MostBest Stereogum Link EVAH

Holy hot fuck! SO FUCKING GENIUS! It's "Now That's What I Call Indie Covers" and it's totally awesome -- Top 40 songs as covered by yer faverave Indie Rockers! I enthused most heartily about Ted Leo's "Since U Been Gone/Maps" joint a few months ago, but, dude, rock the fuck out of these tracks. And if The Mountain Goats' version of Ace of Bass's "The Sign" doesn't thrill you, then you have a heart of stone. And I no longer want to be your friend. (Or, it's entirely possible that you don't like The Mountain Goats, but then you're just silly and/or possibly uninformed).

We Somehow Always Knew It Would Come To This

bonaduceslates, originally uploaded by starbexxx.

Dig -- I took screengrabs of the awesome piece on 'Breaking Bonaduce' that ran on Entertainment Tonight last night.

Backstory: ET came to our shoot at the Bonaduce house to interview Danny and Gretchen and to get coverage of our promo/open shoot. In essence: they shot us shooting the Bonaduces. And, check it on out, our slates were in the segment. If you look closely, you'll see two names in the Director slot: Delbourgo/Schwartz. The Schwartz part is me, and the Delbourgo part is Phil. Phil was the first person to hire me when I was a sassy punk straight outta Wesleyan -- I was his assistant back in the day, a million lifetimes ago. And now we're co-directing Danny Bonaduce.

(Insert shot of David Byrne in "Stop Making Sense" wearing a giant white suit and marking the progress of time against his forearm: same as it ever was, same as it ever was).

August 2nd: Chicks and Giggles

Hell's motherforking yeah, boyeee -- I'm rockin' Chicks and Giggles

Dig it, you sugar-smacks-loving Frog: Funny ha-ha by me and other funny chicks August 2nd.

Deets: (per their website)
Tuesday, August 2
8:30 pm
RAGA
433 East 6th Street (1st/A)
FREE!

Featuring Fantastic Funnies from:

Vicky Bond (Brooklyn Comedy Co.)
Nikki Chawla (New York Comedy Club)
Claudia Cogan (Becky and Claudia's Supreme Offering)
Emily Epstein (Laugh Lounge)
Correne Kristiansen (Saturday Night Live)
Rachael Parenta ($1 Room)

And, back from her stint with the red-headed Partridge... Bex Schwartz! (VH1)

Carolyn Castiglia is hostin' it up per usual!

Lawry's and the Cart of Death

Okay. First story of the LA stint.
So, right before I left work on Monday, I went to the bank to deposit a check. Put the money in the honey and all was good, until I realized that I needed to mac out some more cash for my week in LA. But, when I re-entered my PIN, my brain went all weird and I entered the wrong number. And proceeded to re-enter the wrong number five times. So they put my account on hold. I call the bank (which SUCKS, and, not to be libelous, we shall henceforth refer to as B.o.A or "Bank of Ass") and they say, "We'll send you a PIN reminder." And I say, "I'm going to be in LA for a week, can you send it to my hotel?" And they say no, they can only send your PIN to you actual address, and I say, "well, I'm going to need some cash," and they say, "just go to a branch and give them your card and they'll let you take money out with a withdrawal slip."

So we get up at the crack of dawn and fly to LA, and once we land in LAX we have to wait in line for an hour at Hertz and we finally get our car and we're cranky and ravenously hungry and we start driving to Santa Monica, which is where the MTV offices are. And just as we're leaving the airport, I spot a branch of B.o.A. and we pull over and I duck inside to get some moolah. Except that when I get to the teller and give her my card and my info, she informs me that all my accounts have been closed out and that I'm showing a zero-dollar balance. So I freak out, and I'm like, "there are THOUSANDS of dollars in that account, what do you mean I have no money, where did my money go, AAAAAARGH?" and she directs me over to the ATM machine where there's a little white non-courtesy phone and it takes 25 minutes to get to a real person who finally informs me that no, my accounts have not disappeared but that since I opened my account in Jersey, California can't access it. The real person tells me to go to a diffferent branch, so I dry my tears and we decide to go to the office and I'll do the bank errand the next day.

