"from the cunt to the head is/ a Mobius strip/ that connects us to death" --Eleni Sikelianos, excerpted from "Notes Toward the Township of Cause of Trouble (Venus Cabinet Revealed)"
I knew it! Way back last summer, when I first started watching Californication, I drafted a post in which I got all soggy over Mr. Duchovny. I meant to discuss the show, and not so much the actor... but I got carried away and never posted it. However, in re-reading it today, I'm totally amused that my feelings for the man haven't shifted one iota-- except to get bigger and doubtlessly more nauseating to all who aren't me.
And so, because I'm deep into Duchovny lust at the moment, I think it's only right that I publish my old draft now. Enjoy!
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He has the mind of the haute pornographer. He makes grammar jokes.* He's probably perfect. "Perfect" in that he's really a mess of accidentally happy imperfections.
I've been watching Season 1 of Californication.
His nose is all fleshy. His eyes are too squinty. He does a lot of pantsless acting, thus showing off his comically knobby knees. He's starting to get a little middle-aged dough about the gut. His voice cracks from the cigarettes. And he perpetually sports haircuts that are just about 10 years too young to be "age-appropriate."
But there is not one part of this man's corpus that I would not put in my mouth.
I don't put much stock in celebrity crushes-- it's pretty hard to deem actual depth of sexual attraction when you never get within pheromonal range of these people. Nonetheless, I will occasional 'fess up to tingly feelings being aroused by the mere visage of certain actorly types. Among them have been Zack Braff with his soulful pratfalls, James McEvoy with his smirking Scottish pastiness, Hal Sparks horny, impish smart-assedness... and I'm sure there have been others.
But none of them are David Duchovny.
I searched high and low looking for just the right image to accompany this post. It strikes me that he's not actually all that photogenic. As is often true, the magic is to be found in the man in motion. His lackadaisical gesture. His loose-kneed strut. The way his hands look when he's reaching for something female to pull into him. All that's lost in the still shots-- you lose the shrewdness of his gaze and the amused despair in his demeanor. In fact, he often just looks older and a little pudding-faced in still shots.
And frankly, I think he gives his stylist too much free rein. Here he is, sporting a head-to-toe dolphin-gray silk ensemble, like Angelina in Esquire. Please compare:
I think she's pulling it off better than he is. And I found others in which he was wearing leather pants and trying to look like Bono. Or giggling undecorously while shading the important parts with nothing but a teacup.
I know I'm not the only one who thinks he's molten sex, but why gild this lily? He's at his best in a pair of boutique-washed Rock and Republic jeans, little black t-shirt and 2 days worth of beard scruff. With that hair all falling in his eyes.
Tada! This one pretty much steals my words. I think this picture might singlehandedly bring irony back into vogue.
* Please note that when this was written, he hadn't yet gone into sex-addiction rehab. Were I writing this today, I would add the sentence "He claims to be afflicted with the dubious malady of sex addiction." to that paragraph.
Last weekend, I couldn't look at any porn. Or rather, I couldn't read any of the blogs that the fancy new firewall my building's internet dude installed on our system thought were porn. I mean, I couldn't see all the largely innocuous internet offerings of an esoteric but sexual nature-- like Sex and The Ivy, Beautiful and Depraved, debauchette-- all my favorites. I was pissed. Imagine my chagrin at having to bitch to my building manager and my building's association president about how much I resented my internet freedoms being limited. OK, I wasn't so much chagrined as amused, but were I the sort of person to feel less prideful, and more sheepish, about my pornish habits... well...
What would my poor, shy neighbors do without me, their friendly neighborhood Porn-for-all Crusader? Because, I mean, if you can't read sex blogs at home, where can you read them? And same goes for real porn too, right?
Needless to say, when I informed the internet dude about the blocks he'd forgotten to turn off, he, of course, sent me a porn link. "To test it." Dude! What do you not understand about my complaint that I can't look at porn?
Huh. It's not weird that my building's internet dude sends me porn links, is it?
Anyway, then, this weekend, the whole internet system went down again (I pay for this crap?). I couldn't load anything-- NC-17-rated or otherwise. I had big plans to hole myself up all weekend to write. I've got a pretty serious backlog of stuff about which I'm thinking. I have been remiss in simply setting aside the time it takes to commit it all to print. But then my internet goes down and gives me all the more excuse to melt into the sofa, rather than the desk chair.
