Towards A Theory Of Scandal; Or, How To Become Client 9

On The Good Wife, actress Julianna Margulies
assumes an iconic stance as Alicia Florrick.

Laura Kipnis, How to Become A Scandal:  Adventures in Bad Behavior. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. 208 pp. Bibliography, no index. Illustrations.

Client 9:  The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Alex Gibney: 2010).  Now in general release, and available on some cable systems.

One of our favorite shows chez Radical is The Good Wife (Tuesday nights at 10 EST on your local CBS affiliate or online.) I have always liked Julianna Margulies:  I liked her last series, Canterbury's Law, which got canceled after six episodes in 2008 because of the writer's strike.  She appears to have emerged from that complex show having found her niche as a TV attorney. Margulies' fundamental interiority as an actress is a perfect comment on some of the dilemmas of modern heterosexuality, marriage and parenting for professional women.  By this I mean that every move she makes on The Good Wife is a negotiation between Alicia Florrick the person, Alicia Florrick the mother, and Alicia Florrick, the "good wife" who needs to remain married to her ruthless, sexy pol of a husband until and unless she decides to leave him on her own terms.  Reflecting a theme of contemporary political culture, the husband is disgraced Illinois State's Attorney Peter Florrick, who has been derailed and jailed in a corruption scandal (perhaps a frame-up) that came to light because he had taken to visiting prostitutes.   Debuting on September 22, 2009, The Good Wife followed as closely as was humanly possible on the March 2008 resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose arrangements with the ladies managed by the Emperor's Club VIP, a high-end call service, had also been uncovered as part of a routine federal investigation of money transfers.

Whoa. "Routine?"  If you believe that, implies Alex Gibney, producer of Client 9, a documentary about the Spitzer case, there is a bridge in Brooklyn waiting under your Christmas tree.  Gibney's side of the story is that it was Wall Street that went after Eliot Spitzer.  Powerful financial interests wanted revenge for prior investigations that had uncovered the tip of the iceberg of what we now know was a plan to drain as much money out of the economy and into their own pockets that they could.  The prostitutes are a detail.

"Routine?"  The prostitutes a mere detail? Please. Can you hear Laura Kipnis, the media scholar and author of How To Become A Scandal, laughing?  It's sex scandals that are routine, and politics are the detail.  Strangely, in her newest book, Kipnis features a picture of Spitzer and his wife Silda Wall Spitzer (striking the Margulies pose) in the introduction, refers to him, but never names him, as if it isn't even necessary to do so.  Politicians who scandalize us are routine because we are them, and they are us:  what fills in the space between us is that we all know that the only difference between us and them is that "we" haven't been uncovered yet.

Well, some of we, anyway.  I've been a scandal at least twice, and the only reason more of you don't know about these colorful episodes is that I occupy quite a small stage in the theater of the world.  But that is Kipnis's point:  we are all a scandal waiting to happen.  There's no difference between the ordinary, run of the mill folk who are out there pointing and judging and the ones who are up at the podium with cameras flashing in their puffed, weepy faces (Spitzer's "good wife" didn't weep but looked like she had literally vacated her body some hours prior to the press conference.)  Such unexpected events as the uptight Eliot, a close political ally for a variety of feminist groups dedicated to ending commercial sex, turning out to be an afficianado of pay to play occur in a changed cultural atmosphere in which  "our internal cringe meters... shrill more and more frequently these days, given people’s predilection for confessing their grubby secrets to passing strangers or even complete strangers….it’s like a national compulsion.” Ordinary as it is, watching Spitzer’s press conference was “like watching someone swallow a hand grenade in real time, which obviously didn’t impede anyone’s enjoyment of the event,” Kipnis writes. (3-5) 

Yes.  But that same well-crafted phrase --"swallowing a hand grenade in real time" -- might have also accurately described my experience as a child watching Edward Kennedy's post-Chappaquiddick press conference in July 1969. Two critical differences in these scandals stand out.  In the Spitzer case, although he had broken the law by paying for sex and violating the Mann Act, no one died; and in the Kennedy case, no one resigned from office -- even though somebody died, and died a pretty gruesome death. So what was the big deal about Spitzer? Client 9 answers this question by arguing that exposing Spitzer could only have been the handiwork of powerful capitalists Ken Langone, the Director of the New York Stock Exchange, and Hank Greenberg, president of the insurance giant AIG. Both of these men had been in prolonged litigation with New York State over how they did business while Spitzer was Attorney General and had sworn revenge.

Worse than the investigations was Spitzer's refusal to kowtow to the financial industry, and its vision of what the economic rules should be.  According interviews with Langone and Greenberg, had Spitzer not interfered, the great economic crash would never have happened.  According to Spitzer, who was also interviewed for the film, and others who worked for him, these men selfishly destroyed the world of finance for their personal gain and went after Spitzer for trying to stop them.  The addition of Joe Bruno, the powerful Republican State Assembly leader, adds an important emphasis to this:  in addition to being Dudley Doright, Spitzer was aggressive, nasty, uncompromising, rude and completely undeferential to men who were accustomed to receiving deference at all times.

