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Suzy Creamcheese Joins the Underclass I

July 24, 2012 //
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Shrewd subalterns rise to the top of the meritocracy by telling us about the lie, and living it large. By being Eddie Said, tall, tan, and terrific in Savile Row tweeds, throwing stones at the Israelis’ wall, stifling Carolyn Heilbrun, and conferring an agency on Jane Austen never imagined by the generations of white sexist professors when Said, the brown one, said The Gentle Author was a tool of British imperialism. The lie, for women of my class, is more easily apprehensible than it is for the men, and if it comes through, it is apprehended in epiphanies about life at the top.

Said’s revolutionary 1978 book, which invented post-colonial and subaltern studies.

The lie is basically that progress is inevitable, and that if you work hard enough, keep all your teeth, speak business English, dress like them in chinos, blue button downs, and Top Siders, you will get a good job. Which will procure a trophy woman and trophy children. You will keep both the good job and the expensive woman and the talented children. This isn’t a lie. It happens. The lie is that if you do everything right, you will feel as if you are in the flow, and capitalist society, if not the god of Protestant money management and the prosperity Gospel, will inevitably make you rich and fill your life with abundance. This works for basketball players the way it does for George W. Bush, the benchmark of whose white privilege, lest you forget, was being handed his presidency on a silver platter by the Supreme Court majority his father had confected. God gives you these things if your grandfather was a Senator and you have the stones to run for president on an anti-Washington platform.

Bush v. Gore, 2000.

Creating and getting into the flow of white privilege is what all of us who want to make a living need to do. Your grandpa needs to be a Senator, and I wish you the best of luck with that. For women or people of color, the ’60s generation who intervened in the flow, or just tried to get good jobs, the apprehension of the lie, it seems to me, came in little doses.

Click, as Jane O’Reilly defined, forty years ago,  the moment of revolutionary insight for feminists. I am looking at the typewriter font and pixelated red margins of the six-ply newspaper copy paper on which the editor at the great metropolitan daily newspaper wrote and posted office memos. Between the inch and a half-wide red stripes, with the white silhouettes of spectral sixes glowing in them, he has typed the schedule of who is working weekends. My name is on the list maybe three times more often than the two white boys who were hired the same time I was.

Click. Jane O’Reilly’s cover story for the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine.

Click. I am in the White House press room, which Nixon built over JFK’s notorious swimming pool. I am feeding quarters into the Coca Cola machine and staring at the framed black and white photographs on the wall opposite. They’re of the White House press corps of bygone days, this one sometime during World War Two. Maybe 60 men in fedoras are sitting on a bleacher in front of the Capitol. Their names are written underneath. I read them all, and think, I haven’t heard of any of these people except Merriman Smith. The great UPI reporter had just committed suicide.

Click. The newshens, women who had become reporters in the ’30s. ’40s. and ’50s, who fought like tigers to edit copy at night or cover Pat Nixon, gave all of us our start in the newspaper business. Literally. One of them took me to the White House for the first time to show me how to cover Pat Nixon. Dorothy McCardle was then in her seventies, and had started out in life covering the Lindbergh baby trial and the explosion of the Hindenberg. I once watched her, like Baryshnikov doing sleight-of-body in The Dybbuk, slip through the Secret Service, police and other protection lines to follow Jackie Kennedy on her private tour of the Kennedy Center on the night of its opening. I went to Dorothy’s dentist for 15 years, until an emergency visit to the periodontist revealed he hadn’t been cleaning my teeth, every four months, properly, for nearly a generation.

Click. Another one of the newshens got me good assignments and a $5,000 raise. And one day, may God forgive me, I raised my eyes from my typewriter, and saw her, across the newsroom, approaching 60, breaking her ass over some other Pat Nixon story, and said, if I stay here another minute, I will turn into that. My brilliant black friend, who finally got the job at the New York Times, looked up from her computer one day at a little grey man in a little grey suit killing himself over some other Pat Nixon story, and said to herself, that’s the famous reporter pundit William Boot. This is all there is.

Nixon resigns, by Harry Benson. They also serve who only stand and wait.

And so, when the laid-off executives and retired moguls and the redundant electricians, all those guys who bought it, start complaining that no one invites them out to dinner any more, that people look through them at cocktail parties, that they feel like their cocks fell off, that all their friends departed once they lost the driver/the access/the money/the juice and that bitch of a gold-digging wife, that they know how the n*****s and the s***s feel when they are turned down for the hundreds of jobs they’re applying for, that the charities they volunteer for offer them work picking up dog shit, that they claim, in their eponymous geezer websites, now to be “making art”, though the jay pegs posted show little evidence of it, despite all those weekends off that my ass worked instead of theirs, or, like Leonard Woolf, the radiant stoic, calculate that over the 90 years of his highly productive life he had, in 200,000 hours of labor, produced nothing of lasting value, you know what I think?

I think click.

That’s all there is.

