Last Days of a Great City

And One of Them is Fish

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As a gay pre-teen, I had only an inkling of why I was so strangely attracted to the 1960s TV series Flipper.  I wanted to call Sandy and Bud Ricks on the telephone, wait until they answered, then hang up, giggling like a little girl.

Little did I know that dolphins hold the key to “time shifts and global healing events (and even miracles).”

Dialogue Concerning Samuel Beckett and Snakes on a Plane

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I’m sitting with Raul (another gay philosopher) on my front porch, and we’re celebrating the Samuel Beckett centenary by exchanging silences.  We had been discussing the second act of Beckett’s Happy Days, in which Winnie, a middle-aged woman is buried to her neck in a mound of dirt.  Raul reminded me of Not I, where the stage is in total darkness except for the character Mouth, “about eight feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow”:

“Winnie has an obsession with her gewgaws, but she can’t manipulate them.  Mouth is worse off.  She has a shattered consciousness that she tries to reintegrate without the assistance of her own corporeality,” says Raul.

“I'm totally into your corporeality …”

He ignores me.  “She’s just a mouth floating in the void.”

“You’re saying that Beckett turned the stage into some ghoulish specimen jar.”

“No, just the opposite.  The fact that the characters are constrained makes their struggles more poignant.”  Raul pauses to dab a tear with the corner of his Kleenex.  He’s getting agitated.  “Popular media go the other way.  It’s all about the possibilities inherent in excess, not constraint.”

“Endless, inane chatter; quick-cutting of images; ever bigger explosions—”

“Right, but we can't sustain that.  I think the Blogosphere’s overwhelming response to Snakes on a Plane signals a newfound regard for constraint in art.”

“As in the constraints on the agency of the creatures that would terrorize the passengers?  Is that what you mean?  Like, where are the snakes going to hide—the beverage cart?”

“Yeah, like Samuel Jackson yelling into his radio, ‘We got motherfuckin’ snakes!’”

ANTM as a Source of Moral Wisdom

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Background: America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) is a reality television show in which 13 beautiful young women compete against one another to be crowned “America’s Next Top Model.”  Each week, one contender is eliminated.  The last model left standing (in six-inch heels, of course) wins a lucrative modeling contract.

In episode 5, the girls were joined by aging supermodel Janice Dickinson, a former ANTM judge who was thrown off the show a while back for being too harsh on the contestants.  Ms. Dickinson has an intimidating presence.  Her super-sized lips and botox-immobilized facial muscles give her a freakish, somewhat aggressive appearance.  Reporter Steve Rogers picks up the story:

That night at dinner, tempers flared when Janice tempted [ANTM contender] Gina to admit who was giving her a hard time in the house. After gentle prodding from Janice, Gina finally pointed the finger at [ANTM contender] Jade — something that neither Jade nor Janice herself appreciated. “No matter what — Rule #1, we never rat out our bitches — zip it!,” Janice ... yelled at Gina as she told her to go back to her seat at the table. “Zip it bitch, zip it, you’re dead in my book,” she added as Gina tried to respond. Gina broke into tears on the ride home, upset at Janice’s comments.

This episode brings into focus questions essential to the calibration of our own moral compasses:

1.  Is the imperative that we not rat out our bitches a categorical imperative, or does the carefully constructed reality of a reality show permit a suspension of the ethical?  As Jade herself once pointed out, ANTM stands for America’s Next Top Model not America’s Next Best Girlfriend.

2.  Janice—a kind of God figure in the episode under discussion— is legislator, enforcer, and judge of the moral laws that govern ANTM.  But is she herself bound by them?  If Jehovah may ask Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, may Janice tempt Gina to rat out Jade, as she in fact did?  Does ANTM succeed in motivating the Kierkegaardian transition from the ethical to the religious? 

Discuss.

Madonna and Other Scattered Objects

We invited Enrique the Gay Philosopher to guest blog on White Courtesy Telephone.  In this installment, he uses the latest issue of OUT Magazine to explore the BIG QUESTIONS that exercise the minds of people in the gay community …

There’s a cover photo of Madonna, then this photograph, six short pages into the magazine: a beautiful man, strong-jawed, bearded and most noticeably dirty.  But why?  The most compelling explanation I’ve heard is that it’s a visual pun: Acknowledging that we have succeeded in sweeping aside many barbarous stereotypes, the editors of the magazine now ironically encourage sex with a miner.

The interview with Madonna raises new questions.  No one will stop calling it the Eiffel Tower if I replace one of its beams.  But what if I replace ten? or a hundred? or all of them?  At what point does it strain our sense to identify it with the structure built by Gaustave Eiffel?  Philosophers call this the problem of identity conditions for scattered objects, and it arises with other historic structures like Cher.  We might remove a rib here, enhance a breast there, replace her nose entirely, so that over time we’re left with only a few ratty bits of the original Cher.  Would the creature then really be Cher?  I should mention that Madonna claims her supernaturally youthful appearance was achieved without plastic surgery.  Yeah, right, and I’m the Eiffel Tower!