In Support of Punk Violinists

 Ara Malikian giving a radio performance in Madrid (2011)

If you can overlook the various affectations upon which he has opted to found his stage persona -

the hair which signifies his wild, untamed hippie character ...
the clothes which speak of his unconventional, dandy-bohemian aspect ...
the constant grinning and jigging about which demonstrates his vital, joyful nature ...

- then the fact is that Ara Malikian is a genius with the violin; one who was taught to play not by gypsies or demons, but by some of the finest classical tutors in Berlin and London. Thus he has an extensive old-school repertoire, but has brilliantly added contemporary works to this and beautifully assimilated the musical styles of various cultures (Arab, Jewish, European, and South American).

 

Of course, some critics cannot overlook the hair, the clothes, or the exuberance - and won't forgive him these things either. This is unfortunate, but comes as no surprise. For we saw much the same unforgiving nastiness a few years back in the case of Nigel Kennedy, whose persona was also regarded by some as vulgar, ludicrous, and offensive. In 1991, for example, he was dismissed with sneering contempt as Liberace with a mockney accent by Sir John Drummond, one of the most formidable figures in the UK arts world at that time and Controller of BBC Radio 3.

It's precisely such remarks made by such people that make me sympathetic to performers such as Kennedy and Malikian. I may not feel fully comfortable myself with the way they look, speak, or behave, but oh how I love them in comparison to their enemies within the music establishment!

That is to say, the elderly grey ones who suck the life out of everything - including the works of the great composers whom they claim to revere - by insisting on painfully self-conscious technique at the expense of all passion; and the privileged high-brows who listen in a sort of ecstasy in order to receive the correct spiritual thrill, but feel nothing. 

On Cumshots and the Triumph of the Will to Orgasm

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe in the two-part film 

Nymphomaniac, dir. Lars von Trier (2013)

According to one sexologist, real men like to have narrative closure and some sense of satisfactory ending. Thus the importance and popularity within the pornographic imagination of the cumshot which provides an often premature but nonetheless definitive full stop to proceedings.

Only a few effeminate perverts enjoy the experience of delayed orgasm in which the purpose of pleasure and pleasure of purpose is constantly deferred and often ruined; perverts, a few philosophers, and those rare women who still value seduction over production and regard feminism in a Nietzschean sense as a loss of style, or an obscene staging of desire determined by purely phallic values.  

For such women - to whom the promise of so-called sexual liberation was always laughable - pleasure can very well exist without purpose. They don't mind exchanging amusing stories that lack a punchline (the female inability to tell jokes is rooted in an unconcern with climax, rather than the lack of a sense of humour), or receiving massages without the happy ending that most men anticipate and desire (consenting to a certain amount of back, neck and shoulder work so long as they are able to eventually flip over and have the oiled hands of their masseuse set to in the one area they want to have rubbed).

But today, as indicated, such women are few in number. The majority have been taught to demand equal rights and pleasures and to make sex visible and meaningful, i.e. the essential truth of themselves: I come therefore I am. The insistence on orgasm and the porn industry's obsession with showing such close up and in hi-definition has exorcised the ambivalence of her body and compromised the strange intensities that existed in erotic games of reticence and artifice.

I would like to think that Lars von Trier understands something of this and that his new film, Nymphomaniac - as well as the accompanying poster campaign which features many of the lead actors showing us their orgasm faces (including Charlotte Gainsbourg pictured above) - is a subversive attempt to mock the sexualized order we inhabit and to bring about some form of reversal.    

But, sadly, I suspect from what I have read of the work, that this is not the case; that he too remains a believer in sex as a form of truth to be ejaculated in all our faces in an orgy of realism. For that is precisely what it is to live in a pornified culture; one is subject to endless cumshots and an obsession with the real. 

