Lucky The Tourist Gets Blind Sided

In all I’m a pretty jaded person. There’s not many things in the daily circuit of events, images and suggestions that will make a dent in my comfort level. I mean, from my preteen years to my present adulthood, society’s iterations of violence, commercialized sex and news media have gone from Mortal Combat to Grand Theft Auto IV, Victoria’s Secret Catalogue to Internet porn, Iraq I to Iraq II and CNN to Fox News. That is to say my years of impressionable development have seen a world characterized by a distinct, “bad to worse,” chronology .
I was ten years old in 1992 and in those days I couldn’t make it through a single night of TV without a crippling case of the creeping jibblies. I was a sensitive kid. But through a slowly escalating program of dire religious extremism (both foreign and domestic), exposure to a little bit of nearly everything on earth (yes I’ve spent time on you tube and the like), I am nearly invulnerable to mere images. Ideas seem terminally impotent and even my daily interaction with real humans seems little more than inconvenient fiction.
But everyone has a thresh hold I suppose, and I found mine Sunday night. An image reached me and landed like a biochemical concussion blast, literally knocking me out of my chair. Just another collection of pixels lit in a sequence determined by cascades of ones and zeroes, but it bypassed my thicker skin and knocked me square on my butt.
“What was it?” you may be asking.
Well for heaven‘s sake…what WOULD it be? I’m a twenty-six year old male surfing the internet in the middle of the night. It was a girl. A famous girl. Young, French; a singer possessing the kind of startling symmetry and grace that has caused endless death and misery in every age of man. She performs under the name Alizee and evidently she’s sort of a French Brittany Spears. With the notable exception that she seems to have handled fame without going completely insane. Physically she's kind of Natalie Portman as designed by Hugh Heffner. I don’t know what the universe is trying to prove with her. There’s admirable craft and then there’s gaudy flash.
I wasn’t the one who found the video. Evidently Alizee has made inroads among videogame players by having some of her dance moves featured in the ultra-ubiquitous online swords and sorcery game World of War Craft. --I think I’ll move on without explaining why a game like W.O.W. needs teen-pop dance moves (ask a W.O.W. player. I‘ll bet you know at least one)-- My friend had stumbled across it in his game-related research and shared it with me while I was visiting. If there’s one thing more embarrassing for a jaded media-savvy person than losing control of himself over an image, it’s doing so with someone else in the room.
Alizee is in her mid twenties, seemingly in a transitional phase with her popularity and career. She had the ersatz series of smash singles beginning early in the decade and a couple of hit albums trading on her teen temptress image. Her first hit was named Moi Lolita…no one’s pretending here. But now she’s married, older and likely at pains to grow her image up; the old quest to find a new audience without alienating the old.
She has my sympathies and I wish her well. But in all I really don’t care. She is a danger to me and my reputation for unassailable taste and composure. I lived through the millennial teen-pop craze in this country unscathed. I don’t think I ever looked at Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilerra et al. with anything more or other than pure disdain. But Alizee caught me so off guard, I cannot even gain perspective on her music. On an empirical level I know its type but…damn! The song I heard was catchy and I’m afraid I’ll download it in a moment of weakness. What’s more, there’s no intellectual component to my reaction to her.
I can’t live like that!