more of the same

the same being- in this instance- big breasts and my glistening purple prose



I finished reading jimmy mcdonough's magnificent biography of russ meyer last night, the rather splendidly titled 'big bosoms and square jaws'... it's a devastating read, certainly the last few chapters when meyer's health and mental state is in decline hurt like a bastard

the preceding chapters are a rabble rousing, barnstorming, hell for leather delight... meyer's a true american original and they should really stick a pair of gravity-defying bazoomas on the statue of liberty in his honour... or honor... whichever is preferable... and for all eternity

meyer was the king of ample and plenty and over-abundance and MORE

and he never really relented- not in his work- he was unabashed and unrepentant, defiant and bold

meyer's movies- the great ones- are all UPPER CASE and stamped with EXCLAMATION MARKS!-heady ridiculous fever dreams of straight america's attendant psychoses, a satyrical volcano of swollen desires, weaknesses and HATE... because there was a lot of HATE in meyer's movies... SHEER CONTEMPT... people seem to shy away from copping those sort of 'toods these days... righteous, just and even wrongheaded anger seem to be the preserve of the gassy, the dribbling and the straight up looney to most and yet ANGER, FURY, CONTEMPT seem to me pretty handy tools if used effectively when faced with the bloated big fat complacent overly self-satisfied middle of society... or whoever else might wander in and spoil the view



meyer opened a lot of doors, meyer took on the censors and the guardians of polite society and he did it all (in respect of court cases, etc) without the backing of the major studios (who benefited perhaps most of all from the new found freedoms meyer and his like won and won hard)... yeh, he did go on to make 'dolls' and 'the seven minutes' with twentieth century fox but read mcdonough's book and you'll appreciate that it wasn't a happy or especially supportive union... he was probably better off out in the wilderness with a camera, a landscape and a buxotic female... hollywood was just more trouble

by the seventies, a time when meyer was really pushing the envelope in regards to 'taste and decency' the major studios were peddling much more vicious and explicit material- all in the name of art, of course- films like 'bonnie and clyde'; 'the wild bunch'; 'a clockwork orange'; 'straw dogs'; 'soldier blue'; 'last tango in paris' (let alone crossover porno money makers like 'deep throat' and 'behind the green door') made meyer's stronger stuff look almost quaint in comparison... 10 years previous he'd been seen as a public menace by many, a dirty filthy pornographer... meyer's films startle and surprise and delight, you wouldn't want to watch them with your grandmother, perhaps (or maybe you would... I don't know...) but they don't strike me as porn

they make me think of the cramps and john waters, of vintage mad magazine and vintage playboy (meyer was a contributor back in the early days)... all there bubbling and festering in my psyche (altering me) in my teens before I discovered russ (after meyer I read terry southern, that other great dead-eyed often filthy satirist... all these things resonate with one another, connect and grow)

and meyer's movies make me think of a glorious amalgam of pop art and abstract expressionism (two other twin obsessions of my youth)... go with me... something like a robert rauschenberg or a willem de kooning... think of de kooning's woman paintings, suggestive to me of the 'psychic power' of the pin-up (or the girl on the advertising billboard) on the male id and made undulating curvaceous vibrant explosive flesh (albeit in paint)... there's something primal, totemic and fetishistic about de kooning's women... I think I see that in king leer's photographic gaze too... woman as object but an object that towers above mere men and that met in person would render the viewer speechless, dumb, insensible and quite possibly crushed- the fantasy (or ideal) woman who cannot/will not be contained

a meyer woman could break your spine but more than likely not in the way you'd hope, bub

men in meyer's movies rarely cut the mustard for all their macho bluster and blowhard sturm and drang, it's the ladies who abide, tough cookies cutting it (and laughing raucously) while the boys falter knock-kneed and awkward

that's probably more my world view rather than russ meyer's, admittedly

so, anyway, it's a great book, meyer's is a life seemingly bookended by tragedy and pain... the big heaving bit in the middle, that'll endure... from his world war two combat photographs to his pictures of tempest storm, virginia 'ding dong' bell, june wilkinson, and even his second wife, eve, and onto the moving, shimmying, hully-gullying, go-going likes of  lorna, the pussycats, vixen, the dolls, the supervixens and all... the world of russell albion meyer may never fade... I hope not

yeh, he was a dirty old man

but he was more than the that and as mcdonough says at the end of the book: "... somewhere out there a fourteen-year-old scowling bad seed of a girl is seeing faster, pussycat! kill! kill! for the first time and thinking to herself that the world can't be all bad if tura satana's in it"

damn straight!

p.s. mentioning john waters as I did I should take this opportunity to link to this: john waters' top 10 films of 2009 ('in the loop' is at number 3... I'm not so worried about anything else on the list- it is eclectic, mind- but I get a kick out of 'in the loop' being on there at all- I mean it deserves to be, etc)

the rambling slaphead rambles ever onwards (upwards?)...

we didn't even bother with part two of them bloody 'triffids'

I'm back at work today, I listened to some kicking giant on the way to work this morning, sat on the bus as I was

this made me think of the interview I did with tae won yu (the boy half of kicking giant) for my next paper fanzine which has been having a stop motion slow birth for about the last 18 months... I hope to have this printed up and available come february... anyway I listened to kicking giant and their high on the treble frenetic/aching beat pop as the bus trundled on through the rain... it took me off to someplace better, a world of ideas and stuttering pounding hearts, an incandescent tinfoil world well away from the drab damp post-christmas/pre-new year nottingham I find myself in

