The news that AdultFriendFinder may become the first Internet porn venture to go public is the latest step in the unstoppable mainstreaming of porn. But porn is still the most "Not Safe" of "NSFW" material. Unless you work from home!
Oh, office drones, it's true: As you languish under neon lights in identical Aeron chairs, sneaking glances at naked ladies (or dudes!) during lunch break for fear of getting fired, many freelancers are hanging out in their "home offices" watching tons of Internet porn. That's what our, uh, freelancer friend says! But don't just take his word for it: We emailed the Freelancers Union—a non-profit organization providing health insurance to over 30,000 freelancers nationwide—and a spokesman responded:
I don't think that anyone from Freelancers Union would want to address this issue, although I think you have really stumbled onto something big. I can tell you, personally and unofficially, it is NOT only you.
Our friend will be very happy to hear this! Seriously, though: Much of the blame has to be attributed to the fact that a laptop, the freelancer's tool, inconveniently doubles as a never-ending fount of free porn. One freelance journalist, we will call him Roberto, said he chooses to procrastinate with porn as "it's literally easier because you are right in front of the computer ... I wouldn't be putting down a thesaurus to go find a girlie mag."
And freelancers' feast-or-famine work load produces those long stretches of concentrated aimlessness that are maybe best blunted with porn's mindless stimuli. Cartoonist David Rees, blogger and creator of the hilarious Bush-era strip "Get Your War On," told us in an email: "The bulk of my workday porn-looking occurred early in my career as a freelancer... I've always struggled with creating structure for my workday, and sometimes if there was nothing I had to get done, it was easiest to just waste the afternoon looking at naked titties." But then the Iraq war happened, Rees discovered Talking Points Memo and "from then on, most of my wrist injuries were sustained from hitting 'refresh' on that site, rather than from stroking it to porn."
Graduate students—who are basically freelancers of the mind—are also stirred by carnal impulses as they pore over their texts, though suitably more refined ones. One PhD candidate, "Amy" said, "I don't watch internet porn (prefer erotic fiction.)"
For freelancers, Internet porn is more than a simple timewaster to fill the bleak days where no assignments are forthcoming. The human obsession with porn is joined with a freelancers' singular quest to meet deadlines without a boss constantly goading them. Roberto told us, "As I get older, I get better at just staring at porn for like a minute, receiving a jolt of weird adrenaline and testosterone and then returning to work. Coffee just makes me shakey and listless." Very utilitarian! "I do think I use it both for procrastination and motivation," Amy said. "There are times when I will definitely use it to blot out my responsibilities, and other times when I will sort of hold it out like a wonderful carrot before a stubborn horse. It is a weird feeling—promising myself erotic fiction if I can finish this paragraph about the history of secularization in France."
Don't get the wrong idea: The freelancer's life is no 24/7 FREE PIZZA AND PORN PARTY. Just as in the real world, Internet porn is a vice freelancers believe should be tolerated but not fully embraced. One successful magazine writer told us, "I can report with a mixture of prudish pride and libertine shame that I am not a particularly noteworthy consumer of Internet pornography."
Yes, the ability to watch Internet porn while pretending to be "working" is as much the freelancer's curse as it is the symbol of their ultimate freedom. Rees said, "In my head internet porn = depression, and I'm not as depressed as I used to be (thank you Dr. Benjamin, a great therapist and thank you my wife for the dialectical behavior therapy workbook), so I kinda look back at the afternoon hours I wasted on that stuff as melancholy and embarrassing and, thankfully, distant." And Roberto said he had developed porn "rules," including "the trying to keep it below once a day rule" and "trying to avoid the half-hour mark."
A certain Gawker weekend editor might have best summed up many freelancers' ambivalent, but powerful, relationship with Internet porn when he said via AIM: "i mean, it's like if you had a bunch of heroin sitting around your apartment and you had nothing to do but work that kinda had to get done but, you know, kinda didn't. You might fuck with the heroin."
Send an email to Adrian Chen, the author of this post, at nqevna@tnjxre.pbz
I'm a little over 30 minutes into my Madonna video-watching marathon (thanks to the new, just-shy-of-complete-so-as-to-be-totally-infuriating 2-DVD set, Celebration). I started with Disc 2, as I'm less familiar with her later work, and was eager to rediscover gems I'd unfairly dismissed, and learn where I'd been wrong. I skip over "Ray of Light," because, well, it's hideous. I land on "The Power of Goodbye," and after 30 seconds, I'm seized by anxiety. I feel a weight on me, like my body's been hijacked and there's attempt to force something out of me. I flash back 12 years ago to my freshman year in college. I feel sad, I feel remorseful, I feel like the power of goodbye has nothing on the power of regret. This feeling that the wind, or maybe my soul, has been knocked out of me only intensifies as Madonna broods around under a blueish filter in a fabulous house on a fabulous cliff, and then on a fabulous beach, solemnly crooning words that are as painful as she is pained: "Your heart is not open, so I must go / The spell has been broken, I loved you so..." I'm seeing her drama. I'm raising it.
If this sounds gay to you, welcome to my point.
Despite its one-sided nature, my relationship with Madonna is more complicated than just about any of my personal ones. I'm lucky to get along very easily with my family, and I otherwise do not suffer fools. Shutting out people that prove toxic or time-wasting is easy; if you follow pop music like I do, shutting out Madonna is not. Even when she isn't riding the wave of an omnipresent hit, her shit hovers, provoking at least an eye roll or two (remember "American Life?"). Even while viewing her with disdain for a good part of the past 15 years, I have found her fundamentally irresistible on a visceral level. I can't not feel something for whatever she does, be it good, bad or...well, that's it, really.
