Traipsing Through The Arts -In Lieu Of Discussing Artist And Known Voyeur Edward Hopper’s “Summertime”-Down In The Mud With The Holy Roller End Times Sex Patrol-A Thankless Task-But Necessary     

The much maligned Mary Magdeline before that saint business-Tintoretto's view   

By Laura Perkins

(If you are only interested in reading about the import of Edward Hopper’s works written through the prism of an art lover although not a member of the curator, gallery owner, high-end museum patron-donor, art collector cabal you will have to wait for my next piece to be published. For now I have to get some seriously disturbed people off my case so I can breathe enough to talk of guys like Edward Hopper and the whole sex mad modern art scene. L.P.).

[Once again I have to start imprisoned within brackets to avoid having to ruin a perfectly good piece about one of Edward Hopper’s collection of paintings, about his salacious take on painting young nubile women without them looking while he looked on quite leeringly. (Check, for example, his 1943 Summertime with the diaphanously summer dressed urban dwelling femme waiting, waiting for something to happen to while away the heat. The model although clothed certainly was not his wife who forbade him to paint women other than her in the nude but Hopper must have snuck out the back door or gave her some lame excuse about needing cigarettes to go do his lust-driven task) But that discussion for later. Cutting right to the chase I have been dogged in this series of pieces on my take on various paintings, American paintings that have attracted my attention as I have dug into this assignment, by a clot, no, a cohort of what I call evangelicals who have been trashing me endlessly about my discussing sex and sensuality, eroticism, in art. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the art (both the “rat’s ass” expression and idea about the place of art for these holy goofs courtesy of long-time companion Sam Lowell who has had forty years of experience dealing with what these days he calls the trolls or one sort or another but which took me a little while to figure out) or even my opinion about any particular piece.

What has them hot under the collar and me on the hellish hot seat, me, as a conscious agent of the devil, you know the devil that Johnny Milton talked about endlessly back the 1600s with such best-selling potboilers as Paradise Lost and Paradise Found. Me as Keil, that I am still baffled by since this character was a disciple, man-servant as far as I could tell of the Zoroastrian devil figure Loh, not the Christian one who goes by the name Satan, Lucifer, Bad Boy, Billy Bob Thornton etc. What has them exercised is that somehow their junior or missy will Google something for a school assignment and see me in my vivid splendor talking about the sex life of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X who essentially acted the role of courtesan, of professional beauty in the wild and wily days of the Third Republic in France, the strange opium dream drug-induced kinky sex cult worship of Alexander’s Isabella, or the Whole of Babylon advertisement announcing she is open for business explicit in Whistler’s The White Girl via the telltale wolf’s head and fur beneath her feet. What planet are they on since no self-respecting teenager is going to do anything but laugh at the idea of reading some supposedly sexually suggestive stuff in early modern art in some funky review when they can get whatever they want of real visual sex on the various sexploitation sites that dot the Internet. And with hormones going crazy who could blame them.              

Frankly, although my long-time partner and fellow writer Sam Lowell mentioned above swears by the use of bracketed introductions to not spoil the good stuff I don’t like the idea, am not going to do this after I have my say here. What has me up in arms, although silently since I do not answer any comments by the trolls who have descended on me since I started my little project, is that somehow I don’t know “jack” (that from Walter, from, oh, I forget now where he is from, Kansas I think) about religion, about religious sensibilities. They didn’t frame it that way- it came out more as the well-trodden-liberal multiculturalist secularist, comsymp (communist sympathizer from the younger set who otherwise have no clue what that meant and which in passing also tells me I am dealing with some on the older side parents making me wonder about that so-called concern for their collective off-springs’ moral welfare certainly not of the folk or anything like that, stuff along that line. What they don’t know, and I would not ordinarily feel I had to discuss the issue in a series on art is that I grew up in upstate New York, grew up in the country that was “burned over” in the Second Great Awakening in this country in the early 19^th century.

There are still small standing churches with attendees who can date their church structures to those times, plenty still left practicing the respective faiths of forbears even if the number of congregants is falling off. Not far from where the farm that I grew up on stands a church-Lord’s Host-Disciples of Christ which was built by the farmers in the valley back in 1820 in about three days as a sign of their devotion and of their desire to have a fitting place to worship according to their lights. The few remaining ancient descendants still practice their religion there. You can go across upstate, across the “burned-over” areas traversed by preachers like Grandison, Miller, and the lecherous Hansbury who like today’s Preacher Roe, and allegedly Reverend Larson who just got exposed for playing around with his congregants, male and female, had a field day with the women and girls they conned into believing they were the Son of God and find if not congregations then churches and markers reflecting those events. Find places that farmers and small townspeople built, and built quickly, to temper their faiths. Fourth Awakening folk be advised.       

