Actor Henry Gibson died yesterday. He's mostly being remembered in the press for his stint on Laugh-In but to me he will always be Haven Hamilton, the absurdly vain country music star from Robert Altman's Nashville whose cornpone patriotism turns out by film's end to be a little bit less showbiz-ersatz than we at first imagine.
The above slideshow uses the Henry Gibson/Haven Hamilton song "200 Years" completely in earnest to make some douche-/tea-baggy faux-patriotic point, which is hilarious because Gibson obviously wrote the song--by himself, for the movie, IN CHARACTER, which is totally fucking amazing--as a hilarious parody of smug country music patriotism and nativistic durrh durrh logic.*
That the song is also somehow genuinely moving only makes it funnier. R.I.P. Henry!
*("Must be doing something right to last 200 years." So mere continued existence equals moral rightness? Okay!)
What was my point again? Besides fishing around for scraps of sympathy and attention among whatever remaining readership we have, because TRUST ME I've already overfished my IRL friends for sympathy and attention, even going so far as to tackily put up medical trauma pics on fucking Facebook in a blatant gesture of exhibitionistic self-pity. And besides using my near death experience* as an occasion to turn Feyfriends into even more of a self-indulgent one-man "personal" blog than I already have.
Oh right, my point: SMOKING KILLS!
I'm not a thoracic pathologist so I can't say for sure if it was the Blus, the American Spirits I had started sneaking again, or my previous uninterrupted 17 year stretch as a smoker--or if, as is certainly possible (I GUESS) it was none of the above--that caused it to happen, but I can say that just as I was starting to get cozy with inhaling carcinogens on a daily basis again my RIGHT LUNG FUCKING EXPLODED. It's called a spontaneous pneumothorax, and the experience of it--the wheezing, shortness of breath, and stabbing chest pain--is pretty scary and hurts pretty bad, but is nowhere near as scary or painful as the experience of it not healing itself (which it typically does) and having to have it treated surgically.
But I'm going to back away from my initial plan to lead you through it beat by icky beat, because I'm lazy and I've told this story some forty times too many already and that's not the point of this blog anyway. But re: scary, painful, and gross here's a picture of the chest tubes I had in for four days following surgery:
This was moments before I had the tubes removed, so you are spared the sight of the reddish-yellow fluid that filled these tubes for the first three post-surgery days.
ANYWAY! Today was my last check-up with my thoracic surgeon (who by the way was totally hot) and although he said that since he only took off the top part of my RIGHT lung my left lung is at pretty high risk for another one of these things--so I may have to repeat the entire six week ordeal at some terrifyingly impossible-to-predict moment in the future--it's over for now!
And as the perfect little coda, as I was leaving the parking structure at Cedars Sinai for what I hope truly is the last time I got turned around, fortuitously ending up in a little cul-de-sac near the exits where the following sight greeted me.
IT WAS ALL WORTH IT.
*(It wasn't even remotely a near-death experience.)
Oh right, my point: SMOKING KILLS!
I'm not a thoracic pathologist so I can't say for sure if it was the Blus, the American Spirits I had started sneaking again, or my previous uninterrupted 17 year stretch as a smoker--or if, as is certainly possible (I GUESS) it was none of the above--that caused it to happen, but I can say that just as I was starting to get cozy with inhaling carcinogens on a daily basis again my RIGHT LUNG FUCKING EXPLODED. It's called a spontaneous pneumothorax, and the experience of it--the wheezing, shortness of breath, and stabbing chest pain--is pretty scary and hurts pretty bad, but is nowhere near as scary or painful as the experience of it not healing itself (which it typically does) and having to have it treated surgically.
But I'm going to back away from my initial plan to lead you through it beat by icky beat, because I'm lazy and I've told this story some forty times too many already and that's not the point of this blog anyway. But re: scary, painful, and gross here's a picture of the chest tubes I had in for four days following surgery:
This was moments before I had the tubes removed, so you are spared the sight of the reddish-yellow fluid that filled these tubes for the first three post-surgery days. ANYWAY! Today was my last check-up with my thoracic surgeon (who by the way was totally hot) and although he said that since he only took off the top part of my RIGHT lung my left lung is at pretty high risk for another one of these things--so I may have to repeat the entire six week ordeal at some terrifyingly impossible-to-predict moment in the future--it's over for now!
And as the perfect little coda, as I was leaving the parking structure at Cedars Sinai for what I hope truly is the last time I got turned around, fortuitously ending up in a little cul-de-sac near the exits where the following sight greeted me.
IT WAS ALL WORTH IT.*(It wasn't even remotely a near-death experience.)
In an effort to communicate my growing obsession with Leeds' band Wild Beasts I was going to post the video for "All the Kings Men," their most recent single. But as great as they are, neither that song nor "Hooting and Howling," the first single off their latest album Two Dancers, quite capture the astonishment of lead singer Hayden Thorpe's voice, the insanely sexy and joyful way it swings from a Freddie Mercury falsetto to a Thom Yorke scrape. His wild vocal transitions--he'll often do them between the syllables of a single word--are as peculiarly satisfying to me as scratching a mosquito bite or having a gaz. When Thorpe's voice is counterpointed with bassist Tom Fleming's more conventionally masculine singing style, the interplay of vocal hotness is so overwhelming it makes me feel like a faggy pinball.
"Assembly" (from their first album Limbo, Panto) has a queeny cabaret vibe that's atypical for them but is a lot of fun, and the lyrics are a blast of ecstatic megalomania--"My top's off - I'm a goose pimpled god! Upon my girth rests the earth, gonna give it what I've got!"--that nicely represents the band's unabashed joy at making music.
