Journey to the Center of a Girl

Growing up in Los Angeles- Hollywood, to be precise- can be a very odd experience. Not that I would know any different, so I suppose that it should all seem perfectly normal to me. However, as someone who is a trained critical thinker, I do consider my evolutionary process quite frequently, moreso when an icon that speaks to me passes on.

On February 4, 2009, Lux Interior died.  For me, this was a heavy loss and spanned multiple areas of my life.  In a way, this man’s death was also one of the final nails in the coffin containing the slowly deteriorating body that was the Los Angeles that I grew up with. See, Los Angeles used to be ALIVE. Vibrant. Pulsating. Now I fully recognize that at 30 years old, I am too young to have fully experienced my city to its capacity, especially in the ways that I am writing about it now. That said, I have always had eyes and I have always paid attention. See, I remember when Melrose was a little bit “dangerous.”  When my mom used  to drive down the street and I used to look at all the people whose hair color matched my crayon box, I sensed that this place was a bit verboten and dangerous; not a location for “nice” people to be seen, necessarily. Of course, the greatest irony is that now I *am* one of those people…but I digress. When I was very young, Melrose was not what it is now. vinylfetish I do remember how it all began, though. My mother used to joke about the stores staying for 5 minutes. In fact, since I live so very close to Melrose these days, I still make that same joke- because it still happens. But Melrose now is not Melrose then. In fact, trying to find pictures for this entry was very difficult. As most people know, you can find pictures for just about ANYTHING online. you want pictures of Lindsay Lohan’s original bellybutton piercing? You got ’em! But old school Melrose? HARD. The picture above is a store that is no longer there, Vinyl Fetish. Right across the street was Retail Slut. I remember going in there after school when I went to Fairfax, and being gazed upon with incredible disdain by the employees. I felt as big as a peanut. Shell not included. I remember how horrible that felt. It was terrible, because the honest-to-god truth was that I was a really smart, sweet kid who got swooped up by some crazy slightly older punk rockers later that same year and everything ended up being perfectly ok, cuz I got my “boots’n’braces” education eventually, but…

A very very short time later, my baby brother was WORKING there. Working there. At Retail Slut. My little brother. With a nickname and everything. HUH?!?!? Yeah, that’s what I said. But that’s a whole other story, I guess.  At any rate, that’s not what this is about. this is about  My Experience With Lux. It’s not EVERYONE’S.  And it is most certainly not a *striking* one, but it is mine, and I cherish it because it is part of My Los Angeles.

How long have you been a slut?

How long have you been a slut?

Images as a teen are strange things. Especially if you exist in some kind of perverse “subculture” or have a desire to do so. I was initially part of the latter variety that (luckily for me) ended up in the former. So many visuals came with the territory, and I remember seeing hoards of them. Many that would end up becoming part of my everyday sartorial choices. The Two-Tone label, Bad Religion, Madness, X…all of these iconic things found homes upon my body somewhere, sometime. The FEAR insignia, the Crass logo, the Christian Death symbol- I learned how to read them. It was all a kind of language- a new symbolism almost. But…I remember that the Bad Music for Bad People image scared me.

I cruise through the city & I roam the streets...

I cruise through the city & I roam the streets...

HOW AWESOME IS THAT???? I say that with enthusiasm, because that is every bit of the intent. While I don’t adore every single everything by The Cramps that has ever been done, as a band they are one of the best that has EVER crossed the face of the planet because they hit on all of my favorite things: sexual permissiveness/provocativeness/perversity, horror cinema, b-films/culture, combining aural stimulus with visual stimulus, and, most important of all, breaking boundaries.

I loved being scared, then. I love being scared now. I will probably always love it. If you can find something that can scare me, I’ll kiss ya and buy ya a soda pop! I’m the kinda girl that can go to bed right after watching The Exorcist, and I don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I’ve been Bat Mitzvah-ed and am not Catholic in the least.

OK. So you wanna know what else I REALLY love about The Cramps? You REALLY wanna know? Sure, my heart is broken and totally devastated that I never got to see them, but here’s the other stuff that makes me all gushy inside when I think about why the Cramps are integral to the world as we know it, musically, socially, and artistically. This band changed the world. Now, I’m gonna get all theoretical on you, so if you hate that stuff, here’s your chance to jet……NOW.

