Last week’s suicide bombing in Manchester was the first Muslim terrorist attack on the West that didn”t make me angry or sad.
I”m still haunted by and livid about Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, and Nice, to name only three. I still have nightmares”impotent dreams of vengeance, really”about September 11. But despite the youth of many Manchester victims, and their membership in my Anglospheric, Commonwealth tribe, I feel nothing”not even numb, because “numb” implies sensation.
My feelings, or lack thereof, I only mention because I”ve heard friends and total strangers say the same thing, too. And this outbreak of outrage fatigue has coincided with”to an even greater degree than usual”a widespread determination to praise or condemn other people’s reactions to the attack, and then the reactions to those reactions, rather than the attack itself (and, it goes without saying”literally”all the Muslims behind it, going back to Muhammad himself).
One reaction in particular: U.K. pundit Katie Hopkins didn”t even use the “I-word” in what I”m amusing myself by calling her “Wannsee Conference” tweet:
22 dead – number rising. Schofield. Don”t you even dare. Do not be a part of the problem. We need a final solution #Machester.” [sic]
There are numberless noble reasons to bravely risk your job. Employing the wholly avoidable phrase “final solution” out of historical context isn”t one of them. That reckless decision cost Hopkins her radio gig, drew attention away from her fine Daily Mail column about the atrocity, and worst of all, gave quislings and squishes the hook they”d been looking for on which to hang their misplaced, wrong-size outrage.
The biggest dick in this most recent Katie Hopkins gang rape was attached to”surprise!”a Guardian writer, one Marina Hyde.
Hyde started out praising one victim’s brother’s fondly affectionate yet dark-humored quips on Twitter, after the poor young man’s name started “trending.” Fine. But then Hyde weirdly counsels the rest of the nation to adopt an identical attitude.
A moment’s reflection might have prompted Hyde to reconsider her brain wave that every Briton should react to other people’s agony by tweeting things like “I was a little dubious about Martyn’s recent bold social media move. But it worked.”
For that’s what she’s counseling, intentionally or not:
Whatever our idealised “British values” are”and codifying them would obviously be appallingly against British values”they feel to me better embodied in the heroically black humour of Dan Hett in the days after his brother’s murder than in anything Katie Hopkins has said or written, ever.
Throughout the column, Hyde makes the case that being ever so archly witty about death and dismemberment (even the slaughter of strangers; even, apparently, children) is more patriotic, more reflective of traditional “British values,” than calling for the cessation of these atrocities, however clumsily and even obtusely.
Leftists enjoy quoting Johnson, that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” especially because the “scoundrel” is so rarely them. But here we have one, and a Guardianista, no less, wrapping herself in the flag, a fashion British leftists last felt socially obligated to adopt during World War II.
Speaking of which, Hyde also bashes those who, in the wake of these attacks, “trade in fake Churchill quotes.” Surely she can”t be referring to this very real one, but in any case, yes, every terrorist attack in England stirs up talk of the Blitz, just as Princess Diana’s funeral, going on twenty years ago, is still contrasted with Churchill’s, to considerable rhetorical, if not practical, effect.
(Admit it, guys: We”ve lost the war on teddy bears and the other dollar-store accoutrements of “makeshift memorials.” All we”ve done is condemn them, in often bracingly beautiful prose, but we”ve never offered the unchurched an attractive alternative, and so a generation later, trash is “tradition.”)
I”ve written about this here before, exactly four years ago, in fact. The prompting circumstance then was the uninterrupted slaughter of a British soldier, on a busy street, in broad daylight, by yet another Muslim savage”the anniversary of which, a few dared to notice, fell on the date of Ariana Grande’s Manchester gig.
And back then, I expressed this bitchy blasphemy:
Londoners” highly touted “courage” during the Blitz always struck me as mostly an extreme expression of the average Briton’s temperamental tilt toward weary resignation and inertia.
Since writing that, I learned something that seems awfully apposite just now:
We”ve all seen (and seen and seen) those “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters and related gift-store goodies. These nostalgic relics, we”re told, perfectly embody the English home-front spirit throughout WWII.
Except it turns out they sort of don”t.
The Ministry of Information printed these posters by the millions, but they were never plastered up. Rather, one copy was discovered in 2000 in a used bookstore, framed, and put on display behind the cash register, and the rest is pop culture history.
Adopted after 9/11 and, in particular, 7/7 as a whimsically defiant meme, “Keep Calm and Carry On” was, amusingly, judged an unsuitable morale-booster in its day.
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I still haven”t memorized my cell phone number, or my husband’s. I don”t remember the year my mother or father died, let alone the month and day. I can”t remember my wedding anniversary, either.
However, I”ve never forgotten that, sometime between the release of Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen was the subject of a cover story in either Newsweek or Time in which”while musing bitterly about random, pointless suffering”he put in that cultural critic Susan Sontag’s cancer diagnosis “must have been particularly devastating for a woman of her sensibility.”
I”d never heard of Sontag or even “sensibility” before, but my teenage brain instantaneously turned up, like a tarot card, the image of a slender, serene patrician woman in a book-lined study, a secular Lady of Sorrows, her carefully cultivated cerebral life cruelly mugged by a base bodily affliction (in much the same way, I thought next, as mine was by my mother’s calls of “Dinner!” or “Dishes!” or some other”sigh!“quotidian triviality…).
I vowed to learn more about this Sontag lady, as part of my ongoing preparation (inspired, as it happens, by Woody Allen) to decamp Hicksville for a real city, packed with (other) witty, artistic, important personages, and fulfill my destiny as”at last I had a word for it!”a woman of a certain “sensibility.”
I duly discovered a dusty paperback of Against Interpretation at the used-book store, and studied Sontag’s author photo: an impossibly lovely if slightly severe brunette, her eyes averted, her giant brain obviously uncontaminated by tedious female nonsense like what Kleenex ply to buy, or what to put in the meat loaf.
And I got no further. I simply wasn”t bright enough to discover that precious Woody-approved “sensibility” presumably woven through Sontag’s daunting prose.
However, Deborah Nelson has, belatedly, helped me out.
Her new book, Tough Enough, considers what reviewer Katie Fitzpatrick calls “heartlessness as an intellectual style,” especially as adopted and deployed”as it so rarely is”by women, six in particular, including Sontag.
Fitzpatrick explains:
Nelson examines a group of thinkers (Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Simone Weil) who cultivated a cool, unsentimental disposition. Unsurprisingly, this attitude frequently inspired the disdain of their male colleagues, who saw them as “pitiless,” “icy,” “clinical,” “cold,” and “impersonal.” Several of these women also became notorious among the broader public for adopting an unsentimental tone at exactly the moments when sentiment seemed most necessary. Arendt criticized what she saw as the overly emotional language of the Israeli prosecutors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann; Didion satirized the smug good intentions of the New Left; Sontag, less than two weeks after 9/11, chastised U.S. officials and the media for their “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric.”
