In Memory of My Father

John S. Hall (1912-2000) 

On June 6th my thoughts turn to my father, who died on this date seventeen years ago.

Here he is looking quite dapper at the end of the War, in October 1945, still a relatively young man in his early-thirties, though doubtless this was regarded as mature middle-age back then.

Fuck knows what he's thinking about - if anything.

Perhaps my mother, who would have been nineteen when this picture was taken; a picture he signed on the back and gave to her, so he must have been relatively pleased with the likeness. Possibly it was taken on his birthday, though I don't know that any more than I know where the photo was taken or by whom.       

One presumes it was taken in Newcastle, his hometown. For he and my mother only moved south, to London, after they were married in 1948. But, again, I can't say for sure. As far as I'm aware, my family history isn't full of dark secrets. But it lacks transparency and documentation and my father hardly ever spoke about his past - which is a shame, as, by the time I was born, that was the greater part of his life.

Having said that, I've always been grateful not to be overburdened with memories and free from extended family ties; to feel neither love nor loyalty to any relatives or ancestors. I think never having met any of my grandparents, for example, helped me as a philosopher to feel untimely and experience something of the joy of orphans who gain through loss.

But still, it's nice to recall my father at least once a year and thereby allow a little sentimentality to creep into this blog as a counter-theoretical form of discourse which, as Barthes says, is a necessary transgression that serves to prevent writing from becoming too puritanical (i.e. lacking in the warmth and softness of feeling that is often responsible for the pleasure of the text).  

Notes on Vaginal Vespatherapy

I think even Gwyneth Paltrow - a passionate advocate of apitherapy and steam-cleaned sex organs - might possibly raise an eyebrow at the idea of inserting ground wasp nest into her cunt. Indeed, even my friend Hotaru, who has a real fascination with formicophilia, said she found the practice troubling (and this is a girl who literally likes to have ants in her pants).

But this is the latest all-natural treatment being marketed at women looking to rejuvenate (i.e. tighten and freshen up) their vaginas. Of course, there's no scientfic evidence to back up the claims for the miraculous properties of manjankani. But, even as I write, some poor woman somewhere is doubtless applying crushed oak apple to her intimate regions in the mistaken belief it will pep up her sex life and eliminate embarrassing odours, when, in fact, it's more likely to have serious health implications. 

Thus it is that Canadian gynaecologist and blogger, Dr Jen Gunter, has raised concerns - warning women that it can result in a dry - not merely tight - vagina which can make penetration painful and increase the risk of tissue damage. This supposedly ancient and traditional method of pussy enhancement can also destroy the natural bacteria that help keep the vagina healthy.

She concludes her piece with a professional tip that is surely worth passing on: if it hurts, burns, or irritates when you apply something to the lining of your vagina, then it's probably best not to do it. Care for your mucosa girls! Don't insert random objects or astringent pastes into your body without at least checking with your local pharmacist or GP first.

And if anyone tries to persuade you otherwise, send 'em away with a flea in their ear ...


Notes

Oak apples (or oak galls) are abnormal growths commonly found on many species of oak tree that form when gall wasps lay single eggs in leaf buds. Reacting to chemicals released by the developing wasp larva, the trees produce hard, protective balls of bark, 2-4 cm in size, which the larva then feeds off until ready to emerge as a fully-formed insect.  

Dr Jen Gunter's post - 'Don't put ground up wasp nest in your vagina' (May 16, 2017) - can be found on her blog by clicking here.

Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird)

Dead Baby Bird 
(on chrome yellow background with daisy) 
Stephen Alexander 2017

You know what it is to die alone,
Baby bird!

To have fallen from the nest, unfledged,
Dragon-faced and flipper-winged.

Once your tiny beak-mouth chirruped
With bold reptile defiance, indomitable.

Now maggots rend your unfeathered flesh.

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. 

