Brief Interlude with Kim Bonney

Kim Bonney , more recently known as "-------", is currently seated just a few inches away from me. It's an unexpected visit from an unexpected and rather old friend I have not seen in a long time. I have been in Singapore for about a month now, and I was not even slightly aware that Kim was also in the city. Alas, she is, and apparently has been for about two months now. She arrived in late August finishing up the latest loop of her so called "Wonderland Tour" -- the final show was performed in Singapore's newest coliseum - and then she just never went home.

Of course, home to Kim Bonney is different than home is to most of us in reality. We are, after all, talking about a 35 year old woman with about ten different castles and palaces on her hands, her most recent one being a castle she built and designed herself on the Amalfi Coast. She has not seen it yet, though apparently she "...thinks a few of my boyfriends are living in it...I'm not sure". Boyfriends to Kim Bonney are much like homes and cars and all the rest: She seems to have about 100 of them, at any given time. The man with her today, assuming you're curious, looks like he ought to be the next LeBron James. At the moment he is standing in a pair of basketball shorts, looking over a balcony, with his back turned to us. His dark black body is filled with tattoos. Kim assures me that he is a porn star ...she just isn't sure what country he's doing porn in. He does not speak english, so Kim says. "Only a bit of Afrikaans and  French". French is a language all Kim Bonney fans love, since many of  her most recent films have been shot in that old tongue.

Speaking of films of course, is exactly what I wanted to do with Kim Jane Bonney the moment I saw it was really her. I wanted to ask her if she had any information on The Death of Dionysus, which we are all still waiting for in the States, or if she was still shooting Golden Bitch , which we have been endlessly hearing "rumors" of but have still never seen so much as a single trailer of. Kim told me she was happy to speak of all of these things and more...but most specifically she wanted to speak of something that she's had in the pipeline for a long time but never told the Public about. It is a book , yes, a bok, that she has been working on, entitled The Pink Wormhole and the All Seeing Eye, A Kim Bonney Adventure in 12 Dimensions.

It is a long title indeed, but the book is even longer. I have a copy of it, signed by Kim herself, laid in front of me on my table, next to my sparkling Singaporean wine.  The book is absolutely massive, and when Iflipped all the way towards the end, I was shocked to find that it just said 2.350 in big, bold letters, and then underneath was a sketched image of Kim ,in the most beautiful bright pink dress I've ever seen. 2350 is, in fact, the number of pages in the book. Kim tells me that the text is a collaboration between her and three other vey specific personalities; she did not write it alone. She brought in the renowned physicist and futurist Michio Khan for the first quarter of the book, the musician/director Henry Bloom for the next quarter, and finally for the last bit it was a bit of a race between herself and an old long lost friend, Catherine Rodriguez. Many fans, I'm sure, will be shocked to see Catherine Rodrigeuzs' name pop up. I know I was. This is because, last everyone heard, Kim and Catherine were essentially mortal enemies, after Catherine's film Jungle Girlz shot to the top of the box office and Kims film Caesar's Final Blade was only number 3. Kim accused Catherine of many heinous crimes that summer, all those many years ago. Alas, now, it seems the two have made up, and Kim showed me a photograph of the two of them together, not far from where we are sitting now, feeding a giraffe together. The two of them were wearing matching outfits, much to my surprise: Pink Louis Vuitton tracksuits.

"I've known for years now," Km told me, lighting a blunt, "that I would eventually have to get back in touch with Catherine. I jst ...didn't know exactly when. Then, the idea for the book came to me, and I started to think about how badly I have wanted to collaborate with the best artists an d thinkers this world has to offer, and I realized...now is the time for Kim Bonney to call Catherine Rodriguez again. So I did. And she answered. And that wwas it. There were no hard feelings. I know the fans find it hard to believe. But its true.There were no hard feelings. I even let her spend a night with a few of my most prized men. For example, my most recent  gladiator, Titus Vorenus, from New Rome. I let her have him for an entire day. I thought she would lose her mind. You know how big Kim Bonneys gladiators are..."

I nodded my head. Yes, I have known ever since I was a little girl, in fact, and when I was in middle school in Miami, Florida, I used to hang up framed posters of all the gladiators that Kim would buy the moment she'd get new ones. Even now as a grown woman I sitll love them, of course, much to my husbands chagrin (he is a very small little guy). Kim took a sip of her wine, then poured a bit more out into her glass, bringing it up under her nose, taking a sniff. "So yes, I called Catherine, and she flew in right away. She was actually on the Moon when I called. I guess she has a place up there. But she came down and she flew in right away and met up with me, and we started to write, and write, and write. I think we literally spit out 800 pages together in something like 2 weeks, and I couldn't believe Catherins style of writing. She is very good with it. Oh, believe me. That little bitch is good. The climax of the book, it's her, and when I sent it to Michio Khan -- smartest fucking man on the planet--even his mind was blown. Honestly, Catherine is an artist, man, she really is. She is a great artist, a great woman, great everything, and it was great to work with her."

"Do you think," I asked her, "that this book is something your die hard fans will take to, or not?"

"At first I wasn't so sure, but I think so, yes. Especially once Catherine came in on, like I'm sayin', I knew my fans would like it. There is something for everyone in the 12 Dimensions book. It has science, religion, weapons, time travel, wormholes, computers, art, music, the ancients, everything is in it. The beginning chapters that I did with Michio Khan, too, are unbelievable to me. I've read some of them, like, 100 times. Michio is an unusally intelligent, and even attractive, man. His ideas about the future of robotics and physics, especially the ideas he brings to light about the future of cloning , its all genius. Have you ever seen photos of Michio's laboratory? The main one he has in San Franciso? With the uh, what is it called, the KYPAL 6500 super computer? Its insane. Seriously. Everywhere you look, this guy has something new he's cloned and brought back to life. He sold me, for example, he sold me an authentic miniature tyrannosaurus rex that  I have at my house in London. My daughteer loves it. It's about as big as a pitbull and it runs all around the house. It's beautiful. I love that man, and what he has done for science and the progress of mankind. Let me tell you something, Jen, let me tell you: When we finally manage to truly get through the most recent black hole they found, and we slide into that other universe , Michio Khan is who humanity will thank. And now what do you know? Kim fucking Bonney has worked with him, and the centuries will always remember."

Her man that looks like LeBron James suddenly comes over at this point, and without question, suddenly starts to massage her back, and her shoulders. Without warning, like a robot that someone just flicked off, Kims eyes close and she immediately stops talking. She throws her head back and lets her hair down falling over her shoulders as the muscular boyfriend starts digging his fingers in deeper . I take a nervous sip of my wine not sure if I should look away or what I should do ..and just as I'm getting really uncomfortable and about to stand, I hear Kim call out in Chinese, and the next thing I know there is a man at my back too, digging his fingers in. I close my eyes and drift... whenI eventually re-open them I'm no longer on the balcony...and it seems an entire day has passed. I come to find out: the massage artists had a specific "trip" chemical embedded in the tips of their fingers. They sent me into a trip! Only with Kim Bonney does something like this happen...

Loud old school rap music is blasting the moment I open my eyes. A quiet, dark beat, almost like a heartbeat, with a heavy mans voice tearing through it. Kim Bonney is standing in front of me holding a big brown blunt. She is dressed in a red and black plaid schoolgirls skirt, wearing a backpack that says "SAILOR MOON" on it, and her breasts look like Double D''s now, whereas just the day before they were, in fact, very tiny. Her hair, too, has undergone a significant change: Yesterday it was long and blonde, something like Jessica Lee Trump, you could say, and now today it is pink and dreaded very nicely, falling down her back. For a shirt she has only an old Cleveland Browns jersey she is wearing (remember the men Kim used to get from that team?). She looks at me smiling the moment she's in my sight. She holds out the blunt for me; without question, even though I haven't really properly smoked any drugs in years, I take a big hit and start to cough. "I thought it would be fun if you came along to this little place I love in Singapore." she says.

"What..is the place?" I ask.

She then starts to explain to me that it is a sex dungeon, and "I understand completely if you object, but you will not regret it if you come. The only requirement is that you take 3 hits of the pure opium the Singaporeans create , if you want in."

Limitations of Rap, of Rock ,of music in general

One big thing I am often wondering about rap is whether or not it can ever successfully embrace "actual character acting" or not. What I mean by this is I wonder whether it's really possible that a rapper could come off as believable, if he or she were to rap a story not about the modern inner-city, but rather about topics of fiction, or even history.

At first, it sounds absurd to imagine a rapper talking about anything but the inner-city and being apart of some street gang, but whats weird is that, in rock and roll, as I have written before, this has all already happened -- to a degree -- and sounded completely believable. When Zeppelin sings about discovering the Lord of the Rings character Gollum, "in the darkest depths of Mordor", in the song "Ramble On", it sounds completely believable to me. This is the same case for a song like "The Wizard" by Black Sabbath, when Ozzy says things like "...misty morning, clouds in the sky, without warning, the wizard walks by...casting his shadow, weaving his spell, funny clothes..tinkling bell.."

In 1965 one might have thought that lyrics like this in rock would have sounded out of place, for the same reason they now seem like they'd sound out of place in a rap song: Rock music was being associated with the latest technology, with the latest trends in the big metropolises of the world, so how on Earth could we possibly start applying these ancient stories to it? How could we put a fictional wizard or a fictional dwarf in a rock song? A wizard in a rock song almost seems as ridiculous as talking about the problems of, say, a down home house wife in a rock song, as well. It just seems out of place. Imagine, for example, lyrics like this in a rock song:

"My baby been screamin' all night long

He just won't sleep, a woman is going mad!

My baby just keep screamin' all damn night long

Why won't he sleep? It makes a momma so sad!" 

Even in 2017, this sort of style rock song , about a momma struggling to put her baby to sleep, and getting upset over it -- to the point of screaming like Ozzy over it -- still seems sort of out of place. This is because it never really actually happened...we never really had a female character who sang of stuff like this in rock and roll... and so now, in our own time, what has happened is that the genre feels as though it can only write of certain stories. I have written of this at length in other posts, but basically a rock song has a few general topics it feels it can cover, and almost none of them include parenting or normal home life, more or less.That subject feels just as off limits in rock as wizards feel off limits in rap. 

