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Right. So I'm a slacker, an unreconstructed nerd, an unapologetic dork, and something of a romantic. I'm a straight up sucker for cheesy 80s movies (Lloyd Dobbler taught me how to love, baby), schlocky horror movies, and old Thomas Dolby tracks. My tastes are actually pretty varied, though. So here's the part where I just list a bunch of stuff I like to try to see if you like any of it too:
Books: Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Roethke, Rilke, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Vonnegut, Heller, Douglas Adams, and so it goes...
Music: Pavement, Silkworm, Velvet Underground, Dylan, The Smiths, The Petshop Boys, Duran Duran, Superchunk, The National, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, The Wipers, Dismemberment Plan
Movies: His Girl Friday, Philadelphia Story, Fright Night, Fright Night 2, My Best Friend is a Vampire, Le Corbeau, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Night Porter, Videodrome, The Hand, The Third Man, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Quite a list. Still with me? Good.
Now, as to what I'm looking for....
Friends, mostly. I'm here because I can be open and honest here about things I'm pretty closed off about in much of my life.
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Occasionally I play a game in which I try to divide the authors on my bookshelves into sadists and masochists. Some don't readily fall into either category, of course. Others are clearer--Kafka was a balls-out masochist while Nabokov was a playful and profound sadist (and at the end of the day also a moralist). In fact, I'm increasingly convinced that Kafka's The Trial and Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading are the same story, one told by a brilliant but doomed masochist and the other told by a euphoric, sadistic genius.
Nabokov, who loved Kafka's work dearly, also at one point suggested an easy solution to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Nabokov was convinced he'd determined the exact kind of beetle into which Kafka had transfigured his doomed hero, and one day Nabokov told his class at Cornell "The real genius of the story, which even Kafka does not even seem to have seen, is that it ends happily. Gregor Samsa, as this kind of beetle, would have had large, fully functional wings and would have simply flown away when he'd had enough!"
For Nabokov, though suffering was well and good (and he loved making his characters suffer) at the end there needed to be some kind of growth and resolution--some kind of happy ending for the characters who really suffered nobly.
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Spent an embarrassingly long time arguing with a friend about who would win in a fistfight between Byron and Kerouac. Byron, by the way, is the A student answer.
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Saw The Buzzcocks last night. As a 30something American of a certain cultural and musical background, I've spent entirely too much time in the past several years attending reunion shows for bands that I either loved in my teen years or that actually broke up before I could love anything but their back catalogs.
Some reunion shows/tours are nothing more than cynical commodification of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with that--people will pay a few bucks to feel 18 again and bands will happily take that money. Steve Albini's advice to aspiring musicians, after all, is "Don't forget to remember to get the cash."
But really good reunion shows by really good bands can do more than that. They don't just let you remember what it felt like to be 18 and listening to (for example) "Ever Fallen in Love" in your dorm room while your roommate was out trying to buy booze with a fake ID, while your neighbor was having sex again, while you were trying to figure out whether the girl in your seminar on the the evolution of the Faust archetype had accidentally or deliberately brushed her boot against your leg last Tuesday. A good reunion show lets you approach those memories again with a new, vagrant twist. A good show doesn't just make you remember your days of remarkable plumage and pine for the fjords of your lost youth.
Joyce said that the difference between the pornographic and the sublime was that the sublime was erotic and coruscating but untainted by the imperfect, grubby urge to be possessed. Most reunion sets are pornographic. The Buzzcocks were sublime.
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There's a difference between audacity and tackiness. I think that's why I like Bowie so much. He's audacious, vulgar, occasionally blasphemous, but he's consistently managed to avoid being tacky (even at his glamtrashiest.) Listening to Beauty and the Beast, and I remember a story about how originally the line "Someone fetch a priest," was "Someone fuck a priest," because "Oh, fuck a priest," was the favorite profane ejaculation of Bowie's favorite producer. But then Bowie says he thought, "Well that's really a bit crass, isn't it? Best change it." At the time, of course, he was prancing around in a skintight Gestapo costume wearing eyeliner and platform boots, but he was still concerned about being crass. I don't think it so much matters where one draws the line as it does that one believes there is a line and chooses to draw it.
