shower tourism

Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses, and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this micro-world, which consists of using the showers of others – of friends or family with whom one is staying, or who are staying with one. Both aspects are noteworthy – tourism is, in this sense, a transitive property, since if you have guests staying with you, your quarters are, for the length of the stay, going to be somewhat alien to you. In other words, the tourist is a catalytic creature at whose touch the familiar becomes a tourist site. It is this logico-magical property that makes for the tragedy of tourism, as the tourist searches for an authenticity which his very presence destroys.

Myself, I have stayed with many a host. I have entered naked into many a tiled domain in apartment and house,  and, testing the water from the shower head or wand, surveyed the various unguents stored there. Sometimes, of course, I have entered carrying my own; sometimes, I confess, I have “borrowed” alien creams, soaps, shampoos and the like. This, you will say, is pretty un-guestly. It is a sort of vice. But it is also part of our everyday novel-writing – since we all engage in living through, or parasiting, other characters now and then. The grocery clerk surveys the line and sees Mrs. X and Mr. Y and that girl who always comes in and buys one item and the old woman who makes you go through endless rolls of curly edged coupons, the auto saleman guesses at the libido of the 20 year old guy, etc., etc. The self comes and goes, it doesn’t preceed self-interest so much as it follows it, becoming at worst a ghostly selfishness, and at best a moral worry.

So it is with conditioners. As we know from Kracauer and Benjamin, the houses and apartments we live in are potentially only repositories of clues for the classic detective. The doilies in the living room may be bought for decorative reasons, but ultimately they serve to soak up the blood from the murder victim,  along with the velvety pillow. The shower contains – like the computer and its files – a veritable history of the owner of the shower for those with the eyes to see. Are the hair products bought from the low end? Are they cheap and general? Or are they bought from the high end, and are they expensive and specialized? Is the language on them, by any chance, French? Or English? Do the shower gels refer to milk? To almonds? To glowing skin?

The shower process itself nourishes speculation. We stand under the fierce beating down of warm drops and we think. We ponder the day, the tasks. We make up verses. We make up grocery lists. There are, of course, people who simply shower to get clean. But as every tv ad for shampoo or soap makes clear, cleaning is secondary to the ecstasy of soaping and rinsing, to swinging, fresh hair, to sparkling eyes, to the smell that film is just on the edge of throwing at you if it could – the whole transcends its tawdry utilitarian purpose as much as advertisement’s speedy expensive car transcends that mere metal carapace stuck in traffic jams and hustled into parking lots. Advertisement has a way of changing the purposes of the acts of everyday life. In the case of the shower, it has cinematized our experience.

There is a reason that some sing in the shower.

a magisterial sigh

Ah, the great magisterial sighs of the 19^th century bigwigs! One way to explain the cultural critique in Nietzsche is his exasperation with the high culture of mandarin resignation. It is the side of Nietzsche that can be summed up by the theory of the eternal return (a theory that leads inevitably to parody, or even to parody as the very principle of worldmaking) or by a phrase that never occurs in the papers of that son of a Lutheran pastor: fuck you!

Jules Renan was a great magisterial sigher. He had the highest reputation in the 19^th century. Reviewing his “Reminiscences of Childhood and Youth”, Henry James wrote, Jamesianly: “It is not enough to say of him that he has the courage of his opinions: for that, after all, is a comparatively frequent virtue. He has the resignation; he has the indifference; he has, above all, the good humor.“

There is something to this. To be indifferent to your opinions is as comparatively rare as it is frequent to have the courage of them. One could even ask why one should form opinions at all if we are going to be indifferent to them.  Renan, being a classicist, might reply to that question by pointing to Parmenides poem about Being, a poem in which the great struggle between Night and Light is, as well, a non-struggle, in as much as they cannot mix at all, but only separate. This is not only the struggle between becoming and being, but the struggle between believing and knowing. The latter is a utopia, an aporia, given that the forms or ideas can never mix with that of which they are forms. Knowledge, then, requires a certain exhaustion. We are finally brought to the variable, which no content can fix. This can be viewed as an epistemological tragedy, or… a historical farce.

