Eddie Izzard says that G-d doesn’t love Los Angeles. Then again, he also says that he just performed in Las Vegas and Phoenix and those folks would find Hell a mild summer day. From a temperature perspective anyway. Apparently Phoenix gets jokes about squids and ink faster or possibly it is just easier to get a Phoenix audience to show appreciation aloud. Eddie Izzard performs two more nights this week in Slowsquidwritingjokesville (aka Hollywood) to finish out his Stripped tour in La-la-land.

My friend writer Maria Alexander invited me out to the sold out Eddie Izzard show at the Kodak Theatre. At least, I think it was sold out because it was insanely crowded and took me an hour to get home (once I found my car) even though I live down the street. Despite the fact that a non-Angeleno might consider my home walking distance from the Kodak Theatre, I had never been there before, although of course I’ve seen it on television like anyone else. In person, even the non-box seats are staggered in such a way that everyone gets a clear view of the stage. The ushers are courteous and helpful. The bathroom lines move almost alarmingly fast. The only oddity is that they don’t really show you the nosebleed seats on TV. The venue is like twice the size I thought it was and there are definitely seats farther away from the stage, even box seats, than might be ideal. Our seats were a bit far back, but we had a really awesome straight down the center view I enjoyed. I had to do four laps around three levels of the parking garage at Hollywood and Highland after the show because I am less organized than Maria Alexander, so I only remembered what color level I thought I was on. Turned out I did have the color right and it was just crazy hard to find a black Lincoln Town Car in a super crowded garage packed with black Lincoln Town Cars.

I love Eddie Izzard because he manages to mix being incredibly intelligent and funny, while carrying himself perfectly, and saying fuck a lot. He told the audience tonight that PR people say that response to what one says is 70% what you look like, 20% how you say it, and 10% what you say. Now, I can understand small amounts of French after hearing it exclusively for a number of hours. I can speak French (quite badly) after being immersed for three days. Yet I still laughed myself sick at a joke Eddie Izzard told on a previous tour where he told the whole thing in French. So he is a genius in the how-you-tell-it department. Nonetheless, I admit that my eyes glazed over a bit tonight when he spoke in grunts for too many minutes in a row. Then again, he also made a hypnosis reference at one point, so perhaps he was trying to make me very sleepy in that moment.

At any rate, Eddie Izzard presented his political views with humor, taught a little history as he is wont to do, distilled the nature of religion and ox coveting, and told jokes about dinosaurs. You pretty much can’t go wrong with dinosaur comedy. Well, Eddie Izzard, in his brilliance, can’t go wrong with dinosaur comedy.

The comedian came attired in a dark tailcoat with reddish magenta lining, a red striped buttoned down shirt, and some surprisingly sex blue jeans. I hope he was wearing a lot of eyeliner, but I truthfully was not close enough to be sure if he was or if, with the distance to our seats, my brain just filled that in with my personal preferences. Eddie Izzard did a little bit where he talked about people coming up to him and accusing him of not really being a transvestite. He said of all the things he never thought he would have to defend, he never thought he would have to vigorously insist that he is too a transvestite, even if he has been wearing pants a lot lately. He does play a pretty butch manly man on The Riches on FX and he does a great job of that too. I chalk that up to talent and versatility, rather than secretly not being a transvestite, especially given The Riches’ sensitive portrayal of the youngest child’s burgeoning transvestism and the trantastically fabulous party in the second season finale of the show.

All of my dyslexic pals will be pleased to know that Eddie Izzard says he is dyslexic and just memorizes his shows rather than writing them down and, from here on in, dyslexia shall be referred to as kat spelled with a k. I have a complex theory about why so many flamboyantly unusual and artistic people are dyslexic, but it is long, so I’ll save it for another time. As Eddie Izzard has nothing to prove, I’m going to assume he really is dyslexic and really is a transvestite from the heart and isn’t just claiming such things so people will think he is creative or talented.

Eddie Izzard closed out his performance talking about living on the dark side of the moon with Darth Vader, Pink Floyd and a squirrel. You really have to hear him do it because only Eddie Izzard’s performance can do it justice.

I just had a bit of a DC/Baltimore flashback weekend. Photographer Carlos Batts planned to do a gallery show/video release party at the combined studio locations of Federico Zignani and Apollo Starr. Normally such an event would be on my calendar in pen, but the damn date of this particular shindig kept changing. And then seminal DC industrial band Chemlab was playing the Knitting Factory. Due to the requirements of Murphy’s Law, both events were the same night.

