The CLEAVAGE PETS™ — A NYC REALITY NOIR — episode 2

“Damn,” she said, “Don, I can’t figure out just, just how to start doing this.”

Holly’s last words reverberated in my head. It was interesting seeing what she could and couldn’t do, what she did and what she didn’t, and when she did things. It WAS sortof a weird new thing, even for where I was now, “decades” after she’d actually said such things, I saw no evidence that anyone else had ever tried to do what she was doing… here where I was.


“I know I gotta do stuff like this,” she said “it just makes sense to make it seem more like I am actually there in the future, and by the way thanks for sending the letters in Don, mwa,” she mock kissed me. “Puff,” she puffed. I love it when you can hear that someone is smoking, over a phone… or the thing I had to listen to her on.


I was shooting Lydia, and I was hoping HVV could use this one. She wanted pictures that had a resonant quality.

“If you want to blow people’s minds, you have to have… there has to be a certain amount of familiarity or it won’t work… I think. What I am doing is about the past and the future… it just, I just want something THERE. Like — so I can totally make up things to go with these pictures and there will be a resonance to pick up on… the cool has to be believable, you know what I mean Don.”

“With an element of the actual past so obviously there in the pictures, it will be easier for the past to digest the imagery, and perhaps even believe what I write, as long as there is real energy in the shots… this should work.”

Since I probably wouldn’t see what she was going to do with these pictures till a while later, it really was hard for me to shoot for the years and years as I did… relatively blindly to the actual narrative that would emerge. We had to trust me. It was a zen photography experience. But, the basic reporting was all we cared about in the beginning anyway. Holly and I concentrated on that.


“Fuck I love you,” I said without thinking. She started laughing. Right after this.

Right now I was trying to concentrate on shooting Lydia, but as you can tell, it’s hard for me to focus. But really, this is a big big picture. Just knowing how to think about it is a difficult challenge. I don’t want to miss things, and there is no map. I listened to my friends that I made, and didn’t pay attention to any papers or other “media” as I have found the call electronic information/entertainment outlets.

Goddamn, look at those eyes. I want to kiss you now baby. I want to wipe that look off your face with my dick. That’s right, you are the first bi-era, double timing, living the vida LOCA superlife baby. You. You are a part of the real Marvel Universe. Sexy.
To quote my mind.
“Fuck I love you,” I said again, and she laughed again.


Even now, sometimes, Lydia made me think of Diane. I wish she could have seen this. She almost got to, she could have. We all could have had a big fucking laugh over this shit.


I loved Diane, she would have helped me with this writing...

Noone is writing this down but me, there is no way anyone would ever know this ever if I didn’t write this, and it is a strange thing to know. At any rate, this is the only account that the future will have of this. “The past will never know,” HVV said over and over. But the future would, I would think to myself at the same time. HVV never knew I was doing this.
She only knew I gave her exactly what she wanted like I was her herself.

“And this internet thing you told me about is very interesting. Data is totally doable then?”

It was!


Somehow, we could rig the machine we used to (among other things) transport me here to carry the data back to where HVV was. That’s the machine in the background of this picture. That’s Tigger James Ferguson, and Dirty Martini,

“Don, we are gonna tell the past that The Capitol is Coney Island, and that Tigger is Mayor of Coney Island.”

“Oh — and that Dirty Martini is a General.”

“Maybe others of these times,” (and HVV definitely meant both times — 1933 and TwoThousandThen) “think black politicians are radical… but till I see a man like this man Tigger you found, in office… I am not impressed.”

Me, when I saw this, I had to shoot it for HVV, it was just what she would think is funny. “We’ll tell the people that he’s at an art show, that will cover up the machine being there, hahah. Mayor Tigger James Ferguson and General Martini attend the exhibit by Donato Giancola at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery, hahaha. You would totally think that is an art gallery hahah.”

That was when I started to really catch on. What was the truth what was the past what was the future, what lies… could mean to history. It was really screwy, because it wasn’t a linear development with us. At all. Sometimes it felt like it was threatening to melt my brain like she said how porn from where I was now would melt people’s minds back then. But at least that could be understood far easier than the initial creation of such a machine as we were trying to make, just from pictures and text.

“They are going through the same things where you are now — as they were where I am! Where we were! They even talk about it [the past] — as a way to figure out what to do! Can you believe how lucky we are? That we have that to work with as a reality to show… to show that progress is an illusion.”

That was uncanny, that’s for sure.

