"The Pick-Up"

I didn't see anything interesting in the stores and I didn't have any money. When I talked to the boy at the shoe store he kept rearranging his shoes and he said, "Shouldn't you go home and have dinner?"

I sat in the coffee shop. I held my textbook open just like I was reading it and watched businessmen coming in out, their suits with little creases in them, pants sweaty around their crotches because of the heat. I sat in the black shadow of the investment bank that was visibly moving across my table, feeling my own sweat drying between my shoulder blades and between my breasts

I read for a while. My legs were stiff and tingling and my neck was getting sore, and there was a man standing at my table who said, "Good book?"

I nodded. "It's just regular biology. I forgot my highlighter."

His suit was like the others, but so fresh it looked like it had just come off the hanger. "You can have some of this if you want it," he said, gesturing with his coffee cup. "I only bought it so I could talk to you." As if for inspection he lifted his hands so I could see his clean fingernails, the little pink cuticles. He smelled like the seats in an orange Volkswagon car.

My own fingernails needed clipping, I remembered.


We crept outward in his car, the windows rolled up and the AC blasting. He played '60s rock too loud on the radio and his knuckles were tense, his hand jerking the gearshift.

"What do you do for a living?" I asked. He hadn't looked at me since I'd gotten into the car. He was an excellent driver. He was scrupulous about the right-of-way. "I'm an Biology major," I said. "Third year."

He nodded. "I do financing. Financial stuff. Banking." He didn't answer any other questions.

By the time we'd pulled into his driveway my face was hot and my jaw had a tough knot in it. It was hard to recognize anything without my glasses on, but I thought I knew where I was. I tripped over one of the shrubs beside his porch. "Careful," he said. "Jesus, don't worry."

Everything was orderly in the front hallway. He walked through every room of the ground floor, yelling "Dora? Dora?" while I waited by the door. There was no answer.

"Go upstairs," he said, and walked around the rooms again. He hadn't loosened his tie or taken off his dress shoes.

All the carpets on the second floor showed the runners of a vacuum. I found an office and a nursery and then the master bedroom, a place like a museum. A woman's silky nightgown was over the back of a chair in front of a mirror, a table with hairbrushes and some pictures.

I took off my running shoes and belt and jeans, my awful tank top with the dolphin on it, my underwear. The room was cold with central air conditioning and I lay on top of the plush quilt, mostly naked. When I began to shiver I moved down under the covers and pulled my socks off and held them in my hands.

The traffic was going quiet outside. I looked up at the white whirls of plaster that nobody ever noticed, and my body began to warm up under the covers.

Robert Benchley Wants No More Sex

In the November 29, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, Robert Benchley concluded his weekly theatre column with this:

I am now definitely ready to announce that Sex, as a theatrical property, is as tiresome as the Old Mortgage, and that I don't want to hear it mentioned ever again. I am sick of little Southern girls who want "to live." I am sick of hearting fathers and mothers talk to little girls, Southern or otherwise, about "what lies before them." I am sick of rebellious Youth and I am sick of Victorian parents, and I don't care if all the little girls in all sections of the United States get ruined or want to get ruined or keep from getting ruined. All I ask is: don't write plays about it and ask me to sit through them.

I assume that Benchley was soon to get his wish.

Just Revealed! Our New Model

Okay, sure, in the brains of horny consumers you MIGHT find a link between CARS and sex. But MODEMS?

I have previously mentioned the trashy nature of early British computer magazines. This advertisement is from a publication which positioned itself as more respectable than the rest ("Your Spectrum," January 1984), but I guess you can't pick your advertisers. And maybe there IS something sexy about modems that I've never noticed before...it's an acoustic coupler, after all.

Quick Acknowledgement of a Cooverthon

For the past six weeks or so I have been engaged in a Cooverthon...that is, I've been re-reading all of Robert Coover's books* in chronological order in an attempt to get a sense of his development and his themes.

Doing this same thing with John Barth a few years ago pretty much destroyed my enjoyment of his work, so I'm aware that this is a dangerous and stupid thing to repeat with another of my favourite authors. One reason I'm doing this is to prove to myself that I didn't sell John Barth short; that other authors CAN stand up to such a rigorous and exhausting re-reading without becoming repetitive.

In some ways, Coover has an edge on Barth because his fiction is so unabashedly repetitive to begin with. My impression after years of fandom has been that -- following "The Public Burning" -- Coover used the same structure over and over again in all subsequent books: a protagonist is stuck inside a nightmarish (and usually genre-specific) environment from which he cannot escape, and as the book progresses the environment becomes increasingly horrifying.

That assumption was incorrect. Coover has been dabbling with that "nightmare" structure since his 1969 collection "Pricksongs & Descants," and while the structure DOES become a regular background feature of most of his subsequent novels, those novels ALSO contain many other novel elements: distinctive characters, bizarre authorial quirks, new types of focus.