How could I (a.k.a. “Ming the Merciless“) not order this book before even getting to the end of that review? Simone Weil had been an exasperating yet inspirational “familiar” to me in my 20s. Every crazy, artsy girl loves Diane Arbus” off-kilter photographs of freaks. I”ve developed a late-in-life appreciation for Didion, having always assumed she was just another bicoastal, big-name liberal bore.
Finally, I”d crack the indelible pubescent puzzle of Sontag’s rarefied “sensibility””and wouldn”t you know it, the words “Susan Sontag” and “sensibility” appear on page four.
Indeed, there is much to savor throughout:
For instance, the posthumously published essays of saintly weirdo Weil, which promote a stringent “unsentimental compassion,” confounded certain 1950s American tastemakers.
“That such an ugly woman should be so compelling seemed preposterous, to say the least,” Nelson relates. “Moreover, that this unattractive and physically fragile woman should have expressed herself with such tremendous authority seems to have produced some confusion and irritation.”
Meanwhile, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) is greeted with considerable confusion and even condemnation, due in large part to its insufficiently reverent “tone.” Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem joins this chorus, scolding longtime friend Arendt for her “heartless” prose. Nelson notes astutely:
His insistence on heart, however, can be seen as a protocol-in-the-making for the treatment of the Holocaust…
And Arendt responds to Scholem:
“I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument…. We both know, in other words, how often these emotions are used in order to conceal factual truth.”
A professed loyalty to truth (or “the facts” or “reality,” depending on which of the Tough Enough women is under discussion)”and not “feelings” or “community” or “ideology””is the traditionally masculine trait they all share.
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I subject every new, hotly touted study to the Grandma Says test.
That is, if you stick the phrase “Grandma says” in front of the study’s headline-making finding, and said finding fits, then it’s legit.
Can you imagine your grandma saying, for instance, “Children raised by gay men grow up to be smarter and healthier”? Please.
The study Takimag readers probably got a particular kick out of last week “discovered” that “liberals aren”t as tolerant as they think.” Actually, that Politico article corralled a number of recent studies, all of which “discovered” that very same thing.
And all of which were hilariously pointless, as anyone on the right could have told these researchers in the first place. Except, according to their very own finding”
High cognitive ability correlated with bias against Christian fundamentalists, big business, Christians (in general), the Tea Party, the military, conservatives, Catholics, working-class people, rich people and middle-class people.
“the researchers might not have listened to us anyway…
Actually, these scholars didn”t even have to go that far. A small but solid chunk of decidedly liberal art”such as Hair‘s “Easy to Be Hard,” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the “Summer of Love” creeps immortalized in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and more recently (depending on whom you talk to) Get Out“has already acknowledged the left’s “do as I say” duplicity.
Now, I”m reluctantly resigned to widespread right-wing bumpkinry, but you”d think the other side would possess a rudimentary knowledge of their own creative output, and balk at using Science (or something like it) to redundantly replicate the “findings” of Art (let alone Life). Aren”t they supposed to be (see above) the “smart” ones?
So, yes, studies show that most studies are crap. My crankish theory about the true origin and purpose of all these goddamn studies is, frankly, no more or less plausible than all their more dubious “findings.”
Hey, did you know that “being an only child DOES make you selfish“? A few people emailedl me that one, with subject lines like “tee-hee.” Those people know me very well. But if all you knew about me was that I was raised as the only child of two only children, your split-second appraisal of me would, I assure you, be quite accurate.
When you”re told Frank Sinatra was an only child, don”t you go, “Ahhhhh!”? How about Jean-Paul “Hell is other people” Sartre? Charles Lindbergh? Lance Armstrong? Gandhi? Rudy Giuliani, Lillian Hellman, and Enoch Powell? Only children, all. Surely you aren”t shocked.
But no, “research” was still supposedly needed, although in this case, the science is hard-ish rather than the soft, “social” variety. Hell, they used an MRI and everything:
Only children have different brains which make them both more creative and less agreeable.
They have extra grey matter in the supramarginal gyrus, part of the brain thought to help only children come up with new ideas and think out of the box.
(Although no one, only child or not, has apparently been able to “think outside the box” long or hard enough to coin a popular alternative to the expression “think outside the” goddamn “box”…)
Now, some who read past the first paragraph or two will object that the study’s authors are “with Southwest University in Chongqing, China,” whatever that is; and the Chinese had that whole demographically disastrous “one child” policy, so their motives here might be murky; plus a Chinese “MRI” is probably just a cardboard box with a 40-watt bulb stuck inside it; and also the Chinese eat dogs and probably worms.
These are all legitimate concerns.
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“Stop being juveniles,” a Lindsay aide, Donald Evans, admonished a construction worker.
“What do you mean, being a juvenile?” he replied, punching Mr. Evans on the chin.
Every May 8 for over ten years, I”ve marked the anniversary of the 1970 Hard Hat Riots by calling them “the weirdest “Sixties” event you”ve never heard of”””Sixties” because that protracted decade truly began, culturally speaking, with Little Rock circa 1957, and didn”t end until the April 1975 fall of Saigon.
Here’s the short version of what happened 47 years ago this week:
New York mayor John Lindsay ordered all flags on city buildings lowered to half-staff in memory of the students who”d died in the Kent State shootings four days earlier.
When antiwar protesters assembled at the George Washington statue on Wall Street that day waving Vietcong flags, construction workers who were building the World Trade Center teamed up with stockbrokers and cops to battle the hippies down the street.
Over seventy people, including four policemen, were injured, and six people were arrested.
Post-9/11, the Hard Hat Riot struck me as a particularly evocative, emblematic occurrence. Yet, for obvious reasons (that is, the hippies lost), it had never been crammed into our collective crania like, well, Kent State. (Which didn”t happen quite as subsequently advertised, by the way…)
For the longest time, a Google search of “Hard Hat Riot” served up this anorexic if well-intentioned “educational” website; a segment from a 1987 episode of Our World; the obligatory Wikipedia entry; and my blog posts. I became an informal clearinghouse of Hard Hat Riot ephemera. VDARE‘s James Fulford has been particularly helpful, sending me stuff like a contemporaneous letter to The Nation and this more ambiguous eyewitness account.
Most memorably, I was contacted by fellow Torontonian Henry Gordillo“a New York City Communist Party member”turned”Catholic conservative”who”d photographed the skirmish. As a result, I was able to post previously unseen photos of the Hard Hat Riot”Henry has more in his files”which had been illustrated until then with the same three or four grainy pics.
The paucity of photographs contributed to the event’s relative obscurity, and video of the event is even rarer. Most stuff you”ll find actually depicts nonviolent, union-authorized hard-hat demonstrations later that month, in places like Buffalo and, again, New York City. Videofreex, a hippie alternative-media collective, shot one of these May rallies, interviewing participants on both sides, but their footage is behind a paywall.
The Videofreex had been gifted their A/V equipment from CBS, which briefly assigned them to shoot radical subculture goings-on. (Surely this was Paddy Chayefsky’s inspiration for Network‘s Mao Tse-Tung Hour, no?)
But if Videofreex possessed the means of media production but not distribution, the hard hats (and the era’s populist right, generally) had neither, barring the odd (in every sense) right-wing talk-radio show.