My BBF and I knew it when we were 30 years old. Grow the fuck up.  My BBF also showed me that a real woman pays her own mortgage, through thick and thin. It will make a man of you.  Writes Woolf,

Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the last fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession to myself and to anyone who may read this book that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.
— The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, 158.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

Poignant, to me, is the book store sticker on the faded paper cover of this hardback book. It says Savile Book Shop, 3236 P St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20007. The Savile closed in 1978;  I was reading Leonard’s observations about work shortly after the publication of the foruth volume of his biography in 1970, and quoting the old socialist in the newspaper by the early ’70s. Working weekends. And nights. Not the best prescription for a marriage.

So it seems as if there would be no surprises, no damage done, to such a person when I started, thirty-two years later, aged 62, to look for work. Again.

To be continued.

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Categories feminism, the new economy

Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Too Fascist for Girls?

June 2, 2012 //
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Silence is my metier, and in it I am not always certain rock and roll is good for girls. In spelunking around the intarnets, I discovered the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, its conference, its publication, which is on the right track if not, in major ways, persuasive.

One graf from the IASPM call for papers for its March, 2012, conference:

–Ladies on the Town: Cities have always been sites of female empowerment and risk taking, where the village daughter becomes a Bollywood star or a budding feminist forms an all-girl band. If this has stimulated fears of “women adrift,” free of small-town norms, from Dreiser’sSister Carrie to the girls who “need blinders” in Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” it has also incited celebrations: Beyonce’s single ladies, “up in the club, doin’ my own little thing.” How, within music, has the city made women, and how have women made the city?
http://iaspm-us.net/conferences/

Hmmmm. Beyonce made it on her own? Budding feminists form all-girl bands? Do they now? Or is that the sell-out?

I’m inclined to think that’s part of the Art School Confidential scam. Indeed, the biggest art school confidential scamster I have encountered was [redacted], forming rock bands, posting pictures of her [redacted] boyfriend’s poop, writing artist’s statements enough to put you off art until the end of time, and getting a fine arts degree from Pratt, in the 21st century, with a senior project — her collection of plaster casts of penises. Been done, dude. Baby boomers beat you to that one too. What’s new, and awesome, is you call it art. And it empowered you. Rilly.

And then there’s Alice Bag. And the indies. A whole nother can of worms.

You know, that political agency in rock and roll only exists when subcultures make the music. And it better not just be Suzy Creamcheese whining.

Always mindful that David Bowie and Mick Jagger together watched Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of fascist art together. Fifteen times. And declared Hitler the first rock star. Yay, political agency.  So transgressive! For a quick rundown of the elements of fascist art, including sexual*, you might want to check out this and also this:

The squirmin’ dog who’s just had her day  
Under my thumb  
A girl who has just changed her ways
 It’s down to me, yes it is  
The way she does just what she’s told  
Down to me, the change has come  
She’s under my thumb

That marimba? I can tell you from the way it took me in 1966 it is rock and roll for sure. But is it too fascist for girls? Probably. Am I sorry I danced? Probably not. It is essential to know how the predator moves.

I am thinking of the eyewitness account in the bio of Pauline Kael I’m reading, previously in my reading referred to apocryphally, of a Hollywood producer going through head shots of actresses for a part.

He sorts them into two stacks. Fuckable. And un-.

Grace Slick, who was and is beautiful, if unfuckable, has recently said in her day you didn’t have to be good-looking because there were no music videos.
http://blog.discoversd.com/san-diego-entertainment-blog/grace-slick-dishes-on-sex-drugs–rock-and-roll.html

Mmmm-hmmm. I’m not sure it’s possible to be anywhere near hip, much less empowered, anywhere near rock ‘n’ roll. Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids — along with the great biography of de Kooning, the manifestos of the East Village and hipster life, ca. 1945-80 — makes one thing very clear. It was all about being fuckable, about Allen Ginsberg’s — and Mapplethorpe’s — thinking she was a beautiful boy. That’s why they call it rock ‘n’ roll.

And making a living on your back, as Anne Boleyn, say, among the married ladies, or Fakhra Younus, among the dancing girls, or the Eagles will tell you, is the very hardest way to go.

We can beat around the bushes;
we can get down to the bone
We can leave it in the parkin’ lot,
but either way,
there’s gonna be a heartache tonight….

___________________

*Umberto Eco discerns 14 signs of a fascist, including:

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

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Categories art, fashion, feminism

Old Groupies Are Not Old Babes

May 31, 2012 //
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I’m thinking about a certain kind of older woman and wondering, for reasons that aren’t very nice, if they can be an Old Babe.

The boiler room girls are the prototype I’m thinking about, old groupies, kind of, and Esther Newberg is the only one who could possibly be considered an old babe. Mimi Alford, the well-bred intern who slept with JFK and recently wrote a memoir, is not one. Old Babes do not dine out on who they slept with in 1961.

The meditation is inspired, as so much is, by the femme edition of The New York Times, with a piece called “Starting Over at 48” about Kim France. She is the founding editor of Lucky magazine, a revolutionary — not least because it is making money — format for fashion mags, and one of the many revolutions caused by Jane and Sassy in the ladies’ mag market. I find it unreadable. One good reason for her candidacy as an Old Babe is that, like the graduates of Sassy, France claims she doesn’t mind being called a feminist.

The nail in the Old Babe coffin for Kim France is when she says, “I’m 48, but I’m an immature 48. There are people in this city who work in creative businesses whose interests are still very youth-ish. They like rock music, looking cool, but they are not kids anymore. They don’t, you know, respond to crotch high skirts on a style blog, no matter how cute they look.”

