Monthly Archives: March 2026

Oddments

Cat Tonics, Chakra Unblockers & Blonde Highlights for Dogs

A decade ago, I created Your Search Within, a parody website inspired by a certain prominent health-and-wellness influencer who took herself rather too seriously. This famous woman sold clothing, body care products, sex toys, candles that she said smelled like her body parts, and woo-woo “lifestyle” goods for anywhere from two to ten times their normal retail value.

I could hardly wait to satirize it. I wanted to create a faux-spiritual guide to overpriced and essentially useless products aimed at vulnerable people who sought to attain greater spiritual awakening and purity of body, mind, and soul—but without effort. I asked my daughter, graphic designer Lily Rodseth, if she’d build a website for me if I wrote the copy. She said “Sure!” So we started meeting in coffee houses to brainstorm, design, sketch, plan, and build it.

The Circumflex Cranial Expansion System, the Innervyzion™ Spirit Animal Mask, and the Golden Grrl Highlighting Kit for Blonde Dogs were among the first nonsensical items my we decided to “sell” on the site (though they’re all somehow out of stock at any particular moment).

We agreed that using fame and influence to push merchandise of dubious value at extreme prices was tacky. But it struck us that what the smug celebrity was really selling on her site was the idea that one could attain greater physical, mental, and spiritual purity by simply buying it. Her tacit message was that purchasing just the right kind of colon-cleansing elixir, crystal vaginal egg, or $800 pair of white pants didn’t just make you look cooler or richer or trendier—it made you a better person.

Wearing or using the objects she sold was a way to not only to display wealth but signal virtue. The barely veiled message behind each product description and story of personal growth was that these products made one more focused, disciplined, healthy, attuned, and spiritually elevated.

Pushing overpriced objects at people who assign them glamour and magical properties based on brand or source is nothing new. But the implication that buying these products actually made one a better person of greater inherent value—that really rubbed me the wrong way. So Your Search Within was the obvious response.

Our parody website promises “ethically sourced, pure, wholesome, authentic, small-batch crafted, raw products,” of course. But it also states that “our vision, our mission and our dream all combine synergistically to provide you, our beloved customers, with products that change lives and alter history, all while leaving you refreshed, renewed, supple and glowing.” I mean, why not promise everything, all at once?

The heart of the site is the retail product section offering opportunities to achieve inner harmony, improve bodily attunement, keep a more holistic home, or help animal friends to live more fully and joyfully in the moment. Facial sorbet, an urban aromatherapy system, and the Cat-a-Tonic Feline Deconfusifying Kit will help you align, affirm, and awaken body, soul, and even pets to the wonders without and within.

Namaste, baby.

The website’s blog offers chances to “enhance and deepen your connection to the universe and learn to go with the spiritual flow.” The section on our team of five womyn who form the “Your Search Within collective” includes Natural Products Guru Yonia Cuervo, New Technologies Revelator Nagine Xavier-Woo, and Insight Channeler Starryn Fairchylde. They guide each spirit toward their cosmic energy source. (Funny how each influencer’s photo looks just like me, isn’t it?)

Lily and I have never monetized the site. But then, it doesn’t exist to gather income. We made it to poke fun at the idea that one can buy virtue and become a more pure person by imbibing, inhaling, or adorning oneself in a certain way. We hope it’ll make people laugh, of course. But after that, maybe they’ll notice how influencers manipulate us into feeling so insecure or inadequate that we spend time and money on obvious nonsense that we hope will shine up our tarnished halos.

Film & Television, Literature, Oddments

Nihilism and Nightlights

little-man

The following is one of a series of six film review parodies I wrote for the Sunday Punch section of the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1980s. Each piece featured imaginary foreign films that I reviewed in the voice of a dry and humorless foreign film critic.

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Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, Ciao Chow Chow, and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, Nightlight.

Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.

Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.

These influences can be seen clearly in Ciao Chow Chow, in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.

Ciao is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.

Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.

Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s Nightlight tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.

Filmed in black and white, Nightlight captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.

De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include The Teddy Bear with No Face, Scream, Barbie, Scream and Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids, in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.

Nightlight, the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of Murder on the Trampoline.

Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of The Music Man.

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The illustration above comes from the Little Man movie rating system used by the San Francisco Chronicle since 1942. The excited Little Man above signifies a critic’s greatest satisfaction and is equivalent to a four-star rating.