Pretty Punk Vacancy Contra Sado-Libertine Apathy

The Marquis de Sade looks on as Johnny Rotten 

acts pretty vacant for the cameras

 

'I have a very strong feeling that the opposite 

of love is not hate - it's apathy.' [1] 

 

I.

 

Consult any modern reference source and you will find apathy defined as a lack of emotion, interest, and/or concern. It is presented as a state of perfected indifference; a clinical curbing of enthusiasm. 

 

More often than not, apathy is also regarded in a negative light; as a psychopathological problem that sits on the same spectrum of diminished motivation as abulia and, at the extreme, akinetic mutism. Because they lack a sense of drive and seem to have no purpose or meaning, apathetic individuals are believed to have an inferior quality of life. 

 

Expressive individuals who like to openly display their emotions and endlessly bang on about their feelings, think apathetic individuals must be suffering from depression or some other brain disorder. It's not normal - and it's not natural - to be so cold and detached. It seems to betray not only an absence of passion, but a lack of soul - which is why Christians have historically condemned apathy as a deficiency of love and devotion to God and listed it among the seven deadly sins: sloth [2].

 

The Ancient Greeks, however, thought a little differently on this matter. And so, although the modern English term apathy (first used in 1594) is derived from ἀπάθεια (apatheia), it is important not to confuse or conflate the two terms. For the Stoics, for example, apatheia signified a desirable state of indifference toward events and things that lie outside one's control (and it is still considered a virtue today within Orthodox monasticism and certain schools of Gnosticism).    

 

 

II.  

Moving on from this brief history of apathy and its etymology, I'd like to discuss the concept as developed within the work of the Marquis de Sade, contrasting this with how the idea was expressed in the scene that developed in and around 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s. 

 

My aim is to show that although there were Sadean currents within punk as conceived by McLaren and Westwood - examined at length and in detail by Matthew Worley [3] - there's a world of difference between Johnny Rotten's pretty vacancy and l'apathie of those libertines who do their philosophising in the bedroom rather than at a pervy fashion boutique. 

 

 

III. 

 

According to Matt Worley: "Punk's cultural body bore Sadean scars." [4] 

 

It's a nice line. 

 

And Worley is right to suggest that, at some level, punk was "transmitting the echoes of Sade's howl through the mediums of popular music and fashion" [5]. 

 

However, while McLaren and his young protégés may have subscribed to an ideology of sex, style and subversion coupled to a kinky aesthetic incorporating safety pins, swastikas, and fetishwear, what they almost certainly did not do was read the works of the Marquis de Sade.

 

For if they had, they would have learnt that central to Sade's transgressive philosophy was the formal concept of l'apathie ...    

 

To understand what our punk friends missed, one might look to the Fifth Dialogue of Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), wherein the libertine Dolmancé encourages fifteen-year-old Eugénie to systematically discard traditional moral values in favour of l'apathie. 

 

He explains how the sensations resulting from apathy are vastly superior to those born of emotional sensitivity and advocates a total shift toward cold indifference and egoistic gratification: 

 

"Ah, Eugénie, believe me when I say the delights of apathy far outweigh those of virtue; the latter have only one application, whereas the former can excite and overwhelm one's whole being." [6]  

 

Thus, far from being a secondary concern, l'apathie - derived from the ancient Greek apatheia [7] - is an ideal given primary importance by many (if not all) of Sade's philosophically-minded libertines. 

 

More than a passive lack of feeling, l'apathie is a deliberate, active mechanism with specific functions; eradicating empathy, purging all moral sentiment, and ensuring the libertine's pleasure is derived entirely from the will. Complete indifference to the suffering of the victim thereby eliminates all emotional dependency upon the amorous object. 

 

As Bataille observed in Eroticism (1957), a sadist who indulges their raw impulses simply for instant gratification or bourgeois pleasure is merely a poor doomed creature ruled by vice. True sovereignty requires passion to be strictly disciplined and compressed. L'apathie is the ingenious method used to reject spontaneous emotion, converting raw impulse into a calculating, destructive energy that allows the libertine to abandon the all-too-human aspects of his character. 

 

Deleuze further formalised this in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), arguing that Sadean apathy is fundamentally directed against sentiment. Because moral guilt or emotional pleasure represents a dangerous dissipation of mental focus, the libertine derives ultimate satisfaction from pure mathematical and philosophical reasoning. His sex, as Lawrence would say, is in his head - but that's precisely where he wants it to be. 

 

L'apathie acts as a mechanism that clears away emotional noise, transforming sex into something experienced in the mind and imagination rather than the body and its organs, thereby allowing the ego to contemplate the pleasure of negating natural instincts [8]. By maintaining zero degree coldness, the libertine becomes a machine capable not only of acts of debauchery, but violent atrocity.     

 

IV. 

 

Early punk was to a large extent defined by a rhetoric of boredom, blank generational indifference, and pretty vacancy. The Sex Pistols explicitly stated that they didn't care and Rotten boasted of the fact that he had no feelings for anybody else (only his beautiful self) [9]. 

 

However, like almost everything else, this was merely a defensive (and stylistic) pose against systemic disappointment. The majority of punks, bless them, wanted to have fun, and to feel, and to have a rosy future full of career opportunities. Theirs was a form of faux apathy and feigned indifference - the fact that Rotten would often berate his audiences to get off their arses gives the game away. All too often punk was an expression of sincere moral outrage and a frustrated desire for change.     

 

V. 

 

In conclusion: punk's relationship with Sade remains purely superficial, transactional, and aesthetic and, as a form of Romantic idealism, punk has opposing goals to Sadism [10].  

McLaren and Westwood may have exploited aspects of Sade's work - mostly the tits and bums - just as they borrowed from numerous other sources in order to fuck the rich up the arse and generate cash from chaos, but, ultimately, they were more interested in anarchy and the politics of boredom than apathy and la philosophie dans le boudoir. 

 

 

Photo of Jordan (the first Sex Pistol) 

by David Parkinson (1975) [11] 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Leo Buscaglia, Love (Charles B. Slack, 1972), p. 112.  

 

[2] The word sloth comes from the Old English term slǣwþ, simply referring to pace meaning as it did slowness. But by the late 12th century, the term now written as slewthe or slouthe, had developed a markedly moral connotation and shifted to mean indolence. It was applied specifically to those who avoided their duties and neglected their responsibilities. 

      In the 14th century, it was finally adopted as the English translation of the Latin term acēdia (a state of spiritual apathy) and listed among the seven deadly sins. Thus, in Catholic theology, sloth is more than mere laziness; it's a culpable lack of effort to do good and a willful refusal of the joy that comes from purposeful living and divine goodness. To put this in punk terms, the slothful individual is vacant to the point of no longer caring about their status or condition (the original Greek term - ἀκηδία - literally meant an inert state without pain or concern).  

