On Private Language and Post-Truth (Or How D. H. Lawrence Opens the Way for Donald Trump)

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his 1929 essay on pornography and obscenity by claiming that there is no consensus of opinion regarding a definition of the former: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another". And that, similarly, nobody knows what the word obscene means: "What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe" [1].  

 

I suspect it's this line of thinking which lies behind James Walker's claim that "any attempt to define obscenity is itself obscene" [2], by which I think he means that the attempt to impose shared meaning (or common values) on the individual and their lived experience is something he finds offensive.  

 

But I'm not entirely sure that's what he means: for by the logic of his own argument - which seems to subscribe to a solipsistic fantasy of purely personal feeling and, indeed, a purely private language - how could I ever be certain of understanding what he's saying?    

 

 

II.  

 

The idea of a private language was, of course, made famous by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), where he explained it thus: "The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language." [3]

 

However, no sooner does Wittgenstein introduce this idea of a language conceived as ultimately comprehensible only to its individual originator - because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others - than he rejects it as absurd. 

 

Naturally, there has been - and remains - considerable dispute about this idea and its implications for epistemology and theories of mind, etc.

 

Not that the validity or falseness of the idea will bother Lawrentians, for whom inner experience and (their own) singular being is everything. They'll simply repeat after their master: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be [4] - surely the most intellectually irresponsible lines Lawrence ever wrote, showing disdain for facts, evidence, and reasoned debate and, ironically, opening the way for figures that James Walker certainly doesn't approve of ...

 

 

III. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the post-truth world we live in today; one in which shared objective standards and meanings have dissolved into thin air; one in which Tom, Lucy, and Joe all get to define words however they like, à la Humpty Dumpty. Knowledge is confused with opinion and belief; fact is replaced with feeling; intelligence gives way to intutition.

 

It all sounds very liberal, but it isn't. Indeed, historian Timothy Snyder argues, post-truth is pre-fascism:

 

"When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions [...] Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth." [5]  

If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ... This could so easily have been tweeted by Donald Trump!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence. 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Lawrence appears to think that a shared meaning or commonly accepted definition of a word is inherently inferior and that only the individual meaning of a word has poetic power and rich symbolism. Even the simplest of words, he says, never mind those that are complex or controversial, has both a mob-meaning and an imaginative individual meaning. And these two categories of meaning are, apparently, forever separate. The problem, however, as Lawrence sees it, is that most people are unable to preserve integrity and private thoughts and feelings become corrupted by those which come from outside: "The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside [...] and never from the inside, by its own sincerity." [238] Such thinking is, of course, completely untenable.            

 

[2] James Walker, writing on his Digital Pilgrimage Instagram account: click here. See the post published on 13 April 2021, concerning Peter Hitchens and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

   

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe, (Macmillan, 1953), §243. It's crucial to stress that a private language is not simply a language understood by one person, but a language that, in principle, can only be understood by one person. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. 

[5] Timothy Snyder, 'The American Abyss, The New York Times, (9 Jan 2021): click here. 

Reflections on Milo Moiré's PlopEgg Painting (With a Note on Heide Hatry's Expectations)

Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)

Photo by Peter Palm

milomoire.com

 

 

I. 

 

British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:  

"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying." [1]

Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life". 

 

Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here. 

 

 

II. 

 

Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.    

 

Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate". 

 

The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?            

 

And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball). 

 

We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].      

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly', The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.  

 

[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina. 

      In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here. 

 

  

Reflections on the Goop Jade Egg

 

Goop Jade Egg

goop.com

 

 

I.

 

Launched in 2008, Goop is a wellness and lifestyle brand founded by actress Gwyneth Paltrow that aims - a bit like Torpedo the Ark - to operate from a place of curiosity and nonjudgment in order to make interesting connections and challenge conventional models of thinking.

 

Unlike Goop, however, Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage followers to nourish the inner aspect, nor does it offer a range of wellness products, such as the nephrite Jade Egg, which women are invited to purchase - it presently retails at $66 - and then place into their vaginas. 

