Peep Show

It's okay to look, read the slogan for last year's highly successful Match.com television commercials. The ad campaign was exploiting the roving eye and its inability to hold a steady gaze when it becomes bored or curious. The idea was that no one was ever hurt by looking; the slogan was both reinforcement and challenge.

The ads, which featured singles doing the things that singles do in their zany private moments (rollerskating, running in place while wearing a jaunty Tyrolean cap, releasing and then trying to catch a bird) craftily preyed upon the romantic restlessness of the viewer and the excitement of non-fiction novelty. They are written with the assumption that the viewer is already aware of dating sites in general (if not Match.com specifically), and that the viewer harbors a secret interest in the site's population.

Match went with the median for its spots, including a middle-aged woman in white satin who steps on the hem of her dress while executing a wobbly curtsy. Nothing to be afraid of there.

The ads worked because of their deceptive simplicity, and yet that apparent simplicity belied a semantic complexity. In fact, unless you changed the channel, you were already looking. Since no harm came of that inadvertent exposure, it followed that no damage would be done by visiting the site itself. If you were worried about your spouse's reaction, well, wasn't he or she sitting right next to you on the couch when you saw the commercial? Was there any collateral hurt? No? Then it was okay to venture just that little bit further. This was the brilliance of the campaign: spontaneous, harmless exposure to a peep show.

In any event, who was ever harmed by a goofy man in a plumed Tyrolean cap?

Another deeper meaning occurred by ellipsis. If looking was okay, then what about touching? Naturally, the ad doesn't mention that and one can only presume that contacting (or touching, presumably the goal) might not be as innocuous an activity.

The campaign targeted the married or otherwise taken man, even as it featured both male and female actors. While there is a surely a segment of the singles population that has no interest in on-line encounters, it was the married man who most needed the reassurance that the slogan provided. Here is where the ad became insidious. The ad's creators knew that it was the married man who might suffer the most internal struggle over visiting the site, and that it was the married man who was most likely to believe he was missing out on something someone else was getting. Getting some, in other words.

That is one of the salient sadnesses about life. No matter how full our lives, we are unable to take any appreciative stock without ruminating what the French call "manque," the thing that is lacked.

Mostly what we lack is romance, although the nature of romantic lack is so complex that it cannot help but be depressive. Lacking something is not the same as not having something, which is why romance and finance are not mentioned in the same breath. One is quantified and the other is melancholically qualified. In general practice they best kept far apart.

Lack involves itself with fancy and desire to such a degree that average restless man is defenseless in the face of it. This is why, when confronted with the commercial and the idea that others may be looking themselves, hesitancy is overruled by emotion. Looking is a basic urge.

Dating sites are Schopenhauerian vehicles driven by the motor of desire. Desire precedes thought. Will trumps reason. What better index to the state of romantic itch than the burgeoning on-line dating industry? Providing nostrums for its temporary relief is a multi-million-dollar business.

Match was only taking responsibility for looking, and in turn would hold the looker blameless, while at the same time realizing that slogan was delusive and apt to result in a whole lot more.

The newest set of Match ads is aimed at the single woman's idea of fictional romance: One of the ads features babies. Babies being born and babies being created and all the things that are supposed to lead up to birth, including love stories, piggyback rides on beaches, and meetings on bridges. And looks, of course; now the slogan has been modified to say that "It all starts with a look."

Also starting with a look is a vacation, for those who aren't quite ready to commit to parenthood but yet have moved in together. This is the ad for the couple whose first date is a Spanish-language film called Amor Verdadero and who then go out for a hot dog. Since not everyone likes schmaltzy foreign movies and hot dogs, this is obviously a perfect pairing. This ad capitalizes on the idea that there is another person out there who is every bit as idiosyncratic and emotionally responsive as you are; if you can find a man who enjoys a foreign tearjerker, you might be able to find one who likes shopping for pink lipstick instead of watching football.

A third targets those twenty-somethings looking for a hunky aesthete who, following an argument, will walk around obliviously during a downpour, ruining his best Doc Martens. By inference, this is also the type of guy who will build bookshelves and perform other nest-building activities. Since this behavior is somewhat of a rarity even among the best of men, Match has made sure to advertise its existence, but only on Match. This is the caveat. Clearly, this type of guy will not be found on Adult Friend Finder.

You can see where Match thought that the "look" campaign was too good not to be slightly rehabilitated. It would have been easy just to do another run of plotless spots featuring people who could do bird calls in A-sharp minor or flip their eyelids inside out. Yet the ads were more interesting that way. Not just because they didn't hammer you over the head with love, but because people are eccentric and impulsive, impossible and annoying, and in their purest form nothing if not the best non-fiction.

Girl on Top

We like to watch. We have become a culture of voyeurs, of eavesdroppers, and of spies, and we wouldn't have it any other way. We are Romans in front of our digital Colosseum, with our tub of Cherry Garcia and a frosty mug of schadenfreude to wash it all down.

This is the core premise of reality television. We enjoy watching others sing, dance, swap wives, lose weight, find love, fail miserably, and face public humiliation. We have finally acknowledged that narrow existences and blood lust go together like coleslaw and peanut butter. In other words, we like a gassy but tasty treat.

In the infant days of television, Queen for a Day and Strike It Rich exploited the unfortunate with exacting care. The bigger the misfortune, the greater was the chance to win money, to win that night on the town, to wear that paper crown. A major life event for the contestants was for viewers just one more telegraph pole of better thee than me, flashing by as quickly as creative minds could storyboard new series.

People like to do stupid things for money. That's human nature; money doesn't drop from the skies above with reliable frequency. They also like to do stupid things for hope, which is perhaps more insidious. Hope is a strange thing, tied as it is into the transience of happiness. But happiness requires an ability to look at the smallest things and we are nothing if not big-picture viewers.

Although competitive reality shows have a linear narrative and by progressive elimination result in a winner, they also drop us in media res. It's this interruption that makes reality shows so terribly unnerving; it's as if we have caught the contestants with their collective pants down. Disregard that the poor schmucks signed up and auditioned for Beauty and the Geek or The Biggest Loser and that whatever happens is their own doing. By permitting us to interrupt them mid-stream (or at their nadir), they ask us to accept their flaws without wondering about their imaginations. That we should want to be publicly successful is a given. We should also neither deny nor deprive anyone of the right to purchase a ticket to a fool's paradise.

Reality shows work precisely because the contestants are not us. Nor are they our neighbors or co-workers. If they were, we might feel a tinge of guilt or self-loathing. We might recognize ourselves in their blueberry crumb cake, in their demotic street idiom, or in their stumbling attempts to attract the opposite sex.

We might recognize what happens when we stop trying to be more than what we are. That's the main point of interest anyway, even if we will never admit it to ourselves. The waitress who never finds the millionaire and keeps slinging pancakes, the overeater who cannot live without the comfort of Little Debbie, the washed-up celebrity who never realizes that there are very few second chances when the first wasn't all that much to begin with--all are case studies in ordinariness.

What the shows prove is that our skill at self-assessment is at an all-time low. We fade into and out of some alternate reality where the inner self--always beautiful, talented, and skilled--is finally revealed as truth. Whatever our personal history may be, we will use it and in turn let it be used and then hope that time will eradicate it.

America's Next Top Model occupies a unique position in reality programming. Its big prize, a modeling contract with Elite, is specious at best. None of the ANTM winners has approached standard markers for industry success. America hasn't produced many top models since the late 1980s; what it produces are girls with bigger impossible dreams than they had when they auditioned. As with American Idol, the real prize is hope for what happens after, for the future. Whether the winner will be a success beyond the show depends upon the winners' suitability for an industry that wouldn't look at her twice without the donated prize. Tyra Banks's contestants are home girls, chicas, out of shape, illiterate, immature, damaged and only occasionally viable.
But Banks thrives on preaching positivism to the underclass; one need only hear her pep talks to the discarded to understand that ANTM is simply another version of Queen for a Day, with the latter's paper crown replaced by a paper contract.

What is it about competitive reality shows that turns the thought processes of adults into the delusions of children? All children think they are the fastest until they cross the finish line in last place. It takes repeated failure to realize that we aren't all winners, all of the time. Yet the reality contestants cannot seem to honestly analyze themselves viz other competitors or even to make much of a guess at their own qualifications other than the presumption of wanting something more than someone else wants it.

That the ANTM contestants will never be top models goes without saying. The modifier is as incorrect as the sham is transparent. And yet dreams aren't modifiable, not when they trade so heavily on all or nothing. A few of the contestants are rational enough not to buy into the fantasy in the first place and toss the inevitable rejection off with a shrug, but those for whom the show is painted in terms of black and white respond to the judging with Pavlov's psychic secretions.

