Hello blogosphere dwellers, facebook fiends, and other listless humans frantically searching for the meaning of life in the vibrating glare of your computer screen. I’m Julia Charvat, aka Mimosa Hermosa Stevens, and I’m here to rant about my unhealthy obsessions, disturbing passions, and the weirdo thoughts that pop into my head as I zone out to drag queen shows in West Hollywood at 1am on weeknight. I will discuss such topics as costume parties, beachtime mayhem, music that makes me want to live, and television that makes me want to die. I’m a sometime insomniac and an all-time champagne lover. You will relate to me more if you are wearing something sequined. You will learn nothing from me, in fact, I might make you stupider.
I tried to go to a rave at a gas station in my hometown but I lost my ID and spent the whole night looking for it in giant pockets in my purse. Then I met the DJ while outside who looked like a hot Rick Astley and he told me he would be playing Setting Sun. He snuck me in, but everyone disappeared and it was just an empty room filled with old magazines.
There is really no way to say this gently, so I’m just going to be blunt and honest. I’m currently obsessed with the “erotic romance” book trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey by London female author E L James. The series is about Anastasia Steele, a virginal college graduate who falls for Christian Grey, a painfully sexy billionaire. Everything seems super flowery until…oh wait…Grey has a sex dungeon. And oh no…he wants to do very bad things to her in there. I discovered the series by finding out a woman I would never picture reading an erotic book was in love with it. Sheer curiosity and shock led me to start reading it for myself.
I’m certainly not the only one jumping and humping onto the Grey train. Word of mouth has caused book sales to skyrocket. Women all over the U.S. and England can’t read it fast enough. I, for one, wish I could osmosis it into my brain. I don’t want to work, I don’t want to sleep, I just want to tie myself to Christian Grey’s bed posts and see what happens next. Why am I and so many other women devouring it like entranced hornball maniacs?
My theory for its popularity is that within the outrageous fantasy of this innocent young girl being swept away and then shackled in a dungeon by a hunky bazillionaire, there is somehow a realness to it all. It isn’t set in some 18th or 19th century pasture where everyone is wearing corsets and dragging buckets of water back from the well. This is modern times. Anastasia and Christian flirt via email and texts on MacBook Pros and iPads, drive around in Audis, they live in our world.
And since the story is told in the first person from the perspective of Anastasia, you really feel like it is all happening to you. You are the one caught up in this confusing, binding, sexy, stifling, heady, fucked up love tryst. You ponder just what you would do in Anastasia’s situation. Would you explore a scary world of painful roleplay to be with this outwardly seeming dreamboat of a man?
I think today’s woman is adventuresome. We aren’t as threatened anymore that our equality will be taken away. We can relax a little and breathe and maybe let men have some control every once in a while. It can be a compromise, a trade-off of power. Especially in the bedroom. It can actually be a relief, like oh, someone else is behind the wheel, I can just enjoy this. And you don’t have to feel guilty about what is happening because it wasn’t your idea. He is the one handcuffing you. He is the freak. I would think this would be especially appealing for women raised Catholic who have been told they are the evil seductress, the vixen holding the forbidden apple. Nope, not in this arrangement. It is all his fault that you are doing all these dirty things. No confessional for you.
Underneath our portrayals of being strong, competent, energetic, and productive women of society, don’t we all want to feel a little dangerous? To feel apart from the masses? To feel special and different? Nothing is hotter than a dirty secret. So not only is the idea of a bondage/submissive type relationship exciting and naughty, but reading about it on the sly is also thrilling and gives you a bit of sex street cred.
And with many people now owning reading devices like Kindles and iPads, you can now read freely without nosy prudes peeking at the cover of your novel. You can read without judgement. You can look super smart and techy, like you’re checking the stock market, but actually you’re reading about sex in a bathtub. (Which in reality is never as good as it sounds in fiction. All that splashing and then the tile is so slippery and soap is stinging your eyes…I mean, it’s just fifty shades of skin pruning.)
Universal has just bought the rights to make the books into movies, although I can’t really figure out how they are going to do make them as mainstream films. My friend and I already have some genius casting ideas, but I won’t publish those yet so that all of you can come up with your own visions of Christian and Anastasia. That will be for a later blog, once I’ve finished the series and have a full grasp of all the characters.