So we get to our officespace and we're still cranky and ravenous and even more exhausted and I'm all tearstained and we start prepping for all the pre-production stuff we need to accomplish. And, conicidentally, a hunk of our vee-peers from NYC were also out in LA LA land, prepping to shoot Gene Simmons for another new show. Yes, that Gene Simmons (ROCK!). And so it was decided that we'd all eat dinner together. And thusly, it was also decided that we would eat at Lawry's.

LAWRY'S IS A STEAKHOUSE AND I AM A VERY, VERY, VERY LONGTERM VEGEMATARIAN!

But apparently everyone forgot about that.

So we check-in to our hotel and splash some water on our faces and then we drive back out to West Hollywood and head into Lawry's, which looks, for all the world, like a combination of Medieval Times and a cheezy place where your parents might have gotten married 40 years ago. There was an anteroom where they were serving happy-hour-esque hors d'oeuvres -- swedish meatballs and potato chips. So we headed to the bar to wait for the rest of the gang. Lawry's has a no-seating-until-your-whole-party-has-arrived policy, and the 8th member of our party didn't arrive until 9:30 PST. Which was 12:30 EST in our brains, and we'd been up since the crack of dawn.

So. Between the incredibly homoerotic Medieval-esque mural covering the back wall, and the waitresses dressed in brown polyester tunics with little white napkin hats, I was already halfway between the Twilight Zone and utter hysteria. And the waitress (whose nametag read "Miss Dolce") passed out the menus and we realized that they. only. served. steak. (and a fish dish, but that don't help me none). And we were still ravenous, so we asked if we could just order, and Miss Dolce insisted we first had to tell her what kind of potatoes each one of us preferred (baked or mashed). And then she went away for a while and we got hungrier and tipsier. And then she finally came back, and still wasn't taking orders, and I was like, "I don't meat. Or poultry. Or fish. Can you do anything?" and she said they had a vegetable plate, and I asked if she could check to make sure it wasn't cooked where they cooked the meat and she said it wasn't, so I ordered that.

And then, suddenly, the cart of death arrived.

The cart of death was a large, silver rolltop thing on wheels that contained, I shit you not, an entire cow. As I fled to the lobby to text my boyfriend, "HELP, THEY ARE CARVING A COW IN FRONT OF ME," a man wearing a bloodstained apron and a chef's hat proceeded to slice large chunks of flesh off of the cow and place them on plates for my dining partners. I kept peeking around the lobby to see if the man was done with his butchering, which took forever (I guess everyone selected different cuts of cow) and finally I came back to the table. And promptly lost my appetite. Because my colleagues were slicing cow off the cowbone and their meats were swimming in pools of blood. I moved the food around my plate a few times and generally tried to stare at the homoerotic medieval mural, so as to avoid booting up whatever was left in my tummy.

(My friends eat meat in front of me all the time, but it's always chicken in pad thai, or a hamburger, or chunks of pork or something. I rarely, rarely, see contextualized meat -- and contextualized meat, eg, this-is-flesh-on-a-bone-and-i-am-made-of-flesh-on-a-bone, is why I went veg in the first place -- and that's why it freaked me out oh so much).

So that was my first night in LA.

And yes, it's the same Lawry's as the seasoned salt and pepper (which were on our table, and which I would have used had I been capable of eating).

Moo.

Standing Outside Casa Bonaduce

bexinLA, originally uploaded by starbexxx.

Oh man. This is me, nearing the end of the Bonaduce shoot. I had just finished interrogating Danny and Gretchen -- hardcore! Don't I look ti-ti-tired? I'm very ti-ti-tired in this photo. The on-set medic took this photo. He kept offering me hits of oxygen. How very LA!

Bonadooching It Up!

Heidy ho, tigers, I'm still in LA! We shot the most awesome stuff ever for the open and promo campaign for "Breaking Bonaduce" (premiering Sunday, September 11th!) and I must say: I am the biggest fan of Danny and Gretchen Bonaduce ever. They were so super rad and wonderful and open and honest and frank and generous and I just think they're the bees knees. And also the cats' pyjamas. More than one cat, that's how awesome they are.

