<\/p>\n
Paraphilopolis Journal<\/b><\/p>\n
Overheard at a San Francisco coffee shop:<\/p>\n
Young woman behind the counter:\u00a0 “Mikey!\u00a0 Good to see you!\u00a0 How come you never come in any more?\u00a0 Do I have to beat you?”<\/p>\n
Mikey (thoughtful pause):\u00a0 “Beating would be nice….”<\/p>\n
They both look over at me, a little shyly.\u00a0 I smile warmly, to reassure them.\u00a0 We all smile together, breathe, enjoy the shared permission.\u00a0 I remember for the thousandth time how much I love this city.<\/p>\n
Some time ago, I took my partner on a little head trip.\u00a0 Foreplay, you might say, to later goings on.\u00a0 She was rather wonderfully slutted out in black and skin, and then I blindfolded her and helped her into the car for a sightless hour and a half drive to San Francisco.\u00a0 Once in town we stowed the car and took a leisurely stroll around the Market\/Church area, moving from initial awkwardness and caution to develop real ease, trust and rhythm together.\u00a0 Pretty soon we could walk together, arm in arm, about as easily and quickly as any other two people.\u00a0 People on the street either didn\u2019t notice us or just didn\u2019t care that a blindfolded, helpless woman in short skirt and low-cut top was being led around by her elbow.<\/p>\n
Then it was into Sparky\u2019s for a bite to eat.\u00a0 “Three steps up,” I warned, and then watched with delight as she tentatively felt her way up the stairs.\u00a0 The young hostess watched us with a blank face.\u00a0 If she was disapproving, or even curious, she didn\u2019t show it.\u00a0 “Smoking or non-smoking?” was all she said when we came up the last step to her level.<\/p>\n
“Non-smoking,” I replied, matching casual with casual.<\/p>\n
“Right this way.”<\/p>\n
We followed her to a table around back.\u00a0 My partner felt her way around the table to a chair while I took the menus from the hostess.\u00a0 She pulled me a little aside.<\/p>\n
“Is she blindfolded<\/em>?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper, acknowledging for the first time that she noticed anything at all.\u00a0 The whisper, I thought, came from not wanting to intrude on what we were doing, a courtesy and consciousness that both surprised and pleased me.<\/p>\n “Yes,” I confirmed, watching her face for reaction.<\/p>\n “Cool!” she grinned, going on about her business.\u00a0 And that was that.\u00a0 The people in the booth across from us looked over from time to time, curious and positive.\u00a0 When I caught their eyes they smiled and nodded appreciatively.\u00a0 If I had wanted to, I probably could have incorporated them into the scene.<\/p>\n Maybe it would have been different if we were in Spuntino\u2019s or Max\u2019s or Stars, instead of Sparky\u2019s.\u00a0 Maybe it would have been different, even at Sparky\u2019s, if her hands had been bound or handcuffed in addition to her being blindfolded, or if I had tied her to her chair.\u00a0 (Maybe I\u2019ll just have to check out some of these possibilities and report back….)\u00a0 But isn\u2019t it a treat to live where it\u2019s possible to take someone out blindfolded, even leave them sitting blindly alone while you go to the bathroom, and while you pause for a long time before coming back, pleased to just watch them sitting there, open, undefended and safe — to be able to use the city as a prop for sexual theatre without being corrupted or interrupted by people misunderstanding or thinking you weird?\u00a0 “302.83-302.84 and proud,” as my most esoteric t-shirt proclaims.\u00a0 (A free Spectator<\/em> subscription to the first listener who correctly identifies that tune….)<\/p>\n Maybe we should start collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to rename this town Paraphilopolis once and for all, to acknowledge the forbidden erotics that have always been the core of San Francisco\u2019s Baghdad-by-the-Bay mystique.\u00a0 Then the Chamber of Commerce could openly sell tourists on what so many of them come here for anyway.<\/p>\n In the meantime we could all put ourselves into the public eye a little more each day.\u00a0 If we made it a practice to go to restaurants and films, not to mention City Arts and Lectures readings, or concerts at Davies Hall, blindfolded, latexed, and bound, sooner or later everyone else would just used to it.\u00a0 I mean, it\u2019s not like it\u2019s illegal or anything, right?