So, first, Christmas. When I
was driving home from my run in DC this morning, I passed one of the saddest
snowmen I’ve ever seen. We’d recently had one of those typical Washington area winter-weather
situations in which multiple inches of snow had been predicted but we ended up
getting just slightly more than enough of the white stuff to cover the grass.
It’s almost all gone at this point, and in fact the mercury is expected to rise
to 70 degrees this weekend. But kids will be kids, and apparently one local child
was determined to make a snowman or snowperson even if he/she had to use every snowflake
in the yard to do so, and even though the location beside a busy road ensured that
said snow-being soon would look as pristine as did coastal New York after Hurricane
Sandy.
By this morning, the imagined
child’s loving rendering—gleefully conceived on a day when local schools had
been closed—stood forlornly, half-melted and brown-black, in the middle of an
utterly snowless lawn. It was sort of like seeing the before and immediately after
photos of that handsome Russian ballet director who’d had acid thrown on his
face—or revisiting one’s tidy, well-kept childhood neighborhood and finding
nothing but rubble and crack houses.
Why am I opening a discussion
of Christmas with that image? I don’t know. I’m not a Christmas hater, and in
fact I love Christmas music, and sending out cards, and that spiked eggnog the
liquor stores sell at this time of year. (Note to self: A weekend trip to the liquor
store is a must.) And snowmen aren’t so much a Christmas thing as they are a winter
thing, although it’s not technically winter until tomorrow.
But, that sad snowman somehow
was a reminder, to me, of the mixed bag that is The Holidays. Last night Lynn
and I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas
on TV for perhaps the 10,000th time. Alone among seasonal telecasts, that
particular special never gets old for me. It speaks so poignantly to the
ambivalence that I think most of us, in the West at least, have toward the contradictory
crazy quilt of commercialism and generosity, of secularism and religion, that
is Christmas. Sure, A Charlie Brown
Christmas ends up coming down on the side of Christianity, but to my mind in
a way that’s more hopeful than it is convincing. I’ve read a biography of
Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown’s creator, and it’s clear that he was a
conflicted and in many ways an unhappy man. In his Christmastime fable, with
its less-than-reverent jazz score, Linus ultimately delivers to the sad-sack
kid the savior that Charles/Charlie wishes he felt in his heart.
That’s my armchair analysis,
anyway. Which is worth at least Lucy-the-Entrepreneur-Shrink’s five cents.
Christmas. There’s a lot to
like about it, and a lot that’s problematic. Mostly, it’ll never again be as
good for us as adults as it was when we were kids and it meant that anything
was possible, including Santa. Come to think of it, that may be why spiked
eggnog is so very attractive to me now.
So, let’s move on to the dead
pornographer. I’m an aficionado of obituaries that are well-written and that truly
seem to capture the essence of the deceased, for good or ill. Yesterday I
happened to come across the New York Times’
recap of the vulgarly picaresque life of Al Goldstein, a native son best known as
the publisher of Screw, a skin magazine
that was, by all accounts, exactly as subtle and classy as its name suggested.
Goldstein died in Brooklyn of renal failure at age 77.
I write “by all accounts”
because I never actually saw a copy of Screw,
which debuted in 1968, when I was 10 years old, and had ceased publication by
the time I might have researched it on the web, solely in the interest of journalistic
science. But here’s how the noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz, who
sometimes represented Goldstein in the latter’s legal tussles, described Screw in the New York Times obituary: “Hefner did it with taste. Goldstein’s
contribution is to be utterly tasteless.”
Elsewhere in the piece, its author,
Andy Newman writes, “Sex as depicted in Screw
was seldom pretty, romantic or even sexy. It was, primarily, a business,
with consumers and suppliers like any other.” Indeed, Newman adds, “The
manifesto in Screw’s debut issue was
succinct: ‘We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ. We
will apologize for nothing.'”
As you might imagine, the
obituary isn’t exactly a celebration of a redeeming life well-lived. In fact, it
makes abundantly clear that the ugliness of Screw
reflected that of its creator, who didn’t even describe himself in flattering terms, choosing instead such adjectives as “infantile”
and “compulsive.” (Clearly Goldstein would not have objected to “repulsive,” either,
but, rather, would have worn it as a badge of dishonor.)
The obituary's writing is darkly
masterful. Consider these two paragraphs, which capture Goldstein in a
nutshell:
“Apart from Screw, Mr Goldstein’s most notorious creation was
Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic,
free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment
in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in
the 1960s and ’70s.
