Another rival to the clown crown falls to “natural causes.” So-called “natural causes.”
Larry Harmon as Bozo the Clown
“I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet,
(people) would never be able to forget those footprints,” he said.
Yes, one of the most prominent clowns in history, Larry Harmon, has died. Harmon, who played Bozo the Clown for most of the latter part of the Twentieth Century and could plausibly said to have been the first person of any description to clone a clown, is only the most recent in a string of mysterious clown deaths.
One by one, the most prominent clowns in the world have been picked off, most succumbing to the blandly ubiquitous “natural causes,” and none living much past their 84th birthday.
The world shrugs, sighs, says “these things happen,” ah yes, but why do they always seem to happen to the rivals of one man? One man who is known to associate with hardened criminals. One man who has at his fingertips the very substances of which a heart attack is made?
One man, ladies and gentlemen. One man named Ronald McDonald.
Yves Saint Laurent, one of the greatest forces in fashion history, has died at the age of 71. His career was a testament not only to beauty and to women but also to his tenacity and struggle with disabilities both physical and mental. That he created so much of enduring worth is an eloquent and astonishing legacy, entirely due to his unceasing battle with and sometimes-victory over those challenges, and culture itself has been enriched by his body of work.
Here is some of it: His second collection, from 1962.
I was never a Saint Laurent woman, nor ever will be, but the immaculate, sexy, unattainable, vaguely bondage-inclined goddess is an icon of the Twentieth Century and such women as Catherine Deneuve, Loulou de la Falaise, Gisele Bundchen, and Linda Evangelista owe a large part of their fame to their ability to inspire and collaborate with YSL. Whether he invented the archetype, or whether he simply discovered and dressed it is something for historians to debate. He changed the very possibilities of feminine identity, and he did it always from a perspective of deep respect and love.
The YSL Manifesto. Let his own work stand as his eulogy:
I’m on a kick. I get that way sometimes; there’s no point trying to stop me if you, yourself, do not want to be kicked, whether in the privates, in the majors, or curb-wards (kerb-wards for our overseas readers!) you just have to stand clear. Sometimes I get it in my head to watch every silent vampire film ever made and nothing, not even the unforgivable barrenness of the upper steppes of YouTube, can stop me.
Seriously, though, I’ve seen Nosferatu so often that I can tell within three notes who did the score for this version and surely if it had words I’d recite them along with the actors. As it is, I make do with gesticulating in unison and making the hand-in-the-air-taco-sqeezing move at that point in the Clubfoot Orchestra score where the Squeeze Taco comes into play.
Ah, memories.
Now, when I was in school these kicks of mine, or obsessions if you will or even if you won’t, because they’re mine and I get to say what they are, were useful in a way and after a fashion and before curfew, because every year I had a new topic for the Science Fair or the Essay Bonspiel or the What Have You Arbitrary Competition To Teach Our Kids That Not Everyone Can Be A Winnner (except, at my school, the two grade six girls who were sleeping with the gym teacher, who won everything right up until they transferred to high school and had to start learning for the first time and never caught up) and usually a highly-charged enthusiasm therefor, unlike most of the others who took the assignment home and moped until their Moms told them what to write.
One year it was, and this was University by this time, or even post-University, although with me there was about a decade and a half when I was post- one University and pre- another. It’s complicated.
Does that surprise you?
In any case, one year when I was out of high school but still quite youthful it was this dude. This dude with this thing. I didn’t know what it did, exactly, nor what it would do to me, nor how many other people were in line ahead of me. I didn’t know there was no going back. I didn’t know that things would be different from then on. I just knew that I wanted it. Oh, how many times have we all heard some maudlin, emo variation on this eternal melody, eh?
Did I get it? Oh, not just then, but I’m a patient sort (I have a straight face right now, how about you?) and eventually that which I wished to write apon the world manifested, if secondhand. Sigh, story of my life.
Well, only 50% of it did, because all I got was the computer.
In the age-old rite of passage of women everywhere, I eventually concluded that the actual fellow was too dense to deserve me, possibly psychotic, and possessed of marginal personal hygene besides, and moved on.
No, we really do this.
Also gay. He’s totally gay. Don’t let all those kids fool you; he got them off eBay or something.
Where was I? Oh, yes, did I tell you I’m still on painkillers? But that’s neither here nor there, it’s mostly just in the shoulderblade and the right side of the neck.
Right. Now, I had another enthusiasm once. In fact, I was that person for this enthusiasm, that person where, if you know you’ve got to be at your movie premiere or an awards thingy or something you stop, cold, and say, “Oh. She’ll be there, won’t she? Pilar, help me!” or words to that effect. And I forget why I brought that up.
Oh yes.
Because my friend Dale said, “You like Sean Bean? You should check out Viggo; he’s much more your kinda thing. He paints and writes poetry and he’s quite political,” and I thought, oh yes, poetry? Like:
Jewel-Sean Penn-Hollywood-type-celebrity-poetry?Oh yes. And then I checked it out and realized he actually wrote it himself instead of getting some poor D Girl (not related, or at least only very tangentially, to B Girl) and I read it again and realized it was actually very, very good, and I was a goner for about twenty-four months. Enthusiasms were so much easier before puberty, I must say.
