Life is Elsewhere is the title of a novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a phrase that was graffitied on Paris walls by student revolutionaries during the riots of ’68. George Carlin famously quipped, “I’m into a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clov asks Hamm, “Do you believe in the life to come.” His response: “Mine was always that.”
Oliver Sacks’s recent essay on asylums in The New York Review of Books is a reminder that not all mental institutions are snake pits, and that in the 19th century, some asylums offered the possibility of companionship and community for those who had inadvertently opted out of so-called normalcy. In The Divided Self, another ‘60s artifact, R.D. Laing argues for schizophrenia as a viable form of existence characterized by forms of expression that have value in and of themselves, and that are not only significant as manifestations of mental illness.
When the stock market moves from inflated values to values more commensurate to the equities they reflect, financial analysts call it an adjustment . Whether for reasons financial, political, or geological, the earth seems to be in the throes of something more drastic than an adjustment. It is wobbling on its axis, both metaphorically and literally. Tectonic and climatic shifts have caused massive upheavals, taking the forms of tsunamis in Southeast Asia, flooding in the Southwest United States, drought in Africa, and the melting of polar ice caps. It was recently reported that in the next 10-15 years, shipping companies may no longer have to use the Panana Canal, as they can make their way through the North Pole, thus shaving thousands of miles off their trips. But this savings has been achieved at a cost, and not only in environmental terms. Technological advancement has been met with the equal and opposing rise of fundamentalism, with triumphs of reason overshadowed by desperate millenarian passions.
Every age has its upheavals, its plagues, its inquisitions. In the twelfth century, the Arab world, now so fraught with the ravages of war and religious strife, was the seat of advanced science, with polymathss like Averroes making historic contributions. Today, globalism has compounded the effects of local upheaval. Modern transportation exports viruses and violence with equal efficiency. A once economically viable society like Iceland finds its whole financial system in danger of collapse due to the alacrity with which it leveraged its investments abroad.
Can we still refer to Imperial America when talking about a country whose deficit exceeds the trillion-dollar mark? And when and how do changes in the bulwarks of a society filter down to the foot soldiers of the everyday life? Astronomers believe that a meteor hitting the earth may have caused the ice age, eradicating a huge reptilian population. Which economic or meteorological scourge will hasten the onset of the newest stage of evolution, and where will it lead? Will life still be here—or elsewhere?
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Diasporic Dining: Episode II
The one-time peep show gardens, with their topiaries of prostitutes and porn palaces, like Les Gals and the famed Triple Treat Theater, with its mesmerizing XXX sign, are all gone now. In the halcyon days, there was the GG's Barnum Room, where pre-op transsexual prostitutes swung from trapezes. There was Legz Diamond, which still exists in neutered form, where totally naked lap dances led straight to the VIP room.
Peep show booths with their smell of disinfectant; the change belt of the shills; tokens going in the slot; girls there for the asking twenty-four hours a day; women with lactating breasts. The antecedents reach further back, to Depression-era America with its travelling carnival—bearded women in cages, phrenological singularities, prodigious dwarfs whose feat was to hoist their own monstrous heads.
Evenings ended at the Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, with its Fellini cast of zoot suits and collagen lips.
The deterioration of Times Square is complete. The hookers and hustlers are gone. There are no gay movie theaters populated by characters from Midnight Cowboy, no world out of which Martin Scorsese could steal the immortal lines of Travis Bickle.
42nd Street has been overrun with chain stores, the New Jersey mall at the intersection of Routes 4 and 17 transplanted into the middle of Manhattan, clothed, depersonalized, stripped of its stripping. This is one transplant that the body politic has not rejected.
The girls no longer stream into the Port Authority, Joyce Carol Oates characters from upstate ending the journey at Phoenix House. Now the streets are so crowded with glazed-eyed gawkers it’s impossible to move. Junk is what they called heroin back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but now there aren’t enough rehabs to accommodate all the junk food addicts wandering the streets on their trans fat highs.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Devil is in the Details
Dante spends a good part of the Divine Comedy cataloguing the acts of sinners. He considered some sins worse than others—a sentiment that isn’t always reflected in the inconsistency with which society metes out its retributions. For instance, there are still states where sodomy is a crime, while there are other communities, like Key West, Florida, where refusing to be sodomized, in either the gay or straight communities, results in a totally different kind of punishment—banishment. The Hester Prynnes of Key West wear their scarlet letters for failing to perform fellatio.
