Daguerreotype Bad Boy

No, this photo isn't from the latest Tommy Hilfiger men's fashion marketing campaign. This is Lewis Thornton Powell, one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, colorized and waiting to be hung on the gallows. During his military trial, his lawyer begged the court for leniency, saying he was insane: "He lives in that land of imagination where it seems to him legions of southern soldiers wait to crown him as their chief commander."

I found this bad boy on my new Tumblr obsession, My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, which is,  as MDB tags it, "Where Early Photography Meets Extreme Hotness." Basically, it's hot guys you will never meet because they died years ago. But at least you can enjoy looking.

I've come across some daguerreotype boyfriends in the course of my own Bad Girl research. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for example:

What about you? Have you ever had a crush on a dead man? The first time I experienced it was in college, when I was watching James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," and realized, "Wow, I'm totally in love with this guy, only he's too old for me. And he's dead." But it didn't stop me from wanting to watch his movies. History is funny that way -- you can reach across the decades or the centuries and feel that you have a personal relationship with somebody you can never possibly (and might not want to) meet.

A Day at the Baths

Written on Jan. 26, 2013
Remember Empress Theodora of Constantinople? No? Ex-prostitute/alleged nymphomaniac, mistress of Emperor Justinian, used witchcraft to get him to marry her, ruled together over the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century? Ring a bell?

I’m thinking about Empress Theodora today because she loved extravagant baths: slaves oiled and washed her body, groups of small children massaged her with their tiny fingers, odalisques played the lute as she swam about in a dreamy haze, etc. In her time, a "porphyry shaft" (whatever that is, sounds dirty) bearing her statue stood in the public courtyard of the Arcadian Baths overlooking the blue, blue sea.

Illustration by Jon Lai at http://jlai.carbonmade.com/

Now, I understand that the Arcadian Baths were known for their external splendor and their internal luxury, and that sounds lovely and I would like to go there myself someday. But seeing as how I live in 21st-century Brooklyn and am here on a cold winter's day wanting a bath now, and aside from which the Arcadian Baths fell to ruin centuries ago, I’ll settle for a visit to Brooklyn Banya, located only a few blocks from my apartment.

External Splendor

Brooklyn Banya, “The Best Russian Turkish Bathhouse in Brooklyn,” is a great place to steam and sweat the winter out of your bones. I’m not a public baths virgin – I’ve experienced the Korean Paradise Sauna in Chicago, where naked ladies scrub each other's backs, as well as the Moroccan hammam of Agadir, where half-naked Berber attendants stretch you out on a stone slab and clean you with argan-oil soap – and Banya is right up there with the best of them. (I’ve also toured the ancient Roman baths in Bath, England, but only managed to dip a hand in one of the pools.)

To get to Banya, I walk to the corner of Coney Island Avenue and Church Avenue, turn right at Rocky's Pizzeria, head down CIA past a discount liquor store and the Halal Gyro Café to an oddly styled 1950s chalet constructed of brick and painted concrete blocks. Inside, I pay my $25 to the Russian hostess, who gives me a locker key for the women’s dressing room upstairs. Banya is open to men, women and children, and everybody showers and changes into swimsuits before going down to the baths.

The great thing is that you don’t have to bring anything but $25 and your swimsuit. Banya provides everything you need: soap, towels and slippers. But I brought my own flip-flops, which is allowed. It’s all very casual. You can just be yourself! In a very watery environment!

Internal Luxury

Banya is not a “bath” the way you’d normally think of a bath. 

For one thing, there are no tubs like you have at home, obviously, but big pools – a hot whirlpool and a cold pool where you can go for a mini swim. Then there’s the dry sauna, the wet sauna and the steam room, not to mention a freezing cold pull-chain shower for the toughest people or a temperature-controlled shower for scaredy-cats like me.

They’ve also got a full restaurant at Banya, right next to the pools, where they serve vodka along with home-made pickle plates, borscht, blintzes with caviar and a big piles of garlic potatoes and dumplings. Oh yes, this is public bathing in the grand Russian style. Or, you can be straight-edge clean and eat nothing and just drink water and/or Banya’s special black tea made with honey and cherries.