The back and forth of farce is what Renan opts for. Hence in the introduction to his Reminiscences, he basically signs the death warrant for the world as he has known it:

“The world is marching towards a kind of Americanism, which would all our refined ideas, but which, once the present crisis is over, could well be no worse than the old order for the only thing that counts, which is to say, the franchisement and progress of the human spirit. A society where personal distinction has little price, where talent and intelligence have no official recognition, where high function does not ennoble, where politics becomes the job of classless men and persons of the lowest order, where the rewards of life go, by preference, to the intrigue, vulgarity and charlatanism that cultivates the art of the advertisement, to the rascality of those who find ways to squeeze the Penal Code; such a society, I say, does not please us.”

But then, of course, comes the other hand, that hand that, as though driven by some neurological defect, comes up and slaps its owner’s face. For Renan reviews all the “old orders” he or his parents have lived in, and found them all to come up short, to be full of scurrility, vulgar powerbrokers, and heartbreaking obstacles to the enfranchised imagination. So don’t worry, old man. The worst is yet to come – but it is always yet to come. The worst is behind us – but it is also ahead of us. This is positivism inverted, and it has a certain odd comfort to it. But it is a high price to pay for indifference to one’s opinions.

James notices this too, and makes a reply to Renan that also has its place in some impossible dialogue between Parmenides and Protagoras (who, not by coincidence, name two of Plato’s dialogues): “He [Renan] makes the remark that in his opinion less importance will be attached to talent as the world goes on; what we shall care for will be simply truth. This declaration is singular in many ways, among others in this: that it appears to overlook the fact that one of the great uses of talent will aways be to discover truth and present it; and that, being an eminently personal thing, and therefore susceptible of great variety, it can hardly fail to be included in the estimate that the world will continue to make of persons.”

  

non-disclosure agreements: the trick the mafia missed

In Leopoldo Sciascia’s crime novels, there are always two solutions. One is the true solution, patiently assembled by the inspector or researcher (who either has too much integrity to be allowed to function after a certain point, or has too much naivete to realize that he is putting himself in mortal danger), and the other is the solution most convenient to the representatives of the State – the same State whose laws define the crime that is supposedly being punished.

Such was and is Italy, from the 60s to the 90s. The genius of American corruption is elsewhere. America is a country of laws, so corruption first operates by unmaking the law to suit the perpetrators. It allows such things as non-disclosure agreements, for instance. For a certain sum of money, the perpetrators can either not be tried at all or their trials can’t be accessed.

It would seem, at first glance, that such things are counter to any principle of the legal order. To allow a crime to be hidden by a non-disclosure agreement is logically equivalent to allowing a crime to be perpetrated outside of the law. If we protect a rapist from the disclosure of the rape, or we protect a pharmaceutical company from the consequences of malpractice so severe that thousands die of it every year and hundreds of thousands are addicted, we are doing nothing different from allowing people to be lynched for crimes they are merely accused of.  Interestingly, what ties the Weinstein accusations to the Sackler family exposes recently paraded in two magazines is that in both cases, the outlines of what happened are obscured by court order. The law itself is intent, here, on hiding the possibility of crime.

