The Turkey Was Wi-yuld
So I just got off the freeway where some rocket surgeon spilled a truckload of phone books. Sweet Sault Ste. Marie, what a fucking disaster! It was like a blinding snowstorm, with tens of thousands of pages of lo-grade pulp newsprint being the metaphorical snow. The drivers, myself included, were swerving all over willy nilly like drunken Shriners on parade day.
A truckload of phone books on the freeway? Isn't that the kind of shit that happened on CHiPs during a particularly thrilling chase scene?
Speaking of CHiPs, do you guys like Three's Company? Boy oh boy, I sure do. That show has a particular poignancy for me because, as a wee lad, it was the last show I was allowed to watch before my 8:30 bedtime. Thus, I have seen the opening credits of Taxi, the next show in the '79 ABC Thursday night lineup, but I've never seen the show itself. Taxi, that is.
But I've been housesitting this week ('housesitting' being a euphemism for walking around in my underwear and eating Hamburger Helper out of a frying pan), and therefore watching an assload of Nick at Nite, which I dare decree is the best thing to happen to television (or "TV") since Coy and Vance took over Bo-and-Luke duties on The Dukes of Hazzard. Wait, scratch that analogy, please. Nick at Nite rulez, though.
By the way, before I lop my balls off in a frenzied paroxysm of self-hate, could someone please kindly explain what the goddamn rules are for using quotes or italics or boldface for movies, TV shows, books, and magazines? Which gets what? And when does the period or comma go inside the quotation marks and when does it not? Fuck, I think I missed that section in third grade or something, 'cause I fancy myself a keen observer of grammatical rules, but I just cannot keep this shit straight! If only someone could come up with a nice tidy mnemonic for this crap, I think I would owe you my life. Or at least lunch at Long John Silver's.
But anyway, Three's Company reminds a brother of just how weird the roommate politic must've been in the late 70s. Because I got two girl roommates, and I can tell you right here and now, if there was a perennial subtext of me wanting to fuck either or both of them, as there most certainly is on that show, well, I'd be ostracized and branded a pervo faster'n you can say Van Kamp's Pork 'n' Beans. In the opening credits, we see Jack Tripper strolling down Venice Beach holding hands with both Janet and Chrissy. And there's constantly a spirited game of grab-ass afoot on that show... I don't know; as a roommate and an American, I just can't really imagine that happening in my current personal setup. Yes, I am aware that television rarely reflects reality, but it must have, to some degree.
And then there's the kitchen door. You know, they have that swinging door in their apartment between the kitchen and the living room? Without that fucking kitchen door, I submit, there would be and could be none of the ballsy innuendo that made that show so great. Sometimes people can hear through the door, as in when Mr. Furley (or, in the earlier seasons, Mr. Roper) overhears Jack saying something like, "Put it back in my pants, Janet!" Or, "Oh no, Chrissy, it's all over your blouse!" Other times, whatever capers are going down in a particular episode would not be possible without the fact that the antagonist cannot hear what's going on in the kitchen. So what the fuck, y'know? I realize this particular observation may be a little too abstract and/or mundane for the readership here, but I had to at least get it out there.
Yet another thing about Three's Company that freaks me out is the earlier episodes with Mr. Roper (Norman Fell). When he and Mrs. Roper (Audra Lindley) were trading verbal jabs about Mr. Roper's diffidence toward sex (Were I a middle-aged man, I'd do anything to get that afro'd broad out of that muu-muu and into the stabbin' cabin!), he would always turn his face toward the camera and deliver the creepiest toothy half-grin! Anyone else remember this? Ah, it makes me wince every time, and I still can't tell if it's a good wince or a bad wince. I tend to think it's a bad wince for the sole reason that I don't think there's such a thing as a good or even neutral wince.
The final thing that's freaking me out in this latter-day revisiting of Three's Company is the fact that, as a 7- or 8-year-old, I steadfastly declared that Janet was The Hot Roommate and that Chrissy was icky. Don't ask me why; I also thought Toni Tenille and Kristy McNichol were hot when I was a kid.
