Meetings With Remarkable Men

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In 1965 my parents bought a house in Longport, on the opposite end of Absecon Island from Atlantic City. Longport, which was then still called “The Irish Riviera,” was across a causeway from Ocean City, another (Gentile) family-oriented South Jersey vacation spot. Ocean City was dry, but next to it was Somer’s Point, a veritable Bourbon Street to its Riyadh. My favorite Somer’s Point joint was Tony Mart’s because a highschool classmate of Max Garden’s tended bar there and let us drink for free.

Tony Mart’s booked rock’n’roll bands, and I knew from the subsequent literature that The Hawks played there before they became The Band, and I wondered if I’d heard them. Robbie Robertson’s passing triggered a lot of FB postings, and I learned that The Hawks were at Tony Mart’s the entire summer of ‘65. In fact, Robertson took Bob Dylan’s phone call inviting the group to New York in its kitchen. So I heard them once? twice? three times?

And they made absolutely no impression on me.

Talk about an eye (or ear) for talent.

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Night Within the Night

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[excerpts from Last Beauty of the Earth, a work in progress]

..One can be almost certain that the inflationary horniness among older millennials and Gen Xers, along with the constant mainstream jeremiads about the decline of sex, the inexorable draining of sexuality from the world (echoes of Hölderlin’s withdrawal of the gods), is revanchist, and prefigures either a fascist future of universal eugenics and Lebensborn programs, devoted to the sexual enslavement of the species, or a near-future, closer than one might expect, in which fucking has been abolished, or faded away, along with the money system, labor, the male sex, etc., all that shit Valerie Solanas wrote about. In the meantime, a spiritual disciple of Cronenberg, I carve my anima into my very flesh, I tattoo my name in Hebrew on my neck, Leila, לילה, daughter of the night, goddess of sex and the transmigration of souls, eternal flower and mirror, who is also the agent of the return to oblivion, to forgetfulness, to the unmaking of the flesh: time itself.

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The Unfinished Revolution of “The Joy of Sex”

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The sexual revolution may have reached its high-water mark 50 years ago, the week of August 5, 1973, when The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking first topped the New York Times  list of nonfiction hardcover best sellers. Published the previous fall, the book had swiftly become a publishing phenomenon. For the first time, anyone in America could walk into a respectable bookshop and openly purchase a detailed, illustrated sex manual: a modern version of the guidebooks that Indian aristocrats, Chinese mandarins, and Florentine grandees had consulted centuries before.

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Burning for You

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‘Kitchen Fire’, 2023, oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches.

I’ve had an ongoing series of paintings about lovemaking that pop up every now and then. Depicting intimacy in a way that is a tad voyeuristic yet never prurient is challenging, but I find that it works when the moment is somehow eclipsed by the periphery of life lived.

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Hells and Benefits (Benjamin DeMott on Sexology in the Seventies)

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Originally published in The Atlantic in 1975.

Are sexologists dumb? I’ll admit that’s an impolite question—and I’ll also admit that a little of my skepticism of the sexological tribe stems from irrelevant literary fastidiousness. Sex researchers and commentators sooner or later “bring in” a poet or two to decorate or amplify their arguments, and depressingly often, they misquote what they’ve appropriated or otherwise deface it. (One recent volume includes the following remark: . . [we] realize that, in a paraphrase of John Donne, the unsatisfied metaneeds of any group within a community weaken that community and reduce the chances of all its members of reaching their full potential.” Of what in hell could these words be a paraphrase?)

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R.I.P. to a Man’s Man

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On Cunningham Street in the Upper Brickyard of Clarksdale, Mississippi, Clement Edmond was a man’s man—respected and beloved by all as a bedrock of his community. He reminded me of my pops in his ability to express every aspect of what it means to be a leader and fully human. He was a traditional husband who worked while his wonderful wife, Louise, kept a safe and loving home for their thirteen children.

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Use Him

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In February 2023, music producer Ian Brennan traveled to Mississippi to record with the prisoners of the notorious Parchman Prison, which has a rich musical history. (Former inmates include Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison and Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon Presley.) The bureaucratic process behind Brennan’s visit took over three years: “Granted approval a little more than a week before, Brennan caught a red eye flight to be there on a Sunday morning for the few hours he was allowed to record.” Parchment Prison Prayer belongs to the honorable tradition of song-catchers searching for unchained melodies in penitentiaries.  This time around, Brennan may have caught at least one song for the ages…

“I give myself away,” sings the vocalist to his personal Jesus (as he makes the piano chime), “so you can use me.” That’s the gospel truth.  The singer/pianist is the only Parchman prisoner/performer recorded by Brennan who chose to remain anonymous.

A Pogrom Called Huwwara

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Pogrom. That is the first word that came to mind when I heard about Huwwara. A rabid mob sowing violence, terror, fire and destruction, the terror magnified by the darkness, shops and houses and cars torched, with hundreds of injuries and – apparently by some miracle – just one death, of a man, Sameh Aqtash, who had just returned from volunteering help to victims of the earthquake in Turkey.

