You may have picked up this week’s Weekly Dig, and seen the crotch-shot that came in apparent answer to a cover of a couple weeks back featuring a bikini-clad female buttocks. There was a letter to the editor after that one bemoaning the dearth of covers featuring “dude ass, or some close-up dick bulge.” And it was a legitimate complaint, and The Dig recognized it, issuing “an open call for man-bulge art.” What you see on this week’s cover is apparently what made the cut:

No offense to photographer Jeff Galusha, who has spent a lot of time, apparently, perfecting his art, but, as my good friend Joey Smithers (of The Joey Smithers Effect–and don’t pretend like you don’t know who he is, either) said, over beers last night, “that’s not a bulge, it’s a camel toe.” (By the way, he would like to thank The Dig for having the courage to say what has become glaringly obvious: the penis is the new pussy.)

There followed a lively discussion amongst all those present about whether the cover adequately addressed the original grievance, if at all, and what exactly should be considered a “bulge” in the first place. Personally, I think a distinction must be made between bulge, droop, and sag. I don’t think I have to illustrate the difference for you to see pretty plainly that The Dig cover is more a droop at best, possibly a sag, but really not a proper bulge. Nice try, guys, but no cigar.

Truth is, in the end, this Dig cover satisfies no one. It is overly ironic, and one thing I can say about irony with absolute confidence is that it doesn’t mix well with sex. Irony ends where sex begins. There is no such thing as an ironic sex organ. That’s why we cover them up. Irony can mask or reveal real intentions. So can underwear. But they are not the same.

We are in an interesting cultural moment. I mean, think back 35 years ago (ouch!) when the Stones came out with Sticky Fingers:

Pretty scandalous at the time. But by fifteen years later we had Marky Mark prancing around in his tidy-whities, grabbing his bulge (and it was a proper bulge) in prime-time TV ads for Calvin Klein.

So, what’s happened here? How did we get to where a droop or a sag could pass as a bulge on the cover of an alternative free weekly like The Dig? Here’s the problem in a nutshell: if they put a proper bulge on their cover, they’d be too mainstream, and it would be too confusingly earnest. The problem here is how to make the man-bulge, which has become downright iconic, teasingly ironic?

The funny thing about the original request for “dick-bulges” on the Dig’s letter page is that it was a reaction to what might seem to some an unironic cover featuring, as I mentioned, a female buttocks. But what makes that sort of cover fit The Dig is that it actually slyly parodies trash, but only for those who “get it.” If you’re not in on the joke, they’re just female buttocks, I guess.

Body parts are hard to parody, is the thing. Unless portrayed grotesquely or recognizably grotesque in themselves, a bum is a bum is a bum. Breasts are breasts. Semiotically speaking. You may have a preference as to shape, size, whatever, but it’s hard to make any kind of ironic statement with them.

Man-tools are easier than breasts or buttocks, though, because each has varying states, and because the tumescent state has been so relentlessly idealized and iconized (though in slightly sublimated form) in our culture. Nowadays instruments of domination and monuments to power are assumed to take the form of the phallus.

The bulge, in short, is the status quo. The phallic nature of our monuments was outed long ago. This is in fact why obelisks have fallen from fashion, and part of what was so profound about Mia Lin’s gash-in-the-earth design for the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (although due to that talent for sublimating many who have tried to replicate “The Wall” in small-town monuments to the war have lost the significance of the monument being below street level, and have focused instead, as the popular nickname for the monument suggests, on the wall itself).

Fittingly, you will note that unlike the early seventies Sticky Fingers bulge, the post Mia Lin, mid-nineties, Marky-Mark version is antiseptic and amorphous:

Like the old Jane Russell bras, those CK boxer-briefs don’t reveal so much as acknowledge what cannot be denied. They offer a way to standardize an idealized bulge, promising to give your bulge that same neutral, pleasing form. In the guise of hyper-sexuality (a pumped-up, thugged-up Marky-Mark), Calvin Klein was actually offering our liberal-permissive culture a new-school version of Victorian sexual restraint. Perfect for the decade of Ken Starr.

So anyway, not only would a real bulge not do for a Dig cover, but a noticibly limp droop or a sag wouldn’t go far enough, either. It would clearly take small, sad, droopy bits in loose-crotched, pink man-panties to get the right message across.

It’s not like I’m jonesin’ for eye-candy. My point here is not that The Dig should be anything it’s not. I think it’s interesting how truly girded in on all sides artistic culture gets at times, is all. Not that artistic culture is always as interesting as what constrains the artists themselves.

As for eye-candy, I went to the MFA the other day with an out-of-town friend, and we ventured into some galleries I hadn’t explored. And there, right before my startled but delighted eyes, was a gang of priapic dwarves!

And who can resist priapic dwarves? Seriously. You gotta love the ancient Greeks and Romans. I’ll take a gang of angry, horse-hung dwarves over Marky-Mark any day!

In fact, why not put one of those little guys on your cover, Dig? I mean, Christ, you could still put them in pink man-panties if you wanted.

