CRog

A friend from Austin’s movie is opening manana in LA… sure to be awesome
SHOTGUN STORIES opens FRIDAY April 25 at the Sunset 5 in Los Angeles!

p.s. I’m so close to telling why I haven’t been Kenny Bloggins it hurts. XO

Our weekly movie night in which searching for the strange, inspiring, and disturbingly motivational continues.

This week it was my turn to pick a movie and in a sea of choices at Vidiots, local amazing video store, I was drawn to Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev) by these words on the back of the Criterion collection edition:

Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dušan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.

I’ll let Alex write the review. But that will get you started.

At the invitation of a good friend, I headed up to Los Feliz last night for a party in the honor of cult actress Karen Black.  On my way there I noticed once more how crazy people in this city can go with Christmas (or is it in this country?)

The house was absolutely beautiful, ceilings covered in very nice frescoes and delicate artwork everywhere, like this piece I liked a lot

I was feeling a little tired and rested under a branch

When I came back in and sat in the living room, Karen Black came in and announced she was going to sing.  She started alone and her high pitched voice was fascinating to listen to.  Almost like a castrated nightingale.  Then two ladies from the audience joined her and they sang some more.  My pictures are quite terrible, but the whole point of this post is : if you get a chance to catch Karen Black singing, go for it.

Thank you very much Ms Black

Alex

okay, I know this movie is very questionable, it is one of those pop items we all know of, there was the broadway musical rendition of it which opened this year, but I’d never seen the movie, and after my whole experience rollerskating and moving to Venice, the place where Xanadu was filmed, I finally went to Vidiots and rented the damn thing. Now I am obsessed, and I urge anyone who’s never or who hasn’t seen the movie in 5 years to see it again. Its time.

if anyone knows how to reach director Robert Greenwald, I have some questions for him.

xo,

CR

the Godfather of Electro is dj-ing a roller derby this saturday… just in time to shake off those turkeys.

the sound:

the reason:

yeah! Who’s with me? and who’s got a pair of 9.5 quads i can use? I need them for the boardwalk, as well as I’m on a mission to bring back and update the essence of Xanadu now that I live minutes from where it all started.

the Real Egyptian Lover

more info on the Space Roller Disco party this Saturday

High Rollers in the Park (SF 1982)

I’ve never been a good skater, but I did used to go at “Skate Ranch” in TX circa 1983-86. Their logo was a goofy cartoon horse with four roller skates on, and they played music like, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” “Rasberry Beret” and of course we did the Hokey Pokey.

My mom has a great Hokey Pokey joke:

What if the Hokey Pokey really is what its all about?

and did you know that the Hokey Pokey dance was originally called the Hokey Cokey (hmmm)

and “according to Beth Ann Hughes “hokey cokey” comes from “hocus pocus“, the traditional magician’s incantation which in its turn derives from a distortion of hoc enim est corpus meum – “this is my body” – the words of consecration accompanying the elevation of the host at Eucharist, the point, at which according to traditional Catholic practice, transubstantiation takes place – mocked by Puritans and others as a form of “magic words”.

The Anglican Canon Matt Damon, Provost of Wakefield Cathedral, West Yorkshire, says that the dance as well comes from the Catholic Latin mass^[2]. The priest would perform his movements with his back to the congregation, who could not hear well the Latin words nor see clearly his movements.”

wow.

crinko, originally uploaded by ChristineRenee.net.

Tinko who has been staying with us since he came to New York last September 10th-ish has gone to San Fran and the house is empty without him. Plus I think I’m going through some post party blues. Plus its dark here at 5pm which I only thought I would experience in New York… damn.

I had all these places I wanted to go to last night but could do nothing but snuggle on my couch and watch Oh Lucky Man. my favorite scene is when he finds himself at a church with a bounty of food and he is starving, in a gold lame suit and has just survived not just an intense interrogation by people running an insane nuclear testing site but also the subsequent nuclear explosion that saved him from the interrogation, and the 50 something woman says to him, “That’s God’s food. You can’t eat that” and instead whips out a tit and lets him suckle. The sound effects are perfect.

cocks, originally uploaded by ChristineRenee.net.

I went to the AFM – American Film Market yesterday in Santa Monica. I was really curious to see how this stuff works… the selling and acquisition of big budget movies. Its worse than you might expect, but I hear its great on shrooms.

