Unfortunately, my bottle of Cher perfume, given to me as a birthday present one year by Elvira, is long empty. Just like Burlesque, the film that opened this week that Cher and her once great face that no longer moves stars in. But in the case of Burlesque, I wasn’t expecting emptiness so much as a big fat Thanksgiving turkey gloriously stuffed with kitsch. I’d been whetting my lips for a year and a half since the insanely done-to-death-27,000-times-over storyline was revealed to me when I, along with God knows how many other songwriters, was asked to submit a song for the film. My co-writer dropped the ball and never handed in any of the three we did  – I’ve yet to even hear a mix…..Earth to Steve…..but often when my songs haven’t made it into a film it saved me from being stuffed into too many cinematic turkeys. Unless, of course, you count Howard The Duck, which I co-wrote five songs for with Thomas Dolby. But that was just about writing with Dolby and George Clinton as, despite being excited about being in a George Lucas produced film, I knew it was headed for the turkey farm my first time on the set when Howard, a little person stuffed into a costume that looked like a pillowcase with feathers glued on, ran in.

I was so excited to see Burlesque that I even organized the first public outing of my film club, L’Chien Du Cinema, The Dog Cinema, to leave my living room and see a film at an actual theater for the first time since 1983 when we were lucky enough to have two turkeys in the same season, Pia Zadora’s monumental Lonely Lady and Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone’s immortal Rhinestone.

But, alas, Burlesque isn’t so much a turkey as one big, long, never-ending lump of white, packaged mashed potatoes. No gravy, no cranberry sauce, not even any turkey; just constant servings of the same bad blue lighting on Cher, the one forlorn look from Christina Aguilera, the same numbing beat of predictable songs and we’ve-seen-it-before-Pussycat-Dolls-with-a-hit-of-Flashdance choreography, a story as predictable as jelly slopped on top of peanut butter, and all of it hitting with such regularity that your eyeballs go numb. An endless, bombastic pile of nothing. At least my empty bottle of Cher perfume has enough in it you can still smell some brilliance of what once was.

Which is a shame as all the bad film faithfuls that came to see it with me had high hopes Burlesque would be a contemporary classic of Showgirls proportion. I even got out the old the ol’ doggie bags and filled them with gold sprayed Milk-Bones, as the tradition of L’Chien is for everyone to throw down their bones and rate the films, a 5-boner being the biggest dog and a 1-boner not even worth the price of the ticket.

Here I am walking in with RuPaul:

And here I am at dinner after the film with more of the party faithfuls where we discussed and rated the noisy pile of mush we’d just seen. (Clockwise: Christian Capobianco, Craig Fisse, Michael Patrick KingGail ZappaDiva ZappaLaLa Sloatman, Bob Garrett, Charles PhoenixmePrudence Fenton and Pat Loud, the matriarch of the first reality show family ever.)

It was a sad night for Burlesque as far as our boner ratings went:

Out of a possible 55 bones from the eleven of us, Burlesque only got 9 and 1/32nd. It would have been 9 and 1/64th but a 32nd was the smallest bit of Milk-Bone any of us could break off.

Back to my Cher perfume, the silver paint on the cap has curdled away:

I guess that’s what Cher thought was happening to her face when she started shooting it full of whatever she shoots it full of to be left with a face that’s as immobile as a rock. It may look pretty but the only real emotion you could detect from her in Burlesque is when her eyes teared up. Twice. But I don’t want to be mean to Cher. I love Cher. It’s just that you can’t feel anything from something human that doesn’t move. And when you throw that into a movie that’s all surface/no heart or soul and shakes at the exact same frequency for two hours straight it makes you want to check your cell phone or do whatever else you can do trapped in your seat until the slop ends. My friend Diva always brings her knitting with her in case of just that.  Here’s how much she got done during Burlesque:

Even this bottle of Cher perfume has a little actual something in it:

It may all be stuck in the spritzer thing but at least it’s there and you can still smell it. I was hoping Burlesque reeked with kitsch classicism, bursting with so much flavor of self-importance that I’d never be able to get the stench out of my nose. Instead it was nothing, just a big plastic inflatable turkey:

Big budget movies offend me to begin with. And one that throws so much in your face and you don’t even feel the splat really bums me out. What a nothing experience. And, by the way, how do you put Cher and Christina Aquilera in a movie together and not have a duet?! What a waste of Cher.

But I’m not here to give a movie review. I’m just here to show you a bottle of perfume.

Now the only question is what do I do with all the Milk-Bones?

