[ week 29 | 43 ]
True porn clerk stories.
Thursday, 23.01
So the Spouse and I used to live over in the Northwest section of town up past the Pearl, and one night we were walking—I guess, given what direction we were headed, we were walking from the apartment to the magazine offices. Anyway. The street a block off Burnside, the one that runs past the A.R.T., was quieter than Burnside, and at night you almost never saw someone walking down it unless there was a play up at the A.R.T., which there wasn’t, so we pretty much quickly noticed the guy walking down the street maybe a half block ahead of the guy in the slow motorized cart. What was odd, though, was the guy in the motorized cart was saying “Stop him. Stop him,” in this quiet croaky voice. And the only person he could have been talking to was the guy walking away half a block ahead of him, hands in his pockets, bag over his shoulder, la-de-dah. “Stop him,” croaked the old guy in the motorized cart. “Thief. Stop him.”
“Sir?” I said.
The guy walking half a block ahead of him with his hands in his pockets started running.
The Spouse yelled at me as I took off after him and he rounded the corner and when I came around the corner after him he was already halfway across Burnside, dodging traffic, Jesus, and though I was now a block or more behind the light changed in my favor so I pounded after him, but he was already ducking into the stairwell of an old apartment complex.
So I came running back and the guy in the cart had just turned the corner and the Spouse had some things to say about running after bagsnatchers in the dark, and the guy in the cart is still saying “Stop him” in this growlly gravelly voice, and we figure that maybe some cops should be called, and the only place open that’s likely to have a phone is the Fantasy Adult Video store we’re standing right in front of. So we shrug and the guy in the cart stays outside and we go in and the woman behind the counter under the giant Vivid Video poster of some naked pouting blonde or other says, “Oh, hi, Nicholas!”
—Because, you see, I’d used to supervise a market research phone shop and she’d been one of the crack callers only I’d quit to go work for an arts magazine and then apparently she’d quit and gone into porn clerking, and so we got caught up a bit as the guy in the motorized cart tried to make the 911 operator understand his growlly gravelly voice, and when the cop finally showed up I couldn’t remember what the bagsnatcher had looked like despite the fact that I had barrelled off after him but the Spouse could, sort of, and gave a description and her name and address in case they needed her as a witness only they never did, and that was that.
I think Ali Davis’s stories are much better than that one, though.
[ # ]
Some philological and, perhaps, epistemological questions raised by consideration of what some are saying may well be the Next Big Thing.
Wednesday, 23.58
Comfortable? Good. We’re going to pull out a slice of incipient pop culture and toy with it a bit, use it maybe as an anschauung, get a little perspective on what lies ahead, pop-culture–wise. We’ll maybe kick it around Socratic-style, though I’m not going to be so crass as to make up all your answers to steer the discourse in the direction I think it ought to go. React however you want. Keep in mind there’s nothing right or wrong here. And don’t look at your neighbor’s paper unless you want to. Ready?
Suppose I told you that a couple of teenaged Russian lesbians had sold a million copies of songs about forbidden love. Then suppose I told you they were revving up to storm America. Well?
What if I told you the whole thing was an act, a put-on, a con-job, a fake? That the two of them were picked out of a cattle-call audition, like O-Town and Eden’s Crush and ’N-Sync and Britney? That while the publicist likes to wink-wink nudge-nudge that Volkova Julia Olegovna and Katina Elena Sergeevna insist on a single room with one double bed when touring, the girls themselves insist they aren’t lesbians? That when the camera isn’t on them, they don’t kiss or hold hands or show any signs of undying love?
“Everybody thinks we are lesbians,” says Katina. “But we just love each other.” She also says, “Before, this kind of love was forbidden, but those people are just like us. Sometimes, I even think that with Yulia, I feel more than friendship.” Don’t read too much into all that. Keep in mind they barely speak English. Everything’s filtered through a translator. And anyway, the whole project’s masterminded by a Colonel Tom: Ivan Shapovalov, a former psychiatrist and advertising executive turned Lou Pearlman, and you just know he’s got a hammerlock on everything they do and say. Right? They even brag about it in their biography: “He made us to sign contracts with him, and according to these contracts we didn’t have any rights to even speak. We just had to do whatever he was telling us to.”
