Joe Cillo

SF Ballet Performance, Program 1

February 2, 2013

 

There were three ballets on this performance program. The first was Suite en Blanc Composed by Eduoard Lalo, and choreographed by Serge Lifar. This is a very conservative, traditional ballet. Light on substance, but strong on aesthetics and technique. If you like pretty pictures and dainty, picturesque movements of agility and grace, then you’ll love this. Superbly performed by the SF Ballet dancers. This is visually pleasant to watch, but basically light entertainment. Nothing challenging or particularly interesting to my taste.

In the Night was the second ballet. Choreographed by Jerome Robbins, it uses four Chopin Nocturnes as a back drop to four male-female duos. Despite the fact that the four Nocturnes vary somewhat in character, the four dances were all very similar. It struck me that the dancing did not fit with the music. These Nocturnes are introspective pieces. They are narcissistic rather than romantic. The choreographer treats them as love songs with a happy ending. I don’t think so. I think the choreographer misunderstood the Chopin Nocturnes. The second one against Op. 55 No. 1 was particularly offensive in this respect. This opening section of this Nocturne is tender and delicate, but the middle section is rather distressed and contentious, in high contrast to the sweet calm of the framing segments. None of this was reflected in the dance. The dance was rather bland and had a sameness throughout. The final one, the famous E-flat Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, is a dreamlike reverie, a lullaby almost. It is reflective and somewhat nostalgic. But the dancing didn’t come anywhere near that kind of feeling. It’s weird watching a dance performance where the dancing seems to have nothing to do with the music that is backing it. I think this one needs to be rethought.

The final segment, the World Premier of Borderlands, by composers Joel Cadbury and Paul Stoney, and Wayne McGregor as choreographer, scenic and costume designer, and Lucy Carter as lighting designer, was by far the most interesting of the three pieces. The style was very different from the first two selections. This was hyperactive, with frantic, discrete movements emphasized by strobe lights that seemed to reflect a temperament, and perhaps a lifestyle, of the modern era that is atomized, choppy, jerky, and abrupt. The soundtrack — it wasn’t exactly music — is too loud. It’s rather assaultive. Perhaps that is the object to blast the audience with harsh sounds and oppress them into a kind of unpleasant resistance. It fits with the anxious, staccato, discontinuous movements, but it draws attention away from the dancers, overwhelming the audience with obnoxious sound. Differentiation between the genders is much reduced. Distinct genders are still discernible but very much blended. Identity of gender becomes indistinct. However, the sexes are very much interactive, touching, embracing, well engaged with one another. The middle section cast in orange light is a man apparently trying to invigorate a woman who keeps falling away from him in a kind of lethargy. She doesn’t seem to have the will to keep up with him and remain connected with his interest. But in the succeeding segments she casts off the deadness within herself and becomes a much more alive and responsive partner, and they become a more involved couple with smoother, more fluid movements. The ballet ends on a positive note with the couple dancing with energy, and mutual engagement. It was by far the most interesting of the three selections of the evening, and all were superbly presented by the San Francisco Ballet dancers at their usual top level of performance.

Django Unchained, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino’s latest film takes place in 1858, two years before the Civil War-  the year that William Wells Brown published the first Black drama, Leap to Freedom; John Brown held an anti-slavery convention; Abraham Lincoln said  “A house divided against itself cannot stand;”  The  Richmond Daily Dispatch reported that 90 blacks were arrested for learning.  Early that year a series of events hostile to Blacks happened in San Francisco.  The case of the escaped slave, Archy Lee, heightened conflicts between pro- and anti-slavery contingents in town.  Black children were excluded from public schools and legislation was introduced to ban black immigration into California.

Tarantino made his engaging, well-acted and directed film in the true spaghetti-western style, with Ennio Marricone adding to the soundtrack as he had  for Sergio Leone’s films which featured Clint Eastwood.  However, he tackled a more serious issue than that of the typical pulp western of revenge, show-downs, and gun-battle one-upmanship.  Django Unchained is a seriously nutty “comedy” that elicits a sober discussion on enslavement, and its portrayal over the years by slaves to Hollywood.  Put bluntly, he does not employ mushy sentimental platitudes a la Spielberg in Amistad or The Color Purple.  It is about the deadly craziness of racism and slavery’s particular horrors.

“Django” stars Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the incredible German actor, Christopher Waltz, for whom Tarantino wrote delightful, erudite, highfalutin exchanges (as he did for Waltz in Inglourious Bastards).   He also wrote a lot of inflammatory dialogue for the white guys and some “domesticated” Blacks, including generous use of the “n” word.  Tarantino’s love for Japanese samurai films is evident in lots blood splattering, gushing, and spraying.

Dr. King Shultz (Waltz), a meticulous record keeper, is a bounty hunter who tracks wanted men: Dead or Alive.  He’s masquerading as a traveling dentist, evidenced by the oversize spring-mounted molar that jounces and wiggles on top of his horse cart as it rumbles along .  During a chance meeting in the woods at night, he comes across Django, an escaped slave in a chain gang.  Shultz frees him because  he knows where the bad guys are and elicits his help.  Django agrees only if Shultz helps find his wife, Broomhilda (an obvious play on the name Brunhilda of Wagnerian lore), played by Kerry Washington.  She is a slave at Calvin Candie’s Mississippi plantation.  When they ride into a town, the townsfolk are shocked:  “Looka there!  A n- – – – – on a horse!”  and dumbstruck.   A tavern owner shouts, “Get that n – – – – outta here!”  Over beers, Shultz tells Django that bounty hunting  is “like slavery, a flesh-for-cash business.”  He convinces Django to play his valet so as to come off more a business man than bounty hunter, and sends him off to a costume shop.  Django emerges dressed as Gainsborough’s  The Blue Boy  (Tarantino does have a wicked sense of cultural reference).   To his credit, Tarantino uses flashbacks sparingly; showing them only to flesh out character, such as Django and his wife and his early days as a slave.

Many scenes are shot through with gory brutality wreaked on blacks that are difficult to stomach, one of whipping a half-naked woman for breaking a few eggs.  Shultz and Django rile up white slave owners who resort to forming a hooded posse (precursors to the Klan?) who complain about the hand-made hoods- the eye holes, especially, which is hilarious; much needed levity in this bloody, violent film.  In one scene, Shultz asks Django about Broomhilda’s name, then tells him the German myth, how the hero, Siegfried rescues Brunhilda.  He then convinces Django to act like a slaver himself, to ingratiate themselves with Candie,  outfitting him in fine, well-to-do cowboy attire and a beautiful, hi-steppin’ horse, on which he cuts quite a figure.

By now, almost half-way into the near three hour film, I was getting impatient- when would meet we Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio)?  After witnessing a gruesome contest between slaves egged on by white plantation hands, involving a slave, d’Artagnan (Eto Assando), they arrive at  Candie’s plantation, CandiLand.   Candie is handsome, rich, smooth-talking, corrupt, and evil.  He stages a bloody wrestling-to–the-death matches between slaves in a gorgeously appointed room while guests drink and dine, oohing and ahhhing as they shrink from blood spatters.   Broomhilda is there, severely punished for trying to escape.  Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, made up like, as one critic said, Uncle Ben), is Candie’s kowtowing, simpering house slave with his own agenda, who literally hangs over Candie’s chair at the head of the table.  He bows and nods as Candie explains to his guests why slaves don’t revolt, using a skull to illustrate.  At one point, Shultz is visibly appalled; Stephen asks Django why it doesn’t bother him, being Black himself.  Django answers that Shultz is German, “I’m more used to Americans than he is.”

One scene in particular: Shultz gets Candie’s goat by mentioning the slave d’Artagnan, telling him that the man who wrote The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas, was Black.  Candie loses it spectacularly, in a mad rage.  It’s fair to say that Christopher Waltz carries the film.  When both Candie and Shultz  are literally no longer in the picture (Shultz had a trick up his sleeve) near the end, the film becomes predictable.  Django turns himself in to spare his wife.  But he has an out: money- lots of it.  The ending is, of course, an absolute blood-bath, no one is spared, not even Candie’s toady, incestuous sister, Lara Lee (Laura Cayouette).  Django gives Stephen his comeuppance, too.  There are horrific explosions and a happy ending.   Django impresses Broomhilda with his horse’s dressage, then the couple ride off into a Gone with the Wind-like sunset.  Django becomes a legend for Blacks, almost like Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Tarantino is known to tap “has been” actors for his films.  In Django, the TV actor Don Johnson plays a sheriff, and film star Franco Nero who was in the original Django  a decade or so ago, is seen as one of Candie’s guests at the wrestling match.  The film is up for several Academy Awards.  See it now!

This review can also be read in an abbreviated version at www.socialistaction.org

The Great American Symphony Orchestra

by Anthony J. Cirone.  Galesville, MD:  Meredith Music Publications.  2011.

 

The Great American Symphony Orchestra is an informative, well-written overview of how a symphony orchestra operates.  It is a primer, an outline, a guidebook, not an in depth exploration or analysis.  It is not Ball Four, or The Paper Lion.  I attend San Francisco Symphony performances frequently, and over the years have developed a number of questions about just how does all of this come about and what keeps it going.  Cirone answered many of my questions, especially about the organizational structure of the symphony.  What you see on the stage is only the visible tip or a rather large enterprise.  In his Appendix B he lists the many departments that support and administer the orchestra.  He says the ratio of support staff to orchestra members is one-to-one, but it seems to me like it must be more than that.  There are many people behind the scenes that make a symphony orchestra possible.

Cirone was percussionist with the San Francisco Symphony from 1965 to 2001.  During this long tenure he served under Music Directors Seiji Ozawa, Edo DeWaart, Herbert Blomstedt, and Michael Tilson Thomas and noted guest conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Eugene Ormandy, Kurt Mazur, Rafael Kubelik, and James Levine.  He has vast knowledge of the symphony and its personalities. I wish he would share more of what he knows.  What you get in this book is the public tour.  The Symphony as it would like to have itself presented.

Throughout the book he stresses the dedication demanded of the musicians to reach the high level or performance required of orchestra musicians.  It is an arduous process to create a symphony orchestra musician that begins early in life and continues throughout.  He describes in detail the training that musicians must undergo, the audition process for admission to the Symphony, which is very interesting, the rehearsals in preparation for a concert, the process of moving a symphony orchestra on a tour, the expenses of a symphony orchestra and its sources of funding.  There is a very nice chapter on Arthur Fiedler and his tenure presiding over the San Francisco Pops.  I was very interested in the role of the conductor and how the conductor shapes the character of the orchestra.  I would like to have heard more about the relations between the musicians within the symphony.  These are people who spend a lot of time together and are a rather close knit group that continues over years.  These very intimate relationships which he talks about only in generalities.  He is very discreet about the family business.  One point that he obliquely touches on, but does so repeatedly, is that developing extraordinary musical skill stunts young people in other areas of their development.

