Defenseless under the night,
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light,
Flash out wherever the Just,
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.
(W.H. Auden, “Sept. 1, 1939.” Another Time, 1940.)
All photographs by Andre de Dienes.
The date in the poem’s title refers, of course, to the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s Wehrmacht … or does it refer with remarkably prescient precedence to my birthday?
This post originally appeared on July 19, 2010 at 5:05 pm. Congratulations on another trip around the sun to you, my good true friend, and I hope you have many more to come.
Happy birthday to the one and only Jonohs Danger Welchos!
This encouragement is doubtless unnecessary because I doubt that you ever would. I’m sure you would talk the bastardes around to your point of view and you’d all have Fin du Monde and play Beatles Rock Band and they would vow never to carborundum again. I’m finishing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shortly and I’ll be starting next on my yearly Atwood. How nice to know this year when I re-read it that you will have just done so recently too. Last year I knew you, and was re-reading Handmaid’s Tale as always, and you had not read it yet. This time it will be different and I’ll know that I’m reading words that yet another of my friends has also enjoyed. See the interstitial power of the shared unconscious experience of reading? That’s impressive shit. If that is not impressive enough, I will buy you some sushi the next time we are both in town. But really, dude — the gift of reading. Come on. Be excellent.
But just in case you ever do feel down, remember that you are an awesome friendoh and I’m so glad to have gotten to be friends, and that I know great things are going to happen for you like in a perpetual motion engine powered by amazing karma for all your kindnesses and good humor to others.
And, of course, be prepared for whatever befalls you on this, the day of your birth —
A very recent addition to the pantheon of inside jokes via uglyxdutchling on the tumblr.
Hope you’re off work and having a great birthday, Mr. Welchos! But do try and hold it together.
Today is my kidlet’s birthday. It’s also the day of her class trip to the zoo, as it worked out, and thankfully the school at which I teach is on Spring Break, so it’s all come synchronicitously together in order that I could chaperone the trip and spend the day with her classmates and her. Which is where I’ve been all day. Unless …
When I was a kid, there were no less than three separate occasions on which I was supposed to take a field trip to the zoo with my school and got so excited the morning of the trip that I threw up and was told I could not go.
Consequently, my first zoo visit was in Berlin at age 18. No regrets, because it was a kickass experience, as well as informative: did you know that one of the zoo’s elephants was actually the first casualty of the Allied bombing of Berlin? Tell A Friend!
Well … that’s a pretty bleak fact, any way you look at it, really. Maybe keep it among us. I’m sorry I even said anything. Lately I’ve been blurting out awful things: I don’t know what’s going on with me.
As an example, I was next going to tell you that, growing up, besides vomiting my way out of zoo visits, I also got sick on my birthday two different times, and, in one instance, my mother briskly carried out the party in the backyard without me while I knelt on my bed and watched out the window of my room, but that’s bleak, too. Then I was going to say that I still throw up all the time when I’m nervous, upset, or excited, and it’s not an uncommon sight to see me roll down my window and have to puke out the car while behind the wheel, driving on my way to some place or person I feel Ways about that get my guts all knit up, but that’s even worse. Jesus wept, this is supposed to be about my kidlet’s birthday! I’m giving up.
Here’s hoping that tomorrow (today) finds me on the trip as a chaperone, and not so excited that I got sick and the teacher and my mom made me stay home. Again.
This encouragement is doubtless unnecessary because I doubt that you ever would. I’m sure you would talk the bastardes around to your point of view and you’d all have Fin du Monde and play Beatles Rock Band and they would vow never to carborundum again. I’m finishing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shortly and I’ll be starting next on my yearly Atwood. How nice to know this year when I re-read it that you will have just done so recently too. Last year I knew you, and was re-reading Handmaid’s Tale as always, and you had not read it yet. This time it will be different and I’ll know that I’m reading words that yet another of my friends has also enjoyed. See the interstitial power of the shared unconscious experience of reading? That’s impressive shit. If that is not impressive enough, I will buy you some sushi the next time we are both in town. But really, dude — the gift of reading. Come on. Be excellent.
