Go West
Why You Should Watch Filth
I know I’m like a cheerleader for John Waters here on clusterflock, but I really do love the man and I love the way his mind works and what he says. This is one of a series.
I always wanted a brother, and I wish John Waters had been my big brother.
(Thanks to Juanito for tipping me to this.)
Marcella Riordan reads the Molly Bloom soliloquy
In honor of Bloomsday yesterday Tim Carmody pointed to this beautiful reading of the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Josh Rothman says:
In my opinion, the best audio recording of Molly’s soliloquy appears in the Naxos audiobook of the novel; it’s read perfectly by the Irish actress Marcella Riordan. As it happens, you can listen to the last few minutes of her performance on YouTube. Molly thinks about nature and God, recalls her childhood in Gibralter (she’s half Spanish), and relives the moment she accepted her husband’s proposal of marriage.
Mike Mills, Beginners
Filmmaker Mike Mills’ parents met in junior high school. For 45 years, they lived together, raising Mills and his older sisters, until Mills’ mother died in 1999. Six months later, Mills’ father — a 75-year-old retired museum director — announced that he’s gay.
I heard this interview with Mills on Fresh Air yesterday.
quote out of context
For her performance Nobili, who says she uses dance as a form of prayer, lies spread-eagled in front of the altar clutching a crucifix or twists and turns as in pole-dancing routines.
George Takei vs. Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill
“That is sooo Takei.”
(Thanks to Mr. Ledgerwood for this.)
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
Quote out of context
Once, at a hardware store, he stared up at the glittery chandeliers and wept, “I don’t want to be a daddy! I want to be a mommy!”
Pointy Boots
Girls can wear pointy boots, too.
The Beating of Chrissy Polis
My stomach is staging a revolt. I’m in a foul mood and reading about the beating of Chrissy Polis, a trans-gender woman who was beaten in the dining area of a McDonald’s Restaurant in Maryland, certainly didn’t improve it. The thing that pisses me off about that is the fact that I just happened to hear about this while reading about something else. It wasn’t in the news at all.
Like Bint Alshamsa, I hate what happened to Chrissy Polis, too. And I just learned of it from a TG friend seeking to talk with me about how an awful lot of men who profess to be into TG women want them to be both virgins and hos.
As India once said, más or menos, “Not to go all Women’s Studies 101 on y’all.”
But.
Dick Cavett Interviews Lance Loud (circa 1973)
Rick spoke of Lance Loud, made famous by An American Family, a cinema vérité series shot in 1971 and broadcast by PBS in early 1973. Here is Dick Cavett interviewing Lance not long after the series aired.
Sexy Sax Man
Remembering Scott, 4
From my friend, M.
In the spring of 1974 I’m in our side yard outside the guest house talking to my dad, waiting for Scott who’s coming to pick me up. We hear a huge crash at our corner. The next thing I know I hear my dad yelling, “Lay down Scott. Lay down, son.” Not watching the traffic (the one other car on the street), Scott had crossed in front of an oncoming pick-up truck. Scott’s head goes through the windshield (remember the scars on his forehead?), and it’s like the car explodes. His car was spun around and jammed against the curb, glass sparkling on the ground, and the hatch back was open and stuff was scattered across Mrs. Cantey’s front yard. Scott crawls out of the car, bleeding profusely from lacerations to his head. The woman who was driving the pick-up truck was crying and saying “he just turned right in front of me, he didn’t look, oh my god.” There was a long Loretta Lynn style wig laying in the gutter and someone asked if it was a dog he’d swerved to avoid. Scott’s still lying in Mrs. Cantey’s yard, my dad’s with him telling him he’ll be ok, while I call an ambulance and his mother. I go back to the street and by now the whole neighborhood is standing around looking, and now I’m looking too. Bras, fake jelly boobs, gigantic high heels, a sequined top, wigs and other hair pieces and all sorts of drag paraphernalia are lying all over the place. By now the police are there and the ambulance. The police officer asks me if I can get Scott’s driver’s license. So I reach in Scott’s front pocket where he carried his license, 3 dollars, and a small bottle of poppers. I went with Scott in the ambulance. My dad stayed and managed the business of the tow truck, and I suppose he gathered the wigs, shoes, makeup and fake boobs and put them back in Scott’s destroyed purple Gremlin hatchback. My dad never mentioned a word about the stuff.
