The Madison-Felix Awards: Turning Crap Into Fabulous Prizes

      

The Madison-Felix Awards was an awards show in Buffalo New York, which ran from 1995-2005. It was put together by my friend Big Brian and I. In reality it was a parody of an awards show mixed with an open bar drinking contest. Still it was fun and irreverent and some of the best parties I've ever had. But like all good times, they eventually drifted off to the land of nostalgia. The next four blogs are dedicated to their memory.

      There comes a time in every man’s life when he looks around his hovel and thinks, “I’ve got way too much shit.” A body collects these things as he saunters through life, like ticks in the wild. Until a day of reckoning, or a day of moving, where he starts poking through the back rooms of his life and all sorts of odd bits and pieces fall out. Thimbles, wires, inkpads, left handed safety scissors, shot glasses from Pittsburgh: all safely tucked away “just in case.”

      Just in case of what? I don’t know. In case someone’s strangling me with a piece of yarn and my right arm is paralyzed. The only thing I can use to save myself with is my trusty pair of left handed safety scissors.

      The world is filled with such things. Your house is jam packed with oddities. Go through it right now. I dare you. Sweep out the back shelf of your broom cupboard and the dusty corners of your attic. See what bits and pieces you’ve stored away because “it might come in handy one day.”

A cornacopia of fabulous prizes!

     Jars of batteries, spare cables for the VCR, old demo tapes of some local band that never went anywhere (“Druken Puppet Sings”), album covers with no vinyl inside, mismatched socks, “Dukakis in 88” pins, Volume 16 of the Junior Encyclopedia for 1948, old photographs of a guy who might be a great uncle, or crappy Christmas decorations that you made in 5^th grade that your parents “just love.”

     If my words don’t ring true in your ears, then there is something the matter with you and you need to reexamine your life. Go back to Iraq Mr. Al-Queda. If this does strike a note of recognition, then let me tell you how I turned crap into fabulous prizes.

     The Madison-Felix Awards, that great tribute to cheapness, vulgar audiences, and alcoholic shenanigans, was entering the terrible twos. It’s infancy was marred by various problems that Brian and I corrected. One task was left, and I decided to fix it solo. At the end of the first year door prizes were handed out to the lucky audience, all twenty of them. This last part had been left in the clumsy hands of Ensign Raiff and Nurse Pam. While their enthusiasm certainly wasn’t lacking, their sense of humor was. They bought cute things that were supposed to be funny, but actually weren’t. People chuckled and said it was funny, but it was more out of a sense that they though it should be funny, without actually being funny.

      They gave away a lot of pink plastic jewelry, gotten from a convenient CVS, spice girl dolls, rewritable plastic pads with Urkel’s picture on the cover (though we got some use out of that), and so on.  These items just didn’t fit into the style in which we were fashioning the show. That of cheapness and with a base of crass. We were the Oscar’s evil twin, with all it’s glitz, glamour, and pomposity stripped away. So the following year I took over the door prizes, and like the Russians who built the disastrous Volga-Don Canal in 1931, I declared that there would be “not one kopeck spent.” It would all be gathered from the generous accumulation of crap which had been stuffed into the nether regions of my closet, and beyond.

      Being of a lethargic nature, I didn’t get to work straight away, but let the idea ferment in my mind for awhile. What spurred off the initial gathering was a pile of junk left at my work. I was employed at Noco Gas Station on the corner of Sweet Home and Sheridan. I worked the midnight shift, as it appealed to my nocturnal instincts and paid an additional 50 cents an hour. Not much happened usually, and I had plenty of time to read and sleep, but we were closely situated to the University of Buffalo Amherst Campus, so there were plenty of head-up-their-ass college punks around (more on this in a later post). The hippie revival movement of the early 90s was starting to catch on in the area and brought around all the usual dregs that such movements dig up. I’m sure you know what I mean: Indecent scruffy types who slouch about with their hands in their pockets, just looking at people.

Rockin!

      One evening a VW van, a vintage classic, pulled up to the store. Two tied-died “people,” stinking of petuli and BO entered and started pooling change to buy a bottle of water. A third remained at the van emptying copious amount of garbage into the trash cans. After purchasing their water and finagling two cups out of me, presumably so they wouldn’t swap their various types of hepatitis with each other, they departed. Leaving the store I found that they had filled 3 of the 4 cans and left a pile of old vinyl albums on top of one. Closer inspection showed that these were just the album covers with no sign of anything else in them. The thought then hit me. These would be great gifts to use at the Madisons. I mean who wouldn’t want the album cover of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “A Song Will Rise”, or The Romanian National All Male Chorus Sings, or Neil Hefti’s “Batman” Scores? The covers, while most people would see them as garbage, covered all three of the criteria I had for the Madison door prizes: They were cheap, they were crap, and they were funny in an odd sense. 

