Friday Goulash: 11-20-09

The Onion strikes again...no, wait! This isn't The Onion!

Once upon the 1980’s, a divorced working mother in the midwest performed the same ritual every Friday: she would collect all the dinner leftovers from the week and toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and a mysterious thickening agent.  She would refer to this concoction as  “Goulash.” “Friday Goulash” is a tribute to this woman and her smelly potful of weariness. It’s in her spirit that I serve up a week’s worth of tidbits slow-cooked to dry-yet-strangely-sticky perfection.  It goes great with Kool-Aid!

In The “News”:

• The New Oxford American Dictionary has named “unfriend” the word of the year.   I love the descriptivist linguistic philosophy demonstrated by NOAD.  At its best, the approach has real cultural and sociological importance as it captures our values within the words we actually speak.  At its worst, it comes across as a geeky hipster wannabe that runs with the wrong crowd.  The crowning of “unfriend” as word of the year indicates NOAD has been sucking up to the Mean Girls and not taking the hint.  At all.  Sad.
• Word has it that Oprah will pull the plug on her talk show in 2011.  It’s not even 2010 yet, so we still have plenty of time to not give a shit.
• For the first time in my life, (and hopefully, the last) I agree with Sarah Palin.  Her depiction on this week’s cover of Newsweek is off-base (it was taken from a photo spread for a fitness magazine, of all things), it’s sexist (duh), and plays right into Palin’s crybaby claims of media persecution.  The point that Newsweek wanted to make regarding Palin as a shameless publicity ho/bimbo is a stale one and not worth the credibility hit it took as a result of this sophomoric editorial choice.  No doubt about it: Sarah Palin is a joke, but that joke is best told by Tina Fey, not Newsweek.

On the Net:

•  I’ve come to consider myself not an observer of the Twilight craze as much as a horrified bystander.  The relentless media blitz surrounding the latest Twilight flick has left me dazed, confused, and troubled by the realization that Kristen Stewart is actually kinda hot in a Priscilla Presley kind of way.  It also dawned on me that the story’s romantic premise actually bears an undeniable resemblance to the Priscilla and Elvis love story: teenaged brat catches the eye of a much older, very obsessive, and decidedly creepy guy and then embarks on a slow-burning waiting game of a courtship.   I read the first book in the Twilight series on a dare; it reads like Elvis and Me only without the literary redemption provided by the mention of guns or kung-fu.

Separated at death?

In my life: 

• RIP, iPod earbuds.  Your job was a thankless and an oily one.  For three years you were the musical I.V. that faithfully and reliably delivered the punk, the funk, the jazz and the Nazz directly to my brain.  The blandest environments (waiting rooms, cubicles) were bestowed drama, poignancy, poetry, and comedy thanks to the private soundtrack you provided.  You fit my ears perfectly: you nestled snugly against my acoustic meatus and demonstrated a gentlemanly respect of  boundaries, which is more than I can say for the iPenetrators I bought to take your place.

Carrie Prejean, You’re No Anita Bryant

Same as it ever was?

I’m old: I have several silver hairs sprouting up around my temples just like Earth-2 Superman, pop music makes me angry, and if I don’t get to bed before 11 PM, I tend to be forgetful at work the next day and wander away from my cubicle.  And, like most old people, I am of the firm conviction that everything was way better when I was younger.  The rock stars wore more makeup, the movies had more space ships, and the tv shows had more hair.  Hell, even the bad things were somehow cut from a finer cloth than the bad things we’re stuck with today.  When I was younger, bad things were bad in a way that had meaning and gravitas.  These bad things–like the nuclear threat presented by the Soviet Bloc, and the belligerent wholesomeness of The Lawrence Welk Show– represented the culmination of a generation’s worth of massive-scale ideological brinksmanship from which there could be no turning back.   I’m talking about a time when the “zealot” pigeonhole was big enough to house more than just a contingent of Middle Eastern malcontents; back in the day, bad things and their respective attendants truly believed in their causes.  And they meant business.  With this historical perspective in mind, I really have a hard time taking Carrie Prejean seriously.  After all, I remember Anita Bryant.

Anita Bryant: now there’s a bitch to contend with.  I stumbled upon Bryant in an article in Time about her campaign to “Save Our Children From Homosexuality” when I was 8 years old.  I didn’t know what homosexuality was.  I did know I liked Nova from Planet of the Apes a whole bunch.   And Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels.  And that one girl in my class who was really good at dodgeball.  I wasn’t able to make the connection between myself and the people Anita Bryant sought to oppress, but nonetheless, I came away from that Time article feeling a mixture of anger and indignation.  I didn’t know much about hatred or intolerance back then, either, but thanks to Anita Bryant, I found myself on the fast track to learning.  Who the hell did she think she was, taking rights away from people and telling them how to live, I smoldered.  And right there, on the spot, I made that most sacred of grade school vows: ”Anita Bryant is not the boss of me!”

Anita Bryant was hard-core.  She didn’t just want to “protect marriage” from the “gay menace”; she wanted to legalize discrimination against gay people in regards to housing, employment, and public accommodation.  In other words, Anita Bryant wanted a world in which the difference between hobo and homo amounted to a handful of tattered accessories and a certain way of walking.  And she wanted that world badly enough to found and head up an organization (hysterically named Save Our Children) to create that world.  Bryant was a Disney villainess of a sort:  a larger than life persona with arched eyebrows, cold eyes, and a strangely wolfish smile who carried within her cloaks the threat Your Children Are Not Safe.  And as such, her tactics played to the darkest fears of middle America: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.” 

Anita Bryant got results.  She was able to rally up enough hatred and terror to not only make legal gay oppression in her home of Dade County, Florida, but to create an environment in which homophobia maintained a 31-year stranglehold on the rights of gay people to adopt children in that state.  Because of Anita Bryant and her efforts with Save Our Children people lost jobs, they were prohibited housing, and thousands of children were denied safe and loving homes.  That bitch was no joke.

Which brings me to Carrie Prejean.  Granted, the cultural landscape has changed significantly since I was a kid, and despite my geriatric gripes, it has changed for the better.  While things are far from perfect, at least the trumped-up allegations that Bryant used to trumpet in the mainstream media have toned down to hissed innuendoes from the fringe.  The battle field is no longer one upon which we are forced to struggle for our basic rights to work for a living or maintain a roof over our heads, but to obtain the same protections and rights for our committed relationships and families that are enjoyed and sometimes taken for granted by straight people.  So a new age brings forth a new beauty queen to try to be the boss of us.  But Carrie Prejean is no Anita Bryant.

