Jump! On Defying the Spirit of Gravity (With Reference to the Work of Philippe Halsman)

If there's one thing to which Zarathustra makes himself supremely hostile above all other things, it's der Geist der Schwere - what in English is termed the Spirit of Gravity. 

He prides himself on all that is light-footed and light-hearted in his nature and says that the revaluation of all values begins only when man learns how to love himself and how to fly like a bird, rather than living like a beast of burden weighed down with morality and bad conscience.        

In order to fly, however, man must first learn how to stand upright on his own two feet; and then how to walk, naked and light, before running, dancing, skipping and jumping for joy - no longer taking life seriously and refusing to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. 

We find some of this Nietzschean defiance of the Spirit of Gravity in the marvellous series of 178 pictures taken by American portrait photographer Philippe Halsman and published collectively in his Jump Book (1959), along with his humorous essay on the aesthetics of jumpology.

Starting in the early 1950s, Halsman asked every celebrity or VIP that he photographed to jump in the air for him. His hope was that he might momentarily glimpse and capture on film the spontaneous and carefree individual beneath the formal, self-conscious public persona.

Amazingly, Halsman not only convinced many of the great comics and movie stars of the period to jump for him, he also persuaded many well-known politicians, scientists, artists and members of the House of Windsor to briefly forget themselves and dare to defy gravity.

Arguably, these are amongst his more arresting images. But, for Zarathustra, there's nothing lovelier than nimble young women with fine ankles. And so, above are Halsman's joyous photos of B.B., Marilyn and Audrey leaping barefoot into the future and the Dionysian imagination ... 

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969).

Philippe Halsman's Jump Book, (Damiani, 2015).

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Jumping Grace (A Short Verse in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

En sautant Grace -

Visiblement belle

Ravie dans son nouveau soutien-gorge de sport

Indifférente à la gravité.

Jumping Grace -

Conspicuously beautiful

Happy in her new sports bra

Unconcerned with gravity.

Thanks to Gedvile Bunikyte for kind permission to use her photograph. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon, Christian Michel and Sophie Stas for help with the translation (into French); any errors or inadequacies are entirely my own. 

Rilke: Letters on Cézanne (Some Brief Remarks)

Rilke is one of those poets I should probably appreciate more than I do. But, if I'm honest, I find the lyrical intensity and the mysticism of his verse a bit much. Even his Dinggedichte are not quite concrete and thingly enough for me; push comes to shove, I prefer the work of Francis Ponge.

Similarly, Cézanne is an artist I should also admire more than I do; the only modern painter that Lawrence officially endorses - not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle and his willingness to admit that material objects actually exist. But, if given the choice, I'd rather have a Picasso on the wall.
      

Reading Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, however, has made me want to learn how to love the work of each man more ... 

Rilke wrote the letters to his wife, Clara, during the autumn of 1907, following repeated visits to an exhibition in Paris of paintings by the great French artist, with whom he felt an increasingly powerful sense of kinship. It was such a decisive encounter in terms of impact that, after this date, Rilke often cited Cézanne as the most formative influence on his poetry.

However, as the letters also reveal, Rilke felt dismay as well as delight before the paintings; Cézanne causing him to reflect upon his own inadequacies and shortcomings as an artist. Did he really have what it takes to produce greatness and to devote himself exclusively to his craft? Could he accept the challenge that Cézanne throws down to all those who come after him, which is to know the apple in all its appleyness and smash what Lawrence terms the optical cliché?

Crucially, Rilke recognises that Cézanne's work is a fundamental turning point - and not only within the history of Western art; Cézanne's oeuvre is a wider cultural and philosophical event that challenges Plato's Idealism. This is why he, Cézanne, is not only impossible for old ladies, but offensive to all those good bourgeois corpses who secretly feared and hated him.      


See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).

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

And for an alternative - more empassioned, much better illustrated - reading of the letters, see 'Being Your Work's Bitch' - a blog post on The Musing: click here.

Tyler Shields: Provocateur or Pale Imitator?

Tyler Shields: Self-Portrait (2014)
tylershields.com

According to Andrea Blanch, keen to address criticism of her friend's work from the get-go, the provocateur often receives a bum rap. That is to say, they're often subject to false accusations or unfair judgements; dismissed as a fraud who "peddles in shock or wears the shallow guise of edginess".

But the true provocateur - such as Hollywood's favourite photographer, Tyler Shields - knows how to turn incitement into a fearless form of art that awakens lesser mortals from their mundane slumber and the "consumptive malaise of soul-grinding routine". Provocation, in its highest form, is thus not merely a means of challenging somebody to react; it's also a way of filling them with "passionate exuberance". Provocation is a vitalism; it brings people to life and not simply to the boil.

And so, whilst some of the images produced by Tyler Shields deliberately aim to shock and unsettle, what raises his oeuvre above that of his lesser-skilled contemporaries, is that they also "arrest us with the magnitude of their depth and complexity".

I have to say, with respect to Ms. Blanch, whose own work with a camera far exceeds anything produced by Tyler Shields in my view, this really is so much guff. Unfortunately, Shields - who has what might be termed a healthy ego - buys into this fearless genius nonsense and seems happy to blow his own trumpet when he can't find someone to do it for him. For this is a man who unabashedly places his work not in the world of fashion and celebrity culture, but the tradition of Baroque art - less Terry Richardson and more to do with the transcendental clarity of Caravaggio.

And this is a man who aggressively asserts his ownership of images, threatening prosecution and multi-million dollar fines to anyone who infringes his copyright, despite the fact that, as one commentator has noted, a brief glance at his portfolio "by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of photography would reveal that a high number of his images look an awful lot like those of other photographers".

Now, as a rule, I'm not greatly concerned with notions of originality; all great artists steal, as Picasso said. However, this doesn't mean that all great thieves are artists and what does irritate is to see a powerful image rendered banal. An act of homage or even a playful pastiche should not result simply in an inferior copy or perpetuate a lazy form of nostalgia.

Unfortunately, as art critic Paddy Johnson writes with reference to Tyler's version of the famous Sally Mann photo of a young girl smoking (Candy Cigarette, 1989), Shields often "takes what began as an incredibly haunting photograph and turns it into an art postcard". His re-imaginings disappoint not because they rip-off, but because they devalue and diminish.       


