14:00 Rita

Rita knew nearly no one, including herself, in Paris except Sophie. She played Sophie’s main confidant as she kept mental notes that may have allowed her to become intrigued enough by Sophie’s complaints about my “tits on the brain” and my “obsession with Asian women with full tits who are women already but still look like little girls” to call me to maybe borrow my electronic memory typewriter one strategic day when she knew Sophie was visiting her sister in Switzerland! Because she, herself, had pictures of her semi-clad self, portrait paintings of a sort, voluptuous reclining-nude clichés that she might show me but then again, she might not. She did often discuss their existence, complain about the quality, the leg cramps from the long sessions. How the artist had promised they would be in his next exhibition in a gallery in the 6^th. And either the works were not hung or there wasn’t even a show.

But is all this life? I mean is this responsible, purposeful living? Or is life supposed to be bounded by the horrors of investment and commitments to employment, to rush hours, all framed in the deleterious effects of the work week. Is life what others presume post-30 life is designed to be? Like I was supposed to have outgrown “the hornies,” as if sex were something like acne; and I was supposed to settle into a predictable yawn by 34, or be labeled immature or a serial polygamist. The now only perked up by nostalgia for an over-hyped past. I am listening to the gleefully intellectual music of Pascal Comelade on Radio Libertaire. And whenever I hear his perky pluckings I am immediately transported to my old place on Rue André Antoine, Rita sipping herbal tea and thinking of her next indignation. The light pouring in at a slant cutting her into 2 halves: a light part and a dark part.

“Settle down, Julien,” they’d say. You can feel these friends, these work colleagues fabricating the cage, the same kind of cage they’ve grown used to. The constricted parameters of desire: where dreaming and living are kept far apart; are portrayed as opposites, as adversaries. Adventure is for vacations and desire is for the shopping mall. Sex is a reward. Or was it their way of circumscribing my desire and sense of adventure, clipping my wings so to speak, hoping to alleviate them of the guilt they felt for living such boring, unfulfilling lives? Get some responsibility, saddle yourself with some debt and worry and misery, the sober among all of them would continue to recommend. As they continue to do to this day like tireless Jehovah’s Witnesses going door to door, facing me, giving me electronic conveniences, wearing me down, discussing ceramics, or the particular characteristics of the 1990 Citroà«n XM, “voiture de l’année”and lamenting the end of production of the 2 CV that year ...

Meanwhile, others encouraged my adventures if only to live vicariously through them or be able to garner some moral indignation in lieu of self-esteem. Later, it was these same others who would offer Sophie incredible depths of sympathy because of my nasty lowdown prowlings. These are what used to be known as hypocrites or, better yet, multi-suck-holed parasites, able to gather sustenance from both Sophie’s melancholy and my delirious intrigues. In other words, people invested in our soap opera and were ultimately eating from both ends of the carcass. They observed, offered advice, sympathy, encouragement, all while sucking up our lives second-hand. They would tell me how hurt Sophie was and whether I wasn’t touched by this to the point of wanting to change my ways, going loyal or monastic. But, situations allowing, they could instantly change their tunes and tactics. “But really, you gotta follow the muse in your heart. Women are your art and they need to be ... rendered.” I kid you not! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Frank Lengel encouraged me too. But this was so he could feel that his own prowlings could be conspiratorially aligned with mine. Ah, go ahead, call it male bonding then. Our general need for adventure led us to amazing gestures of connivery. On the other hand, our impecunious state created the misery-loves-company bonds that only served to strengthen our friendship. As we feasted on the misery of our considerable and constant under-employment and the actions it led us to committing. Petty, petty, sure, but every day it was something. I mean, I even stole Sophie’s birthday present! And daily our hearts were gladdened by the fact that the one would not be taken away from the other by some nefarious employer. And there we’d go, wandering, dreaming, plotting along the Seine. Paris is conducive to hypnagogic intoxicated wandering and smooching. The air always thick with the pollen of love. The delightful plinkings of Pascal Comelade’s toy piano. Was Radio Libertaire just playing the entire record?

