I lived in Amsterdam. It was 1992, and I was a barker for a live sex show called the Casa Rosso. I was dating a hooker from Australia and then Miriam, a Surinamese cabaret dancer whose husband was in jail for murder. It was the first time a woman ever took me home, tied me up, and slapped me without my paying for it. I didn’t know anything about the world in 1992. It would be thirteen years before I fell in love.
In my letter I told Heathen I wanted to be penetrated and pierced and laughed at and pulled along by my hair. I wanted to be objectified. I wanted to be restrained and suffocated. I wanted to be slapped and talked down to. I had just come back from Israel, seen the smoke rising from the Lebanese villages beyond the hills, stared into the muzzle of a tank, witnessed the jet hovering still in the sky while Caterpillar D9s churned the soft red soil along the border. I walked along the fence watching for snipers, clenching my fists and pressing them against my head. I spoke with residents in deserted towns terrified to walk down the street. Realized for the first time that war is not about destruction, it’s about fear.
I told Heathen I’d lost my girlfriend to the new sexual politics. I said I wanted a strap-on forced in my mouth while the girl wearing the strap-on spoke with her friends. I wanted pictures to be taken and posted everywhere. I didn’t want to have sex, but I wanted to be penetrated. I didn’t want to go down on anybody, but I wanted to be sat on by people wearing clothes. I wanted to be the only one naked.
There was a war going on between cultures. There was a new crusade, but the weapons were bigger. I apologized for being selfish. It had nothing and everything to do with the controversial Dutch filmmaker. The great conflict of the new century had moved into direct and violent contact with the outer limits of the Enlightenment. One man—deranged, on the edge of society, an immigrant’s son, discriminated against, lacking opportunities, caught in the worldwide web of militant Islam. The Internet jihadist porn store, filled with dirty videos of beheadings, throat slittings, a boot pressing into a woman’s stomach while a geyser of blood erupts from her neck, martyr glorification, bearded men holding guns and smiling for the camera before leaving to seek their death. All of these found on a short stack of DVDs in Bouyeri’s apartment. And the other man, the one he killed, a minor celebrity, an attention seeker, a Dutch Bill O’Reilly. A man full of hate and convenient ideologies, a nationalist, a xenophobe, a grandnephew of one of the greatest painters the world has ever known.
A woman screamed at Bouyeri as he reloaded his gun, “You can’t do this!”
“Yes, I can,” he replied.
It was two years after Theo van Gogh’s ugly murder. My girlfriend was fucking three men in a tent, in a city that had sprung up in a week, with forty thousand naked wanderers, all of them covered in a thin film of white dust, looking to get high. A dry mecca of disposable art. They would burn everything.
“That’s when I decided to leave you,” she said. I don’t think she had ever heard of Theo van Gogh, though I’m sure she’d visited the Van Gogh Museum as well as the Anne Frank House.
Later, Lissette would leave a brief note and a small pile of my possessions on my doorstep. Inside these things, in a white box, would be a clear plastic bag, and inside that a sugarcube full of acid and a capsule full of ecstasy. She hoped I would see what she saw. The pills and the sugar would help me understand. Like Rex Hofman, who drinks a cup of coffee in order to find out what happened to his wife, who disappeared three years earlier, and he wakes up in a coffin, buried alive.
Later, I would send a note to Heathen explaining everything I wanted in the current political climate. I told her I wanted what everybody else wants; it’s just the details that are different. I see connections everywhere I look. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense; it makes perfect sense, it’s just that lives are fractured. I can easily keep this many balls in the air. This is who I am. This is the world right now.
I finished the note by saying I wanted to be afraid and I wanted to cry with someone who’s not afraid to make me sad, who doesn’t stop just because I’m crying.
Heathen wrote me back. She said she wanted the same thing.
—San Francisco, 2007
The Business
of America
Is Business
What was everyone doing? Everyone was getting by.
Why Britney Matters
It’s Britney, bitch. That’s the opening to the first single released from Blackout, Britney Spears’s sex-and-drugs masterpiece.
I’m not sure what led me to the point in life where I’m listening to Britney Spears on repeat. It started while I was writing about a murder trial, a trial that I almost got thrown out of—the judge calling me to chambers, three lawyers and two cops sitting around his desk. He wanted to know if I had been talking to a juror. I had seen the juror at the train and said hello. The juror wrote a three-page memo detailing our conversation, which the judge waved in front of me. He was deciding whether or not to bar me from the court. All I could say was “I’m sorry.” I returned to my pew, passing the smiling accused murderer, seated at the end of a long table in the middle of the court. It was a sympathetic smile, his bright-red lips twisted to points on his cheeks, like the smile of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. He was commiserating with me, trying to say: It sure is hard to stay out of trouble around here!
But that doesn’t really explain Britney or her new album, Blackout. That’s just where I was in my life, immersed in crime, making bad decisions, scattered. Like the rest of America, I saw Britney’s disaster on MTV, lazying around a stripper pole like a cat on Valium. That was enough for me. I downloaded the rest of the album, and then her earlier albums, and I started trying to understand what I had been missing, what the teenage girls always knew.
