Dan Riley's Blog, page 46

Marley

For a very long time, daughter Gillian wanted a dog, and her mom and I did not. Gillian used all the tools available to kids who want things their parents don't want--begging, pleading, painting pictures of dogs for use as placemats, ordering up a seemingly endless film series of doggie movies--Lady and the Tramp, Old Yeller, 1001 Dalmatians, Turner and Hooch, Beethovens by the score...I, II, III...XX...there were 20 of them, right?
Mom and Dad were cold blooded about it. These were the Reagan years...drawing lines in the sand was all the vogue then.
But then came the Clinton feel-your-pain years. Not that Lorna and I started to feel Gillian's pain, but we were suddenly open to negotiation. I had just finished a year of homeschooling Gillian (chronicled here), and though we both agreed that it was time to move on from that difficult but rewarding experience, we had a difference of opinion as to where would be best for Gillian to continue her schooling. She was eager to get back to her friends in public school. I felt she needed a transition period...a half-way house, if you will, between our house and a public school house. My idea, which came as a shock to most everyone who knew me, was that Gillian should spend a year (what would be her 9th grade year) at the local Catholic girls' school. This, of course, would be a radical choice for most any normal American girl, but more so for Gillian who had been raised in a non-religious environment, and was by no means your average kid when it came to happily submitting to authority. Her rebellious streak was one of the prime motivators of the home school in the first place. And though I knew Billy Joel was fairly well right in what he sang about Catholic girls, I also knew enough from personal experience about the power of Catholic educators to focus the mind of even the most wild child.
So, we struck a deal...in exchange for spending one year in uniform--literally and figuratively--at the Catholic girls school, Gillian would get a dog. And that's how Marley came into our lives.
She named him Marley after Bob Marley--"black and white together," she explained, "in world harmony" (Gillian's major at what we called TheDan Riley School for a Girl may have been in Questioning Authority, but her minor was Idealism). She made the poor pooch live up to the lofty ideals she had set for him by training him to be tolerant of a virtual Noah's Ark diversity of species. Lions lying down with lambs had nothing on Marley. He  was made to lie down with rabbits, cockatoos, iguanas....a python! And the dog behaved through it all like the sweetest creature ever to walk out of the heavenly kingdom. As obedient as he was, after about two years under Gillian's care and tutelage, Marley's life took the turn of so many dogs in America...he became Dad's dog as Gillian's interests turned more and more to cars and boys.
That was, as the great movie line goes, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. For about 12 years Marley and I walked over hill and dale twice a day. We blazed trails, dodged rattlesnakes, and fought off coyotes--full disclosure here: Marley was usually the aggressor when it came to the coyotes. He would take off after them no matter how many in their number, and it was left to me to rescue him, like he was a kid brother who couldn't keep out of bar fights. For some reason (probably territoriality, the oldest reason of all for bad boy behavior), only the coyotes could pull Marley out of his Rastafarian mellowness. Otherwise he was the embodiment of patience and tolerance Gillian had raised him to be. Once, quite Lassie like, he had found Gillian's runaway iguana on the farthest reaches of our property and came to summon us and lead us to the Mexico-bound reptile. Another time, I spied him in a corner of the yard intently studying something a few feet away from him. When I came to investigate, I saw a large king snake with its neck extended upward as it was in the act of swallowing a mouse. The mouse's rear legs were just about to disappear into the snake's mouth when Marley leaned forward for a closer look. The snake panicked, loosening its jaws and freeing the mouse, which scampered away in one direction while the snake slithered off in the opposite direction. Another Marley rescue job.
He wasn’t just brave, stouthearted and kind, but smart as well. Last week as we turned our clocks ahead for daylight savings time, I was reminded of one of his most dazzling traits. One of our twice daily walks was at 4 p.m., and if I was ever distracted by breaking news or a tie score in the bottom of the ninth, he would come up to wherever I was comfortably seated and gently nudge me in the leg to remind me that it was Marley time. I know this is pretty common for dogs who love their routines, but what elevated Marley to genius dog status was on those days when the clocks were moved ahead an hour or back an hour, he always knew when it was 4. None of this, “Well, if it was yesterday it would be 3 p.m.” for him. He knew the new time as if he had set the clock himself.
As Marley transitioned from Gillian’s dog to my dog, her friend Christina observed, “Marley should be your dad’s dog anyway, they’re so alike.” It was an amusing observation at the time that only grew in acuity over time as Marley came more and more to reflect my personality (and, yes, I realize I just paid myself the most generous back-handed compliment of all time there). With all the humans I’ve loved and bonded with over time, none really ever seemed more like me than Marley (even his coyote aggression...I can get that way when my territory is encroached too). I understand there is somewhat of a Rorschach effect here where we project onto our pets…most especially our dogs…the qualities we like to see in ourselves. But if that is all there was between Marley and me, that too is instructive and enlightening and yet another gift he left behind for me.
Near the end he was having trouble getting up and walking without the help of steroids and was suffering unmistakable embarrassment over soiling his bed (okay, maybe it wasn’t embarrassment…nod to Twain...just me projecting again). The vet told me he could probably go another year like that, but I wanted to leave him his dignity, so I put him down. He died in my lap and I buried him myself on a plot of land we walked over every day. I have no doubt he would’ve done exactly the same for me.
Thanks for bringing him into our lives G-girl…and happy birthday!

