Best Commercial Ever

BEST COMMERCIAL EVER

Had the TV on without noticing it the other day until this phrase caught my ear: “….the most sophisticated piece of technology you’ve ever peed on.”

It turned out to be a Clear Blue Easy commercial and though I hope I never ever ever need their fine product (again), if I do, they have my business for life. Best Ad Ever. Here it is on YouTube:

Clear Blue Funny

After this you’d think that Clear Blue Easy couldn’t be any cooler, but they can: in 1997 no less a legend than David Lynch did an ad for the company:

Clear Blue David Lynch

Finally, this is one of the best SNL parodies ever,and less of a parody than some of the shmlatzier pregnancy test commercials would lead us to believe:

SNL EPT

My best tip for remembering birth control is simply to spend time in a supermarket, public library or anywhere else at least one set of kids is running one or both parents ragged. Nothing like a tantrum to remind you "Oh! Gotta buy condoms!"

I Want to Believe

I have to get it out of the way: if anyone knows any sex addicts who look like David Duchovny, please feel free to introduce me.

The “X-Files” actor checked himself into a rehab center for sex addiction yesterday and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who thinks that a straight man who looks like that and can’t get enough sex is the best support for the existence of God than anything any church folk have come up with in thousands of years of trying. And dammit…I want to believe.

Shallow? Yes, I admit it. And I understand how some people, and by extension their loved ones, can be very adversely affected by something like this. I do wonder, though, how easy sexual addiction is to define, especially when our definitions of sex and intimacy seem to be changing. For an excellent look at some of these issues, check out Rachel Kramer Bussell’s 2007 essay in The Huffington Post
Am I a Sex Addict? Are you? ).

Joking aside, I at Alice the Goon spent many happy hours watching of the X-Files (I really was more interested in the chupacabra and the ghosts than I was in Mulder’s face) and hope Mr. Duchovny finds whatever he’s looking for in rehab.

And I get how anyone could wonder if they’re addicted to sex. My own preoccupation with it has made me wonder whether I belong at a meeting as well, especially in 2003 when I was writing about Eric Benet’s (Halle Berry’s ex) sex addiction for In Touch Weekly and thought what a great place a sex addict meeting would be to meet men.

Certainly I’ve been unhealthily hooked on some people over the years – I think most of us have had human habits we found painful to break. But as for sex itself, I’ve decided I’m not an addict – I just dig it. Our attractions, our interests, our changes of heart are endlessly interesting and I just keep writing about it, like a Trekkie who knows he’ll never command the Enterprise but eventually does quit his job at Office Max and open a comics shop. Letting your passion shape you without controlling you – maybe it’s the difference between an addiction and a job.

(This image came from the David Duchovny Picture Gallery on geocities.com)

Before You Submit

I at Alice the Goon am excited to announce that I’ve hooked up with Before You Submit, a brilliantly innovative consulting company helping independent filmmakers make the best films – and get into the best festivals they possibly can. You put your heart, soul and life savings into a film, you’re totally committed to bringing your ideas to life – you don’t want to make something people are going to wind up skewering ala MST3K. Before You Submit is kind of like a transition phase between film school and real life, those critiques and suggestions you used to get from your professors and fellow students that would have helped so much before you coughed up all those festival entry fees.
I’ll be joining BYS as a writer and Sex in Cinema expert and hopefully soon we’ll even have some video blog footage to put up. Keep checking them out at:

The website: Before You Submit

And the blog: Before You Submit BlogSpot




See you there!

Review: Midnight Meat Train

Unless you live in a haunted, abandoned summer camp on Dead Teenager Lake, your home is too comfortable for viewing horror movies. The minute you go get your Pop Secret out of the microwave you’ve diluted all the tension some screenwriter worked for years to try to achieve. The best place to see horror is in a theater.

For that and several other reasons I was sad about Lionsgate’s decision to cripple the theatrical release of “Midnight Meat Train,” the best horror film I’ve seen awhile. Evidently trying to distance itself from a genre it’s helped in the past, Lionsgate (American Psycho, The Grudge, Hostel, Saw) gave ‘Meat Train’ a limited release. It was the equivalent of only wearing your good jewelry out into the backyard.

