IDOL INDECENCY

Hard day Saturday, out doing serious legwork on a project in progress, and then up bright and early to join the great Andy Klein for the CityBeat Oscarwatch. Thus you ain’t going to be hearing too much from me probably until Monday. But, here at Doc40, unless, like the other week, I get myself incapably hungover, we try to deliver, and thus I turn over command on this fine leap year extra Sunday to my old pal, Henry Cabot Beck, co-conspirator, NY Daily News film critic, and one-man guitar picker in the late lamented Tijuana Bible (see Funtopia music).

Henry, you have the con,
(Farren has left the electron stream.)

WILLIAM HUNG

Yeah, well the obvious truth of American Idol is that Cowell is all attitude and no taste, and the function of the talent show is to find the best cruise ship or theme park or TV jingle singer. They will never discover the next Etta James or Wicked Pickett or Slim Gaillard, which is why William Hung is the real hero of the hour, and his popularity a great implicit condemnation of the entire stupid process. By the way, there must be a zillion William Hung websites now. He's become the internet/TV equivalent of the novelty song, the Flying Purple People Eater or Alvin and the Chipmunks of our time. America really loves its mutant culture, though not as much as it should, I don't think. All hail Bubba Ho-Tep.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/shebangs.html

JAILHOUSE GAY WEDDING

(Only Beck could come up with this perverse spin -- MF.)

There's a wedding goin' on, up in cellblock #9 Once the dust settles, and Arnie gets on board, I'll be looking forward to the first prison nupitals in Folsom or Quentin. I expect the wedding song will go something like:
Number forty-seven said to number three:
You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me.
And I'll be checking the papers for that gay shotgun wedding, when Clem's kin makes Buford take them sacred vows on accounta that night, back at the holler, when he made Clem squeal like a pig. As for GWB, I figure he's against gay marriage cause he's a tad nervous about outrunning Earthquake McGoon on Sadie Hawkins' Day.*
(Today is Sadie Hawkins Day, isn’t it? – MF)

WUSA

Farren wrote yesterday: I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship...
A great, rabid left wing picture, like Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and, I suppose, M*A*S*H. I haven't seen it in years. There's also a 1975 picture by West Wing TV director Jeremy Kagan about an upper-class revolutionary, played by Sissy Spacek, called Katherine that I remember being good enough that they cut it for subsequent airings. More and more I miss the seventies. Don't get me started.As for Mel Gibson, it helps to think of The Passion as one might a lesser but no less feverish picture by Ken Russell or Alejandro Jodorowsky or even Kenneth Anger. Of course the hype, controversy and the marketing (all the same thing) pull it out of that arena a bit, but at its heart it's a curious vanity movie that only fervent old school Catholics and blood-of-the-lamb evangelicals will really respond to. Some fetishists, I suppose, as well (one definition of fetish is "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion "), but there are far nastier films in the world, like Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, which was put together by Pasolini, who made that other famous Jesus movie, The Gospel According To St. Matthew. Oddly enough, Pasolini is also credited for the story on an all-Chinese animated version of Jesus' life, Yesu (1998), even though he was murdered in 1975.

FROM THE EMAIL

(From Roger)
Following this with interest, thank God (or Mel Gibson!) it's not got here to the UK (yet ?)
What is spooky is that our old mate Orwell says it all in 1984.

"Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it."

Well if they get there way and remove all the filth..it'll be back to browsing National Geographic in the public library...with airbrushed copies of Health and Efficiency* changing hands on the black market....

* For you Americans, Health and Efficency was an earnest, small-format nudist mag that featured naked people playing tennis, and doing bad Isadora Duncan dances. It was much resorted to by desperate English schoolboys of the late 1950s, who believed that the only person on the planet having two person sex was Elvis Presley -- MF

CRYPTIQUE – Yeeee doggies!