antw.re: everyone's gone to the movies

[David Morris]

>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>By the by, "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" might even qualify as Pynchonian... a 
>paranoid central character is on an extravagant and ludicrous quest, the 
>structure is loose and episodic (if maybe a tad linear), the ending is 
>self-reflexive, and the jokes tend to be Cheap. The movie is like a 
>laboratory dish in an incubator, American pop culture is the growth medium, 
>and the absurd characters flounder around under the microscope.

"Pee Wee's Big Adventure" was great, as was his ill-fated TV show.  It was a 
daring "children's show":

http://www.salon.com/oct96/peewee961028.html

In the "Conky's Breakdown" episode (Volume 2 of the reissue), for example, a 
then-unknown Jimmy Smits plays a repairman who comes to the Playhouse to fix 
Pee-wee's robot Conky and catches the eye of man-hungry Miss Yvonne ("The 
most beautiful woman in Puppetland"). Showing her his wrench, he tells her 
that a repairman always has "the right tools and knows how to use them." The 
disembodied genie-head Jambi (John Paragon) sends off a queenly vibe, 
especially in the presence of hunky Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne, back 
when people called him Larry). In one episode, Pee-wee asks Jambi to grant 
Curtis some new footwear and Jambi raises an eyebrow and says, "You know 
what they say about big feet..." (The answer: "Big boots!") As for camp, the 
Christmas special is a veritable who's-who of gay and lesbian icons, from 
k.d. lang to Grace Jones to the Del Rubio Triplets.



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