I met a huge, aged tranny who sat next to an ex-Patriot linebacker turned movie producer who offered to fly me to bangcock to work in his adventure films, a martial arts actor who swore he was the president of ABC and that he’d “make me a star,” a friend of Paul Sev’s who was pretty cool and just finished a doc about the history of Mexican Rock, and this big-time movie producer from Paramount.

Since he was such a big shot, all the hungry people with big dreams invested in this convention come to him and tell their story. He indulged me in saying I was an actress and we sat watching the sun set over the Pacific while the next-big-things and their 17 year old girlfriends told us stores of working with the greats: Pacino, De Niro… and trying to get your picture with these people without seeming like an asshole.

then I was off to meet Hunter at the Tracy Emin opening in the Gagosian

Ezra was there. He says hi, Kate.

From Aviva, tour manager of the Virgins and awesomely fantasic person all around. She writes…
> Hey LA pals-
>
> We’re touring through Canada right now. Haven’t made it to Vancouver
> or anywhere cool yet. Only to the drab, dreary, desolate, depressed,
> barren wasteland of Middle Canada. Winnipeg through Edmonton is so
> incredibly, painfully boring its almost a new sensation. Um, we’ve
> never felt like this before.
>
> We are so god damn bored we’ve stopped talking to each other in the 10
> hour van rides. We go straight to bed at night when we get to the
> hotel. We wake up at 10am and have quiet, newspaper readings over
> breakfast. We sigh alot. And to add to the non-excitement, not one of
> us has had one drop of alcohol because we just don’t feel like
> partying anywhere, with anyone. How bad is that? This is supposed to
> be a rock n roll tour. Meanwhile, it feels like a Home Economics class
> at a Community College.
>
> Our only saving grace is that we’re thrifting across the country and
> making up new slogans for Canada. I know, so pathetic. I’m sure once
> we get to a real place we’ll shut the hell up but for now its a daily
> battle against tedium and the minutae of fueling up.
>
> ON THE BRIGHT SIDE…
>
> The shows are selling out and we’re headed toward LA. I would love it
> if all of you could come to the show at the El Rey Theater on the
> 23rd. We’re only there for one night, but we want all our gorgey
> girlfriends and best pals to come hang.
>
> Anyone who wants to come to Vegas please let me know. We’re there for
> two nights.  Please get your tickets asap! I will do my best to get
> you on the list if its sold out.
>
> xo
> Aviva
>

You WEAR IT WELL 2: WORLD PREMIER: LOS ANGELES: 11 OCTOBER 07 20h30 Vibiana 210 South Main Street
A new lineup of films and videos from fashion houses, designers, filmmakers and other creatives from around the world, including contributions from Erwin Olaf, Maison Martin Margiela, Kim Jones, SHOWstudio and Nick Knight, Ali Mahdavi featuring Dita Von Teese, Gareth Pugh, Diane Pernet, Alex Czetwertynski, Mathias Montero, Charles Serruya, Antonio de la Rosa, Nicole McDonald,Patricia Canino & Serge Pescei, and more

 RJ our roommate (in South Central, we moved back… that’s another CRog)  shared with me today a few films he recently flew into NYC to view at BAM.

His story is a good one.

Here’s an excerpt from the above link describing the film the above stills are from.

“How did this movie come about? Well, it was the brainchild of Karpo Godina, who got his start by serving on the crews of a number of commercial movies. Then he started making short films, outside the studio system, on his own. In the US, people who do such things are considered to belong to the “Independent Filmmaking” movement. In Yugoslavia the movement was called the “Amateur Movement,” with “amateur” being used in its original and correct meaning of working for love rather than money, not the current erroneous definition of untrained ineptitude. Among these “Amateur” films was The Gratinated Brains of Pupilia Ferkeverk (1970), which opens with a shot of a woman on a swing in a river, shot at different times of day and night, and in different weather. When we think, after a minute or two, that we are going to see nothing else, other characters suddenly interject themselves, standing naked or nearly naked in the water, miming different stages of life and politics, using symbolism so abstract as to be meaningless were it not for the captions that are in Serbo-Croatian (or Slovene?) and are not translated into English. The characters all conclude that the universal solution is to take LSD. The depiction of drug use, of course, got the movie banned. Too bad, because the movie’s real subversion is not a mention of a drug, but the depiction of civilization reduced to a cartoon level of unoriginal people standing around in the water mimicking one another and following the pointless commands of advertisers and politicians. The imagery is hilarious.”
read more…