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Decades after dying by her own hand, a renowned female American poet makes the news. Sessions with her psychotherapist become public, revealing accusations of abuse and other sordid details of her already legendary life. Once more, critics and readers wonder: Was she a victim? A heroine? Or”was it possible”a villain?
If you guessed that I”m talking about Sylvia Plath, you”re only half right.
In March, a cache of Plath’s letters to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, was briefly offered at auction, priced at $875,000, until Smith College sued. Barnhouse had willed her estate to the college (which was Plath’s alma mater), but the current owner of the letters, Plath scholar Harriet Rosenstein, claimed they”d been gifted to her by Barnhouse in 1970, and are therefore hers to sell.
This didn”t prevent the general contents (although not Plath’s exact words) of one of the previously unpublished letters from being revealed. In it, she reportedly tells Barnhouse (who”d served as the model for the psychiatrist in Plath’s roman à clef The Bell Jar) that her husband, British poet Ted Hughes, had battered her two days before she miscarried their second child; in another, “Plath wrote to Barnhouse that Hughes had told her that he wished she were dead.”
Choruses of “I knew it!” could fairly be heard in feminist and literary circles, in which the doomed poet is still revered as a martyr.
Plath’s journal entry describing her first encounter with Hughes, at a Cambridge magazine launch party in 1956, has titillated generations of artsy, writerly females:
“Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes…. I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.”
And that, even before the roman portions were restored, having been originally omitted from Plath’s published journals by Hughes, you see. That awful man, we tsked. And of course he drove her to death, sticking her with two kids and running off with that woman with the weird name”who killed herself (and their little girl) four years later! And his son with Plath committed suicide too.
“Typhoid” Ted Hughes! What a creep!
Most women of that particular temperamental and vocational bent, when we”re roughly the same age Plath was when she died”27″reflexively blame the Byronic Hughes for her demise. Some fans have even defaced her gravestone, erasing his surname.
No matter that we know all about Plath’s history of suicide attempts, as we hoard every available (and are they ever) crumb of her life: Each generation has its talismanic “Sylvia Plath biography.” In my day, it was Bitter Fame, which I understand has been dethroned by Mad Girl’s Love Song.
We are, at that age, still too attached to our own high-strung, hormonal neurosis to consider it anything other than permanent and necessary, an organ like a liver or a lung.
So we write our poems “to” and “for” and “about” and “inspired by” Sylvia Plath. (Mine are in here.) My first professional sale, at age 20, was to Seventeen, an accomplishment made even more savory because it had taken her“I knew by heart“fifty tries to crack the same “book.”
So should we feel pity for Anne Sexton, or something else?
Because that’s who I was talking about as well, in that opening paragraph. Plath’s contemporary and fellow “confessional” poet Sexton won a Pulitzer too (although Plath’s was posthumous). They both wrote about menstruation and childbirth and other previously taboo topics. And Sexton duly committed suicide, in 1974.
Then a 1991 biography of Sexton that “relied heavily on material from the poet’s private therapy sessions” purported to reveal her “traumatic”and sexually charged”relationship as a girl with her great-aunt, Nana, and the poet’s sexual abuse of her daughter. Sexton’s adulterous affairs with a succession of men are described in detail, as are her affairs with a girlfriend and one of her later psychiatrists.”
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There Affectation, with a sickly mien,
Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen,
Practis”d to lisp, and hang the head aside,
Faints into airs, and languishes with pride,
On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe,
Wrapp”d in a gown, for sickness, and for show.
The fair ones feel such maladies as these,
When each new night-dress gives a new disease.
“The Rape of the Lock: Canto 4 by Alexander Pope (1715)
So he traded one imaginary diagnosis for another, I thought, after reading the Telegraph story a friend emailed me with the subject line “shocked not shocked.”
I call transsexuals (or whatever we”ve been ordered to call them this week) “future suicides” for what I assume are obvious reasons”to Taki’s readers at least, if not, apparently, to one particular British coroner.
Commenting on the suicide of 27-year-old Oxford University chemist Erin Shepherd, who “took her own life despite being apparently pleased with her transition from man to woman,” Darren Salter called it a “tragic case” and “a great shock,” adding:
Those closest to her did not foresee this. Things seemed to be going in the right direction. Very sadly, something caused her to decide to take her own life.
Note to self: Somehow murder everyone you hate within the jurisdiction of this Salter fellow…
Because truly, nothing says “going in the right direction” quite like “pretending you don”t have a penis when you do, then wearing dresses and making everyone call you by a woman’s name.”
But this is 2017, and everyone”this coroner, Shepherd’s doctor, apparently, all those connected with Corpus Christi (ferchrissakes!) College, and, finally, The Telegraph“is socially and legally obligated to participate in yet another literally deadly charade, with all its “despite”s and “something”s and other tragicomical linguistic trappings.
Add to that list of performers Detective Sergeant Kevin Parsons, who was forced to mouth the following two contradictory sentences in immediate succession:
She had struggled with her gender identity for most of her life. She was doing well and showing no signs of unhappiness.
But it was the rest of his statement to the inquest that prompted my thought at the start of this piece:
Parsons testified that “Miss Shepherd was unable to attend school as a teenager after being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome…”
Ah, yes. Remember chronic fatigue syndrome? (Many hands go up.) Remember when it was called “yuppie flu”? (Fewer hands.)
Now: How about spinal irritation? Bilious fever? Catalepsy?
Nobody? Well, the 21st century isn”t the first era to witness the rise and fall of fashionable (and now forgotten) illnesses, syndromes, and disorders. Many of these mass delusions were also doctor-approved.
I was fortunate to come down with lupus in the early 1990s, after a blood test had been developed to confirm diagnoses. Until then, many women presenting its telltale symptoms had been dismissed as hypochondriacs and malingerers. I suspect novelist Flannery O”Connor was only spared this “diagnosis” in 1952 because, freakishly, her father had already died of the same disease. (Lupus in men is uncommon, but even so, he was likely taken more seriously by physicians than his daughter might have been had she contracted SLE before he did.)
Stories of other women being told their suffering was a sham got my (aching) back up, until I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, and the shamefully lesser-known, and quite magisterial, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era, by Edward Shorter (1992).
Through Sontag, I learned about the tuberculosis fad that sprang up in the late 18th and early 19th centuries:
Wan, hollow-chested young women and pallid, rachitic young men vied with each other as candidates for this mostly (at the time) incurable, disabling, really awful disease….
Surely everyone in the nineteenth century knew about, for example, the stench in the breath of the consumptive person…. Yet all the evidence indicates that the cult of TB was not simply an invention of romantic poets and opera librettists but a wide-spread attitude.
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“While Rand’s inner circle continued to fray, Objectivism in New York was reaching fever pitch. With much fanfare, in May 1967 NBI signed fifteen-year lease on offices in the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building. Even though their offices were in the basement, it was still an ideal address.”
“Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Jennifer Burns, 2008)
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I didn”t know the difference between National Review and The New Republic. (By all means, write your own joke…) I was groping for guidance, as I always had, in the written word, but my knowledge of lofty (and, I hoped, helpful) American political journals was restricted to Woody Allen’s line in Annie Hall that “Dissent and Commentary had merged and formed Dysentery.”