I grew up in a household, a farm as I said where my father was Mountain Methodist, meaning a split from the Wesley boys’ operation over theological differences around whether everybody will be saved or not (Mountain Meths calling out in glee that there will salvation for all-even sinners no questions asked if you can believe that-especially if you had known my father and his penchant for casting me to the hell-fires when I lived at home) and my mother was purebred Brethren of the Common Life, a grouping which broke from the Monrovian Tabernacle over adult baptism, or maybe the need for baptism. (This was not a marriage made in heaven, far from it, since from the get-go my mother’s people “scorned” her for marrying outside the covenant, for marrying a “heathen,” apparently to them no better than an Indian, now Native American, in going for an MM). Those are my bloodlines, that’s my DNA so don’t tell me I can’t go hand to hand with any of the trolls over what they think is happening to their world-which is basically that it has gone to hell in a handbasket. And as a corollary to their well-worked out if sour worldview we need End Times to come quickly to wash away the sins of this earth and return to the Garden. (That latter part not a bad sentiment if they would not be so nasty about explicitly by name excluding Keil’s servant-me.)          

It probably will not do any good since speaking of religious controversy usually gets you nowhere fast and I am not directly responding to any particular thread (although Sarah from Duluth with her numbered list of sins for which I have to atone is in my mind as I write this) from these holy goofs but there have been three main objections to what I have had to say about why people, trolls and non-trolls alike, should back off and just let me go about my business of writing little scrawny pieces about art, about what one troll actually identified, correctly identified, as high culture except used that notion to cast the whole cabal of curators, collectors and gallery owners and their hangers-on to the lake of fires. Exception has been taken to my aspersion that Mary Magdalene, the street whore, lets’ call her what she was, what she had called herself after she changed careers, who converted to Christianity around the time Jesus was murdered had been his lover, and if not him if he was not into sex with women then one, or more of the apostles. Exception has been taken to my assertion that Jesus may have been gay, may have been sleeping with one, or more, of his boys. And exception has been taken to my characterization of the various differences between religious sects over various ceremonial and theological doctrines as “tempests in teapots.”    

Maybe it was all the clamor over my attempt to place Singer Sargent’s Madame X (finally I get to say a word about art if only for a minute) in the long line of professional beauties who used that beauty to get ahead in the world. This may not accord with any religious scruples or anything like that but ever since Eve, ever since Adam poisoned Eve with his jealous ways there have been women who have had to do the “best they could” to fend for themselves. I just mentioned Eve but at least in the Christian saga I trace the genesis to Mary Magdalene, who was nothing but a street-walker despite all the bullshit halos some scholars have tried to throw around her name. Have tried to pawn her off as some bored little rich girl who “got religion” when Jesus showed up at a revival in her town and went meekly, and chastely along for the ride.

Yeah, right. The hard evidence was she was any man’s woman, had a specialty of washing feet for a fee at the time which I guess was an erotic foreplay when sandals were in or something now looked at when we have well shod feet as a fetish, and rightly so. A simple whore doing the best she could who would up being at “the right place at the right time.” There is substantial evidence, despite the conflicting and frankly bizarre renderings on the subject by the four guys who told the Jesus story from their own crooked little subjective angles, that Jesus has spotted Mary Mags in the crowd when he was working the town, working Jerusalem when that was a Roman enclave and he was desperate for converts. Needed some good-looking women to draw the guys in (some things unfortunately never change). Meeting her he saw that maybe it wouldn’t be bad to have a little company on those long lonely nights out on the circuit. On good authority Jesus was not alone when he took a vacation for forty days to refuel himself-and you know who was with him.  

Eyewitness reports, those of a couple of apostles if anybody is asking and if they are to be believed, state that after they met Mary started working the crowd as Jesus started working his grift. Look here you have if you can believe any of the various ancient drawings of the guy a good- looking guy and a good-looking gal, you had to be to work the streets in those days all the older used up women were working the wineries, who were smitten. Now there is no proof that they went under the sheets together, but it is a pretty safe bet that a guy like Jesus, unless he was gay which will be dealt with in a minute had no trouble coaxing her in his bed. Alternatively, if he didn’t, was gay and that is okay if he was although then I believe he would have been stoned or something like that, then at least John and James are known to have had carnal knowledge of her once Jesus left for heaven and his father’s place. For all her troubles and this is kind of the clincher as to what really went on-our Mary Mags got a sainthood, got to get a trip to Paradise. Not bad for washing some guy’s feet gratis when he went down for the count.      