Partially because I do find pleasure in being proven wrong and discovering something I'd been closed off to, and partially because I've noticed myself softening on Madonna in recent years, I decided to take the opportunity in reexamining her that was offered by the release of Celebration both in its double-CD and -DVD formats. Taking in the second half of her career (as designated by the chronological DVDs, which split the halves between Erotica and Bedtime Stories), proved eye-opening and at times painful, but the first half was shocking as well for the memories it elicited. I guess I'd repressed them to resolve with my evolving hatred, but I fucking loved this woman from an extremely early age. I remember being completely transfixed by the "Material Girl" video, virtually praying to the gods of MTV to play it when it wasn't on. I remember worrying about her toes being hurt when she kicked the pole in the "Borderline" video, or watching "Lucky Star" before there was even MTV and they played those weird syndicated music video half hours on TV. I remember being the only person on the dance floor of my cousin's Sweet 16 party in 1985, singing "Holiday" with desperation to the onlooking crowd. We needed a holiday. Why was I the only one who could see that? I remember attempting to hog the camera with an "Open Your Heart" lip sync rendition as my father filmed something that I can say with certainty now, from an objective if not quite fully recollected point of view, was just barely more interesting (a birthday party of my toddler sisters or some shit). I remember learning about what patchouli was via the scent of Like a Prayer. I remember dancing in my parents' room to the Dick Tracy soundtrack/inspired-songs collection/whatever the fuck that was -- all of it, not just "Vogue." I remember sneaking into Truth or Dare with a friend who was too much of a clod to play it stealthy - he jumped over some seats and got us thrown out of that theater and into the one we'd actually bought tickets for, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. (Incidentally, I never stopped loving Truth or Dare. I watch it whenever I find it on TV, and I pine for a DVD rerelease. I'll still take the masturbation scene over "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" any day.) I remember being in school and crawling out of my skin with antipation on the day Erotica was released, because I knew it was waiting for me at home, thanks to my mall-going mom. I remember singing "Secret" at my friend Jessica's Sweet 16 party in high school, not caring whether people were going to call me a fag, because whatever, they were going to anyway.
Indeed, from around the time of "Vogue," and probably before, I was aware (and made aware and remade aware) of how gay it was to like Madonna (this despite having the vaguest of vague awareness of Paris Is Burning, thinking it was about gay people in French hell or queer arson or something). I get angry when I think of how complacent I was in the face of steady gay bashing from the time I was in second grade through high school, but I do credit myself for not caring what people though about what I thought about Madonna. I just went right on loving her loudly and singing her even louder.
I guess she was something of an outlet to my repression. I didn't come to realize that I was gay, I was told it constantly, everywhere I went. Gay was bad bad bad bad, according to everyone, so I was determined not to be that even through my college years. I really related to Whitney when she told Oprah that part of the reason she stayed with Bobby Brown so long was to show up the very vocal naysayers. People could talk all they wanted, but I wasn't going to let anyone determine my identity. I guess instead of exploding on them, I restricted myself. It was self abuse to such an extreme that during my teens, I would steal Playgirls (and Hustlers, since there were always a few dudes in there) from my father's drug store (I worked there), jerk off to them, and consciously tell myself, "You are straight, Rich. Straight." If this had the effect of shaking the soda bottle of my psyche, Internet porn put me in a fucking centrifuge. I can almost relate to the religious zealots who hate me on principle, since I lived through years and years of rejecting reason for faith in the absolute impossible.
Loving Madonna in the midst of all this was no coincidence. People wonder what attracts gay men to her and the larger-than-life women of her ilk. I think some of it has to do with the fact that when you are gay, there are really no restrictions on taste -- you can enjoy the girliest of girly things because what are people going to do, call you a fag for liking something? They already have. But that's more circumstantial that specific. More to the point, I think gay men take an active interest in Madonna, because when whipped into her entertaining frenzy, she seems so free. While masculinity is so often defined by restraint (Sports have so many rules! Real men don't cry!), iconic women like Madonna are characterized by their lack of it. They're allowed to put it all out there, to be as emotional as they want (maybe they aren't always praised for it, but they don't receive questions about their womanhood or death threats as a result). For those of us who feel repressed in any way for being what we are, the Madonnas of the world offer a vicarious thrill, an exuberance in one's identity. It's something to aspire to.
After Evita, things changed. As fixed on delusion as I was, it was becoming harder and harder to ignore my homosexuality. Like transubstantiation, it didn't make sense (Incidentally, I also stopped going to church entirely around this time, though I had been raised Catholic). My freshman year of college at NYU, Ray of Light came out and I dismissed it on the spot, now wary of the gay association. Paradoxically, a few months after the release of Ray that I attended by first gay-oriented event, the 18+ party Curfew at Twilo. I went with a girl because (don't laugh) there was some Tori Amos-themed giveaway going on (OK, you can laugh). You can't even imagine how confusing this was for me. I mostly avoided eye contact with everyone entirely, except for these two guys that came and sat across from us, repeatedly asking if we knew where they could get ecstasy. I was 19, at a gay party with a girl, fixated on my shoes. I can't believe they asked for E, when all signs pointed to K-hole.
Anyway, some dub of "Sky Fits Heaven" played that night (I recognized it because my Freshman year roommate -- gay, of course -- owned Ray of Light). The song just felt so...definitive. As much as I distanced myself from this world, my arms were only so long and so strong, and I kinda always knew that. I remember the dub being mostly instrumental, but one couplet that remained in tact was, "Think I'll follow my heart / It's a very good place to start." I didn't want to face it, but I could barely argue with it. I loved that song from that second on, and it remains pretty much the only thing that I fully adore from Ray of Light. (Though, obviously, in its ability to take me back to that feeling of closeted hopelessness, "The Power of Goodbye," has a place on my heart, as well.)
But those are exceptions -- I mostly disliked everything else through Confessions on a Dance Floor, which came out years after I finally did. (Biggest regret of my life: I didn't so much as kiss a guy until my last semester of college. I could have had so much fun, though given the fact that it wasn't until I was 25 that I realized I was mortal, I also could have put myself in grave danger. Maybe things worked out for the best?) Even though I still don't like Confessions (whatever good ideas Stuart Price has, he compresses into this hissing brick of sound), and even though when I lashed out about it on this blog, so many years ago, it was mostly in response to what I perceived as the thoughtless adoration from my online gay brothers, there were still some kind of unresolved issues with my sexuality going on that were coming out in my bashing. I didn't like Madonna because I wasn't one of those gays (despite the myriad other gay shit I loved and gushed about gaily). What nonsense. But, you know, self-acceptance is a process. I like to think that I'm finally there, but I also look forward to a time in the future where I look back and realize that I didn't even know the half of it at this point.