We were amazed by the profusion of lovers that you could find everywhere in the grips of passionate kissing, mid-high, mid-sigh, mid-thigh, standing, sitting, lying, writhing, intertwined or hunched over one another on Vespas. This is culture shock. The French touch and caress their kids, and these kids when they come of age, caress, fondle, touch each other. We were inspired to the point of celluloid documentation and extreme cases of voyeurism in the name of studying human nature. He making his films through his mind’s eye as we walked and talked for hours along the Seine, through Montparnasse, to the Faubourg edges of the city – I can still hear the wet flap-flap of the sole of his boot as we tramped Chaplin-meets-Orwell-style across paving stones. Finally stopping in a café to borrow some gaffer’s tape from the proprietor to tape up the shoe. He incessantly discussing Bresson’s Pickpocket, Godard, Melville, Clouzot, Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud, Diva, Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord, all of which he [and sometimes we] saw either in the Action Ecole, Saint-André-des-Arts or the Champo, he receiving a stipend from Natalie because in her infinite generosity believed in Frank and thought the [for her] small daily donations to his survival were an investment in a hopeful future. Or in Natalie’s apartment – yea-yea, Frank, I know, it’s not the same as watching them in the cinemas, but it was something – where she, as a successful world-traveling [never home] commercial photographer, had a rich assortment of videos we could watch when work failed to materialize or thoughts were slow or the weather too unbearable to venture out into.

Cinema for him was religion, language, meals. For me, cinema was an offhand way of talking about literature – it was easier to be inspired by filmmakers than other writers – and a way of communing with Parisians, sharing a film, hearing the bodies rustle, move, snicker, cough without ever having to interact directly.

We found it natural [almost obligatoire] to position ourselves inside the frames and settings of photographs by Brassai and Doisneau. and not long thereafter, we began to enter into a seemingly endless cycle of  kissing bouts with multiple partners in every possible setting, some of whom I kissed one day and Frank another. Or at a party, he might be kissing her right cheek [to be specific, Aleana’s] feeling her right thigh and I might be on the left kissing her left cheek and flicking her left labial lip like a contrabass string.  

To give you a little more background on Frank: he was always dressed in yesterday’s dead man’s suit. You know, like a hand-me-down, just a half-size too small, from the mortician. Odd dress shoes with beveled heels worn out unevenly to the outsides which converted his gait into a Charlie Chaplin. He combed his hair back using cheap soap he bought in the flea market as pomade, which worked wonderfully and gleamingly except when it rained [which was often] and his head would suds up and great stalks of matted hair would suddenly spring up, standing straight on end like a pike or something. He looked like a disheveled and yet, somehow, a dapper bohemian from a 1950s New York or Paris documentary.

He was, I guess, best known – if that’s the correct phrase – for having perpetrated a project which got him kicked out of Florida State University. It was officially classified as somewhere between a hoax and an act of public relations terrorism. He carried the yellow tattered articles detailing the local Tallahassee outrage. How alumni were threatening to cut off all donations to the university. How the chancellor threatened criminal prosecution and how his father, a contractor, donated a thousand pounds of cement toward the construction of the law school’s Janet Reno Wing. Radio Nova: Gainsbourg’s “La-bas C’est Naturel” and the Neville Brothers’ “Sons and Daughters.”

What was his crime?  He had “simply” taken some reproductions of the art that was exhibited in the 1937 “Great German Art Exhibition.” In this show, the Nazis displayed thousands of decadent artworks they had seized and then placed them side by side with ‘real’ German art to show how great German art was and how awfully decadent the rest of Western art was.

He had taken a sampling of the decadent works – Cubist, Surrealist, etc. – and similarly placed them in among the Nazi examples of ‘good’ art. He did not divulge the historical context of the show. He removed the names of all of the artists from the reproductions. Then he took a poll – students, citizens, ordinary people voted for their favorites and the artworks they hated the most. A week after the exhibit opened, he printed out the results of his poll: 67% of the 892 polled, preferred one or another of the Nazi-sanctioned artworks. 71% picked a Nazi piece as their favorite. 74% picked a so-called “decadent” artwork as their least favorite. Those polled claimed that the Nazi art better exemplified the virtues of American culture; offering a healthier attitude toward human nature – in other words, they were better.

