In Which We Don't Really Like Ray Drecker Or His Penis

Big Dick Doesn't Go As Far As It Used To

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Ray Drecker's wife divorced him because he was only pulling in a gym teacher's salary. On last week's episode of the HBO series Hung, Drecker eats dinner at the home of her dermatologist Jew of a second husband. After coffee, he asks the good doctor, "How did a guy like you get the girl from a guy like me?" It's not lakeside property, because Drecker (Thomas Jane) has that in spades. He doesn't have to go on living in a tent while he repairs his dreadful cabin of a house. He just has to sell out to his neighbor, reap a tidy profit, and relocate.

But he doesn't. He won't. He's used to being there. It's his parents' house, after all. He's been living on the lake since he was a little boy. Most things in life get stale — children, marriage, work, friendships — but humans never tire of sticking their toes in the water, and sometimes swimming in it.

American men and women of a certain age are used to a particular idea of their country. As it must, it bears no resemblance, none at all, to the country their children grow up in. There is no way to stop the advancement of technology, and even if there were, do you think people were happier before Prodigy and AOL? It seems like they weren't, in all the ways that count.

Ray's nostalgia for the past is immature; as Tony Soprano once put it, "Remember when is the lowest form of conversation." Like Ray Drecker, he's no smarter than he looks. Nobody feels sorry for a guy with a monster dick who owns lakefront property. They hate that guy. Sometimes the person you're making the show about turns out to be the least interesting person in it. This is certainly true of Hung, where two women outshine every single appearance of Thomas Jane's baby's arm holding an apple.

Uma Thurman once asked John Travolta, Betty or Veronica? The hypothetical positions two creatures who could not be more different; the poor, effacing blonde whose industriousness is the key to her reward, and the spoiled, impotent daddy's girl whose rogueish father follows her around. Hung cleverly swaps the hair color of the two, and twists once more for good measure.

The two major women in Drecker's life are his ex-wife Jessica and his business partner Tanya Skagle.

The first is portrayed by Anne Heche in a masterful performance that Elizabeth Perkins should take notes on. We never see her and Ray as they were as a couple (except once in flashback during the show's hour-long pilot) but it's not hard to imagine her girlish side giving in to Drecker's length and girth. That she rejected that for a l'chaim (Eddie Jemison) with smaller package just shows what a special woman she is.

The second woman in Ray's life is Ray's pimp Tanya (Jane Adams). The scenes belonging to her  are among the most disturbing in all of television. She's such a pathetic person that her identity folds in on herself. Despite being startlingly tough to like, Tanya has somehow turned that all the way around and being sympathetic. It's like watching a crowd of people cheering loudly while someone's greatest faults are exposed.

The show had her romancing another Writer (in the Wonder Boys "I am A Writer" sense), who she confesses to, informing him that she's blocked creatively. He turns down sex the next time they see each other, pitching some bullshit excuse, causing her to wonder later, "Why do men only want to fuck me when they're drunk?"

In comparing Tanya to her male business partner, we can marvel at their mutual lack of taste. Both accost a client at her workplace; a client who pays well and on time and demands nothing more than her fantasy fulfilled.

Although we feel bad for what they require from their johns, it's like Hung is bringing the literary concept of the unreliable narrator to the screen. Both Tanya and Ray drink too much, both require too much from other people, so much so that it's difficult to watch. A woman who has reached the depth of her self-loathing and turned back is like a man with a big penis, is the only probable conclusion that can be reached from their union.

The problems that Ray Drecker has with the women in his life are relatively simple. Since his female client's dream was to drag him into couples therapy, he should have used the time to ponder his own relationships with the fairer sex. As in Hung co-creaters Dmitry Lipkin and Collette Burson's last series The Riches, there are only two options for how Drecker, or any man, can relate to a woman. He can worship her, or he can step on her. The first is no more fulfilling than the second, and claims as many victims.

A boy in a home in Detroit on the water is taught to love his mother. He would as soon give his property up to the Jew next door as he would piss on his mother's grave. (It's amazing Drucker doesn't channel his rage at the world into his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.)

For this reason, Ray is a natural prostitute. He worships a woman for a brief time, maybe an hour for the most vivacious of those seeking happiness consultants. Then he is free to step on her. I point this out because Hung keeps wanting to turn selling your body into something it isn't. Whoring is a business. It doesn't lead to marriage or happiness, it will lead most certainly to money. All whores understand that, the richest ones best of all.

