My mom’s neighbor used to have this horse who passed away recently. The horse was like 30 years old. Rail thin. Couldn’t be ridden. He had belonged to the neighbor’s girlfriend and apparently she had abandoned him with her ex when she left. My mom’s neighbor was a big rugged mountain man with a lot of tattoos, very gruff, didn’t get along with people. The horse loved him so very dearly. The horse’s favorite thing to do was go up to him and try to lean on him. It was normal big burly man standing in his yard smoking a cigarette, fixing something, working on his motorcycle with this elderly hospice horse resting its chin on his shoulder. It was a heartwarming sight. The decrepit old horse finally died but I still think about it. He wasn’t that horse’s first owner but he was that horse’s last owner. He was the one who stepped up and loved him in his final years even when the horse had nothing to offer him but companionship and vet bills.
One of my favorite movie wedding dresses is Lisa’s wedding dress in Coming to America. Come on its big, its pink, its sparkly. Its fit for a Queen. She looked like one of those Wedding Barbies come to life.
You’re a man named Jim Steinman. You are one of the most prolific songwriters of the 80s. In your spirit, output and essence, you are eternally popping a wheelie on a motorcycle while a hot half-naked woman clings to you and bats wheel in the sky above.
You wrote a song in which Meatloaf plays a hideously disfigured hunk who steals a nubile lady back to his crumbling manor and introduces her to the pleasures of magic lesbian group sex.
You wrote a song in which Celine Dion sings as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, dancing with Cathy’s corpse on a beach in the moonlight; a scene which you, Jim Steinman, believe should have been in the book. (The moors of Wuthering Heights are landlocked, but you, Jim Steinman, are too fucking real to care about that.)
You wrote the song for the opening scene of the movie Streets of Fire, in which evil leatherdaddy Willem Dafoe leads his malefic motorcycle crew into a concert to abduct Diane Lane while she’s wearing a skintight satin jumpsuit.
You wrote a song in which Bonnie Tyler wanders a haunted boarding school as literal demon twinks gyrate at her out of the fog.
There is no peak of goth camp that you, Jim Steinman, have not summited, no horny energy you have not tapped. They say that Alexander the Great wept when he saw there were no more worlds to conquer. But you, Jim Steinman, are not Alexander the Great. You, Jim Steinman, are better. You, Jim Steinman, have vision.
You take your most successful song, the song everyone knows, the most big-haired, white dress, gothic arches, doves flying, possessed choir boys chanting, bombastic song you have, and think: what if this, but with vampires.
And so you change the lyrics to be about death and infinity and a powerful bloodsucking lord seducing a girl who is ALL ABOUT IT, and then toss off a whole musical for this song to be the centerpiece to, and the musical is bad but it’s also a weird hit that’s been staged in fourteen countries and revived seven times, because nothing has ever whipped as campily, as ridiculously, as perfectly as this:
It never takes off in America. A prophet is without honor in his own land. But that doesn’t matter. How could it matter? You are perhaps the most creatively self-actualized man who has ever lived. Look at that vampire. He’s coming in hot and a hundred Venetian nuns gave their lives to make his ludicrously capacious lace sleeves. Look at that girl. She was born in a fog machine. She wore her best red velvet cape. She’s down bad. She’s singing Total Eclipse of the Heart the whole time.
You are Jim Steinman, and you have reached apotheosis.
yea willy looks beautiful perfect gorgeous etc etc etc but standing next to him is bertuzzi who just looks absolutely disgusting and isn’t that all that really matters
the main problem with this time of year is the irresistible urge to get fully into bed at like 5:34 pm and outside is like yesss, yesss do it, it’s what you deserve yesss. like is it depression or is it just november