Nowadays, Janet (Joyce DeWitt) looks positively rancid to me with that tragic mullet-helmet of greasy black hair and pancake butt, but Chrissy (Suzanne Somers) has me dribbling Yoo-hoo down the front of my shirt for pert' near the full 22 minutes! All that jiggling she does has me positively winded by the end of the episode!
Then later they got Terri (Priscilla Barnes), and Cindy, who I guess is supposed to be Chrissy's cousin or something. Both are pretty hot, I guess, but both lack that certain je ne sais pas or whatever that made Chrissy so bitchin'.
Seems like not too long ago there was an E! Hollywood Stories about Three's Company, but I never saw it. Did anyone else? Of course, we all know that Suzanne Somers' relative hotness only compounded in the interim years since Three's Company went off the air. But I'm dying to know if, like Catherine Bach, Joyce DeWitt looks like ten miles of bad road in her middle age.
Item! Last Saturday I was on kind of a date which culminated in me and the girl meeting at the 15th St. Tavern, where I thought the so-so Denver band the Down-n-Outs were playing. Well, imagine my surprise when I looked up from my Dixie cupful of beer to see Mr. Wesley Willis sitting at the bar! Fuck!
As you know, nothing says "I am a happening guy" quite like a date to see a 500-pound black man of unspecified race play a Casio like a fat kid playing Whack-a-Mole at the dang ol' county fair! Am I right, ladies?
I had seen him Missoula about two years back, but I think he was in a bad mood or something, because all he would do was say "whip a horse's ass". Hardly if any of his trademark songsmithery at that show. I don't even remember him even playing an entire song that night, just mostly swearing and fucking around.
This time around, he was fucking ready to fucking rock. After the opening band finished, Wesley rose from his barstool, grabbed a folding chair, and plowed his way through the crowd to the stage yelling "Rock and Roll!" He kicked off the set with a tune called "The Turkey was Wild," then into "My Daddy Smokes Doobie," followed by a flotilla of tunes marked by an inventive skill and imagination.
As is his trademark, he closed every song with "Rock over London. Rock on, Denver, Colorado.." and then a commercial slogan like "Safeco. It's America's Insurance" or "I love what you do for me, Toyota." What a gem.
Out in front of the bar after the show, I bought a CD from him and he headbutted me and put my money into a man-purse that had bills spilling out of it (see photo below).
I don't really know what more I can say about this.
The man's work speaks for itself...
Here's a shot of him rockin' out.
Here's his man-purse with all the money falling out of it.
Here's Wesley getting into his celebrity mini-van.
Here's Scout displaying some referee moves before the Guided by Voices show three nights later. I forgot the camera for that show. Scout was throwing down yellow flags at the show when he saw people committing infractions like putting cigarettes out on the floor. The other people are Scout's roommate Alanda and her boyf Jeff.
A few years back, it seemed like there was a certain divisiveness among hipsters: those that thought it was a cruel spectacle to put Wesley Willis up onstage so we could laugh at his dementia (he's schizophrenic), and those that forsook any and all moralizing, and just wanted some yuks. And then there were the people who propagated the "from demented minds comes great art" tack, although I don't really know who among us considers "Suck a Caribou's Ass" to be of much intellectual or artistic merit. Especially when you consider that he usually just makes it up before the show, which I suppose is analogous to having babies (note I said "babies" and not either "monkeys" or "retarded kids". You're welcome.) fling feces at a canvas and calling the outcome "art." I guess that all comes down to the very subjectivity of the term, eh?At any rate, these days, you hardly hear anyone say a damn thing about it, so I suppose either the moralizing group forgot about their cause, or they came over to the other side.What's the yalestar.com official stance on this caustic issue? Hmmm... Well, I think if you asked Wesley if he'd rather be a) doing this shit as a homeless man in a Chicago El station (which he was doing previously) and having shithead frat boyz laughing at him or b) making a few bucks by making slightly less derisive people laugh in a (ahem!) nurturing environment such as Jay's Bar or the 15th St. Tavern, I bet he'd take b) any goddamn day of the week. Nobody's making him do it, and moreover, I'm sure he's well aware of the freakshow aspect of his performance. Plus, it is sort of fascinating to take a glimpse into his mind; I mean, what the hell inspires him to sing "The Turkey Was Wild" and then do a commercial jingle at the end?