I wasn’t going to do anything for my birthday this year. Too overworked and no extra coinage to throw around. But word leaked out and spread and all of a sudden these people, most of whom I’ve spent every birthday and momentous occasion with for umpteen years, showed up at my house:

Bottom row (L-R):  Diva Zappa, Lisa Loeb, me, Prudence Fenton and Michael Patrick King.
Middle row (L-R):  Jane Wagner, Lesley Ann Warren, Bob Garrett, Lily Tomlin, Pamela Des Barres, Karen Levitas, Gai Gherardi, Gail Zappa, Nancye Ferguson, Stan Zimmerman and Jim Burns. Top row (L-R): Ben Bove, RuPaul, Tom Trujillo, Roey Herschovitz, Jimmy Quill, Charles Phoenix, Sonny Ruscha Bjornson, Mark Blackwell and Jack Nesbit.

Though all of my friends may not practice kitsch like the religion I do, their lives and occupations are consumed with pop culture and they all bring unique individual style and vision to everything they do. None of us are color-in-the-lines people. Which means that when it comes to birthday presents, it’s fantasyland overload as their sensibilities collide with mine in harmonious gift wrapped chaos! For example, here I am with perennially great gift givers Nancye Ferguson and Jim Burns:

Jim is looking very happy because the video game he stars in, Call Of Duty Black Ops, was released the day before and set the opening day record for ANY type of entertainment,Is he is grossing $320,000,000 by the time he reached my house. Maybe that’s why they got me 14 gifts. Though Nancye and Jim are always reliable for a smorgasbord of age-inappropriate-unless-you-happen-to-be-me offerings like this magnificent 1950’s mother of pearl poodle pocket mirror/pill box:

… and this convenient land line phone ear piece for my iPhone:

They also gave me this wonderfully famous Enid Collins owl box purse…

…and this fantastic 50’s fold up wallet with plastic coin holder inside like the Good Humor ice cream man used to wear on his belt to give people change:

They also threw in this 1960’s Wilma Flintstone bathing cap.

Here I am with Pamela Des Barres, the world’s most famous groupie, and Diva and Gail Zappa, who came straight to my place from the airport after being honored at a Frank Zappa festival in London.

Pamela is a fabulous writer and also travels a lot for her work. Which is lucky for me and the rest of her friends as she hits thrift shops wherever she goes and picks up stuff for us all year round. She makes these finds for pennies and stacks them up so she can arrive like Santa Claus on any given occasion. These “On The Wagon’ coaster and snack trays she gave me are just about my favorite bar accessory ever!

I love when snacks are referred to as ‘Tid Bits’, especially when what is normally a single word is broken up into two separate words as stamped into the belly of the wagon.

This nightshirt could be the heaviest gift of the evening. It’s hard to see all the 1960’s pop culture graphics and slogans in this photo and I’m not sure who the characters on it are but there were more than a few vintage clotheshorses at the party, certainly including myself, and we all agree that Pamela’s $2 purchase would easily go for $500 in the right store.

Then there’s this early 60’s Make-Up Mask that you pull over your bouffant to protect the Max Factor from rubbing off your face when you pull your angora sweater over it:

Pamela graciously modeled it for us throughout the evening.

Her excellent gift giving instincts have definitely rubbed off on the other Des Barres in attendance, Michael, who reliably gives me fantastic African swag.

At one point there was a girl’s conference in the bedroom.  Here I am with (L-R) Lily Tomlin,Prudence Fenton, and Jane Wagner:

Prudence not only cooked an incredible dinner for everyone but made the excellent “Crackerature” portrait of me that’s between our heads in the photo above.

Lily and Jane gave me the most ridiculous-in-the-best-kitsch-sense-of-the-word-ridiculous gift of the night:

He’s only about 3″ high, his little arms are made out of bobby pins and his body is some kind of overcooked Sculpy or baking soda concoction. The card that accompanied him was just as kitschy.

The Diller is Phyllis Diller, which adds a few pounds on the kitsch scale for this gift. The note Jane and Lily wrote me make the cheese wheel even weightier:

Joining Lily and I here is Stan Zimmerman. We all grew up in Detroit.

Stan added a little class to my gifts with this 1950’s signed Sasha Brastoff ashtray.

Here’s Lily and I with RuPaul. Both of them have added greatly to the kitsch cache of my alter-ego, Bubbles the artist, as they are the #1 and #2 collectors of her art, each owning over 20 pieces.

Michael Patrick King, seen here with Pamela Des Barres’ lovely feet, brought me some of my most Americanized presents.

He brought my gifts back from Dubai when he was there filming Sex and the City II. First, this green shopping bag featuring a carefree Michelle Obama:

And then this brain-numbing Muslim Barbie shoulder bag:

I got one more bag, actually a Kitsch Emergency Kit, from Karen Levitas.

