los angeles Archives ⋆ Page 13 of 19 ⋆ Virginia Jones

THE WOLVERINE: NPR Summer Book Review

Because this film is better than any book out this Summer, I’m going to review it for NPR as Summer Reading. Keep in mind that they did not ask me to, and if they had known that I was going to, would have asked me not to.

The Wolverine concerns itself with the big themes: heroes, loyalty, friendship, spanning the distance between cultures with sex and murder, honor, the loneliness of immortality, the natural world vs. the scientific, goth girls with swords, and giant robots.

Logan stands in for such iconic martyrs as St. Sebastian and an adamantium-clawed Jesus, rising from his (SPOILER ALERT) death on a Terminator 2 liquid metal table to battle evil.

Films about The Wolverine are often, by their very nature, about love — its presence or absence — and this one is no exception. The love that Wolverine shares with Jean Grey- that he loves her completely and forever, even after she has died, and despite the fact that he killed her, creates a blood-stained watermark for other romantic films to aspire to.

Also, in this film, Hugh Jackman got really, really super big, like, his head just sits on a triangle of meat that is his neck. This is just one thing that makes it a great film for the ladies, although in Origins: Wolverine, you got to see his Wolverinis.

This is the best book you’ll never read. The Wolverine. Do it.

The Return Of Bloodmeadow: SDCC 13

I stopped in on SDCC 13 to promote Horror Haiku and my friends at Seraph Films and I wanted to share my high points with you!

It’s always wonderful to see my handsome genius friend Douglas Wolk. This time, I got to see him run a panel on cliffhangers in comics.

SDCC is pretty overwhelming, and after last year’s visit, I just accept that I’m going to miss things like Mulder and Scully’s reunion and I’ll see the same fat guy in a Mario hat twenty times.

I don’t like being outside or standing in lines, so most of Comic-Con’s hot spots won’t happen for me.

Steampunk has gotten out of control with nerd crossover as every vendor asks “Can I make a corset out of children’s Star Wars sheets?”

Lots of Dr. Who’s this year, and fewer Anime kids with giant weapons.

PHOTOS!

I got my picture taken a lot, and the nicest compliment was from a guy who said “That’s really…alarming.”

It’s always good to see Old Gregg.

A really good Marla Singer and a somewhat meth-ed out Tyler Durden.

Gris Grimly’s lovely gal Victoria Vengeance poses with a card for me.

Supernatural’s Castiel and Dean were in attendance, and feeling very sexy about it. I did see Rob Benedict, who plays Chuck Shurley, interviewing someone about something.

My personal highlight was meeting Emo Philips for the third time, each time is more delightful than the last!

Competitive Erotic Fan-Fiction: Laura Palmer

Mom, pretty please don’t read this one either. I’m sorry.

This was my entry for the second round of Bryan Cook’s amazing show, Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction at the Nerdmelt Theatre on 7/16.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a show where the first half is talented writers and comics who have pre-written amazing prose, and the second half is crazy people who have had an audience suggestion assigned to them. It is released in podcast form here, please go listen and attend this show! Bryan is taking it to SF, and it’s been to Seattle, Portland, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and just all over. It is hilarious and deeply disturbing. My first show was just posted, which was a filthy story about Touched by an Angel. This time, I wrote on a random pull of topic “Laura Palmer”, in 18 minutes.

First of all, the subject-I love Twin Peaks, it’s my favorite, it was the first show I saw every episode of, and there hasn’t been a second- but it’s a pretty weird topic for Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction. Twin Peaks was pretty much erotic fiction on its own. All in all, it’s like saying, write a really dirty version of Deep Throat. So, this story will be the only one that doesn’t have an orgy in it. Don’t be confused, you’re still at CEFF.

Laura Palmer’s postmortem diary- Fire, Go Fuck Yourself

I’m Laura Palmer and yeah, I’m dead, wrapped in plastic, sooo kinky, as imitated at Halloween by girls who want to sweat off a few extra pounds in Saran wrap. That’s the opening credits and the whole goddamned show is a smear campaign against me. A lot of claims were made about be before, during, and after the show. Recently the internet has claimed that I took off my top at the Glastonbury festival, but that was Amanda Palmer, who married Sandman creator Neil Gaiman, so fuck her. The whole two seasons are about how I f*cked everyone in the show and was eventually murdered by a malevolent spirit who took over my Dad, Leland Palmer, who used to sing as he went nuts, like Ophelia,

Does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?