Horror and shame welled up close behind. This was a pogrom, but with the critical characters reversed. No longer were Jews the victims, in the classic, almost stereotypical role fixed by history and historiography for twenty-five centuries or more. Now Jews were “masters in their house”, as asserted by a minister in the new Israeli government, and determined to show it.[1]

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A True Pro-Life Movement Has Never Been Tried

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In Ohio, this Tuesday, voters in a special election will decide on a scammy state constitutional amendment. “Are you sick of constitutional amendments? Vote yes on Issue 1 and you won’t have to put up with them anymore!” Issue 1 makes the process of amending our state constitution significantly harder. Since 1851, proposed amendments to our constitution needed a simple majority to pass. Issue 1 would up the required majority to 60%. If you take supporters’ word for it, shadowy interest groups from outside the state have set their eyes on Ohio and our big, beautiful constitution. “They” seek to shred it so as to turn us into another Democratic shithole like Chicago or California. We need a special instance of living constitutionalism to protect the original intent of the constitution (or something).

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Brother Sun

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Dear family and friends,As I write these words, the violent rule of gangs in Port au Prince in increasing, and reaching our neighborhood, which is also the neighborhood of US Embassy.

The Embassy is, during these very days, evacuating all non-emergency personnel.The effect on us is that our hospital now receives many warlike trauma and gunshot injuries, especially since the specialty hospital nearby that was managing them closed, precisely because of armed attack on their hospital.We cannot get surgeons to come to our area. It is a red zone. And like many hospitals in Port au Prince, we cannot even keep the competent people we already have, since many are fleeing Haiti to raise their families in a safer country.We are not capable of managing high level trauma. It means we stabilize the gunshot injured as best as we can and transfer them to a private surgery center at our expense, for which we have no budget but must act to save lives.We are facing the worse crisis we have ever faced in 34 years of dedicated mission here, and the consequences are not only the disintegration of a nation and all the institutions that constitute civilization, but the people are floundering in a tsunami of despair. The dangerous sickness of despair surrounds us like a violent sea in a hurricane.And yet amid all of this, there was Raphael.

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HUWWARA

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David J. Wasserstein is professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Vanderbilt he served as professor of Islamic history at Tel Aviv University. He’s provided the following short introduction to his poem which he’s translated from Hebrew into English.

After the pogrom in Huwwara, on 26-27 February, I was like many Jews and Israelis in shock. That shock eventually, a couple of days later, took shape in the text below. It is a cento, a work composed largely of quotations from other texts.

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The Death of the Aryan Race

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..A Verso article on the “downtown scene,” the fascist avant-garde, Yarvin and BAP, etc. I’ve been making “aesthetically alive art out of history’s flotsam” for years that takes in real brutality, not the overwrought racial/gendered disgust these people have at the symptoms of capitalism, but the mandarin left would rather talk about a bunch of liberal art school kids and failed models cosplaying fascism than look for anything genuinely new.

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Yard Politics

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Four days a week, I wake at 4:50 a.m. and start my exercise routine. Thursday is the only day that I don’t exercise. I still wake at 4:50 a.m., but I mow the yard and wash both cars. I’ve been doing that since I was in my twenties, when I was renting a house before I purchased my own home. The Thursday routine was instilled in me by my pops who always cut his yard on Thursday, mostly because his work as a juvenile youth counselor and a member of the Mississippi Democrat Executive Committee meant that his weekends were too busy for yard work. However, the notion that mowing one’s yard and maintaining one’s home is a primary responsibility of a citizen was instilled in me from the womb by my pops, grandpops, and just about every person in my Clarksdale and Jackson communities.

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Heat and Light (Hearing Playboi Carti in “First of the Month’s” 25th Summer)

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I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…

The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.

It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name.

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Benificence

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A couple of comments on Florida’s new history standards. I use the word “standards” loosely, of course.

But first a tweet that I give my highest compliment. I wish I had written it.

Larry Sabato: “So far Ron DeSantis has run a failing campaign. But here’s the good news: DeSantis has developed skills which, in some instances, can be applied for his personal benefit.”

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Loss is More (Ali Siddiq’s Latest)

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Ali Siddiq does some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in his new standup show. The whole thing is full of felt WTF’s that have made him America’s reigning ghetto existentialist. Like post-accident Richard Pryor, Siddiq consigns comedy to the ashes when he relives the loss of his half-sister, Ashley Rae Mitchell, who died when she was eight years old. Per Siddiq, her exit had a killer upshot: “I’m so dead inside I’m a fucking monster in the streets.” Siddiq isn’t being slick. He’s not out to excuse his own crimes even as he makes art out of collateral damage.

You can cut to the “chapter” where Siddiq recalls the death of his baby sister below (beneath the video of his whole show).

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Watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”

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At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.

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