Both Client 9 and How To Become A Scandal argue that there is something far more important going on here than the public's response to people who shtup out of schul, or any one politician getting caught in an illegal sex act.  As Kipnis notes, scandals represent a form of knowledge production that has been surprisingly resistant to complex analysis:  although watching the humiliation of others “may be our national spectator sport…we lack any real theory of scandal.” (7)   She doesn't exactly give us a theory in the end:  instead, we get a series of delightful stories about ordinary people who become celebrities (and vice-versa) as they enter their names into the Book of Humiliation.  In “The Lovelorn Astronaut,” we are reminded of the NASA love triangle in which an accomplished female officer drove over 900 miles in a diaper to kidnap, and perhaps kill, another astronaut's new squeeze.  Here we see Kipnis at her finest, asking the questions you wish you had thought of and published:  "what’s an adult in diapers but someone whose self-management skills have critically failed?” and "how can you possibly know in advance what lengths you are capable of, in extremis or otherwise?”  Here, we get close to what a theory of scandal might look like:  “In short," she argues, "simply having a body is the first step on the road to being a scandal.” (35-41)

The other essays, the last of which is on the uncanny resemblance between Oprah Winfrey and fake-o memoirist James Frey (unnecessarily underlined when Kipnis points out that the last syllable of Oprah's last name in "-frey") are less well focused, demonstrating not that Kipnis herself is failing, but simply that some scandals are more fun than others.  No one, in the other essays, offers the opportunities for analyzing the centrality of pee and poo to national culture that the great little detail of the astronaut's soiled diapers permits.  The Linda Tripp essay is a slightly expanded version of an earlier piece that appeared in Lisa Duggan and Lauren Berlant's 2001 collection on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal:  if you haven't read it, it's worth a look.  Perhaps the best part about these essays is that they continue a series of themes originally explored in her masterpiece (in my view) Against Love:  A Polemic  (2003), where Kipnis argues that love -- or the illusion of love -- ultimately degrades and humiliates all of us and, through its single-minded obsessions, produces a crazy, alternate reality that catches up with all of its victims someday.

Photo Cred

Client 9 is not about love at all -- it is about hate, money, and fucking.  It is about being good and being stupid. It is about how two understandable human impulses came together in one (not as) powerful (as he needed to be) man:  the desire to do good and the desire to get down and dirty with women he didn't know who had very large racks.  What the movie doesn't tell you is that really, both impulses were the same. Eliot Spitzer had a deep need to act out his persona as a Big Swinging Dick, both in public and in private.  Both led to his downfall.

This causes me to wonder whether we don't need two theories of scandal:  one that is expressly political and feminist (in which the wife the politician needs to challenge him intellectually is not the "wife" that offers parallel opportunities for dominance in the sack); and one that is still feminist, but  for ordinary folks like the rest of us.  This latter theory might call on the political, but not rely on the political arena for its significance.  This would point us to one explanation of why we don't see political women confessing to various private misdeeds while a sedated hubby watches from stage left; and how it is that so many non-celebrities are so confused about what they have done when their secret betrayals become public entertainment.  Kipnis provides a promising theory for the political -- that scandal "is a way of organizing the collectivity's hatred"(195) -- but for the latter she leaves only a set of impressions that we are left to organize on our own.

In turn, Client 9 runs the conspiracy theory in a way that left me impatient about the amount of evidence left on the table that doesn't get any analysis.  My favorite quote of the film is a giggly woman who served jail time for running and profiting from the Emperor's Club VIP:  "When you are sending a girl for $30,000 overnight, it doesn't feel like prostitution!" she burbles, putting visual scare quotes around the final word.  No, I guess it doesn't: just like securitizing bad mortgages didn't feel like theft! These portions of the film made me want much more from it:  since what Emperor's Club was doing was, in fact, prostitution, I'm curious as to what activity it did feel like to the people who were involved with it.

Similarly, Spitzer, who was interviewed for the documentary, is open and lively when talking about his Wall Street investigations; he becomes shut down and wooden when we get to the sex scandal.  Why does Spitzer think he risked everything in an obsession for expensive prostitutes?  Why does he think he did not know he was risking everything?  The Luv Guv has little to say about this except that he was bad, it was wrong, he deserved what he got (I sense a really nasty couples' therapist lurking in the background.)  This makes the business of high-end prostitution a tantalizing theme from another angle. It provides a tangible link between Spitzer and Wall Street (several procurers who are interviewed for the film claim that it was the vast amount of money in the go-go bull market that made their own businesses possible) and reveals Spitzer as the same, in at least one respect, as the financiers he despises.  One even imagines Spitzer's and Greenberg's wicks dipping in the same well.  It could have happened!

Me, I'm turning to The Good Wife for theory.  Sometimes I think that only fiction allows us to imagine what happens after the scandal to the people who didn't do anything but have to live with it anyway:  to the wife who stays, to the children who have to live the story that their parents and the political handlers have written for them, and to everyone who picks up the pieces.  Kipnis and Gibney aren't really interested in this, and who can blame them?  But if there is a theory of scandal, it includes the bit players as well as the stars.

Steal This Book! Public Enemies, John Dillinger and Me

Don't be surprised if you are channel surfing in the next couple months and suddenly see -- me! There are at least four different made-for-TV documentaries in which I appear as a talking head because of my first book, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998). For a while I was an all-star on Third Street in Lower Manhattan because the History Channel is, apparently, one of the few things the inhabitants of the men's shelter there can agree that they all like. Every once in a while I would be strolling by and a cigarette-ravaged voice would growl happily, "Hey! I know you!" Once I was at a tenure party for someone else, and that person's father confided that he had really come to the party to see me. People write me mash notes from Australia, England and Canada -- always men, which is really disappointing. I am also occasionally recognized at the off track betting parlor in Shoreline; and lately, my friends at the rowing club have looked on me with new eyes as well.

