Adam Baran

In anticipation of Jinx! screening at the LA Shorts Film Festival (screening Thursday, September 6th at 3:15PM www.lashortsfest.com) I thought I would present a bunch of short clips from movies that spring to mind whenever I think of LA. Come to think of it - once you watch these clips, you might understand why I’m so nervous about going!

My main view of LA seems to be formed by 60’s exploitation/drug freakout movies, none more rich, strange, and completely beyond camp as the absurd Lana Turner melodrama The Big Cube. I first saw this movie after reading that Charles Busch used this film for inspiration for the scene in Die Mommie Die where Angela’s kids dose her with acid to find out the truth about her identity. But that film, with all it’s poison laced suppositories, flying scissors, and Jason Priestley’s gay sex scene, is nowhere near as absurd as The Big Cube, which has a plot that goes like this: Lana Turner is a famous actress, Adriana Roman, who marries a rich guy with a Swedish (I think) daughter, Bibi. When the husband dies, Bibi blames Lana, and when she meets a nefarious lowlife LSD dealer (George Chakiris), the two cook up a plan to spike (or “dose,” as was the lingo) Lana’s tea, sending her into freakouts so severe that she eventually goes insane, leaving them with access to her inherited fortune.

In the scene below we have the daughter’s first introduction to the Acid club, and a subsequent bit where a guy does his rival’s drink with LSD.

Here’s the scene where Bibi’s friends come over and put on an impromptu strip show - don’t you feel bad for the poor queen who can’t even finish his act???

I always expect to see stuff like this when I go to LA, though it’s usually way more sedate, unfortunately. Who knows - maybe this time will be the time?

I should mention that things get even weirder later on in The Big Cube, when daughter Bibi regrets sending Lana’s character to the nutbarn, and initiates a plan to help her regain her sanity. This involves casting Lana as herself in a play that’s actually based on the events that made Lana crazy, so that she can repeat her past experiences, and this can jog her memory, and she can regain her sanity! It freaks me out too!!!

The film was Lana’s follow up to the equally melodramatic Madame X, and shows her towards the end of her Hollywood run. She made few Hollywood films after that, perhaps sensing that the new wave that would soon emerge in the early 70’s in Hollywood wouldn’t have much room for her two special talents. Lana does her best, but, you can tell she sorta had to take what she could at this point - ten years after her triumph in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. In any case, the film wasn’t available on VHS or DVD for many years, until finally it came out this year included in the Cult Camp Classics Volume 2 DVD collection (along with Trog! and Caged). You can also buy it just on it’s own, but it’s a good value for those two other camp delights.

Buy It Here!

Stay Tuned for Part 2!

This is a post coming about a week too late but…

Now that Leona Helmsley is dead, can someone please, please, please cover Nina Simone’s Martin Luther King Jr. tribute song, ” Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” in honor of Leona Helmsley in the same way that Elton redid his Marilyn Monroe song “Candle in the Wind,” for Princess Diana.

The title? Obviously, “Why? (The Queen of Mean is Dead.)”

Compare Nina:

to Leona:

to Suzanne Pleshette in the 1990 Leona Made-For-TV movie “The Queen of Mean”

In the hopes someone will take up my challenge, here are the lyrics to Nina’s song.

What’s gonna happen now? In all of our cities?
My people are rising; they’re living in lies.
Even if they have to die
Even if they have to die at the moment they know what life is
Even at that one moment that ya know what life is
If you have to die, it’s all right
Cause you know what life is
You know what freedom is for one moment of your life

But he had seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead
Folks you’d better stop and think
Everybody knows we’re on the brink
What will happen, now that the King is dead?

We can all shed tears; it won’t change a thing
Teach your people: Will they ever learn?
Must you always kill with burn and burn with guns
And kill with guns and burn - don’t you know how we gotta react?

But he had seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead
Folks you’d better stop and think
Everybody knows we’re on the brink
What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?

Buy Nina Simone albums HERE.

Last night my friend Bill and I went to a vogue Ball at the Roseland Ballroom. It was the House of Latex Ball which is a free show sponsored by GMHC. I haven’t had so much fun in months. We were hemming and hawing about going with a group of Bill’s friends - with me the naysayer picturing a line of shady Pier St. queens thronged to get into a free ball. But we decided to throw caution to the wind and thank god we did, cause this shit was pure realness.

