Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.

Me and Zena x Saatchi Gallery Paint Can Ring

Zena McKeown's Paint Can Ring, which features as part of her Saatchi Gallery Collection, is a tiny piece of perfection: smart, witty, and lovely to look at, it puts to shame many of the expensive artworks displayed in the gallery itself and reinforces my belief that today what really excites our imagination can invariably be found in the gift shop, rather than the main building; that the latter merely serves as an alibi for the former.

In other words, we traipse round art galleries and museums bored out of our skulls, merely because it affords us the opportunity and the pleasure of shopping. Who needs aesthetic transcendence or edification when you can purchase postcards, t-shirts, and novel designer items that brilliantly capture and express who and what we are as a people?    

Coincidentally, the ring - in my mind at least - also nicely anticipates the Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Manifesto, featuring Jessica Chastain, that I love so much. Miss McKeown is thus to be commended for not simply being on trend, but ahead of the game with this design.  

Epilation

The policing and removal of female body hair is practised in every phallocratic society for a number of reasons - from religious phobia to cultural fashion - using a wide variety of methods. 

In the Western world, women have been obliged to shave legs and underarms for over a century. But it is only recently that they have also been expected as a matter of porno-social convention to remove hair from the pubic region like an Arab woman; not as an act of Fitrah, or in the name of hygiene, but due to changing ideas of what constitutes desirability.

I have to confess, I remain a little troubled by this trend. 

For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the aesthetic to the practical and perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.'  

Eat the Rich!

Westminster Council are considering cutting benefits paid to obese claimants who refuse to lose weight and enrol on authorised fitness programmes. Evidence, one might suggest, that if Tory politicians and their rich paymasters hate the poor and the unemployed, they positively despise the poor and the unemployed who also have the audacity to overeat. 

For as Baudrillard pointed out thirty years ago, when obesity was almost an exclusively American phenomenon, the super-sized display the truth of the very system that produced them; its greed, its empty inflation, and its lack of shame. 

The obese accept the challenge thrown down by contemporary capitalism: 'You want us to consume? Ok, we'll consume everything until we are no longer fit to work and we swallow you and all your money.' 

When there's no hope of revolution or active resistance, then there can only be a passive-aggressive (and potentially suicidal) response to the violence and obscenity of the culture we are all a part of. Obesity, in other words, is a fatal strategy: an ironic transpolitical counter-challenge to the morbidity of the fat cats. 

Unnatural Alliances

I have always been a big fan of unnatural alliances, formed, for example, between Beauty and the Beast, Pygmalion and Galatea, or the Owl and the Pussycat, who went to sea in beautiful pea-green boat. 

For the great and intoxicating truth is that once desire has been deterritorialized from its traditional object and aim, then it is free to reterritorialize on all kinds of strange attractors, in all manner of perverse new ways. 

In other words: we can form erotic relations with anything and everything and love achieves its consummation not when boy meets girl, or even boy meets boy, but when entirely heterogenous terms and territories are brought together. 

Thus the advocates of gay marriage are, I'm afraid, nowhere near radical enough in their thinking. What they should be demanding is an end to all anthropomorphic representations of sex: for freedom begins not when everyone has the right to be married in a church, but to be married to a church if they so wish.

Tell that to Pope Benedict XVI.

Senescence

People - especially women over 35 who hold degrees in psychology - like to talk about spiritual growth and personal development, but are much less keen to talk about biological ageing.

Partly, this is because the violent changes to molecular and cellular structure over time invariably result in deterioration and death and no matter how priests, poets, and philosophers might like to dress it up, there's nothing fun about growing old and no one dies with dignity. In fact, death is the ultimate loss of dignity: a shipwreck into the nauseous, as Bataille so charmingly puts it.

The precise etiology of senescence is still largely undetermined and the process seems to be complex. Nevertheless, you can see it every time you look in the mirror, or, as here, by simply placing a series of photographs side by side showing the full ravages of time and decade after decade of fading youth and the failure of homeodynamics.  

Dandelions

The body is always looking to exert itself and escape the overcoding of the organism. And it does this in a number of ways that range from the spasm of orgasm, to the sudden yawn or burst of laughter. D. H. Lawrence understood this as a painter, which is why so many of his figures seem to have given themselves over to 'unselfconscious physicality and abandon', as Keith Sagar puts it.

Thus, when in a watercolour entitled Dandelions Lawrence depicts a man urinating on some flowers, he is not simply trying to shock those for whom biological functions are embarrassing or degrading, but also attempting to show how such a simple act might be conceived as expressive of the intensive forces of bodily sensation.

