Take Two Tuesday and Gotta keep ’em separated — Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: What life will you choose?

Election day special.

Tartu, Estonia.

Choose … wisely.

This post’s picture originally appeared on November 9, 2010 at 9:53 am. Check that near-synchronicity.

R.I.P. retread — Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968

Been buried in academic work, but I needed to throw out a quick, sad retread of Ms. Myers’ “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” post. Beautiful, adventurous Cynthia passed away yesterday of undisclosed causes, per Hef.

R.I.P., Ms. Myers (9/12/50-11/4/11).

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

“Wholly Toledo!” is the name of the article that accompanies the pictorial for the lovely and talented Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s Miss December 1968. Her wildly popular centerfold shot her to stardom among the troops in Vietnam, and a pinup of her is featured in the film Hamburger Hill. She has been a teen model, a television personality, played a lesbian songstress in one of the most famous camp films out there, and become an unwitting space cowgirl in her 60 years on this planet. Buckle up, because here we go!

Cynthia wrote to Playboy a few years ago, informing us that she’d like to be considered as a centerfold beauty. Assistant Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski answered with a reminder that our Playmates must be of legal age but that Cynthia should keep in touch. She did just that.

Well, kind of.

The shoot was in June of ’68, and Ms. Meyers was born in September of ’50, but Playboy waited until Cynthia was comfortably 18 to publish her pictorial. It had become common practice for the magazine after the scandal with Elizabeth Ann Roberts.

In fact, the most recently featured “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playmate, the fantastic Susan Bernard, was also 17 at her photoshoot and saw her spread published after she turned 18.

Posing underage for Playboy is not the only common ground between Ms. Bernard and Ms. Myers. While Ms. Bernard was featured in Russ Meyers’ cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, today’s special gal starred in his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

I promise to have a full-out Movie Moment for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls one of these days. For my friend’s recent 31st birthday, I sent him a picture of the cast of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with him tagged as Dolly Read and me as Cynthia Myers. I explained that I originally had me as Dolly and him as Cynthia, but I switched it because it was his birthday.

You know Roger Ebert wrote it? I don’t think he ever gets to criticize a movie again.

Cynthia is pictured reading a five-year-old palmistry pamphlet about what the following year once held for her because she placed a large credulity in psychic phenomenon.

“I’ve known since I was 15 that I’d be a Playmate. It’s almost as if this had been fated to happen.” Cynthia’s penchant for precognition can be traced to her early teens.

(Ibid.)

“A junior high school friend of mine in Toledo,” she says, “was a nut on palmistry, astrology and even reading tea leaves and crystal balls. Like most people, I thought is was just a bunch of baloney. But when I began reading about prophets like Edgar Cayce, I began to realize that there are strange spiritual forces in the world undreamed of even in The Playboy Philosophy.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Myers, I think you’d be surprised by what the Playboy philosophy can dream of.

In 1994, it was revealed that a picture from Ms. Myers’ centerfold pictorial was among several that crafty NASA jokesters have launched in to space over the years. Ms. Myers, together with Leslie Bianchini, Angela Dorian, and Reagan Wilson, was snuck in to the checklist for the Apollo 12 mission that was placed in astronauts’ suit cuff on their trip to the moon in November of 1969. Ms. Myers specifically took her space journey with astronaut Al Bean.

Don’t forget: Describe the protruberances.

Boobs : Geeks :: Horse : Carriage. I think it’s kind of funny and sweet.

And the gals didn’t just go up in the lunar landing module: they straight moon walked. The astronauts found their pictures while fulfilling their extravehicular (read: outside the module on the lunar surface) mission duties on the moon itself.

Pete Conrad got Miss September 1967, Angela Dorian, (“Seen any interesting hills and valleys?”) and Miss October 1967, Reagan Wilson (“Preferred tether partner”). Al Bean got Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers (“Don’t forget — Describe the protuberances”), and Miss January 1969, Leslie Bianchini (“Survey — her activity”).

(“Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists.” January 13, 2007. BoingBoing.net.)

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

(Ibid.)

A large, color version of the shot of Cynthia that was smuggled up to the moon in the Apollo 12.

Lest we forget, the lovely and talented DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967 and, like Cynthia, one of the most popular Playmates in the magazine’s history, also rode shotgun on the Apollo 12 mission. She was in the control console, her picture labelled, “Map of a heavenly body.”

I always feel compelled when talking about the Playmate pictures and NASA to bring up the fact that my sorority’s badge is on the moon. Neil Armstrong put it there for his wife. It’s my sorority’s badge and it is on the moon. The moon that is in space. Sorry, but I get pretty cocky and excited by that. Tell a friend.

