Psyche in a Dress

You guys know the myth of Eros and Psyche, right? No? Well, here you go. YA writer Francesca Lia Block also has retold it. If you're wondering if there are plenty of skinny beautiful girls, rock gods, and gauzy vintage dresses...yes. Yes, there are. Here's her version:

Francesca Lia Block: "Psyche was born, the most beautiful mortal ever known. EVER."

Sadako: "Um, what about Helen of Troy?"

FLB: "Try to speak a little louder, I'm a trifle deaf in this ear.

"Psyche's gorgeous. Her dad has issues (he's had her mother and sisters killed more than once). And he's a director who has her star in movies where she's topless."

Sadako: "So she's Asia Argento?"

FLB: "Her dad is dating Aphrodite, who wants him to put her in his films, but he only wants to make movies with Psyche."

Sadako: "Aphrodite, the mother of Psyche's future lover Eros? Ew, Aphrodite and Psyche's dad will get married and their kids will be horrible freaks with pink skin, no overbites, and five fingers on each hand!"

FLB: "One day, a dark lover comes to Psyche's side. She never sees what he looks like, but she loves him and he loves her. Then her sisters come to her, wearing black dresses and sunglasses, criticizing--"

Sadako: "Her sisters? You mean, her sisters whom she mentioned her father killing on page one?"

FLB: "Yes."

Sadako: "Just checking."

FLB: "They come and tell her that Psyche is in love with a monster and that she cannot trust him. She tries to see who he is that night and he's gorgeous! He gets pissed at her for not trusting him."



Eros: "Don't look at me. DON'T LOOK AT ME!"

FLB: "Psyche's father puts her in a film with a guy called Narcissus. And then she dates a rock god called Orpheus who lost his girlfriend Eurydice tragically. Orpheus has dark hair, pale skin--"

Sadako: "Is too thin and has dark circles under his eyes? Sweet, FLB sexy boy bingo!"



FLB: "But Psyche couldn't be with Orpheus. She could not give herself up. Or the chance at her god, her real love, Eros."

Sadako: "What IS it with Eros? Does he have Yoplait flavored balls or what?"

FLB: "Then Psyche's sisters told her that Orpheus was dating the Maenad, a crazy rock singer, and they did heroin together...and then Orpheus died."

Sadako: "Considering death's track record, I'm not seeing the tragedy."

FLB: "But the Maenad has a terrible story, too! She had a sad childhood where her father told her she was a dirty slut and wouldn't buy her the Malibu Barbie dreamhouse even though her special pixie friend Mab wanted it--oh wait, wrong story. Anyway, the Maenad played guitar and wrote poetry to keep from cutting herself. She danced at rock shows and met Orpheus.



"But she was always afraid he still had a thing for Eurydice and knew that the only way to be sure that he loved her was to do something terrible. Something...Dionysian."

Sadako: "She made him OD on heroin?"

FLB: "Or something. Then Psyche meets Hades at a concert downtown and they make love in his home, an old Victorian building."



Sadako: "What what WHAT?"

FLB: "Hades is decadent and sexy. He owns tattoo parlors, and BDSM type clothing stores, and promotes clubs, and he's brilliant and dark and deliciously Byronic, feeds her pomegranate seeds and she feels her soul sucked by him, and she's not sure she can let him in but she wants to, and...ohhhhhhh, god, yes, he's so sexy."

Sadako: "Uh. Should I come back when you've had a chance to, um...freshen up?"

FLB: "Psyche and Hades dance and go to the beach and it's frightfully romantic until Hades stops having sex with Psyche. Psyche begins to feel insecure."



Psyche: "Is it me? I'm fashionably thin and waif-like. Is it you? Were you molestered?"

Hades: "SHUT UP! Just...SHUT UP! You're not my mom! I mean, no, definitely not. Maybe I'm just tired of fucking you."

Psyche: "We could...do other stuff."

Hades: "Girl on top? Hoo yeah!"

FLB: "And it turns out that Hades was a sweet little boy who grew up on a farm seeing animals being born and dying, marveling at the circle of life. But he wet his bed and his mom put him in diapers till age twelve and his dad liked to compare penis sizes.



"Hades' mother hated that his father looked at Hades with lust in his eyes. So she did the logical thing, beating him and locking him in the chokey till Hades ran away from home. Hades began to wear eyeliner and change his hair color, listen to loud music, set off fireworks in the desert, and tattoo himself."

Sadako: "Hades is the annoying emo kid I knew sophomore year of high school?"

FLB: "Hades and Psyche have been having lots of kinky sex that sucks the life force out of her. Hm, note to self, ask editor to come up with more mystical way of putting it.



"Psyche's rib is dislocated and her chakra is out of sorts. She goes home one morning and her mother is in the lobby of her building."

Sadako: "Her WHAT--forget it. You know what? Forget it. Getting this story to make sense is like trying to figure out when Big Love jumped the shark."

Psyche's Mom: "Don't date the God of Hell. He's terrible."