Bigamy is openly flouted in Utah, even though it is a federal crime. In some states, failing to pay income taxes is considered evasion, while in New York City, sheltering income is regarded as a sign of sophistication. The oppression of women is plainly looked on as a sin in most areas of the Western world, while in the Middle East women who rebel against prescribed roles can be stoned or flogged. In recent cases, women have been sentenced to lashings for drinking beer or wearing pants, and in some countries women are routinely punished for being raped.
Eliot Spitzer resigned to avoid impeachment for hiring the services of the Emperor’s VIP Escort Service. Bill Clinton was impeached for his sexcapades, even though he didn’t go all the way, while the dalliances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King round out their revered mythologies. Other greats in the pantheon of adulterous lust include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Victor Hugo, George Simenon, Picasso, and Matisse, to name just a few. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gets a slap on the wrist for attending nude soirees with women who are not much older than his 18 year-old daughter, whose birthday he doesn’t have time to attend. Applying a more philosophical approach, Gandhi tested his ability to eschew worldly desire by sleeping next to naked virgins.
There are those who literally get away with murder, like the drug dealer Nicky Barnes. And then there are those who get life terms for possessing relatively small quantities of drugs, under New York’s archaic Rockefeller laws. In California, three convictions can get you a life term, regardless of the crime. And the old adage about having sex with a minor, “fifteen’ll get you life,” is probably exaggerated—in most states, fifteen is more likely to get you fifteen.
The current period of scarcity that has followed in the wake of reckless abundance has left a legacy of fraud in its wake. An entire cabal of elected officials in the city of Hoboken was recently rounded up in a major kickback scandal. Americans ponied up billions in tax dollars so failing banks could pay outsized bonuses to executives.
Jonathan Pollard got life without parole for giving secrets to an ally, while a second trial acquitted Claus von Bülow of the murder of his wife Sunny, who died last December after 28 years in a coma. Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, became the head of the UN, while Comrade Duch, the notorious head of Tuol Sleng prison, claimed he was just doing his job. The suicide bomber takes comfort in his saintly status, while the CIA operative waterboards detainees to save American lives. Victims confoundingly identify with their torturers in what is known as the Stockholm syndrome. When it comes to justice, only one thing is certain: the guilty, as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, are their own worst judges.
Bigamy is openly flouted in Utah, even though it is a federal crime. In some states, failing to pay income taxes is considered evasion, while in New York City, sheltering income is regarded as a sign of sophistication. The oppression of women is plainly looked on as a sin in most areas of the Western world, while in the Middle East women who rebel against prescribed roles can be stoned or flogged. In recent cases, women have been sentenced to lashings for drinking beer or wearing pants, and in some countries women are routinely punished for being raped.
Eliot Spitzer resigned to avoid impeachment for hiring the services of the Emperor’s VIP Escort Service. Bill Clinton was impeached for his sexcapades, even though he didn’t go all the way, while the dalliances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King round out their revered mythologies. Other greats in the pantheon of adulterous lust include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Victor Hugo, George Simenon, Picasso, and Matisse, to name just a few. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gets a slap on the wrist for attending nude soirees with women who are not much older than his 18 year-old daughter, whose birthday he doesn’t have time to attend. Applying a more philosophical approach, Gandhi tested his ability to eschew worldly desire by sleeping next to naked virgins.
There are those who literally get away with murder, like the drug dealer Nicky Barnes. And then there are those who get life terms for possessing relatively small quantities of drugs, under New York’s archaic Rockefeller laws. In California, three convictions can get you a life term, regardless of the crime. And the old adage about having sex with a minor, “fifteen’ll get you life,” is probably exaggerated—in most states, fifteen is more likely to get you fifteen.
The current period of scarcity that has followed in the wake of reckless abundance has left a legacy of fraud in its wake. An entire cabal of elected officials in the city of Hoboken was recently rounded up in a major kickback scandal. Americans ponied up billions in tax dollars so failing banks could pay outsized bonuses to executives.
