Dead Stars (68 page)

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Ass to Mouth

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The Internet informed that Bill Condon, who adapted the musical to film, happened once to have lived with Ryan Murphy—one of the detours of MD's bewitched, bewitching reverie.

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Even Harry was caught off-guard by the rampant success of THE HONEYSHOT!s webpage
Honeyshot! Olden Goldies
(Ms. Hawn's two faces conjoined at the top of the page like those of comedy&tragedy, her
Laugh-In
-era face with her Medicare one), said page being wholly devoted to peeholes of a certain age as they stepped from their cars—Helen Mirren, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Debra Winger. Zsa Zsa got hers as she was lifted from wheelchair to gurney, but that was more of a goof—Harry, who always wrote the webtext, called it a
funnyshot
!

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The kitty-clawed Capote's comments were prescient, prefiguring the fad of live-streaming
Allah Akbar!
decapitation, the extreme sport of extremist enthusiasts. The go-go years of online decaps straddled the millennium, peaking with the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl. Bud had planned to write a novella-length fantasia—in the genre critics call “Swiftian meditation”—about a headless man, but nothing ever came of it.

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He thought it ludicrously ironic that the deceased was a frustrated writer whose unfinished novel JCO found and read after his death. (He began writing it before they met, a half century back.) Even though the deceased was an editor by profession, he supposedly never read any of her books. Any
.
Bud thought that was passive-aggressive o'plenty; there must have been a lot of rage there. Apparently, JCO was remorseful that she hadn't better encouraged his creative side. Reading between the lines—and there were a lot of lines!—Bud thought it sounded like the poor fellow had literally been crushed by his wife's productivity—outgunned, deballed & anonymized. (His surname being Smith, he left the world as blandly as he had entered it.)

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JCO became engaged to her 2nd husband just 11 months after Mr. Smith passed—while the body of her meditation on grief was still warm.

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Of course, the
Times
routinely turned to Toni Bentley when it came to books on ballet, and in the realm of the overtly or mildly incestuous, had Kathryn Harrison on permanent tap; the estimable Julian Barnes recently carved himself a nice little niche when it came to mourning & death. He in fact reviewed Joyce Carol Oates's memoir of widowhood for
The New York Review of Books.
Barnes rather gently took JCO to task for omitting mention of her remarriage, which predated publication of her memoir, a criticism JCO initially rebuffed before eventually reconsidering. She set the record straight in reprintings of the mem. Still, the pairing of Liz Phair and Keith Richards did strike Bud as borderline.

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Department of Children & Family Services.

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Not having read the novel, Bud checked it on Wikipedia when he got home. Wallace wrote about a
movie
, not a virus, which was actually closer to Bud's initial observations of the bums' “watching” something on an invisible screen. The plot synopsis said that viewing the film rendered its audience not
happy
, but
lifeless
, but it was enough in the ballpark to discourage Bud (for the moment) from further “pitch” fantasies. He remembered a Python bit as well, something about a joke that was so funny that it killed whoever heard it.

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He went on a “Rapture” site recently, out of curiosity. It said that the ascension to the Heavens would come at dusk, or the late afternoon.

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Permission to reprint rest of lyrics denied by rights holder. —
author
.

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Permission to reprint rest of lyrics denied by rights holder. —
author
.

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Imagine the unendurable agony of the members of the above, the depressed, depressive Whores With No Name Class as they watch, like invalids, the hypnotic, rainy day, addictive, back-to-pack
X Factor
(UK & US) auditions on YouTube, going back so many years. Confronted by the spectacle of
other
(Non Chore-Whoring) No-Names bursting forth to become instant supernovas, their tears turn them into pillars of Loser Salt. Consider their anguish, watching—knowing—the fecundity of a universe that is constantly spitting out new stars . . . while they remain eternally condemned to the purgatory of the Stillborn.

They cannot even be
dead stars
, for they were never stars at all.

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Before at long last being remanded to the loving care of Engineer Jim and his “Dawnie.”

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As quoted in
London Review of Books
, May 27, 2010.

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The New York Review of Books
, February 24, 2011.

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When it's time for a cable auteur's fawning, metacritical dicksuck (usually coinciding with the release of the complete DVDs of his show), brain surgeon Ms. Moore makes a savory mouthpiece; there are few things sweeter than egghead head. The novelist has shown herself to be down with the squad/groupie—ready to traitorously jump the ship of her own craft: in a wet pantiesgyric to
The Wire
in the pages of
NYRB
(if only David Milch was still around for her to service!), she calls David Simon's Baltimore a “quiet rebuke to its own great [in the dialect of the Brownnose Indians, Moore employs “great” as a means of softening the already soft snarkiness of her takedown] living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth [is Barth great? is he living?]” and goes on to pamdesbarres the anus by asserting that her beloved show is “arguably biblical, Dantesque . . . the series's creators know what novelists know [ooh, I'll bet] . . . whether time comes [like a
jackhammer
] in the form of pages or hours. On DVD, it can be watched all at once, over 60 hours: this particular manner of viewing makes the literary accolades and comparisons to a novel more justified and true . . .
The Wire
has much in common with the plays of George Bernard Shaw. [It] embraces the Wildean sense of art's cleverness as well as its uselessness.” In a companion cockstroke/rimjob of
Friday Night Lights
offered in the same pub, the brainy, brain-giving plaster caster begins by sharing with the reader her slutty surprise and delight in finding herself at a Manhattan book party “locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers [Barth & Tyler? Toni & Fran?], all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series
Friday Night Lights.
” After referencing Janet Malcolm,
Wozzeck
& Daniel Mendelsohn, the pundit pantycreams about
FNL
being filled with actors who are “disconcertingly attractive young people with pink, wavy mouths.” A final quote from Moore: “In fact, two characters on
The Wire
are murdered [Barth? Toni? Tyler? Fran?] in David Simon's Baltimore just in time for the excellent actors who play them to join
Friday Night Lights.
” From
Friday Night Lights
to
The Wire
then back again—this gangbanger knows how to righteously 69!

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Ooh Baby Baby It's A Wild World Films was named after Brando's mother's favorite song. Tolkin was of the opinion that naming a production company thus was “heinously charming—or charmingly heinous. Either way, something about it works.”

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Bud's detailed fantasy drew on the results of research he once did for a still unfinished script.

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. . . . never be eulogized for having a big brain that finally crashed down around him like a chandelier, its footnotes scattering like gewgaw frippery.

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Permission to reprint lyrics denied by rights holder. —
Author.

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Permission to reprint lyrics denied by rights holder. —
Author.

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Or write one of those short books about salt or the word bullshit. “A Brief History of
Brief Histories
” by Bud Wiggins was another possibility.