Week 5 (20)
It’s times like this I wish MetaFilter was taking new participants. Then I could just log on and whip a bon mot out, rather than lamely posting it over here in my own personal very quiet backwater. —See, they’re talking about the Christian Science Monitor’s unutterably lame article on pornography’s “seeping” influence on pop culture and how maybe we should all just hope the pendulum swings back to decency (and since when are naked people and sex and happiness and thought-provoking explorations of human social dynamics indecent, hmm?), and the discussion’s getting to the “Free speech, but pop culture cheapens the sex act, so I think porn should just stay where it is in the ghetto” portion of the mealy-mouthed and unclear-on-the-concept-of-freedom-of-expression debate, and a poster named evanizer says (among other articulate things) this—
So, while I think porn is not inherently evil, I wish it would learn its place in society. And stop humping my leg.
—all I can think of is “Gee, I’d pretty much say the same dam’ thing about the Republicans. And Sen. Lieberman.” Bottom line: we do not deserve to live in a world sanitized for children, and the same logic that says porn might cause some men to maybe do something rash, so we should restrict it, or outlaw it, or hide it away, would pretty much do away with, say, fast food advertising. Encourages obesity, you know. Or violent television programs. Or laissez-faire economics. But the bourbon’s starting to talk, and I feel a rant about the absolute necessity of art and its unfettered ability to speak to us and the world as it is and isn’t and should be and could be and never will and might be and see, I’m starting to babble. Freedom of speech; freedom of thought; peace out. And pour me another, would you?
Not a sequel, but an equal, baby. I’m not sure what I was hearing, in the back of my head. “I know how it feels to be cooling my heels, I’ve been down at them long enough. But if I take to them now—” Or maybe it was “Denton, Denton, you’ve got no pretention, you’re where the heart is, you’re okay!” Or even “I’ve had as much of you as any man can—!” But whatever it was, still funked from this afternoon, I hear it and spark up suddenly and ask the downstairs tenant if he’s ever seen Shock Treatment.
“Shock Treatment?” he says. “What’s that?”
So I show him Richard O’Brien and half the cast of Rocky Horror and Barry Humphries sans Dame Edna playing Henry Kissinger as a game show host pretending to be blind and Jessica Harper with that amazing voice no longer screaming at schocky Italian horror films and Cliff DeYoung as Brad Majors’ twin brother the fast food magnate taking over the world through television and mental health and even the man with no neck no neck no fuckin’ neck no neck is back and it’s the movie about TV, like Rocky Horror was a musical about movies, and the TV show about musicals is probably never going to happen, but hey. I show him not the sequel, but the equal. —Better, really, if you ask me. More mature. More cynical and happier, even. Less mawkishly adolescent, and no weird stains on your clothing afterwards, and no showing up for the midnight show in Harvard Square with your girlfriend, your best friend’s sister dressed as Brad and the dyke doing Little Nell and you’re wearing a bustier and lipstick and everybody else is wearing sweats and baseball caps on backwards and wants to shoot waterguns at the floorshow which was a credible enough version of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” (and since when do Tom Leher and Rocky go together? They do, smashingly, but since when?) and anyway, there’s none of that, there’s O’Brien and co. (Rik Mayall, blink and you’ll miss him) making fun of music videos that haven’t been invented yet and a twistedly post-modern plot (such as it is) and kick-ass music from that time when the ’80s weren’t yet the Eighties but were still, you know, cool—like, you know, I was twelve or thirteen then, but hey, so fuckin’ what, let’s face it, mack, that basic black is coming back—
You’re blinded by romance, you’re blinded by science,
Your condition is critically grave,
But don’t expect mercy from such an alliance—
Suspicion of tradition’s so New Wave...
Or climbing into that dam’ convertible and driving off—
Some people do it for each other,
Some people do it for their lovers,
Some people do it for improvement,
Some people do it for the movement.
