SPELLING (L)IT OUT IN THE AGE OF TOTALITARIAN DECORUM
THE WAR AGAINST THE WAR AGAINST TALENT ISSUE
309 Responses to The Endless Thread 7.0
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE HEAT-SWOONY CITY
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HONEY
Long hot walk with Comrade DJ Sensei Alex yesterday. Alex is having terrible troubles at home with his lover, a lover who no longer wants Alex to be the Bohemian he was when she moved into his flat years back. No, now she wants that beautiful house, that massive car, those luxurious holidays in a Third World setting. She wants, in a word, Status.
Comrades, I came home from this walk and kissed Beloved’s toes and hoisted Offsprung on my shoulders and we waltzed.
CDS Alex’s problems are too familiar as we pass through the spooky-cool corridors of Bohemian middle-age. What strikes me is the fact that when we were young, the polarity of the complaints I heard was different: all our female comrades were suffering, at one time or another, from some dick moving in and making life bad.
The commonest complaint of a given Bohemian female Comrade when we were young was that the fucker who beshat her toilet every other day was also physically and/or spiritually abusive and/or cheating. These female Comrades were often Art School Students or Liberal Arts Majors and trying, as we males were, to make things new (or make new things) while in love with oil paints and hand-stretched canvases and music and typewriters and double-billed Truffaut flicks you’d watch with only eight other people in the audience. They’d go home from said flick dreamy-smiling and their respective evil lodgers would then punch them or call them fat arse or would be drunk in bed with other Bohemian Comrades and a pizza got with a coupon off the fridge and the next day we’d all commiserate. Kick the fucker out, we’d say. Restraining orders were still exotic items in those days (and stalkers were merely called “lovesick”) and we’d share a frisson of the worldly when one of us would table the concept of Legal Intervention over a basket of home-fries split six unequal ways.
Now it’s different. Now it’s five or six of my male Bohemian Comrades who go home most evenings to spiritual violence or tauntingly-withheld sex and live through corrosive eternal gales of discontent and nitpicky, zero-respect criticism. It’s not nice but neither do these middle-aged male Bohemians want to hug their pillows at night alone. These men are suffering. Like me, my comrades were raised on that gender-role cusp between holding-the-door-open-for-a-woman and unisex ethics and this bred us into being super nice guys who do the housework like pros and perform cunnilingus like savants and hold the door open for milady at Starbucks… unaware when we were callow dicks that we’d be putting up with the cultural battle-baggage generated by Classical Cavemen… with no access to the clubs and spears that Classical Cavemen use to control things.
My friends are Leonard Cohens being pepper-sprayed by Monica Vitti’s who are mistaking them for Broderick Crawfords… and that’s by the women they don’t even know. Like battered women, these men have forgotten that they are worth something just because their respective evil lodgers keep reminding them that they aren’t worth enough. I read a book about the CIA when I was very young and the only scrap of it that still sticks with me is the creepy term “Honey trap“.
Bohemian men and women are notoriously bad at choosing mates; I certainly was; how I lucked into Beloved I’ll never know. Perhaps there is, among the ranks of the Arty, a nightmind-compulsion to seek punishment. Anyone who can still squeeze hot Zen orgasms from listening to Miles’ Almost Blue certainly has an advantage over some poor Dupe who needs coke, professional recognition or a pricey vacation to approximate pleasure (and, in fact, there is in these cases only the meta-pleasure of imagining others imagining one’s pleasure and, importantly, envying it)… maybe this spiritual advantage breeds guilt. The Germans call it Künstlerschuld but with the Germans it’s hard to tell if they mean that the guilt is merely felt or perceived or factual.
I can remember walking through the adjacent neighborhood of Mission Hills when I lived in Sandy Ego and the enormous pleasure I took in the nutmeggy smell of the temperate tongue of the breeze and the clatter of palm fronds and the spectacle of hummingbirds clustering jewel-tints around pomegranates. Nature itself was a cultural artifact on par with a Rousseau painting or Wendy Carlos doing Beethoven on a Moog in my headphones and I’d be near-ecstatic for an hour or two hours or four hours of walking until I came home to my evil lodger, my first wife, the former model whose only thoughts were heavy with cash and cars and luxury vacations. In a word: Status.
She was still only in her very early thirties but feeling old and looking for a replacement for the Flesh Value that her “fading” beauty was leaking in spurts like golden oil or eerily unsticky honey. She didn’t give a shit about hummingbirds or Joan Didion or Eric Fischl or Miles Davis or the astonishingly arty sci-fi flange-effect of the wash in the wake of a 727 low overhead in its final descent to the airport. She didn’t give a fuck about listening to “Play Bach” in the dark or watching a VHS cassette of “Faces” over breakfast. Well, she did have a huge collection of Opera CDs but that was because she was a snob and she rarely listened to them anyway. When we started off together in Berlin, going to the Opera was something she did weekly and I misinterpreted this as a Bohemian attribute.
On a spectacularly beautiful So Cal day with no worries and plenty of good food in the fridge she’d yell, “You don’t make enough money!” and I’d yell “I make exactly as much money as you do!” but that never shut her up.
Comrade Alex and I discussed two old acquaintances during our long hot walk around the Bohemian post-apocalypse of Kreuzberg yesterdsay (the “36″ region for connoisseurs of Kreuzberg). Can we call it a cautionary tale if we only ever hear it after it’s too late to help us? The story goes:
Antonio and Tonya were once terribly cool and ran together a trendy bar/cafe I’d never seen before when Alex brought me to the place and introduced them. Antonio (from Madrid) resembled a very tall Revolver-era George Harrison in black shirt and jeans with a silver Zodiac medallion around his neck. Tonya was a Gypsy-dark Czech of great beauty and perfect style also. You just couldn’t help envying them (or I couldn’t) because these blessed fuckers looked like they’d just walked out of a French flick co-starring Audrey Tatou. The cafe was a few steps down (watch your head) from street level and Leonard Cohen and Les Negresses Vertes were on the speakers and the calamari was at a discount for us. I was in Berlin for a few weeks escaping my terrible marriage. There was the affair with a casting director while, back in So Cal, my wife was sucking/fucking a surfer and a busboy-co-worker from the Fine Dining restaurant she was the head-hostess at. Antonio and Tonya were my torment and my inspiration during those weeks I’d go with Comrade Alex to hang out there. Watching lucky Antonio and Tonya giggle and coo and grab each others’ asses in the empty-but-charming cafe was like sipping the finest wine heated to a scalding temperature.
For two years or so, Antonio and Tonya shimmered with hipster grace. Then Tonya said, one day, apparently: we’re getting older. It’s time to grow up. I want a kid. Antonio didn’t want a kid. They had a kid. Soon thereafter began the fights about money. Soon thereafter, kid number two. Fights about money squared. The last time I saw Tonya, by accident, on the street after shopping, her exquisite features had sharpened into the beak and fierce eyes of a bird that feeds entirely on things which scurry.
I’m working toward becoming a middle-aged female Bohemian (galloping closer every day), and feel much the same. I love the man I married, but he’s melting under stress and bills and children and rent and obligation.
He can return from a long day and I tell him, “I finished reading 65 submissions, I sent off five of my own, and I think I found my next cover!”
He’ll say, “Oh, wow, hon. Awesome. Did you wash my good pants?”
It goes both ways (as I’m sure you know.)
Comrade Tracy!
Sounds like what you need is nothing more lethal than a gym sock stuffed with goat shit. Until this man grows leathery wings and a frighteningly-professional sarcasm toolkit, you’ll probably pull through and him with you. My above-post was more about persons who are driving their partners towards kind of wondering if it’s too early to sort of dabble in hypothetical methods of blowing their brains out.
Hit him sharpish with that goatsock (not while the kids are watching) and remind him it’s a little-known sex-crime to withhold conjugations from a woman who doesn’t wash good pants good. Further: if he’s not interested in your Lit-Life now, ask yourself if he ever was. If the answer is no, and he only ever pretended to be in order to see you naked, pee in his coffee until you feel avenged.
Is it illegal for me to say that?
PS My daughter decided to paint all of her hard-surface toys black today while I was on the phone. I then photographed her black-toy-project (last week she covered four chairs with 12 rolls of Scotch tape and they look like something from the lair of the Ice Spider now) and washed the dishes. This was while my wife was glamorously gigging. Serious Bohemian shit.
Okay, firstly, your daughter’s, er, installation (?) is fucking fabulous. You are doing something right. I remember my own joy when my 9-year-old step-daughter told us that High School Musical was “okay, but no RENT.”
But your reaction is where the meat is. I bet most kids would venture farther with the assurance that mom and dad weren’t going to beat the shit–excuse me, time-out the shit–out of them for failing or breaking or trying things.
All that said, I’ve gotta insert the vanilla disclaimer that I do bitch, of course I do, but I’ve got a pretty good guy at my side. We’re old and complacent, but he digs it. Even worked full-time for a year while I held a $30-a-week writing job to see where it went. He’s a keeper.
Coffee piss recipes are still fun though. They don’t have to be done in an angry spirit of repression to be funny. ;)
Liking your blog. I think I’m stringing together sentences here which wouldn’t have happened in other conversations in normal places. Word.
Comrade Tracy:
When I was an 11-year-old Bohemian, I made a list of the shit I would allow/encourage my daughter to one-day do and I am a faithful keeper of that list.
But there’s more to it.
I am going to warehouse the resultant artifacts, wait for them to appreciate substantially (I keep a close eye on the Faux Faux-Naïf Art market) and auction them off before she comes of age. Which will put her half-way through college ( I’m taking my curatorial percentage, after all).
The bonus being that I thereby guilt her into bandaging my chin and hosing my tits and squeegee-ing my furrowed bag of an ass twice a week when the tables are turned and I’m the one making “Outsider Art” all over the tiled room featuring aluminum safety handles by the sewer-grate in the floor while my wife gives me pitying head-pats but refuses to clean me.
“Liking your blog. I think I’m stringing together sentences here which wouldn’t have happened in other conversations in normal places. Word.”
If you don’t mind seeing huge black cocks or a Francoise Hardy video, from time to time, this is the place for you.