I figured I owed you all an Aphra Behn update. I was reading some of her “Love Letters to a Gentleman” this morning:

I cannot help…wishing you no mirth, nor any content in your dancing design; and this unwonted malice in me I do not like, and would have concealed it if I could, lest you should take it for something which I am not, nor will believe myself guilty of. May your women be all ugly, ill-natured, ill-dressed, ill-fashioned, and unconversable; and, for your greater disappointment may every moment of your time…be taken up with thoughts of me (a sufficient curse), and yet you will be better entertained than me, who possibly am, and shall be, uneasy with thoughts not so good.”

Hey, we’ve all been there.

I went to see a movie with my friend Leo* last night: The Oh in Ohio–with the incomparable Parker Posey, the deliciously over-ripe Paul Rudd, the delightful Danny DeVito, and even a surprise appearance by a blonde, pussy-empowering Liza Minnelli! And this film was all about the power of the pussy. Its moral seems to be that you’ll find the female orgasm where you least expect it. And that if you live in Cleveland, Ohio, your choices are probably somewhat limited. Parker Posey’s were limited to Paul Rudd, Danny DeVito, and a French Tickler.

Ah, the sexes!

The Dig has a profile of Jesa Damora’s “Corner Pocket Art” in this week’s issue. Damora has been doing six foot by six foot drawings of men’s balls lately. Ray Hainer, the Dig’s art guy, says it’s like “seeing the balls of God.” Damora says it’s an exploration, at least in part, of vulnerability. I have written about balls before, here, and have long argued they needed an iconography of their own. But I’m not sure I was serious. Not this serious, at least.

You know, it used to be that porn imitated art. First it was Saving Private Ryan, and then it was Shaving Ryan’s Privates. It was American Beauty before American Booty. Not the other way around.

Now art imitates porn. I mean, remember a couple years ago, a New York photographer named Ashkan Sahihi, had an exhibition called “Cum Shots,” that took the city by storm? It was a series of routine headshots in front of a Sears portrait backdrop, only his subjects’ faces were covered in semen. Like so:

It was apparently some sort of comment on the commodification of cum. The idea hit Mr. Sahihi a year and a half before, when all the sudden he noticed that “popular culture is getting more and more saturated with pornographic imagery whenever something needs to be sold.” Astute observation.

“My point,” he went on, “was not to claim that pornography or sexual self-empowerment were ‘bad’ or ‘immoral,’ just to say it’s everywhere, and our acceptance of it is a pose. If you told some of the same people who wore pimp-and-ho clothing that you support gay marriages or gay adoption, they’d be up in arms.”

When asked how a load in the face communicates this, he answered, “Semen is a life force. But in pop culture, any sort of sexual activity leading up to ejaculation is portrayed without the life force. Semen really is the beginning of everything, but in most of the images we’re given for sexual entertainment, it’s the end of everything.”

Oh, Ok. Asked if he liked porn, he replied, “I did visit sites. I have no problem in admitting that some of the things I saw — not necessarily the bukkake [which I have just learned is a Japanese word for a sperm shower] I saw — were extremely exciting…. One image really stuck with me in my head, but also in my lower chakras. And it was of somebody who I do not find very attractive. I came across an image of Paris Hilton getting out of her car, and you can see her very, very unattractive pussy. And that image — the horniness we have toward celebrity culture — gave me a mental hard-on. The picture pleased me as a photographer, too: everything was in there, from the little pack of Marlboros, to the question ‘Was she aware?’ to the car she was driving, to the fact that I thought she had a really unattractive pussy. That image was one single boner for me.”

Glad to know I’m riding the zeitgeist.
___________________________
*Not his real name.

I have to admit that with the rain this morning, I pussied out and took the T to “work”. I don’t have proper rain gear for riding yet. But if it’s just drizzly tomorrow, I’ll ride in. I will. I did leave about fifteen minutes early this morning, anticipating that since we haven’t had much rain, people would be acting all weird. You know how people are whenever there’s a change in the weather. It’s an excuse for all manner of tomfoolery.

Owing to my early departure, the ride in on the T wasn’t bad, although I never like stepping into one of those fogged-up trains, with the condensation on the windows. And then if it’s raining like that, and the train’s packed, what the heck do you with your umbrella? It’s a problem.

Riding the T instead of my bike did give me an opportunity to get started on my new T-reading: Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. (He is Chair of The Cities Programme at The London School of Economics and the author of several books on cities I can heartily recommend: The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, and The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life, among them.)

This morning I got as far as the Introduction and Chapter One: “Nakedness”. In the introduction, in a section on “the passive body” Sennett talks about the geography of the modern city:

People travel today at speeds our forbears could not at all conceive. The technologies of motion—from automobiles to continuous, poured-concrete highways—made it possible for human settlements to extend beyond tight-packed centers out into peripheral space. Space has thus become a means to the end of pure motion—we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them. The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral: the driver can drive safely only with the minimum of idiosyncratic distractions; to drive well requires standard signs, dividers, and drain sewers, and also streets emptied of street life apart from other drivers. As urban space becomes a mere function of motion, it thus becomes less stimulating in itself; the driver wants to go through space, not be aroused by it.

…Navigating the geography of modern society requires very little physical effort, hence engagement; indeed, as roads become straightened and regularized, the voyager need account less and less for the people and buildings on the street in order to move, making minute motions in an ever less complex environment. Thus the new geography reinforces the mass media. The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography.

Both the highway engineer and the television director create what could be called “freedom from resistance.” The engineer designs ways to move without obstruction, effort or engagement; the director explores ways for people to look at anything, without becoming to uncomfortable.

And so on. What Sennett is doing in the book is drawing our attention to all sorts of connections like this. He’s right on the mark with many observations, like: “The triumph of individualized movement in the formation of the great cities of the nineteenth century led to the particular dilemma with which we now live, in which the freely moving individual body lacks physical awareness of other human beings.”

In the first chapter Sennett looks at “the citizen’s body in Perikles’ Athens” and draws some interesting connections between nakedness and democracy, which have, mercifully, gone out of fashion. He includes a fascinating discussion of the ancient world’s ideas on body heat—“women were thought to be colder versions of men”–it thus made sense to keep them covered up. In the Greek view “at least two genders correspond to but one sex, where boundaries between male and female are of degree and not of kind…a one-sex body.” For most of Western history, he reports, “medicine thus spoke about ‘the body’—one body, whose physiology moved from very cold to very hot, from very female, to very male.” Is this what Paris Hilton is talking about?

And speaking of hot. “The gymnasium,” Sennett says, “taught young Athenians how to become naked.” I tried to get my teaching degree in that but they didn’t offer it at Indiana University. Anyway, sexuality, according to the author, was “a positive element of citizenship.” Has he met Suzie Bright, I wonder?

It goes on and gets even more heated from there until we arrive at the “erotic bond between citizen and city,” which we best see nowadays, I think, in the slogan “I ♥ NY”. I was watching a Sex and the City rerun the other night where Carrie turns down sex with a handsome sailor because he insults New York, and she can’t have anyone insulting the biggest love of her life.

Every city aspires to be so well and passionately loved. Even Indianapolis, in my youth, came up with an ad campaign, complete with a jingle, the chorus of which was “move over New York, apple is our middle name!” But only a handful of great cities the world over inspire their citizens to true love. Is Boston one of them? Sure, you might marry Boston, but you’d still be sneaking off to New York for some hot lovin’ whenever you could.

Don’t deny it. You know you would.

I have this very sexy writer friend who has discovered podcasting. So she’s podcasting erotica for the masses now. She told me the other day that one of her secret fantasies was that on the T she’d be sitting next to someone listening to one of her racy podcasts. Rrrroowwwr!

I think it’s racy enough reading “Savage Love” in the Dig on the T. The truth is, people read all kinds of smut on the subway. It’s scandalous, really. But for the most part no one seems to mind. People do get a little nosy sometimes, though. I mean, I’m one to talk. I like to see what my fellow commuters are reading as much as the next guy.

But I’ve been more keenly aware of it lately, since for the past week or so my heavy T reading has been Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, and I always see people trying to read the title from the cover. It’s a little embarrassing, because the title and the cover kind of look like it could be some kind of sleezy potboiler, referring in the title to “knowledge” in the Biblical sense, when in fact it’s straight-laced lit crit from a well-respected, thoughtful, and sometimes prudish octogenarian (actually he died in December ‘05, and was in his seventies when he wrote the work in question).

I just finished the next-to-last chapter (I was tempted to say penultimate there, but I thought it would sound too snooty)–anyway, the climax of the book is Shattuck’s very frank discussion of the Marquis de Sade, with some unexpurgated excerpts from Justine and Philosophy of the Boudoir. This is not erotica, it’s straight-up porn. Shattuck admits that “pornography we shall always have with us. It serves a purpose and in its traditional forms poses no serious threat to decency and morals.” He goes on to say, “the healthiest reaction [to it] is usually laughter, not outrage.”

But Sade takes it too far, he says, and illustrates the point with references to the horrendous Moors Murders in the mid-sixties in England, and Ted Bundy’s killing spree in the following decade. Both cases involved unspeakable crimes, and murderers who claimed to have been influenced by Sade’s philosophy and works, which became widely available only after loosening of obscenity standards in the ’60s in Britain, France, and the US. (Nowadays with the world wide web, we can hardly imagine codes as restrictive as they were before that time.)

Sade’s rehabilitation among academics, marked in the 20th Century by his inclusion in the canon of great works of Western literature, essentially undermines everything the canon has come to represent, according to Shattuck. It has also paved the way for the mainstreaming of Sade. And while the book was published several years before Abu Ghraib, I think Shattuck would have seen that as the ultimate expression of Sade’s triumph over Western Culture. Quoting 19th Century English Historian Lord Acton, he sums up the Nietzschean ethos of the age we live in: “The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”

As the title suggests, Shattuck’s study opens with the story of Prometheus, who, according to the Greeks, stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, for which he was bound to a rock, his liver eaten out by a vulture, repeatedly, forever. Try to do a good deed, and that’s what you get.

But that’s not the end of the story. According to Hesiod, Zeus was so hopping mad he’d been tricked that in retaliation he sent Pandora, the first female, with her “box” (ahem) to tempt Prometheus’s gullible little bro Epimetheus. Being the first stupid het, he took the bait, and upon opening her dowry discovered an endless supply of “grief, cares, and all evil,” which nicely canceled out all the mod cons Prometheus had managed to win for humanity. Ouch.

Then of course, there was Adam & Eve. The snake. The forbidden fruit. Crrruuunnnccchhhh. And now we’re stuck with the Marquis de Sade and Desperate Housewives. What can you do?

QOTD: What are you reading on the T, my naughty little minxes and metrosexuals?

I can’t even imagine how much those new and appallingly useless electronic signs at Downtown Crossing must have cost. Why not just put up an old-fashioned sign that reads: “No smoking.” Not that everybody doesn’t already know smoking’s prohibited. I mean, who doesn’t know that? And you probably can’t read if you don’t, anyway. And if you’re smoking down there and you do know, what good’s it do to have a sign flashing you’re not supposed to? It encourages it, is what it does. And why not flash it in Portuguese and Hindi and Cajun and Farsi?

And what else does the flashing sign say? “For info go to www.mbta.com.” Oh, thanks. Here’s an informative sign that very urgently tells you to go elsewhere for information.

And I’m absolutely sure no useful information will ever be conveyed by this flashy signage. But whatever.

Yesterday I was at Downtown Crossing for the evening rush hour. When I got to the platform, it was packed. And at least three trains came in the opposite direction, so, of course, when finally one lumbered in on my side of the tracks, it was obnoxiously crammed full of commuters. I decided to wait for the next, but you know how people are on Friday afternoon, wanting to get home and all. They were acting crazy. There was one creep on the platform with a briefcase shouting into the car: “move! Move your fat asses! You could get four more bodies in there! Move it!” And he was serious. I mean, he wanted to go home. And I can understand it, but come on.

There’s definitely a hierarchy of evils here, and making a spectacle of yourself in public is higher on the list of sins than not scrunching in sufficiently to allow someone who is making a spectacle of himself onboard. But the sense that entitlement trumps physics was also richly displayed in the incident. Several people simply would not allow the train to leave, although they could not get all the way in. I mean you’d think this was the Fall of Saigon, or something. Wait two freakin minutes, and there will be another train. What’s the emergency?

When finally the train was able to pull out, the wingnut who’d been making a scene, ran along the yellow line, knocking on the window at the passengers who had not heeded his orders to get their attention so he could give them all the finger. And the thing of it is, this freak was with two colleagues. Can you imagine working with somebody like that? I wonder what business they were in. They all three were middle-aged schlubs with briefcases, in their Dockers for dress-down Friday.

None of this excuses the irregularity of trains at rush hour, mind you. There is definitely malicious intent involved on the part of the T. I mean, one last slap in the face on a Friday just to show you who’s who and what’s what, right? But have a little dignity, people. Acting desperate only encourages them, after all.

As expected, not long after another train came, and it wasn’t nearly as packed. It was crowded, yes, but then it was rush hour on a Friday. You’re not gonna have the train to yourself. One thing that bugged me instantly when I got on—and I will admit up front it’s probably just me—was this tall dude who had a hand-held DVD player about the size of a book he was watching. Why does this bother me? I mean, it was about the shape and size of a book, and people reading books on the T definitely don’t bug me, so why should someone watching a DVD with headphones?

I don’t know, maybe it’s that 64% of twelfth graders are below proficient in reading. 26% are below basic. And according to Richard Restak, neuropsychiatrist and clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University Medical Center, author of Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain’s Potential, a kind of user’s guide to your brain, watching TV really does turn your brain to mush. Alzheimer’s has been linked in studies to excessive time spent in passive pursuits, like watching TV. In fact, one particularly rigorous study compared seniors with and without Alzheimer’s, and found that “the only single activity in which Alzheimer’s patients on average significantly outperformed their counterparts was watching television.” Maybe someday it will be an Olympic sport, too, just like everything else. Links between too much TV and obesity? Aggression? ADHD?

But then, why should I care whose brain turns to mush in the end? For me, there’s something else to it. It’s that disconnect from reality. More than that, it’s a defiant disconnect. A repudiation of shared reality, of the concept of “here” and of “now” in which I have tremendous faith.

There’s such a wealth of stimulating reading out there, too. At the same time this dude was watching his DVD, I spied this chapter heading in a course packet the guy next to me was reading: “Situations and Circumstances Conducive to Sexual Intimacy.”

I’m just saying, reading can be informative and fun!

COINAGE & KARMA. I got a free ride yesterday from JFK and I still don’t know why, but I wasn’t gonna ask. The token lady was outside her little booth, standing at the open gate, and I had my dollar out to get my token, but I guess she didn’t want to go back into her little booth to get me one just then. I consider it karma for a wait I had a couple years ago on the orange line, for which I wrote an email to the MBTA to get my fare reimbursed, and was told to go fuck myself.

THE EYES HAVE IT. I have definitely noticed that now that we’re officially into Spring, people are perking up a little. There’s been more eye contact out there in the last few days than there’s been in the past six months put together. People are funny. It’s still tentative, sometimes slightly teasing, rather curious than cocky at this point.

I spent many years in Budapest, and people there always make eye contact, and often stare brazenly on the subway. The staring used to bug me, but you get used to it. The eye contact on the street always gave me something to think about, though. On the one hand, it gave every outing an air of possibility, because each little interaction was a tale of its own, pregnant with possibility–visions of romance and violence, fantasies of intrigue–where did she come from? Where is he going? Was that an invitation in her eyes? Was that a threat in his? That’s what I have always loved about city life–that’s what’s missing from the suburbs. Fact is, in the suburbs, even if you make eye contact it’s in a familiar and thoroughly domesticated setting, like the supermarket or the post office, or the drive-thru from the safety of your car–and lacks that primal frisson of connection—and that vertiginous moment of “right now, if I look again, everything could change. Right now if I don’t look away, everything will change.”

Returning to Boston, I found it bugged me that you’d be passing somebody on the street and you’d be looking at them and they’d be looking at you, but you’d get about to where they were in focus, and they’d shift their gaze to the sidewalk. This is before there was any possibility of making real eye contact, mind you. Of course, in primates, the sustained gaze is a sign of dominance, while avoidance is a submissive or deferential gesture.

But here it seemed a sort of wholesale conflict-avoidance. The fact that the potential interaction was aborted seemed also to argue that people you encounter on the streets of Boston, for the most part, feel that conflict is the most likely outcome of interaction, at least with strangers on the street. Which is not so surprising, seeing as Boston is a city with a population widely stratified along social and economic lines. There also seems to be a lot of self-segregating due to race, class, and age, which is not so unusual, either. I think there’s probably more eye contact amongst strangers in cities that are racially and economically less stratified, more homogeneous.

Of course, psychologists and sociologists have a lot to say about these things. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin –Madison studying autism found that “in autistic subjects, the amygdala — an emotion center in the brain associated with negative feelings — lights up to an abnormal extent during a direct gaze upon a non-threatening face.” It could be that Bostonians have hyperactive amygdalas. Only compulsory mass MRIs can tell us for sure.

In New York City, in the days after 9/11, some psychologists-about-town, and at least one journalist(“gawker” Alex Kuczynski) noticed something: “In acts described by psychologists and sociologists as subliminal bonding consistent with wartime, instead of averting gazes when a stranger stood close, many New Yorkers made eye contact. The cultural historian Neal Gabler, who walked Manhattan’s streets for three days after Tuesday’s attack, said that New Yorkers have always cultivated the blank face. “It is an immunity mechanism, an emotional tax that you pay when you live in New York City,” he said. “Now, people have left it behind and are looking at each other with a different kind of civility, looking for some kind of contact.”

Kuczynski quotes Dr. Gordon Bower, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, on the result of millions of years of evolution in facial expression: “We are now able to pass on an emotional contagion, where one sad person can through their body and facial language pass on sorrow and grief to hundreds of other people,” he said. “It is an empathic, imitative response that even little children have.” Indeed, eye contact is so elemental even newborns seek it out.

But, yes, there are real dangers—but mostly inconveniences—associated with eye contact. I can’t deny it. I remember when I lived in Portland, Oregon. There was this big pockmarked homeless Indian in my neighborhood. I was working nights and he used to hang out in a doorway on my way to the bus stop. He was usually three sheets to the wind by the time I was getting to work. He was always very aggressive, demanding money or cigarettes, and because of his usual state of inebriation and his formidable stature, I found him threatening. I crossed the street to avoid him when I could. Whenever he accosted me I flashed him a look and grunted something. But one night I decided to just ignore him completely. This is something a lot of people do with beggars and bums on a crowded city street, but the less crowded it is, the more likely you are to provoke more of a reaction by ignoring them than if you just go ahead and acknowledge them. This was definitely the case with the pockmarked Indian. He flew into a rage, cursing me, throwing an empty bottle, shouting “Hey! HEY! I said ‘HEY!’” Demanding I acknowledge him. I didn’t. I hurried off to the bus stop, and made a note to try a different route from then on out.

Since that unpleasant incident, however, I always make it a point to acknowledge beggars, but I still don’t give them money. For many of mendicants it’s kind of a “gotcha!” game. If they can catch your eye, even for an instant, you lose, and owe them a buck, or whatever. This may be because of the empathy that eye contact seems naturally to engender. But I’ve been on skid row myself and never resorted to begging, so I feel like my empathy for the situation they’re in does not preclude a certain lack of sympathy for the solution they seem to have come up with.

Another danger in the city is that it seems like it’s mostly crazy people who aggressively seek out eye contact. I passed a mischievous-looking guy near the Pru yesterday, and knew I was in for something if our eyes met (but probably even if they didn’t). All it took was a glance as he was passing, and he barked: “John Lennon! Imagine!” at me. I laughed, and without breaking my stride, shouted back: “Double Fantasy, baby!” and passed without incident. He shouted over his shoulder back at me: “You got a fat wallet!” But what he took for a wallet was actually my leather-bound Moleskine notebook, which I often keep in my back pocket.

