"I am KING SHIT of FUCK MOUNTAIN!"

"WHY would you FUCK with ME?"

God, I love Mr. Show. And yes, I'm still sick. Mask up and pass the Purell, kitties. There's something nasty going around out there. 

Also, "WHAT IS UP SATAN'S ASS?!?"

 

 I am one sick puppy.

Literally! Well, almost literally. I am sick, but I am not a juvenile canine. What I'm saying is that I look and feel like hammered shit, laid up with some kind of horrible sinus-y/upper respiratory/cold thingie with all the usual trimmings: a disgusting phlegm-y cough, achy muscles, and a pounding head. (It's not COVID. I checked.) At the moment I am "bed-rotting" as the kids say, chugging water and OJ and popping Zicam (proven to shorten colds...but we'll see) every two hours. 

At least it's given me a chance to binge all four seasons of Mr. Show--the entire series is now streaming on HBO Max!--because weird comedy is my comfort food. And one of my all-time favorite Mr. Show sketches is the whacked out, spot-on H.R. Pufnstuf parody "The Altered State of Drugachusetts," where instead of Freddy the Flute they got Gurgle the Bong, costumed characters who are either tripping balls or trying to come down from tripping balls, and David Cross sporting a bad pageboy wig and doing a brilliant Jack Wild, complete with those weird, jerky dance kicks he used to bust out during the musical numbers. 

Bonus: a little-known version of the HR Pufnstuf song, recorded by The Murmurs and featured on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, an album with mid-90s mainstays like Liz Phair, Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, and Collective Soul covering theme songs from 1970's kids' shows. It's a lot of fun, and probably one of the best things to come out of the nineties' obsession with seventies pop culture.

And with that, I think it's time for me to down some Nyquil and pass out. 

 MORE AI NONSENSE

I'm not as charmed by automatically-generated Spotify word salad as I used to be. The new "Roast My Listening" feature is pretty bad. This is an example of what the app vomited up for me when I gave it a whirl. 

Remember when they tried to convince us that the inevitable robot uprising would be a good thing for everyone? Yeah, I ain't buying it.

 McCARTHY MONDAY 

The standout memory I have of this movie (Class, 1983), involves watching an episode of Siskel & Ebert at my grandmother's house. (Pretty sure my grandmother was the one watching, I was just sitting with her.) The guys were discussing this new teen movie about a boarding school student who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to be his roommate's mother. They showed a scene from the film wherein the main character and Roommate's Mom are about to start going to town on each other in an elevator. My grandmother harumphed at the depravity occurring on the TV screen and promptly ordered me out of the living room. "You don't need to be watching that kind of trash," she said, giving me a look. I reluctantly got up and shuffled out of there, wondering what the big deal was. I watched way worse stuff at home all the time, since my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gotten cable a few years prior. Along with getting to see all the sex and violence we could handle on HBO (we were mainly interested in stuff like Friday the 13th and "naughty" teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High), there was a steady supply of porn magazines--some of the more explicit rags, like High Society and Oui--hidden out in the woods that bordered my friend Caroline's house, the same woods that on the other side happened to border the playground behind John Strange Elementary, my school. In hindsight, I really want to believe that the culprit was some horny kid who was forced to stash his stroke books where his parents wouldn't find them, i.e. the wooded lot off of North Ewing Street....because the idea of some pedo-vert strategically placing hardcore porn rags in and around the woods behind an elementary school is too disturbing to contemplate. Also, that probably should've been two paragraphs. My apologies. 

I eventually did see Class a year or two later when it was in heavy rotation on HBO, and it turned out that my grandmother--a very wise woman, by the way--was 100% correct. I didn't need to be watching that kind of trash, but not because of the (lame) sex scenes and the (mostly lame) teenage boy hijinks. It's because Class, well....it kinda sucks.  

The movie takes place at an all-boys boarding school outside Chicago. The bros on the dorm engage in your typical raunchy teen movie antics; pulling endless pranks on one another, smoking copious amounts of weed, and trying to get off with the girls at the neighboring all-female prep school. Sensitive guy Jonathan (Andrew McCarthy), journeys to Chicago on the advice of his roommate Skip (Rob Lowe), hoping to lose his virginity to some worldly big-city gal. Jonathan meets Ellen (Jacqueline Bissett), an older woman who picks him up at a bar. Suddenly the movie shifts gears and morphs into a tender-yet-inappropriate romance that comes to a screeching halt when Ellen discovers that Jonathan is only seventeen (not a grad student as he'd led her to believe) and she wisely "nopes" it out of there. Jonathan is depressed for a while, and then, after the inevitable "Hey I'd love to spend the holidays with your family, Skip. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. HOLYSHITIVEBEENFUCKINGMYROOMMATESMOMALLALONG." If that weren't enough, it soon becomes clear that Ellen is battling a raging alcohol addiction that disgusts her husband, Skip's father (played by Cliff Robertson). And boom! Now we got a tense family drama. 