 

The Egg, which some believe to possess mysterious crystal power, is designed to enable women to experience a greater connection with their own bodies. Having first washed the rather lovely looking object with soap and water, the trick is to insert, hold it there for a while, and then squeeze and release. It is recommended that the Egg is also cleaned after use and stored in a sacred space - or at least one that has good vibes. 

 

Over time, this Kegel-like practice with the Jade Egg may bring increased happiness and well-being.           

II.

Strip away the new age nonsense and pseudoscience and ultimately what you're left with is something that you may or may not wish to buy and play with. I shouldn't think there are any dangers, but doubt there are any real health benefits either - though, if I were a woman, I'd sooner pop a Jade Egg inside than experiment with vaginal steaming. 

 

Finally, it should be noted that the Jade Egg (and fifty other Goop products) became the centre of a lawsuit in 2017, filed by the consumer advocacy group Truth in Advertising, who were concerned about false and misleading claims. This resulted in the company agreeing to pay a $145,000 settlement in September 2018 and issuing full refunds to customers who wished for such. 

 

Of course, Goop continued to sell their Jade Eggs, they simply toned down the language re: the benefits of using them; no more promises of increased vaginal muscle tone or greater feminine energy.* 

 

Ultimately, I've not much sympathy for those women wealthy enough and foolish enough to buy into the Goop philosophy. And, as I've indicated before on this blog [click here], I rather admire Miss Paltrow who possesses a winning combination of intelligence, beauty, talent, and chutzpah. Which is why she always seems to have the last laugh over her critics.  

 

 

* Note: at the time of the settlement Goop had sold around 3,000 vaginal eggs.   

 

Above all Things Encourage a Straight Backbone

 

Winners of Miss Correct Posture - aka Miss Beautiful Spine 

(Chicago, May 1956) [1]

 

 

Deleuze - and those influenced by his work (particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari) - often thrill to the idea (borrowed from Artaud) of a body without organs. And they seem equally excited at the thought of heads without faces and backs without vertebrae. 

 

For if the face is a universal mask and machine of moral overcoding which makes pale-faced Christians of us all, then "the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner" [2]. 

 

Perhaps that's why there's a radical tradition of associating bones with fascism and privileging the soft pathology of the flesh as somehow more vital - something I touched on briefly in a recent post: click here. 

 

It's a tradition that one might have expected D. H. Lawrence to have belonged to; for Lawrence certainly celebrated the flesh as opposed to the spirit - and the latter, as Hegel famously declared, is a bone.

 

However, it turns out that Lawrence is all in favour of back bone, particularly the lumbar ganglion which, he says, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psyche [4] and is the centre of all independent activity (or what we might term a will to separation).

 

Lawrence encourages children to stiffen their little backs and escape the influence of their mothers; to kick themselves into singular being full of pride and the joy of self-assertion; to know that they are themselves and distinct from all others. He writes:

 

"From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, independent, and masterful. In the activity of this centre a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this centre he likes to command and to receive obedience. From this centre likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost." [5]   

 

Obviously, those who despise these spinal characteristics, interpret them as signs of fascist or phallocratic imperialism. 

 

But, as Lawrence would say, curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines and slimy, belly-wriggling invertebrates [5] who slander those who dare to stand upright, with shoulders back, taking pleasure in their own sovereign power. 

  

 

Notes 

 

[1] In the 1950s and '60s, American chiropractors decided to stage a number of beauty contests in the hope that this would help legitimise their profession and raise their public profile. The photo reproduced here shows the winner and runners up of one such contest held in Chicago, May 1956. According to a newspaper report at the time, the girls were picked for their beauty and perfect posture. For more details and more images, click here.  

 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, 2003), p. 23. Like many of his ideas and phrases, Deleuze is borrowing this from a writer of fiction; in this case, Franz Kafka. See: 'The Sword', in Diaries 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 109-10.   

 

[3] Lawrence borrows many of the ideas and terminology used in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) from theosophy rather than physiology and when he does use anatomical terms they only approximate with scientific and medical knowledge.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89. 

[5] I'm paraprasing from Lawrence's famous letter written to Edward Garnett on 3 July 1912. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 422.

 

 

This post grew out of correspondence with the artist Heide Hatry and I am grateful as always for her inspiration. 

