Unequal Opportunity Offender

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES

by James Killough

Let me immediately state that, despite the title, there will be no borderline pornographic body parts in this post.  But just the fact I have willfully boxed PFC into a corner where I have to make that caveat is relevant to this article.  I think.

First, take a look at this viral video currently eliciting belly laughs across the Interweb:

It’s a fake, of course.  The bride sort of gives it away, but the drunk woman herself is also too alert; her face lacks the woozy, careless expression of someone who is no longer in control of her actions.  In a way — in a convoluted, forced association sort of way — the video is representative of what I’ve been doing with the content of this blog.

Omnia Vincit Phallus

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I’m trying to make this follow-up post about massive cock a little classier with a title in Latin, which means “phallus conquers all,” a twist on the popular, hopeful gay armband tattoo “omnia vincit amor,” or love conquers all.

Given what has happened in the past few days with hits to our site since the Big Penis Book post, as a content company we have to comment on the effect salacious text and images have on internet traffic.  This is also an excellent opportunity for us to post more images from the Taschen books.  Out of consideration for our token Str8, the beleaguered Eric Baker, whom I imagine is sitting there in Jersey with his head in his hands regretting his association with the feral, smut-minded Gheys of PFC, we are including images from the Big Book of Breasts as well:

There's no point provoking the good burghers of WordPress with naked erections as the lead image. Plenty of room for that later. Well, as much room as all of this flesh can leave.

Just a quick tangent: I have been asked by a few readers why I sometimes use “Ghey” and other times “gay.”  Ghey is the noun, gay is the adjective; e.g., I am a Ghey who makes outrageously gay statements.  And henceforth, “Str8” is the noun, “straight” the adjective.  There is no rhyme or reason for this; this is my sandbox, my content, I make the rules.

The Joy of Stalking

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Alan Cumming has a new site up dedicated to obsessions, itsasickness.com.  I would say it celebrates passions more than obsessions in the truest sense of the word, and I am hanging on the truest sense because the site does have “sickness” in its title.  And sick obsession reminds of the time I went truly mentally ill and stalked a former lover.

Knowing Alan as I do, he probably means sickness as in the recent colloquialism “That is so sick,” like it’s a really good thing.  In the video up on the site right now, Zoe Kravitz is obsessed with a green dragon plushie costume, with how it makes her feel empowered.  This isn’t my particular experience of people obsessed with plushie.  The plushophiles I’ve met are rather lovable, extreme introverts who like to dress up as cartoon characters and have kinky sex.

Zoe Kravitz vogues plushophile lite in Williamsburg for itsasickness.com.

I had a brush with plushophilia and diaper fetishists back in the early Noughties through a friend, Gene, who also had extreme social anxiety disorder (SAD).  Gene was one of a trio of people who would trigger the mnemonic that gave rise to my play Hatter, the film version of which Alan Cumming has been attached to, just so you follow my meandering train of thought.  Gene had some hilarious stories about “furries”

The Circumstantial Exile

How crunchy delicious does "The Borgias" look? It's gonna kick the shit out of "Tudors," I reckon.

BLOGIRADE

by James Killough

Tomorrow will be the season finale of Californication, after which I shall willingly slip into watching Nurse Jackie and less willingly United States of Tara; I find most of Tara’s personas to be more annoying than she does, and I don’t believe her husband loves her so much to put up with that. I’m really psyched about The Borgias.  Jeremy Irons’ voice makes me regret I don’t smoke any more.  He sounds like a total industrial accident.  So glamorous.

I’m going to discuss Californication and its plot, so if you don’t want to read further, please don’t make me say SPOILER ALERT, a term that is equally as annoying as “blog” or “hater.”

The basic story line over four seasons so far: a sexy, rakish writer, Hank Moody (David Duchovny), moved with his girlfriend, Karen (Natascha McElhone), and their daughter, Becca, from New York to Venice Beach in Los Angeles because they were adapting a book of his for the screen.  Hank is deeply in love with Karen, but can’t stay out of trouble much less out of other women’s pussies.  Many, many other women’s pussies.  Snatch is thrown at him like roses at an opera singer.  Hank is basically the wet dream/pet project of almost every male producer in LA I have ever met: the Casanova character: talented, louche, up to his eyeballs in cooch despite himself, chased by the law for things he did but weren’t really his fault.  This is the reason 90% of these guys get into film to begin with: to get laid.  A lot.  And all they end up with is three simultaneous alimonies and a litany of crap on their filmographies.