Jonathan and Ellen rekindle their relationship after the boys return to school following Christmas break. Skip eventually tracks Jonathan to a local motel, finds him in bed with Mom, and goes predictably apeshit. Back at school, Dad arrives to inform Skip that Ellen has voluntarily checked herself into a psych hospital (offscreen)--and, with that--she handily disappears from the movie and is seen nevermore. Tensions between Jonathan and Skip boil over, culminating in a vaguely homoerotic wrestling match in the woods. The boys end up back at the dorm, covered in leaves and mud, all pissed off and exhausted. Skip makes a wisecrack. Jonathan turns to him. They both start laughing, and....freeze frame! The End. I guess the message is, "bros before hos," even when the ho is yo mama.

Well, like I said, Class is a bad movie. And not the fun kind of bad--it's the not-good kind of bad, with all those weird tonal shifts and Rob Lowe trying too hard to be the manic funny guy. The film also lowkey hates women; the female characters are either snotty, shallow bitches (the girls from the neighboring prep school), boozy trainwrecks (Ellen), or pointlessly cruel cunts (the lady who tricks Jonathan into marking up his face with a coin).  

One thing the movie has going for it, at least, is an impressive cast. Besides Lowe and McCarthy, Class is teeming with soon-to-be familiar faces in supporting roles. You got John Cusack, Virginia Madsen, Cameron from Ferris, one of the girlfriends from Weird Science, Lolita Davidovich, and a kid who I vaguely remember from some other Reagan-era flick. There may be more, but you'd have to look closely. 

Upside: Andrew McCarthy is frickin' adorable in this.

Verdict: I give it half a Blane. 

Class can probably be found somewhere on streaming, but seriously, why bother?

 I STEPPED ON ANDREW McCARTHY'S FOOT
AT THE CARMEL CLAY PUBLIC LIBRARY!

He was really nice about it, though.

Andrew is explaining.

Andrew is fixing his hem.

Andrew is listening.

Andrew is amused.

Andrew is pointing.

Andrew is thinking.

Andrew is happy.

I'm reading his new book. It's really good so far, and I highly recommend it.
More importantly -- SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY! The book-banning fascists want to cut library funding. 

Lots of GenX gals go nuts over Blaine from Pretty in Pink, but I prefer Andrew's character in St. Elmo's Fire. I liked his vibe and his cynical attitude, plus he had a much better wardrobe in that one (I love PiP, but I didn't dig Blaine's preppy threads). I know St. Elmo's is generally disparaged nowadays, but fuck it. I love bad movies, and anyway it's pretty to look at and endlessly quotable. (When I met Andrew I should've said, "Quick, what's the meaning of life?" but I didn't. I clammed right up because I was all nervous and excited. Oh well, maybe next time.)

Always loved this scene with him and Emilio: 

I've been toying with the idea of turning this blog into something else. Perhaps an Andrew McCarthy fansite? Maybe I'm kidding, but maybe I'm not.

 J A M  T H E  C O N T R O L S 

 Run + tell all of the angels

Those who could hear the music 

It's a vibe

 Stay Hydrated

 Menopause, amirite?

 Hear them shout across the land

 Pulling threads

Guarding the moon

 

blinked + u were gone 

Jeremy Spoke

 

 Surprise 'em with a victory cry

Watch the shadows

 

 It usually takes a minute....

 Falling faintly through the universe

Kinda Lingers

 

19- ohwellwhatever -91 

 Al Burian Deep Dive

 That space above us

B A N A N A S

 Find me in your leopard-print daydreams

you might think

 

It's Not Easy

Just passing thru

"Is this record a pencil or a beer can?" 

 The Hills Have Eyes

We Are So Fragile

 

Oh My Goddess

waiting for the gift of sound + vision

 

It starts with desire

 

Where's Marilyn

 THE MIGHTY B.C.*

I swear sometimes this blog is like one long In Memoriam tribute, but I gotta acknowledge the passing of Bud Cort. 