Carrie Prejean is an opportunist.  She became famous because she made the statement “…I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there.”  (I can almost envision Anita Bryant looking up from the green glow emanating from her enormous caldron, snarling “‘No offense?!?’”)  Carrie Prejean did not found the National Organization for Marriage.  She doesn’t lead it.  She is employed by it.   In essence, anyone who focuses their frustration on Carrie Prejean is as misguided as those dorks who confused Joe Camel with the tobacco industry. 

Carrie Prejean has no strength in her alleged convictions.   Witness her pathetic display of ignorance and immaturity on The Larry King Show this week when asked why she had settled her “religious discrimination” lawsuit against the Miss USA pageant.  As if it wasn’t lame enough to back down from the question “Why settle since you had a fight to carry on?”, Prejean had to take it one step further into Wussy Wonderland by pussing out and pouting instead of taking a call from a gay viewer.  She is not a crusader.  She is a paid spokesmodel who couldn’t hold up her side of a debate if it came equipped with E-Z grip handles.  Based on this week’s performance on King, I’d say the powers that be over at NOM are probably regretting their investment even more than the Miss USA pageant regrets buying Prejean’s breast implants.  At least the implants are doing their job.

Carrie Prejean has allegedly written a book.  The volume is a testament to Prejean’s mastery of the literary arts in that it clearly has a front cover, a back cover, a dust jacket, and pages that are made of paper.  Furthermore, it demonstrates Prejean’s level of commitment as a gay rights opponent as its title, Still Standing,  bears more than a passing resemblance to “I’m Still Standing”, the 1983 hit song by gay marriage activist Elton John.  I can’t wait until Prejean’s Still Standing hits the cutout bin so I can buy it; my copy of Chastity Bono’s Family Outing is lonely and hasn’t had anyone call it “Daddy” since my copy of The Total Woman was consumed by feminist termites.

I could go on.  And on.  The point is, Carrie Prejean is a joke that practically writes itself.  If she’s the worst that the opposition has for us, the future of Gay Marriage in America is far brighter than she is.

A Modest Gay Marriage Proposal

Gay marriage was defeated by popular vote in Maine this week, delivering the cause a stunning roundhouse punch right in the Guccis.   I, for one, have spent this week marinating in a dark concoction of vinegary frustration and venomous fury to the point that if I were to be tossed onto a grill and parcelled out on paper plates, I have enough taint to inflict at least 20 serious tummy aches at a church picnic.  What happened in Maine pisses me off  for 2 reasons: 1. matters concerning social justice and the individual rights of members of a minority group should never be subject to the mercy of  majority rule, because:  2. majority rule has no mercy.   Going with the conventional wisdom that gay people comprise 10% of the population, it’s obvious that as long as our rights are up to everyone else, we’re pretty much guaranteed jack shit nothing. * I know; I did the math, and yes, the calculator really did swear at me.  

So obviously, the Gay Marriage Movement is failing to convince the remaining 90% of the population that inequality and injustice is anyone’s problem but our own.  If Maine and California are the pace cars of this race to kill gay marriage, then it looks like our rights will be in the hands of people who  have strong objections against us at worst, and, at best, have no personal investment in the matter.  After all, if you’re not planning on getting a gay marriage yourself, what would motivate you to support it?  Clearly, the approach of  trying to appeal our fellow Americans’ sense of compassion and fairness isn’t working.  Being an upstanding citizen who contributes to society by working hard, paying taxes, and not dressing my daughter like a lumberjack counts for–wait, let me check my calculator–that’s right: jack shit nothing.   So the Gay Marriage Movement needs to impel the support of the American voting population by stimulating something more compelling than a sense of good will towards people who happen to be different from themselves;  it needs to play to that all-powerful motivating force called self-interest.  In short: we need to make our problem, everyone’s problem.  How do we do this?  We need to ditch the Mr. Nice Gay stuff and go back to what we’re really good at: ruining Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is such a delicate creature.   It’s the pedigreed poodle of American holidays: each year a new Thanksgiving is born, the immaculately coiffed and stunted offspring bred of untold generations of family tradition and undiluted dysfunction.  And then it is sent hobbling into traffic (i.e. when the guests arrive).  So it really isn’t hard for a gay person to ruin Thanksgiving.   After all, it’s the celebration of the “normal” traditional family.  All a gay person has to do to rattle this pretense and remind everyone that “normal” is just a boring little town in Illinois is, well, show up.  Only the drunks surpass our power to ruin the holiday.  But thanks to internalized homophobia, many of us are drunks, too!

Ruining Thanksgiving is practically a gay tradition.  I remember coming back from college for Thanksgiving break back in 1987, sporting my Dagwood Bumstead-meets-Thompson-Twins haircut, the intensely taciturn way my dad carved the turkey, the worried look on my mom’s face, and the lonesome feeling of being a misunderstood minority within my own family.  Such wonderful memories!  So it’s in the spirit of ‘87 that I propose that unless and until gay marriage is a nationwide reality, we make Thanksgiving as uncomfortable as possible.  It may be the only way we can personalize the pain of injustice for those who make the mistake of thinking gay marriage is someone else’s concern.

We’ve been singled out as “others”– outcasts of the mainstream.  This is why we’ve been denied the right to marry, so while we’re being marginalized, let’s give ‘em what they want until they beg us to stop.

 Some handy tips for the ladies:

Don’t bother hiding your tattoos anymore, particularly the nice big, butchy ones on the biceps and deltoids.  They carry a message of strength and defiance.  They say “I’m an angry feminist!”  Unless they happen to be in the image of the face of Stevie Nicks.

If you’re a vegetarian, stop discretely filling your plate with the side dishes and choking back your disgust at the carnage going on right in front of you.   That turkey smells like death, dammit!  Pipe up and say so!

Don’t let your relatives refer to your female companion (whom you damn well best be bringing to the festivities) as your “friend”.  Loudly insist on “lady-love” and nothing less!

And for the gentlemen:

Spare no critique regarding interior design and fashion.  Scream if necessary.

Join the menfolk in the living room to watch the “big game”.  Ask lots and lots of questions.  Refer to all the players as “she” and “her”.