Paint Your Wagon: Civilization and Its Discontents

Paint Your Wagon (1969) is a 22-carat, rip-roaring musical comedy set in a mining community - No Name City - during the period of the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). Directed by Joshua Logan, the film was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 stage show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and starred Lee Marvin as Ben Rumson, Clint Eastwood as Pardner and Jean Seberg as Elizabeth.

Despite its faults - and it's more ponderous and overblown than it is riotous if I'm being completely honest (which helps explain its failure at the box office) - it's a movie that I love very much.

And what makes me love it is the anarchic, amoral, hobo-punk spirit that the film romanticises and which is embodied in Marvin's character Ben Rumson; a spirit that Pardner - a farmer at heart, looking to settle on a little patch of land rather than a genuine prospector and pioneer always prepared to take a risk and move on - in collusion with Elizabeth - a woman who wants nothing more than the security of a log cabin that she can call home and a loyal, hard-working husband to provide for her - are determined to exorcise in the name of clean living and respectable society.      

This ongoing tension between civilization and its discontents is the essentially Freudian theme at the heart of the movie. As Ben Rumson points out, those who desire the taming of Man take every opportunity to coordinate the natural world and control freedom of movement:

"They civilize what's pretty by puttin' up a city / Where nothin' that's pretty can grow
They muddy up the winter and civilize it into / A place too uncivilized even for snow
The first thing you know ...
They civilize left, they civilize right / Till nothing is left, till nothing is right
They civilize freedom till no one is free / No one except, by coincidence me"

- 'The First Thing You Know' (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner)

Writing in his seminal text - first published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) - Freud discusses how conflict arises whenever the individual's quest for naked liberty bangs up against the walls and institutions erected by a civilization that demands social conformity, even if it involves a violent repression of the instincts (the latter are always thought of negatively by Freud; as desires derived from and representative of the death drive which threaten the greater good of the community).

Thus, for Freud, as for Pardner and Elizabeth, the unrestricted happiness of men like Ben Rumson - drinking, gambling, fighting, whoring - cannot be allowed to continue; it has to be subject to a system of law and order and enforced with the threat of severe punishment. In other words, if you want to have all the benefits of living in society - education, healthcare, honest work, indoor plumbing, home-cooking etc. - then you just have to accept that certain forms of pleasure are no longer permissible.

And if you don't want these things and refuse to accept any restrictions on your freedom and happiness, then, well, you'll just have to paint your wagon and get out of town - not knowing where you're going, uncertain when you'll arrive, but careless of consequences and pleased simply to be on the way, following your dreams with a song in your heart ...


Click here to play Wand'rin Star, the number one UK single taken from the soundtrack of the film, sung in his own unique manner by Lee Marvin. 

See: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey, (The Hogarth Press / Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1969). 

Why I Love the Seated Ballerina

Jeff Koons: Seated Ballerina (NYC May 2017)

I've long been an admirer of Jeff Koons, one of three American artists I remember Malcolm telling me about in the mid-1980s (the other two being Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring). And his giant new inflatable figure - Seated Ballerina - temporarily installed in the heart of NYC's Rockefeller Center, doesn't disappoint.

In fact, it's such a joyous piece - a young dancer adjusting her blue ballet shoes and quietly preparing for the performance of a lifetime - that one feels the city of Manchester would benefit enormously were it to be installed in St. Ann's Square as a permanent memorial for the lives lost in the recent atrocity, affirming as it does all the purpose, promise and potential embodied in youth.      

Art isn't, of course, the solution to terror or religious fundamentalism. But, in the face of Islamofascism, we certainly need the gaiety of artistic creation; the inoculation into the body politic of playful serenity (to paraphrase Simon Solomon, if I may). 


Note: the 45ft inflatable discussed here is a version of smaller, mirror-polished stainless steel piece with transparent colour coating, which featured as part of the Antiquity series of works (2010-15): click here for more details. It was inspired by a previously little-known porcelain figure by the Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnikrup, entitled Ballerina Lenochka.