Steven, looking at your daughter’s chair installation I’d say SOMEONE in your house has serious sellotape dependency issues.
Speaking from the viewpoint of an acrylic ink fetishist of course.
Faux must be one of the greatest let-out clause words in the art market.
But was wondering about that appalling ( faux-naif ) acoustic guitar warbler whose video you cruelly inflicted on us above here or below. It’s horrible of course but I wonder initially if it’s an attempt to try and escape from all that commercial over-produced garbage that fills up MTV and the like?
People respond because it sounds different to something cluttered up with samplers and snare drum sounds arrived at through committee decisions. But beyond the fact that it sounds different ( and increasingly less so with the preponderance of these fey warblers ) there’s nothing much there.
The film “The Devil and Daniel Johnson” is quite interesting about this. A mildly okay-ish at best ( if one is being generous ) naive, borderline seriously disturbed singer turned into a hip star via Kurt Cobain wearing a T-shirt with his name on it. Suddenly the rush of Tom Waits et al to cover his songs elevates his status and turns him even more loony than he was.
“It’s horrible of course but I wonder initially if it’s an attempt to try and escape from all that commercial over-produced garbage that fills up MTV and the like?”
Comrade ET! Yer, but: there’s plenty of not-over-produced, not-MTV-stuff out there in which the practitioners can actually A) sing B) play the instrument with some proficiency and C) write quirky, interesting, clever songs. My point is mostly that the audience for “The Mountain Goats” is made up of Narcisso-Consumers who like anything that resembles/reflects them… therefore, a singer who can’t sing, singing mediocre crap over entry-level guitar is an Audience-Affirmational Home Run.
There’s a Pathology at work here. These kids were raised in a fucked-up way that differs very strikingly from the fucked-up way that less-self-obsessed generations were raised in. They want to read novels and shorts by people like them about lives like theirs and their pathologically-awful taste has a direct impact on a not-minuscule percentage of the books that get published and the films that get made and the songs on i-tunes because they are, first of all, Entitlement’s hideous progeny.
They were a blip twenty years ago (Daniel Johnston is the product of a different phenom which is closer to the phenom of white suburban kids lionizing gangsta rappers, ie Exo-Fetish; a closer early analog was PAVEMENT) but now they are a force. They are Dick Cheney’s fucking nephews and grandchildren.
PS: I like this baffled comment on a Daniel Johnston video: “Che son horribles las canciones, porque lo bancan tanto?” I’m not sure but it seems to say, “What a horrible song, why is it receiving so much praise?”
Was thinking more along the lines of the current mania for “keeping it real” which pervades almost every form of contemporary art.-making.
It’s obviously a reaction against processed-food type art but whereas it started out as a good thing it has now become bloated and detached from what originally made it spring to life.
Same with Outsider art. I’m very partial to some of it ( especially when you see the cynicism of much gallery art ) but when you see the business that’s grown up around it with many of these artists doing limited edition runs of serigraphs you start to wonder just exactly how outside some of them actually are.
Indeed the label has been so stretched that outsider art can mean that you just didn’t go to art school rather than you are a raving loonie who tries to see off their demons with endless repetitions of 12 metre long detailed pencil-drawn maps of how the world works and whose life is definitely one no-one would want.
See your point, Comrade ET, but the sociology here is so very different… white American post-grads and undergrads as “Outsiders”? Nah.
You and I know the provenance of the term “Outsider Art” but for the sake of Comrades who don’t, let’s give them some Wiki:
“The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (French: [aʁ bʁyt], “raw art” or “rough art”), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.
“While Dubuffet’s term is quite specific, the English term ‘outsider art’ is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
“Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the mainstream “art world,” regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.”
An Elder Statesman of Entitlement’s War on Talent:
Yep, yep, yep. Mainstream popularity currently requires the “artist” in question (or pretty record-label stand-in) to rally fans around the “fuck the Man”battle cry in the proper marketing order. Ninety-nine of the demographic buys it. Probably half of them see through it, but don’t care. Seventy-three percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. My dog is gay.
And that’s the kind of stuff to throw in your daughter’s scrapbook–the implied promise of future reciprocal care when you change her diapers. Make a copy of the contract and keep her aware. I’m not even kidding.
[ed.'s note: nah, Comrade Tracy; I was kidding about that. My daughter shouldn't have to wipe my ass when I'm old... she didn't demand to be born, we invited her: all 'debts' canceled. If I reach the diaper-state I'll seek out the one remaining arctic ice floe, hop on, crank up the pod-brain-music-player, float away...]
[wait: your dog is Gay? So is that one tree in our back yard! They should text each other!]
A critical review of PM Tayou’s “Colonial Erection” As part of the “Who Knows Tomorrow” series of large-scale installations in Berlin this summer.
Despite editorial notes implying otherwise, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s “Colonial Erection” delivers none of the potent commentary implied in the title, offering little of the insight into the contemporary state of Africa promised in the exhibition notes. 53 flags on 53 identical 5-meter flagpoles planted in 53 identical cylindrical concrete bases flap flag-like on the plaza in the front of the Neue Nationalgalerie near Potsdamerplatz in Berlin. The Neue Nationalgalerie, one of the premier contemporary art museums in Berlin, is a modernist Mies van der Rohe masterpiece of minimalism, and as such, a rather unassuming presence on the banks of the Landwehr Canal.
Festooned as it is with flagpoles by Tayou, one might be forgiven for assuming that the NNG had been rented out for an international conference or sporting event. On careful observation, one might detect that the flags seem to be those of African Nations. But these are flags of no known nation, made up flags, it is unclear what they stand for.
The flags, however are not alone. Scattered across the plaza, so casually that if not for the exhibition notes, I would have thought they were the work of another artist, are several figures of black men sculpted roughly in polychrome, the toxic material that eventually did in its first major high-art proponent Niki de St Phalle. These polychrome totems, painted very roughly into business suits (one seems to be in a military uniform), are friendly-looking enough, cute even, as they seem to stare out bewildered and isolated into the city from the plaza.
The incongruous folkloric idiom of these totemic figures is explained in the exhibition notes, where we are told that they have been derived from so-called ‘colon’ figures. ‘Colon’ figures are sculptural caricatures, usually of white colonists, using traditional African tribal sculptural idioms. These figures physically manifest how tribal culture attempts to integrate the ‘other’ of the European colonist/modernist within a traditional aesthetic world, and, perhaps for this reason, are highly prized by Western collectors.
But, back to the display on the plaza, are these black ‘colons’ here to colonize Berlin with their African modernism? The exhibition notes describe Tayou as wanting to convey the absurdity of the nations of Africa through his representation of 53 standards with the same colours as those used in Africa. This critique is misguided and ineffectual.
I feel the artist’s frustration faced with the monumental offense that is the colonization of Africa, complete with bogus nations of puppet governments designed to be flimsy imitations of European nations, eternally dependent of Europe for legitimacy and systematically structured to operate like work camps for the colonial powers. The scale of the crime against humanity which began with the Treaty of Berlin in 1884-1885 is obscene and requires a far more incisive critique than that provided by this art work.
The real 53 flags of the 53 nations of Africa may be as piecemeal and arbitrary a notion of nationhood as any, but the fact remains that, economically, politically, and socially, the sovereignty proclaimed by these standards is very real and largely intractable. See the current debate over the independence of South Sudan if you want any confirmation of this.
Yes the Europeans drew artificial (modernist) borders through complex meshes of peoples, their cultural and economic systems, and abstracted foreign nations, foreign to African and European alike. At last, thus, Europeans were on equally alienated footing on the black man’s land, and in this alienated space undertook a pillage of historic proportions to which all the grand cities of Europe owe their grandeur. And, most importantly, the disruptive power of these arbitrary frontiers between Africans functions perfectly to this day, allowing all manner of global players to play one arbitrary nation against the other in order to continue the pillage, unmitigated despite, or in collaboration with the most (apparently) well-intentioned human rights initiatives.
In fact we can see clearly here how the the Human Rights Organizations and cultural initiatives such as that which funded this exhibition perform an essential ethical mopping up operation (black-washing) to compensate for the globalist entities ravaging the continent. The apologia is part of the process of continuous African despoiling and enslavement. This apologia is also responsible for the European funds which flowed into Mr Tayou’s bank account in exchange for his feeble, enfeebled confession of impotence. How convenient for the failing fatherlands of Europe that Africa still needs its cultural guidance and support.
Even if the organizers of this exhibition had truly wished to promote a more egalitarian discourse between Africa and Europe through the media of artistic practises, they have done nothing but confirm the contrary. Africa, according to this show, is still only culturally relevant in terms colourfully inoffensive folkloric production. This show affords no room for effective intellectual African response to modernity and makes no effort to cultivate one. In fact, Africans seem to be encouraged in this show only to conform their discourse to the master narrative of Western contemporary art, and disencumber their arguments of any alternate understanding or interpretation which may compromise the pedigree of the canon. Tayou’s work here is less a ‘Colonial Erection’ than a colonial strap-on.
[ed.'s note: Pastor Prime is an academic researcher and educator whose parents once showed a flare for coming up with evocative names for their many children; this is his first critique for TET]
Excellent fact-filled sword-play, Comrade DJ Sensei Pastor Prime… I’ll engage tomorrow, as beddy-bye now beckons…
CDS Pastor Prime! Back again after a luxurious seven hours of sleep. So!
One of the necessary skills of the Artist used to be the ability to juxtapose choice objects or elements in such a way as to force a resonance; where has that skill gone? There is zero resonance forced by the fact of these flags being near these figures in front of the National Gallery; as you rightly point out, they look like they’re advertising a sporting event or festival of snacks from many nations. This is lazy, careless, no-talent conceptualizing. How much more clever than using actual African flags if he’d used generic white flags each with the name of its respective nation printed on it?
Also have to wonder what kind of canny adjustments in his own sensibility Tayou had to make in order to produce “Art” (on a larger scale) that Western Europeans would be willing to subsidize. The first mission of the “Artist” is to score grants, stipends and commissions. Imagine if Doctors could only make money if they told their patients what their patients wanted to hear and only performed procedures that never hurt? Art should be the disloyal opposition. It should also supersede (while being free to utilize the Trojan Horse technology of) Design.
