"What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all..."

"... everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?"

A Kafka quote begins Roger Kimball's op-ed "This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit/Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken."

Kimball also quotes Hayek:

[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.

And Tocqueville:

"[A] network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules"... reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Books:

Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
Roger Kimball, "The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia"

Finally! "The Greening of America" is out on Kindle.

Got it!

[CAVEAT: The Kindle version is newly abridged, "compressing the original 125,000 words to an Internet-friendly 24,000 words and eliminating most of the sections on "Consciousness III." Updated? Charles Reich wrote a new preface and final chapter." Damn. As you see below, I'm most interested in the stuff that is outdated and embarrassing!]

[From the first link:]

In 1970, The New Yorker Magazine ran a 39,000-word excerpt of ‘The Greening of America' -- the longest in its history. Then the book was published. It caused a firestorm. Written by Charles Reich, a distinguished professor at Yale Law, it showed how a once-free America had become a Corporate State that made no one happy. And then it suggested a remedy.

The way out? It wasn't political change — for Reich, politics came last. The first and most important thing: Consciousness. As he saw it, America had outgrown "Consciousness I," which had helped form a nation of free individuals. It had outgrown "Consciousness II," which was corporate and heartless. Now it was time for "Consciousness III," in which people would turn away from the quest for traditional success and forge a new, personal path to satisfaction.

In short: Change the way you think, help others do the same, and soon the system has to change.

Ah, soon the system has to change. Hope and change, baby. It's 42 years later and look at all this change. It's change as far as the eye can see.

I love reading these pop culture books of the past, that is, my past. Especially circa 1970.

I also got the Kindle version of Roger Kimball's "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," which I have already read and enjoyed, because I wanted to be able to cut and paste a little something of what Kimball says about "The Greening of America," which he memorably savages:

Though it spread like the measles, Consciousness III is difficult to describe because, as Reich notes, the very attempt to say what it is draws on intellectual habits that Consciousness III rejects: “Authority, schedules, time, accepted customs, are all forms which must be questioned. Accepted patterns of thought must be broken; what is considered ‘rational thought’ must be opposed by ‘nonrational thought’— drug-thought, mysticism, impulses.”

Not entirely, though. Reich does allow that the “foundation” of Consciousness III is “liberation.” He adds that “the meaning of liberation is that the individual is free to build his own philosophy and values, his own life-style, and his own culture from a new beginning.” More generally, Consciousness III comes into being when an individual frees himself from the “false consciousness” that society imposes. People infused with the spirit of Consciousness III do “not believe in the antagonistic or competitive doctrine of life,” they “do not compete ‘in real life.’ ... People are brothers, the world is ample for all.... No one judges anyone else.” Also, everyone rather likes himself: “Consciousness III says, ‘I’m glad I’m me.’”

ADDED: From Woodward and Armstrong's book "The Brethren," about the Supreme Court, describing the funeral of Justice Hugo Black:

The minister selected to deliver the eulogy went to Black’s library and found various books that Black had underlined, including The Greening of America, by Charles Reich, one of his former clerks. The minister selected some of the underlined portions to read at the funeral. During the eulogy, Brennan gently nudged Stewart. “Hugo would turn over in his grave if he heard that,” Brennan said. Only Black’s intimates knew that Black thought Reich’s book absurd, and that Black underlined the sections he disliked.

AND: More about the new edition, from the second link, above, written by the editor of the new version:

The other reason to read The Greening of America is for its brilliant and original suggestion of a way out: the radical, idealistic "Consciousness III."...

Then why did you edit most of this stuff out?

Last year, we saw the emergence of the "Occupy" movement, and, with it, ideas that would be instantly familiar to anyone who had read The Greening of America. 

Now we are in the middle of a Presidential election, with a campaign that sounds a lot like a debate between a "Consciousness II" Administration (which argues that the federal government can best protect us from an unregulated marketplace and a shredded safety net) and "Consciousness I" Republican candidates (who tell us that the solution to all our problems is a return to a time when men took care of their own business and government barely existed).

In short: "The Greening of America" is reappearing at a time when it can contribute to — and shape —the national conversation.

Because you've got another alternative but you're not going to embarrass yourselves by telling us the details of what it is.

"The real story has as much to do with journalistic irrelevance as journalistic integrity."

Roger Kimball on WaPo's Pimpsalongate.

