Reflections while watching a DVD: A Tulane Chris Production

First of all, why I hate Memphis. EVERYTHING, except granted good ribs.

- You have to drive through SO MUCH MISSISSIPPI to get there from New Orleans.

- I have never been so lost in my entire life. We went to the airport twice trying to get back to the hotel.

- Black people at Kroger. I didn’t mind them at all. What I minded was Giant Camel giggling like a loon, poking me in the ribs every thirty seconds, and saying, “Chris. You’re the only white person here. Chris. Look. Look at your arm. Now look at anyone else in the store. You’re the only white person here.” HE TELLS THIS STORY. As an anecdote. As though it had a plotline.

- Graceland, oh my God. I was told you could just go in and look at the grounds and the grave, without taking the mansion tour. WRONG. You have to wait in a line of about 200 people to pay $40 to take a bus across the street, and you must stay with the group. I hate staying with the Goddamn group. Graceland was the point of going through Memphis instead of Atlanta and was just a total wash.

- The worst men’s room ever. On our way out, we stopped at a gas station for a standard road trip drink-and-pee. There was a metal plate protecting the lock ON THE GATE, and it took about three minutes to contort everything to open the GATE to get to the men’s room. It was so filthy. The water in the urinal was black, and the less said about the commode, the better. I used the drain in the floor.

Second, I had no idea I had so many feelings about DVDs/movies/Netflix until I started planning this post.

Reflections while watching a DVD: A Tulane Chris Production

• Netflix knows I’m gay. I had a conversation about this months ago with Ex-Co-Bloggeuse Eddie, and it’s only gotten worse. Netflix is cannier than a thrice-divorced aunt, and they can peg you for a homo from fifty yards. They start out casual and low-pressure. “Chris, based on your taste preferences, we think you’d enjoy The Golden Girls: Season 5.” Well, DUH. Add The Golden Girls, and then “Chris, based on your preferences, we think you’d like Ellen: Season 4.” Okay, great. And then “Based on your apparent homoseuxality, we think you’d like Brazilian Boy-Toys Number 6: A Lot Of Hispanic Guys Going At Each Other.” And… granted, but I don’t like Netflix being that perceptive. And for all their sneakiness, they have the sensitivity and aesthetics of a mai tai-drunk fag hag on the prowl. Their recommendations quickly take on the same shrill tone as “Do you want to go shopping? It’ll be FABULOUS!” Netflix has recommended to me about seventeen hundred “light-hearted” gay romantic “comedies” with this plot: Nice guy wants more than just sex. BUT HOW DO YOU FIND THAT in the WACKY GAY SUBCULTURE of [New York or Los Angeles]? Gym rats playing out Protestant morality plays in the Western world’s two least livable cities sounds like a pitch for a satire, but isn’t.

• Since Netflix knows all and sees all, who do I think I’m kidding? I have a short attention span and an infantile sense of humor. I like to watch goofball sitcoms and movies that follow this rubric: (Zombies/giant insects/an unseen evil) attack (townsfolk/villagers) while creating a terrible mess. As intelligent and urbane as I like to pretend I am, I don’t have the attention span for examinations of the human spirit. Viscera, sure; spirit takes too long. Yet I still add all these Herzegovinan historical epics to my queue so I’ll seem “worldly,” and then one of two things happens: I either keep bumping up Designing Women to avoid them, or I forget and actually get Mishtenka, billed as “a Communist Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” I proceed to put it on while I wash dishes, send it back, and claim to have seen it.

• Widescreen? Really? Widescreen itself doesn’t bother me, but people who insist on it do. Granted, I’m a bigger Philistine than Goliath, but I refuse to believe it makes any difference. I lump these people in with other people I believe are lying: people who claim to like Jackson Pollock, people who claim not to like pornography, and people who claim that they like to drive stick shifts.

• Das Boot, my most recent “Oops I meant to get Ghostbusters,” is three and a half hours long. Fuck me. No movie needs to be that long. If someone tried to tell you a story that lasted three hours, you’d call the police and start reading the news on your phone, but if some German auteur with dots in his name does it, he gets called “subversive.” I also hate when cultural artifacts like TV shows or movies are called “subversive.” They never are. Cannibalism is subversive. Arson is subversive. Mass entertainment is the opposite of subversive. I don’t care how many jokes about Republicans are in it, if Disney, Viacom, or Exxon gets a penny from it, it’s not fucking subversive.

• The remote is the same color as the carpet, and the frustration this has caused has probably shaved a measurable amount of time off my life.

• DVD extras have gotten as out of hand as the Gosselins. Why does Soccer Dog need a Romanian language track? Cast bios for Night of the Living Dead? Who cares if “featured corpse” bought a Honda dealership? And, my favorite to hate, commentaries. I don’t care, I don’t care, and I don’t care. They never have the extra I want, which is a bloopers reel. Vivien Leigh calling Clark Gable a motherfucker. Adrien Brody just a little too drunk to make it through the scene. Robert Downey Jr. way too drunk to get through the scene. Bea Arthur punching a boom mike operator in the mouth. Jane Fonda falling into the mud. That’s an extra. Woody Allen trying to explain why his impotence led him to make boring movies? PASS.

• I think one of the clearest indicators that the world is in decline is the shift in the meaning of “piracy.” Circle the situation that is badass: Gold-hungry marauders in the pay of a queen blasting away the defenses of a Spanish settlement and looting it – OR – downloading Three Men and a Baby from BitTorrent. This makes me wonder what petty crime will be called “terrorism” in three hundred years. My money’s on prank calls.

In closing, this week’s “Sorr about the bag":

“When I was just a little girl

I asked my mother, ‘What will I be?’

‘Will I be pretty, or will I be rich?’

Here’s what she said to me:

‘Sorr about the bag.’”