Bad Christmas Playlist 2015

A public service.

Cosmos: War of The Planets (1977)

Ballet Mcanique (1924)

Massacre at Central High (1976)

Chopping Mall (1986)

Film.

"A group of teenagers that work at the mall all get together for a late night party in one of the stores. When the mall goes on lock down before they can get out, The robot security system activates after a malfunction and goes on a killing spree. One by one the three bots try to rid the mall of the "Intruders." The only weapons the kids can use are the supplies in other stores. Or . . . if they can make it till morning when the mall opens back up" (imdb).

The Moon as Fantasy

c/f Ed Leedskalnin Builds an Outsider Art Environment for Nudes on the Moon Coral Gables Nudie Cutie Film

The Mask (1961)

Gladiator 2 Script by Nick Cave

Gladiator 2 by Nick Cave
Context

The Star Wars Holiday Special

No one likes this.

Transcript.

"Who Killed Bambi?" - A screenplay by Roger Ebert (1977)

"This, for the benefit of future rock historians, is the transscript of a screenplay I wrote in the summer of 1977. It was tailored for the historic punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and was to be directed by Russ Meyer and produced by the impresario Malcolm McLaren. It still carried its original title, "Anarchy in the U.K.," although shortly after I phoned up with a suggested title change, which was accepted: "Who Killed Bambi?" I wrote about this adventure in my blog entry McLaren & Meyer & Rotten & Vicious & me. Discussions with Meyer, McLaren and Rene Daalder led to this draft. All I intend to do here is reprint it. Comments are open, but I can't discuss what I wrote, why I wrote it, or what I should or shouldn't have written. Frankly, I have no idea." - from Roger Ebert's Blog. 

Transcript.{

Revenge of the Virgins

Clearly Ed Wood does not set out to create or encourage Art. The films are scantly even commercial B-fair: perverse, idiosyncratic enough likely to irritate the audience of titillation-seekers who would naturally be his, did they not generally require a semantically more even-keeled thrill. With this in mind, here is a badly executed western with one glaring, additional gimmick: the "indians" are, to a person, topless showgirls. There's even a blond one!

Grand Guignol: Resources, Film, Texts

Meaning "Giant Puppets," pulp genre horror owes a great deal to this early 20th C French, live action schlock theater, as does the furnishings of the carnival fun-house and our contemporary sense of the eerie, gory and the macabre. For a history and some cultural context, GrandGuignol.com has a lot of helpful articles and links to resources online. 

Other Resources

Andre de Lorde's: At the telephone is an online Grand Guignol play, in English translation. This mini-drama is pretty smart on why communication technology always seems to contain within it an uncanny sense.

Devil Doll. An American film that borrows stylistic cues from this French horror theater, Devil Doll is also notable for the inclusion of Rafaela Ottiano, a former Grand Guignol actress whose somewhat bizarre performance gives a good idea of the broad, melodramatic acting style presented on the Grand Guignol stage. Not the best film ever made, this version was shown as part of the sadly defunct comedy-cult program Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Elizabeth Taylor Quotes, Quips and Clips

• Source of quotes.
• Wikipedia's biography.
• A suitably trashy bio.
• Socialist eulogy. Elizabeth Taylor and the melodrama of American life in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Peculiar Beauty: Elizabeth Taylor: Too Bloody Much
• Liz Taylor: Rare and Unpublished Pictures
• Richard Burton's letter to Taylor, upon Their Break up

*

Her public profile blurred between flawed serious thespian and unrepentant queen of celluloid decadence, Elizabeth Taylor can be a squeamishly bad film's singular delight. Eventually a career of being type-cast and supremely miscast bleeds into her persona, whereby she becomes sort of a meta-diva, playing the role of Hollywood actress for movies: but also tabloids.

Those sensational grotesqueries in which she plays the part of aging or nubile tyrannical bitch easily surpass melodrama to become touching monster movies with her often as star (even where she is not cast as such).

Glamorously overacting and lushly stage-villainous, she is clearly having a good time, chewing up her luxe scenery of co-stars who seem by comparison of merely pretty types, upstaging blockbuster spectacles, out-pronouncing scripts-by-numbers, adding a comic stirring of life.

