June 2006 Cover
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A concept needing carbon-dating?
By
Mitzel
I was listening to a pop radio station while busy with tasks at work. The music segued into a weather report. The announcer informed us it was a beautiful, sunny spring day, something I already knew. As to the forecast
for the morrow, he said: "It will be a carbon
copy of today." I had to stop when I heard this. Carbon copy? It not only didn't sound right, it seemed wildly dated.
The funny thing was that, just the day before, I was looking for my folder that contained sheets of carbon paper-- I had to fill out some form or something and had reverted to the old ways. I checked myself,
asked what I was doing and then just ran the damn thing
through the copying machine.
It's sometimes confusing living in the present and the past at the same time, an act that requires more measured finesse with age. (Just a few years ago, I had a completely 1960s flashback while about to order a
drink in my favorite watering hole: I asked for a Negroni. The young bartender looked at me as though I were insane. As it turned out, he had on his shelf some ancient cocktail-mix book from decades ago and he found a recipe
for a Negroni, thus removing me, on this occasion, from loony limbo.)
Has anyone under 20 or even 25 ever used carbon paper? Or a typewriter for that matter, for which carbon paper was once an essential peripheral?
Carbon paper must have been a wonderful invention when it was introduced. A sheet of carbon to make instant copies! Think of all the medieval monks duplicating by hand the ancient texts in the scriptoria. Think
of Tom Jefferson with his clever, if clunky, copying machine, which I suspect broke down often-- tinker, tinker, tinker. And the high poetic moment of carbon paper was depicted by Roz Russell, in her movie role as
Auntie Mame, while trying to write up a department-store order amidst a cascade of carbon paper, during, of all things, the hideous Christmas buying rush, even in the Depression. In a later time, La Mame would have just
scanned the bar-code, hit the "Process Order" key and,
whoosh, the customer would have been fulfilled, and Mame would never have met her man.
Upgraded English?
Carbon paper. Shouldn't referents in popular language keep up with the times? In the age of iTunes, can we still call our music provider a "record store"? H.L. Mencken, inspired in the 1920s by the renaming of
hair dressers as "beauticians" wanting to rename the honorable profession of bootlegger as "bootician." Few people say "icebox" when they mean refrigerator, unless, of course, they still have an icebox.
The late, great erotic film star Al Parker is now credited with "introducing" the new Clone Look for gay men. But did he really? Why was this credit given to Parker and not to Richard Locke? Was Locke just a little
too lanky and weathered to be a fashion icon? Parker was younger than Locke, but not by much, and more pretty-boy modelish than Locke; Parker came out of the Colt Studio machine. Weren't some gay men in San
Francisco and New York already presenting themselves in the look that Parker would bring to the screen? I think so. It would be interesting to establish who actually bestowed the moniker "Clone Look" on the fashion.
But here we run into a language problem. How can something be "new" if it is a clone, a sort of carbon copy? It is by definition a replication, not an original, unless we want to wade into the miasma of
advertising lingo, wherein you often hear that such-&-such is "truly unique." But at least with the naming of the gay phenomenon of The Clone, the attempt was made to reference a current technology. It was a further extension
of the concept developed by Marshall McLuhan, except in this case for gay men, when McLuhan analyzed the intersection of advertising, industrialism and female beauty in "The Love Goddess Assembly Line."
To be a wee bit critical, it has occurred to me that Al Parker mostly worked with his clothes off, so it might be difficult to hang a fashion craze on him; a look maybe, but not a fashion spike. Let us remember
Parker with affection; his image stimulated many a retina. And it wasn't long after the Age of Parker that things changed. Along came Bruce Weber and William Higgins and the male body was re-morphed again into... what? One,
a pumped-up steroid wide-eyed zombie look; and the other, a shaved, dyed-blond-- well, Love God Assembly Line, beta version (if we still say that). And in a couple of the early Higgins films, a cast of carbon copies which
I found both visually curious and a little scary.
Full disclosure: I am one of the few gay men in this country who has never appeared in a skin mag or an "adult" erotic film or video-- no one has asked me.
And I can't imagine anything is still put on film or tape
(though I hear that someone just shot a gay porn film, on
film, just for the novelty of it all).
Which reminds me, someone tried to sell me some old super-8mm loops from the 60s not long ago. How many new configurations of technology, as well as language, must we go through in this increasingly
cluttered vale of tears?
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