\u00a0 Who knows, maybe public bondage would even become chic.\u00a0 Black and White Ball, anyone?<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Off With Her Clit!<\/b><\/p>\n Frontal nudity, male and female!\u00a0 Sadomasochism!\u00a0 The heroine strangled nude on the lip of the stage!\u00a0 A third of every audience fleeing the theatre in horror at intermission!<\/p>\n I read the reviews of ACT\u2019s modern-dress production of The Duchess of Malfi<\/em>, John Webster\u2019s 1613 play.\u00a0 I bit.\u00a0 I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.\u00a0 Now I know.<\/p>\n If you blink you\u2019ll miss the much vaunted sadomasochism in The Duchess of Malfi<\/em>.\u00a0 For about ten seconds, the overwhelming scaffolding of the set lights up to display an array of stereotypical s\/m icons, meant to portray the generic domination and degradation of women.\u00a0 A woman getting spanked in slow motion.\u00a0 Another woman, more or less nude, tied to the imposing metalwork.\u00a0 That sort of thing.\u00a0 Clich\u00e9d enough to make Steven Meisel’s photos of Madonna look like Michael Rosen.\u00a0 A strobelight snapshot for pure effect.\u00a0 On, off, gotcha.\u00a0 S\/m as code for debasement.\u00a0 Get used to it:\u00a0 we\u2019re going to see a lot more of this in the months and years ahead.<\/p>\n Pre-intermission (when the great exodus is said to be taking place) that was it, in terms of what might shock a pristine theatergoer to leave in horror.\u00a0 This is what the reviewers say is shocking people out the doors?\u00a0 I looked at my partner and we both shrugged.<\/p>\n Admittedly there\u2019s more dramatic use of naked skin in the second half.\u00a0 The heroine does get strangled to death after being entirely disabused of her clothes and bright red stuff is poured over her naked body in a bright, if purely gratuitous gesture.\u00a0 (Oh, I know<\/em>:\u00a0 blood, violence, violation.\u00a0 I get it, I get it, I get it.\u00a0 I\u2019m not being overly literal here, but the woman was being hanged, not knifed.\u00a0 Later on, when the men get gutted with knives, there\u2019s no blood at all.\u00a0 Are we being told that only women bleed?\u00a0 That women always<\/em> bleed?)<\/p>\n There\u2019s another scene in which supposedly deranged (though stunningly attractive) women writhe around bizarrely to ear-splitting music to make a statement about the conjunction of unrestrained female sexuality and madness.\u00a0 And there\u2019s an effective scene in which the insane Duke is brought naked to a doctor who attempts (unsuccessfully) to conquer his madness with the power of civilized intellect.\u00a0 The image of the Duke\u2019s muscular body stalking the stage and later straddling the frightened doctor is the one unsymbolically effective use of the naked body in the play.<\/p>\n I guess this all adds up to shocking out there in America.\u00a0 And I\u2019m truly glad to see cocks and men\u2019s asses taking their places beside breasts and women\u2019s butts as manipulatable visual stimuli.\u00a0 More of this and we won\u2019t have to worry so much about young co-eds being terrified at the sight of Andrew Martinez\u2019s lovely but hardly threatening unhidden member.\u00a0 So shock-wise and sex-naked-wise this play gets a mixed review:\u00a0 thumbs up for the Duke, thumbs down for the writhing lovelies and the red paint, loud raspberries for the conflation of s\/m and degradation.<\/p>\n I came away from Malfi<\/em> half asleep, half impressed, half amused, half mystified.\u00a0 It\u2019s true that by the end of the play a good portion of the audience had disappeared, but I suspect it was much more from being bored and confused than from being offended.\u00a0 It\u2019s too bad, because it really is an interesting play, bold and ambitious, with a lot of message that I, for one, want to see proclaimed very loudly indeed.\u00a0 But it is also a lot of work to sort one\u2019s way through the 17th-century language, the broad overstatements and the sheer length and ponderousness of the play.\u00a0 Add the continuous distraction of the 20th-century office backdrop activity (making the worthwhile point that sexual harassment is the modern-day mechanism for the control of female sexuality) and the fact that the production clobbers you over the head with everything it is trying to do, and you end up with more work than the play is really worth, and certainly more work than this audience of well-to-do people assembling sophistication for their next cocktail party conversations could be expected to put out.