      Although I here wish to write primarily of apathy, I hope at some future point to return to the concept of acedia (sometimes written as accidie). I am particularly interested in how as it has been used in more modern times by figures including Aldous Huxley, who wrote an essay on the subject in 1923, and Walter Benjamin who in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), describes acedia an 'indolence of the heart' that can lead to the ruin of great figures. Some readers might recall that I have previously said something on acedia in my 'Mourning Post' (25 April 2023). 

 

[3] Matthew Worley, 'Whip in my valise: British punk and the Marquis de Sade, c. 1975-85', in Contemporary British History, 36 (2), pp. 277-321. 

      In brief, this essay argues that punk was an attempt by McLaren and Westwood to fuse youth and sexual subcultures in order to provoke a dominant culture believed to be repressive. Worley examines the Sadean influences on this project conceived at 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s, suggesting that the Divine Marquis had a seminal impact on the punk movement. 

      The essay is available as a pdf at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/104006/  

 

[4] Matt Worley ... p. 303.

 

[5] Ibid., p. 305.  

 

[6] Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir, trans. Meredith Head (Creation Books, 2004), p. 94. 

 

[7] Sade explicitly borrowed the structural technique of l’apathie from ancient Greek philosophy, describing it in Juliette (1797-1801) as an outstanding example of the benefits that one gets from studying Stoicism. Like the Stoics, Sade believed in the sovereignty of reason, rigorous self-discipline (askesis), and independence from external distractions or stimuli (self-sufficiency). 

      However, Sade radically inverted the ethical purpose of Stoicism based on his fundamentally opposing view of existence. For example, the Stoics saw Nature and the Cosmos as essentially harmonious and benevolent. Sade, on the other hand, saw Nature and the Cosmos as destructive and chaotic. The Stoics also wished to eliminate the negative emotions (rage, fear, lust) in order to cultivate a healthy, happy human being. Sade was more interested in suppressing moral feelings (of pity and remorse, for example) so as to engineer a monster of coldness and cruelty who views others merely as disposable objects.  

      Ultimately, Stoic apatheia is about freedom from emotional turmoil in order that one can lead a good life; Sade's model of libidinal sovereignty sees l'apathie as a means to detach oneself from conscience and all human feeling in order to consummate nihilism. As Blanchot says, it's a shocking inversion of values.  

 

[8] The question of nature is not straightforward in Sade. On the one hand, he would agree that the deliberate destruction of all human feeling is unnatural. But, on the other hand, he would argue that by achieving complete insensibility to the suffering of others the libertine frees their passions from moral law and mimics the destructive indifference of Nature herself.   

 

[9] See the posts on the Sex Pistols' songs 'Pretty Vacant' and 'No Feelings' published on TTA on 30 July 2018 and 19 April 2023 respectively. 

 

[10] The 18th-century Romantic poet Novalis declared that the goal was to cast off apathy and to live a life full of passion and feeling; burning like a flame on the edge of ecstasy - and that sounds closer to the punk ideal of living fast and dying young than the Sadean ideal of l'apathie in which one puts the heart on ice and lives a life that is both unnatural and inhuman. See the post 'On Phlegm, Philosophy, and Apathy' (25 April 2023). 

 

[11] This famous photo by David Parkinson of Jordan (Pamela Rooke) modelling a red-rubber outfit from McLaren and Westwood's King's Road store, SEX, featured in a six-page article titled 'Sado Sex for the Seventies', written by David May, in the adult magazine Gallery International (Vol. 1, No. 4, 1975). 

      A copy of the magazine has thankfully been preserved by cultural historian and McLaren's biographer Paul Gorman in his archive. For more information - and to purchase your very own copy of the above in excellent condition (priced $300) - visit recordmecca.com  

 

    

Melpomeni: Queen of the Dark Ambient (In Anticipation of an Event by the Sophia Space Agency)

Sophia Space Agency: The Turning Blue

Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 

Weds 29 July 2026 

  

I. 

 

Etymologically, the word dark traces back to the Middle English derk and Old English deorc, signifying an absence of light, obscurity, or gloom. Somewhat fittingly, its exact origins remain uncertain. 

   

 

II. 

 

It's one of those funny things, but when you place the modifier dark in front of another word - for example, horse, chocolate, or energy - you not only form a fixed idiom, but create a phrase with a mysterious, erotic charge and, in some cases, a gothic double meaning. 

 

Critics will say that this claim is a subjective linguistic exaggeration. But I think that - with a little imaginative generosity - the argument not only holds good, but can be developed. 

 

For dark is not just any old modifier; it has the power to move a noun away from its literal meaning into a figurative (and intensive) space of the unknown, the hidden, the secret. It naturally arouses curiosity and triggers a curious state of arousal in those attracted to the occult and the dark side of things.  

That seems to include the London-based, Greek-Australian singer-songwriter Melpomeni Kermanidou - a self-styled queen of the musical genre known as dark ambient. 

 

 

III. 

  

As the conceptual genius behind the Sophia Space Agency and Chair of the Future Sound Experience Council at the Ivors Academy, Ms Kermanidou has always been more than a Mediæval Bæbe. And her musical style has always been both groundbreaking and genre-defying - a fact which has arguably not served her well in an industry that likes to categorise and label its musical artists.  

 

Her new album, The Turning Blue, was released independently earlier this month and will serve only to enhance her reputation. A dark and experimental work, it uses extensive vocal processing to create a synthesised alien soundscape that prioritises tone, texture, and atmosphere over traditional musical structures like rhythm and melody. Listeners will be treated to elements of drone, minimalist classical and electronic music.

 

Despite its ambient quality, The Turning Blue refuses to sit comfortably as mere background texture. It builds rather an environment that feels both deeply intimate and unsettlingly vast, distorting the human element in the process. Central to this is the fact that the dark ambient genre relies on an orchestration of absence and structural silence to map out the contours of the unknown. It's not just dissonant sounds and sudden loud noises intended to cause a jump scare à la the less subtle of horror film scores. 

 

Crucially, the digital edition of the album was mixed and mastered in spatial audio by Martyn Ware. By utilizing three-dimensional sound, the production ensures these synthetic landscapes do not just sit in front of the listener, but actively surround them and, if they're not careful, swallow them whole. 

