Lovely Lesbians

 Photo of June Miller by Brassaï (c. 1933)

Henry Miller's posthumously published novel Crazy Cock, was originally entitled Lovely Lesbians - this with reference to his beautiful second wife, June, and her lover, the somewhat mysterious figure of Jean Kronski, fictionally portrayed by Miller in the above work as the arts-loving and rather dapper dyke, Vanya.

Miller met June in 1923, when she was still only 21 and working as a dancer in New York. He immediately fell in love and abandoned his first wife and child in order to be with her. They married in the summer of the following year and their relationship is central to much of his work, including the two Tropic books and his semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion.     

In October 1926, at June's insistence, Jean moved in with them. This allowed her to cultivate an intensely close relationship with the latter and she seemed to enjoy Jean's affections more than her husband's, much to Miller's chagrin. Not surprisingly, things soon came to a head and in April 1927 June and Jean left for Paris together.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out very well for the lovely lesbians and June returned to her old life with Miller in New York just three months later. As for Jean Kronski - if that was in fact her name - she is thought to have committed suicide in an insane asylum c.1930.

Now, I'm no expert on Miller, so I don't really know what he meant by the phrase lovely lesbians - one suspects he was using it in a sardonic manner, as I can't imagine he was entirely happy about the affair between his wife and Miss Kronski (though, that said, he didn't seem to mind later sharing June with Anaïs Nin, who was as sexually and creatively obsessed with her as Miller himself) - but it appeals very much because, for me, there is always something lovely about lesbians, wherever they are on the Sapphic spectrum; from the most feminine of lipstick lesbians, to the most butch or bullish of dykes.      

    

Does saying this make me a malesbian perchance? Not really. For this is a problematic term, for several reasons. Let's just say it demonstrates that I'm very much oriented towards women, feel happier in their company than in the company of men, and that Torpedo the Ark is an openly feminist blog which shares the view subscribed to by American poet and activist Audre Lorde that feminism fundamentally emerges out of a lesbian consciousness, whether or not one actually sleeps with women.

Cocksuckers and Communists

As everybody knows, the witch-hunts in Cold War America during the early 1950s, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, were not directed against individuals who liked to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, but those who were - or were suspected of being - communists or left-leaning fellow-travelers.

But what is rather less well known is that McCarthyism was not merely a paranoid political response to the perceived Soviet infiltration of the US, but also manifested a phobic concern with homosexuality as an equally threatening and related form of subversive deviance.

Thus it was that the Second Red Scare was also tinted with lavender. In fact, the so-called Lavender Scare resulted in far more people being persecuted and hounded out of their jobs (or worse) than the more widely reported anti-communist campaign.

Both queers and reds were regarded as profoundly Un-American - that is to say, anti-God, anti-family, and anti-wholesomeness or what we might term apple-pie morality. They were believed to be actively conspiring to bring about a revaluation of sexual and cultural values and the overthrow of government.

For McCarthy and his supporters, someone such as Harry Hay was virtually the embodiment of evil and the link between political radicalism and perversion was proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. On one occasion McCarthy even brazenly announced to reporters that anyone who opposed him had to be either a communist or a cocksucker.

Happily, those of a lavender persuasion not only survived this ugly period in American history, but were strengthened by it. For ironically, the forerunners of today's LGBTQ movement came out of the McCarthy era; the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, for example, followed by the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955.

As for old Joe, he died a broken man aged forty-eight, in 1957, from acute hepatitis (exacerbated by alcoholism), having been censured by the Senate three years earlier and seen his power and influence dramatically wane. As President Eisenhower is believed to have quipped, McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm. 


Notes

See: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare, (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 

A feature-length documentary by Josh Howard based on the above work is presently in post-production.

The Case of Leopold and Loeb

The shocking case of Leopold and Loeb continues to haunt the cultural (and criminal) imagination - not least of all when one has just re-watched Hitchcock's 1948 film, Rope, which was an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play of the same title, inspired by their sorry tale.
    