If Madonna is my barometer, as she has been all my life, I'm making strides. I enjoyed Hard Candy. Despite my tendency to grind my teeth whenever she aspires any kind of meaningful discussion, I loved what she had to say about Michael Jackson at this year's VMAs. Via Celebration, I've even gone back and learned to appreciate stuff that I'd turned up my nose at previously. I understand why I hated "Frozen" at the time of its release -- it sounded instantly dated, with a percussive rattling not unlike Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy," from 1991, which was not a good look in '98. Now if something came out mimicking that sound, I'd fucking flip for it. (Ray of Light, as a whole, does strike me as entirely too po'faced -- it's forced maturity at the expense of fun, which is kind of a sucky thing for pop music to be). Indeed, Madonna's rep as a pioneer still boggles my mind, as she repeatedly was behind trends (she cut her new jack swing album in '94, dabbled with trip-hop in '98, incorporated French house into her sound in '00, did the very electroclash thing of constantly referencing Giorgio Moroder in '05 and didn't get around to working with Timbaland and Pharrell until '08). On the other hand, "Die Another Day" now strikes me as way ahead of its time -- it's Autotuned electropop that would have no problem fitting in (and being better than most of) today's Top 40 programming. I even enjoy "Hung Up," now (the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" sample is genius), although Stuart Price's lisping mess of percussion is infuriating.
As I've come to value the importance of logic and reason (to an almost zealous extent), I realize that when it comes to Madonna, there is no need for extremes. I can handle adoring "Everybody," and hating "Sorry" (and "Don't Tell Me" and "Hollywood" and most of True Blue and Like a Prayer) without feeling particularly conflicted. I can admire Madonna's seeming fearlessness and engagement with the unfamilair without fully giving myself over to her (to do so, I think, is to invest more in opportunism and the importance of popularity than I'm comfortable with). See, right now, I'm all about aspiring to balance. Madonna has allowed me to see myself, again and again, and as recently as this post. It turns out that she's meant more to me than I've wanted to admit, to the point where the prospect of hitting "Publish" is making me uneasy.
Gore Vidal has never been one to keep his mouth shut. Even on the homosexual activist agenda! That includes the subject of gay marriage, which he's never been a fan of. But not in the Elton John sort of way. But in a "even straight marriages are F'd" sort of way. In 2006, he told Time, "Since heterosexual marriage is such a disaster, why on earth would anybody want to imitate it?" His position hasn't changed, but the recipient of his ire may have. He's now going after Americans!
Like pal Dennis Altman, Vidal thinks the idea of gay marriage is bogus. But then why are we all fighting mad about securing the right to, one day, get a divorce? Because we are ignorant patriots, that's why.
“I’m not into partnerships,” Vidal, a single man, says. "I don’t even know what it means. [I couldn't] couldn’t care less [about same-sex marriage. Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”
(Vidal, a former Hillary Clinton supporter who switched to Barack Obama, has his own criticism of the current president. Obama is doing "[d]readfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism. … He f***ed [health care] up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen")
Now, it's easy to dismiss the ramblings of an octogenarian who, it could be argued, is out of touch with the priorities of gay Americans today. But this is a man who appeared on Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G show as himself. He must get us, right?
Mark Simpsonon the birth of the ’sexual’ era (from September’s Out magazine)
As you may have noticed, the out-and-proud modern gay, born amidst protest, shouting and flying bottles outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969, is now forty years old. But you may be less aware that this year is also the 140th birthday of a much more discreet and distinguished (if pathologized and sometimes pitiful) figure that Stonewall is often seen as making obsolete: the homosexual.
The offspring of Austrian-born Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny, the homosexual was delivered to the world in a couple of pamphlets he published anonymously in 1869 arguing against the Prussian anti sodomy law Paragraph 143 – the first appearance in print of the word.
Kertbeny argued that attraction to the same sex was inborn and unchangeable and that besides the law violated the rights of man: men should be free to do with their bodies as they pleased, so long as others were not harmed. Kertbeny maintained strenuously that he himself was ‘sexually normal’ (and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, save perhaps his strenuousness).
Kertbeny’s ‘homosexual’, itself a disapproved conjugation of Greek and Latin, was part of a larger classificatory system of human sexual behaviour he conceived which included quaint terms such as ‘monosexuals’ (masturbators) and ‘pygists’ (aficionados of anal sex), most of which have not survived. However, another of his quaint categories has ultimately proved even more popular than the ‘homosexual’: most people in the US today would describe themselves as ‘heterosexual’ – despite the fact that Kertbeny, as Jonathan Ned Katz has pointed out in ‘The Invention of Heterosexuality’ (1995), seemed to conceive of heterosexuals as more sex-obsessed than homosexuals and more open to ‘unfettered degeneracy’.
Words like most offspring have a life of their own of course, and in this case one that worked against the coiner’s intentions: despite Kertbeny’s libertarian if not actually homo-chauvinist sentiments, we might never have heard of the ‘homosexual’ (or indeed the ‘heterosexual’) if the word had not been adopted by Richard von Krafft-Ebing a few years later as a diagnosis for mental illness, setting the medical tone for much of the coming Twentieth Century with its aversion therapies, sex-lie detectors and psychiatric water-boarding.
Kertbeny’s double-edged legacy isn’t just the coining of the word ‘homosexual’ however, but helping to invent ‘sexuality’ itself: the very modern idea that there are different species of people constituted by their sexual preference alone – ‘heterosexuals’ and ‘homosexuals’ (and ‘bisexuals’ as an exception-to-prove-the-rule afterthought). Kertbeny invented the homosexual because he considered the other available terms, ‘pederast’, ‘sodomite’ and ‘invert’ too judgemental. He also saw no link between homosexuality and effeminacy – which he didn’t mind being judgemental about: he detested it.