This much more recent picture of Ms. Myers just might get her kicked out of the Red Hat Society.

Can our prescient Playmate predict anything about her future? “I’m going to be an actress,” she says simply. “Notice I didn’t say ‘I’d like to be,’ but ‘I’m going to be.’ I don’t know how good I’ll be as an actress, but I’ll be one.”

(“Wholly Toledo!” Playboy. December 1968.)

Judging from her track record as a prophetess — and from her already abundant attributes — we’d like to venture a prediction of our own: Playmatehood should be just the beginning for the remarkable Miss Myers.
(Ibid.)

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Talk Nerdy to Me and Science Friday — New set of prime operatives

Two-step plan for becoming the only species in the multiverse.

Art installation by Lori Hershberger.

We’ve already got cracking on this, really. Well done … Earth. Let’s see what we can do with the rest of the Milky Way, and maybe Intergalactic Viceroy Hawking* will okay a mission to the Large Magellanic Cloud.

You know. Just to see what’s what over there with those guys. Kick the tires, shoot the breeze, strip mine a couple of planets and turn them in to dumps.

*You didn’t actually think he was human, did you? Tell me you didn’t buy that hype.

Take-two Tuesday: William Blake Month — “The Fly”

This entry originally appeared on June 22, 2010 at 1:44pm.

Late post, am I right? I’ve been invovled in some deep bookfoolery which I will explain below. The heading of each of the chapters in a book I read last night/today is followed by a quote, and one such quote was from this poem of Blake’s.

via

Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

via

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

(William Blake, “The Fly.”)

So — the lateness in the day. Yes. Sorry, but I am not even firing on four let alone six cyllinders today. See, I went against all my usual instincts and quickly finished my yearly series last night wayyy ahead of time and I refuse to let that happen with my other obligations, so when I dropped the last in the series to the floor, I dug in to my pile and instead of snatching up The Tommyknockers (absolutely not touching it until July 2nd or 3rd or I will not be where I need to be for the 4th and I cannot afford any more Bad Days), I started this book my cousin Mary loaned me called The Descent.

I was initially skeptical and, at points, flirting with grogginess from the overabundance of sleep-inducing substances I pour down my throat every night in an effort to quiet the seven-headed rock dragon of my insomnia which makes the Balrog look like a Pound Puppy, but it was amazing shit, full of caves and sci-fi creatures and anthropology and linguistics and religious themes and Hell and mountaineers and Jesuits and everything else that rings my bell, and before I knew it I was completely sucked in to the throat of it. I powered through the layers of tylenol pm, Miller, and a slug of Ny-Quil I’d taken earlier, ignoring my sandy eyelids because I Couldn’t Stop Reading, and, having finally shook off any need for sleep and finished the last sentence and closed the book thoughtfully at around nine this morning, I can confidently say I’m a believer.

via

I slid it under my bed and lay reflecting on what I’d read for a few minutes, because I felt like there had been some unresolved plot points, then I suddenly did this herky jerky twitch and thought, “How many standalone science fiction novels are that long? Plus … it was set in ’99, but the cover was new. No dog-eared pages. Mary would’ve loaned it to me years ago if she hadn’t just recently bought and read it. It’s a new book.” Reprint. Why?

via

Totally excited by this chain of thought, I flipped my ass in the air, dove under my bed and grabbed the book back out of my piles and checked the front. HELL YES: among the author’s other books listed by the publisher is one titled The Ascent, which I think it is fair to conjecture can only be a sequel, so now that I’ve finished all the housework and cooking I’d planned previously to do in the hours of the morning I’d spent reading, I’m going to cruise out to the used book store by my house and see about scaring that bitch up for tonight — and see if there are more. Keep you posted. Don’t worry about the insomnia thing: I’ll get all the sleep I need when I’m dead.

John Milton June: As stars to thee appear

Andre de Dienes.

A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, —- as stars to thee appear
Seen in the galaxy, that Milky Way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powder’d with stars.

(John Milton. Paradise Lost. Book VII, 577-581.)

Take-two Tuesday — Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

This post originally appeared on January 5, 2010 at 8:05 pm.

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

Take Two Tuesday — Music Moment: Peter and Gordon, “World Without Love”

This post originally appeared on Nov 15, 2009 at 12:12 pm.

