Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  GlenndaO:There were so many. I’m tempted to say Sharon Stone, but I’m gonna have to go with Nicole Kidman.

  CamillePag:I think we both agree it was Nicole in rags.

  GlenndaO:Poor Nicole!!

  CamillePag:Claudia Schiffer’s gown made her look trivial, I thought.

  GlenndaO:Pity what happened to Anjelica Huston. Her off the shoulder number looked great on her huge shoulders.

  CamillePag:I thought Anjelica made an enormous, regal impression in that strikingly simple dress.

  GlenndaO:The winner of the night was Susan Sarandon. Her hair matched her dress. GENIUS!

  CamillePag:I loved Susan’s spiky copper hair—almost punk.

  GlenndaO:I liked how she managed to sneak in a social message. I’m with her on her non-violence stance.

  CamillePag:Vanessa Williams was amazing in that gold metallic gown with her tawny lioness hair and luminous skin.

  GlenndaO:We like her because she appeared in Penthouse.

  CamillePag:I’ve been a fan of Vanessa’s since that huge controversy. Another person who looked great was Lawrence Fishburne—I thought he was the handsomest and best-dressed of the men, with that beautiful grey tie.

  GlenndaO:Angela Bassett had 60’s Joan Crawford hair. GORGEOUS!!

  StyleABC:LilyZ asks…

  Question:Camille—what would you have worn if you were presenting??

  CamillePag:I would have found some elegant sportive pant suit.

  GlenndaO:That old Givenchy that I have in the closet. I can’t possibly wear another Halston in public.

  CamillePag:There appears to have been only one Dutch dyke wearing pants—it was a dress fest!

  StyleABC:Astorian wants to know about Bruce…

  Question:What happened to Bruce Springsteen? He used to be so cool, and now he’s a pompous, mumbling, preachy bore!

  CamillePag:Well, he began as a preachy bore, in my view, when he ripped off Bob Dylan without understanding all the learning that goes into brilliant surreal lyric writing of that kind. Bruce had a nice middle period that I appreciated, but he seems to be knee deep in the compassion sweepstakes these days, writing heavy penance songs.

  GlenndaO:I went to the bathroom while he was on to fix my makeup. One word for the Boss…ROGAINE.

  StyleABC:Mar f g asks…

  Question:Didn’t the evening seem incomplete without Jodie in her Armani?

  CamillePag:I’m a bit tired of Jodie and her supercilious Yale know-it-all manner. And I think she needs to do some deep meditation about womanliness and take some lessons from Vanessa Williams!

  GlenndaO:She gave Mel Gibson some tacky war beads. She hasn’t had a good role since Foxes.

  Question:Are designers doing a better (or worse) job dressing stars than studio wardrobers in the fifties?

  CamillePag:Emphatically not—the great studio designers had much more distinction in their conceptions, since they were drawing on the classical past in art history and theater design. And furthermore, women were coached more seriously at that time in dignity of bearing and placement of arms and hands—a real lady should know how to use her hands!

  GlenndaO:Edith Head ruled the Oscars from 1953 to 1969—no one got on that stage without her approval.

  CamillePag:Edith Head was one of the great artistic tyrants of all time—she was a creative genius!

  CamillePag:The Oscar shows have got to expand that introductory section more.

  CamillePag:The entire world audience is tuning in to see the stars get out of their limousines. It infuriates me how the theatricality of that moment is underplayed year after year by the television network. We must demand a return to the old Hollywood idea of the Oscars as a panorama of style!

  StyleABC:Another good question…

  Question:Why do we care so much what the stars wear?

  CamillePag:For me, glamour is ART! It is not superficial—it is the essence of human beauty. It is godlike, in the pagan way.

  Question:The late great Gloria Swanson said in Sunset Boulevard that “we had faces!” Where are today’s Hollywood faces—surely not in the likes of Meg Ryan/Daryl Hannah/Geena Davis. Who in your opinion has THE FACES today?

