M


y Spanking and the Spanked page is getting a frightening number of hits because it has been picked as the "cruel site of the day." It's been a hectic day here at Comet, with several difficult customer problems to handle in sometimes overlapping multi-call threads. I also got a crank call, maybe from one of those Chaz supporters, either a girl or a prepubescent boy.

It's not until you surf the web as the rest of the world does that you realize that it's still just a toy, a weak, pathetic, grainy, fuzzy, unreliable novelty.

W


hen I got off work, I lay around in the house drinking vodkatea on ice and watching teevee, then playing with the internet in my room. It's not until you surf the web as the rest of the world does that you realize that it's still just a toy, a weak, pathetic, grainy, fuzzy, unreliable novelty. At Comet in the middle of the night, pages blink into being on nice wide monitors in 16 bit colour as they are sucked in over a T1 through light traffic. That's the Web I'm used to. But in the middle of the day, the congestion is appalling, and using a 14.4 kilobaud modem and a 25 MHz 486 with 4 bit colour is agony, like trying to swim handcuffed in a tank of chilled vaseline to retrieve a lost nickle. I have to really like a page to want to get there with such a handicap.

Susan then went on to tell me that she had been trying to fix me up with some 29 year old woman she knows, but when she'd told this woman about the mustard incident, the woman had responded that she didn't think she could deal with my sort of person.

Susan (Natalie and Shonan's somewhat peculiar mother) came by briefly and chatted with me on the front porch. She wanted to apologize for telling Matthew Hart, Deya and Leah all the terrible things I'd said about them immediately after the mustard crisis of yesterday. I'd run across Susan on the Mall Friday evening and told her all this shit about my housemates being spoiled rich kids with no regard for property, and she couldn't help herself when she saw them, so she'd told them it all. I said it didn't really matter, the issue had blown over quickly as we all know. Susan then went on to tell me that she had been trying to fix me up with some 29 year old woman she knows, but when she'd told this woman about the mustard incident, the woman had responded that she didn't think she could deal with my sort of person.

F


ranz and Cory the Coffee Cart Girl (both of Abundance House) came by, as did Ami Sage. We (Monster Boy, Deya, Leticia the Brazilian Girl and myself) joined forces with these irregulars to go see Pink Flamingos, a 1972 film directed by John Waters that has been re-released on its 25th anniversary. The film was playing at the Jefferson Theatre on the Downtown Mall. The Jefferson, by the way, is the theatre directly upstairs from the Downtown Artspace. It's sort of run down and grimy, made musty and yellow by years of popcorn vapour and spilled soda pop.

Things that were gross in 1972 are still gross here in 1997. As a culture, we haven't become all that numb.

Monster Boy and Leticia had Pink Grapefruit Mad Dog and I had some vodkatea. The Jefferson is pretty laid back about smuggled refreshments; after all, it's staffed with alternative layabouts and shyly friendly teenage girls. The tickets were only $2, and even so the theatre was almost empty. A film like Pink Flamingos, which is notoriously vile beyond simple controversy, doesn't attract much of a crowd in a small southern town, even one as seemingly progressive as Charlottesville.
For all its liberal politics and alterna-urchins, Charlottesville's culture is strangely conservative and stogy. It's based on old money invested unimaginatively. An indication of this is the fact that Charlottesville has always been behind the curve with regard to such trends as internet connectivity, inter-racial relationships and even rock & roll.

Pink Flamingos didn't impress me. The overly stressful and completely unnatural style of the acting (which is common to Waters films) leaves my throat sore with words I haven't even said. And the sheer volume and diversity of disgustingness is integrated into the plot poorly at best. Nonetheless, things that were gross in 1972 are still gross here in 1997. As a culture, we haven't become all that numb. A list of disgusting things in Pink Flamingos:

Eggs are endowed with a special disgust factor unique to me.

• A pair of chickens are crushed to death between a couple having sex.
• A huge fat woman lives in a crib and eats nothing but eggs. Eggs are endowed with a special disgust factor unique to me.
• Women are kept imprisoned in a nasty basement and impregnated so their babies can be sold to lesbian couples. At one point one of the guys keeping the girls imprisoned jerks off into his hand and uses a syringe to transfer the puddle of cum from his palm to a knocked out prisoner's vagina. A couple in the theatre got up to leave at that point.
• Divine (the heroine) shoplifts a slab of meat by slapping it into her naked crotch in a grocery store.
• Divine gives her own son oral sex.
• A guy flexes his anus in a way I hadn't known was possible.
• A group of cops are hacked to pieces and cannibalized by a crowd of like-minded folks at a wedding.
• Liberated prisoners from the nasty basement slice the penis off their guard in an act of revenge. You don't get to see that, but you do get to see the bloody aftermath.
• Divine eats fresh doggy doo and the camera lingers upon her mouth as she chews open-mouthed.

I'm going to build a machine that can convert a person of any social scene into yet another frat boy clone.

I have to confess that I didn't really understand what was going on in the movie. Every character was so completely unsympathetic that I never became emotionally involved in the least. Sure, I laughed plenty. But I also kept wishing the movie would grind to an end. When it did, Waters himself narrated some out-takes. He's a funny guy and I'd be pleased to see a movie documenting his life. When I saw the videotape of the movie Crumb (about the similarly weirdo-genius R. Crumb), I was profoundly moved.

I suppose it would be good at this point if I drew a comparison between the antics of the characters in Pink Flamingos and those of my friends. The goals of both are similar: to be on the outside of conventional society without having any redeeming goals in mind. Perhaps this is why my friends (especially Monster Boy) like Pink Flamingos so much. But I need more from a movie than I got tonight.

While we stood around in the parking lot preparing to head for home, some drunk frat boy types at a party on a nearby balcony heckled us, calling us freaks. They looked like clones in their khaki shorts and me-too haircuts. I've become rather interested in the desire boys apparently have in this town to look identical to one another. I'm going to build a machine that can convert a person of any social scene into yet another frat boy clone. It will be a feature of one of Jacques DeBeaufort's upcoming art happenings.

Back at Kappa Mutha Fucka, I drank a Red Dog beer and fell asleep on the couch. Matthew Hart got off work at 1am, but he took some Nyquil and that knocked him out.

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