The Goddamn Haircut!

 

When I was 21, I also had great hair.  Fuck.

Catie, Boxxy is getting old, but your fans will always love just seeing you talk about something you're really happy about.  Lately, nearly every video from you has felt like my new favorite, and this is no exception.







The uvula shot blew me away.  Further proof that Catie Wayne has some cartoon DNA!

FOAR PRINCE GYASA? Do it, Catie!

 If there was one thing, just one action, I could urge Catie to take, it would be to make  FOAR PRINCEGYASA FRUM BOXXY.

To some, Prince Gyasa may seem like a real-life Svetlana, but I think she's a lot closer to Catie.  A geeky, awkward young feminist, roughly the same age, she made a video in 2009 that was critical of Boxxy,  I believe on feminist grounds.  She was critical; I believe she was misguided, but she was no hater.  Yet, for some reason, probably because she was a geeky young feminist, she's been identified as Boxxy's number one hater, especially in Encyclopedia Dramatica.    From that day to this, she's been pummeled by messages, the tone of which might seem familiar to Catie.




She stood up for it for a long time, not with Catie's grace, but with all of her grit.  But from  that point on, with Boxxy fans posting stupid death threats, Prince Gyasa never lashed out at Boxxy, never blamed her for the hate.  But she made fun of the fans.  They deserved it.


 It would be very awesome.  It would send a message to the Rogue Fans, and did I mention it would be awesome?

Original Stolen Content!

"I'M NOT BOXXY!" ANewHopeee Sampler 

This is an anthology that I put together as an introduction to ANewHopeee for those who are only familiar with Boxxybabee.






New York Dolls "Chatterbox"

This song and this footage is a no-brainer.  I've done this three times now, about once a year.  I keep adding new videos, making it  go faster and faster,

Catie's Dramatic Weight Loss

I hope it doesn't go too far.  Captures from something I found on the forum entitled "boobs.gif" (cute, eh?) tell the story.

  

Late 2011

 

December 2012

                                                    March 2013

 

April 2013

It bugs me that with all the negative attention given to a little voluptuousness, no one has noticed this.  I'm not even willing to a say "a few extra pounds", I think Catie's weight has always been within the range of healthy, normal, and attractive.  However, for an actor who is a woman, weight control is a bigger deal deal than for a mere human being, and this may be necessary for her career.

Catie's pretty sensible.  Isn't that what we who know her love most?  I enjoy her beauty; I enjoy her talent, but I LOVE CATIE for being an oasis of sanity in the crazy internet.   Still, health is a lot more abstract when you're 21 than when you're older.  I hope she's being careful and healthy, and all is well.   Catie looks great with the weight down, though a skinny Boxxy looks a little strange to me.



Congratulations on the sleek new look!   Take care of yourself, babee!


Note:  Catie's Mom, Lisa, writes:  "she hasn't lost a lot of weight, so the less said the better probably."

I think this is good news from a health standpoint, bad news from the standpoint of my quest to not look like an asshole.  I'll take the hit.  The pictures show what they show.  She looks more slender than before.  Maybe she's gained some muscle, or maybe it's just another case of the pretty girls being a mystery to me.

Her weight isn't the issue, and it never has been; it's the campaign of lies.  This was a ham-handed attempt to establish a baseline of truth.  If I ever revisit this issue, I'll try to put the focus where it belongs.

 

I Had a Car Once

Yes, it's true.  Boxxy has no ass! 

If I was 20 years younger, it would be the first time Catie had ever dissapointed me, but I'm far too old to be thinking about Catie's ass, so I'm actually relieved. Indeed, if I was 20 years younger, the petite little thang she shakes in that instantly iconic scene would certainly stir my blood, but I'm pretty much unaffected.  Until the jump cut, when she turns around!  Those eyes can still make my old heart hurt.

I can't say enough about "I Had a Car Once".  If FOAR EVERYWUN (or any short youtube video) can be called a masterpiece, IHACO can be called a masterpiece, albeit in the more conventional, more complex mode of the aNewHopeee channel, which is now firmly established, in my opinion, as Catie's better channel.

(Am I sure about that?  No, I'm never sure about anything, and, to be honest, I haven't been paying much attention to Boxxybabee lately.  If I'm going to be blogging about Catie, I'm going to have to give the recent Boxxy a much closer look.)

The thang-shaking is only the second most arresting moment in this video.  The most arresting moment, of course, is Catie's full-throttle rage at a guy who apparently tries to initiate a physical confrontation with her.  I will tell you frankly, I find this moment to be as scary as it is funny, and I can't tell how much of that is Catie's intention.  On this much, trust me: Catie's videos are more sophisticated than most people think, and always have been.  This is a woman who read Shakespeare as a child (I was thirty when I discovered Shakespeare) and you should expect a certain level of complexity, nuance, and irony.

As played by Catie, the guy certainly looks scary.  For me, something about this guy evokes the hitchhiker from A Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  By the way, it's FUCKING impressive for a cute little sweetie-petitey like Catie,doing her own makeup, to convincingly play a male character who is really menacing.  There's so much great stuff going on in this video that you can almost overlook that.

And what the fuck is he doing?   What kind of man tries to pick a fight with a five foot three inch woman?  To hear Catie tell it, he's a "big boy".  What is his endgame?  Did this really happen?  I don't like to think about it.