Watching a woman pimp a man and take her cut makes the audience feel a certain way. I suppose uncomfortable, and perhaps fascinated, too. But at its heart we recognize that this kind of work isn't healing. Most kinds of work aren't. One generation had its industriousness to depend on. Ours probably won't, so what will everything hinge on? Some will turn to law, or medicine. I salute their choices, or at least the ones that are freely made. But I won't serve my government, and I won't bill by the hour. What's left of honest work? Not much. Then again, there's nothing wrong with being a whore, except that it isn't good for you.

Natural selection was invented by Darwin to describe how humans improved over time. What traits are being selected fpr now? What skill except dumb luck carries on the maudlin genetic pattern of humanity? The weak live, even thrive. The strong, the hung do as well — despite what Lipkin and Burson want us to believe, it's not an inverse relationship. Even in this darkest of economic climates, every teenager has a cell phone and a credit card.

The gap between us and the world that worships us like Ray Drecker's phallus ever widens, until it will be people of the same age across continents who find themselves as unrecognizable as I do the customs of my grandparents. Either they'll go on worshipping, or they will step on us.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Day to Day" — Amy Millan (mp3)

"Bury This" — Amy Millan (mp3)

"Towers" — Amy Millan (mp3)

In Which We Try To Blow Up A Meth Lab

Gallery Chronicle

by HANSON O'HAVER

I have been thinking a lot about art. I have been thinking a lot about methamphetamine. If the two subjects seem dramatically different, well, that's because they usually are. Art is the epitome of cool. Artists are tastemakers, and, despite protesting that they just want to create, they know this. Methamphetamine is definitely the least cool illegal drug. It's barely hipper than Viagra. Cocaine has a glamorous appeal; heroin has that heroin-chic thing; marijuana has its own attraction to basically every different subculture. Even crack has Richard Prior and rappers like Biggie and Young Jeezy. Meth has none of this. It's not associated with rock stars or models or hippies but with skinny hicks with acne drinking Big Gulps.

Which brings me to Hello Meth Lab with a View, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, and, most recently, Black Acid Co-op, art installations done by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe (yes, he is Rob's brother). The two Hello Meth Lab's, consisted of reproductions of meth labs in places like a desert greenhouse and a Miami apartment. Black Acid, which ran at Manhattan's Dietch Projects from July 2 - August 15, was an expansion of the two previous installations. An eighteen room exhibit, it was centered around a blown-up urban meth lab.

This raises several questions. The most obvious of these is the perennial Yes, but is it art? Of course it is art. In fact, the answer to this question is almost always yes. This is not a very good question, however, because if someone says something they made is art, it is art. You're not the art police. Who are you to argue with them?

The next question asked is, What are the artists saying when they build a reproduction of a meth lab and call it art? In their minds, are meth cooks artists, with their lives, inseparable from their drugs, being their art?

This is an interesting idea, but it seems unlikely that the artists had this statement in mind. So is installing a meth lab at Art Basel and in the middle of Soho some sort of ironic posturing? It could certainly be argued that Freeman and Lowe are making an elitist joke, taking a subject, a substance, usually associated with the rural poor and placing it in the upper-class art world. Are these installations the equivalent of white kids ironically wearing Tupac "Thug Life" shirts?

Fortunately, the artists explain their intentions: the installation expands on the notions relating to the connection between counter-culture and industrial society resulting in a spatial collage that extends itself into a vast architectural setting.

Unfortunately, as is generally the case with artists' statements, this statement doesn't really mean anything. Artists' statements always read like they were written well after the work was done; i.e. the artist thought it would be interesting to build a meth lab, and only later came up with a bullshit explanation on the social ramifications of their work. This is understandable, because it's got to be nearly impossible for an artist to explain the purpose of hundreds of hours of work in a couple of sentences. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how important the artists' intention really is.

Maybe social context and intent don't really matter. I'm inclined to think that the aesthetic is what matters; if a work makes some deep statement that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to. I'd rather look at meaningless art that I find cool or pretty than some Shepard Fairey anti-war stencil any day. Perhaps the most important question is: How does this art look? In this case, Lowe and Freeman’s project completely succeeded. Black Acid looked fucking awesome. And how could it not? After all, it consisted of eighteen rooms filled with things like an abandoned Chinese bodega selling pornographic t-shirts, walls covered in pictures of naked women and astrological charts, sleeping coyotes, and formaldehyde jars. Plus an exploded meth lab! Radness was inevitable.

Hanson O'Haver is a contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the Velvet Underground. He blogs here.

"Troubled Medium" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)

"Like How You Are" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)

"Entendre" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)

In Which We Hope They Leave Their Cameras To Us

My $5 Addiction

by JAMIE BECK

Once you start collecting vintage cameras it becomes an obsession. I was at a flea market in Texas and I'll never forget the moment when I saw the first of many vintage cameras which would come into my possession (insert evil laugh). It was a Polaroid ColorPack II Land Camera and was like the women of California: plastic, mysterious, big nobs, and cheap. The first Polaroid I pulled out of it took me to a magic land; it was instant gratification on an acid trip.

