What Was I Thinking? (2 June)

Images used for posts published on this date 

in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2023

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm still busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring and now even the style and content of which is giving me a real headache, it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material.

 

And so, let's time travel and reminisce ...

 

 

The Museum of Failed Products 

 

I always thought this post published in 2014 concerning the fact that the vast majority of new consumer products - just like the vast majority of species - are destined to fail, was an amusing if somewhat poignant post, concluding as it does that just as the marketplace can do without yoghurt shampoo or breakfast cola, so too can the universe do without us. 

 

 

Breast Ironing 

 

In June 2015, I wrote about the attempt to suppress the growth of healthy breast tissue in pubescent girls by using hard and often heated objects to literally flatten any signs of such development. Usually, this moral shaping of the flesh is carried out in the name of Love; i.e., it's a bad act performed with good intentions - just like the equally disgusting practice of FGM. 

 

Unfortunately, thanks to mass immigration and multiculturalism we now have both these things in the UK.  

 

 

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

 

Skip a couple of years forward, to 2017, and I was back in Berlin of the 1920s and early '30s ...

 

For many people, Cabaret (1972) - dir. Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli and Sally Bowles - is a near-perfect film musical; one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. 

 

For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre. 

 

Or, as Susan Sontag writes in her famous 1975 essay, there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.  

In Praise of Denial

 

Skip forward another 24 months to 2019, and I discussed my favourite line from Shakespeare - I know thee not, old man ... (Henry IV Part 2, Act 5 scene 5) - arguing that the need to deny our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves, is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.

 

Why? Because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused. 

 

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

 

 

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

 

 

2 June 2020: what was I thinking? 

 

Apparently, about German philosophers and marine reptiles ...

 

For Schopenhauer, life is a manifestation of a hungry will; concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species - including sea turtles, wild dogs, and tigers - caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

 

Life is thus not only absurd, it is often atrociously cruel and grotesquely violent. And those who imagine that the earth would be some kind of peaceful paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether, are very much mistaken. 

Sometimes, Better a Dead Mountain Lion Than a Live Dog 

Finally, last year, a post about German born, New York based artist and Wunderfrau Heide Hatry and her latest muse and family member; a stuffed puma called Luna - proving that the author of Ecclesiastes who insisted better a living dog than a dead lion was not always right. 

 

For sometimes, as Ms. Hatry knows, it is the deceased who have something vital to teach us. Which is why her long fascination with corpses has often resulted in work of great insight and macabre beauty. 

 

 

In Memory of a Man from U.N.C.L.E.

David McCallum (1933-2023) as Illya Kuryakin 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68)

 

 

Thanks to Tom Cruise's big-screen reboot, many people believe that Mission: Impossible was the greatest secret agent series of the sixties. 

 

But it wasn't.

 

At any rate, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was far more fun and whilst I remember pretending to be Napoleon Solo as a child - and obsessively wearing a Man from U.N.C.L.E. flicker ring until it eventually cut into my finger [1] - I don't recall wanting to be Jim Phelps or a member of the IMF. 

 

Obviously, the two shows share certain similarities; both, for example, have implausible (some would say ridiculous) storylines and both have fantastic opening theme tunes [2]. But I preferred The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to Mission: Impossible because it was more lighthearted - or more camp, as Susan Sontag would say [3].

In other words, it didn't seem to take itself too seriously - and that's something I loved as a child and still like today. It's why, for example, I prefer the Monkees to the Beatles; Adam West's Batman to the brooding figure of the Dark Knight as played by Christian Bale; and Roger Moore's Bond over Daniel Craig's 007. 

 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. also had the advantage of having David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin playing alongside Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo. And that was a big advantage, as the Scottish actor proved to be hugely popular with the viewing public; particularly the younger audience who loved his Beatle-style haircut in contrast to Vaughn's clean-cut appearance and who inundated the actor with adoring fan mail [4].

 

But McCallum wasn't just eye-candy for pre-teen girls; he was an excellent actor and received two Emmy Award nominations in the course of the show's four-year run (1964–'68), for his role as the enigmatic and intelligent Russian-born agent.

