Amber Waves of Brain

A TABLE OF CONTENTS

2011-05-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

This blog is a collection of my writings.
The pieces appear in their original versions, sometimes different from those in print. I decided to use a blog, rather than my websites, which relate to my activities as an artist and filmmaker, for their on-line publication.

Angels of Light

a very short tribute to bearded drag queens

Berlin 1961
The United States films the building of the Berlin Wall, and other things as well.

Bike Boy
an attempt to grapple with one of Andy Warhol’s great, neglected “sexploitation” films

A Capitalist Hallucination
a visit to Enterprise Square USA in Edmond, Oklahoma

Fred Halsted: The Butt Interview
a word collage drawn from the published utterances of the great gay auteur

Government Issue
how a young girl from Steubenville, Ohio changed adult movies forever

Heliogabalus
“a farrago of cheap pornography”

Life in Film: Oscar Micheaux
a tribute to America’s greatest filmmaker

Morgan Fisher: An Impersonal Autobiography
What interests me in his work is exactly what he most wishes to suppress.

Nowhere to Hide
taking a stab at architectural criticism

Odires Mlászho
a too-brief mention of a fascinating artist almost unknown in the Northern Hemisphere

Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before
my essay on contemporary fans of The Smiths and Morrissey

Swallow
an essay on the films of Curt McDowell, and incidentally, what’s wrong with filmmaking today

We Are Not Amused
wish fulfillment: Curt McDowell’s painting of dead Beatles

A Witch Hunt at Amateur Hour
one of law enforcement’s follies, exhumed from the archives and examined

Berlin 1961

2011-05-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

Berlin Flash Frames derives from original camera rolls of 16mm film in the National Archives of the United States. The US Information Agency commissioned two cameramen to shoot this material around the time of the construction of the Berlin Wall. The USIA’s official mission (in the words of its website) is “to explain and advocate US policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign cultures,” i. e., to make propaganda. If this footage from Berlin became a specific propaganda film, I have not found it yet, but I am sure I have seen some of the shots in various newsreels and other USIA productions.

One of the cameramen responsible for this footage, Riecke (no first name given), photographed dramatic scenes featuring a handsome, dark-haired actor in a studio. This actor appears briefly with a hand-held slate in front of his face, something unlikely to happen in candid documentary footage. The slate identifying the take is not a clapperboard. No synchronous sound was recorded during production. The only sound accompanying this footage could have been voice-over narration and music. Spectators were never meant to hear the voice of the actor, who may not have been German. Behind the actor, there is a map of Eastern Europe; on it the outline of Czechoslovakia is visible. In a reverse shot, a map of the German Democratic Republic appears above and behind a pair of men costumed to look like bureaucrats. The conversation staged on this set is meant to be understood as taking place in a government office in East Berlin, somewhere an agency of the US government would not have been allowed to shoot. In the context of a newsreel, spectators might have believed this scene as a faithful representation of a man applying for relocation from the Soviet Zone of Occupation to one of the western zones. In its unedited state, the scene reads as false.

The process of falsification becomes most obvious around the flash frames. A flash frame is produced when the mechanism of a film camera slows down just before coming to a complete stop, thereby overexposing a bit of film stock – often no more than an eighth of a second – in between takes. As a camera is turned off, actors often relax, or extraneous figures enter the frame. These unguarded moments revealing the workings of dramatic filmmaking are not intended for a spectator’s gaze. Seeing them casts the whole endeavor in doubt. For this reason, a professional editor would have immediately cut out and set aside the flash frames in this material. By the prevailing aesthetic standards of 1961, they were of no use whatsoever.

The handsome actor also appears in exterior footage of crowds waiting to submit paperwork to officials in West Berlin. They may have been applying for housing assistance or for relocation to the Western part of Germany. The actor approaches people in line to ask for directions and advice as a way of making conversation. The bystanders in these scenes were not performers and were not supposed to have been aware that they were in a film, though some noticed the camera and looked directly into it. A few of these patient souls “bought” the performance of the actor who approached them. Others probably took him for a spy.

Thrusting actors into real life situations has been a consistent strategy throughout cinema history, mainly in comedies, but it is perhaps most appropriate to compare these scenes from Berlin in 1961 with other scenes shot in Germany a few years later by Edgar Reitz for Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von gestern (Anita G.), a. k. a. Yesterday Girl (1966). Anita G. (played by Kluge’s sister Alexandra) interacts with people in the world who may or may not be aware that she is a fictional character. In Kluge’s hands, the strategy has an effect of estrangement, producing a shock reminding us not only that we have been watching a movie, but also that movies are a part of the real world, and that the people who make them must take a stance toward it, whether they acknowledge this or not. Significantly, Yesterday Girl was shot with direct sound. Unlike the cameramen of the USIA, Kluge allowed his actor to have a voice.

Politicians spend their careers among groups of people who may or may not be aware of how much they have in common with handsome actors. Representations of politicians combine elements of the fictional and the non-fictional; their public appearances are all potential photo opportunities. One such photo opportunity appears in the USIA footage. Willy Brandt, then mayor of West Berlin, later Chancellor of the Federal Republic, takes a group of people to see Checkpoint Charlie. They ask Brandt questions, and he responds with emphatic earnestness. Once again, there is no sound. A politician’s main asset, the voice, was not recorded. (Did Brandt realize that there were no microphones present?) Only this group and the cameraman Riecke heard what Brandt had to say. It is highly unlikely that any finished film made from the footage would have communicated the substance of the interaction or would have acknowledged it as anything but “for show.”

In the work of a second cameraman, Jürgens, the film of Berlin in 1961 becomes something closer to a documentary. Jürgens shot exterior scenes, and due to sunlight leaking through the eyepiece of the camera, his flash frames are generally brighter and of longer duration than Riecke’s. Jürgens’ are also more complex, due to his habit of dropping the camera slightly as he released the button that engaged the motor. Over and over, as a flash frame begins, there is a brief downward tilt, creating a few frames (about a quarter of a second) of motion blur. The distortion has a dreamy quality. It looks as though the scene is being wiped away, only to be restored almost instantaneously in the next take. This unintentional formal effect, no more than an annoyance to the film’s editor, was what originally attracted me to the footage.

The frames on either side of these peculiar flash frames are just as compelling, if more prosaic. Among the subjects of these shots are soldiers of the occupying forces, including American GIs grinning in close ups; Berliners going about their business at the boundaries between occupation zones; and most important for the filmmakers to capture, workers building the Berlin Wall. This last sequence has the quality of surveillance footage. The film shows that at one time, it was possible to reach out and touch people on the other side of the wall, as American and Soviet soldiers could have done, if they hadn’t been armed and on alert. The East Berliners building the wall remained aloof while doing their work. As soon as they realized that they were being filmed, they quickly turned away. The workers knew that they were going to be in a Cold War movie, and they were reluctant to cooperate with its production, because they also knew that this particular movie would present them in an unflattering light. They may even have sensed that things would end badly for their building project. If this was the case, they knew more than their bosses, as workers often do.

The Berlin Wall separated not only two different economic and political zones, but two different historical times. The city of West Berlin became the shining example of The Free World, a capitalist showplace entirely surrounded by the territory of the German Democratic Republic. But the city was always on life support, even after the celebrated Berlin Airlift. It needed help from the generous Western Allies and the Federal Republic in order remain open for business, but its value during the Cold War was never economic. West Berlin was a symbol, a propaganda tool, and an immensely successful one. How could the administration of the GDR not have known that the Berlin Wall, though effectively stopping the “brain drain” of the professional classes to the West, would ultimately be a publicity debacle of tremendous proportions? They saw things in terms of another historical narrative, and the image they presented to the capitalist world was of little concern to them. They had no way of knowing that by the end of the 20th Century, it would be the only world that anyone but the most besotted idealists could imagine.

The silent document I have described, labeled “Berlin 1961” in the collection of the National Archives, has little accompanying description, thus it gives rise to speculation. In an attempt to understand it, I have watched the film many times. The footage reveals more with each viewing, though what it reveals is not what the sponsors of the film intended. A wall is constructed, but so is an image, an image with a political use: propaganda.

Nowhere to Hide

2011-03-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

The first time I saw Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, I parked beneath it without realizing what it was. At that time (1992) the place was a construction zone, since work on Ricardo Legorreta and Laurie Olin’s renovation of the ground level features of the square had just begun. This project was the last in a series of radical transformations of what had once been the intersection of the Camino Real and a small stream. Dedicated as public space in 1866, the square was called St. Vincent’s Park (after a college across the street), then Los Angeles Park, then Central Park, and then Pershing Square, in honor of the World War I general. After this final renaming, the park was planted with a great variety of exotic flora, adding shade and visual interest to the plan of John Parkinson, who later designed City Hall and Union Station. This was the fashionable Pershing Square, one that gradually fell into desuetude as businesses, cultural institutions and the wealthy residents who patronized them left for less densely developed parts of town. After World War II, there were repeated calls to do something about Pershing Square, which had become a gathering place for vermin, drunks and homosexuals, who made use of the trees as cover for cruising and sex. My father lived in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and he used to say about the city, “It was famous for its fruits and nuts. There was a nut on every street corner and a fruit behind every bush.” I imagine he was referring specifically to Pershing Square.

In the words of the historical signs currently in place, Pershing Square was “brutally excavated” in 1952 for an underground parking garage. Though the new plan was rather barren compared to what had existed before, there were still signs of life in the decades after it was completed. Pershing Square was the site of informal public gatherings, protests and festivals, though the centers of gay cruising had migrated west. The area experienced hard times once again, and an expensive attempt to make it attractive for the 1984 Olympics had no lasting impact.

After two separate design competitions and two years of construction at a cost of $14.5 million, Legorreta and Olin’s Pershing Square project was finally ready for public use in 1994. At that time the result, with its masses of multicolored concrete, a path shaped like a fault line, and a gigantic water feature, must have appealed to someone. Today it’s much clearer that the forced whimsy of the visual gimmicks and the strict sequestering of foliage and public sculpture behind barriers give the effect of a postmodern concentration camp. There is plenty of seating arranged theatrically in semi-circles and straight lines, but there is no spectacle to see, aside from pedestrians walking across paved expanses between signs that read “Keep off the grass” and “This space is reserved for private use.” The square offers little shelter from the elements – mainly relentless sunshine during mid-day – and nowhere to hide from surveillance. It makes life a little more uncomfortable for the homeless and mentally ill people who are the main population using the park after business hours. As in a science fiction scenario, those visiting the subterranean regions need have no interaction with the other elements of society occupying the surface of this hellish planet. I don’t drive anymore, so the parking garage is of no use to me. When I get out of the subway at Pershing Square station, I generally avoid the aboveground features of the park, which have an unpleasant, fortress-like aspect from that angle. I can also think of a half dozen other places I would rather go within three blocks of the park. As most other recently redeveloped urban spaces do, Pershing Square segregates the social classes, and the means by which it achieves this goal brutalize everyone.

Life in Film: Oscar Micheaux

2010-06-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

Published in frieze, Issue 129, March 2010, pp. 21-22.

I first saw Ten Minutes to Live (1932), directed by Oscar Micheaux, about fifty years after it was made. At the time, the film gave me an overwhelming impression of strangeness that had nothing to do with camp or kitsch, or any of the other aesthetic categories that might diminish or limit such a unique experience. Every second was (and is) riveting. Micheaux’s films are set in New York or Chicago or in the backward American hinterlands, but they also unfold in a dramatic space constructed by a man who, in terms of aesthetics, inhabited his own world. No written description can prepare a spectator for seeing Micheaux’s films; they are too complex and too remote from the mainstream that issued from the innovations of D.W. Griffith to be summarized in that way. With the passing years, Griffith’s infantile politics have become apparent even to the most benighted spectators, while Micheaux’s blunt impertinence seems fresh and contemporary.

Ten Minutes to Live is a film in two halves announced by old-fashioned intertitles: “The Faker” and “The Killer.” Much of “The Faker” consists of scenes of nightclub performances, shot with a static camera in synchronous sound and in single takes. A jazz band plays and people dance brilliantly, with joy and abandon. One of these musical numbers lasts a mere thirty seconds.

Pursued by a murderer, Letha Watkins, the protagonist of the second half of Ten Minutes to Live, takes a taxi ride from New York’s Grand Central Station to Westchester County. This long sequence has only one soundtrack: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony accompanies the action, but each time a car horn honks, the music cuts out completely. Letha arrives at her home in Westchester and pauses to smoke a cigarette. Micheaux represents this simple action in six separate shots. While Letha is on screen, it is as though time expands to allow greater attention to her gestures and to the play of light through the smoke and on the fabric of her dressing gown.

In order to conserve film stock, Micheaux went to great lengths to avoid shooting expensive dialogue sequences with synchronous sound. Near the end of the film, the murderer, Morvis, observes his potential victim Letha in her home talking to her boyfriend. While the lovers speak, Morvis is on screen; during pauses in the dialogue, the lovers are seen caressing and mugging silently for the camera. Morvis stands in front of a painted backdrop that appears in no establishing shot, so it is unclear if he sees the lovers from his position. The lovers’ voices accompanying Morvis’s close-ups suggest that he hears them, yet this is impossible. Morvis is a deaf mute.

Later, Morvis carouses with a treacherous woman at her house, but they are interrupted by a telegram announcing that policemen have surrounded them. The telegram comes from Morvis’s mother, who calls him a fool and informs him that he has been betrayed. Morvis abruptly turns on his female companion and a chase ensues. The chase goes in a circle, up and down the same staircase, as in a cartoon gag.

The scenes mentioned above bring to mind moments of rupture in a Jean-Luc Godard film, or Andy Warhol’s sound films, or vast sections of Doris Wishman’s exploitation oeuvre, yet Micheaux directed films decades before any of them. The only contemporary whose work Micheaux’s resembles is Dziga Vertov, and indeed, the scene of Letha smoking looks like a delightfully fetishistic out-take from Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Did Micheaux see Vertov’s films? Nothing is impossible, but this is highly unlikely.

What I have described may not give a clear indication of Micheaux’s body of work as a whole, because Ten Minutes to Live has little of the caustic drama that distinguishes his other films. Black characters strive to improve their lives, but antagonists thwart them at every turn. The white characters, when not naïve and well-meaning, operate with vicious impunity. Within Our Gates (1920), Micheaux’s politicized response to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), contains a lynching scene that prevented the film’s exhibition in the American South. Almost entirely suppressed in the US, the film was believed lost until it was rediscovered in a Spanish film archive in 1991. Body and Soul (1925) presents the story of a preacher – played with relish by Paul Robeson in his first starring role – corrupt enough to be familiar to modern audiences accustomed to ecclesiastical venality and hypocrisy. God’s Stepchildren (1938) transforms John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934) into a tragedy of extraordinary power; it ends with a woman who has abandoned her child taking one last look at him before she drowns herself. In Birthright (1939), a black man with a Harvard degree tries to found a school in his sleepy hometown, but he gets swindled; only a bequest from the town’s richest man (who may have been in love with him) can deliver him from his predicament.