But just in case you ever do feel down, remember that you are an awesome friendoh and I’m so glad to have gotten to be friends, and that I know great things are going to happen for you like in a perpetual motion engine powered by amazing karma for all your kindnesses and good humor to others.
And, of course, be prepared for whatever befalls you on this, the day of your birth —
A very recent addition to the pantheon of inside jokes via uglyxdutchling on the tumblr.
Hope you’re off work and having a great birthday, Mr. Welchos! But do try and hold it together.
The perils of leaping before looking (not that you would) via queerlines on the tumblr.
As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says, ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.
(Hunter S. Thompson)
But you did die, you can be rare as all git out but apparently no one is weird enough not to die, and you know I am not yet totally cool with how you decided to do it, but as Bukowski said, it is literally no one’s business but your own if you choose to go out on your own terms and I am attempting to accept that. It’s not something I can just *snap* and feel. I hope, as I do for everyone who dies this way, that you still felt just as strongly about your choice at the very moment that you passed on as you did when you originally engineered the passing and penned your explanatory note about football season, etc.
And I suppose any fan ought have expected nothing less.
Happy birthday to a very special Valentine Vixen, the lovely and talented Lorrie Menconi, Miss February 1969!
Photographed by Bill Figge and Ed De Long.
Tomorrow is brain-asplodin’ly cute Ms. Menconi’s 62nd birthday. Felicitazioni, bella!
The write-up which accompanied Ms. Menconi’s centerfold, titled “Tuesday’s Child,” focused on her birthday and the implications of her Pisces nativity. You know how I feel about zodiac-quackery (unless what I’m reading is painful, scathing, and insulting, I am highly skeptical), but how can I resist an Italian sister in pigtails? Flap-flap, quack-quack — let’s discuss the zodiac.
Astrologically speaking, Lorrie Menconi has her pretty head in the stars. “I was born on Tuesday,” our valentine Playmate told us, “February 24th 1948. That makes me a Pisces, so I think it’s perfect to appear in the February issue — it just has to be good luck. I guess you could call me a zodiac nut. But so many Piscean characteristics are true of me that it’s hard not to believe in it!” (“Tuesday’s Child,” Playboy, February 1969.)
Exhibiting a prime Piscean trait — talkativeness — Lorrie goes on: “Pisces is a water sign, which may explain why I’m so crazy about living in California. We moved to San Diego when I was very young, so I don’t know what it’s like to live away from the water.”(Ibid.)
“The beach scene here is terrific. But the mountains in northern California are great, too.” (Ibid.)
Damned skippy, they are.
When Lorrie isn’t involved in the aquatic life, she indulges another Piscean fancy — a love of animals. Lorrie attributes some of her fondness for fauna to her mother, who wrote a children’s book called The Pony Who Lost Her Neigh. (Ibid.)
The Pony Who Lost Her Neigh must be out of print now, because all the traces that remain on a fairly deep search are Lee Menconi-Bandh’s copyright claims, first from 1965, renewed in 1993. Bummer. I’ll keep looking.
“All the animals in the story,” Lorrie explains, “were based on our family: my father, my three sisters and me. There was billy goat Harry, pony Susie, porky Marilyn and duck Rosane. I was a turkey — you know, ‘gobble, gobble’ — because I talk so much; there’s that Pisces again.”
Along with her sisters, she works part time at the House of Rattan, a shop managed by her mother. “We sell just about anything you can imagine that’s made of rattan,” Lorrie says.
Ms. Menconi, I can imagine many, many things. That you “sell anything you can imagine” made of rattan is a dangerous thing to say to a person who opens my eyes in the shower because I’m positive that, in the time it took me to suds up my hair, a shark has swum up the drain and is a centimeter from sinking his rows of razor sharp teeth into my foot (yes, I grasp physics and biology and am aware on an intellectual level of the impossibility of such a thing; no, that doesn’t stop me from opening my eyes and getting soap in them).