I must get that fanzine out, for no other reason than the interview with tae, the piece I've done on the mctells and the knockabout interview with pocketbooks refuse to go stale and- my input aside- this stuff needs to be out there for the slim few who find it all (this particular strain of el bacteria musica pop) as necessary and compelling as I do

I feel a sense of urgency about this fanzine thing- and have done for all these months (albeit simmering beneath the surface of my genial, laidback exterior)- but I've got too het up with bills to be paid and no money and keeping a roof over our heads and everything else that sort of gets in the way (life) to devote time and indeed coin to getting it printed up and out

eventually off the bus and taking the walk across maid marian way and up st james street I shuffled my mp3 player to the summer cats and the song 'paperweight' which isn't a million miles away from the sort of fires kicking giant used to build... the summer cats album has been one of those records in 2009 that while playing away on my mp3 player has given me cause to get on the bus to and from work rather than throwing myself under it (I'm being dramatic)... it's a peach, and when life gives you peaches, make... um... peach melba

work has been super quiet today

I went out in my lunchbreak and picked up a small sketchbook to carry around with me (hopefully not empty and unused), a pack of those pens I favour (half-price!) and some bulldog clips... these will go to work when I use my drawing board... the purchasing of these bulldog clips and the use they will undertake are sort of half for practical purposes and the other half as a sort of form of symbolic 'I must have these to get over procrastinating and get on and do' kidology

I'm planning to set the world cross-eyed by doing some more 'drawing'...

saying 'not drawing makes me miserable' would be a lie but like most lies probably reveals some sort of truth at the same time (does it? am I just flanneling here?)

I want to draw a lot in the next year...

I drew this in 2008 and it ended up on the sleeve of the latest horowitz single out on cloudberry




I'm delighted by this... possibly because seeing your own 'work' tagged onto something quality does rather give one an ego-massaging, self-regarding thrill and also because, y'know, it's just kind of nice to do stuff for people who are a) ace and skill b) appreciative and c) friends

more of that sort of thing in the year ahead, please

more unfascinating half-assed observations about a tv programme you didn't see last night

the other thing about that 'triffids' programme- that for some reason was going round and round in my head at 7 o'clock this morning- was that our hero was the triffid expert and then the rest of the sighted survivors seemed to be army officers and people from the home office... watching it we began wondering where all the shift workers were, the people travelling on the tube and so on

I should explain that thanks to a sort of terrible eclipse the majority of the world has been struck blind and all as one seem to scramble about blindly like some sort of stumbling zombie horde in need of 'help' rather than brains... it seems the masses in 'triffids' are a useless mob, whereas the survivors are all establishment types desperate for order (at any cost)... but all we wondered was 'where were all the people who weren't witness to the terrible eclipse?'- are we to believe that every denizen of windowless offices and workplaces all just happened to be allowed to go outside on mass? that denizens of her majesty's prisons were all give an evening out in the yard? and so on

the only two sighted civilians (other than our triffid expert hero) are an easy on the eye (oh, the irony) radio (and also tv) presenter and the eddie izzard character, who due to his amoral nature comes across as the most fun and- presumably not the programme maker's intention- the one the viewer (this viewer) most identifies with (even though it's eddie izzard)

when jason priestley turns up as the first character to give a monkey's about the blind it's rather disappointing to find he's an american major

and the 'hero' (dougray scott) is such a clunky archetype: male (obviously), square-jawed, squinty-eyed (presumably to suggest 'perceptiveness' and 'thoughtfulness' rather than poor eyesight or tummy troubles), brooding and upset over how triffids killed his mother when he was a boy (we get regular flashbacks of this... flashbacks that seem to cut off at a key moment which will presumably be recalled and possibly prove useful/meaningful)

his career as a scientist (and perhaps this suggests 'triffids' is some sort of blunt satire) is to 'understand' triffids... his current understanding is that they are plants, they have a stinger with a 15 foot reach, they can move and they eat flesh... oh, and they produce an oil (that's replaced fossil fuel) and that's why they've been farmed around the world and there's millions of them 

despite the update/revision of john wyndham's original novel this adaptation seems curiously old-fashioned in picking it's heroes/main characters and that sends the whole thing askew- the other annoyance/irritant is that despite some flashes of interest and black comedy early on (in one scene blind armed police officers begin firing at a baying mob only to end up shooting most of their own number on account of they can't see... lumme!) the story descends to the very worst aspects of programmes like 'heroes' and 'lost' by having the central characters forever captured-escaping-captured again... this suggests a playground game rather than an intriguing plot device and makes me wish scriptwriters would grow the flip up

much more interesting and grown up, perhaps, to have the main characters find their feet in this new world, for us to explore it with them... particularly if the people we're 'along for the ride with' aren't all experts (that may well have got us into this mess in the first place), government, military and power suited management types... do we really live in an age (for better or for worse) where people look to these people for guidance?

ah, perhaps this adaptation of 'the day of the triffids' is a cold-eyed satire after all... the amorphous masses- at the mercy of killer vegetables- blindly following leaders more interested in self-preservation and 'being important'...

a bit like 'x factor', then

here's a clip of youtube from the previous 1981 bbc adaptation of 'the day of the triffids':