An insight

Love hurts.

Hello! I've been napping.

Putting the 'not' in 'noteworthy':

(1) Cynthia "Bruiser" McKinney lost her seat in Congress, to the delight of pacifists everywhere. And me.

(2) Matthew Pearl, in the jacket photo for his (excellent) new book The Poe Shadow, now looks really hot. I can't find the image online, alas.

(3) I read that Disney CEO Dick Cook axed production head Nina Jacobson a few weeks ago after she rang from the hospital delivery room to announce the birth of her third child. Despite some missteps, Jacobson certainly diversified the Mauschwitz development slate, greenlighting projects by the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson; her successor, in his first press announcement, declared that he wants "to make movies like The Pacifier." Ambitious. Talk about failing upwards.

(4) I want a pet leopard.

FOX News should be shot in the face

I'm not even going to link to this: "New York's highest court ruled Thursday that gay marriage is not allowed under state law," their website squawked today, after the State Supreme Court ruled 4-2 that (and I quote) "the constitution does not compel recognition" (my emphasis) of same-sex marriage. There's a fucking difference.

Flame on?

I have never burned a flag before, American or otherwise; but it looks as though I'd better get cracking. I'm really disappointed in John McCain for endorsing this measure -- or indeed any measure that would require constitutional revision. Yes, I know McCain was a POW. I also know that Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye (D) lost an arm in World War II and still opposes the amendment.

Absolutely pathetic, too, how the Republicans are fueling their midterm-election ramp-up with issues that range from trivial to non- -- gay marriage, flag-flameage, what have you -- while treating the Constitution as though it's a dry-erase board.

Another banner day for Duke athletics

How could J.J. be so stupid?

Rightly or wrongly -- wrongly, in fact -- I'm going to pin this on Duke athletic director Joe Alleva, who should have been fired many moons ago.

Give a hoot

My friend Randy Sue Coburn, who wrote the whip-smart screenplay for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, tomorrow publishes her second novel, Owl Island. It's the tale -- moody, evocative, richly textured -- of a middle-aged Puget Sound woman who must suddenly contend with whirlwind personal crises. Even though I've notably little in common with the protagonist, I find her and her story resonant.

What's that? Is there a group-sex scene? Yes, there is a group-sex scene.

Hail Satan

I don't read Maxim, and I can't say I intend to start, but yesterday's Girl of the Day posting was pretty amusing:

Girl of the Day (6.6.06 EDITION): SATAN

Age: Older than time

Hometown: Hades

Likes: Long walks on the beach, lakes of fire, evil, Matt Lauer

Dislikes: Gene Shalit (even Satan has her limits)

Bat out of hell: After feeding Eve an apple in the Garden of Eden and dooming mankind forever, Satan took a job at ABC News in 1979. Satan's bubbly personality and poor interviewing skills then made her a popular fixture on NBC's Today show ten years later. Soccer moms were going totally apeshit for Satan! Shortly thereafter, Satan vanquished foe Dan Rather to become the first solo female anchor of CBS Evening News. We wish Satan the best of luck in her new career!

Y kant poordani blog

He has been busy of late.

He also needs some new polo shirts.

And a tan.

And a nap.

If you can provide any/all, please get in touch. My information is scrawled on lavatory walls throughout the city.

Bulletin: Research suggests all gay men facially deformed

It was a mistake to register with the Internet Movie Database: As a member, I'm now able to read the user posts caboosed to every project and filmmaker profile. Yesterday, for example, I felt curious about teen_princess244's take on The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold -- teen_princess244 being not, I have concluded, actual adolescent royalty, but instead slumming Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern -- and within moments I found myself trudging through a thread that illustrated the twin Golden Rules of IMDb forums: Every single exchange leads to an argument, and every actor's sexuality is suspect. (As it should be.)

This particular debate swirled around the bedroom preferences of a certain television star who (and I have this on several authorities... ah, but now I sound like an IMDb poster) apparently trafficked regularly in same-sex circles before his recent breakout success. "He IS gay, right?" wondered Allie_Everwood; Allie, an Australian male, ranks Gilmore Girls and The OC among his favorite programs, and has previously initiated incisive discussions of An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, something called The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and the careers of new Superman Brandon Routh ("Why do people think he's gay?"), Mean Girls' Jonathan Bennett ("Hmm gay or not"), a person named David Gallagher ("I wish he was gay"), Matt LeBlanc ("Gaaaaay???"), Jake Gyllenhaal ("Gaaaaay!!!"), and Sergei Parajanov ("THE seminal Soviet geopolitical allegorist... was he gay?"). I would never question the unimpeachable gaydar of such a person, and am prepared to swallow wholesale the bold theory he advances a few postings later:

"Gay guys can be good looking, but slightly... well, not DEFORMED, but slightly peculiar shaped in a certain part of their face. That's the clue."

In Allie's professional estimation, the nose of the actor in question is "odd on an angle" (sic). Gotcha, fags-a-lot! All the macho posturing in the world can't hide that homo-schnoz!

On a personal note, I guess this explains my plus-sized jaw.

Mouse defective

In my zeal for all things Conan Doyle I recently watched Disney's alleged classic The Great Mouse Detective.

It was not very good. I felt bored.

Mice can't really talk.

...This is reading like a dimwit child's book report.

Dream machine

I rejoiced and hummed when Jamba Juice opened a new venue directly across the street back in January. It wasn't that I'd minded the five-minute walk to their location in Columbus Circle; I didn't even care about the throngs of diners mobbing the adjacent restaurant. No, what drove me up the wall about the old locale was Wink.

"Welcome to Jamba Juice! Great big day, isn't it?" Wink would sing, hair flaming beneath his cap, whenever I or anyone approached. Possibly he did this on his own, too.

"Sweet choice!" he'd commend me after I sucked up my pride and requested an Orange Dream Machine by its unfortunate name.

"Thanks a lot -- you've been awesome!" he always cheered as I slunk away. (This reminded me of my college secretary at Oxford, who on occasion asked me to sign and return documents to her; every time I did so, she'd beam, "Great job, Daniel!" ...Not that I object to positive feedback.)

I like happy people. Several of my friends are positive joyboys. Wink, though, made me uncomfortable -- and I wasn't alone: "I knew you were cool the second you walked in!" he once assured a timid Filipino woman while she and I awaited our delightful blended treats.

"Wow," she murmured to me. "That's pretty out there."

I snorted. "Tell me about it. You're totally lame."

As weeks passed, I found myself actively dreading my encounters with Wink, who evidently never left the shop; twelve noon, two o'clock, four-thirty -- there he was, eyes acid-bright, accepting orders from customers and asking, per store policy, for their first names. I began inventing aliases. "Alex," I might say, or "Charlie." Or, when feeling more exotic, "Ebony." It got to the point where I filled out a patron-response card: "Wink terrifies me," I wrote, in the shaky penmanship of the deeply afraid. "No more Wink, please." I stopped short of submitting this, of course, but I did keep it on my person in case Wink should ever attack me and leave me for dead.

And then -- O glorious day! -- the providential news: Jamba Juice had set up shop just down the block. "Hooray!" I sang. "No more Winking!" I rushed to the new store and ordered a power-sized Coldbuster. Wink had once prepared this same drink for me; "Little something for your sniffles!" he laughed, and I wanted to cough up blood.

The months since have passed in a creamy, frosty haze, during which time I've diversified my repertoire, sampling everything from Razz-ma-Tazz (sweet and fruity) to Açaí Blast (hippies only) to Mangos! Mangos! Mangos! (a mistake, as I am allergic to mangos). I have also tried all available nutritional supplements, including Protein, Immunity Boost, and Femme. "What about Homme?" I asked my barrista, who was blessed with the non-onomatopoeic name of Sarah.

"What?"

"Never mind. Fill 'er up!"

Yes, it's been a good spell. This Jamba Juice has begun to feel like home, or graduate school: No one knows my name, and they're principally interested in shunting me out the door.

And then, yesterday, I walked in around one-fifteen, approached the counter, shook my headphones from my misaligned ears, and opened my mouth to speak.

"Hey there, superstar! Welcome to Jamba Juice!"

Not my words. No: There, standing before me, day-glo eyes trained on mine, was Wink.

"It can't be," I whispered.

"Beat that heat with a frozen treat?" he suggested, as though I were there for the conversation.

"No..." I gasped. "No..."

"Hey, howja like to try our new Grape Escape? All-fruit, all-delish!"

"You're dead," I told him. "I killed you."

"And it's seedless!" Wink promised.

Part of me withered inside; I shed a bit of my soul. Yet somehow I made it through; somehow I agreed to a Grape Escape; somehow I mumbled "Fernando" when asked for my name; and, styrofoam cup in hand, I somehow staggered to the door.

"Vitamin C-ya-later!" Wink called.

"Eat bleach and die," I somehow did not answer.

So did the other Jamba Juice shutter up? Does Wink rotate through the various franchises, spreading good cheer and shitting rainbows where'er he wanders? And why does he excite such venom in me? Many customers, I've noticed, seem to enjoy his Ned Flanders vocabulary and musical-theater diction. Many customers also seem to enjoy a certain toxic radish-and-onion beverage that looks like clotted dwarf blood.

I don't know what to do. I need my Jamba Juice, of course, but I'd rather not have to roam another half-mile for a fix. I wonder whether I can ask the manager for Wink's schedule.

Cursed

"[Patrick Kennedy's] car crash near the Capitol may just be the latest installment of what some consider to be the curse over the Kennedy family," says ABC News. Give me a break, says I. The Kennedys' curse is that they're a pack of irresponsible idiots. Getting plastered and installing yourself behind the wheel isn't bad fortune, it's piss-poor judgment; and trying to represent human failing as ill-starred destiny (or whatever) amounts to crude buck-passage.

More from the ABC report: "Patrick Kennedy has spent time in drug rehab.... During his career, he has had to answer questions about personal incidents. In 2000, he was captured on a surveillance camera shoving a female airport security guard. No charges were filed against Kennedy, and he apologized for 'being rude.' The guard's lawsuit was settled out of court. In 2001, the Coast Guard was called after an argument with his girlfriend on a yacht. The woman reported he had been drinking. Kennedy also has been accused by two marina owners of chartering boats and returning them with damage -- sometimes significant."

Man, he's 'unlucky.' I suppose we should be grateful that there wasn't a dead woman in the passenger seat for once.

Still got it!

Pursuant to yesterday's post on Revolution Studios, I just came across the following synopsis: "Shawn Wayans plays a midget bank robber who poses as an infant in order to infiltrate the home of wannabe parents."

Wait, it gets better: "Hijinks ensue when he finds himself developing a taste for breast milk, fending off rectal thermometers, and falling in lust with his adoptive 'mother'!"

Revolution Studios, of course. The project is called Little Man, and already I know it is better than Crash.

Evolution

Some years ago I developed a sixth sense: I could read about a given film and instantly identify it as a Revolution Studios project.

"Tommy Lee Jones guards a squad of federal-witness cheerleaders!" Revolution.

"Eddie Murphy operates a day-care center!" Revolution.

"Adam Sandler controls the universe with a magical remote control!" Revolution.

"Two Wayans brothers pose as Caucasian women!" Revolution.

The company, which specialized in so-called high-concept comedies that more than anything evinced Hollywood's creative bankruptcy, was the production shingle of former Disney chair Joe Roth, who also assumed directing duties for America's Sweethearts ("Married movie stars secretly despise each other!") and Christmas with the Kranks ("Suburban community forces agnostics to celebrate Christian ritual!"). According to an article in today's New York Times, Roth and his Revolution crew originally set out to produce "quality movies with modest budgets." Their maiden release featured a scene in which a prissy surgeon unwittingly eats a testicle.

And now? The Revolution is over. The company couldn't survive Gigli (could anyone?), or XXX: State of the Union, or the direct-to-video release Lil' Pimp, starring the vocal talents of Danny Bonaduce as a person named Ugly Midget (I am not making this up). Happily, the company's current development slate will remain intact, priming audiences everywhere for a feature adaptation of Knight Rider and the much-anticipated sequels to Are We There Yet? and Daddy Day Care.

And at the end of the day, I bet Joe Roth is still worth tens if not hundreds of millions.

I don't understand the universe.

It's an homage!

Another one bites the dust. Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore whose much-hyped debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life recently charted on the New York Times extended bestseller list, issued a statement this afternoon: "Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel and passages in these books" -- these last being Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, two bestselling chick-lit novels by Megan McCafferty. One wonders, of course, how the author could be surprised to learn she's a plagiarist; still, Viswanathan apologizes "to any who feel they have been misled by these unintentional errors on my part."

Unintentional. Hmm. Well, by total accident, I have excerpted these passages from The Harvard Crimson:


‘YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE’

From page 6 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart. Guess which one I got. You’ll see where it’s gotten me.”

From page 39 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty. I had long resigned myself to category one, and as long as it got me to Harvard, I was happy. Except, it hadn’t gotten me to Harvard. Clearly, it was time to switch to category two.”


‘I NEEDED IN A BEST FRIEND’

From page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes."

From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla’s glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.”


‘170 SPECIALTY SHOPS LATER’

From page 237 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done.”

From page 51 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys….”


‘INVADING MY PERSONAL SPACE’

From page 213 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go.”

From page 175 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Sean stood up and stepped toward me, ostensibly to show me the book. He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the book toward me.”


'TO BUY DIET COKES FROM'

From page 67 of McCafferty's second novel: "...but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon."

From page 46 of Viswanathan's novel: "In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields."


When I first learned of all this -- before I compared the passages above, I mean -- I didn't think much of it: I too have certainly "internalized" the syntax and rhythms of certain authors via repeated exposure; and I'm sure there's a standard vocabulary for a genre like young-adult fiction. The excerpts, however, shoot those theories to hell. Viswanathan has argued that "the central stories of my book and [McCafferty's] are completely different," yet as noted in the Times, "Ms. McCafferty's books... are, like Ms. Viswanathan's, about a young woman from New Jersey trying to get into an Ivy League college -- in her case, Columbia. ...Like the heroine of Opal, Ms. McCafferty's character, Jessica Darling, visits the campus, strives to earn good grades to get in and makes a triumphant high school graduation speech. And the borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar." (A more recent Publishers Weekly article ups that figure to forty-five.)

