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Brian Sorgatz
(rhymes with “cats”)
Arcata, California, United States
What sort of man blogs about Playboy? I flatter myself to think that Kendra Wilkinson might call this blog intellectual pimping.
“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study: Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
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.
To my dear Friend:I like to think that Franklin’s buddy found himself the colonial equivalent of Shirley Jones as the unforgettable silver fox in Grandma’s Boy (photo credit: MTV.com).
I know of no Medicine fit to diminish the violent Natural Inclinations you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of Man, and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness. Your Reasons against entering into it at Present appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial Advantages you have in View by postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the Thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the Man and Woman united that makes the compleat human being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her softness, Sensibility, and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in the State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of scissars. If you get a prudent, healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.
But if you will not take this Counsel and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox and demand my Reasons. They are these:
1. Because they have more Knowledge of the World, and their Minds are better stor’d with Observations, their Conversation is more improving, and more lastingly agreeable.
2. Because when Women cease to be handsome they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a thousand Services small & great, and are the most tender and useful of Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a Thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.
3. Because there is no Hazard of Children, which irregularly produc’d may be attended with much Inconvenience.
4. Because through more Experience they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclined to excuse an old Woman, who would kindly take Care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health & fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.
5. Because in every Animal that walks upright the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part. The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: so that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two Women to tell an old one from a young one. And as in the Dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of Corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior; every Knack being, by Practice, capable of Improvement.
6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.
7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflection; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.
8th and lastly. They are so grateful!!!
Thus much for my Paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely
Your Affectionate Friend,
Benjamin Franklin
Labels: Cintv, Lit, NPH, Rom, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:43 AM
As devotees of free minds and free markets, we spend our nights pining for a major-party politician who not only looks dreamy while reading a Teleprompter but shows some passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.—Nick Gillespie and Tim Cavanaugh, “Building the Perfect Candidate,” Reason, April 2004
Labels: ArtPic, BlaSla, CC, Lib, Lit, NPH, OthBlo, Sp
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:04 PM
At least once on That ’70s Show, Donna scolds Eric about his habit of making gratuitous Star Wars analogies. I refuse to take the hint. Sorry. Those analogies are too useful and too much fun. The photography team, the model, and the caption writer generate a mood of such noble, tranquil, dreamy solitude that, despite the anachronism, it’s easier for me to believe that the shiny cylinder at the Bunny’s hip is a lightsaber than a coin dispenser. As enticingly beautiful as Emily Brown is, a man who disturbed her fairy-tale reverie by making a crude pass would be as doomed as Actaeon after his transgression against Artemis.Emily Brown, at the Club’s Living Room buffet above, is a stay-at-home who writes fairy tales.
Photography by Pompeo Posar
Labels: CC, Cintv, Lit, RI, RS, TaoGlam, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:01 AM
Labels: AgeMaj, BlaSla, Lib, Lit, Sc
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:06 PM
Labels: DruPo, Lib, Lit, Mus, RS
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:40 PM
Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, Lit, OthBlo, Ra
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:27 PM
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer—John Keats (1816)
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez [sic] when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Labels: ArtEnt, Cintv, Lib, Lit, Mus, OnVi, VW
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:33 PM
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:12 PM
We suppose it’s natural to think of the pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart. Actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found Miss July in our own circulation department, processing subscriptions, renewals and back copy orders. Her name is Janet Pilgrim and she’s as efficient as she is good looking. Janet has never modeled professionally before, but we think she holds her own with the best of the Playmates of the past.Quickly, the concept behind the Employee of the Month expanded to include women of other workplaces besides Playboy. But at least that change fit logically with what had come before. What the fuck?
Labels: ArtPic, CC, Lit, NaBr, PM, Theme
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:27 PM
Labels: AgeMaj, BGC, Educ, Lib, Lit, Sc, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:58 PM
It is a common mistake to think reality and fantasy inhabit separate spheres. They don’t. They coexist and intermingle. Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. To embrace dreams and make peace with spectacle doesn’t mean you have to abandon your faith in a politics ruled by reason. It means you acknowledge that it’s only a faith. Perhaps people can, and probably should, study the reality of the world, make reasoned political judgments and act accordingly. But this way of seeing and being doesn’t have any taken-for-granted epistemological foundation. It is, to use academic jargon, a system of discourse that must be (re)created, imagined, operationalized and dramatized to appeal to the public’s imagination.—Stephen Duncombe, “Why Don’t Liberals Dream?”, Playboy, November 2007, p. 43-44
HILLMAN: Look. Our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we’re going to process, we’re going to grow, and we’re going to level things out so that we don’t have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.Of course, Hillman’s line of thinking won’t lead inevitably to better democracy. It could, for instance, potentially replace “government by minority and conspiracy” with majoritarian tyranny—always a serious threat in a society where almost everyone belongs to a lifestyle minority of one kind or another. Nonetheless, Hillman’s wary eye on the political uses and abuses of psychotherapy is a model for every American.
