In other words, it was a typical internet contretemps; indeed, at the time, it struck me as maybe an archetypical one. Why did I care? Why did anyone? To answer these questions, I did what any self-respecting internet citizen does – I wrote an unreadably long, meanderingly idiosyncratic post about it on my completely unread blogspot-powered personal blog!

It has been a year and a half (!!!) since I did this, and I subsequently forgot about it entirely. But I was going back over my long-abandoned blog the other day, and re-reading what I wrote, it struck me that, even though the particulars and principals have changed (or, more precisely, dispersed then realigned), the basic structure of publicity I attempted to describe – the endless array of semi-publics these various forums and platforms create, and the alternately tantalized and frustrated affects they produce – still rang true to me, at least in part. In the interest, then, of using the recent (yet, in internet terms, almost unfathomably ancient! Which is part of the point!) history to illuminate the present, I gained permission from Illustrious Editor Virus to re-print my over-elaborate musings in this forum and see what y’all think.

Sometimes Mateo wondered if he and his friends were malicious because they’d inherited all the intellectual pretensions of their parents and none of their scope. After all, when the capital had been rich and powerful, the ideas (even the whims) of its nobles had caused things to happen. Now they all took stands—but they were standing on air. Their impotence made them irritable.

This quote is from Edmund White’s 1986 novel Caracole, a beautifully rendered novel set in a mythical, conquered country that, as the back cover blurb helpfully informs us, is meant to be “reminiscent of Paris under the Nazis or Venice under the Austrians or Rio under the Portuguese.” The title page furthers this referential refraction by highlighting the multivalent meaning of the word “caracole”: “caper” in English, “prance” in French, “snail” in Spanish. But even to a casual reader (like me) of White’s other, more straightforwardly autobiographical books, it becomes obvious that more than a treatise on any of the specific milieux that inform the creation of this imagined community, Caracole reads as a cunning dissection of the New York intellectual scene White himself is writing from within. The removal of specificity allows him to blend, reconfigure, and distill the personalities within this scene in a way that transforms them into mythical figures, much in the same way that his deliberately imperfect composite of Rio, Paris, and Venice transforms into a setting that resonates beyond the specificities of those cities, evoking, for example, the international semicolony of late 1920s Shanghai or the ambiguous legacy of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan.

By the time I reached the passage quoted above, I realized that I was finding the novel particularly compelling because it was beginning to read as an acute dissection not of a late 1980s New York of which I had only the vaguest conception or colonial situations I’d only contemplated in academia, but of the communities forming via the internet at sites like Gawker where I was spending a perhaps ill-advisedly large portion of my free time. This feeling only amplified as, shortly after completing Caracole, I found myself reading along as these communities erupted into a cacophony of indignation and invective over former Gawker editor Emily Gould’s account of the messy intersections between her career and her love life, which was published as a cover story in New York Times Magazine. Exhausted by attempting to find my own words to convey my complicated feelings regarding this article, I found myself quoting the passage above in a comment thread otherwise devoted to excoriating Emily’s duplicity, malice, narcissism, and bald-faced fame-seeking. I felt it gave perspective on the compulsion to write comment after comment either asserting her apparent inelegance and insipidity or defending her against these charges, a compulsion that I found myself unable to stifle as well. Why did I feel the need to participate in this public debate about the indelicacy and possible immorality of the actions of someone I never knew and likely never would? Who did I think I was? Who did the other commenters think they were? And who did we think Emily was?

Caracole is written in a studiously ornate third person that examines in extraordinary detail the complicated and shifting psychologies of each of its main characters as they negotiate the fraught terrain of their contentious, petty, and tumultuous world. Like the debate over Emily’s article, these negotiations are conducted primarily through the dissection of personal relationships: love affairs and friendships, rivalries and shifting alliances, spats and make-ups. But what becomes clear in both cases is that the compelling aspects of this dissection lie not in the salacious details so revealed but in the way that parsing these relationships becomes a parsing of a world where the frivolous, all-too-human micropolitics of the love affair and the bon mot intersect directly with the violent, inhuman macropolitics of empire and class warfare. It seems counterintuitive at first to think that a book like Caracole, conceived and published before the rise and normalization of internet-facilitated community formation and set in a even older composite milieu, would provide any insight into a situation so inextricably bound up in the webs-within-webs that make up contemporary internet culture. And yet, the layers of abstraction that transport the characters and setting into the realm of myth also allow them to resonate with the futures superceding their creation; this is how myths work, after all. And it is as a myth of discontented civilization, of leaving the animalistic, retrospectively paradisiacal world of the de facto private country life for the self-conscious, neurotically public life of the city that Caracole speaks most clearly to the dynamics of internet culture that Emily’s story and its reception exemplify.

The novel tells the story of two young people from the hinterlands, Gabriel and Angelica, who exist in a state of unreflective grace as children scrabbling for food amid the crumbling ruins of a neglected estate before being whisked away by Gabriel’s indolent uncle Mateo to the city. Once lovers, Angelica and Gabriel are kept apart until the last ten pages of the book by Mateo, who acts as a mentor to his scrawny nephew even as he conducts an illicit affair with the beautiful, “tribal” Angelica.

It takes an outbreak of civil unrest to dismantle the elaborate machinations Mateo sets up to keep his two charges apart, a violent disintegration that leads them to fulfill their names’ implied promise that they’d become avenging angels of revolution. But it seems equally important that the final transformation is facilitated by an act of violence stemming not from the grand historical narrative of the colonized citizens revolting at last, but from the interpersonal intrigues perpetrated by Mateo and his ilk, whom he describes in the quote above as irritable with impotence. Most of the novel involves the minute descriptions of the tiniest shifts in the emotions and psychological make-ups of members of a privileged demi-monde of intellectuals, artists and writers who make up the upper echelon of the conquered population. The prose’s style is one of piercing observation, a deliberate approximation of the modulated hypersensitivity of Proust or Gide, despite the third person. The reader is privy to every self-delusion, hypocrisy, and Machiavellian calculation the main characters undertake, and tracing these interior contours constitutes the primary “action” of the story, which saves major plot advancement for the opening section and the short, violent final one. The process of civilization Gabriel and Angelica go through is a coming into self-consciousness, a learning of a language that clings to the skin of experience, at once alienating and enlightening. Angelica reflects upon this process as she reunites, at long last, with Gabriel near the novel’s end:

Angelica loved Gabriel. He was her husband. This “love” they talked so much about, as real and invisible as “art” or “happiness” or “work,” now seemed so full and present within her that she looked and looked into Gabriel’s eyes—did he feel it too? Surely anything so strong must be shared. She couldn’t be hearing so much love unless he was saying at least some of it to her. She reworked their past so that every tough, animal grappling followed by aversion now seemed to have prefigured love and the promise of happiness. What had been all silence and shame now became talk, the eloquence of love.