Inflammatory on principle, Micheaux attracted the attention of censors, and as an independent filmmaker with no studio to defend him, he was completely vulnerable to their whims. Historians have theorized that most of the odd devices in Micheaux’s films are attempts to wrest coherent narratives from material that had been utterly mutilated by racist bureaucrats. This might have been the case with Ten Minutes to Live, which runs a scant 58 minutes, although I am not quite sure.

Apologists call Oscar Micheaux a pioneering African American filmmaker who did his best with limited resources, but whose works – it is sometimes implied – are rather inept. His achievements are undeniable: he was the first African American to direct a feature film; having directed over 40 films, he was by far the most prolific black filmmaker during the era of segregation; and furthermore, he was the only one to thrive during the transition from silent to sound cinema. But his films cannot be reduced to these facts, nor can they be comfortably assimilated into an historical narrative. To this day, no one has given a completely convincing account of why Micheaux’s films look the way they do. They remain mysterious cinematic objects. By now, I have seen most of Micheaux’s surviving feature films, some of them many times, and these viewings have only confirmed my original intuition: that all of his films’ formal eccentricities are the result not only of a perverse sense of humor and a bracing contempt for authority, but of sustained reflection and practice. America’s mainstream film culture, worshipping money and status above all else, has thus far been blind to the true virtues of Micheaux’s work. His controversial subject matter and radical film form have stranded him outside the official version of film history. I believe Oscar Micheaux is the greatest American filmmaker, and I hope that one day my claim will not seem outrageous at all.

Angels of Light

2010-06-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

Jack Coe hitchhiked across the country to San Francisco, where he found Hibiscus being crucified on the beach. Hibiscus had just broken away from the Cockettes to form the Angels of Light, and Jack became his disciple. The Angels of Light were committed to performing for free and feeding their audience. One performance included a meal of bananas and red wine, a kind of sacrament of phallic worship. Hibiscus, born George Edgerly Harris III, began his adult life as a peace activist. It is he who was shown putting a flower in the gun of a National Guardsman at a peace rally in a famous photograph from 1967. After his time as a Cockette and an Angel, Hibiscus allegedly appeared on a television soap opera (under another name, obviously) and finally became what one friend described as a “label obsessed Manhattan queen.” But during a few incandescent years, Hibiscus transformed himself and his fellows into something truly extraordinary.

This piece was written and read aloud for X-Tra magazine’s “One Image One Minute” benefit in January 2010.

A Capitalist Hallucination

2010-06-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

Published in Bidoun, no. 19 (Fall 2009) pp. 34-37.

The promotional literature for Enterprise Square USA, part of Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, announced “an Epcot style attraction that uses imaginative settings and dazzling special effects,” a place where “thousands of individuals experience a small taste of the vision for free enterprise.” This description, promising a taste of a vision, implied synesthesia and conjured an image of hallucinogen-fuelled tributes to Milton Friedman. While Enterprise Square failed to deliver that sort of cockeyed sublimity, it nonetheless deserves its own special place in the pantheon of Bible-Belt kitsch oddities.

A propaganda tool in the waning years of the Cold War, Enterprise Square had as its pedagogical goal the countering of “socialistic” ideas about economics circulating among America’s youth and their teachers. The attraction was the brainchild of Robert Rowland, director of the American Citizenship Center, a group of Christians who conveniently forgot Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and raised selfish ambition to the level of a theological principle—in other words, people who came to power with a vengeance with Reagan’s election to the presidency.

Despite the triumphalist euphoria at the time of its opening in 1982, Enterprise Square became dated almost instantly, as though its designers had never realized that the capitalist spectacle out in the world was already so powerful, adaptable, and polymorphous that it could not be easily tarted up for kids or adequately simulated in a building on a college campus. Entirely contrary to the agendas of its directors, the strength of Enterprise Square lay in its contradictions and failures, in the manner of the vernacular surrealism already plentiful in the Oklahoma City area. As a unique tourist attraction, it succeeded brilliantly, but how it ever functioned as pedagogy remains a mystery.

Visitors to Enterprise Square passed through various themed galleries, starting with America’s Heartbeat Rotunda, a multimedia bombardment reminding spectators that all parts of our lives have an economic aspect. A montage of disembodied voices, accompanied by dozens of flashing backlit transparencies, produced a portrait of that idealized economic unit, a “typical” nuclear family. At one point, a picture of a bride and groom appeared while a female voice cooed, “a perfect couple, and he just landed a great job.” In case the theme of marriage as a financial transaction akin to genteel prostitution escaped anyone, another female voice later shouted, “Spend! Spend! Spend!”

The Hall of Statistics was intended to impress upon visitors the sheer magnitude of the capitalist system. Several signs featured running totals of objects produced and consumed, for example, estimates of 200,016,000 eggs and 33,984,000 bricks laid in the previous twenty-four hours. Above a stock photograph of a boy in a baseball cap about to bite into a weenie, a provocative sign read, “Since 6 p.m. yesterday, there have been 60,264,000 hot dogs eaten.” This tally must have included the entire United States, but still, such consumption staggers the imagination.

The following gallery, with the cumbersome title Free To Be What You Want Under Our System, presented comedic films about professions into which a visitor could insert himself via closed-circuit television cameras. A doctor whose patient wakes up from anesthesia on the operating table and a policeman giving a granny a speeding ticket were but two characters representing possible careers available for rehearsal.

The Hall of Giants, presenting worshipful versions of monopoly capitalists’ lives, was (appropriately enough) the largest gallery at Enterprise Square and a focal point of the exhibitions. A group of enormous busts with interior spaces large enough to walk through paid tribute to figures such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. Presumably aware that such an exclusive group might appear sexist or racist, the planners of Enterprise Square also included Booker T. Washington and Helena Rubinstein as Giants. In the corridor leading up to this capitalist Valhalla, an effort at inclusiveness led to some especially bizarre choices. That space featured the also rans of a capitalist selection process, including John D. Rockefeller, who truly belonged with the Giants, but whose story and visage must have been judged to evince little redeeming human value. Other lesser giants included AFL president Samuel Gompers (an okay guy even if he didn’t play for the right team) and, most inexplicably, Emily Dickinson. Perhaps Enterprise Square meant to suggest that the reclusive American poet would have been a great capitalist, had she only left her house more often.

Beyond the Hall of Giants lay the Remarkable Supply Shop for Demanding Donut Dunkers, an interactive display staffed by a student worker. In a set like that of a game show, visitors voted for how much they would be willing to pay for doughnuts, which appeared to be circular hunks of plaster painted pastel colors such as periwinkle blue. A remarkably crude robot figure (more of a puppet, actually) presided over this speculation in doughnuts.

After passing through a pop art–themed gallery with large Campbell’s Soup cans and pseudo-George Segal sculptures, visitors reached the Great American Marketplace, one of Enterprise Square’s most celebrated exhibits. Large one, two, ten, and one hundred dollar bills with animatronic portraits in the middle formed a barbershop quartet singing the praises of the capitalist system, occasionally to the tune of “America the Beautiful.” In this musical interlude, “freedom,” a word much in evidence in the previous galleries, was drilled into spectators’ minds with merciless repetition, leaving no doubt as to the importance of the term in the vocabulary of free-market dogma.

To clarify what kind of freedom was at stake, the next gallery featured a multichannel video montage synched up to a tirade against government regulation. The video monitors were arranged in the shape of a face curiously inhuman in its features. With what looked like a bowler hat and an animal’s ears, the display brought to mind a cartoon bear as imagined by René Magritte.

The Magritte bear’s presentation was surreal in more ways than one for anyone with a grasp of economic history. His discourse of nostalgia for a time before the government interfered with big business did not acknowledge that the last moment of unregulated American capitalism was in fact an utter disaster: the run-up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the worst depths of the Great Depression that followed. By the time of Enterprise Square’s debut, the notion of a free enterprise system as synonymous with laissez-faire capitalism was no less an imaginative work—a leap of faith, even—than seeing the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.

Collective neoconservative hallucinations, while they animated American politics, were conspicuously lacking in drama at Enterprise Square USA, not least because its multimedia displays often malfunctioned, and, as in the department stores of the socialist East, its gift shop contained virtually nothing to buy. At a doorway to one of several galleries in a state of desuetude, a sign read, “Pardon our mess. Enterprise Square is moving into the 21st Century.” Alas, it didn’t move very far. The entire facility was closed for renovation in 2000, and two years later the administration of Oklahoma Christian University made the decision to close the attraction indefinitely.

Constructed at a cost of $15 million, the Enterprise Square building is the largest and most expensive on the Oklahoma Christian University campus, and the school is currently in the process of raising another $10 million to turn the premises into something else. Apart from a few offices and art studios, it’s still used as storage for the old exhibits of Enterprise Square USA. The projected reuse of the building as the Academy of Leadership & Liberty may not possess anything like the same attraction for connoisseurs of outdated technology that Enterprise Square USA had, but it will almost certainly have the virtue of being easier to maintain.

The new Academy will house permanent exhibitions such as the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame and the America’s Call to Freedom Collection. The latter consists of 214 pieces of art by Sam Ingram, a naval career officer who turned to art in his retirement. His work depicts stories from the Bible, scenes from the American Revolution, and the romance of the American West—in short, the whole reach of human history as envisioned by a Christian capitalist whose world view is consummately Middle American. Most of the collection is predictable patriotic figurative painting of an inspirational variety, but occasionally Ingram vents his resentment of America’s cultural elite. There are a few bizarre ventures into Pollock-style abstraction (including one entitled “Mexican Diarrhea”) and a cartoonish fantasy of a hirsute, effeminate Abstract Expressionist painting with his foot. The best of Ingram’s works recall the style of Paul Cadmus’ tempera paintings, though in more garish colors and without the sense of homoerotic frisson. While not as redolent of pathos as the broken-down spectacle of Enterprise Square USA, these monstrously tasteless paintings may eventually attract their own devoted fans.

We Are Not Amused

2010-06-05T12:20:00.001-07:00

Published in an edition of 100 to accompany the Curt McDowell exhibition, an uneven dozen broken hearts at 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco, February 15, 2009 – March 29, 2009.

I hate The Beatles. As Futurama’s mock-cuddly monopoly capitalist Mom would put it, they make me want to puke my face off. I suspect this has some connection with “Love Me Do,” the first single by the Liverpudlian mop-tops, released in the land of my Mom’s people (England) on the day I was born. Astrologers may impute cosmic significance to this coincidence, but as I know less than nothing about such matters, I attribute my perpetual resentment to years of brainwashing.

My earliest memories of commercial radio broadcasts are of The Beatles. They were truly unavoidable during their existence as a recording entity, and instead of fading away after their dissolution, they only seemed to loom larger in the public mind. There were the solo careers, the publicity surrounding various lawsuits, and with a crushing inevitability, the continued broadcast of their music out of a sense of mourning. Around this time, popular music began to look back on itself — always a bad sign — with various nostalgia crazes, revivals, and worst of all, the enshrining of the “greatest” in monstrous social Darwinist play lists and anthologies. For a moment in the mid-to-late 1970s, Punk would dissipate some of this fatuous piety, but the disturbance of business as usual was only temporary. I mention piety, and that is precisely what it was. The Beatles, their music, their images, their achievements, their chart positions, ad infinitum, became a new catechism for people who really could have been doing better things with their time, like making Molotov cocktails or teaching their children how to read.

In strictly practical terms, brainwashing was an impossibility, as the CIA (and the various North American psychology departments it funded) eventually discovered. The Communists were never capable of foisting Manchurian candidates upon us. Pure coercion did not lead to pure obedience. Pleasure was a far more effective tool of domination, as the great figures of public relations had known since the 1920s. The Eastern Europeans came around to this position some decades late. The Slovenian rock band Laibach released their version of The Beatles’ Let It Be in 1988, just before the definitive collapse of state socialism in the East. Laibach’s previous efforts embodied an un-ironic worship of authority taken to such an extreme that it became — so their fans claimed — something else. But there were no clues that it was all a send up, no moment of respite from the numbing seriousness, nothing to make timid westerners feel smart and superior. When Laibach chose The Beatles as the heroic figures at the center of their English language debut, it came as a surprise to those expecting Stalin or Hitler, but it shouldn’t have. Compared to the greatest (i. e., biggest selling) popular music group in history, authoritarian leaders were mere amateurs in matters of transforming human consciousness.

Twenty years before Laibach exuberantly “murdered” The Beatles’ songs, Curt McDowell presented the Fab Four dead on the slab. In his painting, all four Beatles have their chests cut open for an autopsy. Their remains are expressive and do not have the look of morgue meat. Paul clutches his abdomen, as though he felt the coroner’s incision. (Or perhaps Linda’s vegetarian cuisine did him in.) John has his arm around Paul, who inclines his head toward John’s. Ringo seems to be sniffing Paul’s armpit, or perhaps he is getting closer so as to be included in John’s embrace. Only George strains to get away, as though the prospect of a group hug was too much for him. McDowell painted this post mortem tribute to The Beatles during his first semester at San Francisco Art Institute, around the time he realized that his true métier was filmmaking.

We know the approximate date of the work because of a pendant painting of a calendar page reading November 1968. During this month, McDowell saw a copy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s album Two Virgins, which had recently been released in the U. S. The cover featured a photograph of John and Yoko in the nude. Within the mass of John’s untrimmed pubic hair, one can clearly discern his untrimmed penis. McDowell noticed this and revised his painting accordingly. He added a foreskin to John’s penis, but not having seen the other Beatle members, he left them alone. In the painting they appear circumcised.

Born in the region of the United States where circumcision is most common, McDowell may have been unaware that English baby boys are not routinely circumcised unless religious parents insist upon it. He used his own penis as a model for The Beatles’ penises, as can been seen in the photographic studies that McDowell and a friend made in preparation for the painting. This localized gesture of self-portraiture accounts for the curious uniformity of length and width — something extremely unlikely for any four unrelated men — in the painting’s four penises. It hardly seems possible that McDowell, who first came to San Francisco from Indiana in 1965, had not seen or touched a whole variety of foreskins before making this painting. Perhaps he had simply never had sex with Englishmen.

By performing a painterly mutilation of The Beatles’ genitalia, McDowell has unwittingly transformed three of them into Jews. He thus calls attention to the circumcised man closest to the boys, Brian Epstein. Manager, owner of a chain of record shops, master manipulator and mother hen, Epstein is widely regarded as one of the two chief architects of The Beatles’ success, along with George Martin, who produced their records. A depressive, frustrated homosexual with a weakness for rough trade and a mother with the exquisitely improbable name of Queenie, Epstein was a product of his age. Until the last month of his life, he lived the criminalized homosexuality that had been bequeathed to England by that vicious old Queenie herself, Victoria. Reputedly madly in love with John — a love that some say was once consummated unhappily — Epstein experienced a closeness with The Beatles that was necessarily platonic. He could never lounge around naked with “the boys,” feeling John’s arm around him, casually enjoying physical intimacy. In a sense, McDowell’s painting corrects this slight and dispels the homosexual panic by presenting three circumcised men, three Epsteins, who lie with John, each waiting his turn for a hug from him. With open chests, they have exposed their hearts completely to each other in a utopian if lifeless fourgy.