How can we score some of this money? Why not set up what looks like a voting booth/confessional on wheels (with a curtain), in front of the National Gallery. Waiting compliantly therein, one would find a spectacular-looking Ugandan whore in a Warhol wig and a b&w striped Picasso jersey and naught else, on her knees, mouth open, while a vintage radio broadcast of a world cup tie-breaker plays on a tinny speaker. Art Critics get the first one free.
Let’s do it!
OUROBOROS BORBORYGMUS
the brand new breakfast serial
installment ONE: the waiting room
Stock was just beginning to dwell on the fact that he’d been sitting alone in the waiting room for an improbably long while when something happened. The door to the waiting room opened and Stock walked in and grabbed an old magazine and took a seat. Stock stared at himself.
It wasn’t exactly Stock but Stock at a much younger age, maybe twenty, stylish but clearly poor. He looked relaxed and very healthy. He was sun-burnished and the smell of his health crossed the room. Stock wondered if this was his grown son. A mesmerizingly-pure and beautiful version of his grown son. Wearing a grass-green sweater.
But Stock’s grown son wasn’t in the country. And wasn’t his grown son older? What would his grown son be doing sitting there reading an old Vogue, wearing a grass-green sweater, ignoring him? The young Stock had glanced a cursory greeting at Stock before grabbing the Vogue. He’d smiled politely while shielding himself behind the magazine, leg crossed over his knee at the crux of his sockless ankle. Stock didn’t recognize the model on the cover.
My grown son would’ve recognized me by now, thought Stock.
Stock was quite sure it was Stock. This must be a dream. A dream with a strangely sharp-edged, un-crazy, non-dreamy texture to it. A dream made of standard proportions of the five senses, measured in waking units of time. Stock could hear the complicated inner hiss and whuffle of the breath he kept capturing only to release again versus the soft slap of the young man paging through the Vogue. Stock thought he could remember owning that sweater. He spoke, softly, at first, but then not so softly, almost loud, remembering that this must be a dream:
“It’s like looking at the original of a copy of a copy of a copy!”
“Pardon me?” asked the young man.
“I said that looking at you is like looking at the original of a copy of a copy of a copy.”
Stock stared at Stock with a frozen smile of nil comprehension. Stock said,
“You don’t recognize me?”
The young Stock looked uncomfortable. It occurred to Stock that anyone else sitting in the room, had there been anyone else sitting in the room, would have thought he was flirting with himself. Hitting on the young. He said,
“It’s just a dream, anyway. Who cares?”
By asserting his ownership of the dream, the older Stock hoped to spare himself some embarrassment. The irony was that he hadn’t felt this embarrassed (or been in a situation this embarrassing) since being the young Stock who was now squinting at Stock from the other side of the room, too young, possibly, to understand that there were two kinds of embarrassment at play here.
Stock was embarrassed that the young Stock might think he was trying to seduce him, which was bad enough; that was one kind of embarrassment. Worse was the second kind, which was over the fact that his younger self could not, or did not seem to want to, recognize him. Embarrassment wasn’t quite the right word for it. Stock was humiliated. He joked, so loudly that the younger man flinched,
“Well this is a fine how do you do!” And he thought: yes, this is the way to handle it. Keep it light.
“Are you a friend of my mother’s? You know I’ve been away for a few years. Don’t take it personally if I don’t recognize you… I don’t recognize anyone.”
Stock half-crossed the room without quite standing up, in a kind of fencing-lunge, extending his hand. Stock met the gesture in the middle. They shook.
“Stock,” said Stock, “But I guess you know that. Because you already know me from somewhere. But I don’t know where. So who are you?”
“Stock,” said Stock, sharply, and they were locked, for longer than was standard or natural, in a crouching handshake in the middle of the room. Their eyes met and the younger man jerked his hand out of the older man’s firm grip. He took a long step backwards and looked up at one of the fluorescent rectangles in the ceiling paneled with time-stained acoustical foam and shouted, at the top of his lungs, as though he was trapped at the bottom of a well, “WAKE UP!”
Stock just smiled at the first few minutes of it. He had time.
He rolled his eyes. He mimed looking at a watch (he hadn’t owned a watch in twenty years) and then mimed conducting, with swooping arms and a snapping chin that made his thin hair flop on his head. He mimed conducting the bellowing aria of younger Stock going hoarse trying to wake himself up from this dream.
Stock stopped conducting and stuck his fingers in his ears, winded. His arms ached. It occurred to him that there were no legal consequences to physically attacking one’s younger self in a dream but also that this was out of the question considering his rubbery arms and bad back and weak ankles and high blood pressure and irritable bowels and slightly blurry vision and reduced reflexes and so forth.
He decided to sit and wait the noise out.
He crossed a leg over the knee of the other leg, balancing it on the ankle and he drummed on the outlying knee. It occurred to him to check his pockets for his phone but patting his jacket from top to bottom turned up nothing… no phone, no keys, no wallet. A reassuringly-familiar dream dilemma. His wife was asleep beside him in their bed. Their four-year-old was down the hall. This would be over when the sun rose. Or when Noa went to the toilet and/or he woke himself snoring. He suddenly remembered why he was in the waiting room.
He’d volunteered as a subject for an experimental program of drug-assisted behavior-modification treatments for snoring. It occurred to him that he might not be at home, in bed, beside his wife, dreaming in safe territory, at all. Maybe he was unconscious in a strange chair with wires coming out of his scalp while foreign interns monitored zigzags on a readout and joked about his bald spot. He felt some anxiety. He tried to recall a Doctor’s name or the address of the clinic.
Stock stopped shouting. Stock realized that his ears were ringing. The quality of the light in the room seemed to change when the noise level dropped. Stock was hunched in front of himself, with his hands on his knees, showing Stock the thick hair at the crown of his skull (a view of himself he’d never seen before), coughing on the carpet. From close up, Stock could see that the darkened armpits of the grass-green sweater had holes in them. From his experience as the father of a young child, he knew to go and push through the swinging doors to the left of the check-in desk and find a cup and some water.
He pushed through the swinging doors and they opened into a suite of little offices and examining rooms lined up on either side of the corridor. He hurried.
He caught a peripheral right-glimpse of a seated figure in a dark examining room and reversed by two short steps to peer, half-hidden by the door frame, at a shirtless old man in half-shadow. The old man looked weightless as a bird’s nest on the examining table. Head bowed, his freckled pate shined where the light from the corridor touched it. Tufted shoulders rose and fell while his puckered-cunt belly distended and shrank on a laborious struggle to continue to exist. Stock felt short of breath just watching. The old man wafted pale odors of baked piss as he lifted his head and Stock was certain that he had never seen this wreck before in his life.
1. writing is ghost shit
2. writing is fucking your inner child
3. writing is meatchunk checkers
4. writing is super-gnat
5. writing is always forgetting not to write
6. writing is solid gold condoms
7. writing is making soup with a cemetery
8. writing is a gerbil with an actor up her ass
9. writing is stealing your stash and selling it to yourself at a discount at gunpoint
10. writing is pussy gnosis
11. write
Dueling Dictionaries
Collins Dictionaries of Britain says: “…researchers have estimated that the most commonly misspelled word in the English language is “supersede.”
Webster’s says: “Supercede has occurred as a spelling variant of supersede since the 17th century, and it is common in current published writing. It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error.”
OUROBOROS BORBORYGMUS
the brand new breakfast serial
installment TWO: the device
Stock was reasonably sure that the distance between himself and Old Stock was greater than the distance between himself. And Young Stock. He hoped. He hadn’t asked Old Stock his age yet. Hadn’t mustered the nerve. He wouldn’t have been able to say if this was a function of exaggerated politeness or primal fear. Fear of the too-known. Stock had never gazed upon another human being and been so absolutely crippled in his ability to jump. To conclusions.
Way back when. There had been a terminology in place. A terminology for men of a certain age (duffer, codger, coot) but now, ironically, these words were too old-fashioned to ease unironically into a conversation, even if the conversation was only with himself. To say coot now was to be coot. That hadn’t been true when Stock was a child. It hadn’t. Maybe word pollution was the ecological disaster they should have been worried about all along, thought Stock, though not in so many words. Not even in words but pictograms and emotions. A phone doesn’t tell you it’s ringing.
There was something. Off about the old. Off about the old man now dressed in a white terrycloth bathrobe they’d found on a coat. Hook on the back of the examining room door.
The aged had always seemed to Stock like Death spying on the Living but that wasn’t it this time. Or, no, at least, not all of it. Part of Stock’s problem with Stock coiled in the sidelong approach of the old man’s ambiguous smiles, which put Stock on his guard, made him edgy. Despite the amusing resemblance to Henry Miller. Stock had read and liked quite a lot. Of Miller when he was young and Old Stock even spoke out the side of his mouth like Miller, too. But more like a Henry Miller at an impossible age, boiling rapidly away, at every extremity, into the ether. Thought Stock. He thought it was a good metaphor.
Stock could practically see the white hairs evaporating one by one off the dirty griddle of that scalp. Fizzle. In contrast, Young Stock’s hair was so thick. It covered so much of his head and encroached with such vegetal vitality on the upper limit of his face (where all of his worries should have been expressed) that. Well there was something indecent about staring at it. The top of his head was a rock-hard Mediterranean mons on unabashed display at the beach with each hair glistening. Stock imagined his cock in Stock’s head.
Look at them chatting under that out-of-date picture-calendar of Nova Scotia while I experiment desperately with the telephone, thought Stock. Why aren’t they worried? Because they aren’t real.
The young one had his heels up on the edge of the seat of his pastel chair, hugging his knees, his teeth more. Brilliant than the recessed fluorescents in the ceiling. Stock hadn’t noticed how dark the waiting room walls seemed. He wondered if it really had. Always been this paneling. This woodgrainy thing. It wasn’t silk wallpaper w/ sailboats? It was then he remembered a name associated with the facility for the experimental Sleep Apnea Cure Team he may or may not have been in a coma on the premises of. Doc Pritchett. He remembered a Doc Pritchett and a Tess Trueheart.