Notes

Andrea Blanch, 'The Fearless Artist', Foreword to Tyler Shields, Provocateur, (Glitterati Inc., 2016). 

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, 'Is Celebratory Photographer Tyler Shields Inspired, Or Copying Other Artists?', Vice, Jan 15, 2016. Click here to read. The remarks by Paddy Johnson are also found in this article. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for bringing the work of Tyler Shields to my attention and kindly gifting me a copy of Provocateur. 
 

Miles Aldridge: Supposing Truth to be a Supermodel

Miles Aldridge: 3-D (2010) 
milesaldridge.com

London-born photographer Miles Aldridge is someone whose work I admire immensely; it's so beautifully dark beneath the fluorescent colours and combines so perfectly his obvious obsessions: the great F-words of fashion, film, and fetishised femininity.

Clearly interested in the philosophical question of style, Aldridge playfully explores and experiments with the semiotics of the catwalk, the fatal seduction of cinema and the cultural construction of woman as a revered object within the pornographic imagination.

It's an artistic and a perverse quest for truth, resting upon the quasi-Nietzschean supposition that truth might be a supermodel or a goddess of the silver screen; sacred monsters whose mask-like faces express neither sensitivity nor sincerity; transsexual creatures who, as Baudrillard says, never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and what we might even describe as their apparent frigidity.

Of course, some critics find Aldridge's work vacuous and a form of conceit; a glossy fantasy that far from subverting the political and social realities of gender, class and consumerism - as is sometimes claimed - merely reinforces these things. But I beg to differ with this analysis. For me, his work matters. And it matters because it demonstrates how what we consume, what we worship, or what we most desire - be it a Birkin bag, a lifestyle, or the attractive stranger sitting across the bar - is never a new object in itself, but is rather an object previously encountered on screen or in the pages of Vogue; i.e. one that has already been assigned meaning within a discursive framework.

In other words, Aldridge's work disconcertingly suggests that it's impossible to know real objects existing outside a frame of reference; reality itself is constituted via representation and staged performance - just like a photo shoot. Those commentators who, like Glenn O'Brien, insist that Aldridge is in the business of constructing dreams, have radically misunderstood what is going on in his work - or underestimated what's at stake. For what Aldridge is doing is far more fundamental; he's using the logic of fashion and his passion for artificiality to rupture the order of referential reason.

And central to this project, as indicated, is the figure of woman as actress, as model, as perfect object; as one who understands the need for cosmetics and defends the right to lie. Not because she wishes to protect or disguise some concealed essence beneath appearances, but because she has no such essence. Again, many critics will protest that by placing the question of woman into the context of fashion and film, it means she becomes fetishized and commodified as an object or image, rather than liberated as a subject. But, even if this is the case, is that so bad? Mightn't a clever woman - who is always a well-dressed woman - use her own emptiness and reification to her own advantage?

Aldridge insists that his models have a blank expression not because they are mindless, but, on the contrary, because they are lost in thought. And, far from feeling on the verge of extinction because they have been transformed into a hollowed-out figure of male fantasy, they exhibit the pale power of seduction and stillness that is particular to those who are soulless; what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic.

For me, as for Aldridge, it's on the runway or the movie screen, where woman best stages her refusal of - and resistance to - male power and masculine depth. For although obliged to pout and to pose and embody consumer capitalism's ideals of femininity, luxury and artifice, woman as seductive object remains fundamentally untouchable and inaccessible. She teases her male spectators with a glimpse or the promise of her nakedness, whilst exposing also the truth that they are as fake and as hollow as she (in their desires, emotions and highest values).

Stare long enough into the void, says Nietzsche, and the void begins to stare into you ...

My Three Favourite Witches 3: Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery)

Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha in Bewitched 

My three favourite witches are not the Wayward Sisters found in Shakespeare's Macbeth, dressed in filthy robes, performing weird rituals in the fog, prophesying doom, etc. Nor are they the cock-starved, devil-invoking trio of Alex, Jane and Sukie given us by John Updike in his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick.

Rather, the three broomstick-riding women I find most spellbinding are Jennifer, Gillian and Samantha ...

The third of these, Samantha, was played by Elizabeth Montgomery in the hit TV series Bewitched; an American sitcom that ran for eight seasons on ABC from 1964-72.

Created by Sol Saks, the show is about a beautiful, young-looking sorceress who marries an ordinary mortal, Darrin Stephens, played originally by Dick York, then, later, by Dick Sargent. Samantha agrees to lead the conventional life of a suburban, middle-class housewife without calling upon her magical powers - much to the disgust of her Darrin-disapproving mother, Endora, played by the wonderful Agnes Moorehead. As one might expect, mayhem and nose-twitching merriment frequently ensue ...

Comparisons with the 1942 film, I Married a Witch, starring Veronica Lake as Jennifer, are often made - and legitimately so; Saks openly admitting that he drew inspiration from this, as well as the John Van Druten play turned film, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), starring Kim Novak as Gillian, the Greenwich Village witch.

The theme that unites all of these works is that love is stronger than witchcraft and can overcome all difficulties and forms of prejudice, such as a mixed marriage often encounters. But it's also about a formidable woman having to voluntarily surrender or restrict her powers in order to fit in with a world run by men; even when these men may often be idiots. Thus, beneath the romantic comedy and apparent fondness for witches, one detects a familiar sexism and deep-rooted fear and hatred of witches.      
          
Even the lovely Samantha is viewed with suspicion by male wiccaphobes; she may appear to be as nice as milk and claim to act in the name of love and loyalty to her husband, but she remains a witch first and foremost - and can thus never be a truly good wife to poor Darrin.

For what is a witch? A witch, according to D. H. Lawrence, is a woman - lesbian at heart - who intrinsically rejects creative union with (and subordination to) any man; a diabolical creature who emits waves of silent destruction that undermine the spiritual authority of the phallocratic order; a woman who deserves to be consigned to the flames.

Obviously, I reject and condemn such violent misogyny and wiccaphobia, whatever its source; be it Lawrence speaking, or Bible-bashing televangelist Pat Robertson. I love Samantha and her occult subversion of cultural stereotypes concerning sex and society.

And I also have huge respect and affection for Elizabeth Montgomery, who, throughout her career, was involved in various forms of political activism (she was one of the first celebrities to support gay rights, for example, and was often outspoken on feminist issues). She fully deserves her star on Hollywood Blvd. and her bronze statue, erected, fittingly, in Salem, Massachusetts, shortly after her death in 1995.   