Bob Dylan is considered a very down home writer, for example, and yet even the vast majority of his songs tend to have at least something exotic about them. He writes about far off places like Mozambique, he tells you stories of larger than life figures from the Civil War, he sings about "disappearing in the highlands of Scotland"...the list goes on and on. No, Bob never wrote of wizards or elves in his songs, but he still usually paitns a pretty "different" landscape than the "real world" folks are used to. It might sound odd to some readers, but many of Dylans songs were very foreign experiences for me, when I first began to listen to them. Why were they foreign? Because, before I heard him, most of what I was accustomed to hearing was rap music, and rap music is, as I keep stressing, always in the same place: The Inner-city. /End.

When listening to rappers like Juelz Santana, Nas, Biggie Smalls, or Puff Daddy, its a pretty rare thing to hear about anything beyond New York City, or some other place that is just like New York. Rap songs not only rarely take flights of fancy in terms of the imagination like Ozzy Osbourne did with Black Sabbath, they also never even really take flights of history , either. Rap music is ironically plain, in fact, in comparison to other genres. At first glance, it seems like so much is going on with the genre, because it's fast and vulgar and new, but rap music is very plain deep down. It never references anything that is truly outside of itself...more or less. It's as thoug history has never happened. I  find this sad. Very sad.

But then I also always find myself asking the question I asked in the first paragraph, as well: Would it even sound good, if a rapper tried to take flights of fantasy or history? Or would it just wind up sounding absolutely ridiculous? Would listeners really be able to make sense of it? And what would old school rap fans say if it were to happen? More likely than not, they would hail it as "the death of the genre". They would say that rap was finally being turned into a "product" , because it was leaving its "inner city" roots.

In a way, I again stress, this was also exactly what happened to Ozzy, originally, when Sabbath first debuted: People were very confused by the themes he was trying to delve into, in my opinion. They seemed out of place and weird. In the early days, rock songs were  supposed to be about going on tour, about flying in a jet, about getting chicks. Now Ozzy is here writing about wizards!   This confusion was even more pronounced when it came to a seminal rock band like the Misfits, from the States, who wrote almost solely about horror movies and ghosts, etc. The Misfits were particularly weird too, once you remember that, unlike Sabbath, they generally did not do heavy metal style songs....they instead just did 1950s melodies with distorted guitars! So this was very strange. It was the reworking of a genre that had been thought to be finished. Glen Danzig never writes any songs about the fact that he is, in truth, an actual rock star. His songs instead exist in a sort of "world within a world". He is constantly in character, it seems, when he hits the microphone. He is not a rock star when he sings, like Mick Jagger often was, he is instead a "ghoul" telling you ghoulish tales. Again, it somehow sounds completely believable much of the time, even in spite of the fact that we know Danzig is telling you the story using modern technology. It somehow still sounds very believable when he starts playing at a vampire who just wants to collect hundreds of skulls, etc....

So now I will tell my reader what I wish I could see when I look out into the world of femme rap that my blog is now obsessed with: I wish I could see girls who were rapping about the inner-city, sure, and the hard life, but I also wish I could see girls who, once they were succesful, could rap about other things too. I wish I could have a femme rapper who went in and out of character at will. For me it would not be a problem...it would be easily believable. I would love to watch a femme rapper with a name like, say, "BloOdY MaRy", debut, and I would love for the entire debut album of Bloody Mary to deal with nothing but horror topics in an extreme light. I would like to hear songs from her about how she's friends with wizards, black elves, white elves..about how she has traveled through the "Death Realms" and the "Highlands" ... how she's traveling through portals , seen Wonderland, all of it. Yet I know its going to be a damn long wait for all of this. From the looks of it now, it seems like it seriously might be another 30 years until something like this really starts to happen frequently in the music world. Which I think really sucks!

--- notes

New femme rappers catching my eye

New female rapper alert: Rocky B. 

I found this video just two nights ago from Rocky B, and I'll admit I clicked on it just because she was wearing the Guns 'n' Roses tshirt ...beautifully cut off above the navel...but I was quickly swept up into the story of a new, aspiring femme rapper from Detroit, Michigan, that I am already very interested in. I am sure I will keep following it if & when she keeps making moves. 

I'm also sort of thinking that I want to perhaps start a Twitter account that will be dedicated to all the femme rappers; but I am not sure if that would be "appropriate" or not, since I'm a gay white boy and all. It would be fun though, I think, and it was certainly fun when I ran my Azealia Banks fan page on there. The only problem with the Azealia fan page was that I eventually got tired, since I wanted to occasionally rep other femme rappers on there and I felt it was inappropriate. So maybe I just need to start one dedicated to femme rappers in general and see what happens with it..... 

 One thing I have consistently noticed in the world of female rap is that many of the perfomers do not seem to cooperate with one another nearly as much as the performers in the world of male rap do. In the world of the male rappers, collaborations and "featurings" are a completely vital part of the game. New, unsigned rappers have been lifted completely out of obscurity on a number of occasions, just because a major artist like 50 Cent or Jadakiss, et cetera, decided to feature them on their record. In fact, the featuring, in my opinion, is one of the greatest things the rap world has going for it, in comparison to something like the rock world, where such a thing is unheard of. I have always felt that the featuring goes to show just how tight knit the black community often is, in truth.... 

Having said that, however, it still doesn't change the fact that the females don't seem to ever do it nearly as often. The chance that a young up and comer like Rocky B will be featured on a track by someone already established like, say, Nicki Minaj, or Azealia Banks, etc, literally seems slim to none. Most of the time the only people the major femme rappers feature are male rappers or a singer. For some reason the competition between all the women in this world is absolutely insane...and one thing -- one very sad thing -- that I have repeatedly read, is that "there can only ever be one female rapper at a time". So, for example, now that Nicki Minaj is basically the "Queen Bee" of this world (I don't much like her, by the way), they are all saying that she will essentially have to be totally overthrown, by whoever comes next, if whoever comes next wants to make it.

 There is apparently "no way" that the American public can handle having 2 or 3, or 10, female rappers prominent, at one time. This is a travesty of course, because the number of prominent male rappers around right now, seems literally endless. So I do think it's a little boring , really, that the public should be "incapable" of dealing with a large number of female rappers. It's ridiculous.. For me it' always better "The more the merrier". If you ask me, I want to see a femme rapper coming out of every city and state one is able to find them in. I want to see girls like Rocky B coming from Detroit, others from Miami, from Dallas, from Tucson, from San Francisco, New York, the list goes on and on. I want to have so many of them that I don't know what to do with them! For I don't like it right now, as it is, just having these "few drops of rain". I don't like how women like Nicki Minaj and Lil Kim are just endlessly referenced here. A healthy artistic movement needs space for everyone. Of course, rock and roll falls prey to the same disease....which is probably why it eventually lost relevance. You can't just have 5 bands representing an entire movement and think it's going to last. It just can't work that way...especially in the Internet age. The Internet age is all about QUANTITY. And that isn't a bad thing.....

So, yea, Rocky B....

 CHECK HER OUT! She's awesome. 

Speculating: Stories inside Stories

Decades ago, Stephen King wrote a book called The Dark Tower. I have written of it in before on this blog, because it was a very important book to me when I was a boy. A good amigo showed it to me and I thought it was one of the best books I ever read. One major reason I loved it so much (especially the first one, The Gunslinger) was because it mixed our world with the world of fiction. I'll never forget the first time I followed Roland Deschain, a gunslinger cowboy, stroll into a Wild West saloon in some dusty desert..only to hear someone whistling the Beatles song "Hey Jude". It blew my childhood mind wide open, and it very much still blows my mind to this day. I have not seen the recent film adaptation with Idras Elba yet, but if the song is in there, that's amazing.....

Anyways, why am I talking about The Dark Tower? It's because I was thinking about the story in relation to the last post I made, where I went on about colors for awhile, and how our World still seems to be pretty obsessed with dark colors, instead of bright ones. Throughout this entire book series, Roland Deschain is pretty much trapped in a very dark world...and he's also chasing a very dark tower at the end of it. But what if we decided to flip this entire plot on its head, and find a new story in its intestines? What if we decided to do something seemingly so simple, like change the Dark Tower to a Pink Tower, or a Purple Tower? What if we decided, for example, that the whole story would start out in a dark miserable world full of war, but that the goal of the main character --- a man--would be to find this Pink Tower, and transform into a woman...? He does not know this at first though. He has no idea what the Pink Tower is, just like Roland never knew what the Dark Tower was. Roland was just blindly chasing it, as well as blindly running from the Man in Black. It will be the same for our fellow here.

Another idea: What if we actually just made women ... not even at all present in the fictional world? Until, of course, one of them accidentally gets sucked in through a portal that the main character accidentally discovers, just like what happens in The Dark Tower, when the kid Eddie, from 1980s New York City, gets sucked into Mid-World.

So essentially the first striking part of the plot would be our main character -- let's call him Harley "the Night Rider" Sharpe --- suddenly meets the literal first woman of his entire existence, through this weird portal. He has never seen one before, not in dreams, not in stories, not in some TV (they don't exist for him), no where. What the hell would that be like, really? Would it be hard to write? And how would he feel when this woman starts telling him that she knows about the Pink Tower too, because she's heard about it in her own world, our world. Is it confusing? It probably is. But I could probably make it work,if I was a good enough writer, and it could probably be a pretty good story. We could give the girl a name like Nina...sort of exotic.. and she can be from the 21st century of course, 2012 or so. She will also be very feminine the moment she drops through the portal, extremely feminine. She will be like Eddy was in King's book, urban, from New York, but she'll be a bonified chica.