(Note on our exciting new layout...the pulldown menu on the left gives you a number of great options for viewing the blog...the pullout bar in black and white on the right presents a number of familiar sub-features of the blog.)

Accepting Loss Forever, Part Deux

I am compelled to revisit last week's post by the report this week that the last words of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez were, “I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die.” Not only does it sound a little el pollo poo-poo for a general to be whining like that, but it also shows that Señor Chavez was somewhat behind on his visits to The Nobby Works where we champion Norman O. Brown's exhortation that we "accept loss forever...admit the void."
Advocacy of that position did, however, raise some alarm bells throughout Nobby World. One loyal reader went so far as to embark on a suicide intervention after reading the post, imagining I was writing it with a loaded six-shooter beside my iMac and a shot of hemlock in my Merlot.
Then there was the “Say it ain't so Joe’s” who tried an intervention out of concern over my anti-Marxist sentiments (Marx as in brothers, not as in workers of the world unite). I should've been more careful, I guess, in choosing an example to illustrate the point that life is a succession of losses. The loss of certain enjoyments in our lives is rather relentless, either because of physical failings or emotional depletion. This happens to all of us along the way, and as I said last week, it's not a bad idea to embrace the reality of loss as part of life...if for no other reason than to cushion us for when it happens.
Easier said than done of course. As much as I accept it intellectually and try to write about it with clarity and objectivity, I have found myself reacting to certain losses with an anguished wail from such a deep, wounded part of me that I've feared I might never return from the pain. But eventually return I do. And that happens when I’m able to accept the finality and ineluctability of the loss.
This has all caused me to take an inventory of the various losses I’ve experienced in life—things that brought me a certain degree of joy at one time or another, but no longer do for one reason or another. I present them here in no particular order…and surely not to imply any kind of equality among them. But I do like to think that accounting for them like this prepares me for dealing with the losses to come…
My once-sharp eyesightJeopardy-quick recall of triviaEating DonutsMacaroni & cheeseChocolate cake with white frostingCounting down the days til ChristmasThe three I's of bliiiss--Innocence, Idealism, IdiocyGod
Dad
Dreams of winning the Oscar for best screenplayWatching the OscarsDouble featuresGoing from first to home on a double to rightThe Red SoxPlaying football on Thanksgiving with the home boysSaturday morning cartoonsPlaying the DVD commentariesWatching PTIThe next Beatles albumParadesCircusesSnowBlack RussiansJack DanielsMargaritasCarnickingParentingFlowered tiesBell bottoms (with & without the blues)The Great Jewish Hopes for President (Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner)Marx Brothers moviesMarley…
Speaking of Marley…well, that’s next week…

Accepting Loss Forever

I watched a Marx Brothers movie this week—A Night in Casablanca—and though there were some moments, I was struck by how much their antics had lost their magic for me. I’ve seen enough of them so the elements that once made them such fresh entertainment have gone stale—the plots paint-by-number, the anarchy too silly to be liberating, and the Grouchoisms just groan worthy:

Straightman: Sir, this lady is my wife, you should be ashamed.
Groucho: If this lady is your wife, you should be ashamed.

As the final credits rolled, I thought to myself, “That will be the last Marx Brothers movie I ever watch in my life.” I guess at some point birthdays (like the one I just celebrated) reach critical mass and one starts reflecting on those things that once brought joy and no longer do…or the joy they bring is no longer within reach. This is a universal and inevitable fact of life, but how we treat this fact really has a profound impact on the quality of our individual lives.
Last year we took a family Mediterranean cruise to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 90th birthday. This was her wish, and as a true Tiger Grandmother there was really no choice but to grant it. The cruise included stops at the Acropolis, the Vatican, and Pompeii. But after the first hot, crowded and somewhat grueling tour of the ancient ruins of Epheseus in Turkey, a group decision was made to alter Betty’s itinerary to a far more modest and manageable scope. The lone and very loud dissenting voice on the matter was Betty’s. 
I, practicing son-in-law survival skills honed over many years, abstained from the voting. And it pained me to do so because I couldn’t help thinking: What if at that stage of my life I had not yet achieved one of my life goals (bucket list, if you will) and visited Pompeii, and yet there it was just a bus ride away from the Port of Naples…as close as I would ever get to it? Ever!
It haunts me to this day obviously. But I’m rather glad I was a mere back-bencher when it came to the ultimate decision because if I had urged forging ahead with the original itinerary and it had ended badly, the haunting would no doubt be even greater.
 There’s a world of difference of course between my accepting the loss of joy from watching Marx Brothers films and Betty accepting the loss of joy from visiting Pompeii. My need for Marx Brothers, I can safely say, has been fully satiated, and even if it weren’t the decision is not irrevocable. Yet both losses speak directly to one of the most profound and challenging concepts in Norman O. Brown’s philosophy, referenced at this blog previously. As Nobby writes in Love’s Body:

Admit the void; accept loss forever…The world annihilated, the destruction of illusion. The world is the veil we spin to hide the void. The destruction of what never existed, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away…The absence; a withdrawal, leaving vacant space, or void, to avoid the plenum of omnipresence. The god who, mercifully, does not exist.

In Nobby’s formulation both Marx Brothers' movies and Pompeii’s ruins are merely part of that veil we spin to hide the void. But both, as it happens, work remarkably well as symbols for that illusory world. The Marx Brothers’s anarchy, silly as it now seems to me, still conveys the sense of a world as largely senseless:

Groucho as Kornblow: From now on the essence of this hotel will be speed. If a customer asks you for a three-minute egg, give it to him in two minutes. If he asks you for a two-minute egg, give it to him in one minute. If he asks you for a one-minute egg, give him the chicken and let him work it out for himself!

And Pompeii--the Beverly Hills of ancient Rome…seemingly rich and pampered beyond risk…annihilated in an afternoon of nature’s indifference. 
Lent is a good season to practice loss--even for non-Catholics. It’s what lies ahead for all of us, and there’s an art to it…an invaluable art, I maintain. Learning to accept loss, even momentarily, I believe, can help alleviate some of the sting and panic from the unavoidable losses to come. Temporarily giving up something for 40 days that’s a part of us—our chocolate or coffee--may not actually bring us closer to God, but giving up an illusion or two may make it easier to live with the god who doesn’t exist. 

Plan B

Julie Haggerty does her impression of the US Congress

Of all the birthday tributes that came my way this past week, none meant more to me than when someone Near & Dear, who had been experiencing an excruciating crisis through much of the last year, raised a glass to me and said, “Thank you. The turning point was when you asked, ‘What’s Plan B?’”
Actually, in the course of the crisis, I had twice asked that very question. But the first time I asked, the answer was a shockingly definitive, “There is no Plan B.” All the Plan A chips had been moved to the middle of the table, and Come what may had become the default Plan B for my Near & Dear.  Months later when I asked the question again, and the reality of Come what may had started to announce itself in nightmares and incipient depression, the question took on reinvigorated urgency. My Near & Dear finally stepped back at that moment to more rationally assess options and more seriously address the need for alternatives. It was in that moment of deep, sober reflection--rather than sentimental, emotional reaction--that an alternate route through the fog of frightening uncertainty revealed itself.
I go to Plan B rather routinely. In fact I often go to Plans C, D, and E and to be quite honest  sometimes it’s maddening. It can be paralyzing by preventing final decisions. It can also force premature abortions of Plan A if things don’t seem to be going well immediately because the back-up plan suddenly looks better (if for no other reason than being untested). Yet, for all these drawbacks, I prefer going through life as a multi-plan person. I’ve seen too many examples—both personal and historical—where the all-in on one plan approach leads to disaster. 
Daniel Kahneman, who was the star of this blog for a month a while back, dedicated his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, to examining the difficulty people have in formulating back-up plans. Mostly it’s because Plan B’ing depends upon what Kahneman calls System 2 thinking, which requires more time and effort than System 1 thinking, the launchpad of most of our Plan A’s.

The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least part of a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to. In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given strong incentive to do so.