I like The Cramps because they are, to me, a visual-musical representation of Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject and abjection. And I think abjection is endlessly interesting. Kristeva wrote that “It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior…He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law-rebellious, liberating & suicidal crime.  Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you…” (Powers of Horror, p.13) So what were The Cramps BUT a band about abjection? They were the outside, the other, yet with some very odd traditional sensibilities. In that sense, they bore a significant musical resemblance to Kristeva’s idea of the ambiguous, the composite…. From their very beginnings and their first album, Songs The Lord Taught Us (1980, Illegal Records), they had set up that status. Through singing traditional cover tracks like “Fever”  or “Tear it Up” and marching them up against their self-penned original titles like “The Zombie Dance” or “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,”  The Cramps established themselves as a band that could do exactly what they wanted to do…TO YOU. Especially since they were under the auspices of the Lord, right?

They had a message from God!

They had a message from God!

Variety Lists the Top 10 Cramps song titles as follows:

10. The Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon

9. I Wanna Get in Your Pants

8. Eyeball in My Martini

7. The Most Exalted Potentate of Love

6. Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs

5. Fissure of Rolando

4. Journey to the Center of a Girl

3. Don’t Eat Stuff off the Sidewalk

2. Two Headed Sex Change

1. Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

First thing to be noted here: at least half these songs reference significant physiological issues. The Fissure of Rolando is an area deep within the brain, not immediately accessible or visible. A sex change? Let alone one of the 2-headed variety? Yes, I do believe that would border on “outsider” status, don’t you?  With Abject Cramps Logic, this is all just par for the course. And the lyrics do not deviate any more than the titles do. For example, let’s just take “Eyeball in my Martini.”  On a deeper, more psychological level, abjection is about the breakdown between the subject and object or the self and other.

Sooooooo, our illustrious frontman croons, “I went out to eat the other night. Picked up my girl at eight. In my soup I found a fly. But, there beyond my plate. Was an eyeball in my martini. A highball with a twist. One in my linguini, too. I said, “There’s somethin’ wrong with this.” Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Eyeballs everywhere. Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs…” OK. Not only are we hitting on Kristeva’s issues with abjection and the uncleanliness factor in this instance, but we definitely have significant issues surrounding the recognition of the abject. Kristeva writes that “A wound with blood or pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death…I would understand, react or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse & corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being…” In this song, it is exactly this. Whether he’s looking at his drink or staring at his dinner, he’s being confronted with the very “condition of his humanity” through the existence of a piece of it. Removed from it. One basically can exist without one’s eyeball, most assuredly, but most would choose not to if it could be helped. However, singing a song such as this, where the eyeball/humanity/abjection/symbol of the body’s breakdown or demise is continually appearing in his linguini, drink and so forth???  Lux is about to eat his own flesh. Drink his own sight. Inhale his own existence. He cannot get away from the fact that he has to face mortality, and existence. The pus, the defilement, the breakdown. THIS IS THE ABJECT….

My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border...-Kristeva

My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border...-Kristeva

See, the abject also refers to our reactions to that which is considered “abject” which, according to Kristeva, can be quite a traumatic experience all-around.  Kristeva mentions examples of certain items that illicit these reactions, inclusive of corpses, open wounds, piss, or the skin on the top of warm milk (don’t ask on that milk one- if you want to go further, read her full piece, which I would highly recommend doing anyway).  Because these items remind us of our own mortality, of our own physicality, of the things that we do/are /the “uncleanliness,” (see earlier quote), or other things that rip us away from the general state of “pretty happy shiny” that we tend to live in, the abject causes us to, essentially “flip out,” and experience a very real, significant sense of cognitive dissonance. Yeah, pretty fucked up. So in a sense, we are confronted by our own existence and bodily functions, we don’t like to recognize that we die or bleed or crap, and……OMGWTFBBQ!!!!

We fear. This is exactly why horror films work. This is why Cronenberg has built a cinematic empire upon body horror. This is why the Aliens series works. This is why SO MANY things work. I could go on. Buuuuuuuuuut…..my point here is this is also why The Cramps work!!!

The Cramps played a lot. So did X. So did a great many bands that my friends were able to see and I was never able to bear witness to. However I remember the visual. I remember, as only a child/adolescent does, COMPLETELY mixing up Lux Interior and the cover of Bad Music For Bad People (the main image I always saw around town). I always thought THAT was him. But I enjoyed the fear and the THRILL that he put in me. Years later, when I became a fan, and then a film and pop culture theorist myself, I was able to think about things (obviously) on a different note. However, to this day, I will always think that Bad Music for Bad People is a scary album cover. I will also think that it clearly references theoretical issues of abjection, etc, which only makes me adore it even more.

