LAST OF THE FAMOUS INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOYS

A small chance exists, just possibly, that I might be able to grasp and comprehend Post-Post Modern.

(I already missed -- completely misapprehended or misperceived -- Post-Modern.)

Listening to “Little Steven” Van Zandt’s radio show on his Sirius XM Underground Garage channel yesterday, the host carried on at very great length and approvingly about Hugh Hefner and his so-called “Playboy Philosophy.”  He read in his distinctive voice from Hef’s interminable hoary vanity writing tracts, which in olden days uselessly crowded out Playboy magazine’s pictorials, and were clearly  exercises in "boss's prerogative."

For as long as I can remember (dating back to the Modern era and certainly extending through so-called Post-Modernism), Hugh Hefner and Playboy were considered retardataire, sexist and beneath contempt by feminists and other cognoscenti, i.e., the uptight, supposedly enlightened cohort with whom I was expected and encouraged to peer-bond.

The stiffs had a point, of course.  Hugh Hefner was essentially an uber-successful pornographer -- never the most esteemed profession -- but a filth merchant with zeitgeist marketing imagination (for me, limited to the electronic revolving circular bed) luckily born into the right zeit.

But Steve Van Zandt, the most “politically correct” man ever to walk the earth, was definitively and actively embracing, extolling and promoting Hefnerism from a self-identified progressive/feminist point of view in March 2014. 

His relaxed demeanor and easy delivery clearly showed that he wasn’t  intending on making waves either, but because like television, radio is a passive audience medium, the artist/proprietor was simply palliating his audience with the latest market-tested idée donnée et reçue.

Little Steven, Hugh Hefner, unfunny comedian Bill Maher (a prefect, I believe, at the Playboy Mansion) and most recently the distasteful Duke University freshman porn star Belle "I'm a slut who needs to be punished" Knox.  A "Murderer's Row" of Post-Post Modern feminists?  

These slugs do not define or even relate to the concept of feminism for me, except to demonstrate further (i.e., Beyond Ban Bossy, beyond the ruins of N.O.W.) that the concept is either dead or bereft of any current meaning or significance.  (My idea of feminism was always absolute gender-blindness in terms of conferring professional or personal advantage based on sex, but I’ve been told off and rejected on that score so many times.)   

The Post-Post-Modern Worm has turned (and that isn't a disparaging remark about Little Steven’s personal appearance) and withered in the earth. 


Cognitive dissonance confronts The Hum (Link) and cognitive dissonance rules and reigns.

By the way, Little Steven runs a wonderful radio network and presents a very good show. 

Proof positive: "Playboy" by The Marvelettes (Link)

Mystery, Ingenuity and Bent Plywood (Gerald Summers' Armchair)

"As a designer of great creativity, Gerald Summers remains an enigma, yet the chair he designed is recognized as a major achievement in the development of the shell aesthetic.  As the first chair to be raised from a single sheet of plywood, its construction involved absolutely no assembly process.  This economical means of manufacture allied with the light weight of the product, which made it inexpensive to ship, fails to explain why great numbers of this chair were not produced in the 1930s." [1]

Gerald Summers (1899-1967)
Great Britain
Armchair, designed c. 1934
Manufactured by Makers of Simple Furniture, Ltd., London
Laminated birch
29 3/8 X 23 7/8 x 345 7/7 inches.
Collection: Victoria & Albert Museum, London 

"The production process actually required no heat or steam, it relied on thin pliable veneers being glued together and then held in place in a mould for eight hours. What’s also quite fascinating is that there was no wastage, the whole chair is made from one single piece of bent plywood from which all the component parts – seat, arms, feet – are constructed. This makes it groundbreaking for the time coupled with the fact that it uses moulds to create curved surfaces, something not really explored before. Thanks to this direction the shape of the chair is beautiful in its structure, the strength coming from 17 rectangular veneers, all stacked on top of each other with the grain of each running at right angles to the next. A striking exceptional form.


Obviously once I delved a bit deeper into Gerald Summers’ life, which there isn’t much information on anyway, it was intriguing to hear about his company “The Makers of Simple Furniture” which he started with his wife Majorie Amy Butcher in 1932. From the looks of it the workshop in London didn’t last long but through the 30′s they produced innovative designs which mainly focused on plywood and malleable materials. It makes sense why there are only about 120 of these chairs in the world since they only had a small production facility, it obviously took a lot of hard work and dedication to make one of these. They really are a work of art." [2]

NOTE:  Surveying Gerald Summers' beautiful furniture (all the other examples I found are also exceptional) while trying to find a comfortable sitting position in my deteriorating Staples-surplus fake Herman Miller office chair this morning, I was transported again back to earlier days of Modernism, imbued with the spirit of many-avenued adventure and the  core dual drivers of scientific optimism and theistic/atheistic mystery. All that fun seems to have dissipated in post-Modernism's vogue-ish (in the sense of Madonna's song title) neologisms and garble.  (Performativity anyone?)


I am intrigued to learn that Gerald Summers "remains an enigma" and intend to find out more about him and The Makers of Simple Furniture.  His portrait below spikes interest and instills confidence. 

Gerald Summers (1899-1967)

Timing Is Everything (Missed Connections)

        All of us have probably had occasion to feel or say that “it’s all a matter of timing, ” and fortunately we probably care in unequal degrees about the many things we may have “missed” through our inattention, miscues, missed cues, etc.

Peter Griffin, Example of "Post-Modern Architecture," Zhengzhou Green Fair, China

    I think I missed (am currently missing and will continue to miss) post-modernism.  The only thing the term has ever meant to me (that is to say, the image that forms in my mind whenever I hear it) is of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan becoming overfull (even after its porcine over-expansion), over-capacity, and art marketers desperately meeting in secret committees to coin a new term to promote and sell subsequent "art events" and so-called "art developments."  Branding, after all, is everything these days.

 

      Today, while engaging in research concerning the weird and deplorable "human microphone" (the people control device/exercise being used at contemporary political rallies), I learned that I really must have missed "queer theory"  too (although I knew of its existence) because it is apparently in the process of being supplanted by "post-queer theory" (skip to end of linked article).

 

Scully and Mulder.  For some reaon, Mulder is identified in this photo as the "Post-Modern Prometheus." 

        I can survive without regret both of these losses or deficiencies.  Generally I am able, when I need or want to, to understand complicated, even insanely prolix, pieces of literature or technical writing, provided their authors are sincerely trying to communicate, are making a palpable effort to make themselves understood. 

M.C. Escher, Relativity, 1953.  Modern? Post-Modern? None of the above?  Queer, certainly, and proudly so.

        I cannot accomplish this, however, nor can I abide reading self-involved, neologism and jargon-filled academic or pseudo-academic writing that clearly seeks to impress, but is nothing more than grotesque and distorted Fun House mirror fare.

         I sincerely believe that this kind of work is intentionally self-deceptive and that it also seeks to deceive readers based on the authors' contempt, anger and fear.

Post-modern Chinese surgical needles (Actual caption label)

Mrs. Danvers must fit in here somewhere.  The rest is silence, except for:

Look At Me, I'm Wonderful  &

Tent

(Bonzo Dog Band links from Keynsham, 1969)


[Please Note 3 links in Paragraph 3]