 

Sadly, McCallum died yesterday, at a hospital in New York, one week after his 90th birthday. Like a lot of other people - particularly of my generation - I will remember him fondly as someone who, partnered with Robert Vaughn, captured my imagination as a child.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I also had a die-cast toy car made by Corgi with figures of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin which popped in and out of the car windows firing guns when you pressed on a button protruding through the car roof (see the image above at the end of the post).

 

[2] The main theme for Mission: Impossible was composed by Lalo Schifrin and is noted for unusually being in 5/4 time. Click here to play the Season 1 opening titles.

      The theme music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was originally written by Jerry Goldsmith, although other scores were produced by other composers and the changing musical style reflected the show's different seasons; some, using brass instruments and martial rhythms, were intended to be dramatic; others, using flutes and bongos, were deliberately more jazzy. Click here for the opening title sequence to the Season 1 episode 'The Giuoco Piano Affair' (Nov 1964), featuring Goldsmith's original theme.

 

[3] See Sontag's famous essay of 1964, 'Notes on Camp', which can be found in her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966). 

 

[4] Originally, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was conceived as a vehicle for Vaughn and McCallum's role was intended to be peripheral. McCallum, however, managed to turn the character of Kuryakin into a pop cultural phenomenon and, recognising his on-screen chemistry with Vaughn, McCallum was given co-star status by the show's producers. Incredibly, while playing Kuryakin, McCallum received more fan mail than any other actor in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's history - including such popular stars as Clark Gable and Elvis Presley.

 

 

Tales from Storyville 3: The Poet and the Prostitute (Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey)

Photo of Natasha Trethewey by Nancy Crampton 

and photo of a Storyville prostitute by E. J. Bellocq

I.

According to Susan Sontag, only men find something romantic about prostitution; women look at things - including photographs of naked women taken in Storyville - differently don'tcha know. Nevertheless, there's something distinctly romantic about Natasha Trethewey's second collection of verse, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). 

The work, divided into three main sections, consists of a series of poems in the form of an epistolary novella meditating on an imaginary and composite figure (Ophelia) supposedly captured by Bellocq's camera. It occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading, detailing as it does the life of a mixed-race prostitute in the early 1900s who had nothing to fall back on (as Toni Morrison would say).

But what's really interesting, philosophically, is that whilst Bellocq directs his gaze towards female flesh, Trethewey attempts to offer us a glimpse into Ophelia's soul; transforming her from an anonymous sex object into a unique subject whom we might know, value, and grow to love.

Most people would probably find nothing wrong with that; would think it a beautiful thing to do. But Foucault calls this process subjectivation and regards it as the exercise of power favoured by liberal humanism; i.e., the way in which the (amoral and irrational) forces and desires of the body are codified, coordinated, and given personal expression.

(I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth thinking about ...) 

II.

If asked to choose, I suppose my favourite part of the work is found in section two and entitled 'Letters from Storyville'; the part in which Ophelia recounts her initial experiences as a prostitute, including her name change to Violet, something which fans of the film Pretty Baby (1978) will knowingly smile at.

That said, I'm also very fond of this sonnet from section three of the book, with which I'd like to close this post:

'Storyville Diary,' Photography 1911

I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,

one arm folded behind my back, the other

limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,

my back so straight I imagine the bones

separating in my spine, my neck lengthening

like evening shadow. When I see this plate

I try to recall what I was thinking -

how not to be exposed, though naked, how

to wear skin like a garment, seamless.

Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps

coming to my room. These plates are fragile,

he says, showing me how easy it is

to shatter this image of myself, how

a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.

See: Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, (Graywolf Press, 2002). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part two of this post - on Bellocq's photographs - should click here.

Tales from Storyville 2: The Photos of E. J. Bellocq (With Notes from Susan Sontag)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

Storyville may have been closed down in 1917 - and knocked down in the 1930s to make way for public housing - but thanks to the photographs of Ernest Joseph Bellocq (1873-1949), images of the period continue to haunt the pornographic imagination and inspire artists and onanists everywhere. 