This passage is typical of the prose filling the entire book: emotions are felt and analyzed simultaneously, the two processes inseparable and coterminous. Further, the third person narrator grants the reader access not only to the innermost workings of each character’s mind, but to insights that exceed these characters’ self-knowledge. The reader glides effortlessly with the narrator from mind to mind, each incident played and replayed from different perspectives and parsed accordingly, in effect giving the reader a kaleidoscopic view into this world in the sense that a kaleidoscope presents a new, differently refracted image with every turn even when it is pointed consistently at the same object. The eventfulness of the novel consists mostly of scenes of frivolous sociality: openings, poetry readings, dinner parties, masked balls. These events provide the venues for the micropolitics of power that govern private personhood — love affairs, friendships, petty revenges — to gain a larger force through the segmented publicity of this privileged yet powerless class of intellectuals, actresses, and bon vivants. Moments of indiscretion are relayed and revisited from several points of view as the third-person narrator guides the reader from mind to mind, and this layering and the constant cogitation and analysis it forces the reader to engage in defines the public sphere the characters live within, one that resembles less a sphere than the chambers of a mollusk’s shell. Like Daedulus’s seeing-eye ant, the reader travels perpetually forward through White’s prose only to discover that the road forward folds inexorably back on itself; unlike the ant, though, the reader is provided no exit out of these delicate, endlessly involuting chambers filled with caprice, just scene after scene of apparently inconsequential action that reflects through bohemian indolence the perpetual carnival of the lower classes of the conquered.

Until the shell itself breaks. Fighting in the streets foreshadows the dissolution of this hermetically sealed world, but the true end occurs during yet another masked ball. A culmination of cogitation and tiny slights, one character shoots and kills another whom she perceived to be a romantic rival for Gabriel’s attentions. The reader has been informed, of course, that this perception is at least partly a delusion, but it hardly matters — the true dynamics are, of course, as endlessly complicated as every interpersonal dynamic has been shown to be in the novel, but these complications are rendered effectively moot by the finality of the action they nonetheless propel, and the revolutionary spark that action provides. The particulars of the action are quickly reconfigured for maximum revolutionary purpose, the true killer whisked away and a woman from the conquering class framed — a consequence of she and the killer showing up at the ball in the same dress, which itself is the result of yet another complexly motivated attempt at humiliation that ironically ends up saving the woman it was engineered to embarrass. As witnesses to and perpetrators of this deception, the newly reunited Gabriel and Angelica find themselves suddenly positioned to be the symbolic standardbearers for this long-delayed revolution, itself the culmination and dissolution of the coming into civilization the entire book portrays.

Contemporary internet culture is frequently spoken of as a system of interwoven webs, a metaphor that seems to function similarly to Caracole’s segmented shell. And like this shell, it seems to be a series of interlocking scenes of little inherent consequence that are nonetheless worried over in a series of endless cogitations as blog after blog, commenter after commenter, decides to “weigh in” on whatever event has been caught in the webs of publicity that brought it to his or her attention. There is an odd leveling that takes place in clearinghouses of such events such as Gawker, which is less a blog than a venue that reduces/raises everything it publishes to the status of the events that take place at the masked balls and dinner parties of Caracole. News of Ted Kennedy dying of cancer is given the same level of attention as Emily Brill comparing cancer to excess weight; a photo of Julia Allison pursing her lips at a party is considered and reconsidered as endlessly as a Presidential campaign speech. There is a dividend of frustration with this that becomes apparent whenever a comment thread turns serious — a frustration that mirrors precisely that described by Mateo in the opening quotation. It is a frustration of people given just enough power to feel their own essential impotence. On the internet, we are transformed instantly into a demimonde, our every word public yet mostly inconsequential, every speech act a moment of potential reckoning that can ruin or exalt the speaker within this world of pure rhetoric at the same time as it remains for the most part invisible outside it. We want to change the world through our words but are terrified at the possibility that it may actually happen, since the motivation behind these words are the product of the fluid eternal present of constantly updated content and the shifting ground of off-the-cuff conversation that accompany each new post.

In a follow-up feature wherein she answered a select few of the mostly antagonistic questions volleyed at her in the comment section accompanying her article’s online incarnation, Emily writes that she is reading The Future of Reputation, a book she claims is helping her think about the redefinitions of public and private that the internet is catalyzing and that her own story illuminates as a kind of wounded and wounding parable. Ironically, a commenter on her personal site revealed just before the publication of her article that s/he saw Emily reading this book on the subway, a comment that neatly inverted the dynamics of the gaze that Emily herself defended during a television appearance conducted while still at Gawker that focused on the aspect of the website that she had the least to do with directly: the “Gawker Stalker” map that allows readers to submit sightings of celebrities in and around New York. As Emily writes in her article, it was this appearance that launched her into precisely the sort of visibility that rendered her a target of this feature herself, a visibility that continued even after she quit Gawker, as the comment on her personal site demonstrated (and which will inevitably amplify again in the wake of the New York Times Magazine cover), and which forces her to confront on a personal level the redefinition of public and private the book she was seen reading itself examines.

Emily’s conundrum exemplifies a central paradox of contemporary internet culture, the simultaneous insularity and permeability of its eventfulness. We are all initiates in one way or another, all able to learn how to participate in this eternal present tense and let its language civilize and alienate us, render us sophisticated and indolently clever, able to footnote and link and refer and allude and analyze in a series of public speech acts that in themselves both create chambers to stage new scenes and link them to others: every new blog, every new comment, every new profile represents both a new wall and a new doorway, a new more or less permeable membrane. As readers, commenters, participants in social software, writers, and bloggers, we are constantly negotiating a world defined almost entirely by modulations in the publicity of the words we write on this internet.

