Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin by Mel Gordon (Feral House, 2000)
review by Joshua Glenn
In his 1958 study Les Jeux et les hommes, the radical sociologist Roger Caillois, a comrade and colleague of the pornographer and revolutionist Georges Bataille, argued that the "voluptuous panic" of vertigo—whether achieved through sex, drugs, or just spinning around on a carnival ride—can temporarily free one from "the burden of memory and the terrors of social responsibility and pressures." Thirty-six years later, while writing a punk cabaret extravaganza based on the life of the libidinous, cocaine-huffing Anita Berber, a 1920s German demimondaine in comparison with whom even the wildest American débauchées were (and are) nothing but watered-down imitations, the author of Voluptuous Panic discovered to his amazement that examples of Weimar Berlin erotica—the cabaret postcards and playbills, verboten travelogues, popular crime weeklies, and sexy hotel brochures churned out by a society revolting against the strictures of civilization itself—were nearly impossible to find. Gordon launched what he describes as a feverish search for this stuff, and eventually turned up... what?
Police photographs of a man demonstrating his homemade Masturbation Machine (which involves rolling back and forth atop a bicycle rim while making love to a woman's shoe) membership magazines and calendars from proto-fascist nudism cults; watercolors and line drawings advertising the delights of Berlin's un-secret lesbian social clubs; a risqué board-game; snapshots of the Wild-Boys—violent gangs of tattooed and pierced runaway teens—at play; boxes full of "scientific" pornography, produced in clinical settings for therapists and legal scholars; and much, much more. And then there's the kind of thing Feral House's loyal audience seems to require in ever greater quantity and detail: crime scene photos of murder victims; erotica exciting precisely because it's amateurish, incomprehensible, or outré; the unashamed fantasies and confessions of pedophiles, flashers, sado-masochists; and so forth. Voluptuous Panic is an amazing, fascinating collection, and I'm pleased to report that it manages to be of both scholarly and prurient interest. Nice work!
The Dunkin' Donuts 2001 Calendar by Dunkin' Donuts (2001)
review by Jen Collins
September, 2001: A toddler jumps into a pile of leaves. She giggles and sings as the leaves blow in the air and swirl all around her. Then she's pelted by a blueberry-muffin storm, each oversized sugary muffin at least as big as her head. Enjoy the foliage a special way. The way you used to. Is that how you remember your childhood? Then what were the editors of the 2001 Dunkin' Donuts Calendar going for when they picked the images?
This year's calendar, though free as always, disappointed me. In the very special calendar year 2000, Dunkin' Donuts treated its customers to a 50-year retrospective. They featured photos of smiling bakers and delicious-looking hand-cut donuts, and a paper-doll history of the Dunkin' Donuts uniform, from the adventurous, polyester yellow-and-turquoise jumper waitresses wore in the early '60s, to the lackluster polo-shirt-and-khakis combo that servers—waitresses no more—wear today, dressed-up like they're middle-management, team players, dupes. The 1995 calendar was "a tribute to the true entrepreneurs of the world." In 1996, the calendar was filled with exciting trivia: In one year we pump enough jelly filling to fill over a million basketballs. I enjoyed knowing that. Including that fun-fact proved somebody was thinking about what would be good on the calendar.
This year's model urges us to Loosen Up a Little, and I don't need a calendar to tell me that. It's full of sappy, inspirational sayings like Be thankful for the little things and not so little things—like maybe those huge, dangerous muffins? Give unto others and hope they do the same to you. Thank you, Jesus, I'll take a dozen. Who wants that with their coffee break? Maybe Dunkin' Donuts is going after the Sunday donuts-and-coffee-after Mass crowd. But you always find these treats at AA meetings, too. Maybe the calendar should be in 12 steps, one for each month, with January insisting that we admit we are powerless, and December instructing us to take this message to other munchkin-holics.
The 2001 calendar looks like it was thrown together at the last minute. This October's kid is wearing a purple Anne Geddes-style dragon costume, just like last October's kid. They're cutting corners: no interviews this year, no digging through the archives for factoids about crullers and munchkins. Bet you didn't know that Dunkin' Donuts first introduced munchkins donut-hole treats in 1972. See? That's good to know, isn't it? It's last year's footnote, however. Have they run out of trivia, depleted their store of anecdotes, turned a blind eye to history? Maybe Double-D is putting all their capital into new products now. My suggestion: focus on the coffee. Not the Dunkaccinos or the Coolattas or any of that pumped-up crap. Just the coffee. My family drinks nothing but the finest Dunkin' Donuts house-blend. When I moved to Los Angeles from Boston, my mom started Priority Mailing me two pounds every couple of months. That's devotion. That's Forever Yum.