Catie does something very interesting here.  She talks about the guy not being a threat, and then she acts a little crazy, a little hyper, a little driven.   If you're thinking about it, it makes you wonder if she's really got a handle on how much danger she's in.  That makes her beautiful rage ironic and frightening, and maybe a little funnier, because of the sense of danger.   I'm reminded of the beginning of FOAR ANT, when Catie says: "My name is Boxxy, and I love a lot of people!" and then she gives a crazy look to the camera, that undercuts everything hilariously.  I know Catie said she wasn't acting in these early videos, but I think she was acting when she said it.  As formidable as she is when she is raging at the bus stop, she's the only one in serious danger here, and she's taking it way too far.   As a rule, someone who's backing off is going to talk tough, and as long as they're backing off, you should let them.  I've seen someone get his arm broken for making that mistake.  So the whole time she's calling this guy a piece of shit, there's an implied undercurrent of danger and vulnerablity that I find terrifying and heartbreaking. 

If you've ever created anything, you know that even if Catie didn't consciously intend for the viewer to feel frightened for her, it could still be something genuine, transmitted through the unconscious or just something real that is captured that the artist didn't see.  She is so compelling in that moment!  I want to hold her, while protecting my face.   I don't want anything bad to ever happen to her, not ever, and I know that I can't do anything about that.  James Baldwin wrote that the essential truth about life is that it is "unutterably beautiful, because it is unutterably tragic".  Catie has captured that truth for me.  Did she intend that?   I don't think it matters all that much.  She wanted me to have an experience that would be my own.  This is fucking ART, dude!

And she's just so beautiful!  Her hair and outfit make her look tough, but she also looks fragile, pale and painted like a porcelain doll.  This is not Boxxy; this is not random.  Catie's look is always carefully chosen, and this time it's perfect for the tough, brittle persona she's trying to project. Her T-shirt, while on one level the most nerdy bit of clothing imgaginable, evokes "West Side Story", and images of choreographed street violence.  In the next video, she'll don the look of a perverse child-woman (Jon Benet Ramsey in reverse) for a bawdy discussion of  "My Little Pony"!  The week after that, she'll look soft and sensual, and she'll bake the sexiest pizza I have ever seen on youtube, or anywhere else.  It doesn't matter that no one in their right mind wears a sweater to make a sweater.  All that matters is how much you want touch that fabric.   Oh, these are heady days for the subscribers of aNewHopeee!

Nothing I'm saying about danger and tragedy is meant to imply that IHACO isn't also really funny.  There's a whole lot of great timing and comic nuance thoughout this beautiful performance.  Every moment is just delicious.  I could eat the pause in  "but... I doubt it.", with a spoon.

If there's anything here to criticize, it's the guy who wants to help Catie with her oil.   Maybe this is a California thing, but the last time I saw a guy with a toothpick in his mouth was probably before Catie was born.  Catie's a sharp observer of male behavior in the larger sense.  The oil thing, the way the guy at the bus stop challenges her and backs off, it all rings true for me, and the use of makeup for the physical transformation is REALLY good.  But the mannerisms are a little corny.  Eventually, when people start taking aNewHopeee seriously, Catie is going to be criticized for all the belching, sneering, toothpick-chewing, crotch-grabbing and drunkenness of her male characterizations. Misogynists love to characterize feminists as "sexist".  Hey Catie, let's see you play a dude who is not disgusting! 

She's got a great future, and it causes me severe butthurt to think of all the great Catie Wayne performances I'm going to miss on account of being dead. Goddamn it.

She Owns

On Mother's Day I put together a couple of video slideshows: one for my mother, and one for Catie's mother, Lisa.  Both videos featured musical accompaniment from Frank Sinatra.  In these lean times (pretty much my whole life) , a video is my go-to gift for birthdays and holidays, and Sinatra is my go-to music for Mother's Day videos.  My mom is probably a bigger fan of Johnny Mathis, or at least she used to be, but I can't really do too much with Mathis.  He's too romantic for your Mom, but Sinatra is all-encompasing, and all Moms love him.

I really liked the video I made for Lisa. It was a collection of captures from Catie's "Silly Face Challenge" set to "You Make Me Feel So Young".  I just love a Catie Wayne slide show.  God knows how many I've made over the last three years, and this one was really one of my favories.  I showed it to my friend Victoria.  Victoria is in her sixties, and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.  She's an intelligent, competent, kind-hearted woman who loves animals but nevertheless has a jagged streak of rage running right through her.  She's always angry-- at other drivers, at characters on TV, at Republicans, and, lord knows, at me.

But she loved my little slideshow video.  "This is the best video you've ever made.", she said.  "As a feminist..., she trailed off, and begain again.  "This young woman owns her body.  She owns herself.  Do you know what I mean?"

I didn't know what Sinatra or silly faces had to do with it, but I've always felt that one of the reasons why Catie returned to the internet was a primal need to claim her own image.  Yeah, she needed money for college,  and what she said over and over about giving other people a lift, touching people's lives, that's definitely real. But claiming her own image was always on the agenda.

Or was it? I mean, did she ever really think about it like that?  She just walked in, and she owned it. 

They fought her tooth and nail, the Men Who Would Be Queen.   They bitched about her copyrighting her videos.  Their reasons for complaining were mostly symbolic, but if you'd take her side, they'd complain that her reasons for establishing copyright were mostly symbolic, as if their symbolic reasons mattered more than hers.  You'd see them in Unichan lamenting the time "before Boxxy became a product."  But what they were really complaining about was that Boxxy had become a person.  A meme doesn't need the money from t-shirts.   A person needs money, not only for college and for a webcam that isn't shitty, but simply to live.
The Queen had needs, and she wanted to rule herself.

But did she fight them back?  Not really, because she didn't have to. 

Most people, men and women alike, would have fought anyway, they would have gotten into long bickering flame wars.  But even though a majority of the public still see Catie as her Boxxy persona,  Catie herself is all about quiet authority.

She just owned it.  Because she owns it.