All internet writing is public. Yet learning what this means involves a constant confrontation with the vicissitudes of power within a privileged demimonde frustrated at the prospect of only being able to change the world by supporting and promoting each other’s fame. There are grander, exponentially direr things that deserve the attention Emily receives for being a particularly articulate participant in this process, and so when she attains the fame and rewards that accrue to her for doing essentially a version of what any of us theoretically could do, she becomes a convenient scapegoat for the frustrations inherent in realizing that we really cannot do much more. Elections, genocides, human rights abuses, wars, careers – these things too are affected by the chatter within the rooms of little consequence that make up the internet, and yet the process by which this happens seems inescapably accidental and capricious. It is easy to trace how Emily became a celebrity within a few of the linked chambers in the internet through her sparkling conversation and manipulation of persona, but it seems impossible to trace, for example, why Obama will never stop being linked to a Muslimism he’s repeatedly disavowed and which commenters, bloggers and journalists have spent so much time asserting his distance from [2010 edit: A better example of what I mean is here is the morbidly disproportionate attention paid to phenomena like the neo-/paleo-/pseudo-conservative teabagger “movement” in non-internet venues like CNN, which reproduces the movement's rhetorical visibility in the comments of news aggregate sites as directly representative of their actual presence in a political sense, thus producing a self-referential loop in which news coverage starts to produce the effects it then reports on – in effect, changing the world in concrete ways, since most of what we count as “reality” in our lives is necessarily filtered through these media. The answer to this, inevitably, has been to create more blogs to counter these distorted narratives].

Like the end of Caracole, the chain of events that lead to this or that instance of essentially impotent yet incessant public speech to suddenly accrue real power is so divorced from any one person’s control that a kind of hyper-articulated hum of worldly frustration permeates the atmosphere online, reflecting in microcosm a larger, increasingly decentralized geopolitical field of power that nonetheless features an increasingly centralized conglomerate of governmental and corporate interests as its major players. All we can really hope for is that one of our random shots in the dark will strike lucky and pierce this complacent shell once and for all, and we can find our exit, and a different version of ourselves, in the revolutions this shattering precipitates. We’re all angels of revolution in this sense, but it is not within our control how or when or whether we’ll ever get our wings. So we mope and bitch and whine and make jokes, then analyze these utterances endlessly as we wait and see how it all ends.

Plus, Audrey Tautou is totally hot and fun throughout the whole thing, erasing all that Da Vinci Code yuckiness like a cleansing spa, and the dude is hot too, if you’re into that whole sad-eyed Moroccan dude thing (which, um, I totally am).

I recommend!

I found the creature on the heath. It was a misty morning; I was taking my after-breakfast stroll, the same circuit I took when ol’ Andy had been alive, trotting briskly by my side, looking for a place to stop suddenly, snuffle the ground, and pee. I lacked the heart to either find a new companion or cease my morning walks. I walked along, filling my lungs with vapor as my hands remembered the sensation of Andy’s fuzzy forehead bumping against my dangling palm, followed by his cold black nose.

Suddenly, the phantom nose was replaced by something real – cold, firm, but definitely not a nose. I jerked my hand away but it took a moment before I could muster the gumption to investigate what had brushed against me. It had felt so familiar yet alien, questing and firm and friendly as a nudge can be, but also slightly wobbly, its surface cold but with an inner warmth detectable beneath it, a protuberance as fascinatingly ungainly and vaguely obscene as the word “protuberance” itself.

I looked down, finally, and looking back up at me was the proboscis of a trembling, tartan sack supported by a collection of other protuberances jutting irregularly from its body. It moved forward a bit, allowing me to see that it moved not by “walking” with these strange, ungainly limbs, but rather rolled along from one to the other, its body undulating and revolving as the proboscis that had bumped my hand thrust down into the heather and its “hind” limbs cycled up to probe the air.

Frightened by the flailing, I startled back; it moved forward to pursue me, its limbs cycling quickly around its canvas body like a cross between a stiff-legged jellyfish and the bristling band around the wheels of a tank. I stood stock-still, unsure of what to do but not wanting to provoke it. The creature stood still as well, its plaid canvas body undulating slightly, as if breathing the misty air through its surface like an amphibian.

The foremost proboscis tilted toward me slightly, then swiveled to the side, immediately reminding me of Andy again, the way he’d look at me with his head tipped quizzically to the left as if trying to riddle out my obscure motivations as I shouted at the television or pounded furiously at the computer keyboard or stopped shaving partway through, dispirited by the swarm of little bleeding cuts covering my cheek and chin, saying, “Just fuck it, then,” to the mirror then turning to say it again directly to him, half-bearded and filled with impotent resentment against the physical facts of existence itself and needing an audience. Like a good therapist, though, Andy would never challenge my outbursts; he would just cock his head to one side and let me “own” my feelings. But unlike actual therapists, he made me feel better, which probably stemmed not just from his impeccable listening skills but his acquiescence when I reached out and ruffled the soft fur covering the crown of his little head.

The tilting and the pangs of recognition it brought made the difference. My heart softened, its racing slowed. The bristling bag before me became less disquieting than intriguing, and I smiled at it to show I was no longer afraid. Tentatively, it flailed toward me, bumping against my thigh. I heard a lilting kind of coo, seemingly inside my head. I looked down and saw the creature’s proboscis had split at the end, revealing an opening like a little mouth. The cooing must be coming from there, but the sensation that it was inside my head persisted.

I must have looked perturbed, because the creature’s little mouth had sealed itself again and inside my head, the cooing suddenly stopped. I missed it instantly. I reached down and patted it on the end of its firm but faintly pliable protuberance; I made sure to smile, even though I had yet to locate anything that seemed like an eye. The cooing began again, at first tentatively, then with increased confidence and harmonic complexity. It seemed to unfold like a rose, revealing symphonies. I ached to explore it. I needed to listen, and learn.

“Come with me,” I told it, making sure to also say it very clearly inside my head; I had yet to locate ears upon it either. I turned and headed for home, looking back every once in a while to see if it was following me. It always was, trundling its ungainly and endearing way through the heath, but really, I needn’t have checked – the cooing symphony continued to spread across my brain like a sunset staining an evening sky all the way back home.

And so I came to live with a creature. I tried to give it food, but it does not appear to eat; the same is true of water. It seems made to only give, not take. It curls at the foot of my bed at night, on the sofa near me when I watch the television and curse; it trundles around the room probing the bookcases in my office as I type furiously at my computer’s keyboard; it nudges me comfortingly when I cut myself shaving and reach the verge of giving up on everything, once and for all.