Psyche: "It's...complicated, OK? You don't understand everything! After all, you walked out on me! I don't need to listen to you!"

Psyche's Mom: "I bought you a lacey vintage white dress that you can pair with pink boots."

Psyche: *Sob* "Mama, can you hear me? Mama can you see me? Mama can you find me in the night..."



FLB: "Psyche went on living with Hades but realized she couldn't go on like this. Especially since her mother had an adorable whitewashed cottage by the sea. Every six months, she would go back to Hades, then return to her mother Demeter again--"

Sadako: "Uh, nice lady? Did you ever actually read any mythology?"

FLB: "When I was anorexic, my boyfriend and I would smoke opium on the open sunporch, where he'd read aloud Ovid and I'd think of my dying father as my stomach growled like a cat in the night."

Sadako: "That's a no then."

FLB: "One day, Psyche started working for her dad's girlfriend Aphrodite who now owns a clothing boutique where she sells gorgeous vintage dresses.

.

"Aphrodite's angry and jealous and hate filled and works poor Psyche like a dog and hurls cats at her when people try to tell her that her dresses aren't elegant.

"Then one day Psyche's all sad, so Aphrodite feels bad for her. She gives her a book that Psyche reads, and she realizes that it's just like her life. Psyche writes to the publisher and it turns out the guy who wrote it was her lover Eros. They have sex for a few months and then he leaves.

"Also, it turns out that Aphrodite set up the meeting between Eros and Psyche, then told Eros that Psyche was a manipulative man eater. And Eros believes her when Psyche lights the candle to look at him. Aphrodite did the whole thing out of jealousy of Psyche and fear of losing her little boy.



"But wait! Psyche's pregnant and the child is called Joy. Joy grows up to love Hades, too--"

Sadako: "Ew, ew, ew..."

FLB: "Or, um, not Hades, but her own evil but sexy hell god. And then Joy leaves Hades because this is something every girl has to go through. Psyche and Joy make a performance art movie starring Joy. And at the indie film festival--"

Sadako: "Roger Ebert is so inspired by it that he shakes off his paralysis to rise up and declare it the worst film since the Frank from Donnie Darko/Brown Bunny cross over?

FLB: "Eros returns and he and Psyche are old but they've still got it going on and they...reconnect. Fin."



Worst Eros and Psyche retelling ever.

Pretty Dead

Meet Charlotte. She's a blonde haired blue eyed svelte beauty. She gets compared to Gisele Bündchen regularly. She's got all the right clothes and accessories. She's also a vampire, but please--don't use the "v word," as she puts it. All the boys want her and all the girls want to be her, which seems to make her the Ann Margret of the undead set. Charlotte's got a husband, William, an amoral sexy Byronic cad who turned her into a vampire a hundred years ago, whom she's now fleeing. Plus, she's got a sweetly naive high school best friend named Emily, now dead. And Jared, Emily's boyfriend who Char's now in love with. And oh yeah, turns out Emily's not exactly dead...she's...undead. And I thought life was hard enough when you were just the other kind of v-word.

So...what happens when Francesca Lia Block jumps on the Twilight bandwagon?

That fateful conversation between Francesca Lia Block and her trusty editor:

Editor: So we were thinking of doing something Twilight-y. Except edgier and hipper.

FLB: But I've never worked with vampires before...I'm more into gorgeous skinny girls with fairy wings who wear too much eyeliner.

Editor: Don't worry. That'll go over fine. Make your main character beautiful, but to keep up with the whole Bella Swan ideal, give her a few great qualities that could be flaws.

FLB: Like, she's really tall and thin, but back in the 19th century when she first became a vampire, that wasn't considered beautiful?

Editor: Perfect! Oh, and make sure that her breasts are just a little too big for her tiny waisted frame. God, I love that flaw.

FLB: This whole drinking people's blood thing sounds a bit icky, though...

Editor: Nah. Veganpires are in. The kids love socially conscious vampires--they drink animal blood or synthetic blood or something. Why don't you write it so your main character gets a constant supply of cow's blood on the black market. The black market part sounds edgy, the fact that no one's killing humans will make sure it goes over well in the heartlands, and you won't even offend the Jews and Muslims because it's not pig's blood.

FLB: What about the whole sleeping during the day thing. Sure, my characters wake up late but sometimes they go to the beach at dawn to surf.

Editor: Haven't you read Twilight? When you want to break a rule of traditional vampire lore, just have your character chuckle, look wistful, and say something like, "Ah yes, a bit of vampire mythos from one of your human films. If only being a vampire were really like that." Just make sure they don't sparkle. Meyers and her people have patented sparkling.

FLB: Maybe my character could just...wear a lot of sunscreen?

Editor: One more thing. We're really trying to court the kind of girl who's not usually into vampires, so try not to use the word "vampire" too much. Use "the v word" or have your main character say that she's not really into labeling herself. We want our average reader to be the girl who watches Top Model and spends more time in Sephora than in Hot Topic. What can you do for us?

