Big Ed's Place

On my drive to and from work, I listen to the radio, often flipping stations to avoid the commercials or to look for a weather report. This past week, I caught a Katy Perry Song, Last Friday Night that’s inspired this post.

Now I’m a lyrics guy. Good lyrics grab me, be they country, pop, blues, rock, or Broadway musicals. I’m not a big Rob Thomas fan, but his line, “I’ve got a scar I can talk about” in the Matchbox 20 song Bright Lights nails the emotion and introspection at the same time. Similarly, the lines from the Citizen King song, I’ve Seen Better Days, which go “I’ve seen better days, I’ve been the star of many plays” is just fricking inane (and it’s in the chorus!). So when the Katy Perry song came on the pop song, I listened for the words.

The song’s celebrating a drunken debauchery night that the singer can’t really remember. It has lines about ‘a stranger in my bed’ and not being able to remember if she kissed someone, as well as “It’s a blacked out blur but I’m pretty sure it ruled.” Then it has a repeated refrain:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop
Oh-whoa-oh
This Friday night
Do it all again

And this is where I went, “whoa!”

I’m not used to mainstream pop songs played openly on the radio talking about ménage à trois. It definitely makes me wonder what the younger generation is up to. Has group sex become casual enough to toss off as a line about a wild evening? Is it what the ‘cool kids’ are doing? I suspect it’s a standard “Katy Perry being mildly provocative” since she is the one who burst into fame with “I Kissed a Girl.” However, I’m still struck by how casual of a reference it was. I certainly can’t recall any pop songs from the 70′s or 80′s that referred to group sex. Plenty that referred to sex, but not group sex.

But then I realized that the song also implied that they had to be drunk to have the ménage à trois. That implies there are still inhibitions around group sex. Which leaves me wondering… hmmm. Is this as big of a step in mainstreaming non-traditional sexual practices as I thought?

By now, you’ve probably heard of Avenue Q, the 2004 Tony Award Winning Musical Comedy. It combines the puppetry of Sesame Street with a decidedly adult turn. Besides a lot of cursing and sexual innuendo, there’s actually on-stage sex–between puppets. It’s toured a couple of times and I recently caught it for a second time. That should immediately clue you into how much I’ve enjoyed it–I was willing to pay premium prices to see a show that I’d already seen before.

The basic premise of the play isn’t important–we meet a bunch of characters, some of whom are puppets, some of whom are actors, all of whom are poor and struggling and living on the same street (Avenue Q). They struggle with relationships and personal growth and eventually arrive at “happy for now” endings.

What I happen to love is the way the songs stab directly at things we don’t say, but are true. The most controversial song is “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist,” which pokes fun at PC beliefs that we’re not biased at all. Of course the most famous song is “The Internet is for Porn”–again, something that was nearly 100% true for the first decade of the web and arguably still true now. But even songs like “There’s a Fine Line” point to things we know but generally don’t state. The tunes are hummable and enjoyable and how often do you really get to hear people praise “Schadenfruede”?

So–if you haven’t seen it, I recommend going. If you want to get a sample, you can always catch the soundtrack via the link below.

The movie Nine entranced me, even though I found the main character completely unsympathetic. Since it contained some sexy dance numbers and some musings on the creative process, I figured it was fair game for a review here.

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Sometimes a single song fits a mood and a time better than anything else. For me, Poe’s Hey Pretty (the Drive-By Mix) is the ultimate song to listen to late at night, driving alone on the highway. There’s something haunting about the music mixed behind the narrative of a guy being seduced by a girl in a fast car, and lines (“too bad dark languages… rarely survive”) that stay with me when I’m finished. It gets me ‘in the mood’–not for sex, but to pick up the pen and write. Which is often what I do when I pull off the road and have a chance to relax.

It’s not quite as good in the day, or sitting anywhere than behind the wheel. But there, it’s perfect–five out of five stars.

ZZ Top sings Blues? Absolutely! And very well, I might add.

Of their blues songs, my absolute favorite is A Fool for Your Stockings. Why should be obvious to anyone who’s read my stories or done even more than a cursory skim of the artwork on this site. The subject and title do a damn good job of describing who I am. Doing so in a funky, saucy, struttin’ blues style? I’m just a quivering mass of putty, enjoying the ride. This is one of the top songs for getting me in the mood to write, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Five out of five stars.

