Japanese muscle boy obsession. Domo arigato!

I’ve never had a child and never intend to, but I can tell you just from life experience that there are certain things you want to avoid as a parent if you hope to raise a well-adjusted daughter:

1) Never brand a girl with an ornate name like Chandelier, Fabergé, Ambrosia, or Trinket; she will have no choice but to become a stripper, escort, porn star, or be briefly engaged to Charlie Sheen.

2) Do not force your daughter into show business and beauty pageants that make fame a condition of your love.

3) Explicitly teach her that men are not means to obtain status symbols, luxuries, and security.

4) Teach her that princesses exist only in storybooks and woefully antiquated monarchies.

5) Never fucking ever buy her a kiddie makeup kit that encourages her to equate looking like a New Wave Hooker by way of Hatchet Face from Cry Baby as being a stunning, elegant beauty.

I think my cerebellum may’ve just fused:

“Chalk some of them up as victims of the cult of self-esteem. No one they have encountered in their lives – from their parents to their teachers to their president – wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth. So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson. On American Idol, of course, these self-esteem-enhanced but talent deprived performers eventually learn the truth. After they’ve embarrassed themselves for the benefit of the producers, they are told in no uncertain terms that they, in fact, can’t sing, regardless of what they have been told by others. But in the wider world, these kind of instances of hard-truth-telling are increasingly rare. “

– more keen self-awareness from stage mother Sarah Palin via leaked excerpts from her latest book, all this despite the fact that her meritorious brood — including elder daughter, fleet-footed nymphette, and latter-day Pia Zadora, Bristol — has yet to meet a camera or magazine cover it didn’t condescend to grace.

I don’t want to live in a country where an average teenage unwed mother can’t profit from her horrible life choice, be patted on the head by a political party with a vested interest in insulating her from criticism, rake in the cash as an abstinence shill, dress up as a gorilla in a pink tutu, and turn even a content-free Z-grade TV celebrity employment project into an arbitrary popularity contest.

Dignity, folks. Dignity.

“Susie, do you know anything about… witches?”

— Suspiria

I never particularly cared all that much for the conventional hatchet-faced hag image of the witch; magic is seductive and bewildering, and I have to figure that any sensible or ambitious woman with magic at her disposal would glamor herself up (a feat Roald Dahl‘s nasty lezzie witches never managed). Certainly the main reason why witchcraft is such a transgression for the pious peasantry is because it enables the subversion of God’s order. Nothing was more sinful for the Puritans than the thought of a lovely young thang taking off all her clothes, flying into the night, and cavorting with demons who granted her strange abilities. Except when elderly, homely ladies did the same thing.

In opium-dazed visions, the famed hophead author Thomas De Quincey beheld three terrible sisters — dread Witch Queens whom he took as the incarnations of earthly despair. That phantasmagoric encounter would later become the basis for Italian director Dario Argento‘s superb “Three Mothers” trilogy beginning with Suspiria in the late ’70s, chronicling the exploits of the sisters as they sowed the seeds of Terror, Death, and Sorrow over the world. The youngest sister — the most fearsome and cruel of the lot — was also the most beautiful. (read the full article)

“Let that realm of God’s spirit just come on you right now.”

– Joshua Mills, consummate virtuoso — child prodigy minister, supernaturally-trained pianist, faith healer, happily married man, father, missionary, divine mouthpiece, songwriter, and Jason Sechrest/Ross Mathews hybrid — enlightening us about God’s humanitarian abilities to teleport the faithful and orthodontically heal the Inuit.

Portugo Is Burning!

Some kids are just born cynical.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around me side-eyeing various things proffered to me by the adult world. I couldn’t bear watching the disruptive beastie in any monster movie get blown away, and I wept openly when The Creature From The Black Lagoon bit it because I couldn’t understand why loving the swimsuit-clad heroine not of his kind (as perfectly thematic a realization of childhood gayness as you’ll ever get) and defending his own turf marked him for villainy.

For four years in a row my elementary school forced me to sit through a screening of Annie, and I grew to hate that redheaded little bitch; why should she be rewarded with a rich sugary daddy just for being an optimistic simp while all the ethnic girls embittered by poverty and orphanhood are told to go screw in the gutter? To this day, I still think the There’s No Place Home coda from The Wizard of Oz (Dorothy gets wise in the book and emigrates) is bullshit. Kansas could suck my wake.

