Folks, the world thought it was done with my book Tune in Tokyo, but the world was wrong, because, see, the world is now controlled by Amazon, and Amazon is not done with Tune in Tokyo, the world, or controlling the world.
The point is, TiT was featured in some local deals Kindle promotion yesterday and was discounted to 99 cents. And, as always happens in nature when things are deeply discounted, TiT shot up the Amazon Kindle chart, where it had been languishing at like number a million. (Actually, it's been fluctuating between #30,000 and #70,000 for the past few months.) Last night it reached #69, which I think you'll agree is the most perfect position for it. Sadly, I forgot to take a screen grab of it, so I'm having to settle for this one, where I'm #72, in front of both Sheryl Sandberg's book and the Fifty Shades of Grey filth. Leaning in!
Every springtime, one special song bursts from the fluffy white April skies, squiggles into your earholes, and burrows squarely inside your head to give you a much-needed lift after a long, dreary winter. It colors everything you do and makes even tedious actions like doing dishes, folding laundry, cleaning your cat Stella's crapper, or alphabetizing your boxes of incense seem like the happiest chores you've ever half completed because they present the opportunity to blast this song again and yelp along to it in ecstatic, blissful ignorance of how annoying this might be to your neighbors.
This song is usually brought to you by some collection of young mopey skinny British twenty-somethings with terrible/awesome haircuts and a penchant for sad 'n sparkling melodic hooks that just don't quit. (If they aren't British, they are Japanese or American, but they all probably wish they were British, if only for the socialized health care and the easy access to Cadbury Starbars.) The song captures the lush romance of youth, the jittery magic of first love, and/or the one point in time when everything's shining bright--that exquisite point in time just before it all turns to shit and hope dies. It's a wonderful point in time!
Well, I'm happy to report that I've just found the song that will be digging me out of the wreckage of winter, and it's a marvel. It's by a foursome of fraggles from Britain called Veronica Falls, and it's got everything: passionless vocals, heady harmonies, guitar jangle, and an ear worm of a melody that just won't quit. Aren't you jealous that you didn't find it first? It's okay! These songs were meant to be shared and adored, if not by mix tape, then by the Internet. So here you go, you're welcome (again).
So here's something you didn't realize was a thing: French homophobia. Like "Russian pizza" or "Hawaiian goulash," French homophobia is something we just all assumed to be self-evidently nonexistent. Because the French, after all, are not only the most irritating people on the planet besides Americans, they are also the gayest. After one glass of Beaujolais, any French man you meet on the street or in the park or at the baguette emporium will be begging to have a rock-hard dick in his mouth. This is just scientific fact, proven by me, in the early nineties, in Paris. So this? This is kind of shocking. Sure, a majority of the French public is in favor of equal rights for gay couples, but, let's face it, that's weak support from what we all assumed was the only population on earth to have every single one of its citizens at least go through a gay phase, in their twenties, enthusiastically. What's going on?
There have been beatings. There have been mean words shouted in faces and written on placards. There have been offensive Facebook posts. And get this: some protesters against gay marriage are starting to call their movement "the French Spring." I mean. Don't they know that that sounds like the name of a kickin' gay bar on the Champs-Élysées? Don't they know that any phrase containing the word "French" and/or "Spring" sounds like a kickin' gay bar on the Champs-Élysées? These protesters are probably taking breaks from their marches and going into the woods with their buddies to, how do you say, make the sodomy. What do they tell themselves afterward, on their way back to the march? "It's not gay if it's in a three-way"? But yes it is, if all of you are men! And don't the people in the photo below realize that just because they are holding signs affirming their belief in 1 papa and 1 maman doesn't mean that they don't look totally queer for each other?
The world makes less and less sense as the years go on, amiright? What's next? A fragrance by Lady Gaga called "Intolerance"? A new single by Elton John with backup vocals by the Westboro Baptist Church choir? Michelle Shocked turning into a weird anti-gay religious nut?
So, guys, when Michelle Shocked had her recent (and apparently unfinished?) meltdown, I was bummed because I had such fond memories of her dancing in a video full of hot studs back in the old days. Anyway, so in order to blog about this thing I needed to have that video, right? But after an exhaustive search of YouTube I'd turned up nothing. In fact, the only trace of the video was a low-quality version on Michelle's MySpace page. (her what? I KNOW.) So I did what any red-blooded blogger who needs access to a video that is being withheld from him would do: I downloaded it from this mysterious MySpace site and then uploaded it to YouTube myself, because freedom. It got quite a few views and comments! And they were shockingly fair-minded for YouTube comments, which are usually uniformly Thunderdome-esque in their eschewing of basic human decency. I then posted my blog story and figured that would be the last of it.
But then hired goons knocked on my Gmail door, ignored my protestations that I was in the nude and to hold on a second, and then just let themselves right in.
Sure enough, I clicked on the link and my precious video was gone gone gone. The kicker is that it was yanked BY MICHELLE SHOCKED HERSELF. Or maybe a rep of hers, but she seems to be doing her own repping these days, so I'm gonna just go with "Michelle Shocked is trying to censor my ability to use her creative content for my own ends BURN HER."
In conclusion, let's all just get one last quick peek at what we're missing by not being able to enjoy an HD version of this video, much less the shitty blurry mess I nicked from her MyFace.
P.S.: A plea to Michelle: we gays (at least we gay dudes) will all forgive you for your hot mess of a belief system only if you make this video available to us in crisp, clean HD for free on your website until the End of Days, when all the Internet's Lolcats and Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church will ascend into heaven to sit at the right hand of a pile of Chicken McNuggets and all the nation's gun nuts accidentally shoot themselves in the face.