On the Life, Death, and Shameful Blacklisting of Lynne Frederick

 Lynne Frederick (1954 - 1994)

 Portrait by Terry Fincher (c. 1974)

I. 

 

Let's get straight to the point: the treatment that the English actress Lynne Frederick received, following the death of her husband Peter Sellers in 1980, was shameful. 

 

The abuse and ridicule meted out by the press and public was bad enough; but the behavior of the Hollywood set who, in a display of grotesque moral hypocrisy and spitefulness, blacklisted her was even worse - but then there's no people like show people ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Lynne Frederick was born in Middlesex, in July 1954. Her parents separated when she was just two years old and she never knew her father or had any connections with his side of the family. Her mother was a casting director for Thames Television. Raised in Leicestershire, she was later schooled in London and had ambitions of becoming a science teacher.  

However, when Frederick was fifteen fate - in the form of actor and film director Cornel Wilde, a famous friend of her mother's unfairly described by some as a poor man's Tony Curtis - intervened and put the teenager on the road to stardom. Wilde had been searching for a young unknown to star in his movie adaptation of the best-selling sci-fi novel The Death of Grass (1956). 

 

Wilde was instantly besotted with the beautiful and charismatic teen and so, despite Frederick having no previous acting experience, he offered her the role (sans audition). Whilst the film - released in 1970 as No Blade of Grass - received mixed reviews [2], Frederick became an overnight sensation, much loved by the same British public who would turn on her ten years later.          

As well as establishing an acting career that included a number of TV commercials for soap and shampoo, Frederick regularly featured in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. In one famous spread for Vogue (Sept 1971), she was photographed by Patrick Lichfield. She was, in short, the fresh-faced girl of the moment; young women wanted to be her and men of all ages wanted ... well, we can all imagine what they wanted ...     

III.

 

During the mid-late '70s, Frederick's career as an actress and model continued to develop and she began to evolve a more sophisticated style and image, no longer content to simply play the girl next door or young innocent. Thus, in 1976, for example, she happily took a role in a BBC Play for Today as a sexually enigmatic character who falls for a lesbian artist [3]. She also starred in Pete Walker's slasher-horror movie Schizo, now regarded as a cult classic amongst fans of the genre.   

 

Meanwhile, her A-list Hollywood agent, Dennis Selinger, was preparing Frederick for global stardom in more mainstream film and television, as he had previously done with Susan George. Sadly, however, things were about to go very wrong - both professionally and personally - for Frederick, following her fateful marriage to sociopathic goon Peter Sellers in February 1977. She was 22 and Sellers, who had already married and divorced three wives, was 51.

 

The couple had met at a dinner party the year before, shortly after Frederick had finished making Schizo. He proposed to her two days afterwards, but she sensibly turned him down. However, she not-so-sensibly agreed to date and a year later they married. Initially, things went well and they formed a popular red carpet couple. But things quickly turned sour and rumours began to circulate of drug abuse, infidelity, and domestic violence. As his health deteriorated, Frederick was forced to put her own career on ice in order to look after him.    

 

Whilst they separated several times, Frederick always returned to care for Sellers until he died of a heart attack on 24 July 1980 (the day before her 26th birthday). Although Sellers was reportedly in the process of excluding her from his will shortly before he died, the planned changes were never legally finalised and so Frederick inherited the entire estate, worth an estimated £4.5 million. 

To which I say: Good for her! Unfortunately, that wasn't the reaction of his children from earlier marriages (who only received £800 each); nor was it the reaction of the press and public, or his Hollywood chums. 

 

Accepting unsubstantiated claims made by her stepson, Michael Sellers, it was almost universally decided that Frederick was a deceitful and cunning young woman who had only married for the money and to increase her own fame: the term used over and over again was gold digger - one that is not only derogatory, but misogynistic, as it is invariably applied to young women [4].       

Attempts to restart her film career post-Sellers were unsuccessful; she was effectively blacklisted by Hollywood, although she continued to live (reclusively) in California until her death in 1994, aged 39 [5]. 

