Fragile Industries

I'm Fierce.

.....................................................................................  Lookie what I've got.

It's not just a booblehead.  It's a TIM GUNN bobblehead.  That talks.  Yes, Mr. Gunn's inimitable, perfectly tasteful voice, at the push of a button, cheering me on: "Fabulous! (warm, refined chuckle)," offering his affirmation: "No one can want you to succeed more than I do," or urging me to "Carry on!"

And of course: "Make it work!!"

Plus, it's autographed.  With two kisses and a hug.

Sometimes my Higher Power looks like Tim Gunn.  So where some people might place the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Infant of Prague in a prominent place, I have Tim, standing in his immaculate high-button unvented suit, arms folded, avuncular, on my work table.   He believes in me.  I'm his fiercest protoge.  He never tells me, "I'm concerned." He never frowns, cupping his chin, while pursing his finely sculped lips.  He certainly never says, as he exclaimed last season over the misguided addition of human hair for decorative trim, "My gag reflex is kicking in!"   No, he smiles broadly, and tells me I'm "Fabulous!"

Jealous, tranny bitches?

Merry Whatever, and an invitation to you, and my Whole Fucking Life Story In Music

A year ago, a Brit jackanapes posed a question on Yahoo Answers:

What is the soundtrack to your life story?

Answering this will take a little thought.

They are making a film of your life from birth to the present. You have been asked to select twelve songs that make up the soundtrack to your life. This is not necessarily your favourite songs, just those that mean something.

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I answered:

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In order:
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1) Sail Baby Sail (folk lullabye)
2) If Mamma Got Married (soundtrack - Gypsy)
3) Another Pleasant Valley Sunday (Monkees)
4) 12:30 / Young Girls are Coming To The Canyon (Mamas and Papas)
5) Cracked Actor (David Bowie)
6) She's Leaving Home (The Beatles)
7) Going To The Chapel (Bette Midler)
8) I Am Woman (Helen Reddy)
9) Wasted Time (The Eagles)
10) If You're Going To San Francisco (Scott McKenzie)
11) La Boheme [entire -- only opera can capture the over-emotional drama of this time] (Giacomo Puccini)
12) Since U Been Gone (Kelly Clarkson)
.

And he chose my answer as best, although out of about 20 answers, mine was one of only a few that answered fully.  We've had some fun emails since, and he turns out to be a totally shameless Brit flirt and fellow attorney, stranger than fiction. 

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Here's the challenge, in case anyone's read this far (and Merry Christmas to me, I really have to go to bed to do the Happy Present Opening in the am):

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They are making a film of your life from birth to the present. You have been asked to select twelve songs that make up the soundtrack to your life. This is not necessarily your favourite songs, just those that mean something.

.

12 songs.  What would they be, no explanation needed?

I (heart) prgayboys!

I'm a virgin to reality TV addiction.  Before Project Runway this season (its third), I did not know the joys of weekly pee-in-your-pants suspense, the soap-opera foam of backstage bitchery, the "WHAT were they thinking" (or "chacun a son gout", as uber-mench Big Daddy Tim Gunn would say) squeals.  Now I am Truly Madly Deeply over PR.  Today, since I have no life, I wallowed in my addiction like James Frey,surfed the web for more, more, more, and found Project Rungay.  Two fabulously glamorous gayboys who bring their dish to the dishy.    Four hours later, every post read, I found my true couchmates for Wednesday nights.  Thank you, guys, for your ineffable fabulousness. Slap my face and paint me lavender, I'd rather read them than watch PR3 and that's the truth, so help me Judy.  Their letter to Tim was a masterpiece.  Guys, anytime you're in the neighborhood of My Little Town, Bakersfield-By-The Sea, I insist on buying you a round of Cosmos at the local, and we can all braid each other's hair.

Welcome them to my blogroll even if you aren't a PR devotee.

Gecko Bashing

Leaping lizards!  They killed Kenney the Geico gecko!  My reptilian heart breaks.

Details here.

So There's This Woman, See, Standing at the End of A Continent Eating A Bagel, See . . .

