JTTV - Season 3 Premier

I know that you've been waiting on pins and needles for this. So here it is, the third season of Junk Thief TV. BE WARNED: If you stop by here frequently, you appear in the finale. If you're offended, let us know and you'll be removed. If you're offended that you don't appear, let us know, and you'll appear in a future episode. Even Guru came down from his serene cloud and makes a brief but memorable appearance.

Trixie Friganza - Restored at Long Last!

Yes, yes, I know I just made my comment about curbing my YouTube postings, but I still have a couple more to go before topping this month's quota, and this one is just to glorious to wait on.

While weaving through incredible third disc of The Jazz Singer, I just about fell off my chair, when to my delight, I saw the charming face and full figure of Trixie Friganza. Trixie Friganza! I first discovered her a few years back in an American Masters episode on Vaudeville. Trixie appeared in the 1937 A Star Is Born, some Chaplin films and others. She was also a suffragette at the turn of the century.

This is a brief clip from a six minute clip in The Jazz Singer reissue, one of nearly three and a half hours of Vitaphone Varieties, a series of weird and wonderful shorts from the late 1920s and early 1930s. In a jazz age rap, Trixie gives tips on how married gals who like a nip at the speakeasy when the husband isn’t watching can cover her tracks.

Each minute is superb, but this half minute clip is arguably the pinnacle in which she chronicles the fate of Lulu who ventures off to the Aloha state. Though comic, what's amazing about Trixie, is that she's a pretty strident feminist even by today's terms. This 33-second interlude comes out of nowhere in the middle of a technically comic tune in which she tells the fate of her two husbands. They're both losers, but when one decides to hit her, she does him in.

Enjoy!

Trixie the suffragette.

How to Solve Illegal Immigration

I’ve made a vow not to post more than 3-4 YouTube videos a month on this blog unless they are ones that I create. I consider it to be lazy blogging or mimicking a sloth to just keep zapping the “post it” button on YouTube and sharing it with everyone.

But the new episode of The Pinky Show merits being posted here. After an absence of more than two months, Pinky is back and brings in her wise friend Daisy to provide the most intelligent analysis I’ve seen to date on the immigration “debate”. What a pathetic commentary on contemporary journalism that a cartoon cat has far more intelligent insight on this issue than CNN, the New York Times and The Nation combined. Too much of the media thinks that balanced news or a debate means bringing in opposing sides to scream at each other. Sometimes you do need an analysis like this with a decided slant to move true discourse and understanding forward.

So Much Junk, So Few Gigabytes

Make no mistake about it. We live in the most junk obsessed society on the face of the planet.

Take the "news" and blogger buzz last week. I mean, what incident of significance happened? Correct, it was all about an overweight, drunk 25-year-old stumbling around on a stage in Las Vegas? Search on YouTube, and you'll find 2,160 clips referencing the Britney Spears VMA fiasco. Just so you know that United States Americans (to borrow a phrase from Miss South Carolina) have their priorities straight, you'll find only 76 references to General Petraeus' report to Congress. (Huh, what's that about? Who's Petraeus? What's a Congress?) Amazingly, you'll actually find a total of five references to the bombings in Kathmandu, needless to say none of them in English. (Hey, those folks don't matter, they only make clothes to sell at H&M, they can't actually shop there.)

Nobody cares that people are getting killed by bombs in Nepal and Iraq, right? We want to see Britney bomb.

What's really spooky about this is that there will actually be plenty of people buying the crap she has to sell. We all need another chance to listen to that great message she has to share in her lyric that goes something like "Gimme, gimme, gimme more." However, I'm not clear what she is pleading for in excess -- more dollars for her CDs or just more plain old Chicken McNuggets. All that matters is gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme...

All of this got me to thinking about all the junk that's out there and the very name and intent of this site. I mean, for cryin' out load, there is just so much useless product that we toil away our waking hours in order to waste dollars on and ascribe meaning to. But why are we buying it when there are so many treasures waiting for us to nab for free?

Why do so many of us feel that it's really important that we've bought something with a Kenneth Cole label even though he never saw the garment that was dreamed up by some junior assistant who spent 10 minutes designing and some woman in Nepal wove together and got 50 cents for her 10 hours of labor.

That was one of the reasons I decided to start a blog in the first place, to reclaim the junk that gets ignored or thrown in the trash heap. There is a lot of junk out there and a lot of stories behind each piece. So over the past few days, I've been encouraged to come across others who feel the same.

