He took all the money he made from saving the world and flew to Beverly Hills, where he had large amounts of cosmetic surgery—after which he leveraged his new looks to become a successful TV newscaster.
The 2½th Dimension
The plastic busts that illustrate this essay were 3D printed with plastic filament.
There’s that rare moment we all know when we walk down a street and catch a glimpse of someone reflected in a window and we say to ourselves, “Why, what an attractive and likeable human being that person is! Dang, I wish I could look like that!”…only to realize we were looking at our own reflection…at which point we say to ourselves, “Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on my self-image as I tend to be.” But whatever our relationship is with the mirror, it continues unchanged.
Enter the selfie. I know, it’s been written about endlessly, but there’s a twist coming.
Selfies are mirrors we can freeze. A bunch of selfies is a contact sheet containing nothing but flattering choices. Other people’s selfies allow us to see how others look at themselves in a mirror, making their modelling face when nobody’s around—except these days, everybody’s around everywhere, all the time. And don’t we all know the blushy face and pretend-humble tone of voice used by selfie-takers when we call out someone for posting a selfie? “That picture there? Oh, ha ha, you know, it’s just a casual shot I had in my camera. I shouldn’t have put up such a casual shot on Facebook. I do look good in it, though, don’t I?”
Selfies are the second cousin of the air guitar.
Selfies are the proud parents of the dick pic.
Selfies are, in some complex way, responsible for the word frenemy.
I sometimes wonder what selfies would look like in North Korea.
Selfies are theoretically about control—or, if you’re theoretically minded, they’re about the illusion of self-control. With a selfie some people believe you’re buying into a collective unspoken notion that everybody needs to look fresh and flirty and young forever. You’re turning yourself into a product. You’re abdicating power over your sexuality. Or maybe you’re overthinking it—maybe you’re just in love with yourself.
I believe that it’s the unanticipated side effects of technology that directly or indirectly define the textures and flavours of our eras. Look what Google has already done to the twenty-first century. When smartphones entered the world in 2002, if you had gathered a group of smart, media-savvy people in a room with coffee and good sandwiches, before the end of the day, I think, the selfie could easily have been forecast as an inevitable smartphone side effect. There’s actually nothing about selfies that feels like a surprise in any way…The only thing that is surprising is the number of years it took us to isolate and name the phenomenon. I do note, however, that once the selfie phenomenon was named and shamed, selfies exploded even further, possibly occupying all those optical fibre lanes of the Internet that were once occupied by ads for penis enlargement procedures.
I remember the analog era: that wicker basket next to the land-line phone, filled with bad party shots and unflattering posed shots taken on windy days. But somewhere around 1999 those photos vanished, and while we live in a world of endless images, the images we see are almost never concretized on paper. Perhaps that’s what bugs us about selfies, which are, technically, self-portraiture: their fleetingness. We never get a chance to frame them and put them on our walls; they barely even stick to the walls of Facebook, let alone over the fireplace.
Will there be even more selfies in the future? Yes! Billions more, but the next selfie wave is going to be the 3D selfie, in which one scans oneself and then prints out one’s 3D effigies with MakerBots at the mall or, as 3D printers become insanely cheaper (which is happening as I type these words), at home on the kitchen counter for $1.95. There still won’t be many printed photos in our future—nobody, in the end, seems to want them—but prepare to be inundated by small MakerBot plastic busts everywhere you look, modified and unmodified: him, her, me, them, them with devil horns, her with three eyes, you with a fork stuck into your forehead. It’s going to be fun, yet the weird thing about a printed-out bust is that it’s not quite the third dimension and it’s not quite the second dimension either…It’s like photography posing as sculpture, a 2½ dimension.
The key word here is posing—the next wave of 2½D selfies will, with even more effectiveness, allow all of us to pose and put forward a model of who we think we are, as opposed to who we actually are. And what’s wrong with that? Artists have been doing it for thousands of years—and in the twenty-first century, with all this kick-ass new technology, we’re all, if nothing else, artists.
Living Big
I was in a hotel bar in Toronto once, and suddenly a tiny little woman walked in, surrounded by a scrum of cameras and microphones. I asked who the woman was and was told, “She’s Mireille Guiliano. She wrote that book French Women Don’t Get Fat.”
“Is that true?”
“Look at her. I guess it must be.”
You could have put the woman atop a Carr’s water biscuit. I asked, “Does she say why they don’t get fat?”
“I read on the Internet that digesting ten grams of goose liver burns more calories than sixty minutes of snorkelling. Digesting pâté is actually a rigorous form of exercise.”
“You read it on the Internet? Then it must be true.”
My fourteen-year-old niece and her friends had a high school project to find the one item in a local Safeway with the most ingredients. The winner? Chocolate layer cake. A few months after this, she and I were in a Safeway near where I live. The memory of her project hypersensitized me into cataloguing the sensations my body was experiencing simply by being in a Safeway. The one that hit me hardest was smell. There’s something Safeway-specific going on here, I thought. What is it? Articulate it, Doug.