FLB: Stop comparing my protagonists to Nefertiti or Aphrodite and start name dropping Kate Moss and Gisele? And mention some lip gloss shades?

Editor: Franny, you're on fire. Pretty Dead is going to do for vampires what Weetzie Bat did for weird alternative chicks in love with their gay BFFs.

Attributes of a Francesca Lia Block -pire.

Coffins are NOT a girl's best friends. Char: "I sleep in a big bed with a headboard of an antique silk Japanese wedding kimono, embroidered with flowers and cranes..." (Oh yeah? I sleep in a racecar bed!) Charlotte sometimes thinks she'd like to climb into her Louis Vuitton trunk at night, but she wants to appear normal.

"I never drink....wine." PSYCH! Early on in the book, Charlotte and her manpire William kill to live. In the present, though, Charlotte drinks cow's blood to live. She also eats real food on occasion--like very rare steak. She even imbibes red wine. When your character has more lax standards about drinking blood than Audrey II, you know you're in trouble.

Let the sun go down on me. Nothing bad happens to these vampires in the sun. They don't even sparkle. But they do take care to wear layers just in case, because you never know with vampires (or volcanoes). And I wasn't joking about the sunscreen remark earlier.

Pretty vampire. At one point, Charlotte's process becomes reversed and she starts turning human. During her re genesis of that mortal coil, she breaks a nail that won't heal! And she even gets a zit. Vampires, on the other hand, have impossibly clear skin and great bodies and they never get wrinkles. They're like 90210 or Melrose Place characters. They get to hang around while the world gets bombed (London and Hiroshima circa WWII) and watch while suffering no ill effects. (Hell, even 90210's Kelly Taylor suffered some minor burns after that rave episode that put her self esteem in major jeopardy.)

We never smudge our eyeliner or mascara. Vampires can't cry! They don't even cry blood like in True Blood. Charlotte will always have that perfect smokey eye. Normal girls with their pores and emotions just can't compete.

We don't have to stay undead. Charlotte doesn't even have to deal with the fact that she'll be alone when all her mortal friends and loved ones die because she gets to go back to being a normal girl at the end of it. (Her vampire husband reverses the process so that Emily can turn into a vampire, but Charlotte has to go back to being human.) So Char gets the fun "staring into the abyss" part of being a vampire without the long term soul sucking loneliness. Or as I like to refer to it: angst-in-a-can.

Living in a material world. Vampires get more options for sexiness. No more limiting themselves to Morticia Addams or Elvira for fashion icons. Charlotte's got a house full of sexy red dresses, Chanel No. 5, gladiator type sandals, and make up galore. Charlotte spends most of her century with William feeding and wearing cool decade appropriate outfits. (Did you really think FLB would miss up an opportunity to have her main characters dress like Marilyn and James Dean in the fifties, or John and Yoko in the 70s?) And when Char sees that her best friend Emily has come back to life, her reaction isn't, "Holy shit, are they appealing to the zombie demographic, too" but rather, "Her lips were painted red...I even thought I recognized the shade. M.A.C. Viva Glam."

If you're wondering what makes an FLB-pire all that different from Tyra Banks that time she went postal in season 4 of AMNT...good question.

Beep beep! Plagiarism alert!

There are just so many people that I can think of who might want to sue Ms. Block. That either means she has no new ideas of her own when it comes to vampires or that she's really got her finger on the pulse of young undead America.

The producers of True Blood. Look at those lips.

Except you could tell that HarperCollins was really courting the young teen demographic. Instead of blood red lipstick, we have pinkish lip gloss sheen with a gold shimmer. The teeth are biting into a red and white mint that's dissolving into blood. In other versions of this book, the mint is black and white and there's no blood. (Why, you may ask? So this book would appeal to both the goth crowds who think that the only thing more romantic than blood is dying of TB in a sanatorium, and the kids who just purchased their first Bettie Page t-shirts at Hot Topic but are scared off by bodily fluids.)

The Estate of Francine Pascal. Charlotte has blue eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean. Come on, FLB, couldn't you have thought of something a little bit darker? She's a vampire, not a Bratz doll. How about "eyes as deep, dark and menacing as the Black Sea at dusk"? Whoa. That was easy. Too easy. Urge to stop snarking and start writing vampire fanfic, rising...

Diablo Cody. FLB: "Teenage girls are powerful creatures. They want what they want and they will do what they must to get it." The line in Jennifer's Body that goes, "Hell is a teenage girl" is equally trite, but at least Diablo got there first. (FLB, you do get points for knowing better than to try to lift the inane lines "Honest to blog" or "Oh my god, Move on dot org!")

Britney Spears and whoever got blackmailed into directing her Lucky video. Charlotte says, "People want to be me. But I am like that [Chinese goddess statue] lying prone in my bedroom. No one understands the extent of my loneliness." To be honest, I preferred, "She's so lucky / She's a star / But she cry cry cries in her lonely heart...Why do these tears come at night?"