But—
We’re gonna do it anyhow anyhow,
We’re gonna do it anyhow anyhow,
We’re gonna do it, we just gotta keep going—
Because the sun never sets on those who ride into it. So yeah. I’m feeling better. Thanks.
Sex
and politics.
Friday, 14:28
Like sausage, maybe? Those who like them should never see how they get made?
Nah. Maybe not.
•
Mildly amused to discover, thanks to Daze Reader, that Enron was trying to get into (along with every other pie, and pair of pants) porn, of all things. Not that they were going to make it or anything. Just set themselves up as someone who could buy low and sell high. Broadband futures or some such shit. Shiny packaging with very little inside once you’ve ripped off the shrinkwrap and thrown away the styrofoam peanuts. Don’t mind me, I’m riffing; stream-of-something, trying to avoid a rant about what happens to an economy when the medium of exchange goes from a means to an end, and how no one makes stuff anymore. How those that do are increasingly—out of frustration—turning to giving it away. Because the markets we’ve got are so obviously rigged, and so obviously unfair (and don’t even try to call them free) that it’s not worth the bother.
Maybe I should just make up a batch of open-source cola. No bath-tub rum kicking around, though.
•
Maybe it’s Michael Moore’s latest raillery, and dude, I’ll love you forever for Roger and Me and TV Nation and even The Awful Truth, at least in principle, but please. Shut the fuck up. Your snarking references to Bush being gone in a few months have the reek of desperation about them; we can all smell it, all of us who know it won’t go down that way. The Democrats have no stomach for it. It’s too much of How Business Gets Done These Days to go very far. This guy or that guy will take a fall, and the Lay’s rich friends will buy up their foreclosed houses at cheap prices and quietly give them back to them, which is how things are done in Texas, and more bombs will go off somewhere over the Axis of Evil and the TV crews will hare off over the horizon and even if “Tricky” Dick Cheney is so bloody stupid as to try and hide a smoking gun by refusing to turn over his energy meeting notes (at least, a gun that’s smoking any more than the thick clouds already wafting up by the second), the GAO’s suit will wend its tired, complicated way to the Supreme Court, where five foul justices now have a vested interest in shutting down any criminal investigations. —Might cast some doubt on the legitimacy of Bush’s presidency, after all.
No, Salon’s recent overview of books on the 2000 debacle has a much better—and much more grim—picture of how things will work, of how things already are working. (Damn. Remember when Salon was a fucking great magazine?)
•
Even the John “Bubbies” Ashcroft jokes are wearing thin. Bottom-line: a man who believes we should be legislating morality is in charge of prosecuting in this country, and that scares the bejesus out of me. (Not that there was much in there to begin with, but.) And while it’s fine and all to joke at things that frighten you, it doesn’t do much good, long-term.
•
Eh. I’m in a weird space. Maybe it’s all the books about post-war Berlin I’m trying to soak up at the moment; I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the news. Maybe I do need to go on a bender.
Did you know that lawyers for the Beamer Foundation claim they own the phrase “Let’s roll”?
•
And I’m not even bringing up the whole end-run around Roe v. Wade (an acorn, it seems, being an unborn tree), or how a network that offers Alan Keyes a talk show can be accused of left-wing anything, or how everyone in the weird talking-head mediaspace saw an “eloquent” State of the Union that somehow skipped past the rest of the country, or Howard Zinn putting a human face on collateral damage, or—
I mean, I’m not even bringing up the whole idea of slipping up just enough to allow a terrorist strike that would distract—
I mean, let’s not get crazy.
•
You know how I said sex and politics in the tagline?
I was lying.
•
Maybe I was too hard on Moore.
Fish?
Check. Barrel? Check. And my shotgun’s around here somewhere—
Wednesday, 10:09
One presumes the town of Inglis, Florida, will be shortly begin rounding up all calico cats and evicting them. Or worse.
