FUCK-MONKEY CUNT-TARD SHIT-BATTALION!!! [or "In Defense of Filthy Language" - part the first]

I am all a flutter. I have finally contributed something to the global lexicon. Sure, it's just a humble definition (for UrbanDictionary.com), but I'm feeling accomplished. Finally! Immortality!

Guy Gravy

Definition:

In restaurants, it is "boy butter" mixed into the gravy on dishes for rude customers, or any other person the provider of the butter doesn't like.

Note: it can also be mixed into salad dressing, or dessert topping, or barbeque sauce, or condiments, or...

Example:

"Bonjour, Chef Pierre, comment êtes-vous?"

"Très bien."

"Bon. That woman at table 2 actually snapped her fingers at me and called me 'boy.' Can you believe that shit?"

"Then Chef Pierre will prepare some of his world-famous guy gravy!"

"Bon! Merci beaucoup!"

I love to curse. It's one of the many juvenille things about me that I've just learned to accept about myself. Sometimes, I just don't want to work too hard when it comes to making somebody uncomfortable. And people's response to my sailor mouth is a pretty fair guage of how uptight a room might be. If ya can't take, "clownfucker," my political and religious views are REALLY going to piss you the fuck off!

I'm good at it, too. I've had a lot of practice, after all. My parents were of the neglectful variety of wine-chuggin' suburbanites, the kind of people that they used to hype with a cover-story in Time Magazine, "Latch-Key Kids And Their Horrible Parents." Film at 11... But they weren't so bad. Just, um, distracted. And my desire to curse actually had a positive effect in that it made me want to learn the definitions of "big" words, to take my game to the next level.

Cursing 101: You fucking bitch!

Advanced Cursing: You fucking cretinous, myopic cunt!

So I spent a lot of time in front of the television. More specifically, my old man was a movie fan, AND he had cable. So for two exquisite weekends a month, I would fill up on movies and HBO comedy specials, returning to the playground with all the colorful language I'd picked up. In those days, I was prone to immitating George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, and Robin Williams. [Holy shit! Remember when Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams were the "dangerous" comedians??? Sigh. Me neither.]

I was pretty good at keeping it under wraps, at least in "official" settings. As strange as it sounds to me, I was really afraid of "trouble" as a kid. Strange how it didn't hold me back from doing a lot of stupid shit, but either way, getting sent to the principal's office was the sort of ignominy my parents simply couldn't bear.

Who'd have thought I'd be trying to turn it into a livelihood?

I have been "in trouble" for my fucking foul mouth a total of five times in my life:

1) In the fourth grade, a little girl kicked me in the nads. "Bitch," "balls," "shit," and "dick."

2) In the sixth grade, a boy punched me in the nads because my friends Lester, Ricky and I called him "goober." I guess on a level, I really deserved that. "Bitch," "balls," "shit," and "dick," were all there - but I'd added "cocksucker," and "motherfucker" to my repetoire. I got in more trouble because I laughed when the principal, Mr. Huling (?) was reading off the list of words my teacher had heard me say, which he now had to read back to my mother. He was a very dignified, stoic guy who kind of looked like Martin Luther King. But he also had a very slight speech impediment, making the really good words even funnier.

3) Seventh grade. The word in question... "fetus." That's right. Fetus. We were making banners in print class for Mothers' Day and, having gotten sick and tired of the usual greeting card shit, my banner read "Happy Maternal Parents' Day From Your Fully Developed Fetus." This is the one instance where I didn't catch it from both school officials and my parents. My mom thought it was funny.

4) Eighth grade. I hollered, "Shit!" after my friend Duane had slapped me in the back of the neck, as was the custom back then... Actually, this was the first time I pissed off a government official too. You see, if you scream fucking foul shit in front of George Slavefuckin' Washington's tomb (at Mount Vernon) - even if you've just been given a huge "pink neck" - it's perceived as being less than reverent. I wonder if Washington ever cursed. Well, if he didn't lie, he'd have to. Right?

