It’s likely that parts of the Bible were intended to be humorous. Jonah’s travails are comically over-the-top; so’s his reaction when God spares the city at the end (“I’ve been through so much! Can’t you just kill some people, please?”). Saul’s pursuit of David is like a Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner chase. Even Jesus’s teachings have something of the tenor of George Carlin rants (and they’re illustrated with cute, memorable images, like planks stuck in eyes and camels trying to squeeze through the eyes of needles).

Whether it’s divinely inspired or not, the Bible wasn’t written by unfeeling robots or for unfeeling robots. It shouldn’t be sacrilege to wonder if we were supposed to smile at some of this stuff.

Life of Brian was the most heavily-banned movie of 1979 (with Caligula as competition, that’s saying something). Everyone from Mary Whitehouse to Malcolm Muggeridge lined up to participate in its honor-killing. Unfortunately for them, it might be truer to the Bible’s original spirit than we think.

The story follows the perpetually unlucky Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), born on the same night and in the stable next door to Jesus. As he grows to adulthood, he is continually mistaken for the Messiah. The fact is, people need a savior, and he might have to fulfill that role whether he wants to or not.

The movie contains some fantastic scenes, and some of the strongest sustained performances the Pythons ever gave. Chapman spends the movie being politely baffled and indignant. Terry Gilliam is a slimy creep (he also plays roles in this movie, harr-de-harr). John Cleese is in full shouty bully mode. The set design (by Gilliam, I believe) is fantastic, and the country of Tunisia does its usual job in making everything look rough and sand-blasted.

Is the film really a satire of religion? In a common piece of Python lore, they attempted to dodge bans in Finland by claiming it was a parody of Golden Age Hollywood epics by DeMille, Mankiewicz, Kubrick, and so on. But that might actually be true! There’s a Spartacus parody, a Ben Hur parody, a gladiatorial battle that anticlimactically ends with a man having a heart attack, and more. The religious commentary is kind of incidental: the film’s true satirical target is the sword and sandals epics from a generation previously. The poster kind of goes mask-off.

These films were grand and stirring, but often very, very bloated (a critic described Ben Hur as making him feel “…like a motorist trapped at a railroad crossing while a long freight train slowly trundles by”) as well as artistically dubious (Roger Ebert referred to them as “big-budget B pictures”). In short, they offer a target for satirists that’s a mile wide. Caligula does the same thing in a different way: reimagining the glories of the Hollywood epics, just with the depravity and boy-sex left in. So there’s blasphemy here, but it’s directed more at Cecil B DeMille than at Christianity or Judaism.

Viewed as religious commentary, Life of Brian is halfhearted. The Pythons were Oxbridge unbelievers with little time for faith, and you have to really love something to know where to stab it to death.

They ask the same questions a lot of skeptics ask: how do we know Jesus really said all those things? Fair point: he spoke to 5,000 people at Bethesda without a microphone or amplification. If you were in the nosebleed seats, you probably couldn’t hear shit. But it’s the kind of commentary you make when you’re an outsider looking in on a world you don’t fully understand.

But I’m fine with that, because the Pythons had many other areas to fall back to. Such as mocking squabbling alphabet-soup revolutionary organizations. Or skewering the British educational system (there’s a great scene where John Cleese catches Graham Chapman graffiti’ing a wall with incorrect Latin, and forces him to write 100 lines on the walls as punishment).

The movie is flawed, and is less funny than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Most of the good scenes and quotable lines (“blessed are the cheesemakers”, “what have the Romans ever done for us?”) are piled into the first half, leaving the movie’s latter half a bit of a barren desert. Basically, as soon as the aliens abduct Brian, the film becomes a chore.

Pythonesque comedy is notoriously hard to analyse. They sometimes try for jokes that simply do not work, and I’m at a loss to explain why. In the jail, Brian encounters a mistreated prisoner (played by Michael Palin) who’s developed Stockholm syndrome. The character doesn’t make any sense, and his nails-on-a-chalkboard screeching makes you suspect that John Cleese’s “shut up!” might be ad-libbed.

The movie feels longer than it is. All the scenes involving gourds and sandals and haggling are just boring and skipworthy. Again, this is a classic Monty Python writing trick: taking something absurdly small (like a character’s inability to pronounce “R”) and then exaggerating it until the film’s reality threatens to collapse around the thing’s sheer mass. But sometimes the trick works and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, we get a lot of scenes where the end result is you’re saying “Alright, I get it. He can’t say R. Please move on.”