IN OTHER WORLDS. Anyway, at JFK there were two Asian students, one looked like one of those happy fat Buddhas, talking with great enthusiasm about some computer role-playing game. The whole way to Park Street. You know how people who are really into that sort of thing are. I mean, they can bang on forever about the different characters, their morphology, and their magical qualities. And listening to them, you’d swear it was all very real.

At Broadway, it probably was, an interesting character got on. He looked like he was maybe a Vietnam Vet, wearing what looked almost like a sort of paramilitary uniform. He had on those strangely-fitted pants your school custodian used to wear, the ones that were made out of indestructible rayon. Sensible shoes. A black SWAT-like vest, with some sort of walkie-talkie-like devise attached that would issue bursts of static at fairly regular intervals, prompting him to minutely adjust the volume with controlled competence. He wore a black baseball cap with the emblem of the Dept. of Public Safety Texas Rangers on it, pulled down so low you could not see his eyes, and, in fact, his bearded face was completely obscured. He may have been wearing Unibomber shades, too. Still, I felt like he was on our side, somehow.

Watching him, I thought, aside from the fact that his trousers are too short, and are exposing his white and red-striped (but matching) tube socks, he’s in an absolutely airtight world of his own construction there. OK, to some extent we all are, but his was hermetically sealed, with its own set of signs and symbols intelligible to none but him.

Then, the next stop, a mother got on with four little boys, all around fivish, sixish, sevenish. I think three were hers, because they looked just like her. And they were all lovely. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Squirrely, but in a Beatrix Potter kind of way. The crazies shrank from them immediately, of course, but the boys themselves were so completely good-natured and innocent, they didn’t shrink back from the crazies.

You could tell riding the T was this big adventure for them. And they were bold explorers, watching the goings on with fearless, utterly unselfconscious, good-natured curiosity. And genuinely cute kids are few and far between, let me tell you. But all four of them were delightful.

10,000 JOANS.After the gym I dropped into the Boston Public Library. There’s an exhibition, 10,000 Joans, upstairs in the McKim Building through June 15th. The exhibition, consisting of Joan of Arc memorabilia I guess you’d call it, hints at something, but with no program, brochure, or guide accompanying it, and very little explanatory signage, you’re left to sort it out on your own. There are guided tours, and I’m interested enough in the subject matter to take time out for one. (The exhibition’s title is a bit misleading, though. The number of Joans on display is in the hundreds, not thousands. I think the ten thousand figure comes from the complete collection, impossible to display, obviously, all at once, in the gallery space available.)

Because, truly, the story of Jeanne d’Arc is such a compelling one on so many levels: religious, yes, but cultural and political even more so. Americans don’t always get the deep, enduring significance of national saints in Europe. Sainte Jeanne is, of course, patron saint of France, and as such a symbol of French history and identity on some levels. Does the exhibition explore this? I couldn’t tell.

One thing the exhibition hints at is the incredible appeal and the richness of the material devoted to her story. Up to the present day. But here again, an exhibition of this size can’t even hope to scratch the surface. It did not include any reference to the French military’s helicopter Carrier that bears her name, Jacques Dror’s distinctive Art Nouveau-inflected church in Nice (that has been nicknamed “the meringue” by local critics), or depictions of her by cheeky French artists Pierre et Gilles. This is partly a limitation of an exhibition of an idiosyncratic private collection rather than a more systematic exploration of any certain theme. As a collection of artifacts it’s interesting enough, I guess.

One of my favorite books that takes Joan of Arc as its subject is Michel Tournier’s Gilles et Jeanne. By the way. In fact, I’d recommend about anything by Tournier for a good read.

My, but this has turned into some kind of lengthy discourse, hasn’t it? I will have to save my observations of my orange line journey home for another time. Until then, au revoir, mes petites grenouilles.

Some interesting issues are brought up in this week’s Dig. For example, the issue of expectoration. That’s what the pros call spitting, kids. I don’t want to brag, but I have a friend who is currently in training for Beijing ‘08! At least he seems to be, since every time I see him he expels about forty pounds of phlegm from the back of his throat over the course of an hour or so. I have to admit, his technique is impressive.

But the city doesn’t see it that way. It discriminates against expectorationists. Regardless of their skill level, there’s a potential twenty dollar fine for spitting on the streets of Boston. The other day we were strolling along the avenue, and by my count my friend racked up $3,280.00 from one end of Newbury Street to the other. I mean, of course, he wasn’t fined, but if he had been, we probably could not have afforded dinner and drinks that night.

I think about the only thing that takes more skill on the street is the Farmer’s Blow. It’s like the Nordic Combined of post-nasal drip relief techniques.

This week’s issue of the Boston Courant (serving Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway and South End) features a fascinating front page story: “Wealthiest Bostonians Are Our Neighbors”. Pictures of Boston’s billionaires, and approximate addresses are provided. All for free! So pay your rich neighbors a visit! I’m sure they’ll be happy to welcome you in (re-gift a fruit basket or a cheap bottle of wine, though, just to be neighborly).

Lock your doors! Hide the OxyContin! Stuff@Night is why I stay home.

This free bi-weekly is so utterly naff, it could only have come from the Phoenix Media Group. The Phoenix markets itself as überalternative, but Stuff@Night is all the proof you need that it’s a front. And a flimsy one at that.