Many of ANTM's contestants have a hard time surviving in the present, let alone the future. They've either already tried and failed or haven't had the gumption to do so unaided; their narrative has only so far to go. They've bought countless magazines and practiced for hours in the mirror; why isn't this a surefire predictor of success? Who knows how best to pose while wearing a slab of raw beef? What exactly is the expression of a country singer and how do you arrange your legs to reflect that musical orientation?

In each episode but the final, photo shoots are the main qualifier. Here, where communication should be crystal clear, it isn't, and neither is the models' skill at translating the nebulous commands. They are only praised when something is good and mocked when something isn't, but why something is one way and not another is never quite relatable. There is simply too much going on in their amateur efforts to make a specific critique effective. "You're like....when you should be like..." is as close as many come to receiving constructive criticism.

ANTM photo shoots are not ballet classes and the best photos are achieved not by skill but by sheer luck. Frequently Banks's own photos appear just as awkward, making one wonder about the nature of elusion.

Banks's unbothered confidence in the face of lesser mortals is the show's defining comedy. While the contestants stand for judgment, Banks squints without squinting, overuses the adjective "fierce," grimaces, rigs the photo selection, and dispenses advice to which the contestants nod in dim agreement.

Tyra Banks will not be quitting America's Next Top Model despite an alleged feud with Jay Manuel, overlord of ANTM's photo shoots. Or she will not be quitting ANTM despite becoming a political pundit on her own talk show. Tyra Banks will continue, says an insider, to do both. Tyra Banks will continue to produce television that enlivens our mid-week ennui and makes our cup brim over from the suppression of our own worst impulses. It's sort of the same reason we watch QVC, except that we have nothing to regret in the morning.

Bad-Hair Life

What is it about the 1980s--the Big Eighties--that is alternately so repellent and so fascinating? The 1970s have turned into a revisionist decade, one in which nostalgia trumps ecology and reminiscence surmounts politics. In the same way--minus the fondness--we remember the 1980s as a time of perplexing, unflattering fashion and the biggest, baddest hair. And hair-metal music as exemplified by Poison and its lead singer Bret Michaels.

Poison held court in Hollywood at a time when Hollywood desperately needed a little glamour. There is no other explanation for the Technicolor frenzy of spandex and lipstick that Poison and bands like it detonated on the Sunset Strip. Glamour was at a cinematic low in 1986; top-grossing movies for the year included Platoon and Aliens. Hair metal's response was a gender-bending bouffant of hair spray and hot pink lipstick, with Bret Michaels being the groupies' choice for the prettiest boy on the block.

The hair bands lifted their superabundance of bleach, eyeliner, and lipstick from the strippers at the Body Shop, Los Angeles' most popular exotic dancing emporium. The two cultures had a special symbiosis that was to forever after link that genre of music with gentlemen's entertainment. Hair metal legitimized stripping and made it into the phenomenon it is today. If you are puzzled as to why strippers are now the new girl next door, look no farther than Hollywood's music scene. Bad taste and Hollywood have a long and successful relationship that continues to thrum cheerfully along, especially as respects reality TV.

Michaels is nearing the end of the second season of Rock of Love, the reality series in which the singer attempts to find happily ever after from behind the inflated rafts of some fairly dubious "models." At least that's what most of them are, along with wannabe actresses, singers, low-budget porn performers and the bartender who was the winner of the first season.

Rock of Love isn't an easy show to watch. Those with no taste for close-ups of Michaels' spit or with a need for old-fashioned romance or family entertainment should go watch Country Fried Planet on CMT. Rock of Love makes The Bachelor look Shakespearean by comparison--shall I compare thee to a summer's day or hold your head while you puke? At least once per episode, a contestant performs what for all intents and purposes is a lap dance, while Michaels ogles her breasts and tries very hard not to grab on for dear life. This snake-charming doesn't guarantee one a continuance pass. Elimination leads to a dumbfounded "confessional" in which the contestant either cries that she thought Brett and she were in love or in which she lets fly a harangue of epic epithetical proportions.

Sunday night television is a reality wasteland, a dumping ground for ill-informed career aspiration (Making the Band 4), professionally advised matrimonial preparation (Whose Wedding Is It, Anyway?), and vaguely redneck automotive rehabilitation (Trick My Truck). Rock of Love slots in nicely with these and other voyeuristic pleasures, if only to incite spirited discussion about the realism of Michaels' hair and to further advance the definition of "fame whore." In Michaels' world a contestant is a fame whore if she came on his show disingenuously, not to seek love but to get that 15 minutes of fame Warhol promised we were all entitled to. That, and to hang out with rock stars and the rock stars' factotums.

Now in his mid-forties, Michaels clings to his rock star persona with as much cliché as can be mustered in a 60-minute television show. Does he ever discard this persona or does he really think that axiomatically? He wonders if a girl can keep up with the rock-and-roll lifestyle when she vomits into a bucket; he has a teenager's lust for plastic breasts and confesses as much to the camera; he has blood sugar spells and wonders if a contestant cares about him enough as a normal human being to stab him with insulin and save his life.

The contestants have either applied or have been scouted for their unique qualities, none of which includes any ability to act or to follow a script in other than the most histrionic way. Subtlety is absent in the Rock of Love mansion, and in its place are extreme bitchiness, tears, and some awe-inspiring, coarse vocabulary.

The first winner of Rock of Love was a pink-haired bartender from Chicago who dumped Michaels before the reunion show, stating that he hadn't been in contact except--via his manager-- to ask for his cowboy hat back. She also had a boyfriend back home. Jes Rickleff, the bartender, won Michaels' non-enduring love in a showdown with Heather Chadwell, a Las Vegas stripper. The latter's ability to wear the sleaziest in stripper attire while employing an especially vulgar portmanteau idiom made her a Rock of Love favorite, so when she reappeared on Rock of Love 2 she reinvigorated a sleepily trashy season. To listen to Chadwell blazing away is to take a crash course in neologistic obscenity.

The second season started out well, meaning that the number of mutant lips and breasts outweighed the number of legitimately attractive contestants. The former are important to one's survival on Rock of Love, since you have to be willing to take your clothes off at some point or another and from all appearances Michaels is nothing if not a breast man. Being able to use a stripper pole with medium to advanced skill isn't going to hurt your case either.

You should also have a MySpace and maybe some porn floating around in cyberspace. Last season's Brandi M. had photographs of herself enjoying what is known in the trade as an "amateur facial"; Angelique from Rock of Love 2 had photos that leave no doubt that she knows her away around large and awkward sex toys.

There are no dirty secrets on Rock of Love. When you hit this type of gutter, there is nowhere to go but back to basics. There are only banal, quotidian secrets, such as those held by contestants who are--gasp-- still married or are living with boyfriends, or contestants who might be using the show as a springboard to the type of cheap fame for which L. A. is famous: being recognized in a Hot Topic while shopping for PVC bustiers.

What Michaels is looking for other than reality rebirth is unclear. The scripting isn't clever and the editing is worse. Every episode centers on a fake paranoia in which the elimination depends on whether Michaels can overrule his gut instincts in the face of the jiggling warheads. Incoming! With so much flesh bobbing around, he makes his decisions based on a child's definition of loyalty and a teenager's sense of attractiveness.

The best thing about Rock of Love is its sense of humor, which is to say that it has none and yet is so easy to laugh at. Unlike Flavor of Love, which has some genuine high comedy, Rock of Love seems designed to test the mettle of even the lowest brow viewer, primarily because--unlike Flavor Flav--Michaels appears to take himself and his waning stardom so damn seriously.

So what do the two dozen contestants do in the 13-week span of the show? Besides competing in ridiculous elimination challenges and vying for a one-on-one date with Michaels, they get drunk, hiss, claw, play lesbian, throw glasses, throw up, and wear trashy lingerie like no one's business. Once you've done all of these things there is nothing left to do but trademark your nickname, which is what Daisy, née Vanessa de la Hoya (Oscar's niece), has done. Daisy™ is still living in a one-bedroom apartment with an ex-boyfriend, but she'd like to move out. Or onto Michaels.

A quick leaf through the contestants' MySpace pages shows a great interest in being booked for promotional appearances or perhaps a lead role in the next Coen Brothers film. Early elimination notwithstanding, Angelique claims to make 250K a year. But this is Los Angeles, the city where the impossible becomes the absolute overnight. That's what makes Rock of Love a success. The city thrives on extending 15 minutes of fame so far that you feel as if you've been living with it for an eternity. Which maybe we have; they're making a movie out of the A-Team.

