Episode 169: "Pus Town"

Date

May 30, 2014

Guests

Jolie Kerr

Discussed

Ahoy!

This week's guest is "ASK A CLEAN PERSON" columnist and NYT Best-Selling Author JOLIE KERR! Jolie wrote a book called MY BOYFRIEND BARFED IN MY HANDBAG...AND OTHER THINGS YOU CAN'T ASK MARTHA, but this is a pro-Martha podcast and you don't need to worry about any Martha Stewart bashing. But you SHOULD be worried about being terribly entertained by this conversation about mold, bleach vomit, and other things nobody ever talks about in polite conversation!

Plus! A trip to the Dong Room at the Biennial! Patti Smith's poems and breasts! DiBlasio's pro-weasel policy! And why it's awesome that Deee-lite made RuPaul jealous.

Trivia

• Otters are weasels
• Fluids that come out of your body are all protein-based.

Download the Episode

Episode Link

Monologue Transcript

Transcription by Amy

Some folks
Love to see red
Some folks
Never talk about it
Some folks
Crave a blue lady
Some folks
Know and still they doubt it
I'm just no good without it
I'm not a man at all
It makes me skin crawl

Hello everyone. It’s Julie Klausner back for another episode of HWYW. That was Some Folks by Alice Cooper. If you have not seen Alice Copper singing Some Folks from The Welcome to my Nightmare concert film you are missing out on a great experience. You should all type Some Folks Alice Cooper into google right now and watch this ridiculous thing because it’s a lot of fun. It’s very dumb. One of the skeletons dancing with him is his wife, which is important to know. It’s also a bad song, not a good song. It’s one of those numbers that a black and white cartoon giraffe would watch and think it’s a little broad and it’s not very rock and roll. That giraffe would be right, but I still like it. My Alice Cooper obsession has not abated, abetted? Who cares? Words right?

I love Alice Copper. I think he’s cool. That’s all. Alice Ripley on the other hand, believe it or not, is following me on twitter under the moniker Ripley the Band, and I’ll allow it.

Since I spoke to you last week I agreed to leave Jessica Seinfeld alone on Instagram and I did, but people kept @mentioning me on her photos and captions. Then on Memorial Day she pose din front of a tank with her friend. She looked like she was showing a little tums, showing her tummy. She posed with her friend in front of a VFW tank. I tweeted about it. Her friend followed me on twitter, and then she started commenting on my photos which was horrifying. They were very cryptic comments. She followed me on Instagram and I had a meltdown. I said I can’t do this anymore, especially because she was fighting with people in the comments. The sex tank photo lent itself to a couple of her followers, who are the worst people not on the internet but in the world, her devotees are much much worse than she is. They had a lady saying, “Is this appropriate? Is this more about you than it is about Veterans?” Yeah in a sexy fashion shoot glam pose. She says, “I’m wearing sweatpants.” Her friend said, “We drove 20 minutes out of our way to find this memorial tank and pose in front of it.” I wish I could remember the exact comments she posted. There were selfies, one with me posing with James Urbaniak and a selfie. She @ mentioned her friend who literally drove 20 minutes to find the tank. She wrote, “Oh this is what you were telling me.” That freaked me out. Well done, Jessica Seinfeld. I don’t want to say you win.

You already won a war that very specific women have been fighting against, myself included, for years. Honestly, I don’t want to say that you won this battle because I am not giving up the fight. When I say I am not giving up the fight what do I mean? It’s weird. This has been a very convoluted tense, humid week in the aftermath of the shootings and the twitter hashtags that have since ensued which is a sentence that shouldn’t make sense but yet it does. You all know exactly what I am talking about. Nobody wants to hear about senseless deaths followed by twitter hashtags because this is not an @Midnight Game. This is real life. This is war. This is terrorism. This is unspeakable horrible yet there is so much speaking going on it can be confusing. By this I am talking about the #yesallwomen. I am a firm supporter of any dialogue acknowledging we live in a violent gun-fueled patriarchy ruled over by men who have always objectified and marginalized women since the beginning of time because this is a world that bases its history not only around the victors of wars, but wars themselves. These acts of aggression are evidence that man dominates woman because of physical strength alone, at least as far as an origin story goes. Even though I have said this before, I think women are way more intelligent, including emotional intelligence. Fine.

