Whitney Houston Mourner Gets Her Body of Work Wrong

In case you need help remembering, this is Whitney Houston.


GARY, INDIANA (AP) ‒ Like many other people stunned by Whitney Houston’s sudden death last week, Lavonne Pierce reacted to the singer’s demise with an outpouring of emotion.

“Whitney has meant so much to me over the years,” Pierce said as she fought off tears.  “Her music has touched my life so deeply, I can’t go a single day without it coming through me in some way.  And now she’s gone.  I just don’t know how I’m gonna deal with it.”

When asked about her favorite Whitney moments, Pierce, a grade school substitute teacher in the Gary School District, took a deep breath and composed herself.  After a moment, a wistful, peaceful look came to her face, accompanied with a hint of a smile.

“I suppose my favorite thing of Whitney’s is the same as a lot of people’s,” she answered, “I mean, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ is such an iconic song, it’s hard to name anything better.  Whitney really knocked it out of the park on that one.”

As she continued to discuss the fallen pop icon, it became clear that Lavonne Pierce had confused Whitney Houston with Celene Dion.

This reporter attempted to clarify the error, but Pierce refused to listen.  “No!  Whitney starred in Titanic, and she sang the theme song, too!  Kevin Costner had to save her from an iceberg that was stalking her and sneaking into her ship’s quarters on the Titanic while she was out singing!  Billy Zane tried to shoot her with a gun hidden in a videocamera, the jerk!”

“That rendition of ‘I’m Every Woman’ that Whitney sang with the iceberg, wow!” she added.  “What a scorcher!”

Pierce went on to misremember other highlights in Houston’s career, crediting the achievements of many prominent female singers to her.  “Those pet adoption commercials she made were really heartbreaking, but they really opened my eyes to the suffering of animals.  That song she sang about partying on Friday was a real hoot, too!  And that book she made with Anne Geddes and all those sleeping babies was a Total Cute Overload!”

When asked if she had learned any lessons from Whitney’s troubled times, Pierce nodded solemnly.  “Yeah.  She never should have dated that Lance Armstrong.  He was no good to her.  I don’t care how many times he’s won the Tour de France; if you don’t have love in your heart, it ain’t gonna work out!”

This Friday, Pierce plans to mourn privately with a few girlfriends.  During the gathering she plans to play Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” to commemorate the life of Whitney Houston.  “I know that Elton wrote this song right after Princess Diana died,” Pierce noted, “but it’s so touching and timeless that I don’t think he’ll mind.”

February 17, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Fake News, Satire . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Y Marks the Spot: The Old Man

 

Appropriately enough, the first time I wondered if I had gotten old happened because of MTV, an institution that is barely younger than I am.  On the night and early morning in question, I entered the scene feeling drunk and joyful, connected with the world from the backseat of my roommate’s truck as it wound into the sticks and to an acquaintance’s place.

I followed two of my roommates through a blacked out garage and into a living room that was only blacked out mentally.  While some cool mom hovered around them, a spatter of clearly underage kids splayed on a couch, blankly watching some Jackass-aping prank show on MTV2 featuring hosts who were trying waaaay too hard to act coked out and cool for the camera.  The surge of loathing I felt for the show and its audience was about equal in strength to the frightening question that popped into my head shortly afterwards.  Was I into such stupid crap when I was that age?  The answer is, of course, yes ‒ though I’ve since discovered and loved the MTV self-satire that permeates my beloved Beavis and Butt-head.

Unfortunately, that first question led to another uncomfortable one: had I been a stupid teenager?

This moment in the cool mom’s living room was the first time I remember feeling smarter than another person for no other reason than age, which likely makes it the first time I remember identifying with the people who thought I was an idiot when I was a programmed teen rebel consumer.  That’s kind of a scary moment.  It can lead to zealous, born again past-disowning and delusions of present-tense brilliance.  Gee, I was such a moron back then, but I’m a goddamn Socrates now!

We say these disclaimers in ignorance of the possibility that the versions of us ten years from now could look back and laugh about the so-called stupid people we are right now.

There’s a weird contradiction in this, being that people tend to venerate the past and anticipate the future at the expense of their present tenses.  Man, being sixteen years old was awesome!  Holy crap, I can’t wait until the new Frank Sinatra album comes out and I’m old enough to buy beer!  And yet when the future becomes the now, the anticipation tends not to yield equal parts fulfillment.  If time travel were possible, we’d probably be just as disappointed with a tangible past.  We tend to like living theoretically, but don’t we like to bitch about the actual process of existing.