It’s nice when your friends give you a healthy snack of sardines to enjoy while you read cheesy poetry from the 70’s:

Here I am with Mark Blackwell, who’s also a November 10th birthday baby, and Sonny Ruscha Bjornson, Lisa Loeb and Roey Hershkovitz:

Lisa and Roey gave me some quality reading material:

Maybe I will learn to make beautiful cakes like this one on page 110:

But when it comes to baking, there’s only one Supreme Master and I’m pictured with him here:

Just a few days before my party Charles Phoenix was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with his signature “Cherpumple” cake, one of which he baked for me.

A Cherpumple is three Sara Lee cherry, pumpkin and apple pies stuffed inside three Betty Crocker cakes and frosted as one happy stack of sugary ecstasy:

Here’s my friend, Lesley Ann Warren, indulging in some. Perennially skinny and always eating healthy, she hit the Cherpumple as an extreme gesture of kitsch on my birthday.

Lesley was my first friend when I moved to Hollywood in 1976. She was also the first person ever to sing one of my songs on TV when she did the third song I ever wrote, “Childstar”, on Johnny Carson.

Some people went back for seconds of Cherpumple. Each plate weighs 2 lbs.

Gai Gherardi and Rhonda Saboff shared their Cherpumple:

They gave me an excellent pair of glasses from LA Eyeworks, which Gai co-owns and where I’ve bought all of my eye coverings for the last three decades.

When RuPaul arrived he brought me another birthday cake.

It was delicious but everyone had already gorged on too much Cherpumple.

Which means that everyone went home in sugar shock, the condition they’ve had much practice existing in as they’ve all been over to my house a trillion times before.

I didn’t have far to go as my bed was only feet away from the remains of the Cherpumple. I went to sleep with my crown on and had sugar sweet dreams anticipating a very good year to come indeed!

More party photos can be seen here.

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I’m not really a collector of vintage presidential plates. The only other ones I have, a few Jack and Jackie Kennedy ones, crept in more because of hairdos and fashion sense than for their stature as the First Couple of the United States. But every Eisenhower plate I’ve ever stumbled across has some tragic art department flaw.  Like no one ever approved the plates once they were finished or there’s no way they could have escaped the fact that something was always magnificently wrong with the skin color of the couple who occupied the White House right before the Kennedys, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, President and First Lady of the United States from 1952 to 59.  Here they look like corpses:

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A slight adjustment on color and at least it wouldn’t look like the Eisenhower’s had butter and pancake syrup running through their veins as opposed to real blood that would have forced a more natural skin tone.

Here it almost looks as if the Eisenhower’s race has changed:

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Upon closer look, it looks like  the art director matched the skin texture of a potato rather than a human being:

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My absolute favorite depiction of the Eisenhowers on ceramic is this plate where it looks like they have grown an extra head:

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Upon closer  inspection, it looks like a second head was stamped on just as the plate was beginning to move down the assembly line, as if their faces were on little springs and actively popping out of their heads.

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Sometimes you look at a President and you get inspired because you think anyone can become whatever they want if they just dedicate themselves enough. But these Eisenhower presidential plates inspire me in a totally different way. It tells me that even if you’re the President, kitsch can happen to you. But the good news is that, for one, this American citizen has taken much more interest this particular President than she ever would have had his skin been in better condition.

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I used to actively collect figurative sculptures made out of plastic fruits and vegetables. Largely crafts projects, I loved them because most of them were so completely stupid looking but you could always tell a lot of love went into making them. I eventually stopped collecting these anthropomorphic fruit and vegetable people because in order to stand up straight most of them were made out of really light, cheap plastic food that would crack after a couple of  years leaving them looking like accident victims. Much like what happens to actual vegetables that I periodically have a conscience to buy only to end up jamming them down the disposal when they start curdling and smelling up the frig because they’ve gotten too old to eat. But as with anything, I love when things have dual purposes like plastic fruit for display/plastic fruit for body parts. Like what a great shape an apple makes for a head or how natural the sprouts on the top of an onion look for hair.  And until now, that’s how I prefered to experience vegetables.

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But a few nights ago I ended up staying up most of the night after stumbling on this guy on YouTube who also makes excellent use of vegetables for purposes other than which they were grown. Here he is playing a cucumber trumpet:
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I’ve never heard a carrot used as a pan-flute before:

carrot

This would definitely be a way to get me to pay attention to broccoli:

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Cabbage is one vegetable I actually like though I prefer it as cole slaw or with corn beef at a good deli. I’ve never experienced it in concert as a  flute.

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Both apples and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” annoyed me as a kid. They still do.

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I’m used to radishes being little round red things that I actually like but I guess if I knew they could be used as musical instruments I could wrap my mouth around this one too:

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I have no idea what a butterbur is but it’s leafy and would probably taste good on top of a hamburger.