Eye of the Hurricane, by David Wilcox, is a haunting ballad from the late 80′s, mostly just voice and guitar. It tells the story of a girl who rides a Hurricane motorcycle as a way to forget her pain. I believe it’s beautiful and one of the best “I’m depressed because I got dumped” songs around. Five out of five stars.

This story came to me when Gary Jordan suggested a storm festival in honor of another author who’d been evacuated due to a hurricane. The song by David Wilcox has haunted me since my undergrad days when my then-girlfriend used to listen to it all the time. When she dumped me, it was for much the reason as in this story–because I was second best. It was straight-forward to give the narrator his own ‘second best.’

Fireworks marked the turn in the Holiday Series from light and fun to something with actual conflict. Ironically, by the time I’d written it out, it’s nearly as long as the rest of the series to date combined.

With this story, what I wanted to do was have our foursome hit the limits of exhibitionism. I wanted them to go from it all being fun and games to being something serious, just as Dave has thought it might be all along. I also thought that the transition from looking to touching was the one that would give these characters the most conflict. They’re all rational, mature adults who are good at communication and so most of the standard sources of conflict (which boil down to immature or idiot characters) didn’t exist. Thus, we have a story in which despite everyone’s best efforts, things blow up.

In laying this story out, I identified three key scenes. The men’s striptease just seemed to be fair payback. The women’s show was built around the silhouettes, an idea I got from the book Sex Games by Linda Sonntag. The final scene with the fireworks was stolen from an actual visit to that viewing site in the story many years ago. I didn’t have sex at the site, but I did notice how it would be possible, given a couple of accomplices to serve as lookouts.

The other fun part of this story was the music. ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits has a prominent place in my car’s CD library and just seemed to fit for the guys. The Joe Loss Orchestra classic is, of course, one that just about everyone has heard and summons up images of the old burlesque era. With that as the lead off song, the rest simply had to be Blues, which meant raiding my home music collection and spending a few hours engaged in ‘research’ while listening away.

So… what defines erotica? What defines porn? Is something “erotic” if it’s sexually explicit but doesn’t attempt to arouse? And when is it art?

I’ve seen discussions and arguments on these in a handful of places, most recently in The Fishtank. I suspect the arguments will continue probably for some time, because they’re definitely personal definitions. John Ashcroft (George W. Bush’s first Attorney General) had the nude statues in the Justice Building covered up. His “porn” was what his predecessors called art. Similarly, one reader may find a long drawn out bondage scene to be very erotic and arousing, where another may consider it a waste of words. The ‘different tastes’ make it hard to define erotica.

So I’m going to resist the temptation to walk in and tell you my definitions or make an argument for “this is what it means.” I write both “porn” and “erotica” and you can read my stories and decide for yourself when I’m doing which. I’ll also let you decide when something is art and when it’s just fluff.

I will say that I really loved the way Warhol and others turned the concept of Art on its head. There is an “art” to making something popular, even if it’s pure sugar. Someone has to construct it, fine tune it, and shape it into something good. Now crap is still crap, regardless of whether it’s an attempt to make art that fell short, or an attempt to make something purely for popular/commercial reasons that was done slapdash. But “art” can cover more than what’s classically put in museums.

I’ve noticed this most in music. When I was a teen, I thought certain genres (Country, Heavy Metal, Pop) were crap. Now, much older and wiser, I’ve gone back and listened to the same songs and found that some of them are far more creative and well crafted and “artistic” than much of what I thought was good back then. The best example is Michael Jackson. I did the “I’m too cool to listen to his stuff” when I was in high school. But going back, now that he’s died–wow. There really is more craft in his music than a lot of the “alternative” stuff I thought was so cool.

So it’s the craft (and vision) that differentiates “crap” from “art.” I am trying to get that craft and vision into my stories, regardless of whether they have deep themes or are simply an amusing idea I want to play out. And as a result, sometimes I think I write stuff that isn’t erotic at all. I wasn’t aiming to arouse the reader, but trying for a different reaction entirely. See my short story Eye of the Hurricane as an example. But who knows? Maybe somewhere there’s a reader that gets kicked off into his own fantasies, and so sees my story as erotic anyway,despite my intentions.

In the end, I’d prefer to not define terms at all. The main reason I use “erotica” to describe my work is simple marketing. More readers are likely to associate my work with that term than any of the others that might fit. So if I want readers to be able to find me, I have to give them some guidance on what I’ve got. It’s not perfect, and it’s not going to work for everyone, but it’s better than most of the alternatives.