Clothes fake the man

I'm wearing a Cute Little Boy shirt. It's got horizontal strips, with fat reds, thick blues, slim yellows. It makes grown men look like boys. It's the kind of thing a mother buys for a son whom she wants to keep a boy for a little while longer.

My Mom (Whom I love and adore) didn't buy me this shirt. She bought it for my brother. He grew up a little too quick in some respects (girls) while I grew up too pokey in the same respects. So my parents bought him infantilizing clothes, but buy me leather jackets, sexy briefs, all in the hope that I'll put them to use and snag a wife. But water seeks its own level, and so do shirts. My brother gave me the L'il boy shirt, and I wear it with pride. As RuPaul puts it, you're born naked and everything else is Drag.

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I rewatched Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome last night. It's now on the short list of my favorite movies. I turned it in to Netflix today and it felt like a parting.

I also turned in Eaten Alive, a drive-in potboiler "From the makers of Texas Chainsaw Massacre!" Regular readers know how devoted I am to TCM, but if you follow any creative entertainer who's impressed you, sooner or later you'll see them stumble. Eaten Alive is just drive-in crap, but it's gonzo drive-in crap with scattered moments of cinematic poetry. Too little, though. Lots of gratuitous disrobing scenes near the end. Set-bound; much of TCM's value comes from the documentary feel of it. They didn't film on a soundstage, they went out and found places. Eaten Alive was filmed on a soundstage, and except for the gore and the nudity it looks like a cheap old TV show. The camera setups lack the verite freshness of TCM. Some fun performances. Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund looks like all my North Carolina cousins, so I bought him as a wild 'n' wooly redneck right away. Sometimes bad filmmaking and nightmare logic bleed into one another, so this actually got to be pretty scary. The soundtrack mixes country tunes with jarring musique concrete flourishes, and really builds up a horrific atmosphere, rubber crocodile notwithstanding. Marilyn Burns, the final girl in TCM, delivers some great scream queening in the coveted role of "Only woman in the movie who doesn't take her top off." If you feel like throwing popcorn at a screen and would like for something to be on the screen while you do it, this would make a good choice.