I am sad for my loss. After all, what is sadness after a death but personal loss, really? I am just sad that I was unable to see them. That is my tragedy. It is an aural & visual loss that I will always regret. However I am proud to have experienced them as a Hollywood girl, having them be such a crucial part of my lifecycle, and and even happier to have them continue to prove to be a brilliant source of education and inspiration for theory and learning. Even if, at the end of the day, I am just a Goo Goo Muck…

This is the way, step inside: Joy Division and Me, pt. 1

The silence when doors open wide
Where people could pay to see inside
For entertainment they watch
his body twist
Behind his eyes he says I still exist
This is the way, step inside

And with these lyrics, Joy Division begins their album, Closer. The song? “Atrocity Exhibition.”  The aural impact? INFINITE.

Released 2 months after Ian Curtis’ suicide, and recorded just before his neurological dysfunctions reached the height of their horrors, this album is nothing short of brutally brilliant. And it is brutal, make no mistake about it. Emotionally, aurally, sensually, and erotically brutal. Whether it is Curtis’ plaintive but angry voice growling, “I put my trust in you,” or the dark and dingy basslines that make you feel like you’re existing in a chasm of nothing but pure, unadulterated shadow that has been physically manifested, this collection of songs is the unintentional culmination of a band that no one has seen the likes of since. Fuck the Interpol comparisons. One good, PROPER listen to Closer, and your world will be forever changed. But it has to be at the right time.

A while back, I was having drinks with an old friend, and we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We were catching up over beers and such, and discussing things we had seen or were currently working on. Both being media academic-types, that was the primary focus of much of our conversation. However there was one key part of our conversation having had its origins in an online encounter (great term- online encounter- Sounds almost naughty, doesn’t it?) from a day or two previous.  This was not your run-of-the-mill critical theory conversation (although I suppose that that is not quite “run of the mill” bar chat for most of the world, but I digress…). Oh no. This was a discussion of the most masterful YouTube video that I had seen in a very long time, which I had recently posted on my Facebook, and had illicited quite a response from a few choice people I knew. A clip I will now submit for your own viewing enjoyment.



At any rate, while we lamented the fact that not everyone seemed to enjoy the video as much as we had, I mentioned that, for me, it was quite possibly one of the most intelligent pieces of YouTube-ist fare around today, primarily, because the video had used the song “She’s Lost Control,” one of my favorite Joy Division songs.

While he agreed that it was indeed a good song, he seemed to feel that there was better work in the Joy Division oeuvre. In my defense, as I related to my companion, this song has always had a special meaning to me, as Curtis wrote it about a girl having a seizure and I, myself, have seizures. Thus, “She’s Lost Control,” has, in effect, been “my jam” since I first heard it, in college. However, as we continued our conversation, I thought about it more intensely. In fact, I took this opportunity to re-exam my relationship with Joy Division, Ian Curtis, and my seizures with a much more discerning eye. The results of my contemplations and my residual experiments were almost as intense as the music itself.

When did I fall in love with that song? What made me do it? And why that song over all other Joy Division work? Why did I want to play THAT song over and over, negating the possibility of me appreciating or learning about the breadth and depth of their work? Surely the simple fact that I had a seizure disorder (which was so very minor at the time, and did not ACTUALLY become a real issue until the most recent few years) wouldn’t have affected my critical judgement? The conclusion that I came to was that it very well might have.

See, having epilepsy isn’t fun. I remember my first seizure (well, not the actual seizing part) as clear as day, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was 13 or so years old, brushing my teeth before bed. As most teenage girls of that age do, I had locked the bathroom door. When my parents heard loud banging sounds, they had to break the door down. I was wearing underwear and my Max Headroom t-shirt. I miss that shirt. My life as I knew it, as a normal kid, ended that night. From that point on, my life has always involved MRIs, blood tests, sleep deprivation tests, and a whole slew of different neurological meds…and this was before I could even DRIVE.

This was also when they told me it was probably going to go away, and I would probably be off medication by me early 20’s.

“You don’t have epilepsy,” they reassured me while prescribing me Phenobarbitol, a drug that turned me into a early 90’s metal-head version of Linda Blair from The Exorcist, minus the cross-fucking (hey-I’m Jewish!) and head-spinning. Needless to say, not only did I get off that medication pretty quickly, when it became perfectly clear that a barbiturate was NOT good for a highly emotionally raw and sensitive 13-14 year old, but I believed them and felt confident that by my 20’s, I would be a normal kid. Just like my friends.

cortex

Never once did they explain to me what seizures were. How they worked. What was fucking wrong with me. So when I continued to have them in a highly muted form (ie not doing the dying fish routine with my body, aka grand mal seizures), I never told anyone. Hey- I wasn’t talking to my parents anyway- just one MORE thing not to tell them. Not once did I realize how bad all this was. Until they got worse. And I had a few more. But then they found a good medication after a few failed attempts (one they had to take me off immediately, as it was killing people by anemia, ooo fun!) and I was safe at last. Seizure free. Basically.