As the brilliant sexual historian David Halperin puts it in his influential book ‘How To Do the History of Male Homosexuality’ (2002), pre-homosexual discourses referred to only one of the sexual partners: the “active” partner in the case of sodomy, the effeminate male or masculine female in the case of inversion. ‘The hallmark of “homosexuality”…’ he writes, ‘is the refusal to distinguish between same-sex sexual partners or to rank them by treating one of them as more (or less) homosexual than the other.’
The concept of the ‘homosexual’, medicalized or not, ultimately made possible the rise of the out-and-proud gay man, regardless of his own ‘role’ in bed or gender style, and also a gay community of equals. But it also tended to make all sex between men, however fleeting, however drunken, however positioned, ‘homo’ – along with all the participants, regardless of their sexual preference.
With the paradoxical result that there’s probably now rather less erotic contact – or in fact any physical contact at all – between males than there was when the homosexual was born, 140 years ago. The homosexual, in effect, monopolised same-sex erotics and intimacy.
For the premiere of the fifth season of her talk show today, Tyra wore her real hair. Then she sat down to interview Perez Hilton and pretended like she doesn't read his site or hate his guts.
OK, first of all, this:
Tyra came out with her natural hair completely wet.
And she had audience members come up and touch it.
The lesson here was: "Wigs and weaves are options, not something that you need."
Then she got a blowout and had it styled, and continued on with the show.
Perez came out.
I know, right? For real:
(That's cereal milk on his chin, BTW.)
Tyra referred to him as "The King of Blogging," even though she told him, "I'm not very familiar with your site…" Bull. Fucking. Shit.
That post was the seed that her manure developed into the tree of knowledge that is "Kiss my fat ass!"
She even knows his nicknames for her.
Tyra tried to get Perez to admit that he'd been teased as a child and that's why he grew up to be such an angry asshole. He wouldn't though. Then she tried to strike a deal with him. She asked him to not make fun of the underage children of celebrities for one year. He refused.
Then she knocked it down to three months, but he wanted an "out clause."
Then they agreed that he would only post "newsy" content about celebrities' children, and he'd leave opinion out of it. He would have to do this for three months, and if he followed through, he would get to appear on a future episode of ANTM.
It would seem that he didn't stick to the deal. It's kind of a relief though, that he won't be appearing on Top Model, though.
Christian Poveda during an interview in San Sebastian, Spain, in September 2008. Photograph: Rafa Rivas/AFP/Getty Images
A French film-maker and photojournalist who spent years researching a documentary on the criminal underbelly of El Salvador's gang culture has been found dead in the Central American country, police said today.
Christian Poveda's body was discovered with a bullet wound to the head near his car, about 10 miles north of San Salvador. He was on his way back from filming in La Campanera, a poor and overcrowded suburb where the Mara 18 street gang, the subject of his documentary, is based.
La Vida Loca, an unflinching portrait of gang members' everyday lives, had been due for release in France on 30 September. But Poveda's work had already drawn the attention of the people featured and he had begun to receive threats, said a friend and fellow photographer, Alain Mingham.
During its production, several of Poveda's subjects were either arrested or killed.
"Christian was not overly worried until recently," Mingham told the news website Rue89.com. "But his film had been shown on [the television channel] Canal+Espagne and pirate copies were circulating in Salvador, sold for a euro each. Some gangs then accused him of making business out of them, but the bosses calmed them down."
In a statement today, El Salvador's president, Mauricio Funes, said he was "devastated" by news of the assassination and ordered an immediate police investigation. Funes, himself a former journalist, had met Poveda to discuss the growing problem of gang violence.
"He had real recognition in this world, and the gangs sometimes asked him to act as a mediator," said Mingham. "Even the president … consulted him on the way in which to make progress."
Poveda, 54, first came to El Salvador in the 1980s in order to cover the civil war but soon developed a fascination for the "maras", the violent, tattooed street gangs that originated in Los Angeles and which have formed vast criminal networks throughout Central America.
Over in the Daily Mail today I have a go at Oasis, the popular beat combo which has just split up. (Or so Noel Gallagher says, and since he’s the only one in the band who can write songs, that’ll be it till he changes his mind for the lucrative reunion tour).
To be honest, I probably don’t loathe Oasis quite as much as I make out in that article. When you’re writing polemic there isn’t much room for nuance like - “Well if someone put on Champagne Supernova right now I’d probably feel a pleasant nostalgic twinge for my lost youth” - which is more or less what I really think about Oasis: I’d never ever put on one of their records myself, but if someone else did I wouldn’t necessarily feel an intense urge to kill him.
But I very much stand by my main point which is that Oasis were derivative and overrated. Their second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory remains the third bestselling album (after The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits) in British pop history. Does anyone out there seriously still thinks it deserves a place even in the top 50? Personally, I wouldn’t even put it in my top 100.
It’s not that I don’t like Liam’s son-of-Lennon vocals (and I also like, incidentally, that way he had of placing his mic way too high so that he had to keep craning his neck upwards like a Gerenuk feeding on an acacia tree); and I do agree that a lot of Noel Gallagher’s compositions are very catchy. But there’s a reason for the last bit and it’s very simple: they all sound quite a bit like songs you already know, most of them written by the Beatles.
You might argue that originality is a much overrated virtue in pop, given that from Led Zeppelin borrowing from the blues and every heavy rock band ever borrowing from Led Zeppelin pop has always fed on itself. But to me a truly great band is one that disguises or alters the sound of its influences to the point where you no longer go: “Ohmygod, that is SUCH a rip off.” My true greats would definitely include Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, The Smiths, New Order, Kraftwerk and the Pet Shop Boys. They wouldn’t include Oasis.
