Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
You're right, touche, but who is talking about what? Contention is the
staff of life, is it not?
  

    

>Whatever happened *really* happened to foreplay

The concept of "foreplay" seems antiquated to me.  That's the stuff men do to
women to get 'em allr evved up so when he sticks it in and wiggles for his
pathetic 45 seconds she stands a chance of being satisfied, right?
  

    
It's good nostalgia.
  

    
it got replaced by either begging and pleading (or plea bargaining), 
or negotiation I suppose. Maybe we ought to ask Bill Clinton about that
because he appears to bea past master at foreplay and groping, eh?
Isn't foreplay sexist? please, oh please correct me if I"m wrong :-)))
  

    
Now David, I'm astonished at your concept of foreplay: foreplay is a
mutual "wggling and giggling" it's not just something men do, it's a
group activity; foreplay for one is, I suppose, masturbation, and the
way you've set up foreplay, that's what one is going to get if one
continues along your avenue of approach.Check out the Kama Sutra,
there's lots on foreplay there. Foreplay is sometimes better, much
better than sex itself (if it's the 45 second variety). Foreplay has a
set of "rules" but you'll have to read the book (and you've done that
so maybe you can extrapolate a bit more).

What happened to foreplay? well foreplay was part and parcel with
sexual experimentation and discovery, mutual discovery---four sets of
hands, 2 mouths, tongues, lips. etc. etc. etc.---maybe foreplay's dead
because people are thinking that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way
to deal with sex. Which leads to more therapy, viagra and the whole
catastrophe. There ain't no joy in sex in the US of A, there's only a
plethora of manuals and experts. But then again we all know that
teenagers discovered sex and what do we know about anymore?
  

    
Maybe it's just old terminology/
  

    

>There ain't no joy in sex in the US of A

Dude, you're starting to lose me, too.
  

    <scribbled by silly Mon 22 Mar 99 15:29>
  

    
"I don't choose to categorize myself as a boomer, and I think that
people who do have some severe difficulties, like the fact that
they never got over being in high school, that somehow considering
[oneself as] a boomer with rights and privileges [accrued], that
[it] IS important, very important to hold on to that bit of identity
when it's really not a real identity only one cobbled together [from]
the nostalgia of goods and services, of pictures and images that have
been so homogenized that they have lost any sense of reality, that
some people have decided that they are going to be satisfied with the
labels put on them by advertising, that being in some kind of
age-differentiated cohort is preferable to just being there, or being
here."

A genuine author can summarize in one succinct paragraph what I've
been thinking about for the better part of five years.  No wonder
Zappa let you write a book about him, Mr. Walley.

Hope your health is returning.
  

    
thanks for the tip of the head, silly, and the vote of confidence.
Now back to foreplay---

what I"m saying, David, is that there so much emphasis on sex that its
becoming clinical---we're so sexually loose they we've become
puritans--witness the recent zippergarte follies. Foreplay is supposed
to be one area where everything is allowed (or as Frank Zappa said, "so
long as it doens't cause a murder). What I think is going on at least
in certain F**m**st circles is that there's a confusion about what is
foreplay and what constitutes assault, where the lines are drawn and
how draws them. They seem to feel that ANY kind of sexual act is
assaultive (and I'm going to get a lot of shit for saying this), but
just who makes up the rules, and how are they arrived at? Where is the
consensus? There's more fear than joy these days, more misunderstanding
than ever between the sexes, and that doesn't necessarily have to be
so.

I think if Americans had a healthy attitude about sexuality, there
wouldn't be so many magazine, media concerned with it. We wouldn't have
spent 50 milion dollars describing a third rate softporn loop for the
general audience.
  

    
It might be interesting to discuss "they" if you had a particular author or
incident to cite.  The idea of confusing foreplay and assault seems
ludicrous, but I don't know what you're talking about.

I think this dilemma has been described as an issue of consent and seduction
if that's what you're talking about.
  

    
yes, your'e right, as usual yu're much clearer about this. Seduction,
now what is that? do you seduce the willing? when do you know that
categorical imperative? Can ther such a thing as a mutual seduction?
when is seduction not mutual, when does it corss the line. Where does
one find out about that? There aren't courses, it's more in the range
of anecdotal knowledge, talking about baseball for instance---you know
first base second base. What's it like to be caught stealing third and
who calls you out. Who's 'you'? :-))

I mean how does one 'know'? in the recent zippergate affair who was
the seduced and who was the seducer? The medfia has been go0ing around
and around with that. And to top it off, because she was such an
artless seducer (if that is really the cwse) our media has rewarded her
by making her an "item" on Entertainment Tonight, and in the tabs?
What does this really say about us as a nation? as consenting adults? I
mean are there really such beings as consenting adults? not if you ask
the congress of the religious right.

thanks again Gail for bringing this back into the realm of a possible
discussion instead of a philipic.

