Commie Girl
Listen to Me Crying
“Are you SAG?” was his line, and because my friend Kelly is not an asshole, and thus was not expecting the pick-up, she’d thought he’d asked her if she were sad. “No, not at all!” she explained. “I’m just busy, helping out ... .” Oh, right ... . Was she SAG.
Well, it was Calabasas’ Method Fest indie film festival, after all. She really should have expected it. Instead her interlocutor got an all-evening lecture on the right way to find love, and his way. His way involves Porsches and bimbots, and then he’s sad when the bimbots go prospecting for gold.
Kelly is a junior high art teacher, and her husband, Chris, fixes mandolins and performs in various Long Beach supergroups, and they live on 80 acres on a mountain in Sonoma, and they drink tea made from dried Siberian roses, which tastes exactly as delicious as you would expect tea made from dried Siberian roses to taste, and they bring a proper tea service with them no matter how many miles – and yet they don’t bring proper stemware, meaning we are drinking their lovely wine out of plastic tumblers from the Country Days Inn – and when they are in town, I come running. Method Fest on Friday night? Honey, you couldn’t keep me away.
I was hoping Method Fest would be just terrible. It was in Calabasas, for one thing, the cutest li’l Hummer-filled Agrestic you ever did see, and so that in itself was promising. The worst movie I ever had the pleasure of knowing was at the Newport Beach Film Festival, way back in 2000. It was a movie about Vincent Van Gogh and a crone who tells him in a magnificent Dracula thunder, “You will become the greatest painter of flowers who ever lived! And one day, the flowers will return the favor!” And thus is he called back to life in the middle of the Rose Parade (by Sunflowers! Whee!) to be saved by a poor man’s Julianne Moore who says (whinily, yet nostrils flared) things like, “I want to be respected as a woman and an artist, and I want to know love!” whereupon Vincent says to her, “Listen to the canvas crying, Kaht-tee, and feed it with the paint!” and she listens to him even though he stalks her and totally lives on her roof. You know who else was there? Sally Kirkland was there, as Sally Kirkland, Art Detective! Why? Because Vincent had begun stealing his own works from various billionaires who kept them hung in ill-lit hallways in manses that were intriguingly alarm- and security-free, and Sally Kirkland, she was pissed! “Art terrorists thrive on creating economic chaos,” said she, almost weeping, before ranting spittily about how the Joker made art desecration cool. You know what I always say: Actually, neither do I.
And so Friday night at Method Fest, we saw Crazy. It starred some hot, charming, dimpled young Dennis Quaid type, and he was pretty, and so we sat through it. The truish life story of Nashville session picker Hank Garland was not nearly terrible enough, traveling as it did every rock & roll ’50s biopic ever, and so it was like five hours of Garland and his wife growing apart because he’s always on the road and never puts her first, so she totally fucks some dude doggie-style. There was a shockingly bad moment, though, when a groupie accosts Dimples outside his hotel room door, to have him sadly wave her off because he’s got a girl back in Chicago, whereupon she explains he’s free to pretend she’s somebody else. Wall there, missy, then by all means, please come in and enjoy some dick! So we did like that, then. Also, according to Chris – who knows these things – there were almost a million dollars’ worth of pretty guitars, which were shot lovingly, gauzily, pornily, as they lay center-frame, glistening and throbbing.
Before the movie, Daily News editor Ron Kaye introduced some folks, after explaining that he felt a real kinship with Garland – who had scandalized Nashville by palling with coloreds, which the movie spent probably three whole minutes on in between the torpor of the relaaaationship – because he, Kaye, had been “fighting systems for 40 years in the newspaper business. I didn’t take it as far as Hank Garland did, but ... .” Well. I’m sure you’re holding the line valiantly against Dean Singleton’s rapings, except for that part where you work at the Daily News.
Afterwards, at the afterfuneralparty (where the atrocious DJ was playing 311), nobody talked to us but a guy who said he “help[s] people make money tax-free,” at which point he got a small slice of my mind, and Chris gave us a small music-history lesson on how back in the day, Garland really could shred, but I explained it was shredding like basketball pre-black-people was basketball, i.e. not that impressive by today’s standards, I mean, he was certainly no Nashville Pussy’s Ruyter Suys.
Soon after that, Kelly let loose with “I like to FUCK!” and it wasn’t till the next day that we were able to piece together why she’d said so, because at this point, we were very drunk. Some guy had touched her hair, which gave her great offense, and I’d noted that she’s never had her hair pulled during sex. “You like to make love,” I’d snickered, at which point she’d let fly.
“See?” She said. “It was appropriate! In context.”
And it was.
Published: 04/02/2008
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Who is Rebecca 'Commie Girl' Schoenkopf?
Check these out and find out the truth, in some cases in her own words:
http://sarahspinosa.wordpress.com/2008/0...
http://thecentristoc.com/2008/03/15/the-...
and if you don't believe me, check her out on Liberal OC:
http://www.theliberaloc.com/2008/03/26/m...
Enjoy your new columnist LA Citybeat. I would have used her column-inches to actually make some money with advertising, or perhaps even hire someone who can actually write a coherent piece... but to each their own.
Also feel free to enjoy orangejuice.com and of course thecentristoc.com!
SMS
Beyond the incomprehensibility of this column, Hank Garland continues to get nowhere near the respect he deserves and your column does him a grave disservice. One wonder if this writer knows anything at all about his legacy and the fact that he played some of the most important guitar lines in early rock history.
Do you think it was worth noting in that piece that "the Dennis Quaid type" that she leaves unnamed is actually Waylon Payne who, um, portrayed Jerry Lee Lewis in "Walk The Line"? An important point, no? He's also Waylon Jennings' godson (hence his name) and the son of C&W singer Sammi Smith. Oh, well, since when is a paper supposed to INFORM its readership??
Thanks, though, for at least letting me know that this film exists, though I doubt that was your aim here.
Rebecca -- Great column; just reminds me how much your missed in the OC. Dan Chm.
Welcome to the family! Soooo very happy to hear that you're at LA CityBeat. They clearly hired up.
Commie Girl must be feeling the pain of having a new a_ _hole riped in her. Welcome to the almost big league.
Nothing like being a small fish in a large pond. Your much better jerking off material then the last guy.
Check out the link above to find out more about your new 'editor.'
SMS
Who cares? Now *here's* a story:
http://thecentristoc.com/?p=124
Rebecca Schoenkopf: The long lost daughter of Archie Bunker? A total fraud to the LGBT community? You decide.
SMS
... and the irrelevance keeps on coming. If Steve didn't get hired you wouldn't have a gig. I'm sure he made you part of his deal. I wonder what you deal with him is.
Seriously, what the HELL are you talking about? You accuse me of ranting, but then you babble. The difference is that at least a rant has substance.
I'd find a 5 year old's diary more intriguing than your complete gibberish. Conjunction Junction. What's your function?
SMS