So, for most of the day today, I alternated between watching episodes from Season 2 of Californication and fuming on the phone with the porn aficionado/internet dude. Certainly, the former was more pleasurable.
I love Californication. Love. It. And not just because I think fresh-from-sex-addict-rehab David Duchovny has just got to be ripe for the picking right about now. About a year ago, Michelle, my lovely lesbian ex clued me into this show, swearing that I'd love it... and that she loved it too. It's not surprising that I love it-- it's full of cocks and tits and big words and contemporary literature jokes and an exuberant, happy casualness with regard to monogamy. But it is a little surprising that my ex, consummate clitlicker that she is, loves it so-- because, in a million ways, the show doesn't amount to much more than a testosterone-fueled joyride-- something I would have thought she would disdain as puerile and ookily boy-like. But then, I guess that serves me right for underestimating her, eh?
True enough, the show gets its fair share of internet thrashings from "feminists" still stuck in their Second Wave mindsets. Often, the Hank Moody character (a man who so oozes the Duchovny persona, the person of David and the character of Hank may as well merge to form one big drunk phallus) draws all the best name-calling arrows. He's self-indulgent. He's lecherous. He's a pig. He fucks improbably beautiful woman after improbably beautiful woman and really doesn't much have to suffer for his bullheaded refusal to participate in the social mindset that would have him nursing his heartbreak alone and celibate. But to me? I think the bloggers who hate Hank Moody just don't understand him. Not like I do. Not like I do.
Hank Moody probably comes closest to fulfilling all my fantasies of what a perfect man might be like of any fictional character I have encountered to date. Now, that feels like a big statement and some readers might be prompted to wonder that I could say such a thing only because Hank Moody is wrapped in the delectably dilapidated body of one Mr. David Duchovny.
And it's true. I love to look at David Duchovny. His hair often looks a little greasy (though it falls into his eyes with perfect puppy grace). His schnoz is definitely too prominent for his face and his eyes are too small. He's a little barrel-chested and his legs are surely too skinny. He hasn't much of an ass. His pants ride too low. He's aging-- he's had crows walking all over his temples and his voice cracks from all the cigarettes. He always looks a little dirty, a little paunchy, a little comically hobo-clown-ish. All of which inspires a desire deep within me to put my mouth on him. And to smell all that rank, smoky man smell that simply must emanate from him. So sure, the package certainly helps. Hank wouldn't be Hank if he didn't look like David.
Oh, but there's more. Hank is a writer. The man knows his way around a thesaurus. Never before have I heard more synonyms for "erection," "semen," and "vagina" from any one potty mouth. Never before have I heard a broader ranging personal lexicon--with regard to every other (non-dirty) concept articulable in the English language-- from any man since Shakespeare. He is so goddamn fluent that any girl who fancies language in the slightest has really no defense against him.
He is also fearlessly foul-mouthed. Regardless of social situation, Hank quips profane. And it isn't so much that he lacks a filter as it is that he gets off on the tiny instant of rebellion that billows like a little fart behind every obscene image he conjures. The people around him, the ones who love him, are duly inured but he can't stop himself from testing their limits. And despite the famous deadpan Duchovny delivery, he twinkles ebulliently from within with every dirty word. I love how funny Hank Moody thinks he is. He is always just on the verge of laughing at his own jokes. Which, in turn, makes me laugh all the more at all his little nasty nuggets.
But the best part of Hank Moody is that he isn't a depraved womanizer at all. He doesn't fuck every pussy that crosses his path because he's a cruel manipulator on a power trip or because he's an insecure child with an penchant for instant gratification. Critics who assume he is one or the other or both have completely missed the soul of Hank Moody. Because Hank Moody loves not just the vaginae, but the women to whom the vaginae belong-- every last one of them, even if it's only for ten minutes at a time.
More than once, Hank laments the ubiquitous hairless pussy, favored by so many young Los Angeleno women. He revels, not only in lush thickets of pubic hair, but also in the blood of "crime-scene" sex and the gush that accompanies the mythic g-spot orgasm. Truly, this is remarkable. Here is a man who loves not only all that is pretty and presentable about his many, many women, but also that which is messy, smelly, bloody, gooey and wet about them. I mean that both literally and metaphorically, as he is, to my thinking, one of the few fictional men who I could consider an authentic, unabashed, unconflicted woman-lover. Oh, to be fucked by that sort of devotee. Only in my wildest fantasies-- I'm telling you.
