61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
The U.S. Supreme Court just decided that lawmakers in Erie, Pennsylvania have a
constitutional right to make nude dancers wear pasties! How could they? This news deflates me totally because I learn it just as NASDAQ undergoes a correction, nearly taking me down with it.
Craving distraction, I end up in some chat room, pretending to be a topless dancer named Kittenesca who's pissed about the decision because men don't tip as much for pasties and a girl needs every cent she can get. To my amazement I get a response from "Nino," which I happen to know is what his friends call Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court's wittiest, most desirable political reactionary. His message? If I prove to him that my nude nipples are a true form of self-expression as conceived by the Founding Fathers — exposing nuances that tassled ones can't convey — he will consider reversing his position.
"I, Kittenesca, would be delighted to perform for your Supremeness," I find myself answering. "Can I assume you will you be wearing your robes?"
"Ignorant slut, I would not be a Supreme Court Justice without them,"
Nino replies. "And, BTW, First Amendment protection of the G-string is
at issue as well."
At this moment I feel like my own portfolio: my values are leaping and
falling all over the place. Having sex with the powerful is a dance I've
always performed for myself alone. Except for that one time when I had Max
pretend to be a skirt-chasing, money-mad Donald Trump (which I'm afraid
gave him Ideas), my fantasies have not been under anyone's control but
my own.
"Okay," I bite, "I'm going to start expressing myself freely, slowly
and with my red dress on. It has a plunging back, like an Oscar
winner's, and I look like Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, only I'm
wearing black mascara, like her brother, to indicate that I have a dark
secret."
Nino admits to having, "on behalf of the state, a compelling interest
in the above."
I tell him I'm going to dance to Malcom McLaren's R&B version of "Carmen," followed by
his "Madame Butterfly," because I once read that the justice is an opera fan — Scalia no doubt loves the sound of a passionate, sinful woman swooning herself to death.
Then I explain to him that I'm standing over his ample, inviting lap,
shimmying my shoulders in his meaty, well-groomed face. He asks what
I'm expressing.
"The desire to be passionately and sinfully desired by an Italian-American who rose from Queens to Harvard Law and from there to the very
top," I explain. "Plus, a belief that animal appetites, properly
channeled, degrade neither sex, and that lust has been known to
emotionally equalize people of different social classes."
"I'm responding to your testimony," says cyber-Nino, "in my notoriously
originalist and hypothetical manner, as follows: If you had an organ
that resembled a pen and it suddenly turned into a cucumber, would
Alexander Hamilton have held you legally responsible for its behavior, and
would you not be constitutionally justified in feeling confused and
degraded if some trollop's naked breast had the power to produce the
aforementioned transmogrification entirely against your well-educated
will?"
"Not if my cucumberic transformation was produced by a trollop as
divinely beautiful as Kittenesca," I assure him, adding that now my
dress has slithered off my body like water and I'm wearing a G-string
made of fluffy feathers that I am plucking out one by one as I rotate
and undulate slowly before him while wetting my lips with my pointy little
tongue.
"Expressing?" he reminds me, sticking to the juridical point.
"I'm expressing the wooziness inside me," I explain, "the fear that
certain men feel just before the sleaziness of shame, concealment and commerce give way to the terrifying beauty of naked being. And I am expressing that I am hot as a bottle
rocket."
"Oh, Kitten!" types my Nino, "I have just handed down my decision.
Clearly there is nothing more a person can express through dance than
what you have managed to communicate, feathered pasties and all! Anything more
would cause me to commit the sort of unspecified crimes that the state
must trample every right to prevent."
"Wait!" I beg, distressed that he has reached his verdict before I have
completed my closing argument. "Please Nino — it's only by revealing
myself fully as a physical object that I can properly imply the utter
privacy and mystery of my true spirit!"
But Nino won't hear my case. "Because I am sworn to uphold the
proposition that the rigor of constitutional law is more important than any
of the silly, subjective, inconsistent people it governs," he replies, "I
must leave you high and dry. But the next time we meet, most fabulous Kittenesca, I intend to be an entirely different man."
Before running off to my couch to finish the dirty job that this mystery
person started, I must admit I bookmarked the page.