It wasn’t a hardware store kind of smell…more like a sterilized laboratorial smell. So I mentioned it to my niece, who told me, “Oh, that’s the smell of GMO.”
“Seriously? Really?”
“Yes. Watch this homework project I did on GMOs and it’ll tell you more.”
I went on YouTube, where I saw the ten-minute documentary she’d made on the topic.
“It’s not just corn—everything gets GMOed these days: soy, wheat, rice, cottonseed oil, canola,” she explained, “and this modified stuff goes into everything sold in the Safeway. Hence the weird, slightly sci-fi odour.”
My attention was partly frozen by the fact that fourteen-year-olds now produce documentaries for homework as a matter of course. The rest of my brain was amazed at how deftly and effortlessly modern fourteen-year-olds discuss terms such as Yellow 6. Beyond that, I was amazed by how these young people listen to themselves and what they’ve learned and then modify their lives accordingly. Rather than becoming vegetarians or vegans, they simply leave out the iffy stuff. My niece and nephew have no trouble eating octopus or snails, but a bucket of KFC I brought over two summers ago silenced the conversation and caused many furtive glances.
“Okay, don’t tell me you’ve stopped eating chicken.”
“Oh, we still eat chicken—but we saw how that chicken is raised and…we just can’t do it. Sorry. YouTube.”
There’s a show in the United States called The Biggest Loser. Sixteen deeply overweight and under-exercised people live on a fat farm ranch and, week by week, players are eliminated until there’s a final Biggest Loser, who tends to be someone who loses about half of their body weight over a span of ten months or so. Like anyone, I enjoy a good before-and-after photo, so, if nothing else, the show works on that level. Also interesting are the personal epiphanies that contestants are encouraged to experience—the traumas that made them fat: father issues, mother issues, abuse issues…the usual suspects. But what is ultimately most bizarre about The Biggest Loser is the total absence of any dialogue on the politics of obesity. There’s no dialogue on government-mandated corn-growing. There’s no dialogue on GMO corn or lysine molecul
es. There’s no dialogue on food stamps, no dialogue on advertising and no dialogue on sugar, pesticides, colony collapse disorder, agricultural labour policy or pretty much anything else except childhood trauma. Basically, if you’re fat, it’s all in your head and solely up to you to fix it.
Perhaps the ultimate truth about weight gain in Western cultures—certainly in the United States—is that healthy people are bad for capitalism, and obese people are simply much, much better for the economy than thin people. They eat more food and in so doing drive up the need for agriculture, food processing, packaging and advertising. They get more sick more often and keep the medical system busier. They rely more on their vehicles, which is great for big oil and the post-Detroit economy. In fact there is not one single aspect of capitalism that is not enhanced, on the dollar level, by obesity. Obesity becomes, in its own way, a social sculpture of money in full operation and represents the end state of a certain way of viewing and experiencing the world. The problem is, as The Biggest Loser tells us, that fixing it politically wouldn’t be a very sexy story angle. If right now is the time for a “before” photo, then nobody knows when the time will come to take the “after” picture, and where is the fun in that?
The End of the Golden Age of Payphones
Stella spent her childhood helping her mother scam money off men stupid enough to still be using pay telephones at the end of the twentieth century—men too afraid of technology to get a cell; men who’d lost their cell underneath the car’s front seat and were too lazy to poke around and find it. Suckers.
Her mother was Jessica, a chain-smoking lizard-woman who crossed the nation with Stella, zeroing in on upscale hotels. Once there, they’d hang around payphones close to the hotel’s restaurants and bars, where they dressed in forgettable-looking outfits: no jewellery or weird makeup or distinctive shoes—like Walmart greeters minus the blue vest and cheerful attitude. The two would then wait until halfway through the lunch hour, when the men in the restaurants had had a few drinks—invariably one of them would come out to use the payphone. Once they’d dialed, little Stella would walk over to the phone, look slightly stupid and then depress the receiver, ending the call. Usually the men said something along the lines of “What the hell are you doing?” or “What the fuck? Kid, get out of here!” At that moment Jessica would swoop in and confront the man, who was usually standing there with the receiver still in his hand.
“Why are you screaming at my daughter?”
“I’m not screaming, and what the hell is wrong with your kid? I’m in the middle of a phone call and she walks up and hangs it up on me.”
“She’s just a kid. Come on, Stella, we’re going.”
At that point the man would harrumph and redial and go back to his conversation. Jessica would wait for a few minutes, then walk up to the man, hang up the receiver and say, “My daughter says you hit her.”
“What?”
“You hit my daughter.”
“Lady, are you out of your tree? I don’t hit anybody, let alone kids.”
“I’m going to the cops.”
“What?”
“I’m filing assault charges. Stella, you run and get the security people.”
Stella would run off and the guy with the phone would be shitting his pants. “Lady, I didn’t hit your kid.”
“Are you calling her a liar?”
“I’m saying I didn’t hit her. What else am I supposed to say?”
“And you’re calling me a liar.”
“Lady, I—”
Stella would then come back and say, “Security will be here in a second.”