Yes, yes, Mindy “My Name Isn’t as Easy to Make Fun of as Barbara ‘Anthony’ Comstock’s” Tucker denies all this to Maureen Dowd, but the fact that it’s wholly believable Attorney General John “Titicaca” Ashcroft would have a superstitious dread of calico cats says something, don’t you think? Calicos. The color’s so—promiscuous. Mixed. Multicultural. Impure. Certainly, the fact that the story’s still being denied (with a laugh, but there’s an edge to that laugh) is telling enough to, well. Make me want to giggle. Schadenfreude, you know. —Bonus points: note that Tobias’s column, based on the usual highly placed, unnamed sources, also includes a debate over draping nude statuary, dating back to Nov. 20; adds that necessary touch of verisimilitude, don’t you think?
In related cover-up news, John Ashcroft (and Bush II, wielding that darned Executive Privilege with his usual mad abandon), don’t want to come clean about why the FBI let four innocent men take the fall for a murder. Two of those falsely convicted (on the perjured testimony of a hitman and valuable FBI informant) died in jail, and I’m cheering on Rep. Dan Burton. Jesus.
Pull!
À
la recherche du temps perdu.
Tuesday, 13:27
O-Zone’s closing. Fucking great record store, the place where I first bought Muslimgauze and Add (N) to X, where I found Vampyros Lesbos, the only place in town I knew where you could get kittenhead EPs with any regularity. Victim of the ratcheting gentrification surrounding the massive reconstruction of what used to be the Blitz-Weinhard brewery, which was much more cheery somehow than the offices-lofts-upscale-grocery-parking-garage-brewpub thing that’s going in. Even if downtown smelled like a bowl of cornflakes left in the sink too long on days when the brewery was cooking full-bore. I could take the smell; I miss the merry clinking of bottles on the giant open conveyor belts above the street, moving from one building to another. —And I can’t take the closing of places like O-Zone. The Spouse nipped into their fire sale and picked up some deeply discounted bargains on a lark, and one of them was Pomegranate by Heidi Berry. Intensely layered mid-’90s design on the CD cover, the sort of thing done by people who’ve seen the people Dave McKean has seen, only nicely enough done, the font work isn’t too egregious: yes, Copperplate and Embassy or something similar, and shots of dimly lit Venus flytraps, okay. And the music: heard a snippet when I went in to check on the Spouse, who’s been drawing up a storm at the drafting table and the computer the past few days, incense burning and a cat in the chair she isn’t sitting in at the moment, keeping an eye on things. The music’s nice: dark, moody, layered, dimly lit. You know what I mean.
And then I’m back there last night getting ready to crawl into bed and the CD’s playing again (“I like it,” says the Spouse, and who am I to complain about obsessively playing music into the ground, hmm?) and I stumble over this chunk of memory that I can’t figure out for the life of me. I’ve heard this song before—but where? when? how? Heidi Berry? Who the fuck is that?
(Can I describe it? Dance about the architecture, y’all. —Slow, slow bass, subterranean, fingers squeaking on strings [echoed] and a long slow moaning vocal line [cue the angelic descant] and a guitar picking a slightly faster counterpoint or whatever you call it, and can you make out the words? “There is only love in your heart,” I think, but I’m not going to swear to it. “Lift up your arms and cradle me like a child.” I have heard this song before.)
So I look to the liner notes: “Cradle,” from Love, and none of that’s ringing a bell, Laurence O’Keefe, 1991, 4AD—
Oh.
Massachusetts, and somewhere in the middle of a mess I’ve fallen in with a girl from Kansas, and we hang out and talk about films and she takes me to my first Hal Hartley movie (and let me just thank you, again, for that: thanks) and if we’re flirting or anything it’s the weird kind of flirting where you’re both just kind of waiting for something to happen and nothing ever does, or maybe just one of you is, and the other isn’t, but the first doesn’t know that, and anyway, it’s the sort of thing that accumulates gradually, by attrition, that involves a lot of just standing around under the window with your open arms, as Zadie Smith puts it, except she says it’s a boy trick, and it isn’t, or it isn’t just, but anyway, that’s not the point, and nothing here ever paid off, not with the girl from Kansas. But she did have this thing about playing me these CDs, these beautiful, moody, swoony, dreamy songs from people I’d never heard of and would never hear of again because, you know, I was too busy standing around under her window with my arms open to take notes, but I do remember this: all of them were from 4AD. She really, really, really liked that label. And it’s hard to blame her, really. —The Spouse also picked up something by Operacycle, which she thought I’d like, and I do, a lot, but I’d never heard them before.
