A paradox! An oxymoron! A paradoxymoron!

So all the old mainstays of rock are releasing new albums soon. Or touring while their drummer passive-agressively bitches about it via blog. Or transforming a formerly promising teen actress into a clone of his ex and then fucking her onscreen while blood spews everywhere.

Among those doing the album-releasing thing?

The Smashing Pumpkins.

I sorta had this information swirling in the back of my head. Then I saw a bus bench ad.

The album's title?

Zeitgeist.

Oh, that's fucking rich.


A brief swig of the dictionary tonic reveals Zeitgeist as "the general moral, intellectual, and cultural climate of an era."

I own a calendar. It's not the 90s, upcoming Spice Girls -- sorry, Spice "Women" -- reunion tour notwithstanding.

Which was the last time Smashing Pumpkins were within a 10-mile radius of the zeitgeist. Hell, it's the last time they were even in the same galaxy as our zeitgeist.

There was that one good song on the Lost Highway soundtrack and then a dozen abortive side-projects and "new" bands.

Also, Mellon Collie and the infinite double album that had the cool Georges Méliès-jacking (er, "homaging") video was one of those albums that I bought because I thought I had to to be cool and music-savvy. But I never really listened to it. Not really. Because double albums are usually filler, filler and more filler. The only recent exception I can think of is NIN's Fragile.

Plus, naming your album Zeitgeist is just a weeee bit hyperbolic and setting yourself up for failure. I mean if this record doesn't capture and define our time, then it looks like a failure.

The only 90s musicians I care about their pending comeback? Courtney Love (and her backing band, her misspelled personal demons). Seriously, get clean, get the record done and fucking make me 16 and angsty again and feeling like I heard "Doll Parts" for the first time.

VICTORY IN OUR TIME!

I guess dreams really DO come true...

She's back in jail! HUZZAH!

Okay, now I'm going to visualize a pony and winning the lotto.

i'm gonna be a celebrity....

That means someone everyone knows....

A few weeks ago, I decided that pretty much all I wanted for my birthday - besides Clive Owen and a bottle of Scotch - was for Paris to go to jail. And stay there.

I had other dreams, too, of course -- a rocking party, a fabulous life and Clive Owen. But I've been kinda in the doldrums and not that much in a "MY LIFE IS TOTALLY KICKASS! I ROCK! WOO! CELEBRATE ME!" mood.

But if there's one thing that I never tire of, it's taking pleasure in others' misfortune. (Didja know schadenfraude tastes like strawberries?)

Sadly, as you may have heard from now, Parisite is now free to walk among us.

Damn it. This is intolerable.

I know my Oscar post was about unironic celeb worship and them NOT having to be "just like us". But there are limits. And she crossed them. She keeps crossing them. Quite simply, she believes that the rules don't apply to her and the world keeps reinforcing that belief.

Sadly, I know too many people in town who have gotten DUIs. And they had to take their punishment accordingly. But not Paris. Never Paris. Because she is either made of 95% Teflon or Satan herself. Scandals that, in the past, would end careers (or at least shame a prominent family) - sextapes! drugs! herpes! -- seem to only make her stronger.

Alas, I am not (yet) a celebrity and have to deal with being treated like a normal human being sometimes. Most of the time, actually. I have to deal with astoundingly bad service at dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in town (Hungry Cat, FWIW).

At a place where I have been many, many times before and spent lots and lots of money. (Last summer, dinner and a movie meant Arclight and Hungry Cat). At a place where I've taken parents, tourists and lovers. A place where the burger and drinks are so goddamn good that I'm almost willing to forgive them for making little to no effort in providing us quality service for a birthday dinner.

I don't know if it was a bad table, the fact that we were young or not hip enough or what.

Or simply, I'm not important enough. Because I'm not a celebrity.

Paris, meanwhile, doesn't even bother to pay the bill. And I'm sure she'll keep getting invited back into the VIP room and landing the best tables.

