Sex, Lies and 50 Shades of Crap.

Now that the '50 Shades of Grey' film has been released, commented on, mocked and critiqued, let's hope that they won't make the sequels and we can go back to watching mindless car chases and shootouts and cops and robbers and superheroes.

As we should have worked out by now, Christian Grey is a controlling a$$hole and Anastasia Steele is  a naive twerp, and she may imagine that she can 'fix' him but we all know that life doesn't work that way. This little E L James fantasy of an impossibly rich and young and handsome man with a perverted idea of relationships was even panned by the perverts themselves, the BDSM folks, who called the relationship between Christian and Anastasia for what it was- not a consensual relationship between whipper and whippee, as it were, for kicks, but an unequal and exploitative relationship, NOTHING LIKE what BDSM is all about, oh dearie me. Whatever.

It was a crap book (I only read the first one and that was enough bad writing to last me a while, thanks) and I ranted about that already, and good luck to Ms James who has made pots of money, so I hope that shuts her up for a while.

Meanwhile in the real world, the Royal Commission continues to expose horrific stories of institutional sexual abuse of children at the hands of adults. Unequal and exploitative relationships whose currency is power and sex; hard to know if it's more about one or the other. The whole subject would make a maggot retch.

Then I turn on the TV late at night and I see ad after ad for 'Adult Matchmaker' websites, which seem to be about 'swingers' more than anything, and now there's the Ashley Madison site. I could not believe my eyes when I saw what that was about; it is a website devoted to cheating on one's spouse. 'I'm looking for someone, other than my wife!' happily sing several young and hunky men while browsing their laptops and tablets. The latest one has groups of zombies in their dead relationships, while one living, beautiful person is on the laptop, reanimating her marriage, they would have you believe, by arranging an extra-marital affair. 'Life is short, have an affair!' says the message on the screen.

It goes without saying that all the cheaters and swingers are young and good-looking and it all looks like such fun and excitement. Instead of the tawdry, tacky, immoral and pathetic crap that it is.

Every technological advance that human beings have ever come up with has immediately been pressed into serving the human libido. From the first time someone thought to carve pictures into stone, it didn't take long for the depictions of the hunt to become depictions of 'fertility rituals', i.e. people doing the nasty, usually in groups. Sculpture.Woodcuts. Etchings. Painting. Printing. From the first time Monsieur Daguerre invented photography, it was used to create pornography. Ditto almost immediately after invention of cinema were the first sexy movies made. And so has it been with the Internet. Every generation thinks that it invented sex, but as a whole, the human race has always been obsessed with sex and titillation and prurience and perversions of every kind, many unimaginable to most people, and you do not want to start researching this on the Net or the cops will come knocking on your door. Not to mention, you will wish that you could scrub your brain and then go to the mikvah just to try to purify yourself from the schmutz. That's how I felt when I read the Marquis de Sade's 'classic', Justine. (Compared to that, '50 Shades' is a silly little joke. Well, it's a joke anyway, but you know what I mean.)

There is an apocryphal story somewhere of a rabbi despairing of the state of the world, who fervently prayed one night for G-d to remove the sex drive from the world, as it led to so much sin. And when he woke up in the morning, the birds weren't singing and the flowers weren't blooming and everyone was walking around sad and dejected. So he realised that the libido did have a purpose and asked G-d to return it back to how it was. And the birds were singing again etc.

But I feel that rabbi's despair. When I see the depths to which people will sink because of the desire for sex and the will to power, so often intertwined, and how people will throw away their marriages, families, children and friends, will betray their countries, will risk public opprobrium, humiliation and loss of office, for 'a bit on the side' - Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the so appropriately named Anthony Weiner and his 'sexts', Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his dalliance/rape of a chambermaid all spring to mind- I am just sickened. Surely we are better than that. I would like to think that most of us are. I would like to think that even though we are all in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde famously said, that some of us really are looking at the stars. But so many are just looking at stupid dirty pictures on their smartphones.

But then, I ask myself, what can you expect from a species that shares 97% of its genes with Pan Troglodytes - the chimpanzee.

Here's hoping the other 3% can redeem us.

YOU ARE STILL BEAUTIFUL, JOE

I know, I know, Joe Cocker died last year, December 22 2014, I think; but I was looking through some old stuff and I found this piece which I wrote 20 YEARS AGO. And I still agree with myself. So consider this a late farewell to a remarkable talent.

YOU ARE STILL BEAUTIFUL, JOE

In 1972 I had no faith; I returned my ticket and got a refund because they said Joe Cocker was being deported, the concert was off. In the end, of course, the concert went ahead, but I and my equally craven friends missed out. In 1995 it was therefore important to go to hear Joe. I know, he’s been in town a couple of times since 1972, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as now. I teeter on the threshold of 40, and reminders of my youth are so much more poignant than they were 10 years ago.

So I paid my $47 plus booking fee for my ticket- I could have had it for $12 in 1972, but that’s the price you pay for not standing firm, and they say that the almost-cancelled concert was his best ever, too- and waited impatiently for the Big Night. I discovered all sorts of unsuspected Cocker fans who were going to be there, or wished they could be there, or would have gone with me had I told them about it etc; there was a lot of interest.

I’m glad I didn’t read the nasty little review in the Age, not that I would have missed out again. Yes, he’s old, grey, balding, fat, ugly and twitchy; OK, he can’t hit the top notes, not that he ever really could; but the raw truth of the voice is there, and now that he’s been around so long, you can really believe him. To sing a song for 25 years and still sound like he means it is an achievement. So excited because his baby wrote him a letter! So in need of a little help from his friends! And plenty of new stuff too, big production numbers, simple solos, a great concert, and all the fans were happy. So there, mean little whippersnapper of a critic, I bet nobody will be looking up your newspaper pieces 25 years from now.

As I tell my bemused children during our rock appreciation lessons, usually conducted in the car while listening to a CD, the thing about Joe Cocker is that he has no ego. When, say, Tom Jones or Mick Jagger, or young Axl Rose, for that matter, sing, there is a strong sense of self-parody. There is always the feeling of ‘Here I am , singing this song! Aren’t I fabulous? What a presence!’, a self-consciousness which comes through especially in live performance. Not so with Joe. He opens his throat and lets the raw emotion, the anguish, the love, the despair, just pulse out; he is the song. He always was, whether drunk or drugged or swigging Evian, it made no difference. He didn’t even write the songs; he took them from others and made them his own. He grimaces, he twitches, he’s awful to watch. He doesn’t bop or hop or wiggle his butt, he just stands there awkwardly, a bit shyly, and SINGS. He’s got the best ‘AAAARRGH!’ in Rock history, he has a voice like sandpaper and gravel, and he sounds like he really, really means every word, even if you can’t quite make out some of them.

Joe, you are still beautiful to me.

Shyrla Pakula 22/10/95