A Brief Note on the Conceptual Penis Hoax

Andy Warhol: Penis (1977)   

Peter Boghossian is a professor of philosophy at Portland State University; James Lindsay, a prolific author with a Ph. D. in mathematics. Both are prominent figures on the so-called New Atheism scene.

It's surprising, therefore, that they don't have better things to do than publish a fake paper in a little known journal, making the mock-argument that the penis should not be viewed primarily as a male sex organ but as a social construct, in order to expose how gender studies is, in their view, founded upon the almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.     

Unfortunately, as Ruth Graham points out, what Boghossian and Lindsay’s limp hoax really exposed was their own obsessions and phallic anxiety; "a perusal of their writing online reveals a persistent discontent with the supposed uselessness and hypocrisy of women’s studies and gender studies departments, and feminism more broadly".

This sniggering, sneering, disrespectful and dismissive approach to disciplines outside their knowledge is shameful I think. For as Graham says, anyone who has concerns with the sometimes bonkers but more often brilliant work being carried out by theorists working within the above areas is free to critically engage with it; whilst those who are convinced that such work is completely worthless can simply look away.

There's no need to be such a massive dick about it ...


Notes 

Ruth Graham, 'Phallic Anxiety (Probably!) Drives Male Academics to Execute Lame Hoax About Gender Studies', Slate, (25 May, 2017): click here to read.

Readers interested in Boghossian and Lindsay's spoof paper - 'The conceptual penis as a social construct' - published in Cogent Social Sciences (May, 2017) under the pseudonyms Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle, can click here (taken down by the journal, it has nevertheless been web archived). 

Interestingly - and somewhat ironically - whilst the above paper is indeed nonsense, it's central proposition is perfectly valid and worthy of analysis; the penis isn't merely a biological organ; it has a wide range of cultural, political, and philosophical significance (particularly when conceived in terms of the phallus). 

Stupid Is As Stupid Does (Notes on the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

I noticed long ago that one of the classic hallmarks or tell-tale signs of stupidity is the failure of a subject to recognise or own up to their own intellectual limitations and to arrogantly believe that they are in fact well-informed and of above average intelligence.  

But what I didn't know, until recently, is that this mix of cognitive misconception and conceit has been closely studied by psychologists and described in detail: the Dunning-Kruger effect refers precisely to the phenomenon wherein idiots cannot accurately evaluate their own capacities or knowledge and suffer from illusions of superiority due to their inability to see what is patently obvious to everyone else; i.e., that they're dimwits.   

Interestingly, the corollary to the D-K effect indicates that gifted people of high ability tend to underestimate or downplay their own competence and mistakenly presume that others can do what they do just as well and just as easily. In other words, intelligent people are often self-effacing and overly generous in their expectations.   

Of course, the fact that fools are often smug and superior in their foolishness had been observed long before Dunning and Kruger formulated their theory in 1999. Poets, philosophers, playwrights and even naturalists such as Darwin have commented on the fact that ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.  

But it's Bertrand Russell's remark that has particular resonance today for secularism in the face of religious fundamentalism: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

See: Kruger, Justin and Dunning, David; 'Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments', in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77, No. 6, (Dec 1999), pp. 1121-1134. Click here to read.

See also Bertrand Russell; 'The Triumph of Stupidity', in the second volume of Mortals and Others: American Essays, 1931-1935 (Routledge, 1998), where he argues that the essential cause of trouble in the modern world is that "the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Click here to read. 

This post was suggested by Dr Andy Greenfield to whom I am grateful.

Intelligent Atheists Contra Instinctive Religious Breeders

According to the latest research, religious worshippers are more instinctive but less intelligent than atheists. For whilst the faith of the former is rooted in innate, typically fixed patterns of behavioural response, the cleverness of the latter signifies an overcoming of such biological automatism and increased reliance upon the cerebral cortex and social learning.

