The late eighties were a great time to be a fanboy of weirdo new wave ladysingers from outer space (mainly Britain). It seemed like every time you turned on your new favorite show, 120 Minutes, some wackadoodle dame dripping with otherworldly moxie was popping up sporting a leotard or a tutu or a completely bald head, leaving your mouth gaping in wonder at the sheer brilliance of it all. You had your helium-voiced ethereal fantasist (Kate Bush), your ferocious and feline Weimar Republic throwback/riding crop enthusiast (Siouxsie Sioux), your tiny elfin powder keg (Bjork of the Sugarcubes), your scary trannie android (Annie Lennox of Eurythmics), and your testy and tempestuous ingénue (Sinead O’Connor). All of these ladies had allure to burn and the musical chops to back it all up.
Many folks who know me know that I'm a freak about this Kirsty MacColl lady that they've never heard of. I am! And if you are a fan of classic British pop, you should be one, too. Kirsty is best known in this country for her duet with the Pogues on their gorgeous Christmas song "Fairytale of New York" from 1987. She should have been famous for much more, but she never got her due, then she was killed in the year 2000 in a freak/horrific boating accident in Mexico. It's a sad, sad story that will never make sense. She was only 41. 41! Senseless.
But you can console me by exploring Kirsty's back catalog. I recommend, first and foremost, that you check out her final album, the sunny and celebratory Tropical Brainstorm, which she made with Cuban musicians. She was in saucy form, singing songs about sex and making love and doing it and shagging and f**king and other things like that. (My favorite track: "Us Amazonians") You should also get her album Kite, which is a great collection of British jangle pop that includes a great cover of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby." Also, get Galore, her hits collection, which includes all the greats, plus spectacular early single "He's On the Beach," as well as a cover of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," which she sings with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, as well as "Caroline," a song she described as "Jolene's reply" to Dolly Parton. Also, here is a great BBC2 documentary about her life in music.
RIP, Kirsty. You are missed more as the years troll on toward oblivion, especially looking at how many dumb/tedious/idiotic/talentless pop stars are still alive.
Here she is with the Pogues in better days. Look for the cameo by Matt Dillon!
The Dum Dum Girls are fishnet-fetishist vampy vixens from outer space (California) and lead singer Dee Dee knows how to craft a sparkling pop tune so it was only a matter of time before I saw them live. As you all know, I get easily bored if there's not at least one woman on any stage at a given time, so you can imagine how punch-drunk-happy I was to be able to see these four hot tomales surface from their glitter gutter and show off their legs, lipstick, and la-la's last Friday at Bowery.
Lead singer Dee Dee is so skinny that she can only be seen from this angle.
If I were straight, these are totally the girls that I would have been afraid to ask out in high school.
Gratuitous leg shot.
The only thing that would make this band more perfect live is if they had a topless tambourine player.
If you can read upside down, you'll see that "Wrong Feels Right," the Dum Dum's best song, is weirdly absent from this set list. This is unacceptable, and I'm still waiting on an explanation. Since when do bands completely ignore anonymous internet comment posters?!
Jeez, this is depressing. Not a huge surprise, no, but just so freaking sad. Amy Winehouse was a force of freaking nature. One listen to any one of her songs--or a viewing of, say, the videos for the swinging high-drama "Back to Black" or the trampy, stomping "My Tears Dry On Their Own"--and you knew there was no denying that this lady was, in PJ Harvey's system of measurement, a 50-ft Queenie. Her hair alone could have had a fabulous career. Huge bummer.
Above is footage of her last public appearance, dancing on stage on July 20 while her god-daughter, Dionne Bromfeld, sang. Amy looks, yes, a little fucked up, but she also looks happy.
RIP, Miss Amy.
Also, here is a delightful interview by Jonathan Ross from 2003 or so when her first album came out.
Zola Jesus is one of the most exciting singers around these days, and her song "Sea Talk" is awesome for many reasons. One of these reasons is the video, which combines three of my favorite things: the movie Poltergeist, sleepwalking, and static electricity.
