Ten More Things About Me

or, when in doubt, post a list.

1. Someone gave me a zucchini the size of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers pod.
2.A friend and I invented hip hop rhyming in 1975, aided by a rhyming dictionary.
3. I have never seen Gone With The Wind.
4.I own a copy of The Wind Done Gone, the revisionist version of the novel.
5. If we wrestle, you'll win.
6. I am afraid to be alone with the zucchini in #1.
7.If you send me a SASE, I'll send you the recipe for that powerful cocktail, the fantod.
8. I have never actually drank a fantod.
9. After waiting for three years for the new Morrissey album, I got around to buying it a couple of weeks ago.
10. I hate it ( not really).

Truth in Blogging,or, Ask Me No Question

As a shy type, I am not a natural blogger. I don't feel compelled to show pictures of my pet or significant other, although I've seen some very saucy ones recently. My blog is personal but not terribly autobiographical. If it's the minutiae of everyday life you're after, I'm not your boy. However, just this once, I'll tell the tale of a blogger who got blogged down in his own version of the truth.
When this individual lived with a friend of mine in Baltimore, he sent me a link for his livejournal or whatever he was using at the time. I was surprised to see him describe the house where he rented one small smokefilled room as " my investment property." He posted a photo of himself nude that had been hideously photoshopped to make him the envy of Dirk Diggler.
He inherited some money and bought himself a Vespa, which was eventually stolen but not before it became the love object of a phantom fetishist who jacked off on its' smoothrunning leather seat before dawn each day M-F. He began disappearing regularly and calling. he claimed, from the ICU of various local hospital. He was dying of a rare cancer triggered by recovered memories of witnessing the murder of his older brother in childhood. At last he moved out of my friend's house. I stopped receiving e mails from him.
Two years ago I idly Googled him and found that there was an entire site devoted to the discrepancies, pseudonyms, embellishments and plain damn lies that permeated his various blogs, posted under various names. The photo he displayed of his bf turned out to be a dj photo of a childrens' book author in Texas. He has complained of cancer in nearly every organ of his body and lives camped at death's door much of the time. Unmasking his online personae has almost become a cottage industry in da blogosphere. I suspect that some of these disgrutled folk expressed support, sympathy,etc. on one of his many blogs before smelling a rat. Not nice, Steve, not nice at all.
It's 4:17am, rain and thunder, lukewarm Diet pepsi at my elbow. Isn't reality revolting?

Famous Authors 2

blogger Viddy Knobs said...

Vida and I are in Maryland looking for chiroptera. As this is a nocturnal activity, our days are free. We eat horrific food at unspeakable "joints" as Frank and Peggy and Tony vocalise on the jukebox. Yesterday I ordered a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast. A moth came flitting through the room. "Maybe we should be collecting them instead of bats, darling."

If Famous Authors Left Comments at DC's

blogger Frank Jafja said:

The office is really going to drive me out of my mind. My dreams have gone from being simply prurient to unspeakably strange. Last night I dreamed I awoke transformed into a gigantic pig. At soome point in the man-to-piggy transformation i devouured the Goyutat book Dennis had posted a few days ago. My sister came into my bedroom and screamed, at which point I woke up .... I think.

25

I've been reading a lot of lists on Facebook and even found a Facebook -inspired list on the Dodie Bellamy blog. 25 facts and statements about myself:

1. I'm a bit of a namedropper ( see above - and below}
2. I am lefthanded and not at all ambidextrous. My right hand is a stupid but attractive appendage that does all the heavy lifting and carrying.
3. The first time I ejaculated, I thought I had some kind of disease.
4. Deranged, even schizoid people are drawn to me.
5. I wish I knew the reason for #4.
6. Although I think she is not bursting with ideas and is in many ways an artistic coward, I have seen Laurie Anderson perform in seven different venues.
7. Bowling is not part of my skill set.
8. I've got a never ending love for you, whoever you are.
9. All my dreams are in widescreen format.
10. In 1976 I delayed Ann Beattie's supper.
11. What did I tell you? Larry McMurtry used to hide when he saw me crossing M St. heading toward Booked Up.
12. I have never written anything that could be described as journalism. However, you could call it reportage.
13. I have mixed beer and Campari and survived, but not without sustaining neural damage.
14. When I am alone, I do not talk to myself. Peace and quiet is more important than "vocalizing the interior monologue."
15. Gus van Sant's Gerry is a fuck you to the pseuds and poseurs.
16. The first time I had a dry orgasm I thought I was dying.
17. I lent my best friend three Dennis Cooper books. He used them to prop up his weights bench. He read at least one of them but he can't remember which one.
18. The last Woody Allen movie I saw in the theatre was Small Time Crooks. I fell asleep.
I also fell asleep during The Matrix Reloaded.
19. In Ottowa I was twice accosted by prostitutes, one male, one apparently female.
20. A barroom discussion about Edgar Allan Poe and necrophilia almost came to blows.
21. My grandmother bought Dale Cooper's FBI memoir not realizing it was a television tie-in. Waldenbooks wouldn't let her return or exchange it.
22. I like brie on cheeseburgers.
23. I'd blog daily if all I had to do was complile stupid lists.
24. All my sex partners have been human or at least humanoid.
25. I have no animal phobias.

