Spittin' Wicked Randomness, Vol. XXXV

Soylent Verde by Ryan Graber, from this week's LA Weekly.

The Runaways movie was pretty fun. Not a great movie, but I would pick it over Ray or Ring of Fire in a heartbeat. Ebert ends his review with a little story:

Note: Many years ago, while I was standing at a luggage carousel at Heathrow Airport, I was approached by a friendly young woman. "I'm Joan Jett," she told me. "I liked 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.'"

Just sayin'.

Here's what I said way back when I couldn't figure out how to format pictures on Blogger:

What I find most interesting about this is that in 1970, the idea of an all-girl rock-n-roll band was pretty fuckin' radical. There were female vocal groups, but a group of girls not only singing but playing their own instruments was unheard of. I suppose there was The Shaggs, and maybe The Pleasure Seekers, but until The Runaways' first album some 6 years later, there were certainly no girl bands making the charts.

So I wonder whether BVD is responsible for the existence of all-girl bands. I wonder if, in the same way that scientists get inspired by reading scifi, or police began adopting Sherlock Holmes' detective techniques after reading Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, the idea of female rock bands came into existence as the result of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

The Runaways' manager, Kim Fowley, was a similar svengali to Malcolm McLaren, who claimed to have invented The Sex Pistols. I could see Fowley getting the idea to put together an all-girl rock band after seeing BVD--he seems like that kind of guy--but on their history page, the band claims to have been starting to form before they met Fowley, and I tend to side with the bands in these stories. Still, it's not hard to imagine a young Joan Jett, Sandy West and Kary Krome emerging from a theater after seeing BVD, all having experienced a mutual epiphany that they should start a band, much like The Byrds say happened after they saw A Hard Day's Night.

OK, that took it further than history will grant, but still, I think Ebert's story gives me license to do a little I-Called-It dance. The best review of the film, by the way, is Susie Bright's.

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Opening next month: a musical version of William Lindsey Gresham's pulp novel (the source of my all-time favorite film noir) Nightmare Alley! And hey, April is Film Noir time at the Egyptian! Woohoo!

WARNING: Some readers might be offended by the content of this blog entry, which contains a word that -- in English -- is anti-Semitic.

"I learned many things in the quiet of that room ... I learned that everything is or becomes its own opposite ... You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream ... I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship." - Cary Grant

File under Nerd Shit: Patton Oswalt vs. John Hodgeman in a SciFi Trivia Contest! Be humbled.

Lookee what I spied in Eagle Rock! After having seen the General Lee on the freeway years ago, now it's Roscoe P. Coltrane's car!