Rattan flyswatters, minivans, and light bulbs; rattan bikini bottoms; rattan file cabinets; rattan noodle soup; rattan statues of Ra, the Sun God; rattan Audubon guides to bird-watching and rattan flatware to compliment an ornate set of rattan china — all of these, you sold at your mother’s shop, Ms. Menconi? No? Then I cry fie and false advertising! “House of Rattan,” indeed. More like “Shack” or “Porta-Potty of Rattan.” Even “Junk Drawer of Unimaginative Rattan,” maybe. Pfft.
I kid. She was totally cute and is still completely beautiful; further, her family sounds very supportive. Ms. Menconi travels on the convention circuit, and also maintains an official website, where you can purchase autographed copies of prints from her justifiably popular Playboy spread.
A recent, striking picture. Italian ladies got it goin’ on: accept it!
Besides her looks, her adorable enthusiasm for her hometown of San Diego has also clearly held.
“You know, San Diego is called the place where California began, because the Spanish padres founded their first mission here in 1769. So this year, we’re celebrating our 200th birthday. I’m really proud of this city — it’s sunny and warm and beautiful.” (Ibid.)
Her official site is sponsored by the San Diego Beachlife Press.
Again, supersonic birthday wishes and eskimo kisses to the lovely and talented Ms. Menconi, and many, many happy returns!
Happy birthday, Mme Condra, and many glad returns!
Grey Gardens (Hovde, Maysles, Maysles, and Meyer, 1975).
This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don’t like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.
“The Libra husband is not an easy man to please. The monotony of domesticity is not to his liking, but he is a passionate man, and a respecter of tradition. … He is a born judge, and no other zodiacal type can order his life with so much wisdom.” God! That’s all I need — order! That’s all I need! An ordered life! You know, a manager. But he’s got to be a Libran.
It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult.
In the film, it appears as though Lois Wright only gave a box to Edith Bouvier Beale for her birthday. However, she also gave Edith the sign that reads, “The Great Singer, Big Edith Bouvier Beale.” (the imdb)
He always compliments me on the way I do my corn.
— You can’t have your cake and eat it, too in this life. — Oh, yes, I did! I did. I had my cake. Loved it, masticated it, chewed it and had everything I wanted.
Thank you for your card and your ice-cream, I love you very much!
She may look like an icy-hot Spy Who Came In From The Cold (I have mentioned before my Bond-based, niggling Eastern European fetish), but the lovely and talented Kata Kärkkäinen, Playboy’s Miss December 1988, was actually Finnish.
Photographed by Stephen Wayda and Byron Newman
Kata was a girls’ bowling champion in her native Finland before coming to America for her senior year of high school, where she was actually kicked off the bowling team. I have a feeling it was less to do with being a girl, as she insinuates, than it was to do with her other behaviors:
Kata joined an exchange program, jetted to remotest Rapid City and gave her high school classmates a crash course in Eurostyle. Stevens High School is still reeling. “They found me pretty wild,” Kata says of the teachers and schoolmates she bowled over at Stevens High. “I dressed punk. I dyed my hair blonde — or red and black — or wore it in a Mohawk. I wore wigs, and sometimes a tuxedo, to school.” (“Photo Finnish,” Playboy, December 1988)
Kata is a Scorpio who shares a bappy with the Cappy (October 27th – a BIRTHDAY OF CHAMPIONS!) and Napoleon. Auspicious company for a girl who used to go for the 80’s version of guyliner and striped sweater boys.
“I don’t go crazy over how many muscles a guy has or how hairy his chest is. I kind of like skinny, feminine guys. One of my boyfriends in Finland used to wear make-up. We’d go out and some people thought we were sisters. It was kind of embarrassing, but kind of interesting, too.” Don’t abandon hope, American guys: The more she sees of American chests, Kata says, the better she likes them.