“Progress is an illusion like a new suit of clothes is an illusion, I just bet your ass, Don.” HVV knew that, knew that before history would prove her right decades later during times no one could have imagined.
Look, people still had horseracing!


And guys like John Velazquez.

HVV loved my horseracing/jockey coverage… which in itself was actually super ahead of it’s time…

“It hasn’t changed at all,” HVV said, looking stunned at the first of the racing pictures I showed her. "Shit, look at that!"


“Look I know and trust you Don, but seriously, that horseracing still exists and that it still looks so the same, and that — look, you have to start covering these guys, now, I mean I never saw that as happening, and we can totally use these pictures because they are so close to both eras. So close. Perfect. What’s this guy’s name?”

“John Velazquez,” I said.

She’d have no idea why I did not sound as excited as she did… HVV knew all about Lydia, but she had no idea I had been shooting the tracks for a couple of years already… and the track stuff as I’d shot I just knew after awhile that that is just what she wanted me to do. I actually did take this relatively seriously, almost as a battle, and this is the kindof thing that the leader would want to know.

“He doesn’t know anything about this right?”

“Uh, no.”

“Fucking, oh Don, people would totally relate to this shit right now!”

“Yeah, I uh, I really thought you would like these… since we didn’t talk about it ever… you know, but then one day I saw an ad in the paper and it stopped me in my tracks. You know what it was like when I just got over into T3…” Nothing looked familiar.

“Haha 1933 was the racing year for news too we got a bump from the fight — hahah, Don.”

When I asked her how she thought that 1933 was the best year for doing what she wanted to do, she told me that a superficial change, like the one she imagined would happen — “if in fact change happened at all” — would not stop what she thought would happen, judging by the way people were.

She wasn’t answering my question hahah.

In the end, she found the machine in 1933. That just happened, and we got lucky. The genius year she chose to send me to, was TwoTousandThen. Where another depression was happening! And that wasn’t all. I haven’t asked her how she came to that year, I am not sure I could understand, and I am not sure HVV does either.

“Timing is so everything.” That was her version of religion, time. She followed it, she worshipped it — “You don’t call yourself lensjockey if you don’t feel time and timing, pace, making time-based decisions on the fly.”

Anyway, it was too bad for me that Johnny looked just like then.


Horseracing indeed was one thing that I found that just had not really changed. In fact, the only real action in that scene (after decades) was happening now… of course. It wasn’t doing too good, I’m not saying it was doing good, but it was still around.

The few times HVV asked me for some special image, say, a composite, she gave me such great direction the results were stunning. The first one she wanted was of a horserace running out of a cemetery.

“Hahahah, I doubt that many people in 1933 could comfortably deal with horseracing in cemeteries. See if you can give me something — people will think the world just went to SHIT.”
And she was right. I even sent images of composites I’d made with tape… and people reacted to them in even stranger manner.


Tape itself had only recently been invented in 1933, I found that funny…

That "The Woodlawn Invitational Cup" was the first feature story she published under the “operation.” That story broke from the gate like a winner, and caused a commotion for months. She just had a really good way of putting things together… I bet she had fun writing that.

"...disgusting, sick, crazy."

That was what people really said about these pictures in T3 — imagine what they would say in 1933, I couldn’t really finish imagining… somewhere along the line the concepts would all bottleneck and my thoughts would jam entirely.

We never had time to talk about what she was doing after I came here to T3. But somehow, we had such a rapport, a creative understanding that I could think for her here sometimes. This picture I sent along with “The Woodlawn Invitational Cup” images. I thought she’d weave that into some spell.


“Thanks Don! That will look great in black and white, Lydia’s ass, totally pops. You are a genius matching that stonework, hahah from such different locations, and the lighting is perfect! Shit!”

Looking at her ass, made me think of John Velazquez.


Because I had just found out recently that they had been having an affair. And I still had to shoot him at the tracks. Now especially. I didn’t bother telling HVV what had happened, I showed her the racing stuff and that was my responsibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it yet myself. This shit me and HVV and Lydia were doing was too important to fuck up with emotional shit… but it was gonna drive me crazy.


He knew I knew, but he didn’t know why I wasn’t doing anything and mistook that for me being an idiot — the smiles I'd started getting in the shots could just be mistaken for sportsmen courtesy, but they weren’t. I’d started getting these looks from the jocks that were different…


I believe it flew around like gossip does, and then I think, well, now I think, I think quite a few people know. I think Calvin knows, and Edgar…


shit. Things started to make more sense…
Shit, I don’t know what to do. This is not what I need… and it didn’t seem like Lydia really knew what kind of guys these jocks were, but it doesn’t matter why it happened, only that I know it has and all of this together would make anyone’s head fucking spin.

