[Kzyxtalk] A boy or a girl and his or her dog.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: A boy or a girl and his or her dog.

/"The truth has to be melted out of our stubborn lives by suffering. 
Nothing speaks the truth, nothing tells us how things really are, 
nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except pain. And 
this is how the gods declare their love." -Aeschylus/

Here's the recording of last night's (Friday 2023-09-08) eight-hour-long 
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg 
(CA) and KNYO.org:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0557

I'm happy to read your writing on the radio. Just email it to me and 
that's all you have to do.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to worthwhile items I set aside for you 
while gathering the show together, such as:

Rerun, because he (Jimmy Buffett) just died. The story of /Peanut Butter 
Conspiracy/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3GwfpXPgmA

Paramotoring over Slovenia.
https://theawesomer.com/paramotoring-over-slovenia/715344/

And Miss Cellania posted a link to the 1992 Robert Downey Jr. film about 
Charlie Chaplin. The part that stuck in my mind back when I saw it on 
VHS was where he's in a bedroom with a fourteen-year-old (?) girl and 
it's implied that they're about to have sex. From across the room she's 
acceptable to him, but up close he doesn't seem to be feeling it. She 
says, "Charlie, what's wrong?" He mutters, "I need some more, ahem, you 
just need lip rouge." She hesitates a moment. Is he serious? Yes. "It's 
over there," he says. She fetches it. The camera moves in to fill the 
screen with the lipstick being applied. Ick, now I recall a movie where 
Steve Martin can't feel sexy toward his wife until she puts lipstick 
around her nostrils.

I've never liked lipstick, from as far back as I can remember, from when 
I was a little boy. The idea of it has always nauseated me, just to see 
it... the texture, the smell. One of the plays I made sound for at 
Mendocino Theater Company in the 2000s had a scene of several 
over-made-up middle-aged women sitting on folding chairs, legs crossed, 
wiggling their shoes. It was a rehearsal. The director of the company at 
the time, Doug Warner, was near me. I don't remember what I said, but it 
might have been a question about the fright-mask level of makeup they 
all had on; was that intentional? Doug said, "I think they look kinda 
/hot/." I said, "Are you kidding." He said, "No."

Young women in offices and on sales floors now use less makeup than they 
used to but they have whole sleeves and calves of tattoos, and metal 
ornaments stuck through holes not only in the flesh of their ears but in 
their cheeks and noses and lips. Or a whole zipper of earrings across 
the length of an eyebrow. I went in for lab work today and the young 
technician who drew blood had one arm covered with tattooed outlines of 
various seemingly unrelated objects, maybe to color in later… People can 
do what they want, of course; it's their body. I don't like it, but it's 
not up to me. But here's what I just noticed: none of any of those 
rather extreme levels of self mutilation are anywhere near as creepy to 
me as Charlie Chaplin calmly, anticipatingly instructing that girl to 
put lipstick on.

Later when the same actor played Iron Man I had an uncomfortable feeling 
whenever he was in a scene with Gwyneth Paltrow. I think my memory mixed 
her with the girl in the Chaplin movie. I liked that they eventually 
gave her superpowers of her own. Iron Man didn't have a superpower. He 
just had a flying suit. My favorite superhero is a tie between Jessica 
Jones and Daredevil. Or maybe Powder. Or The Great and Powerful Turtle 
in the Wild Cards series of books. Or Ned in Pushing Daisies. Or 
Supergirl. Or Magneto. Or Tom Strong. Or Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor 
Who and Torchwood (an anagram for Doctor Who). Jack has the same super 
healing power as Wolverine of X-Men but no super strength, and he has a 
special wristwatch to travel through time.

Here's the whole Chaplin film. The lipstick scene will be somewhere in 
the middle.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2023/09/chaplin.html

Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com