The Venerable Johnny Depp

Praise the Lord.  I have seen Johnny Depp’s apotheosis and it is named Rango.  It’s like he’s pulled together all of his work since Edward Scissorhands into one masterpiece symphony in the form of an animated feature.  It all makes sense now.  Rango tips its mottled cowboy hat to Ed Wood, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but most of all, intentionally or not, to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, the last Jarmusch film I truly enjoyed, as opposed to feeling flattened by enervation.

I don't know why they kept calling Rango a lizard when he was in fact a chameleon. I know, chameleons are lizards, but lizards makes them sound so pedestrian. Maybe the studios felt that American audiences would be too tempted to pronounce the "ch."

If you haven’t heard by now, Rango is truly trippy, brilliantly written, gorgeously animated, superbly voiced, and I have serious doubts it will ever make its real cost back.  If the studio reported a budget of $135 million, it’s bound to be much more than that.  Rango is basically an art film with a big Hollywood finish, which you really don’t mind because the whole journey is so jaw-droppingly audacious and bizarre.  It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever been sexually attracted to a rattlesnake.

One hot motherfucker. If you ignore the fact he is voiced by Bill Nighy, this is the sexiest cartoon character since the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast."

Regarding my most recent blog, which was about the spineless penis, my virtual cohort Old Ancestor commented:

“Do the creationists know why the penis has a helmet? It’s to scoop out the last guy’s love potion and increase the chances of his own getting to the promised land. Of course, that only makes sense if the woman has multiple partners in short succession.  That’s right, creationists. God wants women to have multiple partners. In one day.”

Barf.  This is particularly revolting to me because I am so cum shy.  Yes, I am a homo who can’t stand ejaculate, which might disqualify me from being a homo in the first place.  Between that and hating musicals and steroids, you might well be thinking that I’m faking being gay in this blog just to attract the elusive, finicky Pink Reader, to worm my way into the ultra-exclusive Hollywood Velvet Mafia.  As an ex of mine once noted, “You’re your own sexuality.  I’m not sure what it is.”  Maybe I just sleep with men because I crave gay companionship.

Nah.

Leaping right ahead in a streaming hot jet of conscience, my personal style guru Tuttle tells me that the muscle-bound steroid look is finally at an end, some twenty years after steroids were introduced in HIV med cocktails and the look took off amongst the gheys.  Suddenly, in the late 80s/early 90s, fagelahs who were the size of bicycle inner tubes inflated to Michelin Men.  They were almost as believable as real men until they opened their mouths or you saw them walking from behind, with that tightly controlled wiggle I call The Bottom Bitch From Ipanema Strut.  According to Tuttle, the new chic body look has gone back to natural and athletic, and that has always been sexier to me, not to mention how exhausting it is to have sex with a mountain of inflexible synthetic muscle.  However, like The Man said, I’m a sexuality all my own.  Not only do I not find the pneumatic steroid look appealing, the thought of spending over a thousand dollars for a cycle two or three times a year, of turning my liver into pâté and shredding the valves around my heart seems ludicrous, even if I could afford it.  (I can hear Tuttle piping in here, “Don’t forget to tell them about the pimples and the stench!” Yeah, them too.)

No, he's not an extra from "Spartacus," who can't keep his legs closed because of the muscle mass. He might be handsome, but having sex with that is back-breaking.

Maybe it’s also because the first Muscle Mary I ever knew well, a guy named Rich who worked at a media buying company I slaved in when I was a kid, died of a heart attack while bench pressing at the gym.  He was twenty-six, but, hey, his biceps were larger than my thighs.  It’s the important things in death that matter.

People are still landing at my blog via Google searches for Amanda Seyfried’s boobs/breasts/or just plain singular breast.  Do they understand that Amanda is a midget?  Seriously, she’s barely topping five feet and with those bug eyes she looks like Frodo’s sister.  Liam Neeson is colossal, like six-foot-five.  They must have had her on a cherry picker to do that scene in the conservatory when she jerks him off.

The hobbitess Amanda Seyfiend about to give the giant Liam Neeson a hothouse handjob in "Chloe."

I can’t tell whether it was the tsunami or the word penis in the title of yesterday’s post, but readership was down to almost half pre-Spanking Galliano levels.  Obviously dick doesn’t have as much appeal as boob.  Maybe guys were landing at the site expecting boob, saw the title, read the first few lines and thought, “Gross, this is all about cock.  And there’s spine in them, too!”  I have to confess that when I first read that penis spine piece, my legs clamped together and I thought about pre-penicillin gonorrhea remedies, when they stuck the umbrella down your urethra and then opened it and … ARRRRRGGGGHHH!  I’m sure the clap umbrella came to everyone’s mind, too, when they read that, ergo the drop in readership.

All About Amanda: I was briefly capturing a fashionista audience there, but I may have scared them away with my tirade against Lady Gaga and/or my landlady. Now it seems it's just me, the pervs and Old Ancestor.

The last tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 happened during a Charlie Sheen Weekend I was enjoying over that Christmas break.  The person I was with had such an allegedly unprecedentedly powerful orgasm that we later remarked, when we had sobered up enough to pay attention to the news, that it must have caused the disaster via a butterfly effect emanating from Kentish Town in London to Sumatra in Indonesia.  This gallows quip was particularly not funny a month later when I spoke to my friend Stephanie, who almost lost her children to the disaster when she was vacationing in the Maldives.  And, yes, it would be in even more grotesquely bad taste to mention this story now were it not for the fact that I used the word “tsunami” three times in my penis blog two days ago.  A few hours after I posted, look what happened.  I feel like Lord Shiva the Destroyer.  (Note: I have since gone back to that post and changed the word tsunami to “tempest,” in honor of Julie Taymor’s last flop.)