For those unfamiliar with the case, the salient facts are these: Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were highly gifted students at the University of Chicago, from extremely privileged backgrounds. In an attempt to demonstrate their intellectual and moral superiority, they set out to commit the perfect crime. This involved the kidnap and murder of fourteen year-old Bobby Franks in May 1924. 

Leopold, born in 1904, was the son of a wealthy Jewish family who had emigrated from Germany. A child prodigy with an outrageous IQ who spoke several languages fluently, he had by the time of the murder already completed his undergraduate degree at Chicago with honours and was planning to study law at Harvard. His partner in crime - and lover - Richard Loeb, born in 1905, was also exceptionally bright. Despite this, he was regarded by his tutors as lazy and overly interested in pulp fiction. 

Although the two boys knew each other whilst growing up in the same affluent neighbourhood, their relationship only really blossomed at the University of Chicago; particularly after discovering that they shared a mutual love of crime stories and an interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Leopold was particularly fascinated by the latter's concept of the Übermensch and imagined himself as someone destined to pass beyond good and evil. In a letter to Loeb, he wrote that superior individuals are, on account of certain inherent qualities, exempted from the laws which govern the lives of ordinary men.

Putting theory into practice, the two friends engaged in a series of petty crimes in order to demonstrate their contempt for and rejection of bourgeois society. Emboldened by their success at evading capture, they progressed to ever more serious acts, including arson. Disappointed, however, with the lack of media coverage they felt their crimes deserved, they decided to up the stakes in order to capture public attention and confirm their status as superior individuals: thus the killing of Bobby Franks, a second cousin of Loeb's described by Leopold as a 'cocky little son of a bitch'.

Unfortunately, the so-called crime of the century was solved by police in just a matter of days. Leopold and Loeb were arrested and both confessed during interrogation (although each blamed the other for delivering the fatal blows to the head of the young victim with a chisel). Both men also declared that they were motivated by a sense of philosophical investigation; this was murder as an intellectual exercise or moral-aesthetic experiment - as justifiable, said Leopold to his lawyer, as the killing of a beetle by an entomologist.

At the end of their month long trial, both were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, plus an additional 99 years for the kidnapping. The two maintained their intimate relationship behind bars until Loeb was brutally slashed with a razor in the showers by another inmate, James Day, in January 1936. Although taken directly to the prison hospital, his life couldn't be saved. Leopold was allowed to wash his friend's body as a final act of affection.     

Following this incident, Leopold went on to become a model prisoner and he made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary before his release in 1958. He then went on to become a model citizen, working in healthcare and social services and studying bird-life as he searched for a halo in Puerto Rico. He died in 1971, aged 66.

The Franks murder has since inspired many works of fiction, film, and theatre. I think what really interests about the case of Leopold and Loeb is also what most depresses: when you strip away the lavender trappings and philosophical pretension all you are left with is a rather squalid act that demonstrates what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. In other words, for all the sensational and transgressive aspects of murder, it results finally in a feeling of numbness and terminal boredom.

One might have hoped and expected something else, something more, from such gifted young men. Why do so many self-confessed Nietzscheans disappoint?     

The Joy of Buttons - A Guest Post by Christian Michel

I

When the success of Lolita allowed him to live in the luxury he had been accustomed to in his childhood before the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Nabokov complained after the long-serving and much-loved lift man at the Montreux Palace was replaced by an automated system of buttons.

Nabokov doesn't elaborate, but his concern seems unrelated to the misery of unemployment or the human cost of further advances in machine technology. Rather, it was more to do with his own desire for recognition as a respected patron of the hotel. Buttons, alas, do not meet this need.

The lift operator - educated, well-mannered, and at ease around the rich and powerful - was, if not quite a gentleman in his own right, nevertheless a true professional who understood perfectly how society is founded upon mutual respect and recognition between its members, even across divisions of class. The sordid topic of coin does not - or at least should not - be allowed to disrupt this.      

