The invention of the pant leg* in Florence in 1473 was a milestone for menswear, though little is known of the tailors, legs and circumstances behind this garment's humble origins. (*UK residents please convert "pant" to "trouser" for the correct fit.)
The following account is loosely based on something a local tour guide once told me as he pushed his way to the front of the queue in an Ufizzi pissoir, after sticking me with the bill for 37 lattés he’d bought for a busload of German soccer fans he’d left for dead along the Appian Way.
Giuseppe Giordano Pantalone, credited with the first patent for a pant leg, was not originally a tailor by trade. His father, a Genovese upskirt videographer, had made his fortune after stealing the recipe for couscous from the Berbers of North Africa, taking advantage when they were temporarily weakened by tsetse fly sickness, beri beri, invasions by Mau-Maus, and relentless reduplication.
Thereafter dubbed Pantalone the Wily, he made the most of his gains. Finding grains of couscous too hard to count for the purposes of keeping inventory, he shaped the durum semolina into longer strands that could be cut up by the customer after purchase. Busy housewives quickly realized they could save a step by boiling the strands uncut and keep their families busy twirling it on their forks, giving them more free time to indulge in their hobbies such as cleaning, sewing, grinding sausages, and staying pregnant.
Pantalone the Wily marketed his "spaghetti" (Italian for "tiny little spaghs") by launching one of the greatest ad campaigns of the Renaissance. With the personal endorsement of the Medici family, it was soon the rage among Italian soccer moms (i.e. all of them), who only used their leftover couscous to soak up vomit from the kitchen floor when the sawdust ran out.
The elder Pantalone grew fabulously wealthy, but it wasn't long before he ran afoul of Italy's notoriously strike-prone workforce. When Pantalone raised the price of the mini sausages sold in his warehouse's snack machines, his dockworkers and ship crews staged the Great Salami Sitdown Strike of the 1460s, which erupted into the Little Pepperoni Riot when a group of cops and scabs arrived on the scene. Fearing for his life, the elder Pantalone fled Genoa, leaving many a sore sailor behind. Although it grieved him to leave his hometown, he wrote later in his diary that in hindsight it was for the best, since the Genovese chicks were all crazy for Christopher Columbus anyway, and he couldn’t even get laid there if he were a solid gold brick (“uno mattone dell'oro solido”).
The elder Pantalone eventually settled in Florence, hoping to corner the Tuscan durum market and strengthen relations with his southern Italian clients. Rome was also an important market for spaghetti, since Pope Innocent IX (known as Innocent the Guilty) had used it to strangle his dissenting cardinals and became known as the Pasta Pope. The Church became one of the elder Pantalone's biggest customers, especially when it realized that spaghetti could also be eaten.
Once settled in Florence, the elder Pantalone married the daughter of a middle-class Florentine who owned Europe's first hairdressing salon chain. She soon gave birth to little Giuseppe and his nine brothers and sisters, all in one sitting according to custom.
As the youngest child of a small family (by Italian Renaissance standards), Pantalone was indulged by his parents, who shipped him off to the cheapest boarding school they could find. Unfortunately the school uniforms consisted of the standard woolen hose, which itched Pantalone like a case of full-body herpes. Thanks in part to the distraction of constantly having to scratch, he quickly tired of the Latin grammar and ruler slaps that made up his formal education, and decided to take a year off to travel Europe, until someone reminded him that he was already there.
After dropping school he apprenticed in various trades such as plumbing, cement mixing, and soothsaying, but they failed to capture his interest, his mind much too given to wandering to master a single craft. The local trade guilds soon grew tired of his attitude, and banned him from all apprenticeships within the city limits in order to prevent him from learning all of their secret handshakes.
It was at this low ebb of his life that Pantalone met the great Leonardo Da Vinci while loitering outside the Florentine town hall. Da Vinci bummed a smoke off Pantalone and the two made small talk, soon realizing that they had something in common: they were both there to pick up their unemployment checks. Da Vinci showed Pantalone where to get in line, and a bond was formed between them.
Filled with gratitude, Pantalone invited Da Vinci to his apartment, promising to show him some of his card tricks. That very evening Da Vinci knocked on the door, and after Pantalone failed three times to guess his card, Da Vinci suggested they just put on some TV and veg out.
