Erotic Dream/Dog Diarrhea

My “that’s a fine how-do-you-do” moment of the week: I was having a very vivid, very pleasant erotic dream when the phone woke me up. It was, of course, my mother: “Oh, I’m so tired, Chris. The dog has had diarrhea all day. I heard little sounds in the night, but I just thought it was the fish tank, but then I woke up and looked at the floor and… well. He only weighs eight pounds, I don’t know how it all fits. Anyway, I’ve been cleaning that up and making him rice. Rice is good for upset stomachs. Oh, it was a chore getting the Kaopectate down him, though. We had to get one of those oral syringes for babies. I gave him some Pedialyte, too. I’m sure he lost too many electrolytes….” The sudden transition from “men at work” to “the poodle digestive catastrophe hour” has ruined my sexual imagination. I can still envision Scott Fujita in the leather harness, but now all he says is, “I even stepped in some in my sock. Under the end table! I was finding little poops all morning.”

We got a wonderful little write-up in my college’s student newspaper. My cover is pretty much blown at this point. I had hoped to graduate without my professors knowing I was behind such phrases as “I can still envision Scott Fujita in the leather harness, but now all he says is, ‘I even stepped in some in my sock. Under the end table! I was finding little poops all morning,’” but there it is. In the alumni newsletter, my entry will read: “Tulane Chris. Sagittarius. Research interests: medieval England, prewar Vienna, and diarrhea jokes.” So that’s fun.

Speaking of “phone conversations I had with female relatives recently,” here were some pips from last week:

Grandmother: How is the book coming?

Me: Oh, fine. It’s hard work, but I think it’ll be good.

Grandmother: Don’t write anything your grandmother can’t read.

Me: Um. About that…

Grandmother: I’ve been twenty-nine for fifty-one years. I don’t want to be shamed by my only grandson this late in life.

Me: Now, this “shame.” Would you be ashamed of, say… an entire page of suicide jokes? Topped off with a limerick?

Grandmother: I wouldn’t be particularly pleased. Is that something I need to be worried about?

Me: SO HOW’S THE NEW DOG

Grandmother: He’s fine, but you won’t get to meet him if your book is vulgar.

Later….

Mom: How did the book go? Am I in it?

Me: Indirectly, in that any psychiatrists who read it will probably guess your existence. We need to talk about Grandmother.

Mom: Oh, she was grouchy today. I asked her if she was regular and she jumped all over me.

Me: Well, bowels aside, it’s probably best she not read the book. There are… discussions.

Mom: Just tell her not to read it! She’s not stupid; she can guess what it’s like. She’ll just blame me. I raised you to write books like that, is what she’ll say.

Me: Well, still.

Mom: You didn’t use the c-word, did you?

Me: Crocodile? Colostomy? The answer to both of those is yes.

Mom: You know what I mean.

Me: Oh, “cunt?” Are you asking me if I said “cunt” in the book?

Mom: Yes.

Me: A little.

Mom: You’re grounded.

Me: MEG DID IT. MEG SAID “CUNT.”

Mom: She’s grounded.

[Ed. Note: Chris' mom is a cunt.]

It’s lucky I have them to talk to. Nothing funny happens to me anymore, since I’ve gotten “lolz busy” with school. It’s a brutal little arrangement: now that I’m a little bored with grad school, I hit the busiest patch. I thought I was covering well and not showing the stress of school/work/book/blog/personal issues we’d all rather not discuss, but then I got a “talking-to” at work yesterday. I was told that my “level of politeness in dealing with other employees’ requests had gone down,” which is a very, very diplomatic way of saying “you’re being kind of an asshole.” My initial reaction was enormous embarrassment, which probably worked in my favor, but now I’m annoyed, since I was never rude and just occasionally an stitch short with someone. Brusque, maybe, but not rude – the difference between “in a minute” and “Nothing would give me greater joy than to make these copies.”

Of course, having apologized profusely, I can’t very well go back in and say, “I’ve changed my mind, whoever said I was rude is irrational and probably a Communist, I’m a Goddamn peach to work with and you’re lucky to have me, I brighten everyone’s fucking day and you very well know it.” And to be fair, I do regret upsetting whomever I’ve upset, since I do genuinely like my job and all of my co-workers, but this whole incident seems a little thin-skinned – a classic “well, I’m sorry you feel that way” situation.

