Vile Smut

Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of the publications that were both produced and purchased by the raincoat brigade. You young people today, saturated in smut, are so jaded and jaundiced and all that you may not immediately appreciate the pathos of the many approaches to porn in the time before the soi-disant sexual revolution. Consider the many shadings of the word "art," especially as applied to privately printed portfolios and editions of "exquisite" and "piquant" and sometimes "frank" character, intended exclusively for an audience of "discerning connoisseurs." Think of slim paperback novels, published in Hollywood in awkwardly boxy typefaces and dirt-colored wrappers, armed with introductions by persons able to append a Ph.D. to their names. Imagine a bookstore of the bygone sort, as discreet as a boudoir, with a curtained doorway in the rear leading to locked glass-fronted bookcases housing a category known as "curiosa."

These musings were occasioned by the rediscovery on my shelves of Sadism in the Movies, by one George [sic] de Coulteray, published in 1965, in a translation worthy of Babelfish, by the important-sounding Medical Press of New York City. "The book that shocked a nation," screams the dust jacket, an unlikely encomium coming from a starchy scientific publishing house. To read the book I find that I have to reverse-translate in my head, since many sentences make no sense whatever in English but are convincing in the presumed original as St.-Germain des Prés table talk:

"But one must admit that since the end of the 19th century one is in the presence of a rise so brutal that in our times the spanking has become the privileged form of what may be called minor sadism, a harmonious mixture of pain, slight in itself, and a ceremony which by making ridiculous, emphasizes its humiliating character, followed by the double arousal, active and passive."

But nobody ever read it, anyway. They bought the book for the pictures, half of which derive from the original and look as though they were photocopied with a machine of the era--they're so murky you can barely make them out. All the pictures are stills, all are unidentified, some show garden-variety brawls and others get into skulls-and-chains territory. Nearly all are so smudgy and hasty and low-rent they seem much smuttier than the movies themselves (or even a decent print of any given still) ever could. The one shown above is in its own right a terrific example of the power of film stills--you just can't imagine that the rest of the movie, whatever it is, could possibly measure up to the sheer sordidness of the image.

But to go back to the French, the adjacent book on the shelf is Lo Duca's L'Érotisme au Cinéma (J.-J. Pauvert, 1957) which is both serious and sumptuous in exactly the ways its neighbor isn't. Just flipping through it is guaranteed to inspire indulgent fondness for the French at their most nominally insufferable. Take this chart, for example, which is worthy of Edward Tufte's books:

The movies are (1) The Blue Angel, (2) Ecstasy, (3) Tabu, (4) The Lady from Shanghai, (5) Notorious, (6) Bitter Rice, (7) Manon, (8) Los Olvidados, (9) Miss Julie, and (10) One Summer of Happiness. No, I'd never heard of that last one, either. Don't you wish you could nonchalantly illustrate your humid reveries with charts so rigorously white-smocked? I certainly do.

Dunt Esk

This is the problem with blogs: You start blogging in an idle moment, and one thing leads to another and you wake up one day to find that you have readers. And readers, no matter how coolly disinterested they are nor how they are getting the deal free gratis for nothing, eventually become something like customers: they begin to have expectations. They expect frequent deliveries of new material. For the blogger--excepting, I guess, the fanatically driven or the logorrheic--the situation is like being a columnist, like one of our heroes at the great gray New York Bugle, with all the problems and responsibilities inherent, only you're not being paid. You're still bagging groceries to pay the rent, and that profession like all others has its seasons and its crises.
Maybe the association of ideas is why today we're featuring the work of the great Milt Gross, who knew from daily deadlines in his decades of newspaper employment. These are from his (criminally) out-of-print Nize Baby (1926), a work in prose and drawings that is one of the funniest books ever, and is especially recommended to children of immigrants, even if your home language wasn't Yiddish. But to reduce its matter merely to the comedy of ESL is to do it an injustice--imagine it as an episode of E. C. Segar's Thimble Theater with Finnegans Wake performed by the Marx Brothers. Even Smokey Stover fans will have to give it up to Milt, who as far as I'm aware actually coined the immortal password "banana oil."
So anyway, postings have become scarcer around here, and they may well become scarcer still, as our unpaid author contends with a mountain of past-due obligations, each of them with a promissory note attached to its curly little tail.