In 1967, Brian Epstein asked an English homosexual of another stripe, Joe Orton, whose plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot had recently scandalized London theatergoers, to write a film vehicle for The Beatles. Orton seemed like a properly subversive choice to sustain the film career of a pop group that had quickly become an institution. A working class kid from Leicester, Orton escaped from provincial council flat hell with a scholarship to RADA, then escaped from school with an older man named Kenneth Halliwell. Not content with the domestic joys to be had in an Islington bed-sit, Orton constantly prowled for sexual hookups around London. Never in the closet, always on the make, Orton was the model for a generation of gay men who would leave homosexuals like Epstein in the dust. That is the myth, anyway. In fact, Orton lied about his age, and was a year older than Epstein. The two of them might even have frequented the same cottages, or public rest rooms, in search of sex. Unfortunately, neither lived to see what followed the decriminalization of homosexuality. The two died within a week of each other in 1967, Epstein by accidental barbiturate overdose, and Orton famously at Halliwell’s hands.

Like the penises in McDowell’s painting, The Beatles in Orton’s screenplay, Up Against It, are almost indistinguishable. Orton didn’t even bother to give them separate names. They act as a team, and at one point, they end up in bed together. Brian Epstein was not amused. To give Orton “notes,” Epstein called him on holiday, while in bed with Halliwell and a couple of Tangiers’ handsomest boys.

Epstein: As I understand it… [The Beatles] are all in bed with each other. No no no no no no.

Orton: Why?

Epstein: Why? Because these are normal, healthy boys.

Orton: I take it they all sleep together.

Epstein: They do not.

Orton: Ooh, but they’re all very pretty. I imagined they just had a good time. Sang, smoked, fucked everything in sight, including each other. I thought that was what success meant.

Epstein: Mr. Orton, success means… well, it means respect for the public. Besides, one of the boys is happily married.

No one could possibly know what, if anything, actually transpired between Orton and Epstein. The dialogue above is from the film Prick Up Your Ears, based upon Alan Bennett’s script, an adaptation of John Lahr’s Orton biography, which was based in turn upon literary agent Margaret Ramsay’s Orton diary typescript, which derived ultimately from the original diary of Joe Orton. The scene as it was imagined for cinema might contain not even one iota of truth. The version that can be substantiated by historical research is blandly prosaic: the Up Against It script was returned without comment. Orton’s response to The Beatles and their manager: “Fuck them.”

The fictionalized scene may be untrue in detail but not in spirit. Paul McCartney once talked about the aborted Orton film project in an interview with Roy Carr:

The reason why we didn’t do Up Against It wasn’t because it was too far out or anything. We didn’t do it because it was gay. We weren’t gay and really that was all there was to it. It was quite simple, really. Brian was gay... and so he and the gay crowd could appreciate it. Now, it wasn’t that we were anti-gay — just that we, The Beatles, weren’t gay.

Paul, who may well hold the record for number of instances of the word “gay” in a single utterance, could simply not stop making himself perfectly clear. Brian Epstein, it seems, was not the villain of the piece after all.

In one of his few large-scale paintings, Curt McDowell managed to accomplish what a modern English dramatist, buckets of Hollywood money, and sadly, the man who loved them most could not accomplish: he got The Beatles to lie down naked together for all the world to see. And he had to kill them to do it.

Swallow

2010-06-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

Published in an edition of 100 to accompany the Curt McDowell exhibition, an uneven dozen broken hearts, at 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco, February 15, 2009 – March 29, 2009.

I once brought up the topic of Curt McDowell’s films in conversation with an administrator at Art Center College of Design, where I have worked in an adjunct capacity for the last few years. A student had told this administrator that I taught an avant-garde film course, and he asked me if I had shown any of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films. I said no, and he ventured the opinion that Barney had “really raised the bar in experimental filmmaking.” I asked, “In what respect, production values?” He responded, “Yes, but in other ways, too.” Caught a bit off guard by someone skeptical of his latest diktat, he asked what interested me. I mentioned Curt McDowell and offered a brief but explicit précis of his film Loads. My conversational foray left this man temporarily speechless, so I continued to talk about my course. Whatever thoughts crossed the administrator’s mind as his eyes glazed over, it was clear that he was a man who had learned the main lesson of the great “cultural producers” of the era. What mattered in art was not what a marginal character like McDowell had to offer: frisson mixed with a faint hint of nausea, exchanges of bodily fluids, cheap thrills; what truly mattered, even to a guy who had named his masterwork after a testicular muscle, was access to money. If one could see where the money went, in art as in Hollywood movies, then high seriousness and legitimacy would follow. This conversation took place during a boom in the art market, when people at art schools could talk like film industry executives without being laughed at. Perhaps now that the great gaseous bubble of cultural production is getting deflated, another conversation can begin.

A while later, around the time of a precipitous decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I showed Curt’s films to my avant-garde film class. The students’ reactions, as expressed in their discussions and weekly writing assignments, ranged from the indignant to the unabashedly enthusiastic. A student in the former camp had this to say:

I would be shocked if McDowell wasn’t a sexaholic. I still can’t believe that Curt filmed his sister getting screwed, the thought of it really creeps me out. Also, I think I would be very happy if I never saw another man get raped, or a man receiving a blow job from another man. That kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Oh well, the films we saw this week were pretty cool and I enjoyed them a lot.

I wonder if Curt would have recognized the writer’s attitude, and how many people reacted this way in the 1970s and 80s, when he was around to present his films in person. Curt probably would have been surprised to learn that the writer of the comment was a young person, all of 19 years old. Perhaps Curt would also have been shocked at the new “generation gap” that has arisen between young prudes and their libertine elders.

One of the films on view in my class was Nudes: A Sketchbook (1974). When Curt made it, everyone he knew considered sex a cheap way to have fun rather than a potentially addictive activity. (Is there such a thing as “sex withdrawal”? Do people who suffer from it get delirium tremens or the like?) Regarding the charges of rape and consensual sodomy leveled against Curt, he does seem to take advantage of a few men in the film: while one man shoots a load on his sister, Curt can just about be discerned in the shadows playing with the man’s ass; Curt reenacts groping a hunky young letter carrier who passed out at a wild party he stumbled into; a man, in another charmingly crude reenactment, gets knocked unconscious in a dark passage, then gets his own dark passage explored; a male friend receives Curt’s oral services while perusing a girlie magazine. When I called the bait-and-switch tactic in the last scenario “the oldest trick in the book, a porn film staple,” one student loudly declared that nothing like that had ever happened to him. (A shame.)

Despite the bluster and protest, Nudes: A Sketchbook, as well as the other films I showed, clearly spoke to some need in the students. In keeping with Art Center’s sexual harassment policy, I told the class that anyone offended by the content of Curt’s movies could take flight, but no one did. The student who wrote the comment above, in unconscious imitation of Sarah Palin, mentioned that films of certain activities “kinda rubbed me the wrong way,” but then in a surprising and contradictory concluding sentence admitted, “I enjoyed them a lot.” Either the woman threw this in as a sop to an old, perverted instructor, or it took her pages of prose to get to the five words she really meant.

Curt McDowell had no use for such evasion and disavowal. He arrived in San Francisco from Indiana in the 60s, went looking for what he wanted, and offered no apology whatsoever for getting it. The great George Kuchar was one of many to be ensnared by Curt’s considerable sexual charisma. In the book Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, George describes his welcome as a new arrival from the East Coast:

The first student I ever laid eyes on was the underground filmmaker Curt McDowell. He was sitting on my desk, wearing cut-off jeans and swinging his bare legs in the stuffy setting. He had on a tee-shirt and woven sandals of straw, looking very much like a big boy with a huge appetite for cinematic knowledge (and for his teacher).

That meeting led to other meetings outside the classroom, and before too long, Curt (the “satyr” as he is called in the book) and George (the “secret pervert” as he calls himself) were a couple. It is hardly surprising, considering the satyr’s appetites, that tears and anguish quickly followed. As George explains, “Curt and I were going together, and perhaps we fondled too many sticks of dynamite for our own good.” This brief summary of their affair leads me to another student comment that is worth noting:

Dear Mr. Kuchar,

I am in love with you. When I say that, I am not implying that sort of intellectual love that goes along with deep admiration for a predecessor’s work. I mean love…. I realize that you are older than I and homosexual. I am not a man, but it is said by enlightened people that true love is unattachment, that because you love someone so much, you want what is best for them, including loving someone other than yourself. I think you, George, would agree with this. I accept my fate. I am miserable, unhappy with unrequited love. I am letting you love whomever you must for your own happiness, thus creating my own misery. The only choice left is to delve into my own work — thus devoting myself to you even more.

This student, echoing and expanding on sentiments expressed in Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, has summed up George’s dilemma. The traits that draw this woman to her beloved are precisely those that will break her heart, but by taking refuge in art, she can indulge (and redeem) all the wretched, maudlin excesses of misdirected lust.

Curt, the satyr himself, was no mere Lothario counting his conquests. He had his own dramas of unrequited affection, and he returned to them over and over in his films. Perhaps Curt’s films do not approach the grand thwarted passions that pervade his teacher’s works, but they have a raw power in their directness. There is an aching pathos in Curt’s halting delivery of unadorned autobiographical monologues. He is unashamed in his sexual behavior but reluctant to make his account of it. He knows that by telling his tales, he is revealing dark undercurrents in the daily erotic life of a gay man who wants what he can never truly have.

From the evidence of his films, it seems that Curt’s greatest pleasure was in giving straight men pleasure. As George Kuchar memorably put it, Curt enjoyed “lapping up cream filled Ding Dongs.” Never one to shrink from a challenge, Curt loved nothing more than blowing (and rimming) guys who couldn’t care less whether he got off. Curt applied himself to this service with an almost evangelical sense of mission. Today — when young Republicans go to jail on charges of “criminally deviate conduct” for sucking off their sleeping bunkmates — Curt would be called a compulsive fellator, and would gravitate to any number of websites, 12-step groups, or places where recently released convicts congregate. During the 1970s, Curt was a sexual pioneer, making movies about practices that most men preferred to keep quiet, then as now. Curt found his own fun, and most importantly for him as an artist, he also found a number of men who were vain, indifferent, or desperate enough to be filmed while they reached their climax.

Curt McDowell, like Pasolini before him, did not conform to society’s expectations of the abject, straight-chasing homosexual. Curt and Pier Paolo both knew what many men engaging in these sexual games eventually learn: within the surrender of giving pleasure without taking any in return, there is a species of control. The man with the rock hard cock in need of relief thinks he calls the shots, but every moment is staged and directed by the man doing the draining. As the title character of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge confides to her journal:

The sailor who stands against a wall, looking down at the bobbing head of the gobbling queen, regards himself as master of the situation; yet it is the queen (does not that derisive epithet suggest primacy and domination?) who has won the day, extracting from the flesh of the sailor his posterity, the one element in every man which is eternal and (a scientific fact) cellularly resembles not at all the rest of the body. So to the queen goes the ultimate elixir of victory, that which was not meant for him but for the sailor’s wife or girl or simply Woman.

Cineastes from the days of silent cinema to the latest pay-per-view scenes on the internet have treasured the knowledge of this elixir and transformed it into art. PPP, whose oral escapades with the young men of the Friuli lost him his job and his membership in the Communist Party, fled to the slums of Rome, where for years he profited from his obscurity, avidly consuming cruel tales of working class life and rivers of working class spunk. (It’s hard to miss the admiring descriptions of men’s crotches occurring throughout Ragazzi di Vita once the details of Pasolini’s life are known.) Alas, Pier Paolo never got around to directing a cum shot, but there is little doubt that he was capable of imagining one as hilarious and profane as the shot of the devil’s asshole expelling priests at the end of Canterbury Tales.

The cum shot, that staple of porn straight, gay and bi, cannot satisfy the truly devoted cum pig. All that juice spilling onto bellies, butts and faces goes to waste. A memorable, if atypical, scene from the early 90s gay porn video Doin’ Hard Time features a fat, hairy, balding (fully clothed) photographer seducing his model. He devours the model’s cock so avidly that when the magnificent youth finally ejaculates, only a thin white foam limning the greedy queen’s mouth is visible. Such a mistake was not allowed to occur again in the work of Latino Fan Club director Brian Brennan. The scene reminds us of a central contraction in filming sex: what feels (and tastes) good does not necessarily “read” on camera. In a recurring shot in Loads, Curt plays with this contradiction as he fellates one of his tricks. Curt nibbles on the head of a man’s cock, waiting for it to erupt, and even though his eyes are closed, his hesitation seems to indicate a thought. He asks himself, do I coax this cock to shoot a wad on my face, or do I just get things over with and take it all down my throat? The answer, after some teasing, is the one that makes the most sense for the film. The suspense is broken at last by a thick line of semen spurting over Curt’s nose and forehead.

Coitus that plays well and the moment that is camera-ready have won out in the present era of immediately accessible porn. Boys who have been watching money shots in movies for several years before their first real, physical sex act wouldn’t think of ejaculating during intromission. This is what Larry Clark discovered in the course of interviewing young men in Impaled, his contribution to the art/porn film Destricted. A band of guys from the Inland Empire, some aspiring porn actors and others just up for a good time, tell Clark that they imitate what they have seen since childhood: shaved pubic hair, lots of tattoos, and a preference for shooting cum on (rather than in) their partners. If a few of them have tasted semen, they aren’t admitting it to Clark, the director who has taken an interest and might make them stars. Only an old pro, actress Nancy Vee, cops to her pleasure in lapping up seed. She makes Daniel, the MILF-loving male talent of the movie, groan in ecstasy, but when the climactic moment arrives, we get to see very little spunk. Nancy, with a fiendish grin, admits, “I swallowed most of it.” She chuckles because she has done a naughty thing, but she knows that she can get away with it. Impaled is a documentary, and the cum shot is not the dramatic and economic necessity that it would be in a real porn movie.

During the late 1970s, another MILF had her say about swallowing. Citrus spokesperson and free-lance moral entrepreneur Anita Bryant recognized a threat in semen consumption, which she understood to be a kind of cannibalism. “The male sperm” as she put it, is the essence of life with the greatest concentration of blood in the body. In her 1978 Playboy interview she decried the vampiric sin of drinking cum. Pasolini did not live long enough to read this condemnation of his favorite pastime, so we are deprived of the pithy response he no doubt would have made in the pages of Corriere della Sera; but gay men in San Francisco pounced with relish upon new pronouncements from this Baptist virago. Curt McDowell’s rejoinder to Bryant’s pseudo-medical rationale for gay-bashing came in the form of the film Loads. Made in 1980, Loads followed the success of the “Save Our Children” campaign but preceded the first wave of AIDS panic. In that transitional moment, around the time the jovial fascism of Ronald Reagan got him elected president by a landslide, it was still possible to make a case for cum guzzling. Curt never wrote a manifesto extolling the beneficial effects of drinking cum on filmmaking. He put his convictions into practice, and the results inspire fascination, discomfort, and admiration (in almost equal measure) in contemporary audiences. This polarizing effect is strongest among those spectators whose childhood president was Reagan, the man who told us that big city perverts were really some sort of vermin to be ignored, demonized, even killed. Like all skillful grifters, he did it with a smile on his face.