When we arrived we got in quick and easily - all we had to do was fill out an anonymous survey about HIV - the best question was “What are the top three problems facing the Ball community in your opinion?” Choices included 1) HIV 2) Hate Crimes 3) Lack of Jobs 4) Homelessness 5) Violence 6) Drugs and my favorite choice of all - 7) Shade. Yes that’s right - Shade was a mothertrucking answer!

Inside we had arrived close to the start of the show - the 12 bored judges onstage and the announcer, all obviously straight outta Paris Is Burning (PS. I know this may seem a really square and obvious reference to some, but it was still really awesome to finally be at an event like this, after watching Jennie Livingston’s legendary documentary as a kid and hoping one day I’d be able to go to a ball.)

The whole event was sort of a cross between a fashion show, a cock fight, and a Friar’s Club Roast. The announcer onstage would line up the walkers (contestants for a lack of a better word), announce the category they were competing in, and either ask for a score from the judges (”Score this bitch!”) or cut them (chop them) by shouting “Thank You, Isadora!” It was an elusive statement - I’d heard him saying “You don’t want to be an Isadora!” when we got there, but I figured this was another code reference I wasn’t going to pick up. I thought maybe it was a reference to legendary dancer Isadora Duncan, queen of the scarves, who as we see below could work a look and a pose -

Here she is vogueing -

Here she is competing in the “Hands” category:

And here she is competing in “Pretty Boy School Boy Realness”:

My best guess was that you didn’t want to be an Isadora because Isadora Duncan as we all know died from her own fashion choice - choked by her own famous scarves during a terrible car accident. Metaphorically, this all made sense. If you couldn’t work a look, and a pose, you’d end up dead as a Duncan. It was absolutely hysterical every time he would chop someone with this phrase. A heavyset queen was chopped with “Thank you BIG Isadora,” to our delight. So now the phrase of the year for me is obviously “Thank you, Isadora!” Anytime you want to read someone to your friends, or you pass one of those particularly odd New York crazies, it’s a perfect phrase - as opposed to in jokes as I normally am - this one is pretty great.

But apparently, and thanks to my friend Ken for filling me in - Isadora was actually the name of the first girl who walked and was chopped. The announcer asked her name, and since she was the first, anyone who got chopped from then on was christened with her name. Can you imagine??? The poor bitch got made fun of for the next 6 Hours!!!! So embarrassing!

The outfits ranged from bland (me and Bill) to outrageous (the queen who was naked except for a small strip of cloth and a strange Tonka Truck building crane on her head). The crowd gave off a really good energy, I never felt unwelcome or got any dirty looks, unlike all the other regular gayborhood haunts in my nabe - Phoenix, Eastern Bloc, etc. The announcer teased us at one point during the runway competition (during which the most amazing pre-teen girl walked her way to the title, hopefully someone will put the footage online) by announcing that Tyra Banks was in the house. Well, you don’t want to get my hopes up like that. When he said he was kidding, I was pisssssed. Instead they had Keenyah, from Season/”Cycle” four, you know the girl who went to Nelson Mandela’s cell in South Africa and got all emotional, but couldn’t overcome her weight issues. I’m just saying she could barely walk. They refrained from saying “Thank You, Isadora,” but you could tell they woulda.

The whole thing - according to signs posted around the entrance, was being taped by NBC for a show about gay life or something, but Bill and I were convinced that the entire event was going to end up being a set up for “To Catch a Predator: Vogue Edition.” I pictured them luring unsuspecting pedophiles to the theater via the Internet and then setting it up so that when they walked into the other room where the pre-teen was supposed to be waiting - they’d have to walk the runway of shame.

I’ll post some footage of it when it eventually makes it’s way online be for now - here’s a clip from last year. The category is “Hands.” The player is Javier Ninja.

A few months ago the lovely people at Foam Magazine contacted me about writing a piece to accompany a portfolio of work by local photo star Ryan McGinley. Foam is a quarterly International photography journal from Amsterdam which features portfolios of new work from photographers accompanied by texts from interesting writers, which apparently, and it was news to me, I am - although you can be the judge when you pick up a copy of the issue.