Bring your knitting.  Even if you don’t knit, pretend to knit.  I have it on good authority that seeing a dude knitting really shakes up the squares.

For supportive straight people who want to be part of the fun:

Broaden the horizons of the table talk.  Some examples:  “Grandma, I’ve always thought that cranberry sauce was the gayest of Thanksgiving foods, have you seen Brokeback Mountain?”, and “That turkey is stuffed tighter than Adam Lambert’s pants!  You go, turkey!”

For everyone::

Don’t forget our mission; don’t let anyone else forget, either.  When it’s time to give thanks, some variation on the following will make your point: “I’m thankful that I live in a country where ‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’  Oh, wait!  No, I don’t!  And I guess I won’t until Gay Marriage is a reality.  Amen!”

If I can’t inspire you to ruin Thanksgiving in the name of social justice, then let Jeannette Saucier, 71, of Topsham, Maine, inspire you as she did me.  When I first read her statement “It’s not that I feel bigoted to gay people. We have gay people in my own family, but I don’t see them having to be married to prove a point,” I knew something had to be done to prove my “point” that Gay Americans are Americans and human beings deserving of their rights as citizens and members of the human race.  Until this is recognized, we cannot let go or give up. 

They may be able to take the right to marry from us right now, but they’ll never take away the power of  ”Grandpa, pass the gravy; I’m gay!”

 

 

*Looking at the voting results in California (52.47% in favor of a gay marriage ban and 47.53% opposed) and Maine (53%  in favor of the ban and 47% opposed), you can see that while the numbers showing support for gay marriage are signifigantly higher than 10%, the result is still the same: jack shit nothing. 

Things That Scare Me

Shudder...

 Halloween is not for sissies, yet I love it anyway.  I love it because it’s the one time of the year when being afraid is a shared experience as opposed to my usual solitary, soggy-armpit, hyperventilating, pull-it-together-in-the-ladies’-room-for-chrissake kind of experience.    So it’s in this Christmas spirit of sharing that I present the following fear list this Halloween:  

•   ”Shore” by Zdzisław Beksiński (above):  There was a time when The Future was depicted as a utopia of progress and enlightenment.  When I was a kid, I drank my TANG (just like the astronauts) and watched The Jetsons joke with friendly robots and go for Sunday drives in space sedans.  The Future was going to be a better place!  Even if it might be taken over by talking apes, at least the apes were intelligent.  Now it’s looking like The Future doesn’t have much of a future at all.  The very real possibility that the human race will dumb itself into a huge dung heap is becoming the default portrayal of The Future.  To really get that cold-in-your-bones, the nadir-is-nigh feeling of impending doom, rent Idiocracy (the funniest horror movie ever) or its kid-friendly equivalent Wall-E, or just look at “Shore” (above).  (“Shore” courtesy of Miz Larreau.  Thanks a lot, Miz Larreau!)
• This 1959 video of Santo and Johnny performing ”Sleepwalk”:

Time has disfigured the faces of performers Santo and Johnny, yet their almost pristine music plays on: eternity echoing forth from disintegrating hands.  Spare me your Saws and your Final Destinations; this clip is all the memento mori I need.    

• The Jelly Belly Factory.  Yes, I said the Jelly Belly Factory.  Jelly Bellies were instrumental in softening the public image of former President Ronald Reagan.   Photos of  Reagan dipping into candy jars filled with Jelly Bellies transformed him from a  let-them-eat-cake conservative into a fun, cuddly grandpa with a sweet tooth.  This horrifying realization struck me while accompanying Kate and our daughter Mabel  to the Jelly Belly factory as a sort of pilgrimage for Mabel.  We came to pay tribute to the treat that played a huge role as a positive reinforcer in Mabel’s potty training, only to flee in terror when I realized it had helped Reagan to also drop a deuce… on America.

Dramatic reinactment brought to you by Photoshop.

•   True Story: I arrived at the hospital on time for a routine appointment.  It was the same hospital in which Mabel had been born nearly three years ago, yet in that short amount of time, the place had become unrecognizable: new concrete multi-story office buildings crowded against freshly cropped-up brick laboratories.  They blocked out the sun and rendered the old schlep between the parking garage and the hospital into a sort of strange safari.  The interior of the hospital, too, had changed: it had become a huge labyrinth of  mirror-clean tile and numbered doors.  A few recognizable landmarks from the time of my last visit–the fireplace where I’d once sat with my family as Kate and newborn Mabel rested in their room, the player piano that filled the hallways with the Liberace-like renditions of soft rock hits of the seventies, the gift shop–popped up occasionally only to disorient me in time as well as place.  As I scrambled here between here and there, then and now in this mind-scrambling maze, I was reminded of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski , the horror epic about a house that could literally remodel itself right behind the backs of its occupants.  Fortunately, I caught the attention of a support staff member who guided me to my destination.  As we walked, she asked me if I’d been to the hospital before and I responded that I had, but it had changed a lot since my last visit.  “It’s changed for us, too,” she said, “We leave at night and come back in the morning and find a wall where there wasn’t one before.”

Nobody’s Perfect, Superman

Attack of the Misplaced Genitalia!

 The gays have long enjoyed a playful relationship with gender.  And why not?  Since many of us have already disregarded rules like “That’s an exit, not an entrance”, “No spitting tobacco juice on the sidewalk”, “The booty dance is not for white people”, and “Go to church!”, it’s not hard to understand how the social mores that rigidify and categorize human experience wouldn’t be much to our liking, either.  Gender rebels abound in the gay world, in fact.  Witness drag maven RuPaul and her Drag Race dynasty, a reality show that takes boys and turns them into men who will kick your ass if you have a problem with them looking like fabulous flamingo women.  Witness the mullet, a manishly short in the front, lady-long in the back hairstyle popular amongst rural lesbians that says “I fix trucks real good, hoss.”