Prosaic Prose

• Charlotte has reservations about killing people, so the vampire William makes a speech about why it's okay to kill people to satisfy the bloodlust. Yes, this is before Charlotte decides to only drink cow's blood. The vampire Bill plays the amoral Lestat to Charlotte's sensitive Louis:

We must make the best of it. We must love our victims, honor and respect them. We give them meaning. We give them value. By dying this way, their lives have purpose.

This almost makes Mufasa's insipid reply to "But Dad, don't we EAT the antelope" seem deep. Vampire William, do you guys also make sure to use every part of the human after you drain it for blood?

• Jared begs Charlotte to make him into a vampire, and she replies:

I will not pierce your neck like a barbarian...But my body senses your need, like a mother with a newborn.

Char, if you weren't a vamp, I'd be begging you to get your tubes tied.

Conclusion

I know as a teenager that I was pretty lame. My idea of being a vampire meant seducing pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland while living in a coven that featured Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Richard Gilmore. I thought Cry Little Sister was a great song. And I thought vampire chokers were the height of good taste. Yup, I was a square.

With all that in mind, I still feel comfortable condemning Charlotte and William to the trash heap of vampire fiction.

Girl Goddess #9

I've reviewed another Francesca Lia Block book. This one was comprised of nine different stories, and I'm going to review the four that I read and reread the most. The good news is that I did have fun rereading and snarking. The bad news? I've got Love Potion #9 stuck in my head.

Girl Goddess #9

This story was written in a zine format. You remember zines, don't you? They're what girls with something to say did before we had blogs. This one's called Girl Goddess (and is the ninth issue, hence, Girl Goddess #9) and is written by two girls who call themselves Lady Ivory and Alabaster Duchess. Their faux names and their zine name come from song lyrics of a (thankfully fictional) singer, Nick Agate. In this issue of Girl Goddess, the gals explain how they got started and how they got to meet and interview idol Nick Agate. But first, an intro to our girls.

Alabaster Duchess describes her hair as "ebony." Her least favorite things are people who eat meat, people who are mean, and people who make fat jokes. Between this and the detail about how one day after school, some boys made fun of Alabaster Duchess's figure for being "too womanly and voluptuous," I'm seeing less punk rock Vargas girl, and more pale, tubby goth kid.

Lady Ivory is incessantly quirky. Her favorite things are "dancing around [her] room in [her] silver platforms from the 70's, reading poetry, having picnics in the backyard when the moon is full." And she's dyed her hair so many times, she doesn't even know what color was originally anymore. God, Lady Ivory, how many times did you rent Garden State and Eternal Sunshine before you got your delightfully quirky persona down pat?

May I present, Alabaster Duchess.

And Lady Ivory.

They write a letter to one of their favorite authors who passes their zine on to someone who knows Nick Agate. Eventually they get to meet him and interview him for their zine. How to describe Nick Agate, whose life ambition is to one day be described by Rolling Stone as a latter day David Bowie? Think the ego of Kanye West, the pale sunken chested allure of Sid Vicious, the sensitive pussitude of Connor Oberst. He features midgets, naked children, jugglers, and dancing trees at his concerts. He's also got pierced nipples and a tattoo of Venus on his back. And if you're wondering how we know these asinine details, yes, he did give his interview topless. At this point, the only thing that makes him less assy than he could be is that there's no detail about his tattoo having implants.

The girls ask Nick Agate about his position on drugs. Nick: "Let me put it to you this way, my body can handle a whole lot of shit. My veins are like gold-plated...My gut is like a crystal cave." Nick, baby, have you been listening to your personal physician again? Dr. Conrad "Seriously, baby, I can prescribe anything I want!" Murray can't write poetry for shit.

After the interview, Nick Agate's gorgeous, pale skinned girlfriend (Celeste) comes in, and since she makes Edgar and Johnny Winter look swarthy, our girls stop idolizing Nick Agate and get massive girl-crushes on his galpal and start to realize how douchey the world of rock stars is. I envy them for their moment of truth--even Tootie on the Facts of Life got one when she realized she spent every waking moment idolizing a member of the Jackson family whose greatest claim to fame in the 00s wouldn't be a huge memorial in death, or bringing sexy back to the Superbowl, but getting voted off Celebrity Big Brother.

I myself wouldn't realize how truly unworthy of my time rock stars were till my late teens...not till the dawn of reality TV when I got to watch Leif Garrett wrestle Vern Troyer on Celebrity Big Brother, or when I saw Ozzy Osbourne go through the bowel movements of an aging constipated bulldog for his lost Viagra tablets.

Celeste and Nick:

Words to live by, (Nick Agate) "I just want to write songs that make people's flesh start dancing on their bones without them even realizing what's going on. I want to create something to take you into the fuckin' solar system." Hey, it's fifty percent less douchey than, "If I heard [my album] and it was made by somebody else, I would go to the bathroom and take a shit, because I would be scared." (Yes, that's Kanye.)

