In Praise of Fat Elvis

Bejumpsuited, Chestal hairs breathing free!

What fool would choose your earlier, easier, milquetoastier incarnation. That Elvis is the Elvis of the nostalgic; of the weak.

No, give me the operatic, the melodramatic, the bombastic Elvis. The Elvis of "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto" and "Burning Love." Give me the avatar of rock n' roll pathos and excess. Give me the hunka hunka himself, apotheosis of the American id.

That svelte proto-Elvis was consumed, like the newborn Olympians, sacrificed to that final, monolithic Elvis and his sequined destiny and his windmilling arms and his rhinestone encrusted belt.

Crouch down and be counted as one of the mighty.

Here are your flared pants and your floral leis. Here are the scarves, drenched in your salty, buttery sweat. Here are the heaviest sideburns. Here is the fried peanut butter ball you asked for.

Sic transit gloria mundi? Not if you die on the toilet LIKE A ROCK STAR.

Never for me that narrow hip shaking army joiner. No, for me the splayed legs and billowing cape, spread like a thunderbird in laboring flight, one arm raised above your head like Michelangelo's Christ the Redeemer.

All hail Fat Elvis. He was more MORE.

If this suit wasn't too tight, indeed . . .

From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee!

The Chase - Day Five

Call me Lazy-as-Shit.

It has been nearly a week and still no sign of the paper I’m supposed to complete by Tuesday. Morale runs low and even the distractions are wearing thin. Today, while ostensibly preparing a gloss on the Scylla and Charybdis named Nollan and Dolan, I drifted magnetically to the pile of magazines on the sofaback table.

After half of an article (about frogs), I grew so faint and insubstantial that it became necessary to take a thirty-five minute shower - though my hair was clean. Only Starbuck remains to give faith in my enterprise, and he at exorbitant prices and somewhat middling quality. I think he uses too much sugar in his mochas.

Internet internet everywhere, but ne’er a drop of research.

Spied an albatross dancing in the currents spun off by my desk here in the loft. Looked a bit like an outline, sketched on a yellowpad. Shot it.

Spent an hour or so composing monkey-grams to my friends. May have been a bit hasty with the albatross.

To Queequeg, in the guise of my wife: hell is an idea first born of a required essay due during finals week and repeated by the act of watching reality television.

To produce a mighty essay, you must choose a mighty theme. I have - unfortunately - chosen "art exactions in Culver City."

There, nailed to the mast, glinting in the sun, is the coin I would spend. Let us call this coin “Studying for my Comparative Legal Systems exam on Wednesday” and let us imagine that winning this coin (by filling the white paper marked “Local Goverment Essay” with six, double-spaced pages of text) is something I would like.

But the coin is nailed to the mast like Ulysses before the sirens, and I, working the oars but futilely above the slapping waves, have stuffed my ears with video games and Tivo and Springsteen albums.

(Here let us imagine an entire chapter about chowder)

But lo! A cry from the crow’s nest! A spouting, fragrant, introductory paragraph! Deploy the boats before he sounds!

Toward thee I roll, Great, Breeching, Snow-White Paper, scarred only superficially with the scrawlings of essays begun and deleted by others.

And I go down with the Leviathan, to the watery hell he keeps called “Westlaw” and “Lexis” and for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at Law School.

Like Satan, this paper will not sink until it has dragged a living part of my week along with it and helmeted itself with it. And even should I succeed in the coming days and hours by extruding something thick and oily like a paper onto the printed page and lashing it to my boat, it’ll probably only be eaten by the red-tipped, correctionist sharks that savage exams on the way back to grades.

God help me if the devious-cruising Rachel of Alcohol doesn’t pick up this surviving orphan and bring him back to Port.

Musings While Watching The Birds in bed with Chiara

“I wonder if it is supposed to be a sly play on words that the film The Birds is really almost entirely about women.
The awkward pauses, glances, and conversations between Tippi Hedren (the poor man’s Grace Kelly) and Suzanne Pleshette (the rich man’s Stockard Channing) chew the scenery in a way that the titular animals never do except in that final scene.

Jessica Tandy and Pleschette and Hedren spend their catty energy almost entirely on the attentions of hamburger-in-suit Rod Taylor. The women fight almost resignedly for this hunk of middle age while the passions of the (actual) birds rise to a fever pitch.

Bird attacks almost always follow conversations with or about Mitch, Taylor’s character, our great jutting jaw-and-chin. One is left to ponder whether this biblical plague visited upon the inhabitants of sleepy Bodega Bay is really little more than a manifestation of the prefeminist fear that a powered class of men felt when forced, for the first time, to truly face up to the power of femininity unbridled.

Women, it should be said, have often been associated with birds - in slang and in mythology – both to celebrate their otherworldliness (from the male perspective) and to denigrate it.

And, the only safe haven when the birds stage their first attack is in the Tides Restaurant, named for that mysterious and powerful force of nature that, like women are supposed to be, is ruled by the moon.

Inside we find, huddled and angry, the women of Bodega Bay, who see Tippi as the cause of it all. Is this because she is a liberated (though idle) woman? Or is it because – perhaps as in all Hitchcock films – the female lead is really a cipher for female sexuality, a subject feared as much by the women of Bodega Bay as by the men? Is it that Mitch, as the only male in the town of any import, is so jealously guarded as a source of lantern jaw and broad shouldering?

In the end, when our heroes beat that slow, sinister retreat, is Hitchcock suggesting a détente with the surging power of the feminine? Is it meant as a kind of terrible rebuke of feminism, that it can be figured as a scourge from which none will escape, run as they may?”

He wondered (aloud) as his hand wandered (allowed) up her skirt. She continued to watch the movie.

Property Law is for the Birds

I am supposed to be reading for Property. Chiara came upstairs and seemed very suspicious.

I am banking on her still imperfect English to have made her rapid identification of pornography hidden on a tab at the bottom of a computer screen (and masked by an overlaid CNN.com) all but impossible.

To distract her I did a kind of a dance in my chair. I threw small objects at her playfully and told her to leave me alone so I could finish my studying. I told her if she would leave me alone I would finish my reading and then we could watch The Birds, which I rented today.

Later, while Tippi is in the phone booth, I will confess all of this and laugh and laugh.

I learned that from you, Eric.

Reflections on Seeing a Photograph of My Father

My father has the largest calves I have ever seen on a man of his hair coloring. My calves are weak and svelte and can barely manage to propel me up stairs. I often yearn for an ottoman while sitting in chairs. I am the diminution of a man who watches Sci-Fi channel original movies and gives awkward reminiscences about meals he has eaten to waiters. My father has no opposable thumbs. He cannot reach his thumb to touch his little finger. To touch the other fingers causes him physical discomfort. I had a long argument with him once over the process through which tea is accomplished. He insisted that it was not composed of particulates of leaves, but rather was created through some alchemy of hot water and plant extracts. He also added, almost as an ad hominem, that the words ‘dissolve’ and ‘melt’ had identical meanings when applied to sugar in coffee. I could have spit. I could have pulled off my own head like a tick. But the girls called me from the pool and insisted I swim. My father read an article from a food magazine to his travel magazine.