CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Sleazy Rags To Fight The Drags

Rick Johnson

Killing the afternoon is one of everybody’s favorite activities. It’s simple, clean, very 20th Century and can usually be accomplished at home in your spare time. Scientific materials required include a Noise Source (TV, stereo, gagged infant), an Individual Recreational Space (bed, sofa, bed), one or more Imagination Enhancers and—most importantly—a big, sloppy pile of sleazy magazines.

Of course, rock music and rock “culture” mags areamong the best instruments of creative inattention. But once you’ve memorized the pages of America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine (True Zamboni Operator), you’ll find some pretty slim pickings unless you waht to take down your POSTED: HEAD INOPERATIVE sign and flirt with the ever-present dangers of reality.

No thanks—let somebody else dance that mess around. There’s a truly monotonous variety of typeset hangouts for the discerning mold-node and all that you, the Autonomic Redundant, have to do is know where to look.

The first stone you should look under is Overthrow, the Tiger Beat of radical punkdom. Whether you want to know about Todd Rundgren’s psychedelic mushroom intake, the B-52’s’ thoughts on blowing up high schools, who’s in the Stilettos this week or what Elvis C. really said to Bonnie B. after he removed her toe from his inspiration, this is the place.

In the finest white-dopes-on-punk tradition, the fun-loving probable FBI informants at Overthrow combine snappy ju nk journalism with the sort of eye-appealing graphics rarely seen outside of notes to the relatives of kidnap victims. In the latest issue Patti Smith guitarist and lean-to Lenny Kaye explains in the feature interview how producer Rundgren cooked up a pot of peyote tea for the group prior to the recording of “Seven Ways Of Going. ” Now we knoto why that cut sounds like someone is demonstrating a wok in your inner ear.

Other recent stories range from stoned-out .coverage of Rock Against Racism rallies and heartwarming editorials (“Hey, fuck thle boat people!”) to fact sheets on those teen sensations, theB-52’s, which, instead of items such as favorite color of gum and I-like-girls-thatlicktheir-waffles, include statement like “Fred thinks chemicaDy pure acid should be made available to consenting adults.” Overthrow can also be congratulated for starting the rumor that a certain bleached blond English singer and roomie of Britt Ekland... wait a minute, that’s no help.. .you know, the guy who thinks he’s sexy and sings like

he just swallowed Sam Cooke? “R_The Mod”?

Yeah, him, well anyway, it says he was rushed to the hospital with a stomach disorder and, upon pumping out the contents of said singer’s tummy, doctor’s were surprised to find nine fluid ounces of semen! That’s terrible, what a vicious, unsupportable heap of rubbish—it couldn’t have been less than a gallon!

Enough of this heavy-duty muckraking, it’s time for some culture! And, outside of Pea News, there’s not better trash can than AFTA, The Magazine of Temporary Culture. A cast of towering internals like Eddie “Dead” Flowers,

Bill “Me Later” Sherman and editor Chinky Marcinko lead a cavalcade of dimmed pilot lights in a piss-on-reality revieW of all the irrelevant facets of global moo that matter, from TV, records and shirts to unrehearsed snapshots of each other’s mother’s legs.

Typical titles include “Long Dead Teen Needs Your Letters,” “How To Make Everyone Like You,” “Gig Young: Man Or Myth” and “How You Smell Affects The Way People Think About You.” Remember, if you smell like a dentist, you probably are one.

A few serious and even Useful (what a concept!) items are scattered among the Hefty fodder like so many Lynda Carter picture discs in a minefield. There’s a Mork & Mindy index that sums up all the pertinent poop (i.e. writers, actors, plot, whether or'not Mindy’s nips showed) on the program forf uture Morkologists, a Steve Martin Concordance (concordance is the medical term for squeezebox), a sneak preview of Irving Wallace’s upcoming book of lists, People You Would Like MostTo Put A Spike Through Their Head and even an in-depth interview with director George Romero wherein he insists that Dawn Of The Dead is an “activist” film. Sure, and so is Benji Cops A Weiner.

The intentionally humorous stuff is pretty funny as well. For the KatG isi Memorial Dead Baby Joke File: why do people boil water when a woman is giving birth? So, if the baby is stillborn , they can make soup! Oh god—that was so hilarious I guess we can skip the pus and afterbirth jokes and take a look at the letters.