Born into a wealthy family of French créole origins, Bellocq established himself as a professional photographer who specialised in pictures of landmarks, ships, and machinery. However, unbeknown to but a small circle of acquaintances, he also enjoyed taking photos of the seamier side of life in New Orleans, as found in the opium dens of Chinatown, for example, and the brothels of Storyville.

After his death, most of Bellocq's pictures were lost or destroyed (including the Chinatown series). However, by a stroke of good fortune, the Storyville negatives were later discovered and eventually purchased by a young photographer and artist, Lee Friedlander, who, in 1970, mounted a show at the Museum of Modern Art (curated by John Szarkowski) featuring prints from Bellocq's original 8" x 10" glass negatives.

All of the images were of women: some nude, some dressed; some looking bored, some smiling and playfully posing. In my favourite picture, "an exceptionally pretty woman with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise-longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings" (Susan Sontag).

A book, Storyville Portraits (1970), with a preface by Friedlander, was published to coincide with the exhibition and, overnight, Bellocq's posthumous fame was assured [1]. The images were said to have a unique poignancy and beauty, as well as great cultural-historical importance (serving, for example, not only as a record of what the prostitutes of Storyville actually looked like, but also providing clues as to how the interiors of the brothels were decorated). 

And I suppose that's true; though there's also an undercurrent of violence present in some of them - which might be said to manifest itself in the fact that several of the negatives were deliberately damaged, with the faces of the women scrubbed out. Probably this was done by Bellocq himself, though no one knows for certain who did this or why. [2]
     
The fact that we have so little biographical information about Bellocq has encouraged several writers to create fictional accounts of his life, filling in the gaps with made-up details and fantasies of their own. A cinematic version of Bellocq was famously played by Keith Carradine in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), a film I have recently discussed: click here.

The Storyville pictures have also inspired a good deal of imaginative literature about the women in them and in part three of this post we shall examine Natasha Trethewey's collection of poems Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) ... 

Notes

[1] A more extensive collection of Friedlander's prints was published with an introduction by Susan Sontag in 1996. Sontag argues that, above all else, the pictures are unforgettable once seen and notes how there is much about them that affirms current taste: "the low-life material; the near mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouvés, and a gift from the past." See Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, ed. John Szarkowski, (Random House, 1996). 

[2] Sontag seems to deny this violence, although she also is disturbed by the attempt to (literally) deface some of the amorous objects. In an interesting passage (marred only by the sexism of her final sentence), she writes: 

"Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn't have dictated to them how they should pose - whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were. How far we are, in Bellocq's company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious - or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute's life - are those [...] on which the faces have been scratched out. [...] These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these pictures, find nothing romantic about prostitution." (Ibid.) 

Readers interested in part one of this post - a brief history of Storyville - should click here. 

Readers interested in part three of this post - on Natasha Trethewey's poetic musings on Bellocq's pictures - should click here.

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 1: Remembering the Rushdie Affair

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
Image credit: John P. Johnson / HBO

On Valentine's Day, 1989, when the rest of us were sending flowers to loved ones, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini - decided to issue a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie: a religious decree that urged Muslims around the world to kill the author (and publishers) of The Satanic Verses (1988); for it was a novel that was said to offend the sacred values of Islam.   

This grey-bearded cleric, aged 89, and with only months left to live, added that any good Muslim who was killed trying to carry out the death sentence should be considered a martyr, i.e., one whose place in paradise was guaranteed. Just in case that wasn't a strong enough motivating factor, a $2.8 million bounty was also placed on Rushdie's head.    

The writer was immediately granted police protection by the British government, though many seemed to resent the fact (and the cost to the public purse). Rushdie then spent many years moving between safe houses and living a life in which everyday activities - like kicking a football in the park with his son - became either impossible or subject to tight security measures.

Many Muslim countries around the world banned the import and sale of the book and encouraged violent protests against the West. In Bradford, a mob publicly burned copies of the work and echoed the call for Rushdie's execution. Whilst some authors, including Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe were vocal in their support, others - who shall remain nameless - were noticeably silent on the issue (some even implied that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion).   

It was only in the 1990s that Rushdie was able to gradually recover something approaching a normal life once more, eventually moving to New York. But the threat to his life remained; Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, stated in 2005 that as Rushdie was still an apostate his killing was authorised within Islam and he again stressed the irrevocable nature of the fatwa in 2015.

Thirty years on, not only does Rushdie remain a figure of hate for Islamists across the Muslim world, but the issue of blasphemy - in 2019! - remains an incendiary one; people are still being killed or threatened with death for any perceived insult to God or his prophet Muhammad (the case of Asia Bibi is just the latest grotesque example).   

The problem, of course, is that laws designed to protect religious sensibilities ultimately stifle intellectual debate and artistic expression. Indeed, as Christopher Hitchens notes, the fatwa issued against his friend Rushdie was essentially the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom: after The Satanic Verses controversy came the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004; followed a year later by the Danish cartoon crisis; and then the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 ...

Happily, three decades on, Rushdie is alive and well and - as we'll see in the second part of this post - able to laugh at his own nightmarish experience. Even if, again to quote Hitchens, "the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force".


See: Christopher Hitchens, 'Assassins of the Mind', Vanity Fair (February 2009): click here to read online.

To read part two of this post, click here. 

Rushdie with a copy of his offending text (London, 1989)

Photo credit: PA Photos / Landov 

Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks

Debbie Juvenile and Tracie  O'Keefe
(Seditionaries 1977) 

There are two reasons why I like this photograph ...

Firstly, there are the clothes: McLaren and Westwood's idiosyncratic designs looked fucking amazing back then and they look even more astonishing now. One forgets just how romantic and swashbuckling punk fashion was - and just how queer (using that word in its fullest sense, to mean strange and outlandish as well as sexually deviant in some manner). It was never really a style that came from the streets; it came, rather, from the extraordinary imaginations of Malcolm and Vivienne and made very little sense outside of the world of 430, Kings Road. Clothes for heroes - and clothes for weirdos.         

Secondly, there are the two girls: Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O'Keefe.* They seem unable to contain their pride and joy at looking so fabulous as they pose for the camera lens and actively transform themselves into an image. The fact that each is smiling - such a rare thing for a punk to do - provides the picture with a warmth and a charm that makes me love it and love them.   

If they look so young, it's because they were so young. And their youth - the freshness of faces, the whiteness of hands - also illuminates the image and arouses great affection in me (almost a kind of tenderness). But what gives it a special poignancy is the distressing knowledge that both girls are no longer living.

I look at this photo and see two lovely - if unconventional - young women, dressed in their punk finery; they would appear to have their whole lives ahead of them. But in the back of my mind is the thought: they are going to die ... This, of course, is the challenge and the scandal of every photo. Indeed, it might even be said death is the very essence of photography; that every snap is to some degree or other mortifying: A second of your life ruined for life.

However, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph also powerfully attests to presence and to the reality of lives that have been. It doesn't merely remind us of the past, or preserve what was abolished by the passing of time. It forms an actual bridge between ourselves and the dead. Thus, you look at Debbie and Tracie and - although they are no longer physically with us - they manage nevertheless to affect those of us who are still here in the flesh; not as ghosts, but as tiny suns that continue to shine long after they have burned out.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the presence of the absent being touches me like the delayed rays of a fading star.


Notes

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang, 1981).

*Both girls were early fans of the Sex Pistols and part of the so-called Bromley Contingent; both worked as sales assistants at Seditionaries; and both were arrested during the Sex Pistols' Jubilee gig on a Thames riverboat. Tracie, however, was the only one to be given a prison sentence (for assaulting a policeman), although she was later acquitted on appeal. Shockingy, she died the following year, from cancer, aged 18.

