5 posts tagged “podcast”
[I wrote this earlier tonight for inclusion at my main personal blog, located at jasonpettus.com, the oldest presence online I now still maintain. But the guy who hosts my sites for free there is in the middle of switching them to new servers (Linux-based, more-MySQL-friendly servers); and that has my upload process at MovableType all screwed up right now, which is preventing me from posting this journal entry at my main blog right now. Which is why I've decided to publish it here for now instead, because I'm all gung-ho for what I've said here today, and want to publish it to the general public while I'm still feeling all gung-ho for it, which I know for a fact will wear off in just a couple days from now. Which, er, is why I wanted to publish it. So...um, there.]
(WARNING! Today's journal entry is especially confessional and dirty, and this from a website explicitly known for being confessional and dirty. Those who only know me as a nerdy conservative arts administrator, and who are unaware of my past as a liberal gonzo sex columnist, should take particular caution today.)
Regular readers know that I listen to podcasts on a daily basis, and that one of the ones I like the most is called the "SModcast," put together by filmmakers Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (one of Smith's old college buddies and the producer of all his films, for those who don't know), which is basically like a Kevin Smith film come to nonfiction life; he and Scott basically sit around in front of a microphone for an hour each week, talking about whatever random shit just happens to pop into their heads, the two of them slowly building these elaborate hypothetical situations that they're constantly presenting to the other, just to see how the other would react and what crazy shit they'll have to say about it. And I was listening to the latest episode earlier today, while I was running my errands, where among other things they got to talking about sexual orientation, and started asking all these outrageous theoretical questions to each other about what defines it all. What if you're a dude, for example, and have spent your whole adult life sucking dick, but suddenly switch to pussy in your thirties or forties? If you switch back to dick after just one pussy, does that pussy still count, and are you now bisexual instead of gay? What if you've never actually had sex, but all your fantasies are about sucking dick? Is it fair to say that a person has a sexual orientation at all if they've never actually had sex? They're ridiculous questions, of course, handled in a juvenile and hilarious way by the two of them, which sums up Smith's career as a filmmaker in a nutshell; not that he's any genius, but that he has a natural knack at posing interesting questions, and wallowing in certain subjects for awhile even while never really coming up with a cohesive answer.
At a certain point in the discussion, Smith declares his own opinion about it all; that as far as he's concerned, unless you've actually handled someone else's genitals in a sexual way at least once, it's unfair to say that that person has any sexual orientation at all, and should instead still be considered a sexless child. And Mosier replies with, "So, like, unless someone sucks a dick for the first time, right?" and Smith replies, "Well, no, dude, I'm saying the first time someone even rubs their dick against your knee or whatever." And Mosier laughs at this in an absurdist way, as if thinking, "What teenager out there is rubbing his dick against other teenagers' knees?" But I gotta tell you, very honestly, as soon as Smith said that, my own mind immediately flashed back on an experience I had back in high school, one I haven't thought of literally in decades, not only one of the very first legitimately erotic experiences I had with another person, but still one of my favorite sexual memories of all time. Plus it's a story I've never talked about in public before, and that's unusual when it comes to my past as a confessional nonfiction writer, so thought it'd be fun to talk about it here at my journal today.
See, I was one of those classic late bloomers; nerdy, dysfunctional, straightedge and afraid of the world as a teen, slowly coming out of my shell during college, then really making up for lost time between 25 and 35, finally settling down in middle age to a place where most other people my age are, no matter what the order of our experiences. (By the way, this is but one of many things I treasure about moving into middle-age, the chance for all the people in my age group to finally mellow out into deep empathy with each other, since by 40 we all seem to have finally had the same collective set of experiences; despite how today's entry might possibly sound by the end of it, I do not miss my youth in any way whatsoever, and in general am highly glad to be moving into middle-age myself.) The story of my undergraduate sexual awakening is pretty typical (dorm + liquor + adventurous girls = yay!), but the point I want to make is that my high-school years were defined mostly through the filter of sexual frustration, an overwhelming prism that colored every single other subject in my life back then.