Now, sure. He's got an alcohol problem. He's hung up on a woman with whom he's acquired entirely too much shared baggage. He's a little overly invested in protecting his teen-age daughter's virginity for my taste. And he has a little bit of a problem anticipating the consequences of his assorted debaucheries. But even with all the big, broad bravado and stupid, thoughtless stumbling, he's such a freaking sap. He is, at once, disgusting and sweet. Very manly, very id-driven, yet an embodiment of emotional availability. And he's not polite about any of it.
If the universe can devise a fictional character like Hank Moody, surely it can cough up a reasonable real-life facsimile for me. Can't it? Which is to say: all you Hank Moodys out there-- come find me! You're it for me. I'm telling you.
***
Now that my internet is working again, I'm hoping to be getting back on track in short order. In the meantime, thank you, readers, for indulging my paean to Hank Moody. I just couldn't help myself.
My heart sank when I first heard reportage of the Marilyn blowjob tape. Weird, right? Why on earth would such a video make me feel, I dunno, sad? Well, to be honest, every time another one of these celebrity sex tapes surfaces, I suppose I find it a just little bit sad. I think it's kind of crappy that the American cult of celebrity is so huge that we feel we have the right to invade the private worlds of people who get famous -- in a way that makes very little sense to me. I mean, watching celebrities have sex is really not much different than watching amateur porn-- their fame doesn't confer upon them superhuman powers of eroticism, by any means. No more than it confers upon them superhuman powers of being interesting outside of the respective fields from which they generated their fame. Celebrities, in their day-to-day lives, do not particularly interest me at all, actually -- with the possible exception of David Duchovny, of course... and that's just mostly because he's an ABD English lit scholar and, godDAMNit, I would give my i-teeth to read his take on "Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose." Oh, man, would I! And he could bring me lemonade and let me pet his hair while I read...
Um, anyway.
Even putting aside my general disinterest in the personal lives of celebrities, I was a little surprised to find myself having much of a reaction at all to the Marilyn tape. Particularly one such reaction that seems to be stemming from some strange desire to keep her distant, starlit and pristine. Marilyn occupies an acme in the collective imagination that no one before and no one since has been able to achieve-- and I dare say none who are to come will do so either. There was something very other about her -- something ineffable. I think perhaps it's that her public persona one that could be described as The Ultimate Receiver. With her wide open eyes and her plush open mouth and her sumptuously buoyant open, open body, it's as though she was designed to take on our fantasies-- of sex goddess, of movie star, of tragic beauty, of perfect, angelic fragility. The real woman, doubtlessly, was NONE of those things. She was notoriously lousy in the sack. She was a neurotic. An addict. A frequent public puker. And she became more and more unprofessional as her addiction progressed. And open? Who really knows the hearts of women?
So, why then, would I care if she got caught on camera giving head to some mystery man? I wonder if it's because I, too, want to believe in the fantasy of her. Because I want her perfect and distant and incandescently celestial. Because I hate old movies -- the pacing, the overacting, the film quality... gak! I just can't hardly sit through them! -- but every time I catch a Marilyn film on TV I stop, transfixed. What is it about this woman? For a woman so plagued with insecurity, how is that that she occupies every ounce of her luscious flesh with such vitality? Such conviction of bodily presence? She is just lovely. And she really does seem superhumanly erotic, in even the simplest of her gestures.
And now, I just can't get my imagined version of that video out of my head. Her cotton candy head, rendered aglow in stark, contrasty black-and-white, bobbing over some miscellaneous penis. Darkened mouth O-ed up, leaving streaks of lipstick in its repetitive wake. Luminous eyes shaded with an absurd overkill of false lashes, checking upwards every so often, obsequiously solicitous: is this right? Am I doing ok?
It's just so very human. So not goddess-like. And that's OK. She had every right to be a real person. Of course she did. But I must admit, I kinda like that she still elicits a gleam of the star-struck in me. She's Marilyn. The Marilyn. That she is of the same species as me seems not quite accurate. That she could be caught on tape rutting like the rest of us feels disorienting to me.
It is so stupid that I would feel like that. I'm not prone to sycophanticism. I don't see much value in either the demonization or the perching-on-pedestals of anyone, let along perfect strangers who just happen to have caught the eye of the public.