He got a dial tone easily enough. Punched four buttons seven times. The call signal rang and rang at the other end of the line but. But no one and nothing, not even an answering machine or voice-mail. Nothing. After he’d gone through the private numbers he knew by heart he started on random numbers. Numbers he’d found in the Yellow Pages on the bottom shelf of a small metal table behind the receptionist’s desk. Nothing. He was listening to the unanswered call signal for Wagner’s Hardware when he saw and pretended not to see Old Stock’s right hand touch Young’s Stock’s left knee. The young one was chuckling with genuine pleasure at something. The old one was saying. Nothing. Averting his gaze from the old hand on a young knee, Stock noticed. He noticed an earring in Old Stock’s ear. A silver poker chip. Silver with blue hieroglyphics. Nothing.
Old Stock looked up as Stock walked over with the handset and he said. He said to Stock, “I was just telling the kid here about the time you tried to get the number off that young waitress in that, “ he took a breath, “Vietnamese restaurant after leaving a ridiculous tip.” He patted the seat of the adjacent chair. His mechanically-even grin was several shades lighter than his sun-fried face. Stock’s mouth ached just looking at it. That tooled grin. Patting the seat. Nothing.
Stock remained standing and said, uh, “The phone seems to work but no one answers. All over the town. Nothing.”
Old Stock touched Young Stock’s knee again and said, “And you know what? After she’d told Mr. Big Spender here that she… get this… that she doesn’t have a phone… she goes into the kitchen, if you can picture it,” he paused with relish. “And he hears…” He winked at Stock. “He hears everybody in the kitchen…” He winked at Stock. And he hears…
“Do you have your cell-phone on you?” asked Stock. He wanted to hurt.
“My what?”
“Your cell-phone.”
“My what?”
“Remember Dick Tracy?” said Old Stock. They could still hear distant unanswered phones ringing through the virtual hosepipe of the piece Stock was holding.
“Sure,” said Young Stock. As a kid. “Tess Trueheart.”
“A cell-phone was like Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, only it wasn’t on your wrist. You carried these things in your pocket, back in the day. They’d play popular song melodies when someone called you, if you wanted.”
“Aha,” said Young Stock. Scratching his chin. With boredom. Cell?
“Oh, it’s a little more than that,” said Stock, surpassing glad of the topic change. “It’s a revolutionary telecommunications device. You can talk to anyone almost anywhere on the planet. You can watch television.” He was about to introduce. The topic of laptops when Old Stock. Old Stock aid,
“Like I said, Dick Tracy. Look at this.” Uh.
He twisted in the umber and ebony chair to show off a quasi-Egyptian silver pokerchip earring. Stock could literally count the hairs on the back of Stock’s head. “You squeeze it like so, for so long, it powers up.” He demonstrated. “You won’t hear this but I just heard, in the middle of my head, the most beautiful voice in the world telling, ‘Call ready’. Then I might say, ‘Call Noa’ and it calls Noa. Simple as that.” Said something under his breath to his phone and added, “When I’m finished I say, ‘Call finished’ and the voice repeats ‘Call finished’ and asks me if I want to do anything else. Like anything. It asks me, ‘Would you like another menu?’”
Old Stock added, this time audibly, but in a strangely different voice, as though talking to a hireling whose opinion mattered to him, or, no, as to a secretary he’d fucked well once or twice without regrets but with whom he was now trying, with mitigated results, to resume the staggered footing of strictly professional relationship, “Access local weather, Robert” and he blinked at the middle distance while waiting for information to rush into his head like jackpots.
Young Stock brushed flaps of hair out his eye and mouthed Wow.
Stock was still busy being bothered by Old Stock’s mention of his wife. He wanted to hurt.
“Hmm. Guess there’s no service,” announced Old Stock. “Satellites down, probably.”
“End Times, huh? It’s like The Book of Revelations,” said Young Stock. Looking excited.
Stock rolled his eyes.
“I’ll be honest with you both. I was just thinking the very same thing, kid,” said Old Stock. “Coincidentally, I’ve started reading The Old Testament in all seriousness again, recently and I think this might be some kind of, what would you call it? A kind of prophecy or omen or so forth. Ignore it at our own peril.”
Stock chuckled. Like I’m the only grownup in the room. These fucking immature imaginary dreamselves of mine. He didn’t see Old Stock mouthing, as he said it,
“Omen? Why not shit in a bucket and read the entrails? I doubt it. It’s a lot more likely to be three slices of cold pizza I ate too close to bedtime, jalapenos on the side and a warm beer to wash it down, thanks. Listen to you two.” Stock felt better hearing his rational words as he spoke them.
“The best theory I can come up with is I fall asleep, start snoring, not enough oxygen gets to the brain and the indigestion causes nightmares. This is just one of my nightmares. I’ll wake up soon and tell my wife all about it.”
The other two belly-laughed.
“Well, we can certainly see why you’d like to think that,” yawned Old Stock and he winked at Young Stock, who was flustered from laughing too.
“So tell me about your wife,” said Young Stock, “Are you still in love with her?”
“You want the truth or some poetry?” Old Stock scratched.
“Excuse me?” said Stock. Still so in love with his Noa that the possibility that he might actually be dead and therefore separated from her for eternity was a thought. He hadn’t even allowed his conscious mind to creep-toward crabwise. And she will suck this Old Stock’s cock before I’m gone.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” said the Old Stock.
Young Stock was not particularly bothered. He said “Okay,” a couple of times, just stroking his chin. Seeing a Styrofoam cooler somewhere.
“Kid, one thing I’ve learned in all these years is that change is the only thing you can count on.”
“Bullshit, Stock,” said Stock. He wanted to hurt and he would.
Old Stock shrugged at Young Stock with an unreadable expression and Young Stock, who seemed embarrassed for Stock, he seemed embarrassed and gestured. At the handset Stock still clutched which emitted the bouncy-shrill pulse a phone emits when the receiver’s off the hook yea-long. Stock could remember the first time he had heard this sound and it was his mother’s first attempt. An open bottle of candly-colored tranquilizers by the perforated black mouthpiece of the club-like receiver with its beveled grip feathered and worn to a composite hand of the family. Stock had just come home from school. He punched the Off button. “Receiver” was obsolete terminology, he knew. The one among them for whom the terminology was most obsolete stood and cinched the belt around his bathrobe. Everything they were seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and thinking was becoming his memory in real time. He said,
“Now please excuse me while I go take a well-earned crap.” He shuffled towards the swinging doors and added, as an afterthought, “Pardon my French.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Young Stock. He saluted the old man’s back.
Stock was waiting. Until Old Stock was safely out of earshot before commenting but Young Stock suddenly. Found his Vogue again. He immediately started paging through, pretending to be immersed, feeding pictures into the kitty.
Stock’s suspicion that this was a dream of his making (as opposed to that of either of the other two) was confirmed by the look of the waiting room, with all of its devices, furniture and overall style so very pointedly of Stock’s own era and not the near-Past or distant-Future, as would have been the case had it all been taking place in either Young or Old Stock’s skull. He was sure of it.
No sooner had Stock thought this than his eye caught an object on the far left corner of the glass plane of the receptionist’s desk (had it always been glass?) that he could not, from where he stood, identify.
“Stock,” hissed Stock to the Younger Stock. He pointed at the object with his left hand while waggling his right. “Stock!”
Its bulbous tip glowed lavalamp-orange, expanding.
“It is ‘Scott’,” said the young man. “Scott. S-C-O-T-T. Why do you keep calling me ‘Stock’?”
Six years ago, when Beloved and I had just begun dating, I was seated on the couch in her little flat in her trendy neighborhood when she got a call from a friend of her ex-husband (a decadent Fauxhemian son of an Austrian architect), an Australian feller she hadn’t seen in years. This Australian -call him Bob- was surprised to learn that Beloved was now divorced, said he was in town for a few days and asked if she’d have time for an early-afternoon cup of coffee. Beloved was 28 then and innocent as a Lama’s doodle. She told Bob “sure” and when she rang off asked if I could hang around to meet him. I said, well, Beloved, I have things to do but I’ll say “hi” to this Bob before clearing off. But not too long, I warned her. Not too long. Okay? Things to do etc.
Bob was some sort of hypno-therapist milking the Self Actualization racket. He embodied the cruise ship ventriloquist who’d forgotten his rug… shortish, under-bitey, long-nosed and anti-aphrodisiacal in manner, toilet water and dress. Somewhere around 50 in age. We shook hands and Bob sat on the sofa and opened his Mac Book to show us an Australian talkshow (lone host, round table, Ionesco-esque stage-lighting and no audience) he’d appeared on, back in Australia (where I’m fairly sure you can still buy soup bowls made from aboriginal skulls of recent vintage). At that point, grinning over his brand new Mac Book, jokey Bob just struck me as a huckster with nothing creepier than a can of New Age snake oil up his pants. He was brimming with the simulated youth and enthusiasm. It was clear that Bob used the video clip of this interview to establish his credentials; ie, to impress people.
After we sat politely through the interview on his laptop, Bob opened another folder, called “BERLIN”. The Mac Book was laid out in such a way that it was a little too easy to get a glance at the names of other folders before he opened the one we were about to look through and I quite clearly saw a folder labeled “BERLIN XXX”.
The BERLIN folder was a collection of at least a dozen amateurish Photoshop projects in which Bob had concocted imitation-magazine covers (a là Vogue or Time) , each featuring a nude girl (late-teens, early 20s) of Bob’s actual acquaintance. Actually, he called them clients: they had been through his therapy course, which entailed, he explained, releasing inhibitions. Bob was very enthusiastic about these faked covers and explained how his knowledge of current pop music (he was a big fan of the Cardigans at the time) usually put the girls at ease. Each and every naked girl in these photos had a weirdly blank look on her face as if. Well, it’s too obvious, isn’t it?
Beloved and I exchanged several WTF glances. What was Bob playing at? He showed us through a whole folder of these ho-ho, ha-ha mock-ups. As crappy as they all were, it was obvious he’d put quite a bit of time into them. He kept saying, “It’s all just silly fun” and went on at some length about how good the latest Cardigans album was. I decided to hang around for coffee. Until Bob left. Until about three hours after Bob left.