So, for the record: poetry. Poetry totally works.
But by the time the final installment of LOTR and the restraining order were served, I had learned to make do with mere representations of my enthusiasm; samizdat copies of Darkly Noon or American Yakuza, the odd Aragorn standee, and, when I want a bit of buzzkill, the man’s music.
So it is with Steve Jobs: given that he’s apparently happily married, lives in a different country, doesn’t know I’m alive, and has a really flat and boring LiveJournal, I’m going to make do with a replicant.
Hey, wasn’t there an Ann Magnusen movie about that?
So: it turns out that Fake Steve Jobs is quite a poet. Only rarely is he inspired to Calliopean efforts, much less Eratoran or those of Euterpicacity, but rather usually actually prefers to produce Melpomeneian art if it comes right down to it, for he’s a great writer of funeral poems.
“Tiny Bubbles.”
That was your famous song.
But others made more money on it.
Bastards!
Still, you were the most
famous Ho in Hollywood.
And that is saying something.
Honestly, it brings a tear to the eye, does it not? But that’s nothing compared to what he wrote as a sendoff for Evel Knievel:
Jon Ive says if someone crashed
that much in our business
they wouldn’t call you “world’s greatest.”
They’d call you Microsoft. Or Windows.
A bit unkind of him, I think.
Because you inspired people.
Including me. One time,
when I was thirteen, I built
a ramp on my street
& put on a cape
& a football helmet
& tried to jump a Schwinn Stingray
over three kindergarten kids.
Each kid lay on the pavement
holding a pair of enormous torches —
rolled-up newspapers doused in gasoline.
Flames leapt eight feet into the air.
Soon after this
as a condition of my parole
I joined my school’s electronics club.
The rest, as they say,
is history.
Once more, for old time’s sake, here’s Don Ho doing Peter Gabriel‘s Shock the Monkey.
Gary Gygax, inventor of the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons and born-again Christian, has died at his home after a long battle with illness. He had suffered several strokes and a near-fatal heart attack within recent months. The funeral is to be a private, family event. Forum posts by friends and fans are posted at Troll Lord Games, who are adding information as it becomes available. His influence went far beyond the world of RPGs and influenced two generations of fantasy writers and not a few armchair theologians as well.
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?
Feast your eyes on this glorious Youtube and wonder no more at whether or not Bob married above himself: oh, he did, baby, he did! This is a clip of a classic catfight showdown of the very iciest type in good olde timey Hollywood style; duck and cover, boys! We blondes have to stick together, but just this once I’m calling it for the brunette; Suzanne Pleshette really knew how to take it up a life-threatening, eyebrow-arching notch. The men in this case are as incidental and interchangeable as chess piece Disney Princes, those vacuous, photogenic losers.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, inspired, I suppose or no, I actually know for a fact, by VF’s piece on Angie Dickinson, and today by the sad death of the original MILF, Suzanne Pleshette (okay, maybe second to Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson, but there can’t be many straight Gen-X males who didn’t have a thing for the divinely sensible and sexy Emily Hartley).
Now, I’m a chick. Been one for years, actually. So I’m used to it. But there’s more to it than meets the eye: when you think about it, women as diverse as Princess Diana and Paris Hilton have managed to become some kind of arche- or at least stereotype. And it pays to type well, not fast or you can get stuck as your 7-year-old self’s idea of a cool chick, which explains the whole Madonna wannabe situation. So when you’re a little girl and you want to grow up to be a woman, what, exactly, do you have in mind? Britney Spears? Madonna? Marie Curie? Isabel Allende? Amanda Lepore? You’ve got to choose your icons carefully, if you don’t want to end up dated by nothing more than your accessories and identified by nothing more than the labels your mother sewed into your underwear.
It wasn’t until the seventies… that Dickinson met her pop-culture destiny, playing Sargeant Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson on Police Woman. Pepper was a lot of firsts: the first woman to have men report to her, the first unmarried female officer, the first to display self-doubt and, occasionally, a weakness for Jack Daniels. While she was doing all that, she also carved out a new look for the powerful woman—briskly beautiful in minimal makeup, blond hair permanently tousled from running down perps, her white Bianca Jagger–esque pantsuit adding to her unconscious swagger. Take that, Sydney Bristow.
“It’s a pleasure to meet a lady who’s a gentleman.” Frank Sinatra
Unlisted but indelibly a part of this pantheon are Catherine Deneuve and the fictional, yet nonetheless iconic, Catwoman and Emma Peel, about whom I’ve written elsewhere and will link up once I find it.
and born-again Christian, has died at his home after a long battle with illness. He had suffered several strokes and a near-fatal heart attack within recent months. The funeral is to be a private, family event. Forum posts by friends and fans are posted at 
raincoaster 