Once, while I was waiting for coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts in Davis Square, Somerville, Rod Stewart's "Love Touch" came tinkling out of the speakers. Rod Stewart is the patron saint of Dunkin' Donuts, I thought. He's indirectly the originator of the 50-Year Anniversary Calendar's slogan, Forever Yum. That must be why so many Dunkin' Donuts employees adopt his fancy hairstyle. If the marketing department at Dunkin' Donuts had any sense, they'd ask Rod for a calendar concept. Something sexy, catchy, and colorful. Nothing so goony or impractical as Skip down an entire city block. No, just something cheerful we can look to when we want to see what day it is. Something we can remember. Every picture tells a story, right? And the stories the pictures in the new Dunkin' Donuts calendar are telling me are about a chain of donut shops that doesn't have time for me and my memories anymore. That's another anchor gone. They don't call donuts sinkers for nothing.
Managing Generation X: How To Bring Out The Best In Young Talent by Bruce Tulgan (W.W. Norton, 2000, revised and updated edition)
review by Susan Roe
In 1995 Bruce Tulgan, a young lawyer tired of being interfered with by managers who didn't recognize his entrepreneurial spirit, published Managing Generation X. Transform your company's management techniques, he promised personnel directors, and the body-pierced "independent and hyperfluid"—read: directionless and flaky—new workforce would finally stop kicking against the traces. As someone who started working as a Human Resources professional around the time that the first edition of this book was published, I can testify that, in the past six years, young workers have indeed been encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, and that Gen Xers have managed to shed their reputation for being anti-careerist slackers. So, kudos all around, right?
Wrong. When I got into this field, it was because I was interested in studying, and hopefully figuring out how to change, both the balance of power in the workplace and the nature and meaning of work itself. I was horrified that the Organizational Behavior textbooks I was required to study devoted themselves entirely to training managers how to hoodwink their managees into working harder. I learned about Perceived Control, which means encouraging employees to imagine they have more control over their work than they actually do; Stroking, in which managers force themselves to perform an "act of recognition" for employees once in a while; and Management by Walking Around (MBWA), meaning... well, you figure it out. So Managing Generation X's advice to managers, to share information with employees; to make work goals clear; to give employees responsibility, space, and time; to allow employees' strengths to shine; and so forth, while not particularly original, seems harmless enough.
But it's not harmless, at all. I could criticize various surface aspects of the book: the shoddy research techniques; the sick-making praise of Gen X's inborn excellence; the inane statistics about what makes an Xer an Xer (finding "images of ourselves" in Beverly Hills 90210 and Ally McBeal being one of the more bizarre), but I want to get right to the heart of the matter. Is it really so laudable of Tulgan to instruct his elders how to submit a new generation of workers to the discipline of the harness and the plough, even if that discipline now involves more carrot, less stick? His enterprise begs the following questions: Why do some plough, while others stroll along behind? Were we really put on this planet to be work animals? and even: Why plough at all? I believe the workplace can and should change, in the direction of equality and justice. But Tulgan is only interested in helping business, as usual, stay on track. By substituting the surly complaints of twenty- and thirtysomething workers for even the slightest peek into industrial history, Managing Generation X sells them down the river. Maybe instead of getting to work on a third volume of his book, Tulgan should try MBWA in the poorly lit, non-OSHA compliant, cubicle-hive of his own conscience.
The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan (Semiotext(e)/Smart Art, 2000)
review by Ingrid Schorr
There's this slow Johnny Cash song, "Home of the Blues," that absolutely embodies heavy sadness. "I walk and cry while my heartbeat/keeps time with the drag of my shoes," Cash sings, dragging out the word "drag," and you can hardly move, it's so replete with melancholy. But if you feel like it, you can also dance a little half-time two-step to the same song. If you feel like it.
