Rottin' in Denmark

I'm reading Edmund White's 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America', which I found in a bookstore outside of Sydney for $2. It was written in 1980, the final year of un-ballasted gay hedonism. It opens with a passage about L.A.:

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. On e may grumble at a television performer out West but never at someone appearing 'live'. So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.
[...]
The polite friendliness of Californians is an ambiguous quality. Within the first ten minutes a visitor is showered with affection and familiarity, but that may be as close as one is ever likely to get to someone out West. This openhanded but superficial civility, linked to an obdurate and profound reticence, is precisely the granite wedge that all those hostile forms of California therapy are trying to dynamite. There is, however, a great public if not personal benefit to be derived from uniform good manners. People are able to cooperate. They can accomplish things.

This reminds me of Seattle, how everyone you meet is instantly welcoming and impressed with you, but that's as far as you ever get. Denmark has poured some bitter black coffee into the sweet cream of my West Coast superficio-ductions, but I still catch myself doing this.

I also liked this part about a New York acquaintance moving out to LA.

His tenement pallor is giving way to a tan. His monologue pauses occasionally now for reflection or even for listening, and he has discovered in California that politeness I have mentioned, which he mistakes for acceptance.

I'm only on page fucking 21, and I can't stop quoting this thing:

'The real problem here,' [He's now quoting a gay psychotherapist in LA] 'is that smart people don't know each other. In a large nomadic population such as the gay group in this city, the rules must be kept very simple. In Los Angeles the one rule is sexual display and curiosity. Even the most brilliant man, once he is at a party, will succumb to the general vapidness. From nine to five these people are bright, clever, grownup, but after five they become emotional morons. At parties there are no serious conversations and little real warmth. People arrive an hour late (a sign of hostility) and leave saying it was a terrible bore. Of course they were disappointed; what they needed was companionship but what they thought they wanted was sexual adventure.'

You have to resist the impluse to nostalgize this period in contemporary gay life. It's tempting to reclaim the pre-AIDS period in 'those were the days' terms. But they weren't, objectively. A lot of these men were profoundly damaged. No one was out of the closet. The cops openly harassed gay bars and assaulted patrons. Legal and civil rights were nonexistent, as everyone in this book would discover in the next decade. Still, it's hard to not to find a wistful sigh on every page. 

I'm in Singapore this week, and I picked up Antony Beevor's 'Berlin: The Downfall 1945' at Heathrow on the way over. Most of the book is a painstakingly detailed account of the Red Army advance through east Germany, complete with heteroese terms like 'batallion' and 'rightward flank'. You only find the good bad guy vs. bad guy stories in nonfiction.

The best parts of the book are the descriptions of life in Berlin during the Russian advance. Here's a city of 3.5 million people (plus probably 500,000 refugees) that has been the center of a rapidly expanding, and now dwindling, empire-let for the past four years. All the residents' husbands, and now sons, have been conscripted, often literally at gunpoint, and they know that they're going to lose the war. The only thing they're hoping for is that the Americans get to them before the Russians do.

The book contains passages like this:

Air raids were so frequent, with the British by night and the Americans by day, that Berliners felt that they spent more time in cellars and air-raid shelters than in their own beds.
[...]
The complex of shelters under the Gesundbrunnen U-bahn station had been designed to take 1,500 people, yet often more than three times that number packed in. Candles were used to measure the diminishing levels of oxygen. When a candle placed on the floor went out, children were picked up and held at shoulder height. When a candle on a chair went out, then the evacuation of the level began. And if a third candle, positioned at about chin level, began to sputter, then the whole bunker was evacuated, however heavy the attack above.

Beevor says there were more than 80 raids in just the first four months of 1945.

Here's Berlin right before the 'Ivans' arrive, on April 21:

That morning, the ordinary women of Berlin emerged to queue for food after the air raid. The sound of artillery fire in the distance confirmed their fears that this might be their last chance to stock up. The sunshine buoyed the spirits of many. 'Suddenly one remembers it's spring,' wrote one young woman that afternoon. 'Through the fire-blackened ruins the scent of lilac comes in waves from ownerless gardens.'

The sheer recentness of the history in Berlin makes it almost unique among European cities, and it's one of the reasons I like it so much. Beevor's book is a good reminder that in Germany, like every other country, history is the word we use when we talk about the derailing--and curtailing--of millions of lives. That 'ownerless gardens' thing gets me every time.

Have you guys seen the clip of the Japanese hidden-camera show where a dude is tricked into thinking that a sniper is picking off everyone else in the room? It's pretty great huh.

You can never really say how you would react to extreme, surreal stress, but six years after the invention of YouTube, I can't help but think that the first time something genuinely terrible happens to me, my first reaction will be 'OK, where's the pinhole camera, asshole?'

Come to think of it, this is probably how I will die. Someone's gonna come into a subway car waving a handgun around and I'll yell 'Cut! Worst Punk'd'ing ever!' and get shot. The only ones screaming will be people who never upgraded from dial-up.

They were the expression of a minority demographic group asking a president to deliver on the promises he made to us.

We're not comparing Obama to Hitler. We're not making things up or hopelessly exaggerating reasonable policies. We're not saying that gay marriage has to be legal at the federal level by Halloween.

All we're saying is that you should make demonstrable steps toward the shit you told us you were going to do. Some of that shit is easy, and some of that shit is hard. We understand this. Our advice:Start with the easy shit.   

It's not fringe when a group that the president has directly addressed asks him to enact the promises which were the reason we voted for him. Those words were the reason we supported you and, simply put, now is the time to put substance behind them. That's all we're asking.

 

When you think about it, it's kind of silly that we don't hitchhike more in Western countries, especially the United States. The cars and roads are there. The distances are reasonable. No one is so socially disastrous that you can't make 15 minutes of small talk with them.

Yet we never consider it. Hitchhiking has become so rare that only the weirdos do it. It's taken on cultural connotations (lower-class, hippie, daisy dukes) that no respectable middle-class professional would want to be associated with. Consequently, we waste billions of petro-gallons driving empty chairs from A to B.

We've set up a series of cultural rules for ourselves that prohibit hitchhiking. We're awkward and untrusting in confined spaces with strangers. We're wary of the motives of someone who would want to take a random thumber in their car. We don't like making ourselves vulnerable, or relying on other people. We don't want to risk hearing a John Cougar Mellencamp mixtape.

We look at the cultural practices of developing countries and pull our hair out: 'These people are dying of AIDS yet they won't use condoms because they think it will dampen their manliness? Come on!' You can imagine someone walking around D.C. going, 'These people are so concerned about global warming that they'll spend thousands of dollars on local food, electric cars and building retrofits, yet they won't share their commute with strangers? Come on!' When you control for the cultural factors, we're all idiots.

That said, I'm not gonna start thumb-mmuting anytime soon. It would take hours to get anyone to pull over, and I am wary of their motives and personality. This is the world we've got. But hitchhiking is the kind of thing that governments all over the world should be encouraging, not discouraging. Practices like hitchhiking aren't inherently unsafe. They're unsafe in practice because only the fringe does them. The minute they become mainstream, the risk falls away.

I can't help thinking that prostitution somehow follows this model too. Most people would never get a prostitute  because, well, they're fucking prostitutes. The buyers and sellers of sex are a fringe group, and indeed, there are a number of risks associated with that market as its currently practiced.

But most of the seediness of prostitution really comes from its rareness and practitioners. Just like hitchhiking, the act of prostitution isn't what gives us the gishies, it's the reality of prostitution. The girls are exploited, the pimps are assholes, the brothels have lava-lamps, etc. It's not that it's immoral, necessarily, it's more that it's fucking tacky.

My generation's promiscuous as hell. We're not offended by one-night stands, or fuck-buddies, or threesomes, or any other kind of sexual hitchhiking, as long as its consensual. Yet most of us would never even consider buying or being a prostitute. In the world we've got, that's a prudent decision. But in moral terms, we should acknowledge that it's the current reality of prostitution that offends us, not the prostitution itself.

[P.S. you gotta admire this dude's candor: Why I Slept with 1,300 Women]

for the first time since 'Captain Eo' at Disneyland when I was 12. I found the 3-D-ness kind of distracting, actually, but I bet people found color and sound distracting, too, when they were first introduced. Luckily the movie was 'Up', which is good no matter how many dimensions its in.

For some reason, this video reminded me of that

and thought it was utterly amazing, and probably the best 'show don't tell' argument for why I turn off most movies after 20 minutes these days.

Officially, it's a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. But it's really a home movie by Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, who bought a video camera for $20 off the street the day before the storm and kept it on almost constantly for three days in their attic, camped out on a neighbor's top floor and, eventually, in a Red Cross shelter. The movie's tied together by some post-production and some title cards, but mostly its just the Roberts trying, first, not to drown and, second, to sort through the rubble that the storm makes of their lives.

It looks like a liberal guilt-a-thon, right? I know. What the movie's really about, though, beyond the platitudes, is the insufficiency of fiction to address genuine tragedy. It's amazing how the Roberts survive the hurricane and its aftermath, but nothing about the movie could ever be pitched as a 'triumph of the human spirit.'

Both Kim and her husband are former (and possibly current) drug dealers. They steal a truck to get out of New Orleans and keep it. Kim's brother is in prison. Kim's using the publicity from the film to launch a rap career. Her husband doesn't have a high school diploma, and you can hear real bitterness when he explains his return to New Orleans from Memphis with, 'they only hire graduates up there.' A fiction film would never give its protagonists so many empathy obstacles.

But that's the whole point. We're all adults, we shouldn't need our heroes and survivors to come complete with college diplomas and sparkling intentions. The Roberts aren't 'good people who took some wrong turns in their lives' or however our binary moral compasses want to preserve their hero-ness. They are simply compelling. That's all they, or the movie, owe us.

It's funny how bands choose which songs to release as singles. I'm still obsessed with the entire Dan Deacon album, 6 months after it came out, but I never would have expected 'Paddling Ghost' to be a single. Maybe it's because the lyrics lend themselves pretty well to a narrative video. (Or do they? I can't understand half of them.) Or maybe it's just because it's the only song on the album that has anything resembling a verse-chorus-verse structure, and a radio-friendly runtime.

Anyway, the video's great, and the song is 200-proof joy. Mostly in the form of marimbas.