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Old-lady love/hate

On Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center screened 1970's awful-enough-to-subvert-its-own-camp Myra Breckinridge. (I have a very complicated relationship with this movie: when I watch it, my emotional state is a perpetually motive vacillation from love to hate.) The showing was preceded by a live chat between Simon Doonan and Myra herself, Raquel Welch. She was such a bitch. Simon opened with an anecdote about watching Raquel on a motorcycle during the '60s, biting the air and introducing the notion of sexuality to him. It took him five minutes to get that out because Welch repeatedly denied that it was she on that motorcycle. She claimed it was Ann-Margret. I'm more inclined to trust Doonan on this one (he's the pop culture encyclopedia!), but fine: If he was wrong, he was wrong. She was unduly condescending about this, though, at one point talking about how captivating our hallucinations can be. She seemed to mean it as witty banter, but it was just cutting. I couldn't help but wonder if the entitlement that comes from being a fawned-over legend for decades and decades obliterates the nuance necessary to pull off pleasant nastiness.

Welch also bristled when Doonan compared Myra Breckinridge to Showgirls, finally saying, "I don't do nudity," as if that were what he was implying in the first place, and as if Showgirls isn't at least 10 times more entertaining than the movie Welch claims to dislike but regularly shows up to discuss (she has a solo commentary on the Myra DVD – it's entertaining, and far be it from me to begrudge anyone profiting off her bomb, but she makes a lot of time to protest too much). Much of her Myra discourse involves trashing her dusted-off co-star Mae West, who by all reports was terribly unkind to Welch, refusing to appear alongside her on screen and dictating Welch's wardrobe. Well, Welch gets the last laugh by virtue of having outlived West, so HA! (I guess?)

Granted, I admire a good bitch. The utter lack of political correctness Welch exhibits by speaking ill of the dead (pirouetting on a grave, even!) is breathtaking. That said, what she doesn't seem to get is that West is by far the best thing about Myra – West's Old Hollywoodness is one of the few things about the film that actually flatters Gore Vidal's pillaged source material, and she's weird enough to be a standalone freak show. The peak of her performance is a completely needless musical number, a medley of "You Gotta Taste All the Fruit" and "Hard To Handle." You haven't lived until you've seen West bring her trademark snarl to an Otis Redding standard. She feels herself up better than anyone else could possibly hope to.

 

Happy Valentine's Day!

This is the dumbest

 

This post should open with me saying, "I've seen some stupid as-seen-on-TV inventions in my day," and then list all the ones that now fall short of what I'm about to talk about, except my GoJo is so tight on my head it's affecting my recall. Literally a band to fasten your phone to your head so that you can walk around with your phone fastened to your head, this commercial is full of second-hand embarrassment while peddling third-. I feel like if this guy ever discovered speaker phone, he'd know the jig was up.

This was playing on a screen above a treadmill I was on this weekend. I glanced up from my iPad, saw it on mute, and figured it was a joke...until it went on for another minute and a half. I was hoping it was just a Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie flashback.

And by the way, you can strap a laptop on your head with the GoJo:

He's trolling, right? He's just trying to start a meme of things the GoJo will attach to your head, right? Someone want to get the ball rolling and make this a happy man?

The best woman

 

Ugh, this week, right? For the sake of posting something, anything, here is Editta Sherman, who in my opinion, stole the show in Bill Cunningham, New York (not an easy thing to do from an also-amazing man who happens to be the subject of said documentary!). The self-aggrandizing that is so popular in our culture and that I tend to loathe in most people is endearing here. I guess when you've been around for 96 years, you've at last earned the right to toot your own horn. A legend and a fixture, indeed.

Maybe my favorite thing of the year

 

I saw this during Everything is Festival at Cinefamily this summer and fell in love -- it's a highlights reel of a video sex advice column Heidi Fleiss and Victoria Sellers did years ago for Laugh.com. Their flippancy and tendency to give guidance that amounts to, "Get a hooker!" reminds me of...another duo of online advice dispensers that are not to be trusted. Mmmmm...who could I be talking about? (But really, seeing this was, in a warped, fun-house way, like looking in a mirror for the first time after having living life oblivious to the existence of mirrors.) Fleiss has never been more endearing and Sellers alternately hilarious and really sad (especially when she talks about her black outs)! (Also, the language is totally NSFW, if that's even a thing, and this does involve a life-life latex vagina being poked at, so BEWARE.)

Also, Cinefamily is doing this live streaming telethon starting Saturday at noon and its lineup is insane. It's a good cause, as they are an unending source of the weird shit that makes pop culture fun. Also, I love them. Please give.

A very important JCPenney denim fashion show

 

On Thanksgiving, yet another Dancin' on Air reunion/retrospective aired on Philadelphia's local PHL17. It was very much like the first one, so I won't get too deep into rehashing, but I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't share this fashion show of gorgeous denim goods from JC Penney with you. This is so cheesy that it'd make Sue Ellen from Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead say, "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!" Unfortunately, Suell wasn't quite the commentator as the dude who's announcing this stuff.

Have you seen Zack Montana?