Professional musicians practice constantly; in fact, they become slaves to their instruments.  Even as young children, these artists-to-be spent years developing technique and preparing etudes for lessons — time that often replaced social activities. (p. 25)

Students who excel as music majors at the undergraduate level and want to pursue graduate-level studies in this field love to perform and have no other strong interest. (p. 39)

Although members of a family have hobbies, this is not always the case with symphony artists, many of whom have no interests outside of music. . . To  excel in any one area takes a great amount of energy and when family obligations are added into the mix, little time is left for anything else in a busy musician’s schedule. (p. 18)

This theme of the personal and social cost of producing high caliber musicians recurs throughout the book although he does not develop it in detail or illustrate it with specific anecdotes.  But I have the sense that there is some regret or ambivalence about his life as an orchestra musician when he weighs what he has missed in terms of his personal life against the notable achievements of a symphony musician.

Professional musicians spend an inordinate amount of time practicing in order to maintain technique and learn new music.  Besides juggling a major orchestra schedule, many players perform in chamber music ensembles or hold teaching positions in universities and conservatories; others compose, conduct, and participate in a variety of music-related activities.  These never-ending endeavors leave little time to master the personal life skills so necessary for enduring friendships and close relationships. (p. 197)

This de-emphasis of the personal is also reflected in how the book is written. The book is detailed and engagingly written.  He includes anecdotes from his personal experience that add interest and color to the narrative, but his anecdotes are generally not revealing of himself.  This is not a personal perspective on a life in the symphony.  It is not about his personal point of view on the symphony, it is written almost in a journalistic style that concentrates on the facts and the processes, while at the same time keeping the reporter’s subjectivity in the background.  I think it is in keeping with the mentality of a player in a symphony orchestra.  Symphony musicians are team players par excellence.  Individualism is discouraged.  The symphony musician must suppress his own idiosyncratic interpretations of the music to create a unified whole in the context of the group.  The individual musicians are submerged into this well-integrated totality.  He wrote the book as a member of the symphony, who executed his part flawlessly, carefully observant of the smallest details, but very discreet in his choice of what to report, and otherwise kept his mouth shut.

The other point that impressed me is the conservatism of this music and the players who perform it.  The demands of the profession foster a very conservative, structured lifestyle and personality.  There is great reverence for the printed score.  Punctuality is vital.  Interdependence is understood and taken for granted.  People who are unable to subject themselves to the regimen necessary to achieve the high level of technical proficiency and maintain it over years are weeded out of a symphony orchestra.  They will never even get close to one.  People without the even temperedness and tolerance necessary to be in close quarters with the same 100+ people for much of the time including traveling for months on end together cannot be in a symphony orchestra.

This book helped me understand why I have never been able to warm up to symphony music.  Although I often attend symphonic concerts, it is not to hear the Symphony.  I am far more interested in the soloists, usually pianists or violinists.  I like seeing that single figure standing out apart from the mass with his sound soaring out above the rest with spectacular strength and power, dominating the attention of the listeners.  In recent years my tastes have broadened somewhat, having become more interested in the different instruments and intrigued by the myriad ways a symphony orchestra can be used to create communicative sound, but I’ve never been much of a team player, unless I am the captain.  When I studied piano, I studied the solo repertoire, and I never liked to accompany people.  It is perhaps a limitation in my character, but it is reflected in the kind of music I like.  The Symphony interests me, but I do not feel passionate about it.

This book gave me a greater understanding of the organizational structure of a symphony orchestra, some of its inner workings, and especially the wholehearted dedication demanded of its players and the high cost it exacts on their personal lives.  I would like to see something that would fill out this picture more in terms of a personal perspective, an introspective look at an orchestra and its musicians.  But this book is a good, solid introduction for anyone who attends the Symphony.

The Sex Abuse Industry and the American Police State

 

The Science of Sex Abuse. By Rachel Aviv.  The New Yorker, January 14, 2013.  pp. 36-45.

 

The case reported by Rachel Aviv in the January 14, 2013 issue of The New Yorker documents the growth of the American Police State over the last thirty years to the point where it is now intruding into the inner space of our private thoughts, desires, fantasies, and emotional longings, making our imaginings and sentiments an arena of criminality and prosecution.  It is the expression of a trend that has always been present in American society, especially since the passage of the Comstock Act in 1867, a draconian law which banned all forms of sexual material from the U.S. mail, not only erotica of every kind, but also informational material about birth control and other topics relating to sexuality.  These oppressive restraints were partially rolled back by a series of court decisions in the 1950s and 60s, but since 1982 there has been an increasingly brutal persecution of “child pornography” and sexual activities involving children that has reached a delusional fever.  Rachel Aviv presents one example of how distorted and perverse this has become, but there are many thousands of equally grotesque cases.

She details the story of a man she calls ‘John’ and his twelve year saga in the criminal justice system.  In 1998 he was a 31 year old soldier stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  He had served in Desert Storm and Bosnia and graduated from Penn State with a degree in history.  He downloaded some child pornography on an internet site “after watching a television special about how Internet child porn had become epidemic.  He hadn’t realized that it existed.”  (This illustrates how the media hype and hysteria over child pornography is actually fomenting interest in people who would otherwise have little inclination toward it.)  He went to a chat room on a child pornography site and chatted with an FBI agent posing as a girl.  She offered him her fourteen year old sister and they set up a meeting. He told her he was looking for a relationship more than sex and wanted someone who “could accept me as I am.”  When he arrived at the park where they arranged to meet, he was arrested.  He pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and using the internet to persuade a minor to have sex and was sentenced to 53 months in federal prison– for looking at pictures and wantingto have sex with a young girl — not actually doing it.  Aviv reports that the current average sentence is 119 months, nearly 10 years, for simply possessing child pornography.  Aviv tells us that in the past fifteen years sentences for possession of child pornography have increased more than 500 percent.

After the passage of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in 2006, the government extended the confinement of child pornography offenders practically indefinitely through a contrivance called “civil commitment,” a procedure usually applied (and abused) to confine people with severe mental illness.  Most of Aviv’s excellent article details the nightmarish outcome of this ill-contrived legislation and the needless destruction of a person’s life, not for anything he has actually done, but simply for what he likes to look at and think about.

The more I studied this matter the more alarmed I became.  What is going on is extremely appalling and sinister.  It has created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation among parents and teachers, dividing children from their caregivers with very heavy handed threats and interventions from outside agencies.  Some teachers and child care workers are actually leaving their professions because of it.  (Levine, 2002, pp. 180-83) Families are being broken up on the most trivial grounds without due process, without judicial review.  The so-called treatment programs or rehabilitation plans that people are coerced to participate in are sadistic and cruel.  The “rehabilitation” is being farmed out to private companies who have a financial incentive to keep people in the program as long as possible, and they are the ones who judge the inmate’s progress. Aviv reports:

In Minnesota, which has one of the largest commitment programs, six hundred and seventy inmates work on correcting distorted thoughts about sex (at a cost of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars per person annually), but in eighteen years only one man has been discharged from the program.  (p. 41)

This is why I call it the “Sex Abuse Industry.”  Huge amounts of public money are being squandered to private, self-serving companies, who have no clue what they are doing, for sadistic “treatment” programs of indefinite duration that amount to torture.  They have no oversight and are set up to run parallel to the criminal justice system.  They are continuous with the practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Americans do not realize how fast we are moving toward a Stasi-like police state.  The avenue of its growth is this persecution of pedophilia, precisely because it is so commonplace, so broadly defined to be applicable in almost any situation involving a child, and most of it occurs within families or close communities.  It could indeed appear on your doorstep or on your street.

Aviv calls the article “The Science of Sex Abuse.”  I think she intends this ironically.  There is nothing of science in any of this.  This is the documentation of a legal system run amok pursuing imaginary demons of our own creation.  It is a craziness that is becoming increasingly grotesque and out of control. It is really necessary to curb this madness and I am glad she has put this forward in such an effective, well organized, well thought out discussion.

It all comes down to the idea that sex is this great monster and children need to be protected from it at all costs.  Any untimely exposure will damage the fragile little darlings beyond repair.  I’m going to try to approach this in a way that will do some good.

Ford and Beach (1951) categorized 191 societies around the world according to the restrictions they impose on the access of sexual activity to children.  They placed the United States among the most restrictive, with restrictive societies being decidedly in the minority.  Despite considerable relaxation since the time of their writing in 1951, this highly restrictive, ultraconservative mindset is still institutionalized in our legal system as well as in educational and social institutions. However, the vast majority of human societies, and I believe this can be projected back to prehistoric time, have allowed and encouraged their children to engage in sexual activity from a very early age (Chapter 10).  If this were harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health of these children then it would be evident and observable.  But no such evidence exists.  In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the restrictions we place on access to sexual activity in our children is doing them very great harm, and the policing efforts that are being marshaled to punish and prevent sexual activity in children is causing incalculable harm to many thousands of families and individuals. Levine (2002) has extensive documentation of this.  We are a very unhealthy society emotionally and psychologically as evidenced by our drug use, obesity, violence, divorce rate, incarceration rate, drop-out rates, homelessness, and there is a relationship between these social ills and the oppressive restrictions on our sexual culture, and in particular on the sexual development of children.  Preventing children from early access to sexual experience stunts their emotional and social development, and we pay a heavy price for it as a society.

Judith Levine(2002) has done an excellent study on all aspects of this issue making the case that the imagined harm of sex and its application in law and governing institutions is doing untold damage to children and families all across America.

The trauma of youngsters sex, with anyone, often comes not from the sex itself but from adults going bananas over it.  As for “sexual behavior problems” the trauma inflicted by the “cure” may be far worse than the “disease” itself. (p. 60)

Every lawmaker, judge, prosecutor, police officer, social worker, counselor, and school principal should read her excellent work.

 

We have to start from the beginning to understand a child’s psychological development and the role that sex plays in that development.  In describing the development of the human sense of self from earliest infancy Jeffrey Seinfeld (1991) suggests that

biological needs engender a sense of lack that becomes the empty core. The physiological state of emptiness resulting from hunger is translated into a psychic state of emptiness that becomes the core of psychic structure.  The empty core is felt as a lack disrupting the sense of boundedness or wholeness.  The empty core is not a static space.  It is the hunger for objects internal and external.  It is a state of insufficiency and activity through suction and pulsion. The empty core is the dynamic that generates activity in self and object components.  It is the transcription of biological need into psychic desire.  It is the libidinal desire for the object. The erotogenic zones serve as signifiers of the empty core.  It is the driving force of human personality and of self and object relations.  The experience of emptiness also generates ego interests, ambitions, and ideals. (p. 9-10)

Let me try to make this a little more accessible.  In the earliest phase of human development the psychic experience of the infant is generated by physiological needs:  hunger, elimination, warmth, cold, tactile sensations creating comfort or discomfort, sounds that are soothing or disturbing.  The response of the mother (or lack thereof) to these basic physiological urges creates a sense of self and other. The infant develops an awareness of the mother as the external source of comfort and nurturing and satisfaction of these basic biological needs.  A conceptual distinction between internal and external becomes established and forms the core of the infant’s sense of self.  I disagree with Seinfeld that the “psychic state of emptiness becomes the core of psychic structure.”  This is seeing the glass half empty.  It is a negative, pessimistic view of human development. The other side of emptiness is fulfillment.  When the infant’s needs are responded to timely and appropriately, the infant establishes an expectation that the empty longings can be alleviated and that his efforts (crying, physical movement, gesture) can bring a satisfying response. This lays the foundation for a self that is self-confident, positive, and optimistic, with favorable expectations of human relations — as opposed to the schizoid development, based on an expectation of disappointment, that is the subject of Seinfeld’s book.