 

Whilst I don't wish to go into details of her tragic final years - which involved seizures, alcoholism, and depression - I'm pleased to say that in the decades since her death, Frederick has gained a posthumous following of loyal fans and that even some of those who had been unfairly critical of her were prepared to concede that she had been poorly treated. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Famous names who voiced unfavourable opinions of Frederick include Roger Moore, Spike Milligan, and Britt Ekland. One person who always stood by her, however, was the actor David Niven, whom she had met whilst filming in 1974. Frederick regarded him not only as a close friend, but as a trusted father figure.   

 

[2] No Blade of Grass also generated disquiet amongst some critics due to a controversial abduction and gang rape scene involving Frederick as 16-year-old Mary Custance. The graphic nature of the sexual violence - lasting for several minutes on screen - was regarded as gratuitous at best. Although the rape sequence was cut in length when the film was released on video, the full scene was restored when issued on DVD.    

 

[3] Admittedly, the fact that she married former lover David Frost just a few months after the death of Peter Sellers didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that she divorced Frost after 17 months and then married a Californian heart surgeon shortly afterwards.   

 

[4] To her credit, Frederick was an outspoken advocate for same sex relationships and gay rights in a time when this was not so fashionable or morally and politically de rigeur. 

 

[5] Frederick was found dead by her mother in her West Los Angeles home on 27 April 1994. Whilst foul play and suicide were quickly ruled out, an autopsy failed to determine the cause of death. 

 

 

I'm Still Searching for the Ants Invasion: Notes on Phase IV

 I hope that insect doesn't see me / He's not renowned for his courtesy [1]

 

 

I.

 

There are numerous films in the so-called bug genre, some of which involve swarms of killer bees and many of which involve armies of soldier ants on the march. I will always remember Michael Cain battling the former in the The Swarm (1978) and Charlton Heston taking on the latter in The Naked Jungle (1954).

 

Arguably, Hollywood's fascination with insects and the possibility that they might one day threaten human existence, culminates in The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), a strange but fascinating movie which combines elements of documentary, science fiction, and horror, and features a variety of insects, including wasps, locusts, termites, and even butterflies. [2]  

But the film I wish to discuss here, however, is another odd work, which, whilst little-known today, has nevertheless achieved cult status ...

 

 

II.

 

Directed by graphic visual designer Saul Bass, Phase IV (1974) is perhaps the most philosophically-informed and arty of all ant movies. One reviewer described it as "designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot" [3]. 

 

Whilst, essentially, it remains a six-legged sci-fi horror, it's certainly a very different kind of film to Them! (1954); for one thing, the ants aren't giant-sized, even if they are supposed to be super-intelligent, and they are revealed as sophisticated creatures capable of great feats of engineering and heroic acts of self-sacrifice.         

 

When I first saw Phase IV as a child, I found it boring and incomprehensible; second only to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) in that respect. Unfortunately for Paramount Pictures, that was pretty much how everyone else also felt at the time - moviegoers and critics alike - and the film was a box office flop [4].

 

However, 45-odd years later, I now find much to admire about the film; not least its low-key anti-humanism and the luminous screen presence of 20-year-old English beauty Lynne Frederick as Kendra Eldridge, a traumatised survivor of an earlier ant attack whose destiny is to become a kind of human ant queen. [5].

 

The plot is actually fairly straightforward: a mysterious cosmic event causes ants to undergo rapid evolution and develop a collective cross-species intelligence. One of the results of this is that they begin building huge towering nests in the Arizona desert, disconcerting the local human population who decide to vacate the area.

 

A two-man scientific team - Hubbs and Lesko (played by Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy respectively) - arrives to investigate. But they soon find themselves having to battle against the ants for survival. Things, however, take a fascinating turn when it transpires that, far from wishing to simply exterminate humanity, the ants wish to remake us in their own image and absorb mankind into their alien new world order [6]         

 

Some viewers will, obviously, object strongly to such a prospect. But I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords ... [7]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Ants Invasion', by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, on the album Kings of the Wild Frontier, (CBS, 1980). Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group. Click here to listen on YouTube. 