Kim France has left Lucky and started over, in her West Village apartment, as a blogger.  She calls her blog “Girls of a Certain Age.” I am thinking in this unnamed sub-species of Old Babe, inspired by Kim France, of Vivienne Westwood, who always appears to be a candidate for an old babe, but is not, and the Guardian’s Invisible Woman, who is not, but writes about it.

As you know, Princess Lilian of Sweden is the captain of the old babe team, along with Iris Apfel, and we must consider both what Lilian and Iris, the floral life leaders, would do about Kim France.

What binds Vivienne Westwood, the Invisible Woman, and Kim France together is being old rock chicks, still trying, it seems to me, to make it on those terms.* The terms are murky, one of them being one’s former career as a groupie, and dining out on who one slept with in 1961. I can’t say for a fact that any of these ladies but Westwood was an actual groupie. I have read the memoirs of Pamela des Barres, Patti Boyd and Bill Wyman, so there’s nothing I don’t know about groupies, including a close encounter when Stephen Tyler and I were young and I was interviewing him for the Great Metropolitan Daily. He thought I was a groupie because that’s the only kind of women he was meeting.

I don’t think Vivienne Westwood is an old babe. While she looks like a chewed rawhide bone with orange hair, and what she wears is old but not babe, she’s not emanating fashion, but rather parroting the 50-year-old rock epigrams which passed for revolution in the 60s. She is, in a young friend’s immortal term, a rock gorgon, mimicking half-a-century old hipster gestures.

Westwood looks 100 per cent better than usual here, in this Guardian video clip, because her Gorgonesque ’70s orange Three’s Company ponytail is covered up in a chic black do-rag, and she’s not wearing a slogan t shirt. She looks chic, but her garrulity, and the idiocy of what she says, which was cute when she first said it in 1964, has worn rather less well than her eyebrow pencil. She did not wear underpants when she went to collect her OBE from the Queen, which is just about the feeblest non-punk gesture I can think of. Any self-respecting punk or Old Babe would omit one or the other, preferably the OBE.

The Invisible Woman excited me with her Ralph Ellison reference, but basically writes,  timidly and 30 years behind the times, about the issues. The Land’s End tugless soft cup tank suit, for example, is known to every woman who put away the bikinis at age 21, because a black tanksuit on the beach where everybody else’s greasyass stuff is all dangling in the sand is 10,000 times hotttter. Trust me.  But not to the Invisible Woman. The Invisible Woman is broken by the tragedy of having to put the bikinis away at 50 — which there is no reason to do, whether or not your breasts and your belly hang down to your knees. Unless you want to be chic and not have the decolletage of a baseball mitt. The Invisible Woman is British; the British are sun whores; think an Ibiza tan is paradise; and must be forgiven. Or Jade Jagger NSFW, perhaps not. (Pippa Middleton, this is your future.)

Dame Helen in her ‘kini. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/woman/life/helen-mirren-why-that-bikini-photo-will-haunt-me-for-rest-of-my-life-16056266.html

She writes about bullshit fashion panels convened to discuss the pros and cons of Botox and diet — except there are no cons, and the prospect of old age anorexic and on the needle is clearly and uncompromisingly promoted. There’s a pressing-her-nose-on-the-glass-of-youth tone which is neither old nor babe-ish. Truthfully, I suppose I’m a bit put out because I feel a tiny bit excluded but if I can’t make a grand entrance perhaps I can sneak into the party by the side door? Oh Jeez. She really wrote that, and her circling about parties is at the core of my revulsion. An Old Babe doesn’t go to parties, unless they’re for the arts of seated conversation, business, or ceremonial purposes. She is the party.

Princess Lilian, our leader, emerges briefly, on the arm of her great-nephew, to celebrate the millenium.

Which brings us to the case of Kim France, who, having been at the helm of the hot fashion rag quit Planet Conde Nast recently to become a blogger. She had daily migraines and felt she had to quit. Her blog is for women who wanted, she says, to be Tatum O’Neal in Bad News Bears, whatever that might mean. I think it means ’90s feminism as per the Australian-founded magazine, Sassy, a mesmerizing feminist girl power magazine of the ’90s edited by Jane Pratt. It was famous for enterprising girl reporters, and much more than its one true take on the groupie disaster that is Courtney Love, and I miss it.

Sassy discovered Chloe Sevigny, which may have been a mistake. And now they’re all grown up, or grown old Kim France and the Sassy girls, reading the Janedough on line, secretly praying to Tien Hou their grateful thanks that their Rielle Hunter/Mr. Big instincts didn’t work out, and quitting a real magazine gig for the pale simulacrum of the Bohemian life in the West Village, where rich people live. Kim France jokes that she’s starting a Tumblr page called “I Preferred the 90s”, because, as France says, “it sort of was the last time before things started being super adult.”