To read part 1 of this post on Jennifer (Veronica Lake), click here.
To read part 2 of this post on Gillian (Kim Novak), click here.

My Three Favourite Witches 2: Gillian (Kim Novak)

Kim Novak as Gillian Holroyd 

(with Pyewacket the Cat)

My three favourite witches are not the Wayward Sisters found in Shakespeare's Macbeth, dressed in filthy robes, performing weird rituals in the fog, prophesying doom, etc. Nor are they the cock-starved, devil-invoking trio of Alex, Jane and Sukie given us by John Updike in his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick.

Rather, the three broomstick-riding women I find most spellbinding are Jennifer, Gillian and Samantha ...

The second of these, Gillian Holroyd, the free-spirited, Greenwich Village witch with a penchant for going barefoot, was played by Kim Novak in the 1958 romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine). The male lead in the film was taken by James Stewart, playing Shep Henderson, the handsome (but much older) next door neighbour upon whom Gillian casts a love spell. 

Unfortunately, things backfire and she eventually falls in love with Shep; problematic for a witch as this (apparently) means the loss of her magical powers. However, rather like Jennifer in I Married a Witch (1942), played by Veronica Lake, Gillian decides this is a price worth paying; that love is stronger than witchcraft - or, at any rate, more valuable, more vital. She chooses fulfilment as a married woman, over the lonely and frustrated life of a spinster-witch.        

Interestingly however, her feline familiar, Pyewacket, is unimpressed with this caving in and conforming to a conventional mix of romantic idealism and sexism; when Gillian opts for love, he puts his nose in the air, turns tail, and leaves her to her new, all-too-human life.

Novak is an interesting woman: of Czech descent, she began as a model before establishing a career as an actress. Studio bosses initially hoped that she would be a new Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe, but Novak had no interest in being typecast. Indeed, despite her success, by the mid-1960s she was fed-up with the Hollywood lifestyle. Rarely acting after 1966 (and preferring TV projects to cinematic ones), Novak chose to concentrate on her first love, the visual arts, often writing poetry to accompany her pictures.

Now in her eighties, she continues to create work as a photographer, poet and painter. But it's as a seductive (slightly scary) on-screen witch, humming that infernal tune and stroking her pussy, that I, like many wiccaphiles, most fondly think of her. 


To read part 1 of this post on Jennifer (Vernonica Lake), click here.
To read part 3 of this post on Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), click here.

My Three Favourite Witches 1: Jennifer (Veronica Lake)

Wallpaper by VampireMage

My three favourite witches are not the Wayward Sisters found in Shakespeare's Macbeth, dressed in filthy robes, performing weird rituals in the fog, prophesying doom, etc. Nor are they the cock-starved, devil-invoking trio of Alex, Jane and Sukie given us by John Updike in his 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick.

Rather, the three broomstick-riding women I find most spellbinding are Jennifer, Gillian and Samantha ...

The first of these, Jennifer, was played by Veronica Lake in the 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch (dir. René Clair). The tagline for the theatrical poster declares: NO MAN CAN RESIST HER! and I suspect that's true, both of the character and the actress playing her; the much-loved peek-a-boo girl whose hairstyle was much copied by young women in the early 1940s.

Lake is often best remembered for her performances alongside Alan Ladd in movies such as The Blue Dahlia (1946), a classic example of what came to be known critically as film noir. But Lake was never comfortable being cast as a femme fatale and was a very reluctant sex symbol. Indeed, she became so disillusioned with the movie business and the way it turned people into what she termed zombies, that she quit Hollywood in 1951.

So, partly as a mark of respect to this intelligent and talented woman, I prefer to recall her playfully camping it up as mistress Jennifer and teasing the hapless Wooley, played by the much older, distinguished star of stage and screen, Fredric March (whom Lake described as a pompous poseur after he dismissed her as a bimbo void of any acting ability in remarks prior to production).

I Married a Witch is such a joyful, fun film; one that always makes wiccaphiles happy. And it comes with a moral lesson that even D. H. Lawrence - who hated witches - might endorse: Love is stronger than witchcraft.    


To read part 2 of this post on Gillian (Kim Novak), click here.
To read part 3 of this post on Samantha (Elizabeth Montogomery), click here.

               

Caitlin Doughty: Death Becomes Her

Caitlin Doughty 

Photo by Juliette Bates

LA-based queen of the alternative funeral scene and founder of The Order of the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, is a much admired, much respected, and much loved figure in thanatological circles. Her sometimes amusing, often shocking lessons from the crematorium - published as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - may not carry the philosophical weight of Heidegger's reflections on Dasein's angst-ridden confrontation with the void of non-being, but they are, in a way, just as crucial.

For they ultimately form part of the same wider project: A radical rethinking of our mortality and the practices surrounding our deaths; reclaiming the latter from those who would deny us access to the truth of being and the opportunity to ontologically grasp our own finitude by making death into something stereotyped and sentimental, rather than a thing of authentic joy and fundamental source of freedom (a liberating line of flight and inhuman becoming, rather than a judgement which condemns). 

Death is not the opposite or the end of life, so much as a violent reconciliation with the material world; a return to the actual as Nietzsche writes. And Doughty, to her great credit, is insistent that we face up to this fact and admit that, sooner or later, we are all going to die and the atoms that compose us chaotically disperse back into the universe. More than this, she encourages us to refamiliarise ourselves directly with the corpse. Perhaps not with the same degree of intimacy as she has experienced, but certainly to be on far better terms than we are presently in a world in which dead bodies are kept on ice behind stainless-steel doors and chemically embalmed so as to be made at least semi-presentable and semi-acceptable (not too gross looking, not too foul-smelling).

There's certainly nothing glamourous about corpses. Despite what certain poets and necrophiles might think, dead people "look very, very dead" [115] - i.e., horrific. But surely we needn't stigmatize them, or turn them into the stuff of nightmares and subject to taboo. When we become mad with fear and allow our revulsion to become irrational terror (zombie hysteria), then it's always a waste of sane human consciousness, as D. H. Lawrence says.

