Big Enough, Anyway

Here's the basic outline: in 1967, when he was the sixteen-year-old front man for the Box Tops, Alex Chilton made the charts with the improbably big-bottomed pop-soul record "The Letter." The Box Tops--always one of my favorite names for a second-tier '60s pop group--managed to turn out enough singles for a dandy greatest-hits collection, but it wasn't until they disbanded in 1970 that Chilton learned guitar, began songwriting in earnest, and showed signs of an inspiring flakiness. In 1971, in Memphis, he joined up with Chris Bell to form the core of Big Star, one of the greatest American groups of that era to never sell a record until years after their dissolution. By the time I started buying records myself in the late 1970s, nothing by Big Star was still in print--not that this caused me distress at the time, because I'd never heard of them--but a few years later, their name started making it into such self-consciously new-style bibles of hip as Trouser Press, with the understanding that they were noble commercial failures who set down roots that were only now being tapped by the emerging jangle-pop bands, such as R.E.M.

By that time, Chilton was well into his storied solo career. A disconcerting number of the stories revolved around the reports that he was a drug-addled, drink-sodden wreck, and there was plenty of evidence to back the image up, starting with his willingness to be in the same room with, never mind produce, Tav Falco's Panther Burns. Every so often, though, he came through with the goods, whether it was the eary single "Bangkok" or the best scrapings off his lovably erratic comeback album Like Flies on Sherbert, the coming-back-from-the-comeback surprise EP Feudalist Tarts, or my all-time favorite AIDS awareness song of the Reagan era, "No Sex." ("Pretty soon we're all gonna get it/ It's time to buy some stuff on credit.") That solo career never stabilized, but for a while there, there were three things you could count on from ol' Alex: he'd eventually release something, and it would be a long way from perfect and often a bit of a ways from recommendable to anyone but the passionately converted, and by God, there would be something on it that'd knock your hat in the creek. Now he's dea, at 57, of a heart attack.

What none of this information conveys is the special kind of affection--hell, call it love--that every rock freak I hung out with in the '80s and '90s, and who I wouldn't mind hanging out with today if I still had their numbers and addresses, seemed to feel for Alex Chilton. Paul Westerberg came close to capturing it in the Replacements song, "Alex Chilton", in which he depicted the barnstorming Chilton as a terrestrial minor deity, a living rock god but a down-to-earth one, with a well-worn minivan for a tour bus and a deep familiarity with Holiday Inns. (That song appeared on Pleased to Meet Me, the 'Mats' second album for a major label and their first after the dismissal of their own Dionysian fuck-up and rock-god figure, Bob Stinson, who left his mark on a few great records and died the death that many people assumed Chilton must have been headed for. Maybe Westerberg wrote that song when he most needed to believe it.) Chilton himself probably said it best, describing the impact that a song about him had on his career: "A lot of times people will just come up and be excited about it. The words they say are maybe not all that informative or interesting. It's just the excitement that's the main part of the message: 'Dude! Alex Chilton! Wow!' That sort of thing." I suspect that the people who heard that song fell into two categories, those who'd never heard of Chilton before and immediately thought, Man, I need me a piece of that, and those of us who were already fans and were grateful t Westerberg for translating what we'd all felt about him into words and a beat.



I suppose that much of the hero worship that Chilton inspired was the sort that pinheads express towards anyone who's legendary for having trashed himself; Keith Moon and George Jones and Tom Waits and Keith Richards all inspired some of that in their day, and so did a lot of sorry wankers who I'd rather not mention in the same post as them, especially not on what really should be a national day of mourning. But I know that, for a lot of people my age, Chilton's name had a special magic to it because of what was resolutely unmagical about him. He was a working stiff, someone who'd had his greatest popular success when he was still practically a child and who preferred to tend his own garden and do what struck his fancy than try to replicate it or cash in on it. When he met the Replacements after they'd helped introduce him to a new audience and solidify his standing as a college radio cult hero, it was on more or less equal terms: he wasn't a big swinging dick of the music industry whose ring they had to kiss, but he wasn't a broken-down dude out of rehab who had to be beholden to the big new stars, either. They were both pros, in it for the long haul, stubbornly working their limited market share, left of the dial. But Chilton was treasurable in that company because of his experience and the fact that he'd had a mass success and had kept making music without having one again.

It's an open question whether he could have had another one if he'd wanted it. But the fact that he seemed capable of living without it--that he let Big Star run its course rather than twist the band's sound this way or that, desperately trying to have a hit, and settled in Memphis and then New Orleans, where he tried new things and did what he pleased whenever he could book some studio time instead of carving out a niche in Vegas or L.A. and working the oldies circuit--made him seem like one of the guys to those of us who spent our college years, in the '80s and '90s, crowded into underheated music venues with walls plastered with mimeographed fliers and creaking wood floors that felt as if they might have given way if too many people had cheeseburgers on their way to the gig and squatting in cars with the radio tuned to the college station. His whole career had an improvisational, D.I.Y. feel to it that was inspiring, especially to those of us who weren't sure enough that we'd be dead by thirty that we sometimes wondered if it was possible to bypass business school and still have a future with some dignity. "Dignity" isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Chilton, but he did earn himself plenty of respect, to go with all the love. I know a lot of people who thought of him when Katrina hit New Orleans, and I know a lot of people who reacted with a mixture of relief and "whadaya expect?" when word spread that he'd patiently waited out the cataclysm in a handy bar, like Walter Matthau in Earthquake. Technically, he wasn't supposed to die, ever. But you can expect your heroes to do only so much for you.

