Obviously, my week-long fugue here reveals a subconscious resistance to the topic I have to address now, but only because I have so much love invested in the crucial second part of the Clown Ministry Video. The payoff. The kickback. The point at which the narrative of the clown mission reaches its inciting incident. The moment when pious but directionless clowns reach tha crossroads and begin tha journey.

They choose “Nursing Home” and it’s oh so clearly the correct decision, at least of the three choices they could see with the middle whiteface sprite blocking all other options.

The only clown who ever seems to choose the third from the bottom is Ronald McDonald.

(Occasionally Ron’ll find himself on the losing end of an argument with a disgruntled subchapter vee-pee dressed in a cow outfit who, when curtly reminded by McDonald that hamburgers do, in fact, grow on trees, will find his red nose meeting the business end of a tofu cream pie.)

The video’s guru lists about 73 reasons why nursing homes make the best location for clowns to make their congregative cotillion society debut, but only three of them don’t involve the sad-but-true observation that elderly people need someone to haul their ashes. Those non-bootylicious reason are, and here I add my own words:

1. They have cataracts and their eyes look at clown make-up and see real Jell-O on tonight’s menu instead of Desserta imitation gelatin.

2. They’re dehydrated and 400cc of seltzer water helps get the daily pill regiment down (or up) easy.

3. They are routinely confusing the Bible with the Shrine Circus, and need to be reminded that not all parables are accompanied by Sousa. Sometimes they sound like Ligeti. Or women’s roller derby.

Oh, I guess there is actually a fourth reason. Clowns, as I said before, remind everyone that there’s always something worse than being what you are. You could be a clown. Though most clowns are fully capable of touching themselves without outside altruism.

(In saying that, I’m obliged to acknowledge the video guide’s dissenting opinion on clown onanism .)

Old people’s energy levels ain’t what she used to be, but they still find a way to mysteriously usurp outside energy, and, according to the guide, clowns’ levels are notoriously easy to access . Be sure to tote Flava Flav in your clown posse.

Speaking of clown posses, this segment of the video comes with probably the single most useful piece of wisdom: Do not stand in a large cluster of clowns.

Witness what effect such a spectacle can have on the delicate constitutions of the unsuspecting elder.

Just because there’s so much ground to cover, here’s the first part of the nursing home segment in its partial entirety. Take notes if necessary.

Back to touching… Rule number 5 of the remaining 68: Always make a memorable entrance.

Another benefit of plying your goofy, religious trade in nursing homes: you can never tell if your subjects are smiling or dying of horror.

Usually the distinction gets even more cloudy when you invade the personal bubble for more of that essential touching.

Happiness or death, who can say? Administer the last rites anyway.

The best thing about clown liturgy is that it means nothing, like the 2005 revision of the ELCA statement on human sexuality, drafted so that Lutherans could sound it from the hills that they are, in fact, aware of the concept that homosexuals exist. But what more can you expect from a doctrine that results in convoluted streams of almost-consciousness like this.

Or this.

The centrality of the strident paradox in Lutheranism is what I hold primarily responsible for those prodigious moments when I bore anyone foolish enough to listen to me with statements like “well A is true, but then again the opposite of A is also true,” feigning profundity, masking the fact that I don’t know how to string together theorem with proof. Perhaps you’ve seen me on my weekly television show?

Maybe I’m just scatterbrained as a result of my time spent incarcerated in a nursing home. Whenever clowns came mounting each other at my door, I’d always beg them to touch me, but upon hearing my request, they’d always pull away saying “Whoa! Our instruction video told us we weren’t supposed to fulfill any of your requests.” I tried reverse psychology, asking them to not kidnap me and to not brain me over the head with stolen bowling trophies. Sure enough…

The woman in this video is way more lucky. She gets invited to pull the whiteface’s floppy handkerchief phallus…

What’s the surprise in that sock? Healing, Gaye-style.

A clown condom.

I can feel her trembling excitement vicariously.

And, like her, I’d probably peak prematurely too.

Again, because the density of the text is, in this case, too heady to be summarized in pictures and captions, here’s the second part of the nursing home segment. Take aphrodisiacs if necessary.

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I couldn’t help but notice that most of the traffic on this blog today came from searches adamantly inquiring “is Evan Lysacek homosexual” or variations on that theme. Maybe we can double those digits by examining the question just a little further.

While watching the free skate competition this evening, I kept qualifying my unpopular “crush” on Johnny Weir to my skeptical female roommate with the explanation that Mickey Mouse-sporting Weir would be the type of person I’d have a quick, unabandoned one-off with before seriously pursuing a relationship with someone more sensitive, low key and introspective like Lysacek. (I almost went with the third American candidate Matt Savoie, only he looks a little bit more the type that would be too sensitive to my needs… putting a kettle of rose-hip tea on after sex and asking “where are you right now” at least five times before I could actually finish my cup. Sweet guy, I suspect, but I’m sure he’d be Rose Nylund oblivious every time I tried to crack Dorothy Szbornak.)