Needless to say, the guy on the phone would be watching his life circle the drain, imagining the horrific press and the life-destroying damage this false accusation would cause. This crazy lady could destroy him.
And so that’s the point where Jessica the lizard-woman would say, “You know, you can make this go away right now. Apologize to my kid and compensate her for her trauma.”
“Compensate her? Oh…I get it.”
“I’m glad you get it. Now pay up or Stella’s going to scream that you groped her too.”
Out would come the wallet.
Stella had watched countless men call her mother the most dreadful things imaginable.
Stella and her mother tried to do only two grifts per city, three max, depending on the haul. They methodically crossed the country in a Winnebago and lived well off their scam, although as Stella aged, it became more difficult for her to pretend she was an innocent toddler merely goofing around with the telephone. Then Jessica made Stella pretend that she was mentally challenged. This was actually more effective than when Stella was young, because “Sweetie, smacking a retard is going-to-hell territory. Your calculated drool is pure gold.”
In Stella’s eyes the only positive skill her mother gave her was to teach her to read, and that was only because reading was the only surefire pastime that would keep Stella quiet. Besides, to get books for free, all you had to do was go into any library, sign them out and take them away forever. As a result, Stella became self-educated and could speak with authority on most subjects. Around the age of eleven, Stella became more book-smart than her mother.
One day they were in a Kroger, buying baloney sandwich makings, when the cashier looked at the price of a steak the next teller over was ringing in. “Can you believe that?”
Stella said, “That’s nothing. Steak is three times as expensive in Tokyo.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. The economy there is in what’s called a post-bubble state.”
“A what?”
Stella went on to discuss 1990s Japanese land speculation, though she didn’t realize how much this was spooking her mother, who saw Stella leaving her one day to go on to a better life—and then what would Jessica do? As they carried their baloney fixings out to the Winnebago, Jessica was feeling sick and alone.
Then one day the inevitable happened. They were scamming a heavyset older man with thick white hair at a bank of hotel payphones at the Meridien hotel in Salt Lake City. Stella did a remarkable job of faking mental and physical disablement, and Jessica felt a stab of motherly pride when she approached the man and asked for money. But the man acted a bit strange. When he got hit up for dough, he didn’t call Jessica any names. That should have warned her.
When they got back to the Winnebago, there were three cops and two hotel staff. Shit.
“I’ve been hearing about you scammers for years and I always thought it was an urban legend. I guess not. Good thing we got it on tape—the Channel Three News Team is going to love this little puppy.”
So off they went, Jessica to the clink and Stella to juvenile custody. The local TV news show did a feature on grifting, using Jessica’s scam as the centrepiece. It turns out the hotel had CCTV cameras all over the lobby and had that day’s scam on tape from dual vantage points.
Fortunately for Jessica, a lawyer named Roy, who liked Jessica’s body type, took on her case. He bailed her out and they went to his condominium apartment and had raging hot sex. Later, over cigarettes and Cuba libres, they discussed Stella’s incarceration. The rum—along with Jessica’s lizard-woman tendencies—made her re-evaluate her relationship with her daughter. Jessica told Roy that Stella was now smarter than she was, and confided her worries about that dreaded day a few years down the road, when she’d be left behind.
Roy said, “Jessica, you need a man. Men are for keeps.”
Jessica fled town with Roy, who turned out not to be a lawyer after all, but another scammer. Talk about meant for each other.
When Stella turned sixteen inside the juvenile custody system, she was released. She moved to Los Angeles, where she tried for maybe ten minutes to get a real job, finally realizing that real jobs weren’t meant for her. So she turned tricks, tried auditioning for roles and tried to have real relationships with men and friendships with women, but every time she tried, at some point—usually early in the process—she’d
have a massive failure of trust in the other person and pull the plug.
Years went by. Stella’s inability to trust only grew fiercer, and she also lost her curiosity about the world. Before she was thirty she was officially too crazy to ever bond with another human being, ever—so she turned her mind to becoming a minister to an evangelical congregation. For a year this actually worked. With her learned sociopathy she was able to manipulate members of her flock into thinking that they were getting from Stella what they felt they needed from life. But after a while, being a minister was too much work for her. People were, if nothing else, a hassle. Her congregation grew disenchanted with her and asked her to leave.
She moved to a small town in northern California and got a job as a dog groomer and walker. It was enough to pay the rent on a small house in a slightly methy part of town. It was in this house that she realized that what she really wanted in her life was animals. Animals gave love without condition, although they did require food. Also, animals could be bossed about without legal repercussions. If they became troublesome, animals could be abandoned at the feet of dead volcanoes. Animals were all pluses and no minuses.
Her menagerie grew to five dogs and four cats, as well as local birds and squirrels and chipmunks, and for a few years Stella really thought she had it made in the shade. Then one afternoon she fell asleep on the sofa.
When she woke up, she padded quietly to the kitchen for a glass of water. Through the screen door she could hear her pets having a conversation in the yard, and they were talking about her: “Man, is that bitch ever clueless.”
“I can’t believe how easily human beings can be fooled. She actually thinks we like her.”
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