So on this Friday before Hallowe'en, in order to celebrate the birth of Christine O'Donnell, Delaware's most electable witch, I offer the gift of this video unto you, my readers, all of whom live at Riker's Island serving time for illegally downloading terrorist porn and then selling it to Todd Palin.
Some of you obsessive-compulsive fans of mine might remember that I recently wrote about Throwing Muses' early song "Vicky's Box" on my music blog over at Deadbeat Bohemians. (Just kidding! I have no fans.)
ANYWAY, I meant every word of that post and I love Throwing Muses lead singer Kristen Hersh for life. (Though I must admit I love her drummer Dave Navarro more because teenage love never dies.) And I've just found out (hat tip: HilaryWrites) that La Hersh has a new memoir out and I CAN'T WAIT TO READ IT!
Since I always find out about fun things to do after they've already happened, I missed Kristen's appearance at Barnes and Noble at Union Square, where she was interviewed for about an hour, read a few passages, and played a few songs. Thankfully, B&N (whose site, by the way, also sells my book, if you're interested) have a video of the event, which I've embedded above.
The memoir is apparently about the year that Kristen was 18 and her world exploded: record deal for her band, bipolar diagnosis, pregnancy, among other things. (Just like me!) From the passages she read at the event it sounds like she's just as awesome/crazy/hilarious a prose writer as she is a lyricist.
I can't wait for her next memoir, which will no doubt have a chapter covering the time she met me, in 1994, when I was working as a barista at a terrible Starbucks knock-off in London's Covent Garden. I waited on her, her man friend, and my high school crush Dave Navarro. They were just getting out of a radio interview, had stopped into my place of work for an American coffee, and I had a real hard time hiding my fanboy hard-on for all of them. Kristen couldn't order anything with caffeine in it because (she told me in the strictest confidence) she was pregnant again HOW EXCITING! I made her a decaf sugar-free caramel latte with whipped cream because she deserved it: she'd written "Two Step," for God's sake.
I'm sure that experience has as special a place in her heart as it does in mine. And Dave's.
As if she's not busy enough with handling her television show and movie career, answering the many frenetic 'n frantic fan letters she gets from frothing-at-the-mouth Sarah Palin fans, and babysitting Trig, now apparently Tina Fey has been hired by some pet grooming shop in Chelsea to brush felines' canines. At least that's what I'm assuming from the looks of this (CREEPY) painting sitting in the window of the shop showing an emotionless Tina Fey and her amazing mechanical arm just stone cold going to town on some kitty's chops. She will brush those fucking teeth with a scouring pad until they fucking glisten!
Ease up, Tina! Jesus, you're gonna kill that cat. And anyway, you're good at all the other stuff you do, you don't HAVE to be good at this. Leave it to the professionals and go help Judah Friedlander with his teeth.
This Golden Girls death trend absolutely must stop because it's getting depressing. Rue was only 76! She did a sex scene in that Sordid Lives cable series just a couple years ago!
But now all we have is memories. I remember when I was just a young boy five years ago and I'd just moved to NYC. I was starting a new job in Chelsea and I had to be there on my first day at 1:30. Tragically, Rue, Betty, and Bea were appearing at Barnes and Nobel on 6th Avenue to sign copies of their recent DVD at 12:30. Not enough time! I decided to go and at least get some photos. But the ladies took their sweet time coming out to the table, and by the time 1:15 rolled around I knew i would have to leave without even getting a glimpse.
But then, like the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, Rue McClanahan descended from a side entrance and started making her way through the crowd toward me (and toward the back room where Bea and Betty were camped out, probably sipping vodka and insulting each other). My sweaty fingers snapped a few priceless pics as she waltzed through her sea of fans smelling of Mint Juleps and collard greens. After a few quick snaps, I dashed off to work, satisfied that I'd just been within a few feet of the great lady who once uttered the immortal words, "Let's rent an adult video, drink mimosas, and french kiss the pillows!"