And I have sooooo many stories about the week-in-LA thus far, but let me start with this one, and it's something I never thought I would tell you, but I might be on the tonight show with Jay Leno tonight or some night soon because we were driving to Ashton Kutcher's suckfest restaurant Dolce (aka La Dolce Suckfest) last night and hit a light right where Leno was taping some stand up on the street and we hollered at him our our car window. And he hollered back, and, although we ain't no hollaback girls, we had quite the hollering exchange of niceness. Even though I claimed that I hated Jay Leno, that is mosdef NOT what I shouted at him. Sigh.It's not my best moment, to be sure, but we were chock full of post-wrap adrenaline and it seemed like the thing to do at the time. For reals. Sigh.

I will soon regale you with tales of La Dolce Suckfest as well as tales of Lawry's Steakhouse and Creamy Mouth Feel and Danny Bonaduce's Bologna-Covered Dog and "Is Anyone at this table named Morrissey?" and various other stories of kickawesomeness.

Dance, Little John, Dance

Dance, Little John, Dance, originally uploaded by starbexxx.

When your daddy's an anti-abortion schmuck who just might be the next appointed-for-life Supreme Court justice, what should you do?

The "I'm a Little Teapot" dance, surely.

And let's, for the love of all things sacred, hope that he did the double-handled, "wait a second, I'm not a teapot, I'm a sugar bowl" version.

Special thanks to my fave MSNBC friend Susan for the hot link.

Everyone, Beam "Right to Choose" Thoughts Towards Washington

right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, right to choose, you fucker.

(... and I choose NO to the idea of Justice Roberts.)

Why Berkeley Breathed Continues to be the Most Best

Diggity dig dig!

I am officially AWESOME

Hot diggity damn, and thanks to my anonymous tipster: I'm wiki'ed as a hipster. Oh, sweet Bwana Dik, this is the loveliest piece of infoporn ever.

Yeah, look "hipster" up in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and there I am, right alongside Christina Ricci and someone named Seth.

Thanks for the tipster, hipster-tipster!

Once More, Soldiers, Into the Brink

I'm off to LA to spend a week out there working on good ol' "Breaking Bonaduce." Woo. I thought of maybe wearing my David Cassidy shirt when I meet him, but I think that would be asking for it. Still, I packed it anyway.

We saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tonight and I lurfed it, particularly the honest-to-goodness Roald Dahl oompa loompa poems, particularly the polyphonic-spree esque choral number they sing to Veruca. Kickawesome. The only thing is, I think Dahl wrote them as tribal chants and the words aren't necessarily written to be performed lyrically and melodically, but, heck, it's Danny Elfman, so hey. Anyhoo. Awesome movie; I take back what I said on MSNBC about not caring about anything in the theaters -- this one rocks.

(Although I saw War of the Worlds last Friday and it didn't rock -- Spielberg shoots a fine action sequence, and he builds suspense masterfully, but for me, if the world is under attack by giant alien tripod biomechanic things, I'm more interested in watching someone more exciting than a deadbeat dad and his two kids. Show me world leaders or key religious figures or anyone about whom I might care -- Dakota Fanning's all cute 'n' shit, but I just don't care about her cute little fate when the entire world is seemingly doomed. I don't recally anything in the book about a dockworker dude, but, hey, at least they still lived in New Jersey).

Also, haven't you always wanted to know how the Canticle bit of Scarborough Fair/Canticle goes? (or "Parsley Sagels," as one might call it). It's quite pertinent nowadays, as it was when Simon and Garfunkel inserted it into their song. And it goes like this:

On the side of a hill, in the deep forest green
Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground
Blankets and bedclothes, the child of the mountain
Sleeps unaware of the clarion call.
On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves
Washed is the ground with so many tears
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun.
War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions
Generals order their soldiers to kill
And to fight for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten.

