Track Mangoes

Once I thought everyone I had ever dated was steadfast in their beliefs and that this typified the lot of them. A dancer, an artist, a business man, a dentist--I thought they all knew, to some modicum of accuracy, how their lives would play out and what they wanted to "do" with their lives, a question I am being tired of asked by people who I know don't actually care. What I discovered however, was that I have always seemed to fall in love with people who pretend to know, yet always change their mind in private.

My favorite story of a private change of mind is Devadatta’s, the tormented cousin of the Buddha. Having tried to kill the Buddha twice and creating a schism in the Sangha (the community) once, he traveled to the Buddha’s monastery to make an apology. However, at the precise moment he internalized the error of his ways the ground opened beneath his feet and he was killed.

Every preacher’s dream.

I once composed a submission to a literary magazine in Minnesota. The submission contained over 13 poems and prose works, one of which was entitled “Hartford Jew,” an epic song that really had nothing to do with Judaism and everything to do with problems of race. When I finally received word from the magazine my heart jumped. However, it wasn’t an encouraging word. “Hartford Jew,” they said, on top of being poorly written, was racist, and they weren’t going to grace the pages of their magazine with a single thing I’d written. In the following nights I fantasized that the editor would send me a retraction letter that read something like this: “I never understood the complexity of race until I read your poem. Please forgive me for everything I’ve written. By the time you read this I’ll be dead.” And that, of course, is the only letter any writer ever wants to receive.

Later I put my feathered poetry pen back in the inkwell and decided to continue working on my novel, something I had been procrastinating on. I had crafted a novel about kids and their relationship to religion; and during what I believe is called “the writing process” I began to think about resentment. This comment is not as jejune as it might seem; A Serious Man may be a charmingly artsy film, but it isn’t about Judaism. But my novel was about resentment, which is to say the polemic between persons of varying ethos. What I then realized was that the central problem of the novel was not one of my own but that of my sister. Having watched her spiritual growth closer than any other human being I know I can quickly sum her dilemma up in the inability to reconcile the two chief ways of approaching religion: that being the faithful approach and the perfectionist approach.

Do we change our ways to accommodate the times, or do we buckle down and get traditional? This is the same question as should your church have a webpage? It is the same problem the Buddha faced during the vassana, or rainy season: while the sangha wanted to travel from place to place in India, expounding the Dharma, they quickly realized that it was more difficult to do so during a rain storm without stepping on submerged animal life. The perfectionist response, at the time, was philosophically utilitarian: it will do a lot of good if we spread the dharma, so we should temporarily suspend our belief in non-violence to do that. The faithfuls scoffed back: your willingness to suspend your faith highlights just how unfit you are to teach the dharma. Luckily the sangha had the Buddha, who was a moderate. His solution? If people want the dharma they can come to us.

The first Vassana retreat was held in Varanassi. We still have them today.

So now I wonder, how the Buddha so magically intertwines the liberal and conservative modes of thinking and how I could reflect that and, more importantly, how I could communicate that which I had no clue how to do to my spiritually struggling sister. The split seemed stark. You can be a perfectionist liberal and think people are basically good at heart or you can be a faithful conservative.

This time I turned to Devadatta. It didn’t really matter whether or not Devadatta was good at heart or not, because he was still a member of the sangha who wanted to kill the Buddha. That liberal view of human nature is not wrong: people probably are good at heart. It just doesn’t matter.

This somewhat dry view of existence has prompted my writing ever since I started. I think that people, in circumstances of stress (read love and death), can behave like rats and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but also the only subject of all art.

How could I not know that religion wasn’t all peaches and cream? The realization seems boggling to me now. After learning about how Catholics burned Christians, the Christians killed the Jews because the Jews killed Christ, and eventually the Pagans killed all Romans anyway, with that history in mind you will say “DUH” and you are right in doing so.

But my intention in writing this essay was not to simply posit “we’re all human.” I wanted to point out that Buddhist philosophy, rather than suggesting that we all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will sabotage even themselves in order to peruse what they see to be their proper interests.

To that end the teachings of the Buddha have been neatly parsed into four noble truths, which are the only things I have retained from 13 years of schooling in Buddhist Philosophy at KCC and a three month stint at Bokar Monastery in Mirik India. (That is not to say that the rest is scintilla, but merely to point out that I’m burning out quicker that I thought I ever would).

