1: The Massage Parlour… if, indeed, that is its name.
For the last little while I have been playing sitar now and then at Studio B. during their Friday night yoga classes. I’ve been playing yoga classes for years at different studios and I enjoy it in a couple of ways: first it’s great to see highly flexible women in skin tight clothing twisting their bodies into unusual positions. Second, because people are not listening that closely but at the same time are picking up on my vibe, I can kind of experiment and practice without too much concern. I rarely stick to any particular raga (and I avoid ones that it would be disrespectful to play in those circumstances) and mostly I just mess around. It is what it is and in exchange for my services the people at B. have been giving me vouchers for one hour massages from their massage parlour downstairs.
Do they call places like this massage parlours? I have no idea. The first thing people always ask me about this whole deal is whether the massage is one of those massages; you know, the ones that happen behind poorly lit storefronts with dusty windows covered over by drab curtains. They want to know if disaffected topless women from mysterious Eastern block countries are working the cum out of my shaft with rough fisted strokes of the right hand while meanwhile the left hand is relentlessly lifting and dropping a cigarette from the curving lipsticked lips. B. isn’t like this at all, though.
Or at least I always assumed B. wasn’t like this because the truth is that until yesterday I had never bothered to use any of the vouchers. It’s not that I was against the massage concept or anything; although I often do have issues with personal space and I don’t always love people getting close to me or touching me; much to the consternation of certain people who became frustrated by the fact that I didn’t want to hold their hands every single second that we were out in public. It’s not that I hate you or that I’m embarrassed to be seen with you in public, it’s just that sometimes I want to not have anyone touching me while I walk… anyhow I digress, as usual.
I had all these massage vouchers and I didn’t know what to do with them and I was thinking about it over the summer and I realised that each one represented a value of almost $100 and that maybe I could barter them for something useful if I put an imaginative ad up on Craigslist.
2: The Slight of Hand… or, getting a lot from a light hand.
Craigslist has been a marvellous venue through which to sell for $100s of dollars various items of furniture that I have found in the street on garbage days. It never ceases to amaze me that people will walk by a thing and refuse to touch it just because it is in the trash and yet if the same item is listed on Craigslist along with a bit of sexy description these same people will come banging on my door with handfuls of cash that they can’t wait to shove into my paws. Well ok, I’m not exactly ready to retire from this business (I’m pretty fucking broke, actually) but I think it’s more because I’m not willing to put in the hours then because it is a bad business venture.
Not only this, but one time I posted an ad on Craigslist in the pets section saying that I was a filmmaker making a movie and that I needed a whole lot of animals for the movie and that if anyone had any unwanted pets they could give them to me and I would “use” them in my film production. I then said that I was sorry but the pets would not be returned, due to the nature of the film. I said, also, that, since I was pressed for time, I was planning to try and pick up all the animals in one day and drive them out in the back of my cube van to my warehouse and so I needed to make pickup arrangements with everyone in advance, and I was looking for suggestions for how to transport horses and cats and gerbils all in the back of the same truck without damaging any too badly before the filming began…etc, etc, etc…I tried to make it all sound a little sketchy, anyhow. So after this I started getting all these e-mails informing me that what I was doing was illegal, and that I was a sick fuck, and that I was going to burn in hell, etc, etc, etc…people were especially vexed by the whole cube van thing. It was quite a laugh…ok if you don’t have a sense of humour you probably hate me right now….but back to the point…
The thing that I really wanted to get during the summer was a sofa, but not just any sofa; I wanted especially one of those old 70s style sofas with the wooden rectangular arm rests and the bad rough woven cloth covering them. I wanted the kind of sofas that sat in every waiting room in every dentist’s office and outside of every school principal’s office in Christendom. This kind of thing, you see, I believed would fit in best with my particular decoration scheme.
Thus, I began searching online for photos of these kinds of sofas by typing in such terms as “waiting room sofa” and “dentist’s office”. The amazing thing I discovered during this process was that most of the photos of sofas I did locate were on pages that resolved back to the government of Canada. I began to browse the government’s websites and I found that there were often pictures there advertising the waiting rooms in different governmental offices. “Just look at our fabulous waiting room” these sites said. This really blows my mind. I mean, who gives a goddamn what the waiting room looks like? It’s not like they call you and then you go up to the desk and say, no actually I don’t want to get my passport renewed/ drivers licence ratified/ parole papers signed/ Canada Council grant reviewed, I actually just came to enjoy your waiting room because I love sitting on these ratty fucking sofas that you haven’t replaced since before I was born!