But where you will not see me is in the credits of the new Michael Mann movie, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and an all-star cast of very pretty boys (there are virtually no women in the movie.) And yet there is an important connection between me and this movie: the script was written from the book that ripped off my book.

That's right: your academic nightmare come true. The book everyone told you could be a crossover success (but wasn't exactly, although it has sold a lot of copies over the last decade), gets re-written with conversations, sold to a commercial press and then to the movies.

The nightmare began in 2004, when I walked into a bookstore and saw a bright shiny pile of books with a picture of John Dillinger on the cover. Bryan Burrough, a journalist for Vanity Fair, popular writer and author of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 gave me a lovely citation in almost the first footnote. But that said, while he did a bunch of his own original research, most of the major theoretical and historical insights of my book were lifted into his, repackaged with vivid dialogue and highly descriptive prose and resold. And then he sold my book again to the movies. I had recovered from the first ripoff -- because after all, what are you going to do? Beggar yourself suing someone with a powerful agent for something that is very hard to prove? Then I got a call from an assistant to Famous Costume Designer letting me know about the Johnny Depp project. She asked if I would be willing to talk to them a few times about what the film should look like -- what things the bandits were likely to have, what clothes they would wear and whatnot.

"Sure," I said. "But you'll need to pay me a consulting fee." I explained that I had been ripped off once before and that if they wanted me to work for them, I couldn't do it for free.

"Uh - oh, jeez, I'll have to get back to you on that," she said, beating a hasty and permanent retreat. (Note to Hollywood people: do you really think we are all so star-struck that we have endless time to give you for free? Because the budget on this film must have been in the hundreds of millions, and if you wanted to talk to me, you could have squeezed out a thousand bucks or so just out of courtesy.)

Now don't get me wrong: it isn't as if I didn't profit from this book. It did get me tenure, which over an academic career is probably worth about 3 million dollars in salary and benefits. I have probably made around 3K in royalties, which isn't much, but since Public Enemies came out, the book seems to be selling on Amazon (the last time I looked, they said they only had one copy left, but had more on order.) I predict a little bounce in this year's royalties. It's also nice to be able to say that historians still read the damn thing, people other than Mr. Burrough. Graduate students, for example, make a point of saying so, and most recently I got a really nice shout-out from Elliott Gorn in an essay titled "Re-membering John Dillinger."* (Thank you Elliott: I will light a candle for you.)

Eventually, of course, I had to see the movie. I trundled grimly off to our local theater night before last, and despite the good reviews Public Enemies has gotten in places like The New Yorker, I am happy to say that, beautiful as it is, it really stinks. They should have hired me to help them. I don't know whether the errors derive from Mr. Burrough's translation of my work (because every time I try to read his book I feel like I am getting the stomach flu and have to stop) or whether it was the script writers' rotten translation of Burroughs' work. But here are the major flaws from my perspective:

1. Errors of fact. For example, the implication that the FBI went after Dillinger because Hoover couldn't get funded properly by Congress unless he did; that the War on Crime was Hoover's initiative; that Melvin Purvis hired a bunch of out of work Texas Rangers to help him track Dillinger; that said cops for hire tortured, beat and withheld medical attention from mortally wounded members of the Dillinger gang to get information from them (I don't know why I was especially offended by this, Radical that I am, but it seems to me that the FBI has done enough bad things without gratuitously adding to the list); that Dillinger hung out with the Barker-Karpis gang; that Purvis found out that the gang was hiding at Little Bohemia Lodge from a telephone tap -- there is absolutely no evidence in any of the files I read to support these things, and they represent major turning points in the narrative. Furthermore, it was my finding that bandits actually went out of their way not to harm people, particularly police, since they knew it would intensify the pressure on local and state government to capture them. And yet in this film there are constant pitched battles, with thousands of rounds being fired in each encounter, cops and civilians falling like flies.

And why that dumb scene at the end, right before his death, where Johnny Depp wanders through the fictional "Dillinger Squad" at a Chicago police station but isn't recognized? Why tell us at the end that Melvin Purvis died by suicide? What is the audience supposed to do with that information?

2. The story is incoherent. I'm not sure how anyone who did not know the Dillinger story already would actually understand what was going on in this film or why. There are lots of long shots of J.Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson smirking and moue-ing at each other, with cigarettes cocked in their femmey hands, but no one ever explains, for example, that Tolson is the number two man at the FBI, not just Edgar's boyfriend who hangs around listening to him rant. There are gestures at the real history of the FBI, and the real history of the war on crime, but since those gestures are never tied to anything specific -- or even completed -- my guess is that they just get in the way of the average viewer. The problem gets worse when director Michael Mann turns his attention to the criminals: people like the Barker brothers, Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Harry Pierpont and more come and go with little or no explanation as to who they are. And then the dumbest details are given prominence. One of the things I do know about the Burrough book (from the Amazon blurb) is that he uncovered the fact that (drum roll) Anna Sage was wearing an orange skirt -- not a red dress!! The movie gestures at this -- Purvis explains to his team, "She'll be wearing an orange skirt!" But since the red dress is practically iconic, doesn't this simply serve to confuse?

I dunno.