So screw this plebian shit. It's time for me to be famous -- not just internet famous, but actual famous. Because, well, why shouldn't I be?

ask and ye shall receive....

Well, that was weird.

No less than 24 hours after having an insatiable curiousity about Gay Zombies, MySpace has a banner ad for this "mockumentary" [please, someone, banish that word] entitled American Zombie. The tagline?

"We're here. We're dead. Get used to it."

Stop INVADING MY BRAIN, universe! This hat is made of the *really good* tinfoil, okay?

Meanwhile, in non-Gay Zombie news -

Last week, I was depressed. The kind that needs industrial-sized Manhattans and impulse buying in grocery stores. I went to get Maraschino cherries and their sweet juices for said Manhattans. I ended up with a shit-load of nacho ingredients. Along the way, I spied this:
I hate to go all CopyRanter because he'd dissect this better than I, but I have to.

Vertigo is many, many things, such as:

• A side-effect of this blog, along with dry mouth and unquenchable bloodlust.
• One of Hitchcock's finest works.
• A so-so U2 song [even after the brilliant explanation by Jane Avril, the "uno, dos, tres, CATORCE!" *still* bugs. Said explanation is that the band went back to the same producer for their 14th album as they did for their 1st-3rd. It's a giant shout-out to Steve Lillywhite that annoys almost all who hear it. Plus, the video took place in a Target ad.]

But it is NOT - NOT a good name for a candy lollipop. Even one that tastes like a massively artificial chocolate-covered strawberry. I can picture some exec thinking that naming a candy "Vertigo!" is, like, totally rad and is an X-TREME candy or whatever. And then I hate them.

What remaining hate I have is directed toward ABC and their fucking new Jimmy Kimmel campaign smeared over seemingly every bus in Los Angeles.


The ad reads "Be A Good American. Jimmy 5 Nights a Week."

What. The. Fuck?

Besides having an ear-splitting radio ad that changes Franz Ferdiand's "Do You Wanna?" into "Do-Do-Do You-Do You Do You Jimmy?," ABC is under the belief that if you throw enough money into it, slang will come.

No. You can't just INVENT verbs from proper names!

And then USE them with disturbingly masturbatory over/undertones [i.e. "12:05 am - Time to Jimmy."]

And you especially can't do this with a word that is already a verb [i.e. "jimmy a lock."]

What the hell is WRONG with you?! I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE YELLED AT A NETWORK LIKE THIS!!

Seriously, I was indifferent to Mr. Kimmel beforehand. Now? Filled with white-hot hatred.

there are no small parts...

Only gay zombies?

So. A while back, certain people [namely me, Kay Rose, Holly Magnolia, Livia Harlowe] and I were talking about how there are no brief/funny puns involving gay zombies. And there aren't.

The sad thing is that I own this book [a gay spoof of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books from my/your childhood], which includes ZOMBIE DRAG QUEENS. But no humorous puns or cool slanguage.

I've seen this awesome YouTube video [entitled 'That Guy (of the Living Dead)'], which involves bears + gay zombies. Still no good puns are coming to mind.

Why is this important, you may ask?

Well, I helped out making a friend's film -a nifty little horror-comedy-totally Maegan Poland thing entitled "10 Signs Your Roommate is a Serial Killer." Anyways, I had to play dead.

So we took pictures of me made up and dead. I totally look like an awesome gay zombie.

And since things only matter when they're relevant to me, I now MUST resolve this burning question of "why are there no fantastically witty yet concise gay zombie puns?"

I probably am not as up on my horror knowledge as other people and therefore can't apply my fancy film school edumacation...

[I *still* somehow never managed to see any of the Romero stuff - I genuinely think the only "zombie" movie I've ever seen is 28 Days Later.]

But this is bugging the fracking HELL out of me.

So far, the only thing our friends have come up with is "Night of the Lisping Dead."

Which. Come on. We have to do better than that, don't we?

best. week in film. ever.

A long, long time ago, I went to a private, conservative high school.