 

I was watching the local news at my mother's house Thanksgiving night (it's a Philadelphia station) and I just happened to catch a snatch of a child who supposedly performed at Philadelphia's kind of sad, definitely janky Thanksgiving Day Parade (CeCe Peniston, for example, lip synched the original, 20-year-old version of her "song that everyone knows," "Finally" -- no remix or anything!). Except, instead of performing, this child looked like he was batting out an invisible fire that apparently had a tenacious grip on his entire body. I soon discovered that he's a Radio Disney type named Zack Montana. I don't think he's related to Hannah, as she is a fictional character, but I do think that the last name is supposed to remind you of her and/or confuse you (especially if you are old and were previously used to Montana only being a state, a steamboat and a Slim).

I would have posted the video that introduced me to this wunderkind, but the quality of the clip posted on ABC 6's site is so poor, you can barely make out what's going on. That's jank on top of jank (spread jank, it's the Philly way). Luckily, Zack's act doesn't seem to change very much between performances, so I was able to find a much sharper, slightly older version of his up-to-the-syllable interpretive dancing on YouTube. It is above. This kid's got swagger like nothing I've ever experienced. It's like a drag show, except he's impersonating not a woman, but an adult, and since he's 13, Justin Bieber soooo qualifies as a grown-up.

(Am I wrong for kind of digging the song, though?)

Best commercial ever?

 

I am not one of those people who says, "I love that commercial!" On the contrary, I do a great job of tuning them out (to a fault -- references to commercials are the most consistent pop culture references that go flying over my head). Weirdly, I heard this one playing from the other room and couldn't believe what the voice over was saying about Immortals. It's truth in advertising to the extreme and admirably doesn't take seriously what obviously shouldn't be taken seriously in the first place. Won't spoil it here, but full text is below:

Awesome intro, great job!

 

I'll tell ya what, this intro to registered Encourager Liz Curtis Higgs' VHS Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Have I Got News for You was intriguing enough to get me to watch the whole 45-minute thing. It paled in comparison, I'm sad to report.

The worst song I heard this weekend

 

...But also, the best.

This is from the god-awful TV movie Rockin' with Judy Jetson, in which a song written by the prematurely greying daughter of George for a pop star who is not Jet Screamer, ends up getting mixed up with alien gibberish (just like what happened with Jet Screamer!). It becomes a huge hit and Judy gains tons of fans based on her counterfeit songwriting talents. This is maybe the most ridiculously optimistic view of the future that The Jetsons ever offered. More than flying cars!

I watched this, by the way, because I'm working on a Jetsons-based project that I'll post in a few days and then create a sense of Jetsons overload on this blog. Sorry. I thought this was too horrendous not to share.

Proselytizing in 2011

I was on the boardwalk at Coney Island this weekend and something in the distance caught my eye. "It's a puppet show!" I said (fine: squealed) to my boyfriend. And then, upon approaching, "...and I think it's religious!!!!" It was:

 

I think this is a wonderful metaphor (or working example, even) of evangelism's burden in 2011. No one cares and the wind's blowing too hard to pay attention, anyway.

Though it was an obvious highlight, this was not the most surreal thing I experienced on Coney Island. The Coney Island beach is pretty gross (it's more dirt than sand), but a nice thing about it is that people walk by all day selling things. This makeshift dim sum set-up is very convenient if you want ice cold water or a Corona in a paper cup or a $1 blow-up beach ball. As part of this series of nomadic peddlers, an overweight, older man with a gray ponytail that was down to his ass approached our group and held up a seashell with a pot leaf laminated inside of it. "Would anyone like to buy an ashtray?" he asked. His intonation was somewhere between music and a child-beauty pageant announcer (really, he sounded like Mr. Tim in Living Dolls when he announces that Reed Hale's hobbies include "playing in the dirt and watching Unsolved Mysteries"). Of course we were like, "No." "It's made with a realllll leaf," sang-song the man, lingering. We ignored him and he slinked off. I realized that he was probably speaking in code: his Lynchian tone and behavior were either his way of signaling that he was selling marijuana or that he would be back to murder us later. We're all still alive, so I'm going with the former!

And thennnnnn, when we had left the beach and were standing on the boardwalk, waiting for people to finish using the bathroom, two guys approached our group of eight or so and asked, "What's a douchebag?" Someone started to explain exactly what it was, but the pair interrupted and clarified: they wanted to know whether "douchebag" was more frequently used to describe men or women. The more laid-back of the two was gently trying to convince his friend that "douchebag" was typically used for cocky, boorish guys. His more excitable friend (who had what I think was a Dominican accent) was insistent that you call women "douchebags" because "douchebag is the equivalent of scumbag" (literally, that is a quote). I calmly explained that, no, the laid-back guy was right and that men are typically called douchebags. Someone else in our group said that you could call anyone anything but typically the connotation is that men are douchebags. The excitable guy began pointing at each person in our group in an impromptu poll that got him nowhere except more insistent that he was right. Then a giant pitbull with a football in his mouth walked up and distracted them. We slipped away and I got ice cream.

The literary-level irony of this is that both of these guys were total douchebags! (I can only imagine the conversation that led to this debate – it almost certainly stemmed from shit-talking a stranger, probably a woman.) They didn't know it, but they were in the middle of an existential crisis.

Anyway, the larger point is that if you go to Coney Island, you should talk to people because everyone is fucking insane.