King Diamond Looking Latino Band, Glasslands, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, December 19th, 2007, 11pm:

George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal A/K/A the Heinrich Himmler Moon Station, Washington Heights, Manhattan, NY, December
21, 2007, 10:57PM:

Sweeney Todd: Tim Burton’s best film in years. Even without the “Ballad.” I like the musical, so I may be biased.

Juno: If you self-consciously inject class into your narrative– contrast cars, homes & attitudes!– and self-consciously model said narrative as a quirky, yet sensitive and oddly Real look at teenage pregnancy, don’t mess up my head by then having all of the consequences of pregnancy happen for the upper middle class adoptive couple. Don’t screw with my mind, man, by having the baby daddy fly home to the lower middle class empty nest and do an acoustic number.

I read a New York Times article about Juno’s screenwriter, Diablo Cody, before I saw the film– but even without the data therein, I would have been able to pinpoint the screenwriter’s age at somewhere between 28 and 32. Only a crumbling, decaying hipster would write teenagers This Cool while being totally clueless as to how The Kids Talk. One sees the project’s genesis in a single image: a heavily-stickered Macbook Pro with a window opened to the screenplay and a second resolutely stuck on urbandictionary.com. And, c’mon, really? Iggy & the Stooges and Patti Smith? I can’t suggest any plausible alternatives for the favorite musical acts of a Unique, Weird sixteen year old girl in 2007, but there’s a reason for that: I’m old. Whatever retro-wave the current crop of freaktards are riding, it sure ain’t the same one as 1994.

Wizard.

Walk Hard: Not exactly funny but astonishingly wry, with an obsessive level of detail. If you’re an idiot like me who loves stupid music biopics and documentaries, then this is your film. Sam Tregar, I’m talking to you. You gots to know, Trick loves da kids.

There Will Be Blood: Other than dating Fiona Apple, I consider all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous efforts to be amongst the world’s worst mistakes, but the trailers for There Will Be Blood had me anticipating this film. It was clear that something had changed. And I was right. The first two hours and twenty minutes are about as good as this type of filmmaking can get. Much has been said, rightly, about Daniel Day Lewis’s performance, but I found something completely genuine and realistic about the tone of the character interactions. Dang, it was great, and more importantly: it was like Paul Thomas Anderson had matured & shed his lapdog hangup about needing to be coddled and stroked by his master.

Then there’s the final twenty minutes in which one can smell the artistic self-doubt about what’s come before, including the film’s natural ending, and the director falls back onto his D.O.A. bag of tricks. Suddenly we’re in a Paul Thomas Anderson film. The only thing missing is Philip Seymour Hoffman singing and dancing in Katamari Damacy cosplay.

Gross.

–

Special Bonus, The Brave One: It was raining so hard that I had to do something to take my mind off the flood, so I picked this. One of the most racist and paranoid films in a really long time. Awful.

The Mysterious Dr. Tallon. Boy poet, filmmaker & apparent dweller in the opium parlors of 19th Century Limehouse.

Child of the same backwoods that inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in The Darkness” & now transplanted to New York City. Bonafide hustler, making his name. Straight up 11211, the hippest palindromic zipcode of these United States.

Having found his mad Rimbaud book on the consignment rack of the St. Mark’s Bookshop– first, second & third impressions: “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”– I deciphered the various clues and codes and maps included therein and hunted down our man. We’ve been pals of the bossom ever since. Let me sleep in his bed. Was very concerned about the number of pillows.

Had borrowed a magick lantern & through it projected his magnum opus. A film that he’s been laboring on either 6 or 2 years, or his whole life, depending on your system of mathematics. As the lights went dark, I had a pang of worry– like, what if it sucked?– but that was only The Adversary giving ugly thoughts. I need not have worried. It’s a massive achievement.

Does a mean impersonation of Jim Carroll & demanded a rewrite on 2/3rds of this content.

At the ripest age of them all: 28.

December 18-19th, 2007.

Fritz Donnelly (on the right.) Filmmaker, writer & apparent Gollum impersonator.

Williamsburg bridge rising up behind. Mix-n-match mojo master. Man, that dude’s a mystery. Just go here.

Age: somewhere between 25 and ?

December something, 2007.

–

Previous Donnelly Action.

What the Christ, I’m in San Francisco listening to Mechanical Animals.

(Trick Daddy.)

San Francisco is a city with which I have a turbulent history. While within its limits, I’ve broken my foot, killed a relationship, spent a sleepless week in a fleabag residency hotel, watched a visit with an old pal go horribly awry, and had my only episode of genuine Xenophobic paranoia– and these are only the bad memories. The good ones are too numerous and possibly painful but in a different way.

–

I’ve come back to Los Angeles, the freak kingdom, and I’m feeling whacked.

I’ve been dealing with some form of vacation– either my own or that of others– since December 1st. That’s a month and a half, with only about 10 days off. I believe that we may safely conclude that this Winter Tour has come to its inevitable end.