5) College. The truth is that, to this day, I've got no fucking idea what I said. I know I offended an older woman who was doing costumes for a production I was in. I said something to another actor across the room, and she took offense. So I guess there were two times where my parents weren't called... Being the 90's, it's a fucking miracle that she didn't press some kind of charges. It was a little weird to me because, having spent a significant chunk of my childhood acting, everybody backstage had "Sailor's Mouth." Actually, I was more leary of the people who didn't curse a blue streak. And with good reason - they were usually motherfuckin' pederasts.

Actually, there's a sixth. And it was in a professional setting, so it's particularly embarassing. Still fucking hysterical, actually. I was working for SBC at the time, so much of my day was throwing on my headphones, "down periscope, silent running." I don't like to make too much "water cooler talk." I like to choose who knows things about me, and even one's taste in movies and TV does telegraph a little info about you. In this case, my screensaver was a Bill Hicks quote that I'd set to scroll, "Do you think I'm wearing all black in the summertime because I'm a #$%@&* ray of sunshine???" Seriously, I even blocked out the dreaded f-word!

Personally, I don't quite get it. Any of it. Shit, by now, it all just bounces off my ears. And it seems to me that most people are pretty good at code-switching. Everybody's got a grandma they don't want to curse in front of. But the comedians who make a point of telling you that they're above "working blue" are making up for the fact that they don't fucking have much of an act.

"You ever notice how hot dogs come in packs of eight, where buns come in packs of 10? What's up with that?"

I just keep thinking that a lot of censorship is unnecessary bullshit. Most people have heard the words, yet the conservatives act as if people would go apeshit if curse words made it on the air. For example, I always love AMC's versions of R-rated pictures. Gotta make sure that the "seven words" and boobs don't sully the delicate ears and eyes of the children who might be watching Sudden Impact.

So like I said, I'll cop to being just enough of a hack to take advantage of the wonderful gift the uptight people in the world have given me. If I'm really, really lucky, I'll piss the right people [or should I say "Right"?] off. See, cursing alone - feh. Eventually, everybody tunes out. Now when you have ideas that you get across with cursing, that's another thing altogether. You give them an easy "obscenity charge," and they'll holler about it for ages, which makes any intelligent person want to hear what you have to say. And you really can't buy that kind of press. Sure, it's a cheap tactic, but fuck it!

It's either that, or I'm going to have to develop a serious Blow habit...

The Misery Of Others Is Your Best Entertainment Value [or "Sympathy Porn"]

I have a brief, "nutshell" review for Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (that is the movie's actual title): File under "Things I'd really like to un-see."

The annual AFI film fest was in town this week. For one of America's oldest and most respected film institutions, they made a super-cool, down-to-earth move - they offered mass quantities of free tickets to the proletariat. YOU HEAR THAT, REDFORD??? PUT THAT IN YOUR PATCHOULI BONG AND SMOKE IT!!!

Actually, I like Robert Redford - and Sundance. But it's nice to know that a film fest held in what most people regard as the centerpoint of all things superficial might just be one of the most accessible this side of SXSW. There's more to the festival circuit than starfucking and schmoozing. But I digress...

I wanted to see Vincere - a movie about Mussolini's first wife - but Simon Phoenix wanted to see Mariah Carey in person... you know, why the fuck am I sugarcoating it? He wanted to check out Mariah's ass in person because he wanted to see if it's beautiful shape in pictures was a Photoshop thing. And I really didn't feel remotely bad about indulging that desire. Not one goddam bit.

A brief pronunciation guide before we proceed:

serious = sir-yus
important = imp-hor-t-an-t
issue = iss-see-ewes

But, brevity being the soul of wit (which makes me the biggest fucktard of all time when you really think about it) Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire was, in a word, terrible. In twenty-two: one of worst and most gratuitously repugnant films since... I don't know, what the fuck was Tyler Perry's last movie called again?

I know certain folks love them some "serious" "imporant" films. Fare with lots and lots of issues.