Peter and Gordon – World Without Love

Please lock me away
And don’t allow the day
Here inside, where I hide with my loneliness
I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay
In a world without love

Birds sing out of tune
And rain clouds hide the moon
I’m OK, here I stay with my loneliness
I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay
In a world without love

So I wait, and in a while
I will see my true love smile
She may come, I know not when
When she does, I’ll know
So baby until then

Lock me away
And don’t allow the day
Here inside, where I hide with my loneliness
I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay
In a world without love

(Please lock me away)
(And don't allow the day)
(Here inside, where I hide with my loneliness)
I don't care what they say, I won't stay
In a world without love

So I wait, and in a while
I will see my true love smile
She may come, I know not when
When she does, I’ll know
So baby until then

Lock me away
And don’t allow the day
Here inside, where I hide with my loneliness
I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay
In a world without love

I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay
In a world without love

edit: In the original post’s comments, superfly jam-master Steven Harris, a friend of the journal from Way Back, shared “Written by Paul McCartney. Peter, of Peter and Gordon, was Peter Asher, Jane Asher’s brother. Jane was Paul’s fiancee at the time.” Bombass connections. Never Forget!

edit 2.0: Unless the world without love has beer. I mean, let’s not get crazy, here, Peter and Gordon. Surely there are trade-offs.

Vonnegut Month: The people on the edge

Nous allons a la lune! via.

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

“Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

(Player Piano. Scribner, 1952.)

I think this is more important now than I ever have before. I stayed comfortable in the past, I kept nervously to the middle and tried not to draw attention to myself even though I found it unfulfilling and dissatisfactory, purely because the idea of doing anything else and letting the real me out seemed far too iffy.

via.

And now I have been galvanized in to action, in to pursuing the things I want, and I can’t believe I ever kept away from the edge, kept myself boxed-in and low-key and up-and-up. I don’t regret the time I spent hiding and gathering courage to myself, because that’s no use, and I don’t disdain myself for my fears or insecurities, nor anyone else for feeling like they are not able to be a jumper just yet, but I’m just so glad I’ve begun.

Take-two Tuesday and Yesterday’s News — Movie Moment: Une femme est une femme, Zodiac quackery and cock-gobbling Virgos edition

edit: Since this post’s original appearance, I’ve been reclassified as a Leo by … the sometimes-I-tune-in Zodiac powers that be? Not actually sure whom. Fellow fabulously-damaged Virgin Panda tried to explain it to me over soosh bombasticos last week but she is much, much better at understanding this stuff than I am.

This post originally appeared on February 7, 2010 at 9:14 a.m., so practically one year ago. Synchronicity in Yesterday’s News!

Romance, science, and zodiac quackery in Une femme est une femme/A Woman Is A Woman (Godard, 1961).

Virgo is a hard worker, a neglected mother, a quotidian task master, and a selfless martyr. Virgo is also a reality TV train wreck, a drunken psychopath, and a self-abusing anorexic. Virgo is analytical on a good day. Virgo is self-critical, self-loathing, self-deprecating, self-flagellating, and self-defeating on a bad day.

The Virgin, contrary to what her title may suggest, is the resident cock gobbler of the zodiac — never a topper, always a bottom. If you’re looking for a woman who will abuse herself, party like it’s Greek harvest time and she’s drunk on mead, please you sexually without so much as a nod to her own hungry genitalia, and perform all the humiliating duties you’ve assigned to her as wife and mother, look no further than the drunken Virgin of the zodiac.

And yes, more often than not, this naughty little maiden is getting crunked at the club or downing daiquiris at the Mommy and Me block party, an attempt to drown to death the echoes of self-loathing that usually prevent her from embodying the female charm and charisma she labors to possess.

The Virgo vibratory pattern is restrictive, effective, judgmental, exact, helpful, and neurotic. Virgos are a lot of things, socially charismatic not being one of them.

Usually, when I meet a Virgo, my natural reaction is, ‘this person must have Aspergers.’ They fixate on minutiae like Rainman [and] have more clicks and ticks than a malfunctioning android attempting to process human emotion.

Virgos rule the house of diet, perfectionism, and nourishment. Just glance at a list of famous Virgos and you’ll find more self-flagellating, adulthood suppressing skeletors than you can shake a stick at: Amy Winehouse, Rachel Zoe, Nicole Ritchie, Karl Lagerfeld, Twiggy, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Peggy Guggenheim, etc.

[personally adding Anne Bancroft, Evan Rachel Wood, Lauren Bacall, Ricki Lake, Greta Garbo, and Rose McGowan to that list].

Yes, that is pretty much the way of it.

Virgo is the embodiment of human turmoil.

Insightful and amusing zodiac sign analysis by Carly, whose blog “Do you think I’m smart? Astrology and other Ass Munchery” is right here on the wordpress. Usually I say that I don’t believe in all that large astrological nonsense, but I have to admit that’s the first one I’ve ever read that was right on. Maybe I just needed to read all the horrible things I already know about myself confirmed, instead of the butt-licking backhanded compliments in most horoscopes, in order to start giving it some credence.

Final thought.

