This Filthy World! and something really disgusting…

Watching the last bits of John Waters’ wonderful monologue entitled John Waters: This Filthy World made me soooo happy…I hope he gets to make the film MangerMania! He seems like a happy person…said he loves the description the Japan Times gave Pecker, his delightful flick about the art world, pubic hair, shoplifting, young love, and a talking Virgin Mary: “a Disney film for perverts.” Seriously…i didn’t think it was like that at all, but loved the film, and its efforts to encourage young people to vote, LOL… was hoping he’d mention the enthralling Harry Dodge / Harriet Dodge, who played a lovely filmic revolutionary in Cecil B. Demented as well as one of my favoritest characters in ALL OF CINEMA: Valentine in By Hook or By Crook–but perhaps he’d done so earlier. Still, was glad I learned he has a TV show on HERE!, John Waters Presents Movies that Will Corrupt You. One thing that he mentioned, however, caused me to look up something reeeeeally disgusting online. When Mr. Waters mentioned “reborn babies” I went right to Google, having seen one of the hideous products of these sick “artists” at my day job. I even gave my colleagues’ little monster, Baby Josh, a tattoo, and used some of my nicest white shimmery eye shadow to make it look like he’d been snorting something white and a little sparklescent. Sure enough, these things are truly scary. Imagine how scary the people who make them must be. And, at least at a site called Destiny Dolls or something equally putrescing, they can’t spell. On a website selling their frightening spawn, they can’t even bother to spell correctly.

A friend of sorts at work told me today of someone who, he felt, “wouldn’t like [my] comics at all.” Now, I have a lot of problems with much of the work I put out there in the past and would someday like to put out more and better and truer and realer comics. But just hatin’ on ’em?! That would be the type of person, I suggested, who would like to drown kittens. My friend irritated me by disagreeing bluntly that someone “with a different worldview from my own” would hate my work. Let’s see, even if my art were brutally reduced in the most insulting and trivializing manner possible to simply propaganda for some “worldview,” that worldview would propose that women are people…that a generation of gay men decimated by AIDS was a bad thing…that knowledge and investigation and education and joy go better with sex than shame and rejection and closed minds…that children are to be loved, encouraged, taught, and listened to with respect… My friend wouldn’t tell me what a different worldview from that could look like, other than a misogynistic, homophobic, sexually puritanical, pro-child-abuse kitten-drowner. This hurt my feelings surprisingly and so I went to look at some dinosaur statues nearby at the Academy of Natural History at lunch. They looked so birdlike, I found it heartening: a reminder that theories come and theories go.

But a sense of humor, including the ability to at least peek over the walls of one’s ego, can help in any era a time traveler might visit.

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