Take It Off, Take It All Off

The latest Axe commercial features a young man who turns into milk chocolate after spritzing himself with Dark Temptation, Axe's newest scent. Dark Temptation is number eighteen in a line of deodorant products whose target consumer is the teenage male or middle-aged Englishmen who live in Rutland and append a "007" to their e-mail addresses.

Just why Axe's newest scent might appeal to these consumers can be intuited from watching the Dark Temptation commercial. After a liberal dousing with the product, the protagonist turns into milk chocolate and takes to the streets, where he is licked, bitten, and otherwise caused bodily harm by a plethora of exciting young women, none of whom is diabetic.

Terrible acting aside, what happens to the man--who loses a hand, an arm, and his nose--is called "The Axe Effect." The message is simple: Spray yourself with Axe and watch shameless women become even more shameless, especially in public places where one might otherwise pass unnoticed. When was the last time someone ground a giant strawberry into your navel in the middle of a city park and then devoured the fruit?

Women, it appears, are extremely oral creatures.

Although the man resembles Ex-Lax more than he does an Easter rabbit, the commercial works on a simple, gut level. The continuity is so appalling it can't help but be deliberate; the man tears off off his nose in an early shot, only to have it reappear in the next; he gives away his right hand only to be missing his left; his ears are licked away and regenerate in time to hear the beat of disco music.

While the premise of female sexual mania is formidably exciting to advertisers, it is only a forty-year-old phenomenon. Sex in advertising dates back to the Stone Age, when Neanderthal man first exfoliated himself with lava rock, did the prehistoric boom-boom, and spread the good news to his fellow Paleolithic humans.

The lusty female took over where the romantic female left off, roughly around the time Hugh Hefner published his first copy of Playboy. Devoid of intelligent conversation (or outright mute), the lusty female first attacked a man in a commercial for Hai Karate aftershave. Since this is not Chekhov, actions speak louder than words: Wow! What's that aftershave you're wearing? a woman exclaims, and without waiting for reply attacks a man so ardently that he must use karate to fend her off. There will be no movie date tonight, Ernie. "...drives women right out of their minds," the narrator says, "that's why we have to put instructions on self-defense in every package."

While that is certainly agreeable news to any defenseless male, what is even more agreeable is the sheer number of products claimed to provoke a sexual response. In the 1960s, that primarily meant the very allusive cigar and shaving cream. Both Tiparillo and Noxzema wasted no time in casting their products in formulaic starring roles.

The similarity between these ads and the Axe commercial isn't just the sexual premise. At their core they describe that sex was never meant to stay strictly in the bedroom and that the reason we are so fascinated by sex is that the possibilities are endless. So are the combinations. An anonymous yet well-manicured hand offers a topless brunette librarian her choice of a regular or menthol Tiparillo; a topless blonde violinist gets only the menthol option. In neither case does the model appear remotely interested in the product or the hand; her gaze is aimed directly at the camera and not at "the slim cigar with the white tip." One presumes that the models will choose the cigar over the violin or the literary tome, although why the models would pick up these items in the middle of foreplay isn't made clear. The mystery Lothario gives these ads a Bond-like appeal; the women could be Honey Rider or Pussy Galore and except for hair color and career are interchangeable.

Less Bond-ish are the ads Joe Namath did for Noxzema shaving cream. Following his win in the 1969 Super Bowl, "Broadway Joe" romped home with lucrative commercial endorsements. Although his pantyhose ad was more notorious, it's the Noxzema ad with Farrah Fawcett that had men lining up to "get creamed." You see right through Namath in this one; there was no point in playing up an intellectual angle that simply didn't exist. Namath looked and sounded stoned, as if he'd taken a quick toke to calm his nerves before filming.

This commercial was a follow-up to an earlier shaving series featuring Gunilla Knutson, a Swedish model who implored men to "Take it off, take it all off." Never mind that the smell of Noxzema could never be mistaken for sexy, it only counted that the girl was and that she was talking to you.

It has to be said that most of these commercials--Tiparillo excepted--did not gravitate towards sophistication, as if some quasi-continental quality might make the product seem suspiciously un-American and therefore less than macho. Plus, didn't most men spend their days sitting in commuter traffic and raking leaves? Or making lopsided bookshelves and watching football? These backyard heroes could be efficiently attracted by appealing to both the need to reproduce and and the need to escape domestic banality. There was no need to cast them in the role of their European counterparts, since European savoir faire might be mistaken as fussy or perverted.

In all events, the target consumer was a full-grown adult who sowed his oats singly.

This is why the Axe ads are such an exciting feature on the advertising landscape. Their scenarios reflect true biology far more cannily than those of their predecessors; who in 1968 would admit that group sex is the desirable outcome of the male urge and not merely the practice of swingers? They display a complete lack of intimacy and bonding, two emotional climates that in retrospect seem hopelessly out of step and almost naive. What Axe does may seem crude and even a bit sloppy, but that is a large part of the ads' allure. Teenage boys are crude and sloppy, so? They grow up to become men who will presumably acquire some ability to discern, but there's no guarantee of any specific outcome. Nor will they be held back by body odor. Pimples and onion breath maybe, but never funk.

Dry Up!

Nineteen seventy was an epochal year for bad trends. Why this should be so has never been adequately explained. Nineteen seventy was so eager to break with 1969 that it completely separated from that landmass and floated away, high on aerosol from a can of Gillette Dry Look for Men.

The Dry Look, in case you weren't born yet or had a father who was a macramé-knotting hippie, was an attempt to fluff men's hair out of the wet look. This makes sense, they are perfectly oppositional objectives. Men had been sporting the wet look for years; it used to be achieved with something called brilliantine and historically was best viewed on racetrack touts and Clark Gable. Brilliantine is still used in Mexico and in a musical genre known as rockabilly. There is more of a connection between German polka music and Mexican norteño than there is between norteño and the Stray Cats, so there is absolutely no correlation between these two cultures' use of floral hair tonic. Brilliantine was a slick product that gave the user a sinister, menacing appearance and appeared to best effect on cheaply dyed black hair. Cads, pimps, and any character played by Mickey Rourke all favored brilliantine.

You could also achieve the wet look by means of a hair goo called Brylcreem, which came on the market in 1928 and had a far less threatening aspect. Brylcreem was a hair dressing, distinguishing it from the malefic brilliantine and making it safe for bathroom cabinets nationwide, where it would share space with Obtundia and Bactine. Men who worked at NASA used Brylcreem. Richard Nixon used Brylcreem. If you couldn't trust a man who used Brylcreem, then you were probably a closet Communist with a subversive agenda.

Both Brylcreem and brilliantine were invented because--unless serving Uncle Sam with a buzz cut--men needed some way to command their hair. Men were masters of many things--kingdoms, boardrooms, Colonial starter homes--and too smart to be done in by a badly behaved cowlick. Flyaway hair could do more than destroy a promising career. Women were suspicious of messy hair, finding it to signal mental weakness and probably the type of chronic alcoholism found in the more neurotic stories of John Cheever. A man with unkempt hair had an unkempt wallet and probably drank rum extract on his lunch hour.

The problem could have been resolved by using hair spray, but hair spray for men sounded less than manly and in any event was something used by the hustlers who hung around the men's room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.

With all of these expectations to keep hair short and controlled, men did not get the chance to try their hands at other, more exciting hairstyles. One look at a Scandinavian blue movie would tell them, however, that the men of Europe wore their hair longer and fluffier and that women--blonde Swedish women--responded with enthusiasm.

Thus was born the Dry Look, the first men's hair spray and a product of good old reputable Gillette, the Boston-based safety razor manufacturer. Gillette razors spared many a bloody nick and their integrity in the men's grooming business was unimpeachable. If Gillette said it was okay to tease and puff around the ears, then why, to quote Tennessee Williams, hang back with the brutes?

In 1970, the Dry Look revolutionized men's hair styles. Men who had been afraid to grow their hair over their ears lest they be branded a counterrevolutionary could spray with abandon and not only be found outstanding models of their sex, but also be deemed outstandingly sexy.

This is where Burt Reynolds comes in. We love Burt, he posed nude in Playgirl with a droopy cigar stuck between his choppers and a lascivious grin behind that. Burt Reynolds had more hair on his body than he did on his head, which is why Burt Reynolds was the walking embodiment of what the Dry Look could do for a man. Women loved Burt Reynolds, more than they loved the bonhomous George Hamilton, who always seemed as if he might be a wee bit slimy. Whereas Hamilton was a member of the global jet set, Reynolds was a down-home boy with a not-insignificant whiff of cracker wafting through a corona of cigar smoke.

If Burt Reynolds could wear the Dry Look and be more of a stud than ever, then what was stopping the rest of America from enjoying this unfamiliar territory? Soon, thin hair that had been subjected to tell-tale comb-over rose from the scalp like spun sugar. Those with thicker locks puffed until the hair became a resplendent nimbus; Donny Osmond perfected his until it looked like a thunderhead.