Jonathan Pollard got life without parole for giving secrets to an ally, while a second trial acquitted Claus von Bülow of the murder of his wife Sunny, who died last December after 28 years in a coma. Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, became the head of the UN, while Comrade Duch, the notorious head of Tuol Sleng prison, claimed he was just doing his job. The suicide bomber takes comfort in his saintly status, while the CIA operative waterboards detainees to save American lives. Victims confoundingly identify with their torturers in what is known as the Stockholm syndrome. When it comes to justice, only one thing is certain: the guilty, as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, are their own worst judges.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Opium Wars
It’s not surprising to discover that Iran has been building a weapons-grade nuclear reactor near the holy city of Qum. War and religion have gone hand in hand since ancient times, the conjunction of the two seemingly opposing phenomena reaching its apotheosis with the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the most fought-over piece of real estate in the world is Palestine, the cradle of the three Adamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
The expression “no good deed goes unpunished” comes to mind in response to this contrariety of human nature. What is religion but an organized aspiration for the greater good? But curiously, the desire to disseminate good works and helpful information has historically ended in violence.
Family life is a microcosm of religious wars, and what greater description of domestic conflict than the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and their rivalrous broods? Parents pass on experience to their children, who find the phenomenology tainted by an outlook they consider foreign to their own. Baby boomers who became the flower children of the ‘60s were perennially at odds with their Depression-era parents, who unwittingly educated their children into an opposing worldview. Few graduates of elite colleges would cotton to Polonius’s famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
The other thing that religion and war have in common is the notion of an army. An army of believers is hardly distinguishable from a military army, and members of both subsume the self to a higher authority. As Shinto kamikazes and Islamic suicide bombers illustrate, belief is a powerful weapon that can produce destructive, not to mention self-destructive, results. Very few modern religions have been founded on principles of skepticism, and few would subscribe to Wittgenstein’s famous last proposition from his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence,” which limits the possibility of grandiose proclamations.
Many of the most violent battles of the past decades have been in places where there is religious conflict, whether Serbia and Croatia, Afghanistan, Israel, or Sudan. (Curiously, the First and Second World Wars were secular conflicts motivated by desires for political and economic hegemony). Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The French philosopher Raymond Aron went on to say, “Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.” In the l9th century, the British fought the Opium Wars with China. But aren’t all wars opium wars? Religion just happens to be the most powerful opiate that fuels the delirium.
The expression “no good deed goes unpunished” comes to mind in response to this contrariety of human nature. What is religion but an organized aspiration for the greater good? But curiously, the desire to disseminate good works and helpful information has historically ended in violence.
Family life is a microcosm of religious wars, and what greater description of domestic conflict than the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and their rivalrous broods? Parents pass on experience to their children, who find the phenomenology tainted by an outlook they consider foreign to their own. Baby boomers who became the flower children of the ‘60s were perennially at odds with their Depression-era parents, who unwittingly educated their children into an opposing worldview. Few graduates of elite colleges would cotton to Polonius’s famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
The other thing that religion and war have in common is the notion of an army. An army of believers is hardly distinguishable from a military army, and members of both subsume the self to a higher authority. As Shinto kamikazes and Islamic suicide bombers illustrate, belief is a powerful weapon that can produce destructive, not to mention self-destructive, results. Very few modern religions have been founded on principles of skepticism, and few would subscribe to Wittgenstein’s famous last proposition from his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence,” which limits the possibility of grandiose proclamations.
Many of the most violent battles of the past decades have been in places where there is religious conflict, whether Serbia and Croatia, Afghanistan, Israel, or Sudan. (Curiously, the First and Second World Wars were secular conflicts motivated by desires for political and economic hegemony). Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The French philosopher Raymond Aron went on to say, “Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.” In the l9th century, the British fought the Opium Wars with China. But aren’t all wars opium wars? Religion just happens to be the most powerful opiate that fuels the delirium.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Blackmail for Dummies
Forget Letterman. What about all those people who are dying to be blackmailed, even though they’re not hiding any sexual peccadilloes, and in fact have no sex life at all? Imagine blackmailing some lonely widower whose sole enjoyment in life is watching “The Wire” while eating a Salisbury steak TV dinner. Wouldn't a good blackmailing add a little zing to his life?
From a moral standpoint, it’s easy to become a talk show host and have sex with staff members, while making wisecracks about the sins of rollers high and holy. It’s about as easy as playing Eliot Ness while employing the services of a VIP escort service. Client 9, aka Eliot Spitzer, met Ashley Alexandra Dupre, his rock n’ roll hooker, in room 871 of The Mayflower, the legendary Washington Hotel where Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers were handed over to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Talk about a lack of sophistication.