What is the #yesallwomen about? I don’t know if I am sure. I think it sprawled into a catch-all for people to talk about sexism with this hashtag after it. Talking about sexism is good but I don’t know. It seems unfocused. I am concerned about it. I think the original intention was brilliant as a counter to #notallmen therefore removing yourself from the problem of men being responsible for violence against women and violence in general, no offense to Aileen Wuornos. I think the hashtag has sprawled out a bit and has since lent itself to some gross people merging and being gross, ignorant, loud, and insensitive to their fellow humans. I don’t know if it helps to approach someone that is impassioned and tell them they are focusing their energy on the wrong thing. I know it is easy because of the internet.

I was looking into this issue minutes before I started recording this monologue. There is a guy on a show called Unwatchable, sorry Undateable. He said something that led to another thing... I would say who cares but it is an interesting time. It’s like the bayou of ideas on twitter and on the internet. As horrified as I am that this nation is reacting to a confusing idea, our first PUA Men’s Rights shooter if this leads to a greater understanding of the fact that there is a generation of scared angry entitle boys coming up with access to guns than hashtag away. That’s what I have to say about #yesallwomen. Any forum in which women feel comfortable to talk about experiences they have had that prove there is in fact a patriarchy and that eventually we will topple it. There is no other alternative. I have heard the death rattle and it sounds like a Bob Dylan song honestly.

Guys, since I last spoke to you I heard the RuPaul interview with Marc Maron and I want to mention how, what is there to say? He’s brilliant. It was a great interview for a bunch of reasons. There was a lot of gay-splaining for people who needed it. Now you know why Judy Garland is celebrated. Holy shit, if you don’t get Judy Garland, we’re coming up on the anniversary of her death, do me a favor if you haven’t listened to Judy live at Carnegie Hall just do that. Listen to it once. It’s all I ask. Do that or watch All About Eve. We will reconvene next week. It will be the gay-splaining club. I did not see the Normal Heart. Please don’t tell me how Julia Roberts was in it. I saw a lot of people crying in my feed and my life. RuPaul on Marc Maron was so brilliant. I don’t mean this disrespectfully because I have had her chai and it’s fantastic, is he really the smart Oprah, is this what we are getting at? The brilliant Oprah, I’ll put it that way. As spiritual as RuPaul is he is also someone who grew up in the counter culture. Marc seemed a little surprised that he’d done acid and grew up idolizing Bowie which was funny to me. I respect Marc’s curiosity around it, when he said ‘I was wondering about that’ in regards to Madonna or Judy Garland. At least he’s wondering. That’s a good thing to be open, curious, and vulnerable.

If you haven’t heard it I strongly recommend that you listen to it. I particularly enjoyed the part of the interview where RuPaul talks about how DeLite made him angry because he was successful before he was and that put a fire under his ass to get his shit together which I think is a fabulous story. Everyone always says, especially when they are being inspirational, philosophical, or spiritual and are trying to make sense of the violent chaos of life, people say there’s no point in comparing yourself with someone else: that’s all well and good until one of your friends get famous and rich and does your dream job. You get to say, “I knew him when...” as though that were ever, ever a thing anyone wanted to say about their famous friends. God Bless you RuPaul for owning up to the fact that when Lady Miss Kier was in our eyes, and DJ Tawa and DJ Dmitri and to some extent Bootsy Collins and to some extent Qtip you said to yourself I’m going to get my shit together and boy did you.

God Bless RuPaul.