Meanwhile, McCafferty's publisher Random House, already a 2006 headline mainstay in the wake of the James Frey and Dan Brown controversies, has filed a formal complaint with Little, Brown. Gloves are off.

It'll be interesting to see whether this scuppers Viswanathan's DreamWorks deal; movie projects based on books by Frey and J.T. Leroy stalled earlier this year, but those circumstances were somewhat more outrageous.

Crazy kids!

UPDATE: Girl doesn't know when to quit! Seems Viswanathan (still maintaining, as of this writing, that her plagiarism was unintentional) also internalized passages from Rushdie (who's got no sympathy), Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, and Sophie Kinsella.

Please stop talking

The fellow behind me is complaining about Brokeback Mountain.

"It was okay," he says, authoritatively. "It was only as good as it was because it's about, you know, gay cowboys."

This is obscenely stupid. It is like saying that Chill Factor was only as bad as it was because it's about, you know, an ice-cream salesman who stores a heat-sensitive explosive device in his cooler.

But maybe this guy's onto something. I think we can all agree that Chill Factor would have been vastly improved had it concerned gay cowboys.

"The sexiest thing you ever did see"

Yesterday I watched The Third Man for the eleventy billionth time... and across the Atlantic, Alida Valli was dying of as-yet undisclosed causes. This has happened before: A month after my high school graduation, I rented Out of the Past; that same night, Robert Mitchum succumbed to lung cancer. I wonder if I should slide a Tara Reid movie into my DVD player and hope for the best.

Lordy, though -- Valli was beautiful. According to IMDb.com, her marriage to surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo "dissolved amid a 1954 drug, sex and murder scandal that involved her former husband and his mistress, [resulting in] a public outbreak that nearly ruined her career." I've never heard anything further about this.

Oklahoma

Kevin Underwood, the Oklahoma grocery stockboy responsible for the murder of ten-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin, maintained a blog. It's formatted just like this one -- we selected the same Blogger template, he and I, though Underwood began documenting his thoughts, which range from the mundane to the deranged, over three years ago -- and its author describes himself in his profile as "single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy."

I know I'm going to track this case, if only because much of my graduate research has concerned the development of psychopathy in the undersexed postadolescent male. Underwood is of course a prime specimen; in his blog, he repeatedly cites his frustrated sex life, and even hazards a theory or two himself:

"I mean it, I really need a girlfriend. It's not just depressing anymore, it's actually starting to have a negative effect on my mental state I think. For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird. If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be."

The details of his crime are indeed particularly gruesome: In the same apartment where Underwood stashed the asphyxiated, nearly decapitated body of his neighbor, investigators discovered hacksaws, meat tenderizer, and barbecue skewers. Underwood admitted he intended to cannibalize the child. This is a man without a single misdemeanor to his name, and in one fell swoop he's graduated to Dahmerdom.

But I expect it's the blog that will mark this as a landmark case for criminologists and criminal psychologists. Dahmer didn't commit his thoughts to paper; there's no chronicle of Bundy's private neuroses; the Hillside Stranglers never collaborated on a journal; yet here we've got a provocative and detailed record of a psychopathic mind, authored by the subject himself (he even posted a few words the day after his victim disappeared, linking to a Discovery Channel article). Tracts will be excerpted in textbooks. It's fascinating.

Horrifying, too -- all, all horrifying. That poor little girl.

Back in blāK

Coca-Cola BlāK [sic] -- "a soda that blends Coke, natural flavors, and coffee essence. Just like your garbage disposal" (per Tina Fey; even Saturday Night Live couldn't miss with this) -- premiered in France two years ago. Inauspicious beginnings. Now, like hordes of immigrants, bottles of the stuff, which the manufacturer describes as an "innovative carbonated fusion beverage" (catchy!), have breached our virgin shores. Why Coke insists on tinkering with its formula -- despite the graduated failures of Coke Zero, New Coke, and Coke II -- is anyone's guess.

I don't know what's worse about Blāk: the concept or the packaging. Can't wait for the caffeine-free version, though.

Waughsome!

I love Back Bay's Evelyn Waugh reissues. They're so natty. At one point, I owned most of these, but as I shuttled between Durham and Oxford and New York and Nome*, my library was gradually depleted.

Man, I'm boring.


Decline and Fall, 1928


Vile Bodies, 1930


Black Mischief, 1932


A Handful of Dust, 1934


Scoop, 1938


Put Out More Flags, 1942


Brideshead Revisited, 1945


The Loved One, 1948


Men at Arms, 1952


Officers and Gentlemen, 1955

*not true

Attackutani

If you ask me, Ben Yagoda could've wielded a sharper scalpel in his vivisection of abjectly useless New York Times Book Review critic Michiko Kakutani; nowhere, for example, does he describe her as "abjectly useless." (I got your back, Yago!) He's patient, almost plodding, in his description -- not dismissal -- of Kakutani as "a profoundly uninteresting critic," and even manages to acknowledge her intellect ("estimable") and work ethic.

Still, this is an incisive and necessary critique of a profoundly uninspired woman whose "main weakness," Yagoda contends, "is her evaluation fixation.... Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from [Pauline Kael] and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing." He liberally excerpts her reviews as "evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear," observing that her "prose is even flatter when it praises than when it buries," then finally concludes that she "appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do."

To this I would add that Kakutani is elsewhere crucially deficient: She doesn't seem to even like books, or reading. Now consider that unabashed sentimentalist Roger Ebert, who pronounced Crash and Monster's Ball the best films of their respective years, and whose standards have sunk like a limbo stick over the past decade (in recent months, She's the Man, Find Me Guilty, and not one but two Paul Walker titles all erected his thumb). I usually disagree with Ebert; yet his criticism and commentary, which often highlight the virtues of otherwise negligible projects, almost invariably communicate a real affection for movies, moviemaking, and the moviegoing experience. The man's work is a sustained celebration of film.

Kakutani, by contrast, reminds me of English classmates and students I've known throughout my school years -- studious, serious, altogether precision-focused on The Final Verdict... and as such completely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading. That sounds like flower-child panegyric, but shouldn't literature be enjoyable? Not, apparently, for Kakutani, who often seems to actually despise the printed word; on her better days, she's simply puzzled by it. Her own writing is inert and frequently bitter.

It is of course perfectly fine not to enjoy something -- I myself dislike video games. I wisely decided against becoming a video-game critic. This is where Michiko K. and I differ in our approach.

There's the rub

My semi-friend Dominic manages a nifty triple-tiered trick. He seems, at first acquaintance, to be ruthless, ambitious, and distinctly amoral; but if you scratch the surface, you'll discover a gold-hearted softie who puts up a tough front. Beneath that, however, he's actually ruthless, ambitious, and distinctly amoral, and his heart is merely a noxious vortex plated in gold. Think of him as you would the earth's geosphere: crust, mantle, core. I give you Dominic.

"My ambition in life is to commit a white-collar crime and then go to prison for it," he told me recently.

"Why don't you just stop after committing the white-collar crime?" I asked, knowing there was no use trying to talk him out of Phase I.

"No. I want everyone to know I got away with it."

I detected a flaw in his logic. "But if you're sent to prison, you won't have gotten away with it. You'll have been caught and convicted," I added.

Within his head the machinery ground. "Fuck."

"Sorry."

"So how," huffed Dominic, "am I supposed to get away with a highly publicized white-collar crime?"

I told him I thought it was one of those abiding mysteries. "Like 'Is there a God?' and 'How can I be happy?' -- that sort of thing."

"But I know how I can be happy. All I have to do is get away with a highly publicized white-collar crime."

"A classic dilemma."

Dominic stewed.

"I'm just kidding about all this," he assured me after a few minutes. "I'm a sweet boy."

"Except you're really not."

"Yeah," he sighed, "I know."

Like a tree-hugger, but with children

Doesn't accused child-hugger and Homeland Security spokesman Brian J. Doyle kinda sorta resemble a certain primate several rungs up the political ladder? My heart juddered when I saw this photo beside the caption "Sex Sting."

But it was Doyle, not the Commander-in-Chief, putting the Ho in Homeland this evening, as he engaged in graphic online discourse with a 14-year-old girl who turned out to be -- this so crazy -- a Florida Computer Crimes detective. I hate when that happens.

Authorities just released a transcription of their fateful chat:

DHSDaddy: Hey, little lady.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: hi!!!! im not a cop!!!!

DHSDaddy: Kewl.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: so if u r looking for cop sex dont look here!!!!!! lol!!!!!

DHSDaddy: Aight.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: talk dirty 2 me!!!!

DHSDaddy: What do you like to hear?

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: hot stuff!!!!

DHSDaddy: How'd you like a mild massage?

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: ok fine but say stuff that could be used against you in a court of law!!!!!

DHSDaddy: I will smooch your cheeks in a respectful manner all night long.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: something more incriminating!!!!! lol!!!!!

DHSDaddy: Can't wait to undress you... with my eyes.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: right lets pretend im a cop EVEN THO IM TOTALLY NOT LOL LOL LOL!!!!! :) :) :p what would u NOT want 2 say 2 me???

DHSDaddy: Let's totally hold hands.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: dude u r so not getting me off

DHSDaddy: Wait... you're -- you are a cop, aren't you? This is a set-up! A sting!

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP:

DHSDaddy: Aha, just kidding. Get your pubescent ass over here and gargle my balls, missy.

I ♥ Republican hijinks!

All your basic are belong to us

"One for Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," said my friend Nate, loudly.

"One for Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," said my friend Nancy, proudly.

"Uh -- same," I mumbled.

The cashier frowned and shook her head at me. We both knew I was a coward. And a traitor, to boot -- for weeks the three of us had been looking forward to BI2RA, reciting its name in full even after the subtitle was dropped from the final cut; when The Los Angeles Times, among other sources, likened the film to Showgirls, there was much rejoicing in our camp. I should have held my held high. I should have divorced my legs. I am a hypocrite.

"Don't be ashamed," Nate advised me as we entered the theater.

"Too late," I told him.

As it turns out, I was early. BI2RA is awful: dank, daft, and, though not without camp value, pretty dreary. Director Michael Caton-Jones also committed Doc Hollywood, so he is obviously the man to helm a lurid erotic thriller. The screenwriters, a pair of husband-and-wife sadists with the whimsical names of Leora Barish and Henry Bean, cannot between them devise a single memorable double entendre for their leading lady -- they stall at that first entendre. "Is this where we're gonna do it?" Stone asks upon entering a therapist's office. And later: "Come with me," she beckons an acquaintance. "You'll enjoy it." It's just witless. When someone offers her a chair, you expect her to answer, "I'd rather stand, because my crotch is sopping wet."

Considering how she micromanaged the production of BI2RA -- filing a $100-million lawsuit against the filmmakers while the project languished in turnaround; nixing a litany of prospective leading men; demanding rewrite upon rewrite -- I was surprised that Stone, as the formerly bisexual novelist Catherine Tramell, doesn't even try; it's an ignoble failure, a joyless sneer of a performance, inert as the actress' bebotoxed face. Her sparring partner, one David Morrissey, was unknown to me before I saw the movie, and remains unknown to me afterwards. He and Stone share the sexual chemistry of Tom Cruise and a woman.

Let it be said, in fairness, that the graceful Charlotte Rampling, playing a Hungarian psychologist who at one point is glimpsed listening to an audiobook entitled Hungarian for Beginners, manages to emerge unscathed. The same almost goes for David Thewlis, until he (very deliberately) throws his final scene, death-rattle shivering in his throat as he slumps against a door. "You cunt," he rasps. I think he was talking to Morrissey, actually.

I can't recommend Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, but I'm eager to tout the sequel we've envisioned: Basic Instinct 3: Risk Aversion. It's mostly octogenarian Sharon Stone huddled in a corner, conspicuously not having kinky sex.

Crash

Another week, another music video starring my Anberlin friend, this time a collision-themed film for Sanctus Real's "I'm Not Alright," shot on a desolate stretch of California highway.

It's a nuclear show

"Elevator Love Letter," by the Canadian electronic-indie band Stars, is the most affecting pop song I've heard in months -- sad, almost bleak, yet uptempo and fizzing with synthesizer reverb. (Per the Splendid album review: "'Elevator Love Letter' bounces along with a driven punch, dreamy pop hooks rubbing softly against guitar-laden sparkle and snappy beat programming.") It's the heterosexual version of Saint Etienne's "He's on the Phone," another singalong ode to doomed yuppie romance, and the only disco anthem that gets me misty-eyed; both songs evoke that almost exquisite melancholy of feeling lonely in the city.

I think I find these all-is-lost ditties more engaging when they're (bitter)sweetened by studio sheen. Maybe I identify too much with my inner lovelorn British Commonwealth lass. Sometimes she's not so inner, actually.

Anyway, the song available on iTunes, along with the rest of Heart. Good stuff. The Delgados would kill to record a track this melanchoric. (...I just coined that term! Watch out, Dr. Johnson!)

Which brings us to an interesting... well, I hesitate to say "phenomenon"; call it a trend: home-made music videos. YouTube is teeming with amateur versions of everything from
Madonna to OK Go to 50 Cent; while some of these seem like just-for-fun projects, and others are geared as parodies, a sizable percentage have been made in total earnest. This "Elevator Love Letter" enactment, for example. It's kind of sweet.

Inspiring, too. I want to star in "My Humps." I wish I had a camcorder.

Yuck

Grotesquerie in literature is well and good -- I wish, I wish I could find Mervyn Peake in hardcover -- but Martin Amis frequently wallows too damn deep: Witness Dead Babies, a repellent book (with a repellent title) about repellent characters doing repellent things. Grand, I say. So now consider this passage, in which the "tufted" American Marvell Buzhardt catalogues the options at a local restaurant:

"You can have cunt cubes in your drinks. And not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got... yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles -- oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place."

The weird thing is, he's describing the Olive Garden.

What the hell is this? It's not clever, it's not snappy, it's not plausible. It's just foul. Juvenile, even (Amis published the novel in his mid-twenties). I hope I'm not now permanently prejudiced against popsicles. Something like that happened when I saw Deliverance; you know how Burt Reynolds gashes his leg in that one scene and blanched muscle bubbles from the wound? That signaled the end of cottage cheese for me.

I think it'd be interesting to read Evelyn Waugh and Amis fils in succession. The first is so acutely uncomfortable in his depictions of sex and private anatomy (there's a line in Brideshead Revisited about "the narrow conveyance of her loins"), while the latter never met a maneuver or a vulva he couldn't render in glistening detail -- yet only eight years separated Waugh's death and Amis' Rachel Papers. Discuss.

Annyong!

Many quotations are not funny out of context. I don't care. Because Arrested Development hurtles forward at such a rapid clip, I can only catch every third line of dialogue; most of these are worth memorizing:

- "I'm a failure. I can't even fake the death of a stripper."

- "Tobias had snuck into the costume closet and disguised himself as an English nanny in an attempt to see his daughter and prove to his wife he had what it took to become a successful actor. It was the exact plot of the movie Mrs. Doubtfire."

- "I have Pop-Pop in the attic."

- "Gob was getting the feeling he could not return a completely frozen dead dove to a pet store and get the full refund the felt he was entitled to."

- "Say goodbye to these!"

- "Why won't you fuck me?"

- "Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over? An analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist."

- "He only talks to her because he thinks she has a penis."

- "Hanukkah can be spelled so many ways! Oh, God!"

- "Your husband is dating Kitty, the whore."

- "Annyong!"

If you're able to identify 70% or more of these, please (as Maeby would say) marry me.

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

"If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow neo-Nazis into their parade? If African-Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?"

These are the musings of the raging o'bigot who organized New York's Saint Patrick's Day Parade, which for the sixteenth straight year explicitly excluded a gay group. I for one had no idea that homosexuals are to Irish nationalism what the KKK is to African-Americans.

Complaints of vi-o-lins

Considering how I've inveighed against music videos, I sure do seem to post about them often enough.

Good excuse this time, though: A friend of mine stars in the video for Anberlin's hit single "Paperthin Hymn," which I encourage you to watch.

Hello, stranger

This may be more information about Poor Daniel than you require, but I have had remarkably little -- or, rather, remarkably unvaried -- sexual experience in my quarter-odd-century. Perhaps this is because I was never particularly girl-crazy; perhaps it's because I only started seeing guys at age twenty-one; perhaps it's my perpetual raging syphilis. Despite living in England for years, I somehow managed to avoid contact with horny foreigners of almost every strain -- this in stark contrast to, for example, my friend Peter, whose list of conquests reads like a UN delegation, or my friend Lily, with her catholicity of Soviet Bloc bedfellows.

…Actually, I lied: I was inducted into the heady (leave it) world of homo-dating in the spring of 2000, at age twenty, during my junior year abroad in England. Thing is -- things are, if you will -- (a) I didn't know I was gay; (b) I didn't know he was gay; (c) he didn't know he was gay; (d) neither of us knew it was a date. Well, I didn't, at any rate. Can't a couple of casual male friends enjoy a candlelit dinner in Soho before trekking over to Mamma Mia for an evening of choreographed ABBA?

My date's name was, and in fact remains, Geoffrey, complete with stylish G and mini-spare-tire o. This should have tipped me off; by my count, Geoffrey is the seventh-gayest name in all of masculine nomenclature, behind Sebastian, Boniface, Tristan, Kevin Spacey, Jayson, and Faggot. Except this Geoffrey -- my Geoffrey -- was not yet quite worthy of his moniker. Yes, he owned a pair of spats, but he couldn't dance. And while his DVD collection included Ice Castles and several Patrick Swayze flicks (more on that anon), he'd never heard of Gore Vidal; I learned as much on the bus ride back to Oxford, where we said good night and parted, each humming "Under Attack."

I mention all this because last night I encountered Geoffrey in one of New York's filthier gay establishments. I'm not much for The Scene -- it'd been several months since my last circuit tour, in fact -- and so am usually able to wallflower in total anonymity; you can imagine my surprise on hearing my (full) name brayed across the gridlocked Barracuda barroom.

"Hello, stranger!" Geoffrey clucked, flinging his arms around me. I flinched, because I don't, as a rule, really like hugging, unless I'm exceptionally fond of the hugger/huggee, and because his skin was glossy with Joop.

"Let me see you!" he demanded. We exchanged appraising glances. I've been less heinous, I know; Geoffrey, by contrast, looked better than I remembered: He was still pale and elongated, still a bit peaky, and he had bullied his hair into an unconvincing fauxhawk, but on the whole he seemed somehow more relaxed, more confident. Maybe it was his arms, which were toned, or his tank top, which read SLUT. I fidgeted and tugged on my tie.

As I refilled my ice water, he filled me in on his postgraduate years -- law school, court clerkship, midtown firm -- and politely inquired after my own. And then, having jammed his number into my cell phone, Geoffrey vanished into the crowd. I located my friend Tom and made for the exit.

Geoffrey. Huh. Six years now.

I suppose I find it interesting that neither of us went the "Isn't this a surprise!" (or "This really isn't a surprise") route, even when we spoke of our West End outing; yet I kind of wish we had done so -- I'd have been interested to hear about his experiences, his mistakes, his boyfriends. I guess I didn't want him to backboard the questions onto me. Poor Daniel is a private creature.

Still, he seems happy, and I'm glad for that.

And why did I want to discuss Dirty Dancing? Oh, right: the Sittenfeld. According to the critical hosannas packed like cigarettes into the first few pages of her overlong, undergood boarding-school opus Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld is a millennial Salinger (!), a latter-day Plath (?). A few crucial distinctions: (1) Salinger and Plath can/could, you know, write; (2) neither of them ever penned pieces for Salon or Jossip on Dirty Dancing ("best girl movie ever!"; I wonder if Geoffrey agrees) and Hollywood ephemeralia -- cf. "Divorce on the D-list," an article in which Sittenfeld laments the demise of Kathy Griffin's union. She first discovered Griffin while pacing the treadmill at the gym; on dismounting, her legs "felt weird and bouncy." Sylvia Plath, incidentally, authored a famous poem called "Metaphors," in which the phrase "weird and bouncy" appears not once.

Sittenfeld's next book opens with a meticulous, loving description of Julia Roberts' aborted 1991 wedding -- the cake, the flowers, the dreamy would-be groom (Kiefer Sutherland). This woman should be writing for In Touch.

I did, however, recently have the pleasure of discussing the matter with a certain former editor for the New York Times Book Review, who, on learning that Prep had been anointed one of the Times' Ten Best Books of 2005, rang up a certain not-so-former editor and asked (ahem), "Are you fucking shitting me?"

Gather round

One of my British friends, whom I shall call Tumnus, recently described a certain vocabulary-deficient Canadian pop musician as a "song-cow." Song-cow -- what a glorious notion! It could rival the selkie. It could trump the jackalope. I envision a mythic beast running wild over the twilit moors, graceful and diaphanous in the half-light, filaments of bovine melody trailing in its wake. "Hush, children!" Gran Myfanwy would murmur, her milky eyes a-gleam. "'Tis the song-cow!"

"What is a song-cow, Gran?" asked little Flora, the goldilocked younger child, who would later die of scurvy.

"Aye, aye, little one -- the song-cow, yes, 'tis. Shiver and shriek."

"But what is it, Gran?" This was Miles, Flora's cousin, son, daughter, and godfather's lover. Welsh families are complicated.

"Shiver and shriek, lad, shiver and shriek!"

"Ach," cried Flora, "Gran Myfanwy's touched with the moon-fever. Let's put her in a home."

Her brother punched her shoulder. Flora vomited in his ear.

"You've no right to make a pig's dangly of me," argued she, invoking a quaint colloquialism.

"Aye, I do," Miles answered. "For I'm your mother and uncle as well as your son and godfather's lover. Watch your tongue; I'll bide no deny."

"I wonder if anyone will notice that you're plagiarizing Twelfth Night."

"Aye, aye; I hope not."

"The song-cow," said Gran Myfanwy, "is a numinous creature that haunts the hills of Wales, searching the countryside for its calf."

"Ooh," chorused the children.

"It lives in the mists and the fogs."

"Aah," chorused the children. "Can 'fog' be pluralized?" added Miles.

"The song-cow issues a delicate tune from betwixt its mottled lips," their grandmother explained. "It is the siren of the moors."

"I thought cows said 'moo,'" said Flora. "There was that Jane Smiley novel."

Gran Myfanwy wagged her head in every direction. "Aye, aye; nay, nay: The song-cow sings, my lass -- like all the beings of the vapor. It runs with the song-sheep...

...and the song-horse...

...and the song-mastodons...

...and the song-ostrich...

...and the song-pterodactyl...

...and the fearsome song-Nepalese urchins, who eat their own kind...

...and the rare song-Tom Welling, star of the WB's Smallville and the Sony release The Fog."

"What a ruddy pack of mist-dwellers!" exclaimed Miles, whose name had been anglicized a few years earlier. His real name was Wnyllgrpabnbnbylyylllwelly.

"How I love sheep and Nepalese urchins!" cried Flora, whose real name was Essence. She and Miles danced a jig. It looked kind of gay, to be honest.

"It's magical!"

"It's charmant!"

"Long live the song-cow!"

"Long live all creatures of the fogs!"

Flora dropped dead of scurvy.

"Well," said Miles, inspecting her luminous corpse, "we seem to have drifted rather far from the subject at hand."

"Aye, aye," Gran Myfanwy agreed.

And then from without, worrying the curtains, sweetening the air, came the most silken and silvery sound they had ever heard. Gran Myfanwy and Miles were rooted to the spot. They could barely breathe. They both sprouted erections.

"Is that..." Miles gasped.

"It is, boy, it is." His grandmother shook her head, and her thick braids licked the floor. "The song-cow."


QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

(1) Would you like to be a song-cow? Why or why not? Answer in two words or less.

(2) What would you name your song-cow? I would name mine Gloria, but you don't have to. Gloria's a pretty good name, though.

(3) How bad was Michael Cunningham's last novel? Choose either "bad" or "revoke his Pulitzer."

Isn't it ironic?

Irony ('I-r&-nE, n.): Three hours after George Clooney hailed Hollywood's progressive spirit from the Oscar podium, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarded Crash Best Picture honors, thumbing its nose at the incalculably superior Brokeback Mountain. Mighty progressive indeed, recognizing a movie that retreads the blunt can't-we-all-just-get-along exhortations of Grand Canyon while turning a blind eye -- well, cataracted, at any rate; Brokeback did scoop the Director and Adapted Screenplay trophies -- to the instantly iconic (but fatally gay!) Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

Crash is the most facile, hackneyed, contrived, self-important, dimwitted movie in many a moon, an indigo melodrama that artlessly splices nine or ten LA-set vignettes illustrative of the movie's noble but effectively worthless central tenet -- namely, everyone's a little bit racist sometimes. (This same idea, as you may know, was communicated verbatim with much more brevity, insight, and melody in Avenue Q. The stars of that show are day-glo puppets; the stars of Crash are Sandra Bullock and Ryan Phillippe. No points for guessing which cast is more expressive.) Irony deux: On an evening when the Academy presented Robert Altman with a lifetime-achievement statue, they also saw fit to demonstrate how far their industry has fallen since Altman's heyday by lauding a movie that bears some of the director's hallmarks -- braided narratives, torrents of dialogue (lived-in and voluble, in Altman; didactic and plodding here) -- but none of his intelligence or nuance. In fact, Crash and nuance do not occupy the same dimension. This is the movie equivalent of a primary-color fingerpainting. (I loved, though, how director-producer-screenwriter Paul Haggis, in accepting the prize for Original Screenplay, acknowledged Brecht -- give me a break -- and likened his own work to a hammer. I heard that, pal.)

It's almost too bad, because the project's history is appealing: Haggis and his crew produced the film independently, recruiting a roster of heavyweight Hollywood talent at bargain rates, and ultimately steered their release to healthy commercial returns. This, as critics nationwide have noted, parallels to an eerie degree the storied production of my 1986 stage play Headless Barbie, which I wrote at the green age of six. A parable about the dangers of being both headless and Barbie, the show was to have revolutionized the way we think about the sans-noggined in society and revitalized the moribund genre of decapitated-doll drama; and thanks to my cast, which featured several talented players on suspect loan from my sister Mason's Malibu Dreamhouse, we packed the garage at 55 Whitehall Boulevard. Trouble is, like Crash, Headless Barbie just wasn't any good. At all.

AMPAS, of course, is not really praising Crash in its decision, but insulting Brokeback. (Irony trois: A movie that foams at the mouth in its indictment of bigotry has now become the Academy bigots' weapon of choice.) And this shouldn't surprise: For more than a month, reports from the trenches hinted that Hollywood -- a place where everyone from Tom Cruise to Barry Diller has shuttered himself within the closet; a homophobic (and antisemitic) town governed by gays (and Jews) -- might shy from heralding Ang Lee's same-sex-themed project; instead, some pundits predicted, voters would opt for a film as self-congratulatory and false as the motion-picture industry itself, a film that says a great deal but tells us absolutely nothing (in a style so overwrought it verges on camp -- look at Crash slightly askance, and it's a parody). This movie does not, despite Haggis' assertions to the contrary, break any rules; it is not, whatever else it may be, controversial; it skirts no edges. Exposing the homo-subtext beneath Western iconology -- that's rule-breaking; that's controversy. Fairly explicit gay sex: edgy. Manipulative declamations on the state of racial affairs in the United States? Safe and pat, tried and tired.

I know this doesn't really matter... much. Bragging rights, mostly; and within a month, Crash will be forgotten, thereafter referenced only as one of those head-scratching Oscar-night missteps on par with The Greatest Show on Earth or the thematically similar Driving Miss Daisy. Brokeback, on the other hand, is landmark, immortal, one for the ages, and will endure as such. It's just tough to believe, or accept, that a community of filmmakers could pretend they don't know this -- or, worse still, deliberately flout it. And there's no denying that movies, more than literature or journalism or even politics, exert control over and inform American culture; so I fear that this event -- that sounds a bit dramatic; let's call it an incident -- will be (mis?)construed as a repudiation of homosexuality.

At the end of the day, it's a stupid award -- a banal phenomenon, as Jodie Foster put it -- that much more devalued by this sad, regressive act of highway robbery. Now more than ever, anyone who cites Oscar voters as a collective barometer of taste or sound judgment should be, in the words of Jackie Flynn Clarke, shot in the face.

UPDATE: Kenneth Turan, film critic for The Los Angeles Times, is a more cogent man than I:

"It may be true, as [Crash] producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was 'one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history,' but Crash is not an example of that. I don't care how much trouble Crash had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.

"For Crash's biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.

"So for people who were discomfited by Brokeback Mountain but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, Crash provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what Brokeback had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.

"Sometimes," concludes Turan, "you win by losing, and nothing has proved what a powerful, taboo-breaking, necessary film Brokeback Mountain was more than its loss Sunday night."

Scratch this tummy

I like dogs.

I like electronic music.

I like the video for Goldfrapp's "Number One."

That kewpie-voiced irritant Gwen Stefani must be clawing her eyes out.

Buzzworthy

Spelling bees are hot again: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway, the Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, Myla Goldberg's novel Bee Season and its failed 2005 movie adaptation, and now Akeelah and the Bee, a new film starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. The principal argument of this project seems to be that black people can spell, too, which is a point that wouldn't need to be made if it weren't for individuals like Ludacris and Ginuwine.

I have considerable personal difficulty with bee-themed stories. They evince my competitive spirit; though I am pretty poor at most things -- soccer, flying, depth perception (cf. "soccer"), dressing myself, heterosexuality -- I've always spelled real good. (Also, my thumbs are double-jointed, which is great for parties.) So when one of the audience participants at Putnam County fumbled the word "stygian," I wanted to cackle and call out "Subliterate!" -- and I would have, too, except I worried she might whap me with her walker.

This Akeelah trailer, though, seems a bit much. "Own it" is not the sort of thing a spelling coach should say to his pupil. "Smack that diphthong like it's your white bitch" isn't, either.

If you can't say something tasteful

At the grocery store this evening, I was approached by my mother's brother Jack, a very Bostonian personage -- stiff upper lip, does not employ contractions in his speech, wears suits in grocery stores, the sort of individual you'd describe as a personage. He found me hovering over the lettuce, gathering materials for a salad; in my hands I held a bottle of vegetable oil and a plump cucumber. I turned at the squeak of his shoes.

"Hello, Poor Daniel," Uncle Jack said.

"Hello, Uncle Jack," I answered.

"Are you making a salad?" he asked.

"Oh, no," I sighed, holding the cucumber and vegetable oil aloft, "I'm just lonely."

He blinked.

Why did I say that? Why? Why? A good vegetable-sodomy joke has its place, of course -- parties, first dates, christenings -- but that place is nowhere within the vicinity of Uncle Jack. Really not his thing. Just as his sister Aunt Bunny is the sort of aunt who misuses the expression "blow my wad," so is Uncle Jack the type of uncle on whom cucumber-penetration jokes are wasted. I fear my relatives are a difficult lot. The only thing we all find amusing is Beth's death scene in Little Women. "Read it again, read it again!" we'll plead at Christmastime, gathered round the fire, as a grudging smile plays upon Aunt Jane's lips. "Oh, all right. Settle down," she'll chide. "'And so with tears and prayers and tender hands, Marmee and sisters made Beth ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again...'"

Uncle Jack blinked again. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing." I swallowed, the cucumber wagging in my hands like a penis. "Just that... I'm lonely. Salad for one."

He looked uncomfortable and moved to the checkout line without a word. We do not share things in my family. No doubt he feared he'd run into me in the cereal aisle, where I'd admit I was molested at age eight.

I hope this doesn't mean our annual lunch at the University Club is off.

Hot Swedish teenage lesbians

Oh, I have seen a wonderful film: Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love), the movie that first established Lukas Moodysson as a world-class director. (He would top himself two years later with Tillsammans [Together], my favorite foreign film of all time.) Upon its release in 1998, I've learned, Fucking Åmål quickly eclipsed Titanic as Sweden's reigning all-time box-office champ; the two make for a stark and interesting contrast: James Cameron's $200 million spectacular boasted lavish production values, dreadful performances, and a three-hour-plus running time; Moodysson's project, shot on grimy video and impeccably acted, clocks in at a trim 89 minutes.

It's the story of two girls in the dull southwestern town of Åmål. Newly 16, pretty introvert Agnes lusts after Elin, a self-absorbed drama queen just this side of promiscuous. Their paths intersect at Agnes' birthday celebration, where she has evicted her lone guest, a wheelchair-bound young woman who makes the mistake of presenting her hostess with perfume: "If this is the best you can do," stammers Agnes, frustrated with herself, embarrassed by the piddling turnout, "don't bother. Go home, and keep your perfume. We just pretend to be friends because there's no one else to be with." (Something similar, incidentally, happened to me in eighth grade, when Michael Rolfe cast me out of his bar mitzvah, though that was in front of our entire class, and I did in fact elect to keep my gift of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.) Elin and her sister soon crash the party; on a dare, Elin kisses Agnes, whom she (rightly) supposes to be homosexual, then flees the premises, giggling.

Now, if this were a Hollywood film, our heroine would reinvent herself as a self-assured sexpot, go heteronormative, and upstage her tormentors at the prom by slow-dancing with Freddie Prinze, Jr. Instead, Elin immediately repents and returns to apologize, leading to a development as unexpected as it is convincing. Cue Hot Teenaged-Lesbian Makeout Scene.

This being Sweden and the characters being young, of course, sex soon intervenes, in the bumbling person of Johan, a young technical student who pursues Elin. What will she do? Whom should she choose? It's testament to Moodysson and his actors that we find ourselves sincerely caring about the decisions of a somewhat silly Swedish teen who nearly goes epileptic when she learns that raves, according to a style magazine, are "out."

Almost everything about Fucking Åmål rings absolutely true: Agnes' devotion to Morrissey, the troubador of adolescent anguish; her parents' fumbling efforts to console and understand their daughter -- in this movie, the grown-ups are good-hearted and -intentioned adults, not the brain-dead foils tumbleweeding through American pictures -- and, in particular, the scene in which Agnes' mother tries to discuss sexuality; Elin's impulsive behavior (note, for example, how and why she breaks up with a boy); the insipid cruelties and tiny triumphs of high school life. I'd argue that Moodysson missteps in portraying Agnes' wronged friend as a petty, vindictive turncoat... but then I guess that many young people, having suffered an embarrassment, probably retaliate in kind and at length. I myself told everyone that Michael Rolfe was a bedwetting transsexual.

Also, I think the Swedish language is beautiful, alluvial, the sort of sound that you want to fall asleep to. A friend of mine has likened it to the sound a pelican makes when passing through an electric fan. This, I suppose, is why volume controls were created.

So rent Fucking Åmål. I'd say it's the best movie about adolescent Swedish lesbians of the last ten years.

True romance

Jackson and Marisa were decidedly attractive. This surprised Cross: He had met Horace, of course, and also his sister, parents, and nephew, and beauty had favored none of them. Perhaps Jackson was a second cousin, or a relative by marriage.

But his eyes recalled Horace’s own, a sharp, clear grey; they winked at Cross as the men clasped hands. Cross had to look up into his face: Jackson was long and lean, handily clearing six feet, with a slalom nose and strong teeth bolting from strong gums.

Beside him drifted Marisa, her face lurking within a cave of blue-black hair; she wore a plain dark cocktail dress that exposed her burnished shoulders and the terse slit of her cleavage. Marisa’s mouth was a bit vague, her skin somewhat sfumate, thought Cross, who had studied art history; still, she spoke brightly and carried herself high.

They seated themselves in the living room, where bottles of gin and Glenfiddich stood sentry upon the coffee table. Jackson, Cross soon noted, had the irritating habit of advising his audience, at irregular intervals, to “listen up.” At first Cross assumed he looked disinterested, so he made full moons of his eyes and pitched himself forward whenever Jackson spoke.

“Listen up,” Jackson instructed him after a moment. Cross, vindicated, poured himself a second gin.

He asked them how they had met.

“Oh, that’s a funny story,” said Jackson, refilling his glass. “It’s a good story.”

“It’s true,” Marisa said. “It’s a good story.”

“So I’m in Boston two years back, right?” began Jackson, unknotting his legs. “I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend. I drove up from Hartford to do it, because she told me she was going to do it on the phone, and I tell her, Don’t do it on the phone, babe, do it in person. So I go up to Boston and she does it in person. I’m in and out of there in under two minutes.” Jackson winced, drained his Tanqueray, winced again. “Fucking cold, man. So I’m driving down Commonwealth, in downtown Beantown. It’s midnight, and the place is empty. Listen up: There is nothing going on in Boston after ten o’clock. Place shuts the fuck down. And I’m driving towards a red light at the intersection of—what was it, babe?”

“Comm Ave and Mercer,” answered Marisa, wistfully.

“Comm Ave and Mercer. Listen up: I’m approaching this red light, and I see this woman crossing the street right in front of me. She’s kind of staggering, you know, and cradling her arm, and all I can think is, That is beautiful. That is the most beautiful hooker I’ve ever seen.”

“I was dressed like a hooker,” offered Marisa.

“You were a hooker, babe.”

“It’s true,” Marisa admitted. “I was.”

“So I’m cruising towards this gorgeous hooker staggering across the street. Great legs. Endless legs. Ass like a Cub Scout. And suddenly she stops and gives me the finger with the hand she’s cradling.”

“I was really cranky.”

“And I’m thinking, Oh, man, sweetheart, you just lost yourself a trick.”

“Stop it!” laughed Marisa.

“No, that’s what I thought,” Jackson continued. “I’m thinking I’ll cruise right on by, teach her a lesson.” He dealt her shoulder a playful blow. “Then my brakes seize up. I was driving this shitty old VW Rabbit—falling apart, total highway hazard; it’s out front, if you wanna see it—and the brakes sometimes gave out. The first time it happened it kinda freaked me out, but I figured out that if you pumped them really hard for a minute they started working again.”

“Mm,” nodded Cross, before he saw that Jackson expected more. “Oh? That’s quite resourceful.”

“Thanks, man. So I start pumping. But then I look up and I see the hooker standing in the middle of the crosswalk, still giving me the finger. So I’m pumping the brakes and trying to swerve off the road and then I start laying on the horn. She won’t move! I’m yelling at her, like, Hooker, get out of the way! Don’t just stand there giving me the finger! You know?”

“Certainly,” said Cross, reaching for the gin.

“Right? So I’m pumping and honking and swerving and screaming. But listen up: I run her over anyway. And then—this is the best bit—then my brakes start working.”

“I love that part.”

“Me, too, babe. Pass the Tanqueray, would you, pal? Thanks. Listen up: So I run her over. And I remember—this is wild—I remember thinking that the sound she made, or the sound the car made when it hit her, was just like the drums at the beginning of ‘Always.’ Bon Jovi. Ba-da-buh, ba-da-buh-bum. Weird.” Jackson drowned an index finger in his glass, stirred, blotted his knuckles on a napkin, and sipped. “Now I’m thinking, Oh, shit, I just ran over this whore. What do I do? It’s like one of those classic… moral choices, you know? What do you do after you drive over a whore? Do you take off, or do you try to look after her?”

Cross furrowed his brow and nodded ruminatively, as though he had long dwelt on this very issue.

“Right? So I think about it for a couple minutes and then I make a split decision. I tell myself—” here Jackson’s voice went tumescent with gravitas “—you help that hooker. So I open the car door and I get out and I step on her.”

“It’s true,” confirmed Marisa. “He did.”

“Yeah, turns out I didn’t run her over so much as kind of knock her out of the way,” said Jackson, wreathing Marisa in his arms, “and she landed next to the driver’s door. I’m like, Shit, there she is. And you know what? I was right: She was beautiful.” He angled his face towards hers. “Perfect lips, perfect cheekbones—you could ski off those cheekbones, I always tell her.” His thumb grazed her face; she cooed, quietly, and Jackson applied a kiss to her nose. “Perfect nose,” he proclaimed.

“More ice?” asked Cross.

“What? Oh, no thanks, man.”

Cross fidgeted in his seat, his buttocks compressing.

“So I’m falling in love right there on the street. She’s kinda bruised, though, her arm’s twisted all weird, and she’s got a big scrape on her forehead. Course—” Jackson laughed “—later I learned that she’d just kicked the shit out of her pimp, and he walloped her a couple times, too, and that’s why she had a lot of these cuts and bruises.”

“But it was mostly you.”

“Babe, I was moving at ten miles an hour.”

“I know, but it was mostly you. Vinnie didn’t do much damage.”

“I dunno. Guy sounded mean. Sounded like one mean midget.”

“He was a dwarf.”

“Mm?” asked Jackson, sipping his gin.

“Yes. That’s why they called him Vinnie the Dwarf.”

Jackson swallowed. “What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know, but he was a dwarf. He got really angry if you called him a midget.” Marisa invaginated a cigarette between her lips. Cross cleared his throat.

“Well,” said Jackson with a shrug, “you weren’t in great shape when I ran into you, that’s all I’m saying. And so I’m looking at her arm and her bruises, and the next thing I know—instinct or something, I don’t know—I heave her into the backseat, jump back in the car, and floor it. No idea where I’m going. I’m driving around for ten minutes, no plan, nothing. She’s not moving. I try shaking her, I’m like, Hey, hooker, you alive?” He shook his head solemnly. “Nothing.” Jackson tweezed the Marlboro from Marisa’s mouth, inhaled deeply. “Man, was I pissed: My girlfriend just left me, I got a dead hooker in the backseat, and my car’s for shit.”

When he returned her cigarette, Marisa smiled and stroked his knee.

“Listen up: I’m thinking she’s dead, it was a mistake to bring her on board. I’m looking for, like, a hospital or a church or something, right? Anyplace I can leave her. Then I see this playground and I’m like, Bingo. And I’m just pulling over when she starts to say things.”

Cross wanted them to leave. “What did she say?” he asked.

“‘Oh, shit, my arm.’ ‘Fuck, my arm really fucking hurts’—things like that.”

Marisa sucked on her cigarette.

“There was this bone jutting out of her elbow,” recalled Jackson, “and she said, ‘Fuck, do you see that bone?’”

“It’s true,” said Marisa. “That’s what I said.”

“It was a huge relief. Her talking, I mean. But still she was pretty messed up. Bleeding from the head and shit. And I ask her where the hospital is. But she says no, no, don’t take me to the hospital. So I ask her, Can’t you go to some street clinic or church or someplace? Saint Hooker or something? She just keeps bleeding all over the back and moaning about her arm.”

His fingers snapped a gunshot. “And then I remember—Niall! My buddy from high school—he’s a fucking male nurse at Mass Gen. I hadn’t spoken to him in a couple years, but I had his number in my cell phone. So I call him up and explain the situation, and he gives me directions and says he can take care of the hooker, no questions asked, it happens all the time. Five minutes later we pull up in back of the hospital and I yank her out of the car. But she can’t even walk, ’cause she’s in these fucking high heels.”

“I’m wearing them right now!” Marisa announced.

“Holy shit, you are. So she’s wobbling all over the place like a drunk whore—”

“I wasn’t still drunk by then.”

“I know, babe, it’s an expression. She’s wobbling all over the place, and thank God Niall runs out just then, and we get her inside, and she goes off with him, and I’m standing there at the loading dock thinking, There goes the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

He inclined his head towards Marisa, who accepted the cue.

“Guess who’s waiting for me four hours later when I come back downstairs?” she beamed.

“Ah,” smiled Cross. They looked at him expectantly. “Jackson,” he added.

“Yes!” Marisa was delighted. “There he was.”

“I couldn’t leave,” Jackson grinned. “Hell, I would’ve stayed another four hours.”

“The operation was successful?” Cross asked.

“Oh, totally,” Marisa replied.

“Well…” said Jackson. “It still aches a little when it rains.”

“True. And when I bang it into something.”

“But other than that, good as new.”

“And Niall couldn’t have been sweeter.”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy.”

“Well,” said Cross, “that’s quite a story. Very dramatic.”

“You bet your ass it is.”

“Very dramatic.”

“That’s why ‘Always’ is our song,” volunteered Marisa.

Cross turned to her. “Because the sound your body made when Jackson drove his car into you reminded him of the drums at the beginning.”

She nodded.

A silence dropped suddenly, like a stage curtain. Marisa arrowed smoke from her lips and looked directly at Cross; Jackson’s eyes were closed as he stroked the parenthesis of her ear.

Cross heard ice collapse within his tumbler, a tiny avalanche. When would they leave?

I want my MTV

Though I don't much care for music videos -- they serve no practical purpose, as my proto-Puritan mother once pointed out -- I've recently discovered a few notable specimens:

Robyn, "Be Mine" Lunging strings power this relentless surge of electropop so smoothly that you find yourself joining the chorus -- "You never were and you never will be mine" -- before its lyrics even register. In the video, Swedish ingenue Robyn makes desperate bids for approval, shearing off her hair, performing a frantic striptease, etc.; it's an unpretentious anti-vanity project that casts her, often simultaneously, as a figure of ridicule and sympathy. (Bonus: the "All-Stripper Version" -- Robyn's words, not mine -- which is somehow more poignant still.) You'll have to navigate the artist's website to find the feed (click on the gyrating X, then hit "Go Back," and finally locate the video link near the cuff of her sleeve), but it's worth the search. Demonically catchy song, too.

New Order, "Krafty" There are five or six moments of visual acrobatics in this video that flat-out baffle me: 360-degree rotations, vertiginous Steadicam swoons, sweeping low-angle pans -- how did the cinematographer pull them off? You won't find a single static shot throughout the four-minute runtime; our teenage lovers' every kiss, glance, and last-night-on-earth leap is chronicled in loving, fluid movement. The track itself? Sleek, propulsive, bittersweet ear candy -- surprisingly safe for New Order, perhaps, but head-bobbing nonetheless. (Even more bewildering than the camerawork, though, is the lyric one minute and forty-two seconds into the album edit: "They got violence, wars, and killing, too / All shrunk down in a two-foot Jew." Now, I realize this is not what Bernard Sumner's actually singing, but I prefer to remain ignorant. Who is this abbreviated child of Zion?)

Yes, the "Krafty" link directs you to VH1.com. I'm not cool enough for MTV.

DJ Prydz, "Call On Me" A bestselling single in the UK and Australia, this thumping hi-nrg dance number is almost obnoxiously repetitive -- over and over and over, it samples the refrain from Steve Winwood's "Valerie," to increasingly diminishing effect -- but its video attracted much acclaim (and, from conservative quarters, some criticism) for its in-your-face depiction of what I assume is a typical ladies-only aerobics session. Prydz (a Swede, naturally) and director Huse Monfaradi apparently tapped the 1985 John Travolta bomb Perfect for inspiration.

Be my baby

Last week's Grey's Anatomy introduced (me to) the term "Code Black," which, in this particular episode, signaled a bomb threat. I wondered if such shorthand actually existed, and cornered a medical resident at my earliest opportunity.

"God, I need to get fuggin' drunker," he drawled, slopping vodka into his maw. We were at a party.

"Yes, yes. So does Code Black really exist?"

"What the fug is this?" asked Ernie as he fingered my tie and jacket. It was a costume fête, you see: Our hostess wore a carrot ensemble, complete with lime-green wig-sprig; Ernie had donned chaps and a cowboy hat; and I was dressed as Tina Turner. On the inside. On the outside I looked more like a pigment-deficient WASP in narrow semiformal attire. Inside: WHAT'S LO-OVE GOT TO DO, GOT TO DO WITH IT?; outside: Saville Row and psychological issues. All clear?

"Code Black," I answered, prying my personal effects from his slippery mitts. "Did they make that up?"

"Nooo," Ernie told me. "Noooo. Code Black exists."

"It does not," chimed in another resident. There were about six or seven of them present. I'd only come to this party so I could score some lithium, in fact.

"Does." Ernie nodded. "But it means violence."

"Well, I've never heard of that. At Saint Florian's, Code Orange means violence."

"Oh," Ernie said.

"Oh," I said.

The resident continued: "And Code Yellow means hazardous materials, and Code Red means fire, and Code Silver means hostage situation, and Code Pink means missing infant."

I assumed she was joking. "Are you joking?"

"No." Now Ernie shook his head. "Code Pink means missing infant at Mennonite Memorial, too."

"Really? How often do they flash a Code Pink?"

"More often than you'd think," the other resident told me.

I was aghast. "So infants are just getting misplaced right and left?" I am not a great champion of babies' rights, but it seems fairly poor form to leave newborns scattered around under sofas and on cafeteria trays like so much loose change. I said so.

"Well, it's usually a case of abduction," the she-resident explained. "Like when there's a suspicious character sneaking around baby-snatching."

I find this scarcely more comprehensible: Since when have infant wards been open to the public? In my imagination, these are maximum-security cryochambers lit in moody ultraviolet, with steel cocoons for the inmates and dry-ice vapor slinking along the floor. Not unlike the embryo crypt in Jurassic Park, come to think of it.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to make perfectly clear my stance on infant abduction. I'm against it -- and I think you should be, too. When in doubt, just remember to SNAP (Stop Newborn Abduction, Please)!

Squashed

Too much squash today
Wrists sprained, lumbar region strained
Didn't even win.

Charging down the court
Tried to catch ball in the air
Caught ball in the ear.

Steamroom: two men laughed
And gay-bashed Brokeback Mountain.
Nude. In a sauna.

Shaven and showered
I curl up in bed and cry.
Squash, you break my soul.

This is the remix

My friend Andrew introduced me some months back to a very funny (and weirdly convincing) gag trailer that reimagined Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as a Cameron Crowe/James L. Brooks romantic dramedy. It tickled me pink. Flaming, flamingo pink. ...Holy Hedda Hopper -- did I just stumble upon the etymology of the word "flamingo"?

While I investigate, I've two new faux-previews to recommend: One spins Sleepless in Seattle à la Fatal Attraction; the other pitches Brokeback Mountain via Zemeckis and Spielberg.

The trailer for Se7en doesn't work quite as well, but it's amusing to watch the camera pursue Morgan Freeman through that field as Avril Lavigne whines on the soundtrack.

"Oh, lame," indeed

The Da Vinci Code is like an Easter-egg hunt for slow children. I am not making fun of slow children; I myself was a slow child. My Easter-egg hunts lasted through Memorial Day. And I enjoyed Dan Brown’s silly, engaging novel, even though its puzzles seem to me the sort of cryptograms the crossword editors at People magazine might concoct. (David Sedaris has already mocked these same; I’ll just note that, in this week’s issue, 27-down reads “1939 movie classic Gone with the _ _ _ _”, and 3-across asks for the “first 3 letters of alphabet.”)

Remarkable, though: Time and again, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, whose credentials alone could power the Enigma machine, find themselves baffled and bewildered by any number of connect-the-dots ruses Brown has tucked into every other chapter. None of the other characters fare much better, either; it’s like an Umberto Eco mystery minus several chromosomes.

So here’s a quiz of my own devising. Read the scenarios described below, and decide whether they feature in The Da Vinci Code or an alternative title from classic mystery literature.


(1) Our hero, a renowned symbologist and global leader in iconology, discovers a message recorded in characters so inscrutable they appear to be of ancient Semitic extraction. We soon learn that the words are in fact plain ol’ English, and have been written in mirror image, instantly decodeable with the use of any reflective surface.

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. Nancy Drew and the Case of the ‘Secret’ Message That Was Obvious to Everyone Except Ulla, the German Exchange Student Who Had Been Kicked in the Head by a Mule at Some Point in Her Childhood and Whom Nancy’s Mother Was Always Inviting Over for Playdates that Nancy Came to Resent Deeply


(2) As he dies in anguished solitude, an elderly museum curator, principal guardian of an historical secret that could blast the foundations of the Western world, leaves a baffling anagram message for his cryptographer granddaughter, directing her to the Mona Lisa: “Oh, lame saint!” he writes, eschewing the equally valid “Am alone -- shit."

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. The Hardy Boys and the Adventure of Passing Notes to Each Other in Homeroom


(3) In order to unlock a time capsule, the intrepid adventurers must enter a five-letter code that has something to do with seeded fruit and Isaac Newton. (Hint: The answer is not “guava.”)

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. Encyclopedia Brown Suffers Debilitating Brain Damage


How did you do? I missed two.

A history of violence

We stand shoulder to shoulder in the elevator. My eyes swerve hard right. For a moment, I admit, the disguise nearly worked. Your glasses are not familiar to me -- and I remember glasses. Your bag bears the name of a college I did not attend.

But then I spy the three telltale freckles colonizing your earlobe, and the name writ large across your identification card, and I know you anew.

You beat me up for three years, from first through third grades.

I have not forgotten.

We stutter to a halt. The doors open on the second floor. Two passengers exit. The doors slide shut, and we levitate again.

It started over a disputed crayon -- do you remember? I expect not; this, after all, is just a footnote in the dictionary of terror you've been writing since age six. No: the encyclopedia of terror. Encyclopedia.

Early April, late morning. Mrs. Bennett's art class. I was applying the final touches to my portrait of Tigra, the ThunderCat who always wore a form-fitting, tri-toned leotard. Tigra whirled a mean bola. He could also will himself invisible. I wanted to be Tigra. It was very important to me that I represent him accurately.

Your beady eyes appraised the periwinkle-blue crayon I had selected for this very purpose. "Give it to me," you muttered.

Mrs. Bennett was smoking in the bathroom. I told you I would let you have the crayon when I was finished with it.

"Give it to me," you muttered.

I had it first.

"Give it to me," you muttered. "I'm drawing the ocean."

Huh. Barely. This "ocean" was in fact a vast stretch of miscolored water, without depth or dimension or even a horizon: just a sheet of paper sopping with crayon, and a couple of fish scribbled in for aquatic effect. So uninspired. Your casualties lay beside you, brutalized, blunted, denuded -- navy, cobalt, cadet blue, cerulean, aquamarine. What a mess. I was much more talented. I told you so.

"Give it to me," you muttered, unable to refute me.

I explained that my crayon was periwinkle blue, and ill-suited for your purposes. Try a green, I suggested. Sea-green, for example.

"Give it to me," you muttered -- and, before I could oblige, you mashed my face into the carpet and wrenched my arm behind my back. The bone snapped. Not cleanly, either. Well, not at all, in fact. But it could have.

"Give… it… to… me," you hissed, plying the crayon from my wrenched fingers, grinding my nose against the floor.

I should have complained; I should have cried out; I should have pummeled you with my dainty fists. I was too well-bred, though. I told you that, as well. And you, flush with ill-gotten victory, realized you had found the perfect victim.

Now the elevator judders and pauses at floor fourteen. Three people leave.

Three remain.

Confrontations ensued everywhere, anywhere: ambushes in the bathroom stalls, where you would beat my forehead against the toiletbowl; a memorable attack in the cubby closet, when you bound my wrists with your Playskool Toolbelt, sat on my head, and wet yourself. At recess, while other children harmonized on the see-saw or patiently encouraged one another atop the slide, you often pushed me from my swing and, mounting my prostrate body, forced me to eat sand. "Eat sand, eat sand," you would order. "Eat sand, shitface." As the first student at school to comprehensively master the full range of expletives, you commanded respect and esteem; even as you packed my mouth with the contents of the sandbox, I admired you.

Like most monsters, you wore two faces. The teachers doted on you; the parents sang your praises: You were gracious, polite, helpful, even charming. So was Ted Bundy. “Why don’t you two ever play together?” my mother sometimes asked after I returned from school. “And how did you get that fat lip?”

(You had heaved a dodgeball at my face. I was on your team.)

Another floor up, and our fellow passenger brushes past, curtly advising me to step aside, but I’m riveted to the spot.

It’s just the two of us now: you, gazing serenely at the doors as they whisper shut, and I, sweating, moist, in the near-panic only you can induce.

Three years you waged war on me. Thirty-six months you indulged your every psychotic impulse. And all that time I kept silent, because you threatened me with real violence, and because there was a chance -- wasn’t there? -- you would one day let me play with your famed Easy Bake Oven. I wanted to be a pastry chef. I also wanted to be Tigra. I was confused. I would not experiment sexually for another fifteen years.

Maureen. The decades have been kinder than you deserve.

Look at you: hair thick and golden as honey, your nose a tiny prow. Your breasts are scarcely more prominent than they were twenty years ago, and you now stand three feet shorter than I do, but I'm not fooled, Maureen -- oh, no: You are, as ever, a fierce pygmy with a body as stunted as your emotional vocabulary. I said as much to you in second grade. I made the mistake of doing so during a soccer game. I remember the concussion.

As the elevator yawns open on the seventeenth floor, your shoulder twitches, and I spring into the corner. A pregnant woman wades aboard. Good. I will hide behind her.

But you’ve left, Brut for Her churning in your wake, evil head lustrous under the lights in the elevator bank. Someone greets you. “Guard your lunch money,” I want to warn him.

Now the doors close. I release the pregnant woman’s shoulder.

So: floor seventeen. You are a publicist. Most publicists are bubbly girls who have never urinated on someone else's naptime mattress. What valuable experience you bring with you.

You are only one floor below me -- physically, I mean -- but I've got the edge: I recognize you. I will spend the day plotting.

See you around, Maureen. And you’d better watch out, ’cause I’m a lot bigger now, and I have no problem telling people when a girl beats me bloody.

Stem this, Gene Shalit

Today show film critic Gene Shalit, he of the electric-socket hair and famously homosexual offspring, recently excited a furor amongst the gay community -- not too tough, admittedly -- by describing Jake Gyllenhaal’s Brokeback Mountain character as “a sexual predator” who “tracks Ennis [played by Heath Ledger] down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts.” Well, I don’t know what all those gay gays are gaying on about, because Shalit, who rescinded his remarks last week, was right on the gay money. Here’s an excerpt from Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay:

EXT. TRAILER IN STRAIGHTEST WYOMING. ENNIS and JACK loiter outside.

JACK: Let me suck your penis.

ENNIS: No! That’s disgusting.

[The RANCHER appears.]

RANCHER: Git on up to Brokeback. Don’t let no sheep get et up by wolves, and don’t have no anal intercourse.

JACK: Ah, Brokeback. There I shall suck your penis.

ENNIS: Stop it, you sexual predator!

EXT. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Sheep. Wolves. Trees. Strictly unilateral homosexual attraction.

ENNIS: …So then, after my pap died, I lived with my sister for a time. But she got herself a man, and they didn’t have no room for me.

JACK: What’s that? You want me to gargle your balls?

ENNIS: I can’t even talk to you.

JACK: Spank me.

INT. TENT. Jack and Ennis shiver beside one another. Suddenly, Jack, naked and oiled in salad dressing, yanks down Ennis’ jeans. He begins happily impaling himself.

JACK: Hahahaha! And there’s nothing you can do about it!

ENNIS: Ack! Stop! The predation! Oh, God! Somebody help! This sexual predator is preying on me!

[MONTAGE: Jack repeatedly violates himself in Ennis’ lap. Jack preys on Ennis indoors, outdoors, against doors, missionary, piledriver, wheelbarrow, etc. Ennis is forced to perform the wraparound ass-grab, the glass-bottomed boat, even the donkey punch.]

ENNIS: What the Sam heck is a donkey punch?

JACK: Ride me from behind and then, just as your need for physical gratification overwhelms your revulsion and unwillingness, smack me upside the head.

ENNIS: Never!

JACK: DONKEY-PUNCH ME!

[Ennis does so.]

JACK: Ahhhhhhh.

ENNIS: Can’t you see I have no interest in your homosexual advances?

JACK: Tomorrow I’m going to force you to nail me on the horse.

EXT. FIELD. Jack enjoys energetic sex with a sheep. Ennis watches.

ENNIS: What a sexual predator you are!

[The rancher appears.]

RANCHER: You fellers git! I said no anal intercourse! Bad cowboys! Bad icons of western masculinity!

ENNIS: Goodbye, Jack. I hope you never track me down and coax me into sporadic trysts.

JACK: Thanks for stemming my rose, Ennis.

INT. ENNIS' BEDROOM. He is stemming the rose of his wife, ALMA. Or maybe he isn't. We don't really understand the term, to tell the truth.

ALMA: Oh, Ennis.

ENNIS: Oh, Ja… alma.

ALMA: Ennis?

ENNIS: Ja… alma?

ALMA: Why do you always make love to me from behind?

ENNIS: A queer homosexual preyed upon me one summer up on Brokeback Mountain. He preyed upon me over and over, in four hundred and two positions. I’ve never gotten over the experience.

ALMA: Is that what happened to your name? Were you once a Dennis, before the queer homosexual preyed the D off you?

ENNIS: Sure.

ALMA: Oh, Ennis.

ENNIS: Oh, Ja… alma.

[A CAR HORN sounds outside.]

ENNIS (positively leaping from bed): There he is!

EXT. ENNIS' HOUSE. Jack leans against his truck, looking very predatory.

ENNIS: Jack!

JACK: Ennis!

ENNIS: What’re you doin’ here?

JACK: Well, I was just passin’ through Wyoming, singin’ along with the radio and dreamin’ my big-sky dreams and cravin’ your hot dong.

[Jack unbuttons Ennis’ fly.]

ENNIS: Whoa, whoa, whoa, partner! Jiss you wait a tic. You’ve been preyin’ on me since Brokeback.

JACK: And now that I have tracked you down, I shall coax you into a sporadic tryst!

ENNIS: NOOO!

[Jack drops to his knees.]

ENNIS: My wife’s probably at the window.

JACK: Then she can see how you give a feller the Tallahassee Oil Slick.

[Alma yells from within.]

ALMA: Ennis, where’d you positively leap off to?

ENNIS: Nowhere.

ALMA: Well, the dry cleaner just called. You can pick up your boa any time.

ENNIS: I got an idea, Jack.

JACK: Let’s hear it, cowboy.

ENNIS: If you must persecute me afresh, why don’t we go on up to Brokeback? You know -- pretend things was the same. Before the vortex of your rectum started sucking my penis inside it, I mean.

JACK: Whatever. Sure.

ENNIS: Back to Brokeback… back to the solitude and the sheep…

JACK: Brokeback, Schmokeback. I just wanna get rammed.

[Jack busies himself at Ennis' crotch.]

ALMA (appearing at window): Holy Jesus, Ennis, what’s he doin’ to you?

ENNIS: He’s a-preyin' upon me!

ALMA: Is that… say, is that the Tallahassee Oil Slick?

JACK (coming up for air): Yes'm.

ALMA: My poor preyed-upon baby!

ENNIS: It feels so awful and hot and wet and awful! Not empty and wrong the way it feels when you do it!

[Jack tosses Ennis into the bed of his truck. They drive up to Brokeback Mountain.]



Gene Shalit, you were right -- and you were wronged!

Guest blogger Willard Penny, age 5

Because I am a rather clever child -- I began reading shortly after my second birthday; by contrast, I wouldn’t utter my first words (“Do I have to say it?”) until almost a year later -- my parents enrolled me at an early age in the region’s premiere kindergarten, Temple Ohabei Shalom -- or, as I’ve learned from my exhaustive Hebrew classes, Temple Ohabei “Hello!” Though I applied under the auspices of the Gentile Outreach Scheme, the competition still proved very fierce: Candidates were expected to produce a diorama dramatizing our stance on abortion, and also had to prepare an original Spenserian sonnet commemorating a major third-world political figure. I chose Qaddafi, because his name almost rhymes with that of Raffi, my songwriter of choice, who has introduced me to the wonders of beluga spawn. Last autumn, Uncle Biff bought me a DVD documentary entitled Whaling, which, as it happened, featured no little white whales on the go. “Here we see the mother whale bleed to death,” reports the narrator midway through, as Eskimos swarm the beast, barking and screeching like the seals they skinned in the prologue. “In her death throes she aborts her fetus.”

That first morning at Temple Ohabei Hello!, my teacher, Miss Rabinowitz, affixed to each student’s lapel a construction-paper Star of David inscribed with his or her first name; we looked like extras from that Italian movie that uses the Holocaust as a springboard for crazy slapschtick. As one of two non-Jews in the class, my presence proved instantly irksome to Miss Rabinowitz, who despite my manifest semitophilia still refers to me as “young Eichmann” and registered particular horror when I selected Charlotte’s Web for Book Report Day -- from then on, she ordered, all my protagonists were to be kosher. Never mind that I was principally interested in Mr. White's portrait of sexual politics and their disruption of agrarian mores. My classmates soon began exacting petty torments upon me during our playground games of Duck Duck Goy, though I’ve noticed they’re much more ginger with the other gentile, Remy Jones, who attained instant local celebrity last summer when he fell down a well, the stupid fuck. A few weeks later my brother Joxy ripped my right ear off -- where the hell was my NBC-4 interview?

I can’t catch a break at Temple Ohabei Hello! -- even my AV presentation of Whaling yesterday failed to impress: “How could you think this was suitable material for show-and-tell?” demanded Miss Rabinowitz after we watched a sperm whale vomit up a giant squid.

We hadn't even gotten to the flensing before that tree-hugger Francie Keppelman started bawling in the back of the classroom.

“You will apologize to Francie,” Miss Rabinowitz told me. "I'm-sor-ry," she suggested. Didn't the daft heifer know that I can apologize in thirteen languages plus Romanche, which isn't really a language but a polyglot dialect? Then, in a thoroughly unnecessary gesture, she tweezed my ear between her fingers.

“I ask that you don’t, Miss Rabinowitz.”

“And why not?” my teacher replied, steering me towards Miss Daytime Drama.

“Because it might fall off again.”

She released me with a start, then maneuvered to my left and seized the other ear. We ground to a halt beside Francie.

"Well, Willard?" prompted Miss Rabinowitz, relinquishing me.

As I smoothed my affronted temples, this year's Best Actress sniveled. Her hair was frightful. And what the hell was she wearing? How on earth could Mrs. Keppelman unleash this creature upon the world in that outfit? Is she headless?

"I see the presentation has upset you," I began, inclining slightly in a grave bow. "But you know, Francie, the actions you've just witnessed, however unsettling, contribute directly to the sustenance of one of our great native peoples. And I think it's rather cheap of you to divert attention from this magnificent spectacle, this drama, with such puny theatrics as you've exhibited. This isn't the Golden Globes, my dear," I reminded her. "Not that you're dressed for it. Francie, as students at Temple Ohabei Hello!, we are obligated to study and celebrate the venerable customs of our neighbors across the globe, from Mongolian tribesmen who sodomize their hunting partners to Belgian housewives who eat their young, from the Camerooni elders who'd just as soon clitoridectomize you as make you their child bride to the British and their historic and obdurate ignorance of basic hygiene. It is not only our task, Francie, but our privilege."

Her tears had abated, and her mouth gaped. I was getting through to her. This must have been how Annie Sullivan felt when that Keller idiot finally wised up.

Time to cite our solidarity: "Would you entrust such a responsibility to those troglodytes at Mayfield Prep?" I asked Francie, effecting the requisite smirk. "Or the homosexual training camp that is Saint Peter's? I should hope not, Francie. I should sincerely hope not."

That's when Miss Rabinowitz called Mother.

Cachet

Just awoke from a half-hour nap and swam towards the kitchen, where I mistook a bottle of A1 for my Stewart’s orange cream soda. Tasting pretty Thick ‘n’ Hearty right now.

You know, I was the most exquisitely tasteful fourteen-year-old boy of my generation, a bona fide Fauntleroy. Seriously: I read Valerie Martin and Wallace Stegner, devoted hours to the perfection of my bow-tiemanship, and, after the family relocated to a neighborhood within walking distance of an art-house theater, kept faithful vigil there every Saturday afternoon, ingesting mystical hokum (Little Buddha), filmed theater (Vanya on 42nd Street), period pieces (Enchanted April; Orlando), political screeds (The Last Supper; miscellaneous Whit Stillman detritus), and all manner of foreign movies about buxom but unattractive adolescent Norwegian seamstresses exposing their pubic hair and dreaming of life in the city (Hulga, I Am Curious).

This round-up reminds me of Agnieszka Holland, the Polish director whose credits, notably Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier, indicate an affection for titles, titles. I’m baffled as to why more recent films haven’t followed duonymous suit: Munich, Munich has a wistful rhythm. Underworld: Evolution, Underworld: Evolution sounds doubly bad-ass.

But now I fear I’m becoming less discerning as a moviegoer -- well, more discerning, perhaps, though in the wrong way. A few weeks back, I saw Caché, the rhapsodically received Michael Haneke film that boldly declines to furnish a conclusive ending. Or, for that matter, much of a definite middle. And reader, this irked me. Irked, I say. You endured Blow-Up, I reminded myself. You withstood Last Year at Marienbad. You asked for Picnic at Hanging Rock as a first-communion present -- what’s the problem here? (Incidentally, the final shot of Caché, which implies conspiracy between two characters who shouldn’t know each other, suggests a possible [re]solution… but as my friend pointed out, their acquaintance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.)

Just this afternoon, too, I struggled through Capote, Capote, a fine film that moves like a quadriplegic sloth on a glacier. About twenty minutes in, I started hoping, with mounting fervor, that something, anything, would explode. Harper Lee, for instance. Nor did the movie feature a single transsexual hooker. This caught me off-guard, because the five most recent films I watched (Transsexual Hookers Gone Wild 1-5) all boasted transsexual hookers in prominent roles. I think this constitutes real progress.

My Netflix queue confirms this sorry state of affairs. Once upon a time, La règle du jeu and Blithe Spirit crept inexorably towards the top of the list; now they’ve been demoted, subordinated to the likes of Into the Blue and Howard the Duck (I was curious). Yes, yes -- I know Days of Heaven is an important film... but does Hugh Jackman at any point rip his clothes off and morph into a benippled CGI werewolf? ’Cause he sure as hell does it in Van Helsing. And it's FRIGGIN' AWESOME.

Merchant-Ivory transfusion, stat!

The whorl of my navel, vol. i

Am suddenly worried that my metabolism will decelerate abnormally fast. Tomorrow I might enjoy my usual breakfast of sliced butter and fried-chicken skin; next Wednesday I’ll wake up swollen as a water balloon, breathless, spine bowed, the rubble of strawberry cheesecake upon my bedside table (I’ve got a slice squatting there now; it is delicious), heart squirming within my chest like a swaddled infant. Baby Jesus, if you like.

Sweet dreams are made of these

I'd describe the object pictured at left as a sound machine, but according to Target and Sharper Image, it is in fact a "sleep soother" or a "sound soother." I bet at Hammacher Schlemmer, where lamps are called Diurnal Simulacra, it's known as an REM-Promotional Appliance.

…Shoot: I just visited hammacherschlemmer.com to ensure that the company name wasn't hyphenated (it's not -- hooray for me!), and I've already identified ninety-three products I want, like the Three-Dimensional Star Atlas, and the Strain-Reducing Wheeled-Leverage Snow Shovel, and the Giant Wooden Pirate Ship, and the useful Upside-Down Tomato Garden, and the Baby Jesus Ass-Plug.

And, to be fair, their unpretentious Sleep Sound Generator, which pretty much tells it like it is: This wondrous instrument emanates an array of relaxing... hold it, hold it; looks as though the Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound Generator only features a single setting -- Gentle Whooshing Noise. Not really sold on this. If I want a Gentle Whooshing Noise at night, I'll start sleeping with an asthmatic.

However, I see that this model does boast a "high-impact plastic case." In case, for example, you use it in your car.

Well, my sound machine, which I recently borrowed from one of my sisters, can simulate six calming sonic motifs: Ocean Surf, Wind, White Noise (Catherine’s mode of choice), Jungle (subtropical, not blackboard), Stream, and Howard Dean. Ahaha; just kidding. I forget what the sixth option is. Unadventurous sleeper that I am, I restrict my usage to Ocean Surf, which makes me think of those hazy childhood days I whiled away at the shore, constructing sand castles as the sun crashed on my shoulders and my parents beat a surreptitious getaway.

A few months back, my brother Jack and I bought a sound machine for our cousin Eleanor; this implement featured a built-in recording device, so that one could venture into the wilderness, sea, traffic, etc., and capture one's own GWNs. Before presenting Eleanor with her gift, we decided to break it in, duly and dually committing to tape the most heinous screech either of us could produce. Think of a rabid cat being fed through a paper shredder. Now imagine that rabid cat was Céline Dion in a past life. Trying to speak Korean. During a hysterectomy. It was glorious -- O, 'twas glorious.

Jack carefully repackaged the item, I filled out a shipping label, and off it went. Two weeks later, Eleanor's mother rang us.

"It’s that contraption," explained Aunt Bunny, who is the sort of aunt who uses words like "contraption." She is also the sort of aunt who misuses the expression "blow my wad," but that's not really important here.

"Doesn't it work?" Jack asked.

"Oh, it works very well. Eleanor is terribly fond of it. Won't sleep without it, in fact." She sounded dismayed.

"Which setting does she prefer?" I wondered.

"The one that sounds like a rabid cat being fed through a paper shredder."

"That's just what we were going for!"

"All night long," continued Aunt Bunny, her voice swollen, "she listens to it. On a loop. Over and over. I haven't slept in thirteen days." We heard ice chatter within a sherry glass. "Thirteen days."

Jack is not one of those nephews who like to make aunts cry, so, wrapping his knuckles in telephone cord, he switched tacks. "She knows that she can listen to, like, rainforests, right? And rivers? And whispering Himalayan winds?" These, indeed, were merely three of the twelve-odd GWNs stored within the machine. The womb, I recall, was another.

"She doesn't care for rainforests, or rivers, or whispering Himalayan winds. Only that Thai-banshee scream will do. It sounds like a hyena being violently sodomized."

"Gosh, Aunt Bunn--"

"Like a tortured Flemish milk-maid."

"I’m sorry, Aunt Bun--"

"Like a furrowed field, or felled tree."

"I don’t even understand the reference, Aunt Bu--"

"Jack," Aunt Bunny wept. "Oh, Jack." Sobs guttered in her throat.

That was the last we've heard from Aunt Bunny.

There is no audiorecorder on my (Brookstone) sound machine, but it's nonetheless a suddenly indispensable part of my nightly ritual: I activate it right after brushing my teeth, just before I settle in to read. It even drowns out the sound of my own screams! Call me a very satisfied customer.

Pants on fire

The Smoking Gun has concluded, to the satisfaction of many, that James Frey, whose bogus memoir A Million Little Pieces ascended the bestseller lists after Oprah awarded it her imprimatur, is (as fellow faker Stephen Glass might euphemize) a fabulist. A phony. A fraud. The lengthy but sharp article diligently disproves its subject's every criminal claim, pointing out that anyone who could substantiate his stories has conveniently shuffled off this mortal coil, and faulting him for his hackneyed fabrications: the illiterate cellmate who comes to embrace Cervantes, the crack-whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, etc. -- the sort of fever dreams a wannabe-badass middle-class WASP would find alluring, flattering, convincing.

So now Frey's the latest outed offender in a disturbing proliferation of compulsive liars-in-print: Glass, Jayson Blair, Augusten Burroughs (if you ask me), a certain former Duke Chronicle columnist (if you ask anyone), Sandra Day O'Connor (who loftily ruminates, in Lazy B, on a supposed Supreme Court appointment. Uh-huh. I think not, "Justice" O'Connor).

I quite like the autobiographer's response, though. "So let the haters hate," Frey preaches, "let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response." Word, home slice.

UPDATE: You know, I kind of suspected as much about JT Leroy. Well, nothing this convoluted or bizarre -- but (s)he did always strike me as somewhat dubious. What a week.

Kinderwhorage

"My goodness," I said.

"No one says 'my goodness.'"

"Dearie me," I said.

"No."

"Well, I'll swan," I said.

"What does that even mean?"

"Look at that... storefront." I'd been in transit for most of the day, and now the swollen tides of mall shoppers threatened to drag me under; it was a struggle to articulate any words beyond, say, "Look at that."

My kid sister Catherine narrowed her eyes. "Oh, sure," she answered.

"Those appear to be child mannequins."

"So they appear."

"Dressed as whores." One dummy, a double amputee, sported a sequined gold bustier and a pleather miniskirt rent up the middle; her headless friend had donned a skintight, translucent blouse and leopard-print jeans.

"Well," explained Catherine, "it's a store for prostitots."

"What's a prostitot?"

"A little girl who dresses like a prostitute."

I rolled the word around in my mouth, chewed it, and swallowed. "I love it."

"They're also called kinderwhores," Catherine supplied.

"That's very helpful. I wonder if they sell assless chaps."

"I know they sell My First Thongs."

"Oh, my goodness."

"Stop that."

Needless to say, "prostitot" is my word for the new year; I will do all I can to promote its cultural currency. Please check out the relevant entries in Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary, which feature handy sample usage like "That prostitot should put on some clothes" and "Ew, I think that prostitot is looking at you" (but not, alas, "Aw, man -- my prostitot gave me herpes and chicken pox"). You might also consider joining the Prostitot Outreach Program (POP!); we seek to identify and encourage the six-and-under would-be sex worker in your neighborhood.

I wanted to post visual evidence of one of these fine specimens, but Google Images doesn't yield much, and I'm wary of entering "little girl dressed like freaking whore" into a search engine. So instead I'll ask you to please consider this important picture of a kitten wearing a lime helmet.

Persons who love persons

While I'm glad they eschewed some more visible candidates -- President Bush, Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame/Judith Miller, Terri Schiavo, the FEMA board -- I can't help but wish Time magazine had not, in its 2005 Persons of the Year plaudits ("People of the Year" sounds too en-masse, I guess), cited everyone's favorite Messiah-complex rocker. Well, everyone's favorite Messiah-complex rocker who doesn't molest young boys.

The editors forgot to consult me, so I prepared this no-particular-order list on my own:

1. The producers of Cellular, who saw fit to cast Chris Evans and Jason Statham in the same film.










2. The producers of Chris Evans. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Evans.




3. John Fowles (1926-2005), because The French Lieutenant's Woman is landmark and The Magus is irresistible and The Collector is immortal (Thomas Harris should be sued) and I can forgive Mantissa.


4. Pat Robertson, who boldly asserted his inalienable American right to lobby for the assassination of foreign leaders. Reverend Robertson and I are now gunning for Marc Forné Molné, head of the accursed Andorran race and fuckin' walking dead man.


5. R. Kelly, for the flat-out insane "Trapped in the Closet" -- even though it seems to crib a line from the Partridge Family ("The midget says, 'God, I think I just shitted on myself'"). I can't understand how anyone could take this project seriously.


6. Sam, the late and lamented World's Ugliest Dog.

Take that, Bono!

A little bit dangerous

I love Roxette, the Stockholm pop duo comprising Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson. I love their NutraSweet melodies; I love the tiny syntactic tangles knotting their lyrics; I love their irony-free use of children's choirs on techno tracks; I love the lusty close-ups of fresh produce featured on the band's website; I love, in short, their unapologetically Scandinavian cheesiness. I especially love how Roxette frequently address objects of affection as "you fool" or "you soggy sack of shit."

So I find this noteworthy: Seems Roxette don't believe in accidents. (This we have on the authority of their 1991 track "Don't Believe in Accidents.") A bold (and not especially Lutheran) stance, predestination... but then I'd expect nothing less from the masterminds behind "It Must Have Been Love" and "Make My Head Go Pop," with its immortal line "I feed the ducks with a buuuun."

However, closer inspection of their lyrical output reveals a very specific preoccupation with vehicular manslaughter, aquatic mishap, and killer migraines:

"Jefferson got hit by a westbound truck
I guess that didn't make him look like a million bucks."
-from "Jefferson," a rockin' ode to a child "always out of luck"

"I want you so bad, I'm pushin' my luck
It feels like being hit by a truck."
-from "The Center of the Heart [Is a Suburb to the Brain]"

"Now you know what I look like, I'm feeling like a fool
I thought I could swim, I'm drowning in the pool."
-from the reggae-accented "Fool," which implores its dedicatee to "consider to stay"

"I wish you'll never stop to make my head go pop
You make my head go pop pop pop pop pop pop
PoppoppoppoppopPOPPOPPOP"
-from "Make My Head Go Pop"

"Non-plus me, concuss me
Push my face into an electric fan
Take a tire iron and batter me like a piñata
Massage my torso with a cheese grater."
-from "Punch Me in the Face with Your Love," a song I wrote for Roxette. ROXETTE, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, WRITE ME

Confused, altogether asea, I put it to Per and Marie: Clarify your position on traffic hazards, infinitives, and determinism at large. Your musical integrity depends upon it. My ideological welfare is at stake. You'd better not be goddamn Presbyterians, I swear to Christ.

I love you, Roxette.

The female of the species

Soft Revolution is a trendy club on East 21st -- not the sort of place that would admit me as a patron; nor, I suppose, am I the type who'd hear about it to begin with. Last night, however, found me striding semi-confidently past the bouncers in the company of my high school friend (we attended school together, I mean; I do not socialize with current high schoolers, try though I may) and her fiancé, who had invited his fraternity brothers from university.

I immediately understood why: The Soft Revolution scene suggested a sorority party as conceived by the National Lampoon. Girls in flagging halter tops writhed atop a bar counter; lissome cocktail waitresses funneled kamikaze shots down each other's yielding throats; a group of coeds at the center of the dance floor had stripped to bras and panties, whirling their jeans overhead like overpriced bolas. At a propitious 1:3, the male-to-female ratio instantly agreed with mine hosts.

"Aw, hells yeah," snorted Ken, an investment banker.

"Thass what I'm talkin' about," snorted Kyle, an investment banker.

"Is this the new Madonna single? Fuckin' sweet," snorted Kev, an investment banker and closeted homosexual.

My friend and her bridesmaids quickly entrenched themselves within the ladies' room while the boys colonized the bar, each engaging in extended disquisitions on such hetero-club topics as the Rams cheerleaders (Ken) and the Jets cheerleaders (Kyle) and the Bears cheerleaders' cute outfits (Kev). After about forty-five minutes, I felt ready to pack it in; but Cate had vanished. I surveyed the room as best I could from my sorry vantage by the lavatories -- on tiptoe, I'm a seventy-seven-inch summit -- and then, heaving a noble sigh, waded into the throng.

Almost immediately, a hand cupped my pert bum. I turned to face a pretty redhead in slashed Levis and an immodest tank top.

"Who are you looking for?" she shouted.

"My friend," I answered.

"Your girlfriend?"

"No."

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Her lashes were sooty with mascara.

Let's nip this in the bud, I thought, not unkindly: "No. I'm gay."

"What?"

"Gay." Glassy, glossy eyes. "Gay. Gaaay." She needed me to spell it out for her. "G-A-Y."

"G-A-Y?"

"Yes. I like guys." She squinted. "G-U-Y-S."

"G-U-Y-S?"

"Yes, please." Her hand was still on my ass, incidentally.

Depeche Mode cascaded from the sound system, shook itself on the dance floor like a wet dog; I went briefly epileptic, by way of demonstrating gaiety.

"You like this song?" she asked.

"But of course!" I squealed. "It's fabulous!"

"Why do you like it?"

"Because I am gay."

"How do you know?"

"Well," I explained, "I sincerely appreciate Zach Galligan circa Gremlins."

"Have you tried being straight?"

"Did my mother send you?"

She added something inaudible; I decided to interpret this as "Goodbye! I wish you a pleasant evening," and it was once more into the breach.

Four minutes later, I'd canvassed the entire joint, to no avail -- my party had pulled a Hanging Rock, save Kev, who was thrashing about to the strains of Cher's "Believe." I tried Cate's cell phone; nix.

Four familiar fingers insinuated themselves into my back pocket.

"Are you looking for a girlfriend?" she wondered. In her right hand sweated a Bud Light.

"Actually, I'm still gay."

Her eyes narrowed, and I thought of that line from A Separate Peace -- something about a child who knows he is about to say something clever.

"You suck cock."

"Never. I admire it from afar."

"What?"

"Yes, I suck cock." Fuck it.

"You know," she confessed, deadly earnest, "I think two guys going at it... 's really hot." She spoke like a car negotiating tortuous back roads.

"As do I."

"Especially when they're both, like, stubbly." A swig of beer. "All stubbly."

Was she trying to stimulate me? "Strumpet, I've no time for your festishes," I did not reply.

"Do you ever... do that?" Her words swayed with her.

"Go without shaving?"

"And screw other guys who're all stubbly."

"Gosh. Not often enough."

She frowned, disapproving. "You should."

"I think so, too."

Someone tugged at my belt -- I can only assume those trousers flattered my posterior -- and I caught a delicate whiff of Cate's Givenchy. Gripping my elbow, she steered me towards the door, her cheeks flushed with liquor.

"Where have you been?" she asked. And then, before I could answer: "Who's your friend?"

"I didn't catch her name."

"Oh." Cate cast her scarf about my neck. "Girls think you're so handsome," she assured me.

"It is my curse," I agreed.

Move over, Borneo ferret-badger!

“Researchers to trap mysterious cat-fox animal,” announces this headline; the article details scientists’ plans for the capture of an Indonesian carnivore. "Researchers [will set] cage traps to catch a live specimen," we learn.

They seem supremely confident in the cat-fox’s illiteracy. I hope it visits CNN.com and proves those cocky bastards wrong.

Hogwarts revisited

Last night, my cousin Theo and I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the cineplex on 86th and Lexington. Man, I wish I could perform a Refundus spell: This is a toneless, pedestrian film, with asthmatic pacing, palsied performances, anemic cinematography, and CGI like... what's an apt medical metaphor? Explosive diarrhea, I guess. Michael Gambon, in particular, fails to persuade; and while I'd happily submit to Miranda Richardson in almost anything -- Stallone's Get Carter redux, The Hours, even The Phantom of the Opera (though I draw the line at The Prince and Me; me find its grammar offensive) -- she barely contributes a cameo here. Also, I'm still confused as to the Durmstrang Institute -- its schoolbus seems to be a Viking ship, but the name of the place itself spoonerizes a German phrase, while the actors playing the students hail from Eastern Europe, and their headmaster looks like the love child of bin Laden and Al Pacino.

One dazzling flash of inspiration does distinguish this movie, though: its fanciful inclusion of a black character in an English academic community. Great special effect.

Disturbing trend among hour-long television dramas: Four out of five characters who claim to have been raped are, by minute fifty-five, exposed as liars or frauds. As I'm still awaiting this week's edition of Sexual Assault Today, I can't cite any real-world statistics, but this seems to me pretty misrepresentative.

Disturbing trend among navel-gazing online diarists: non-sequiturs.

The next generation

Yesterday morning I received an e.mail from my sister Mason, who lives in Germany with Will, her husband of sixteen months.

"Hello, ugly," this correspondence began. "You know how we thought Will hadn't gone through puberty? We were horribly, horribly wrong. You're going to be an uncle."

At twenty-four, Mason -- or, more accurately, the offspring -- will make grandparents of our mother and dad, first-time great-grandparents of their respective mater- and paterfamiliae (all but one, alas, deceased), and uncles and aunt of my brother, me, and our baby sister. I immediately registered five distinct thoughts:

(1) Pressure's off.

(2) Must diversify family nomenclature -- everyone in the extended brood is named Jack, Jack, or You. I intend to use the chart featured above for reference.

(3) I only hope the labor gods will spare pithy, graceful Mason what Martin Amis described as a prolix and generally rather inelegant parturition.

(4) This means that, technically, I can be described as avuncular. Am displeased.

(5) How will my father react? [I have since learned that Dad, on hearing the news, grumbled -- grandpaternity's perhaps a bit much for a man still in his early fifties. Mason tried to assuage him by promising a ride in the new black BMW she and her mate plan to acquire for offspring-transit. "A new car and a new kid?" Dad answered. "Will they both be black?"]

My college buddy Kat, the most peerlessly well-bred girl ever to flash me, has suggested I investigate assorted infant products -- bottle-warmers, pajamas, those pee-pads generally purchased for incontinent schnauzers and fraternity houses, etc. After considering her advice, I bought the o. a tee-shirt that reads "I ate my twin." This pays respectful homage to my mother, who, I'm told, bodily appropriated her own sibling in utero; she says the absorbed fetus still resides within her right elbow. Sometimes, when feeling particularly spirited, Mother will drive this joint into my stomach and bellow, "Take my twin!"

If Mason's smart -- and she is -- she'll claim likewise. It's excellent child-rearing: You just don't fuck with a woman who ate her sister.

A process in the weather of the heart

7.34 pm EST, Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005: Six days after locking eyes (and lips) at a friend's birthday party, Henry Solomon of Canada and Baltimore resident Imogen Greene, both seventeen-year-old virgins, follow up online:

H: hi imogen, it's me henry!
I: hi henry!
H: hi!
I: hi it's me imogen!
H: just wanted to write you from CANADA!!
I: omg!!!!
H: yeah canada!!!
I: canada rulez!!!! :P
H: yeah!!!
I: yeah! go canada!!!
H: it was fun meeting you last week!!
I: u2!
H: that par-tay was cra-zay!!
I: 4 sure!
H: shirley temples are delicious!!!!!
I: :P
H: lol
I: lol
H: lol
I: lol
H: lol
I: i'm so lonely
H: lol
I: lol
H: i cant believe we made out in the hallway, i really liked it tho!!!
I: me 2!
H: your lips tasted like cotton candy!!!
I: cotton candy rulez!
H: you gripped my balls like a vise!!!
I: lol
H: no seriously it fucking hurt
I: lol
H: i think you bruised my testes
I: lol
H: stop laughing you sadistic bitch
I:
H: lol
I: lol
H: lol want me to send some music??!!
I: yeah i want u 2 send me some music! email it 2 me!
H: do you have enough space??!!!
I: yes just shove it in my inbox!
H: ok
I: just cram it all in my inbox!!!
H: got it
I: then pull some of it out and push it in again!!!!
H:
I: turn my inbox on its side and fill it up!!!!!
H:
I: i can make my inbox wink at u!!!!
H:
I: just stuff as much as u want in there, u don't even need 2 say anything!!!!
H: your inbox must be huge
I: it is
H: and empty
I: it is
H: omg, it totally sounds like youre talking about your privates
I: I AM
H: ok i wrote u a poem on the plane back to CANADA!!!!
I: omg let me hear it!!!!!
H: yeah canada! woo woo!!!
I: yeah!!! let me hear the poem
H: saskatoon ROX!!!
I: let me hear the poem
H: it kinda sux!!!
I: faggot let me hear the goddamn poem
H: imogen, oh imogen
    your lips are sweet and meaty
    imogen, yeah imogen
    lets go out again someday soon... sweety
I: omg I LOVE IT
H: all right!!!
I: its so kewl!!!!
H: :)
I: ;)
H: was that a wink??!!!
I: no im half japanese!!!
H: you kinda tasted japanese
I: what?
H: nothing
I: I WROTE A POEM 4 U 2!!!!!!!! just now
H: can i hear it!!!
I: it totally totally sux!!!
H: thats ok!!!
I: omg, it totally blows, here!!!!
    A process in the weather of the world
    Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
    Sits in their double shade
    A process blows the moon into the sun
    Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin
    And the heart gives up its dead.
H:
I:
H: sux
I: i know i told you!!!!!!! i wrote it in like 2 secs
H: omg SECS
I: sounds like PECS
H: lol
I: and MEXicans
H: lol and SEX
I: dont joke about that, i could invaginate an eggplant right now
H: lol
I: lol i gotta go, it's almost time for the oc!!!!!!!
H: ttyl
I: ???
H: talk to you latah!!!
I: lol ggb
H ?
I: gotta go BYE!!!!!
H: omg lol wnwmiwtahvloyf
I: ????!!!
H when next we meet i will toss a hot voluminous load on your face!!!!!!
I: lol
H: lol
I: lol
H: lol
I: lol
[user H has logged off]
I: i thought my poem was good

Protesta demasiado

On a talk show last week, Ricky Martin hailed Life as his "most honest" album yet. Then he sang a song about dating a woman.

"Wired for sound / Wide awake here for days in a row"

The New Pornographers’ “Sing Me Spanish Techno” lodged in my skull back in August, like a little Athena or an aneurysm, and I require biopsy. (NB, amateur surgeons: Biopsy does not represent appropriate treatment for a brain aneurysm, but "endovascular coiling" lacks zip.) Worse still, these Canadians know exactly what they’re doing: “Punish you for list’ning too long to one song,” meta-chides the refrain. I can’t help it, A.C. Newman -- slap my ass and bob my head, but I can’t help it!

Reasoning that I might substitute a lesser evil, I’ve tried everything: repeated exposure to “Electric Avenue” and that whistle-jangle by Air; remixed versions of “Since U Been Gone” (u failed me, Kelly Clarkson); this instrumental shiznit from one Johann Sebastian something; even the Pornos’ own “Letter from an Occupant,” which scored my life for seven weeks in autumn 2001. All for naught.

Damn you, Spanish techno. Damn your choric glories, your cryptic lyrics, your tantalizing evocation of Iberia -- damn it all.

List’ning too long to one song...

Great blog, enlarge your penis

My first reader response today:

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I've reread this a couple of times, basking in the first two sentences, which confirm Roberto D. as a reader of sensitive critical faculties and exquisite taste -- clearly, this man holds a professorship at Oxford. The sexual-enhancement business throws me a bit... but maybe Prof. D. really did enjoy my postings; maybe he just mentioned penis-pumping as an afterthought. (My own Oxford tutors did that all the time when marking my essays: "A lacking paper, Daniel. Make ur cock HUGE the natural way!!!!" they might write. "Good effort, but NEW PILL ADDS 1-3 INCHES OVERNIGHT!!!!!! 8==D")

Perhaps, though, my prose bespeaks a runtish endowment. Maybe I shoudn't have posed for those pictures.

Good-ass soup

At the organic grocery store tonight, my friend and I circled the hot bar; the soup looked tasty, I thought.

“The soup looks tasty,” I said.

A pneumatic woman to my left overheard me. “Honey,” she declared, “I make some good-ass soup.”

I wonder if this was innuendo. At any rate, it seems I now have an alternative to Whole Foods.

Gulag 1953

Sometime in the early evening of December 31st, 1953, my grandmother clapped a hand to her brow: "Oh, hell," she muttered. "We didn't get a whatsit for the creatures." A whatsit was a sitter; the creatures were her five children.

My grandfather, a cadaverously handsome man known to his acquaintances as Mr. Raine and to his family as Mr. Raine, shook his Attic head, gravely.

"Well, we can't leave them alone. Bunny will gorge herself on nickels." This was no mean conjecture; their third child had developed a taste for five-cent coins. All winter long my grandmother struggled to convert her to pennies -- "Think of the money we'll save," she reasoned. "Good God, what if she graduates to dimes? It'll be the end of us."

Mr. Raine cast aside the newspaper, arched his left eyebrow.

"Don't be ridiculous,” argued his wife. “We can't take them along. James will piss in every corner of their house." Another documented fact: On finding himself in unfamiliar surroundings, the only Raine son would furtively mark his territory. This, as Granny Raine pointed out, is an instinct among creatures of the lower order.

"And Jane will give herself a haircut," she continued, extending her fishbone middle finger -- each Raine offspring was represented by a designated digit; if a child fell from favor, she might find herself rapidly demoted to thumbhood. "And Cate" -- pinkie -- "will put the baby" -- thumb -- "in the refrigerator again. There’s no room in the refrigerator for a two-year-old. And one of them” -- now all five fingers splayed -- “is sick."

Mr. Raine reared his left nostril.

"I don't know which one, Mister Raine. Someone threw up on the back stairs this morning. I didn’t see any pocket change in the vomit, so we can rule out Bunny. Oh, creatures, creatures!" cried Granny Raine, pacing before the vast acreage of the parlor fireplace.

Her husband cleared his throat. He had formulated a plan.

The cook was out for the evening (to the annoyance of her employer, who had assumed the Christian New Year would mean little to Sun-Li), so resourceful Granny Raine fried some liver in a skillet and exhumed an ancient Roquefort from the icebox; all through dinner, the creatures plotted the construction of their Winter Palace, a term Mr. Raine had managed to communicate by sucking on his inner cheek and twitching his ear. Jane, at six the eldest, seized her grease pencil and sketched on butcher's paper a lavishly detailed blueprint, resplendent with turrets and drawbridges; Cate suggested a refrigerator for the baby, who in turn vomited (“A-ha!” cried Granny Raine); James demanded his own bathroom; and Bunny, the piggy-bank, secreted fifteen cents beneath her tongue.

By nine o'clock, while my grandmother bathed, construction efforts were underway in the backyard. Mr. Raine etched a large circle in the powder at their feet, and the creatures, swaddled in winter coats and Shetland scarves, duly steeped snow along its circumference. Within the hour, they had shaped a solid-packed enclosure thirty inches high.

“That looks splendid, creatures,” called Granny Raine from the terrace. “Insurmountable. Nothing could breach those walls -- not pumas, not Mongolians. Mister Raine, it’s time we were off.”

Her husband folded his gaunt frame and clasped Jane by the armpits. She alighted on the other side of the wall; one by one, her sisters and brother were deposited beside her. Mr. Raine crouched down and peered within the fort.

“All right, my darlings,” he said quietly (my grandfather always spoke quietly), and five hooded heads snapped round, for his every word was religion and law, “Mother and I are going to a dinner party. You must guard the Winter Palace with your lives. Your mother seems to feel that there’s no risk of pumas or Mongolians, but I’m not so certain.” He cast a glance over his shoulder and frowned. “No, I’m not certain at all.”

Mr. Raine rose and walked toward his wife; they hastened down the drive.

Inside their pen, the children sat and remained silent, except for Bunny, who grunted happily as she chewed dry snow. Beneath the burnt-orange light slanting from Mr. Raine’s library, the creatures gazed solemnly at each other, like inmates in a Siberian gulag; they looked to the sky, and a fine snowfall dusted their faces.

Jane squirmed first. Not one of them had relieved herself since well before dinner.

Mr. and Granny Raine returned from their revels soon after midnight, he faintly smiling, she humming a Moss-Hart tune. As they approached the door, they saw a solitary form sprawled on the lawn by the front walk, fanning its limbs.

“Cate!” my grandmother exclaimed. Her thumb twitched.

Cate rolled to one side and stood from her snow-angel plot. She had made silhouette seraphim of the entire yard, Mr. Raine noted.

“You clever, clever creature! How in hell did you escape?” asked Granny Raine as she strode around the house.

The wall still stood, proud and high, but the snow was caved in a narrow gulch at the furthest arc. My grandmother inspected the wreckage, soaked bright yellow.

The children had peed their way out of confinement. Jack, the compulsive nitrogenator, went first, directing his slim penis toward the base of the wall and marveling as the stream lanced clear through the packed ice. His sisters followed suit, each squatting against the embankment, one after the other -- even the baby, though her aim was criticized. As Bunny contributed her quantity of nickeled urine, the wall shuddered; she capsized backwards, and cleared a girl-shaped path through the ureic frost.

Out trod the creatures, single-file, except for the baby, who seemed perfectly content in internment. Her mother found her babbling placidly to herself.

“Happy New Year, you little sock puppet,” Granny Raine said, and gathered the child in her arms.

The other creatures had fashioned a midget snowman by the cellar door; as Mr. Raine silently commended their handiwork, he passed a sleeve across his forehead -- it was a warm night, unseasonably so.

In the woods beyond, the Mongolians shook their fists, and the pumas growled.