Look, I’m not making this shit up:
This is the waiting room at the Kingston Penitentiary
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/kingston_1_e.htm
This is the waiting room at Collins Bay (this blue sofa is really a nice one!)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/collinsb_1_e.htm
This is the waiting room at the Kwìkwèxwelhp Institution (nice sofas here too)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Pacific/kwik_1_e.htm
Here’s a great shot of the cloak room at Libraries and Archives Canada
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/the-public/005-4020-e.html
Here’s a shot from the Frontenac Officer’s Mess in Kingston
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/ffom/Owl_room_e.asp
Here’re some not too comfy benches at the Supreme court:
http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/details/gal2-eng.asp
So up went my ad on Craigslist, basically saying that I was looking for a particular kind of sofa and that, if anyone happened to know where one was, I would be willing to exchange some massage vouchers for one (especially of they delivered the sofa to my door). A few responses came back: there is a sofa on the corner of Madison and Sherbrooke in NDG, maybe if you go over there you can pick it up… no thanks. Perhaps the government of Canada has old ones in a warehouse someplace; apparently there is an auction once a year on Montreal and you can buy all kinds of stuff dirt cheap… more useful, but I don’t think the government will accept my massages as payment.
Finally I got the king of all responses: this guy wrote to tell me that a few years back he had been a guest of the Canadian penal system and had been doing his time in New Brunswick. Apparently, he told me, the reason that Canada has all its waiting rooms (especially the prison ones) done up with these sofas is that they are actually manufactured in house (so to speak) by prisoners and then shipped all over the country to government offices. Well, continued this fellow, I used to be a quality control overseer for the manufacture of these sofas and therefore, if you like, I can make you one from scratch but unfortunately the 2-300 dollars worth of massages is not going to cover the cost of even a fraction of the material I will need… never mind labour, but if you give me thirteen massages I will do it for you.
I decided to decline his offer, partially because I didn’t have thirteen vouchers and I didn’t want to have to give him the massages myself (although I believe this was an option). I mean, ok maybe I could have given him the massages… but you just know that if you gave someone thirteen massages it’s going to get to sex eventually and I’m not prepared to whore myself out for a custom made sofa that is going to end up looking like something I found hanging out of a dumpster. Also, I’m not actually gay, despite what I wrote about Superman and also about the chests of teenage boys in skateboard movies and also about the movie 300.
But by all accounts, I should have been gay since both my mother (a former ballerina) has (and my grandmother had) a lifelong association with the National Ballet (Rudolf Nureyev once drank all my grandmother’s vodka and then attempted to have sex with my uncle…but this is a tale for another day) and also my mother forced me to watch musicals as a child and taught me all about interior design and brought me with her countless times on her wedding planning excursions. Lets face it, I could have been the greatest homo of all time… but I just like women too much… plus I look fat in pink.
3: Thinking about Gay Porn… or, how to kill time and have fun doing it.
I will confess to you, though, that I saw a gay porn film the other day and I thought it was pretty hot. I was killing some time before I went to visit my friend Andrea downtown and so I decided to wander around downtown to see what kind of mischief I could get into for a couple of hours.
I went first into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and mingled my way into a conference, a meeting of people who provide essential services to educational institutions or something like that. I crash conferences whenever I get the chance because, the way I figure it, no one there will be certain that you should not be there because everyone is a stranger to everyone else, thus is it extremely difficult to get kicked out. I ate some strawberry tarts and drank some tea and I had a really nice conversation with someone named Tiffany who gave me all kinds of free stuff (swag, if you’ll forgive me using the term again so soon). She and I will be lovers in our next life.
I went up to the Concordia complex and started to wander around in there for a while. It’s pretty amazing how deep into a building you can get if you locate the right door or elevator. I came back down and slipped into the main lecture hall. There was a film class going and I sat down to watch the movies:
1: It Wasn’t Love, by Sadie Benning
My first impression, while I was watching this movie was that it was a typical example of what happens when you combine a complete lack of talent with a utter lack of imagination. It seemed like the kind of thing the filmmaker’s friends would laugh at hilariously and sycophantically just because their girl made it. Ok I know it problematized gender in all kinds of ways and it used fractured interpretations of popular culture in order to reconstruct concepts of gender and selfhood and all these things are really interesting to talk about, but just because a movie is theoretically rich and just because it is a historical curiosity, this doesn’t make it good. The thumb sucking scene was hot, though.
I was going to put up my hand after the screening and talk but then before I got the chance this other lady in the audience put up her hand and started going on about how she could see why Sadie Benning became the darling of the lesbian community and blah blah blah young genius at work gush gush gush. So I kept my hand down. I’m not even in the class anyhow so it seemed better not to pour a bag of ants into the keener’s picnic basket.
2: Positiv, by Mike Hoolboom.
At first I wasn’t sure about this one. The way that the narrator was reading the text in that halting way that people read when they are trying to represent the natural cadence of spontaneous speech but are instead only serving to highlight just how textual and self conscious their performance is was a thing that was very distracting to me. And I thought a lot (as I did during the first movie) about Ann Cvetkovich’s book An Archive of Feeling…all those disjointed images and mediated realities combining to create a fractured sense of self. What a lovely book that was. I also thought about Susan Sontag’s Aids and its Metaphors. Another book that influenced me a lot. By the end of the film, when the narrator was talking about watching his friends change as he drifted away from them into death I was sold on this move, though. It was very good.
3: A Phone Comes to Jammu, by Nila Gupta.
Once again we are talking about mediated realities. In this case it is a desire to discover oneself and one’s history through old photographs and the narrative is cut with stock footage of childhood days. I think this is part of what Cvetkovich was talking about when she said that the experience of being gay often feels like (or gets treated like) a subversion of the normative narrative of a human life; this is to say that one is made to feel as if one is not acting according to the script. Certain aspects of the script: love, the desire for happiness, the relationship (or lack thereof) to one’s family remain, but all these things become fractured and disjointed and must be reassembled in new ways. These three films can not tell linear narratives or linger on single images because they are aspects of lives that are defined by a constant push against the stream of normality.
So, for example, do you remember when I was talking about how all biopic movies about rock stars all follow the same pattern? Well in the case of a biopic about someone who is somehow forced to the fringes of polite society because the way that desire manifests itself in their heart, they can’t simply just slip their life into the expect narrative; it won’t fit. They can look at photos or film clips that are signifiers for this narrative and then they can try to make sense of their fractured relationship to these signifiers… but this makes the movie complex, non-linear. It doesn’t make the movie good necessarily, but it does make it theoretically rich.
4: Loads, by Curt McDowell
See, now this one was really interesting because it wasn’t all hung up on the confusion and angst and fractured sense of identity that the other three were. I mean, it does come from a slightly earlier (pre-realisation of AIDS) era but it also comes from an era when homosexuality was a lot less normal than it is now (although I guess this was counterbalanced by the fact that it was made in San Francisco, which is, you know, a pretty gay city). Anyhow there is still a sense of mediated reality in this film because the narrator doesn’t just pick up men off the street and suck their cocks. Rather, he picks them up with the pretext that he wants to film them or photograph them and then while he’s doing that he sucks their cocks on camera. Also, the narrative is not linear, and, as the film progresses, the sex scenes with the different men turn into an increasingly confusing montage of cuts and angles and butts glistening with afternoon light streaming through dusty windows and muscle bound pelvises with thick veiny pricks stabbing outward toward the audience, swallowed up my the moustachioed lips of the narrator. Indeed, at a certain point it is almost impossible to tell which cock is which and which body is which and, in the end, at the climax, with the great streams of seamen spurting out over the narrator’s hairy beard, with a single glowing string of ejaculate stretching down the dark furry chest of a body builder from his nipple to his hips, over his gorgeous belly while he reclines on a loft mattress, completely satisfied by what has passed, with the tattooed and bearded man arching his pelvis into the narrator’s mouth and gripping at the very point of explosion into the narrator’s hair, jamming his engorged member further and further down the narrator’s throat, it probably doesn’t even matter which cock is which.
The salient comment from the crowd was that if the film would have been made with women instead of men, if it would have been a shameless and completely self-confident exploration of heterosexual lust from a male perspective instead, then maybe all kinds of power issues that didn’t feel like they were there with the men would have been painfully present. This is a shame because, as turned on as I was by seeing all those frankly gorgeous men blowing each other, I would have much rather seen something close to what I see when I go to play for those yoga classes but with a lot less spandex covering the good bits
Anyhow, even if the yoga gig isn’t the kind of celebration of lust that I pine for, I do get the free massages and, thinking that I had best take advantages of what few advantages I have in this life, I decided to forget about ever finding a good sofa and go in and get my first massage yesterday.
4: Palmistry and Palm Artistry, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the balm.
The massage itself was just what I suspected it would be (and I mean this in a good way). I lay down on the table and the masseuse worked at my muscles for an hour and after I felt better and more loose. There were some things that I was a little dubious about, for example, she told me that for the most part she was going to give me a Swedish massage, which is working the muscles and doing different things to them with her hands. This was good. But, she said, I’m also going to do something called an inter-cranial-something-or-another, which is a more unusual method and not everyone appreciates it right away. It turns out that this was the part right in the middle of my massage when she stopped massaging me and just held my head in her hands and didn’t move at all for about ten minutes. Inter-cranial-something-or-another my butt! I figured she was just taking a break on the job, but she insisted after that it was actually a real technique and that it would have positive benefits for me. Anyhow, I often find people’s bullshit charming and what the hell it was a free massage so how can I complain?
The one part that really interested me, though, was that while I was being massaged (for real massaged, not during the fake part) was that I suddenly had a flashback to something that happened to me years ago. I believe this kind of thing is normal with good massages because certain tensions get released when the muscles open up and, when these tensions go out, the body reverts to a prior state of being or something…I can’t really explain it right now but trust me I think this kind of thing is normal.
Anyhow, what I remembered was this:
When I was twenty years old I was living in Andhra Pradesh, India and working there on a rural development project. One day, one of the project workers, an interesting fellow who was almost always in sunglasses and open silk shirts and who went on endlessly about this or that lady that he was planning to “enjoy with” and who buzzed around the dusty rural roads on his old Yezdi 250 Classic sounding like a bumblebee with a Marshall amp tied to its back, came to me and told me that he wanted to take me to see something.
I sat myself on the back of his bike and we rode for probably three hours away from the project through the low rocky hills and the long dry plains and scattered roadside villages of the area. Finally we arrived at a place called Thimmamma Marrimanu… well it’s not a place so much as it is one single tree; the world’s largest tree, in fact, a single banyan that covers more than five square acres of land. This tree, which is hundreds of years old, is actually a forest unto itself and within the forest is a small temple and people go there and worship. The project worker and I went to the temple and made a puja and then sat down in the forest and ate lunch.
After lunch, on the way back, we stopped in to look at some small agricultural projects that the NGO I was working with had set up and it was sitting here, under the small shade of some saplings, with a massive hillock studded with great brown boulders brilliantly illuminated in the afternoon sunlight, that he began to interrogate me.
Have you ever been with a woman? he asked. Yes, I have, I told him. He looked into my eyes. You’re telling me bullshit, he said. What do you want me to say? I can’t prove if I have or not. He took out a piece of paper and a pen and he handed it to me. Draw me a picture of the lady’s sexual organs, he said. I took the paper and I carefully sketched out a vagina, first making an elongated almond shape and then filling out its sides with an elegant labia that fluttered away from the inner slit like a slender butterfly. After this, I worked my way up from the bottom, drawing the butthole just below the almond and then filling in the vaginal opening, then the urethra and then making a little clitoris at the top of the almond. I thought it was not a bad rendition, all in all, but when I handed back the picture to the project worker he examined it for a moment and then looked up and me and said: you are bullshit.
Next he took my hand and gave me a palm reading. He ran his fingers over the lines of my hands and he explained to me what each line meant.
You are a very interesting fellow, he said. No matter what you are doing you will always think about it too much and be stressed about it. If we were climbing that hill over there, for example, you would worry that the rocks were going to collapse on you, and when you are on the bike you always worry that you are going to fall off the bike. You spend too much time in your own mind worrying.
Also, he said, you will have whatever you want in this world but you are going to have to work for it and you are going to have to suffer for it and nothing will ever come easily to you. And you are going to have a lot of lovers, he said, because ladies will fall in love with you, but you will find it hard to be settled because you think too much. I’ve already had some lovers, I told him...
He looked me in the eyes. You are bullshit, he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment