Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
Up the Tao Staircase: self-deprecating wit and wisdom from a Taoist perspective.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin”—more plausible than the interpretation in Reservoir Dogs—has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is German-Hungarian Lutheran on my father’s side and Anglo-Scots-Irish secularist on my mother’s.)
I don’t get Holden Caulfield, the first-person narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. His hatred of the “phoniness” of the movies alienates me. I find him sanctimonious, almost morbidly so, for damning Hollywood’s game of iconographic make-believe. A philistine like Caulfield can never admire the cultivated phoniness of Oscar Wilde, for example. If I say so myself, my own essay on the magnificent phoniness of Playboy photography has aged well over the past 45 months. Although I’ve read Catcher only once, roughly twenty years ago, I remember my impression of Caulfield as an overrated antihero.
However, the death of 91-year-old J. D. Salinger moved me to sample more of his work online yesterday. Even if you don’t like Catcher, try his short story “Teddy,” originally from the January 31, 1953, issue of The New Yorker. Salinger’s lifelong quest for transcendence finds a much better spokesman in ten-year-old genius Teddy McArdle than in Holden Caulfield.
“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”
Far out, man! I’m shocked and fascinated by Teddy, his words, and his fate. See if you aren’t also.
“If corporations are capable of making the public do their bidding, then why isn’t everyone driving their Edsels to Circuit City to purchase Betamax video recorders?” So asks Bert Gall, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice. I challenge anyone who thinks of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission as bad news, not good, to answer Gall’s question. (I thank Reason’s blog, Hit & Run, for making me aware of the quotation.)
According to televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson, the disastrous earthquake in Haiti was a consequence of the pact with the devil the Haitians made some two centuries ago to drive out their French oppressors. While I wouldn’t make light of the suffering in the Caribbean, I believe ridicule is the best response to callous, moronic statements like Robertson’s. Let’s have some fun.
Let’s watch these two videos, one right after the other. The first shows Robertson telling the “true story” on The 700 Club:
What’s so funny about that, you ask? As you watch this clip from a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Howling Man,” in which Lucifer escapes from the monastery that has held him prisoner, try to imagine him thinking, “The first thing I’ll do is liberate the Haitians,” as he strokes his beard and begins his transformation. If you’re like me, this will help you savor the delicious absurdity of Robertson and the science fiction version of Christianity (as opposed to serious Christianity) he stands for.
These beautiful pundits, brought to us by Bloggingheads.tv, do a better job of extrapolating meanings from the Tiger Woods scandal than I could, so I’ll give them center stage. Keep your ears open for the dirty joke seventeen and a half minutes in.
Now that I’ve pretty much retired from this blog, I can write a blog about another passion of mine: reversed audio and video. Play It Backwards sdrawkcaB tI yalP will let you experience the subliminal, satanic fun of songs and video clips played backwards. Anything that scares fundamentalist preachers ought to entertain you.
...I feel a need to make some amends to improve this blog’s feminist karma before I retire from it. Four years ago today, I started it by posting “Please don’t assume I’m a pig.” In retrospect, I sometimes question that thesis.
For example, I have inappropriately sexualized the women of Reason magazine, especially Kerry Howley. I remember seeing an online video at Reason.tv of one of their editors’ meetings in which Howley looked rather uncomfortable in her own skin. It may be egocentric of me to suspect it was my fault, but I can’t help wondering. Oops.
I really did have a crush on YouTube star Brooke “Brookers” Brodack for a while. But even though I described some of her videos as sexy, I never sexualized her in my imagination the same way I’ve done with Playboy models. ’Nuff said. Actually, for all I know, my feminist karma may have gotten worse with that confession. Oh, the ambiguity!
On at least two points of predictable controversy, however, I’m ready to defend my feminist karma. As a group, women have disappointed me with their general unwillingness to defend equity in male and female reproductive choice. A Roe v. Wade for men is a moral necessity, no matter how many feminists hypocritically invoke nature’s will to force men to open their wallets to support unilaterally chosen children. Philosophically, I still believe in a woman’s choice to give birth or not, but I can’t be more than lukewarm in support of that cause until feminism learns to listen to men more sympathetically.
The other predictable controversy is that I’ve called my mother a cunt. I stand by what I said about that particular woman. MDMA has been teaching me the value of forgiveness, but not fast enough to forgive her (or my father) in time for this day of confession. I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. She stood by idly while bullies and bureaucrats humiliated me at school and my know-it-all father fucked with my head at home. Just in case she ever reincarnates as a mother again, I hope she learns her lessons on how to avoid raising an ungrateful son.
For the past few weeks in particular, I’ve been grateful that my attitude toward drugs resembles Ram Dass’ more than Dr. Drew’s. If Pinsky doesn’t believe in letting people decide for themselves whether marijuana can help them, he surely wouldn’t have approved of my choice to buy MDMA (Ecstasy) powder from hippies in order to treat my post-traumatic stress. After about seven MDMA experiences between August 28 and October 9, I harbor more respect than ever for the career arc of Ram Dass. Under his born name, Richard Alpert, he helped Timothy Leary study psychedelics at Harvard in the 1960s. In context, his statements on drug addiction in the above video don’t refute but refine his earlier work. Meanwhile, Playboy has betrayed its own institutional principles by helping Dr. Drew promote the disease model of addiction, an inappropriate medicalization of human behavior that weakens civil liberties and limits options for healing and personal growth. If I had waited for permission from the drug-control bureaucracy to use MDMA, I might have waited my whole life for that molecule’s healing touch.