Suppose I told you some attribute their success to “something in all Slavs and Balkan people that Americans as a whole will never understand.... It is some doomed sense of lost love, hope, humanity, some craving of things that are not to come.” (Suppose I then told you this person hadn’t hung out with too many American teenagers.)
Suppose I told you the girls perform in schoolgirl outfits that are stripped down to white tank tops and panties. Suppose you imagined what the lad mags will do when they get a hold of them; suppose I told you you don’t have to imagine. (Underage? Well, one of them’s 17. They were 15 and 16 when the band got started. But keep in mind that’s only underage for the important American market. Russia’s age of consent for gay and straight sex is either 14 or 16; the law is unclear, but either way, Colonel Shapovalov’s in the clear.)
Suppose I told you teens were talking about how inspirational Tatu is. (Or t.A.T.u. Or Taty. Or Tattoo. Whatever. Tatu.) —Then suppose I pointed out that if any message board out there in the wild and woolly web is a hotbed of viral marketing at astroturfing, it’s MTV’s.
How do you feel about all this after doing an unfiltered Google search for “russian lesbian lolitas”? (Come on! Where else do you think he got the idea?) How about we ponder Sleater-Kinney’s chances of getting on TRL? (Oh. They were on the MTV Spring Break show. Not quite close enough, I guess. But still.) How about we keep in mind that there are hordes of teenyboppers gay, straight and questioning who don’t like Sleater-Kinney (fault them for their taste, but it’s true). Remember what it feels like as a teenager and to ache for the thing that says love and loss and angst and (yes) sex and the whole goddamn world crashing away into nothing but someone else’s eyes and the doom and the craving for things that will never be because if they were you’d just die; remember how sometimes you had to twist things into the most remarkable shapes to make them work like that and you did it anyway, and turn on the TV and flip over to MTV and see what already goes on and rate this image say or this one in that overall scheme and think about it some more.
Before you roll your eyes, think back and be honest and remember some of the awful, awful stuff that was for one brief shining moment your love and your loss and your angst and your doom. Okay?
Consider that I can remember the three very specific instances that were the first times that the concept of homosexual and homoerotic contact impinged on my world: a Time magazine cover from 1979 or so about gay rights, which had a stark white cover with a photo of two sets of held hands: one pair obviously two men’s, one obviously two women’s; the Lawrence Sanders novel The Tomorrow File, whose narrator is bisexual, and at the beginning of the novel is sleeping with his male partner, which I read at, what, 12? all unknowing—I’d picked it up on a whim with a dozen other paperbacks at a library book sale; the third was when Christopher Reeve suddenly kissed Michael Caine in Deathtrap, which I saw with a friend and her cousin whom I had an astounding instant crush on, who squeezed my hand when the “dead” Reeve crashed through that window, and afterwards we all wondered just how much money they had to pay Caine and Reeve to do that kiss. Eww. (I was, what? Maybe 14?) —Because what I’m led to wonder, if only for a moment, is what things might have been like if, in addition to those three startlingly isolated instants (it’s only later that I even began to connect them, much less try to figure out what it all meant), there had maybe been an MTV. (It was just getting started, yes.) On which there might have been a video of a boy band. The Pet Shop Boyettes, maybe? The Young Jimmy Sommervilles? Doing a prep school thing, A Separate Peace, maybe, with übertext instead of subtext. With the ties and the jackets and a kiss or five, you know? And a good New Wave hook and a killer beat, too, yes, of course.
Maybe not.