Thanks, however, to the medicalization and Disneyfication of death this is precisely what has happened. If, in the past, when death was a common daily occurrence and corpses were regularly viewed in public spaces, people became somewhat desensitized to suffering and bad odours, today we are overly-squeamish and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of mortality; the screams, the smells, the soiled sheets, etc. We want what Doughty terms direct disposal in which everything is taken care of online, with no fuss. Doughty challenges this - and I respect her for it. And I second her call for an active "interaction with death" [114] in the belief that corpses "keep the living tethered to reality" [168].

Now, let's be clear: I'm not advocating the re-opening of the city morgues and the re-staging of death-as-spectacle which, as Doughty reminds us, was immensely popular in Paris in the late 19th century. Nor do I think we should cook and eat our dead relatives, like members of the Wari' people. Neither morbid voyeurism nor mortuary cannibalism are the answer. But, somehow, we need to get back in touch with one another and with our dead. As a culture, we need to embrace death and be proud (rather than slightly sad, slightly bored, slightly embarrassed) witnesses of that moment when our loved ones take their leave and miraculously burst like Bernard Shaw's mother, "'into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame'" [64].

An atheist at heart, Doughty nevertheless realises the importance of ceremony and ritual even within a secular culture. If the old ways, historically tied to religious beliefs, have become untenable, she's all for creating new methods of body disposal that are relevant to the way we live (and die) today and "inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition" [216] via the composition of their very own Ars Moriendi, written with "bold, fearless strokes" [234].

All of this is excellent, I think, and I fully support Doughty in her efforts. Indeed, my only criticism of Doughty's book is similar to my criticism of Mary Roach's Stiff (2003); the writing style is just a little too folksy and upbeat for my tastes. I appreciate she's American and therefore culturally predisposed to this kind of thing, but to see the great European thinker and essayist Emil Cioran flippantly dismissed as a Negative Nancy is more than a little irritating. In wanting to revalue our thinking on death, Doughty seems willing at times to strip it of all darkness and negativity (of its tragic pessimism, of its obscenity, of its monstrous character). The book could do with just a little more nihilism and a little less homespun sappiness.

Having said that, it's encouraging that she openly regrets her youthful ambition of putting the fun back into funerals and recognises that holding celebration of life ceremonies sans corpse or any act of mourning - just the deceased's favourite records playing while everyone sips fruit punch - seems akin to "putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one" [64].                  
    
Doughty, we can conclude, is both a smart cookie and a good egg. And she's doing sterling work; torpedoing the ark of the corporate funeral industry and teaching people that death becomes us all if we learn to affirm it. May she live a good and happy life and succeed in all her undertakings. And then may the animals of the forest devour her body with relish ...   
         

See: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016). All page numbers in the above text refer to this paperback edition. 

Visit: The Order of the Good Death web page: click here.

Anatomy Presupposes a Waxwork Venus

Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)

Bella Italia! Terra d'amore! And home also to some of the most exquisite art works depicting the goddess of love, including, famously, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c.1486) and Titian's rather more risqué Venus of Urbino (1538). Less well known - although just as exquisite in its own macabre manner - is the life-sized wax sculpture made by Clemente Susini known as the Little Venus (1782).

Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.

Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:

"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."

But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.

The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica. 

As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...


See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here. 

Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116. 

Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).

On the Art of the Persimmon

Stephen Alexander: Lip Service (2017)

The relationship between fruit and art is long and intimate; in paint and poetry - still life and free verse - mankind has attempted to capture the fleshy beauty and essential thingness of these delicious, nutritious, seed-disseminating structures formed from the swollen ovary of the flowering plant and heavy with cultural and symbolic meaning. People everywhere love to consume fresh, juicy fruit. And people everywhere love to articulate their own perishable existence in angiospermatic terms; we too blossom and go to seed; we too ripen and rot.      

Now, I'm sure everyone will have their favourite fruit, favourite fruit painting and favourite fruit poem. Personally, I'm a big fan of the persimmon at the moment; the glucose-rich, lotus fruit of the ebony tree which ranges from pale yellow-orange in colour to deep orange-red, depending on species and variety. Belonging to the genus Diospyros, many mistakenly believe the persimmon to be a divine fruit, but, actually, it's an earthly delight found all around the world from East Asia to Southern Europe to North America.      

As for my favourite fruit painting and fruit poetry ...

Well, in my view, Cézanne's apples are still the most brilliant and courageous attempt not only to astonish Paris, but to affirm the existence of the fruit as a mind-independent object; i.e. as something that has its own mysterious reality external to our ideas and ideal representations.

And, in my view, D. H. Lawrence's fruit poems in his magnificent collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), remain the greatest verses ever written on pomegranates, peaches, figs, sorb-apples, and grapes. For Lawrence, like Cézanne, was sensitive to the otherness of the non-human world in all its libidinal materiality and allure; he doesn't give a fuck about what we might term the spiritual aspect of fruit which appeals to human vanity and results in reassuring artistic cliché.

But whilst Cézanne painted many types of fruit apart from apples - including pears, oranges and lemons - he unfortunately didn't paint any pictures of persimmons (as far as I'm aware). And so I've provided my own image to accompany this post; a photograph I've entitled Lip Service and which shows the eaten remains of a persimmon on a pink sponge background. It might not have the Zen-like qualities of Mu Ch'i's 13th century ink on paper masterpiece, but I think it's a provocative work of postmodern art.    

Equally regrettable is the fact that Lawrence didn't write a poem about the persimmon either. However, this happily affords me the opportunity to offer a few lines taken from one of Li-Young Lee's rather lovely verses in which, amongst other things, he instructs us how to identify which persimmons are ready to eat and remembers how his mother alerted him to the solar nature of the fruit:
      

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

...

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

- Li-Young Lee, "Persimmons", from Rose, (BOA Editions Ltd, 1986).

On the Woman in Hitler's Bathtub

Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub 

Photo by David E. Scherman, Munich, April 1945

Photo credit: Lee Miller Archives, 2015

Bathing scenes - particularly bathing scenes featuring an attractive young woman, nymph, or goddess - have a long history within the world of fine art. Like King David, we can all easily call to mind the image of Bathsheba at her toilette thanks to Rembrandt. And, thanks to François Boucher, we don't have merely to dream of Diana naked and displaying her divine attributes.     