This is not to say that atheists have a more complex neural system than believers - and it doesn't explain why they tend to be better-looking and make superior lovers - but it does suggest that they use their grey matter more.        

The theory put forward by Edward Dutton and Dimitri Van der Linden - the so-called Intelligence-Mismatch Association Model - attempts to explain why numerous studies over recent decades have consistently found a significant negative relation between intelligence and religiosity. It would make sense, say the authors, if faith is considered an evolved domain and intelligence the ability to transcend primitive instincts and to think in a rational manner that allows us to problem solve and freely develop our curiosity without falling to our knees and calling upon deities.  

However, although advantageous in many ways, evolution in no way ensures the survival of intelligence. Indeed, whereas smart individuals have successfully curtailed their fertility, peoples who still instinctively believe in a god have maintained high rates of reproduction. Thus, whilst atheists have plenty of ideas, true believers have lots of children.   

Partly, this is because the latter reject contraception on theo-superstitious grounds. But it's also because a people who still believe in a god ultimately still believe in themselves and in their right both to sacrifice and to breed. One might say they venerate their deities and express their will to power by exercising their loins, rather than their minds (and are often encouraged to do so as a religious duty).

This being the case, as a godless and childless Nietzschean one also has legitimate concerns for the future ...


See: Dutton, E. and Van der Linden, D.; 'Why is Intelligence Negatively Associated with Religiousness?', in Evolutionary Psychological Science (2017).

See also: Michael Blume; 'The Reproductive Advantage of Religiosity', a lecture given at the Explaining Religion Conference, Bristol University (2010): click here to read a published version.

Towards a Queer Ethology 3: When You Feel A Little P-Pervish, P-P-P Pick Up a Penguin

 Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae)

When constructing a queer ethology concerned primarily with aberrant sexual behaviour, one has to mention the Adélie penguin. For not only are they among the most southerly distributed of all seabirds - found along the entire Antarctic coast - but they are also one of the most depraved. 

Just how pervy they are became quickly apparent to George Murray Levick, a scientist with the famous Scott Antarctic Expedition (1910-13). An experienced naturalist, Levick nevertheless found the sight of young male penguins engaging in auto-eroticism, fucking with other males, sexually coercing and abusing young chicks, and attempting to mate with the corpses of dead females, profoundly disturbing.

To be fair, when he'd signed on for the trip he was simply hoping to learn something about breeding habits; he wasn't expecting to witness acts of avian masturbation, homosexuality, gang-rape, and necrophilia and couldn't understand them except in anthro-moral terms (today, observers interpret them as responses by immature and inexperienced birds to false cues).

Struggling to describe what he saw, Levick recorded his original observations in Ancient Greek so that only gentleman scholars, such as himself, would be able to read them. Back in Blighty, however, he produced a short paper in English on the sexual habits of the Adélie penguin that was privately circulated amongst a select number of experts thought likely to be interested in tales of hooligan birds causing havoc in the colony via constant acts of depravity.

This paper, based on material deemed to be so shocking that Levick was asked by his publishers to remove it from his original, more comprehensive study in order to preserve public decency, was eventually lost and forgotten about for many decades.

In fact, it wasn't until 2012 when a copy was unearthed by a researcher at the Natural History Museum that the work finally entered into the public arena; a much-needed corrective to all the idealistic penguin propaganda churned out by those who find them not only cute 'n' cuddly, but virtuous ...


Note: readers interested in this material should see Douglas G. D. Russell, William J. L. Sladen and David G. Ainley; 'Dr. George Murray Levick (1876-1956): unpublished notes on the sexual habits of the Adélie penguin', in Polar Record, (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Click here to read on penguinscience.com. 

To read part one of this post - Bambi's Revenge (The Case of the Carrion Deer) - click here. 

To read part two - Who Fucked Bambi? (The Case of the Deer-Loving Monkey) - click here.