It was approximately at this point that I found myself living in Santa Cruz, and that I found Joy Division.

Let me preface this by saying, I have never been “cool” or up on things the way I would like to have been, except perhaps in the worlds of literature and film. I may have read/seen some stuff ahead of other folks in that particular area. Other than that, I spent a good long time trying to play “catch up,” mostly because all of my friends were a great deal older than I was. They were probably drinking beer and singing TV Party while I was still getting through the Narnia books. At any rate, I had heard Joy Division, never got “into” them, but knew that a lot of people I liked really liked them. So the day that my housemate who worked at the corporate record store downtown next to the Santa Cruz 9 (was it the Wherehouse?) brought home the 4-disc collection, Heart and Soul in order to sell it to the other record store in town (he’d stuffed the box set down his pants on his way out the door), I knew it had to be mine instead. And it was.

b00005mkhq01lzzzzzzz1Unfortunately, what this prevented was the first cohesive aural experience of a Joy Division album. True, I did get 4 discs of pure, unadulterated amazing music, but I did not get an album.

See, here’s the problem with that. In this day and age, albums do not carry a whole lot of currency for most people, or so it seems. However, with the musics that I happen to love, albums mean a whole lot. Sure, you can listen to “Pinball Wizard,” from Tommy, and it’s a great song on its own, but without the context of the album it loses a great deal of its power. The same goes for most of my favorite albums, to be honest. They are albums.

But within this context, having only really had intimate familiarity with “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” (as anyone who has spent ANY time within 50 feet of a goth or goth club does), I was immediately drawn to “She’s Lost Control.” Once I read about the background story….even more so.

Sure, it was ego. I wanted to find myself in there. I was that girl. Because also, at that time, I was in my late teens/early 20’s (aka Second Adolescence, only gotta pay your own way this time ’round!), and so many other things seemed…out of control. In fact, the only thing that was not out of control was what I was studying, because I had fallen so deeply, madly and passionately in love with film and media studies that every pore in my body, every hair on my head, every beat of my heart seemed to exude it. I lived for it. But that song……

Confusion in her eyes that says it all.
She’s lost control.
And she’s clinging to the nearest passer by,
She’s lost control.
And she gave away the secrets of her past,
And said I’ve lost control again,
And a voice that told her when and where to act,
She said I’ve lost control again.

I must have listened to that song 10,000 times. It was kinda like the song “Swamp Thing,” by the Chameleons, UK. I heard it and I simply. Could. Not. Get. Enough.

And that was it. My story. That was how I met Joy Division.

Things have changed now. But that’s another story for another time. Part 2.

But I wonder if my world would have altered had I been introduced to a full album instead. Was my musical maturity level at the time up to par? Could I have understood it? Would it have done anything for me? More inportantly, does it mean I am less of a fan because I have done my listening in such compartmentalized doses that were so separated? And what is fan-ness of this individuated and personalized genre anyway?

To me, this song meant a great deal. Little did I know how much the band and its singer would come to mean when my own illness became more advanced, 10 years in the future. Stayed tuned, true believers, that part comes up next…




The Tower of Babel

It’s not like it never happens. It happens all the time.

We just never notice.

Well, most of us never notice.

On the other hand, were more of us proficient in other languages, we would be far more indignant about the sheer volume of cases of incorrect subtitling that occur on a film-by-film basis. But, alas, we are not. So they pass us by, and we accept foreign films as having a certain amount of fidelity to their original intentions, linguistically.

To be fair, there are a good number of films that do maintain a pretty faithful translatory nature. However, it is in those few films that stray so desparately from either the exact wording or the feel of the dialogue that are the bad apples that ruin the bunch.

The tragedy comes when it happens to a film as breathtaking and ground-breaking in many ways as Let The Right One In. I was sitting here tonight, and my good friend Gariana from Popcorn Mafia sends me this link that nearly sent me screaming down the street, accusing any young studio exec-type within yelling distance of having *anything* to do with it (even though I knew, full well, that they had no such position in the matter).

So yes. It appears that someone has decided that Americans, on the whole, were ready only for Twilight when it came to Vampire movies. The dumbing down of the subtitles on the DVD is not only ludicrous it’s insulting. Thanks to RobG at Icons Of Fright, I now know that I will not be buying the American release. His treatment of the subtitling and what was “lost in translation” is not only informative, but incisive and well-displayed.

In any case, just a FYI and a heads’ up. If you care about the film (and you really should- its ALL about the “little things” in this film that can ONLY be conveyed through the incredible use of finely attenuated dialogue and storytelling), do yourself a favor and skip the American release- get the Canadian release, get the Korean/Swedish/Swahili…who cares! Just as long as the subtitles are more finely accented to the Real Dialogue.