While my own particular stripe of gender rebellion is confined mostly to the wearing of men’s shoes and, on occasion, men’s pants (with its hilarious phantom bulge), I’ve always been a fan of gender envelope pushery demonstrated in music and film.  When done right, depictions of male/female turnabout can really launch a flaming arrow into the methane-bloated sacred cow of  gender.  Take for example Some Like It Hot (the 1959 Billy Wilder film, not the 1985 Power Station tune):  this film is a multi-faceted gem that hilariously lampoons the cultural tyranny that defines and limits human beings based on outward appearances.  By dressing its lady-killer protagonists (Tony Curtis and the phenomenal Jack Lemmon) as women and setting them loose in an all-girl band with a gig at a resort, Wilder shows us that walking the straight and narrow path defined by your perceived gender is a bitch if you happen to suck at walking in high heels.  This struggle is most clearly epitomized by the train scene  in which the phenomenal Jack Lemmon, disguised as “Daphne”, struggles to maintain his feminine cover while Marilyn Monroe and a cast of dozens of women practically crawl all over him.  He tries to offset the torture of turn-on with the mantra “I’m a girl, I’m a girl, I’m a girl!”, but it doesn’t work.  The scene rings with a truth that any gender transcender can immediately identify: you can try to wear the “right” uniform and  obey the rules, but you can still lose the game.  The train scene is especially compelling from a lesbian perspective:  people bearing female visual signifiers are not supposed to be aroused by other girls, but as Some Like It Hot points out sometimes they are, no matter what they tell themselves, and the only thing a girl in this situation can do to stay out of trouble  and remain true to the expectations imposed upon her gender is to pull the brakes on the whole soul train.  Another of my favorite cultural salvos against gender tyranny is the song “Lola” by The Kinks, an ode to an amazing creature who “walks like a woman and talks like a man”.  In record time, (about 4 minutes) the song  gives voice to the assertion that gender conformity is only for the naive and self-deluded.  Lola’s love interest, a bloke who “left home about a week before and… never, ever kissed a woman before” becomes a man only by accepting the less-than-manly side of his nature. It’s worth remembering that “Lola” is an artifact of the ’70’s, a time when the rigidity of the 50’s (without which the incendiary Some Like It Hot would not be possible) was briefly defeated and all its proponents cast as squares who don’t get it.  I love “Lola” and  Some Like It Hot because they depict the gender transcender point of view with witty insight and compassion.

And then there’s Superman #349, “The Turnabout Trap”.  I can’t believe I missed Superman #349 when it was published in the summer of 1980.  The issue came to my attention nearly 30 years post-publication courtesy of The Gift Shop At The Statue Of Corrupted Endeavor, the superbly icono-smart-ass-clastic gift app created for Facebook by my brother.  When I received the gift of  Superman #349’s cover, complete with Hank’s tagline “part one of the never completed ‘Superman; Under A Pink Sun’ epic” I did what any self-respecting aging Gen-Xer would do when confronted with a missing artifact of their childhood, which was to hit that “Buy It Now” button on eBay with a quickness that rivalled that of the proverbial speeding bullet.  Having grown up loving Some Like It Hot and “Lola”, how could I possibly resist an opportunity to experience Wonder Woman as a studly dude or Superman as a delicious female badass?  In the end, I have to say I’m glad I missed it the first time around.  Let’s break it down, shall we?

In Superman #349: “The Turnabout Trap”, our big blue boy scout  returns to Earth from an outer space adventure only to be surrounded by gender-opposite versions of everyone he knows, including himself.  Handsome Louis Lane stands in for Superman’s lady-love Lois Lane, Penny White calls the shots at “The Daily Planet” instead of Perry White and (Great Scott!) the entire Justice League of America has apparently undergone gender reassignment surgery!   But to the obsessive careful reader, there’s another twist to be found within this twist: these gender-opposite substitutes actually manifest the gender of their original counterparts in subtle but very telling ways.  The ladies sport mannish threads  and the gents flounce some decidedly femmey fashions.  Jenny Olson retains Jimmy’s blazer and bow tie, as well as his boyish slouch.  Clark Kent counterpart Clara Kent researches the “Daily Planet”’s morgues, crisply attired in suit skirt and her hair swept up off her butchy shoulder pads.  And frankly, the only thing that differentiates puffy-sleeve-rocking Superboy from Supergirl is a scant couple inches of hair and maybe a few months’ worth of hormone treatments.   These characters are not cross dressers, really,  so much as they are androgynous winksters.

Ladyfellas and girlymen:  hmmm…this looks pretty gay to me.  The creative team behind the issue tries to play it safe with the radical premise of gender contraires and the result is utter sidewalk-spitting, booty dancing gayness.  It could be said that the gayness of  Superman #349’s gender romp is likely an accidental by-product of the continuity efforts of creative team behind the issue.  After all, comics are allegedly for children, and therefore it would make sense that in order for “the kids” to understand that, for example, the lady with the red hair is supposed to be Jimmy Olson, that same red-haired woman should also retain a certain Jimmy sais quois, such as his bow tie.  Such androgynous flourishes not only serve as useful visual cues to help tip-off young readers as to the true identity of the turnabout twins, they also subtly and homophobically reassure them that Clark Kent may be wearing a skirt, but he’s no sissy.  But despite the creative team’s “best” efforts to assert underlying gender normality, the gayness of this world cannot be denied.  Any doubt of this can be assuaged by the brief appearance (as well as the appearance of the briefs) of Black Condor, the male version of Black Canary.  In attempting to reinforce his “actual” gender by way of deep-cuffed pirate go-go boots and tight black plum-smuggler shorts, Black Condor’s creators reassure the reader of nothing but Black Condor’s place in the Hot Piece Hall of Fame.

“Girls will be boys/And boys will be girls/It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook up world…”: Superman #349 is ”Lola” come to 5 color life, with the notable omission of the brilliant insight conveyed by the line ”except for Lola.”  The issue could learn quite a bit from the song, as Superman #349  lacks appreciation for the fact that gender transgression is ultimately most troubling to those who blindly follow the rules of gender with no inner reflection towards the possibility that not all of the rules are right for everyone, themselves included.  As Ray Davies points out, the only beacon of clarity and order in such a chaotic world is Lola herself.  At first glance, a she-male like Lola would personify confusion, yet she is exempt from it because she knows who she is.  Her existence agitates confusion only amongst those who don’t really know who they are themselves.  When confronted with such a world, Superman instantly assumes “someone” is out to drive him “crazy”.  Of course.  It’s in this assumption we know exactly where our hero is coming from: the 50’s.  The openness of his mind  to diversity measures a whopping “Zero” on the six-point Kinsey Scale.  So I guess it goes without saying that it doesn’t even occur to Superman to notice how hot he is as a woman.  In the hands of the #349 creative team, gender discrepancies are wrongs for Superman to right.  Interestingly, these wrongs are the products of magic and guess what?  In one of those comic book caveats as inspired and enduring as a “let’s pretend” playtime loophole, Superman is powerless against magic!  (Probably because he’s such a fucking square.)  So it’s up to his powers of logic and deductive reasoning to find a way out of this “Turnabout Trap.”  It takes only a few pages for Superman to sus out the perpetrator: one Mr. Mxyzptlk. 

