Men (7 page)

What's with all the fucking bunnies? It's one thing to sublimate aggression and violation into art (or even “art”), it's another to transform them into kitsch and cuddliness. All this cuteness about the bunnies and flowers is overdone, as though rebranding Galella as Mr. Quirky will be good for his legacy. I get that transforming a photo archive into an oeuvre means convincing us that there's a consciousness behind the work, one with depth and interesting contours, meaning Ron needs to be set apart from your usual hired-gun magazine photographer out on assignment. An oeuvre is the product of a sensibility, whereas the other thing's an industrial product. And art is worth a lot more, monetarily speaking, than celebrity journalism. Understood; we just don't need all this sensibility jammed down our throats.

It's not that I begrudge Galella whatever cultural respect anyone wants to confer on him. Ron learned photography in the Air Force, then went to a commercial art college, while I went the fine arts educational route, where we learned early on to nurture our obsessions as the path to cultural respect. It was never precisely stated but simply understood that your obsessions were your bread and butter, your ticket to eventual gallery shows, and, someday—hopefully before you were too old to enjoy it—reverential articles in
Artforum
and the attendant perks. The more obsessed you were, and the more committed to your weirdness, the more seriously people took you, especially the instructors.

I was doing some photography in those years too, though I never really mastered the technical stuff like exposure. For my final project in one class, following the tracks of my weirdness, I did something that in retrospect seems bizarre but proved to be the ticket to unimaginable success. I was living in San Francisco's Mission District, which also served as a landing strip for squadrons of the homeless and deinstitutionalized (though at the time they were still known as bums and winos), and somehow got the idea of asking one of these neighborhood habitués to come home with me and having him dress in my clothes, then photographing him for an installation project. There was an accompanying sound track I'd written and recorded on the theme of brief encounters and dashed romantic illusions. The piece was called
Brief Encounter.

I paid him of course, and he was pretty amiable about the whole thing, though looking back I don't know what I was thinking. I showed the piece to an influential visiting artist who was doing critiques of student work. She pronounced it unethical and reprehensible but also made a phone call that got me invited to a prestigious fellowship program in New York for budding artists—I'd passed the “Is it art?” test with flying colors apparently—which eventually led to a grad school fellowship, then another fellowship, and then a teaching job. Looking back, I guess the homeless guy was sort of my Jackie.

What's odd about it all isn't just the happenstance of how careers get off the ground, it's realizing how much the themes of that piece continued to haunt my work, even after I drifted away from the art world and started writing books. When I came across the script for the piece in a box of papers from those years, there were lines almost identical to some in a book about love I'd write twenty-five years later. Things turned out okay, I guess; still, I wonder whether Ron's choice of muse was a little more propitious than mine. What does it say about our respective inner lives that his was a famously gorgeous woman and mine a local wino?

But that visiting artist was right: we exploit our muses and it's not a two-way street. It's what Gast and Galella's other partisans resist acknowledging—they're eager enough to designate Ron an artist, yet want to sentimentalize away the aggression and egotism of art and make him cuddly. But it's not exactly evident that being an artist and being an upstanding guy were ever one and the same thing.

Some of the Jackie images, out of his many thousands, were included in a 2012 retrospective of Galella's work in Berlin—the exhibit is still traveling around Europe, speaking of artistic success—and in the sumptuously produced volume
Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire!
that accompanied the show. Replete with admiring essays by a bevy of German critics, it's a beautiful object in its own right: two hundred gilt-edged pages each the weight and thickness of shirt cardboard; 104 gorgeously printed black-and-white images with a running commentary on Galella's antics over the years. Though many of the original images were actually color, the lush black-and-white confers more artistic gravitas, which seems to be the idea. But that gilt-edged paper tries too hard—it's gravitas jammed down your throat.

Ron is determined that he and his muse will go down in history arm in arm: his website, which advertises a new collection called
Jackie: My Obsession
(available for $300, or in a limited edition for $2,000), asserts rather gracelessly that “our collective memory of Jackie would be non-existent if it weren't for Ron Galella.” But graceless or not, posterity is still calling, and Ron's there with the prints.

 

Juicers

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn't have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who've somehow contracted it. I can't remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it's just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don't notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant.

The affliction I'm speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic's career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it's more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people's foibles and failures at a moment's notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people's literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That's how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal
mots justes
. You'd better be right there with that verdict or you'd better just shut the fuck up.

But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I've written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it's like I'm shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I'm capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it's the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering.

