Sonic Youth – "100%" (1992)

I’ve been around the world

A million times

And all you men are slime

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film, Poor Things, is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the late writer and artist Alasdair Gray. 

It is undoubtedly the most abhorrent movie I’ve ever watched.  (Before I settled on “abhorrent” to describe Poor Things, I thought about describing it as “abominable,” “atrocious,” “loathsome,” “nauseating,” “repugnant,” or “vile.”  But I chose “abhorrent” because I thought it was the strongest of all those words.)

After watching Poor Things, I fired up my trusty computer and researched whether the movie is true to the book – which I haven’t read – or whether screenwriter Tony McNamara took significant liberties with the novel’s plot.  I needed to know the answer to that question so I could assign the blame for this deplorable piece of crap.

It turns out that while the movie follows the book pretty closely, the most disgraceful single element of the film is the responsibility of screenwriter McNamara.  Apparently he didn’t think the shameful Poor Things book was quite shameful enough, so he wrote a really shameful new ending for it.

That truly depraved denouement was the final nail in the coffin for me.

(My thanks to Oxford Languages for their excellent online dictionary – without it, I probably couldn’t have written the previous paragraph without repeating myself.) 

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[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Poor Things, you should really read the rest of the post despite the fact that it contains a number of spoilers.  Unless you’re a truly depraved weirdo, you’ll be so appalled that you’ll choose to eschew viewing the film.  (Trust me, you’ll be glad that you did.)]

The heroine of Poor Things is a young woman named Bella, who throws herself off a London bridge and drowns in the Thames.  Dr. Godwin Baxter, a demented genius, fishes her out only moments after her death and takes her to his laboratory.  (Accent on the second syllable, please!) 

Emma Stone as Bella Baxter

Bella was great with child when she jumped from the bridge, and Baxter was able to deliver her unborn baby alive.  But instead of nurturing the baby, Baxter decides to transplant his brain into Bella’s body in order to restore her to life.   

The procedure is successful.  Bella is mentally an infant, of course, but physically she is a growed woman – which results in some rather shocking behavior on Bella’s part.  In one scene, she joins Dr. Baxter in his laboratory – where she diddles the penis of a male corpse before inexplicably grabbing a spare scalpel and gleefully stabbing it into the corpse’s eyes and face.   

[NOTE: Emma Stone, who won the “Best Actress” Oscar for her portrayal of Bella, had this to say about the character: “She was the most joyous character in the world to play, because she has no shame about anything. . . . It was an extremely freeing experience to be her.”]  

Baxter is the survivor of a number of gruesome medical experiments at the hands of his father, who was an even more demented genius – the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  I won’t tell you what was done to young Baxter by his dear old dad because you may be eating your lunch, but suffice it to say that Dr. Mengele’s monstrous experiments on concentration camp prisoners pale in comparison.

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Screenwriter McNamara apparently decided that one odious brain transplant wasn’t enough, so he added a sequence involving  a second such operation.

Near the end of the movie, her husband – and the father of the unborn child whose brain was transplanted into Bella’s skull – makes an unexpected appearance.  (It’s a real deus ex machina moment.)

The husband is convinced that Bella’s unhappiness results from an excess of libido, and he decides to take care of that surgically.  But Bella manages to turn the tables on him before he can execute his extremely nasty plan.

Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter

Dr. Baxter – Bella’s creator and surrogate father – is dying of cancer at this point in the movie, and I thought Bella might take care of two birds with one stone by transplanting his brain into her husband’s healthy body.

Silly me!  Bella removes and discards her evil husband’s brain and gives him a goat’s brain instead.  As the movie ends, Bella is sipping champagne in the garden with her friends while her goat-brained husband contentedly grazes on the shrubbery.

So much for saving Dr. Baxter – Bella apparently decided it was more important to punish her husband in this particularly horrific fashion.  

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Most of the critics l-o-v-e-d Poor Things, calling it “an insanely enjoyable fairy tale,” “a virtuoso comic epic,” and “a brilliant tour de force.”