Why I'm not Wild about André Gide

Last night, despite a persistent cough, I went to an interesting if somewhat old-fashioned seminar at UCL in which Professor Patrick Pollard examined the French reception of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 

Briefly commenting on Charles Grolleau's 1900 translation, Professor Pollard then discussed in rather more detail and with rather more enthusiasm, André Gide's subsequent translation of 1922. He argued that whereas the former praised Blake as an idiosyncratic English poet, painter, and mystic, the latter saw him as very much part of a nonconformist tradition of writers which would include Baudelaire, Whitman, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche; authors who liked to flirt with evil and prided themselves on their immoralism.
   

One author whom Gide did not name as part of this satanic pantheon - and his absence was a glaring omission - was Oscar Wilde. Of course, we all know the reason for his exclusion. Quite simply, Wilde's ghost continued to haunt and torment Gide as much as the living figure, whom he encountered several times as a young man, scared the pants off him. 

Gide, in my view - though I don't think I'm alone in this, - never fully acknowledged his intellectual and aesthetic indebtedness to Wilde and, despite his attraction to diabolical characters and pederastic pleasures, never fully accepted the profound challenge which Wilde presented to his own thinking and his own sexuality. 

Ultimately, I think of Gide as something of a coward, ever-fearful of losing his precious soul; the sort of man who would hurry home to write to his mother after spending time in Wilde's company that the latter was a terrible human being and the most dangerous product of modern civilization. 

His great success as a writer and existential humanist, contrasts tellingly with the Irishman's spectacular failure on all fronts. Gide wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and lives to a ripe old age; Wilde gets a prison sentence and dies exiled and in poverty, aged just 46. 

Informed by Wilde during one of their final meetings that, in art, there is no first person, Gide simply smiles and carries on exploring subjective depths and confessing what he sincerely believed to be his essential self. He never quite understands Wilde's transgressive philosophy or love of masks, anymore than he understands Nietzsche's revaluation of all values.

That's fine. But his own rather smug face and his attempt to read these authors in line with his own project is not and I find that I don't much care for M. Gide (despite the fact that the Catholic Church placed his work on their Index of Forbidden Books after his death in 1951). 

Spectrophilia (With Reference to Wuthering Heights)

Illustration by Cassie Zwart (Feb 2013) 
See her blog: Doodling in the Margins

The dead they do not die; they look on and help, wrote Lawrence, in a letter to a grieving friend, attempting to provide comfort. 

But for those who subscribe to the possibility of ghostly love - or spectrophilia, as it is now commonly known - the dead might be said to look on and perv and, in fact, they very often do more than this; engaging in non-consensual sexual activities that range from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers and the inducement of erotic dreams, to violent spectral rape as in the famous case of Doris Bither whose traumatic story was the inspiration for early-eighties supernatural thriller, The Entity (dir. Sidney J. Furie and starring Barbara Hershey).

Perhaps the most famous spectro-romance in English literature is that between Heathcliff and the ghost of poor Catherine Earnshaw with her ice-cold fingers, forever begging to be readmitted into life. She may give the idiot Lockwood cause for alarm, but Heathcliff is as in love with the spectral figure of Cathy as he was with the flesh and blood version. He calls her to him through his bedroom window with an uncontrollable passion of tears: "Come in! Come in! Cathy, do come. Oh do - once more! Oh! my heart's darling ..." [29]

Heathcliff, in other words, yearns to be haunted and voluntarily engages in a posthumous relation; he denies Cathy the right to rest in peace or ascend unto heaven, just as she prevents him from living happily on earth without her: "Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! ... I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" [167]

Having begged thus to be haunted by Cathy's ghost, this is precisely what happens to him for the next twenty years and, it has to be said, it's no picnic. For to take a ghostly lover is an intolerable torture at times. And if, as he does, Heathcliff twice digs up Cathy's corpse, Wuthering Heights remains essentially a novel in which the dead are guilty of disturbing the living rather than vice versa.

Note: The lines quoted are from the Penguin edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, (2000).

Bukkake

 Illustration: en.wikipedi.org/wiki/Bukkake

When viewing a bukkake scene which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the act, involves multiple male figures masturbating and ejaculating onto the face of a young woman, one is tempted to ask what the essential role of the latter might be; is she there as a necessary object of desire, or does she serve a symbolic function as sacrificial victim? 

