Truth or Dare (in bed with Madonna)

This will be a complicated piece with roots deep in the very core of the world you're interested in, which is why it's Lifespiel rather than say Trilematograf, even though the title follows the conventions of that category.ⁱ It is not possible to proceed without crediting the proximate node of the process that leads us to this discussion : had Anthony Kiedis not killed Louise Ciccone, we wouldn't be here.

So then : I participated in (not one, but) two successful revolutions during my stay here so far. I guess the only fair statement of the facts would be to say I'm a professional revolutionary, because god knows I never could summon the interest in any other occupation.

The saying goes "you don't choose your family, but you do choose your friends", and it bears some relevancy : I was born in a communist Romania pregnant with its very own death. Pretty much every known tribe, no matter how uselessly primitive, nevertheless carries through the world the legend of the little boy who, coincidentally, shook his little fist at some great and incomprehensible evil that had wrought havok for generations upon the people, only for it to fall dead at his very feet. The reason for this communion is purely psychogenic, of course, children are born with scant conception of the difference between the outer world and the inner world ; but even after the first inklings of the human condition a difficulty in evaluating downstreams lingers, which is why every small child whose parent dies will forever carry through the world the vague notion that perhaps he'd done it. It is possible, right ?

Certainly, it's possible. Out of this stable failure of the human mind therefore arise standard stories of the human species -- because the defect is so reliably present therefore it drives predictable outcomes, precisely like any other broken RNG.ⁱⁱ I don't claim, of course, that I personally ended communism, in either some Iron Curtain place or all of them. Nor can anyone else claim this, it's a ridiculous claim by its very nature, of the exact substance of claiming to be "setting the Sun". But I was there, see ? I was right there, as it happened, I was the boy living in a world that invented horses and dogs and Red Ryders just as I said it should. I wasn't a boy introduced to a world pre-existing, I was a boy who witnessed the world -- not "his" world, THE world -- change, painfully, deeply, to better accomodate his views, leaving the adults all around in a lurch, and markedly less capable to adapt, or to compete. Reality is subjective experience, and well... that was my subjective experience, what can I tell you. I was a child adults bowed to, so coincidental was the world ending that the ruins it left behind consisted of grown men and women coming to a little boy for guidance. Total coincidence, right ? Except... with coincidences like this what ever is the meaning of work ? Ever told the hairstylist looking at your paycheck and muttering something with "luck" in it that it's skill, not fucking luck ? Well then ?

Yet you can choose your friends, and that's precisely what Madonna was in the 90s -- a perfectly stalwart ally. The confused little girl (aged well over 30) with nice tits that "wanted to push people's buttons" and "be political" was exactly the pillar needed in that corner of the grand edifice. We were doing the whole sexual revolution thing back then, we were, and it was a genuine revolution -- unlike, say, the "black liberation" lulz. A natural defense of "freedom of speech"ⁱⁱⁱ and getting filthy rich went together hand in hand, but the whole construction needed a Madonna right there just like the last year's pantsuits needed an Obama. So there she was, just like Obama, made to spec but holding her own. With her in her place and other people other places and other things in dispositions, once the chips fell "as they may" indeed the world burned down. You may perhaps say that the world was just as pregnant with blowjobs, and anal sex and latex dildos and girl-girl scenes as the sad soviet dominions were pregnant with forgetting about the idiocy^iv. You certainly can trace earlier roots. You may, perhaps, point to the orcs and say "o, look, so and so obscure tribe still doesn't get free sex and slutty female teenagers". You may say many and sundry things, and they'll all be nonsense nevertheless. You lack one important reagent in all this : you weren't, actually, there. I was there for both of these, and as such I can tell you with an authority extremely difficult to impeach^v that they were quite different things ; not superficially different but substantially different. They tasted different, not like how chocolate tastes different from cake, but how pickles taste different from sorbet. "It's all just vegetal matter in goop", right ? Wrong.

After all that, now, I look upon Madonna, and I wonder : why did she ever think she was part of things, one of us, somebody ? Why and wherefore did she arrive at this utterly indefensible notion I couldn't begin to retrospectively guess. I look upon the confused little girl, singing "say no to harems"^vi while kneeling at the feet of a boy who is neither a man nor her Master (but at least he's not gay, hey)... What the fuck was she thinking, exactly ? I look trying to ascertain the difference between Ciccone and Gault^vii and come up empty. This one got the part because better tits/nicer waistline, exactly like Obama got the job over ten thousand other black studs because taller. There's absolutely nothing inside that puts Ciccone onstage and Gault backstage. I know, at the time it looked like there was. Well -- show it to me ?!

The complete disorganised chaos of the production, sporting the least competent managerial team I ever laid eyes on running into the sorts of problems highway fast-food fry cooks and obscure brand pizza delivery boys run into... why the fuck is this woman trying to direct her team while getting her make-up on ? Why is that bald inept fuck even there in the first place, the girls were cringing in bed while watching the horror unfold because at every step their brain yelled "holy, hell NO! Do not DO THAT!! MASTER WILL BRING DOWN HIS WRATH!!!" yes it's a film, but no, slavery doesn't just switch off -- it's a proxy for competence, after all.

The truth is the truth. The dare's up to you.

1. 1992, by Alek Keshishian, with Madonna & crew.

   It should be perhaps noted that the item's rather the jumbled remains of a crashed delivery van containing footage, than either a film (which is always a tree constructed towards a view) or a documentary (which is always the opposite -- a view deconstructed along a tree). Alek Keshishian's work is not either kind of tree, but just a flat morass, closer to what "comedians" or those schmucks filming themselves while driving and talking (an intrinsically unsafe behaviour) tend to produce (because the means of that production are cheap and accessible -- always and forever the cause of widespread stupidity (aka socialism). [↩]

2. Remember the many bits of this lengthy discussion ? [↩]
3. Noticed how the pantsuit luminaries ditched the traditional garb of their nominally revered fore-runners, and are now kinda ashamed of the very tools that pushed the "queer revolution" ? Freedom of speech is not nearly as good for today's generation of gentrified dorks who pretend to countercultural filiation, exactly like it was not nearly as good for yesterday's generation of gentrified dorks, who pretended to "all that's right good and proper" then as ever.

   "We're queer, where' here, get used to it" happened because prostitution, and as an epiphenomenon of our sexual revolution. Not the other fucking way around -- which is to say, in very plain terms, that if the faggots fail to align themselves behind the current revolutionary process, they will forthwith meet the fate the Arabs contemplate for them.

   A place for everyone and let everyone know his place, I say. [↩]

4. While, magically, and "totally impredictably", the world's never been pregnant with white black men, which is why you can put all the trained monkeys you want in the White House, nothing sparks and nothing catches. Isn't that fucking annoying, you thought revolution will have to be fair, and in fact revolution doesn't give shit one about you or your notions. Must suck... [↩]
5. You could, perhaps, say that I'm not intelligent enough to understand my own experience. Experience shows that it'll be a hard wash, that line. What else you got ? [↩]
6. "Express yourself" in-universe, "don't go for second best, baby, put your love to the test, second best is never enough, you'll do much better on your own" and all that. [↩]
7. Another girly, exactly as confused. She's the fat make-up artist that introduces herself with "I was born a poor black child" and then briefly stars when recounting her previous night party experience (of being assfucked post-mickey) and concluding she'll only go out with us guys in the future. Now prythee, explain the difference. What, it's that Madonna "loves to make people think" ? [↩]