October 2006
October was our best night yet. We had a full house and an even fuller array of subject matter than usual. The audience heard readers rhapsodize on subjects ranging from dumpster diving, to lesbian kisses, to cuddling. Rudolph Giuliani and Democratic Strategists were two of the objects of the more rant-ish ravings. And there was a eulogy of sorts, to our fallen friend Brad Will. We heard selections from Williams Cole, An Xiao, Stephen Duncombe, Andrew Boyd, Jean Railla, Mark Read, Doug Cordell, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. They read the following. OUT LOUD:
JEAN RAILLA:
Digging Trash
When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field,
you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan,
and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your
undertakings. --Deuteronomy 24:19
Streets with overcrowded and Glittering store windows ... the displays of
delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity,
stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its
products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of
scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. -- Jean
Baudrillard, from Consumer Society.
Trash can inspire. I was reminded of this the other day when viewing the
documentary the Gleaners and I, directed by the Grand Dames of French
cinema, Agnes Varda. In it, the seventy-two-year-old filmmaker explores the
French country-side, philosophizing about consumption, trash and art, and
interviewing gleaners people who live off the refuse of others. From
gypsies who pick through potatoes left in the fields, to gainfully employed
city-dwellers who rifle through garbage cans as a form of protest, and
artists who use furniture and scraps left on the street as creative
material, everyone she meets takes a stand on and about waste.
I love this film. Maybe it¹s because my own family comes from rural France
and I recognize my grandmother Meme¹s stoop in the poor women gleaning for
food in the fields depicted by Millet in his 19th century painting Le
Glaneuses. Maybe it¹s because gleaning appeals to my moral principals in a
waste not, want not, sort of way (Meme had grown up dirt-poor and knew what
it was like to go hungry, like so many people in Varda¹s film, and taught me
to make soup out of old vegetables and fish bones, to eat the organ meats no
one else wanted, to enjoy good food, but to never let it go to waste.)
Maybe it¹s because I have experienced the rush of finding clothing,
furniture and electronics on the street. Or maybe it is simply love. My
dog Bookie was a product of my husband¹s gleaning; Steve found him shivering
under a car, barely a year old, on Delancey Street in New York City.
I first discovered gleaning as a kid when my best friend Laura¹s little
brother, Michael, started coming home with bunches of flowers, equipment,
wood and sometimes candy. He had found his treasure in large dumpsters in
the back of the stores that line Ventura Blvd in the suburban San Fernando
Valley.
One Sunday afternoon we set out on bikes, Michael ahead of us in rubber
boots, Laura and I following in shorts, flip-flops and tank shirts, our
pubescent bodies alive with adventure. We hit the party-supply store¹s
dumpster first. Although neither Laura nor I actually jumped into the large,
steel, green container, we stood to the side as Michael did and gladly took
the coffee-stained stationary and stickers. (Their plastic wrappers
protected the actual products.) Then it was on to the florist. I couldn¹t
believe all the beautiful--albeit wilted--flowers that had been thrown out.
We greedily picked through the piles, placing together motley bouquets to
give to our mothers. Finding that stash was invigorating, a rush. I hadn¹t
yet begun to think about the environmental ramifications of waste. My joy
was a gambler¹s high; getting something for nothing, beating the odds. Free
shit.
Years later, in my late twenties, living in New York city, my gleaning
became more intense, both because my proximity to trash was greater as I
spent hours walking the city streets each week and New Yorkers seem to cycle
through their stuff more often, swapping out the old for the newish at an
alarming rate. As urban dwellers, we have small apartments. We don¹t own
cars. Everything gets tossed to the curb. And while donations to the thrift
stores might suffer, gleaners gain. At least 50% of my current furniture,
plants and appliances were found on the street.
It¹s not only in New York and LA that people are finding treasures from the
trash. Chris from Oakland, CA found a working washing machine (she simply
brought it home and hooked it up), a complete set of luggage, a few winter
coats, kitchenware and a lot of books in the trash. Amy from Baltimore
found a Kate Spade purse and a black computer chair. Janet, a Tulsa girl,
found a brown leather couch, with nary a stain. The possibilities for
treasure from the trash are endless.
Gleaning is crafty activity not merely because of the fun of finding
something for nothing (although that¹s clearly a large part of the joy) but
also for what we do with it once we get it home. Often times the gleaner
transforms the items from the trash into something new, with a use for which
it was not intended, like turning an old door into a writing table. For
instance, Becca, a cross-stitcher from Atlanta, found a vintage refrigerator
on the street and converted it into a computer desk. Suzanne, the domestic
engineer from Washington, came upon an old eight-pane window in the alley
behind her house. She cleaned it up, left the hinges and latch on and made
it look 'distressed.' Then she dug up some old black and white snapshots of
her grandmother¹s house and had them matted, using the window as a big
picture frame. She proclaims, ³It looks so beautiful hanging above our
fireplace!² Becca sees the inner-desk in the vintage refrigerator just
aching to come out. Suzanne glimpses the picture-frame in an abandoned
window. When a gleaner sees a piece of trash, her mind starts reeling. She
thinks about how to distress it, noticing the hinges and latches give it a
certain appeal, and starts plotting out her attack, even before she gets it
home.
Gleaning is visionary work. You must be able to come across a pile of wood
and see that within these scraps lie the makings for a shelf to hold your
CD¹s. You have to know that the planted tree that looks a slightly brown,
down and dejected will flourish with a little love, water and sunlight. To
glean well, you must be able to look beyond something¹s obvious state, to
abstractly conjure up a new use or purpose for the object. Like a good
thrift-shopper, the true gleaner must spend time imagining not what is, but
what could be.
To glean is to accept the abundance that the street offers. It does not then
follow that one must subsequently live without luxury. In fact, for me, it
is just the opposite. I keep bottles of expensive L'eau D'Issey perfume on
my dumpster-diver end table. In my closet, my prized three-inch Manolo
Blahnik heels, found in the trash on Mott street, sit side by side with the
black patent leather boots that I bought new at Sigerson Morrison, a high
end shoe shop on the same block. I love the art and craft that goes into
what someone¹s mother might call finery. I cherish my writing chair, with
its exquisite ergonomic design. I bought it on Ebay from a failed dotcom in
Atlanta. I adore handmade clothing by small local designers, which are
thoughtfully cut to enhance my shape. I enjoy getting facials and massages
and putting fancy creams on my body. I have no problem reconciling my inner
dumpster-diver with my luxury-item diva.
A few of my more hardcore gleaner friends look askance at my taste for fine
perfume but, truthfully, I¹ve received more flack for my love for trash
pickings. Walking down the cobblestone streets in my Soho neighborhood,
going through the piles of waste, I get dirty looks from the black-clad
folks who frequent the fine restaurants and designer boutiques, and they
don¹t even live here! Because trash-picking is most often done by those
without resources, there is a distain for the practice by the very people
who waste the most in our society.
Reality-check: Our trash dumps are reaching epidemic proportions.
Americans generate more waste every year. In 1990, we collectively created
247 million tons of trash. In 2001, 409 million tons. That¹s almost double
the amount of trash produced in ten years, and that¹s taking into account
recycling programs! We are running out of landfill space and there are
more and more reports on the dangers associated with our dumps, including an
increase in birth defects in surrounding areas and the pollution of
underground water sources. Yet, stores still place barbed wire on their
dumpsters, because they don¹t want to give anything away for free. They
would rather it rot. We need to readjust our thinking, to look at the fan
that someone so recklessly threw out and think: it probably only needs
cleaning. We need to think twice before we so readily trash our
possessions, only to buy something similar. The truth is, most of us know
that our society is overly-wasteful, but we find it difficult to put our
theories into practice. Gleaning is a good way to start. We should
consider it sacred activity. In my world-order, the Gleaners shall inherit
the earth.
AN XIAO:
chinese lesbians
outta my way,
he grows, you
fucking chinese lesbians
we're standing on a street
corner on the lower east side,
holding hands like it's our right to
she, a jappo lesbo
me, a flip chick with some kind
of sexual minority status
hey,
i yell back as the
self-righteous motherfucker makes
his way up first -
we're not chinese
and i have an unspecified queer identity
i figure he doesn't hear me
or maybe he's just too embarrassed
that he flubbed his slurs,
because he just keeps walking
and she and i make out
just like the straight couple
on the other side of
the street
And here is my rant:
Dignity, or,
Angry Fantasies About Conservative Old White Men
1.
I'd like to make you want
to wear dresses at night.
I'd like to watch you struggle to fold your wife's
laundry back the way you found it
and wash out the stains from your
private little night of excitement.
I'd like to watch you
struggle with make-up
and its infinite intricacies,
just to see you go outdoors for the
very first time and know how it feels when a
car honks as it speeds by,
when men grunt and your skirt flaps
and the cops eye you just a little too long
and all you know is that this all
feels "right,"
the way a pervert feels "right,"
and even though you're messed up, you've
got to keep on trying.
2.
I'd like to watch you
stare in the mirror, every day
every night
and wonder who you are, or why
you are
and then carve
out "freak" onto your hairy arms to remind
yourself that your life
sucks and there's nothing you can do about it.
3.
I'd like to let you dance your little dance
and hop your little hoops
and grovel for that little letter from
your shrink that says
you can have your hormones now,
your body now,
that "you're not quite normal so we'll have to treat it"
now
and I want you to know just what it's like
to scrap together every last penny
for a so-called cosmetic surgery
covered by an insurance plan you don't have
in a job you won't have
paying for a life you can't have
as you cry out your little eyes just trying
to make ends meet with
whatever little dignity you have left
MARK READ:
Remembering Brad Will
The night after I found out that my friend Brad Will, an independent journalist and activist, had been murdered in Oaxaca by government-backed right wing paramilitaries, there was a vigil for him held at the Mexican Consulate. I planned on going, but also knew that there would be other opportunities to honor his life, including a protest about the ongoing violence in Oaxaca that was scheduled for the coming Monday, and I had other social obligations to attend to. It was a Saturday night, and one of my oldest friends, my old college roommate, Buck, was having his birthday party. I hadn’t seen him, or his children, for some time, and it was important to me to connect with them. For the first three years that I lived in New York I, along with some friends, rented the 3rd and 4th story duplex in Buck and his wife Beth’s brownstone in Park Slope. I watched his son Roan go from toddling to tee-ball, and I was around to greet his daughter, Janet, days after she was born, when she came home from the hospital. Needless to say, I love them all a great deal.
