In Which We Were Running For The Money and The Flesh of Dexter Morgan

Murder for Fun and Profit

by ELEANOR MORROW

Showtime's Dexter is set in a Miami of startling contradictions. Clean, polite, and homicidal, Dexter's hometown has the worst police force in recent memory, narrowly topping the LAPD of the early 1990s. Right now the town is full to the brim with serial killers, making it not exactly the ideal tourist destination.

Perhaps a fascination for continental America's nearest point to the equator lives on in some quarters. The first jungle killer is Dexter Morgan himself, who, over three seasons of gleeful murder, turned himself into a sympathetic character. Now set up with a charming wife, two garrulous children (dulcet Cody and the recalcitrant Astor), Dexter must protect his family from his dark passenger.

He's not quite doing a bang up job of it so far. Last episode, Dex beat up a female cop who he convicted in the court of his own mind of murderering her own family on a whim. Part of a bloody glove in a garbage compactor was his evidence. "Circumstantial" doesn't even begin to describe it. As he's cleaning up the wreckage from his latest kill, his family comes strolling in.

We are taught that it is wrong to kill people, but it is not really wrong to kill people. It is more about being frightened by those who do the killing. Many of mankind's most prominent civilizations legalized murder as a way of excluding certain individuals. Our country still does the same by killing citizens as revenge for their own crimes.

Thus, the glorious seasons of Dexter slaughtering every bad guy who had a traffic violation felt like a true justice, a better justice that extended beyond the system. In the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow?!?) Dexter seems to have met a rule-breaker whose passion for not getting caught exceeds his own.

While it was all right for Dexter to go around cutting up criminals, women are a different story. The writers of the show have become rather nonchalant about their protagonist's favorite pastime. Making Dexter a charming father backfired; now his darker moments fill with dread for him and us of what he really should be doing with the balance of his time. It's not even the murders that makes him a bad man, it's all the hours away from home.

This season also featured the unfortunate return of Agent Lundy (Keith Carradine), whose face was a craggy reminder that grey hair and grey suits don't generally mix. Dexter's sister Debra finds herself in a triangle between the decayed carapace of this ancient creature and weed-smoking, somewhat annoying musician Anton. I haven't been less excited by the idea of group sex since the Manson Murders.

Unable to give its Latino characters anything to do, the show's writers went with the old standby - team them up! Once the most interesting police chief on television, Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta now gives her underlings tugjobs and spends her time calling Dexter into her office for extended sit downs where she asks Dexter for advice on her feelings. Should the top cop in Miami be such a buffoon?

Of course this is all mere build-up. Dexter is at its best when it puts the resident non-moralist in a quandary from which only murder can free him. In the second season, Dexter caged and planned to murder someone who caught him red-handed. What we would give for him to put his sister or wife in such a difficult situation! Life imprisonment is really the greatest fear of a potential murderer, and there is no death he will not effect to avoid it. "Put the pressure on," Frank Herbert once said about storytelling, "and never take it off." Amen to that.

Drama is more enjoyable at a higher level of intelligence, with the characters anticipating each other's every move. With a serial killer in the Miami mist, people seems more relaxed and prone to free association. It's like Dexter is subliminally comforting everyone. Cold and unable to empathize with other human beings, Dexter hasn't become more like Miami's cattle: they've become more like him.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here.

"The Burgundy Stain" - Doveman (mp3)

"The Cat Awoke" - Doveman (mp3)

"From Silence" - Doveman (mp3)

In Which Tanning Is Pretty Much Forever

My Phototherapist

by MOLLY YOUNG

The tanning salon was located in one of the malls alongside Highway 101, its logo a stylized pineapple and its exterior the kind described as "tasteful" in Yelp reviews. You had to be eighteen to tan legally, but this rule, judging by the girls at Tamalpais High School, was a flexible one. As with many discomfiting pastimes specific to adolescence (weed, statutory rape), tanning was technically illegal but widely permitted and often abetted by our elders. Certainly it was my favorite activity of the three.

The first time I tanned was with Alice, my best friend. We parked in the Corte Madera parking lot and located the salon easily, since it was tucked right next to the bookstore where we'd often gone with our parents to buy gifts. The change in our patronage from bookstore to salon seemed like a significant upward shift in  maturity, while the legal restrictions on tanning gave us the charge we got when buying Smirnoff with fake IDs.

The waiting area of Pacific Tan was conceptualized as a jungle and it smelled wonderful, like tanning oil. Next to issues of Cosmopolitan lay brochures touting the benefits of Vitamin D, reminding us in their nature of the health-based arguments we lobbed at our parents in favor of Fruit Roll-Ups and Gushers.

The clerk was a kind man who recommended options from the tanning menu and asked me if I was part Chinese. I no longer had frosted highlights at this time but I was still interested in resembling Carmen Electra, so I chose the maximum tan that my skin could handle; Alice was able to go a shade darker thanks to her base tan. The goal was not only a positive one (to roast ourselves) but a negative one (to make our teeth look whiter) and a holistic one (to become hot).