Daniel Stern (1985) modified psychoanalytic conceptions of human development prevailing at the time of his writing arguing that the self begins to form very early.

The infant’s first order of business, in creating an interpersonal world, is to form the sense of a core self and core others. The evidence also supports the notion that this task is largely accomplished during the period between two and seven months.  Further, it suggests that the capacity to have merger or fusion-like experiences as described in psychoanalysis is secondary to and dependent upon an already existing sense of self and other.  The newly suggested timetable pushes the emergence of the self earlier in time dramatically and reverses the sequencing of developmental tasks.  First comes the formation of self and other, and only then is the sense of merger-like experiences possible.  (p. 70)

Stern does not take this up, but his conclusions seem to imply that the “empty core” which Seinfeld takes as an inevitable outcome of the infant’s biological needs, is actually a particular construction of the self that is forged in response to external nurturing environment in which the infant finds itself.  The schizoid outcome [isolated, disengaged, shut-out, unconnected, apathetic, and emotionally withdrawn, (p. 3)] is not the only possibility for human development, although I think it can be argued that it is prevalent in American society today.  It is what fuels the drug culture, alcohol abuse, pathological ambition, workaholism, political and social apathy, the obsession with guns and security, much of the disturbance in relations between the sexes, the high divorce rate, much of the violence against women, and the current hysterical persecution of pedophiles.  These are all related phenomena.  What ties them together is a profound sense of disconnectedness Americans feel from society and from each other.  We withdraw into our own private worlds.  We shun deep involvement with other people.  We substitute things for human relations.  We see the world as dangerous and full of enemies.  We externalize our enemies and comfort our inner emptiness with drugs and entertainment.  The superficiality that many Europeans and foreigners notice about American society is a further manifestation of this fundamental psychological structure that gets set up very early in life.  What I want to get to is: what does it have to do with sex?

We know, and it has been long documented, that sexual feeling and experience go back to birth. Human beings are born sexual and are hard wired for erotic feeling from the very beginning.

According to Kinsey’s (1948) data

Orgasm has been observed in boys of every age from 5 months to adolescence. Orgasm is in our records for a female babe of 4 months.  The orgasm in an infant or other young male is, except for the lack of an ejaculation, a striking duplicate of orgasm in an older adult. (p. 177)

In preadolescent and early adolescent boys, erection and orgasm are easily induced.  They are more easily induced than in older males.  Erection may occur immediately after birth and, as many observant mothers (and few scientists) know, it is practically a daily matter for all small boys, from earliest infancy and up in age.  Slight physical stimulation of the genitalia, general body tensions, and generalized emotional situations bring immediate erection, even when there is no specifically sexual stimulation involved. (p. 164)

Originally the pre-adolescent boy erects indiscriminately to the whole array of emotional situations, whether they be sexual or non-sexual in nature. By his late teens the male has been so conditioned that he rarely responds to anything except a direct physical stimulation of the genitalia, or to psychic situations that are specifically sexual.  (p. 165)

 

I’m only going to talk about boys here.  Girls are different, and in my eyes, more complicated, but the argument would proceed along the same line.  This physiological readiness to respond sexually to a whole range of stimuli means that human children are prepared from birth to respond erotically to all manner of situations.  The idea that sexual stimulation of children is “premature” or “damaging” is utterly ludicrous in the face of such overwhelming experience.  As I mentioned earlier, the survey Ford and Beach (1951) made of societies around the world found the vast majority to be permissive and encouraging of early sexual experience in their children.  Sexual response is part of the daily experience of young children, and in most times and places that response has been accepted and welcomed as a natural part of daily life.  But it follows a learning curve.  It is shaped by experience and events.  What kind of experience and events?  The same kind of experience that shapes everything in a child’s development: his or her interaction with the adult environment.

Sex is relatedness. Sex is connection.  Erotic desire engages one with the self of another.  One’s inner world of emotion and arousal makes contact and merges with the inner experience of another.  This is what we call intimacy.  It is inherently ambivalent and conflicted.  But it enriches our experience of one another as human beings; it promotes our emotional growth and maturity; it creates emotional bonds between people; and it is pleasurable.  It is opposed to schizoid detachment and withdrawal.  The schizoid self, having been traumatized and weakened by repeated conditions of disappointment and deprivation, withdraws from emotional involvement with others, renounces or avoids as much as possible the desires and sentiments that bring people into close contact.  Sexual feelings and experiences tend to be minimized, marginalized, devalued, and avoided.  Our laws, and perhaps also our economic system, promote this peculiar form of psychological detachment and isolation.  It has taken a long time to establish such prevalence in our society.  The detachment, loneliness, isolation, superficiality, antagonism and addictive obsessions that characterize American culture are the result of more than a century of government and mass media intrusion into the sphere of personal relations and sexual conduct.  It is this sustained attack on our private, personal desires that has played a large role in creating our present culture of social, emotional, and sexual disengagement.

There will always be deficiencies in family circumstances and personal failings in mothers and fathers that can lead to a schizoid outcome.  But the social milieu that isolates the family and prevents people from reaching out to one another sexually and emotionally effectively closes off alternative routes of compensation or supplementation for the limitations in family relationships.  This tends to fix the schizoid pattern and allows it to gel into a permanent aspect of character, or existential position, let us say.  Seinfeld, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip, Kohut and others of psychoanalytic approach look at the problem narrowly in terms of the internal dynamics of the family. They fail to see the social context in which that family has been created and how social factors define the emotional struggles within the family, stresses they impose upon personal relationships, and how they limit alternative solutions to individuals within that family.

Imagining children as delicate, fragile beings who are damaged beyond repair by sexual stimulation represents the projection by adults of their own anxiety and fragility. Children are actually much more resilient and emotionally capable than many adults imagine and are much more damaged by the efforts of adults to protect them from things they enjoy and are inclined to explore.   Protecting children from sex and disrupting their families and relationships by punishing a sexual relationship involving a child causes much more permanent harm than the sexual relationship ever could.  There are many examples of this and Rachel Aviv has carefully documented one. Judith Levine (2002) offers many others.

 

There are three crucial legal pillars upholding this whole institutional structure.  The most fundamental is New York v. Ferber 458 U.S. 747 (1982), a 1982 Supreme Court decision, authored by Byron White, which gives the government broad powers to prohibit “child pornography.”  The decision’s reasoning is the following:

(a) The States are entitled to greater leeway in the regulation of pornographic depictions of children for the following reasons: (1) the legislative judgment that the use of children as subjects of pornographic materials is harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health of the child, easily passes muster under the First Amendment; (2) the standard of Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, for determining what is legally obscene is not a satisfactory solution to the child pornography problem; (3) the advertising and selling of child pornography provide an economic motive for and are thus an integral part of the production of such materials, an activity illegal throughout the Nation; (4) the value of permitting live performances and photographic reproductions of children engaged in lewd exhibitions is exceedingly modest, if not de minimis; and (5) recognizing and classifying child pornography as a category of material outside the First Amendment’s protection is not incompatible with this Court’s decisions dealing with what speech is unprotected. When a definable class of material, such as that covered by [458 U.S. 747, 748] the New York statute, bears so heavily and pervasively on the welfare of children engaged in its production, the balance of competing interests is clearly struck, and it is permissible to consider these materials as without the First Amendment’s protection. Pp. 756-764.

The crux of it are the first and the fourth points that children as subjects of pornographic materials is harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health of the child, and that the value of permitting depictions of children engaged in lewd exhibitions is exceedingly modest, if not de minimis.  To deal with the fourth point first, it is not up to the state to decide what depictions are valuable and which ones are not.  The First Amendment does not stipulate that speech has to meet some threshold of value in order to be protected.  For the state to appoint itself the arbiter of what kinds of materials are valuable and worthy of protection is totally contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment.  But the more pertinent point is whether depicting children engaged in “lewd conduct” or sexual activity harms their physiological, emotional, and mental health.  There is no evidence that this is true and plenty of evidence that it is false.

When you think about it in the context of human evolution and the way human societies have lived for millennia, the idea that sex harms children is so ridiculous it is hard to believe that anyone but the most conservative, bigoted ascetic could take it seriously.  Yet, America has been taken prisoner by this notion and is willing to set aside its most basic liberties and civil protections to shield itself from this delusional demon.  If sex is a worthy, positive, life-enhancing human activity, then children should certainly be groomed for it and encouraged to engage in it.  Why wouldn’t we want our children to participate in something that is a rich and satisfying part of our own lives?  It would seem perfectly straightforward.  On the other hand, if sex were a part of life that was an inevitable source of disappointment, pain, tragedy, and turmoil for which we had inordinate fear, then we would naturally teach our children to be afraid and avoid something so threatening and perilous.  American society has adopted the schizoid position that emotional closeness and sexual intensity is of the utmost peril and attempted to create a whole society built around that anxious, fragile structure.  America now has more single people than married.  That is the first time in history that that has ever happened in a society.  One quarter of all Americans live alone.  (New York Times, January 16, 2007; Associated Press, May 28, 2011, reporting on U.S. Census figures)  We are becoming increasingly separated and estranged from one another.  Persecution of sexual relationships in many forms is a large part of the reason for it.

The idea that the state has an interest in protecting children from “sexual exploitation” is a baseless notion.  ‘Sexual exploitation’ is a vacuous concept.  It is so broad and nonspecific that it becomes meaningless. Exploitation in the negative sense means taking something from someone or making use of the resources or abilities of someone without returning adequate compensation.  In the case of sexual relationships, which are so complex, and layered with so many tributary aspects, this defies specificity and definition.  “Commercial exploitation,” or “financial exploitation” make sense because they can be quantified and made very specific. Where sex is related to commercial gain, this is a perfectly intelligible notion.  But in that case the exploitation would refer to the commercial or monetary aspects of the relationship rather than to sex itself.  For an abstraction like “sexual exploitation” to be meaningful, sexuality itself must be exploitative.  Any sexual conduct or interaction on its face must be ipso facto exploitative.  And, in fact, that is exactly how the laws have been drawn. This concept means that there is something wrong with sex itself and that for children to be involved with it in any way is inherently exploitative.  It is clearly untenable and an outright falsehood.  This nonsense idea is the basis for the entire edifice of the sex abuse industry.  Once this concept is exposed for the fraud that it is and becomes purged from legal understanding, the sex abuse industry can begin to be dismantled.

A much more ominous Supreme Court decision, and one that is operative in the case reported by Rachel Aviv, is the 1997 ruling in Kansas v. Hendricks521 U.S. 346 (1996) that upheld by a 5-4 margin Kansas’ Sexually Violent Predator Act.  This law “establishes procedures for the civil commitment of persons who, due to a ‘mental abnormality’ or a ‘personality disorder,’ are likely to engage in ‘predatory acts of sexual violence.'”  If you look at the cases cited in support of this decision, it is astonishing how poorly reasoned the decision is and how irrelevant the supporting cases are to the decision.  The first case cited Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, (1905), deals with a challenge to a Massachusetts law compelling vaccination for smallpox.  It imposed a fine for noncompliance.  This is far removed from the issue of preventive incarceration in Kansas v. Hendricks.  Kansas v. Hendricks goes on,

This Court has consistently upheld involuntary commitment statutes that detain people who are unable to control their behavior and thereby pose a danger to the public health and safety, provided the confinement takes place pursuant to proper procedures and evidentiary standards. Foucha v.Louisiana, 504 U. S. 71, 80.