We'll see if that impression continues to hold as I make my way through "Pinocchio in Venice" (1991) for the third time. Halfway through "Gerald's Party" (1986) my enthusiasm flagged a bit -- particularly discouraging because it has always been and still remains my favourite Coover novel by far -- but that's to be expected: most of Coovers books are INTENDED to exhaust you ("Gerald's Party" more than most).

I wish I'd rigorously blogged the earlier novels while I was reading them (and I wish I could guarantee that I'll continue to blog them as they come), but here are some scattered impressions:

• Coover has dabbled occasionally with theatre, but his plays are underwhelming. Having just read "A Theological Position" (1972) for the first time, my belief that Coover is not a great playwright is further reinforced.
• The real joy of "The Public Burning" (1977) is Coover's characterization of Richard Nixon: insecure, self-centered, nervous, awkwardly outgoing. Much of the book is just Richard Nixon endlessly pontificating in his head, and this is some of Coover's best writing. He's masterful at distinctive and consistent characterization (see "Gerald's Party" for the extremes of this), and it's easy to lose sight of that with all the experimental flim-flammery going on.
• On the other side of this, however, is "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears" (1987), whose Jewish socialist sculptor is Coover's biggest failure: he never comes to life.
• "You Must Remember This" (the concluding short story in his "A Night at the Movies" collection) is, I think, his crown jewel. Although "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" tend to be his most anthologized stories (probably because they're early works and -- more importantly -- do not have extended scenes of outrageously graphic sex), "You Must Remember This" sums up everything Coover does well. A close second is "Charlie in the House of Rue," also in the same collection. If you only read one Coover short story, pick one of those.

And now, a list of common Robert Coover themes.

• Women with big hips and butts. This obsession tends to taper off eventually, but it begins right there in 1966 with the introduction of the wonderful nurse "Happy Bottom."
• Cartoon/vaudeville mime routines. This again is more a feature of his early work, and again begins with "Happy Bottom."
• Bawdy songs.
• Vicious, fickle audiences.
• The protagonist is trapped inside an environment which he cannot escape, and the environment degrades over time. The landscape is usually disconnected -- doors never lead to predictable places -- and often chronology is confused as well.
• As a continuation of the nightmare environment, the protagonist usually suffers most when he is feeling proud or confident.
• In addition, the protagonist is constantly being punished for failing to follow rules, through no conscious fault of his own.
• Sometimes the environment and protagonist are part of an obvious genre.
• A large cast of couples who screw around with each other.
• Scatology. People tend to poop their pants.
• Puns.
• Extremely dense, impenetrable, high-brow concepts introduced in tiny snippets within the most banal of events, with the result that the concepts themselves seem banal. This starts happening during Coover's middle period.
• Sex with strangers.

* ...with the exception of independently-published pieces, which are difficult and expensive to find.

Deep Wide Open (Rough Mix)

I'm working toward the first Lemurian Congress album, tentatively (but with much certainty) entitled "A Storm Targets Your Childhood Home." A few rough mixes are already up on my SoundCloud account, and here's the newest, "Deep Wide Open" (with another great picture by Patrick):



I'm calling these "rough mixes" because they are unmastered, and because the mixes themselves still need some work...I've decided to do the final mixes when I've finalized everything that is going on the album, because I discovered with the Pico and Alvarado EP that remixing (and then mastering) everything in sequence was a great way to unify the songs (this may be less of an issue for those who have settled into a good production method).

I'll spare you the postmortem on this particular song, except to say it's my first real use of Five12's "Numerology 3" plugin. "Numerology 3" is a real amazing creature, but every method of applying it to a song results in some type of problem: either you can't record the MIDI, or you can't use third-party plugins with it, or you suffer sync problems. Each method will allow you to do SOME of those things, but you can't do all of them at once.

Work: Telemarketing, Plus Bonus Stripper Stories

After a year in University I realized that I needed to get a job. Fortunately I'd fallen in with the members of industrial/noise band "Mindsculpture," and two of the members -- Jared and Jim -- were working as telemarketers during the summer of 1992. They recommended me to their boss and I was hired.

I only lasted a few weeks. I have a deep-seated hatred of the sales game and I particularly hate being annoying to random people over the telephone. Each day we'd be given a page out of the local telephone book -- no high-tech database for OUR company -- and we'd call every number on the page. In order. For hours and hours and hours.

My co-workers and I operated out of a single room in what is now the Eaton's Lofts. There were approximately fifteen of us and we'd sit at long tables that were arranged along the walls, all of us looking in at each other. Each of us had a telephone and we'd call our numbers in sequence: "Hello, I'm calling on behalf of the Policeman's Association. Were you aware that the Policeman's Circus is coming to town this fall? Well, this circus is a charity event for the Children's Fund, and we're offering single tickets and family passes for this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle..."