It is worth asking how a non-disclosure agreement, which might have a use in protecting Intellectual Property, became the go-to instrument for lawyers protecting monied criminals. That history leads us back to the eternal struggle between capital and labor. At the beginning of the twentieth century, progressive legislation made it necessary for employers to disclose to their laborers facts pertinent to the particular dangers to health faced by the laborer from the materials he or she dealt with. However, the courts saved capitalism by making that disclosure an agreement, such that the laborer couldn’t hold the employer liable. From this, it was a hop, skip, and a social cost to the establishment of Workers Insurance schemes mounted by the state (which, in this as through its entire history, was not the enemy but the collaborator of Capital). At the same time, it became apparent that the products of companies could be hazardous – accidentally or for a purpose – and a requirement to disclose those dangers was incorporated in the law as well. Upon this base of law was built – during the brief spring of democratization that swept the U.S. in the sixties and seventies – a whole movement for consumer rights. At that time, many ‘right to know” laws were passed. Where employees were formerly not told that, for instance, the asbestos they are mining will kill them horribly, or even where they were informed tardily, they could be sued. In fact, in any real history of the U.S., the suing of John Mandeville Asbestos should take a larger space than it is given, for that suit shocked the business establishment. The counter-revolution had many sources, but one of them was definitely the nightmarish idea that a company could make a fair profit while killing its employees with chronic diseases and then, then, the fuckers would take that profit back to pay for a lot of slacker hospital time. The very idea made officials in the Reagan whitehouse – and in neo-lib think tanks advising the Dems – feel so bad.

One of the landmarks in the counter-revolution against labor was an obscure court decision, Chrysler Corporation vs. Brown. The court held there that the “Trade Secrets Act” of 1905 trumped the FOIA laws that had been set up in the sixties. That a third party would have any access to government files concerning Chrysler’s discriminatory hiring practices from documents submitted by Chrysler was outrageous. An informed population is a population that is difficult to govern. And imagine the nightmare of everybody knowing Chrysler’s business?

The muffled roar of Chrysler vs. Brown was, of course, heard by those paid to hear such things: corporate lawyers. The charge was on.

How the non-disclosure agreement extended from trade secrets to secrets of life and death, of rape and pillage, is wrapped up with another strand of the story of the cold war. For it was the security state that innovated in using the NDA as a powerful tool to keep things out of court.

In 1984, for instance, the Reagan administration was forced to form a commission to investigate the murder of four nuns in El Salvador. The nuns were lefties, and their murder was planned and executed, it was suspected, by allies, to say the least, of the Americans. The study was completed, and turned into the State department, which promptly branded it top secret.

The families of the nuns protested. This protest was heard. The administration then took a compromise position. The family members could see the report, as long as they signed an NDA that pledged them to never disclose the information in the report under any circumstances as long as they shall live without the permission of the State Department.

Thus, at one neat stroke, a crime could be hidden beneath an agreement.

I say a crime. But what is a crime? The United States is a very nominalist culture. To attack racism, for instance, you attack racist labels. Once the labels are forbidden, voila, racism is solved. Similarly, rape or murder might be a crime. Or it might not! An NDA is a nice way of suspending that label forever. Like Schrodinger’s cat, it is concealed from the observer, and is therefore in a perpetual middle state, the state of Mu, to use the Zen term (no doubt incorrectly).

What the CIA and FBI get away with doing will soon be standard practice for the rich and famous – or simply the rich. Expanding the trade secret sphere was relatively easy in an age in which publicity had seamlessly merged into product production. Hence it becomes common that film companies have all workers sign a NDA to block release of information about, say, the behavior of the actors on the film. Creep creep creep, its mission creep for creeps, time. The NDA becomes an instrument of corruption that is all above board and tucked in. And so we get to our current epoch, where thousands die and the company that sold them their pills continues to not only profit, but ultimately block information about how they did it; where the Sackler name adorns multitudes of buildings, the result of donations that flowed from the money made by Oxycontin; where thousands of women are subject to sexual harassment up to and including rape, and the Weinsteins roam the landscape.