Every day I woke before six a.m. to spend three to four hours trying to place what I’d seen into a coherent narrative before heading to court. I needed music that wouldn’t challenge me in any way. I sat at the table in my small room, staring at an air shaft, the sound of my roommate shifting noisily on the other side of our thin wall replaced with earbuds piping Britney Spears, who was twenty-six years old and the seventh-best-selling female artist of all time.
It’s challenging to engage in a serious conversation about Britney Spears. My friends are proud of their musical taste, and I frequently embarrass them, but there are limits. Over time, derivative acts such as Stone Temple Pilots and Everclear have gained a grudging hipster acceptance. Ten years from now, I predict, we’ll think about Nickelback in an entirely different way.1 Despite selling 80 million albums, it’s doubtful Britney will ever be appraised as anything more than a signifier of other, more relevant cultural trends. The intelligentsia doesn’t even consider her a musician. She’s barely a vessel. One friend tells me that Britney Spears is a wholly manufactured sound and that the only difference between Britney and a computer program is her ability to walk onstage.
But it’s not true. Britney has a way of dipping at the end of a verb like she’s having an orgasm so intense and fast, the only thing to do is dance right through it. Other times she’s forceful, or innocent; she always feels it at exactly the right time. She doesn’t have “pipes” like Mariah or Christina. What she has is a sweet Southern drawl that tells a story, which is strange, because it’s a story she doesn’t seem to understand. Her songs contradict each other; as she gets older, her schoolgirl drawl is ripping in two, leaving a ragged, adult edge evidenced on almost all the songs on what is her best album by far. It’s the sound of a voice at its peak, about to go into steep decline.
Much of the criticism of Britney is based on the fact that she doesn’t write her own songs. If she did, it’s likely the rest of her transgressions would be easily forgiven. After all, artists are supposed to be self-centered and crazy. I have to remind people that Elvis didn’t write his own songs either.
“Are you comparing Britney to Elvis?”
“Yes, I am.”
Remember, Elvis wanted to lead the war on drugs. He arranged a meet
ing with Richard Nixon on this very topic. He showed up to meet the president of the United States stoned out of his mind and wearing a cape. And not just any cape, but a half cape that went to his elbows like an unfinished Batman costume. Tell me Elvis is a genius, I’m not going to disagree with you. But can we agree on what the word “genius” means? The word “genius” almost always begs for a modifier—a musical genius, a physical genius, an empathic genius. Sometimes I wonder if these qualified terms aren’t interchangeable with “talented idiot.”
I’m talking here about Britney Spears performing at the Super Bowl wearing socks on her hands. Compare that high-energy performance with the totem-faced members of the Rolling Stones, swinging their guitars over their craggy shoulder blades. Apples and oranges, of course. The Stones write their own music and play their own instruments. They were never chosen; they insisted on taking the stage. Without any help from anyone else, the Rolling Stones are still a great band. Britney is just a performer. It’s like comparing an actor and a director. Let’s get back to that “genius” word for a minute. Stanley Kubrick is indisputably a genius. Tom Cruise, not so much. But I’d still rather hear Tom say, “Worship the cock.” And I’d rather watch Spears dancing with socks on the wrong appendages than four old men clapping their hands over their heads. And I love the Rolling Stones. I’m just saying.
Her unquestioning trust in her producers is a hallmark of her sound. Cluelessness pervades her music—a deliberate ignorance of larger societal issues, lyrics shocking in their meanness, all of it layered over a pitch-perfect delivery and simple, unforgettable beats. How many people could remove themselves so entirely from the process until called upon, at which point they slip into their role like a spoon into soup?
Which is to say that Britney Spears is more complex than she’s given credit for. Take her debut album, … Baby One More Time. At first glance, the target audience would seem to be pedophiles. But it’s not. There she is in her video, in shiny, flat, round-toed shoes, socks to her knees this time, a short skirt, a jacket open to expose her belly button, dancing in the school hallway. She shakes her chest, then sways her hips in a way that’s more of a promise than a suggestion. Her skirt flashes open, baring the tops of her thighs. Inhibited schoolgirls in starched button-ups look approvingly from behind open lockers, like they’ve been given permission to live, though in real life they’re professional dancers, some with coke habits. What’s going on here? Britney is wearing pigtails with pink ribbons, and a quarter inch of lipstick, singing, My loneliness is killing me. Not likely. But that’s not what this is about. The call is to teen girls in sheltered suburban environments preparing to break the chains of their generation’s expectations. And they do, for a moment. Then they go back to their schoolwork, then college, then they’re married with a kid on the way. Soon they’ll be chastising their own children, running out the door of the Montessori school, screaming, “Come back here, little missy! You look like a whore!”
Britney is the opposite of that. Britney doesn’t fade into obscurity. Britney goes all the way.
