Wax Banks

Five.

She had native American blood, I realized only much later, which gave her straight black hair and skin the colour of a deep summer suntan. Her head and torso hardly moved when she ran, her legs deeply bent, and her motions were fluid; even suddenly skipping she was never jerky or clumsy. Our grades were similar in high school but I never really saw her as competition - in my arrogance I supposed we were entirely different creatures. We would see movies together, listen to cassettes in the car, joke around backstage at concerts, and I seemed to have a crush on every girl in school but her. For years she loved me. She suffered and not in silence, but I paid no attention. (And what would I have done, had I been able to acknowledge her feelings? What could I possibly have done or said?) Her skin smelled like woodsmoke and earth and she dressed in old clothes, but I never noticed, or never admitted it. When the time came to go our separate ways for college we kissed finally, and more, and after a week together and a couple of months apart we had moved on. I moved on first.

* * *

I can't remember what she looked like crying though I must have seen. Within a week we were in bed and within two I was in love, or supposed so. She had a smattering of Italian and an overbite, a radiant smile and a horse laugh that disarmed me, and had slept with older boys; I let my hair grow long and knew that we were meant for each other. I knew nothing. We spent fifteen months dating and another six breaking up, and she'd leave our escalating fights troubled, and tell me so. I realize now, a decade on, that while she constantly projected happiness and comfort, she had long since lost hope. In us, anyhow. I wished for blindness, to escape responsibility for seeing unhappiness I was causing. She left in early September, but it was February or a year or five years later before I realized how much happier she was without me. I'd like to tell you what she loved, but I don't remember. I know she loved me and then didn't. Which is my blindness rather than her darkness, right?

* * *

I wore silly red pajamas and assumed she'd be impressed, and she was, or played along. Her eyes let me see myself as a man. A year passed and graduation, and we spent the summer reading novels together, crawling in and out of bed, unwinding. It was a good time. We were sexy together and foolish and it was perfect. She was unhappy. She left for grad school, a year of starting over, and I stayed put for a year of more of what I knew. She returned shaken. We moved in together and survived the year - our third - but only just. I moved on first. Her shoulders were pale broad and bony, small breasts set wide apart, and she took long heavy-booted strides and loved joking around. I guessed her hair looked better short, and was right. She said she wanted to wait and I said 'I don't see any reason why.' We both should have known but how can you? And in one way or another each was the love of the other's life 'til then, but that's what love is for: it destroys emotional context. She loved the outdoors and gave it up entirely while we were together, and I was tired of blaming myself and ready to break something long before I kissed someone else, another friend, while rain fell.

* * *

She wanted to be a writer but wouldn't, isn't, and a friend said 'She was ready to be in love with you from the first day' and, who knows, maybe she was. Maybe I wanted. We talked about dead family members, cried, and what I took for narrative one-upmanship she saw as confession and connection. You can make a whole life out of that if you don't mind destroying someone else's. She walked like a rag doll on its way up to claim a gold medal: joyfully, unself-consciously, a little goofily. If we had a relationship I spent a lot of it drunk and all of it unhappy, and passed the latter affliction on to her. We dreamt of growing old reading one another's literary first drafts, and when the time came for her to leave for graduate school we'd wasted a year more on fighting than friendship or anything else. That sin was largely mine; others were shared. You can mistake persistence for strength. She was ready for something desperate and pure but I was empty. We might have been something, my only such, but not then. Nothing then. And not since. I pulled away first - from the start actually - but for a while she was the only one who had moved on.

* * *

I disliked that she was gorgeous and thought of herself as mature - wrongly to my eyes - and she disliked (rightly) that I was not and not. Her grades were much much better than mine but I made some excellent mistakes. She was rail-thin, her spine a shallow sine curve, sandy hair or red or brown as mood dictated, and a hard shell protected whatever was inside, or so I'd learn in time. Half a decade passed and more. Each of us was nearing the other side of something exhausting. She knew what music could do, how sentences sing. She hoped the way I did, it looked like. We became slow friends and fast lovers; the former was irreplaceable and the latter unpalatable. When the friendship blossomed and the need to impress one another passed, the other parts worked themselves out quite nicely. She moved into our house of six before we'd worked out what (or whether) we were as a pair, and for a year it was fine for me and bad for her. We broke up in April or May, something inside me rotated 180 degrees (and warmed another twenty), and a few years later we were married. We weren't broken up long. I laugh aloud at her jokes and admire her work her honesty her effort of every kind, she moves like everything matters, and her smile and scent and savour are to me a lesson in dangerous geography or topology, undiscovered cities at the burnt fringes of a map where seadragons wait. She is my new world.

Singles.

It's common to request 'D/D free' in singles ads - 'drug and disease free' - but those who aren't hip to the lingo sometimes put 'DnD free.'

Cuts like a knife.

Scents and lies.

[Wrote this the other day.]

Italian fella and his girl just sat down next to me and - I swear I'm not just repeating a meanspirited commonplace here - the B.O. is overpowering. I mean I understand the appeal of not using deodorant, fine, back to the natural state and whatever but Jesus Christ!

But on the other hand.

On the other hand maybe there's something to the idea that it's precisely the sanitary nature of our public spaces that's robbed us of connections to things? The same way urban spaces give us too many right angles, too much visual information, not enough use of other sensory channels...maybe the loss of one another's smell is precisely the cause of some of our unhappiness, our inhumanity to one another? Maybe improvements in hygiene make it increasingly possible for us to abstract one another's humanity away entirely. We talk about the need for strong sensory connections, along with connections in channels we can't necessarily detect with the five canonical senses - you know I don't want to admit it but I do believe in something like extrasensory perception, not 'psychic' but basically augmented senses, a sensory gestalt, perhaps sensory processing we don't yet know about or can't conceive of.

In every culture there are myths and folk beliefs about additional senses - the root of religious belief, basically, is that alternate states are accessed through alternate sensory or cognitive channels, to which we get access only through disciplined action. But in the U.S. today we haven't integrated such beliefs into our actions; they come overdetermined by crazy religious riders, etc. Atop which we poison our olfactory sense with perfumes, artificial flavours at astonishing concentrations, the absence of traditional natural cues and clues about the identities of things, their trustworthiness, intentions, the olfactory history of skin and flesh...

We think of Italian culture as sensuous, and of course we need to include as part of that evaluation not the 'absence of deodorant' (which is a perspectival mistake) but the positive presence of strong human smells, a dataset we're biologically equipped to understand richly and directly. As the B.O. fades you get something like a strong olfactory identity. And after a while it's not unpleasant anymore. Like so many things. We get accustomed to what we initially think of as an imposition; we train ourselves to allow, forgive, welcome in. (Consider anal sex - possibly the most backward possible violation of the human body's intention, yet a fixture throughout human history, in some cultures considered a means of transmitting wisdom, for millions a source of pleasure - even extreme pleasure. And yet what blocks, exactly, do you have to overcome to experience anal sex as pleasure? Why is it worthwhile to overcome those blocks? You might answer, 'The pleasure itself is sufficient reason.' To which 'the very concept of "civilization" says otherwise' is perhaps an unfair answer?) Sometimes an act is enjoyable precisely because it's a forgiven imposition: 'I could be biting you, but we're kissing instead.'

Part of the appeal of heading out into the country for a while is the olfactory analogue to the visual shift from hard angles and bright lights to the sunlit day-rhythm and organic, chaotic variegation of leaves and stone and water. Topology rather than simple geometry. We've destroyed our minds slowly by overpowering them. And how do you write? Go alone to a cabin in the woods somewhere. The absence of noise and interruption, sure, but also the full presence of you, your own complex physical identity no longer drowned out by the multimodal distractions of the city. You can let part of your mind rest. A 'sensory deprivation tank' doesn't actually deprive your senses, it heightens them - by limiting what they have to deal with. Starting with: you smell yourself. You hear your breathing. You become hyperaware of the location of your hands, arms angled, legs touching at the knee, the hairs of your forearms standing up...In other words, you reawaken a proprioceptive faculty linked to your perceptual apparatus, supplementing and heightening both.

We forget ourselves, stop thinking of ourselves as linked by kind and intention and emplacement to the humans around us. We abstract - and we become capable of evil. (It was segmenting the world into 'good' and 'evil' that got Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden - and made possible the murder of Abel, the first abstract act, the beginning of civilization. Original sin was: taxonomy.)

One thing that soap and deodorant do is discretize our sensory experience of the world; they put a temporary stop to our olfactory history and impose a new, completely artificial olfactory texture upon us - and thereby upon our interactions with others.

We don't know what perfume means. The smell of perfume isn't natural; it's an imposition. We become accustomed to it but we never learn how to speak back to it. There's no appropriate response. In despair at our own inability to communicate we respond abstractly - isn't the perfumed, made-up whore a type throughout all time? Goddess and whore: either way not quite human. Because we have no behavioral language for responding to such olfactory and visual abstraction. What emotion is a clown depicting? Happiness, but fake. We react instinctively to its parodic reproduction: first with discomfort (laughter), then with horror.

Not to say cultures with less deodorant react more badly - Italy's gone through how many goddamn governments in the twentieth century? - but rather that sensory overload coupled with sensory deracination, a Culture of Plenty of Nothing, causes a certain form of despair. We talk about the sweatiness of sex as part of its appeal, recognize the importance of pheromones in dating, and then the very first thing we do before a date is: 'clean up,' removing not foul odors but all olfactory information, and then providing false information in its place. This creature at ten paces is: Old Spice, 'Swagger.' This human-shaped being has the smell of: Pantene Pro-V, 'Icy Clean,' with...is that a hint of Chanel? 'How a woman should smell,' the bastards have the temerity to claim.

I've argued in the past that the model and culture of French sensuality was tied in part to the comparative widespread French use of the bidet - which provided, if not necessarily total sanitation, a reprieve from the shame (if not the fact) of our defecatory orifices being stained with shit. (The idea of being fully cleaned by toilet paper is absolutely laughable - and yet it's a point of American pride. But then much of our pride is laughable.) But let's point out the obvious: our culture is preoccupied with masking smells, not with sanitation but its grotesque appearance, its simulation. What we take for cleanliness is only absence, sparseness. And so the most tasteful home interiors contain nearly no furniture, no accidents of human array, none of the consequences of human presence, no trace of our passage. The 'ideal' American home looks as if no one lives in it; luxury is to abstract and arrange away any hint of mere humanness. The Pharaohs' tombs were pyramids of straight lines, congruent angles, geometric array - but at least the Pharaohs had the sense not to entomb themselves until after they were dead. Wealthy and upwardly-mobile Americans, unmotivatedly industrious as we've always been, get a head start on our journey to the afterlife, stocked by Williams-Sonoma no doubt.

Refinement 'purifies,' but 'purity' is impossible in nature - good thing too, as it's not desirable anyhow. Our measure of civilization, of progress, is 'refinement.' Refinement gave us calculus, penicillin, the Sistine Chapel, the Manhattan Project, YouTube, the KGB, indoor plumbing, Joe the Plumber, a billion humans in poverty. 'Refinement' made all of this possible, and helps you figure out exactly how to feel about it. Civilization is the result of a process of abstraction which is - by definition - the sidelining or abandonment of natural impulses. Our justice system is a machine for getting past 'an eye for an eye,' and that's the genius of humanity, its ultimate value - but then we're arguably the only animal with a concept of 'revenge' either, the only creature twisted enough to derive satisfaction from retribution against proxies.

And we hide our smells - our names - to hide from one another. It's only a fig leaf: it covers a shame we didn't realize we felt until we covered it - because until then, it didn't exist. The secret is the betrayal, its existence, its idea. Not what's hidden but the very notion that there's something to hide. You didn't create sin, merely instantiated it. What's betrayed is the natural capacity of all human creatures, our need for one another. The way we know other humans - the way we recognize our needs - is via that rather tricky thing, our human sensorium, the extent of which we don't yet know, whose channels and modes we can't yet count. Wouldn't know how. Another thing we've hidden from one another, from ourselves.

Ecstatic.

I want to talk more about it because it's been needlessly - and tastelessly - shat on by critics, but the short version is: Mamma Mia! isn't just a 'celebration of middle-aged female sexuality' and it isn't nearly as brain-dead as it's been docked credit for. The obvious: yes it's a mass-produced jukebox musical. Live with it. Barring one downright smutty song ('Does Your Mother Know,' joyous) and one bizarrely erotic/ambivalent one ('Mamma Mia,' Streep solo on the roof going crazy, less inexplicable than it first appears), the thing seems to be less about celebrating sexuality in a 'turning up the volume equals empowerment' way than about learning to live with what other people want, in or out of bed - so many big sugary major-key songs talking about such a minor-key subject! Impressive, in a way. Not since Casa de los Babys have I seen a flick about Women of A Certain Age congregating in an atmosphere of similar realization, plus the ladies of Mamma Mia have got a few years on the cast of John Sayles's film.

The structure is ridiculous and the Abba songs are Abba songs, but there's more going on in Mamma Mia! than critics insisted on insisting. Which is a compliment to the journeymen filmmakers and a yet another disappointed wag of the finger to our useless self-involved corps of movie critics. If you couldn't tell.

[Oh, bother. A sharp review here, barring some unnecessary swooning. Boston represent!]

Literary porn titles dying to be used.

'Peyton Plays'

'The Gropes of Wrath'

'Picnic at Hanging Cock'

(Bonus world-music/porn starlet name: 'Wry Cooter'!!)

how to put on a condom.

how to put on a condom

1) disconnect the electrodes
2) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
3) make a cup of fruit-flavoured belgian/antipodean tea
4) put little beauregard in the backyard with a bowl of milk, a bowl of dog food, a bowl of liquid LSD, and the five thousand sheets of blank newsprint paper he asked for
5) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
6) drink the tea
7) put on the condom
8) tilt the mirror to a more flattering angle
9) try to understand, this doesn't make you gay
10) i'm so totally not worried about that, you have no idea
11) oh that's good, that'll go into the moleskine later with a check mark AND a plus sign
12) update your status message on instant messenger to keep your friends in the loop
13) why, does it SEEM gay?

Reminder of a decent euphemism for balls.

'My business partners south of the equator.'

Invaluable dating advice.

Spend your free time making things you can be proud of.

Watch what people do, and really try to understand why.

Your mind and body are connected; take care of them both.

Be honest about everything you can; be understanding about the rest.

Gifts do not embody affection; they commemorate it. Find other ways to show affection.

