How Rocky Horror always made me a better person

Re-watching a film you used to be obsessed with is always a strange experience, and the longer it's been since you last indulged, the stranger it gets. Some dialogue, characters and entire scenes can seemingly be forgotten, until the re-watch drags them up from somewhere deep in the memory, and you realise you never forgot any of this shit.

Last week I watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film I was brutally obsessed with for an incredibly brief time many years ago. It was the first time I'd seen it in more than a decade, and it was bloody awesome. I knew every song (up to a very particular point) backwards, and greatly enjoyed drinking in its unique vibe again.

Looking back, with its themes of wild and rampant sexuality, it probably wasn't the best film to be watching over and over again when I was 12 years old. But it really did help me become a better person, so maybe it was exactly what I should have been watching.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains a strange and goofy movie that is unlike anything else ever put on film. A lot of this is due to the fact that it remains oddly timeless - a pastiche of dopey fifties horror films made in the seventies, on very limited sets that have no foundation in the real world. It's a hermetically sealed world where everyone bursts into delightful song, or gets on down into some dirty sex, and it all takes place in a tight little universe.

Fortunately, almost all of those sings are still just as irritatingly catchy and meaty as they ever were - everybody knows the Time Warp, but each song, which come along at surprisingly regular intervals, is infinitely catchy. Over at The Frankenstein Place is a dose of haunting glam, Sweet Transvestite has some great thundering keyboards, I'm Going Home is still fucking heart-breaking, and the whole Science Fiction/Double Feature thing is a fantastic bookend.

And it's all held together by a fine cast, including the young and unflappable Susan Sarandon, and a ensemble who had mastered the roles in the stage show.  Tim Curry has done many fine things over his long career, but nothing beats his sly, snide and spectacular Frank N Furter.

Even with the groovy songs and unique atmosphere of cheery and gross dread, Rocky Horror still has some flaws. Some parts of the story are needlessly cruel, and some of the sexual politics are incredibly dated. And it's easy to see how the whole thing could be repulsive to certain people, with its callous disregard for taste and social niceties.

But it's precisely  those things that still make it an attractive experience for some. For many beautiful freaks and lovely geeks, Rocky Horror is still one of the greats.

My own obsession with the movie was oddly limited, in more ways than one. I had a copy on video tape when I was 12, but it ran out of tape almost exactly halfway through the film, right after the point when Frank separately seduced Brad and Janet.

So I just rewatched the first 45 minutes over and over again, because that was enough. I loved the look of the film, and that unique and unusual atmosphere. I would watch that same 45 minutes over and over again, memorising the tunes and dialogue through sheer osmosis, (although I had to play 'Hot Patootie, Bless My Soul' a million times over to figure out what Meatloaf was on about). I pestered my parents to rent out a copy from the video store so that I could see how it ended, and was thrilled to see the second half continue with the same bizarre vibe. They didn't really understand the attraction, but indulged it.

It didn't last long - youthful obsessions like that rarely do - and I was over Rocky Horror by the time I was a teenager. It was still something I would watch now and then, but the spaces between those viewings stretched out further and further, until I didn't watch it for 10 years.

A brief aside on the experience of watching Rocky Horror - I never, ever got into the whole audience participation thing, something Rocky is truly infamous for, and actually found myself actively turned off the movie by those fan events.

It's hard to really explain why, especially when so many outsiders and loners found those special movie screenings a revelation, all over the world. There are plenty of people who couldn't even think of watching the movie on their own, because the communal experience was what it was all about.

Not for me - right at the height of my Rocky Horror love I got a hold of a soundtrack album that actually included the whole audience participation, and it was so fucking annoying and restrictive and elitist that it turned me right off the idea. It was something about the strict rules over what dumb lines to insert in any gap in the movie, and the loss of the movie's silent charms, that was so off-putting.

I went to one live show once, and it only took five minutes for one person to get loudly upset because the others "weren't doing it right".

Still, while I'm just a grumpy old shit on this issue of watching it with a crowd, I can point to one way that the Rocky Horror Picture Show made me a better person, and I'm so glad it did.

Because when I was going through that phase of watching it every day at school, I was literally living on a farm outside a small rural community in New Zealand in the mid-1980s, and that whole scene was conservative as shit. And growing up in that place, I was a bit of a conservative little prick, worried about things like homosexuals and transexuals and anything that could be classed as 'abnormal'. I never experienced anything to do with it, it wasn't really on TV or anywhere, and I knew a few camp adults, but they just seemed really happy all the time.

So Rocky Horror was actually one of my very first exposures to all these issues, with some very mature moments in between the rock and roll. And seeing a man in sexy ladies underwear seduce both Brad and Janet was an absolute revelation, because I suddenly discovered I had absolutely no problem with any of this. Confronted with some very adult issues at a reasonably young age, I couldn't see why people were so scared of this sort of thing. Because if Rocky taught me anything, it's that you should just be happy with who you are, no matter what the rest of the world says.

