Can You Be Disinevited?

Someone has to outlaw evites and all the other newfound internet spawned invitations to social gatherings. Weddings, bar mitzvah’s, christenings are all gris for the mill. Are e-condolence cards with animated tears on deck? These electronic salutations are spinoffs of a culture which uses expressions like “sounds like a plan,” and “being on the same page.” evites are for people who “can’t complain” when they're asked how they are. What could be wrong with the evite? They’re practical and paperless and allow instantaneous replies and even comments. What’s wrong is the ubiquity. The mediocrity of the evite with its little dog holding an invitation in its mouth foreshadows an event that is the plan someone sounded out when the whole subject of congregating first came up. All the eviters will be together in a room now where they are all on the same page (which means experiencing self-righteous anger at the latest atrocity) consoling themselves by refusing to complain about their lots in life. The real problem is that all of existence is becoming homogenized by the facility with which new technologies and bywords take the pauses and awkwardness out of communication. It used to be that if you were holding a social function you would have to design an invite. Many of these took the form of cards in which read, Where: The Smiths, 129 Grover Street, When: Friday February 13 at 7:30. At the bottom the inviter might scribble something like “hope you can come.” For all the perfunctoriness, there was at least some human intervention. You weren’t simply hitting an invite app. You had to think. You had to do something and there was the opportunity for you to say something to one person that you hadn’t to the other, however internecine or predatory the motives. So you get to the party and the hors d’oeuvres are exactly the same ones you had the night before courtesy of the prepared foods section of Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s or Citarella.  But it’s not only the food that's the same. It’s the conversation--a mixture of moral superiority and self improvement (usually through Yoga) marked by the arrival with its obligatory praise of the premises and finally the good-byes, punctuated with fervent promises of future monotony, sooner than later.

Requiem for a Light Heavyweight and a Remission for Boxing

Despite the fact that the promoter Al Haymon is bringing boxing back to primetime TV (“Is Boxing Dead, Some are Betting Heavily That It Isn’t," NYT, 3/5/15), boxing has become a moribund sport. Sure there's anticipation about the upcomng Mayweather/Pacquiao fight. But there are a distinct lack of mythic and semi-mythic figures like Ali, Foreman, Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano and one tires of hearing about Mayweather’s girls and cars. The days of famous conflagrations like Gotti and Ward and Hagler and Hearns are for the most part gone. Those who need to gratify the urge for gladiatorial brutality, watch the MMA fights. But every once and a while you see a great fight. There were two recently. The middleweight fight between Gennady Golovkin and Martin Murray was the kind of test of the human spirit that sometimes ends in tragedy. Golovkin was the stronger fighter, but Murray refused to give up and it’s hard for a ref to stop a fight, no matter how much punishment a fighter is taking, when the fighter is returning punches. In the case of Murray, he was not only returning, but returning with impressive combinations. In other words, the Murray/Golovkin match was good old fashioned brawl. A similar situation happened again on HBO Saturday night. The fight, which took place in Montreal, had the iconic ring announcer saying “mesdames et messieurs” rather than his usual “ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble!" Jean Pascal, a Haitain Roy Jones protégé, who looks and acts like his mentor was up against a Russian named Sergey Kovalev, with a reputation for being mean in and out of the ring. Kovalev scored a knock down in the third round, but Jean Pascal wouldn’t give up. The fight for the Light Heavyweight title was finally stopped in the 8^th round, but not before a rather remarkable exchange in which Kovalev slipped just after he connected with Pascal. If it hadn’t been a testament to the human spirit, the choreography would have looked like something out of a Popeye cartoon. How many times do you get to see a fighter going down after himself connects with a pair of lethal punches.

Mons Pubescent

“The apparel oft proclaims the man, “ advises Polonius to Laertes. And Thomas Carlyle would write a novel entitled Sartor Resartus, literally “tailor re-tailored.” But what about woman?  If we take the cover of the recent swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, where the model Hannah Davis, flaunts her mons pubis can we conclude that neither clothes nor hair make the woman? The shot leaves little to the imagination, but there is little to imagine. What if Joanna Hiffernan the model for Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” who also happened to be an inspiration to Whistler, had struck a similar pose. Hiffernan’s pulling her bikini bottom down would have been a far more far more sensational news event. The current epidemic of Brazilian waxing, of which Ms. Davis is apparently the latest public victim (Kim Kardashian’s  recent spread in Paper is another prominent example of a similar phenomenon) has reduced the female genitalia to a state of pre-pubescent nothingness. Pedophiles must be entralled. The Sports Illustrated issue has raised some eyebrows, but when you scour the newsstand to see what all the hullabaloo is about you almost need to be told that something provocative is going on. A risqué pose with a model in a state of undress is nothing new, but what’s disconcerting is to find a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a little girl in the guise of a woman. Unless of course you have a predilection for these kinds of things, you could pass the newsstands where the Sports Illustrated cover is brazenly displayed, thinking that the female genitalia had actually been whited out. It’s reminiscent of another parable, the Emperor’s New Clothes, but also of the experience of dining in one of those trendy new restaurants where you pay a lot for very little and a chorus of praise accompanies minuscule portions which are nearly impossible to see.