You're not entitled to sex; you're not entitled to anything. Give generously.

There's no such thing as destiny, nor The One True Love. But love is real and you should honour it.

Talk about something other than yourself. Ask about everything. Don't fear answers.

Stand up for yourself, but don't be possessive; ideas are cheap. Principles aren't.

When you die, that's it. Revel in the time.

No one knows anything. Be understanding and forthright and work with your lover.

You're not as good at sex as you think you are; keep studying. Practice often.

Don't be afraid to be alone.

Don't be afraid to be together.

When you lift weights you tear your muscles; they grow back bigger and stronger. No other way to do it. Which is to say: breakups are good for you. Pay close attention.

Listen to your friends.

If it feels wrong it probably is. If it feels right, keep your eyes peeled.

Learn your weaknesses and address them directly.

When you're in love you can't see straight. Breathe. Take people's advice. Trust your instincts - but verify.

Love is a renewable resource.

Excerpt from five-act play entitled 'My wife and I talk during our after-workout trip to Anna's Taqueria.'

'You know your sexual lifestyle is no longer interesting when you can pick up a copy of The Ethical Slut at Whole Foods, OK?'

Roleplay and fantasy and their unexpected(??) relevance to basically everything, including our national character. Plus sex talk.

[This isn't really an article about Dungeons & Dragons, though that game is its surface subject. I'm pleased with this, but too unsettled to be proud, yet. Which is to say I'm satisfied and not fulfilled, which brings us - neatly enough, I hope/think - to the actual subject of this article.]

The biggest barrier to entry into fantasy gaming, fiction, film, and fandom, is...'fantasy' as currently understood by publishers, readers, gamers, and filmgoers, i.e. 'Tolkien repackaged.' It's strange to think that a grand genre of storytelling is 'incorrectly' labeled - what's a genre label if not a collectively agreed-upon circumscription, an emergent set of shared cultural markers? - but in this particular case, at this moment and within our commercial matrix, 'fantasy' isn't what fantasy is.

What is Dungeons & Dragons about? It's not about monsters, demons, barbarians, dungeons, magic, adventures - it's definitely not about dragons. Indeed the 'fantasy' element of D&D is only incidentally about commercial fantasy as broadly understood today (a mix of Conan the Barbarian and Lord of the Rings with a wing set aside for Neil Gaiman's goth-Victorian delicacies).

When you say that D&D is a 'fantasy' roleplaying game, you're describing not its generic trappings but the imaginative activity it intends to provoke. D&D is a dicerolling framework for fantasizing and then acting out one's fantasies. It differs from 'live-action roleplaying' (LARPs) only in that it happens around a table, rather than around the neighbourhood. And crucially, it differs from what 'adults' think of as fantasy play or roleplay - dressing up in the bedroom or at the bar to act out naughty fantasies - only in it ends in fighting rather than fucking.

Let me say this again in slightly different terms: the purpose of fantasy roleplay in its 'adult' form - sexual fantasy, acted out - is not essentially sexual. You don't dress up like a schoolgirl or a naughty stable boy because you want to have an orgasm; the vast majority of people can do that anyhow. You dress up, you engage in the fantasy, because you want to explore the content of the fantasy - you want to be this other thing. The erection, the exchange of fluids, is a byproduct (quite literally in the latter case) of the excitement caused by fantasy itself.

We make a distinction between these activities not because we want to set aside special space for nominal adults, not because imaginative activities of this sort are 'childish,' but rather because this imaginative play isn't inherently tied to age or maturity at all, except to the extent that we think of 'maturity' - getting a job, buying a house, settling down - as the socially-productive foreclosure of imaginative possibility. Within this framework it's easy to imagine, for instance, why there was a 'Satanism' scare surrounding D&D in the 80's: not because D&D books have monstrous demons on their covers, but because the image of Satan and related images are about forbidden knowledge as such, content-agnostic and made sacred by its very forbiddenness. And from that idea of 'forbidden knowledge' it's easy to get to a new, consistent attitude toward pornography: let it be, and teach our kids that representation of sex and sexuality is part of an imaginative continuum rather than a reproductive one. Permit the knowledge and then assign it a value within a new moral framework. Make more world to wrap it in - which is to say, a rich moral code is glad to accept and incorporate new, unexpected forms of behaviour. As is a rich game system.

There are games (and lives) in which whatever isn't expressly permitted is forbidden; there are games in which whatever isn't expressly forbidden is permitted. The two types of games place implicit (or even explicit!) moral weight on game actions, and are related to two opposed moral codes. Poker is of the first sort of game, and there are probably more unhappy poker players than happy ones. (All happy bank accounts are the same; all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own ways.) Dungeons & Dragons is of the latter sort - it's a framework for story development, cravenly marketed even now as a combat game with storytelling elements. D&D labours under a lot of deadweight. The worst of it is the need to be a 'fantasy' game - when everyone knows, before the ritual day of their forgetting, that fantasy has no shape and no genre, that its power comes from its shapelessness, its individuality, the rough and dangerous work of sharing it.

Let's come back to a small concern then, in the middle of these big ones: Why is Dungeons & Dragons marketed as a combat game?

* * *

D&D started at a level of abstraction at which dicerolling combat results were reasonable - tabletop miniatures wargaming, in which a single figure might represent twenty real-life soldiers - and moved to a 1-to-1 model, binding D&D to a particular mode of abstraction and simulation. As the game evolved and storytelling became more important - as complex plots requiring 'social' dicerolls (diplomacy, bluffing, 'knowledge checks,' etc.) became standard roleplaying fare - the game's combat mechanics were extended to the gameworld/storyworld at large.

This was fine as far as it went. but in the middle of D&D's evolution something big happened to the generation of gamers who would have grown up on complex tabletop simulations - something big known as video games - and suddenly a new mode of abstraction achieved imaginative ascendancy among the target D&D/wargaming demographic, as did new modes of storytelling. I suspect that the open-endedness of great homebrew roleplaying campaigns is opposed by video games' evolutionary tendency toward the cinematic - as well as by the advent of home videos, which make it possible to dwell continuously in the mere circumstances of a story rather than its implications (which, if it costs money and time to get to a movie theatre to watch a first-run flick, are all you're left with when the movie's done). Indeed, D&D has always been a self-consciously literary game, even if the literary forebears are largely abject rubbish, and the function of literature is itself changing in the video game era.

So why is D&D marketed - cynically, I say - as a combat game? Because tactical combat is something that most kids know nothing about; it presents well onscreen; it tends to be morally cut-and-dried (not politically, but in its staging) with a clear win condition (you're still standing or the other guy is); because young children, who'll be far less measured in their financial expenditures than adults given the opportunity, can relate to the urge to fight more than the urge to, say, research spells. And let's face it - it's a hell of a lot easier to create a thing-to-kill than a thing-to-live-with, especially for a little boy (do most boys have imaginary friends, or imaginary oppressors? I had the latter). Atop which, because combat is of all simulated activities the furthest from players' daily experiences, it's the activity they're least like to be able to recreate realistically in other forms (whereas one could roleplay a debate by actually debating - which would make adjudication harder, etc.). It needs dice to make any sense.

But most importantly, D&D is marketed as a combat game because that's what its rules were initially created to cover, and they're not that good at simulating anything else.

Combat in Dungeons & Dragons is like sex in pornography - it's not the point of the exercise, which is the fantasy of power/control/submission/exploration/etc. that surrounds the combat/sex. But the central representation has become, over time, the (largely commercial) meaning of the activity. You look at sexy things to get excited, and you satisfy that excitement. You play D&D to imagine other lives and circumstances - to bring your circumstances and your aspirations/imaginings into proportion - and you stage a fight because the monsters are heroes in a story at odds in yours.

Or you can come to these forms of representation - porn, an RPG - because you wish to achieve the effects they promise. And the people who sell these things to you have a much easier time imagining that kind of desire, that interaction, than the more complex fantasy-investment originally offered by the form (and its narrative antecedents: novels of the fantastic, erotica). The bosses want to sell you the effect, so you learn to shop for the effect instead of the ongoing, fluid experience.

Hence a generation of guys who don't care if you have an orgasm as long as they get theirs.

Hence a generation of gamers who assume they need to min/max their characters in order to enjoy themselves in play.

The bosses do not care about faith in means, they care about ends. They sell ends.

The most diabolical slogan in American history is 'Satisfaction Is Job #1.'

* * *

Related anticlimactic topic: 'power creep.' By the time D&D 3rd edition was retired, it had expanded to include hundreds of sourcebooks, adventures, and supplements, from D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast and various third-party publishers. I learned only recently that expansions like The Quintessential Drow and The Complete Fighter and the Power Gamer's 3.5 Wizard Strategy Guide are known among D&D fans as splatbooks - 'splat' being the sound a basic character makes when hit by a souped-up creature, ha ha. [Update: No! The truth about 'splatbook' is much geekier, charmingly so. Thanks to Mark Argent for the call.] Typically, Dungeon Masters don't allow new features and mechanics into their games unless they're (1) homebrew or (2) from a book that one of the players owns, which is an interesting economic model - same thing with costly, high-powered Magic: The Gathering cards, unsurprisingly (WotC publishes both M:TG and D&D).

The problem with these expansion books is their inflationary effect - while good designers aim to balance their work with existing resources, there's an overarching feeling that 'more is better' - that after the core classes (fighter, rogue, cleric, etc.), the only thing a player will be interested in playing is an even more powerful class (Dragonrider Mage! Master of Time and Space! Raging Spellcaster Paladin Thief Potionmaker Demigod!!!!), balance be damned.

Call it the Anime Inflationary Effect if you'd like.

When this effect sets in, the first thing to go is imaginative daring. Splatbooks put a premium not on wild creativity, not on the embrace of human possibility past known limits, but on the mechanical advantage such creativity might offer.

Splatbooks regulate and monetize exploration; they place value on expansion rather than consideration. Maintaining speed rather than depth.

The 'civilization' that gave us The Quintessential Barbarian and Sword and Fist: A Guidebook to Fighters and Monks also gave us Brooke Ashley in The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang. At heart, the impulse behind each is more or less the same: more is better. Bigger is better. Balance is for Frenchmen. The problem is power creep, and it is the American Dream.

Rationalizing 'bros before hos.'

I ought to know better than to read Pandagon; the best writer on the site by a wide margin is Amanda Marcotte, but she's also in some ways the most disturbing member of that cohort - a thoughtful person who works hard, and knows she's working hard, to rationalize and aestheticize her overpowering hate and disgust. She says some absolutely stupid things, but then so does everyone; the problem with Amanda's writing is that the stupid or hateful or (to be more precise) blandly misandrist ('man-hating') things she says (when she says them) are couched in bog-standard 'progressive' rhetoric of a particular young white bourgeois feminist variety, shot through with just enough co-opted punk style to appeal to the cool kids.

The rest of the writers are histrionic and boring (and old hand Jesse Taylor has unexpectedly supplanted Pam Spaulding as the site's resident screeching harpy). Well what can you do. [Update: Well yes, some qualities I hold as dealbreakers w/r/t Pandagon I tolerate in writers like Andrew Sullivan. And I should note that the Pandagonians are in most issues 'allies' of mine, at least in theory (or Theory, if you like), so why carry on like this? I plead insanity on the former case and shrug at the latter. Sullivan, for his part, seems good-hearted for the most part - though to be frank I think he's a racist misogynist asshole and a world-class hypocrite. I'm not sure why I continue to read his site, nor those of his fellow poli-bloggers like Yglesias and Klein, with whom I've got so many problems. My hate is complex, today isn't the day to think it through. Someday will be, I promise.]

In any case:

People like Laura Sessions Stepp who scold young women and tell them to manipulate the guys with their sexuality in order to make everyone more mature are doing young women a great disservice. Young women have enough on their plates---Kimmel does take time to mention how young women feel this intense pressure to be effortlessly perfect, just for starters. They have to grow themselves up, and people like Stepp would have them take on the responsibility to grow young men up, too. Which is fucked up on 14 different levels. To name a few: Good luck even getting a guy to submit to being your maturation project. Love, especially early love, shouldn’t be this horrible and thankless job. He’ll resist you, which means endless amounts of tears for you and hostility from his male friends about how he’s pussy-whipped. He’ll probably cheat on you and dump you. It’s unfair to have to take care of your own development and a man’s, especially when he’s not going to give much back in return.

Now, Amanda's talking about young men in particular here; on the other hand, she's a young woman (just a couple years older than me if I remember correctly), so let's call a spade a spade: this is how she sees men. This is what she thinks is the basic nature of male/female relationships. And to be clear, this is not merely her description of a free-floating patriarchy that keeps all people down, nor a diagnosis of the unfortunate abuse of most men by emotionally closeted misogynist alpha males desperate to pathologize all non-macho masculinities: this is everyone, in Amanda's world. She uses the language of victimization to talk about men who don't fit the frat boy stereotype, but she happily slides into general condemnation when she gets going (and she gets going fast). And notice that she criticizes Sessions Stepp's tactics but not her feeling, which is that young men women's help to grow into reasonable human beings, while (it is implied) that relation does not go the other way. Plus Amanda seems happy to do what Sessions Stepp is describing, if only it didn't take so much work. Which is a gross fucking attitude even outside of this dubious argumentative context, even outside of this specific instance.

That said, it's worth reading her whole post, which is about 'hookup' culture (which should be pluralized). It's these sentences that stopped me short:

I suspect a lot of young women also know that they're basically biding their time until guys their age grow up a little and lose some of their allegiance to the "bros before hos" mentality and become acceptable boyfriends who can exhibit care about you as a human being. Until then, why waste your time? And hell, even after guys start growing up, there’s often plenty of times when you’re single and it seems every guy you meet has "issues" with grown women, and it's self-punishing to hold out for the good one to come along when that could means months or years of waiting.

Again, this is a perverse way of seeing the world, though not a surprising one: it basically removes from women's shoulders every scrap of responsibility for the state of dating relationships, implying that because women allegedly 'mature faster' than men that men are inferior beings, certainly inadequate.[*] But that's common perversity. So what. I'm interested, rather, in the classic line, 'bros before hos.'