Okay, as I write this, I actually think I’ve figured it out. The geography of the office means that 1) people who need files have to come into my area, which startles me and puts me uncomfortably close to someone I don’t know very well and 2) anytime someone needs to ask me something, they have to come toward me from behind, which – my whippet-drinking-a-Red-Bull nervous system being what it is – startles me several times a day. Maybe they’re misinterpreting my bulging eyes and flaring nostrils as anger, rather than “OH GOD SOMETHING’S BEHIND ME IT’S A WOLF! WOOOOOOOOOOLF! - oh, here’s the stapler.” My ancestors must have been fun to be around on the boat to the New World:

Other Immigrant: I can’t wait to see this beautiful new land.

My Ancestor: Tomahawks. Syphilis. Wide open spaces. Shipwreck. Weird plants. We’re all going to die.

Since this whole business went through “the boss” and was all done in vague, correct HR terms, I have no idea whom I annoyed or how, leaving me with the same old options:

-       - Quit

-       - Get fired

-       - Get drunk in the parking lot before work

-       - Unnatural glee when confronted with any request of any kind, you know, like we all claim to have in cover letters

So, I guess the reason I’m telling you this story is that in case a headline shows up that reads “Area Man Found Dead at Copier, Smiling, Wearing A T-Shirt with Two Chipmunks Hugging on It,” you won’t expect a purple post that week. Hail and farewell, readers.

Worst of Netflix: Pervert!

After the Human Centipede/Karla/How to Be a Serial Killer trifecta, a commenter asked that I move my focus to comedies for a while. The relentless focus on man’s repeated, vivid inhumanity to man was getting to be a little much. I intended Pervert! to serve as a bridge: it’s about killing, but it’s also billed as a silly backwoods sex romp. I thought then I could ease back into movies where most of the characters survive, even if the audience may not.

Pervert!, to put it bluntly, is a loose, in many ways, reimagining of Native American trickster legends, with the addition of a lot of bare breasts and near-ceaseless double-entendres. It straddles the previously-undiscovered line between misogynist exploitation and feminist allegory in an 81-minute, partly claymation cringefest with some classic zingers and great cinematography. I’ve never had more mixed feelings about any film, much less one I’ve reviewed. We’ve all seen good material done badly and bad material done well: Pervert! is mixed material realized by people with widely differing levels of talent. The flim is unrated by the MPAA, but sports its own rating of “Horny-14, because of blood, huge boobs, and a snake.” They’re not kidding. The top-billed star is Mary Carey, the pornographic actress who ran in California’s infamous 2003 52-pickup gubernatorial election that made Schwarzenegger Governator.

Pervert! While visiting his Bible-thumping yet lecherous father in the desert, randy college student James (Sean Andrews) tries everything he can to hook up with the local curvaceous cuties, but his sex quest stalls when a bloodthirsty killer targets every buxom beauty in sight. Porn star and onetime California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey stars in this lusty nod to 1960s exploitation films.

Much like a Michael Moore film, the movie opens with a grey-bearded man standing in the middle of a desert highway, declaiming in a weird, barely intelligible voice that the story we are about to see contains much that is bloody and shocking. This then cuts to the opening credits, a rowdy montage of T&A with the words “death,” “sex,” and “freedom” scattered about. We bounce or last bounce, for now, and the flim proper begins with an attractive doofus picking up a hot hitchhikeress in his beautiful vintage Mustang. They make a little suggestive small talk, but then she opens the glove box. Pornography flies out, like bullshit from an ex-boyfriend, and the hot hitchhikeress demands to be let out, announcing that she’d rather take a ride from a serial killer. Your mom foreshadows. James, the attractive doofus, arrives at his father’s ranch in time to overhear the end of an argument between his father, Hezekiah, and his lush young mistress Cheryl, played by Mary Carey’s breasts and, to a lesser extent, Mary Carey, who delivers all her lines with the same jerky flow most people use when trying to name every state.