Miraculously, it does. Life of Brian regains its footing in its final scenes, and manages to be amusing and tragic. It really does capture the same frustrated, frustrating divine absurdity of the Jonah story. Brian is not the messiah, but he still suffers the fate of one. It might all be God’s plan, but His ways are not like our ways, and to Brian it simply appears cruel and random. He has at least five or six opportunities to walk free, but they all fail, for extremely stupid reasons. Here, as nowhere else, the Pythons are touching on something existential and profound.

I remember reading about Chris Gueffroy, an East German citizen who hatched a daring plot to cross the Berlin Wall. The Schießbefehl (or order to shoot on sight) was nominally still in effect, but Gueffroy did not believe he would actually be fired upon. On the 5th of February, 1989, he entered the Britz canal district, and tried to scale the metal lattice. On the last climb, he was spotted by a NVA border patrol and shot to death. The irony was that the wall was torn down just a few months later – Gueffroy could have walked into West Germany if he’d merely waited!

Is that story tragic? Yes. But is it also funny? Yes. However our own death comes, there will probably be an element of absurdity to it, and maybe we’ll even laugh at it. One of the worst mistakes you can make with fiction (and life) is to collapse it to a single mood, a single tone. There are no comedies or tragedies; life is a multiform jewel, glaring contradiction out of every facet. Life of Brian isn’t always a great movie, but in the moments when it is, it juxtaposes pathos with humor. Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true. You’ll see it’s all a show, keep ’em laughing as you go. Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

When you read early erotic novels (1748’s Fanny Hill, 1747’s Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1787’s Justine, etc), something sticks out. No, not that. Don’t be disgusting.

I’m talking about the authors: Cleland, Diderot, Sade, etc. They’re all men. Female-written erotic work in the Western canon literally crosses from Sappho’s poetry (~570 BC) to Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1957) in one step, with nobody in the intervening 2,527 years. Early erotica authors were literally all male.

Or were they? It’s possible (though unprovable) that one of the shadier early manuscripts was written by a woman, and either published anonymously or under a man’s name. Note that that the two prominent female erotica authors of the postmodern era – Réage and Anaïs Nin – both took active steps to conceal their identities. Réage was a pen name. Nin’s stories in Delta of Venus (which were written in the early 1940s and published posthumously in 1977) were intended for a private collection.

“Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret,” Stephen King wrote in one of his books. So is sex, at least where women are concerned. We accept with a shudder that they have sex (that’s where babies come from), but writing or reading about sex? That’s just too weird. Men are beasts and can’t help themselves, but why would a lady write about something that should be hidden?

Well, the hiddenness makes it attractive. The box you most want to look inside is the one you’re told to leave alone. It’s the censor’s paradox: people want forbidden fruit.

The increasingly explicit content of the mid 20th century ruined erotica, in books as well as film. It’s rather like Johnny Rotten’s observation that you demystify the swastika by wearing one: if everyone dressed in Nazi regalia, it wouldn’t trigger the cultural acceptance of fascist ideas: it might actually do the reverse. Could anyone feel awe at the sight of a sonnenrad, after seeing the lamest dork in the neighborhood wear one?

Anaïs Nin’s early writing actually has more shock value than modern porn; you can see her hands bleeding as she pulls walls down.

As I’ve said, we were never meant to read Delta of Venus. This adds the reader’s unintended voyeurism to sins on the page, which are legion: incest, buggery, rape, bestiality, and pedophilia. Nin writes about all of this with an praeternatural lack of judgment. She just documents human iniquity on the page, the way a camera obscura might.

It’s certainly diverse. One wonders what Nin’s collector (probably a heterosexual man) got out of stories like “The Boarding School” (“The experienced boys penetrated his anus to satisfy their desire, while the less experienced used friction between the legs of the boy, whose skin was as tender as a woman’s. They spat on their hands and rubbed saliva over their penises. The blond boy screamed and kicked and wept, but they all held him and used him until they were satiated.”). Sometimes the tales are gruesome and excessive. “Mathilde” and “The Ring” feature genital mutilation. Horrible stuff. You shouldn’t want to read it. I forbid that you read this book. Please don’t open the box.