After getting properly oriented, I became curious about the evolution of U.S. conservative and libertarian publications, and basically inhaled George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Nash’s classic introduced me to what I think of as “the old, weird, other America,” that of The Freeman and Albert Jay Nock, anti-Communist folk music and Isabel Paterson.
Of those who populated that long-passed world, only the name of Ayn Rand retains widespread recognition, almost 75 years since the release of her first novel (and subsequent cultural phenomenon), The Fountainhead. I don”t think Jennifer Burns meant it as such, but that bit above, about Rand’s riven yet driven disciples loudly setting up longish-term shop in the lowest level of the highest skyscraper, serves as an uncannily apt metaphor for Rand’s standing on the right.
Last week, The Guardian reported with predictable snark that Ayn Rand’s work has been added to the U.K.’s politics A-level curriculum. They note that Rand is “achingly on trend” and “having a moment.” Oh, dear. By my amateur estimation, Rand’s “moment-having“ has been reoccurring every seven or eight years since the end of the Second World War, yet is always heralded with the same air of surprise and alarm.
Not that I am an unalloyed fan of the woman. Of course, like countless conceited teenagers before and after me, I was relieved to learn of Rand’s very existence, let alone her staggering success”evidence, surely, that more of “us” were not only out there, somewhere, but right.
Especially for a particular variety of female, Rand’s mannish ambition and uncompromising idealism set a rare and welcome example. Unlike Florence King, who broke her braces trying to mimic The Fountainhead‘s imperious heroine, I found Rand’s thick fictions impossible to swallow.
However, I eagerly read The Virtue of Selfishness while in high school. (I want to type “of course”; Could a book title better calculated to appeal to the adolescent mind possibly be conceived, other than perhaps 101 Ways to Murder Everyone Around You and Get Away With It?)
Reading Goddess of the Market much later in life, I finally met the woman behind the philosophy. Rand doesn”t start out so bad, at least in Burns” telling. Who can blame the Russian-born Rand, watching helplessly as Communists seize her father’s pharmacy, for growing up to be a furious foe of collectivism (and realpolitik compromise), whose übermensch heroes fight back against the “parasites, moochers and looters,“ and win?
Yet the sprinklings of patriotic, almost Capra-esque populism that softened The Fountainhead‘s unavoidable elitism are absent entirely in her follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, replaced by an almost hallucinatory misanthropy. What happened, Burns wonders, in the intervening thirteen years?
The answer seems obvious to me now, rereading her book in my 50s:
Menopause.
Ayn Rand, the avatar of adolescence, was going through The Change.
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I call them the “Ackchyuallies“: the concern trolls who reflexively politicize and pollute every occasion of mass recollection, wailing, “Columbus was a mass murderer!” and “Thanksgiving is racist!“
But when rock & roll pioneer Chuck Berry died last month, for once these human toothaches were onto something. I”d call them “party poopers” except that, in this instance, that sounds too much like something the target of their scorn would have enjoyed.
Readers of a certain vintage may recall that, in 1961, Berry was found guilty of transporting an underage girl across state lines for “immoral purposes.” However, they might still be blissfully ignorant of his other, more scatological perversions, like Berry’s (costly) habit of secretly filming women and girls in the washrooms of his Missouri restaurant.
As a female Guardianista complained, not unreasonably:
The “New York Times” obituary of Berry…didn”t mention the Escalanti case until the 23rd paragraph; the so-called “potty camera” scandal was entirely absent. Instead, the news coverage of his death leaned on soothingly euphemistic terms like “legal troubles” and “colourful life.”
The longer “Chuck Berry” trended on Twitter, the higher the volume of reactions like this became:
Wasn”t Chuck Berry a bankrobber, a statutory rapist, alleged child abuser, and installed cameras in a women’s restroom at his restaurant?
“Robert Dobalina, Jr. (@Linhem) March 19, 2017
(Speaking of “sex tapes”: Wait until they find out that Berry’s biggest midcareer hit, “My Ding-a-Ling,” was “filled with innuendo about masturbation and recorded in front of school children in Coventry.”)
Of course, all these prim protestations were buried beneath the gush of sanitary, hyperbolic eulogies from reliably liberal, nay, feminist celebrities like Bruce Springsteen. Indeed, Berry’s death provided them with a brief respite from their burning preoccupation with (a) 12-year-old audio of Donald Trump musing about pussy grabbing, and (b) a so-far imaginary video of him supposedly indulging in some Berry-esque sex play.
This worshipful outpouring was inadvertently revealing, psychologically: Berry famously treated other musicians like dirt, once punching Keith Richards”who worshipped the man”in the eye. (The Who shared a bill with Chuck Berry in 1969. “The Who loved Chuck Berry, we all loved Chuck Berry,” recalled DJ Jeff Dexter. “Unfortunately Chuck was a cunt to everybody else.”)
But others in the left-leaning pro-Berry camp hurried to use his death to make a point about”you guessed it”racism.
Look: I loathe thin-skinned numpties who detect “racism” everywhere (I hear “milk is white supremacist“ now…). But again, I”m forced to admit that in this instance, the “Ackchyuallies” had a valid point:
That “Chuck Berry” sequence in Back to the Future was indeed the most racially tone-deaf scene in American cinema since Mickey Rooney and his prosthetic teeth rendered Breakfast at Tiffany’s unwatchable in 1961.
That is: In Back to the Future‘s climactic scene, (very white) 1980s kid Marty McFly, having accidentally time-traveled to the early 1950s, “invents” rock & roll by performing Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (complete with duck walk) at a high school dance. In the wings, the leader of the (black) combo originally hired to provide the evening’s more subdued musical entertainment phones his “cousin” Chuck Berry, yells, “Listen!” and holds out the receiver in the direction of McFly’s ringing guitar.
I defy even Richard Spencer to sit through this scene without cringing. But for the accidental-on-purpose intervention of some random Caucasian kid, certain African-American musicians would never have composed their own songs? The “Magical Negro“ trope is troublesome enough; in Back to the Future, it slathers on whiteface. Just appallingly insulting and ignorant.
But while those who find that scene unforgivably wrongheaded are right, they don”t go far enough. To do so uncovers a more complicated story.
Tellingly, Chuck Berry himself, a notoriously petulant diva, never commented on the Back to the Future travesty. The generous compensation he received for the use of his song in the movie couldn”t be the reason; surely he was free to complain forever once the check cleared. And next to making money, screwing jailbait, and coprophilia, Berry’s favorite pastime was seething.
But the thing is: While Chuck Berry always acknowledged, in passing, early influences like Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker, it was white music-geek rock journos who revealed that, in fact, Berry “stole his “Johnny B. Goode” guitar riff” from Jordan’s 1946 record “Ain”t That Just Like a Woman,” and the song’s guitar break from Walker’s 1950 “Strollin” With Bones.”
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Filmmaker John Waters is one of those weather-vane celebs whom conservatives celebrate when they point in roughly the right direction.
