A Den of Angels

Downtown Orlando is but a small, rubbery carrot in the American melting pot, a flip-flop of tourism in Florida. My girlfriend has taken me to a “BJD” get-together. The attendees are predominately female hobbyists from a message-board called “Den of Angels,” and the “BJDs” are ball-jointed dolls, a breed of effeminate Asian manikins valued between $500 and $3000.

Ball-Jointed Doll Collection (by Yves Tennevin)

Ran Getsu, like the Staybridge Suites Hotel next to it and the Kobe on the other side, represents just one flavor in the stew, but the thing is that the flavors don’t mix. The restaurant is immured by a moat of koi and surrounded by a bright-red oriental fence. Parking lots demarcate the property lines. Inside the establishment are a variety of white American females who’ve decided to stage their BJD exchanges in makeshift Japan. But this “Den of Angels” is authentic. The Asian brand (Volks, Angelregion, Dollzone, and Cerberus Project) has life not in the slender little bodies of these resin “avatars” but in the excited gesticulation of the young women, who are dressed either in gothic-maid outfits, leopard print, or Hot Topic fashion. Culture is the stuff of the meal, bound by property. The stew is green.

Ran Getsu Napkin (by Jason Garber)

I try not to make a value-judgment. I merely observe that a Japanese buffet is an oxymoron in the same way that Splendid China is a paradox. Yet both faux pas are miraculously resolved at the boiling-point in Orlando. This is because, as these collectors line up for a taste of the “culture,” the Japanese waiters politely curb the American appetite by individually dishing out the food to their patrons as they line up for the buffet. Simultaneously, two girls dressed in anime costumes discuss how rude their friends were the last time they went out. How little their friends “understood the culture.”

Campbell McGrath concluded, in Pax Atomica, that “America’s epic is the odyssey of appetite.” I, on the other hand, would disagree with him and call this “Woe,” as he did in his poem:

Consider the human capacity for suffering,
our insatiable appetite for woe.
I do not say this lightly
but the sandwiches at Subway
suck. Foaming lettuce
mayo like rancid bear grease,
meat the color of a dead dog’s tongue.
Yet they are consumed
by the millions
and by the tens of millions.
So much for the food. The rest
I must pass over in silence.