Schumpeter, Pol Pot and The Grand Inquisitor

Tomas de Torquemada

Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” was the embodiment of the anti-Christ. Tomas de Torquemada was the model and he himself would have ultimately been sentenced to the tortures that Dante envisioned in his infamous ninth circle of hell, where Satan is trapped in ice. But everyone has a Grand Inquisitor lurking inside them, in the form of a  negative doppleganger or alter ego, the self-immolating spirit that casts doubt on every assertion of the life force. You may recognize it in the cynicism about motives. You like someone for being kind and responsive, but immediately begin to look at the compassion they’ve demonstrated as a kind of barter. You think about extending your hand to another suffering soul, but then shrink from it fearing that you’re only trying to inflate your own ego or exonerate yourself from guilt. Every step forward in time becomes a potential mistake and every act that’s transpired is filled with regret. The negative might be looked at as a necessary part of the dialectic of existence. Joseph Schumpeter termed one of the dynamics of capitalism, “creative destruction." Looked at on a micro or macro, on an ontogenic, or phylogenic level destruction has its place. It doesn’t have to be the kind of genocide that Pol Pot inflicted on the Cambodian people, but the negative can sometimes be the only way to countermand entrenched, anachronistic and maladaptive world views. The question is, how does one distinguish between spring cleaning and murder?

Sigma Alpha Epsilon v. United States

photo: Harris and Ewing

What are the limits of free speech? In the famous Schenck opinion Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But Holmes would later do a turnaround in Abrams v. United States. Both cases relate to the Espionage Act of l917, but in this instance Holmes along with Louis Brandeis dissented from the court arguing that the exercise of free expression did not pose an equally dire threat. Both cases are significant in and of themselves, Schenck involving conscription and Abrams, concerning armaments. However, the spirit of these decisions is alive and kicking today. For instance, the University of Oklahoma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was recently closed down when a racist chanting incident became an online video, “Fraternity is Closed Over Video With Slurs,” NYT, 3/9/15) In the famous case of the National Socialist Party organizing a march through the predominantly Jewish village of Skokie Illinois, the courts ruled in favor of expression. Can an academic institution be equated with a village? Could it be argued that however horrific, students with Nazi sympathies have the right to dress up in Gestapo garb and spout anti-Semitic diatribes? The first amendment is really the first cause of American life. It’s America’s raison d’etre. It was the liberal ACLU who defended the Nazis in Skokie. How free speech issues make strange bed fellows! Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, find themselves aligned with otherwise leftist feminists over the depiction of women in pornographic films. Would it actually be better to allow the fraternity brothers who had chanted the racists epithets to face opprobrium rather than allowing them to become victims who find safe havens in a racist subculture that supports their inanities? Who are we protecting with ostracism? The students or the administrators who themselves don’t want to be found guilty of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of l964? As a social experiment, why not let the fraternity stand and why not encourage open dialogue with its members? Why not take the recovery movement model and look at the chanters as sick? Why not help them so that they can go on to help others rather than creating a crew of societal rejects who will become the Timothy McVeighs and Terry Nichols of tomorrow?

Forbidden Fruit

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Back in the 70’s there was a strip club located in the garment district, on 35^th off Eighth called Forbidden Fruit. That was back in the days when New York was a far more dangerous and wide open city. New York was on the skids and anything went (or goes), It was years before there was money for the kind of development that was the modus operandi behind Rudy Guiliani’s clean up of Times Square. But even by the standards of the time, Forbidden Fruit lived up to its name, with totally naked often inebriated sylphs populating what was essentially an adolescent wet dream. But the name is the point. There were other strip clubs but they had more prosaic names like Diamond Lil’s and Legz Diamond (which still exists). But who ever named Forbidden Fruit was inspired by the biblical story of temptation which led to the Adamic “Fall.” In l990, MoMA would present High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, an exhibit curated by the then New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik in collaboration with Kurt Varnedoe, the director of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture.  But it’s nice when the conjunction of two impulses takes places in a truly underworld, or underground setting. Forbidden Fruit was a far cry from today's Gentlemen’s lap dancing clubs (like say Scores) where sex is highly regulated, expensive and accompanied by fine food and wine. Forbidden Fruit—its name conveying a biblical jeremiad—could have been the second circle of Dante’s Inferno where sinners as varied as Paris, Semiramis and Helen were punished for their desires. It also resembled the lust scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, minus of course the murderous rape device. Forbidden Fruit was painted in chiaroscuro and the action that transpired on the premises called to mind Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”