I don’t know if the manic pixie dream girl is a version of Candace Bushnell’s famous Peter Pan boy — in her immortal piece on the Manhattan biciycle boy — or if the Kim France Peter Pan Girl of a Certain Age  is a new breed — the 21st century version of the Boiler Room Girls. Who stayed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long at the fair, kicking around Georgetown, doing married men a la Rielle, pretending to be connected. Getting drowned at Chappaquiddick. Esther Newberg got the hell out of Dodge, left for New York, reinvented herself as a ball buster, and started a whole nother non-Kennedy, more or less, life. That’s what an old babe does.

You can become a Bohemian at age 48. And I have hope for Kim France, based solely on her post about the immaculate white cloth flats worn in sooty early summer Manhattan by the girl who waxes her eyebrows.

They’re $6.79 from K-Mart. Princess Lilian and Iris Apfel would say, I think, there was a glimmer of hope here. ________________________________

*I’m still thinking about whether Gracie Slick is an old babe. She has famously retired from the stage, let her hair go white, gained weight, and paints pictures. She says, we didn’t have to be good-looking ’cause there were no music videos. She says, repeatedly, that performing is not for rock gorgons. “God bless The Rolling Stones, but I think old people doing rock and roll is kind of pathetic.”

 I think she’s getting there; much depends on the quality of her paintings and whether or not she’s hiding. I don’t think she is.

http://blog.discoversd.com/san-diego-entertainment-blog/grace-slick-dishes-on-sex-drugs–rock-and-roll.html

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Categories fashion, feminism, news

Torture the Women

May 9, 2012 //
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1.

Mad Men. I don’t know how widely spread the Tony Soprano trope now is, but Weiner, the writer and producer of Mad Men, and a writer on The Sopranos, has reproduced it trope for trope in Mad Men. Ie., a protagonist engaged in a brutal and immoral business is also a sensitive family man and hero.  (See also Breaking Bad and The Wire, the third and fourth contenders for best TV show of the last 25 years.)

I’m noticing how psychiatry, which was the key to Tony’s sensitive family man and hero stuff, is being used here by Weiner — to analyze his Barbie wife, and to repress, as when he tells Peggy Olsson (is that Superman’s sidekick’s sister?), that Peggy’s accouchement and breakdown never happened.

I think this project, which delectates (as did the Sopranos) on very bad behavior by a whole group of men, is, like the Sopranos, a defense of Hollywood and corporate frat boy values. What’s shocking, when you think about it, is the number of movie tropes that are deployed, even as they are deployed very, very well. I don’t think there’s a single original idea or line in the whole production — maybe, just maybe, the costumes and sets are the real deal. I am thinking of the outfit Peggy wears on the date with the truck driver — those purple floral lapels were a masterpiece.

The Barbie wife, shooting pigeons, seducing the tow truck guy — is an especially insidious trope well exploited — let’s just cut to the chase — by Spielberg in the Schindler’s List wet t shirt scene, which may be the most repulsive iteration of the trope since the beginning of time.

Sardou, the author of the play on which Tosca was based, was asked what to do when the audience of his jaded fin de siecle Parisians grew bored. Torture the women,, he said. The whole icy blonde Grace Kelly trope — the gripping Hitchcock iteration — is based on this insight of Sardou. Spielberg’s ouevre is especially guilty of the sadist/sex connection, and it is pernicious.

Eggs Sardou as served at Brennan’s.

That Barbie wife has herself a Thelma and Louise moment, and then a Holly Golightly moment — just adds to the strange sense that this is all collaged and parroted by a kid who spent too much time watching TV. (Zadie Smith!!!)

The sense of looking at the lamination of capture-computer-animated actors is a trope too — apparently there’s a new app on your Iphone called Hipstamatic which takes photographs with fake sprockets and hyped Polaroid colors to achieve the effect of photographs taken with celluloid.

And the idea that this laminate world is the only one in which a naturally gorgeous actress like Christina Hendricks — a redhead, not an icy blonde — with the rococo shape could get work just makes the whole enterprise even worse.

Why cannot there be original work on television? And wtf is this lamination thing?

Plus, it’s like Twin Peaks, Gatsby, My Sister Eileen, Kiss Me Guido meets The Office, except with really serious mindfucking as the job.

2.

Treme. More frat boys. Some black. Lacks the specificity, the entire Dickensian/Zola sweep of the city and all its stories that The Wire had, and is lost in the (strangely square and sentimental) music. I attribute this to the  late David Mills and his romance with music. Musicians? Dude. Are frat boys.

The main thing I like is somebody saying, naw, just playing the music in New Orleans is the important thing. The Cubans are like that — music just is what one does.

But the music portrayed at stupefying note-for-note lengths in Treme again, has that strange formaldehyde-enbalmed, Hipstermatic feel to it I was complaining about in re Mad Men. And Wendell Pierce’s character is so completely unmusical — nothing about who he is except the king of dawgs is portrayed —  so flat as almost to be limbic — that it seems to be saying that being a musician is about scoring. Here’s a black guy name of Antoine Batiste, which is a whole television series in its ownself, that Treme seems not to be covering. (I hate the whole Antoine story arc, and Pierce is such a fine and intelligent actor, I miss him.)