When I was in college, my housemates used to use this line all the time. I lived at a fraternity, of sorts; culturally, the only thing it had in common with typical fraternities was its all-male membership, and even that was negotiable.[**] Still, you'd hear 'bros before hos' all the time. 98% of the time it was said in jest, or as half-ironic affirmation of the worth of a brother ('Don't worry boss, you might be single but you've got us'), in which case 'bros after hos' might have been a more precise formulation. It was also a way of needling one another: 'What, you don't want to hang out with us? Because you're gonna go have sex or something?' Which was both a reasonable claim (c'mon, you can have sex any goddamn time) and a misrepresentation. While my housemates did tend to display some resentment toward the women who 'stole' their brothers away - I was quite often guilty of this, shamefully - ours was a committed, consciously welcoming community; our aspiration was equality of treatment in all things, one of the few rules actually enforced in the house, and extending our love and affection to everyone who entered the community was the one task we all worked hard at for four straight years.

In other words, the phrase was never spoken nor taken at face value. (How many such slogans are?)

But the one positive meaning 'bros before hos' had, its mock-dismissive language aside ('bro,' like the later 'dudebro,' was as much a slander in our house as 'ho,' though 'ho' was never ever used in isolation that I can recall), was that it reaffirmed our commitment to one another. Unless you're wearing a ring of some kind - of the wedding or (argh) promise varieties - you likely have only informal commitments to reassure you of your place in your Special Somebody's life. But we had actually taken oaths to one another (regarding trust and friendship and acceptance rather than loyalty, though our national organization's oaths contained some of that stuff), and crazy as that sort of thing sounds to many people, the oaths (like wedding vows) served as markers of faith, rituals with the power not only to mark time and space but to transform relationships.

My first college girlfriend split with me during sophomore year; we'd dated since between semesters as freshmen. I couldn't understand why we were breaking up - or rather, I wouldn't let myself believe what I perceived were her reasons for splitting (boredom, frustration, etc.). The fact is, I'd come home to my crazy housemates and they'd take care of me, which granted me the security, the 'safe space'(!) I needed to deal with my confusion and sadness (and anger). It took me a long time to accept that it was for the best. And in the intervening nearly-a-decade (Christicles!) I've learned a lot about relationships, much of it from my housemates themselves.

But that's fanciful. The imaginative material is this: our words of stylized, ritual affirmation had power. And in a country and a culture where men are for various reasons constrained in their ability to express their thoughts and emotions verbally - indeed, in any form but the physical - we found ourselves co-opting the language of the frat boys we despised (our biggest common bigotry) in order to express a complex truth about ourselves and our shared life.

I know Amanda's using 'bros before hos' as a synecdoche here for the genuinely misogynist culture(s) found in many 'first-world' fraternities and macho-male organizations, but as usual she's eliding certain crucial differences between such groups, and as usual she's ignoring the fact that (like religious beliefs that are ridiculous on face - the Ascension, the Annunciation, reincarnation - but symbolize emotional truths) the language of men's cultures is always shot through with the same complexity as the (sure, let's grant this) women's cultures formed in reaction to male aggression or control or circumscription. It's a common move in academia and its popular bastard discourses to valorize woundedness or defensiveness while criticizing identical behaviour in allegedly dominant groups, but we shouldn't roll over for it, even when the people perpetrating such double standards do so for 'progressive' reasons, or (orthogonally) with a good heart.

So to sum up: 'bros before hos' doesn't actually mean 'it's better to hang out with the guys than with bitches,' nor does it simply reduce to 'women don't understand us, dude.' Nor is the 'attitude' it purportedly signifies as simple as immature dismissiveness and avoidance. And while it's nice to have a simple explanation for or response to everything in pocket - for instance that old chestnut, 'I blame the patriarchy' - the cultural prejudices of both men and women are twinned with biological predilections of both men and women which in complex, unpredictable, and sometimes mutually beneficial (and often mutually disastrous) ways determine the roles of men and women as they grow, adapt, intertwine, and slowly devour one another. Which is maybe only to say that we can hate or even love features of the world without hating or loving the people who seem to embody or display them, and we'd be well-served asking how the people who display them feel about the whole thing - and whether the allowances you make for people shaped and coloured like you, you should consider extending to the Other Half.

Though maybe I was saying something else, or more. Honestly, I'm better at maintaining speed than depth. You may know that by now. If you're disinclined to be charitable toward the above, I hope you'll take it with a grain of salt. Amanda's readers have got the shaker and they're using it up at a goodly clip. Ask politely.

* * *

[*] I should note that, as Amanda has literally made it her job to let people know how she feels about male/female relationships, at extraordinary length, it's possible that her sense of 'every guy [having] "issues" with grown women' might have less to do with spirit-crushing patriarchy and the emotional crippling of the American male than with Amanda Marcotte. And believe me, this isn't the bog-standard misogynist 'Oh another uppity feminist bitch' reaction so commonly seen among reactionaries; I'm guessing Amanda would be a more effective advocate for her political views and (broadly) her sex were she less self-involved, less resentful. And a more effective advocate would a wonderful thing. Alas.

[**] There are a handful of progressive-minded living groups at MIT, to go with the usual assortment of alpha jocks, midlist jocks, overcompensatory subjocks, whitebread nerds, and the batch of nice Jewish boys at AEPi. My fraternity was doggedly nerdy, somewhere in the middle of the MIT pack in terms of social skills but near the top in terms of open-hearted extroversion; we were zealous about our house culture, which was built (I kid you not) on four rules: 'No hazing. No homophobia. No misogyny. No one shall force his or her lifestyle on anyone else in the house.' 35 people on top of one another can be frustrating and tiring, and my brothers' lives were more densely interconnected than is typical for college kids, in part because of the absence of freshman/upperclassmen competition or alienation (because of the no-hazing rule). But when the house worked, when we acted in concert and allowed love and trust to guide us - in other words, when we lived in faith with one another - I believe we had something truly unique among living groups anywhere. In particular, the aggressive and even abrasive boys-at-play, nothing-is-sacred quality of house culture balanced out the retiring awkward-touchy-feely tendencies many of us had: for instance, at house meetings we'd end with 'Gossip and Slander,' in which we went around the room gleefully outing one another's secrets and peccadilloes, especially the shameful or tawdrily sexual ones, under the belief that almost nothing is worth keeping from family. (In truth we would respect serious secrets and blood-family concerns, of course.) This only sounds invasive; truth be told, it was the best part of house meetings, other than the drinking game, which had only one rule ('Every time someone says something stupid you take a shot'). It was a short game.

Kissing.

Harsh start; truth.

The GF says a 'harsh start' is a beginning to an argument that puts you immediately on the defensive: e.g. 'DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE A SHOPPING LIST?!' She also says:

'There's a claim that women are responsible for most 'harsh starts,' but I believe that's because men are inferior. They need so much direction.'

And that's why I love her.

Hat tip to Ai-ris for bringing this truth into our lives.

Medeski Martin and Wood: Farmer's Reserve.

In 1997, MMW came off the success of their electric funk breakout Shack-Man (still a fine record), and retreated to their solar-powered Hawaiian recording studio to make a lovely hourlong free-jazz recording, Farmer's Reserve. As the MMW newsletter put it at the time, it's 'headphones music': spare, delicate, more accessible than the screeching cacophony that so often passes for avant-garde jazz but a hell of a lot less welcoming than their electric albums. You can count the hummable melodies on one hand and the rhythms are all over the place, but it's a charming piece of work, more representative of the band's live shows than the tight dance tunes that make up most of their album tracks. (They spend a lot of time onstage exploring outer space; their demonic funk grooves tend to emerge from their soupy free playing, rather than the 'jam band' approach, which tends to go the other way around.)

In any case: turn down the lights, grab a bottle of wine (or smooth whiskey over melting ice), and give it a listen. Grab a lover if you've got one - or more, if more is your thing. The tunes make room.

Oh don't be such a lesbian, Andrew.

How can you possibly be upset with Hitchens for calling Andrew Sullivan a lesbian on TV, when you almost certainly have no fucking idea what he was talking about? Just the sound of it was awesome, helped of course by Hitchens's sly delivery. And yet: dear God what was he talking about? I'm sure Hitchens meant it in some colloquial sense I've just never heard of, or it was some private joke, fine, but I experienced the whole thing almost as abstract poetry, like Andre 3000's rhymes or something from one of the more accessible sections of Finnegans Wake, or a scene from the nonsensical-but-extraordinary Southland Tales. There's something under there but who gives a damn.

Should this post be titled with an 'untouchables' pun?

Why the fuck should Eliot Spitzer resign for having sex with hookers? Maybe his wife should leave him, maybe his kids should distrust him, maybe he should be ashamed of himself for messing up his marriage - but if he didn't use The People's money nor their good graces to to do, I can't see that it's The People's business. Yes, it's illegal; yes, prostitution laws should be enforced to the extent that they shield the public from increased health risk; no, we shouldn't have such stupid laws in the first place. And they're best observed in the breach.

Good for him for not resigning - and here's to him keeping his political balls, if he can, and getting through this inanity to be judged on his merits as governor.

Cock? Complex.

Yes. Just as preferring sex with a woman to sex with a man isn't ultimately about proximity to/interaction with a vagina, wanting to have sex with a man presumably isn't usually about 'craving cock.' The stupid tendency to equate 'male sexuality' with 'dick' is exactly as offensive as every equally denigratory reduction of woman to their orifices, no matter who displays those tendencies. Even the political 'good guys.' Even your precious 'fellow-travelers.' Even the (shock) 'progressives.'

Right, now with that big caveat you ought to go read this. An admirable bit of self-analysis, a dash of hope, a surprisingly upbeat comments thread. Well there's your blog triumphalism for the day, baby:

Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm biphobic.

I say such not to be proud of it, but rather to own up to it. We all have our own prejudices, so having or not having a prejudice is not what I am too concerned about here, but rather, if we are working to get rid of those we have, and particularly, how we do so.

I'm biphobic because I've been a part of lesbian communities for a long time, since I started to come out in my freshman year of university. Biphobia, as any bisexual woman will tell you (and any honest lesbian), is pretty endemic to the community, not inherent in it, mind you, but certainly endemic.

Not my scene, but up my alley. And there's some symbolic overloading for you, Reader(s), and good day!

Stick shift.

When Joe Average looks at a conventional pornographic video as an aid to self-pleasure, several levels of (self-)perception commingle:

1) 'I am imagining myself in this situation.'

2) 'I am watching other people in this situation.'

3) 'I am aware that I am watching others.' ('I am aware that this is not a video of me.')

4) 'I know that this is "forbidden" for many people.'

5) 'I am not actually seeing this event occur; I know that it has been staged.'

6) 'I know that I will probably not get involved in such situations.'

This is by no means a simple thing. And notice what's missing: 'I'm glad that that is being done to that person or those people; it's right and good.' Sitting in moral judgment of porn and what it represents isn't exactly a stance encouraged by the text. The collision of (1) and (3) is complicated - (3) and (5) aren't obliterated by (1), no matter what Noam Chomsky thinks.

Music == (obviously) sex.

I've often said that the sexiest stretch of music I have on record is the piano solo in Medeski Martin & Wood's 'Just Like I Pictured It,' off Combustication, thirty seconds so naughty I feel guilty putting that album on in polite company. But I'd like to submit that the sexiest six hours of music I've heard is surely the collection of bed-burners that makes up Miles Davis's 'On the Corner Sessions' box. Though I'm not 100% certain about that judgment: there are a few abrasive pieces in this collection, and the quietest moments are still more threatening than anything from the In a Silent Way sessions. Maybe this particular sonic landscape is just symbolically overloaded and it's the clavinet/guitar/wah-wah trumpet/processed soprano sax textures that fire certain neurons in my mindbrain. Still, the fact remains: throw on the last few minutes of 'He Loved Him Madly' and you'll never need to watch a Michael Mann movie again; 'Peace' sounds like it was performed by a group of musicians floating in a sea of Astroglide and red wine; 'Hip Skip' is what orgies sound like at Stevie Wonder's house; 'U-Turnaround' could be the soundtrack to a gigantic polychromatically perverse downtown sex romp where everyone speaks every language that ever existed and only walks in slooooow motion. And 'Jabali' is the invitation to the last party before they tear the whole city block down, drinks with names no one can pronounce, which all your friends got but you somehow didn't get, and then on the night of the thing someone slipped you a card with a number and you called it and that's the last thing you remember, and that's just fine.

But I had meant to say.

Congrats Em and Darrel! It was a little weird getting tipsy in your hotel room late on your wedding night with all those people in your bed. Weird in a good way. I forget what kind of miniworld ours is. See you soon. :)

Those poor, poor kids.

You know what's really screwing up today's teenage boys? Not the 'culture of violence' nor the Iraq War nor videogames.

No, for millions of teenagers there is a new, unlikely scourge: they're sitting there furtively masturbating to Internet porn, short streaming video clips free of charge, and the dropped frames are only a mild irritant - indeed in an odd way part of the pleasurable anticipation - and then the Pleasure Moment arrives with all its power to imprint on the malleable teenage-boy mind, and instead of the explosive climax of Anal Crime Spree 6 what is our poor protagonist looking at?

Buffering........35%

Theirs is a lost generation.

Bad/good: a service to young males.

Bad: Uh, I don't know if this is weird or whatever, um, but have you ever, y'know, faked it? Like, an orgasm? With me, I mean. I don't wanna know about before, sorry.

Good: If you're ever not satisfied in, um, bed, y'know, if you haven't, uhh, arrived yet, please tell me. I want you to feel comfortable, uh, saying stuff like that. You can talk dirty or whatever, too. I mean I don't mind. I love you. Sorry, is this a weird thing to talk about on the bus?

See the difference? Go get 'em, tiger.

Fear causes safe sex?

From a HuffPo article entitled 'Andrew Sullivan declares the "End of AIDS" - again' by Gabriel Rotello:

As the meds [combo therapies for HIV] came into use, people began celebrating. Opinion leaders -- most notably Andrew Sullivan -- recklessly proclaimed the "end of AIDS" in major venues like The New York Times. Mainstream journalists took their cue and largely dropped the subject.

Healthy fear -- the primary motivator of safe sex -- swiftly declined. Unsafe sex -- a vital part of the 'infectivity' leg of the Triad -- swiftly rose. Sex with multiple partners -- the 'contact rate' leg of the triad -- also rose. [emphasis mine]

I don't want to dwell too much on the overt content of the column but a couple of observations are order. I think Rotello is right to call Sullivan out for his own personal (and let's say it: selfish, in its way) history-of-AIDS narrative, which does get a little starry-eyed where Big Pharma and the 'end of the plague years' are concerned. Sullivan's is, after all, a survivor narrative - he was diagnosed with HIV in the 90's.

It's also clear that Rotello is misunderstanding the point of Sullivan's 'end of AIDS' talk. Sullivan's hitting on what would seem to be a key transition in gay culture (from his perspective), a shift from 'AIDS as central metaphor, organizing principle, and major cultural determinant' - AIDS as death to all, in other words - to a culture (or rather a set of cultures) in which HIV is one of several diseases to be conscientious of, more dangerous than most perhaps but such that it's possible to imagine life without it. If you have AIDS your life changes of course, but Sullivan's point seems to be in part that something like 'AIDS exceptionalism' has deformed the self-conception of gay culture(s), and that healthier, more integrated culture is impossible until a shift in consciousness occurs. He's not saying it's just swell to get HIV, he's making cultural arguments about rhetorics of martyrdom, suffering, and exceptionalism. He loves such rhetoric - but not from that bogeyman 'the gay left,' which he (not unreasonably) puts on the frontlines of gay advocacy and identity-promulgation.

The argument isn't really my business; in the abstract, my sympathy is with the kind of argument Sullivan is making, but Rotello scores plenty of points in the exchange, and doesn't resort (in this salvo) to the drippy melodrama that weighs down Sullivan's column.

What caught my eye, rather, and which I want to briefly respond to, is the highlighted bit above:

Healthy fear -- the primary motivator of safe sex

Many, many, many people are asymptomatic for potentially dangerous venereal diseases (like HPV: frighteningly common, all but undetectable in men as I recall, and linked to cervical cancer). Isn't there something perverse about fear being the main reason people (want to) take measures to prevent the spread of disease? Isn't respect - for your partners' health, for your own, for the wider community at risk from the very viruses you might pass on - a finer motivator for safety? Wouldn't a communitarian attitude toward sex put this talk of 'plague' into persepctive, and help shift responsibility back to individuals in a way that encourages and socially rewards them for doing the right thing?

It seems to me that we know from other realms of human experience that scaring adults into doing the right thing is a dubious moral plan; it's one thing with kids, who need to learn a lot awfully fast, but aren't grownups equipped with finer moral metrics? Mightn't we put them to use even in the bedroom? Or is pure selfishness really the only appeal left to civilized women and men when the continued existence of a culture is at stake?

Work clothes.

Check it out: the advantages of working at home! What you can't see are the underpants I'm wearing on the outside. The discolored fingernails are 'cause I was eating nachos. The short fingernails are 'cause I'm a fucking lesbian.

Best and worst things about the North End 'round Friday midnight.

Best: Tiramisu and port over pen and notebook at a corner table dimly lit.

Worst: The grotesque spectacle of middle-aged Italian-American men fixating on undesirable foreigners ('tambourine cocksucker' was the colourful phrase of the night) and the aroma of teenage vaginas.*

Whatever mechanism perpetuates the myth that certain men's leering and catcalls are shows of 'appreciation' and 'respect'** is more dangerous to the psychic wellbeing of this country than any presidential malfeasance or bird flu. Someone should tell the big bald fucker at Caffé {ahem} that The Sopranos is going off the air, so he can stop perpetually auditioning for the role of 'Tony's even less charming misogynist cousin.'

* * *

* For a moment I found myself wondering if, as a concerned member of the wider community, I was allowed to make a citizen's arrest for violation of Workplace Sexual Harrassment laws. Then I wondered how long a knife would have to be to reach a lung through that many inches of pendulous man-boob. Then I felt really, really bad.

** ...which demonstrate nothing more, of course, than dull-witted insecurity, but who's counting?

Aah, so this is why Photoshop the GIMP is fun.

The artist who's being spoofed/emulated here is not, to me, terribly exciting at all; I just find the look of these cartoony paintings appealing. His portraiture is a little too uninflected for me to love it. Nonetheless if the work is supposed to present primarily the shock of recognition - as when a cartoonist renders an unexpectedly accurate picture of someone, who seems to leap out from among the abstractions and caricatures (cf. for instance Jaka and Cerebus and 'Ham Ernestway') - it can be quite enjoyable in small doses. We are our own thoughts' biggest fans after all.

It's really, really straightforward (though time-consuming) to produce primitive simulacra of Julian Opie's work in your photo-editing software of choice; the GIMP is slow as hell on my machine, puttering along in X11 like it has all the time in the world, but it's free and earnest, so who can complain? I'm finally growing comfortable with the interface and Photoshop/GIMP conventions, and a (semi-)productive (and possibly profitable) day closed out with pleasant diversions.

Anyhow: here is someone pretty.

Oh Lord I need to find / Someone who can heal my mind

Proposition** re: progressive sexuality.

If the desire to be humiliated and controlled is a 'reasonable' or 'normal' level of 'kink' - i.e. if submissiveness is a natural aspect of human sexuality and should be accommodated by a caring sexual partner - then the desire to humiliate and control (domination) is so as well.

The perversion of the former desire yields 'victim culture'; the perversion of the latter yields 'rape culture.'

Both 'cultures' spring from the same locus of desire.

** Prompted by this, and offered in lieu of the long, long post that I can't seem to finish, in which the point in this post is made laboriously, at terrible length, after a long digression about Andrew Sullivan. (Which is why I didn't post the thing.)

Also let's be clear on something about sex relations, hmm?

I have no idea what the (e.g.) gay men's dating scene is like, so this whole dating-as-supplication notion comes from my own experience and is limited in applicability to a certain moment, sexual and cultural, and to a certain mainstreamness that, let's be frank, we'd all be best off avoiding now that there's Craigslist for your anonymous jones.

'Anonymous Jones' would be a good name for a detective.

Anathema to nature.

'Being funny' is supposed to be easy, but making humour is proving rather difficult. The deflationary or combative aspects of weisenheimer comportment - taking the piss in casual conversation, cutting at sentiment, or offering exaggeration as its own justification (a kind of atmospheric comedy of manner) - aren't translating into my writing of late, not the fiction in any case. It's easier in a piece of 'critical' writing to sound like myself, because my opinion - that is, my self - is my object. Comprehension isn't combat, but the translation is easier when personal terms can be employed. Structuring comedy, revealing character through a mode of conversation whose point is at least in part to protect or withhold character, is a learned skill. There is something to talk of a national or cultural knack for comedy, an association between a group's discursive character and the manner of literature it can produce. (I hear Irish humour and sentiment more cleanly than, say, French. Or so I think.)

I don't know who my people are, exactly, but they're intensely solitary. The comedy is borrowed. Joking portmanteau.

I tried to inspire myself watching some special features from the Season One Lost DVD, figuring that the story of the show's genesis, or discussion of its plot, might goose my energy level a bit. It didn't pan out that way. For one thing, the show was picked up from a 20-page outline put together in a week by handpicked writers who had worked with ABC's executives before, based on one of those non-idea 'ideas' TV executives are so proud of. (Lloyd Braun's original pitch consisted, near as I can tell, of 'I want to do Castaway, the series.' Abrams and Lindelof were given a shoddy script and the following idea: a plane crashes on a deserted island. TV executives don't rise to power because they have any creative ability.) For another, the pilot was written in a matter of a couple of weeks, under a tight deadline, meaning the show's mythology was only barely written out initially, and its character relationships and identities not at all. It's frustrating to hear about this stewpot method of showrunning, because I want the art I read to have a structural and ideational integrity, and I don't feel that Lost does. (Locke wasn't formerly paralyzed until the writers broke the story for episode four, 'Walkabout'; in other words, one of the show's few remaining interesting character mysteries was initially conceived of as an illustration of a principle of faith, which we know well the show has no interest in handling at real depth. Like I said: frustrating.

But what comes through even more strongly is: the script I'm working on right now, for an August 7 deadline, is half broad farce, half low-key coming-of-age comedy, half romance, with a dash of theological/moral piss-taking. Its outline is one of those that gets less dense (i.e. less done) as it goes, so that Act III is basically 'He tries to get out.' I know the final beats (and writing this, I just realized and fixed a big problem with an earlier scene, thanks for listening), but I haven't put much thought into the mechanics of the final buildup and climax. In part the issue is: I don't particularly want to be writing broad farce. Maintaining the tone is difficult because it requires an always-on approach to comedy - each unfunny line or piece of move-character-A-to-place-B business starts a clock running that only stops when the next laugh comes. And because these characters aren't simply performing for their best friends, but rather anonymous strange readers (and Reader(s)), they can't simply trade on attitude. I figured this would be formally fairly straightforward, and indeed it's a lot of sitting around talking or running around talking with somewhat thin connective tissue, but I had no idea expressing archness was so far removed from maintaining an arch disposition. The latter comes naturally (I'm apparently terribly arrogant &c.) but I'm only now practicing the former.

Each of the last two years a good friend and I have written, over a couple of boozy, exhausting, exhausted nights, hour-long 'crock operas,' parody musical comedies trading on well-worn jokes and a huge collection of ready-to-go songs. Last year I wrote a lyric about exposition to the tune of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' that was better on the page than in performance (apparently not everyone knows that song - how is that possible?). In any case, the two of us knocked out many pages of material in literally a couple of nights or a night and a morning, starting from a full script (entirely rewritten but with a fine structure) in one case and an immediately-jettisoned script in the other. Each time it's been...fantastic. We laugh a lot, rewrite one another's scenes, and embrace the dubious 'art' of the pun sequence (my collaborator's specialty). Thank God the audience is a generous and forgiving one.

It's a world away from trying to write comedy by my damn self. When a man goes out chasing women he presents himself as an option among many; the goal is to manipulate, in part - of course - but the power at the stage of presentation and initial contact tends (as I see it) to rest in the women's hands. Urges run strong on both sides, we know, but pursuit of women's attention isn't a hunt as it's so often characterized...it's supplication. (Oh I've got theories baby.) Trying to write this ridiculous script I've found myself caught up in the same dynamic, only without a way of tailoring my presentation and supplication to an audience. At least in this first draft. (Which by the way stands beside page 90 right now - Act III is around the corner.) I imagine my audience, imagine an embodiment for my ingrained critical-responsive tendencies, and then try to simultaneously appeal and overgo. Politics is war by other means; comedy, like dating, is diplomacy meant to mask the sounds of shooting in the streets. The labour's end and aim is to enable generous appeal by shaping, by manipulation. The readerly contract is murderous all of a sudden, because I get to choose its language but not evaluate its fulfillment.

I'm getting around myself here, it's late, that's what happens. Not late: just at the tail end of a long day. Angels in America is on the TV downstairs, riveting; I started this post this morning and am finishing it a winding half-day later. Between the words 'Thank God...' and 'It's a world away,' I rewrote some pages - there's a scene in The Wrong Trousers, the second Wallace and Gromit movie, in which Wallace (Gromit?) sits in a fast-moving train and lays track hurriedly a half-step ahead of the engine's progress. Dave Sim says the happiest he's capable of feeling is when he's working at the absolute limit of his physical and mental capacities. Catching up with oneself: I'm somewhere in the middle, far from capacity, the train not moving terribly quickly. And then, the simultaneous certain knowledge that I want to be writing something else. I am at war with my trusty old urge toward laziness and flight. The noise in the street is 'friendly fire' - and if those two words aren't comedy I don't know what is, and may as well hang up the keyboard. Metaphorically of course. It's wireless and just gets stashed on a clothespile in front of the closet, but you take my meaning or part of it and that's a wrap folks.

OK but modulo this postscript: I know how to be funny but not how to do comedy as such, and that births respect. But I'm growing quickly, real Tetsuo-in-Akira style, Neo-Tokyo at risk of metaphoric-nuclear apocalypse. Today the GF and I read a scene I wrote the other day, the first time aloud for those pages, and I found that I had dug inside myself to get outside myself. I had worried that it wasn't funny; for a moment I was talking in a strange tongue and I realized it wasn't a private language anymore. Do you know she sat on my lap and we read aloud laughing and I could hear the music of unfamiliar voices. All around.

This'll take loads of explaining, I reckon, for some of his readers.

Sully's take on a talk he gave with Erica Jong and Dan Savage:

[...] Dan and I agreed that moderate hypocrisy - especially in marriages - is often the best policy. Momogamy is very hard for men, straight or gay, and if one partner falters occasionally (and I don't mean regularly), sometimes discretion is perfectly acceptable. You could see Jong bridle at the thought of such dishonesty. But I think the post-seventies generation - those of us who grew up while our parents were having a sexual revolution - both appreciate the gains for sexual and emotional freedom, while being a little more aware of their potential hazards. An acceptance of mild hypocrisy as essential social and marital glue is not a revolutionary statement. It's a post-revolutionary one. As is, I'd say, my generation as a whole.

Am I reading this wrong, or are 'hypocrisy' and 'discretion' code words for adultery in this passage? And regardless, isn't Sullivan's endorsement of 'moderate hypocrisy' as an essential social glue a perfect illustration of which direction the moral-conservative slippery slope actually slopes?

Look, Andrew, if you want to make the argument that it's fine to adulter in moderation, every once in a while, so long as you don't tell your partner, by all means make that argument openly. And then you can be excoriated openly for being an immoderate hypocrite, but at least you'll be a little freer.

What then happened with the booze and the noise and hands on hidden skin: everything, but nothing new.

I went through two periods of fairly heavy socializing in college - 'partying' to be more specific, though it wouldn't have occurred to me to say the words 'I'm partying all the time' at any point. I would have been, in a rare habit of honest lucidity, considerably more likely to say 'I'm drinking every weekend.' But then I was young, and it was a point of pride, as stupid things sometimes are. I would surely have added, too: 'All weekend.' In case you missed my point. I was quite the ersatz man-about-town in those days.

The first such period was right at the beginning of college. I'd been away from home on my own only once, during a summer program at Johns Hopkins, and I was always a Good Kid, never any trouble for anyone, much better-liked by parents than my fellow students. At MIT that changed - I came back home less likable overall. It wasn't the booze, of course. And let's be clear: as a young undergrad I drank almost nothing at all, getting drunk perhaps once or twice in my first year of college, once or twice more as a sophomore - most memorably on the night after my freshman girlfriend and I broke up for the first time. (She and I drank together, and staggered around together, and later had the kind of sex that you'd only really praise if you hadn't ever slept with anyone else. Sloppy and not particularly affectionate and (in retrospect) expedient. Which is not to say unappealing.)

Let's backtrack a bit. I can feel myself equating 'drinking' and 'socializing', and am not yet ready to look at myself as closely as this realization demands.

College parties are all more or less alike from my current vantage, at age 27: most crucially, they're full of college students, all of whom cluster much more tightly than they realize as they make the transition from high school cliques and teenage melodrama to productive, clarifying monomania (of work, of family, of creative exertion, and so forth). But eight or nine years ago I was an eager party taxonomist. It was obvious where the 'interesting' parties at MIT were, where you'd go to meet girls, who had the good booze selection (about which I knew nothing), where the backrub circles would form after the party, and so forth.

A note on backrub circles: there is a remedial sensuality to geek flirting, which stems in part from the socially/sexually somewhat stunted development of many high-achieving geek types, in part from the surprising crossover between theatre geeks and tech types. It's certainly possible to be a connoisseur of good backrubs, and there's a world of difference between good and bad ones, but it's hard to escape the sense, once you're finally getting laid, that there's something creepy about earnest black-clad Maglite-carrying self-identifying pagan engineers stroking one another's hair and kneading each other's backs and letting out noises of demonstrative faux-juvenile satisfaction in a grubby dormitory lounge at 4:30 on a Saturday morning. First term at MIT I was very much the type to stay up for such things, or the occasional pillow fight in a group of the sort of people who choose the names of pubescent anime characters as their network logins. I did this for two reasons, primarily: on the one hand, I desperately wanted girls to kiss me and touch my genitals, which happened very rarely in absolute terms and with about average frequency for MIT freshman males. On the other hand, I was so awkward and overenthusiastic around girls (now that there were new ones around, and not just the girls I'd been friends with in high school, about whom I knew too damned much) that backrubs and pillow fights and Serious Emotional Conversations About Reality were the closest I figured on getting to the parts of a girl not involved in a friendly handshake. I offer my 18-year-old self as a representative example of the pathetic dialectic of desire that marks many geek guys' entries into the world of flirting, dating, and the eventual death-by-a-thousand-cuts known as first love.

In any case, I went almost exclusively at that time to parties in 'east campus', which confusingly included both the East Campus dorm and several others - Senior Haus, Bexley, Random (though the latter only by a kind of Pigeonhole Principle; Random Hall at MIT is even more insular than any of the other places mentioned, and not just because it's a tiny dorm). East campus dorms tended to house the misfits, or so their residents flattered themselves to think; as anywhere else there was a diversity to each place, but the lines grow subtler the further away you get. The first full-on college party I went to was at EC itself; they served something called 'Florey Punch', which tasted like fruit juice gone rancid and drew few takers from the, oh, twenty people present at the event. It was in EC's Talbot Lounge, which right off you could tell was going to be a problem - the DJ put on a Nine Inch Nails song I didn't know I liked, and there were chairs stacked along the walls, and the whole thing had the unpleasant air of a high school dance.

Later I would turn up for the 'Reawakening of Krotus', an annual party centered around some kind of mock-sacrifice and Cthulhu references and....forget it, the explanation will bore you. (It bored me, and I was desperately seeking girls who'd kiss me and touch my genitals - so everything was exciting, or so I thought.) In any case, that party was a bit better: on a hall at EC, Fifth East, famous for its hacker culture and ostentatious anti-aesthetic decor (including a long stretch of hallway painted entirely black known as 'Black Bemis'). There were girls in corsets and guys in corsets and people wearing bunny slippers and even a few guys in flightsuits - I was with them, and my flightsuit has a little namestrip that says 'Minwax', thank you - and the whole thing seemed to be trying to hard but still came out tame, not least because by that time a girl or two had in fact kissed me and touched my genitals, more than once in fact, so the aforementioned remedial sensuality of the place didn't seem quite so debauched or dangerous. (Sci-fi theme parties thrown by actual sci-fi fans are a world unto themselves, as well they should be.) Moreover, at that point I was going regularly to parties elsewhere, and had discovered How The Other Half Drank. Not surprisingly I was well into my own personal period of greatest debauchery - or in any case, my personal highest Average Quantity of Bourbon Per Week, which for a certain kind of guy passes for debauchery. Some sex happened too, in a dissipated sort of way, about which nothing need be said.

The phrase my compatriots and I would use was 'G-cubed at Baker', where 'G-cubed' stood for go get girlfriends. The idea - which seemed sensible enough at the time - was that no right-thinking sorority-type girl could resist the allure of 'nonconformist' guys who lacked the feeling of entitlement possessed by frat-boy types and jocks (who after all know they'll eventually fall backwards into piles of sex if they just take off their shirts and mention the model of automobile they drive) (well not piles as such, though maybe sometimes). The first time I turned up at Baker House - the most clique-heavy and frat/sorority-like dorm on campus - as a first-term post-breakup junior, I was wearing the same purple flightsuit in which I would later help Reawaken Krotus and in which, that very summer, I'd driven with a group of other flightsuited fools from LA to San Francisco and across to Boston in a burgundy car (later two) known as the Violet Beauregard. My hair was seven inches long, thick and curly and ridiculous, my sideburns bushy (I'm a big Phish fan, what can I say?), my jawline then well-defined under pale, smooth skin. Eight girls came into my friend's room to sit down; I felt like I was being appraised. Apparently I came in a below market value, because not a one seemed impressed.

Days later I returned in a more heterosexual outfit, having shaved my head and let some stubble grow. My fortunes changed. I was invited to parties - in Baker they still use the quaint term 'kegger', though draconian alcohol regulations had forced a change at that time to sick-making boxed wine in light pink - and at those parties I drank staggering quantities of alcohol. I impressed people with my tolerance for the stuff. Under the influence of alcohol, my new boon companion, I somehow managed to insinuate myself into the dorm rooms and beds (and once, memorably, the bedroom floor) of girls who, when asked nicely, agreed to kiss me and touch my genitals. I mentioned at the outset that I would at this time drink all weekend; that was no exaggeration. From Thursday night until Sunday morning, every single weekend, I spent a substantial percentage of my time pleasantly intoxicated, making a manful effort to Go Get Girlfriends at whatever place I was. Of course I failed, but the failure had a poetic rite-of-passage quality to it. I aged a lot that semester. There were any number of compelling breasts and asses and midriffs but few singular personalities on display in those days, it seemed, and truth be told my own personality left much to be desired then as well. (It was easy enough to entertain people as status-conscious and normative as my newfound drinking buddies, but unsurprisingly my all-over-drinking time corresponded with a period of deep nihilism and self-loathing - I mentioned I was recently post-breakup, right? - so the one-on-one sessions were lacking in my full emotional participation, as I recall.) This isn't to say I didn't make friends and meet very good people - I did - but my criteria for companions had changed. You might say: you grow out of Krotus and into keggers, and then you grow further, and might even find yourself heading back the way you came, if only in appreciation.

Parties at Baker were exactly what I'd always figured college parties would be: loud, dumb, absolutely soaking in liquor, embarrassing (afterward), set to atrocious dance music and leading to regrettable hookups, kissing, the touching of standard-issue genitals. One girl had a poster on her bunk bed with a picture of (if I remember correctly) a kitten, and the word 'Heaven'. She was from Texas, and had the figure to prove it; I would never have gone to see the kitten poster on any other weekend, I suppose, but the ebb and flow of one's needs is a curious thing, and the boxed wine persuaded me. Damningly, she was a freshman, and my upperclassmen friends and fellow drunkards remonstrated against the awkward (but sweet-natured, I'd say) coupling rather loudly, as I recall. The whole episode neatly summed up the dual function of those parties: on the one hand, making out is a learned skill, and experience tells, so one may as well have a tussle if one is otherwise not busy; on the other hand, the need for alcohol to lubricate such exchanges pointed up an unappetizing repression that was akin to the geek asociality across campus, yet dealt with perhaps more sustainably at EC and the like. You don't get to do backrub circles for the rest of your life; it's booze for most people, so you may as well learn. And yet I'm fairly certain that sober most of my fellow Baker-partygoers would have shied away from such earnest physical contact, outside perhaps of the context of games like football and so forth. I dated a nice junior girl from Baker the next semester - she was Navy ROTC, very much so - and I was surprised all over again by the discreteness of her zones of personal intimacy, having come from a more continuous emotional/physical microculture. You might say: her softness and almost maternal side were only on display when we were alone, and by then I'd had the good (and also mixed) fortune to forget what such a stark division was like.

The parties were venues for drinking; the drinking enabled intimacy; the intimacy often found no venue for expression more serious or focused than the parties. People weaned themselves off boxed wine and dance music eventually, and after a few months of good solid undistinguised obligatory College Life - straight out of some kind of 50's-era boy's magazine, but with personal computers - I weaned myself off it too. I'd met the Navy girl, or become reacquainted (I'd chased her jogging on the Esplanade once, and asked her name, during my first Out Every Weekend period, the innocent one). And we fell maybe in love and then certainly out of it, but not before I'd enjoyed a private repeat of my Thursday-through-Sunday drinking schedule during the summer before my senior year. I filled a journal with handwritten bitterness then, the first time, and though I didn't know it I was learning to admit things to myself. The journal was the key in a lot of ways. Certain dreams you don't talk about. I wished she'd been around that summer, but she was on a boat, on a different ocean; perhaps it's better that I was alone. There's a quota of socializing too easily filled for those of us who tend to need absolute aloneness. Some things you can only learn to love on your own. I had a drink in my hand the first time she and I really spoke, and I don't know whether I finished it or put it aside, but the sun was on its way back by the time we parted with a hug hours later. We went to some parties together but it was pointless: I'd met someone willing to kiss me and touch my genitals, and as a Catholic I don't approve of dance music, so why drink? Which is to say, why 'party'? I never did grow my hair back out, and wore the flightsuit less often with each passing year, and I don't wear it anymore now. And now that I pay for my booze there are, curiously, fewer and fewer reasons to crack a bottle. Which makes no sense in one way, and in another way makes all the sense in the laughable world.

5 things I quite like about my girlfriend.

5. She does stupid dances sometimes without even caring how stupid they are, which let me tell you is pretty goddamn stupid, but it doesn't matter.

4. She's generous, shockingly so, and helps people out of a genuine feeling that they're worth it, that things will be better off if she does people good rather than ill. She supports me beyond what I thought possible or sensible in a girlfriend.

3. We hug and kiss etc. quite compatibly.

3(a). To elaborate: Holy wow seriously.

2. She's a good housemate, I think, but not too good: she strikes a better balance between neat and slob than I do, though we're both closer to the latter than the former. And she's conscientious without being uptight; I believe she has more patience than me for petty around-the-house things, which is good, because in my case 'patience' is a smokescreen for laziness after all.

1. We laugh all the time, and our shared humour-vocabulary stretches from dorky political wonk/wankery to absolutely the most immature joking I've been a part of since elementary school. She tends to be 'always on' except in the very early morning, at which time she's not my girlfriend, not really, but rather another creature of shorter fuse and limited cognitive/physical faculties temporarily inhabiting my girlfriend's body in some kind of twisted symbiotic bond. But other than that - I mean I'm a bear when I'm low on sleep but that's nothing by comparison, seriously people - other than that she comes firing, goofiness and wit and an off-center sense of things, and it's an elixir to me, a tall drink dangerously criminally strong.

20 minutes: preoccupation.

On occasion I like to write '20 minute stories'. It has in the past been a relaxing exercise but the latest one was like pulling teeth for some reason. I don't write enough 'organized' fiction - unless you count my political ranting as fiction, which is reasonable - and so I'm having to learn a lot of the basics of writing short stories even now. It was easier when I was a kid (wasn't everything?), and settled for mimicking the style and effects of the adventure-story trash I most enjoyed reading.

(As an aside, did anyone else read Dragonlance books galore back in the day? They still write them, you know. Somewhere a robot marked 'Dragonlance' is turned on and off, one trilogy of faux-Tolkien novels at a time.)

The importance of the 20-minute story is that it's largely an exercise in (unconsciously) letting the characters' small actions dictate what will come to have been their personalities. Exercise is good; more to the point, this kind of rigorous not-thinking is intended (as Milch suggested/instructed at MIT the other day) to foster ego-suppression by an immersive process. We've talked about this, though as with other things William James got there first: the dissolution of the self as a precondition of 'mastery' which we might broadly define as 'expansive consciousness'.

Thus far - I've done these exercises far too rarely, but periodically over the last few years - the exercises haven't produced good short stories, though this one (the previous) is the most successful so far to my eyes. The last two, today's and the one from early March (why don't I do this exercise every single day?), are similar stories told en passant in the context of a threadbare narrative frame. In the first case, a thin 'science fiction' premise wraps around a tiny vignette about first love, while the nominal plot of today's story consists of 'Girl comes home and doesn't check her answering machine' - which only enumerates the prompts to reflection, which is the real story such as it is. The reflection is about sex - last instead of first - which is what you write about when you have nothing else to say, I guess. I'm mildly proud of the first, not proud of this one, but it keeps my ego in check to share this writing with people. I never had to figure out who left the message - which is the positive way of saying, I got distracted by the possibility that the call was from her ex-boyfriend, and then started playing out a lightly-fictionalized version of a memory of my own, certainly one of the most bizarre and desperate conversations I've had with a girlfriend. Through the first half-page I thought it was a story about Danielle's parents and the answering machine itself. You can probably figure out the point at which I changed my mind: the story goes from a thinly-imagined present (complete with irrelevant details, like the cat) to a memory that's more vivid for its author than the reader or character. Still, the memory of a failed attempt at saving the relationship through sex becomes the point of the story. When Danielle puts her hands on the counter it's not clear what she's reacting to. Only in retrospect can I discuss this lack of clarity as strength or weakness (it's a weakness); at the time it just didn't occur to me to wonder. Perhaps I knew beyond saying.

The story doesn't sustain analysis.

I find that I run out of patience when attempting to write short stories; I want them to wrap up too quickly. You can't do a ten-page tale in a single sitting, and it seems like such a small thing (Ten pages? Bah! As an undergrad I used to write twenty-page research papers in an afternoon!) that I think I resent that inability. Delaying personal satisfaction is one of the more difficult parts of transitioning from writing-as-solipsist's-holiday to writing as reaching-out to real and imagined Reader(s). That might be one utility of MFA writing programs (though you see the argument often that those are also solipsists' holidays, a claim to which I have nothing to add). This blog serves that purpose for me, to a degree. If I write for myself knowing that someone will probably read it when it gets posted, my Editor Brain clicks on earlier in the process of writing, and the worst indulgences never make it to the page.

You are permitted to wonder: There are worse indulgences than the ones that do get posted? You've got to be kidding me.

You wouldn't believe it. Well maybe.

(That sentence was revised: 'Well, maybe you would.' → 'Well maybe you would.' → 'Well maybe.' For the record. For you.)

Milch talked about writing as a 'going out in spirit' to one's characters, after you've 'lived into your sense of them.' Arbitrary formal structures lift the need to be 'structurally clever' - which is one of my worst tendencies, that need - and emphasize the integrity and authenticity of the story itself. Or as one of my other polestars (Joss Whedon) puts it, constraints do the work for you, and free you. Which if that sounds fruity or too-easy I suggest you take it up with him, since he's the damn genius after all.

A proposition concerning sexual desire.

Sexual desire seemingly takes social form as egotism: the desire to conquer and own another human being's affections and attention. It's also the desire for comfort and communication, but stems from a felt need.

The sexual desire for another body, however, is centrally an egoless desire: to lose oneself in another human being's need, to become object of need. Or: it is pathological to want blowjobs all the time (the act itself capable of sustaining intimacy and mutuality but the desire for it, disembodied as it were, involving the reduction of the other to receptacle), yet (for a man) to want to fuck all the time is not a self-aggrandizing or self-serving desire, but a self-abnegating one. 'I lose myself in you' is a hoary turn of phrase but apposite: I abandon my abstracted need for 'fulfillment' by immersion in action, action which engages all the senses and thereby disconnects the conscious (egotistical) mind.

Orgasm is the surrender of control, not its culmination. The fantasy of control does not bring ecstasy and isn't mean to, which is not to say that the act of control can't be immersive and fulfilling. But it can't be thought of as control. Indeed it can't be 'thought of' at all. One must get out of one's own way.

By this line of reasoning we can escape the need to condemn lust and find the will to refuse to apologise for it.

We can prepare our environment so as to maximize the impact of the moment of ego suppression, for instance by lowering the lights in a concert hall (or cinema) or burning scented candles in the bedroom. These preparations have the effect of dissolving the boundary between us and our environment. To say 'You look so beautiful' and mean it is to acknowledge a total sensation, the apprehension of beauty which though transformative is the opposite of egotistical. It is truest when we forget ourselves - when our function is service to beauty.

All of which applies as well to writing, I would think, or music, or soccer, or any other activity in which a balance must be struck between craft (by which unconscious apprehension of totality is translated rudimentarily - though less so with time - into artwork) and the reduction of the self to element or conduit. They say you have to read Strunk & White over and over until you are able to forget it and simultaneously retain it. It must become the part of you that is left behind to record the moments insight afforded the deeper matrix of self.

Boston warm and drizzle touched; tutoring redux; sex/film.

Gorgeous day today in a weird way: not bright sun, exactly, but sun to be sure, and heat. Saw the first ant of springtime this afternoon trundling back from tutoring at Boston Latin. Today it was two periods of math and one of English, sort of - third period the girl had to work on a history assignment re: abolitionists, and write up a three-page speech beseeching a crowd of abolitionists to free a slave being carted off to Virginia. The assignment was ludicrous; she was expected to put together this speech, do a dramatic presentation in character, work in '20 facts' from a book, utilize contemporary cultural references, make it compelling as both rhetoric and history lesson...the teacher's got a neat idea, sort of, but the requirements are just over the top.

I told her to listen to the 'I have a dream' speech, to think poetically and performatively and not worry about the references, blah blah blah.

The math was easier: the Pythagorean theorem! Oh easy math how I had missed you while getting C's in my differential equations class in college.

Walking home I passed through Northeastern, a part of town I've visited on occasion, the layout of which I always forget. When people tell me they're at Northeastern I have trouble picturing it for some reason. No more. It's a great deal closer than my addled brain had previously thought.

Rapid turn, OK: why are movies today so unsexy? Actually I'm about to offer a tentative and partial answer: because there's so much sex in them. No erotic tinge present. Thinking today about the sex scenes in Spike Lee's films I'm struck by how sensually charged they are; compare the cold, borderline-porn sex scenes in something like Basic Instinct (which (in)famously opens with a blonde writhing on top of an (un)lucky guy about to get a pickaxe to the chest). I thought the sex scene in Matrix Reloaded was somewhat charged, but apparently everyone else disagrees, as it's routinely cited as one of the film's low points. And in any case that scene kept drawing attention to the machine attachments embedded in the characters' bodies, which added kink but not abandon. Whereas the sexuality in something like Monsoon Wedding is engrossing and...fluent, you know? Like the physical language of desire was central to the characters' daily lives. Desperado's stylized sex scene is a little silly but still hot, and it has nothing on the scene that immediately follows: Salma Hayek playing the guitar and singing in bed in a filmy housedress, while Antonio Banderas silently moves about the room preparing for their big gunfight/escape. Hayek is like some kind of physical embodiment of desire in that scene.

And then of course there's Y Tu Mamá También, which is from a different universe. The final scene is so hot you can't even believe it.

Or the sex in 2 Days in the Valley. Or the entire movie Secretary...

But these are exceptions or stuff from foreign directors. (We can practically consider Spike Lee a foreign filmmaker in most ways.)

I don't know, considering how obsessed Hollywood is with the subject of sex, and how free characters are these days with bawdy chatter and verbal expressions of mere sexuality, you'd think more people could shoot sex scenes that are actually charged with sexual energy rather than relying on the mere fact of staging sex for their charge. Watch something like It Happened One Night for a glimpse of effortless sexual interplay that's never coarse and never played just for shock value. But there's a coyness to depictions of American onscreen bodies that robs many sex scenes of their possible charge. (I seem to recall the sex in Angel Heart being great, but I saw that flick a long time ago.) I mean, look at 8 Mile: Eminem and Brittany Murphy bonking disconsolately/eagerly up against a piece of machinery in a single long continuous shot. This is the girl from Clueless, people! And the most syncopated white man in all Detroit! And yet it's dull and lifeless - it may as well have been Toby McGuire (in Cider House Rules for instance).

Hollywood, I beg of you: give us people enjoying sex, enjoying flirting as much for the feeling of the chase as for the desire to get bouncy! Show us sex not just as a function, not a plot element or abstract concern, but for what it is: bliss. YOu might say: it's not just a blissful physical sensation or set of sensations, but the very quality of bliss, release, communion themselves, an energy that can suffuse hours and days.

This is all quite poorly thought out and whatnot, sorry. It's been a couple days since I've written anything (blah) and I still don't remember how to stick words together. God willing it will all come back.

Brand new old axiom.

Given the choice between fucking someone you like to talk to, and talking to someone you like to fuck, always choose the former.

Unless you're really lucky, you're bound to get bored of the other thing soon enough.

The unpleasant semiotics of left-by-girlfriend dreams, part one million and four.

I woke up somewhere around 7am from a dream: I'd been reading email in an iTunes-like program, and had gotten a message from my girlfriend, announcing that she was leaving me. In the email she was happy to be moving on, and had indeed found someone else. The language was inspecific as to whom; there was an air of having the unpleasant truth rubbed in my face.

So: yes. Awoke. Mercifully!

Maybe I should've taken that opportunity to, um, go to the bathroom or something, because:

I fell asleep a few minutes later, and returned to the dream.

This part was staged in my parents' master bedroom from our house in Texas, and consisted of the inevitable confrontation about the email. You might think I'd delay such a conversation, owing to my infamously passive-aggressive style; not so. Like any 21st century idiot I respond well to wakeup calls, if only in the short term. (It's cyclical: you'll see why this matters at the end.)

I acquitted myself extremely poorly during this fight. She was gorgeous and in control, in an unfamiliar sweater, but she also didn't look exactly like herself - or rather, her appearance kept shifting, so that came to resemble, at parts of the dream, other women I've dated. Or actually: it wasn't an unfamiliar sweater. Just one belonging to a girl I'd dated a long, long time ago. It felt like I was being dumped by ten years' worth of girlfriends. But the character was still very much my girlfriend - having come to encompass aspects of others.

Here is what I did: jumped up and down stamping my feet in the manner of Rumpelstiltskin; pushed her onto the bed to sit when it looked like she was leaving; repeatedly punched the wall of the bedroom (in which, in the dream, I strongly felt trapped and ill at ease); was constantly hearing/reminded of the lyrics to Rufus Wainwright's 'Poses' (to which I'm listening now, as a purgative measure); realized who her new paramour was; accused her of just wanting sex with lots of people; promised to 'change'; complained that she embarrassed me repeatedly in front of our friends by undermining my 'authority' and making fun of me; listed a litany of wrongs I'd committed, starting with an inability to adhere to a fitness/health regime, possibly as a preemptive measure against her telling me that was the case.

In short, I was a synoptic edition of every bastard, pathetic or otherwise, I'd ever been in a relationship, with an added dose of Generic Angry Husband for good measure.

The riveting part of the dream (other than the Rumpelstiltskin part) was that she responded, in the calmest possible manner, by asking: 'Do you remember the week when you decided to be nice to me?' And went on to describe a period - which actually happened, mind - when events provoked us to a certain effort at rejuvenation and renewal, at something approximating 'wooing' which was long overdue. She even proposed a methodology. I was, howyousay, a better boyfriend in the classical sense at that point. More a suitor than a live-in companion. And it was a goddamned good time, though difficult. (Absence, fonder, etc.) My unconscious self was busy giving my waking self a bit of good advice, and for a change, the message passed ungarbled from one realm to the other. I go to work today from 8:30-2:30 (overtime!), and do so with a mild spring in my step; it's not often that nightmares (for this unquestionably was one) can grant a sense of hope amid the fear and loss, and when you're working on a Saturday morning, you take what grace you can get.

I did go from wanting to be someone
Now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue

(I brought a single tear back with me from dreaming. As a reminder, I should think.)

Joss and Warren Ellis, re: midget pimps.

U.
N.
F.
UCK.
IN.
G.
BEL.
I.
E.
V.
AB.
L.
E!!!!!

Trying to cope with Antony and the Johnsons.

[N.B. I'm not sure I stand 100% behind this post. But by its end it's gotten into territory that's important to me. So there.]

OK, so maybe there's a general post-Stonewall sanitized-Weimar-depravity expectation associated with some kind of NYC cabaret scene that I'm not really privy to - I accept that. And maybe I'm missing the calculatedness of Antony's peculiar gender-outlook; for all I know he might be the shrewdest manipulator this side of Hedwig Schmidt. And atop it all, I recognize I'm not the target audience for this music exactly. But here's what I get from listening to A&theJ's first two albums:

1) Antony's lyrics, which all the hipsters find so 'uplifting,' are uplifting because they're featherweight, platitudinous, and childlike bordering on childish.

2) The music, which has what the Pitchfork (*gag* *choke* ha) reviewer referred to as 'purity' in abundance, would excite no one behind a less singular vocalist. Boy George's affecting turn on 'You Are My Sister' points that up: if you picture the songs coming from a radio rather than a retro cabaret stage, they sound a little ridiculous and clichéd. Their appeal seems heavily biographical - which OK see below.

3) Antony's fluid gender deconstruction etc. etc. etc. generally sounds naïve rather than clever (which might be a pose but might not), and coupled with the insistent, thudding simplicity of his lyrics ('One day I'll grow up / and be a beautiful woman / One day I'll grow up / and be a beautiful girl / For today I am a child / For today I am a boy / etc. etc. etc.'), I think part of the reason people are so moved by his music is that he sounds like a goddamn defenseless confused child ('this slip of a girly-boy from Communist East Berlin' and so forth, thanks Hedwig!). 'For Today I Am a Boy' is supposed to be a heart-rending affirmation of something or other - freedom and love for all the sexual progressive/transgressives? - but, well, no. It isn't a professional songwriter's creation, it's a 13-year-old's diary entry. Cf. also 'Cripple and the Starfish'. Cf. also 'Forgive me / let live me / set my spirit free', Jesus Christ almighty.

4) That voice, that voice! I still can't decide whether I like it. But he can sing, and he's got guts. Hell, I kind of like the second album, as background music if nothing else.

The third thing is the one I wanted to think about at greater length. And I'm gonna need Hedwig and the Angry Inch to do so.

Hedwig is at times a really disturbing story. The film (I've not seen the play, unfortunately) trades on a lot of Rocky Horror's schock-shlock aesthetic for laughs, as with the confused look on Hedwig's face during the 'Angry Inch' coupled with the creepy doctors and swinging lights at the top of that song. But it also packs an emotional wallop - the 'Love the front of me, honey' scene being the plain-old-painful low point before the cathartic-painful intensity of Tommy's 'Wicked Little Town' reprise. The final shot of that film stages about as bizarre a tableau as you could hope for: a naked man/woman with a 'Barbie doll crotch' stumbling into traffic. But it's a scene that's considered in every way, that's meant to resonate in a slew of ways with the rest of the film. The gender-sense of that film is all over the place, but in a decidedly grownup way.

Why bring it up? Because Hedwig is all-over SEX. 'I did odd jobs, mainly the jobs we call blow.' The bathtub handjob. 'Of course when you talk about big openings a lot of people think of me.' The naked G.I. wearing only a pile of American candy. The prominently placed enormous tub of Vaseline among the family mementos during 'Wig in a Box'. (Indeed John Cameron Mitchell's current project is a hardcore sex comedy, I believe.)

Antony and the Johnsons exude exactly zero sexual energy. Antony's got an extraordinary voice, a blues voice, with or without that astounding vibrato. And I think he could do justice to sexy material - I'm just not seeing (hearing) any sign that he could write it. And maybe it's my pessimism, but I think that's part of what some people like about his music. Anyone outside of his Factory-inspired milieu gets to dip a toe into that world free of charge (monetary or sexual), and gets a chance to laud his 'bold crossing of gender boundaries' without actually considering that manga-heroine identity in the context of the very complicated, very messy, very damaging relationships that are the stuff of, y'know, the other art we really like.

The reactions to Antony's music that I've read online have been very personal; I'm in no position to chastise people for a personal or biographical interest in art, but as with Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia, I wouldn't be surprised if a note of pity didn't inflect these critical plaudits. (Of course, if Dylan could sing and really rock the guitar he'd be the greatest rocker in the history of the universe, so from a non-head-exploding standpoint maybe it's OK that he's got his limitations.) When Jerry sings 'Stella Blue' I want to care for him; I also want to call up my dead grandfathers and find out how they're doing. Dylan's a lot more sly, more knowing (of course), but I think people cling to him in part because they're drawn to the struggle of a performer trying to work around an 'imperfect' voice. (An ex-girlfriend used to refer to a chickenpox scar of mine, between my eyebrows, as a 'perfect flaw' - it sits there invisible until you notice it, and then it's almost kind of cute, even though it's a friggin' chickenpox scar. Or so I'm told. OF COURSE NOW YOU'LL ALL BE LOOKING FOR IT.) They trigger responses in us that aren't about their music at all.

(How could it be all about the music, after all? I don't know if it was the drugs or what, but Garcia could hardly hold a note. Call it 'personality' if you want, but don't pretend it's not an aspect of his professional musicianship that he simply didn't work on, because rock'n'roll means never having to admit you didn't practice. [Insert note about the Ramones et al.])

These personal reactions to Antony often mention how affecting his voice is. OK so I'll say it: get past how cool his God-given talent is, get past his lunatic vibrato and your own tourist interest in sexual transgression, and ask whether the songs actually have anything to say other than 'I think I might at some level also be a girl.' Either in the lyrics or the music! (Another thing I can't pretend is that I'm a close lyrics-listener most of the time.) What level? Why?

Bite-sized transgression and oddity, like a clothing shop named 'Proletariat'. (We've got one in Harvard Square.)

Somewhere in here it's necessary to mention Ender's Game: of all the books I've loved as an adult the most egregiously sympathy-seeking, a book that's nominally about little children but is written as if every voice belonged to a sharp adult, a book that's far better in the mind than on the page. The moral message of the book is a relatively complex and compelling one, but what bakes my cheese is that the mechanism by which the book builds sympathy for the at times flat-out insufferable asshole main character is pretty transparent. I've surely bitched about Orson Scott Card's first novel before so there's no point rehearsing those complaints here.

BUT BUT BUT also yes: it's his second album. Antony's I mean. Given the usual lifespan of NYC hipster-darling bands I've no idea whether Antony will be around five years from now. And maybe he's got another astonishing talent, for writing, which isn't really on display in his first two albums. I mean, the second one's stronger and clearer and more emotionally involving than the first, no question. And when the next album comes around I'll give it a listen, because I'm curious about the guy, and I wanna know whether that voice can be put to a new use. I'm more curious about why people love the things they love, what the mechanism is, and what trigger is squeezes by this voice or that riff. What the wiring is. Let us now praise great works of craft wedded to great inspiration and the fearless pursuit of a personal vision. And if we're not allowed to say 'for the right reasons' (nor should we be, I guess), let's say: Love is only deepened by understanding, by interrogation - it's never cheapened or unmade, so long as it's really love.

Ten years in love.

[The following (below the fold) is a longish thing I wrote a couple of weeks ago - the 11th of December, to be precise. It's nominally about my love affair with a band; at least, that was the germ of an idea that prompted the writing. I hadn't intended it for this blog, for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that it's quite personal, and talks about friends and lovers by (thinly veiled) name. If you know me you'll know these people; I guess that's the cost of taking up writing as a hobby. Not everyone is in here. I know that a few people mentioned in this piece are readers of this blog, and to them I say: I apologise if the following does you injustice. I tried and try and will try. Caveat very very much lector and I hope this is good and true.]

This weekend in sexual/romantic/academic-labour history: late December 2003.

On NYE 2003 I was busy grading tests and papers all day (starting c.5am!) trying to make a deadline for the Tufts class I was TAing. Nonetheless, on that day I found time to email not one, not two or even three, but four past, present, and future sexual partners. Three of them I emailed in the span of less than eight minutes; I saved the fourth email for later in the morning after I'd gotten through the tests and was moving on to the papers. I also got pleasantly intoxicated when one of my correspondents stopped by for a little while, did not drink, and then pissed off to Somerville or something to have obviously less fun with her friends than she would have had with me and mine. Ha! Sucka!!

I didn't get a New Year's kiss that year but - brief aside - that's only happened to me once. Ever. And in circumstances only slightly more romantic than a prolonged medical examination.

(This whole blog is just an aside anyhow.)

This year's celebration should be a bit more vivacious. Ironically enough the co-smoocher from NYE 2002 will be present. She and I don't smooch these days so much. Nor talk, actually. Nor really acknowledge one another in any way. At some point I went from Really Nice Guy to something else; I'm annoyed by the possibility that I'm a typical guy and nothing more. Would like to think not. And she? She went away and changed a bit, and I want to say something bitchy like 'not as much as she thinks she did' but how would I know?

It's better without her in so many ways but that's not to say better because without her - just better, and she's gone, and that's life.

[Listening to a banjo/bass/acoustic guitar cover of 'Sweet Emotion' right now and I might throw my head back laughing and just die.]

[Ha ha I read that 'nor really acknowledge one another' passage again and for a moment couldn't figure out which former correspondent I was talking about ha ha isn't that a nice thing you ass.]

On this day in 2003 - the 29th of December - in the span of seven minutes I emailed two of the most attractive women I knew at school in reference to their plans for New Year's Eve. (I'm talking combination-cute-and-hot here. Not to mention like freaky smart, both talented beyond their school stuff...Jesus fuck I know the most amazing women.) A pleasant coincidence, nothing more, and innocent! Well, as innocent as these things can be I promise. One of them - the one with the lighter hair - responded with the quickness, and a semilively exchange on the subjects of life goals, Artmaking, and Jonathan Safran Foer ensued. (She dissed my boy Eggers and I found myself liking it.) The brunette got back to me days later, idly.

She's an intermittent redhead these days, by the way - the anti-Eggers partisan. I think she might have gotten a haircut this week, which may make spotting her at the airport tomorrow a little complicated.

That reminds me: I gotta pick up a pack of gum tomorrow at the store.

My first college XGF (she was just a GF at the time - my mates and I referred to her as 'Gee-prime' after some line from our Discrete Math class - but 'XGF' seems extra-appropriate) once asked me if her sexual history made me jealous. It did, of course. I was all philosophical-like and said no, and went on to explain: you're the sum of what you've done and been through blah blah blah, you're a whole and good person and I love you blah blah blah, so if I love you I should learn to love what and whom you've been. And a blah and a blah blah. I wasn't lying so much as thinking wishfully. More of a talent back then for giving myself over to hope. Call it naïvete, which it was. No point implicitly discrediting today's self on the subject of hope, which I find returning to me at odd times (in odd times yes), imbuing me lately with something not unlike contentment. I've got my addiction to melancholia under control baby.

No point wondering what I should have said to Gee-prime (think of it: G' - it's a symbol for something. Probability? Shit, I got a C in that class) but I can imagine what I'd say now. I seem to recall having a similar conversation lately with someone else entirely - the sometime-redhead actually - or maybe I didn't have it and wish I had. The extent of my personal/sexual progressivism: it's none of my business baby, and my pettiness isn't your problem baby, and I shouldn't be afraid of understand nor immersion baby, so baby yes it bothers me but yes baby I want to be stronger than I've ever been, fuckingfinallyforfuck'ssake - no joking that's the sort of thing I say when I get all tense, probably even Oscar Wilde went 'duh' once in a while or so I hope - and the more I learn to say yes yes yes to you the more I grow to bursting, and the past is past. I mean duh. If you can learn to live with mine I can learn to live with yours but let's give that a go. More than just 'can' is 'will'.

Plus as Jack Burton always says: 'What the hell.'

('Who?' 'Jack Burton. Me.')

(I mean it's a frickin' classic movie, people.)

Erotica; pornography; writing. (Quick note.)

Pornographic images foreclose on imaginative exploration outside of their realm; i.e. you can watch porn with someone and want to act it out, but it's unlikely to give you the ability to form new ideas, only fill you up with its own. And really getting into pornographic entertainments, from Die Hard With a Vengeance to Afterschool Anal 6: Butt I'm a Cheerleader! (a made-up title, but consider the possibilities!), makes it impossible to come back to creative work right away. You have to clear your head. It's like with anything else, I guess, only there's a singlemindedness to porn of every kind. It aims to satisfy, to fill up the pleasure-receptors without expanding and deepening your capacity for pleasure - which is what erotica aims to do, erotic art.

I leave this here as a piece of advice to myself, purely hypothetical advice let me add, for this November project. (Which by the way stands at a healthy 5,687 words, almost 300 of which are good!)

Ween.

Like Christmas and to a lesser extent Thanksgiving, Halloween has come uncoupled from its roots. There's probably something liberating about the experience for somebody, but I don't get much out of it. I won't pretend this is due to the outright influence of harvest festivals and paganism or whatever. I just don't get much reward from doing up a costume. Or let me put it this way: it's hard for me to distinguish the good feelings I get in costume from the good feelings I get just schlepping to a friend's party at all. Unless it's a big group activity it doesn't seem worthwhile, and my friends by and large aren't the types to go for it. And I by and large am not that type either.

Here's the thing for me: you know what a 'wassail' is? If I remember correctly from some reading I did a few months ago (thank you Commonwealth Books!), a 'wild wassail' is what happens when a mob of servants go from rich house to rich house singing threatening songs demanding gifts, raises in pay, fair treatment, &c. (which the masters would sometimes ignore but sometimes not, shockingly enough). It's a meaningful Christmas tradition by which 19th century servants would be allowed to run freaky and free. Picture the best and most sinister Halloween revels you can imagine, slipping from door to door in terrifying masks, knife-edged songs in the air. Fill the glass or the door comes down and worse, lord.

The word itself refers to a spicy drink, according to Wikipedia. Which as far as I'm concerned only adds to the creepiness of the image, not detracts. A class-conscious Carnival evincing the most jovial, the most sincere, the friendliest murderous intent you could possibly imagine, and a happy Christmas to you sir and you, and would you care for a drink? It's Christmas after all.

I bring up the wild wassail to make a point about Halloween, which is this: it's a pretty toothless holiday. People get a one-day frisson from dressing up as harlots or vampires or Joan of Arc (who had a personal relationship with God), but that's about the extent of it. The sexual perversity of it is downplayed in popular representations, the seasonal importance is gone, the unwillingness to recognize the personal presence of the dead - by which I mean the weird way of the deaths of real people at arm's length by playing out silly abstract comedies of the undead, mere urban legends. Americans seem to have a strained relationship with the past, and some amount of guilt or displacement undercuts a fuller understanding of what we have been and done, as individuals and as a nation. So on Christmas we pretend to remember our religious roots, but are encouraged not to think too hard about them; on Thanksgiving we might mention but don't consider exploration, religious persecution, the complex entanglements of two cultures (and in the blind spot, a wee bit of genocide); every Halloween we drag the dead from their coffins and claim not to know them; and on Easter we definitely don't talk about a cornerstone western myth involving a man dying for his community and rising from the dead a few days later, even as it forms the center of the liturgical calendar. Easter is hard to sell, and to market Thanksgiving we've turned it into 'go home and have a big turkey' day.

And maybe all of this is actually fairly simple: there's money to be made, and people will always be up for making and spending money. Imagine, though, children making their own Halloween costumes, or Christmas without the expectations of a lamentable 'Christmas shopping season' (which begins tomorrow I believe)! It's just hard to shake the feeling that we do our holidays wrong in this country. In each family the holiday takes a personal form and that's good, but the net effect is at an absolute limit of sheer tackiness, edgelessness. There is no threat in Halloween, no recognition of those veins of perversity and monstrosity that run in and between each of us. Children can imagine their way out of it, but that's what it is to be a kid, I guess.

[All of which is obviously just an explanation of why I missed all the Halloween parties this weekend, and I'm sorry. I did have a nice weekend at Chez Justice, thanks, which included the mysterious appearance of a bottle of bourbon in our kitchen (go Ray!) and our Internet connection dying an awful death (go Comcast! or Saurabh's computer!), and some extraordinary writing by Joan Didion who might be my new favourite more or less everything (go Joan!). Her essay 'The White Album' is perfect. Plus I got no small amount of writing done, and tomorrow I can look forward to NaNoWriMo knowing, if not what I'm going to write or about what or how or in fact why, then that I will sit down and write with a number in mind and a mood, and no matter the outcome on December 1st I'll be able to say I spent some time doing something I'd been meaning to do for a long time, and that's OK, thanks.]

Digital media: a proposal.

[Thoughts prompted by a (heated, personal) conversation among a subset of the housemates at Chez Justice about the benefits/pitfalls of CMC (computer-mediated communication) and walking around with headphones on.]

Online dating doesn't serve primarily to fill a need that's always existed; rather, its main function is to deal with limitations of our time, stemming from recent technological shifts. Online dating, in other words, wants primarily to be an antidote to the following scourges:

• cell phones
• portable music players
• email
• PDA's

Attention-deficit technology: it fills a self-created niche. What do the above-listed technologies do? They destroy the productive presence of chance in our social lives. For the individual, they enrich the environment, but for the community, they act as barriers.

A person walking down the street talking on a cell phone is 'socializing' but isn't really being social. Yet look at kids: they do all these things at once, no? iPod in one ear, phone in the other, conversation happening too. Of course it's culturally conditioned (i.e. suburban WASPs probably have a different cell phone experience than urban blacks, in part because of the other social outlets they do/don't have, but that's changing and probably converging). This isn't just to say kids've mastered a kind of social interaction, though that's true: it's to say that they have countless tools for overcoming a lack they don't even realize they experience. (And wow that's a lot of italicized text up there.)

If someone learns to survive under shitty circumstances, to scrape by, we don't commend that person's lifestyle as a healthy and desirable one; when we valorize people remixing shitty corporate content into amusing paratexts we make precisely that mistake. Being in therapy isn't the same as 'being cured'. Do you see where I'm going here? Technologies of pleasure are too often also technologies of escape, and ours is a culture with a non-ideal relationship to social tech: so often we don't know how to differentiate between symptoms and diseases.

Sometimes you can't tell that you're scraping by.

So online dating for instance. A tool nominally bringing people together from afar, yet its adoption pushes people away from situations in which chance and social effort (risk-taking) might pay dividends. And so people learn less about working those situations, &c. And though we pretend in movies and TV shows that online dating poses a risk - of embarrassment, of bad blind date situations - really the point is to eliminate risk from dating. It flattens things out, risk and reward alike. (And I say this knowing that several of my friends are quite happy dating people they met online. I'm happy for them. I do not mean to imply that these people are 'scraping by' in their choice of a mate. But as far as methods for meeting people goes, it's one less-than-perfect choice or another, and it seems the least organic way of going about the business of mate-finding. Then again, one's 'mate' doesn't mean what it used to either - and maybe it's all of a piece, eh? On which more another time.)

Batting 1.000!!

From our boy Stephen Colbert, the new word for the year...

Cockthusiast.

The Colbert Report got off to a good start. BY GUM LET'S KEEP IT UP YO.

Porn and erotica, and their importance.

Erotica shows what is possible.

Pornography can do this to a limited degree, at first. Hence the excitement teenage boys feel when they discover porn for the first time: before it can foreclose on erotic possibilities, porn enables them.

But pornographic culture - and I mean that phrase in a number of ways all at once - can only show us what is expected. It kills mystery. It raises expectations without communicating demands. The presumptive viewing subject of a porn film is not a lover and is not expected to be, but free reign is given to his expectations. Imagination plays no part.

A pornographic culture is one with a diminished appreciation for the erotic, which is to say the generative. It is a society in which lovers are all too rare. (Do I need to make the obvious joke? They are replaced by fuckers.)

Americans too often develop a sexual vocabulary without also developing an erotic or sensual one.

Love, to be love (as we know it), must remain a mystery. Lovers must embrace that mystery and serve it. Love is created and maintained.

Pornography is about satisfaction, which is to say, completion. Porn is ending. Love is dwelling.

(Hence the lover's perverse love of heartache, the ultimate dwelling place because denial of returned-love feeds and nurtures itself.)

(Hence also the brutality and boredom of lengthy pornographic entertainments, from Debbie Does Dallas to Titus Andronicus and back.)

Entertainment of all kinds can of course be pornographic.

Erotica can both provoke and evoke. Porn - whether peddling flesh in a peep show, flogging hurricane deaths on the Weather Channel, or offering the visceral thrill of Grand Theft Auto - forecloses on the erotic possibilities of past and future.

Ours is, in general, a pornographic culture.

The erotic or lover's discourse is, for whatever reason, a hard sell (though a useful tool for selling).

It hasn't always been so, and needn't always be.

Stuff!

This is inspiring, this is depressing, this is inspiring, this is depressing, and this is Camille Paglia in all her terrible glory.

Excelsior!

Sex? In media? No way!

The ESRB - dimwitted video game equivalent of Jack Valenti's dimwitted, depraved MPAA - has changed the rating of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to 'AO', the game equivalent of 'NC-17', months after the game's release. Why? A hidden code in the game unlocks a softcore sex scene not accessible without that code.

(And let's mention what hasn't been mentioned in any of the very little press I've read: it's an interracial sex scene to boot.)

Personally I don't really care what this does for Rockstar's bottom line; I doubt it will make any difference for them, balancing the loss of Wal-Mart sales with a huge bump in publicity (then again, everyone who would've bought this game presumably already has it, right?). More important to me is the by-now-played-out cultural 'furor' around sex in media.

This has already been roundly discussed, but it bears repeating: Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman (two 'moderate Democrats', pro-war and pro-'family values') are calling for federal investigations into the game industry yet again. Their interest in the matter is 100% cynical politicking; their knowledge of games amounts to roughly nothing, and their sense of contemporary children's media experiences is (improbably!) even less. The ESRB has already demonstrated its hypocrisy with its grossly pandering overreaction (because for Christ's sake it's a Grand Theft Auto game, if the nihilist violence of that series doesn't mark it as 'adults only' we definitely don't have the right to get up in arms about a little bit of consensual sex between digital adults), but the esteemed Senators stand to make matters worse by mobilizing a small but fanatical army of ignorant overprotective parents who want to censor or destroy one of the most creative sectors of the media industry (such as 'it' is).

I don't care for the GTA series, but they contain nothing more grotesque or 'morally shocking' than the Iliad - and provide kids, through extra-game discussion, with a shared social space that the Iliad no longer can. Many parents instinctively defend old texts on the grounds that they're...well, old; additionally there's the usual noise about how reading engages the imagination in ways that 'looking at a screen' just can't (try and ignore the ignorance and condescension implied by that description of gameplay). Consider only that, to continue with that bizarre piece of terminology, the '18th Century imagination' doesn't appear to have been richer or more expansive than that of today's kids. Nor did the 19th's. Nor - let's be frank here - the 20th's. Clinton et al. don't want rich childhood imaginations - they want for their children, by and large, the same repression and moralism they experienced as kids, because it's what they know, and more importantly it's what they can control. Fine, fine, 'parental prerogative' and all that. But this is the wrong place to exercise such power. GTA3 and its ilk are straw men. This isn't a battle worth fighting - because in any case who's the enemy?

Game makers, for better or worse, are artists. Recast this silly debate in terms of 'attack on the creative freedom of the artist' and you have rather a different political situation - or you would, if the American public (you might say 'people in general' I suppose) wasn't so happy to be sheep-herded along whenever someone presses the blinking red 'morality' button. Put it flatly: Hillary Clinton doesn't want to 'protect' anyone (nor does Brownback, nor Santorum, nor the loathsome Tom DeLay): she wants to shore up support. She doesn't understand games, she doesn't know how to approach them as art or as commerce or as social fixture, so she feels the need to lash out. These clowns are mothers and fathers, but distinctly not the type of parents who've ever spent much time in the home. As usual, in the rush to censure (and presumably move on?) we see played out the same old generational drama, this time with career-oriented boomers trying long after the fact to reach out to their children-by-proxy under the cover of 'the urge to protect' - which is to say, the urge to control, but that particular love shouldn't speak its name.

Parenting has to be a display of power - I accept that and embrace it ('permissive parenting' is a display of power as well - but trying to be your children's 'friend' seems to me like an abdication of authority). But the hypocritical moralizing that goes on around representations of sex (the violence-in-media trope doesn't play as well anymore because by now everyone's used to seeing this violence everywhere: go from Channel 13 News to The Passion of the Christ and you're guaranteed the limits of depravity, even if the villains are exclusively black, Jewish, left-wing, etc.) might find its origin in a parental impulse, but really it's more cultural wagon-circling. The older you get, the less likely you are to understand anything at all about how children learn, read, watch, play, imagine - because the less likely you are to remember, and to have seen firsthand the new form(s) of children's culture. Lawmakers in this country are prey to a potent mix: the myth of the innocent child, the need to appease moralizing fringe elements (such as the tiny number of Evangelicals in this country), and a shocking ignorance of the rich galaxy children's media forms.

All of which takes us back to GTA:SA - it's a sex scene. You control the character - I'll say it again to underscore a sublimated concern here - a black gangbanger fucking a white girl in a series of positions and with a level of nudity no different from what's on HBO (e.g. no genitals are visible in the scene, and the player character doesn't even undress - further evidence of how primitive this technology is, at heart). The sex is consensual and apparently pleasurable for both characters, and even if the dialogue is inane porn-posturing, that's OK - or if you like, no less OK than everything else on TV, in the movies...

People fuck! And they dig it! I don't know why we lead children to believe that that's not true, but it is, and we do (or we're supposed to). The ESRB seems to think this deception should continue - that parents can't be counted on to actually raise their kids, so the ratings board should do it for them by 'prohibiting' the sale of the game to minors (yeah and I've got a bridge I want to sell you). Porn is another thing, but if the violence in GTA isn't pornographic, then there's no way the sex is. (I would claim that for most players the brutality and murder is pornographic - but that marks me as a moralist, oddly enough, and in any case I play the game and to a limited degree enjoy it, so does that make me, um, relaxed?)

Funny thing: I think I've put as much thought into this blog post as Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and their Puritanical colleagues across the aisle have put into knowing what video gaming is really like for kids. By all means let us shield our children from harm, but let's not make that an excuse for reflexively hiding them from what we don't understand and can't be bothered to learn about.

[Quick note: there's a separate concern here, namely the massive sexism, homophobia, and provincial stereotyping that are Rockstar Games's stock-in-trade. The sex scene (video here) is tacky and lame, yet another version of the adolescent male fantasy that "all a girl needs is some deep dickin', and I'm just the stud to give it to her." We should be more concerned about the content of children's sexual education than its mere fact - but that's not the kind of inquiry Congressional subcommittees are able to make without embarrassing themselves.]

What do you call your act?

Last night I saw a free preview of The Aristocrats, a new film from Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza. It consists of interviews with dozens and dozens of comics, on the subject of a particularly dirty shaggy dog joke called, you guessed it, 'The Aristocrats'. Knowing the structure of the joke won't spoil the film at all: guy walks into a talent agent's office, says he's got a great act he'd like to show to the agent. Agent says, 'OK shoot.' Guy then describes the most absolutely disgusting acts of depravity involving family, pets, bodily fluids, violence, all manner of grotesquerie. The agent, mouth open in disbelief, says, 'And what do you call such an act as this?' And the guy says, 'The Aristocrats!' Ta-da!

The thrill of a shaggy dog joke is in the telling, by definition, because the punchline isn't really a punchline at all. (If you've heard the clown joke - about the clown humiliating the kid, and the kid growing up to seek revenge with the Greatest Comeback of All Time - you know one of the monsters of the form, with one of the richer punchlines.) The purpose of such a joke is to showcase improvisation by the jokester - indeed, it isn't really a joke so much as a platform for extended, digressive storytelling. In the case of 'The Aristocrats', the joke is an excuse to spin off a litany of depravity and unspeakable offense (most common themes in the many, many versions in the film: incest, bestiality, coprophilia, forced sodomy, &c.). Great lines deliver themselves (witness The Importance of Being Earnest), but 'Aristocrats' is a showcase for one's verbal dexterity, imagination, and subtle delivery. Let's face it: it's not necessarily funny to utter the sentence 'So the guy's buggering his dog Fluffy while his wife grabs the lawn ornament and...'

You can imagine a film like this getting really old. It is, after all, only a single, horrible 'joke'. But the cast is astonishing (Penn Jillette must know everyone by now), and I'm happy to report that The Aristocrats is hilarious - never moreso than at the final credits, with a special guest appearance by a master. These people are for the most part unbelievably funny when just shooting the shit on camera among friends. Since 'Aristocrats' serves as a kind of secret handshake for comedians (beautifully illustrated by Gilbert Gottfried's triumphant telling of the joke at the Friar's Club in late September 2001, captured in the film as its emotional climax), it's a professional litmus test as well - can you top this? Can you take these other professionals by surprise and shock them? And since the joke is such a bizarre piece of comedy-business folklore, the comedians featured in the film get to revel in both the history of their craft and the proud tradition of enjoying one another's cocksmanship. (The ideal companion piece to this film would be the Seinfeld documentary, Comedian, which is for the most part resolutely unfunny, but also lovingly chronicles the Doing of Comedy.)

Stand-up comedy is a highly structured performance form, not simply a matter of 'being funny' but of doing a certain kind of story-inversion and -augmentation. That performative logic goes out the window with a shaggy dog joke, replaced by a newly generative logic of one-upmanship and pleasurable collective exorcism (when you can laugh at something demonic, your own demons are set free). The perverse pleasure of 'The Aristocrats' is that it doesn't sting with the usual post-climax laugh of a typical joke (though some clever non-standard variants on the thing appear in the film, especially a delicious showbusiness-sexism riff from Sarah Silverman that ends with a totally un-funny line that nonetheless destroyed the crowd with which I saw the movie). The laughter it provokes is at first anticipatory: oh this'll be good. Then troubled: what can this possibly be building up to? Then, generally, disgusted/excited: he just smeared what all over his toddler? When the joke builds up enough, it's moving under its own power, and the audience's laughter is transformed from the acute laughter of joke-recognition (Oh I have noticed that about Puerto Ricans, how true!) to a sustained or chronic laughter that begets itself.

Among other things this is the basic visceral-thrill mode of a Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showing.

Like all easy, foul jokes, 'The Aristocrats' reveals a lot about the teller. The women in the film acquit themselves well - even, or maybe especially, crazy old Phyllis Diller - in part because their versions of the joke tend to hinge on subtle inversions of the thing. One group of female comics discusses it in a raunchy poolside sewing circle; another turns it into a therapist's confessional encounter; another feigns surprise at the unladylike nature of the discussion; another plays her pregnancy into the matter, in a locker room moment par excellence. There is a grotesque humiliation to the joke, and the 'acceptable boundaries of taste' of course reflect something of the nature of the profession and its makeup - witness what the worst swear words around are understood to be. This isn't a focus of the film, but the women in our group picked up strongly on it. As one friend put it: the 'commentary' versions of the joke are some of the funniest, not merely because they're actually classically-structure bang-at-the-end jokes, but because of the sharp relief into which they throw the rest of the schoolyard-style proceedings.

And for me, a most bracing moment: Chris Rock, the picture of seriousness and thoughtfulness (Rock is, for the irritation I feel at some of his style, a pretty remarkable guy), points out that the vaudeville roots of the joke were contemporary with the chitlin circuit of black venues and and performers. Black comedians, unlike their white 'family-oriented'(!) counterparts on vaudeville, were expected to be foul-mouthed; the 'Aristocrats' joke, whose basic aesthetic move is just offending sensibilities, is a reaction to a buttoned-up set of performance constraints. When played against Whoopi Goldberg's comments - that her audiences are disappointed if she doesn't swear a blue streak, so she would rather deliver the joke daintily for its own brand of shock value - Rock's observation adds a dark grace note to the proceedings. Rock doesn't tell the joke on camera. He chooses, rather, to be a witness to the writing of this shared history. It makes a dark kind of sense.

The Aristocrats is in the end a celebration of the craft of comic storytelling; though this foul joke is repeated many, many times throughout the course of the movie, the joke itself is really only a symbol for a kind of interaction and trust (between comics, and between them and their audiences). The joy of the film is a combination of pleasures: we're entertained by comics (and by the way, prepare to like Paul Reiser again - and by the way, if all you know of Bob Saget is his Full House persona, prepare to implode sometime around the sentence 'But this guy sees it as an opportunity'), but more lastingly, we're brought into a shared folklore, the internal language of performance artists happy to share their collective professional heritage. From Eric Idle to Jon Stewart, Don Rickles to Billy Connolly, Carrot Top to a cheerfully demented mime - and one unexpected sleight-of-hand man with a deck of naughty cards - what's really depicted in the film is the lineage of a piece of shorthand. Submit The Aristocrats to a cultural studies conference and it's a piece of deconstructive discourse analysis with a performance studies bent; for the comics involved, it's a family album (this would make Saget the parolee uncle, I imagine).

I laughed my ass off watching this film, and you might do so as well. But - and this might be irredeemably hoary phrasing, I admit - though it's an uproarious film, it's not really a joking matter.

New word.

Fellatriarchy: when the people in charge suck.

Or something to that effect.