What I love about Banya is that it’s a real Brooklyn mix of people – so aside from white ladies like me, there are real Russians, local families with kids, hipsters, middle-aged men with big bellies and hot chicks in string bikinis.

Rest assured, it’s all very clean. The Banya website insists on this: “The facilities are very clean – the cleanest of all the Banyas, and the staff works really hard to keep it that way. We take great pride and care in what we do.” And I can tell you from personal experience that the pools are full of chlorine.

“At some point in the sauna, you will see people beating one another with leafy birch branches. This is normal, enjoyable, and also supposedly increases circulation,” the Banya site explains. “It definitely exfoliates. If you want, you can buy a birch branch for $20 and beat your friends with it. We sell them at the front desk. Or you can get a real treatment from our “PLATSKA MAN” for $30.”

Did I tell you this place is awesome!??!

Dreamy Haze

I do believe I saw the PLATSKA MAN in action – at any rate, there was a fit guy in a speedo and a flannel cap who had a woman laid out before him in the wet sauna, and he was swishing and slapping and pressing a big bunch of birch leaves all up and down her body.

As for me, I just did my own thing, unassisted. I started with the hot whirlpool, then moved to the cold pool for a refreshing dip, then entered the wet sauna where I saw the PLATSKA MAN, continued with a cold shower, then on to the dry sauna, where I stretched out on sweet-smelling wooden planks, then cold pool, hot pool, dry sauna…. 

…. somewhere along the line I slipped into a dreamy haze and time passed unnoticed as all stress and toxins left my body….

All of this built up to the final finish: the steam bath. Which, to tell you the truth, scares me a little bit. I went to a party at Banya once, and a man I didn’t know followed me into the steam bath and propositioned me even though we couldn’t see each other through all the steam, so that was a bit strange, and I left before getting the full benefit.

But this time I was with my husband and only unsure about whether I could cope with the intense steam cloud of heavy wet eucalyptus-scented heat that comes blasting out of a vent at timed intervals. I did cope, and it was lovely. And then we agreed that we were hungry, and not for borscht or dumplings, so we went home, limp and relaxed as two blissed-out ragdolls.

It was just as brooklynbanya.com promised:
After all the sweating and relaxing walking out of the Banya, feeling ten years younger with skin soft and smooth like babies, you will promise yourself to come back.

Timothy Leary: She Comes in Colors

I'm wandering pleasantly through the wilds of Timothy Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy this sunny Sunday morning, trying to put together some narrative that makes sense. I don't know if it's the writer in me, or if this is the way everybody's mind works, but I'm always seeking a story that fits, no matter what elements get mashed together.

I suppose I came to this place because I recently read Oliver Sacks' personal history "Altered States" in The New Yorker, where he describes his self-experiments in the chemistry of chloral hydrate, morning glory seeds, morphine, LSD and various other druggy concoctions during his years as a medical student:

"I recall vividly one episode in which a magical color appeared to me. I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo....I had long wanted to see 'true' indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964 I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, "I want to see indigo now -- now!

"And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: it was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, that Giotto spent a lifetime trying to get  but never achieved --never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth."

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Never having taken LSD myself, I became interested in learning more about the experience -- not by taking it, though who knows?, that may happen someday, but by reading up on it. For a few years, an old book has sat on my shelf, picked up somewhere, perhaps a Brooklyn stoop sale, and left unread: The Politics of Ecstasy, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D., a collection of essays written by and about the Harvard professor who spent the 1968 San Francisco Summer of Love defending his psychedelically assisted research into the inner spaces of the human mind. So this weekend, I finally picked up the book and started to read an essay titled "She Comes in Colors," which turns out to be the transcript of an interview Playboy magazine conducted with Leary in 1966.

Basically, the dude dropped a lot of acid. A lot.

"The lesson I have learned over 300 LSD sessions, and which I have been passing on to others, can be stated in 6 syllables: Turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary told Playboy. (Which means that he must have taken many more trips between the interview and the time of The Politics of Ecstasy's publication in 1968.) Click here for archive.org's complete transcript of the interview.

I was especially interested to learn what Prof. Leary has to say about LSD, women and sex. It's a mixed bag of drug-tested experience, scientific wisdom, unfiltered thought and a sprinkling of sheer nonsense that sounds dated.

For example, I now know that in a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman can have several hundred orgasms! I also have learned that every woman has built into her cells and tissues the longing for "a hero, sage-mythic male, to open up and share her own divinity." Plus, LSD is a powerful panacea for impotence and frigidity, "both of which, like homosexuality, are symbolic screw-ups."

‘She Was All Women, All Woman, the Essence of Female’

But Leary was a brave thinker, a man ahead of his times in many ways, who pressed forward without shame in his belief that LSD opens a person to the fact that "every man contains the essence of all men and every woman has within her all women."

There’s a funny passage in the interview where Playboy keeps asking Leary variations of the same question, which is whether it’s easier for a guy to pick up chicks while tripping. The doctor warns against it, saying that on LSD, her eyes would be microscopic, and she’d see very plainly what the guy was up to, coming on with some heavy-handed, moustache-twisting routine: “You’d look like a consummate ass, and she’d laugh at you, or you’d look like a monster and she’d scream and go into a paranoid state."

Leary recalls an LSD session with his wife, Rosemary, when their eyes locked and she pulled him into the center of her mind, where he experienced everything she was experiencing. There's real beauty in his telling.

As he looked at her face, it began to melt and change.

Dr. and Mrs. Leary

“I saw her as a witch, a Madonna, a nagging crone, a radiant queen, a Byzantine virgin, a tired worldly-wise oriental whore who had seen every sight of life repeated a thousand times. She was all women, all woman, the essence of female – eyes smiling, quizzically, resignedly, devilishly, always inviting: ‘See me, hear me, join me, merge with me, keep the dance going.’”

Mrs. Leary was all women to her husband. He had no need for a constant, ever-changing parade of young female flesh, he told Playboy. During the six-year period of his extravagant, promiscuous, unchaste use of LSD, Dr. Leary was faithfully monogamous. “The notion of running around trying to find different mates is a very low-level concept,” he said.

There's something sweetly old-fashioned in his fidelity to Mrs. Leary. Say what you will about him -- and plenty of criticisms have been lobbed at him -- Timothy Leary was a man who clearly loved and cherished his wife.

Vaudeville Oddballs

Gypsy Rose Lee is my latest obsession. She got her start in vaudeville, you know.

So, I've been reading Gypsy's memoir, called, uh, Gypsy: A Memoir, the one that Gypsy the Broadway musical was based on, so I've learned that it was only after years of driving around the country, singing "I'm a Hard-Boiled Rose" on Orpheum Circuit stages and sleeping in a tent with her pushy show-biz Mama Rose and baby sister June that Gypsy became a fabulous burlesque star.

Vaudeville was dying, but before it was stone cold finished, Mama Rose kept dreaming up these cockamamie acts for the girls to appear in. For example, Mama had a cow made with a papier-mâché head and a body made of fuzzy brown-and-white material along with leather-spat hooves. One of the unpaid boys in their act occupied the front of the cow while another boy took up the rear.

And then l'il June sang this song:

I've got a cow and her name is Sue
And she'll do most anything I ask her to.
I took her to the fair one day
And she won each prize that came her way

Cornball, right?

As it turns out, this was typical fare back in the 1910s and 1920s before radio and talking pictures killed vaudeville. Gypsy mentions a number of the vaudeville performers she shared a stage with, and they're...odd. Hard to believe American culture created them, but you know that L.P. Hartley quote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Or maybe you don't. The point is, entertainers did things back then that you wouldn't see now. Here's a sampling of a few of the vaudeville stars Gypsy met back in the day:

Eva Tanguay:  Slate calls Eva Tanguay "the biggest rock star in the United States" from 1904 until the 1920s, although Eva referred to herself as "the girl who made vaudeville famous." Her big number was "I Don't Care," and she wore costumes like this:

"Billed as an 'eccentric comedienne,' her act—essentially—was that she was nuts," says the Travalanche blog. "A bad singer, and a graceless dancer, with hair like a rat’s nest, the homely, overweight Tanguay would put on outrageous outfits, sing provocative self-involved songs, commissioned especially for her, and fling herself around the stage in a suggestive manner."