Gillette's success in revolutionizing men's hair styles opened the door for more galling products, like chest-hair toupees and that spidery paint you spray on a bald spot to make it appear as if it is alive and growing. So perhaps the Dry Look wasn't the worst thing about the 1970s--that was Ron Popeil and his Chop-O-Matic--but it lasted throughout the decade without a trace of self-mockery or any other sort of mea culpa. Needless to say, the most hapless hair was always the happiest.

Hot Pants College

"You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard," sings Ray Davies in "Celluloid Heroes." You can also see a decent number of hookers, many of them wearing gold hot pants.

For a brief period in the early 1970s and at around the same time that knit maxi-vests were popular, hot pants were the fashion equivalent of the Big Mac: cheap, semi-digestible, and ubiquitous. It has been proposed that the trend started in Germany, where the German prostitutes must have cursed their climatic bad fortune. Another truth is that hot pants were an organic extension of the miniskirt and took over where the miniskirt left off: convenient indecency.

In 1971, hot pants were a retail cluster-bomb, the type of trend that has universal appeal and isn't just limited to regional gaucherie. It was as if they had been dropped from the skies above and scooped up as salvational juju just when Gloria Steinem was at her most maddening.

What women's libbers failed to apprehend was that many women did not want to be the equal of men. They may have resented bras that chafed at the shoulder blades, but they did not want any part of abjuring feminine ritual or bagatelle. To mock or scorn time-honored gender roles and their conventional behaviors would be to forswear everything mainstream society deemed not just acceptable but affirming. The very foundation of civilization would crumble under the dust of female armpit hair.

It was to reassure the male gender that women still liked playing traditional sexual roles that hot pants were dropped, scud-like, onto the fashion terrain. Hot pants were thus an index of control even as they appeared to represent the nadir of a woman's enlightenment. The result was a brief, albeit happy, period in which men felt free to ask shorts-clad stewardesses for a date without being arrested and a "dirty" magazine still meant Playboy.

Hot pants were an extended metaphor for the emancipated urbanite of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl and later for her Cosmo Girl. This was a woman who not only had an adult interest in sex, she also had a vested interest in displaying herself in ways that would attract the fittest of males. Males were known to like a little leg and hot pants were just dichotomous enough to deliver that message without being lewd.

The trick to hot pants was that they couldn't be scandalous. Worn correctly, they gave off the desired good girl/bad girl vibe that is the reason Playboy Enterprises is an empire and not just any old pornography business. Hot pants, unlike youth, were not wasted on the young. The minute shame crept into the picture--in whatever form it took--the shorts became obscene.

At nearly 40, Liz Taylor shouldn't have gone anywhere near hot pants, not even when they formed the bottom half of a matching ensemble. Strutting through Heathrow, Liz wore hot pants so short that they looked cannibalistic, which was probably the point. Liz's fashion missteps were already legendary; it seemed as if once she tried on the slatternly, uncouth Martha of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she was unable to part with the excitement of vulgarity and channeled it right into her closet.

Liz turned hot pants into a steamy danger zone. Where a stewardess was able to wear the shorts with a wink, Liz wore them with a radiator's hiss. The irony was that everyone expected that of Liz anyway, so the hot pants were simply a case of gilding an already overripe lily. The Burtons' sexual appetites were the stuff of legend, and no pair of shorts was going to fan the flames any higher than they'd already risen.

Still, though, the first covenant of hot pants was not to let them creep into ripeness, and once they did they got a return ticket to their home base on the street corners of Hamburg and thence the world.

The Pussycat Dolls: Shhh (Shut Up and Prance)

En garde: Los Angeles would like to be taken seriously as a fashion capital. Here we have the backwater of London struggling along as the poor relation to Paris, New York, and Milan and now Los Angeles is trying to muscle its way in on the action. Los Angeles being what it is, it will probably succeed, but only because the people of Los Angeles never turn down an invitation. Call it self-promotion, call it malignant narcissism, call it the curse of shutter, but in Los Angeles anywhere a photographer is you should be too.

That's why the apparel shown at Los Angeles Fashion Week--or as its sponsor would like it to be known, Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Los Angeles--is of so little importance. There are actually so few opportunities for fringe "personalities" to receive any real media attention that to miss a chance to be mentioned or photographed would be to risk falling into the type of celebrity disrepair that doomed the career of Carolyn Ann Clark.

Never heard of Carolyn Ann Clark? She was an actress who played a plot-inconsequential nurse on The Guiding Light. She then moved to L. A, had a guest-starring role on Hunter, and made a low-budget horror movie; later she landed a bit part on Cheers (billed as "Woman") and another on Night Court ("Girl"); appeared in one episode each of One West Waikiki and Moesha; did a slightly larger one-off on 90210 and then vanished into the Valley.

This occurred a decade or so ago, before anyone really understand the power of egregious self-huckstering. What is important is not how many agents you harass with your latest head shots or voice-over reels, but how many times you get your picture in the paper, looking as if you are attending something mildly interesting and are mildly interesting looking yourself. We can thank Paris Hilton and Kimberly Stewart for this new type of promotion, because they are known to attend anything, often pantiless, and therefore the smart wannabe should be hot on their tails. Anywhere there are pantiless girls there will be hungry paparazzi. Lots of them.

Back when Carolyn Ann Clark was making the rounds, there was still a certain circumspection to the acting profession; it could be conducted with quiet good taste and noble intentions. There was no Rock of Love with Brett Michaels or Celebrity Fit Club (a sad but telling exercise in fanning the falsest of hopes). Carolyn Ann Clark wouldn't have been caught dead in either; there would be no drunk-driving arrests, no straight-to0-video sex tapes, no talking to spaceships , and no dating Tommy Lee.

No parts, either, but that's because Hollywood used to conduct itself in a very formal manner, compared to today's frontal assault on the cheapest possible dollar. You used to have to work very hard to get that two-liner on Cheers and it was considered quite the coup to have done so. That was back in the day when casting agents wouldn't look twice at someone who hadn't done anything, or who didn't already have something of a name. This is why a semi-well-known soap actress ended up being billed as the anonymous "Girl."

Now, it really depends on who has the most lurid appeal. People like Traci Lords come to mind; it was she who opened the door for Jenna Jamison and Paris Hilton and Tara Reid. Craft? You think anyone cares about craft? That's for serious dramatic actors only, and also for those who keep those well-oiled acting studios out in the Valley in business. The goal is money, baby, and exposure. Even the writers know that; who gives a fig about artistic integrity and the Great American Novel when writing creaky jokes for Gary Shandling pays so darn well? And have you ever taken a good look at a serious writer? They are the personification of anguish. They've hung around the old neighborhood long enough to write a pretty good book about it, but it's almost killed them. They have bags under their eyes. They have jowls, they look bloated and ill. This is why they've traditionally never done well as screenwriters. A jowl in New York may be a sign of intellect and of suffering for one's art, but in Los Angeles it's a sign of stupidity.

If you want to be seen, you have to get out, which is why Los Angeles Fashion Week exists in the first place. Don't kid yourself, it's not about young American designers or showcases for up-and-comers. It's about Hollywood's favorite party entertainment--the Name Game--and for creating opportunities for other names to be photographed or mentioned while at your show.

Unless you're seriously obsessive, you won't recognize any name on the MB Fashion Week calendar except for Lauren Conrad, but in what context you've heard her name before you can't be sure because you don't watch MTV. The rest of the schedule is filled with the likes of Joseph Domingo, Whitley Kros, and Falguni & Shane Peacock, which sounds like a magician and his assistant . You're supposed to know something about Ashley Paige, but I suspect this is because Ashley Paige sends models down the runway in swimsuits that look like underwear and you can tell that all the models have fresh bikini waxes.

That leaves the Pussycat Dolls by Robin Antin as the biggest name of the week. In case you are out of the loop (or live in Fresno), the Pussycat Dolls are the biggest entertainment franchise to come out of L. A. since Disney. Originally a troupe of cheeky burlesque performers headed by Carmen Electra and other acting non-entities, they were spun off into an honest-to-goodness singing act in 2003. This occurred on the tail of the original Dolls' appearing in Maxim, the men's magazine for the man who was tired of hiding his Victoria's Secret catalogues in the back of the closet. Since men's interest in whom Maxim considers hot borders on the pathological, the Dolls and their newly launched singing career were an overnight success.

It didn't hurt that Antin is one of Hollywood's shrewdest businesswomen. Antin knows that more men than women watch the annual Victoria's Secret fashion show, and that given half a chance most men can turn just about anything into pornography. Along with record producer Jimmy Iovine, she also grasped that taunting men--as in the Dolls' first hit single "Don't Cha," with its sing-along chorus "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?"--and forcing them into an envious lather would result not just in onanism but in exceptional sales.

