Fatale Abstraction

This past weekend, the bizarre 1976 documentary Grey Gardens was on television, and I called my mother to tell her to turn on the telly, but she was already watching it, horrified.

The film starred mother and daughter (big Edie and little Edie) who were aunt and cousin to Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Both famed as great beauties in their youth, the 80-ish big Edie and 50-something little Edie had been cohabiting for about 25 years, since the ailing mother called her daughter home from a budding showbiz career to aid her in convalescence after surgery. Little Edie never left, because she was the only one who would (or could) care for her bat-shit manipulative mother.

Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie O, had sent these brother documentary film makers out to interview the Edies for a film they were going to make about Lee and Jackie, but that deal fell through. Then the brothers proposed the Edies were an intriguing subject for a film.

Bequeathed on Big Edie in 1923, the 28 room mansion, Grey Gardens, was noted as one of the most splendid garden estates on the East Coast at that time. By the time of the filming, it's pretty much kudzu world. The Edies live predominantly in a few rooms upstairs along with a clan of 6 toed cats. At one point, Big Edie says "Look, that cat is going to the bathroom on my portrait. Well, at least someone is doing what they want to do."

The ladies cook on a hotplate and keep cold food in a mini-fridge near their piled-under twin beds. Supposedly, the place was so infested with fleas that the film makers wore cat flea collars on each ankle during filming.

My favorite part is when the camera follows little Edie up the darkened staircase into the attic, and through a window milky with dirt we see a raccoon peering into the darkness expectantly. Edie says all these different animals live up here, opossum, raccoons, etc. Next thing you see is her upending a sack of white bread and then opening and dumping a box of cat chow out on the floor for the varmints. On the attic floor - she's feeding the rodents - amazing!

Anyway, I think I'm going to sell some crap on ebay and maybe, just maybe, like, ya know, clean up. Sheesh.

But I'm keeping my barf bags, dammit.

Interesting news from monday - this totally got my attention - Naked man arrested on concealed weapons charge. Impressive. He'd recently been paroled and was found naked lying on a tree stump masturbating and was going to be arrested for indecent exposure. However, when asked by the arresting officer if there was anything he should know, they guy told him he had a weapon secreted in an intimate area of his person. Turned out, he had a an awl wrapped in electrical tape in his rectum.

Wrecked 'im? It liketa killed him. ba-dum chhhh!

I digress. Anyway. On to the more important issue of the day: it will be exciting to see how things pan out today with the US elections. Sadly, one could not honestly say that this has been the most contentious or ugly campaign in living memory - this seems merely par for the course (or should that be coarse?) and it's quite wearing, actually. If we held our elected officials accountable, we wouldn't have such a high rate of recidivism - er, make that career politicians.

And one thing further about polls and the media: there is this huge turning in the polls in just the past 5 days which rings false to me. I haven't changed my mind one whit about whom I will vote for, and I don't believe other people have, either. I'm thinking the pollsters want to shape public perception and provoke a reaction that will get out the vote, and I think that is a prime example of the cart pulling the horse. If this election, like the last major one, has greatly disparate results from what the polls have been saying, then I think the way public sentiment is "measured" pre-election should be scrutinized and scrapped, or overhauled at the very least. That's my two cents.