If they are not, you lose half the film, and it would be like seeing the film without hearing it, or vice versa, a very difficult proposition indeed.

Curtain Call

I have a bone to pick. And there is a hellovalot of marrow inside so…watch out.

Look, I know the economy sucks. I know prices of things have gone up substantially in the last 10+ years. And furthermore, I know that changes in technology have gifted us with the wondrous ability to have more things at our beck and call than ever before in our small and insignificant lifetimes. I KNOW. I’ve been here, living it too.

I’m not unsympathetic. However, at some point we have to make a choice. Draw a line. We have to figure out what is important to us as individuals and as human beings, and we need to stick to that. I like technology as much as the next person, however I am seeing some very difficult things within its soft and welcoming folds.  As it envelops, it seems to also trap and keep in certain circumstances. It’s intoxicating and addicting. And THAT is where the danger lies.

The danger with technological advancement lies in the part where people would rather interact with each other over a video game system online than even playing video games together in the same house. The danger lies when people would rather text message each other complete conversations than have a vocal conversation. The danger lies in people preferring to stay at home and watch a film because the “other people” at the theater are really annoying, and at least at home it’s more comfortable, completely forgoing the entire way that a film was designed and created to be watched.

Theoretically, all of these things are fucking fascinating. They are creating an entirely new culture that is removing itself from each other and human interaction. Human robots, so to speak. The less contact we have with each other, the less effort we have to put forth into our relationships and the less energy we have to put into knowing other people. We expect less, we want less, we give less. Tragedy is, those of us who don’t buy into this? We also get less from the vast majority of folks on the planet these days, as well. But that doesn’t stop me from expecting more, as frustrated as I may be and frustrating as the whole thing is. I was not raised to have 1/2 relationships, nor was I trained academically to interact with people in such a way that was unbecoming to what my full potential could be. Now I fully recognize that in the last few years my behavior has been less than stellar, and I have been less than 100% of what I “could be” but that only gets you so far until you realize that its utter crap and makes you incredibly unhappy.

So then you change.

And you alter your behavior. Which I have done. Much to ny satisfaction.

I had a point to this entry. I wanted to gear it towards the discussion of why we should make it a point to attend theaters for our film-viewing, but perhaps I shall go into that more in-depth another time. For now, perhaps I have babbled enough. I have much more to say, but I have gotten to a point where I am perhaps a bit more frustrated than I should be in order to write coherently.

Thanks for listening…

Happy Birthday Bill!!!

Right-o, since I’m still a-workin’ on somethin’ bigger, and the inimitable James Tiberius Kirk/Denny Crane/Man who had the Nightmare at 20,000 Feet/Priceline Negotiator, etc CLEARLY takes precedence ANYWAY….Have at it.

Happy 78th birthday to the one…the only….William Alan Shatner.

shatnertrombone_rev

Plus I shall give you Henry Rollins on his experience recording with Bill….

And some puppets singing the recorded song. Because the song? Fucking rules. And….so do puppets. In general.

ENJOY!!!!

My time in a Dublin Police Station…

Y’know, traveling is a fun AND a funny thing.

You get to have all KINDS of experiences. ESPECIALLY on holidays.

Especially on HOLIDAYS in FOREIGN COUNTRIES.

st-patricks-day-1

So St. Patrick’s Day has a long and involved history, right? Involving religion, and snakes, and all sorts of fun stuff. But to a few 20-21 year old kids going to college in the UK, well, it was……about going to St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. Not so much about historical pretense. Even if we were well educated individuals who actually did (and still do) care a great deal about the ways in which theology and history intersect to create ritualistic celebration. However, one must admit- it’s changed quite a bit from St. Patrick and his Snakes, no?

In any case, there we were. In Dublin. March of 2001. I was 21 years old. We had decided to go to Ireland, oh…maybe…72 hours previous.

I was with my Partner in Crime, my Ultimate Traveling Companion, the girl I met at school in the UK who hailed from Wisconsin. What *is* it about Wisconsin??? Constantly meeting awesomely people from there. Must be in the custard or the brats.

At any rate, there we were.

We’d done the “night.”

We’d hit the pubs, drank the Guiness, seen the madness, and were ready to call it a night.

…only we couldn’t. And funny thing? Neither could the folks we came with.

See it was almost comedic. I do say ALMOST. It was quite like those movies where you watch in horror as the people disperse into disastrous chaos and simply laugh. And why do we laugh? Because we know, according to filmic convention, that, in the end, It Will All Be Just Fine.

This didn’t seem like one of those movies when we were standing on the street, freezing our asses off, and all the bars were closing at about midnight or 1am. Yeah. That’s what we thought too. A bit early.

