http://www.greatsasguests.com A blog by Rick and Barb Townsend en-gb 4 Jan 2008 at 23:52 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?100
Anyway, we goofed. Yep, we will do better next time.

All the same, I can not help having serious regrets: I was supposed to get that plate. Not a guest. Certainly not Lu...


----------------------

February Preview

Come our next First Friday, February 1, our diverse guests will include a French warrior, an American clergyman, and an Irish rocker. You're cordially invited to stop by.

These three Greats follow upon 1) November's basketball legend MICHAEL JORDAN, lively historian MARGARET MACMILLAN, and iconoclastic editor TOM HODGKINSON and 2) December's web pioneer TIM BERNERS-LEE, transistor inventor JACK KILBY, and Friends actress LISA KUDROW. Our accounts of those dinners reside in our Archives. You're invited to stop by there too...]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 23:39 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?99
As Hu shakes our hands and climbs into his stretch limo, he says that sometime we all should visit the new Beijing. For one thing, its 3 million car drivers generally are much more patient than the lane-changing Western drivers he keeps seeing on our roads (and whose incautious behaviors made him late tonight). Chinese may well toot their Audis’ horns, he says, but theirs is a toot to inform, and certainly not to vent the sort of road rage he’s seen in the West.

“You behave yourself now,” I advise Lucian. He shrugs and murmurs a sub-linguistic sound, which I interpret as meaning that he will, his way.

Lucian kisses the hostess goodnight. A wisp of Barb's hair falls out of place.]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 23:28 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?97 is it? That 'is it?' is my little inducement for Hu to begin making much more of a difference, maybe by providing helicopters and providing Chinese peace-keepers there. (We use whatever weapons we have to animate others to change, yes?)

('Weapons' is not the right word here.)

Hu assures me that China is trying to be a responsible stakeholder in Darfuri affairs by backing UN and African Union forces to finally, finally end the dreadful fighting there. I want to ask about this week's tribal fighting in Kenya, but don't know if China has a strong presence there too.

As graciously as possible and apropos of nothing that in particular that I recall, Hu later says that his countrymen will transcend limits of their pasts. Curious. No one had said tonight that today's Chinese were copiers, but Hu still feels obliged to say that increasingly the Chinese are original in their intellects, technologies, and standards. “You’ll see," he moves closer to Rick to predict, "the West can and will learn from China.”

Somehow the example I remember the most, involves fish. Before being served for dinner, China's fish increasingly are being raised in irrigated rice fields. Fish droppings then are recycled as natural fertilizers, a step which in turn boosts rice production and lowers usage of synthetic fertilizers. Meantime, as fish eat weeds and insects, the demand is cut for pesticides.

Hu's example plays to my green prejudices...]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 23:06 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?96 quick, very quick sketch? It could be arranged.

Head tilted now, Hu Jintao is sitting in a wooden chair with his feet tucked under his legs. He sort of resembles the chap we saw earlier tonight in our coffee-table artbook, Lucian’s “Red Haired Man in a Chair.” Fortunately for us all, Hu is neither red-hair or long-nosed, since red-haired men with long noses in China commonly are thought to be The Devil. (That’s my Folklore vocation coming out.)

From that perch, Hu remarks that Elisabeth Lloyd and Barb are refreshingly free-talking, at least as compared to the Communist women he comes into contact with, in Beijing and around his country on many tours. He remembers Hillary at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, saying that it no longer is acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.

Women number less than 25 percent of his current parliament, he says, and that’s about the same proportion as in the U.S. and Canada. The downside is that it’s far from fulfilling Mao’s old espoused goal of “women holding up half the sky.”

Men, he adds about the overall population, so far outnumber women in his country that his government is going out of its way to promote bright and emancipated women as role models.

When Hu does speak with Chinese women, he says they sometimes preface their remarks by noting (as Mao used to do) that women are a strong economic force. Then the women rail against bureaucratic corruption and cronyism, against the government’s slow (but Hu says “deliberate”) decision-making and its over-emphasis on memorization in schools, against lowbrow content on TV and Communist Party extravagances, and so forth. According to Hu, Hu rails about those concerns too.

Barb has another smile during Hu’s brave litany of Chinese women’s grievances. Who knows, perhaps she’s freshly glad that she didn’t hook up with that Chinese suitor from years ago, now a bureaucrat back in Beijing's Foreign Ministry?

Hu lauds to us women’s contributions to China’s present work and knowledge force. And are you ready for this? (Lucian and I are ready, but I don’t think Barb is.) Refusing to let go of our wicked and preposterous leitmotif of the night, Hu volunteers that women parliamentarians have yet to speak to him of the big O, an Ultimate Human Right (UHR). (You had to be here to believe he said that.) Perhaps, Hu muses with a smile –- O.K., he’s outright laughing –- women parliamentarians should rail for that UHR too.

Lucian agrees that 1) it probably wouldn’t upset the stability of the Chinese state if women’s UHRs included their Orgiastic selves and 2) a proclamation along those lines could help lure those many young Chinese men away from the online games that Hu had said they're addicted to.]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 22:43 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?94
Did Elisabeth Lloyd know of that painting when she made her point about nipple uselessness?

