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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
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Just in time for the holidays comes this heartburning story about a downfallen Hollywood charity event planner, and the perks (think jewelry, watches, airline tix) and cash payments often given to celebrity guests and performers at charity fundraisers.
This anecdote is the best--Cher in name and nature:
...In one particularly expensive episode, Tonken wrangled a private jet to fly the singer to Atlanta so she could appear at a fundraiser for the Dallas-based Children's Craniofacial Assn. Tonken wasn't directly connected with the event, but he believed Cher would return the favor by performing at his own Los Angeles Kids Campaign gala, to be built around the Dallas charity and other philanthropies. The gala never occurred.
Once in Atlanta, Cher told Tonken that she wouldn't need his chartered Gulfstream for a return flight, so he let the plane go, even though he was obligated to pay for a round trip, according to people familiar with the situation. The singer then changed her mind and asked for a plane to return home — so Tonken chartered another jet, raising his total cost to more than $63,000. But Cher decided not to use the second jet, once sent.
The Direct TV channel guide's old movie plot summaries are collectibly perplexing. One sentence recaps of movie plots that typically emphasize some weird detail, and sometimes two or three. When more than one non sequiturial plot point is highlighted, the summaries become almost incomprehensible dada riddles. I will sometimes read them four or five times before I give up altogether.
Our first specimen for the collection is of the simpler type. I will introduce more complex examples of the form when I think you are ready.
Condemned Women Drama. Sally Eifers, Louis Haywood (1938)
A prison psychologist takes the case of a wronged woman inmate he meets by the furnace.
I had been keeping a list of books read for a couple years when I came across someone's insight that such lists are a lazy man's diary. A lazy, book-reading man. I don't find my list much use as a diary, though. Looking over the list doesn't help me recall otherwise forgotten memories. It does make patterns in my reading apparent and shames me into not reading too many of the same kinds of books.
There is a sure-fire lazy man's diary, however. Or there was, but now the fires gone out. Answering machine tapes created an accidental diary easy enough for Oblomov to maintain. If you'd regularly saved your full tapes and replaced them with new blanks, instead of continually flipping one tape over and recording new messages on top of the old, you would now have cache of souvenirs supremely evocative of your day to day existence over the years. I only had the foresight to save a couple, but I know from them what I lost but not saving the others.
Now, tape-based machines are found only in thrift stores, all the new ones record messages onto an inaccessible memory chip, and remote voice mail accounts are worse still. The golden age of the answering machine diary lasted only a decade or so. Except if some manufacturer of the new machines realizes that the advent of cheap memory makes it possible to market answering machines as time and memory machines, as well. All it would take is a machine with enough memory to hold a lifetime (or a decade's, for starters) worth of voice messages. If that's not practical right now, it will be soon enough. This built in memory should be dumpable to other media, your computer's HD most obviously, as a backup. The machine would have an archive option so that once a message was replayed you'd be able to either delete, save for immediate reference or preserve it in the permanent archive.
More focused sentimentalists could choose to save only the messages of loved ones, while the omnivorous mnemophages would archive everything--wrong numbers, vacation package sales pitches, robo charity appeals, election day phone bank calumnies, and dueling eliminate-bad-credit helpline numbers. This decades spanning, total-recall sound-collage will make your eventual rest home internment either more bearable or more dreadful. More something, in any event. And then you could pass it on to your grandkids, one of whom might even treasure it. Probably the gay one.
Take my idea--ATT, Casio, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Memorex, GE, BellSouth, Sharp, Siemens Nixdorf, Conair, Nortel, Trend Micro, and RCA--and build this machine. Flood the datasphere.
A friend of mine sent me one of those dozens-of-useless-facts emails.
As in:
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
It looked like something my young nieces would enjoy, so I started to fwd it. But then I considered the source. My friend, well, she is a very dirty girl. This email was rather out of character for her. The UN charter forbids me from posting here an example of an email in her usual style, or her website address. She brings to mind the Dylan Thomas blurb on the back of Flan O'Brien's deliriously entertaining At Swim Two Birds:
This is just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.