Let's honor our Rue by watching one of her best ever Golden Girls scenes, from the season 1 episode "A Little Romance."
How did I not know this was happening? Last night! And they apparently have a new album coming out! Will it suck? Probably! But who cares? I could happily listen to Ann Wilson sing a Sarah Palin speech. And as long as Nancy Wilson keeps fucking her guitar during the guitar solos, I think we'll all be satisfied.
In conclusion, Heart will play "Alone" at Jimmy's and my gay wedding, which will take place at their next NYC CD signing.
Paula Poundstone is a national treasure. She dressed like a blogger decades before there were bloggers! One of the reasons I was so sad that my company changed health insurances last year was because the endocrinologist I wouldn't be able to go to anymore looked exactly like her. You don't find many doctors like that. (Plus she never asked me to keep a blood sugar diary.)
As you know, Paula is periodically on the NPR show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and last Saturday she was on. She proved her worth to the universe during the "Not My Job" segment, during which she had the following exchange with Buster Olney, an ESPN Magazine sports journalist and baseball obsessive:
Paula: Can I ask you a question? Is there a point at which you've said everything that can be said about baseball?
Buster: Absolutely not! There's a new game, a new story every day!
Paula: (not even trying to sound convinced) Yeah.
Listen to it. The exchange starts around the four-minute mark:
Now, before all y'all start calling me a gaywad for wanting to say "amen" to her question, let me ask you: how many of YOU hit a home run in Little League, hmmm? Cause I did, so hush up.
Also be assured I would ask the same type of question--substituting the word clothes for baseball--if I were to interview Tim Gunn from Project Runway.
Dearest readers, everyone knows that American gay movies generally suck balls. It's just a fact. It's very strange, because the Mos are all OVER Hollywood making straight movies, but once it comes to making gay movies they make complete and utter shite. Why is that?
Yes, there are exceptions. Sure, in the history of American gay cinema, there have been movies that have not made me want to throw up all over my dildo: Milk, Torch Song Trilogy, Parting Glances, Longtime Companion, Jeffrey, Hedwig, The Boys in the Band, My Own Private Idaho. (Brokeback Mountain, as good as it was, doesn't count because even the dude that did makeup on that movie was straight.) But In and Out? Another Gay Movie? Trick? Shortbus? Adam and Steve? The Broken Hearts Club? These movies are hideous. (Sorry, Jack, Broken Hearts Club is the SUCK. But I love that you like it!)
In the terrible 90s I once rented a movie from the local Blockbuster called Lie Down with the Dogs and just about lost my eyesight from all the eyerolling I was forced to do. God, that movie was terrible.
ANYWAY. American gay movies by American gays are fucking weak. In general. (Unless they aren't, miraculously.) Which brings us to OH MY GOD NATALIE GREEN IS IN A GAY MOVIE I'M TOTALLY GONNA SEE IT WHO CARES IF IT SUX LOL OMG OMG!! The preview above already includes a few soon-to-be-classic quotes. ("I'm the oldest living fag hag." "I'm waiting behind the shrub." "What have you manifested?" "FUPA.") It's quite possible this is a DVD I will buy. Y'all.
For real, this movie looks kinda smart and sweet. I hope it relaunches Mindy Cohn's career, because George Clooney is NOT the only Facts of Life alumnus who deserves recognition. She's been gone too long and needs to do a cabaret show or some shit where she just sits on a stool and reads a series of Natalie's one-liners. ("From now on it's goodbye Natalie, hello Hotlips!")
In honor of the forthcoming release of this movie, which is apparently called Violet Tendencies, you should join me in watching my favorite ever episode of Facts, "Come Back to the Truck Stop, Natalie Green, Natalie Green" below.
Good God, I had to go all the way to MySpace to get this dang video. My Space, people. Who goes there?!