Case Study

The subject, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. The resulting picture is of considerable interest. The woman is only marginably noticeable, and then only because her coat presents the largest single expanse of white space in the composition. Clearly, the subject entirely subordinates maternal affection to the far greater stimulus of commercial consumption. For that matter, the nature of the consumer products themselves is of secondary interest; the subject is enthralled by packaging, and above all by names.

Because the composition is so crowded and frenetic, it is worthwhile to break down its constituent parts. The woman is pushing a shopping cart overloaded with products down a supermarket aisle. It would seem to be aisle six: coffee, tea, juice, soda. The items heaped in the cart seem at least partly stereotypical: the protruding head of celery in particular is a trope familiar from myriad cartoons and illustrations. It might likewise be doubted whether she purchases toothbrushes on a regular basis, and ditto for "wax"--presumably floor wax. Other items seem more likely to be true to his actual experience of grocery shopping: that the sack of potatoes has been placed in the cart's bottom tray, for instance, or the exact replication of the Fritos logo, or the prominence of the detergent Beads O' Bleach.

But even the groceries in the cart are overwhelmed by the serried ranks of products on the shelves, which are depicted in disproportionate scale. The boxes of Lipton tea bags are nearly the size of the cart itself. (The curious symbol on the boxes represents the subject's attempt to come to terms with the concept of the tea bag. Coming from a coffee-drinking culture, he had only ever experienced tea bags as pictures on boxes, and averred he thought they looked like "pants on a hanger.") It is fascinating to observe the rigor with which the subject records brand names, even the ones that make no sense to him, resulting in solecisms: "Early' Morn" for "Early Morn'" and "Chock O' Full Nuts" for "Chock Full O' Nuts."

A strong reaction to American consumer abundance is typical of recent immigrants. It can take various forms: hysterical blindness, catatonic undifferentiation, at least eighteen catalogued types of aphasia. The delirium on view here, in conjunction with the subject's powers of observation, leads us to predict that he will become a highly achieving adult, one who will subordinate all other drives and desires to the acquisition of brand-name goods. He will work three jobs, if necessary, to purchase the latest model automobile, equipped with all the premium features--such a goal, in any event, will encouragingly overshadow romance or idealism. If the subject is properly steered, he will actually work three jobs to achieve his goals. The danger remains that he may choose to rob service stations instead. The subject should therefore be closely and carefully tracked, but for now we do not recommend deportation.

Skins

Aside from brandy and cigars, no product on the market is packaged quite as traditionally as cigarette papers. Nearly every item on your grocer's shelf gets an image update every few years to make sure it passes the nowness scan the shopper's eye performs as it scrolls down the aisle. The rolling-paper package, however, like its fellows, presumably appeals to aged gentlemen who consume those items at their club while leafing through bound volumes of Punch, and remain faithful to the brands favored by their grandfathers; they care that their brand won the gold medal at Saragossa in 1908. Okay, but really--haven't those old gentlemen already gone to the glue factory, and aren't rolling papers mostly consumed by stoners, backpackers, squatters, Deadheads? I guess we can assume that a polite fiction is at play, the manufacturers of cigarette papers pretending that their product isn't really employed as accessory to what some people might consider a crime. Meanwhile, potheads can spend hours in happy contemplation of the complex patterns and inscrutable imagery on the packages.