Certainly in the well-ordered environment of a grand hotel, members of staff are not regarded as abject inferiors and whilst they must certainly not be overly-familiar or forward, neither are they expected to be obsequious or servile. It's a question of balance; of being relaxed, but not informal or discourteous. This, in turn, impels the guests of the hotel to be polite and, hopefully, generous with tips. Thus all actors in this disciplined artificial utopia perform in accordance with social expectation and custom.  

Of course, this social model may not appeal very much to a modern, democratic sensibility. But isn't it more human and, indeed, more humane than a world wherein we are all required to push our own elevator buttons? 

II

Having said this, perhaps Nabokov and those who subscribe to an idealised world of masters and servants miss something crucial: we moderns love pressing buttons and interacting with technology and that is why the machine has triumphed and the old order given way.

Perhaps our daily use of and reliance upon mighty machines and smart devices has somewhat dulled the pleasure, but imagine our ancestors joy at realising that they could suddenly achieve miracles at the touch of a button, or the flick of a switch. To get anything done at all used to require hard labour and dirty, dangerous, tedious hours of endless toil. And the result was often hardly worth the effort!

It is only after the industrial revolution ushers in the Age of the Machine and, later, information-technology, that work becomes honourable and life becomes more than merely a short, brutal form of meagre existence that is scratched out from the dirt on a day-to-day basis. What is more beautiful than being able to press a button in order to power up and light up the world? Or indeed, destroy it. 

Nabokov neglected or chose to ignore this aspect. And so, whilst I agree with him that individuals need the recognition and respect of their fellows, we don't want to be deprived of the joy, the convenience, and the privilege of pressing buttons.


Christian Michel is a London-based, French political theorist and activist; un homme de lettres et un homme de la ville. He teaches courses on economics and is regularly asked to speak at international events as a leading figure within the libertarian movement. Christian also organizes a twice-monthly salon at his West London home known as the 6/20 Club and facilitates the Café Philo at the Institut français on Saturday mornings.      

Christian appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind permission to revise and edit - and not merely reproduce - the above text which has previously appeared elsewhere in a longer, somewhat different version.   

Ash to Ashes (In Memory of a Pagan Philosopher)

Steve Ash, the writer and pagan activist who was well-known in occult and counter-cultural circles in London, is dead.

That's not a sentence I expected to be writing, or take any pleasure in so doing. I wouldn't even have known of his passing in the autumn of last year were it not for the kind dedication of a recent book review made by Mr Tim Pendry who, like me, had a somewhat ambiguous, on-off, up-and-down friendship with the deceased. 

I knew Mr Ash via Treadwell's - Christina Harrington's wondrous bookshop - and for a brief period in 2009 we were fairly regular correspondents. He had an MA in philosophy from King's College London and was interested in questions to do with mind and consciousness from both an academic and an esoteric perspective. He also wrote on a wide variety of other subjects including the Knights Templar, Queer Theory, and the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

I can't ever remember agreeing with him on anything and thought that he was fundamentally mistaken on pretty much everything (particularly his reading of Nietzsche), but I always admired his ambition as a writer and his populist touch; here was a man who was unafraid to place the multiverse in a nutshell. 

The last time I heard from him was a couple of years ago when he left a comment on a post written on this blog (see How Even Witches Lose Their Charm). Ever-provocative and desirous of conflict, he accused me of being a crypto-Christian. But, now, in the circumstances, I suppose I can forgive him for this final erroneous insult. 

I'm told he has a loyal following and I'm sure they, as well as his friends and family, will miss him greatly. I won't, but wanted nevertheless to take this opportunity to write something in his memory. 

The Charm of Kink (with Reference to the Case of Mrs. Peel)

The charm of kink is that it has charm. And the nature of this appealing quality is camp.

In other words, whilst it would be wrong to set up a false dichotomy and seek to salvage kink from a more problematically perverse aesthetic with origins deep in the pornographic imagination, it is certainly more playful than pathological; a kind of frivolous form of fetishism in which stylization and mannerism matters far more than actual sexual activity. 