HEGEL SCHMEGEL: PRECIOUS HISTORY X
(The Consumptive Film Critique)
Beware the Collective Subconscious, Comrades. Beware any Civilization’s efforts to describe itself. Beware your own.
The perfecting of the Black Boogie Man involves stripping him of all Ideology (ie, Intellect) and all Humanity (ie, Moral Limits) and all Sexiness (ie, make him pathetic and unclean and worthy only of distanced pity: see the Hollywood film “Precious“). We need more images of animalistic Black Rapists/Child-Killers/ Crack-Mothers juxtaposed with White Angels/ Potential Pillars of the Community Cut Down in The Bloom of Youth. (There are four essential News Archetypes now: 1) Black Felon 2) Black Celebrity Who Has Let Us Down 3) White Hero 4) White Victim… many presented figures are combinations thereof)…
I mentioned the film PRECIOUS in that comment. Now let’s say something about that film’s conceptual mirror image (black subhuman vs white superman and both in the name of “progressive” values! ); its ideal prequel…
Last night I watched a patchwork YouTube version of American History X, one of the most powerful and compelling recruitment tools for the neo-nazi movement ever made… by Liberals. As any ten-year-old can tell you (listen, Mr. Zizek!): it’s not what a film says (or “really” says), it’s what a film shows, that counts.
The narrative arc of American History X says that being a neo-nazi is not, in the end, so good. Fine. Standard, in fact. It’s a Hollywood product, after all. You wouldn’t expect it to argue for nazis. Right?
But the narrative arc is nicely subverted by a flashback technique that essentially divides the story into two coterminous films, one in color (the NOW story of a repentant former neo nazi maturing into tie-wearing, Yuppie-stem impotence) and one in b&w (the exhilarating THEN tale of a badass neo-nazi who makes things happen). American History X is now an astonishing 12-years-old… which doesn’t mean it’s “old news” so much as it means that this Volk Hit has put in twelve years of doing its bit towards energizing America’s imminent Race Wars.
The structure of American History X is, in effect, one brilliantly wicked b&w film packed within a crappy well-meaning one in color. Or Trojan-Horsed, say. And the YouTube version just means that impatient young nazis can do away with all but the ultra-cool b&w sequences, anyway. It’s just so liberatingly-transgressive, and socially counter-intuitive, to show a neo-nazi who is loaded with positive attributes… Right?
Derek, the protag of the b&w film, is a white suburban petit-stormtrooper… he’s no Rutger Hauer but he’s ripped, bold, honorable, articulate and loaded with an IQ of about 110 (enough to manage an Arby’s). His neo-nazi girlfriend is way-hot and he fucks her quite brutally well (one is reminded of the Spartan Queen-humpage in 300). His bumbling fat neo-nazi friend is endearingly bumbling and fat. He wasn’t always a neo-nazi, our protag, of course… he started off as a well-intentioned, lower-middle-class white kid, like any other, with a handsome, hard-working, beloved white manly dad who is just a leetle beet racist. Reasonably racist, I mean. Like your parents, I mean.
The transformational trigger (the radioactive spider of this mythology) comes when beloved dad (a firefighter, no less) is shot and killed by nigger gang members while putting out a fire in the hood. Or, no, forget that Spiderman joke: this is pure Bruce Wayne Creation Myth. The beloved Dad, killed by craven thugs? This film was made by liberals, remember. Ed Norton was in a Woody Allen film, after all! He’s a Liberal! Tony Kaye is a Liberal!
Right?
The b&w film is by far the most fun of the two films in this narrative package and even its cinematography is, by far, the best. The color film-within-the-film is an After School Special, skimpy on invention or pizazz, musty with stereotypes and saggy with animatronic-acting and cloth-eared dialogue (embodied by a crusading black principal who is stealing Sidney Poitier’s shtick using Darth Vader’s voice; oh those orotund, sexless, Negro Moral Compasses). The b&w film is almost as stylish and sexy with liquid slo-mo and silvery timbres as Raging Bull. Whenever Derek strips off his shirt to reveal the triumph of the huge fucking swastika painted on the magnificent pec like Captain America’s shield over his heart, one is helpless to resist the obvious association: Clark Kent becoming… ÜBERMENSCH.
It’s not what a film says, it’s what it shows you yourself in.
In the color film-within-the-film, the Yuppie-stem, wearing his tie, neatly civilized (ie, we’ve seen him smile at a little black girl, after all), learns his final filmic lesson by having his little brother shot five times through the heart by a black kid. It’s not a stretch to think that a proto-nazi watching this flick will reason that the Yuppie-stem lost his brother as a result of going soft. Or being in color (same thing?).
There are no graceful, beautiful, articulate, heroic, intelligent, sexy or honorable blacks (as thematic counter-examples or refutations) in this movie. None of the well-reasoned, statistics-based arguments that the neo-nazi hero of the b&w film-within-a-film delivers in Ed Norton’s bravura performance are, at any point, refuted rationally by any character in the film. The pseudo-refutation (ie, “violence begets violence”)… ie the death of the little brother… which functions as the pay-off of the color morality play… is a dramaturgical non-sequitur in that it could have happened to anyone, good or bad, nazi or liberal, black or white. What really counts, of course, is that a black kid pulled the trigger. First the father, then the brother. Offed by niggers. Not to mention that fallen Aryan mother nearly shtupped by a Jew.
If you weren’t already a nazi when you sat down to watch this film, you were after, whether you knew it or not. If only for an hour or two. Until the effect wore off. That’s the magic of film. But does it ever wear off?
Look at this clip, in which the charismatically DeNiro-esque Norton (as Derek) tells off an unctuous, effeminate, upper-middle-class, bien pensant and ultimately gutless, aforementioned Jew. Can anyone beat Liberal filmmakers for making Nazi films these days? Ask Precious!
BECAUSE ASSERTING THAT SUCKASS SNAILSHIT IS MIND-BLOWING & GOLDEN IS JUST KIND OF A PART OF ENTITLEMENT’S SMUG LITTLE META-PACKAGE
“Lately I’ll wake in the middle of a conversation and realize I’m evangelizing. Odd thing is I’m always evangelizing the same man, John Darnielle, or rather the same band, The Mountain Goats, who are to its songwriter and primary vocalist as the primeval fauns, or in Darnielle’s case, fans, are to the spring-horned piper with the cloven hooves.
“Odd, because Darnielle needs no help. From his start as a psychiatric nurse recording songs to cassette on a grinding Panasonic boombox, he’s now a favorite of Stephen Colbert’s, written up in The New Yorker, and interviewed by storyteller Tobias Wolff on stage. He’s the avatar of every college-age artist with a bad attitude and nervy vinyl archives.
But poets don’t quote him. Here’s someone releasing album upon album with alarming namechecks like Transmissions to Horace and Songs for Petronius, and the poetry machine figures he’s another guy with an acoustic guitar. “I play an acoustic guitar,” Darnielle advises. “But I am not one of those guys with an acoustic guitar.”
Steven Augustine says:
July 12, 2010 at 3:51 pm
John Darnielle: the will-to-mediocrity in a pitched battle with a lack of musical talent… in a winningly, self-effacingly, distinctions-erasingly post-Hipsta, Everywimp package. And I thought Jonathan Richman sucked; this guy makes Richman seem like Scott Walker.
Is it i-pod damage? Is that what it is? Having listened to everything, you guys can’t hear *anything*, anymore? Or is it a jaded-MFA thing?
Yo: put on a cassette of The Roche Sisters (try, The Train) and get back to me.
UPDATE:The Paris Review deleted the comment! Maybe the CIA is still behind PR, then… but I was always under the impression that the CIA supported good music…?
Steven Augustine says:
July 18, 2010 at 7:35 am
Oh, aha, I get it now. PR is a hip bastion of intellectual “freedom of speech” by posting material featuring an unironic use of the term “model poon” (see: Lunch with Terry Southern) … but my comment calling John Darnielle somebody’s mediocrity-buddy gets deleted (as will this one, perhaps; worry not, I’m keeping a record of it all). So: hands off the puff-pieces, then? Terry Southern would just love it.
To quote Lorin Stein, “Thanks also—equally—to those who hate the stuff [the Terry Southern material], and piped up. We are not in the criticism business at The Paris Review. But we believe in it. Here we differ with our friends at The Believer: we like snark, when it comes from the gut. It may not be the lifeblood of the arts, but a healthy organism also needs bile, not to mention a gag reflex.”
That was before they deleted my Snarky comment, of course; one supposes that they have since revised their Snark Policy.
So let’s have another look at John Darnielle’s pretentious, soul-sucking void of anti-talent anyway… seriously! No matter how many ways you think of to think that this sucks, I can always add another
THE PEOPLE’S COMMENT-THREAD LEAVES OF GRASS
Black women must run
away from randy pastors that
seduces them to bed. Remember
that you are not his
only prey. He is
probaly sleeping
around with many
other women
that are are HIV
positive. most randy
black pastors also downlow
with men. Always
use condom. engage
your men with
meaningful activities
especially cerebral activities,
sports, music and
politics. Don’t stoop too
low. marry lateral
as in the military, meaning
your equals mentally and
socially as in
“Bill Cosby ”
show.
If you are a female
doctor marrying a UPS
guy because he is muscular,
you will be dragged
down and your next
man is
most likely to be
an HIV
positive ex
convict with gold
teeth. always
aim
high.
The Abbess Qw’ T-Ang of the Impenetrable Convent of the Odious Gorge on a Scarred Planet (nicknamed, by her aging warlord lover, “The Abyss”) is now accepting requests for personal advice from readers
DEAR ABYSS
DEAR ABYSS: Many years ago I made a conscious and deliberate decision to leave the dating scene. Whenever I tell a woman I’m not interested or have made other plans, she becomes upset and angry with me. I try to be tactful and diplomatic with women, but it invariably results in acrimonious behavior toward me. I am exasperated with the situation. What’s your advice? — NICE GUY IN NEW JERSEY
DEAR NICE GUY:Agon-song is sweetest under boughs where carrion swings… let thine sword be compass and sail in the driven hordes’ blood-wind
DEAR ABBYS: This may seem like a silly question, but what is the proper thing to do if fruit drops on the floor at the grocery store? — WONDERING IN COLUMBUS, GA.