Because you’ll probably say that the male gaze rules and the male gaze always wants to watch girls and not boys and I’ll say yes, but Jason Biggs and Seann William Scott won Best Kiss at the MTV movie awards this year and you’ll scoff and say that was a joke kiss, that was nothing, and I’ll say so was Sarah Michelle Gellar’s and Selma Blair’s when they won in 2000 and you’ll point out it’s hardly the same thing, the girls were played for prurience and voyeurism and the boys were nothing at all but a joke and I’ll concede the point, yes, but still: joking and laughing is how you first approach something that scares you but nonetheless attracts, and even if most people never get past that stage still, a step is being taken, an effort is being made, for God’s sake, two guys kissing won an MTV movie award! and you’ll ask what, exactly, this has to do with the topic at hand and I’ll stop, and blink, and shake my head; we’ve gotten off track. Haven’t we.
Because we aren’t talking about two teenaged Russian gay boys. Or boys pretending to be gay. We’re talking about girls. And for all that the differences between sexes are hard to find and harder to map, the differences in how we perceive genders is glaringly obvious and seemingly intractable.
And anyway, Seann William Scott and Jason Biggs and Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair are all straight. Just like (apparently) Volkova Julia Olegovna and Katina Elena Sergeevna. Not that there’s anything wrong with pretending to cross over. Is there? How about making money for pretending to cross over, if just for a moment, not that they’d ever really, but there’s nothing wrong with it, you know?
Is there?
Because you have to remember that for all the lonely lesbian teenagers out there who are inspired by the music of Tatu, there’s middle-aged men rifling through their photo galleries because they like the idea of teen girls kissing—but what, exactly, is wrong with that, anyway?
Because, of course, for all the middle-aged men rifling through their photo galleries, there’s also lonely lesbian teens, pumping Tatu through their iPods as they headbang in their individual rooms in front of a racy J-pop posters printed somewhere in the former Soviet Union—and what’s wrong with that? Exactly?
(Aside from the fact that we’ve slighted all the middle-aged women who like the idea of teen girls kissing, and the teen boys who find it safer to cast their dangerous lust into utterly unattainable forms, and the frat boys who get off on the idea of lezbos, damn! and I’m sure you can continue this particular exercise on your own for a while.)
And you could ask yourself what it does to the whole Dionysiac ritual aspect of a rock concert when you go from eroticizing the person on stage, and wanting that person to want you, to eroticizing the relationship the people onstage are having with each other, and wanting them to want that—instead of? As well as? (If she wants her, maybe she could want me?) And maybe you could say something clever, like, now that Elvis has left the building, those sixteen-year-old girls he liked to watch, the ones who’d wrestle in white panties, well, now they have the stage. And you could maybe think about where Menudo ended up, and most of the New Kids on the Block, and I think some of the Boys II Men made it, but some didn’t, and Debbie Gibson’s on Broadway, but Tiffany just did a Playboy spread to make ends meet, and when Colonel Tom Shapovalov says he’s got a five-year plan for the Tatu girls, well, you know how much money he’s gonna walk away with. And you know how much money they’ll walk away with. And maybe that’s a sobering thought that helps put this anschauung into more perspective.
And anyway, the whole thing could tank and disappear. Ask me again in six months. Tatu who?
(But with our Congresspeople getting all upset over Muppets with AIDS, I think we can guarantee a backlash large enough to catapult these girls into the lower reaches of the Zeitgeist at least. Welcome to America...)
The music?
Well, hell. The two snippets I’ve heard beat Britney by a country mile. Which ain’t saying much. But I did take two years of Russian in high school. So—
You know in A Fish Called Wanda, when John Cleese said that Russian is the sexiest language?
I knew exactly what he meant.
[ # ]
Isn’t there a war on terrorism to fight, or something?
Tuesday, 21.37
Apparently not—if they aren’t too busy lecturing us on how we shouldn’t cook the books the way they themselves used to, back in the day, and anyway we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads since no one ever decided if a pesky law was broken, so no harm, right? and if they aren’t too busy letting (rich) Saudis pick up visas unexamined through travel agents (and then trying ineptly to intimidate reporters who ask pointed questions about the wisdom of such a policy, in this day and age), well, what currently passes for political leadership in this country feels they must write stern letters to Sesame Street about how the humane, inclusive treatment of an HIV-positive Muppet will necessarily have a deleterious effect on the morals of American youth and they should think twice about trying that sort of thing here, you betcha.