But I’m a patient guy.



TO BE CONTINUED.


______________________________________________

NOTE! THIS IS A COMPLETELY FICTIONAL ACCOUNT USING THE REAL PEOPLE I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY FOR YEARS. IT IN NO WAY REFLECTS REALITY!

here are the other episodes sofar:

episode 1) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/08/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir.html

episode 3) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/09/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html

episode 4) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/10/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html

Everybody loved them. Everyone loved them NOW I mean. But they were around for a long time before anyone saw them. My boss made them, the three original Cleavage Pets, in 1933. 1933 was a year that was ready for a lot of things — I was there — we were ready for the end of prohibition, we were ready for a NEW DEAL, we were even ready for the first sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

“Timing is everything,” Holly Van Voast said, "and we aren’t going to see the right time for these little bastards till TwoThousandThen, we just aren't.”

TwoThousandThen, TwoThousandThen, TwoThousandThen… I heard a lot of that. And I probably would have dismissed her as just another loopy tomato… but she said things and did things


that sometimes gave me the manshivers. I really got the manshivers one day in 1933 when she showed me a drawing she’d done one night to entertain her girlfriends with.

“I know it says BILL, but it really is more about my appreciation for Charles Bukowski.”

What can you possibly say to that? I was working late in my office in the LENSJOCKEY Building in New York City (at the time her quiet newspaper HQ) and she just dropped this notebook down in front of me. Of course, at a glance I could tell instantly generally what I was looking at, but further inspection revealed a rather revolutionary document. How many tomatoes could diagram the sensitivity zones of manland? How many guys ever diagrammed it? I was just reading the most recent COSMOPOLITAN magazine, and there was a Dr. a real doctor woman… a “certified sex educator and relationship expert,” who just this month wrote, “In fact, it is true that nothing you do with your hand is going to be “better” than what your guy can do with his (in general, a steady, rhythmic pressure feels amazing, with your hand rotating down his shaft in a corkscrew motion.)”

“Well, you’re never gonna give a guy a better handjob than he gives himself if you don’t know THIS," HVV said, lazily drawing her finger up and down the length of the shaft in the drawing. For me.

She had actually gotten to about 9 times better than what a guy could do for himself with her knowledge. I won’t say any more about that.

“Damn, you know I was gonna wait a few more years to drop this on people, like everything else… but the world is in such shit Then… really, I hadn’t anticipated so much bullshit in the culture — if no one cares, no one cares. Christ noone’s done this? I couldn’t even find something like this on Gooble.”

“That’s Google,” I told her. Holly was a genius, but the internet was sortof a lot for someone in 1933, even someone like her. Somehow it worked out good that I was the one who went forward to TwoThousandThen. I more instinctively acquired a grasp of the wild new technologies, anyway, she trusted me, and my pictures.

The internet blew my mind. The porn alone “online” would have melted guys minds in 1933. Melted their minds! The world I was in now — decades after the world I as born into and should have rightfully stayed in, seemed to have turned a corner when you started to be able to buy things with these little plastic cards.


I don’t know what the Cleavage Pets would have done to peoples’ minds in 1933, but the people and the clothes were not ready. HVV knew that… in fact this kindof “before your time” situation with her ideas happened so often. The Cleavage Pets were inspired by something her dad made for HVV’s mother one day.

"He was so ahead of his time sometimes… I could tell, but most others were too close to see that… he was totally into the idea of “drive-in” theaters in 1918… but that wasn’t gonna fly till 33."

She INHERITED that particular quality from her father. I am convinced that is something you can inherit.
She made three of the Cleavage Pets. I remember the first time I saw them. As cute as they were, I’ll never forget the first sight I had of Lydia’s creamy real estate like a valley in a picture, in the background of a picture Holly pulled out of her files one day.

“The Three Graces, Stooges, Musketeers… the Holy Trinity… The Police — all you need to start something is three.” She said. Two of them had gold teeth, one of them looked quite sour, but when tucked in a nice pair, suddenly the expressions took on a certain... life. I thought it was interesting that anyone who saw them immediately recognized how funny and great they were, but even Then, even THEN — decades in the future, we still had to wonder if it wasn't too early to make the idea actually sell. And, we were not alone in our high hopes for The Cleavage Pets. We were happy we still had them.


