The indomitable Ed Galvez has offered me a spot on his Punk House showcase Wednesday, May 22nd at the Westside comedy theatre. It will be so fun you will collapse in the street, and will find yourself unable to return to your normal day to day life. This show will ruin your life. With comedy.
The best thing about the Westside comedy theatre is that you can only get there from a secret entrance in an alleyway behind the shiny Santa Monica Promenade. Your Iphone will tell you that the address is a Crocs store. It is wrong.
Friends of me get in two-for one and get a free t-shirt! Tell Ed Galvez I sent yeh!
The lovely and hilarious Peter Serafinowicz made a dance video for those famous French robots, Daft Punk. I just think everyone should see it. Right now.
I guess the term for this is “reblogging”, but really I’m just stealing it. I had lots of fun at Bridgetown recording an episode of my favorite podcast with lovely star of the Girl Code, Alice Wetterlund- this time, I did not gush humiliatingly about doomed love like last time, and Alice and I had matching sunglasses and we talked over each other about sex and comedy while our beautiful hosts passed out on comfy couches! I try to podcast with these foxes every time I’m in Portland, because I am in competition with Sean Jordan for most appearances.
Episode 61 with Alice Wetterlund and Virginia Jones
Join the ladies as they accidentally wake themselves up at the crack of noon by their own voices, updates on the Bridgetown after parties, the new geese sex noise app, awkward next day interactions, feminism in comedy, female masturbation, the best vibrators, peeing in the shower and much more.
But more importantly, proper labeling of pot brownies?
Subscribe to Patioh! Patino! at ITunes, Follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook. Feel free to email us your questions, concerns, compliments and date requests to patiohpatino@gmail.com.
After seven years of writing and posting here, I realize that this blog is really just a repository for pictures of myself, so for a break, here is a wombat and a kangaroo who are best friends.
Virginia Jones likes dancing, trivia, playing guitar badly, creating increasingly obscure Halloween costumes, and doing comedy. She will destroy you at Skee-Ball. She became a famous Portland blogger on accident.
She has appeared at the LAFF comedy festival in Austin, WICF in Boston, Bumbershoot in Seattle, and the Oregon Women’s Comedy Festival. She will go anywhere for a craft services table and a laminate. She’s performed at Book Klub, Good Luck, GIRTH, the Chatterbox, CRAVE, Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction, and Power Violence in LA, and many others. She has lived in LA for a year, and has made 5 friends and 286 Facebook friends.
She is the writer and star of the vlog series GOTHIXXX, in which two gothgirls share their dark world vision. It has literally dozens of views.
She has performed in venues from NYC to SF to Hong Kong, and recently someone recognized her at a Costco. She appears in Portlandia- Season 2 and in Jordan Brady’s documentary, “I AM COMIC.” Her mother is proud of her.
I went to London last week to see the David Bowie Is exhibit at the V&A, to visit my sister Emily, and to experience 32 degree weather and a light dusting of snow during the week everyone usually calls Spring Break. We hit Camden market, ate some local vegan food, enjoyed the Tate Modern, and thoroughly failed to get stage time, but the most important thing was the exhibit I flew across an ocean to see.
The Bowie exhibit had sold tickets by time slot, in order to have some semblance of crowd control. It is currently sold out until it closes in August, so there’s not a lot of good to me telling you about it, but I am anyway. In the traditional style of my family, my sister and I were late for our slot, because the exchange for the green circle line was inexplicably closed, and a very nice man with teeth that splayed out like a water spigot told us in a very friendly manner that there would be a bus along in only twenty-five to thirty minutes. Luckily, I got in without crying or striking any marble countertops with my wee fists.
Photos are prohibited at the show, which at first seemed like a bummer, but when LACMA opened the Kubrick show and anyone could take non-flash photographs, the flood of Instagram photos of dispensers from the Cordova Milk Bar made the whole thing feel less special. Granted, the image is not the thing itself, but sometimes it feels like the thing.
The show itself was arranged in rough chronological order, but mostly as clusters of influences and connected things interesting information. There were famous outfits, but also some amazing Berlin era paintings of his friend James Osterberg, instruments, handwritten lyrics, stage props and designs, and other ephemera. The show stayed away from salacious gossip about Bowie’s drug use, love affairs, and mental problems, but returned again and again to the theme that Bowie is an editor, collaborator, and borrower, always consuming, interpreting, and composing music and image that is consistently ahead of its time.
Speaking of Kubrick, Space Oddity was a pun on Space Odyssey. Seems obvious now.
I was glad to see the SNL footage of Bowie with backup singers/prop managers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias that was used in the great documentary The Nomi Song, but also amused to see photos and drawings of English music hall artists that Bowie’s sculptural outfit was drawn from, which Klaus’ outfit was a simplified version of.
The Alexander McQueen jacket from Earthling that I had always rather assumed was a shiny vinyl thing was, in fact, a distressed and torn Union Jack frock coat- I had been seeing the white lining as “shine”- and of course, it was inspired by another of my favorite bands, Pete Townsend’s mod Union Jacket.
I learned that when David Bowie was writing Suffragette City, he was rocking a 26 1/2″ waist on cocaine.
Bowie has always been a fan of the mash-up and cut-and-paste surrealist method of songwriting, but in recent years, he’s written a program to do it.
Bowie’s a better mime than you are.
Also, the reason I just started seeing the amazing video for “Boys Keep Swinging” with Bowie in various drag aspects is because it was slightly too kinky for RCA records and they banned it.