From fictitious reader Kevin Postuback, “Wh^ do people climb mountains? Because they want to get high. Why do people take drugs? Because they’re there.” My sentiments exactly. And speak-of-the-drugged, Geraldo Rivera drops a preview from an upcoming survey he’s doing for Kids Are People Too. Question: “Which would you like doing more, helping people or taking drugs?” Don’t want to reveal all the findings, but I will mention that a full 16% of American Youth answered “helpingpeople.”

My own personal favorite music/kulture mag is Close Up On Crime, Which claims to be “America’s Leading Crime Journal.” Apparently they haven’t seen the last few issues of Petroleum Producer.

With a format resembling old copies of National Enquirer digested and then re-set by hyenas, Close Up unabashedly takes on the big crime stories that other papers are toofactual to bother with. GHOSTS OF STARSKY AND HUTCH screams one recent cover, right above 49 ZOMBIES ON DEATH ROW! Let’s hope one of ’em’s Rod Argent! Or how about NUDE LADIES AND GUARD DOGS IN CHURCH AROUSE COP’S SUSPICION (sounds like a Hounds’ LP cover) or the stunning caption beneath a grainy picture of a knife, a foot and a too-gross-to-account-for spatula: “knife found near victim’s foot.” I tell ya, you need sunglasses to read this rag because it hurts to look directly at the reporting.

Fora paper whose publisher balances his chepking account with everything people dread, the stories have a surprising incompleteness to them. For example, in “Doc Charged With Sex During Surgery,” they fail to indicate the intensity of the female orgasm under anesthesia. Goddam sexists! And why bother to do a piece like “Farm Family Slaughtered And Fed To Hogs” if you’re not going to mention whether the oTnkers enjoyed their meal?

Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything when you’re doing nothing, and you can quote me on that. If you want to check out these shining proctologist’s pans of hot pop lit and you can’tfind them atyour newsstand there in Talula, IL, Overthrow is available from BQX 392 , Canal St. Station, NYC 10013; AFTA’s Cryptic number is RPO 5009, CN 5063, New Brunswick, NJ 08903 and Close Up On Crime will probably take your money and laugh, so don’t bother.

Good for nothin’? You better believe it, but it sure beats hanging around Marineland with a fryingpan! , ¶@^

Death Of A Traveling Weinerperson

A VIEW FROM A BROAD by Bette Midler (Simon & Schuster)

Like Marlin Perkins, I am sometimes asked what is the most unusual animal behavior I’ve seen. Was it the wave of audiences at Britt Ekland films jumping up on top of their seats and screaming “Kill Britt! Kill Britt!” for no single apparent reason? Was it the bizarre ritual practiced by groupies backstage at Iggy concerts called Bobbing For Meatus? Or how about the twisted hatred that’s sometimes visible behind the polystyrene Sebastion Cabot masks of the fanatical Doug McClure Revenge Squad?

Nope, it’s got to be Bette Midler in a rubber-foam hotdog costume singing “Shiver Me Timbers” to a crowd of herring-intoxicated fishermen’s families at a Swedish hockey rink. As ludicrous as Larry Mondello in Beaver’s pajamas, right? A true sight to be thrown in a canal. But not the kind of thing you want to write a whole book about.

Especially a pretty damn funny book like this one. Basically a journal of the Divine One’s last world tour, A View From A Broad is an amusing, lightweight collection of smart remarks, snappy comebacks and candid snapshots of Bette’s cleavage demanding independence and self-determination.

, The layout—a chain collision of brief sketches, lists, stage patter, travel quizzes and outraged notes to editors cushioned by plentiful color photos and numerous blown-up quotations in cute violet boxes—vfery much resembles an extended version of Random Notes. Like Shake ’n’ Bake, it’s “tender enough for a two-year-old” and easy on reviewers too!

Midler’s alternately self-deprecating/worlddeprecating sense of humor however, is the main selling point. How can you not like someone whose sole description of Puget Sound is “octopus-ridden,” or who compares the moonlit lakes of N orway to compact mirrors? Or whose mopt treasured remarks include “1 will stand in tears amid the alien corn” and the oft-repeated “Let tHe Philistines spit on my weiner now!”

Speaking of quotable quotes, B.M.’s tres cheezee world view is as dependable as a character in a TV show turning on his television and finding a cowboys and indians movie on.

Not only does she tackle the big questions, like how does the soul feel at the moment of violent death or just what thoughts go through a person’s mind while they wait to suffocate inside a foam rubber weiner, but the Immense Divinoid also shares with us her observations on sentiment (“The only thing I put above'Sentiment is Revenge”) and morality (“Being moral isn’t what you do, it’s what you mean to do.”)