And here's another confession while I'm at it—wow, it feels
good
to finally come clean about it all. It's that … once in a while, when I'm feeling especially jellylike, I've found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of
other
people's moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I'm supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It's not like I'd crib anyone's actual
sentences
(though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that's how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it's the tranquillity of their moral authority I'm hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about
New Republic
editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I'm in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

I suppose some will condemn me for taking these shortcuts. I know the whole idea is that your moral outrage springs from some authentic place deep within the fibers of your
own
superego, and you're not supposed to be enhancing your performance with artificial supplements cribbed from the Internet.

These remarks are prefatory to admitting that, having gone the mother's little helper route on occasion myself, I find it especially difficult to pass judgment on the increasingly long list of those suspected of, or admitting to, juicing their game in some way or another too. I wish I could work myself into a lather about it—I realize the consensus view is that juicing is a moral affront. They hold Senate hearings on it, for God's sake. But frankly, I'd rather juice than slip down in the rankings too. Like so many other ambition-wracked bastards, I'll do what I have to when it comes to staying competitive.

But men have it far worse when it comes to staying competitive at the moment. They've
lost
it, apparently: their edge is gone, they're lumpish, unemployed, and increasingly obsolete. Or so it's been reported, notably by Hanna Rosin in a much-lauded magazine article with the guillotine title
The End of Men
(later expanded into a bestselling book). “What if modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?” asks Rosin provocatively. Patriarchy may have been the organizing principle up until now, but the era of male dominance is finally over, largely because eighty percent of the jobs lost in the last recession were lost by men (prompting the jokey term “man-cession”) and, according to Rosin, men aren't bothering to retool sufficiently to find new ones. We all know about declines in traditionally male industries like construction and manufacturing (of course, capital crushing the labor movement was part of the job loss story, too). The good news for women is that the information economy doesn't care about your size and strength, which were men's sole advantages in the past. What's needed today is
social intelligence
. Also obedience, reliability, and “the ability to sit still and focus”—traits seen by employers as women's particular strengths. Which is why women are procuring the largest percentage of what few jobs remain, and are now, for the first time, a majority of the workforce.

One notes a certain mocking tone on Rosin's part when it comes to men getting thrown under the employment bus. They've lost, we've won: hooray for us! But maybe the triumphalism is a bit myopic, given that it was the ruthlessness of winner-take-all capitalism that chewed men up and spit them out when their services were no longer necessary (then the so-called jobless recovery kicked them in the nuts for good measure). Sure it's the new social reality, but is it really anything to crow about?

And maybe women have been a little
too
adaptable? Yes, the job market has flipped toward us; yes, we now hold more of the cards—except, unfortunately, when it comes to heterosexual women who want some kind of equal partner as a mate, or any mate at all. With men transformed into soft-bellied unemployable losers, more and more women are left high and dry in the romance and mating department. One option Rosin offers is for men to become the wives while women go to work. The problem with this scenario, as Rosin herself acknowledges (though only in passing), is that these new jobs women are procuring aren't especially high-paying. The dirty little economic secret of the last forty years is that the job market played women off against men to depress
everyone's
pay.
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Which is to say (though Rosin doesn't) that the real winners when it comes to the influx of women into the job market during this period have been our capitalist overlords. Still, why assume, as Rosin seems to, that it means the overlords should get to dictate the terms of the social bargain?

This is why I'd like to suggest—returning to the juicing epidemic and my own propensity for situational ethics—that playing by the rules of whatever industry currently employs you may once have been a premise with some moral force, but now it's just obtuse. That's how you get rooked. If women are more employable these days because bosses like how well we play by the rules, allow me a moment of appreciation for some good old-fashioned rule-breaking of the sort men have had more opportunities to perfect, as emblematized by the long parade of big-time juicers ritually hung out to dry in the media.

Take Major League Baseball star pitcher Roger Clemens (indicted for perjury and obstruction of Congress after his testimony denying steroid use), cyclist Lance Armstrong (stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping), the embattled A-Rod, or any other sports world miscreant of your choice. But I'm also thinking of juicers closer to my own professional neck of the woods, namely authors of factually dubious memoirs such as James Frey, publicly indicted for lying about his past in his 2003 bestselling memoir,
A Million Little Pieces
. To refresh your memory, Frey was the former junkie who produced a swaggering account of self-destruction, criminality, drug addiction and valiant recovery, though it turned out that he'd made up a lot of the best parts. This is supposedly verboten in the memoir-writing business, though the perimeters of the genre have been (as with doping, until recently) selectively observed at best. Or there's Mike Daisey, the political monologist who massaged some of the details in
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,
his theatrical piece about the gruesome labor conditions at Apple's Chinese manufacturing plants, saying (when exposed) that it was dramatic license.