Mr. Mxyzptlk is a classic Superman adversary, a bald little sprite who’s not dangerous as much as he is mischievous, has always been on hand to lend the Superman saga a much-needed element of imaginative fun.  It’s too bad he was recruited to personify the lack of it in this issue.   As the stand-in creator of the chaos created by the 349 team, Mr. M doubles as an enforcer of the gender norms underlying the issue.  As the mouthpiece of its politics and presumptions, Mr. M. is eventually called to task by Superman with mind-bendingly disappointing results.  The sorry cards are laid on the table in the issue’s final pages when Superman confronts Mr. M and learns that this magical world of gender reassignment was created not to challenge Superman’s narrow-mindedness, but to (and this is baffling to me) punish him.  Superman’s crime: he has something that Mr. M doesn’t– a successful love life.  Needless to say, this explanation ranks right up there with A Christmas Story’s “Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine” as a Classic Kid Culture Rip-Off Golden Moment.  In fact, I’m pretty sure my reaction was exactly as foul-mouthed as Ralphie’s.  What I found especially bull-worthy about Mr. M’s revenge on Superman was that he basically gave the entire planet a sex change so that Superman wouldn’t have Lois Lane to smooch on. Why go to all the trouble? Why didn’t he just turn her into a toaster or something?  The sex-change premise of the issue is sensationalistic in its inception and executed with bad writing.   Utter crap!  That gender rebels were exploited to the tune of 40 cents an issue was at first pretty irksome to me, and then I thought about it some more and got even more pissed off.

Okay, so Mr. M wanted revenge, and he went about it in a really big and poorly written way.  Superman’s cross-examination of Mr. M (and by proxy), the 349 creative team fails to ask the real question and that is “Why is this revenge so gay?”  That this question is never asked is indicative of the very real likelihood that it was probably considered too dumb to even be asked.  Asking why a gay world is a worthy weapon against “good” is like questioning Lex Luthor why death rays are useful in killing good people.  The question goes unasked because asking it would call to task the issue’s very foundation, that foundation being the presumption that the limiting and inhibiting rules of gender connote a world as it “should” be, and those who transgress are  not natural and not right.  In its way, this ending is to me is the turnabout twin of  the sublime last scene in in Some Like It Hot.  The end of the film finds Jack Lemmon’s Daphne riding off in the sunset with her beau, a rich gentleman by the name of Osgood (played with uncanny comic timing by Joe E. Brown) and into another cover-compromising pickle: imminent marriage.  Daphne, frantic to extricate herself from this situation, pummels Osgood with numerous reasons why he shouldn’t marry her but the cheerfully enamored Osgood shrugs them off, one by one.    Even when Daphne hammers Osgood with the most compelling reason she can think of: “I’m a man”, Osgood is unswayed.  “Nobody’s perfect”, he responds.  With just these two words, Some Like It Hot shows itself to be the opposite of Superman #349 because it says gender really doesn’t matter and the joke is on anyone who thinks it does.

Post Script: Gender Transcendence is alive and well today:  Check out Cecilia Bartoli’s Sacrificium album and Dana Baitz or just get your Google freak on and find it yourself.

The Triumph of Awkward

The Constellation of Awkward: and we all shine on…

“Awkward” is a star.  I’m not sure how it happened or who exactly is responsible, but the word is everywhere.  It’s…hot, which is an odd place for “awkward” to be, but let’s face it, anywhere “awkward” goes instantly becomes an odd place, hence its genius.  It’s a pinch of an off-recipe ingredient delivering the ringadingding  punch that lands an ordinary meal on the mat, leaving it to wonder who the hell it is and how it got there.  (Try introducing some cinnamon to Hamburger Helper sometime to appreciate the flavor of this analogy.)

Awkward* has been echoing around the American Pop Lexicanyon for nearly a decade now, and it has a resonance that lends itself to all kinds of disparate applications.   Awkward is making headlines, regardless of its contextual suitability: in International News, “Pakistan’s Awkward Healing Process”, in Sports, “Derek Jeter believes it will be ‘awkward’ without Jorge Posada starting a playoff game”, in Celebrity Beat,  “Megan Fox kissed a girl – and the girl felt ‘awkward’” .  Perhaps Pakistan’s healing process would be better described as “complicated”, or Derek Jeter’s  Posadaless playoff game, “challenging”, or the act of kissing Megan Fox as “not unlike tongue-bathing Satan’s chamber pot”, but nope, Awkward gets the nod every time. 

Before Awkward became the bark of a million dogs in our cultural nocturne, it was just an adjective used to describe a dearth of skill or ease in either a physical or social sense.  It was also useful in describing situations created by those demonstrating that dearth of what I’ll call Social Smoothery.  Not surprisingly, it was the go-to word whenever the subject of adolescence came up.  This is something for which I feel a certain personal ownership; like anyone who spent prom night listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland double LP (in its entirety!) on 5 pound headphones, or playing Dungeons and Dragons solitaire, or designing dresses for long-dead noir vixens,  I’d like to say I was into Awkward before it went Hollywood. 

Michael Cera: The Sammy Sosa of Goofball

Which is not to say I begrudge its success.  Being intimately familiar with “the real Awkward” allows me to vicariously enjoy its whodathunkit zeitgeist in a “Revenge of the Nerds” kind of way.  Its rampant misappropriation is in itself, so wrong, so triumphantly awkward, I can only compare it to the career trajectory of one Michael Cera, the Sammy Sosa of goofball. 

Its popularity as a misused word, however, is revealing.  Given that a culture’s priorities are often apparent in its putdowns,  Awkward’s status as the putdown of choice is indicative of the fact that Social Smoothery is prized in our culture over more honest and enduring attributes.  Anything “complicated” (like peace in the Middle East), or “challenging” (like facing a playoff game at a perceived disadvantage) or “uncomfortable” (like tongue-bathing Satan’s chamber pot–I mean kissing Megan Fox) is deemed Awkward and therefore lacking Social Smoothery as if it were a buzz-killing faux pas at some big party.  The word works a subversive magic when miscast in this crowd-pleaser of a role.  Like a kind of bizarro chameleon that transforms its surroundings to match its ungainly image,  Awkward’s guileless, cumbersome, yet honest presence skews the existing paradigm in such a way as to alert us to the glib superficiality of its surroundings, and gee, how awkward is that.   