In a nutshell, the four Nobel truths are, like the Constitution, a system of checks and balance. “The Turth of Suffering” (Dukkha) is that it wants to be king, just like the executive branch of government. “The Truth of Why We Suffer” (Samudaya) is like the legislative branch, that “representational” system of governance that tells you that, indeed, the problems of the world are your own damn fault. You voted them into office, didn’t you? So even though it may not seem like your fault, it really is. “The Cessation of Suffering” (Nirodha) is like the judicial branch, everybody resents them, but when you can’t work it out yourself you have a system of monarchic rule to lead the way. Those three truths—Dukkha, Samudaya, and Nirodha—are pitted against each other. You are sad, it’s a fact. It’s your own fault, it’s a fact. There is a way out, it’s a fact. In the mean time we have the eightfold path, which is the village that Hilary Clinton said it takes. The eightfold path is the relative truth, the way to live a life day to day if you can’t, which we can’t, understand the first three truths, simple as they might seem at first.

One last story: Chenrezig, vowing never to rest until he had freed all sentient beings from samsara, despite his most honest attempts, he realized that many unhappy beings were yet to be saved. After struggling to comprehend the needs of so many, his head split into eleven pieces. Amitabbah Buddha, seeing his plight, gave him eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering of all the people he had yet to save (one wonders why). Upon hearing these cries and comprehending them, Chenrezig attempts to reach out to the suffering, but in doing his two arms shatter into pieces, like tubes of glass. Once more, Amitabha comes to his aid and invests him with a thousand arms with which to aid the suffering.

Now I ask: is any religious institution free from maladroitness?—no, but neither are you and I.

As to the role of religious institutions in the cessation of all suffering, answering that question is like asking what the role of government is in the individual’s search for life, liberty and the mythical pursuit of happiness.

I’m a conservative. I believe that the there have been few instances in history in which the government has intervened and the whole shin dig hasn’t gone up in flames. The same goes for art: I find that the characters in my novel are most happy when I don’t write them. (Yes, it’s true, the production of art is essentially an act of coercion). In this way, religious institutions have seen a long history of injustices to the truth: indulgences, crusades, violent physical jihad, cleansing, and even my beloved Tibetans have a history of being bullies. So the list goes on. But if the government is not to intervene then how will we go on? If religious institutions have no role in finding the “truth” then what are we to do?

Well, I have absolutely no idea, but I am overcome with a feeling that we just will. We need the government, if only to say “FUCK IT.” We need our institutions, if only to say “you are in the wrong.” So, taking the tragic view, as my sister and I both did, the question does not become “Is everything perfect?” but rather “How could it be better?” You can go on and on about faith, or perfection. Either way, you still have to sit in the same pew.

Larry Sultan
“Practicing Golf Swing” 1986
From Pictures from Home

Irving Sultan: …That sounds good but it’s a load of crap. If anything, the pictures show how strained and artificial the situation was that you set up.

Larry Sultan was born in New York in 1946, but grew up in Los Angeles – an environment that much of his photographic work would later explore. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and received a BA in political science in 1968, and received a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973. He currently teaches at California College of the Arts as a professor of Fine Arts and Photography. Sultan has published several books, notably The Valley (2004), and Pictures from Home (1992) a series of photographs of his parents Irving and Jean Sultan, mixed with home video stills, old family photographs and text. For this project Sultan photographed his parents for over a decade.

When Sultan first conceived of a project centered on his family in the early 80s, it was in the context of resurgent conservatism and the Reagan presidency. Defensive of the traditional patriarchal family structure and trumpeting “pro-family” values, the rhetoric of the New Right had risen to a new level of prominence with the election of its figurehead Ronald Reagan. Success and middle class affluence (typified by the growth of suburbia) had become the ideal in postwar America, but by the 80s faith in American exceptionalism and continuous economic growth had been shaken – the fantasies and facades of American suburbia had begun to unravel.

Larry Sultan: Sure, it was a charade, but I’m talking about how the image is read rather than what literally was going on when it was made. There’s a difference. Don’t you think that a fiction can suggest a truth?