Probably the major insight from my book that shows up in the film is the parasitical relationship bandits like Dillinger had to Chicago's syndicates, and that eventually bandits' notoriety led to organized crime cutting them loose. But again, there is crucial information missing: Frank Nitti is introduced as a character in the film, but there is no explanation that he is running the Capone organization, or why the creation of a national horse racing wire has anything to do with why the Mob ceases to support Dillinger.

3. The popular fascination with Dillinger is poorly evoked and very much in the background. This, I would have to say, is the movie's worst flaw, because it's one of the few reasons historians care about Dillinger at all: he spoke to something very deep in the Depression-era psyche. John Dillinger was a 1930s version of a rock star: he was an uber celebrity at a moment in time when celebrity itself was being reinvented. But you have absolutely no sense of that at all, nor of a cultural moment in which an entire nation held its breath to see when and where he would appear next. Staring crowds and paparazzi appear at various moments, but there's no sense of the mass excitement about this man that caused Americans to flood Washington with letters offering to help capture him, pleading for mercy for him and musing on Dillinger as a metaphor for the nation.

In the end, Public Enemies is a gangster picture in which it isn't altogether clear who you should be rooting for. The police are boring, and the gangsters' characters -- even Dillinger's -- are not memorable. And Johnny Depp? Well, he's handsome enough enough. But you can't help but make an unfavorable comparison to Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), which probably planted the earliest seed in my brain of the dissertation that became War on Crime.

Strangely, I left the movie theater no less ripped off but less worried about it. And while I hope to write books with a crossover audience in the future, and books that sell a lot of copies, I doubt that I will ever write a book again that has the kind of potential to really become a movie or a best seller without actually intending to do so in the first place and working hard to protect it.

************************************

*See The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present and Future, James Cook, Lawrence Glickman and Michael O'Malley, Eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 153-184.

How Will We Write The History Of The Man In The Mirror; Or, Who Was Michael Jackson (To You)?

Last Thursday night, my iPhone -- which only works intermittently in the hills of Litchfield County, CT, and only then if you stand in the exact right spot in the house -- buzzed to indicate a text message. I looked down. "Michael Jackson died :(" read the message, sent by a colleague and a good friend (the Radical's agents are everywhere.)

Wow, I thought: and only three days after Judy Garland.

It is good there is no internet where I was, otherwise I would have spent the rest of the evening on my computer looking for the very few details that were (and still are) available. I also missed most of the relentless tributes, as there is no television in this little retreat either. Friday morning I did decide that I needed a New York Times, so I went to the grocery store out in Northford, CT, where I have shopped since about 1986. The woman at the check-out station was weeping, tears rolling down her face as she rang up my purchases efficiently. "Pretty bad, huh?" I said, gesturing at her grief by handing over the newspaper with its huge picture of Michael on the front page.

"First Ed McMahon," she sobbed; "then Farrah Fawcett, and now Michael Jackson...who could be next?" She was inconsolable.

Since Jackson's sudden death from drug abuse -- er, heart failure -- a lot of people have compared this moment to Elvis's death. I remember that moment vividly. Coincidentally, Elvis died on my parents' wedding anniversary. When we got the news on the radio that was often playing in the kitchen, my mother was visibly distressed. She looked out the window and said, "Elvis and I were almost the exact same age," which was only sort of true because my mother was two years older then Elvis. It was only years later that I learned the full story: Elvis spent his final minutes on the toilet, and his final days in a darkened bedroom gobbling uppers, downers and Dannon yogurt. Like Michael, Elvis was also preparing for a tour, and part of that process was losing weight so that he could execute those bizarre karate kicks that became his signature, and squeeze into white spangled jumpsuits that were slit to the navel. He believed, according to Peter Guralnick, that because yogurt was advertised as a "diet food" that he could eat cases of it (this is the kind that is flavored with heavily sugared jam, you understand) and still lose weight.

Not just similar in death, Elvis and Michael Jackson are being compared constantly as artists too. Anyone who ever met Michael Jackson is being asked for a tribute, and you won't be surprised to learn that -- despite his obvious lack of good health for over a decade -- everyone is shocked as well as devastated. One obvious place to go for a quote is Lisa Marie Presley who was not only Elvis's daughter, but you may recall, Michael Jackson's first wife. "I am so very sad and confused with every emotion possible," she said in Australia's Herald Sun.

I think the check-out lady in Northford did better.

Both Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were hugely talented people whose careers stalled. Michael was probably musically more innovative, but it is hard to know what Elvis might have accomplished if he hadn't been packaged as something that could be sold over and over again to aging female fans willing to pay top dollar to get a sweaty scarf tossed in their faces in Vegas. The tragic, campy comparisons seem more apt: unbelievable grandiosity (sequins, anyone?); endless spending to buy happiness, inner peace and the company of people who didn't real care about them; an off-key attraction for children (Elvis liked to have little girls in white cotton panties over to play, and the mothers of Memphis happily obliged); and sudden, untimely death aided by an unscrupulous physician who aided and abetted fearsome physical self-abuse.

The other thing they had in common was that people told them what they wanted to hear: eat as much of the yogurt as you want, you'll get thin. Those children are coming over to play with you, it will be fine, they don't have parents who will want to be paid off to keep their mouths shut about what goes on at your house.

The people who surrounded Elvis and Michael were the mirror.