It's just the book for my friend, D.T. was trying to say. So I had to read the entire list of dubious facts just to make sure that entries along the lines of "the shortest dicks shoot the farthest." and "the hottest fucks make the prettiest babies" weren't interlarded among the rest.
Hey, did you know that:
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag
Turner Prize Committee Sought in Attempted Murder Of The Corner: Prosecutors Face "Can You Kill The Dead?" Hurdle
London, Dec. 8. (PTI): Transvestite Potter Grayson Perry who scratches explicit phallic imagery and disturbing scenes of child abuse on to the surfaces of ceramic vases has won the prestigious Turner Prize.
The Tate's jury handed a 20,000 pounds cheque to Perry, dressed like Shirley Temple, last night amid accusations that it had exhibited a complete lack of sensitivity.
Above is from The Hindu. I don't know what (PTI) is, but it exhibits here a Reuterian inclination to loaded verbal constructs, that scratches is a brilliant bit of reportorial malice. MSNBC's coverage doesn't summon up quite the same image of a British Baby Jane gouging out stick-figure dicks in the fired clay with his transvestite claws:
Perry is best known for his classically shaped vases which he intricately paints with figures, patterns and text. Subjects include autobiographical images of himself, Claire and his family, as well as examinations of cultural stereotypes.
I like the concluding paragraph from The Hindu story as well:
Outside a group of artists known as the Stuckists, who campaign for traditional artistry, staged a protest with a blow-up sex doll purchased from a Soho sex shop.
The trads method of protest seems to undercut their argument somewhat.
I have and I have no problem with Perry getting the cash this year. Look like some nice pots to me. I have further adjudged myself the winner of next year's prize. My scratchings here ought to be worth at least 20,00 pounds by now.
And finally, in classic High Cataloguese, this year's losers:
Anya Gallaccio was born in Paisley in 1963. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College, University of London. Gallaccio is one of the leading British sculptors of her generation, yet the ephemeral nature of her chosen materials, such as flowers, fruit, ice and grass, means that few of her works remain permanent. Most of them simply decay, rather than being acquired by private or public collections. The unpredictable time-based qualities of her installations relate to the history of performance as much as the tradition of sculpture. This fascination with cycles of transformation and degeneration, properties inherent in the organic materials she uses, lies at the heart of Gallaccio�s practice.
Willie Doherty was born in 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland. His art relates directly to the complexities of living in a divided society. Derry (also known as Londonderry) is a city synonymous with the Northern Irish conflict. The religious and political divisions there are epitomised by the contested nature of the city�s name. Much of Doherty's work refers to an undercurrent of fear, oppression and uncertainty that for many has been a daily experience of life in Northern Ireland over the last three decades, whilst revealing a deep mistrust of the journalistic medium. Through photography and video, he adopts documentary codes and the strategies of film noir cinema, to undermine the boundaries between perception and memory, truth and fiction, creating highly poignant open-ended narratives.
The Chapmans first rose to prominence in the early 1990s with their three-dimensional recreations of Goya�s series of etchings, The Disasters of War. These depict atrocious acts of violence, carefully and playfully reconstructed with miniature and life-size figures. Subsequent works have continued to use the body as a way to explore an aesthetic of horror. Tragic Anatomies 1996 consists of a group of sexually-mutated child mannequins with genitalia sprouting from unlikely places, naked except for a pair of Nike trainers. With such works, the Chapmans challenge the very boundaries of taste, forcing the viewer into an uncomfortable position that fluctuates between child-like fascination and sheer revulsion.
Hey, you limey artfucks, nobody fluctuates between child-like fascination and sheer revulsion like yours truly. You want open-ended narratives and decaying ephemera, then buy American and keep stopping back here.
