Life's a Banquet!

My cousin and J. are going to throw an AUNTIE MAME-THEMED party for me a month or so after I arrive on Maui! He said, “You’ll be the fresh new meat on the island,” meaning most of his crowd is older, and I’ll be a whipper-snapper at the tender age of 33. I’ve been researching Hawaiian centipedes and cane spiders so I know what I’m up against. Hawaii is generally pest-free, so if I don’t have trouble with these two fearsome insectoids, I should be fine. My cousin said cane spiders aren’t venomous, “just gross and scary, and they jump AT you,” and he said centipedes are what you really need to watch out for, “I’ve been bitten three times.” Supposedly they can get up to a foot long, and I saw a video of one eating a mouse (!) People occasionally end up in the hospital with baseball-sized swellings from centipede bites. The pain has been described as similar to a lighter flame being held to your skin. But I don’t think they’re poisonous either, or if they are, their poison only works on the insects and small vertebrates they prey on, not humans, so you’re not going to die.

This reminds me of hearing a woman on the bus a few months back talking about camel spiders and how soldiers in Iraq have to deal with them. She went on and on to her friend about how horrifying they are, how they have crazy jumping ability and can run 30 mph and they’ll inject a sleeping person with anesthesia so they can’t feel anything and then devour their flesh while they sleep. Then I went to the Wikipedia page for camel spiders and found that this is all either greatly exaggerated (they CAN run up to 10 mph, which IS crazy fast for an insect, though), or completely untrue (they don’t produce anesthesia, and according to almost all studies, they aren’t venomous, though their bites are certainly very painful).

People have a need to believe certain things that eclipses any intrusion by facts or reality. When faced with such facts they deny them, or more likely simply tune them out, because they’ve decided that their own constructed pseudo-reality must be defended at all costs. You can still find plenty of vestiges of the old-world, pre-Galileo belief that the earth was flat and if you sail too far you’ll sail over the edge of the world and be eaten by giant monsters. It’s like how James, poor James who I met last summer in Glacier, absolutely INSISTED that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a true story. He’s from Texas, and he KNOWS it. But it’s not a true story. It sets itself up as a true story, but so have plenty of other films from Citizen Kane to The Blair Witch Project. Chain Saw is loosely based on the exploits of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein, who was a graverobber and artist working in the medium of human skin (but didn’t use a chainsaw). Then you throw in some Charles Manson, a bunch of social unrest and governmental deceit, the no-gas crisis of the early 70s, and the basic structure of Hansel and Gretel, and you’ve got this eerie film that is a weird mixture of modern horror and Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

How do I know this? By reading the words of Tobe Hooper, who wrote and directed the film.

Another good example: COURTNEY KILLED KURT! Or, along the same lines, KURT WROTE COURTNEY’S MUSIC! There is absolutely no compelling evidence of either of these claims, yet many people persist in believing them. A friend who visited me last week put an entertaining new spin on this by insisting that BILLY CORGAN wrote Hole’s second album, Live Through This! Now, that one I’d never even heard before, so you get points for ingenuity! But I’m afraid you’re confused. Corgan had nothing to do (and has never claimed he had anything to do) with Live Through This (except insomuch as the opening song, “Violet,” was apparently written for Corgan by Love, inspired by their on-again, off-again relationship). He DID co-write several songs on Hole’s LAST album, Celebrity Skin. Check the liner notes and you’ll see he was credited as such. And yet when I confronted my friend with this information, she sternly refused to let it impinge on her preferred version of events.

What can you do? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.

I just watched a gay French movie called Like A Brother (Comme un frere, en francais). It was only 55 minutes long and felt more like a first draft than a finished film, and it ended very inconclusively, yet I enjoyed it, and it had many sweet and sexy moments. I think I like movies that challenge the pre-molded conception that films have to be between 90 and 120 minutes long. Why is that, anyway? Did some sort of scientific research determine that was the greatest length of time that most peoples’ attention spans will tolerate? And if that’s so, NOW, is that because of some innate threshold of the human brain, or because we’ve gotten so used to movies being that long?