Or is she not, in a still more fundamental sense, simply serving as an alibi? That is to say, is she not there merely to placate the heterosexual make conscience? 

For it seems to me that the real excitement of bukkake is generated by the fact that it's a homosocial and homoerotic event; a rare opportunity for straight men to be naked and in intimate physical proximity. It's not the sight of a woman on her knees that arouses, but of other men openly masturbating in a cock-and-cumfest which fetishises phallic masculinity and elevates semen to first place within a hierarchy of bodily fluids.

The viewer of such scenes which, as with the vast majority of porn, are shot from a male POV, is expected to identify with the anonymous (sometimes masked) male figures and encouraged to enjoy the feeling of vicarious pleasure.

They are not, of course, expected or encouraged to concern themselves with the young women at the centre of the action or think about the problematic sexual politics of bukkake, which, involving as it does, an undeniable element of violence and ritual humiliation, is uncomfortably close to a form of group rape and not merely a disguised form of gay circle jerk. 

Meganekko (On the Love of Girls with Glasses)

When it comes to poetically naming a fetish and translating it from a niche activity within the pornographic imagination into an accepted trend within popular culture, you can always rely upon the Japanese. And so it is with glasses fetishism - or, as they call it, meganekko. 

Meganekko - which translates literally as girl-child with glasses - refers to young women for whom wearing glasses can be considered a defining characteristic or trait and whose sexual attractiveness is magically enhanced by the fact, even in those cases where their eye-sight is not; some girls choosing to wear glasses with non-prescriptive lenses, or even without lenses altogether, simply in order to comply with a look that for us in the West is a key component of geek chic. 

This latter trend, adopted by hipsters of both sexes who delighted in wearing large, black horn-rimmed glasses, demonstrates that the Japanese youth are not alone in understanding spex appeal. However, whilst glasses fetishism is not unique to Japan, there is something unusual, something different, about the widespread Japanese fixation with glasses which are not merely valued for their symbolic associations (i.e. as a cultural trope), but as objects (of desire) in themselves.

This, arguably, is the crucial issue; particularly if you happen to be dating a meganekko devotee like a friend of mine. She never quite knows whether he loves her as a woman behind the spectacles with her own physical attributes and personal qualities etc., or whether he really only cares for her frames and lenses.

(The fact that he immediately loses his erection if she removes her glasses during sex probably provides a clue.)

On Babes With Braces etc.

Photo: www.dailymail.co.uk (03/01/13) 

The other day, on the metro in Barcelona, I saw a young woman wearing dental braces, which, somewhat perversely, only served to enhance the loveliness of her smile and transform her somewhat conventional and nondescript beauty into something provocative and challenging. 

And so, without claiming or wishing to be thought a genuine devotee of babes with braces, I can understand how one might become fixated with the look - as with other signs of attractive imperfection or desirable disability, such as spectacles and hearing-aids. 

Ultimately, men who don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, for example, are the kind of sexually unsophisticated dullards that even the most myopic women can see for what they are.     

 

The Trial of the New York Four

Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer with their lawyer, Jackie Chiles,
in 'The Finale' (S9 E23/24). Originally broadcast May 14, 1998.

Everyone loves a good trial and one might almost be tempted to bookend Western civilization between the trial of Socrates in 399 BC and the Seinfeld trial almost two and a half thousand years later in 1998.

In the former case, an Athenian gadfly is accused of impiety and instilling the younger generation with a morally nihilistic and disrespectful attitude via his uniquely provocative mixture of irony, sophistry and dialectics. Found guilty, he is sentenced to death, which he willingly accepts by drinking the hemlock provided. 

In the latter case, which is my main concern here, an American smart alec and professional comedian is - along with his three friends - accused of contravening article 223-7 of the Latham Massachusetts Penal Code; i.e. the so-called Good Samaritan Law, which requires citizens to actively help or assist anyone in danger as long as it is reasonable for them to do so. 