Being the plucky Los Angeles denizen that I am, I managed to hit the Chemlab show, the Carlos Batts party, and the cool hot dog stand. (Yes, in LA, we have hot dog stands ranked by factors like cool and celeb client list.) Afterwards, Forrest Black and I took Carlos Batts and his gigantic entourage home in my limo. Passersby never can be sure how many people are behind tinted black glass and Carlos was all plotting mischief we could get into.

Anyway, in addition to his coffee table books and lots of other accomplishments, the fabulous Carlos Batts has shot a whole lot of erotic photo sets currently on BlueBlood.com and you should expect to see a whole lot more from him there. He has just released a video, two years in the making, starring April Flores, called Voluptuous Life and you should expect to see more about that here as well. Interview about the release party and gallery show now:

Amelia G: What was the special printing process for the images displayed on the wall?

Carlos Batts: The images on the wall were R prints mounted on sentra.

AG: What made you decide to do your party at that location?

CB: I shoot a lot of my commercial work there including fashion ads and music videos. The owner of the studio has parties there and is a good friend.

AG: The date of the party kept moving around; what was up with that?

CB: We were trying to plan around the holidays to make it work for everyone.

AG: Where did you and April Flores get your fabulous premiere outfits?

CB: We got them from our good friend Oskar de la Cruz’s store Luxe de Ville. It’s this really great store on Sunset in Echo Park. Oskar styles us for all our major events.

AG: How many people do you think it would be possible to fit it a limo and who would you most like to surprise with an angry mob exiting one?

CB: I think 20 people could squeeze into a limo and I would have to say I would want to surprise George Bush with the angry mob.

Just in case no one picked this up from all the pinstripes and shotgun-themed photo sets on BlueBlood.com or the fact that I roll in a Lincoln Town Car:
Yes, I have a mobster fetish.

Triad Election is actually the second in a series of Hong Kong mobster from action director Johnnie To, but it is the first to be released stateside this month. It has been well-received on the festival circuit, partly for its perceived anti-commercial (or at least anti-big business) message, but the salient points of interest here are gangsters, issues of honor and competition, and lots of gunplay.

Trailer after the Read more » jump below.

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 things, and there was no nostagia back-in-my-day shit or mindless bashing of how everything sucks now and everyone’s a sell-out. No, it was well-researched bashing – funny, but not hatefully hipster ironic – and it read like something I’d write, or something one of my friends’d write. I wanna buy the writer a drink and see what they say next. That’s good writing, right? Hell, I even read Amelia G’s one-pager about buying a fuckin’ car. Sure, I know she can write and all, but who the hell care what car she bought and why and what it means to her? By the end of her story, I did. Who knew? It was a little tough to read cuz the text was one column across the entire page, but I read the whole thing, liked it, and I wanna buy Amelia G a drink to see what else she has to say. (OK, maybe I just wanna get her drunk. Heh.) . . . All in all, a damn fine publication, and one quite unlike anything else out there. And it’s got layers, baby, cuz these are not stupid fuckin’ posers spouting hipster slogans, parroting some review they just read and passing it off as their own wit. There’s eye candy, there’s smart, attitude-laced editorial (without being needlessly vicious), and there’s coverage of topics you didn’t know you were interested in until you found yourself absorbed in the piece.” Go to Lollipop and check out the whole feature on Swag there.

And now for the promised editorial:

I admit that sometimes I get discouraged with my subculture lifestyle. I think to myself that I started down this path by choice and maybe it is not too late to change direction. I think that, now that I have finally paid off my student loans and gotten my brain out of hock, maybe I should go back to school. Maybe business school could beat the importance of money into my head. Maybe I should become an attorney like my father. Maybe, at a bare minimum, I should steer my photography and writing towards more mainstream subjects.

There are a variety of things which will make me spin out into the headspace where I think such things. Inconsistent friends pretty much top the list. We’ve all known people who were our friends one day and the next they were blabbing our confidences or talking trash and then the next day they thought they could just be pals again. I’m not talking about plastic Los Angeles fair weather friends. Those are honest in their fashion and all you have to do to keep them pleasant is to keep doing well. I’m talking about alterna-identified people who have such deep-seated unhappiness about where they are at that they strike out at those closest to them because they just feel upset and are sure it must be somebody else’s fault. One of my pet peeves is cool counterculture girls who get to a certain age and start obsessing on how classy they are.

