Grace Jones on the Pee Wee Herman Christmas Special from 1988
Jones clip via the fascinating, poignant HBO documentary on Pee Wee Herman, which shows how much he came out of the whole Andy Warhol / Theatre of the Ridiculous / Angels of Light / John Waters lineage
A fellow traveler with Club 52, B-52s, Klaus Nomi (some image cross over there), Devo et al
An ancestor (in his collecting of kooky Americana) of World of Wonder
Paul Reubens was also an alumnus of Cal Arts, doing performance art and weird films and such... a trip to see shaky old super-8 footage of things performed in the corridors and halls that are now very familiar to me
filtered through this
Until the doc I never even heard of this big bump in the upward trajectory of his career
For reasons best known to himself he wanted to have the longest kiss in cinema history
This explains a lot about Pee-Wee Herman that was previously incomprehensible to me. There was a period - in the late 80s, maybe - when he seemed fabulously cool. He was on the covers of style magazines, and talked about as a comic genius who meant as much for adults as he did for kids.
ReplyDeleteI found it mystifying. You couldn’t watch his TV show in the UK, and I don’t think the film was out yet. And even when it was released, it was certainly not anything like a mainstream commercial success.
I assumed it was just another manifestation of the ethos of raging elitism that ruled the British style mags in those days. “We’ve been to America and you haven’t, so we can tell you sorry provincials about all the cool stuff you ought to like.” But if Herman had all these cool connections, I guess he at least earned a bit of adult credibility by association.
I actually watched Big Adventure many years later, and really enjoyed it. He had that kind of genial weirdness that characterizes all the best entertainment for children. But the idea of grownups getting seriously worked up over it still seems ludicrous.