We learned that each private tanning room had a theme––Shangri La for one, Captain Nemo's Nautilus for another--and that a tan included complimentary refreshments and chilled water. Nothing feels more luxurious to a seventeen-year-old than free Mint Milanos still nestled in their paper cups.

Tanning is the most counter-intuitive process imaginable. You strip, put on violet steampunk goggles and lie still in a lit tube, feeling your molecules denature. Ten or twenty minutes pass with a feeling of combined doom and tranquility; it is exactly what I imagine dying to feel like. All the while, the same thing is happening to other women and men lying prone in tubes nearby. On average, more than 1 million Americans visit a tanning salon each day, 70% of whom are Caucasian girls and women aged 16 to 29 years. I'd bet that a good portion of these girls inhabit Marin County.

Back to Pacific Tan. After our machines went off––they were on timers according to how much we paid––we got dressed and ate the fun-size Milky Way bars that had lain atop the folded towels in our tanning rooms. Then, separately (we confirmed this later) we each located the secret cache of candy bars within our rooms and ate a few more. When we emerged from Shangri La and Nemo's Nautilus, I observed that Alice's tan was much deeper than mine, while she maintained that the opposite was true. Naturally.

Examining our crouton-colored fingers we got back in the Corolla and planned the next tanning session. Moments later, speeding down the 101 with vulgar music blasting and sentimental thoughts of lacrosse players in our heads, it all added up to a productive afternoon. We were still operating under the principle that sexual appeal could be bought, provided we bought the right things. This was an exercise in money-wasting and futility, but it also simplified life. What we lacked was strictly material; all we needed to be more successful at parties was what the other girls had. And to a point, this worked. Fake nails and giant hoop earrings actually did make us feel sexier. We just didn't know what to do with the attention once we got it.

Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. Her website is here. You can find her recent work on TR here.

"The Impulse" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

"Silver Trembling Hands" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

"Convinced of the Hex" - The Flaming Lips (mp3)

In Which We Are A Byronic Figure of Masculinity

I Was A Lover

by CAMILLE PAGLIA

Jane Porter found Byron's complexion "softly brilliant" with a "moonlight paleness." Lady Blessington called his face "peculiarly pale," set off by curling hair of "very dark brown": "He uses a good deal of oil in it, which makes it look still darker." White skin, dark oiled hair: Elvis Presley. In homage to singer Roy Orbison, Presley dyed his brown-blonde hair black and continued to do so to the end, despite friends' urging to let the natural color return. Presley, a myth-maker, understood the essence of his archetypal beauty.

Byron and Elvis Presley look alike, especially in strong-nosed Greek profile. In Glenarvon, a roman a clef about her affair with Byron, Caroline Lamb says of her heroine's first glimpse of him, "The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt." Presley's sneer was so emblematic that he joked about it.

 In a 1968 television special, he twitched his mouth and murmured, to audience laughter, "I've got something on my lip." The romantic curling lip is aristocratic disdain: Presley is still called "the King," testimony to the ritual needs of a democratic populace. As revolutionary sexual personae, Byron and Presley had early and late styles: brooding menance, then urbane magnamity. Their everyday manners were manly and gentle.

Presley had a captivating soft-spoken charm. The Byronic hero, says Peter Thorselv, is "invariable courteous towards women." Byron and Presley were world-shapers, conduits of titanic force, yet they were deeply emotinonal and sentimental in a feminine sense.

Both had late Orientalizing periods. Byron drawn to oriental themes, went off to fight the Turks in the Greek war of independence and died of a mysterious illness at Missolonghi. A portrait shows him in silk turban and embroidered Albanian dress. The costume style of Presley's last decade was nearly Mithraic: jewel-encrusted silk jumpsuits, huge studded belts, rings, chains, sashes, scarves. This resembles Napoleon's late splendor, weighed down in velvet, ermine and jewels.

Napoleon, Byron and Presley began in simplicity as flaming assertions of youthful male will, and all three ended as ornate objets de culte. British legend envisions a "westering" of culture: Troy to Rome to London. But there is also an eastering of culture. We are far from our historical roots in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor; yet again and again, collective emotion swelling about a charismatic European personality instinctively returns him or her to the east. Elizabeth I also ended as a glittering Byzantine icon.

Byron and Presley were renowned for athletic vigor, yet both suffered chronic ailments that somehow never marred their glossy complexions or robust beauty. Both constantly fought off corpulence, Presley losing towards the end. Both died prematurely, Byron at thirty-six, Presley at forty-two. Byron's autopsy revealed an enlarged heart, degenerated liver and gall bladder, cerebral inflammation and obliteration of the skull sutures. Presley suffered an enlarged heart and degenerated colon and liver. In both cases, tremendous physical energy was oddly fused with internal disorder, a revolt of the organism. Presley's drugs were symptom, not cause. Psychogenetically, Byron and Presley practiced the secret art of feminine self-impairment.

Camille Paglia is a professor in the humanities. The above is excerpted from Paglia's 1992 masterpiece Sexual Personae, which won the 1992 Literary Award for a volume of general literature written by a Philadelphian.

"Amazing Grace" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"Bridge Over Troubled Water" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"Take My Hand, Precious Lord" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"Who Am I" - Elvis Presley (mp3)