Anyway, the spring warmth has infected me with a thrilling and probably ill-advised optimism about my newly repaired bike, my cat, and the health care bill. This starry-eyed euphoria will come crashing down this weekend, surely, but in the mean time, let's just enjoy this infectious pop tune by the nice Santigold lady.
Listen up, fanboys and -girls. Goldfrapp is coming out with a new album in March called "Head First," and you know what that means: more dancing girls with sparkling horse heads, yay! I must say, I wasn't terribly swoony over the 'frapp's last album Seventh Tree. Too much toothless hippy-harlequin balladry and not enough songs about fucking robots. But the word on the street is that the new one is a return to the glittery Goldfrapp of old, and to celebrate the reemergence of our Alison in the queue for the club, sitting atop a wispy white horse and holding a riding crop in her teeth, let's revisit the first time we ever saw her on the teevee.
It was, what, 2002? Conan O'Brien still had a show, and Jay Leno was easily ignored. It was a time when one could turn on the television after 12:30 and be assured of seeing a masturbating bear, a horny manatee, or at least Max Weinberg. Into this late-night circus dropped Goldfrapp from Bath, England, dressed for Halloween. When I first saw the band I thought, who are these Swiss Miss weirdos who've just been beamed in from a Weimar-era opium free-for-all? Then Alison opened her mouth and I thought, wow, that's a great Maria Callas sample. But it 'twasn't! 'Twas actual singing! I spent the next five minutes melting. Jimmy and I saw the band play a few years ago here in NYC and that bitch hit Every. Single. Note.
Watch until the end when those high notes just fly out of her open mouth like a flock of seagulls escaping an awful 80's hairstyle.
Fun fact: It was this guy on the violin who inspired me to always wear my lederhosen when playing my viola in public. (To distract the public from my playing, duh.)
Well it's official, I have a new secret girlfriend (sorry, Rachel Maddow!). And a new favorite foreign lady (sorry, new First Lady of Japan!).
As you may know, former teen star and current tedious evangelical dingbat Kirk Cameron has a new project he's really excited about which will officially debunk Darwin's theory of evolution by using a new edition of the book itself to "prove" his point ("the call is coming from inside the house" approach) If you've even seen one of Kirk Cameron's dumb youtubes, you know that he needs to be slapped and hard. Here's a notable one in which Cameron passes over the Crazy Reins to Ray Comfort (porn name?) so that he can explain how the banana proves that God wanted us all to suck cock real good is a perfect food made by God for humans. Witness the airtight logic! Marvel at Ray Comfort's DSL! Stop laughing, this is scientific fact!
Anyway, this woman Christina in Romania is having none of Kirk Cameron's foolishness about the whole evolution thing, and she really deserves to win "Romania's Got Talent" for this 5-minute video she made of Kirk being a dumbass. At the very least she needs to be declared the new first lady of something (bananas?). There are lots of videos on her youtube channel that I will spend the weekend watching while sunbathing naked and flipping through the latest issue of Charles Darwin Unzipped.
There are many reasons to love new Japanese First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama (aka Miyuki-chan): she has eyeballs the size (and explosive power) of grenades; she has long wispy locks of hair that you could use to field dress a moose (suck on that, Palin); and, best of all, she has visited the planet Venus. Witness this excerpt from an actual published book of hers (actual title: Very Strange Things I've Encountered) from last year:
While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.
This story is awesome and so important. Hopefully, the new administration headed by Miyuki-chan's husband will usher in a refreshing new era of openness and transparency regarding alien abductions. Was the triangular-shaped UFO equilateral? Obtuse? Acute? Scalene?!ISOSCELES?! (Please say it was isosceles.) Miyuki-chan must answer this and many more questions, because her public will want to know. (The shape of alien spacecraft is a very important public policy issue in Japan.) And she will in her next book Earthlings Are So Curious!
