[ week 21 | 36 ]
Chunky soles.
Saturday, 23.46
First: thanks to the Weblog Review (and to kika thereof) for taking a walk round the premises hereabouts and posting a review. Gawrsh. —But (ungrateful bastard that I am) I want to kick around the very first thing out of kika’s mouth: “‘...inexplicably fancy trash’ makes me wish I had a better sex life so I could completely relate to the discourse on this site, which revolves around sex, sexuality, and erotica.” Leave off for a moment the fact that I don’t know much about kika beyond what can be picked up from a quick read of her blog, and thus can say nothing at all as to the quality of her particular sex life—if what she says is true to any degree whatsoever, then I’ve pretty much failed in whatever it is I’m trying to do around here. (That the fact it pretty much isn’t true—proved rather handily by her own commentary; she certainly seems to relate to it well enough, protestations aside—does nothing to prove I haven’t failed is, well, cruel and unfair, but there you are.)
I used to work for a small start-up arts magazine. (It’s dead now.) Being small, and a start-up, we looked for ways to call attention to ourselves; being artsy and cheeky, we gravitated towards the sort of content that tends to make people excitable. PVC and piercings and transvestite fashion shows and fetish photography and we were maybe I think the first publication in town to say anything substantive at all about Jacob Pander’s “The Operation” (which is really keen, if you haven’t seen it; now, of course, I’m curious about this one); that sort of thing. What proved terribly amusing, though, is we started to get this rep: we were the tattooed, pierced, dyed-hair fetish enthusiasts, the “chunky-soled shoe set,” to quote one write-up. Dog collars and clove cigarettes; sneers and black leather on sultry First Thursday gallery walks; slam poetry erotica readings and dancing to porn movie soundtracks on those 6-inch chunky-soled shoes.
Which, if you’d seen us schlumping around our $250-a-month office in blue jeans and tennies, arguing about exactly how the shadow should break from the logo on the front cover and whose turn it was to go for Pizzicato leftovers and Arizona teas—well, it would have made you laugh as hard as it made us. We were, in a word, geeks. (Still are, really.) We wrote about comics and television and urban planning and vintage shops and how to work estate sales and local history and pirate radio and chapbooks of poetry and Ursula LeGuin and comics and movies, too. More often, even. But still: chunky-soled shoes.
It’s not that appearances are deceiving, or that you should be careful about that; that’s not the moral to draw here. When it comes to sex and sexuality, we all too often want to be deceived by appearances; makes it all the more fun, really. But it’s also all too easy to imagine that someone who you know only through a sexualized context must necessarily be steeped in that context—in sex. That, say, someone who blogs about sex, and writing about sex, and the stupid things people do because they’re scared of sex, is someone whose sex life is different, unthinkable, other, tottering about in a rubber harness on chunky-soled shoes. (I’m married. Happily monogamous. We have cats. I wear seersucker and tweed and look dreadful in rubber. Or PVC. I’m balding and have a beard [neatly trimmed] and if I’m not too happy about the twenty extra pounds I’m carrying around, I like sushi and pasta and cheese and dessert and whole milk and olive oil and sour cream too much to do anything about it yet, although yes, I will cop to the occasional clove cigarette; it’s a habit. —If I perhaps think more about sex than some people from time to time, it has little to nothing to do with my sex drive per se, and [almost] everything to do with my curiosity about people, and why they do what they do in certain circumstances, and the art they make about it. Or, granted, I make about it. But which also leads me to write about comics, say, or music, or television; even urban planning, which, honest, isn’t nearly so boring as you might be thinking it is.)
But maybe Heather already made this basic point better than I could, and anyway, it obscures the even more basic point: thanks, kika. Sorry to jump on a simple lede like that, and to have spun it off in directions you may never have meant.
The obverse: well, Momus makes that case better than perhaps I could, for all that maybe I’ve been steeping in it a bit much, lately. It’s a song called “The Animal That Desires.” Written for a musical by Georgina Starr called Tuberama, it goes a little something like this—Fan, if you’d be so kind as to warm up the Fairlight—
I am cursed with a strange delusion:
I imagine myself to be
The only creature in the world that desires
And reproduces sexually...
For I, uniquely, must carry the rose
I, uniquely, have a cock beneath my clothes
And dream uniquely lewd dreams in front of multiplex screens...
Anyway. For all that it perhaps makes little sense to you yet, many thanks to Lisala. Off and out I go, and more on which later, and et cetera.