Possibly the single naffest feature of the rag is “booty call,” “because Boston stays up late (even when the clubs close)”. The idea is that you’re out late, and you’re so thoroughly, irredeemably pathetic that you either already have “booty call”’s number programmed into your phone, or you’re so bored you’ve picked up a copy of Stuff@Night, found the number inside, and actually called it and left a message.

Wanna know how something like the Imette St. Guillen murder could happen? It’s right here in “Booty Call”:

“I’m in a car with a random guy who’s giving me a ride home, and I heard something on the radio about lactive centers. Do I have a lactive center? Are you born with those, or do you grow them? And can guys have them? I was just curious. I don’t know. Lactive centers, huh? Who knows?”

Aside from that, most “booty calls” run along the lines of “I love Stuff@night and I love keg parties!” “I had a good night, drank some vodka, and I’m not that drunk, so I’m proud of myself.” And “Hey, Booty Call. I’m making a booty call because it’s in the morning now and I’m gonna do my thing like always: go to the computer and meet lotta girls in there, and have sex and get paid for it. Yeah, I know it’s funny how I do it. I know it’s crazy and everything, but it’s great. It’s great. I do it every time, I go meet lotta girls and have sex and get paid for it. And I’m enjoying this, I’m enjoying, but I gotta do what I gotta do. Yeah. Yeah. Bye.” This guy is probably a busboy at Chili’s. I think I may have dated him once.

When it comes to “sex,” Stuff@Night’s got a column under that heading in every single issue! This week’s theme? You guessed it: pap smears! Yeah, baby!

It is THAT NAFF, people.

There’s a letter in the Phoenix this week that sort of sums it up: “As for the Phoenix, what’s up with you? Are you owned by the Clear Channel now, or what? No, seriously, you are not progressive or hip. You are the frat boy in the pit, and we hate you.”

Met a friend who’d just returned from Israel in the People’s Republic of Cambridge yesterday. It was kind of an overcast Winnie-the-Poo style blustery day, which I like. My first memories were of days like that–I can’t say whether it was early spring or late autumn, but the pleasure I take in inclement weather is due to a kind of emotional atavism. It’s like liking Paul McCartney and Wings, who I learned the phrase “inclement weather” from, by the way. You remember the song, “With a Little Luck”:

There is no end to what we can do together.
There is no end, there is no end.
The willow turns his back on inclement weather;
And if he can do it, we can do it, just me and you.

I can’t say whether this is, objectively speaking, a good song. It’s inextricably tied to the mystical, blustery, happy-sad days of my childhood. I will say I’m grateful it was Wings on the soundtrack of my early days, and not, like, Billy Ocean.

Speaking of. We went to John Harvard’s Pub to hang out yesterday, and it was, like, eighties night, or something, and all my worst memories from high school came rushing back. Eighties nostalgia should be illegal. It was a decade without merit. And the music reflects that. But for those poor children of the Eighties, I guess Wham! is their Wings.

So we’re sitting there aghast, reliving the audio car crash of the eighties over and over, and my friend’s like, all that’s lacking is Billy Ocean’s “Get Out of My Dreams, Get into My Car” and sure enough, next thing you know, it was booming from the sound system. I think the chorus bears quoting at length:

Get outta my dreams
Get in to my car
Get outta my dream
Get in to the back seat baby
Get in to my car
Beep Beep, yeah
Get outta my mind
Get in to my life
Ooooooh
Oh I said hey (Hey) you (You)
Get in to my car

After all that desperate entreaty, did she ever actually get in? I don’t think she did. He’s still begging for it on the fade-out, isn’t he?

Whereas Sir Paul manages to get his rocks off in his pop song: “Can’t you feel the comet exploding?” Yeah, baby.

Anyway, the New England Flower Show’s going on at the Expo Center at the JFK/UMass stop. So when I got on the train there yesterday afternoon, you had quite a few passengers who looked like they don’t usually take the T getting on. Gingerly, with wide, sort of frightened eyes. And then they look at you sort of pleadingly, like, “please don’t hurt me!”

It’s hard to believe, when you use the T more or less daily, that there are really people who never do. Public space can be a scary place when you’re not used to it. And even when you are. There’s danger everywhere, from germs to bad behavior to the constant threat of bodily harm. It’s a wonder it works most of the time. I mean, it’s pretty amazing that people from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds can all share the same train without incident for the most part. But I can see why SUV-suburbanites would be sceptical.

I brought along some reading that turned out to be somehow appropriate. I subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly, although for the last several years, since its neocon editorial shift, it’s been consistently irritating. There’s apparently a class of people out there who think it’s still 1954, and they all write for The Atlantic. There was a big brouhaha in the last issue on the subject of good girls giving blowjobs. For the trust-fund chicks in question a blowjob’s about the only meaningful job they’ll likely ever have. I say put ‘em to work!

In this month’s issue there were seven(!) lengthy letters to the editor on the subject of teenage knobgobblers. It’s supposedly an epidemic now. Ever since it was on Oprah. But come on. What happens to people when they have kids? Are their memories of their own teenage years automatically erased? I can tell you, and this is probably TMI, but when I was a teen, I didn’t have any trouble getting it, either. I don’t think it’s anything new.

