Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Days of Pant Past

Hollywood Boulevard at Whitley, 1986

Occasionally I like to look back at my neighborhood, to the days when Fashion was available...at a price. Not at a "discount", oh no, but for a price, and that price was a human life. It's just as well the the joint next door was called "Reflections", because it behooved the prospective shopper to pause and consider: Would you kill for a fashionable pant? Granted, it was the Reagan Administration, and human life was cheap, nevertheless, what profit a man to gain the latest Pant, and lose his immortal soul? But that was the Boulevard in the mid-80s, when many a wide-eyed innocent breezed into the Pant Station, only to emerge a different person. A person who has not only bought a spectacularly fashionable Stretch-Stirrup or Parachute Pant, but has also faced the fact that -- like John Huston in Chinatown -- at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The "Do You MIND?" Edition

SHADOW: Please go away, we're having Spoon Time. And if you don't mind, I've been waiting allllll week for this.

MOONDOGGIE: Is this a bad time? Should we maybe spoon later...?

SHADOW: NO!

Monday, April 16, 2018

Beast Blogging: The "Moondoggie's Drag Race" Edition

Moondoggie found a plastic shopping bag, and as a lifelong West Hollywood (adjacent) resident, decided to get Glam with it:
MOONDOGGIE: Shadow! Shadow! Who am I?


SHADOW: The light of my life, the fire of my loins--

MOONDOGGIE: Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman! Get it?

SHADOW: Hey, cool! Let me in there, I'll do Jeremy Irons...

MOONDOGGIE: No! This is my drag show!

Then -- predictably -- it all went to hell:

MOONDOGGIE: Damn the Glam! Why can't I resist it?

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Join the Prune Party!

I've been scrambling to meet a deadline, so I missed Keith's birthday last week, but that's no reason we can't make it up to him now with a bacchanal of prunes! Yes, prunes...The desiccated, rectum-relaxing, mummified corpse of a plum, recognized the world over as the Birthday Fruit! Biting into one will magically transport you to those first screaming, slimy, bloody moments of life, when you were yanked from a maternal orifice or incision and slapped by a rubber-clad hand as fair warning of what to expect from the next three score and ten years of life, just as Proust, lying in his bed in a cork-lined room was suddenly transported through lost time by the taste and fragrance of a madeleine, with the minor difference that Proust didn't immediately have to call for a bedpan.

This plump, meaty fruit "cooks up" fast.
Del Monte: it's the meth of dried fruits!
Stuff cooked Del Monte prunes with cottage cheese, nuts, sliced celery.
No need to shit your pants like Ted Nugent. Behavior like this is more than enough to excuse you from the draft (but if not, the prunes are an essential ingredient of the Nugent Method).
Easy eating--
Which is why they spoon it into Grandpa's slack jaw at the nursing home every day!
--Because Del Monte's "Natural Flavor" process protects both flavor and delicate fruit tissues while it "plumps" the prunes with moist, sterile heat.
People laud George R.R. Martin's gift for writing vivid, sensual descriptions of food, but if you ask me he's met his match in the copywriter who penned this ode to soggy, sterilized prune tissue.

But we come here not to praise prunes, or even to eat the nasty bastards, but to wish a Happy Birthday to Keith, who's both a contributor to the blog and a longtime member of the Crapper community. So when I say I searched high and low, far and wide, to find just the perfect Sexy Birthday Lizard, well...check out this reptilian diva:
"It's time to lip-sync for your life!"

Okay, not actually a lizard -- it's an endangered Mary River Turtle -- but it's just so fabulous I had to bend the rules this once.

We leave you know with this Classic Slice of Hollywood Cheesecake, silent film heartthrob Ramon Navarro, working out nude on the rowing machine, like you do, in preparation for his star-making role in the 1925 Ben-Hur.
Happy birthday, Keith!

Sunday, April 8, 2018

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The "Earworm Game" Edition

Since Facebook users are now shying away from those once ubiquitous games and quizzes ("What Bugaloo Are You?" or "Answer 10 Questions and We'll Guess Your Favorite War Atrocity!"), I thought we could fill the gap with a fun little recreational activity that won't scrape the contents of your wallet, address book, and whatever compromising bits of personal history you divulged to the Scientologists during that Free Personality Test you took on Hollywood Boulevard because you were hot and tired from walking and that folding chair next to the E-Meter looked so very enticing...

Anyway...

Based on what you know about these two, what song was each cat involuntarily singing in their head when they were surprised by the photographer?

Moondoggie

Shadow

Leave your informed or fanciful guesses in the comments.  We'll get things started...

Scott: You can tell by Moondoggie's stricken expression that at the moment the paparazzi caught up with him, he had "Billy, Don't Be a Hero" stuck in his head.

Mary: Judging by Shadow's expression -- moody, distant, melancholy, yet with a touch of Gallic fatalism -- I'm going to guess "Seasons in the Sun". The super lame Terry Jacks version.

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Happy Easter Fools Day!

Mary was planning to make an elaborate meal to celebrate the day, but a short while ago she suffered a mild flare-up of her trigeminal neuralgia. I urged her to put on one of her herbal "Muscle Melt" patches, but she was reluctant, since the supply is dwindling. It went a little something like this...

ME: You don't want to be suffering from jaw pain on a feast day.

Mary considers this, then nods and peels a patch from its foil envelope. Suddenly, as is my wont, I suffer a moment of crippling self-doubt:

ME: Is Easter a feast day?  The Feast of Easter?

Mary absently nods as she fiddles with the packaging.

ME: [UNABLE TO LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE] The...Feaster?

Mary ignores me and focuses on applying the herbal patch to her face.

ME: That sounds more like one of the monsters in Dennis Muren's 1970 stop-motion horror movie Equinox.

Mary ignores me.

ME: Also known as Equinox...A Journey into the Supernatural.

Mary really ignores me.

ME: Which, what with the dead rising from the grave and all, is actually a pretty good description of Easter.

Mary visibly gives up on me and any hope that this conversation with improve, which is actually a pretty subtle and complex piece of pantomime, yet her meaning comes through with amazing clarity.

Happy Feaster everyone!

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