This is a heavily whitewashed version. What my Daddy really used to sing was:

Whores eat cck and mares eat cck and little lambs are fuzzy, my kid’ll eat p*ssy too, wouldn’t you?

Everyone thinks I fucked my Dad, and he went crazy from the guilt, but he was slowly going crazy because he spent most of his time licking mercury out of broken thermometers. Everyone has a hobby. Sexually, my father was ahead of his time, he was a Bronie. He went mad drawing graphic illustrations on legal pads of Twilight the Pony being f*cked in all her pony holes, her tail held aside and grasped for purchase.

The only person in this town who I might have had sex with was the FBI agent assigned to my case, unfortunately he showed up after I died. I looked down through the Douglas Fir trees and I liked what I saw. I’d like to just f*ck his chin, just once. But it’s all over for me. Dale Cooper had hair as black as shoe polish and was even hotter than he was in Dune. He loved coffee and pie and poor little rich girl Audrey Horne, who appeared to be 17 and three quarters for their whole relationship. I’d like to lick his licorice hairline and rummage through his files.

Audrey Horne, a busty brunette, had the sweetest cherry pie in all of Twin Peaks. She nearly f*cked her dad one time when she was going undercover as a prostitute at One Eyed Jack’s, but that wasn’t her fault. She was just trying to get a good review at work.

I supposedly f*cked James Hurley, the adorable boyfriend of my best friend Donna Hayward, but he wasn’t interested. James was a furry. He was only interested in people dressed as cum-covered wolves.

I supposedly f*cked Dr. Jacoby, my therapist, and honestly I tried, but he couldn’t maintain a hard on when he wasn’t wearing a lei and listening to the music of Don Ho, and I was simply not that kind of ho.

It’s true. Sometimes my arms bend back. It’s because I’m a contortionist and acrobat, which is part of my job as a cheerleader.

Supposedly I had an affair with Bobby Briggs, but honestly he was only interested in watching films of people in business suits taking a shower. Reputedly I had an affair with his lover Shelly Johnson, the hot-ass waitress in town, who would put on a wool suit and get down in the shower for Bobby, with blonde hair cascading, and I was supposed to have slept with her murderous drug dealing brain dead new-shoes loving trucker husband Leo, but I didn’t have sex with them. I couldn’t stand those guys. Besides, Shelly was a fecal freak and Leo preferred to be beaten with footlong novelty gummy rat candies while being penetrated with a Tootsie Roll bank he had bought at Disneyland.

I was accused of having an affair with Diane, whom agent cooper sends microcassettes to. She’s not even a person, she’s a figment of his goddamned imagination! He’s a hot ass crazy person!

I supposedly had sex with Jaques Renault, the Canadian drug dealer, but he was only sexually interested in women farting onto cakes. Also, as a Quebecer, he spoke French like a slow child and English like someone who once saw something in English.

I supposedly had sex with a backwards-talking dwarf who danced weird and was obsessed with gum, but honestly, who could? WHO COULD?

One woman could.

But It wasn’t me. I met my maker with a slit so tight you could whistle through it, like when you blow across a fresh green blade of grass pulled taught between your thumbs.

My c*nt looked like a goddamned paper cut on a crisp white business envelope and honestly it’s a waste.

I’m a scapegoat, when I died it was seen as a way to keep the peace and knit this broken little town torn apart by its secrets back together.

Do you know who it really was? Who screwed all those people, who catered like a slave to their strange afflictions and affectations and who simultaneously brought this town together and tore it apart?

The log lady. Her log saw things. Her log did things. Awful things. There’s splinters from that log in every tw*t and a**hole in this town, and from skull f*cking poor Nadine Hurley’s empty eyesocket, her eyepatch abandoned on the couch. she cradles her log and fingers the edges worn smooth from activity, sometimes smelling it and reliving memories and looking into the past and towards the future.

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, or in the city of Twin Peaks- It’s because, as Pete Martell said, “There was a fish in the percolator.”

Drunken Tales!

Here is the handsome buffalo that watches over everyone as they talk about puking their guts out at the Monty Bar.