Throughout the 19th century, the western pornographic imagination took on an increasingly exotic character and there were thousands of canvases produced depicting life inside the harem, or steam-filled Turkish bath. More modern artists, however, such as Degas, rejected the pretext of mythology or orientalism and preferred to paint contemporary bathers splashing about or towelling off (as if spied through a keyhole, as he voyeuristically confessed).           

The genre remained popular in avant-garde circles at the beginning of the 20th century too. Indeed, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was still referencing the subject and making his distinctive contribution to it in 1963. There's just something irresistible, it seems, about the combination of girls, soap, and running water ...

For me, however, the most powerful of all bathing images is one that does far more than affirm the slippery appeal of wet flesh. It's a photo of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, taken at the Führer's Munich apartment in April 1945 (just 24 hours before he blew his brains out in Berlin). 

Miller, an American fashion model who travelled to Paris in 1929 in order to become a photographer and hang out with the Surrealists, was one of only a tiny handful of female correspondents working alongside the Allied forces in Europe during the War. Attached to the 83rd Infantry Division of the US Army, Miller was in the thick of the action whilst recording events for the readers of Vogue: she was there when they landed on the beaches of Normandy; she was there as they entered Paris; and she was there, camera in hand, when they liberated Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.     

Despite her distress, Miller nevertheless photographed survivors and photographed also the mounds of decomposing bodies piled up of those enemies of the Third Reich who didn't survive, but died from disease, malnourishment, brutal mistreatment and/or the Nazi policy of extermination through labour.   

After leaving Dachau, which was situated ten miles northwest of Munich, Miller accompanied GIs into the Bavarian capital, where they discovered Hitler's apartment. Always one to seize (and to stage) a unique photo opportunity, Miller stripped off and had herself pictured by fellow photographer David Scherman naked in the German leader's bath.

It remains a striking and unsettling image; the culmination of her work as a surrealist and photojournalist, combining humour and political defiance. Miller and Scherman deliberately placed the Heinrich Hoffmann portrait of Hitler on the tub as an amusing indicator of just where she was. They also just as deliberately placed the small sculpture by Rudolf Kaesbach in the bathroom in order to pass critical judgement on the Führer's kitsch-classical (nicht entarteten) taste in art.

And, finally - most crucially - in front of the tub, Miller set down her heavy boots covered with the filth from Dachau earlier that day; filth she has trodden with contempt into Hitler's pristine white bathmat. In this way, a beauty in the bathtub achieves her victory over a beast in the bunker ... 


Afternote

It would be nice to conclude this post with the thought that she who laughs last laughs the longest and that this iconic photo represents the idealistic triumph of aesthetics and humanity over fascist ideology. But, sadly, it would be somewhat disingenuous. 

For it's not so easy to forget traumatic experiences or erase horrific memories and so, long after the War, images from the camps - many of which she destroyed or hid away - continued to haunt Miller and she suffered from severe episodes of clinical depression, eventually giving up the darkroom in favour of the kitchen.  

No poetry after Auschwitz - and maybe no photography either - but there's always cookery ... 

On the Art of the Kiss 3: Man Ray

Man Ray: Le Baiser (1930)

The above photograph by Man Ray, featuring his lover, model and muse - the magnificent Lee Miller - kissing an unknown woman (sometimes identified by the mysterious name of Belbourne), is one that I like very much; elements of faux-lesbianism and frigidity always excite my interest more than passionate scenes between genuine lovers prone to emotional excess and that soulful look.

I also find the photogram below of great interest and, in a sense, just as exciting:

Man Ray: Le Baiser, ('Rayograph', 1922)

Also entitled The Kiss, this is one of Man Ray's earliest Rayograms; a technique in which he abandons the camera and experiments with image-making by bringing objects directly into contact with the surface of light-sensitive material, resulting in spooky-looking shadow images (variations in tone indicating the degree of transparency of the objects used).

To create this negative kiss, Man Ray combines the ghostly heads and hands of himself and his mistress at the time, Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse); an actress, model, nightclub chanteuse and artist in her own right, who perfectly personified the bohemian culture of Paris in the Twenties.

I suppose the question that arises and which intrigues me most is this: What did Radnitzky, the great American surrealist and son of a tailor, desire most; to fuck his models in the flesh, or capture their ephemeral beauty on film?

Either way, I greatly admire his avant-garde genius and envy him his way with the ladies. Man Ray is an amazing example of a creative, intelligent individual who devotes his life to the joy of erotic and artistic freedom. Insouciant, mais pas indifférent - as it says above his grave, I wish I had but a fraction of his talent, his courage, and his humour.       

On the Art of the Kiss 2: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Der Kuß, 1907-08.

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm x 180 cm.

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Almost everyone is surely familiar with Gustav Klimt's gilded Art Nouveau masterpiece, The Kiss. Indeed, when I was a student back in the 1980s, it was almost obligatory to have a poster reproduction on the wall, purchased from Athena and placed alongside a work by his more daring, fiercely talented young protégé, Egon Schiele, who stripped away the prettiness and coyness of Klimt's gold leaf.

Looking at it now, however, I have to confess to finding its dreamy symbolism and romantic idealism all a bit too hippyish for my tastes (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). And, annoyingly, one also can't help thinking of Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat - and one doesn't want to think of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (or the tedious Hebrew scriptures upon which they based their musical) under any circumstances, but particularly when trying to discuss a work of erotic art rather than Christian rock. 

And, obviously, The Kiss is primarily an erotic painting; featuring as it does a pair of lovers lost in a moment of bliss, bodies entwined. But it's a subdued rather than scandalous eroticism, that lacks the perverted excess that belongs to the pornographic imagination and which characterised Klimt's notorious Faculty Paintings (1900-07), commissioned by the University of Vienna (none of which were ever displayed and all of which were destroyed by the retreating Nazi forces in 1945). 

It really is a lovely work, The Kiss; one that was enthusiastically received and which immediately found a buyer. But, in all honesty, it's simply not as challenging as some of his other great canvases. His public reputation damaged and his confidence severely shaken after the Vienna Ceiling Affair, Klimt was looking to win back favour and produce a successful picture; to demonstrate to himself, as well as his critics, that he wasn't too old, too nervous, or too stupid to do so.

Ultimately, The Kiss is a compromise; unlike the beautifully provocative Goldfish (1901-02), which mockingly invites his detractors to kiss his arse.