      I was inspired. I rushed home, grabbed a cardboard box, and started to dig, dig, dig. And the wonders I found. Our house, it seems, had become a receptacle for unwanted material from both sides of the family. Older members died and there was always something left behind when the loot was divvied up. They would turn to us and say, “Rex, you like reading and stuff, so here’s a crate of books from your Great Aunt Betty.” This was all on top of my Mother’s and my natural pack rat mentality. We find an item, file it away, thinking “Well it might come in handy,” and then promptly forget about its existence.

You had to be there.

     Handfuls upon handfuls of buttons were dumped in the box, a phone book from 1985, game tokens from a destroyed copy of The Blizzard of 77 board game, a few ratted up copies of The Watchtower, old comic books ("Green Lantern vs The Mind Melter!" A non-classic showdown), and so on.

     Then under my generous loft bed I found the grand prize. An item of singular beauty and attention. By itself it seemed useless, yet I found myself incapable of getting rid of it. No matter how many times I found myself handing it over at the Madisons, I found it back in the box at the end of the night. We had a true love/hate relationship. I didn’t want it, yet could not let the joke go.

      The item was an old scuffed up black Oxford shoe for the right foot, left over from High School. For those who attended private school (3 of the 4 major posters) you remember we were required to wear proper shoes whilst attending the institute, along with a shirt, dress pants, tie, clean shaven face, and short hair. For sneakers, along with long hair, leads to degeneracy and general lapses into moral turpitude. Though, as a side note, one of my class mates, Ralph Maggio, managed to go for 4 years never wearing a pair of shoes. He always snuck the sneakers through.

     Back on topic: Yes, a shoe. A glorious right shoe. Its partner had been torn to pieces by my dog Thor many years prior. For nine years I attempted to give it away and, without fail, it was left behind or tossed back into the box by an ungrateful winner. But each year it gathered bigger and bigger laughs; became one of our standard running jokes, from the people who remembered it from the year before.
      To make a short story even longer, I previewed my low budget door prizes at the end of the 2^nd Madison-Felix Awards and was met with uproarious laughter and applause. Filtering out the high alcoholic consumption at such events, I still feel that people appreciated the humor value of such junk over the “cute” prizes handed out the first year. The door prizes remained in this form for the remainder of its decade long run.

       Now as I sit in my apartment looking at the increasing accumulation of “stuff” during my years in the South, I feel like starting the Madison’s again, if only to clear the clutter from my closet. I’m sure my right shoe would agree.

Salo- The Film Which Gives You PTSD

            Salo is perhaps the vilest, most evil minded film ever made, that can still be considered an artistic achievement. Sure there are many violent gorefests out there, brimming with intensity, but Salo is a cut above these, earning the title “the most controversial film of all time.” It is a beautifully shot film of the most vile content imaginable.

            Salo is based upon The 120 Days of Sodom authored by Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, which he described as “the most impure tale that has ever been told since out world began.”  In it 4 Lords, a Duke, a Bishop, a Bank President, and a Judge- each representing a different pillar of society- kidnap 16 youths (8 boys and 8 girls) and take them to a fortress in the dead of winter from which they cannot escape. There with their guards, the Four Fuckers (men chosen for their enormous penises) and the Four Whores (old brothel keepers) the villain protagonists present themselves to the youths as their new Gods, their every whim to be considered law. They youths are told that they are objects to be used and discarded at the Lord’s will.

            The Whores each take turns telling stories from their experiences as a prostitute and madam, to incite the Lords and form an inspiration for the sexual abuse and torture of their captives. The stories begin with simple vices, and quickly move on to complex, criminal, and murderous ones, emulated by the Lords- eventually ending in the slaughter of their victims. And in the end, all fourwalk away unscathed, because they represent the law and power in the world.

            Strange as it may sound, de Sade novel's was attempting to make a political point here, not a sadistic pornographic one. Simple and direct (and perhaps overstated as is de Sade’s style) he demonstrates that the forces of government and power, who are supposed to prevent things like this from happening to, are the ones perpetuating the crimes. 

