Brioche

Beneath the apologetic differentiation between ‘movies’ and ‘film’ gets swept all the blatant prejudices of bourgeois guilt. Nothing smacks of bad faith so much as the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’.

Rationalizing baser indulgences must remain a furtive maneuver under the watchful eye of intellectual vanity. For this reason, having one’s cake and sanctimoniously eating it too takes a distinctly moralizing tone. Enjoyment is tethered at one end to the evenhanded appeal of righteous populism and at the other to the condescension of knowing better. As with all moralization, making such vulgar allowances requires sympathetic ears, preferably the ears of those who require the same circuitous validation. The sermon of the everyman gives special permission for that which the unsure and insincere dilettante regards as a little tyrant of conscience: taste. Policing every desire, then, this bourgeois guilt separates pleasure from aesthetics, the activity of enjoyment from the activity of thinking, and thereby derives from a fundamentally unreflective attitude a sense of intellectual smugness. So it is said: a Bergman or an Antonioni may be truly great, but never have I enjoyed myself so memorably as during that forgettable romantic comedy.

Useless Territory

Baudelaire: “…there is a kind of mysterious aristocratic pleasure for the man who no longer has any curiosity or ambition, to contemplate, when he is lying in the belvedere or leaning on the pier, all the movements of those leaving and those returning, of those who still have the strength to wish, the desire to travel or grow rich.”

Naked Water

“The Bath is an animal instinct: and, par excellence, a human instinct; it is as much a necessity of our nature as drink. We drink because we thirst—an interior sense. We bathe because water, the material of drink, is a desire of outward man—an exterior sense.”

—Sir Erasmus Wilson

Water, too, can be naked, and we should not ignore this subtle facet of its elemental comportment. In a way, the transformation of matter from liquid to vapor mirrors the process of disrobing. Its burdens are cast off, exposing a concealed body underneath. The dense carapace gets stripped away from a wisp of flesh: like opening a milkweed pod. Steam, in its vanity, is a committed exhibitionist. Or is it that the architecture of the bathhouse is essentially voyeuristic? The chamber shelters and conceals the vapor, while bathers fix their gaze to water-in-the-nude, catching glimpses of water’s bare bottom. The appearance of steam naturally lends itself to being gazed at. It performs an enigmatic dance through the interplay of matter and spatial disclosure, folding-in on itself over and over.

We can imagine steam as autoerotic water, as water washing and caressing its own materiality, exciting itself to the point of transcendence. This is perhaps why the emission of steam generates such a universally pleasurable and comforting response in the body. The primacy of the skin in all steam cultures, from the gay bathhouse to the ritualized Turkish hamâm, and the immediate contact of the skin with the world, is derived from the eros of steam, the joyful allure it carries through sensate textures and movements.

Nowhere is the erotic image of bathing more important than for the Greeks. The gymnasion, containing at its root gymnós(meaning nudity), always poses a particular jealous worry in the mind of the older lover: that his beloved, exhibiting his boyish physique, may be seduced by the virtue and wisdom of another man. Roberto Calasso recounts this precarious state of affairs: “…his beloved will go to the gymnasium accompanied by a lynx-eyed pedagogue hired by the boy’s father precisely to prevent him from listening to the advances of any would-be lover lying in wait.” For the Greeks, the gymnasium is the ideal institution for observing the beauty of the nude male form, where young men display their physical strength and skill, where they bathe and socialize, often at the exclusion of what they saw as that more troublesome aesthetic of feminine beauty: 

“Better for men the sweat and dust of the gymnasium. ‘Boys’ sweat has a finer smell than anything in a woman’s makeup box.’”

In contrast to the male body on public display, the attitudes of Greek men towards female bodies were often associated with bathing by way of privacy and intrusion. Plato notes that the unsightly nudity of women, exercising publicly alongside men at the palaestra, would certainly be met with ridicule. A sort of anxiety and confusion reigns over the Greek male’s rejection of the feminine, perhaps, as Calasso argues, a fear that womanhood might elude him.

In any case, we see in later depictions of mythology, such as Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, a definitive unease in the spectacle of the feminine, as the young hunter-turned-voyeur catches the virgin goddess by surprise while she bathes with her nymphs. But by the time bathing pools became a much more pronounced feature of city life, in ancient Rome for example, women were assigned their own pools, apart from those of men. Given the centrality of the thermae for the communal and social life of the Roman citizen, the division of men and women indicates not only a prescriptive attitude towards the relationship between sexuality and nudity, but also that this sense of community was categorically gendered. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting, A Favourite Custom, faithfully reconstructs everyday life set at the Stabian Baths of Pompeii, emphasizing this communal Roman image of bathing, perhaps in contrast to the erotic masculine anxieties of the Greek gymnasium.

