Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Going Underground and Coming Out
There are new streetlights across the street, sleek and black and vaguely retro in a futuristic way. They remain dark at night, dwarfed by the lamps currently bolted onto the crude utility poles that punctuate the sidewalk - but shortly, those poles will disappear. The switch to underground utilities is nigh for this block, and proof is manifest everywhere. Soon the wire umbilicals connecting my flat to the other side of midnight will be no more. I can sense that the time is upon us for change. The metal plates in the street and sidewalk have been replaced by smooth concrete and uninterrupted asphalt. There are spools of new cables tied to the utility poles. And most importantly of all, I now have about 20 new television stations. These aren’t actually new stations, but I hadn’t been able to get them before. HGTV. Animal Planet. Classic old tv shows. All the important cultural input - plus a network each for golf and fishing, in case I think life’s too interesting. It’s like opening the medicine cabinet and finding a big bag of cocaine. I am rationing myself.
One of the benefits I’m reaping now is a sudden influx of Queer Eye. I’m not going to get into the well-established debates as to whether it’s a good or bad thing, culturally, for this show to exist. It entertains me while I eat supper and that is sufficient for my humble purposes. BUT. An episode I recently saw did give me a bit of a strange vibe.
The straight guy on this episode was a dad with long greying hair and a full beard. He’d had the beard for 20 years or more, and the same with the hair that fell to his lumbar curve. His cute wife had called in the fab 5, but his 14 year old daughter was really running point on this remake. She was helping with the shopping, the redecorating, anything she could do. It was very sweet to see how dedicated she was to her dad - but it was clear that this was a filial matter for her, she was helping dedorkify the man who picks her up from school.
Then they cut his hair and took off his beard. Dad had been a male model in the 70s but his daughter had never seen him cleanshaven or nicely coiffed. When he was unveiled to her, the sight of her father seemed to press her eyes back into her head. It took a few moments for reality to register, and then it was spraypainted all over her face - “oh damn my dad is a total hottie.” After a few minutes she was almost drooling over him, grabbing hugs and kisses whenever she could, and at other times, gaping at him with a sudden stimulated charge that she’d only fully sublimate on horseback or a vigorous mountainbike ride. When the wife came home she reacted identically, and then, hopping up and down on his hip, told her husband, “You’re gonna get lucky tonight.” I could see the daughter react, not in disgust, but - could it have been - disappointment? That the hot new stud in her house was already taken, that her special time with that chiseled jaw and tousled hair and broad smile had come to an end? Has queer eye broken the final taboo and introduced incest to the american family’s prime-time televised life?
I think I’d better stick with old Stanford and Sons. Maybe some Barney Miller. You know, entertainment from the era of the funky themesong. Those were days when we knew what television was for - dancing. And incest stayed where it belonged - the legitimate stage.