Francis Renault: This drag queen billed himself as "The Slave of Fashion" and performed as a Lillian Russell [Note to self: Who? Must google.] impersonator before opening his own speakeasy in Atlantic City.

 "Is it proper also is it legal for a real ladylike man to further simulate femininity and appear on the streets dressed in woman's garb provided this man be a professional female impersonator?" asked the Atlanta Constitution in 1913.

Read more about Francis Renault at Queer Music Heritage.

Sophie Tucker: Actually, I think I've actually heard of Sophie Tucker before. Anyway, Gypsy mentions her as playing on the Orpheum Circuit. She was like a combination of Mae West, Janis Joplin, Bessie Smith and Francis Renault (see above). Apparently, she was born in 1886 and got her start by singing for tips in her family's restaurant.

She sounds tough and cool in her big number "Some of These Days":

Helen Gurley Brown's Advice to Men on How to Have an Affair

Helen Gurley Brown died this week at age 90, but oh what a ride she had before leaving this world. For such a tiny woman with a delicate voice, the Cosmopolitan magazine and Sex and the Single Girl author certainly made a loud impact on American culture in the 1960s.

As the feminine counterpart to Playboy editor Hugh Hefner, she encouraged young women to work hard in their careers, obsess over their figures, and manipulate men with sex. I wouldn't be surprised if Mad Men's scriptwriters pore over old issues of the magazine in creating the characters who inhabit the show's secretarial typing pool.

You either loved or hated Helen Gurley Brown: just read the comments in The New York Times' obituary.

Here's one: "Former Cosmo Girl copy editor here. CG was hands-down the best job I ever had, and I've been around in publishing. I'm about as mouseburger as you can get, but working there made you feel like a million bucks. If you only read the cover lines at the supermarket, you don't understand the tone of Cosmo. It's about being happy that you're a woman--and yes, sex IS an important part of that. I'm a lesbian and a very different kind of feminist than HGB was, but she spoke to women who might not have been entirely happy with who they were, especially in the early days. She didn't brainwash them, she told them they weren't mouseburgers—they were absolutely fantastic and deserved to have fun."

Here's another: "HGB was a woman without morals and basically one who cared not at all about other women. She had a brief affair with my father in the 50's and pursued him relentlessly!
I asked my 90 yr old mother yesterday why she was so passive while feeling so hurt and heartbroken and her response was that it was economic. She had 4 small children to care for and no real job skills. Obviously my father was lacking in character and morals too but what kind of woman does that to another woman? Where is the sisterhood?"

But to really get a feel for her, the best way is to listen to her in her own words. Here's Helen Gurley Brown's advice to men on how to have an affair, taken from a recording circa 1962 after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl:

Now, I'm not for promiscuity, but I think it's ridiculous to pretend that it doesn't exist, and I think there's far less hurt and more joy for everybody if certain rules are followed.

So first, how to get a girl to the brink, and second, how to keep her there when you're not going to marry her. I believe most girls are attainable by somebody, really most girls, but you have to work at it. I think the reason you don't always succeed is that you want everything now, this minute, tonight's the night.

Rule One is, take time to court her. 

Rule Two, love her out of bed. Laugh at her jokes. Women have fantastic egos too, you know, even pretty little slips of girls just love to be thought fascinating and funny. Make her talk to you, and you listen. No matter how shy she is, make her feel that with you she's a dynamo.

Rule Three, admire her character, even if she doesn't have any. You like the way she handles her jobs, her friends, her family, her money. When bedtime comes, you'll have her thinking that with you, at least, she can't do anything wrong.

There's much more, including the advice that "brute force isn't sexy," here at YouTube.