Don’t Bite Your Nails!

In commenting on his toughness in being able to endure despite his low numbers in recents polls (and stave off Donald Trump’s repeated tweets that he drop out of contention), Jeb Bush told CNN's Jamie Gangel, “I’m a grinder. I eat nails before I have breakfast." (“Bush Keeps Hitting Rubio,” CNN, 11/3/15).There’s a famous scene in Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a masterpiece of depravity, far exceeding even the Republican presidential debates, in which the feckless victims are forced to eat apples laced with nails. It’s one of the more harrowing interludes of a film that's both brilliant and well nigh impossible to watch--comprising as it does coprophilia and numerous other eccentricities that leave little left to the imagination when it comes to the indignities that human beings are capable of perpetrating on each other. Pasolini himself was murdered shortly after Salo was shot. But getting back to Bush when you watch the interview he doesn’t look like someone who has eaten nails. Let’s go back to the video, as Warner Wolf used to say. If you look at Salo you will get a pretty good facsimile of a normal human reaction to eating nails and it isn’t something that’s going to turn a politician into a great interview subject on CNN.  Huge cries of anguish emanate from the nail grinder and then there's the inevitable damage to the gums and teeth. If Bush's claim about his nail eating ability is simply afflatus, he should watch out what he wants for he may get it. How is someone going to get on the horn with Putin, speak to the UN or negotiate Iran-Contra II when they chew their nails?

Gaspar Noe’s Love

At one point in Gaspar Noe’s Love, his male lead Murphy (Karl Glusman), a would be director studying filmmaking in Paris, announces “my biggest dream is to make a film that depicts sentimental sex.” Audiences who see Love may ask why it isn’t simply called Sex, since the sex is graphic, and so ubiquitous that the brazenness becomes almost routine. During the Q &A the followed one of the opening night screenings of the film Noe remarked “I don’t see why there aren’t more genitals in movies. They’re everywhere.” But make no mistake about it Love is not  porn. Noe whose contribution to civilized society may lie in reintroducing the now almost extinct cosmetic notion of pubic hair into a world intent on Brazilian waxing, tips his hat to Courbet, particularly with respects to the painter’s famed “The Origin of the World,” whose wanton sexuality negotiates a fine line between beauty and provocation. From the first scene of mutual masturbation between Murphy and Electra (Aomi Muyock), the film uses sex to communicate states of emotion and being. A later threesome with a next door neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin) is a set piece. It’s not the climax of a dramatic scene, it's the scene. As in Blue is the Warmest Color, the sex itself tells the story. It’s the language of the film. The problem, in the case of Love, is that  the result creates a kind of schizophrenia that was not apparent in its predecessor, which was a seamless melding of sex and talk. With Love, the sex is more intelligent than any of the words iterated by the characters. Here for instance are a few examples of Murphy’s lines: “I’m just a loser, a dick and a dick has no brains,” “living with a woman is like sleeping with the C.I.A.; nothing is secret,” “I want to make movies that are blood, sperm and tears” “it’s raining, it’s cold and maybe we’re not the great artists we once dreamt we were.” None of this does justice to the complexities of the physicality the director portrays or from his singular view of sex a mixture of pain and babies. And the dialogue has caused some critics to ask how a film that’s shot in 3-D could have such bi-dimensional characters (though commenting on Noe’s use of erotic 3-D one audience member remarked that it was the first time she’d been cummed on by a movie). All this being said, it must be pointed out that Noe carries on the tradition of the European directors he obviously admires. Electra whose appearance recalls the vampish Jeanne (Maria Schneider) of Last Tango  disappears much like Antonioni’s Anna (Lea Massari) in L’avventura. His male lead wears a Fassbinder tee shirt and there’s a Salo poster on the wall of his apartment. And the notion of the outlaw as artist or in this case the artist as outlaw recalls the world of Godard’s Breathless. Noe, who made his reputation as the infant terrible of art house cinema with Irreversible and Enter the Void, has followed in the footsteps of giants while developing a cinematic vocabulary that’s all his own. N.B: If words fail, why not just use movement? Remember  The Joy of Sex? Why not produce a  graphic dance piece called The Pain and Joy of Sex? Such a work would undoubtedly play to sell out crowds.

Survival of the Fittest?