Back to the cool kids and my old man dilemma.  I reacted to that moment of elderly paranoia well, deciding that the question of me being a stupid teenager was one of degrees, not absolutes.  Sure, I wasn’t as wise as I am now, but it’s not as though I’m complacently fully formed today.  In any event, my age fears became irrelevant when a group of us left the couch kids and cool mom to wander into the neighboring rock quarry and hurl ourselves from the tops of pebble mountains.  Very childish.  Very fun.

Still, this lingering worry that I had in fact gotten old stayed with me for months afterwards, further inflamed due to my living in the dining room of a house without a scrap of privacy and five roommates in their mid-20s.  Half of those people were in a band which practiced often and took the rest of us along whether we wanted to go or not.  Also, most of my roommates’ musical tastes weren’t like mine.  Again, I didn’t have an enclosed room of my own to filter that out.

What ended up happening was that I spent that year flat broke and doing little more than lying around that dining room, getting pissed at the noise of the band and the songs played ad nauseum in between those live practices.  And I began to feel very old.  It felt as though I’d have been more okay with loud noise and contrasting tastes if I was younger.  The phrase “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” swam through my head like a sanctimonious goldfish that year.

Those thoughts, of course, were bullshit.  Since moving into a place of my own and building up my own little sanctuary, I’ve been able to put everything into its proper theoretical, past-tense perspective.  The answer I’ve come up with to that second, uncomfortable question is this: if I am truly old, then I’ve always been old.  I’ve always needed privacy and space like a sanctimonious goldfish needs purified water.  I’ve always needed the ability to filter other people out.  And I’ve never liked the styles of music that my roommates were into, and it’s not as though they didn’t exist when I was a teenager.  Hell, I’ve always been annoyed by teenagers, even ‒ especially! ‒ when I was one.

In contrast, I’m pretty okay with getting older.  Aging has to me been a process of getting over unimportant shit and getting better at being myself.  I used to idealize the irresponsible life I had when I was sixteen; now I’d be hard pressed to take that life back for anything.  Worrying about fitting in?  Being horribly damaged by real and desired romance?  Waking up at 6:30 in the morning, five days a week?  The hell with that.

When I actually do become an old man, I’m going to be amazing.  Unless I’m not.

Two additional points bear mentioning.  The first is that last weekend I went back to my old place, hung out with my old roommates, and enjoyed a night full of loud music and drunken frivolity.  I had a great time.  The ability to leave and not have to clean up, combined with the ability to afford to drink, both helped immensely.

The second thing is this: every time I tell somebody that I’m in my early thirties, they act incredibly surprised.  Apparently people think that I’m five.  Which I am.

Growing up and growing old are two different things.

February 14, 2012
Categories: Y Marks the Spot . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

This picture pretty much sums up the whole movie.

Film: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

Director: Jack Sholder

Starring: Robert Englund, Mark Patton, Clu Gulager

Written by: David Chaskin

In discussions about the Nightmare on Elm Street series, this gem invariably gets brought up and described as the queer one.  That label is absolutely correct.  Even the creators of the film have gone on record to marvel at how they ended up making a gay Freddy movie.  I don’t know how all the blatant gay innuendo in Freddy’s Revenge got past them, though; there’s so much that the viewer starts seeing such metaphors and subtext that might not exist.  Look!  That clock on the stairway is rather phallic!  The teacher’s giving a lecture on the colon!  There’s a cardboard box in the guy’s closet that says Probe!  Uh huh huh huh huh.

Beyond all those grasping connections, however, is a lot of very real manly subtext.  Our hero Jesse has an awesome dance number to the sultry tune of “Touch Me (All Night Long)” in which he prances about in gold lightning bolt shades, closes a dresser drawer with his swiveling, supple ass, and gyrates around with some wooden popgun thing thrusting from his crotch.  He also ends up shirtless and sweaty a whole lot, with the film offering many loving shots of his bird chest and tighty whities.  He finds his best friend after the other doofus depantses him during a game of baseball and the two roll around the diamond locked in buttcrack mortal combat.

The issue of Jesse being possessed by a mass murdering child killer always seems to be mentioned in the most pervy ways possible.  “Something is trying to get inside my body,” our hero moans to his doofus buddy as he pleads for Doofus to watch over him as he sleeps.  Doofus, being obliviously awesome, responds: “Yeah, and she’s female, and she’s waiting for you in the cabana, and you wanna sleep with me.”  Said female, a Meryl Streep-looking ginger who serves as the film’s real hero, usually comes off as kind of a beard in the midst of all this machismo.