*Who am I kidding?  Awkward’s gone big time; it can eschew those quotation marks like Madonna ditched Ciccone.

Friday Goulash

Yep, that's Mariah Carey.

I had a friend who ate goulash almost every Friday night of the eighties.  Her mother used to take all the dinner leftovers from the week, toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and an unnamed thickening agent and call it “Goulash.”  Tossing in a wooden spoon into the pot to complete the Oliver Twistish tableau, this tired mom would leave the goulash on the stove and her kids to fend for themselves for the rest of the evening while she retired to her living room for highballs and episodes of “Dallas”. 

It’s in the Tired Mom spirit that I rehash the Friday Goulash, Gaytheist Gospel Hour style: a big warm bucket of the week’s bounty, slowly crusting from the bottom up.  You’ll probably want to slap a slice of American cheese on it.  

• In The “News“*:   Mariah Carey returns to the silver screen (because we all loved “Glitter” so much), playing a “dowdy” social worker in some sort of overwrought, “gritty” secular humanist uplifter called “Precious”.  Normally, this sort of story would whiz past my head like so many other celebrity news bullets, but since I consider “dowdy” to be my beat, I couldn’t resist.   Quoting the AP: ’”By making me look so bad he [director Lee Daniels] brought out the ability to never be self-conscious again, and that was a gift that he gave me.”‘  Mariah’s “gift” came wrapped in a little extra weight, an outdated hairdo, an inexpensive outfit, and a certain tiredness around the eyes…  She looks like, well, a Mariah Carey fan– someone who might have fond memories of slow-dancing to “Vision of Love” back in 1990.  And that looks “so bad.”  Well, Butterfly, I’m glad one of us has stopped feeling “self-conscious”.
• On The Net: Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz with pure interactive brilliance, Netflix has created an application called Oz Yourself.  With a simple photo download and a couple of minor tweaks, you can do a Victor Fleming and recast the role of the Scarecrow any which way you want.  This has been a dream come true for anyone (like me) who feels the Wizard of Oz just wasn’t terrifying enough the first time around.   Too bad I can’t Miss Rossify Dorothy…

• In My Life:  Did you know Los Lobos is classified by iTunes as “Country”?  The band’s fiery classic blues rock sound (enriched with eye-opening social commentary and heart-breaking poetry) doesn’t feature any fiddle-sawing or mention of putting boots in anyone’s asses, so I’m not sure why my iTunes player calls it “Country”.  Maybe what iTunes actually meant to say was “You so Country” because listening to Los Lobos instead of, oh, that Kanye guy, is indeed a Country thing to do.  I have a theory that when I play an actual country album, the corresponding  iTunes player genre will call me out as a ”Cracker.” 

 *Punctuation denotes author’s attempt to launch a snarky pseudo-attack on the infotainmentization of the actual News while armed with nothing but a sad set of quotation marks.

Giftmas (TM) 2009 Shopping Guide!

My copy of the Harriet Carter catalogue arrived this weekend, ushering in the auspicious Giftmas (TM) 2009 season!  Sure, it may seem a little early to start preparing for that beloved annual non-denominational, consumer-driven, mass-craze-behavior frenzy tradition, but I march to the beat of a different drummer.  Harriet Carter is her name.

The receipt of the Harriet Carter catalogue is akin to the crack of a starter gun for the True Believers who take its presence in their mailboxes as seriously as Punxsutawney Phil does his shadow, at least insofar as the behavioral patterns displayed by the borderline agoraphobic demographic in America resemble those of  burrowing rodents.  (Which may be quite a bit, as far as we know.)  Harriet Carter says it’s time to take advantage of this beautiful September weather to start stringing up those lights, cranking that Perry Como music, and buying inexpensive gifts for everyone in all 14 categories listed in her online Holiday Store!

So without further ado, please enjoy the cream of the HC holiday crop:

Auto Enthusiasts

 After the dehumanizing experience that is the typical commute, nothing is more pleasurable than seeing your existence visually confirmed by the impression of your own ass in foam.  Spray it with some latex and make your own fossil for all eternity!

Cooks

Cupcakes are now 6 1/2 inches in diameter and 7 inches in height?  Time to start drug testing at the Federal Bureau of Weights and Measures!

 

Sizzling wieners!  Hot buns!  Think of the Hot Dog Toaster as your one-stop-butt-sex-joke shop.  Besides, it really is hard to make hotdogs.  Ha ha– I said “hard”.

Co-Workers

 Secret Santa wants you to shut the fuck up.

For Those Near And Dear

The inscription is a little hard to read, but allow me to quote a few highlights:  “Daughter/You are a special gift to me/ Blessing my life forever…”  I’m buying one of these babies and packing it away for a rainy day in case I need a last-ditch guilt-trip contingency plan for the day my daughter packs me away to some shady Social-Security-Fleecing Factory nursing home.

Fun and Games

This tragedy transformed into an “ice breaker” (guf-freakin-faw) of a sight gag “gives your guests something to talk about.” Like what a raging crasshole you are.

Gadget Gurus

Like ol’ hoss Jean-Paul Sartre says: “Hell is other people”, so defend that sacred solipsistic sanctuary of yours with a Wireless Driveway Alarm!  No one will ever disrupt your enjoyment of Jerry Springer ever again.

Gardeners

 

Old McDonald had a garden torch, E I E I, burn the mother down!

Gifts of Laughter

This Gift of Laughter, merely pretends to laugh with you, only you’re too stupid to know it.  Merry Giftmas (TM), you lazy sack of shit, you!

Hard To Shop For

People who are ”Hard To Shop For” tend to be, well…different.  Redheads are different.  Don’t let that redhead in your life forget it for a second!

Please note the hair color of the model of this, the weirdest offering in the “Hard To Shop For” category.  I rest my case.

History Buffs

Scratch a history buff, sniff a leather daddy, I always say. 

Kid Stuff

Tiger Woods started playing golf at the age of two.  Your child’s championship cornhole career begins this Giftmas (TM).

Pets and Pet Lovers

Angels’ Eyes (R) isn’t so much a gift for Grandma and her watery-eyed purebred as it is for anyone disturbed by the fluffiest family member’s propensity to cry the sacred, rusty tears of a Mexican Virgin Mary statue.

It’s potty time for puppy!  Can’t seem to wrestle that box of Domino’s Pizza off your chest because your right hand is stuck in a bag of Fritos and your left hand is texting your views on the latest reality show?  Even if you could wrestle out from under the weight of This Modern Life, will getting off the couch to walk Swayze around the neighborhood cost you valuable televison-watching time?  The Potty Patch Mat will buy you a gallon of golden couch time!  That’s right; I said a gallon.  Give the pet lover in your life the gift of squalor and blackest ennui.

Pollyanna Picks

Okay, so this DVD celebrates 75 years of the Rockettes, so odds are the recipient of this gift is just about that old themselves, possibly even older.  They probably don’t have that many Giftmases (TM) left in them, come to think of it.  That said, don’t you think you can do just a little better than this unwatchable digital drink coaster?

Sports Buffs

Snuggies as we know them leave a lot to be desired when it comes to manliness.  Complete your manly Snuggy ensemble with officially licensed NFL g-strings and hooker wigs (coming soon)!

Yard Sale!

Handmade sign and adorable toddler: the only promotional devices God intended. And by "God", I mean my beautiful wife. Who else?

Say what you will about the suburbs (no wait, allow me: they are pretend nowhere towns filled with soulless, greedy honkeys who like to pay a lot for coffee at space/time intervals approximating every third city block), the burbs really can’t be beat for rolling out bang-up quality yard sales.  This is owed to the simple fact that these greedy honkeys have a knack for acquiring a lot of shit they have absolutely no use for nor any appreciation of the value of said shit.  The suburban yard sale is sort of like a modernization of  American Indian potlach in which the wealthiest chiefs demonstrate both their power and benevolence by just giving  lot of valuable shit away, only add a cup of Starbucks and minus the underlying mission statement.   Why, in the near decade I’ve spent in the suburbs, my partner Kate and I have scored enough premium stuff at yard sales, we are sometimes both dazzled and at times slightly dazed at the pickin’s, if you will.  Amongst the bounty:

• Uber-girly pink and purple plastic play house valued at triple digits, purchased for a mere ten spot.  It kills the grass wherever it stands, but I do my best thinking there.
• Ginormous coffee urn from the Kennedy administration, mint-in-box.  It now claims a place of honor on my closet shelf for only 3 bucks.
• Enough pink cotton fabric (festooned with psychedelic 70’s style animals) to make a hash tent for 6 little girls.  Price: 1 measly dollar.
• Deluxe Scrabble game (with lazy susan, tiny timer, “official” score pad, letter bag embroidered w/Scrabble logo, the very existence of which ratchets up the ghetto cache of our letter-filled Crown Royal pouch to Cabrini Greens proportions).  Price: 1 mind-blowing dollar.  We know for a fact the game was played only once because the ”official” score pad had recorded only one game: an apparently epic battle between ”Denise” and ”Yulie”.    Final score: Denise, 285; Yulie, 305 in only 12 rounds of play.  I guess they found Scrabble too easy and went on to ostensibly more challenging fare, like playing Machiavellian mind chess with actual human beings for game pieces. 
• More vinyl copies of Carole King’s Tapestry than you can shake a quarter at!

The average household income here in Charlemagne Oaks (name changed to prevent possible angry honkey retaliation) is $106,352.  (Jewel Shoppers here have been known to bundle up their brittle bones against the arctic chill inherent in the excavation of Smuckers Crustables from the freezer section in honest-to-golly-gee-floor-length fur coats.)   The Hellraisin household has yet to dent 30K, unless you were to factor in the sum total value of the stuff we’ve practically stolen from our neighbors, in which case, then yes, 30 K has probably been scratched.  Considering we’ve been riding on the back of this town like a cootie-consuming bird for three years this month, we decided to have our own yard sale as our way of giving back to the community.  Charlemagne Oaks, we love you!  Buy our shit!

Typically, the yard sale experience is a four step process: you set up, you sit, you sell, you put the shit you didn’t sell on the curb.  But to boil it down to its core elements would be robbing posterity of the richly rewarding experience that was Our Particular Yard Sale, so here it is, in easy-to-reference time line format:

• 9:30 Set up is complete.  Great pains were taken on Kate’s part to ensure that our merchandise was attractively displayed and organized for ease of browsing.  What’s more, considerable “behind the scenes” work was done by the both of us to ensure said merchandise was suitable for our clientele.    Judging from the objects our neighbors have discarded at their own yard sales, we surmised that we were selling to a demographic that has no use for anything that kills grass in the yard, inspires imagination, challenges verbal abilities, caffeinates family reunions, or features the backing vocals of one James Taylor.  This process forced us to realize many of our earthly possessions did not fit though such fine-screen filter.  Items like the Padre Pio rosary key chain, the banjo I will never learn to play, and Kate’s own hand-crocheted Wicked Witch of the West/Flying Monkey matched set were deemed frankly Too Weird for Charlemagne Oaks.  Thankfully, contributions from Kate’s friend Sara and Sara’s in-laws prevented Our Particular Yard Sale from being a cavalcade of ghastlies.

We love you, Charlemagne Oaks! Buy our shit!

• 10:30 A pair of shoes and a jacket are sold to a couple whose accents betray a place of origin far, far south of Charlemagne Oaks.  We do our best to appear gracious and not in the least disappointed.
• 10:45 I retrieve my copy of Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury from the house and resume reading the “June Second, 1910″ chapter.  This is the amazing stream-of-consciousness prelude to the suicide of Quentin Compson in which Faulkner ruminates on matters concerning race, class, madness, and the very fabric of time.  Did I say “amazing”?  I meant “almost freaking god-like”.  They sure don’t make fall-down-drunk genius authors like they used to, that’s for sure.
• 10:50 Never fails: open a book and someone’s up in your grill in no time.  A woman and her two children (again, clearly not C.O. natives, of questionable citizenship) snag the Song Burst game and the doll high chair, a 3 dollar purchase which I suspect may have been a ruse designed to break a twenty.
• 11:00 I resume reading, Kate begins some light yard work, and Mabel does her best to prevent us from accomplishing even those modest endeavors.  Lately, her most  effective diversionary tactic has been “butt shakin’”:

 

 

Foreground: butt shakin’. Background: grass-killing playhouse.

