Wayne Koestenbaum
Philosophy in the Shower (a playlet for Walter Pfeiffer)
characters: P (a photographer) C (a critic)
P: Long ago I photographed a man’s mouth.
C: I saw that photo, next to a red feather, in a scrapbook.
P: Who gave you permission to see my scrapbook?
C: I specialize in the surreptitious.
P: Your beauty has a caustic edge.
C: I’m no longer young, but I’m caustic.
P: We respect the law of genre.
C: Is youth a genre? Is caustic a genre?
P: No, but scrapbook is a genre.
C: Like Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas?
P: Or like Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.”
C: Please translate disco hyperbole into caustic understatement.
P: My photographs are salted by a hyperbole cut down to size by a rigor that I usually baptize as “formalism.”
C: Is formalism what happens when subject matter gets shoved out the window?
P: Formalism is the experience of knocking on Ingrid Caven’s door and discovering that it’s Romy Schneider’s door.
C: Futurity’s door? Interchangeability’s door?
P: Even children love to paint.
C: Even children like to play dress-up.
P: The fashion model, like the slow movement in a sonata, rotates its adjudications, as if an art magazine were to become an automat.
C: The 1970s were a gay decade.
P: The 1980s were much less of a gay decade.
C: We stepped backward into stultification.
P: We placed hedonism, like a tepid casserole, on a hot plate?
C: No. We stewed our desires in a stolid Crock-Pot, but the meat dried out.
P: Put it this way. A naked man is sitting on a tractor’s axle. Butt and axle have an uncanny friendship.
C: In your hands, male nudity is always incongruous.
P: Better incongruity than kitsch. Kittens are kitsch.
C: I’m not afraid of kitsch. Must we declare it the enemy?
P: I’d like to take a shower now.
C: May I join you?
P: Here’s the soap. You’re squinting.
C: We squint in the shower to avoid injury.
P: Use the towel with the map of Switzerland on it.
C: That reminds me of Shelley Winters. You took a photograph of a woman who looked like Shelley Winters.
P: She was chomping on a chop and wearing a fur coat.
C: Incongruity makes a photograph sing.
P: It’s nice sitting next to you on this loveseat, now that we’ve showered. Our side-by-side status— like the Sondheim song—is a lesson in aesthetics.
C: Like clothed butts on the left-hand page, and unclothed butts on the right-hand page.
P: Butts are themselves a lesson in aesthetics.
C: Elementary juxtaposition, as practiced by buttocks and scrapbooks.
P: No single photograph can relay a message untouched by a neighboring vibe.
C: Cocteau’s films—Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Blood of a Poet—squeeze narcissism’s sponge. You and I collect the adulatory droplets.
P: The shock of a fabular temperature—a laconic surrealism—lifts us from our ordinary, doomed relation to our own bodies.
C: As if an exit sign had begun to flash: this way out of the paradox of existence!
P: But when we approach the exit door, we see that the door is a gag, like a whoopee cushion, emitting the noises accompanying an exit but without the liberation that actual egress offers.
C: Can’t we leave liberation out of this discussion?
P: Photography is sometimes a form of protest. Sometimes of compliance. Sometimes both at once.
C: I dare you to measure the ratio of protest to compliance in any particular photo.
P: A photograph makes me feel on fire.
C: Erotic fire? Transformational fire?
P: The fire of cordial sameness.
C: As when the yellow drapes are the same fabric as the yellow tablecloth?
P: When all the decor elements match, space is flattened and forced to sing.
C: We’re singing that aria right now.
P: Our aria is not merely expressionist, though the pathetic fallacy underlies any art that erases the distinction between the wanderer’s psyche and the mirroring landscape.
C: Refresh my memory of the pathetic fallacy.
P: It’s when we believe that clouds, mountains, and lakes reflect our fugitive moods.
C: The subjects of your photographs avoid melancholy.
P: Warhol’s grids, in the 1960s, helped us remove deep space from consideration.
C: Space catalyzes melancholy?
P: When a photograph flattens space, depression vanishes.
C: In Kandinsky’s improvisations, the moving constellations convert space into a transactional, many-dimensioned proposition, changing orientation with each heartbeat.
P: If I photograph a model wearing a garment but don’t identify its designer, does the image still qualify as a fashion photograph?
C: No. “Fashion” is a golem, sighted in a nightmare.
P: Thus a photograph shirks its economic context.
C: The material stain persists.
P: If you’re looking at my photos online, are they no longer material?
C: As material as Mario Montez, or the banana that Warhol filmed Mario eating.
P: When a woman looks like Mario Montez, what happens next in the story?
C: What happens to your memory of Mario Montez? What happens to the woman who looks like Mario? What happens to you?
P: I call that process of drift and dissolution “the Bobby Kennedy effect.”
C: Because the name “Bobby Kennedy” appears in one of your scrapbooks?
P: Next to a nude and a shipwreck.
C: Naufrage, as we say in Paris.
P: Naufrage of scrapbook. Naufrage of nude. Naufrage of Bobby Kennedy. Naufrage of the namable.
C: The young men in your photographs: Do we call them boys? Does boy identity last for decades?