And so perhaps there was something not only touching about the drunk young woman pissing outside the tube station last night, but also liberating.   

How to be an Idle Cunt

Is the writer Tom Hodgkinson the most despicable human being in the world? Perhaps not. But his book, How to be Idle (Penguin Books, 2005), remains the most offensive publication I have ever read: snobbish, sexist, racist, banal and moralistic, it was of course critically acclaimed by his chums in the media.   

One might have expected far more from a man who openly boasts of his knowledge of the "philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years" [P] than to be told that the working class are gullible and too stupid to delegate or live life according to their own rules. But that, pretty much, is the central message.

He still loves them of course, for he's a man of the people who, when not hiring nannies for the children or contributing articles to The Daily Telegraph, likes nothing better than to listen to the Clash. Tom might have purchased his idleness at the expense of others - those "office girls with lots of make-up" and "immigrants with hard hats" [14] that he refers to - but he's still a punk revolutionary at heart.

Tom loves the homeless too. And, without wanting to over-romanticize them, he thinks it a real shame that they are seen as unfortunates in need of help, rather than  happy souls who "do not want a job ... do not want to become middle class ... do not want to keep fixed hours and spend their surplus income in department stores and theme parks" [108]. Tom knows this, because it says so in a song by the Monkees. But is it not peculiarly insulting to be told this by a man who, whilst working at The Guardian on the homes-and-interiors supplement, came up with the line 'staying in is the new going out'?

However, next time a homeless young person approaches, rather than mumble about not having any change, I shall take the opportunity to inform them that they "represent an ideal ... of pure living in the moment, of wandering without destination, of freedom from worldly care" [110].

No need then for more temporary accommodation to be made available, or new houses to be built. No need for hospitals either, because, according to Tom, it's a good thing to be sick: "bodily suffering  can improve the mind" [69]. Instead, what we should do is open more pubs and tobacconists: because alcohol makes us into "thinking, feeling, laughing, independent human beings" [113] and smoking "transforms the common man into something more heroic, more complete" [137]. Perhaps the latter is true; but if completion involves developing malignant tumours, I for one would prefer to remain incomplete.

Tom also supports the opening of legalized brothels, because the "quest for liberty" is tied to "the pursuit of sexual freedoms" [194]. In practice, this seems to mean fucking prostitutes, masturbating with pornography, and being raped: "Oh, to lie back and be used and abused! This is surely the secret wish of every sexual slacker" [198].

Not that he advocates too much debauchery as he slips happily towards respectable middle-age. For one thing, he doesn't have enough "energy (or staff!) to get blasted all the time" [222]. And besides, his real pleasure now is getting plenty of sleep in order to "restore body and mind to a comfortable condition" [222]: his bourgeois default setting.

In fact, it was whilst innocently day-dreaming that Tom came up with the idea of starting his own business and forging a successful writing career so that he might have his ideal life. Good for him! But whilst dreaming might be free, one might wonder where he found the capital needed in order to do these things: his professed frugality and thriftiness perhaps? Or was it from his wealthy parents, his famous friends, or his business partner and old school pal, Gavin Pretor-Pinney?

I don't know and I don't really care. But I would like to know why it is Tom Hodgkinson's model of idleness has to involve such naked ambition and colossal conceit. He's not the most despicable human being in the world. But ...  
 

Hand Partialism

There's something deeply affecting about the poster campaign for the new perfume from YSL. It's not the gaze of the actress modelling which transfixes; rather, it's the fact that attention is drawn to her hands which have been dipped in purple paint. 

I suddenly see why Baudrillard insists that the slender and lively hands of women are of greater symbolic and seductive beauty than their eyes or hidden sexual organs. 

I suppose that's why nothing gives greater pleasure than to stroll hand-in-hand, or be gently masturbated by a girl with delicate fingers.     

Life's a Drag

'A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, 

for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.'

                                                                                           
                                                                                          - Deuteronomy, 22: 5                                             

Really? I mean what's the problem here: why is God so troubled by everything?

I suppose it's because the simple pleasure of cross-dressing creates an element of uncertainty and causes the poles of male and female to vacillate via an abolition of differential opposition. 

Cross-dressing demonstrates how the signs of sex can easily be separated from biology. In other words, it reveals gender and sexual identity to be nothing but a playful and performative game involving clothes, hair and cosmetics; a question of style, rather than a fateful combination of anatomical fact and metaphysical essence.

Personally, I have always found something enchanting about 'men dressed as women' and 'women dressed as men'. Like Wilde, I am of the view that wherever there is loveliness of appearance, then there is no fraudulence. 

And besides, as Judith Butler points out: we are all transvestites.