I just tried to categorize this post before I wrote it and checked just about everything because I'm sitting at a desk in a gorgeous house in the Haight, overlooking Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco feeling the rising sun just blinding me through the window to my right, overlooking the Bay and the mysterious, Eastern land known to dedicated City dwellers as, erm, the East Bay.  (OK, I wnt for something emotive, mysterious, yet accurate, damn those honest tendencies.)  I have to admit, I love this city, "where Gay is like a spoken language," (see earlier poetry posts -- Ruth Somebody, Accordion Dancing . . . ) and there is something more evocative, hands down, about dawn in this City, over my current view over the condos in My Little Town.  Maybe you can't be born in the region you come to love for no reasonable reason.  There is one City where you know you will wake just as the skies are coming violet, and rush to that back staircase, the one that may not be safe, it was built long before accurate property records, but it faces east, so you sit until your eyes are dazzled by the firerim and shake your head and maybe even you breathe deep for a minute with your eyes closed.  There is one place at a time where that happens.  And there is that morning when you do that, maybe even make a point of doing that, when you realize that it is the Last Time you do it and it feels like home.  And what a glorious time it was, and you kiss the City on both cheeks, and maybe feel a little naughty, but it is definitely goodnight and Good Morning.  And you've rarely felt so awake.

I love it here.  I love the pulse of this city and the perpendicular, not horizontal of this city, and the food (oh, god, the food........... am I staying with my soulmate or what, my dear hostess Anna has a WALL of wonderful old and new cookbooks, the palate of a New York Times food critic, and yet no foodie pretension preventing us from fabulous cheap neighborhood Indian curries for dinner last night).

I love it when it is showing off, on those three and three only days  a year when the weather, throughout the City, is uniformly sunny and temperate (and I KNOW her tricks, I loved her and lived with her for seventeen years, so I am not tempted when the weather looks as it looks this past weekend.)  I am having a glorious time, and I've figured out that I can get what I need one or two weeks a year.  I am that most tiresome of tourists:  I love this city, but I'd hate living here.  I can see my opera and plays here just as I used to schedule for Manhattan -- and get the hell out of Dodge.  It's wonderful and quirky and beautiful and seductive and I completely understand anyone who lives in San Francisco or Manhattan.  I live somewhere else, and that's actually a lot of fun.  There's something kind of bent and unknown about the future, but it's an acceptable trade for the light I'm looking at -- it really is better that the past.  I find that I spend more time selling My Little Town to my friends than I'd expected.  It compares, well, it doesn't matter.  It's right for me now.

I'm going next door for a depth charge (while I'm still in the city that knows what that is) and a bagel with tomato.  Good morning.

The Last Deep Throat Post

Now that everyone else has had his say, I'm ready to pony up my comments on good old Deep Throat, or at any rate, my comments on everyone else's comments.  The first observers outside of Woodstein themselves were our pals, Bob and Dick, the President and his Chief of Staff, who it turned out knew all along.  That's the sort of "Edge of Night" twist that I love about Watergate.  Just when you think it can't possibly get any more Byzantine, tapes reveal they had the following typically Nixonian exchange (paraphrased):

Halderman: Turns out those reporters have a source, uh, source feeding them (unintelligible).

Nixon: (Unintelligible) cocksucker?

H: Yes, from the FBI, Mark Felt.

N: Felt, yeah, Felt (muffled Tourette's outburst deleted). . . he's Jewish, isn't he?

Nixon really did ask if Felt was Jewish.  I heard the tape and I wouldn't lie.  Nixon asked that about everyone: Kissinger, Sammy Davis Jr., Mao Tse Tung, Pat, Checkers.

Other Republican apologists have more recently weighed in on Felt's actions.  According to Doghouse Riley, Pat Buchannan and others claim Felt has more to answer for than the downfall of a Presidency.  I refer you to Riley's wonderful blog and discussion of these claims because, well, because he's smarter than me.

Pat Buchanan: "People that brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam..."

Rush Limbaugh: "Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn't have lost Vietnam..."

Rush Limbaugh: "Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide."

Peggy Noonan: "Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events...the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide."