I made up "Pimpsalongate." It's just a placeholder coinage. Help me out here!

IN THE COMMENTS: Curtiss has "All the President's Pimps."

Asked at the Saddleback Forum "when does a[n unborn] baby get human rights," why did Obama say the answer is "above my pay grade"?

Roger Kimball finds Obama's "above my pay grade" feint on abortion "insulting and mendacious."

It is insulting because it ostentatiously evades the question while giving a little wink to his home team: “Oh, these religious morons and their obsession with abortion! Of course, I could care less about it, but I also know it’s impolitic to say so, so I’ll emit a brief rhetoric fog and hope no one will notice.” And it’s mendacious because when it comes to “pay grades,” no one’s is higher than the President’s.

"Above my pay grade" does seem like an awful expression in this context. It made a bad impression on me when I heard it last night. (I said it sounded "cold.") But thinking about it this morning, I'm pretty sure he meant to refer to God.

"Above my pay grade" is an expression of humility and submission to God: I don't purport to answer the question that belongs to God. He's trying to be folksy, coining a phrase akin to "the man upstairs." When someone says "the man upstairs," you don't start railing about how we're on the top floor, but that's because we know we're dealing with a folksy expression. People are too touchy on the subject of abortion to process the less common "above my pay grade" as an expression.

Obama may have thought that, in a church, talking to a pastor, with religion hovering around every question, listeners would understand that he was putting himself beneath God. But I didn't pick that up last night, Roger Kimball isn't picking it up, and, scanning the articles on the subject this morning, I'd say almost no one heard it as a religious statement, so we must judge "above my pay grade" as a rhetorical misfire. But we shouldn't say it's "insulting and mendacious."

***

Now, let's also look at Rick Warren's rhetoric. He asked, after a preface about abortion, "when does a baby get human rights in your view?" And, most obviously, his use of "baby" instead of "fetus" or at least "unborn baby" conveys a lot of opinion. But look at what else Warren is doing. He is not asking when does life begin?, a question that is much more susceptible to Obama's answer that only God knows. Warren is asking when do rights begin? That makes it a legal question. And Warren even appends the phrase "in your view."

So Obama's answer — that it's not for him to say — is inapt. Obama answered the question he expected to hear. But Warren had the wit to frame the question in terms of a legal opinion that Obama was fully equipped to give. When does the baby have legal rights?

And we know Obama's answer to that question, don't we? I think his answer is: When it is completely outside of the mother's body. Is it any more subtle than that? If it is, it's not much more subtle, and it's no wonder Obama chose not to answer the question asked.

ADDED: Rick Warren is asked whether the "above my pay grade" answer was good enough:

No. I think he needed to be more specific on that. I happen to disagree with Barack on that. Like I said, he's a friend. But to me, I would not want to die and get before God one day and go, 'Oh, sorry, I didn't take the time to figure out' because if I was wrong then it had severe implications to my leadership if I had the ability to do something about it. He should either say, 'No scientifically, I do not believe it's a human being until X' or whatever it is or to say, 'Yes, I believe it is a human being at X point,' whether it's conception or anything else. But to just say 'I don't know' on the most divisive issue in America is not a clear enough answer for me.

Jerome R. Corsi's #1 bestseller "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality."

Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman discuss the book and interview the author, who also wrote "Unfit for Command" (the notorious "Swift Boat attack" that hurt John Kerry so much in 2004).

Corsi openly admits his "goal is to defeat Obama," which seems to mean it should be read as a polemic, but Corsi calls his book "investigative" and denies that he set out to write "a political book." And his editor — Mary Matalin — calls it "a piece of scholarship."

Though books are generally viewed as loftier than journalism, NYT journalists Rutenberg and Bosman look down on books like this. It seems especially galling to them that books gain prominence via the NYT bestseller list (or as they say in the NYT "best-seller list"):

[B]ooks like “Unfit for Command,” which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, “The Obama Nation,” have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks.

Ha ha. Books are a "delivery system for attacks." The pen is mightier than the sword, and the book — look out! — is a veritable missile.

There have been anti-Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) and anti-Bush books too numerous to name. The sensational findings in these books, true or dubious, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the news media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Fact-checking the books can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber.

Imagine! A book is able to get out in front of the usually nimble "delivery system" of the newspaper. And isn't it annoying that book authors get into the media and say things that require fact-checking? Who are these people? Who let them in? How dare they impose extensive labor on journalists!

