Olivia Nuzzi’s much-maligned memoir American Canto opens with a phone call and a cockroach rave. Stomping down Fifth Avenue in front of the Met, Nuzzi argues with croaky-voiced bear-crime-scene-stager and whale-beheader Robert F. Kennedy Jr…I mean, The Politician…about whether their long-shot presidential candidate x political journalist affair is wrong (it is). Answering his invocation of … 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
Little wet gelatinous orbs of yellow egg yolks, slopping over one another on the top of a trash heap, have never looked so erotic as in a memorable montage in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, dutifully separated from their whites for a healthier breakfast by Kristen Stewart’s reserved, choppy mulleted gym manager Lou for her … Continue reading
“Distinctively different.” Isn’t that the exact response you want from relatives and friends this Thanksgiving, our dear Filthy Dreams turklets?! Why, we can’t think of a more ecstatic rave review! And neither, apparently, could the advertisers in the 1960s who were determined to convince the sugar-addicted American public on the most cloying of all holiday … Continue reading
Our new Bible (all photos by moi) Susan Sontag may have written the most renowned and widely considered definitive consideration of camp, but let’s be honest, Susie could not be camp if her public intellectual life depended on it. Regarding the Pain of Others, Illness as Metaphor, or even, On Photography aren’t exactly laugh riots! … Continue reading
Someone was taking a dump in The John Waters Restrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Was it an art-inspired intestinal emergency or a dedicated tribute to the filmmaker whose major public stink involved Divine sampling some doggy-doo in the filthy finale of Pink Flamingos? Or perhaps, this intrepid museum-goer previously devoured John’s chapter “Act … Continue reading
Are you sick to death of sleek cinema? An overbearing aesthetic that has trickled down so far that even the most whacko experimental films and unhinged underground movies strive to achieve a similar spotless surface perfection as those boring big-budget Hollywood films? Blech! Give me the awkward, the uncanny, the janky, the shonky, the half-baked, … Continue reading
I’m beginning to hate the phrase “chosen family.” Conducting an interview recently for a well-known “queer” publication, I felt myself physically recoil when an interviewee used that term. Why? Because like queer itself, the phrase, to me at least, feels increasingly hollow—emptied of all meaning—especially as queer becomes a brand identity and chosen families, the … Continue reading
Where have all the cowboys gone? I’ll wait for you to finish belting the rest of that song. It’s hard to resist Paula Cole’s 1990s classic, but if we suppress the urge to run to Sing Sing to furiously (and drunkenly) yodel, “Where is my John Wayne?” we can take her question seriously. I mean, … Continue reading
In the latter half of the year of our Lord—or really Lady—2021, I decided to become a Princess Diana obsessive. That’s right, send me all your purple Princess Diana Beanie Babies that you’ve been squirreling away under your beds since the late 1990s just in case they finally become worth more than NFTs. I’m now … Continue reading