The occasion for the Dolls' appearance at Fashion Week was the debut of Antin's Doll-branded Shhh lingerie. It also served as another performance opportunity for the group and for various male celebs to get their names in print as having been on the guest list. Whether the lingerie is worthwhile fashion or well made is irrelevant. Some claim that Antin's entry into lingerie is taking up the slack left over by Victoria's Secret, whose CEO recently decided that perhaps the mall favorite had crossed the line into "too sexy." (Maybe the CEO, Sharon Tunney, became aware that the average age of the VS customer is now 11, which would indeed result in a downturn in net income.) Whatever the reason, the Dolls are always ripe for marketing and more promotion, so Antin sent out a hurried collection of underwear that isn't meant to be worn under anything. And the Dolls got to sing and everyone went home happy.

Except, that is, cranky journalists who realize there is no such thing as a free lunch, especially not in Hollywood, where a sweet roll can set you back twelve bucks and a career. The lingerie show was an edifying spectacle where we learned that our tastes really are that low, that we do not know how to have a good time, and that we should probably throw down the mighty pen and take a pole-dancing class instead.

The first part of the show featured models clomping around in half-laced boots. You weren't supposed to look at the boots. The boots were merely there to give things some indie cred and to separate what the Dolls do from what Heidi Klum used to do. You were supposed to admire how half-naked bottoms appeared at a distance like growths, and how several of the girls walked no better than those sad little creatures on America's Next Top Model. Critical opinion is of no value to you or anyone else, not when we have Dolls' lead singer Nicole Scherzinger trying on Nina Simone and coming up partially constipated. In order to distract you from this small bit of overreaching, the other Dolls enacted a chair dance straight out of a regional theatre production of Cabaret, except the Dolls spread their legs wider.

More lingerie followed, leading up to an extended performance set in which the Dolls sang and ground their behinds to songs that brought the casual observer to a not-so-casual question:

Why are the Dolls, for lack of a better word, so ghetto? Scherzinger sounds like one of Tyra Banks' rescue stories, someone from the inner city who will never be rid of the "wazzup" that otherwise would keep her forever bagging groceries at the local Safeway. No offense to Ms. Scherzinger, but what is wrong with sounding upwardly mobile?

Does it matter, or do you just want her to climb onto your lap and undulate?

Seriously, though, the tie-in between the Dolls and hip-hop culture is what makes the franchise a success. It's got that urban--not urbane--beat that irritates everyone over the age of 40. And who knew that their dance routines were so easy to master? With a rewind button, they can easily be performed at home after watching them twice. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but men love this stuff. Check any fluff journalism piece about how to keep a man from straying and fake strip routines rank right up there with threesomes. Or maybe they keep a man from requesting threesomes, so they might not be such a bad idea after all.

Really, the only bad idea was a jangly cover version of the Guess Who's "American Woman," minus the 1:15-minute intro and the "No Sugar Tonight" section that would have been antithetical to the message.

The Dolls show was about as edifying as things get in LA these days. It represents LA at its finest and most commercial moment, even more so than Shrek. If the reviewers mentioned the abundance of skin and struggled to find anything meritorious to say about the garments, that's only because we have cellulite and are looking for exposure ourselves.

It wasn't always this way. Los Angeles has done just fine being the capital of something else. The city isn't really used to having to struggle; it is used to sweeping us off our feet and into its diamond dust where we lose all sense of proportion and good taste. Now that it actually has to work for credibility, it underestimates our all-American taste for processed cheese.

It's Just a Shot Away

In October of 1969, the Rolling Stones flew into Los Angeles to prepare for the US tour that would end in the bloodstain of Altamont. The Stones were touring in support of the soon-to-be-released Let It Bleed and America was a nation in transition.

The Stones hadn't toured the US since 1966. Three years later, things had changed both for the band and for the country. Brian Jones had died, drowned in his swimming pool in July of that year. Musically, the band was far more aggressive and ravening, feeding on a new imagery of violence and unrest. Their darkened mood matched America's own. We were then a country jittery from political assassinations and race riots, anti-war demonstrations and the Manson murders. There was a war on and we were still a long way from consolation.

The Stones hit LA like a bolt of lightning. The tour would be the granddaddy of all arena rock to come and was for a brief moment the hottest ticket in town. In a city that normally thrived on its ability to be unimpressed, the Stones were subject to fervent hero-worship. Taking up residence in the DuPont mansion and at Stephen Stills' Topanga Canyon house, the band prepared to kick off the tour in Fort Collins, Colorado, on November 7th.

Aside from the band the touring party included the writers Stanley Booth and Michael Lydon and the photographer Ethan Russell. Booth would chronicle the tour in The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones and Russell's photographs would become the ultimate visual souvenir.

Before Perez Hilton and TMZ, before iTunes and YouTube, before information became blasé and instant gratification the popular drug of choice, there was only distance and anticipation. For a music fan, that meant waiting a couple of years for an album to be released and in the meantime mailing off a few bucks for a subscription to Rolling Stone or Creem. If you lived within spitting distance of a major city and didn't mind camping out at the local Ticketmaster, you might even get to see a concert. Blink, though, and you'd miss it. In most cases, still photography provides the only serious visual record and for many it would be the only chance to get an idea of the band in live concert.

In information's dark ages, the camera's eye built an illustrative framework by which music might be augmented and dissected. Chances are you've seen some of Russell's photographs; they remain the definitive images of the band in the middle of its hottest streak. More importantly, they capture a civilization on the verge of extinction and that civilization's lack of awareness of the finality of its own demise.

Russell took some of the last photographs of Brian Jones; the famous photo of Jones in the flag shirt, wielding the butt of a rifle, is his. His images of the Rock and Roll Circus were part of scant documentation of that event before the film was finally released in 1996.

Recently, Russell compiled the photographs of the 1969 tour into Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones 1969 U. S. Tour, a doorstop collection of images and text that provides the definitive visual accompaniment to the live recordings of Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out. Through April 4th, many of the prints are on exhibit at the San Francisco Art Exchange.

The first thing you notice about the photos is how young the Stones were, and yet they wear expressions of world-weariness, of having seen it all and having it become ordinary, or, as Jagger would later opine, "Just another mad, mad day on the road." Until Altamont, that is. The road as captured by Russell is a vast and empty space littered with propeller aircraft, anonymous fans, cheap backstage furniture, and beer bottles. Outside of its large cities, America was full of provincial potholes, each one every bit as much a "sleepy town" as the London of "Street Fighting Man." Glamour also doesn't look quite so glamorous when it's redundant, and yet you get the sense that nothing much happened before the Stones came to town, and nothing much would happen after they left.

You very quickly learn about our innocent and trusting nature: a four-foot-high stage separates the band from the audience, a detail that seems impossibly reckless in these days of anxious security. Thanks to this, the concerts seem more intimate; there isn't a JumboTron in sight and fans in the front row could reach out and touch Jagger's concho-studded pants as he taunts at the lip of the stage. Jagger was an entertainer who understood burlesque, who got the tease. When the band would later play enormous coliseums and erect the fourth wall for good, most of that old-fashioned showmanship was lost. A good part of the entertainment value of the '69 tour was watching Jagger whip the crowd into a frenzy and dare them to rush the stage; you can see that in the ecstatic, transported faces of the fans. Russell excels at capturing movement and direction. You understand the meaning of spectacle in the Roman sense and you also understand why concerts did away with festival seating after the stampede at the Who concert in Cincinnati.

We were a deeply flawed and spontaneously hopeful society.

The core of the exhibit is performance: Here's Jagger in the hot spot of Midnight Rambler, flaying his belt on the stage, lips pursed in a primal grunt. And Richards tuning his guitar backstage while wearing Anita Pallenberg's Biba cardigan. There are soft, non-business moments as well: Jagger holds the infant Seraphina Watts as Richards lounges on the lawn behind him; Jagger in his uppercase Omega shirt has a backstage chat with Chuck Berry. Mick Taylor is mute, Charlie Watts is wry, Bill Wyman is Bill Wyman, and the ghost of Brian Jones is nowhere to be seen.

The whole tour seemed to run at a high metabolism that, until Altamont, lacked histrionics. When you see the Altamont photos, Jagger hunched and fretting, you grasp what it was like to briefly walk upon the surface of the sun. And get burned.