But after his post-skate interview, I was sorry to say that I couldn’t detect so much as a trace of gay in the guy’s DNA. I remarked to my roommate, “he’s totally the guy the rest of the dudes on the figure skating circuit are too busy wishing were gay to actually date each other.” (Then again, my frequencies might’ve still been jammed trying to process the freakish flexibility of Canadian Shawn Sawyer.) Lysacek’s responses to “how! excited! were! you!” questions were the precise opposite of Weir’s Xtina-trained pssh-anah-nah-nah fabulocity. Listening to a few examples taken from earlier interview video seem to corroborate his apparent hetero-vague status, with reservations.

Lysacek exhibit #1

Though the totally pansy “might’s well learn” that follows “might’s well have fun” at the coda gives me a little bit of hope, this is otherwise the sound byte of a snowboarder. The haze of concealed spliff aroma practically permeate each “kinda.” “I have kinda a newfound respect…” Nope, not even one single Weir-like “totally” balanced on that tongue.

Lysacek exhibit #2

I like the lilting melody he gives to his impersonation of what people always say to him: “what’s your goal this year, what’s your dream for the Olympics?” Additionally, the sensitivity to poetic cadence compels him to add the third, recapitulatory “what is your Olympic dream?” Beautiful segueway into his narrative imagery of him sitting at home, in complete awe of Sarah Hughes. I can see him lying on the ground, head resting in his hands and legs crossed in the air behind him… his dad in an A-shirt or string-vest, nursing a beer and trying to break through the communication barrier with his burgeoning rink fairy by grunting “That Sarah Hughes, eh. She’s… she’s got a lot of spunk, huh?” And yet, Lysacek doesn’t ever reveal any particular extra emotional attachment to Hughes. That’s another mark in the hetero column. Only gay figure skating junkies would ever actually go from respectful of Hughes achievement to actually creaming over her.

Lysacek exhibit #3

“A lot of bit taller”?! If it weren’t a coy boast — a blatant reminder to everyone else that “hey, when you fall, your ass only has to fall half as far as mine” — this coy bit of linguistic byplay (and the audible smirk on his face) is the most suspect bit of dialogue I’ve heard in my terse research. Then again, he has to go and undercut it by wrapping up his own self-assessment of his adjusted choreography with — not “beautiful,” not “elegant,” not “unique” — “good.”

“Good”? I give up. Bode probably gives sprightlier sound bites. So, on the off chance that one of the people googling their way here might actually be Evan Lysacek himself, know this much, dude. I stand firmly convinced that you are as straight as male figure skaters come. So go forth into the Olympic village and its endless supplies of condoms and have fun. And learn.

Then again, I won’t discount the possibility that Lysacek’s entirely speculative gayness is deeply encoded in his ice-dancing DNA and is subconsciously encoded deep within his vernacular. Maybe if I asked the kid from Code Unknown for a little help figuring out the patterns…

Lysacek Code Revealed

Ooh, someone who’ll talk down to you? I knew he had it in him, that little olive-skinned, red-handkerchiefed, matador outfit-clad bit of rough trade.

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At this, the tail end of Valentine’s Day (i.e. the hour when I really do wish I had someone to say I love until I shrug and fall asleep), I could send out mutiple mash notes to practically every male figure skater on the ice tonight, including stumpy Stefan Lindemann from Germany with those piercing Aryan eyes, Yevgeny Plushenko and (poor, poor) Evan Lysacek and their shared Adrian Brody noses, Brian Joubert’s whole Marty McFly as 007 schtick, and finally Johnny “I don’t care what people think of me especially if they’re from the Republican South where they should be scared of me” Weir (who continues to execute the most fascinatingly elongated coming out flourish yet even halfway attempted during a figure skating career, much less during the career’s waxing end). And I probably would, too, if only as something of a “fuck off” to all the deluded “I’m a man’s man” fags out there who are pretending to be attracted to the tanking Bode “Russell Crowe’s paunch” Miller. C’mon, dudes! There’s no shame in admitting that twink faces atop taut, toned physiques is an ideal fantasy combination (indeed, it’s like one of the only events where you even get to see the athlete’s faces). Throw choreography into the mix, and you can keep your breakneck downhill speedsters. Sure, I’m being a little shallow in saying it, but I don’t really want my dessert to taste like beer gut. (That said, reason number one that Johnny Weir is only a fantasy crush as opposed to a legitimate celebrity crush: his awful, juvenile taste in just about everything.)

