A few pleasures
For really good sex I don’t have to be with someone who I have an erotic connection with because ultimately I feel I’m the source of my own sexual pleasure.
Annie Sprinkle, interview by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick
Annie qualifies this with the obvious fact that if there is a spark of real erotic connection with someone, the sex can be even better. But in itself, this thought has been intriguing me recently. For myself, a woefully single 32 year-old still trying to rebuild bridges to the outside world half-consciously burned down during solipsistic teen years, there’s a knee-jerk "Fuck off!" reaction. Y’know, it seems like something that’s easy to say when monogamy is an "experiment" for you. When celibacy is something to "try out".
But a little humility helps the truth in it emerge. It’s a truth that years of yearning for another will dull beyond recognition. And I suppose that years of socially positive prostitution will render this truth clear, bright and empowering. It does seem solipsistic, a kind of navel-gazing sexuality. But I sense a paradox at work, just beyond the bounds of my language at this moment, but one that’s helping me see that without being able to pleasure myself—yes, in every sense, but in their deepest aspects—I’m getting tangled in a thicket of illusion trying to find someone to give me pleasure. And that owning a connection to my source of pleasure—"touching myself", in the TOPY sense—is the real path to connection with others.
Annie’s observation, as it burrowed its way quietly through my brain, met one of Nietzsche’s early prescriptions for "becoming what one is":
But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, man can shed seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer slough." In addition, it is a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a forced descent into the shaft of one’s being by the nearest path. Doing so can easily cause damage that no physician can heal. And besides: what need should there be for it, when given all the evidence of our nature, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we forget, our books and our handwriting. This, however, is the means to plan the most important inquiry. Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer As Educator‘
A strange, convoluted, beautiful convergence happens between Annie and Freddie, where the path to connection with others lies in your connection to your core, and your connection to your core is empowered by the feelings that flood out of your admiration for others. Some Tantric revelation beckons… Obviously Nietzsche was grasping at something quite distinct from idolisation here; it’s equally obvious that, through his relationships to Schopenhauer and Wagner, he eventually shed even his constructive impulses towards his "venerated objects". As ever, he’s interested in processes along the way, not systems that are The Way.
But, as I recently find myself finding more pleasures in other people’s creations alongside finding more pleasures in myself, it’s been interesting to meditate on the notion that the qualities that art, music, film and so on evoke in you are in you. Admiration can (and does) over-ripen and rot into envy. If plucked at the right time, though, the delicious fruit can open up genuine, hidden parts of your true nature. Gathering together the fragments of youself that have been scattered far and wide in the mediascape, hiding in revered albums, wonderful performers, magical films… Which brings me to the things that have been ringing my bell of late.
The whole cluster of gigs around Halloween were great. Thursday found me down at the Hammersmith Lyric for Julian Cope’s first night of his 3-night stint playing full-band gigs for the first time in years and years. Playing a very Brain Donor oriented set, Copey managed to truly rock the entire place, despite the curious choice of a seated venue. His customary jaunts into the audience to feel everyone up started early. I saw him collapse into the aisle at one point, his thrashing legs just visible, and I decided this would be a good point to break for a pee. I exited on the other side of the stalls, and was pretty befuddled and stricken with hilarity at meeting him on the foyer landing coming the other way. Really, who else wanders around the venue in the middle of their own show? When I got back, all eyes were on the upper circle, where Copey was rubbing against the railings and whipping the crowd with righteous rockisms. A frankly astonishing ‘Reynard The Fox’ finished things off, the swelling climax fired by a psychedelic stream-of-consciousness rant.
Halloween itself was Jane’s Addiction at Brixton Academy. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to go out in drag, but if any night was going to re-ignite that flame, this was going to be it. Fishnets, black sequined skirt, lacy black vest and my big grey fur. I looked fabulous, as did everyone I went with. Such a great feeling to be glammed up on the tube with friends, a few shrooms kicking in. Not many others had made an effort as it turned out (though my friend Mee looked great playing her electric violin above the lobby). But the band were everything I hoped they might still be, and everyone down the front was up for getting gleefully violent and happy as Perry and the boys crashed through ‘Up The Beach’, ‘Oceansize’, an explosive ‘Three Days’, ‘Mountain Song’, and the glorious ‘Jane Says’. Everyone sang along to their new material as much as their classics, which ranks as a real achievement by the band.
The next night was The Legendary Pink Dots at the Slimelight in Angel, where I realised two things: the Pink Dots are one of the best live acts on the planet, and never having heard of them really shouldn’t stop you from keeping your ear to the ground and trying to catch them next time around; and, say what you will about goths, at least they make the effort to dress up. (Going from a ’special event’ where most people stuck to jeans and T-shirts to a regular club where nearly everyone looked fantastic, if easily categorised, was an eye-opener for me.) Then there’s the conundrum: if a beautiful woman you’ve just met mentions her "ex-boyfriend" by her third sentence, is that an "I’m single, grab me" kind of hint, or an "I’m still obsessed, steer clear" kind of hint? Predictably, I missed it completely, whatever it was, and clammed up.
The next day, hangover tempered by pickled gherkins and a greasy spoon fry-up (and a lunchtime pint) found me ambling into the Screen on the Green near Angel for Kill Bill. Nowhere near as likeable as Pulp Fiction, but equally deft and rich. Like Reservoir Dogs, the humour is a salve to make the cold-hearted repression of feelings bearable. Equally, there’s the same sense of feelings inexorably bubbling up to make a mess things in the final act. Looking forward to volume two.
And then, throughout this week, Jim and I have been mining the local video store for good-sounding gems that we missed at the cinema. First up was the marvellous Adaptation, from the team that created Being John Malkovich. Anyone enamoured of the latter will find more expansive self-absorption and fresh, disarmingly honest observations in this great film. Nic Cage, Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper are all brilliant, and I’m kind of shocked that the film actually manages to be more original, and probably better than its predecessor. Following the Charlie Kaufman trail led us next to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney’s directorial debut. A cracking film, showing (once again) that: George Clooney is vastly underrated by all my friends who don’t rate him (we also caught his funny and amiable bungled robbery romp, Welcome To Collinwood); that Sam Rockwell’s a totally fascinating ball of energy; and that Charlie Kaufman’s one of America’s most promising film talents. I’m salivating in anticipation of his next project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple attempting to rescue their failing relationship by having their bad memories erased…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love would make a great double-bill with Adaptation. Anderson and Kaufman share a knack of unveiling the seedy battles people fight against themselves, a magical process for anyone who shares those battles, as embarrassing, ugly, shameful behaviour is transfigured through frank, compassionate portrayal into… something else, something to be looked at. I’ve not seen Adam Sandler in anything else, but this film shows him to be an incredibly courageous and talented actor. Anderson’s at his most idiosyncratic, despite the Romantic Comedy plot arc and the attention-friendly just-over-an-hour-and-a-half running time. A kind of slapstick Taxi Driver, the film rattles along through one excruciating situation after another, protagonist Barry Egan’s seething, barely-contained inner violence reflected in the hectic, expressionistic score, erupting here into mindless destruction, melting there into abstract psychedelia. Genius.
