London and France and Bruno’s underpants.
So Bruno’s stripping.
(You don’t know from Bruno? Possibly the oldest and one-of-if-not the best daily strips on the web, originally published in the pages of the UMass Daily Collegian [Amherst] and in painstakingly hand-assembled books and now seven years’ worth online and counting [though the books are still available, yes], about the daily misgivings and peregrinations of a 20-something—no, now 30-something woman who thinks not wisely but too well, who pissed off her parents and dropped out of college and corrupted her niece and ran away to New Orleans and discovered girls and invited a circus to stay in the house of a reclusive crank and helped her fondest enemy find the love of his life and worked for a newspaper and forgot to feed her cat and travelled across country with a theatre troupe and dissed Ginger Spice and moved to Portland on a whim and fell in with a philosophy group at the Pied Cow and didn’t so much try polyamory as get involved with more than one person at once and it didn’t so much work out and she got hit by a car and she traveled across Europe and for a while there she’d been optioned by Jeremiah Chechik and she has these dreams, and all of it in gorgeous black and white, and lately she’s taken up stripping. Exotic dancing. Ecdysiasting. —Thus, Bruno.)
The thing about Bruno stripping—and yes, I see your furrowed brow; let’s drag this out in the open: there is something (inherently?) salacious about a gynephilic artist writing and drawing stories about a woman working in the sex industry; all the good intentions in the world can’t change that fact. (There’s something [inherently?] salacious about androphilic artists doing stories about shirtless Foreign Legionnaires in the Algerian desert, too.) Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to hide this salaciousness; “Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” as he puts it in a recent journal entry. —But there’s nothing inherently wrong with this salaciousness. As most budding artists sooner or later get around to figuring out, one of art’s great, brute-force purposes is giving shape and form to inchoate desires—or, as Howard Cruse puts it in the delightfully screwball “Unfinished Pictures” (from Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels):
Ah, for the newly-ripened sexuality of pubescence, the high-voltage horniness of youth! Yech, for the agonies of not being able to do anything about it! Artists have an advantage, though… I was thirteen when I realized I could draw dirty pictures anytime that I wanted to!
Don’t scoff. It’s a heady, potent feeling: you may not be able to control your desires, or the objects of those desires, but you can at least use words or pictures or both to effect some control over images of those objects, and those desires. It’s a damn sight better than nothing. —When done badly, of course, you end up with Victoria’s Secret commercials and Lady Death and everything else on the TV and the radio and the internet that reminds you marketers think there’s nothing cooler in this world than to sell to 13-year-old boys; when done well—in comics, at least—you end up with delightful trifles like Colleen Coover’s girly porno and Dylan Horrocks’s beautifully dirty stories and oh, I dunno, a decent chunk of early Desert Peach. So let’s make sure we’re clear on this: there’s nothing inherently wrong with salacious art.
that that’s what Chris is doing, per se.
He’s done his homework. He has an appreciation of the ironies and the cognitive dissonances; he knows something of what it feels like to have this as a job and something of what goes through your head on stage and when you don’t want to tell your boyfriend what it is you’re doing because he’s at least doing a pretty good job of faking it on paper. He isn’t (or isn’t just) playing salacious games with an object of his desire (“Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” he says, disingenuously); he’s actively putting himself in her shoes (much as he has been the whole seven-year run thus far). It’s a more richly ambivalent incoherent text than it maybe first appears.
But more to the point: it’s only a small part of her life. —She’s been doing it for four months now, and it’s something of a part-time job; she’s also just self-published her novel and hates working in a mail room and hangs out with her friends and still forgets to feed her cat. And even moreso: we’ve seen seven years of her life so far. We’ve gotten to know Bruno like an old friend, or more importantly, a favorite character in a long-running serial. And for a variety of reasons that with hindsight we can see nudging here and there the past few months, she decided to challenge herself by trying to do this thing. Stripping. And she seems to have found something in it or about it she likes more than not. This person we know has become for the moment a stripper; this stripper is a person we know.
Think of all the strippers and hookers and sex workers, all those bit parts in all those movies and books and comics, good, bad and indifferent, all those calculating sexpots and hearts of gold with dark and violent pasts. How many of them were strippers first, and people only as afterthoughts? How many of them do you think had writers who knew or even gave a damn about what they’d done in college and the other crap jobs they’d had and the time they’d hitchhiked across the backwoods of Massachusetts and why they’d dumped their third boyfriend and the orrery they’d spent the night under and whether they still forget to feed their cat?
That, I think, is what Chris is doing with Bruno and the stripping, at least in part. Or finding himself doing. And I think that’s far more good than not.
—The reason I bring this up, though: since Chris did a lot of his research for these strips at Mary’s Club, he’s going to be doing a little giving back. He’s going to be hanging out there a week from yesterday (at this point): 11 December, from 7 till at least 9, and he’s encouraging all and sundry who are in the area and so inclined to stop by with books to be signed and dollar bills ($2 for each 3-song set at a minimum, apparently). Myself, I’ve never been to a strip club (I don’t think catching the Porcelain Twinz at Dante’s counts; that’s more of a cabaret setting). It’ll be interesting to see if my money’s where my mouth is.
Figuratively speaking. Geeze. You have such dirty minds…
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