Yet the easiest thing to bring up is the sadistic gym teacher who hangs out at “queer s&m joints downtown” and operates as the Casey Affleck-meets-Mark Hamill-looking hero’s authority figure nemesis.  Oh, and the film makes it pretty clear that Teach plans to rape our hero as well.  Yeah.

He seemed like such a nice guy.

Following one of our hero’s midnight freakouts, he heads to the local queer bar in question ‒ which is really more of a punker bar for freaks of all orientations.  He’s looking for a beer but finds the leather-clad gym teacher, who busts him with an unwholesome gleam in his eye.  Teach drags Jesse to the gym in the dead of night and makes him run laps, after which our hero is pushed into a stack of folding chairs and told to hit the showers.  While Jesse is gamboling around naked and weepy in the dark, steamy shower room, our heroic gym teacher lurks in his office, amassing physical education paraphernalia by which he obviously plans to tie up our hero and have his way with him.

Unfortunately, Teach runs afoul of a Freddy Krueger poltergeist, who hurls all the balls in the office at his face (uh huh huh huh huh).  After this, Teach finds his bondage jump ropes turned against him, and he is dragged into the shower room and tied splaying to a pair of faucets.  After that, he’s stripped naked, and then the Freddy poltergeist grabs a towel and whips that gym teacher’s ass till it’s lobster red.  After all this degradation, the real Freddy emerges from the shower room steam and gives Teach a few razor-claw swipes, but at this point the quick death feels a bit anticlimactic.

Like most of the franchise films which followed the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy’s Revenge runs the risk of losing all its horror cred and becoming a campy, Adam West’s Batman sort of slasher film.  This flick is certainly in the running to be named the main offender of the bunch, but coupled with all the dude on dude silliness are some pretty sweet horror moments.

It’s clear that the creators of this film didn’t quite have the Freddy Krueger formula down yet.  Besides looking like more of a shadowy, melting Hindu instead of the stock bright burned hawk he’d later become, Freddy isn’t his usual wisecracking ghost of the subconscious who murders people in their dreams.  In fact, he doesn’t kill anyone who isn’t fully awake, and he’s not much for quips here.  Instead, he becomes a rampaging real-world monster who has real-world supernatural powers, and when he Caesarian Sections himself out of Jesse and busts up a pool party with claws and fire, he actually gets pretty terrifying.

There was one moment, however, which makes no sense.  Bookending the rest of the film are two scenes featuring Jesse on a haunted schoolbus that goes off the rails.  Watching the film, I blankly accepted these scenes, but my girlfriend saw the flaw in the logic.  “Doesn’t he drive a car?” she asked.  “Why would he be on a bus?”  Why, indeed; our hero drives a beaten up old clunker known as the Deadly Dinosaur, rendering mass transit unnecessary.  Sure, you don’t know that at the beginning of the film, but you do at the end.  Maybe Freddy’s just an idiot.

February 14, 2012
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: 2 Comments

Valentine’s Day News Hell, 2012

BUY ME.

 

Single Man Refuses to Support Valentine’s Day Industry, Purchases Many Anti-Valentine’s Day Products to Show It

 

A Bangor man, Reggie Hobbes of 713 Cat Food Factory Lane, has had enough of the commercialization of Valentine’s Day ‒ and he has bought the merchandise to let you know it.

“I’m always disgusted at this time of year,” Hobbes, age 43, said.  “The greeting card industry, the out of season flower dealers, and the chocolate robber barons like to turn up the heat on the common man on the 14th of February, telling him that if he doesn’t buy a lot of meaningless crap for his girl, then he’s a failure as a guy.  I’m done with all that.”

To show his contempt, Hobbes has purchased a multitude of banners, clothing, yard decorations, candy, and greeting cards which malign and deride Valentine’s Day.  Wearing a black t-shirt which reads “Love is for Losers,” he showed us around his home, which was festooned with pictures of broken hearts.  He plans to distribute heart-shaped candies to his friends and coworkers which bear such messages as “Get Bent” and “You Suck.”  He plans on sending hateful off-Hallmark greeting cards to all his ex-girlfriends, including one with a front which reads “I miss you…” and an inside featuring a crosshairs and reading “…but my aim is improving.”  There is a paper-maché sculpture of a cherubic Cupid, pincushioned with arrows, dangling from a tree in his front yard.

When asked how much all this cost, Hobbes skirted a direct number, saying only that “The cost was totally worth it.”