Sultan sought to challenge these established mythologies of family and success and examine the deterioration of this representation of American life. He chose to scrutinize the complexities of our success-driven culture through an in depth study of his own family. In the 60s and 70s his father, Irving Sultan, personified the American Dream: he was a handsome, successful Vice President of the Schick Safety Razor Company. However, when he began working on Pictures from Home, his father had just been forced into an early retirement. Sultan was interested in exploring what happens when major corporations cast of old employees and specifically how his father dealt with from going from being a successful business executive to a powerless retiree.

New York Times art critic Charles Hagen called Sultan’s work in Pictures from Home “post-modern snapshots,” because they “combine intimacy with an implicit social analysis.” Beginning from a sociological angle, Sultan’s project evolved into something much more personal, a self-conscious family portrait that explores familial representation, identities, and power dynamics. In examining Sultan’s photograph of his father, “Practicing Golf Swing,” along with the text placed in conjunction with it, these nuanced issue are thrown into sharp focus.

The golf club suspended in the air imitates the antennae of the television set just as the plush green carpet mimics the grass outside. Both Irving and the woman on TV look down, each caught in the middle of doing something – swinging the club and orating respectively. The translucent curtains function in two ways – creating the impression of being in a studio, and consequently drawing attention to the photographic process, and secondarily providing an obscured, mediated link to the outside world, a function echoed by the presence of the television set. The layers of mimicry and illusion unsettle the viewer, drawing attention to the superficiality of this situation. But then the voice of Irving Sultan interjects and shatters our interpretation; the subject speaks! He says to his son, “I’m sure you had very high-minded interests in the image and the implications of swinging a club with the television on and the curtains drawn, but for me the picture is pure description.”

Irving: Maybe, but whose truth is it? It’s your picture but my image…

Sultan considers this series to be a collaboration with his parents. He deliberately includes challenging conversations about the photographs themselves and the process of photographing. The presence of his parents’ voices throughout Pictures from Home subverts Sultan’s own conceptions of the images and effectively questions the implicit documentary truth of his photographs. These interjections disrupt the photographer’s authority – and it is precisely this multiplicity of both agency and truth that attracted me to Sultan’s work to begin with. There is a dialogue between the text and the images: Sultan presents his melancholy view of suburbia, and his father questions that representation. There is an ebb and flow between Sultan’s constructed reality and the personal reality of his father. We know some photographs are posed, but we also know that these images are based on actuality. “Don’t you think a fiction can suggest a truth?” Sultan asks his father in the book. But his father is more concerned with whose truth his son is portraying.

Larry: There are no clear lines – I don’t know where you stop and I start. And it’s crossed my mind that perhaps I’m out to justify my own life, my choices, by questioning yours. Perhaps I’m an average old wound.

These considerations are unavoidable precisely because of the nature of the photographer’s relationship to the subject. The act of photographing one’s own family is distinct from photographing a stranger or a friend because of the photographer’s positionality. When Tom Bamberger curated the show “Blood Relatives” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he said of familial photography:

To photograph family is to be held accountable; to photograph family is to have much more at stake… What is maddening about parents and children is they can never finally distinguish themselves completely from one another. There is a continuity of self that extends across the boundaries we usually reserve to define our individuality.

Sultan’s work ultimately strives to reconcile this accountability by collaborating with his parents and giving them a voice. The photograph’s potential to misconstrue is counteracted by the subject’s repudiation. The viewer is left somewhere in between and is forced to synthesize and extract their own truth. However in the most straightforward sense, Sultan has said that behind this series there is a desire to come to terms with his past and to understand his parents. He initiated that process by simply taking a photograph, giving his parents space to react, and starting a conversation.

How the political climate has constructed the gay male object of desire.

Is it an accident that Asian pornography became popular in the post-Regan aftermath? Is it an accident that Eastern European boys became commodified in gay pornography after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

With white-gays skyrocketing into strata of gentry and the solidification of a unified queer identity for men, came what Nicholas Radel calls “transnational gayness"--a sugary, dogmatic principle that is a “a celebration of gay identity as gay identification with the other.” The men who mouth these political clichés insist that gayness itself can transcend national and geographic distinctions. That gay man over there is the same as this one here because they both have anal sex.

Have we learned nothing from Gloria Anzaldua? who once said even the term "queer" erases our differences and marginalizes our individual struggle. And that's precisely what "Transnational Gayness" does: it conflates gender, which is plastic, with nationality, which is imagined.

