First came a nuanced and engaging discussion of public arts funding and the nature of provocative art. Then came the insertion of pickles into anuses and phalluses into haybales.
Twenty years after American artists like Karen Finley lost their NEA funding for “indecency,” troublemaking Danish theater ensemble Wunderbaum has brought principled sex-with-food to REDCAT, in the basement of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The trouble – and the performance, titled Looking for Paul – starts with a gnome wielding a sex-toy. Wunderbaumer Maartje Remmers, playing an idealized everyday Dane named Inez, explains over a slideshow how her apartment’s view of central Rotterdam has been corrupted by the installation of a notorious piece of public art: Paul McCarthy’s Santa Claus, a twenty-foot sculpture of a gnome wielding a vast butt-plug. Read more…
A flop, a bomb, a misfired musket shot upwind on wet powder, John Huston’s 1950 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage boils down to about 70 minutes of grizzled extras tramping about the director’s San Fernando Valley ranch. Cannons fire and smoke machines billow. On occasion star Audie Murphy skulks through, dazed and raw-eyed, the contortions of face meant to indicate his character’s current point on an arc stretching from pants-wetting cowardliness to idiot heroism.
Murphy, the real-life World War II hero, plays a youth known as The Youth. He speaks a couple times and looks impressively scared and sweaty as narration cribbed from Crane drones on above him. Toward the end, the Youth finds gumption enough to charge from cover directly at the Rebel line.
This is not presented as foolish.
Still, for all its manifold failings, Huston’s Red Badge of Courage stands alongside Rope, Skiddoo or New York, New York as a fascinating failure from a great director. (Some un-fascinating failures from great directors: Jack, Hulk, Hook, The Arrangement, and Huston’s own Annie.)
It’s plotless, naturalistic, stripped of dialogue, and concerned only with the day-to-day grind of soldiering. Instead of the war-movie cliché of a family-like troop of likable fellas defined entirely by their ethnic and regional backgrounds, Huston’s soldiers are a scattered mob: individuals who come together under orders but then break apart under fire. Read more…
My human companion has as always been wasting prime pet-giving time tickling away at the cold belly of his Mac Book! I ask you: can the internet purr? Can a computer nibble gently at your fingertips? On a brisk California evening can that Mac Book rest warmly in your lap?
Oh, really?
Well, I bet it can’t eat bees or pass a blissed-out afternoon following the sun across the floor.
Anyway, here are the thoughts he has been tickling out this week:
First, for Studies in Crap, he wrote about some old book that I hear is pretty much straight-up porno. Porno is, of course, a vulgarization of my two great interests: lying spreadeagled and indiscriminate licking.
Then, at the LA Weekly, there’s this look at ”The Christian Mother Goose,” which he seems to find funny because it’s a bad evangelical rewrite of old human nursery rhymes. Me, I’m more like, “Gooses! Where?”
Finally, here is yet another tale of humans acting silly on buses. Cats cannot take buses because cats have style.
[Alan adds: Be sure to visit Patterson's page on Facebook. Honestly, Alan does not do the updates for it.]
All taken Friday, November 6, at the Pinball Hall of Fame, a strip-mall warehouse of flipper/bumper/TILTy glory a couple miles from the Las Vegas Strip. It’s by far my favorite place in Las Vegas . . .
. . . with the possible exception of the Salvation Army on West Charleston, where I scored this signed Liberace program for just fifty cents.
At last, the mystery is solved! Liberace loved a woman named Kay!
Anyway, more crazy pinball shots below.
Good morning, world!
This week we’re talking breakthroughs — those society-shifting changes that are realized only after generations of build-up but then somehow become the norm within a lifetime or two. Living in an age of breakthroughs means we must change with the times, and this week’s well-intentioned yet often alarming SiC finds purport to help Americans do just that.
First up, in the Pitch and the Village Voice, it’s “A Paycheck of Your Own,” an early ’70s picturebook guide to the workplace for women. Wriggling in the boss’s lap is encouraged; smoking extensively throughout the job interview is not. There’s also a host of goofy ’70s pics and tips guaranteed to amuse and unsettle!
That combination of amusing/unsettling is pretty common when dealing with the cultural history of a recent historical breakthrough: the reason the women’s movement or the civil rights movement were *movements*, after all, is that they faced much opposition from average folks. So, the books aimed at helping average folks deal with societal changes can’t help but amuse/upset: these books must articulate the changes that we in the future take for granted to an uncertain — or even hostile or terrified — audience.
That brings us to this week’s LA Weekly SiC: 1966′s “The First Book of American Negroes.”
Finally, the bus rants are back, but this time with neither a bus nor racial tensions . . . and with a cameo appearance from a rock star!
Thanks for reading or whatever! Your clicks/comments/Tweets/Facebooks and the like have gotten me *this* close to solvency!