I would add Judy to this list of tragic comparisons, and I wonder why she isn't being mentioned by anyone. Perhaps it is because all of her destructive behavior really was aimed inward, although the fact that her children have lived similarly sordid lives suggests that at least a couple other people got hurt by her excesses. Both Elvis and Judy were binge eaters, binge drinkers and binge dieters, puffing up and slimming down at terrible cost to their psyches and health. Oh, when Dexedrine was in vogue! Both had their careers molded by systems that only the canniest stars were able to use to real artistic advantage.

Michael's physical changes, and his career, were different. I've always been uninterested in his whitening complexion, perhaps because I am a white person who likes to get darker when possible, because I am a historian who knows that Black people come in many shades, or because I really think Michael's whiteness was more transgendered than transracial. But he was also physically debilitated over the years as he fought being fixed by age, gender and race. Ongoing drug use didn't help, and neither did the pain and damage inflicted by cosmetic surgeons and dermatologists who did what their client wanted regardless of the effect of chemicals, scrapes and surgeries on his general health and appearance. I saw an item on the Huffington Post only a week ago asserting that what amounted to a partial amputation had been performed on one of Michael's ears over time, since cartilage was needed repeatedly to rebuild his ruined nose. This may or may not be true, but it can't be grislier than the truth, when you look at a face that has nearly disappeared in the past two decades. Imagine how much his body must have hurt, even aside from the toll his brilliant dancing must have taken on his ligaments and joints.

But, as with my views on Judy and Elvis, this is not everyone's perspective. Fans are lost in grief over the fantasy that was cultivated by Michael Jackson Incorporated. What has seemed to me to be a grossly underweight, mutilated man in terrible psychological and physical pain seemed to his fans to be a star. What I believe was a physically and sexually abused boy, who subsequently visited similar behaviour on children put in his way by greedy parents, was believed to be innocent of any wrongdoing by his fans -- and a court -- when he said that the children lied. Other incongruities abound. For example:

I saw: A beautiful black child (who was a year younger than me, so I have watched him age) become a shrunken, pasty skeleton with long stringy hair, no affect and no public personality when offstage.

Fans saw: The beautiful person they believed lived inside the ruined body.

I saw: An adult who invited little children to his house constantly, spent the night in bed with them, decorated his property like a theme park to entice them, and who went on television holding hands with a teenaged boy and acted shocked that anyone could be dirty-minded enough to believe that he would "ever hurt a child." Now if Michael Jackson had been a queer theorist, or a member of an organization advocating the decriminalization of all intimate and sensual relations with children, I would have thought this was interesting, and even radical. But he wasn't, he was just delusional: all of these observations say "child molester" to me.

Fans saw: Peter Pan; someone who "loved children" and was "really a child at heart." (Note: this "nice Peter" is the Disney version. The J.M. Barrie version of Peter Pan is dark, jealous and stole people's children because he hated grown-ups. He also didn't care what happened to the children as long as they satisfied his outsized ego by admiring him.)

I saw: A person who showed all the signs of having been a fearfully abused child, was terrified of the world, paid women to have children who he then raised in ways that were beyond controlling and eccentric. I wondered to myself, as the children walked around with drapes and veils over their heads, does he even talk to anyone in his family? Because I have got to say, if any of the rest of us did that (much less hold a baby over a hotel balcony in what was, I suspect, not a sober moment) our children would be in foster homes.

Fans saw: A loving father protecting his children from a cruel media who would otherwise have hurt them in some unnamed way.

I could go on, but I won't. While Michael Jackson was far better able to keep control of his career than either Elvis or Judy, and donated millions of dollars to good causes, he seems to have met the same bitter, sad end as they did. And like them, he has left a pile of troubles behind for other people to solve, as well as weeping fans who look at pictures of their hero and see:

Themselves?

Be Afraid of Your Wife: Feminism and the History of Everyday Rage

(Crossposted at Cliopatra)

A Vietnam-era suburban housewife is standing in front of a kitchen counter. She stares calmly and without expression into the camera, as if she is the star of her own cooking show. “Knife,” she intones, displaying a knife in her right hand. With short, violent strokes she stabs the cutting board in front of her. She puts the knife aside. “Measuring cup,” she intones, and begins to flip an invisible liquid into the face of an invisible person. “Nutcracker,” she says, holding up the new implement and snapping it together sharply three or four times before setting it down.

Ouch. “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975), one of five short performance pieces produced and filmed by Lynda Begler, shows how ordinary kitchen implements express a woman’s rage, or what Betty Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name.” But Friedan – and other feminist writers – are considerably better known than the many female visual artists who worked for women’s liberation from 1965 on. If you are interested in an understudied, and dramatic, cultural history of second wave feminism, run – do not walk – to see “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” an exhibit at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York.

Curated by Connie Butler, WACK! represents 120 artists, collectives and collaborations in an international mixed media display that stretches from the mid-1960’s into the 1980’s, with the bulk of the exhibits concentrated in the years that defined movement feminism, 1966 through 1975. Collectively, and emphasizing images of domestic objects that defined bourgeois women’s existence during the late Cold War, the exhibit centers a series of critical questions that were central to feminist consciousness raising as it distinguished itself from other New Left movements. How does women’s oppression become visible in normal and everyday settings? Under what conditions does domestic patriarchy intersect with other oppressions, such as racism and American imperialism? What do women look like – and how would we know, when images generated by consumer culture construct “womanhood” as an artifact of cosmetic and commercial perfection?