“A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he
once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of
his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show Midnight Blue,
to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian
restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself, and, most troubling
to his own defenders, his own family.”
Much later in this tour-de-force
biography—which prints out to four full pages, and which I urge you to seek out
while it is still online if you appreciate great writing and have a reasonably
strong stomach—Newman puts a fine point on that mention of “family” by
recounting, “After his son, Jordan, disinvited him to his graduation from
Harvard Law School, Mr Goldstein published doctored photos showing Jordan
having sex with various men and with his own mother—Mr Goldstein’s third
ex-wife, Gina.”
Not surprisingly, Goldstein’s
final years, as chronicled by Newman, were as unpretty as had been his oeuvre.
He was homeless for a time, and he spent his final years in a Brooklyn nursing
home where, one gets the impression, he was not exactly besieged by
well-wishers. His one late-life “highlight”? A Best Supporting Actor nomination
at the Adult Video News Awards for his role in Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed.
Yes, this was a sad, sad
life. But it was one that Goldstein defiantly lived on his own terms, and that
a New York Times writer has spun into
bleak and darkly entertaining art. I’d heard of Al Goldstein before his death,
but it’s only now that I feel I’ve truly experienced him. (Second note to self:
While showering today, scrub particularly vigorously.)
Finally, my opening reference
to naked chests has to do with an eye-catching headline earlier this week in
my daily e-mail from Rolling Stone
magazine: “Miley Cyrus Flashes Twitter to ‘Free the Nipple.’
Well, of course she does! was
my first thought—given that the tediously rebelling former Disney Good Girl
always is in some state of public undress or self-conscious outrageousness. The
only question in my mind was whether “Flashes Twitter” was a reference to the
social-networking tool or whether “Twitter” now has become a descriptor of an
intimate female body part.
It turned out, however, that Cyrus
had bared her breasts in support of an upcoming film called Free the Nipple that is part of a wider
if loosely-organized campaign to give women the legal right to go topless in
public, just like men can. Actually, apparently it’s not technically illegal in
most states for women to go topless, but it’s nearly impossible to do so in
most places without getting arrested on some charge or another. This even is so
in New York City, where female toplessness has been legal since 1992—an abuse of
law enforcement that no doubt made Al Goldstein apoplectic.
Did you know there’s even a “Go Topless Day,” which
annually is observed on the Sunday nearest to Women’s Equality Day (August 26th)
and is the creation of a group led (per Wikipedia) by “former French auto-racing
journalist Claude Vorilhon, currently known as Rael, spiritual leader of the
Raelian Movement, a UFO religion”? I discovered this in my own research (you’re
welcome). Presumably Miley, the Nipples
filmmaker and other toplessness advocates would consider association with whack-job fringe
groups antithetical to their mammary-liberation efforts.
Anyway, you might think that,
as a heterosexual male, I’d be all for women having the freedom to wave their
unfettered breasts in my face should they so choose. But that is decidedly not
the case. I actually, totally agree that it’s a horribly unfair societal double
standard for men to be allowed to walk around shirtless on a hot summer day
while women’s breasts must swelter underneath their bras. But my solution to
this inequity is to make men put their shirts on.
I hate seeing guys walk
around topless. And it’s not because I’m latently gay and plagued by temptation,
although I’m certain Al Goldstein would’ve depicted me that way in compromising
doctored photos had I ever crossed him in any way. It’s just that it really doesn’t seem fair to women.
And, OK, it’s also that I don’t
want to see the exposed chests of
flabby guys. (I’m reminded of a great New
Yorker cartoon in which a bartender at a beachfront watering hole tells a
male patron that the T-shirt he’s holding in his hand is courtesy of the woman
at the end of the bar.) Furthermore, I
don’t want to see the exposed chests of ripped guys, either. They’re just showing
off. And also feeding my insecurity about my own un-taut upper torso. I don’t
need that.
As far as I’m concerned, guys
should put their shirts on. And women should keep theirs on. I mean, let’s face
it: Most people, regardless of gender, look better clad than unclad. (I certainly
include myself in that number.) And here’s where I will speak as a heterosexual guy: There’s something to be said for
a bit of suggestiveness and mystery. That’s all I’m sayin’.
Now, how do I bring this post
full circle and tie these disparate elements together?
Ah, I’ve got it. That Rolling Stone item about Miley Cyrus
noted, “On Saturday, she tweeted an almost topless selfie featuring two strategically
placed hearts that read ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Again, this holiday truly is
a mixed bag.
