A shy and sneaking lustmole
Jul. 24th, 2004 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
A German magazine, years ago, once described me as 'a shy and sneaking lust mole'. The German word is lustmolch, and you really feel the sensuality of the semi-blind mole as he pushes through his hot, sandy tunnels. Perhaps a more accurate picture, though, would be of a mole sitting over iced chai with various Japanese or semi-Japanese women, ex- or potential girlfriends, being a good listener, framing questions about cultural differences, memorising the names of his conversation partner's sisters and ex-lovers, and wondering, in a timid sort of way, what his conversation partner would be like in bed. Our mole loves women, and, given the choice, spends his time 'amongst women only'. Sex, though welcome, is not an essential component of the experience. The man who loves women loves them whether they go to bed with him or not. He might string out a seduction for years, knowing that, physically, it will go nowhere, savoring the unresolved tension as a musician savours an unresolved chord, admiring his conversation partner's resistance as a military strategist admires his enemy's lines of fortification and defense. (In fact, you might even say that these unresolved games are his favourite. For it seems to him that nothing is more erotic than limits. It is not the leg that arouses, but the exact position of the hem against it. It is not the body that is erotic, but limits and boundaries and frontiers, and the games we play with them.) In the end, our mole is just someone who likes to talk and flirt and listen.
Into his mole-tunnel, dovecot sort of existence (where it's basically just him strutting around turtle-doves or nosing through moist soil) bursts... not just a man, but a man's man. Spending time with Gavin McInnes makes me realize how different our personal styles are. Gavin is a certain kind of 'chaotic homosocial entrepreneur'. He's a hip capitalist, a rambunctuous rockist, a male bonder, a business-Belushi. You might hate him (many of you apparently do), but people like me need people like him. Intuitive, adventurous, impatient, outrageous culturepreneurs like Alan McGee and Malcolm McClaren are people who make things happen; people who make the difference between someone like me having the ivory tower existence of an academic or poet or scholar, and our becoming known, making money and living large. But it's not just personal ambition which interests me. This type, the chaotic-intuitive-capitalist-male-bonding businessman, goes way beyond the call of duty. He is not just selling advertising. He has an agenda, a calling, a style that the creative people he attracts and rallies can adapt their styles to. Now, I never really fitted into Creation Records' style just as I will never really fit Vice style. But it's important to me to know that, in both cases, these organisations, like them or not, helped set the tone of their respective decades.
As a shy and sneaking lustmole mostly concerned with quieter, more oblique things, my relations with these big, obnoxious, likeable, charismatic, galvanising figures have always been problematical. And in the end their chaotic-managerial Midas touch has usually worked for others and not for me. I am not Oasis, and I am not Ryan McGinley. I will not contribute to the style any decade is remembered for, though I might be present in several, scratching away underground, a semi-permanent lustmolch.
I feel like galvanic Gavin was making bonding overtures to me this week, and that's the closest you get in hip chaotic capitalism to a job interview. And I feel like I failed every test. I failed the party test, and I failed the loyalty test, and I failed the drinking test, and I failed the homosocial bonding test. I failed to get stociously drunk and do something so outrageous that the Tokyo police would have to intervene, and we'd have a funny story to tell Terry Richardson. Our last conversation (Gavin leaves Sunday) was after a surreal Vice reception at the very grand and staid Canadian Embassy in Minato-ku. It went something like this:
Gavin: Momus, you left without me noticing.
Momus: Yeah, I snuck out. I'm back home now.
Gavin: The party's just starting. There's going to be a big orange explosion of partyness now...
Momus: I'm home and I'm fixing something to eat.
Gavin: Wasn't I being a good host?
Momus: Oh, you were being a great host. I just didn't like that band [Vice signings Death From Above] much. [Showing his cards, exaggerating for effect.] You have to understand that I hate two things. I hate rock music and I hate America. I liked the string quartet, though. I kind of like uptight things. I wish that people would sit around being uptight, doing tea ceremony or something.
Gavin: Oh, I have a lot of sympathy for that stuff too.
Momus: What's happening tomorrow?
Gavin: Tomorrow I'm getting a guided tour of the Japanese sex industry. You should come.