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Perfect day for a dorky guy:
Strawberries and gunpowder green tea.
Playable Pac Man doodle on Google homepage which provided far too many minutes (okay, nearly an hour) of entertainment/distraction.
Went for a quick run and the first three tracks on my iPod's random shuffle were Everybody Wants to Rule the World, E=MC^2 (Big Audio Dynamite), and Diamond Sea.
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The short fiction I've probably read the most often is Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges. It's a mind bending story about a "dynasty of recluses" who form a secret cabal that, over the course of generations, through a series of elaborate but mundane practical jokes, manages to literally shift reality. The cabal not only alters the composition of the present, they also rewrite the past. Like all of the Borges canon, it's brilliantly written and, unlike some of his short fictions, it's also brilliantly executed.
There is a line describing an incidental character, a well-bred Englishman who lives out his life in a respectable but no longer fashionable hotel. His name is Herbert Ashe, and Borges says of him, "In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as so many Englishmen are; in death, he was not even the ghost he was in life." That's always reminded me, not entirely arbitrarily, of the old DC Berman lyric, "I wanna wander through the night/As a figure in the distance even to my own eyes."
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Volataire once said something like "The Romans reserved their most glorious feats of architecture to make stadiums in which wild beasts tore each other to shreds." In Chicago, they built Wrigley Field.
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Cap'n Jazz is playing Chicago like four times this summer. It's amazing how fast I can go from "God, I miss that band," to "That'll do, emo boys, that'll do."
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As far as I know, only two bands have ever referenced Kim Philby in their songs. Those bands are the Pet Shop Boys and Simple Minds, and they are both awesome.
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Ordered Une Semaine de Bonte, the collection of collages Max Ernst published as a graphic novel. I've adored Ernst for some time now, and the collages I've seen from the book have been wicked sexy: bleak, dystopian, and brutally surrealist. Ernst is able to eroticize fascism at the same time he lampoons it, which is crucial, because for satire to work properly the satirist has to be able to recognize both the seductive and the repulsive elements in his object of ridicule. Fascism is, as Nabokov said, a "dull beastly farce" but some of its trappings and pretenses are uncomfortably arousing.
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Ha ha a Sigue Sigue Sputnik track just showed up in a commercial for, of all things, ESPN's World Cup coverage. Occasionally the world trends toward the kind of surrealism that makes life livable.
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Listening the other morning to that cheesy old album that I'm really fond of by The Streets that has the single Memento Mori. The song made me think of memento mori iconography, which in turn made me think of one of my favorite paintings, Guercino's Et in Arcadia ego. The painting shows two handsome shepherds in a bucolic setting who have stumbled upon a rather grotesque human skull, which they are staring at longingly.
The juxtaposition of the idyllic and the grotesque holds a strange sway over me. The romantic and the morbid have always been awfully difficult for me to pull apart completely--hence my interest in Moz, Byron, Rimbaud, &c.
It isn't so much that I believe in that old dictum of teenage angst "The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care." But I do experience suffering as a kind of currency of affection--to want to make someone suffer, to want to suffer for someone else, is certainly my favorite kind of affection.
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Phone call last night from a friend in Manhattan:
Him: Dude, we were at this great strip club...
Me: Sport, I'm not judging or whatever but just, you know, that's really kind of gauche.
Him: No no, dude, it was a really hip strip club. One of the girls was stripping to Lisztomania by Phoenix.
Me: I have no response to that. Let's talk about baseball.
Added fact: My friend works on Wall Street. So, you know, the bailout cash in action!
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I like to pretend that the Elf Power single Spiral Stairs is about Pavement's backup singer finding himself as an accidental Lovecraft protagonist.
