Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Sunday Herald-Times [Bloomington-Bedford, IN] The Rt. Hon. Birch Bayh, a man with no known psychiatric record, delivers the kind of April Fools' Day oratory now...
...As long as I can showpeople that, I'm happy," says Holmes, passing out another picture...
...He's even attracted to some of the French master's dubious politics...
...And as for the possibility of picketers showing up at the Ypsilanti theaters, recent focal point of persistent anti-pornography protests, Holmes smiles and says he'd probably just "shake their hands, buy them a Coke, and talk religion with them...
...Otherwise I'm just like any other guy, I even garden," he smiles, while smoking a cigarette...
...Obviously, the Dealmakers will make it harder and harder for people to create and maintain indivisible units, but, if you can manage one, consider it a progressive political force for as long as it lasts...
...Previous Cuban dictators, like Batista and Muchado, were despised, but criss-crossing the island by jeep, with Fidel at the wheel, is an experience not to be faked nor forgotten...
...Keeping that in mind, everything else is optional—this unit can be gay or straight, urban or suburban, childless or breeding, of any possible creed or persuasion or thought process, including married or self-committed...
...It is a different shock, perhaps more insidious, to realize that an achievement of the mind in the modern era can be lost as surely and totally as an achievement like the building of metaled highways was lost in the European Dark Ages...
...Branching out from being a sexual stuntman on camera, Holmes continues to practice what he maintains is his first love—writing—not performing...
...The people react to him more like a father figure than a head of state...
...Too many adult movies are not sensual enough, he complains, made not for women but for men...
...Which will still not change the basic reality, the one basic reality that has always existed: the only viable unit of defense in a fundamentally hostile world is two people who can achieve the ideal—best friends who f--k...
...I had no hangups doing it, although after 15 years of Sunday school and a very religious upbringing I worried a little about the morality of what I was doing...
...But he says he hates "porn...
...He shares Celine's contempt for the intelligentsia (for what Wolfe calls "tout le monde"), for distinguished writers, ecologists, psychiatrists, old and new leftists, liberals...
...The government must act within the boundaries of reason and humanity to see that persons, handicapped through no fault of their own, are able to pursue those goals...
...He has a touch of Celine's rage at mutability...
...After my upbringing I probably know just as much of the Bible as they do...and believe in God just as much as they do...
...Practice your breathing, you'll have a lot easier time," Holmes was casually imploring the obviously pregnant Mrs...
...But I just think they're confused...
...He feels it could have been better spent buying school books, or feeding hungry children...
...Sex is a normal part of life, it's not dirty or filthy...
...May 12, 1977]The Ann Arbor News The cultural Ann Arbor News interviews Mr...
...He feels he and other performers and producers of sexually-explicit materials are too often an easy target for public officials "trying to make political mileage," citing $6 million in taxpayer money spent prosecuting an obscenity case in Tennessee recently...
...It is one sort of shock that the "civilized" mask of a culture can fall, revealing men who possess wristwatches and radios but who are prepared to send their neighbors to a gas chamber...
...He (God) probably giggles a lot at all of our hangups...
...August 2, 1977] The New York Review of Books Midst a long and tortured polemic on the wonders of Chairman Mao's vast torture chamber, Prof...
...If it's a boy, they said, they're going to name him John...
...He takes to the road like an eager campaigner...
...Until I started getting hundreds of letters from people saying I'd helped them, saved their marriage, and improved their sex lives," Holmes explains...
...Wherever he stopped, there was pandemonium, as crowds gathered around to ask questions, register complaints or just beam...
...Make sure you send me a picture of your baby," Holmes shouts out after Mr...
...Crum, standing beneath several Holmes nude publicity photos...
...John (Johnny Wadd) Holmes, the talented star of theatre pornographique, and discovers a humanitarian, adept in the philosophical arcana of the modern American Enlightenment—verily, a candidate for high office in the League of Women Voters: "I'm just a human being," he insists while shaking hands with such loyal fans as Rick and Pat Crum who came all the way from suburban Detroit to see Holmes "in the flesh...
...August 1977] 42 The American Spectator December 1977...
...But the kids books are selling under a different name...
...They're giving the industry a bad name," he snaps...
...May 12, 1977] The Boston Globe The analytical powers of Senator Frank Church, fresh from being taken for a ride by one of the world's second-rate butchers: It must be a shared pride in these accomplishments that accounts for Fidel Castro's unquestionable popularity...
...Now he enjoys performing sex acts...
...Freedom means knocking down barriers and roadblocks to opportunity....Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is what Americans are all about...
...Robert Lipsyte, noted writer and widely respected lover: Once we're all pretty much the same, we can be tracked toward interchangeable job functions and mass spirituality as groups, and toward highly individualized clothing, amusements and styles of living as persons...
...Crum...
...In their faces, I could not detect a trace of fear...
...But W olfe ' s anger, like his malice, is free-floating--an aimless violence without specific cause or target...
...Neal Ascherson bawls incontinently over one of history's hitherto less accessible tragedies: There's little in history more depressing than the collapse of the first wave of feminism after about 1820...
...Jody Powell, White House press secretary and keeper of the presidential joke: I think it is a tremendous achievement that Jody, who has to have an hour or hour and a half every day, sometimes answering unanticipated questions, has had his statements and my positions confirmed...
...People send their kids to watch that stuff, it's disgusting...
...John K. Fairbank proffers one of those reason-over-idealism formulas so urbanely employed by liberal sophisticates upon encountering a large, menacing, left-wing totalitarianism that, frankly, scares hell out of them...
...He obeys the signal lights, jokes with the pedestrians crossing at the intersections, and waves amiably to the people who call out to him as he passes by...
...So are adult films with sadomasochism and killing, that's garbage too," he says...
...December 26, 1976] The New York Times Our President speaks, with his usual clarity, on the achievements of Mr...
...I've straightened out a lot of people's lives...
...To him those are the movies starring a John Wayne or a Steve McQueen where people get killed and there's "blood and guts everywhere, with gallons of stage blood spewed all over...
...I try to make my movies sensual and erotic," he adds, noting he's turned down scripts calling for abusing people and would "turn in those in the industry" exploiting children in sexually explicit movies...
...September 4, 1977] Mother Jones The esoteric and hopeful excogitations of Mr...
...He's inked over 17 television scripts and at least five "children's classics," as he calls them...
...But if people are making love in a beautiful way, that's not porn, that's beauty...
...In dealing with all other despotisms, e.g., Chile, the idealism-over-reason model is preferred: The fact is that the human rights concept, though enshrined in a self-styled universal declaration, is culture-bound...
...Birch Bayh, a man with no known psychiatric record, delivers the kind of April Fools' Day oratory now so characteristic of the United States Senate: The true test of meeting our potential is how much money we're willing to spend on programs for the handicapped....It has been frustrating to have to bring some members of the committee (the Senate Appropriations Committee] screaming and kicking into the light age and out of the dark age....Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose...
...and Mrs...
...October 23, 1977] The New York Review of Books A despondent Dr...
...October 23, 1977] New York Times Book Review Reflecting on the troubling case of author Tom Wolfe, the only apt comparison is with Celine, the mad French Nazi, according to authoritative reviewer Thomas B. Hess, whose namesake languishes even now in Spandau Prison: He seems as snug as a bug in Celine's old clothes...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