And motherfucker! Did Precious ever come with issues. Let me break it down for you, in the span of one movie, nay, ONE FUCKING CHARACTER you had the following issues:

• Teen pregnancy - Precious is pregnant.
• Teen motherhood - Precious already has a child that her grandmother is taking care of. Her classmates are at varying stages of teen motherhood, too.
• Incest - The father of Precious' children is her father.
• Rape - I don't know, is incest ever consensual? What do you say, "Papa" John Phillips??? "Don't look at me. Ask the Gyllenhaal kids." You're a sick fucker, "Papa" John Phillips!
• Poverty - Precious and her abusive mother live in the genre's requisite urban squalor. Naturally, they live on government aid.
• Down's Syndrome - Precious' first child, Mongol (short for Mongoloid, ain't that charming?), has Down's Syndrome. Look at the bright side, she didn't refer to it as "Corky."
• Illiteracy - Precious can't read, although she has enough skill at math to matriculate to an "alternative school." The one goddam good thing that happened to that poor girl in two fucking hours of celluloid!!! TWO!!!
• Obesity - Precious weighs 350 pounds. Her abusive mother keeps her heavy to make her less attractive to her father.
• Abuse - see above comment. Oh yeah - she beats the shit out of her on a regular basis, verbally berates her, and at one of the film's many climaxes, attempts to drop a TV on top of Precious and her new baby boy.
• Prison - Daddy is in prison. But not for raping his daughter...
• Drugs - Of course.
• Absentee father-ism - You know, the mom really seemed to miss the man.

AND... 

Take a guess. You know what I'm about to say, don't you?

Drumroll please...

• AIDS!!! WOOOOOOOOOOO-FUCKING-HOOOOOOOOOO!!! JACKPOT, KIDS!!!

Precious is also tied to a railroad track by moustache-twirling villain, Snidely Whiplash, in the third reel. She's rescued by her father, who was walking home after being discharged from prison. So he rapes her AGAIN, not behind, but IN, a dumpster. But he hits her in the head afterward, and she loses her mathematical ability, thus costing her the scholarship to the alternative school. As she's going home from the meeting at the school where she loses her scholarship, she drops her first child in the gutter. The kid's puffy coat makes her a virtual life raft, but alas, poor Mongol is washed down a storm drain. While trying to fish Mongol out of the drain, she sets the newborn on the bench at a bus station. That baby is abducted by a man wearing a t-shirt that said, "Black Market Babies For Sale!!! Just Ask Me!!!" and an 800 number. As she's crying at the bus station, Corky from Life Goes On says, "You deserve to lose your babies you retarded cunt!!!" and kicks her into the gutter. The bus arrives, running her over, but NOT KILLING HER, and roll credits.

Feel-good movie of the year, folks! OF THE DECADE. Just ask fuckin' Oprah!

Does "SPOILER ALERT" really count when not a soul I know would see this for any other reason but duress?

I didn't see that last part of the film. Simon told me all about it. I was about to go into hysterics, so I left early. Laugh at Oprah, and that bitch will find you. She's friendly with the Scientologists, and you know what that means!!!

After the show, Simon punched me in the face.

"OW!!! Fuck was that for??? You could have left with me, you asshole!!! Mariah had already split!!!"

"It's because you're white."

And you know what? After seeing that picture, I knew he was right - so I went back inside and punched myself in the face. I caught Tyler Perry in the lobby.

"Punch me in the face!" I said.

"Nigga please. We may have a black President, but I'm still not hitting a white man in this town. At least not with cameras around. Now if this were Chicago... Call my publicist."

And then he went across the street to shoot another movie, Madea Turns A Trick. Only took him twenty minutes. Then another ten minutes to edit, and he did an about face, and went to its premiere BACK INSIDE THE CHINESE (packed house - fucking packed). Say what you like about Tyler Perry, but that dude is prolific!

Like I said, I love a good drama. I'm not so much as a film-snob, as I am a cinema nut. Yeah, there's always the "escape" aspect to a movie. But escape, for me at least, doesn't have to entail unicorns and/or laser guns. If nothing else, I simply prefer movies with unicorns AND laser guns. Get it straight.

But seriously, I love it all, genre wise. It's like music. I can't pick a style I prefer over everything else. The main thing: take me into a world, any world. You don't have to take me away, just get me into a mind that isn't mine. Deal?

