As a childhood KISS fan, this makes my stomach twist. Trump has tapped the grizzled glam rockers as inductees to the Kennedy Center Honors this year, a tribute so perfectly tawdry, I don’t think many get the irony, the hilarity.
KISS, whose integrity has always been dubious, is reportedly not a fan of our portly prez, calling Trump a “true danger to democracy,” but now of course say they’re “honored.” Trump says he picked the bawdy band because they’ve “made a fortune,” which is true, but a repugnant reason to exalt them. He’s also trying to irk the libs, of course. Funniest snub: Tom Cruise dissed Trump’s induction. That’s why he’s a big-screen action hero who can practically fly, without a cape. (Seen the Photoshop illustration of Trump as Superman, cape and all? You’ll vomit.)
Trump’s so stupid he doesn’t even know what culture is. He also elected disco queen Gloria Gaynor for the honors, evidently unaware that her biggest hit “I Will Survive” is a celebrated gay anthem — a song he loves with ignorant gusto. It’s much like the Village People’s comically transparent “YMCA,” a Trump theme during his campaigns that he would clap to like a bloated orange oaf.
The bigot is blind. And deaf. Our tinpot despot has a tin ear.
It’s billed as the “BEST NIGHT EVER,” comical hyperbole that actually might live up to the puffery. How? Why? Because we’re talking about an excursion starring tacos, beer, tequila and — wait for it — tickets to Lucha Libre wrestling at the main arena in Mexico City. All for $84. Bust the bank? Let’s bust some chops.
What is Lucha Libre? Poor dears. Much like the muscle-bound, spray-tanned, flamboyantly theatrical wrestling spectaculars in the States, this is Mexico’s native version, with its own zingy flourishes. It pops with spangled spandex, gasping acrobatics, high-flying punishments and, of course, glittery but menacing masks. It’s like a ‘roided-out Cirque du Soleil with pile-drivers instead of creepy puppets.
You might know it from “Nacho Libre,” a 2006 Jack Black comedy I found flat, though some people swear by its broad satirical swipes at easy cultural targets. (And, really, any movie starring the frenzied Black, who looks like a stout, overstuffed burrito in his glistening wrestling regalia, can’t be all bad. Well, yes it can.)
The sport — more like “sports entertainment,” because these shows are about as real as a Bugs Bunny cartoon — is massively popular in Mexico and boasts a cast of characters who act out elaborate storylines of good vs. evil, much like in American professional wrestling. Villains are lustily jeered, heroes cheered, feuds and rivalries fanned, and the wrestlers, known as luchadores, egg-on the rowdy throngs.
The clownish masks that fit snugly over the brawlers’ entire head denote their identity and persona, like superheroes. “Losing a mask in a match is a significant loss, sometimes even more devastating than losing a hair match where the loser shaves their head,” that according to the web. (Think about a hair match in American wrestling, where the men fling their Goldilocks in a weird kind of virile vanity. It would never happen.)
Back to that BEST NIGHT EVER (Trumpian all-caps theirs), which unfolds when I visit Mexico City in November. Our small group meets at a cantina for tacos (al pastor, please!), beer, tequila and mezcal (another pour, please!) before we head to Arena Mexico, dubbed the Cathedral of Lucha Libre, holding 17,000 fans.
It’s going to be bedlam, sheer madness. Fans going crazy, beer being hawked, wrestlers executing thunderous body thwumps that rattle the giant ring, masks all over the place. I’m not a big public noisemaker, but I understand our host gives us our own Lucha Libre masks. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be whooping it up, too. I’m rooting for the villains.
“Research has associated smartphone use with ADHD symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023.”
Keeping it light, some recent news plucked from the headlines …
RIP Ozzy Osbourne, madman and mensch, who amazingly didn’t die of rabies. He was the gentle, doddering Prince of Darkness, whose live shows brought out the crowd-pleasing celebrant, all cackles and hand claps. He would hop like a pogo stick. I saw him in concert when I was 13, my first metal show. I can’t shake it decades later. Satan is smiling.
Trump can’t elude the loaded Epstein case, and he’s shaking in his loafers and pissing his pants as he tries to deflect the pressure. Wipe your brow, sir; the flop sweat is showing. And on a scathing “South Park,” so is your talking micro-penis.
The New York Times posted its 100 best films of the past 25 years just to tick me off. While I agree with the bulk of the choices, if in different order, some make me want to throttle the voters. For starters, “Parasite” (#1 ?!), “Mulholland Drive” (#2 ?!), “Inglourious Basterds,” “Hereditary,” “The Master,” “Amélie,” and I’m just getting going. But bless them for including “Melancholia,” “The New World,” “Grizzly Man,” “School of Rock,” and so many other gems. Still, I don’t know why I read such lists. I don’t need the aggravation.