Duchovny is good at this because he is entirely believable and sympathetic; apparently he checked himself into sex addiction rehab a couple of years ago, so the role of Hank isn’t a stretch for him.  Even better than Duchovny, and someone I would give a molar or two to work with, is Natascha McElhone.  What a revelation she is, and so beautiful to look at.

What An Owl I Am

BLOGIRADE | THE INDIA FILES

by James Killough

It turns out I spoke too soon about Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey.  By the season finale, she’s had more comeuppance than she deserved, and she’s managed to move from super bitch to sympathetic heroine.  I have to hand it to show creator and writer Julian Fellowes: superb job on the old character arc, there, dear chap.

Regardless of what happens outside the house, what is at the center of Downton Abbey is the dynamic between servants and their masters, which is always the basis for shows like this, that intricate Upstairs, Downstairs relationship drama, a perverse master-slave relationship that can be seen as a microculture of the whole employer/employee, ruler/subject dynamic of the world at large.

Servants and masters from "Downton Abbey." Very much like a small corporation.

I grew up with live-in “staff” or “help,” or whatever euphemism works best to chase away the sour taste of having to use the word “servant.”  And it’s correct to use a euphemism in our case because they weren’t servants as the term denotes in a Downton Abbey way.  They really were there to just to help the family, and were treated in as egalitarian a fashion as possible, except for the fact they slept in the servant’s quarters near the kitchen where the laundry was drying, they never ate with us, they called my parents “sir” and “madam,” served us dinner from the left, cleared the plates from the right…. Well, I suppose we did our best not to have servants despite evidence to the contrary.

Just Shoot The Bitch, Already

Very aptly, I am the son of a Mad Man.  In the 60s and 70s, my father was with one of the larger ad agencies that are referred to from time to time in the dialogue of Mad Men.  He accepted a position to head up the Italian operations of that agency, the purview of which was expanded over time, but we the family were based in Rome while he traveled around.  The real reason we were there is probably because the US was afraid to lose Italy and France to the communists during the 70s, so we sent some of our “businessmen” over there to help bolster the interests of democracy.  If I were in a pitch meeting and had to do a mash up of references to describe Dad, it would be Mad Men meets The Good Shepherd.

If Dad has a quibble with the authenticity of "Mad Men," my only problem with "The Good Shepherd" is the women in my world just didn't look like that, which means it was eerily real.

I won’t delve too much into The Good Shepherd aspect because much of it is conjecture, albeit conjecture based on high probability.  Dad has expressed a desire in this last chapter of his life to tell me his story, and I would like him to feel free to do so without fearing that it’s going to end up in a blog side by side with some willfully salacious anecdote that involves sodomy, haute couture and Class A drugs.  Suffice it to say, there is a reason the period we lived in Rome is referred to as the anni di piombo, “the years of lead,” referring to the flying bullets and the bombings that seemed to be a part of our daily lives.  After we left in ’79, things calmed down in Italy considerably.  Hopefully that was just a coincidence.

OMG, BFF! TMI! LOL! CYA! ;-)

That’s the longest phrase I’ve ever been able to make with those triple-letter acronyms.  I never use them in real life.  I’ve never given in to emoticons, either, which has caused a number of misunderstandings over the years when I’ve sent sarcastic texts that weren’t backed up with a wink or a smile.  Fuck it, I’d rather take the flack.  I just can’t do them.  They are too twee, too saccharine, too Disney.  I don’t mind a few Xs after a message to my female friends, but no smiles or winks.  The only emoticon I would conceivably use is the one for ‘fuck you,’ which according to the humoristic Encyclopedia Drammatica is something I don’t even know how to make with symbols from my keyboard, much less with my Blackberry.  Either it’s not too popular, or the sugar plum fairies who invented emoticons just don’t want you to send such filthy symbols.

This demonstrates what happens to even the butchest men when they use triple-letter acronyms and emoticons. This Local 237 teamster innocently texted "LOL" to his gf while waiting for the L train, and look what happened. (Photo: S. Fullana)

The phone call is dying, according to a piece in the Times over the weekend.  Awwww.  As you can no doubt tell from this blog, I like to talk.  I am loquacious to the point of logorrhea.  I shall miss the phone, but I realize I already do.  Gone are the days when I could spend literally hours gassing about anything on the phone with a friend, watching TV on the phone with a friend, nodding off on the phone with a friend.  And I don’t just mean when I was a neurotic teenager trying to work out this terror-ific thing called life.  Well into my twenties I could churn out some seriously meaningless verbiage down the horn.