Like many others nerds, I was a band geek, at a high school that had a highly competitive marching band (one of the endless surprisingly competitive things in the American Midwest that full-grown adults encourage among children on a regular basis, for international readers who don't know); and like any other band geek, my autumns in rural Missouri mostly consisted of paling around with my fellow band geeks, piling into old family cars from the '60s and '70s that had been downgraded over the years into the status of "teenage child's main car" -- for example, the car I drove daily all throughout high school was a 1978 dark-brown Mercury Marquis with bright chrome '60s-style tailfins, one that could comfortably fit eight or nine teenagers if you can believe that shit, as long as a certain amount of people were all piled up and sitting on each other's laps and crap. This is how it always seemed to be in friends' cars, in fact, during trips to and from school and during road trips, during Friday nights out to the graveyard or diner or whatever other nerdy straightedge punk/goth band-geek thing we were doing; it always seemed to be seven or eight or nine teens all piling into one car together very dangerously, instead of doing the sensible thing and traveling in two or three cars to our destination. Ce la vie, I suppose the French would say; or to put it in the American vernacular, "What's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't pile into a giant outdated family car seven or eight or nine at a time?" Indeed -- what's the point of even being a teenager, if you can't do this?
And it was during one of these trips that yet another one of these casual-acquaintance band-geek friends needed to scoot in and sit on my lap during the ride, a tough and wiry little female saxophone player I didn't know very well, a redneck with short blonde hair who was tough and mean and smoked at the age of fifteen. Sheesh, the things that went on back then, you know? Hard to believe that I went to high school in the '80s and that our campus still had an official legally-sactioned smoking area for fifteen-year-olds; hard to believe that such things were accepted and tolerated even so recently as 25 years ago. Anyway, so this tough redneck smoking short-haired sax player crawled in like usual, after all us guys first got in and were sitting across the backseat as usual; except that instead of sitting kinda crookedly and in as chaste a way as possible under those circumstances, like all the other girls back in high school did it, this girl sat directly on top of my own lap in a very Euclidian fashion, so that our...um, parts lined up. And then proceeded to stay in that position for the 45 minutes it took to get from my rural high school to her rural home, while making several pit-stops along the way to drop off others and fill the gas tank.
And it was...whoo. Oh shit, I'm getting all squirmy just thinking about it again, 25 fuckin' years after it first happened! And now that I'm really thinking about it in an analytical way for the first time in my life, I realize that it's because it was the first moment in my life when someone else's sexual organs went from theoretical in my brain to very real and concrete, the first time I really understood in any way whatsoever what it's like to interact with another person's genitals. Because, man, 25 years later, I have to admit that I still distinctly remember the physical sensations of this girl's inflamed vagina on my inflamed penis, even through two sets of jeans, even in full view of seven other teenagers and trying to pretend to them that nothing was happening. I remember her oh-so-gently shifting the hard seam on her denim that ran between her legs; how it pushed against the head of my penis oh-so-subtly, how I realized that it was pushing against her clitoris at the same time, that the sensations I was feeling led to no other interpretation than that the seam was nicely bisecting the folds of her...er, womanhood, and that those two halves were currently located just on either side of the insanely hard teenage cock of mine that was itself about to rip out of its own 501 confines and it own insanely well-designed seams.
That's the thing I really want to emphasize, in order for the main point I'll be making later to make sense, that as an enlightened '80s teen I was already fully aware of the biology behind the baby-making process itself; I had understood the female parts from a medical sense all the way from seventh grade, the medical sense of the male parts too, completely understood how a baby was actually made and how to prevent that from happening if that's what you and your partner decided. But shit, that's a long way from understanding how sex actually works, you know? This experience I'm talking about today, the one with the tough redneck sax player sitting on my lap, was the first time I had actually been confronted in the physical world with someone else's genitals; the first time, for example, I understood that the pussy of a horny woman emits its own heat source, which in reality was also the first time I really understood (I mean, very seriously, very internally understood) that yes, females get horny too. The first time it truly occurred to me that women might in fact desire men in the same desperate, almost out-of-control way that men desire women. The first time it occurred to me that a woman might, you know, God forbid, like me in that way.