DEAR WONDERING: E’er the smith’s black chore in smelting / E’er this rape of Hell’s cold ore!
The best way to control the opposition is to lead it.
-Lenin
Drear Diary plus Even More Difficult Text Work
Up at our version of the crack of dawn (8am) because a gospel choir in London is booked to sing the bridge and “vamp” of a song that I’ve co-written. The producer, seized by inspiration (always dangerous in commercial pop), re-composed the bridge at the last minute (about three in the morning)… which has me scrambling now to generate a plausible 42-syllables of lyric to replace the original 54. Not as easy as it sounds, minting clichés for markets some of which are Anglophone and others not… and all before noon (when the session is booked). The permissible vocabulary encompasses probably three-hundred words at most. And that includes “and”.
Busy busy round here: last night I was up until 2am, editing a promotional video for my astonishingly-beautiful Beloved; filming her drove me a bit nuts. The urge to fuck pressed hard up against the need to conceptualize. I invented a technique I’ve yet to see any videographer use, btw: smear the lens with lens-cleaning solution and film while the volatile fluid evaporates. A pretty neat psychedelanalog effect. No two times will produce the same results (unlike the faux “random” button on your mp3 player).
Later, I’d like to address the fact that Paris Review deleted my righteously-indignant comment re: their hyperbolic puffing of a guy with no fooking talent… I mean none (this stuff means something, Comrades; the War on Talent is claiming lives: yours) and perhaps also say something (unrelated) about just how slick Fascism is under The Fourth Reich. Or you can just Google “Daniel Tosh”. Alarming Ante-Upping-of-the-Month, Comrades. Perhaps you’ll understand the picture I’ve posted with this comment in light of my alarm.
Plus: this weekend I’ll be generating an essay, on my strange recent run-in with a Grand Old Literary Celebrity, called FAME, THE FLAME and the VISIONARY SHIT. Don’t miss it.
Finally: while I’m waiting for the producer’s response to this morning’s heavy-lidded work, I’ll post another pdf of unabashedly postmodern fiction. For want of a better pigeonhole. Well it’s not “experimental” fiction because I’ve been writing this way for almost fifteen years now (writing this way satisfactorily perhaps ten). So much dreary dull shite out there, Comrades! So much paint-by-numbers, snap-together Lego Lit. I like to think I’m doing my little local virtual bit to make The Species Imagination horny. O, Comrades! (as Walt would put it)… I can understand and forgive if some sophomore from a pious little province still clings to the narrative expediency of wedding the Sermon to the Campfire Tale (and in edge-worn language, too), but… etc. In creative raptures do I shit on your beachread. You’re welcome!
(if there are typos in this pdf I’ll have to repair them later)
FROM THE DEPT. of EMPHASIS MINE: THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
Q: Many a legend and fairy tale say about giants and titans. Why do you think no giant bones have been found so far?
A: Ancient giants may have never buried their dead in the ground the way we do. Different people in the present-day world bury the dead differently. It is a custom in India to burn the dead and throw the ashes in water. It seems to me that ancient people put the dead bodies into sarcophaguses where the bodies dematerialized and turned into a kind of energy blobs that were used by living people for various purposes. That is why the bones of giant people may never be found.
Q: Did you find any?
A: No, we did not. But we found the graves of ancient giants.
Q: Could you please elaborate
A: The grave of Abel, the second son of Adam and Eve, is the most famous and significant grave. It is located in the vicinity of Damascus. A huge number of pilgrims from Arabian countries arrive here to worship. Druzes, members of an independent religious sect, have been guarding the grave for 300 years. They speak Syriac, a form of Aramaic used by various Eastern Churches. Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic at his time.
The tombstone of Abel’s grave is a granite structure about six meters long and 1.80 meters wide. There are orifices on the side of the gravestone. You can smell a strange odor if you get closer to the orifices.
It seems to me that this is the best use of “it seems to me” that I’ve ever read. The “orifice” phenomenon is just a bonus. via Pravda.
SURREALISM and its UNWITTING MISSIONARIES: A MEME NOIR
I came late to Sex or it came late to me. In 1968 I had already been a Beatles fan for nearly half my life and The Beatles I knew were not about Sex… unless one already knew enough about Sex to look for clues in the lyrics.
I listened obsessively to The Beatles on a portable Philips record player. In ’68 the thing was a marvel, powered by six “D” batteries, its heavy speaker built into the lid. I remember listening to “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite” on this Philips portable while my mother listened to Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic debut on a four-legged Magnavox stereo console record player/radio downstairs. The Magnavox was all wood and tubes and gold-threaded-fabric behind the speaker grills. It was hot and heavy and the green light of its radio dial glowed in the dark at twilight, when it was too dark to read but not yet dark enough to justify switching the living room lights on. There’s a smell associated with hot RCA tubes glowing in wooden cabinets that will soon be lost from human memory but I can smell it as I write this. Something like a hot melange of Bakelite and pancakes.
I was listening to The Beatles upstairs while my mother washed dishes, and prepared dinner, listening to primal Aretha. The grinding-blue electric-piano riff from “I’ve Never Loved a Man” is so drenched with Sex that I didn’t even need to know what the word “Sex” meant in order to fear the tune. That music was so grounded in earthy, sweaty, daily existence that it almost made me ill, at the age of nine, to hear it. It was the sound of a prison cell. As an adult I now love that entire back-catalog (as a professional composer, how could I fail to?) but, back then, that music was my nemesis and it threatened to destroy me, Comrades. That is nothing but the shocking truth: in 1968, only a member of the white middle class could really afford to boogie to Race Music.
I’d listen to “I Am The Walrus” with my ear about an inch from the speaker, which was up on the desk I did my homework on. I’d finish my homework in ten or fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the evening listening to The Beatles or reading, say, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I kept the volume low playing these records. I feared I’d be in serious trouble if the neighbors ever caught me listening to The Beatles. I spent my pre-pubescence a little like Anne Frank, sitting in a virtual closet, afraid to sneeze.
I lived in the second-worst neighborhood in Chicago, then (the worst being Cabrini Green; the third-worst being the Robert Taylor homes)… a bona fide ghetto… and this fear about having the shit kicked out of me was probably justified. Guns weren’t common but they weren’t absent. A school-chum in kindergarten had had his teeth blown out by a brick during a gang fight. One of the summer pastimes (which I studiously avoided, eyes averted, of course) was the Roman spectacle of dogs fucking in a drained swimming pool on the site of an abandoned Youth Club project I had to walk by on the way home from the grocery store.
The old neighborhood is still there, on the border between Chicago and Gary, Indiana. There is a nearby Lake, polluted by a Steel Mill; also a Sherwin Williams paint factory, a mile or two upwind, the smell from which (like the smell of the glowing RCA tubes), I recall with perfect accuracy. Oh, and: a missile silo, across a highway and a marsh from us, featuring a pipe about a hundred feet high from which a flame, day and night, burned off the volatile rocket fuel, on constant alert, our local Cold War’s eternal flame. In case of nuclear war I suppose our otherwise-inconsequential ghetto was on a Russian first-strike list. I have an adult son (married) and a four-year-old daughter and I’m frankly astonished that these brilliant, beautiful kids can prove that I suffered no environmental gene damage from 1964-1972.
Almost every day I listened through both sides of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember also that I’d appropriated my mother’s old collection of recordings of Tchaikovsky. Those were amazing: the size of “45″ singles and transparent-red, one played them at 33 rpm. I was reading Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison…
I had a subscription to a now-defunct magazine which came in a format I haven’t seen since: one week the Science issue of the magazine would come, next week an Arts issue, another week for Politics (I think) and one for Entertainment. I’d get these four different editions of the Saturday Review per month. The Saturday Review saved my life. The Saturday Review along with The Beatles and Ray Bradbury and every other producer of the cultural artifacts with which I was able to nurture an intellectual imagination. I can remember being ten or eleven and phoning my father (my parents separated when I was five, then divorced; my father lived a middle class life; my mother refused his alimony, weirdly) to complain that my mother and brother were watching too much television. I was on a planet of my own making. Things turned out well.
The Beatles, by not being overtly Sexual, and by channeling an Art School sensibility (via Lennon), turned me on to the redemptive (and dissident) possibilities of Surrealism. They opened a window that served as a door I used as a Fire Exit.
As long as I had “A Day in the Life” or “Across the Universe“, it didn’t fucking matter to me that I’d been born into an underclass that wasn’t even legally human, by decree of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, until I was five years old. Before turning human in 1964, I was at the far end of a continuum encompassing people who had been traded and abused like cattle. By the time I was nine, and fully aware of my position at the bottom of American society (and the “family of man”), I was checking out ten-or-more books from the library at a time. I could tell you the difference between RNA and DNA (I seem to remember that the difference is an oxygen molecule, but the memory is hazy on all that). I read with nerdy glee Project Blue Book (“official” Air Force findings on the matter of UFOs) and Charles Forte’s “Book of the Damned” and grisly arcana about stuff like spontaneous human combustion and so on. I could tell you who Enrico Fermi was but I was so ignorant about Sex that I once raised my hand, to answer a (rhetorical?) Sex Ed question, “Do girls have penises?” with a resounding, “Yes!” To the deafening merriment of my classmates, some of whom were already totally at it. There was a girl named Vanessa who once asked, during the Sex Ed Q-and-A part of the day, while I was hung up on metaphorical pistils and stamen, “What do you do if a boy always cum too quick?” She was twelve or thirteen. Come? Come where?
I knew I knew nothing about Sex. And I was proud of it. I understood, subconsciously, that Negroes were North America’s Dirty Libido. This was obvious from the ecstasies with which fat white cops were hosing-down lithe black integrators and whipping them with nightsticks on Television. National porn on a b&w Cold War canvas in our timeless ghetto exile. There were riots when King took his bullet and the cops very cannily stayed away.
