Finally out on DVD!

This: Aspiring stand-up comic Marty Malt (Judd Nelson) can get a laugh only out of his fellow trash man Gus (Bill Paxton), who accompanies Marty's deadly routines on the accordion. But things change for the duo when Marty suddenly grows a third arm out of the center of his back. They soon get an agent (Las Vegas royalty Wayne Newton), who books the act for a Hollywood TV appearance. Director Adam Rifkin wrote the warped cult comedy when he was just 19.

Netflix here has left off the brilliant trashiness of Lara Flynn Boyle in the role of Marty's sometime love interest. Picture a set flooded with trash, filth, and shadows--ala Naked Lunch.

Now if only I could get some dvd lovin of this persuasion:


Mmmmm. Helen Slater.

No No No No Drama

August. What a strange month this has been. A week of cabinning. One significant addition to our small community (Once again, congrats to GC and the lovely T). School starts in less than a week but I seem to finally have managed a headspace where I'm blissfully in denial about it. After returning from Allegany, I had a couple days of blinding panic, threaded with existential despair. That mood has finally dissipated a bit and I'm now hoping that I've experienced the bulk of my craziness and stress well in advance of the main event. Penultimacy. Of course, a week into the semester, the weirdness will already have begun to wear off. Normalcy will be settling in like a warm blanket, and I can once again turn to the fresh terrors of dissertationism.

Much as I enjoy my time at my other job, the end of the summer inevitably finds me ready to vacate the retail space for most of the week. One day turns out to be the perfect amount of time to spend on a sales floor, being nice to irritable shoppers, and teaching my coworkers words like "vestibulary," "innocuous," and "superfluous". The bureaucracy bums me out. The capitalism bums me out. The bums bum me out. I'm also, increasingly, made to feel very old. I had the horrifying experience of discovering this week that many of my co-workers have never heard of Tori Amos. And the ones that have, don't know who Christian Slater is. Horror. When the hell did this happen?

I find myself groping for common ground. Validation. An anchoring sense that the people in my small community share in some critical ways an orienting grasp on reality. For example, the conviction that Tori Amos, whether or not you like her, is important. A worse example, and you may want to brace yourself for this one, follows.

Approximately five years ago, when I was doing my year in the Shen'do Valley with my sister and her family, she decided to buy my nieces puppies for Christmas. She did some research, and finally decided to buy, at considerable expense (think in the thousands), two Newfoundland female puppies. She did the whole thing, signed papers and agreements, flew them in from wherever it is their breeder lives, bought those hideous cages for them, etc. I must admit to not liking them from the start. They're reputedly very gentle and good with other pets, but one of the first things they did when they got big enough was tear apart the ducks that lived around the pond that was on the property. Also, they're water dogs, which means they have thick oily coats that smell like hell. They slobber. They roll in the mud and then lean on you. Eventually they got freaking huge, as they do. They're incredibly stupid. Untrainable, even. None of this is their fault. Our obsession with purity creates such critters. So, yes, I never liked them. I like small, clean, tidy dogs. Newfoundlands are the antithesis of this. I even have a story I liked to tell about how these dogs would lap tons of filthy water off the sidewalk and then come inside and throw it all up. All of this is not the point, though. The girls dug them. All was well.


Several years pass. The last time I visited, the family had more or less relinquished the downstairs of their sizable farmhouse to the dogs. They slept there on the destroyed armchairs all night. The kids took care of them, but I never saw them walked or really played with. Here's where the story takes a sinister turn. I was on the phone with my mom yesterday, and she was filling me in on all the changes that my sister has made to her house recently. My sister does this kind of thing often, completely changing up her living space in almost unthinkable ways. My mom is going there for a week to watch the kids so the parents can take a romantic vacation in the Bahamas. Then my mom says, "Oh, yeah, well since they got rid of the dogs--" I said, "What do you mean, 'got rid of them'?" And she said, "Yeah, they weren't staying on the property anymore, so they put them down." (here's the dramatic pause in our conversation where I grasp for the edges of reality) She eventually hedged a bit, saying that she wasn't sure what had happened, but it sounded a lot more like...simply hedging. I asked her, seriously, whether she didn't think there was something weird/awful/crazy about this, and she responded in a sort of shocked way. She had no idea there was anything to be upset about. It simply hadn't occurred to her.

So, yeah, the rest of the conversation was...stilted. I was so shocked I wasn't sure what to say. I'm now desperately hoping that there is more to the story. That my sister actually gave them away. Or if she didn't, that they were... I don't know...sick or something. I had to tell Q and a few other people before I was able to reestablish my ethical mooring. I had to ask, like I asked my mom, "Isn't that messed up? Aren't you seriously disturbed by this?" I mean, you wouldn't think one would need validation. Nothing so alienating as family.

Matoes!

Yes, its true. I've actually grown something. The tomato is my first homegrown ever. I'm so proud.

Channeling Lorna

Why? Because for the first time ever, q and I have retreated from the blazing heat and sweltering stuffiness of the Livingston into the air conditioned refuge of Cafe 59. Q is plugging away on her second chapter, and I'm endlessly poking the chapter I'm now referring to, with a hearty chortle, my charticle! How delightful, yes? I wish I could take credit, but it was the neologism of my better half. Why "charticle"? Because it is a chapter that I'm trying, and perhaps failing, to convert into an article. Surely, you might think, it wouldn't be that much work. After all, the chapter was fairly well received and all that. I'd already done some revisions, and so on. Of course, what you would be forgetting is that for some of us (not all *coughqueercat*) the chapter must be fed into the proverbial grinder and what comes out may only bear a slight resemblance to the previous thing. In that spirit, I started out with a 50-odd page document. I've since cut approximately 20 pages and rewritten whole passages including the entire introduction.
And other stuff of course...transitions...blah blah. I realized all of a sudden that "barbaristic" isn't a word, though I had used it as one on my first page. Who would have thought? Not that I'm against coining words because clearly I'm all about it. And I would argue that academic writing is uniquely suited to the coining of neologisms. There are so many words that really should be words as well as so many that are words that nonetheless nobody knows. I was mildly shocked when I described something to a co-worker recently as gelatinous and she responded with a "huh?" "Viscous," I explained. "Huh?" she said. Not that such things really matter. They merely flag my particular brand of mudgeon. Which, indeed, has enjoyed free rein of late as my disdain for the "Can you double it? I'm walking" crowd intensifies. It all makes me think that the end of the summer heralds my return to the entirely different set of anxieties and difficulties that is teaching. Things to look forward to.