  CamillePag:Sharon Stone is magnificent for me. The way she showed herself last night to dramatize her facial contours—that black outfit combined with her gold complexion—proves my point.

  GlenndaO:Joel West, the model, has a great face. He looks like an extra from the finale of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  StyleABC:IGP89 asks…

  Question:I wonder if Prof. Paglia noticed the resurgence of the strapless gown, and if she sees any import in this new trend. I am a gay designer and appreciate her respect for our art, btw.

  CamillePag:Yes, I think that it shows the influence of Rita Hayworth in Gilda— that amazing cantilevered gown constructed with all the care of a Gothic cathedral! I love the return of the strapless, because it echoes our new interest in traditional sex roles—it’s very difficult for men in drag to replicate the soft plushiness of a woman’s natural bosom.

  GlenndaO:It goes back to the 50’s motif. It calls for creative bra-wearing. I have a problem wearing that look!

  StyleABC:Our last question is…What are you wearing right now?

  GlenndaO:My silk pajamas that Doris Day gave me with my fluffy slingback slippers. It’s very comfortable.

  CamillePag:I am in my characteristic at-home writing garb—sweatpants and t-shirt and sneakers. Yes, I am quite dowdy in real life! Glennda is the one with the glamour in this collaboration!

  CamillePag:My advice for next year’s Oscars attendees is to practice, practice, practice with those gowns in front of a mirror and then have a very waspish gay man critique you!

  GlenndaO:Maybe everyone should wear GAP—to hell with the designers!!!! And more tans and blond hair, i.e. Donatella Versace!

  Online Host: Thank you, Camille and Glennda, for sharing your expertise with us tonight. And thanks to all of you in the audience. Remember, though Oscar night comes but once a year, you can always keep an eye on what the stars are wearing by visiting the Style Channel. And you can learn more about glamour and gender at the Gay and Lesbian Community Forum.

  CamillePag:Good night, everyone!

  GlenndaO:Good night, everyone.

  StyleABC:Good night, everyone. Thanks for joining us! Sweet Oscar dreams.

  9

  A LOVE LETTER TO JOAN RIVERS*

  Joan Rivers is a force of nature. Her caustic voice, relentless energy, and driving ambition are formidable, while her flinty toughness and grit have carried her through bruising career reverses and shocking personal tragedies. Joan is the queen of comebacks and a master of all media, having invaded every genre and format from stand-up comedy, theater, movies, and books to talk shows, shopping channels, reality TV, radio, and the Web.

  When I arrived on the public scene after the release of my first book in 1990, I was called “the academic Joan Rivers”—a title I loved. Yes, Joan influenced me profoundly. Watching her for decades on TV, I learned so much about how to work a crowd or even how to wake up groggy students in my morning classes. With her combative, rapid-fire style, Joan has shown several generations of women how to command a stage and make it your own.

  In her most recent book, I Hate Everyone…Starting with Me, Joan demonstrates her scathing rejection of humanitarian pieties and political platitudes. Unlike virtually all American comedians these days, she never preaches to the liberal choir for easy laughs. On the contrary, she goes against the grain and overtly offends and repels. She has endeared herself to free-thinking gay men by her pitiless attacks on political correctness. She cracks jokes about Nazis, mass murderers, the handicapped, the homeless, the elderly, starving children, racial minorities, stroke victims, and even suici
des (despite the suicide of her second husband, Edgar Rosenberg).

  Joan’s relationship with the entertainment industry remains uneasy: in an era of soft celebrity journalism, she treats stars with an impish mockery that borders on cruelty, as when she dogged Elizabeth Taylor and Kirstie Alley about their weight. Her feuds (as with her former benefactor, Johnny Carson) are infamous. But ever since Greco-Roman times, true satire stings and bites. Joan is just as mean about herself, frankly admitting her countless plastic surgeries (“I’ve undergone more reconstruction than Baghdad”) and the foibles of her sex life.

  Born in Brooklyn but raised in affluent Westchester County, Joan Alexandra Molinsky graduated from Barnard College in 1954. She bounced around in minor advertising and fashion jobs until she discovered her vocation as a comic in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during the early 1960s.