Most people said "I'm not interested," and I'd say "Okay! I'm sorry! Bye!" and hang up. Then I'd look at the posters on the walls, which showed anthropomorphic telephone creatures saying things like "Turn a negative into a positive!" and "No means yes!" I'd look down at my empty pad of paper where I was supposed to write the names, addresses, and payment details of all my sales.

In my entire time as a telemarketer I sold a grand total of four tickets, to two different people.

The other employees were either detached from their roles, uncomprehending of being nuisances, or outright mercenary in their approach. In the first category were Jared and Jim, who did the bare minimum just to keep a job that was relatively easy. The second category contained almost everybody else: a bunch of public school boys who saw this as an alternative to a paper route, each somewhere between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.

The sole person in the final category was a man I'll call Rick. He was in his early 40s and was a professional telemarketer. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase and his hair had long ago receded. While the rest of us just slouched around and doodled during our calls, Rick leaned sideways into the corner and plugged his ear, talking intimately and urgently into the telephone. At the end of the day he had a stack of invoices on his end of the table. He earned COMMISSIONS. He was the COMPANY STAR.

You might think that Rick would feel out of place working with a bunch of pubescent boys, but no: he bought them pornography. Every week, when the boss was out of the room, the kids would hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for the girlie books that Rick kept in his briefcase. Jared, Jim, and I viewed Rick with utter disgust and disdain, but that didn't bother him...he was a hero to his mental and emotional peers. He had found his niche.

During our final week Rick started to call us from across the room. He'd figured out how to dial our phones internally. He'd say "I'm hiring a stripper for the boss on his birthday. Everybody's donated ten dollars except for you guys. Are you in?"

"I'm not in, Rick. I already told you." I'd say.

"You can't watch the stripper if you don't pay up."

"I told you, I'm not in."

"Then you can't watch her."

"I'll take the day off," I'd say, and look across the room where Rick was crouched in his corner, knees crossed high, staring at me from the side of his eyes. Jared, Jim, and I called in sick that day, and the following day I just stopped coming in. I'm sure they didn't miss me.

Bonus Stripper Story

Before my first year of University I had never seen a stripper, and like most sensitive virgins I had considered a woman's nether regions to be sacred, inviolable, and absolutely private. The thought that women would voluntarily lower their genitals from the mental pedestal I'd constructed for them was unthinkable and could only be due to the exploitative influence of Nasty Men.

During my second year I went to Toronto with a guy I'll refer to as "Monkey Boy," and in between shopping and clubbing we found ourselves with three hours to fill. "Let's go to a strip club!" said the terminally horny Monkey Boy, and since I looked up to him and he styled himself a Enlightened And Realistic Feminist Ally, I agreed.

We went to a place called "The Brass Rail." It was not happy hour at the club -- whenever that is -- so except for some laid-back truckers and a drunken Japanese businessman we were the only men in the audience. Having splurged on outrageously expensive non-alcoholic drinks, we watched as a series of skinny bored women swung around a metal pole, always to classic rock, always with the same appearance except for their height and hair colour.

Meanwhile, Monkey Boy was farting. He farted when he was nervous, and women made him REALLY nervous. He was also living exclusively off the discounted cheddar cheese that his fiancee brought home from work. So there was a constant stench of cheese and farts to my left.

The seat on my right had been occupied by the drunken Japanese businessman, who kept leaning against me and slurring in an incomprehensible language, pointing at the girls, pointing at me. In between songs the girls would leave the stage and I'd sit there drinking my warm 7-Up, Monkey Boy farting on one side and the Japanese guy poking me on the other.

You can understand why this was a bad first experience. And besides all that, even if I were to go to another strip show, I would not be able to think that the women on stage were doing anything besides working. It is not fun to watch people at work, and I think the whole stripping/burlesque thing is too complicated anyway.

Final Bonus Stripper Story

After a string of women who performed to songs like "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Thunderstruck," a statuesque blonde stripped to "How Soon As Now" while wearing thigh-high vinyl stilettos, long before that kind of thing would have been common. The strangeness of it was the only highpoint of the night.

"Picked You"

I picked you because of your sweet voice,
your softened Rs and your awkward drawling vuh.
"How vewwy stwange" you said to me when I made a joke
and you didn't look nervous, like you didn't know you were doing it.
Talking to you, I thought, must be endlessly pleasant.
I could hear your voice and not even notice my own.

I picked you because your job conferred the impression of brilliance.
You did not have the eyes of the dim and the vacant.
Your wit must be as polished as your Rs, I thought,
your temperament fine, your patience velvet.
I would really like to hear about the things you did at work today,
I really would like to know.

I picked you for your anamorphic hips
as wide as they could naturally be,
and the way you goaded your body with a touch of grace
though you were not a floating swan, if we're honest,
and you're always pulling at your sweater
because designers draw blanks when they look at you.

I've picked you, and I must be a prize!
I'll write about you and imagine you
in quick-cut scenarios that I swear are mostly innocent.
I will, simultaneously, view you as a perfect vision,
and recognize in my heart that you usually don't look
the way I've seen you, and might never look that way again.