In the days when The Rocky Horror Picture Show played every weekend in major American cities, eager spectators/participants would shout the question, “What’s your favorite high protein drink?” and from the film, Frank N. Furter would answer, “Come!” Now that swallowing during oral sex hovers between the categories of “possibly unsafe” and “unsafe” sexual activity, and many men must perform the calculation of how many hours ago they brushed their teeth before performing fellatio, jokes about the nutritional value of jism tend to fall flat. The juice extracted from so many anonymous cocks can no longer serve as a rejuvenating force for cinema, at least outside the sequestered world of porn. Perhaps the lack of semen swallowing among high-profile directors is the real reason movies are so anemic these days. No matter how much liver these boys eat (or how much money they have access to) their silly macho pablum fails to exude any real energy. To take only one example among many, it is impossible to imagine Michael Bay swallowing another man’s cum. In his office decorated with pictures of his most famous ejaculations — movie explosions — Bay can probably muster little more than masturbating and licking a watery load from his fist after an afternoon of screaming into a megaphone, jettisoning it to the ground, then starting all over again with a new megaphone. The throat that barks can never get the soothing balm that all those grips and gaffers have percolating inside their bulging pants. The man who blew up Alcatraz doesn’t have the goods to direct The Gospel According to Matthew, and if he ever saw Loads in the course of his education, what he took from the experience has been buried too deep to benefit his filmmaking. Michael Bay attended Art Center, but he graduated before I arrived to teach there. If he had swung his bare legs in my direction, I doubt I would have given him so much as a second look.

Odires Mlászho

2010-06-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 24, 2008.

At São Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho this fall, I saw for the first time the sexy and cerebral, disciplined and dissipated work of Odires Mlászho. He juxtaposes ordinary mortal faces and Roman portrait sculptures with geometric rigor in his collage series A Fossil Dig Full of Hooks. He cunningly cements pages of reference books together in his sculpture Enciclopédia Britânica. His most powerful works (a series called Butchers and Master Apprentices) involve elaborate collage rearrangements of male nudes that manage to look at once disemboweled and bloodless. Diaphanous yet strong, a body becomes a deconstruction of a flesh-colored Herman Miller lamp.

Though this piece is miniscule and hardly does justice to Mlászho’s work, I have included it to draw attention to an artist who has not yet been exhibited in North America.

Heliogabalus

2010-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Varius Avitus Bassanius, called Elagabal and later known in his infamy as Heliogabalus, ruled Rome from 218 to 222 of the Christian Era. He was a pampered, flamboyant youth who became emperor through the machinations of his mother and grandmother. As high priest of a Syrian sun god, he attempted to impose his eastern religion upon Rome, and as a result of this as well as other transgressions, he was brutally murdered by soldiers in the army that had formerly supported his rise to power.

Unless an emperor had something to gain politically from linking himself to the person he succeeded, he generally waged a propaganda war against his predecessor. This sort of posthumous punishment, or damnatio memoriae, often took concrete form. Sculptures of an emperor were desecrated (protruding parts such as penises or noses were hacked off) and the marble recycled. Imperial portraits of a youthful Alexander Severus bear a strong resemblance to Heliogabalus, not only because the two were cousins, but also because Heliogabalus’ portraits were recarved in the image of his successor. Most surviving likenesses of Heliogabalus come from coins minted during his reign. The iconoclasm directed against Heliogabalus was so vast that intact portrait busts of him are extremely rare; one exists in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

The ideological campaign against Heliogabalus was still more effective. Tales of Middle Eastern effeminacy and luxury had furthered Roman political interests for hundreds of years. The emperor’s Syrian origins suggested perversities foreign to an officially virtuous and chaste Roman culture. Many elements of Heliogabalus’ biography — his selecting government officials based not on their abilities but on the size of their genitals, his masquerading as a palace whore, his offering a reward to whomever could perform a sex change operation on him — are likely exaggerations at the very least. There is little reliable information about Heliogabalus; on the other hand, the apocryphal literature is extensive.

The chief source of this material is the Historia Augusta, a long text by six authors including Heliogabalus’ biographer Aelius Lampridius. The great connoisseur of perversions Robert Burton and even the towering figure of Edward Gibbon took the text as authentic, but subsequent scholars have demonstrated that most aspects of the work are fictional or plagiarized, and have gone as far as questioning the very existence of Lampridius. One diligent classicist called Historia Augusta a “farrago of cheap pornography.”

Michel Foucault once remarked that fist fucking was the only sex act invented in the 20th Century. Many have repeated this statement without question, but I can’t imagine how it could be true. Fist fucking is possible in any group of people with considerable leisure and inventiveness, an obsession with power, and perhaps most importantly, an adequate plumbing system. The Roman aristocracy had all of these things, and in the absence of religious proscriptions, some men of this class must have tried it, if not on their peers, at least on their slaves.

Roman emperors engaging in fist fucking: as scholars say, it is not attested. No known history of ancient Rome describes the practice. Even fictional accounts neglect it. For instance, The Memoirs of Hadrian describes that emperor’s love for the beautiful youth Antinous with such daintiness that physical acts between them are almost impossible to contemplate. Samuel Delany’s Phallos, a literary fraud presented as a fragmentary text of obscure origin like Historia Augusta, can be understood as a corrective to Marguerite Yourcenar’s pudeur. Interest in the intimate capacities of ancient Romans persists to the present day, even — or especially — in the realm of mass culture. Caligula appeared on an episode of television’s Venture Brothers, and when circumstances required, his imperial person concealed the magical Hand of Osiris inside his rectum.

In the absence of evidence for or against fisting, it is tempting to fill the imperial void with plausible fabrication. If I had to nominate Rome’s most likely to be fist fucked, I would choose Heliogabalus. He was definitely what we moderns would call a “size queen.” His life in Historia Augusta contains the piquant Latin phrase bene vasatorum, which recent translators render as “well hung men.” The author formerly known as Lampridius wrote that Heliogabalus “received lust in all the orifices of his body” (a phrase repeated with relish in The Anatomy of Melancholy); and furthermore, that “he invented certain new kinds of vice, even going beyond the perversions used by the debauchees of old, and he was well acquainted with all the arrangements of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero.”

In speculating about what lies beyond the excesses of Rome’s most decadent emperors, I am taking a license, but one that others have taken before me. Heliogabalus as a mythic figure has inspired many artists and writers, including Antonin Artaud, who expressed a serene indifference to questions of strict historical authenticity: “I have written this Life of Heliogabablus… to help those who read it to un-learn history a little; but all the same to find its thread.” New access to data, and with it, new forms of cheap pornography, admit new possibilities for finding the thread of history. Wild speculations may be proven correct after all.

Like an ancient literary fraud, this text has served different purposes at different times. It was first a part of an (unsuccessful) application essay for the Rome Prize. An expanded version of that text became part of a conversation with Bruce Hainley published in Bidoun in a censored form. (Mention of fisting was considered to have an adverse effect upon the magazine’s distribution in the Middle East.) Finally, an unexpurgated text appeared in my book Heliogabalus, published by 2nd Cannons in 2009.

A Witch Hunt at Amateur Hour

2010-06-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

Published in Tearoom (Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons, 2008).

“…it is logical to assume that this is no local phenomenon, although this is possibly the first place where it has been so shockingly and authentically documented.”

— anonymous editorial in the Mansfield News-Journal, August 22, 1962

Over the course of three weeks during the summer of 1962, the city of Mansfield, Ohio produced an hour-long film of men having sex in a public restroom. Intended for use as evidence in a court of law, the untitled film has thus far been the only one of its type to reach a wider audience. The Mansfield Police Department publicized its efforts in developing new investigative techniques and produced the how-to film Camera Surveillance with some of its footage. No other police department followed Mansfield’s example. The operation required more money (for film stock and equipment) and more manpower (for hours of surveillance work) than any city was willing to commit to tracking down perpetrators of a non-violent crime. Even law enforcement officers who admired Mansfield Police’s ingenuity must have wondered why the department had gone to such lengths to arrest and convict a group of men having sex with one another. Mansfield prosecuted its cases only a few years before the decriminalization of sodomy, first in Illinois, then in many other states, including Ohio.

A unique set of circumstances made the production of this film possible. Earlier that summer, a man named Jerrell R. Howell had molested two young girls in a Mansfield park. When the girls attempted to escape from him, he grabbed them and stomped them to death. Police apprehended him within hours, and he quickly confessed to the crime. In a defiant gesture probably calculated to take others down with him, Howell taunted the police for not knowing what was happening in the very center of their community. He said he had gotten his first blow job — presumably the act that initiated his criminal career — in the men’s room under Mansfield’s Central Park. Hoping to diffuse public outrage at a savage crime and playing on what was then a popular belief in the connection between child molestation and homosexuality, Chief of Police Clare Kyler decided to crack down on “sex deviants.” In this atmosphere of heightened vigilance, one particular vigilante, Richard Wayman, stepped forward to help the police, and his contribution was crucial.

Wayman, the director of a non-profit organization called Highway Safety Foundation, donated film and offered the foundation’s cameras to the Mansfield Police for use in its surveillance operation. Highway Safety Foundation had previously achieved notoriety by producing and circulating instructional films featuring gory images of car accidents. Views of this carnage were intended to scare young spectators into driving safely. The most complete history of the organization can be seen in Bret Wood’s documentary Hell’s Highway.

Richard Wayman’s role in Highway Safety Foundation, his character and motivations, as well as the decline of the organization, remain controversial even now. Former Mansfield Chief of Police John Butler defends Wayman in his memoir The Best Suit in Town. Private investigator and former Mansfield journalist Martin Yant, in his book Rotten to the Core, tells a far less flattering story. (Both Butler and Yant are interviewed in Hell’s Highway, and their complete disagreement is one of the best passages in the film.) The various accounts of Wayman’s activities differ so much that it is impossible to form a precise impression of him. Apparently, Wayman himself preferred it that way. He seemed to combine in equal measure aspects of two great American types, the concerned citizen and the confidence man.

Wayman was an insomniac and amateur photographer who, like some Midwestern vernacular Weegee, listened to a police radio and went out with officers on calls. His main interest was car accidents, and he eventually obtained permission to visit the scenes of gruesome crashes. When asked about Wayman’s special relationship with law enforcement in Hell’s Highway, John Butler, not given to rhetorical flourishes or references to J. G. Ballard and Krafft-Ebing, answered simply, “he just liked police,” with a trace of impatience. Butler’s tone suggests a wish to hide his bending of department rules for Wayman, who as a civilian wasn’t supposed to be riding around in patrol cars. Perhaps Butler’s tone also betrays something else, a realization about how peculiar his friend’s behavior appeared to outsiders. In the many years since Wayman made his impression on Mansfield, Butler has had time to reflect upon the impulses behind his friend’s activities, and doubts may have formed about the purity of Dickie Wayman’s motives.

With the equipment borrowed from Wayman, Mansfield Police Officer Bill Spognardi, assisted by Officer Dick Burton, photographed activities in the Central Park men’s room from behind a two-way mirror. Spognardi’s reflection is visible in this mirror at intervals in the film, especially when the scene is dark. Spognardi was responsible for the filmmaking decisions: camera angles (quite limited, since he was hiding in a confined space), camera movement, and duration of shots. Markings on the leaders of the film indicate that he exposed only one 100-foot roll of film stock, lasting 2 minutes and 45 seconds, per day. The element of choice — Spognardi’s — has an importance not previously mentioned in accounts of the case. The cameraman often filmed activities he thought might lead to sex but didn’t; sometimes he filmed other moments that simply caught his attention. The film includes images of men combing their hair and washing their hands, as well as a shot of a man positioning a transistor radio to find the best reception. There are also images of children, including a boy grabbing a newspaper from a trash can, and boys hiding out to smoke cigarettes. Spognardi’s training had prepared him to see evidence of child molestation. When a man in a toilet stall exposed himself to one of the boys, the investigation came to a hasty conclusion. Spognardi could not film this violation, because his position did not afford him a clear view inside the stalls. The most serious crime — the sort of act the police had expected to film, the one involving a child — thus remained invisible.

What is missing from the police film exerts its own fascination. Officer Spognardi did not photograph the hours of dead time; the fleeting conversations between men cruising for sex; and quite possibly the activities of men he knew but preferred not to implicate, or men too powerful to offend. There is no reverse angle, no image of the cameraman’s reaction to seeing men touch each other while he observed them unseen. At certain moments the film reveals this reaction indirectly, as when a particularly attractive young man in a white t-shirt lowers his pants for a man in a stall, and the camera tilts up and down frenetically. On a couple of occasions, it is just possible to discern in the mirror an image of Spognardi licking his lips.

Spognardi’s response to what he filmed might lead some to conclude that he was gay. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Mansfield of 1962, only a man considering himself normal in every respect would allow himself to participate in such an elaborately perverse scenario. In that place and time, no gay man would feel safe enough (or secure enough in his self-hatred) to enjoy this level of complicity with authority. A man’s reputation could suffer only so much speculation in Mansfield, which was a far cry from the Washington of J. Edgar Hoover or the New York City of Roy Cohn. Of course, even men who feel completely normal let their curiosity get the better of them from time to time, and there have been many vice cops who, like Mae West, could resist anything but temptation. In the words of the prosecuting attorney, “sending uniformed or plainclothes officers into the restroom for frequent observation produced no results.” On the present topic — the thoughts and feelings of a man in a closet filming other men masturbating and having sex — we cannot speak of that which we do not know.

II.

“The sex pervert, in his more inoculous [sic] form, is too frequently regarded as merely a queer individual who never hurts anyone but himself.”

— narration from Camera Surveillance

The question of who was actually gay among the suspects in the Central Park men’s room is one that, regardless of so much visual evidence of sodomy, will probably never be answered with any certainty. As many as a third of the men arrested were married, and most of them had children. Still others must have been sexually active with men exclusively, but were loath to call themselves gay. It is difficult, if not impossible, for modern spectators to find self-identified gay men in this film of sexual activities, but the authorities who dealt with these men at the time and in person had much less trouble. It is very likely that they singled out anyone acting like “a queer individual” (to use the words of Camera Surveillance’s anonymous narrator) for especially harsh treatment.

If some suspects got the book thrown at them, others got off comparatively lightly. Otho Thomas, an African American man 48 years old at the time of his arrest, challenged the right of the state to prosecute him, and lost on appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. If anyone can be said to have survived the tearoom bust with reputation intact, it was Otho Thomas. He was a married man, and remained married to the same woman, living in the same house, long after his imprisonment. He was a church deacon in 1962, and be became one again after his parole. He died in Mansfield at age 93. (This information comes from Kevin Jerome Everson, who interviewed people in Mansfield, his hometown, in 2007. He found a number of older men who knew about the Central Park tearoom, but none of them would admit to having been inside the place, for fear of being called gay.) Though Otho Thomas seemed to have experienced the least disruption in his personal life, he nonetheless served his full sentence: one year and six days, first at the Ohio Penitentiary, then at the Mansfield Correctional Institution.