The magazine graciously gave me carte blanche to write about the work in a way that didn’t have to be directly about the work itself, and since the theme of the magazine was “Youth,” I wrote a mid-length essay “Jen’s Fridge,” about a sister of an old friend whose apartment I visited as a teen. I was particularly fascinated by her refrigerator, which was covered in Polaroids of people who visited the apartment accompanied by witty text - something McGinley used to have in his apartment as well. It’s all inspired by the McGinley photographs in a roundabout way - as McGinley’s habit of taking photographs of his circle of friends seems to be one of the major talking points most critics mention - and which I was desperate to avoid repeating. So I wrote about the habits of two different girls I knew as a kid who were into taking pictures of their friends and tried to examine the tendencies behind this desire from the point of view of someone who hates to take pictures on vacations and when hanging out with friends.

Of course, Foam were a bit surprised to not get an article that mentioned McGinley even once by name, but they warmed up to it quickly - although whether I’ll be asked back to write something else is yet to be seen.

Foam Magazine is available now - check out their website for info on where to find it - as it’s based out of the Netherlands and I haven’t seen it in regular magazine shops here - though you may need to go to one of those super thorough magazine shops that have lots of international magazines. Or you can go to Amsterdam. Read it high. It may make it better.

www.foammagazine.nl

OUT NOW: FOAM MAGAZINE #11
Sunday, 21 June 2007
Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Vandejong Communications proudly present Foam Magazine #11 ‘Young’. The issue will be available in bookstores and newsstands from 26 June on.
With portfolios: Raimond Wouda, JR, Lauren Greenfield, Oliver Sieber, Viviane Sassen, Ryan McGinley.
Essays and interviews: Marcel Feil, David Campany, Adam Baran, Anneloes van Gaalen, Christoph Schaden, Max Houghton, Merel Bem, Catherine Somzé.

I’ve created a MySpace page for my short film “JINX!”

The link is www.myspace.com/jinxfilm. Click HERE to go there.

Be our friend (the royal “our”).

Be our friend on MySpace and tell your friends, and tell them to tell their friends, and so on and so on.

I also found out the film will eventually wind up on the IFC.com website, sometime after October!

TTFN.

PS. I was so excited to create this MySpace page until a friend called up and said that everyone uses Facebook now. I don’t really understand - isn’t it all the same site? Didn’t MySpace just copy Friendster, and now Facebook has copied MySpace. Why is one of these sites not enough????

About two months ago I bought a huge box of rare trashy films whose descriptions sounded beyond comprehension. Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century, Rooster: Spurs of Death, Black Terminator (with is sitting proudly on my shelf next to the Indonesian Lady Terminator), Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things, and Spawn of the Slithis. I’ve been slow going through said box and actually watching the films, but one of my favorites so far has been Attack of the Beast Creatures. From 1985, this piece of trash gem tells the tale of a group of survivors of a shipwreck who get stranded on a deserted island in the tropics (though it’s clearly some woodsy Connecticut area) and run afoul of tiny killing monsters who pick them off one by one by one….

Now the plot is pretty much standard horror - they land on the island, one guy’s injured, and there’s upstanding guys who care and that one mean guy who keeps telling the others not to care, that they have to fend for themselves. One guy sticks his face in the river to clean it off and when he gets up his face is melting off, because the water wasn’t water at all! D’oh! Then they all go to sleep and these little eyes show up and attack them. It’s hard to get a look at the monsters at first, but eventually we see them and realize that they are basically dead-on copies of the Zuni Doll in Trilogy of Terror. Here’s a glimpse of that immortal classic, which I showed at my last birthday party to much delight:

Yeah, that’s right. She tries to drown a wooden doll with magical powers. Bright move. Anyway, compare the Zuni Doll with the monsters from Attack of the Beast Creatures.

Exactly the same doll! Except the Beast Creatures have that cat-hissing noise whilst the Zuni doll has the immortal “YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA.” I know, folks, I don’t get it either. I guess they figured nobody would notice because nobody would probably ever see the movie?

Yep, it’s the best movie ever! And did I mention the whole thing takes place in the 1920’s? It’s not clear whether the filmmakers wanted to evoke the memories of the Titanic disaster, which only occured 8 years before the start of the Roaring Twenties, or whether those costumes were all they had in their stock. In any case, we’re (the audience) are treated to the most ludicrous “I can’t believe what I’m actually seeing” horror film since, well ever, in my opinion. Amazingly bad acting, ridiculously bad puppetry, a script from Mars….what more do you need people?

Oh by the way…

BOO! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!