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I’ve never had trouble with scallions as I love them in tuna fish salad.

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I may have a Grammy and songs I’ve written may have sold over 50 million records but I can’t blow a watermelon and make it sound like a clarinet no matter how strong my musical proclivities are.  I suppose there’s nothing to stop me from trying but in the meantime I’m doing fine without adding this skill to my repertoire and I’m just going to enjoy my fruits and vegetables as really cute plastic people.

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If ever there were a garden for 2010 with no water required, no gardening bills to pay and always picture perfect plumage on well-sculpted almost-topiary-but-without-the-cute-animals tree/bushes this would be it.

I love interspersing the rectangle tree with the ball trees. Thought was definitely put into the planning of this garden.

I also love tree arrangements when actual nature is involved. Here are a few from around LA that would go well with the excellent brick landscaping above.

tree_3612 A tree_3648 trees_8734 tree_4317 tree

All trees are beautiful. Bushes sculpted to look like trees are even more beautiful. Murals painted to look like sculpted trees and bushes are more beautiful still.

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Big-tv-SFV-1

As Kitschmeister General I love, love, love the San Fernando Valley, just inches from the center of Hollywood and pumped full of Kitsch like a buffet line at Trader Vics. This is the first in a series of short films I’m making glorifying the Kitsch monuments that abound around me for bigisgood.tv. Part 1 features everything from Roman architecture and giant submarine sandwiches to clowns, frog families, volcanoes, giant fish, horses, shoe cars and very happy houses.

AWWoK-volcano AWWoK-star-gardens AWWoK-twin-houses AWWoK-circus-liq-sign AWWoK-silver-saddle AWWoK-frog-house AWWoK-hair-to-please

For the full glorious and kitschyfied tour:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRxzFdByMQs

And check out bigisgood.tv.

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This is a product worthy of an Oscar for Best Kitsch, a fake wood cardboard stand-up “plaque” that looks suspiciously like the piece of  cardboard that comes with any cheap picture frame, stapled on, staples askew, emblazoned with a cheap gold embossed sticker with three imprints, none of which have anything to do with the Academy Awards other than a trophy atopped with a nude female athlete that kinda sorta is in that Oscar trophy pose.

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All of this is encased in a really cheap brittle plastic enclosure that’s tinted gold to make it look more fancy. The writing on the package slays me.  As if any idiot wouldn’t know to “INSCRIBE IN ALLOTED SPACE YOUR OWN GRAND AWARD WITH ANY BALLPOINT PEN”.   How elegant! And how worthy of ALL CAPS!

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These “Awards for those you Love and Admire” – I guess ALL THREE stickers are Oscar worthy despite the lack of tie-in – were made by Syd Art Novelty Company, Inc. of New York in 1976.

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The Do-It-Yourself Oscar  is “Fun Giving for Gags”.  Then come the words “Sports” and “Occasions.”,  the latter of which somehow also merits a period. Perhaps next time Syd Art could hire an actual writer rather than some family member to create the language for a product that supposedly honors achievements in creativity.

An excellent feature of this is that the price tag is still on and it’s from the Hollywood Magic store, a relic a lot older than this do-it-yourself Oscar that’s still alive and well on Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from where the real Oscars take place tonight.

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I love sculptures like this, especially when they’re crafted by mechanics and stuck out on the street in front of their shops. I’m assuming that “Mofles” means muffler in some language. If not, there’s more that I love about this place than just the metal foliage.

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I’ve been known to use a muffler or two in my handiwork as well. Here’s a movie camera prop I made out of a muffler and old vintage LPs for the 1987 MTV Award nominated video, “Right on Track” by Breakfast Club, which I art directed and production designed.

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A more appropriate title for this ultimate kitsch rendition of The Carpenters legendary “Rainy Days And Mondays” is “Raining Or Not, I Can’t Find the Key”. The problem with the stupefyingly scale-jumping Leo isn’t his voice so much as his ears. He slips over and under keys faster than a greased cat, consistent in his own musical universe thousands of miles beneath the melody only to rise like a phoenix into an entirely different melodic universe drenched in its own never-before-heard key. To be fair, there are actually two bars where Leo sings in the right key. Unfortunately they don’t follow each other.

I love when Leo gazes into the camera at 2:08 and then closes his eyes and FEELS the song even more. I love how his mouth gapes open at 2:07 and remains in a state of quivering preparedness waiting for the lyric to appear until 2:11 when he finally switches to spectacular nose wipe choreography during the instrumental. I love that all of this is performed in a “Jesus Loves You” t-shirt. Perhaps so, Leo, but I wish he loved you enough to include a check for vocal lessons.