I do love Clarke Peters and I dote upon his bowlegs. I love the Indian thing. But I think it’s not well portrayed; I think the thread on the real musicians trying to get their gigs (why is the only drug addict a white Dutch carpetbagger asshole? Give me a break) is strangely wonkish and boring. The Southern gothic aristo Davis McAlary, also strangely wonkish and boring, thread makes me FF in pain, although a glimpse of the artist formerly known as Elizabeth Ashley, all false teeth and fais do-do Tennessee Williams, made me want to cry.

John Goodman is overacting like a mamma jamma. He also looks on the verge of death. The failure of imagination entailed in making the Goodman character into David-Simon-auteur-as-boring-old-one-shot-fart character a YouTube Cassandra makes me wince.

It’s all musician polemic and no music and no Cajuns and apparently no real New Orleans black people plots, no real music, no real musician stories, no conflict except with buffoonish and faceless acts of God. There’s no worthy opponents here, as The Wire had in spades,  from Omar to the mayor of Baltimore himself, just faceless FEMA bureaucrats and George W. Bush. Too easy, not Big Easy.

Big Easy the movie had rockin’ music, btw, as well as the real racial/corruption scenario: still listening to the magnificent Claude Jeter, coal miner, reverend, and the best singer ever, and the Swan Silvertones’ Saviour, Pass Me Not which they had on their soundtrack. You should be too.

Still Treme is better than anything else on television, though the material is oddly thin. I love the look of the post- apocalypse city, of the ruins, the waterline mold as the opening credits, Goodman standing at the empty waterfront and pointing out the truncated footbridge which had led to one of the  great old 19th century landmark buildings sunk ‘neath the waves forever, that whole Blade Runner visual of the pan-Asian food trucks beside the gigantic concrete sewer pipes, of the mummy under the canoe, Daymo’s body on the shelf in the refrigerated truck (that whole two-ep MAX narrative arc was stretched out for at least eight episodes, so much so that a really good story became a pain in the ass because you figured it out 15 seconds into ep 1). Simon is good at that, and I like it. I think the deal is, David Simon based every single character in The Wire on somebody he met or heard of in 25 years of covering Baltimore. And he cannot create a character, only describe real ones.

The wimmin. Strong black wimmin. Strong blue collar white chicks. Yeah, whatever. The story seems to be about fat Antoine gettin’ gigs and gettin’ laid. There’s a whole narrative arc based on I lost my ‘bone.

Not interested, frat boy.

3.

Michael Holroyd announces, with the publication of his biography of the bodice-ripper romance between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, that he is retiring from writing. A recent NYT book review has this gracious farewell by Toni Bentley in her review of A Book of Secrets:

Holroyd will be 76 on Aug. 27, having survived several years of aggressive cancer treatment that has left him, he says, “ludicrously pragmatic.” “Now, as in a film,” he writes toward the end, “I can bring back the characters who occupy the pages of this, my last book.” And so he announces, with infinite poise and quiet humility, his retirement. Our loss.

“This has been my exit from myself,” Holroyd has said of his life’s work as a biographer. “I seek invisibility,” he writes, “behind the subjects I am trying to bring alive on the page.” But in this he fails miserably: his heart and humor bounce in vibrant rays off every hot-blooded, lovelorn, crazy, jealous and joyous woman — and what enlightened being would have any woman be otherwise? — in his book. Through his “exit” Holroyd is well found.

“A Book of Secrets” is a book of magic, a sleight of hand by a master conjurer singing his swan song, sweetly, softly, with piercing wit and overwhelming compassion, his poetry in prose evoking a time past, with all its outrageous obsessions, its illegal passions, its melancholy perfume. It is the scent, I believe, of violets that rises from these intoxicating pages.

Holroyd likes this poem by Violet Trefusis, a woman he elevates from feisty sidekick to contender:

My heart was more disgraceful, more alone And more courageous than the world has known. O passer-by my heart was like your own.

And in this final offering, this small book bursting with the tremendous generosity of its author, one feels that courage. Sir Michael, I curtsy before you. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/books/review/a-book-of-secrets-by-michael-holroyd-book-review.html?scp=2&sq=holroyd&st=cse

Biographers are very interesting cats. Biography seems to be the only thing I am able to read these days, except for 19th century novels.

I am interested, as anybody of my vintage is, in Holroyd’s concentration on Bloomsbury (he is the biographer of Strachey; Strachey is the icon-smashing biographer and probably Bloomsbury’s central character, with Virginia Woolf, his former fiancee, and Keynes and Grant, his former boyfriends). Why, in the 40 years since I wrote, for the great metropolitan daily newspaper, of the incredible surge of feminist interest in V. Woolf, no one has thought to write the love story of Vita and Violet — one of Bloomsbury’s most notorious liaisons — I do not know.  What I do know is that Vita Sackville West would not have become the central hero/ine of queer romance literature were it not for the limelight accorded her by  the gold-dust touch of her lover, Virginia Woolf. The other contemporary gossip here is that Camilla Parker Bowles is, like Violet Trefusis, a descendant of the beautiful, randy Mrs. Keppel, Edward VII’s last mistress.

Mrs. Keppel, mother of Violet Trefusis, ancestrix of The Parker Bowles, mistress of Edward VII.