To get blackmailed, it’s necessary to be on a search, and not the kind of search that motivates Bix Bolling in Walker Percy’s classic novel The Moviegoer. Bix, like Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger and Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishement, seeks something that goes beyond the gratification of the senses. People who commit philosophical crimes, even if they’re accompanied by murder and mayhem, should be exempt from blackmail.
It’s easy to get blackmailed if that is what you’re after. Go to a serious prep school and then some Ivy League colleges and law schools, become a governor in the Northeast, or make it as a network talk show host, or become a Republican senator from a Western state. Perhaps even mouth off about how William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale didn’t go far enough. Getting blackmailed is easy. Just do all of the above and then “shit where you eat.”
From a moral standpoint, it’s easy to become a talk show host and have sex with staff members, while making wisecracks about the sins of rollers high and holy. It’s about as easy as playing Eliot Ness while employing the services of a VIP escort service. Client 9, aka Eliot Spitzer, met Ashley Alexandra Dupre, his rock n’ roll hooker, in room 871 of The Mayflower, the legendary Washington Hotel where Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers were handed over to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Talk about a lack of sophistication.
To get blackmailed, it’s necessary to be on a search, and not the kind of search that motivates Bix Bolling in Walker Percy’s classic novel The Moviegoer. Bix, like Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger and Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishement, seeks something that goes beyond the gratification of the senses. People who commit philosophical crimes, even if they’re accompanied by murder and mayhem, should be exempt from blackmail.
It’s easy to get blackmailed if that is what you’re after. Go to a serious prep school and then some Ivy League colleges and law schools, become a governor in the Northeast, or make it as a network talk show host, or become a Republican senator from a Western state. Perhaps even mouth off about how William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale didn’t go far enough. Getting blackmailed is easy. Just do all of the above and then “shit where you eat.”
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Sex Tips for Seniors
The metaphysical poets regarded every sexual consummation as a tiny death. Of course, studies have shown that, among the elderly, the imminence of death is inversely proportional to the frequency of sexual activity—something Marvell and Donne would undoubtedly have been thrilled to hear. But speaking of endgame scenarios, Nagg and Nell, the aging couple encased in garbage cans in Samuel Beckett’s classic drama, offer a heartening depiction of the wealth of sexual possibilities available to couples in their golden years.
The fact is that geriatric sex opens up a world of opportunity, with dementia unlocking the doors of inhibition. Retirement colonies are notorious for STDs, and rape is not uncommon. The French author Héléna Marienské sets her racy novel Rhésus in an old-folks home whose residents are invigorated by the introduction of a free spirited Bonobo.
Cialis ads on television advertise sexual readiness that lasts for 36 hours, so that old-timers can be ready when the time is right. Is there a Princess “cruise to nowhere” that offer Cialis and Lipitor cocktails with little umbrellas right before Bingo?
Carpe diem should be the byword for all aging couples when it comes to sex. What happens when an 85 year-old woman tells her husband she’d rather wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes?
The painter Lucien Freud was the poet of imperfection, and his portraits of unwieldy naked figures (like overweight performance artist Leigh Bowery) are liberating to aging couples who feel inhibited about the exhibitionist romps that are the joy of foreplay. On the other hand, Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” with its luscious study of wide-open feminine glory, is hardly the appropriate prescription for an aging woman who is self conscious about her vaginoplasty.
Every Sunday, The New York Times Book Review offers an ad featuring a photo of a very well preserved couple demonstrating their lovemaking techniques for any audience willing to buy the DVD. There are two programs offered, one for beginners, and one for aficionados who are seeking post-graduate degrees. The appearance of these ads, week after week, leads to one conclusion. The New York Times Book Review appeals to an older audience.
The fact is that geriatric sex opens up a world of opportunity, with dementia unlocking the doors of inhibition. Retirement colonies are notorious for STDs, and rape is not uncommon. The French author Héléna Marienské sets her racy novel Rhésus in an old-folks home whose residents are invigorated by the introduction of a free spirited Bonobo.
Cialis ads on television advertise sexual readiness that lasts for 36 hours, so that old-timers can be ready when the time is right. Is there a Princess “cruise to nowhere” that offer Cialis and Lipitor cocktails with little umbrellas right before Bingo?
Carpe diem should be the byword for all aging couples when it comes to sex. What happens when an 85 year-old woman tells her husband she’d rather wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes?
The painter Lucien Freud was the poet of imperfection, and his portraits of unwieldy naked figures (like overweight performance artist Leigh Bowery) are liberating to aging couples who feel inhibited about the exhibitionist romps that are the joy of foreplay. On the other hand, Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” with its luscious study of wide-open feminine glory, is hardly the appropriate prescription for an aging woman who is self conscious about her vaginoplasty.