To me, saying that a film is "great" just because it's realistic is a fucking cop-out. It's as if a story gets automatic street-cred simply because it's close to a reality people WHO DON'T LIVE SAID REALITY can believe about people who aren't affluent liberals. I'd love to say it's a white, affluent, liberal thing, but Oprah and Tyler Perry are on board.

Did anybody else see the fucking parallels to The Fuckin' Perils of Pauline??? I don't get a dramatic structure that just heaps shit upon shit onto a character only to give the character more shit in the end. Not too put too fine a point on it, but it feels like torture.

It doesn't have to have a happy ending. But I guess that's the other problem. No matter what, and here's where I'm going to be a purist, every good drama (in the general sense) involves three things: goals, obstacles and the achieving or failing at those goals despite or because of the obstacles. It's just how it works.

If I want to see the reality of a tragic and sinking situation that just continues and continues, well, I can step outside my door for that. Fuck, somedays, all you have to do is stay home for that!

I was talking about this with my friend, Double E, and she coined a term that I think is particularly appropriate: Sympathy Porn. And this is without any knowledge of the horror sub-genre of "Torture Porn," the term and the films. I'd love to take credit for creating it, but I'll certainly exploit and disseminate it with no problem whatsoever. It's true.

Obviously, "porn" here isn't referring to hardcore sex movies. [But I want to state for the record that I really, really, REALLY love that kind of porn. I'm watching some now. Real deviant shit. I should fucking be locked up.] It's more an issue of exploitation. More specifically, it's the exploitation of emotion to cover up what appears to be total lack of artistic intent. Silence of the Lambs and Hostel both scare the holy fuck out of you, but the latter goes for the jugular, while the other has emotional beats that lead to crescendos, choices and moments of serious jeopardy.

And I'm not saying one is "better" than the other. "Better" is a useless term. I've got no issue with exploitation pics. Sometimes, ya just need that, you know?

Same with porno-porno, right? But then again, that's the one where I think the more exploitive version is the more honest one. I have one word in the other direction: Skin-emax. Seriously, when those folks try to act... Well, it's beneath all of us, I think. And I mean the entire human race.

Sensuality as a dominant theme in a movie-movie is more difficult. A lot of the time, it comes off as pretty retarded. Henry and June and 9 1/2 Weeks were pretty good. But then again - goals, obstacles, yadda yadda.

So to me, Sympathy Porn, entails those stories that basically play on the heartstrings in absence of real story. "I can't do this artfully, so I will clobber you over the head with a sledgehammer of woe." You know: pretty much anything that has the words Oprah Winfrey or Toni Morrison attached to it. Fuck - The Color Purple is the trifecta of this genre! You've got Spielberg's suburban white guilt and inability to empathize with black folks mixed in there! There are plenty of movies that play pathos artfully. It's all in the pacing.

Now let's keep this between us. I'm scared of very little in this world. The Wrath of Winfrey is one of them. She has a pack of wild dogs that she's raised on nothing but human flesh (milk-carton kids, you know), testosterone shots, and pure fuckin' hatred. I saw it in a  conspiracy theory 'zine...

Stuck on Fuck [or "How To Talk Dirty and Make Somone Squirm"]

I've spent a substantial portion of the last couple days on lines. And since I've managed to fucking forget some portable reading material each and every single fucking day, I've had a lot of time to think. Ordinarily, I'd just be thinking about sex on its own, but in light of the "Baby, I wanna fuck you so bad..." bit, I've been thinking a lot about sex and violence.

Try this experiment - if you dare!

The ideal place to do this would be work, unless you're a K-12 teacher. But regardless of what you do, it's probably not the smartest thing in the world to do. HR people are more superstitious and cowardly than entertainment industry people. It's just that the perfect "control group" would be a bunch of individuals who know you, but in the most vague way possible. It may or may not work with close friends, it just kind of depends on how deep your conversations go. The shallower, the better.

Why? This experiment has two phases.

