Snips, snails and shaggy-dog tales

>> A trio of male Montrealers debate masculinity, jellyfish, fat naked guys and "tit shirts"

By RUPERT BOTTENBERG

 The place: a resolutely masculine Portuguese coffee-and-cards joint on the Plateau.

 The players: Jimmy Goodrich, whose elegantly goofy cabaret excursions make him a local musician to watch. Murray Lightburn, emotionally volatile frontman and conductor of the Dears, one of the most exciting things happening in Montreal right now. Jake Brown, spoken-word artist and Yawp! promoter whose insistence on shirtlessness makes him a Montrealer to hear but avoid watching. All three are involved in the upcoming Heart Attack Hotel series of performances by men (a follow-up to the Heartbreak Hotel women's series).

 The purpose: a roundtable symposium on the modern masculine condition--our hopes, our fears, our secrets and our cool Zippo lighters.

 Mirror: The reason I've called this roundtable into session is that there is apparently a crisis in masculinity going on right now. This kinda crept up on me after I saw Fight Club. I just thought it kicked ass, but more astute friends remarked that it was a reflection of our crisis. Now, is there a crisis?

 Murray Lightburn: I don't think so. I think it's a good thing to shed as much as you can about who you think you are. You think you're a man--in my case a black man. It's about trying to find out who you are, and that goes beyond being male, or a black male, or a black male Canadian living in Montreal.

 Jake Brown: I'd like to step in here and compliment the Major here on his remark. I don't like the pigeonholing either, and one of the reasons I don't like it is the profiling. My friend here, with the information he gave us, could be sold for profit, as a target market.

 ML: The Soul Train Awards, man! I just watched that last night.

 JB: I don't like it! I don't want it in the schools, I don't want it near the children!

 M: What, Soul Train?!

 JB: I read a 241-page book to prepare for this interview! I did, literally! It's called The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.

 Jimmy Goodrich: I don't think there's a crisis, but there's still a lot of confusion left. There's still a widespread message coming out of a certain branch of academic feminism--and I stress, a certain branch--that frames everything in terms of man having caused all the problems alone, and women solving them alone. To me, that's a critical misunderstanding of the way things really are. There's also been a lot of pandering to esoteric ideologies, which brings nothing to the man on the street, who does the things that everyone is then analyzing. Besides, the idea of gender is a hallucination. You know, the idea of having this conversation in a Portuguese tavern is funny, because it makes me think of the Portuguese man-of-war, on the one hand a great and fierce creature...

 JB: It's a hermaphrodite!

 JG: ...and on the other it's a spineless, obnoxious jellyfish who, if you're not wearing the right protection, could cause you a great deal of discomfort.

 Naked on command
 M: Do you guys feel in touch with your feminine sides?

 JG & ML: Absolutely.

 JB: Having read the book, I'm no longer comfortable with the use of the words "masculine" and "feminine." I don't like the way masculine is tied to courage and strength, and feminine to weakness, cooperation and gentleness. Ideally the terms would drop out of usage. One would talk about a person's behaviour as appropriate or inappropriate.

 M: Have we become divorced from our masculine selves?

 JG: No, but we've never defined, along the lines of a synthesis of culture and biology, what the hell we are. Maybe it's more important than we think. I'll tell you a story. We were in the basement of Artishow after a concert, buncha men, buncha women, all extremely drunk. One guy, about 300 pounds, whips off his clothes and invites everyone else to do the same. Now, Rufus Wainwright was there, and you know he's gonna do it. I hate to be left out of anything, so I'm suddenly naked. We're standing there awkwardly, looking at each other, waiting for the women to follow suit.

 ML: That must have been soooo gross.

 JG: The women are just shaking their heads, thinking, "Stupid horny men." It made me think, like, you've got a gay man, a straight man, and myself, somewhere in between, and it dawned on me that men, despite whatever deviation or persuasion they indulge, the same as women, want to be seen, and understood, physically. The critical misunderstanding is that not every display of masculinity is sexual. It's like Shania Twain sings: "Man, I feel like a woman." There has to be some crosstalk between men and women.