Snow Day

The Outlaw ( Howard Hughes)I have probably seen fewer westerns than any other type of genre film. If this vanity piece was the first western one ever saw, one wouldn't be in a great hurry to see another. Hughes' inflated ego floated through Hollywood for several years. Clamor and outrage surrounded this movie, with its unequivocal "suggestive" music cues and bizarre camera angles ( courtesy of Kane camera man Gregg Toland)that drew the viewer's eye
to the generous bosom of Jane Russell. When Hughes isn't steaming up the room with Ms Russell, he's telling a version of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Pat's best friend Doc Holiday is cleverly played by Walter Huston. This isn't a dull film but the absence of la Russell only emphasizes Hughes' sub- Ed Wood directorial prowess.

Master and Commander ( Peter Weir)Peter Weir hit America with Witness, a sound variation of his theme of cultures colliding. He made one more picture that was on a par with his Australian films, Fearless, the tale of a man who has no business being alive ( he's survived an airliner crash)that has affinities with Phillipe Mora. Master and Commander is a precis' of the work of the popular nautical storyteller Patrick O'Brian. Weir depicts the archetypal homosocial milieu, the life of the sea, but plausibly keeps everything on a friendly basis. It's still enough to wring a tear from even the phlegmatic likes of me. Russell Crowe gives us another 3D portrait, his best after John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Paul Bettany offsets Captain Aubrey's genuine piety as the ship's doctor, an amateur naturalist whose idea of heaven is the Galapagos Islands. It's no The Last Wave or Gallipoli but a worthy film. I'm sorry I missed it in the theatres.

Dance With A Stranger ( Mike Newell)Nightclub hostess and retired prostitute Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England. Scenarist Shelagh Delaney presents the events leading to Ellis' execution as the impossible triangle of the lady, aspiring race car driver David Blakeley and unrequited lover/ protector Desmond Cussen. Blakeley is besotted
with Ellis and even breaks off an engagement to "the kind of girl my mother wants me to marry". But this is England in 1954. The kind of slumming popular among the toffs was still several years away. Ellis is played by Miranda Richardson as a collection of tics,twitches and tantrums. She conveys so much through shrieks and cries that she's almost the female Nick Nolte. I've spoilt the movie already but I hope my description of Richardson's acting drives you to find this movie and watch it anyway. There were at least two other very good British true crime films during the late 80s - early 90s, Peter Medak's
The Krays and Let Him Have It. The latter was most people's first look at Christopher Eccleston.

When it snows, I watch movies.

Some Favorites of 2008

( A film or book or record's inclusion doesn't necessarily indicate that it was published or released in 2008.)

Wild Nights - Joyce Carol Oates. JCO imagines the last days of James, Poe, Hemingway, Dickinson and Twain.
The Sluts - Dennis Cooper - The latest by the man the gay lit establishment loves to hate. This assemblage of sex worker critiques is marbled with some of the darkest comedy imaginable.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - My weakness for school stories isn't limited to tales of boarding school buggery. Can anyone tell me why this book reminded me so often of John Fowles' The Magus?
My Lives - Edmund White - White throws pretense to the four winds and gives us the book lurking beneath his famous autobiograhical quartet.

Let The Right One In
Margot at the Wedding
The Host
In Bruges
Fear(s) of the Dark
Midnight Meat Train
The X Files: I Want To Believe
The Dark Knight Returns
My Winnipeg
Savage Grace
Mother of Tears
Newcastle

Live music:
The National / Modest Mouse / REM Columbia,Md.
The Duke Spirit Baltimore, Md.
Melissa Etheridge D.C.

I played the hell out of Enigma Love Sensuality Devotion, Morrissey/ Smiths in toto, Cassndra Wilson's Miles Davis album, Kevin Ayers Joy of a Toy, Bryan Ferry Dylanesque, Van Dyke Parks Tokyo Rose, Richard and Linda Thompson / Best of and John Cale The Island Years.