The White Peril 白禍

That was the headline on a message I got yesterday. It means, loosely, "Word is our Kylie has breast cancer!" And, indeed, it appears she does (the first report I saw was at Michael's). Luckily, it was diagnosed early, and Kylie takes care of herself and can obviously get the best available treatments.

As a British friend and I were discussing last night, Kylie is one of those stars who get such deep affection because she hasn't forgotten how to work first and foremost to entertain her fans. She doesn't write "confessional" lyrics in which she works out her spoiled-celeb neuroses, or use every interview to complain that she has deep, dark psychological recesses that people don't understand. Given the way pop and dance fans have been beaten with the diva-complex sledgehammer for the last quarter-century, it's touching to have at least one superstar who still seems to enjoy--in a forthright, good-natured way--the sheer fun of dressing up in spangly costumes, dancing around with a bunch of buffed-up guys, and singing a catchy tune. To the good wishes already expressed by millions of her other fans, let me add my own.

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Naturally, Ghost of a Flea has already posted about this. His entry is brief, but I'd be remiss if I mentioned Kylie without linking to Flea.

Yesterday, I went to get my hair cut, and the nice assistant girl told me she was going to massage my scalp with oil. My eyebrows rose slightly, and I said, "Uh, I just wanted the usual cut--have I mistakenly ordered the King Xerxes Package?" I had not. My hair place has converted to Avedaism, which also helped to explain the glass of rose-hip tea and lavender-scented hot towel I'd been offered on entering. I'd just figured they were placating me because my hair guy was running late. But it's apparently part of their routine now.

I don't know about you, but nothing makes me edgier than the promiscuous sloshing about of soothing essences. I'm not one of those guys whose hygiene consists of a rough white washcloth and a bar of Ivory soap, but I don't do anything that requires more than fifteen minutes from turning on the shower to being ready to get dressed. I don't even wear cologne.

By the time I was halfway through my haircut, I nearly leapt from the chair and was like, "Okay, this is way too gay even for me." In addition to rose-hips and lavender, there were bergamot and some other stuff in the massage oil, mint-type-things in the shampoo, and something that smelled like cut grass in the styling wax. (No, I don't use styling wax, but my hair guy seems to think I'm not getting my money's worth if he doesn't gunk up my head before sending me off into the great, wide world.) I had so many plant extracts on me, I was afraid someone would tie me up in a tulle bag and toss me into the sweater drawer.

Yet another song you shouldn't listen to on a crowded Tokyo commuter train. It was raining yesterday, the sort of chilly rain that reminds you how open to the elements you are as an organism, and in combination with Atsushi's having gone back home on Thursday night, it probably made me a little more downcast and emotionally susceptible than usual. That wasn't all of it, though. Tokyo isn't populated by self-centered rock stars with celebrity doctors attending to them, but it is the sort of place where people frequently feel as if they're being prodded from all sides to bury what they really think and perform, perform, perform for their handlers.

I know that that's a reductive picture. In the same way that "America is an individualistic society" doesn't mean that we don't have social rules and conformism, Japan is a free country with a lot of personalities on display. But last night, everyone looked unusually tired and spaced-out (first day back at work after a week-long holiday) and the rain and dark made the train feel like its own little isolated world. Hearing Roger Waters sing, "There is no pain / You are receding," made me ache; it was so oppressively fitting. (Well, except that for most on the train, the show was over for the week and not about to begin again until Monday.)

Despite its specific resonance for me, I don't believe that I would try to argue that "Comfortably Numb" is a great modern poem, though. I was thinking that wry thought on the walk home from the station because my copy of Camille Paglia's all-new book finally arrived a few days ago. I don't know what took it so long to get here--amazon.co.jp can be weird that way. Anyway, it feels like another throwback to college, since the last time we had a whole new book of essays by Camille to read, I was a junior. Most of it is great. Even when she's reading very familiar poems, she brings something new to them: I'm a big, bad Dickinson fan, but I don't think I've ever been as chilled by "Because I could not stop for Death--" as I was when reading Paglia's essay on it the other night. Her (Camille's, not Emily's) pushy, idiosyncratic voice has an odd way of making her readings universal. You get the feeling that you, too, with all your quirks, could find deep reserves of beauty and meaning in the same artifact, even if the actual points she makes sometimes seem a bit overworked.

But, I'm sorry, not even Camille can brandish enough libidinousness and cosmic-geological history to make Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" a great poem, much less "possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy.'" I am fully convinced that there are two pages' worth of Significance in the sixteen words of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." But the six pages (!) devoted to "Woodstock" are the only passage in the book when you get the sense that Paglia yearns for literary value that just isn't there. (I'm not the first to think this, as you might imagine.) And, while Camille almost always surprises you somewhere, about Joni Mitchell's piece she says exactly what you expect her to say and no more: Flower power was a beautiful but incomplete dream; the Sixties visualized men and women as equal partners in civilization but underestimated aggression and sex differences; those fighter jets turning into butterflies are, like, totally trippy symbols of melting back into nature; and so on, and so forth.

All good points, yes, but there's another problem. When you finish reading her essay and go back to the lyrics, you find something you don't with Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens: you have to keep consciously reminding yourself what Paglia said about this or that line in order to feel its importance. Despite Mitchell's clear and mostly timeless images, the poem doesn't reveal more about itself unless freighted with Paglia's nostalgic interpretation. It's an oddly satisfying way to end the book nonetheless. She's so touchingly eager to make readers feel the vibrancy of the visions of the Sixties, even in the face of what four succeeding decades have done to them, that it makes you feel almost protective of her. And how often do you get the chance to feel protective of Camille Paglia?