Movie House Madeleine

American Review Lev continuedfrom previous page fucking legend. . .1 expect you to show some respect," and requiring them to pass a quiz on the Brad-Brian history and submit to metal detectors for hidden cameras. This nightmarish but also absurdist scenario is the logical conclusion of the men's collective obsession with "Brad"—the selling of sex, and then body parts, functions both as a literalization and an allegory of obsessive-compulsive, fetishistic desire engendered by Internet ad culture, celebrity-ism, and our culture of the spectacle in which simulacra displace any real-life referent in a free-fall through the rabbit burrow. As the Brad-Brian saga becomes incrementally extreme, it's also deconstructed by other interlocutors who seem to locate the "real" Brad and Brian elsewhere; impersonations within impersonations are revealed, countered, and performed. Brian is seemingly impersonated by the man posing as "thegayjournalist ," Zack Young, who's writing for The Advocate—a jab at journalistic veracity, to say the least! —while Brad is probably Thad, another young hustler obsessed with Brad. Finally, the (possibly) "real" Brian posts that "Brad was just your idea, and I guess you think he's a great idea. He may be a great idea, but Brad himself is just a kid who got drafted into the job of representing an idea." As in Cooper's book Frisk (1992), the text forces its readers to question their engagement with the narrative; that the bloody deeds turn out not to be "real" shifts the focus from horror story tout court, to complex meditations on ownership of collusion with lurid narratives, boundaries between voyeuristic pleasure, and disavowal that may be less stable than we'd all like to think, but that mainstream culture outside Cooperlandia comfortingly erects with movies and books that preserve the "us vs. them" dichotomy. A consummately artistic work by our contemporary poète maudit. In the midst of this self-dismantling snuff horror tale, dark humor sends up all and sundry, gay and straight. The guys' handles parody the foibles ofgay Internet self-presentation and body fetishism, as well as the hypocrisy and neurotic insecurity-arrogance dialectic ofhomo and hetero dating cultures alike. "Thebasher" aggrandizes himselfas a youthful sixty-one-year-old celebrity S/M leatherguy, while "Godsrighthand" has a hissy fit that his pleasure at brutally injuring someone who was not the "real" Brad was destroyed. The "builtlikeatruck," "rawandrawer ," and "llbean" handles reveal a reality-denying obsession with image and skewer the sartorial and cinematic idiocies that govern a mainstream culture that's ever "dumb, dumber, and dumberer." "tufforeal" is a Hispanic guy whose homophobia disavows his pleasure in gay group sex, and whose heteromasculinism is, alas, common in a machista culture where women and gays are stigmatized by the very guys who'll happily have sex with both. And in an ancillary "Kill Nick Carter" board, the "we'll eat you up, we love you so" star fetishism—as well as a heteronormativity that still can't see itselfasjust one category within a spectrum ofgender variances—are brilliantly parodied. This book is not a fireside chat with the five people you'll meet in heaven. It is, however, a consummately artistic work by our contemporary poète maudit, and a trial-by-fire tour through the abyss that exists both within and without, with stops atthe grand guignol peep shows, specimen jars, carnival booths, and caged beast caravans of our fin de millennium culture. The book's limited printing and beautiful presentation perform the melancholic idea that silvers the narrative's darker interstices: the object ofdesire is only ever chimeric, gone before it can ever even fully breathe. Leora Lev is editor ofand contributor to the anthology Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper,forthcomingfrom Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Her interview with John Waters also appears in this anthology. Movie House Madeleine Davis Schneiderman 10:01 Lance Olsen Chiasmus Press http://www.chiasmuspress.com 196 pages; paper, $12.00 Based on a film time code that meticulously charts hours: minutes: seconds: frames, Lance Olsen's 10:01 may just be a thin sliver of some monstrous, non-contiguous, as-yet-unwritten twentyfirst -century Proust. Wait...