One of the things I intend to work on while on Maui is a screenplay for a new film, longer than any I’ve done so far - I’m guessing 30 to 45 minutes. That’s a good next step. I’m not ready for a feature yet, though.

The fish who drowned in moonshine

Somebody left this Care Bear outside the Taco Bell by my house. That's kind of sad, right? I guess that makes it a Nobody Cares Bear.

I just got off the phone after about an hour with dear mum, wishing her a happy birthday – FOUR TIMES, since my cell still drops calls continuously when I’m at home and it’s using the wifi connection. She sounded in great spirits, although she’s afraid she’s going to have to move to a smaller room since her rent went up $40, but when I asked how much her income also went up (it does every January) the figure she gave me came out to $39, so I don’t get how it really makes a difference. I told her to crunch the numbers and talk to her people and get back to me and if she needs me to I’ll send her a check each month to cover the difference so she can keep her big beautiful room that she loves. I called and left Anthony a message about how much I love Little Britain and there’s a sketch in it where the queen or some other aristocratic fat bewigged lady is lying on a couch dictating a memoir to her assistant who sits there typing it, and every so often she stops and asks, “How many pages is that?” and the assistant checks and says, “Twelve,” and the silver haired lady utters an exclamation of disappointment and goes back to recounting more anecdotes. I watched it with my roommates the other day and said, “That’s me and my cousin writing his memoir on Hana!”

A friend of mine (I'm not sure whether to use peoples' names in a public forum, some people are shy and sensitive about that, while others are like me and don't care) said the original title of my book made her think I sounded like a trustafarian. If she meant "Live Through Me" it is (intentionally) a bit grandiose sounding, yes, but it also references the fact that people who absorb other peoples' journals and diaries are in a way living vicariously through them, just as I used to absorb Virginia Woolf's life through her diary back in my freshman-in-college days (I'm with the Indigo Girls on that one). It also relates to my mother, who is disabled and living in a nursing home in Minnesota, telling me every time I talk with her on the phone that she nows lives vicariously through me and my sister. (Naturally, she's excited about me going to Maui in the spring.) And lastly, it is (also intentionally) a reference to Hole's album "Live Through This," which although I don't really listen to it any more (just as I don't read Marvel comics any more), defined a certain era of my life and is probably one of my 10 favorite albums of all time.

If she meant the title "Como me llamo" made me sound trustafarian, I'm not sure why, unless just because I'm a white American using a Spanish title - but I'm studying Spanish in school, I genuinely find it to be a beautiful language, and learning a second language is good! Maybe she meant the translation of that title, "What is My Name," but I'm not sure why that would be either. It certainly has a personal resonance for me, since I've been changing my name to one thing or another practically my entire life, as my family can well attest. I was born with the first name Joseph, called "Joe" throughout my childhood (my sister, mother and cousin still have that name in their phones and address books for me). At one point I was toying with the first name Simon, at another J.D. At another (now highly embarrassing) point when I was a teenager, it was going to be Gary Glamdring! (Good God.) So when I legally changed it to Anthony LeTigre in May 07 it was only the culmination of a long history of wondering, more or less, "What is my name?" I still have a poem with that title in the booklet I'm publishing in January and I'm going to work this whole question of names into it as a theme.

Nonetheless, the final title I'm going with is "The Fish Who Drowned." Unless I think of a REALLY KILLER new one within the next week or two.

What are you doing for New Years? I get invited to parties (of course!), but I'm really kind of over getting drunk, and how much fun will a New Year's Eve party be without booze? I guess I'll find out.

I'm meeting with my three cast members tomorrow afternoon to discuss a script I wrote called "The Art Police" which they're going to help me film in January! And the neo-noir reimagining of Sunset Boulevard that I'm conceiving with Kirk and Melanie is starting to look really promising, and I've bestowed upon it a working title - "Moonshine Boulevard."