Also found guilty, Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, George Costanza, and Kosmo Kramer are given a year in jail in order that they might reflect upon the manner in which they have conducted themselves in relation to society. In passing sentence, Judge Vandelay speaks of the "callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent" that the four have repeatedly demonstrated. In this he echoes the sentiments of the prosecuting district attorney, who, in his opening statement, told the jury that the defendants not only ignored but mocked the victim of a violent crime and that they each had a long history of vain, greedy, selfish, and immature behaviour which often resulted in the abuse and deception of others.

To many fans of the show, this caused an uncomfortable moment; their own guilt and complicity ruthlessly exposed by the writer Larry David. They doubtless didn't want or anticipate a happy ending - but this was brutal. And many have not forgiven him to this day. However, the fact is Socrates was not falsely accused and convicted and neither were the New York Four. And, with a magnificently cynical form of stoicism and noble indifference, they accepted their prison sentence just as the ancient philosopher accepted death: no tears, no complaints, no appeals. 

And still - above all else - no hugging, no learning. 

Thus it is that the greatest TV show ends with its protagonists behind bars and still trapped in the magic circle of their own solipsism as Jerry lectures George once more and for all eternity on how the position of the second button literally makes or breaks a shirt.    

Pussy Whipped (Or Never Mind the Cossacks)

Photograph: Morry Gash / Associated Press (2014)

This just in: members of Pussy Riot attacked with whips and pepper spray by Cossack militiamen as they attempt to stage a protest at the Sochi Olympics.   

Nothing surprising perhaps about the actions of the former, whose opposition to the Games and to all things which receive official state endorsement is well-known. But it was rather surprising to learn that there are still Cossacks in the world (outside of the Moscow State Circus) and that they are now working as an auxiliary police force under orders from the Kremlin.

Surprising and even a little disappointing: for one might have thought and hoped that this people who pride themselves on their independence and who have often been on the wrong side of events in Russia, would resist the temptation to be no more than hired thugs in silly hats doing Putin's dirty work.   

But there you go: the partly shocking, partly ludicrous footage that has come out of Sochi obliges us to forget any romantic notions we might have had, thanks to our poets, of courageous Cossack soldiers on horseback or dancing around the campfire; free spirits, resistant to all authority, etc. The fact is they have always been vicious mercenaries prepared to serve those in power and do whatever is asked of them, whether this be fighting foreign invaders, killing the Jews, or, indeed, attacking feminists in order to uphold traditional values (racism, misogyny, homophobia ...).

This is not to say that the Bolshevik policy of decossackization [Расказачивание] was in any way admirable. But I certainly prefer the radically progressive elements of Soviet Communism over reactionary and religiously-minded ethno-tribal stupidity.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Laura Hollick as one of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon 

Photo by Kevin Thom (2010)  

www.soulartstudio.com

There's simply no point in maintaining a figurative conception of sex based on a series of identical images, unless one wishes to keep love constrained under the yoke of idealism. 

Perversity becomes philosophically of interest when it sets itself the task not merely of finding ever-more sophisticated pleasures, but also of "tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions" and thereby "liberating the pre-personal singularities they enclose" (to quote Deleuze and Guattari if I may). 

It would be nice, for once, to know a woman in a purely impersonal manner; to experience her as a vibration of forces or some kind of event far below the level of identity; to see her as Picasso saw les demoiselles d'Avignon - en route to pure abstraction.

Stupeur et tremblements

Cover of the Faber and Faber English 

paperback edition (2004)

In some ways, Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (1999), can be regarded as a fictional supplement to Roland Barthes's L'Empire des Signs (published thirty years earlier) and ought not to be thought of simply as an autobiographical novel.

For like the latter, Nothomb's book is an attempt to isolate a certain number of features and from out of these delineate with great delicacy and ingenuity a system called 'Japan'. It succeeds because she wisely avoids any banal sociological analysis of Japanese corporate life, just as - despite autobiographical elements - she avoids offering a simple recreation of her own past. 

Central to her little comedy of manners is the question of etiquette. Amélie-san longs not so much for intimacy with Fubuki, but informality. For informal relations are so much more desirable to a modern, occidental sensibility than the strictly coded ones that exist within the Japanese work place. 