While the price tag ($12.50) might seem a bit steep for a 160-page glorified scrapbook such as this, Views truly captures what our humble author describes as “the thrilling rush of insignifi> cance.” Or, as she says in the afterword: “Fuck ’em if thfey can’t take a joke.

Rick Johnson

Cherie Busted!

Edouard Dauphin

“For God’s sake, take it back!”

No, that’s not the cry of customers attempting to return the latest Knack album to their local record store. It’s a line of ad copy for The Godsend, a new horror film that’s about as terrifying as Gidget&The Three StoogesGo To Windsor.

Shot by bloody limeys in London and points south, The Godsend is one of those evil child movies a la The Omen. Except instead of being a malevolent boy, the brat here is a big-eyed blonde girl child with a disgusting overbite who looks like a four-year-old Peter Frampton.

Bonny (even her name is repulsive) has been bestowed on a young married couple courtesy of The Stranger, a tall, stately blonde whose idea of a good time is to drop in on complete strangers, give birth to a baby in their living room, bum a cigarette and slip quietly out the door, sans baby. Don’t invite this woman to the next CREEM staff party—unless you’d like to see the spectacle of Nick Tosches changing diapers.

Alain and Kate the young marrieds, are understandably dismayed. They already have four children and weren’t hoping for a fifth. (At this point in the movie, I was hoping for a fifth of Wild Turkey to miraculously appear in the screening room—anything to relieve the excruciating boredom I could see coming for the next 80 minutes.)

Predictably, Bonny launches her one-girl crusade for zero population growth. Within hours after her arrival, she suffocates Kate and Alain’s youngest in the playpen. Dad is distraught. Mom wastes no time in transferring her attention to poor little Bonny, holding the murderous whelp to her bosom and calling her a godsend. So much for the maternal instinct.

« Two more of the couple’s children bite the dust—one by drowning, the other via a fall from the hayloft—before anyone even begins to suspect Bonny as the villain. And even then, it’s only Alain who feels she’s less a godsend than a sawed-off juvenile version of lisa, She Wolf Of TheSS.

Not that the violence of The Godsend even approaches that of lisa. a true classic of the genre. Everything in this soggy British trifle is about as bloodless as an amiable collision at a cricket match. Even at the film’s conclusion, when the couple’s last child is pushed four flights to her death, she bears only a slight facial scratch and looks ready to jump up immediately for tea and biscuits.

Skip The Godsend ’cause it’s god-awful.

Own up. Admit it. You never thought Cherie Currie would be able to act her way out of a Hefty Bonded 2-Ply Trash Bag with attached twist tie. When you heard she was to make her feature film debut opposite no less a movie pro than Jodie Foster, you said “Anything but that—even the Runaways.”

Well, The Dauph is here to tell you he always thought Cherie had thespian tendencies and in Foxes she wipes out cutig-pie Ms. Foster like Lester Bangs lapping up a random beerspill on the bar of CBGB’s.

Cherie portrays one of a girl quartet of girls drifting around fhe teenage wasteland of L. A. All four foxes hang out together—they even sleep intertwined. Bet you thought the Ramones were the only foursome that spent the nightthat way.

As the picture opens, Cherie’s three roomies are trying to rouse her in the morning out of a slumber that approaches the living dead. Screaming in her ear had no effect. Ditto loud

music—disco, so you can’t blame her for snoozing. Finally, the solution: cold water in the face. Cherie drowsily opens her eyes, struggles to her feet and trundles off to the kitchen for a Budweiser. Ya gotta love her.

For the next hour and a half, Cherie pops pills, causes fist fights, drinks too much, latches onto creepy boyfriends, wears a ton of makeup, trashes a party, collapses, throws up blood and dies in a car crash. And you thought Cherie Currie couldn’t act. What do you think she did with the Runaways—it sure wasn’t singing.

See Foxe§ for next year’s Oscar-winning performance.

The Visitor is the most baffling horror film of recent years. It has something to do with aliens from space. John Huston appears in several scenes—all shot on a roof, with cone-headed children. Glenn Ford is a police chiief who dies after his first scene. Sam Peckinpah is listed prominently in the credits but can not be spotted on the screen. Should I go on? The ad copy says: “They know we are here.” But do we know they are there? Or why?

You’ll skip The Visitor even if you see it.