You know, I really should have called this blog "Cerebral Rape and Pillage." Too late now, though.

Kitchy-Kitchy-EWWWW

The only Penthouse Forum confession that I remember reading--and I haven't read Penthouse Forum since I was in high school, so I've been remembering it for a long time now--was about a married guy who discovered, to his surprise and kind of by accident, that he got a charge out of tickling his wife as a prelude to sex. The wife didn't really get it but agreed to humor him, to the point of agreeing to be roped to the bedposts while he treated her as his personal lifesize Tickle Me Elmo plushy doll. Still, he felt unfulfilled, partly because he was made uncomfortable by the uneven balance of power and partly because he couldn't help wondering what he was missing.

So, for the rousing climax, he hired a couple of working girls to drop by the house and tie both himself and his wife to the bed and tickle both of them while he fucked her. When the narrator and his wife both seemed to have peaked, he told his new friends that they could now untie them, whereupon the hookers, demonstrating both an admirable enthusiasm for their work but a lamentable inability to take direction, announced that he might have had enough but they were just getting starting, whereupon they dove back in and tickled the helpless couple at length and without mercy. The narrator reported that, united in their bonds, he and his wife loved it. Then the hookers untied them instead of bludgeoning them both with a lamp and looting their home of its valuables, which, as Oscar Wilde used to say, is why we call it fiction.

I've been thinking about that story ever since Congressional Representative Eric Massa resigned a week ago, amid allegations of all kinds of mess, including an Ethics Committee investigation of charges that he had sexual harassed members of his staff. (I actually think of that story every four months, like clockwork, but the news about Massa caused me to reboot my inner clock.) Massa--who originally said that he was resigning for health reasons before the contents of his closet began to tumble out to a chorus of rolling eyeballs--has been specifically accused of "groping" guys, as well as "tousling their hair". His inevitable sit-down with Larry King turned into a weird semantics argument in which King kept insisting, "There's no other way to define groping but sexual," as if Massa were trying to argue that he had groped guys in a nonsexual way, even as Massa kept denying that he had ever "groped" anyone in any spirit at all. Massa, whose evident belief that no one will ever suspect that he might be gay if he just keeps insisting on how manly he is--you kept expecting him to ask King if he likes gladiator movies--puts him squarely in the ranks of the truly clueless--happily cops to compulsively laying hands on the young men who work for him, so long as it's understood that he's wrestling with them. ("Mommy, what's that cat doing with that other cat?" "They're wrestling, dear.")

But the centerpiece of the accounts of Massa's trips to the Thunderdome are the charges that he's a tickler. "I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," he told King of one lusty young combatant, after which "four guys jumped on top of me." (It's raining men!) If there is a streak of cunning inside Massa, it's in his frank admission of being a tickler. He must suspect that most people who hear this will want to understand him as a goofy big kid rather than draw the conclusion that he's a creepy, sexually abusive boss with an S & M streak. And he may well be right.

Is tickling sexual? Of course it is. Many of us learn that very early on, sometimes in our parents' arms. A parent who traps a kid in an embrace and tickles him until he's blue in the face may be experiencing the pleasure one gets from giving pleasure, but at the same time, the physically larger party is asserting his control over the smaller. And the party on the receiving end is learning what many a bondage enthusiast may come to think of as the most important thing there is to learn about pleasure: that ceding control over what's done to you, being made to feel good "against your will", can seem like bliss. Of course, making any kind of connection between your sexual identity and innocent memories of mom giving your tootsies a workout is one way to go from zero to "Ewwwww!!" in no time, which will strike many people as reason enough to agree with Massa. No, it's not sexual. Not at all. And don't persuade me otherwise, or else I'll have to hang myself.

So far as voluntary fetishes go, tickling certainly falls under the broad heading of the S & M and B & D flavored. It says something that, in the realm of B & D porn, it tends to be tightly segregated: you're not going to see Madame Payne chain up her victims and break out the cat-o'-nine tails and then, for a change of pace, set them aside in favor of the ostrich feathers for a while--at least, not in the same video. When one publisher started testing the waters with magazines aimed at the tickling connoisseur, they included an introductory editorial extolling the virtues of tickling in a way that might have been endorsed by Ed Wynn in Mary Poppins: "Instead of pretending to hurt our girls, we could make them laugh!"