Dear Everyone;

The talented genius Mike O’Connell asked me to tell a story of drunken excess at his wonderful show, Drunken Tales of Glory and Shame, at the Monty Bar, and I’ve already written it and everything, so here it is.

Mom, don’t read it!

Ladies and gentlemen, you are experts in this field, and I’m not gonna bore you with regular old drinking stories, like the time I woke up in a shed in Dallas, TX wearing striped tights and a strange man’s suit jacket, or the first time I puked, or the second time I puked, or the first time I puked in my 30’s and said to myself, hey self, this is not cute anymore –or the first time I cracked a fresh Zima in a friend’s kitchen at a house party and wondered where the fuck everyone was and realized that the sun was coming up and it was time to go home. I can tell you that as I get older, I can’t drink the way I used to, because now, I have to use my mouth.

Like most of you, I grew up Mormon in a family of Irish Catholic alcoholics and my grandfather died of alcohol-derived cirrhosis at 44 years old. My other grandpa died of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 52. And we all thought, That was a LIFE lived, man. When people my age are all broken up about their grandparents dying, I like to ask, your grandparents are in their eighties? What are they, pussies? So, until I was 21, I didn’t drink at all, but I did drugs, because nobody in my family had a drug problem. You can see the wisdom. Standing before you now, I am half made of acid. Probably the lower half.

So in this story, I was in my 20’s, and I had a first date with a really special guy, who was tall and could play guitar and looked like Douglas Coupland, an author who is no longer famous.

The night I fell in love with him was when a group of us went to New Orleans and got rip roaring drunk, and were slowly making our way back to the hotel. Our friend Steve was with us, and Steve both loves a drink and walks with a cane, due to Cerebral Palsy, and he found that he had had too many drinks to walk at all, so we decided that the only thing to do was to heave him onto my swain’s back and he would be piggybacked to our beds. The big man knelt down and Steve was trying to clamber on top, and he made such a grunting and a noise in the French Quarter that a resident yelled out a window, “I don’t care what you faggots do, but don’t do it in the street!” and that was it. I was in love.

I was nervous to go on a date with him on my own, so my best friend and I decided we would throw a party, and we decided to take GHB, because we heard it was rad. In the 90’s, people would take GHB and Rohypnol on purpose, just because they were bored, or a new episode of Friends wouldn’t be out for another week, or they couldn’t wait for a new Diet Coke flavor. They were both legal at the time- GHB was legal until 2000, when a 19 year old died of an overdose. Small doses of GHB is sometimes referred to as liquid ecstasy, due to its tendency to produce euphoria and sociability, Despite this nickname, GHB or Gammabutyrolactone,has separate chemicals than Ecstacy, or Methylenedioximethamphetamine, but can produce the same effect in SMALL amounts. Small ones.

The really great thing about GHB was that it inhibits metabolizing alcohol, so once you’re drunk, you stay drunk for a really long time and you don’t sober up, and we all know that that’s a great idea! We got enough for four doses, because four of us wanted to take it. However, when push came to shove, in a carpeted living room, my date and one of the other girls chickened out, and the one thing you should know about me is that I don’t like to waste, so my best friend and I split the dose.

I did not know then that even a slightly larger dose of GHB is used to treat insomnia and narcolepsy and is a potent depressant. Then, I laid down to rest awhile and passed out cold and covered in sweat on the floor for three hours and listened to the two remaining undrugged people awkwardly watch six episodes of South Park.

When I woke up, I realized I had to puke, so I very classily on my first date walked down the hallway, steadying myself on the wall with my shoulder, and knocked on the bathroom door only to realize my best friend was already puking in the bathroom. It’s that kind of connection and sympatico feeling that keeps our friendship strong. On Facebook. So, I cleverly went outside to puke over the side of the balcony onto a teal Dodge neon in the parking lot and I felt much better, and rested my hot forehead on the wooden plank of the balcony, and later found a large splinter in my forehead .

After that, I brushed my teeth and we went out to a gay bar in walking distance of the house and drank crappy bottled beer until closing time, and so then I was drunk until 2pm on Sunday, and having proved myself to be smart and have to have good planning skills, I dated the boy for a year and a half, before he married someone just like me but a little shorter and not as crazy, and they had beautiful twin girls and I moved to Los Angeles and stopped mixing my drugs and drinks, for the most part. The end!

