Liz Patrick | Sushi Glory Hole / 2024

holy fish!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Mark Potsic, and DJ Nu Mark Music (screenwriters), Liz Patrick (director) Sushi Glory Hole / 2024 [TV (SNL) episode]

I should imagine for those seeking out evidence for the true fall of the Western civilization—and I recognize there are always those out there seeking such irrefutable evidence, for God knows what logical reason—they might surely find it in the 970th episode (Season 50, Episode 2) version of the now tireless and, I have to admit often tiring Saturday Night Live. Indeed, even the citation now almost sounds like a Biblical reference.

    I’m sorry to stay that this formerly remarkable TV series has gone long, long beyond its sustaining life system, only occasionally hitting upon some US, mostly political, nerve that might still be throbbing in its now quite ancient viewers—including me, although I admit I usually don’t any longer stay up so late to enable my watching it.

     Please, I might demand of any Network television station, cut this comedic series’ vocal cord, and let it fall into oblivion, providing it with a possible Phoenix bird-like version of something akin to what it once represented to the ten generations since it’s marvelous initial appearance. The actors are no longer wild and crazy, the jokes are stale, and, well, it so often is simply for a 77-year-old who grew from a 20-some year with this often startlingly disruptive TV program, no any longer very funny.

    I admit, I love the concept which Samberg and Schaffer are trying to sell to the panel of presumptively resistant investors for a new way to enjoy Sushi, reinvesting the sexual connotations of both gay and straight bathrooms’ “glory holes”—where we once engaged in sexual interchanges of cock with ass, or mouth—now evidently obsolete to be replaced by lovely pieces of rice topped with delicious raw delicacies of fish.  

   The future investors (Samberg and Schaffer) suggest a new link with your cellphone connections that might show you the location of the local bathrooms that serve up such treats. And we see the customers, male and female, enjoying those “enticing” treasures. “Sushi | being fed | through a hole | in the wall,” as the rap singer carefully enunciates the sentence.

     Perhaps—at least I hope so—rap singer DJ NU Mark and the writers meant this to satirize the way our culture has replaced even sex with the sensual delights of the gastronomical world. Has sex been replaced by our tastebuds for something far more edible than sperm?

     As much as I truly love sushi, has it become a replacement for sex by my generation or even younger individuals? Who, I have to ask, are the current Saturday Night Live episodes really speaking to. Might I have giggled about such a sketch in 1975, just five years after Howard I began our gay sexual relationship? I do think by that time we had become connoisseurs of Sushi, but, I have to admit I might have still sought out some other sustenance placed in the glory hole as a tribute to my sexual desires.

     I too might declare this as a “fall of Western civilization,” but obviously for very different reasons from my conservative resistant colleagues, shocked by the cultural shifts which deeply disturb them. Even as much as I love my sushi, I’m far more disturbed that it has replaced what once had been my favorite glory hole, or how the multi-gender bar now inhabits my once gay hideout, or how the local gay porn store has been replaced by a multi-sexual workout gym. I remain an old-school guy despite my longstanding seemingly heteronormative relationship.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).