Posts tagged: cars

I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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In March of 2003 I wrote an opening editorial for the late lamented Swag magazine project. The editorial was about how a lot of freaks internalize the negativity the larger society has for them. It was about how punk was supposed to promise the allure of a classless society. It was about how we shouldn’t hammer ourselves down because we deserve the rewards of the larger society, at least as much as anyone. The mere existence of this editorial is ironic in so many ways. I have no idea how many people read this the first time around, though, so I’d like to share it online now.

You should also definitely read the piece on Swag, by my old school, zine explosion compatriot Scott Hefflon, which ran first in Lollipop in print, and is now reprinted on Lollipop online. Part of what Scott had to say about the content Forrest Black and I and our pals created was, “It’s really surprising how rarely you find something unique in these “alternative” times. So many things still tow the line, the line is just called something else . . . So yeah, on the surface, Swag could look like a Gothic fashion mag. Lots of scantily-clad vixens, most of them models for one of the sites under the Blue Blood umbrella, but seeing as Amelia G and Forrest Black are top-notch Goth/fetish photographers and have great taste in hotties as well as the few bits of clothing the models wear, that’s far from a bad thing . . . What makes Swag cool is what doesn’t become clear right at first. Style . . . It was fun, I learned a couple …

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I never thought I would be a car person. I always spent all of what money I made on art projects. I drove an increasingly rusted out Camaro for years. When I used to take it on road trips through the deep South, I would be able to tell the depth by whether people at gas stations were asking, “hey, yew all wanna sell that car?” But then I moved to Los Angeles. I loved the city, but I was baffled by the car culture here. People who liked me would avert their eyes if they saw me in my Camaro. The Camaro might have been the ugliest car in the city, but it had a fast engine under the hood and most of the time it ran. Only I got parking tickets all the time. For parking violations I’d never even heard of. Basically, I think they all added up to, if you are going to park a car this ugly on our street, we will charge you accordingly.

When I was a kid, my paternal grandfather used to buy a new champagne Lincoln Continental every year. This was back in the days when it was the size of a continent and the Town Car was a little bit smaller and perhaps more feminine. When I was six, I heard somebody or other saying that the Continental was awfully big and I said that I thought I would perhaps get the more practical Town Car when I grew up. I think this may have been viewed as cute. I was never cute enough to convince my grandfather’s chauffeur to let me play with his gun. When I …

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