Selfie as Edward Scissorhands at the Monty Bar

Names have been changed to protect the drunk. Objects may be closer than they appear.

I Am The Inventor Of Animal Sleeveface

4. Same goes for this gross lil guy.

Same goes for this gross lil guy. Aw, actually, I would almost pet this one… maybe.

Via: badinia

OK, last Friday a photo of my dog Hazel Samedi Jones with a Damned record in 2007 was posted on Buzzfeed, which I took as a sign from the universe that the genius of Animal Sleeveface was finally being recognized. I’m a little hurt that she gets called a boy, because look at them womanly nips!

See the whole post here.

Alt Resume

I am close to taking my Summer Sabbatical, which is not really what it is, but it makes my Mom feel better when I say “I’m Taking A Sabbatical” instead of “I’m quitting my job and hanging out all Summer”. I thought it was time to get my list of “OTHER” skills together and post them on the Internet.

If you feel like you read a slightly different but kind of the same list as this one, it’s because my site was hacked and my service restored from last week’s restore point and I lost it. It’s because SOMEONE was very jealous of my 70 hits a day. Eat it, haters!

1. Pit Toilets: I’m very good at using pit toilets in Asia. You just have to pretend you’re camping, which you kind of are.

2. Sleeping on Airplanes: Also work related. I can sleep bolt upright on a red eye to Turkey and emerge as fresh and ready as if I had slept in a garbage- filled car.

3. Tap Dancing. I’m not the world’s best tap dancer (SAVION GLOVER, because we can really only have one famous tap dancer at a time), but it’s the skill that took the most time and expense to learn, and which has the lowest street value. I’m considering trying to make people pay me NOT to do it.

4. Bemani. It’s no longer fashionable but I can totally do it- I get more points for style than accuracy on Dance, Dance, Revolution, but Karaoke Revolution is my bitch.

5. For that matter, I can lead in six count swing, and I can lead about five things in Lindy hop- I’m a good Lindy follow- I like a lot of dances.

6. I can make dance parties happen. I can make people do it. At karaoke, at coffeeshops- most of the time.

7. Karaoke. I’m good at it. I don’t have the most amazing American Idol style voice, but I know my range and I will perform the SHIT out of a song. I like to work a crowd. When I do it in Hong Kong they are upset with the dancing and eye contact.

8. Comedy. I do it for money and for free. Mostly for free. Don’t ask me to tell you a joke, I’ll make you laugh, m-f. Just you wait.

9. I can draw- I haven’t for around five-seven years, but I probably still can, right? I’m sure I can. I have an art degree. I can blind contour the shit out of something.

10. According to the Munsell test of Color Acuity, I am a Superior Color Discriminator. I will discriminate the shit out of your color. I need a lab coat and a light box with a true North setting. But I will do it.

11. I can make patterns and sew. Again, I usually don’t. But I can make seriously obscure and fucked up Halloween costumes!

12. Goth Makeup and Fantasy Make up! I have an airbrush and I’m not scared to use it, including airbrushing a fake tattoo on you!

13. I’m really good at telling long, involved, interconnected stories to people on acid. I can be on acid or not, it doesn’t matter.

14. I can tell a fake art history lecture at the drop of a hat, especially if the hat is from a particularly evocative period

15. I’m really good at making one kind of vegan chocolate chip cookies. Just one kind.

16. I’m really good at maintaining a blog for 8 years that only my mother consistently reads!

17. If I had just bought my first guitar, I would be a crazy natural guitar playing genius- however, I have had my own guitar for a decade, and play it occasionally. I’m mediocre, but proud!

18. I’m really good at steering an oversized Costco shopping cart with my elbows while eating free BBQ nuts.

19. I’m a good trivia team member- I don’t know that much about television or sports, but I’m very good at arbitration to try to determine the likeliest answer. Also, I like to win but I don’t care if I do.

20. I’m really good at running a White Elephant party. I will whip the crowd into a frenzy over Scratch tickets and a rubber garden gnome. Blood will flow!

21. Despite all the above, I’m really good at not going to Burning Man! I haven’t gone every year it’s happened! Consecutively!

With this kind of skill set, I’m gonna destroy this job market!

Ed Galvez’s Punk House!

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.