Rave

This is written as a memorial piece to a girl that the nameless protagonist knew in high school. Our protagonist sang in a kiddie rock band until he stopped being cute (so I guess this is what happens if you have a Toddlers and Tiaras type mom, but you're not a girl). In his post Menudo days at a high school, he meets a hot girl who's a rock star groupie. They both feel like freaks, him because he used to be a kid star, and her because of all her rock star sex. Even though he would never tell her what to do, he hates that she has sex with all these rock stars who (in his opinion) aren't good enough for her. He secretly loves her and wishes he could rock her world. Years later, now that he's writing the story, he finds out that she overdosed when she was only seventeen.

Worst dialogue ever?

I said, 'You're so soft,' and she said, 'I have a special beauty secret. Rock star body fluids.' 'No way, Rave,' I said. 'By touching you they're getting their power,' and she just looked at me. Her eyes got really wet.

Rock star body fluids. I haven't been so skeeved since the time I read that Michael Jackson used to refer to ejaculate as "duck butter."

A snapshot of our two young freaks:

Dragons in Manhattan

Tuck Budd is a young teenager in Manhattan who has two mommies--Izzy, a sexy six foot tall redhead, and Anastasia, who's very quiet and short-haired. They do socially relevant things like watching the play Angels in America and acting out parts of it in Central Park, and going to the shrine at Saint John the Divine to cry over the people who died of AIDS. But one day Tuck freaks out when she goes to a real school and gets teased, wanting to know why she doesn't have a dad like everyone else. She does some research and finds a baby book in Izzy and Anastasia's closet that contains a postcard of a hotel in San Francisco called the Pink Gingerbread. Tuck steals some cash from her parents and flies to Frisco to find herself and her father.

She meets a cast of characters and to make a long story short, she learns where she came from. Back in the day, Izzy was a guy with gender identification issues, named Irving Rose. But a guy who wanted to be a woman and was attracted to women. (Sigh. I blame this book for all the skeevy guys who, when I tried to blow them off with, "I like girls!" responded with, "Cool, I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body!") Irving Rose met Anastaisa in high school. Anastasia was a lesbian whose girlfriend was forced to move when her parents found out. So, Irving Rose asked Anastasia out and told her he was in love with her and wanted to be a woman. The two of them ended up getting married and conceiving a baby (Tuck) after which Irving Rose got surgery and became Izzy.

Incidentally, when Tuck got home, she gets no hide-tannin' for stealing and running. away from home And neither a a hymen check nor a drug test were in the works (either Izzy and Anastasia are super progressive or they just haven't read up on their Go Ask Alice).

Pixie and Pony

Pixie and Pony have been friends for years, and tonight is prom night. They, and their third friend, Pony's "BFF" Mini go to the prom, drink a lot, and fuck their beaux. Pixie reminisces about how Pony never really considered Pixie her "best friend" even though she always wished they could be best friends. They try really hard to be cool and quirky. Like on Pony's thirteenth birthday they have a pig party (make a pig cake, silk screen pig t-shirts) and on Pixie's birthday they have a peach party.

Anyway, basically Pixie feels that she's a hanger-on in Pony's way cooler life because Pony always has official best friends which change about as often as Pony changes lip glosses. At the end, Pixie says that she wishes they could be best friends. Pony replies, "'Best friends?...We are sisters.'" Well, that explains why you and your other best friend in elementary school stole Pixie's lunch bag and made her cry and why your first choice activities all involved your "real" best friends.

Pixie, I'm going to tell you the same thing I tell all awesome but overlooked girls with hot, bitchy best friends. I told it to Veronica when Heather Chandler dubbed her Pukeahontos at that awful college party, to Amanda Seyfreid when she decided to take a role playing second banana to Megan Fox, and to Thora Birch when Scarlet "I Reinvented Curves" Johansson got all those magazine covers post-Ghost World and Thora got bupkis. And that piece of advice is: diet coke covers the taste of Drano perfectly. (How come only Klepto McStealy listened?)

And scene! Expect California Girls! by the end of the week.

Francesca Lia Block's Nymph

The book starts off with a quotation from Ovid's Metamorphosis. No, Francesca, putting in an Ovid quotation doesn't make this book anything less than glorified fanfiction. It's a series of erotic stories that are sort of joined together. And the main point is sex. And while I have enjoyed FLB in the past, these erotic stories are quite painful to read. I recapped about five of them for your pleasure (or pain).

On a housekeeping note, I know most of you said you wanted Gossip Girl and Nanny Diaries, but I haven't gotten around to recapping either of those--hopefully, I'll have one up by the end of the week. And if you're hungry for TV, I recapped a Dr. Vink episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on my other blog. Well, here's Nymph!

Mer

An ex surfer named Tom who broke up with his girlfriend, Tawny, hangs out on the beach all day thinking of the good old days surfing with his old lady. (Man, Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys really need to collaborate on a song one of these days. I'd call it Working Class Kahuna Blues.) On the beach one day he sees a girl in a wheelchair with silvery fabric covering her legs. She's your typical FLB/anime creation--huge boobs, tiny waist, super thin. Her name is Mer, and she claims that she's already met Tom (he's had dreams about being rescued by a mermaid when he was younger). Since Mer always wears that sheath around her legs, they can't have regular sex, so the whole story reads like a testimony to oral sex and breast fondling. (I get the feeling that FLB got bored and let her horny stepbrother whose girlfriend won't do oral and has weird hang-ups about her breasts, ghost-write the story.)