For a short time, while he was “between living situations,” Brad stayed with me in that apartment. By then we had become pretty good friends through our work with Reclaim the Streets, a radical street-party-protest collective with a decidedly anti-capitalist agenda. Brad acted as a kind of direct-action trainer and tactical adviser for the group. He’d been trained by Earth First folks in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, which was more than the rest of us could say, so his words were given considerable weight. Brad, for me, defined a certain type of radicalism, an uncompromised and uncompromising way of living life. Treesitter. Folk-Punk. Anarchist. Pagan. Dumpster diver. Squatter. The dude wasn’t play-acting. He was a true believer. I loved him for that, and admired him, but he didn’t exactly fit into Buck and Beth’s world. Don’t get me wrong, Buck and Beth lean pretty well to the left- it’s what brought them together in the first place- but theirs is a settled life, and sensible, their politics moderated by the practical realities of raising two kids and paying a mortage. As we’ve grown older, and remained friends, and as my choices have led me down a path that has significantly diverged from their own, I have often felt like a bit of a freak in straight clothing when around them. Brad’s stay with me kind of amplified those feelings, and heightened the sense of contradiction that I often felt, and still feel, as I go about living what seems like two lives- one amongst the landed, child-rearing professional class, where I am a good lefty professor and documentary filmmaker, and another where I am the guy blocking traffic, screaming at the cops, or writing inflammatory broadsides. Brad lived one life and one life only: as a soldier in the struggle to defend planet Earth and rid the world of the scourge of capitalism, and I think this sometimes made more settled people a bit uncomfortable, including me, and definitely including Buck and Beth, who, though they seemed to like Brad well enough (he was charming as hell, after all, and funny, and hard not to like), were a bit, I don’t know, startled by his more hobo-ish qualities; his patches and his scraggly beard and his funkily-repaired glasses and his equally funky smell. There was more than one casual, comical, kind of .patronizing remark about one or another of these qualities during his stay with me. Meanwhile, Brad either didn’t notice that Buck and Beth were a bit uncomfortable around him, or he just plain didn’t care. He was infinitely comfortable in his own skin. But he was an exotic to them, sort of a man from another planet, and I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that I could feel them seeing me differently having seen me with him, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.
Societies- and specifically I mean those privileged parts of a society that benefit from the status quo- have a way of dismissing political views that challenge the foundations upon which privilege is built. It’s a reflexive, automated response, like a body fighting off a pathogen. The dismissal doesn’t even register as such, and is generally forgotten as quickly and as thoroughly as the thought, or the person, being dismissed.. I was, and am, capable of seeing how Brad was dismissed by “straight” culture: as a well-intentioned but impractical dreamer, or worse. An Extremist. Unstable. Marginal. I recognize also that I might share in that fate, and this both frightens and infuriates me. I mean, who wants to be treated like a pathogen? Who wants to be seen as, well, a little bit crazy.
The fact is that Brad, and others like him and yes- hell yes- that means me, are fundamentally correct about many things. The planet is fucking burning. We have an illegitimate government waging war for private profit and control over a deadly and diminishing resource. Multinational Corporate Capitalism is an inherently exploitative, violent and destructive system that oppresses people while threatening the health of all life on Earth.
Does this sound extreme?
So, on the night of the vigil, I planned on just stopping by Buck’s birthday party before heading to the Consulate, but I never made it out of Park Slope. In part this was due to my weariness and need to step away from the real sadness and grief that I was processing. However, I also chose to stay because an opportunity to experience a uniquely sharp set of contradictions presented itself, and it seems I have a thing for contradiction.
Around 7:30pm, Eduardo, a friend of a friend of Buck’s, and a high-up functionary at the Mexican Consulate, arrived at the party. I didn’t know that he would be there, but at that point I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Here I was, drinking wine and chatting with a representative of the government of Mexico, which was responsible for my friend’s death. I couldn’t leave. I needed to hear from Eduardo what he had heard about Brad. What did he think of all of it? What did he know about the situation in Oaxaca? What was going to happen?
Of course he knew all about Brad’s murder. And he was aware of the vigil, and of the small protest the previous evening. He was afraid that the consulate would be under attack every day for weeks, and that this would make getting work done impossible. The consulate, he pointed out, has no influence on what happens in Oaxaca. It was just a target. They were not to blame. Oaxaca, he told me, was a disaster. The APPO (Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca, the group that Brad was working with, whose story he was documenting with his video camera), had taken over the city, erecting dozens of barricades, shutting down the government, and throwing out the police. They were trashing the Zocalo, he complained. They had “no sense of aesthetics.” They “cared nothing for the artistic heritage of the city of Oaxaca”. And they just pumped out this “tired rhetoric from the 1970’s,” he said.
“Yes, the same old rhetoric,” I thought to myself. “Yes, lacking subtlety. “ But I couldn’t help thinking that not much has changed since the ‘70’s. I mean, it’s been the same fight more or less, and against the same enemies, and using the same arguments:
The planet burns.
America wages wars of Empire.
Capitalism Kills.
I am conflicted because I enjoy contradiction, even to the point of ignoring the obvious. I prefer complicated conversation, in part because I want to be seen as sophisticated by others. Brad saw the obvious and did not flinch or turn away from what he saw as his responsibility to fight the good fight, with whatever means he had, and wherever the struggle presented itself. He was fearless and uncomplicated. He was also, without a doubt, seen by mainstream culture as an extremist. And when I, or others, articulate views similar to Brad’s, we too will be seen as extreme, and maybe even unstable. However, throughout history, truthsayers have almost invariably found themselves in similar predicaments, and often in similar danger. The only way I can conceive of faithfully honoring my friend’s life, and avenging his untimely death, is to stick to my guns. I, for one, think we need a few more extremists. I miss my friend.
DOUG CORDELL
“Victor and Me”
I met Victor through Craig’s List. I was planning to stay in LA for two or three months over the winter--maybe longer, I wasn’t sure--and I was looking for a furnished room somewhere, something quiet where I could get some writing done, and with a little outdoor space to zone out in the afternoon sun and imagine how cold it had to be back in New York.
When I pulled up to Victor’s place in my rented Taurus, I knew I had found the spot. It was a classic 1950’s Silverlake bungalow, perched atop a steeply sloped street, with a vintage Cutlass in the carport. As I got out of the car, a wiry little guy in a sock hat came out on the front patio holding a coffee mug and waved me in.
Right away, I had a good feeling about him. He was intense, you could see that, but a genuine bohemian, it looked like. The bookshelves in the living room were packed with hardcover originals of all the beat classics, as well as a few tomes of Eastern philosophies, some art books, and the entire, seven-volume, leather-bound set of William Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I had the sense Victor might’ve been the one person in the world who’d actually read the thing, too.
“This is just what I was looking for,” I told him, taking in the room.
“Me, too,” he said, regarding me with a thoughtful nod.
I moved in that night, and the two of us stayed up til two or three, drinking and talking about pretty much everything while Victor hopped off the couch every few minutes to throw on something from his impressive vinyl collection: a bit of early Stones, into Pharoah Sanders, and then the Circle Jerks, and so on, into the night.
Soon we were hanging out together quite a bit. I didn’t know many people in LA, and Victor seemed to have burned a few bridges in the last couple of years. He rented a guesthouse in back to a sweet-natured lump of a guy named Yorin, and I got the idea that he and Victor had been good friends at one time. Now, though, Yorin shared the guesthouse with Helga, a gorgeous young German. According to Victor, she didn’t pay rent; Yorin let her stay there for free because he liked having her around. “And he’s not even fucking her!” Victor told me, sounding disgusted with Yorin about the whole arrangement.
So that left Victor and me to one another. A few nights a week we’d pick up some beers and take his Cutlass for a spin, stopping here and there to play pool with junkie hipster chicks in a Mexican bar in Echo Park, or get cocktails in Chinatown, or just drive up and down Sunset, Victor taking the occasional pull off his flask and drumming the dashboard while I dug the warm night air and the look of the silhouette of palm trees arching above the lights in the hills.
Once, as Victor took a turn off the boulevard at maybe 40 miles an hour, he offered me the flask and yelled over the music, “You should meet my buddy Mongo! You’d like him.”
“He’s not like us, though,” he shouted, grabbing the flask back and flooring it as we tore through an alleyway. “He’s a crazy motherfucker!”
I truly liked Victor, thought he was the real deal--an edge character, for sure, but a seeker, which is a rare things these days. There were, however, increasingly unsettling aspects of living with him. For one, he began to imitate some of my daily routine--on top of which, he would proselytize to me about his new habits, as if he’d stumbled across them on his own.
I would exercise in my room every morning, just to burn off the existential angst I usually wake up feeling, and within a few days I began to hear Victor in his room grunting his way through a workout, doing pushups or skipping rope.
“Nothing like starting the day with intense activity!” he told me, coming out of his room soaked in sweat, with a towel around his neck. “You should try it. Changes your whole perspective.”
I’d also taken to reading in the early evenings on a little settee in the small room off the living room, mostly because Victor spent that time in the living room, watching Kung Fu DVD’s. I would bring candles and a TV tray from the kitchen and set myself up with a glass of red wine, then put on classical music, just loud enough to muffle the sounds of the Chop Sockey adventure coming through the wall.
A week or so after I moved in, I came home in the evening to find Victor reclining on the settee with a book in his lap, classical music playing and candles glowing all around, a glass of red wine on the TV tray beside him.
“I used to read on this couch all the time, you know. Then I fell out of the habit. I don’t know why. But I realized I needed to get back to that. So good for your mind.”
As time went on, I was also more reluctant to sit around the house all night and drink with Victor. Not because I had anything to do the next day, but because he got extremely maudlin the more he drank, alternately swigging from a bottle of wine and taking a snort from his flask. Once, around three in the morning, after several hours of booze and talking, he leaned his head back on the couch, stared at the ceiling and began to sob openly. After a couple of minutes he sat up straight, took another gulp of wine, then gave me a wild look, as if he was entertaining the possibility of cracking the bottle over my head.
After that, I began going to bed earlier.
One morning I woke up to a light rain and saw Victor out my bedroom window, pacing around the front yard, hands on hips, eyeing the base of the house. It turned out the foundation was sketchy and whenever it rained the house was in danger of sliding down the street. (The guesthouse was slowly sinking into the ground.) Apparently, Victor didn’t have the money to remedy the problem—which would’ve required hoisting the entire house and laying a new foundation—so all he could do was pace around, nervously monitoring things and cursing the rain.
Money was a major issue for Victor, in that he didn’t seem to have any. That’s why he was renting out the room in the first place. He was an out-of-work grip trying to bang his way into the union, where all the sweet gigs were. In between his surveys of the foundation of the house, he was on the phone in his bedroom calling his grip buddies for leads on jobs.
That morning, after the rain had stopped, he came bouncing into my room with a manic grin, telling me about a job someone had turned him onto.
“Here’s the thing,” he told me. “I need some clean urine, because these fuckers are going to test me. You mind if I borrow some of yours?”
The request kind of caught me off guard. I think I mumbled something like, “OK,” before I realized what he was asking. Then, before I could clarify the situation, he gave my shoulder a solid squeeze, said, “Thanks, brother,” and bounded back to his room. I thought of following after him and telling him that, in fact, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea, but I could hear him on the phone by then, all hopped up, telling his buddy he was going to take the job.