Treasures From the Photo Trove
These are offered without explanation:
(above photo from Mr. Charlie Beaton)
(Above photo from a Mr. Carmine Matarazzo)
Interesting Fact of the Week:
Yalestar.com's Hand-Based Text Formatting
While driving through New Improved Mexico a couple weeks ago trying to keep myself from going insane, I asked myself: "Yale, you know how people do that air-quote hand gesture? Well, why aren't there similar gestures for other punctuational inflection used in everyday speech? What if I want to bold or italicize what I'm saying?"
To this end, I came up with a series of hand gestures for just this purpose. I don't know whether I'm the first person to come up with this or not, but I'm gonna go ahead with it anyway. My longtime stuntman Scout said he's willing to pose for a series of photos demonstrating this new technique. We were going to do it the other night, but, you know, there were girls there and stuff, so sometimes it's best not to blatantly demonstrate to the womenfolk what a freak you are.
However, I did manage to capture Scout right as he was applying underlining formatting to his speech:
So that's what you, the Yalestar.com reader, have to look forward to. Hand-based Text Formatting. We may do an instructional video as well, depending on Scout's stuntmanning schedule this year.<
And of course, as was lamented earlier, I ll have to learn whether you bold, italicize, or en-quote movie names, books, and so forth before any of this hits the market.
In a related note, if you ve ever read the Boulder/NYC zine Skyscraper (in which you will be soon be seeing a Yale-designed Wantage Records USA quarter-page display ad), you've no doubt noticed that the interviews are very obviously done in person-to-person conversational exchange format. And yet some of the text is in parentheses! How, when you're talking to someone (assuming they're not employing hand-based text formatting), do you determine when they're speaking parenthetically?
So you can see the need for my new text-formatting system. I may get rich off this, so if it seems like I dropped off the face of the earth, that's why.
Album of the Week
Rob Z Bitchin' Various Tape
Back in high school I had a good friend named Rob Zuuring. He actually went to Sentinel, the rival high school, but, y'know, I'm not one to let school spirit jingoism get in the way of a friendship.
Rob had perhaps the top-shelfest record collection in town. Seems like every time we went to the record store together, he'd manage to strike gold. I don't know how he did it, but rarely did his record buying sorties bear no fruit.
He was a year ahead of me, and when he graduated in '89, he went off to the Seattle Art Institute and went on to be the light man for Tad (the band). As a result, he was into all the cool Seattle bands long before cool dudes like you or I were.
He came back to Missoula one summer with a sassy rock 'n' roll girlfriend and an armload of highly prized and rare SubPop records. Naturally, I made him come over to my pad and twist up a mix tape of all these treasures.
We're talkin' about shit like Soundgarden's "Screaming Life" EP and rare-as-shit "Fopp" 12-inch, Big Chief's first 7", Sonic Youth's 7" for the SubPop Singles Club. Side 2 is Green River's "Dry as a Bone" LP in its entirety, plus some other sundry rock.
I don't know how many people would have ever heard Green River had their cool status not been reactivated by the popularity of Mudhoney and Pearl Bummer. It seemed like in '92 or '93, you could scarcely read an article about either of the latter bands without seeing the sentence, "Green River, which splintered into Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone, which later begat Pearl Jam." The words "splintered" and "begat" were in every single article.
The above is simply a roundabout way of saying, "Yup, I was into Green River long before they were fashionable." And it's true, I was. And I am therefore much more awesome than you had previously imagined. Please update your diaries and address books accordingly.
Excellent work, Mr. Zuuring. This tape you made holds up ten years after you made it. I love you. Ahem! I mean, y'know, thanks again.
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