I like the implication that American guys in this time were unilaterally buffed-out, tanned, models of masculinity who drove stateside women wild with their oozing sexuality, and we ladies went for that or we burned in hell. I’m not so sure that was the case. (*cough* Duckie.) But on the other hand, I’m all for bashing pretentious emo Eurotrash, so good on Playboy.
These days, Ms. Kärkkäinen is a novelist. You may visit her official site here, but be advised it is in Finnish. Her 1999 novel Minä ja Morrison was adapted into a film in 2001. The movie functions loosely as the second part of female director Leena-Kaisa “Lenska” Hellstedt’s (and friends’) Levottomat trilogy.
Kata Kärkkäinen has an IQ of at least 148 (sd 24) according to Cattell & Cattell Culture Fair IQ test (see Ilta-Sanomat, 5 Oct 2006). (the wiki)
Finally, when the centerfold is this hot, you’re damned tootin’ you put her on the cover, too. The girl can move some magazines, y’all!
Spark up the candles (or, you know, whatever you spark on birthdays) and get ready to sing a happy 34th go-round on this earth with lots of good wishes and eskimo kisses to the lovely and talented Milla Jovovich! One of my favorite Model Citizens, mothers, and all-around good-time gals. Keep on rocking in the free world, kiddo.
High Times, October 1994.
It’s your birthday; do what feels right!
lost credit please help
And we should really all say thank you to Milla for the memories. I mean, you do not even know how grateful I am for the huge folder on my computer, chock-full of amazing pictures of the girl. It took me ages to pick the right ones for this post.
by Ellen Von Unwerth for Vogue Italia, July 2009.
Besides screencaps from films like Dazed and Confused, the Fifth Element, Joan of Arc, and the Resident Evil flicks, I had to decide between photographs from devil-horned shoots with Ellen von Unwerth, topless shenanigans by David La Chapelle, that phatty spread in High Times, even … it was truly a challenge.
Paper magazine, 1994.
Man, this girl has given me some smiles over the years. Do your thing, chicken wing. Haters to the left! You keep on keepin’ on.
I truly love Cass Elliot and I have boatloads to say about her, another day. Right now I need to dash this off, hustle her through her morning routine and take my sweet little kidlet to kindergarten, and come home and tend to some chores around the house, so I’m scheduling this entry to appear much later today in case I decide on reflection that it needs editing.
Mama Cass Elliot – Lady Love
This song was written by Delaney Bramlett and was the B-side of the extremely successful 7″ single Make Your Own Kind of Music, featuring the eponymous A-side track “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” one of Mama Cass’s earliest solo efforts. (At this point she has hella outsold the Mamas and the Papas, besides being the whole reason they were popular to begin with. In your face, John, you monster … I’ll save that sauce for another day.)
The daughter she refers to at the beginning is Owen Vanessa Elliot, born in 1967, to whom Cass was a single mother until her early death.
Owen was only seven years old when her mother passed away, and Cass did not have the opportunity during her lifetime to reveal to her the identity of her father, which she’d also kept secret from most of her family and friends. I think it’s safe to assume she was waiting until her daughter was curious and emotionally mature enough to ask and receive the answer, and be okay and stable enough to handle whatever came next (like, you can’t lay such heavy stuff on a little kid from day one, don’t people see that??) but she unfortunately died before that time came. I don’t understand why everyone, even sympathetic biographers, gets up in her grill about that. Leave a bitch alone, people. Babymama drama is seriously some really heavy shit. I personally have weighed my options and always played it Cass’s way, and I don’t really care about anyone else’s opinion of the matter. It’s now between me and the kidlet and God, thank you very much, and thank you to my friends who know about it and understand.
Custody of Owen went to Cass’s sister Leah and Leah’s husband, drummer Russ Kunkel, after Cass’s death of a heart attack at 32 –which had nothing to do with choking nor a ham sandwich, and was a total tragedy for the entertainment world– and it ended up being, unexpectedly, Cass’s old bandmate Michelle Phillips who helped Owen track down her biological father in the mid-1980’s.
