quiet

From Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff




"By early November of 2001, there is no need to look to the past for our daily dose of tawdry. While the rest of the country has wrapped itself in the flag and emerged newly patriotic and bellicose, New York scarcely two months after September 11 has tempered the jingoism by rising like a drunken, horny phoenix from its ashes. The city is electric with the renewed crackle of filth. Chalk it up to that old market-theory chestnut about the rising hemline in the plummeting economy, or that people simply don't want to spend their nights alone. The media have coined a term for the transitory love-in-wartime clutches they claim are happening everywhere: Terror Sex."

- On Penis Puppetry
"Even though the temple on stage has a Latin designation, it feels quite Greek in here. I mean Greek in that binge-drinky, Daliesque-arcs-of-airborne-vomit, ripe-with-incipient-danger-of-date-rape, college fraternity sense of the word, as opposed to the Aegean birthplace of democracy."

- On crowds standing outside a Today Show taping
"The contact sought with 'HI GRANDMA AND GRANDPA I MISS YOU. LOVE PRINCESS GABBY' is intimate. Watching [the] Today [show], even in public, is a very personal pursuit. The members of the crowd are not doing this for what could be characterized as the typical reality-television kind of attention: that disinhibited, oversexualized, bereft-of-pride behavior that makes people - whose parents are presumably still alive - allow themselves to be filmed having catfights while wearing thongs, or tucking into heaping plates of beef rectums (while wearing thongs). The simple act of standing, clothed, in the street with naught but a homemade sign seems almost Louisa May Alcott-sweet by comparison."

- On The Log Cabin, a gay Republican group:
"As someone who can still barely comprehend the concept of Jewish conservatives, despite their shaming and undeniable existence, I know I am a naive throwback to a time when both visible and invisible minorities largely allied themselves with progressive politics. Having only arrived in D.C. on an overcast day in October 2003 for my first direct encounter with gay Republicans, I am a veritable Darwin in the Galapagos, slack-jawed in the presence of this confounding genus, a creature that seems to invite its own devouring; the cow helpfully outlining its tastiest cuts on its side with chalk, while happily pouring the A-1 sauce over its own head."


"To briefly rant about The Swan, the television show that takes depressed female contestants - all of whom seem to need little more than to change out of their sweat suits and get some therapy - and makes them all over to look like the same trannie hooker: what makes The Swan truly vile is that for the months that these women are being carved up like so much processed poultry, all the mirrors in their lives are covered over. Such willing abrogation of any say or agency in how they will be transformed BY DEFINITION means that in the real world, they would not be candidates for surgery. It is the very sleaziest of all the plastic surgery makeover shows - quite a distinction, that; like being voted the Osbourne child with the fewest interests."


"It can be hard to remember what one's anticipatory image of something was once you're on the other side. I'm no longer sure exactly what it was I was waiting for, but I do know that it was something wholly unfamiliar and thrilling. Like a new color. Not a mixture, no trace of blue or yellow or red. What would that look like? I have some basic understanding about light - how it can only be broken down and refracted into its seven constituent hues - and even though I know that the physical world makes the existence of such a thing basically impossible, I'd still really like to see that."