 

• 11:30 I tally up a little over 6 dollars in take-home and begin to wonder (very loudly, and in Kate’s general direction) where we went wrong.  The merchandise was, again, impeccably screened.  Who can resist premium items like the 6 quart crockpot–big enough to cook a fucking goose, used only once?  Or the Tony Bennett CD (new, in shrink wrap, shoplifted by Mabel herself), free to a good home?  Or the pink sweater festooned with beach-themed decorative elements, studded with eye-catching bead work, and batter-dipped in sequins?  It’s from The Quacker Factory, for chrissake!  Kate, standing ankle-deep in vegetative carnage, and regarding me with something that looks a lot like death in her eyes, admits to me that no, she did not post a notice on Craigslist, that the only attention-getting resources we have our disposal are our signs, our adorable toddler, and my hollering.
• 11:37 We create a new sign that says “Untold Treasures Await You At 3rd Street.”
• 11:39 The neighbor attempts to bond with his son in the dwindling hours of  his custody by unleashing what looks and sounds like a remote-control fart on wheels.  This greased flatulence tears around the parking lot adjacent to our house, and distracts Mabel from distracting us from distracting ourselves from the failure of Our Particular Yard Sale.
• 12:40 The socio-economic clouds part!  Our Particular Yard Sale is finally and at last graced by the presence of two actual Charlemagne Oaks pedigree-holders.   The first, a  woman sporting the  Kate Gosselin Hackle-back hairdo (the Official Hairdo of Charlemagne Oaks)  inspects a Little Tikes playground implement without the slightest dip of her chin, taking what looked suspiciously like a down-the-nose view of our 10 dollar offering.  Before we can even explain duct tape to her, she flees like a startled doe, making a  excuse that her husband “would have to okay” a purchase of this magnitude and high-jumps into an SUV whose Bluebook value rivals my annual income.   The second, a man with  Rod Blagojevitch hair cross-examines Kate on the truthfulness of her claim that a set of bamboo blinds ($5 each!) –sealed in their original package–had never been used.  He pays $8 for the both and leaves us with a disparaging comment about “Sunday Yard Sales.”
• 12:41-12:59 Faced with rejection, deception, exploitation, and insult, Kate and I do what any 2 members of a pissed off  minority would do: we turn on each other.  We channel our pain into a debate over the theological ramifications of the Sunday Yard Sale, verbally slapping each other like a couple of drag queens wielding fists full of curtain call roses.
• 1:00 The neighbor’s remote control fart car apparently malfunctions, punctuating our argument with a  literal bang.  Smoke sweeps across our yard, and with it, a revelation is ushered in the startled hush.
• 1:01-3:00 I decide that the “giving back” done by Our Particular Yard Sale is not to be done in the distribution of bang-up cheap material offerings, but rather in a sort of spirit of Xmas kind of way.  We will give C.O. what it lacks most of all: Diversity.  According to the 2000 Census, white people comprise 93.92% of the population of Charlemagne Oaks.  There are apparently no gay people here, either, (or anywhere else, if you believe the Census), so I take it upon myself  to go inside, place the stereo speakers on the sill of an open window and blast the danceable sounds of diversity (Stevie Wonder, Sylvester, Los Lobos, Ani DiFranco and TV On The Radio) out into the neighborhood.  Charlemagne Oaks, we love you!  Shake your straight honkey asses! 

Apparently too expensive at any price.

Shit My Old Man Says

 

Why does the wisdom of the ages sound sort of like the breaking of verbal wind?

My sister recently hipped me to the Twitter blog “shitmydadsays” in which someone calling himself “Justin” has preserved for the ages an assortment of his father’s rabid, fist-shaking, denture-rattling proclamations.  Running the discourse gamut from the question of whether household pets are sentient beings (“The dog is not bored, it’s a fucking dog. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube. He’s a god damned dog.”) to the exaltation of culinary cult figures (“Love this Mrs. Dash. The bitch can make spices… Jesus, Joni (Justin’s mother) it’s a joke. I was making a joke! Mrs. Dash isn’t even real dammit!”) to existential alienation in the modern world ((left on answering machine) “Hello? Hello? It’s Sam. Anyone there? Nobody checks this god damned thing. HELLO?! HELLO?! Screw it.”), Sam is a fearless philosopher warrior who “goes there”, as the kids might say.

While I certainly enjoy these quotes, it does appear to me that  Justin may be deliberately provoking his dad on some of them, like since when does an old man just bust out a slap-down on Kate Beckinsdale?  Ordinarily, I might dismiss this as just reality-show-style-scene-setting, but the fact that this guy is very likely baiting his dad and making him look like an ass in a public forum is richly satisfying from a vicarious standpoint.  Who doesn’t want to stick it to the old man?  God knows I do.  I love my dad, but I don’t call him The Dream Crusher behind his back for nothing.  And instead of trotting out that tattered tapestry of grievances that makes our relationship so special and touching, I would much rather retell (for what’s probably the 75th time, tirelessly, and to people I barely know, even) the story about how he once tried to order ”TWO SENIOR COFFEES!” at the top of his lungs, like a murderous Mr. Magoo, from one of those hooded garbage cans in the McDonald’s drive thru.  Take that, Dream Crusher! 

What’s more, “shitmydadsays” will most likely put another nail in the coffin that contains the idea that the elderly have “so much to offer”.  It’s a sentimental notion that casts a sheen of altruistic nobility on those in their ”twilight” years that I suspect no person in their right mind would want to even pretend to embody.  Sure, with age comes experience, and with experience comes wisdom, but contained within that wisdom is the knowledge that nobody learns by listening, if they even listen at all.  (And anyone who’s dwelled on this planet past adolescence can tell you practically nobody listens.)  So if no one’s listening, you can pretty much say whatever you want.  Hence, Sam’s quotability and ultimately, the revelation that the Wisdom of the Ages is itself one big bitchfest.

Justin lives with his dad, and from the looks of things, their relationship is kind of a caricature of the classic parent/child dysfunction: contentious and fraught with prickly criticism.  The use of the remote control, the leftover meatballs, and even the toilet, are glittering golden prizes in this battle for dominance.  Justin may not get the meatballs, but he’s listening while managing to get the last laugh.