As Ram Dass says about drugs in general, MDMA takes me to paradise for only a few hours. But some of the tranquil wisdom of the experience just might stay with me forever. Having noticed how perfectly I fit within the cosmic order, I can’t cherish my inhibitions as personal stamps of uniqueness with the same ardor that I did before. For instance, I’m running out of patience with my smug posture of asexuality. Why am I blogging about a stream of fantasy images—and being lazy as hell even at that cushy job—instead of pursuing relationships with real women? The pictures in Playboy are never more beautiful than when I’m on MDMA, yet MDMA has been depriving me of my excuses for obsessing over them. Ram Dass appears smart enough about drugs to appreciate this paradox in all its political and moral nuances; Pinsky does not.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m pretty much retiring from Reflections on Playboy. On October 17, it will have been a good four-year run. Over the next few days, I’ll write one or two more posts to tie up loose ends. I’ll be glad to moderate new comments in perpetuity, so please speak your mind on any post. Despite what you might think by glancing at the comment menu, a Blogger.com membership is not required. Thank you all for your readership.
Thanks to Salon.com’s Broadsheet, I’ve learned that Marge Simpson will have a pictorial in the upcoming November issue in honor of the cartoon’s twentieth anniversary. Many of the Hollywood gossip blogs claim that she gets totally naked, but according to Broadsheet, she wears lingerie. As usual, The Simpsons looks tame in comparison to Family Guy. Marge may have a sensual side, but she’s not a wild woman like Lois Griffin, who would certainly have given us the full monty.
By the way, only the newsstand edition will have Marge on the cover. This would seem to vindicate my decision to buy Playboy at newsstands rather than subscribe.
The timing is ironic. Just when the memory of recent mind-opening experiences is encouraging me to admit how bored I am with this blog, the October 2009 Playboy contains a one-page article by Steven Pinker, one of my biggest intellectual influences. I would feel disloyal if I let it go unmentioned.
One page is not enough space for Pinker to spread his wings and soar to the logical and rhetorical heights he is capable of. He thinks complex thoughts that require many pages for adequate disclosure. But page 135 of the October issue gives at least a hint of Pinker’s worth as a public intellectual:
Advances in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology and genetics are being brought into psychology and are illuminating human nature in breathtaking ways. The result will be insights into spheres of life that may not have seemed psychological at all.... Political ideologies, we now know, are partly heritable—people are genetically predisposed, in part, to left-wing or right-wing worldviews.... Religion emerges from a brain predisposed to see disembodied spirits everywhere and to ask “why” questions of everything in sight. Economic behavior ... is shaped by cognitive illusions about risk, loss and probability. Also under the microscope are beauty, sexuality, reasoning, language, social relationships, violence and the other human obsessions.
By reading Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, I gained a deeper appreciation of the Playboy phenomenon than I could from strict adherence to Hugh Hefner’s doctrine of sexual revolution. If awkwardness, hypocrisy, and an irrational sense of shame are enduring problems in human sexuality—as Pinker assures us they are—then a woman’s choice to pose nude for Playboy can attain heroic and tragic dimensions. Pinker has a way of making everything humans ever do more fascinating to behold.
I give thanks to certain members of the hippie community of Humboldt County, California—they know who they are—for helping me blunder my way to a purchase of approximately one gram of MDMA powder last Thursday. Their compassion and willingness to trust me compensated for my awkward lack of street smarts. With great hope riding on the outcome, I took my first dose alone in my motel room the following morning, August 28. I had a good experience during my one “roll” so far, and it seems to continue being good for me four days later.
At 7:30 in the morning last Friday, I guesstimated a dose of 200 milligrams [error]*, a relatively high but not outrageous quantity, and swallowed it. An hour and a half later, dizziness, mild nausea, rapid heartbeat, perspiration, and a distinct sense of fearless open-mindedness told me it had kicked in. Did I say “fearless”? Actually, it scared me very briefly at first, but in a good way. I had already gotten some idea of what to expect by visiting TheDEA.org (no, not that DEA), a treasure trove of information on MDMA. Thanks to that site, I was prepared to deal with the side effect of jaw clenching by chewing gum. It brings a smile to my face to recall how vigorously I chewed.
For the next few hours, I performed certain tasks I had decided on in advance. From other people’s accounts of this substance, I had guessed that practicing piano under the influence, for example, could show me how not to be menaced by the obsessive thoughts and flashbacks that come with mental stimulation. It’s not clear whether my specific activities during the roll made a difference, but I was suddenly able to talk myself through the menacing thoughts. I suddenly noticed that they had no real power to deprive me of happiness.
Since MDMA is not suitable for everyday use, the psychotherapeutic effect needs to be permanent in order to be useful. So far, without taking the drug again, I appear to have retained the ability to cope with everything better. Fear has less power to keep me from setting goals and working toward them. Conversations are easier, warmer, and slightly more candid. I may still have demons, but I can never take them quite as seriously again.
This morning, a tinge of melancholy told me that my brain is still recuperating from Friday’s serotonin rush. Significantly, though, the depressed feeling did not evoke despairing thoughts. 200 milligrams of 5-HTP, an over-the-counter nutritional supplement, made me feel happy (but drowsy). I’m convinced that a few more MDMA experiences, one every four weeks or so, could liberate me further. If you haven’t met Molly, maybe you should.
*Update, October 18, 2009, 6:42 p.m.: Now that I have a scale that measures down to the hundredth of a gram, I can see what 200 milligrams of Molly looks like. In hindsight, I would guess my dosage of August 28 to have been in the neighborhood of 120 milligrams.
Thanks to Salon.com’s Broadsheet, I’ve learned that Marge Simpson will have a pictorial in the upcoming November issue in honor of the cartoon’s twentieth anniversary. Many of the Hollywood gossip blogs claim that she gets totally naked, but according to Broadsheet, she wears lingerie. As usual, The Simpsons looks tame in comparison to Family Guy. Marge may have a sensual side, but she’s not a wild woman like Lois Griffin, who would certainly have given us the full monty.