The creature lives in my house, but more importantly, lives inside my head. It entertains me, tells me jokes, provokes me, shows me images I’d never have imagined, eggs me on toward articulations I’d never be capable of alone. This creature, this strange and shifting bag of pipes, this tartaned pulsing presence with a sonorous symphony within it, has become oddly indispensable, a part of myself that lies outside myself, giving me a new language with which to speak. It is a message and a medium, a connection to a world within the world, one that lies just beneath the surface, just behind the mist. It is affection and creative impulse; it is a nudge in the right direction. The creature inhabits me like a welcome virus, shields me on my journeys like a shoe protects a foot. Its mouths sing the sweetest songs, its protuberances pinwheel as it essays awe-inspiring acrobatics, its words within my head make me smile on the coldest days.

And sometimes all we do is watch reruns of The X-Files, waiting for the water for the tea to boil on the stove. The cooing has a tendency at these times to have a lot to do with tits. Who can blame it?

Oh, that Gillian Anderson!

Invisible: the border
between our faces shimmers
liquid, crystalline as air, as a
drop of rain:
pendulant, quivering,
suspended from
barbed wire.

Glassy, gilded guilt
encrusts every word
as we simulate
the nearness every word disproves
as it travels through fibers
optic like telescopes, like
microscopes, like
eyes, scaled and artificial:
you and I
scaling a ladder of ones
and zeros, maximizable,
minimizable, but always
scaled down.

Eros: it makes my body
ache everywhere your
hands don’t touch, an inverted
sore, a scrambled
rose: it’s the softest part
that makes me bleed.

And as I contemplated this fearsome phantom, I remembered that it was almost exactly a year ago that our attention, as a nation, was transfixed, day and night, week after week, as the details of her life unfolded like soggy origami into ever more grotesque shapes before our very eyes.

Back then, the focus was on the family. And while a certain sense of all-pervasive conspiracy birthed one kind of frenzy, behind it lay the more banal boondoggle of the Palin family itself. Every day seemed to bring a new family member into view, and with it, another mindbendingly unlikely yet prosaic name, as if produced by cutting up an outdoor goods catalog and assembling a family from the debris. These were names?

This fascination spawned a frenzy of inspiration. A Palin family name generator popped into existence. We found out that the most famous of these names, Trig, in an almost impossibly ironic twist, meant “Truth,” and was “a male name common in some Nordic countries (Icelandic:Tryggvi Norwegian:Tryggve) but it is maybe most common as a dog’s name.”

And the community of Wordsmokers then under nascent formation was not immune from such frenzy. On the Friday night before last year’s long, harrowing-but-hopeful Memorial weekend, a group of brave souls found themselves in an obscure corner of the internet, caught up in that most time-honored of internet traditions: beating a joke so far past its natural death that the activity becomes unmoored from its initial inspiration and takes on a life of its own, fueled by the giddiness of communal creation. In premodern Japan, saké-soaked jackanapes would trade linked verses into the wee hours to satirize public figures and show off their linguistic dexterity; today, this is what the internet is for.

And so, as a makeshift send-off for Sarah and the nonsense she inspired as her most lasting legacy, I’ve assembled an official list of alternative Palin Baby Names for all to see, in order, and unexpurgated. Contributors to the cause include yours truly, Rosa Luxembourgeoise, Kora In Hell, BC, NotAndersonCooper, Mister Hippity, Dorothy Mantooth, Aaron Altman, HtotheOmo, Nina Hagen, and Binky’s Dream.

I recommend pacing yourself, and maybe lining up some shots in an easy-to-reach spot.

Enjoy:

Truck, Burlap, Ski-Doo, Unleaded and Trig

Bunk, Twister, Pegleg, Gumboot, and Tuft

Toque, Frostbite, Paper-Clip, Breast-Pump, and Trig

Flubber, Turin, Murdoch, Slinky and Trig

Dawdle, Gunboat, Stromboli, Hobo and Dek

Bolero, Krunk, Fleetwood, Stetson and Trig

Stick, Bratwurst, Whiplash, Partay and Trig

Clearcut, Tonka, Spacecraft, Elkjerky and Trig Michael II

Clip, Ammo, Semper, Bradley and Trig

Grunt, Cubicle, Pogo Stick, Dander and Nom Nom Nom

Boson, Planck, Syzygy, Ersatz and Chumbawamba

Elvis, Sugarwater, Mercury, Oliver North and Trig

Dump, Man Purse, Schwinn, Fogger, and Trig George Michael

Permafrost, Octane, Goob, Sandbag and Trig

Single Malt, Santaland, Wimper, Bogey, and Trig Little Feet

Camper Van, Foam, Weepy, Hoser and Trig Kim Vo

Clambake, Pylon, Liszt, Catamaran and Remedial Trig Jr.

Mush, Rummy, Fanny Pack, Dander and Trig Van Halen-Gogh

Glock, Chastity, Windshield, Clap-on, and Trig Todorevitch

Tiffany, Playdoh, Pluribus, Jar Jar and Trig Madison

Transformer, Hissy Fit, Hemlock, Canker and Trig Maddyssen

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Butane, and Trig or Treat

Ripcord, Hummer, Moraine, Pinprick and Trig

Creamjam, Bonestorm, Fist, Dock and Trig

Breadcrumb, crouton, shekels, voir dire, Interlochen

Pit Stop, Banality, Nutella, Sprinkler and Trig Beau Biden

Luftballon, Dextromethorphan, Poppycock, Analingus and Trig Trig Trerie

Grumman, Livestock, Serbian, Head-on, and Trigger Finger

Osmond, Nilla, Crisco, Altoid and Trig

Clitorasaurus, Rex, Balsa, Weinberger and Trigoleeza Rice

U-Haul, Spork, Cheney, Locust and Trig Ziggy Stardust

Pepsi, Dokken, Scrapbook, Dogfight and Triggy Dig

BVD, HPV, IRS, SONAR and TRIG

Flap Jack, Carpet Munch, Gazebo, Manifest Destiny and Trig I Stan

!, ?, %, * and Trig

Hep-A, Hep-B, Hep-C, Hep-D and Trig

Ham Hock, Measle, Tito, Filofax, and Trig Happy Meal

Schnapps, Casey Kasem, Tweeter, Crocs and Trig Bin Einberliner

Seacrest, Jäger, Otter Pop, Cymbalta, and Trig Benihana

Roid Rage, Lamé , Dingleberry, Pampers, and Trig R Happy

Adderall, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Zanax and Trig SE

Hee Haw, HoHos, HooHah, Hi-Ho and Trigger

Strap-On, Polio, Falstaff, , Restoration Hardware and Trig ABD

Hemroid, Eczema, Psoriasis, Diaper Rash and Trig with Aloe

Guar Gum, Gwar, Guantanamo, Gordito and Trig Trig Sputnik

Sacrifice to Baal, Ashley, Reckson, Taylor, Blake, Chet and Trig

Tidy Bowl, Rabies, Bad Seed, Courtesy Flush, and Trig Jefferson Clinton

Centrum, Cremaster, Creation Museum, Camembert and Cunny Trig

Scat, Scuba, Skillet, Sketchers and Trig Scooby Doo

Prat, Pregger, Pringles, Priapus, and Prince or the artist formerly known as Trig