For instance, and ironically, I”m writing this the day the inventor of the rainbow flag died, and the very gay Waters has expressed a bemused hostility to such mass-market queer iconography, along with “camp“ (“Two older queens talking about Rita Hayworth under a Tiffany’s lampshade”).
Andrew Breitbart, in fact, was a lifelong fan of Waters. When they met, though, on Bill Maher’s show, it went badly“for Breitbart (which is saying something; admirers have blotted out just how crap the late conservative hero’s media appearances frequently were).
So, for instance, Waters was widely quoted postelection for saying:
I hate liberals who say: “I”m leaving the country.” Oh, like it’s going to matter. You”re not that important, go ahead.
Not every outlet included the sentence that followed””But the only thing I can think that’s positive is that a new kind of anarchy is going to happen next””which is too bad, because I happen to agree, but Waters and I may define “anarchy” differently. At least, these days…
In high school, I saw his cult movie Polyester at the Broadway just like the other local weirdos. But when I moved to the big city, I met scarily cool people who had seen (and even owned!) the older Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, and Female Trouble. I quickly and quietly caught up on Waters” “trash” oeuvre via Suspect Video. While I was never able to completely get past his actors” of-its-era hairiness, these movies were absurdist fun, with their proto-punk sensibility and mock-mental-hygiene dialogue (“The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life!“).
Affection for the man dubbed “the Pope of Trash” by no less a personage than William S. Burroughs was compulsory in hip circles.
Until he “sold out.”
Longtime fans who”d sat sanguinely through Divine chowing down on an actual dog turd literally recoiled (believe me, I was there) when Waters” Hairspray and Cry-Baby broke through to the mainstream. Where had these wholesome, upbeat, pastel demi-musicals come from?! Sure, the heroes were still outsiders, but they were glossily embodied by real actors, not Waters” Dreamlander stable of fellow Baltimore freaks.
Around the same time, his first books Shock Value and Crackpot came out, and I came to respect him more (with reservations; he’s since outgrown his juvenile obsession with murderers, but back then was still parroting Genet’s pernicious “crime is beauty” bunkum). Like those of his fellow indie impresarios Roger Corman and William Castle”who”d also crafted cultured, avuncular public personae”Waters” stories about making his movies were far more endearing and entertaining than the finished products.
And that’s the John Waters the “straight world” has known best for most of this century: the New York Times best-selling author, and brains behind a Tony-winning Broadway musical that gets put on in high schools; the dapper, ever-pleasant yet ever-so-slightly edgy afternoon-talk-show guest; hell, he even staged a G-rated table read of Pink Flamingos with children (and without the puppy poo part).
Some aging artists, having thus risen from low- to middlebrow, would stomp down “rediscoveries” of their back catalog, but not Waters. Anyhow, few filmmakers could resist overtures from Criterion to restore and release a chunk of their obscure juvenilia. And so, 1969’s Multiple Maniacs (a.k.a. The One With the Giant Lobster Rape) is finally on DVD.
Which means Waters is on yet another press junket, patiently repeating highly polished drollery: The black-and-white flick, made for five grand borrowed from his parents, and formerly marred by ugly splices, now looks as crisp and pristine as “a bad John Cassavetes movie”; “The first comment I got when [the restored Multiple Maniacs] premiered was “That acid must”ve been good then””and it was.”
Now, at this point in my life, I normally wouldn”t care. But I kept hearing that Multiple Maniacs sent up not just the usual low-value targets”square, suburban families and blustering authority figures”but also its era’s radical left. One minor character was a Weatherman! This I had to see.
And, well, it was just okay. No, I wasn”t that shocked by the drawn-out “rosary job” sequence; it was obviously a zany nod to Pasolini, and only slightly more profane than the sick fantasies of your average precocious Catholic kid.
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Empire waist floral baby doll dress, worn over black cycling shorts? Check. Doc Martens (or cheap reasonable facsimile)? Check. Pink rape whistle and bowling ball bag purse? Check.
What else might you discover among a young downtown gal’s belongings, circa 1990? Pretty on the Inside, the Nonesuch reissue of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares and I Do Not Want What I Haven”t Got; a Wild at Heart poster, perhaps. “An American Girl in Italy,” for sure. A Bettie Page postcard”or even paper doll set (an ex-boyfriend’s Christmas gift)”on the fridge door.
On her Billy bookcases? Generation X. Serial-killer trade paperbacks. Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish.
And, of course, Sexual Personae.
Camille Paglia’s doorstop debut, subtitled Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson“note its ingenious, unit-moving cover“provoked a good year’s worth of praise and scorn.
Or rather, its author did. The then-42-year-old academic from NeverHeardOfIt U. landed on the scene like Klaatu and Gort combined, equipped with Kevlar self-confidence, brash, contrarian quotability, and butch-chic élan.
As the only woman in my circle who hadn”t gone to university, their hostility to this female professor’s book (and her very person) unnerved me. I”m too lazy to derange my”yes, shut up, but at least now they”re a grown-up “black-brown””Billy bookcases to find my old copy, but I expect I”d find her jabs at liberals underlined. Those were the early days of political correctness, one of Paglia’s recurring targets. As I”ve written here before, while still a leftist-by-lazy-default, I nevertheless roundly mocked that burgeoning trend from the start, certain it would choke to death on such ridicule, and its own self-evident Maoist absurdity, in a few more months.
What I do remember is that one of my local contemporaries in age, sex, and literary bent (but not formal education; she was a doctoral candidate) publicly defended “Paglia’s right to publish her bullshit.” While never nervy enough to talk, I was never convinced by that formidable poet’s feint at magnanimity; she seemed to mean only half of it, but which half”the “right” bit? Or the “bullshit”?
Because what did Sexual Personae‘s “bullshit” constitute, precisely?
Helpfully, Paglia’s new “best of” collection, Free Women, Free Men, opens with three chapters from that first startling book. Rereading its opening chapter half a lifetime later, I now recognize “Sex and Violence, or Nature in Art” as an extended”superbly stylish and aphoristic”gloss on Horace (“You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back”) and de Beauvoir (“Must We Burn Sade?“), shot through with then (and now) unfashionable-Freud and mid-century anthropology.
And it all comes back to me:
“Modern feminism’s most naive formulation,” Paglia declares in that chapter (she never simply “writes,” whatever the topic), “is its assertion that rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.”
So true, but even today, (mostly) unsayable.
Then Paglia praises male homosexuals” “valorous attempts to defeat nature,” but adds that “Nature has won, as she always does, by making disease the price of promiscuous sex.” Just so, but in those AIDS-crazed days, such observations were otherwise confined to bulbous, comical televangelists.
“Criminals through history,” she goes on to opine, “have never needed pornography to stimulate their exquisite, gruesome inventiveness.” That was a sheer, unmitigated heresy not one year after Ted Bundy had, well, satisfied so many anti-porn feminists by claiming from death row that hardcore skin mags had driven him to kill.