How to Spot a Virgo Woman:

They have an eating disorder.

They give rigorous handies.

They have acid reflux.

They’ll do “anything for my man.”

They want your love, but don’t deserve it.

(more, if you’re into that — she is very clever and scathingly funny)

Vonnegut month and Movie Millisecond: Only in superstition is there hope

Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1971), via.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.

(Kurt Vonnegut, Graduation Address to Bennington College. 1970)

Take-two Tuesday — William Blake Month: the torments of Love and Jealousy

This entry originally appeared on June 12, 2010 at 11:14 a.m.

Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy

Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea I know
That I have sinned & that my Emanations are become harlots
I am already distracted at their deeds & if I look
Upon them more Despair will bring self murder on my soul

O Enion thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful
to draw me to destruction

(William Blake, excerpt from “Part I: Enmion and Tharmas,” in Vala, or, The Four Zoas: the torments of Love and Jealousy in the death and judgment of Albion the Ancient Man.)

All photos are screencaps from a collaborative short film put out by Lula magazine and the ubiquitous UK-and-now-THE-WORLD clothing store Topshop. Here is a linky to the video, which is unusual and beautiful and freaky, but as you are watching this artistic short film remember it is designed to sell faux-Bohemian low-quality overpriced clothes that will be out of style in six months to impressionable and likely self-loathing young women with eating disorders and disposable income. The fashion industry is so cruel with its kindness that I go back and forth on appreciation and hate.

I’m sorry, I went to the mall earlier to pick up some comfortable summer shoes with my grandmother and now I’m in a low mood. Nothing puts me out of sorts like that snake nest. Like, everyone is slithering over the top of each other and accidentally biting their own tails and dropping money on shit they don’t need, finances they have gained from the jobs they keep specifically to make a weekend trip to a goddamned mall and drape shiny fabrics over the viper shitpit of the system so it looks all pretty and coordinated while they sip complacently from some kind of frapped coffee bullshit drink packed with sugar and empty calories that they store in the cupholder of their child’s stroller. Their kids are with them, of course, because children must be taught to want made-up food like chicken nuggets and aspire to own over three pair of shoes. Seriously, I want to watch it burn, burn, burn.

I know that my Emanations are become harlots.

I think I’m going to go take ten and paint with the kidlet or something.

Take-two Tuesday — Talk nerdy to me: LeVar Burton “The science of peace” edition

This post originally appeared on April 25, 2010, at 2:18 pm.

I have mentioned before that I follow me the shit out of some LeVar Burton on the twitter, which keeps me abreast of his doings. I have these pictures up mainly to get your attention.

From LeVar Burton’s twitpic account. With the Shat-man. Look at those OG’s! Super-cute!

It is obvious, accepted, manifest fact that LeVar Burton is one of the coolest and best human beings to walk the earth. Duh. Would you like to be as basically all-around amazing and centered and loving and a vessel of karmic groove in this universe Just Like Him? Then let’s talk about LeVar’s involvement with the extremely cool documentary The Science of Peace, dudes!

What if …

…science discovered a unified field of consciousness which affected the way people think and behave?

…we could find a way to consciously impact this field with our thoughts and feelings?

…a global media event would succesfully enroll millions of people to participate in an unprecedented world peace experiment?

(official site)

with the amazing STEVIE WONDER!!

Great minds from Tesla to Kant to Rosseau to Jung have believed in this tantalizing possibility of reaching a positive meta-energy which just might happen to be God’s will for mankind, so don’t dismiss it straight out of hand as tree-hugging hippie crap! There is some real Science to this, guys.

Hosted by LeVar Burton, The Science of Peace features pioneering physicists, biologists, and philosophers who are established in the emerging new field of Peace Science.

The film effectively illustrates how each person, when bringing peace in to his or her own life, becomes an instrument for global peace.

He is also the executive producer. Putting this post together lead meto some really neato-terrific and amazing sources.

Yes.

I hope to share more about Peace Studies soon but here is the essential lowdown on relative newcomer Peace Science, which is the subject of the documentary: it is a hard-science effort to unify the threads of ideas that run through the incredibly important social sciences movement of Peace Studies. The Peace Science Society has an explanation of the various philosophies and social sciences that comprise the touchstones of the “argument” for peace studies at Penn State, and it is always well-spent time to give the latest articles in The Acorn a spin. (The Acorn is the official journal of the Gandhi-King society. If you don’t feel like subscribing, it’s on ProjectMUSE and the JSTOR.)

Great picture with Nichelle Nichols. Remember on Dr. King’s Day when she came up? In case you forgot, the factoid that was related then was how she was thinking of leaving the TOS cast and Dr. King told her to stay because Lt. Uhura was a wonderful role model for people of color, especially women. Soooo great.