See, Ireland gets super cold at night and…..we were c.o.l.d.

I admit- our planning was POOR, at best. We, um, well….were gonna wait until the bus station opened at 6am, then leave. BUT, we were hoping that there would be stuff going on until at *least* 2, and then? Well, we hoped we could find a diner or something

No such luck.

Oh, the stupidity of youth. However, that stupidity makes for GREAT storytelling. Eventually. Once the hypothermia wears off.

I have images of our somewhat inebriated compatriots waiting for the bus or taxis back to the hostel in County Cork (a good WAYS off). We kept passing them, as we searched for somewhere to hang out for a few hours. And no, it wasn’t pretty.

It looked like the damned zombie apocalypse was coming, because we weren’t the only bad planners. There were a whole bunch more, only………they were SERIOUSLY drunk and my friend and I? Well, we were actually only pleasantly celebrational. Like, as in, we could stand, walk, ENJOY ourselves.

However, we were caught up in the rest of the folks banging on hotel doors to let us in for a few hours of respite.

No such luck.

And we kept passing our poor friends who were still waiting for the cabs.

Finally, exhausted, after a few more mishaps, we just didn’t know what to do.

A kind soul took pity on us.

“The police station, “ they said, “Just go there. They won’t bother you at all. You can sit there as long as you want.”

We looked at each other in disbelief. Neither of us were, um, too keen on the idea, shall we say? However, what did we have to lose?

We headed down towards the station. And entered the next part of our adventure.

ladycraved

OK, so we were in the damn Dublin Police Station for St. Patrick’s Day.

Can you get much more bizarre than that? Well, yes you can. She and I sat there. Staring at the wall, shivering and wondering a) how the hell we got there in the first place, b) how the hell we were gonna stay awake until the bus station opened and c) what we would say to the nice Irish police officers, should they ask us why we just barged into the police station and sat down, without saying a word to anyone.

Dublin Police Station

Dublin Police Station

Just as we were coming to terms with our fate…….SHE came in, accompanied by another woman and two of the aforesaid Irish Police Officers (who, for the record, completely ignored us except for once, if I remember correctly, for the entirety of our “visit”). One of the women was taken back “behind the scenes,” while the other? She became our friend for the evening.

And boy oh boy, was she our friend. Aside from the nice homeless man, eating bread and listening to his walkman in the far corner, she was the only person in their with us. And we were her captive (and I DO mean captive) audience.

“Ah, but she’s sech a good gerl, she shouldna been done fer tha drunk drivin’, ye see, she’s a good gerl, y’see,” she kept telling us.

We nodded in agreement. Of course she was. Of course.

Then she asked us some questions, I think. Her sobriety, of course, was….less than reliable. We mostly just froze and agreed with Everything She Said. Because she Wouldn’t Stop Talking.

You think *I* talk a lot? You never met HER.

Mostly about what a good girl her friend was, and how she just “shouldna been done like tha’” of course, but she really was what my mother would call a “character.”

If you think this lasted forever, well you’d be right. IT DID.

And there wasn’t much we could do but listen to her. It’s entertaining now, but woah nelly.

At some point, she realized that as an audience we weren’t much, and started to try to figure out what to do about LEAVING.

That’s when the REAL FUN began.

She started to flip the lights on and off. She started running around the room. She started to knock on the bulletproof glass where the policeman/receptionist sat. Not only did this disturb him, but our Homeless Friend started going bonkers. He removed himself from underneath the seats, and started to be, um, not so happy with her, making sounds of protest, quite zombie-like, where he had been perfectly well behaved and just calm and walkman-listening before. Now he was ALL about the bread-chomping and pissed off at her proclivities towards flashing lights on/off and generally disturbing the peace.

The woman went a bit loopy, to say the least. At this juncture, our friend was spoken to. Firmly. By her friends, the nice police officers who had taken her friend in. They informed her in no uncertain terms that if she did not QUIT IT IMMEDIATELY, she would join her friend, the “nice gerl.”

Pouting, she sat down.

My companion and I sighed with relief as the tension left the air.

Shortly thereafter, she was escorted from the premises to meet her friend (we assume?), and it became light outside. The Dublin bus station opened, and my Partner In Crime and I removed ourselves from the freezing chairs (they left the doors open all night- it was no warmer inside the station than it was outside), and got ourselves to the airport.

FAST.

So, my friends, that was my story for this St. Patrick’s Day. Hope yours is well and good! Please be careful and well, keep safe and most of all, stay outta police stations!!

Are you down with the sickness?: In a Lonely Place and Modern Traumas

Interesting times right now, I have to say.  And the synergy of my film viewing and the world at large is not going unnoticed by this rabid cinephile.