Oh,
that’s all it was.
Tuesday, 13:11
Barbara “Anthony” Comstock, spokesperson for Attorney General John “Bazooms” Ashcroft, says (Beverly Lumpkin’s sources notwithstanding) that he had nothing, nothing to do with the decision to drape the 70-year-old statues of the Spirit and the Majesty of Justice, and that it’s just because the drapes make for better television.
I’m so glad we could clear that up.
—In related news: John “Knockers” Ashcroft writes porn! (Well, no. Not really. But.)
Hey! I restrained myself. You’ll note no jokes about “I have not had relations with that statue.” —Oh, okay. It’s only because I couldn’t think of a better way to work it in. You got me. Sigh.
The
work in question.
Monday, 17:12
It’s quite simple, really: Vanessa’s married to Jackson Cuyahoga, and they have (at least) two kids, Addison and Alexandra. Sam is Vanessa’s sister. Richie Meeuwissen is Sam’s boyfriend, and he kissed Marlowe in the club before Marlowe had a tryst with Sam in the club’s men’s room, who did it as a favor for Jackson, who’s Marlowe’s friend. Peter isn’t all that important and he’s pretty much already gone, but Torvald (who isn’t a hacker, or wait, maybe he is) might be, and anyway neither of them is related to anyone else, but they both have something to do with Jackson. Probably sex. Vanessa and Sam have sex, yes, which is incest, and Vanessa and Addison have sex, which is also incest, and Addison has a girlfriend, Edie, who doesn’t seem to mind having sex with Addison and Vanessa, though Alexandra doesn’t like it very much. Alexandra only has sex with Mister Tisdale, who’s a pedant. At the very least. Which Jackson doesn’t like, and Edie thinks he’s a creep, and Charley Vanderhook is a straight-A student who’s being blackmailed into compromising positions by Edie and Addison. The Lappalainen brothers have if not sex then at least sexualized contact—with each other, that is; they both have very definite sex with Vanessa—and they’re going to build one of those infinity pools at the Cuyahoga house. And there’s a cop who rapes people, or at least Vanessa, and takes pictures, but I have no idea what she’s doing in there. Yet. And I’m being deliberately vague about the ages (why? I don’t know), and the whole thing is named after a song by R.E.M., or an album by Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny, or a river that once caught on fire, which is really the song by R.E.M., and none of it has anything at all to do with any towns in Ohio. Or Kansas. —See?
Oh, come on. All my friends in college had sex with each other—oh, wait; that’s probably a bad analogy.
But honestly: As Falls Cuyahoga, So Falls Cuyahoga Falls (which went through such tentative working titles as New Duluth, Parsippany, Florida, and My New Fucking Technique is Unstoppable) was supposed to be light-hearted, inconsequential, fluffy, odd, quirky, bizarre; “a way of ridding myself of numerous, persistent obsessions” without worrying about morals or consequences or Artistic Statements or what anything meant or signified. Wallow in the muck for a bit and worry about the politics later, in some other context. —Some formal rules to spice things up: 2,000 words or thereabouts, stripped bare, as cruftless and as utterly third-person objective as it’s possible for me to be. And no quotation marks. (As close, perhaps, to Hemingway as I’d ever want to get. —Upwind, to be sure.) And by the time I had three of them littering the hard drive and a fourth bubbling along, I was thinking, why not? What the hell? Post them to alt.sex.stories.moderated, rapid-fire-and-forget, maybe generate some buzz, maybe at least pick a fight about punctuation and technique. Don’t worry about the impossible paradoxes of the James family; don’t worry about researching Georgian brothels and Victorian stables. Just think it, and do it, and forget it. Teen lesbians in ankle socks? A strap-on in a men’s room? Daredevil games with power dynamics? Blowjobs for pedophiles? Whatever. Do it. Pleasure principle. Consequence-free. Sex stories. Stroke stories. Line ’em up and fuck ’em hard and fast and over and done and on to the next, bam.
But: one correspondent writes to praise “this network of sexually active people that you’ve brought together here. It’s pleasure driven and consequence free.” And yes, and yes, and I’m glad you liked the image of Sam lying on the rock with the condoms and lube and dildos scattered about (not enough still-lives in porn, methinks), still: consequence-free? Something inside (the inner Comstock?) balks at that. There are always consequences. Maybe not the ones you’re thinking of, and certainly not the ones that insist, that demand, that draw morals and lessons (no hugging, no sharing, no learning—well, maybe some hugging)—but there are consequences. They’re fucking with some potent, dangerous cross-currents here, and this isn’t Jerry Springer, but A does lead to B and then to C, even if by unexpected routes, and maybe that’s one reason why Alexandra is so uncomfortable. And what’s between Sam and Vanessa and Jackson (or Richie), and Addison and Edie (and Vanessa) (and Charley), and Alexandra and that pedantic creep, Mister Tisdale (and everyone else), and Mister Tisdale and Marlowe and Jackson and Torvald, and even Richie, all of that is going somewhere. I think. —Though I’m still not sure about the cop.
And yet: another correspondent writes to extol the “sense that the jaws of the trap are just starting to close,” and remark on his dismay that I’m just making it all up as I go along. I mean yes, there is a sense of foreboding; yes, something is going to happen, or several somethings, all at once, or strung out a bit, timing, you know, but—it is just me making it up. Larking. Pleasure-principle stroke stories, free of consequence. No traps. Or maybe, but—
In the shower this morning, a large piece fell out of the sky and onto my head, or rather, a piece that I’d been turning over in my hands, wondering what to do with it (an off-handed reference? a throw-away joke?) turned out to snap very neatly into it all at an angle I hadn’t considered, and— Well. I now know, for instance, What Started it All, and I know the catalyst that will serve as our turning point from Act 1 to Act 2 (to borrow, for a moment, from Syd Field and his ilk). I know now that there are acts, dammit. And a structure. I have some further idea of Where This is Going (because I know Where it Has Been). I know what the consequences are, or will be. Could be.
Of course, this wasn’t supposed to be about that. Structure and dynamics and plot and subplot, thrust and counterthrust. It was supposed to be—light. Carefree. Think it; do it. People fucking. Stroke stories. Bisexual teenaged nymphomaniacs with short hair and cheeky grins and chainsmoking men with dark hair and long, clever hands and no quotation marks because it’s a freakin’ affectation. Daredevil games with power dynamics, sex and persistent obsessions, dashed off with nary a thought as to what’s to come—
None of which is any fun, really, if there’s no bleeding consequences.
Oh, well: there’s been six new stories from me in two weeks’ time, and more to come, and they now have a spiffy new home on my website. —That’s something, at least.
Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something—by a narrow margin, but still safely.
—H.L. Mencken, “To Expose a Fool”
Would that we had; would that we had. I’m re-running yesterday’s link to the story of Attorny General John “Titties” Ashcroft hiding away semi-nude Art Deco statues out of shame, because it’s funny, and sad, and outrageous, and deeply humiliating to any American with half a brain and the wit to use it, and because it ties in with the Ashcroft Action Item I’ve found for this week: it seems he wants to relax restrictions on the FBI’s ability to spy on domestic religious and political organizations. The ACLU offers their unbelievably handy one-click faxblast page, so you can tell John “Gazongas” Ashcroft to quit fucking with our rights and go flaming straight to hell—politely, of course, and with no little panache.
nicholas urfé
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