The lying liars on the Republican side have been singing the same awful song lately when discussing health care, saying that they oppose the "public option" because of a study by the Lewin Group that says it's baaaaaaaaad. They're all repeatedly referencing this shadowy Lewin Group over and over on the teevee while gesturing wildly, like a bunch of wrinkled old back-up singers. And who is the Lewin Group? Oh, just a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Health Care.
Anyway, this well-informed grammie calls out fibbing toad Chuck Grassley on his disingenuousness on this point and, in the process, has won my heart forever. She even breaks down how much the CEO of United Health makes per hour! Hire her, Obama.
This woman should win a Peabody and have her own MSNBC show.
I woke up the other night in a cold sweat, realizing that I didn't commemorate the death of the late, great Kirsty MacColl last December 18 on the eighth anniversary of her horrible death (which makes me want to scream every time I think about it). I'm ashamed.
If you don't know Kirsty MacColl, you've probably encountered her in some way if you were at all with it in the '80s. (With It in the '80s--great title for a memoir, no?) Besides writing and recording her own material—including "They Don't Know" in 1979, three years before Tracy Ullman would take it into the US Top 10—she sang back-up on the Smiths' "Ask Me" ("the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, etc") and on Morrissey's "Interesting Drug"; she's the female singer on the Pogue's celebrated Christmas anthem "Fairytale of New York"; she covered the Smiths' "You Just Haven't Earned it Yet, Baby," turning its famous refrain of "you must suffer and cry for slightly longer" into a Phil Spector-ish, gleefully sing-songy summertime jam; and she famously (er, in the UK) covered Billy Bragg's "A New England," to which Bragg himself added two verses especially for her version. That video is above and is adorable.
Kirsty had troubles with record companies throughout her career and always had a hard time breaking the American market, due to her being so awesome. But she actually started shattering that glass ceiling in 2000 when she released Tropical Brainstorm, arguably her best album. It was Cuban-flavored with a bitter British twist, and you need to just go f**king buy it now. You probably heard her song "In These Shoes" in an episode of Sex and the City, if you watched that hideous program like I did.
Her overdue success in 2000 made her death on December 18 of that year while scuba diving in Mexico with her two kids all the more heartbreaking. I won't recount the whole sad story here, but here's her Wikipedia page and here's an official website dedicated to her memory and to getting justice from the Mexican authorities.
I remember one time a few years ago I was driving somewhere with my dad, and I put in her 1989 album Kite. After a few songs, Dad said "this girl is sharp." She was. And deeply, desperately missed.
But let's not end the week on a downer, y'all. Below please enjoy Kirsty's appearance on a skit in season 3 of French and Saunders. In the immortal words of Dawn French, "it's only tits."
Like many young gays of my generation, I wanted to marry Dolly Parton when I was about 6 years old. I would be her proud house husband, also acting as her tour bus driver and wig tester.
But when I saw 9 to 5 in 1980, my goals abruptly changed: I was now more career oriented, wanting to work as a typist alongside Doralee, Violet, and Judy in an office of at least 30 stories for a company called Consolidated. We would smoke weed in the ladies room in the afternoons and go on happy hour excursions of hilarity in the evenings. I would have a special locker for my hats. (What a way to make a living.) Then after I grew weary of being a working girl I would retire to Florida and live with the Golden Girls, eating cheesecake and doing mushrooms on the lanai with Estelle Getty. In short, this was the life plan that I hid from my parents.
Of course, things haven't turned out exactly as I'd planned during those long bubble baths I took while playing with my sister's Barbie and Ken (mainly Ken). Yes, sadly, I'm not a secretary with two fed-up sidekicks. But I am a great typist. And my first love is still Dolly. Which brings me to an event that my entire life until this point has been leading up to: the adaptation of the movie 9 to 5 into a Broadway musical.
Now, I'm not a blind devotee of musicals. They can be good. They can also be just awful. (I wanted every person in Rent to die of AIDS, for example.) But if Dolly Parton is at the helm, writing the music and lyrics, then I'm all in. And if Allison Janney of The West Wing is playing Violet, then I'm in deep.