In terms of gallant action I will glance at you over shelves
and admire your valiant, struggling poise
and wonder if you are in a bad mood because you're working,
or because I'm watching you,
or because I'm watching you without saying anything,
like a screwed-up scary murderer would.

Creepy Pedro Reviews "Austin Powers"

The rumours are true: Mike Meyers can do no wrong!

This is not because he hasn't tried. Before he starts working on any movie he wonders "How can I make this go wrong?" and then he says "I know, I'll make these jokes not funny! My jokes will require too long to happen!" But somehow when the camera is on him we laugh at his cute ways, and when he is ad libbing the libs he ads are funny, and the movie is another big hit no matter what Mike Meyers intended to do. Ka-ching! He buys another expensive thing for his enjoyment!

Like Eddie Murphy, maybe he thinks that if he plays all the parts in the movie he will have a greater influence to mess it up. This would be a good plan, except that when he finds himself in his makeup chair he is suddenly a different person, a cute ad-libbing character who does not want to do wrong. And the audience agrees with this performance! We laugh! Unlike the way we respond to Eddie Murphy!

"Austin Powers" is a good example of a movie where several characters may or may not be Mike Meyers. If you are a film critic like me then you often wonder "Is this Mike Meyers on the screen, and is he doing anything wrong?" You ponder this for only five minutes before you are laughing uncontrollably, and you think to yourself "These are things about sex that I never knew!" and eventually, when the time comes to write your review, you can only say "Funny man!" You might also say "Excellent lighting and an obscure geopolitical subtext!" because you are a film critic after all.

I disparage the sexy females in the "Austin Powers" movies because they are not Mike Meyers, they are not as funny. Meyers has been called a "Woman's Writer" because he writes meaningful parts for women, and when he sees them with their breasts and hips he shouts "Oh, HORNY, baby!" And God help us, we laugh!

Gary Jennings: Smut, History, Purity, Coincidence, and Torture

I'm re-reading "Aztec," the Gary Jennings book that I first read many years ago, and I have a few things to add to my previous post about the Jennings formula (at least as it applies this novel and "Raptor").

Yes, Jennings does his research, and combined with a perfect sense of pacing he manages to convey a realistic impression of what it was like to live at the time (in this case, to be an Aztec before, during, and after the Spanish conquest). I'm re-reading this particular book because I want to learn a bit more about Central American civilization, and "Aztec" is telling me a hell of a lot.

But Jennings isn't content to write 750-page books about dry old history, he must also introduce characters who are almost Ayn Rand-ian in their purity: the loyal and innocent servant, the battle-hardened and kind-hearted soldier, the intelligent and noble protagonist, the honest craftsman who pours his entire soul into his work.

These characters would be the first to disappear in an Ayn Rand novel, though, because they are so noble and pure that they can't even be CAPITALISTS (what sort of craftsman would give away his work for free simply because he is proud of what he does?), but they do share the Rand-trait of being such focuses of ideology that reality seems to WARP AROUND them. Thanks to their unswerving characteristics they form impossible alliances, get out of impossible (but clever) traps, and discover impossible things...you know, like Mayan eyeglasses.

During all of this they engage in meticulously-described sexual acrobatics, and they also witness meticulously-described tortures that make even the most hardened reader (me) physically ill. When reading either "Aztec" or "Raptor" you can rest assured that if things are getting a bit bogged down in philosophy or natural beauty, a flaying or an orgy is right around the corner.

As amazed as I am by Gary Jenning's audacity at writing historical novels which are simultaneously accurate and wildly exploitative and impossible, I have to admit that he's an incredible writer. In the pauses between the lesbian couplings and the guys whose guts splash out, his characters meditate on civilization and love, on warfare and writing, on the beauty of the universe and the beauty of the flowers. I have never read any other author who could pull this off so seamlessly that it becomes a genre unto itself...and for 750 pages, no less!

Here's to Gary Jennings. I wish I knew more about the man who wrote these books. In fact, I wish I could read at least one other review that bothered to mention this curious juxtaposition of brilliance and cheap smut.

The Beat!

Over the years I have become a better person, but there is still a type of person who frustrates me: she (or he) who monopolizes the dancefloor without any sense of "the beat."

"The beat" isn't hard. It's the drums. It's the bass. Unless it's a song by Tool then it's probably even in 4/4. Stay on The Beat and everybody gets along. Even if you're only looking for sex this is a good tip to keep in mind, because otherwise you look goofy and must fall back on your physical charm.

In honour of The Beat, here's Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Murder on the Dancefloor." It's an indication of the sort of circus that a dancefloor is. And if you can't take the beat...

"Me and My Imagination" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Once a year (approximately) I hear a song that is Pure Ear Ecstasy. It "sends" me. It gradually seeps into my brain and possesses every waking hour. When I listen to it, I get covered in goosebumps. When I'm not listening to it, I'm hearing it in my head.

