sex, seduction, and oppression

^ Louise Brooks was arguably the personification of the edgy sexuality and seductiveness of Prohibition oppression, which just goes to show you - clamp down all you want, but all that good stuff will soon ooze out elsewhere in the most titillatingly wicked ways.

Prohibition Life: Politics, Loopholes And Bathtub Gin | NPR interview (audio, text)

Between the years of 1920, when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, and 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the restriction, it was illegal to sell, transport or manufacture "intoxicating" beverages for consumption in the United States.

But Prohibition didn't stop drinking; it simply pushed the consumption of booze underground. By 1925, there were thousands of speakeasy clubs operating out of New York City, and bootlegging operations sprang up around the country to supply thirsty citizens with alcoholic drinks....

When I used to live in Chicago my then partner proposed an outing to a gay bar. It was situated somewhere in the East Rogers Park neighbourhood, if I remember. He told me it used to be a 1920s speakeasy. I was in! Naturally the place probably looked very little like how it used to during the Prohibition era. There were black & white pictures on the wall of how it used to look. Though it was Friday night there were very few patrons, just me, my partner, his best friend, and two or three others at the bar. It wasn't a hotspot, obviously, but it had a rich back story.

I used to live near The Green Mill Lounge, in the Uptown neighbourhood of Chicago. That place was serious during the 1920s, hosting such infamous types as Al Capone, and serving up gallons of bootleg liquor. The gin, rye, and other goodies were transported to the joint through underground tunnels starting from the lakefront and ending directly below the lounge. There's a trap door on the floor behind the bar leading down to the basement. The tunnels had since been closed off.



I hadn't been there in years, but I still remember the excellent martinis I had, the live jazz (on some evenings it's bosa nova), the cozy booths, and sweet nightclub ambiance. The bartender was more than happy to show us a fat scrapbook of old newspaper clippings dating back to the early 20th century and starring The Green Mill and many of its edgy and glamourous patrons.

The Green Mill itself was a hotbed of gangster activities, crime, and endless streams of cocktails made from spirits smuggled from Canada and floated down on Lake Michigan...

The Green Mill opened in 1907 as Pop Morse’s Roadhouse and from the very beginning, was a favorite hangout for show business people in Chicago. In those days, actors from the north side’s Essanay Studios made the roadhouse a second home. One of the most popular stars to frequent the place was “Bronco Billy” Anderson, the star of dozens of Western silents from Essanay. Anderson often rode his horse to Pop Morse’s and the proprietor even installed a hitching post that Anderson’s horse shared with those of other stars like Wallace Beery and William S. Hart. Back then, even screen greats like Charlie Chaplin stopped in sometimes for a drink.

- Weird and Haunted Chicago: The Green Mill

Silent film legend Louise Brooks epitomized the roaring 20s with her drop dead beauty, severe pageboy bob, and highly erotic glamour. Her star quality and edginess would have been perfectly at home at The Green Mill. This was one dangerous babe, that much more so holding a perfectly mixed martini, bombshell contraband sipping contraband.

crossing over, then back

Ambiguity scares most of us Americans. Instead of exploring the grey terrain we too often stay within our comfort zone of black and white. Democrat or Republican. Straight or gay. Left or right. Neurotically macho or flamboyantly femme. We've become willing victims of our own pathological puritanism.

I remember my numerous trips to Europe, to cities like Paris and Rome, where the lines were less boldly drawn, where I could sometimes, if I listened hard enough, hear the disdainful laughter at American culture and values for puritanically drawing extreme distinctions between ideas, thoughts, experiences, and states of being. And I realized how pitiful that was, to severely limit ourselves to a narrow funnel of existence when we could be exploring instead - exciting ourselves with newly discovered senses and sensuality and mindsets. The very idea of growing and deepening in unexpected ways is frightening to us. The Europeans deserve to laugh at most of us.

This Italian commercial for Campari does just that, if you think about it. It laughs at the immature idea of fixating on merely one gender, one life, one state of mind. But as it does so it also offers us a chance to tap beyond our self-imposed prisons. In the span of one minute we journey from man to woman, then back again. How sexy and inspiring is that?

It offers us a glimpse of ourselves, but guess what? It's a far more seductive version of ourselves that we fleetingly see, even when it isn't necessarily a literal transformation (and it doesn't have to be literal, just a suggestion). We can remain man or woman, and yet still discover the strengths and the lightness and the gravity of the 'other' within ourselves.

And no commercial in America could ever give us that glimpse. Pity.

anagnorisis, peripateia, and lamb testicles

The Entertainment Gathering 2008
Monterey, CA
Dec 12th, 2008 (20 min. 35 sec.)

^ Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture belittles necessary labor.

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe is old school hot & hunky, with a hot & hunky voice. You know, that kind of man many women - and many of us gay guys - swoon over by default, the kind of man many straight men would consider a man's man, someone to buddy with and have a few brews with. The catch (well, he is a catch, but I digress...no, I don't, really) is he's also a damn good sport and has an amazing sense of humour belying his intelligence. If that doesn't make you look up to heaven and beam while your knees weaken, I dunno what will.

Furthermore he holds a profound admiration towards manual labour and the humble folk doing that labour. These are the invisible human beings who make it possible for us martini sipping cosmopolites, jetsetting tycoons, credit card whoring mall shoppers, gadget worshiping geeks, tax cut preaching Republicans, tree hugging liberals, and otherwise squeamish processed weaklings of humanity to live a reasonably comfortable life. We enjoy the sausages, we just don't wanna see how they're made.

Mike has not only seen how the sausages were made, he has helped out with the process, hands on. Like in the title of this post. It was painful for him (though the lamb never seemed to make a scene of it). But it was also epiphanous. Many, many of us Americans have lost touch with the salty, earthy, and ultimately grounding physicality of our lives. It shows in how we live, how we consume, how we socialize, how we view and formulate opinions, how we experience, and how we vote.

"We have been bred to consume, not to create." - Jennifer Connelly, actress

Maybe it really is time we put sweat into it or at least had a humbling glimpse into how this sausage of a country we call home is being made, everyday (no, I don't mean manually washing the dishes). Only then can we re-discover it and admire the hard work and craft put into it, humble us a bit, while maybe even putting a little hair on our chest and a little muscle on our arm.

And looking at Mike Rowe, with his "aw, shucks" earthy, sexy, funny, grounded, manual labouring charm on his show and, I trust, in person, I'd say that wouldn't be so bad, now would it?

haute provocateur

^ A celebration of the provocative beauty of woman, Saint Laurent style, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

For those of you who think nothing of fashion and style - especially you who dismiss them as useless, irrelevant or even annoyingly distracting from the more important issues today, especially today - I ask you to take a moment and step back and ponder this. Think of the last time you caught sight of a woman or man on the street, in a restaurant, on the train, at an event, who held your attention for more than a few seconds, and whose very atmosphere you fixated on. Everyone has had this fleeting moment with a stranger, even you.

You may not remember what they wore, who they were with, or even if it was day or evening when you saw them. But you do remember them, right? More piquantly you remember how you felt, how their presence affected you, even if you never met them. Perhaps they radiated power and confidence, or an enticing eroticism, or some oblique intellectual charisma, or even sheer cool factor. But just the same, they affected you, held your attention, admit it.

This experience you had felt is emphatically a vital, dynamic element in the coda of Yves Saint Laurent in how he creates for women. His understanding of what at once titillates and disquiets men about women isn't so much intellectual as it is intuitive. And that offers another clue into how the Saint Laurent style enchants, elusively - to analyze it is to kill it, to dissect it is to dilute it. Saint Laurent played with this enchantment sartorially, the idea of seduction through this cocktail of intelligence, knowingness, and sheer sensuality. The woman who dresses in Saint Laurent is very well aware that she can strike a man from the inside out, at once upsetting him with her intellect and massaging his vulnerabilities betwixt her fingers. And she also knows he wants that.

^ Photographer Helmut Newton's rather controversial yet iconic vision of Saint Laurent's "Le Smoking" is a powerful mix of provocation and evocation; today's "Le Smoking" as interpreted by the house of Saint Laurent's current designer Stefano Pilati is no less powerful (photographed by Greg Kadel).

A crisp khaki cotton mini dress from the late 60s is styled with details usually found only on safari hunting gear, yet the skirt is so short, hemmed at the thighs and showing off mile long legs. It's as if Saint Laurent suggested that woman can be both hunter and prey to a man. A woman's "Le Smoking" (a black tuxedo pantsuit first conceived by Saint Laurent in 1966) envisioned in 1975 by photographer Helmut Newton deep into the night on a deserted Paris street on a willowy high cheekboned woman, half bathed in shadow, holding a cigarette, her hair slicked back like a man's, eyes cast down. Does she desire to be man or that much more feminine in her androgyny? Is she a willing victim or predator? Is she waiting pensively for someone or in thought about what she had done to someone?

The Saint Laurent style possesses the power to both challenge traditionally accepted gender roles, almost as a reprisal, and suggesting new ways to experience them without necessarily decorticating them - skirting the issue by wearing pants, as it seems. This is why his pantsuits and mini dresses caused controversy in Paris and around the fashion world during the turbulent 60s, with the Vietnam War in full swing, the white hot rise of feminism, and the post 50s cultural uprising of youth. Saint Laurent's clothes were both reactionary and boldly optimistic politically, though the shy Saint Laurent himself would have been quick to say that he was just exploring new ideas about women and beauty, not pushing buttons with subversion. Such is the oft unintended consequence of most any visionary or genius.

^ A Mondrian on my wall: the visual and textual field report from my niece from the exhibit at the de Young Museum.

Saint Laurent's exploration, as it turned out, is in the end more about the experience of feminine beauty's evocation and provocation, not a dissemination of it.

Perhaps one aspect of woman's beauty as provocateur can be explained in terms of how institutions have perceived it and dealt with it historically:

"Beauty is trivial, even though it is intertwined with money, sex, power, pride, fear, love, respect, race, and class. I believe theologians have treated beauty as trivial precisely because it affects them and those around them so powerfully that it makes them uncomfortable. They don't know what to do with it, so they pretend it doesn't matter and urge anyone who asks to do the same. Like money, like sex, like alcohol, beauty is potent enough to be dangerous."

- Is Feminine Beauty Dangerous: A Brief Look at Our Theological Legacy by Karen Lee Thorp

I regret not being in San Francisco right now to experience the current Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the de Young Museum (it will not be shown anywhere else in the U.S., up and running until the first week of April next year, so I still have a chance). My two nieces who live there (both young women with strong individual personalities) saw it. One of them sent me a postcard, a mannequin in one of Saint Laurent's iconic Mondrian inspired dresses. I wrote this post in response to her quizzical comment about the exhibit and of the role of haute couture in the world, hopefully it can explain things a bit. As well I'll leave off with a quote from an album of the 80s German band Propoganda....

"Without love, beauty, and danger it would be almost impossible to live."

Yves Saint Laurent invoked all three, indeed.

Related:

Yves Saint Laurent | Wikipedia
Yves Saint Laurent YSL online shop
Yves Saint Laurent biography | infomat.com
Yves Saint Laurent, Giant of Couture, Dies at 71 | The New York Times

maureen dowd: a sexy intelligent cocktail

Who’s the Question Mark? | The New York Times

"The McCain campaign specializes in erratica, while the Obama campaign continues to avoid any dramatica."

I absolutely adore Maureen Dowd! A most intelligent, witty, linguistically cunning, and very sexy woman. Her views on what happens in the idiosyncratic realm of politics - and the men and women who play in it - emerge from classical Greek and Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. Her pen is not so much poisonous as it is a pointed and potent cocktail, certainly one tipsy buzz I don't mind at all. No wonder she earned the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.

^ Maureen Dowd "misses" George W. Bush.

Political pundit, intellectual, strong, stylish, classy, alluring. How tangy, deliciously dangerous is that? I would love to buy her a martini and talk shop and shit with her for an hour or two. Or three.