Only known portrait of de Sade

            For a historical context, we must remember that de Sade wrote this during the French Revolution, where the greed of the nobility had created one of the widest wealth gaps ever seen in Europe. By today’s standards France was a third world country. And the people, driven by desperation and a lack of the basic necessities of life, revolted. Wide spread revolution tending only to occur when they had no other viable option. For many revolutionaries it was literally fight or starve. Thus the events of the book fits very well into revolutionary ideology of the time.

            The 120 Days of Sodom is not actually a complete novel. While writing it de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille, for crimes of sexual deviancy and for penning the novel Justine (another work detailing the rape of innocence by the ruling classes). He had completed only the first part and outlined the other three,when the Bastille was taken by revolutionary forces, freeing the Marquis and the other 4 inmates. Unfortunately for the Marquis this freedom meant a loss of a lot of his material, including his only copy of The 120 Days.

            The book had been written on a long continuous roll of paper, made up of small pieces of paper glued together and written in nearly microscopic text and hidden away from guards. De Sade had believed it lost in the post-battle looting of the Bastille, and it was not seen again until nearly a half century after his death, tucked away in its hiding place. But still the novel did not see publication until the second decade of the 20^th century.

            Salo is the final film of Pier Paolo Passolini. He had finished his Trilogy of Life series (Deacameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights) and Salo was to be the first of his Trilogy of Death. Considering the unabashed cruelty in Salo one can only speculate what was going to happen in later films- consider Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS without the sex. Pasolini updated the setting, placing it during World War II in Salo, a town in northern Italy and made the four villain protagonists members of the fascist party. The town had a special place for Passolini as it was there that his brother was shot by the fascist government. But apart from these changes, he kept the flow and flavor of the book, picking and choosing which scenes of barbarity to display from the wide variety described by de Sade. Unflinchingly he kept the most grotesque scenes of rape, incest, blasphemy, sacrilege, torture, sodomy, and coprophagia.

Pier Paolo Passolini

            This was Pasolini’s last film because he was murdered shortly after he finished editing. Always a controversial figure, he was last seen alive walking down a beach with a male prostitute. His body was found two days later. The autopsy determined that a car had driven over his head at least twice, he had multiple fractured bones, and his genitals had been crushed by an iron bar (some reports claim they were severed and placed in his mouth), then the body was doused in gasoline and set ablaze. The prostitute was arrested and confessed, but as he was much weaker build than Passolini it has been a generally held belief that he was innocent. Other rumors suggest a mafia execution, leftover members of the Italian fascist party, or someone else upset with Passolini’s communist affiliations.  The truth will probably never be discovered. 

           Salo batters you, not with a continuous bombardment of images, but with a constant buildup of dread, a steady progression of evil, and the knowledge that it will get worse. There is no release from it. That dread is what cements everything in the mind. You cannot help but place yourself in the victim’s role and you find yourself asking, “What if that had been me?” Which is the cornerstone of the film, I never doubted that it could and might actually take place. A realistic horror film, which makes it all the worse.

And as the film progresses the dread increases.  We see the four villain protagonists take in more and more power, act to spit every social convention of society, and eventually spiral deeper into their own madness. The scene where feces is served up as a delicacy is perhaps the most nauseating thing I have ever viewed, up there with Divine’s dog shit eating scene in Pink Flamingos.

Eat up!

The film gives you PTSD. For days afterwards bits and pieces of it bob from your subconscious and slap you in the face. Weird things set it off- eating a bar of chocolate, seeing some art deco architecture, a mention of Italy or World War II. It is like a stain on your brain that you cannot scrub off. You cannot unring the bell. You cannot unsee the movie. Salo has such a large volume of vileness in such a short span of time that it is difficult to take in at first. Usually by the end you feel numb. Your brain needs time to process it all, hence the delayed effect.

 The Criterion Collection version contains a lot of behind the scenes footage and interviews and I was surprised ro see that the cast had a lot of fun making this film, both torturers and the tortured. Most of the actors were young, never having been in a film before, so there were many laughs and practical jokes being played.  And since it has filmed so disjointedly, most of the actors did not realize just how grim the final product would be.  

Viewer beware. Salo is a solid film, but earns it’s title of “the most controversial film of all time.” Criterion version is here.
 Trailer is below. Enjoy and Caveat Emptor