Today, retaining pride of place in the Belvedere Museum, Der Kuß is regarded as a national treasure by all proud Austrians, who boast it's not only more popular than Leonardo's Mona Lisa - and might even be more valuable if sold - but is a much bigger canvas to boot!        

On the Art of the Kiss 1: Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin: The Kiss (1901-04) 

Tate Collection (1953, Reference: NO6228) 

Pretty much everyone is familiar with Rodin's sculpture known in English as The Kiss. If they haven't seen the 1882 marble original in Paris at the Musée Rodin, they'll have seen the full-size version displayed at the Tate here in London. But what everyone mightn't know is that it commemorates Francesca da Rimini, the 13th-century Italian noblewoman and adulteress immortalised in Dante's Inferno, who copped off with her crippled husband's younger (and able-bodied) brother, Paolo. 

Observant viewers will note that Rodin doesn't actually allow the lovers' lips to touch, suggesting perhaps that they never consummated their affair (and that Le Baiser - a title supplied by the critics - is something of a misnomer). But this romantic idea isn't true. In fact, they carried on their illicit relationship for a full ten years before they were discovered (in flagrante delicto) and met their tragic fate at the hands of the cuckolded figure of Giovanni Malatesta.         

The sculpture's provocative combination of down and dirty eroticism - the male figure is clearly aroused in the original life-sized work - with high aesthetic idealism, secures it a permanent (if controversial) place within the history of Western art as well as the pornographic imagination. Rodin prided himself on depicting women, their bodies and their sexuality, in an active manner and Francesca is seen here as a willing partner in crime.

However, despite being a celebrated work, Rodin himself amusingly considered it as far from being a masterpiece; he described it privately as very traditional in style; little more than a large sculpted knick-knack that follows the usual formula.

And this remark - a kind of kiss this to popular opinion and conventional taste - makes me love him all the more.

Ken Dodd: How Tickled I'm Not

I don't know why, but I don't like - and have never liked - newly knighted comedian Ken Dodd. Or Doddy, as he's known; the self-proclaimed Squire of Knotty Ash and King of the super-creepy Diddy Men, waving his tickling stick about and rejoicing in his own personal merriment:

Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess / I thank the Lord that I've been blessed / With more than my share of happiness.

Dodd essentially belongs to that Mersyside music hall and variety tradition that also produced the spectacularly unfunny Arthur Askey and Tommy ("It's That Man Again") Handley.

But, rightly or wrongly, he's associated more in my mind with that depressing generation of Liverpudlians that dominated light entertainment in the era I was growing up; Jimmy Tarbuck, Cilla Black, Tom O'Connor, Stan Boardman ... Showbiz reactionaries who sentimentally pride themselves on their Scouse roots and humble origins, but love Margaret Thatcher and think the Royal Family do a marvellous job.

Great hair though. And, like Picasso, Doddy's a monster of artistic stamina. So there's something to admire and respect, despite the dodgy politics and sometimes equally dubious stage material.   

Flogging a Dead Horse (Notes on The Rocking Horse Winner)

Still from The Rocking Horse Winner (dir. Anthony Pelissier, 1949),

showing Valerie Hobson as Hester Grahame and the shadow of John Howard Davies 

as her son Paul upon his magical wooden steed

Having just re-read it, I was hoping to write something provocative on 'The Rocking Horse Winner', Lawrence's short story first published in the American fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, in July 1926.

But, unfortunately, I've so far failed to even get out of the starting gate. Indeed, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that anyone attempting a new interpretation is likely to find themselves flogging a dead horse. For between them, the Freudian, Marxist, and Christian critics have done an effective job of foreclosing the text; they've nobbled it, so to speak.

For Freudians, Lawrence's story is simply a classic tale of Oedipal desire with scenes of sublimated masturbation thrown in for good measure; easy to understand by any one with a working knowledge of psychoanalysis. Hester's reliance on her young son to satisfy her needs, emotional and economic, rather than her hapless husband - and Paul's frantic attempts to do so - tragically arrest his development and lead to his premature death.     

For Marxists - less interested in sex and the libidinal unconscious and more concerned with class and the role of cash within a commodity theory of exchange - and for Christians - convinced that the love of money is the root of all evil - the tale is also very straightforward and easy to explain. For the former, capitalism dissolves the human bonds that tie us together; for the latter, all forms of materialism lead to sin.

I would like to find and to offer something more; something, for example, that allows us to relocate desire from the nursery and free it from its entrapment within the Oedipal triangle of Mummy-Daddy-Me; or something that allows us to conclude other than that greed is bad, luck is vulgar, and there's merely shit in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.

But Lawrence, who at other times goes out of his way to prove himself anti-Freudian, anti-Bolshevist, and anti-Christian, gives us so little else to work or play with in this story. He's so unambiguously opposed to wealth, success, and even good fortune - not to mention so openly contemptuous of Hester - that he can't help producing a tale that virtue signals its sympathies and its prejudices too clearly, too crudely (as, arguably, he does in much of his later fiction - including his notorious last novel).             


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Rocking Horse Winner', in The Woman Who Rode away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Portrait of the Führer as a Young Artist (Or How Hitler Helps Us Counter Aesthetic Idealism)

 Adolf Hitler, Self-Portrait (detail), 1910

Hitler had a long and passionate relationship with painting; one that swung from the love and devotion of his early years as a would-be art student in Vienna where he produced hundreds of sketches and water colours, to his notorious rejection as Führer of almost all modern work as degenerate.

In Mein Kampf (1925), he confesses how his youthful ambition was not to become a great statesman, but, rather, a great artist. Indeed, even in the dark days of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler told a somewhat bemused UK Ambassador: 'I'm an artist, not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my days as a painter.'      

Unfortunately, however, most of Hitler's pictures - whilst technically competent and not lacking in a certain charm - displayed only a mediocre and all-too-conventional talent; one that failed to convince the examiners of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who twice rejected his application to enrol as a student (first in 1907 and again a year later).     
  
But some - particularly the faceless self-portrait above in which a 21-year-old Adolf sits on a stone bridge and dangles his feet over a colourful stream (possibly contemplating his own failure and growing sense of alienation and anonymity) - really have something intriguing and challenging about them.     