Those Yellow Rubber Bands

So, I've been thinking a lot about those "livestrong" wristbands recently. They kinda blow my mind. I'm trying to think of another phenomenon that's become so very widespread and so very ripped off. EVERYBODY was wearing those things last summer -- it was a trend that cut across demographic, socioeconomic status, race, creed, personality archetype, EVERYTHING. from the five year old kid on the subway to then-Prexy-candidate Kerry, everyone was rocking that thing. And then every other cause decided to join in -- there are pink ones for breast cancer and red ones for AIDS and (my very fave) a lime green one for lyme disease. Dig this list! It's crazy! There's a rubber bracelet for everything! And some colors have more than one cause! If you're wearing a burgundy bracelet, you might be supporting women who've had C-sections, or you might be supporting headache-sufferers. Or maybe multiple myeloma. Or hospice care. And that green one I like so much? It might mean you're supporting people who are coping with Childhood Depression, Kidney Transplantees (or -ers), Depression, Lyme Disease, the Environment, Genocide in Darfur, Mental Retardation, Organ Donation, Tissue Donation, Worker Safety, Lymphoma, or Kidney Cancer.

And before the livestrong jammies, no one wore those rubberband bracelets. The closest I ever came was finding a really fat rubber band once and wrapping it around my hand to form two claws, and then I pretended I was a lobster.

So all's I'm saying is that the all-pervasiveness of the rubber-bracelet trend blows my mind. We went from nobody-wearing-rubber-bracelets to everyone-wearing-yellow-rubber-bracelets to every-cause-gets-a-bracelet in very little time. Can anyone else think of a trend that not only took over the nation but has also been spun-off in so many ways?

Speaking of livestrong, I met the lovely Linda Armstrong Kelly yesterday in the greenroom at MSNBC. She was there to talk about the new livestrong laptop -- when one purchases it, $50 of your purchase goes to cancer research (AWESOME!). She was wearing all sorts of yellow accents -- two livestrong bracelets, a big puffy flower in the same shade of yellow, yellow hairthingie. Very cool and very committed and very proud of her son and the movement he's started. So very inspiring. Not just the whole winning-the-bike-race and beating-cancer thing ... the starting a trend that spreads like motherforking wildfire.

Launching Memes

I'm quite taken with the story of the word "spoffle" - (courtesy of Popbitch)
"Many moons ago, when Hugh Laurie and Sir Stephen of Fry were just becoming 'known', they were interviewed on a BBC radio show. Mr Fry asked what the foam covers on the end of the mics were called. To which Mr Laurie said, "They're called 'Spoffles' and they prevent what's known as 'Popping'". Mr Fry, the Host and the Engineer were all impressed by Mr Laurie's knowledge and the interview continued.

Years passed, and once again Fry and Laurie were in a radio studio. The Engineer said something like he'll just adjust the Spoffle. Mr Laurie says, "The what?" And the Engineer explains that this is what the foam things are called. "Good Lord," laughs Mr Laurie, "I made that word up on the spot years ago in a studio!"

And someday, friends, I hope you're all using the word (censored because I'm nice, but stick around because someday the word i wanted to use will reappear). My niceness is really bonadooching my humorjokes.

Still More Fantrom

Still More Fantrom, originally uploaded by starbexxx.

This girl is:
a) magically fighting gravity and riding a bike at a 45 degree angle
b) falling off a bike
c) a wonderful example of fantrom

(photo by Jed Teres)
I hope that whenever anyone googles "girl falling off bike" they will get to this page. Don't fall, girl, don't fall! Or else you might fall down go boom and skin your knees and get an owie.

Yay, 12 Emmy Nods for "Lost!"

And a supporting-actor nom each for Naveen Andrews and Terry O'Quinn! Woo!

But, alas, where's the love for my very very very very beloved Battlestar Galactica? (holy holy holy shit, new season starts TOMORROW!)

Syllogisms and Other Nuggets of Ick

So, I was watching the news at the gym the other day, and, I swear, Scott McLellan was speaking in syllogisms. His logic was something to the effect of "President Bush wouldn't surround himself with bad people, and he surrounds himself with Karl Rove, so clearly Karl Rove is not a bad person."

For anyone living in a cave: Karl Rove is a bad, bad person.

Also for anyone living in a cave: they're just shadows, you should really unchain yourself from the bench and go outside and look at the pretty flowers. Then you can be a Philosopher King!