I was hooked and bought three more of the same cameras as backups. That was my first buying experience. I loved the thrill of learning what film it took, if they still made the film, where to buy it, how to load it and what it will look like in the end. The picture is the ultimate prize and with so many factors, some controllable and some not, and with the old cameras you're never exactly sure how it will turn out. I imagine this was the feeling of discovery the fathers of photography experienced. You know the basic idea of how it will work, but there is something about the way a camera sees that your eyes can't. The glimpse in to that world is what keeps us coming back. Then you're standing there holding an image that feels unique, that exists beyond a computer screen. It belongs to you: there is only one and you created it.

The first camera I ever held was my mom's old Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic with 50mm lens. She purchased it some time in the late 70's and passed it on to me. There was no Auto or Program function on the camera, so I had to learn how to use it the way servicemen learn to disassemble and reassemble rifles. I guess you could say I was armed and dangerous, locked and loaded.

Once I became addicted to old cameras I learned a thing or two about how a camera works. Always check the shutter. Does it open and close without getting stuck? Is it fast at 1/500th and slow at 1/4th? Does the aperture open and close as you turn the dial? Do they still make the batteries? The film? How is the rainbow on the lens? Are there light leaks in the bellows? Is there a light meter and does it work? How does it focus and do I really feel like carrying a measuring tape with me? Is this camera high maintenance like I am?

Then you research if you can problem solve. For example, I've used black electrical tape to seal holes and rolled my own 120 film onto vintage 620 reels to fit into a Kodak Duaflex, but the biggest undertaking was turning a Polaroid Land Camera 800 (a beast of a beauty) into a 120 film camera.

When I purchased the 190X Reflex Zoom 8mm Movie Camera I had to buy the film in New York City, have it processed in California, and transferred to video tape in Oklahoma.

After you buy one camera there will be another, then another, and then a backup for your backup. You will see one in a flea market or on ebay you think, "This is it, the last of the great cameras, it must be mine!" Onset dizzy spells and an empty wallet later you own a piece of history, each light catching box different from the next.

How will this one photograph? Could this be the Pandora's box I've been searching for? Then you feel the anger of disappointment when you discover they quit making the film in 1960, you look at your new camera and it lets out a whimper.

You'll cheer on things such as The Impossible Project, visit museums and wonder what camera or film took the image hanging before you, and you'll keep the New York Times Polaroid gallery tab open as inspiration.

Like old cars, vintage cameras they are built to to last and fill with memories. You become that girl (or guy) with "that thing" in your family or on the street. But the good news is that people stop to talk with you. Family members find forgotten cameras in the attic to pass down to you. You learn how to capture the perfect image you see in your mind so the moment is always yours and you become impressed with yourself for learning how to use an EV scale or applying the sunny 16 rule successfully you swore in high school photography class was useless. After enough practice you can even transcend time: my hope is that some day my hypothetical kids will go though old photographs of mine and wonder how it was possible I was alive in 1940 (some 40+ years before my actual birth date).

My friends and I talk about vintage cameras in whispers like we are trading stock market secrets in the back of speakeasys. As with any good addiction, I even have my "supplier", kept top secret so I always have first pick. However, now that you know my lips are sealed I will give you some advice: flea Markets and antique stores outside of major cities have the cheapest cameras and in the best condition. I wouldn't go near a New York City flea market but major cities do have used departments in photography stores with some serious vintage equipment such as Hasselblad and Leica. My college mentor gave me a Hasselblad 500C and it's magic: like seeing what's on the other side of Dorothy's rainbow. For everything else, we hope when the others die they leave their cameras to us.

I find it funny that consumer photography started in the 19th century with Kodak's philosophy of "You push the button, we'll do the rest" and that's right back where we are now in the digital world. Maybe it's the mystery left in these old light boxes that is never really "what you see is what you get" when it comes to the images it produces or the limiting factor of film's physical media. In any case, I like going to bed at night knowing that in my living room is a trunk full of my life and memories: old cameras, negatives, Polaroids, and prints that anyone could open up now or 100 years from now and know me, and maybe even be inspired to pick up a camera.

Jamie Beck is a contributor to This Recording. She is a photographer living in New York City. Her blog can be seen here and her twitter here.

New York City was my first project with my vintage 8mm video camera I bought for $30. Walking the streets, capturing all the people and places keeps me in love with this city:

"Save Your Love" — Sally Shapiro (mp3)

"Looking at the Stars" — Sally Shapiro (mp3) highly recommended

"Miracle" — Sally Shapiro (mp3)