However, what Riley, Republicans or any other of these observers have thus far failed to mention are the

TOP 10 TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF DEEP THROAT'S ACTIONS:

10. Donald Trump's hair

9. Phil Spector's hair

8. Reality TV

7. Paris Hilton's sex video

6. Gigli

5. Extinction of the spotted owl

4. The designated hitter rule

3. New Coke

2. The first-round defeat of UCLA in this year's NCAA finals

AND, THE NUMBER ONE TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCE OF DEEP THROAT:

1. The Day That Music Died

. . . and we were singing, bye, bye Miss American Pie . . .   

humor current affairs

Runaway Bridezilla

I married Antonio, my second ex-husband, in 1995.  Houston performed the ceremony, beautifully.  In the last week or so, much of that time has come back to me with immediacy because of all the fluff coverage of that poor Georgia woman, Jennifer Wilbanks, the "Runaway Bride."  Personally, I think the story hit a nerve with any woman who has been, at some point in her life, caught up in Wedding Lunacy.  It's the same reason movies like "Father of the Bride" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" do so well.  Women who have been there remember, and men stand back out of the way, if they've any sense.  Weddings are guaranteed to turn any sane, intelligent woman of values and integrity into a raving nutter, especially if she's the one who's planning the wedding, most especially if the wedding involves more than a dozen or so people and the personalities that go with them.  Sure, there are exceptions.  I had a friend from high school who wafted like a gentle breeze through her wedding, stiff corsetry hiding her swelling 4-month pregnancy, cheerful through a reception for 150 or more, all without Thorazine.  Maybe it was because she knew, inside, that the marriage would last just barely long enough to give her son legitimacy.  But if a woman thinks it's the Real Thing, and is involved in the Wedding to End All Weddings, she's doomed to lose friends and scare caterers.

Even with copious Xanax supplied by dear dying Howard, the world's bitchiest terminal patient and my florist, I was certifiable the week before the wedding.  I vibrated like an over-tightened harp string.  I had two bridesmaids who despised one another planning a shower together.  Antonio's office threw a pre-wedding party with, unintentionally, I'm sure, at least 3 women he used to shtupp in attendance.  My hair turned Bozo orange under the hairdresser's ministrations.  Herb Caen's column reported (mistakenly, thank God) that the wedding and reception venue, a supper club/night club called Coconut Grove, had gone bankrupt and padlocked ten days before D-day.  I needed more than Xanax; I needed a morphine drip and Dr. Phil to hold my hand 24/7.

Jennifer Wilbanks had 14, count 'em, 14 bridesmaids.  That alone should tell you something.  First, she's a girl who just couldn't say no.  I don't know who all those taffeta-wrapped, dyed-to-match women were to her, but no one has 14 best friends.  Even if they were mostly kin to her and her groom, someone had to stay behind to sit in the front pews.  And with that many peau-de-soie pumps to fill, a major bitchfest behind the scenes was inevitable.  Someone was unhappy with her assigned escort down the aisle, more than a few disliked the dress, and everyone squabbled over who was maid of honor.  If Jennifer was weak enough to have that many attendants, she'd never survive that much divatude around her.

I never considered running, despite the drama.  I dealt with my growling bridesmaids by being the biggest bitch on the block, the Bridezilla to end all Bridezillas.  It was "my special day," and no one was fucking forgetting it.  I had those women whipped into line.  When a "wardrobe malfunction" required last minute repair, three needles, pre-threaded with white, instantaneously appeared (I had another kind-hearted sucker for punishment in the dressing room).  When I had to pee, they were eager to hold my dress out of harm's way.  In other situations, it would have made for an entertainingly kinky Dominance and Submission fantasy.

The latest news is that Wilbanks has retired to a funny farm for a little time out.  Good for her.  Hopefully she'll receive a little assertiveness training in between electroshock sessions.  And maybe we can all focus on the real news and let the poor woman alone.

humor current affairs personal history

Wiki Wiki Girl Girl Deux

See earlier Wiki post if you don't know about Wikipedia.  In a nutshell, it's amazing, and I'm having fun with it. 

