TODAY I AM 60

                                                                Yer Bunche, circa 1965.

Despite decades of hardcore drunken carousing, smoking as much weed as Cheech & Chong, eating lots of food that's bad for me, surviving multiple stents being placed in my ticker due to congestive heart failure, years of torturous atopic dermatitis (now cured thanks to Dupixent), and enduring late stage kidney failure and thrice-weekly ongoing dialysis for the past five years, Yer Bunche has somehow made it to age 60. I have to spend my birthday enduring yet another dialysis session, but at least I still live to spread my madness. "HOKUTO SHINKEN WA MUTEKIDA!!!"

Yer Bunche at 60. Other than the giveaway of the white beard, "black don't crack."

"RUN AWAY!!!" Celebrating 50 years of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

I just attended Fathom Events' 50th anniversary screening of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), the film I have seen countless times since discovering it at age ten. I went With dear old friend Matt Snow, whom I met nearly a half century ago, and one of the many things our adolescent sensibilities bonded over was our love of all things Monty Python. Some things you never outgrow.

Me representing as Tim the Enchanter, and Matt, wielding the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

If I had to guesstimate, it was an audience of perhaps thirty people, many of whom were under-16s who had been brought by parents.I wonder how they processed the film, and Python in general, because Python's bizarre style has been well-absorbed into the global language of comedy over the past 55 years, so does their flavor have the same kind of seismic impact on today's youth as it did on my generation? I kinda doubt it, and it saddens me to think that works such as this may now reside in the "you had to be there" category. Nonetheless, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL remains my personal pick as the funniest film ever made. Definitely not for all tastes, but its utter absurdity has always resonated with me.

Representing with a female Sir Bedevere cosplayer, Note her bag: a duck. If you know the movie, you get it.

RECOGNIZE!!!

When I returned from Tuesday afternoon's screening of SINNERS, I crossed 5th Avenue and was about to enter the Associated supermarket, when I saw a scruffy, hipster-looking dude who was perhaps in his early thirties, sporting the above t-shirt. I waved at him and exclaimed "Yeah! Fuckin' GG!!!", at which he stopped and smiled, and he then noted his appreciation of my Hardcore Devo tee. We chatted briefly at the corner of 5th Avenue and Union Street, sharing anecdotes about each of us having met GG Allin and his Hitler-mustached brother Merle, and when we both had to leave, we smiled and bade each other a friendly farewell. It was a lovely moment, and proof that music brings people together. Even the music of a guy with (non-) hits such as "Kill the Children, Save the Food" (GG's answer to USA for Africa), "I Wanna Piss On You," "I Wanna Rape You," and that timeless family favorite, "Expose Yourself to Kids," in his catalog.

CLASSIC OF MARTIAL ARTS ASS-WHUPPIN' THAT YOU NEED TO SEE

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EARLY SHORTS OF JOHN WATERS: HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964), ROMAN CANDLES (1966) and EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968) at Lincoln Center

From 2014.

Young John Waters, circa 1972.

Manhattan's Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center has been home to many terrific retrospectives that I've had the distinct pleasure to attend over the years, and last night was the opening evening of the first complete retrospective of the films of John Waters (which, I might add, saw several nights of its program completely sold out online in a matter of moments after tickets went on sale). I've been a slave to Waters's films since I saw the infamous (and fucking hilarious) PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) while still in high school. The film's warped and offensive sense of humor, incredibly twisted content, and in-your-face celebration of its outsider protagonists had a seismic effect on my development as a person and I unequivocally consider seeing that movie to be a life-changing experience. It also instantly rendered Waters my favorite living director and I subsequently went on to see every one of his movies, so I naturally had an interest in experiencing his rare, seldom-seen short film works. Never released on any home video format and only periodically screened when Waters had the whim to do so for friends or as a limited  part of a film series or art show, these early efforts have been the source of great curiosity among the Waters faithful, so their inclusion in the Lincoln Center retrospective is a joyous occasion indeed. The films are apparently no longer extant in their original 16mm prints but they have been preserved in digital form (presumably transferred from archival videotapes), allowing for them to be shown on the huge flatscreen TV in Lincoln Center's amphitheater.

I arrived early and picked up my pre-ordered ticket for the sold-out 6:30pm screening of FEMALE TROUBLE and then made my way across the street from the Walter Reade Theater to the amphitheater. The screening of the shorts was at 4pm and free to the public, and every seat was filled by the time the lights dimmed. Here's what transpired, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by what I got.

HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964)   17 minutes

Sporting one of the best titles ever, this seventeen-minute experiment was shot by the eighteen-year-old director on a budget of thirty bucks — the actual figure according to Waters and, judging from what's onscreen, he's not lying — utilizing stolen film stock and starring a number of Waters's cronies, including Mary Vivian Pearce, who would later become a recurring featured player in his first five full-length films. The quasi-narrative depicts the marriage of black man to a white ballerina on the roof of John Waters's parents' house, with the ceremony witnessed by assorted weirdoes and presided over by a cross-wielding Klansman. Employing the same kind of ADD-riddled unlicensed soundtrack collage technique as later found in MONDO TRASHO (1969), the film is rough around the edges — very rough, an aspect not at all helped by the dodgy video transfer — but briskly-paced and amusing. It also definitely already has the signature feel and trashy aesthetic of Waters's later work. Oh, and it should also be noted that there is neither a hag nor a black leather jacket to be found anywhere in this film.

ROMAN CANDLES (1966)   40 minutes

Freshly kicked out of NYU film school and influenced by Andy Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), Waters aped Warhol's split-screen technique, only going it one better by intending its three free-form non-narratives to be projected onto a trio of individual screens. The result as seen on video at Lincoln Center was a screen composed of two upper tiers of imagery atop a third, with each running a series of unconnected clips and stock footage, including snippets from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1958) and THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (1956). It's dizzying and somewhat headache-inducing if one tries to follow each tier at once, but it's impressively well-constructed and never boring (which, frankly, I expected it to be), unlike many short films that bear the mark of film school influences.

EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968)  45 minutes

The short opens with an anguished young woman crawling across sand dunes toward a shirtless young man while she repeatedly screams, "Makeup! Makeup!!! Makeup!!!"— an hilariously overwrought performance that elicited gales of laughter from the theater audience — until the mysterious man throws her a plate full of beauty products that she greedily devours. Following the credits, the short shifts location to a Baltimore park where a crazed-looking black-clad woman (Maelcum Soul) has her underlings kidnap young women off the street and take them into the woods, where they are forced to wear ridiculous outfits and repeatedly stalk a bargain basement outdoor catwalk until they model themselves to death for the amusement of a drugged-up and violent throng of spectators. The crazed modeling is periodically interrupted by the models being force-fed makeup, and diversions into fantasy and other odd attractions in what is revealed to be a boardwalk-like setup. The fantasy comes in when a wigless drag queen, played by a seventeen-year-old Divine, arrives to chat with the black-clad mistress of ceremonies and imagines herself as Jackie Kennedy riding and waving in the ill-fated motorcade as canned laughter brainlessly guffaws on the soundtrack. The sheer balls/bad taste of doing such a sequence even five years after the real-life event that shocked the nation and the world screamed Waters, and it was amazing to see something so intentionally transgressive and offensive so early in his catalog.

Dangerous filmmaking: a parodic reenactment of the Kennedy assassination — with a laugh track, no less — some five years after the dire real-life event and featuring an obese teenage Divine in drag as the First Lady. I'm amazed Waters and company were not tracked down and stoned to death for this at the time.

The boardwalk element includes a Horror House ride (whose signage proudly proclaims "It'll make you sick") that drives a patron to terrified, shrieking apoplexy and apparent death with its depictions of mundane and wholesome suburban life and American values, and would be harkened back to and inverted for the "Cavalcade of Perversion" in MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970). It all wraps up with a "happy" ending cribbed from a mashup of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty's stories, and is once again accented from start to finish with music Waters didn't bother to get the rights to use. Of the three shorts, I would name EAT YOUR MAKEUP as the most accessible of the lot and the one where Waters's later tropes first begin to coalesce. 

Totally worth paying to watch yet kindly screened by Lincoln Center at no cost to the audience, the three early Waters films are a must-see for Waters fans, provided you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch them. Waters has stated that they will never be made available on home video because obtaining the music rights would be prohibitive, and also, reportedly, because they are simply too embryonic and relatively crude when compared what came later. I get where he's coming from when it comes to their stylistic/aesthetic primitiveness, as he is a filmmaker whose growth in assuredness and skill is visibly trackable on a film-by-film basis, but it would still be nice to have the shorts readily available for scholarly perusal and also to make Waters completists happy. Too bad about the damned music rights, though.

ALLIGATOR (1962) by I*n Fl*m*ng

 From 2010.

Back cover bio of author I*n Fl*m*ng.

Among my many passions can be counted the adventures of James Bond, in both prose and cinematic form, but my real interest in the character lies in his literary incarnation.

The James Bond of the movies is for all intents and purposes something of a superman (that trait beginning in earnest with 1964's classic GOLDFINGER), but his literary antecedent would surprise those unfamiliar with the books by being, as my friend Kevin so concisely and accurately put it many years ago, "a fucking mess." The Bond of the books is a borderline alcoholic, chainsmoking sadistic asshole, not at all like the fantasy figure found in the films, and he fascinates because of his very human failings while serving as a combination investigator/hitman for Her Majesty's secret service. 