I also posted this video and not something newer or more typical because Thorpe looks hotter with the short hair and hipster stache he rocks here than he does long-haired and shaved, and my girlish, cream-myself-every-time-I-listen-to-it obsession with Thorpe's voice is the main reason I'm writing about the band in the first place.
I'd been planning an epic post about my lifelong love affair with cigarettes for a long time when unforeseen circumstances rendered the whole idea painfully absurd. What follows is a little taste of that blog-post-that-never-was-to-be (aw, TEARZ!), as well as a little scenesetting for tomorrow's post, wherein I will discuss those unforeseen circumstances. The idea was to begin with a brief history of my cigarette addiction--how I started smoking as a way to wean myself off the Doritos and full-flavor Coca-Cola habit, which by age twelve had turned me into, in my mother's overheard words, "a fucking whale;" how cigarettes and my intense brand loyalty to Marlboro Reds formed a crucial part of my social identity through my teens and twenties; how through some high-powered self-help intervention I managed to kick the habit with almost no suffering or feelings of deprivation at age 29; and how, in the wake of a big move and some interpersonal and romantic upheavals, I took the habit up again during the first half of this year--and to filter this history through my then-contemporary dabbling in smoking Blu brand electronic cigarettes.
I was also planning to write some very foolish stuff about the specific relationship of gay men and cigarettes, how without the looming responsibilities of parenthood the temptation for even thirty- and fortysomething feys to keep flirting with Thanatos by cheerfully puffing away can be uniquely difficult to resist; and how, as the impact of AIDS has waned a bit since the height of the epidemic, a (perhaps wholly imagined-by-me/anecdotal) tendency for gay men to persist smoking into later life has helped to keep a creepy, unspoken Death's Head-Peter Pan image of gay men alive in our (homophobic) collective consciousness.
It was also to be a humorous and very personal product review of Blus, which I smoked, and more or less enjoyed smoking, for a couple weeks as a cig substitute. I was going to start with a detailed blow-by-blow on their pricing model, how they work, and how you use them--which I'm so glad I don't have to do anymore because it's actually really complicated and would've been totally ZZZZs to try to explain--and then go into the finer social nuances of smoking the stupid things.
As semi-satisfying a smoking substitute as Blus actually turned out to--briefly--be, I was going to conclude that they'd never fully catch on...because what's the point in being HALF a smoker? Smoking electronic cigarettes is probably the least cool thing ever. Out and about in LA, if I lit up a real ciggo I could still reasonably expect that maybe 1 person out of every 20 was not actively pegging me as a pitiable, run-down wreck of a weak-willed human for smoking. The other 19 were, yes, but maybe one person was sympathetic, or sweetly indulgent, or--even better!--a smoker themselves! But when I smoked an electronic cigarette in public, that was 20 out of 20 people full-on thinking I'm a douchebag. That's like 100%!
But even though I was going to finish my review with a big old thumbs-down--I mean, besides the shallow reasons mentioned above my e-cig actually SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED in my pocket on the dancefloor at Akbar, such that I had to pull it out of my totally charred jeans pocket and toss its smoldering remains posthaste into an unattended martini glass--smoking Blus was kinda fun, especially when I would videochat my helplessly regular-cig-addicted friends like Bmad and taunt them by blowing (fake) smoke in their faces.
Don't I look happy? Carefree? And--completely incidentally and not at all as a set-up for what I'm about to reveal next--HEALTHY? I was, all of those things! Smoking Blus, like smoking cigarettes, was totally fun!At least, it was fun until MY RIGHT FUCKING LUNG FUCKING EXPLODED!
Just when I thought Party Down couldn't get any awesomer they brought in Jennifer Coolidge to play Bobbie St. Brown. (Sadly, she was brought on to replace the equally awesome Jane Lynch as Constance.)
The paper-thin pretext that female-voiced disco songs describe female--and not pre-AIDS gay male slut--sexual experience has never been so papery, nor so thin, as with this Ian Levine produced Hi-NRG track and (GAY!) video.
The YouTube comments, mainly from survivors of the promiscuous 70s and early 80s, are worth checking out. What might sound to our ears like a disposable lesser-cousin to "It's Raining Men" clearly has the capacity to overwhelm Gay 80's clubgoers with the profoundest kinds of nostalgia.
My own post-gay bullshit prudishness shrivels in the face of such hard-fought, battle-scarred sentiments as Davethedoobie's:
Hi Ian, love all the posts. Why don't you release all the record shack titles as acapellas? Think of it. The songs are brilliant uplifting pure club music. Times have changed. Imagine, all the 'ladies' singing this today. The Record Shack revival is surely only around the corner. Anyway I'm still living my own life and no one can change me ...Thanks to Ushi for the tip.
From youtube description: "Julia Child seems to be cooking pita bread with a transgendered woman. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just caught me by surprise."
I love this fucking song! And as soon as I get this chest tube out and my lungs cut up, sown up, and healed up I am going to DANCE TO IT.
That someone out there has done such a lovely job of crafting a music video for a 15 year old song, with little to no hope of finding a significant audience for it, has restored my faith today. That it happens to be one of my favorite songs of all time, and that the quality of the video surpasses--while being, as Matthew Perpetua points out, roughly consistent with--the quality of the band's own videos, only makes it more affecting.
(via Fluxtumblr)
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