Every Sunday, The New York Times Book Review offers an ad featuring a photo of a very well preserved couple demonstrating their lovemaking techniques for any audience willing to buy the DVD. There are two programs offered, one for beginners, and one for aficionados who are seeking post-graduate degrees. The appearance of these ads, week after week, leads to one conclusion. The New York Times Book Review appeals to an older audience.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Out, Out Bright Spot
It was Sharon Tate who first predicted that her husband would end up making an adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Nastassja Kinski starred in the 1979 film, and now, like one of the characters in Hardy’s novel, the director sits in a Swiss prison cell, society exacting its vengeance 31 years after Polanski fled sentencing for statutory rape.
In a recent Times Op Ed piece, screenwriter and novelist Robert Harris faults Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The screening of the well-received documentary at Sundance, Harris argues, excited Polanski’s desire to prove his innocence, thereby daring the Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley to prove that no amount of talent, celebrity, or notoriety puts a man above the law. If Polanski had continued to walk softy through his cherished international stomping grounds, if he had not had the hubris to believe that he could test laws he had spent years flaunting, then he might have returned from the Zurich Film Festival to the comfort of his Paris home without incident. Instead, he sits in a Swiss jail, guilty in fact, but begging for exoneration due to extraordinary circumstances.
Unfortunately, the legal system cannot do justice to the complexity of human existence the way a great novel can. Tess is guilty of murder, but innocent by circumstance, just as Polanski is guilty of rape, and now entrapped by a fateful miscalculation, which led him to seek a pardon that the law would not grant. Once his appeal failed, he protested his innocence by behaving like a man who has nothing to fear. This might seem understandable for a Holocaust survivor whose wife was brutally murdered and who then succumbed to a temptation of the flesh. But it’s hard to let go of the image of an impish, irreverent genius who ruined a young girl's life. Is he callous, indifferent, unrepentant, or merely reacting to the consequences of an original trial which many deemed to be unfair (particularly as regards the behavior of the trail judge)? The fact that the girl now protests that she has long since forgiven Polanski is almost irrelevant to the moral and judicial issues the case poses.
From the point of view of law, it’s an open and shut case; in fiction, it’s an essay on the fallibility of the moral universe; and in life it fills the observer with what Aristotle defined as the two ingredients for tragedy—fear and pity. Classical theories of tragedy also introduced the notion of the fall of a great man. Well Polanski might not be great, but his early film Knife in the Water is a masterpiece. Rent it.
In a recent Times Op Ed piece, screenwriter and novelist Robert Harris faults Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The screening of the well-received documentary at Sundance, Harris argues, excited Polanski’s desire to prove his innocence, thereby daring the Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley to prove that no amount of talent, celebrity, or notoriety puts a man above the law. If Polanski had continued to walk softy through his cherished international stomping grounds, if he had not had the hubris to believe that he could test laws he had spent years flaunting, then he might have returned from the Zurich Film Festival to the comfort of his Paris home without incident. Instead, he sits in a Swiss jail, guilty in fact, but begging for exoneration due to extraordinary circumstances.
Unfortunately, the legal system cannot do justice to the complexity of human existence the way a great novel can. Tess is guilty of murder, but innocent by circumstance, just as Polanski is guilty of rape, and now entrapped by a fateful miscalculation, which led him to seek a pardon that the law would not grant. Once his appeal failed, he protested his innocence by behaving like a man who has nothing to fear. This might seem understandable for a Holocaust survivor whose wife was brutally murdered and who then succumbed to a temptation of the flesh. But it’s hard to let go of the image of an impish, irreverent genius who ruined a young girl's life. Is he callous, indifferent, unrepentant, or merely reacting to the consequences of an original trial which many deemed to be unfair (particularly as regards the behavior of the trail judge)? The fact that the girl now protests that she has long since forgiven Polanski is almost irrelevant to the moral and judicial issues the case poses.
From the point of view of law, it’s an open and shut case; in fiction, it’s an essay on the fallibility of the moral universe; and in life it fills the observer with what Aristotle defined as the two ingredients for tragedy—fear and pity. Classical theories of tragedy also introduced the notion of the fall of a great man. Well Polanski might not be great, but his early film Knife in the Water is a masterpiece. Rent it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