Reading the exhibit as a historian of political feminism, and not as a historian of art, I was nevertheless struck at how difficult it was for these women to be perceived as artists at all when the gritty masculinity of the Cedar Tavern crowd in downtown New York dominated the gallery scene in these years. Entering the exhibit on the first floor, I was immediately drawn to Mary Beth Edelson’s “Some Living Women Artists” (1972), a photo collage in which a spoof of the Last Supper (Georgia O’Keefe’s head placed on Jesus’ body, surrounded on either side by twelve “apostles” that include Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono), is framed by miniature photographs of sixty, less well known, women artists. Further into the exhibit, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic’s silent film “Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful” (1973) displays the dilemma of recognition for women artists, as Abramovic slashes at her thick, dark hair with a comb and brush for fourteen and a half minutes. Sometimes scraping her face and yanking at herself viciously in this “beautifying” effort, she obsessively mouths the title of the piece.

Even those with casual knowledge of the early years of women’s liberation will recognize one of its central themes, the critique of a consumer culture that urged women to perform a feminine role scripted by others. This later acquired a name, both among radical feminists and gay liberationists: “looksism,” something that women’s liberationists freed themselves from by throwing away girdles, bras, curling irons, make-up and shaving devices. Ann Newmarch’s photographic collage “Look Rich” (1975) centers a magazine clipping from a women’s magazine that urges women to “look rich” while on vacation, and to purchase expensive luggage, so that they can attract potential marriage partners. In block letters, the artist comments: “We must risk unlearning all those things that have kept us alive so long.” In “Beauty Knows No Pain” (1972), Martha Rosler cuts strategic holes in print advertisements for foundation garments and lingerie, inserting pictures of breasts and other body parts, so that the models blatantly display what these feminine garments are intended to both conceal and “sell” to men. Predictably, several exhibits – Ann Mendieta’s photographic series “Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints, 1972)” and Alice Neel’s oil on canvas portrait “Margaret Evans, 1978” – address this theme by showing women’ naked bodies in their most unflattering light, the first distorted by the pressure of glass against skin and hair, and the second distorted naturally by the final stages of pregnancy.

In another register, Betye Saar’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), one of the few pieces by a black artist in the collection, shows a raised plastic cartoon “Mammy” doll, positioned in front of a background made from multiple pictures of a more comely, domesticated “Jemima” cut from the pancake box. A broom in her right hand, “Jemima” carries a rifle in her left: under one armpit is a pistol, and inset into her capacious skirt is a portrait of yet a third “Jemima,” holding a particularly anxious-looking white baby. Rising up in front of the whole collage is a brown fist, raised in a black power salute.

Although the exhibit offers much to think about, a great deal of it can be best appreciated as a commentary on a time when, as Ruth Rosen has put it, “The world turned upside down.” One series, however, bridged past and present for me by its insistence that prosperity at “home” is inevitably linked to a violent foreign policy: Rosler’s series of collages (1967-72) that contrast everyday household scenes with a parallel world of U.S. imperialism in Viet Nam. In “Red Stripe Kitchen,” two GI’s are rummaging through a suburban American kitchen, one peering around a doorjamb, perhaps looking for insurgents; the other is thoughtfully removing a rocket from a kitchen cupboard, as if it were a favorite chafing dish. In another brightly-colored collage, an American woman in a seductive pose is reflected in a bedroom mirror, but out the window and on television we can see artillery firing in black and white. In a third, a napalmed Vietnamese woman cradles her baby in her arms as she runs through a bright, sunny living room carpeted in white shag. Yet another features a photograph of a brick suburban ranch house; on the curb, a private soldier pauses in between firefights for a cigarette break.

The exhibit, in its insistence that viewers question the “normal” – or the connections between what we consider normal and the violence to self and other that the normal conceals, reinforced the intellectual links in my mind between second wave feminist theory and queer theory. But the exhibit also does the important work of linking feminism to a variety of New Left movements, and demonstrates visually how much intellectual exchange there was between feminism and other political impulses, even as feminist activists began to narrow their focus to violence against women by the mid-1970’s. As the 1969 proposal Mierle Laderman Okeles performance piece “Washing/Tracks/Maintenance” (1973), in which she described how she would live and clean publicly every day in a gallery, asked: “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage Monday morning?”

Since the revolution didn’t come, we never got to find out – although we could probably guess, which was Okeles’ point. But for historians who are interested in what a lesser-known feature of the women’s movement looked like, this exhibit is a gem: don’t miss it.

“WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” is at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave., Long Island City, New York, 11101, through May 12. Open 12-6, Thursday – Monday. Admission is $5.00.

Home Again: Driving Dr. Radical

Although the AAA was not the last conference I am going to this year, it is the last one I am going to this calendar year. Phew. And my return home was marked by the oddest taxi ride ever.

Those who are familiar with Shoreline's taxi history know that it is a somewhat recent event to have taxis at the train station at all. Back in the 'seventies, I remember slogging up to the Oligarch campus with my duffle bag on my shoulder, block after block, usually in the cold. There were often troops of us going up together, and this before the days of suitcases with wheels even. Sometimes we would have to stop for a drink or two on the way. It was that bad.

In any case, there are now lots of taxis: whether all those medallions existed before and were being held off the market in hopes that Oligarch University would relocate to another town, or whether the city did something to create them who knows. That they are there is all that matters. So, as at most transportation centers, when you emerge from the train station, you line up in the cold, driving rain and wait to get into a long string of cabs, one by one, as they pull up.