Tonight I went to the Silent Movie Theater to see In a Lonely Place, a film that I fell in love with back in college at UCSC, when my best friend Ray showed it to me. Since then, I have read the book it was based on, wrote a paper about it, and, better still, found an absolutely fucking BRILLIANT song that was based on it (using one of the best lines from the damn film).

This is undoubtedly a troubling film. There is no question in my mind that it is one of Bogart’s best performances, as you see his range of acting through an array of facial expressions that he rarely gets the opportunity to use in most of his more standard roles, however…it makes the film (and his character) that much more, well, disturbing.

See, there’s a murder, right? And it’s a noir, so there seems to be a wrong man thing, right? (And no, I’m NOT going to give anything away, I hate spoilers and ruining films for people with the heat of a thousand burning fires) And of course there’s a love story somewhere inside. All set within the confines of Hollywood and the film industry. Now, the WONDERFUL thing about many of the films in the ’40’s and ’50’s that were made about Hollywood is the way that they treated the landscape. Far from it being the environment where dreams come true and stars are born, it is diseased. Hollywood is sick and rotting, it is a corpse being slowly picked apart by the vultures who live there; beasts who feed upon it (some call those agents, but hey…) trying to gain some substantiation but end up with nothing but more contamination. My point is, that this film is about the sickness.

I am not a stranger to Hollywood, nor am I a stranger to infirmity, especially the kind discussed within the narrative of this film. I wish I could say that it was foreign to me, however, whether it was a personal experience or a friend’s, it is all too familiar. See, no matter how you cut it, Bogart’s character, Dixon Steele, is guilty. I know, I know, I just told you I wasn’t going to spoil anything, but hear me out- I’m not. The main issue in this film has to do with anger issues, and, more crucially, domestic violence. As the cops look at his case, they go through Dix’s files, they come across case after case of fights and brawls and assorted other socially “acceptable” male misbehavior. Then they come to one of his former girlfriends. She retracted the call she made about him, and said that she had broken her nose by “running into a door.”

This is the point where we start to worry and wonder. This is the part where we become disturbed. THIS is the part where the acceptable “guy-ism” of punching the other dude’s lights out doesn’t count. Because you hit a girl. Now I am a full-on feminist, but I don’t think that there aren’t extenuating circumstances to many situations and the term “hitting a girl” does kinda rub me the wrong way at times because it infers that, well, I couldn’t punch the fuck outta someone if I wanted to. However, I also realize that it is a biological FACT that most men are physically stronger than most women in many circumstances (minus weightlifters, bodybuilders, military, and probably a good percentage of the crazy nutjobs that survive Burning Man on a yearly basis, etc), and therefore? YOU DON’T HIT A GIRL.

Which brings me back to my main discussion. Nicholas Ray’s film and Chris Brown and Rihanna. Wh-wh-wh-what??

Yes, I wrote exactly that. Now the interesting thing is, as I was driving to the theater tonight, I was oblivious to the connection between the two (Gee, I dunno, film noir from 1950, R&B teeny-bopper couple from 2009…connection just *didn’t* immediately spring to mind…call me crazy), but as I watched the film unfurl, I was horrified to realize that there was Too Much There. Watching Dixon Steele unravel, watching Gloria Grahame respond, watching their relationship build to the crescendo that it does, the magnificence that is that film…I found more items inside of the diegesis alarming that I had before. Yet, I also found them more heartbreaking and more heartwrenching as well.  Because nothing is ever simple, nothing is ever easy, and love, above all, is the most difficult of all things. However, this film shows that love, with certain people, can be a combat zone, and does nothing to hide that fact. As a sidenote, it would seem to me that this at least partially stemmed from the fact that Nicholas Ray and his star, Gloria Grahame, were in the middle of ending their marriage during the making of the film (he slept on the set, actually, claiming the need to “work late”). However, like war, in this film love is hell.

However, it is not that simple. Especially not in real life. And especially not when the media gets involved (also one of the pivotal messages of the film- a critique of fame and the role that the media plays in making/breaking personal lives).  This very aspect of media involvement hit me like a jackhammer. Actually, it hit me more like the unending barrage of updates I’ve been seeing everyday at the gym about Chris Brown and Rihanna. And I was fascinated by the parallel issues that I was seeing within fiction and non-fiction, with the more than 50 years in between.

I had been listening to a piece on NPR about teenagers in LA and their responses to the Chris Brown/Rihanna thing right before I pulled up to the theater. See, it’s pretty phenomenal what fandom and fan culture will do to people and their synthesis of actual real life events. The way I see it, there are three main activities that fans regularly engage in that can be seriously and horrifically detrimental in situations like this.