This is a long set-up for showing us the results of the imposed fact-checking task that Rutenberg and Bosman apparently find so irksome. Let's have it:

... Mr. Corsi writes that Mr. Obama had “yet to answer” whether he “stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond.” “How about in the U.S. Senate?” Mr. Corsi asks.

But Mr. Obama, who admitted to occasional marijuana and cocaine use in his high school and early college years, wrote in his memoir that he had “stopped getting high” when he moved to New York in the early 1980s. And in 2003 The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., quoted him responding to a question of his drug use by saying, “I haven’t done anything since I was 20 years old.”

In an interview, Mr. Corsi said “self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable.”

So the statement that he hasn't answered is wrong, and Corsi's point should have been that Obama once used drugs, and we might want to be suspicious of the assertion that he stopped when he says he did. In saying this, Corsi reminds me of those Bush antagonists who speculate that he still drinks or that he is somehow dogged by the "dry drunk" effects of not drinking. Let's see if all the bloggers can be non-hypocritical. Treat Obama exactly the way you've been treating Bush on the substance-use issue.

In exploring Mr. Obama’s denials that he had been present for the more incendiary sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Corsi cites a report on the conservative Web site NewsMax.com that Mr. Obama had attended a sermon on July 22, 2007, in which Mr. Wright blamed “the ‘white arrogance’ of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.”

Mr. Obama, however, was giving a speech in Florida that afternoon, and his campaign reported he had not attended Mr. Wright’s church that day.

William Kristol, a columnist for The New York Times, had cited the same report in a column, and issued a correction. “There is a dispute about the date, and Kristol chose to side with Obama,” Mr. Corsi said. “We can nitpick the date to death,” he added, saying his “fundamental point” was Mr. Obama’s close association with someone ascribing to “black liberation theology.”

So Corsi is faulted for citing a report that the campaign disputes and — perhaps, I can't tell — not also stating that the fact is in dispute. (I need to look at the book, which I don't have at hand.)

Mr. Corsi described most of the critiques of his book as “nitpicking,” like a contradiction of his claim that Mr. Obama had failed to dedicate his book “Dreams of My Father” to his family; Mr. Obama dedicated the book to several family members, in the introduction.

And that's the third and last of the picked nits Rutenberg and Bosman report. Are there more? Why isn't this article more of a fact-check by the NYT? It can't be enough that Media Matters is fact-checking the book. I'm inclined to assume the NYT didn't find any more mistakes or they'd have told us about them. That looks pretty good for Corsi. He is such a huge target. He destroyed Kerry and his book on Obama is #1!

Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to weigh in heavily on Mr. Corsi’s accusations. It appears to face the classic decision between the risk of publicizing the book’s claims by addressing them and the risk of letting them sink into the public debate with no response.

But the Obama campaign made a big deal about how they were not going to let themselves be "Swift Boated." The "Fight the Smears" web site was supposed to jump on everything right away. Now, they're weaseling about not wanting to draw attention to the book? That's a complete contradiction.... which has to make us think that they don't have answers to the charges.

ADDED: If you want to buy the book, buy it by clicking here, and you'll support this blog (without paying any extra).

MORE: Roger Kimball has a post titled "NY Times tries to torpedo anti-Obama book; succeeds in spreading its message."

The art that was obviously a hoax was a hoax.

WaPo reports:

A Yale University student's senior art project, which she said documented her bleeding during repeated self-induced abortions, sparked a protest on campus, an outcry on the Internet, and debates over morality, medicine, art and academia.

And -- the project was all faked. Senior Aliza Shvarts told Yale officials yesterday that she didn't get pregnant and didn't have abortions. But that didn't stop an outpouring of emotion as the story spread....

Within hours after the article ran yesterday in the student newspaper, blogs were full of livid reactions, including horror that so many fetuses were apparently aborted, revulsion at the graphic nature of the piece, shock that someone would risk her own health in such a way, and general disdain for art and academia.

I wish the WaPo would report that in addition to the "outcry on the Internet," there were plenty of people, including myself, who immediately spotted a hoax.

In a statement yesterday, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said: "Ms. Shvarts . . . stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body."

Ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body... So that's what passes as insight at Yale these days? If I was going to get livid and horrified about something it would be that a great university sucks so many young women into the into the intellectual graveyard of Women's Studies. Think what these women could be studying instead of this endlessly recycled drivel. If you care about women's bodies, study science and help us with the limitations of the body. But to imagine you are helping us by restating meager platitudes is just very sad.

Shvartz, an arts major, told the Yale Daily News: "I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity. I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be."

So you "believe strongly" in the boring dogma that's been circulating in the art world for decades? Do you believe anything interesting or original that might make it worth inflicting yourself on the world in the form of an artist?

"It's supposed to challenge the mythology of the body," [said classmate Juan Castillo]. "Are we only supposed to do what our bodies were 'naturally' meant to do, which is to procreate?

"I think she was definitely trying to spark conversation. In that respect, she's accomplished her goal," Castillo said. "But I don't know if she meant it to get this crazy, this out of control."

No, the conversation about whether we are only supposed to do what "our bodies were 'naturally' meant to do, which is to procreate" has been going on for a long, long time without the "spark" of a jejune art project.

The only interesting question is who was dopey enough to think this wasn't a hoax. WaPo would like us to think it was only those deranged internetters who get everything wrong. But it seems to me that a lot of the Yalies were slow on the uptake.

ADDED: The first commenter here links to this Yale Daily News item headlined "University calls art project a fiction; Shvarts '08 disputes Yale's claim." She's saying her school libeled her?

But Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.”

Ultimately inaccurate? That sounds weaselly.

But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself.

Who's to say she didn't? Produce the sperm donor! Sue the university for libel! Let's keep thinking about Shvarts and her semen injections, because it's really enlightening on women's issues. Put her on "Oprah." This is at least as profound as the "pregnant man."

At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant.

At the end of her menstrual cycle... she got her period!

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, “because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Uncertainties... ambiguities... that's so heavy.

This afternoon, Shvarts showed the News footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts — sometimes naked, sometimes clothed — alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup.

Oh, great, homemade porn.

Yale’s statement comes after a day of widespread outrage all across the country following an article in today’s edition of the News in which Shvarts described her supposed exhibition, which she said would include the video recordings well as a preserved collection of the blood from the process, which she said she is storing in a freezer.

Right next to the Haagen Dazs vanilla raspberry swirl frozen yogurt.

IN THE COMMENTS:

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...

It would of been cool if it was true.

I would love to see an art piece of hundreds of people on toilets pinching a loaf also.

Also, pictures of the hog in different "moods" would be interesting.

8:57 AM

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...

Tits bouncing in slow motion on thousands of televisions would also be something that should be explored in someone's art.

8:58 AM

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...

I'm really into Avant Garde shit.

9:00 AM

ADDED: The Chronicle of Higher Education presents the issue in terms of protecting the free expression of the student:

Robert M. O'Neil, a free-speech expert at the University of Virginia, agreed that displaying the Yale student's artwork is about freedom of expression. "Art departments have always been and must remain shelters for creativity which sometimes offends and often challenges," said Mr. O'Neil, director of the university's Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. But he also acknowledged that such a message "doesn't usually go down terribly well with people in the outside world."

[T]he episode at Yale has prompted questions about what constitutes legitimate academic work and how far universities should go in giving voice or providing a platform to students who express outrageous and offensive opinions. The incident also has caused people who already are skeptical about what they see as an anything-goes attitude in higher education to feel even more alienated from the world of academe.

(The boldface is mine.)

This is framed as if the "people in the outside world" don't understand art and don't care about free speech. But that's not how I've written about the problem here. I'm big on free speech. That's why I want more speech and why I'm dishing it out in hefty portions here. I'm being "outrageous and offensive" as I try to shine some light on bad, boring, unoriginal, lame, weak and bad for women and damaging to abortion rights. I am concerned not with the strength of the academic citadel, but with its feebleness. What is this elite institution giving young people if it pads out their minds with art world and Women's Studies ideology. Where is the critical thinking? Where is the education?

(I'm saying this as someone who has put a lot of time and energy into studying and caring about feminism and who wasted my undergraduate education years frittering away my powers in the art school of a great university.)

At least the Chronicle has the sense to talk to Roger Kimball: "What does a higher education mean and what is going on in these privileged, expensive redoubts of educational endeavor?"

But why am I reading that, when Roger Kimball has a blog. Yes, he's writing about this, of course:

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal” ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and they video taking the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale.