Few things had more than fairy tales though, the majority of which seemed to be sanitized (as in dumbed down) for the stupidest kids among us. Snow White and the loyal huntsman should’ve just iced the Wicked Stepmother in her sleep and shacked up together. The Princess On The Glass Hill waiting idly for a paladin to rescue her had me yelling “Just slide your dumb ass on down it!” The big reward for the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin is marrying her captor/would-be executioner and getting pregnant by him. Dipshit Rapunzel spent how many years trapped in that tower when all she really had to do was use the shears to shank that lezzie witch, cut off her own hair, climb down it, and make a break for it.

Since Disney became the conglomerate that packages and mainstreams all the tales of The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll off the pages and into the multiplexes, it’s fitting that the studio has fallen under the withering glares of grown-up kids who resent its lame gender paradigms and prostitot tween horrors. Why, I ask you, are all Disney princesses golddigging bimbos? Why can’t animals ever be more than friendly, singing helpmates? And why the hell are all Disney villains so dastardly, flamingly gay? (read the full article)

If you’re a certain variety of geek, then cryptic polysyllables like Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub-Niggurath will have a significance for you outside of bringing to mind Native American-titled hamlets scattered throughout Southern New York or the sound of violent hay fever.

You’ll know them as key cognomens in the works of author H.P. Lovecraft, the celebrated fantasy writer who dreamed up not only a new form of horror, but a mind-bending cosmogony chronicling humankind’s infinitesimal place in the universe. I’ve long contended that if Creationism — which only raises more questions than it answers — is taught in schools, then Lovecraft’s collective Cthulhu Mythos should be part of the curriculum as well. In this cosmic horror, the earth began as but a petri dish for great, protoplasmic gods who fell from the stars, dwelt in imposing temples, engineered lesser forms of life (man decidedly not being born in their images), and ultimately abandoned it — or were banished from it — for far-flung gulfs in space.

I wonder if H.P. — who died unknown and flat-busted — could even begin to comprehend the loony array of public domain merchandise his life’s work has inspired; not only can you have titles like At The Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, and The Doom That Came To Sarnath populating your book and DVD shelves, but his stamp appears in comics, action figures, role-playing games, plush toys, water bottles, t-shirts, posters, bedroom slippers (!), and most recently…

…a 13” hand-crafted silicone dildo… (read the full article)

Yes, Focus on The Family’s ostensible mission statement is the strident defense of every homespun convention that can be invoked under the name of Jesus, Santa Claus, or Uncle Sam, but we all know what the watchdog group’s true raison d’être is: condemning smut while teeth-gnashingly wallowing in it and convincing its members they’re above it all.

This vintage F.O.F. seminar on porn addiction is hysterical on multiple levels: the wonderfully trashy Ho Stroll opening montage, the assertion that the strategy behind our hugely successful War on Drugs should be applied to combating porno cartels, James Dobson‘s hilarious “The fags and the dykes, and every kind of perversion!” rhetoric that sounds lifted right out of Myra Breckinridge, and best of all, the most over-the-top drink-the-Kool-Aid audience reactions ever.

I once went to a funeral for a family friend that almost immediately descended into an interminable hour-and-a-half-long Evangelical sermon on the dangers of pornography in which the deceased was barely even incidental. Watching this brought back the same avoid-the-groupthink phrase I kept repeating over and over in my head to keep me sane:

Not a looker among ‘em.

Hat tip to Found Footage Festival.

What would Jesus do?

The question has, fittingly, become something of an inane T-shirt slogan along the lines of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” or “No Fat Chicks.” If he was real — he still falls into the same category as Robin Hood or King Arthur for me — then why the hell would he want anything to do with the lovely cross section of humanity that’s turned him into a QVC tchotchke, much more sit by idly as his followers arrogantly put words in his mouth?

If you’re looking for the perfect embodiment of the dissonance between what a bearded, down-at-heel hippy and the star-spangled superpatriots among us would do, then thankfully there’s Tea Party Jesus, a site devoted to literally using Big J as the puppet through which the very worst Tea Bagger illogic is funneled to wince-inducing effect. Yes, somehow our savior was able to anticipate such events as financial reform, gays in the military, and the turbulent 1960s. Simply click on a captioned picture to reveal which God Wad said what jaw-droppingly heinous pontification about which apocalyptic social development/hated class of people. (read the full article)