Faster Pussycat

Riding the bus is close to drifting in a place where it's difficult to drift on foot. Many literal drifters are on the bus, or else they're fading into the landscape--hiding out in the grass by lagoons or sleeping in the same groves that the egrets nest in. The train, which used to be fast, now feels slow--the train whistle gives the day a rhythm that seems less frenetic than, say, the highway. But of course, the highway is often slow. In last Sunday's travel section in the San Diego tribune, there was an article about how riding the train to LA is faster than driving. This is true.


Mark and I watched Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965)last night. Until I moved out here I'm not sure the scenes of drag racing in the desert and the horror of the train would have made any sense to me. The male characters are pretty violent, but they can't imagine that female desire for domination could be physically violent. Kirk, the older brother, is especially dense, even though his older brother, "The Vegetable," is the one who supposedly isn't right in the head. It's hard to feel triumphant about Kirk and Linda getting away together in the pickup truck.