Why I Love Marisa Tomei

Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito

in My Cousin Vinny (1992)

There are doubtless many reasons to love the Brooklyn-born, Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei, but here are a couple which, along with her amusing Seinfeld appearance, secure her a permanent place in my heart.

Firstly, there's her dead-on balls accurate and critically acclaimed performance as Mona Lisa Vito in the 1992 movie My Cousin Vinny (dir. Jonathan Lynn); a legal comedy starring Joe Pesci as recently qualified New York lawyer Vincent Gambini and the late, great Fred Gwynne as Judge Chamberlain Haller of Beechum County, Alabama.

Amongst the many memorable scenes featuring Miss Tomei, perhaps the one for which we are most grateful is the so-called 'biological clock scene' in which she wears a backless, shoulder-padded, floral catsuit. A daring choice of outfit that provides conclusive proof that despite what certain narrow-minded fetishists believe, the catsuit needn't always be black and made of shiny leather or latex in order to work its magic. 

Secondly, there's her not quite so convincing (though massively underrated and sometimes unfairly derided) performance as Cuban refugee and prostitute Dottie Perez, in the 1995 movie The Perez Family (dir. Mira Nair); a romantic comedy-drama based on the 1991 novel of the same title by Christine Bell. 

Marisa Tomei as Dottie Perez in The Perez Family (1995)

No reprise of the floral catsuit in this film, unfortunately, but we do get to watch Miss Tomei pulling on a pair of stockings whilst riding a bus (much to the distraction of the lead male character played by Alfred Molina) and, even more provocatively, we get to see her in a bright orange frock sporting luxuriant underarm hair. 

Again, this is a bold look to go for and tricky to pull off. But Miss Tomei once more succeeds where others would fail and she causes one to wonder why more men aren't partial to maschlagnia and the delights of axillism. For it's puzzling (and slightly disappointing) is it not, that women in the Anglo-American world obsessively shave and deodorize their armpits, thereby neutralizing powerful sites of animal sexuality, whilst in France and many Latin countries men and women show far greater awareness of the body's full erotic potential, including its strongly sensual aromas.            

On the Question of Scottish Independence

David Bowie's unexpected and rather pitiful plea that Scotland stay with us - made at the Brit Awards and voiced via Kate Moss - brought a predictably abusive online reaction from nationalists north of the border, informing him, in short, to fuck off back to Mars and keep his nose out of their affairs.

One might of course simply smile at this and say fair enough. But, as a matter of fact, Bowie is entitled to his view and entitled to express his view, as a Brit and as an Englishman (albeit an Englishman in New York and no longer a UK resident). 

Similarly, I feel entitled to both hold and express a view on the issue of Scottish independence, which is to go to a referendum in September, as a Brit and as an Englishman who also happens (not uncommonly) to have had a Scottish grandmother, even if I'm not entitled to a vote in said referendum.

But what is my view? 

Well, until recently, I would have been fully supportive of any movement that sought independence and wished to proliferate cultural difference, thereby countering the political will to oneness. I shared Lawrence's dream of a future democracy of touch that would dissolve all ideal attempts at universalism and put an end to centralized government. 

Like Lawrence, I thought that a vivid recoil into separateness would see the joyful rebirth of many small states in an infinite variety of forms and that this had to be positive and progressive; that war, for example, was born not of difference, but of the denial of otherness and an obsession with making all people think and act and speak the same beneath a single flag.          

But now I'm having to rethink and revise this view in light of recent world events. Suddenly, the idea of encouraging solidarity and defending political union no longer seems so monstrous or mistaken in the face of grotesque and sinister micro-fascist attempts to rekindle old hatreds and divisions based on racial identity, religious sectarianism, and tribal nationalism.   

  

And suddenly the vitriolic remarks aimed at Bowie no longer seem so innocent or amusing ...

Nor, for the record, do I much care for the fact that my Spanish ex-wife, who has lived and worked in Barcelona for almost twenty years, still has to accept being called a guiri on a daily basis by her Catalan friends - as if she were not only a foreigner, but also a Francoist.    

On the Spectral Rape of the Virgin Mary

Astonishingly, some Christians continue to believe that if they lead modest, conventional lives unblemished by additional sin, then they'll avoid harm and receive God's blessing; or, at the very least, he'll leave them unmolested until they stand before him on the Day of Judgement. 

One might have thought that the shocking story of the girl-child Mary would have taught them differently. For here was a thirteen year old girl who, although born without sin due to her immaculate conception, was nevertheless leading a regular life of moral and social conformity, happily betrothed to a man, Joseph, according to the traditions of her people, and nervously awaiting her wedding night when they would be united as man and wife.

But, having already been selected by God as a broodmare (and doubtlessly groomed by him and his angelic servants throughout her childhood), Mary was never going to be allowed to live a happy, healthy, orthodox life as a Jewish wife and mother. Instead, she would be subject to spectral rape and divine impregnation and obliged to accept her role within a perversely insane religious melodrama:

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
      But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ...'
      When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus."

 - Matthew 1: 18-24.

What Matthew's account wishes to reassure its readers is that Joseph is placated and, effectively, made complicit in the rape of his young wife and the exploitation of her fertility. It says nothing of how Mary felt about events. For an account of this, we have to turn to Luke. He tells us how God also sent the angel Gabriel to visit the virgin Mary and that he greeted her as the special plaything of the Lord:

"Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus ...'
      'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?'
     The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.'"

- Luke 1: 29-38

     
Recognizing that she has no choice in the matter, Mary gives what might be regarded as consent: 'I am the Lord's servant. Let it be as you have said.' Only then, having got her agreement to be fucked, does Gabriel depart. But her consent is clearly rendered null and void given her age and the situation of extreme duress or coercion under which it was given.

It surely doesn't take much to imagine how, despite her resignation, Mary remains distressed; she is clearly agreeing to act in a manner that she would not normally act were she genuinely free to choose. If it's difficult to say no to sexual predators in positions of power and authority, it's virtually impossible to say no to a god: ask Leda. But yes doesn't always mean yes and all the pure white lilies in the world don't make it so.             

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.