Kahneman refers at length to a series of those studies that show conclusively that mental energy is not merely a metaphor and exhaustion of the nervous system is as real an outcome for the heavy thinker as exhaustion of the muscles is for a long-distance runner since both rely heavily on glucose (an exhaustible--albeit renewable--resource). In short, coming up with Plan A is often more than most people can handle, and to expect them to also come up with a Plan B is to put extraordinary expectations on them.     Which now brings us to that house of horrors known as the US Congress. It is hardly Near & Dear to me…more like Jeer & Fear…due to its overall commitment to turn everything it touches into David Vitter’s soiled diapers. It perverted the sublime logic of plan B’ing when it decided back in late 2012 that if it couldn’t gather the political courage and patriotic fervor to forge a just and equitable deficit reduction plan for the nation, it would default to sequestration. Its Plan B amounted to across-the-board spending cuts, which financial wizards have predicted would have immediate dire consequences, including the loss of over 2 million jobs forcing the unemployment rate to 9% again, torpedo personal income and economic growth, and slash first responder budgets and military benefits (oh, yeah, and it would make it much easier for planes to crash).
In other words, our Congress’s Plan B is akin to a couple who promise each other that if they don’t get themselves to a marriage counselor to resolve their differences in due time, they’ll burn their house down and kill their children. It is a plan borne of self-loathing and utter contempt for the institution in question, be it Congress or marriage.
As Kahneman reports, “In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given strong incentive to do so.” And I guess that was the thinking of our legislative (ho-ho) leaders when they latched onto their cockamamie sequester as Plan B…that its outcome would be so self-evidently hideous that it would force them to measure up to the American exceptionalism they propound upon every time they face a camera or campaign rally.
Oh, if only we could attribute this negligence and betrayal to a lack of glucose. But we cannot. First of all the ego that drives Congress is beyond depletion (and let’s be clear about this, when Kahneman writes about “ego depletion,” he’s talking about the personal investment in actually trying to solve problems). Secondly--and most importantly—there is a considerable segment of the Congress that longs for the disaster that looms ahead. So for them this particular Plan B is brilliant.
For the rest of us? Their recklessness renders us as hapless as Albert Brooks in the YouTube clip above. We can do nothing but run around in circles as the cherished nest egg is sacrificed at the altar of 22…22…22.

It's My Party, and I'll Lie if I Want To...

No, dammit, I'm not 64 any longer, but like Jack Benny I've decided to stick with one birthday from here on out--and 64 it is. This overtly self-indulgent video will stay posted as long as false modesty permits.

Thank you, Beatles, for providing a beat for the ages...
and the aging...

It's My Birthday, and I'll Lie if I Want To...

No, dammit, I'm not 64 any longer, but like Jack Benny I've decided to stick with one birthday from here on out--and 64 it is. This overtly self-indulgent video will stay posted as long as false modesty permits.

Thank you, Beatles, for providing a beat for the ages...
and the aging...

As Years Go By

Another birthday, like the warming sun, rises on the horizon. I do not freak about these things as much as some because 1) there’s no point…like I told my city desk editor long ago when I forgot to log in the weather report, “The weather’s going to happen whether we report it or not and 2) I keep a close eye on my generation and know that as long as I’m in the upper percentile when it comes to health, wealth and having my wits about me I can live with aging (such as it was in high school and such as it ever will be). I pay particular attention to the successes of my generation, especially the early successes, and most especially Marianne Faithfull. If she had been born in Enfield, Connecticut (or more precisely Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthing place of most us little nutmeggers from our north border town), she would’ve been a classmate of mine…quite possibly a girlfriend. I fell for her anyway…even from half a world a way. And who wouldn’t fall for the sweet, demur, young thing that appears in the video above (not accounting for the miniature aircraft carrier protruding off her topside). There she is all of 19, with a hit song on her hands written by none other than Mick Jagger. Who knew what lie ahead?
A romance with Jagger; multiple divorces; episodic drug addiction; institutionalization; a suicide attempt; a lover who did commit suicide; the loss of one child in the courts, another in birthing; a flirtation with political terrorism; cancer; homelessness.  She was the female icon of London's Swinging Sixties; she co-wrote Sister Morphine and inspired a half dozen other classic songs of the era; she married a Vibrator and became godmother of the punk movement; she acted in Checkov at 21, Shakespeare at 23, played opposite Nicol Williamson, Anthony Hopkins and Orson Welles (and became the first actor in a mainstream film to utter the word fuck—thus unleashing the careers of a thousand desperate screenwriters). She got beat out by Helen Mirren for a best actress award; won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women’s World Art Awards, Whew! And in the following video she delivers the best rendition of Pirate Jenny this side of Lotte Lenya. Compare her voice here with her voice from As Tears Go Byand tell me all the living summarized in the previous paragraph isn’t there in spades:


Well, I was class president and editor of the student paper…still Marianne Faithfull may be the measure for all baby boomers. In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown writes:

The king personifies the pomp and pleasure of the community; but must also bear the burden of royalty, and, as a scapegoat, take away the sins…It is a story not only of triumph, but also of crime and punishment.

Brown was writing in a political context, but I think the passage applies more to artists than kings or other political powers. Artists do that for us. They live the lives—for both better and worse--that convention and domesticity prevent most of us from living, and in doing so they take away the sin of our timidity.
In the past 20 years or so, we’ve had a spate of artist biographies—Great Balls of Fire, Ray, Walk the Line, etc. They all follow the same pattern—up from hardscrabble beginnings; undeniable, but sometimes uncontrollable talent; discovery; skyrocketing fame; battle with personal demons; crash and burn; the Phoenix-like rising from the ashes. It's mythic--a tale we tell ourselves over and over again to assure ourselves that this is how the world works. The Marianne Faithfull bio-pic hasn’t been attempted yet, and gods help the moviemaker who tries to compress all her living into 2 hours. For those of us who have been paying attention though, the movie can wait. We’ve been watching her life unfold in real time. And it’s a true wonder that she will be celebrating the same birthday as I will this year. It’s a wonder because she has lived her life so entirely on the edge, and I have lived mine a comfortable remove from the edge. The difference between us (well, one of them anyway) best summed up in these--perhaps the most prosaic words ever to leave her lips-- "I'm not prepared to be 70 and absolutely broke. I realised last year that I have no safety net at all and I'm going to have to get one.”
I’ve got my safety net of course…and it’s in as good a shape as safety nets can be these days. But as I blow out the candles in a few days, don’t think I won’t be asking myself if I wouldn’t trade my safety net for a co-writing credit on Sister Morphine.
Below, a video from Marianne’s later acting career, opposite Kerry Fox (the Australian Meryl Streep, and as such the greatest underrated actress of our time). It’s another rich character role for Marianne Faithfull, who gained her character the old fashioned way--she lived through it and survived herself. 

Infidelity & Other Valentine Thoughts, Part II

Dangerous Methods Trailer
When last we met, The Nobby Works was dutifully stuffing the hot, juicy topic of illicit sex into the maw of erudition. Spicy infidelity was on the verge of being swallowed, digested and excreted out the other end as so much psycho babble. But that's how the Nobby works. Nob is less interested in the steam and seaminess of sex than in the fact that affairs have endured for so very long despite the stern moral rebukes, broken homes, and searing tales of loves and lives lost in their wake. Because the foundation of this blog is the writing of Norman O. Brown rather than Tina Brown, I’m inclined to think upon the subject of sex as more complicated than the mere scratching of an itch. 
How complicated you may ask. Well, in Love’s Body, Nobby quotes Northrup Frye favorably as saying: "the 'sin' in the sex act is not that of love but that of parentage. It is the father and mother, not the lover and beloved, who disappear from the Highest Paradise...." Brown in Love’s Body and his other masterwork Life Against Death is pretty much a Freudian when it comes to viewing sex through the prism of parent-child relations, though it’s a far less icky perspective than comedians and charlatans would have us believe. As Brown channels Freud, even the most wholesome mating of an all-American couple poses a threat to “the natural order” and causes disruption to one degree or another. Meet the Fockers may be a heavy-handed Hollywood pun, but it does convey a primal reality. Upon meeting the intended mates of our children, we are meeting our replacements…the fuckers, as it were, of our kids. And we know subconsciously, if not consciously, that in that act of sex they will achieve a level of intimacy with our children that’s beyond us. And our children know instinctively that in that act of sex they are achieving the independence from their parents that they’ve been struggling for since at least pre-pubescence.
Like Freud, Brown sees sex as an act of rebellion…and much of its pleasure and joy comes not just from the physical sensation, but from the psychic liberation it provides. In Dangerous Methods, David Cronenberg’s outstanding film about the relationship between Freud and Jung, Keira Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein--at first a patient, then a student and finally a disciple of the two pioneers of psychoanalysis. When we first meet her, she’s a certified hysteric, a common affliction among women of those very sexually repressive times. (Important historic note: as modernity turned away from sexual repression, hysteria as “a woman’s disease” virtually disappeared.) As Jung guides her through Freud’s “talking cure,” she reveals that her father used to take her off to a private room and spank her. The great discovery of her psychoanalysis (and she's really Jung's partner in it) is that her hysteria stems not from the fact that her father spanked her, but that she enjoyed it sexually and felt hysteria-inducing guilt for enjoying it.
Though John H. Richardson’s Esquire piece that launched this two-part Nobby post focused on infidelity, the reality is that the sexual prison he discusses can become manifest in many kinds of taboo sex—spanking, fetishes, pornography, etc.—none of which requires infidelity to one’s mate. But infidelity still presents the biggest conundrum because the number of people affected by one’s infidelity increases exponentially as does the need to rebel through sex.  The need to reaffirm one’s personal liberation does not dissipate after declaring independence from the parents. That temporary euphoria is most graphically illustrated in this chartfrom an earlier post. What happens is that the keys to the sexual prison inevitably fall into the hands of the mate who previously helped free you. 

So, what’s a love’s body to do?
Well, marshmallows might help. The famous marshmallow test has been conducted on kids from 3-5 years old for 40 years now with increasingly reliable and surprising results. Put a marshmallow in front of a child and give the child the choice: eat the marshmallow immediately or wait 15 minutes and receive a second marshmallow as a reward. The test has shown consistently that the kids who demonstrate the ability to delay gratification have greater success later in life. And delaying gratification can be a learned behavior.
So imagine, if you will, an intimate relationship which is not about denying gratification, but delaying it—which is not in denial about the ephemeral nature of passion, but embraces a broader view of love that includes the reality of human nature. Imagine a relationship where you hold the keys to liberation rather than prison for your mate. 