Later in the day, after Victor had left, packing an airline-size Chivas bottle filled with my urine, I was sitting alone on the back steps of the house wondering whether this scenario might blow back on me somehow. At that moment, I looked up and saw Helga, the beautiful young German, step out of the guesthouse in a terri cloth robe and heels and wave in my direction. I’d never spoken to her before, only nodded and smiled as I came and went from the house, so I wasn’t sure she was signaling to me. Then she tottered across the lawn on her heels and stood at the bottom of the steps. Would I mind photographing her, she asked in a heavy German accent. She had a little digital camera, nothing special, it looked like, and she handed it to me as she talked: something about a foot model job, the internet, I wasn’t sure what. It was hard to concentrate because she had ditched the robe and was standing in front of me now in a black lace thong and bra, asking for suggestions on a good spot to shoot.
“Something that shows off my body,” she said, in a clinical, Teutonic tone.
Soon I was clicking pictures of her stretched out on a lawn chair, leaning over the picnic table, and spread-eagled against the garage door. At one point she ducked into the guesthouse and came out in an ensemble of white lace underwear and matching heels.
I did my best to invest in the scenario, suggesting poses and saying things like, “Yes,” “Nice,” “Fantastic,” like we were shooting somewhere on Ibiza. I thought that might help me convert the Dear Penthouse setup into an actual tryst.
Eventually I became more daring in the poses I suggested, but she simply struck them dutifully, ignoring any entreaties to playfulness. Then, when she stood next to me, examining the pictures I had taken so far, I tentatively reached out and traced my finger along her thigh, telling her how beautiful she was. She looked at me and smiled, to acknowledge this obvious truth, then studied the pictures more closely to see if they had captured it.
No matter what I tried, I wasn’t able to change the dynamic. Her matter-of-fact, European manner about cavorting around in her underwear in the back yard in the middle of the day, coupled with the bright, flat afternoon light, seemed to take the idea of an overtly sexual encounter off the table.
The only whiff of that I got from her was when we were done, and she was putting on her robe and thanking me for my help.
“Now you haff something to think about when you write today,” she said, giving me a wink and a broad, flirtatious smile. Then she turned and tottered into the guesthouse.
Within seconds, I was back in my room jerking off furiously.
That night, Victor came back late. I was on my bed reading one of his Isherwood diaries, with a story from the 40’s about a picnic in Topanga Canyon with Aldous Huxley, Greta Garbo and Krishnamurti, when I heard the front door slam.
“Fuuuuuck!” he yelled, as he stomped past my room into the kitchen.
I gingerly stuck my head into the hall, wondering if there was any way to avoid dealing with him at that particular moment, when he stomped back my way, chugging from a bottle of wine.
“Fucking New York bitch!” he said, pushing the door open.
“What?”
“That whole job was ruined by some fucking New York bitch.”
He started pacing the room.
“Fucking miserable hag wanted me to work til midnight on some goddamn Vanity Fair photo shoot. I spent the whole day taping up 9 by 12’s--using my own money on tape!--so they can shoot some television bitch at Mickey Rooney’s fucking ranch. Can you believe that? I told her I was done for the day—I wasn’t gonna stay there all night—and she starts balking about my money, saying the job wasn’t done, and she wouldn’t ever work with me again, and how I’d been difficult the whole time. When I slaved for that bitch. She better send my check, too, or I’ll follow her back to New York and cut her fucking throat.”
“Meanwhile, check this out,” he said, pulling a large telephoto lens from his parka.
“You took that?”
“Yeah, they’re not gonna know; they have so much shit. So what did you do all day, besides sit around in your sweatpants?”
“Well, I had a little photo shoot of my own. With Helga.”
“Helga in the guesthouse?”
“Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon taking pictures of her in her underwear in the back yard. She said she wanted them for some modeling job, I don’t know.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Why you?” he said, sounding pissed.
“I don’t know. I was here.”
“I knew that bitch was hot. Did you fuck her?”
“What?”
“Did you fuck her?”
“No.”
“You didn’t fuck her?”
“No. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.”
“It wasn’t that kind of vibe?! What does that mean?!”
“It just wasn’t that kind of energy.”
“She’s walking around in her panties in the back yard!”
“I’m telling you, it wasn’t that kind of thing. If you’d have been there, you would’ve seen.”
“If I’da been there I would’ve fucked her on the picnic table!”
“Trust me, it wasn’t like that. I know women--”
“I fucking know women!” he said, stomping out of the room and slamming my door behind him.
“I know ‘em enough to fuck them when they’re asking for it!” he called out, marching down the hallway.
The next thing I heard was the Cutlass engine revving in the carport, then tires squealing down the driveway.
After Victor left I realized I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about the urine sample. I began to wonder if there was some way they could use it to trace the stolen lens back to me. Would they DNA test for a telephoto lens? And who knows what else he did…
That’s when the phone rang in Victor’s room and his machine picked up.
“Victor, this is Marcia Temple,” an angry, piercing voice announced. “You cost a lot of people a lot of money today, and let me tell you, they are not happy about it. My advice to you is to do what you can to rectify the situation, and you know what I mean.”
She called back two or three times over the next couple of hours, leaving even more heated messages. But I couldn’t tell if she knew about the missing lens.
When I went to bed, around two, Victor still hadn’t come home. Meanwhile, I had decided that maybe it was time to get back to New York.
The next morning I waited until Victor had had his coffee, then told him I didn’t think I’d be staying past the end of the month.
“Whatever,” he said, not lifting his head from the newspaper.
We didn’t talk much for the couple of weeks before I left. The calls from Marcia Temple eventually tapered off, so I didn’t feel the need to pursue that. Victor told me he’d have to inspect my room from top to bottom before I’d get my security deposit, and that it’d probably be a while, anyway, since I was leaving on short notice. I didn’t bother to make an issue of it; I had the feeling that when all was said and done, he’d do the stand-up thing.
When the van to the airport rolled up in front of the house on my last morning there, I went to look for Victor. I wanted to say my goodbyes and maybe put a positive cap on the whole experience. I found him on the back steps, hunched over the phone, dialing around for other jobs. I thought of tapping him on the shoulder and giving him a wave, then noticed how tensely contorted his body looked, and thought better of it. Instead, I went back inside, grabbed my things and left.
A light rain had started by the time I loaded my stuff into the van. As we pulled away, I looked out the rear window to see Victor in the front yard, pacing around, hands on hips, eyeing the foundation of the house.
ANDREW BOYD:
How to cuddle.
I met up with Diana at Milano's, a bar down in Noho, just around the corner from my sublet on Mott St. It was back when my father was still alive. I'd been living for several months in a scrappy studio a few blocks from my parents' apartment. We ordered a couple of Black and Tan's. Diana and I had been friends since college. We don't see each other that often, but when we do there's a light, flirtatious energy between us, that on this night the beers stoked right up. After 20 juke-box songs and another couple rounds we quit the place. As we walked out onto Houston Street I was remembering that our last evening together had also ended with us on Houston Street, also with us a little drunk. I remembered getting nervous right at the end. Should I make a move? Do I even want anything to happen? But just as we flagged her down a cab, I figured why the heck not and invited her over. She demurred, saying she didn't want to mess up our friendship. So there.
This time I said, "Look, why don't you just come upstairs and we'll cuddle?" I'm sure it sounded like the oldest and lamest trick in the book. But the thing was, I wasn't trying to trick her, and I wasn't even trying to trick myself. That was all I wanted to do. I wasn't particularly horny. I too liked our friendship where it was. But I was lonely—and I was thinking that maybe she was too. I wanted companionship. I wanted physical closeness. I didn't want to fuck, I just wanted to cuddle. I really really really wanted to cuddle.
She looked at me askance. "Cuddle?"
"Yes, cuddle."
"OK. That would be nice, actually."
We went upstairs, washed up, and—with some uncertainty as to protocol—stripped down to our t-shirts and underwear. We climbed into bed, and we were cuddling, and it was nice. I was spooning her: her shoulders up against my chest, my knees under her thighs, that one extra arm you wish was detachable, scrunched into the bed, my other hand curled around that lovely spot on a woman just where her hip turns into her waist, pulling her gently closer. So there we were cuddling, talking softly. We were still a little tipsy, and there was still a trace of the chemistry we had at the bar. Were we just going to lie there cuddling? The big test. We were both with somebody new, we were curious. Was I going to just rest my hand on her hip, without wanting to slide my way down her thigh, or run my fingers up along her flank, and collarbone, and at least brush my forearm against the outer curves of her breast? So there we were cuddling: neither of us talking now, me spooning her, me running my hands slowly, tenderly over her, kissing her shoulders. And it felt sweet, almost Platonic. Yes, Platonic. OK: I was touching her thighs and brushing against her breast, and we're mostly naked and lying in bed, and inevitably I'm getting a little hard and there are no chaperones—but it felt Platonic. And it felt good. And it was all I wanted to do. Nothing more. For once: I'd told a woman I just wanted to cuddle, I'd told myself I just wanted to cuddle—and it turns out to be true, it holds true.
"Look," she said, pulling herself away, and sitting up in the bed, "We're going to have to fuck—or I'm gonna have to leave."
"Uh..." My face, even in the half-light, must have let on some of my dismay.
"Look, I should probably just go."
Through her t-shirt I could see that her left nipple was hard. "And those are my only choices?" I asked.
She nodded.
But I really just wanted to cuddle. I didn't want to fuck. I didn't want to get all wet and squirmy and deal with organs. I just wanted to cuddle (well, and maybe touch a bit). Why couldn't we just lie there together (and touch a bit), and wake up in the morning together, all warm and entangled? But she was serious. It was all or nothing for her, and there was no way I was going to send her home in the middle of the night. So, we fucked. And it wasn't too weird. Actually, it was OK. And then, finally, we cuddled. And it was a lovely thing to again be bundled up in her smell and warmth. And as we drifted off to sleep, I was thinking about all the things a guy has to go through sometimes just to cuddle.
WILLIAMS COLE:
Giuliani's Fantasy
My Diary Entry – October, 2006
By Rudy Giuliani
Look people, I’m not stupid. I’m writing this now with the knowledge that, if all goes according to plan, what I say will be open for all the activists and wimpy dimps to see. And as I’ve commanded it, they’ll see it on September 11th 2020, at the 6th Anniversary of the Giuliani 9/11 Memorial National Security and Crime Reduction Center.
But by then I’ll have nothing to lose, so now I want to impart my no nonsense wisdom. As a straight shooter, I just want to give you my take on what’s going on in late 2006. I ain’t going to mince words. I’m going straight up pre - 9/11 Rudy. Boy, did I have fun in those days.
This is what I think: Basically, I’m going to be President. He he he. “Sure you are, Rudy,” many people say. They say I love homos, abortion and tail too much.
“The Christers will never let you in. You’ve even got a vowel at the end of your name” they say.