VENTURA: Which is probably not a human possibility.
HILLMAN: But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?
VENTURA: What?
HILLMAN: Could—
VENTURA: —could the consulting room be a cell in which revolution is prepared? Jesus. Could it?
HILLMAN: By revolution I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.
It’s like, you want your father to love you. The desire to be loved by your father is enormously important. But you can’t get that love fulfilled by your father. You don’t want to get rid of the desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he’s the wrong object. So we don’t want to get rid of the feeling of being abused—maybe that’s very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn’t imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of “my job,” “my finances,” “my government”—all the things that we live with. [A personal example of my own.—B.S.] Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, “What is actually abusing me right now?” That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.
VENTURA: Let’s double back a second. You said, “Could analysis have new fantasies about itself?” What do you mean by fantasy? For most people that word’s associated with “unreal.”
HILLMAN: Oh, no, no. Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, “The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy.” Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it.
VENTURA: So any perception, in that sense, is fantasy.
HILLMAN: Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.
VENTURA: But if therapy is to take this new direction, have this new perception or fantasy about itself, it seems we need some basic redefinition of some basic concepts. [p. 38-39]
Labels: ArtPic, Cintv, Lib, Lit, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:31 PM
The Supreme Court has upheld the DEA’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state law might say. And even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.Regrettably, Safer doesn’t see through the phony scandal of adult citizens purchasing an amazingly safe herb for the difficult to explain but very real benefits of getting high. I credit Imler with intellectual humility when he says, “We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists.” I wish he would take that reasoning a little further. Why doesn’t Imler notice the alarming discrepancy between the scientific and political processes? Why doesn’t he then apply the same standard of intellectual humility to politicians (and the health care workers they have forcefully deputized) that he does to himself?
“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.
Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.
The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”
Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.
So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.
“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.
“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.
Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.
“Most of these cannabis centers are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market,” Imler says.Those are the last words of the 60 Minutes story. For some reason, what Imler calls chaos is supposed to be scary, like a movie presented by Count Floyd. Unless Imler can justify his fear of that kind of chaos without regurgitating hoaxes about marijuana, his newfound hypocrisy ought to diminish his reputation in the medical marijuana community.
“Marijuana—what? Coming in from Mexico or wherever?” Safer asks.
“Some of it is,” Imler says. “Some of these places sell hashish, which comes in from the Becca Valley in Lebanon.”
“What you’re suggesting is that the traditional black market or part of the traditional black market is now legal?” Safer asks.
“Yeah. That’s essentially what’s happened,” Imler agrees.
....
And looking back on a decade of controversy, Rev. Scott Imler concedes that good Samaritans with good intentions weren’t enough. He argues it’s time for the federal government to step in and legalize and properly control medical marijuana.
“Until that happens, we’re gonna have what we have now, which is chaos,” he says.
Labels: DruPo, Lib, Lit, MorPa, RS, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:16 AM
One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys [in their thirties] with kids their age who didn't grow up in [utopian communes]: Not one of them owns an iPod.—“The Ranch,” Playboy, October 2007, p. 136
The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up out of the shadow of the Depression. Since they had no fear of going without, they embraced voluntary poverty. Today this concept has metamorphosed in our new overheated economy into “voluntary simplicity,” a trend bearing a hint of the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit mentality: I’ll reduce my expectations before the bubble pops and we’re all left with enforced simplicity, which used to be called poverty.Although I wasn’t alive to see that decade, I know that Black’s memories of it are rather selective. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb forecast inevitable global famine in the 1970s and 1980s that would kill hundreds of millions all over the world. This is fairly typical of the many Malthusian predictions that have failed to come true since then. Still, Black needs a reason to sneer at people who shop at Costco and admire Ronald Reagan. The proper term for his attitude may be “voluntary despair.”
A different world from the dream of the 1960s. [p. 133]
Labels: ArtPic, Educ, Lib, Lit, MorPa, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:24 PM
This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM
Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:
I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.
[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]
By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.
Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.Labels: AgeMaj, BlaSla, Educ, Femi, Lib, Lit, OthBlo, PM, Sc, UCL
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:23 PM
Of course, discussion of human natural inequality will always be sensitive. It’s a hard fact to absorb that some people will never be as intelligent as some others, or as musically gifted, or as mathematically skilled. Americans in particular hate the notion that there is some natural limit on what people can and cannot achieve.Since Brin prefers “true science fiction” to space opera or superhero comics, I’ll say that my experience as a “gifted child” in the government school system—perhaps one of the “institutions” Brin would have us serve—reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins with this paragraph:
But there is a distinction between moral and political equality for all—the bedrock of a liberal society—and unavoidable natural inequalities between human beings and, in a few narrow areas, between social groups. This cannot and should not mean that any individual should be prejudged or denied opportunity. But it does mean that some imbalances in certain professions may not be entirely a function of prejudice or bigotry.
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.A related earlier post:
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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:57 AM
Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magaz
Where did those days go?