Anyway, check the documentary’s official site out and show some love by visiting the “How You Can Help” section — it’s too late to participate in the documented experiment, but you can still donate and help subside costs for production, travel, distribution, etc. Cool beans!

Dickens December: The time before you is your own

God bless us, every one.

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. … A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!”

(Charles Dickens. Stave Five: The End of It. A Christmas Carol.)

The time before you is your own, to make amends in and to forge a better future. Remember that you are made out of stars.

Take-two Tuesday — Dreamtime: The Hanged Woman

This entry was originally posted on December 3, 2009 at 10:01 a.m. I’d originally intended for Dreamtime to be a series of entries, but writing about my dreams was so disturbing that this ended up being a one-off.

Recurring dream — I am in a bedroom with my back to the closet. I turn around and find a hanged woman in a blue nightgown.

“It’s Hard To Say That I’d Rather Stay Awake When I’m Asleep Because My Dreams Are Bursting At The Seams” by inspire*dream*create on flickr

The air in the room feels thick but sounds tinny, like it does in a doublewide, you know, the way the sound and the air are different, I guess because it’s perched on a foundation poured in to the ground rather than dug in, so it’s not flush up against the earth?, and the windowsill is aluminum. She’s in front of the closet, which has a sliding door with inset slats. She’s always high enough up, on a short enough noose, that her face is angled down but very near the ceiling, and I have to tilt my head back and look up to see it. I do not know why I always have to look at her face.

“Hang’er” by Dominic Rouse. Click through to his website.

She doesn’t sway or kick or open her eyes or anything predictably horror-movie-ish like that. In a way, the certainty that she is absolutely dead and has been for some time is worse and even more uncanny than if I had got to the scene just in time for her death throes. Because I never realize right away that I’m in The Room with her, or that it has become That Dream until I turn around and see the closet, and her swollen feet and mottled legs with the blue nightgown at mid-calf.

Stock

The stultifying stillness of the trailer starts beating in my ears, this weird and distant rhythmic roaring, like living near the ocean but if all other life had been extinguished and only the water remained on earth, like the beginning of time is hurling toward me.

I wake myself up.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

“Wholly Toledo!” is the name of the article that accompanies the pictorial for the lovely and talented Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s Miss December 1968. Her wildly popular centerfold shot her to stardom among the troops in Vietnam, and a pinup of her is featured in the film Hamburger Hill. She has been a teen model, a television personality, played a lesbian songstress in one of the most famous camp films out there, and become an unwitting space cowgirl in her 60 years on this planet. Buckle up, because here we go!

Cynthia wrote to Playboy a few years ago, informing us that she’d like to be considered as a centerfold beauty. Assistant Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski answered with a reminder that our Playmates must be of legal age but that Cynthia should keep in touch. She did just that.

Well, kind of.

The shot was in June of ’68, and Ms. Meyers was born in September of ’50, but Playboy waited until Cynthia was comfortably 18 to publish her pictorial. It had become common practice for the magazine after the scandal with Elizabeth Ann Roberts.

In fact, the most recently featured “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playmate, the fantastic Susan Bernard, was also 17 at her photoshoot and saw her spread published after she turned 18.

Posing underage for Playboy is not the only common ground between Ms. Bernard and Ms. Myers. While Ms. Bernard was featured in Russ Meyers’ cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, today’s special gal starred in his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

I promise to have a full-out Movie Moment for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls one of these days. For my friend’s recent 31st birthday, I sent him a picture of the cast of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with him tagged as Dolly Read and me as Cynthia Myers. I explained that I originally had me as Dolly and him as Cynthia, but I switched it because it was his birthday.

You know Roger Ebert wrote it? I don’t think he ever gets to criticize a movie again.

Cynthia is pictured reading a five-year-old palmistry pamphlet about what the following year once held for her because she placed a large credulity in psychic phenomenon.

“I’ve known since I was 15 that I’d be a Playmate. It’s almost as if this had been fated to happen.” Cynthia’s penchant for precognition can be traced to her early teens.

(Ibid.)

“A junior high school friend of mine in Toledo,” she says, “was a nut on palmistry, astrology and even reading tea leaves and crystal balls. Like most people, I thought is was just a bunch of baloney. But when I began reading about prophets like Edgar Cayce, I began to realize that there are strange spiritual forces in the world undreamed of even in The Playboy Philosophy.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Myers, I think you’d be surprised by what the Playboy philosophy can dream of.