There’s a transition cut here, expressed by a short shot of a nude woman running around the desert with a rubber chicken and screaming. She reappears at each major break, doing something weird in the desert, unclothed except for a silly prop (a golf cart or a luchador mask), and is credited as “Transition Babe.” We may add this feature to the blog.

The three sit down to dinner, where it’s revealed that James is going to college in New Orleans! I dub him “TJ,” for Tulane James. Cheryl spreads butter on her corn, rubs it around with her hands, sucks it off the end, and generally Freuds the shit out of her dinner while they make awkward small talk about college, and have an appallingly frank discussion of sex. My father has many good qualities, but chief among them may be that he has never once asked me how the “pussy-poking” is at school. Granted, he may have known better, but still. Every single line in this movie is a double entendre. Remember being 13?

“This is hard.”

“LOLOLOLOL OMG YOU SAID HARD”

“I’m having trouble…”

“LOLOLOLOL YOU SAID HAVING”

“It seems…”

“LOL IT”

And so forth. Sometimes they’re funny, but often it comes off as “Hey, remember that this is a sex comedy! About sex! And dicks!” Everyone retires, but Hezekiah and Cheryl’s vigorous bedroom antics are overheard by TJ, who masturbates to them. His own father. They expand on the popular “say my name” trope:

“What’s my name!”

“Hezekiah!”

“When was I born!”

“July 20, 1924!”

“What’s the capital of Maryland?”

“BALTIMORE! [sic]”

Spent, they all go to sleep, whereupon TJ has a nightmare about being in a voodoo temple. The next day, he and Hezekiah do some generic “farm work” before Cheryl pops up to offer a snack. Apparently she means food, since she takes TJ into the root cellar and hand-feeds him jam.

“You’re going to make some lucky girl very happy some day.”

All I’m going to say is that if eating jam straight from the jar = cunnilingus mastery, I’m wasted on men. They then go outside, where Cheryl continues her two-pronged assault on TJ’s libido and pancreas by plucking a beehive from a tree, pouring the honey on herself, and rubbing it on her breasts. TJ ends up swollen in a number of places, since the bees decide to attack him instead. While sleeping off the venom, he has another voodoo dream. Get it? New Orleans! Voodoo! Tits!

The next day, Hezekiah shows TJ his studio, where he makes sculptures of women out of various cuts of meat. It’s his “art.” You could spend years going into the potential symbolism here, so I’ll just note that his magnum opus is named “Ophelia,” and that he “used to use beef jerky, because it was so malleable.” Beef jerky has been described many ways, but seldom as malleable. They adjourn for lunch, which they have three feet from Cheryl as she uses the outdoor shower, accompanied by a jaunty version of “Dear Old Donegal.” Hezekiah and TJ play a few rounds of “I’m More Passive-Aggressive Than You,” then leaves to take his car to the garage. The mechanic is a homosexual with a lot of white power tattoos, and that goes about like you’d expect. He also uses “y’all” in the singular, which is my biggest pet peeve. It’s plural. No one who actually uses it would EVER use it to refer to one person. I think the “all” should tip you off.

TJ starts walking home, but runs into Cheryl, who’s driving back from her manicure topless. She opens up about her upbringing “in a trailer park full of dust mites and Lithuanians” and then abruptly mounts him, which somehow nearly causes them to crash. They then meet an oblivious Hezekiah, who’s hunting coyotes. He expands briefly on their role in the trickster myth, ending with how their meat is “not fit to be et by a Chinaman.” This is illustrated by a shot of a woman “dressed” as a coyote dancing around in the desert.

Cheryl and TJ then star in a “we’re having an affair” montage, set to spicy little swing number. Hezekiah finds out because TJ jauntily tosses the condoms away after sex, and they land in the cistern. It’s not a sex comedy until semen ends up in food, drink, or grooming. He thunders at them both, threatening divine wrath, and in the morning Cheryl is gone. TJ suspects his father, who arrives home the next day with a new “spicy Latina” mistress, the new flavor at Whores n’ Things. She can’t decide if she’d rather be a bitch to TJ or seduce him, so she tries to shoot the gap by being enticingly rude. She doesn’t last long; when TJ sneaks into the studio to see if Cheryl is in among the meat, something unseen attacks and kills Hot Tamale. Cheryl isn’t among the meat, but staggers into the studio drenched with blood. Then her head falls off, which is less surprising than the absence of a “don’t lose your head!” joke. Father and son accuse each other of the murders, so decide to compromise by not telling the police and burying the bodies.