Yeah, well let me tell you. It’s close to the midterm and the days of the Last Days folks are coming to their last days. They had their shot, starting back in the early 80s. Trust me, I know. When I was in the Reagan administration those guys were like pushing up at our nuts all the time. They fluttered about, motivated and singular in their zeal. Even Ronny didn’t know what to do with them sometimes. Yet he slurped their biscuits up with a grin. He was grateful. They made inroads. And after the Bush-Reagan years they were only just primed. By the late 90s the base was really stroked. But let me say that going after Bill and Monica’s oral high jinx was I think some, let’s say, premature ejaculation.
I’ll explain, but let me say first that I learned a lot from that crew.
Look, I went to NYU in the 60s maaaan, I knew about context, about the grayness of it all. But then I saw these Christers coming up with all these over the top proclamations from God with this certainty. They weren’t wavering even though they were drinking four bottles of sherry and licking each others’ shoes (I swear I saw some young Christian Coalition guys do that once at one of Casey’s parties in ’82). And they stayed on point even though they had naked time with each other (Look, back then, you either hung at the lake house with Foley or not. I didn’t, end of story).
Hell, they were the ones who really pushed getting all that coke money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. And NO ONE said anything. It was like anything was acceptable if it contributed to the means to get to the ends. I could relate to that! I learned from that.
Let me put it this way: what I learned is that Gray is NOT the way. If you want to be poor and weak than you should believe in context and be a progressive or whatever you want to call it. If you want to be powerful and maybe rich then you put forth the black vs. white, us vs. them, in certainties – no matter what you’re doing. It’s fucking simple people.
OK, so that’s not serving Georgie and Co. well anymore. But the thing is that they really don’t have the chops. That’s to say, how can a Christer like Dubya really be tough? Toughness is certainty with respect. Why do you think I used to always mimic Don Corleone? The WASPs just don’t have it. Old Ronny Reagan wasn’t tough. Georgie Boy, even when in jeans and a cowboy hat isn’t tough. Even when he tries to be all pissed off it looks dumb, right? Look back at the tapes, he looks like he’s about to smile all the time, chuckle or something. It’s embarrassing.
Real toughness means intelligently knowing your enemy. Back in my Mayoral days all I had to do was size up the enemies at hand. C’mon, Al Sharpton? Hippy activists? Professors? Please. All the general American public cares about (and OH YES I was always thinking about them!) is the price reduction for the matinee of Phantom of the Opera or, you guessed it, terrorists destroying the biggest fucking buildings on the East Coast.
So, to all you snotty New Yorkers who go on about civil liberties and the poor and all that, I was like: “bring it on!” And while you’re at it throw some documentary filmmakers in the mix, even Michael Moore if you can get him off the can. Bushie and the Boys – well, they were messing with fire and their horse blinders just burned away and sizzled their eyeballs.
The Last Days folks? I think they’ll just stop hovering for a bit and touch the ground, eat a little dirt. I’ve talked to their leaders and they like me. If things go like I think they will, they will need my REAL toughness to keep the pansy-wansies out of office. They know that. Even the Christers are getting pissed at Bushie and his Boys. I mean, their sons are the ones with no limbs or fragments buried in their abdomens. And, as much as they’re obsessed with the moral rules that preachers have shoved down their throats for so long, really they are also as much a Hollywood obsessed, perverted and substance-abusing bunch like the rest of us (though they do do it in their own way!).
The reality is (remember that phrase of mine, it’s one that keeps on giving!). The reality is that I’ve created my own world. And it’s a world of 9/11 dust. That dust travels into the gullets of the country and stays there. The footage of me covered with that dust, decisively walking right when the towers fell, is the contemporary version of MacArthur walking onto the beach with wet pant cuffs.
I’m the future Mr. Security. The Mambo King of Anti Terror. No one can take that away from me! Just try it! I decree a moral imperative of toughness. And I will take that into the gullets of the world. And I will take you lily livered liberals with me, just as I did in New York City.
The strength of fear is the primary strength. And America is all about fear. And I love fear more than most Americans do. You want freedom? Well, freedom is about authority and it is ruled by toughness. Freedom is really about fear.
(pause)
Wow, I’ll tell you, writing in a diary is a lot of fun. I get carried away. But after this coming November Tuesday, I have no doubts that my phone will be ringing off the hook.
One more thing: If I’ve fucked up and I wasn’t President – Jesus, O Glorious Father, will you please have me in your Kingdom. Remember, my gullet is chock full of 9/11 dust!
STEPHEN DUNCOMBE:
Politics in an Age of Fantasy
In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U. S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles it was well-written, well-researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon to be (in)famous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president. The exchange went like this:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in an oversized, multicolored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.
What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much liberal and left animosity and felt something else: excited, inspired….and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.
How could my reaction be so different from so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there is something about progressive politics that has become increasingly problematic.
The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan of “Take your desires for reality” were now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. The left and right had switched roles: the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”
Dreams often make those left-of-center nervous. Fantasy and spectacle have been the property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism, and, more recently, the unspeakable horror known as Entertainment Tonight. Traditionally we are more comfortable with those things mumbled by the Times reporter underneath his breath: “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.”
It’s not surprising that progressives feel an affinity for the Enlightenment and empiricism. It was empiricism that broke the Church’s grip on the interpretation of the world. By challenging the Church on its explanations of the physical world, the empiricists opened up an assault on its political and spiritual power as well. Likewise, the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, reasoning creature undermined the hierarchies of feudalism and the foundations of divine right. Traditional “common sense” held that common people could not govern themselves nor act orderly in the marketplace. Contesting these assumptions cleared the way for new forms of politics and economics. The religious festivals and entertaining spectacles mobilized by church and crown to excite or divert the masses and cement religious or royal power could now be replaced by town meetings and coffee houses where enlightened citizens debated the issues of the day. These reasonable citizens, understanding reality as it is and not as it is imagined, would guide democracy and rationalize the market, breaking forever with a reactionary past cloaked in magic, mystery, and manipulation. In other words, and more to the point, progressives throughout history embraced the Enlightenment and empiricism because historically these ideas were progressive.
But all this is history. Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of the past, or rather, past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images, political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news. More and more of the economy is devoted to marketing and entertainment or the performance of scripted roles in the service sector. We live in a “society of the spectacle,” as the French theorist provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. Yet, faced with this new world progressives are still acting out a script inherited from the past. This is a mistake, for those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.
Walter Lippmann, the influential writer, popular newspaper editor and informal political adviser to nearly every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, argued that democratic theory has little to do with democratic practice. Democratic theory resides in the coffee houses and government buildings where enlightened men hold reasoned conversations, examine evidence, and arrive at rational decisions. Theoretical democracy is a heady process. Its practice aims a bit lower. To win elections among a large and diverse population and get the majority to agree upon policy or go along with decisions, politicians, like their commercial counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, speak to people’s fantasies and desires through a language of images and associations. By manipulating symbols, exploiting memories, and spinning stories the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. “The practice of democracy has turned a corner,” Lippmann argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” He called this revolution the Manufacture of Consent.
Those of us opposed to rule by a political elite learned an important lesson from Lippmann. If democracy is to be sustained, and citizens are to truly govern their lives, then the manufacture of consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed. Political stagecraft must be relentlessly attacked with our arsenal of facts and reason.
We learned the wrong lesson.
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form. A politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational. A politics that employs symbols and associations. A politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.
JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER AND AMY RICHARDS;
Introduction: Take the Cake, Girls.
Courtney Love is already more exposed than her journals could possibly reveal. Still, you get the feeling that she'd be furious if she caught you reading her diaries. That is part of the essence of Courtney: a contradiction. Hiding behind her dramatic persona is actually a very ordinary girl and the girl who seeks what Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann called “mass love” doesn’t edit herself for the sake of public approval. She’s one of those rare people who might be exactly the same wherever she is and whomever she is with, whether it is walking down the red carpet or solo in her house checking her email. She’s always Courtney Love, difficult but rewarding.
In many ways Dirty Blonde is a kind of performance, just like her Hole shows, her star turns as Althea Leasure (Larry Flynt's wife) or Lynn Margulies (Andy Kaufman's girlfriend), and her make outs with Drew Barrymore. She's bad and brilliant, surprising and predictable. Performing comes naturally to Courtney, as do her other attributes: being passionate, political, spontaneous, and vicious. Despite Courtney's sporadic claims throughout the book that she doesn't want these tknumber pages published—that “the editors are idiots” and she doesn't want her “fucking diary published!” (in her words)—she loves to be in the public eye.
But why do we—the public—care about Courtney Love? Why should her diaries be published? People love Courtney, in part, because she is easy to hate—fulfilling the role of “bad” woman to catch our free-floating cultural anxieties about women in general. For some, she is a modern day Yoko Ono—the real reason the guitar gods are no longer with us—and punished with rumors and anti-woman screeds. For others, she is simply iconic. She is like Roseanne or Sandra Bernhard, she takes up space and causes problems and never says sorry. She is the spiritual daughter of Janis Joplin—wild, smart, un-beautifully sexy, boy crazy and vulnerable to drugs’ dark allure. She's also a rawer version Madonna—she isn't a victim of sex, she wields the power, and she controls her image. And yet, after all that, she's just an average girl we can relate to: “In her little-girl dresses and bright red lipstick, Courtney Love gave more the impression of a child playing dress up than of an adult rock star,” writes Debbie Stoller, Bust's co-founder and editor in the Bust Guide to the New Girl Order. “Her girlie-girl style, coupled with her very unladylike, out-of-control performances, helped to convey her rebellion against the stereotype of the demure, selfless female and won her loyal following of young women who were grasping for a model of female adulthood and sexuality that could include anger and aggression.”
An amalgam of letters, emails, song lyrics, photos and mementos, these diaries are the emotional fragments of an outcast girl, a troubled teenager, a striving twentysomething, a superstar mother in her thirties, and a somewhat tragic figure in her forties. Looking at that characterization, Courtney might say, Fuck you. Her ambition and her ability to constantly reinvent herself defy feminine conventions. She is unscripted—and that is a frightening state for a woman, which makes her all the more heroic.
People love Courtney because she's fragile and yet protects herself by being over-confident and by exposing herself before others get the satisfaction of doing so, not unlike other iconic (tragic) women like Marylin Monroe and Billie Holiday. The fact is that Love is seeking attention for reasons many women understand—she wants love and feels ugly and drank too much and made mistakes and all of that is part of her allure. She's not perfect, but she's powerful—she’s human.
People love Courtney because she is an icon—not due to her crazy antics, but because she has been an emboldening presence in the lives of so many women and girls. The real essence of Courtney is her impact, the storms she leaves in her wake, the gumption and defiance she so naturally inhabits and makes possible for others to possess. Because of Courtney Love, there are 22-year-olds who picked up guitars, 16-year-old girls in Ohio who learned about feminism by reading the word in a SPIN interview with Courtney, and women who don’t feel held back by society’s expectation of what it means to be a lady. Girls and women, including us, have been inspired to be more aggressive and to ask for more because of Love's example.