Does This Corset Make My Ass Look Queer?

Ask any red-blooded baboon: as repressed as the Victorians were, the bustle was a flagrant invitation to do nasty things from behind.

I miss the Victorian Era.  It’s not just that I miss the high-waisted trousers and the frock coats, and the prospect of reading Dickens serialized in the paper every week.  I am probably one of the few men in the modern era who can say he had two frock coats hanging in his closet at one point, made for me by my tailor in Delhi to my amateur designer’s specifications, based on yet another Yohji Yamamoto frock coat I brought in for him to copy.  It’s not that thinking about the Victorian Era makes me miss when I had hair, either, which I usually wore long and curly on top and shortish on the sides, with my sideburns always down to my jawline.  No, the real reason I miss the Victorian Era most is because had I lived then I would have been straight.

As every gay man knows, while inwardly guffawing at those misguided conservative poodles who incessantly yip that ours is a “lifestyle choice,” only an extreme masochist with a major reactionary streak would ever choose to be gay over being straight.  Most of us believe we would make great straight men.  We’d be wonderful fathers, we would seriously pay attention to our woman’s appearance, we’d never even tire of clothes shopping with her.

The reason a Ghey like me would have been straight back then is I would likely have gotten married, had kids, and nobody would have been the wiser.  My wife would have been so repressed and confined by the rigid corset of social mores that she wouldn’t have admitted even to herself that I wasn’t banging her, much less to anyone else.  She would have ignored the stable full of handsome young stable hands, who would have walked funny after I’d spent an afternoon “grooming my horse.”  In the unlikely event of a complaint from her, I would have just yanked a lace in the back of her dress like a yo-yo string and she would have passed right out on the parlor floor like a rag doll, after being cut off from what little air she was getting to begin with.

The Victorian Era was basically when Western culture turned Japanese for a hundred years.  It was graceful, fraught with fascinating social intricacies and niceties, but was, all kidding aside, clearly a real pain in the ass.

Matt Damon Gets Religion

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt think they are about to meet God and are appropriately slack-jawed at the prospect, as I would be. Actually, I'd be snickering while pretending to go along with the prank.

I take movies way too seriously.  I don’t mean the business of filmmaking, that’s too much of a surreal farce, like a performance of Ubu Roi in a never-ending loop with Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin and Steven Spielberg alternating in the role of Père Ubu.  I mean the movies themselves.  I’m constantly relating real life to cinematic reality, a sure sign of not-so-latent mental illness.  For instance, I might be in an animated conversation about my landlady, the Wicked Blais, gesticulating like a Roman trying to wiggle out of blame for a traffic accident, and I’ll say something like, “I’m just like Burt Reynolds in that scene in Deliverance when he’s down, his leg is broken, bone jutting out, and the rabid hillbillies are coming after him and he picks up his crossbow and …”  All of this is to say that while I know Matt Damon is only engaged in an extended game of adult Let’s Pretend when he makes a movie, I’m a bit concerned about two of his recent choices, The Adjustment Bureau and Hereafter.

I really loved the first twenty minutes of TAB. And I mean that: I more than enjoyed it, I loved it. I was smiling. I thought, Hmmm, this might shape up to be the intellectual challenge that Inception wasn’t.  Then they brought God into it, and I started fiddling with my Blackberry, itching for a game of poker. (I am way down right now, over a million dollars at the World Series tables, but that’s nothing compared to the fiasco a month ago when the damned thing reset and I lost thirty-one million in a nanosecond.)

Let me jump off the rails a second to talk about Inception.  I was expecting too much from a major summer release, I think.  My expectations were raised even more when I had a brief scene with a showcase Cali couple just outside the Arclight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.

“Are you going to chain your bike right there?” the She of the couple asked.

“Uh, yes, that’s right,” I replied, resisting a retort like, No, I’m just practicing public displays of light bondage with my buddy Schwinn, here.  You know these Germans, so kinky.

It’s a Shithole, So Keep Digging

Look at what I found on the stairwell of my tenement-slash-college dorm this morning:

Hey, as long as it's got carpeting, it's a bed.