Confronted with these things, I really didn't think it was any big deal. If feeling good about yourself means putting on some tight pantyhose and slipping the odd nipple out, go for it. Who cares what anybody else thinks?  I'm still painfully heterosexual, but if people want to change clothes, or genders, or anything like that, then I don't want to get in their way, and I encourage them to do whatever makes them feel good, because we could all use a bit more of that in life. I may have been a small minded little son of a bitch, but Rocky Horror opened that mind right up.

I'm many years older now, and a lot of things have changed. But some things haven't.

I still love the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I love the way Richard O'Brien's kiwi accent only pokes through once (when he yells that they never liked him, right at the end), I love the American Gothic thing at the start, and I love that it's still as funny as hell - the 'Brad! Janet! Doctor Scott! etc...' bit is a strange comedic highlight.

And I'm still trying to keep that open mind going. I've seen plenty of other sexual shenanigans since Rocky Horror, but as long as it's this much fun for everybody, I'm up for anything.

(This was originally posted on the Tearoom of Despair in 2015, and I'm dusting it off in honour of Tim Curry, who really was one of the greats. I just read his memoir a couple of months ago, and he was just a super dude. RIP, Tim.)

Whatever Happened To...? A reprint request

The big comic companies have been reprinting all sorts of crazy things lately, but one comic I wish they would still republish is the 'Whatever Happened To...' back-ups in early 80s DC Comics Presents, where they would dig up some obscure character, and give them a proper send off, or maybe even a new lease of life. 

The main motive for these stories was quite clearly so the company could hold to the copyrights to characters they had no idea what to do with, but the tales themselves were often quite charming and nerdy, and could feel oddly important in the histories of Robotman or Hourman, or some other Golden Age hero. 

It might happen one day - DC is putting out a comic that is nothing but Joe Kubert covers soon, which is also 100 percent my jam -  so I can still dream about a book of codas.

The Matrix is glitching hard

One of the side effects of moving house and actually sorting out the collection for the first time in years is that I keep finding I have multiple copies of the same comics and toys, even though I have no idea where the hell the multiples came from.

They are the most random things - a complete double up of six issues of the Kev series by Ennis and Ezquerra, several Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition comics. While cleaning out the kids room I found the same puzzle in two different toy boxes, when I always thought there was only one.

I can only assume that or reality really is something like the Matrix and it is getting so glitchy and buggy that there are repeated errors. Like it's not even trying anymore to keep track of how many comics there are in the world, or even in the cardboard boxes I have in the shed. 

The radio doesn't help - after talking to a friend about the wonderful Kiwi band the Straitjacket Fits during a recent catch-up, I heard two of their songs on two different rock stations on the drive back home, and I never randomly hear their music out in the world.

And then when we moved out of old place, I met the guy who was going to move in with his family, and I recognised them as the DJ who plays at the kids' school disco. I don't know 99.9 percent of my neighbour's names, but I knew that guy.

Are there only so many people in the world, the universe has to keep using the same characters? Does reality need more quantum computing power? 

I don't think I'm going to try and jump off a tall building to fly like Neo to test the theory, but I am getting rid of those extra Kev comics. They freak me out.

The joy of admitting you are wrong

One dull weekend in the late 1990s, I got into a slightly heated argument with some dude I hardly know over an actor who appeared in The Fast Show, the wonderful British sketch comedy programme. I was certain that an actor in that was also in a recent movie, and that other somebody was certain it was someone different.

Until that point in time, it would have been hard to convince me I was wrong - and I was very, very drunk at the time, so I was totally steadfast - but we also had the internet by then, and we looked it up, and I was 100 percent wrong about it.

What I could not convince anybody else was that I was fine with being proven wrong, because I have often been wrong about things, and there is no real growth or development in a person's life if they can't admit that.

It was hard to convince them that I was okay with being wrong, because it's human nature to be upset about it, to feel a little foolish or chastened. 

Which, of course, is an attitude that is responsible for a lot of shit in the world these days. World leaders who can't admit they might have fucked up, and double down on their catastrophes, because the very idea that they could learn from their mistakes - and maybe even avoid them in the future - is completely unthinkable.

I'm wrong about all sorts of things, and I change my opinion all the time. I look back at things I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago and think that I sound like a total dipshit, as my tastes and opinions change, and I reassess things and come to a different conclusion.

I don't regret all the Radiohead hate I hurled at my mates after they fell for the first album - Thom was a whiny git and Creep just tried too hard, I insisted - but turned all the way around when OK Computer came along with the sound of the future. I was happy to admit I was wrong, and change with the times, and I could live with the constant reminders I got about my earlier hatred.

Usually it's the other way around, and I dislike stuff that I once thought was the bee's knees, and there are just too many examples of that to go around, because the movies and comics I once loved can now look clumsy and dumb.