Eva Deadbeat, has a great new vlog about Found magazine. I came across the 'zine in a bookstore over the weekend, and it was heartening to see another like-minded group roaming the U.S. in their van to collect and ascribe meeting to junk they find. The whole concept of being a Junk Thief is not original, and more than a year ago when I predicted the coming Junk Thief revolution, I knew that I was neither the originator nor alone in my quest to promote finding and ascribing meaning to all the trashy treasures out there. The question is, will all the junk thieves ever manage to connect? I'm curious if the creators of the play Lost and Found in the Mission that made an entire musical production centered around trash lingering in the streets of our fair city and staged at the now sadly departed Jon Sims Center and Junk Pirate magazine know about each other as well as Junk Thief and Found magazine. The best thing about Found magazine is that it has nothing mined form Google searches, just plain old-fashioned, physical gleaning. I think we all should make a convoy of funky old vans and tour the country. And as hungry junk thieves, we'll probably look a lot more appealing as we dance in our skivvies belting out "Gimme, gimme, gimme more (junk)."

Let's Get a Luna Bar & Split it!

It will be a cold day in Hell or Alabama before I will subscribe to the Logo channel or cable in general, for that matter. Hey, I’m a Junk Thief and think TV channels oughta be free. Plus I don’t need one more diversion. However, I could easily get pulled in by Julie and Jackie whose sense of humor is eerily close to mine. I’m no fan of Carol Channing, but I have a couple of friends with whom I also play mommy in a similar way. Just the other day one of them came over with his Elaine Stritch doll, er, I mean came over with Elaine Stritch, and we just sat on my famed purple couch and shot the breeze over jasmine tea while Elaine pretended to be Camille Paglia while playing with Bunter.

If that doesn’t make sense, just watch the clip. Julie’s website/blog is pretty cool too, and she’s got a cat that looks a lot like Bob next door.

These girls are hilarious. I want to be their best friend!

UPDATE: The more of these videos I look at, the more I am conflicted of trying to decide if Julie is the new comic genius of this century or has the same stark raving mad sense of humor that appeals to me. Beside having cat news, her fake tourism video on Manhattan has to be the most side splitting four and a half minutes that I've ever seen. "32nd Street and the West Side Highway, the center of the universe!" On top of that she cute as a button and has a damned fine singing voice. Her main site is here.

Further News From the Set

Exploring the hidden treasures of Egypt with Zasu Pitts, shopping with Mary Todd Lincoln, tooling around the dark alleys of the Mission. Oh, what fun we're having wrapping up the premiere of JunkThief TV's second season. We've had such a blast going through the archives at the JunkPlex pulingl out these old magazine covers from the glory days and wanted share a couple more. After all, they're on the screen for mere seconds during the opening and closing montages. The show is essentially wrapped, we just need to do some fine tuning on audio levels and keep our fingers crossed that its epic nine and three quarters minute length is able to load on YouTube!

We're about ready to shoot episode two with a special, surprise guest. (Think insects and sweaters.)

Junk Thief Is an Evil Bastard!

Oh, that Mr. Junk Thief is one cruel man. Here it was a perfect, sunny (but not too hot) day in San Francisco, and little Greggy was hoping that after plowing away on overdue work projects most of Saturday, he could go play in the park today. But noooh, Mr. Junk Thief made poor little Greggy toil away like a singular band of elves, cranking out copies of the two set DVD of the first season of Junk Thief TV to give away to his far flung and local friends. Granted it looks and sounds 100 times better on DVD than with the tinny sound and fuzzy images on YouTube, but it's not like his show is that exciting.

With that project finished, you'd think he'd let our poor boy have a break, but then like an insane combination of Tina Brown and Busby Berkeley, he demanded content and two -- count 'em tw0 -- production numbers for the second season of Junk Thief TV. And then poor Greggy had to edit the thing, first on dinosaur Microsoft Movie editor until it just crashed, and he finally got around to learning to use Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 7.0 that he bought months ago but has never taken the time to learn to use. It's infinitely more complex but also much, much more efficient and produces a gorgeous product. Unfortunately that product is as a few hundred MBs and thus won't load directly onto YouTube. Thus the product posted on YouTube is out of sync, the Vincent Minelli worthy colours are washed out and blurred, and the sound is like a 1971 transistor radio.

After all the work little Greggy had done, Junk Thief gave him no thanks and just went into a profanity laced rage and called our boy an incompetent idiot and was ready to hold him down and strangle him until...oh, yeah, wait, Gregg is Junk Thief.

Okay, folks, enough of the ever confusing mix of third, first and now second person. I'll just step out from the curtain and say that if you're one of my far flung blogger friends and would like the DVD set of Junk Thief TV, just email me at junkthief@gmail.com with where you'd like me to send your copy. It's really worth it for music and images on the second season preview.