A similar tension fills The Pain Journal. Writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan kept a journal of the year before his death from cystic fibrosis in 1996, at the age of 43, with all the persistence and curiosity that he devoted to his public explorations of pain and sex and the difficulty of the same when you're drowning in thick green mucus ("Bob Phlegmagain," he called himself).
"Shitty lungs filled with shit and I feel like shit. Anything else to talk about? No," he writes in an early entry. But he finds plenty to talk about. Exhausted by pain and painkillers, he misses his masochism. His partner and dominatrix, Sheree Rose, harps on him for being so unsubmissive about dying. He angsts about his long lists of art chores (familiar to any self-employed person), yet in the hospital a month before his death, he's up all night writing an application for a Guggenheim grant. "Art and life, what a bunch of crap. We're all just... traveling salesmen getting screwed up the butt."
The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl maintained that you find meaning not in life itself, but in what life demands of you. Don't try to smooth turbulence out by putting it in terms of drive and need, he said. Struggle with it. Keep curiosity, not hope, alive. So don't read The Pain Journal as an antidote to your own little troubles. Don't look for Freudian clues to Flanagan's masochism. Just try to keep up with him as he nails down his last hellish days.
The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee by William Osborn (Random House, 2000)
review by T.R. Johnson
Very rarely does something I've been reading make me wake up in the middle of the night and roar for blood. But this book piled my sleeping mind a few nights ago with severed limbs, ears, fingers, heads, and genitals, till I finally leapt out of bed and startled myself awake with an animalistic war-whoop. This is not to say the book is any good; it's a hog-wallow of lurid madness heaved forth to defeat, once and for all, the weirdly persistent and "politically correct" notion that the Native-American was a noble savage.
More specifically, the book is a catalogue, arranged chronologically, of incidents of scalping, torture, cannibalism and mutilation. Occasionally, Osborn alludes to settlers doing something nasty to an Indian, but in nearly all cases the Indians are the bad guys. Osborn constructs the Indian essentially the same way that Puritan preachers did more than three hundred years ago—as Lucifer's minions—and one can't help but feel that, if he had any training as an historian, he might have been able to tell a more nuanced and engaging story.
Osborn claims that more than 16,000 atrocities were committed during the two hundred sixty-eight year "war" between the settlers and the natives, and he strings out descriptions of a few hundred of them to arrive at this conclusion: the general malaise of most Native-Americans today shows that they are simply the sore losers of a war they very much deserved to lose. Osborn's narrow, naïve book recycles primary documents about life on the frontier ad nauseum without contextualizing any of them within the broader mythology that has long controlled the way the White Man scripts the role of his Other. As scholarship, an atrocity.
Hermenaut also recommends:
Book of Changes interviews by Kristine McKenna (Fantagraphics, 2001) "If I have any goal," Iggy Pop admitted in 1979, "it's to be an unchanging beacon [of the lowest garbage that's shared by the universal mind] in this world full of health food and good vibes. I do not wish to change." "I was in a bar in New York last week and I had to put my foot in a woman's face to make her go away," the chanteuse Nico recounted that same year. "I didn't know her, but I could feel her black magic." The journalist who elicited these deathless pronunciamentos was Kristine McKenna; this collection of her interviews is illustrated by Fantagraphics artists R. Crumb, Charles Burns, Megan Kelso, Chris Ware, and many others. Of particular note: the amazing portrait of outsider artist Howard Finster by Hermenaut illustrator Ted Jouflas.—JG
Seinfeld and Philosophy ed. William Irwin (Open Court, 2000)The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'Oh! of Homer ed. William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble (Open Court, 2001) Let's start by quoting from "Jerry and Socrates: The Examined Life?" by William Irwin. No, let's start with "The Moral World of the Simpson Family: A Kantian Perspective," by James Lawler. No, wait!"'And the Rest Writes Itself': Roland Barthes Watches The Simpsons", by David L.G. Arnold. No! Let's start with "The Costanza Maneuver: Is it Rational for George to 'Do the Opposite'?," by Jason Holt. Grrrr. Lousy slumming academics. Can we just forget about the whole thing, please? —JG
Super Greg Web site (http://www.supergreg.com) The fake authentic site of a DJ named Super Greg, "homemade by Da Man (dat's me)." Rumored to be sponsored by Lee Jeans, but no one in the photos is wearing jeans. Check it out, fah sheezy—IS