But Foucha v. Louisiana – 504 U.S. 71 (1992) was a reversal by the Supreme Court that contradicts the claim it is being cited to support.

Held: The judgment is reversed. 563 So. 2d 1138, reversed.

JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I and II, concluding that the Louisiana statute violates the Due Process Clause because it allows an insanity acquittee to be committed to a mental institution until he is able to demonstrate that he is not dangerous to himself and others, even though he does not suffer from any mental illness. Although Jones, supra, acknowledged that an insanity acquittee could be committed, the Court also held that, as a matter of due process, he is entitled to release when he has recovered his sanity or is no longer dangerous, id., at 368, i. e., he may be held as long as he is both mentally ill and dangerous, but no longer. Here, since the State does not contend that Foucha was mentally ill at the time of the trial court’s hearing, the basis for holding him in a psychiatric facility as an insanity acquittee has disappeared, and the State is no longer entitled to hold him on that basis.

 

What Kansas v. Hendricks does is create a legal construction whereby a person’s right to due process is completely subverted and voided. A person can be held potentially indefinitely on the basis of a determination that he has a “mental abnormality” or a “personality disorder,” and is judged to pose a danger to himself or others.  There are no constraints on the definition of “mental abnormality” or “personality disorder.”  No process is established for making this determination, and no review process is required.  It further declares that this confinement is “not punitive.”

Although the commitment scheme here involves an affirmative restraint, such restraint of the dangerously mentally ill has been historically regarded as a legitimate nonpunitive objective. Cf. United States v. Salerno, 481 U. S. 739, 747.

Again the case citation to support the reasoning is disingenuous.  Salernoapplied to individuals who were already under arrest awaiting trial for violent crimes.  There were procedures established where the defendant was able to present evidence and argue his side.  The detention was limited by the right to a speedy trial and the defendant had to be held separately from convicts.  Salerno showed great respect and consideration for the basic rights and civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution.  Salernowas careful and limited in its scope.  In contrast, Hendricks is careless, vague, poorly thought out, poorly reasoned, and I would say, contemptuous of basic constitutional rights.  This decision is a subversion of the Constitution and is a real threat, not only to pedophiles, but now anyone the government doesn’t like or disagrees with can be deemed “mentally abnormal” and a threat, and thus held indefinitely without charge and without judicial review. This decision places no limitations on what the government can do in terms of preventive detention.  It is an extremely dangerous move in the direction of authoritarian government and people need to be aware of its potential.

 

The third legal pillar of the sex abuse industry is the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.  This is a particularly vicious law that institutes what amounts to lifetime punishment for sex offenders and attempts to make them social pariahs.  It is paranoia run amok.  It established the National Sex Offender Registry with three tiers of severity. The least severe mandates 15 years on the list, the second tier mandates 25 years, and the most severe requires lifetime registration.  No other group of convicts is treated this way.  It intensifies and extends punishment for offenses that are already crimes under the law.  It places much more severe sanctions on child pornography.  It expands the use of “civil commitment,” that is, holding people without criminal charges on the basis of their alleged “threat” to the community.

The Act also instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to create a national registry of persons who have been found to have abused or neglected a child. The information will be gathered from state databases of child abuse or neglect. It will be made available to state child-protective-services and law-enforcement agencies “for purposes of carrying out their responsibilities under the law to protect children from abuse and neglect.” The national database will allow states to track the past history of parents and guardians who are suspected of abusing their children. When child-abusing parents come to the attention of authorities (for example, when teachers begin to ask about bruises), these parents often will move to a different jurisdiction. A national database will give the state to which these parents move the ability to know the parents’ history. It will let a child-protective-services worker know, for example, whether he should prioritize investigation of a particular case because the parent has been found

to have committed substantiated cases of abuse in the past in other states. Such a database also will allow a state that is evaluating a prospective foster parent or adoptive parent to learn about past incidents of child abuse that the person has committed in other states.

This registry does not even require a criminal conviction.  It completely ignores due process.  The government wants to take over the role of raising children and managing families.  But it is a very cold, punitive, sadistic parent. You can see that a whole army of people has to be employed to carry out this surveillance, tracking, and intrusive intervention.  Huge expensive bureaucracies need to be created and maintained.  If families were able to care properly for their own children, all of this wouldn’t be needed.  This act does nothing to address the problems confronting families that create the stresses and tensions that lead to abuse and violence.  This act has absolutely no insight or understanding of the problems in which it is intervening. It is an example of utterly irresponsible legislation crafted by shortsighted, self-interested legislators to respond to magnified fears and manufactured crises.  This law needs to be repealed in its entirety.

One important development that might affect this is a pending revision of the definition of “mental disorder” in the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — V, to be published by the American Psychiatric Association in May of 2013.  The proposed revision to the concept of “mental disorder” is as follows (Stein, 2010):

A. A behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual

B. The consequences of which are clinically significant distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning)

C. Must not be merely an expectable response to common stressors and losses (for example, the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (for example, trance states in religious rituals)

D. That reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction

E. That is not primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society

 

E is a very crucial point. If this is adopted it would seem to rule out many deviant sexual behaviors, including pedophilia, from being snagged under the umbrella of “mental disorder.”  In the example Rachel Aviv presents, John is not in distress or impaired in his functioning.  Whether there is an “underlying psychobiological dysfunction” could be debated, but there would be no conclusive evidence for it in his case.  The problem for most people with unconventional sexual preferences like pedophilia, is social deviance and societal conflict.  But this is not sufficient to qualify it as a “mental disorder” under the new proposed definition.  So John could not be diagnosed with a “mental disorder,” under this proposed conception.  This could make a huge difference in how laws that make use of “civil commitment” to hold people without criminal charges can be applied.

There is beginning to be some pushback against this exorbitant retaliatory vengeance as mandated in the Adam Walsh Act.  Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and at least one Pennsylvania state legislator are suing the NCAA on behalf of Penn State against the excessive punitive actions by the NCAA against Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky case.  I don’t think the governor would do this without broader public support, and I suspect he must be aware of widespread, but unpublicized, dissent from the way the whole case was disposed of.

This might be the beginning of a counterattack against the “industrial” aspect of child sex abuse.  A lot of people are making lucrative careers from it, but the money is coming out of someone else’s pocket.  Once it dawns on people that they are shelling out enormous sums of money for things that shouldn’t even be crimes, they might begin to push back.  The money trail may be the first line of resistance.

The elements in society opposed to this mindless and extreme persecution of pedophilia are disorganized at this point and do not have the ideological muscle to fight back, but it is beginning to coalesce.  This piece by Rachel Aviv documents how extreme and irrational the government can be in pursuing these demonic phantoms.  A man who has never actually committed a crime or harmed anyone can be held in prison indefinitely because he has been deemed a threat on the basis of the type of erotic pictures he likes to look at or what he likes to think about.  This is a threat to everyone, because it implies that anyone who is deemed a threat by a bureaucrat or medical professional can be detained indefinitely without recourse or review.  It undermines the integrity of the justice system and the very legitimacy of the government.  If the administration of justice and the meting out of punishment is arbitrary and capricious and based not on actions that one has initiated, but stems rather from entrapment by law enforcement officers and surmises by unaccountable bureaucrats within the system, then it is not a system of justice anymore; it is a police state.  The United States has been moving ominously in this direction over at least the last twelve years.  The executive branch has been showing decreasing respect for the law, due process, and the civil rights of citizens.  It is been most heavy handed in the enforcement of sanctions against pedophilia and child pornography, and this case highlighted by Rachel Aviv brings the extreme nature of this to the fore.

The paucity of resistance up to now has a number of reasons.  The main reason, I think, is because sexual activities between minors and adults occur overwhelmingly between family members, caregivers, and people close to the child.  Most of these incidents and relationships are not only not harmful, but actually beneficial, and are kept private and never come to public attention.  There are plenty of people around who know that sex does not harm children, but they are intimidated, and the law does not permit them to speak publicly about their experience.  There is no incentive to contradict this prevailing mindset, and every reason not to. There is, however, a lot of money to be made if you can pass yourself off as a victim of child sexual abuse.  Great financial incentives have been built into perpetuating this mythology that sex harms children.  Many people’s jobs and livelihoods are built around it.  You stand to receive considerable financial gain if you come forward with a lawsuit.  Entire bureaucracies have been erected to promote and enforce this misunderstanding. Rachel Aviv has documented this very powerfully.

This power structure can be eroded when people begin to ask, “just what is the harm, anyway?” Many people blame their personal miseries on sex, but his does not mean it is a universal experience.  At one time people thought masturbation caused all sorts of maladies from blindness to insanity.

By the nineteenth century the campaign against masturbation reached an unbelievable frenzy.  Doctors and parents sometimes appeared before the child armed with knives and scissors, threatening to cut off the child’s genitals; circumcision, clitoridectomy, and infibulation were sometimes used as punishment; and all sorts of restraint devices, including plastic casts and cages with spikes, were prescribed. Graphs assembled by one scholar showed ‘a peak in surgical intervention in 1850-79, and in restraint devices in 1880-1904.’  By 1925, these methods had almost completely died out, after two centuries of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children’s genitals. [Lloyd De Mause, quoted in Heins (2002) p. 272, 52N]

Within my own lifetime I can recall people seeing all manner of threat in homosexuality.  Now we have numerous gay representatives in Congress and the first openly gay Senator.   Many thought that the military would be compromised if openly gay soldiers were allowed to serve.  That prohibition was lifted and nothing untoward has happened.  Many mindless fears dissipate once they are challenged and defeated.  Pedophilia is the latest object of this mindless hyperbolic hatred.  We need to keep in mind that pedophilia means “loves children.”  Pedophiles are everywhere and many pedophiles occupy prominent positions in society. They are productive citizens; they have important jobs, families, and responsibilities.  Society cannot afford to be crucifying all of these people and locking them up in jail.

What has been missing so far is a philosophical critique of the very idea that sex harms children and that any exposure of a child to sexual activity constitutes abuse.  This is beginning to be formulated and Rachel Aviv has provided an excellent illustration of the need for such reform. I am ever optimistic that we can bring this creeping menace to a halt and allow American society to begin to heal from its long history of self-inflicted deprivation in the emotional and sexual lives of its people.

Notes

 

Ford, Clellan S.; Beach, Frank A. (1951)  Patterns of Sexual Behavior.  New York:  Harper Torchbooks.

Foucha v. Louisiana  504 U.S. 71 (1992)

Heins, Marjorie (2002) Not In Front of the Children:  ‘Indecency,’ Censorship and the Innocence of Youth.  New York:  Hill and Wang/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kansas v. Hendricks 521 U.S. 346 (1996)

Kinsey, Alfred C.; Pomeroy, Wardell B.; Martin, Clyde E. (1948)  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia & London:  W.B. Saunders.