 

The true test of this atmospheric manipulation, however, will be its translation to the stage. Melpomeni's upcoming live performance at Kings Place presents a compelling paradox. Staging an art form deeply rooted in silence and dark obscurity within a contemporary London venue celebrated for its acoustic clarity and state-of-the-art lighting creates a tense, fascinating friction.

 

Ultimately, this convergence of a flawless physical space and the Sophia Space Agency's dark ambient compositions offers something rare: a challenge to the audience to step out of the comfortably illuminated world and willingly surrender to the hidden, the secret, and the beautifully unresolved. 

 

    

For an earlier post by Stephen Alexander on the Sophia Space Agency (26 June 2026), please click here. 

 

And for a sister post by Jennifer Davis Taylor on the Sophia Space Agency (27 June 2026), click here.  

  

An Epitaph for the Avant-Garde: A Review of Stephen Alexander's 'No More Heroes' - By May Spear

No More Heroes (SA/2026)  

 

Editorial Note 

 

May Spear is a former contributing editor to the now defunct French literary magazine  Pourquoi es-tu un con aussi odieux? Her post published below is a revised version of a text originally submitted in the form of personal correspondence and can be read as a riposte to the post previously published by Mr. Jeff Francis: 'No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poseur' (22 July 2026).  

 

 

******************************************

 

 

Opening Remarks

 

Stephen Alexander's recent series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' (14-17 July 2026) offers a profound case study not just in personal disappointment, but in cultural exhaustion, centred on four main characters: the punk provocateur Malcolm McLaren; the Dionysian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; the priest of love D. H. Lawrence, and, finally, the comic assassin turned court jester Larry David. 

 

By examining the deeper theoretical architecture connecting these chosen figures, we can discern three underlying thematic currents that unify his analysis of des héros aux pieds d'argile ... 

 

 

1. Capitalist Realism and the Closure of the Outside 

 

The primary architectural pillar supporting Alexander's entire series is the diagnosis of spatial collapse - specifically, the systemic closure of any radical Outside from which to mount a critique. 

 

McLaren, for example, believed he was operating in a volatile, shockable mid-century landscape where cultural terrorism and the politics of desire could threaten the Establishment. In reality, his libidinal subversions merely prototyped a highly adaptive, flexible market format. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, operates entirely within the hyper-insulated, hyper-monetised ecosystem of cultural elites. His rage is no longer authentic; it is a synthetic, domestic product pre-formatted by high-end production companies and packaged as low-risk partisan entertainment. 

 

Thus Alexander reveals a sobering truth: the contemporary iconoclast is a structural impossibility because capitalism has colonised the very space of transgression and resistance. McLaren's anti-fashion called punk was absorbed into the high street, while David's once outrageous comedy has become a regular feature on billion-dollar streaming platforms. 

 

 

2. The Illusion of Libidinal Liberation 

 

A profound philosophical continuity in the series is Alexander's deployment of Michel Foucault to dismantle the romantic myths of sexual and existential liberation from power. 

 

Both Malcolm McLaren and D. H. Lawrence are subjected to an identical post-structuralist autopsy: both fell victim to the repressive hypothesis, naively operating under the assumption that power functions solely through censorship, prohibition, and denial. 

 

Not for the first time on Torpedo the Ark, Alexander masterfully pairs these two figures to show how this philosophical error manifests across different eras. 

 

Lawrence transfigured sex into metaphysics, unaware that treating sex as the ultimate, hidden truth of human being is the exact mechanism by which modern power categorises and disciplines the subject. 

 

Decades later, McLaren repeated this exact mistake, naively assuming that flogging fetish-wear and bondage trousers on King's Road would provoke a state insurrection, failing to see that he was simply pioneering a frictionless new consumer market. 

 

By linking Lawrence's 'austere monarchy of sex' to McLaren's 'pseudo-academic earnestness', Alexander exposes the tragic irony of the sex-radical; by speaking of desire ad infinitum, they do not evade power; they simply map its coordinates. 

Today, in 2026 - when every identity is instantly tracked by digital algorithms, their 'liberation' and free expression simply provide free data and something new to be commercially exploited.  

 

 

3. The Hermeneutics of Failure and the Comedy of Decline

 

The deepest, most melancholic tier of Alexander's critique addresses the temporal vulnerability of the hero and the tragic reality that an artwork or a philosophy is entirely dependent on the physical, decaying body of its creator. 

 

This creates a fascinating thematic bridge between Friedrich Nietzsche and Larry David, both of whom suffer from a profound failure of narrative control. Alexander frames this through two distinct modalities of failure: the tragedy of biological over-ripeness and the comedy of decline.

 

Nietzsche’s failure to 'die at the right time' acts as a literal, physical catastrophe. His eleven-year vegetative decline stripped him of his authorial agency, transforming his body into a 'living museum exhibit' and leaving his raw notebooks open to the parasitic, proto-fascist splicing of his sister. The body's failure to expire corrupted the semantic integrity of the philosophy itself. 

 

Larry David's failure is also one of timing, but it manifests as a slow slide into the comfy accommodations of elite compromise. Like Nietzsche hanging on the tree like a worm-filled apple, 79-year-old Larry David outlives his sharp, misanthropic 'social assassin' persona, declining into a petulant, partisan 'court jester' who blacklists friends to appease former First Ladies. 

 

In both instances, the iconoclast fails Zarathustra's ultimate test: the sovereign exit. Whether corrupted by physical decay and a controlling sister, or diluted by the softening comforts of extreme wealth, both thinkers failed to maintain narrative control over their own legacies. 

 

  

Conclusion 

 

Ultimately, Alexander's 'No More Heroes' cycle is a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight. 

 

By methodically exposing how his own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, Alexander has elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning - an epitaph for the avant-garde. 

 

The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclast no longer exists as a dangerous agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category.

  

No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser (A Guest Post by Jeff Francis)

No More Heroes 5 (Stephen Alexander)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I received this by email: 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

I have written a short post in the style and format favoured by Torpedo the Ark. Perhaps you might care to publish it as an addition to your 'No More Heroes' series (14-17 July 2026). I think it will amuse some of your readers; particularly those who, like me, found the series disappointing (to use your pet word of the moment). [1]  

 

Always happy for contributions from guest writers - even those that are cuntishly critical in character and come from authors unknown to me - here's the post (to which I've added one or two editorial notes).  

  

 

I. 

 

There is a famous early scene in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) when trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) first visits Dr. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in his prison cell. 

 

Rather rudely, he tells her that she looks like a rube with her good bag and cheap shoes. Well-scrubbed, and possessed of a little taste, but a hustling rube all the same; "not more than one generation from poor white trash".   

 

Momentarily taken aback by this, Starling eventually regains her composure and replies: 

 

"You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to." [2] 

 

 

II. 