My driver, who looked a lot like Samuel Beckett, said after my bags were stowed and he had started to pull out of the station driveway: "I hope you don't think you are going to pay me with a twenty."

"I don't know," I said, pulling my wallet out, although I had been holding onto the option of paying with a twenty. "Would you like me to check?"

"Yes," he snapped, "Because I don't have any change!" Meanwhile, he is driving down the main drag outside the train station and heading in the general direction of my house. "This is about a five dollar ride. Do you have a five? Or a ten? People always want to pay for short rides with big bills on Sundays when you can't go to the bank."

I pay with twenties every day of the week, but hell, I was game. I pawed through a wallet full of the various receipts I will staple to my travel reimbursement report tomorrow. Nada. "Uh," I said, "I think I only have four ones."

"SHIT!" he yelled.

"Well calm down," I said, firmly but soothingly. "We can go to my house," since we were already halfway there; "and I'll go in and get you a couple more dollars. Then at least you'll have some change for the next customer."

He was not mollified. "An hour ago a girl tried to pay for a three dollar cab ride with a fifty," Beckett snarled. "Can you beat that?" No, actually, I couldn't. The base price of a ride is $2.50: this customer must have wanted a ride around the corner to buy crack, or to be driven into the parking lot to pick up her car, since you can't go anywhere for three dollars in Shoreline.

"Dreadful," I said, trying to place myself on the side of the working stiff. "What are people thinking?" Just then the driver tapped the brakes and skidded sideways a few inches before coming to a stop.

"SHIT!" he yelled. "That just takes the cake! Black ice! GODDAMNIT!" We were now within four blocks of my house, Thank Goddess. "This is the lowest point in 49 years of driving a cab!" he ranted. Egad, 49 years? Is your Ph.D. in English or Philosophy, my friend? (Just kidding!!!)

"Well," I said softly, "Maybe it will be all uphill from here." We turned the corner into my street.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Maybe I'll just dig a fuckin' hole and jump in and pull the dirt over my head." OKayyyy.....

We pulled up in front of my house, and he got out and unloaded my bags. I handed him the four ones and said, "Now wait here and I'll go in and get more money," since of course, it wasn't even a five dollar ride, it was a seven dollar ride. What I didn't tell him was that he would be receiving the other four dollars (who could resist tipping such a charming guy?) in quarters because no one else was home and I would be getting it out of the Bottomless Dish of Change that accumulates in a bowl on my dresser. The prospect of handing him sixteen quarters was causing me some anxiety, until I noticed -- to my astonishment and relief -- that he had gotten back in the cab and driven away as fast as the sheet ice would allow.

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Prompted by Acephalous, I went to the list of New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year," and realized that I have read exactly four of them. And two I used for an article I am writing. How can this be, given that I probably read around 200 books in 2007? And that I read for pleasure more or less at every available moment? Am I reading too few popular books? (I meant to read the Tina Brown on Princess Di.) Too many academic press books? Too many books that were published in 2006 or before? And who made up that list anyway? I think the academic bloggers should do their own list of Notable Books.

Dogs, Violence and Popular Culture

Last night I was watching the pilot episode of Damages, the new Glenn Close series on FX about a Manhattan litigator who sues corporations for the Big Bucks when they do dirt to the little guy. Ted Danson plays the evil Kenneth Lay-type CEO who has encouraged his employees to invest in the company, then dumped his stock, killed the company and voided their pensions. I think it's going to be a pretty good series, in part because, in true Fox News style, the producers are not going to let Glenn Close -- a torts attorney, one kind of right-wing whipping boy -- be a heroine. It appears that she has constructed an elaborate deception to get a witness to testify for the case against the robber baron by killing the witness's dog, a large friendly mutt named Saffron, and framing the "bad guy." The witness was willing to let five thousand people's pensions go down the drain, but her moral compass has been aroused by the need to avenge her dog's death.

Sounds right to me.

I had a friend once who said she couldn't watch Hitchock's masterpiece, Lifeboat, because they throw the dog out of the boat and row away as the camera follows the dog, paddling frantically after the boat and thinking that this must be some terrible mistake. And I feel very much the same way: as I watched last night, I knew they were going to find a dead dog in the apartment, and as I always do, I chanted silently in my head "Pleasedontkillthedog, pleasedontkillthedog." But they did.

I hate it when they kill the dog. And of course movie and TV people know that, and they are able to make us feel feelings -- fear, rage, grief -- in relation to an unknown dog that we tend not to feel when seeing people killed on screen. Every time I watch The Shield I see three or four people killed, maimed, choked -- Aceveda, the precinct captain, was forced to fellate a gang banger at gunpoint, and while I was glad I wasn't him, I happily ordered another DVD from Netflix to see how he would get over his feelings about being, well, raped.

But I can't bear to see them kill the dog, hurt the dog, threaten to hurt the dog -- and you could pretty much substitute cat, or any domestic animal, for dog. Funny, isn't it? And I guess a lot of people feel that way. Even if, as a few lone voices have pointed out in recent days, this verges on the hypocritical. As someone who loves thoroughbred racing, eats meat of all kinds that is raised and killed "humanely" (Ha! I do wish I believed that), has been known to poison and kill rodents invading my home, and does not believe that abortion is murder, I cannot comprehend why anyone would knowingly harm a living animal. I know this is really strange. But I am particularly disgusted by dog fighting. In part, I am convinced, in a beyond rational way, that dogs are more social beasts than people. I also believe that, like people, all dogs are good dogs if they get the love and respect they deserve as puppies.

