It was early December, as far as I can remember, and I had moved to a new town. Being once again in school (a student instead of a teacher), I had both time to fill in my day and space to fill in my head. My sister, Blurt, mentioned to me that she started a blog. Having taken my cues from her so often in the past, I decided to do the same.
As is usually the case with most things I undertake, I misunderstood the purpose of blogs and went about creating my own version of this online document. It was imperative for me to have a concept that would help me raise the online journal to a more pretentiously literary form, so I spent days searching for a name. I thought if I was going to blog it must be something that had thematic coherence and could be looked at as an object in and of itself. My pretension often knows no bounds.
Now, for as long as I have had the means to do so, I have heavily depended on music to guide me through the sots and thralls of…life. And ever since I left the country fields and started living as a city mouse I have needed portable music players to protect me from the crowds on buses, trains, and sidewalks. Because I had not yet acquired an iPod at the time I was birthing my blog, I carried a discman with a single CD that I would listen to over and over throughout the day until I made it safely home and could swap it out for something new. On that day I was listening to the soundtrack of the movie Man on the Moon which was compiled by R.E.M. The song “Kiss You All Over” by EXILE came on, which I was keen on because my friend Abby had talked about how she used to sing it during her job bagging groceries. The soundtrack version of this song has overdubs from the movie, and the song begins with a snippet of dialogue from a scene where Andy Kaufman is visiting a prostitute. The madam is explaining how Andy comes to her establishment often, sometimes as himself and other times in costume. Right before the song begins I heard these important lines: “Andy comes here almost every weekend…. Doesn’t always call himself [Andy], sometimes he’s Tony and he wears a tux.”
When inspiration hits it hits hard. Suddenly here was a justification for blogging–an alter-ego with an outlandish personality that allows one to do in public something that maybe he would otherwise be shy about. I had both a name and a powerful trope. I ran home to make sure my name hadn’t already been taken by someone else, which of course it wasn’t, and within a few minutes Tony Wears a Tux was born!
Tony Wears a Tux
“A blog about a superhero named Tony”
The first incarnation of this blog was housed on Blogger and had a blue background with polka-dots and its tagline was taken from a song by the Pixies called “Tony’s Theme.” The concept was an overwrought trope of Tony as a cartoonish partner of mine whose outlandish actions and ideas would be the inspiration of various blog entries. He allowed me to take the mundane day-to-day happenings in my life and spice them up a little. Tony was my everyman. And I couldn’t help but stumble over instances of “Tony” all over my pop cultural awareness. This is from my inaugural post: “He already has his own theme song. (Go find your copy of Surfer Rosa, now!) He was a famous comedic alter ego. We all debated about his status as the boss. He always finished all his homework; raised his hand in homeroom. Does anyone remember Tony?”
Tender Loins
“…in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul.”
Tony was fun and inspired me to write almost daily in the beginning but much like Seymour’s plant in Little Shop of Horrors he grew too large and needed too much blood. I wasn’t writing as much because some things I wanted to write about didn’t really have a way for me to insert Tony into them. I had also had some feedback from my sister indicating that she found my simpler prose to be better than the Tony stories and so I killed off Tony and renamed the blog Tender Loins. The background image was now a repeated photograph of a spork on the ground taken by my brother-in-law whose images I often blogged and was minorly obsessed with. (This same photograph also inspired one of the collaborations with George which have been one of the major gifts of this blog.) Both the name Tender Loins and the tagline came from the gorgeous novel Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. The novel is about a little boy/monster named Geryon whose sexual/artistic awakening mirrored what I hoped I was achieving through my writing. The name also referred to my own self-confessional intimate sexual revelations and images I was becoming keen to share on the blog. Also lots of pretty pictures of men in various stages of undress started to appear on the blog to illustrate almost anything I wrote about.
Prüfstein
“How should I presume?”
The year after I had begun the blog I moved to a new city and began a new job. In a way I began to settle in to my own self-hood and simultaneously my own blog/writing alter-ego began to settle in to me. An anagrammatical creation, German Jones, had sprung out of blogging and he began to eclipse my previous blogging needs. I rechristened the blog Prüfstein which is a German word for touchstone. I am not sure how I came up with it (a chicken or the egg dilemma) because it is such a meaningful and perfect summary of meaning for my blog/writing/vision-of-self. It resonates in the following ways: 1. My freshman year of college I took Dr. Sununu’s Ruin and Re-begetting Honor Scholar seminar and she had us select “touchstones” at the end of the class–quotes from works we read that inspired us. In the blog I had taken to finding and quoting often from works of fiction, songs, images, etc…. 2. I artistically love my Germanic heritage. My pseudonym makes that explicit. I am often stumbling upon Germanic-coincidences in literature, music, art, and life. Translating touchstone into a beautiful German word just works for me–maybe it is the umlaut… 3. Legend tells us (also known as Wikipedia) that T. S. Eliot may have used the word Prüfstein as inspiration for the name Prufrock. I had begun to relate to both that character’s poem and his anxiety in my blogging about my late-20s domestic life of drinking, worrying, watching the world pass me by. Obviously the tagline comes from that poem. My new background image was another photograph from Idiolector.
Me and Mr. Jones
“I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.” — Goethe
The three previous versions of the blog all lived on Blogger. All along I had hoped I could branch out into the interwebs and have my own domain and even design my own page. Finally, because I wasn’t really blogging and needed to entertain myself in some way, I did just that. The domain I originally wanted was “www.germanjones.com” because I now fully embraced this literary alter-ego and had placed all my eggs in his basket. However, that wasn’t available for some annoying reason (a German family with the last name Jones–who’d a thought?!) so I settled for “www.muse-ich.com” which I found perfectly passable because of both the implication that I am my own muse (write what you know) and also I enjoyed the play on words with “music” which still reigned as my main inspiration. In fact, after designing a very simple home-page for my domain, I downloaded a WordPress blog template, uploaded all of my old blog posts, and re-named (nothing like a good re-branding) the blog Me and Mr. Jones. This was taken from my favorite Amy Winehouse tune (What kind of fuckery is this?) and the title helped define for me the fine line between fictional creations and factual re-tellings that my slightly schizophrenic blog had always been about with characters posing as me and me sometimes posing as characters. The Goethe tagline still kept me connected to my adopted motherland and underscored my newly adopted profile image of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Goethe which I present as my internet identity.
The story ends happily because I have finally acquired my rightful domain name and am ready to re-establish my habit of blogging in the new year. Goal: blog every day or bust.
I am both held hostage and kept moving by my fixation with time. I, like most of you, have made the same resolutions every new year’s day for years and years. I think of the impulse as a mixture of regret and optimism not unlike the dying man’s sudden religious conversion. (Well I fucked up in life but can I have another chance for eternity?) Our human delusion of “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I’ll love ya, tomorrow!” keeps us on our toes. We simultaneously want to improve our condition and know that we probably won’t and so we are able to anxiously feel each passing second as we count down to the end. The dread and anticipation. The peace in procrastination.
Me and Mr. Jones 