what with all the headless heads on here, i've done gone got my katys confused.
i need a current email addy for the luminous katy o., who i manage to drunkenly hug on a semi-regular basis out and about, but alas we talk little about electronic mail.
and one for roz, if anyone's got that.
i put ya'll down as character witnesses--i mean references--for a nonprof thing where it made sense to...
hello. my name is shauna and i recently relocated with my husband to new york city. greatest city in the world we got here. i'm real smug. i even tried that weird straw-in-your-soda thing.
i am currently employed in an extremely cushy retail job (where i am honing my bitchiness skills) 6 blocks from my place, but i am starting to get tired of park slope. it's fine to call home, but i need to get out.
so where should i go? who's wanting to hang with strangers?
i'm also thinking of volunteering at the brooklyn superhero store. "we can help with your nemisis problem!"
"let me take your photo, let me take your photo--graphh!"
wait. why, yes, i am in the market for a photo printer. hey! i have friends, like in the commercial, who i enjoy taking pictures of. because you know, life goes by fast, just like these white people are moving. i'm white!
and i know this buzzcocks-sounding song. i love this song. wait. this is on something really random like a teen line or killed by death or bloodstains or chocolate soup for diabetics comp.
how do they know this song! how is the artist never gonna see money from it?
ew. i'm alienated. i will not buy your product. this was like a date where you moved way too fast.
and from me, that's saying something.
and there's nothing any of you can do to stop me! bwah ha ha ha!
actually, i'm in the mid-stages of researching my first major vehicular purchase. any scooter peeps out there with advice or horror stories, hit me.
now, i have a knee-jerk hatred for repro anything. i like perfect vintage. i am a spolied brat who thinks she's rich, but i am not. i want a perfectly restored somethin from the mid '60s that i can go to the eagle on and throw makes and models around and stupid crap like that.
however. in grilling all the chicks (and one dude too rich and old and obsessed with restoring rare scoots from the 40s to count) i know who ride scooters and/or choppas, one point becomes clear. the pretty, old bikes need fixing all the damn time. a feat which sounds really boss once you have any kind of knowledge about engines, but not if you want it to pass emissions so that you may actually ride the thing this year.
a friend who owns lots of heart-stopping custom choppers fully understood this reluctance to buy new, and intimated that even she got her first bike new, just cause she wanted one, and all the fancy shit came later (mid-'60s totally rebuilt triumph, drool) when she knew more and could care for them.
while learning repair, search for parts, etc. sounds fun, it sounds like a hard start. i know too many people who got a crappy vespa shell off ebay and it is still collecting dust.
i don't know how to fix anything yet, never even seen a scooter engine. and i'm gonna want something reliable to ride to learn. so it seems like the thing to do is to grudgingly buy a new, retro-look bike, learn to ride it and keep it up, then, if i'm good, sell it a few years down the road and buy my fantasy babemachine.
and and and, i'm gonna need to get a licence, pay insurance, and what's the point if it's always broke?
so, i'm a goin' test-driving, specifically this little number:
just got off the phone with ma, who tells me that not only am i marrying my cousin to a very nice man with a graffix jester tattoo, not only will the ceremony be conducted on a civil war battlefield where thousands died and i swear i used to smell blood when i was a kid...
but we will all apparently be in period dress. CONFEDERATE period dress. with the stars and bars flying and men shooting guns.
oh-ho-kay, then!
mind you, my family has no grand war history. my uncle was way into the re-enactment scene (i can't explain it if you didn't live it, but for little girls it pretty much involves collecting sticks and boiling soup. slaves? what's a slave?). he owned all the time-life books on the subject and various things made from fine pewter. there are sepia-toned photos of him all over the place in the weird regalia. but as far as i know, no one in our family fought for the confederacy.
but that hasn't stopped my motorcylce-riding, pickup-driving, pall mall-smoking family from thinking that this, somehow, is our history. mostly because they want it to be.
i mean, i love them, but do we have to add on MORE cracker accoutrements to our crew, guys? having a shauna joye, a shalana joye, a santana, and a savannah in one brood counts for nothin'?
i guess it's okay that a heathen woman representing a made-up internet church is marrying them, though! if they make me wear a bonnet, fuggit.
oh, joy! i am bright pink. mostly my face, which is now peeling off in sheets. my freaking ears are peeling. i look like the vicitim of a chemical spill! i have aloe everywhere and i'm a big red greasy oozy burn ward patient with skin flaking off!
the left side of my nose got it the worst. i think the sun bounced off my nose stud and fried the flesh surrounding it,
how long will this last? when will i be adorable again?
i'm sittiing in the dark in my office. i'm gollum.
i got to drive a beat-up bmw convertible full of hot women to the beach. one busted up with her boyfriend, the other her girl. we got a lot of attention from truckers the whole way up, blaring REO speedwagon.
fell asleep in the sun. ow. noted there was a bottle opener screwed to the inside of the bathroom door. sweet. got hammered, got buzzed, got to the boardwalk. were immediately horrified at the sheer smell of free-floating hormones and desperation emitted by 3,000 half-nude 18-year-olds. because old-ass us had accidentally picked SENIOR WEEK 2005 WOOOO! to hit the sand. oops.