The shit quickly hit the fan. The short story version is: At the beginning of exhibit week 2, Frank revealed the show’s historical context; and by the end of week 2 the show had been removed, Frank had been expelled, and the University spokesman had offered his excuses while simultaneously maintaining that the University valued freedom of expression and that this was something else – hate speech, which is not protected by the First Amendment. By week 3 he’d become a cause celebre on the local punk scene and by the end of week 3 his life had been threatened by Right-to-Lifers and he took a courier flight to Europe, working as a golf caddie the following spring and summer. [His “The Worst day at the Golf Course is Better than the Best Day at Work,” an 8-mm film blown up to 16-mm short about the caste system between golfers and their caddies, working conditions and caddy culture, is a much under-valued film and was shown once at IDFA in Amsterdam.]

That fall, Frank came to Paris, where he met Nathalie and he decided to stay. I went to many events with Frank. But none were to be as fateful as the Beaux Arts presentation of “Re:Flux” an event that was meant as a retrospective homage to the Fluxus Movement. Because this is where I first met both Rita and Suki and where I swear I saw Ted “Thud” Hall in the background observing, photographing. Frank will vouch for that. He saw him too.

So, please bear with me and please do not look upon me unkindly if I admit that for months I confused Suki for Rita and vice versa. I mean, cut me some slack, after all, I met them the same night, both are Asian – Japanese actually – and both of them floated around in the ex-pat Anglo community. They were svelte, had bangs, painted their toes the same color, and both were impressed by the fact that I had somehow managed to somewhat once perform with Yoko Ono. But more on that later.

At first they were necessarily conflated into one woman – not out of any hegemonic, disrespectful, sexist or convenient faceless need – but because my mind had become addled beyond being able to keep names straight let alone the particular characteristics of either of their pussies or the way they kissed or resisted kissing. I mean, Suki’s and Rita’s mouth and pussy and mind each had its own particular suction, grip, obsession, saturation levels, protrusion of pubic bone, aroma, not to mention texture of pubic hair, in other words, each of their various orifices and thinking processes had its own character. But that did not mean that I was able to put name to vertical smile. As I think I just mentioned, my agenda had become a ferocious tangle of liaisons and so when I first whispered Suki in Rita’s ear I suddenly became aware of how far things had deteriorated. This was a faux pas at its plus haut niveau! … where I saw them as the same woman and then as two women from the same island.

Only weeks later did I begin to experience them as two totally different beings. They were as different as Japan and China. Lemonade and saki. Lo mein and sushi. Rita considered Suki well, there’s no way around it, as subhuman and not even from the same solar system. In this – if not much else – she was very correct. Rita still had a streak of Japanese nationalism in her, believing that only the pure Japanese matter – sticky rice, cherry blossoms, Shinto, emperor crap.

Suki, meanwhile, had a questionable parentage, somewhat Japanese although maybe Filipino, maybe Mauri blood. Suki was the epitome of the post-modern Japanese girl. Ingesting everything Western in a raw fish through a long intestine way. Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Heidi, yodeling, John Cage, Crispy Critters, Rietveld furniture, Kerouac, Gainsbourg, tater tots, Pong, prog-rock, Le Grand Bleu, fringe directors, Jewish cuisine, noisecore, Mae West, Russ Meyer… Suki may have been from Planet Way Out but Rita was from Planet Way-Way Out.

Suki was a cat – independent, a stroke here, a bit of food, some attention, a good fuck, and off she’d would be without so much as an entire sentence of unrelated words. She was from another planet, a planet where all attire was fluorescent and made of rip-stop nylon, styrofoam and wire and in constant motion, hundreds of beats per minute, sparkling, techno, whimsical, reflecting her surroundings, tingling, jangling, an uneasy moiré dialectic between her body and her surroundings.

Skinny, diminutive, talented and tranquil with a perhaps turbulent, or maybe just an impatient, core [For visual reference: she looks strikingly like Eihi Shiina, Japanese fashion model and actress as she appears in Miike Takashi's Audition. Perhaps a bit less healthy and more boldly driven to sleepless excess]. She was Cubism in the flesh, a motion study, a blur to paraphrase: Her soul through all its being is immortal because entities forever in motion are immortal. In any case, she was definitely the wild child at Beaux Arts that year. She would do anything. I mean ANYthing! Including naked romps through public spaces to liberate them, the spaces, from their “rigid stagnancy and their psycho-tectonic reinforced ennui.” She had studied the 70s phenom of streaking, had written a thesis about it in relation to Fluxus and dérives, had all but majored in it.