As in, we are going to basically try to take someone whose biggest idol is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and get her sucked into a portal and thrown into the most masculine world of all time.. What will Harley Sharpe do to her? Would he rape her? I suppose some 'femnazis' would say of course he would. But they would have to remember: Harley Sharpe is living in a world where women were never even present. He, therefore, can be written as not even knowing what rape is. Harley Sharpe has no idea what a vagina is, for that matter. He's from ... "Middle World", or "Wittle World" ... "West World"...whatever the hell we can think to call it. It is a world with only men. It is a world where birth is explained, even to adults, like it is explained to children in our own: A magic stork came and dropped you off in an egg, and the egg cracked, and then you were born. In "Witt World", this is actually a fact. Harley Sharpe was born of an egg. Not of a vagina. He has never had sex with a woman, nor has he had sex with a man. Sex is not something Harley Sharpe needs to have (though we will give him the ability!). So what will he do when he finds little 5 foot 5 Nina , dressed in a pink fur coat (pink is a color he will have never seen!) bursting through this portal? What will he do? Kill her....?? Of course not. For God's sakes of course not. He is going to take care of her is what he's going to do. He's going to get ...influenced by her. To the point where she will eventually lead him to the Pink Tower, where he himself will turn into a woman! Un mujere! 

All of this will be hard to write of course, extremely hard to write. Characters who are from such different worlds are always incredibly challenging to combine with the other, which is why we rarely see this happen in most fiction, as I wrote in another essay. Alas, this is the exact reason why Stephen Kings book series about Roland Deschain was so powerful: All of us readers felt like Eddy, getting a chance to meet our bad ass Wild Western gun slingin' grandad from the past. How would all this feel with a woman as Eddy instead? With Nina Glass. Yes. There's a name and a half aint it?? Nina Glass. An upper lower class New York City resident from Staten Island, or Brooklyn, 2012. A massive Lil Kim fan. A poster of Paris Hilton above her childhood bed. A Britney Spears CD in her car the moment it crashes and the glass windows shatter and she wakes up underneath the black murder skies of Witt World, with the vicious gunslinger Harley Sharpe the only one to see her appear......

----N0TES

Queenie's dRama

There are lots of things I imagine when I feel like Queenie. I guess most of them would be considered pretty stereotypical, and maybe sort of stupid. In fact, one part of the reason I'm convinced I have such a hard time writing about wanting to be Queenie is because I think everything she wants to do is painfully typical for most women, especially in the States.

This is a dilemma because usually writers are supposed to write about things typical people can't do. Typical Men write about being James Bond. Typical women write about being Madonna, or some epic wife who lives in a castle in Florida. And don't get me wrong, Queenie has a big Madonna side to her (look at her name after all) but there's also a lot of fantasizing she does that's so purely typical and normal. For example, take something like getting her nails done or just driving to the mall to stroll around in big stores like Victoria's Secret, looking at beautiful  clothes. Or something like going to try on wigs and being able to afford them, and then actually having an entire apartment ...or HOUSE...filled with wigs and other Queenie stuff.

For instance, when I start trying to imagine having a house where you'd walk in and the first thing you'd see would be a big sparkling pink framed poster of Azealia Banks or Lil Kim, my eyes roll in the back of my head, and I lose my mind. I can't even fathom having that sort of freedom. Odds are it will never happen to me. Even if Keyshia did get hersef a house (that's one of queenies real names) I still don't think she'd have the courage to decorate it like that. It would just be a boring dull house like everyone else in this boring country has. Nothing interesting about it. Just another bland suburban home. It would probably just have all the typical decorations, because that'd be all anyone was able to afford. Keyshia would be forced to make do with whatever was selling at IKEA, that intolerable hellhole. There would be no huge gleaming oil  portrait of Monica Bellucci and Beyonce in the kitchen. There would not be a purple shining refrigerator that smelt like roses. There would not be a bowl of really good pink marijuana on the center of the kitchen table all the time. Keisha can't afford it. No one can. No one can afford anything remotely interesting....so everything must be perpetually bland. A boy can't get himself a nice pink set of kitchen chairs that all say GLIMMER QUEEN on the top. Those chairs basically don't exist yet. All we have so far, mostly, are just plain wooden ones.

Having said that though, this is what i mean about how little things have become so precious to Keyshia. She just goes gaga for the smallest stuff, the smallest little HINT of femininity in this dark and murderous United States city. This is the case whether you are talking about fashion, hair, music, or of course the house decorations. Why is everything in our current time period so obsessed with darkness, Queenie wonders? Certainly I can't be the only one who notices it. We all seem to despise and avoid bright colors. The keyboard upon which I am typing, for example, why was the standard model just automatically chosen to be colored black, with the letters all white? This color is the same for the cheap speakers I just randomly grabbed, as well as the monitor thats given me 10 years of life: Both of these things are black, just like the keyboard, and the computers I had before this, they were always white. Why? Why are the standard default computers always either white or black? Why can't they be light blue,pink, green, yellow, orange, red, azure? What is going on herer?

 We here in the early 21st century...I'll tell you: We certainly are highly technological, but so many of our designs still seem to be rather trapped, in my opinion, in the darkness of "centuries past". Don't forget: There was no electricity back then. Ben Franklin had yet to figure out the light bulb or the lightning rod, whatever he did. So when it was night time, it was dark time. In fact, I spend a lot of my own life in this new century in the dark,since the florescent lights in my room here never quite work. You won't believe me, but if you exclude the illumination of the computer monitor, I am writing solely by candlelight right now. We are, in many ways, still in a strangely dark and bland world. It shows in our clothes. I often look at people and think I am seeing Amish demons flashing by. It makes me want to cry...I get very scared...Keyshia gets particularly scared...she is mortified of the Amish. But many people today, especially men, seem to dress sort of Amish. They all wear dark pants, like the cheap dark blue Dockers I am wearing now, and usually you will never see a man in a pink shirt or a light green shirt, etc. Not in my experience,  at least, and I'll admit it almost even looks weird when you do. Maybe it's because colors require more effort to give birth to, where as "white" and "black" is easy. So it's almost like, you know, we are still unable to completely afford, as a whole society, to really color everything in. Perhaps the argument could be made that we are living in a world that is still just being sketched out. A lot has been filled in now; but another whole part of it is just still being sketched. The poor parts, for instance, they're just beginning to undestand creativity. 

Often when I, or rather, when beautiful Keyshia, imagines the future, she starts to see a place that will be filled with brght colors and also be filled with stories that include many bright colors. I always go back to Lord of the Rings, for example, or just fantasy stories in general, to help people understand this idea: In our own time, most fantasy stories are set in a medieval English sort of place, and most of the characters look just as bland -- usually--as people back then looked. They also tend to talk and act just as bland as people back then did. Gandalf is a very fantastic wizard, but he basically looks like a bland monk in those dark robes he wears, with that very plain white hair he has. It is rare to see a really colorful character in our fantasy tales, surpisingly enough. Evrey now and again you see a character who is a princess presented in some beautifully light outfit, but it doesn't really happen as often as you would think it would.

The Shire is presented as a really great place in Lord of the Rings , but it's basically just filled with natural greens, browns, whites, etc. In fact, the presence of green is probably why so many kids love it so much. Green is the brightest thing we ever chance to see in our world. Well, Keyshia's guess is that the future will become much more focused on these other more "extreme" colors, like pink, purple, blush, watermelon, bubblegum, magenta, hot pink, etc. In our own time pink, if you look at it, almost seems to be considered a "plastic" color, as though it does not have its origins in the natural world -- like green or brown-- but rather in the artificial world of the department store, etc. This is ridiculous of course: Pink is just as natural as any other color, it's just that it's very bright so the "serious soldier men" who are running everything (and ruining everything) in our own time, don't like it. In the future, I feel this prejudice will pass away. You will start to see pink getting itself taken more seriously. It will start popping up in films that are taken seriously. It will be a joyous part of our lives in a way it simply is not right now. Pink cars will be more popular, pink eyeshadow, hot pink hair, big pink earrings, pink shoes, pink grass in films, etcetc.....

When I think of who the future Gandalf character might be, in a popular fantasy film 30-40 years from now,   I can imagine, for starters, that it will be a woman, and not a man, and it will probably be a woman who might dress a bit like Keisha would want to dress...but who could still be just as powerful  & mysterious & mystical. I can imagine a woman who could show up to the little green door of Frodos home dressed in a bright pink robe or jacket, glimmering and sparkling, and holding a bright purple staff, instead of the grey one Gandalf always held. I can imagine she will have long beautiful hair, and maybe it will be designed in a curious way, not just falling over her shoulders, like Gandalfs was.I suppose The Wizard of Oz sort of got close to this at times, there's definitely something extremely queer about that story, and now I am remembering that RuPaul recently did something related to it ...but I dunno. Even the Wizard of Oz is still pretty pastoral, and in many ways, pastoral always means bland. Dorothy might wear bright red ruby slippers; but her hair is still just plain old brown, and her little dress couldn't possibly be more plain. I think Oz could be way more colorful than we have ever seen it. There should be a new sequel to Oz made, actually, where Dorothy isn't a woman, or at least she doesn't start out as once. I want to watch an adaptation of Wizard of Oz where Dorothy starts out as a big 6 foot 6 linebacker, and then after the twister tosses him into Oz and he follows the Yellow Brick Road, he turns into Queenie. At the end of the film, we see him on a bed, as a woman, with the red ruby slippers on, dressed in a hot pink skirt with hot pink eyebrows. He's opening his mouth about to accept the "pole" of the Great and Powerful wizard. The wizard of course is also revamped: It's a big colorful man, with a big magic phallus, wearing a purple cape. Maybe someone loosely based off of Prince.....

Sigh. If only it was a all real....

old Queen

My obsession with female rappers is growing more severe by the day. Yesterday I took it all a step further. What did  I do? It was simple: I got into touch with the one female rapper I have actually known in reality, a girl whom we will call Anijah. Yea ..I met Anijah last year on Twitter, when I used to run an Azealia Banks fan page, and though Anijah actually despises Azealia, we sort of connected over our mutual love of femme rap. Then though,in September of 2016, we sadly lost touch, mostly because I refused to give Anijah my number and I forced her to solely communicate with me through long e-mail letters, which she promptly got tired of. So finally yesterday I went and found her again -- Anijah runs a YouTube site giving makeup tips--and we began to talk again. A little bit. Not as much as I would like (I was expecting her to bombard me with texts, maybe) but at least a little bit.