The real quesiton is how are young adults supposed to learn about this
when there's really no room for fumblings. Which is what foreplay
space allows, that area of play.
  

    

>we're so sexually loose they we've become puritans--witness the recent zip-
>pergarte follies

That wasn't the work of any "we" that I am party to.  Sex in that context is
a red herring, an excuse, a smokescreen for much more dastardly stuff.  Sex
was the fulcrum, but the lever and the force applied were something else al-
together.



>They seem to feel that ANY kind of sexual act is assaultive

Catherine McacKinnon and some tiny cadre of adherents, and no one else with
any sense at all.  You can do better than this.


>I think if Americans had a healthy attitude about sexuality, there wouldn't
>be so many magazine, media concerned with it.

I certainly agree with this.


>in the recent zippergate affair who was the seduced and who was the seducer?

By all accounts, Monica was the "seducer," but he made it VERY easy for her.
  

    
Ahem, the lead interviewer steps in here to shift gears . . .

As a teacher in a big urban public high school, I know first hand about the
lives, inner and outer, of contemporary adolescents. Not surprisingly,
David, the chapter of TNB that had the greatest personal relevance to me is
"Play School." I'll share the following with the folks who are still reading
this topic, and then perhaps we can follow up with a conversation on this
subject:

"As goods become ideas and students become habituated to the ever-changing
panorama of prepackaged images, they become easier to manipulate, and a kind
of mindless goods-enforced conformity is elevated and encouraged. In the
end, this process runs contrary to the idea that adolescence is a period of
"growth and individuation [which] can be fruitful only if a reasonable and
increasing degree of integrity is maintained." these days, there is no
chance to discover that integrity, since the ideas themselves have none in
real time. A spurious kind of integrity is substituted instead, far easier
to comprehend and infinitely interchangeable as fancy (and/or fashion)
dictates--which superficially appeals to a teenager's desperate need to
know. The pace and cost of this kind of change has exacted a heavy price,
not only for those in the system now but also for all the rest of us who
survived it. . .

For us as individuals, retrospective reediting of memory's tapes or
nostalgia's healing properties coupled with some semblance of productive
post-high school life will perhaps help to assuage those old feelings, and
we may succeed at the very least in rewriting the whole business. Perhaps we
can exorcise the memory of being in a total environment controlled for the
most part by teachers who were marking time and making do or flashbacks of
chuckle-headed principals and assistant principals and phys ed teachers who
themselves were working out their own high school disappointments on you and
yours eternally. (Ain't that the truth?)
Then what? How does America deal with its collective tapes? Where do we
begin? Whose rules were lodged? Which games did we all learn how to dodge? .
. .

Here's what it is: If instead of accepting, making do, or settling for their
designated identities as consumers, market makers, and/or omniscient
spectators, high school students lived more within the world instead of out
of it in age-segregated and peer-mediated environments, they'd be able to
effect real societal change. By living in the present with a presence of the
past they would cease to be mere bellwethers for transient consumer
preferences whose future identity was to be inevitably homogenized as items
on theor own nostalgia futures market down the road, a statistical blip.
Instead of being a symptom of the problem, the linchpin that eternally ties
them and us all into the consumer society, they'd become part of the
solution, and we'd all have a chance to break the loop."

Very good stuff, David. Filled with insight and possibility. You see, as a
high school teacher I have very literally never left high school. In fact,
my first five years as a teacher were spent at my alma mater, Fairfax High
School, in Los Angeles. I have since moved over to Fairfax's arch rival
Hamilton High School. Still, I have pretty much remained in high school for
most of my adult life. However, I'm in a funny position. I am expected to
serve as not only an educator but as a role model for today's teens, yet the
very fact that I am a teacher prevents me from serving with any kind of
authority because the students automatically presume that my career as a
teacher is a symptom of my ultimate ineptitude. Why should they take advice
or follow paths suggested by some dude who couldn't do any better than a
career as a schoolteacher? This makes me sad. I believe teaching is a noble
and beautiful profession. I had mostly rotten/mediocre teachers as I came
through school, but I had a handful of magnificent ones, and it is those 4-5
great teachers who made me what I am today. I became a teacher because I was
so inspired by my own high school English teacher, Richard Battaglia. I
wanted to do for others what he had done for me. And so I've been trying for
the past 12 years. How to have an impact though in a society that doesn't
value my profession. People want their children to have good teachers, but
they don't want their children to become teachers.

I'm kind of rambling here, but I think what I'm trying to say, less cogently
than you have in your book, David, is that a paradigm shift in the way
schools operate might effect a break from the consumer-youth matrix that has
embedded itself in the American psyche, and part of that shift must be
accompanied by a true rise in the estimation and value of this country's
teachers.
  

    

So Barry do you know Jim Burk?

(I think that's his name - former principal of Hamilton - ?)

David, there's just way too much that is formulaic. It's not about The Girls
and The BOys as though we were teams or something. I frankly don't agree
that there is "misunderstanding between the sexes." I think the
misunderstanding is between individual people; I never signed up to be part
of a politically aligned group called women.

Naturally, there are lots of problems when people think they are supposed to
behave in predetermined ways according to their group. But this is not a
problem about sex or gender roles. This is a problem about authoritarianism.
  

    



You know, since I have a chance to ask someone who actually wrote a
biography of Frank Zappa this question, I'll indulge myself.  David, you
know what has always puzzled me?  That Zappa, whose approach was rather, er,
ironic, not to say sarcastic, would add two of the Turtles to his band.  I
mean, (MAJOR CONFESSION BEGINS HERE) I loved the Turtles, damn it, every on
///that's every ONE of their singsong, mindless melodies

("Me and you, and you and me/No matter how they toss the dice, it had to
be"), but I did realize that their approach seemed anathema to that of the
Mothers of Invention.  I was totally shocked when Zappa added Flo and Eddie
to his musical ensemble.  Did he do it as a joke?  Or did he actually
respect them as musicians?  Or was it something else altogether?
  

    
Last things first: The Turtles provided the needed "teen appeal" power
to the Mothers of Invention plus they had terrific voices as well as
stage personnnas which fit very well within the image of the Mothers
that FZ was trying to promote at the time. No flies on Frank, and come
to think of it, if Frank was giving this interview he'd probably say
something like I said almost the very same way. Flo and Eddie had some
great routines, interplayed very well with Aynsley Dunbar and George
Duke---and they were fairly serious potheads (well almost anything
would do)  He also liked their act, simple as that and couold see
possibilities for the stage show he was mouting at the time (which was 
the selling of 200 Motels, the movie) ... Anyrate without really
getting silly and into it here, Flo and Eddie served well the master
plan that Frank ZXappa had to take over the puop music world---in the
early seventies before he put together a totally modified and tweaked
aggregation and took that act on the road again---anyway it was teen
appeal. I'll take British Guitar bands for 400 Robbie---

Thank god Barry has stepped back into the interview, I'd rather talk
about something I know something about (better somethintg that I spent
a few years thimpking about---I would have done serious damage to
myself had I continue down that primrose path. 

I'd love to see the shift you talk about, I don't know whether it's
psssible because the teen spirit virus is so protean in its
manifestations and the councils of advertising that mediate on this
universe are equally adept at shifting their focus, blending right in
there. So how much of it do we destroy, how much of the virus can be
cut away without effecting the health of the person/civilization we are
trying to save? Like we both know, these habits of mind are
exceedingly well placed within the culture as a whole. The only shift I
can think of, something that is long-lsting as somehow explaining the
idea, and this is going to sound silly, that thinking "is neat",
thinking is the most subversive ting one can do to defeat this culture
which militates against thinking, that the brain is a horrible thing to
waste, that the things that go on while reading is far more visual
than tv or movies --- [ while I"m saying this, I"m thinking how
difficult it is for me to even talk about TNB much as as I love it and
it fed my reative and intellectual fires for so long that I'm no longer
in that space/place, udnerstand though nevertheless I'll jump right
back into this thread]---I tink that what you describe is what happens
in high school, but only to certain people. And here's the elitist
scoming out in me and that's just toughshit for all you antielitists
out there---but there's only a certain few people who actually are
aware that they are aware---I had a wonderful history AND English
teacher in high school Jacques Le Grand and Gale Hoffman---who did the
same for me. Some of my classmates got it, some of them didn't. The
real issue here, David, is just exactly how to we change the odds,
balance the scales in the battle betrween the forces of light and
darkness, because that's what I'm really talking about in 
TNB, and that is a continuing saga, has been for as long as mankind
has been aware of the struggle.

YOu can't legislate people to learn, you have to trick 'em, you have
to be a magician, a jokester, a clown, a beat poetry saint (if you're
teaching English). If you're going to be a good teacher, you've got to
look at it as a struggle, a joyous struggle, one in which you are
constantly being handicapped by the administration. But it's always
been a fight to teach when the students are bored, especially now when
the consumer world presents so many alternative ways to live (even if
they happen to be transient, shoddy, and addictive).

I wanted to teach in college (fool that I was), and I was told by my
major professor a man who was an awesome intellectual historian, John
Marcus that,"There are two ways to do things, David: our way and your
way. NOw hou're bright enough to do it our way (and you know what I"m
talking about here); but if you do it your own way, it will be YOURS
and THEY'LL never be able to take it away from you." And so I bailed.
I've done some teaching or tried to do lecturing here at Williams
College with varrying degrees of success. A few years back I co-taught
this course in the Sixties, a freshman honors courwe in methodology
(ie. ways of looking at historical documents). Fine with me, I called
the course "Decadent Memories: tyhe Sixties in Theory and Practice". I
told the students that one of the objects of the class was to show them
that their parents actually had real lives, and have gone through the
same things you are and have---anyway for the final we had them take
over the campus radio station in a role play: Bosnia has just gone
postal, you've got to make grade point or you're drafted---and it was
like everyone broke doen into their constituent parts: radicals,
hippies, activists, jocks, all co0ntending and talking to and at each
other---students have told me, and this was almost four years ago that
it was one of the most interesting courses they ever took--- I know I
got the teacher into a shitload of trouble because some of the students
didn't quite know what was going to "be on the hourly" if you know
what I mean, they had trouble thinking, and my purpose was to recreate
a state of mind using the media of the time--- I've got an opportunity
to do it again, a buddy of mine, a brilliant mathematician and head of
the first order, asked me to put something together--and I suppose I
will. 

Anyway, I look on teaching as a subversive activity, because thinking
is a subversive acticity, but being realistic now, I have absolutely NO
idea how one could put what I'm advocating into practice (or in
practice what I'm advocating if you prefer that turn of phrase). There
are people out there who like it the way it is, it just suits them down
to the ground, they don't have to think, it's a nice living and you
get lots of paid vacations. If the government was serious about
educaiton, they'd start making teaching pay real money, treat it like a
growth company of venture capitol. If Gates wants to do something with
his billions, let him take one of them, put into a fund which pays for
a series of Gates Humanities Professors--and he's got more money than
Carnegie to do that, and look what Andrew did with his pickers millions
(!!). Make these professorships, rewards for creative teaching, which
would encourage innovation, research, repose, and renewed commitment.

It just gets down to that old saw: 99% of the world is made up of
fatheads. As a teacher all you can hope for is those few, and there are
other fews somewhere else with other great teachers, and so on and so
on. What you're speaking about is a human condition. I just don't like
the fact that its harmful aspects are exacerbated by the effects of
advertising and consumerismh. Not for everyone, the price of admission
your mind---absa-fucking-lutely right, all we can try to do is even the
odds---

and I thnak you Barry for stepping in---
  

    


Whoa, validation!  I'm way pleased to hear the good words about the Turtles.
Yeah, they really could sing and the melodies were tres infectious.  I
remember going to one of Zappa's concerts after Flo and Eddie joined - I'd
forgotten about the stage act and how good it was.  It did seem like an
incongrous combination, Turtles feelgood pop and the Mothers of Invention,
but I agree that Mr. Frank pulled it off very well.
  

    

Flo & Eddie had teen appeal?? Well maybe, but just until the teenagers SAW
them.
  

    


Heh!  Well, can't argue with THAT.  Flo sorta resembled the Pillsbury
Doughboy in a fright wig.  Just as puffy and pasty.
  

    

>the very fact that I am a teacher prevents me from serving with any kind of
>authority because the students automatically presume that my career as a
>teacher is a symptom of my ultimate ineptitude.

What a heartbreaking observation.  I don't doubt its validity -- sports
heroes and hiphop stars seem to be the leading role models these days; what
that says about our values is pretty sobering.

On the other hand, Barry, I had a few teachers in my school career who really
inspired me.  You may only see a few, but I'll bet you have made a really
deep and wonderful impression on more than you know.
  

    

>consumer-youth matrix

I saw something in the paper this weekend about textbooks that are loaded
with actual brand names in the word problems.  The authors and publishers
insist that it isn't paid product placement.  I don't see the justification
for it: why the hell not use phony brand names, if you must use brand names
at all?  Why "OREO Cookies," and not "cookies"?
  

    

Lolly said:

>I frankly don't agree that there is "misunderstanding between the sexes." I
>think the misunderstanding is between individual people

I agree.
  

    
OREO cookies in a text book!!!  Sheesh.
  

    

And count me as another big fan of the Turtles!