Another appeal to the erotic is famously made with the institution of “Adam and Eve’s Pools” in Bacon’s New Atlantis. The Jewish merchant Joabin explains that these bathing pools are used by the Bensalemites for the purpose of coupling prospective husbands and wives by allowing each gender to send a proxy voyeur in order to guarantee the other’s physical suitability prior to marriage. The allusion here to the biblical Joab and to King David, who sees the wife of Uriah the Hittite bathing in the nude, suggests a strange moral ambiguity in the institution of sexualized bathing. Like with Titian’s portrait of Actaeon the hunter encountering Diana, Bacon seems to exploit a deeply embedded historical connection between voyeurism and the private or gendered ritual cleansing of the body.

Perhaps, then, as much as the Eastern bath can be associated with community, health, and leisure, the practice of bathing in the West has been stained with these images of temptation and forbidden sexuality. The private bath is now the place to apply ointments and salves, bath salts and designer soaps, all with the eros of that same thoroughgoing self-indulgence that good marketing relies on. The television commercial is a peep-show, secretly looking in upon the young woman as she lathers a candy-scented shampoo into her hair. Unlike the bathhouse, the bathroom’s organizing principle is individualism, removing the ritual from communal space and reinventing the bathscape with the equivalent of a kind of bathing Protestantism. The expert bath attendant is replaced by total democratization: the technological apparatus is now the sole authority. And the buying and selling of cosmetic or hygienic products is proportional to the fetishization of both the bathwater and the bather.

Airport Decorum

1. Breakfast alone on the allowance of hotel voucher with depraved looking businessmen.

2. TSA officials appreciate minimalism, but not modernism.

3. Ask pilots if uniforms are issued or purchased. If purchased, where?

4. In-flight movies cannot be distinguished from the act of flying itself; ask Howard Hughes.

5. All airplane experiences are purely statistical.

Two Mechanisms

What makes my photo album so inhuman? There is an errant expectation that what we are photo-documenting when we photo-document should be nothing other than the projection of a memory not-yet-formed. In actuality, we are hoping to reproduce photos we’ve seen framed in other people’s living rooms or collected in their photo albums. Others’ memories become mimetic bypaths to our own, and the gravity of human faces which tugs on the focus of our camera, purely a social contrivance.

Reading Francis Ponge’s account of his creative method reminds me of why my photographs remain mostly peopleless. The smiling faces of a family vacation present themselves with a heavy set of demands. Whereas an unpopulated beach, a discarded food tin, or the facial expression of a toll booth attendant caught off-guard remain unequivocally free of the burden of having later to be framed and placed on the table beside the television. Ponge’s expressed aversion to ideas, which is his motivation for “Taking the Side of Things”, is no different:

“Ideas seek my approval, demand it, and it is only too easy for me to offer it; this offering, this consent, produces no pleasure in me but rather a kind of queasiness, a nausea. On the other hand, objects, landscapes, events, individuals of the external world give me much pleasure. They win my trust. For the simple reason that they don’t need it.”

Nous ferons nos malles pour Tornéo.

Baudelaire is perhaps more voyeur than critic in the way he attunes his eye to the moral life of Paris—to the multitude on the street, the din of the harbor, innocent trinkets shared between children. This insufferable “spleen” of the city, the ensuing numbness, forbids his soul to answer the allure of any worldly place. It bares a deep repulsion boiling up not simply from aesthetic distaste, but from a disgust afforded only by the luxury of voyeuristic detachment. “This question of moving is one I am endlessly discussing with myself,” he says, but everywhere the possibility of moving is spoiled with the despondency of a terminal illness: what does it matter where?

Dine-in or eat out.

The backdrop of this conversation became thoroughly enshrined in American movies. The general ubiquity of this scene, all its idleness, now mirrors many other iconic public forms—the bathhouse, the café, or the pub. Nested in vinyl booths, the crowd files in off the street and reaches for murky pots of coffee across chipped Formica. How orthodox: the griddle-cook’s labor, tireless eggs and hash browns, painted ketchup bottles, greasy windows, the yellowed cash register.

Earlier in the day, the scene might have been different. Newspapers delivered, read, and discarded. From six in the A.M. to just before eleven the customers possessed an almost intellectual poise. But by noon the setting accommodates a different face: that of disquieted loan managers, grandmothers, the workaday lunch crowd. Subdued by the conflict of pressing hunger and loquaciousness, there is little time for contemplation.

This ritual is consummated only in the indistinct hollow of the late night shift, at the hands of our waitress with her makeup pancaked on, endearing us to the frustrations of provincial life. All her years waiting tables fall upon us with the sort of brusque bedside manner that we sometimes yearn for. Her words fall short of penetrating the skin. Unencumbered by the persuasion of alcohol, the conversations are more tender and melancholic, abandoned to various states of recovery and sobriety.

These scenes are secondhand. Just last week a conversation was had in a diner precisely like this one. We console ourselves with the dim certainty that these conversations are commonplace—that we, too, have had them. But that lie murmurs with the paroxysmal acidity in our stomachs.

This is why we are forced to approach the question by beginning with film and only later driving around through traffic, past all the chains and franchises, in search of an appropriate eatery. Do such conversations also occur here?