As for Debbie, she embodied the look and spirit of punk: it was Debbie who sold programmes on the Anarchy in the UK tour and it was Debbie who can be seen singing backing vocals on stage with the Sex Pistols auditioning for a new frontman in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Post-punk, she apparently drifted into the world of vice. Then she simply disappeared and is presumed dead.  

On Art and Syphilis

Elizabethan Era Syphilis (detail)

by Swedish makeup artist 

Ylva Konradsson 

Even though, by his own admission, Lawrence knows "nothing about medicine and very little about diseases", that doesn't prevent him from offering a reading of English art history that is both critical and clinical in character and from assuming the role of what Nietzsche terms a cultural physician. 

Thus, in a fascinating late essay, Lawrence asserts that the reason the English produce so few painters is not because they are, as a people, "devoid of a genuine feeling for visual art", but because they are paralysed by fear. 

It is this which distorts Anglo-Saxon existence; an old fear which "seemed to dig into the English soul" during the Renaissance and that we might characterise as a morbid and mystical terror of sex and physical intimacy. The Elizabethans came to regard their own bodies with horror and began to privilege spiritual-mental life over instinctive-intuitive being.     

And, according to Lawrence, this was caused by the "great shock of syphilis and the realisation of the consequences of the disease" - particularly by the late-16th century when its "ravages were obvious" and, having initially entered the blood of the nation, it now "penetrated the thoughtful and imaginative consciousness". 

Someone, he suggests, ought to "make a thorough study of the effects of 'pox' on the minds and emotions and imagination of the various nations of Europe at about the time of our Elizabethans", who, despite their attempts to joke about the disease, were haunted by the fear of it. For the fact is "no man can contract syphilis, or any deadly sexual disease, without feeling the most shattering and profound terror go through him ... And no man can look without a sort of horror on the effects of a sexual disease in another person." 

I suspect that's probably true - and dare say many who experienced the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s will agree. Like the arrival of syphilis, AIDS not only gave a "fearful blow to our sexual life", but the horror of it shaped our cultural imagination. We recoiled further and further away from one another - from physical communion - and into virtual reality (including online porn). 

Now we know know one another only as ideal entities on social media, or obscene online images; fleshless, bloodless, and cold. And our contemporary art reflects this great move into abstraction. It's often very clever, often very amusing, but it's real appeal is that it's germ-free.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare's England, (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1994).

Arguably, the above book is the serious study Lawrence calls for and it lends support to his thesis concerning the manner in which syphilis profoundly changed the manners and morals of Renaissance Europe and shaped the literary and artistic imagination. Fabricius also suggests - as I have - that, in many ways, the emergence of syphilis has numerous parallels with the AIDS epidemic and the socio-political reaction to it. 

Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989). 

In this brilliant work of critical theory - a companion text to her earlier work Illness as Metaphor (1978) - Sontag extends her arguments made about the way in which cancer is culturally conceived to AIDS, deconstructing harmful myths surrounding the disease. Further, she also provides an interesting comparison between AIDS and syphilis    

Ali Baba Comes Today: Notes on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures

Participants in Jack Smith's queer-oriental fantasy demonstrate 

how all sexes can be transformed via savage splendour 

and erotic intensity into Flaming Creatures

I.

Flaming Creatures (1963) is an experimental short black-and-white film directed by Jack Smith and famously described by Susan Sontag as a rare modern work of art, full of Dionysian joy and innocence. Other critics weren't quite so generous and dismissed it as a disturbing and unpleasant work full of limp genitalia and limp art which defiled sex and cinema in equal measure; not so much a vision of paradise, as a glimpse of hell.

It premiered in all its avant-garde excess at midnight on April 29, at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Manhattan. Interested readers can now view it on YouTube by simply clicking here.


II.

Flaming Creatures is composed of several disconnected scenes or provocative vignettes, including an orgy, an earthquake, and a mock commercial for a heart-shaped lipstick that doesn't smudge when performing fellatio. The sexually ambiguous and heavily made-up actors are dressed in elaborate costume as if attending a Scheherazade party; i.e., an exotically camp soiree based on the Arabian Nights.