But when it comes to “art”: oh, that’s a tricky one. Shvarts “is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” the Yale spokeswoman said. But doesn’t it depend on the nature of the performance?

Read the whole thing.

Norman Mailer died.

Today.

Remember when he ran for Mayor?

I do.



The idea was that NYC should be the 51st state. It'd be the 12th largest, you know. (In case you've been wondering how big a job it is to be mayor of NY.)

Sorry I don't have anything more to say about Norman Mailer. I've never read his books. I read the mean things Kate Millet wrote about him in "Sexual Politics," back around when that picture was taken of me. The man stabbed his wife and nearly killed her. Maybe I should have wanted to read what he had to say anyway — I've heard him interviewed on the radio and found him interesting — but I never did.

ADDED: Sorry, I read "The Executioner's Song." I even wrote an article about it, called "Standing, in Fluffy Slippers" (PDF).

AND: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking, but I'm surprised he says that I'm remembering Mailer "fondly." Anyway, he points to Roger Kimball's essay, and I was glad to see that because I'd just read Kimball's book "The Long March," which has a section on Mailer, and I was trying to remember exactly why Kimball heaped abuse on him. So let's read the essay (which tracks the book):

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash....

An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual—just like Norman Mailer, you see—starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.”

(Buggery—another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (“Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe—who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions—makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wants us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

[Novelist William] Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

It bothers me that Kimball does not acknowledge Kate Millet's attack. She set a generation of feminists — including me — against him. His name was poison for me for years, and I read "Executioner's Song" because I was writing about the death penalty theme, but the whole time I held Norman Mailer at a distance. (Writing this post, I initially forgot I'd read one of his books!) I was suspicious. I saw his respect for Gary Gilmore's sexual vigor, and I could still hear Kate Millet's denouncement echoing in my ears.

Of course, the feminists detest the social conservatives like Kimball, and vice versa, but would it kill Kimball to acknowledge the feminist attack, which was there in full view in 1969? Don't act like no one was onto him at the time.

Speaking of feminism, Kimball hates this quote from Mailer (from "Pieces and Pontifications"):

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

But Kimball should know that feminists — no matter how pro-abortion — hate that too.

"Our avant-gardist artistic establishment... prefers to exercise its anti-bourgeois animus within the coddled purlieus of bourgeois security."

Brilliant New Criterion editor Roger Kimball writes about the horrendous Hans Neuenfels production of Mozart's opera "Idomeneo":

Mr. Neuenfels's version is Modern German--i.e., gratuitously offensive. It is more Neuenfels than Mozart. Instead of appearing as the harbinger of peace, Idomeneo ends the opera parading the severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and the Prophet Muhammad. How do you spell "anachronistic balderdash"?

Poor Mozart. Mr. Neuenfels is one of those directors more interested in nurturing his own pathologies than in offering a faithful presentation of the geniuses with whose work he has been entrusted.

The production -- which has already been seen, back in 2003 -- seems to be a desecration of Mozart and quite hostile to three religions -- four if anyone's still into Poseidon -- but Deutsche Oper has cancelled the production specifically out of concern for how it will affect Muslims.

There is a certain irony in all this. Our avant-gardist artistic establishment preens itself on being "transgressive," "challenging," "provocative," etc. But it prefers to exercise its anti-bourgeois animus within the coddled purlieus of bourgeois security. It has discovered that there is a big difference between exhibiting photographs of Christ on the cross in a bottle of urine or Madonna having herself "crucified" on her current concert tour and poking fun at Muhammad. The former earns you the delicious obloquy of the Catholic establishment while shoring up your credentials as a brave artistic and moral pioneer. The latter sends murderous hordes into the streets looking for something, or someone, to destroy.

There are plenty of good reasons to refrain from gratuitously insulting other people's religions. For one thing, it is bad manners. One should respect what is respectable in the habits, mores and beliefs of other people.

But this does not mean that we should allow ourselves to be blackmailed by militant fanatics who shelter under the authority of religion and employ the freedoms of Western democracy to attack and undermine those very freedoms.

This is a complex problem. Neuenfels's production takes the easy faux-daring route of "Piss Christ" and the Madonna crucifixion, but at least he had the nerve to hit all religions equality, and not to single out one religion. Perhaps he did that because it wouldn't have made any sense to go after the conventional target of Christianity when it's an opera about the Trojan War. It doesn't make all that much sense to drag Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad into that setting either, but bringing them all in to join their super best friend Poseidon made some kind of crazy sense.

Now that some Muslims have made it painfully obvious that religion-taunting is not an easy game anymore, abandoning it expresses fear, not respect for religion. And continuing to disrespect the religions that don't lash back only highlights that cowardice. Poor transgressive rebel artists! How are they to shock the middle class anymore?

Still wallowing in the 60s.

I've been listening to the audiobook of Roger Kimball's "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," which is emphatically not a pro-60s book. I'm enjoying hearing the social conservative's ultra-tart judgments about all the terrible things my generation embraced. It's fun to hear the evidence against the 60s marshalled by a sharp writer who really is beside himself at how awful and dangerous all that 60s stuff is. I need to face up to the fact that a lot of the material that affected me was crap or worse, and it doesn't bother me that some of the things I still think are great -- like The Beatles, duh! -- are also crap in Kimball's view or that Kimball won't just laugh off the stuff that we all laughed at and knew was junk at the time (like "The Greening of America"). It's actually pretty amusing to hear Kimball slam that too, especially when said crap was written by a Yale lawprof -- i.e., "The Greening of America."

So, you should understand why a quick skim of this article had me clicking over to Amazon to buy this 3 DVD's worth of "Playboy After Dark," which was a TV show that started in 1968. There are also some episodes of "Playboy's Penthouse," from 1959 -- not quite the 60s, but laying the groundwork, and hence, more interesting to the 60s person than the 1968 show. Hugh Hefner was ridiculously behind the times to a young person in 1968, but he represented the way of the future in 1959. You're wondering if I was allowed to watch "Playboy's Penthouse" in 1959, when I was 8 years old. Let's just say my father was a great fan of Playboy Magazine who had every issue going back to 1953 and always proudly displayed the newest issue on the (kidney-shaped) coffee table (sometimes along with Swank and Escapade!). (I'm really afraid Roger Kimball might read this post and have a convulsion.)

Anyway, back to the article:

As [Cy] Coleman’s smoothly addictive theme plays over the opening credits, elevator doors part and a subjective camera roams the party, stopping when the pipe-smoking Mr. Hefner turns to introduce himself. Not the most natural of hosts, his sometimes awkward presence nonetheless has its charms: if the editor and publisher of Playboy can appear uncomfortable, there was hope for every nebbishy reader, a fantasy that fueled much of his magazine’s success.

‘‘Playboy’s Penthouse,” produced in Chicago over two seasons, also helped break down racial barriers on television. Black performers don’t just entertain and walk off. They socialize. Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. join the party, chatting, laughing and sipping their drinks. Cole, who does not sing, seems pleased to relax with the likes of [Lenny] Bruce and the novelist Rona Jaffe. Conversations have a natural feel, and Mr. Hefner never rushes anyone.

Bruce is the life of the party, riffing on TV censorship, integration and the definition of a “sick” comedian. And he’s funny, relating how executives from another show wouldn’t let him tell a story about why a tattoo on his arm might prevent burial in a Jewish cemetery. (Mr. Bruce, who died in 1966, need not have worried. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery in California.)

‘‘Playboy After Dark” arrived in syndication in 1968. Taped in color in Los Angeles, the show has production values that are slicker than “Playboy’s Penthouse.” But what was elegant and slightly cool about the earlier series here seems forced. Joe Cocker and Canned Heat share the bill — weirdly — with Billy Eckstine and Vic Damone. Instead of Bruce and company, there is Rex Reed discussing “Myra Breckinridge,” the legendarily awful film in which he co-starred. Under his dinner jacket Mr. Hefner wears a shirt so puffy it could have inspired a famous episode of “Seinfeld.”

I love this kind of thing.

"Boredom: the desire for desires."

I was thinking about boredom -- and not because I was bored -- so I read the Wikiquote quotes on Boredom. I liked the above-quoted one best, partly because it's concise, and I like concise. It's Tolstoy. I nearly chose this one, from Soren Kierkegaard: "Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself." I found it fascinating, but then I realized I had no idea what he was talking about.

MORE: Yes, I know it's absurd to browse so shallowly by reading Wikiquotes on a subject I purport to be interested in. Here's Roger Kimball on Kierkegaard and boredom:

“All men are bores,” he wrote in “The Rotation Method” (a key essay in Either/Or).

Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

Kierkegaard was very astute on the subject of boredom. He understood “the curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others.” He also understood that boredom could be far more than a passing mood of nameless dissatisfaction. In Kierkegaard’s view, boredom is essentially a spiritual malaise, endemic wherever a purely naturalistic conception of man holds sway. Hence he defines boredom as “the daemonic side of pantheism.” It is the dark side of a life devoted to amusement and pleasure. What happens when amusement palls and pleasure fails to please? Boredom yawns before one, a paralyzing abyss. (Compare Tolstoy’s definition of boredom as “the desire for desires.”) It is part of Kierkegaard’s task to show that boredom can only be defeated by moving beyond what he calls the “aesthetic” conception of life, a mode of life unleavened by moral or religious engagement.

There. I feel I've done right by Soren. Very good. "Those who do not bore themselves usually bore others." Ah, there is a lesson in that for professors everywhere! In fact, I was thinking about boredom in the context of thinking about a professor who was boring me. I won't say when or where! It's not you! And, no, you don't need to remind me that I am a professor. I willingly admit that I don't bore myself. I know what that means in Kierkegaard's calculation. At least he said usually.

"Those who do not bore themselves usually bore others." That directly contradicts the folk wisdom: If you're bored, it's because you are boring.

Is anyone saying anything interesting about "The Gates"?

You can go to Central Park and see "The Gates," or you can look at the pictures of it that are everywhere, and we all know what it looks like by now. But my question is whether anyone is saying anything interesting about it. There are hundreds of MSM articles, presumably thousands of blog posts, and a million conversations, but are we getting anything beyond the basic facts (Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent $21 million of their own money and accepted no grants), the obvious starter question "Is it art," and the snap judgments (from "I love it" to "Get this out of my park")?

I went looking.

Kenneth Baker, in The San Francisco Chronicle, attempts political analysis:

It may have no political intent, but "The Gates" does achieve something radical. It makes vivid an idea eclipsed by the ideological fog of official propaganda -- the idea of the commons.

Ordinarily, Central Park is too large and, to some, too unwelcoming to symbolize shared realities preserved at everyone's cost for everyone's benefit. "The Gates" -- for the next 16 days at least -- has brought this idea back to life by making the park intimate again.

Everyone present felt it. Conversation among strangers flowed easily as it seldom does in Manhattan or in any American city. Having felt it, how can they sustain it?

Put less foggily: "The Gates" awakens us to what the park already is.

Blake Gopnik has an elaborate piece in The Washington Post. His main point is that "The Gates" has no depth of meaning that has to do with the time and place. He compares it to Christo's 1976 project "Running Fence," which "seemed to talk about the fencing of the West; about the American Dream's obsession with open space; about competition between man and nature" and which "had the grandeur of a splendid folly" because it was set out where few people would see it. And he compares it to "Wrapped Reichstag," Christo's 1995 project that spoke of "muffling ... the past" and becoming a cocoon out of which "the newly unified nation" would emerge. The Gates, by contrast, was conceived in 1979 and meant something in the context of that earlier time:

There is an era in which the gates seem to belong, but that's three decades back. They remind me of a certain kind of celebratory public sculpture that you could see in the 1970s, and that represented a kind of last-gasp moment in grand modernist abstraction. Imagine huge sheets and beams of brightly enameled steel, set down in public plazas everywhere, and you'll get the feel I mean. Postwar optimism still hung on in this art, mingled with a bit of flower-power energy: It was the Mary Quant moment in public sculpture, and it didn't last....

It strikes me as passing strange than any artist would imagine that a piece that might have been a good idea at one moment would still matter just as much half a career later. When the "Gates" project was first proposed, New York was near bankruptcy, the middle class had fled and the filthy walkways of Central Park were where you went for a good mugging. The idea of using cheery orange fabric to lure strollers up to Harlem Meer had all the ludicrous energy of a bedsheet strung up across the West. Now, with Meer-view condos going for a few million bucks, the artists' gates just seem like the latest thing in bourgeois beautification. (Crate & Barrel must be due to launch a home-and-garden version any day.)

I'm going to assume Gopnik is rather young, because he seems to be blurring the 1970s in to a single moment in time. 1979 was so not the time of Mary Quant and flower power. The early 70s were thematically one with the late 60s. But 1979 is part of the era of the 80s: the time of yuppies, dressing for success, and the chrome-and-glass high-tech look in decorating.

At the end of his piece, Gopnik switches to the fashions of the 1950s: the fabric looks like "the deeply pleated, below-the-knee skirts the well-dressed woman wore in 1950s middle America." Now the gate posts look like legs, and he's got the feeling he's walking between the legs of these presumably strait-laced women and in a position to look up at their crotches. Well, that should be racy, but he imagines it to symbolize some reactionary turn in American politics:

Somehow, despite seemingly unending war and nuclear-armed tyrants and gaping social safety nets, we've decided that it's time to revive the look and feel of America at its most buttoned-down. And Christo and Jeanne-Claude have managed to channel our complacent retrospection.

Or maybe it does not have much to do with them at all. After all, it was New York's corporate mayor, and the gentry that he leads, who decided that the time at last had come to fill the park with elegant day wear.

It seems to me that "The Gates" are providing a chance to review whatever ideas you already have sloshing about in your head as you go for a long walk in the park. These gates mean ... these gates mean ... these gates mean George Bush is eeeevvvvviiiillllll!

Much more down to earth, Geraldine Baum, in The L.A. Times, has a nice collection of vignettes from different sorts of people:

[A]s Naomi Liselle led her three children, ages 6, 9 and 12, to their favorite playground, she tried to engage them in the art of it all. "Look up — look at the symmetry of the poles. Look over the hill and see the orange sticking out among the gray trees. Listen to the flapping of the panels. Doesn't it sound like the sails of our boat when we're in the Hamptons?" asked the young mother, who studied art history in college. The children looked at her dully as they used the legs of the gates as makeshift soccer goals. "Mom," said Marcus, the oldest, "what are you talking about?"...

"I don't know whether [Frederick Law] Olmstead would have liked this great work of art in his great work of art, but as a Jeffersonian he would have approved," said art critic and historian Irving Sandler, as he sipped champagne and gazed out at the park from a 10th-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue.... "Nobody would like it if it was still here in March"....

"Why didn't they bring snow too?" a jogger, who'd clearly been unable to finish her run because of the crowds, complained as she exited the park at 72nd Street. Out of nowhere a man walking his dog chimed in. "Yeah, look back at the great view," he snarled. "It looks they left their dirty laundry hanging!"

The best thing about having this in Central Park, as opposed to somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, is all the people who are there to provide their endless comments. Let the ooh-ing and the carping continue.

UPDATE: 1. Welcome Instapundit readers. 2. Best headline goes to The New York Post for: "The Big Apple Gets The Big Orange." 3. (Same link) One of the volunteer workers on the project is former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who said: "Isn't it spectacular? It's so full of life and energy, and all these people are having a great time." 4. And no, I'm not in NY. I'm just reading the newspapers here in Madison. I did go to Lodi yesterday, however. I did contemplate traveling to New York just to see it though. And my colleague Nina Camic is there and blogging, with photographs. 5. Did I really write this post at 4:25 a.m. Central Time? Yes, I did. It wasn't the sheer excitement of "The Gates" (or blogging) that had me up that early, though. It was just ... just nothing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Kimball reprints a Spectator piece from mid-January. He's quite negative:

Christo and his wife are geniuses at self-promotion. They have gulled municipalities around the world into letting them stage their pranks, and the result is celebrity and riches.

I must admit that's what I thought of Christo for decades, as I read about his projects in various news reports. But I completely changed my mind about him when I watched the Maysles Brothers documentaries ("5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude" -- linked in the sidebar). I was won over and came to believe that Christo is an art saint.

AND STILL MORE: Vast, non-art-related claims are made for "The Gates." This is from the Christian Science Monitor:

City officials are touting the massive undertaking as a sign that New York has recovered from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They hope to impress not only the tens of thousands of tourists from the United States and abroad who are coming to see "The Gates," but also members of the Olympic site-selection committee who will visit during the installation.

Most significant -- most touching -- is the social, psychological aspect:

Everyone's talking about it," [one woman] said. "You know, because we need it, our souls need it -- the beauty which this brings."...

"As New Yorkers, I think we gravitate towards anything that lifts our spirits and makes us happy, especially in the middle of winter," [another woman] said.

MORE: Here's a strong new entry in the "Get this out of my park" category.