It seems to me that erotic writing has gentrified itself. It now possesses rules about what subjects are okay, what subjects are off-limits, trigger warnings, and so forth. Some AO3 stories have lists of tags and disclaimers that are nearly as long as the stories themsevles. By contrast, Delta of Venus offers a look back at a weirder, wilder time: where erotica was so far from the pale it was almost in the black.

Nin, like Tolkien, was rediscovered in the 70s. She cuts a confusing figure: it’s hard to know what to make of her. She was of Hispanic descent, yet her settings of Brazil and Peru seldom rise above exoticism (her descriptions of Paris in “Marcel” are far more vivid). She rejected the Catholicism of her youth, yet it hangs across her writing like the Shroud of Turin (“The Boarding School”, for example, gets most of its punch from the emotional repression of its setting).

She’s hard to claim as a feminist figurehead. She lived under the shadow of men all her life: Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, her father, and the anonymous “collector” who made all of this possible. The stories are all written for male consumption, although with shards of her personality poking through the pornographic narrative like iceberg-tips. She stands in two epochs: old-fashioned yet modern. This make her captivating: she can’t be captured for some political cause.

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

Anais Nin, Henry & June

Even her descriptions of sex embody this contrast, with high romantic verbiage clashing with gutter crudeness.

“For the first time, the hunger that had been on the surface of her skin like an irritation, retreated into a deeper part of her body. It retreated and accumulated, and it became a core of fire that waited to be exploded by his time and his rhythm. His touching was like a dance in which the bodies turned and deformed themselves into new shapes, new arrangements, new designs. Now they were cupped like twins, spoon-fashion, his penis against her ass, her breasts undulating like waves under his hands, painfully awake, aware, sensitive. Now he was crouching over her prone body like some great lion, as she placed her two fists under her ass to raise herself to his penis. He entered her for the first time and filled her as none other had, touching the very depths of the womb.”

Artists and Models

The stories are mostly fast and short, thrashed out quickly, establishing a scenario that swiftly builds to an explosive climax (or climaxes). None take more than a few minutes to read. Nin was supposedly paid a dollar a page for this stuff: one admires her restraint in using so few paragraph breaks.

And while the stories seem bold and incredibly revealing, they’re nothing of the sort. Nin wrote this stuff for money. She was pushed at every turn by the “collector” to focus more on sex, more on body parts, more on the beast with two backs. Her natural inclination toward poetry was throttled. The introduction contains a letter, written by Nin to the Collector. It’s basically history’s first “men only want one thing, and it’s disgusting”.

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. “If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world.

introduction

Delta of Venus is well-written, but its stories often have a note of cynicism, or contempt. “The Hungarian Adventurer” describes a man of incredible attractiveness, charm, and virility (perhaps how the Collector liked to imagine himself?) before turning him into a bloated, aging pig, abandoned by his children. “Lilith” involves a woman trying to spice up a marriage with Spanish fly. The ending is such a thudding anticlimax that I think this must have been the intended effect.

These little rebellions against form are as fascinating as the form itself. Like Nin, the book is complex, with many layers.

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,” he said. “I see it in fragments of cut marble, I see it in worn pieces of wood. There is a perfection in a woman’s body that can never be possessed, known completely, even in intercourse.”

Marcel

By her own standards, Nin was perfect. Worn, broken, weird; selling prose for a dollar a page.

Yet she could not be possessed.

What did they think of “Talk Talk” in 1966? In 2023 it uncoils from your speakers like a cobra: alive and evil and glaring with death. It’s just 1:56 in length – short, even for the time. The tempo is punishing. The instrumentation is just lunges and stabs of fuzz; flames leaping from a barely-existent structure, as though the song’s burning down while still half-unwritten.

The lyrics are fragments. Ugly, mean thoughts, articulated with the stumbling self-seriousness of a teenager who’s drunk for the first time. “My social life’s a dud! My name is really mud!” Far from poetry…but people have thoughts like that. I used to. Sometimes eloquent phrasing doesn’t capture stupid, sullen emotions, “Talk Talk” may have been the first song they’d heard that truly sounded like the inside of their own mind.

The band was a five-piece called The Music Machine. One year earlier, they’d been playing folk rock.

They were fronted by Sean Bonniwell, a restless self-reinventor who never found a home. “Talk Talk”‘s success (#15 on the Billboard charts in 1966) proved a fluke. They had no followup hit. They were driven first aground and then apart by royalty fights, label disputes, and internal discord.