Unsurprisingly, due to its graphic and illicit sexual content - not to mention the elements of queer gothic horror, including vampirism - even some underground venues refused to show it and, in March 1964, police interrupted a screening and seized a print of the film on the grounds that it was in violation of New York's obscenity laws.

Various intellectuals and artists jumped to the film's defence, including Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, and Susan Sontag. Nevertheless, the defendants in the case were convicted and given suspended sentences. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict and quashed the convictions. Despite this, the film continued to be banned and screenings continued to attract police attention throughout the sixties.

Indeed, it was only after Smith's death in 1989 that art institutions and film festivals started to regularly screen Flaming Creatures, Smith's unconventional approach to cinema - no fixed narrative, unashamedly cheap sets, bizarre rather than special effects, the use of non-professional actors, peculiar camera angles and close-ups, etc. - having finally been recognised as seminal (no pun intended).  

Smith himself, however, always regarded Flaming Creatures as a comedy which contained not only all the most amusing things he could think of, but also his idiosyncratic ideas of what constituted glamour (ideas inspired in part by Hollywood and in part by flamboyant forms of performance art, such as burlesque).  

Notes

Susan Sontag, 'Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures', in Against Interpretation (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), pp. 226-31. This essay originally appeared as 'A Feast for Open Eyes', in The Nation (13 April 1964) and can be read online by clicking here. 

Interestingly, Michael Moon challenges Sontag's reading of Flaming Creatures, arguing that she theorizes urban gay male social and artistic practice under the "extremely reductive rubric of 'camp'". His main criticism is that Sontag depoliticizes Smith's film by understanding it purely as an aesthetic exercise. I don't think that's entirely fair or accurate, however, and it seems to me that Moon misunderstands how Sontag uses the term innocence in its Nietzschean sense; she is not at all suggesting the film lacks sophistication or an understanding of how gender and sexuality are political issues. Indeed, she repeatedly stresses that art is always the sphere of freedom and not just about beauty and pleasure. 

See: Michael Moon, 'Flaming Closets', A Small Boy and Others, (Duke University Press, 1998), pp.67-93. The line quoted is on p. 76. 

Cabaret: Divine Decadence and Fascinating Fascism

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles 

Cabaret (1972) 

For many people Cabaret (1972) is a near-perfect film musical: one that appears to starkly contrast the divine decadence of Berlin during the Weimar Republic with the fascinating fascism of Hitler's Third Reich, but which actually demonstrates how the two share the same cultural foundations and possess similar aesthetico-sexual concerns to do with questions of gender, style and performativity. For ultimately, if life is a cabaret old chum, then politics is just another form of show business and - as Jean Genet once wrote - even fascism can be considered theatre ...      

Brilliantly directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, Cabaret stars the magnificent Liza Minnelli as international singing sensation Fraulein Sally Bowles and Michael York as Englishman abroad, Brian Roberts, a somewhat reserved bisexual academic and writer. It opened to rave reviews, was an immediate box office smash and won eight Academy Awards. And yet, without doubt, it's the darkest and queerest of musicals - one that even Nazis can enjoy. Indeed, it provides an anthem that is today sung without any trace of irony by neo-Nazi groups.

Written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' is certainly a catchy number. And when sung by a good-looking Hitler Youth in a bright, sunlit Biergarten (cf. the dark and seedy Kit Kat Klub), it's not surprising as, one by one, nearly all those watching add their voices and raise their arms in salute. But it's not just that the tune happens to be diabolically rousing; more important, as Susan Sontag points out, is the seductive idealism of the Nazi aesthetic itself:

"It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism ... also stands for an ideal, and one that is also persistent today, under other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community ..."

In other words, it's insufficient and a little dishonest to pretend audiences are powerfully moved by 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' simply because of the songwriting genius of Kander and Ebb. The song is so compelling because, among other things, the Nazi fantasy of a future utopia is one which many people continue to share.    

