Tweeting, Bondage, and Sweating Alcohol

by Gary Phillips

We here at FourStory are celebrating our third year of existence this month. In the old model of print weeklies a trio of years would barely be when the training wheels had come off. On the left, The Nation is hanging in there after a hundred plus years, while the centrist Newsweek, begun during the Great Depression, is on the auction block. But, and I have absolutely no statistical data to back this up, in terms of the Web, being able to produce and disseminate original nonfiction and fiction content consistently for these last three years, that’s got to be some kind of milestone.

I feel honored I was in on the ground floor when our EiC, or however the hell he refers to himself, Nathan Walpow, asked me would I be interested in writing something for the then percolating idea of FourStory. What I came up with was The Underbelly, my first serialized mystery novella, online or in any other format. The plot was in keeping with some of the tenet of the site, particularly around matters of development, gentrification and affordable housing. In the story the main character, Magrady, a semi-homeless Vietnam vet prone to bouts of post-traumatic stress syndrome, searches for his wheelchair-bound friend who has disappeared from a Skid Row that is in flux from the aforementioned forces. Not only did I finish the tale on this site, next month will see a print version of The Underbelly out from PM Press.

On the matter of milestones, friggin’ Twitter is getting up there in Web years since its founding in 2006 by whippersnapper Jack Dorsey. The lad, adept at software design, had a background in enterprises using the Internet for dispatching purposes, like sending out taxis and ambulances. He and business partner Isaac “Biz” Stone cooked up a prototype of Twitter in two weeks and after that, it was off to the races.

Limited to 140 characters per tweet, writers have attempted to construct tweeted fictional narratives (with little success, given the constraints of the form); politicians on both sides of aisle use it to stay connected with constituents or riff on things like the president’s State of the Union speech; protestors in Iran following last year’s elections there used tweets and cell phone images to get their messages out during demonstrations; and out of work screenwriter Justin Halpern trapped lightning in a bottle with his tweets quoting his opinionated old man, Sam Halpern.

Tweeting under the catchy title Shit My Dad Says, Halpern, who had to move back home to live with his folks from Hollywood, got attention among the millions of tweets that go out there every day. Ol’ pops, according to Halpern, has opined such lovely observations as, “Engagement rings are pointless. Indians gave cows ... Oh sorry, congrats on proposing. We good now? Can I finish my Indian story?” And there’s this dandy bon mot, “Look, we’re basically on earth to shit and fuck. So unless your job’s to help people shit or fuck, it’s not that important, so relax." Halpern pimped those tweets into a book deal and a TV show with William Shatner as the salty old duffer.

Actress Lindsay “Freaky Friday” Lohan, who may or may not be trying to revive her career after several publicized missteps and misdeeds over the last few years, hasn’t been doing interviews but has been tweeting her fans. Currently she’s been wearing her court-ordered SCRAM (Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor) ankle bracelet that registers when her alcohol level spikes in her perspiration. Apparently at the recent MTV Movie awards, that bad rascal went off and she had to then post more bail. As reported in the July 4th L.A. Times Calendar piece on her, she subsequently tweeted, “This is all because of a FALSE accusation by tabloids & paparazzi & it is ... digusting [sic] I’ve been more than I’m compliance & feeling great.”

Well, it seems the judge has sentenced Miz Lindsay to 90 days in jail for her lapses, so maybe she’ll get some fashion ideas for her 6126 clothing line while on lockdown. And fashion sense brings me to yet another milestone. Wonder Woman, the flying fighting bootylicious Amazon who has been around since 1941, just got a new costume that includes full length tights. Quoting Wikipedia here, as this summation is accurate:

Dr. William Moulton Marston (May 9, 1893 – May 2, 1947), also known by the pen name Charles Moulton, was a psychologist, feminist theorist, inventor, and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.

Two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne (who lived with the couple in a polyamorous relationship), served as exemplars for the character and greatly influenced her creation.

Marston was also responsible for the development of the systolic blood pressure test used to ferret out deceptions in lie detectors. He came to conclude women were more forthright than men and not for nothing does the peerless princess of power have a golden lasso that when roped around a devious opponent, usually a man, compels him to tell the truth.

This is not the first time Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman has gotten a new costume. I remember in the late sixties, due to the influence of that swinging, karate chopping spy chick Emma Peel of British TV’s The Avengers, our girl went all mod for a few years as she battled evildoers. But up until then, Wonder Woman’s red, white and blue costume of star spangled shorts (when she first came on the scene she wore this kind of cowboy girl frilly star spangled skirt over the shorts), sometimes bikini bottom, red and gold metal bustier, and red and white boots remained fairly constant.

Being a good-looking ass-kicking babe with the battle savvy of Alexander the Great rolled into Patton wasn’t the only draw of Wonder Woman. It’s been noted in various articles that there was also a fair degree of bondage imagery in her comic book adventures. Sure there’s been plenty of times when Superman and Batman, the other two of the DC Comics Big Three of heroes, have been bound. Certainly Batman has also tied up the Joker a time or two with a nylon line attached to his batarang, but there was something curiously enticing in the way being tied up as depicted in the pages of Wonder Woman took place. Whether this trope is picked up in her new retconned tales (writer J. Michael Straczynski has jettisoned a lot of contradictory complicated backstory and has started over with Diana Prince as a fetching twenty-something exile of a destroyed Paradise Island, home of the Amazons), or even if the new costume, which is getting mixed reviews among the fan base, remains, we shall see.

For nothing it seems is constant in this era of instantaneous communication and gratification. But here at FourStory, we plan to be around for our next mini-milestone and I plan to be there too, by moderating my bondage, keeping the alcohol sweats down, and probably never, ever taking up tweeting.

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