This beautifully shot movie by the lusciously disturbing Clive Barker has just the right amount of scary/bloody scenes to keep the viewer’s hunger in high gear. It’s gory. I’ve seen gorier, but it’s gory. It’s Clive Barker, for god’s sake. If Clive Barker had written “Steel Magnolias” Julia Roberts would have come back from hell in a rubber suit and bisecected the Hee Haw Junior League with a meat hook and a paint scraper and it would have all made sense. This is why we love Clive Barker.

‘Meat Train’ is about Leon (Bradley Cooper), a photographer who’s starving for his big break. He’s promised by a high-end gallery owner (Brooke Shields), that if he gets some really gritty images of city life he can be part of a group show. After capturing the image of a mysterious man in a suit during a violent incident in the subway, Leon starts prowling the tunnels at night, obsessed with his artistic mission and, increasingly, with the mysterious man. Where this leads to I can’t say lest I wreck the ending, but I’ll tell ya, this is the first time I’ve ever glad my town doesn’t have a subway.

Vinnie Jones in the role of the man in the suit was positively inspired casting – his chiseled, superhero bearing, robotic sense of purpose and the fog of silent solitude he travels in make him as irresistible as a second potato chip. He is the most magnetizing character in the film but on a different level, Leslie Bibb, as Leon’s girlfriend, nearly stole the show, not because she did such a great job – though she did fine – but because her resemblance to Jessica Lange is so uncanny it’s hard to concentrate when she’s on the screen.

‘Meat Train’ isn’t perfect – some of the sensible-girlfriend-lectures-reckless-boyfriend scenes ring a bit stale and there are occasional elements of comic book obviousness, but that’s part of the fun of horror. Bottom line: the stylish photography, attractive freakishness of Jones’ character and thoroughly creepy story mean that Barker and this movie deserved better than they e. There are plenty of movies that deliver more blood with less art. Hopefully next time Lionsgate has a creepy little jewel like this – and a far shinier one than Hostel or The Grudge – it won’t just wear it to let the dog out.

Kawaski let's the good times roll

If you collect anything, there comes a point when your friends will start contributing to your stash. My friends have collected dragonflies, butterflies, cowgirls, poodles, R2-D2, cows and cats and every time I see something germane to their various menageries (or corrals or space ships) I feel compelled to get it for them.
My most observant friends, I’m proud to say, have started sending me penis imagery, the coolest and most exotic coming from my friend Hilary – natch – who passes along this awesome treatise on “Kawasaki’s annual fertility festival” from the WordPress blog Tokyo Times.

Japan’s Fertility Festival

Those of us who have been celebrating the wang and its wonders in our own way for a long time have got to love this public acknolwedgement. If it’s possible to lobby to have this festival take place in one’s own town, like they do with the Olympics, then I’d like to put Orlando’s Eola Park up as a potential host to the scrotum poles, penis pops and whatever else this wonderfully elemental fete has to offer the public. We could have it during Gay Days! – and it will tarnish our family-friendly image once and for all. If there’s one thing that can overshadow the Mouse it’s The Acanconda.

Art & Porn: Interview with Taschen editor Dian Hanson

After reviewing The Big Penis Book back in June, I was really intereted in talking to writer/editor Dian Hanson who seemed to me to have one of the more intriguing careers I've ever read about. Thanks to alternet.org, who said "Yes!" to a profile on her I got to have a great conversation with her a few weeks ago. The story is below:


Art & Porn: An Interview with Dian Hanson


Hope you enjoy!

She's Not a Hot Mess - She's Just Hot

When I say things like “God, I love Pamela Anderson!” I feel like some old school feminist in the world just winced and held her hand to her forehead, like Harry Potter with his famous evil-sensing scar. I grew up with the bra-burning, hairy-legged, HERstory feminism of the 70’s and between that and the portrayals in mainstream culture, I grew up with a film of “beauty and brains don’t mix” that still clouds my perceptions, even though I know it’s just as much a prejudice as any other. It’s unfair and untrue, but there’s still a glitch in my bain which, when it sees statuesque blonde and does not think “scholar.” And if I’m that way I know a lot of other people have it a lot worse.