So how did Oasis ever get to be quite so massive. Well hype, quotability and attitude clearly had a lot to do with it. But by far the most interesting theory on this is in a new book on the history of recorded sound (which I highly recommend: trainspotterish but lively and compulsively readable) by US journalist Greg Milner, called Perfecting Sound Forever.
Oasis’s career, he argues, coincided with the Nineties trend in studio recording techniques for “loudness” at all costs. By “loudness”, he means music which has been heavily “compressed” in the studio - removing most of the loud/soft dynamic range and instead making it sound like the kind of muddy wall of noise which comes across well in a crowded pub. It’s actually a form of musical brainwashing: stuff recorded like this is designed to lodge in the brain and achieve massive and overwhelming cultural domination. Which Oasis did most effectively.
But the effect this had on pop music generally was disastrous. As one muso purist - a Vermont studio engineer called Chris Johnson - has tried to demonstrate scientifically by comparing the most “culturally significant” albums of all time, the music we really like (as opposed to the stuff that is bombarded at us relentlessly till we succumb) is the stuff which has the greatest dynamic range . The top ones on Johnson’s list - led by the Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 and Led Zeppelin IV - are the ones with the biggest contrast between really loud and really soft. Oasis took us down a wrong alley. On the back of their success, every major label wanted to imitate that big, sludgy sound, in much the same way publishing companies try to replicate Dan Brown novels. Good commerce, maybe; but dreadful art.
In late medieval times, so it is claimed, theologians argued about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The majority of the disciplinary committee of the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) would have felt right at home amongst those theologians.
In their decision, handed down today, on why it would not proceed with a full hearing of the complaint of the Constitutional Court judges against Judge President John Hlophe, the JSC provides a stunning example of splitting hairs and drawing distinctions without any meaning in order to justify their decision not to proceed with a full inquiry.
The JSC found that because Judge Nkabinde (and Jaftha) had not “with sufficient consistency said that Hlophe JP had said that the cases must be decided in a particular way” (in other words, in favour of Zuma) there would be no use in pursuing the matter. The judges have of course said – very consistently – that Hlophe had said that the case had to be decided “properly”. The JSC found as follows:
We also accept, for the purposes of our decisions, that in their conversations Hlophe JP in all probability said, among other things, that the Zuma/Thint matters must be decided properly; that privilege was an important element of the matters that were before the Court; that he used the word “mandate”; that he, like President Zuma (then President of the African National Congress) was persecuted; that there is no case against Zuma; that “sesithembele kinina” – “we pin our hopes on you”; he believed that the issue of privilege was a very concerning one and had to be dealt with properly; he felt strongly about privilege and fair trial rights; that the majority in the Supreme Court of Appeal did not attach much weight to the issue of privilege; that the Zuma/Thint cases was probably one of the most demanding of cases that the Court had dealt with given its important to the President of the ANC, Jacob Zuma and the ANC itself and the country. We also accept that his discussion with Jafta JA was robust…. [Nkabinde] has not with sufficient consistency said that Hlophe JP had said that the cases must be decided in a particular way, in particular in favour of Mr Zuma. As pointed out above, when pertinently and expressly asked if Hlophe JP had said so, she was firm that he had not.
Because Nkabinde had not claimed that Hlophe had ever said the case must be decided in favour of Zuma, a hearing would not be necessary as there was no evidence that Hlophe had improperly tried to influence the judges to decide the case one way or another.
This distinction drawn by the JSC seems to me to be so absurd as to border on the irrational. It means that if a judge wants to improperly influence other judges he or she could get away with it as long as he or she never says the magic words: “Decide the case in favour of X.” He or she could say the case must be decided “properly”, and can argue what a “proper” decision would be, but this would not, according to the wise people at the JSC, constitute an attempt to influence the judge approached.
The JSC also accepted that there were “sharp disputes of fact between the different versions” given by Hlophe and the complainants. Nevertheless it found that these disputes were “not central or material to the validity of the respective complaints” and therefore a full hearing with cross examination would be of no use.
In this context the JSC found that:
[I]t is difficult to conclude that Hlophe JP acted with “wilful blindness,” “with the addition of a vituperative epithet”, “involving extreme departure from the standard of reasonable person which must demonstrate complete obtuseness of mind or total failure to take care” when he spoke to Nkabinde J and Jafta JA, which would be “gross misconduct” within the meaning of section 177 of the Constitution.
Although the JSC found that Hlophe had discussed the pending matters with two judges of that Court in matters in which he had not sat, it did not amount to gross misconduct. Rather it may merely have been “unwise, ill-considered, imprudent, not thought through”.
Judge Hlophe just simply did not know that the practice in the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court is that the judges, even amongst themselves, do not discuss matters before argument, and even after argument do not discuss the matters with other judges who are not involved. Maybe it was an honest mistake?
This decision, with respect, is utterly implausible. It will inevitably tarnish the image of all parties concerned. All the complainants (Hlophe and the judges of the Constitutional Court) will now have to continue sitting as judges despite the fact that we now know for a fact that one or more of them are pathological liars. The judge or judges who truthfully gave evidence to the JSC have been treated in a shocking manner as the JSC has decided not to make a finding about who is lying and who is speaking the truth, tarnishing the reputation of all involved.
That is why I cannot imagine that either Hlophe or the judges of the Constitutional Court would gloat about this decision as it leaves a dark cloud hanging over all of their heads. If anyone gloats about the decision it would strongly suggest that the gloating party or parties were liars and were just too happy to be let off the hook despite telling huge lies.
The JSC itself also comes out of this saga with its credibility in tatters. It drew a distinction where none existed to avoid a full hearing that could have exposed the lies of a sitting judge (or judges) and could have gotten rid of one or more bad apples on the bench. The fact that the JSC does not seem concerned about the fact that its decision condones scurrilous lies, suggests it does not have the ethical compass required to deal responsibly with matters like this.
All in all, it is a sad day for our judiciary and for the JSC. There are no winners here.