Da Vinci, a born complainer and the biggest crybaby of the Italian Renaissance, started to moan about how his rich yet idle patrons refused to finance his groundbreaking inventions, such as the Flying Latrine and the Bottomless Diaper. He was also resentful of them for failing to appreciate his "Da Vinci Coder Ring", just because cereal boxes had not been invented yet. His maniacal ranting had a profound effect on Pantalone, though not profound enough to get him to loan Da Vinci a fiver. Pantalone was impressed, however, when Da Vinci drew him an anatomical sketch illustrating the proper way for a man to do jumping jacks in the nude. A vague idea began to form in Pantalone's mind, but he couldn't express it. He scratched at his woolly hose.
“Damn these itchy knickers,” he muttered.
Overhearing, Da Vinci immediately launched into a tirade about his own hosiery, complaining that it was impossible to find good work clothes in the late 15th century. With a series of wild hand gestures, he illustrated to Pantalone how his wool hose got terribly dirty in the workshop, and that his dry-cleaning bills were bleeding him dry (dry cleaning was prohibitively expensive during the Renaissance, especially if you needed it done by Tuesday). Unfortunately, fashion design was never Da Vinci’s forte, which is why he always sketched everyone nude. He was at the mercy of his own tailors, he said, who weren’t at all interested in meeting the requirements of a fledgling Renaissance man.
“Stitch me something practical,” he begged them. “These stupid hose are way too slimming. This is the Renaissance, for chrissakes. You should see all the fat ladies that horn-dog pope had painted on his bedroom ceiling!” But they didn’t listen.
He would plead with them some more. "These damn hose itch something fierce. Plus, if I crack a fatty, everyone can see it." But they continued to didn’t listen.
The tailors would inevitably shake their heads and offer the same response. "Be sensible, Leo. It is the fashion for a gentleman to wear hose. Is est quis is est."
Da Vinci, who remained inconvinci (as the Paduans say), related to Pantalone how he had scorned the tailors for their refusal to innovate, but despite his entreaties, the problem remained.
Right then Pantalone had a flash of inspiration, probably caused by a syphilitic Parmesan cheese he’d bought from a dealer selling knockoffs in the market square. He told Da Vinci that if he were to return sober in a fortnight, his problem would be solved.
Da Vinci left in a good mood (for Pantalone had loaned him the fiver after all), and Pantalone immediately set to work. He bought textiles from all over Europe, hired seamstresses, and rented the apartment above him to use as a studio. Working from Da Vinci’s plans, he built a replica of Da Vinci's workshop to use as a testing facility for his design, but in the process he accidentally invented the wind tunnel, combine harvester, and CAT scanner through trial and error. Then with the jumping-jacks sketch tacked up on the wall for inspiration, Pantalone set to work on a replacement for hose.
He first had to decide on a suitable fabric, and wool was out of the question. Silk was far too expensive and delicate (plus a bit fruity). Spandex was comfortable on the skin, but too tight. Then Pantalone remembered his father telling the family about the Great Salami Sitdown Strike, and how the sailors thereafter started wearing lengths of denim sailcloth to protect against attack from behind. He took a bolt of denim from his shelf and inspected it: it was a comfortable yet durable cloth that could be easily washed at home, so the choice was obvious. He’d found his material, but still needed a design.
After several grueling hours at the drafting table, Pantalone finally found his favourite pencil. From that moment he sketched day and night, even though he was out of candles. While sketching in the dark he came up with designs for the synchrotron and X-ray machine, but had no idea what they were and they ended up in his recycling bin, only to be rediscovered years later by Albert Einstein and the Marie Curie.
He decided that the most practical design would be one where two pieces of cloth were sewn together to cover both legs from the waist to the ground, allowing room for movement inside. He designed an aperture in the front that opened using a revolutionary zipper, which that would allow the wearer to undo the garment quickly and relieve himself without having to undress. Knowing that Da Vinci would want to have his other tools handy, he put loops around the waist of the garment, so that hammers and chisels could be hung there and kept within reach. He also added deep pockets on either side for keeping smaller objects such as nails, pins, bits of string, poker chips and loose change. And so, the first pant leg was born; Pantalone rather immodestly dubbed the new garment the "Pantalone," but everyone soon referred to them as "pants" and the inventor lost all royalties and subsidiary rights.
After a rigorous bout of testing in the mock workshop that resulted in several pairs being soiled beyond recognition, Pantalone realized that some sort of undergarment would have to be developed and tested for wearing beneath the pants, and chose a light cotton for the material. He thus became the inventor of y-front briefs, which served as a buffer against stains from the back-end, sparing a gentleman the embarrassment of having to explain them to the cleaning lady. They were also designed to hold the man candies snugly front and center, keeping them from dangling down either leg of the pants, which could result in dribbles and humiliating piss-dots.
Pantalone presented this new garment to Da Vinci exactly two weeks to the day after their last meeting. Da Vinci tried them on but they were too big around the waist, and when he squatted down to test them, the crack of his behind was clearly visible to Pantalone, who laughed in spite of himself. Indignant, Da Vinci glared at Pantalone and started to remove the pants, but the latter came up with a solution on the spot: he took a strip of leather, attached a buckle to one end, and threaded it through the loops around Da Vinci's waist, thus tightening the pants over his hips and preventing them from falling down.
Da Vinci now thought the pants were Da Bomba. He was pleased to note that the new garment allowed freedom of movement and protected his legs at the same time. He was especially keen on the innovation of the zipper fly, and remarked that he would sometimes labour in his workshop until he pissed himself, since he was reluctant to leave his important anti-gravity and perpetual motion machine projects in order to satisfy the demands of something as lowly as a bladder.
Impressed with the pants, Da Vinci recommended Pantalone to his buddy the Duke of Padua, who offered him a job. In the duke's court Pantalone served as technical advisor in all practical matters, bearing the title of Chamberlain of the Waist-Down.
Although his new position afforded him many opportunities, Pantalone failed to produce any new innovations. Some speculate that his cushy new job caused him to lose the passionate spark of desperation that motivated him. Others claim Pantalone was nothing more than a one-hit wonder, even suggesting that Da Vinci had been the real inventor of pants but let Pantalone take credit because he didn’t want to be known as “that pants guy”. Either way, Pantalone was jailed by the duke after just two months on the job for leaving his dirty undercrackers lying around the castle.
Despite the ignoble fate of the namesake of the pant leg, the citizens of Florence put up a memorial plaque over the door of his former residence. Though the house and plaque were bulldozed to make room for the Enlightenment, and his name only survives in abbreviated form, Pantalone is still resented by the descendants of Da Vinci's stubborn tailors. To this day, they resist all innovation in menswear, and never listen to anything their customers want done with their pants, preferring instead to tailor them in the ugliest fashion possible: baggy, high up at the hips, buckled several times at the ankle, and a foot wide at the bottom with great ugly cuffs sewed on with nylon thread. Despite these drawbacks, the pant leg has so thoroughly outpaced its rivals that hose are now worn only by men on ballet stages or in seedy motel rooms.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Probing Probability
WARNING: CORNBALL JOKES. Proceed with caution.
I like submarine sandwiches, even though I find it hard to eat underwater. Nyuck-fucking-nyuck.
Every time I go to Subway, I get the same thing: botulism. And the vehicle of transmission is always a footlong-veggie-and-cheese-on-whole-wheat-bread-with-everything-except-green-peppers-and-southwest-chipotle-sauce. Today, for some reason, they charge me almost a buck more for it than usual. $6.49? If I want to get gouged, I'll go to Quizno's.
As if that weren't bad enough, the bun's the stalest I've ever had from any Subway outlet (and I've eaten at the ones along Mississippi highways in the hottest and darkest of August nights), but to add injury to insult, there's a rock in the sandwich. Not a small piece of cooked bone, but a rock. It could have been igneous, basalt or granite, but I dropped it before I could take it down to the Earth Sciences building at the ol' alma mater for a thorough testing. I finished the rest of the sandwich in slow motion, working at it with the caution of a mine sweeper.
At least I didn't chomp down hard on it like I did a few months ago, when I crunched a rock in my felafel from Laila's and almost broke a molar. What pisses me off the most about finding a bonus in my fast food isn't so much the dental damage, but the fact that I can't ever bite into something valuable for a change, like a gold doubloon, or the Hope diamond, or one of the many pairs of sunglasses I've lost. In a universe where anything is possible, why does it always have to be a rock?
I like submarine sandwiches, even though I find it hard to eat underwater. Nyuck-fucking-nyuck.
Every time I go to Subway, I get the same thing: botulism. And the vehicle of transmission is always a footlong-veggie-and-cheese-on-whole-wheat-bread-with-everything-except-green-peppers-and-southwest-chipotle-sauce. Today, for some reason, they charge me almost a buck more for it than usual. $6.49? If I want to get gouged, I'll go to Quizno's.
As if that weren't bad enough, the bun's the stalest I've ever had from any Subway outlet (and I've eaten at the ones along Mississippi highways in the hottest and darkest of August nights), but to add injury to insult, there's a rock in the sandwich. Not a small piece of cooked bone, but a rock. It could have been igneous, basalt or granite, but I dropped it before I could take it down to the Earth Sciences building at the ol' alma mater for a thorough testing. I finished the rest of the sandwich in slow motion, working at it with the caution of a mine sweeper.
At least I didn't chomp down hard on it like I did a few months ago, when I crunched a rock in my felafel from Laila's and almost broke a molar. What pisses me off the most about finding a bonus in my fast food isn't so much the dental damage, but the fact that I can't ever bite into something valuable for a change, like a gold doubloon, or the Hope diamond, or one of the many pairs of sunglasses I've lost. In a universe where anything is possible, why does it always have to be a rock?
Friday, August 14, 2009
Ad for a New Product
Are you tired of the boring old products and services that you're expected to pay for with your hard-earned dollar? Do you find it hard to maintain an indulgent lifestyle with the rising cost of living? Are you tired of being told to spend money you don’t have to keep the economy afloat, as if it’s your responsibility?
Well, have we got the product for you: Nothing! That’s right, good old-fashions nothing at all! Nada, zip, zero, zilch. A fucking goose egg.*
Unlike things, nothing is easy to use. It has no moving parts and requires no complicated instructions, batteries, or packaging. Nothing is kind to the environment, soft on hands, hypo-allergenic and suitable for vegetarians.
Just think of the many advantages nothing brings:
-No down payment
-No interest
-No monthly fees
-Zero percent financing
-No salesman will call
-No solicitations
-No cancellation fees
-No flyers and no junk mail, which means no sweepstakes and no Ed McMahon
-You will not be entered in a draw where you will not be one of ten lucky winners.
Here are some of nothing’s many useless features: it’s cordless, odorless, unscented, frost-free, sugarless, and seamless. Nothing contains no fat, no calories, no artificial flavors or colors, no preservatives, and no polychlorinated biphenyl tetrahydrazine alkaloids.
Also, you might be surprised to learn that nothing lasts forever, travels faster than the speed of light, and is certain. There's simply nothing like it (except itself).
Even if you don’t act now, nothing will be shipped straight to your door**, with no charges billed to your credit card and no obligation. And remember: if you are not completely satisfied, simply do nothing before the 30-day trial period expires, and you will be refunded the full purchase price, with no red tape and no questions asked.
Nothing: Because without it, there’d be no place to put anything.
(*Offer not valid anywhere.)
(**Please allow six to eight weeks for non-delivery.)
Well, have we got the product for you: Nothing! That’s right, good old-fashions nothing at all! Nada, zip, zero, zilch. A fucking goose egg.*
Unlike things, nothing is easy to use. It has no moving parts and requires no complicated instructions, batteries, or packaging. Nothing is kind to the environment, soft on hands, hypo-allergenic and suitable for vegetarians.
Just think of the many advantages nothing brings:
-No down payment
-No interest
-No monthly fees
-Zero percent financing
-No salesman will call
-No solicitations
-No cancellation fees
-No flyers and no junk mail, which means no sweepstakes and no Ed McMahon
-You will not be entered in a draw where you will not be one of ten lucky winners.
Here are some of nothing’s many useless features: it’s cordless, odorless, unscented, frost-free, sugarless, and seamless. Nothing contains no fat, no calories, no artificial flavors or colors, no preservatives, and no polychlorinated biphenyl tetrahydrazine alkaloids.
Also, you might be surprised to learn that nothing lasts forever, travels faster than the speed of light, and is certain. There's simply nothing like it (except itself).
Even if you don’t act now, nothing will be shipped straight to your door**, with no charges billed to your credit card and no obligation. And remember: if you are not completely satisfied, simply do nothing before the 30-day trial period expires, and you will be refunded the full purchase price, with no red tape and no questions asked.
Nothing: Because without it, there’d be no place to put anything.
(*Offer not valid anywhere.)
(**Please allow six to eight weeks for non-delivery.)
Disgraceland: Taking Care of Your Cash in a Flash
Tens of thousands of years from now, if there’s still a human race, Elvis Presley will be the Christ of his own religion. The language he sang in will be dead, none of his recordings will survive, and scholars will chuckle at the Brylcreemed plebs who’ll anxiously expect his Second Comeback. What’s more (if the Christ analogy is anything to go by), the King of Hips will be the bedrock of an economic empire that will make the Catholic Church look like a penny-ante poker ring.
And if there’s ever to be an Elvis Vatican, it’s Graceland, the country estate now visited by over 600,000 of the faithful every year. Graceland is the most unashamed tourist trap money has ever devised, the home that Elvis bought with all that teenage-girl allowance money. I came across the place on a driving trip to New Orleans with my German buddy Gerhardt, and I generally use the excuse that mental exhaustion combined with the August heat of Tennessee forced us off the highway and onto Elvis Presley Boulevard.
Let's get one thing straight: the people who turned Graceland into a shrine to the Presley godhead had the same sense of humility as the Egyptian pharaohs. Nanoscopic details of Elvis' life cover the walls of the place like the hieroglyphics of King Tut's tomb, and like the Tut Hut, Graceland also carries a curse (courtesy of P.T. Barnum) that decrees that any fool to cross its threshold will be separated from his money faster than you can say "twenty-dollar hackeysack". Visiting the Graceland complex is like stepping into a financial punji trap.
Among the various sites to see were the Elvis souvenir shop (although we saw better-quality Elvis crap for sale in rest-stops in Kentucky), the Elvis car museum (a treasure trove of Cadillacs and sparkly dune buggies), and the "Lisa Marie" (his private jet, not Michael Jackson's estranged wife). The main prize of course was the mansion itself, which was less of a mansion than a suburban bungalow converted to full-time rumpus room by one of humanity’s most committed kooks.
Being the gape-mouthed shmucks that we were, Gerhardt and I shelled out a tenner apiece for the mansion tour (since then the price has been upped to $16). They give you a tape recorder with headphones, and the idea is that you listen to the tape and follow the bouncing ball as you walk around the house. Unfortunately, the bastards who devised this scheme must have been high on Percodan while reading over the blueprints, because I ended up gawking at the shooting range while being told about the squash court in ten languages, making it impossible to rewind the thing to get back to the right spot.
The recording featured colour commentary by none other than Mrs. Priscilla Presley herself, queen by default (and dee-vorce) over this here land that grace forgot. Her saccharine-sweet homage to the divorced King's memory practically clogged the gears on the tape machine with syrupy, lucre-fuelled gratitude. All those posthumous royalty cheques have turned the ex-Mrs. Presley into the most doting biographer Elvis ever had – you'd never suspect that they so much as flung a paper plate at one another during their three-odd years of wedded bliss. I submit to the jury that whatever beef she had with the Sideburned One, she sure got her own back on him by turning his house into a veritable money vacuum: while recording this tripe, they probably had to stop every five minutes so Prissy could laugh her way to the bank and back.
As might be expected, the details on the cassette were bland, dealing with only the most stereotypical Kingly trivia:
"Here's where Elvis watched his three TVs."
(No mention of him shooting the screens in with his Colt .45 when he saw the Beatles perform on Captain Kangaroo.)
"Here's where Elvis played piano the night he died."
(A bowlderized account of his death, purged of all the nasty details. Plenty of proof when you think of it that Elvis definitely bought his ticket for real that night: if one were to concoct a phony death that was sure to make newspaper headlines across the globe, who the hell would rubber-stamp a scenario picturing himself naked on the toilet, straining a tenaciously turgid turd?).
"Elvis is seen here receiving an award from President Nixon."
(Gadzooks, Beelzebub himself, and they’re politely shaking hands! This from the young rebel who once gave Ed Sullivan harrumphing fits with his low-angle loin-lashing?).
For your ten bucks you get no explanation why Elvis' motto in later years was "Takin' Care of Business in a Flash". Could it have been the prescription that kept him perky the night he bit the big one whilst throttling a Mars bar on the crapper at dawn? Of course not; for the sake of the little old ladies in tennis shoes who visit Graceland, that didn't really happen. He was kept awake by a fascinating article in Better Homes & Gardens and got so excited about interlocking bricks that his stool was squeezed up his aorta, causing heart failure.
Tabloid voyeur that I am, I just wanted to see some evidence of the King's legendary sexual je ne sais quoi, but we didn't even get a peek at the bedroom where in all likelihood Elvis first introduced Priscilla to the contents of his trousers. Though she didn't mind putting every detail of Elvis’ life on display for the passing hoi polloi, no amount of long green could get her to expose those saucy details on that cassette. There’s nothing worse than a zip-lipped strumpet, I say.
Since the bedroom was a no-pry-zone, the best part of the tour was the gallery where they displayed all the useless shit that Elvis collected over the years. Imagine if someone took everything out of your closets and drawers and put it up in display cases, except that instead of boring old you, you're Elvis, and not only are you as weird as Crazy King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but you've got half the taste of that Eurotrash pretender and twice the cash. Elvis' guns, police badges, booty-whompin' karate outfits, jumpsuits, guitars, and just about every piece of paper he ever touched were packed inside a dark maze that could give a minotaur a headache. The most striking piece was an oil painting done by a devoted fan, depicting a highly homo-eroticized Presley in a white silk outfit with matching scarf around his neck, skin glistening like olive oil, gazing benevolently down upon the viewer with the slightest hint of a pout on his Statue of Liberty lips, like some gay saint. In the Elvis Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, the ceiling was well taken care of.
After the tour we checked out the car museum, filled with Elvis’ collection of automobiles, motorcycles and other internally combusting toys. Seems the King was queer for anything gas-powered, whether it was a barbecue, lawnmower, or his private jet. There was a separate tour of the plane too, but at that point, we figured that Priscilla and her battalion of lawyers had gotten enough money out of us already, so we split for cheaper climes.
The Graceland Tour does much to explain why Elvis considered his own life the embodiment of the American Dream. Here was a simple Tennessee cracker with no work skills beyond driving a truck, but thanks to his ability to work girls up into a lather, the good life was his: watching three TVs at once, eating a half-pound of bacon for breakfast with a maid to cook it for him, giving away cars as gifts, and living the spoiled existence of an entertainment aristocrat. Whether intentional or not, the Graceland experience drove the point home minute-by-minute. In ten thousand years people will still love Elvis, and Graceland will still love their money.
So we pulled out of the parking lot that evening a bit poorer and none the wiser. It was already 8 p.m., and Sun Records was most likely closed to the gawking public. Besides, THE UNQUESTIONABLE LAW OF THE ROAD said we had to reach New Orleans that evening. With Gerhardt behind the wheel and me behind a dozen Budweisers, we burned down Highway 51.
Even on the Interstate at night, we noticed the difference between dusty old cornbread Tennessee and steamy Mississippi. Hours after leaving Graceland, tired from too much diuretic American beer, I was mumbling something Catholic in my stupor when Gerhardt woke me up with "Hey man, we're in Mississippi. Don't talk to me about Lourdes", which sounded funny in his Kolonel Klink accent. Mississippi! Poorest and most backward state in the Union; home of countless bluesmen and women without whose influence Elvis would have remained a truck-driving corn-cracker 'til the day he died. “Here's where it all began,” as them what writes the liner notes to the records say.
It was time to pay the water bill on that Budweiser, so we pulled off the highway on an exit that was miraculously free of McDonald's restaurants and bright neon gas stations. It was a small, unlit road, leading towards what sounded like Biblically-proportioned plagues of insects and frogs. The chorus of swamp life woke us up to the fact that we were now, finally, knee-deep in what could be called the South. This was most definitely getting closer to IT.
And if there’s ever to be an Elvis Vatican, it’s Graceland, the country estate now visited by over 600,000 of the faithful every year. Graceland is the most unashamed tourist trap money has ever devised, the home that Elvis bought with all that teenage-girl allowance money. I came across the place on a driving trip to New Orleans with my German buddy Gerhardt, and I generally use the excuse that mental exhaustion combined with the August heat of Tennessee forced us off the highway and onto Elvis Presley Boulevard.
Let's get one thing straight: the people who turned Graceland into a shrine to the Presley godhead had the same sense of humility as the Egyptian pharaohs. Nanoscopic details of Elvis' life cover the walls of the place like the hieroglyphics of King Tut's tomb, and like the Tut Hut, Graceland also carries a curse (courtesy of P.T. Barnum) that decrees that any fool to cross its threshold will be separated from his money faster than you can say "twenty-dollar hackeysack". Visiting the Graceland complex is like stepping into a financial punji trap.
Among the various sites to see were the Elvis souvenir shop (although we saw better-quality Elvis crap for sale in rest-stops in Kentucky), the Elvis car museum (a treasure trove of Cadillacs and sparkly dune buggies), and the "Lisa Marie" (his private jet, not Michael Jackson's estranged wife). The main prize of course was the mansion itself, which was less of a mansion than a suburban bungalow converted to full-time rumpus room by one of humanity’s most committed kooks.
Being the gape-mouthed shmucks that we were, Gerhardt and I shelled out a tenner apiece for the mansion tour (since then the price has been upped to $16). They give you a tape recorder with headphones, and the idea is that you listen to the tape and follow the bouncing ball as you walk around the house. Unfortunately, the bastards who devised this scheme must have been high on Percodan while reading over the blueprints, because I ended up gawking at the shooting range while being told about the squash court in ten languages, making it impossible to rewind the thing to get back to the right spot.
The recording featured colour commentary by none other than Mrs. Priscilla Presley herself, queen by default (and dee-vorce) over this here land that grace forgot. Her saccharine-sweet homage to the divorced King's memory practically clogged the gears on the tape machine with syrupy, lucre-fuelled gratitude. All those posthumous royalty cheques have turned the ex-Mrs. Presley into the most doting biographer Elvis ever had – you'd never suspect that they so much as flung a paper plate at one another during their three-odd years of wedded bliss. I submit to the jury that whatever beef she had with the Sideburned One, she sure got her own back on him by turning his house into a veritable money vacuum: while recording this tripe, they probably had to stop every five minutes so Prissy could laugh her way to the bank and back.
As might be expected, the details on the cassette were bland, dealing with only the most stereotypical Kingly trivia:
"Here's where Elvis watched his three TVs."
(No mention of him shooting the screens in with his Colt .45 when he saw the Beatles perform on Captain Kangaroo.)
"Here's where Elvis played piano the night he died."
(A bowlderized account of his death, purged of all the nasty details. Plenty of proof when you think of it that Elvis definitely bought his ticket for real that night: if one were to concoct a phony death that was sure to make newspaper headlines across the globe, who the hell would rubber-stamp a scenario picturing himself naked on the toilet, straining a tenaciously turgid turd?).
"Elvis is seen here receiving an award from President Nixon."
(Gadzooks, Beelzebub himself, and they’re politely shaking hands! This from the young rebel who once gave Ed Sullivan harrumphing fits with his low-angle loin-lashing?).
For your ten bucks you get no explanation why Elvis' motto in later years was "Takin' Care of Business in a Flash". Could it have been the prescription that kept him perky the night he bit the big one whilst throttling a Mars bar on the crapper at dawn? Of course not; for the sake of the little old ladies in tennis shoes who visit Graceland, that didn't really happen. He was kept awake by a fascinating article in Better Homes & Gardens and got so excited about interlocking bricks that his stool was squeezed up his aorta, causing heart failure.
Tabloid voyeur that I am, I just wanted to see some evidence of the King's legendary sexual je ne sais quoi, but we didn't even get a peek at the bedroom where in all likelihood Elvis first introduced Priscilla to the contents of his trousers. Though she didn't mind putting every detail of Elvis’ life on display for the passing hoi polloi, no amount of long green could get her to expose those saucy details on that cassette. There’s nothing worse than a zip-lipped strumpet, I say.
Since the bedroom was a no-pry-zone, the best part of the tour was the gallery where they displayed all the useless shit that Elvis collected over the years. Imagine if someone took everything out of your closets and drawers and put it up in display cases, except that instead of boring old you, you're Elvis, and not only are you as weird as Crazy King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but you've got half the taste of that Eurotrash pretender and twice the cash. Elvis' guns, police badges, booty-whompin' karate outfits, jumpsuits, guitars, and just about every piece of paper he ever touched were packed inside a dark maze that could give a minotaur a headache. The most striking piece was an oil painting done by a devoted fan, depicting a highly homo-eroticized Presley in a white silk outfit with matching scarf around his neck, skin glistening like olive oil, gazing benevolently down upon the viewer with the slightest hint of a pout on his Statue of Liberty lips, like some gay saint. In the Elvis Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, the ceiling was well taken care of.
After the tour we checked out the car museum, filled with Elvis’ collection of automobiles, motorcycles and other internally combusting toys. Seems the King was queer for anything gas-powered, whether it was a barbecue, lawnmower, or his private jet. There was a separate tour of the plane too, but at that point, we figured that Priscilla and her battalion of lawyers had gotten enough money out of us already, so we split for cheaper climes.
The Graceland Tour does much to explain why Elvis considered his own life the embodiment of the American Dream. Here was a simple Tennessee cracker with no work skills beyond driving a truck, but thanks to his ability to work girls up into a lather, the good life was his: watching three TVs at once, eating a half-pound of bacon for breakfast with a maid to cook it for him, giving away cars as gifts, and living the spoiled existence of an entertainment aristocrat. Whether intentional or not, the Graceland experience drove the point home minute-by-minute. In ten thousand years people will still love Elvis, and Graceland will still love their money.
So we pulled out of the parking lot that evening a bit poorer and none the wiser. It was already 8 p.m., and Sun Records was most likely closed to the gawking public. Besides, THE UNQUESTIONABLE LAW OF THE ROAD said we had to reach New Orleans that evening. With Gerhardt behind the wheel and me behind a dozen Budweisers, we burned down Highway 51.
Even on the Interstate at night, we noticed the difference between dusty old cornbread Tennessee and steamy Mississippi. Hours after leaving Graceland, tired from too much diuretic American beer, I was mumbling something Catholic in my stupor when Gerhardt woke me up with "Hey man, we're in Mississippi. Don't talk to me about Lourdes", which sounded funny in his Kolonel Klink accent. Mississippi! Poorest and most backward state in the Union; home of countless bluesmen and women without whose influence Elvis would have remained a truck-driving corn-cracker 'til the day he died. “Here's where it all began,” as them what writes the liner notes to the records say.
It was time to pay the water bill on that Budweiser, so we pulled off the highway on an exit that was miraculously free of McDonald's restaurants and bright neon gas stations. It was a small, unlit road, leading towards what sounded like Biblically-proportioned plagues of insects and frogs. The chorus of swamp life woke us up to the fact that we were now, finally, knee-deep in what could be called the South. This was most definitely getting closer to IT.
A K9 Konundrum
In Liverpool, an ornery schnauzer
Fought a scouser dog named Bowzer
"Is it safe to come down now, sir?
They both made off with my trousers."
Fought a scouser dog named Bowzer
"Is it safe to come down now, sir?
They both made off with my trousers."
The Dunwich Library Horror
"The shelves were stacked with leathery tomes of arcane lore, each filled with the treacherous machinations of vilest sorcery, the noisome incantations and abominated formulae amassed across the chasm of the aeons by the evil servants of Cthulhu. Then, among all these poisonous volumes, my eyes fell on the book that glaciated the innermost core of my very being: it was a perfectly preserved copy of Wormius’ Latin translation of the dreaded Necronomicon, the work of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. The very sight of the cursed book filled me with a remorse from which I would never be redeemed. It was two weeks overdue!"
Verbal Dumping Ground
I was out for coffee with the klatch gang this afternoon: the lovely and provocative Mysteene, who daylights as a stenographer but klieglights as a prestidigitator's assistant, and the Commisioner, who inadvertently provided me with a title for this blog while describing what a recent photo of Madonna's gristly dorsal musculature reminded him of: a sack of said reptiles.
While no herpetologist myself, I'm keen on all creatures great and small, though I occasionally snack on some of them. (Apologies to the salmon and, generally, to all animals unwillingly kebab'ed and be'cued.) And while I'm tripping the confessional trestle, I'll admit that I set up this page to use as a dumping ground for scribblings that otherwise had no fixed address.
Frankly, they had nowhere else to go.
-Rayomatic
While no herpetologist myself, I'm keen on all creatures great and small, though I occasionally snack on some of them. (Apologies to the salmon and, generally, to all animals unwillingly kebab'ed and be'cued.) And while I'm tripping the confessional trestle, I'll admit that I set up this page to use as a dumping ground for scribblings that otherwise had no fixed address.
Frankly, they had nowhere else to go.
-Rayomatic
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