Here’s an excerpt from a fairly typical review: 

[The movie] is at once daring, funny, beautiful and surreal.  Poor Things is a staggering accomplishment of a movie, a film . . . with a heart and a shocking amount of joy . . . . Poor Things is a visionary delight [and] potentially the best film of 2023.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Poor Things is the most heartless and joyless movie I’ve ever seen.  Did something terrible happen to the director and screenwriter when they were children?   They must hate their fellow human beings very deeply.  How else can you explain their seeming delight in a movie that so glibly depicts such unspeakable tortures?

Or maybe they’re unfeeling and utterly cynical people who are capable of intellectually distancing themselves from the on-screen horrors they have wrought.

In any event, they had the last laugh.  Poor Things was nominated for eleven Academy Awards – and won four.  

The folks who give out the Golden Globes one-upped the Oscar voters.  They awarded Poor Things the Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.”

Poor Things was certainly not a musical – so the Golden Globe voters must have thought it was a comedy.

You have GOT to be kidding me.  

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Not everyone loved Poor Things.  One reviewer said the film was “a 141-minute mistake,” while another called it “a seriously misguided take on female empowerment.”  

The New York Times critic wrote that the movie’s “design is rich, [but] its ideas [are] thin. . . . It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a film that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.”

My favorite “review” of Poor Things was a post in Reddit:

I feel like critics are complete bullsh*tters after I watched Poor Things.

Midway through the film I almost walked out of the theatre.  [NOTE: She’s not alone – a story in Variety reported that a stream of moviegoers had “bolted for the exit” during one Los Angeles showing of Poor Things.]

The theme of a baby being inside of its own mother’s head, and how she basically followed the path the men in her life wanted her to follow made me uneasy – how she was having relationships with men who knew that she was a baby technically. . . . It felt like honest to God pedophilia.

I found it weird how people where hyping up how “bad” Saltburn was . . . People online kept talking about how disturbing it was [but] they’ve clearly not seen the shit show that is Poor Things. . . .

I wanted to vomit at the end.

Amen to that.

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, I promised you more Sonic Youth – and what 2 or 3 lines promises, 2 or 3 lines delivers!

The Dirty album cover

Click here to listen to “100%,” which was released on the band’s 1992 album, Dirty.

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.

Sonic Youth – "Dirty Boots" (1990)

Dirty boots are on

Hi di ho

Incendiary bombs – bombs designed to start fires rather than do damage by exploding – were used extensively by both the German and Allied air forces in World War II.

In April 1941, one such bomb fell through the roof of the home of the home of a London shoemaker and his family.  Fortunately for that family, they owned a Great Dane named Juliana, who saved the day by promptly urinating on the smoldering bomb. 

Juliana the Great Dane

Great Dane bladders can easily hold a quart or more of urine.  Juliana’s owners were fortunate that they hadn’t chosen to go with a Yorkie or a Pomeranian instead.

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The bladder capacity of a Great Dane is impressive, but pales in comparison to that of an elephant – whose bladders can hold an amazing 40 gallons of urine.  (Elephants can weigh 100 times more than a Great Dane, so it’s not surprising their bladders can hold 100 times more urine.)

Would you believe that it takes fully-loaded Great Danes and elephants the same amount of time to pee?  In fact, all mammals (except very small ones) take about the same amount of time to empty their bladders – roughly 20 seconds.  (We know this because a Georgia Tech engineer and his students filmed a number of Atlanta zoo animals urinating and timed how long it took them to finish.)

That’s because urination speed comes down to urethra width.  The larger the animal, the larger the urethra.  That’s how an elephant can expel two gallons of urine a second and empty his bladder in the same amount of time as a dog.

Nature is awesome, isn’t it?

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When I was in college, I and my friends spent all our summer evenings drinking beer in Galena, Kansas.  (I lived in Missouri, where you had to be 21 to buy beer.  But Kansas allowed 18-year-olds to drink 3.2% beer, which was legally considered to be non-intoxicating.)

I was young and stupid back then.  So I would occasionally hold off as long as I could before heading to the men’s room, and then time how long it took me to empty my bladder.  

Hitting the 30-second mark was easy, and I think I exceeded 45 seconds a few times.  I don’t recall ever going longer than one minute, but my memory’s not what it used to be.

