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"... I was left with a one inch mound of flesh/ where my penis used to be.../ A one-inch mound of flesh with a scar running down it/ like a sideways grimace/ on an eyeless face/ Just a little bulge/ It was an angry inch.." |
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"... I was left with a one inch mound of flesh/ where my penis used to be.../ A one-inch mound of flesh with a scar running down it/ like a sideways grimace/ on an eyeless face/ Just a little bulge/ It was an angry inch.." |
Here at The Soft Toy Department, images like these are not unfamiliar. And thanks to the hit musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch, from which the above lyric is quoted, penectomy is becoming an ever-more-familiar concept, if not exactly a household word.Propelled by rave reviews and an original-cast soundtrack CD, Hedwig accumulates with each passing week a worldwide cult following of Rocky Horroresque dimensions.
Ground zero is The Jane Street Theatre, a ballroom attached to the flophouse-like Riverview Hotel at the corner of Jane and West Streets in Greenwhich Village.
According to play's program notes: "The Riverview was erected in 1907 as a lodging house for able-bodied seamen. In 1917, it housed the surviving crew of the Titanic... Herman Melville is rumored to have worked the front desk."
Although Moby-Dick's author died sixteen years before the Riverview was built, today the lobby--for so very long the habitat of down-and-outers, or foreign travelers lured by the scent of low-cost hyper-authenticity--comes alive six nights a week with Hedwig fanciers.
Late-night-Friday performances of Hedwig seem especially to attract a cavalcade of atypicality and otherness- -omnisexuals, confirmed bachelors, polymorphs, just plain morphs, voyeur types like The Soft Toy Department, and Japanese club kids with blond dreadlocks.
Having attended two performances of Hedwig over the past month, The Soft Toy Department is left with an unmistakable sense of Hedwig as family entertainment...for the non-Oedipal family.
Is there life after penectomy? Not since Jim Thompson's 1954 The Nothing Man has penile amputation been more dynamically, or lyrically, addressed than in Hedwig.
Hedwig, nee Hansel, was born in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, his childhood filled with Westward yearnings borne on the waves of U.S. Armed Forces radio. The sound of glam rock and the taste of Gummy Bears spelled f-r-e-e-d-o-m for the fey teenager-- their allure heightened by Hansel's nightmarishly dysfunctional home life. His escapist fervor is such that he undergoes a substandard sex-change surgery in order to marry an American GI and cross to the West. Not only does the surgery leave the newly incarnated Hedwig with permanent iatrogenic injury--"the angry inch"--but within a year, the Wall that Hansel/Hedwig sacrificed his organ to breach came tumbling down.
The hapless transgenderist, marriage kaput, turns up in a Kansas trailer park--where he/she forges a germinal rock-and-roll persona in local coffee houses. The newly penectomized Hedwig also gives nurturance and succor to a studly local Army brat--the raw human clay from which springs the rock-and-roller Tommy Gnosis, who then rises to superstardom using material stolen from Hedwig.In the meantime, Hedwig's plot plays the Riverview's skanky, end-of-the-line squalor for all the self-referentiality it's worth. From the ballroom's stage, she can hear , clear across the river, Tommy Gnosis doing his act-- Hedwig's songs--from an arena in New Jersey's Meadowlands.
Adjacent to the Riverview is Manhattan's meat-packing district--the world-renowned, truck-and-warehouse theme park for trannie hookers and those who like them. Struggling chanteuse Hedwig occasionally moonlights on these suet-stippled streets, dispensing cut-rate blowjobs just to make ends meet.
And it is here that Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis are ultimately reunited in an offstage limo wreck that evokes J.G. Ballard's Crash.
Not only is Hedwig's a legend-quest that finds its antecedents in The Who's Tommy, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, and every other operatic rock- musical ever staged or recorded--but it is a quest as old as literature itself. Thus "The Origins of Love", one of the show's most affecting numbers, was inspired by Plato's dialog "The Symposium":
"And the fire shot down
from the sky in bolts
like shining blades
and it ripped right through
the flesh of the children of the sun...
...the pain cuts,
a straight line down to the heart;
We called it love..."
Hedwig's is a narrative of opposites seeking wholeness and conciliation: good/evil; East /West;slavery/ freedom; male and female"; stardom/ and failure; self-creation/self-destruction; Manhattan/New Jersey.
At its worst, Hedwig and The Angry Inch is probably better than any current musical theatre playing Broadway; at its best, Hedwig kicks Tommy's butt.