Now, for those expecting a great payoff to this story, I'm going to have to unfortunately disappoint you; this woman and I never hooked up, never in fact even acknowledged the experience we had in the car that day. Or, well, other than her at a certain point literally grabbing my outer thigh with her hand, the thigh that was next to the car door and away from everyone else, and holding on for a few minutes while I lightly brushed against her hand with my own; this was the closest we ever got to acknowledging to each other the teenage sexual experience we were going through in the moment, the closest we ever got to plainly admitting to each other how incredibly turned-on we were at that moment. And really, if I want to be completely honest about my high-school life, I need to plainly admit that I was not exactly the antisocial geek I like to sometimes portray myself as; if you really look at what actually happened to me in high school, in fact, you'll see that in reality there were actually a whole string of tough, lower-class, introverted redneck girls who expressed a very nakedly aggressive interest in me back then, girls who would go on in the '90s to be the exact sullen riot-grrrl bassists and slam-poets I fucked on a monthly basis all throughout that decade, girls who would've happily given me the chance to literally get some pussy every two or three days all during high school, if I had only had the courage to respond to their insanely obvious flirtations.
This is the thing I've never liked to admit about my high-school years, because it doesn't fit into that funny, easy-to-understand story, of the introverted nerd who no one loved and who only came into his own as an artsy undergraduate. But the fact is that it's my own neuroses that largely held me back in those years, a subject for example that I think author Joe Meno explored fantastically in his first novel Hairstyles of the Damned, despite me giving it an only so-so review at CCLaP. (And don't worry, all you Meno fans; I ended up giving a much better review to his later novel The Boy Detective Fails.) While these women were giving me insanely obvious hints as to their attraction, all to no avail, I myself was giving insanely obvious hints of my own attraction to others, again to no avail; and thus is the nerdy, dysfunctional, immature circle of high-school life, will the circle be unbroken, amen, amen. I could've literally been swimming in pussy in high school, I realize a quarter of a century later, and with women I secretly found really attractive too; and that was the whole problem, of course, is that I found them only secretly attractive, namely because I wasn't mature enough to understand why I was really attracted to them, and thus was never in a position to actually act on these impulses.
This is why I say that I will ultimately never really miss my youth, although I confess that I too am sometimes guilty of nostalgic reminisces about it all. And let's face it, that the only reason I've been thinking about this so much recently in the first place is because I'm once again going through a long dry spell; it has in fact been a whopping four years since I've last had sex with another person, or indeed even kissed another person or even intimately touched another person. And that's for a variety of complicated reasons, which boils down to "I'm not in a position to do so;" and that's no so bad unto itself, but does tend to drive me a little crazy during the height of the summer here in Chicago, that period of the year when it's hot and sweaty and muggy every single day here, with a whole nicely-tanned city population running around the sidewalks wearing almost nothing at all, while I'm biking every day and being very active, taking in about three times the amount of food I do during the winter when I'm inactive, three times the energy, three times the...er, horniness. Um, yeah. There, I said it. I need to get laid. There, I said it.
Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do so, for reasons I've detailed here in the past: Because I'm mostly unemployed and usually broke these days, for example, making traditional dating out of the question; because I'm a small-business owner now, for another example, so have given up the sexual-swinging I partook in from 2002 to 2004, so that no conservatives or other enemies can use such a thing as a weapon against me and the running of CCLaP. And because my mouth is all fucked up these days too, because of going through a bunch of dental work these days which basically involves the implanting of 32 fake teeth, which has me extremely self-conscious these days about the entire idea of kissing another human being. And if you can't kiss another human being, what the fuck is the point of having sex with them? Which is my third point, that it kinda defeats the purpose to actually hire a prostitute, plus there being a much more important reason why I could never fuck a prostitute; because back when I was a broke Henry-Miller-worshipping raconteur myself, I too when younger once traded money and economic goods for sexual favors in a variety of situations (never as formal prostitution, although many times as an artsy alternative; see Miller's "Rosy Crucifixion" series for more). And all of those experiences left me extremely creeped out, which is why I could never in good conscience actually pay someone else to arbitrarily have sex with me, no matter how horny I am at any given moment, and no matter how few options I have for having sex in a non-prostitution way.