Levine, Judith (2002)  Harmful to Minors:  The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex.  Minneapolis & London:  University of Minnesota Press.

New York v. Ferber  458 U.S., 747, (1982)

Seinfeld, Jeffrey (1991) The Empty Core:  An Object Relations Approach to Psychotherapy of the Schizoid Patient. Northvale, NJ, & London: Jason Aronson.

Stein, Dan J., et. al. (2010) What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V.  Psychological Medicine. 2010 November; 40(11): 1759–1765.

Stern, Daniel N. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant.  New York:  Basic Books.

House of the Sleeping Beauties, and other stories. 

By Yasunari Kawabata (1969)  Translated by Edward Seidensticker.  Tokyo and New York:  Kodansha International.

 

Recently I bought several porcelain figurines of nude young girls.  They are made by Kaiser of Germany and are exquisite in detail and craftsmanship.  The absolute smoothness of the surface of the porcelain and their pure whiteness coupled with the finely detailed features of the nude girl create at once an idealization of the young girl’s body and a kind of perverse reduction of a girl to this idealized representation.

As I look at these lifeless figures I find that I begin to recall living, breathing girls from the past that I once held in my arms.  I recall the details of their bodies, their “imperfections” in contrast to these perfect porcelain representations, the way they kissed, especially their kisses, the fierceness of the longing and hunger in their kisses, their pants, moans, and sharp cries in my ears.  My response to these porcelain figurines is exactly analogous to the memories awakened in Eguchi by the all but lifeless bodies of the deeply sleeping girls in the House of the Sleeping Beauties.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties is no ordinary brothel.  It is very exclusive and caters only to very old men, who “are no longer men,” that is, men who have lost sexual potency, and can thus be “trusted” to spend the night beside a sleeping nude girl without performing intercourse on her.  The girls are between about sixteen and twenty.  The madam supposedly drugs them into a deep sleep from which they will not awaken while the man is present.  They are not dead, but nearly so.  Customers are free to examine and explore the bodies of the sleeping girls to their hearts’ content, but the house rules are very strict and absolutely forbid the girls being sexually violated.  Eguchi claims to be still capable of sexual performance and on a number of occasions considers defying the house rules and taking sexual liberties with the girls, but he always backs off, finding one excuse or another.

The story is psychologically complex and works on a number of different levels.  First of all, on the obvious level of presentation one might question whether the girls really are drugged into a deep sleep, or is it an elaborate performance?  Numerous passages suggest that the girls are indeed aware of the man’s explorations of their bodies and they seem to respond at times to his overtures as if they had sensible awareness.  The madam told him on one occasion that the girl that evening was “in training.”  But how much training do you need to be drugged into a stupor and lie unconscious all night in the nude?

I had the sense that there is a pervasive and profound hostility toward women expressed throughout the story, but it must be qualified by some counterweighing factors.    The negative valuation and destructive impulses toward women are strong, but they are at the same time nuanced and tempered.  This extreme ambivalence is reflected in the way the story ends, which we will examine.

Eguchi, at sixty-seven, is a man who has had a lifetime of extensive sexual experience with many women.  He is not an ascetic and continues to desire to sleep beside the nude body of a young girl, even if drugged into insensibility.  He is deeply disappointed in women (p. 17, 22), yet they continue to offer a comfort that is worth paying for, and there is also profound comfort in the memories they evoke of women long faded in the past (p.27).  He still finds their bodies beautiful and fascinating.  He remains drawn to women and strongly so, despite his disappointment in them.  He has not renounced the pleasures of sex, a la Wagner or Tolstoy, in search of an ideal of “spirituality.”  He feels impulses to both violate the girls and to kill them.  His feelings toward the girls are extremely mixed.  There are murderous impulses, suicidal impulses, alongside a deep longing for connection which he is in despair of ever attaining.  I think this is part of the reason the girls must be unconscious, but at the same time nude.  They are reduced to their physical bodies, much like my porcelain figurines, devoid of personality, devoid of response, unable to interact — although not entirely, as it turns out.  As he told the madam, “It is not a human relationship” (p. 38).  Promiscuity is another way of interacting with women on a physical level while evading a deeper attachment and engagement with the personality of the woman.  Eguchi is able to make attachments to the women, something which commercial sex and promiscuity tend to discourage.  The madam takes the initiative in making sure that he does not sleep with the same girl more than once.  She understands Eguchi’s tendency to become attached to the girls and seek and involvement beyond this superficial acquaintance with her body, and she is very much at pains to avoid that development.

There is a deeply pessimistic attitude toward women, human relations, and life itself that runs throughout the story that hearkens back to the Zen Buddhism that has afflicted Japanese society for centuries.  This pessimism is also related to the profound sense of loneliness and isolation throughout the story.

Eguchi visits the house several different times.  Each time the girl and the experience is different.  On his final visit the madam provides him with two girls.  The experience of two girls divides his attention and makes it difficult for him to sleep.  During the course of the night one of the girls dies, perhaps from an overdose of the sleeping drug, or an allergic reaction to it.  This is only a minor inconvenience and the madam encourages him to stay on, “there is the other girl.”  The cold indifference with which the girl’s death is treated evinces the hostility toward women that pervades all of these stories.  Her death is no more than a nuisance such as a spill or a broken dish.  But it is balanced by the girl who remains living with whom Eguchi spends the remainder of the night.  This conflict between the impulse to kill the girls on the one hand, or to keep them alive and enjoy sleeping with them, even if only in a condition of near total insensibility, is the theme throughout the story from the beginning, and finally at the ending it is made stark and concrete.  Throughout all of these stories the attitude toward death is callous and diffident.  It reflects a low valuation of life itself.

There is no moral or message to the story.  It is a portrait of a man who is so fragile within himself that he is unable to interact on an intimate level with a living, breathing woman.  He can only deal with women on the level of their bodies, without the driving force of lust, and only with the utmost detachment, as if he were appreciating the beauty of an insensate object, like my figurines.  This desire is itself a source of pain for him, because it emphasizes his loneliness and isolation and his inability to reach beyond it.  This is probably the reason for the murderous impulses toward the girls.  If he can kill the girl, maybe he can kill the desire within himself for her, is the logic.  But, or course, it is futile.

Incidentally, this is a mechanism in some serial killers who kill women or prostitutes.  What they are trying to do is blot out an intolerable desire within themselves, a desire that is experienced as intolerably painful because of deep disappointments and frustrations in the past.  It is an attempt to externalize an internal problem.  But projecting it onto the girl who is the object of the desire and killing her does not work, so he has to keep on killing.  Serial killers of women are fundamentally lonely people to an extreme degree, who are trapped in a horrifically painful isolation from which they cannot escape, and which tortures them with relentless, hopeless desire.  In Eguchi we see a very similar psychic mechanism, but in this case the girl is not overtly killed, she dies, more or less by accident.   Eguchi has mitigating forces in his personality that prevent him from becoming a killer, although not by much.

House of the Sleeping Beauties might well be called a novella.  It is the flagship story in this small volume of three stories by Japanese writer, Yasunari Kawabata.  The additional two stories in this volume are One Arm, and Of Birds and Beasts.

One Arm is a tragic representation of the inability to accept intimacy, the partial merging of another with one’s body and one’s self.  The writer borrows an arm from a young girl just for one night — the right arm.  “I don’t suppose you’ll try to change it for your own arm, but it will be all right.  Go ahead, do,” the girl invites him.  And indeed he does exactly that.  In the course of the night he removes his own arm and replaces it with the arm of the young girl.  “Is the blood flowing?”

“[The arm] lay over my heart, so that the two pulses sounded against each other.  Hers was at first somewhat slower than mine, then they were together.  Then I could feel only mine.  I did not know which was faster, which slower.  Perhaps this identity of pulse and heartbeat was for a brief period when I might try to exchange the arm for my own.” (p. 118)

The arm is a symbolic representation of the girl, perhaps it might be better to call it an abbreviation of the girl, which the man brings to his residence and sleeps with in his bed.  The result is a partial merging with her.  The girl [the arm] become part of himself, incorporated into his own body.  He removes his own arm and replaces it with the girl’s.  His blood flows through it.  The girl becomes part of his self.  He and the girl merge into one.  “I’ll keep away the devils,” she tells him.  “Our sleep was probably light, but I had never before known sleep so warm, so sweet.  A restless sleeper, I had never before been blessed with the sleep of a child.” (p. 123)

But he awoke screaming.  “I almost fell out of bed, and staggered three or four steps.  I had awakened to the touch of something repulsive.  It was my right arm.”  (p. 123)  In an instant he tears the girl’s arm from his shoulder and replaces it with his own.  “The act was like murder upon a sudden, diabolic impulse.”  The story ends with him weeping over the dying arm of the girl.

The story is short on analysis and explanation, so I will try to provide some.

“Woman why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?”  These questions of Jesus to Mary Magdalene are recalled in the text “as if spoken by an by an eternal voice, in an eternal place.”  “Very often when I’m dreaming and wake up in the night I whisper [this passage] to myself.”  (p. 120)  These questions might well be posed to every woman a man ever sleeps with.  They truly are eternal in place and voice.  But the answers to them are myriad.  In One Arm no answers are attempted.  The man is entirely absorbed within himself.

Intimacy is a merging of the inner self with that of another.  It is the most profound communication between people.  In the Bible the phrase “he knew her” is used to represent having sex with a woman.  Having sex with a woman is equated with “knowing” her.  One knows a woman through sex.  I like this locution.  Sex is communication.  Sex is discovery.  Sex tells you where you are in your relationship with another person.  Sex is a merging of the body and the heart, and it extends beyond the act of sex.  Sex creates a bond, because once you “know” someone, that knowledge does not disappear with the sunrise.  It is this emotional bond, created by the intimate connection, that this protagonist revolts against.  It is experienced subjectively as a feeling of revulsion toward the woman, an intense desire to get away from her, even to destroy her, to repudiate the connection that had been made through the night of unleashed desire and longing with the merging of self and other that resulted.  Why is that?  Why did he wake up screaming after the warmest, sweetest sleep he had ever had?  The girl said she would keep away the devils, but she didn’t.  The devils were much deeper than her arm could reach.  In order to be intimate with another person, sexually and emotionally, one has to have good internal boundaries.  That means that one has to have a sense of oneself and who one is that is sturdy enough to withstand penetration by the needs and longings and inner world of another.  If one feels overwhelmed by the emotional needs of the other, if one merges with the hunger, longing, and pain that the other brings to your bed to the point where you begin to feel you are losing yourself, a kind of panic may result, experienced as an intense need to escape from the suffocating quicksand of the inner world of another.  The origins of the writer’s dilemma are not described, but we can surmise that he must have experienced some severe and confusing early rejection.

