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.

texas chainsaw / lesbian separatists / japanese monsters

It's all downhill from here. Last night Lucy went to her new home. I also finally sold my computer yesterday. Today I returned books to the library and went shopping at Everyday Music with the gift certificate Kirk gave me at my party the other night. I bought A Dirty Shame (John Waters' best movie since Serial Mom, which was his best movie since his 70s heyday) and King Kong vs. Godzilla on DVD. The latter was a big favorite of mine as a teenager. I've always loved those Japanese monster movies with the hilariously bad English overdubs. Then I distributed copies of my zinebook at Powell's, Reading Frenzy and the IPRC. (I still have copies, if anyone wants one!) Then strolled down to Saturday Market and enjoyed walking about in the sunlight watching people buy things. I bought a nice little ring for $10 that fits my middle finger. This young girl kept trying to get the seller to tell her what size of ring to buy for her boyfriend, and the seller kept coming back to, "Without knowing what size your boyfriend's fingers are, it's hard to say."

After the market I light-railed it to Chameleon and met with Pat for the last time, and to give him the corrected DVD copy of the Hat Party footage. I drank water with a slice of lime and ate a delicious slice of carrot cake with white chocolate frosting...I've always loved carrot cake, but this was like a whole notha level, a carrotcakegasm. Pat and Aaron were mixing a new drink while I was there, trying to get the taste right. The third version was great: scotch with saffron, a little sugar, and tuaca. They needed a name and I suggested "Scotch Saffron" or "Mad About Saffron" (after the Donovan song), but they went with Aaron's suggestion of "Scotchbroom." Pat said he would give me a reference so I can get a server/host/bartending gig in S.F. That will really help, since my resume over the past few years is like a road badly in need of repaving.

I cried a little after Lucy left last night, for the first time in forever. It's probably good to do that once in a while. I sure will miss that girl. I keep expecting her to be there, thinking I glimpse her out of the corner of my eye. "Cat love is one of the strongest kinds of love," as Kaj-ann told me during the opening party of the Love Show. Which reminds me: I also volunteered (again) for the Love Show closing party last night. Got a hug from Chris H, gifts from Kara (including a hilarious musical card), handed out copies of my book to various people, briefly saw Molly, but there was no warmth. Break my heart. I sent Nataliya Kaye a friend request on Facebook as an experiment, and just as I expected she didn't accept. So I deleted Siren Nation from my list of friends.

I wrote the FIRST ARTICLE about your then-incipient festival in the local press years ago, and you're too good to be my online friend? Fuck that. As far as I'm concerned, support is a two-way street, even if you're a lesbian separatist here in Lesbos, Oregon.

Tomorrow night I'm going to see one of my all-time favorite films, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974 original, not the dumbass Michael Bay remake from a few years back that Tobe Hooper had nothing to do with) at the Bagdad Cafe. I first saw it at age eight and can't count the number of times I've seen it since. It is a work of warped genius, and if you haven't seen it, you should really grab this opportunity to experience its full brilliant insanity on the big screen! It is the single most raw, intense and unrelenting film I've ever seen, but few films with its budget have ever packed such a stylistic punch or impacted our culture as much, and the final shot literally brings tears to my eyes. As insane, violent, and inexplicable as it is, it also possesses a crazy beauty like nothing else before or since.

This girl named Allison I met at the Hat Party was at the media center the other day when I saw Chain Saw was playing, and she seemed like the kind of girl who might like it (a little crazy and abrasive - I always gravitate towards those people), so I asked, and sure enough she has, and she said she's going to see it tomorrow night, too, and maybe we'll get a drink afterwards, and discuss Tobe Hooper's one and only unequivocal masterpiece. (They're also screening part 2, but I don't think I can take that one ever again.) As Kinsey said, it's miraculous that they're screening it right before I leave PDX.