For to be informal, even at the risk of seeming impolite, is to be true according to the logic of Western morality which rests upon what Barthes terms a mythology of the person; we believe ourselves and others to be composed of a false, public exterior and of a personal, authentic interior which it is our duty to know.

And so it is that, after a certain period of time, we naturally assume we have the right to be ourselves in the company of others; further, we also think we have the right to know them as they really are, stripped of any social status or superficial difference on which they might pride themselves. For is it not taught that all souls are equal in the sight of God.

That we could believe other and behave differently is something that Amélie-san has to learn. But whether she does learn this is debatable, for her attachment to a democracy of souls seems extremely strong. Thus, at the end of her time working for the Yukimoto Corporation, she bids farewell and shakes the hands only of those colleagues who have acknowledged what she regards as her essential humanity.

For this reason, one can't help but wonder about the nature of the great happiness that Fubuki's letter brings at the end of the novel; does Amélie-san feel that it signals some kind of final victory and vindication?

I would like to think not, but there is something profoundly disturbing and even ugly about the character of Amélie-san: like a soul-devouring monster, she's obsessed with discovering the truth of poor Miss Mori and, via what Barthes calls the willed simplicity of Western manners, she seems determined to declare her affability, her honesty, and her authenticity whatever the consequences for herself and those around her.

Ultimately, and ironically, she's the bully in the office place! For her friendship is something that cannot be refused and her pity is a type of poison. 

On Convalescence

Oy, I don't feel so good! Coughing, aching, lemsipping, etc. Still, whilst I might not have Zarathustra's animals to look after me, I do have the pigeons on the balcony for company and the Little Greek to make some chicken soup. So I can't complain. 

Also, I have a period of convalescence to look forward to during which colours, sounds, etc. all seem to become clearer and more vibrant and one feels momentarily perkier than usual. Doubtless this is simply a physiological effect of returning strength, but Heidegger prefers to see it in slightly different terms, relating it as he does to questions of nostalgia and being:

"The convalescent is the man who collects himself to return home - that is, to turn inwards, into his own destiny. The convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is."

Obviously, this is anathema to me; a rootless cosmopolitan who knows no home, scorns notions of interiority and prefers anonymity and masquerade to self-confession and the revelation of true identity. In fact, I'd rather stay sick and self-alienated than convalesce in a Heideggerian manner. 

The Gulf War Is Still Not Happening

And still - rather amazingly to my mind - there are well-read and intelligent individuals who just cannot or will not allow themselves to see what Baudrillard is arguing in his series of short reflections from 1991 on the Gulf War. Individuals such as the libertarian blogger and photographer Brian Mickelthwait, for example, to whom these comments are addressed. 

Contrary to the title of the third of his three articles originally published in Libération and which also became the title of a later book - The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) - Baudrillard is not suggesting that the events in Kuwait and Iraq didn't happen; the violence was in fact all-too-actual. But it was also, for us in the West at least, spectacular and virtual, rather than real, constituting a form of simulated warfare. 

This was certainly the case for those sat in the comfort and security of their own homes who experienced the war in the form of televised imagery and stylized media presentation. But even the US armed forces for the most part did not directly engage in combat with their opponents and suffered few casualties. They too largely conducted the coordinated and choreographed slaughter of Iraqi troops from behind the safety of screens. 

Thus to call the events in the Gulf a war, Baudrillard suggests, is a misnomer; for it was both rehearsed and enacted as a videogame in which the actual violence and atrocity was overwritten by electronic narrative (complete with a missile eye-view of events). There is thus a fatal interdependence established between truth and fantasy; in fact, nothing separates them any longer in the hyperreal orgy of simulation.          

This might have been a controversial view at the time, but it seems today incontrovertible and really rather modest. As for the charge - often made against Baudrillard - that he displays at best casual indifference to human suffering and at worst political and moral nihilism, this is simply ignorant and malicious and, ironically, risks falling into the kind of banality and fraudulence which his critics accuse him of.