I have assorted photos & videos, but otherwise that’s it.

It’s done. Thanks, world!

LA is remarkable– I’m more than tired of it, but coming back feels like the warm hug of home. Before today, it’d been so long since I’d been down in Hollywood that I couldn’t even remember the last time– maybe early December with the Etters.

There is nothing more pleasurable and disgusting than the bombast of Hollywood & Highland. The first time that I felt like a citizen of the Freak Kingdom was on that very block, watching the dude who dresses like Spongebob Squarepants hit on high school girls. In character. Instinctively, I knew that any place capable of such a disturbing misuse of media properties must be where I belonged.

Today’s tally: (1) premiere of a Hannah Montana movie at the El Capitan, replete with crowd of several hundred screaming kids, (1) giant fiberglass promotional half destroyed Statue of Liberty for Cloverfield and (1) overheard instance of Danny Bonaduce giving people directions to the best tattoo parlor.

Following is an open letter of complaint from Arafat Kazi to Dhaka Stage, a theatre troupe in Dhaka, Bangladesh:

–

Dear Dhaka Stage:

Over the years, I’ve attended several of your plays. Off the top of my head, I can remember watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and All in the Timing in the 90s, as well as one of Wilde’s plays. A few weeks ago, I saw a poster for today’s and tomorrow’s staging of your adaptation of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Being a fan of Douglas Adams, the theater, entertainment in general, and with pleasant memories of Dhaka Stage in my mind, I went to buy tickets at the Nordic Club for my friends today. I was refused on the grounds of, specifically, not being “foreign”.

I don’t want to go into the etymology of “foreign” and argue that, as your average rich Bangladeshi I was, in fact, an Other figure. I didn’t want to go back home to get my Green Card (Bangladeshi foreignness apotheosized). Curiously, my biggest reason for wanting tickets was to show my girlfriend a good time. We had met while I was living in Boston and she in New York, and both Boylston Street and Times Square featured prominently in our courtship. Interestingly enough, this wonderful girl who loves me enough to travel to Bangladesh, is herself foreign. Not ABCD foreign, not European-posted-in-third-world foreign, but a white girl from Galloway, Ohio; American as apple pie until I curried her favor and carried her away.

I’ve studied at one of the greatest universities in the world, and loving Bangladesh enough to return home in spite of a Foreign Degree and Green Card, I can say that I understand the importance of preserving one’s cultural trappings in the face of strangeness. Since we’re all homogenized these days, the only great differences that exist anymore are between rich countries and poor countries, between the occident and the orient. Beyond understanding, I can even say that I empathize with this need to make sure that expatriates in Bangladesh don’t forget Western culture and like Kurtz go native.

The one difference I’ve seen elsewhere in the world, in this culture-preserving movement which is common to all immigrants, no matter where or how permanent, is that members of the host country are usually invited to participate or, at the very least, attend as guests. My friends used to drink beforehand so that they could survive the Bangla Society bore-a-thons hosted at MIT. I remember even trying to get them to listen to Bangla rock music, comparing James favorably to Iggy Pop and “Ekta Prem Dao” to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”.

Now Douglas Adams and Shakespeare will live on in greatness whether or not their works are performed by your piddling group. But hosting a play in Bangladesh, and then barring Bangladeshis from being able to watch it, smacks of arrogance, of self-importance and cultural egotism. I guess that, while I’m angry at not being able to watch the play, I could have justified my personal exclusion by writing it off as the exclusivist habits of a bunch of incompetents who’ve failed at both getting posted to nicer countries AND at befriending people from their host country, thereby essentially dooming themselves to the soiled pit of each others’ society. This would have been my personal reaction to being refused, as an individual member of society, from watching a live adaptation of one of my favorite novels ever. (I even have the original radio scripts.) But as an aesthete, as a patron of the higher arts, as a fan of Douglas Adams and other Greatest Hits of Literature Written In English (or translated to), this snootiness transmogrified itself, in my eyes, from petty racism and xenophobia to a complete refutation of all the qualities that have made literature great from the time of Wordsworth onwards. I can picture Byron raging at the injustice of it all, I can imagine DeQuincey writing to Keats, I can picture serious Arundhati Roy likening the incident to Gandhi on the train and unable to find her own family a seat when Dhaka Stage invites her to speak on tolerance and friendship. I thought of my own immigrant experience in America, and finally, I thought of the girl that I love, and her own situation as an expatriate living in Bangladesh. What if I had faced a similar situation when I walked into Boston University for the first time as the only brown student in my literature classes? Would I have spent Christmases in New Jersey with my best friend, and would he ever have been invited to my parents’ apartment for Eid? What about my girlfriend? What if my friends, instead of accepting her as a fellow human being, responded with the Dhaka Stage welcome and rejected her on the basis of her not being Bangladeshi?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, because thankfully, out of all the “foreigners” I know, both living in Bangladesh and all over the world, and all the Bangladeshis I know, similarly scattered across the globe, none of them are assholes. Pity you guys are.