My appreciation for flexibility, the athletic approximation of grace and carnal androgyny can probably be traced to the occasional male dancers who would (very) occasionally take the stage at my sisters’ dance competitions. Then again, it could be traced to Bess Motta, the host of the popular early ’80s aerobics TV show :20 Minute Workout.

She sort of synthesized Jane Fonda’s workout tape prototype with her Barbarella past, and anticipated Sigourney Weaver’s tough, leathery sexuality in Aliens. Not surprisingly, Bess’s one significant film role was as Linda Hamilton’s roommate in The Terminator. She probably helped Linda tousle her hair between takes.

Bess was both a hard-ass and completely cordial.

It was like she was daring all the pear-shaped housewives who’d invariably quit at minute five or six to hate her enthusiasm…

Her flexibility…

Her confident smirk…

Did I mention her flexibility?

Her grotesque, frightening flexibility?

Peek-a-boo!

Bess’s mane was fierce.

But, at the same time, it had a soft, pliable Kelly Lebrock quality. She could kick your flabby ass and still coo “Don’t hate me because I can kiss my kneecaps.”

“Don’t hate me just because I can channel Patrice Rushen imitating Bo Derek on command.”

“It don’t even matter. Your catty insults just roll off my back. See how they’re rolling off?”

Bess was always flanked by two back-up, er, exercisers, who were always ready to step in if someone stepped off.

Even if they don’t, on closer inspection, incite much fear. Alison…

… sort of resembles what JonBenet Ramsey might’ve looked like had she not been been sent to sing with the angels in heaven.

And Michelle…

… was probably one of those girls that got canned after the first series of The Facts of Life. She’s practically the result of a gene-splice between Blair and Natalie. Those pigtails!

They might have Bess’s back… in Michelle’s case, literally:

But you can’t be as rubber-perfect as Bess without inviting a touch of animosity. Pictures can only go so far in this case, so I’ve uploaded a five minute clip from the video workout to illuminate some of the finer points of Bess’s supple delivery.

There’s a blink-and-miss-it moment of awesome bitchery in there, just a bit past the halfway mark, right at the point where they switch to their left legs. Michelle is busy mugging for the camera when Bess barks out a harsh, corrective directive: “Small, tight moves! Don’t throw that leg, switch tight.” The endlessly, hypnotically circling camera just barely catches the tail end of Bess turning her head coolly away from her upbraided lackey, her eyes glinting with the roar of a lioness, queen of her pride. Without skipping a beat, Bess finishes craning her head back the “front” and continues counting off directions while Michelle’s plastic grin is still melting into total embarrassed fury. The next three pans past Michelle on her right side repeat the same facial morph: giving the camera face and then giving Bess’s ass lip. Just examine the evidence written all over this donkey-punched face.

You don’t want to get on Bess’s bad side. Then again, maybe Michelle just takes it all too seriously. Some of Bess’s commands can tend to sound a little gruff.

Maybe it’s all that pounding Moroder-by-way-of-Vangelis music going on behind her. She’s got the music in her so much that she sings along throughout her instructions, making up cute little couplets right off the curly top of her head.

A sample of Bess’s uptempo Greatest Hits:

01. “Release it to the single, take it left, right… ah-left and right.”

02. “In and back and in and back, all the way, stomach tight. Exhale! Exhale! Don’t stop breathing.”

03. “And don’t you stop your breathing come on stomach tight and let it straighten don’t forget to breathe stay with me four more… ah-uh.”

04. “Front front side side, front… front… and side… and side.”

05. “Two, and one-uh-uh whoa!”

She writes songs about breathing like Tom Waits wrote songs about drinking or like Rusty Warren wrote songs about her knockers. Clearly her gifts were suited to disco diva paces…

… though she could turn out a stunning ballad during the cool down when the mood struck her.

But that Vicki Sue Robinson itch in her throat can’t be denied. She actually might be the first female MC.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the ingenious staging of director Ron Harris (who later lost his capacity for subtlety when he created Totally Nude Aerobics), who knew well enough not to complicate a simple formula: Bess, hi-NRG-lite, jumpsuits, sneakers, leg-warmers. His team of set designers and camera operators maximize that line-up by minimizing everything else. But it’s also the best representation of that ’80s sort of horny, cosmopolitan fascism, a body-improving regiment whose results were secondary to the self-inflicted punishment. Occasionally, the junction of Fosse and Triumph of the Will would reach almost insane, heady levels of gyno-angular abstraction.

Is it just me, or is the gleaming, lightly-reflective white set is the virtual prototype for every flashy, oversexed piece of Apple Computer equipment on the market today?

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I could watch and listen to the deaf child’s emphatic summation at the very end of Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown over and over. In fact, I just did. Ten, twenty times. The more I observed his expressive cues and listened to the untethered shards of vocal interjections, the more clear Haneke’s “incomplete tales” became. I’ll hand it over to him.