I wonder as I wander how long such things can go on. They have gone on almost my entire life. The man in the iron mask used to be an emblem of unaccountable power. Now, he’s your everyman. Let’s marvel that Rosie McGowan is so bound legally that she can be sued by Harvey Weinstein if she describes in any detail what he did to her in his hotel room in 1997, and the accuser of Bill O’Reilly is bound to anonymity forever as a result of her settlement. Marvel that Purdue Pharmaceuticals is at the moment claiming that the documents it was forced to release to Oregon when the state sued them for abusive oxycontin pill pushing are all a trade secret, and can’t be disclosed to anybody else. Marvel that with the far right justices who rule the court system, probably Purdue will win in the end. Marvel that the Mafia missed a big trick.

from Koestler to Weinstein: men behaving "badly"

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read Elmore leonard or Leopoldo Sciascia, not the papers, to find out how things work

Trust the great crime writers. It was somewhere in one of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit novels, one set in the early eighties, that one crook complains to the other that now, legit businesses have taken up the Mafia style. Hardly make a dishonest living anymore.
In reality, we know that the line between mafias and establishments are thin, thin. I’m on vacation in Montpellier, and I’m rereading Scascia, my fave crime novelist, or political crime novelist, and cross referencing with Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which was written when Andreotti was on trial and there was a vivid sense of the overlap between the establishment and the mafias in Italy.
I’m also crossreferencing the spate of stories, in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-family-that-built-an-empire… and Esquire, about the Sackler family. Philanthropists, aesthetes, and the peeps responsible for about 17,000 oxycontin overdose deaths per annum. Although, like the mafia, the Sacklers learned early to put their name on other things besides their drugs. The Sacklers are post-mafia, representative of a whole new era in deregulation, when there are no rules, and no regulatory agencies that can’t be legally bribed. Bribery, you see, is a temporal thing. Give a regulatory hundreds of thousands before he makes a decision, and it is a crime. Give him a job with your organization two years after he made a decision in your favor, and everything is fine, fine fine.
These new rules took the place of the old rules, the New Deal – Great Society America, where the mafias were all about extorting and defrauding trade unions. The old Vegas times. There were actually consequences for corporate malfeasance. Not always, but often enough. Even in the early Bush era, there was the Enron moment, when they actually put some upper management people away. In the 80s that happened too. We remember Ivan Boesky, fondly.
But the general ethos from George W. to Obama to Trump is: there are no rules for the powerful.
No banker goes to jail nowadays. And putting in jail a man who pushed oxycontin to the point that rural America is a trail of oxy and heroin burnouts ignores the fact that he is a billionaire. So there is no chance whatsoever that he will be deprived of the merest tuppence. It’s America, Jake.
Still, the new world order of impunity can’t last forever. It can break, as it did in Italy – and lead to something worse.
Thus, I like reading Sciascia, who lived through this, and saw through this, and tried to keep his sanity. Although, as Robb points out, Sciascia was never pessimistic enough.
Pessimism is your friend.

vista and corner

The American eye expects a vista. We enter the Walmarts, the Target, the Walgreens, the mega-grocery store, and we expect to see the commodities arrayed there like the corn in Oklahoma fields, spread out, flat. We expect the great plains. When we come in, when we look at the goods extending as far as we can see, under one roof, we are pioneers, we are … we are that mythical creature from economics, the sovereign consumer. We see the checkout counter on one side, and we see the staff in their designated shirts doing inventory. We don’t think of that staff as advisors, fellows who have solved our consumer problems, but as walking signposts, to whom we can ask directions.

In France, on the other hand, what confronts us are corners.

Vistas abhor a corner.

Yesterday we went shopping for Adam’s birthday. We have incautiously invited his class to a party, tomorrow, in the park, and  the class responded with a large yes. So now it was time to get little gift bags together, as well as getting Adam his gifts. So we headed to Village JoueClub, which is located in the Passage des Princes, near the Grand Magasins. The Passage turned out to be one of those beautiful 19^th century constructs that Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists raved about. The Village JC occupied the whole of it. But here’s the deal – the store was split into several stores, organized by several themes – outdoor games, toys for children under three, etc. – and each of these shops was typically French. That is, at no point were you given the Vista. Rather, you would enter near the counter, and some path would trickle back to a room that would then shoot away at a right or left angle. You would wander among these shelves with the curiosity of city walkers scanning the display windows rather than with the arrow like intentness of pioneers harvesting the prairie.