Kobe Beef, Appletini, Arugula, Latte and Trig Tartare

Dougherty, Wentz, Lodwick, Juliaallison and Triggermax

Labia, Vulva, Urethra, Ovulation and Trigtini

Kardashian, Lohan, Hilton, Spears and Trig Kimora Lee

Nutsack, Scrotus, Spermatazoa, Smegma and Trig Vas Deferens

Rad, Rhisome, Remora, Reptilicus, and Cheap Trig

Greenwich, Stockbridge, Willliam F. Buckley and Trig van Devere

Vulvantine, Penildo, Assimistros, Analbittenstrensom, and Tribbin’ Trig the Trolloping Trenchcoat Trattoria Owner

Tim Gunn, Angry Peanut, Santino, Blue Fly Accessory Wall, and Trig Hot Mess Tranny from Transylvania

Tarp, Brillo, Worchestershire, Putin, and Trig Doggy Dogg

Vlad, Cruella, Syphillina, Cold Sore, and Trig the Clean

Bullwinkle, Metamucil, Discharge, Perianal, and Trig Honeysuckle Shishkebab

Wimbledon, Duracel, Ovaltine, Ballpeen, Vagina and Trig Nasty

Cos, Sin, Tan, Sec, and Trig

Jockitch, Clusterfuck, Centrifuge, Plastique, and Colonel Trig Sanders

Groinmeister, Miley Cyrus, Ball Bearing, Slap Happy, and Trig Aleve Hegel

Chancre Boy, Pustule Girl, Mike Barnicle, Contempo Casuals, and Trigfeetsmelllike Cheddar McCheese

Cosh, Sinh, Tanh, Coth (the one that dresses like Robert Smith) and of course, Trig (the straight one)

Blazing Saddles, Despair, Clitoridectomy, Ziplock, and Trig von Lap Danzig

Pinesol, Short Leash, Cellophane, Aspartame, and Trig the Barbarian

Superfly, Shaft, Cinderella, Joleen, and Trig Scott-Heron

Ashcroft, Burqa, Studio by JC Penney, Stealth, and Trigs on 45

Ban-Ki Trig, Trig Hammarskjold, Boutros Boutros Trigsli, Botswana, Five Guys Named Trig

BJ, Bear, Convoy, Breaker Breaker and Trig Rig

Slobodan, Radovana, Ceaucescina, Seselj, and Trig with his hands in the air like he just don’t care

Rumsfeld, Zbigniew, Muskie, Dulles, and Ernesto Che Trig

Skoal, Jailbait, Booty Call, Woodpecker, and Trig sans serif

Pride, Avarice, Gluttony, Walmart and Trigsley Mortimer

Stetford, Exacto, Pennysaver, Bendy and Henry the Trig

Boorman, Wynette, Evita, Rapture, and Triglet from Poo Corner

Flag Pin, IUD, Temperance, Knob, and Trig Biv Devoe

Beaver, Wally, Junior, Bjork, and Triggle Down Economics

Trig Boat Veterans for Truth, Red My Trig: No New Taxes, Triggy Horton, I Am Not A Trig, Hey Hey Trig B J, How Many Trigs Did You Trig Today?

Drill Bit, Funkytown, Snowshoe, Dilantin, and Trig, the neighborhood bully

Chastity, Forbearance, Vestibule, Beyoncé and Myers-Trig

Syrah, Grenache, Viogner, Merlot, and Jackson Trig

Butte, Climax, Hooter, Tammy Faye, and Ludwig von Trig

Carmina Trignana, Beethoven’s 9th Trigphony, The Blue Trigube, Trig of the Valkyries, Rhapsody in Trig

Yar, Wesley, Geordi, Troi and The Trouble With Triggles

Spruce, Cannery, Pipeline, Doomed Gay Son, Trigger Finger

Larry Bird, Dennis Johnson, Robert Parrish, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, Trig Auerbach

Cinque, Sewage, Neckwound, 4hourboner and Trig the Bloatedorphan

Leakage, Dormroonpeestain, Chokehold, Shitty Jean and Minnytrig

Rotten, Exene, Beefheart, Bauhaus and Triggy Pop

Absorbine, King of France, Stepchild, Roadwork and House of Trig

Gummo, Thirdleg, Letterbomb, Noose and Trig The Magic Dragon

Zephyr, Trout, Drowny, Wrench and Trig Inthewildlifepreserve

Triggy, The Twigplacements, Twig Who, Twig Leppard, Twigsryche

Aphasia, Feces Lee, Toilet, Raunch and Trader Trig

Bareback, Santorum, Humper, Astroglide and Twig Tiffany Buttgasm

Glans, Mulva, Sphincter, Gurney, and Boss Trig

Leiderhosen, Glue Gun, Thumper, Gellule, and Three’s Company Trig

Lance, Exxon, Massengill, Sally-Ann, and Fredricks of Trig

Lisbon, Brussels, The Hague, Yalta, and Maas-Trig

Canker, FreezerCase, Gas Station, Oilyrag, Trigger’s Stuffed Dick

Burkina Trig, Myantrig, Eritrigea, Bhutrig, Madagastrig

Gloryhole, Gymbag, Rugburn, Pimpernel, and Trig the Plentiful

Freezerburn, Cocktease, Lolita, Sister Mary-Elephant, and Trig the Knife

Arrested Boy, Patriot, Fructis, Skittles, and the Seminal Work of Trig

Ni, Bint, Fechez la Vache, Dennis and Trig of the Round Table

Skeet, Portia, Lucretia, Imelda, and President Trig-For-Life

Odor, Slaughterhouse, Entrail, Tumor and McTrig The Crime Puppy

Cahulawassee, Griner, Toothless, Dueling Banjos and Trig Squeal like a Pig

Vasodilator, Pfizer, Motel 6, Le Car, and Cap’n Trig

Oxymoron, Skort, Clapper, Festivus, and Trig the Comedian

Chaps, Serendipity, Shovel, Clapboard, and Le Trig

POW, Liverwurst, Impetigo, Lil’ Booger, and the Quiet Trig

Rent, Hairspray, Le Miz, Riverdance and Trig Lloyd Webber

Gogol, Bento, Lesion, Valtrex, and a Trig for all Seasons

Lance, Gomorrah, Playtex, Particleboard, and a Trig Called Wanda

Sunkenbus, Caution Flag, Human Torso, Shallow and Twigscaughtfire

Flatulence, Kugle, Repo, Easy Bake Oven, and Trig the Impaler

Funky Chicken, Chia Pet, Shag Carpet, Feeling 7Up, and Peaches & Trig

Bunker Blaster, Deep Throat, Solvent, Residue, and Trig, the Pimp with a Heart of Gold

