William Mortensen
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Book Review
Death and
desire have always been a part of the human experience. Cars and car
crashes are something relatively new. The former themes are
deeply-rooted psychological currents that manifested in the Romantic
paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich while the latter
cultural phenomenon emerged as modern technology and its modernist
and postmodernist artistic expression. In Death and Desire in Car
Crash Culture, Ricarda Vidal
uses the car crash motif to demonstrate how the two themes are
related.
Vidal
uses the theoretical framework of the Futurist avant-garde art
movement, as detailed by Tomasso Marinetti in his manifestos, to
illustrate the trajectory of society’s fascination
with the automobile. Marinetti conceived of the car as the primary
element of the technological utopia he envisioned before Word War I.
Cars were to be the vehicle that transform the
world into a state of rapid acceleration, a plunge into speed that
would never end but perpetually keep going faster until everything
ended in death. The Apollonian Futurists were obsessed with hygiene
and war. The car was to transcend gender,
being both a protective metallic womb and an object of penetration.
Despite the automobile’s obvious use as a sexual metaphor, the
Futurists were anti-sexuality and sought to eradicate gender. They
claimed to be making a clean break
from the Romantic artistic tradition with its longing for an
imaginary mythical past, its celebration of nature, and its
preoccupation with death and decay. But the fact that cars crash and
auto-fatalities interrupt the process of never-ending acceleration
cocked up the humming motors of Futurist cars. Vidal
explores the extent of Futurist theory and how it has emerged until
recently.
She
begins by comparing Futurist theory to the ideas of Henry Ford and
the Fordist vision of future humanity; in Ford’s mind, the mass
production of cars would
become a means of social engineering. He believed in mass conformity
and limits to individuality; every person was to be an appendage to a
motorized vehicle. His dream was one of a cybernetic society that
moved smoothly and efficiently like a perpetual motion machine that
never breaks down, one that can be easily controlled by a small
number of men possessed of superior intelligence.
From
there the car becomes a vehicle for individuality and freedom as we
see in the proliferation of road trip movies and the writings of Jack
Kerouac and the Beat Generation. The car liberates the individual
from the restrictions of what Henry Ford desired. As the Beat
Generation’s high speed, spiritual
experience on wheels and
asphalt became more commonplace, so did the inevitable unwanted
consequences of of traffic jams, the car crash, and the disappearance
of human empathy in the face of tragic disaster. Vidal
takes up the two latter themes in her analysis of Andy Warhol,
amongst others, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash and
its cinematic counterpart in David Cronenberg’s film.
A
major hinge in Ricarda Vidal’s critical analysis comes in the
chaper on Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt’s landscape portraits
in which the ruins in the Romantic paintings of Friedrich get
replaced with the inclusion of wrecked cars in somber, mystical
settings. A significant portion of Vidal’s analysis exemplifies the
flaws and unintended disasters the Futurists could not envision in
their time. Ultimately, without her having saying explicitly saying
so, she proves that Marinetti and his movement were shortsighted and
myopic.
Another
theme introduced in this book is gender via the installation pieces
of Sarah Lucas and the films Thelma and Louise and
Quentin Tarantino’s Death
Proof. In Vidal’s view, the
car has also been a tool of liberation for women. As a hermaphroditic
object, simultaneously womb-like
and phallic, it provides women with an opportunity to control gender
roles. The Futurists believed in the end of binary gender
distinctions but this did not connote what it does today; they were
all about hyper-masculinity and the car for them was a tool for
destroying and eliminating weakness and passivity, in other words,
traditional roles associated with women. For the Futurists, the
transcendence of gender meant an unadulterated purification of
masculinity and phallocentric power. As one of my art history
professors said, they exaggerated and reinscribed traditional macho
Mediterranean values. They didn’t fight against toxic masculinity,
they reveled in it and glorified it. So
in Vidal’s analysis, when women take control over gender roles,
they become more domineering and equal to men by embracing the sadism
and violence traditionally associated with the masculine.
If
these ideas are not troublesome enough, you might want to consider
what Ricarda Vidal chose not to say about the Futurist art movement.
The Futurists were early supporters of fascism and Tomasso Marinetti
formed a futurist political party that later merged with Mussolini’s
fascisti. Their preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness entailed
their disregard for sexuality and dismissal of the orgasm as an
obstacle to never-ending speed and acceleration. Their end game was
about progressing faster and faster until the ultimate explosion and
transformation into pure energy, in other words death. Their visual
idioms glorified misogyny, violence, war, and the conquest of nature.