The kinky individual delights in props, costumes, and role playing as pleasures in their own right and not simply as methods of enhancing orgasm and camp perversity is ultimately more about fashion, fun, and theatre than fucking in dreadful earnest which, if it does take place, does so off-stage, as all forms of obscenity should. It relies upon (and is happier with) suggestiveness rather than anything overt; a sophisticated and teasing combination of imagination, irony and innuendo.  

This is perfectly illustrated by the case of Mrs. Peel, played by Diana Rigg in sixties spy-fi series The Avengers. Mrs. Peel is the personification of kinky charm and English cool, whether she's wearing her trademark leather catsuit, fancy dress, or groovy get-ups created by John Bates and, later, Alun Hughes, to emphasise her youthful, contemporary character.    

Perhaps her most notorious outfit was the Queen of Sin costume, worn in the most viewed and much discussed episode entitled 'A Touch of Brimstone'.

As can be seen in the photo accompanying this text, the Queen of Sin costume consists of a black embroidered corset laced tightly at the back and cut straight across the breast. The corset comes with a barely-there, see-through black lace micro-mini that just about reaches the top of her naked thighs and fails to conceal the black satin high-cut bikini briefs worn beneath. The look is complemented with a spiked leather collar (complete with leash), evening gloves, stiletto heeled boots (also back-lacing) and, somewhat lamely, a live snake.     

For many fans of the show, the moment that Mrs. Peel strips away a long black cloak and stands revealed in her Queen of Sin costume constitutes a real highpoint or kinky consummation of some kind. It certainly makes Steed's eyes - and one suspects not just his eyes - bulge with surprise and delight.

But for me, as for the censors at the time, with its explicit visual references to the world of BDSM, 'A Touch of Brimstone' goes too far; the cat is let out of the bag so to speak. I prefer Mrs. Peel kept under wraps and think she is at her most seductive when she manages to combine the perverse with the prim and proper; the deviant with the demure.

Notes

'A Touch of Brimstone', episode 21 of series 4 of The Avengers, written by Brian Clemens and directed by James Hill, was first shown (with cuts) in the UK in February 1966. It was deemed unsuitable for broadcast in the US. As well as starring Patrick Macnee as Steed and Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel, it also co-starred Peter Wyngarde as The Honourable John Cleverly Cartney, the camp libertine and aristocratic anarchist who is the villain of the piece.

Those who are interested may care to go to the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmxe3ueE9jU

Sottorealism: Beneath Contempt ...?

Photo of Aris Kalaizis (2010)
kalaizis.com

Bataille's philosophical and political critique of the elevated, the ideal, and, indeed, of the very prefix sur (as in surrealism) remains, eighty-five years on, pretty much valid and legitimate as far as I can see. He's right to stay - as far as is possible - low down and dirty and to posit the world of things upon a base materialism; right to value those old moles who burrow under the surface and subvert those systems that look to the heavens where angels fly and eagles dare. 

Any revolution or art movement that involves soaring over the everyday with contempt led by those who suffer from an Icarian complex and secretly desire their own downfall, or pathologically delight in the thought of worldly destruction, deserves to be met with suspicion, derision, and contempt. 

But what of sottorealism? Is it a weird form of speculative materialism that interestingly counters the idealistic pretension of surrealism; or is it merely a dubious postmodern return to symbolism? 

The term, sottorealism, was coined by American art critic Carol Strickland in a 2006 essay to describe what she recognized as a new aesthetic approach in the work of Greco-German artist Aris Kalaizis; one which, like surrealism, values dreams and unconscious forces, but attempts to crawl beneath the surface of a reality invested and shaped by such, rather than rise above it. By manifesting these numinous realities in his work (after a lengthy process that first involves model building and photography), Kalaizis hopes to create canvases that are zones of convergence between the seen and unseen.  

We could also describe this practice as mythical realism - a term that the poet Paul-Henri Campbell likes to use with reference to his own work and it's surely not coincidental that the latter has written extensively and enthusiastically about the art of his friend Kalaizis.

According to Campbell, Kalaizis works with the immateriality of boundaries and probes the liminal joints of reality in a unique manner, viewing the world with his inner-eye and demonstrating how the creative process doesn't simply involve skill and toil, but opening oneself to a paramount mystery by which, I suppose, he means some form of divine (or demonic) guidance.