There were the “Dylan before Dylan” albums. HVV saw Dylan coming, but she didn’t have the technology to record either “John Singer Sargent” or “FRONT COVER” till, well, after Dylan. Nobody was gonna go for that — especially from a woman, before Dylan. It’s too bad — I bet quite a few people would have liked the song “Painting” (on the B-side of the album) — it was a super instrumental that captured the chess game that is painting. Stroke by stroke, the guitar would lay the song out, totally painting the picture you’d see finally at the end of the song. Way ahead of it’s time. The wild thing is that most people would see the same picture, from listening to the instrumental. That was a pretty good trick.

“Even Dylan himself had to tell you what you were supposed to see,” she told me.
And “Drawing Conclusions” — has to be heard to believe.


“FRONT COVER” — also known as the “Blue Cup Album” — signaled the beginning of the ideas Holly was having about news and fiction and an artform that was gonna be big, it was big, and it was called “videos.” “A Killer’s Killer” was the first full music video to be shot with absolutely no acting — in fact the subjects of the video had no idea they were being shot. The actual people and places that told the song’s story were completely shot candidly in the hidden infrared format over 8 years. By me.

“The actual reverse engineering of the story out of the years of candid photography was the hardest. I never really knew when I was finished, except to have an instinctual relationship with my subjects to begin with. My gut was the storyteller.

(cough)

...like a card game, with characters just like a real deck. Like… there were Queens and Jokers and Aces, but the Queens were neoburlesque dancers, the Jokers were jockeys, the Aces were architecture, the King was The Freak. Oh sorry, that's a different story — but the point is — I try to play the footage (I shot) like a poker hand. Making a story out of the evidence of events... Right in front of people. The music, that was easy. In the video, I tried to turn photography on it’s side, use it like noone else before.”

“We had Phil Spector too. He did an awesome job bringing out the tobacco stained brilliance of the guitarwork. In the language of TwoThousandThen, it really did “kill.” It killed photography like Dylan would kill with his own switch to electric instruments. This was an album where the photography was the point — unlike most albums where the music really did dominate the dynamic of the expression.

I'm trying to make this as simple as possible, but it IS a new idea for you as an audience, readers. This is the colorful reality.


“Phil really did me a favor to with this album. Not only was he between two murder trials, he was also producing a whole record for his wife at the same time... well, supposedly... I mean, that's what she said.”

Luckily HVV didn’t need as much help as Rachelle.

“When Phil eventually got convicted and went to jail, well, that didn’t make either of us too happy.”

I really wish I had been around to shoot the recording of THAT album. The riffing she did with those early early infrared pictures was spectacular. You can really see what she was doing now with me even then, but in a smaller more easily digested way. So simple… the idea of shooting first (for as long as it takes to build up such a deck of characters)… and then shuffling them and creating a whole new world out of them —

it really was a whole other card game with the cards everyone else just called pictures. When Dylan DID eventually see and hear these albums, even he had to say he’d never thought of the reverse engineering of a story from the actual pictures taken to "document" events and people in real life.

“Fuck,” said Dylan, “I never thought of anything like that…,” then he went on to talk about some other stuff, shaking his head. It’s a long story.

Holly was so glad she’d gotten to meet the man (Phil) who inspired her so much before he was even around to see what she did. Who wouldn’t like that? Phil felt the same way. Phil totally dug the photorevisionist ideas Holly would spend hours telling him about. It was orchestration, arrangement, and within a supertight frame, of mass data. HVV thought that Phil had done something musically speaking, akin to developing the atomic bomb.

"His songs reached a critical mass like stage..." she'd start up, hahah.

“Fuck!” said Phil one day, “you know, she’s kindof crazy, that reverse engineering… those ideas… John Lennon — when John told Yoko to pack her bags… at first I wasn’t quite sure why he’d dropped the Y-O-K-O… but now… Christ… — what’s it like to work with her everyday Don?”


My name’s Don Spiro. I hope I don’t LOOK like a guy who’d swallow a lot of insane chick talk.


This is just an account. It wasn’t my idea to reshuffle reality for a neojournalistic edge, but I thought it was an interesting way to approach my boss’s biggest problem, when she told me about it.

She’d begun by simply reporting the future as I shot it to the past, hoping to entertain 1933 with a look into TwoThousandThen. She didn’t really want to melt people’s minds with the porn of the future, noone would want to do that, but what was really happening was not really impressing the past that much. People still looked the same, dressed the same, they had freaks back then too — trust me, 1933 was FULL OF FREAKS.