And that's maybe the final irony of the entire situation; that given the way my brain is working these days when it comes to the subject, it might very well ultimately be futile to have sex with a prostitute anyway, as far as the ultimate goal of simply being less horny in my life. Because, as today's entry has hopefully fuckin-yak-yak-yak proven now, what I've recently realized is that it's actually intimacy that I'm profoundly missing, not just the sex act itself. And that's funny for me, frankly, as I right now face the longest time in my entire post-virginity life I've gone without sex, a mere half-decade after I was a cultishly popular sex columnist who did more crazy fucking than you could ever hope to do in your own life, you goddamn loser; that when all is said and done, what I'm really pining for in my life these days are those teenage intimate moments like I described earlier, those moments when almost nothing explicit is going on but everything emotional is happening. In fact, I was just talking about this with a fellow middle-aged friend of mine, someone going through her own crises these days, family-related ones which is why I won't be going into it in any more detail; let's just say that she's finding it rewarding these days to dump a bunch of shit on me, and I'm finding it rewarding to dump a bunch of shit on her, and this is what's making it rewarding for the two of us to occasionally spend an evening together these days, drinking and blabbing secrets about our crappy lives and dumping a whole bunch of unexpected shit on each other.
The last time I hung out with this woman, I ended up detailing this whole way I've been feeling about sex lately, which funnily enough makes most of my female friends sorta unpleasantly shake their heads when I mention it and say, "What the fuck are you talking about?," while making my male friends nod their heads in recognition while I mention it and say, "Yes, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about." And that is -- I've been feeling lately like I've been getting back in touch again with a lot of what I consider the "female side" of my sexuality. Or, to put it a little more bluntly....Now that I've gone four years without any intimate contact whatsoever, I'm starting to think of the entire sexual cycle, the entire lovemaking process, not as an elaborate ritual towards the two of you eventually reaching orgasm, but rather as a self-sustaining activity unto itself, one that should be enjoyed on its own terms even if it never does lead to a "Level Two."
And this leads then to yet another weird confession: That in these post-sex years I'm going through right now, these years where I instead delve whole-heartedly into the entirely nerdy and erudite world of language, words, writing, literature, semiotics and semantics, what is really becoming both a priority and a tangible fantasy for me sexually is precisely the non-language, non-intellectual, non-semantic part of sex. Er...you know. The world of grunting and squealing. The world of pushing and pulling. The world of bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids. Er, other people's bodily fluids sprayed across your own body parts. This is a universal part of sex, no matter which gender or orientation you're talking about, no matter how little or how much that particular person emits...stuff, from their...body, when they're...glad to see you. Even when it's a tiny bit, even when it's a whole lot, even when it's disgusting, even when it's non-existent; it's the fact that our partner wants to share that moment with us that ultimately gets us turned on, not whatever it is that actually happens in that moment.
I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of days, to tell you the truth; of just how turned-on I was, for example, back 25 years ago, during this random packed car trip in high school, even with nothing actually happening, even with her and I never once even officially acknowledging the experience to each other. And really, isn't this human sexuality in a nutshell? Isn't it really all about the elaborate stories we build in our heads, regarding whatever specific subject just happens to turn us on? And this, frankly, is ultimately why I love Kevin Smith as a creative professional, why I will most likely spend the rest of my life being one of his apologists, and explaining very patiently why you should actually secretly love that one movie of his that everyone else just happened to passionately despise (which can be said more and more about all the movies he's made past his original Clerks -- but whoo, talk about a subject best tabled for another time). Kevin Smith makes me think about weird shit, which I believe is ultimately the only justification you need for being a big fan of his; yes, his scripts are mostly trite, yes his production values are virtually non-existent, yes he's basically the arts equivalent of some frat-boy loser extending his perpetual adolescence longer and longer and longer and fucking longer and fucking longer and FUCKING LONGER.