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Proposal for the opening to a dime store detective novel:
She wasn't quite a sex goddess. She wasn't quite an ice goddess. She was the kind of girl who would look good in a Panama hat.
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I've been pining for the old Labyrinth text adventure game. I want, quite desperately, to adumbrate the elephant right at this moment.
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So we finally got around to watching Dr Horrible's SingAlong Blog tonight. I appreciated it. I even liked it. But I didn't love it. Maybe Joss Whedon and I have just grown apart?
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If Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Sifl and Olly faced each other in the semi-finals of a Tournament of Awesome Awesomeness, I wonder who would win. My money would be on MST3K, but Sifl and Olly could prove to be a Cinderella story.
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I kind of miss the "sport jacket with tee shirt and Chuck Taylors" look.
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The last few days have been strangely tumultuous emotionally. I've rethought several long held beliefs about myself and where I might fit into this lifestyle. Reworked my profile rather clumsily--will have to work on it more later but it is now, if not terribly elegant, at least awfully honest.
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Played my "I always meant to get around to listening to this" playlist on the stair machine tonight. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover version of Diamond Sea is fairly brilliant.
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Tofu Benedict with vegan Hollandaise Sauce for breakfast. Turned out reasonably well, though in the future I'll likely stick with scrambled tofu with diced tomato/spinach. Listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Cold sunshine outside the window. Going over notes for a meeting this afternoon.
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Liz Phair's old cover version of Turning Japanese almost justifies her existence. Almost.
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Ordered Maturin's opus Melmoth the Wanderer. Not sure why I haven't read this book before now--it's influenced so many writers I've loved, including Wilde (who renamed himself Sebastian Melmoth after he was released from prison). It's been called the greatest gothic horror ever written. Chomping at the bits to get started.
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I seem to crave torment and degradation at the hands of a sadistic woman with a sick sense of humor most acutely in rainy weather. Perhaps a move to an arid region would cure me of my gorgeous masochistic affliction. But would I want that?
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Late dinner soon with a woman I met at the gym last week. Smart, cute, funny. Promising.
Drinking pomegranate juice. Listening to Of Montreal, which always put me in a fabulously bouncy mood. Deciding which shoes to wear (red Campers, je pense).
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During an interminable budget meeting, I'm in a semi-trance, thinking about straight jackets, pink riding crops, hands in shiny gloves wrapped around my throat. Always Crashing in the Same Car by Bowie is in my head and I'm thinking of being bound, mummified really, and beaten while that song plays in the background. I'm thinking of soft laughter, useless pleas, the eventual, inevitable, uncomfortable gag.
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Last winter I had a small crush on a salesgirl at Banana Republic. Dude, now I have so many striped shirts and argyle socks in pastel shades!
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There is an issue I've been thinking about. I've really been turning it over, again and again, in my mind; and I've decided I wouldn't say "No" to a rich sadist. Maybe like a Countess or a Duchess or something who wanted to punish and torture the brash American dude for the Bush years. We'd go from castle to beach house to penthouse. She'd cage me, flog me, take me to exclusive restaurants. Just, you know, just putting it out there.
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Voices that always get me hot:
Jarvis Cocker
Patti Smith
Polly Styrene (weird, right?)
Serge Gainsbourg
Nico (natch)
Kazu Makino
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J.K. Huysmans is criminally under-read and under-appreciated. His prose is self-indulgent by fits and starts, but both his sinister imagination and narrative ability can leave me floored. The description of the Black Mass in La-Bas is decadent, sensuous, unnervingly erotic and absolutely wicked.
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One of my closest and vainest friends took a job in Los Angeles several months ago. Shortly after moving, she mentioned that she'd (deliberately and of her own free will) gotten a "Factory Girl" style haircut. She sent millions of pictures. My response was something like "Well, uh, you're a bit late for that particular party, princess, but you wear it well." Like, she's hot so she can pull it off' but it's one of those deals where it's more like you're impressed "Wow. Even with that haircut you're still sexy. Way to go for the high level of difficulty and stick the landing."
