blog temporarily suspended

This blog will be temporarily suspended until I complete the process of moving to my new domicile and settling down.  It will resume soon, most likely in the springtime.  Thanx to everyone who's taken the time to read my rants thus far.  Be well and be swell.

The Oscars: A Clammy Tribute

     Between December 26, 2k8 and February 23, 2k9, this blog will refinish the tacky gold plating on old naked Uncle Oscar and render it shiny and fresh enuff to look spiffy on even Ramon Novarro's mantelpiece.  Ladies and gentlemen, trannies and hermies, may we present to all sentient beings:

  

     THE CLAMMIES!!!

     THE CLAMMIES!!!

     Give it up for THE CLAMMIES!!!

     

     

     (Tepid, tentative applause pitter-pats here and there in the nearly empty ampitheatre.  The bandleader barely stifles a gaping yawn.)

     Every post between to-morrow and the Monday after the Nite of the Red Carpet Mile will be devoted to subverting and renovating the Oscars and adding bay windows, brickface and other niceties to the very conceptual structure of the award ceremony.  Every post will reference the Oscars and/or the Clammies at some point or another.  Awards and their ceremonies may pop up when you least expect them, or they may be the very trilling locus of my tales, trend analyses and tirades.

     George C. (The Great Actor) Scott thought it wuz degrading and humiliating for thespians to compete against each other, so he very publicly no-show-Jonesed his Best Actor Oscar for portraying George S. Patton.  Patton, who was not only a Marlene Dietrich-fucker (or so she bragged) but the Vince Lombardi of tank brigadiers, found it degrading and humiliating to compete with Field Marshal Montgomery and General Zhukov for the prize of Adolf Hitler's mustache presented with upper lip still attached, so there was a certain historical parallel attached to Scott's afterparty-pooping.  GCS, a notoriously prickly sorta boozer when he wasn't imitating dive bombers with flailing arms and attempting pratfalls in the War Room, failed to see the jocular absurdity of the process or consider the possibility of turning what he called the "God-damn meat parade" into a postmodern performance piece w/ (or w/o) heavy sociocultural overtones.  Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather would accomplish that a coupla years later; after Brando had re-invented acting for the second and third time in the space of one year, he scored a triad by recombobulating the art of accepting trophies.

     My question, as usual, is:  wtf is wrong with meat parades?  Darnitall to heck itself, wtf is objectionable about degradation and humiliation, as long as it's consensual, GCS?  Gitcher big ol' beak out of the martini shaker, wipe Colleen Dewhurst's drunkdrool off 'n the bib o'yr turtleneck sweater (ew, snotty, save that for the maid) and embrace the unthinkable...

     Which is, that performance art, so transcendentally silly and sensually serious, is inherently larger than life.  It's garish, non-utilitarian and so far over the top it lands upside down, where it plants and grows roots out the mouth, nose and ears.  Cattle calls can be liberating.  Flesh traders don't own you if you won't let them (Mary Ann hadda learn that the hard way in "Prime Cut").  The life of an actor, cracked or otherwise, is a luxury liner's voyage in sewage, and that's a major oodle of why it's true and beautiful and beneficial.  No artist in any medium is more distinctly, naturalistically human than a thespian who spends far too much time gazing like Narcissus at the vaguely grey bubbles in backyard septic tanks, Brigadier.  

     I won an award, once.  O Man O God O Man O God I wish I had a roomful.  The physical nature of my solitary award mocked my very love of the concept.  Two English teachers picked me as McCluer High School's Poetry Award Winner.  I received a miniscule pin that said "MERIT" on it, you could read that if you squinted.  The pin was tinier than a flaccid clit.  Poetry don't sell beans and it never shapes mountain ranges anymore, but couldn't they have given me something half the size of a broken bowling trophy?

     I can only dream of trodding red carpets in my middle age.  Meanwhilst, I'll disseminate Clammies with more fervor and approbation, esp, if they honor the worst among us.  Judas is necessary and beyond sacrilege.