Some individuals - les fleurs du mal - cynically reject the comfortable trappings of bourgeois life and like to indulge their taste for illicit pleasures and nihilism; they choose to be Jewish and queer rather than Aryan and straight as a die. Like Sally Bowles, they abort the chance of a stable family life, preferring a headless, homeless and childfree lifestyle. But most people do not; most prefer Kinder, Küche, Kirche and like to see men in black uniforms patrolling the streets rather than girls with emerald green nail varnish and black stockings. 

But this is not to say that the masses lack a libidinal economy; Sontag is right to remind us that National Socialism doesn't only offer an aesthetic, it also places sex under the sign of a swastika too. And Cabaret crucially hints at how a sexually repressive and puritanical regime on the one hand is profoundly kinky and perverse on the other; the leather boots and gloves providing us with a clue as to the likely predilections of SS officers who continue to figure prominently within the pornographic imagination.

And so, if at one level the film can be read simply as the tale of a failed love affair between Sally and Brian, the violent rise to power of the Nazis and how this influences every aspect of life for all characters - be they German, Jewish, or foreign nationals who just happen to be in Berlin at the time - is the real story. Cabaret demonstrates that fascism compels us to speech and obliges us all to take sides; of how totalitarianism leaves no space for neutrality or political indifference. 

Thus it is that, by the end of the movie, even the Kit Kat Klub is putting on anti-Semitic skits for an audience dominated by uniformed Nazis and their supporters and we are obliged to admit that there's a disturbing (almost symbiotic) relationship between the world of the cabaret and that of the concentration camp; the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death.


See: Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism', The New York Review of Books, (Feb 6, 1975): click here to read online. 

To watch Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles singing 'Life is a Cabaret', click here. 

Lady Chatterley's Daughter

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter, ed. Lawrence Lariar, 

(Popular Library, 1960)

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie is carrying a child of unknown sex. But, of course, within the pornographic imagination, it has to be a girl; a daughter who will inherit her mother's desire for unlicensed pleasure and sexual freedom; a Lawrentian nymphet who would make Nabokov smile.

For the pornographic imagination unfolds within a universe in which, as Susan Sontag points out, everything is conceived as an opportunity to fuck and everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to screw everyone else. This is what makes it a total universe; one with "the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative".

The dream, ultimately, is of a pornotopia in which there are no fixed distinctions between the sexes and no inhibitions can be allowed to endure. Gender, for example, is fluid; something to be performed and perverted. And taboos surrounding things such as incest are simply another means to intensify pleasure and multiply the possibilities of sexual exchange.

Whether the incestuous fantasy of the hot milf and her even hotter daughter was one of Lawrence's, I don't know. Probably not: for Lawrence relates incest to idealism and he is keen to reject and overcome the latter. For Lawrence, incest is just another example of what he terms sex-in-the-head. He writes:

"Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul-de-sac, man proceeds to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal."

Thus, incest is a logical deduction of human reason, filtered through the pornographic imagination. If at first it rouses deep instinctive opposition, this can soon be eroded or persuaded away. But this motivizing of the passional sphere by idealism is, for Lawrence, the great danger facing us today; "the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle".

However, Lawrence also says that we have no choice but to fulfil these ideals in their extremity. In other words, the pornographic nihilism of our culture cannot be ignored, reversed, or transcended; it can only be consummated.

But note, this doesn't mean spending all day surfing internet porn; it means, rather, rediscovering something of the pristine unconscious - and for this we still need our really great artists and poets.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 2, 'The Incest Motive and Idealism'. 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', essay in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009).
 

Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Pornographic Imagination

Poster for the English language version of  
L'Amant de lady Chatterley 
(dir. Marc Allégret, 1955)

Although Lawrence often writes about pornography in pathological terms - as the grey disease of sex-hatred coupled with the yellow disease of dirt lust - he also reluctantly admits that what is obscene to one person is the laughter of genius to another. 

Lawrence thus problematizes and pluralizes the concept in a manner that anticipates Susan Sontag who, forty years later, will argue that any discussion of the subject must begin by acknowledging that there are at least three pornographies; the socio-historical, the psycho-sexual, and, lastly, a minor but interesting modality or convention within the arts.