The free concert had been a miasma for the Stones ever since it was announced. Here, the photos change from swagger to malcontent. Bill Wyman is delayed in arriving, the Angels have punched out Marty Balin and then someone slugs Jagger himself as he exits his helicopter. Where the previous photos seem like not just a historical record but an annal of immortality, at Altamont they become mortal. Even without knowing the history of that event, there is a sense of something critical about to happen; it's in the way the Angel hovers between Jagger and Watts as they wait inside the performers' tent. The biker's stormy intensity, his fear of not being in total control, rises off the print. Russell also does superb work in recording the electricity of emotion.

As a collective narration, the exhibit cannot help but be a ruminative one. The photos themselves, however, are neutral. Russell has merely captured the human edge to seminal cultural events. Even as he draws you into the action, Russell has no viewpoint and he makes no statement. That's up to the individual observer. You may end up wondering how we ended up boxed into a corner and gasping for air. You will certainly understand how mundanity led to our need to release pent-up energy in forms that could turn deadly.

The Stones returned to America in 1972 without any chinks in their armor, but America had been repaved with a new sophistication. Once wounded, we were no longer as trusting and our tendency towards fetishizing our idols was diminished. In their prime, the Stones were a great band--the greatest rock and roll band in the world, they claim--but ultimately their blood ran just as red as ours.

Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones 1969 U. S. Tour, at the San Francisco Art Exchange, 458 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA
Let It Bleed, the book, published by Rhino.

Images © Ethan Russell, via Rolling Stone.com

An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down

In July of 1971, Rolling Stone music critic John Mendelsohn said that Rod Stewart had the "most profound influence on rock & roll fashion since the Stones' Tour." The occasion for this comment was a review of Every Picture Tells a Story, the album that contained the hit single "Maggie May." One sentence later, Mendelsohn wrote that the singer was "the single most glamorous rock figure rolling."

You might remember Stewart sleazy in spandex from his "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" era, seven years later. Abandoning his Gasoline Alley where "the milk's upon the door" for the big Los Angeles glitter ball of the mid-1970s, Stewart entered a renaissance era worlds away from the turf of Rod the Mod.

Stewart's past as the whitest wailer of deep-black blues had been built upon a foundation of lyrical translation; his brilliance was in being the oracle of the working class. He nearly always wore a woolen scarf, because it was nearly always cold. The sun didn't shine on the labor pool. Unlike Jagger, who mumbled and mimed his way across both the music and the class stratum, Stewart's osmotic empathy sounded like the last mortal fracture. Listening to the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces, and Stewart's first three solo outings was putting an ear to the human condition. It was also concrete proof that while adversity is a home truth, so is a balls-to-the-wall good time.

Stewart had a way of phrasing everyday strife that made working-class inconveniences into big questions. "Have you perished in the drizzling rain?" he asked, wearing "that old school coat to keep you from the wind." His glamour was that of eternal struggle wrapped in wardrobe remix, at least so long as he kept his uncertainty and his home base. Who was surer than he of the false front of make believe: "So what becomes of you, my love, when they have finally stripped you of the handbags and the glad rags..."

The glad rags of Rod the Mod were dictated by spontaneity and informality. He mixed individual pieces that were not so much reflective of trend as they were off-hand comments on improvisation: He made it up as he went along. Like his singing, his look didn't appear to have been cultivated. He wore his hair not as an accessory but as a mate; the shag haircut so favored by the British rock musician of the late 1960s became on Stewart a disobedient alter ego.

As soon as Stewart left his tartans in England, he found the stardust jumpsuit of Atlantic Crossing. His maribou boas, once a careless, insouciant gesture, became jet-set props. He lost his recklessness as he tried on his feminine Doppelgänger. No longer looking as if he'd arrived--hooch in hand--from the corner pub, Stewart zeroed in on the one thing that can always be counted upon: Los Angeles is glitzier, faster, dumber, flashier, and blonder than anywhere else on the planet.

Stroked by sun the way he used to be stoked by peat fire, the former busker and barroom belter took to California without a streak of the revelation that had made his former albums so emotionally resonant. Now that he had only Los Angeles to evoke, he changed his tune, abandoning his inner English Galahad to become a California caricature.

Stewart's understanding of California was opportunistic and full of innocent, eye-popping response. He consigned the Faces and his tartan scarves to the bum bin in order to pull on tiger-striped spandex and leg warmers. He was a kid in a candy playland, built just for him and his urgent need to assimilate into what he thought was California's primary culture: dreams and sex. It's a common mistake, and one that results in either abject failure or spectacular success. The latter is what keeps the fallacy alive, and for a man whose blues had run deep, he was defenseless in the face of the conceit.

Stewart surveyed Los Angeles with the eye of a broke fanatic. Money can buy you love and everything else, including bad taste. Los Angeles was a shopping mall of dubious idea, cheap bamboozle, and ad hoc passementerie. Gilding the lily with spandex or Swedish models was just one more way of spelling success to the lads back home, who could watch the whole thing go down on the Midnight Special.

Older fans rejected the new Stewart, whose disco efforts were as awkward as "Shattered" and "Miss You" were for the Stones. They felt Stewart had sold out, had become part of the commercial machine, but they were wrong. Stewart was simply reflecting the values important to him at that moment in time, and he was making more money than ever by doing so. To fans, Stewart was glamorous only so long as he was poor and vocal about it. Shared experience was what counted when listening to early Stewart. If your heart was ripped out, then so was his; if you huddled against the winter, he was sharing your coat.

Originally, glamour to Stewart was appropriation of mindset and behavior more than it was a wardrobe choice. Clothes, as you probably realize, are only half the battle. Spandex has its limits, even on rock stars. It does no one any good to pose without the correct position. Stewart was a polymorph, someone who could pick up and leave off a character as deftly as he had forsaken the blues for disco. If he lost his rawness to electric-blue elastic fiber and the Top 40, then who could blame him? The sun is always hottest where money burns a hole.

As L. A.'s culture of superficiality worked its magic on Stewart, he lost the tonality and texture he'd had previously. It was already too late. The new glamour was cheap and anonymous and belonged not to him but to whoever wore him out with her hot legs. Stewart was the perfect victim for Los Angeles from as far back as his street-busking days. Asking Stewart to warm his hands over a peat fire and sing the blues when he'd basked in the Los Angeles everglow was like asking Scott Fitzgerald to give up hooch and return to West Egg.

An old raincoat could let you down. So could spandex, but not where it counted, in the pocket. That's the L. A. lesson. Authenticity is for the birds, for art houses, and for Englishmen who go green in the noonday sun. Remember that the working class works and that minimum wage is no reflection of honesty.

Barbarella: Rabanne's Intergalactic Runway

I remember the year 1968 clearly, even if I didn't see it that way. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I got glasses, thick lenses in brown plastic frames that I got before I had a chance to see my teenage reflection without them. By the time I entered high school, I was used to being referred to as "Who? The girl with the glasses?"

Due to the outstanding genetic fortune of others, I was the only person in school who needed to wear them.

Nineteen sixty-eight was also the year that Richard Nixon was elected to the White House, barely beating out Hubert Humphrey. By the time Nixon won the popular vote in November of that year, America had already witnessed the Tet Offensive, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Laugh-In, and Arlo Guthrie singing "Alice's Restaurant" at the Newport Folk Festival.

Historians like to talk about the end of innocence, and how bloodshed knocks some sense into a nation. You usually hear this type of rhetoric on the History Channel, spoken in a solemn drone. Naiveté is dead and someone else is to blame. Insert any war fought on American soil or with American intervention, the Depression, drugs, and Elvis Presley's pelvis. Innocence stripped away by bullets or rock and roll is still innocence lost.

Middle America of 1968 sucked on the fifties like a desiccating teat. Never had the generation gap been wider. The divide was blamed on the hippies, but the hippies were at best a sideshow attraction. Just like the Vietnam War, the hippies were one of those things that don't grow in our own back yards. Heads buried in sand, the short response to all that peace, love, and dope was disengagement. Still, the hippies were on to something, and that something was self-expression. As usual, the younger generation caught on first, but by 1968 the salesman next door was grooving to Jose Feliciano's Light My Fire and shopping the Sears catalogue for a Sansabelt leisure suit.

Language thrummed with idiom that reached critical mass on Laugh-In: groovy, you bet your sweet bippy, let it all hang out, sock it to me. Watching Laugh-In marked you as with it, "it" being defined as whatever was anti-establishment-antithetical to Spiro Agnew.

Laugh-In tackled subversion through a mod filter. Mod wasn't revolutionary and didn't require either the burning of flags or the eating of raw foods.

Mod started in London and spread to Europe and only then to America. Wearing go-go boots wasn't a political act; mod wasn't a movement to explore. Without political or philosophical message, it could not have a negative shape. Mod was simply a brief moment in style that lasted from 1964 until 1969.