Also I saw Hedwig last night. I thought it was fabulous. I was concerned going into Hedwig Neil Patrick Harris’ Hedwig would not have the same vulnerability. He is athletic and sinewy looking and not as androgynous as John Cameron Mitchell. He’s not a pretty Hedwig but he gets raw. It’s almost like you can understand Hedwig’s anger more in the Neil Patrick Harris version although I have no idea what that man has to be angry about, he has a lovely family and every job you could ever have wanted. When he said he passed up the Late Show job I don’t know how classy that was. Total class act—11 out of 10. Here is my take on Neil Patrick Harris’ Hedwig, John Cameron Mitchell doing Hedwig was Bowie, Neil Patrick Harris is Iggy—you’re welcome.

Moving on, I went to the beach on Monday Memorial Day. It was a lot of fun. I went to the Rockaway beach which is a beach populated with white hipsters and Latin families. It was dirty. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t go near the water, god forbid. There was a pipe because of the erosion form Hurricane Sandy, it’s all fine, I got a sun burn but I had a nice time. I drank a beer and looked at a fashion magazine. Oh look at me, I’m passing. Not every day is Paris is Burning, not every day. I went to the beach and I am halfway through Please Kill Me. I have to say I like it and I’m going to finish it, but back to Marc Maron, these aren’t really my guys.

I love the first chapter about Warhol and Lou Reed. I love the stuff about Iggy. To be completely honest I had a hard time getting through the New York Dolls chapter. Now I’m on Patti Smith and no one can shut up about how big her breasts were. There are at least four quotes from random people about how big her breasts were. That is so weird first of all and second of all not really true. We have seen them. They are great. Why are we talking about Patti Smith’s breasts when we should be talking about our poems? I thought it was cool and interesting that Patti Smith was kind of hanging out and not quite sure what she wanted to be and not quite sure what she was aside from intensely cool, smart, and talented. I liked the idea that she was a poet, that she would read a poem at St. Marks Church. Next on the stage is a good friend of mine. She’s a talented gal. She’s a poet. She’s going to read a couple of her poems, please give it up for Patti Smith. “This poem is called Slaughter.” She’s make up the poem in the middle of the poem. I was reading this thinking I cannot picture this, is it a Thursday night? I like to read books about nightlife because I never would have been out at those times. I also know that when I do read these books, I always wonder, this is normal (I hope), what would I have been in this world? What would my place have been if I had a chance to live in a different time? Books do take you to a different time and place, that’s why I’d like you to fund my Kickstarter called Super Reading Rainbow.

There’s no place for me in the poem community I have decided. When Patti Smith is going up and reading a poem I am in the audience checking my watch wondering when the internet will be invented so that I can get more Candy Crush lives. I don’t see it. I am looking forward to getting to the Ramones. Beyond that I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. No disrespect, no disrespect to Patti Smith.

I went to the Whitney Biennial, guys I don’t know if you know this about me but I am a New Yorker and I live in New York City. May I add you can say whatever you want about Sarah Jessica Parker but you cannot say she doesn’t love New York City because she does. I read on her twitter earlier it was Manhattanhenge which means the sun is in a particular place. I have no idea. You go outside and see the building in regards to the sky. She said she was crying. Do you know what? Say what you want about Sarah Jessica Parker, she love New York and I respect that about her. Anyway, I went to the Whitney Biennial. I saw some art. Before all of the news of the shooting had broken and the sexual violence wasn’t in the conversation yet I saw an art show. You come in and there’s a room with video in it. People were standing looking at the screen. In this case it was performance art. I love performance art because it is funny and assaultive if it is weird enough. If it is not and is boring, I could just watch any movie. I went into one of the video rooms hoping it would be a modern day equivalent of Karen Finley shoving yams up her twa(t), but instead it was a chair onstage. A woman was sitting on the chair, wearing clothes, it’s performance art for god’s sakes show some skin you dumb dumb.

