If I had to pick the absolute perfect song, tied up with a gun to my head, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with one better than Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses.” That sparse, sultry beat that slowly emerges as if from the clouds, combined with a strange, sci-fi keyboard do-dooing that somehow comes off as … Continue reading
I didn’t know what to write about David Lynch. Sure, I knew that I had to write something in tribute to our preeminent filth elder (tied with John Waters)—the dreams of Filthy Dreams. But…what? Scroll through this website’s archives and you’ll already find pages upon pages penned on the man, his quinoa recipe, his paintings … Continue reading
“Help! There’s a pervert after me!” A gorgeous woman (or so we assume) with petite features, framed by her pencil-thin eyebrows and gigantic 1970s bug sunglasses, dashes up to a man with mussed hair and a blue and red striped shirt, rudely interrupting his shouty breakup phone call with a soon-to-be ex: “Only losers get … Continue reading
“I’ll take Jesus for mine! I’ll take Jesus for miiiine! You can have the whole wide world, but I’ll take Jesus for mine!” Just try to dislodge this song from your overheated brain after watching The Disappearance of Aimee, an oldie but also a so-baddie-it’s-goodie Hallmark TV movie (Thank friend of Filthy Dreams Graham Russell … Continue reading
You must understand two things to appreciate the overblown, overindulgent glory of Francis Ford Coppola’s crackpot masterpiece Megalopolis. First, the most pie-in-the-sky fantastical architecture that Coppola can muster is apparently a waving, gelatinous, see-through, glimmering moving walkway as if Hudson Yards’ suicide shawarma, The Vessel, traded its now-fenced-in staircases for technology largely found between far-flung … Continue reading
“What has been used on one side is lost on the other side. There’s no going back,” lectures a stern voice at the other end of the telephone after Demi Moore’s frantic has-been actress turned Suzanne Somers’-like exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle calls customer service to whine about a hitch in her new, ill-advised foray into … Continue reading
Squish. Squish. A couple embraces, their fingers carefully caressing two fleshy gashes in the shape of a carved X. Located on their respective torso flanks, these slashes pucker like keloid scars around a wet red opening as if David Cronenberg designed Jesus’s yoni-ish crucifixion wound. Squick. Squick. The couple’s middle two fingers enter each other’s … Continue reading
It’s been a stinking hot ass summer in NYC (as usual) and I live in a fifth-floor Alphabet City walkup. Even with a brand-spanking new air conditioner, it’s stuffy in here! So I escape the heat by schlepping, panting and slicked with sweat, into movie theaters to try to soak up the not-quite-free AC. This … Continue reading
A shakily drawn, Occult-like circle ripped from that possessed videotape in The Ring flashed ominously before transitioning into a montage of country-fried American Gothic scenes: a woman in short overalls walks down a red dirt path, rides in the back of a pickup truck on an empty road, stares into the fluffy blue-clouded sky, and … Continue reading
Long beaded necklaces, faux pearls, brooches, golden baubles, jingle-jangling bracelets, and an assortment of other ornate, tacky costume jewelry tossed in a clicking-clacking heap inside of an unused toilet. That is the sublime image—the pinnacle of the trash aesthetic—that I’ve been unable to get out of my head since attending a screening of Jill Godmilow’s … Continue reading