Admittedly, Vidal’s book is not a political tract and the
aesthetics of this particular art movement can be understood without
the obvious fascist political overtones they encapsulate. But fascism
was such a big part of Futurist ideology that
it seems a little weak of her
not to engage with it at all. Maybe she saw it as a distraction to
her main thesis or maybe it might have tainted her work in ways that
would have guaranteed her cancellation as a cultural critic. If
we keep the fascist aesthetics of Futurism in mind though, it adds
another
disturbing element to her writing; it might imply that the end goal
of technological advancement might be fascism, disaster, and
dystopia. In terms of her analysis of gender politics, it might lead
to the conclusion that a genderless society could also result in
fascism or totalitarian social engineering. To be fair, we also have
to remember that Vidal’s selection of art
mostly prove the Futurists
to be wrong on some levels and she never actually says she likes what
the Futurists had to say; her tone on that avant-garde art movement
is neutral and non-judgmental, neither
celebrating it nor
discrediting it.
On
a final note, why is this book, along with most books in the Western
intellectual tradition so American and Eurocentric in scope? It
covers a geographical region that does not extend any further east
than Switzerland and no further south than France. Should
intellectuals always be stuck in the assumption that the ideas of the
Transatlantic represent all the psychological
currents throughout the world? Don’t people in China, Thailand,
Nigeria,
Cuba, or Uruguay have thoughts about cars? Why not include the
culture of automobiling in Saudi Arabia, a country that, despite its
ban on alcohol, has one of the highest rates of auto-related
fatalities in the world, a country where women only recently were
given the right to drive, a place where illegal high speed drifting
is popular entertainment,
and where rich young kids earn
bragging rights based on how
many sports cars they have destroyed in wrecks? Are
France, the U.K., and America really the only places where car crash
culture matters?
Overall,
Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is
thought-provoking and has a keen sense of where we started with car
technology and where we have ended up. Her artistic critique is
arbitrary but serves a definite purpose and despite what is left out
the ideas hang together nicely. Maybe someday a similar book will
emerge about the all-pervasive presence of computers in our lives.
The thriving tech-utopianism of the 1990s has died down as we begin
to see the dark side of internet technology. Cyber-crime, trolling,
election hacking, the easy distribution of child pornography,
sweatshop labor in Asian cellphone factories, more non-biodegradable
plastics in our garbage dumps from
discarded technology and
other atrocities may be the car crashes of the future. Can these
cultural disasters be another
manifestation of the Romantic ruins of art in times past?
Vidal, Ricarda. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms. Peter Lang, Oxford: 2013.
Stairing at the rude boys: A brief look at climacophilia
In a number of my previous blogs, I have mentioned sexual paraphilias that appear to have been derived from the opposite phobic behaviours. Some examples include defecaloesiophilia (sexual arousal from painful bowel movements), lockiophilia (sexual arousal from childbirth), categelophilia (sexual arousal from being ridiculed), and rupophilia (sexual arousal from dirt). Another one that I could add to this list is climacophilia (sexual arousal from falling down stairs). This particular paraphilia got a lot of media publicity a few years ago when Dr. Jesse Baring was plugging his 2013 book Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us. (which I will return to below; I ought to confess that I love reading Baring’s populist articles and Professor Paul Bloom [of Yale University] went as far as to describe him as the “Hunter S. Thompson of science writing.”). Climacophilia appears to be the opposite of climacophobia.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Paint what you do, it’s the way that you do it: The (not so) secret sex life of Salvador Dali
n a previous blog, I briefly overviewed the influence that the Catalonian surrealist artist Salvador Dali had made on psychology (based on a couple of articles I had published about him earlier in my academic career – see ‘Further reading’ below). In that blog I briefly mentioned some of the strange aspects in his life relating to his sexuality and sexual desires but did not go into any details. In this article, I delve a little deeper into Dali’s sexual psychology and concentrate on some of the more extreme aspects of his life. I’m certainly not the first person to do this given that there are various online articles covering similar ground such as ‘Five sadistic and depraved secrets of Salvador Dali’, ‘10 depraved secrets of Salvador Dali’, and ‘17 unbelievably weird stories most people don’t know about Salvador Dali’. In a nutshell (and if you believe everything you read about him), Dali didn’t like sexual intercourse, was ‘addicted to masturbation’, was a sexual voyeur, was obsessed by buttocks, had an interest in necrophilia, was sexually attracted to Adolf Hitler and hermaphrodites, and was a candaulist (i.e., he liked to watch his wife have sex with other men).
What's the harm in reading?
