A Gateway Drug to Fabulous (Ep. 75 - 80s Cartoons)

A Gateway Drug to Fabulous (Ep. 75 - 80s Cartoons)
Matt Baume and Ted Biaselli
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This Week's Guest: Ted Biaselli

How far can passion take you? My guest this week is Ted Biaselli, a TV development executive who's had a hand in shows from My Little Pony to Elvira's Movie Macabre. I've had the lovely pleasure of knowing Ted for a couple of years, and from our first meeting -- at a Dr. Who themed Halloween party that he threw -- it was clear this this is a man who lives to entertain. It's kids' shows where his passion lies, ever since he was, well, a kid. And when he moved to LA as an animated art-school gay, he brought with him an infectious enthusiasm for the weird shows he watched as a child. And now these days, the spirit of the shows that filled his youth are what animate the shows he puts on TV.

This Week's Recommendation: Kubo and the Two Strings

Adults love to complain that today's cartoons are nowhere near as good as the cartoons we had when WE were kids. Often we're remembering our own childhood shows more fondly than they might deserve. Not to mention, that grousing overlooks the truly wonderful, strange, risk-taking new entertainment that's still being made for kids today. And for this week's recommendation, please tell everyone you know to go see Kubo and the Two Strings. It's playing in theaters right now, and I've been describing it to people as The Wizard of Oz plus Alice and Wonderland as directed by Miyazaki. You just have to see it.

The movie takes place in a fantasy version of Japan, with monsters and gods and magic powers. The hero, Kubo, is a boy with a gift for telling stories. And as he tells his stories, they come true, sort of. It's a movie with a lot of ideas, but the one that I keep coming back to is the power that a good story has to shape the world around us. The mortal realm is messy and chaotic and disordered, and storytelling converts that chaos into -- well, not quite order, but sense. It gives the mess meaning.

Getting enough people to agree on the same story, the same meaning, can be a powerful force for good or for bad. But stories aren't just made to be told. They're made to be listened to. And its through listening that we find people whose stories complement our own.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The Women and the Monsters (Ep. 74: Drew Droege)

The Women and the Monsters (Ep. 74: Drew Droege)
Matt Baume and Drew Droege
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This Week's Guest: Drew Droege

Why do villains get to have all the fun? Surely you've noticed that Darth Vader has a better time than Luke Skywalker, that the Joker relishes his misdeeds, and that Skeletor lives in a party house. One of my favorite movie lines ever is when Magneto tells Rogue "we love what you've done with your hair."

Drew Droege may have come to your attention on YouTube, performing as the character Chloe, but he's been inhabiting colorful characters for years. In fact you can see Drew onstage in his new show, Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. It's running from September 16-18 at the Barrow St in New York, then Monday nights at Celebration Theater in LA starting September 26.

His whole life, Drew found himself unable to resist the devious charm of over the top villains, particularly women like Divine and Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. There's just something irresistible about the way they chew/claw the scenery, and when he moved to LA to be an actor, he discovered that he could put their colorful turpitude to use as inspiration in service of his career.

This Week's Recommendation: I'm So Beautiful

Thanks again to Drew for joining me. And don't miss him in New York and LA -- his show Bright Colors and Bold Patterns is running from September 16-18 at the Barrow St in New York, then Monday nights at Celebration Theater in LA starting September 26. The show's about a gay man who's scared that with the onset of gay marriage, he'll become respectable and boring -- the worst thing that can happen to anyone -- and if you're worried about the same thing happening to you, allow me to make a recommendation: head over to SewersOfParis.com and look for Drew's episode, which I'll be posting along with a very special music video.

The video's called I'm so Beautiful, and it stars Divine singing ferociously about her incredible beauty. Now, just to set the scene here: she is wearing a dress that looks like uncooked ground beef, a wig that looks like an albino tumbleweed, and the rouge on her cheeks is so emphatic it looks like a sunburn. And there is simply no way you could dress Divine that she would not be a strange sight. But she's made up her mind about how she looks: she is beautiful, as she sings over... and over ... and over ... in a tone so aggressive you don't dare argue.

The song's a nice little pep talk -- if this vision can determine that she's beautiful, surely so can we all. And what I love about it is that it's so sincere. Divine is definitely not the butt of the joke here, an ugly drag queen meant to be laughed at. No, her incredible boast, her flaunting of her body, and the room of mirrors she's in makes it clear that she knows precisely what she looks like and if you don't agree that she's beautiful, there's something wrong with you.