  After World War Two, it was Jewish comedians—Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl—who transformed stand-up comedy into social commentary, a legacy of Jewish political activism in the unionization and civil rights movements. Before that, stand-up on the vaudeville circuit was just a string of harmless gags. Bruce in particular had a beatnik edginess, which he uncomfortably turned against the audience, as in avant-garde theater.

  In the 1950s, virtually the only woman daring to do stand-up comedy was Phyllis Diller, who dressed like a clown in a fright wig to erase any hint of sex appeal but whose body language was as coolly contained as her mentor Bob Hope’s. Joan Rivers, in contrast, took Lenny Bruce’s slouching, surly menace and converted it into a hyperkinetic prowling of the stage, from which she launched abrasive provocations. She lambasted the audience for its sentimentality or hypocrisy and insisted on comedy’s mission as a vehicle of harsh truths: “Please. Can we talk?”

  What Joan brilliantly represents is power of voice, which she was developing for years before Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women. Jewish-American women (including Friedan herself) already had a startling candor and audacity, producing the shrill ethnic stereotype of the “Jewish seagull.” Joan Rivers turned the seagull into a lioness. Although her self-deprecating acceptance of the iron law of female beauty initially put her at odds with the women’s movement, Joan must be recognized as an iconic feminist role model. Everything she says or does, even when following her killer instinct for marketing and publicity, is about personal empowerment and ferocious independence. Her work ethic alone is a constant inspiration.

  That Joan Rivers is a comic genius is incontrovertible—even in her George Burns and Gracie Allen exchanges with her daughter Melissa, who deftly plays the straight man. Joan has a better ear than most living poets for the spare, sinewy rhythms of modern English. Profane, irreverent, and fearless, Joan Rivers is a legend in her own time.

  * [“Camille Paglia Pens Love Letter to Joan Rivers, Iconic Feminist Role Model,” in “Joan Rivers Turns 80,” a roundtable package of tributes for The Hollywood Reporter, June 12, 2013.]

  10

  ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK*

  Nature’s clock ticks behind technology’s facade. Try as we will to perfect society’s gleaming latticework of metal and microfiber, we are hostage to our stubborn bodies, which still pulse to primeval rhythms.

  We were once wedded to the sun. In the agrarian past, the calendar was fixed by seasons, and days began and ended with the light. On farms, there was steady, perpetual movement. Work never ended, and energy had to be conserved.

  I felt that stately, archaic sense of time in my Italian grandmothers’ kitchens when I was a small child in upstate New York. My grandmothers never rushed. Yet they were always on their feet, and they never seemed to sit, even at meals. They tended the stove all day and hovered at the table.

  Time seemed hypnotically dense at my grandmothers’; it was something one could almost swim in. That this was no childhood illusion was dramatically proven to me 35 years later, just after I began teaching in Philadelphia. After an exhausting day at my university in Center City, I decided to try to track down a barbecued-rib restaurant I had heard was located in the vast black community of West Philadelphia.

  Zigzagging my car in and out of rush-hour traffic, I finally found what I was looking for and, in my usual manic, blitzkrieg style, parked, jumped out, ran down the block, dashed through the door—and nearly fell on my face. I hit agrarian time, or rather it hit me. My mind could not process rapidly enough what I felt literally on my skin. The only comparable sensation I have ever had was when, as an adolescent traveling with my parents, I jumped into the Manatee River at a Florida campground and felt the reddish, brackish, mineral-laden water heavily swirling, thick as syrup.

  At the restaurant, it was as if I had glided through a wall and stepped into another dimension in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. There were no tables, just a large, dimly lit room packed with chatting customers, patiently waiting for their take-out orders. Several generations of the black family who owned the restaurant methodically circulated behind the long wooden counter, hefting and chopping hunks of succulent grilled meat, spooning out salads, and wrapping up bags.

  Everything seemed in dreamlike slow motion.

  As if struck by a thunderbolt, I was ecstatically transported back to my grandmothers’ kitchens. Here once again was that majestic rhythm, unanxious and unhurried, startlingly removed in this case from the hectic urban clatter outside. I immediately sensed the nearness of the Southern rural roots of the restaurant owners as well as many of its patrons.

  In hot regions, like the Mediterranean or the American South, people must pace themselves or suffer sunstroke. Hence contemporary Italians from Rome southward still close their shutters and take a midday siesta, after which shops casually reopen at staggered times in the late afternoon. It is a practice that baffles and infuriates Anglo-American tourists, who are used to the stricter business clock invented some 200 years ago by the Northern European industrial revolution.

  In A Passage to India, E. M. Forster describes the comic clash between British and Hindu cultures, with their quite different expectations about organization and efficiency. In college in the 1960s, during my generation’s tilt toward the Far East, Hindu and Buddhist ideas about time were everywhere. Even in a class on seventeenth-century poetry I heard about the “Eternal Now,” the suspension of linear clock time in religious meditation, experienced as well by Christian mystics.

  The massive drug-taking of my peers (from which, thanks to my Mediterranean preference for Dionysian liquors, I miraculously escaped) was an artificial way to interrupt the Western clock. Its aim was to stop cold the careerist pressure from parents and authority figures on the young to enter the materialistic “system.” Marijuana in particular, which squeezes or stretches the ordinary sense of time, was used to blot out external pressures.

  So much great 1960s pop music still communicates that hazy reshaping of time, from the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” to Vanilla Fudge’s operatic version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” The psychedelic style, fueled by LSD, was ideologically hallucinatory, transforming concrete space and time into a higher realm of imagination and art.

  However, this was a journey from which many of my generation never returned, their brains so chemically altered that they could no longer focus their energies enough to contribute meaningfully to society.

  Salvador Dalí’s famous melting watches symbolize the relativity of Western notions of time, which Freud saw subverted every night in our unconscious dream life. This Freudian and Surrealist vision was prefigured in Lewis Carroll’s influential Alice books, which open with the frantic White Rabbit, a parody of a British businessman constantly checking his watch (“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!” the sputtering rabbit sings in Walt Disney’s cartoon film).

  The Jefferson Airplane’s great song, “White Rabbit,” from Surrealistic Pillow (1967), became a generational anthem because it describes young people’
s experience of falling down the rabbit hole of drugs, by which they were trying (as the Doors put it) to “break on through to the other side” of reality.

  Back then, I had my own interpretation of time resculpting. In one of my elaborate college pranks (40 in all, which got me put on probation for a semester), I created a Surrealist homage to Dalí. Poking around my dormitory, I had figured out that the big, white campus clocks, sunk into the walls of hallways and classrooms, were easily pried out and unplugged.

  So late one weekend night, while everyone was off at a beer blast, I lifted two of these clocks (each the size of a large pizza) and tucked them into the twin beds of my dorm’s senior student resident advisors. Each clock seemed to be sleeping peacefully on a pillow, with the sheet and blanket neatly pulled up under its chin.

  I thought the effect was quite striking and humorous—an anthropomorphic allegory of suspended time. However, the advisors did not find it so wonderful, staggering drunk into their room at 3 AM and screaming in surprise and terror. I don’t think they ever spoke to me again.

  Modern culture has been obsessed with speed since the invention of the steam-powered locomotive in the early nineteenth century. Our sense of space has progressively contracted and collapsed because of our ability to cross huge distances with magical effortlessness. Many chronic, stress-related medical complaints are certainly aggravated by this headlong pace, which has disrupted our physical perception of time.

  My theory is that the massive rise of rhythmically intense pop music over the past 70 years is partly due to our urgent need to reset our inner clocks to match this new world. Similarly, the modern pornography industry serves an important function in reorienting our high-tech consciousness toward our baseline identity in the fleshly and the organic. Love poets in the lascivious carpe diem tradition have always known time is transient, as written in the human body, which blooms only to decay.