“I want to be the girl with the most cake,” she sings in “Doll Parts”. And who wouldn't want to be?
—Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
New York City
June 2006
JEAN RAILLA:
Digging Trash
When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field,
you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan,
and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your
undertakings. --Deuteronomy 24:19
Streets with overcrowded and Glittering store windows ... the displays of
delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity,
stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its
products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of
scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. -- Jean
Baudrillard, from Consumer Society.
Trash can inspire. I was reminded of this the other day when viewing the
documentary the Gleaners and I, directed by the Grand Dames of French
cinema, Agnes Varda. In it, the seventy-two-year-old filmmaker explores the
French country-side, philosophizing about consumption, trash and art, and
interviewing gleaners people who live off the refuse of others. From
gypsies who pick through potatoes left in the fields, to gainfully employed
city-dwellers who rifle through garbage cans as a form of protest, and
artists who use furniture and scraps left on the street as creative
material, everyone she meets takes a stand on and about waste.
I love this film. Maybe it¹s because my own family comes from rural France
and I recognize my grandmother Meme¹s stoop in the poor women gleaning for
food in the fields depicted by Millet in his 19th century painting Le
Glaneuses. Maybe it¹s because gleaning appeals to my moral principals in a
waste not, want not, sort of way (Meme had grown up dirt-poor and knew what
it was like to go hungry, like so many people in Varda¹s film, and taught me
to make soup out of old vegetables and fish bones, to eat the organ meats no
one else wanted, to enjoy good food, but to never let it go to waste.)
Maybe it¹s because I have experienced the rush of finding clothing,
furniture and electronics on the street. Or maybe it is simply love. My
dog Bookie was a product of my husband¹s gleaning; Steve found him shivering
under a car, barely a year old, on Delancey Street in New York City.
I first discovered gleaning as a kid when my best friend Laura¹s little
brother, Michael, started coming home with bunches of flowers, equipment,
wood and sometimes candy. He had found his treasure in large dumpsters in
the back of the stores that line Ventura Blvd in the suburban San Fernando
Valley.
One Sunday afternoon we set out on bikes, Michael ahead of us in rubber
boots, Laura and I following in shorts, flip-flops and tank shirts, our
pubescent bodies alive with adventure. We hit the party-supply store¹s
dumpster first. Although neither Laura nor I actually jumped into the large,
steel, green container, we stood to the side as Michael did and gladly took
the coffee-stained stationary and stickers. (Their plastic wrappers
protected the actual products.) Then it was on to the florist. I couldn¹t
believe all the beautiful--albeit wilted--flowers that had been thrown out.
We greedily picked through the piles, placing together motley bouquets to
give to our mothers. Finding that stash was invigorating, a rush. I hadn¹t
yet begun to think about the environmental ramifications of waste. My joy
was a gambler¹s high; getting something for nothing, beating the odds. Free
shit.
Years later, in my late twenties, living in New York city, my gleaning
became more intense, both because my proximity to trash was greater as I
spent hours walking the city streets each week and New Yorkers seem to cycle
through their stuff more often, swapping out the old for the newish at an
alarming rate. As urban dwellers, we have small apartments. We don¹t own
cars. Everything gets tossed to the curb. And while donations to the thrift
stores might suffer, gleaners gain. At least 50% of my current furniture,
plants and appliances were found on the street.
It¹s not only in New York and LA that people are finding treasures from the
trash. Chris from Oakland, CA found a working washing machine (she simply
brought it home and hooked it up), a complete set of luggage, a few winter
coats, kitchenware and a lot of books in the trash. Amy from Baltimore
found a Kate Spade purse and a black computer chair. Janet, a Tulsa girl,
found a brown leather couch, with nary a stain. The possibilities for
treasure from the trash are endless.
Gleaning is crafty activity not merely because of the fun of finding
something for nothing (although that¹s clearly a large part of the joy) but
also for what we do with it once we get it home. Often times the gleaner
transforms the items from the trash into something new, with a use for which
it was not intended, like turning an old door into a writing table. For
instance, Becca, a cross-stitcher from Atlanta, found a vintage refrigerator
on the street and converted it into a computer desk. Suzanne, the domestic
engineer from Washington, came upon an old eight-pane window in the alley
behind her house. She cleaned it up, left the hinges and latch on and made
it look 'distressed.' Then she dug up some old black and white snapshots of
her grandmother¹s house and had them matted, using the window as a big
picture frame. She proclaims, ³It looks so beautiful hanging above our
fireplace!² Becca sees the inner-desk in the vintage refrigerator just
aching to come out. Suzanne glimpses the picture-frame in an abandoned
window. When a gleaner sees a piece of trash, her mind starts reeling. She
thinks about how to distress it, noticing the hinges and latches give it a
certain appeal, and starts plotting out her attack, even before she gets it
home.
Gleaning is visionary work. You must be able to come across a pile of wood
and see that within these scraps lie the makings for a shelf to hold your
CD¹s. You have to know that the planted tree that looks a slightly brown,
down and dejected will flourish with a little love, water and sunlight. To
glean well, you must be able to look beyond something¹s obvious state, to
abstractly conjure up a new use or purpose for the object. Like a good
thrift-shopper, the true gleaner must spend time imagining not what is, but
what could be.
To glean is to accept the abundance that the street offers. It does not then
follow that one must subsequently live without luxury. In fact, for me, it
is just the opposite. I keep bottles of expensive L'eau D'Issey perfume on
my dumpster-diver end table. In my closet, my prized three-inch Manolo
Blahnik heels, found in the trash on Mott street, sit side by side with the
black patent leather boots that I bought new at Sigerson Morrison, a high
end shoe shop on the same block. I love the art and craft that goes into
what someone¹s mother might call finery. I cherish my writing chair, with
its exquisite ergonomic design. I bought it on Ebay from a failed dotcom in
Atlanta. I adore handmade clothing by small local designers, which are
thoughtfully cut to enhance my shape. I enjoy getting facials and massages
and putting fancy creams on my body. I have no problem reconciling my inner
dumpster-diver with my luxury-item diva.
A few of my more hardcore gleaner friends look askance at my taste for fine
perfume but, truthfully, I¹ve received more flack for my love for trash
pickings. Walking down the cobblestone streets in my Soho neighborhood,
going through the piles of waste, I get dirty looks from the black-clad
folks who frequent the fine restaurants and designer boutiques, and they
don¹t even live here! Because trash-picking is most often done by those
without resources, there is a distain for the practice by the very people
who waste the most in our society.
Reality-check: Our trash dumps are reaching epidemic proportions.
Americans generate more waste every year. In 1990, we collectively created
247 million tons of trash. In 2001, 409 million tons. That¹s almost double
the amount of trash produced in ten years, and that¹s taking into account
recycling programs! We are running out of landfill space and there are
more and more reports on the dangers associated with our dumps, including an
increase in birth defects in surrounding areas and the pollution of
underground water sources. Yet, stores still place barbed wire on their
dumpsters, because they don¹t want to give anything away for free. They
would rather it rot. We need to readjust our thinking, to look at the fan
that someone so recklessly threw out and think: it probably only needs
cleaning. We need to think twice before we so readily trash our
possessions, only to buy something similar. The truth is, most of us know
that our society is overly-wasteful, but we find it difficult to put our
theories into practice. Gleaning is a good way to start. We should
consider it sacred activity. In my world-order, the Gleaners shall inherit
the earth.
AN XIAO:
chinese lesbians
outta my way,
he grows, you
fucking chinese lesbians
we're standing on a street
corner on the lower east side,
holding hands like it's our right to
she, a jappo lesbo
me, a flip chick with some kind
of sexual minority status
hey,
i yell back as the
self-righteous motherfucker makes
his way up first -
we're not chinese
and i have an unspecified queer identity
i figure he doesn't hear me
or maybe he's just too embarrassed
that he flubbed his slurs,
because he just keeps walking
and she and i make out
just like the straight couple
on the other side of
the street
And here is my rant:
Dignity, or,
Angry Fantasies About Conservative Old White Men
1.
I'd like to make you want
to wear dresses at night.
I'd like to watch you struggle to fold your wife's
laundry back the way you found it
and wash out the stains from your
private little night of excitement.
I'd like to watch you
struggle with make-up
and its infinite intricacies,
just to see you go outdoors for the
very first time and know how it feels when a
car honks as it speeds by,
when men grunt and your skirt flaps
and the cops eye you just a little too long
and all you know is that this all
feels "right,"
the way a pervert feels "right,"
and even though you're messed up, you've
got to keep on trying.
2.
I'd like to watch you
stare in the mirror, every day
every night
and wonder who you are, or why
you are
and then carve
out "freak" onto your hairy arms to remind
yourself that your life
sucks and there's nothing you can do about it.
3.
I'd like to let you dance your little dance
and hop your little hoops
and grovel for that little letter from
your shrink that says
you can have your hormones now,
your body now,
that "you're not quite normal so we'll have to treat it"
now
and I want you to know just what it's like
to scrap together every last penny
for a so-called cosmetic surgery
covered by an insurance plan you don't have
in a job you won't have
paying for a life you can't have
as you cry out your little eyes just trying
to make ends meet with
whatever little dignity you have left
MARK READ:
Remembering Brad Will
The night after I found out that my friend Brad Will, an independent journalist and activist, had been murdered in Oaxaca by government-backed right wing paramilitaries, there was a vigil for him held at the Mexican Consulate. I planned on going, but also knew that there would be other opportunities to honor his life, including a protest about the ongoing violence in Oaxaca that was scheduled for the coming Monday, and I had other social obligations to attend to. It was a Saturday night, and one of my oldest friends, my old college roommate, Buck, was having his birthday party. I hadn’t seen him, or his children, for some time, and it was important to me to connect with them. For the first three years that I lived in New York I, along with some friends, rented the 3rd and 4th story duplex in Buck and his wife Beth’s brownstone in Park Slope. I watched his son Roan go from toddling to tee-ball, and I was around to greet his daughter, Janet, days after she was born, when she came home from the hospital. Needless to say, I love them all a great deal.
For a short time, while he was “between living situations,” Brad stayed with me in that apartment. By then we had become pretty good friends through our work with Reclaim the Streets, a radical street-party-protest collective with a decidedly anti-capitalist agenda. Brad acted as a kind of direct-action trainer and tactical adviser for the group. He’d been trained by Earth First folks in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, which was more than the rest of us could say, so his words were given considerable weight. Brad, for me, defined a certain type of radicalism, an uncompromised and uncompromising way of living life. Treesitter. Folk-Punk. Anarchist. Pagan. Dumpster diver. Squatter. The dude wasn’t play-acting. He was a true believer. I loved him for that, and admired him, but he didn’t exactly fit into Buck and Beth’s world. Don’t get me wrong, Buck and Beth lean pretty well to the left- it’s what brought them together in the first place- but theirs is a settled life, and sensible, their politics moderated by the practical realities of raising two kids and paying a mortage. As we’ve grown older, and remained friends, and as my choices have led me down a path that has significantly diverged from their own, I have often felt like a bit of a freak in straight clothing when around them. Brad’s stay with me kind of amplified those feelings, and heightened the sense of contradiction that I often felt, and still feel, as I go about living what seems like two lives- one amongst the landed, child-rearing professional class, where I am a good lefty professor and documentary filmmaker, and another where I am the guy blocking traffic, screaming at the cops, or writing inflammatory broadsides. Brad lived one life and one life only: as a soldier in the struggle to defend planet Earth and rid the world of the scourge of capitalism, and I think this sometimes made more settled people a bit uncomfortable, including me, and definitely including Buck and Beth, who, though they seemed to like Brad well enough (he was charming as hell, after all, and funny, and hard not to like), were a bit, I don’t know, startled by his more hobo-ish qualities; his patches and his scraggly beard and his funkily-repaired glasses and his equally funky smell. There was more than one casual, comical, kind of .patronizing remark about one or another of these qualities during his stay with me. Meanwhile, Brad either didn’t notice that Buck and Beth were a bit uncomfortable around him, or he just plain didn’t care. He was infinitely comfortable in his own skin. But he was an exotic to them, sort of a man from another planet, and I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that I could feel them seeing me differently having seen me with him, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.
Societies- and specifically I mean those privileged parts of a society that benefit from the status quo- have a way of dismissing political views that challenge the foundations upon which privilege is built. It’s a reflexive, automated response, like a body fighting off a pathogen. The dismissal doesn’t even register as such, and is generally forgotten as quickly and as thoroughly as the thought, or the person, being dismissed.. I was, and am, capable of seeing how Brad was dismissed by “straight” culture: as a well-intentioned but impractical dreamer, or worse. An Extremist. Unstable. Marginal. I recognize also that I might share in that fate, and this both frightens and infuriates me. I mean, who wants to be treated like a pathogen? Who wants to be seen as, well, a little bit crazy.
The fact is that Brad, and others like him and yes- hell yes- that means me, are fundamentally correct about many things. The planet is fucking burning. We have an illegitimate government waging war for private profit and control over a deadly and diminishing resource. Multinational Corporate Capitalism is an inherently exploitative, violent and destructive system that oppresses people while threatening the health of all life on Earth.
Does this sound extreme?
So, on the night of the vigil, I planned on just stopping by Buck’s birthday party before heading to the Consulate, but I never made it out of Park Slope. In part this was due to my weariness and need to step away from the real sadness and grief that I was processing. However, I also chose to stay because an opportunity to experience a uniquely sharp set of contradictions presented itself, and it seems I have a thing for contradiction.
Around 7:30pm, Eduardo, a friend of a friend of Buck’s, and a high-up functionary at the Mexican Consulate, arrived at the party. I didn’t know that he would be there, but at that point I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Here I was, drinking wine and chatting with a representative of the government of Mexico, which was responsible for my friend’s death. I couldn’t leave. I needed to hear from Eduardo what he had heard about Brad. What did he think of all of it? What did he know about the situation in Oaxaca? What was going to happen?
Of course he knew all about Brad’s murder. And he was aware of the vigil, and of the small protest the previous evening. He was afraid that the consulate would be under attack every day for weeks, and that this would make getting work done impossible. The consulate, he pointed out, has no influence on what happens in Oaxaca. It was just a target. They were not to blame. Oaxaca, he told me, was a disaster. The APPO (Popular People’s Assembly of Oaxaca, the group that Brad was working with, whose story he was documenting with his video camera), had taken over the city, erecting dozens of barricades, shutting down the government, and throwing out the police. They were trashing the Zocalo, he complained. They had “no sense of aesthetics.” They “cared nothing for the artistic heritage of the city of Oaxaca”. And they just pumped out this “tired rhetoric from the 1970’s,” he said.
“Yes, the same old rhetoric,” I thought to myself. “Yes, lacking subtlety. “ But I couldn’t help thinking that not much has changed since the ‘70’s. I mean, it’s been the same fight more or less, and against the same enemies, and using the same arguments:
The planet burns.
America wages wars of Empire.
Capitalism Kills.
I am conflicted because I enjoy contradiction, even to the point of ignoring the obvious. I prefer complicated conversation, in part because I want to be seen as sophisticated by others. Brad saw the obvious and did not flinch or turn away from what he saw as his responsibility to fight the good fight, with whatever means he had, and wherever the struggle presented itself. He was fearless and uncomplicated. He was also, without a doubt, seen by mainstream culture as an extremist. And when I, or others, articulate views similar to Brad’s, we too will be seen as extreme, and maybe even unstable. However, throughout history, truthsayers have almost invariably found themselves in similar predicaments, and often in similar danger. The only way I can conceive of faithfully honoring my friend’s life, and avenging his untimely death, is to stick to my guns. I, for one, think we need a few more extremists. I miss my friend.
DOUG CORDELL
“Victor and Me”
I met Victor through Craig’s List. I was planning to stay in LA for two or three months over the winter--maybe longer, I wasn’t sure--and I was looking for a furnished room somewhere, something quiet where I could get some writing done, and with a little outdoor space to zone out in the afternoon sun and imagine how cold it had to be back in New York.
When I pulled up to Victor’s place in my rented Taurus, I knew I had found the spot. It was a classic 1950’s Silverlake bungalow, perched atop a steeply sloped street, with a vintage Cutlass in the carport. As I got out of the car, a wiry little guy in a sock hat came out on the front patio holding a coffee mug and waved me in.
Right away, I had a good feeling about him. He was intense, you could see that, but a genuine bohemian, it looked like. The bookshelves in the living room were packed with hardcover originals of all the beat classics, as well as a few tomes of Eastern philosophies, some art books, and the entire, seven-volume, leather-bound set of William Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I had the sense Victor might’ve been the one person in the world who’d actually read the thing, too.
“This is just what I was looking for,” I told him, taking in the room.
“Me, too,” he said, regarding me with a thoughtful nod.
I moved in that night, and the two of us stayed up til two or three, drinking and talking about pretty much everything while Victor hopped off the couch every few minutes to throw on something from his impressive vinyl collection: a bit of early Stones, into Pharoah Sanders, and then the Circle Jerks, and so on, into the night.
Soon we were hanging out together quite a bit. I didn’t know many people in LA, and Victor seemed to have burned a few bridges in the last couple of years. He rented a guesthouse in back to a sweet-natured lump of a guy named Yorin, and I got the idea that he and Victor had been good friends at one time. Now, though, Yorin shared the guesthouse with Helga, a gorgeous young German. According to Victor, she didn’t pay rent; Yorin let her stay there for free because he liked having her around. “And he’s not even fucking her!” Victor told me, sounding disgusted with Yorin about the whole arrangement.
So that left Victor and me to one another. A few nights a week we’d pick up some beers and take his Cutlass for a spin, stopping here and there to play pool with junkie hipster chicks in a Mexican bar in Echo Park, or get cocktails in Chinatown, or just drive up and down Sunset, Victor taking the occasional pull off his flask and drumming the dashboard while I dug the warm night air and the look of the silhouette of palm trees arching above the lights in the hills.
Once, as Victor took a turn off the boulevard at maybe 40 miles an hour, he offered me the flask and yelled over the music, “You should meet my buddy Mongo! You’d like him.”
“He’s not like us, though,” he shouted, grabbing the flask back and flooring it as we tore through an alleyway. “He’s a crazy motherfucker!”
I truly liked Victor, thought he was the real deal--an edge character, for sure, but a seeker, which is a rare things these days. There were, however, increasingly unsettling aspects of living with him. For one, he began to imitate some of my daily routine--on top of which, he would proselytize to me about his new habits, as if he’d stumbled across them on his own.
I would exercise in my room every morning, just to burn off the existential angst I usually wake up feeling, and within a few days I began to hear Victor in his room grunting his way through a workout, doing pushups or skipping rope.
“Nothing like starting the day with intense activity!” he told me, coming out of his room soaked in sweat, with a towel around his neck. “You should try it. Changes your whole perspective.”
I’d also taken to reading in the early evenings on a little settee in the small room off the living room, mostly because Victor spent that time in the living room, watching Kung Fu DVD’s. I would bring candles and a TV tray from the kitchen and set myself up with a glass of red wine, then put on classical music, just loud enough to muffle the sounds of the Chop Sockey adventure coming through the wall.
A week or so after I moved in, I came home in the evening to find Victor reclining on the settee with a book in his lap, classical music playing and candles glowing all around, a glass of red wine on the TV tray beside him.
“I used to read on this couch all the time, you know. Then I fell out of the habit. I don’t know why. But I realized I needed to get back to that. So good for your mind.”
As time went on, I was also more reluctant to sit around the house all night and drink with Victor. Not because I had anything to do the next day, but because he got extremely maudlin the more he drank, alternately swigging from a bottle of wine and taking a snort from his flask. Once, around three in the morning, after several hours of booze and talking, he leaned his head back on the couch, stared at the ceiling and began to sob openly. After a couple of minutes he sat up straight, took another gulp of wine, then gave me a wild look, as if he was entertaining the possibility of cracking the bottle over my head.
After that, I began going to bed earlier.
One morning I woke up to a light rain and saw Victor out my bedroom window, pacing around the front yard, hands on hips, eyeing the base of the house. It turned out the foundation was sketchy and whenever it rained the house was in danger of sliding down the street. (The guesthouse was slowly sinking into the ground.) Apparently, Victor didn’t have the money to remedy the problem—which would’ve required hoisting the entire house and laying a new foundation—so all he could do was pace around, nervously monitoring things and cursing the rain.
Money was a major issue for Victor, in that he didn’t seem to have any. That’s why he was renting out the room in the first place. He was an out-of-work grip trying to bang his way into the union, where all the sweet gigs were. In between his surveys of the foundation of the house, he was on the phone in his bedroom calling his grip buddies for leads on jobs.
That morning, after the rain had stopped, he came bouncing into my room with a manic grin, telling me about a job someone had turned him onto.
“Here’s the thing,” he told me. “I need some clean urine, because these fuckers are going to test me. You mind if I borrow some of yours?”
The request kind of caught me off guard. I think I mumbled something like, “OK,” before I realized what he was asking. Then, before I could clarify the situation, he gave my shoulder a solid squeeze, said, “Thanks, brother,” and bounded back to his room. I thought of following after him and telling him that, in fact, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea, but I could hear him on the phone by then, all hopped up, telling his buddy he was going to take the job.
Later in the day, after Victor had left, packing an airline-size Chivas bottle filled with my urine, I was sitting alone on the back steps of the house wondering whether this scenario might blow back on me somehow. At that moment, I looked up and saw Helga, the beautiful young German, step out of the guesthouse in a terri cloth robe and heels and wave in my direction. I’d never spoken to her before, only nodded and smiled as I came and went from the house, so I wasn’t sure she was signaling to me. Then she tottered across the lawn on her heels and stood at the bottom of the steps. Would I mind photographing her, she asked in a heavy German accent. She had a little digital camera, nothing special, it looked like, and she handed it to me as she talked: something about a foot model job, the internet, I wasn’t sure what. It was hard to concentrate because she had ditched the robe and was standing in front of me now in a black lace thong and bra, asking for suggestions on a good spot to shoot.
“Something that shows off my body,” she said, in a clinical, Teutonic tone.
Soon I was clicking pictures of her stretched out on a lawn chair, leaning over the picnic table, and spread-eagled against the garage door. At one point she ducked into the guesthouse and came out in an ensemble of white lace underwear and matching heels.
I did my best to invest in the scenario, suggesting poses and saying things like, “Yes,” “Nice,” “Fantastic,” like we were shooting somewhere on Ibiza. I thought that might help me convert the Dear Penthouse setup into an actual tryst.
Eventually I became more daring in the poses I suggested, but she simply struck them dutifully, ignoring any entreaties to playfulness. Then, when she stood next to me, examining the pictures I had taken so far, I tentatively reached out and traced my finger along her thigh, telling her how beautiful she was. She looked at me and smiled, to acknowledge this obvious truth, then studied the pictures more closely to see if they had captured it.
No matter what I tried, I wasn’t able to change the dynamic. Her matter-of-fact, European manner about cavorting around in her underwear in the back yard in the middle of the day, coupled with the bright, flat afternoon light, seemed to take the idea of an overtly sexual encounter off the table.
The only whiff of that I got from her was when we were done, and she was putting on her robe and thanking me for my help.
“Now you haff something to think about when you write today,” she said, giving me a wink and a broad, flirtatious smile. Then she turned and tottered into the guesthouse.
Within seconds, I was back in my room jerking off furiously.
That night, Victor came back late. I was on my bed reading one of his Isherwood diaries, with a story from the 40’s about a picnic in Topanga Canyon with Aldous Huxley, Greta Garbo and Krishnamurti, when I heard the front door slam.
“Fuuuuuck!” he yelled, as he stomped past my room into the kitchen.
I gingerly stuck my head into the hall, wondering if there was any way to avoid dealing with him at that particular moment, when he stomped back my way, chugging from a bottle of wine.
“Fucking New York bitch!” he said, pushing the door open.
“What?”
“That whole job was ruined by some fucking New York bitch.”
He started pacing the room.
“Fucking miserable hag wanted me to work til midnight on some goddamn Vanity Fair photo shoot. I spent the whole day taping up 9 by 12’s--using my own money on tape!--so they can shoot some television bitch at Mickey Rooney’s fucking ranch. Can you believe that? I told her I was done for the day—I wasn’t gonna stay there all night—and she starts balking about my money, saying the job wasn’t done, and she wouldn’t ever work with me again, and how I’d been difficult the whole time. When I slaved for that bitch. She better send my check, too, or I’ll follow her back to New York and cut her fucking throat.”
“Meanwhile, check this out,” he said, pulling a large telephoto lens from his parka.
“You took that?”
“Yeah, they’re not gonna know; they have so much shit. So what did you do all day, besides sit around in your sweatpants?”
“Well, I had a little photo shoot of my own. With Helga.”
“Helga in the guesthouse?”
“Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon taking pictures of her in her underwear in the back yard. She said she wanted them for some modeling job, I don’t know.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Why you?” he said, sounding pissed.
“I don’t know. I was here.”
“I knew that bitch was hot. Did you fuck her?”
“What?”
“Did you fuck her?”
“No.”
“You didn’t fuck her?”
“No. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.”
“It wasn’t that kind of vibe?! What does that mean?!”
“It just wasn’t that kind of energy.”
“She’s walking around in her panties in the back yard!”
“I’m telling you, it wasn’t that kind of thing. If you’d have been there, you would’ve seen.”
“If I’da been there I would’ve fucked her on the picnic table!”
“Trust me, it wasn’t like that. I know women--”
“I fucking know women!” he said, stomping out of the room and slamming my door behind him.
“I know ‘em enough to fuck them when they’re asking for it!” he called out, marching down the hallway.
The next thing I heard was the Cutlass engine revving in the carport, then tires squealing down the driveway.
After Victor left I realized I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about the urine sample. I began to wonder if there was some way they could use it to trace the stolen lens back to me. Would they DNA test for a telephoto lens? And who knows what else he did…
That’s when the phone rang in Victor’s room and his machine picked up.
“Victor, this is Marcia Temple,” an angry, piercing voice announced. “You cost a lot of people a lot of money today, and let me tell you, they are not happy about it. My advice to you is to do what you can to rectify the situation, and you know what I mean.”
She called back two or three times over the next couple of hours, leaving even more heated messages. But I couldn’t tell if she knew about the missing lens.
When I went to bed, around two, Victor still hadn’t come home. Meanwhile, I had decided that maybe it was time to get back to New York.
The next morning I waited until Victor had had his coffee, then told him I didn’t think I’d be staying past the end of the month.
“Whatever,” he said, not lifting his head from the newspaper.
We didn’t talk much for the couple of weeks before I left. The calls from Marcia Temple eventually tapered off, so I didn’t feel the need to pursue that. Victor told me he’d have to inspect my room from top to bottom before I’d get my security deposit, and that it’d probably be a while, anyway, since I was leaving on short notice. I didn’t bother to make an issue of it; I had the feeling that when all was said and done, he’d do the stand-up thing.
When the van to the airport rolled up in front of the house on my last morning there, I went to look for Victor. I wanted to say my goodbyes and maybe put a positive cap on the whole experience. I found him on the back steps, hunched over the phone, dialing around for other jobs. I thought of tapping him on the shoulder and giving him a wave, then noticed how tensely contorted his body looked, and thought better of it. Instead, I went back inside, grabbed my things and left.
A light rain had started by the time I loaded my stuff into the van. As we pulled away, I looked out the rear window to see Victor in the front yard, pacing around, hands on hips, eyeing the foundation of the house.
ANDREW BOYD:
How to cuddle.
I met up with Diana at Milano's, a bar down in Noho, just around the corner from my sublet on Mott St. It was back when my father was still alive. I'd been living for several months in a scrappy studio a few blocks from my parents' apartment. We ordered a couple of Black and Tan's. Diana and I had been friends since college. We don't see each other that often, but when we do there's a light, flirtatious energy between us, that on this night the beers stoked right up. After 20 juke-box songs and another couple rounds we quit the place. As we walked out onto Houston Street I was remembering that our last evening together had also ended with us on Houston Street, also with us a little drunk. I remembered getting nervous right at the end. Should I make a move? Do I even want anything to happen? But just as we flagged her down a cab, I figured why the heck not and invited her over. She demurred, saying she didn't want to mess up our friendship. So there.
This time I said, "Look, why don't you just come upstairs and we'll cuddle?" I'm sure it sounded like the oldest and lamest trick in the book. But the thing was, I wasn't trying to trick her, and I wasn't even trying to trick myself. That was all I wanted to do. I wasn't particularly horny. I too liked our friendship where it was. But I was lonely—and I was thinking that maybe she was too. I wanted companionship. I wanted physical closeness. I didn't want to fuck, I just wanted to cuddle. I really really really wanted to cuddle.
She looked at me askance. "Cuddle?"
"Yes, cuddle."
"OK. That would be nice, actually."
We went upstairs, washed up, and—with some uncertainty as to protocol—stripped down to our t-shirts and underwear. We climbed into bed, and we were cuddling, and it was nice. I was spooning her: her shoulders up against my chest, my knees under her thighs, that one extra arm you wish was detachable, scrunched into the bed, my other hand curled around that lovely spot on a woman just where her hip turns into her waist, pulling her gently closer. So there we were cuddling, talking softly. We were still a little tipsy, and there was still a trace of the chemistry we had at the bar. Were we just going to lie there cuddling? The big test. We were both with somebody new, we were curious. Was I going to just rest my hand on her hip, without wanting to slide my way down her thigh, or run my fingers up along her flank, and collarbone, and at least brush my forearm against the outer curves of her breast? So there we were cuddling: neither of us talking now, me spooning her, me running my hands slowly, tenderly over her, kissing her shoulders. And it felt sweet, almost Platonic. Yes, Platonic. OK: I was touching her thighs and brushing against her breast, and we're mostly naked and lying in bed, and inevitably I'm getting a little hard and there are no chaperones—but it felt Platonic. And it felt good. And it was all I wanted to do. Nothing more. For once: I'd told a woman I just wanted to cuddle, I'd told myself I just wanted to cuddle—and it turns out to be true, it holds true.
"Look," she said, pulling herself away, and sitting up in the bed, "We're going to have to fuck—or I'm gonna have to leave."
"Uh..." My face, even in the half-light, must have let on some of my dismay.
"Look, I should probably just go."
Through her t-shirt I could see that her left nipple was hard. "And those are my only choices?" I asked.
She nodded.
But I really just wanted to cuddle. I didn't want to fuck. I didn't want to get all wet and squirmy and deal with organs. I just wanted to cuddle (well, and maybe touch a bit). Why couldn't we just lie there together (and touch a bit), and wake up in the morning together, all warm and entangled? But she was serious. It was all or nothing for her, and there was no way I was going to send her home in the middle of the night. So, we fucked. And it wasn't too weird. Actually, it was OK. And then, finally, we cuddled. And it was a lovely thing to again be bundled up in her smell and warmth. And as we drifted off to sleep, I was thinking about all the things a guy has to go through sometimes just to cuddle.
WILLIAMS COLE:
Giuliani's Fantasy
My Diary Entry – October, 2006
By Rudy Giuliani
Look people, I’m not stupid. I’m writing this now with the knowledge that, if all goes according to plan, what I say will be open for all the activists and wimpy dimps to see. And as I’ve commanded it, they’ll see it on September 11th 2020, at the 6th Anniversary of the Giuliani 9/11 Memorial National Security and Crime Reduction Center.
But by then I’ll have nothing to lose, so now I want to impart my no nonsense wisdom. As a straight shooter, I just want to give you my take on what’s going on in late 2006. I ain’t going to mince words. I’m going straight up pre - 9/11 Rudy. Boy, did I have fun in those days.
This is what I think: Basically, I’m going to be President. He he he. “Sure you are, Rudy,” many people say. They say I love homos, abortion and tail too much.
“The Christers will never let you in. You’ve even got a vowel at the end of your name” they say.
Yeah, well let me tell you. It’s close to the midterm and the days of the Last Days folks are coming to their last days. They had their shot, starting back in the early 80s. Trust me, I know. When I was in the Reagan administration those guys were like pushing up at our nuts all the time. They fluttered about, motivated and singular in their zeal. Even Ronny didn’t know what to do with them sometimes. Yet he slurped their biscuits up with a grin. He was grateful. They made inroads. And after the Bush-Reagan years they were only just primed. By the late 90s the base was really stroked. But let me say that going after Bill and Monica’s oral high jinx was I think some, let’s say, premature ejaculation.
I’ll explain, but let me say first that I learned a lot from that crew.
Look, I went to NYU in the 60s maaaan, I knew about context, about the grayness of it all. But then I saw these Christers coming up with all these over the top proclamations from God with this certainty. They weren’t wavering even though they were drinking four bottles of sherry and licking each others’ shoes (I swear I saw some young Christian Coalition guys do that once at one of Casey’s parties in ’82). And they stayed on point even though they had naked time with each other (Look, back then, you either hung at the lake house with Foley or not. I didn’t, end of story).
Hell, they were the ones who really pushed getting all that coke money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. And NO ONE said anything. It was like anything was acceptable if it contributed to the means to get to the ends. I could relate to that! I learned from that.
Let me put it this way: what I learned is that Gray is NOT the way. If you want to be poor and weak than you should believe in context and be a progressive or whatever you want to call it. If you want to be powerful and maybe rich then you put forth the black vs. white, us vs. them, in certainties – no matter what you’re doing. It’s fucking simple people.
OK, so that’s not serving Georgie and Co. well anymore. But the thing is that they really don’t have the chops. That’s to say, how can a Christer like Dubya really be tough? Toughness is certainty with respect. Why do you think I used to always mimic Don Corleone? The WASPs just don’t have it. Old Ronny Reagan wasn’t tough. Georgie Boy, even when in jeans and a cowboy hat isn’t tough. Even when he tries to be all pissed off it looks dumb, right? Look back at the tapes, he looks like he’s about to smile all the time, chuckle or something. It’s embarrassing.
Real toughness means intelligently knowing your enemy. Back in my Mayoral days all I had to do was size up the enemies at hand. C’mon, Al Sharpton? Hippy activists? Professors? Please. All the general American public cares about (and OH YES I was always thinking about them!) is the price reduction for the matinee of Phantom of the Opera or, you guessed it, terrorists destroying the biggest fucking buildings on the East Coast.
So, to all you snotty New Yorkers who go on about civil liberties and the poor and all that, I was like: “bring it on!” And while you’re at it throw some documentary filmmakers in the mix, even Michael Moore if you can get him off the can. Bushie and the Boys – well, they were messing with fire and their horse blinders just burned away and sizzled their eyeballs.
The Last Days folks? I think they’ll just stop hovering for a bit and touch the ground, eat a little dirt. I’ve talked to their leaders and they like me. If things go like I think they will, they will need my REAL toughness to keep the pansy-wansies out of office. They know that. Even the Christers are getting pissed at Bushie and his Boys. I mean, their sons are the ones with no limbs or fragments buried in their abdomens. And, as much as they’re obsessed with the moral rules that preachers have shoved down their throats for so long, really they are also as much a Hollywood obsessed, perverted and substance-abusing bunch like the rest of us (though they do do it in their own way!).
The reality is (remember that phrase of mine, it’s one that keeps on giving!). The reality is that I’ve created my own world. And it’s a world of 9/11 dust. That dust travels into the gullets of the country and stays there. The footage of me covered with that dust, decisively walking right when the towers fell, is the contemporary version of MacArthur walking onto the beach with wet pant cuffs.
I’m the future Mr. Security. The Mambo King of Anti Terror. No one can take that away from me! Just try it! I decree a moral imperative of toughness. And I will take that into the gullets of the world. And I will take you lily livered liberals with me, just as I did in New York City.
The strength of fear is the primary strength. And America is all about fear. And I love fear more than most Americans do. You want freedom? Well, freedom is about authority and it is ruled by toughness. Freedom is really about fear.
(pause)
Wow, I’ll tell you, writing in a diary is a lot of fun. I get carried away. But after this coming November Tuesday, I have no doubts that my phone will be ringing off the hook.
One more thing: If I’ve fucked up and I wasn’t President – Jesus, O Glorious Father, will you please have me in your Kingdom. Remember, my gullet is chock full of 9/11 dust!
STEPHEN DUNCOMBE:
Politics in an Age of Fantasy
In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U. S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles it was well-written, well-researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon to be (in)famous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president. The exchange went like this:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in an oversized, multicolored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.
What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much liberal and left animosity and felt something else: excited, inspired….and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.
How could my reaction be so different from so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there is something about progressive politics that has become increasingly problematic.
The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan of “Take your desires for reality” were now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. The left and right had switched roles: the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”
Dreams often make those left-of-center nervous. Fantasy and spectacle have been the property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism, and, more recently, the unspeakable horror known as Entertainment Tonight. Traditionally we are more comfortable with those things mumbled by the Times reporter underneath his breath: “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.”
It’s not surprising that progressives feel an affinity for the Enlightenment and empiricism. It was empiricism that broke the Church’s grip on the interpretation of the world. By challenging the Church on its explanations of the physical world, the empiricists opened up an assault on its political and spiritual power as well. Likewise, the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, reasoning creature undermined the hierarchies of feudalism and the foundations of divine right. Traditional “common sense” held that common people could not govern themselves nor act orderly in the marketplace. Contesting these assumptions cleared the way for new forms of politics and economics. The religious festivals and entertaining spectacles mobilized by church and crown to excite or divert the masses and cement religious or royal power could now be replaced by town meetings and coffee houses where enlightened citizens debated the issues of the day. These reasonable citizens, understanding reality as it is and not as it is imagined, would guide democracy and rationalize the market, breaking forever with a reactionary past cloaked in magic, mystery, and manipulation. In other words, and more to the point, progressives throughout history embraced the Enlightenment and empiricism because historically these ideas were progressive.
But all this is history. Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of the past, or rather, past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images, political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news. More and more of the economy is devoted to marketing and entertainment or the performance of scripted roles in the service sector. We live in a “society of the spectacle,” as the French theorist provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. Yet, faced with this new world progressives are still acting out a script inherited from the past. This is a mistake, for those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.
Walter Lippmann, the influential writer, popular newspaper editor and informal political adviser to nearly every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, argued that democratic theory has little to do with democratic practice. Democratic theory resides in the coffee houses and government buildings where enlightened men hold reasoned conversations, examine evidence, and arrive at rational decisions. Theoretical democracy is a heady process. Its practice aims a bit lower. To win elections among a large and diverse population and get the majority to agree upon policy or go along with decisions, politicians, like their commercial counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, speak to people’s fantasies and desires through a language of images and associations. By manipulating symbols, exploiting memories, and spinning stories the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. “The practice of democracy has turned a corner,” Lippmann argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” He called this revolution the Manufacture of Consent.
Those of us opposed to rule by a political elite learned an important lesson from Lippmann. If democracy is to be sustained, and citizens are to truly govern their lives, then the manufacture of consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed. Political stagecraft must be relentlessly attacked with our arsenal of facts and reason.
We learned the wrong lesson.
Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form. A politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational. A politics that employs symbols and associations. A politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.
JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER AND AMY RICHARDS;
Introduction: Take the Cake, Girls.
Courtney Love is already more exposed than her journals could possibly reveal. Still, you get the feeling that she'd be furious if she caught you reading her diaries. That is part of the essence of Courtney: a contradiction. Hiding behind her dramatic persona is actually a very ordinary girl and the girl who seeks what Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann called “mass love” doesn’t edit herself for the sake of public approval. She’s one of those rare people who might be exactly the same wherever she is and whomever she is with, whether it is walking down the red carpet or solo in her house checking her email. She’s always Courtney Love, difficult but rewarding.
In many ways Dirty Blonde is a kind of performance, just like her Hole shows, her star turns as Althea Leasure (Larry Flynt's wife) or Lynn Margulies (Andy Kaufman's girlfriend), and her make outs with Drew Barrymore. She's bad and brilliant, surprising and predictable. Performing comes naturally to Courtney, as do her other attributes: being passionate, political, spontaneous, and vicious. Despite Courtney's sporadic claims throughout the book that she doesn't want these tknumber pages published—that “the editors are idiots” and she doesn't want her “fucking diary published!” (in her words)—she loves to be in the public eye.
But why do we—the public—care about Courtney Love? Why should her diaries be published? People love Courtney, in part, because she is easy to hate—fulfilling the role of “bad” woman to catch our free-floating cultural anxieties about women in general. For some, she is a modern day Yoko Ono—the real reason the guitar gods are no longer with us—and punished with rumors and anti-woman screeds. For others, she is simply iconic. She is like Roseanne or Sandra Bernhard, she takes up space and causes problems and never says sorry. She is the spiritual daughter of Janis Joplin—wild, smart, un-beautifully sexy, boy crazy and vulnerable to drugs’ dark allure. She's also a rawer version Madonna—she isn't a victim of sex, she wields the power, and she controls her image. And yet, after all that, she's just an average girl we can relate to: “In her little-girl dresses and bright red lipstick, Courtney Love gave more the impression of a child playing dress up than of an adult rock star,” writes Debbie Stoller, Bust's co-founder and editor in the Bust Guide to the New Girl Order. “Her girlie-girl style, coupled with her very unladylike, out-of-control performances, helped to convey her rebellion against the stereotype of the demure, selfless female and won her loyal following of young women who were grasping for a model of female adulthood and sexuality that could include anger and aggression.”
An amalgam of letters, emails, song lyrics, photos and mementos, these diaries are the emotional fragments of an outcast girl, a troubled teenager, a striving twentysomething, a superstar mother in her thirties, and a somewhat tragic figure in her forties. Looking at that characterization, Courtney might say, Fuck you. Her ambition and her ability to constantly reinvent herself defy feminine conventions. She is unscripted—and that is a frightening state for a woman, which makes her all the more heroic.
People love Courtney because she's fragile and yet protects herself by being over-confident and by exposing herself before others get the satisfaction of doing so, not unlike other iconic (tragic) women like Marylin Monroe and Billie Holiday. The fact is that Love is seeking attention for reasons many women understand—she wants love and feels ugly and drank too much and made mistakes and all of that is part of her allure. She's not perfect, but she's powerful—she’s human.
People love Courtney because she is an icon—not due to her crazy antics, but because she has been an emboldening presence in the lives of so many women and girls. The real essence of Courtney is her impact, the storms she leaves in her wake, the gumption and defiance she so naturally inhabits and makes possible for others to possess. Because of Courtney Love, there are 22-year-olds who picked up guitars, 16-year-old girls in Ohio who learned about feminism by reading the word in a SPIN interview with Courtney, and women who don’t feel held back by society’s expectation of what it means to be a lady. Girls and women, including us, have been inspired to be more aggressive and to ask for more because of Love's example.
“I want to be the girl with the most cake,” she sings in “Doll Parts”. And who wouldn't want to be?
—Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
New York City
June 2006
posted by Mark W. Read at 5:31 PM
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