Against the American vista, the French pit the atelier, the artisan’s shop. To an American, it is a little weird. It feels more like a professional workspace, like a doctor’s office. In a doctor’s office, there are little rooms that seem to branch off from corridors that are doored off from the waiting room. The space is all about being a “patient” – that is, being patient. Patient is a big French word – when you stick your credit card into the machine for such, the screen will tell you to patientez. To bear up, to bear suffering, to endure – such are the etymological roots. It is not something American machines tell you.

Yet, as we all know, the sovereign consumer is a joke, a cardboard king in a kingdom of parity products, cheaply manufactured, quickly running to shabby. The distance from the atelier of manufacture is naturalized in the vista, the false vista, of all those commodities like plants.

But to continue with our story – so we had a great time buying toys at the Village JC. It overflows with trinkets and unfamiliar games, and it confines the legos, blessedly, to one shop. I’m crossing my fingers for the weather to be good tomorrow. I want Adam to be pleased.

neo-antiquarianism

Who wants yesterday’s papers, the Rolling stones sang a long time ago. Then they became yesterday’s papers. And so will all of us.  

However, I’m doubtful about this, as about all other nuggets of Mick Jagger’s wisdom. Myself, I find yesterday’s papers much more interesting than today’s.

One of the great things about the internet – or no, let me go to 11, here, mes amis – the greatest thing about the internet is that it makes archives so instantly available to us. The prestige of the archive is, in part, derived from the fact that it is inaccessible. Archives conjure up the secret police. In fact, after revolutionary acts – such as the storming of the Bastille – everybody wanted to get their hands on the files of the Parisian police. But it wasn’t until late in the 19^th century that a scholar, Francois Ravaisson, put them in order.  And now they are available on Gallica and archives.org and one can read the testimony of a prostitute named Mlle. July about her whipping sessions with the philosopher Helvetius. 

Of course, this may or may not have been true.  To rely on what the police collect and put in an archive for a factual picture of the world is like relying on the astrology column for proof that the General theory of relativity is valid.

But it is interesting.

 Newspapers, with their tabloid flights and their bourgeois judgments, are also filled with interesting items that may be true, or may be false, or end up somewhere in the wasteland between. But their age gives them a certain interest, if you have that cast of mind, that reading today’s papers lack. Sure, if you want to know what President Dumbass said at his press conference yesterday, then go ahead and read today’s Times. Myself, I think what President Dumbass said at his press conference will be much more interesting fifty years from now. It will have the interest of a mystery. Time will lengthen it – how did such a person become president? This is not, really, a question the news will answer.  It can only pose it. The news can tell you about the weather, but it is not very good at telling you about the climate.

Murders, kidnappings, and high end robberies are very good news items to mull over as time goes by. The newspapers of the 20s and 30s were much more unbuckled about crimes – they were all on the tabloid trail. The front pages  Plus, it was an incredible era of crime.

And, not least, the journalistic trade had not yet been absorbed by the journalistic major. Rather, newsmen very often came up from the street. They came at their stories roughly – pretty much the way their readers read them. The front pages were blessedly short of thumbsucker pieces telling us the meaning of it all. Consequently, front pages tended to look like chocolate boxes full of horrors. This, for instance, is a list of the headlines on the front page of the Madera Tribune, a paper that served the Fresno region in California, for December 31, 1937:

CHINESE PLAN GREAT OFFENSE – Natives Flee from Tsingtao

BLASTS ECHO AS PROPERTY OF JAP RAZED – Vigilante Group Organizes to Prevent Lootings by Chinese

MYSTERY OF LITTLE BOAT TOLD POLICE – Adventurer who Sought to Turn Pirate is Blamed for Death of Two

ATTACK ON WEALTH IS AWAITED

LOYALISTS ARE TRUSTING FATE TO AMERICANS – Volunteer Battalions Are Rushed to Front Lines to Battle Rebels

Hollywood Celebrities Routed in Raid Exclusive Night Club

Navy Mail Plane Crashes Into Bay

WILDWOOD MAN IS HELD FOR THREAT

Etc.