Vita was connected to Bloomsbury forever by her love affair with Virginia Woolf. Her androgyny (and her ducal connections) inspired Woolf, long before Olivia Butler made it “science fiction”,  to write Woolf’s shape-changing, sex-morphing, magic realist “biography”, Orlando, which was essentially the story of Vita, with a Vita and Violet chapter, and Vita’s ducal forebears, in the form of young Orlando, who lived for 500 years and changed sexes as necessary.

Orlando is a wonderful, rich book, much more profound than its gotten credit for — its form-conferring sci-fi, magic realist and queer biography chops notwithstanding. It has been totally unexploited for the Vita and Violet material until now. I don’t understand why nobody treats it seriously (beauty of surface, one reason, Woolf herself criticized herself for; the sexuality (in a writer notorious for being allegedly frigid); and in its treatment of time/history/eternity, always a huge interest of Woolf’s, picked up in her posthumous novel, Between the Acts).

Biography may be Bloomsbury’s most influential and sophisticated contribution to the 20th century. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, the original godless Bohemian, became in 1882 the official cartographer of the British canon when he was named editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Virginia, on whose education he spent no money, grew up reading his books instead of going to school. Her second brush with biographers was editing her parents’ love letters for Sir Leslie’s biographer, who refused to believe her father had viciously sexist temper tantrums. Her third brush with biography was with the homosexual Lytton Strachey, who probably fell in love with Virginia’s older brother Thoby at Cambridge. (The young Stephens all looked —  I think it was Strachey who said it first —  like Greek slaves; Thoby among the most beautiful and dead at 26.)

Thoby Stephen, 1880-1906, the lacuna around whom Bloomsbury, and two of Virginia Woolf’s novels, were formed.

Thoby’s early death made his Cambridge friends friends of his sisters for life, and these formed the nucleus of Bloomsbury. Thoby’s death in 1906, of typhoid, may be the most influential and least-known literary event in 20th century history. It inspired the modernity of the lacuna — no “plot”, no “character” — in at least two books of Virginia’s — Jacob’s Room, and the thrillingly abstract and yet autobiographical The Waves. How Thoby’s death affected Strachey, I do not know but plan to discover by reading Holroyd’s bio, on which the silly fag hag tragedy movie Carrington was based.

In any case, Strachey was the atomic bombardier of biography. In 1918, Strachey published Eminent Victorians which changed biography forever. Every iconoclastic trick Christopher Hitchens performs on Mother Theresa et al, Strachey performed first on personalities of enduring substance and influence — Cardinal Manning (Oxbridge convert/politician), Florence NIghtingale (the lady with the lamp), Thomas Arnold (Rugby, the school) and General Gordon (Opium Wars, Africanist, Khartoum), heroes of Victorian hegemony.

Cardinal Manning, by Watts.

The New Journalism doubtless owes a huge debt to (and I’m guessing here) the very intelligent Tom Wolfe’s reading of Strachey, and the adoption of the famous Strachey voice, which had as much to do with Lytton’s enormous family of siblings — like Virginia’s, part Anglo-Indian colonialists — and their famous drawl as it did with Lytton’s own Cambridge Apostle-inflected high camp candor. (G.E. Moore, the fin de siecle Cambridge philo, whosePrincipia Ethicawas recently chosen as one of the 20th century’s most influential books, had something to do with the directness of the voice. But the queerness was all Lytton.)

 I’d be interested to trace the influence of Eminent Victorians on Virginia Woolf’s own writing — she was both competitive and very loving with the man she called her Old Serpent. He dedicated his next, and much less good, biography, of Victoria herself, to Virginia. As I recall, she criticized it in the same terms she criticized the work of other Bloomsberries —  as if it were “a luncheon party at Gordon Square”. And indeed, the aural and conversational beauty of both Woolf’s and Strachey’s rhetoric and dialogue is notable.

The fourth connection of Virginia Woolf to the enormous subject of 20th century biography writing — think about how memoirs of abused children have taken over the best seller list — is her own magnificent foray into the genre, Orlando, and the much more troubled effort she made at the end of her life with the biography of the artist Roger Fry. These have, I think,  just begun to be influential. Holroyd’s popularizing queerness touch should do for Orlando what his biography of Strachey did for Carrington — Carrington being Strachey’s devoted fag hag, who killed herself after his death.  The classic women-who-lust-for-gay-men piece to date is the biography — by the incandescent Hilton Als — of Dorothy Dean, gentle and sad, in The Women.

The fifth and probably most infuential connection of Woolf to biography is her foundation, with others of the Bloomsbury circle, of the Memoir Club — designed to get their alcoholic friend, Desmond MacCarthy, to stop expending his energy on magnificent conversation and ephemeral journalism, and to begin to write books. I have written about the Memoir Club,  and its ethical infuence, its powerful amity for atheists, as well as its influence in producing memoir by their rich and powerful, queer, lifelong stalwart friend, Keynes, here.

There’s also a connection in the whole early 20th century language of seduction used by Vita and  Violet in their love letters — only Violet’s are preserved — used to great effect by Holroyd. The gypsy sheik cross-dressing rhetoric is used, as I have written elsewhere, in the Lost Generation Lesbian poetry of my own Aunt Cherie. It was creepy to read it written much less well, but with equal passion, by the daughter of the King’s mistress, and to think it was the way all the queer girls talked to each other in 1925. Another ducal connection, so essential to the bodice-ripping genre.

