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Posts Tagged ‘tura satana’

So my friends constantly appear dismayed, not to mention disbelieving, that I am the last person in the free world who still goes to Blockbuster. I go for the entertainment and not all of it is on the shelves.

As you know I’m doing this mini bucket list of things to accomplish before Mad Men comes back to AMC next summer. The first thing on the list, which is in no order at all, is: #1 See a Russ Meyer film.

So the other day I went to Blockbuster (and found out that their really cool manager that I loved isn’t working there anymore) and asked them about Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! because I didn’t see it on the shelves.

The new manager, who I also love, said it’s not even in the system and that several people were suddenly asking about that particular movie. I told him the lead actress Tura Satana had just died and that’s probably why, etc.

Me: You guys don’t really carry exploitation films, do you.
Him: No. Corporate is really careful about that. They want this to be a family friendly kind of place.

I love Blockbuster. I do. When I first moved to Seattle after 9/11 the employees there literally supplied some of the only interesting conversation I got in my first few years here.

But family-friendly standards, seriously?

I may not be online much this weekend because I’m getting my family together to watch Antichrist, Deadgirl, Se7en, and Hostel, which feature genital mutilation, teenage necrophilia, horrifying Biblical perversity, and, among other things, an eyeball hanging out of a woman’s head.

I will be renting them all at the big BB.

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Don Draper writing his own bucket list -- it's all women's names

Writers are a slippery, distracted breed. That’s why we function best with deadlines. Writing is never perfect or “done” so we need an arbitrary drop-dead date. Very rarely does a deadline correspond to something in the real world.

I mean, I think last year one of my girl friends had to finish a novel and have it to her editor on Christmas Eve, which weirdly makes sense because then she got to enjoy the holidays without tearing her hair out over her book. But I assure you that kind of deadline was just a coincidence.

So I wanted to do like a bucket list (I hated that movie and only made it through part of it, by the way) but a short-term one that goes until the summer. To me a big event that I look forward to is the return of Mad Men, the best show in the history of television, so I thought I would have the items on my mini bucket list completed by the time that Mad Men returns. It usually premieres in July, so I was just looking to see if they had set a date yet and I came across some disturbing news from Variety.

It looks like they haven’t locked the show down yet. Is that right? I don’t speak Hollywood negotiation talk fluently, but it appears that some contracts have been extended and others haven’t? No!

Hopefully it will all work out. Anyway, the news that my favorite show may be in a precarious state completely distracted me from my bucket list (that I have to come up with a better name for, especially because it is milder than Things I Want To Do Before I Die).

The list may mostly be arts-related, but here are the first two:

1. See a Russ Meyer Film. I’m thinking Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! because it gets referenced so much and because I saw that the star of it, Tura Satana, died last week.

2. Read To Kill a Mockingbird. I was talking to some author friends on twitter and there were actually quite a few of us who haven’t read it. Totally disgraceful and embarrassing. It also gets referenced constantly. Just like there’s a band called Faster Pussycat, there is one called The Boo Radleys–named for a character in the book, not that I’d know since I haven’t read it.

3. I should also probably reluctantly put The Matrix on my list because people are always talking about it.

Of course if Mad Men isn’t coming back I have a lot more time to complete this project.

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