It is of course an axiom among the makers of bondage porn, repeated over and over at top volume in case The Man might be listening, that the models are thrilled to be there and only pretending that they don't get a kick out of splinters, damp cellars, leg cramps, and catering provided by the director's mother. But do the models really enjoy being tickled that much more? Comparing the faces in tickling porn and more conventional S & M porn, it's easy to believe that the tickling isn't faked, and it's also a stiff reminder that it's easier to pretend that you're being lashed with a pool cue than it is to convincingly pretend that somebody's found that secret tickle zone at the small of your back: people enduring the latter torture tend to come up with expressions of pop-eyed surprise and squinting crumpled-face sweet agony that Meryl Streep couldn't summon up if you gave her a lifetime to work on it. I remember, though, that when I was an adolescent and trying awkwardly to find a way to join my earliest pleasurable memories with the screaming messages that my hormones were sending to my brain, I used to try out my own tickling moves on young ladies who seemed to regard my company as not wholly objectionable, and what got me to considering other paths to the waterfall was the time that one of them convinced me that she was not enjoying her laughing fit by kneeing me, hard and by no means accidentally, in the crotch. That never happened to Massa, just as it never happens in tickling porn, but in both those cases the victims are being paid money to put up with their attackers. I'll bet it's really good money, too, but I'm not sure that the woman who sent my balls to visit my tonsils didn't walk away with the greater feeling of personal satisfaction.



Tickling fits neatly into the same category as foot massages, as defined by Vincent Vega in his landmark debate with Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction: "I've given a million ladies a million foot massages and they all meant something. We act like they don't, but they do. That's what's so fuckin' cool about 'em." The big gap here is that there is nothing cool about tickling. Whether it's carried out knowingly by self-conscious fetishists or indulged in by stupes too repressed or confused to understand their own needs, as may be the case with Massa, it's infantile, a way of corralling your libido in the playpen forever. (Note that, in that Pulp Fiction scene--which was written by the most openly enthusiastic foot fancier among the auteurs of our day-- when the super-suave Jules boasts of his own exemplary technique at foot massage, he spells it out: "I don't tickle or nothing." Note also that when Vincent, challenging his opponent's refusal to admit that they're discussing a sexually charged activity, asks him if he's ever given a man a foot massage, Jules appears to contemplate shooting the rude bastard right then and there.)

I'm not sure it's ever a healthy thing to make tickling a mainstay of your bedroom diet, but it's fine in small doses between consenting adults--I guess, in theory, since I myself have never found an adult who'd consent to it--and even those specialists who enjoy it with others have found their dream matches. But tickling an unwilling employee until it interferes with his breathing, as Massa has indignantly copped to as a way of boasting of his good-natured innocence, is clearly an act of horny bullying, and strikes me as a clearer case of workplace sexual harassment than many of the cases or reckless dirty talk and ill-chosen wording that have been keeping the courts busy and busting up careers since Clarence Thomas crawled out from under his rock. For a man in his fifties to be carrying on this way, and proudly asserting that he behaves this way instead of in any way that might be out of line, is to suggest layers of repression and denial in Massa that would make J. M. Barrie shudder. If he gets to return to his home town and walk its street without people regularly macing him or setting their dogs on him, it'll be because no one wants to admit to being able to be realistically dirty-minded enough to see just what a creep he is.

We Interrupt This Hiatus to Take Note of Some Sad News

R.I.P., Al Weisel, A.K.A. Jon Swift. I never had the pleasure of Mr.s Weisel's company, but I admired and enjoyed his work and felt flattered last year when he extended an invitation to me to submit a favorite post for his annual link-fest where he used his site to draw attention to a few of the many, many lesser-known bloggers squeaking loudly to be heard, like puppies in a pet shop with their paws pressed against the glass. Thanks again, sir. Your friends and relatives are weighing in elsewhere, but know that you will also be missed by many strangers.

Old Fart at Play

I was just reading the comments of Richard Schickel [thanks for the head's-up, House Next Door], and the scales immediately fell from my eyes. Of course this blog has been a waste of my time and yours, and not only that, The Outlaw Josey Wales is much greater movie than McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I will of course be doing the right thing and pulling a Louis Tobin on this site forthwith. Flowers, letters of condolence, and small rocks suitable for pelting should be forwarded to Mr. Schickel, currently keeping a regular vigil at the future grave site of Clint Eastwood, at least between speaking engagements. I myself will be checking into a monastery as soon as I can find one of those funky ones where Leonard Cohen liked to hang out before learning late in life that you got to keep your eye on the people who have access to your bank accounts twenty-four seven.




The preceding has been my annual April Fool's joke, which I like to get in about a month early to beat the holiday traffic. But I do want to announce that this blog will be on hiatus or something close to it for a month of so while I dedicate the better part of Lent to applying some muscle to my personal affairs, including a lot of time at the remorseless, soul-crushing activity that I laughingly call a day job. in the meantime, I hope that any drunken millionaires stumbling across this place for the first time will consider using the DONATE button to ease some of my pain, and I could also use any sturdy cardboard boxes you have lying around. And if you need something to read and have never gotten around to checking out Barry Hannah, well, it's a shame that it's too late for you to write him a fan letter, but I'd most strongly recommend Ray and the short story collection Airships, while acknowledging that the big debut, Gernomino Rex, remains a personal sentimental favorite from its title on. Later, gators.