And, for you cavedwellers, seeing as Bush pledged to fire the person who leaked Valerie Plame's cover, and seeing as Karl Rove was that person, it stands to reason that Bush needs to fire Karl Rove.

Who Made This Robot?

This new helpmate robot is the coolest mofo thing ever! It's like a helper monkey but it's a robot!!!!

Also, in the world of really cool things, Dig: it's a geographically correct subway map! I always knew the L wasn't really cutting a straight trajectory across Brooklyn. Ha!

Media Alert! I'm Rocking MSNBC Today at 5pm!

Yes indeedy, tigers, I'm doing "Connected" on MSNBC today at 5. Live at 5, for reals not farina! Can I slip another "sexmusk" on to the t-vision? I think we're talking about the John McCain "controversy," Trump's plans for the next season of the apprentice, and the theory that Hollywood is slumping because "Republicans don't go see movies made by the liberal Democratic media" (BWA HA HA HA!). Talking points TBD this afternoon, I reckon.

And, for the record, to those mark-ass-bustas who wrote in last time to chastize me for wasting their valuable time by talking about TomKat on the news, here's how it works: MSNBC calls me, yo, and asks me to talk about shit. It's not like I'm waking up at the crack of dawn each morning and pitching stories to the news. The people who do that are called "publicists" or "press agents" or "flacks". And they often have good hair and uncomfortable shoes.

Quote O' The Day

So I'm screening some rough cuts of I Love the 80s 3D and following along with the scripts ... just the day job, you know, same ol' same ol'... And, see, every so often on Planet Bex something tickles my fancy (in a nondirty way) and I start laughing uproariously until my mascara and glitter stream down my face in rivulets of ex-glam. Like when I was obsessed with the singing bush from "Three Amigos," singing "Jimmy Crack Corn," or like when I came up with this brilliant joke: what do you get when you cross Kafka and Snow White? A Metamorphosis / Get-a-Dwarf-to-Kiss (it rhymes!) (and, back off, I was 10).

Anyhoo, so I'm leafing through these transcripts and I came across this gem during the "Short Circuit" segment in "I love 1986."

S/U (sound up): JOHNNY 5 flipping through encyclopedia and making this noise: "awlalalalazezealwalalawala ahhhhhhhh. More input, Stephanie, more!"

Steph: "There isn't any more, you read everything in the house!"

And for some reason, that transcription of the noise he's making struck me as the very fucking funniest thing EVER of all time EVER EVER EVER.

Awlalalalazezealwalalawala !

Gay Penguins! Gay Penguins!

Hi-diddly-ho, tigers. I'm done with the Logo launch and I'm back working for the vee. (Current projects: the launch of "Breaking Bonaduce" and the upcoming "I Love the 80s 3D"). But I wanted to share a little sumpin' sumpin' from the land of Logo. Now: disclaimer: this spot is the property of Logo and I probably shouldn't be sharing it but I'm so proud of it, so if you like it, you have to go watch Logo.

I wrote the story a long time ago, and then we hired Arnie Levin, world-famous cartoonist for the New Yorker, to do the illustration. The very incredibly double-plus awesome Elise Malmberg and Joe Gore ofClubbo did the music. And I'm the voice of the penguins. Teehee. Ackackack meh meh.

And the final result? A lovely tale about Gay Penguins and the Beer-Bellied Man.

This Beach is Soooo Gryzk

Gryzk, originally uploaded by starbexxx.

A few weeks ago, the boyf and I went to see his friend Matt Mulhern (the Lt. from Major Dad! AWWWWWWESOME!) in a Horton Foote play that was part of the EST's Marathon of one-act plays. Matt was totally awesome, and the play in which he starred was wonderful as well.