No task is more thankless than being the Dirty Black Libido of an uptight white post-Germanic nation. I wasn’t about to exchange the iron shackles of chattel slavery for the velvet noose of erotic noble-savagery. The more whites demanded it of me, the more I resisted, whether I could have articulated the reasons for my inherent dissidence or not. I couldn’t have. But I knew, ironically, with my body. Whites needed, on so many levels, my animality. I fucking refused.
But it was whites, too, who saved me from the downward-mobility of the instinctual body and showed me to my mind. Malcolm X was all rhetoric and no real practice whereas John Lennon was conceiving, recording and distributing the blueprints to my own Imagination for me. Lennon hipped me to the transcendence of the cult of Apollo when everyone else was being suckered in the mud by Pan. He advocated Fucking, too, of course, but he made you pass through a conceptual gallery of possibilities first. Maybe you’d have to be shit-poor and nine and banned from using certain drinking fountains to get that point… the enormity of the difference.
If you’ve never lived on a wire calibrated to such fine vibrations that a five-dollar-bill is the difference between shelter and eviction, or in which one multiple-choice test can change your life, or one glance at the wrong person at the wrong time can mean prison or a bad beating or death, you won’t understand what an atrocity it is to implicitly encourage black kids to mock and beat other black kids for being too articulate, too bright, to averse to crime or violence… too open to the possibilities inherent in, say, Italian madrigals of the Renaissance. Any “urban” kid who can be allowed to learn to genuinely love an Italian madrigal of the Renaissance is rather less likely to rape, rob or kill. A life of the mind is the obvious best option for the children of the congenital-poor. Which is so obvious that you’ll find it impossible to accept. A well-meaning teacher who gives a black kid only books about the ghetto, by blacks, is turning that child back at the maze’s exit and pointing to its center.
And here is the real beauty and the secret paradox of my childhood obsession: Pablo Fanque, of that supremely surrealist Lennon song, was black.
Whites saved me. If you find yourself trapped in a maze designed by whites, it stands to reason that you’ll need the help of whites to find your way out of it. John Lennon and Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut and Eugene Ionesco and Enrico Fermi and so many others (some dead for centuries) saved me. It was an Inadvertent Intervention… maybe even some of my saviors wouldn’t have considered me fully human, themselves… how to verify? It doesn’t matter now: I was saved. And the irony is that Aretha and James (Brown) would have seduced me into a damnation… the same cultural Potter’s Field that most of my poor fucking classmates of the 1960s faded into as their own anonymous epitaphs. The slo-mo genocide of the North American black. Very few think-pieces are as thoroughly-supported by empirical evidence.
I was the valedictorian of the private Catholic School I attended before escaping, to Vegas, with my father, in 1972. Graduating from eighth grade was a big deal (I had actually taken a college entrance exam, btw, and passed it, at 13… but there wasn’t enough financial aid in the country, back then, to make that miracle happen). I don’t remember the speech I gave. Much of that year was a blur of the fear that I was becoming the age at which it would have been impossible to remain such an oddball and live; a strange child is one thing; a gang-age Surrealist is marked. As I write this, from my home in Europe, I can frame that passage of my life as the beginning of the acquisition of Escape Velocity. And it had nothing to do with installing the bourgeois glass-ceiling of getting a degree and a “good” job, Yankee Materialists please note.
That flickering image of a child in the ashen heart of a rat-infested ghetto, listening to “Strawberry Fields”, with his ear just inches from the speaker, is as surreal, itself, as anything Lennon ever recorded or Magritte ever painted or Ionesco or Kafka ever wrote.
Lennon and Surrealism and Tchaikovsky and physics were the parts of my cultural patrimony that saved me from certain death and every permutation of indignity and the fact that a populist circle of fire has been drawn around so many black kids, to keep them from these treasures (their patrimony as humans), speaks to the current mercilessness of American culture; its near-autistic cluelessness.
If I can save just one white person from the cage of her/his preconceptions by writing this…
THE GIFTED RE-RUN
because I believe in the aesthetic of repetition (and the art of permutation)
RAVENELLA
a para-fairytale
Once upon a time, on the edge of the forest, there lived a girl who was pretty as a doll, but who had turned black in the womb as the result of a wicked spell. The poor little girl did not appear to belong to her mother at all, for her mother was blonde as straw, with skin like moonlit snow. Nor did she appear to belong to her father, who was blonde as butter, with skin as white as milk in the morning. Because of this wicked spell that had turned the child black, her parents kept her locked in a little room at the top of their simple house on the edge of the forest. The room’s only entrance was a window her father climbed in and out of, on a tall red ladder.
Every night, long after the Sun had set and the Moon had replaced the bright star in the throne of the heavens, up the red ladder her father would climb, bearing a lamp, a basket of food, and a key to the lock on the shutters. Unlocking the shutters, her father would lift his lamp to her open window and call,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Whereupon the little girl received her father with great happiness, as if the day was just beginning, and the Sun was bright in the sky. She believed that the Moon was the Sun, the Night was the Day, and the supper she ate was her breakfast.
“Can we play a game now, father?” asked the little girl, after the supper she thought was her breakfast, in the night she thought was the day.
“Yes,” said her father, “But only until I win it,” and they played a game that her father was sure to quickly win.
After making certain that there was enough oil in the child’s lamp to burn until daybreak, and that she’d eaten enough to fill her belly as long as the oil would last the lamp, and that her hair was combed and her buttons were straight and the toys in her chest were not broken, her father would climb back out of the window in order to take his place in bed with his wife until early the next morning. Awakened by the first light of the Sun, he would then climb back up the ladder at dawn to tell little Ravenella the bedtime story that would put her to sleep.
The bedtime story was always the same, about a fair princess with hair as blonde as straw and skin like moonlit snow, but whose eyes could only see gold. In this story, the King decreed that all in the Kingdom be painted gold so that his daughter would finally behold its totality: the carts and their oxen, the birds in the sky and the fish in the stream and every subject young and old, man and girl, beautiful and ordinary, of the Kingdom. So the smiths melted down all of the King’s gold and made a precious paint of it. And the artisans then worked day and night to cover the Kingdom with gold. When the painting was finally done, the princess was delighted, for now she could finally behold the totality of the Kingdom. But the oxen with their carts, and the birds of the sky, and the fish in the stream, along with all the subjects of the Kingdom, including the King and Queen themselves, lay cold as coins, dead in their glittering coat of gold. The princess saw naught but the glittering dead wherever she ran to.
This bedtime story her father told her always made Ravenella weep the most beautiful tears, which shone on her black cheeks like glass beetles on velvet.
No one in the village or the forest or the greater countryside around them had any idea that such a little girl as Ravenella existed, for her supper was everyone else’s breakfast, and her bedtime story was everyone else’s morning prayer, and her night was the day they were all just waking to toil through. None but this handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife knew of the existence of the bewitched child who was black as the birds that rule the night. Neither did the child know of the world, happy in her dreams behind the locked shutters of a room only her father could enter with the use of his tall red ladder.
One day it happened that the handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife had another child, a child who was not bewitched. This child, a boy, was beautiful to behold, for he was fairer than his mother and father combined, with fine hair like gold, and eyes much bluer than a robin’s eggs. The handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife were overcome with joy.
Still, every night, Ravenella’s father climbed the red ladder to her room at the top of the simple house, calling,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
In time the little girl grew tall, and keen of mind, for she had amused herself by thinking. She was so like a porcelain doll in her features and so innocent in her aspect and so perfect in her grace that despite her terrible blackness, she was not so hard to look at. Though none but her father had gazed upon her in as many years as there are months in each year plus one, she could inspire no emotion harsher than pity in any good soul who might glimpse her.
The exception to this rule was her own mother, the handsome woodcutter’s beautiful wife, who wished the blackened child away from the house. As Ravenella’s brother, unknown to her as she was to him, grew into the strength of his youth, the mother of both children dreaded the notion that her offspring, the first bewitched into blackness, the second blessed with an unsurpassed fairness, should ever by accident meet. Neither child must know of the existence of the other.
She put this to her husband, the handsome woodcutter. “She is old enough to live on her own. Take her into the heart of the forest until she is lost and leave her there.”
“But where shall she sleep?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall sleep on a pile of leaves like all the children of the forest,” said the beautiful wife.
“But what shall she eat?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall eat berries as black as her skin,” said the beautiful wife, “And drink water from the stream in the forest.”
Heartbroken, but unwilling to defy his wife’s wishes, the handsome woodcutter did as he was told, and climbed the red ladder that very midnight, unlocking the shutters and calling to his daughter,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Hearing the sorrow in the man’s voice, the good-hearted child asked, “Father, what is it that troubles you?”
“It is time for a great journey,” said the handsome woodcutter. “In this basket we must gather your possessions, and carry them from this room, and travel to a place that your heart has never dreamed of.”
Being an obedient child, Ravenella gathered the simple possessions that her father had given her over the years. These included a silver comb, a silver mirror, and a silver cross on which to pray at her bedtime. Packing the basket with these objects, along with as much food as he could fit in it, her father helped her down the tall red ladder, and her slippered feet touched the earth for the first time in her existence.
Father bade her keep silent as the Moon itself, which she thought was the Sun, and they made their way to into the forest under cover of the night, which, of course, she thought was the day.
Far into the darkness they journeyed, and when she tired, her father made Ravenella a bed of leaves, deep in the forest beside a stream. The whisper of the water was a powerful lullaby which put the girl to sleep as the sun was rising, and the woodcutter, with a breaking heart, left his daughter in the care of her deep and innocent dreams as he began the long walk home.
The years went by, and though the poor woodcutter eventually died of his broken heart, which turned to a stone in his chest and stopped beating, his son grew strong and tall. The fair young man soon acquired a reputation as a remarkable hunter, second to none in both his bravery and the accuracy of his arrows. Not only did he stock his mother’s larder with the wild game he killed every day in the forest, but provided most of the meat for his village, and the mother and soon son grew prosperous.