Even pit bulls: go here to read about the American Staffordshire Terrier. Because I lived on the Lower East Side of New York for many years, I learned not to trust your average urban pit bull, many of whom were trained to be aggressive, and now I try actively to introduce Breezy, my dog, to pits with responsible owners because when I don't it feels a lot like bigotry.



I am sparing you the pictures of the maimed and brutalized dogs I came across on line in order to get these nice pictures of pits raised by decent, responsible people.

That's right, I'm getting to the ongoing investigation in which it is alleged that Michael Vick is an investor in a dog fighting syndicate recently busted on a property he owns in Virginia. Vick plead not guilty yesterday in a courtroom surrounded by a few fans and many, many animal rights people (augmented, perhaps, by people with other motives or those who were just grossed out) demonstrating against him. Atlanta Falcons training camp opened yesterday as well, and someone hired an airplane to circle the practice field with a sign condemning Vick. You can read about it here in the New York Times. A young player said to a reporter that this would just be a bump in the road in their season: ex-Patriots linebacker and veteran defenseman Lawyer Milloy stepped in (one imagines him smacking the rookie on the helmet on his way to the reporter) and said "Yes, a big bump."

But initially I wasn't going to blog about this case, in part because there are so many issues to address, many of which are quite morally vexed. Is the prosecutor going after Vick because he can, in what is now a familiar career move for an ambitious attorney in the public service? Republicans seem to have forgotten, for example, that Rudolph Giuliani originally came to prominence in New York by being one of those "overreaching prosecutors" who conservatives claim to despise, unless they are putting men of color in jail for murders and rapes they did not commit. Does Michael Vick being a famous black athlete make him a convincing target for a public that has a love/hate relationship with celebrities? Is it partly a good opportunity for animal rights people to get their message out whether it is Vick who ought to be carrying it or not? Certainly the bootstraps, millionaire athlete surrounded by a posse of rough characters who bring him down through their wild ways is a common popular culture narrative, in life and on shows like CSI. It's easier to connect to than the 40,000 other people estimated to be actively involved in dogfighting, who are poor, working class and anonymous.

And what can anyone just reading about the case know about what Vick knew about the dog fighting ring-- or whether he was connected to these people at all? We can't and we don't, and what people now call the "rush to judgement" is something to be aware of because things are not always what they seem. We project various kinds of rage on people we don't know, often the wealthy and privileged, among whom carelessness and poor judgement can easily result in harm to others less powerful than they: cocaine and booze-fueled white women running over folks in their SUV's, for example, or young men at prestigious universities who think that because it is legal to amuse yourself with a stripper it is ethical to do so and treat her like the trash you think she is. We are not mistaken to feel quite viscerally that such things might have been prevented, and that they are wrong, even when no laws are broken. We expect more of people who have had advantages and education, whether that is fair or not. We expect them to be aware of their responsibilities to others, and we expect them to do good and not take advantage of other people's poverty, ignorance and venality. We expect them not amuse themselves at the expense of people, or animals, who are weaker. It may not always be illegal, but it is wrong.

And in the end, this does work to the disadvantage of the privileged when they stumble or make stupid mistakes. For example, if a machinist working for United Technologies up here in Shoreline were busted as the owner of a Bridgeport slum property where dog fighting occurred, there probably would not be general calls from PETA to boycott Otis Elevators and those who used them. That is not fair, but it is true.

Which is why -- much as I am repelled by dog fighting -- I think it has to be put on the table that I , at least, think it is credible that Michael Vick may not have known about it. In other words, the idea that he must have known needs to be distinguished from the fact that he should have known. This turns on what seems to be the central fact of the case: that he owned the property. But I would like to put this in context. I have an old college friend who lives in Shoreline who had a more than moderately successful career in the NFL, and one thing I do know because of this friendship is that Vick owning real estate in a variety of places is not unusual, and not necessarily a sign of conspicuous consumption or careless habits. Quite the opposite, in fact. Football players who make a great deal of money in a short period of time - and they can never know how short their careers are going to be -- if they are smart and get good advice, buy things that will more or less protect their money over the rest of their lives, produce a little ongoing income, and allow them to transition into a useful, productive life after football at a moment's notice if they must. My friend owns real estate and fast food franchises in at least four states that I know of, and he could not possibly know or be responsible for what goes on in all of them, even the properties in Shoreline. There is no question in my mind that Vick should forfeit the property if that is how the law is written, as he would have to in a drug case, but whether he actually knew about the dog fighting and should be prosecuted as a co-conspirator is an open question in my view.

So the whole case will turn on if Michael Vick knew, if he was an investor in the dog fighting ring itself, and if he could have and should have known what was going on in Virginia; whether these were regular associates and whether he visited the property. What I would say is that if Vick did not have an agent who regularly dropped by all his properties to make sure they were being maintained properly, and who ascertained that what was going on there was legal, he was very, very foolish. But not, perhaps, a criminal, or even a bad person. And I doubt seriously that the prosecutor would have brought these charges in the first place if one of the so-called tenants were not prepared to flip on him in exchange for immunity. That tends to be the way the cookie crumbles. So it is going to be very ugly for Michael Vick, for a while at least, and whether he is exonerated or not, this moment will change his life and alter his professional prospects because -- rightly or wrongly -- I doubt that he will ever really be perceived as reliable again.