TJ then sneaks away to call a nursing home, which sends over a naughty nurse to investigate. She’s tougher than her predecessors, in her way: when Hezekiah tries to rape her, she overpowers him, ties him up, and sexually attacks him, including a Matilda-style face-fart. (It’s funny when it happens to men, you see.) She and TJ leave Hezekiah tied up so they can flirt for a while before she tells him that she’s a lesbian. TJ isn’t to worry, though: since homosexuality is a choice, if things go well between them she’ll just switch. They cuddle up on the couch to “just talk”:

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Red.”

“Mine’s blue. What’s your favorite sport?”

“Basketball.”

“Mine’s baseball.”

“If you could wipe one race off the face of the earth, which would it be?”

Things progress, until finally (late morning the next day,) Nurse Patty makes a move. She stares at TJ’s groin and runs away, screaming. (It’s not me, it’s you. Specifically, your genitals.) He catches up with her and explains that, when he went to a voodoo witch doctor to try to make him sexually appealing, he didn’t realize it would mean his penis would be able to detach itself and go on a killing spree, underscoring the importance of reading the fine print. Back at the ranch, the claymated penis – which can turn itself into a little weasel-sized monster with fangs, walks using the balls as feet, and now has a little face – helps Hezekiah to escape.

Right here is where it all goes off the rails, as usually happens in these movies. The last half-hour of the movie is a lot of running around fighting an evil, detached penis. I’ll bullet-point you through:

-The white power homo mechanic comes back and tries to rape TJ, launching himself onto him with the battle cry “I ain’t one of those queer-ass dickless faggots. I didn’t come here to redesign your living room. I’m here to fuck you in the ass!” Word for word, my college match.com account profile. The penis kills the mechanic, rescuing TJ, who keeps running mindlessly around the desert.

-Nurse Patty was Cheryl’s lover, sworn to avenge her death at the hands of men. This is “tastefully” illustrated by a several-minute flashback of them in bed. The penis attacks and injures her, but she escapes and gets a shotgun, somehow.

-Hezekiah points out that the penis is a female, and in love with TJ. I don’t understand it either.

-TJ tries to fellate the penis, “just to see.”

-Nurse Patty shoots Hezekiah, who, in dying, reveals to TJ that TJ’s mother was a cannibal, and that he is in love with TJ.

-Nurse Patty and the penis kill each other off in a final showdown involving a beehive.

-There’s a nailed-on “Six Months Later” scene that lets us know that the penis returns to kill again, and the same ranting man from the beginning wraps it up.

The credits show that this was another family project, with five or so different Yudises popping up in the closing credits. The special features include a “making of” called “Into the Valley of the Hyper Vixens,” an “extended lesbian scene,” three different trailers, and a half-assed blooper reel. I’ve never thought it was funny when actors just forgot their lines. A blooper is someone falling down, at least. The “making of” clues us in a little: this movie was shot in twelve days for $50,000 and premiered in Helsinki, which may reassure the Finns about their decision not to join NATO.

As plotless wonders go, it’s not bad. The photography is very good, and shows off the beauty of the desert, instead of trying to use it as a blank backdrop like some other movies do. The movie in general just looks wonderful – it’s hard to explain in writing, but someone clearly has a good eye. It’s got some good one-liners and sight gags, and uses sound effects to grab a few extra laughs. Ultimately, though, the movie rests on one very faulty premise: that a disembodied penis, for any reason, would kill a woman who pours a hiveful of honey onto her bare breasts for kicks. I don’t believe it for a second.

Thoughts I couldn't flesh out into full entries:

- From an article entitled "Asteroid Program Lagging" in this morning's Post Express:

"NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but does not have the money to complete the job, a U.S. government report says.

That's because even though Congress assigned the space agency that mission four years ago, it never gave NASA the money to build the necessary telescopes, according to the report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Specifically, the mission calls for NASA, by 2020, to locate 90 percent of the potentiality deadly rocks hurtling through space.[...]NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter―slightly smaller than the New Orleans' Superdome."