“Woman why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?” are probably questions he has been asking himself for many years.  Do you really want to know?  Are you really ready for the answers that might emerge?  Why does he wake up in the night with these questions in his mind?  They represent his greatest fear.  He is lonely and isolated.  He reaches out to the woman.  He wants to be close to her.  He needs the soothing and comfort of her body.  Yet the closeness overwhelms him.  The reality of merging with the woman’s heart is intolerable.  This is the tragedy of the story.  He longs to come close, and he succeeds.  But he has to turn around and destroy the connection he created.  He is not able to consolidate what he has gained through his connection to the woman.  Like Sisyphus, he has to start pushing the rock back up the mountain all over again.

Of Birds and Beasts describes a man in his late 30s — who is not named — who feels very little connection to other people.  It is the story of a man who is deeply depressed, estranged from human connection (with the exception of his maid), and on the verge of suicide.  He maintains a few small birds and dogs which provide him with his only joy.  I think it is fair to say that the only thing between this man and suicide is the fleeting vivaciousness he finds in these small animals.  The story opens with him and his maid in a taxi on his way to a recital and they become stuck in a funeral procession — essentially equating this excursion to the recital with a funeral.  Additionally, he mentions two dead birds to his maid, which have been left dead in their cage at his house for a week.  So the theme of death is at the forefront of consciousness right from the very beginning, and the indifference to death is also evident, represented by leaving the dead birds unattended in their cage for a week.  The bulk of the story is a discussion of his birds and his dogs, and especially their fates, which often come at his ineptitude in taking care of them.

He relates an anecdote about a group of children who find a baby bird that has been coldly thrown away by some neighboring bird keepers.  Our hero at first has the intent of taking in the discarded bird and raising it, but he abandons the idea when he considers that this bird was discarded as garbage by his neighbors, most likely because it would not become a singer, and he leaves the baby bird to be tortured to death by the children.  He points out how the human love of animals quickly becomes a quest for superior specimens, and the discarding of the inferiors is brutal and cruel.  He tells us he would not take in an animal that had been raised by someone else.

Smiling a sardonic smile, he excused them as symbols of the tragedy of the universe and of man, these animal lovers who tormented animals, ever striving toward a purer and purer breed.  (p. 134)

This transformation of the simple nurturing impulse into one of competitive striving for relentless improvement can be seen as a metaphor for modern middle class values of child rearing.  In many families great stress is created by the imposition of expectations for achievement on growing children.  In America today the entire educational system is obsessed with testing and retesting and measuring the progress of children — and teachers — in every imaginable way.  The whole system of education has been distorted by the testing regimen to the point where we have lost sight of what education is all about.  Education has become a competitive struggle to maximize certain numbers:  grade point averages, standardized test scores.  The problem that no one considers is: what happens to those who don’t measure up, or who are only average?  We are a society that only awards achievers.  In Garrison Keillor’s mythical Midwest town of Wobegon all the children are above average.  The anxiety of the American middle class is being average or below.  Because we all know there is no provision and no place for those who are only mediocre, like the small bird in Kawabata’s story who is brutally discarded and tortured to death because it could not sing.

The great strength of the Christian faith, which has sustained it for centuries and continues to be its wellspring of renewal, is that Jesus came to seek and to save that which is lost.  Jesus saw value in the losers, the outcasts, the rejected.  To the people nobody else wanted, he said “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  It has inspired millions who see hope for themselves in his promise.  That unconditional acceptance is powerfully appealing.  The great flaw in industrial capitalism is that its emphasis on competition, innovation, efficiency, and improvement makes no provision for the losers.  Those who do not measure up, those who can’t cut it, those who are left behind in the mad rush of progress:  What happens to them?  They simply perish.  It is not a workable value system for human societies, because, in fact, most people are losers.  Over time, the winners become an ever smaller and smaller group accumulating more and more of the wealth and power in the society while the vast majority of people are forced ever downward in their standard of living and in their prospects.

Kawabata captures this ruthless indifference in his attitude toward the baby bird discarded by its human possessors because it could not sing.  There are other such parallels drawn between the indifference to the deaths of animals and human deaths caused by human failings.  He describes a female dog who dug a nest of straw to sleep in and placed her puppies beneath it.  “she [the mother] would lie on the straw under which they were buried.  They would die in the night of cold and suffocation.  She was like a foolish human mother who suffocated her baby at her breast.” (p. 138)

The birds and beasts in this story provide this man with a tolerable, if feeble, connection to life.  The birds and the dogs do show personality and vitality with which he can choose to interact minimally. He observes them with coldness and detachment, and often neglects them to the point of death.  Nothing in the story suggests that he “cares” for the birds or the dogs.

But for him life was filled with a young freshness for several days after a new bird came.  He felt in it the blessings of the universe.  Perhaps it was a failing on his part, but he was unable to feel anything of the sort in a human being. (p. 131)

The three stories in this book provide an excellent representation of what the psychiatric literature calls a “schizoid personality.”¹

The schizoid condition consists in the first place in an attempt to cancel external object-relations and live in a detached and withdrawn way.  . . . It pervades the whole life. (p. 19)

The attitude toward the outer world is . . . non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling. (p. 18)

The schizoid person’s capacity to love has been frozen by experiences of rejection and the breakdown of real life relationships.” and results in a “longstanding unsatisfied hunger for love about which, however, she could only feel hopelessness and despair. (p. 91)

This psychiatric description is rather abstract and from the outside looking in, but these three stories of Yasunari Kawabata illustrate this mode of existence very concretely from the inside out.  Through the eyes and voices of the protagonists one sees and experiences the detachment, the emotional coldness, the loneliness and isolation, the suppressed rage, and the indifference to death.  It is at once beautifully written and deeply tragic.  I’m not sure I would recommend this book to the general reader, but if you want to gain insight into this particular type of “borderline” personality, these stories bring you into the heart of how it is lived and experienced in the context of Japanese culture.

 

 

1.  Guntrip, Harry (1968)  Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self.  London:  Hogarth Press.

 

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON, now playing at Landmark’s Embarcadero and Clay

Cinemas in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area, is a charmingly intimate look

at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life at his home in Hyde Park, New York.

 

The film focuses on Roosevelt’s erotic relationship with his cousin Daisy Suckley,

which only became public knowledge decades later when her letters (and some of his)

were discovered under her deathbed. Roosevelt is played, with a touch lighter than

air, by the great Bill Murray; Laura Linney’s Daisy is a wallflower at first flattered by

Roosevelt’s attention and then angered by its limits. Both are completely believable and

very affecting.

 

The other focus is on the weekend in June 1939 when the King of England, George

VI, and his wife Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), came to Hyde Park and

were famously treated to an informal (for them) hot dog picnic. They are presented (by

Samuel West and Olivia Colman) quite differently from the way we saw them in The

King’s Speech.

 

Olivia Williams is astonishing as Eleanor Roosevelt. She has her look, her manner,

her physical presence, even her gait, to the life. The screenwriter Richard Nelson gave

Eleanor almost nothing to do, which was a miscalculation. In her occasional few seconds

of action Williams gives the best performance in the film. Also excellent in brief roles

are Elizabeth Marvel as Roosevelt’s secretary Missy LeHand, and Elizabeth Wilson as

his gorgon of a mother. The costumes and production design are true to the period and

beautifully enhance the presentation.

 

The main interest of the film is the insight it gives into President Roosevelt’s life, and

by extension into his work. Nelson (who adapted his BBC radio play for this film), and

Murray too, succeed admirably by their restraint. Some reviewers have criticized the

film for not giving a rounded view of FDR, larger than life (as he could be) and booming

out an inspirational message. But Roosevelt was a hugely complicated man, and Hyde

Park on Hudson is not a biopic. A lot of the value of the film is precisely that it shows

him in a way we are not familiar with – quiet, lonely, exasperated by the tensions in

his household, needing intimacy but also moved as much by his own nature as by his

circumstances toward extreme reserve in his emotional life. By keeping most of the

action centered on small things, and by deliberately underplaying this publicly expansive

figure, Nelson and Murray give us a better look at Roosevelt than most of us have ever

seen before.

 

In particular, the film shows a lot about how Roosevelt’s paralysis affected his life.

We see him in his wheelchair, being carried when necessary, moving with difficulty

by clinging to the side of his desk. During his lifetime the press scrupulously avoided

showing any of this – there are only eight seconds of film in existence that show

him (after polio) walking (with a brace and a strong man to lean on), and only two

photographs (both taken by Suckley) showing him in a wheelchair. The film helps us

understand this part of his life in a way difficult to access otherwise.

 

The visit of the royal couple was not just a colorful episode, but a historically important

event. In June 1939 war in Europe was recognized as inevitable, and Britain urgently

needed American help to survive. But Roosevelt was constrained by the isolationist

views of Congress and the electorate, and couldn’t give the help he wanted to. Not

only were Americans determined not to repeat the experience of World War I, a lot of

them (especially the Irish) were actively hostile to Britain. The Mayor of Chicago said

publicly that if he ever met the King he would punch him in the nose. The real point

of the hot dog picnic was to humanize the British royals in American eyes and make

them appear friendly and approachable, so it would become easier to help them. And

Roosevelt did after this manage a lot of back door help (Lend-Lease, the Destroyers for

Bases program) before Hitler solved that problem by declaring war on the United States

after Pearl Harbor.

 

In keeping with the private focus of the film, close attention is given here to the

personal relationship between the King and the President, which developed into a

strategically important one. It is handled here with great sensitivity and insight.

One false note is the character of the Queen, who is shown here shrewishly hectoring

the King about his stammer and comparing him unflatteringly to his brother (the former

Edward VIII).

This is quite inconsistent with the historical record and all that is known about their

relationship, and it mars the film’s effectiveness.

 

But on the whole, and in almost all its parts, Hyde Park on Hudson is a superbly

crafted and beautifully presented look at a moment in time and an aspect of the life and

personality of one of America’s most important and compelling historical figures.