That’s why I love Pamela Anderson and moreover, I love her new show on E! “Pam: Girl on the Loose.” This 21st century siren ends her show with a broadcast from her bathtub, a sweet and sultry burlesque move for the digital age and she comes off throughout the show as smart, practical, creative, hard-working, unaffected and lovable. She bleaches her own hair. She blithely gets rid of Baywatch memorabilia in a charity estate sale in a fine example of material detachment. She has a nice, normal relationship with her mom. She’s not a hot mess – she’s just hot.

Maybe the fact that this is such a refreshing change says more about the nature of the current crop of stars than it does about Pamela, or bombshells for that matter. Our expectation have been systematically lowered by the Paris-Britney-Winehouse level BS that one is impressed if a young beauty is even sentient, much less vibrant and interesting, someone you’d want to have a vodka cran with.

Pamela Anderson comes off like that, a sister you’d want to hang with and learn a few things from, things like a) being a success doesn’t mean being a snob-and-a-half, b) you can use and enjoy your looks but they’re not everything and c) no freaking kidding – a Walt Whitman quote they used to was shown during her estate sale to benefit PETA: “This is what you shall do…love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches….stand up for the stupid and crazy…and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

A nice sentiment. And Pamela Anderson is, I think, one fabulous couplet.

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombshells

This is a copy of an Orlando Sentinel column that I wrote in February 2007, shortly after Anna Nicole's death, about smart bombshells who upend the stereotypical image of the gorgeous dumb girl. I love them and I love this piece - I'm putting it up because it goes with the review of Pamela Anderson's new show which is the post above this one. Enjoy!

Liz Langley
Even in a skimpy outfit, you can have a head on your shoulders
Published February 23, 2007


When Anna Nicole died, the rush to turn her into a cautionary tale was so fast it actually blew my hair a little. Glamorous and sad, sexy and doomed, the inevitable comparisons were made to Monroe and Mansfield. Fair enough: They were all juicy blondes who died too young.

But I think there's a vague odor of something else there, an undercurrent of our Puritan heritage that wants to be very certain that if you're sexy and you flaunt it, are proud of it, you're going to meet a horrible end.

That's not fair, and it's definitely not true.

Life is not a horror movie, where only virgins live to overact another day. I was raised with '70s feminism and traditional thinking, which both suggested that if you liked tight clothes and red lipstick, you were a twit or a tramp, and only shallow people put tons of emphasis on their looks. Then I grew up and realized that liberation is simply about making your own choices. It is entirely possible to care for both Shakespeare and stilettos. The only shallow thing is thinking you have to be limited (except by other people's limited thinking).

So to cleanse the palate of this attitude that sexiness must end badly, here are some sirens who aren't remembered as tragic figures. These aren't women whose careers I followed, but whom I admired, remembered or just now rediscovered and Web-searched, though I know there are many more. Buckle up: serious curves ahead.

Charo. Alternately Maria Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza or just The Cuchi-Cuchi Girl, she learned to play the guitar in a convent, studied with Andres Segovia and has made an incredible career out of seeming as if she can't speak English very well. Actually, she's fluent in four languages and is still looking great at 65.

Brigitte Bardot. "Rated to be one of the most sexually active people on the face of the earth," according to celebritywonder .com, Bardot, 72, has been so successful at switching gears that her name is now more synonymous with animal-rights activism instead of her animal magnetism. She's still controversial, but not just as a siren anymore.

Sophia Loren. An Oscar-winning actress, author of several books, Loren has worked on behalf of various charities, still acts and still wows the world at 72. She was married for 50 years to producer Carlo Ponti until his death in January.

Betty Grable. She defined " pinup girl," was the highest paid female star in the U.S. in 1947 and enjoyed a 44-year career. Grable, 57, died from lung cancer in 1973 and left an estate in debt -- a sad end but not the morality-tale type, unless the moral is "Yeah, you might want to quit smoking."