I can't pin down what these songs have in common, but I DO know that they all have a "soaring" quality -- like they're flying higher than anything else in the world -- but only in certain parts; during other parts of the song they are quite low-key. In short, they employ an emotional rollercoaster in perfect mix.

These songs are also musically complex, but they're still pop songs. And their lyrics are interesting. And the singers themselves have an expressive quality to their voices.

Past songs that spring to mind are "Living in Another World" by Talk Talk, "I Know What I'm Here For" by James, and "Ride a White Horse" by Goldfrapp. The most recent song is...

..."Me and My Imagination" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.



I didn't care much for it the first time I heard it but now I can't get enough. It has the minimalistic dance element during the verses, and then the "soaring" chorus that employs a totally unexpected and almost lurching chord progression. The lyrics are fun and interesting. The thin disco-style strings perfectly complement the fat keyboards. And Ellis-Bextor has the most emotive, expressive voice around...contrast her "upbeat dance" delivery during most of the song with her "intimate, slightly broken, almost soulful" approach during the breakdown.

I'm in love with this song. Actually I'm falling in love with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in general, but this song especially.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Bugge Fatale"

I don't know about insects eating oatmeal for breakfast -- I suppose they'll eat anything for breakfast, actually -- but I'll say this for Dr. Seuss: he sure knew how to draw a va-va-voom bug!

Monday Morning Cartoon

Xanadu and '80s Sexuality

I'm sitting here watching "Xanadu" and trying to define the elements of it which make me slightly queasy. It's not the music -- which I love -- or the clothes or hair -- which will look less and less ugly as time goes by -- or even the bad acting.

It's the ATTITUDE. It's the overdriven '80s sexuality.

This is hard for me to define because I grew up in that era. I also don't want to make any assumptions about the '80s without likewise analyzing OTHER eras. "Xanadu" is interesting because it encompasses some '40s elements as well, prompting the question "Why do I not see similar problems with the attitudes of the '20s? The '40s? The '60s? Today? Is it just because I cry whenever I see Gene Kelly dancing inside a giant pinball machine?"

Thanks to "Xanadu" I think I can finally define what makes me nervous about the late '70s and the '80s: a cocksure, unsubtle, party-all-night attitude combined with often sadistic misogyny. Every shot seems to communicate "We're havin' a three-day PARTY, everybody! And we're gonna have SEX WITH ALL THESE CHICKS! And the worst that'll happen is we'll get herpes and a bloody nose!"

Look at the musical numbers in "Xanadu" and compare them to a '40s musical, or compare "Solid Gold" with what you probably would have seen in a '50s nightclub. Sure the women would be objectified, and the men would pay overt sexual attention to the women, but while in -- for example -- a '50s nightclub they'd communicate "I really would like to have sex with her tonight," in "Xanadu" they're saying "I'm gonna f*ck her tonight, and her sister too, and it'll feel so GOOOOOD, LET'S GO!"

I can't prove this, I'm mostly just looking at facial expressions and body language. The sexuality is self-obsessed and dead-eyed and just a little creepy, if not simply lecherous. Leaving aside the number by The Tubes* for example (in which an moaning, orgiastic woman is strapped to a synthethiser by a simpering idiot) you've just got this feeling that it's ALL about the sex and the cocaine, nothing else, nada. It probably always HAS been about the sex and the Current Drug of Choice, but it was never quite as bare-faced and cocky.

I think things have changed. Men in the media still prowl around women like horny dogs, but there is no longer the same degree of entitlement and certainty and thrill-seeking. Even as outfits have become more sexual and revealing in the mainstream, women seem to have a BIT more power than they did in the '80s.

All that aside, however, Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra make the perfect combination. It's amazing the producers could afford such huge musicians after filling out their rotoscoping budget.

* When I think of cocky, aggressive, downright grotesque '80s sexuality I think of The Tubes. Do you?

Burlesque, Then and Before Then

The state of burlesque occasionally appears in the pages of the old New Yorker, and every few years the reporters mention Minsky's. The Minsky Brothers kept a high-profile burlesque show going at the National Winter Garden, even through the late '20s and early '30s when the artform was unappreciated.

In the February 1st, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, theatre reporter Robert Benchley compared the cleaner Minsky style of burlesque with the "old Fourteenth Street or Old Howard days." Besides the somewhat "cleaner" costumes and a greater reliance on "effects," Benchley makes a (perhaps backhanded) compliment to the fuller figure:

The most noticeable change in burlesque...is in the structure of the ladies of the chorus. Gone are the leviathans of an earlier day, when women were women and gold teeth flashed like beacons above Scyllas and Charybdises which could sink a ship if given half a chance. The burlesque girls of today are agile wisps for the most part, although here and there one detects a form which, if given its quota of starches for a year or two, might approximate those which used to ply back and forth in irregular array behind Clark and McCullough, Tom Howard, and Jim Barton.