People speculate about how Mer and Tom have sex, like maybe Mer was molested and that's why she does the sheath thing. Some people think she's an actual factual mermaid. And me, I'm just wondering why there was no, "Why couldn't she be the other kind of mermaid with the fish part on the top and the lady part on the bottom?!" reaction from Tom.

Cringe worthy sex talk: "His cock feels huge, full of ocean."

Nymph

This story basically sums up everything I loved and hated about Francesca Lia Block's writing. Sylvie and Plum are best friends, "...who met at a poetry workshop in Venice and fell in love with each other's imagery--blood, lace, booze, angels, emaciated coughing boys...Also they were both shy, their hair was bleached blond then, choppy with dark roots; they only wore black thrift shop dresses or torn Levi's and vintage rhinestone jewelry." And, let me fill in the rest: they both think they were the only ones who really knew what the Velvet Underground with Nico album was about, after the bleached hair thing they decided to dye their hair black with Bettie Page bangs, and every weekend they go shopping for a new pair of Converse sneakers.

Anyway, Sylvie spends most of her time going home with skinheads who, after screwing her, reveal that they have swastika tattoos (actually, this happened in Weetzie Bat, too, and it makes me wonder if FLB had a Nazi fetish). Sylvie then gets mopey because she hasn't found a Nice Guy yet. Plum tells her she has a secret that could help Sylvie. No, Plum, I want to see Sylvie try to find love at a Klan rally and complain some more about the dearth of classy guys. Okay, okay. Plum's secret? Every time she sleeps with someone (male or female), they find the gal/guy of their dreams.

Sylvie agrees to sleep with Plum. I really wish that FLB did twist endings, and that it turned out that Plum was lying and she had a hidden camera in one of her Deepak Chopra samplers that recorded the whole torrid sex scene for posterity (and lonely horny guys watching ads for Hipsters Gone Wild in between episodes of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Big Bang Theory). But Plum was telling the truth and Sylvie meets a guy called Ben at a poetry reading the next day. Ben tells her he loves her emaciated coughing boy/blood/lace/booze/angel poetry. Our Ben is an awesome liar when it comes to getting into Sylvie's lacy white fairy wing festooned thong. Either that or he really likes her poetry because he's got a hard on for tuberculosis victims.

Cringe worthy sex scene: "She can feel the warm night air on her clit and her womb is heavy inside of her." Mm, uterine talk.

Goddess

This one's about a guy called Elvis Dean who broke up with his girlfriend a few months ago and is heartbroken. (Okay, FLB, we get it, you lust after old 50s and 60s icons. Just please don't name Elvis's girlfriend Marilyn Mansfield and we'll be cool.) Elvis's guy friends try to bring him to a strip club to show him a good time and get him laid.

All the girls at this club are kind of weird and twisted looking--like there's one girl with wings and another with lots of limbs. It's kind of like if Tod Browning designed a strip club. Then Elvis sees his ex-girlfriend, Cocoa, and she's some kind of cat-girl. Her body's still a hot human but her face looks all cat-like. She tells him that this place is evil and begs him to take her away, which he does. Apparently, Cocoa ended up here because she always wanted to be a dancer and no one (Elvis included) ever took her seriously. (Honey, the only way you could be taken seriously is if you were a gorilla who mastered sign language, and even then there are going to be people making banana jokes.)

Cocoa met a guy called Wonder who promised to make her a star in exchange for her getting surgery. The surgery made Cocoa look like a cat girl. And no, not an Eartha Kitt/Julie Newmarr type. No, not even Michelle Pfieffer level. I'm talking actual cat features. Then she was trapped in the strip club to dance with all the other freak girls for all eternity and could only leave if she was really in love with someone who could help her escape (or once gravity took its toll and her tits started being less feline and more udder-like). I do have to point out that if your name is Cocoa, you can't be surprised when you wind up in a strip club (or in Paris Hilton's Kate Spade clutch). And if a guy named Wonder makes a deal with you, you better be damned sure he's black, can't see, and can sing a few bars of Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

So Cocoa begged Elvis's friend Tony to come to the strip club to take her away. Elvis tells her she was already the most beautiful woman and she sadly says that now she's a freak. He tells her, "'You're still a goddess.'"

Cocoa: "Mew?"

On a happier note, after this book came out, teen girls everywhere flooded Hot Topic trying to buy as many kitty ears and tails as they could, and Furry conventions enjoyed an all-time high in membership.

Cringe-worthy prose: "He thinks of that old wives' tale about how cats can strangle babies, take their breath away. How she will take all of his breath. How he will let her."