As soon as the middle-aged middle class started wearing mini-skirts and longer sideburns, mod became just another paste-on pastiche. As a style, though, mod was arguably the most influential fashion movement of the 20th century. It spanned generations; you can see it in the television shows of the era. Compare My Three Sons with The Lucy Show. Beatle boots and hair in the first, flower-power dresses on a fifty-something redhead in the second.

Television and movies are as good a place as any to look at 1968, because where else but there can you get a good 360° at a culture through the eyes of commercialism? Photographs won't cut it; they're too honest and they don't pay the rent. Newspapers, magazines, and books tell stories that require creative abstraction; unless your lively imagination can conjure Françoise Hardy performing at the Savoy in her 16 kg chain-mail pantalons you've missed the bottom line .

Those pantalons were the work of Paco Rabanne, the Spanish designer who, along with Pierre Cardin, defined futuristic couture for the nascent jet set. In 1968 Rabanne was designing costumes for Barbarella, the sexy sci-fi romp to Sogo. Barbarella was a distillation of all Rabanne's wildest innovations with rhodoid (a science fiction-sounding plastic if ever there were one), chain mail, and le métal. Rabanne had been molding and sculpting these materials and more since the early 1960s, but it wasn't until Barbarella that his concepts found a perfect commercial symbiosis.

Jane Fonda, with her nonplussed peachiness and custard-smooth body, suited Rabanne's vision of the artificial future. As Barbarella crashed her spaceship into yet another erotic scene, she changed from netting to fake fur to plastic. Plastics, as Dustin Hoffman was told the year before in The Graduate, were the future. For Rabanne they were old news; the designer had already eclipsed them and had gone on to body armor. Where the movie was chintzy and oversimplified, the forward statement of the costumes was not.

Barbarella was a low-rent cinematic glimpse into the type of campy naughtiness America would get up to if it weren't so...American. America didn't get camp, even camp as self-consciously done as Barbarella's. Special negative on any hint of decadence, especially European. The only American cognate to Barbarella as a character study was Leroy Neiman's mute Femlin, who possessed exactly the same degree of acting talent.

Despite its latter-day cult status, Barbarella is nowhere near a great film. Even with its spectacularly clumsy effects, it doesn't need to be. What it provides in the way of fashion retrospective is remarkable. Rabanne never translated well into American English; his startling use of industrial materials was a half century away from its time. Even in its molding spaceship, it may still be too anticipatory. Or too European. Accents make us suspicious. We are still bothered by innovation; we call it theatrical and impractical. And we still want romance.

Not everything needs realism and glasses. We may as well admit, though, that we like both sex and fashion without intergalactica.

He Hits My Hair

Brooklyn. It's got that buzz that comes along with artistic groundswell. It hums the way the East Village and Soho used to, before those creative neighborhoods were swallowed alive by Bugaboos and Whole Foods. Brooklyn--or more particularly Williamsburg--is the hot place to be a writer, or the place to be a hot writer. Or artist, musician, or Indian chief.

Williamsburg has both the indie groove and the hipper-than-thou culture that comes along with rejecting institutions for the sake of identification. This is especially true in light of the fact that its residents have turned their backs on Manhattan, which they can still see across the river. Williamsburg is today's hip stomping ground in the way Paris was in the 1920s or San Francisco was during the Beat Generation. Since the secret is already out, there can only be decline.

Soon, the last frontier will be where it always was--Alaska. Until that day, what befell Haight Ashbury and the Lower East Side will befall Williamsburg. In due time, of course, after the forward march of expensive pram and expensive degree.

Brooklyn as an artistic and cultural showplace dates back to Spike Lee's 1985 film She's Gotta Have It, a movie that accidentally gave off an impression of arty calculation. As Lee's oeuvre expanded, Brooklyn became much like Woody Allen's Manhattan, the backdrop as character, the city anthropomorphized.

When people mention Brooklyn in the same breath as culture, they usually mean culture as a carrier of artistic and intellectual merit. What they don't mean is culture as a set of social ideologies and conditions. That would be the volatile culture of The Lords of Flatbush or that of Saturday Night Fever.

Saturday Night Fever was set in Bay Ridge, a world away from Williamsburg, under the long arm of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The film had its genesis in a story written by British journalist Nik Cohn that was later proved to have been a contrivance. Cohn's story took place at 2001 Odyssey, a disco located in an industrial wasteland. 2001 Odyssey catered to a subcultural pocket of Italian-Americans who on the weekend thronged to its dance floor. That pocket of young Americans had nowhere else to go, not on Saturday night and not for the rest of their lives. They hustled, they sexed, they swore, they fought the Puerto Ricans.

More than it is remembered as responsible for the disco explosion and as the music that revived the Bee Gees, the film should be recollected as having a strong voice of both entropy and moral relativism. Although the main premise was not stepping out but stepping up, several of the film's subplots dealt with ethical quandaries and the consequences of choice. While true north was geographically located at 802 64th Street, morally it was centered in the Catholic church and in adherence to class traditions.

And then there were the costumes. It seems unfair to call them costumes when they were taken wholesale from the dance floor at 2001 Odyssey. Nineteen seventy-seven was the year of gabardine and Qiana. The former was a slightly scratchy wash-and-wear polyester used in suits and the latter was the silky nylon fiber of huckapoo shirts. With the addition of Italian horns and platform shoes, these fabrics formed the cuigine uniform. Although it wouldn't have gotten its wearers past the door at Studio 54, this was Brooklyn dapper.

If it weren't for Stephanie Mangano, Travolta's Manero may not have tried to cross the bridge into the city. Stephanie was ambitious and not unaware of the silliness of striving for something beyond one's intellectual reach. With her moderately less pigeonholed wardrobe, she was the antithesis of Annette, who wore the female disco uniform: the Danskin leotard.

By 1977, the Danskin leotard had expanded beyond the barre. That summer, the halter version was worn as a bathing suit. A companion wraparound skirt could take the leotard out for an evening of dancing. This combination had a particular American glamour even as it marked the wearer as suburban or a bridge-and-tunnel striver. You wore this outfit with Jontue, a cheap floral fragrance that had all the subtlety of bug spray.

The picaresque authenticity of Saturday Night Fever is so palpable that its truths are still close enough to feel alive. This was not a film you watched as a voyeur; it was impossible to experience it with any sort of detachment. Its complete lack of Hollywood egocentricity makes it no more tethered to the seventies than Apocalypse Now is.

Thirty years down the road, with hip glossed all over Brooklyn, the social and intellectual dead-end of Saturday Night Fever feels like a welcome breath of exhaust-filled air.

2000 Man: Keith Richards for Louis Vuitton

Keith Richards aged overnight. Unlike the rest of us, who must sit helplessly by and watch as a barely discernible line turns into a crow's foot and slight shadows become permanent baggage, Richards rusted in 1978 and has stayed that way. At 65, he looks only marginally craggier than he did at 45. Long the subject of unflattering visual lampoon, the only significant difference between the Richards of today and the Richards of 20 years ago is the color of his hair.

For years an anticipated morality tale of the type parents like to use to caution teenagers against drugs and debauchery, Richards has persevered through addiction, Altamont, and Anita Pallenberg to become a New Millennium poster boy for Louis Vuitton, not "Just Say No."

The Vuitton ad finds Richards, the eternal nomad, in a luxury hotel room. In this anthem to life on the road, five-star style, the room is decorated with heavy, bland decor. Richards strums his guitar while taking a break from a novel that requires a magnifying glass to read (oh, those stylists); a cup of tea recklessly sits sans doily on top of a custom-made Vuitton guitar case. Ever mindful of rock-and-roll quirk, the stylist has thrown Richards' trademark scarves over the lamps and placed a scabbard on an end table. A lens filter makes the guitarist's hair appear blue; the video made to accompany the shoot proves that Richards in his dotage has not resorted to an old woman's colorful rinse.

As Leibovitz welcomes him to the set, Richards asks where he should "park the carcass," and in that wheezy moment he calls to mind not just his own archetype but that of Bill Nighy's marvelously decaying musician in 1998's Still Crazy.

"Some journeys cannot be put into words" reads the text of the ad. Indeed, if one were to consider the whole of Richards' public life, from 1964 onwards, that would be almost half a century of rootless, indestructible survival. Richards is life itself, bruised and abused, but he is not a lifestyle. Rock and roll used to be, before it went corporate (at the hands of Jovan and the Stones, no less). Jagger stopped being hip around the same time he started wearing kneepads on stage, but Richards has been chugging along for five decades as the undisputed king of all things reckless and therefore recklessly cool.

Richards' journey of je m'en foutisme can be traced back farther than his first rotting tooth. You first see it in his shaggy hair as he frolics about a beach in Santa Monica, circa 1965. By 1966 he'd found his inner dandy, and in 1967 he'd grown the hairstyle that has provided forty years of bad imitation among would-be guitar gods. If some little Strat-wielding punk says he's going to get his hair cut like Keef, you immediately apprehend the man and the era.

By the late 1970s, Richards had built himself into a Roman ruin, with all the glories of antiquity attached. Living history? Sure, he's writing a book, but try science instead: Where else could you see an ongoing experiment in pushing the human body to its limits?

Richards, as biology will attest, is no ordinary human. He singlehandedly invented heroin chic, 20 years before magazine editors realized it had editorial appeal. He's nodded off looking as if he smelled like a skunk and has been photographed that way, glamorously. He wandered around for fifteen years without a front tooth. He doesn't appear to eat, and yet you hear he makes one hell of a fry-up. He was not born in a cross-fire hurricane, he was born sucking the teat of Jack Daniels, with a Telecaster instead of hips. He's one of very few celebrities who've transcended decades--five of them-- without falling into, as the French say, "les oubliettes." He gets away with calling women "bitches."

The Vuitton ads are reminiscent of the Blackglama "What Becomes a Legend Most?" campaign. In Vuitton's case, they've been designed to appeal to an older consumer now that Vuitton's customer base has skewed younger. The idea was to take random legends--Richards, Deneuve, Gorbachev--who'd have some face value among the senior set. Richards has been entitled to his pension for five years now and he's ten years past eligibility for Denny's senior special.

Still, he strums.

The Leibovitz video shows Richards at first pretending to play, without an ounce of attitude to his skeletal frame. You get the feeling that Richards motors through life at a very comfortable 33 1/3 rpm, always. Time waits for him. One wonders if his lack of urgency is the key to his longevity. Blues play in the background, low key. He mimes a strum, catching his hand in the air, and then repeats. At one point, this resembles nothing so much as Bill Murray's impersonations of the Rat Pack in Lost in Translation. Leibovitz encourages: That's great...so great...when you play...don't even need to play...

"Like a Rembrandt," Richards says about the photos, as the crew applauds. The final photo catches him looking off into the corner, a deep grove running down his his cheek like a tear.

Vuitton's in a bit of tough spot. They make luggage and handbags that are copied everywhere; one can hardly set foot into an international tourist area without seeing hundreds of them, many made better than the originals. They never had the type of hipness one associates with popular culture; they aren't Burberry. For the cynical, the Richards ad fails as propaganda; this is a guy who sleeps--when he sleeps--in his clothes. He's crusty. It's hard to imagine him couching himself in terms of material possessions. He's never been a studied wastrel, which is why all of his countless imitators are just that, cheap knock offs. One can see him using the custom case, but not buying one. That doesn't mean that there aren't any potential customers. Anyone who's been to Stones concert since 1995 has seen them, pulling up in their SUVs, firing up their portable barbecue grills, loosening their ties, watch the tail lights fading...time not so much on their side.

Hommage d'Homard

In the spring of 1937, Wallis Simpson posed for Vogue in a Schiaparelli evening gown that had a lobster printed on its skirt. Salvador Dalí designed the print, which also featured sprigs of parsley. The Vogue spread was intended to introduce readers to Mrs. Simpson, who in July of that year would marry Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor and abdicated King of England. Cecil Beaton's lens captured Mrs. Simpson wearing a softened expression that was the antithesis of what would come to be called "hard chic" and for which the Duchess of Windsor would be famous.

Mrs. Simpson was an important client for Schiaparelli, whose white organdy gown appeared superficially naive and whimsical. Organdy was the fabric of debutantes, the fabric of virgins. The gown had a modest neckline, red waistband, and full skirt. The lobster motif must have seemed fanciful, yet by wearing the gown Mrs. Simpson was telegraphing her ignorance of the artist's message. For Dalí, the lobster was full of frank sexual connotation and metaphor. Mrs. Simpson was an ardent Schiaparelli fan and history has not recorded who, if anyone, suggested she wear the dress in the layout. Interestingly, it also suggests a naïveté and lack of cultural awareness on the part of Vogue's editorial staff. Surely Schiaparelli was aware of the ramifications, and it is likely that photographer Cecil Beaton was as well.

Dalí liked the idea of the jolie laide, saying, "In the elegant woman, there is always a studied compromise between her ugliness, which must be moderate, and her beauty which must be "evident," but simply evident without going beyond this exact measure." Such a presentation resulted in a sharp, aggressive profile and seems to epitomize Mrs. Simpson.

Dalí had been using lobsters in his work for several years prior, most famously in the 1936 Téléphone-Homard. There, a plaster lobster replaced the ear piece. The telephone was a prime example of the symbolism of the Surrealist object. In their juxtaposed incongruity, Dalí felt, such objects were freed from "formal preoccupation" and "depend(ed) only on the individual's amorous imagination." Also, as work of art the phone had no social status. It was not a Monet or Rembrandt, artists who work conveyed the wealth and supposed taste of the buyer. Quite the opposite; the absurdity of the phone telegraphed an enlightened, anti-bourgeois philosophy.

It also carried a message of Freudian sexuality. Dalí equated lobsters with the vagina dentata.

The expanded definition of lobster as symbol of vagina dentata would appear two years later, at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The fair, billed as "Building the World of Tomorrow," was a theoretical and technological showcase for American industrial design and its consequent power. Built on land repurposed from a garbage dump, the fair was intended to demonstrate American determinism as it moved away from the bleak years of the Depression and towards a future that would soon be clouded by war. At the entrance, the Trylon and Perisphere invited visitors to enjoy pride in modernization. The phallic Trylon soared skywards while the orb-shaped, maternal Perisphere suggested totality. That the fair relied heavily on the babbittry of the citizen was contrasted by a pavilion parked away in the Amusement Zone.

The pavilion proposed by art dealer Julien Levy was to contain a gallery of Surrealist artwork. When Levy and architect Ian Woodner were unable to obtain financing, they approached Dalí, then the most well-known proponent of the movement. With Dalí's name attached, the project went forward, becoming The Dream of Venus and a furthering of Dalí's Freudian interpretation of the Surrealist code. As conceived by Dalí, the pavilion was a pile of biomorphic deformities: a fish head for a ticket booth, disembodied female legs as a portal. Inside, a topless Venus "slept" on satin sheets while her dream was enacted by models swimming in a water tank.

A Horst photograph of one of the costume designs underscores the erotic connotation of lobsters and Dalí's evangelism for the crustacean as sexual totem. In the photo, a model wears a necklace of fish-hooked crab claws while a lobster rests between her legs. In a separate work by George Platt Lynes, Dalí is superimposed on a photo of a nude woman with a lobster at her crotch. In each of these photos the lobster is grasping, cannibalistic, and an object of vulgar carnality. Horst photograph of a costume design for the Dream of Venus; body paint by Dali

Much of the modern European art community felt that nefarious bourgeois plotting caused World War I. By nationality and original aesthetic part of that group, Dali's taking part in a bourgeois fair that advanced America as a mechanized superpower and provider of a synthetic good life seems odd until one remembers the ultra-conservatism that caused Dalí's 1939 expulsion from the Surrealist circle. America was over two years away from declaring war on Japan and was maintaining a stance of isolationism even as it intended for the fair to be international. At the time the Pavilion was conceived, Dalí was living in New York, enjoying a capitalist lifestyle, and was no longer philosophically connected to the Surrealist movement. The Pavilion was a monument of separation; it reduced Surrealism to fantasy art alone.

Would Mrs. Simpson have posed in the gown had she been aware of its connotations? The simplicity of the fabric and design belied the sexual complexity of the concept. A duality of whimsy and repulsion, along with the disruption of reality and literal significance would have been completely lost on her as she nonchalantly posed in the garden.

What appeared as a nonsense motif had its roots in a Dada cynicism that questioned the smugness of the social class of which Mrs. Simpson was a member. On the eve of her wedding to the Duke, she posed in a dress that was loaded with social and sexual implication.

Schiaparelli had a long affiliation with the Surrealists. The fashion medium was ideal for incorporating the Surrealist object. The designer made hats that looked like pork chops and gloves onto which red snakeskin nails were affixed. For the mainstream client, the lobster gown was refashioned into a summery apron dress, appearing that way in the July 1937 Vogue. As ready-to-wear, the rephrased dress lost its charge and the further addition of parsley makes the dress as carefree as a clambake.

History has not been kind to the Duchess of Windsor; she is remembered as a conniving American divorcée who interfered with the royal line of succession. Hers may have been a café sophistication and not an intellectual one. How she missed the context of the original design seems the oversight of a past that was far naiver and more superficially trusting than the world that emerged at the end of World War 2.