There’s a woman sitting on a folding chair on stage. A guy comes out, also wearing clothes-yawn, sits on this woman’s lap and reclines like he’s a baby. She holds him. He gets up, she gets up and leaves and he assumes the position she was in on the chair and another person comes in and sits on his lap, etc...etc...etc... Yawnsville, USA. I left that room and went to another room. There was an installation full of dongs. There were dongs everywhere. You stood in the doorway and you were hit by a dong. The dong was in a stuffed fabric form. There were pillows sewn together and a color photo of an African American dong screen printed onto fabric and the fabric was sewn around a phallic shape of cotton stuffing. The other side had the same photo of the same dong. Everything was sewn up. You walk through getting bonked on the head with what is like a throw pillow; you’re not sure what it is. In the room there’s a big couch, it’s very colorful. I remember thinking it’d be cute in my apartment. It was sort of ABC Carpet. It was a lot of fun, and then you realize there were dongs in it too. Never mind. Then on the sofa there were 3-4 Real Dolls. Those are expensive. I really wish Jessie Helms were still alive. It would be fun to send him the receipts and ask for the reimbursements and keep asking every day. These Real Dolls are disgusting and very upsetting. Have I seen one in real life? I don’t know if I have. They are all sitting on the couch with their mouths open. I see what this guy is going for. Projected on the wall was video of chimps fucking. There’s audio of two men acting out a scene that is intense, “Why did you tell John?” “John is dead to me.” “You’re a piece of garbage.” That was going on in another corner.

There was audio or video of someone shooting a machine gun. I remember thinking this is a lot of fun. It is also probably not very good. It is definitely made by a man. That’s all. That’s all I have to say about that art. I think it is important to see as many different kinds of art as you can if you make one kind of art. That includes comedy.

Comedians owe it to themselves to see performance artists and drag queens because it is very very very important to know how not shocking you are. Artists think they are hilarious. They are the most humorless group of people that actually do think they are really funny, that’s interesting. If you had an idea for something funny you would probably tell your friends or execute it in a way that everybody would know it would be funny. But in fine art there tends to be a guy who thinks, “Oh man, we’ve got to get footage of chimps fucking that would be hilarious!” Is it or is it just a weird afternoon for someone who happened to have gone north of 42nd Street? Shout out to the Biennial.

I also wanted to mention that Maya Angelou is dead. I am really sad that she is gone, but I am happy that the event of her passing has lent itself to more trivial celebrities eulogizing her on twitter than she ever would have approved of or dreamed of or written about. Real Housewives are tweeting RIP Maya Angelou, Countess Luann, Ramona Singer, Lisa Rinna weighed in sharing one of her favorite quotes. I also want to remind you, because we should never forget, that Maya Angelou, according to her Wikipedia page and a couple of books because I sourced it, this was the episode with Amy Schumer and Jackie Collins HWYWikians please cross-reference this, maybe with transcripts. I love that that website.

I think it was the episode with Schumer and Collins wherein we discovered how Maya Angelou writes. To give you a refresher this is how Maya Angelou writes, Season 1 Writers Room-Billy on the Street when researching Maya Angelou- Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same writing ritual for many years. She would wake up early in the morning and check into a hotel room, by the way there’s already a disparity there because hotels don’t let you check into until after dinner, but maybe it was different for Dr. Angelou. She’d wake up and check into a hotel room where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed with only a bottle of sherry and a deck of cards to play solitaire, a Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible and would leave by the early afternoon. She would average 10-12 pages of written material a day which she would edit down to 3-4 pages in the evening. Angelou went through this process to “enchant herself” and as she said in a 1989 interview to “relive the agony, the anguish, the sturm und drang.” She placed herself in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird. Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to that place o enchantment and in order to access her memories more effectively. She stated, “It may take an hour to get into it but once I’m in it, Ha! It’s so delicious.” She did not find the process cathartic but rather she found relief in telling the truth.

I also want to mention that she wore a scarf tied around her head tightly so that the ideas would not seep out. She will be missed. I also respect anyone who drinks a bottle of sherry before noon. Salud to her. We should all be so lucky to have effective Ramona Singer in our lives and in our deaths.