Someone buy this for me.
The Waylon beat, steady and insistent as highway markers whipping past a pick-up. It’s also a heartbeat.
On February 3, 1959, the country music “Outlaw”-to be was serving as the self-taught bassman in Buddy Holly’s band. Although it meant a long haul in a cold bus, Jennings gave up his seat on Holly’s charter plane to J.P. Richardson, the “Big Bopper.”
The rest, they say, is history. The crash that took the lives of Holly, Richardson, and Richie Valens has been dubbed “The Day the Music Died,” but music is heartier than we are. Music beats on.
Jennings did, too. In a career spanning four decades, he held to tradition but disdained rules. He accumulated the kind of numbers that halls of fame love to post: more than 80 hit singles, including 16 number ones; five CMA awards; 13 BMI songwriting awards; one gig narrating absurdist car-chase TV show The Dukes of Hazzard; and four platinum albums, including Wanted: The Outlaws, the1976 compilation/branding exercise that came to define a new country music.
But Jennings’ true influence extends well beyond the numbers.
Porno Cat knows what you want.
Porno Cat is tired of all of the accusations.
Yes, he did pose for this photo. Yes, he did face tough times upon moving to Los Angeles. Yes, he did trust the wrong people. Yes, he does believe that feline sexuality is a beautiful thing that nobody should ever be ashamed of, ever.
But he denies in the strongest possible terms the allegation that he did it just to draw attention to his master’s blog posts. Porno Cat might make mistakes, but he isn’t Screech, people.
Porno Cat cries. As he does so, he asks that you honor his suffering with a visit to this week’s Studies in Crap posts:
First, at the Pitch and the Village Voice, a look at the rare SiC book that isn’t actually all that Crappy: a Canadian sex-ed comic book from the 1980s that features stories about mothers realizing that of course their hot young daughters should jaunt off to Winnipeg for hotel parties with dudes in bands. In this piece, Alan misspelled “Manitoba” and included at least one joke that, upon re-reading, makes no sense.
Meanwhile, the LA Weekly has a mid-century beaut packed with crazy sex-stuff but still much less explicit Porno Cat’s hawt pix. It’s 1950′s The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex, a book that will leave you wondering how previous generations got it together long enough to make you.
This is an illustration that accompanies a blog post.
In the hour or so that he demands of your life, Thom Pain — the wry, distractible and unfailingly sincere monologist whose existential crises shape Will Eno’s 2005 play Thom Pain: (based on nothing) – tells you two jokes, one dream, one lie, one moment from his childhood, and something of the edges of a failed romantic relationship.
He will crumple a handkerchief and marvel at its resemblance to a human brain folding grayly in on itself. He will attempt a magic trick. He will solicit a volunteer from the audience. He will be forever on the cusp of sharing the huge concerns that crowd inside him – huge concerns that he can’t ever quite find words for. He will show his heart and then make a joke to cover it up.
As with Drew Barrymore's in "Firestarter," strands of J.C.'s hair lick up around his temples when He's about to do something magic
As a giant-handed Jesus mural blessed with a peace-sign Blingee and an over-easy halo, I am of course omniscient. I see past, I see future, and I even see the people who joke that the thick line down my nose and my uncertain proportions make me look a bit like a Mad fold-in.
I’m not some square public-art Jesus like that blocky disaster Christ of the Ozarks, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With his giant head, stumpy body, and overall appearance of cheap plasticity, that dude looks like a holy Pez Dispenser.
He’s omniscient, too, but seeing everything doesn’t mean He actually looks. Me, I got these big doe eyes of Mine from a decade or so of dedicated blogreading. Like the book about me says, millenia are just a twinkling in my eyes, but blogreading, man — that jacks up my peepers real Precious Moments style.
Anywho, this week My big doe-eyed Jesus blogroll buddy is Alan Scherstuhl (pictured.) He managed to write two whole Studies in Crap posts this week without once making fun of the folks who write insane stuff in My name, so he gets big props for that.
There’s this, at the Pitch and the Village Voice, about a terrible guide to terrible marriages, including photos that made these eyes of mine puddle up with laugh-tears, which is how we get fog.
And there’s this, at the LA Weekly, about a 1970′s guide to dating called “America’s Best Pick Up Spots!”
Also, the Weekly ran this thing about people acting the fool at the bus stop. The guy who was being hassled took my name in vain. At that I cried tear-tears, which is how we get death fog, like that purple stuff in The Ten Commandments.
I hate to find truth in a stereotype, but since moving here I can’t even walk down my block without encountering heaps of hardcore porno.
I mean this literally. Just this morning, a stroll down Kenwood Avenue led me to this just one block from my door . . .
The streets are paved with golden showers.