I love Robert Benchley's theatre reviews. "Scyllas and Charybdises?" Holy cow!

Anyway, Benchley goes on to say that what sets Minsky's burlesque apart from regular Broadway shows is the "informality in chorus dance routines." Each dancer can do whatever she wants "so long as they all get on and off the stage at the same time," though he bemoans their attempts at synchronized arm-raising.

The Emancipated '80s

Some days, to pass the time, I read back issues of '80s computer magazines. It's a nerdy pursuit but sometimes I run across something interesting.

The North American computer scene was pretty stoic. Lots of horny kids owned computers, but the magazines themselves tried to maintain a certain respectability, writing in a fact-based journalistic style in an attempt inform and edify. "Creative Computing" was downright dry and businesslike in its approach, whereas even the less formal magazines kept their childish shenanigans to a minimum.

Then there was Crash.

Published in England and devoted to the ZX Spectrum, Crash Magazine was a swill of pre-adolescent humour, faux hipness, and over-the-top gore. Add Oliver Frey's strangely homoerotic cover art and you have an untinted window into the minds of repressed British childhood during the middle '80s. It's boring and annoying and repetative, yes, but it's a type of sensationalistic weirdness that I've never been exposed to before.

"Tip pages" were very popular in these magazines. Readers would write in with advice for beating the games, or programming cheats, or maps of the sprawling levels which typified Spectrum games. Crash's tip page was nothing special until -- in 1986 -- the previous tip page compiler stepped aside and he was replaced with...A GIRL!

Hannah Smith's hiring was presented initially as some form of female emancipation: women could be smart and clever and competitive just like men! But some of the spotty readers wrote in to say typical '80s things like "Women should go back to where they belong and stop taking men's jobs," as though being the self-styled "girlie tipster" for Crash Magazine was a high-paying position of executive power.

What's most bizarre, however -- and what, in retrospect, was very typical of the '80s reaction to female empowerment -- was how other readers (and the editors) would simultaneously defend and DEGRADE women. All the male readers said things like "Get out of your chauvinist caves, you idiots! This is the '80s! Hannah Smith is great and she's GORGEOUS! Please give her my PHONE NUMBER!" The female readers said "Just because we're weak and frilly doesn't mean we can't do a man's job!" And the editors...

...well, the editors printed covers like this:


...and they wrote articles about how sweaty she got during aerobics, and they tried to set up a jello-wrestling contest with another female writer...

...all while defending her right to be a member of the team.

I'm not saying that England was particularly sexist at the time -- they had Benny Hill, sure, but they also had Margaret Thatcher. Reading these magazines, I'm remembering that this was how female emancipation was treated by the average person in the mid '80s: "Sure women should have the freedom to do whatever they want...as long as they do it in my pants!" There are still lots of people who have that attitude, surely, but you don't see NEARLY so many of them, and they CERTAINLY don't have a mainstream high-profile forum for their views (not without being viewed as crackpots, at least).

This leads me to Benny Hill. I've been watching his 1982 specials today and comparing them to both his older '60s programs and to today's television shows. They're creepy because Hill had gotten older while his female talent got younger (and more scantily clad), and 95% of the jokes involved Hill and his cronies trying to squeeze some woman's bum...

...but what's weird is that Hill almost always suffers HUMILIATION for this. The women outwit him, or he suffers some sort of punishment for his actions, and we (the viewer) are left respecting THEM and laughing at HIM (while still chuckling at his impotent horny buffoonery).

What's my point? I only have an inkling of one. It seems to me that as sexualized and marginalized as the Hill's Angels and Hannah Smiths were, they DID embody a sort of privilege and power as long as they remained at arm's length. By being intelligent and beautiful they had control of the scripted, imaginary situations they were put in. They were very much the superwomen...fetishized goddesses on pedestals.

When I do drag I'm very aware of this aspect of idealized femininity, so I see the attraction to it, and I also see the benefit of it...

...but it all DOES fall apart when reality enters the picture. The average woman on the street is NOT one of Hill's Angels, and NO women live inside his television scripts. The REAL world is a dangerous place for the desired female, and its one where that element of sexual power tends to wane as the years go by.

So it's certainly good that today's Hannah Smiths are not so routinely dismissed as "girlie tipsters" (though it does seem to me that many women would embrace that type of diminutive for themselves). Things have certainly changed publicly, and that's a good thing.

As for the rest of it, though...gender, sexuality, society, and politics are a terrible stew.

Reassessing Peri

I was an avid Doctor Who fan as a child, but I stopped watching the program midway through the Peter Davison era. So when I resurrected my fandom as an adult I was unpleasantly surprised by Colin Baker's incarnation as a clownish, brash, bullying, smug, but somehow impotent know-it-all.

