Word: langner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...IMPORTANCE OF WEARING CLOTHES (349 pp.) - Lawrence Langner-Hastings House...
...Supreme Court Justice in a steam bath is divested not only of shirt, shorts, socks, shoes, pants, and robe of office. but of his authority. So argues Author Lawrence Langner, director of the Theatre Guild, authority on patent law and, in this volume, theorist on the use and abuse of clothes. Writes Langner, with the fervor of a textile magnate enjoying a martini after a board meeting: If it were not for the invention of clothes, "there would be precious little religion, government, society, law and order, [or] morals...
...Author Langner's point is not that without clothes everyone would be too cold, too hot, or too bug-bitten to worry about such matters. Nor is it entirely that cops would look just like bookies-tattoos could take care of that. The author is a disciple of the late Psychologist Alfred Adler, inventor of the universal inferiority complex. It is Langner's extrapolation of the master's work that man clothes himself in order to feel superior-to the beasts by hiding his apparatus for procreation and excretion, and to other men by putting...
...theoretical garments the author weaves have holes in astonishing places. He speculates, for instance, that the brutish-looking Neanderthalers may have vanished because the wearing of clothes (or animal skins) shifted attention from muscular development to facial beauty. Finding no such refinements in members of their own race, Langner suggests, beauty-conscious Neanderthalers may have mated with other, more comely dawn men. This argument violates the Wart Hog Principle; one Neanderthaler probably looked just dandy to another...
...operators meeting in Manhattan last week 1) called for the organization of an independent production unit solely concerned with plays for the road, 2) suggested an industry reserve fund to be built from a 10? bite on every ticket sold on the road, 3) sent Theatre Guild Director Lawrence Langner to plead with actors' agents that they persuade their clients to hit the road...