P: We can’t put a stop to the game of Twister that masculinity plays.
C: Do you mean that the word “boy” is just the giggle experienced en route to the contortionist fête?
P: A hunky fête solemnized in the photograph of the boy’s upturned face.
C: Note that his face occupies the book’s gutter.
P: We know that crevice.
C: We have spent our career investigating it.
P: The crack, where certainty divides in half.
C: Broken arm in a plaster-of-paris cast doesn’t contradict the Teen Beat straightforwardness of the young man’s B-movie gaze.
P: His talent flourishes within B-movie brokenness.
C: His talent is a tectonic plate and a placid lake.
P: A lake we’re rowing on now, in the Bois de Boulogne.
C: Talent—its dubiousness—keeps our boat afloat.
P: And these oars are the scissors that seize the images that populate the scrapbook.
C: Scrapbook consciousness frees us from the obligation of seeing images as separate entities.
P: Scissor the image away from its original context.
C: Personality, psychology—those deterrents, those killjoys—evaporate, within the scrapbook’s holiday regime.
P: Elia Kazan once said, “Sometimes talent goes underground.”
C: In your scrapbook, that quotation appears in a magazine clipping.
P: And the clipping, if you recall, appears next to a photograph of a young man getting a haircut.
C: I remember. The customer is looking at a photograph of a naked man in a skin magazine.
P: Right above that naked man, on the scrapbook’s page, are seven canceled US postage stamps.
C: The stamps honor W. C. Fields.
P: Was W. C. Fields talented?
C: Was the model in the skin magazine talented?
P: Was the barber talented?
C: Let’s stop emphasizing talent.
P: What word will occupy us now?
C: Stoppage.
P: A photograph staples a stop-work order to joy’s wall. The sign announces that no joy will be produced today, because the building inspector discovered hazards on joy’s construction site.
C: We enjoy stoppage. When ordinary joy stops, a kinkier ecstasy canters and kicks.
P: We’re back in the shower, in our hotel, on the Bois de Boulogne’s outskirts.
C: And now you’re squinting.
P: When I squint, vanishing-point lines disappear. Perspective deliquesces.
C: Deep space loosens its forceps?
P: Suddenly, in this shower, where we squint to avoid the tumultuous spray’s arrows, a milquetoast anhedonia arrives.
C: A drinkable anesthetic, seasoned with catnip.
P: Now that we’re done with our shower, and we’ve dried off our warm, lake-fatigued bodies, we can turn complex visual reality into a flattened composition of cubes, circles, and lines—an immobile arrangement of colors. Thanks to photography, to rowing, to conversation, to showering, and to scrapbooks, space has turned into a game we can handle.
C: Here, on the bed, we can take a nap inside the game of deep space. We needn’t be the game’s victim.
P: This hotel room looks like a mortuary.
C: A Parnassian punctiliousness of decor.
P: The decor, because it arrives on time, and is careful about wiping food crumbs from the corners of its lips, can enjoy stoppage.
C: Photography, like embalming, beautifies stoppage.
P: Objects on this hotel room’s windowsill are guests at humanism’s after-party.
C: Outside our window, the landscape is nightmarish, like the absence of kindness in a Michael Haneke film.
P: Funny Games?
C: You seem like a priest officiating at the wedding of Douglas Sirk and George Kuchar. Or August Sander and James Bidgood.
P: James Bidgood! Of Pink Narcissus fame.
C: A fashion show of stopped bodies, lurid and horny because arrested in booths, cubicles, crèches.
P: A photo is a cubicle where stopped time gets off.
C: Degrees of mustache—meager, premonitory, flourishing—embellish a young man’s face.
P: We hail the incipience of mustache, however spare.
C: You’re good at spotting talent.
P: Casting is an art. I do it so it feels like hell. Did Sylvia Plath say that?
C: You consecrate your days to quests, spotted(like the “freckled hind” of pastoral odes) with eroticism.
P: We occupy portraiture, that dungeon, because we crave the structure that the search for a human subject gives us.
C: Spelunkers for the divine.
C: Cropped, stylized, forensic, samizdat.
P: Pass the pictures around, secretly, but don’t kill them by describing them.
C: “I’ve got the muscle and know how to use it.”
P: I recognize that phrase. A sex ad, in a magazine. I cut out the ad and pasted it in a scrapbook.
C: “Horny young truck driver wants to meat you.”
P: Now that our nap is over, and we’re eating breakfast downstairs in the hotel, it’s time to think seriously about self-annunciation: how to become the angel heralding to yourself that you have new desires and that you have strategies for enacting or refusing them.
C: I tend to rebuke my own desire.
P: Like Cleopatra rebuking Antony.
C: A woman in a fur coat reclines on a marble bench, indoors. You photograph her from above Floor tiles create diagonals. Blue drapery creates verticals. She remains oblique to the diagonals and verticals she incites.
P: Sounds like a recipe for “formalism fricasse.” Six portions. Serve with a chilled Bourgogne Aligoté.
C: Another specimen of scrapbook consciousness. Which needn’t be as apocalyptic as Chris Marker’s La Jetée.
P: Our conversation is making me sweaty. Let’s go upstairs and take another shower.