 

I thought of this scene after reading Stephen Alexander's four-part series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' and I put the exact same challenge to him that Starling puts to Lecter. 

 

But I do so knowing that, like Lecter, Alexander cannot genuinely self-reflect. For his narcissism extends only to the surface, manifesting as a rigid ego-defense mechanism and a strange inability to integrate his shadow or look inwards. This is why, for all its superficial cleverness, his writing consistently lacks psychological insight and philosophical depth.

 

Consequently, I offer my own critical assessment of the 'No More Heroes' (NMH) series, exposing the internal contradictions, structural blind spots, and stylistic failings within these four specific case studies. 

 

My examination also reveals how Alexander - operating through a matrix of performative disillusionment and elite proximity - ironically positions himself as a candidate for the very heroism or critical authority he seeks to deconstruct.  

 

 

III.  

 

A close reading of the NMH series reveals two significant weaknesses that undermine its critical validity: 

 

Firstly, there is a methodological reliance on biography that elsewhere on his blog Alexander often condemns other writers for. He routinely substitutes a figure's personal, domestic, or existential choices for an interrogation of their actual ideas. 

 

Thus, for example, Nietzsche is judged not on the beauty and originality of his text, but on his failure to execute a clean, sovereign death (not for the first time on his blog we find Alexander fetishising the idea of suicide). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a highly metaphorical work of philosophy and Alexander subjects it to an all-too-literal reading that is both crass and ungenerous. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, is dismissed because of a 2026 sketch show's production credits and rumors of a social snub involving the actress Cheryl Hines. Alexander downplays David's massive contribution to TV comedy and decades of excellent work in favour of sharing some real-time celebrity gossip.

 

By tying the validity of an idea to the purity or narrative perfection of the biography that produced it, Alexander commits a deeply conservative critical error; falling into the kind of fallacy that betrays the more radical methodology he invokes elsewhere. 

 

Secondly, in the NMH series Alexander sets up a kind of no-win matrix - a conceptual trap where failure is structurally predetermined, thereby rendering the entire analysis tautological. 

 

If an icon dies young or self-destructs, they are dismissed as a failure. If, however, they live long enough to navigate the complexities of ageing and shifting cultural landscapes, they are condemned as overripe worms (Nietzsche), sell-outs trapped in the past (McLaren), or compromised court jesters (David). As for Lawrence, well, apparently, he was an idealist and crypto-theologian all along whose sexual metaphysics are now simply laughable. 

 

Similarly, if their ideas are ignored, they are irrelevant. But if their ideas achieve cultural traction, they are dismissed as recuperated commodities. By building an analytical framework where every possible path leads to an accusation of compromise, Alexander ensures his own conclusions are entirely self-serving. 

 

The NMH series does not, therefore, analyse the mechanics of cultural transformation; it merely functions as a screen for the projection of his own psychic stagnation, wallowing in a predetermined and pessimistic narrative of inevitable defeat. It's a lose-lose scenario and I would never want to play a game of heads or tails with Alexander.   

 

 

IV. 

 

If the ultimate objective of the NMH series is to dismantle the very category of the hero archetype, it simultaneously (and ironically) functions as a performative showcase for its author. However, Alexander himself fails to convince as to why we should care in the slightest what he thinks about the four figures he pits himself against. 

 

Alexander adopts the pose of the detached provocateur, viewing the collapse of cultural standards with cynical amusement. Yet this cynicism functions as a profound form of intellectual evasion. By declaring that there is no Outside and that all resistance (be it political, philosophical or cultural in character) is not only futile but fake, Alexander neatly absolves himself of the responsibility to propose any constructive alternative. 

 

His stance is not at all edgy or transgressive; it is a comfortable, low-risk position that allows him to collect cultural capital by sneering at the failures of those who actually risked public exposure and artistic production. 

 

  

V. 

 

Throughout his writings, Alexander insists on his punk detachment from mainstream institutions. However, his own biographical fragments consistently betray a reliance on the very networks of privilege he critiques, revealing a profound splitting between his (overly inflated) public persona and his structural dependencies. 

 

For example, he explicitly boasts of his time spent as a spy placed within the press office of Charisma Records by his hero Malcolm McLaren, trading on insider access while simultaneously claiming a pure, underground status. 

 

Furthermore, his writing relies heavily on the cultural capital of the academic institutions he disdains - referencing Oxford podcasts and expensive Cambridge editions. 

 

He attacks Larry David for his proximity to the Hollywood liberal elite and his friendship with President Obama, yet Alexander's critical persona is largely parasitical upon the cultural output of the bourgeois institutions he holds in contempt and the individuals he now claims to find disappointing.  

 

 

VI. 

  

Finally, the ultimate contradiction in Alexander's blog project is his relationship to time and archiving. 

 

He ruthlessly attacks Malcolm McLaren for being 'trapped in his past like a spider in its own web' and borrows from Baudrillard (via Mark Fisher) to condemn the contemporary digital landscape as a desert of the real defined by endlessly recycled pasts and lost futures. 

 

Yet, what is Torpedo the Ark if not a meticulously maintained digital museum? The blog's sidebar contains a massive, self-canonising archive stretching back to 2012, categorised by a hyper-specific taxonomy of labels. 

 

Alexander is caught in precisely the same web (or loop) that he attacks McLaren for. He uses twentieth-century theoretical tools to endlessly recycle his own youthful experiences and encounters, transforming his digital platform into a highly curated, risk-free space that perfectly expresses a state of psychological arrest within a karaoke culture.

 

 

VII.

 

In conclusion: ultimately, the NMH series fails because it is fundamentally driven by ressentiment and the narcissism of disappointment. Alexander does not mourn the compromises of McLaren, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and David because of what it says about the structural state of modern culture; he mourns them because they failed to satisfy his archetypal demand for an unblemished hero. 

 

The entire four-part cycle is an exercise in projecting an impossibly pure, static ideal of heroism onto flawed, living subjects, and then throwing a performative tantrum when those subjects succumb to illness, ageing, or political contingency (or when they - as he says - let him down).  

 

By positioning himself as the final arbiter of who is or is not heroic, Alexander reveals that his ultimate loyalty is not to cultural greatness, but to the preservation of his own pristine, uncompromised, and thoroughly unproductive sense of intellectual superiority. [3] 

 

  

Notes (supplied by Stephen Alexander)

 

[1] Each post in the 'No More Heroes' series dealt with a different figure who has been hugely influential on Torpedo the Ark over the years: the first featured Malcolm McLaren (14 July 2026); the second Friedrich Nietzsche (15 July 2026); the third D. H. Lawrence (16 July 2026); and the fourth Larry David (17 July 2026). 