Bonniwell tried to regroup, but the window he’d exploited was now gone and his moment had passed. The Music Machine’s legacy is 1:56 of brutal noise and an unfulfilled promise. From the outside looking in, it was as though they’d come from nowhere and then gone back into nowhere. They did not become a Great Band.

But in a weird way, that helps me appreciate Music Machine more. There’s a long list of “classic” Rolling Stone approved acts (The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen) that I either can’t appreciate or appreciate in an academic thinking-things-through way. Part of it is their critical reception: they’re so adored and revered that it triggers suspicion in me. And it distances me from the music, I feel like I’m listening to it from across a GREAT BAND cordon line. The immediacy is gone.

Rock music was never supposed to be a canon, or an establishment. It was supposed to shake your bones. So I enjoy listening to bands like The Music Machine, that doesn’t have a Rolling Stone-appointed crown weighing it down.

If The Music Machine is remembered, it’s for either their heaviness, their earlyness, their subtle influence on other bands, or their rapid collapse. The entire band left soon after their first LP, aside from frontman Sean Bonniwell. He changed the band’s name, changed their style, and then left the music business altogether. It was as though the Music Machine had packed a thirty-year career into one minute and fifty-six seconds.

In other words, they were the Sex Pistols, ten years before. Which brings up the p-word.

Music journalism as we know it barely existed in the mid sixties: as a result, some history is barely-written and misremembered. A lot of people seem to think that punk rock was a seventies phenomenon. That was actually the second wave of punk. The first wave happened ten years earlier, with US “garage rock” bands like The Sonics and MC5, as well as UK acts such as The Downliners Sect and the Kinks. This was raw, aggressive, cheap-sounding music, driven by jangling guitars, powerful drums, and farfisa organs. Much of it was retroactively classified as “punk” in the early 70s – the first recorded reference to the genre is in the March 22, 1970 issue of The Chicago Tribune.

Unlike the second wave of punk (conspiracy theories about “God Save The Queen”‘s UK #2 aside), garage rock actually got some singles to number one. “”(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Stones and “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians both reached #1, among others. It’s disputable to what extent these songs are punk. The lines between a garage rock band and, say, The Troggs or The Beatles could be pretty blurry. And their 1960s mod and greaser fashions have left less of an impression in the popular memory than the edgier styles pushed by Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood.

The Music Machine were among the heavier of the 60s garage rock set, but soon psychedelic rock and heavy metal left them behind in sonic firepower, and Bonniwell proved unable to keep the band on the charts on the strength of his songs.

He was a clever and inventive songwriter, pulling inspiration out of the air, but maybe not actually a good one. “Talk Talk” is sonically impressive but soon wears thin. “Trouble” and “Wrong” are the best songs, particularly “Trouble”, with its dense and rubby rhythms and melodic complexity. “Masculine Intuition” has a really awkward chorus that doesn’t fit the verse. And it’s too short to develop its ideas much: all of these songs are sonic mayflys, dying before they can progress or go anywhere.

The album was recorded quickly to capitalize on a hit single. Most of the tracks were laid down at RCA Studios at three in the morning (on a hand-built ten-track machine built by engineer Paul Buff) after the band had been touring for thirty days, back to back, which explains Bonniwell’s hoarse, ragged voice. A surprising amount of punk aesthetic comes from what is ultimately accident and circumstance. Only in the aftermath does anything seem planned.

The band’s limited stock of originals is padded with covers, which are sometimes great (“Hey Joe” rivals Jimi Hendrix’s version. Bonniwell would later lament that his label wouldn’t release it as a single), sometimes pointless (“Taxman”), sometimes really stupid (“See See Rider”). The cover of “96 Tears” is pretty ironic, as ? and the Mysterians also failed to follow up their one hit.

The Music Machine is a fascinating curio, but they were riven by image and identity conflicts that they never figured out. Were they art, or yeah-yeah-yeah teenage music? They were initially presented as mods, but Bonniwell soon got into transcendental meditation and eastern mysticism. There was little sense of musical history to the Machine. You couldn’t obviously pick out their influences, the way you could for the Beatles or the Stones. This made them seem fresh, but also a little disconnected in time, as though they were visiting aliens. There wasn’t an easy “story” you could apply to the band, which made it easy for music history to not give them a story at all.