I’m eighty pages into the second book, and I’m itching to get back to the book now. I urge you all to read it. Yes, it is porny and pervy, but really, aren’t those selling points?
I’m both feet deep into a bottle of mediocre red wine. I just have to break this hibernation. Crawl out of the lazy bear cave. Nothing has been sounding right lately. I try and write something, and it sounds forced, like I’m trying way too hard to be some skewed idealized version of myself. Like some asshole blogging Zoey Deschanel, with dark blunt bangs and mary jane heels, blinking my vacant doe eyes way too fucking much, trying to be so stomach-churningly cute.
You know I want a cleansing pure psyche reunion when I start blasting Pearl Jam’s “Release”. Even that sounds contrived, but I really do die for that fucking song. Any song that says “rocking horse of time” I’m of course going to obsess over for twenty plus years. Mainly this is just some misguided pathetic writing exercise I’m forcing upon myself like some shitty high school English pupil. Just keep writing. Don’t stop. Just write. “I wait up in the dark for you to speak to me.” God that lyric takes me back to weepy teenage nights clutching my parents’ smuggled cordless phone into my room, my heart ripping for that ’him’ to call me. Moving on to “Kinda I Want To” off of NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine. I really have to stop romanticizing my teen years through 90′s music but I just can’t stop myself. “And I know it’s not the right thing and I know it’s not the good thing but kinda I want to.” Way to sum up the illogical human want right there with a dirty crawling dungeon thump.
So I’m resurrecting myself from my blogging hiatus. I’m going to post things I should probably just keep to myself. Ramblings best left to sorry drunks in seedy hometown dive bars. Even unicorns long to breathe fire every once in a while.
THE FOO FIGHTERS, THE FORUM, LOS ANGELES, 10/13/2011
Nine years ago, I was obsessed with the Foo Fighter’s video for All My Life. I was living in Ohio in a nothing special apartment, working at an everyday car dealership, and the thought of ever escaping to California was no where near conception. When I watched the video, it awakened something inside me. There was such rawness, such passion, so much of it that I wanted for myself. The band was performing the song on the stage of a huge venue, and at the end, when the lights went up, the crowd was empty. There was nobody there. Yet they had played as if the world had been watching. I remember thinking back then, if only I could be in that audience. If only I was standing there jumping and cheering for them. What a waste that no one had seen it. I wanted them to know that I really saw it, and yearned to be transported into the vacant room.
I loved the song so much that I shared the CD with my best friend Jessica way back then. She couldn’t get enough, and the band quickly became her number one favorite. She surpassed me in her dedication, and throughout the years attended Foo Fighters shows and let her admiration for Dave Grohl be known to the world.
Fast forward to last week, and Jessica and I were on the floor of The Forum in L.A. at a Foo Fighters’s show, my first Foo Fighter’s show. There Dave Grohl was, stopped right in front of us on the runway, just a tiny bit out of reach. Jessica and I were right there, we had staked our claim in the front row of this stage appendage. No one was getting in our way. Dave Grohl was ours for the taking. The other faceless fans were of no matter. We were the only two people in the crowd. It was all happening just for us.
I had no clue how to hold it together. I wanted to claw at my own torso and dig in, slowly drag out my guts, then raise my bloody hands into the air with my intestinal peace offering to the rock god before me. I jumped up and down, and with my arms stretched towards him like a little 60′s Beatles freak I screamed, “I love you!!!!” He turned a bit, seemed like he was about to walk the other way, and then in a split moment of surreal cosmic magnetism, he stepped off the stage and walked right up to Jessica and me, like he was riding some invisible overpowering tsunami wave towards us. I had been thinking, please just touch our hands, just for a second, I just really wanted that for Jessica. She is his number one fan, she had flown out from Cleveland to see him, and she deserved it more than anybody. And then there he was, but not touching our hands, no, he was practically mounting our faces as he raged out on his guitar to My Hero. He then said, “Right back at ya”, and banged his head forward as his sopping wet hair sprayed a shower of sweat all over our vibrating bodies. My mind couldn’t at all comprehend what he had meant, until a few seconds later I realized he must have been responding to me. I had just screamed out my love for him. I hadn’t even meant to do it, the words were just suddenly leaping off my vocal chords. Jessica and I had desired him so much that we had physically lured him into our arms.