This Valentine’s Day why not show how much you dare to care with a marshmallow?

Infidelity & Other Valentine Thoughts, Part I

(with apologies to Joan Armatrading)
If Jesus were to return to earth as the Messiah of sexual liberation, John H. Richardson might want to put in for the post of his new John the Baptist. Richardson was recently spotted wandering around the wilderness of Esquire magazine draped in goatskin and exhorting the adulterers, philanderers, and horn dogs of this Gomorrah of ours to"Repent NOT!"
In an essay that provoked quite a bit of Internet fury and caused a Salome or two at Andrew Sullivan's Dish to call for his head, Richardson wrote, under the title of The Martyrs of Sex, a defense of marital infidelity that included the following passage:

I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin. To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn't indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero's journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand. He was the Martyred Jesus of Oral Sex with Interns and all we see is a mean little sin, as all the sexual deviates pretending to be puritans gathered around in an orgy of denunciation and scandal. In our condemnation, we focus on the supposedly broken vows and the supposed pain of his wife when in fact we know nothing of his wife's true feelings or her knowledge and tolerance of his "frisky" side (frisky being one of the endless array of demeaning expressions we use as invisible prison bars, along with dog and pig and you only want one thing). We never consider that our reaction is the punishment and the meanness is all in our eyes. Every single time we play out this ritual, we replay the Old Testament rite in which the pious transferred their sins to goats, which were then driven into the wilderness, just as we drive David Petraeus and a parade of other scapegoats out the gates of our smug little village of lies in the hope that we can put the "sin" outside the gate — when it is, of course, always inside. That's what happens when you put up gates.

Rationalizing adultery is not what makes Richardson's essay so radical. Every other month or so some woman's magazine or Huffington Post offers up an article on how an affair can actually be good for recharging the dead battery of a long too-idle marriage. Richardson heads into wild man territory on the subject when he calls an act generally characterized as "cheating" as rather heroic. It takes one's breath away--and maybe one's sense of logic and proportion as well. To consider a 62-year old Senator trying to solicit illicit sex in an airport men's room or a 50-year old president engaging in oral sex with a 24-year old intern as heroic seems to stretch the very concept of heroism to the breaking point. Perhaps a ringing public declaration, “I did have sex with that woman!” Now that’s something a lot more folks could swallow as heroic. Even David Petraeus’s quick and quiet resignation comes much closer to our notion of heroism than does the infidelity that forced his resignation in the first place. 

Yet, we at the Nobby works are no strangers to the suggestion that infidelity—even as it often involves the betrayal of sacred vows—has something of the heroic about it. In Love's Body and much of his other writings, Norman O. Brown often frames the sexual act--both in and out of marriage--in heroic terms. “The soul is the penis," he writes at one point.  "The wandering heroes are phallic heroes," he writes at another.
Of course, in these wanderings one must always be on the lookout for the ever-dangerous Slippery Slope…more fearsome for those of us who inhabit real earth than anything Tolkien imagined for Middle-Earth. After all, if wandering heroes are phallic heroes, could not Jerry Sandusky and a parade of pedophile priests count themselves among that number? Richardson certainly doesn’t shy away from that possibility when he includes deviants among those noble few struggling against the chains of convention and repression. This is where the phrase “consenting adults” becomes the most essential in any discussion of sexual freedom. The conversation starts to get irrational around the edges when one man’s sexual liberation is fixated on another man’s 10-year old child. (Though the guys at NAMBLA do their best to keep the conversation rational with constant references to Ancient Greece and Rome. Operative word there, fellas, is Ancient .)  
But deviancy must be part of the discussion because it is such a subjective term. In most people’s minds deviancy is anything they wouldn’t do…or think of doing. That is why, since Kinsey in 1948, people are repeatedly shocked by the revelations in sex studies. And the shock is not just for those with a narrow view of sexual activity, but for those with a broader view who can’t believe there are more people like them than they ever dared think.
However over-the-top he may be in making his case, Richardson does not overstate the daring element required in sexual adventurism. As loathsome, silly, or pathetic we may choose to view Senator Craig’s attempt to play footsie with an undercover cop in a men’s room stall, we must admit it takes a bit of derring-do—even if it is driven by desperation. (And let’s not overlook the role of cultural bias in our degree of tolerance for these behaviors. Larry Craig’s situation was almost identical to the pickle rock star George Michael made for himself in 1998, and he didn’t experience half the backlash.) 
Anyway, as coincidence would have it, a day after reading Richardson’s Esquire piece I happened upon a little Israeli film aptly titled Footnote. It’s about a pair of Talmudic scholars—a father (Eliezer) and son (Uriel), who have a very strained relationship due to the son’s career eclipsing the dad’s. As a consequence, the father has sunk into bitterness and near-permanent gloom. The son is shocked one day to see that gloom lifted when he comes upon his father relaxed and smiling in the semi-secluded company of another woman. He comes home at night and tells his wife, Dikla, about it. Here’s their dialog:
Dikla: Do you really think there's a woman?Uriel: I don't know. Anything’s possible. If he does, it's hilarious, no? Where does he get the courage?Dikla: What's courage got to do with it?Uriel: It takes a lot of courage to risk everything for a momentary passion.Dikla: Maybe it's not momentary.Uriel: Still, he has a lot to lose.Dikla: So that's why you don't cheat on me. Too much to lose?Uriel: Who said I don't?Dikla: You don't.Uriel: How can you be so sure?Dikla: You're a coward.Uriel: So my father is brave and I'm a coward?Dikla: Your father is true to himself and willing to pay the price. You're a nice guy who's afraid of confrontation. Even with me.Uriel: What are you saying? I don't understand. You want me to confront you? I can do that.Dikla: No. I'm glad you don't want to break up our family. It's not out of fidelity, but out of fear.Uriel: I love you. I really doDikla: I know.
These words flat on the page can’t possibly convey the exquisite nuance and subtext of this exchange. Dikla is basically echoing much of John H. Richardson’s argument, but rather than coming from a man in a men’s magazine, it’s coming from a woman lying in bed with the one person most vulnerable to this particular viewpoint (albeit, a woman whose scripted words and actions have been written and directed by a male).
Dikla really does appreciate the civilized man lying next to her who has made their life together safe and comfortable. But with her sigh and last look in that scene, she clearly conveys that she also longs for whatever daring qualities Uriel possessed that attracted her to him in the first place. In Dikla’s sigh, Footnote brilliantly captures the paradox Freud discovered a century ago: to build families and thus our civilization, we must repress our individualistic basic instincts. But that repression eventually becomes the greatest threat to both civilization and family because those instincts cannot be forever repressed and will assert themselves eventually--to paraphrase the marriage vow: for better or worse. The challenge for us is to make the outcome of that more good than bad.
To Be Continued…