Now, forgive me if I'm being crass or overly hasty here, but doesn't this sound like a return to the language of the old religiosity or metaphysics with which art seems to invariably entangle itself?

Again, it's surely not coincidental that Campbell has studied theology and that Kalaizis's recently completed and monumental canvas, The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew or the Double Martyrdom (2014/15) presently hangs in the Imperial Cathedral, Frankfurt. It might be that Kalaizis, a self-confessed atheist, maintains a critical and ironic stance towards organized religion, but something seems to whisper here of what Bataille would describe as a predilection for values and a call for some kind of spiritual reinvestment of contemporary society.

In sum, whilst I admire the technical brilliance of his work and concede that looking beneath is something different from looking beyond, I can't help thinking that Kalaizis wants desperately to locate the miraculous beneath the mundane and is unfortunately not quite enough of a dirt-digger to be a true mole.  


Notes

Georges Bataille, 'The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 32-44.

Paul-Henri Campbell (ed.), Sottorealism, (Imhof-Ed., Petersberg, 2014). 

See also the documentary about Kalaizis entitled Sotto, by Ferdinand Richter (2014): click here.

Pagan Magazine (1983-92)

Pagan: the Magazine of Blood-Knowledge
Issue I (1983)

For some, the way to move beyond the ruins of punk was via a colourful and poppy new romanticism. For others it involved wearing all black and the creation of a queer gothic sensibility; or power dressing for a job in the city and a shameless embrace of Thatcherism. 

For me, however, the natural progression was towards a post-punk primitivism inspired by - amongst other things - D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse, McLaren and Westwood's Nostalgia of Mud, Killing Joke's Fire Dances, and a second-hand copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology.     

And so, in 1983, I created Pagan: the Magazine of Blood-Knowledge ...

For nearly ten years I single-handedly wrote, illustrated, photocopied, and distributed the above giving full-range to my various obsessions, including those that were not only literary and aesthetic in origin, but esoteric and political in character as the magazine veered dangerously from poetry, art, and nature worship towards the black hole of Nazi occultism.

This is not to argue that the latter is always the fatal outcome of the former. But, in aggressively confronting Occidental reason and Christian morality with its absolute Other and in promoting a pessimistic vitalism tied to an anti-modern, anti-democratic politics of cultural despair, one inevitably runs the risk of encountering and thence succumbing to the temptation of fascism. Habermas is not wrong to argue this.    

On the other hand, just as Dionysian philosophy can lead you into the abyss, so too can it lead you out and I would say that it was ultimately Nietzsche and those thinkers often derided as postmodernists - not Jürgen Habermas - who helped me see that irony, indifference, and incredulity are preferable to the faith, fanaticism, and fervour that I valorised and called for in my younger days.

I can still look back at Pagan Magazine with some pride and amusement. But I have to admit there are also feelings of shame, embarrassment, and even horror. Anyway, for the record - and for those few readers who may be interested - here's an index of the issues:


I: Dark Sex (1983)
II: Pan (1983)
III: Pagan Poetry (1983)
IV: The Cult of the Plumed Serpent (1984)
V: Pure Sex (1984)
VI: Rejuvenate! (1985)
VII: The Priest of Love (1985/86)
VIII: Erotic Art (1986)
IX: Once Upon a Time (On Folk and Fairy Tales) (1986)
X: Death to Democracy - Long Live the Folkish State! (1986)
XI: Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf (1986)
XII: The Ithyphallic Issue (1986)
XIII: We Shall Remain Faithful ... (1987)
XIV: Women (1987)
XV: And Time is Running Out ... (1987)
XVI: The Summer Edition (1987)
XVII: Transformation (1987)
XVIII: European Folk Dress Fashion Special (1987)
XIX: Poetry for the New Age (1987)
XX: Killing Joke: A New Day (1987)
XXI: The Tarot (1987)
XXII: Alchemy and the Transference Phenomenon (1988)
XXIII: Astrology (1988)
XXIV: On Magick and Witchcraft (1988)
XXV: Retrospective: the History of Pagan Magazine 1983-88 (1988)
XXVI: An Illustrated Miscellany of Curious and Interesting Items (1988)
XXVII: The Dead Kennedys Issue (1988)
XXVIII: Expressions (1988)
XXIX: The Green Issue (1989)
XXX: Farewell to the 80s ... And Welcome to the 1990s (1989)
XXXI: Modigliani: Le Peintre Maudit (1990)
XXXII: Vincent Van Gogh (1990)
XXXIII: Vive Picasso! (1990)
XXXIV: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: On the Life and Work of William Blake (1990)
XXXV: Dreams, Nightmares, Visions (1990)
XXXVI: The Pagan and Occult Roots of National Socialism (1991)
XXXVII: Adolf Hitler (1991)
XXXVIII: The New Order (1991)*
XXXIX: Blood and Soil: Race, Nationality, and Eco-Mysticism (1991)*
XL: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pagan: The True Confessions of Stephen Alexander (1991/92)*
XLI: New Poems and The History of Pagan Magazine (Part II): 1988-1991 (1992)


Note: The issues marked with an asterisk were not completed and so never circulated. Three further issues were also semi-assembled after issue XLI: one on the figure of the prostitute, one on Nietzsche, and, finally, one entitled 'Bits' that was a celebration of fragments and leftovers. 

The Object is Poetics

Jean Dubuffet, Personnage Hilare 

(Portrait de Francis Ponge), 1947

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 

In a text entitled The Object is Poetics, Francis Ponge correctly points out that the relationship between man and object is not at all limited to possession or use. Our soul is transitive, writes Ponge. By which he means it needs "an object that affects it". For man is a curious body "whose centre of gravity is not in itself". 

We have our being, in other words, in the infinite number of things outside ourselves. There are thus as many ways of being as there are objects and relationships. Arguably, the artist understands the multiple and decentred nature of man best of all; understands that the world is not only populated with other human beings, but with birds, beasts and flowers - and, indeed, with objects belonging to the inanimate world:       

"The world is peopled with objects. On its shores, we see their infinite crowd, their gathering, even though they are indistinct and vague. Nevertheless, that is enough to reassure us. Because we also feel that all of them, according to our fancy, one after the other, may become our point of docking, the bollard upon which we rest."

But, in order for this to be true, we must choose true objects, says Ponge. By which he means real objects that exist as such, with their own weight, mind independently. All too frequently we become enthralled by our own ideas: "Most often, man only grasps his emanations, his ghosts. Such are subjective objects". 

These pseudo-objects endlessly sing the same dreary song - the song of a triumphant humanity. True objects, however, exist outside of our own thoughts and desires and are not merely decorative or background features. They emit a black noise, inaudible and alien ... 

See: Francis Ponge, 'The Object is Poetics', in The Sun Placed in the Abyss, trans. Serge Gavronsky, (SUN Books, 1977). 

Note: this post forms part of a longer (as yet untitled) project on Ponge, poetry, and object-oriented philosophy being worked on in collaboration with Simon Solomon.  

   

Why I Love Richard Avedon

Selfie in the Manner of Richard Avedon 

Stephen Alexander (2015)

New York has been home to many great photographers. But perhaps the greatest of them all remains Richard Avedon whose magnificent portraits continue to resonate within our cultural imagination.

Like Warhol, whom he famously photographed alongside members of the Factory in 1969, Avedon understood how art, fashion, sex, and commerce have an intimate and sophisticated relationship within modern society.

Further, Avedon knew that the non-essential essence of these things is revealed not at some underlying ideal level, but in the accessories, poses, and small personal gestures of his models and can thus easily be captured on catwalk, canvas, film, and face.

He wasn't interested in revealing the hoary soul, but fascinated rather with how photography creates profoundly stylish images that grant access to the greatest of all truths (which is the truth of masks):

"My photographs don't go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces."   

This remark alone makes me love him dearly and recognise Avedon as a comrade-in-arms in the never-ending struggle against depth and interiority.