[2] Regrettably, I've not had the opportunity to watch this film in its entirety. But it comes highly recommended by Mr. Tim Pendry, whose knowledge and critical judgement in this area - as in many others - I respect and trust. It's interesting to note that Ken Middleham, who shot the insect sequences for The Hellstrom Chronicle, also shot the ant close-ups for Phase IV.

[3] Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 'Saul Bass directed only one feature - and it's about super-intelligent ants, The A.V. Club (31 Oct 2014): click here.

[4] Unfortunate, too, for Saul Bass, as he was never again invited to direct a feature-length film. 

 

[5] Despite only being twenty years of age, Bass was concerned that Frederick looked too mature for the role she was playing. Thus, he obliged her to wear a specially designed (and extremely uncomfortable) corset to flatten her breasts and attempted to persuade the beautiful starlet to restrict her diet to chicken broth and black coffee for the duration of the production.  

[6] Bass originally shot a surreal montage with which to end the movie, indicating what the future ant-dominated world might look like. Sadly, this was cut by the studio executives at Paramount. However, it has recently been rediscovered and is available to watch on YouTube: click here.

 

[7] This much-loved line was spoken by Springfield news anchor Kent Brockman, in the classic season 5 episode of The Simpsons entitled 'Deep Space Homer' (1994), dir. Carlos Baezer and written by David Mirkin: click here. Despite what some mistakenly believe, it was not originally spoken by Joan Collins in the film Empire of the Ants (1977).  

 

 

Bonus: to watch the official trailer for Phase IV, click here. Or to watch an excellent modernized trailer, edited by Dan McBride, click here. 

 

For a sister post anticipating this one - on ants with artificially enhanced cuticles - click here.  

 

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones

The Lovers of Valdaro 

Image: Dagmar Hollmann / Wikimedia Commons

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

 

 

I. 

 

New York based German artist Heide Hatry has recently been posting a series of images on her Icons in Ash Instagram account showing the exhumed skeletal remains of lovers who had been buried together for what they probably imagined would be all eternity, including the pair shown above discovered by archaeologists at a Neolithic tomb in San Giorgio, near Mantua, Italy, in 2007.

 

The Lovers of Valdaro, as they are known, are believed to have been no older than 20 years of age when buried, approximately 6,000 years ago, with arms wrapped tenderly around one another. Osteological examination revealed no evidence of a particularly violent death (no fractures or signs of traumatic injury, for example), so perhaps they died of broken hearts, or having swallowed poison in an amorous suicide pact - who knows?  

 

Anyway, morbid voyeurs who might wish to, can see the skeleton lovers for themselves on permanent display at the National Archaeological Museum of Mantua. 

   

 

II. 

 

Touching as the story of the Valdaro Lovers may be, regular readers of Torpedo the Ark will recall that - for philosophical reasons - I have a real problem with bones. But allow me to summarise these reasons for those readers who are not quite so familiar with the contents of this blog ... 

 

Due to the fact that bones are relatively long lasting, many cultures accord the skeleton - conceived as a noble infrastructure - far greater respect than the soft pathology of the flesh. As Nick Land notes in The Thirst for Annihilation (1992):  

 

"A corpse has one pre-eminent and historically fateful heterogeneous distribution: that between its skeletal structure and its soft tissues. This is apprehended as a difference between what is perdurant, dry, clean, formal, and what is volatile, wet, dirty, and formless."

 

Thus it is that osseological idealists of all varieties - including Christians, Hegelians, and fascists - love bones and skulls, associating these things not only with phallic rigidity, but spirit and intellect, whilst, on the other hand, associating the flesh (and filth) with the feminine. 

 

Unable to face up to the fact that we will all one day decompose and melt into slow putrescence, they posit the skeleton as that which provides figural permanence to human being and marks an acceptable transfiguration of the organic body. 

 

The skeleton is thus the affable mascot of humanist narcissism - reassuring in a way that a rotting, stinking corpse crawling with maggots can never be.       

 

Musical bonus: Dem Bones - aka Dry Bones - is an African-American spiritual song first recorded in 1928. The lyrics, whilst often changing, were inspired by Ezekiel 37:1-14, wherein the prophet visits the Valley of Dry Bones and foretells of the resurrection of the dead: Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again! Now hear the Word of the Lord! 