In their letters, Vita was “Mitya,” and Violet was the lush “Lushka”: “My poor Mitya, they’ve taken you and they’ve burnt your caravan. . . . They’ve pulled down your sleeves and buttoned up your collar! They’ve forced you to sleep beneath a self-respecting roof with no chinks to let the stars through. . . . Come away, Mitya, come away. . . . I’ll wait for you at the crossroads. . . . Ah, Beloved!”

And you wonder why 21st century fictions are so moronic.

Michael Holroyd, biographer in the iconoclastic Bloomsbury tradition of Lytton Strachey.

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Categories art, feminism, literature, queer theory, television

Fashion Police: Manic Pixie Granny Chic vs. Boho Chic, and the Polychrome Old Babe

April 26, 2012 //
3

I have a deep, deep, Boho streak which would have me dressed in lacy white ruffled cotton petticoats, bright colored prairie skirts, rose-embroidered off-the-shoulder peasant blouses and buckskin fringe, with orange and magenta embroidered touches, perhaps on the handknitted stockings, from the Estonian crafters on the island of Muhu, Frida Kahlo earrings and do rags and perhaps a Day of the Dead rose garland with rainbow colored ribbons over the ears? Or a room which looks like this. I have a deep deep resonance with Natalie Chanin and her boyfriend’s visionary art aesthetic, Dixie Boho, if you will, and African-American yard art.

But there are several caveats.

When I was young, I dressed for the office. And not as a hippie, either. I had to be six feet tall and bullet proof; peasant lace and hand hammered earrings would have had them stabbing me in the front, and not just the back.

Now that I am an old babe, I am sensitive to dressing for the office and the — negrifying effect of not doing so. You want to look hip, and there is a way of doing polychrome hipster Old Babe, as personified by Iris Apfel, which is genius, carefully curated, and requires a flat chest if not the entire substitution of clothes for secondary sexual characteristics — the number one aesthetic reason for going polychrome.

But imagine what Apfel’s trademark brutalist jewelry would look like on Stephanie Seymour’s chest.

Old Babe Iris Apfel

Iris Apfel, co-captain with Princess Lilian of Sweden, of the Old Babes team.

The immortal Stephanie, mother of four, in her see-through Chanel dress.

Now you need to turn to imagining what obloquy an old hippie chick gets from Britain’s highest paid journalist. A.A. Gill is Murdoch’s TV critic at the Times of London and has twice reviewed television shows by the Cambridge classics professor, 57-year-old Mary Beard, as unviewable on account of her appearance. The first time, Gill wrote:

…for someone who looks this closely at the past, it is strange she hasn’t had a closer look at herself before stepping in front of the camera. Beard coos over corpses’ teeth without apparently noticing she is wearing them. The hair is a disaster, the outfit an embarrassment. If you are going to invite yourself into the front rooms of the living, then you need to make an effort.

Mary Beard, in the ancient Roman latrines at Ostia.

Gill is as famous for his feral attitude toward women and shooting baboons, as he is for his alcoholism, his dyslexia, his lack of a college degree, his salary, and the 62 complaints that have been filed against him with Britain’s toothless Press Complaints Commission in the last five years.

This last time, as Beard hosts “Meet the Romans”, a well-received BBC doc on ancient Rome, Gill reviewed the show by saying that she is too ugly for television, except as a contestant on “The Undateables”, a British Channel 4 series about disfigured and disabled people who can’t find partners.

Mary Beard, professor of classics, Cambridge University.

While Beard does not dress in the kind of elaborate Boho chic I like, imagine the screams of obloquy she’d get just walking down the street in a prairie skirt. Virginia Woolf radiated vulnerability and Bohemianism; according to her husband, people would literally point at her and laugh as she walked the streets of London.

Only young ladies want to inspire that kind of derision, one of the real reasons for the young, and not just the old, to have blue hair. To annoy the bourgeois.

I think Boho chic is the purlieu of the rich, the young, and the unemployed. Real Bohemians, like de Kooning, wear work clothes, paint-spattered jeans. Which brings us to exhibit A of my manic pixie dream girl find of the day, a Boho chic costume, shot in Instagram, by the manic pixie dream mom who freaked me the eff out this morning.

Given my love of Boho chic, tell me what is wrong with this outfit? Why is it not making me lust for it? The last person I saw in a fab Boho chic outfit was Jericho Poppler Bartlow, the old surfer girl, at a meeting of the Surfrider Foundation in Long Beach, and it was awesome, moving into the Talitha Getty zone.

Jericho Poppler Bartlow, surfer chick.

Rock on, Jericho.

But so here is the outfit that is So Wrong. A friend elsewhere has weighed in on my private blog. You do the same. It has to do with the infantilization — the replacement of the secondary sexual characteristics with clothing that is — ohhh grrrl, just say it. Limp. The young lady’s granny chic pastiche, unlike Iris Apfel’s masterful polychrome Old Babe collage, is …Not Sexy.