And always--like a Brechtian distancing device--there is the penile injury to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted...a reminder that Hedwig is no mere amusement or divertimento, but a tragedy of errors that reflects the fragmentation of these times.
Elsewhere in Manhattan--operating from deep within the Lower East Side--Axel, self-described "world's most dangerous jeweler", recently generated a number of newsgroup postings for his "axelizations.com" website, headlined "Axels [sic] jewelry found here."As many RABbits and BME readers are aware, metallurgically-minded Axel creates a genre of lethal-looking jewelry and "exoskeletal" accessories, drawing upon insect, reptile and other non-human lifeforms for designs that fall somewhere between art and weaponry.
Axel's work has adorned many living and dead celebrities--notably Howard Stern, Nina Hagen, Axl Rose, and the late Mssrs. Sam Kinison, River Phoenix, and Vincent Price.
Axel also specializes in paintings executed with delicate nurdles of his own blood "Because blood is an iron oxide, I'm remaining true to my metallic heritage", Axel explained to The Soft Toy Department in an interview two years ago. "I'm not only giving my time and my soul to these artworks--I'm giving my body."
According to Axel, it was at the late Salvador Dali's side that Axel-as collaborator and occasional human inkwell-was initiated into the bloodly artforms now being merchandized on "Axelizations.com".
Axel recounted the epic Late Sixties scenario that drew him into Salvador Dali's orbit:
"I had just taken some mescaline at the Jersey shore and I was watching the sun rise when, on an impulse, I hitchhiked to Manhattan. I arrived in the city barefoot and an old man came up to me on the street, handed me a card, and said 'Dali would like to see you.'"
The aged, ailing Dali at the time was holding court in the King Cole Room of the St. Regis Hotel, and Axel found a welcome place in the master's ectomorphic entourage, where he came to be known by Dali as "my little Jesus".
Inexplicably, Axel would later be arrested and charged with stealing tools and other property from the senescent maestro.
Almost as inexplicable are the messages that recently appeared in both R.A.B. and alt.gothic.fashion, containing the following promotional text:
"Organic in nature, twisted and reformed into the darkenly [sic] brilliant works of bodyart in a way that only Axel can. Once you've seen his work, you'll feel incomplete without it."
"Are you telling me I'm incomplete?", one indignant RABbit textually huffed. "I think not."
Explained another RABbit to The Soft Toy Department, "He's selling silver, non-piercing jewelry--definitely not what R.A.B. is about. Despite having appeared in the book Modern Primitives, Axel's just not part of this scene. Furthermore, the R.A.B. charter says you can't post ads. The charter also says it's only for permanent body modifications. Axel's ad would have been more appropriate to a goth newsgroup."
Much the same mood, however, prevailed in alt.gothic.fashion, where Axel's minions had posted a message reading, "Part of his gift to you and the scene is the procedes [sic] this site earns. That ignorance can only suggest your [sic] some kid who needs alot of growing up to do."
Huh?
The inhabitants of alt.gothic.fashion were not slow in responding to the latest communique from "axelizations.com".
"Sounds like you're a rude art director/webmaster in need of a spelling lesson", observed one.
Posted another, "i'm [sic] saddened on Axel's behalf that he'd employ, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but, such a FUCKING IDIOT that not *only* violates plainly-put FAQ-outlined ad guidelines, but is then STUPID enough to post a snotty, downtalking reply of the sort quoted above."
Meanwhile, an enterprising RABbit had traced "axelizations.com" to its source: "Registrant: Axelizations (AXELIZATIONS-DOM), 20 Clinton Street Apartment 5G New York, NY 10002, USA."
Not only is this the apartment where Axel resides with his female companion and a creamy, peach-flecked cockatoo, it is also the apartment previously occupied by influential penectomy survivor Joe Christ...who acted as Axel's paid publicist for the financially and psychologically disastrous 1994 blood-painting exhibit at Psychedelic Solution Gallery.
[And across the hall from "Axelizations.com", in Apartment 5B, lives Joe Christ protege Amy Shapiro, who has roles in two Joe Christ videos: In Acid Is Groovy, Kill The Pigs, Shapiro simulates victimhood by being bludgeoned face-down against a toilet seat; in Sex Blood and Mutilation , she spits fire.]
Truly this is a tale in which the gritty realism is exceeded by an even grittier surrealism.
Hello, Dali!
April 1, 1999