      Click here to watch The Delta Rhythm Boys giving us their version, a recording of which can be found on their album Swingin' Spirituals (Coral Records, 1960).     

 

Plastic Ants (There Might Come a Day When They're Treading On You)

Lasius plasticus

 

I. 

 

The world isn't actually going to turn Day-Glo as Poly Styrene predicted [1], but it - and the life that it supports - is going to become progressively plastic at every level, including the molecular, as chemical additives known as phthalates - used to increase the flexibility, transparency, and durability of plastic - are released into the environment at ever greater levels.  

It's not just ourselves we are transforming with these things, even insects, for example are undergoing an artificial metamorphosis, as a study of ants by Alain Lenoir from a few years ago made clear ...

 

II. 

 

Investigating the biochemical process by which the common black ant can differentiate between friends and foes, Dr. Lenoir discovered to his suprise the presence of phthalates alongside hydrocarbons in the creature's protective cuticle. And this was true not just in a few specimens, but all of them.     

 

Other researchers had previously reported such findings, but Lenoir had been sceptical and suspected that the presence of phthalates was due to contamination within the lab. However, he could now see for himself the startling fact that all of the ants that he and his team studied were contaminated with phthalates, no matter where they originated [2]. 

 

Now, whilst there are serious concerns related to the presence of phthalates within living organisms - including us - it's probably too late to worry too much now and, who knows, maybe they'll have some positive evolutionary effect in the long term ... 

 

Maybe, for example, the ants will become a cyborg species with an artificially enhanced exoskeleton - super-ants, if you will, who might end up one day treading on us just as Adam forewarned ... [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to the classic punk single by X-Ray Spex, 'The Day the World Turned Day-Glo', from the album Germ Free Adolescents (EMI, 1978). Click here to watch the band - fronted by Poly Styrene who wrote the track - perform it on Top of the Pops.

 

[2] To see how widespread the problem of phthalates in ants was, Lenoir and his team tested six-legged subjects from several countries around the world, including Spain, Greece, Morocco, and Egypt. In every case, the ants - which were not believed to have had any direct contact with plastic - tested positive (although in some cases only trace amounts were found). They also tested crickets and bees, just for comparison, and the result was the same.   

 

[3] I'm referring here to the single 'Ant Music', by Adam and the Ants, released from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980), which contains the wonderful verse: 'Don't tread on an ant, he's done nothing to you / There might come a day when he's treading on you / Don't tread on an ant, you'll end up black and blue / You cut off his head, legs come looking for you'. Click here to watch the official video on YouTube. 

 

For a follow up post to this one - on the prospect of a posthuman world dominated by ants - click here.  

Absolute Zero

Prof. Julian Allwood

cam.ac.uk 

 

We don't need any more talking - just action!

 

 

As I'm sure most readers will know, carbon neutrality refers to that glorious time to come - presently projected to be 2050 in the UK - when we finally achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and make the radical transition towards a post-carbon economy in which all the major concerns of a modern state - transport, energy, agriculture, and industry - will be sustainable and environmentally friendly.  

 

Unfortunately, such an eco-utopia probaby won't be so great for the majority of people living within it: they'll be poorer, colder, less mobile, less free, and living on a diet of rice and dried insects. 

 

This becomes clear when you read a 2019 report from the UK FIRES consortium entitled Absolute Zero and published by Cambridge University. Authored by Professor Julian Allwood and colleagues, it sets out to answer the question of how Britain might achieve its net zero goal - to which it is legally committed thanks to the Climate Change Act - within 30 years.   

 

The report - which can be read by clicking here - basically says yes to electric cars, trains, heat pumps, and homegrown vegetables, and no to pretty much everything else: from steel and cement to beef and lamb; from aviation and shipping to gas central heating.

 

And you thought life in lockdown was grim! 

 

Well, brace yourself, for this has just been a trial run for what lies ahead: a revolutionary period in which our present lifestyle is abandoned in favour of a model that seems to have been borrowed from the Khmer Rouge ... It's tough, kid, but it's green ...         