She had some pretty interesting news to share with me, and as usual with people I know, a great deal has changed in her life. For starters, Anijah has made a rather enormous geographical move: She started out in Brooklyn, so she tells me, and when I met her she was in South Carolina, and now it turns out -- so she says -- that she's all the way in Miami, Florida. She has re-united with her husband. Last I heard he was kind of crazy. I have no idea. I just imagine him to be some enormous dude who probably looks like an NFL linebacker. He is probably threatening. From the sound of it, he is. Anyways, Anijah is living down there in Miami with this husband and she tells me , much to my shock, that she is eager to go and audition for Love and Hip Hop in Miami. This was very bizarre to me, I have to admit! Because it was ike ..woah...what da fuq...is this a female rapper coming to life now on my actual text messages here?

That show is, like...that's where you go when you want to become legitimate, when you want to swim up above sea level. For example, I wrote once before about how I first discovered the Georgia Peach, Rasheeda, on Spotify, late one night, and became obsessed with her....and she was so mysterious...and then one day I turned around, searched a little more for her, and there she was on this show. I have to admit: I was sort of disappointed when I found Rasheeda on Love and Hip hop in Atlanta. She didn't seem much like the Rasheeda I had imagined there I guess. Of course, I have since tried to get used to it, and become a fan of Rasheeda as she is on that show, just like I'm a fan of her music. The problem ,I think, is that I don't like watching Rasheeda share the limelight with all of those other characters on the show. Every time I tuned in, or watched old episodes, I just wanted to see her. I suspect it would maybe be the same with Anijah if she auditioned and actually got on...

As much as I love all of this "black" culture in my way, I have to admit that the TV part of it kind of bothers me, in some respects, more than the misogynistic & homophobic male hip hop ever did. From one angle, I think the Reality TV is an approach that the black community might think is helping them, because it is showing all us plain Jane whites that they have, you know, real lives, above ground, during the day. But I think that reality tv is actually a bit of a curse, and it actually seems to me to make an ethnic cultures image that much worse. For example, my own Italians have certainly fallen prey to the reality tv trap, just like the blacks have, and this is best seen in shows like Jersey Shore and that other one with "Big Ang" called Mob Wives. Yes, I believe that's the name: Mob Wives. I will gleefully admit to my reader: I have watched black reality TV, but I have never actually watched my own Italians. I don't think I would be able to take it. I would vomit. I would scream. I would curl up in the covers at night weeping and crying, to see my Italians portrayed.....like that. Which is why I again say: I think reality tv is more of a curse than a blessing.

I'm not sure it's the dream I have for Anijah, like she clearly has for herself. I'm excited for Anijah when I think of her releasing a mixtape, like she keeps saying she wants to ,or when I think of her working as, say, a hair stylist or a makeup artist, etcetc. But as a reality tv star? Oh, I don't know. I guess I'm happy for her...I'll tell her I am..."oh Anijah yes! Do it! Go to the audition! Yes girl yes!" ...but deep down..my gay white boy heart....is shattered. How come? Because I feel the show would steal her artist soul. Which seems to be what it did to Rasheeda to me. Rasheeda, if you look at her records, she was her own person back in the 00's and early 10's. Then she took that show, and just became a charactr on the show. She no longer compares to Azealia Banks for me, whom she once sort of went to toe to toe with (in my white boi brain).  Azealia is still running her own independent theatre, you see, and she's still very interesting, and controversial. She has this company called XoCheapy and it's some sort of soap making business. She's an independent chick...ironically one of Rasheedas song titles... 

So whats the solution, you ask? To dismantling the reality tv hive mind?

The solution is real drama, which thankfully my Italians have also always had a good bit of, in addition to still being stuck with this reality TV bullshit in the 21st century. Indeed, in my opinion, nothing can bring a group to that area of being truly beloved like an actual properly filmed drama can. The problem, however, is that we have to be eventually allowed to see our "ethnic" actors go off on their own, and break out of their ethnic shell. What this means is that, when you look at someone like Al Pacino, you'll see that he started out in the Godfather, completely trapped in his ethnic shell as an Italian from New York, but then,  when you go to find Al in the 90s, you see him taking roles like Insomnia, where he's still Al Pacino, but now he's in Alaska, very disconnected from the Italians back home, and doing his own thing. This aspect of "doing his own thing" is very important for the ethnic breakout...and it's something I have noticed many blacks and Latino actors still don't get a chance to do. Jennifer Lopez, for example, has a show I was watching (I watch dubbed in Spanish) called Shades of Blue. It was of course just her playing a Puerto Rican cop in New York. Boring! Go play a mermaid, J-Lo. Go play a whaler. Go play a snowboarder. Anything except who you actually are...that's my advice. Always my advice. Azealia Banks did the film Love Beats Rhymes. Guess what is about? A black femme rapper, from New York. And not just that, but a struggling black femme rapper. Its hard for me to watch personall, even though I will watch it 30 times. I want to see Azealia become someone else when she acts. I want to see her become a cowgirl, or create the next big Star Wars film. I want to see Azealia Banks with a lightsaber or a sword. I want to see Azealia in a blockbuster movie loosely based off of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

This is what I mean about the importance of escaping ethnicity. Love Beats Rhymes is just like Love and Hip Hop: It doesn't reach the folks that need to be reached, and slapped, and taught a serious lesson.

But good Lord almighty what am I talking about? I was trying to discuss Anijah. Remember her?Yea...I was trying to say how she is not as open as I thought she might be and it's making me sad. I suppose she is busy and doesn't have time for an old white queen like me. When she was still living in South Carolina she used to say she'd drive up north and come to "beat my face". Sounds extreme...I know..but it turns out it is just drag queen slang for getting my face all made up pretty, and maybe even getting the chance to wear a WIG! Oh my gosh....wigs....I can't even....my heart skips a beat when I think of wigs. Also robes. Silk robes. I can imagine sitting with Anijah, or some cosmetics mastermind just like her, in a big comfortable room, filled with little mannequin heads that have wigs on them...filled with pink fur coats and colorful silk kimonos. That would be an actual good life to be living. Unlike this one. Sigh. When I dream to be a queen, I hate it, because it is so far away from me and it makes me so depressed. On Twitter there is a boy from Mississippi who has a quote "....all my life I had to fight to wear mascara..." The boy hates everyone, including me, but I relate with him so much. I never even got to wear the mascara, chico. I lost the fight. No, worse: I never even got started fighting. I just sat here loking sad, isolated and alone...wishing someone as cool as Anijah would talk to me.

But they never do. I'm just an old white queen, and I often veer off into weird conversations no one wants to hear from a gay boi. Like when I start referencing politics, or things like that, everyone gets bothered. Who knows. Not me. I'm outcasted even in the circles of the outcasts.Forever Alone.

---n0tes from da White Queen

Folks on the New Internet

What is up with people on the Internet these days, and how many details so many of them want to know about you....literally right off the bat? Am I the only one hanging around 2 years from 2020 thinking that's weird as Hell? Like y'all new folks do realize how we vets we used to do things back in the days right? Y'all realize that Internet friends didn't generally pry so deep? Especially if you asked them not to? Which , back in the day, was considered a totally acceptable thing to do?

Perhaps I am a lunatic, but these days on the Internet, it seems like everyone you become friends with, even if you both know you probably won't ever meet in real life, still always wants all your real life details. They be wantin to know where you live, where you work, how long you been working the exact gig for, what your spouse is like, everything! Back in the good old days, like when my beloved EverQuest was still nuovo, I feel like no one gave a shit. You met people online and just automatically went into conversations about anything except the reality you had to walk off into  in the mornings. No one asked you what your job was. It was basically like being in Europe (where many people consider that totally rude to ask). Nowadays though, all the fuckin Americans from the deep pits of emptiness logged on. And they always want to bring the real world into the net convos RIGHT AWAY! Seriously...right away. It's so annoying. I call them the cell phone people. What this means is that most of them seem to have been totally unaccustomed to really using the Internet, until Steve Jobs went and shat out the iPhone. Then all of a sudden, badabadaboom, these were the new kids the Internet had to offer. "Meet the new boss...he's actually quite different from the old boss."

See, to me, the way I see it, an internet chat conversation was created to be its own universe within a universe. It doesn't matter if its a blog post, a message board convo, a Twitter convo, an old school chat box, or a fucking iPhone text message, to me it's all the same: It is a universe inside a universe, and it is not as effected as the real world like a "real convo" is. A real convo is trapped in the real world for obvious reasons: If you are chatting in a broken down gas station parking lot, in a broke down 1994 Ford, you obviously have to admit that to your chat partner. On the Internet though, what the fuck man? Who cares! Nobody ever cared! You can imagine yourself as chatting anywhere when you're on an Internet chat. In EverQuest we were usually pretending we were in some place called Nektulos Forest with ghouls and wolves screaming all around us. Plus a bunch of black bats flying all around. Nobody cared that you were just in dirty Hanes underwear in your living room, 40 pounds overweight, living on bad ramen noodles, frozen pizza, and whiskey.

Now of course, they care. Deeply do they care.  And the worst part is that ... even if you initially try to make up lies (like I do, I'll admit), you always get cught out eventualy, in a way you never used to get caught out. Kids, you do not even know how easy and beautiful it was to lie about who you were on the Internet in 2004. It was the easiest thing in the world! I lived my entire life as the coolest chick who had ever lived back in 2004. Now it's next to impossible. 4 days go by and the person is demanding a picture of the nice house you lied about living in. "Let me see your car." "Let me see your room." "Let's do facetime and let me see you naked having SEX! GIVING BIRTH!"

Why can't these folks just carry on friendships like everyone used to do? Without knowing every last detail about who they're chatting with? Without knowing your fucking life plan from now until 2070? Why do these people care? Why can they not just accept a good chatting buddy? Don't we all want  a nice roster of folks to text when we need? Or is that just me. Maybe I'm being unfair? I don't think so. I don't understand why these people feel that these friendships have to go so deep. Why do people care so much about who they're talking to? I never cared. I guess the guys I used to chat with could have been on the other side of the PC hacking the heads off of their 20 wives and I couldn't have cared. Because I didn't know it was happening. Uncle Gino used to always say it, kid, before he hit the deep dark: "What ya dont know cant hurt ya". If only Uncle Gino had lived to see this fucking day of "We must know everything...literally everything...even if it fuckings kills us we want to know it...fuck it!"

I mostly still live back in the good old days myself, as you can imagine. If you ever chance to run into me on some random Internet chat database (I'm recently making my rounds in Spanish on "HelloTalk") you can be guaranteed I shall give no fucking shit at all about your husband, your wife, your 10 kids, your bills, your job, your car, your dog, your dead cousin, any of it. Unless, of course, you start talking about it. If you start talking about it, I will appease you. But so long as you just want to talk about, say, how much you absolutely adore all the movies that Antonio Banderas ever made, and all the records Madonna should have released but never did, I'm OK with that too. I don't care how you managed to get the phone or the Internet connection to talk to me. All I care about is that you got it, and we have met, and we now have the ability to create our own universe within a universe. Does it make sense?

I hope it does.

Ciao. ----

Kayla Pink, the Last Diva

The Internet and all of its Stories

When Tom Petty died recently, the one thing that struck me as most interesting of all about the entire tragic experience was the manner in which folks on the Internet reacted to the death of this long beloved rock star. Twitter went into a mad uproar of people pouring out love for Petty, sharing memories, the New York Times printed a numer of articles (as did other publications), and then of course, on trusty YouTube, tons of folks that I am subscribed to -- musicians -- all began to publish their various videos dedicated to Tom Petty's wide and very beloved catalogue.

For about a week straight, and a bit even still, Tom Petty beacme more of a major presence than he had ever been in my life previously. And at some point, I'm not sure when, all of the focus on Petty and his rather unexpected passing got me to wondering about other famous celebrity deaths we all know about, but that did not have the "luck" of happening in the Internet era. Like Jimi Hendrix, for example, or Jim Morrison, or Brian Jones.

I began, I suppose, to wonder about what the reaction to those very famous deaths must have been like, all those many, many years ago. What, really, was it like, the night Jimi Hendrix died, in September of 1970? Who, exactly, discussed his death? Who was truly aggrieved by it? Was it really as mourned as the Petty death was this month in 2017? Something tells me no way. For how could it have been? In 1970, where could you have really thrown all of that grief? And I mean, really thtown it? Who could you have really talked about Jimi Hendrix with in 1970, especially if you lived in a small town? Who is to say that all of the other kids there would be automatically interested in discussing him with you? Who is to say anyone in your small town back then, with no Internet access, had ever even heard of him?

After all, we are living in the time of instant communication, and yet there are still many things that people are very confused about, and oblivious to. So what must this obliviousness have been like back in 1970? I cannot even imagine. Which leads me to think that , for the most part, when Hendrix the Legend died, I bet the refrain of lament was a bit soft, in comparison to what we hear today. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, that anyone back then would have really thought Jimi Hendrix would survive as such a formidable legend,  even now, 20 years into the 21st century. It sounds ridiculous, really. The people of 1970 had no Internet, no Wikipedia, no cell phones, no Rock and Roll hall of fame, and Rolling Stone magazine had only just begun. For all they knew, rock and roll really was just some sort of freak trend that was going to come to a swift end at any point. I just do not think there was any way they could have imagined how "archived" all of this was going to become.

Again, don't forget: When those kids of 1970 looked into the past, even just their own recent past, they had no real archive to sift through. Oh, ya, they had libraries...(if they were in a good town)..but whens the last time you heard about somebody studying rock and roll at a library? Sounds unlikely to me. Plus they couldn't have studied it there if they had wanted. No books had been written on it! So, in truth, all of this was just one big mystery world to those people. No one knew what the hell was going on. In 1970, televisions existed, and so too did telephones and vinyl records, but in many ways, the World was still operating by word of mouth, just like it always had, for centuries prior.  Instant facts that you search on Google were impossible to fathom.

No one average knew quite hwen anything had really happened, exactly. These kids didn't know, one imagines, that Hendrix was from Seattle, or that he had once been in the Army, or that he had traveled with Little Richard on the Chitlin Circuit, or lived in Harlem, etcetc. Details were, so I believe, scarce in the past, even for famous people!  This is not at alll the case today, really. Wikipedia tells the condensed story of eveyones life and all the necessary details the moment they're famous. For instance, Jimi Hendix was born on November 27 in 1942. He had a paternal grandmother named Zenora Rose Moore. She was a quarter Cherokee. His grandfather was the result of an extramarital affair between a woman named Fanny and a grain merchant from Urbana Ohio, or maybe Illinois.

 What in the hell was that, right? And how in the good hell could you have ever easily tracked down that information, in 1970? It's almost mind blowing. It's ridiculous. Every time I think about it my mind is just like ...I can't believe it! How is this all possible? This gigantic pool of information? All of these deep stories just unraveling everywhere you look. They are EVERYWHERE! And so too, of course, are the little stories connected to the big stories, like the ones people tell on Twitter and on message boards and on YouTube when famous folks die. Stories the little folks tell that, a lot of the time, I dont' think they realize just how long they'll last, just like the kids in 1970 never realized just how long their favorite music star of their short high school career would last.

 Have you ever really thought about what it might feel like, 50 years from now, assuming you are younger and you make it 50 years, to look back on YouTube videos folks are publishing now? To me its a mind fuck. I can't imagine it. But it will certainly be the case. Which means that people in the year 2067 are going to have the option, when they read about Tom Petty and how he died on October 2, 2017, to look back and search the web and see exactly how we all felt the very moment we heard it. They will be able, in fact, to even see how we all thought, for about 4 hours, that Tom Petty was about to miraculously resurrect, because the news initally broke the wrong way.Smething that probably culd have never really happened in the 70s...and even if it had, it would be forgotten quickly, one imagines. It would become an unverifiable story, just like everything was back then. Now it's all verifiable all the time. You can't really just make things up anymore. If "Daddy" tells a story the wrong way now, you can catch him in his tracks. It's all written in stone now, kid. If I want to go around tricking people into thinking Hendrix was really from Texas for some reason -- easy thing to do in 1969 -- there's no way my trick will lats long. Probably wouldn't last 10 minutes. Is that not weird? I find it weird. Will people ever get tired of all this verification, one wonders? Will they ever yearn for a time when it was all just a fuckin mystery? Am I, in fact, doing that right now?

Maybe it's just me, but I have always been a little "weirded out" by the fact that people like Hendrix, who never used the Internet or even probably heard of it, are, in our own time, on the Internet, in such huge ways. It is almost as though the Internet is some other galaxy entirely and they just don't belogn on it and yet here they are, caught, for eternity, in the "Internet stone". It has always seemed odd to me, I feel, ever since I was a little boy and I first started using Wiki and stuff and reading of Hendrix. It has especially seemed odd to me as I have watched the first two decades of the 21st century pass (I've been rather conscious for all of it now, being 10 when the century commenced) and seen the way in which my old 60s stars just keep getting slightly re-invented, and brought up all over again, with each new little Internet neighborhood that gets created. First place I saw Hendrix was on a VHS cassette of Woodstock 1969, then it was mIRC, where we used to download things through weird dark chat channels, after that it was on Napster, from there  his records were all on the BitTorrents, and finally,now, he has landed on YouTube and Twitter and everywhere in between.  And each time I see him pop up agian, it just gets weirder and weirder. He is eternally in orbit. His music is, literally, always being performed somewhere. Right now, right now, right now, someone else in our World is just discovering their first Jimi Hendrix song. Just like I did all those many many years ago, watching that Woodstock 69 VHS cassette. And also right now, or soon, someone just found out that Hendrix died at only 27. They are beginning to mourn for an event that happened almost a half century ago, in a wildly different world. They will perhaps learn the exact details of his life that no one in his own time even knew the first thing about.

Weird, huh?

The Queen- The Reina

I do hope that everyone who stumbles upon this blog knows that it is, of course, run by a secret hidden Queenie right? Like ... I am da biggest Queenie of all time ... behind the scenez.. and I think, maybe, yet again, like... IDK ...it's just that sometimes the Queen wants to reveal herself. Properly. In full. She wants to be HEARD ya know? Not necessarily seen (cuz she is never made up right) but a bitch definitely likes to be heard. She likes to be read. If only she knew what to really write..

Well, I should take that back, because the truth about the Reina in me (thats Spanish for Queen) is that she likes to write a hell of a lot. In fact, at times, this little bitch has taken over my notebook entirely with all sorts of weird, queer fantasies. Fantasies that, when I wake up and read them back to myself at 9 in the morning, I am sickened and disgusted to read. I have described it before haven't i? Probably. 20 times maybe. I don't know. Because I am like a charactr in a novel about amnesia: I don't bloody remember anything after it happens. So a lot of my thoughts , i guess they repeat. So what though you know baby???? A good writer always has one main theme; and so too does a good QUEEN.

So maybe at this point the reader might wonder where or when exactly the queen in me wuz really born. Like really really born. Well, in truth, it's hard to say, but I mostly think the Queen in me was always alive, deep down somewhere, but what happened was that I felt she was completely prohibited and illegal , so I never dared let her out. In fact, I think I kept the queen so discreetly hidden and contained inside my "bottle" that , eventually, even I myself did not realize she wuz there. You dig? Then what happened was that I started reading more shit, and the next thing I knew ...BOOM!!!!!!! Lil Queenie popped out. On some real shit. Hell Lil Queenie didn't just pop out. She went on some femme rapper shit (hehe) and took a knife to my throat and said to me ... she said.. "yo boy, if ya don't let me breathe, I won't let yo mo fuckin ass breathe..." Get it? The queen is essentially holding me hostage. She insists I pay her homage. She is a violent bitch and she is armed. Bitch got a knife and she keeps me locked up and I have to pay her proper respects , and then she lets me out, so I can do my thang.

 It's hard to explain, but it's like, the Queen doesn't hate my "boy self". She think he is a smart dude and everything. She digs what he got going on. She learns a lot from him, and he is sure to teach her things she would, like, never fuckin' stumble on in a million YEARS! But she still demands true power over this vessel ... .aka ...this body...this, as they say in Spanish, cuerpo. If the body was a house, the Queen wants the master bedroom.

Speaking of Spanish, in fact, I personally think it is a language that has a lot to do with the Queens emergence . I think she is mostly a Spanish speaker, really, which is why she is hard to pull out in English for me at times, and though you might not believe it, most of the Queens greatest friends (and I am talking real friends now) have all been Spaniards or Italians. Again, its a little difficult for a bitch to explain, but basically it went like this: When I first started learning Italian, as a boy, and talking to ragazzas in Naples, I for some reason also began to see the queens face occasionally "flash by in the night". This was especially the case with one ragazza in particular named Flavia from Rome. To this day I literally have no idea if Flavia is a transgender or an actual born woman, but i think she looks like a transgender and she used to say things that seemed vaguely transgender. I don't kow how to describe those things, but she used to say them.

And I used to talk to Flavia on the phone, in Italian, 3-4 days a week, for hours at a time, and then I even met her, three times, in fucking Rome, and so , I dunno, it was like I started to feel the queen emerging through Flavia, because we were really intimate, but it wasn't like amantes (lovers), it was instead just like friends. Like I was Flavia's best friend for awhile, and it made a white boi feel GIRLIE.  Therefore, once Flavia put the Italian language on my tongue after countless conversations about so many things, the next thing happened: Spanish became infinitely easier to understand in all its forms, and so what happened but that strange characters in South & Central America became, for the most part, totally comprehensible. This was a big move for the queen because, if you have ever watched pornography that features "chicks with dicks", you'll know that many of them seem to come from South America. Like, there is a big problem with femininity down in America's Spanish south (Juarez is particularly horrific for women) but there also, at times, seems to be this enormously larger transgendered movement happening down there. Spanish people all seem vaguely more feminine than plain jane Americans, I guess, and so they perhaps create more trans folk. Being a bitch talking Spanish is very fun for many reasons I might try to explain in a bit. The main point though is that I',m convinced the South Americans -- uncircumcised as they are --- create more trans folk. 

 For example, I used to have this one South American transgendered porn star I loved called "Bia Bastos".   She's from Sao Paulo, Brazil, born just a year before me, in 1988. She also goes by the name "Bia Di Filipo"... and man...no, girl....I used to watch her all the time , and ....well, I guess I just thought we looked similar. If I put makeup on, I look a lot like Bia Bastos. Cause we both got that Latin face, diggggg? So I would watch Bia get on down and give some dude a BJ and wear big platinum pumps and hot mini skirts and shit, and I' be like... woah...I think I'm...getting.....hypnotized! Into being a woman! A MUJERE! Jesus, what is going to happen to me? I started to imagine myself swallowing those weird scientific hormone pills and popping tits. One afternoon I got caught shaving my big hairy legs by friends. Then another I just showed up to a get together (rare for me to show up anywhere) with black eyeliner on, and within an hour a girl at the party added eyeshadow and......

I am talking too much. The Queen is a fucking snake. Un serpiente. She sneaks out when I don't want her to . She is so hard to control. You know what I feel like? I feel like I have a big bottle or something and there's a hole in it. From the hole the Queens feminine pink juices keep leaking all over everything. I desperately want to j ust throw the bottle out and shatter it but I can't bring myself to do it. It smells too good, I guess. Like pussy. Like ... pink. Plus it brings--as I was saying before--a lot of interesting people to my life, whom I never would meet when I just perform as "The Man".

The people that the Queen introduces me to, in fact, are probably the best part of the whole fucking' thang.As a man, I kept running into people who all felt like clones of one another: The boys I would run into were all just trying to be tough all the time, and woo women, and when I would run into women, they would just judge me as a boy who was "secretly" trying to woo them, so they'd never want to talk intimately with me. As a queen--especially a queen speaking Spanish---I don't have this problem at all. When I become Ariel, Pamela, Amber, Kaylee --- I always take a different name, hehe-- I suddenly meet people, generally women, who actually have something interesting to say. It's very fun. Women friends are, like, infinitely better than male ones, at talking. Males are fucking wretched at talking. Every conversation ends after 5 minutes. "What up?" "Nuttin'" "Payce". Not so with women. These convos now, they stretch on from 7 PM to fucking 5 AM!!!! It's like bliss. My women friends from places like Lima, Peru, Chihuahua, Mexico, Brazil, and Madrid...man, they are AWESOME!!!!! They exchange things with you that men never will. Men suck. I hate men. Not totally. But for the most part I just think they are so fucking, like, locked down, you know? Everyone says how women are all sorts of limited; everyone don't be realizing how imprisoned men are. Life as a dude is very bland. I can't wear a scarf without thinking I might have to fight for my life to the death.

Honestly though, you probably think it's mostly about the dick sucking for the queen, right? You think she's just some horny bitch looking to catch a hot dick up her culo. It's not the whole deal though, baby. She also just likes conversation....... and the men in her life never gave that to her...... fucking punks that they were! So now this is a big reason she comes out, usually at night. She has better friends than the man part of me. Way better  friends. Her most recent one is from Lima. So cool. LIMA! It's a half indigenous chick named Lesli. Lesli is awesome. She talks constantly..about everything. I -- for real--  can't even imagine meeting a man from there and talking reasonably with him, like I talk to Lesli.  We'd be at war or something after 5 days over politics. Two bitches though? Whoop, there it is. Immediate connection. "How many Queen Latifah videos can I send you, baby, before you hate me?" "I'll never hate you, we're Besties." "Ohhh si ...I love you ... ti amo..." See what I mean? In fact, I'm going to send her another vidoe right now, to brighten her afternoon. It's a video by an artist she sent me, a Portoriquena named --what else?-- "Ivy Queen". Ivy Queen is very good; I really like her. She has a spirit that is feminine in all those Latin ways I descrbied before. She's completely unlike anyone in the English scene. Down there I guess they also call her "La Caballota". Google says it translates as horse. She doesn't seem at all interested in talking about soldiers or fighting wars in Afghanistan. Incredibly relieving for a white American man...boy...faggot.

But oh! Now I remember what I wanted to say about why it's sooooo much better, in my opinion, to be a bitch in Spanish than a bitch in English. OK, so how exactly can I explain this? Where can I start? I think a good place would perhaps be with television, and in specific television shows that are run by women. I know, it seems off topic right? But it isn't. It's very connected. See, one of the first things I came to find when I started learning these Latin languages , was that the female TV hosts are -- or at least seem to me-- to be wildly different than the female TV hosts in English. Like, it's a seriously unbelievable difference, in my opinion. I don't want to offend anyone, but all of the women characters I have met in English/American TV always seem kind of dull and lifeless to me. They seem not interesting. Bland, plain, quiet, tranquil, not wanting to really "scream" or "get excited". They also often seem as though they're, like, ashamed to be women or some shit. They don't seem to have any fun (and pink) feminine oomph to them. In short, they don't smell much like pussy to me. Ellen is probably the perfect example of this, and so too is practically the entire cast of The View, I hate to say. They just don't seem to be having any fun, girl. Yes I dig them, as my American sisters, but something seems different about them to me. They seem all serous all the time and shit. Like they is in a box, and trapped. I can't stand it. The only American female TV host who does it for me truly is Wendy Williams. She actually references cool shit that I'm marginally concerned with, like Cardi B and Tami Roman and shit like that. Watching The Wendy Williams Show perhaps leaves me feeling mildly drenched in pink. Not so with Ellen and others. Not so at all. They just feel like hanging around in the dark miserable 50s or something. Fuck that man. I'm trying to hop a bitch train here. I'm trying to pick up a glass of pink champagne and drink that shit till I'm choking!!!!! I'm trying to shake my little white boi ass to La Caballota here.

A white boy and his femme rappers: a strange and certainly queer tale

I would really love to write of female rappers, maybe even all day long, and it's something I've felt for awhile...but every time I try to do it, I never know where to begin. I try and I try and I try, and every attempt is always in vain.

 Femme rappers are such a major part of my life really, at this point -- I listen to them every day, during the happiest parts of my day-- that you think I would be able to write of them all day long, with ease, just like I'm often able to do with old rock and roll stars that, yes, I listened to in great depth years ago, but now hardly listen to at all. Yet, again, it seems impossible at times, and I suppose the main reason, in truth, is because of the oh so obvious fact: Femme rappers are simply too new, it would seem, to write deeply about.

There is only so much to say about them, just like there is only so much to hear from them. Most of them, especially my true favorites, seem to only have a small handful of tunes for me to sift through, sometimes they only have one or two. There is one woman, for example, one small little black woman, who literally only has one verse in one mere track with only 12,000 views. I have watched her one mysterious verse --her name is Solette -- repeatedly. She spits the rap wearing a fur coat in a city that looks half destroyed, snow falling down all around her. I have seen it in dreams. I have searched, in total vain, through all corners of this blasted Internet, looking for more of this Solette. She is no where to be found. No where at all. She is like some strange phantom who has only appeeranced once, for just a minute and a half, and never more, never more.

This is very different, you can imagine, for a white boy who is accustomed to sifting through an artist like Bob Dylan's catalogue -- where I have literally decades worth of material...and well over 700 originally composed songs. Not to mention all the great big books  I can--and have--read about him, and others like him.

 What on Earth is a white boy to do with his newfound love of da femme rap? What am I to do? I so desperately want to scribble about them, and make a great story of them, but I just...never know.... again...where to begin! Can a white boy like me even begin to write about this muzak?

 I also, I feel,when I do get in these moods, never know quite which femme rapper to truly give all my love and focus to. Certainly, I say, one of these girls has to get all my focus, but who? This is another thing that is very different for me, since in the rock world my allegiances were always, for so long, very clear to me from the starting gate. Indeed, in rock n roll, I was alwys able to choose my favorites with absolute ease. I loved Dylan, Keith Richards, Jack White, and someone like Robert Plant -- of Led Zeppelin-- with undying admiration (they were soomething like Gods of my bedroom) and , at the same time as that, I often despised acts like Motley Crue, Queen, Van Halen, and Metallica with a fervor like you have never known.