By comparing the mug shots in Camera Surveillance, the unedited evidence footage, and the prisoner registers of the Ohio Penitentiary and State Reformatory, one can identify two men by name: Vernon Sheeks and Roger Pifer. In these two cases, the prison records have faces, as well as names and numbers, associated with them. Both men received harsh sentences; one with an obvious legal justification, the other with none.

Of all the men arrested, Vernon Sheeks served as an exemplary figure, since his case “proved” the connection that the police insisted on making between child molestation and homosexuality. He was 51 years old and single at the time of his arrest. Sheeks had been arrested on a charge of sex perversion in Los Angeles 17 years before and had just been released after four years in the Ohio Penitentiary for assault upon a minor. The evidence film shows him receiving anal sex from two men. Unlike the rest of the suspects, he was charged with two counts of sodomy carrying a sentence of 2 to 40 years in prison. After his conviction, he was held as a psychopath at Lima State Hospital for nearly two years. He subsequently served five and a half years of prison time, first at the Ohio Penitentiary, then at the Mansfield Correctional Institution. Vernon Sheeks was the last of the men arrested in the Mansfield tearoom busts to get his final release from parole, in December 1971, over nine years after his arrest.

Roger Pifer, age 29 and single at the time of his arrest, had no criminal record, yet was held at Lima State Hospital as a psychopath. He was transferred to the Ohio State Reformatory in the spring of 1964. The O. S. R. prisoner register contains no more details of his sentence, but if he was committed immediately after conviction, he spent a year and a half in psychiatric treatment. After being deemed sane enough to join the general prison population by a state psychiatrist, Pifer served his one year sentence.

In the evidence film, there is a record of what Roger Pifer did to deserve his punishment. He engaged in conversation on one occasion, then on another day, he either masturbated or gave a man a hand job; from the camera’s vantage point, it is difficult to determine which. The most incriminating activity captured on film is Pifer briefly performing oral sex on Sheeks, a man who, in the film, is passive in all his other sexual acts. Pifer’s trips to the tearoom — two poorly documented and a third during which he gave a recently released sex offender a blow job — merited nearly three years of treatment and incarceration. Perhaps a confession while in police custody or his behavior in court made matters worse for him. In the absence of any better explanation, it is reasonable to conclude that acting queer got Roger Pifer in trouble.

Although the dispositions of the Mansfield cases are not completely documented, the records suggest disparities in the sentences of various suspects not entirely explicable by their prior convictions. These disparities may not constitute a pattern. But if one accepts that acting queer — not being married, taking a passive role in sex, and perhaps confessing a gay past, talking back to the presiding judge, or merely looking a bit odd — had serious consequences in at least one case, it is important to consider why that happened. The vague psychological term “homophobia” seems inadequate to describe what was in effect a political strategy.

From a point of view more humane than that of a moral entrepreneur or a law enforcement dupe, the Mansfield tearoom busts have an aspect of grotesque disproportion. With the hidden camera, the round-the-clock arrests, and a coda of self-righteous editorials, the whole affair, while strictly defensible in the eyes of the law in that specific time and place, looks more like a witch hunt at amateur hour. A bunch of policemen, given carte blanche by a public out for blood in the wake of a brutal murder, peeped on some marginal characters, perfect scapegoats who had no way of justifying themselves, and made a movie of their activities. As this nightmare unfolded for the participants, the ones who flashed a wedding ring or presented a suitably deferential demeanor received the mandatory minimum sentence, a year in prison, which was already barbaric. The real gay men — the ones who had no political clout or even a decent bar to frequent; the ones who knew that no man can truly be as normal as he says he is; in other words, the ones most able to recognize the situation in its naked idiocy — received psychiatric treatment for homosexuality, followed by at least one year in prison, with no possibility of probation. After courses of psych meds and electro-shock, these gay men were supposed to have learned their lesson, obedience to authority in thought as well as deed, if in fact they could still remember their own names.

III.

“The restrooms were closed after this investigation and later were filled in with dirt.”

— The Best Suit in Town by former Mansfield Chief of Police John Butler

Mansfield Police Officers Spognardi and Burton were almost the last people to use the Central Park men’s room. After the place was closed to the public, they marked measurements in chalk on the walls, filmed themselves walking through the space, and revealed the cameraman’s hiding place. One of them poked a finger in the peep hole between the first stall and the urinal. After Spognardi and Burton, the men’s room received a few more visitors in the fall of 1962. Prosecutor William McKay explained, “The initial juries were given a view of the restroom involved. This did not appear to materially aid the trial.” A chalkboard diagram showing the positions of the urinals, the stalls and the men conducting surveillance was found to be sufficient for the jurors.

When the restrooms were of no further use to Mansfield, the city destroyed them with blunt brutality. Exterior structures were demolished, and underground rooms were filled with earth, so that no trace of the tearoom site remained.

Since the 1960s, Mansfield, like other industrial cities in Ohio, has become a virtual ghost town. Most of the factories that once dominated Mansfield’s economy stand empty, and the downtown area surrounding Central Park shows few signs of life. Hotels and banks have moved to the edge of the city near the highway, Route 30. To all appearances, the world has changed and left Mansfield behind.

In an attempt to draw visitors to downtown Mansfield, the city has encouraged the construction of monuments in Central Park. Traditional memorials dedicated to Johnny Appleseed (once a resident of Mansfield) and to fallen soldiers of the Civil War and the World Wars have been joined by more recent structures. The visual clutter of so many monuments attracts few tourists. The travelers who do exit the highway in Mansfield tend to visit the formal gardens of Kingwood Center or the garish dioramas of the Living Bible Museum. A large Korean War memorial bearing the inscription “Freedom Is Not Free” now occupies the ground over the former restrooms.

No memorial exists to acknowledge the men convicted in the Mansfield tearoom busts, though their cases bring attention to the city to this day. The people directly involved in the episode have their ways of deflecting serious inquiries: tasteless jokes, feigned ignorance, silence. City officials would rather not endure the scrutiny of those who take a dim view of Mansfield’s zeal in eradicating deviance. They have not yet acquired the cynicism or amnesia that would enable them to transform the most shameful chapter of their city’s history into an attraction. There are now guided tours of the old Ohio State Reformatory building, where a number of the convicted men served their sentences. Perhaps some enterprising soul will see the visitors to the site of Senator Larry Craig’s 2007 arrest at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and be moved to re-make the design of Central Park to accommodate a tearoom memorial. Presenting such a proposal would be a challenge to even the most fanatical civic booster.

Mansfield’s Central Park tearoom has been buried but not forgotten. The scars associated with this place still persist, even on the land itself. In one corner of Central Park, next to the Korean War memorial and across from the building that was once the Leland Hotel, lies a circle of dead grass. The small geometric pattern with a diameter roughly equal to the height of a man was plainly visible on August 22, 2007, the 45th anniversary of the tearoom arrests. It brings to mind a line delivered by Paulette Goddard in The Women: “Where I spit, no grass grows ever.” This dead spot looks like the result of the convicted men taking a cue from Goddard and protesting at the site where they fell into a police trap. The circle of dead grass may be gone in a season, but for now, it serves as the marker of a small-scale earthwork, an anti-monument commemorating the most famous events that ever occurred in Mansfield, Ohio.

Government Issue

2010-06-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Published in Words Without Pictures. Edited by Alex Klein. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009).

The U. S. Supreme Court, in its decision Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), unanimously affirmed the individual’s right to privacy by holding that “the State may not prohibit mere possession of obscene matter.” It was the first time — and in all likelihood will prove to be the only time — that the Supreme Court was unanimous in its opinion of pornography.

Two years before, the U. S. Congress had set up a commission to study pornography, and its report, published in 1970, found no proof of pornography’s alleged social harm, and recommended that no legal restrictions be placed upon adults’ access to it. Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography alarmed conservatives, notably Charles H. Keating, founder of Citizens for Decent Literature and a member of the commission himself. He wrote a lengthy dissent in which he called the commission’s conclusions “a blank check for the pornographers to flood our country with every variety of filth and perversion.”

During the early 1970s, the much-anticipated flood could not quite begin, since there was no adequate legal definition of filth. Specifically, the distinction between pornography, the immense and variegated genre of sexually explicit images and words, and obscenity, that part of the pornographic so irredeemable that it was not protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression, remained ambiguous. The previous definition set forth by the Supreme Court in Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476 (1957), was schematic, and in a word dear to First Amendment scholars, overbroad. Justice Potter Stewart’s jejune assertion about obscenity that “I know it when I see it” (in the 1964 decision Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U. S. 184) did nothing to clarify the matter.

A final decision came in the form of Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15 (1973), which formulated a tripartite definition still in use today. Material is obscene if (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Miller ruling had a few problems — e. g., who is the average person? — but it nonetheless emboldened pornographers, who saw plenty of room to maneuver within its provisions, to make substantial investments in production and distribution. The notion of “community standards” gave local law enforcement agencies the latitude to rid their jurisdictions of adult bookstores and theaters, but the losses caused by these actions were minor annoyances to what soon became a multi-billion dollar industry.

The Reagan years brought an about-face in the federal government’s policy: Attorney General Edwin Meese set out to demonstrate the social harm caused by pornography, and to provide law enforcement agencies with strategies to fight it. The Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (1986), criticized by social scientists for its prejudices and distortions, became an unexpected popular success when readers found that it contained a nearly 2,000-page flood of unintentionally hilarious filth. Charles H. Keating, the dissenter of the previous commission, was vindicated, after many unsuccessful prosecutions in his native Cincinnati of figures such as Larry Flynt and Russ Meyer. The federal government’s position on pornography had finally aligned with his own. Whether Keating had occasion to gloat is doubtful, since he was occupied at that time with financial transactions of immense proportions at Lincoln Savings and Loan. These transactions, approved by the likes of Alan Greenspan and Senator John McCain, precipitated Keating’s fall from decent citizen to felon, when he was convicted on multiple counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy.

If Meese’s report was risible, pornographers did not have long to laugh, because the First Amendment protections they had enjoyed for a decade and a half were threatening to dissolve. The crucial figure in this shift in the legal climate was not a law enforcement official or a moral entrepreneur, but a girl named Nora Louise Kuzma. In 1984, using an older person’s birth certificate, she obtained a California driver’s license stating that she was over 21, when in fact she was only 15 years old. She presented this identification at liquor stores, and then at studios where she performed as Traci Lords. Lords appeared in a number of popular pornographic movies, until she became so famous that someone (perhaps a “friend” from her hometown of Steubenville, Ohio) told the feds her true age. She was Pet of the Month in the same issue of Penthouse that featured the photo spread that cost Vanessa Williams her Miss America crown, but Miss Williams’ predicament was nothing compared to the consequences of revelations about Traci Lords.

After sexually explicit representations of Lords had been removed from stores, the FBI prosecuted producers and distributors of her videos. Defense attorneys argued (without much success) that when Lords presented her illegally obtained identification, she did not appear to be under 18 years old, and that her movies were marketed to mainstream consumers, not to pedophiles. Regardless of these arguments, her case was put to use in the campaign to eliminate child pornography. In the aftermath of the scandal, Congress passed the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988 (18 U. S. C. § 2251 et seq.) Without realizing it, Traci Lords provided anti-porn crusaders with an unassailable device for manufacturing moral panic: concern for the welfare of children.

Section 2257 of the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act requires that producers keep proof of legal age for all people appearing in sexually explicit representations, and that these records be available for inspection by law enforcement authorities. Injunctions delayed the enforcement of this section of the law until July 3, 1995. (Works produced before that date are exempt from these specific requirements.) In practice, producers retain pictures showing performers holding photo identification next to their faces, and a “guardian of records” organizes these files, deals with demands to inspect them, and, it is hoped, keeps the producers out of federal prison.

Record keeping requirements, called 2257 regulations, while reasonable in principle, have become a political device used against the porn industry. The PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today), passed in 2003, gave the Department of Justice wide discretion in amending and enforcing 2257 regulations. Proposed changes to section 2257 have included: (a) defining as producers not only companies that make adult videos, but also anyone who re-uses or circulates sexually explicit images in any way; (b) requiring that records be available at any time that production and distribution activities are maintained (24 hours a day in some cases); (c) rescinding the “grandfather clause” exempting older material (for which no records exist); (d) accepting only U. S. government issued identification for “proof of age” photos (for foreign as well as domestic productions); and (e) mandating enhanced penalties of up to life imprisonment for pandering, the definition of which may embrace advertising and even casual emails.

The porn industry responded to this and other federal initiatives by organizing the Free Speech Coalition, which has brought suit against the government to seek the repeal of legal requirements that they argue are arbitrary, illogical, and burdensome. The 2257 regulations have been the focus of repeated litigation, and thus far in all cases the Free Speech Coalition has been successful in rolling back the federal government’s incursions into what the industry considers legitimate business practices and expression protected by the First Amendment.

Like it or not, pornographers have been the most effective guardians of freedom of speech during the waning years of the George W. Bush administration. In repelling attempts to limit First Amendment rights, they have seen far more consistent success than artists, journalists, or the mainstream film industry. The triumphs of the porn industry are a testament not only to the deep pockets of its prominent producers and the legal acumen of its lawyers, but also to the raw power of capitalism. Economic and technological changes have created a situation beyond the control of the most astute capitalists and the most ardent censors.

Considering that they risk vast sums of money as well as the personal liberty of their executives, the major porn producers are at pains to avoid employing underage talent. Neither does the industry explicitly attract underage consumers. Professionals in the industry emphasize this by using the term “adult video” or “adult content” rather than the vague and subjective term “pornography,” though the general public has not followed their example. If children find sexually explicit material, how can the industry, the feds, or an army of concerned parents stop them from looking at it?

By prevailing U. S. legal standards, those who circulate or own child pornography are breaking the law, since this obscene material has never had any constitutional protection. But the logical subtleties of defining the terms child, obscenity, pornography, circulation and ownership in the digital age have been a challenge to Supreme Court Justices barraged with hypothetical cases ranging from the benign to the horrific. Recoiling from the suggestion that Romeo and Juliet — which after all deals with the sexuality of teens — could be considered child porn under federal law, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002), “Art and literature express the vital interest we all have in the formative years we ourselves once knew, when wounds can be so grievous, disappointment so profound, and mistaken choices so tragic, but when moral acts and self-fulfillment are still in reach.” This statement brings to mind another hypothetical case: a Supreme Court Justice, born during the Depression and raised by Victorian parents, in conversation with a grandchild whose first exposure to pornography occurred around the same time as learning to read.

The legal issues around obscenity and the First Amendment are still in flux, and are likely to be so for a long time to come. Provisions of the PROTECT Act have been struck down in Federal Circuit Court, and appeals are only now reaching the Supreme Court. Whatever their outcome, one thing is clear: in its stated aim (protecting children) and in its implicit aim (harassing the porn industry out of existence) recent federal legislation has failed spectacularly. No matter how many ways federal authorities devise to stop the spread of sexual imagery, it remains a fact of contemporary life. In America, pornography is, like the Judeo-Christian God, omnipresent; whether it is also omnipotent remains to be seen.