Welcome to the New, Re-branded, Re-formatted Clambroth!!!

Er, uh, what it says in the header...

To-morrow, the notorious festival of grief and shame known in furtive whispers as "Christmas Day" will mark something good and holy for a change.  The proprietor of this bloggishment, jotto the merciful, will make a startling announcement that will immediately transform popular culture in heretofore unseen ways.  Be mindful of your manners, pray to be predator, and don't forget to leave bear traps on the rooftops this eve before it's too late.

A Weather Crisis Has Indeed Occurred

  I won't be able to update this blog until Christmas Eve.  Curse these confounded holidays.  Boycott them, I say.

12.22.k8

  The nouveau "Clambroth" will debut on this date, barring weather crises.  I look forward to returning from holiday necessities beyond the drawbridges of Clamville with minimal difficulty.  

A Final Daily Week: Damn, King Barry's Good

     The grandmasters of chess are said to see the match four, five, six moves ahead.  Paul Morphy, it is told, could see eight moves ahead, but his was a time of slower and more precise, less crowded neurolinguistics.  We no longer create things and fashion victories in rooms of quietude.  The zeitgeist pounds at our walls to make noise for us, and we must interact.  Creative solutions, like life itself in its crawling stutter steps of halting progress, becomes purely reactive and glistens with shards of cultural pollution.

     Bobby Fischer looked for places with sound muffled by ice and permafrost and tyranny.  He didn't seem to realize that in this day of age the voices always break thru.  Disruptions are as inviolate as the seasons in gravity.  They remain intact and plasticized, molded but never broken or avoided.  The postmodern genius deals.  Paradigms must be co-opted; smashing them into slivers of glass or seeping them aside will make them burrow into the skin of our feet and the soft wet pockets of our lungs.

     In the course of lulling us to sleep with His beige, Metamucil 'n' Marrow-thick choices for His Cabinet, Good King Barry rattled our cribcage with a bold yet cringeworthy selection for Secretary of State.  Lady Hillary, the bane of Good King Barry's ascension, was bestowed with keys to the fiefdom of Dear Foggy Bottom.  As if a scab had been ripped from a healing mortal wound, the gnats donned vulture's garb, darting to release eggs of emotional pestilence.  What hath Good King Barry wrought?  Are we to be liege or leaf, and is there at all a difference in the broad scheme of Nature's Grande ol' Dame?  We do after all enter upon the Hybrid Era, wherein suffocation itself can be source...

     The Good Sovereign's deliciously deviant scheme emerges immediately after Lady Hillary becomes enmeshed in His paramount web.  She has forgotten that He can move both forwards and backwards.  He does, in fact, reverse the siege to his very gestation to smother his rival most effectively and incontestably.  There is no stronger power than that of a nascent presence, a gifted and beloved child cloaked in education, protection and predestination.  This power on earth was the most famous child in the world when Good King Barry was conceived.  

     Lady Caroline arrives in court with her procession.  They need no favored seat at the conference altar.  They brought their own booth behind veiled thresholds and own a legacy of arable soil and estate more vast than either GKB's or LH's. 

     Good Queen Caroline will reign in the year of our Mother 2k16.

     The House of Kennedy will be restored, and the solipsistic, turbulent House of Clinton be kept at a respectful distance.   

     Good King Barry leans back in his throne, eyeing the board askance with one keen eye, balancing as precariously as Henry Fonda on "My Darling Clementine"'s oblique Tombstone porch, awaiting the human contents of his domain's daily incoming carriage.  He keeps his Ladies closer than Wyatt Earp did.  That matters.

     

     

Gathering Sticks and Mud

     A storm blew the nest apart, but that's never a tragedy, it's nature.  I'm gathering sticks and mud to build a new nest here.  Next week I'll post it.  There will be new categories and I'll dispense with any daily anything.  Open wide for daddy bird's regurgitation.

      What could possibly be a more nauseating marketing pitch than that?  Never fear, Polly Purebred, I'll brainrain something more vile...