Kevin’s Monkey of the Week

My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. Every year or so I take a month off work for my “Monkey Tour” – visiting exotic locales that have a considerable population of rare and interesting primates. When I get back, some asshole will usually ask me what it’s like to be a roadie for Mickey Hart. I usually just show them the candid, amateur pics from my journey. I know that may sound a little like a type of homemade pornography, and the photo to the right may look a little pornographic, but these are really just snapshots of all the chimps I’ve seen. My monkey of the week is one such chimp, Lulu the Lady Monkey.

The sign pictured to the left tells tourists not to put their fingers inside the cage of Lulu, who happens to be a Cotton Top Tamarin, typically found only in southeast Asia. This is because most people do not understand how to speak the highly advanced body language of monkeys. For instance, standing with your arms folded across your chest, staring and smiling at an ape is the human English equivalent of telling someone to “bite my fingers off”. So, it is not surprising if someone who chooses to put their fingers in the cage after doing just that, loses their fingers. My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.

The One About Roadside Women

The decision to stop your car for a helpless woman desperately flagging you down from the side of a deserted road is not an easy one. It seems like the good-guy thing to do, but this is the real world, and there’s a good chance her boyfriend is hiding in the bushes with a gun (for killing you) or a suitcase (for throwing in your backseat and demanding you drive them both somewhere terribly inconvenient). I’ve also seen enough bad movies to know she may be a vengeance wraith trolling the highways in search of the drunk driver who killed her. Then again, I’ve also seen enough good movies to know she might be a Catholic Girls’ School runaway who wants nothing more than to get out of her rain-soaked t-shirt. There are so just many factors you have weigh during the time you see a stranded woman and the time you either stop or speed up.

The first time it happened to me I was living in Tucson and it was midnight. I stopped to roll down my window, which is apparently a form of “street lingo” meaning “feel free to open the door and climb in”. Fortunately, I was able to pull away before the woman could get all the way in and finish whatever she was saying. I felt my action was justified by her brazen audacity, but I still tried to convince myself she had said something completely incoherent about “getting stoned on bong water”. Deep down, I’m pretty sure it was more about “getting home to my daughter”. This guilt, perhaps, slowed my response in future situations.

The last time it happened, two weeks ago, I was not fast enough to prevent an aging, Hispanic lady with a minority of teeth from jumping in the passenger seat to ask if “we” could go get some drinks at a bar, right before she started crying. I told her I didn’t drink, and she asked if I was a Christian. Saying yes probably would have prevented the entire course of the conversation to come, and I’m not sure why I didn’t since I lied anyway by proclaiming, “No, I just don’t like the taste!”

She first explained to me that she hated her husband, which I presume was one of three Mexican men sitting by a broken down car I had passed about a mile earlier. It seemed they had been teaching her to drive but she’d plowed into a cactus and he had’t been too happy with her. Then, she abruptly began to describe what a bad lover he was using phrases like “Mr. Bam Wham Done” and “Short Stuff”. This was a big problem, she explained, because she likes to have 2 or 3 “wow-ee’s” instead of none.

Finally, as my anxiety was escalating, she asked me if I liked blowjobs. To my ears, this was the same as asking if I wanted a blowjob, and even though she knew I wasn’t Christian, I was surprised she thought I was heterosexual after my admission that I just didn’t like the taste of alcohol. “Not me,” I stated, “I don’t like the taste of blowjobs either!” That seemed to clear up the situation.

Eventually, I agreed just to drop her off at a bar because I was very busy. On the way she told me I should never get married and that she “wasn’t a racist, but her daughter was dating a lazy Mexican with no money.” I stopped at the first place that looked like it might have a bar, a pizza joint, and gave her my best wishes. I’m not sure what happened to her, and I’m pretty sure there was no bar in there, but they did have pizza. And who doesn’t like the taste of pizza?

The Real Red Mountain Reunion

I am organizing a ten-year class reunion for my old stomping ground, Red Mountain High School. It will compete with another reunion for the same class being held across the street. Check out all the details at www.realrmreunion.com.

Hellboy: What Ya Gonna Do When He Comes For You?

If you want to see a movie about a bunch of the most annoying, selfish, ill-tempered kids you’ll ever see bully around their equally irritating parents, I suggest you rent Cheaper By The Dozen on DVD. But if you want to see a red superhero save the world from an evil space lord using logic only a 13-year old comic book fan could understand, you should probably see Flash Gordon or maybe even Hellboy, the latter of which should be coming to your dollar-theater soon.

Hellboy, played by Ron Pearlman, is an offpsring from hell rescued from Nazis (who planned on using him to release several omnipotent, tentacled deities trapped in large space crystals) by Americans who eventually raise him to work as an undercover, paranormal cop with a fetish for house cats. Again, you need to be 13 to really understand it. Pearlman is joined by Selma Blair, playing his love interest and firestarter Liz Sherman, and some other guy, who plays a human named John who is torn between helping our titular hero and trying to sleep with Liz at the risk of being burned alive.

Director Guillermo Del Toro, who also directed Blade 2, made his name with creepy and atmospheric horror films made in Mexico. Everything he’s done in America, now including Hellboy, are mostly just excuses for Herculean brawls choreographed with convincing enthusiasm. This is not a bad thing, though I hope he will ultimately combine his old flair for plot with his new knack for using computer generated effects in a way that doesn’t piss me off. But even if he can only ever manage doing one thing per movie, that is better than most directors. I hate you Stephen Sommers.

The strangest thing about this film occurs at the end when Liz is killed during a ritualistic sacrifice (by the way, you should avoid this paragraph if you don’t enjoy learning who dies at the end of a movie before you see it). She is nude under a blanket while she lies on an altar and then Hellboy carries her body away. He leaves it with the human John before he returns to defeat the final enemy (in a method, by the way, that will seem eerily familiar for anyone who’s beaten the boss of Tree Island Dungeon in The Legend of Zelda for the Gamecube). When he returns, Liz is fully dressed, the only conclusion being that the human John, enamored with her for the entire movie, had taken this last opportunity of privacy to caress her naked, dead body. Apparently, I am the only one who noticed this, as several other reviews have failed in even alluding to it. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think this sort of fawning necrophelia bodes well for the spin-off, stop-animation cartoon on Fox! Kids this fall, Hellbaby (pictured right).

On a scale of demon seed, where The Omen’s Damien is a 1 and Rosemary’s Baby is a 10, Hellboy rates a Haley Joel Osment, the numerical equivalent of a 7.

Talking Point Blues

The year is 2004, the 213th anniversary of the passage of the first amendment. I bring this up because it is in danger of being effectively abolished for the first time in my life. People from Howard Stern to Bono are being swept up in the FCC’s dragnet led by Michael Powell and his right wing consorts. This has swung Stern to the left, which is actually good, because I used to be so offended by his political rantings I had to change the station and hope I remembered to turn it back in time for Lord the of the Anal Ring Toss. Now I don’t have to do that.

2004 is more important because it is the 20th anniversary of Motley Crue’s debut album, Too Fast for Love, a blistering eruption of leather, sex, and electric guitar. Besides its lasting contribution to cock rocking, it may also have something to say about the state of the world- even today. So to people like Powel Jr. and Sen. Sam Brownback, I quote a line from an unreleased song recorded during the Love sessions, “What’s right for you ain’t right for everyone”, and to Stern, I quote the chorus, “Stick to yer gunz!”

To join the fight against the unconstitutional actions of the FCC visit www.stopfcc.com. To purchase the remastered edition of Too Fast For Love visit www.amazon.com.