She perched gracefully atop sign posts, fences, rocks and cars, like a canine ballerina, poised and pliant. Maddie the spotted coonhound was the subject of her owner’s lustrous photography, clearly in the spirit of William Wegman’s whimsical photos of his preternaturally patient Weimaraners. Maddie’s charming pictures boast 1.2 million Instagram followers and comprise two books. But there will be no new pup pics, as Maddie died this week at age 14. I just got acquainted with her visual poetry, and still I’m crestfallen. Her loving obit.
Chuck E. Cheese got mouse-trapped. “Come with me, Chuck E.,” said the policeman who arrested the human-sized mouse — er, a human in a mouse costume — at the children’s pizza chain in Tallahassee, Fla., this week. The un-mousey behavior? Credit card fraud. Somewhere Mickey Mouse is blushing. “Astonished children wondered why the restaurant’s mascot was seemingly done for the day even as they continued to eat pizza and play arcade games,” said one report. “How do you explain this to a 4 and a 6 year old?” asked a witness. A youngster wanted a photo with the mighty mouse, but “a cop out of nowhere grabs his arm and says: ‘Chuck E.’s busy right now.’” Dying to know how his fellow inmates take to his gaudy outfit, big plastic head and all.
Hulk Hogan, a hideous human being, did the world a favor — he died.
Four mini-blogs, bite-size essays, from eyewear to dog hair …
Shopping for new eye frames is about as thrilling as shopping for underwear — a little fun, but mostly a utilitarian ritual for a deadly pedestrian accessory. I got new frames this week to go with new prescription lenses, making me feel very old. I’ve had my current blue frames and lenses for two years and I felt like underwear shopping. Yesterday I took my new (burgundy) frames to the optician to get the fresh lenses. The whole deal cost an eye-singeing fortune — around $1,200 for frames, lenses and exam. The nice guy helping me said, “You don’t seem old enough for progressive lenses.” I sort of thanked him, then thought to myself, ha!
When it comes to a big juicy novel, I’m a restless reader. My standards are unreasonably high, and if a book hasn’t hooked me by page 70 or so, I close it and move on. I am not one of those chumps who strains to finish a book once they start it, no matter the quality. That’s obscene. I just closed Rebecca Makkai’s wildly praised novel “The Great Believers.” The Pulitzer finalist about a group of friends impacted by the AIDS crisis was worse than overly familiar and a mite trite, it was dull as dirt. So I started the also-acclaimed Adam Haslett novel “Imagine Me Gone,” a substantial (356 pages) story about a family of five facing mental and physical challenges that upend the unit and try the bonds of love. On page 89, I’m with it for now. But every so often it sags and I give it the stink-eye. Book, you are on perilous ground. Watch it.
Puffs and curlicues erupting over his face and body, the dog at last got a summer haircut. A professional groomer came to the house, bathed him in the sink, then took the razor to him good for more than an hour. Cubby now looks like a bewildered sea otter and it’s fabulous. Everything about him has shrunk — my, what tiny ears you have! — and it’s adorable. Thing is, now he’s licking his butthole and nether regions with frantic intensity, like he’s infested. It’s merely razor burn and getting used to the lack of locks, and if the past is any indication, he’ll stop licking presently. But it sort of drives everybody crazy, not least of all himself. Why are haircuts such trauma? Cubby and I both want to know.
My brother’s radar is exquisite. He knows my dubious tastes, my oddball obsessions, my disgusting fetishes. So it was Christmas in July when he recently gave me a gift of surpassing thrillingness: an immaculate wax double-wick candle of deformed conjoined twins skulls. Craig, my only sibling, said he got it for a Christmas present but couldn’t resist bestowing it now. He bought it at a local taxidermy/tattoo shop called Unlucky Rabbit that deals in deer heads to “Lesbians and Taco Trucks” bedroom candles. My kind of place. I’m a freak fanatic, sideshows, medical curiosities, monsters on down. For now, the Siamese twins skulls are on proud display, and I have no plans to torch them, they’re so gruesomely perfect. Still, lighting them and watching them melt into bone-colored goo would be its own grotesque beauty. Where’s the matches?
Here he comes. Yes, he is coming. I don’t see him. I hear him. From afar. He’s whistling, oh-so carefree, head swaying, body grooving. And he’s doing it loudly and without a whit of shame or self-consciousness. Notes swirling from his pursed lips for all to hear.
This middle-aged guy, this oblivious songbird, comes to the cafe almost every time I’m there, which is a lot. He sports sunglasses, a down vest, chinos. And he strolls around whistling, sometimes to a song of his choosing, often to whatever is playing on the cafe stereo. Tweetle-lee-dee …
Why am I so vexed by a man who whistles merrily about a coffee shop? Whistling, it’s said, is a symptom of happiness. One site muses: “Are whistlers so insanely happy that they have some overly elevated level of joy? So much so that it bubbles up and spills out in the form of air molecules passing over the tongue and through their lips?”
If so, am I just madly envious of this fellow’s happy mien? His ability for unfettered glee to pour out and tweetle in everyone’s eardrums unbidden? He’s not a bad whistler. He’s actually fairly adroit, a mini jazz-flute maestro vamping on his facial wind instrument.
No, I am not envious. I have no idea if he’s inflated with uncontainable ecstasy, though he appears pretty content and confident with his hands-in-pocket swagger. It’s that his music is like a yappy-dog bark, nails on a chalkboard. Then again, I can’t whistle enough to call a dog.
Yet I give him license. Whistling Willie, I’m convinced, is simply indulging a bad habit. His tuneful penchant is pure reflex, like the drummer who instinctually taps the table with his fingers. We all have tics, mannerisms and foibles, even if they’re not as piercing and public as full-throated whistling. The dude’s just doing his thing.
The lip-doodling is pretty damn distracting (otherwise I wouldn’t be grousing) when I’m trying to read and write. “If you’re an anti-whistler type, short of duct tape, how can you keep your focus when Tweety Bird starts up?” asks the above web site, Screenflex (a portable room divider company!).
There are no answers. There is only discipline. Tune out the tunesmith. But it’s not just the “music” that kills me. It’s the brazen indifference to his fellow folks, inflicting, without a flinch, his own song list on strangers, like the lunk who hoists a blaring boom-box strutting down the street for all to hear, no matter individual taste and basic social decorum. It’s the principle.
My whistler, my personal Bobby McFerrin, who’s probably a swell human being, despite the cloud of patchouli cologne he resides in, just needs a touch of self-awareness to wake him up — perhaps an actual whistleblower to call him out, bawl him out, and slip a cork into that irksome “O” on his face.
Last night, as the boom boom booms went off in the comfortable July 4th gloom, my brother and I sat on the patio, sipping whiskey and smoking Cuban cigars we paid $25 a piece for in Hong Kong last January, and listened to the brooding-funny music of Nick Cave and blew smoke rings and coughed and giggled.
Then the dog showed up.
Poor Cubby was terrorized by the hiss and bang of the nearby fireworks and needed a friend. Quivering and panting, he leaped on my lap, sitting upright, Sphinx-like, sporadically craning his neck back at me to make sure I hadn’t abandoned him in his spasm of fear and trembling.
Cubby’s a smallish hound, but a whisper too big as a lap dog, especially when you’re wearing shorts and his nails dig into bare flesh. He was antsy as hell and we decided to slip him a Mickey, a harmless prescription doggie sedative. I would have shared my hooch and stogie, but he was having none of it. I am agitated and afraid, he seemed to be saying, and your vices are but futile distractions. Away with them!
At about age 10, the dog is becoming more and more neurotic, and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass. He pees on the rug when we vacate the house, leaving him alone. He barks at nothing in the same situation, as though crying for the humans’ return. His need for affection is amplified and his weird, random panting makes him a freak of nature. He’s been suffering stress-related diarrhea. He’s devolving into a nervous Nellie, unmoored and a little loopy.
Enter the doggie Prozac. The vet wants to try it, see how it goes. I took Prozac eons ago, so I’m not worried about Cubs taking it. If it helps him, it helps me. He is my unofficial therapy dog, my best buddy and furriest friend. Need to get him balanced and happy. We can’t, after all, have two kooks knocking around here.
Next to the excellent bookabout the Beatles I just finished, I’ve been staying intellectually nourished this summer with a spate of lush art, from musical earworm discoveries to great movies revisited. These are some highlights so far:
My brother turned me on to the rambunctious novel “The Death of Bunny Munro,” and I don’t know if I should thank him or break his thumbs. Outrageous and splendidly salacious, the book, a dark comic romp, is by Nick Cave, the singer, performer, screenwriter and all-around Renaissance man, who looks like a dapper, raven-haired cadaver with a ghoulish gothic cast. Bunny, the protagonist, has just lost his wife to suicide. He decides to take his 9-year-old son, Bunny Jr., on a rambling, sex-fueled road trip that becomes a pervert’s picaresque filled with carnal catharsis and lessons learned for innocent but brilliant Junior, who appears to be on the spectrum. The novel pops with blazing prose, twisted laughs and, as one critic put it, “grotesque beauty.” This Bunny goes down the rabbit hole and never comes up for air.