PS: The full decision of the JSC can be accessed on the “Seminar Room” page of this Blog
Gore Vidal speaks to Mark Simpson (Arena Hommes Plus, Summer 2009)
I’m having trouble hearing the last living Great American Man of Letters. He says something else I don’t hear and I ask him to repeat it. Suddenly this 83 year old legend is very loud and very scary indeed: ‘IS “QUIET” A EUPHEMISM FOR DEAD?!’ he thunders in a voice much more Biblical than his old foe the late Charlton Heston was ever able to muster. But then, Mr Vidal is amongst other things, an Old Testament prophet - albeit a Godless, ‘pinko’ one with a very mischievous sense of humour.
***
‘I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.’ So announces the opening sentence of the 1968 sensational bestseller ‘Myra Breckinridge’ about a hilarious, devastating, but always elegant transsexual, by the hilarious, devastating, but always elegant Gore Vidal. Myra, a (slightly psychotic) devotee of High Hollywood, hell-bent on revenging herself on American machismo, continues her manifesto:
‘Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for ‘why’ or ‘because. Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.’
From the right angle, and in the right light of hindsight, Gore Vidal resembles his most famous offspring. Clad only in his wit - and an armour-plated ego - Mr Vidal has, during his long and prolific career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, (failed) politician, commentator, movie special guest-star, (gleeful) gadfly, and America’s (highly unauthorised) biographer, taken on The Land of the Free’s finest literary warriors, who had no word for ‘why’ or ‘because’, but plenty for ‘faggot’ and ‘pinko’. Vidal broke the balls - and outlasted - tiresomely macho brawlers like Norman Mailer: he compared ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ to ‘three days of menstrual flow”; later, when he was knocked to the ground by Mailer, he retorted, still on the floor: ‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again’.
And also right wing bruisers like William F. Buckley Jnr., whom he famously provoked into threatening him and shouting ‘you queer!’ on live national TV in 1968: ‘RIP WFB - In Hell’ was Gore’s very Christian obituary notice last year. (Like that other thorn in the side of America, Castro, Vidal has survived almost all his foes.)
In his spare time, piercing, pointed Gore has taken on the Cold War, the American Empire, what he calls the ‘Republican-Democrat’ Party, monotheism, and, even more sacred to America (and, for that matter, the UK), monosexuality. He himself has had relationships with both men and women (and what women! He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward) and maintains, like the incurable blasphemer he is, that ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are adjectives not nouns, acts not identities. Most recently, his impressively unnecessary punking of the venerable, extravagantly charming BBC presenter David Dimbleby - ‘I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE!’ he barked in his best Lady Bracknell - on live TV on Election Night has become an unlikely YouTube hit.
As he once said: ‘Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ Or was that Myra? Either way, Mr Vidal is more of a man than many of his adversaries sadly mistook themselves for - and, perhaps, more woman than any of them could ever hope to possess.
Maybe that’s why, twenty years ago when I was a callow youth, I sent Mr Vidal a fan letter - the only one I’ve ever penned. I also included, as you do, a topless shot: back then, I had Hollywood tits. And who better to appreciate them than Gore Vidal, MGM’s last contract writer? Fortunately for both of us, I didn’t hear anything back.
I put my tits away, and took to writing. But I was probably still writing fan notes to Vidal, even when I scribbled, as I did from time to time, nasty, Oedipal things about him. Re-reading Myra Breckinridge I can see that far too much of my own work is just footnotes to this forty-year-old novel which more or less invented metrosexuality decades before the word was coined, strapped it on and rammed it where the sun don’t shine. (Described at the time on the dust-jacket as a ‘novel of far-out sexuality’ it now seems, well, all the way in).
But now I’m actually speaking to Mr Vidal. I feel like Michael J Fox in ‘Back to the Future’ where he meets his teen mother at High School (save my ‘mother’ is generally agreed to be no pussycat). Am I going to disappear into an embarrassing time-paradox? ‘Please forgive my nervousness,’ I stutter. ‘I’m a Big Fan - though I suppose those words probably strike terror into your heart….’
Without missing a beat comes the laconic reply, in that measured, unmistakable voice: ‘They clearly strike terror into yours.’
Later, I hand him another line when I gush, not entirely baselessly: ‘To someone like me, you almost seem like the embodiment of the Twentieth Century!’
‘On arthritic days I know I’m the Twentieth Century’.
Mr Vidal is speaking today from his American home of the last forty years in the Hollywood Hills. Vidal in the Hollywood Hills makes sense - it is an LA Eyrie; a place where his back is covered and from which he can spy people coming a long way off. His fortress-like house in Ravello, Italy, which he recently sold, was perched atop rocky cliffs, reached only by a steep, dizzying pathway. But Vidal says he chose the Hills because they weren’t vulgar. ‘Unlike other parts of LA, like Beverly Hills or Bel Air, when I bought this house forty years ago, it did not attract the super rich, wherever they live they build these huge houses. You don’t have many of those up here in the hills.’
‘Do you survey Los Angeles from your window?’
‘Heavens, no! There’s no sight uglier than Los Angeles!’
‘But at night it can be very beautiful.’
‘Well, almost anywhere can be beautiful at night.’
‘True. Even a refinery town like Middlesbrough, which just happens to be down the road from my own somewhat less glamorous home. The opening aerial shot of a future, infernal Los Angeles in ‘Blade Runner‘ were supposedly inspired by Middlesbrough at night - the director Ridley Scott grew up round there.’
‘Yes, Ridley Scott used to hire my house. I think also during the making of that film. I used to hire it out a lot - mostly to Brits.’
‘You’re regarded very fondly on these shores.’
‘It’s reciprocated,’ he says, almost warmly. ‘The books were read in the UK at the same time as they were in America. Although more easily for the English since, unlike the New York Times, the London Times was not dedicated to attacking me.’
The New York Times, taking ladylike fright at the matter-of-fact way Vidal’s second novel ‘The City and the Pillar’ dealt with same-sex love in the US Army during the Second World War (Vidal enlisted at the age 17), had an attack of the vapours and banned Gore’s next five novels. No minor snub this, since the NYT even more so then than today could make or break you as a writer.