Those I loved andthose I hated have always been easy to see in the rock world; I know immedaitely what I am looking at, and I am never at risk for making a fool of myself. After all, most of the stories have been written in full. Ozzy Osbourne, for example, doesn't seem like he can do that much to pull the rug out from under me now. He's a safe bet. I can hang Ozzy's poster in my room and let my friends think of me as a fan and nothing bad will come of it. But what about these girls who are, oftentimes, even younger than I am (by just a few years, I'm elated to tell you)? Why, anything is possible with them! Anything at all. They could wind up.... as anyone! They're in their prime. Some of them might never even really and truly make it.  This is tough! What if I pick a bad horse, man? What if my female rapper doesn't win the prize? Not to mention the other dilemma I'm sometimes encountering: What if I choose one who is the enemy of the other!? I have never felt such confusion!

Again and again though, I always come back, initially, to the same question, whenever I start to think about these femme rappers: Just what is it that has drawn me into their world, after living so long in the apparently "masculine" world of what many people actually now call (white) "dad rock"? How did I go, for example,just last night, from listening to "Houses of the Holy" by Led Zeppelin, to a song like "Real Ting" by Stefflon Don? How did I go from wanting a poster of Joan Jett and Lou Reed and Jagger above my computer, to now wishing - so badly - that I could have one of the Da Brat --if only I could find one? How has this happened? Especially when you think that, as a boy, I pretty much always -more or less- did all I could to avoid that horrific "male rap". I mean, growing up in the ciudad in a barrio, I of course knew all the big male hip hoppers--and I suppose I found some of them vaguely intriguing---but, for the most part, I never really liked them, past a certain point. They made me feel uncomfortable, and often I found them insidiously obnoxious. They were too simple minded for my elegant tastes, I you see.

I was reading HG Wells and Jules Verne by the time I was 12: Male rap was simply not something I wanted to be involved with or known for liking. They looked, as I always say, like a bunch of cats from the misogynistic, homophobic, straight laced 1950s. Nothing worse to me. Nothing worse. All the male rappers -- white or black-- always seem to have crew cuts. I was raised with an enforced crew cut as a young boy; but, gleefully, at the age of 12, I demanded, with a picture of Kurt Cobain in hand, that I be allowed to grow my hair out. Hence,  9/10 of those male rappers always just came off looking boring and bland to me. Like marines, I always say. And I sure as hell ain't lookin' to be no marine, momma. Na, homie, no way!

But oh holy day! The day I remembered, about four years ago now, that female rap was also someting which existed, but which was never spoken of! Oh holy day that grandiose evening when I remembered that there are not just one, but two genders, that walk God's earth, and thus two genders that are capable of spittin' mean raps, and so I began to poke around and look. And I came, much to my surprise, to find some of the most moving music I have ever, in my life, heard. Music that I now keep trying to write about (the essays are piling up on my hard drive) but never can quite get started saying anything about...as I stress....

Alas, it is a music that I have so many ideas myself as an artist for, but music which I myself can, literally, have nothing at all to do with! It is for this reason,I think, that I really do find it intriguing in some weird light: The world of the femme rapper, especially the black femme rapper, is a world in which I can never hope to be a part of. I cannot truly cover the songs these girls give me, like I was able to do with every Dylan or Rolling Stones song Iever heard. I cannot do much of anything with them -- besides listen. In fact, much to my chagrin, mostly due to financial purposes,I cannot even take inpiration from them in my manner of dress. Here I am , a poor white boy, trapped with this lousy beard (can't always afford razors) and these old, dusty hoodies, with a pair of 10 year old black motorcycle boots.

In the world of rock, my outfit permits me some entry: I tie a quick scarf around my head, and I make my long black hair a bit messy, and I am in. But in this world of femme rap? Who in hell am I *there*? Why, I am just about the mangiest scrub who has ever lived is what I am. I have no place in that world; though God knows I wish I did. One must think: As a boy, I am a reject to the female rappers because I have next to nothing fancy to offer them; as a girl, or  a "trans", or a "crossdresser", I also, basically, come up empty handed, because my outfits cannot compete with theirs. Not at all. Stefflon Don wears some of the greatest big pink fur coats I have ever in my life seen; all that I wear when I want to be feminine is an old purple flannel with no sleeves. And sometimes I draw girly designs on my arms with markers...as I listen to Stefflon blaring. Oh and...before I forget...don't even dare mention the cosmetics department of these great, inspirational women. I don't even know where on Earth to begin when it comes to that blasted area! You are talking to a boy whose hand begins to shake the moment I uncap one tiny bottle of Wet n'Wild black eyeliner. I have no idea how to apply it, though of course I wish I did, just like lipstick, and rouge, and everything...so that I could be like Stefflon or Azealia, etc! But...what was I saying again? I lose myself in my heat.

I think I was talking about participation or something along those lines, right? Yayayaya, I was saying how I can dream of being a rock god, maybe, because I can play all those diddies on my piano and my geetar, but with femme rap, I'm just a nobody. I can't even, basically, *dream* of being a femme rapper. I can't even really take inspiration from it as a potential performer myself! For how can I hope to write lyrics that are anything like the ones I love most from these women? Take this quick fragment from that Stefflon tune I mentioned before, "Real Ting":

If him cheat, yo the pussy cock up

But when me click me finger like Erup

A cocky fi ah send up in that pussy 'til it buck

Cocky fi ah send up in that pussy 'til it buck

Pussy it 'til it buck, pussy 'til it buck

Take the trash out, let a real nigga in, yeah

They ain't fucking with the kid

Labels on my back 'cause they know I'm gonna win

What on Earth is even going on here? I have little to no idea, perhaps -- but that doesn't mean anything! That doesn't change the fact that I love listening to it..and especially watching Stefflon, in the fantastic video, as she spits it, in a big pink silk robe. Indeed I love it, and I would be a bad liar if I were to tell you that I did not wish I could --somehow-- slip into this character with a snap of the fingers. Oh yes. Why lie about it, my friends and countrymen? Why even bother to lie or hide the fact? I would, perhaps, if the Gods gave me the option, probably shotgun someone to death, in order to get the chance to become Stefflon or Azealia or Iggy when I wanted.

 I cannot even imagine the elation I would feel, if I could get dressed like my femme rapping heroes get a chance to dress, and then get up on a stage & shake my big booty just like they do, and sing lyrics just like they do, etcetc. It would be the show of a lifetime; in fact, I already even have a name -- a few of them -- picked out. Care to know one of them, diligent reader? Here it is: Keyshia Rose. What do you think? No bueno? Bueno? Or what about something like Taccarra Kim? Yes that one is pretty cool, no? Taccarra Kim...an epic first name, but also with an obvious homage to my idol Lil Kim. Would Taccarra make it past one mixtape release? Would she get the chance to film a proper rap video? Would she ever perform, like Queen Azealia Banks now has, in Poland and Texas and everywhere in between? Would she get to make a film, like Banks also now has, called Love Beats Rhymes? What would Taccarra's fate be? Who would she date -- if anyone? Would she marry and then divorce, like the Georgia Peach, aka Rasheeda, has, in the public eye? Would she get international success or just be trapped in the States..? Worse, a specific region of the States?

I think, if I was able to become Taccarra Kim, that I would name the opening album something particularly ferocious and feisty. Debut albums are very important in the world of the feminine rap, just like they are in many other worlds, and we all know how vital good names are. Remy Ma's debut album, for example, is "There's Something About Remy". Queen Latifahs, back in 1989, the year this white boy was born, is "All Hail the Queen". Azealia Banks named hers "Broke with Expensive Taste". And as for my white Aussie friend, Iggy Iggz, she called hers "Ignorant Art" (which seems to be more of a mixtape than an official release). So what on Earth would Taccarra Kims be called...? I think I would make it something like "When Bitchez Gank Caesar" or .. hmm .. "Pink Ceezar". Yes, that's a good one. "Pink Ceezar". We is gettin' somewhere now, ain't we, diligent reader? We're begninnig to let Taccarra breathe, shes coming to life... we are imagining her in the back of a Cadillac Escalade, somewhere on the Interstate...she's heading for JFK airport...

What is she doing? She's about to commence upon her first tour of course, for the "Pink Ceezar" album, just like she ought to.

They turned on Johnny Depp

American audiences don't like Johnny Depp that much anymore, it sometimes seems. From one angle, a lot of the distaste for Depp is now coming from the fact that he allegedly abused his wife (of a year) Amber Heard. Then there is also the claim that he is a wildly irresponsible spender who wasted millions upon millions of dollars. However, I've been following Depp's career as an actor pretty closely since long before his trials with AmberHeard , and one thing I can tell you for sure is this: American audiences , in truth, haven't much fancied Depp for a long time. In fact, there cold even be an argument made that they never really liked him at all (he is not so much a leading man as one would think). But the question is why? Why don't the American audiences like him?

The answer, as with the rest of the American questions, is simple: Johnny Depp is, in fact, simply **too much of an actor** for American tastes. What's that mean? Well, a lot of it ties in with previous arguments I've made, which means a lot of it goes back to , first, the box/prison of ultra seriousness  that grown white men are supposed to live in until death, and second goes back to cultural appropriation, or something like it. In short, Johnny Depp is a little too interested in being interesting,  for the plain Jane Americans. They are frightened by him, and confused by him. Deeply confused. One way to put it is to say that, when the plain Jane American-- man or woman-- sees Johnny Depp, they start hearing that old familiar Amish phone call of blandness and perpetual suburban boredom calling them homewards again. So they reject him....

Many people of course will tell me that I'm merely imagining this. Johnny Depp, they'll explain, is clearly beloved by Americans from coast to coast. He's an A list Hollywood actor. What am I talking about? He's been incredibly famous for a long long time now, etcetc. This is all the true of course. The problem , however, is that Johnnys boat has caught a lot of holes for the years, and if you look at how he's doing at the box office recently -- say, since about 2011--- you'll see that at times it almost looks like the boat will sink. American audiences have been steadily beginning to reject him since around that year. I myself predicted it would happen, long before that date. How did I know? Because I know how boring the plain Jane  Americans are, and I know their tastes like the back of my hand. I hate many of those tastes of course,...just like it seems Johnny does. Often, at least.