He’s part of the musician crew from the studio apartment across from mine, the place I described in an earlier post as reminding me of how many musicians you can fit with their instruments into a phone booth.  They’re the ones who have no furniture, so they all sleep on the floor and vacuum once a day rather than making the bed.  So glamorous.

I went on a hike yesterday with my friend James Tuttle up to the Hollywood Sign and around Hollywoodland.  When we were still at the base of the hills, we were treated to another ultra-glamorous sight of some smack-head weaving past us, stopping his car, rolling down his window and projectile vomiting onto the street.  Because we were on foot, we had to walk past a streak of barf now decorating the path.  Ten yards later, he stopped again, opened the door this time and spewed once more, even more copiously.  Given that both Tuttle and I are gay men named James with rapid-fire, caustic senses of humor, it was astounding that we didn’t have much to say.  I believe I was processing a thought something like: if a black cat crossing you path is bad luck, what is someone puking across it?  Is it sort of reverse bad luck like when a bird shits on your head, and whoever is with you snickers in that way that means he’s really smothering a hefty schadenfreude-laden guffaw, and says, “That brings good luck,” after which you feel like cracking open his idiotic head like a fortune cookie?

Like spitting in a really butch way, projectile vomiting is a talent, as demonstrated on "Little Britain."

A few yards up the road, the guy pulled into a driveway and was met by another pasty-faced junkie who handed him what I assumed were drugs, but handed them over just like that, cool as can be, not even bothering to hide the transaction from the two revolted homos tramping up the hill trying to get their cardio in and commenting on the houses and how they’d do things differently if only they could afford something more than their current respective shitholes (well, Tuttle’s is a considerably nicer shithole than mine).

Later Tuttle told me that Moby, who as I also mentioned in a previous post has bought a mini-castle on a peak in Hollywoodland called Wolf’s Lair, left his door open one night and awoke to find some druggie passed out in the front hall (or something like that, we’re trying to locate the story; stand by for verification).  Moby being Moby, having started his career playing at raves, allegedly just put a blanket over the kid, and the next morning he was gone.  This makes me feel better about the phone booth musician passed out on my Hollywood shithole’s stairwell this morning.  I should have put a blanket over him rather than kicking him in the ribs as I walked by.  But that’s why Moby’s a rich vegan and I’m a poor carnivore.

The gatehouse to Moby's new 8-bedroom faux French château at the entrance to Hollywoodland. Bastard.

A side view of Moby's new castle, Wolf's Lair. See, if I were him, I would pour boiling oil on junkies who tried to scale my walls and sleep in my foyer. But I'm not a vegan.

The Health Department came today for an inspection of my apartment as well as the  studio across the hall, which is being rented by the lead phone booth musician, a 19-year-old named Corey, who is much more the right demographic for this building than I am.

Let me backtrack a second to explain how I ended up here to begin with: a couple of better options fell through suddenly; I needed a place to move fast; I was staying around the corner at Tuttle’s; I saw this place listed on Craigslist, went to see it, met the handsome manager, was totally charmed, moved in the next day.  I felt so good about my producerly efficient handling of a mini housing crisis.  Two months later, psycho Susan Blais fired the manager, who was by now my drinking buddy and good friend, and now she’s after me, presumably because he was my drinking buddy and good friend.

So the lovely Persian woman from the Health Department showed up chatting on her iPhone with her grandmother, from what little Farsi I understand.  After she’d noted the shameful condition of my toilet, we went across the hall to the musicians’ phone booth and knocked on the door.  It was 2 p.m.  I’d warned Corey this was happening today, but I knew he’d fuck this up when I heard him still partying at 3 a.m., so I mustered my best parental knock in order to rouse someone in the phone booth to come and answer the door, which I accomplished with evidently more success than the stairway sleeper, who had been shut out of the room all day.  A musician I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before (they all look the same with that hair in front of the face) answered the door and I strode in with my best avuncular stride.

“COREY!!  HEALTH DEPARTMENT’S HERE!!”  I barked.  He was asleep in the master bedroom, better known in real estate argot as the walk-in closet.  I kid you not: Corey really was sleeping behind the sliding doors of the walk-in closet.  Adorable.

The reason I was so loud is I was getting my own back for being kept up last night.  Having been a 19-year-old artist into heavy Class A drugs myself, I know there is nothing better than being roused from a nice coma in a shag-carpeted closet following an all-night bender by your avuncular neighbor’s fog-horn voice announcing the presence of government inspectors.