Lousy stage-acting and glorious, operatic scene-stealing are indistinguishable in her performances. Below are some haply campy quotes and films in full of her dizzily erratic, dramatic, high trash appearances. 

Big girls need big diamonds.

I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed too - for being married so many times.

I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.

I have a woman's body and a child's emotions.

I haven't read any of the autobiographies about me.

I really don't remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on.

I suppose when they reach a certain age some men are afraid to grow up. It seems the older the men get, the younger their new wives get.

I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes.

I think I'm finally growing up - and about time.

I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive.

I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage.

I've only slept with men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?

If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.

It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

It's not the having, it's the getting.

Marriage is a great institution.

My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked.

People who know me well, call me Elizabeth. I dislike Liz.

So much to do, so little done, such things to be.

Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.

Success is a great deodorant.

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

When people say, 'She's got everything', I've got one answer - I haven't had tomorrow.

You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.


*

THIS LAST LINK to the movie Identikit, or The Driver's Seat  is one of her best, most emotionally disturbing appearances as aging diva (and, in this case, thief). Featuring a cameo by Andy Warhol!

Susan Sontag's Camp Canon

These are a list of links to works, often literary or cinema, in their entirety when possible, which Sontag specifically cites as part of her imagined, informal pocket canon of camp in her famous essay Notes on Camp.

Attending to the subject of Camp with as alabaster reverence as a Sontag essay, then following up on all its associated literature, a gesture itself steeped in campiness.

Christopher Isherwood's - The World in the Evening (Excerpt on Camp)

Oscar Wilde - Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Beerbohm, Max, Sir - Zuleika Dobson

Tiffany Lamps
History

Scoptione Films

. . . an example . . .

The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Vintage National Enquirer on Pulp International

The Brown Derby Restaraunt

Aubrey Beardsley drawings

Swan Lake

Bellini's operas

Oscar Wilde - Salome

John Ford - 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore

Certain Turn-of-the-Century Postcards. Source 1: NYPL Digital Library. Source 2: Lu Lu's Vintage.

Schoedsack's King Kong

the Cuban pop singer La Lupe

Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man

the old Flash Gordon comics

women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)

the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett

stag movies seen without lust

(as well, a great many rare and vintage stage movies can be seen here.)

Louis Feuillade (here Les Vampires)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard

Der Rosenkavalier

Jacopo Pontormo

Rosso Fiorentino

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Georges de La Tour

John Lyly

Alexander Pope

Horace Walpole

William Congreve

Oscar Wilde -The Decay of Lying

Jean Cocteau

The Operas of Richard Strauss.

42nd Street

The Gold Diggers of 1935

The Maltese Falcon

Trouble in Paradise

Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat

All about Eve

Gaudi's buildings

- Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia

Carlo Crivelli

Quotes from Charles de Gaulle

The Prodigal

Sampson and Delilah

The Mysterians

The H-man

Rodan

Maciste

The Triumph of Maciste  . . . . 

Rudy Vallee

Vera, or the Nihilists

Excruciations . . . . 

James, Henrey - The Wings of the Dove

                          The Awkward Age

                          The Europeans

Shaw, Bernard - Major Barbara

Oscar Wilde - Lady Windemere's Fan

Oscar Wilde - A Woman of No Importance

Paul Valery - Monsieur Teste

Walter Pater - Marius the Epicurean

Huysmans' - À Rebours

 from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours.


Frontispiece-Gay Paris The Serpents "He had tasted the sweets of the flesh with the appetite of a sick man" "It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it..." "He possessed in accordance with this taste a marvellous collection of tropical plants" "Come and have a drink" The Image of the Pox "It was Miss Urania, one of the most famous of the acrobats at the Cirque." "Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship" Stolen Kisses "He returned to Fontenay, feeling all the physical exhaustion of a man restored to the domestic hearth..." "When all was said and done, the future was the same for all" Pagan Idyll "He was alarmed at the doctor's silence" "The physician, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world, only smiled..."

(this article is still, and perhaps forever, in progress, I am trying to find the best material possible, preferably at first hand, preferable legible to read on most monitors, to support references. If you know of better, please let me know)