This text was a response to Charlie White’s essay “Minor Threat,” hence the title. (See Dischord Records discographies.) I wrote it during the last summer of George W. Bush’s presidency, hence the rather dire tone. With the economic problems that became drastically obvious in the fall of 2008, then the election of Barack Obama, the U. S. federal government turned its attention to matters more urgent than the prosecution of producers violating 2257 regulations.

Fred Halsted: The Butt Interview

2010-06-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

Published in Butt as “A Rather Late Yet Interesting Interview with Dead Porno Artist,” Spring 2008, pp. 24-28.

Fred Halsted’s L. A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece. Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a long-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once more rural and sleazier than its present day version. L. A. begins with a lovely coupling in idyllic Malibu Canyon, then shifts to the old hustler strip around the YMCA on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. There Halsted picks up a hick from Texas and “shows him the ropes” in an S/M scene climaxing with the first appearance of fist fucking in a commercial gay porno. Director of other films such as the great black and white short Sex Garage and the hallucinatory feature Sextool, Halsted also performed in Joe Gage’s El Paso Wrecking Corp., owned a Silverlake sex club (called Halsted’s, of course) and published his own magazine, Package.

In a rare interview from beyond the grave, the great Halsted spoke with artist and filmmaker William E. Jones at The One Archives on West Adams Blvd. in Los Angeles.

Let’s begin with how you would describe yourself for a personal ad.

Five feet nine and a half, sixteen-inch biceps, under ten inches, thirty-three years old, smooth skin. Into scat, S&M, bondage, water sports, wrestling, Levis, jockstraps, motorcycles, dirty socks, boots, leather, amyl nitrate, belts, whips, chains, masks.

What is your background?

I was born in Long Beach. I was raised in every hick town in California. I was a member of the lower classes. That means you’ve got to work as a kid, help support the family, my mother. My father left when I was three. He just didn’t come home from work one day. I can understand why, though. My mother was a mind-fuck. She was basically a hustler in the sense of an independent, self-made woman. We were constantly on the move. We did lot of agricultural work.

I was born into paradise. A life of being free. As a kid I was able to run naked through a hundred miles of orange groves in fragrant bloom. Revisiting those areas as run-down tenements thirty-two years later is like reading a history of L. A.

How did you “come out”?

I went to L. A. State, the dreariest college ever invented, and studied botany. I thought I was straight then and got engaged. I was into mild S&M even then. I knew I was gay, but my fiancée didn’t believe me. She asked, “How do you know? Have you balled with a guy?” I said, “I just know; intellectually, I decided.” She asked what I was going to do about it. I said, “Well, there’s faggots in Hollywood aren’t there? I’m going to Hollywood to find me one.” Two days after I arrived I met this guy – he was ten years older than I – he brought me out, and we were lovers for three years. That was flowers and poetry. We’re still good friends.

In 1967 I was arrested in Echo Park. Quite simply I was entrapped by two Vice Squad detectives and charged with “lewd vagrancy.” I pleaded guilty and got off with a small fine. I was, at the time, the biggest closet queen you can be. Even when I started L. A. Plays Itself, I didn’t tell people what it was about. I’d just call it “the film.” Making the film was my liberation, my coming out of the closet.

When did you decide to make gay porno movies?

It was 1968, the year Robert Kennedy was murdered. He was my hero. When his life stopped, I stopped everything I was doing. I was a petit bourgeois: I owned a nursery in El Monte, California. I started analyzing my life. I asked myself, “Is selling plants it?” I brooded through the fabulously rainy 1968 into the spring of 1969.

I sold the nursery. Then I worked for people like Vincent Price, Joey Heatherton. I love gardening and plants. Just working took the pressure off. I used to smoke a joint every day and think. I knew something was wrong with the world, with me.

I started back at zero. I thought of the earliest things I could remember. I traced my whole life from the beginning. I sat alone in my single room for weeks.

One thing had been carefully forgotten. I had been raped by my stepfather when I was eight. At that age, I didn’t know what rape was; I didn’t know what had happened to me. I wasn’t repulsed, but I couldn’t accept it. Nineteen years later I introduced fisting to the screen in my first film, which showed it as intrusion, violence, brute force. My interest in sadism, my fascination, had its roots in that early incident. I never meant to editorialize about it; it was catharsis for me, a little kid picked for a sex-object. Analyze it, and it’s myself doing to somebody else what had been done to me.

How did you make sense of this experience as an adult? I guess by that I am asking what S/M means to you.

By sadism I understand the need to dominate another. I can’t get along with anyone sexually who doesn’t want to be dominated sexually. I can’t have normal type sex. I am about the only person who makes gay films from a sadist’s point of view. Almost all gays are masochists, if not overtly, at least subliminally. I see heavy S&M tones going through everything gay, especially gay art. Of course, I am prejudiced, because that is the way I am myself, but I find that most gays even if they are not into it and say that they abhor it, are still intrigued by it.

I am using masochism in the broadest sense from out and out masochists who have to be tortured every day to people who are completely repulsed by it, but who still have it in their consciousness and are intrigued by it. Masochism is both physical pain and psychological humiliation. Everybody loves this stuff on some level, because it is the whole macho, male domination thing. Most homosexuals really want to be dominated by another male. You can take any of them and turn them around. At least I can.

What is your sex life like?

I come maybe one out of ten tricks that I like. Coming is not the point. The point is revelation – the why. Orgasm is fun, but you can do that anytime, anywhere. I am not interested in orgasms. I am interested in me. I can jack off better than I can have sex with anybody. Celibacy is great. I like it. It is more pure, more strong, more real than sex.

My God, you sound like a priest! What are your religious beliefs?

I’m not part of a Christian/Judaic heritage. My mother was a Dukhobor. The Dukhobors have always been spiritualists, vegetarians, and pacifists – all the stuff that I am – for a thousand years. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been going to flying saucer meetings, to séances. I met L. Ron Hubbard in 1949 when Scientology was just five people. He audited my mother and me when I was about eight years old. So most of my religious training was in spiritualism.

You should have been here last weekend. My last friend was a Fundamentalist Christian. As we went through the night, I revealed his Christianity to him and as he was eating the shit out of my asshole, I told him that the words of the Lord are written right there. That is where the Lord has written, right in my shit. And I told him, you don’t say to me “yes, sir,” but “yes, sir Lord.” I put him through a revelation to himself. I told him that anytime he wants to see where the Lord is, he just has to watch my asshole.

I reveal things through sex. I am very religious. I don’t say that I am the Lord. I find such little satisfaction because few people can break out of their egocentric shells and protectiveness, their Christianity and humanity, and whatever else it is that they surround themselves with. The Lord is everywhere – in the sunset and in my shit. It is all Him.

All I can say is, oh, wow. To get back to your movies…

In 1969 I realized I wanted to be a porno star and make plenty of money. I mean I wanted to make my own porno film – to create a part and then be the part. After all the thinking I had done, I decided that I had something to say about sexuality. Things just sort of jelled and I wanted to make my statement: an autobiographical homosexual story, which became L. A. Plays Itself.

One of the purposes of L. A. Plays Itself was to get S&M and allied perversions out on the screen where people could look at them think about them, analyze them, let it affect them, whatever they wanted, but not have it hidden anymore, and leave it open where people can deal with it easily. Maybe it affects them, maybe it doesn’t, it’s irrelevant, the thing is being an open pervert and not being ashamed of that.

Your films have been some of the most successful gay pornos ever. How did you promote them?

On my first films I screened them for the big name critics. Up to that time porno was always considered something you made money off of, but a thing you were never proud of, something you did secretly. Well, I just barged into fucking New York and said this is film, a work of art. It also happened to be gay, hard-core porno. A sadomasochistic, fist fucking faggot film, but that is not the point. No one had ever done this before with a sex film. To me sex is the most viable area of human interest, it is the most important area, so I was proud of what I was doing. I wasn’t the least bit ashamed I and never have been.

Nothing could throw me after my first screenings of these films. In New York City, I invited all the gay liberationists, writers and other artists. I thought, Jesus, here I’ve made this great gay liberation film, L. A. Plays Itself. They can’t help but love it. I was there and I was happy and then the curtain went down and they started to boo and hiss and stomp their feet. I thought, My God, is this a gay, liberated audience? I had to go up and talk to them, to the crème de la crème of New York gay lib writers and poets and jackoffs, had to explain what I had just done on screen.

They said, “What are you doing all this shit for?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “That’s the way I ball. I’m just another faggot and that’s just another sex scene. Why make such a big deal out of it? You know all about it.” It was a hostile audience, which surprised me, but I disarmed them in ten minutes. “Where are all the fist fucking faggots around town?” I asked. “I know this stuff goes on and we all go to it and we all go to these places, so why are you acting as if your virginity has been lost or something?” I guess they expected love and kisses and beautiful flowers, which they got, too, but I think they expected me to give them a poem to sexual virginity. I stuck with the audience and thought, well, I just assume too much. I thought they’d been around, but they acted like they’d never seen a cock before.

The film was a forced expression of my overt sexuality.

Are you happy with what you have achieved?

I think I’ve been extremely influential in terms of breaking faggots out of the swish era. My films present faggots in the macho era, and maybe it’s too overdone, but the whole style changed. I think that it had an enormous influence on the style and fashion of gay America, and I think that’s good. At one time for several years I was the dominant thinker in America in terms of breaking this softness, and I think it’s succeeded.

L. A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage are the only hardcore movies in the Film Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. After seeing L. A. Plays Itself, Salvador Dali kept saying over and over, “New information for me,” and William Burroughs said that it “breaks all the stereotypes.” I feel that these two artists certainly are outrageous too, certainly many people felt that Burroughs was disgusting with Naked Lunch. I would like to film Naked Lunch as an all-out sex film. Burroughs and I were working on that a few years ago in London.

I’m proud of my work. The best is yet to come.

This séance/interview was pieced together from a variety of sources, some unpublished, and others long out of print. A full bibliography will be included in the book Halsted Plays Himself, forthcoming from Semiotext(e).

Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before

2010-06-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

Published in Is It Really So Strange? (Los Angeles: David Kordansky Gallery, 2006).

One of my college friends introduced me to The Smiths at the end of March 1984. She had gone to London for spring break. During her trip, she walked into a record store and asked for something typically English, something that everyone was listening to. The clerk handed her a copy of the first album by The Smiths, which had been released a month before. Upon her return, she lent me her copy of The Smiths, and within twenty-four hours, I had my own.

As I listened to the first song on the album, “Reel Around the Fountain,” I wasn’t aware that this was the last record that would, as the saying goes, change my life. There is a limited window of time when this sort of thing can happen to a person. For me, it was roughly the period from 1974 to 1984, not a bad time to be coming of age, considering the deplorable state of pop music in subsequent years. I suppose this opinion is hard to defend, but there lies the problem of making any claims at all about pop music. Often, people who love it are searching for themselves, or more likely, an ideal version of themselves, in what they hear.

I understood very little of what I was hearing at first. The music, sounding simultaneously modern and old-fashioned, couldn’t have been more different from the dominant trend of the preceding years, manufactured pop groups playing electronic music. The Smiths were a traditional four-piece rock band, distinguished by the incandescent talent of guitarist Johnny Marr, who also composed the music. The words, full in equal measure of yearning and resentment, were written and sung by a character named Morrissey. The beautiful music seemed timeless, but the mournful tone of Morrissey’s voice, languid and occasionally maniacal, seemed exactly right for the times.

The only word I can use to describe the early 1980’s is a favorite of Morrissey: vile. The economic decline that had begun during my childhood showed no signs of reversing itself, though some people were getting very rich. In public life, an atmosphere of meanness and gratuitous cruelty came to appear normal, and more sensitive souls turned inward. A group of shy, isolated young people retreated to the only place their voices had any effect – their bedrooms – and for many of them, The Smiths provided the perfect theme music to accompany their private dramas.

In my youth, I had the habit of buying records for their covers. Before the internet made a wide variety of music available even to kids in the provinces, there were few alternatives. The cover artwork was often a reasonable way to gauge the merits of a record that got no radio airplay, that is to say, a record that might actually be worth buying. I had noticed the first single by The Smiths, “Hand in Glove,” in a record store near where I lived. The cover featured a picture by Jim French, a rear view of an anonymous nude man. The sentiments of the photographer seemed fairly unambiguous, and I was afraid to buy something that made such a blatant statement.

The Smiths, the album that followed this single, bore a cover image of Joe Dallesandro’s torso as it appeared in Flesh, produced by Andy Warhol. I had seen this movie. It was the first feature directed by Paul Morrissey, no relation to the singer, but the coincidence led me to take the image on the cover as a clue to the album’s contents. Flesh presents a day in the life of a male hustler. He is a beautifully proportioned example of trade. He has a wife and child, but most of his customers are men. He interacts with a number of Warholian types – aggressive women, desperate johns, fellow hustlers, tattered drag queens – but he remains rather passive throughout the film. Flesh is a comedy; everyone is on the make, and sex is a joke.

The Smiths’ first album suggests the world of a working class youth with a taste for revenge. There is no role for him to play in the industrial wasteland where he was raised, so he writes his own story. He assumes poses that will be useful when fame and fortune beckon. He tries to avoid being beaten up or ground down. He wants to relive the old school days, this time with a sense of mastery. He relies on the favors of older men and ultimately resents the situation, or perhaps he only fantasizes about it. He rejects the advances of well-meaning female friends. He falls into the abyss of unrequited passion. A sense of menace pervades the scene, but the action remains unconsummated.

These impressions occurred to me before I had read any publicity about The Smiths. Such was the work of Morrissey’s words on a young, impressionable mind. I bought this album decades ago, but my original memories of it are still vivid.

I must confess that the spell did not last. I bought and enjoyed Morrissey’s early solo albums, Viva Hate and Bona Drag, and in them I found consolation during an especially lonely period of my life. Then came Kill Uncle in 1991. I never bought that album, and my ignorance of what followed in the next ten years of Morrissey’s career was complete. I missed a number of his solo albums, some of them better than others; Morrissey’s array of problems and provocations, fascinating to members of the music press, at least for a while; a change in record labels, and after disappointing sales, no record label at all; finally, the move to Los Angeles. Morrissey in exile simply slipped from view. Widely dismissed as a has-been, Morrissey remained a star to hardcore fans who followed his every move and paid tribute to him in ways barely noticed by the media.

In November of 2001, I saw an ad for a club in Los Angeles called London Is Dead, which exclusively played Morrissey and Smiths music, and I thought to myself, I’ve got to see this. It was a surprise for a lot of reasons. At the event, I was surrounded by people in their twenties, dancing and singing along to music I had loved long ago. The atmosphere was quite joyous, and belied the popular perception of Morrissey as a poet of doom and gloom. Another surprise was that most of the crowd was Latino. A whole scene had developed around the work of an artist who hadn’t released a new record in several years. I was happy that my original opinion of this music was being confirmed, and more importantly, I felt that I had something in common with a group of young people to whom I would not normally be expected to have a connection. I decided that night to document the scene.

The first problem with this project was how I could manage to do it. For my work in photography and film up to this point I had shot very few images of people. I began to wonder if my commitment to this kind of circumspection was really just the result of shyness. Now I needed to solicit the cooperation of strangers who had no particular reason to trust me. Like many people reluctant to engage in the shameless social encounters necessary to get a documentary started, I resorted to the internet.