I will always love Kevin Smith, though, because he makes me think about stuff that no other public intellectual makes me think about. He makes me think about teenage virginity-era sexuality versus adult cynical sex-columnist sexuality, and he makes me think about it in a way I rarely hear other sex writers talk about it, much less some fuckin' mope like him. Plus he makes me think about it in a complex way, no matter how simplistic he himself is. I admire that, and I respect that, and it's what makes me watch every fucking Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier movie that comes out, because believe me, I've seen every single one of them now (except Jersey Girl, of course, because no one's seen that, a fact I hope to finally change in my own life this fall). It's why I continue to think of these subjects as important ones to muse upon, which is the reason I continue to write entries of this type at my personal journal, despite being far away these days from the confessional trainwreck pop-culture journalist I used to be back in the '90s.
Just got finished editing up episode 3 of the CCLaP Podcast, which will be getting posted to the official site tomorrow morning; so like always, I thought I'd post a sneak preview of it here as well, for any VOX readers who are checking in over the weekend. This episode is four minutes long and is a video report from the latest Dollar Store Show at Chicago nightclub The Hideout; run by "Time Out: Chicago" Books editor Jonathan Messinger (who is also one of the founders of Featherproof Books), each month Jonathan asks a couple of people from the city's small-press community to write and perform a brand-new story, based on a piece of merchandise from a dollar store that Jonathan had given to them a month previous. Enjoy!
Links to the projects and people mentioned in this episode:
Jonathan Messinger
The Dollar Store Show
The Hideout
Featherproof Books
Time Out: Chicago | Books
The Printers Ball
THE2NDHAND
Uptown Writers Space
Okay, got done earlier today with episode 2 of the CCLaP Podcast, produced for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; so thought I'd go ahead and post a sneak preview of it again for those of you who follow along with this personal account of mine on the weekends. Below, the text that will run with the "official" entry on Monday at the CCLaP site itself.
In this second episode of the CCLaP Podcast: a four-minute video interview with Andrew Huff, editor-in-chief of Chicago arts-and-entertainment guide GapersBlock.com. Sorry for the crappy sound! This will all change when my new digital audio recorder finally arrives in the mail, which I'm expecting any day now. Recorded at Gapers Block's June social get-together, at Xippo in the Lincoln Square neighborhood (Damen and Grace).
Links to the things mentioned in this podcast:
GapersBlock main page
Transmission (music)
Drive-Thru (food)
Book Club
Fuel (question of the week)
RSS feeds
Oh, and that point near the end where we both broke into laughter? That's because there was a fire station across the street from Xippo, and Andrew had joked beforehand how it would probably be our luck to have a firetruck blaze through in the middle of the interview...which is exactly what happened.
Hey hey, just got finished with episode 1 of the brand-new CCLaP podcast, which will be debuting this Monday there, at the same time as the new CCLaP channel at iTunes for having such videos and audio delivered in the future. In the meanwhile, though, thought I'd post an early copy of it here as well, for those checking into this side-side project of mine over the weekend, since it's short and it won't take that long to do.
And hey! Oh! Bonus! For this entry and this entry only, I'm leaving on the ability to comment as well, because I really am that interested in seeing what you think of the idea of an ongoing series of videos like this. Did you consider this an annoying two minutes of your life you'll never get back (or more precisely, 1:45), or would you happily subscribe to a podcast that gave you one of these every week, interspersed with 10- to 20-minute audio-only interviews of much higher quality with a series of interesting writers and photographers? Your opinion wanted, before I put an entire damn Saturday morning and afternoon into preparing two minutes of video again.
Music: "Mannequin" by Cats and Jammers. Used under the terms of their Creative Commons license.