Prior to the advent of the 007 movies, author Ian Fleming's novels enjoyed great success worldwide and even counted President John F. Kennedy among their avid fans (1957's FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE reportedly being his favorite among the novels), so the character and his author's signature prose style were very much in the public consciousness, and anything that gains such a measure of public familiarity is destined to at some point fall prey to parody. That would have been no easy feat at the time of the novels' releases, due in large part to the then-extreme levels of sex, shocking violence and sadism that defined the series and rendered some of the books downright controversial in some circles. Thus it fell to a respected organ of humor produced by collegiate scribes, namely the Harvard Lampoon, to give Fleming's work a much-needed satirizing, and the result was 1962's ALLIGATOR, a dead-on parody of the Fleming oeuvre that's so on target that it's barely distinguishable from an actual James Bond novel, save for a few moments of quite ludicrous exaggeration of Fleming's stylistic tropes.

Front cover to ALLIGATOR.

Back cover to ALLIGATOR.

To those familiar with the Bond editions as they appeared in the 1960's (the versions I grew up with), the first thing to notice about ALLIGATOR is its flawless mimicry of the series' cover design style, right down to the cheesy author's photo on the back, and once the reader dives into the text, it even reads just like a Fleming novel. 

The plot is a hash of several elements that will be familiar to the experienced Fleming reader (this book is not advised for those unfamiliar with the 007 novels since it is such an accurate stylistic parody) and details J*mes B*nd's clash with Lacertus Alligator, an over-the-top megalomaniac whose freakish physical attributes (including a mouth full of sharpened steel teeth) go hand in hand with his behavioral quirks (such as sating his fetish for the color purple by constantly whipping out a spray can of purple vegetable dye and liberally applying the pigment to anything and everyone around him). Alligator would be very much at home among such villainous Fleming creations as Hugo Drax and Doctor Julius No, only in this parody he brings to mind how Chuck Jones or some of the other classic era Warner Brothers animating directors might have handled such a figure with their trademark satirical flavor.

B*nd is brought into direct conflict with Alligator when B*nd's boss, *, tasks him to discover if Alligator is cheating at cards at an exclusive London men's club (a plot lifted directly from Fleming's MOONRAKER) and once B*nd takes the villain for an outrageous sum of cash, the agent is assigned to investigate the murder of a British intelligence section head in Bermuda (a nod to the plot catalyst of 1958's DR. NO). That seemingly routine assignment soon spirals into the expected web of sex, violence and mayhem that one has every right to expect from a 007 yarn, and it's all communicated with astonishing brevity since the book is but a mere seventy-seven pages in length (which is just fine because a goosing of Fleming's storytelling could easily be achieved in short order by a talented parodist). 

But while it's a great idea to give the world a knowing spoof of the Fleming books, the problem with ALLIGATOR is that it simply isn't funny. It hews far too close to its source material and other than a few moments having fun with B*nd's general arrogant assholism, Alligator's bizarre/insane villainy and B*nd's in your face and totally irritating flaunting of his epicurean leanings, there's nary a chuckle to be had, and what little laughs are generated depend heavily on the reader's intimate familiarity with the ten 007 books ranging from 1953 through 1962. When all is said and done, ALLIGATOR is best left to Bond completists and curiosity seekers who want to check out just how closely a writer can ape one author's style.

Having been an avid collector and reader of Fleming since my early teens, I picked up a copy of ALLIGATOR a little over thirty years ago but never got around to reading it in full because I didn't get what it was going for at the time, a lack of understanding stemming from only having read the first two or three of the original novels, so I set it aside to be read at some later time. During the years since those formative days, I lost my copy of ALLIGATOR and pretty much forgot about the book's existence until recently, shortly after re-reading all of the Fleming novels over a two-year period, so I recently found the cheapest copy I could get on eBay for around $36. Simply put, it's an item of interest, but it wasn't worth the wait or the cash expenditure. Save your money or shell it out for a worthy parody, such as the infinitely better and frequently hilarious BORED OF THE RINGS (1969), written by Henry N. Beard and Douglas Kenney, both founding editors/contributors of the NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. (Doug Kenney notably wrote "First Blowjob" for the magazine and later co-authored NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE with Harold Ramis and Chris Miller, so that'll give you an idea of how funny that guy was. Kenney died as age 32 in 1980 after a fall from a cliff in Hawaii, a death that may have been a suicide).

LIKE A SEX MACHINE

This morning the van that transports me to dialysis arrived over a half hour early, and when I went downstairs I noticed and open case containing what looked like a dis-assembled mic stand or something, but I could not investigate because the van was there and ready to roll. The mysterious case was still there when I got home from treatment, but I ignored it as I staggered up the front steps.

Then, just ten minutes ago, my down-the-hall neighbor, Ruth, texted me freaking out. She had just gotten home with a friend and the two of them encountered the case, so, curious, they investigated and sent me a video of them trying to figure out what it was. Ruth noted a brand logo on one of the bulkier components, so she did an Amazon search when she came upstairs and here's what has been laying next to our stoop since sometime late last night. 

 

Who just leaves an expensive sex toy up for grabs on the sidewalk? Did it belong to someone in the building? All of the residents know each other, so Ruth and I demand answers!