I was 12 years old when I first caught Harold and Maude on TV, and it was exactly the right time in my life for that movie to find me. I was a shy, quirky kid just entering middle school, and while people are somewhat forgiving to shy, quirky, little kids, by the time you hit that pre-pubescent stage, you notice that you're suddenly expected to straighten up, blend in, and CONFORM. The halls of my middle school were filled with these mean, nasty little preppy clones who had not only gotten the memo, they enthusiastically embraced and celebrated their uniformity. It was all profoundly depressing, and I wondered if this was what life was going to be like for the rest of forever. 

Then I saw Harold and Maude, this wonderfully weird, darkly funny, big-hearted film that was unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. I remember thinking, "Someone gets it." And that brought me a great deal of comfort.         

Ruth Gordon was brilliant of course, but Bud Cort was a revelation.

Sometime later, I learned that BC was also the voice of the computer in Electric Dreams, a romantic comedy that I'd loved for years. I couldn't believe it--Harold was Edgar, and Edgar was Harold! It made me love him even more. (I still maintain that Electric Dreams is a darling movie, even though there seems to be lots of mixed opinions on it. And the new wave soundtrack totally rules--I wore it out on cassette tape as a youngster.)

BC with Virginia Madsen on the set of Electric Dreams.
How adorable are they?!?

I think I'm finally going to have to bite the bullet and check out Brewster McCloud. Even though I'm not an Altman fan, I'll do it for Bud.

I mean, just look at him with Shelley Duvall! 

I like to think they became besties after this.

In fact, BC actually made an appearance on an episode of Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre years later. I have vague recollections of that show, and now I think I'm going to have to hunt that one down as well.

The most surprising place Bud Cort turned up was this outtake from Arnold Schwarzenegger's Pumping Iron, of all things. I had no idea this clip existed until recently, when I came across it among all the online tributes. I love how chill and down-to-earth Bud comes off in it. And dig his groovy leisure suit at the end!

Rest in peace, Bud. 

You made generations of oddball kids feel seen.

*A play on the title of this excellent tune by the late, great, doomed For Squirrels. If you want to disappear down a rabbit hole--and discover some good music--check 'em out.

 

Anyone else so fucking angry right now, they're about to explode? Dumb question. Anyone with eyes, a functioning brain, and basic human decency is beside themselves about the ICE murders in Minneapolis. When I watched the footage of that fucking ICE Nazi JONATHAN ROSS (may he never know a moment's peace for the rest of his miserable worthless life) shoot Renee Good three times in the face and growl "fucking bitch" as her SUV careened into a parked car, I swear I felt my soul leave my body. Same thing on Saturday when I saw the video of Alex Pretti getting beaten, pistol-whipped, and shot dead in front of Glam Doll Donuts. A sickening mixture of horror, rage, fear, and overwhelming dread.

The worst are the apologists, of course. The smooth-brained MAGAts dutifully sticking to the script. "She was a domestic terrorist attempting to ram ICE agents with her car." And the ludicrous, "Well, he had a gun!" Seriously. I don't even need to point out the irony on that one. Everybody already knows.

The Trumptards think their allegiance to Orange Hitler and his regime makes them safe. It doesn't, and they'll be the last ones to know it. Renee Good was an SUV-driving mother of three with a glove compartment full of stuffed toys and a labrador retriever in the backseat. You just know the MAGAts were relieved to hear that she was a lesbian. Like she had all the trappings of a "normie," but her sexuality made her an "other," so whatevs. It's okay -- she was one of them. No need to worry. I'm sure they're waiting to hear that Alex Pretti smoked weed, or was a practicing Buddhist, or any other detail that makes him "sketchy" or different, so they can shrug off his murder as well. 

Right, fascists. Keep fucking that chicken.

It would be cruel and hypocritical for a middle-aged liberal feminist type like me to post an extra-large image of ICE Barbie Kristi Noem's fucked up face, wouldn't it? Especially since she was so bothered about the South Park guys making fun of her appearance.  

I don't know how I'll live with myself. 

I think Kristi Noem was actually upset because the South Park satire touched a nerve and brought her greatest fear into the open. You know that underneath that flammable synthetic weave, somewhere in the back of her tiny brain, she's terrified that there will actually be consequences someday. Not the consequences she deserves, but consequences nonetheless. And if she is thrown in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, (oh please please please let that be coming) you know what that means? Her lips and face will deflate, her Mar-A-Lago makeover will be ruined, and she'll be stripped away to nothing----just a plain-faced, puppy-killing nobody from South Dakota with bad skin and traction alopecia. 

From my lips to God's ears.  

 

Also....

 Okay, 2026.
Let's do this.