At some point in the mid-80s, when Owen Elliot was in her late teens, she called Michelle and said, “You have to help me find my father!” Michelle spent a year running down leads through musician friends.
Cass and Mitchie share a giggle on a plane during some of the tough years
Once she had pried loose the name Cass had kept so close to her vest, she placed an ad in a musicians’ publication, urging the man to call an “accountant” (hers), implying a royalty windfall. Like clockwork, Cass’s long-ago secret lover took the bait. When Michelle phoned him, she recalls, “he wasn’t all that shocked,” and, the next day, Owen says, “Michelle gave me a plane ticket and said, ‘Go meet him.’ ” (Owen and Michelle will not reveal the name. Owen says only, “I had envisioned this Norwegian prince.”)
The meeting “answered a lot of questions,” says Owen, who is now married to record producer Jack Kugell and has two children. Since then, she says, “there have been times when I’ve been devastatingly upset about things in my personal life, and I’ve really leaned on Michelle.
“She’s ironically been a mother to me in a way that would make my mom definitely chuckle.” — December 2007, Vanity Fair, “California Dreamgirl,” by Sheila Weller.
Anyways, I can’t believe that I have to type these lyrics up myself, that is a total trip to me, they are NOWHERE online. Maybe I’m just crappy at looking cause it’s so early in the morning. I’m happy to do it really quickly though. I’ll come back and fix typos later.
(spoken) I’d like to sing this song especially for my little daughter.
I don’t require a lot to make it
times are hard but I can take it
as long as I got my little someone to hold on to
I’ve been down but I don’t mind it
what I’ve lost I’m sure I’ll find it
as long as I’ve got my little someone to hold on to
A little sugar to sweeten my tea
A little girl just for me
Hard times I can rise above
With a little help from Lady Love
I’ve heard it said if you’re strong
you can make it all alone
but I’ve got to have my little someone to hold on to
A little sugar to sweeten my tea
A little girl to set me free
Hard times I will rise above
With a little help from Lady Love, Lady Love
She came along just in time
Time to ease my worried mind
and now I’ve got my little someone to hold on to
Well, time to go make sure my lady love has been getting dressed and brushing her teeth and hair all this time. Then we will sit and have breakfast and she’ll fill me in on the dramz with this boy she likes and her best friend (who has already stolen one guy: typical). Catch you on the flip side!
Approximately one hour ago, one of my dearest of dear people on this earth, the incomparable Cappy, who I consider a brother, a counselor, and a friend with the depth and nuances that only come from years and years of real conversation, turned the big 3-0.
In a perfect world, I would have insisted that he call in sick to work today, and he’d swoop over to my house to spend the birthday in style. We’d gorge ourselves on baked goods and guzzle bottles of beer while playing cards, maybe ogle some movies.
Then we’d bounce over to Outback (I associate that place with the Cappy and only the Cappy from way back … like, over a decade) to do some damage to fat steak and even taller glasses of booze. We’d laugh at the out-of-work-supermodel waiters and waitresses and repeat many times that they got no use for spoons there.
But, that’s not the case. It’s not a perfect world even at all. It happens that he is in Iraq right now. Second time, no less. If it was me, I’d be down. It’s not me and I’m down. I think that’s why I went all nuts with Makery Monday. I needed to do something because this day was important to him (10/27, not the 26th, to be clear; it’s already tomorrow where he is cause he’s from the future and stuff, being in Iraq), which makes it important to me. My friends are the family I choose for myself. I’ve chosen Captain JKA to be a confidante and counselor for the last decade and a half, plus, and I continue to choose him every day. He’s the Man. You don’t even know! I can’t believe we are not together this day!
So let’s all turn to the east and blow booze and kisses, okay? I miss you and I love you and I can’t wait to see you, brotha-from-anotha-motha and dearest old friendoh. Happy birthday, JKA.
“Basement Kitchen Cake” by vivavanstory on deviantart.
The Thought Experiment 