Dumb up.

What I am most interested in usually leaves me dumb. By "dumb" I mean silent, mostly, though many things I am attracted to or lost in thought about, are seemingly stupid also. I have spent a good deal of the last few months trying to find words for what I saw in the Denver International Airport while waiting for a flight unaccountably delayed on a clear day. In the middle of the wait, Steve Burton, an actor, a bit of sunshine on General Hospital, inquired about his flight somewhere and then bent over to tie his shoe or to adjust his sock; his shirt, untucked, moved with him, revealing the rim of his jeans, the band of his briefs, his tan waist and the small of his tan back; he walked away. I understand that this moment - Steve, his bending over, his tan interstice, his walking away - was banal, stupid. Yet he was more striking in "real life" than on TV, startling even. Generosity (dahlias in full bloom, that kind of thing) governed the motion, or seemed to. "Necessary receptivity and necessary laziness," to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, applies not only to Steve, his appearance, something receptive to and lazily related to thought, but also to my relation to General Hospital, which I watch most of the time with the volume off while doing something else. Steve's character, a recent amnesiac, has let go his former identity, walked away from himself. Something of this fiction connects with the reality of him in an airport walking away having struck me dumb.

I like the way the Steve episode, perhaps far from art, rubs up against my thinking about things not so far from it. Mario Testino's GAP ad showing a blond boy among similar girls or its complement, the "rhyme" of three-jeaned, shirtless wonders doing dumbbell curls. Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's portrait of male "super" model Marcus Schenkenberg, pearled, powdering his face. Bill Cunningham's Sunday, July 28, 1996 "On the Street" on the "Clean Sweep In Men's Style." Illeana Douglas in Grace of My Heart; Matt Dillon in same. Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted.

Looking at Testino's pictures, I observe the line of the boy's and girls' arms, their eyelashes, the combs in their long straight hair, their primping. Like the guys lifting weights, the boy among the girls is obviously a studio shot, artificial, so obviously so (the seamless background, the starry mascaraed eyelashes) that the shot gets at something very real - the endlessness of the beauty regime, its sedative charms, and fashion as men and women standing around almost confusing themselves for one another. In Van Lamsweerde and Matadin's portrait series, I could say that Schenkenberg's stance - one arm behind his head to flex his biceps, the other about to powder puff his face, his taut thighs bearing greasy black handprints (I would love to see Polaroid tests for this shoot) - displays the delicate qualities of buff musculature yet shows the veneer of health to be a put-on. Think of a model's career as a series of shots showing a body's decomposition frame by frame. Schenkenberg reveals the nature of the body, any body, to be strange, freakish, as made-up as everything in this photograph is (the pose, the hand marks, the suggestion of rimming). The confident tone of the prose accompanying Cunningham's documents ("the look of drug-free, healthy, sunny faces, where a smile no longer indicates weakness") suggests exactly what it denies; Cunningham, the truest inheritor of Atget's methods of document-making, keeps photography apart from art, which allows him to focus elsewhere. I could point to Illeana Douglas' winsome quirks; Matt Dillon's sexy befuddlement; Val Kilmer's saronged innuendoes and Brando imitations; Brando's white-face, his bulk the fat of genius. Or say that Stereolab's sounds declare the past the future, the future as already past. But I still feel I've failed to even begin to say what I would like to about all this and am left with something akin to incomprehension.