At any rate - and as Peter Beech, a freelance journalist and subeditor on the Culture and Review section of The Guardian (a paper not known for its Nazi sympathies) concedes - Hitler's work, whether we like it or not, isn't that bad. It's certainly superior to most of the outsider art produced by the criminal and/or criminally insane. Beech writes:

"I'm no expert, but I sense that the putdowns of the art world are overstated. Hitler's paintings are amateurish, but they certainly aren't an abomination - that came later. In fact, they're quite sweet. The man who dreamed up the death of the Jews proves to be a surprisingly dab hand at sunlight on stone walls. They show him nearly getting it right, or at least not getting it very wrong. This is much, much worse. Looking at these pictures, it's not enough to say they are something Hitler tossed off during his brief, early masquerade as a human being. The artist quite clearly has a grasp of a very nuanced and very human proposition: what is beautiful."
   
This, as Beech points out, is problematic - not least of all for those beautiful souls who think art has something important to teach us; that it's morally instructive and uplifting:

"What is the link now - if any - between aesthetics and morality? We all accept that our creatives needn't lead impeccable lives, but it's something else to admit that true monsters are capable of taste. ... Hitler's paintings, if we look at them, hard, should help us dismiss any lingering belief that we can learn in a moral sense from something that demonstrates technical accomplishment. They confirm, if we needed confirmation, that there has never been any relation between form and content, between what is pretty and what is right. ... If Hitler can do loveliness, then it has nothing to teach us. Beauty is simply beauty - and that's the truth."

Many have come to accept the banality of evil. But it's only a few as yet who admit also the superficiality of art. 


See: Peter Beech, 'Face it, Hitler's art isn't that bad', The Guardian, 29 April, 2009.

Why I Love Carry On Cruising

Kenneth Williams as First Officer Marjoribanks

There are many reasons to love Carry On Cruising (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1962), the sixth film in the series and first to be filmed in colour.

Firstly, it retains all the innocence and queer charm of the earlier black and white films and is essentially a finely balanced romantic comedy without too much sentiment or too much vulgarity; it's tender without being soft-centred, saucy without being smutty.   

Secondly, regular cast members - Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor - all deliver excellent (nicely restrained) performances; and, just as crucially, stand-in cast members Lance Percival and the lovely Dilys Laye also do fine jobs. The former, playing the ship's cook, occupies the part originally meant for Charles Hawtrey, dropped from the cast for demanding he be given top billing and a gold star on his dressing room door. The latter, playing a young woman looking for love whilst cruising the Mediterranean, replaced Joan Sims at short notice after she was unexpectedly taken ill just days before the commencement of filming.

Cruising also co-stars the magnificent Liz Fraser and - as I think we can all agree - any film or TV show with Liz Fraser is instantly improved, even if, sadly, not always worth watching. When she departs the series after Carry On Cabbie (1963), it's a real loss. Seeing her in her black underwear always makes happy (and nostalgic); she has the erotic charisma that Barbara Windsor in the later movies, for all her infectious giggling, completely lacks.                    

Someone else who always makes happy (though for very different reasons) is the diminutive, Australian-born character actress and funny-woman, Esma Cannon, here making her third of four appearances in the Carry On series. British cinema would not be British cinema without her and Miss Madderley is a very welcome passenger on board the Happy Wanderer. Her table tennis scene with Kenneth Williams is particularly pleasing.   

Finally, Cruising also contains a somewhat curious scene in which James and Williams discuss different schools of psychoanalysis. James, as Captain Crowther, declares himself to have always been a Freudian and too old to change; Williams, as First Officer Marjoribanks, quips in response that that's nothing to worry about or apologise for - just so long as one remains Jung at heart. 

It's not the greatest joke ever written. But it's inclusion in a film of this nature is surprising and a welcome relief from the more predictable double entendres, sight gags, and elements of slapstick.    

On the Keys to Happiness (and the Women Who Hold Them)

I hold the keys of eternal bliss; whatever shall be locked in this life shall be locked hereafter

 and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.

For some lovers, it's not enough to symbolically hold the key to their partners heart; they want a real key that brings with it real power and authority - and it's not the aforementioned organ that they wish to exercise control over either ...

The chastity belt was originally a device designed to be worn by women in order to prevent sexual activity and remove even the temptation to such. Today, however, modern versions are predominantly made for male wearers and used not by crusading knights, elderly husbands, or moral puritans obsessed by the thought of masturbation, but by submissives within the world of BDSM looking to heighten their erotic pleasure via games of genital tease, torture and orgasm denial.       

The use of a chastity device in a kinky context, be it a traditional belt or a more contemporary cage design, is of course consensual. But, once it's locked in place, it's the amorous subject alone who, as keyholder, is expected to call the shots and assert dominance over the wearer and their sexual behaviour. Only the keyholder may decide if, where, and when the chastened object might be released and allowed some degree of gratification; the latter having often been trained to quite literally come on command.     

Keyholders can, of course, be of any gender or sexuality. But, as most of those happily squeezing their genitals into chastity devices are heterosexual men looking to be enslaved by a cruel and beautiful mistress, it follows that most are female.

And, interestingly, many of these women enjoy carrying the little keys of happiness entrusted to them at all times; often wearing them on a necklace or bracelet, or, as in the picture above, tucked neatly and conveniently into a specially designed stocking top.      

(The point - for those who like things spelt out - is this: we none of us hold the keys to happiness in our own hands; we are all dependent upon others for our fulfilment.)

On the Peacock and the Gamekeeper

Peacock by go-bananas on deviantart.com

The literary imagination of the nineteenth-century was fascinated by the symbol of the peacock. Indeed, even the young D. H. Lawrence, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, can't resist having one of these ornamental birds come screeching its way into his first novel  ...

The narrator, Cyril Beardsall, is sat one evening in an abandoned churchyard, chatting with his new acquaintance, Annable, the misanthropic (and misogynistic) local gamekeeper.

Although Annable is despised by the villagers and regarded as something of a devil, Cyril can't help confessing the erotic attraction he feels towards him; "his magnificent physique, his great vigour and vitality, and his swarthy, gloomy face drew me in". Cyril also likes the way that the older man treats him "as an affectionate father treats a delicate son", touching him on his shoulder or knee, as they sit discussing "the decline of the human race" into folly and corruption.        
 