No wonder establishment second-wave feminists denounced Paglia”a foolish gambit, considering she was in a higher pugilistic weight class in terms of scholarship and style. Free Women is made up of speeches and other occasional writings, and some critics are complaining that its contents are repetitive. A peevish objection: Professional speakers rarely deliver a completely original address on every occasion. Duh. And in fact, one of this book’s delights is seeing Paglia’s insults against her arch feminist enemies metastasize.
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“No matter what madness I”m hearing from the podium, he’s thrilling.”
That observation about Donald Trump’s speechifying is so pedestrian it qualifies for its own crosswalk sign. Then again, when one of rock’s most electrifying (and cantankerous) frontmen rates your stage presence, that’s not nothing.
Looks like John Lydon (better known to know-nothings by his Sex Pistols stage name, “Johnny Rotten”) has softened his stance on the new president. Preelection”the first Lydon could vote in since decamping to California from England decades ago”he”d been more hostile toward Trump, while nevertheless calling his preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, “that lying old hag.”
“I”m up for anyone shaking up the jaded world of politicians,” continued Lydon last week:
It’s all about people combining in one glorious fact: We don”t trust politicians. Anything to rattle that lot is for the benefit of mankind. We”ve been dosed and cosseted by loud and mediocre politicians for far too long and now the wake-up call has come and it’s self-determination time.
Sounds about right, coming from the ripened iteration of the teenager who wrote and performed “Anarchy in the U.K.” But whether he’s being reflexively contrarian or simply candid, Lydon’s political comments occasionally break his fans” hearts; this Guardian writer said he felt like the Pistols singer had “cheated on” him when Lydon, asked to justify a concert in”gasp!”Tel Aviv, replied:
Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won”t understand how anyone can have a problem with how [the Palestinians are] treated.
Lydon was, of course, mobbed for comment after Margaret Thatcher’s death, and didn”t disappoint”although not in the way so many had apparently been counting on for their entire adult lives:
“I was her enemy in her life but I will not be her enemy in her death,” he said, calling those who were “dancing on her grave” “loathsome.”
So whenever I see John Lydon’s name in a headline, I compulsively click, as I”ve been doing before “clicking” was a thing: His face and snarkiest quotes”snipped from Creem and NME“papered my high school locker. As I said a while back, the Sex Pistols were “my first musical love.”
Yet, weirdly, I haven”t read either of Lydon’s memoirs and have no plans to. “Rotten” is a charismatic genius, but such a prickly, mercurial one that I can only digest him by the spoonful. Besides, I can already hear UKIP called “a black hole for the ignorant to fall into“ pretty much anywhere else.
That’s why, 40 years after their only album dropped, the only Pistols memoir I”ve read is this year’s decidedly apolitical Lonely Boy, by guitarist Steve Jones. I doubt Jones timed the release to coincide with his old group’s ruby anniversary; that would suggest an organizational talent that Jones would probably admit doesn”t rise to the level of his guitar-playing. (He snagged a bottomly spot on Rolling Stone‘s “100 Best” list, a whimsical distinction Jones notes with the weary self-deprecation that pervades his book.)
Born to unmarried (and quickly separated) Shepherd’s Bush Teds in 1955, Jones” barely post-rationing working-class milieu was basically Poland with better TV:
The khazi [toilet] was outside, and when the tin bath came out in the front room, I”d be the last one into the dirty water after he”d gone first and then my mum had followed.
I don”t remember having a fridge or a TV, no one ever had showers, and for hot water there was a sink with the Ascot heater above it…. I remember when I first went to America in the late Seventies, even poor people who were near the bottom of the ladder seemed to take things for granted that I”d always seen as luxuries.
Like fictional axman Johnny B. Goode, Jones “never ever learned to read or write so well,” and Lonely Boy fairly screams “as told to,” but that contributes to the book’s considerable charm. The occasional “I forgot to tell you about” has been, thankfully, left in, along with other conversational gems like:
One day I got a phone call from Bob Dylan. “Hey, Steve,” he said, however he talks.
And yes, names are dropped: David Bowie (Steve, a compulsive thief since childhood, famously nicked Bowie’s equipment between the penultimate Ziggy Stardust concert at the Hammersmith Odeon and the farewell show), Iggy Pop, Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, Chrissie Hynde (had sex with her a lot), Siouxsie Sioux (never did and regrets it still).
Now, I have all the time in the world for Gene Simmons of KISS, but when he boasts of having screwed thousands of women, I get skeeved. Steve Jones” sex drive sounds like it rivals if not surpasses the Demon’s, yet I (mostly) made it through Lonely Boy without getting nauseated or judgmental.
Along with booze, drugs, and thievery””This is the good stuff you just don”t get from the guy from Nickelback…””sex is a propulsive through-line of the book, but there’s no braggadocio or phony “But I”m a sensitive feminist guy now” regret. These bawdy adventures”one is reminded of another famous (albeit fictional) Jones, name of Tom”simply were.
But why? Jones places some blame on another sordid feature of his surroundings: the “local nonce,” or pedophile. “Every area has one,” he says matter-of-factly, and the more you hear about England, the more plausible that seems.
Jones was also “fiddled with,” once, by his stepfather, and struggles throughout the book”without a cc of self-pity”to bring a couple of similar childhood incidents into sharper focus. What’s clear to Jones now”after 25 years of sobriety (which actually intensified his libido), hours of therapy and TM, and simply the passage of time”is that “the consequences of what happened are still with me half a fucking century later.”
I understand completely, but although This Sort of Thing goes on the world over, what seems uniquely English is the level of systemic perversion. While the McMartin preschool case made me forever suspicious about “Pizzagate“-style moral panics, there was something to Operation Yewtree.
Hilariously, they”re practically neighbors now”Jones also fled London for L.A.”but he and Lydon never got along. However, he gives his former frontman tremendous credit for trying to “tell the truth” about Yewtree’s “star,” Jimmy Savile, in a (hastily shelved) BBC Radio 1 interview back in 1978.
“Imagine how many kids” lives wouldn”t have got ruined,” Jones muses now, if that segment had, miraculously, made it onto the air”or someone in the control booth had had his conscience pricked.
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So TCM ran The Nun’s Story again, and I watched it again, and cried again. Which isn”t that big a deal because I cry at pretty much every movie, and by “pretty much every movie,” I mean Galaxy Quest.
Since duty and sacrifice are the nuclei of melodrama, you don”t have to be Roman Catholic to be mesmerized and possibly moved by stories about pre”Vatican II nuns, with their paradoxically cumbersome yet graceful habits, and the strictly ordered minutiae of their alien daily lives. In fact, it probably helps.
In my anarcho-peacenik days, almost every young feminist atheist woman around was going through a “nun” phase. Having been assigned Holy Anorexia in their women’s-studies classes, some began collecting Catholic kitsch (“ironically,” of course) and became compulsively drawn to depictions of cloistered life.
(Other irreligious women devour Amish romance novels or, as we”ve recently seen, eagerly, even tearfully, allow themselves to be hijabbed; religious austerity is a surprisingly good conductor of a kind of sentimental glamor.)
Those feminists” fascination with Catholic nuns made sense, actually. Here were women living and working together, doing good”and without men around. Catholic nuns had been acting out a secular separatist feminist ideal, and for centuries, too, not the scant single suite of seasons (if that) a faddish “wimmen’s commune” might endure.
