Day: January 6, 2004

Expensive Cure

looky

This site is hysterical- it’s an ad for a book, “Vanquish Fear & Anxiety,” and seems to be written to bring in crawlers… So they have the identical page for every phobia in their database.

This means there is a long plea to treat your Clown Phobia somewhere on the site.

Here’s an example of a particularly ludicrous one.

To add insult to an already distressing condition, most atomic explosion phobia therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to their fear. We believe that not only is this totally unnecessary, it will often make the condition worse. And it is particularly cruel as atomic explosion phobia can be eliminated with the right methods and just 24 hours of commitment by the phobic individual.

BRIAN: now that’s an expensive therapy!
DGIES: the easiest cure for atomic explosion phobia is being exposed to an atomic explosion

I’ll Take “Famous Lesbian Murderers” for $400, Alex

looky

Word is Charlise Theron is going to be playing Aileen Wournos in the new movie, “Monster.”

Who the heck is Aileen Wournos you ask? She was a woman in the 1980s who worked as a truck-stop prostitute and ended up killing a bunch of people. There are a number of movies on her now-

For some reason I associate her with Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol. Maybe because they were both violent grungy drifter lesbians? Maybe that makes me a bigot, I dunno.

Or maybe it’s because they both had musicals made about them. I saw an opera based on Aileen Wournos’ story, “Wournos,” a few years ago. A few months apart I saw a musical production of “Up Your Ass,” which is the play Solanas shot Andy Warhol over.

I have to say that of the two, Solanas is a lot more entertaining. To get a feel for the deranged comic possibilities her life story has, check out I Shot Andy Warhol with Lili Taylor playing Solanas.

I love that movie… Valerie Solanas has speeches about SCUM, Society to Cut Up Men, a secret society she is trying to put together, the aim of which is apparently to eliminate all males from the planet and replace them with cloning tanks to populate the earth with an utopia run by legions of angry lesbians.

I had thought this account was exaggerative until I saw “Up Your Ass.” The George Coates playhouse put it on, and had made it into a musical by setting many of the speeches to music, karaoke style.

Example: 10,000 Maniac’s “The Night Belongs To Lovers” –

Because the night,
belongs to lovers

becomes

Why Must We Dress
To Give Men Hardons?

The best part of that production was the very beginning and the end- two members of the cast, playing a narrator and the Solanas’ alter ego, were dressed in a sort of updated look for her- backwards black beret, a wife beater, snakers, and giant black skater pants.

Pure genius. These two sing the preface to the play, in which Solanas dedicates the play to herself, for among other things, being an excellent typist. For the chorus, the two Valeries shake their fists at the audience and scream “Up your ass! Up your ass!!!” in harmony.