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MAY/JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2003 (after hiatus to attend weddings on opposite sides of the planet)
Life after entertainment is woefully painful. And it's not like I didn't try, like I wasn't feverishly working to pin everything down, but it started coming too fast and breaking down into tiny pieces until I simply couldn't see it anymore, like a window fan that rotated slowly the first half of my life, effectively blocking the view, but which has now picked up speed and become transparent to reveal the muggy graveyard on the other side of the street.
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The British didn't just imagine the Teletubbies set; England really looks like that. I know because I was there for Jeff and Claire's wedding.
I'm not kidding, the wedding looked like a diorama inside of a giant strawberry. If a six foot toad with a monocle had been milling through the crowd with a tray of drinks, no one would have batted an eye. During the reception, a rainbow appeared above the goddamned castle and hot air balloons soared over the hills; these British hills which looked like they would have borne children if anyone had bothered to "have a go at them."
It was the most perfect thing I've ever witnessed, a fairy tale wedding indeed.
I of course brought plenty of black and white film and my photographs look like clusters of iron filings.
I never properly conveyed my astonishment to Jeff and Claire because I was exhausted and drunk and freaked out about not being able to get out of the way of pedestrians. (When you go right, they go right too. It's bizarre.) But I wanted to thank them for getting me off of my huge unreasonable couch in Delaware and onto the compact sensible furniture of the UK. I see the world in a new way. It was like finding out I had an extra foot I'd never used, or that my walkman could dispense ice cubes if I bought a certain brand of batteries.
Speaking of England and Walkmans, one thing I really want, and I hope this exists somewhere, is a cd of the woman announcing the train stops between Manchester and Lancaster. Something about the way she said "Picadilly" and "Preston" with crisp consonants made me feel like I was on another planet. I think the girl from Logan's Run was driving the train.
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"Just be yourself."
It's the most ineffective phrase ever uttered. The subtext is "be more entertaining." When you tell a sheepish or nervous person to be his or herself, what you mean is that you want to see some breakdancing or hear a hilarious tirade about the stupidity of breakdancing. There is no middle ground to stand on. If you're standing on it, you're not being yourself. (The middle ground would be raising one heel to moonwalk and then grumbling for a second.)
I'm essentially a gorilla. If someone tells me about their job or things they want to buy, my first response is to walk gingerly on my wrists and feet to the other side of the room and groom the hair on my chest. But then I consider that I am not necessarily being myself, which I know I am, but "self" implies a cataloguing of things that make me something greater than a gorilla. So I tell a story about working at the movie theater and how I still have a single disc cd player. The chest thing is written off as an eccentric method of thought-harvesting.
I remember Lisa's birthday party. We had dated in kindergarten. What we did was we rolled around on the floor and made Moowah Moowah sounds in kindergarten. My parents thought it was hilarious. After being shipped off to Catholic school, I figured I'd never see her again, but was later invited to her tenth birthday party. I recall sitting on a chair in the kitchen while loud ethnic looking kids in sweaters played an abstract, vocal pre-teen game in the living room.
Lisa emerged, older and taller, with a silly expectant grin on her face and I shook my head at the floor. She was surrounded by three or four of her friends and I was so paralyzed that I muttered "man," like all of this jive-shit was bogus and I was just there as a favor to the squares.
She returned to the living room and her mother asked me what was wrong.
"I don't know."
"Just be yourself."
"man."
Being a member of the last generation not to have their lives videotaped from birth to death, my dim romantic memory of that afternoon suggests I spent it in the kitchen wondering if I could somehow pull a lever which would either turn me into one of the spastic Zoom kids or jettison my kitchen stool through the roof of the house.
Someone told me that shyness is a form of vanity, that a quiet person is speechless and flabbergasted that the loudmouths of the world are not perceptive enough to recognize his or her genius.
I am usually silent because I feel like a slug with a slow, bewildering lifestyle that makes very few people feel good about anything. And because I often objectify a fledgling conversation into a large flapping monster, with flaming breath, roaring "Be Yourself!" which distracts me from whatever is actually being said. And instead of slaying it with an appropriate story, I sort of dismantle it with incomplete thoughts and jokes about people in the other room.
And it goes away.
April 2003
The David Lee Roth, Van Halen "shrug" represents a notably embarassing spike in pop cultural psychosis. You feather back your hair (...just got a body-wave!) and smirk, then raise your arms with up-turned palms as if to say "I don't know...I'm just good looking, a good looking man. Who knows how I do it? It is beyond human understanding." Then the leotard-clad girls exercise all around you and you lower your glasses to look at them, turn to the camera and make an "O" with your mouth...again, shrugging as if to ask "What's this? Why is this happening? I am bewildered and oddly apologetic. This wasn't my idea and I'm as surprised as you are that it has occurred. It must have something to do with me being a good looking man."
Henry Winkler may in fact have planted the seeds for this, for the "Heey. I just can't help it." aspect of it. But Van Halen did it relentlessly. It was the money shot, shown in rapid fire sequence for the duration of every Van Halen video. Even the bass player did it.
Consequently, there are millions of forgotten snapshots, in yellowing albums, of American males shrugging their shoulders in the company of two or three women, typically a girlfriend and two of her homely "single" friends at a picnic or Junior ring dance. "Hey, don't look at me. It's just the sort of thing that happens when I go out. It's good that you're photographing this anomalous event, to preserve it for future sages who might unravel its many layers of mystery. As for me, I just...dunno. It may have something to do with me being a good looking man."
Rap had an equivalent stance: the Run DMC high crossed arms and tilted head. This suggested a more direct engagement. "Well this is certainly interesting. These girls dancing before me are triggering thoughts and considerations. My options are numerous, and I will cautiously assess them. My good-lookingness notwithstanding, this is truly fascinating."
Last summer, I went to a wedding which became an inadvertent display of the newest in choreographed dudeness. One specific dance move shone like a slithering serpent sent by the sequined gods of middle-class hubris. It works like this: A woman approaches a man and slowly lifts his tie. The man's immediate response is to throw his arms in the air as if to say "I didn't start this. This was your idea. Look, my hands are up in the air! I'm not even doing this!"
Then the woman gyrates and sways from side to side, leading the man by his tie as if they're crossing a plush but bleak 80s bedroom suite to a canopied bed with lighting that creates silhouettes from every angle. The man pivots his upper body, keeping his arms aloft. "Does everyone see what is happening here? Because I honestly have no idea who this girl is and want to make sure everyone understands that I am not encouraging this, but if she wants to go do it or whatever, well that's just fine with me. Not that it matters, but this must have something to do with me being a good looking man."
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Milk cartons, when I was in high school, featured public service announcements starring Archie, of the Archies.
Archie doesn't need alcohol to enjoy a party.
And of course, Archie is yokking it up with Jughead, Betty and Moose (As if Moose hadn't just funneled a gallon of Pabst and punched a hole in the wall.)
This was 1987, by the way, before media was snide and obnoxious. Cynicism came from within. Our environment was littered with dumb, defenseless marketing schemes that had not yet learned to beat us to the punch.
And on this milk carton, Archie was apparently telling a joke, one which prompted Betty to arch her back (yowzah) and guffaw, Reggie to appear devilish, and Jughead to raise his eyelids and misalign his jaw. Since there were no speech balloons, I could only conclude that the joke Archie was telling was:
Archie doesn't need alcohol to enjoy a party.
Which is a pretty funny thing to say...when you and your twenty-something teenage pals are at a party in Riverdale...getting loaded.
Later that year, a handful of my fellow students would be expelled after a school-wide locker search revealed a staggering profusion of cocaine.
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