Okay, it is definitely possible that Jesus was the “B” of LGBTQ, “bi” but that makes it harder to make my case about the torrid affair between him and Mary Mags. If Mary Mags and he were not getting under the sheets after a tough day of preaching, which is my preferred and more historically correct view, then Jesus hanging around with twelve guys and no gals is very, very strange, especially for those times when twelve guys or so doing anything amounted to an act of insurrection against the Roman state. And not just twelve guys but a bunch of guys who were fishermen, a profession known to be nothing but a gay preserve back then -at least at sea. The whole thing would have escaped my attention except that, and this information gathered via Sam Lowell, W. H. Auden, the English poet make a habit of “outing” various guys whom he called in the parlance of the 1930s part of the “Homintern,” which Sam says is just a take-off on the Comintern, the Communist International, another international organization of the time.

This “outing” given the nature of the times and the criminal implications when the “love that dare not speak its name” was a serious crime just ask Oscar Wilde, was privately held by him and his circle but did not include Jesus. It did however include Matthew and the villainous Judas Iscariot of unblessed memory. Since then Edward and Timothy have been added to the list. Of course the trolls will go crazy on this one since to them “gay” means devil, maybe not as bad as Keil, the devil’s servant, me but bad and beyond the pale. That Jesus was letting gay guys into his operation if he was straight would be beyond the pale. The idea that Jesus was gay would destroy their whole theological construct, blow the Catholic Church a fatal knock-down as well and wreak havoc with their opposition to gay marriage.         

Although I have laughingly noted that my troll cohort has created a veritable “united front” around my acting as an active agent for the devil, as the truly sinister Keil who in Zoroastrian lore really was a bad- ass from what I have read up on the character I have noted that they are not above a few internal skirmishes around their various religious differences. What I have called to their furor “tempests in teapots” have appeared from time to time. To add fuel to the fire I have consciously tried to be provocative about those differences. I mentioned in my own family my father’s Mountain Methodist roots which derived from the differences around who could be saved and under what conditions. Like I said strangely my father’s MMs strongly believe everybody will be saved come judgement day as against the traditional view that only the repentant will avoid the lakes of fire. In my mother’s case the main split point back in the 1700s in Monrovia was how long it took God to create the earth-the Tabernacle’s traditional six days and a day of rest or the Brethren’s view of twelve days and two days of rest. Those are at least understandable doctrinal differences and while maybe there should not have been a century of religious civil wars over the damn issues and nobody should have faced the stake, or worse been shunned, there you have it.           

What makes no sense to me and this came up an exchange between Wanda from Wabash, a leading and prolific troll, and Jeffrey Jay, no hometown given, was over the question of when and in what condition baptism would be appropriate. Wanda, strait-laced Wanda, has argued for adult baptism, only done after appropriate repentance and while fully clothed in some mud-raked river or pond. Jeff, and a few others who have become his acolytes, has argued that those who have attained the age of reason, have repented of their sinful ways before the gathered church, should be stripped naked to receive the Lord and can do it anywhere from a mud-calked river to the family swimming pool. Such distinctions floor me but that is what keeps guys, endlessly repentant guys like Preacher Roe and Preacher Baxter in clover. Reverend Larson even as I write is probably writing up his repentance statement, getting some cheapjack loin cloth at the Salvation Army store and getting ready to get back on the gravy train and into those dark bedrooms.           

All this religious talk though really is just that compared to the firestorm I set off among a small subset, a mini-cohort when I made a statement that none of these holy goofs cared about art. Were happy to see the whole art world and the culturati blown to bits, won’t let their kids within five miles of an art museum. As long as they have their Velvet Elvis memorabilia to grace their trailer living rooms. Then the guns came out, the heavy guns. Needless to say all the tripe of the cultural wars came out, the class issue with the trailer, gun, Walmart, Bud-lite crap.

You would not believe the stuff thrown at me, would have been surprised at the lack of elementary solidarity with a fellow human sufferer who maybe had lost her way. A lack of Christian charity even to a vowed opponent. None of that for I was to be immediately cast in the lake of fires (one guy Jed I think must have been playing Johnny Cash when he wrote because that came out “ring of fire” in his submission). Of course I got the now obligatory Keil, devil’s servant business, although Betty from Toledo at least called me the devil’s handmaiden. There is more but I can’t go on without commenting on this rush to have me put down as Keil, a male figure, a male bad guy in the ancient Zoroastrian religion who when I looked it up, and I had to look it up, was struck down by Lan, by the force of some primeval moan, some artful prayer which saved humankind. Is that the fate that awaits me among some of the brethren?      

Speaking of brethren, we could not have a bout of revelation without the obligatory stand-off between those who will be saved and those who won’t. My father’s now seemingly gentile religious beliefs that all would be saved-sinner and saint alike-is like some beautiful dream compared to the hoops some of the cohort want the “saved,” meaning sinners are in that lake with me, to jump through. Funny how much it all comes down to ceremony-to the outward show. Those who want adult baptism via that muddy river fully-clothed and after public repentance and those who want their saved naked as jaybirds in some backyard swimming pool with all eyes averted while the swimmers read off their lists of transgressions. But enough. Back to strictly traipsing through the art museums.