Meltdown at Home

Three Mile Harbor Reactor (United States Department of Energy)

Two self haters seeking validation of each other is a little like the critical mass that occurs in an atomic reaction, using say Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. Put Hedda Gabler together with Hamlet and you would have the potential for mass destruction. Someone should actually create a play about a  therapeutic community inhabited by a host of self-hating and self destructive characters, adding of course Iago, Lady Macbeth, Medea, Mary Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey, Solyony from the Three Sisters and say Bazarov from Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. That’s essentially the palette the director Neil LaBute is using in brilliantly misanthropic films like In The Company of Men. If you look at the history of the humankind the self-destruct impulse has often won out over the forces of creation. When Tito died and Yugoslavia caved into its irredentist impulses former neighbors, Bosnians and Serbs, who had lived peacefully for generations, became enemies and the massacres of Srebrenica and Sarajevo were the result. On a microcosmic or ontogenetic level we see the same pattern occurring in proliferation of relationships where freedom often includes the choice to fail. You see it must frequently in aging couples who blame the failure of their aspirations on each other. The aspiration for greatness, for success in either art or life is often the culprit, but once the chain reaction starts, it’s a little like the meltdowns at Three Mile Harbor and Chernobyl. When the “reactor” becomes overheated,  it’s almost impossible to stop.

Who is God?

“The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Rembrandt

When you’re waiting for something spiritual to happen is precisely when it’s not going to happen. Deus ex machinas are fine for plays like Sophocles’ Philoctetes or The Threepenny Opera where Macheath is miraculously spared the gallows by a reprieve from the divinely ordained Queen. That’s why so many people are disappointed in God. Foxhole praying rarely works. Instead of using unanswered prayers as a proof of the nonexistence of God, you might try praying in a different way. Praying for things is the telephone operator view of divinity. Remember those old l930’s movies, which preceded the rotary phone, when a character would pick up the receiver and speak directly to an operator. Some of them even featured shots of phone lines or banks of wires, or consoles to show where the call was going to or coming from. That’s tantamount to the anthropomorphic notion of a God or higher being that listens and reacts. But what if God doesn’t have time to field all these requests? What if it has better things to do like attend to dark matter and energy, quasars, pulsars and supernovae or to such eternal questions as how something can coming out of nothing? What if God simply doesn’t work in human ways? What if it’s an emotionlessly immaterial force a kind of sinuous version of Kant’s categorical imperative which implacably seeks to align living matter with a force of multiversal duty? What if God is value neutral and doesn’t weigh in on the side of what we would call good or evil but is rather a juggernaut of torrential will, an unimaginable version of the Shavian “life force?” What then? Do you pray for the knowledge of its will? Do you pray to align yourself with it?

Pornosophy: The New York Times Magazine Then and Now

Young men growing up in the ‘60s read The New York Times Magazine for the lingerie ads. It was their initiation into the secret world of the other, the female, whose divine mysteries might already have been revealed to them in Irving Klaw’s photography which was the subject of the 2005 film, The Notorious Bettie Page. By the early’70s in order to compete with Penthouse, Playboy, in a stage of history Hugh Hefner termed the "pubic wars," would show the full monty. What is the equivalent experience for the pubescent male today? He attends a metaphoric striptease show in which there is neither strip nor tease. By the age of 5 most young men and women will have had their first experience of hardcore porn. They will have seen penetrated orifices before they even know what they portend. What would have been science fiction to a 50’s and 60’s adolescent is almost jaded now—much the way that the everyday application of the principles of quantum physics (say in quantum computing) is taken for granted today. It’s a little like going to one of those extravagant buffets at a Bar Mitzvah or wedding parlor in which you can’t remember any of the food with all the varying stations devoted to sushi, barbecue, delicatessen, French and Italian cuisines and firstly not knowing what to eat and then after not remembering it. Further, there's no such thing as lingerie, in the classic sense of the word. Many women practice a kind of minimalism that leaves nothing to the imagination.  In the 50’s and 60’s the young man who stealthily extracted the The New York Times from the thick Sunday paper which lay outside the door, surreptitiously beelining for the bathroom, was content with very little, maybe just a bra, panties or stray garter. But the visual memory was as indelible as the olfactory recollection of Proust’s madeleine. Less was definitely more. The female body was full of pregnant signs and signifiers which have all but disappeared today, with nudity itself losing its potency, as a sanctuary for the transgressive sensibility.

Hair! Again

In the famous musical of the same name, hair was looked at as sign of rebellion. Hair was both a symbol and sign of freedom. It’s always astonishing how times change and how the sensibility of a culture is reflected to by a host of new manners and mores. Now hair is looked at far less benignly than it was the 60’s, especially in relation to femininity, with natural women, who populated Woodstock and the cast of films like John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus 7, and sported hair on their legs, underarms and pudendae looked at as an anomalies--and Brazilian waxing all the rage. Really it’s the difference between women and children. In the 60’s pornography was rife with flamboyant displays of pubic hair and with the advent of full frontal nudity in Playboy and Penthouse, centerfolds really had something to show. Now their counterparts, the starlets of internet porn, literally have nothing to reveal, below the belt at least. Today’s pornography is basically a not so veiled form of pedophilia, as is the sexuality being marketed by the fashion industry. But a revolution is in the making (“Is Dyeing Armpit Hair a Harbinger of the Future?" The Screaming Pope, 7/20/15). Like the l905 uprising in Russia it may be the harbinger of things to come. Women around the country are beginning to grow underarm hair and a recent Times piece, “Woman Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair,” 7/14/15, reported the phenomenon of  “pit-ins.” In Aristophanes Lysistrata the women of Greece refuse to have sex until the men stop waging war. Men should support this sea change in the values of our sterile kiddie porn oriented culture, by refusing to have sex with Barbie Doll clones who shave their genitals.

Is Dyeing Armpit Hair a Harbinger of the Future?

The Style section of the Times ran a piece on “Woman Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair,”  (NYT, 7/14/15) The piece began with a priceless quote from 17 year old Destiny Moreno of Seattle who dyed her armpit hair Voodoo Blue courtesy of Manic Panic. Said Destiny about the sales person who sold her the dye, “I was like, ‘Oh I’m dying my armpit hair.' She stared at me shellshocked for five seconds, and then she started laughing and was laughing throughout the entire interaction.” Sometimes revolutionary moments occur with a whimper rather than a bang. After all Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin quite by accident. And as the article goes on to demonstrate, it wasn’t the dying of the hair that was unusual; it was the hair itself. In our age of Brazilian waxing who sports armpit, much less pubic hair? You have to have hair in order to dye it and if this piece is any prognostication of a trend, women will be talking about dying their newly grown pubic bushes before the death knell of waxing is even rung. If you remember back in the '60s day glo colored pudendae were as common as cherry pie or as ubiquitous as the big tufts of expressive black hair in a post-war Italian actress’ armpit. The idea of dying underarm hair in the current cultural climate is tantamount to having the industrial and Russian revolutions in the same year or say having Lindbergh climb into the cockpit of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane and fly it across the Atlantic. It’s not just a step for mankind. It’s two. Hopefully the Times piece will be a harbinger of an uprising against waxing in which women will free them themselves from the dominance of the pre-pubescent pedophiliac vision of femininity created by the fashionista/porn version of the military industrial complex and proudly display romantic unruly mounds of pubic hair in colors of Voodoo Blue or whatever their heart's desire.