 JB: She didn't even write that.

 JG: Sure, it's like the Spice Girls, managed and created by men, singing about girl power in their come-fuck-me boots, and it shows just how confused and hysterical everyone's become.

 Thatcher's beard
 M: When was the last time Canada had a prime minister, or the U.S. a president, with facial hair?

 All: Ummm...

 ML: Was it Wilfrid Laurier?

 JG: The civilized man will curtail his instinct to grow, which many people associate with the masculine and live in abject terror of.

 JB: When women got the vote, they wanted candidates who weren't so butch.

 JG: Now, if Margaret Thatcher had had a beard...

 ML: I think she did, for a while...

 JG: It bothers me when women think their new power option is to emulate the behaviour of men, and that's what Thatcher did.

 JB: That's ridiculous!

 ML: How do you know she was emulating men, and not just being herself?

 M: The ol' battleaxe!

 JB: If you're aggressive in an awful way, you're just being an asshole! I reserve the right to call Thatcher an asshole, and that has nothing to do with her femininity. Forget masculine and feminine!

 M: But Jake, you're trying to eliminate the binary code. The polar energy.

 JG: Hey, I'm down with that! The idea that there's a zero and a one, just like cellular thought, amoeba thought. You're absolutely right.

 M: The singular is entropic. The binary, two items, affect each other and create energy.

 JG: It's not yet time to abandon the masculine and the feminine. There are separate components in the world, and uniting components, and male and female make them up.

 JB: The male and female shouldn't be binary. They shouldn't be opposites.

 M: Why are we using the term "opposite"? Why not "complementary"?

 ML: That's an excellent point. We're programmed to use these negative terms. It's bullshit! (sighs deeply) I can't stress enough how much bullshit there is out there when it comes to these things.

 Dumbbells vs. slide rules
 JG: If we want to recognize equal power, women also have to be accountable for their negative attributes.

 M: Let's get into that.

 ML: Oh, dear.

 M: When was the last time you guys saw a TV commercial where a woman makes a fool out of a man?

 ML: Five minutes ago.

 JG: Where the guy's sorta dumb? Well, that's a marketing strategy.

 M: And when was the last time you saw the reverse? Do you guys feel that, in defense of ourselves, we have a hand tied behind our back?

 JB: It's a corrective. Officially, men have to be seen to be bending over backwards to not be seen as pushy or patriarchal...

 ML: We're walking on eggshells.

 JG: New men are growing up scared. Jake's right, it's been one way for so long that there's a major reactionary push the other way. On the other hand, I'd hate to be going through puberty right now. I wouldn't know what to think, whether to lift weights or Loreena Bobbitt myself. There's all these stereotypical images of buff, macho men in magazines, and at the same time it's a post-Woody Allen world where being self-deprecatory is cool.

 M: It's like that delightful Jimmy Stewart film Flight of the Phoenix, where he says, "It's the little fellas who are taking over the world! The little fellas with the slide rules!"

 JB: And did they get out of the desert alive? Yes. So that settles it.

 Closing "thoughts"
 JB: Can I ask a question? Talking about cultural evolution. What's up with all the tit-shirts, again? Prominently displaying your tits in a skintight shirt!

 JG: That's because the new power option for women is being presented, I don't know by whom, as reclaiming sexuality, which suggests that that is the extent of female power.

 JB: Which is negative. But how do we feel personally about tit-shirts? Don't lie to me!

 ML: This is where we revert.

 JG: My bourgeois political sense is offended, but my raging hard-on knows the truth. :

 

The Heart Attack Hotel series takes place every Sunday from March 12 to April 1 at Jailhouse Rock, 9pm, $5. Week one features Goodrich and Lightburn. Brown hosts on March 26. See listings for complete info