Tina Turner. She of the legendary legs is still doing movies and TV appearances at the age of 67 and, long after ditching her bad marriage, has become the dignified definition of "survivor."

Jill St. John. A legendary beauty with an IQ of 162, this Bond girl, who is now 66, is purported to have had a fling with Henry Kissinger. In the '80s, she veered off the acting path to write cookbooks and become a food columnist but still does occasional parts (i.e., the yada-yada episode on Seinfeld) and is married to Robert Wagner (a k a No. 2 in the Austin Powers movies).

Barbi Benton. She's was Hef's girlfriend but the sexiest girl-next-door ever was never made Playmate of the Month. Benton, 57, did, however, have an interesting career in country music and eventually dropped the Hollywood thing to become an interior decorator, not a statistic.

Raquel Welch. Even as a cavewoman (One Million Years B.C., 1966) or a transgendered sexual revolutionary in one of the (famously) worst movies ever made (Myra Breckinridge, 1970) she was impossibly gorgeous and a talented actress. And at 66, she still is. Extra points for having married a man who is 15 years younger than herself (so says imdb.com, where most of this stuff came from).

Pam Grier. A '70s action-film star with measurements of 38-22-36, Grier was diagnosed with cancer in 1988 and given 18 months to live. She battled it out, and at 57, she is still stunning and still working (The L Word, 2007).

Cassandra Peterson. "My name's Elvira but you can call me tonight." The person who should probably get the credit for the trend of adults wanting to wear sexy costumes on Halloween, Peterson, 57, is still out there looking hauntingly good.

That's not a bad Top Ten, and actually I think Jayne Mansfield belongs on the list, too. Toward the end her career flagged, true, but Mansfield -- a k a Mariska Hargitay's mom -- died in a car accident, not from self-destruction.

So yes, while there is a lot of tragedy among screen sirens and sex symbols (and Britney seems determined to be one of the disasters -- baldness is the only way anyone could see her as an egghead at this point), there's also a lot of success, happiness and life-goes-on. It's not just what's in the skimpy outfit that matters, it's what's in the heart and head, which is true of anyone in any job. Astronauts can self-destruct just like starlets, many of whom have stellar careers that aren't sealed with a tsk.

Hardcore Hendrix

A little while ago I reviewed the Jimi Hendrix sex tape for the Orlando Weekly – I’d said I wasn’t quite convinced that it was Hendrix, but honestly – and I said this in the review – how the hell would I know? It’s a pretty hot video anyway, and a day before my review came out this news hit the web (this is excerpted from showbizspy.com):

Porn Company Boss Claims Victory In Hendrix Sex Tape Battle
By WENN, July 9 2008
The bosses of a DVD porn company are claiming victory in their battle over the authenticity of a JIMI HENDRIX sex romp, claiming the rock legend's estate has failed to prove the star of the raunchy footage isn't the late guitar great.
Vivid Entertainment released Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape on DVD in May (08) and company bosses were immediately challenged over the authenticity of the footage.
The controversial video depicted a man having sex with two women, and Vivid insisted the star was Hendrix.
Vivid co-chairman Steven Hirsch even offered Experience Hendrix, LLC officials $100,000 (GBP50,000) if they could prove the man in the video wasn't the rock star.
Sixty days after the offer, the Hendrix estate has failed to come up with verifiable proof that Hendrix is not the star of Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape

Despite my flawed-but-typical skepticism the review is worth reading – link below – hope you enjoy it!

Hardcore!

Wimpynomics

Hunter Thompson said “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” and things have never been weirder than they are now. That means that in some sense, those of us who never caught on to traditional lifestyles are in a better position than most. We freelancers don’t have to worry about losing our 9-5 jobs since we never had them to begin with. Having spent our whole lives confidently saying “I can do that!” when someone offered a paid gig – and then scrambling to figure out how to do it –we are, in some ways, better prepared for the current economic Wonderland, where nothing makes sense. Sense wasn’t something we trafficked in to begin with. The going is weird and the weird are ready.

That doesn’t mean we’re not feeling the pinch and one of the places I feel it most - and like it least - is not being able to support my fellow freelancers as much as I’d like, to take their classes, buy their art, books and music, support their businesses. On the ten-mile long list of why I want money, after “champagne for breakfast,” is so I can hand wads of it to my friends to support their talent, because they so, so deserve it.

This could put me back in the poor house before you can say MC Hammer because I have lots of talented friends and one of the most talented is Chas Martin. Chas donated the tag line for Alice the Goon, is one of the funniest people and best writers I know, a great DJ, editor, voice actor, teacher and computer genius (see? Weird and pro). Chas would never ask for it, but I would love to be able to give him a stack of bills as thick as “The Stand” in exchange for doing my website, because he deserves that and more, but it’s not something I can do right now. So this is what came out of my brilliant mouth when I had him on the phone the other day:

“I can’t afford to pay you now,” I told him, “but when I have more money…well, I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a URL today.”
“Wimpynomics,” he said, “Don’t worry. Everybody’s doing Wimpynomics now.”

I fell out.
It never occurred to me before, but he’s right: that’s the perfect name for how it works and how it’s always worked. The world runs on Wimpynomics. Credit card debt is entirely the result of Wimpynomics. Budget deficit…Wimpynomics. For so long we thought we were the image of the jet set, but we were really a dumpy, mustachioed Popeye character getting our hamburgers on the promise of Tuesday, giving other people hamburgers on THEIR promise of Tuesday….and some how Tuesday never comes. You notice…Wimpy never said which Tuesday.

I could go on and on about it – about emotional and spiritual Wimpynomics, creative Wimpynomics, about the Wimpynomics we do with our health, but I just had to give that Chas conversation to you right now because I haven’t laughed so hard since the Smell-o-scope episode of Futurama and that was in 199frickin9.

So there you have it. Thanks, Chas, for keeping it in the Popeye family.
Chas’ Crusty Old Wave show - Chas' Crusty Old Wave!! - and his blog are on the list of Alice Loves, so pay him a visit. Hell, send him a check. I’ll gladly do it Tuesday but I don’t have it today.

(Picture of Wimpy came from Monmouth College Classics Department Homepage on Eponymy.)

Brideshead Revisited Revisited

I just reviewed "Brideshead Revisited" for the Orlando Weekly - charming movie, and if you're really anglophilic, charming book and 1981 TV mini-series, too. Check out the review at:

http://www.orlandoweekly.com/film/story.asp?id=12528

Or click the link below.
I apologize for always having the cut-and-paste version of web pages in here but I have yet to figure out how to put a link directly into the text on blogger. If anyone knows, let me know!

Brideshead photo came from the Orlando Weekly

New Twist on Elvis

We’re aware there are plenty of people who are into the whole pain/pleasure thing, but instead of going out and buying bondage gear, from now on they can just go to YouTube and watch this supremely horrible clip from the Elvis movie “Easy Come, Easy Go,” It’s of the King trying – and failing – to do yoga.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Tw2THK8jk


You can watch it or just have someone step on your palm in with a stiletto. Same difference.

But it had one redeeming factor: I knew there was a reason I loved Elvis. He can’t do yoga either. I’m as big of a klutz on the mat as he is in this video….maybe the two of us should have removed our pointy black boots and Catwoman outfits before trying the lotus, but whatever. I’ve accepted that there are some people who want inner peace and some people, like me, who just prefer inner conflict.

Elvis is the star of this show, poor thing, but not everyone might recognize the yoga teacher – that’s Elsa Lanchester the marvelous British actress who played the Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. I bet she wishes they hadn’t asked her to talk in this flick, either.

Thanks to Sally for sending us this clip. The Elvis Pic came from Elvis and the Martial Arts on tripod.com. Bride of Frankenstein picture came from the SUPER FUN blog out of Toronto, Sue Darroch and Matthew Didier’s Paranormal Blog, which you can, and shoudl, check out at http://seminars.torontoghosts.org/blog/