Teaching the Gorillas

...He had to make sure that he was not him, and then he could go back to the wife and kid...

...76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 I t used to be quite a familiar quotation—although it is not, I believe, to be found in Bartlett's anymore...

...Absolutely nothing is given...

...It turns out Dad had abandoned Cal and his mother when he was a child and Cal had—not to compare notes, exactly—but to define him-self negatively in relation to his father...

...For men as for women, the committing of even the most egregiously wicked or foolish deeds, at least when it comes to sex and "love," might almost be seen as necessary to any understanding of why they should not be—if-they should not becommitted.The moral question is treated as an afterthought at best.What really matters is the characters' feelings and what they are induced to do because of them...

...You realize, when listening to these labels, how many great artists are out there and how had a Deutsche Grammophone recording can sound by cornparison.The definitive recording does not have to be Barenboim or Zuckerman...

...If I had to guess, I would say that the reason for the omission is that we wish nowadays to think better of the pioneering American feminist and transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, than as a butt for the wit of Thomas Carlyle who, when told that she had said, "I accept the universe, ' replied:"Gad...

...A good way to think of this ghastly show is as feminist pornography...

...He has to explain to her what's wrong with sleeping with other people...

...That Samantha must learn it the hard way—and that with-out any of the obviously really bad things that can happen to people who don't know it—strikes me as being too trivial a matter for treatment at feature length, a demonstration of the obvious...

...Could he not have imagined the pain that his leaving without a word cost his wife and child and not done it...

...Here there are no Gods of the Copybook Headings because there is no copybook...

...It's not that the show's sex does not involve the emotions: it's that it never goes beyond the emotions, either to the spiritual in one direction or to the practicalities of permanent commitment in the other.Where the men's fantasy ends with ejaculation and a cheery goodbye on both sides, the women's positively revels in the aches and pains of longing and rejection, as well as the joys of conquest in short, the whole panoply of emotions that sex minus commitment invariably generates...

...There are already some signs of new life, much bemoaned by the competing establishment, attacking the classical establishment from the periphery...

...after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return...

...What indeed...

...At the beginning of the film, Samantha breaks up with her boyfriend, Anthony (Jeramy Guillroy) after a party at which she leaves him to go upstairs for a casual coupling with another party-goer...

...For instance, instead of stocking 60,000 titles, an online retailer might offer custom-mixed CDs, or titles may just be "burnt-to-order...

...The classical repertoire can inspire deep feelings...

...Everything has to be learned from scratch...

...Of course the fantasies are very different.The men's has to do with naked writhing bodies, while the women's has to do with designer shoes and giggly, girly lunches...

...But the point about such people is that their splendidly awful personal authenticity, which is what is admirable about them (if anything is), is chosen...

...In the "real" world we would expect them to know, but real doesn't necessarily mean what is the case...

...See sidebar...

...There we will find the people who capitalized on the form's innate appeal (rather than its establishment fund-raising powers appeal) of this art form, using all the new media, technology and marketing avail-able to them...

...Once among the principles too obvious even to need copybook expression was the under-standing that sexual promiscuity was bad for men and much worse for women...

...Poor Anthony...

...It's as if we were seeing people constantly talking about how hungry they are while seated at a banquet and not eating...

...Presumably not...

...It isn't the music...

...I say, let the market evolve...

...The denial of our nature may be real enough, but it does not change that nature's own, deeper reality...

...It doesn't just make you wish you had gone to the bathroom during the intermission.While the recording industry may downsize or fragment first, we will some day read about the "renaissance of classical music...

...B. films that deal with the hardships and disappointments women endure while negotiating the "dating" scene...

...Also, vital artists such asYo-Yo Ma are using their appeal to draw in more listeners,"crossing over" and experimenting with new forms...

...It can be rebellious, soothing, tragic or thought-provoking...

...Just as obvious to men as the lesson of Some Body ought to be to women is the message of Bart Freundlich's World Traveler, in which Billy Crudup stars as Cal, a successful young architect who suddenly and for no apparent reason abandons his wife and young child to go on a solitary road trip across the country, stopping here and there to pick up friends and lovers—most notably the drunken fantasist Dulcie (Julianne Moore)—before finally fetching up at his dad's place in Oregon...

...Life, as we know, imitates art and the invention in some respects becomes the reality...

...Feminists, for all their lesbian selfrighteousness and anti-porn crusades, exploit promiscuity as revolutionaries exploit poverty.Yet in recruiting the victims of sexual "liberation," they promise a remedy for what they themselves, with their passionate advocacy of sexual autonomy, have caused...

...Well, duh...

...The next morning, Anthony says to her: "I wish you wouldn't party so hard like that, Sam . . . You gave the impression that anybody could be with you, so I think:What's so special about us...

...But it is hard to forget the terrifying conclusion of Kipling's poem, with its vision of the time when...

...Who doesn't know this...

...Was it a lack of imagination...

...Well, why do you mind...

...The latter approach creating demand—is riskier, but economically more explosive and certainly more fun...