Creepy. My dad took culturally-exploitive photos for that rag?

Of course, it just wouldn’t be a Haneke film without offering a dissenting opinion.

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Akufen, “3.0″ from Psychometry, Volume 3

Word-devoid songs didn’t perform particularly well on the Slant list, but then again there were exceptions. I was really surprised that at least two of the participants really took to “E.T. Boogie,” and I doubt that it was just the interjections of “Ouch!” that sent it over the top. What didn’t do so hot was techno, non-trance division. I take some of the blame for this in that I adopted a pragmatic posture towards the analog disco and funk of the ’70s and left nearly everything beyond elecrofunk to others’ devices. It’s to my debit that I couldn’t admit that there are methods for making techno sound less rigid and digital. I guess one of the more prominent recent examples is the form dubbed schaffel. Now two years ago’s “next year’s thing,” schaffel house isn’t really anything groundbreaking: it’s mainly mid-tempo house with a 6/8 shuffle, which opens up the lockstep. Akufen’s “3.0″ (which is the initial “software update” on his third volume of Psychometry clicks) is, like the genre, hardly reinventing the wheel. (It sounds not unlike a blissed-out Underworld instrumental remake of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”) But it’s a refreshing, low-stakes change of pace for the German producer whose club hit “Deck the House” stitched together hundreds upon hundreds of millisecond FM radio samples into the aural equivalent of the Freeling house sucking itself into the next dimension at the end of Poltergeist. Samples still abound, but they’re quietly absorbed into the cool glow of the swingin’, swangin’ groove.

. . . . . . . . . .

Also, YouTube has certainly turned into a gold mine repository for vintage video clips of live, lip-synched disco performances, which make up for their poor video quality with the notion that the VHS (or Beta?) tapes they came from were well-worn and well-loved. A lot of them courtesy of a user named soulvega. Below is my favorite: Donna Summer’s “I Remember Yesterday” (another arguably German song carried to loopy heights thorugh harnessing an antiquated rhythmic pulse). Here Donna can be found twirling a cane, sticking her pooch out in some sort of sad-sack guess as to how dancing to a doo-wop disco throwback should look, using the cane as some sort of trombone/clarinet hybrid (that still comes out “doot doot”), bugging her eyes out in stern appreciation of corn camp (like some schoolmarmish part-time music teacher leading sugar-laced kids through a calypso unit). All the while, the backup dancers do the windshield wipe. At least the singing is live. It sounds a lot better when she puts some brass into it. Her poltergeist vocals on the studio version (which, though I never had the balls to play it on my disco-only college radio show, I’m now man enough to admit is one of my two favorite Donna Summer songs evah — the other to possibly show up in some future Yowsah installment) always seemed sort of inadequate for the barrage of banjos and spoons Moroder threw into the mix, in their own way as densely layered and punishing as his programming on the album-capping “I Feel Love.” But seeing and hearing her perform this song live (which she must’ve done a lot, since it showed up like a sore thumb on Live and More) is like watching someone stick their tongue simultaneously in both cheeks. In case you wanted further proof that disco knew its camp potential, watch Donna demonstrate how “we both looked around the room.” Then swoon to the most gratuitous and satisfying middle-eight key change ever. (I always wanted to arrange this for my high school jazz band. As one of the alto saxes, I would’ve choreographed it so we’d stand up from our chairs at this point.) And then note that empty drum set behind them. And then mourn the lack of a hardwood floor panel and a pair of tap shoes. And then watch Donna struggle to figure out exactly where On The One would be on this bitch and stop mourning that lack.

While you’re there, check out either of the two versions of Donna performing “The Hostage,” her pre-”Love to Love You Baby,” minor hit about a woman’s husband being kidnapped for in Europe… though not the US. That must explain why, despite having more greatest hits compilations than Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder combined, it hasn’t shown up on a single one. Except for on this one (an identical copy of which was pressed by Holland’s Groovy Records and I know that because I snatched the vinyl from my aunt years ago). Well, because of that and also because the song is an incredible effing downer. (”Well, they finally found my husband a few days later… Yes. The funeral’s tomorrow.”) Anyway, I think both these clips were performed on consecutive weeks on some French music countdown show (“L’Otage” was at numéro trois both weeks), and I guess I’d recommend watching both. The former features some fantastic staging for the bridging phone-call sequences (which I’d like to think were intoned, dare I say phoned in, by Moroder himself if the dialogue weren’t going by at a offergoodwhilesupplieslastrefundsvoidinohioseelocaldealerfordetails clip), but only the latter has that ridiculous all-is-full-of-bleak epilogue, which took its nihilistic cue from every American movie made between 1969 and 1974.

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