I became the sort of person I am today partly because my parents raised me to be without prejudice of class, color, or religion. On the face of it, one might think that bringing a child up to be genuinely colorblind was a very virtuous act. I believe it was. Of course those are the values I was brought up with, so I am biased. But it certainly contributes to my sense of alienation because some of the artificial things that other people use to identify supposedly kindred spirits just don’t apply for me.

One of the things which first attracted me to the counterculture was the lack of class boundaries. It was up to the individual what impression to make. You could be cool whether your parents were rich or poor, educated or illiterate, prominent in the community or living in another country. The lack of boundaries also meant a rich cross-pollination of ideas because everyone had a different background and there was not a this-is-the-way-it-has-always-been mentality.

Okay, over time, I have realized that there is one hidebound idea which really bothers me but which is endemic to subcultures. There is the notion that freaks should not be successful. This self-defeating sentiment can be found throughout most of the counterculture, whatever the specific affiliation of the people involved might be – Gothic, punk, deathrock, rockabilly, fetish, hippie, altrock, etc. No matter what I believe intellectually, my inner punk rocker believes that, on some level, success equals oppression. No matter how hard you work for it. On some level, like any minority, I have internalized the prejudice of the mainstream. I’ve been told that my weird hair and my perceived sexuality and my leather jacket all mean I do not deserve to be successful.

Well, the point here is to tell my inner punk rocker that there are rewards for being cool. Being able to express yourself with your appearance and being able to enjoy unique cool stuff are important rewards for taking the road less traveled.

And I deserve those rewards. And so do you.

Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. I adored his unfettered capacity for pleasure. He was deeply into consuming cookies and he didn’t care who knew it. If there were no cookies available, he would eat a cardboard circle if he had to. He would eat that cardboard circle with no shame. He was so ready for anything, he would eat the moon, if he could get to it. The scope of his desire was infinite and proud. He could see no 12 steps coming. He was Cookie Monster and he was prepared to shout his joyous desire aloud. If you baked him a flat crisp cake of sweetened dough, he would let you know how much he enjoyed it. You wouldn’t have to wonder whether he was experiencing pleasure because he would let you know about it and he didn’t care who was watching. Cookie was the kind of Monster where you had to understand he might take just as much joy from someone else’s baking. He wanted cookies and he wanted them from everyone he met. But, if you didn’t require monogamy of him, there was no one else with such contagious happy hedonism. CM’s turn as Alistair Cookie on the intellectual Monsterpiece Theater showed his smart side, but it was still his intense googley-eyed passion which inspired us all. Cookie just knew how to make people feel good. He embodied unrestrained id in its most beautiful and fulfilling form.

Sure I enjoyed the curmudgeonly insight and willingness to speak his mind exhibited by Oscar the Grouch, but it was Cookie Monster I dreamed about. It didn’t matter if he was a little heavy around the waistline. His charisma overrode all that. He made everyone around him share his sense of satiation as they marveled at the magnitude of his consumption. This was why all the girls and, let’s face it, the boys loved Cookie Monster. As time went on, he was even idolized by a new generation of entertainers such as Bart Simpson whose cowabunga catchphrase is an homage to his blue predecessor. Despite his lifestyle, or perhaps because of it, Cookie has been beloved enough to be welcome everywhere from celeb galas to the White House. He campaigned for milk, but only as something to wash cookies down with.

Somewhere there is a photo of my father in a hallway at our home in Scarsdale, New York posing like Cookie Monster to entertain me. His musician’s ear gave him the ability to do the Cookie Monster voice so well, although he wasn’t down with pigging out or the whole making crumbs thing. I have so many happy memories associated with Cookie Monster. I don’t see him as much as I used to, but TiVo lets me slip off to visit him at Sesame Street from time to time, no matter what is going on in my regular day-to-day life. He is always the same and he always makes me smile. If it is his fault that I overeat as an adult, I love him too much to care.

Some time ago, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ran a special report about whether Cookie Monster was a bad role model for children. The show suggested that maybe children were overeating sweets because they saw their fuzzy blue hero do it. They interviewed a child chomping a large cookie. They showed one of the show’s reporters, Steven Colbert or Ed Helms I think, chasing after a Lincoln Town Car trying to get a comment from a blue figure in the back who never makes eye contact. I laughed out loud. I might have moved on to more mature relationships myself, but Cookie Monster was still a rock star, still doing it his way. No one was going to tame my Cookie or tell him what to do.