Hi. I currently have 45 dollars in my bank account. NASA: you are more than welcome to 35 of it. I just need 6 bucks to get a salad this afternoon and 4 bucks to get my "Yay! You made it through the week!" Friday morning latte, and the rest is all yours. Because I've seen Deep Impact. If I were lobbying for NASA funds, I would simply walk into Congress, sit down my laptop, ask people to gather 'round and show the following scene:

Then I would shut my laptop, do an "AND WHAT?!" chest-bump to the crowd and walk out.

- One of my life dreams is to be a tattoo artist. Tattoos and tattoo culture are probably the most fascinating thing in the entire world to me. I know I only have three tattoos, but If it were up to me, I'd have a half-sleeve by now. But it's not up to me. Because I fear my mother's wrath. Diane is one of God's chosen people, so automatically she's not too keen on the idea of tattoos. Plus I think my parents still associate tattoos with criminals, sailors, prostitutes and prison dykes. When I was living in New York, my (completely magical, wonderful, amazing, miss him everyday) therapist, Bart, was really into the idea of me pursuing this dream, so I started sketching more and more and even put together a drawing portfolio so I could get an apprenticeship. When I moved home last year, the dream will still very much alive. I started researching tattoo apprenticeships in DC and found a woman-run studio in Southeast that was hiring apprentices. Now, you could not ask for two more supportive parents than mine. They support all of my wacky dreams and kooky antics and somehow remain proud at the end of the day. Not all parents would be cool with their daughter calling them up all "Yo! I'm quittin' my job and shacking up with you two to write a comedy blog, sooooo you need to come help me move out. KSEEYOUSOONBYEEE!" But they thought that sounded like a great idea. So kudos to them! However, they do not like the idea of me becoming a tattoo artist. I wouldn't even say they don't like it. I would say they don't even tolerate it. They've made it very clear that if I were to seriously pursue this, they would cut me off. I've always kind of resented them a bit for this. I mean, it's not like I want to be a stripper or a hit man. And my parents are both artists! And I'm an artist! And they've always supported that! I'm just switching my medium up. I feel like they should get that. But they don't, so I get all emo and angsty and writhe around in my bed listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's Parent's Just Don't Understand, screaming at the wall about how no one gets me and my life is a lie. But then I read this in the Express this morning (man, relevant morning for the Express, huh?):

Police: Tattoo Artist Shot Husband to Death in SE [tattoo shop]
The co-owner of a Southeast tattoo parlor has been charged with fatally shooting her husband in the head and back. Kristin Kozak, 36, known in the tattoo world as Liquidity Jones, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of a 56-year-old Michael Burnett. Police say Kozak told officers that Burnett was not armed or trying to attack her when she shot him.

Yes. That is indeed the tattoo shop I was thinking of apprenticing at. Hmm. Mom and dad―point taken.

Score:
Meg: 0
Parents: 1

- Allison and I want to start a Christian folk-rock band and call it "Thunder Cunt." I can objectively say this is the sixth best idea I've ever had.

- I just had an epiphany. Every time I watch More to Love, I can't help notice that there aren't any minorities on the show. I mean, Kristian is a little ambiguously tan and The Tranny is Israeli, but I don't know if that would fly past the Reverend Jackson. A tan chick and an Israeli tranny = weakest Rainbow Coalition ever. Anyway, in doing More to Love research yesterday, I stumbled upon a bunch of M2L reject audition interviews. They were sad and priceless and LOLz-worthy and I was going to post them today so we could all point and laugh, but then I saw this one:

And that's when I realized, there aren't any black women on the show because black women are too confident. Being heavier in other cultures isn't a huge deal (pun intended,) so they don't have the broken spirit of the over-weight white woman. And this show is all about exploiting that broken spirit for entertainment purposes. How fucked up is that? Imagine how different the show would be if there was a sassy black chick in the mix. Luke would be all, "I know Prom was a very special event that most of us missed out on―" and this chick would interrupt all "BITCH PLEASE! Not only was I there sweeping the floor with it, I was the entertainment:"

Really though. I think Fox should have to legally change the name of More to Love to Homely, Unfortunate White Women in a Dating Situation.