As an actual Catholic who had been raised by nuns since what used to be called nursery school through (now defunct) grade 13, then worked with them at a left-leaning newspaper, any “inside information” I proffered to these eager seekers inevitably let them down. The “Josies” who pretty much ran my hometown, and the sisters I shared a Toronto office with, didn”t glide around serenely, emanating patience, wisdom, and holiness. They were, I explained to the frowning feminists, just generally decent old ladies”tough, sure, but also frumpy and frequently tired. The nuns I knew then, in the late 1980s, wore polyester pull-on slacks and cheap, sensible shoes, went to baseball games, drank the odd beer, and read detective novels.
And yet they weren”t “just ordinary women,” either. Their remove from modern life’s most basic ingredients”relationships with men and child rearing, of course, but also job hunting, home buying, and retirement planning”sometimes bestowed an otherworldliness that wasn”t charmingly fey so much as brittle and tone-deaf.
I expect that when pop singer Katy Perry put that down payment on the Los Angeles manse she’s hoping to move into, its history as a convent added to its already considerable allure. She, like so many outsiders, likely presumed the walls would fairly exude the hum of vespers and not, as is more likely, the residue of Enneagram seminars and lectures on liberation theology. (Then there’s the bad karma from those pedophile priests who were shacked up there, come to find out…)
Perry was raised in one of those stuck-up Protestant denominations that consider Catholics weirdos, while simultaneously forbidding their own kids to eat “Lucky Charms [cereal] as the term “luck” reminded their mother of Lucifer,” and making them “call deviled eggs “angeled eggs.”” Perry’s attempted purchase of the old Immaculate Heart convent is probably a wee jab at said mother, who sounds a lot like Carrie’s but without the charm and wit.
“Attempted” because there’s a murky, sleazy-sounding conflict over the $14.5 million Los Feliz mother house. Like all but the most traditional women’s religious orders, the Immaculate Hearts are dying off, rendering their huge residence redundant. The remaining nuns are refusing to sell, but not because they”d always dreamt of transforming the place into a homeless shelter or something. They say they have a higher bid from local restaurateur Dana Hollister, who wants to turn it into a boutique hotel.
Whereas the Archbishop says the property isn”t theirs to sell and he’s siding with the chubby chick who rocketed to fame and fortune singing “I Kissed a Girl.” The nuns aren”t thrilled with Perry’s sexpot persona, but they seem especially peeved about her flaky flirtation with witchcraft.
Hollister serves up the money quote:
It’s interesting [Perry] has all this “girl power” and she’s running over a woman and five nuns.
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Steeltown was headbanger heaven. Heavy metal devotees stomped the streets of my hometown in their mustard-yellow Kodiak boots, fingering their long, ratty hair behind their ears exactly like Wayne Campbell, the jackets of their Canadian tuxedos embellished with off-register head-shop Led Zeppelin patches.
Not that I had to see them at my all-girls Catholic school. And they steered clear of “weird” Star Records. But headbangers still cluttered up the joint, and I especially resented their routine occupation of the Broadway. The city’s only rep cinema, a block from our apartment, was my sanctuary from The Drunken Stepfather when my mother worked late and I needed a place to hole up in until he passed out. And The Song Remains the Same sure as hell did, way too often on the Broadway schedule for my liking, paired with”I think? “some Pink Floyd thing that wasn”t The Wall.
Admittedly, those sold-out rock-themed double features probably kept the shabby theater’s lights on (or rather, off), showing Amarcord and King of Hearts to a half-empty house all the other nights of the year.
And on one of those nights, the Broadway ran The Kids Are Alright.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” Emily Dickinson said. That was the effect watching that rather roughshod documentary about the Who had on me. Here at last was a “dinosaur” band”they recorded their first single the year I was born”with power, brains of a sort, and a surfeit of style. The Who were speed, not weed, a mix-matched quartet of jolie laide soloists-at-heart, a group greater than the sum of its eccentric parts.
While not my first musical crush”that would be the Sex Pistols”the Who introduced me to a branch of rock’s family tree blessedly devoid of hirsute hippies yodeling about fairies and elves between 20-minute guitar solos. And I love them still.
So like any Who fan, I noted the death last week of Gustav Metzger. While a student at the Ealing School of Art, Pete Townshend had been inspired by performance artist Metzger and his theories of auto-destructive art, which Metzger conceived of as “a desperate last-minute subversive political weapon…an attack on the capitalist system.”
His resulting displays, passing condemnatory Marxist judgment on everything from the Nazism that had killed Metzger’s parents”he had come to England with the Kindertransport“to rampant post-rationing consumerism and the supposedly ever-looming threat of nuclear war, were fueled by the spirit of demolition rather than creativity in the traditional sense.
So, for example, Metzger threw acid on a nylon sheet rigged up at the river’s edge, with the resulting hole, he explained, “opening up a new view across the Thames of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
Metzger wasn”t entirely above indulging in old-fashioned handiwork and its more permanent results. By heating and cooling liquid crystals stuck between glass slides, then projecting their hypnotically oozing colors on walls, Metzger helped invent those nasty-ass psychedelic light shows that made the 1960s such a puke-tastic era.
And at one of his auto-destructive symposia, a pre-Lennon Yoko Ono invited punters to cut off chunks of her clothing and actually had quite a few takers.
But almost every headline announcing Metzger’s death noted his most notorious contribution of all to modern music.
As Townshend wrote in his memoir:
Encouraged too by the work of Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, I secretly planned to completely destroy my guitar if the moment seemed right.
That moment came, but whether it was quite “right” or not isn”t entirely clear, because Townshend has told differently shaded versions of this tale over the intervening half century. In that same autobiography, he claims he destroyed the first of many guitars by accident rather than artistically inspired design, blaming the too-low ceiling of the Railway Hotel. Regardless, Townshend (encouraged by the band’s appropriately mismatched, eccentric “managers”) kept the stunt in the act. (When the band was still broke, he snapped his guitars at easily reparable spots.)
(Not that Townshend was the first instrument-smashing musician. Amusingly, this feat was born on the decidedly uncool soundstage of The Lawrence Welk Show in 1956, and these days, its most famous exemplar is probably not Townshend, but the Clash’s Paul Simonon, whose oft-parodied one-off tantrum has even made it onto a Royal Mail stamp.)
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Did you have that stupid idea in high school too?
That on prom night or graduation, you and your two or three hippie or punk or goth friends (the only ones you had) would go, all right, but wear tuxedos (if you were girls) or drag (if you were guys) and maybe somehow sneak on some real music, right, or even pull off some Carrie-like prank (except you were the school’s “Carries”…)”oh, man, you”d show them…
Except you all sat out the evening in somebody’s rec room instead, smoking menthols, drinking lemon gin, singing along to the Rocky Horror soundtrack, and watching all the Malcolm McDowell movies you could rent, because those losers weren”t worth it anyhow.
Well, I think that was Richard Spencer’s plan for CPAC, except he made the mistake of actually showing up.