In all of her roles, Divine exhibits a power to create a strange alternate reality, and to then insist that you join her inside. She makes it so easy to play along, to agree, to be a part of her weird world. That's an amazing gift, because if you ever feel too boring or too respectable or too much of a stereotype, all you have to do is nod your head along to this bellowing drag queen, and agree, yes, you are beautiful, and suddenly you're as otherworldly as she is.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

We Were Our Own John Hughes Movie (Ep. 73 - Voyagers)

We Were Our Own John Hughes Movie (Ep. 73 - Voyagers)
Matt Baume and AK Miller
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This Week's Guest: AK Miller

Would you rather travel the world to seek out new experiences, or create new experiences in your own home town? My guest this week is Chicago theater person AK Miller, who couldn't wait to leave his small town and find the big-city gay communities he'd always read about.

But before long, he discovered that being part of a gay community can go way beyond simply moving to a major metropolis. He could go even further, not just joining but creating a community, the likes of which he'd only ever read about.

This Week's Recommendation: Jobriath

Thanks again to AK Miller for joining me. You might've noticed that he mentioned Caffe Cino in New York, an experimental theater that changed performance in the 1960s. I interviewed one of the playwrights who worked there, Robert Patrick, on episode 66 of The Sewers of Paris. So if you'd like to hear about what it was like to be a gay playwright in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, just hop back a few episodes and listen to Robert Patrick's story. It's pretty incredible.

My recommendation this week is a Google search. Go look up a man named Jobriath and just start clicking and reading and watching and you will discover an incredible performer who was going to be the next David Bowie until he went too far, was too gay, and the world turned its back on him.

You owe it to yourself to learn about this man. Just click everything that comes up. Read his wikipedia article. Watch the few youtube videos that exist. Find the documentary that was made a few years ago called Jobriath AD. He was an amazing, groundbreaking artist, the first openly gay musician signed by a major record label, an early casualty of HIV, and for some reason we've allowed him to be almost completely forgotten by history. 

Well it's time to rediscover Jobriath. He was extravagant and strange and he created elaborate queer performances, such as a planned show where he would appear as "King Kong being projected upwards on a mini Empire State Building. This will turn into a giant spurting penis and I will have transformed into Marlene Dietrich."

He called himself "rock's truest fairy" and maybe it's statements like that that explain why mainstream audiences just weren't willing to embrace him. It was the 1970s, and gay musicians winked -- they didn't climb spurting penises.

But while his memory faded, his influence still lives: you can feel his fingerprint in the music of The Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan, Siousxie Sioux, and Def Leppard. Morrissey cites him as an inspiration. So whether he's recognized or not, Jobriath's still with us. He's all around us. Like so many great artists, gay and straight, he gave us a gift when he was alive. And we're only just now figuring out how to unwrap it.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

A Bomb Went Through the Wall of the House (Ep. 72 - Sondheim)

A Bomb Went Through the Wall of the House (Ep. 72 - Sondheim)
Matt Baume and Daniel Krolik
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This Week's Guest: Daniel Krolik

Is it better to hope for the best and risk disappointment, or expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised? My guest this week is Daniel Krolik, one of the hosts of the podcast Bad Gay Movies Bitchy Gay Men. On each episode he and his co-hosts select one bad gay movie to pick apart its flaws, and maybe if they're lucky discern some kernel of potential.

Finding flaws is a skill that Daniel unfortunately honed on himself, with a habit to be overly self-critical. Not too surprisingly, he found comfort on stage as an actor, where he could disappear into the personas of other people. That was a comfortable place for him to hide -- until the night that the character he was playing appeared in the flesh in front of him.

This Week's Recommendation: The Ladies Who Lunch

Thanks again to Daniel for joining me and for giving me any excuse to talk about Stephen Sondheim. For my recommendation this week, I want you to take a look at my two favorite versions of the Sondheim song "The Ladies Who Lunch." One is sung in  the movie Camp -- I'm not a big fan of this film but this particular scene, featuring a bitter, snarling little pre-teen Anna Kendrick accompanied by squeaky amateur band is so bizarre and uncomfortable it has to be seen.

But the other, and far superior version, was sung by Elaine Stritch in the 1970s, with a bitter acidic intensity that verges on terrifying. I'll have links to both at SewersOfParis.com. The reason I love this song is that it's both angry and forgiving; it's an indictment of the idle rich who waste their days, but also a resignation that they're never going to change. 

As the audience, you can read the song in a variety of ways -- maybe with smug triumph, looking down on the ladies. Or maybe by defiantly identifying with them, rising proudly with a swagger at the end, because after all everybody dies and you might as well have a meal and a drink before you go.

And that's a little disorienting -- do we want to be ladies who lunch or don't we? And maybe that's why, when I watch Elaine's performance of the song, the emotions that resonates most with me is fear. Not fear that the ladies are right and I'm wrong, or the ladies are wrong and I'm wrong with them. But fear that there's no way to know who's wrong and who's right.

Stuff We Talked About

 

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/