A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ secret admirer

      I was at a rock show recently; a friend of ours got signed to a major label with his tight-black-shirt-and-hair-in-the-face alternative goth, wanna-be-cock-rock boy band. Their black limousine was waiting with sinister promise out in front of the East Village venue, and hottie girls with long blonde hair and silver boots were waiting for our friend to get offstage so they could casually smother him with girlish attentions. The lead singer was kind of a cross between David Byrne and Perry Farrell with just a skosh of Iggy, all of the boys were exceptionally cute, and the music was loud, but the night was distinctly boring. It was funny was how unexciting it all was. One of the band boys got offstage and told me with guilt and horror that he thought he might have smoked too much pot. The twentysomething audience was barely drinking; they were worried about getting up in the morning and carefully monitoring their substance intake and responsibly choosing the right condoms.

      There was a woman older than me in the club hanging out with her dad; you could tell by the relaxed and vacant look on his face that he had been used to way more intense party scenes than that polite little evening of hard rock, which was just pleasantly middle-aged enough for him to deal with after the abject chaos of 1971. Nothing actually happened in the nineties. Partying backstage with 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys probably involved playing Tomb Raider II and drinking bottled water; it can’t possibly have been like snorting a nine-inch rail of Methedrine and dripping candle wax all over the naked bodies of Van Halen in their heyday. All our unctuous songs of love on the radio are like the American dollar now, which is only paper, not having been backed up with gold for generations. There is no actual cock behind the rock anymore.

      But there is one bold, fiery, tumescent approximation.

      Chick porn, thy name is Ricky Martin. Love him or hate him, Ricky wears see-thru sweaters and has hips like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair, with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, openmouthed-kissing, and driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and soap-opera good-guy ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male cliché sexual images: one part Cary Grant self-amused privilege to one part James Bond eyebrow-raised-at-the-way-these-girls-seem-to-tumble-into-my-lap to two parts Julio Iglesias-cum Ricardo Montalban-cum-Medellin-drug-cartel Latino mega-suave to three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear cock power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk-'n'-leather Milano-pimp outfit. He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood: Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He's a little smarter than the old Elvis; he's already lived through the whiplash agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a healthy arrogance: he's not going to need shock levels of Demerol and pork to bolster his comfort level in the end. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of Music and all that other stuff. He has cracked the mystical code that makes the young girls cry.

      Ricky has also claimed the abandoned scepter of John Travolta's Saturday-Night-Feverishness by pulling off a look that has up to now been regarded as either totally homosexual or ethnically slimy and stereotypically sexist: i.e., “Get a load of Sergio Valente at the bar over there, ohmigod, who does he think he is?” He has resuscitated obvious male sexiness from the way it disgraced itself in the seventies, when it wore open Qiana shirts and gold chains and pants so tight you could see all the veins in its schlong. Ricky has brought the sacred man-fire back to the pop stars in a way that those weepy, drum-beating-in-the-woods, encounter group guys have been trying to bring it back to their own soft gutless bellies for the last decade or so, and he deserves some kinda credit.

      However...

      I was all set to speak tirelessly of Ricky's golden legitimacy and flawless panty-heat, but I caught a little throwaway interview with him. Normally, when Ricky speaks, he's all chocolaty corporate cheerleading—for example, when he picked up his World Music Award in Monaco: “To all you leaders,” he said, presumably meaning World Leaders, “you should take the music industry as an example—it's all about creating, not destroying.” Idiotic, but heartfelt. Maybe forgivable. But later, he gave two spontaneous answers that made me think the Golden Ricky might be more hollow than solid.

      A love-struck fan-girl interviewer asked him: “Who is your favorite singer and biggest influence?”

      “Journey. Steve Perry,” said Ricky without a beat of hesitation. Oooch.

      “Who is the most important person in the world to you, and why?” asked the interviewer.

      Ricky then got an unfunny paranoid shrapnel gleam in his big puddly eyes and started mumbling about how he always wanted to invite “his enemies” to dinner, because he wanted to keep them very close, even closer than his friends. The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turnin'. Wo-oh-oah.

      I wonder if I’ll ever see it in my lifetime: a whole generation of naked people too high to say no to anything, with some super-legitimate, undeniable Mick-like Rock Lord at the center of it all, driving it all like a many-limbed Magic Bus. But when it does happen, I’ll probably disapprove.

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAMPIONSHIP KARAOKE:

      Singing to Win

      From Pan

      laughing & fucking

      & making light

      of all devils…

      to the Devil himself

      the Man in Black

      conjured by

      the lusts of Christians…

      O for a goat to dance with!…

      O unicorn in captivity,

      come lead us out

      of our willful darkness!

      – Erica Jong ,

      “To the Horned God”

      While I like to embrace all cultures, no matter how remote, reveling in their difference and adopting their trinkets and religious idiosyncrasies and snacks of exotica, I fear that there is nothing to love about the goddamned dijeree-doo. Leave that noise to the aborigines. Dijeree-don't. If I never here that wobbling burp sound again I’ll be only too happy. Likewise, the Peruvian bamboo pan-flute. Pan—the leaping satyr! Pan—Father of panic! Pan—with his pan-flutes, gallivanting through the primeval forests of myth, arousing flame in loin! Oh, the laughter and randy skirt-hoisting! Maybe, once upon a time, it was OK, in a movie about the Amazon rain forest, to hear a mellifluous, airy tune being hooted through a quaint little pan-pipe while soaring over lengths of wild black river and tangled jungle majesty; but when you are in a subway, and some cocksucker in an alpaca pullover is spitting out “My Heart Will Go On” and emoting so hard the veins are sticking out in his neck, it’s enough to make you want to destroy all young trees so that hamburgers and chemicals and cancer can prevail uncontested on the earth.

      How, you may wonder, did I even recognize the theme from Titanic, as popularized by songstress Celine Dion, when it was in such a heinously bastardized form, arranged for the Peruvian pan flute, as it were?

      I will tell you.

      Living in the world right now, unless you are building pipe bombs in a little shack in the woods full-time, you СКАЧАТЬ