Perhaps the NYT was so shocked because this distasteful dissident was a product of the very heart of the East Coast Elite. A cuckoo in a feathered nest. Born in October 3, 1924 at the US Military Academy in Westpoint, his father an aeronautics pioneer and airline tycoon (founding what would become TWA and Eastern Airlines), his grandfather was Thomas P. Gore, the most powerful Senator of the age - and also blind - his mother was an actress and socialite (and a mean drunk). He was christened Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, a school for the DC elite which he was to attend. He later took the name ‘Gore’ in honour of his grandfather (a leading Isolationist - whose outlook Vidal has remained faithful to), whom he spent much of his childhood reading to, and mixing with the most powerful figures in the most powerful country in the world - just before it was about to become the world.
I’d like to think that Vidal was almost a kind of internal émigré from the East Coast when he arrived in LA in the early 50s as a scriptwriter for MGM. ‘Not really,’ he demurs, ‘I was back and forth between the East and West Coast. I was one of the founders of live drama on television. I must have done a hundred plays during ‘54 to ‘57. After the New York Times banned me I had to make a living, and there it was: I never wanted to be a playwright but I found out I was one. Theatre work kept me going for many years.’
A number of his plays were made into movies, including ‘The Best Man’ (1960), starring Henry Fonda as an idealistic Presidential Candidate faced with one who will do anything to win. It includes a prophetic speech: ‘One day there will be a Jewish President and then a black President. And when all the minorities are heard from we’ll do something for the downtrodden majority of this country: the ladies.’ I mention to Vidal it’s being re-released on DVD.
‘Oh, they never tell me,’ he sighs, ‘and I never receive any money from it - it just happens. I mean now I think the rights probably belong to a group of Martian businessmen.’ (Possibly a bitter reference to another play of his, ‘Visit to a Small Planet’, made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis in 1960, in which a delinquent Martian visits Earth - the play’s sharp satire of the Washington elite and 1950s American values disappeared in the film version.)
It’s a busy Oscar Weekend in LA, but will Mr Vidal be attending any of the events? ‘I’ve been invited to the Vanity Fair Oscar Party but I don’t think I’ll be going along. I haven’t been to the Oscars for years. I really don’t have much interest any more.’
‘Whatever happened’, I ask, ‘to the uplifting propaganda for the American Way of Life that Hollywood used to produce?
‘Well, there are no longer studios to generate that kind of euphoria,’ he replies glumly. ‘Money is all powerful these days, and calls all the shots-in Hollywood and pretty much everything else in American life. We watched ‘That Hamilton Woman’ last night, as it was called in America, the 1941 Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton biopic. It really was a spectacular movie, they certainly don’t make them like that anymore. It was the first time that Vivien Leigh and Olivier had appeared together, which caused enormous excitement. London was being bombed and they were making this movie in Hollywood! With Alexander Korda directing and producing. A superb romantic film and great acting. God…!’ He trails off in an unguarded reverie.
High Hollywood, the period that Vidal grew up with, visiting the movie theatre almost daily, almost religiously, is one of the few things that Vidal could be accused of being sentimental about. In ‘Screening History’ (1992) he wrote: ‘It occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.’ In ‘Myra Breckinridge’, the heroine declares: ‘…in the decade between 1935 and 1945, no irrelevant film was made in the United States. During those years, the entire range of human (which is to say, American) legend was put on film, and any profound study of those extraordinary works is bound to make crystal-clear the human condition.’
No one could accuse most Hollywood contemporary output of being amenable to ‘profound study’. High Hollywood was about money too of course, but movies back then often seemed to be the most aesthetic medium imaginable: fashion, art, glamour. How was that?
‘The early moguls liked art,’ explains Vidal. ‘Like Adolph Zuckor who founded Paramount. He cast Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress, in Queen Elizabeth, his first feature film. Zuckor aspired to the highest standards of theatre. Then of course Hollywood became very successful and money became all anyone was really interested in.’
‘Remember, movies are movies. It’s better to do them out here where there’s plenty of light without going broke over the electricity. Mind you, the reason that Warner Brothers films were often the best movies made in the 1930s was because they looked so dark - the chiaroscuro quality of WB films was priceless. Bette Davies in The Letter was a great one- from the opening gloomy, brooding shot. How did Warner do it? Well it was because the Brothers Warner were very, very cheap! They’d go around from soundstage to soundstage turning the lights down, so halfway through the day every scene was in darkness!’
‘It was said that a British actor, a little on the pompous side came over here for some loot. Addressing some of the old timer American actors he asked: “Isn’t it difficult living in a society so unrooted and uprooted, without tradition of any kind?” One of them answered: “Why the Warner Brothers Christmas layoffs are one of our greatest traditions!”‘ Vidal laughs scornfully.
Vidal is himself a frequent visitor to the UK, ‘When I was younger I always made a point to visit Saville Row Whenever in London - though the last time was 30 years ago.’
‘How long does a Saville suit last?’
‘Forever! I don’t believe in fashion. I have no time for it. Versace once told me I looked a state and sent some of his staff to visit me in Ravello and make a suit. And very nice suits they were too. But it isn’t something I take an interest in.’
Vidal may claim not to believe in fashion, but in ‘Myra Breckinridge’ he proved a profound observer of male fashion trends, predicting in effect the Twenty First Century: ‘…young men [today compensate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.’
But when I suggest this to him, bringing up his most famous, most prophetic book, he just says quickly, ‘I should read it again.’ Making it quite clear that he doesn’t wish to discuss it. Perhaps the eccentric 1970 film version starring Raquel Welch left a bad taste in his mouth - it certainly left a bad taste in the critics’ mouths.
I ask him when he was last in the UK. ‘Just the other week. I had the great joy of addressing the House of Commons in Westminster’s Great Hall courtesy of Third World Solidarity to talk about the matter of Cuba and the United States. It was the venom of the Kennedy brothers who were out to destroy Castro because he didn’t want to be killed by them. Or invaded. Or taken over. And his revolution erased. The vanity of that family!’