Of course, those days are a distant memory now . . .

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My older son gave me a year-long subscription to Spotify for Christmas.  

Once I figured it out – which took some time, I admit – I created a playlist with all the tracks from a dozen or so Sonic Youth albums.  For the last week or so, I’ve been up to my neck in Sonic Youth music.

Today’s featured record is the first track on the group’s 1990 album, Goo – the first Sonic Youth album I owned.  If you’re wondering what it has to do with Juliana the Great Dane or anything else in this post, you can stop – there’s no connection.

“Dirty Boots” is the first Sonic Youth song I’ve featured in years.  It won’t be the last.

Click here to watch the official music video for “Dirty Boots.”

Click here to buy “Dirty Boots” from Amazon.

Isley Brothers – "Fight the Power (Part 1 & 2)" (1975)

I tried talking about it

I got the big runaround . . .

We got to fight the powers that be!

Here’s a query I recently received from a loyal 2 or 3 lines reader:

The grocery store where I usually shop recently sent me an e-mail that said I could get up to $75 off my groceries if I transferred my prescriptions to that store’s pharmacy.  I jumped on the offer.  

The pharmacist there didn’t know what I needed to do to get my $75 off, so I called the grocery store’s customer service number.

The customer service rep told me that I wasn’t eligible for the advertised discount because I was a Medicare recipient, and the offer didn’t apply to beneficiaries of government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid.

The signs in the store promising the $75 discount said nothing about Medicare recipients not being eligible for the offer.  

I did a little research, and learned that approximately 40% of all the prescriptions filled in this country are for Medicare and Medicaid recipients.  That’s a lot.  

The $75 offer was also subject to a number of other conditions.  (For example, you weren’t eligible if you had filled a prescription at the store in the previous 12 months.)

Put it all together, and I’m guessing that at least half the people who were sent the e-mail offering the $75 discount weren’t eligible for it.  

Shouldn’t the company have disclosed that there were significant limitations on the offer?  If I had known I wasn’t going to get the $75 off, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of transferring my prescriptions.  I’m sure the grocery store is going to make a lot of profit of my prescriptions, but I’m not getting doodly-squat for my trouble.

Taking the company to court obviously isn’t worth it given that only $75 is involved.  And sending a complaint to a government agency would probably be a total waste of time.

I always use the self-checkout machines at that store, so I could simply help myself to something every time I visit that store until I’ve gotten my $75 worth of food.

I’m guessing that would be technically illegal.  But do you think it would be wrong?  

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Some of you may not know that before I became a wildly successful blogger, I was a wildly successful lawyer.  So I was able to confirm to my loyal reader that walking out of a grocery store with food you haven’t paid for is illegal, and would subject him to prosecution for shoplifting.  (That’s assuming that law enforcement where he lives gives a you-know-what about shoplifting, a crime that seems to be completely ignored in many places.)

As for whether it would be wrong to get even with the company for its deceptive advertising by simply taking the $75 worth of free food he was promised, that’s a very different matter.  I was trained as a lawyer – not as a moral philosopher – and have no special qualifications to opine on issues of right and wrong.

What I will say is that it has long been my belief that some things that are illegal are not necessarily wrong – and that some things that are perfectly legal are still wrong.

Further affiant sayeth naught.

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The six men who recorded as “The Isley Brothers” were brothers O’Kelly, Rudolph, Ronald, Ernie, and Marvin Isley and Rudolph’s brother-in-law, Chris Jasper – but I guess it would have been awkward if they had called themselves “The Isley Brothers and an Isley Brother-in-Law.”

“Fight the Power (Part 1 & 2)” was released in 1975 on there group’s thirteenth studio album, The Heat Is On.  It was a huge hit for the Isleys, occupying the top spot on the Billboard R&B chart for three weeks and making it all the way to #4 on the “Hot 100” chart.

The other tracks on The Heat Is On album include “For the Love of You (Part 1 & 2),” “Sensuality (Part 1 & 2),” “Make Me Say It Again Girl (Part 1 & 2)” . . . well, you get the picture.

Click here to listen to “Fight the Power (Part 1 & 2).”

Click here to buy today’s featured recording from Amazon.