Skin Tight

This whole blog post requires a big red spoiler alert. I’m about to give away every significant beat in a movie I just saw. I do this with pretty clear conscience, however, since it’s a foreign film and so many people I know—even the best and brightest of my friends and acquaintances--refuse to watch movies with subtitles. As for those who dare watch subtitled films…well, what I’m talking about here is a Pedro Almodóvar movie, and as with all his films it’s not what happens but how it happens that matters. In any case, for foreign film buffs and those who prefer not to, I offer the ensuing plot synopsis to launch the discussion that follows and in the firm belief that you’re not likely to ever hear a movie plot quite like The Skin I live In…
Marilia, a servant, has two sons…one by the wealthy man she works for and one by a fellow servant. The brothers are as different as their fathers, but equally evil. Zeca grows up to be a thief and a brute; Robert grows up to be a doctor and a madman. Robert’s wife Gal runs off with Zeca, but their car crashes. Zeca escapes, and Robert comes along in time to pull Gal's badly burned body out of the fire. For weeks he broods over her heavily gauzed, near comatose body. One day she’s awakened by the sound of her little daughter Norma singing in the garden and pulls herself out of bed to painfully follow the sound to her window…but at the window she catches sight for the first time of her charred visage and in horror throws herself out the window, crashing to the pavement below in front of little Norma, traumatizing the child for life. Years later Robert takes his now teenaged daughter out of the asylum she’s been in since her mother’s death to escort him to a party. There she captures the attention of Vicente, a dressmaker who’s nonetheless an ardent ladies’ man. Vicente invites Norma out into the garden and with her seeming compliance attempts to have sex with her. But the disturbed Norma freaks out as the two of them squirm together under a tree. She struggles and screams and sends Vicente running off in panic. Robert’s in a panic as well, as he rushes through the woods frantic for Norma. When he comes upon her unconscious, he believes that she has been raped. And when she comes to, she believes that he raped her. Norma is institutionalized again, but this time she is so far gone that she cannot bear being around people--especially her father--so like her mother, she throws herself from a window and dies. Robert now sets off on a path of mistaken revenge against Vicente. He kidnaps the boy and takes him to his hidden laboratory, where--like Extreme Makeover Frankenstein--he performs a transsexual operation, turning Vicente into Vera. But rather than working with Vincent’s handsome face, Robert gives his Vera creation the beautiful face of his dead wife. Robert then proceeds to keep Vera against his/her will, living in the splendid isolation of his remote country home under the watchful eye of his mother/servant Marilia. One day, Zeca, on the run from the law for a jewel heist, comes to the house disguised as a tiger (it’s carnival time conveniently enough). He wants Robert to perform plastic surgery on his face so he can elude the law. Marilia tells Zeca that Robert would never help him after what he did to Gal, but as they argue Zeca spies Vera on the in-house security monitor. With ludicrous tiger-tail wagging behind him, he tears through the house looking for the woman he believes he saw go up in flames in that car years before. Zeca finally breaks into the room where Robert has locked Vera away and proceeds to rape her. As he’s doing so, Robert walks in and shoots him dead.  After disposing of the body, Robert tries to seduce Vera himself. After a fashion, he gets her to comply, but the vagina he gave her is still too tight for use despite the specific instructions he gave her for stretching it and Zeca’s prior forced penetration. So Robert suggests that she take him (ahem) “from behind.” Vera agrees, but says first she must get some of the lubricant she just bought on her first trip ever outside of the house. Robert sends her off for lube despite owning a house that’s fully equipped for any and all medical circumstances. Vera finds the lube in her purse and puts Robert's gun in there with it and returns to the bedroom. She tosses the lube to the eager Robert and she shoots him as he opens it. Marilia, alarmed by the gunshot, comes rushing in with a gun of her own, but Vera shoots her as well. Vera at last