This was a paper to come home to. This is what fascinated millions of eyeballs in the evening, after swatting the kids and going to the icebox for a cold one. I’ve instanced this particular paper because one of the stories – about the “Mystery of the Little Boat” – is about a crime that illustrates the hop, skip, jump way secret histories – like crazy jigsaw puzzles – can amass on the Web. The little boat was an “ill-fated yacht” named Aafje, which was owned by a wealthy Santa Barbara “sportsman”, Dwight L. Faulding. Faulding’s boat was chartered by a man named Jack Morgan, who came aboard with his pregnant, 17 year old wife and a nurse. Also aboard was a photographer who often sailed with Faulding and a guy named George Sternack, described as a “guest”. It turns out that Jack Morgan, having absorbed a number of gangster movies, had decided to make the Aafje into his pirate boat, and to that end he plugged Faulding and threw him into the sea, and terrorized the rest of the passengers.

“It had been Morgan's'plan, since he had no money, to steal his provisions at ports that he passed, or

take them by force as the occasion arose, federal men believed. Apparently he was making foi some south sea island where his wife could give birth to their child with the nurse in attendance.”

Morgan’s plan ended abruptly with Morgan, when Horne and Sernack snuck up behind him and one of them bashed in his head with a marlin spike. Then they threw his body in the drink, and sewed an SOS message to their sails. They drifted and starved, until the SOS was spotted by a plane and the coast card cruiser, Perseus, took them in tow.

The Aafje is an interesting craft to track. I am not the only pursuer, here – others have been on the trail, due to the yacht’s later association with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Some information I have gathered comes from websites devoted to that LSD cult.

After the Faulding murder, the yacht was up for sale. Errol Flynn announced he was buying it, on account of the story of Crazy Jack Morgan. But apparently he did not. Instead, it ended up in the hands of Bob and Evelyn Gaylord, who made a troubled voyage in it in the early sixties. Going from Hawaii to California, they were blown wildly off course and ended up near the Aleutian islands, from whence they limped down the West Coast and docked in San Francisco. The boat was sold at some point to a man named Travis Ashbrook, and here it again enters the annals of crime. Travis Ashbrook was a famous surfer; he was also a famous head. Many of the star surfers on the West Coast were attracted to drugs and selling drugs, and, in true sixties fashion, they formed a drug commune that they named The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Ashbrook was an adventurer. He went to Afghanistan in the mid sixties and came back with a load of hashish to die for. Many eventually did. It was the beginning of the Hippie road through Central and Southeast Asia.

In the late sixties, early seventies, Ashbrook bought the Aafje. In Orange Sunshine, Nicholas Shou’s books about the Brotherhood, it is stated that Ashbrook knew about Crazy Jack Morgan, which was one of the attractions of the boat. However, Ashbrook didn’t quite get the point of the story: don’t try to navigate a boat in the Pacific if you don’t know how to navigate a boat. The crew that Ashbrook put together – mostly ex surfers and heads - got lost, along with its tons of Sinaloa marijuana, for weeks on its maiden voyage out of Manzanilla. It finally did, however, make it to Maui, and from the seeds that they brought, they started growing ever more powerful Hawaiian pot – Maui Wowee, famous in song and old codgers’ stories.

Such is only one story, culled by chance from yesterday’s papers. The intersection of the newspaper and the internet, of the ambiguous collection of fact and scoop and the millions of witnesses testifying in blogs and listservs endless has not really been explored, or even scoped out, yet. It is a new form of archive. I don’t even have a name for it. Neo-antiquitarianism?