 

 

Note: readers interested in this topic might like to watch a 25-minute video on YouTube in which Professor Allwood tries to sell us the notion of absolute zero, arguing that we can still enjoy a good life whilst reducing our energy consumption by 60%, providing, that is, we accept restraints in certain areas - such as what we eat and how we travel - in order to deliver zero emissions and secure a safe future: click here. 

      It's amusing how, on the one hand, Allwood says that the kind of drastic social and economic changes being advocated clearly require public debate, whilst, on the other hand, he insists that we don't need any more talking - just action (a view that all ideological fanatics ultimately subscribe to). 

 

 

Notes on An American Werewolf in London

Nurse Price and David Kessler enjoy a tender moment 

before things get hairy

 

 

Last night, for the first time in a very long time, I watched An American Werewolf in London (written and directed by John Landis, 1981). And whilst it is neither as funny nor as frightening as many once found it to be, I don't begrudge this comic horror the critical and commercial success it enjoyed at the time, or the cult status it has since attained amongst cinephiles [1].

 

For whilst it's not a great film, it is an enjoyable film to watch, with a strong lead performance from David Naughton as David Kessler, the unfortunate American backpacker attacked by a werewolf whilst trekking by moonlight across the Yorkshire Moors [2] with his buddy Jack Goodman (played by Griffin Dunne). 

 

The film also stars Jenny Agutter, as nurse Alex Price, who falls in love with David whilst looking after him in the intensive care unit of the London hospital in which she works. And, as male readers of a certain age will know, Jenny Agutter is the sexiest and most beautiful English actress ever to have graced the screen. It's always a pleasure to see her and my only regret is that it was David, not Alex, who wakes up naked in the wolf enclosure at London Zoo. 

 

Still, you can't have everything you might wish for in a movie, and Landis does offer some erotic compensation in the form of Linzi Drew as Brenda Bristols in the film-within-a-film entitled See You Next Wednesday - a soft-porn movie showing in the seedy Soho cinema that David finds himself in towards the end of the movie [3].

 

Now, whilst Linzi Drew is no Mary Millington, she did have a successful (and varied) career in the UK sex industry during the 1980s, working as a stripper, glamour model, and porn star. She also landed minor roles in a number of other mainstream movies apart from American Werewolf (Ken Russell was something of a fan).

In sum: there's more than enough good things in An American Werewolf in London to justify spending another 97 minutes of your life staring at a screen - and I haven't even mentioned the demonic Nazi stormtroopers that appear in a terrifying dream sequence that the Chapman brothers would've been proud of, or how the film is crucially tied to the question of Jewish identity and feelings of cultural estrangement ... [4] 

 

 

 

 

Notes

[1] An American Werewolf in London was released in August 1981 and grossed $30 million at the US box office and $62 million worldwide (against a budget of $5.8 million). Whilst not every critic loved it - Roger Ebert, for example, found it curiously unfinished - most wrote positive reviews, finding it not just funny and frightening, but an intelligent film also. Particular praise was reserved for Rick Baker's makeup effects used in the transformation scene.  

 

[2] Filming took place in Feb/March, because director John Landis wanted to ensure bad weather. But it took place on location in Wales, not Yorkshire.  

[3] In an interview with Jason Solomons for The Guardan in 2009, Landis says that the title of the porno film was "in the best smutty British tradition", but that really doesn't make any sense (to me at least); was he perhaps thinking of the euphemistic backronym for the word cunt - See You Next Tuesday? Possibly. But it should be noted that the line See You Next Wednesday (usually referring to a fictional film) is a recurring gag in most of his films and that he probably picked it up from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it is spoken by Frank Poole's father.

 

[4] There are numerous essays and articles discussing the Jewish aspect of the film: see for example Joshua Rothkopf's 'How "American Werewolf in London" Transformed Horror-Comedy', in Rolling Stone (19 August 2016). According to the author, the film is an allegory of exoticised Jewishness (made monstrous). Click here to read the piece online. For an equally interesting piece by Esther Saks entitled 'What's So Jewish About Werewolves?', and published in the offbeat online Jewish arts and culture magazine Jewcy (31 Oct 2017), click here. 

 

Bonus: to watch the official film trailer on YouTube, click here.