I had never seen the Ottoman package until I spotted it recently at a Turkish import store in Berlin; it became an instant favorite. More than any other design I can think of at the moment, it succeeds in activating the wayback machine: looking simultaneously venerable and startlingly new, it manages to replicate permanently the effect that its modernism must have had a century ago, its modern-style curlicues blending in with Victoriana to a degree, but in their asymmetry preparing the eye for the shouting Broadwayism of the logo. More than any other brand, Ottoman has suffered no updating of any sort. Its boast of excellence, within, is printed in four languages: Arabic, French, Greek, and what appears to be Amharic. The only change is that, although "Constantinople" is printed in Roman and Greek characters along the edge and "Stamboul" appears in the inside flap, the papers are now made in Italy.

Abadies, with their imperial arms and fly device, were so much the most elegant of the brands that I, for one, manfully struggled with them for years even though their adhesiveness left something to be desired. Like the famous Zouave on the Zig-Zag package, the trappings of the Abadie pack seem to hark back to the reign of Napoleon III. Today, as shown, the import version is marred by a textual addition in a drastically ill-judged typeface and size. Most American vipers had no idea what that central word meant; as a result it became a kind of stoner invocation: "Riz, man..."

Riz La Croix, on the other hand, just became "Rizlas" in America. If you tried to buy them in France, though, you'd have to respect the quasi-rebus and ask for "ree lah crwah." The ravages of globalism are demonstrated in this pack, made for sale in France: the gap between the "z" and the "l," formerly distinct in the European version, has been closed up. The packaging has been updated in other ways, too. Those fine white lines, not unpleasant although they nearly obscure the escutcheon, weren't there before. On the back, the phrase "Rolling Since 1796" appears, in English, a nod to the international confraternity of hacky-sack players.

Finally, from the archives come the Spanish-made Blanco y Negros, a package from circa 1980 that may or may not have changed since, although I would suspect some more racially sensitive adaptation must have taken place. These fall into a different category, since they proclaim not long and immovable tradition but modernity, circa 1923. They perhaps meant to encourage subsistence farmers in Extremadura to imagine themselves reveling in the sensual delights of Harlem skyscraper speakeasies every time they rolled up a gasper. They didn't change for at least sixty years for the same reason that innocent but eager Euros perpetuated the misconceived idea of Dixieland jazz well within living memory, in thrall to a confusion of exotica and modernismo as firmly rooted in the European mythosphere as Karl May's idea of the American West. As with all these papers, whatever was being smoked in them, the packaging itself sold the consumer a viper's dream of otherness and elsewhere.

My True Story

Someday I will write the true story of my youth, but the details are so hair-curlingly bizarre that I may have to call it a novel. If I told how I was raised by capuchin monkeys in a remote canyon, and emerged at the age of six to be conscripted into labor at a blacking factory, before being recognized as a living Buddha by a breakway sect of hashishin, then made a career of winning spelling bees in languages I did not previously know, at the last of which I encountered the glamorous movie star who was my true mother, but who could not acknowledge me because of her secret and unwilling ties to the North Korean nuclear program, the codes of which remain on a chip implanted in my left armpit, which throbs exactly a week in advance of an earthquake... But no, none of these matters can be fact-checked. The media would have my hide. A tearful confession on a popular talk show is no sweat, of course, but by now they've amped up the amends. I would have to return the advance. Including the film options.

So I will have to call it a novel. But then no one will care. Because, you know, the imagination--bah, everybody has one of those! It is contemptibly common, the imagination. If literature were concerned with the imagination, everyone would waste their time reading books filled with lies. The point of literature is to let people step forward and tell their story, the true, unvarnished tale of their struggle to become fully human in the face of overwhelming odds. It is the one source of true beauty, this struggle. As the great captains of literature--the Defoes and the Dickenses and the Samuel Clemenses--have shown, it is only by purification in the white flame of suffering that literature is made whole. Were it not for this purification, then literature would be morally ungrounded, a freak show of no lasting purpose and with no lesson to impart. Sadly, though I have been seared by suffering as few mortals have, I will have to deprive the world of the moral refreshment only I can provide. My beautiful story will remain my tawdry secret, and the media will continue their caviling, soul-destroying ways. Alas!

Torn Down

In 1985, an unknown person briefly went around tearing down sections of compacted poster-gneiss from the walls of lower Manhattan, mounted them on light stock, and sold them as postcards. I'm very sorry I only bought one; I probably thought they'd be around longer than a month. The unknown person was perhaps aware that he or she was reviving décollage, also known as lacération, the art devised by Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé in Paris starting in the late 1940s. The idea was that a vast, constantly renewed collective artwork was available for the taking on the walls of the city. It was a sort of readymade in Duchamp's sense, since its primary essence was commercial imagery, but it also transcended the readymade by virtue of having been serially lacerated by the crowd, who shredded the posters because they were bored, because they were angry, because they needed a scrap of paper, because they were waiting for a bus. If there ever was a populist avant-garde work, that was it.

It was the purest art of the city: open to all, viscerally satisfying, and recording an actual dialogue between citizens and the stuff they were force-fed. It was bright and explosive and hurtling toward nothingness as you watched. In New York City at the moment of the postcard the display was less bright because there was less commercial fly-postering of the type seen today--therefore less color--and much more in the way of monochrome photocopied gig flyers wheatpasted by the band members. There were still many unpoliced blank walls then and many plywood-covered storefronts, which sometimes carried so many layers of postering that sections would peel off, from combined weight, like icebergs calving. The posters were advertising of the most zero-degree sort--bands that existed for one night, bands that existed only in one person's imagination, texts written in a code understood only by the writer. The laceration therefore was less a matter of citizens talking back to authority than a phase within a cacophonous ongoing babble. The postcard, with its fortuitous subliminal impression of the World Trade Center, is a fragment of something overheard.

School of Paris

She did a little stripping at the Lido, a little chorus work at the Moulin Rouge, a little cocktail hostessing here and there. She got her face into the margins of society photos now and then, somewhere behind Cocteau's shoulder or beneath Zizi Jeanmaire's hairdo. She came from Bergerac and kept in touch only with her younger brother in veterinary school. She lived in a maid's room on Boulevard Voltaire but contrived to spend as little time there as possible. She was popular with the Corsicans.

He came from Ivry but pretended to be something more exotic, employing a highly variable accent and a series of misleading biographical details. He told people his name was Paco. He had prepared for a brilliant career as a painter, but he'd gotten the decade wrong. It was pretty much over by then unless you were a Tachiste or an American. But he couldn't help himself. He wanted to be some hybrid of Dufy, Matisse, Foujita, and Modigliani, and that's what he did. He sold a canvas now and then to tourists who thought Montmartre was still happening.

They met when they ducked into the same doorway during a police riot. He thought she was a vision. She thought he could afford her modeling fee. His studio was around the corner, so when it was safe they went up. It turned out he didn't have enough scratch for her to pose nude. She opened her shirtwaist as a favor, also because he served her a no-name wine that wasn't half bad. She smoked five cigarettes, kissed him and left.

He took the canvas to galleries, where they laughed. He thought it was too good to stick out on a blanket on Place Blanche for foreigners to gape at. He took it to publishers of portfolios of sensitive figure studies for the discriminating connoisseur, where they told him she had too many clothes on. He took it to publishers of calendars, where they told him they only used photographs now. Finally he found a publisher who wanted to put it on the cover of a novel. His heart raced with joy.

It was an 80-page train-station novelette, part of a series of underworld potboilers written by minor ex-Surrealists addicted to paregoric. Across the picture they had a staff letterer slap that month's title, Autant s'en foutre, which means "you might as well give two shits," more or less. She spotted the book and bought a copy to send to her younger brother in veterinary school. One of the Corsicans bought the original to hang in his office bathroom. Later that same month the painter was killed by off-duty cops who took him for an Algerian.