 

Lincoln

Directed by Steven Spielberg

 

 

This movie has been hyped and promoted far out of proportion to its merit.  Even Lincoln scholars have gotten on the bandwagon heaping praise on this mythologizing propaganda.  At first I was puzzled by this.  I couldn’t understand why so many scholars would throw their support behind this film in the public way that they have.  Are they just afraid to set themselves against something that is so popular and has so much money behind it?  But after thinking about it for a few days, I realized that the scholars are actually the problem.  Steven Spielberg consulted them and probably followed their advice.  He didn’t make this up out of his head, and he didn’t do all the research himself.  The community of Lincoln scholars is largely beholden to this idealized, honorific, and in many ways, false conception of Lincoln that the film presents.  This film is a correct reflection of the way Lincoln is perceived and reconstructed in mainstream American society, and this in turn derives from the scholarly community that has created and perpetuated this Myth.  This Lincoln could have come out of Leave It to Beaver.   He’s a genial, storytelling, wholesome, fatherly figure.  Everyone says Daniel Day-Lewis plays him so well.  I don’t get it.  He’s nothing like I imagine Lincoln to be.  Lincoln was depressive.  Melancholy.  He was forbidding and aloof.  He was indecisive on the one hand, and stubborn on the other.  He had human compassion and a crude sense of humor.  He was a very astute politician, he had a talent for making deals, and an appetite for power.  Psychologically, he was very complex and hard to gauge.  He did tell stories, but his stories tended to be earthy, if not vulgar.  They served the purpose of entertaining people and making himself the amused center of their attention.  At the same time, they served a defensive function in that they enabled Lincoln to conceal himself.  Lincoln the story teller remained an elusive, private, enigmatic man.  The film implies that the story telling was didactic, that he told parables like Jesus to teach people moral lessons.  He might have done that.  He won some court cases that way, but for the most part Lincoln the story teller was a man hungry for attention and approval.  He was a politician looking for support and good will.  This movie simplifies him and turns him into a warm, friendly cupcake.  It is an apology, an attempt to elevate him, beatify him.  It’s a feel good movie, to make Americans feel good about themselves, about America, about the Civil War, and about Lincoln.  It starts out with soldiers quoting the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln, as if the common soldiers were fighting out of a sense of idealism and dedication to the cause of liberty and freedom.  Then there is a shot of Lincoln raising an American flag, and a scene with him and his wife, Mary, in private having an intimate conversation like a married couple that is getting along well and has good communication.  It’s a lot of nonsense.  The biggest lie of all is the portrayal of Lincoln’s marriage and of Mary Lincoln.  This is an attempt to rehabilitate Mary Lincoln from the corrupt, mentally ill woman she was, who was the bane of Lincoln’s life, and make her appear to be some strong, influential participant in his decision-making and private deliberation.  Sally Field is completely unconvincing as Mary Lincoln.  This is a very contrived, incredible role that has nothing to do with the real Mary Lincoln.  There was one scene that felt real and that was when Lincoln and Mary had a screaming argument over their son, Robert’s, enlistment in the Union Army.  They even have Lincoln slapping Robert in the face at one point — a very unlikely scene that illustrates how far afield they are of Lincoln’s true character.  In a couple of places the word ‘fuck’ is used as a curse word.  This is an anachronism.  ‘Fuck’ did not become widespread as a curse word in American English until the late 19th or early 20th century.  They can get away with it, of course, because not too many Americans know this and they don’t teach it in school.  The rest of the movie was manipulative, annoyingly distorted, and mendacious.  The predominant content of the movie is actually the drama surrounding the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, rather than about Lincoln himself.  This is also a rather simplified, sanitized, honorific reconstruction.  I thought the acting was rather poor in general.  Everyone was overplaying and the characters and scenes seemed simplified and cartoonish.  This whole movie is just annoying from beginning to end.  And it is rather dull, I have to say.  I found myself waiting for it to end.  I couldn’t get interested in anything they were doing.  They have taken an extraordinary time and an incredibly interesting person and turned them into something mundane and ordinary.  If you haven’t seen it, don’t go.  Watch Ken Burns Civil War series instead.

If you want to learn about Abraham Lincoln for real, take a look at Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man.  It was originally published in 1931 and the U.S. Congress actually tried to ban it.  That speaks well for it right there.  Of the many biographies of Lincoln, which tend to be redundant and hagiographic, Masters is my favorite, because it falls well outside this mainstream tradition.  Most biographies of Lincoln deal overwhelmingly with the last five to ten years of his life, and they focus on his policies and actions as President rather than his personality or his character.  Masters has his flaws, like they all do, but it strikes me as more realistic and it takes more interest in Lincoln as a person.  C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2006) details Lincoln’s affinity for same-sex relationships.  My paper, “Was Abraham Lincoln Gay?” (2010) Journal of Homosexuality 57:1124-1157, draws heavily on Tripp, and examines Lincoln’s private life and the 19th century sexual culture in which he grew up and lived.  Lincoln and Booth:  More Light on the Conspiracy (2003) by Donald Winkler, is a fascinating study of the assassination of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth’s relationship to the Confederacy’s intelligence network.  David Donald’s Lincoln is informative and probably accurate in its facts, although it tends to fall into this apologetic, mythologizing tradition, and is heavily weighted toward the last four or five years of Lincoln’s life as President.  One of the best books you can read on this subject is Lincoln in American Memory (1995) by Merrill D. Peterson.  This is an excellent study of the growth and evolution of the Lincoln Myth in American culture, which this present film perpetuates and promotes.  Peterson explains how Lincoln was transformed from this ineffective, indecisive, much hated, vilified president that he was into this godlike icon of American goodness.  It is important to understand this because it enables one to see why it is well-nigh impossible today to get a balanced, “realistic” understanding of Abraham Lincoln.  One’s position on Lincoln will be heavily influenced by one’s take on American history since Lincoln, and where one stands socially and politically in contemporary society.  There is no such thing as “objectivity” when it comes to Lincoln.  He has become almost a religious myth.  It is an annoying myth to me.  It is a false myth that embodies a saccharine view of American society and its history, that is conservative, self-congratulatory, glosses over unsavory developments, and is sometimes invoked to justify highly offensive policies, like the expansion of executive power and the abrogation of basic constitutional liberties.  This film falls squarely in that mythological tradition, and I think was subtly crafted to resonate with some of the recent overreaches of executive power in the conduct of warfare and the bypassing of due process.  I’m not going to make the case in detail, because I would have to watch the film several more times, and I am loathe to put myself through that.  But I remember having that feeling several times as I watched it that I was being bamboozled and that it was really referring to our time, rather than being an honest historical piece.

Steven Spielberg has made a film that he knew would make people feel good and that they would be willing to pay money to see, not something that would disturb them and make them question everything they had been taught about Abraham Lincoln and American history.  He has succeeded very well and will undoubtedly be well rewarded for it.  But count me as a NO!  I am not taken in by it.

Hendrix 70 Live at Woodstock

Directed by Michael Wadleigh and Bob Smeaton

 

This was a one-time showing of Jimi Hendrix’s concert at Woodstock in August of 1969 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco, December 4, 2012. We arrived a few minutes late and the film was already in progress. It was my fault. Sorry. We missed some of the introductory interviews with fellow band members and promoters that explained how Jimi Hendrix was recruited to play at Woodstock, but we didn’t miss any of the concert, which was mesmerizing. Jimi Hendrix had a powerful physical charisma that naturally drew everyone’s eyes toward him. But, of course, it was his guitar playing and his singing that kept people spellbound. I love the way he sings a song. He had a natural feel for how to use his voice to let the song speak through him. He was casual, yet precise. His sound is chaos. It is the sound of a battlefield. It is agonized. There are screeches and sirens, explosions and clamor, bombs going off. It can be relentless and tries to crush you. And yet it can subside into captivating, soul searching lyricism. His voice rides above this tumult smooth and steady. He doesn’t scream or shout. He sings even though underneath there is a seething cauldron.

Someone who knew him once told me that Jimi Hendrix cared about three things: music, drugs, and sex — not necessarily in that order. In my case, I would say it is the arts, ideas, and sex. The order depends on circumstance and inspiration. But I have a natural affinity for Jimi Hendrix. Rock and roll guys tend to be relaxed and easy going, but underneath there is a driving sexual energy that is combative, defiant, and even reckless. The music helps to channel it and give it some structure, but in Hendrix’s case the disorder and recklessness is right on the surface. The chaos is palpable to the point of being overwhelming.

The concert included many of his standard favorites like Fire, Foxy Lady, and Red House, but my personal favorite was his version of the Star Spangled Banner which then morphed into Purple Haze. His version of the Star Spangled Banner is a different view of America than they play at NFL football games. His version is harsh, abrasive, and violent. When the rockets red glare and the bombs burst in air, you can actually hear the rockets blaring and the bombs exploding. It is not a sanitized, romanticized America that makes you stand and put your hand on your heart. It is the violent, rapacious America of slavery, the extermination of the Indians, the pillaging and despoiling of the natural environment, the unnecessary wars, the millions incarcerated, the violence between the sexes, the fear of walking the streets at night, crumbling schools, declining wages, the disillusioned and angry. It is all there in Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. I remember being taken with it the first time I heard it around age 16 or 17. I remember many people being offended by it. Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner is America with the gloves off. He then segues into Purple Haze, which is another of my all time favorites. Missing from the show was All Along the Watchtower, which I was hoping he would do. Altogether it was a magnificent concert, and I am so glad I was able to see it. If it comes around again or they put it out on DVD, by all means try to catch it. Very unfortunate his early death.

Chasing Ice

Directed by Jeff Orlowski

 

 

This is a film about making a film, rather than the film that should have been made.  I think a good opportunity was missed.  This film should have been about the melting ice, the retreating glaciers, and the implications this has for the world.  Instead it was a self indulgent portrayal of James Balog, the photographer in charge of the mission, the suffering hero, and the trials and tribulations of making a film in the harsh conditions of the Arctic.

What is good in the film is the spectacular photography of the glaciers, ice formations, and seascapes in the frozen worlds of Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska.  The film visually documents the dramatic retreat of the glaciers, which is accelerating with the warming of the Earth.  They placed 25 cameras set to continually photograph numerous glaciers throughout the Arctic creating a time-lapse record of the ice melt and retreat of the glaciers that is undeniable.  There is powerful footage of a massive calving from the Colombia glacier in Alaska the size of Manhattan.  One cannot help but be awed by the visual beauty and obvious, alarming decline of these unbelievably massive glaciers.

The film falls short in establishing the significance of its own report.  So what if the glaciers are melting?  Let them melt.  Who cares?  The film does not deal with this.  It does not spell out the implications of all of this melting ice for climate, the oceans, and human societies.  There is brief, passing mention that 150 million people will be affected by a sea level rise of one foot, but who, or how, and over what period of time is not described.

The problem is that too much time is spent on James Balog and the gory details of how the film was made.  All of this should be relegated to minor footnotes.   Frankly, I don’t find James Balog particularly interesting, nor his wife, his kids, his knee, nor all the different problems he had getting his cameras to work under the inhospitable conditions of the glaciers.  He is much too grandiose and masochistic for my taste.  Tramping through ice water in his bare feet to get the best shot.  Gimme a break!  He thinks he is going to save the world through his self sacrifice.  But carbon dioxide is at 391 parts per million and it is still climbing.  That is about 30% more than the maximum over the last 800,000 years.  The Earth is in for some rough sailing ahead and there is nothing we can do about it.  The only question is how extreme the catastrophe will be and how quickly it will rain down upon us.  Balog claims he wants to inform people and get the message out about global warming;  he should do that and get himself out of the way.

Much of the film is preoccupied with the petty troubles of the expedition and establishing what a great photographer James Balog is and his dedication to the project and how much he is prepared to suffer and punish his body to accomplish this noble challenge.  But the issues this film should be dealing with are far bigger than James Balog, his life, or any of the difficulties in making the film.  The dirty laundry of how the film was made should be kept well in the background.  His photographic work is stunning and incomparable.  He really is the Ansel Adams of the Arctic.  If he would put his work in the forefront instead of himself, I would go see anything he does.

This film offers some magnificent views of the glaciers of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska, and it establishes without question that what is going on is well outside the boundaries of normal fluctuation.  Maybe the filmmakers thought that simply showing the glaciers and documenting the severity of their melting would be too boring, and therefore they felt they needed this human interest aspect to draw people in and hold their interest.  Actually it is the other way around.  I found myself getting impatient watching them figure out the best way to mount a camera on the side of a mountain.  I want to see the pictures they took with that camera once they finally got it to work.  So the film is worth seeing, but it gets a little tiresome and falls far short of its potential.

