Today was more or less an R & R day, spent primarily in p.j.’s til 2 P.M. We only got dressed (in the end) so we could walk off the “breakfast” we ate, in order to have room for the fuck-ton of homemade spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove at Ma’s in the meantime.
So what did we do with all the other eighteen hours of our day?
…’Member camp as a kid?
I never went to the summer variety, or anything organized around a specific extracurricular task…like band, or choir, or Girl Scouts. All I remember was 6th Grade Science Camp.
…I remember climbing Heart Attack Hill, and standing over a puked-up owl pellet with tweezers, picking out all the little animal bones and rebuilding them again. (Mine, of course, were always headless.) I remember getting up at the butt crack of dawn thanks to an obnoxious alarm bell going off like the kind they sound in prison movies, and taking freezing cold showers on cement floors, being shifted in waves of various classes studying all the really exciting science kind of stuff…like watching green grass turn brown, compare river rock to fossilized lava, and looking at dead bugs under a microscope.
…After dinner, (and singing ten or twelve camp songs around a bonfire), we’d break up and retire to our cabins, smelling like singed hair and burnt logs. Then, we would get ready for “lights out,” wait for the den mother to kick it for the back room, then spend all the rest of the night gabbing our asses off about nothing at all, only cuz we weren’t “supposed” to…well into dawn.
…And that is the reason we slept until nearly noon and did absolutely nothing with our day. Because when you add Puff and me in the same room, we will talk until 5 A.M. like prepubescent little girls, about anything and everything in the world. And we’ll add in rainbow sprinkles to the mix, by things like, “Why Coach and Prada bags are essential, ” “what the hell keeps a Jimmy Choo on your foot,” “why we always like men who are not available, but don’t want the ones we’ve got,” and “our undying love of kitsch movies, especially in period, space and/or featuring drag queens.”
Today we’ve been mixing all of the above, in nonstop, unending natural evolution from one topic to the other…and most while movie-underscored by people wearing plastic tuxedos, going to “are you gay, we can fix that” camps, alien animals in space, communal swingers in 70′s San Francisco, serial Bear Queens, and French Divas in heightened fifty’s couture doing singing strip teases while murdering people.
…Honestly, we are one Joan Crawford/Bette Davis movie away from completing our collective Top Ten Greatest Hits list.
Oh, yes. We’ve made a “list.”
…Besides being the natural accompaniment to our general discussion topics, it also provides an often fitting punctuation mark to a completed sentence, idea or thought. The plots are ridiculous. The costumes are worse (therefore automatically fabulous.) Everything is covered in plastic, animal fur, or laytex. Alien sex is totally acceptable in primetime, if you do it with Lucas Film anamatronics. Every female fight starts with hair pulling and ends in epic “accidental” lesbian make-out sessions. And its totally normal to get naked, snort coke, smoke a doobie and rent a commune-like apartment in 1970′s San Francisco from a transsexual Olympia Dukakis, when you work for a Republican Advert Exec.
TOTALLY normal, you guys. Laura Linney just did it, while I ate breakfast.
…THIS is why kitsch is important, people. If nothing else, then to service us ridiculous scenarios, with epically kinky titillations that you COULD NOT GET AWAY WITH, if you tried to put it across with a straight face. Which is the secret reason people use to excuse the fact that they read those craptastic “50 Shades” books.
…Professionals, like Puff and I, (and everyone who really knows anything), fully recognize what a piece of shit those books are in comparison, however. Though they try to gain the same audience appeal, it is not at all the same thing.
Kitsch is preplanned with love and care and dedication. Kitsch has “standards” and “art design” and the plot lines make you want to laugh and gorge on more, like a king-sized candy bar. They don’t hold you in horror, mid-chew, making “what-the-fuck” faces, continually turning to the front jacket where it insists it is a, “#1 New York Times Best Seller,” no matter what kind of Twilight Zone episode you think you are in.
“She can’t POSSIBLY think this is legit ANYTHING,” you insist. She has no idea about the lifestyle, or sentence structure or dialogue-play. Is it a joke? Is it tongue-in-cheek? I don’t understand.
Is it the same audience She is attempting to gain? Does she actually write that poorly, or is she doing it on purpose, “ironically?”
After a lengthy discussion on a book neither one of us could stomach getting past the second chapter of: Puff and I are actually stumped on this one. It actually IS bad enough to land in the kitsch category, but not good enough to be legitimate in it.
…A butt-raping, sadistic, wealthy millionaire owner of a major corporation, who nominates some virgin chick to be his dungeon Sub, and is secretly glorified for this instead of plastered all over the newspapers, is NOT the same thing as “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Farscape,” “Mommy Dearest,” or “8 Women.”
Its just not.
…First of all, they have way fucking more class. Second, they are more realistic. And third, they aren’t some 20-something’s fetishized S & M naive idea of never-experienced lifestyle, written in the language of teenager.
She MUST have meant it to be Kitsch-tastic though. She must. No grown person would put that kind of book out there, and NOT think to themselves (every time they cash a check), “Haha! Suckers! Just wait for the next trilogy! It’ll be bestiality with sex monkey Architects, in space! Written in crayon! From the perspective of a nine-year-old! And you’ll totally eat that shit up! I’ll win the Pulitzer, even! And use it as a bookend for my First Editions shelf. To be ‘ironic.’”
…Full circle, friends.
…And these are the kind of things we talk about.
For eighteen hours.
The end.
~D