The controversey that erupted over a sci-fi short story by Isabel Fall raises questions about how we encounter difficult art.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Andy Warhol’s paintings of death & disaster
Andy Warhol created a series of artwork with a distinctive act of discrepancy, which he named Death and Disaster. Death and Disaster show images in one color, a reproduction of the same images, or the same images with no color entirely.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Doomsday Clock nears apocalypse over climate and nuclear fears
The symbolic Doomsday Clock, which indicates how close our planet is to complete annihilation, is now only 100 seconds away from midnight
Book Review
The Ship of Ishtar
by A. Merritt
The pulp
fantasy writer A. Merritt once had a huge following in America. Times
have changed. His writing style and themes are no longer relevant to
contemporary readers. His most famous novel, The Ship of Ishtar,
is not a great piece of writing
but may be of interest simply because it does not transcend the time
it was written in.
The
first half of the novel is a fairly entertaining read. An
archaeologist named Kenton receives a package at his New York City
home. It contains a stone box from a colleague
that contains a carved ship. Without warning, he gets transported
through space and time to the deck of the ship that
is fated to sail eternally. Kenton
now lives in an ancient time when Babylon ruled as the dominant
empire of the Middle East.
The inhabitants are, on one hand, led by a woman named Saharane and
her consort of bare breasted beautiful women. The other half is
inhabited by Klaneth, an evil priest and his followers. The two
groups are able to see each other on their respective halves
of the boat but they can not cross into the others’ territory since
Ishtar, the goddess of love and creation agreed to this arrangement
with Nergal, the god of
destruction. Sharane and Klaneth are mortal representatives
of Ishtar and Nergal.
The
other people on board the ship are slaves who work below the deck as
oarsmen. Kenton gets seized by Klaneth and set to work as a slave but
while chained to the oars he befriends a Viking named Sigurd. Kenton
breaks free and leads a rebellion against Klaneth with the help of
Sigurd and two of his henchmen who take sides against the evil
priest. This battle happens after a particular kinky passage in which
Kenton binds Sharane to her bed and gags her with silk cords so she
can not interfere with the fight. When the little war is over,
Sharane falls madly in love with Kenton and they
retreat to her cabin while Sigurd stands guard outside, polishing his
sword. Really.
It
must be obvious by now that there is nothing unique about Merritt’s
story. What makes it stand out, just a little bit, it the writing
style. While the characters are as stereotypical as they can possibly
be, the descriptions
of their appearances is one of the stronger points. Klaneth and his
friends look like impish devils from one of Brueghel’s apocalytpic
canvases. Sharane and her followers are reminiscent of the Art
Nouveau stylizations of an Alfonse Mucha painting. The
king of Emakhtila could be a character straight out of Fellini’s
Satyricon. The Ship
of Ishtar is more style than
substance. The language is also something in and of itself. Sentences
are long and wordy with lots of adjectives and some odd syntax that
might make you want to reread some lines just to make sure you
understand what they
say. It is like reading classic epic poetry that has been translated
by an amateurish Victorian author.
This may be interesting for some while being pretentious and annoying
for others. On the bad side, some of the descriptions, especially of
the ship and the Temple of
Bel in Emakhtila are not well described and hard to visualize.
The
second part of the novel is not as interesting and as the narrative
starts to run out of steam. True to her status as a trophy wife,
Sharane gets kidnapped by Klaneth after he escapes from the ship. He
imprisons her in the Temple of Bel in the city of Emakhtila. Also
true to his stereotype, Kenton is the muscle-bound action hero who
must go and rescue her. Once they get back to the ship, Kenton has a
mystical vision where his identity as an emissary for Nabu, the god
of wisdom, is revealed while he sees the ship’s spiritual
counterpart with Ishtar and Nergal’s faces in the sky.
Kenton’s
big hallucination is unique to this type of story. What it reveals is
that a theme of tension between the secular and the divine runs
throughout the narrative. Kenton
resists the sleep-inducing magic of a trumpet by putting ordinary
objects in his ears so he can not hear. His companions complain about
the stupidity of the gods. The king of Emakhtila claims his power
over the city is the result of his disbelief in magic, superstition,
and religion. Kenton and his crew win all their battles with strategy
and strength rather than magic
and Klaneth’s magic does nothing to hold them back. When the gods
command Kenton to make a judgment about life, he curses them for
causing so much human suffering. Although the voice of Nabu speaks to
Kenton at times, this supernatural guidance serves a more explanatory
narrative purpose
rather than being useful as
magic to increase Kenton’s
prowess in battle. In the smoke and mirrors of all the mysticism and
hallucinatory imagery,
The Ship of Ishtar hints
at a secular dissatisfaction with the religious side of life.
A.
Merritt’s novel strives to be better than an ordinary sword and
sorcery fantasy tale. It injects a touch of modern
existential angst into a
flowery, sometimes overwrought writing style. But this novel does not
go far enough. With a little more effort this could have been a book
with more staying power but, as it is, it feels just a little dated.