But before we got to see Matt's play, we had to suffer through a piece of dreck called "Gryzk." It's apparently part of the playwright's "Beach" series and it takes place, appropriately enough, on a beach. There's this rich woman with a horribly oit of date "wealthy" accent and her neighbor tells her that this couple, Mr. amd Mrs. Gryzk, were brutally murdered the night before. The rich woman apparently knew the Gryzks because she sold them her house, and as the play unfolds the rich woman reveals that she's waiting for her teenage son to come join her for cocktails, and then the ghost of Mr. Gryzk appears and starts shrieking about crucifixes, and the rich woman gets drunk on daiquiris, and then the ghost of Mrs. Gryzk shows up in a wedding dress, and there's a lot of stupid lighting cues and some really atrocious dialogue and then, ohmystars, the teenage son never shows up and he was crazy and an alcoholic (just like his mom!) and he brutally murdered Mr. and Mrs. Gryzk. The play was so bad that the boyf started doing that hold-in-your-laughter silent shaking thing and almost vomitted. And then, right before Matt's play was about to start, the actor playing Gryzk sat right in front of us and I started silent-laughing so hard (GRYYYYYYZK!) I like unto wet myself.

Anyhoo, since then, "Gryzk" has come to mean both anything that sucks and also anything that is faintly reminscent of the stupid, wannabe pretentious world of the play of Gryzk. And so. Just for a lark, during our layover before returning from vacation, we visited one of Nassau's casino/hotel complexes. And found this totally Gryzk scene. And the boyf snapped a photo, just so we could revel in the Gryzkness of it all. This beach is soooo Gryzk.

Shaving the Pussies and Other Weekend Details

Yes, it's true, folks, we shaved our pussies this weekend. One of them was relatively well-behaved and the other one cried bloody murder and we barely got any hair off. See, this new apartment we live in, it's kinda dusty. And when you add kitty fur to an already-dusty environment, it gets a little tough. Klaus is our bigger kittie, and he's a Russian Blue who sheds grey fur all over the couch -- to the extent that you can take a lint brush to the couch and roll off enough fur to make a little ball of hair that looks an awful lot like a rat. And the other kitty is Peter, and he's black and white and he gets hair all over the places that Klaus hasn't already covered. So my roomie decided we should shave them.

When I was younger, my fambly had a kitty named Ollie, who was the best cat ever, and he was really fat and he didn’t necessarily groom himself very well and he got mats in his hair and the vet shaved his back, the part above his tail, and he was fine (except he was soooo ashamed) so we figured that it would be fine to shave our cats, just a buzz cut really, and we’d do both of them so they wouldn’t be sooooo ashamed. My roomie has clippers that he uses to trim his hair, so we decided we’d use a longer-hair attachment and just sort of trim the cats. We got Klaus into the bathtub and it went okay – we trimmed most of his longer hair. He didn’t like being restrained in the tub, but he was okay with the buzzer. But Peter FREAKED out. He didn’t like the noise of the trimmer and his hair is a lot finer and we couldn’t really sheer him at all and he howled and made pitiful mews so let him go.

I heard the best explanation for being anti the new wave of Boho fashion. Everytime I go shopping, I see all these long hippie skirts and peasant blouses and all sorts of ruffly, frilly light things. And I just can’t buy ‘em. I was talking to a friend on Saturday night, and she, too, was a hippie-chick in high school. And she said, in re: these skirts that are everywhere: “I can’t add anything to my warbdrobe that I’ve already thrown out.” And I was like, THAT’s IT! I wore all these clothes in high school and I don’t wear ‘em anymore and that’s why I will not buy them again.

My brain feels better, knowing that.

And I feel happy in general. Just like good ol’ Dr. Lao says: ‘I’m alive and being alive is fantastic!”

Ah, Brasil... A country seemingly run by 12-year old boys

For evidence, I direct you here and here.

Watch out, Ladies: The American Storm Descends

Look -- after the dudes win "Strip Search," they'll be part of an elite male-entertainers' troupe called "American Storm".

It sounds vaguely militerrific, does it not? Like, it's the American version of Desert Storm?

My fave part of the website:Billed as America’s Hottest Male Revue, the company will treat audiences to a thrill-filled journey through America’s greatest moments.

Do you think they dress up like Pilgrims and Revolutionary War soldiers and Hippies and Yuppies?

That would rock. Fuck it, I'd go to Vegas to watch Pilgrims strip, yo.