1) Fans will intentionally ignore the negative/unacceptable in order to keep their image of their Perfect Idol “perfect”

2) Fans will actively search for and find “back up” evidence (no matter how outlandish it may seem) that defies the event in question in order to reposition and restore the Perfect Idol back to his/her “rightful” throne

3) Fans will vigorously disseminate their version of events as the absolute truth, as a result of their expert knowledge in that area

Now, please do not misunderstand me. I am a HUGE fan of Fandoms and Fan Culture. I study it, love it, AM it, to a certain extent. Each of the above things in and of itself is not inherently evil. However, when it comes to a situation like Rihanna and Chris Brown…it becomes very dangerous. These three things are, obviously, methods that fans use to intentionally distort the truth. This is not bad when it comes to the discussion of William Shatner’s toupees, but it is damaging beyond words when it comes to something like domestic violence.

Especially when there are, oh, no celebrities with the balls enough to stand up and say “Hey guys- this shit don’t fly. This was not good.” That certainly doesn’t help. So when KCRW has these teenagers discussing their feelings about whether Rihanna hit him first, and then whether she deserved to get hit back because she started it, and others disowning Brown altogether, you end up realizing that there is an entire generation of kids out there right now, struggling to cobble together some kind of reasoning and some kind of meaning from all of this with no guidance. Oh boo hoo, so Brown isn’t getting to do that awards show. Is that going to help these girls who love(d) him? Not really.  One of the girls said something to the effect of “Oh, he’s never going to be able to come back from this one. He’s being called Ike Turner, you don’t come back from that.”  Tragically, and especially after rewatching the film tonight, I have to play the cynic on this one. He’s already coming back. His PR people are working overtime to make damn sure that happens. Thus I say, welcome to the sickness. Welcome to the disease. Welcome to the virus-ridden place that used to be located in Hollywood, but has now been expanded to a meta-location called, simply, Celebrity.

inalonelyplace3791 I was going to post a picture of Rihanna and her face, but do you really need to see that? I mean, that is a physically embodied example of illness and malady, physically imposed and created, but sickness nonethless. But I thought better of it. We’ve all seen it by now, and if you haven’t, google it. NO ONE should EVER get beaten like that. I’m glad that picture got leaked though, even if her 21-year-old ass isn’t. It’s going to make a difference in someone’s life. I hope. But I’m not going to repost the damn thing.

Do we need to see more reiteration on WHY you shouldn’t beat another human being to a bloody pulp? I’m thinking….no.  So instead, I’ll end with a brief musing on the foreign poster I found for In a Lonely Place. I thought it was particularly fascinating because, well, the title change. I have a penchant for foreign film posters. BIG time. My favorites currently are the Polish ones. But this one is pretty interesting. The film’s “tagline” literally says “Of hatred? or of death?”  And the title? Well, this film is now called “Death in a kiss.”

Quite a different feel from In a Lonely Place, eh? The association of kisses with violence and death with hate and intimacies, all against the backdrop of what seems to be Bogart caressing Grahame’s face in his hands…It’s quite intense. Not unlike the film. Translations and updates can be funny things, not unlike language itself. It can change a film from having a semi-moody, melancholic title to one that connotes vicious violence and explosive passions. That very same language is also used to change one man’s actions of anger and violence into a simple “mistake,” or something that was “taken out of context,” with very similar effects: the entire scene changes.

At the end of the day, media is as sensitive as we are. However, as it seems to be continually proven, not all the people who are producing it these days, are. They are those vultures as mentioned earlier, circling, waiting. At this point it is just up to us really. We have to decide whether we’re going to be down with the sickness, or abscond to greener pastures and leave it for others to deal with, as the celebrities seemed to have done with the Rihanna/Brown case. Alternatively,  we can always try and revitalize this bitch, give it some blood, a new title and tagline perhaps. I don’t know about you, but those foreign posters? They always speak volumes to me.

A taste of things to come….

So I’m working on something really interesting and personal and wonderful. I am very excited about it.  It’s totally in the editing process, & it’s saved as a draft here on my “dashboard” and it will be getting published up here by the end of the weekend.  That is my plan, anyways.

BUT, as a little precursor……here’s a hint at what you’ll be reading about next. Sorta.

And thank god for 8mm film & people who took/take care of it, cuz MAN…this is amazing looking footage….

Damn Fine Panties

Yeah, so I’m failing right now on the blogging thing. Been reaaaaaaaallly busy….work, school, etc.
So the good stuff- the writing- it will come.
I found this today, though, and had to share.

These Boots were made for Walken…

As I work on a proper entry, a tribute to the late and great Lux Interior of The Cramps (stay tuned),I will give you this: