Ragtag grab-bag
There are so many reasons why The Bionic Woman is an all-time favorite of mine. And that was before I remembered there was an episode where Jaime poses as a nun to uncover a diamand-and-heroin smuggling ring operating out of the winery at a convent.
TV in the seventies wasn’t better, really, but it was certainly simpler.
Of course, if you have any memories of the show at all, you were probably traumatized by the same images that have haunted me all these years…
Every now and then certain pieces of music will catch me unawares and hit me with an onslaught of memories that had been packed away for a while. Usually, the culprit will be a song that I had one of the mix tapes I thrived on during high school. Like with most teenagers, I guess, music was a huge part of my life back then. It was a way to choose and declare some kind of identity and tribal association. It was a litmus test to see who was on your wavelength or not. It was a complement to heady adolescent emotion. I spent so many hours listening to music then — on my long commute between Staten Island and the Upper East Side, hanging around with friends listening to each other’s albums, and just hanging out alone in my room (probably sulking or pining away for one thing or another, since I was a teenager). Hearing a random track from that time can dredge up exactly the feel of the moment in the most vivid ways, especially when it takes me back to moments I’d forgotten about.
I’d downloaded a bunch of tracks a while ago without looking at what the batch included, and I’ve been slowly working my way through the bunch while I sit at my desk working at night. So I’m sitting there tonight polishing up a few letters (I’ve got 26 lowercase and 9 uppercase so far, if you’re curious) when Slip It in by Black Flag comes on. Wham! A flood of heady, hormone-fueled teenage memory comes flooding back. Slip It In was on one of the earlier mix tapes — number 4, I think, of the 120 or so I’d made by the time I gave up cassettes in the late 90s — and was probably taped off of WSIA, the college radio station on Staten Island. I listened to this particular mix a lot.
Actually, I listened to Slip It In more than the rest of the mix. In a way that only a closeted homo with a neurotic flair for being a goody-two-shoes can really pull off, I didn’t really tap into my churning hormones until I was well into my teens. By the time I finally discovered the simple, intense pleasures of pulling my own pud, my whole sense of sex and self was already deeply mixed up.
For me, Slip It In was like a thunderclap of sex. The whole pace and tone of the song is about sex, and not the polite kind. My first really intense orgasms came while listening to this song over and over, getting off on the sound and the images I put to them. (And I didn’t even know that Henry Rollins was monster hot yet.) What’s fucked up, though, is that I could imagine what I wanted so intensely without actually realizing it. When I was horny, I would think about all these cute New Wave girls I had crushes on — you, like I was supposed to — but it didn’t take long before my pulse was racing and my dick was throbbing to images of wiry punk rock boys in leather jackets and combat boots. If you want to know how fucked up it is to be in the closet, that’s it: happily jerking off to one thing for years without ever even acknowledging it to yourself. And man, did I know some hot punk rock boys when I was in high school and college. So many wasted opportunities! It would have been a lot easier for me, the girls I dated, and probably everyone all around if I had just been able to figure out why that stuff kept popping into my head when I let myself go all those afternoons in my room.
(You can watch the video here, but it really doesn’t do the song justice. In fact, if I had seen the video back then I doubt the song would have become so erotically charged for me.)
Now that my Christmas-killing cold has settled down into a manageable case of congestion, I’m lucid enough to string a few sentences together without needing a nap to recover.
I was waiting for a touch of cold to hit me. I’d gotten through two changes of season without one, so I was convinced I was in for a whopper. Apparently the climate here suits me. Either that or my seasonal colds really have been psychosomatic all along, and there was no need for one since I’ve been supremely happy ever since I got to the UK.
I celebrated the end of term with a brief weekend visit to Bristol to see the good Drs. Paul and Tony, who whisked me off for an afternoon tour of Cardiff to take advantage of the inexplicable burst of sunny weather I’d brought with me. Since I had never seen any episodes of the new Doctor Who series (and I only ever saw a few minutes of the older shows, usually while I waited for Blake’s 7 to be broadcast late at night on public television) or its spin-off, Torchwood, I couldn’t fully appreciate the thrill of being in locations featured prominently on screen, but I at least did my nerdly duty and took pictures:
The gents kindly indoctrinated me into the ways of the Doctor, Captain Jack, and their cronies later that night, so now I have a new avenue for exploring my not-so-inner geek. It figures the Doctor Who franchise would finally grab me once they figured out that cute leading men might be a good idea. If only I had a television.
The end of the term didn’t actually mean the end of work, so it was back for a few more days of productivity after my trip. Hilariously, it seems we’re supposed to have a direction for our typeface designs “locked down” by the time the next term starts in January, and I know I’m not the only one in the group who stills feels a total lack of confidence about being that far along. I guess I’ll have to think about that, too, in between bursts of work on the huge essay I have due the week after classes resume. (Bear in mind, though, that I am totally digging all this type geekery in which I have become so immersed.)
The flatmates and I threw a lovely shindig so we could celebrate the season with our classmates before everyone scattered for Christmas. (I can safely say “Christmas” because we were all raised with that flavor of midwinter gift-giving holiday.) That party set in motion a lovely string of coincidences that led to me hanging out in London a few nights later with some Brazilian and some Belgian pals at a phenomenal Brand New Heavies reunion show.
I have been waiting for over a decade for a chance to see these folks play, and I was relieved that this wasn’t just some half-assed walk through their back catalogue. They were on fucking fire as they funked their way through old singles, gems off their new album, and even an amazing cover of Seven Nation Army. I have never seen a band coax so many white people into dancing so much. When I went back to crash at my friend Tim’s place afterward, he chided me for never mentioning my love of the Heavies when I visited him back in their heyday, because at the time he probably could have arranged for me to meet their drummer via a mutual friend. Sigh.
I was hoping for some quiet down-time in London for the next couple of days, but I wound up walking for hours and hours again, getting to know a bit more of the city. I finally have the bearings to get from certain key locations to others without a map, or without worrying about following a particular route. I also developed magnificent, firm legs and slightly sore arches from all this exploring. The robust condition of my legs was offset by the achey back I developed from sleeping on Tim’s teeny couch for three nights in a row, but in a city that’s even more expensive than New York I was happy to have any lodgings I could afford.
I finally dipped my toe into London’s gay nightlife, as well, tagging along with my pal Jonathan, who can’t go ten feet without running into someone he knows. We spent most of the evening at a pub called the King’s Arms where I felt really young and slim, but yet still invisible since neither of those things count for much in a roomful of bears. Since I don’t really like drinking, smoking, bears, or crowded rooms it was kind of a long night, despite some very enjoyable company. By the time I left I could feel my cold coming on, so the die was cast for Christmas to cast its usual cloud over my spirits.
After a long, long morning of last-minute errands in London and lots of public transportation filled with lots of holiday travelers, I wanted to crawl under a rock with a bottle of cough syrup and a pillow. I was pretty miserable by the time I got back to Reading, so I was double-extra-happy to discover a long-awaited package from Dave that was filled with three months of comic books. Plus the Super Pets!:
Streaky is the only cat I can love. I mean that.
Leave it to my bestest pal to find a way to provide me with exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it most. He’s spooky like that. As I was passing out from exhaustion and illness, at least I knew I would have Krypto and Yorick to keep me company if and when I woke up.
And somehow I missed yet another glowing review from CyberSocket back in February. Thanks guys!
This charming little booklet was published by the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas. The put out all sorts of teeny newsprint screeds like this, sadly undated. This particular edition is mostly sweet, occasionally tongue-in-cheek (pun intended, I confess), and occasionally exactly what you’d expect from something of a certain era…
It has nothing to do with this doozy of the same title, even though they share an equally sophisticated point of view on the subject matter.
Thank you, Cybersocket, for the very kind words: “POSEABLE THUMBS: We couldn’t offer a tour of seedy but effulgent art-porn without neglecting the consistently superb Poseable Thumbs, whose Tom of Finland-derived action figure sex remains to be both hot in a rather disturbing manner, and soaked in faultlessly-saturated Technicolor.”
There was another nice write-up for the Thumbs in the November 2005 issue of AVN (Adult Video News). Although I knew this was coming out, it slipped my mind until after the fact, so I never grabbed a copy for my archives. Luckily the writer, Ken Knox, sent me a PDF file of the page for posterity.
Ken had also given the site some enthusiastic coverage in a blog entry of his own a while before this hit the stands, which made me all kinds of smiley. Any attention for the project is always nice, but it’s especially satisfying when people get a kick out of the full mix of elements going on in those photos, instead of just appreciating them for the humorous or the horny content.
In case you’ve ended up here after reading James Withers’ New York Blade article, “Blog Star Confidential” — WELCOME! I hope you enjoy the show.
Speaking of enjoying the show, you really ought to read more about the WYSIWYG Talent Show that my sexy cohorts and I put on every month at P.S. 122. WYSIWYG is a monthly series of all-blogger readings and performances, we’ve been at it since February 2004, we’ve featured over 80 bloggers so far, and it’s awesome and you’ll love it. Also, cheaper than going to the movies!
Our next show, which promises to be the cattiest yet, is coming up on Tuesday, September 27 — First, Last, and Insecurity: The World’s Worst Roommates!
Going into Cowgirl Hall of Fame, I could see that there was a lot of rubbernecking happening a block down, at the corner of Christopher and Hudson. It was hard to tell, though, whether there was a fire, an accident, or what. I was curious, but I was hungrier. By the time dinner was over, though, the sun had set and the floodlights and an even larger crowd had arrived at the scene, making it very clear that something was still going on, and it was kinda major.
This awesome review from the August 2005 issue of Unzipped is probably the best one of them all (my reviews for Poseable Thumbs, that is). They obviously get it.
