clips that accompanies the book.

But what's above is, and it's even better. In the clip, Vanessa explains that after getting her male cat, Tarzan, fixed, she bought him a "deluxe" set of replacement silicone balls to fill his sac. "I didn't want him to have a shriveled up, hairy sac, with nothing in it," she explains. I think it's an aesthetic thing? Cat's are, after all, terribly, terribly sensitive. She elaborates and it's all pretty insane ("I got him to match my house!" she gushes of his leopard print). If you went into a lab and mixed up tacky porn-star brain chemistry with that of a crazy cat lady, this is exactly the sort of thing that would come out. And really, any discussion that begins, "OK, I'm going to explain my cat's balls," is obviously a discussion worth listening to.

The lessons of Jersey Shore: Season 2, Episode 5

Ah, the eternal question.

I'm almost sorry to report that I am pro-Teenage Dream

Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is a (perhaps unwitting) thesis on the burden of the modern pop singer. The album reveals that is no longer enough to be all things to all people – now one must be all things to all people all at once. This album that has been unfairly derided for lacking in consistency (and, in my opinion, unfairly derided, period) is anything but – the bulk of these tracks focus on pop's growing obsession with hybridization. They’re guitar pop with drum machines or mall rock in moon shoes or diva house so inclusive, traditional instruments are invited to the party (rave lives!). Gone are the days when one merely needed to spread her dabbling over the course of an album, like Gwen Stefani did during Love Angel Music Baby – our culture’s accelerated pace means it now happens simultaneously. There's an urgency here, and its effect is exhilarating pop music.

Teenage Dream's songs are almost all power ballads in the same way that Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” is basically a Pat Benatar song that got caught up in the club (and couldn’t call to cancel, ‘cause, you know). There’s something very ‘80s about this record in way that's almost comforting (nostalgia, after all, is as close to a lyrical theme as we come, if the youth-yearning title track is an indication). The songs are matter-of-factly anthemic, dazzlingly extreme but almost relaxed about their power, as though they know they’re hits and have nothing beyond that to prove. Aside the final, piano-driven actual ballad, “Not Like the Movies,” the title track might be the most delicate thing here. It’s a stage whisper of a song based on some gently strummed guitar strings, a muted house beat and a bridge that sounds like it took melodic inspiration from Jackson Browne's “Somebody’s Baby." There’s not much left to the imagination when Perry sing-shouts, “Let’s go all the way tonight!” but then, she’s not one for subtlety. If she spends most of the time on 11, she rarely goes down past 9.

Perry is, of course, a ridiculous person. She is pop music’s Judy Tenuta, her ever-quivering voice always threatening break into a snarl, and often doing so. She almost always sounds like she’s kidding, not that we’re taking her seriously, anyway. She hosts subject matter ridiculous enough to make Ke$ha sound nuanced, by comparison. “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” is a rundown of going-out-and-getting-wasted imagery that’s so unimaginative, it suggests alcohol-induced brain damage. Perry smells like a mini-bar, wonders if a mark on her skin is a hickey or a bruise (same thing, Einstein!), recalls dancing on tabletops, skinny dipping, taking part in a ménage a trios (she makes it sound classy!), and realizes that this has been captured on the Internet. Her response is the motto of a generation: “I’m screwed. Oh well!” The song finds absurd redemption in a hokey group chant of “T.G.I.F!” and then again in a synth sax solo that immediately follows it. It’s so kitschy, I’m assuming the tabletop she danced on was formica.

As with Shakira, reading Katy Perry as a comedy act provides maximum enjoyment. Instead of rolling your eyes and her command to, “Stop actin’ like a beyotch” and her threat that, “I’mma peace out if you don’t give me the payoff,” in the “Hey Mickey”/Eurohouse hybrid of “Peacock,” just laugh at how dumb she’s willing to sound in the name of impressing people. She says things like, “We got it on lock,” and “West Coast represent,” and in a fairly obscure reference to Busta Rhymes’ “Hustler’s Anthem ’09,” “I know your forte.” Granted, a white girl parroting hip-hop culture no longer has any potential to shock (if that is in fact her goal), but Perry’s lyrics call to question where appropriation becomes just how we do. It's probably not on Teenage Dream, though. Conversely, where "epic fail" becomes a thing that actual adult people say with their mouths is precisely on Teenage Dream.

She calls someone a “firework” and means it as a compliment (wouldn’t it suck to be a firework and be gorgeous for 10 seconds, tops only to linger as a reminder of the damage we routinely inflict on the environment with your residual smoke?). She tries on the simplest sounding dubstep beat (courtesy of Dr. Luke and Max Martin -- the former produced most of the album) in “E.T.” Seriously, it's Dubstep for Dummies (dumbstep), and yet it works -- the sound is so giant, it sounds like she’s trying to communicate with space via the speakers in her recording studio. She invokes Biblical figure Esther at one point in “Who Am I Living For” (a Timbaland rip-off that results from Tricky Stewart’s acknowledgment of Justin Timberlake’s “Your Love” as dogma). In that track she also says, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” which does nothing but remind me of Bikini Corrie. She takes on a pulsing Italo ballad in the impressively restrained “Pearl.” It all goes down easy and none of it lingers for too long, as though the goal is to create something as ultimately elusive as the very concept of “now.” Or maybe it's just a blacked-out blur by proxy. Either way: oh well!

The art of removing the lid of a sugar pot from one's head

It is a very delicate art. On par with origami, I would say.

Big fins, consider yourselves filled

Because Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is as close to a holy text as I come to having (it is, simply, the standard against which I judge all entertainment), I don’t invoke its name lightly in reference to other works. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D is a direct descendant of Russ Meyer’s “exploitation-horror-camp-musical,” but it shares a similar genre-straddling sensibility and, more importantly, it adroitly balances its disparate elements. What's most reminiscent, though, is not that the horror/sex/comedy/suspense/sci-fi elements work well in tandem with each other -- it's that the whole ridiculous tale of prehistoric carnivorous fish being awakened only to prey on the spring breaking hedonists on Lake Victoria (including soft porn operation headed by Jerry O'Connell's Joe Francis-esque sleazy character) is played with a straight face. (Elisabeth Shue’s character tases fish at one point, since she’s a sheriff and you know how sheriffs love their Tasers!) Meyer famously assured his actors that they were in a serious drama, even after they protested playing such an outrageous script with nary a wink. Here, the pirahanas are the only ones who give indication that they’re in on the joke, mugging directly into the camera as they, for example, chomp on a disembodied human penis, spit it out, and then devour it again.

The girls are fucking hot (do not be surprised if Kelly Brook ends up a superstar as she is clearly a goddes; meanwhile, Elisabeth Shue, bastian of role-selection that she is, has never looked better), the suspense is fucking real (one of the final scenes involves shimmying across a rope that hangs just a few feet above hungry piranhas) and the carnage is fucking disgusting (my three favorite site gags included a girl’s entire face being pulled off as the result of her hair being caught in a boat motor’s, a piranha eating through another’s face from the back so that for a second it looks like she has a pair of fangs and still another’s post-attack body falling apart in the hands of two guys carrying both sides of her body out of the water). Horror-obsessive Aja already showed off his deft skill at referencing in Haute Tension and he does even better here. He casts Richard Dreyfuss as the guy responsible for awakening the piranhas in the opening scene (he’s basically reprising a role, since Jaws , in which he starred, technically awakened its rip-offs including the original Piranha). Christopher Lloyd pops up in a mad-scientist role, his knowledge base traveling further back in time than Dr. Emmett Brown ever had to. There’s a scene, in which a girl trapped in the kitchen of a boat is forced to fend off frisky piranhas with kitchenware (a la Gremlins, directed by Joe Dante, the director of the original Piranha). Maybe the most pointed laugh occurs during the main piranha attack on the partying idiots, who in an attempt to get out of the infested water, climb up on a floating stage, which ends up toppling from a horizontal to completely vertical position, spilling them back into the water Titanic-style. Even the flying-piranha gag of the first film is bestowed an upgraded significance – gravity-defying absurdity gets promoted here.

The 3D element is as over-the-top as the plot and effects – the medium is messiness. This is as close to you’ll come to enjoying someone throwing up in your face and spraying a keg of beer at you. There is an operatic, extended, full-frontal, girl-on-girl underwater scene before the piranhas hit that is as much a tribute to the female form as it is to the pornography that exploits it.  See, Piranha 3D isn’t just trash unto itself, but it's that celebrates, nay worships, trashiness. Hallelujah.

The lessons of Jersey Shore: Season 2, Episode 4

Be that as it may, Drama-free isn't on the show. Unfortunately.

Terrible-hunting: Piranha

Alexandre Aja has big shoes (fins, whatever) to fill this weekend when Piranha 3D arrives in theaters. I am excited because I like watching people struggle in water (on film, at least), but I am also scared (and not in the horror way!) because it couldn't possibly live up to the glorious shittiness of the 1978 2D original (even with the incompetent CGI evident in the Piranha 3D trailer that seems like it's rendered for kitsch factor). Joe Dante's Piranha is an utter gem that embraces its own derivation (it's essentially Jaws with a bunch of tiny monsters instead of one big one) and silliness with a straight face. It's kind of like the cinematic equivalent of a blonde girl who learned how to be a dumb blonde from the dumb blondes that came before her. Instead of a knowing wink, we get razor teeth.

Let us pray...

If church were like this, I'd be there everyday:

I don't speak Italian, but I believe that song was about Jesus. Anyone care to confirm?

This, by the way, is from White Pop Jesus, an Italian flick from '80 that involves a Tony Manero-esque Jesus returning to earth to take on the mob. I haven't seen it, but I'm obviously going to because DUH.

Share my world, share my garbage

GSN's Baggage is the most cynical dating show I've ever seen, and it just might be the best. It's as though the genre itself has hardened and grown bitter in the 45 years since its birth and this is the result: a show that suggests everyone has suitcases full of shit that you have to put up with, and the most suitable mate is the shit-bearer you find most tolerable. At least philosophically, the very idea of keeping up appearances isn't relevant here -- the people who go on Baggage go out of their way to exaggerate their flaws (in many cases, absolute statements like "I pretend I'm famous to get laid," end up describing an incident, not a habit). Maybe as we've grown more comfortable with ourselves as an increasingly over-sharing culture, so have our game shows -- the dating show is now so comfortable that it's shitting with the door open.

The lessons of Jersey Shore: Season 2, Episode 3

New developments. NEW DEVELOPMENTS. NEW DEVELOPMENTS. NEW DEVELOPMENTS.