Sweet 65

Prowling on the sawdust is a naked boy cracking a whip. He has a pile of tornadic ink black hair draped all over his childlike face...like a samurai orphan. He cracks the whip like a lion tamer. There are no lions in the cage, but clocks. Half a dozen clocks. They angrily prowl the cage and he cracks the whip again. They sit up on their stools, roaring and screaming at him.

The clocks have wet fangs bared at him, they also have razor sharp claws with blood stained on them from scratching themselves. They want to tear away at him with time…ravage him with painful years and decades.

Once they lost the plot and got at him..a little lunge and he went a little deaf and went a little blind. In revenge, he not only cracked the whip but made contact to them, tearing off a minute hand here and there. Let them know who’s boss. Now they obey.

Before he was born his mother was in a jail cell pregnant, expecting him and a gypsy shared the cell with her. She told his mother that the boy was going to be the loudest most cacophonic creature ever born…he would burn up every room he walked into. Outside the cell were the sounds of people rioting, burning cars, pulling down monuments and breaking shop windows.

Insane Scorpio boy, intoxicated by the darkness, turning everything upside down and frightening every beauty and every beast in the forest. Look at him now, cracking his whip and taming the clocks that want to tear him up. They’ll never succeed. Sweet 65.

Junkies For Obama

Well, the election is finally over and thanks to the hard work of every shrill liberal white girl on the planet President Barack Obama has been reelected for a second term. His fans are dancing in the streets because their hero will be around for another four years of rising unemployment, forced insurance payments, rising gas prices, a heavily censored administration and not one, but two concurrent wars created by Americans for Americans. Black Superman promised us four years of change, we definitely got change for the worse and the next four years will be more change for the worse. Thank you, Black Superman.

No one’s saying the other guy was better but it’s weak to think that Warbama was the better alternative. Either way everyone loses, and if you don’t believe me check the national suicide rate. It’s at the highest level in decades, in fact the highest since the Eighties when Ronald Reagan was President. Was the rising suicide rate what Warbama had in mind when he talked about change?

A lot of Black Superman’s fans rallied on Facebook, protesting Genetically Modified Foods. Many of these people are already taking steroids, taking ecstasy at shows or just doing drugs of all kinds to maintain their hipness quotient. I didn’t know there were such prioritized standards in harmful elements you could place in your body. Some of them even cried about Hostess Twinkies getting phased out(!). Talk about Genetically Modified Food. Change!

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Drove by the El Rey Theater the other night and saw the marquee announcing the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion playing. When I saw them play there it was the mid-Nineties and there was a line going down the block waiting to get in. Fast forward to now and there were, at best, maybe twenty people standing in line. Sad, I know. I pulled into the supermarket a block away and as I walked up the staircase to the market a tiny mob raced out with Mr. Spencer holding a birthday cake in his hands. His entourage acted very important and almost elbowed everybody out of the way. I just thought it was a whole lot of fuss over a fading star. Sad!

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There's something simultaneously exciting and surreal when you make outfits for celebrities and it shows up on TV shows like TMZ and tabloid magazines like The Star. Rebecca and I were hired to make Halloween costumes for stars Alexis Denisof and his wife Alyson Hannigan and their kids. They wanted outfits that looked like sea horses, which was right up our alley since I already wore a sea horse pendant around my neck.

Click on the next line to see the UK Daily Mail pictorial on their costumes made by us:
Alexis and Alyson Sea Horses

The project took a few weeks since we were dressing four members of the family of varying sizes (one was a newborn so that was a good challenge). They were very easygoing and open to our ideas so they were a pleasure to work for, plus they liked our choices of multicolored sequin fabric. They were not only a hit for the holiday but garnered tons of publicity from the "paps". It's one thing to let your clothes speak for themselves, it's quite another to turn jaded Hollywood heads around, but that's what makes Rebecca such a genius.

High School Weight

Rebecca had a friend in his mid-forties with awful crows feet and a jowly face who proudly bragged that he could still fit into his high school clothes. The thought of someone keeping their creepy old fashions from the 1970’s is too disgusting to bear. After all, those who forget past fashions are condemned to wear them again, so it’s said. Now that another year has gone by and my birthday is approaching the following changes have occurred in my life:

1. I really like spaced out trip-hop because there’s only so many screaming rock guys I can handle and I’m bored with bad jazz music, so I listen to crazy shit like DJ Spooky’s “Zxero”, DJ Food’s “The Riff”, and Kid Koala’s “Drunk Trumpet”, to name a few.

2. I like wearing makeup, and it’s a bizarre leftover from the glam era from the 1970’s. In fact I miss the whole glam era in general, pre-punk so it was all about love, narcissm, beauty and safety-pin hate wasn’t on the menu just yet. Slade, T. Rex, The Sweet, and Roxy Music called the tune, and it didn’t hurt a bit.

3. Social networking means nothing to me. I still haven’t been on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, or anywhere else. For five minutes I had a momentary lapse of reason and tried to register with Facebook. I had to fill out so many boring questions about myself that I had an anxiety attack and got off as quickly as I tried to get on! I can only go as far as Flick*r (who thankfully don’t care what my favorite food is).

4. Maybe I'm crazy, but I still feel like taking off my clothes and dancing - I refuse to get caught up in the 9/11 A Go Go paranoia set where everything is cause for panic and anxiety. I just don't give a shit. I'm here to tell you that everything's gonna be alright. Because I said so.

Getting old doesn’t bother me a bit but guys going through weird Dorian Gray maneuvers like keeping their old clothes and bragging about fitting in them does. The best thing about being seventeen is getting over it, the same way getting over twenty-seven is epic, too. It’s not the age you’re at but how hot you are living it, and it’s not something you can hang in your fucking closet.

Suggested listening: The Stranglers' "Old Codger Running" (from "Black & White")

C0un7d0wn to Hall0w33n

The latest trend on the internet is Halloween countdowns, replacing Christmas countdowns by many. The only thing I have to say about this without stating the obvious is that people are more comfortable celebrating ghosts, goblins and jack o’ lanterns than Jesus. I can’t argue there!

Seven more days until Halloween! Pumpkins, black cats, wicthes, ghosts and ghouls!

Rather than buck the trend I’ve added a few classic Halloween images. Seven more days until the blessed/damned event.

Release the bats, release the cats! Out demons out!