I've noticed more and more of these haircuts in the Midwest, and that's been kind of irking me lately. Tonight, I was speaking with her on the phone and I made the comment, "Every time I see a pretty girl with one of those Edie Sedgwick haircuts happening, I just want to put my arm around her and say 'Oh. Honey, no. That haircut was just Andy's little joke on women. Please stop.' "
I had forgotten, you see, that my very vain friend had such a haircut. So there was freezing on her end of the line. In a blind panic, I remembered, and blurted out "I mean, he had a sick little sense of humor. I can just picture Warhol, sitting there chuckling about all the girls who aren't as pretty as you or Edie trying to pull that off."
Crisis averted.
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Listening to The Lunachicks cover of Heart of Glass, it occurs to me that Blondie never really stopped writing punk songs.
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Sometimes I think it would be fun to become a huge fan of roller derby. Those women are tremendous athletes. They're tough. They're passionate. Tomboys are wicked hot. I should definitely check out some roller derbies.
Also, I'm a Cubs fan, so I need something to do during the playoffs/world series.
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For a couple of days now, I've been fascinated with a question that I'd like to hash out a little better at some later date. The issue is this: As a masochist, how do I subtly inform a sadist of my strongest genuine fears and aversions? It's a kind of dance--a sadist would want to know what hurts me most, what makes me most uncomfortable, what makes me suffer most. I want them to have that information, but I can't just blurt it out, because if I just blurt it out, the game is done. Besides which, I genuinely don't want these things to happen to me. This is where it becomes deliriously incoherent to anybody who has never lived this particular dance.
The masochist puts the information out there. The sadist wants, and takes, the information. Since the information is about things the masochist honest to God fears/loathes/is averse to he hopes she doesn't do any of it to him. But she does, because she wants to see him suffer. What tweaks the masochist most is that he now knows that, given the information about how to torture and break him down, she will use it gleefully, remorselessly.
This is blurring into either supersensual supersubtlety (as Severin might say) or incoherence. I will make an effort to rework it later, when caught up on some other projects.
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Reading Ambrose Bierce for inspiration. Sipping tea. Listening to Roxy Music. In Every Dream Home a Heartache came on. That song was playing the first time I was ever tied up (semi) sexually by a girl.
Age 15 (girl 17). Christmas break. Her mom's dining room. A big, Norwegian wood chair. Duct tape. Lots of duct tape. An awkwardly arousing makeout session. A threat to leave me tied up while she met some friends for Thai food (she relented).
Memories are distracting, unpredictable. I feel like Proust, only straight.
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The one thing every woman I've ever dated has had in her record collection?
Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
The one book every woman I've ever dated has had on her bookshelf?
Infinite Jest
The one movie every woman I've ever dated has had in her DVD collection (dating back as far as DVD collections were a thing, of course)?
Rushmore
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One of my favorite (very) short poems by Stephen Crane:
A Man Feared That He Might Find an Assassin
A man feared that he might find an asassisn;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.
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I'd like to live in a cage. Not for the rest of my life (I'm not sure how the world would get along without me) but for some prolonged period of time. Maybe a week? Certainly long enough for it to become agonizingly uncomfortable both mentally and physically.
Ideally, this would be a precursor to some kind of grand denouement--a particularly brutal beating perhaps. A beating while tied to a cross. Confinement and (psychological and physical) torture before a crucifixion. Hawt.
I'm curious how I would react in this predicament. I'm also, equally, curious how my tormentor would react and behave. It would be quite a thing if we both kept journals and, at the end, compared notes.
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So I get really annoyed when semi-obscure, late 70s/early 80s punk lyrics are difficult to find transcribed accurately online. Right now, it feels unbelievably important to me to know every word in No Generation Gap by The Wipers and yet I keep coming up with lyric listings that are little more than half-truths and innuendos. Modern life is rubbish, dude.
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Blackout is among Bowie's most drop-dead, insanely sexy songs. Lyrically and musically its controlled incoherence, its atomic yellow paranoia, and its overt references to captivity and danger are wicked hawt. It makes me want to be bound to a chair, in the hands of some sadist of genius.
A lyric has been running through my mind all night:
I just cut and black out I'm under
Japanese influence and my honour's at stake
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Saw Hot Tub Time Machine with some friends. Laughed myself hoarse in parts. After the movie, we went out for pancakes and milkshakes. A friend's girlfriend (psychiatric nurse) told a story about straight jackets that was sort of awkwardly extremely arousing. Noticed that girls/women get progressively bitchier to cute waitresses sometime around age 30. Mentioned this. Punched in arm by one of the women in our group, which was also strangely hot.
Made an excuse to come home sort of early because I wanted to get some writing done and also because I find groups enervating after awhile. Did some writing. Goofed around online. Listened to old REM. Read some Hart Crane which put me in the mood to read some old Melville poetry.
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Cold but brilliantly sunny morning and my official position is "boundless optimism." Strawberries and gunpowder green tea. Early Thomas Dolby.
Later today:
Writing. Tennis. Enormous Nabokov biography. More writing. Occasional periods of angst, with gin and tonic and 80s movies to cut the edge.
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Killing time tonight before a third date with a reasonably rad girl. Desultorily thumbing through some David Foster Wallace essays. Listening to some Gang of Four. Sipping some pomegranate juice.
My strategy, with regard to "disclosing" my own warped, perverse idea of fun, is to be casual. I try to insert, as laconically as possible, into a conversation that "of course I enjoy having my ass kicked a bit." If my interlocutor responds with enthusiasm then, basically, punk fucking rock. This will likely happen tonight.
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I dug out Velvet Undergound Live at Max's KC tonight, because it throbs with beauty and sadness and that inexhaustible-exuberance-in-the-face-of-bloodblack-melancholy-thing that V.U. captured so perfectly.
But you know, much as I hate to tell tales out of school, I'm beginning to suspect Lou Reed may have had some sort of substance abuse issue.
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Idea for a first line for a sadomasochistic novel:
It all started with a drugged gin and tonic, and ended with me left alone, bound and gagged, in a truckstop bathroom at 3 in the morning.
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One thing that occurs to me the more I interact with people who self-identify as being part of "the scene" or "the lifestyle" is just how bizarre, self-indulgent, and outlandish my sexual fixations tend to be. They seem like the coefficient of some kind of perfect storm of egotism, indolence, immaturity, masochism, and vanity. Much of my life feels like a series of experiments in situationist masochism--like found-masochism as a performance art.
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Ever since I heard the story of Samson in Sunday school many and many a year ago, I've had a strange preoccupation with the idea of being rendered unconscious by a femme fatale and having my head shaved. I think it appeals to me, in part, because the idea of being bald just freaks me out and it's one of the scenarios I'd struggle hardest to prevent and find the most genuinely miserable (at least until the hair grew back in).
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My most assertive idees fixes:
Fake furs and spiked boots (oxblood boots)
Taunts and threats written in lipstick on mirrors
Hair condescendingly ruffled while my head swims, while my nerves throb, muscles ache, flesh stings and burns.
Coquettish sadism. Audacious cruelty.
Drugged drinks
Confinement. The terrifying and infuriating knowledge that the only person who knows where I am is off doing something else, amused by my predicament.
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I've been on a serious Braid kick. It started when Collect From Clark Kent came on while I was on the stair machine today, and I've been listening to their old tracks ever since arriving home. Laconic but urgent. Detached but broken. Raw but poised. Genius plus heartache plus rage plus a lingering sense of bratty entitlement.
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I'm opposed to the trend of rewriting classic works of literature with the insertion of zombie hordes--mostly because I didn't think of it myself.
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As a connoisseur of bedazzling trash, I'm naturally drawn to the Cruel Intentions trilogy. Oh, you didn't know there was a Cruel Intentions III? Well there totally was!
Anyway, a friend and I were discussing the many glories of the first film tonight. We're both enamored of the dynamic between Phillippe and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the film. We're also both enamored of Phillippe's nose and that shirt he was wearing on the escalator. I mean I'm straight and everything but Jesus. Right. So anyway, we disagreed about the film's relationship to Dangerous Liaisons--I actually prefer Cruel Intentions (even though the performances, obviously, are weaker) because it's so unabashedly, flamboyantly, gaudy and plastic. There is nothing inherently wrong with being derivative, if you are audaciously derivative. In (another) ten years, smart critics will realize just how successful it was as both a period piece and a comedy of manners. It was also fascinating to watch it play with teen movie archetypes. Let's face it, Phillippe in Cruel Intentions was suffering for James Spader's sins a decade earlier in Pretty in Pink.
I sometimes scoff when someone refers to themselves as a Manipulatrix. But then I remember how astonishingly perfectly Gellar played her role and think "Oh. I do know what that would look like. And it really would be hot. Also, dangerous."
The dynamic at the end, where Witherspoon got her revenge, was also excruciatingly sexy in the way that I find it hot when girls are ruthlessly vicious with each other in social settings (which is part of why I get so excited reading Fitzgerald's accounts of flappers). As a rule, I'm not a fan of comeuppance. I like to see a certain amount of wickedness and brutality rewarded. But Witherspoon's apotheosis was a rare case of righteousness being sexy.
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So I have both some familial loyalty and a small amount of money on Duke. But I just saw the Butler Bulldog waddling and panting and wearing his little sweater on television and now I'm all "OMG GO BUTLER!@" Because bulldogs are adorable.
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Had extended, vivid daydream during a budgetary meeting about forced intoxication, being bound to a a chair and gagged with my own (quite elegant, if I do say so myself) necktie and then tortured mercilessly. Details of the meeting remain unclear. Details of the daydream include clothespins, a riding crop, rivulets of blood, achingly slow Joy Division songs at high volumes, spiky heels, an amused and supercilious poison pink smirk.
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Finally got around to listening to the new Ted Leo album. It's a drop-dead, spot-on impression of Nick Lowe era Elvis Costello. I've been missing the old Elvis Costello for a long time now, so that's not exactly unwelcome.
That said, there's a dark sarcasm and brooding paranoia to Costello's old lyrics (no matter how poppy the hooks) that is missing from his myriad imitators. There is simultaneously a pervasively brutal, cynical worldview and a sense of alternating between chilling detachment and absolute obsession that echoes through Costello's very best early tracks (Less Than Zero and Watching the Detectives come immediately to mind) that, for lack of a better phrase, just turns me the fuck on.
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Played some badminton. Watched some Sifl and Olly. Ate some intense banana pancakes. Tennis and drinks later with a girl from work--she's vanilla as far as I know but pretty clearly pretty twisted. Also cute.
Listening to Jawbreaker again. Their cover of the Furs' Into You Like a Train may be my favorite cover version of any song ever. That song (both versions) contains one of my favorite lyrical tricks ever:
If you believe that anyone (like me within this song)
Is outside it all then you were also wrong.
That parenthetical is totally hot in a "Oh hello there, fourth wall" kind of way. I don't know why I'm so gay for parentheticals, but I am and always will be.
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Drinking gunpowder green tea. Eating strawberries. Reading HP Lovecraft. Listening to The Pet Shop Boys. Pausing from time to time to make notes on a novel about the world being destroyed by zombies sometime in the late 80s.
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This summer, I am:
Going to at least one Conan O'Brien standup special.
Seeing at least two Pavement concerts.
Going to at least one Bret Easton Ellis book signing (Imperial Bedrooms releases in June!).
It's almost like the last ten years of American pop culture never happened. By completely insulating myself from knowing what a Hannah Montana is or how American Idol is scored, I've created my own private Hot Tub Time Machine right back to some vague blip on the cultural radar from my college days.
Maybe that's the best thing about the commodification of nostalgia in modern maudlin American culture--with a little effort and cash it's now possible to continue to pretend you're frozen in a particular moment (for me the mid-late 90s, natch) forever.
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Slightly under the weather so I've been hanging out most of the night watching John Hughes movies and listening to old Dead Milkmen albums. It's eerily like being 13 again (which, holy Christ, was 20 years ago already). When Sri Lankan Sex Hotel came on, it reminded me that in 8th grade I'd used the cadence of that song to help me remember the quadratic formula for placement exams. So long-story-short, at the moment I am more prepared to cope with a random quadratic equation than I have been in years.
Punk rock.
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Getting ready for a date. Listening to Pansy Division's cover of Femme Fatale (probably my favorite cover version of any VU song) while noticing that I have entirely too many pairs of shoes. Sometimes when I take Ambien to sleep, I end up online shopping for a few minutes in a kind of trance, which explains, for example, a very snazzy pair of retro style Penguin sneakers that I don't even really remember ordering.
The point is, even though I'm jazzed about the escalating themes of yellow and green of spring, I have to admit the one thing I'm going to miss about winter will be the leather dress gloves women wear. Le sigh.
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I was a warped kid. Lapsed Episcopalian (Christmas and Easter services, usually) family. Fascinated by the occult. Already, at a tender age, fixated on the erotic possibilities of power and suffering.
So on Easter Sunday, I used to pass time in church fixated on the enormous crucifix on the church's altar. Crucifixated on the gorgeous anguish some sculptor of genius had taken the time to carve into Christ's face.
I'd imagine an interregnum between the spectacle and the too-dramatic (let's be honest, downright tacky) denouement when Lilith made her way to the side of the cross. Seen only by Christ, she'd recline laconically against the wood from which he dangled, cracking jokes and running her crimson nails up and down his body. When I got old enough that I was both vampire crazed and fairly certain God wouldn't strike me dead in the middle of church for using the same sick mind He'd blessed me with to improve upon the set and setting, I would think of Lilith (Solomon's seductress, Adam's first wife, the first vampire) giggling as, despite enervated murmurs of protest from the man on the cross, she sunk her fangs into his neck and took the first real Eucharist.
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I run hot and cold on TS Eliot. In my hotblooded youth, I was enamored of him. As time passes, we've become a bit too familiar and now I'm sometimes smitten, sometimes peevish. But my affection for the Four Quartets remains fairly constant. Since it's Good Friday, I was reminded of a few stanzas from East Coker. I think it's clear how the mood and imagery would have appealed to me 15 years ago--an angsty closet goth at prep school....
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere
The chill ascends from feet to knees
The fever sings in mental wires
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars
The dripping blood our only drink
The bloody flesh our only food
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday Good
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I sometimes feel a paranoiac pang that my inner emotional life is comprised of nothing but a concatenation of half-remembered song lyrics, movie lines, and poses I've seen in magazine ads. What if there is no there there? What if it's all done with mirrors?
Then I remember, reassuringly, that if I have time to angst trip about this kind of thing then life is, apparently, pretty sweet.
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Listening to Gang of Four. Eating strawberries. Reading Wallace Stevens, whom I associate (not entirely arbitrarily, I'd insist) with green, with rebirth, with the mellowing of gloaming in early April. This passage in particular struck me today.
It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human
There were roses in the cool cafe. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink and yet except for us
The total past felt nothing when destroyed
Civilization may be nothing more than an elaborate ritual created so that the past would have something to mourn it, so that when Arcadia crashed down, there would be someone to remember and shed a tear.
Like that line from Stoppard "So we cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us and all that lingers is the smell of smoke and the presumption that, once, our eyes must have watered."
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Do we really need both Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock?
Please understand, I bear neither of them the slightest trace of ill will. They both seem like perfectly nice people. It just feels redundant to have both of them in Hollywood at the same time. Is there really any role either of them have played where the other wouldn't have done just as well?
Sandra Bullock could have been the hooker with whom Richard Gere fell in love. Julia Roberts could have helped Keanu save that bus. I can't even remember which one of them was in the Pelican Brief without looking at IMDB.
I just feel that, in this tough economic climate, perhaps we need to choose one instead of keeping both of them around.
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I've been around scenesters of one type or another for much of my life. There was the punk scene, goth scene, zine scene, geek scene, industrial scene (okay music, hot girls), and then the whole Williamsburg Scenetopia where all the superstars of sundry scenes migrated semi-simultaneously at some point in the late 90s.
I tend to be pretty entertained by scene politics, but I've never personally taken them very seriously. I am amiable and respect individuals, but have no particular inherent respect for any "scene" or "lifestyle." I wanted to listen to Jawbreaker, not worry about which scenegirl stole whose sceneboi boy. I wanted to write, not worry about which editor threw the best parties. Well, I worried about who threw the best parties, but it didn't impact who I wanted to work with. These days, I like to be tied up and tortured but don't much care who is using which BDSM lexicon/etiquette book.
It's still entertaining, though, to watch as various "lifestyles" sometimes clash and sometimes complement each other, even here at CM. So many people preoccupied with semantics and traditions. For me, it's always the same no matter what "scene" I'm orbiting....I like nerdy people with good taste who can laugh at themselves. And of course in girls, having a very, very, terribly mean streak is a plus.
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Rereading The Odyssey (Graves Translation). Calypso is seduction with sinister intent, which is hot; but Circe is coercion, which is infinitely hotter.
I remember when I was a kid, and everybody else had crushes on actresses, my crushes were Circe and Lilith (though those hairy legs wouldn't look great in fishnets). Oh, and on Samantha's evil cousin Serena from Bewitched.
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Some days, my egotism feels infinite.
The beginning of spring. I want to be captured. Abducted. Bound and gagged in the trunk of a car. Hogtied face down on a filthy bed in a motel room and left in the dark, struggling frantically but utterly helpless. Later on beaten, lacerated, humiliated. Tortured by someone cruel, smart, with a sense of humour sicker than God's. Finally left alone, confined, uncomfortable, debased. The click of heels on the floor and a raucous laugh as I hear the door close for the last time.
I wonder what it is about Easter time that arouses me so much, that makes me ache to transgress every limit. Must be all the chocolate and crucifixion.
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Semi-embarrassing confession #1
I'm daft for Dire Straits. Tunnel of Love and Romeo and Juliet both make my top 20 list of cheesy love ballads.
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It's entertaining to read journal entries in which some dude makes himself sound as pitiful as possible and closes with "Looking for a Dominate[sic] woman to humiliate me."
I always wonder why anyone would bother, when he's already doing such a good job of humiliating himself.
There's definitely a high rate of correlation (I won't say 1:1) between experts at accidental self-humiliation and the inability to distinguish between "Dominate" and "Dominant."
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If you really want to know a person, don't waste time with questions like "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" or "Are you a Deist or an atheist?" or even "Do you prefer Shakespeare or Dante?" Just ask "Which was a young John Cusack's best role--Say Anything or Better Off Dead?" The answer will tell you all you need to know.
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What thoughts are cascading coyly down the elegant corridors of my brain?
An imperious coquette. A drugged drink. Duct tape on my wrists and ankles. Waking up bound uncomfortably to the sound of soft giggling. Pricks. Cuts. Bites. Welts. The realization I've become a plaything. Sublime pain and profane humiliation. Plaintive, useless begging. Finally something stuffed in my mouth and duct tape covering my lips. Used up and whining softly through the gag while she casually rests her boots on my bare, bruised back, continues to laugh.
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| Age: 33 |
| Concord,
New Hampshire |
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