This necessary unpleasantness — I need to prove to the court that this is indeed a shithole, ergo the call to the Health Department — was capped by a spat with the new manager of the building, a sanctimonious Born Again Christian who keeps saying, “Hey, man, I’m just doing my job,” which is the kind of statement that makes my eyes want to pop out of their sockets with the sheer force of steaming rage arising from pressure-cooked moral indignation.

I needed to get away, so I hopped on the bus and headed east, which is where I should have headed to begin with four months ago rather than moving into Susan Blais’s Trap for Runaway Suckers just because the building manager was handsome and charming.  For Christ’s sake, I’m a filmmaker, I should have seen the most obvious forewarning: the Greyhound Bus Station is two blocks away.  The bus stations in New York and Hollywood are a movie-of-the-week cliché.  This building is for kids who come to Hollywood/New York with their dreams stuffed in their guitar cases, who walk up the street, see the “For Rent” sign, think, Wow, this isn’t bad, and like Corey move in, only to find themselves out on their asses a few months later because of the bedbugs, or because they’ve fallen behind of the rent, or whatever, and Susan Blais has fucked them for their deposits, because what they didn’t realize is that this is really the gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale, which lures the young uns in so that the evil witch can bake them in a pie.  If they’re lucky, they escape and  follow the bread crumbs back down to the bus depot and home they go, lighter for the guitar they hocked to give their last penny to the Wicked Blais.

I was never meant to live in this place.  It was a total accident.  I shall never rent with my dick again.

So after being slathered with sanctimony by the building manager, I headed east to my friend Ricardo’s furniture store; I knew he would be trapped there and thus an unwitting victim to my need to mewl.  The whole notion of having to call the Health Department and fight back against this insane woman had given me indigestion, and I hadn’t even eaten.  Of course, as always on buses in LA, there was the ubiquitous schizophrenic talking to himself, a Bus Schizo.  He was quiet until we got to around Silverlake, and then the tirade began.

“SHALOM!” he yelled, which was a nice way to start seeing as it was Friday and it was almost sundown; this was a Jewish Bus Schizo.  After singing a little rhyming ditty, he launched into a diatribe on comparative religion for the benefit of the mostly Latino passengers, the gist of which was that all the “damned Catholics” on the bus should “go to hell because we Jews don’t believe in hell anyway, HAHAHAHA!”,  which actually made some perverse sense.  Unfortunately, his bellowing “SHALOM!” set off another one-eyed Bus Schizo in the handicapped seat behind the bus driver, who started whimpering to himself and rocking back and forth.  All I could think was, Where is John Galliano when you need him?  Imagine him in this scene all coked-up and boozy, personality splintering everywhere, collagened lips a-flapping with racist invectives, hurtling himself down the bus at some militant Jewish crackpot who is screaming, “SHALOM!  I’m meshugana!  Can’t you tell?  All you damned Catholics are going to hell!”  (He really said that.  I copied it verbatim on the notepad on my Blackberry.)

Ricardo’s new store (Freespace Modern, 1282 Sunset Boulevard) is in Angelino Heights sandwiched between Silverlake and Echo Park.  Or maybe it’s just after Echo Park.  I dunno.  It’s pre-hip and it’s over there, near downtown, where I should have moved in the first place, if I’d only taken my lazy ass a bit further than just a block away from Tuttle’s place.  Ricardo is selling his formidable collection of mid-century furniture and lamps at  insanely good prices compared to what others just down the road sell the same thing for.

FreeSpace Modern on Sunset Boulevard in Angelino Heights, the next Silverlake.

It was good I made that trip east today;  I needed a chilled, balancing Ricardo Diaz infusion.  I need a plan for whatever happens after my court date with the execrable Susan Blais next week, because whatever happens, I am out of here.  Going to East Hollywood is a good idea for the time being.  I’ll miss my stomps through the Hills with Tuttle and waving to Moby, but sometimes you gotta be a little Californian and follow the signs, you know what I mean, dood?  One minute you’re chilling in your shithole-slash-dorm room thinking about what to do, where to go after this, so you hop on a bus, listen to a rousing schizophrenic Jewish racist tirade, and the next thing you know, the road ahead is clear, lined with florescent yellow bricks.

Indeed, Hollywood: everything is for a reason.