escapes and returns to her mother’s dress shop where she comes face to face again with Cristina, her mother’s beautiful sales girl, who rejected Vicente’s earlier advances because Cristina is a lesbian. But now seeing Vicente as the beautiful Vera, CristWhew, huh? Sounds pretty ludicrous, don’t it? And in the hands of a hack it would be. But Almodóvar is no hack. He’s a mighty fine filmmaker who infuses his movies with style and humor…and nobody but nobody can pull off kink with the panache of Pedro. I’ve enjoyed every film of his that I’ve seen…Volver; Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down; Bad Education; All About My Mother. And I have such a feel for his sensibility at this point that I realized what he was up to five minutes after Vicente’s kidnapping…and muttered to myself, “Pedro, you glorious bastard.” The Skin I’m In makes it to The Nobby Works, however, not by dint of cinematic excellence, but because it speaks to many questions The Nob—in channeling its master, Norman O. Brown--is compelled to confront regularly: the impact of parentage on personal destiny; the eternal male/female dichotomy; salvation through the body—for Robert having sex with the person who he believes destroyed his daughter…for Vera killing Robert who destroyed her life as Vicente…for Cristina and Vera a relationship perhaps to come (please, Pedro, make the sequel).
To the parentage question: Marilia realizes she gave birth to two evil sons by two different fathers, so the source of their evil, she concludes, must be her entrails, not that of the fathers. Technically, of course, there is a remote genetic chance that both fathers contained enough fucked-up DNA to produce both Zeca and Robert. But given what little she knows about all the genetic history, Marilia is both reasonable and fearless in placing the blame on herself for producing two malignant human beings. And what’s a mother to do? No woman starts out wanting to bewomb Rosemary’s baby, but no woman is in complete control of what her loins give forth either. Nancy Lanza, mother of mass child murderer Adam Lanza, surely did not have that horror in mind as she held him to her breast 20 years ago…but so it happens. And though I’m more than willing to place blame for the tragic outcome of Adam’s life on guns (most surely guns), and video games, and Nancy’s own near-criminal parenting, I’m not at all persuaded that genes didn’t enter into it at some significant point along the way and played a far greater part than some amorphous evil floating about in the air. But good for Marilia…and good for Almodóvar…for reminding us that sometimes badness can be traced back to mere biology.
To the question of male/female dichotomy: The treatment of Vicente in the film as an unwilling transsexual turns the whole science of transsexualism on its head. You cannot read or watch anything serious on the subject without being beaten over the head with how much effort is put into determining how psychologically prepared the patient is for the operation. Yet, in making Vicente a victim of a transsexual operation, Almodóvar (who I suspect is very sympathetic to transsexuality) challenges his viewers with this question: What would you do if your sex went through a radical, unwilling change? Is your personal identity so wrapped up in your sexual identity that would you try to kill yourself as Vicente/Vera does at first? Or would you try to accommodate to your new sexuality as he/she does at the end?
And last, but most important to this blog’s mission, the question of salvation through the body: At first The Skin I’m In suggests that like Red Road, which I blogged about earlier, a parent who has lost a child can find salvation for their hurt and hate in the arms of the person responsible for the child’s death. But then Almodóvar flips the script. Vera leaves Robert’s arms only to return to kill him. It’s still salvation through the body, in a manner of speaking, but a harsher salvation than Brown’s Love’s Body intends. Still, in the end…the very last shot, Almodóvar leaves us with an impression closer to Love’s Body. Cristina, the lesbian who viewed Vicente in the beginning with suspicion bordering on contempt, and Vicente who viewed Cristina with lust bordering on more lust, glimpse in each other the male/female dichotomy bridged. And when his mother steps forward to find her lost son in Vera’s eyes, we get the mother/child reunion that’s as big a part of Love’s Body salvation as male-female fusion is.

Heavy stuff. Time for a song...