At the end of that video, Britney is back in class. It was all just a dream. Though obviously it wasn’t—she’s still wearing a full tube of lipstick. In her next album, the pining schoolgirl returns in a red-leather catsuit to tell us that she’s not that innocent, that she’s a self-satisfied heartbreaker. She doesn’t care about other people at all. She has the same inviting smile, but it’s no longer friendly. In fact, she might not be capable of love. “Oops! … I Did It Again” has more to say about the Britney phenomenon and is perhaps why so many smart people loathe her. It’s too much to be expected to empathize with this greedy, beautiful creature. I played with your heart, got lost in the game. But hey, she’s just the messenger.
Fast-forward past the Pepsi commercial, though it is impressive to note that Britney can sing a ballad about a soda with the same conviction as any of her songs. Her “genius” is transferrable. My father used to tell me a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting, but I’ve never believed that. An author has to be interested in his subject. Britney doesn’t have that problem. Or perhaps she’s just passionate about everything.
Fast-forward past In the Zone, a worthless album with the exception of “Toxic.” Fast-forward past Britney’s cover of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” which should be enough to convince anyone that this no-longer-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman is in possession of a unique and terrifying talent, irrespective of the vacuum it may exist in. Past the marriage to the backup dancer and the two children. Stop on the best track on Blackout, “Piece of Me.”
Every star at this point in their career puts out a song like this, an angry or wistful ballad about the difficulty of being recognized, misunderstood, and exploited. But Britney’s version is one of the best. This song is so infectious, so basic, that when you hear it the first time, it’s like you’ve heard it a hundred times before. In fact, you’ve already got it memorized. It reminds me of a pornographic novel that held my interest for a couple of years. I read that book at least once a month, despite its lack of literary merit and its having no ending (the author stopped at the halfway point, having painted himself into a corner). I read it more times than anything I’ve read before or since. “Piece of Me” has everything in common with that unfinished tome. A pornographic novel doesn’t need to make sense; pornographic music doesn’t either. It just feels good. You don’t have to think about it at all, just nod your head and do your work. Or you could listen closer, fall off that ragged edge I was talking about—you might get an idea of where this is going.
Britney is having her perfect moment. If you want a piece, the time is right now. Despite shaving her head, flashing the paparazzi, losing her children to K-Fed, or the other things that have absolutely no relation to her music, when she says, You want a piece of me, she’s right. The only flaw, the only line in the whole song that accidentally snags on the listener’s intellect, is when Britney says,
I’m Mrs. “Most likely to get on the TV for strippin’ on the streets”
When getting the groceries, no, for real,
Are you kidding me?
No wonder there’s panic in the industry
I mean, please.
When you take that last piece of Britney, the playful horror of grocery shopping, there’s nothing to do but let it go—the synthetic slide guitar is intersecting the sounds pouring from her beautiful lips at just that moment. She’s been Miss American Dream since she was seventeen. Nine years later, did you really think she was shopping for her own groceries? Do you shop for yours?
—San Francisco, 2008
1. I no longer stand by this prediction.
The DIY Book Tour
I arrived early—I’m always early—at a house in Chesterfield, Virginia, a short drive from Richmond, down the Powhite Parkway. This was the fifteenth city I’d been to. I had given a reading the night before at a home in a nearby town, and when I mentioned Chesterfield, people made sour faces. But I go where I’m invited.
The small house was on a street filled with similar houses and well-tended front yards. My host explained that she was a nurse at a hospital in Richmond, and Chesterfield was the closest place she could afford. She had just moved in, and there wasn’t much furniture, just twenty white folding chairs not yet arranged.
Nineteen of her friends showed up, and we spread out into the living room and small kitchen. Many of them also worked at the hospital. One was a professional jujitsu fighter and personal trainer, another a real estate agent. None of them had ever been to a literary event before. Several told me they were big readers, at least a book a week. But when I asked about their reading habits, they hadn’t heard of the authors who are famous in my world: Lorrie Moore, Roberto Bolaño, Michael Chabon. This is most of America, I thought. I’ve stepped through the door.
Originally, my publisher had a standard tour planned: five bookstores in five large coastal cities. The early reviews were strong, and one friend, a succ
essful author, encouraged me to do a larger tour. But the idea depressed me. This was my seventh book. I have my following, but I’m not famous. I didn’t want to travel thousands of miles to read to ten people, sell four books, then spend the night in a cheap hotel room before flying home. And my publisher didn’t have the money for that many hotel rooms, anyway.
I decided to try something I hoped would be less lonely. Before my book came out, I set up a lending library, allowing anyone to receive a free bound galley on the condition that they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense. Four hundred people had participated in the lending library, and I wrote this group and asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise twenty attendees. I would sleep on their couches. My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself.
When you read in people’s homes, you’re reading to a reflection of their world. In Lincoln, Nebraska, I read in the home of Ember Schrag, a twenty-five-year-old folk-rock musician. She plastered the town with flyers, but the people who came were all in their twenties and into rock ’n’ roll. In Las Vegas I read at Laurenn McCubbin’s house. She’s a painter, and her primary subjects are adult entertainers. Many people in attendance were either artists or sex workers or both.
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