But maybe this is part of its charm; it
might be interesting because it
is like a good museum piece or an interesting object in an antique
store, existing now but
hopelessly trapped in
the 1930s.
Merritt, A. The Ship of Ishtar. Avon Publications Inc., New York: 1934.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
LOST RABBIT: THE STORY OF GENIE WILEY THE FERAL GIRL
On a Wednesday afternoon in November 1970, social workers at the Los Angeles County Welfare Offices sat at their desks processing mountains of paperwork, answering phones, making small talk over coffee. Suddenly the office door flung open, disturbing the humdrum ambience of office noises and leading to an uncomfortable silence. A woman, Dorothy Irene Wiley, had suffered cataracts in both eyes for several years and as a result stumbled blindly into the wrong office. In one hand, a walking stick to guide her through the city. In the other, she held the hand of her 13-year-old
daughter, Susan.
Read the full article on Cvlt Nation here
Friday, January 17, 2020
The K Foundation and the Destruction of Money as Art
In 1993,
British artist Rachel Whiteread received a nomination for the coveted
Turner Prize as administered by the Tate Gallery in London. At the
same time, she received a less prestigious nomination for the worst
work of public art from The K Foundation. The latter appeared to be a
dubious reward but the concept of “dubious” is a subjective one.
In 1992, the
government began demolishing a neighborhood of decrepit Victorian
houses and apartment buildings. Rachel Whiteread had an idea for an
art project and succeeded in purchasing one of the homes before the
demolitions began. At the same time, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty,
the two members of an acid house band called The KLF were wondering
what to do with all the royalties they had made from record sales.
That was neither here nor there for Whiteread; she was busy making
plans to gut the Victorian and fill it with concrete. By the Autumn
of 1993, the outer walls and scaffolding used for support during the
construction of the sculpture were removed. The new public art
object, titled House, was revealed: a white concrete cast of
a house that looked like a giant backwards E from one angle while
from every other angle it looked like what it was, a giant concrete
cast of a house. Some people thought of it as another concrete
monstrosity in a country that did not need any more concrete
monstrosities. Others thought the work disrespected the history of
the neighborhood, a lower class enclave being razed for
gentrification. Whiteread, to some, looked like an upper class snob
who, without any knowledge or interest in the people who had lived
there before, dumped tons of money into a project that would soon be
demolished anyway.
Earlier that
year, strange advertisements began appearing in British newspapers.
With big letter K’s and slogans like “Divide and Kreate”, The K
Foundation started a buzz in the underground art scene amongst other
places. Some of the ads announced the release of a new single called
“K Cera Cera”. The song would be unavailable in any format until
word peace was achieved or so the announcements proclaimed. “Abandon
all art now” was another slogan used.
When the
announcements for the four finalists in the 1993 Turner Awards were
made, The K Foundation released another bunch of advertisements, this
time asking readers to vote on the worst work of public art made
during 1993. Not coincidentally, the same four finalists for the
Turner Prize were also the four choices on offer for the K Foundation
award. Of even more interest was the reward the K Foundation winner
would receive. 40,000 British pounds were to be given out, twice the
amount of the more prestigious Turner Prize winnings.
Drummond and
Cauty were putting together their first installation piece. Called
Money: A Major Body of Cash, it
consisted of piles of banknotes nailed to various everyday objects
like a boat, a table, and
other common things. One piece titled Nailed To a Wall had
one million pounds sterling nailed to a wooden board. They intended
to sell it for 500,00 pounds, half the value of the cash used to
execute it. As The K Foundation explained, the buyer of the art
object had a choice; they could either destroy the piece by removing
the bills and doubling the value of their initial investment or they
could wait and see if the monetary value of the work would fluctuate
or even increase in the future. Drummond
and Cauty tried unsuccessfully to have their installation pieces
shown in the Tate Gallery as well as other major art museums in
Europe. Nobody wanted anything to do with it though. The pair tried
to make arrangements to tour with it across either Russia or America
but no insurance company would underwrite the project. Finally they
succeeded in negotiating a chance to show it in Dublin’s Kilmainham
Jail but in the end they chose not to.
When
the beginning of 1994 rolled around, announcements were made for the
winner of the Turner Award. Rachel Whiteread won for her public
sculpture House. At
the same time time, the winner of the K Foundation prize was
announced. Rachel Whiteread won for her piece House also,
dubbed the worst piece of public sculpture in London. When contacted,
Whiteread at first refused to accept the prize of 400,000 pounds but
it was explained to her that if she did not take it, the money would
be destroyed. In the end she decided to accept the prize. She gave
one part of the money to a charity and another part of it to a fund
that helps young artists without money get started in their careers.
But
The K Foundation’s piece Nailed To a Wall still
did not attract any buyers. The two artists were not happy with the
idea of showing their work in an Irish jail, so they came up with a
better idea. They burned the entire one million pounds in an
incinerator on the Scottish island of Jura. The event was filmed by a
friend named Gimpo using a handheld Super 8 camera. Not all the money
burned though; some of it went up the chimney and blew away in the
wind. The hour long film was titled Watch The K
Foundation Burn a Million Quid. Drummond
and Cauty had finally caught the art establishment’s attention.
Several galleries and lecture halls invited them to show their film.
They pair toured the U.K., with a suitcase full of ashes leftover
from the fire. After playing the movie, most often to small
audiences, the floor was opened up for a question and answer session
to get the audiences’ reactions.
Opinions
were mixed. Many could not understand why they would destroy a small
fortune in that way. The K Foundation could not precisely answer why
they did it either. They did say that royalties from The KLM sales
gave them enough money to live comfortably and everything else they
made was just extra cash they didn’t need. Some people objected to
the waste of money that could have been used for a good cause but a
counter-argument to that might be that public works of art are just
as much a waste of money. How often do members of the general public
look at some mediocrity
of an abstract sculpture on a street corner or an island road divider
and ask why somebody would make such a thing? And couldn’t they
have put the money to better use like feeding poor people or paying
for children’s education? Does
anybody actually benefit from public art, especially when no one
likes it or understands it?
The
K Foundation later tried to sell the ashes from the burnt money but
nobody wanted it.
To
wind the anti-art event down, The two members of the K Foundation
rented a car in Scotland
and drove
it to the cliffs of Cape Wrath. They signed a contract stating that
Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty would begin a moratorium and never talk
about the burning of their money for 23 years. After signing the
document, they locked it in the car and pushed it over the cliff. The
event was well covered by the press.
World
peace never happened. Seeing as they had previously announced that
such an accomplishment would be the necessary precondition for the
next KLF single to be released, they found a way to get through their
own loophole. While The K Foundation were busy at work burning cash,
they quietly released their next single “K Cera Cera”. But
it was put out in as a limited edition without any publicity, solely
in Israel and Palestine. Due to breakthroughs in negotiations between
the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
the song was meant to encourage further discussions on solving
political conflicts without war. Furthermore, the song was not
officially
done by The KLF since the song was released under the band name The K
Foundation Presents the Red Army Choir. Five years later, militants
from the Gaza Strip embarked on a long-running campaign of suicide
bombings and terrorist attacks.
The
K Foundation finally announced that they would never record another
song ever again. But soon after that announcement, NME ran
an article stating that a new K Foundation track had been released on
Help, a CD produced to
raise money for charity. The drum ‘n bass track named “The
Magnificent” was credited to The Massed Pipes and Drums Of the
Children’s Free Revolutionary Volunteer Guards. The single
immediately rose
high up in the British music charts.
On
Christmas Day of 1995, the K Foundation decided to hold one last
happening. They filled up a van with cases of Tennant’s Super, a
high-alcohol content beer. They drove to the Waterloo subway station
in London with the intention of distributing it to the homeless
people who ordinarily camped out there. When they arrived, the scene
was deserted. The homeless population had accepted invitations to be
fed dinner at charities located near that area.
That
was the final happening of The K Foundation.
References
Dwyer,
Simon, editor. Rapid Eye 3. Creation
Books, London: 1995.
Home,
Stewart. Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis. AK
Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco: 1995.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
When Trippy Black-Light Murals Brought the Cosmos Down to Earth
ONE DAY IN THE 1950S, Thomas Voter pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, reached for an airbrush, and attempted to make the aurora borealis dance across a darkened sky. The particular paint he was using contained ingredients that would fluoresce under ultraviolet light, also known as black light. These lights near the mural would be designed to sweep across the image, making the aurora shimmy, quiver, and astound.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Book Review
Go
by John Clellon Holmes
In its time,
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was
called “the novel that defined a generation.” While it certainly
was the most commercially successful of the Beat Generation novels,
Go by John Clellon
Holmes more properly deserves that designation.
It
may not be fair to compare the works of Kerouac to the small output
of John Clellon Holmes but it is difficult not to. If the Beat
Generation had not taken off as a cultural and literary phenomenon,
then Holmes might very well have been forgotten. Go is
now considered to be the first Beat Generation novel but it is
significant for more than just being the first horse out of the gate.