In 1994, it was revealed that a picture from Ms. Myers’ centerfold pictorial was among several that crafty NASA jokesters have launched in to space over the years. Ms. Myers, together with Leslie Bianchini, Angela Dorian, and Reagan Wilson, was snuck in to the checklist for the Apollo 12 mission that was placed in astronauts’ suit cuff on their trip to the moon in November of 1969. Ms. Myers specifically took her space journey with astronaut Al Bean.

Don’t forget: Describe the protruberances.

Boobs : Geeks :: Horse : Carriage. I think it’s kind of funny and sweet.

And the gals didn’t just go up in the lunar landing module: they straight moon walked. The astronauts found their pictures while fulfilling their extravehicular (read: outside the module on the lunar surface) mission duties on the moon itself.

Pete Conrad got Miss September 1967, Angela Dorian, (“Seen any interesting hills and valleys?”) and Miss October 1967, Reagan Wilson (“Preferred tether partner”). Al Bean got Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers (“Don’t forget — Describe the protuberances”), and Miss January 1969, Leslie Bianchini (“Survey — her activity”).

(“Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists.” January 13, 2007. BoingBoing.net.)

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

(Ibid.)

A large, color version of the shot of Cynthia that was smuggled up to the moon in the Apollo 12.

Lest we forget, the lovely and talented DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967 and, like Cynthia, one of the most popular Playmates in the magazine’s history, also rode shotgun on the Apollo 12 mission. She was in the control console, her picture labelled, “Map of a heavenly body.”

I always feel compelled when talking about the Playmate pictures and NASA to bring up the fact that my sorority’s badge is on the moon. Neil Armstrong put it there for his wife. It’s my sorority’s badge and it is on the moon. The moon that is in space. Sorry, but I get pretty cocky and excited by that. Tell a friend.

This much more recent picture of Ms. Myers just might get her kicked out of the Red Hat Society.

Can our prescient Playmate predict anything about her future? “I’m going to be an actress,” she says simply. “Notice I didn’t say ‘I’d like to be,’ but ‘I’m going to be.’ I don’t know how good I’ll be as an actress, but I’ll be one.”

(“Wholly Toledo!” Playboy. December 1968.)

Judging from her track record as a prophetess — and from her already abundant attributes — we’d like to venture a prediction of our own: Playmatehood should be just the beginning for the remarkable Miss Myers.
(Ibid.)

Take-two Tuesday — Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Christmas is going to the dogs edition

This entry was originally posted on November 30, 2009 at 9:16 am.

Leeds, England.

Bump a fat rail because foot-traffic at the mall was a fist-raping, soul-tarring clusterfuck, but by gum, Jesus would’ve wanted you to get that doorbuster deal, so you done all right, sunshine.

Take-two Tuesday — Movie Moment: Extras from the Goonies

This entry was originally posted on November 10, 2009 at 10:21 pm. Some pictures and more action descriptions have been added.

This post was originally accompanied by screen captures from a spotty YouTube video. I’ve capped the extras from Goonies myself since then, so I’ve got much clearer versions now. Also at the bottom you may enjoy lovely bonus caps of the madness.

Back to the original.

The Goonies are good enough for Cyndi Lauper.

Today after I picked up kidlet from kindergarten, we jetted down to Ceres for some gloomy day movie cheer. Clue strangely put us to sleep but then Miss D, kidlet, and I watched us the crap out of some Goonies. We watched every single feature it had. Maybe even to our detriment.

Steven Spielberg has a cameo and Cyndi Lauper wrestles the octopus that vanished from the Goonies final cut — oops.

One of the features we watched, which I'd never seen before in its … I'm not sure what to call it? totality?, was a two-part music video put together by director Richard Donner and theme songstress/my fantasy fairy godmother Cyndi Lauper, with a cameo by producer Steven Spielberg, to promote the film. I don't even have words for the surreality of watching the video. It was really something. I will not soon forget it. These are my neutral words.

The video features

World Wrestling Federation pro-wrestlers André the Giant, Captain Lou Albano, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Wendy Richter, The Fabulous Moolah, The Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff, Freddie Blassie; Steven Spielberg; The Goonies cast (except for Kerri Green, Anne Ramsey, Joe Pantoliano, Robert Davi and John Matuszak*); and the relatively unknown Bangles as a group of female pirates. Roseanne Barr appears as the “sea hag”. Lauper’s mother appears as “Cyndi’s mother”, reprising her role from “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”.

(the wiki)

*The lead cast members from the film who do not appear in this video are those playing Andy, Ma Fratelli, and the Fratelli brothers.

The plot runs like this: Cyndi’s folks run a Mom and Pop gas station that has fallen on tough times. They are packing up and ready to come west to Californny or some such to start a new life and meet Peter Fonda, when they think they have customers! Is the station saved?? Wonderful!

