Rock & Roll Whores

So I says to myself, self, I says, why do these rock & rollers always have songs about prostitutes? Maybe it’s the outsider status they both share, although, now, rockers are hardly outsiders. Maybe it’s because sex and money is what they both are all about. Also, the ones I choose were all English rockers, so maybe there is some stuffy English attitudes in there somewhere. Whatever it is, it needs scrutinizing. So I picked a few I knew and checked ‘em out. Won’t you join me? But first are you a cop? Cuz you have to tell me if you are a cop. Okay, here we go.

“Roxanne” by The Police

The most well-known ‘ho’ song. The Police took reggae music and extracted politics and sex to make safe pop music. Later on, Sting threw in references to Jung and all that, but no ganja references can be found. The narrator is in love with the whore and, lucky her, he doesn’t “talk down to” her. He is her knight in shining armor, bringing his chalice through the teaming crowds for her thirst. No more will she have to sell her body through the night. We never hear what she has to say though. We are stuck in his continuous chant, turn off the red light. Sounds ominous doesn’t it? Kind of like Othello’s chant of put out the light? All we know about Roxy is she doesn’t care if it’s wrong or right. My kind of woman. Maybe that’s the English attraction, since morals are about caring what your neighbor thinks, and the English love that shit. Personally, I don’t think the relationship will last. He’s too needy and bossy, and she looks great in red.

“22 Acacia Avenue” by Iron Maiden

The most straight forward and therefore lame streetwalker songs. And like most Iron Maiden songs, it’s in E and chugs along like a train. It has two narrators, but, again, not the prostitute’s view. The first narrator is a pimp telling the client about Charlotte the Harlot (from another Iron Maiden song). She only costs 15 quid, which is roughly 30 American dollars—not a bad deal, really. The song changes tempo and then we get the lovesick client begging her to stop, much like Sting’s wet-bag narrator. He warns her of disease and going past her prime. He asks if she loves to lay or the pay—looks like someone bought a rhyming dictionary. The pimp comes back and lists the various things you can do to her, the British are so exact. And in the end the narrator tells her to pack her bags, for she is coming with him. Yay! In Adrian Smith’s defense, he did write this when he was eighteen, but really, this song sucks. A heavy metal band should never be sincere, and that is what this song is.

“Sweet Painted Lady” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

This song probably influenced the preceding two but as a far as lyrics go, it’s much better. Taupin is a weird lyricist, usually substituting wacky for emotion: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids / In fact it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.” Hmm, okay, I won’t argue that Mars sucks to raise your children, but you could rocket up a nanny from earth I suppose. In “Sweet Painted Lady”, he tries to capture a relationship rather than a fantasy of men saving broken women. The narrator is a seaman—we know this because he is on dry land, there is a squeeze box playing in the background, along with the sound of seagulls—who apparently has tricks that he wants to show off. Where did he learn these tricks? On board the manly ship, perhaps? We also have a madam, promising beer, sex, and a warm bed to sleep in. That’s all I ever wanted. What’s nice about the lyrics is the lack of moralizing. The narrator shrugs, saying that sex for pay is the name of the game. And the olfactory mnemonic of the “smell of sea in your beds” is both post-coital, and a great symbol for the loneliness of the sea and its workers. Sex at its heart is a face slap to loneliness.

“Trick of the Light” by The Who

I suppose I should warn you, I thought John Entwistle, the writer of this song, was the cat’s meow for a very long time. You see, I played bass for many years, and I wanted to be John Entwistle. The guy was one of the best bassists to walk the earth. He also was a coke addict with a weak heart. So falls one of my idols. Anywhoo, he wrote one of the best working girl songs (working girl, now isn’t that a quaint title?). The song has the typical Who roar, especially since Entwistle is playing an eight-string bass on it (the bass has each string set with a higher string making for a very thick sound.).

Again the narrator is the prostitute’s john. The scene starts after the sex. The prostitute is reading True Confessions, a woman’s magazine. The john thinks those supposedly sordid stories are fairy tales compared to her life. But he has fallen in love with her and asks her if she had an orgasm. He thinks he might have seen a flicker of emotion on her deadpan face although it could have been a trick of the light—Apparently, there are prostitutes who advertise giving a girlfriend experience, that is to say, they act like they love you when they fuck you. I suppose I can say something snarky about it, or maybe say tisk, tisk, but small amount of feeling nice even with a price tag isn’t so bad.

The narrator then breaks down into a series of clichés: “What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? / They don't make girls like you no more / And I'd like to get to know you on closer terms than this.” And finally he asks her, like most other narrators, to steal away with him. Although we still never hear the prostitute’s point of view, she does get to roll her eyes and kick him out. With the red light shining in his eyes, he still wonders if her made her come. I’m betting, he didn’t. This song really captures the monetary relationship of whore and john. The job is sex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as dull as any other job.

Summation

So what have we learned? One thing, we need songs from the prostitute’s point of view. I’m sure they are out there. We also learned if you fall in love with a streetwalker and ask her to run away with you, the cliché police will come knocking on your door. We’ve also learned the red light symbol, with its intimations of passion and tumescence, is too hard to pass up. The prostitute is romanticized by rockers. She is a woman in dire straits, needing her knight for salvation, but like Entwistle’s whore, she more likely will roll her eyes and kick the knight out on his armored ass, red light reflecting the metal.

Suckin' Aces

I saw Smokin’ Aces the other night, and it made me realize how much I like Quentin Tarantino. Aces had the usual ensemble of wacky lowlifes and hoodlums. It had scenes of ultra-violence laid out like a ballet. It had great character actors like Jeremy Piven, Alex Rococo, Ray Liotta, and a very, very funny Jason Bateman. And it pretty much sucked.

Why?

I saw Grindhouse, which I enjoyed immensely. Planet Terror contained all that I love about zombie films. The trailers were great too. But Deathproof, Tarantino’s contribution, was fantastic. The violence in it is short but shocking. But what makes it a great film is the sparkling dialogue. There are four long scenes of dialogue around a table. Tarantino has such a good ear for colorful dialogue, the kind of talk that close friends have around a bar table or a breakfast table. Of course, there are the references to pop culture that are humorous and make those of us that are Tarantino’s age feel all googly inside. And he has plot points put in there too that make the story churn at a comfortable rate.

But the key is how the dialogue really fills the character. Do we really need to hear about the first date of one the doomed girls at the start? Why is it important to know what drink the girls order? Why does the Kiwi get faux-pissed when her friend asks about her Australian background? There is no main point to this except Tarantino loves his characters and gives them these needless details. Combine that with the vicarious thrill of the exploitation violence and you have a hell of a ride.

Now Smokin' Aces has weird dialogue but it doesn’t have the intelligence that Tarantino film's have. It’s too wrapped up in the plot to worry about filling up the many characters. So Joe Carnahan, the writer/director, seems like a hack trying to capture the Tarantino spirit and failing miserably. He's like a pale ghost. Worse, is his black female talk really seems hackneyed. You can only say mother fuckah and niggah so many times before sounding trite. And no matter how many bullets are flying, if I am yawning, something is wrong. Maybe he should do a Elizabethan costume drama

Fab Town

I live in the part of San Francisco called The Castro, named after the main drag of the neighborhood, Castro Street. It is, to paraphrase a Daily Show correspondent, the gayest street in the gayest city. But it’s more than just a label of sexuality; the neighborhood pulses like a heart, or in gay terms, a disco strobe light.

The Castro used to be called Eureka Valley, although it’s really more of a slight decline from the major hills of San Francisco. Castro Street is where the decline levels out. It has the amenities of urban life: coffee shops, movie theater, restaurants, bars, boutiques, book shops, accessible public transportation, and, unlike most places, a plethora of gay porn shops.

And it has plenty of what I like to watch: people, and more than that, eccentric people. Every neighborhood should have an eccentric. San Francisco has had some famous ones, such as Emperor Norton. Now every weekend, The Castro fills up with all sorts of eccentric folks, and with the addition of cheap booze the eccentricity really starts to crackle. The leather boys and the fashionable twinks, the femmes and the butches, the bewildered tourists and the pushy homeless, the cops and the drag queens make for a Mardi Gras every weekend

My neighborhood has a gentleman that I call Otto. Otto is a white male about six feet tall with long brown hair and a beard. He is a bear--that is a hairy gay man. He usually walks around the area with only a leather vest, leather shorts, boots, and sometimes a tail. Yes, he has a tail that sticks out behind his ass and slightly curls upward. I’ve never talked to him, and I don’t know his real name, but I appreciate the color he brings to my street. Just another day in Fab Town.

Beware the jubjub bird and the binge drinker!!!

There is tiny anti-drinking advertisement in this week’s SF weekly (page 63) among the ads for bars and clubs. The headline states, “My Beer Told Me to Puke on my Girlfriend”
The copy reads, “Binge drinking? That’s five or more drinks in an evening. It may not seem like a lot, but it’s enough to make you act like a complete idiot. Alcohol shouldn’t have that much influence over your life or anyone’s for that matter.”

I think it lists a website to visit in smaller type, but the font is black against a dark image of a 40 ounce beer bottle, and I could not read it in direct sunlight, and I have no magnifying glass.

Okay, let’s begin with the title. There have been times, gentle reader, when I’ve had five plus drinks. And yes, my beer did start whispering things to me, but not puke on your girlfriend. My Erdinger Weisbier usually screams in a high pitch voice, “99 Luftballons auf ihem weg zum horizont.” But then again, I am a child of the eighties. Yes, and my Fuller’s E.S.B. sometimes will hoarsely whisper, “oy, Wot are ‘ew then, eh? Ya cupid stunt, don’t be a tosser and stop staring at her Brad Pitts and buy her a pint, then eh?

I agree that five plus drinks will make you an idiot but not a complete one. A complete idiot starts pointless wars, defends incompetent attorney generals, and lies through his teeth. And this obvious idiot did this completely sober. And the term “binge drinking” is a loaded term—enjoy the pun. Much like the term, “functioning alcoholic,” the term “binge drinking” insults and is redundant since one of the meanings of the term “binge” means drinking excessively. Now you can insult me, but never be redundant. It insults because if you have five or more drinks, you are labeled a BINGE DRINKER!! I leave the binge debate to The Onion with this article.

What’s mysterious is who paid for this advertisement? MADD? Alcohol Beverage Control? The ad is pretty lame graphic-wise, cheaply made with no thought to readability. MADD wants to end all drinking: temperance for all whether you like it or not, so it’s probably not them because it sort of okays four drinks or less. I think it’s the booze lobby with an ass-covering ad, much like those save-the-children ads that Phillip Morris puts out. Whoever put it out, you could do better. Come one, I wanna be manipulated. I wanna feel bad.

In the Beginning

Hello, and welcome to the beginning, when every post is fresh and interesting, before ennui sets in and the posts deteriorate into grocery lists and excuses for not posting. This blog will talk about, joke about, and possible deconstruct the incredible amount of cultural detritus that flies in our faces 24/7/365. I will also go into detail about the bars where I occasional imbibe a white wine spritzer, heavy on the spritz. That is if white wine spritzer is made with gin and vermouth. Also, since I'm lazy and single-voiced, I will beg my erudite friends to add postings. Hopefully this will entertain you, dear reader, while you waste your life away in a cubicle. God save us all.