Vidal’s vigorous attacks on liberal icons the Kennedys - whom he knew personally - for their warmongering are always value for money, exploding as they do the soft-focus mythology of Camelot. Vidal was one of the few people in American public life to dare to denounce the Cold War as an American invention to keep the politically and economically profitable US war machine turning over after the Second World War ceased trading. ‘The thing about Jack was that he actually believed all that anti-communist propaganda - the previous Presidents didn’t.’ (To which could be added: George W. Bush had much in common with Kennedy’s messianic zeal and frothy talk of ‘freedom’ - he just didn’t have the good fortune to be assassinated in his first term.)
Vidal was vehemently attacked for his outspokenness about the Cold War and particularly for talking and writing about something that was as clear as day: the American Empire. ‘”How dare you!” people shouted,’ recalls Vidal. ‘”We’re not an Empire! We stand for freedom!”‘
‘Recently pretty much everyone has started talking about the “American Empire”,’ I observe.
‘Well, when we started down the Roman Imperial, dynastic way with the Bush family,’ says Vidal wearily, ‘it became quite clear it was all wrong whatever it was. Remember, we didn’t break away from England, we broke away from the King. That’s what the Declaration of Independence is all about. Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant propaganda united the colonists against George III.’
‘We’re the original Evil Empire.’
‘Well, you certainly were then.’
‘Alas, our empire fell . . .’
‘Well, you ran out of money.’
‘Yes. As the US seems to be doing now. Are you surprised by the speeded-up schedule of Imperial implosion?’
‘I was surprised by the speed at which we lost the Republic, and lost Magna Carta during the Bush Dictatorship.’
‘But you see liberal icon Roosevelt as the first American Emperor - decreeing there should be no Empires, save his.’
‘I’ll tell you a story. Roosevelt was having lunch with Churchill. The Second World War was drawing to a close. They toasted the end of the war. Then Roosevelt gave Churchill a radiant smile, and said [here Vidal imitates Roosevelt's high Patrician voice: he is a great, savage mimic, ‘You realize you’re going to have to give up your precious India, don’t you?’ [imitating Churchill's jowly tones “Never!” And they had a quarrel over the lunch table. Many people who happened to be there spread it around. Roosevelt not only won the argument, it was force majeure. Roosevelt said, ‘The days of Empire are over, and I trust you realize this.”‘
‘Churchill said: “What do you want me to do? Get on my hind legs like your little dog Fala, and beg?” Roosevelt said simply: “Yes.” Don’t tempt an Emperor!’
‘Most people in the UK seem not to have realised the real nature of the ‘special relationship’ we have had with the US since 1940.’
‘Why should they? their lives go on anyway…’.
Vidal is a keen historian, but that most dangerous kind: an autodidact. ‘I didn’t go to Harvard,’ he once boasted. ‘I just sent my work there.’ Unlike most historians, Vidal has actually had met most of the key players. Or perhaps the other way around - as he has put it himself elsewhere: ‘People always say: “You got to meet everyone.” They always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the right way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: “Oh, look, there’s the governor.”‘ Wouldn’t you want to meet Gore Vidal if you were Jack Kennedy or William Burroughs? Although he is an incorrigible name-dropper, it’s probably because his world has been so filled with names that not to drop them would be the pretentious thing to do.
‘I used to know Nancy Astor,’ he says, launching into a five star anecdote sparked by our discussion of Britain’s rather unlikely Imperial past. ‘And I asked her about her famous trip to the Soviet with Bernard Shaw. “Well, I was just lookin’ out that train window” - she had a Virginia accent - “I was watchin’ the whole world go by. And it was pathetic - he kept readin’ one of his own books!”
In Moscow Stalin was in charming mode, embracing them, one in each arm. He listened to Shaw go on for a while, then pointed to a map of the world on the wall of his Kremlin office and he asked, “How is it that this little island in the North Sea has ended up with all this??” And he pointed to all the pink on the map. ‘”Can you explain that to me Mr. Shaw?” Shaw declined to respond. And so he turned to Lady Astor. “Well, ahh think it is becaauuse it was we first who gave the world the King James Version of the Bible.” I asked her, “What did Stalin say to that?” “He didn’t say anythin’.” On the way out, Lady Astor asked, “Mr Stalin, when you gonna stop killin’ people?”
“Oh, Lady Astor,’ replied Stalin, looking directly at her. “The undesirable classes do not kill themselves.”‘
‘Now,’ says Vidal only slightly ironically, ‘that’s a nice story where everybody’s in character!’
My audience with the Twentieth Century is winding down. ‘Do you think,’ I ask, looking for silver linings and sunny endings, ‘the latest Emperor, Barack Obama, can rescue the American Imperium?’
‘The US is a very racist country,’ responds Vidal sorrowfully. ‘He will probably be assassinated. Then Martial Law will be declared. The contingency plans are already in place, I’m sure.’ Like the Brother’s Warner, he’s switching off the lights.
‘Do you think the American Dream can be revived?’
‘No. There was never anything to it. It was always fraudulent.’ Off goes another light.
‘LA was once the city of the future - does it still have one?’
‘No. It’s run out of gas.’ And another bulb dies. We’re now in darkness. Bette Davies had more light in that opening shot in ‘The Letter.’
‘Do you think America can survive without the kind of brilliant dreams and illusions Hollywood used to manufacture - or without an Empire on which the sun never sets?’
‘Of course we can,’ he retorts. ‘We’ll just get on with our lives like everyone else.’ And a little no-frills night-light comes on.
All things considered, it was probably for the best that I didn’t mention the topless fan letter I’d sent all those years ago to Gore, glorious Grinch of the Hollywood Hills.
The news that AdultFriendFinder may become the first Internet porn venture to go public is the latest step in the unstoppable mainstreaming of porn. But porn is still the most "Not Safe" of "NSFW" material. Unless you work from home!