I found a Morrissey fan website called ambitious-outsiders.com. It was the personal project of Chris S, who wrote a tribute to his idol on the site: “I see Morrissey as a father figure mostly, the one who was always there when I needed him the most. He moved me in inexplicable ways, like no one ever did before. He spoke as if he was singing just for me and no one else, that’s when I realized that I was in total devotion to him. But I am going into too much detail, so I’ll stop.”

The site held contests, and I decided to enter one in an attempt to get to know this young man. The contest involved answering the question, “Why do you think Morrissey said ‘Because We Must’ in Introducing Morrissey and other live shows?”

My response was as follows: “When Morrissey quotes a literary or artistic work, he is usually doing so to alert his fans to some source of inspiration that they may not otherwise have encountered. The phrase ‘because we must’ is found in the work of the poet Emily Dickinson. Miss Dickinson composed poem number 114 around 1859. It was not published until many years later, when its modernity was not quite so shocking.

Good night, because we must,

How intricate the dust!

I would go, to know!

Oh incognito!

Saucy, Saucy Seraph

To elude me so!

Father! they won’t tell me,

Won’t you tell them to?

Morrissey’s lyrics echo various aspects of this untitled poem: its brevity; its irregular meter; its emphasis on secrecy; its juxtaposition of decay and sexual desire; and most of all, the address to an idealized figure, presumably male and definitely unattainable. Perhaps Morrissey was even thinking of Dickinson when he said, ‘There’s nobody modern I’m influenced by because I think poetry has died a long, long time ago… so it is generally people who lived and died a hundred years ago. It’s people who never experienced success, people who were never blinded by money or confused by breakfast television programs. People who just did their art silently, quietly and perhaps unhappily, and then died.’ Emily Dickinson died in relative obscurity in 1886, one hundred years before the release of The Queen Is Dead.”

I won the contest. My prize was a tape of a BBC program about Latino Morrissey fans. The segment began with a shot of a Mexican man singing a corrido in front of a Ritmo Latino store near Santa Monica and Western. There was also an interview conducted at a Mexican restaurant on Melrose. The location was presented as “East L. A.” This journalistic liberty reminded me of getting on a number 26 bus on Waterloo Bridge expecting to go to Shoreditch but ending up in Bloomsbury. The mistake made by my neophyte bus driver means nothing to people in Los Angeles, but Londoners recognize it immediately.

I had made contact with Chris S, but it took me another six months to meet him in person. On that day – appropriately enough, Morrissey’s birthday – I took a portrait photograph of Chris in his bedroom. He looked terrified. He hid a bit under the covers, but this precaution was unnecessary. I was a perfect gentleman during the shoot. By that time, I had been photographing Morrissey fans for a little while, and I had developed a reasonable sense of how to behave. I knew that there were boundaries to be respected. For instance, it was unwise to ask direct questions about anyone’s sexuality. Patience had its rewards, and I learned that when fans talked about Morrissey, they were sometimes talking about themselves in an oblique way. Intimidating greaser guys presented a tough exterior that often concealed a fragile interior, while in the case of their female companions, it tended to work the other way around. The people in the scene were reinventing a set of received symbols, and in the process, trying out various poses that would one day become something like identities. Outsiders usually got it all wrong, so I made an effort to be an insider, even if that meant returning to the follies of my youth.

I began taking pictures at the Smiths and Morrissey Convention held at the Hollywood Palace, and then at other tribute events, and at the concerts of Sweet and Tender Hooligans, the Los Angeles Smiths and Morrissey tribute band. As I got to know people, I would ask them if I could take portraits. Most of the fans I photographed approached the situation with ambivalence, a combination of shyness and exhibitionism. This seems curiously appropriate for fans of an entertainer who transforms solitude and social discomfort into spectacle.

From the beginning of the project, I found befriending people in the scene a bit of a challenge. Many were reluctant to talk to me, since I was a member of an older generation. I wondered how I could fit in at these events. I tried wearing a pompadour, and I was very pleasantly surprised. Not only was it much easier to take pictures of people who had the same style as I had, but potential subjects started asking me if they could take my picture, and as far as I was concerned, that was just fine. It was great fun, though some of my friends referred to it as my midlife crisis expressed in a hairstyle.

My pompadour was the creation of Jaysin, introduced to me by Dorian Gray, a drag king specializing in Morrissey impersonations. Jaysin had the distinction of being the one subject whom I didn’t have to beg to sit for a portrait. He was eager to be photographed so that he could have a gift to leave at Morrissey’s door. In Jaysin’s fantasy, Morrissey would see the phone number written on the back of the picture, would call Jaysin up, and would succumb to his considerable charms. Alas, Jaysin moved to New York before he had the opportunity to convince Morrissey to become his sugar daddy.

When I last saw Jaysin, he was hanging out with his friend Russell. Russell had the most severely plucked eyebrows I had ever seen on a boy, and his forearms were entirely covered with tattoos of the Garbage Pail Kids. Though Russell was not a hardcore Smiths fan, he did have his own special story to tell. He once went to the Hollywood Tattoo Convention wearing a Queen Is Dead t-shirt over his tattoos. This shirt caught the attention of a muscle-bound, heavily tattooed homeboy who insisted on walking Russell home. Russell soon found himself back at his apartment stripping off his clothes in front of the excited homeboy. His companion apparently saw too much of Russell’s anatomy and gasped, “You’re a guy!” Russell asked him how he hadn’t noticed the five o’clock shadow under the makeup. He answered, “With those lips, I thought you were a girl,” as he pulled up his pants. Russell had no time for a snappy comeback, since his trick vanished in an instant, leaving Russell to marvel at the power of The Smiths as well as the power of denial.

One can only guess what murky passions motivate the hordes of young men who show up at the concerts, but Morrissey plays the audience like a finely tuned instrument. In his between song patter, he knows just how far he can go so that he excludes no one and teases everyone.

When Morrissey asked the crowd at one of his shows at the Wiltern Theater, “How are things in San Bernardino?” he was doing more than making idle chatter. He was acknowledging the geography of his grassroots audience. During the hiatus of Morrissey’s career, the region where his fame was the greatest stretched from East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, and Highland Park in the west to San Bernardino and Riverside in the east. This corridor along the 10 and 60 Freeways is the eastern edge of the Los Angeles metropolis, formerly irrigated agricultural land, then a center of heavy industry, now old and new suburbs.

Unlike the West Side or the Hollywood Hills, this region is rarely chosen to represent Southern California in movies or television programs, perhaps because it offers a better sense of what it is actually like to live in the region. There is a lot of pollution, terrible traffic, and real estate is more affordable the farther east one travels. Most of the population is Latino, and several cities have Asian majorities. The outlying area of the region is called the Inland Empire, but its boundaries are vague and there is no emperor. Audiences all over the world see an image of Southern California in Beverly Hills 90210 or The O. C., but the true hotbed of youth culture is more likely to be Pomona 91766 or The I. E.

This leads to the unavoidable question: Why is Morrissey so popular with a Latino audience? While there are almost as many answers to this question as there are fans, I have noticed some patterns in the conversations I have had while documenting the scene. Some insist that what has been called a phenomenon is only a coincidence or an example of media hype, but I would say that it is indicative of wider changes taking place in youth culture. Although I concentrated on the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, I also attended events in Tijuana and El Paso, and I suspect I could have photographed scenes in any number of other cities, particularly in the American Southwest. Before the “Latino Morrissey fan” is relegated to a marketing profile used to shift a few more units of obscure items in monopoly capital’s back catalogue, I would like to mention some of the things I learned in the course of my project.

At least since the 1970’s, there has been a significant current of Anglophilia in the Los Angeles music scene, and not just because the area is a popular tax exile destination. The Smiths were played on mass-market radio in Los Angeles – unlike every other major U. S. city – and they are very much alive in the popular memory. The Anglophile tradition continues with ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones’s immensely popular noontime radio show Jonesy’s Jukebox, which provides Angelenos with daily doses of Northern Soul, Glam Rock, Ska, Reggae, and of course, Punk.

A demographic change has occurred in Los Angeles, and strictly in terms of numbers, Latino culture is (or soon will be) the dominant youth culture in the city. What form this culture will take is an open question. The combination of new demographics and old Anglophilia has some surprising consequences; for instance, anyone walking around Hollywood wearing a Union Jack on his jacket is almost certain to have a Spanish surname.

A sense of historical continuity is also an important aspect of the phenomenon. Among Chicanos who were born in Southern California, “oldies” music (e. g., Doo-Wop, American Soul and R & B) has been revered for generations, and the most recent generation has embraced the music of the Punk and post-Punk eras in its turn.

The phenomenon expresses itself somewhat differently among the children of immigrants. Though they may speak Spanish at home, they don’t necessarily feel a connection to Spanish language pop music. At the same time, the themes associated with a lot of great English pop music – especially sexual ambiguity and contempt for middle class respectability – speak volumes to them. A rebellion against conformity and traditional machismo enacted in a language poorly understood by parental figures proves irresistible.

The members of The Smiths were all sons of immigrants, and while Morrissey does not refer to this fact directly in his lyrics, the songs have a pervasive mood that strikes a chord with the children (and grandchildren) of immigrants. A line like, “I just can’t find my place in this world” (from “Ouija Board, Ouija Board”) is profoundly meaningful to this new generation of fans, though in ways that Morrissey could not have originally predicted.

Recently, Morrissey has capitalized on these cultural affinities. Some of his songs acknowledge a Latino audience, and his stage presentation would not be out of place on Mexican television. Latin American culture has traditionally had plenty of room for crooners belting out highly dramatic songs, and Morrissey seems to fit right in.

Many English pop stars are aware of the adoration they inspire among U. S. Latinos, but to my knowledge, Morrissey is the first one to change his image in an effort to cultivate this audience. The effect is appropriately recherché, and I sometimes find myself wondering if he will one day take his act to Vegas. I think that this may well be a case in which Morrissey, while appearing to be mired in nostalgia, is actually catching a wave of the future.

When I mentioned to an art student in my acquaintance that I had been photographing Smiths and Morrissey events, the tribute bands, and their audience, he responded, “Oh, wow, how ironic.” I certainly hope not. My young friend’s use of the term irony referred not so much to a literary strategy, but rather to the tendency of would-be sophisticates to disavow that which they most enjoy. When someone admits that he loves something, he becomes vulnerable; perhaps it isn’t cool. Ridicule descends on the heads of those embracing last year’s trend. I have always thought it was the signal virtue of The Smiths that they were not cool. They never insulated themselves from possible scorn by taking a step back that implied “we don’t really mean it.” They wore their hearts on their sleeves and dared the audience to accept them. The tribute bands of the present era approach their craft with total sincerity. There are no connoisseurs of the unfashionable at these shows; nobody announces his superiority to the material; and that is why the events are successful. It is a thrill to be in a room full of people who believe.

The frenzy of adulation that Morrissey provokes is part of a tradition that has been with us for a very long time. Had he lived a century longer, Friedrich Nietzsche would have been interested to see 1992’s Morrissey Live in Dallas. A venue’s surveillance camera recorded the absolute madness that engulfed Morrissey’s first American solo tour. The band can barely get through its set, but the spectacle of a man being physically attacked by his cult more than makes up for any musical deficiencies. Morrissey seems to be channeling a force that is beyond his control. His audience wants to be blessed by him. And they want to tear him limb from limb. If they can’t have his flesh, they will settle for bits of his shirt, and they put the precious shreds in their mouths for safekeeping. No wonder the mother of one of the people I photographed is convinced that her son is possessed by the devil!

Although there were moments when world domination seemed imminent, The Smiths and Morrissey never quite captured a mass audience. They have never been as famous as their gifts clearly indicated they could be. Even so, I still find it hard to believe that some people simply have no idea who they are. Others, left with a superficial impression of miserabilism or even self-loathing, know The Smiths but reject them. There seems to be little common ground on the subject, and conversations between fans and non-fans lead to the sort of irrational, emotionally fraught impasses usually experienced in discussions of religious dogma or sporting events.

I think that a crucial factor in the case of The Smiths is the complexity of the world they suggest. Their approach has an aura of self-deprecation, but this only serves to intensify the power of their seduction. The Smiths never appeared on their record covers. Their stand-ins were a series of “cover stars,” often figures from English popular culture of the 1960’s. Many fans (especially young Americans) find themselves researching who these people were, and thence are led down the path of true obsession. The world of The Smiths offers such a wealth of detail that a listener can get lost in it, just as a reader gets lost in his favorite novel.

The character of the box bedroom rebel, who made a cameo appearance in the Dickensian novel of Thatcher’s Britain, has reappeared in sunny California. This turn of events isn’t as strange as it seems. Wherever there are working class kids attempting to flee their suffocating families, yet incapable of leaving them behind, this figure will return. Morrissey described his favorite characters in movies as “people with their tails trapped in the door... trying to get out, trying to get on, trying to be somebody, trying to be seen” but held back by family expectations, old bonds of friendship, and simple lack of money. Many young people see themselves in this description, and they flock to Morrissey for moments of solace and imaginary escape.

My most intense memories of The Smiths are of their early work, a handful of singles and the debut album. They contain the last lyrics that Morrissey wrote before he knew he would be famous. In a sense, he spent his whole life up to that point preparing his material for a breathless, and by no means certain, bid for immortality. After that, Morrissey’s lyrics became more indirect and vague. Later still, Morrissey’s solo material resorts to self-conscious camp a lot more than The Smiths ever did, and the threat of self-parody looms.

Throughout his career, Morrissey has written succinct word portraits of types resurrected from the “kitchen sink” realist films produced in his childhood. In England, he mourned the disintegration of traditional working class culture, but when he moved to Los Angeles, he discovered aspects of this culture reinvented in a new landscape. The persona narrating his songs was originally that of a working class youth ambivalent about being admired by his betters, and it gradually became that of the older, successful man doing the admiring. This transition, partly artistic, partly geographic, and accomplished over nearly two decades, is extremely interesting in itself, but I would still maintain that Morrissey’s first, most urgent utterances were his greatest.

In my initial flush of adoration for The Smiths, I imagined an army of fans making their presence felt in a hostile world. Effeminate, bookish, incapable of sustaining gainful employment or of starting families of their own, they were disappointments to their fathers. But what made them failures in a conventional way of life made them splendidly successful in another realm of endeavor. They were modern dandies. They rarely banded together, but one can sometimes catch a glimpse of them in old concert footage.

A whole new generation of dandies has appeared to worship Morrissey, though the scene and its forms of expression have drastically changed. One thing remains constant: the people I met and befriended do what they do not because someone told them to buy a record or to go to a concert, but out of love and spontaneous enthusiasm. The events I attended were not planned or staged by publicists. They were organized by the fans themselves. They were expressions of popular culture in the truest and most admirable sense. It’s important to remember that the early Smiths records were released by an independent label with very little money for promotion. The band’s success was a surprising departure from business as usual, and a story unlikely to be repeated in a music industry dominated by a small handful of corporations.