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Categories fashion, feminism, news

Gyno Porn: Pinny Porn Meets the Sexting Generation

April 3, 2012 //
0

I had a friend once who worked in a titty bar. She was the head waitress, which meant she counted out the tip pool and could wear a jacket sometimes. She was a math prodigy, the smartest person with the least education I have ever met. Her deal was cross racial dating with guys who, to put it nicely, pulled her hair. Her idea of glamor was to be likened to Nicole Simpson, to serve boneless, skinless chicken breasts marinated in bottled Italian dressing, and perfectly folded pink towels to match her bathroom.

I think of her often, and what I worry most about is the pink towels. Being respectable will kill you.

The reason I am thinking about her today is that part of her blue collar feminist nexus was menstrual cramps. Or, no, PMS. All the girls at the titty bar had PMS. It was verb. I am PMSing. It was the de rigueur, don’t-ask, don’t-tell, reason for not coming to work. Apparently no boss who requires you to show your tits as a job description has the stones to question your PMSing 23 days a month.

Demi Moore’s 1991 VF cover, voted the number two best magazine cover of all time.

It is what the immortal Florence King, a Lesbian lover of women, called pelvic politics in her immortal discussion of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen:

The Southern woman is the world’s foremost practitioner of pelvic politics. She has more power over men when she is sexually hors de combat than other women have in the middle of intercourse, for the Southern man’s socioeconomic identity and masculine image are trapped in her bonny blue box. Being delicate means that she is both aristocratic and feminine — which means that he is both aristocratic and masculine. This is pussy power in the most literal sense.

Her obsession with her body is by no means limited to her pelvic region. She is launched on the road to self-absorption early in life because the notion that she has the power to drive men crazy is constantly drummed into her.

“I can’t wait till I get bosoms, can you?” my girl friend said when we were ten years old. “You can bump men with them and just drive them crazy.”

…As far back as we could remember, we had heard about driving men crazy. We knew that merely touching a man’s sleeve could turn him to mindless lust.

“Don’t be a lint-picker,” Granny warned me — when I was five. “A woman’s touch makes a man go crazy.”

This, and — dear me, what to call it? aside from a flood — an entire library of saucy, ironic, riot grrl zine books called Flow about how punk and saucy your menstrual war stories are, a kind of icky medical materialism closely aligned to prurient narcissist cervix porn, and a trend among bloggers like Penelope Trunk to Tweet their having a miscarriage at a business meeting, or to post a picture of her naked hip with the bruise on it allegedly caused by her husband, has given rise to the next stage in pinny porn.

I will call it gyno porn.

It afflicts home reno bloggers who may or may not be third wave feminists. I think not. I think they’ve stolen the valorized gyno affect of the serious third wave feminist cultural histories of menstruation, blendered it up with Sex and the City Me Me Me plus the Fear Factor gross vittles ethos and come up with gyno porn. I think the Sexting Generation is just talking about their periods, their prenatal mucus plugs, their aching uterus, their ovulation IVF sagas and posting the latest meme — month by month or week by week bump pictures* — because it’s saucy and transgressive and seems kind of pornographic. I mean, how saucy and transgressive am I to monologue on the fascinating subject of my own vagina, Fallopian tubes, perineum, taint, between really educational and artistic posts on how to craft your own sunburst mirror out of cheap wooden shims from Lowe’s?**

TMI

Is it a Lesbian or paganist kind of narcissism thing by which I accrue pelvic power and become aristocratic, as King suggests? Does it make my man a real man, and is it therefore shuck and jive? Is it a class prerogative, a kind of extortionate sorority girl hazing ritual, a blue collar or Southern or peasant thing? The other person I know who does this, that is, delectates on the whole process of ovaries popping eggs into the baseball mitt of the Fallopian tube, and all, is no southerner unless the harder scrabble purlieus of the Black Sea count. She has strange veins of queer female shame and narcissism, as if female trbbl actually made her visible, and transgressively sexy, the way hypochondria works for neglected children. (Shame is narcissism, or vice versa, as far as I can make out.)

It just seems like flashing your crotch — some starlet eating her own placenta was actually the subject of a recent item in the baby-crazed People magazine — in your home renovation journal is, for the twenty-somethings, that which matches the chandelier earrings and the tube top. Call me fastidious. But I do not want my shelter porn adulterated with tedious Girls Gone Wild personal detail.

I tell you what. It is not remotely transgressive. Transgressive is like inviting somebody with COPD to dinner at your house and smoking (Ptolomea in the Inferno). Or a teacher fucking his student (Judecca). Abuse of privileged access. Nothing half so cute or as newsworthy or as accessible as your prenatal mucus plug, of which you are the first human on the planet to produce one and discuss it on the internet! Wow! What a woman!

Lucifer surveys Judecca, home of the teachers who betrayed their pupils, and vice versa, in Dante’s Inferno, by Gustave Dore

Even educated fleas do it.

We are not amused.

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*Britain’s Mail Online newspaper website recently became number one in hits due to its gossip aggregate feature, which has no less than five reports daily on celebrities’ “bumps”, accompanied by papparazzi shots.

**A project touted as one’s own invention, and bogarted without attribution, in one prominent gyno porn case, from This Old House.

(c) 2012, Jeannette Smyth. All rights reserved.

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Categories crafting, feminism
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