<\/p>\n This is a play about the conflict between propriety and male power on the one hand, and passion, sexuality, and liberated womanness on the other.\u00a0 The Duchess, against the orders of her incestuously possessive brother, remarries after the death of her husband, thereby putting the hot dictates of her female blood ahead of the cold dictates of patriarchal authority.\u00a0 Not only that, she marries her steward — a commoner, a servant, in this production a black.\u00a0 (The racial stereotyping offended me just as much as the simple-mindedness about s\/m.\u00a0 The whorish mistress of the Duchess\u2019s brother, the play\u2019s other sexual temptress, is also the play\u2019s only other black.)<\/p>\n Director Robert Woodruff wants to ask good questions with this play, questions about our own time as much as about Jacobian England.\u00a0 “Why does there seem to be, in our society, a fear of the feminine?” he asks in his director\u2019s notes.\u00a0 “What is the male fear and discomfort with womanness and fluidity?\u00a0 This production explores aspects of human sexuality… as a locus for thinking about our systems of political and corporate power, and how these structures promote behavior that degrades women.”<\/p>\n The play contrasts male, asexual, cold, cerebral power (true Sadism, not the fun kind) with unrestrained, arational, unreasonable, female passion.\u00a0 We see the Duchess subjected to vicious mental torture, but always within a context of cool detachment.\u00a0 In the end, the Duchess, the embodiment of sexuality refusing to be bound by rational dictates, is murdered for her heresy.\u00a0 But while she loses the battle in the realm of worldly power, she wins decisively at the level of sanity and human dignity.\u00a0 Murdered with her head held high, she never loses her sense of self, her internal power and aliveness, her emotional groundedness and integrity.\u00a0 By contrast, her two brothers, the Duke and the Cardinal, go insane within the tortured contradictions of their own sexual self-denial and self-loathing.<\/p>\n A good message.\u00a0 Substitute Madonna for the Duchess and you should get the picture.\u00a0 Can\u2019t go about letting the women have their sexuality full strength and on their own terms or… or… or… who knows what might happen?\u00a0 Unfortunately director Woodruff, like so many people obsessed with the political content of their art, gets carried away with his dedication to his message and makes the fatal mistake of bludgeoning us with sledgehammers when some artful slicing with a scalpel would be much more effective.\u00a0 Thus we have the stage dominated with only slightly metaphorical images of gargantuan male body forms fashioned of metal tubing — now standing over us, spread-legged, cock over our heads; now turned with its back to us and a huge chute ready to shit in all our faces; now with an immense plunger-cock pistoning out and back to the clamoring sound of industrial machinery.\u00a0 Thus the cheap and misplaced s\/m buzz imagery, the gratuitous blood, the writhing sexual maniacs.\u00a0 Thus line after line overplayed, overemphasized, overacted.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it have been more skillful, more effective — more honest — to use a little subtlety to convey the same message?\u00a0 Don\u2019t we need to move beyond Four-Legs-Good-Two-Legs-Bad thinking on these issues?\u00a0 Reagan is gone now.\u00a0 Son of Reagan is gone.\u00a0 What needs to be gone with them is the dangerous notion that the issues of our times can or should be reduced to sound bites, to simple-minded one-liners, to right and wrong, black and white, us and them.<\/p>\n P.S. — I can\u2019t close this without noting that Randy Danson is truly brilliant as the Duchess — passionate in all the best senses of the term:\u00a0 lusty, alive, powerful, overflowing with emotion.\u00a0 She is passionate in her sexiness, her anger, her joy, her grief, even passionate in the way she resigns herself to her destruction and finally to her death.\u00a0 She embodies exactly the point of femaleness respected:\u00a0 she is able to combine most inspiringly being out of control and retaining a sense of natural balance and dignity.\u00a0 She had tears in her eyes as she took her curtain calls to the most tepid applause from what remained of the audience, and I could feel her frustration, trying to carry the great weight of this production, 500-pound pearls before swine, so to speak, by the sheer force of her passion.\u00a0 That, as Betty Dodson once said, is the price of being a sexual revolutionary.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Pawns in their Game<\/b><\/p>\n I went to see Magic Theatre\u2019s Unquestioned Integrity: The Hill\/Thomas Hearings<\/em> with more than a little ambivalence.\u00a0 The hearings were hard enough to watch the first time around.\u00a0 What\u2019s the point of assembling a play entirely from hearing transcripts? I wondered.\u00a0 I expected an exercise in one-dimensional Oh-Isn\u2019t-It-Awful-What-They-Did-to-Anita-Hill:\u00a0 true but stale.<\/p>\n Happily the show went far beyond that kind of simplicity, raising a wealth of unexpected feelings and perspectives and managing to be theatrically engaging as well.\u00a0 Spurred most of all by a wonderfully passionate Artis Fountaine (Clarence Thomas), the play shows both Thomas and Hill to be pawns in the white male power structure game, sexual gladiators doing a verbal race-sex show for the titillation and entertainment of soap-opera-loving white America.<\/p>\n What struck me most was the real anger and embarrassment of both Thomas and Hill, forced into performing verbal sexual tricks for a panel of power brokers hopelessly confused and oblivious to the gender, sex, and race issues before them.\u00a0 Magic Theatre\u2019s Associate Artistic Director Mame Hunt, who created the play, shows that not all feminist sexual perspectives are simple-minded, even on an issue as susceptible to blind rage as sexual harassment.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this play, like The Duchess of Malfi<\/em>, will close before this column makes it to print, but if it is revived, it is definitely worth seeing.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Marco Vassi Back in Print<\/b><\/p>\n Marco Vassi aficionados will be glad to hear that ten of Vassi\u2019s books, all long out of print and generally unavailable even through used porn distributors, have been republished as The Vassi Collection<\/em> by Second Chance Press.\u00a0 Vassi, who has been hailed as America\u2019s foremost erotic writer and heir to the mantle of Henry Miller, wrote most of his fiction in the early 70s — novels and short stories that range from vintage explorations of sexual philosophy to pulp outpourings that Vassi himself referred to as “formula pieces without any relationship to literature at all.”\u00a0 Most were originally released by care-less porn houses, though several were also published by Olympia Press, the groundbreaking publishing house that championed the work of such avant-garde authors as Henry Miller, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett.<\/p>\n The collection includes The Stoned Apocalypse<\/em> (1972), Vassi\u2019s autobiographical description of his work as “an old Bolshevik of the sexual revolution,” and nine novels:\u00a0 Mind Blower<\/em> (1970), The Gentle Degenerates<\/em> (1970), The Saline Solution<\/em> (1971), Contours of Darkness<\/em> (1972), Tackling the Team<\/em> (1976), In Touch<\/em> (1976), The Devil\u2019s Sperm Is Cold<\/em> (1976), The Sensual Mirror<\/em> (1977), and Slave Lover<\/em> (1977).\u00a0 The somewhat funky trade paperbacks (the books preserve the unattractive and sloppy editing and typesetting of the original editions) are available by mail individually ($19.95 postpaid), or as a set ($110 postpaid) from Second Chance Press, Noyac Road, Sag Harbor, NY 11963.\u00a0 The first printing is a limited edition of 151 copies, so if you\u2019re a long frustrated Vassi buff you\u2019d best get your order in right away.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n April 2, 1993<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1993 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Paraphilopolis Journal<\/p>\n Overheard at a San Francisco coffee shop:<\/p>\n Young woman behind the counter: “Mikey! Good to see you! How come you never come in any more? Do I have to beat you?”<\/p>\n Mikey (thoughtful pause): “Beating would be nice….”<\/p>\n They both look over at me, a little shyly. I smile warmly, to reassure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}