Kinky Sex Blog (Part Two)

Notorious - Loverboy (mp3)
Tied Down and Chained - BoDeans (mp3)

This is a continuation from Tuesday's Kinky Sex Blog (Part One)...

When Flying Tandem, Avoid Ropes: The David Jansen Story

Meanwhile, the story out of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, gets odder every day. The original story: an Atlanta woman was kidnapped by an acquaintance, taken to a cabin near Gatlinburg and allegedly raped. A pizza delivery man arrives (dude pictured at right), sees this woman bound on the couch as the man pays for pizza, and the woman mouths "Call 911!", and the rest is history. The latest, according to the dude's lawyer: The woman has filed multiple false accusations of rape in her past. She was a stripper. They were having relations. She asked him to abduct her, because it was a fantasy of hers. He has text messages and emails and surveillance footage to substantiate his story. A couple in the next cabin saw no indication of forced captivity, either.

Except around here, the only part most people know is the part where a crazy man kidnapped a woman and raped her. The follow-up stories all fall inside the paper and don't make the TV news.

The dude's name is David Jansen. His mug shot is available in print and on the web. He was married, and his wife has filed a restraining order and for divorce. Meanwhile, the woman in question remains under journalistic protection. It is newspaper policy; it is not a legal issue. If journalists so chose, they could reveal her name, but they won't so long as she remains a "victim."

First, I ask not that you pity this man. The man dillied where he shouldn't have dallied, and he did so with a woman whose chest was clearly more stable than her brains. Either is enough for plenty of folks to think he deserves to sit in jail for a while. The wackos would be fine if he was shot or had his tallywhacker lopped off, but I think most reasonable minds are just fine with the "you lie down with dogs, you get fleas" theory.

My frustration is not in his exposure per se, but by the injustice of our journalistic standards. This guy's face and name are all over. We even know he's a software engineer from Snellville. Basically, his life as he knows it is totally over even though it looks increasingly like charges will be dropped before he ever stands trial. Who really knows whether he'll manage to find another job? Who knows how much in legal fees this experience will cost him? Yet, did he commit any actual crimes? Did he do anything expressly illegal? Probably not.

This woman, on the other hand, has Glenn Close'd a man's life. She's accused people falsely before, to the point of being sentenced to psychiatric help. She looks to have been a willing participant in this particular game. Yet her name and her identity is protected because she's a "victim," because this man gave her money for cosmetic work, because he went along with her kinky tie-me-up wishes, and because ordering pizza during bondage fantasy role-play is apparently par for the S+M course. ("No anchovies! Noooooo, not the anchovies!!!" "Yess you bad boy, you're gonna eat allllll the anchovies!!")

I absolutely despise this rule of journalistic ethics: If you're arrested, your face and your name and your ass is fair game. Guilt matters not a lick. But if you're an accuser with a criminal history of falsely accusing, you're protected.

Basically, it's OK for our media outlets to rape someone accused of a crime and drag them through the streets like dead soldiers in Somalia. The best the accused can hope for is a fair trial and a forever-sullied name.

One of my relatives, whose life was admittedly a small-town soap opera already, was on the verge of filing child abuse charges against her ex-husband's new wife when she was arrested for sexually molesting a friend of her daughter's. The girl in question was the daughter of the best friends of her ex-husband and new wife.

Now, at the very least, all of that looks suspicious. Yet one name was revealed, and one picture was put in the papers, and all other names are protected by journalistic integrity. My relative has lost her job and every last penny. She's lost all visitation rights to her daughter and hasn't seen her in more than a year. She's only allowed to see her son once a week for a few hours under strict supervision. Her parents have lost their retirement and put down a second mortgage on their house.

Trust me when I say this: I really hope my relative is guilty. If she's guilty, then justice or something like it is being served, and all this misery and suffering is, in some sense, justifiable. But if she's innocent? If she never did these things? Sadly, I believe she is innocent, which means that the accusing family engaged in a very Abigail Williams small-town witch hunt revenge plot that has spiraled into something straight out of anyone's worst nightmares.

If you think people in small-town South are above involving their young child in a revenge plot against an ex-wife, then you really haven't lived down here very long.

But for now, this is our reality: if you're accused, you're fair game. You're bound and gagged and declared "probably guilty" in the public sphere, and by the time you've proven yourself innocent, no one cares.

If you're the highly suspect accuser with questionable motives or dubious explanations, you're protected. You're free to throw accusations behind a veil of privacy and protection like a caged monkey throwing shit at onlookers.

"Notorious" was actually written by Jon Bon Jovi, but apparently had too much synth and wacky voice machine for his own band (?). If both songs can't be found at iTunes and Amazon.com, mock those companies and demand they grow up and get some real music.

You're My Kind of Asshole

Tom Waits--"Hang Down Your Head (live)" (mp3)
Tom Waits--"Innocent When You Dream (live)" (mp3)

"I think it has something to do with what kind of prick they are and how much of a genius they are. Van, Bob, Frank Lloyd Wright---they can be kind of pricks because they are artistic and justifiably egotistical because it allows them to do what they do. The Eagles and people like that aren't great enough to justify it. Somehow, too, there's a difference between cantankerous and douchebag."

--Jeff K., a friend

Recent rumors of Bruce Springsteen's affair with the woman at the left have revived my simultaneous needs to both defend and convict my heroes. Back in the late 80's, I remember a heated conversation I had with several friends when Springsteen left his model-wife Julianne Phillips for back-up singer Patty Scialfa. Though we disagreed on how we were supposed to react to Springsteen's music from that point on, part of our discussion was based on a partial lack of information and, therefore, a hope that Springsteen had "done the right thing."

Without knowing, it was possible, just possible, that he had fully closed the door on his relationship with his wife before he picked up with his back-up singer. Yeah. Right. He was not divorced, but he was "sharing his mike" with Patti in, as the current divorce papers of his lover's husband state, "places too numerous to mention." We sat in the darkening afternoon, four or five of us, trying to figure out what to do with a hero who had broken whatever code we had established for him.

Far too much time during my college years was spent daydreaming about the Platonic notions of love contained within the catalog and ethos of Springsteen songs--the pledges, the desperation, the give-it-everything-you-got, the sense that that love was part of and only possible in the great America. So, the news of his affair with Patti rocked me. It rocked me in a way that a Mick Jagger affair would not have. It rocked me in the way that a Pete Townshend child pornography story did. Bruce was not who I thought he was, and I abandoned his music for several years. When I came back to him, he had not only divorced his wife, he had divorced his E-Street band. But I was more jaded then, too, and so it kind of worked.

You see, Bruce Springsteen is my kind of asshole. There's no other way to put it. Like many other substantial artists whose work I admire, I started off by putting him up on a pedestal, and then when he has proved to be all-too-human, I excoriate him, but never fully abandon him. He now has a pattern of hurting people; he has a pattern of public, messy relationships. But I'm still there, (usually) still listening.

I'm sure you can put together your own list. Here's part of mine. Hemingway was an asshole, but he is my favorite writer. Zevon was an asshole, but his songs transcend that. Joyce was an asshole, but he convinced himself that in order for him to pursue his genius, everyone else had to take care of him. Maybe it was true. Van Morrison is a cantankerous, paranoid asshole who thinks everyone is stealing his ideas. Steve Earle--foul-mouthed jerk, 5 time married, former heroin addict--is one of my favorite songwriters. Bob Dylan, as far as I can tell, has become so weird as to place himself beyond judgement.

People like me are enablers of people like them. They live their sloppy lives in public and I acknowledge those, perhaps condemn them, and then keep on going along with them.

The problem is that I am unable to establish any kind of stable moral code to evaluate them, and that concerns me about my other evaluations.

When I sit in the bathroom and read through an issue of In Touch, I feel absolute disgust for the lives of the Hollywood stars, for the hook-ups, for the pseudo-dramas, for Matthew McConaughy's apparent desire to spend his entire life getting buff and throwing frisbee in the surf at Malibu, for the magazine's lame attempts to depict stars in situations that show they are "just like us."

But when my wife was getting kind of cranked up by the current Bruce fiasco last week and asked me something about it, I gave her kind of a "Yeah, it's no big deal" response, and she was taken aback. She thought I was pooh-poohing his adultery, but that wasn't it at all. It's just that I've now been down a 36 year road with Bruce Springsteen. I've seen the warts and I still like the songs. So,what?

It's the oldest question related to art of any kind: do you separate the art from the artist, or do you gauge the art based upon what you know about the artist? It's not always your choice, since sometimes you know nothing about the artist at all. Check the body of work, even on this blog, by Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous. But with most modern popular musicians, their lives, or at least portions of them, are played out on television, in books and magazines, on the Internet. And so, it's hard to separate, isn't it?

I think my friend Jeff has a pretty good handle on our odd kind of hero-worship of musicians. I even used the word "hero" myself up above. But there's something more to the modern listener-musician relationship. It's kind of like they become friends of ours. The Phish-heads who speak so adoringly and so casually of "Trey" know little of who he is, and what they do know, including his incredible problems with addiction, they likely dismiss as part of the territory. So do I. Whether you are a spokesman for a generation or a spokesman for a bunch of lonely, drunken boys in a Philadelphia dormitory, they and I are going to cut you a lot of slack if you can deliver musically, deliver in performance.

I don't know if that's the way it should be or not.

I was speaking with a friend tonight of Bruce's affair, and his dismissive comment was, "That's old news. That isn't a new affair." Of course, the story only broke in a major way in the press two or three weeks ago. But the fans have moved on. Bruce and his wife have made prominent public appearances, have sung significant duets together since then. If your best friend had done it, you probably would have told him he's an asshole; if your favorite rock star does it, it's as if you nod to yourself and think, as you buy his latest stuff, 'You're my kind of asshole.'

Tom Waits' songs come from a concert found online called "Glitter And Doom In Atlanta." A superb show.