Terence Stamp in “Toby Dammit”
Terence Stamp, speaking in his own voice, in “Toby Dammit,” Federico Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 omnibus (anthology) film, Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary Stories/Spirits of the Dead).
For years only dubbed versions were easily available.
This is my Easter basket treat for all y’all. Make of it what you will.
(Terence Stamp just got another award. This one from the Film Society. San Francisco.)
Savage Car Talk
So some genius motherfucker decided to do a mashup of Car Talk and Savage Love, and it’s pretty awesome.
NSFW should go without saying.
It Gets Better: Apple Employees
Excuse me, I have something in my eye.
You are — “in quotes” — a serious actress
Historical perspective on Helen Mirren’s magical bosom.
Thanks to Kimberly and Ju Ju for this. (We’ve had an extended afternoon conversation about Helen Mirren.)
An agnostic looking for love in the Bible Belt
I find this article fascinating because I so often have precisely the opposite problem (although, I am a far cry from the dudes in this article):
After the waiter departed, Matthew leaned across the table, almost apologetically, and said, “You don’t mind that I ordered a bottle of wine, do you?”
I assured him that I approved of his choice. Still, he looked bothered.
“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I like to unwind with a drink now and then, but I don’t drink all of the time,” Matthew said. “I bet you don’t either.”
“Not in the morning.” I laughed.
“Oh, a joke. That’s funny. But seriously, do you think you’ll drink after you have children?”
I was certain he was putting me on. I was 22, freshly graduated from college and unaccustomed to this line of questioning, especially on a first date. But he persisted. He’d enjoyed our tipsy two-step, he explained, but he was looking to plan his future. He believed in getting the serious business out of the way on a first date. I wondered how many second dates Matthew ever had.
“I don’t even know that I’ll have children,” I said.
“Is that another joke?”
“No.”
The wine arrived. As if to demonstrate how moderation worked, Matthew poured me half a glass, which I definitely saw as half-empty.
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“But you believe in God?”
I drained my wine glass and reached across the table for the bottle. I gave him an honest answer, though I suspected I would never see Matthew again. I said that I really wasn’t sure. I certainly didn’t believe that the Bible was the literal word of God, nor did I buy into stories about building giant arks and visiting whale’s bellies. While I didn’t consider myself a Christian or a practitioner of any other religion, I wasn’t an atheist, either. To say definitively that God didn’t exist seemed as restrictive as saying that he did. I was a skeptical agnostic, I concluded.
Chicks Who Scorn Chick Flicks
So I think it’s really cool that I am connecting with other chicks who scorn chick flicks. Chicks into “explosions and naked people.” And chicks into Robert Aldrich and Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine and Keith Carradine. And hobo flicks.
Dangle
Dangly earrings. A continual point of contention between me and my late mother.
Read more
Two Weeks with Love
It was fun today having lunch with a friend at the suburban lesbian bar and watching part of Two Weeks with Love (1950), starring Jane Powell, Ricardo Montalban, and Debbie Reynolds.
The Robinson family, father, mother and two daughters, are spending two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills. Older daughter Patti vies with her friend, Valeria, for the affections of Demi Armendez but Patti is at a disadvantage because her father thinks she is too young for boys. But with Patti singing at an amateur show and a dance, her adventures in quest of Armendez end happily.
Note to Deron: Two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills.
Alan Turing Documentary
A trailer for a documentary on the life of Alan Turing:
Turing was the British WW II code breaker and early pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence who proposed an operational test of intelligence as a replacement for the philosophical question, “Can machines think?”
Be careful, this is heartbreaking.
(thanks, Tim)
tweet of the day
Tweet of the day, honorable mention
Specifically, he’s been tweeting gorgeous photos from this collection all afternoon.
The worst thing that will happen to you today.
Will be watching this bra fitting video.
Via The Hairpin.