Not that I understand why anyone would want to go to CPAC, but what Spencer expected to accomplish is even more mysterious. If his goal was to get conspicuously kicked out, he succeeded”but that’s a pretty puny aspiration, on par with muling itching powder into the balloon-festooned gym. Like me and my friends, Spencer should have stayed home.
Because whatever your opinion of his opinions (and no one who’s witnessed more than twelve minutes of The Jerry Springer Show can swallow “white supremacy” whole), the undeniable persuasive power Spencer has acquired toiling online all these years is drastically depleted every time he goes out in public, like the half-life of boron-16.
In one short stretch, Spencer has been sucker punched (not a great look); sucker punched himself at his own conference, declaiming, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory” with all the quavering conviction of a one-line extra from They Saved Hitler’s Brain. (Pro tip: As a vehicle for conveying sincerity, volume alone is a rickshaw at best); and now this multilevel mortification:
Spencer was ostensibly expelled from CPAC last week for heading a “left-wing fascist group”; he “asked if he could stay if he would simply “stay out of trouble””; and then said something even weirder:
One reporter “asked if he liked rock music,” and Spencer replied cryptically, “Depeche Mode are the official band of the alt-right.”
As a snotty mic-drop response to an irritating journalist, that comment isn”t just unwarranted under the circumstances, it doesn”t work, the way a patently absurd pick like the Partridge Family or the Grateful Dead would have.
And it lacked the knowing trolling potency of Trump’s “Sweden” streamer fly. If only Spencer had namechecked Eric “Enoch was right” Clapton or, orders of magnitude better, David “yes, I believe very strongly in fascism“ Bowie, thereby dispatching droves of Bowie’s postmortem millennial fans to lose their ideological innocence in the archives of The Guardian or Rock’s Backpages.
Someone just smart enough to be stupid might have chosen Sham 69, the Cockney Rejects, or even Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Someone stupid enough to be smart? Skrewdriver.
But Depeche Mode? The most serious of that batch of po-faced new-wave synth-based “haircut” combos who oozed up post-punk? Okay, “Master and Servant“ gives off a Night Porter vibe, but that just means they”re Englishmen, not Nazis.
There was nothing remotely fascist about Depeche Mode. I say this as an avid consumer of the U.K. music press during the band’s heyday, and an owner of their most popular album, although never exactly a fan”a species that, I was startled to see, still exists in sufficient numbers to get “Depeche Mode” and “Richard Spencer” briefly trending on Twitter after his remark went viral. (Although a hastily conceived hashtag, #AltRightAn80sSong, yielded predictably disappointing results.)
Along with the band itself, its fans swiftly mocked and denounced Spencer. A clip from Matt and Trey’s ill-fated Orgazmo (1997) suddenly started making the rounds, one in which a mulleted, trashy weirdo says, “I don”t wanna sound like a queer or nothin”, but I think Depeche Mode is a sweet band.”
Now, Depeche Mode’s lead singer had recently”along with now-countless historically incontinent celebrities”compared Donald Trump to Hitler, and a few hours earlier, the group had unveiled early ticket access to their “Global Spirit” tour with some fanfare. So maybe Spencer just had Depeche Mode on the brain”a condition I haven”t experienced since around 1988.
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I haven”t cared about the Oscars since 1992’s Silence of the Lambs sweep. Like, I presume, 99 percent of Takimag readers, I won”t be tuning in on Feb. 26, when one of the broadcast’s “highlights,” we”re informed, will be the choice of Best Picture presenters: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
See, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the movie that made them stars and altered the course of American cinema, and culture: Bonnie and Clyde.
The subsequent 1968 Best Picture short list was such a freak show”how could anything that ghastly year be otherwise?”that it inspired an entire (fine) book by Mike Harris called, aptly, Pictures at a Revolution:
The Best Picture lineup was more than diverse; it was almost self-contradictory. Half of the nominees seemed to be sneering at the other half: The father-knows-best values of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” were wittily trashed by “The Graduate”; the hands-joined-in-brotherhood hopes expressed by “In the Heat of the Night” had little in common with the middle finger of insurrection extended by “Bonnie and Clyde.”
That the fifth nominee was the movie equivalent of the embarrassing elderly aunt you”re forced to invite to the wedding, Doctor Doolittle“an “old-fashioned family entertainment” forced-march flop that cost its Big Studio “twice as much to produce and promote as the other four combined””adds just the right dollop of sour, zeitgeisty zest, no?
But note: Bonnie and Clyde didn”t take home the golden statue that evening. In the Heat of the Night did, possibly because (I risk arousing the wrath of Price Waterhouse here) Martin Luther King was assassinated right before the ceremony, which prompted a brief, respectful postponement (and, just maybe, time and motive to switch the winner from, say, the highly Caucasian The Graduate to The Less Embarrassing One With Sidney Poitier. Look, a movie like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner had to be made in 1967. Unfortunately, the movie that got made was…Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.)
Yet it’s Bonnie and Clyde that’s being singled out this Sunday night.
The film so divided critics upon its release that one critic divided himself, first panning the movie, then penning an apologetic retraction in Newsweek‘s next issue.
By the time it was nominated, all the best people”nudged along by rising critical stars Roger Ebert and, especially, Pauline Kael“agreed: Bonnie and Clyde was a masterpiece. The considerable initial dissent was “disappeared”: Chicago columnist Mike Royko’s piercing paean to the real Bonnie and Clyde’s flesh-and-blood victims (“They shot my father to pieces,” one lawman’s son recalled) was roundly mocked”didn”t he Understand Anything About Art?”so he followed up by pitching a new “Art” film, called Evie and Ade. After almost 30 years at The New York Times, where he”d made all the right noises about civil rights, censorship, and McCarthy, the once all-powerful Bosley Crowther condemned Bonnie and Clyde three times”and was abruptly replaced.
In his review, Ebert boldly and accurately predicted that “Years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.” But in 2008, leftist historian Rick (Nixonland) Perlstein went further:
My theory is that “Bonnie and Clyde” was the most important text of the New Left…. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys”you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.
In patented boomer fashion, Beatty, his colleagues, and his admirers”when defending the picture”adopted a moralistic tone about an immoral subject; that now-familiar voice they”d so far reserved for their sex-and-drugs propaganda was now put to use normalizing violence.
Naive Americans, you see, needed to see what mayhem really looked like. No more mortally wounded big-screen cowboys clutching their bloodless chests heart-attack-style! Why, in-your-face screen slaughter”like porn and weed “was grown-up, even weirdly good for you, man, like wheat germ.
Besides the fact that tens of thousands of Americans, from emergency-room nurses to armed-forces vets, already knew what real violence looked like better than two guys from Esquire and a pussy-hound matinee idol, a moment’s reflection reveals”you”ll never guess!”that Beatty & Co.’s “authenticity” relied just as heavily as any corny “old-fashioned” movie on artifice. Sometimes even more so if you consider the unprecedented use of hidden squibs to pull off the notorious “dance of death” finale“which, note, is shot in ultra-natural, hyperrealistic, er, slow motion.
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