So you can well imagine my horror when I saw the recent press info. They make no mention of the Daily Show segment, but they make it clear that Cookie Monster is now being forced to promote vegetables and sing a new song called “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food” to teach healthier living to a new set of fans. Maybe he is bowing to media scrutiny. Did he sell out because of Sesame Street’s new business partnership with Earth’s Best health foods? I like to think he wouldn’t do that, but maybe he blew all his early paychecks on baked goods and really needs the money. Maybe he got busted boosting something tasty fresh out of the oven and this is part of his community service. I just can’t see my beloved Cookie doing this willingly. McDonald’s is one of the underwriters of Sesame Street, so I feel like there is something truly insidious about curtailing Cookie Monster’s one true pleasure. How much do they really care about health if they are taking money from Mickey D’s? Something just does not add up. The Sesame Street site now showcases a game, sponsored by the letter G, which is called “Toss a Salad with Cookie Monster.”

Maybe Cookie Monster is just getting old. I guess we all age faster than we want to. As the years go by, the cookies take a greater toll. The big CM is turning 36 now. DJ Larry Levan of New York’s legendary Paradise Garage, who mixed the smash hit Cookie Monster and the Girls LP, died when he was only 38. Rock stars usually have to die at 27 if they want to be remembered at their best, but Elvis still gets painted as he was young and beautiful, snarling and full of life, ready to take on the world. I will choose to remember Cookie Monster at the height of his fame and success, as my blue hero who belted out “C is for Cookie” for the whole world to hear.

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 complained about this to my father, he told me that my grandfather’s chauffeur did not have a gun.

My grandfather grew up very poor in a tough neighborhood and was the only member of his family to get an advanced education. He claimed to have been Golden Gloves in college and, as an older man, he still had a powerful boxer’s build in his pinstriped suits. He drank scotch and smoked cigars. He planned to take a few hundred people on a weekend cruise for his seventieth birthday. He told me duckling with black cherry sauce would be one of the menu choices just for me.

When my Camaro finally gave up the ghost and could not be repaired and could not be driven above 35mph without certain death, I was at a loss. I didn’t know what else to get. I was a disenfranchised artistic punk rocker. But I was also in Los Angeles. I know people in LA will judge you on your ride. But I am not from around here and I do not know the code. I don’t know what a certain car says about a certain person. I asked everyone I knew what they thought I should have. I think maybe they could not tell me because then how could they judge me on it.

My Camaro was ugly. It was rusty. My clothing often got torn getting in and out of it. It had such deep-seated dirt, it was impossible to really clean. It had no working A/C and I often got heatstroke in it. My neighbors would throw smoothies on it because they didn’t like it being parked nearby. Once I actually got pulled over and the police forced me to remove the little voodoo doll which had hung from the rearview since before I bought the car. It stopped working shortly thereafter. I surprised myself by crying when it was towed away for the last time. That Camaro was such a symbol of my chosen road less traveled.

I live three blocks from a Lincoln dealership. After the Camaro breathed its last, I was paralyzed for a month on the vehicle issue. I finally decided to go over to the Lincoln dealership and just test drive a Town Car. I probably wouldn’t even like it. The fleet manager thought it was weird that a little purple-haired girl wanted to try that one. He tried to steer me towards an LS which is the sporty sedan Lincoln is trying to position against BMW and Mercedes. I didn’t even want to try one. I wanted to get in a new Town Car, see that it was not what I wanted, and then go buy another beat up big car from the seventies.

But the second I slid behind the wheel of that black gleaming Town Car, I wanted it so bad my stomach hurt. It smelled like leather and the A/C worked immediately and I drove the fleet manager all over Hollywood and cracks in the pavement which had once caused my Camaro’s bent wheel well to cut the tire below . . . well, I couldn’t even feel those bumps in the road.

My grandfather started a trust fund for me at the same time he began making plans for his seventieth birthday party bash. My grandfather worked very very hard for everything he had. He died of a heart attack before the birthday he was so looking forward to. The trust fund I got when I finished university was eight hundred dollars, not even enough to make a dent in my student loans. But there were more than four hundred people at my grandfather’s funeral and I know he would have liked that, even if it was not quite the party he’d planned.

When I sat in my Lincoln Town Car for the first time, I had the most intense sense that maybe some of the life I had once expected could happen. It made me feel optimistic. I still have no idea what Los Angeles natives make of it. They mumble about it not being the car they would have expected, but they still can’t tell me what would have been the right choice.

And I’ve finally got the car I wanted when I was six-years-old and anything was possible.