Arafat Kazi

Prior to yesterday, the last time that I heard anything off the bloated & overproduced Guns N’ Roses album Use Your Illusion II must have been back in Boston, reclining on the filthy bed of Mr. Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka theatre community.

Those were high times, with the lumbering giant cycling through the entire history of 1980s and 90s metal, trying to convince me of the magic inherent in Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I have long attributed Arafat’s fondness for metal as a product of some bizarre cultural translation whereby his Bangla brain hears music in a way fully different from my own. (This theory is scalable to Europeans– how else do you explain Robbie Williams and All Saints?)

But last night the random brought up a few old favorites from the semi-original G’n'f’n'R lineup– specifically “Civil War,” “Shotgun Blues,” “Pretty Tied Up,” and “You Could Be Mine.” I’ve never had any patience for the ballads on the Use Your Illusion albums– unlike Mr. Kazi who, to this day, adheres to the beauty and power of “November Rain”– but I admit a weakness for the sound of the rock numbers that, had they been on an earlier album, would stand with the band’s earlier efforts. And let us make no mistake: Appetite for Destruction is the defining album of scum rock, one of the great works, and a thing so fully digested individually and culturally that there’s no reason to listen ever again.

This got me thinking along a line of weird truth: there is a very basic argument to be made that the reason I live in Los Angeles is because of the awful impact of Guns N’ Roses on my childhood brain. I have very specific memories of being a wee lad of 10 or 11 and seeing the videos for “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience” and thinking to myself that I should ever so much like to go and live in the disgusting hell of Hollywood. An echo of which occurred at 13 when I bought both Appetite and the Illusions.

It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision but I think I may have moved here to follow out that forgotten childhood wish. God knows “My Michelle” and “Pretty Tied Up” are readable as blueprints for my life, circa early-to-midlate 2007.

The point of all of which is: for all the outcries that it’s just art, that it doesn’t really impact the kids, I’m living proof otherwise. Watch what you give your kids. Shit has consequences. And another thing: there are no more old scores. Yesterday was the day that I settled all the family business.

There was no way in Hell that I was paying $25 to go to MacWorld, but elly had a Solution. She scummed a badge off someone not in need & thus, for an hour, my name was Nicole.

Not counting bathroom breaks and crying jags, the amount of time I spent inside MacWorld proper was about 15 minutes. This was enough to see what was necessary: a weird, religious pillar of MacBook Air cases strung together and hanging from the ceiling. The faithful flocked like man-apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and touched the plastic in the hopes that it would confer powers. (In a cruel twist of fate, it was later pointed out that the man-apes had a primitive, barter-based economy allowing an amount of social and individual mobility, while the attendees of MacWorld were all landlocked booshwah-z incapable of change. Dang. )

Anyway:

These pictures reminded me of the… third to last convention that I attended, Erotica LA 2007, for a gig that never panned out, way back in July. Something about the cameras and the creepy grabbing. Contrast & compare, amigos:

(That’s Tia Sweets in the role of a lifetime: the MacBook Air pillar!)

Regardless of this election cycle’s outcome, it is safe to say that we have avoided the worst of all possible fates– the dreams of a Rudy Presidency have been dashed like the brains of Babylon’s children.

My first stint in the city coincided almost exactly with his tenure as Mayor, and like all New Yorkers from the hey-hey pre-9/11 day-days, Rudy was a constant fixture of my personal landscape– an unhinged, sociopathic and gruesomely racist bully capable of saying everything and doing anything.

Jimmy Breslin summed it up best: “A small man in search of a balcony.”

Even so, I have a tinge of sadness that Rudy went out with a whisper, begging for votes through broken microphones. I wanted his campaign to fall apart, but I didn’t want the implosion of a lazy candidate surrounding himself with inexperienced yes-men. I wanted a red faced freak out, a screaming monster of a debate answer, or R.G. pushing a pie-faced kid in the mud amidst the laughter of Bronx goons.

Who could have imagined that Nosferatu would trade in his fangs for the mannerisms of a party hack, lisping out limp answers on economic policy and disaster relief?

Not me, anyway, and it seems like a strategic mistake. Somewhere in frenzy of post-9/11 adulation, the Mayor bought into his own hype. He began to believe that people liked him. The problem with this theory is that no one likes him.

His appeal as a candidate for any office had never been that of the amiable fellow. He had always been the jerk who’d show the sissies what needed doing; not so much George Bush as George Wallace.

What might’ve been if only he had embraced his fundamental repugnance of character and turned it into a campaign virtue? This year’s contest was too crowded with bland non-entities afraid of making mistakes. The new Rudy never had a chance of gaining traction, not while he was continually forced to address his personal life and past record.

But there’s always room in the circus for a firebrand.

Of course, he still would’ve lost– but he could have gone down a Lion rather than a lamb.

(And Florida? What vampire goes to the Sunshine State?)