"A carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters' comprehension of the world" is how Elizabeth Hardwick describes Didion's novels. The Last Thing He Wanted is a novel about the fracture and splinter of our comprehension of the world. Instead of being at home (with the world, themselves), the women whose lives Didion's nuanced, acetylene sentences collectively relate live in hotels, having turned away from who they were supposed to be. The bizarreness of our national political machinations, the Iran-Contra charade in The Last Thing He Wanted, is not just linked to but made up by so-called small-time (your private life is small-time) wheelings and dealings - which is why the main action or nonaction revolves around not governmental offices but nondescript hotels. Elena McMahon fakes references to get the assistant managership at one of them, the Surfrider. This is how she structures her daily life. "By the time shew as hired there was already not much left to do, but at least she had a desk to arrange, a domain to survey, certain invented duties. There were menus to be made, the flowers to be arranged." Aside from these tasks, she teaches herself Italian from an old grammar and reads a used textbook called General Medicine and Infectious Diseases to learn "the principles of diagnosis and treatment." A driftwood existence. A blankness becoming even blanker. And when it becomes necessary for Elena to leave the Surfrider she ends up in the Aero Sands Beach Resort, "a two-story structure near the airport so unremarkable that you could have driven to the airport a dozen times a day and never noticed it was there." Didion makes the five words "The Aero Sands Beach Resort" a separate paragraph. My interest in Elena McMahon and her hotel life, a state of mind, has little to do with some misguided romantic notion of living such a life myself. But I find sense and a kind of solace in Didion's daring to show that the "game," the "plot," the "setup," the "whatever you want to call it" operates around a woman's transit from one hotel to another, from the Intercon to the Surfrider to the Aero Sands Beach Resort. Such utterly unremarkable structures are the residence of wholly remarkable affairs. Let me put this more bluntly: what meaning there is, what ramifications there are, adhere if anywhere to people, places, things let go from the expected.

This daring has to do with trust. Continuing despite embarrassment, failure, the unknown, unrecognizable, or dangerous. In the recently rere-leased 1964 film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The umbrellas of Cherbourg), Jacques Demy finds such risks in sunshine and jazz. With its variegated musicality, solar colors, spdng beauties, it makes most movies (life itself?) appear barren for forgoing fuchsia, emerald, cerise, and lemon; stingy for not risking song, admiring pocketbooks, overcoats, stiff hair, shoes, umbrellas, and gas-station-attendant sexiness. I am still overwhelmed by Demy's forging on with what must have, at the time, seemed to all around him an incredibly dumb idea (movie as operetta, movie as a way of exploring color's sonic depths). Demy understood the importance of artifice and melodrama for getting at the heart of whatever "life" may be: he trusted meaning to appear if it does, if it is wanted, in a tune's repeated refrain and variation, in the outrageous tenderness of wallpaper. With ornate patterns, Mary Poppins hues, this wallpaper provides no content; it in no way "comments" on what goes on around it, delightful or devastating. Yet the appearance of the wallpapers in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg affirms my belief in the movie's unverifiable lessons, Demy wrote that The Umbrellas was "a film against war, against absence, against everything that one hates and that destroys happiness." But it admits all those things. Guy and Genevieve do not live happily ever after, yet they continue, as the music and singing continue just when you thought it had to stop - that this moment could not possibly be sung. The candy of Umbrellas' aesthetic is as crucial to its being what it is as its bitter notes. In a letter from Guy faraway at war, Genevieve reads, "it is strange how sun and death travel together."

A similarly carefree radiance, or its undertow, shone in Jack Pierson's show at Luhring Augustine which generously risked investigating what turns you on as it turned you on. Pierson's glowing, digitized paintings with their unapologetic exuberance (hibiscus, flowering vines and patios, walled gardens) could be the wayward relatives of certain Alex Katz canvases, but they are also spectacular ads for a perfume impossible to formulate. On the work table of the studio-installation that was paired with these extravagances, Pierson had taken a typically chiding review from The Village Voice and highlighted - gilded - certain accusations: "pudgy," "glamorous," "decadent." This easily overlooked gesture shows Pierson's daring: for things to remain liberatory, for there to be possibility, inspiration, fascination, all must be allowed - too-easy pink breeziness; beauty, passe or impolitic; an interest in perfume.