after picking a lot of fights ("are you a guy or what?" "well, she's got tits and she's not talking to you, so she must be a girl, kid!"), kicking ass at air hockey, and turning our skeeball tix in for three sets of redneck teeth, please, we retired to the hotel to trash it.
and shauna was happy.
in the morning, i napped in the sand and listened to the only gay dudes within 50 miles (overheard 1 million times: "huhuh. lookit the fags. huhuh.") talk about how their college sorrority had a scavenger hunt, and the big-ticket item was a come-covered pork chop. for some reason, all the girls went right to the gay dudes for a favor. the guy was like, do little straight girls think gay gays are just game for jerking off on meat? what the hell?
marrying her to her fiance, that is. i printed out the ol' internet reverend form (universal life church--the same people who married my parents on a beach. wait, is that our religion then?) and they want me to officiate.
well of course! it's terrifying, weird, and time consuming, not to mention awkward. but they asked me! and she's my family. i grew up with her. she's worked so hard to make it out of the life most of my family hasn't been able to. i don't need to go back into it, but pretty much everyone but me drives a bus, a sewer truck, strips, or does nothin' but smoke crack and drink all day. i'm the one who's supposed to president of the united states or something because i live in a city, married a great guy, and didn't have 2 kids before i was 17. oh, my 20 year old cousin just got pregnant, too. she is going to have it harder now, but she knows.
anyway. i need to call my cousin because basically the family drafted me. and i love these girls. they just live in west va, on black memorial road, etc. and i really don't feel like reliving the wedding drama crap already!!
the entire point of this post was: the only wedding idea i have heard from her so far involved port-a-potties. i need to help her see a cheap, pretty, simple and beautiful gathering of family. but NOWHERE will there be port-a-potties. we're millers, dammit! and we party, but we have our dignity.
i would like to reiterate this fact. also his roomates. and conor oberst or whatever, who i might have kissed in the yard, but it might have been someone who looked like him. a lot of people there looked like him.
(blatantly reposted from my friend's site, jennymiller.com. but there's no such thing as first rights here!)
- a review by the ultimate queen of noise, shauna
last night, my beloved surprised me with a copy of this film, which i have been frothing at the mouth about since i heard about it. i tore the wrapper off with glee, imagining that i was, in fact, tearing an 18-year-old joan jett's sweaty midriff tee from her lithe body... whoa! back to the review.
first, this film has nothing to do with "edgeplay" of any kind. i thought i was gonna see, like, the go-gos porno or something. oh, well. yet this film still delivers on several levels: yep, cherie was doin' both joan and sandy. her review of joan: "she was goood. real good." of sandy: "sandy wasn't half-bad either!" that's IT?? i'd like to point out here that they don't even show the infamous cherie currie bush shot--just her face in that pic! (see me for said bush shot. i keep it under my pillow next to my laminated prayer cards.)
also fantastic is a gracelessly aging lita ford, who sits on a beach chair in jams clutching a cup of what i imagine to be tequila, gruffly recalling girlfights about noxema. i think lita is related to me, as she acts exactly like my aunt carolyn at a ballgame. joan, however, is nowhere to be seen except in japanese concert footage (i guess she's too busy doin' le tigre), but even those few glimpses made me want jump up and down on the furniture screaming about how i don't give a damn 'bout my bad reputation. she declined to be part of the film, and also has a stranglehold on the rights to all the songs, so there's a lot of suzie quatro, but no runaways songs. doh.
also, the ladies all seem to hate one another to this day, which is sad. the interviews are all conducted in different settings, and they never appear together. there is lots of crying. at one point lita laughs at a band member's post-abortion suicide attempt. we learn, too (in case we didn't know already), that svengali kim fowley is a pig-fucker. a genius, but an abusive slimeball.
all in all, the film was sort of depressing, in that i always imagined the runaways as a band of feminist superheroes, but they were really just scared teenaged girls who got taken advantage of and turned against one another. but good god damn did they fill out some silver running shorts!
i saw a screener of this film yesterday. it has a few way too precious moments, but it reminded me of hal hartley--when he was good.
the best part of this film is that a 7-year-old child inadvertently has an internet sex hookup with a 40-something woman. they bond over this child's (she doesn't know his age) fetish, which goes something like, "i want to poop into your butt, and then you will poop into my butt, and we will go back and forth like that, with the same poop. back and forth. forever."
so my friend and yours, geoff johnson, just blew into town with the beautiful leslie for two days. he's one of the few photographers i've modeled for who i trust completely. i love everything he's ever done. i've crawled on many sharp things in the buff for this man. he also did our wedding, which turned out gorgeous.
we got some beers and figured if we all had time to kill tonight, we'd go on a photo-shoot adventure. oh, yeah, a nekkid one. duh. i have not done this in a while, so i'm a little nervous. also, he mentioned roofs. and some chick i don't know, but that's cool.
so i pours myself a big heaping bowl of peanut butter cap'n crunch.
ahoy, what's that? a special prize? could it be some sort of bonus chocolate cap'n crunch pellet?
ucgh! no. it's some reject burnt one. great. now my hopes are dashed, my mouth is fulla greasy burnt-up flakes, and i have a bad case of "cap'n crunch mouth."