Psych. Turns out it’s the creditors. The gas station is being bought out by villains from the WWF, each attired as a different weird stereotype. Unfortunately, they also have dialogue.

Cyndi and her brother? friend? and sister? his wife? are helping Mom and Pop (Cap’n Lou) pack up the ol’ place when the action begins.

The nouveau riche, stereotyped creditors chew up the scenery and generally set up quickie symbols of their wealth, such as a Benihana-type joint in the middle of the parking lot, which many consider the international sign of good taste and refinement, some to the point of exclusion. (Do not even try to talk dimsum on rollerskates to them; they will not listen.) The hibachi flows like wine and the wine is snorted like cocaine. In fact, there is no wine. It is just cocaine. Off-camera.

The skeleton and she scream at each other and her hair blows. It is a deep and fractured commentary on the intersection of orgasm, death, and bad ’80’s video special fx.

Cyndi discovers a secret cave behind a painting of their grand-ancestor, where she encounters the Goonies, who help her decode a map she lifted off a dead guy — real fuckin’ nice, Cyn.

The we get a nice long look at the same clips America had been seeing for several months in the Goonies trailer, and you think maybe it’s done? but no. Suddenly, some pirates show up (psst, it is the WWF guys IN DISGUISE — could it all be a dream, but a real adventure, too, a la The Wizard of Oz?), and Roseanne Barr. Oh my god, nightmare combination! The Bangles are there, too, but they do not try to sing.

In the chase that ensues, Cyndi stops real quick for some hibachi, creating a prevalent and provocative ongoing theme in the video.

Perhaps this is meant to make us reflect on the marketing of foreign cuisine in America, or on materialism and the ease with which an ordinary item common to one country can acquire peculiar clout in another country. Or perhaps it is merely included in order to set up a joke that is some straight racist garbage: ie, the following picture’s caption.

The pirates and the sea hag enslave the kids at murky tasks like, um, stirring big pots, and force Cyndi to dress like a Floridian prostitute while carrying buckets and singing (they do not allow her to stop singing even once).

Cyndi and her friends manage to overthrow the pirates and get away with some loot from the ship, but the “cheatin’ creditors” will not accept it as payment for Mom and Pop’s debt on the shop. Not even when she repeatedly bites it to prove its value! I know, right? If only she had offered them some fresh, dope funky fun hibachi.

As it is, Cyndi grows weary of attempting to convince the creditors to accept her jewels as payment, and whistles as one only does for a taxicab or deus ex machina. And what is it going to be?

Why, it’s Andre the Giant, and I am pretty sure he is literally still wiping coke from under his nose when he first appears! He beats up and chases away the creditors, which means the debt is legally and officially cleared forever, duh, and the video ends with this triumphant shot.

Oh, my god, I want that to happen to me every day after I die. I like to believe in an afterlife, unless I am in a particularly foul and doubtful and wobegone mood, and of course Andre the Giant is there waiting for me so we can finally hang out and stuff, and I hope so fervently that every single day when I greet him in Heaven he scoops me up and we cheer and do ’80s fistpumps in the air. It’s gonna be sick.

So here’s the video if after a report on all that insanity you need fuller confirmation of its existence.

Bonus caps:

Cyndi struggles with the octopus who never made it in to the theatrical release but was apparently still considered an important enough plot point at the time of this video’s production that Spielberg and Donner made sure to include him.

Stuck on a log, Cyndi asks Spielberg for help via the magic of television screens. He basically says he does not care, he is only here to remind people that hey-hey-hey, Stephen Spielberg is involved in this picture so you should run out and see it just as fast as your thickening Dorito-and-Pepsi-lovin’ legs can carry you. He signifies his essential non-interest in what’s happening by not removing his sunglasses despite being indoors and ostensibly watching television.

Captain Lou laments to his long-lost dead ancestor about the state of the gas station. But it’s going to be okay because …

Secret treasure inside the hidden cave! Happens all the time!

Goonies does not have any fart jokes, but the “Goonies R Good Enough” video does. As is evidenced by the sign in the below cap.

I say again, for all the casual vulgarity of youth as young as elementary school-aged and as old as seventeen that characterizes the scripts of both Goonies and E.T. (and their rather heartwarming insistence that these two age groups consistently interact and save the world), the movie Goonies does not have even one single fart joke. In a movie with as many other dick, breath, sex, and LCD body-function jokes as Goonies, that is pretty anomalous. I’m going to call it happenstance. I doubt it was on purpose.

WWF Pirates hunt for Cyndi Lauper. Recall that they have been dispatched by Roseanne Barr, assisted by the Bangles.

1. WWF.

2. Cyndi Lauper.

3. Roseanne Barr and the Bangles.

80’s Trifecta!!