The wiping-off lipstick gesture from the video was something that came from Weimar-era burlesque, and that would later be quoted in the video for China Girl (written by his friend James Osterberg), and later I would do it in high school, but it just annoyed my boyfriend Philip Montoro.
The Space Oddity cover used a photo of Bowie superimposed over a painting by Victor Vasarely.
The close of the show was a wall of “influenced by” images, including The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding in his makeup and silver jumpsuit, Annie Lennox in all her androgyne glory, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig, and dozens of fashion pictorials. Many musicians have picked up and made careers out of things that Bowie used for a week or two and abandoned- I’m looking at you, Marilyn Manson! ( We love you! Please be on Gothixxx!)
Selfridge’s now has a new David Bowie pop-up shop, though, so even though you can’t see the show, you can buy all the V&A stuff from the exhibit, as well as a specially curated collection of vintage from Decades in LA, and three makeup looks by Illamasqua’s Alex Box!
And that’s a weird coincidence, because the other thing I made sure to do when I was in town was to take a makeup class called Drag Superhero at the Illamasqua store on Beak Street, where we did this amazing natural, no-makeup look!
It was a great deal of fun and I enjoyed working with my makeup artiste, a very darling fellow named Brett from Sheffield, where all the good music comes from. When we were done, I was asked if I wanted a towel or remover to take the look off with, and I was a little surprised at their shock that I would walk back to the hotel with my “face” on. I explained to them that I was not visiting weirdoland, that I had been weird for quite a long time, just never before on Carnaby street.
After going out for drinks, my sister Emily and I were plumb tuckered out and we went to bed.
Trading Places is a film that came out in 1983, and which I enjoyed as a child many, many (too many) times. It is a film that I will watch whenever it is on, and when the television show Trading Spaces was running, it frequently confused me and annoyed me that it wasn’t Trading Places, but only a show where strangers redecorate rooms for other strangers. It is a John Landis film that was originally written for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, but was recast with the rising star Eddie Murphy and still-foxy Canadian Dan Aykroyd. Anyway, this was one of my favorite films of childhood, even though I didn’t really understand it.
On my flight home from London, I chose it to watch as comfort viewing, having not seen it in probably a decade. I was greeted with the following message from United:
This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen and edited for content.
This is a normal thing that one generally ignores, but because Trading Places was originally 116 minutes long, it was edited in many bizarre ways in order to make it closer to 90 minutes long.
What was cut out is much of what makes the film funny, or at least, makes it very funny. Plane talk:
1. When Eddie is pretending to be a disabled Vet in the beginning, he makes a Porgy and Bess joke that I never got before.
2. The first scene I noticed was missing was Winthorpe’s sexy fireside date with Penelope, which I guess she’s wearing a bra and panties in. Too racy for United!
3. Some of the replacement swears are pretty great. No statement of “shit” remains, and in the Jacuzzi, “We used to fart in the tub” is replaced with “fight”, but later in the film the Dukes use the N-word. Strange logic.
4. The snip about what to do with Billy Ray’s clothes is gone, along with the timely racist quip about being from a very musical people.
5. Penelope is pretty much gone from the film, the club scene where Louis comes to borrow money is deleted when the twits sing to Aura Lee, when she picks Louis up from jail a tiny, funny exchange is gone where a homeless man comments that she has a nice purse, and she sprays perfume on his bald head while she waits.
6. Billy Ray’s party scene is gone. This is very sad. Not only do you get the first appearance of 80′s comedy tits (I’ve been waitin’ for you, Billy Ray!), but you miss the Sylvester song “Do You Wanna Funk”.
7. Soft hands…and a manicure. This is just one of the little establishing details that makes the movie more than a weirdly racist time piece.
8. Bo Diddley’s scene in the pawn shop is gone. They cut Bo Diddley. That’s dumb.
9. I never caught that the stolen crop report is Operation Strange Fruit. Another funny joke I was too young to understand.
10. “Motherfuckers” become “Moneygrabbers.”
What’s left of the film is still funny…but not as intricate, rich, and full of sidebar causal if-then happenings.
This has been an overly nerdy post that amused me to think about on my airplane ride home.
Illamasqua is not just the most gothity-goth high end fantasy makeup line in the market, they are also 100% vegan, animal testing, and cruelty free. II particularly recommend their luxurious line of synthetic makeup brushes. It’s not your mother’s Wet & Wild dollar eyeliner, people- I have used them for many years and was delighted to get this update on EU animal testing policy ban from them in my email this morning! How far behind is the US going to lag on this issue?
Virginia Jones has worked as a boxing instructor, a swing dance teacher, a waitress, a DJ, a designer of country and western apparel, and also was the only vegetarian assistant manager Jack-In-The-Box ever had. She holds a certificate for two years' erfect attendance at J.C. Penney, and she can probably find it to show to you. She likes dancing, playing guitar badly, creating increasingly obscure Halloween costumes, and doing comedy. She will destroy you at Skee-Ball. She has accidentally become a "famous" Portland blogger.
She has appeared at the LAFF comedy festival in Austin, WICF in Boston, Bumbershoot in Seattle, and all five Bridgetown Comedy Festivals. She will go anywhere for a craft services table and a laminate.
She has performed in venues from NYC to SF to Hong Kong, and recently someone recognized her at a Costco. She appears in two episodes of Portlandia- Season 2 and in Jordan Brady’s documentary, “I AM COMIC.” Her mother is proud of her.