It's the latter, particularly as it operates within the field of literature, which Sontag examines with her customary intelligence and sophistication, but it's not what I want to discuss here. For I'm not really concerned with showing what it is that makes Lady Chatterley's Lover a legitimate work of art. Rather, I'm interested in how the novel evolved within the contemporary cultural imagination, which is not only pornographic but popular and postmodern in character.

In other words, what fascinates is not the novel's reception or status amongst a handful of scholars, critics, and readers still genuinely interested in Lawrence's uniquely powerful attempt to explore extreme forms of human consciousness and erotic obsession, but the manner in which the book and its famous pair of lovers have become, for the majority of people, ludicrous; two stock characters defined by their organs, rutting in the woods for all eternity.     

Lawrence may have wanted men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly, but, after the orgy, most people simply can't take sex, art, or porn seriously. They smile at the idea that there might lie within these things either some great truth or mortal danger. Indeed, even in Lawrence's own time he was aware that the younger generation would, lacking what he terms real feeling, find Lady Chatterley's Lover old-fashioned, its phallic language, laughable.

And so one suspects that Lawrence anticipated what would befall him and his work and that, in a sense, he offered the figures of Connie and Mellors to fate and circumstance; knowing they'd secure immortality within the pornographic imagination, even as they were repeatedly and sometimes grotesquely transformed within it.  


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity' and 'À Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in À Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961). 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009). 

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part III) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Cover of the 2010 Penguin edition of 
Wilde's 1891 essay 'The Decay of Lying'

The Romantics understood that all poetic mendacity begins in childhood, which is why children should be extravagantly rewarded for their relentless pleasure in confabulations of all kinds; from invisible friends to self-incriminating fibs. 

But adult pretension matters too, for, as Dan Fox has succinctly argued in a valuable piece for 'Frieze Magazine', pretension is a form of pretending - and pretending can be extremely productive.

Thus, in contrast to the cynic's inability to see beyond affectation, charlatanism, and self-aggrandizement in such matters, the idealist perceives an innocent, adventurous and sometimes tragicomic excess of ambition over attainment - something Fox suggestively correlates to Susan Sontag's depiction of camp as a 'sensibility of failed seriousness'. 

The melted wings of Icarus depict the tragic potentiality of the soul's imaginative flights, not a mythological excuse never to test one's creative limits. If we remember that the Greek word for actor was hypokrites, then it becomes apparent how the thirst for such performative slippages between who we are and would like to be, is woven into the West's cultural DNA.

What is needed - I am suggesting - is the pursuit of a strategic (if not satanic) reversal of the hypothetical value of our key terms. Like Brian Eno, we should turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment and move beyond the mistaken assumption that there are authentic individuals and others who simply pretend to be something they're not. As a matter of fact, to fake it, is probably the most creative - and important - thing we might do. For it's the way in which we learn about art and experiment with becoming-other     

Further, if the accusation of pretentiousness essentially rests on the idea of people getting above themselves, it is also not hard to follow Fox into regarding the politics of pretence as implying a kind of informal class surveillance. He is right, I think, to highlight the corrosive snobbery embedded in both historical and contemporary England, with its craven obsessions with rank, accent, and the cynical coalition between sex and social exploitation. 

At the same time, even in toxically class-conscious Britain, we should not make the mistake of confining the codices of class to a socio-economic integer rather than an ontological domain. From whatever walks of life, there is a self-selecting unnatural order of romantics, outlaws, aliens and poseurs - let us call them the constituency of the counterfeit - who refuse the rat-race of reality, whose experimental aesthetics configure the vectors of artistic escape and who understand, in a much over-used phrase, that all style is risk. 

In conclusion, we might do well to remember Wilde's words in 'The Decay of Lying', spoken by the decadent aesthete, Vivian, sworn enemy of the old, the conventional, and the well-informed: 

"Many a young man starts life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful." 

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.