Suddenly, a peacock came flapping out from behind the church and flew onto the marble figure of an angel that continued to guard a grave, even if it had long ceased caring for the poor parishioner buried therein:   

"The bird bent its voluptuous neck and peered about. Then it lifted up its head and yelled. The sound tore the dark sanctuary of twilight. ... Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at the same time turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it showed us the full wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream of coloured stars over the sunken face of the angel."

At first, Annable was silent and simply watched the peacock moving uneasily in the twilight. But then he exploded with unexpected and somewhat absurd misogynistic rage - especially considering the exuberant maleness that the large bird displayed: 

"'The proud fool! - look at it! Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a pedestal for vanity. That's the soul of a woman ... the very, very soul. Damn the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to wring its neck.'"

The peacock gave another loud cry; it seemed to Cyril to be stretching its beak at them in derision. Annable picked up a piece of earth and flung it at the bird, saying: "'Get out, you screeching devil!'" The peacock flew away, over the tombs and down the terraces.

"'Just look!'" said Annable, "'the miserable brute has dirtied that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement.'"

Now, it transpires that this contemptuous view of women is the result of a bad marriage experience; according to Annable, his wife manipulated him from the beginning and quickly turned him into an objectified plaything. Then she got bored and fell in love with a poet. Feeling he'd been shit upon and humiliated, he left and allowed the world to think him dead.

That doesn't sound very nice. But, ultimately, his ugly and resentful remarks on women - like those of Lawrence's other famous gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, - are unpleasant, unfair, and unforgivable, whatever the unfortunate circumstances that gave rise to them.
 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

In Praise of an Unnatural Death (and in the Hope of Dying on the Scaffold)

Unnatural Death by Ashkan Honarvar (2015)

Ultimately, to have done with the judgement of God means refusing to accept what medical professionals like to describe as death by natural causes. Which is to say, the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

One should - as a philosopher and anti-theist - always desire and seek out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the way to go.

Personally, I have always quite fancied the idea of being executed. It's not that I particularly want to be hanged, guillotined, gassed, electrocuted, given a lethal injection, or shot at dawn, but I do like the thought of enjoying a last meal before then facing an audience before whom one can display the noble virtues as I understand them; irony, indifference, and insouciance. 

I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage and stoicism of the dandy - and a ready quip on my lips that might cause even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such circumstances). 

In a famous essay from 1927, Freud theorised gallows humour thusly:  

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."

There are many examples; William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: 'Is it safe?'

But I think my favourite story concerns Mussolini who, about to be shot by communist partisans, asked them to aim at his heart - before turning his face to one side and adding 'Don't ruin the profile.'

Cold Turkey and TV (How We're Betrayed by Tradition)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy
(looking as bored then as I feel today)

There are many traditions associated with Christmas; singing carols, decorating a tree, hanging up a stocking, kissing under the mistletoe, exchanging presents, etc.

But, for many people, the big day itself is ultimately reduced to a plate of cold turkey leftovers and zoning out in front of the TV: sic semper erat, et sic semper erit. Is it any wonder that suicide rates spike at this time of year?

The fact is, whether we like to admit it or not, traditions can be fatal: the mindlessly repetitive transmission of customs that no one really cares about and beliefs that no one considers truthful, from one generation to the next, is at last soul-destroying.

Far from sustaining a people within a living faith or culture, tradition becomes a substitute for such; an empty form, devoid of significance, whose meaning has long been forgotten. Nietzsche warned of the way that history can, at a certain point, become disadvantageous; the past starts to enforce its claims on the present regardless of the cost, preventing the birth of new thoughts and feelings and any future unfolding.

Etymologically, the word tradition warns us of the threat that it contains; for tradere means not only that which is delivered as a gift across time, but also that which betrays. We are exposed to danger by our own inheritance, as soon as we allow it to automatically determine who we are and how we live.

This is why we must challenge convention and all forms of doxa; why we must not simply show unquestioning love and loyalty to the past; why we must let the dead bury the dead (so that they don't bury us beneath the accumulated filth of ages).

And this is why, if you really want to have a merry Christmas, it takes more than pulling a cracker and wearing a paper hat round the dinner table ... 

All I Want for Christmas ...

All I Want for Christmas Is You

Ever since a young child, I have, as a rule, instinctively felt myself in visceral opposition to that which has mass popular appeal, or solicits universal critical consensus. But there are, thankfully, always exceptions to any rule - even one's own.

And perhaps the loveliest of all exceptions is that slice of immaculate pop magic conjured up by the American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey during the festive season of 1994.

It's not my absolute favourite Xmas song: that would be Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End), by The Darkness (2003), for reasons indicated elsewhere on this blog [click here]. And, obviously, I'm also very fond of Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody (1973), showcasing the unique genius of Noddy Holder.

But Mariah's is the best and gives the purest sense of festive joy. She is, as one critic has pointed out, a great philosopher of the human heart:

"Since 1994, the song has sold more than 14 million copies and made a reported $50 million in royalties. And besides making her some sweet seasonal cash, Carey's masterpiece is an incredible feat of philosophical subterfuge. Christmas is a time of material and affection-based excess, yet the song is narrowly focused on just one thing: getting to be with a specific person, e.g., you. It rejects the idea of love in general in favor of love in particular, simultaneously defying and defining pop-music conventions. With infinitely more economy of expression and undoubtedly catchier lyrics, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is a sort of Hegelian dialectic of Christmastime desire, taking the conflicting notions of abundance and specificity and packaging them neatly into an earworm for the generations."
              

- Emma Green, 'All I Want for Christmas Is You: A Historical Dialectic', The Atlantic (23 Dec 2015).

Infrathin Erotica (Fragment from an Illicit Lover's Discourse)

 

The blissful feeling that the Illicit Lover experiences when he sits in a seat on the Tube vacated by a young woman and her body heat is transferred unto him is heightened by his knowledge that this is not merely a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, but an example also of Duchamp's ambiguous concept of the infrathin - a concept which refers to (amongst other things):

(i) those fleeting sensory experiences whose pleasure escapes any form of rational explanation  ...

(ii) that intangible fourth dimensional state that transcends mundane existence ... 

(iii) the almost imperceptible difference that exists between two seemingly identical objects ...  

Later, he notices how the perfume of the Prostitute marries with the scent of her flesh into an intoxicating cassolette. And he delights also in the way that her cigarette smoke smells of the mouth that exhales it (the same mouth that fellates him with such consummate ease).