Gay men obviously don’t take the idea of transnational gayness too seriously. Pornography demonstrates the West’s representation of Eastern Europeans as the exotic-white-other, in search of identity, shape and focus, given to them by the jolly white westerner--nothing, I'm sure, you haven't heard before. It can escape you, particularly in moments when watching something like the infamous Bel Ami production Out of Athens. Here, the protagonist, quite randomly, meets a Greek tour guide who cant actually speak English, but who takes him on a tour. Ah Yes! The Greek pan leading whiteys through the maze of architectural ruins so he can have his COCK SUCKED. And there are more. Boy (1995), Viz (Tom Kurthy, 1995), and Sauna Paradiso (George DuRoy, 1994) all feature young men from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and take place in the friendly yet foreign setting of the bathhouse (an originally European locale still foreign to most heterosexual men and indeed many gay men). In My Polish Waiter the protagonist reaches out to a nubile boy from the service staff, who again speaks little English. This veiled desire is emphasized and emblematized by a pivotal scene in which the waiter performs an exotic polish dance.

Gay sexuality itself, as an epistemological category, needs to be understood as a significant factor in the crisis of representation occasioned by the collapse of communism. The films aforementioned portray desire-objects (twinky, economically disenfranchised, nearly mute, slightly depressed Europeans) as having been there all along, waiting found in wanting. Their space becomes his space, the space of the transnational gay man.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain has lead to the reshaping of gay male desires. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, the U.S. has looked down at Eastern Europe as the locus for chaos and confusion. Within a post-Cold War framework pornography is tremendously recuperative. Nationality, politics, and sexuality maunder in order to keep the wires of culture smoothly functioning. The utopian vision of gay transnationality (might I add, a Leftist fantasy?) that energizes these films, a vision that is important to contemporary constructions of same-sex desire, obscures the extent to which the production of gay films about Eastern Europe is part of a larger, capitalist expansion into Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War period.

This reading of transnational gayness as being intimately connected to the political climate carries over quite nicely to other objects-of-desire as well. Take the mysterious Asian-effect: the phenomenon of some white men to only date and fuck Asian boys. Can we draw some connection between the Asian effect and political aftermath?

Yes. If the obedient, sexually curious woman was the trope before the Vietnam war, the obedient sexually starved woman was the stereotype after the Vietnam war. During the war the sex industry provided Vietnam with a new source of income. The business carried over to other south Asian territories, particularly Thailand, where they still flourish today. But the Asian American identity would not conform to the obedient prostitute stereotype up until the Regan administration. Asian Americans in America were used as the puppets for racial politics form the 1960’s in the dying flames of the civil rights movement, particularly on the West Coast. We throw around terms like ‘model minority’ today as if it had always been in place, but truth be told the american-asian object of desire didn't become such a model until this time. The Asian American was held up as a punching bag for resentment: When in 1965 The Negro Family publication came out, it accused black families of experiencing financial subordination due to “a lack of family values.” Asians were the opposite, according to conservative pundits. Asian success stories popped up in The New York Times Magazine and The U.S. News and World Report as "proof" of minority families pulling themselves up by the imagined bootstraps. If they can do then why can't you? seemed to be the tenor of these pieces.

The rhetoric seemed to carry over into my middle school too, where Asians were actually taunted for being good at things. Go figure. That particular brand of racism didn't do Asian slackers, such as myself, much good. For then the question became: Gosh, they're good at math, so why aren't you?

Of course in middle school I had no idea that my fate had long been determined during the Johnson administration. During the Regan administration, innovative technology caused massive job cuts, the conservatives insisted that a return to traditional values was a cure-all for these socioeconomic problems. Vietnamese shrimp wholesalers, Korean greengrocers, and Chinese computer whizzes were recognized as the epitome of ‘family values.'

The white-bourgeois-gay-male American identity cannot construct itself outside a framework of entitlement. Gay men have often had to sacrifice much of their personal lives in order to bare the burden of being able to sleep with whomever they want. Does this, and this is the question that boggles me, excuse them from proclivities such as the Asian effect? I have had to loose so much to be able to sleep with men that it's okay if I'm a little picky. After Millet, we know that the way we have sex is political, but for gay men it's a different game, particularly when removed from the discussion of Birth Control. As the Gay American Man stands on the edge of a cultural abyss, looking down into a pit of normalness, Transnational Gayness points to something rotten in the state of faggotry.