I change my mind all the time and I'm not going to deny what I once felt. Human beings are complex creatures and contain multitudes, and can have different opinions from day to day, let alone over years.

And world leaders, or the odd in-law who doesn't like to be called out on their racist attitudes of old, who just can't admit that they were wrong, are really missing out on something. I am glad to be proven wrong about something, because I learn from it. I never got anything wrong about The Fast Show ever again, at least.

Bone: Well, bless my buttons!

- Bone #3

By Jeff Smith

I'm never getting to the 13th Doctor

I have spent a significant portion of the 2020s playing the online Doctor Who: Thirteen game on the doctorwho.tv website. It's a variation on the classic 2048 game, where you have to slide tiles to double numbers, only they do it with all the Doctors. I have played it hundreds and hundreds of times, and I have never come close to getting to the 13th Doctor.

The screenshot above is as close as I ever got, up to the 12th, but was nowhere near getting all the other Doctors needed for that last regeneration. I do actually get 13 Doctors, because they count the War Doctor, but there's no Jodie Whittaker for me.

I'll keep trying, though. The Doctor wouldn't give up, no matter what number they were.

The death of MF Doom: Just let people live where they want

The ongoing demonization of immigrants around the world drives me crazy, and I am constantly disappointed by political parties that profess to be on the side of justice and compassion, but still use immigration as an obvious scapegoat to appease all the moronic bigots in society.

I am ridiculously pro-immigration, the people who move into a new community bring vibrancy and life to the places they join. The school my kids go to is full of families from dozens of different nations, and I adore their exposure to all new traditions and histories and cultures and ways of thinking about the world.

But if I had to choose one small example of how fucked up the entire global immigration system is, it's in the sad death of MF Doom.

Doom was a terrific artist, his beats were epic and his wordplay was sublime. There was depth to his music, an intelligence and humanity lurking beneath that stark metal mask. His work with Czarface was legit my single favourite album of the past decade. 

And you had this guy who did wonderful music, and his words were poetry, and he died far away from home, kicked out of America by the dullest of bureaucracies.

What kind of a society is that, when you can just dispose of artistic genius like it is nothing? Doom's history of nationhood was complicated, but every life is complicated, all pounded into submission by the brute force of the system, and there was no recourse for Doom to get back to his family, his friends, the world he grew up in. 

When societies treat their greatest artists like this, those societies are worth nothing. And all this happened to Doom before the current shitshow that is the ICE nightmare gripping the US, and there will inevitably be more great minds and great people currently being forced to leave the place they love, because John Q Fucknuckle doesn't like how many brown people are working in his fast food joints.

Borders are just lines on paper, that fuckwits use to justify their own feelings of superiority and cruelty. Because if you can't see the value of keeping poets like MF Doom in your nation, you are no nation of worth at all. 

Awards always beat cockroaches in the pie game

There was a grimly fascinating exercise in human behaviour at the local bakery in the past couple of months, and I got to see what really matters to my friends and neighbours, and I am honestly not surprised by the clear result of it all.

It's a very bougie bakery, with $12 pies that are, admittedly, fucking excellent. Of course I tried them, I have very serious opinions about meat pies, and had to see if their special Philly Cheesesteak pies were really worth $12.

And then the store shut down for a week, and I thought they were just on holiday or something, but it turned out they had a cockroach infestation. And despite a quick clean up and the prominent display of a 'A' health rating in the front window, it definitely had an impact on business. There used to be constant lines out the door for their terrific pies and excellent sourdough options, now there was only ever one or two people in there. 

It was never empty, but it certainly wasn't as popular any more. If you're going to pay premium prices for your grub, you want to know it won't have a cockroach leg in it or something. I didn't think it would last much longer - fancy eateries must have massive overheads - and I did feel quite bad for them, and then the NZ pie awards were announced last week.

I'm not the only one in Aotearoa to have strong opinions about pies, all five million of us have very clear judgements. My five year old has some extremely valid thoughts about what makes a good pie. So the pie awards have great weight.

Even my own apathy towards all awards everywheer is tempered slightly by the pie angle, and it is always interesting to see what comes out on top, and watch the inevitable feeding frenzy that follows, as fairweather pie fans descend on the award winner.

And when that tarnished local store won the Supreme Award for its bacon and egg pie, I had to see if it had an impact on business, and for the last few days it has been back to lines out the door 

I wasn't going to get into line - I think bacon and egg pies are not quite an abomination, but they are definitely getting there - but I got my kicks on seeing all those pie loves snake down the street again. Because a health code violation is all well and good, but if some randoms say it's the best in the country, maybe that's more important than a cockroach or two.

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The fine end of Roddy the Ruin

I am nowhere near as emotionally invested in House of the Dragon as I was in Game of Thrones - mainly because every single character in the new series is just a total cunt - but I am so happy for Tommy Flanagan getting one of the top five death scenes in all of the Song of Ice and Fire.