Sometimes, when I tell someone of my interest in Kubrick, they will briefly brighten and then suddenly grow dour before asking, “What did you think of Eyes Wide Shut?” It is not for nothing. This film was and still is reviled by many in the public and the critical establishment. Is it Tom Cruise? Is it the couple’s lavish life? Is it the nature of Dr. Bill’s odyssey into the manors of the superrich, where women are still treated like chattel? It can’t be Nicole Kidman or her character, Alice Harford, who stonily confesses an ulterior life of desire, can it? Its threats are multiple, with the fabric of the Western privileged life taken to task. Since the wife doesn’t have to work to keep them financially afloat, these are people who can afford to cheat on each other, who can afford to let their dreams almost destroy the life they have. At root, the film demonstrates how the moneyed life of doctors, of stars, of people living on Central Park West — that the poor and middle classes look up to and seek to be — is largely a sham of shallowness. Given this, it’s easy to see why so many people dislike the film, and beyond that, why men and women have a bone to pick.
Women don’t like it because of how women are portrayed. Women do want sex, but not like how many endeavor to secure it in the film. It’s too hard to believe there are women who will go out and get drugged up to be sex slaves to elderly, unattractive men. And why is Alice being so flirty with an old oily Hungarian? Can’t she keep her husband’s attention by herself, by her own charms, and without resorting to such games? If she can’t, what is her problem? Why would she marry him? Money isn’t everything, right?
Men don’t like it because of how men are portrayed. Here’s this schlub doctor — all these women (and one man) want to sleep with him and he sleeps with no one. What kind of dude is that? Such a strikeout disappoints everyone. What’s funny is how Kubrick engenders a raw reaction to these characters, because most of the film is about the allure of sex and what is gained by “having” someone—how some hoot and holler about a conquest. The male audience is sometimes reduced to highschoolers rooting for a guy to nail a woman, while the female one is chatty and circumspect about how Alice would not keep such a delicious secret (her desire for one particular man) and start fucking with her husband’s head — better only to tell her friends in the bathroom while smoking a cigarette.
I think what I really wanted was a visitation from beyond the grave, with each of my characters assuring me that I’d really nailed it, they loved the book, these new versions of themselves were so true! But in lieu of a séance, here are five permissions I wish I’d given myself earlier, and can perhaps give to someone else instead.
There are, however, an awful lot of other languages that have some version of this phrase that doesn’t use Greek. Some of these are weird in their own right. What’s up with the Baltic countries, which think Spanish is so impenetrable? Why do the Danish use Volapük, a short-lived Esperanto-type constructed language created by a German in 1880? When a Bulgarian says “Все едно ми говориш на патагонски,” which uses “Patagonian” instead of Greek, what the hell are they talking about? Do they mean some extinct indigenous Chonan language, or Spanish, which is the dominant language there, or Patagonian Welsh, which also apparently exists?
And what, you might ask, do the Greeks say?
“Εμένα, αυτά μου φαίνονται Κινέζικα.”
“To me, this appears like Chinese.”
Russian really is hard for learners, and a casual comparison might serve the conclusion that big, prestigious languages like Russian are complex. Just look, after all, at their rich, technical vocabularies, and the complex industrial societies that they serve.
But linguists who have compared languages systematically are struck by the opposite conclusion. They tend to find that “big” languages—spoken by large numbers over a big land area—are actually simpler than small, isolated ones. This is largely because linguists, unlike laypeople, focus on grammar, not vocabulary.
Before he built the world’s greatest playground and transformed the world of children’s design, Eric McMillan had spent little time thinking about how kids played. In 1971, the 29-year-old English immigrant was a design consultant living in Toronto, Canada – a sleepy city whose nickname “Toronto the Good” both referenced the place’s lingering Victorian moral rectitude and seemed to set a hard ceiling on its expectations for greatness. It would never be Toronto the exceptional, and the locals seemed content with that.
McMillan’s job was to design an exhibition for a massive new waterfront park called Ontario Place, whose somewhat unpromising theme was the glorious past and thrilling future of the province of Ontario. The architect Eberhard Zeidler had created a series of artificial islands and “pods” that stuck out of the water of Lake Ontario, skewered by columns like olives in a martini. The question of what to do with these architectural wonders, however, seemed to come second. “Now we had to think up a great idea for what to do with our island,” wrote Zeidler in his autobiography, Building Cities Life. “We thought we might have a nature reserve on them, but this was a short-lived dream because the wild animals could easily escape.”
Within train cars, an ad for the linens company Brooklinen shows three pairs of feet tangled together under a sheet. Brooklinen originally wanted to tell riders that the sheets were meant for “threesomes” but was made to tweak it by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The advertisement now says that the sheet is for “throuples,” those in a committed relationship of three.
There are so many more. The Museum of Sex. Breast Augmentation. Lola prompts riders to talk about “condoms, lubricant and wipes,” under an image of two women happily discussing “the weirdest thing I’ve ever felt.” OkCupid uses a common acronym for being willing to have casual sex. Roman asks if you’re subject to (again!) erectile dysfunction.
When did this start? Where is it going? Do we really need this much sex on the subway? And what do we tell the kids?
Bill Berkson’s “A Frank O’Hara Notebook” feels like a magical artifact, a kind of time capsule with the power to transport readers to another era. That era, the Manhattan of the early 1960s, has been so heavily romanticized that trying to see through the fog of myth that has come to surround its artists and cultural icons is at times a difficult task. Berkson’s “Notebook” somehow penetrates the obscuring mist. Holding it, one feels the living presence of its subject, the aura of a writer who helped shape the cultural landscape of his time and who, against the expectations of many, has become one of the most influential American poets of the second half of the 20th century.
A particular blur
attended my mind
from end to end.
These feelings
of futurelessness.