Plum

I smell a cross-over! Plum meets Elvis Dean. She knows that whenever she sleeps with anyone they wind up with another person but she's cool with that. She dates Elvis Dean and they're going really slow. Then one day she decides she wants to have sex with him so she drives to his apartment and finds him staring at videos of him and Cocoa doing it.

Plum tells Elvis he's been a very bad boy and proceeds to spank and finger him. After, she explains about her secret (everyone she fucks finds their real love). He says he's already found the girl he's looking for and she says she saw (meaning Cocoa). He explains that that was a long time ago, that Cocoa died. Plum says, "'I'm sorry...I wish I was her for you.'" Elvis Dean replies, "'Sweetie! No. You're you. That's all I want.'" The cynic that lives inside me and feeds on snark and ginger snaps says that Elvis Dean will soon start to channel the Jimmy Stewart character in Vertigo and start trying to dress Plum in kitty outfits, but I think I lack the requisite wide eyed wonder to really "get" FLB's books. (That's what she said when she turned me down to be her assistant back in college. Also my wardrobe is sadly lacking in gauzy fairy wings, and I made the mistake of saying I thought Springsteen was more talented than Bowie.)

Cringe worthy sex scene: "Elvis Dean stands up and Plum pulls him down over her lap. She pulls his pajama bottoms half way down so his big powerful curved ass is up in the air." Did you borrow that ass from J-Lo?

Overcoming

This story is about a girl named Carmelita and her boyfriend Tony. (The same Tony who brought Elvis Dean to see Cocoa.) Tony adores Carmelita but she's got a lot of insecurities that stem from being the middle child with gorgeous older and younger sisters. Carmelita's beautiful, too, but she doesn't think so, and she's always looking at other hot women and thinking how Tony must prefer them. Then she fantasizes about them and masturbates herself to sleep. (She's not a lesbian, though...supposedly.)

One of her fantasies involves Tony as a contestant on the dating game with three beautiful women each showing off their best feature to them (one woman shows off her huge breasts, another her huge booty, and another her long, shapely legs). Somehow, I think this was FLB's concession to the fact that women with junk in the trunk can be hot. (I do get the feeling that due to the fact that almost every FLB heroine is an emaciated hot girl that Anorexics of America complained.)

In the end, Carmelita decides to embrace her insecurities and incorporate it in fantasies with her beau by describing hot women to him while they make love. Let's count down the number of hours it takes before Tony talks Carmelita into a threesome and she agrees and then afterward they have one lies awake feeling hollow and empty inside, shall we?

In conclusion, this wasn't the worst erotic fiction I've ever read. If you'd like to read about that, wait a few weeks. It'll be up soon.

Weetzie Bat

Before I start the book, I also want to do a shout out to my fellow blogger, friend, compatriot, and partner in crime, Ali, who started a travel blog (travelogue? travelblogue?) called Travel Rambling. It's in my blog roll, and you should all check it out. Well, snark on, MacDuff!

This is the story of Weetzie Bat, a high school girl who's a little different. She meets Dirk, who turns out to be gay. The two of them go duck-hunting (searching for guys) together and get into all kinds of PG rated scrapes. Then one day, Dirk's grandmother (whom he lives with) tells Weetzie and Dirk that they have to love each other first before they can fall in love with someone else (then she rips off her face mask to reveal she's Whitney Houston). She gives Weetzie a lamp and a genie comes out and Weetzie asks for three wishes--a duck for Dirk, My Secret Agent Lover Man for Weetzie, and a house for everyone to live in. Then Grandma Fifi kicks the bucket and they move into her cottage. Dirk meets a guy called Duck with a hideous duck tail hairdo. Eventually, Weetzie meets a guy called MSALM, a movie director who puts Weetzie and all their friends in his movies. Two babies and some ethnic friends later, they're a real family. And there are many more Weetzie books to come.

• Dirk's car is named Jerry because it reminds him of Jerry Lewis. Did it marry its thirteen year old cousin? (Okay, okay, I know, wrong Jerry Lewis.)

• Grandma Fifi dies only a few chapters in, leaving her house to both kids, and her clothes to Weetzie. Okay, considering that later on, about a thousand random people move in, I'm bemused as to why they had to 86 Grandma Fifi. And there's no Twilight Zone/Monkey's Paw lesson to be learned about why we shouldn't make reckless wishes--Dirk channels Dr. Kevorkian as he talks about how happy Grandma Fifi would have been knowing she was able to do something good for the kids. Also, look at these dresses she left behind. (No, that's what Dirk actually says.)

• Actually, I do know why Grandma Fifi had to go. Pretty much everyone who moves into Chateau Weetzie is young and bizarrely hot. I get the feeling that Francesca Lia Block wanted the vibe to be more Big Brother meets a Boy George video and less hipsters move to Boca Raton. (And yes, I'd rather read about the latter. I want old Jewish relatives to tell me jokes and call me bubbelah and tell me I'm not eating enough, and I'm tired of settling for Old Jews Telling Jokes!.)