Cyndi singing in aforementioned Floridian prostitute getup under the insistence of the Bangles, Roseanne, et al.

The octopus himself. Farewell, dude, we hardly knew ye. We’ve only seen ye in weird television cuts that were edited for time and had the master with the alternate ending. (Which Data still refers to in the released ending.)

Finally, my secret crush from this movie may be reported to be Data, because I squeal when he comes on screen, but really deep down it’s actually:

Martha Plimpton. Her and Jan Brady can come live with me and finally be appreciated the way they deserve. Oh, Martha Plimpton. Have my nearsighted, sarcastic blonde babies. Won’t you please? We’ll find a way.

Burroughs Month: Madness is.

via.

“Madness is confusion of levels of fact. … Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.”

(William S. Burroughs.)

Take-Two Tuesday — Model Citizens and Movie Moment: A case of the Mondays cured

This post originally appeared on November 16, 2009 at 2:14 pm.

Got a case of the Mondays? Not me, because I pretty much do whatever I want, whenever I want. But in case you have somehow been enslaved by the System and are sneaking peeks from beneath fluorescent lights in some dreadful cubicle, here’s some Office Space quotes to snap you out of it, and some naked models too. You’re welcome!

Doutzen Kroes and Raquel Zimmerman, “Working Girls,” by Mario Testino for V magazine, Spring 2007.

Peter Gibbons: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.
Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Dr. Swanson: Wow, that’s messed up.

Peter Gibbons: I don’t like my job, and I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.
Joanna: You’re just not going to go?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Joanna: Won’t you get fired?
Peter Gibbons: I don’t know, but I really don’t like it. And I’m not going to go.
Joanna: So you’re going to quit?
Peter Gibbons: Nooo. Not really. Uh… I’m just gonna stop going.
Joanna: Well, what are you going to do about money and bills and…
Peter Gibbons: You know, I’ve never really liked paying bills. I don’t think I’m going to do that, either.

Peter Gibbons: It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us. I don’t know what happened to me at that hypnotherapist and, I don’t know, maybe it was just shock and it’s wearing off now, but when I saw that fat man keel over and die – Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.
Michael Bolton: I told those fudge-packers I liked Michael Bolton’s music.
Peter Gibbons: Oh. That is not right, Michael.

Peter Gibbons: Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday and you’re not feeling real well, does anyone ever say to you, “Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays”?
Lawrence: No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked sayin’ something like that, man.

Fuckin’…A.

Photograph by Ellen von Unwerth

Look. I understand financial obligations and suchlike, but please be sure to draw lines in the dirt declaring how much you let the world and its ways infringe on your personal happiness, and ask yourself what you would pay to be happier; if the amount is the difference between the wage you make at the miserable job you have and a lower-paying job that you would better enjoy, then jump!

And don’t forget to refuse to be normal at all times. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, chickpeas. Quit your job and go on tour.

edit: What I like about Flashback Friday and Take-Two Tuesday is that it gives me a chance to take a recent-reflective turn in this business of self-audit. This was written nearly a year ago. Do I still “pretty much do whatever I want, whenever I want?” Not really, but not in a depressing way and certainly when I do it is not in a rude or irresponsible way — but, examining that period carefully, I didn’t really much then either. Anyway I despised that job (professional plagiarism: I hated almost everything about it) and it tarred my soul. Substituting when I can and caring for my grandmother is infinitely more satisfying, fulfilling, and uplifting. And I am doing what I want, I think perhaps much better now than then. I like it.

Burroughs Month: Man is designed for space travel

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Postulate that there is no privacy and no deceit possible in space: Your innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions are immediately apparent to those around you. So you want to be careful who is around you.

(William S. Burroughs. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Arcade, 1993. p. 85.)

I did a lot of Burroughs reading in October to get all primed for the take-two of Burroughs month this November, and one of my favorite pieces from The Adding Machine was this little gem. I plan to share more later this week, about shit-spotting. But as far as this excerpt goes, I drew a lonely and ugly conclusion from the parameters of Burroughs’ postulate in this passage: if there is no privacy in space, I would not want to go.

Astronomy Domine by pequeñísimo ser on the flickr.

If that’s part of the rules, that I can be in space but people can read my thoughts and my feelings? My first instinct in the face of that stricture would be to reject the chance of space travel, which is something that I have wanted to do my whole life, to the point that I mist up when I think about how I’m getting too old to ever be approved to colonize the moon, which means giving up on my dream of making love on the lawn in my terraformed backyard by Earthlight (the most beautiful thing possible — just think about it), yet here I am saying “no-go” to space travel if it means tipping my hand about all my secret romantic notions. That is crazy. I need to work on tearing down some of my walls.