...In other words, in pursuing the sort of Higher Thoughts that commonly occupy the minds of artists and philosophers, we may forget such basic and unalterable—also useful—data as that water wets and fire burns...

...Courtship was supposed to take place—and for the most part did so—on a continuum leading from casual acquaintance through deepening love and friendship to marriage, because marriage and its sexual consummation were seen as the culmination of that process, a terminus ad quern which alone could give meaning to everything leading up to it...

...Labels like Chandos and Hyperion put out records of less explored works and differentiate themselves by offering great production values, such as (terrific sound) audiophile-quality recording...

...In some sense they like being like this...

...The one thing we know for sure is that feminism can be compatible with almost anything, even porn (Camille Paglia is its great champion), but the one thing it never proposes is chastity and fidelity in marriage, which is what—so the Copybook Headings used to teach—man and woman were made for...

...But another reason why this once-famous retort may be fading in the folk memory is that Miss Fuller's proto-feminist assumption of alternative universes to be had for the asking or at least to be reinvented with each new ideological advance—is now one that we all share...

...In no area of human life has this forget-fulness been more apparent—at least in the nearly 40 years since the sexual revolution of the 1960s—than love and courtship...

...In movie after movie Lovely and Amazing, NeverAgain, Sunshine State, Cherish, Crush, to name just a few of the most recent examples the heroines sleep with men on little or no acquaintance and then wonder why they get hurt...

...You remember them...

...Smaller organizations are better at stimulating demand for newer concepts (although Sony broke the mold with the Walkman...

...In this sense, we are all Marxists now...

...Film has always been a pushover for propaganda, and what we see in so many of the ostensible entertainments committed to celluloid these days is a kind of sexual propaganda...

...It's both a charming and a morally responsible way for the film to end, but somewhere lurking in the back of our minds is the question: Why did Cal have to do this bad thing in order to understand that it is bad...

...But what they have in common is the belief—or I should say the fervent desire for belief in no-fault sex...

...Classical music isn't threatened by dramatic change in the pre-production of James Bowman is American editor of new CDs—only our present, half-hearted The Times Literary Supplement way of consuming it...

...After Amadeus, Mozart's symphonies were heard every-where...

...For me the problem with this movie was the need to believe that, even today, there is a sufficiently large body of opinion among thirtyish single women that it is a good idea to be sexually promiscuous, to get paralytically drunk and sleep with whomever can be bothered to take you home, to drink and do drugs and go to bars and parties for casual sex...

...she wonders...

...E K By James Bowman Teaching the Gorillas points out, the labels are stuck in the rut of issuing a 101't recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...

...The one thing that would obviate all these difficulties, the avoidance of casual or experimental sex with relative strangers, is the one thing that is never even considered...

...That women suffer in their fantasy is never a reason for questioning the basis of the fantasy.The suffering (and the various sorts of consolations it attracts, such as ice cream and shopping and girlfriends cooing over one another) is part of the dream...

...So far as sex and courtship are concerned, the various reports one gets from the "singles" scene seem to suggest that a world of female promiscuity is no longer just the stuff of male fantasy, though the fantasy element is not necessarily removed by making the fantasy come true...

...She'd better...

...absolutely everything has to be learned, argued over, justified...

...And what do you think...

...But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind...

...SICK IN THE CITY 0 ne example of the sexual ethos that is part reality and part propaganda is the HBO smash hit Sex in the City...

...Untune that string, as Shakespeare's Ulysses said about "degree" in Troilus and Cressida, and hark what discord follows...

...That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn...

...For the reality is that sex, particularly for women, inescapably implies some deeper attachment the denial of which, for ideological or other reasons, involves a tearing away of JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...

...That this is a common point of view among women would seem to be the mini-mum requirement for us to sympathize with one such as Miss Bennett's character, Samantha, who only learns from bitter experience that it is a bad idea to do these things...

...It's true that movies have for some time offered us portraits of sociopaths of one kind or another for whom we are meant to feel, if not sympathy exactly, at least a kind of admiration—like Hannibal Lecter, say, or Angelina Jolie's character in Girl, Interrupted...

...We were living in trees when they met us.They showed us each in turn...

...These two movies are admittedly extreme examples, but we see something similar over and over again, particularly in the plethora ofemotional tissue and a permanent scarring of the psyche...

...By that I mean a fantasy version of sex from a female point of view, just as regular porn is fantasy sex for men...

...Or at least all but a few irrelevant curmudgeons such as myself who are haunted by Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings...

...Barber's Adagio for Strings was made wildly popular by the movie Platoon, even showing up on the pop charts...

...Or watch what ugliness follows in a film like Some Body, directed by Henry Barrial from a screenplay he co-wrote with his star, Stephanie Bennett...

...But Samantha is just a ninny who thinks that playing the slut will make her happy and then finds that it won't...

...Classical repertoire often seeps into the mass consciousness...

...Well, maybe it was the copybooks that lied...

...We see the same organizational phenomenon here as else-where, namely that big companies are good at delivering products the marketplace tells you specifically it wants, in a survey or marketing study or box office results...

...and The American Spectator's movie critic...

...be deeply moving and is rewarding to the repeat listener...