My man, Lord Shiva, in two of his attributes. The one on the left, Shiv Shankar, is the meditative stoner dude I am more often than not. Shiv Nataraj, on the right, the dancing lord of destruction, is me when I've got some house cleaning to do. Pretend the dead guy he's dancing on is the Wicked Susan Blais.

The truth is, whenever I think of tsunami or tidal I think of a horrifying illustration from my parent’s Time magazine when I was a small child.  We were doing something for the relief of children in Bangladesh who were the victims of the Bhola Cyclone, the deadliest cyclone in recorded history, which wiped out half a million people in the blink of an eye.  The illustration in the magazine was of screaming people running down the street with this wall of water towering above the palm trees bearing down on them.  In the foreground was a terrified, crying child my age.  From then on, tidal waves and tsunamis have been a pet phobia, and maybe one of the reasons I became such a strong swimmer as a kid.

As Temple Grandin said when she was playing Claire Danes in that HBO movie, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.”  Is anyone keeping an eye on Mama Gaddafi right now?

Comments: 7

  • oldancestor March 12, 20118:04 pm

    Thanks again for the mention. My evil plot to replace Susan Blais a daily blog entity here seems to be working out, though I hope my tenure doesn’t end with being described as “execrable.”

    I’m not so hot on the steroid look either, especially in women. I don’t want the woman I’m sleeping with to shame me at the bench press. I don’t really want her to go to the gym at all. Her figure should be honed by girlie things like figure skating and shopping and eating disorders.

    I try not to picture people who aren’t me having sex, but I have to admit my curiosity was piqued when you said having sex with a big muscle man is back breaking. What exactly does that look like? Are you required to crawl all over him like a bug and use weird, clever tricks of seduction and fakery – evolved over the eons – to get him to submit? Why is it back breaking? Do you have to kill him and eat his head after? Curious heterosexuals want to know.

    I’d offer quid pro quo and explain sex with women, but you’ve surely seen it and have maybe even tried it. After all, you live in California, and we east-coasters (you may have seen us in that David Lee Roth video when he did the Beach Boys cover… you know, “east coast girls are hip,” accompanied by a shot of two girls in hip sunglasses) know you are all strange and sexually adventurous. A friend of mine who lives in LA likes girls, especially Mexican prostitutes, but he also does transexuals. They can have dicks, but they must have boobs too. Seems reasonable.

    If someone said I HAD to be with a man…

    (you know, one of those devious mastermind criminals who don’t want money or power but enjoys making people choose between two uncomfortable options. “Have sex with a man in the next 12 hours or I will behead your sister’s puppy”)

    … it certainly wouldn’t be some steroid-abusing power lifter. Somebody funny, who is less manly than me and has a British accent, since that would make him slightly feminine. Simon Pegg might be tolerable. He’s a non-smoker, I hope. That’s a deal breaker.

    Popular opinion might be that I surfed in here a couple of weeks ago in search of nude pics of Amanda Seyfried. I reiterate that this is not the case. I don’t want to cut off your gravy train of readers, but finding naked pics of actresses online is easier than admitting gravity works. I’ll take nude pics of her any day, her short stature and far-apart-eyes notwithstanding, but I’m certainly not going to use wordpress to find them.

    I realize not a single person who has ever lived or ever will live cares if I did or did not first visit here because of Amanda Seyfried. However, it’s important to me that they know I have integrity. Yes, I like to look at naked actresses on my computer screen and pretend they are attracted to me (and have many times), but on that particular day, I was not doing so.

    Why does the spineless penis bit freak people out? None of us has a spined penis (as far as I know), so it shouldn’t be disturbing when the fact is simply confirmed. If we had spines down there and heard about them getting ripped out, we’d be justified in wincing.

    You know who should be happy penises don’t have spines? Women and gay men. The spine functions as a series of hooks that dig in and stay there until ejaculation. Not pleasant for the receiver, I’m sure.

    You see, creationists (my version of Susan Blais), nature is amoral. Animals are amoral. The universe is amoral. Man is born amoral but, fortunately, are brains are just big enough that we can make a choice to be moral. Our choice, born of freewill and aided by nature selecting us to have a spineless penis.

    Too bad I posted this following the wrong story, two days after the fact.

    • James Killough March 12, 20118:47 pm

      Your talents are wasted leaving comments on this blogue.

      • oldancestor March 13, 20112:26 pm

        They’re probably wasted leaving it on my own, since that takes a lot more time.

        This is one of my favorite blogs on all of the internets, and leaving comments is entertaining to me and, hopefully, amusing to you. It’s cheaper than a netflix account too.

        • James Killough March 13, 20117:02 pm

          You make me smile. And the reference to the internet as plural just gave me a string theory moment.

  • oldancestor March 14, 20117:01 pm

    I’ll bet that was the first time in the history of English that anyone ever typed “And the reference to the internet as plural just gave me a string theory moment.”

    I think I just got a fleeting glimpse of how your mind works.

  • tzopilotl March 23, 20114:39 pm

    …is this the way two artesian monks talk after
    taking their orders from above? celibacy has a
    humorous effect on your writing, like salve on
    a good dose of mange, may the blesséd virgin
    come down and give you the same handjob she
    gave god, out of her merciful grace.

    • James Killough March 23, 20114:47 pm

      I’m pleased to see I have attracted another wit to the PFC fold.

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