When it came to sexual contact [like wrestling a water spider], she had no taboos short of death. She was hands on although not in public. Not at first, in any case. She liked almost everything, trusted you, had multiple orgasms, liked to record her sexual acts on video and audio tape: She had entire cassettes of her pissing in the toilet – her “piss de resistance” had already made a “splash” in the intramural arts network of artsy Paris. And Parisians loved to love the Japanese, especially its women. This, in part, because the Japanese come to Paris en masse to worship touristically and are shooting photos at a rate of 3 per second every second of every day of every year.

And when a photo of me and her performing her “Golden Eneman” emerged here and there the following spring I could only cringe in the fear that Sophie might find out. One of the many good traits of Sophie, who grew up in the immediate Paris banlieu, however, is that she avoided almost all Parisian art culture, had never been to the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Folies Bergeres, the Catacomb Nocturnes, soirees in clubs that had no addresses, no names, and the frolickers refused to carry ID [nomad culture], E.P.E., and you name it and thus would never ever learn about these kinds of things.

Suki was also a urophile, but so much more. She laid me down on an old shower curtain that first night and squatted over my body and pissed on me. Then she laid on top of me and rubbed and squished and sloshed about in her own piss – YEEEE – as if my body were some miniaturized Water World. You have to be especially sloshed to be initiated. There had been Czech absinthe. Imagine my state of mind somewhere between frightened, perplexed, and fascinated. She went berserk on top me, sticking penis, fingers, toes into whatever electrical outlets her body pressed outward.

The next day I walked around in a daze. Do you blame me? I couldn’t even write about this first evening for weeks. I’m not even sure it happened or was just something I’d seen in a bad Brian De Palma film. I eventually did manage to write about it but disguised it from Sophie by transforming it into fiction. Or was it a fiction that I had entered, having discovered a hidden portal, some forgotten manhole cover that led me somewhere into the middle of some labyrinthine text that was Suki?

By late afternoon, I discovered myself entering the Pompidou Centre library and looking up urophilia: “To engage in such activities as urinating in a partner’s orifices such as the mouth, anus, or ears, or over one’s naked torso. It may be a show of humiliation, punishment, or reward depending on how the submissive or inactive participant feels about being urinated on by the active urinator ... urinating is a form of defilement. Defilement arousal is called anophelorastia and can involve a variety of activities including the destruction or violation of a fetish object like a teddy bear, a sexual partner or the self (automysophilia)...”

In any case, it was obvious that Suki was fun and intriguing, a bomb dressed as a smiling confection, and everyone liked her; everyone, that is, except Rita.

Rita, on the other hand, was all recline, reclining nude, Goya, dust on shelves, framed photo, admiration from afar, stasis, precision hairstyle, and a face that wavered between bland and pretty, presumption and wishful thinking; solid, ceramic. She earned most of her money as an artist’s model and found plenty of work doing that. It seemed to suit her personality perfectly – to be something seen, an inactive verb, a sleeping chat on the warm hood of a BMW, to be, never to do – motion only messed with the focus, her hair, her cleavage, she might perspire. And she had over time acquired – no doubt as a spoiled neglected only child – a strange repertoire of tics and habits that managed to turn every statement and every event [even of global proportions] into something that referred to her, to her desires, fears, and demands for control of everything from not being allowed to touch anything in her appartement to ordering coffee in a café in her own unique French.

Well, let’s just say it outright: She just wanted to be worshipped like a nude martyr on a bed. She was put on this earth to be pampered and worshipped, and has on numerous occasions admitted as much. Love was a one-way affair of pragmatic idolatry. That is part of her immediate charm – her utter unwitting ability to admit things about herself that she considered positively charming traits, which all but the brain-dead [and me] considered abhorrent or at best annoying. Most of her men [think of schlumpfy comb-overs with over-compensating automobiles, always looking bedraggled and oppressed, shuffling along three steps behind her, carrying fancy Hermés bags in both hands with fluffs of white tissue paper emerging from the bags] never stuck around long enough to even think differently. They could put up with a lot but not with her.

But ultimately it did not matter. They would both have me and they both had wonderful tight and controlled delta regions, sensitive breasts – Suki’s were boyish – two peas on a saucer; while Rita’s were immense and legendary, to the point that most of her every day life involved her relationship to her breasts, how she denied them, presented them, talked about them, complained about their fullness and their heavy maintenance, referred to them, went to a few art exhibits to see her and her breasts immortalized in paintings or sculptures by various has-beens and wannabes.