But the next day Gavin didn't call. I'm sort of glad. Although I think the Japanese sex industry is the best in the world, and must be a fascinating thing to get a guided tour of (the sex industry here represents 1% of GDP, the same size as the Japanese defense industry -- that's a long tour), I sort of prefer sitting in cafes with real girls, memorising the names of their sisters. I'm in this tunnel, and I don't know where it's going, but the warm sand feels really good against my snout.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-24 05:38 am (UTC)That's this entry rather fucked then isn't it?
Do you suspect Mr. Currie is losing it a little, perhaps a result hanging around with the "ironic nazi" crowd this week. Still not sure if I can forgive the passivity of judgement of that one - shame on you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-24 06:01 am (UTC)Still I rather liked the image of Mr. Mole and the women, like a character from The Wind in the Willows entered the adult world.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-24 07:17 am (UTC)Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-24 08:59 am (UTC)Americans may lack subtlety, but this does not, in all regards, mean we lack substance. I love reading your journal, and I understand that in journal format it is not always possible to elucidate fully each well-meant point in all its powerfully charged and gray-area loaded glory, but as an ‘American’ (meaning born, raised, and still living in America) I would have to say that your blunt, all-encompassing, decree of “I hate America” is not entirely well-received, although it is probably more ‘American’ in its style than you would like to admit. This is not to say that critique of the country in question is not welcome. In fact, bring it to the floor. I, myself, feel like a foreigner in my own country due to George W. Bush’s representation of what, he feels, the definition of 'Umerica' to be. And, while in no small way, I feel cheated by my country’s leadership, I can not, I suppose, run abroad, abandon ship, and set up camp elsewhere to let my anger simmer down as I watch my native land in turmoil with detached amusement. Mostly, because I love the United States, in all of its complex, contradictory, self-righteous, in-your-face perversity. As I am a Kansan that has relocated to NYC, I get double the abuse. From New Yorkers, I get the sly ‘you must have been raised on a farm without culture, books (unless you include the Bible), or beauty’ sort of abuse. These people obviously forget that we have had out share of literati (and a small but interesting cultural history all our own as well) through or from Kansas in the last one hundred years alone. And I am not speaking of just the Laura Ingalls Wilder ‘Little House on the Prairie’ types, but the decidedly "fagé", up front, and Unfitting-of-Christian-Kansas-Stereotyping personalities like William Burroughs. From foreigners, well, I get “I hate America” (albeit, many of these foreigners that utter this totemic phrase are saying it as they occupy the very soil which so enrages them). But, I suppose, I diverge from my point. A few years ago I read Fury. Salmon Rushdie is an author, whose two-fold critique and condemnation of the pillars of American (by way of New York) life, I very much respect. This novel speaks to the complexity of the situation at hand, and while I would not expect you to write a novel on the reasons for hating America, I would, perhaps, hope that a bit more specificity could be used, as, I am sure, you don’t hate the whole damned country in any uniform, plain-vanilla-yogurt fashion, but dislike (or if you prefer the stronger demarcation…hate) parts of the whole. Like, if you’ll allow me the obvious simile, black spots, and a bit of gray in the middle, and, hopefully, some areas of bright white…where you see something lovely or praise-worthy in a country that is…well…quite large, with vastly different definitions of what ‘America’ stands for from region to region, state to state, person to person, and then, of course, dividing and changing infinitely within each person.
Cheers, and I apologize for the rant,
Vivian Ritchie
P.S.- I started reading your journal a few months ago when you posted on my friend Elena’s LJ. She’s The Groupie, and I believe your comment was in reference to an entry that included a photo and was titled something like girl on girl on girl. For better or worse, I am the girl sandwiched in the middle. At least you can now put a face to this aggravatingly long post. I hope you won’t hold it against me for sending this, I think you are a unique individual and I am more than a little intrigued, but I am sure that receiving random marathon postings from folks you don’t know would get old quite fast.
Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-24 03:53 pm (UTC)Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-24 04:44 pm (UTC)Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-24 05:37 pm (UTC)Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-24 05:41 pm (UTC)Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-25 06:08 am (UTC)Re: Saving Face in America
Date: 2004-07-30 07:31 am (UTC)