Far worse, though, was the huge-breasted presence of Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, the Doctor's assistant. She simpered and bounced and bitched a lot. She had a range of exactly two emotions: stuttering fear or eye-rolling sarcasm. And her American accent sounded weak and terrible, sprinkled with incorrect word usage and lapses in pronunciation. Every time she appears in a scene I want to scratch my ears out.

I developed a serious Nicola Bryant hate-on.

But like many of the more obnoxious aspects of that era -- the pantomime acting, the crap-synth music, the Doctor's outfit -- I've slowly begun to realize that Bryant wasn't really the problem. All of these failings started at the very top of the hierarchy -- John Nathan-Turner's potentially-compromised vision for the program -- and trickled down to the poor people like Bryant and Baker who didn't have any real say in the matter. Colin Baker HATED his coat and he was BAFFLED by what he was told to do. And, likewise, Nicola Bryant was simply Doing What She Was Told.

It was Mindwarp that really changed my mind about Bryant, first because she does some really first-rate villain acting, and second because the Peri/Yrcanos love story is so ridiculous that it spells the whole issue out for all to see: the Peri character was poorly scripted, not necessarily poorly acted. What's more, during the commentary for Attack of the Cybermen, Bryant specifically mentions Peri's incorrect American word usage, and reveals that she was told to speak that way so British viewers would understand her.

Well blow me down.

So even though I get annoyed every time Peri Brown gets stuttery and out-of-breath, my respect for Nicola Bryant has actually grown, and I can see moments -- usually funny ones -- when she managed to REALLY act in the role. I feel a bit sorry for her being written as T&A eye-candy "for the dads." I can still hate Peri...but I can finally appreciate Nicola Bryant.

And she's great on the commentaries, by the way.

"Cthulhu" and THE GAY!

At Gen-X video they have a special rainbow-coloured sticker that they place on movies with homosexual themes. I'm sure that the primary intent is to inform gay clients that a particular film might interest them, but I can also see the sticker being a type of stigma: if a film has that sticker on it, you're bound to assume that ONLY homosexuals will be interested in it. It doesn't help that most of the rainbow-stickered movies have an overtly sexual theme, to the point where those stickers tend to imply "porn."

So it was weird for me when I picked up "Cthulhu" in the new releases and saw that it had the "gay sticker" on it. What's this? A queer adaptation of a cheesy H.P. Lovecraft story? I would have rented it anyway but the sticker made me doubly curious. I hoped that the movie was one in which the protagonist just HAPPENED to be gay -- as opposed to the type of film I'd expect based on the rainbow sticker -- and I was pleasantly surprised because that's exactly what it was.

The plot of the movie wasn't particularly interesting...if you've read Lovecraft's work and you recognize how it could merge with environmental and political apocalypse, then you won't be surprised. What IS interesting, however, is how the sexuality of the protagonist is generally unimportant; it is not more explicitly "gay" than any other movie is explicitly "straight."

Where a gay theme HAS been introduced, however, is the VERY interesting subject of a gay protagonist "coming home" to the inbred small town he ran away from, as Lovecraft's work tended to use the "coming home" theme as part of the horror. There is also a subplot about the desires of the protagonist's family to produce an heir.

There are two really wonderful things about "Cthulhu": the overall tone (lighting, music) and the totally natural dialog, which is mostly free of cliche. Jason Cottle is an excellent actor, and -- surprisingly for such a low-budget movie -- everybody else is top-notch as well. "Cthulhu" could have been really, really good.

Why isn't it? Because it's disconnected and awkward. The pacing is weird. The ending is too ambiguous. And they simply didn't have the budget for any "pay off" scenes. They did the best thing they could possibly have done to sidle around the need for expensive effects -- relying on mood, uncertainty, and quick edits to sell the story -- but horror movies really DO need a bit more than that.

I listened to some of the commentary and it's disheartening to hear Grant Cogswell and Dan Gildark (the writer and director) be so crushingly disappointed with their own movie. I wanted to call them up and reassure them that the film was FAR better than they'd given it credit for. More disheartening -- but hardly surprisingly -- has been the online reaction to the film, where the usual comment is "Why did they have to make the guy gay? Just to be COOOOL?" They seem to miss the wonderful balancing act that the filmmakers achieved: to have a gay protagonist who ISN'T a token, who ISN'T there just to be cool or attract a gay audience.

That last point is the truly sad thing about "Cthulhu," that it achieved something quite remarkable -- and was a pretty good movie as well -- but it's a little too early for the world, perhaps.

"Attraction" by Muffy St. Bernard

The man with the grey toque leaned against her, using her shoulder to support himself. He could come no closer because there were too many people around the bar.

"I'm attracted to you," he said.

She thanked him for saying so.

"It's strange, this attraction I have, because I'm gay. It's not obvious to anybody. Even my friends don't know! They're back there." He gestured. His friends were at the end of the bar, lounging, staring, interested.

"Would you know that I'm gay if I didn't tell you first?" asked the man.

She said no, she wouldn't have guessed. He pushed his toque down to hide his hair and then he smiled. "I want you to keep this a secret," he said, "just between you and me. Don't tell anybody what I just told you. About me being gay."

She said she wouldn't tell anybody. She promised. There were so many people around that she couldn't uncross her legs without hitting somebody.

The man with the toque kept bumping her shoulder, swayed by the moving crowd, bumping and bumping, but he didn't seem to care. "This is significant for me because I'm not actually attracted to women, I just pretend, I do it all for show...but you're the first woman I've ever been attracted to and I wonder what that means. I wonder if it's important?"

She said she didn't know if it was important or not. He put his hand on the shoulder he'd been bumping.

"Will you make this a special night and sleep with me?"

She said no. She said she was sad that he had to hide his homosexuality from his friends but that she was simply not interested in having sex with him. She said that there was no chance of him ever having sex with her.

He didn't remove his hand. When one of her male friends brought her a drink, the man in the toque said "So that's how it is, is it?" and he scowled bitterly, but he didn't remove his hand.

He was silent for a while, bumping. "It would mean a lot to me, if we could have sex," he said finally. "Since I'm gay and this is significant."

She said no, and he said "Kiss me," and he tried to pull her away from her stool and she sat back again forcibly. "Kiss me please." He pulled her face towards his. "It would be special. My friends are watching." And they were; they were taking pictures with their cel phones.

She pushed him away. He sneered. "I can't believe I told you about my sexuality and you're just rejecting me," he said. "I can't believe I confessed my biggest secret to you, and you're not going to have sex with me. That's awful. It's like you really don't care."

Her male friend intervened, pushed his way in and telling the man to cool it. She finally managed to uncross her legs and she drank her drink behind the barrier of her friend's arm.

The man with the toque stretched across from the other side, hissing. "I can't believe this," he said. "I told you my biggest secret and then you got your boyfriend to attack me. I can't believe you'd do this to me. I can't believe you'd betray me like that."

My MRI

Yesterday was the long-awaited day for my MRI.

I'm not going to tell you about the more unpleasant parts because I don't think such stories are helpful. I heard all sorts of MRI-stories during the last few months and none of them did a lick of good; they were either single anecdotes of things gone wrong or alarmist stories about extremely rare complications, neither of which improved my mindset at all.

The only pre-MRI lessons that WERE useful were the ones that said that getting dye injected into a joint is not a pleasant experience. They were right, and I'm glad I knew this so I could mentally prepare myself; if I'd gone in expecting a painless procedure I would have been terribly shocked.

As for the MRI itself, I imagine that everybody has a different experience. It was an absolute nightmare for me, but that's because my arm needed to be positioned in exactly the way it CAN'T go: twisted around with its palm facing upward. They even put a sandbag on my elbow to keep it that way. Thirty minutes later, staring up at the ceiling just two inches above my nose, every second that passed was another second to seriously consider pressing the emergency "stop" button; it felt like somebody had stuck a fork into my shoulder and was twisting it out of sheer vindictiveness. I'm still paying for the forcible relocation of my joints that was necessary for the procedure.

One thing that kept me going through both the injection and the scanning was the realization that as bad and endless as all this was, it probably wasn't HALF as painful or interminable as childbirth...and what's more, the end result of childbirth is the ultimate punishment of actually being PRESENTED with a child. At least I'd get something GOOD out of the procedure. My mother confirmed this but still meted out some much-appreciated sympathy on the way home.

I feel sorry for the doctors, nurses, technicians, and volunteers. During these procedures their jobs are to put you through varying degrees of unpleasantness. I felt like a dog going to the veterinarian, the unthinking dog part of me screaming "No, no, just stop it!" and the owner part of me saying "It's necessary and it will be over soon."

Again, everybody's experience is different. Mine was so bad because of the nature of my injury, apparently.

I did in fact wear a blue hospital gown that was open in the back. I spent some time chatting with a wonderful volunteer whose primary role is to calm people down; volunteers, you are golden. The old man ahead of me whose hip was being evaluated was a particularly good sport: he referred to his walker as his "Cadillac," and when the pretty nurse told him to take his trousers off, he said "You've got a wonderful technique, haven't you?"

As an aside: Why is it charming when feeble old men say sexual things to young ladies? I think it's because there is absolutely no hint of threat in their comments -- if this guy had tried to actually cop a feel the nurse could have simply pushed him over -- and also because we assume these men are impotent, and that -- therefore -- their comments are largely self-deprecating. When an old man says such a thing he is REALLY saying "Ahhh, I'm beyond all that now." And somehow that's cute, and we feel sorry for them.

Anyway, my MRI is done and I hope it shows something useful. In the meantime, if YOU are going to get an MRI which involves a dye injection, simply be aware that it WILL hurt a lot, and that it WILL end, and that going through a couple days of pain is better than a lifetime of reduced mobility.