While I was documenting the fan scene, Morrissey made a comeback – or should I say a return? – and an apparatus of publicity made it possible for him to reach a wide audience. He appeared on television and radio, and in countless magazines. He was described by the meaningless hyperbole and impoverished adjectives that are the stock in trade of mass culture. Morrissey went from being a fanatical cult’s object of worship to being just another celebrity. Among the fans, there was excitement about this development, but there was also the sense of an ending. The scene that was faithful to Morrissey during his period of relative obscurity continued to exist, but it just wasn’t the same. I loved the homemade quality of the events and the complete conviction of the people who attended them. An era has passed, but I can say I was there while it lasted, and I recorded some of what I saw.

Morgan Fisher: An Impersonal Autobiography

2010-06-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

In 1968 the first American to receive wide publicity for a sex-change operation published Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. The book’s title means to suggest that outside the realm of television appearances and photo opportunities, there is a real person with a private life. Inadvertently the title also suggests that some sort of autobiography (less predictable and bathetic, perhaps) other than a personal one can exist.

When I first met Morgan Fisher, I mistook him for a pop music celebrity. In all innocence, I asked him if he had ever been a member of Mott The Hoople. He said, “No, that is another Morgan Fisher. What is Mott The Hoople?” I was disappointed that he could not play the keyboard part of “All the Young Dudes,” but I soon discovered that he was quite expert at playing himself. Over the course of a career having nothing to do with the music business, he has refined a persona, an indelible but rarely examined part of the body of work signed Morgan Fisher.

This persona emerges, somewhat paradoxically, from an artistic project committed to excluding traditional notions of self-expression. In a note on his film Cue Rolls (1974), Fisher outlines certain elements of a style he would make his own: mechanicalness, impersonality, disproportion, misdirection, verbosity, redundancy, obscurity, and monotony. He goes on to assert that these elements are necessary in that they are dictated by external circumstances. Personal preferences or judgments of taste have nothing to do with the matter. Such constraints give Fisher very little room for creativity, and that is precisely the point. In this way, the work can be said to generate itself. Of course, the work does not generate itself in any strict sense. There is an artist to make it, and in more or less oblique ways, that artist remains present. In the case of his early work, Fisher sought to absent himself from the work while consistently making representations of himself within it.

The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2) (1968) seems to teach a lesson: that cameras take their best pictures with the least interference from humans. Paul Morrison, the actor of the title, takes a number of photographs around picturesque Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pictures rehearse a number of whimsical clichés, and as a result, it is not always clear what they are intended to describe. Fisher, the director of the title, restricts himself to taking pictures of Morrison in the act of photographing. His task is to record an activity, and his success is complete on his own limited terms. There is also a third view of the scene, that of the cinematographer who makes a record of the recording. From the first shot, this view reveals the great disparity in height between actor and director. This instance of disproportion assumes the status of a running gag. Fisher towers over Morrison in every shot, and in an awkward, comic moment, he even perches on a high stack of pallets to photograph Morrison. In The Director and His Actor… Fisher stages his first self-portrait and lets it be known that the director has a sense of humor about himself.

A number of Morgan Fisher’s films from the 1970’s can be considered self-portraits in the most obvious way: he appears in his own works. Fisher presents himself performing the tasks of production or speaking about their technical aspects. He confines himself to revealing prosaic details. There is very little sense of who he is as a person, aside from what can be gathered from the tone of his voice and his outward appearance.

Production Stills (1970), one of Fisher’s most complex films, is a self-portrait than is not necessarily a self-portrait at all, a work which deflects questions about who is the author of it, and by extension, casts doubt on established notions of authorship in the collaborative medium of film. The synchronous sound track consists of the sounds of the film being made. Unlike almost any other film production, all of the crew members are free to speak while a shot is being taken, and there is no script. The action consists of a still photographer taking black and white Polaroids of Fisher and the crew at work. As soon as the development of a Polaroid is complete, it is placed in front of the camera, a massive Mitchell. The Mitchell’s field of view is restricted to a mere four by six inch area of celotex, but by virtue of the stills placed there, it is possible to see a fairly extensive part of the sound stage. An intimidating array of old-fashioned equipment has been assembled for an exceedingly modest production. Fisher takes only one Polaroid, the last, so that the still photographer, Thom Andersen, may also appear in the film. Fisher does not dictate the details of the other stills, and thus does not control how he is represented. The control over the image, which is normally considered the responsibility of the director, has been surrendered to Thom Andersen. What the task of directing entails in such a situation is open to question, and Fisher has suggested that his role on the film is more properly one of producer, rather than director. Production Stills is an example of what Fisher refers to as avoiding the responsibility for inventing.

Picture and Sound Rushes (1971) includes synchronous sound footage of Fisher explaining the premise of the film that is being shot. He improvises his dialogue from notes to which he refers while the camera is rolling. At predetermined thirty-second intervals, the film alternates between sync sound, wild sound over black, MOS or silent footage of Fisher speaking, and silence over black. After the segments of silence over black (called the “null case” in the film) Fisher’s reappearance comes as something of a relief.

In the sync sound footage of 240x (1974) Fisher is seen making photocopies of a black pattern (the design of Maltese cross movement, a part which produces the intermittent motion of the pull-down in a film projector.) Fisher punches holes in the copies so that the images can be properly registered. He then shoots the 240 individual sheets on an Oxberry animation camera. The title refers to these sheets in two ways: “240x” may mean 240 times or (in animator’s shorthand) 240 frames. The film ends with a ten second coda, the 240 frames of animated footage that is the product of the work previously represented.

Fisher’s only video, Protective Coloration (1979), breaks with the decorum established in the films. It does not show Fisher at work, and it imparts no information about film production. It has the aspect of a private amateur experiment. Shot in one long take, it consists of a frontal view of Fisher seated at a table. Behind him is a black void. He wears “scrubs,” the surgeon’s operating room uniform. He does not speak. An unseen assistant passes him brightly colored pieces of protective gear one by one, and he places each on the appropriate part of his body. Pauses allow time to consider Fisher’s discomfort. With the addition of a respirator, his breathing becomes audibly labored. He places goggles on his face, but it is obvious that by this point, he can no longer see. He has difficulty finding his own eyes. Two layers of gloves obscure his hands and forearms. As this test of physical endurance continues, the visual characteristics defining Morgan Fisher become more and more difficult to discern. The action has no climax; there is no release from the accumulated layers of latex and rubber. The video ends with its director in full gear, almost obliterated and barely looking human. Protective Coloration is Fisher’s last self-portrait in moving images, and he uses the occasion to stage his own disappearance.

Standard Gauge (1984), the culmination of a whole period of filmmaking activity, is Fisher’s first film with a subject outside itself, and marks a shift from self-portraiture to autobiography. Apart from two shots of Messiah of Evil (another director’s film which, in its uncorrected anamorphosis, recalls the sight gag of The director and his actor…) Fisher’s image does not appear in Standard Gauge. The sense of Fisher’s presence in the film comes mainly from the soundtrack. Whereas in previous films Fisher’s voice may exhibit the impersonality, verbosity, redundancy and monotony that are his stated goals, in Standard Gauge his voice recites a carefully prepared text, a narration belonging more properly to the literary genre of autobiography.

The narrating persona of an autobiography (the “I” of the text) is a fictional device that in its way speaks the truth. “I” may resemble the person doing the writing in many respects, but there is inevitably some disparity, even in texts written with the purest of intentions. This gap between person and persona can become wider with time, as memories fade and the stories based upon them assume different forms. The “I” of the text speaks with greater precision and is capable of greater synthesis than any person speaking spontaneously. A lifetime of experience can be distilled in a few well-chosen sentences. It is only a matter of choosing them.

Standard Gauge has a subject outside itself in the sense of the film representing something extrinsic to the circumstances and materials that generated it. The film functions as a string of synecdoches, tiny parts standing in for whole movies, whole genres, even a whole industry. Standard Gauge has another, equally important subject: a locus of subjectivity as embodied in the persona of Morgan Fisher, filmmaker and narrator.

Standard Gauge begins with a scrolling title giving an account of the way that a width of film, 35mm, was established as an industry standard that has endured over one hundred years. After a title card, nothing appears on the screen but a white void, the most austere possible establishing shot, if such a conventional term can even be applied. Fisher’s voice begins its narration from no place in particular, and he speaks in the first person: “The first time I ever handled 35mm motion picture film was in the summer of 1964.” He confesses his irresistible attraction to 35mm film and defines the term “short end” before any recognizable object appears on screen. When something appears, it is revealed to be a length of a motion picture print (specifically, the leader of a reel of La Chinoise) enormously magnified and backlit. The end of the second paragraph of the narration answers the question of the picture track. The question of the sound track – Who is Morgan Fisher? – remains.

The Morgan Fisher of the narration is clearly an educated person and a great fan of the movies. He has worked in the film industry, and yet he is not entirely a part of it. He knows who Bruce Conner is, but the technicians with whom he deals do not; he also knows that Helge is not the name of a German philosopher. He has arrived on the scene of production rather late. The great factory that is the Hollywood studio system continues to churn out motion pictures, but it does not function as it once did. In a series of more or less demeaning jobs, Fisher serves an apprenticeship for a position that may no longer exist. He expresses his affection for the work of Edgar G. Ulmer, a Poverty Row director who made the best of the limited resources at his disposal. Ulmer exemplifies the director as craftsman, one who has a sense of pride in his own work regardless of its social status, and who has convictions about the power of motion pictures to tell stories without condescension or cynicism. Fisher implies that these convictions have become more the exception than the rule, and evidence of them can be found most often in unexpected places. He ends the narration by mentioning a great film that does not enjoy a respectable reputation, The Honeymoon Killers.

Standard Gauge acknowledges that it owes its very existence to the film industry, and that independent filmmakers work at the sufferance of this industry which supplies them with materials, but which does not concern itself with whether they continue to produce films. Executives in Rochester or Tokyo or Leverkusen regularly decide to discontinue emulsions or film stocks, and everyone must accept their decisions. All individuals, irrespective of their status or ambitions, must cope with such indignities justified solely by economics. Considered in this context, Standard Gauge is an answer to two important questions: first, how to express chagrin at the ruthlessness of change in the film industry, and grief at the passing of cherished institutions and technologies, without indulging in a resigned nostalgia; and second, how to have some sort of productive relationship with the film industry, to be a filmmaker who is also a fan, but who has a critical attitude, even though no individual act, however decisive, has any effect on the relations of production that make all films possible.

Standard Gauge’s main compositional strategy rehearses an opposition between image as site of the impersonal or industrial and writing as site of individual expression. Images have a long history of being made and reproduced by machines; they can also be read by machines; and in the age of robotics, machines can now act upon what they “see.” This is not the case (thus far, at least) with writing beyond the level of the purely instrumental. Any text written by a machine reads simply as a description, a list of instructions, or a recombination of the elements already programmed into the machine. Images can exist and proliferate without consciousness, but writing in any complex sense cannot. There is always a trace of subjectivity, the grain of the voice, and this aspect of writing troubles the project of mechanization. The ideal of a mechanical literary text has yet to be achieved, though there has been a well-known attempt that later assumed a special importance for Fisher: the work of Raymond Roussel, whose impersonal compositional strategies were admired by the Surrealists, and in a sense made the literary modernism of the nouveau roman possible.

After a hiatus of nineteen years, Morgan Fisher returned to filmmaking with ( ) (2003), a departure from all his previous work. Fisher abandoned autobiography, self-portraiture, voice-over narration, even the use of the camera, in order to pursue the ideal of a practice that is purely mechanical. Consisting entirely of insert shots from narrative motion pictures, ( ) is constructed according to a pattern which appears random, yet adheres to a rule. Fisher devised this rule, but does not reveal it, either in the film or in his writings about it.

In narrative films, inserts are generally close-ups of anything but a human face. They contain information that cannot be transmitted in dialogue or in any of the other conventional figures of film editing, (e. g., master shots or two shots). Inserts have a fairly marginal presence in narrative films; they do their work best when they are hardly noticed, but the codes of narrative are present within them. Shots of money, weapons, hands, cards, dice, calendars(to mention only a few examples) serve as a sort of narrative shorthand. If, as in the aphorism of Godard, all that is necessary for a certain kind of movie is a girl and a gun, then inserts provide the gun. In ( ), inserts are isolated from their original contexts and become a series of details without any characters to see them, without any story to give them specific meaning. Fisher performs a kind of liberation for the lowly inserts, and brings to our attention their simple beauty.

The autonomy Fisher grants to individual shots in ( ) and the rule he uses to construct his film have an historical precedent in Raymond Roussel’s treatment of words in his writing. Roussel considered words not as a means of expression, but as concrete entities that yielded narration when he applied what he called his procedure. For Fisher, shots generate films; for Roussel, words generated texts.

Roussel’s rule for composing texts was not obvious from the finished works, but he revealed some of his secrets in the posthumous How I Wrote Certain of My Books. He cited an example from his novel Impressions of Africa, the plot of which was generated by two near-homophones that have two distinct meanings:

les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billiard

[the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table]

les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pilliard

[the white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]

For Roussel, the problem or puzzle of the text was how to establish a logical connection between the first phrase and the second. In filling the gap between them, Roussel wrote other phrases, which in turn suggested more homophones. Using Roussel’s procedure, simple words and phrases could yield very strange results; for instance, règle de l’art (rule of art) may have become règle de lard (lard ruler) in Impressions of Africa, and chapelet (string of beads), chat pelé (depilated cat) in his later novel Locus Solus. Previously written texts became a fund of potential double meanings that provided the basis for subsequent texts. By obeying a difficult but arbitrary rule, Roussel wrote an invented world while avoiding conventional problems of inspiration. He did not have to empty his mind to produce automatic writing. He found the potential for it in language itself. Roussel’s texts were also virtually bereft of autobiographical detail. They expressed nothing. Roussel removed himself as a persona from the scene of writing, and thereby achieved an unprecedented kind of objectivity. The locus of meaning, if such texts can be said to have one, cannot be in the author, but must be in the words themselves.

Roussel wrote in a way that could be described as mechanical, and Fisher seeks an analogous way of making films. Narrative films in the most literal sense are made by machines, yet they work to make spectators forget the machines and be carried away to a fictional world of thought and expression. With ( ), Morgan Fisher has produced a film not only made by machines, but also mechanical in its construction. It is composed of fragments of narrative films, but it is decisively non-narrative; each fragment is loaded with meaning, but in combination the fragments do not lead spectators to any single meaning that can be agreed upon. The inserts of ( ) remain concrete, autonomous and mysterious. By obeying a difficult but arbitrary rule, Fisher has invented a world, neither fictional nor documentary, without recourse to montage, and without a conventional locus of meaning. ( ) approaches the ideal of a film void. It expresses nothing.

My essay on Morgan Fisher’s films began as a text for his 2002 retrospective at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Germany. Unfortunately, due to budget problems, the exhibition catalogue was not published. I then reworked the essay as a preface for a collection of Fisher’s writings, another book that has not come out. Excerpts of the text were used as program notes for Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher at Tate Modern in 2005. This is the first appearance of the complete revised version of the essay.