Kerouac’s purpose was to spontaneously express the lifestyle of the
author as he and his friends spun
wildly out of control. Holmes set out with a different task in mind
though. Go is more of
an attempt to introduce, portray, explain, analyze, and judge the
Beat Generation as it grew into a scene in New York City.
The
main character of this story is Paul Hobbes, a writer working on his
first novel. He decides to befriend Gene Pasternak and David Stofsky,
representations of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg respectively,
because he sees them as manifestations of a newly arising cultural
impulse, the cutting edge of
a new way of being American. Hobbes, actually a stand in for John
Clellon Holmes himself, struggles to fit in with their lack of
self-control. He also struggles in his marriage to Kathryn who has an
affair with Pasternak, an affair that is given Hobbes’ blessing
even though he appears to be hurt by it. At one point in the novel,
Hobbes realizes he has to choose between being a part of the
meaningless masses of society who seemingly do nothing but work and
sleep like a horde of gelded horses or ally himself with the Beats.
He chooses to go with the Beats but he sadly remains at the margins
of their group and never clears out the clutter and confusion in his
mind.
Aside
from Kathryn, Pasternak is the character with the closest relation to
Hobbes though the two never seem to actually connect at a deep level.
Pasternak is a sad man who drinks heavily, loves jazz, smokes a lot
of grass, and has an easy time seducing women, especially if they are
married. Stofsky is a poet, given to reading William Blake and having
mystical visions; he sets off to help all his friends find the right
path in life but
instead he just annoys people and they often tell him to go away.
Hart Kennedy is Holmes’ depiction of Neal Cassady; he hits the New
York scene like a cyclone, always
manic and permanently in the here-and-now without any sense of
responsibility. After arriving from a roadtrip that started in
Denver, the other Beats follow him around as he takes them from bar
to bar, from party to party, establishing himself as the king of the
group. During a fight with
his eighteen year old wife, Diane, Kennedy is portrayed as being less
than an ideal husband. Holmes almost makes him look like a monster
rather than the portrayal as some holy prophet of individual freedom
as he got from
subsequent authors.
Together
with an extensive bunch of second-tier characters and subplots
weaving in and out of the action, we get an idea of what it meant to
be “Beat.” As Hobbes explains it, beat is
meant as in beat up, beat down, beat tired,
or beaten as opposed
to winning. Therefore Go is
quite
a downer of a novel. On the surface, the characters pursue
a life of never ending ecstasy
but this is really a means of escaping from their inability to relate
to other people or even to themselves. The post-World War II
generation of youth feels
restless and confused, full of anomie and unable to relate to the
world. Go is a dark
and brooding novel, full of frustration and urban angst, the language
is nervous and melancholy
while the scenes of social tension, arguments between lovers, drunken
nights in shadowy apartments and muted conversations in shady dive
bars depict a clique of young people who always seem to be on the
brink of despair, if not plunging over the edge into
self-annihilation. Holmes depicts the Beats as caught in a space
between writers, artists and intellectuals on the one hand and
thieves, criminals, and junkies on the other hand. The
concepts of crazy and
cool are central to
the narrative, crazy being
the state of manic euphoria, spontaneous expression, and living loose
and out of control while cool means
being aloof, cold, unemotional, deflated,
exhausted after the
psychological extremes of
crazy have reached their peak
Go provides
u with an in-depth look at the New York City scene and it deserves to
be read for that reason, The characters are well-drawn and portrayed
with depth and an ambiguous sympathy. Holmes
saw the good and the bad in every character. He
also gave voice to a lot of
the females in a way that no other Beat Generation writer ever did
with the exception of a couple women authors associated with the
movement (Diane DiPrima and Carolyn Cassidy deserve mention here). Go
still has some serious flaws
though. The pacing is irregular, moving in fits and starts, sometimes
going
so slowly it becomes hard to follow. The dialogue also
tends to be melodramatic and reads like a counter-cultural soap opera
at times, so much so that it is can be hard for the reader to avoid
rolling their eyes.
Overall
though, Go puts the
Beat Generation in a particular time and place. It situates the
movement in a historical context and a specific social milieu. It
says a lot about who the Beats were, what they were reacting to and
why they lived the way they did. It should be the first Beat
Generation novel anybody reads if they care to see what that whole
thing was about. Sadly it remains obscure to this day.
Holmes, John Clellon. Go. Plume Books/New American Library, New York and Scarborough, Ontario: 1980.
Monday, January 13, 2020
Satan, the FBI, the Mob-and the Forgotten Plot to Kill Ted Kennedy
During the 1980 presidential campaign, a notorious Hollywood satanist was linked to a plot to murder the third Kennedy brother, uncovered documents show.
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Sultan Qaboos, Modern Oman’s Founder, Dies
Read the full article on The Wall Street Journal here
Friday, January 10, 2020
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Book Review
Cunt
by Stewart Home
This novel is
called Cunt. The title itself
should prevent at least a few people from reading it. In one passage
the author, Stewart Home has the narrator fucking a woman in an
airplane bathroom on a flight from London to Helsinki. “Then she
dropped her jeans and got me to lick her funky twat. It tasted a hell
of a lot better than the pre-packaged in-flight meal I’d just
eaten. The girl sat
down on the toilet bowl and I licked her clit while she took a shit.”
If writing like that offends you, then you are an uptight bore and
should stay clear away from this wonderful story. If it doesn’t
bother you then you are a pervert. Such are the dilemmas presented by
Home in this book.
The
plot is simple. David Kelso,
a successful author in his
mid-thirties travels around, re-fucking every woman he has ever
fucked and keeping a journal about his adventures which he will
eventually publish as a novel. Along the way, he comments on how he
exaggerates the accounts when he writes, taking poetic license and
altering details to make it all more readable. He
does not just re-fuck all his past women though; he fucks just about
every other woman he meets along the way. Without any effort, he gets
them all to perform whatever he wishes without any strings attached
and not one single STD gets transmitted either. In fact, his sexual
partners often seem to just magically appear out of nowhere, begging
to suck and fuck his dick. If it sounds pornographic that’s because
it is. A lot of the passages read like they were plagiarized from the
filthiest of the filthy magazines you find in any bookstore. In fact,
they probably were. The scenarios are ridiculously improbable,
emotions are non-existent, descriptions are repetitive and leave
nothing to the imagination, and the metaphors are often cliched and
usually banal even if they are funny; he continuously calls
blow jobs “Bill Clintons” for example. But you never really know
if this novel is just about the journal Kelso keeps or if it actually
is the journal itself. The meta-narrative suspends
your ability to decide and reminds us not to take anything said in
this book too seriously.
Then
there is a bit more to this than pulp porn fiction. Several passages
address literary theory and comment on the state of the publishing
industry. David Kelso attends a writer’s conference where he gets
confronted by a confused feminist; unwilling to acknowledge the
difference
between fantasy and reality, she
insists a fictional depiction of sex is the same as real sex. Other
published writers are portrayed as boring dolts without any
imagination. Some of the women Kelso meets want to fuck him so they
can be immortalized as characters in his novels. Sometimes
the charcters spontaneously
and inexplicably gets into theoretical discussions with his partners
that sometimes sound like sincere
analyses and at other times sound like typical postmodernist
pseudo-intellectual psychobabble. Following the play between
narrative and meta-narrative, fiction and non-fiction, is like
watching a coin being flipped; it spins in such a way that the
distinction between heads and tails is blurred.
Cunt has
several subplots that are as thin as eyelashes and extend about as
long; no one ever said Stewart Home was going for depth. The
deliberate shallowness is like a British two finger salute to the
literary world and he not only waves his two fingers in their faces
but he jabs them into their eyes too. A
gay journalist and conspiracy theorist who suffers from paranoid
schizophrenia stalks David Kelso with his pre-op transsexual partner,
for instance and the latter half of the book is partially a travel
narrative that leads through Scandinavia, Estonia,
and some of the more remote regions of northern Scotland. That
travel narrative almost reads like serious fiction and we get a blend
of highbrow and lowbrow literature, even if the bulk of the book
does tend to wallow at the lowest end of the scale.
One subplot stands out as commentary on the nature of the interplay
between fiction and non-fiction; David Kelso and his sleazy publisher
come up with a scheme to invent a fake poet from
the punk scene of the late 1970s.
Kelso writes poetry and self-publishes it in chapbooks which he
clandestinely drops off on the shelves
of used book stores and thrift shops. He creates a literary buzz
about the poet by buying up all the books with the intention of
having his publisher release an anthology of the non-existent poet’s
work, all for the sake of
making money. By the end of
the novel, the poet’s legend has grown so that people claim to know
more about him than David Kelso who invented the whole myth to begin
with.
So
why is it called Cunt?
The title might be a description of the amoral protagonist’s
personality. A lot of other
characters in the book could just as well be labeled as that. Maybe
it refers to Kelso’s prurient preoccupation with dirty, meaningless
sex. Or maybe it is directed at you, the reader. After all, what kind
of person would see a book called Cunt and
think “Now there’s something I really ought to read.” It forces
you to consider the relationship between the reader and the text
before you even open the cover.
If
there really is any reason to read this unique story, the final
chapter is what it is all about. The closing pages take this sickly
odyssey to a whole other level of hilarity.
Home, Stewart. Cunt. The Do-Not Press Limited, London: 1999.
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
John Baldessari, radically influential Conceptual artist, dies at 88
In 1970, Los Angeles artist John Baldessari was ready to take his work in a new direction, so he gathered up paintings he made between 1953 and 1966, brought them to a mortuary and had them cremated — the remains laid to rest in an urn for what would eventually be called “Cremation Project.”
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Book Review
Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt
by John H. McConnell
There’s no
business like show business, they say, and the circus business is no
exception. If you are interested in the business side of the circus
then John McConnell’s Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic
Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt is
the book for you. It is written from a management angle so if you
want to read about circus performers and circus performances, you
probably should look for another book.
Shrine
Circus starts out by explaining
who the Ancient Arabic Order Of the Nobles
Of the Mystic Shrine, otherwise known as Shriners, are and how they
began after the Civil War. They are that fraternal order of
businessmen who wear red fezzes and drive tiny cars in parades. They
formed as an appendage to the Freemasons but developed a reputation
for being a bunch of drunks with a penchant for mischief and
disorder. To counter their unsavory public image, they engaged in a
campaign of philanthropy that involved running free hospitals for
physically disabled children. Contrary to popular belief, the Shrine
Circus was not started to raise funds for their charity but to pay
the expenses necessary for financing
the fledgling secret society. The
chapter outlining the history of the Shriners also goes into a long,
unnecessary
sidetrack about the history of Freemasons and the
Knights Templar. This section
should have been left out of this book.
The
most interesting chapter gives the history of the circus from its
start in ancient Rome to its modern origins in Europe, its spread to
America and its rise to prominence in the
19th
century.
The circus of P.T. Barnum merged with the rival Bailey circus and the
two eventually merged with another rival run by the Ringling Brothers
thereby forming the now famous, and now defunct, Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Throughout the warmer months of the
year, they were one of many circuses that traveled around America by
rail; their performances were given in tents alongside carnivals on
rural fairgrounds. During the winter months, the performers and
carnies were unemployed. Enter the Shriners whose major contribution
to circus history was starting the winter circus. The Shriner’s
Moslem Temple in Detroit began holding
a yearly production
in an indoor arena,
hiring off-season performers to do
their shows. The idea was a hit and other Shrine Temples around the
USA began doing the same.
McConnell’s
narrative is broken into several sections. Each era of the Shrine
Circus timeline is demarcated by who produced the shows. Al Dobritch
was the most innovative and spectacular producer; his career went
downhill as he became more and more coarse in his behavior and ended
up extorting money from strippers in Las Vegas before falling
to his death from a hotel window.
The other producers tended to be unimaginative and mediocre in
comparison; businessmen tend
to have a conservative outlook by nature and their lack of creativity
did not do the Shriners much artistic or financial good in the long
run.
Accounts
of the Shrine Circus from the performance point of view probably
takes up less than half the book. The rest is all about management.
There is more information about advertising, telemarketing,
accounting, labor union
disputes, and committee formation than you might care to imagine.
Financial mismanagement and internal power squabbling have proven to
be endemic drawbacks. Circus management teams have even had a long
history of disagreements with the Shriners themselves and at times
the story reads like a bunch of grand poobahs
bickering over which grand poobah is the grandest of all grand
poobahs. If you take all references to the Shriners and their circus
out of this book, it would read like a generic tale
of any ordinary corporation.
John
McConnell’s
Shrine Circus is not a
well-written book. It is loaded with bizarre spelling and grammatical
errors; sentence structures are awkward and information is
unnecessarily repetitive. There
is no overall sense of how a book should be put together. The
author could
have invested in a better editor and proofreader. Although it is
well-researched, it is written without any regard for what a reader
interested in circuses might actually want to know. It appears to be
the work of a retired businessman who finally got around to writing
the book he had always dreamed of writing. McConnell
probably thought of himself as a great writer the way Donald Trump
thinks of himself as a Valentino; it would be no use in telling him
he is wrong since he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.
Overall,
Shrine Circus is a
mediocre history book that would have benefited from more awareness
of what an audience might want. Maybe
that is also a reflection of the Shrine Circus’s trajectory as
well. The bits about the
performers are interesting and it does present a good historical
perspective. It simply does not have enough of that type of content
to make it a great book. It
is the aesthetic equivalent of watching the greatest circus in the
world on a tiny black and white television screen mounted on a desk
in an office cubicle while trying to do paperwork.
McConnell,
John H. Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners
Yankee Circus in Egypt. Astley&
Ricketts, Detroit: 1998.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Century-Old Headless Torso Found in Idaho Caves Finally Identified
First they found the body. Then the arms and legs. The head, however, never did turn up.
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
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