Since my arms were already outstretched and his hands were occupied with delivering sonic perfection, all I could do was start feeling him up. I touched at his stomach, his side, my eyes wide, only a low, thin, flimsy metal gate separated us. Jessica was freaking out right along side me, spastically discovering the ripples in his sleek sticky body. I could see a few limbs reaching over our heads, sort of poking at him, and then my eyes went to his pectoral, and like a sick freak, I just start rubbing all over his pecs and chest, just exploring like a fumbling pervy horndog preteen. Yet somehow, even as sexually charged as it was, there was an innocence to it all. It was all more of a transfer of positive strong energy. He morphed into a rockstar Care Bear, and he was beaming his Care Bear heart, pumping life and hope and a fearless future into our racing, wanting human hearts.
It suddenly dawned on me that I could be arrested, that I shouldn’t just be having my way with Dave fucking Grohl as 15,000 fans looked on with shock, amazement and thick envy. But the bouncers did nothing. They didn’t flinch. And more importantly, Dave Grohl pumped his chest even bigger towards us as we openly molested him. He genuinely seemed just as lost in the moment as we were. And he didn’t miss a note. We ravaged him as he played hard for the packed house.
Then he kind of snapped out of it, seeming to realize that maybe he shouldn’t just be standing there as we publicly groped him like a violated passenger on a crowded subway. And off he went, back down the runway, to join his bandmates and finish out the song.
As he walked away, I felt all of my major organs fail at once. Every extremity was buzzing, and I didn’t know whether to start sobbing or vomiting. I felt the room’s eyes on us, and I almost wanted to duck so I could flip the fuck out in peace. But I just looked in Jessica’s equally glassy eyes and we rode out the endorphin high together. My sheer ecstasy had everything to do with Jessica. I had wanted a Dave Grohl encounter with her so badly that when it finally happened for the both of us, I just felt my heart do a series of methed-out backflips.
This would be the only time he stepped off the stage the entire night. It never happened again. He barely even touched anyone else’s hands.
I will never be able to convey the impact this experience made on Jessica and me. And in a way, I love it that way. It was a moment, a sudden electrical jolt, and Dave Grohl was the bathtub filled with sweat, and Jessica and I served as the turned on hair dryers leaping ourselves into his slippery genius. Maybe we all died in that moment. Maybe the electricity created a new universe in a far off galaxy. Maybe we are still there, frozen in the pure unexpected realization of a lustful secret dream.
Oh and that video I talked about earlier for All My Life? I wouldn’t realize it until the next morning when we pulled it up on youtube, but guess where they filmed it? Guess where that empty room was that I had so longed to be in all those years ago? The Forum in Los Angeles.
[Above, at 2:45 you can see our moment. Thank you random youtuber for posting this video.]
There is something so cathartic about taking a bunch of unrelated images and arranging them in a way that makes sense. It gives me the feeling that I can make sense of anything, even of my own chaotic life. It can sometimes take only one image or set of words to ignite that creative flame that lives deep beneath my belly fat. In my latest issue of Nylon, I discovered a picture of a rhinestone necklace that read “Reality TV Makes Me Sad”. And that was the image that spiraled this latest project into motion. I had been saving a photo of Lykke Li from an Interview magazine, and I had the idea to combine the two to create a glittery homage to sadness.
I recently discovered the thrills of patterned duct tape, so I decided to leopardize the picture frame. Seriously, I’ve never been so in love with tape before. I then of course showered the entire collage in gold glitter (Rose Quartz by Martha Stewart to be exact) because I’m forever in lust with shiny objects. I feel as if the gold glitter sort of acts as metallic tears.
The final product is a creation that I connect to perhaps more than any of my previous collages. Yes, the women are sad, but I feel like it is one of those good sads, like the sadness you feel after a really good cry or when a haunting song really gets into the core of you. The kind of sad that reminds you of who you are and what you care about. It is a cleansing sad, like a rain washing out the day’s filth to make room for a sunnier day.
Lykke Li is a haunting, space-soaring Barbarella. Looking into her eyes is like free-falling along galaxies. She really just might be singing from the moon.
This week I won free tickets to her November 7th show at the Fox Theater from my favorite radio station, Moheak Radio (listen online at www.moheakradio.com).
I’m looking forward to the complimentary starship ride into the echoey, deep beyond.
