A few weeks ago I attended an incredible BBQ and then had some incredible ideas which needed to be documented and shared. Some will make sense and some will not, but this is okay – just follow your heart’s instinct. I suggest listening to Janis Joplin’s The Pearl Sessions while you read. So now, without further fanfare, I present them to you now in nearly unmodified form, with appended illustrations:
I’ve been standing here at the Utica Ave stop waiting on the A train and mulling things over. I’ve had this brilliant idea that I maybe need to create a documentary or some sort of memoir chronicling my adventures, particularly recent, astrologically related ones. It would obviously be called Gemini Trouble. You know, after the obscure John Waters film of a similar name. Anyone? Anyone?
Ok, so its Female Trouble. Oh. Okay. I guess this will be on the test? Okay.
The only thing I’m hoping is that it wouldn’t be one of those cartoons resembling a Cathy comic.
I realize the title kind of implies that this could be a possibility, but I’m really wanting to take it in a much different direction, one that evokes something of a meditation on kitsch. Not Taylor Kitsch. Although, Texas Forever.
More like a very campy kitschy veil on my story, like if Janis Joplin came over, smoked a few doobs, and left her amber marbled scarf over one of your lampshades.
The kind of perspective you’d get on the world then, seeing it through tortoise shell glasses. But also something you could totally talk about in the context of the lens of the grotesque. But I digress because I’m getting dangerously close to Slavoj Zizek territory. Not that my master Zizek impersonator friend Willie is on the train and ready to launch into some good old fashioned ideology joke but it feels like that sometimes.
Anyway really that’s the idea. I haven’t even really considered it in terms of content, it’s really just the title thats been thought through and little else. So basically it all kind of boils down to an extended inside joke based on something one of our teachers said on the first day of a class. But I mean there’s a little bit of Janis Joplin earth mother thrown in there for good measure. Plus that’s just my censor talking so I refuse to acknowledge that hesitation as a conscious de-empowering of my work. With some kind of forced labor motive in Serbia or something, Zizek ideology style. Like Sisqo’s Year of the Dragon CD from 2000, only Year of the Zizek (Big Willie Style) (circa 1999).
Would that statement seem dated now? Not in relation to our barbeque, obviously, but in relation to the time when knowing about Sisqo’s Year of the Dragon constituted relevant cultural currency. That might not be the case now. To note, it was also a time when multiple theater viewings of Spice World was not shameful.
When people have those things set on their phones to flash and light up when they receive notifications, it kind of looks like they’ve got a buzzer at Olive Garden and their party’s table has just been called. Obligatory Mitch Hedberg homage in the form of a one sentence punchline joke, as is customary.
I once stood outside a classroom and told a student I get “no respect,” Rodney Dangerfield style.
If Elvis was around today and had a shoe sponsorship with any contemporary company, it would definitely be Vans.
Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love (A Bad Name)” sounds musically laudatory, but lyrically it’s a condemnation of the woman who shot him through the heart, and is, furthermore, to blame for this action. I don’t know why I never considered its potential dual meaning, why I assumed that Bon Jovi should only speak in concrete, explicit terms without resorting to vulgarities clothed in innuendo (Slippery When Wet, anyone?♧). And of course it makes sense that I would be stoned and talking about Bon Jovi.
There was a dude standing in front of me on the train and he started buttoning his cardigan from the top down. I panicked for a while because I thought he hadn’t matched up the buttons correctly and I pondered the moral implications of being witness to this act but not mentioning it.
[Author’s note: Sisqo’s 1999 debut album was actually titled Unleash The Dragon, with the sophomore effort Return of Dragon following in 2001. Ironically, neither of these two albums were released in the year 2000, which, according to the Chinese Zodiac, is the actual Year of the Dragon.]
tartmandel 