 

PRIDE & PREJUDICE

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Encinal Drama Department, never one to back away from a challenge, has successfully taken on Jane Austen’s PRIDE & PREJUDICE.

In a theatrical context, there exists a continuum of risk taking ranging from informed confidence, to ungrounded hubris and on to reckless abandon.

Director Gene Kahane may have hugged the shore of hubris on this one, but at the same time he signaled his unflagging trust and confidence in the cast and crew.

As they set sail across the proscenium, he obviously set the yardarm high, proclaiming that success would be their only port of call.

Imagine the odds of an amateur production company taking on a major opus—which required five hour-long episodes when performed for public television—and compressing it into a two act play that would not exceed the attention span of a high school audience nor be reduced to a dramatic narrative.

An adequate plot synopsis of the play alone is over 1200 words, and such a summary is so skeletal that it provides for little character development.

As is a director’s prerogative, MR Kahane rightfully pared the script down to the essentials, leaving enough meat on the bones so that his earnest troupe had plenty of opportunity to showcase their thespian talents.

As the curtain rises . . . wait . . . what curtain?

The set design was so expansively spacious—yet intimate with the audience—that the need for a curtain was obviated.

As the Klieg Lights came up, we were greeted by the tempered strains of violin music provided by Marquise Robinson, first violin and concert master of the Encinal Drama Department.

What? Is this FIDDLER ON THE ROOF?

By coincidence the play parallels TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN by Sholem Aleichem.

In Aleichem’s tale, Tevye, the father is trying to marry his daughters into advantaged positions within Anatevka; in Austen’s book it is the over-reaching, meddling, manipulating mother—MRS Bennet—who is the match-maker of Longbourn.

Just as our planet has two poles, the true north pole and the magnetic north pole, so too does this excellent production.

One pole, consistent with Jane Austin’s original intent, is Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps the true pole.

Elizabeth is the protagonist, the second eldest of the Bennet brood; twenty years old, with character, confidence, intelligence and willfulness cantilevered well beyond her easily measured years.

But alas Lizzy is saddled with the proclivity to judge on first impression.

She reinforces her opinions, engaging in confirmational psychology, sifting through a conflicting body of evidence discarding all that argues against her conceits and embracing all that supports her predilections.

Hence Elizabeth single handedly accounts for the “prejudice” of the title.

Kinga Vasicek is simply stunning as Elizabeth Bennet.

Like an overzealous district attorney she argues with biased passion, unsubstantiated conviction, blanket condemnation and compulsion.

When she finishes dressing down Mister Darcy, the jury i.e. the audience is ready to drag Darcy to either the pillory, the confession booth or to the scaffold.

Miss Kinga’s persuasive and powerfully delivered misguided indictments are augmented by her stern and roiled countenance; one wonders how does she get her face to flush and the veins to standout on her temples when expresses stage anger and mock ire?

Miss Kinga’s role as Elizabeth afforded her opportunities to square off with, dress-down and dismantle nearly every character in the play; by the final curtain the audience is convinced that Miss Kinga’s next stop should be Berkeley’s Boalt Hall.

One also wonders if the character Miss Kinga unleashes could ever be able to shelve her contentiousness for the sake of a domestic tranquility with Mister Darcy.

In the absence of an epilogue, we will never know the answer.

The other pole, perhaps the magnetic pole—although to set the record straight, no one is confirming nor denying allegations of up-staging—is the tremendous performance of Tina Burgdorf as Mrs. Bennet.

Miss Burgdorf’s character—perhaps based loosely on Austen’s Mrs. Bennet—is absolutely a riot; every development in the Bennet family fortunes becomes a melodrama catapulting Burgdorf’s Mrs. Bennet on a soaring, hyperbolic emotional arc.

True Austen’s matriarchal Mrs. Bennet is frivolous, excitable and narrow-minded, and her manners and unbridled social climbing are an embarrassment to Jane and Elizabeth but Burgdorf exaggerates these minor character flaws into hilarious parodies reminiscent of Saturday Night Live comedy sketches.

As the stage adage has it, “there are no small roles in theatre.”

Great acting and a willingness to run with a character—indeed hijack a character—succeeded in inflating Miss Burgdorf’s Mrs. Bennet into a Macy’s Parade Float; she elevated a romantic gothic novel into highly enjoyable modern entertainment.

Almost as ballast for the unmoored Mrs. Bennet, Zachary Bailey plays Mr. Bennet; a character described as a patriarchal gentleman commanding a sarcastic and cynical sense of humor that he uses to irritate and neutralize his wife.

Given our Mrs. Bennet, can we fault Mr. Bennet if he prefers to withdraw from the never-ending marriage concerns of the women around him rather than offer up constructive help?

True to his character, Zachary delivers his well measured lines with low modulation and steady inflection as if to avoid igniting his highly volatile wife; in this respect Burgdorf and Bailey are a perfect pairing for the stage.

Beatriz Algranti plays the pivotal role of Jane Bennet, the catalyst that breaks the Bennet family out of its provincial doldrums and lurches it forward into the vagaries of matrimonial dice rolls.

As is revealed later into the play Darcy tried to scotch Bingley’s plan to marry Jane because he observed “no reciprocal interest in Jane” for Bingley.

Here may lie a glitch in the script.

Contrary to Darcy’s observations, Miss Algranti’s radiant, effulgent and sustained smile for Bingley—as played by Chase Lee—dismantles Darcy’s credibility as a witness.

Miss Algranti’s Jane is a veritably beacon of luminous infatuation; every time she is within eyeshot of Mr. Bingley she radiates romantic love.

Chase Lee is the love smitten, handsome counterpart to Miss Algranti’s Jane; to his acting credit Mr. Lee achieves a certain blissful obliviousness that only Eros and young love can perpetrate on the uninitiated.

Austen’s Jane is arguably the most beautiful young lady in Netherfield; her character—which Miss Algranti has captured with precision—contrasts sharply with Elizabeth’s; Jane is sweetly demure.

Jane too is prejudiced; only she strains to see only the good in others.

Another Klieg Light in this show is Lizzy Duncan; she superbly plays Lydia Bennet, the youngest and most wayward of the Bennet sisters.

Miss Duncan is arguably the best piece of casting in the entire play.

Her character Lydia, is barely 16, is frivolous and headstrong; she enjoys socializing, especially flirting with the officers of the local militia.

Miss Duncan, possibly coasting on the elfin enchantment of her twinkling eyes, signals her character’s casual disregard for the strictures of convention and . . . ahem . . . the moral code of her society.

Lizzy’s blithe smile, lithe gait and insouciant expression collectively signal the audience that her Lydia is devoid of any inkling of remorse for the disgrace she causes her Victorian family.

As Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mario Jimenez is the master of ambiguity and transformation.

Faithfully portraying Mr. Darcy’s initial arrogance, contemptus mundi and haughty pride, Mario deludes the audience in to believing every accusation and invective launched by rush-to-judgment Elizabeth and the perfidious Mr. Wickham.

Mr. Darcy’s aloof decorum, dislike of dancing and small talk, and exacting rectitude are understandably construed as excessive pride.

Darcy makes a poor impression on strangers—particularly Elizabeth—yet he is respected by those who know him well.

Mr. Jimenez’s acting provides for a certain transparency that reveals to his audience that Darcy has more than one dimension and that the true Mr. Darcy is in fact a noble being.

As Darcy and Elizabeth are forced to be in each other’s company, Mr. Jimenez begins to effuse a certain romantic glow, signaling an expanding romantic interest in the naively and forgivably prejudiced Elizabeth.

Ryan Borashan is delightful as the nefarious Mr. Wickham, pouring his perfidious venom into the eager ear of Elizabeth.

Wickham was a childhood friend of Mr. Darcy and now, as an officer in the militia, he is superficially charming and smarmy; just as Elizabeth is wrong about Darcy so too does she misjudge Wickham.

For all the wrong reasons Wickham and Lizzy form an erroneous alliance.

Mr. Borashan’s Wickham displays a convincing, yet duplicitous, charm that earns him the privilege of running off with the bright-eyed Lydia and marrying her.

Again, no epilogue informs us on the outcome of that union.

Several frosty characters, like large monolithic hailstones, litter Netherfield Park and its environs; chiefly amongst them are Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine.

Caroline Bingley is played with cryogenic frigidity by Caroline Campbell.

Miss Bingley is the snobbish sister of Charles Bingley—Charles, along with Mary and Kitty Bennet all suffered a horrific accident when the director’s hedge trimmers, which he used to hew down the prolix script, went amuck excising poor Charles, Mary and Kitty from the play entirely; they are now known as the desaparecidos.

Miss Bingley has a dowry of twenty thousand pounds and harbors hopelessly misplaced romantic intentions for Mr. Darcy; she is viciously jealous of Darcy’s growing attachment to Elizabeth and is disdainful and rude to Elizabeth.

Miss Campbell is so convincing when performing the condescending snobbishness and vile jealously of the rich, that we eagerly await tax increases for anyone who earns more than we do.

Even more chilling is Cienna Johnson’s portrayal of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

We learned that several people in the orchestra section had frost bitten toes due to their proximity to the set and Miss Johnson.

As Miss Johnson veritably hissed her threatening lines to Elizabeth, one could imagine icy vapors billowing with her every vituperation.

Lady Catherine, as personified by Miss Johnson, reinforces stereotypes of the wealthy leisure class and those with inherited social standing.

Thanks to Miss Johnson’s glacial performance, we are now psychologically prepared to boost taxes on inheritances and tax the daylights out of the trust funds of haughty, domineering dowagers like Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her ilk.

Rarely when actors are double cast do they appear on stage simultaneously as both characters, but Assistant Director Tait Adams breaks that taboo; she played both Mr. and Mrs. Gardner at once.

While Mrs. Gardner was three-dimensional, poor Mr. Gardner was merely two-dimensional, was always forced about by his wife and never spoke without Mrs. Gardner speaking first.

Tait Adams exuded a degree of stage confidence rarely evidenced in amateur productions; her delivery was well chiseled and clearly articulated.

There were several times that the quality of the acting in this play was indistinguishable from professional stage acting—certainly Miss Vasicek’s heated denouncements and Miss Burgdorf’s high blown histrionics—Miss Adams indisputably reached that plane.

Necessity or resourcefulness placed Laura Gomez in the androgynous role of Mr. Collins: an obsequious boot-licker to his employer: her haughty highness the Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Miss Gomez ably transmitted Mr. Collins’ exaggerated sense of self-important and even more vividly Mr. Collins’ pedantic nature—Miss Gomez should consider public education someday.

Supporting actors of this thoroughly enjoyable production included Linnea Arneson, Jess Vicman, Skye Chandler, Megan Jones, Gabe Lima, Brad Barna and Alexandra Barajas.

While this reviewer approached the marquee with a certain amount of misplaced trepidation, he was delighted by the creative spontaneity and vitality of the show.

You may have missed Hendrix at Monterey, Janis at the Fillmore West, Bob at Newport, the Stones at Altamont, hopefully you did not miss a superlative PRIDE & PREJUDICE at Encinal nor will you miss the upcoming DINING ROOM and HAIR, THE MUSICAL.