 

[2] This famous opening scene from The Silence of the Lambs can be watched on YouTube: click here. The lines of dialogue quoted begin at 4:35 and end at 5:36. 

 

[3] As this letter illustrates, Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost every other day in my inbox there's something from some troll or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e., a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

      Indeed, I mentioned this in a post published back in August 2013 - click here - so this isn't the first time I've been told that I'm a performative ressentiment-ridden narcissist who exploits the work of others - including those I identify as opponents - from the safe space of a virtually private blog, and I don't suppose it will be the last. 

      I'll allow readers to decide if Francis has made a critically strong case, or if his remarks often miss the mark and that, actually, the NMH series is, as a friendlier correspondent emailed me to say, "a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight". The same correspondent concludes her email: 

 

"By methodically exposing how your own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, you have elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning (what one is tempted to describe as an epitaph for the avant-garde). 

       The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclastic icon no longer exists as an agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category."

       

This will do for me - and let Mr. Francis put that in his pipe and smoke it!   

 

 

Musical bonus: The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes', single release from the album of the same title (United Artists, 1977). 

 

Afternote: there is now a follow up post to this one that acts as a kind of riposte, written by May Spear and titled 'Epitaph for the Avant-Garde' (23 July 2026).    

 

 

A Man Named Herman (2): Herman Munster

Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster in American sitcom  

The Munsters (CBS, 1964-1966)

 

(Not to be confused with the German master glassmaker, 

Hermann von Münster (c. 1330 - 1392)) 

 

 

I. 

 

If D. H. Lawrence is to be believed, then Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851), is a man with the hate-filled heart of a monster:  "Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, than Melville did." [1]

 

While there may be disagreement amongst literary scholars about the validity and reliability of Lawrence's claim, I think all lovers of classic American sitcoms will agree that Herman Munster, a fictional character played by Fred Gwynne in The Munsters [2], is a monster with the loving heart of a man. 

 

 

II. 

 

The difference between the two Hermans turns essentially on how they experience family life: Melville was only really happy (albeit briefly) on Polynesian islands among palm trees, and lizards, and the people he found there who - despite their savage reputation as cannibals - were gentle and generous toward him. 

 

Unfortunately, Melville had a long chain round his ankle all the time, binding him to the white world of home sweet home and apple pie: 

 

"It was a long chain: and it never broke. It pulled him back. By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and Mother [...] back on the same old doorstep. Like a fatality." [3]     

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of courtship and fifty years of disillusion.  

      He just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet." [4]  

 

A savage-souled artist like Melville doesn't want domesticity and "lovey-dovey fulfilment" [5] found in the bosom of his family. 

 

But a man like Herman Munster, however, wants precisely this ...

  

For despite his monstrous origins [6], hard-working Herman Munster is perfectly content to lead a conventional and traditional family life in his spooky mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane [7], playing the devoted husband to Lily (played by Yvonne De Carlo) and the patient father to his young son Eddie (played by Butch Patrick). 

 

Herman is also proud to act as the supportive son-in-law to his wife's elderly father, Grandpa (played by Al Lewis) and the doting uncle to Lily's blonde niece Marilyn (played by Beverley Owen and later Pat Priest), who lives with them and is amusingly thought of as the ugly duckling of the family. 

 

Much put upon Herman even cleans up after Spot, the family's fire-breathing pet dragon, as well.

 

But let's examine Herman's character in a little more detail before deciding whether he is, in Deleuze-Guattarian terms, an oedipalised figure who has sacrificed his monstrous otherness in order to fit into American suburban life - i.e., one who has retained his neck bolts but lost his balls, so to speak - or is, in fact, what one commentator calls a rad dad [8] and a leading contender for best TV father ever.     

 

 

III.     

 

The consensus is this: Herman is a lovable, good-natured, and clumsy buffoon, prone to stuttering and childish temper tantrums, punctuated with animal-like roaring and a very distinctive laugh.   

 

In keeping with his goofy and childlike personality, Herman loves balloons, candy, and especially his wife's pancakes. He plays with toys and loves to read comic books (despite Lily's irritation at such behaviour). 

 

Above all, Herman is kind to everyone he meets and a champion of liberal values, once famously telling his son Eddie that it doesn't matter what someone looks like physically, or what colour their skin is, as long as they have a good heart and display strength of character.  

 

Which, I suppose, is true to some extent, though I'm philosophically wary of such trite humanism. And I do find Herman's comic silliness boring after a while. 

 

I'm also not convinced that the show's attempt to satirise the typical family sitcom of the era and the American domestic ideal was successful - it often just seems to reinforce such and, as a thinker shaped by Anti-Oedipus (1972), I have serious issues with the character of Herman Munster ... 

IV.

 

As far as I'm aware, despite their penchant for vampires and werewolves, Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about The Munsters. I'm confident, however, that they would diagnose Herman as a profoundly oedipalised figure who has lost his radical otherness and proud monstrosity in becoming a family guy and all-American dad. 

 

Whilst Frankenstein's original Creature managed to liberate a body without organs and become a kind of desiring-machine - disrupting the social order, unbound by law or lineage, refusing the judgement of his maker, etc. - Herman, by contrast, has been stitched together and stitched up within a scientifically organ-ised body and subject to the canned laughter of a '60s sitcom.  

 

The Creature flees into the wilderness and spends much of the time relentlessly wandering across Europe and the vast frozen expanse of the Arctic; Herman settles down to life in Mockingbird Heights, CA. Instead of seeking murderous revenge on his creator and terrorising humanity, Herman is a dedicated employee, a submissive husband and a regular consumer. 

 

No longer a figure of the Outside, Herman Munster has been metaphorically castrated and his monstrosity commodified and packaged as safe, weekly entertainment designed to reinforce the status quo.  

 

In other words, his chaotic potential has been successfully channelled into the service of capitalist production and domestic complacency. Herman doesn't just inhabit the role of the father, for example, he desperately hyper-performs it; fretting about his son's school grades and - as we have seen - giving wholesome, moralising speeches about character.

 

But if this makes him a sap and a sell-out for Deleuze and Guattari, it makes him something altogether different and more positive for others - a rad dad ...  

 

V.

 

According to A. Michelle Smith, Herman Munster deserves to be nominated "as the best dad to ever walk across the television screen" [9] and should be looked up to not just as a father figure that all children can learn from, but the dad "that has the ability to guide other dads to be better dads" [10]. 

 

But then, this is a woman who finds the most admirable thing about The Munsters to be the fact that "despite the fictional characters being unusual and odd in their appearance, they resemble the epitome of what it means to be together as a family at home" [11] - they learn, they love, and they grow together. 

 

Smith congratulates Herman for his noble attempts to ensure his son Eddie grows up to become "the best version of himself" [12] - not by freely expressing his lycanthropic nature, but by repressing such [13]. But that, arguably, is a form of child abuse and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, one day, a teenaged Eddie goes full werewolf, refusing like Arthur Fleck to just sit there and take it like a good little boy. 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-132. The line quoted is on p. 124.

      And see also the post on Herman Melville that forms part one of this two-part series on men named Herman (published on TTA on 19 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The Munsters is an American sitcom about a family of benign monsters that aired from 1964 to 1966 on CBS (Thursday evenings at 7:30). The series was partly a satire of American suburban life and partly an affectionate spoof of the Universal monster movies from the 1930s and '40s (as Universal jointly produced The Munsters, the show was able to exploit the copyrighted characters). A total of seventy episodes were produced.  

      Interestingly, it achieved higher ratings than (the more sophisticated) Addams Family, which aired concurrently on ABC. But the show was cancelled after ratings fell dramatically in the face of competition from a new ABC show that began to air twice weekly in January 1966 called Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. 

      Today, of course, thanks to re-runs on free streaming platforms and digital on-demand services, The Munsters continues to find new fans.    

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 130-131.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 131. 

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] The fictional facts, if we may call them such, around Herman Munster's origins, are rather vague. He is said to be one of Frankenstein's monstrous creations, assembled in a lab in Heidelberg at some undetermined date in the 19th century. Having left Germany for the UK at an early age, Herman was adopted by the Munsters of Munster Hall, a noble family living in the fictitious county of Shroudshire, England.  

      Later, Herman moved to Transylvania, where he met his future wife, Lily Dracula. After marrying, in 1865, the couple emigrated (taking her father, the Count, along with them) to the United States. Herman later enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Second World War. 

      In the early 1950s, Herman and Lily move to the Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional town of Mockingbird Heights. Herman finds a job nearby at a funeral home (Gateman, Goodbury & Graves). Although his co-workers sometimes comment on his height and superhuman strength, they otherwise seem to find nothing unusual about his appearance (including the greenish hue of his skin).   

 

[7] Readers would be forgiven for mistaking the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane for Gothic or Mock-Gothic. It is, rather, a Second Empire Victorian mansion given a haunted house makeover, complete with decaying exteriors, gloomy interiors, and spooky, overgrown grounds. The set was originally built by Universal Studios for the movie So Goes My Love (1946) and features the classic hallmarks of the Second Empire style, including a mansard roof, a wrap-around porch, and ornate woodwork along the cornices and eaves.  

 

[8] A rad dad is a slang term for a hands-on, modern father figure who actively shares his hobbies with his kids, balances fun with guidance, and brings a relaxed, youthful energy to traditional parenting. The phrase was popularised on social media by Millennials and Gen Z-ers who contrast the rad dad idea with a more emotionally distant model of fatherhood concerned with the maintenance of paternal authority.

 

[9-12] A. Michelle Smith, 'Herman Munster Is A Rad Dad', in the online literary journal The Odyssey (13 June 2016).

[13] As a reader of Deleuze and Guattari, one has to use the concept of repression carefully. 

      They no longer frame it simply in terms of biological instincts, but of desire's containment within the Oedipal confines of the family (Mommy-Daddy-Me) and argue that because the child as a desiring-machine is connected to the wider world his development becomes a socio-political question and not just a family affair. 

      For Eddie to become a healthy, happy adult he has to be allowed to howl at the moon and not forced into an isolated all-too-human identity that leaves him vulnerable to state and corporate control and ashamed of his own lupine desires.    

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch the opening credits to The Munsters. The instrumental theme tune was composed by Jack Marshall and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965. 

  

This post is in memory of the actor Fred Gwynne who was born 100 years ago on July 10th, 1926 - the same date as my mother. 

 

 

A Man Named Herman (1): Herman Melville

Herman Melville by Vedran Štimac [1]

behance.net

 

'In his human self, Melville is almost dead: 

the sea monster was so much greater than the man ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Herman is a masculine name of Germanic origin, meaning warrior or soldier. First recorded in the 8th century, it was popularised in English-speaking countries - particularly the United States - during the 19th century by German and Dutch immigrants. 

 

While there are doubtless many notable figures with the given name Herman, in this series of posts I shall concern myself with just two, beginning here with the author Herman Melville (1819 - 1891). 

 

Melville's darkly Romantic style helped shape the American Renaissance in literature, forging a distinct style of writing much appreciated by, among others, D. H. Lawrence, whose two essays on Melville published as part of his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) [2], helped spark a critical revival of interest in his work after he had fallen out of public favour.

 

Today, Moby-Dick (1851) is considered a classic of world literature. Although I must confess it remains a novel I find impossible to read and the only work of Melville's with which I'm deeply familiar, thanks to Deleuze [3], is 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', a short story first published (anonymously) in Putnam's Monthly in 1853.  

 

 

II. 

 

Melville is, I think it's fair to say in agreement with Lawrence, the "greatest seer and poet of the sea"; one who doesn't "personify the sea" (like Swinburne), nor "sentimentalise the ocean and the sea's unfortunates" (like Conrad) [4]. 

 

He first set sail as a young man in 1839, aboard the merchant ship named (funnily enough) the St. Lawrence, and then took to the sea again two years later on the whaler Acushnet - jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands.  

 

Typee (1846), his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry and earned him his reputation as the man who dared to live among the savages [5]. 

 

Obviously, both books were imaginative recreations of events: "He had altered facts and dates, elaborated events, assimilated foreign materials, invented episodes, and dramatized the printed experiences of others as his own", as the great Melville scholar Harrison Hayford conceded [6].      

 

His later works - including Moby-Dick - were not so well received, neither by the public nor the critics and he eventually gave up writing prose in favour of poetry, although I'm not entirely sure how that (along with the odd public lecture here and there) was supposed to help the family finances [7].

 

During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished [8]. The novella Billy Budd was also unfinished at the time of his death, but was published posthumously in 1924, with the definitive corrected edition we read today, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr., appearing in 1962. 

 

Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891. He was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. The New York Times published a death notice but misspelt the title of his greatest novel, calling it Mobie Dick [9].  

 

 

III. 

   

Having given the briefest of biographical sketches, I'd like now, if I may, to return to Lawrence's work on Melville; because it is Lawrence, I think, who provides the most astonishing portrait of this great American writer as man and monster ...

 

"Melville", he says, "has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness" [10]. 

 

That is an extraordinary sentence. But Lawrence doesn't end there - not by a long chalk: 

 

"He isn't quite a land animal. There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said he was mad - or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships." [11]  

 

Lawrence, then, makes Melville sound like a cross between a sea serpent and Erling Haaland. He continues:

 

"Melville is like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. For he cannot accept humanity. He can't belong to humanity. Cannot. 

      [...] The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church-bell, and goes back down to the shore, back into the ocean again, home, into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the element." [12]     

 

"Melville was a northerner, sea-born. So the sea claimed him. We are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived." [13] 

 

Is that true? 

 

I speak English and I have blue eyes - which makes me a bit of a Viking - but I'm not sure I want to "turn away from life" and go down to the "vast corrosive sea" in order to wash myself clean "of the leprosy" of my humanity [14]. 

 

According to Lawrence, however, that's exactly what Melville wanted to do: 

 

"Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look over out horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get out, out!

      To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life. 

      Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked, salt, elemental sea. To go to sea, to escape humanity." [15] 

      

I could go on - and Lawrence certainly goes on [16]. But I think I'll close this post here and leave Melville anchored in the dark, shifting waters of the American literary canon. For the story of another monstrous Herman awaits us in the next post in this series, where we trade the high seas for 1313 Mockingbird Lane and shift our focus to a very different cultural icon ...

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Vedran Štimac (aka PoliteBastART) is a Croatian illustrator and street artist. Recognised for his striking, surreal portraits of renowned authors and historical figures, he intricately blends physical likeness with fantastical scenes representing their literary or philosophical works using a meticulous stippling technique. 

      For more information, visit his website - vedranstimac.com - or check out his latest work via his Instagram page - Vedran (@politebastart).   

 

[2] See Chapters X and XI of D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-147. 

      The so-called Melville revival, during which his work experienced a significant critical reassessment, began around the centennial of his birth in 1919. Raymond Weaver published the first full-length biography - Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic - in 1921 and this was followed by Lewis Mumford's biography - simply titled Herman Melville - in 1929.   

 

[3] See Deleuze's study of Bartleby in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 68-90. And see the very early post on TTA titled 'I Would Prefer Not To' (31 Jan 2013) in which I discuss this essay. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 122.

  

[5] Interestingly, Melville expresses a great deal of sympathy for the native peoples and interrogates the description of them as savages. He is also critical of the European colonialists, including Christian missionaries. 

       Literary scholars currently researching in the area of Melville studies are doing good work examining how he addressed ideas dealing not only with race, but also gender, neurodiversity, and ecology. Melville's preference for sea-going tales that almost exclusively involved male characters has been of interest to scholars in men's studies and especially gay and queer studies (Melville was remarkably open in his exploration of sexuality). 

      Readers who want to know more about recent developments in Melville scholarship might like to know that the Melville Society, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, publishes Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently edited by Jennifer Greiman, three times a year. 

 

[6] Harrison Hayford, writing in an introduction to a 1969 edition of Omoo. 

      Hayford goes on to say that Melville cannot be thought of either as a pure fantasist or simple plagiarist; neither solely inventing details nor stealing ideas. Even if he had, this wouldn't trouble me in the slightest; he's an artist, ffs, so is allowed creative license and to mix fact with fiction, humour with hyperbole.     

 

[7] In fact, it didn't bring in enough to support an expanding family and even the financial subsidies generously provided by his father-in-law weren't enough. And so, after moving to New York City in 1863, Melville, now well into his forties, took a position as a United States customs inspector. He would have preferred not to, but needs must. 

      He held the post for 19 years and had a reputation for honesty in a notoriously corrupt institution, but Melville obviously hated his life as during these years, suffering as he did from nervous exhaustion, physical pain, and intellectual frustration. To his credit, he kept writing. Less admirable is the fact that he began drinking heavily and his behaviour at home became increasingly violent, leading his wife's family to attempt an intervention.  

 

[8] Melville didn't publish any poetry until his late forties and didn't receive recognition as a poet until well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, he wrote predominantly poetry for around twenty-five years - i.e., twice as long as his prose career. Some critics now regard him as the first modernist poet in the United States, whose work is behind only that of Whitman and Emily Dickinson in terms of importance. 

[9] This misspelling puts me in mind of something said by Leon (J. B. Smoove) in the season 6 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'The Bat Mitzvah' (dir. Larry Charles, 2007). For an explanation, see the TTA post dated 2 January 2025: click here. 

 

[10-12] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 122. 

 

[13] Ibid., p. 123. 

 

[14] Ibid.  

 

[15] Ibid., p. 124. 

 

[16] I will return to Lawrence's writings on Melville in the next post in this two-part series. Here, I just wanted to capture the idea of Melville as more monster than man in some regards, driven by a hatred of humanity (particularly white-faced landlubbers).  

 

No More Heroes 4: Larry David - From Social Assassin to Court Jester

No More Heroes 4 (Larry David)

(SA/2026) [1]

 

I. 

 

This is the fourth and final post in the No More Heroes series. 

 

We have already seen how Malcolm McLaren disappoints due to his stuckism; how Nietzsche disappoints because of his not dying at the right time; and how D. H. Lawrence disappoints due to his determination to always remain a priest of love. 

 

Now it's 79-year-old Larry David's turn to be criticised for letting me down - becoming just another Hollywood liberal and, worst of all, unfunny.  

 

 

II.

 

 

Larry David is an American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer, who has received various accolades and numerous awards for his work.  

 

He is loved by people like me for his cynical and at times nihilistic humour, comic portrayals of awkward social situations, and misanthropic observations on everyday life. 

 

The fact that he laughs at everything - even the most tragic events, such as the death of a parrot [2] - and promotes an irreligious ethos of curbed enthusiasm [3] - means that David is accorded a privileged status on Torpedo the Ark alongside the three figures named above. 

 

 

III. 

 

David started his career as a stand-up comedian with a famously confrontational and uncompromising stage persona. Rather than attempt to please his audience, he took a willfully hostile and uningratiating approach. 

 

If a crowd wasn't laughing or paying attention, he would frequently drop the mic and walk off mid-set. David was even known, on occasion, to walk on stage, assess the room, and, if he sensed the crowd was going to be unreceptive, depart without telling a single joke.

 

As Dewey Finn would say: That is so punk rock [4] - and torpedophiles will therefore understand his appeal to me.  

 

  

IV. 

 

Eventually, David made the transition to TV - briefly (and unsuccessfully) working as a writer on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1980s [5], before striking comedy gold when he and Jerry Seinfeld created the NBC sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998), eventually picking up Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. 

 

David left Seinfeld amicably after the show's seventh season (returning two years later to write the series finale in 1998). He then gained further critical recognition for creating, writing, and starring in the long-running HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999–2024), which frequently revisits many of the themes, obsessions, and even story ideas from Seinfeld. 

 

David has often said that his character in the show - a fictionalised version of himself - is what he would be like in real life if he lacked social awareness and sensitivity. In a sense, it's this Larry that most serves as inspiraton for Torpedo the Ark and my disappointment is more with real life Larry, as I'll make clear below.  

 

 

V.

 

I don't care that Larry David has a huge amount of money [6]; or that he resides in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, with an additional coastal home in Montecito [7].

 

I don't even mind that he's a registered Democrat who is deeply involved in party activism and fundraising and has become a kind of court jester in Obama's circle (or Bamelot as it has been dubbed by some). 

 

He's got to live somewhere, after all, and he's entitled to his political views.  

 

However, I'm really not keen on left-leaning celebrities with phenomenally privileged lifestyles using their public platform to lecture others and judge others.  

 

And it's disappointing that someone who was genuinely funny is now becoming just another out of touch Hollywood liberal who holds a large number of his fellow Americans in contempt because of their support for Donald Trump, whom he describes in a CNN interview as an insane sociopath [8]. 

 

I want Larry the libertine who doesn't care about which side of the ideological, religious, or ethnic divide someone is on, provided they can make great chicken and satisfy his sexual needs [9]; someone who refuses to be blackmailed and when forced to choose between sides chooses not to choose.

 

Instead, I get a Larry who returned to TV last month with a deeply disappointing seven-episode sketch show [10] celebrating overlooked figures and absurd moments in U.S. history. Titled Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, it premiered on HBO on 26 June, 2026.  

 

Co-written by David and his longtime collaborator Jeff Schaffer, who also directs, the series was produced in collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions. The former President even makes an on-screen appearance as himself. It's basically like watching Curb but in historical context and period costume - but without the laughs. 

 

Many of David's A-list Hollywood friends appear and there are cameos from former Curb co-stars, including Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, and JB Smoove. But not Cheryl Hines, who is conspicuously absent. This exclusion was reportedly at the insistence of the former First Lady who actively opposed Hines's involvement due to her marriage to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. [11]. 

 

If that's true, then it's another cause of disappointment in David. 

 

It was mildly amusing - although out of character and unbelievable - when TV Larry declined the opportunity to sleep with Cady Huffman because she was a Republican who had a photo of George W. Bush in her dressing room [12], but his personal snubbing (and professional blacklisting) of close friend Cheryl Hines in this way is petty and way more spiteful than anything done to Mocha Joe by Latte Larry.

 

And so, when it comes to Larry David, consider my enthusiasm well and truly curbed ...  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] I've given this picture a pinkish hue (or rosy glow) as I thought fans of Seinfeld season 3, episode 16, 'The Fix Up' (dir. Tom Cherones, 1992), would appreciate that. Unfortunately, whilst Larry David was the writer (or co-writer) of around 60 episodes of Seinfeld, one can't give him credit for this particular episode, which was written by Larry Charles and Elaine Pope.   

 

[2] See the posts 'On Learning to Laugh at Everything' (9 Feb 2019) and 'Torpedo the Ark Means Everything's Funny' (14 Nov 2017).   

 

[3] I would remind readers that the word enthusiasm derives from the Ancient Greek term ἐνθουσιασμός meaning possessed by a god. It first entered English around 1600, still retaining the idea of religious fervour (taking on a more secular modern sense by the 18th century). 

      Torpedo the Ark opposes ideas of rapture, ecstasy, divine inspiration, etc. affirming as it does a materialist (and anti-theistic) philosophy. As far as I'm aware, Larry David identifies as an irreverent atheist born of a Jewish cultural background that has shaped his worldview and comedic style.

 

[4] I'm referring to the character played by Jack Black who utters this line in what is probably my favourite scene in School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003). 

[5] During his time at SNL, David was able to get only one sketch on the air and he quit his job as a writer on the show within the first year, after angrily disparaging the quality of the show to producer Dick Ebersol. On the plus side, he did meet cast member Julia Louis-Dreyfus who would later play the role of Elaine Benes on Seinfeld.    

 

[6] David's estimated net worth is around $500 million, with most of his wealth originating from syndication deals for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.    

 

[7] These are exclusive, affluent, and it has to be said beautiful neighbourhoods: located on the Westside of LA, just north of Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades is known for its stunning ocean and mountain views (as well as its high-end real estate); Montecito is situated in Santa Barbara County and is a highly exclusive enclave famous for its sprawling estates and celebrity residents like Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.   

 

[8] David blasted Donald Trump during a March 2024 interview on CNN's Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? As well as describing him as a "sick man", he accuses Trump of throwing "250 years of democracy out of the window" and of "fooling everybody" - though presumably not those who were smart enough to vote Democrat in the presidential elections in which Trump stood. 

 

[9] I'm thinking here of the genuinely transgressive and risk-taking episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm from season 8 titled 'Palestinian Chicken' (dir. Robert B, Weide, 2011), written by Larry David in collaboration with Alec Berg, David Mandell, and Jeff Schaffer. 

      The closing scene linked to from the episode illustrates my point about rejecting the binary logic of the either/or. Motivated by desire, Larry wants both A and B (and C and D and ... and ... and); in this case, great food and great sex and his loyalty is not so much to 'his people' as it is his penis.        

 

[10] I am not alone in finding Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness lame, lamentable and unfunny. Many critics found it disappointing and derivative, noting that it largely recycles and relies upon material from his earlier work. 

      It was noted also how the series sometimes leaned heavily into overtly partisan talking points and political satire, rather than keeping observational objectivity. For me, all the star-studded guest performances - and Barack Obama's introductory appearance - couldn't save it and, in fact, only added to the impression that David had run out of ideas. 

      Writing in a review for The Guardian (27 June 2026), Lucy Mangan rightly describes the show as "a total TV shambles" with overlong sketches mostly consisting of a lot of shouting rather than clever writing and witty punchlines. The official HBO Max trailer can be watched by clicking here. 

[11] See, for example, Matt Wilstein's report in The Daily Beast (13 July 2026): 'Why Cheryl Hines Is Missing From Larry David's New HBO Show'. According to this report, David's creative partner Jeff Schaffer has confirmed that RFK Jr.'s wife is persona non grata.   

 

[12] Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 4, Episode 10, 'Opening Night' (dir. Robert B. Weide, 2004).