Released in 2007, “There Will Be Blood” retains its status as a cinematic landmark and holds up awesomely years later, getting better on each viewing. The New York Times recently named it the third best movie of the 21st century so far, behind the number two slot, the flatly unworthy “Mulholland Drive.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s strange, majestic saga of greed, faith, misanthropy, violence and of course crude oil is anchored terrifyingly by Daniel-Day Lewis working his acting sorcery for one of the great performances of male tyranny. He’s a monster, and he’s mesmerizing. Johnny Greenwood’s eerie, atonal score is as epic as the gorgeous visuals, and lends the film much of its woozy, unsettling power. There’s so much grandeur going on, you have to ask: How did they do it?
I tend to be way behind on new popular music. (Olivia Rodrigo who?) Mostly I just ignore it, and then it takes years for an ancient song to wind its way to my virgin ears, and then it’s a revelation (and a slight embarrassment). Like, I just discovered the 2018 album by the inimitable Mitski, “Be the Cowboy,” which was slavered over by every critic and named the best record of that year many times over. I’m especially infatuated with two songs, “A Pearl” and “Me and My Husband,” neither of which were the album’s hits or standouts. But they’re little jewels to me, each just over two minutes long. Mitski, a Japanese American with a made-up stage name, plays with piano, synthesizers, horns and her trademark guitar on the album, which has been frequently called genre-defying, but is firmly modern pop, with an outré twist. I won’t get all music critic-y and deconstruct my two favorite songs, saying only that “A Pearl” is dreamlike and yearning and rather heart-tugging, while “Me and My Husband” is funky with perhaps terribly ironic lyrics about a marriage. Or not.
They are practically begging to die. So it seems amid a coterie of big wave surfers whose only aim in life is to locate the wickedest, most ferocious waves possible, get on their surfboards and hit the water and ride roaring barrels. That’s what ace documentarian Chris Smith captures in his transfixing HBO series “100 Foot Wave,” an unlikely plunge into foam and fury and a beautiful human portrait of a tribe of surfers who salivate at the sight of an unforgiving ocean that dares them to take it on. The nominal star is middle-aged master Garrett McNamara, who leads the surfers from massive swells in Portugal — you cannot believe how enormous the waves are — to the far reaches of the Pacific. It’s season three in the series, but start anywhere, because the drama — from gnarly surfing to nasty wipeouts — is everywhere. Watch with a glass of wine. Your adrenaline is going to skyrocket, in the best way.
With a trip to Mexico City planned for early November, I’ve been flipping through a couple of travel guides to see what I’m in for. (I smell tacos al pastor. Dog-ear that page!)
The place is ginormous, the sixth largest city in the world and the most populous city in North America, with 22 million people. I plan to weep as I inevitably get lost in the grand sprawling Spanish-speaking metropolis. What’s the Spanish word for “mommy”?
Yes, I am going to eat tacos on an epic scale and drink tequila and mezcal with stupid abandon and avoid the sun while lapping up kaleidoscopic art and archeological thingamabobs and trying to figure out why everyone’s so batshit about Frida Kahlo.
There’s a Kahlo museum set in her childhood home or some such, but I’m more interested in the massive murals painted by her lecher hubby Diego Rivera — he had more mistresses than murals. Either way, it’ll be an art orgy.
I’m staying in the leafy, shady, unspeakably bougie La Condesa neighborhood, where a gorgeous park resides and is evidently the city’s dog capital, which makes me serene about the fact my hotel is charging me two year’s salary for a six day stay. Perros! 🐶
But my canine pals are just a bonus on a trip that promises heaps of highlights, be it the spectacular, art-stuffed Palacio de Belles Artes or insane, masked Lucha Libre wrestling; the lavish Catedral Metropolitana or self-explanatory Museum of Tequila and Mezcal. And, of course, street tacos out the wazoo.
I really don’t know what to expect. When I was 14 we took a cruise down the Pacific Coast of Mexico, strictly beach stops — Cabo, Mazatlan, Acapulco. But Mexico City is a landlocked, high-altitude megalopolis teeming with fine dining, clubs, bars, galleries, museums and such. (Like any major city, it also has unfortunate pockets of crime and squalor that shouldn’t be ignored.)
Mexico City. What am I doing? I ask that before almost every journey — Budapest, huh? — and almost always return enlightened, brightened. It’s about discovery, learning, seeing, and in this case, a lot about tacos al pastor. I’m seriously considering taking a $70 class on how to make these scrumptious finger foods while I’m there.
That sound you hear is me turning pages in my guide books with increasing excitement, the revelations and expectations. It’s all part of the trip — an expedition of the known and the unknown blended in a zesty imperative: show me what you’ve got.
GNASHING. 