I venture out on a limb and suggest that male nipples can indeed both be sensually stimulated and stimulating. Firm. Whereupon Elisabeth and Hu Jintao look away from me over to Rick. They seem to almost imagine that vulpine, brooding, fit look of his -- from 4 decades ago...]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 22:39 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?93
(What flashes thru my mind right now is this. As a seventh grader on the wild side, before I knew much about life -- remember, that was way back in the tame, antediluvian '40s -- I submitted to our school newspaper a smart-alecky article about our music teacher. She played organ at her church and at Wednesday Night Sing-Alongs in the local movie theater. My text referred to that teacher as an ‘orgasm.’ That was a word I’d vaguely heard bruited-about, which I must have thought had edge (although that connotation of 'edge' was then unknown to me). Maybe too, I was envious of whatever majesty that word conveyed. A friend of mine was horrified, and more knowing: she persuaded me to tone down my language and call the teacher an ‘organism’ instead. I did. To myself now, I also recall another teacher, the faculty censor. He rejected my whole article and afterwards spoke rudely to my parents.)

Back to tonight's party.

I continue tuning-out something Hu Jintao is telling me about externalities and consequences. And how activities that address problems in one sector create interlocking problems in other sectors. I cock my ears, but not my eyes, across the room. There Elisabeth Lloyd, responding to Lucian Freud’s specific inquiry, is repeating that the orgasm itself appears to be strictly for fun. This time, she adds that a woman’s climax can presently be seen as “useless” for biological purposes as a pair of male nipples.

------------
UPDATE: After our guests left, Barb asked me about the girl, the "knowing friend" who'd suggested the word change in my article about the organist. Last I'd heard, Emma was a beautiful grandmother somewhere.]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 22:18 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?92
And oh yes. Elisabeth Lloyd reminds Hu Jintao that the evolutionists’ upsuck theory is not substantiated.

What next?

Many of Lu Freud's very human models, pictured intimately on sofas or sprawled across a floor or couch, are beautiful women. Some of them have become lovers and mothers of his children, said to number between 14 and 40.

(Unlike Larry Rivers, the avant-garde painter of New York’s ‘50s and ‘60s, Lu however has not painted a nude of his mother-in-law or his mistresses’ mothers…I’ll tell you one thing: my superlative son-in-law, Phil, is no painter. Even if he were, I can tell you I would not pose naked for him…)]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 22:07 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?91 “Because of his conviction that female orgasm must be an evolutionary adaptation to promote reproduction, Freud insisted that women ought to have orgasms through vaginal intercourse, and labeled women who required clitoral stimulation for organism ‘frigid,’ ‘neurotic,’ and ‘dysfunctional.’ These sorts of labels have made millions of women miserable for decades, yet there is no evidence to support these theories. In the 1960s and ‘70s, (sex researchers) Masters and Johnson challenged Freud’s ideas, marshalling biological evidence indicating the women have only one type of orgasm -- clitoral -- and that [your grandfather] Freud’s oppressive standard of vaginal orgasm was a myth.”

I lose my train of thought for a while.]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 22:05 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?89 is Hu thinking? What a risky, gutsy, off-putting thing to do when you’ve just met the people.

All that I can surmise that Hu is roughly accustomed to quickly, very quickly, judging colleagues from assorted cadres.

In Hu’s reckoning, the intensity and honesty of Lu’s hogshair-brushed canvases have helped set his work apart from the restrained, more thinly applied paint favored by other British figurative artists. If money is too crass a topic for a dinner conversation, the Communist leader doesn't much care: Hu notes approvingly that a while ago, one of Lu's works brought the highest price ever paid to a living European artist.

Bowing slightly, Hu then moves on to congratulate Elisabeth for her integrity and for academically concentrating on…on what?...I am dumbstruck that he re-introduces this topic… on muscle-tightenings around genital areas experienced as pleasurable waves of tingling sensations throughout parts of women’s bodies. Long live intensity, Hu proposes, and sits back down with a tight brave smile.

From the two other men in the galleries, “Here! Here!”

From the responses of Hu's toastees, I infer artists and academics like to be toasted.

From me, there is curiosity about Hu’s entourage, back in that limo of his. What would his staff make of their Man’s table topics tonight? I doubt if he is always like this.

Taking the cue, Lu warns Elisabeth that he was fond of his paternal grandfather Sigmund and warmly remembers his high spirit. Then in his very own high and amicable spirits, Lu asks Elisabeth whether she rejects the psychiatric theory of vaginal orgasm articulated originally by his ancestor? “I feel very guarded about it [psychoanalysis], but I’m fairly ignorant about it.”

Oh my, we are back to that again. I had hoped that we had moved on…]]> 4 Jan 2008 at 21:52 http://www.greatsasguests.com/post.php?88
Thirty or more years ago, I remember Barb wearing a certain smile when she once observed from a distance (in a second balcony) that Zubin Metha, the conductor, was ‘Sexy.’ I think she’s smiling like that at Lucian now, from up-close.

Lucian picks up on sensory data fast, and if at this instant he were to ‘do’ his host, he’d paint me a jealous green.

Most likely in Lucian’s case, the attraction is his glorious output. Yes, that must be it.

Definitely the allure is not his input, all those supremely long stretches introspecting his subjects, standing at his easel day after day, with his models laying on a couch, perhaps even his Grandfather’s couch. Lucian takes time out for the artist & model meals that he cooks. With drive and focus like that, who could hang with family or orate in cafes with other artists (isn’t that what artists do?)

We learn, however, that one way that Lucian does connect with his daughters is to paint them many times, perhaps in bathrobes. The pictures are benign and paternal, and in his clinical and visceral style.]]>