If the "aesthetic" looks familiar, or obvious, it's no mystery that it heavily borrows from Kiss Me Kate, with the MGM Orchestra's version of "From This Moment On," reaching heights worthy of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. This song plays heavily in the family memoirs section from which these two photos are borrowed, the first showing my mom, her dad and the infamous sister whom readers seemed intent on trashing in my previous post. She was a complex, conflicted, stylish, controlled, distant, compelling woman whom I simultaneously adored and feared. Our relationship was more about mutual admiration than love, and I have really been struggling to write something of significance about her suicide last December. Her only living heir, her son, has encouraged me to write something but it just won't come.
I truly adore this picture since it speaks volumes about the relationship between these two women and their radically different styles, and I am eternally indebted to both. What's especially telling is that this is not taken at the time of a formal event, but how they dressed for a casual Saturday supper. Though that supper would probably be meat loaf and brussel sprouts. Their high sartorial sense did not translate over to cuisine until the mid-1970s. Not only did this living room in Kansas City (my grandparents home) look like a Douglas Sirk set, the dramas that took place there were the same with everyone speaking in affected, clipped MGM English.
The other shot (just look at those drapes and the continued riot of pink!) features none other than baby Junk Thief and his family. And it was in this living room that Junk Thief was first introduced to "From This Moment On" from the Kiss Me Kate soundtrack. For years he hated that movie and the rest of the tunes that were played repeatedly, the only "pop" music allowed in a household where Chopin, Satie and Debussy were the ruling sounds. The movie itself never held appeal, mainly because it had only been seen on late night TV with drained colors, fuzzy sound and scratches on the print. But "From This Moment On," which is primarily a dance number, always got little Junk Thief leaping around that Douglas Sirk living room, performing balletic leaps as his grandparents looked on in delight, never fearing he'd knock over some priceless vase or tear the rug. (If you've never seen the video "Big Round Up at Lazy Acres," it tells you about how Junk Thief's macho grandfather had no problem with his little grandson being a flaming, dancing nutcase.)

Years later, Junk Thief would have the pleasure of seeing Kiss Me Kate in 3-D on the big screen, and it was as if a hideous building had been sandblasted to reveal a hitherto unknown architectural jewel beneath. Alas, you really can't appreciate the tune on the web.

So, if you're a local, let's plan on a screening soon and I'll give you your DVD. If you're not local, fly out soon or I'll happily mail you your version.

Get Ready

When the Future Kisses the Past

I have now managed to catch up with both of the DVD compilations of the films of James Broughton and the first volume of those of Kenneth Anger. Anger, I have known for at least 35 years, mostly for the Hollywood Babylon books and Lucifer Rising and Scorpio Rising. Broughton was more of a vaguely familiar reference, and I'd never seen any of his work. Both, it could be argued, are JunkThieves, Anger in particular, who had no problem of weaving together trashy pop (or porn) images with higher, classical art. (The Rabbit's Moon being the best case of that.) Broughton, on the other hand is at once the worst embodiment of trippy hippie new age nonsense and just plain, childlike nonsense. He's been called the person best qualified to carry on the torch of Walt Whitman, though his "poetry" is more a weird mix of Dr. Seuss, Mother Guess and Dr. Ruth. Some of it is so laugh-out-loud bad that you're not sure if Broughton is in on the joke as he narrates his films like some tripped out kindergarten teacher leading us through an exercise of removing our clothing and consuming Kool Aid last with some mysterious substance. There are both similarities and contradictions in both. Broughton has a lot of nudity but not that much outright sex; Anger has a lot of sex and sexuality but not that much nudity. Both, it also could be argued, are the reason YouTube and its 10 minute limit. Both are masters of the six to eight minute form, but they falter when they opt for longer, near feature length works. (Dreamwood in Broughton's case and Inauguration to the Pleasuredome when it comes to Anger.) If there is anyone out there still doing this type of film (though Anger, at 80 this year is still out there), I would argue that it is Guy Maddin. Though he managed to keep my attention through most of The Saddest Music in the World, the closest he has come to an outright feature with actual stars he too is best in the ten minute or less form. Fun as Music was with an actual narrative of sorts, Maddin seemed to but trying to mesh a dozen or so short films into one big one with so many diverse styles and references that they ultimately overwhelmed whatever narrative or emotional continuity there was beneath his many surfaces. No wonder that Heart of the World, at a mere six jam-packed minutes, is his masterpiece. For all the diverse references and images, it is a coherent, gripping narrative in which the future of the universe is at stake. No wonder that Junk Thief finds all three film makers to be inspiration for their ability to see the past in the future or the future in the past or seeing that the future is actually Narcissus staring back at its reflection, ultimatley realizing that they are one in the same. What has been is what will become. Oops, what, did I lift that line from Broughton?