What’s strangest about this tale of anti-commercial commercialism is that Reggie Hobbes isn’t some loveless malcontent rebelling against Valentine’s Day out of loneliness.  His wife of 13 years, Marjorie Hobbes, is supportive of his Valentine’s disdain, and their son, 10 year old Marty, helped decorate the house.

“I think hating a holiday based on love has really brought our family together,” Marjorie said.

 

Valentine’s Day ≠ VD, Study Shows

 

Dissenters of the usual Valentine’s Day traditions refer to the romantic holiday by many names, including the Hallmark Holiday and the Night of 1,000,000 Faked Orgasms.  Yet according to a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, one name that is inaccurate for these romance critics to use is VD.

This study, designed to measure which holidays saw the most spread of sexually transmitted diseases, collected case data from hundreds of clinics across the country.  “In terms of STD proliferation, Valentine’s Day is surprisingly small potatoes,” noted project lead Byron Torrance.  “You’re actually much more likely to get the clap on Flag Day than on Valentine’s Day.”

While the report lists greater transmission rates during predictable holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve, there are other holidays which see a surprisingly greater rate of disease spread as well.  Columbus Day sees 45% more transmission of Chlamydia and 27% more syphilis, President’s Day sees 37% more cases of genital warts, Father’s Day sees 41% more gonorrhea, and Purim sees an astonishing 65% more crabs.

The main offender?  “May Day,” Torrance responded.  “It’s a veritable cesspool of disease.  I wouldn’t touch a doorknob on that day without cleaning my hands with sanitizer afterwards.  It must be something about dancing around a large phallic object that gets the blood up.”

When asked why Valentine’s Day’s rates of STD spread are so low, Torrance was at a loss.  “I can’t declare with any finality,” he said, “but my best guess is that, with all the effort put into the day’s grand romantic gestures, it’s all rehearsal and no show.”

February 11, 2012
Categories: Comedy, Fake News, Satire . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

The Designer’s Drugs: Drew Magary – The Postmortal

 

Medium: Literature

Stimulus: Drew Magary ‒ The Postmortal

 

 

In keeping with my recent forays into near future dystopian literature comes The Postmortal, a fascinating account of a 21st Century in which humanity has eliminated aging.  This story is all about being careful what you wish for; almost from the moment humanity unleashes nigh-immortality it spends the rest of the story trying to cram it back into Pandora’s Box.  Humanity doesn’t become one iota superior for having shaken off the reaper: immortals keep pumping out kids on autopilot, the new mankind-worshipping religion comes off as equally totalitarian as the afterlife salesmen it supplanted, and the internet trolls have painted themselves green and run out into the real world to maim and murder.  In this world of total overpopulation and self-absorption, it takes no great imagination to predict that the forever business would soon change back to the death business.

The story’s lead, a former estate lawyer named John Farrell, eventually falls into the death business, getting his feet wet as a euthanasia assistant (known in oh so customer service terms as End Specialists).  As the world continues to slide due to people’s stubborn refusals to die and/or stop multiplying, Farrell and the rest of the Kevorkians find themselves upgraded to government-sponsored public hitmen, charged with taking out the elderly and undesirable.

But that’s only the latter half of the story ‒ and honestly, it’s the least compelling half.  Mostly, that’s because the most fun in The Postmortal comes in watching Drew Magary describe the minutiae of the brave new world through Farrell’s journals.  Our hero ponders such ideas as the decline and transformation of marriage in a world where “to death do you part” has no meaning, the end of retirement and Social Security, immortality’s effect on crime and punishment, the fading of personal goals to work towards, and the strong possibility that almost nobody is really prepared to face up to the massive personal responsibilities involved in existing forever.

I like John Farrell as a character, though his narrative is way too full circle as old flames tend to neatly pop out of nowhere to replace new voids in his life.  He’s an intelligently written cipher through which the reader gets to look into a fantastically terrifying future.  That’s said, his philosophies and sociology are much more gripping than his life.  As Magary’s big world-building gives way to the desperate living within that world, a bit of that fascination fades and is replaced by horror.

Within the dystopia lit I’ve read recently, I’ve found that I like the big-picture approach, on display in Albert Brooks’ 2030, over the sort of Player One solipsism seen in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.  The Postmortal occupies a strong middle ground between the two, moving from Brooks’ style to Shteyngart’s, from sociology to the surreal.  Beyond my reservations on building a story of immortality around a guy who seems unable to move forward ‒ and maybe that’s the point ‒ this story of the end of the end is really magnificent.

February 7, 2012
Categories: Literature, The Designer's Drugs . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment