From: Duke of URL
Sent: Sunday, 7:32 p.m., 12 July 1998
To: Suck Team
Subject: My Career as Editor of The New Yorker
We are about to have a Suck staff meeting and "Taffy Pull." I get a message on my shoe phone to call Si Newhouse. I call him. He just pinched a loaf, wants me to flush his toilet. I race home and to the airport for a 12:45 plane to NY. So much for our team high jinks. Also for our planned weekend purple-nurple and Indian-burn tourney.
Saturday, 11 a.m. EDT.
I meet Si at his apartment. Rice paper shades with a calligraphy pattern (Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching) block out the late morning light. I read a few lines in fluent Mandarin. Si's impressed. Low music and chilled champagne. We talk for a couple hours. One thing leads to another.
Afterward, I'm running my fingers through Si's chest hair (surprisingly downy), and he says, How would you react if I offered you X? I say, Are you offering me the job? He says, What would you do for it? I say, Hand me the phone. A couple calls later, and the heads of all my immediate family members are on their way to Si's place. Si nods appreciatively. I'm catching on to the game.
Si says, All work and no play.... Let me call you up a couple bims.
Things get rough. It's hazy, there's a lot of rock. Something happens to one of the girls. Si says, Don't sweat it. He can hush it up.
He makes a proposal. I say, That sounds fine. I pusillanimously accept, but I promised Willie Brown (mayor, SF) I'd check with him before definitely accepting, and I need a night to sleep this thing off. He says, Fine.
Later, I get back to the hotel room, and there's a message: Call Si Newhouse. I call, and he says, I'm starting to feel reluctant. I think it would be better to call it off. No apology.
After some slurred pleading, I say, If it's the delay, fine, I accept your offer. Whatever offer. If it's this Web site they've got me on, I mean, Holy Jesus, it's nothing to me. I know the Web's finished, and I want out.
He says, No, it's Wolcott, he's running all over town saying Suck's rants are as tired as Village Voice chestnuts. I can't have that kind of heat on my operations.
I say, Wolcott? That skylarking lard bucket? He's been stinking up the joint for years. What kinda muscle has he got? He says, Sorry, J., he's a made guy. Through his daddy and all, but he's still a made guy. Besides, I need you to go to Miami.
On reflection (about two minutes of reflection), I realize I won't be coming back from Miami.
- - - - -
Ah, the first time! You're callow and clumsy and woefully sincere, but it doesn't even matter because you're so happy just to be experiencing the rush of something completely new. The second time, you start developing a sense of timing, a few theatrical touches designed to make your performance more memorable for all involved. By the third go-round, your repertoire of tricks and flourishes has gotten so sophisticated it rivals that of a veteran courtesan: You could be faking it or not faking it, and no one would know the difference. Ultimately, however, it doesn't really matter if Diane and Mike are the virginal vessels of unsullied exhibitionism that they purport to be or just a couple of auto-pimping flauntrepreneurs, well-drilled in the mechanics of pubic relations.
Either way, Our First Time, the public deflowering Diane and Mike have scheduled for cybercast in a few weeks, is still the most compelling demo of Web-based communal voyeurism that we've yet seen. In marrying recreational surveillance with the concept of appointment viewing - we're certainly not going to be watching Jennifer Ringley fold her laundry on 4 August at 6 p.m. PDT - it points the way toward a promising pay-per-spew future that many are already parodying and even more, no doubt, are using as the foundation for their latest business-plan pipe schemes. But while Our First Anal Sex, the first of the knockoff sites, looks like a parody, it also ups the ante for customer service. If Mike hopes to keep up his hit count, he'd better top off that first score with a back door extra point.
- - - - -
Speaking of a sex act that, in certain circles, is called "laying down the law," we've noticed that GOP leaders in Congress are preparing to plug President Clinton's very quiet executive order of last month ensuring no job discrimination against gays in federal government.
GOP homophobia is OUT there, baby! Only weeks ago, Texas Republicans barred the Log Cabin Republicans from exhibiting at its convention (party spokesman Robert Black hastened to reassure conventioneers that GOP elephant nipple rings and Judy Garland squeezebags would still be available at most exhibition booths); meanwhile, Great Thinker Trent Lott compared gays to kleptomaniacs (basing his homophobic cringing on the Bible, which includes law esoterica - outlawing the eating of pork, for example - that makes Mississippi's state laws look like the Amsterdam public charter); and James Hormel's nomination to the ambassadorship in Luxembourg is still in Senate purgatory because of the nominee's orificial preference.
Adding insult to injury, the Federal Trade Commission has launched an all-out assault on the Hormel family's signature meat byproduct. But there may be more than one way to put the "G" in GOP. With disclosures that the Queer Nation spans from Newt Gingrich's family tree to William F. Buckley's dinner A list to the most stalwart of Republican Congressmen to city halls and state legislatures all over the place, even Orrin Hatch has summoned the sense to get out of the missionary position. Well, there's a first time for everything.
- - - - -
Despite the best efforts of CBS to give the show a quiet, last rites in the nursing home, the Family Matters finale continues to draw encomia, in shades both arch and unfunny. In addition to providing a likely hiding place for all those black viewers who turned up their noses at Seinfeld, this famous-for-being-obscure show was a fascinating case study of the rich fungi that grow in the shadows of TV decadence.
Sitcom senescence tends to bring out the kind of desperate creative energy witnessed in the last season of Roseanne. It manifests itself in recklessly conceived wacky characters, graying high school students, wig-wearing evil twins, and, if you're really lucky, appearances by Ted McGinley - the one-man TV killing machine whose scythe-swinging presence presaged the deaths of Happy Days, Dynasty and Married ... with Children.
The innovation of Family Matters was that Jaleel "Urkel" White's towering, muscle-bound, falsettoing adolescence gave the show a late-period quality even in its early years. As the show sent Urkel on increasingly fatalistic "Polkapaloozas" and trotted out such Urkel alter egos as the swinging Stefan Urquelle (a sly nod to Nick Ferrari, Latka's doppelswinger in Taxi's final days), White made a sub rosa stab at becoming the black Andy Kaufman, and Family Matters became a Hubble-worthy spectacle - a sitcom whose final season lasted about eight years (including this last one, in which ABC traded it away in a Babe Ruth-style scandal).
Now it's finally over, but while the kids may have lost interest and hipsters exhausted themselves on more high-profile immolations, the real TV fans will be watching the swan song tomorrow night to find out how Urkel gets out of his wacky space shuttle adventure. It may not sound like much, but trust us, it's better than your first anal sex.