Here's a thread started by Wiki'ers (men, apparently) who were under the impression that women don't wiki.  They thought the programming culture or the "masculine group structure" -- whatever that means -- scared away the girls.  (I suppose that there's lots of work for programmers at Wiki; I'm strictly about content.)  The wikigrrrrrrrrrrrls took note of the blathering and responded loud and clear: Girls Do Wiki.  The structure actually promotes collaboration, and according to the Venus/Mars model, women thrive in such environments.  There are women programmers.  I think some programming guys who actually didn't know any Real Girls, or were too scared to ask, started the rumor.

I found the debate when I Googled Wiki Wiki Girl (no quotes, shoulda had 'em) to see if anyone remembers that phrase.  In the late '60's or early '70's, Chevron had an advertising campaign with the "Wiki Wiki Girl" -- a gorgeous pseudo-Polynesian woman in a grass skirt hula-ing her butt off on top of a gas pump.  There may have been a contest involved.  I remember it only because 10 years later, I had my first full-time job working for the Wiki Wiki Girl herself, Irene Tsu, former dancer and now fashion designer.  I got the job because I knew her husband, photographer/director Ivan Nagy. (Pronounced Yvonne Nazhh, not that it matters.)   He had directed several dreadful movies in the early '70's my dad had acted in, and everyone had stayed in touch.  His was the biography I wanted to write in Wikipedia, which at this stage is left blank.  The only mention of him to date is in the biographical note of another woman he started seeing long after his divorce from Irene, and my departure from the job and both their lives.  In the '90's, he was Heidi Fleiss's . . . boyfriend ( and procurer?  pimp?  partner?) -- yes, the Hollywood Madam.  His involvement was shadowy and I believe no criminal charges were ever proved.  However, he appeared at great length in a documentary about her, and the film actually became less about her sinful exploits than about the seriously sick relationship they, well, appeared to enjoy.  I intended just to fill in his earlier life, list the films he directed, etc., because I have no direct knowledge of any of his later adventures.  But . . . since it's just us chickens . . .   I can tell you this. 

About 3 months before the whole Fleiss brothel was busted, my father got a call from Ivan, the first in several years.  After some small talk, Ivan asked my dad about his living arrangements.  He asked about the house Dad had inherited from his mother, which he was renting to students -- it had 4, possibly 5 bedrooms -- and whether it was vacant.  Ivan gradually elaborated: he was offering my dad free rent in a house, maybe my grandmother's or maybe a house in Hollywood, in exchange for a little watering, keeping the place up, and playing house mother -- "college girls" would be renting the remaining rooms.  The whole thing sounded so vague and half-baked that my father begged off.  Once Ivan hit the nightly news (and he and Heidi dominated the newscasts in LA for some time), the plan, of course, became very clear . . .

Back to the gender issue on Wikipedia.  Ironically, was that the first biography I worked on in a minor way concerned a female-to-male transsexual friend.  The authors of the entry debated at enormous length the policy for gender references in pronouns in such cases: retroactive or no?  Many of those involved in the debate, they made clear, were transsexuals, and felt that it would be wrong to refer to any gender but the chosen one, because they had,  to their core, been that gender from the start, but were housed in the wrong body.  Nothing concrete was decided for future cases.  In this case, the subject was contacted and he agreed, because of his activism as a lesbian before the gender change, that it made more sense to use a female term during that time.  This seems the logical conclusion for this biography; certainly no one can sensibly object if it makes the entry clear (and it would be hopelessly unclear if written without any gender reference or only the male) and the subject agrees.  I find it amusing that the initial Girls Don't Wiki thread started by the male Wiki'ers don't even go there at all.  Many genders Wiki.

Will you wiki too?  Ewww, this is starting to sound just too cute.

web family history

The Wiki Wiki Girl

Yesterday a friend of recent acquaintance sent me an article about the Wikipedia.  I suspect I'm always the last to hear of such things, but for those who share my residence under the third rock from the left, the Wikipedia is an amazing web phenomenon: an entirely accessible, editable encyclopedia of EVERYTHING.  It continues to grow, rather like the giant fungus that extends under half of Minnesota that is the largest life form on the planet. (And we thought that fungus was Pat Robertson.)  But I digress.