As far as RHW is concerned, I know I am not writing recaps right now but I will say that this season’s RHNYC is fabulous, what a show! What a show. What a pulsing pile of human garbage. It’s an organic mass; it’s the real life dong room. What a smart girl they found in this Kristen character. What a charming husband she found. What a catch. I don’t know if it is because it’s New York that it is so phenomenal compared to the rest of the franchise. It might be like that thing whenever I see a page full of photos in a fashion magazine where people were out this week at the opening of this movie or this premier my eye always goes to the red head in the photos and I have decided a couple of things. One is plain old narcissism the other has to do with your earliest ideas of what beauty could be which are rooted in narcissism and in the investment in your genetic possibilities. Which is to say when I was a little girl I thought the two most beautiful women in the world were Tina Louise on Gilligan’s Island and Kate Pierson. I believe it was my lizard brain saying I can make red-headed children as pretty as these red headed children if I continue to propagate the species.

That brings me to the fact that I found a women in the pages of Purple magazine and I googled her and her name is Kiera Lillie, I’m not quite sure what she does. She had a website but I don’t understand it because it is very fashiony, she does photography, fashion? No one knows but she is very attractive. I am not going to Single White Female her. But I might I might Hand that Rocks the Cradle her.

Mayor De Blasio is trying to lift the ban on ferrets as pets in NYC. Why is this important? A couple of reasons: 1) Mayor DeBlasio is still just getting started so he hasn’t done as much as another mayor, like Giuliani, he’s a fascist then you’d move on. He doesn’t have a signature thing yet except that he has an explosively beautiful family. DeBlasio who has big earlobes said recently that he thinks it is unfair for New Yorkers to be prohibited from owning weasels as pets. I want to mention that ferrets are weasel. What is a weasel? It’s an important question. I am beginning to believe it is subjective. Possums are weasels. Ferrets are weasels. People on Twitter were arguing with me that chipmunks are not weasels, I believe they are. I believe that Alvin and the Chipmunks would be a funny show if you realized it’s about a guy that lives with 3 weasels and only yells at one of them. I think the difference between weasels and rodents is a zoology question that’s not a Julie question. Ferrets are definitely weasels and I don’t want to encourage the right-wing people, nor stir up any hubbub around this and make it into a controversy but I encourage you to think about whether or not you are comfortable with a world in which your neighbor could have a weasel and if you are not drop DeBlasio a line.

I don’t have anything against ferrets because no one has ever made me touch one. I have seen weirdos hold them in ways that demonstrate their bendiness; it has never made me comfortable. I obviously have heard stories about them ripping off people’s faces and I saw one episode of Doctor 90210 on the E Entertainment Channel where a young woman was meeting with the doctor because a ferret weasel had harmed her face. She ended up as pretty as a picture that was a nice story.

Meanwhile no one is talking about Hero Cat anymore which I think is disgusting. They put her out on the baseball field and then what? Did they finally let her go home and take a nap? I fucking hope so. I fucking hope so.

Guys as I speak to you right now we have a scant amount of tickets left for HWYW Live. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Come to the show please, for god’s sakes. It’s Sunday night. It’s a homecoming. We haven’t done one of these in 6-7 months. Ted Leo, Chris Spooner, Hotlips Houlihan, and I will be on stage. So will Jake Fogelnest, Danielle Henderson, Nellie Mackay and it will be a family god damn reunion! Are you not going to go to your family reunion? If I didn’t go home on Passover do you know what would happen to me? Nothing good. Nothing good so go to the BellHouse.com for that.

Are squirrels weasels? They can be, not Gary. I have seen a couple in Tompkins Square Park that are definitely weasel adjacent.

We wrapped Difficult People on Friday which was fabulous. So fun. Guys, I strongly recommend that you shoot, star in, and write a TV show, even if it is only for a week. It is like rock star camp. Isn’t there some way they can give adults the opportunity to do that? Holy Shit if I never do anything that cool for the rest of my life will I be disappointed? Disappointed isn’t even close to the disparity between ambition and reality that I have going for me in therapy alone. Whatever happens I will say that I had the time of my life. God was that fun, so much fun, that’s over for now.

Big Ang went to Linda Simpson’s bingo last week. I thought I saw Big Ang on the train because I have Big Ang on the brain. It wasn’t Big Ang and I am glad I didn’t go up to her and say oh my god it is Big Ang. That is a great way to completely ruin a humans’ day.

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