Gotcha, Chapstick, Gherkin, Anusol, and Secretary General of the Central Committee, Comrade Trig

Manboob, Ringworm, Krusty, Vadge, and Trig Knows Best

Stubble, Carlabrunisass, Polyp, Surface of Venus, and Marquis de Twig

Wile E., Accent Table, Slush, Fissure, and the Iron Trig

Tool Kit, Thong, Nozzle, Colostomy Bag, and Trig Factory Outlet

Veejay, Veejayjay, Swallow, Accident, and Cardinal Trig

Trag, Treg, Trug, Trog, Tryg

Crowd Control, Dart Game Mishap, Foodsource, Digital Exam and Twig Upmybutt

Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Triphasil, Gingivitis, Anticlimax, and Trig, the Junior Senator from Illinois

Roughsex, Younevercallme, Overdose, Facebook and Cowardly Twig

Captains Courageous, Adam’s Rib, Father of the Bride, State of the Union & Father’s Little Trigadend

Barium Enema, Bulimia, Slimfast, Irregularity, and Chicken Soup for the Trig

Drillbit, Dirty Sanchez, Dockers, Download, and Digg It Trig It

Plea Bargain, Coitus Interruptus, Space Heater, Ovule, and Grandmaster Trig (and the Brides of Funkenstein)

Live Bait, Otter, Diarrhea, Overbite, and Club Twig

Undescended Testicle, Retractile Testes (fraternal twins), Trampoline, Freedom Fries and 100% Recycled Trig Matter

Jailer, Mute, Skillet, Scrotum Hotel and Brazilian Twig Dance

Muggle, Mercutio, Distemper, Champagne-Urbana and Trig Newton
Spartacus, Spartacus, Spartacus, Spartacus, and Trig

Kalashnikov, Gloss Finish, Velcro, Landing Strip, and Trig the Next Generation

Alma Mater, Barrista, Plantain, Crocs, and Michael “Trig” Phelps

Gherkin, Toad-in-the-Hole, Banger, Tripe and Triggy Pudding

Mephistopheles, Kegel, Zygote, Carbuncle, and L. Ron Trig

Grunt, Leakage, Non-Dairy Creamer, How-Did-This-Happen, and DJ Jazzy Trig

Trig, Trug, Trigging, Will Have Trugged, and Trigger, Please

Wolfscat, Prostitute, Furniture, Drinkshisownurine, and Twignac The Magnificent

Elvis, Blubber, Django, Aluminium, and Trig 2.0

Twitch, Tubal ligation, Toilet Train, Titer and Trigomonas vaginitis

Manhunt, Juvenalia, Scat, Jon-Benet, and the Unbearable Lightness of Trig

Pelt, Stoolsample, Federal Reserve, Riding Crop, and System of a Trig

Cumulous, Fortran, Ikea, Mein Kamf and Li’l Trig

Gaydar, Engorge, Talking Point, Crimson Tide, Heck-Of-A-Job Trig

Beer Goggle, Rainbow Yawn, Bumping Ugly, Walk of Shame, and Trig Transmitted Disease

Glastnost, Jocasta, Munchausen-by-Proxy, Handjob, and Devious trig

Rape Kit, Aneurysm, Filler, The Beatles and Walt Trigney

Reams, Fister, Queef, Spank and Blumpkin

Gump, Pap Smear, Meth Mouth, Butterball, and Trig the Supercollider

Steinbrenner, Azazel, Lawn Dart, Stem Cell and Trigged Election

Target, Bulemia, Eve-Ensler, Rhythm Method, and Trig Habermas

Snoopy, Rubik’s Cube, Manhole, OB-GYN, and Diana Trig as Medea

Gimlet, Buckshot, Sniglet, Nurse’s Choice, Trig Triggerson

Hungarian Crotch-Rot, Germs That May Cause Bad Breath, Cunnilingus, Lysol, and Trig on Rye

Clip, Teabag, Estrogen, Luna, and Primo Trig

Seratonin, Frangipani, Spanx, Hammerhead and Trigdor

Slavoj, Udder, Mammal, Mishap, and our little angel, Trig

Saddleback, Wonderwall, Pith, Glucose, and Trig Chi Minh

Blackjack, Matrix, Hellion, SlutMachine, and Trig Gardiner

Onan, Princess, Membrane, Pisse-Chaude, and Martin Luther Trig

Manthefuckup, Haliotosis, Crapshoot, Britney, and the Catcher in the Trig

Upchuck, Humperdink, Slackjaw, Syllabus, and the Alpha Trig

Birth Defect, Skullfuck, Shrapnel, Asphyxtor Asphyxtoria, and Mohamed el Trig

Cinnebon, Support Hose, Diabetic Coma, Reverse Cowboy and Trigger Pull My Finger

Costanza, Credenza, Clytemnestra, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Trig

Pre-cum, Bikini Kill, Suppository, Slightmiscalculation, and Trig Zimmerman

Manscape, Sanitary Napkin, Beer Bong, Fingering, and Trigs Gone Wild

Minibar, Scrum, Coelacanth, Semantic Drift and Trigula, the Transylvanian Mathlete

Age Inappropriate, Show Me On the Doll, Crystalle Meth, Back to Africa, and Trig In Japan

Bald Spot, Femur, Trump Sweat, Stinky Widow, and Chiquita Trigita

Barely Legal, Bellini, Meniscus, Rhinoplasty and Trig-in-a-Poke

Fauxhawk, Shart, Organza, No-spot, Cameltoe

Airwick, PTSD, Areola Borealis, V Chip, and Trig von Karajan

Strap-on, Glitterati, Mallard Filmore, Demitasse and Trig Von Furstenberg

JELL-O Pudding Pop, Labial Rejuvenation, Hoof and Mouth (the twins), and High Definition Trig

Rage Issues, MoneyShot, Second-Runner-Up, Solidarnosc, and psychadelic Trig

Nexus, Sexus, Praxis, Lexus, and synthesis, i.e.: Trig

Knut, Pebbles, Bam-Bam, Ishtar and a Streetcar named Trig

Brute Force, Bathtub Gin, Donkey Show, Vaginal Fart, and Trig on a Kaiser Roll

Gerbil, Manhands, Upholstery, 8Track, and Trig in a blanket.

Kreutzfeld and Jakob, K Mart Special, Krucoff, and Kim Trig Il

Twister, Hookah, Spin-the-Bottle, Goulash, and Trig, your hair smells terrific!

Esperanto, Falwell, Foreskin, Lugnut, and Beavis Trig.

Smack, Pistol, Pillow, Sniper, and Triggie Smalls.

Groin Injury, Mission Accomplished, Surge, Personal Jesus Travel Wipe, and in Search of Lost Trig.

Mormon Jesus, Blithering, Chicken of the Sea, Rectal Tuft, and Triggie the Mooch.

USA, Dysmennorrhoea, White Bronco, Tipper, and Vladimir Ilich Trig.

Smack, Pistol, Pillow, Sniper, and Triggie Smalls

Crank, Dristan, Beechnut, Pamper and Trig Herbert Walker Bush

Rambo, Abstinence, Swiss Miss, Jason, and Rear Admiral Trig.

Mumia, Effexlor, Tupak, Genesis, and Astrig Lindgren.

Lifer, Tang, Aiken, Rimjob and Trig in a poke

Four-Wheel, Twofer, Seven-Up, Threeshelle and Triggy-Five

Peter-Trig, James-Trig, John-Trig, Matthew-Trig, and Judas-Trig

Construction Beam, Infant Sex Harness, Folio, Tourist and I Dream of Trig

Hernia, Easy Pass, Monkey Organ Transplant, Lawn Product and Gentleman Trig

Soup Kitchen, Smokers Hack, Trophy Dog, Follicle and Trig of The Jungle

Jumpsuit, Shapely, Cartilage, Roller Derby and My Fair Trig

Starsky and Hutch (the twins), Freak Out, Pistule and Huggy Trig

Guns and Ammo (the twins), Highlights, Cat Fancy and Ladies Home Trig

U-Haul, Norwegian, Copraphilia, Nancy Reagan and The Importance of Being Trig

Blow Chunks, Hanky Panky, Deflate, Bungee, and All Terrain Trig

Jack-a-lope, Pilates Sex Ladder, Tournequet, Pony Ride, and Lee Press-On Trig

Combat Boot, Outpatient Surgery, Gas-X, Rooster, and Ye Olde Trigge

Flop Sweat, Second Life Avatar Abuse, Mayhem, Golden Shower, and When I Think of You I Touch My Trig

Wolf Blitzer, Big Girl Panties, Taintgasm, Oven Cleaner, and Trig: It’s What’s for Dinner

Hat Trick, Vibrator Fiasco, Garfield Enthusiast, Creamy Nougat Center, and Trig: The Other White Meat

Bristol, Willow, Piper, Track and Trig

As surely you must know, every choice to share involves another choice, one of equal, or indeed even greater, importance: the choice *not* to share.

But some aspects of culture will always resist the benevolent hand of brokerage, it seems. And some participants in this exchange will always stray starry-eyed into the wilderness, just clicking away at whatever looks “fun,” or “cute,” or [shudder] “kawa-ii!”

And so here we are. Face-to-face with what has been termed, in a misguided but well-meaning act of “taking the edge off” of what would otherwise be a dead-eyed stare into the whistling abyss, a “purrito.”

How “fun.”

How “cute.”

How [shudder] “kawa-ii!”

So now the time has come for little “cultural sharing,” a little “translation,” if you will.

I’ll wait until you’re back with your deliciously ironic box of “Men’s Pocky” you picked up in Chinatown and your “bubble tea” that I know you know is not particularly Japanese but is irresistible anyway and besides you get the “red bean” flavor so how non-Japanese can it be?

I’ll wait until you get settled and comfy, until the initial zazen position you assumed to impress me makes your legs tingle enough that, groaning and smiling sheepishly, you stretch your legs into the more comfortable “Indian-style” position on your square, indigo-blue zabuton cushion. Okay? Ready?

Okay.

Look at the title card on that video. It clearly states that the spectacle before us is not, in fact, a “purrito.” Nor is it an “en-cat-lada,” a “kittychanga” or a “tabby wrap.”

The title card, in stark black-and-white, in fact warns us of what lies ahead, in the plainest terms possible. And yet you blunder forth, grasping at the promise of “purritos,” of “fuzz-jitas.” But wait. Read it again. What does it say?

That’s right. It tells us that we are about to be confronted not with an adorably literal and purring approximation of “comfort food,” but rather an “imomushi na neko.”

Yes, you read that correctly. “Imomushi na neko.” “Caterpillar cat.” Or, if you will, a “CATerpillar.”

“Kawa-ii,” right?

I’ll remind you of a little story you may have heard of, by an author named Edogawa Rampo. An author of lurid and popular tales, Edogawa styled himself a Japanese Edgar Allan Poe – to the point that his very penname is a riff on his dour predecessor’s. Sharing Edgar Allan’s instinct for storytelling, Edogawa otherwise diverged from his inspiration in career trajectory and thematics, leading a long and richly rewarding career in publishing by satisfying a public with dark tales that substituted voyeurism, dismemberment, and slithering sexuality for Poe’s obsessions with live burial, ghostly return, and shuddering romanticism.

And in 1929, Edogawa unveiled one of his most enduring – and disturbing – tales.

One called “Imomushi” — “Caterpillar.”

The caterpillar in the story is in fact a man, a great General returned from an unnamed war decorated and mutilated – no legs, no arms, his face blasted into near-unrecognizability, his vocal cords obliterated, he is unable to communicate save via a pencil clutched between his teeth and the expressive power of eyes stripped of the context of any other features.

Naked. Imploring. Wet.

This general-turned-worm is tended to by his wife, who feeds and cares for him and yet is a boiling cauldron of unfulfilled desire. She fattens the general until his bandages strain against his bulk, and she caresses his silky, limbless body until he writhes with desire himself, his eyes rolling, his cries inchoate and as desperate as those she cannot allow herself to vocalize aloud.

In the end, it’s the eyes that break her. In a fit of madness, she plucks them out and flees the house. To stop the staring. To get some peace.

She returns, guilt-ridden and weeping, with a doctor who dresses the wounds and leaves. “Forgive me,” she traces with her finger on his shuddering skin. “Forgive me.” She writes it invisibly again and again across his chest as it grows wetter and wetter from her tears. “Forgive me.”

And one day, she returns home, and finds his room empty and a message scrawled clumsily across the paper doors. Reading it, she runs out into the garden – and sees her husband, the decorated general, the war hero, as a shadowy lump wriggling across the ground, burrowing blindly into the soil: a caterpillar finding its home at last, beyond desire, beyond speech, beyond humanity. Where there’s peace at last.

And of course, his last message to her, scrawled laboriously with a pencil clutched in his teeth across the wall he could only sense through the bandages covering the sockets where his eyes once were, engulfed in an unending darkness brought on by the ruthlessness of desire: “I forgive you.”

“I forgive you.”

But I was given a mission, so crescent drumroll please….

First off, I must give mention to Mediahohoho’s lovely, painful triptych portrait of the moment when one’s idea of oneself and the reality of one’s situation are forced to reconcile, From a Balcony Overlooking the Cactus Field in Al Mazzeh. Despite the irregularities of form (it was really one piece in three movements, each 110, not 101, words long), it is an absolutely stellar achievement and a true privilege to read. Thank you, Mr. Hohoho.

Also worthy of the most honorable of mentions: VoxPopuli’s clever reworking of, well, we’ll just call it a premise used first by F. Scott Fitzgerald; SamuraiPandaPoetry’s terse, rhythmic ode to the heady rush-and-crush of a good, sweaty concert; and DahlELama’s funny, tone-setting evocation of the feeling that perhaps we all have each week as we gather under the Wordsmoker covers and scribble our twisted scribblings to share like secret candy after all the lights in the house are off.

But the winner this week is BellTolls, for his polished, ironic story about sudden fame and Hott UN Action, What’s Black And White And Red All Over. I think it was the pacing and the perfectly set up final line that put this one over the top for me.

Great job this week! It was humbling to be confronted with such an embarassment of riches to pick from, and I look forward to joining the fray once more! And good luck judging, Bell – something tells me you’ll need it. The kids are on fire!

I was reminded forcibly of this dynamic a couple days ago while fiddling along through the RSA-that-walks-like-an-ISA “social networking” techno-monstrosity called “Facebook” at a computer whose browser, unlike my personal one, is not set to block ads (“I’m a free wo/man! What a wonderful world I live in! Ooh, what a clever product-placed joke about product placement Tina Fey just told!”). Jittering down the margin like a pixel-powered centipede, row upon row of dancing pandas shucked and jived for my attention. Was I hallucinating? What were they offering? And what did they want?

Well, as you more experienced types know, they wanted my attention, and were offering me an online degree. I could join them! I could have any of the labels they danced upon! I just had to sign up!

And I admit it might be interesting to know how to become a psychologist, nurse, software professional, criminal investigator, marketing specialist, med. billing specialist, health care manager, graphic designer, HR officer, teacher, web designer, police officer, therapist, and/or accountant, but isn’t the real question why all of these positions are signified by exactly the same dancing panda?

I sense a clever Marxist subversion here. The dancing pandas are winking at me even as they wriggle, undercutting the ideological construction of capitalism as a system that allows for the ‘freedom’ to ‘choose’ from a diverse array of employment ‘opportunities.’ They claim to represent this diversity even as they reveal it to be a sham, displaying with every tippity-tap of their adorably oversized paws that within the lockstep of alienated labor, we are all just interchangeable dancing pandas.

Which seems a bit unexpectedly truthful for a google-enabled advertisement for an online degree program, but who am I to be choosy about the avenues through which revolution is fomented?

And then, of course, I “refreshed”, only to find an even deeper, more disturbing lesson than that taught by the pandas’ little game of Dance Dance Revolution: that even (or especially?) selfhood itself is immanently alienable. The ad takes the form of an apparent profile of some snowboarder named “Shaun,” and he seems in the throes of a crazed, twitching species of hysteria, carrying on a shouty, one-sided conversation consisting of a barrage of questions he’s too hyped-up to hear answered:

What, you want Shaun’s personal info! No way! Only joking! Born and raised in the wilds of California, been standing sideways on a snowboard or a skateboard since he could walk!

And then of course, the inevitable is revealed: “Sponsor: Red Bull.” Which seems to explain both the content and the tone rather concisely.

And yet Shaun’s grotesque, burlesque performance is occurring at the margins of the Book where I myself jostle amidst all the other Faces, performing similar acts of identity assertion, cavorting around in an attempt to be considered “interesting” or “funny” or “just psychotic enough to be compelling but not quite psychotic enough to compel police intervention,” much like my new friend Shaun.

So here I am, dancing away like a panda who tells himself he can be a psychologist, nurse, software professional, criminal investigator, marketing specialist, med. billing specialist, health care manager, graphic designer, HR officer, teacher, web designer, police officer, therapist, and/or accountant if only he had right degree, and now Shaun is “bringing it home” for me, making it personal, “b(e?)aring the device” of how the institutional apparatuses that churn out dancing pandas by the barrelful intersect with an inner life consisting of desperate assertions of the boundary between self and other (“No way!”) followed immediately by equally desperate entreaties to be liked (“Only joking!”), buoyed along by the dehydrating currents of consumerism and caffeine that keep us all hyped-up and hysterical (“sponsored by Red Bull”). It’s a chalky Caucasian circle-jerk up in here, and I thank Shaun for his enlighteningly enthusiastic ejaculations.

The revolution is already here, the google ads tell us, hailing from within the very apparatuses that perform the subjugation they simultaneously gleefully subvert. “Click to learn more!” And then they winkingly add, “Life is a series of transactions performed while suspended above a void! Let’s snowboard! Let’s learn criminal forensics! Let’s dance, then hump slowly while eating bamboo! Let’s watch ‘NYC Prep’! It’s all the same thing! I was raised in the wilds of California! No way! Only joking! WHY WON’T MY HANDS STOP SHAKING?!”

Why won’t they, indeed.

Yes, the description makes it sound intolerable, but this film, shockingly, is not. It is stylish and hilarious and maddening and treats mother and son with compassion even as it skewers both.

See it at least for the deliciously accurate satire of French-Canadian fashion (check out the spectacular pink sweater in the trailer, par exemple).

[sorry I couldn't find a subtitled trailer!]