Imagine: a group project, with no bosses, and the entire planet, conceivably, free to do as they would to it.  Apparently there are areas (predictably, religion, politics) subject to near-constant dispute and high scrutiny, but if they are defaced with anything that carries a non-neutral tone or if portions are eliminated, the good-hearted worker ants come back and restore it.  There is considered debate, as I found when I looked up the name of a friend who is well-known in some circles and controversial on several levels.  The biographical note was awesomely detailed, well constructed and completely accurate.   The various writers debated at great length how to handle some genuinely prickly issues in telling the story and at no point did anyone raise their voice, in the keyboard sense.

There is no enforcement system per se, conversely, everyone is a cop.  It is the definition of anarchy.  And it works.  The author of article about Wikipedia was staggered by this result.  Perhaps one should not draw too many conclusions or analogies, but I find this less surprising and more encouraging. 

I recently watched the first season of the HBO series "Deadwood" on DVD.  In the very first scene, our protagonist sets out for Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876, because "there are no laws there."  And it is indeed lawless at the outset.  Yet within months, people fall into societal roles, and certain agreements seem to bind the residents of a place so wild and remote it was not even annexed by the US at that point.  All have their own personal reasons for the town's gradual taming, including personal selfish glory and greed.  The bit of grit that starts the nacre flowing in Deadwood is the discovery of gold, and the town forms around it -- going in less than two years from a disgusting, bloody hellhole domineered by murdering thugs to a civilized town that had electric streetlights years before San Francisco. 

Wikipedia (or WP as it refers to itself) seems like a weak beacon of hope, when large, real life examples of lawless societies (say, any unstable country in Africa) have such dismal outcomes.  But perhaps the presence of an over-arcing purpose and a personal stake in the result makes the difference.  I cared that the biography of my friend be accurate -- and I had something to add that had not been there before, something with which only a handful of people were personally familiar.  I realized that some of the B-movie listings for the late '60's and early '70's were missing, or needed to be fleshed out, and I could do that because I was on those sets.  Another entire biography is blank, and I can start it with personal knowledge of the subject.  It's not just that I have something to gain from the ultimate purpose -- an accurate and comprehensive encyclopedia -- I have something to contribute.

Check it out.  What do you know that no one else does, no matter how trivial it seems?  The more the merrier.  It may not build a peaceful One World government, but it at the very least is a lot of fun.

web popular culture current affairs

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

The Firesign Theater, I just learned, continues to promote its inspired lunacy nearly 40 years after its inception.  American Monty Pythons with more than a nod to the drug culture, their absurdity either leaves one totally cold or quivering helplessly with laughter. I first learned of them in my teens, and discovered they made perfect if hilarious sense on acid.  I can still recite most of the first side of "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers,"  after a dusk to dawn psychedelic marathon when I lived In My Little Town where I grew up.  Porgy and Mudhead.  Just how many braincells did I kill outright, or are busy with that sort of thing, when I could have learned the periodical table?  Nah, I don't think it matters either.  Where was I?

My other vivid memory of this group of strange men springs from another evening, this time in Huntington Beach, in the company of My First Love.  The MFL and I have a long and checkered (that's "chequered" to you, P & T) history that has burned through several spouses apiece and has led me to believe in karma.  We met and fell instantly and insanely in love as children.  At the particular point of which I write, he was married to his first wife, though temporarily separated, and I had yet to marry, though I had met my first husband.  We were still laughably young.  It was vertiginous to be with him again, after an absence of some years, and a tad queasy-making to be with a married man.  We sat drinking wine in a little house, the dying sunset filtered through bamboo shades, and listened to "The Giant Rat of Sumatra."  There, the Firesign boys presented a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Holmes predictably coke-addled and manic, full of convoluted plot leaps.  Our laughter was genuine, came from the best part of ourselves, the better for being shared.  The MFL, who tends to brood, was loose and happy, probably the last time I've seen him so.  It is one of my favorite memories.

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