The collective “whatever,” from the past drove my boss to “think outside the box” as they liked to say so much now.

“A box?” she’d say to me… (HVV felt that that phrase sounded like “the McDonald’s advertisement of philosophy.”)

“How primitive, and you can’t move, with a sphere you can roll — I want to think outside the SPHERE.”

...and since people had super short attention spans and even shorter memories, it was quite easy to just start over…


and people at least thought it was original.
Oh sure, there were things people didn’t want to hear. Or couldn’t understand right away. But she’d nicked them all like a vampire in the beginning with The Cleavage Pets™. I mean, after that, wouldn't you follow that person anywhere?

In TwoThousandThen, people were mistaking Inception for the Immaculate Perception…

“the people of the future start to appear like the architecture of the future… transparent slick superficially shiny in personality. Fragile, with skins and personalities of glass. Personalities that take less time to create, personalities with the same face… hella just like the architecture. Blowing the mind of the past showing them a vision of the future was on HVV's end an attempt to

"scare the bejeezus out of the past so they might shape up a small bit or two.”

Holly wanted to get a message like that across… as with others.

“So many people really cannot tell the difference between Bloomberg and Dahmer — even in the far far future!” “They have no nose for the truth anyway, just like now.” “Lie about the future to change the past — NOW!“ that was what she wanted to do.

“I think MTV did that,” she said “in a way.” I thought that is was cool that she could talk so well about that kindof thing in 1933… I’m not sure if many women — or men, could have. But she had the machine, and they didn’t, so we’ll never know.

“Now and the past know the future from nothing.”

Lydia I met like I said when I saw her breasts in the picture of the Cleavage Pet that HVV had shown me.


She became my assistant when I’d just been shooting at the racetracks in NYC early in the “operation.” After we had spent some time together, I realized she’d meet less guys if she became a neoburlesque dancer, so I encouraged her to start dancing. That was also after my wife Diane died. I swear I was good till then.
But Lydia wasn’t. I am just trying to let you know about Lydia.


Oh Jesus… it wasn’t enough that the songs on her second album (songs she sang while she did her performances — songs which WERE her performances) were songs like, “Oh You Silly Indians” and “The Buffalo are Damn Gone Y’all (Let’s Get Over It, Let’s Get Over It”). The songs meant a lot to her, bless her badass little bad ass, and there was an awful “Wholelotta Wholelotta” truth in them… but people were JUST maybe ALMOST ready to take that when HVV went and produced the Lydia’s routines. And I mean she wrote the songs, played them, and designed and made the costumes, under the name NEOFRONTIER, and she also designed the posters/album covers under the name Cool Anonymous.

I know this is alot.


Blackface Indian Bling, we had to hold that show in The Swooning Dewd,” the speakeasy under my place, Spiro’s. The character she used for the BIB performances was La Roja Noche — the name she used as her regular burlesque persona was Medianoche. Let’s put it this way, she was not a bad photographer, and she was a great assistant, but her shake was wasted on it. And those jokers, I mean jockeys, I just didn’t want her around them, no, no, no, no, no.

In her performances, she was assistant to no one. You’d be surprised by how the past got her. Or at least, she got them, She got them good.

“Smart shit is the broccoli of entertainment,” Holly said, and in the future, it just gets worse anyway. Let’s just replace the Kardasians with these chin dogs? I think the people here (in 1933) will think that’s funny, and we don’t have shots of the Kardasians anyway.” “Lets have the chins stand for the Kardasians in the new stories.”


Hahah, perfect.


I told Holly to stop. Haha. Since we knew who the Kardasian sisters were, we thought this was so much funnier than anyone in the past could possibly know, but they’d still like this in 1933. Dogs.


Sometimes we got carried away — “Kim Kardasian DWI!”

“Wait —,” said Holly, “that’s too close to the truth for this project.” While Holly and I were trying to tighten up the details for the operation, we had to amuse ourselves every once in awhile. “… hahaha… … Kardasian… sisters.”



TO BE CONTINUED.

______________________________________________

NOTE! THIS IS A COMPLETELY FICTIONAL ACCOUNT USING THE REAL PEOPLE I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY FOR YEARS. IT IN NO WAY REFLECTS REALITY!

here are the other episodes sofar:

episode 2) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/09/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir.html

episode 3) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/09/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html

episode 4) — http://lensjockey.blogspot.com/2010/10/cleavage-pets-nyc-reality-noir-episode.html