The author of the piece, Caitlin Flanagan, laments: “What girls are discovering, to their infinite heartbreak, is that boys will happily agree to any form of sexual experimentation a girl cares to offer [duh], but will reserve certain honors for the girls who build power in the ancient ways.” It comes down to what evolutionary psychologists call the “Madonna/Whore dychotomy”–but our children aren’t learning about evolution in school, unfortunately, so they’re missing out on some vital information here.

She goes on: “If you want a boy to invite you to the prom, or to treat you well, or to speak highly of you to his friends, or to spend long hours thinking about how he can work his way into your heart—if what you want from him is courtship, romance, and respect—the very last thing you should do is ambush him with a sexual favor.” But what if you just like giving head? Help me out here, girls? Is it possible you could enjoy it? I had a girlfriend in high school who sweared she loved it.

Caitlin concludes: “That girls no longer know this to the marrow of their bones—that this knowledge comes to them in a slow awakening of misery and shame—is testament to how badly our culture has failed them.” Wow. It’s worse than reefer madness! Reminds me of the Victorian-era cartoons depicting the “two paths”:

So, girls, think twice before you give that first blowjob. It could lead to a life of complete and utter dissolution. And boys, for God’s sake, stop touching yourselves!

Anyway, we stopped into the Harvard Hillel Center before the pub, and, always on the look-out for free T-reading material, I picked up a copy of the Harvard Mosaic(a review of Jewish Thought and Culture)–although I see here that an annual subscription actually costs $25.65, which is $12.82 per issue. I wonder why I thought it’d be free?

Anyway, I guess that means I cadged a copy.

I wanted it, particularly, for an essay on “The Debate over Circumcision and Conversion in Nineteenth-Century American Reform Judaism,” which seemed like it would be ideal T-reading for the trip home, and was! The big question Reform Judaism was grappling with in 1843 was whether converts to Judaism should be snipped. In the able hands of author Lora Dagi, the debate reads like a thriller. It’s pretty riveting, let me tell you. Will they or won’t they snip it? The answer’s yours for $12.82.

too-toooot!

There were a couple of interesting things in this week’s Dig, though the so-called “style guide” was not one of them. The sad thing about fashion these days is so much of it is so self-consciously unfashionable. And just a note to Ys or Nexters or whatever they’re calling you nowadays: be beautiful while you’re young. You have the rest of your life to be ugly. And you will be, trust me.

What I liked in this week’s Dig was “Oh, Cruel World!” which was relevant, as it so often is, to our mission here at T-rage! It was addressed: “Dear T riders clipping their nails in front of me,” and can be summed up thusly: “knock it the fuck off.”

Of course, there’s no question that clipping your nails on the T is mind-bogglingly appalling behavior. But I would add brushing your hair and eating to the list, too. I’m not trichopathophobic (if you are, you can go here for help), but there is something somehow slightly unsettling about a stranger combing out her hair next to you. Why should hair and nails cause us to recoil in disgust? For an interesting discussion of the matter, see William Ian Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust . Whatever the cause, we all know the horror of finding a hair in our food.

But why eating? Well, eating as public spectacle is itself a recent evolutionary development. The restaurant dates back to just the 18th century. When people think of the modern restaurant, with individual tables, menus, and so on, most think of Monsieur Boulanger, of sauce fame, who opened one in Paris in 1765. By the way, Boston has the distinction of being home to the first restaurant in the Americas: Jullien’s Restarator, which opened in 1794.

When you look at the giant leap mankind took with Boulanger & Co., not to mention the millions of years of evolution that went into utensils, paving the way for necessaries like tables and table manners, fast food is as giant a step backwards for mankind. Here’s the thing: eating ain’t pretty. Especially ripping animal flesh from the bone. I’m all for it, but it ain’t pretty.

And if there is one rule I hold to steadfastly and believe wholeheartedly society should heed, it is this: by all means, unsightly things should be hidden from public view. Enough is enough. I know I’m turning Le Corbusier and all of modernist art and architecture and modern culture itself on its head here, but as Yeats once wrote (I have quoted him fondly before in this context and will again, no doubt): “The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told.” This is why most people don’t have sex in public, too, by the way. Because most of the time (and there are exceptions) sex is almost as disgusting to watch as eating. If you don’t believe me, get your camcorder out and shoot yourself doing it. Alone or in a crowd, doesn’t matter. You’ll see what I mean. Only thing is, you may want to shoot yourself afterwards, too.

No personal grooming, no eating, and please, no sex on the T. I mean, monkeys do these things in public, not people. Precious little sets us apart, let’s not forget that.

Speaking of. The other interesting feature in this week’s Dig had to do with porn star and hedgehog Ron Jeremy’s appearance at Northeastern. Talk about unshapely things. I have never seen this particular porn-hedgehog in action, and have no desire to, whatsoever, but I have to say I admire the guy for following his dick to its logical conclusion. 1,800 porn flicks he’s been in. Bravo.

(I was gonna do another picture here of human carnivores in action, but you can imagine it on your own, I’m sure.)