In this place, a younger, no less wise huntergrayson wandered about, feeling alone and confused.

Then a mad hatter arrived to take over the theater program. Said mad hatter started offering film classes and, well, my life as I know it now sorta began then.

Keep in mind that this was before the DVD age reached full swing. So the mad hatter would show me mysterious bootleg VHS tapes that were burned from laserdiscs. [Yes, they really existed, look it up.]

Besides introducing me to the works of David Sedaris, that man is responsible for my first viewings of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

And the insane musical I just now discovered came out on DVD - Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here. There's a fruit hat, dancing bananas and a number that's a swooning psychedelic tribute to polka dots.

I can NOT WAIT to see this again. I can't...put it into words. It's just something you have to experience yourself.

Also, a brief review:
Running with Scissors - written/directed by Ryan Murphy:

For someone who balances so delicately on the razor's edge of camp every week on Nip/Tuck, it is surprising that he would make a movie so....dull. So inert. Bear in mind that I haven't read the memoir - my viewing companion had and is a HUGE Burroughs fan.

But the movie kinda sucks. It has no momentum, no "oopmh." It's a string of vignettes pieced together as a feature film- pearls through a necklace whose string gets more frayed as it goes along. The emotional modes are only two -- blankly delivered psychobabble talk about "feelings" and such or over-the-top screaming matches. And that's it. It's either one or the other rather than the rich and varied shades of melodrama that Murphy's TV show consistently delivers.

A more fitting title would've been, "Powerwalking, then Sprinting, with Scissors."

While the acting is decent enough across the board [look for Gabrielle Union to prove her dramatic chops in a "blink and you'll miss it" role] only two actors manage to seem like real people rather than cardboard characters. The first is Alec Baldwin, who earned Salon's Honorary Oscar in part for his turn here.

The other? Gwyneth Paltrow. Yes, her. I tend to stay away from her gossip threads because while she's probably an insufferable person, she has never ceased to remain a compelling screen presence in my eyes. Given how the entire film is barely distinguishable from a sad Tenenbaum retread, Fishstick must be commended for not doing Margot, part deux.

Evan Rachel Wood's faux-punk "fuck you" posturing sometimes makes her seem like early Avril Lavigne. Joseph Fiennes? Yet another screen role where "crazy" is little more than a collection of tics and business. Cross doesn't get much to do as Augusten, despite being the author of the memoir. Bening, is, of course, fantastic and startling. But none of them hold a candle to what the talented Miss Paltrow does here --

She makes you believe her. Oh, she's a nut. A spoiled brat and a space cadet rolled into one. But she is so deeply wrapped up in herself -- so uniquely on her own wavelength - that you can't take your eyes off her. You begin to believe her madness and start counting the seconds until she appears again.

At one point in the film, she claims that her cat is speaking to her and is begging her to keep her in a laundry basket-shaped prison.

And while the rational part of you says "Oh, that's terrible! Free kitty!" The other part of your brain starts to think, "well, maybe the cat *did* speak to her via its purrs."

Kudos, Fishstick. Kudos.

i'll sleep when I'm dead, again....

3/6/07 7:45:05 AM

I know how Billy Chenowith dies.

I have no idea how my grandfather will. Besides likely sooner rather than later.

Yeah, that’s a thought that will keep one awake even if they had all the Ambien in the world. I’m seriously considering drinking at sun-up just to turn my mind off.

I’ve been an insomniac since birth because, well, my head is a scary and busy and infinitely changing place that I spend most of my time in. But it won’t shut up. Ever.

Sigh. Almost five-o-clock somewhere, right?

Since my phone has a World Clock, the answer is Casablanca*.

Salud.

[Longtime readers will recall that the headline is a callback to my very first post. Have I come full-circle or simply shame spiraled back to the start? Only the fans can decide – and remember, if you don’t vote, then you don’t get to pick your next American Idle.]

* - another “romantic” film that leaves me cold inside.