So where is the first place that Depp went wrong? In truth, it all begins and ends, in a big way, with Edward Scissorhands. This is arguably the most important film in johnnys career and often if you're discussing him with a casual fan it's the first one that comes up. Edward Scissorhands occupies a place that Pirates of the Caribbean simply does not: It is widely known and seen as a film that , though clearly strange, was also something rather serious. Pirates of the Caribbean is obviously written off as a ridiculous children's film made by Disney....and many would even argue that, though it was the beginning of Depp's real super star status, it was also the end of his chances at ever winning an Oscar , etx. Hence we shoot back to Scissorhands , in order to explain the opening blast of johnnys stardom, and here it is: It's true that American audiences hold Edward Scissorhands dear to this day, but what's also true is that, afterwards, they never really knew how to accept any other "masked" role Johnny did for one key reason, which is this: After Scissorhands, Johnny Depp wasn't as young as he had been when he made the film, and what this meant was that he was supposed to conform, immediately, to taking regular "I'm a dead serious emotionless and colorless white man for life" roles. Most other actors probsbly would have done this, immediately. Most have. Most have simply never taken any exotic or interesting roles at all. Channing Tatum, for example, is a recent white male star who did some vaguely interesting roles as a young man who it seems is now preparing to jump into his" dead serious white man" role for life until death. The problem with Johnny was that he somehow never got the call to do this. Or rather, he got the call, and just kept hanging up the phone.

When one looks at what Johnny spent the rest of the 1990s doing after Edward Scissorhands brought him success , a lot of wine, and a comfortable lifestyle, one starts to see that he just takes role after role where, it seems, he plays literally anything but the dead serious and strong, oh so masculine and courageous white man he was supposed to play. He does films like Dead Man , where he is a frightened white fellow who comes to depend upon an Indian for guidance, he does the Ninth Gate, where he plays a geeky white reader in Gay Europe (he never has a gun), Ed Wood where he steals Sarah Jessica Parkers clothes and wears them, Sleepy Hollow (he seems
Vaguely Gay and European as Ichabod crane) and he also does the now cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which to this day it seems, to me, that no one besides Deadheads selling acid in concert parking lots seems to really know about on any intimate level.

The only two films that Johnny does in the 90s where he plays someting close to who he is supposed to play are the gangster films Blow(2001) and Donnie Brasco...(this is how I met him as a teen in Little Italy) but even there, when you look at it, he doesn't quite nail the white American man who never misses a shot and never sheds a tear the way other actors usually do: In Blow, for instance, Penelope Cruz,  aka "a human being with tits"  at times threatens to steal the show, and so too does his daughter, whom is shockingly developed as a real person, plus he ends up in prison ...and then in Donnie Brasco, he plays a rat cop who is terrified to kill anyone like the bad boys in the Mafia actually do. In other words, johnnys the bitch in Donnie Brasco. Us bad boys in Little Italy watched it and hated him for his role in screwing over Pacinos "Lefty" Ruggiero character (who had 'cancer of da prick') in that film.

Therefore you see, by the time the early -mid 2000s come around , the next and obvious role Johnny needed to take, if he wanted to be Oscar material, was something dead serious, something where he would come out totally virile. He had to play another even harder white cop on a murder case , maybe, or a struggling angry husband always wearing a Guinea tee, a fighter of some kind, etc. Or of course he could have done what DiCaprio, also known as "Jim Dandy", did, when he got tired of waiting for an Oscar: He could have gone back in time, or to Alaska I guess, grown a beard , picked up a shotgun, and connected with the mountains whilst eating canned soup or burnt meat and shot something--anything at all-- to death. If he had done someting like this, Johnny Depp would be a respected American star right now. He would maybe have an Oscar. He would be secure, in terms of being an actor "folks can trust." The chance was there in the early 2000s ; the chance was missed.

Instead of taking something a serious white man was supposed to take, Johnny Depp took a Disney pirate. A "gay seeming" pirate (so we are repeatedly told) who, as it is commented in the film, starts out with "...no ship, a pistol with no bullets, a broken compass, & a sword perhaps made of wood..." In other words, it is a character who starts a film in a manner in which we are told emotionless and instantly successful white men never start anything at all: Totally and completely unprepared, disorganized, and prscticslly in rags. Not to mention the fact that this particular white man, Jack Sparrow, is sporting dreadlocks, a goatee with beads in it, earrings, rings, a colorful scarf tied around his head, and ...worst of all...eyeliner. He also, it should be strongly noted, seems to have not a single real female love interest throughout 5 entire films now. What in good hell was this guy thinking? This was the last role he was supposed to take! Seriously! The last role! Yet he took it...and despite Disneys "hand wringing" over Jack Sparrows "effeminacy", and even despite the fact that Orlando Bloom was perhaps supposed to be the actual star of the first Pirates film (we have all forgotten this now), Johnny Depp shot the Pirates of the Caribbean into legend territory ...at least so far as the kiddies are concerned.

Unfortunately for his fans down here in the trenches of american society who love him dearly of course, he also accidentally shot himself, as an actor,  when this all happened. Because after Pirates, Johnny was never quite the same again. Not to say it had anything to do with him as a person of course. It didn't. Who it had to do with was, you see, that god damn plain Jane American audience. For after they met Jack Sparrow, (as their children watched) I'm of the opinion that they were , deep down, enraged with Johnny Depp for how liberated and free and not serious  he seemed in that film. They watched In horror as their children met a character they loved more than them.

So the only natural response was to start slandering him, and to make sure he would , eventually , fail. This was commenced immediately. And much to the dead serious white man critics orgasmic pleasure , Johnny just kept taking more and more roles that white men need never take , throughout the 2000s, just like he had in the 90s. He became an incredibly strange and queer Willy Wonka that everyone was "mortified by", he became a psychotic English barber in Sweeney Todd, a lunatic writer in Secret Window, a sex crazed Earl of Rochestor in a film no one has seen called the Libertine, plus an animated role, for weird goth kids, in Tim Burtons The Corpse Bride. The only role he did in the 2000s that he was supposed to do, as a real white man, was Public Enemies, where he played John Dillinger the gangster. This film came out in 2009. It received horrific reviews and now sits totally forgotten. Why? Because by 2009, American plain Janes were at the point where they could now no longer accept him as such a character. He had gone too far. He had gone off the deep end, probably whne he did Willy Wonka.

Still, even after all of it, I can vividly remember thinking of Johnny Depp in, say, the year 2011 and 2012, and thinking that he wasn't nearly as despised by America as I would think he ought to have been by that point, for all of the fun he had. It was a curious thing back then, how few Americans had written badly of him. I enjoyed it. I thought maybe I adjudged my people the wrong way. Then, however, it quickly began: The 2010s began to roll onwards, and what might one day be described as the horror decade of johnnys career began to unravel. Film after film that he did, like Alice in Wonderland, the Rum Diary, The Lone Ranger, and then the new Pirates films all came out and, not only were these films completely eaten alive by the critics (wolves lying in wait) but they were also eaten alive, this time, finally, by the American audience itself. The reason is the same as always: The plain Janes from New York to La to Saint Louis  and every good old Main Street in between were perplexed and also , now, **dead sick** of johnnys "refusal" to stop wearing masks and "hiding behind" costumes. The typical refrain of lament went something like this for the average US Joe: "this guy isn't a real actor. A real actor would stop doing these stupid fucking costume roles. When's this guy gonna stop HIDING behind a mask? When's he gonna do a REAL role? A serious role?"

A serious role, of course, is what? A masculine grown white man who doesn't wear costumes. A masculine grown white man who will play roles that -- surprise!-- aren't all that far from just being a masculine grown, regular ol white man. And I suppose that what I personally find so endlessly intriguing about all of this is the idea that a non costume role is real acting , whereas the costume roles that Johnny is most famous for are "not real acting". Maybe it's just me- but doesn't it seem a bit odd? I mean, when I personally think of acting, it seems to me that making an attempt to play a New York City cop in the year 2016 would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to play a pirate, or a Mad Hatter in wonderland, or an Indian in the 1800s West! Yet it seems the audience-- stateside--- does not read things this way. They see it all as exactly the opposite: they think that JD is relying on a costume or a mask to do most of the work for him. In fact, what's even more interesting to me is that, in 2016, when Johnny released Black Mass--- the darkest and most masculine role of his career as an Irish gangster---many fans, I saw , were initially hailing it as what would be his "epic" ; but then even this was derailed and crashed. Why? It's simple: Johnny Depp somehow still went too into costume as the Irish gangster. He literally had a makeup team that had his face made to look exactly like the real life gangster Whitey Bulger he was playing. This was something actors like Ray Liotta or Robert Deniro-- who both played real life gangsters in Goodfellas-- certainly did not do. I thought the makeup was fascinating. The fans, apparently, no. They watched and saw shades of Edward Scissorhands and Jack sparrow and the Hatter and everyone in between. "He's all washed up." they cried, "in the end Johnny Depp has nothing. Maybe he never had anything at all. He can't really act. He just wears fuckin costumes."

Of course, while all of this is being said stateside, I kept noticing something very different always being said in the Great Beyond, aka, ourside of America: Out there, where not every boy is born with the dream of soldiering  for Uncle Sam, it seems that the love for Johnny has, this whole time, just been growing, instead of dissipating. Literally every time I wold read about how johnnys films bombed at the American box office during this decade, it also seemed that I would always also read about how well those exact films were always doing in places like Gay Europe and Asia and elsewhere. It would seem to me that the people in those places watch Johnny Depp films and see more than what the critics here see...where you can rest assured that they will describe each character Johnny does as "quirky". Quirky. That insufferable word! Has ever a word more fastidious been scribbled in the English dictionary? I tell you, If only I had a dollar for every time I read an article where John was described this way. I find the word insufferable. John's characters are not "quirky". They are just ...you know...characters. That's all. Good characters. Characters who deserve to be in a league with all those so called serious cop characters and mob characters and shotgun shooters and onwards, but who aren't allowed to be. Because "quirky".

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