Michael Farrell
California Girls
With their crotches they could crush, we’re told,
both the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera
House, in one turn of a tanning angle – they’ve
done it in Los Angeles before. They walk with
high heels on Venice Beach: they could make any
rock platform sand. At fifty still wearing bikinis
while lecturing on Whitehead, brushing students
from their hair. If you’ve seen Banksy’s documentary,
you’ll have seen all the Mexican women being
processed into bleached pubic bushes for these
giants – other immigrant workers jerking off and
bleeding into vats that broadcast banks of attraction
and resistance to the non-Californian world. If
there’s anywhere left that could really be called
that. In San Francisco a young mathematician finds
her homework unchallenging; in Orange County
an athlete pole vaults over a statue of a pierced
navel. She has D Y K E tattooed on one set of knuckles
and M A R X on the other. We own them I suppose,
in the way that ownership’s dialectic in Western
terms or symbiotic in original Australian. Just
turn on the internet, and you’ll see men flaunting
cleavage and Hollywood. They’re frog ancestors,
confusing slim for slime. I’ve been kidnapped by
these Girls; they make me pretend to be gay, force
me to brunch with them, to wear sunglasses as
big as my head, and eat icecream made from something
that doesn’t look or taste like milk. We go shopping
for apartments made out of diamantes or cute little
chinchilla farms you can wear as a wrap if a designer
breeze drifts in. Then we play swimming pool frisbee,
as often as not with gin in the swimming pools
in place of water. We get things done, the things
of our bodies. If this was then we’d be My Sharona.
We star in a commercial for something big and
shiny: they have their own planet, why should
they care? At night, in bars, treating men like celery.
The celery responds like it’s fleas. How can I and
my brothers crammed in the Girls’ backpacks escape
and return home to Japan? Pepsi in Japanese means
California Girls and they have us hooked on the
stuff. But we salt away their collagen until we have
enough to build a Shinkansen. Meanwhile we endure
many hot sessions with Kanye West. We are all
super straight and the sight and smell of his masculine
body is a heavy blow. He shoots his load like putting
out a fire. He will say one worthless thing after
another and then it suddenly coalesces into brilliance:
even his farts syncopate. Once, coming back from
yoga, we are confronted by a protest rally, of beautiful
stumpy women under seven feet tall. Some even
wear glasses, which enrages the contact lens heiress
of our troupe / army. What on earth did they have
to protest about? Who’d bother reading their grubby
matte signs to find out? David Hockney made a
few sketches – we tried to make contact. But he
was hard of hearing or easy of feigning. I think
he thought he was seeing a tsunami as the smiles
of the Girls approached their kitten shakes. They
were perhaps a screen. Mouthy women teens talk
down to them, though they have to climb on Gloria
Steinem to do it. Who will build shelters for them
when they come out of the sun? It’s the responsibility
of the community: they can’t go back to their own
planet, they’ve acquired too many shoes. The mathematician
turned physicist hits on using these Girls as the
sun – should the old one fail – or as an ultraviolet
shield. But there’s an accident at the factory and
the socialist rags hold their grudging praise for
an exposé. The sun didn’t fail exactly; but it got
interested in physics, and concentrated on the beach
less than it had, hanging around the Ultraviolet
Museum in Chicago with Brian Wilson who became
fascinated with the diagrams and recorded a concept
album around them. It rocked everyone’s huevos off