Dwight Garner starts his Times review of the fourth volume Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle by citing Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (“Review: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s: ‘My Struggle: Book Four’”, NYT, 4/20/15). My Struggle or Min Kamp is naturally an intentional and provocative allusion to Hitler’s infamous ars poetica. Garner remarks “ There’s a special kind of despair, Thomas Pynchon observed…that can arrive ‘when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.'” Garner discountenances the kind of despair Pynchon is talking about in the case of the “quasi-autobiographical”18 year old character depicted in the novel. However, that sounds precisely what he's suffering from to the extent that he's a virgin and gifted with a mind that easily makes fictions out of everyday reality. In our day and age when varying sexual styles--transgender, transvestite, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, pre-op transexual--are openly flaunted and politicized, it’s hard to imagine one finding the equivalent for the thrilling shame of a secret and transgressive obsession. The Crying of Lot 49 was published in the sixties, which while the heart of the Woodstock era, was still the dark ages for things like SRS, sexual reassignment surgery and hormone therapy Now, even soldiers in army brigs have the right to it (“Military Approves Hormone Therapy for Chelsea Manning," USA Today, 2/13/15). Yes, the interior of the mind is a separate place that doesn’t always participate in the ideological advancements of an age, at least as far as sexuality is concerned. But still the wonderful secretive thoughts that Pynchon and Knausgaard both allude to has been almost violently transfigured by amongst other things midday talk shows, on which sexual chimaeras are now free to air their once dirty laundry. It’s all kind of sad, since shame aided and abetted by institutions like the Catholic church, can be such a delicious turn on. Now people do whatever they like and it’s sometimes hard to tell if anything, well nigh anything momentous, is happening at all. Even movies like Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart, which deals with incest, fail to make filmgoers bat an eye.The butter scene from Last Tango in Paris is looked at as normative sex and the almost clinically displayed fellatio of Marco Bellochio’s Devil in the Flesh fails to have the shock it did when it was released in l986. Thank God for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) whose graphic depiction of coprophilia is still singular in its ability to elicit a gag reflex.

The Return of the Gray Panther

The question is will Liberator’s SpeediCath Self-Lubricating Catheter bring happiness in the golden years? If you tune into CNN on a typical Sunday morning you will find a plethora of commercials geared to graying panthers. A recent commercial for a popular PDE5 inhibitor featured two couples, one black and one white. The curious thing is that neither looked a day past forty. The black man was built like a lineman and wore a shirt that read “football.” His white counterpart did have a bit of gray in his sideburns, but he had the sturdy build of the veteran actor in television commercials. The idea that the PDE5 inhibitor commercial was trying get across was that you wanted to be ready when the time came and not impeded be by circulatory problems. However, these kinds of commercials fail to show what sex is really like between older couples who have been together for years. Everyone has that little kink that turns them on and some times they even have code names for it--just like D- Day was called Operation Overlord. If there's a little bit of larceny, there is also an a little bit of perversion in all of us. A more truthful version of the PDE5 inhibitor commercial would feature crosscuts to Pasolini’s Salo in which elderly fascists attempt to be stimulated by viewing acts of coprophilia. But while drug companies will do almost anything to market their wares, they fail to show the big picture—which is that getting an erection is only half the battle. You have to be turned on to begin with.

Screaming Pope in Bid for Papacy

 Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Portrait of Pope Innocent X (l953) by Francis Bacon

The Times listed Peter Appiah Turkson of Ghana (“he suggested that condom use was worth considering for married couples in which one partner is H.I.V.-positive,” the Times remarked), Timothy Dolan (archbishop of New York, “When he was archbishop of Milwaukee, Cardinal Dolan authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to leave the priesthood,” the Times further commented), Marc Ouellet of Canada and six other as “early front-runners” for the papacy (“Successor to Benedict Will Lead a Church at a Crossroads," NYT, 2/11/13). Naturally The Screaming Pope himself has been thrown into the mix by numerous readers of the blog. The choice would be distinctly ecumenical to the extent that he would be the first Jewish fellow to be appointed to such a position. To the extent that he's a closet liberal and intellectual shock jock who supports the use of ribbed condoms to maximize sexual pleasure and, as a creature of habit, is definitely turned on by the idea of allowing women into the priesthood, the choice of The Screaming Pope would allow the church to extend its reach to a far wider audience. The Screaming Pope would, in addition, be the first Pope in modern times to have included Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in his library (along with Salo, Pasolini’s filmed adaptation of the work). Recent news reports have emphasized the difficult nature of a job which entails so many duties, but let’s face facts. While Benedict recently got points for using Twitter, The Screaming Pope regularly uses Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and hundreds of apps. He is known as a multi-tasker who can be on the phone, on-line and on the treadmill as he goes about his Sisyphean routines.