• Weetzie meets some diverse friends. There's Jamaican Valentine Jah-Love, and his wife, Ping Chong. Their multi ethnic kid is Raphael Chong Jah-Love. (And I call shitty parenting. No, not for the biracial thing, you neocons, for saddling their kid with a double hyphenated name. That will be such a bitch when he has to bubble in his name for the SATs.)

• Valentine tells Weetzie about Jamaica: "'...your body feels radiant, like orange lights, like Bob Marley's voice...In Jamaica we climb the falls holding hands and the water rushes down bluer than your eyes. In Jamaica. In Jamaica it is hot and wet, and the people are hot and wet, and the flowers look like shells and the shells look like flowers...'" and I have to stop you, Valentine. No reason, I just have to stop you. Besides, I think Jamaica Tourist Board frowns on you working off the clock.

• My Secret Agent Lover Man puts the kibosh down when it comes to baby-making. Because there's just too many babies out there already (cool! field trip to Malawi!). But no, there are also psychos and diseases and nuclear accidents. Okay, then. Weetzie's rebuttal. "'But we could have such a cool, beautiful baby...and we would love it so much.'" Why does this sound like every pet wanting kid EVER? Yeah, that totally didn't work when I was eight(een) and wanted my very own sugar glider (google them and tell me I'm wrong?). And then I got about four Furbies from well-meaning relatives, parents, and my rabbi, and they all of the Furbies ended up talking to each other late at night when I was trying to sleep and if you thought you wanted Gizmo from "Gremlins," you're wrong. Hell is other Furbies. Anyway.

• Dirk gets a great idea. He thinks that he, Weetzie, and Duck can have a threesome and then Weetzie can get knocked up since MSALM won't oblige. Duck agrees: "'I saw it on that talk show once. These two gay guys and their best friend all slept together so no one would know whose baby it was...and when someone in the audience said, "What sexual preference do you hope [the child] has?" they all go together, they go, "Happiness." Isn't that cool?'" Yeah, but, Duck, you know how hippie free loving parents grow up to get Alex P. Keatons? By my calculations, those talk show people probably just spawned Ann Coulter. Good job. You, Dirk, and Weetzie want to go for Rush Limbaugh redux?

• So the three of them make love. The Beatles are playing while they conceive Weetzie's baby. It's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." I guess that's better than losing your virginity to "Your Body is a Wonderland." Stupid top 40.

• And they name the baby Cherokee. Cherokee. So you know she's just going to grow up to tell people that her grandmother was a Cherokee princess, and blah blah blah. Ugh. My Secret Agent Lover Man has left the building because Weetzie cheated on him with two gay guys, and it was either stay with her and do the talk show circuit or leave. (And let's face it, this was the eighties. He was under steep competition when you consider all the appearances G.G. Allin and the Club Kids were making.) But MSALM comes back for no real reason, telling her he was an idiot to go, and saying how beautiful baby Cherokee is.

• But it turns out that My Secret Agent Lover Man, when he was away, was really catting it up with the head of a coven that obsesses over Jayne Mansfield and the fact that she was decapitated when she died in that car crash (beep, beep, urban legend alert). The woman shows up pregnant and wanting money for an abortion. Weetzie's pissy at first, and MSALM gets all, "We were on a break...and I thought of you every time I climaxed. Really." Then Vixanne Wig (Easy Bake Coven lady) dumps the kid (whom they call Witch Baby) with My Secret Agent Lover Man.

• They call the baby Lily but she acts all wild and ends up going by Witch Baby. (Wild meaning she chops the heads off of Barbie dolls and chants "Beasts beasts beasts.") Yeah, well, I christened my puppy Jack Russell the Ripper but I knew better than to be surprised when dead whores turned up in my closet every month. (Surprisingly the same thing happened with my pet alpaca, Dolly Llama.)

• Later, Weetzie's father, Charlie Bat, who lives in New York dies and Weetzie gets upset. Yeah, well, maybe he willed you a magical toaster oven, so it's all good. His ghost makes a cameo in a later book.

• Now let's snark some of the movies MSALM makes. They make one called Shangri-L.A. because they think that L.A. is just like Shangri-La. It's about a girl who comes to L.A. to make it big and ends up going back in time to the olden days and meeting a guy who looks like Charlie Chaplin. They try to go to the present but he dies, and she ends up overdosing on drugs and waking up in Shangri-La. Or something. I have a feeling that what Francesca Lia Block isn't telling us is all about the non-artsy, money making movies that MSALM had to make to finance these, like In & Out (and In Again), Any Which Way But Lubed, and Pop on Pop.

• At the end, there's a sad moment as Duck freaks out when one of his old boyfriends (Bam-Bam) is dying of AIDS. (Is he sure? Yup, he's HIV positive.) There's some depressing talk about how said it is that you can get HIV just by loving people.

And, scene. I'll do some more Francesca Lia Block books if anyone's interested. They're actually fairly decent and fun. And short! This book was part of a larger set that I bought when I was about thirteen, called Dangerous Angels.