Vincent Fecteau was similarly daring in a seemingly more severe manner. His collages and accumulations created out of weird interior-design-magazine ads and editorials, foamcore, and laminate owe much of their strength to his own fascination with such obtuse, doubtful materials. The play, the placement of these materials is just oblique enough for some innate unverifiability to radiate and linger: the more time spent with his precise, blank, space-age-bachelor-pad environments, like maquettes Klaus Nomie might have made had he been an architect rather than a disco opera singer, the stranger and funnier they become. Just so, Claude Wampler's gloved touch caressed the site of pleasure and waste, the "Vertical Smile" beaming throughout her show in all dimensions. Her careful goosing of each viewer bending over to look at her video through a peephole provided the stimulus to see connections between hands, gloves, and pet fondling - all represented in sculptures and photographs. In her performance Knittease: Ms. LaFarge Gives Another Historical Performance, disarmingly complex despite its apparent (comic) simplicity, Wampler wore a knit dress and knit another by casting off from the dress she was in stitch by stitch, pausing only to replay a 45 of "The Stripper." Five hours later, burlesque, taken apart by attenuation to become something else, a kind of duration, Wampler had stripped herself bare, the new knit dress dangling from her needles, finally still.

It is a cool evening. I am preparing to move to LA. Toward this end I have been selling books - to remove from my presence any book I could not wholeheartedly recommend at any moment, and to pay for sex. I sold all my volumes of Frankfurt School theory for an hour with a blond surfer-type named Troy ("type" because, I mean, who knows?); sold almost everything published by Routledge, Verso, and Duke for an Italian bodybuilder name Franco; several first editions of novels which no longer seem to matter as much as they once did for someone who called himself Blaze, I think. Looks are a kind of intelligence. We were merely trading in knowledge.

Meaning, identity, inhibition, surety are just some of the many things on hiatus - or if not on hiatus, unstable, as things are in earthquake territory - in Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro's new flick Hustler White, which follows the various escapades of a hustler named Monti Ward (played sweetly and sexily by Tony Ward) and his encounters with a writer named Jurgen Anger (LaBruce) and others on Santa Monica Boulevard and around the "flimsy backlot construction" that is L.A. The movie trades in preconceived dichotomies - good or bad, real or fake, sexy or comic - for more fascinating questions, like: Who does a hustler really love - the one with the most money or a cute guy regardless of his bank account? Is S/M and scarification something serious and sexy or laughable? Do you care anymore whether you can tell if you're watching "real" fucking or someone's "contractual obligation?" Hustler White gives us both documentary and porn without telling us which is which. Though it has the point-blank fun of a porno, LaBruce and Castro brilliantly lengthen the hapless narratives that most pornos rush through to get to another fuck. When bumpy Monti, in his makeshift muscle-T halter-top and knee-length cut off jeans, is passed over by someone in search of an amputee, we eventually get to see the (funny? hot? tasteful?) act of someone being stumpfucked, but also a sweeter and even sexier sequence of Monti spotting another distraction, a skinhead, whom, as soon as Monti learns his name, he serenades with "The wonderful thing about Piglet/Is that Piglet's a wonderful thing. . . . "It would be difficult to say why the voice-overs (Monti's song and his narration of these events) are more interesting out-of-sync, but I can say that as in LaBruce's previous movies they jettison the idea that things in life ever are in sync. When near the end of the movie Piglet cries on the street, mourning his unrequited lover Eigil's dead body being found, the close-up of his tears is genuinely moving, but you're not exactly sure why since Piglet has had to almost asphyxiate himself to get his hustler crush to kiss him.

"Some real things have happened lately" begins The Last Thing He Wanted. Meaning: real things had been happening all along and no one seemed to notice or real as opposed to unreal things have happened lately? With Didion there is a necessity to tell the two apart, despite everything working against this possibility. With Hustler White, such a distinction, however necessary, may no longer be possible. There are things just as they are (the miraculous ass of Kevin Kramer in short shorts; the careful motion with which a lone driver reaches across the front seat to open his passenger door; the money shot) and things more ambiguous. Some off-camera voice keeps asking if Tony Ward (or Monti, the hustler he plays) is gay or straight. He answers as realistically as he can: he ignores it the first time; says, "You're bugging me" the second; and finally responds, "I'm a hustler." After the credits, a hustler in tight white jeans straddles a chair. Another off-camera voice commands in English and German: "Come on, let it go! Let it go!" The hustler wets himself and enjoys it. Or seems to.

That is the aesthetic order of the day. Let it go.