Phase I is easy. I guarantee you, if you did this at work and left it at that, you wouldn't be in hot water. At all.

Just discuss an injury with somebody. You don't have to use my "script." Feel free to do anything you want with it. The main thing is that the injury can NOT, under any circumstances, involve an injury to your "naughty bits." No crotch shots, no hits to the tits, and so on. But lay it on thick.

Example:

I nearly lost two of my toes when I was a kid. [Note: true story, for the record.] I was riding a Honda "Kick and Go" scooter. It was like a Razor scooter, but a little bigger, and it had this little pedal at the back you would pump with your foot to make the scooter go.

There was a decal with "rules" on the handlebars. One of those rules was "no bare feet." I'm a fuckin' kid! Think I'm going to pay attention to your silly rules?! Bah!

So I'm laying in the middle of the hot-ass street, in August, with the second and third toes on my right foot wedged between the tire and the chain. Now the chain, being a moving part (and greased up) was gradually slicing into my toes - went all the way to the bone, incidentally. I don't know which hurt worse - my toes, or my ass and legs. I don't know if you really can fry an egg on a hot sidewalk, but I know you can braise a seven year-old!

I'm screaming my fucking head off, trying to get the attention of my brother, friends and/or babysitter - who were all inside the trailer, [That's right! At my roots, I am very much "trailer trash."] watching cartoons. That's right. Screaming. Not yelling, "Help!" - a nice, high pitched, co-ed being murdered scream. I was seven, and I think the last thing I was worried about at that moment was whether or not I'd take some shit for "screaming like a girl."

After what seemed like hours, an old lady came out. Say what you like about the elderly, but that woman was FAST! She ran out, assessed the situation, dashed back into her place, and a couple seconds later, was out in the street with her toolbox, taking apart the rear wheel. It had to be like diffusing a bomb or something - one wrong move and she'd have had a toe-less hysterical seven year-old on her hands!

But it didn't end with a visit from the paramedics. At the hospital, they had to give me a local anesthetic and sterilize the area. Having a dirty chain saw into your fucking toes is like setting up a bacteria colony.

Now I wasn't a particularly skittish kid when it came to injections, but fucking SIX of them into an already injured area on a little foot - OH THE FUCKING AGONY!!! I know the doctor thought he was being helpful when he told me not to worry, it would just feel like a bee-sting. However, being a little alergic to bee stings, that really was no comfort. At all.

Now give it a couple days.

Phase II is where you'll get into trouble. It's going to be like riding a mechanical bull. I'm pretty sure you'll get "thrown" in a matter of seconds. Again, you don't have to stick to my script. But this time, you have to discuss an orgasm with the same person. Try not to lay it on thick this time. Even straight-up lie if need be. But don't pull any punches, either.

I was with a girl, briefly, I called "Planet Janet." This is because being with her was like being in another world. Free-spirited, "hippy-adjacent" kind of girl. Super-cool when it came to movies and music. Didn't own a TV. Not a college girl, but she read.

She went with some friends and I to a Santana concert. The guy riding in the back with us must have sensed the chemistry, because I shit you not, he chose to ride in the trunk all the way from LA back to Riverside. Maybe he thought she was going to give me a handjob underneath my poncho... In any event, we were passionate, but not exhibtionists - so we made out all the way home.

During the show, she grabbed me by the back of the head and just planted one on me. I'm not a timid guy, and I was working my way around to it, but I really have to say that I love a woman who takes charge! Fuck yeah!

Oh yeah - I'm not so narrow as to say "she was the best I'd ever been with." That's frat-boy bullshit. BUT SHE IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PLANETS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. I loved being on her. And her on me. And to the side. And up against the walls. And on pretty much every stick of furniture in our apartments. I mean, I'd read some of the Kama Sutra in hopes of blowing somebody's mind, but she walked me around the fucking block.

Do you know I actually lost count once? Not hers - mine. Lost. Fucking. Count. I was so there, I actually forgot how many times I came. Sure, we were baked like cakes a lot of the time too, but I swear that weed has never really affected my memory that adversly...

Did you stop reading yet??? I rest my case.