Being both famous for his skill, and prosperous as a result of it, the young hunter soon enough came to the attention of the King. The King sent a courier to the house in which the hunter lived alone with his aged mother, inviting the young man to the palace. The mother of the hunter, who had once been the woodcutter’s beautiful wife, but now was old and gray, swooned with pride and delight. She knew, as did every old mother with a son in the kingdom, that the King had several daughters of a marrying age, the eldest of which was at an age to be in desperate need of a husband.
“O, to be the mother of the husband of a princess!”, thought the old woman, and she clapped her hands with joy. She dressed the young hunter in his finest garments, and sent him off in the company of the page for his audience with the King.
Just as the old woman had predicted, the King offered the handsome young man the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage, but the offer came with a twist, for it was only on the condition of the completion of a dangerous task.
“In the very deep dark of the heart of the forest,” said the King to the handsome young hunter, “there lives a witch called Ravenella, black as the birds she is named after. She is a terrible witch who has lured many a young man to his death in the stream that runs through the forest. Kill this witch, and bring me her heart as the proof that you have killed her, and the hand of the princess is yours.”
So he did.
MORE GIFTED RE-RUNS
Inter-Dimensional Varieties of Longing
1. Wilderton third person past archaic
If he opened his eyes he saw horrors real but with them shut he glimpsed infernal sideshows of the imagination. He did not believe in an immortal soul but had no doubts as to the existence of his mortal shame. One could feel shame and be of a modern disposition: it struck him that the latter engendered the former with a bitter insistence unheard of in the Old Testament. If being modern is to admit that humanity is not a flesh and bone mask behind which a purer essence exists but the measurable extent of things, he unmasked himself whenever he indulged. Behind his mask was no void but a succubus that modernity put there.
There were varieties of a novel scientific argument about an infinite regress of proto-man. He remained objectively neutral about this argument in debate but he believed it on the evidence of his own eyes, in secret, when his eyes were closed, because he saw a proto-woman (by how many thousand removes not a person, he couldn’t say) when the urge to see her, and then to act on the urge, struck, which was not less than once a day; in the morning, usually, when he was about to shave. A she-beast with matted hair and vaguely Negroid features —though in complexion white as a cave fish— perhaps a Jewess— and sweaty teats he made himself feel nearly sick imagining. Though not so sick as to stop him. To shave right after was parlous. Eating breakfast and dabbing the yellow of an egg at his chin he found blood on the napkin, a dot of it the size of a curio he once viewed through a magnifying glass in a collector’s shop on Warwick Street, an Emperor’s profile from that part of the world still suffering Emperors, the chiming of the hour on the clock his father had gotten from his father’s father interrupting the reverie.
From the head of the dining room table to the old clock which was half-way in its journey to the stroke of nine was a distance of fifty paces he was helpless against enumerating each and every time he walked it. The pleasure he took in making the number fifty-one or even fifty-two, sometimes, by his stride’s independent subterfuge, struck him as pathetic, knowing that a similar path in his father’s house had measured twice that. Yes and in his father’s father’s mansion the path had been twice and half-again more, his grandfather having housed two families, the extraneous one based on the two little men he’d got by the girl who polished the brasses and remained pretty much longer than his wife, who, in all fairness, bore him four times the number, seven of them men, the youngest of whom inherited the clock now chiming down the hall and precious little else. He touched it in passing.
The tree-tops and cloud-bottoms and spires of the university were all still there, familiar elements of an oil painting that would crumble before it ever yellowed with age. The wind that pushed him was a playful spirit and lifting a hand to steady his hat he managed also to wave at Mr. Wilderton who happened to turn, at that moment, from studying the Airship as though he’d been reading an inscription on it. He waited for a carriage to clatter past and waited again to defer to arms-linked women in blindingly bright dress and finally crossed the street to approach the hatless and stubbornly mutton-chopped figure. The affect of Wilderton’s haughty posture and obstructive position was as if the Airship were his own and that Mr. Wilderton was neither unduly proud of it as a possession nor likely to offer anyone else a ride on it. Forty yards up in brilliant blue it glinted where the sun surpassed the long morning shadows of the university, in apparent size large enough to hold several men.
“Mr. Wilderton,” he said.
“And to you,” nodded Wilderton. It was not the first time he wondered if Wilderton had trouble remembering any or all parts of his name. At best, Wilderton sometimes addressed him as “Sir”. He stuck out a hand and Wilderton took it with surprising warmth. Wilderton himself, as a figure, so lacked any hint of surprises that his every deed or gesture fairly minted them. He had once seen Wilderton stick out his tongue at a large woman’s gingham back and the image would endure to amuse him on his very deathbed, he was certain.
“I went mad on the occasion of my thirty-fifth birthday,” said Mr. Wilderton, “and ordered by catalogue a thing to be delivered by international post; a thing I suspected you’d be interested in seeing. Collected in Java. On the eve of my thirty-sixth birthday I have received notice that the package is now arrived. Do you have time, Sir?”
The package (covered in covetable stamps?) was assigned to be delivered before noon and he walked with Mr. Wilderton to the latter’s house, behind the university, on Edgeware Road. It was a forty-minute walk at a stiff pace, their walking sticks flashing with an almost embarrassing unity.
2. Salome third person past demotic
Dolph Schneider wore a monk-like beard for years on account of his weak chin, but gave up the practice after hitting thirty, because the beard, he felt, made him look too old. His striking red-headed mother Salome said “Jesus thank God… finally…you look like my son again…” and hugged him and that was nearly enough to make Dolph grow the beard back. He’d almost forgotten how much self-assertion had gone into that itchy affectation in the first place. Not that he didn’t love his mother. He did he did. He knew he was lucky to have her. Things could have been worse.
Pantsless, with bruise-colored blazer draped over one arm, he yanked open his closet and squinted with suspicion at the sad things that found solace in its darkness. T-shirts on hangers; a dangling camouflage belt or two, and behind that, the material residue of his childhood dream. This stack of stuff weighed as much as Dolph did, but was three feet taller.
The strata of the stack revealed historical epochs of Dolph Schneider, starting with various flattened boxes of Milton Bradley board games at the very bottom; the visible red edge of an all too fragile Etch-A-Sketch which had lasted exactly a week in ‘79; several cracked ant farms (abandoned cities now); the wood-burning kit that one of Dolph’s innumerable ‘uncles’ had brought over, re-wrapped, the day after Christmas one year, as consolation for the fact that he would never leave his real wife and kids, Dolph guessed; the hinged wooden case of a junior biology lab (with its grisly black jars of pickled specimens, still somewhat of a nightmare factory), a thin layer of comix and coloring books, a case of water colors, a case of oil paints, a case of pastel crayon and a tower of vintage Penthouse magazines that teetered to within a few inches of the closet ceiling. The Penthouses were still subject to frequent raids and anthropological investigations.
The five-year subscription had been a birthday gift from Salome on Dolph’s thirteenth. You’re a man now and all that. Where she got the money he could only guess. Maybe they all chipped in… his ‘Uncles’. Despite the fact that even then Dolph had rightly interpreted this convention-flouting gift as a deft maneuver around a parental lecture of an embarrassingly intimate nature, he had to admit to himself that he could’ve done worse than have Salome Schneider for a mother. She could have been like home-schooled loony Tim Patchett’s mother, she of the distracted gaze and permanent I-see-Jesus-standing-right-behind-you smile. Or she could have been like Boggy’s mom: Boggy called her Stalinetta. No, Dolph’s mother was cool and everyone (except everyone’s parents) knew it. She was funky and foxy and had even tried to get Dolph to smoke pot with her. She had hoped for a kind of new family tradition to take root: pot night on Sundays in the attic with Mom.
She was always hoping that some new family tradition might take root. Dolph assumed that her palpable longing in this department was related to the fact that she had shattered every connection to actual old family traditions by moving to Southern California (‘So Cal,’ or as she later re-christened it, ‘So-so Cal’) and renouncing the Jewish faith and having him, Dolph, so far out of wedlock that he hadn’t even known his father’s name for the first twenty years of his life.
Not that Dolph regretted the fact that he hadn’t been brought up a Jew. But he had positively hated Kwanza. And those mother-son dervish classes at the YMCA (“Dervish” always sounded too much like an adjective in his opinion, and his incessant sarcastic use of ‘derv’ or ‘derving’ as a verb had contributed to Salome’s decision to cancel the non-refundable classes; she still found time to guilt him about that one, occasionally). The attempted pot tradition had come and gone the summer before Dolph left for his aimless year-and-a-half at a semi-prestigious college back East. That’s one thing that semi-prestigious colleges back East are good at: knowing when you don’t belong at them.
“Dolphy, come on, you’re kidding. You don’t… (drag; gulp)…you don’t smoke (cough)…pot? At all? Never? Aren’t you even… (drag; gulp)… curious?”
That soft July night, with so many stars visible through the propped-open attic windows and his mother’s pretty face flickering in the parchment light of a single candle that seemed tied by a fine string to the breeze, Dolph had wished with all of his heart that his mother would say what she really wanted to say. He was very psychic with her, Dolph was. He knew she wanted to quip about his abstinence from drugs, “Christ, Dolphy, what would your father say?” and they both would have giggled over that one and it was a giggle Dolph had sorely wanted to share with her.
But the “P.P.” (Phallo-Progenitor) was off limits. Verboten. The conversational territory of Dolph’s biological father was a scorched and salted circle of sand surrounded by razor wire in the desert of high unmentionables. Rather than making that joke about his unmentionable father, Salome had opted for the obvious and awful alternative, a sentence that had made Dolph wince so hard he’d actually pinched a ladybug-sized fart when she said it.
“Christ, Dolphy, are you a …a virgin, too?”
“ ‘Virgin’?,’ demanded Dolph. His volume increased as the sentence progressed. “Why the euphemism, Mom? I’m a pear-shaped bushy-haired semi-Jew with a weak chin, a zero-status job and 17 months of college under my belt that I’ll be paying off for the rest of my ridiculous life!”
And yes: he had been. A virgin. Back then. His surprising reaction had prompted a compassionate hug from his mother that had in turn broken his heart. Now, at nearly thirty one, things were no longer quite like that for Dolph in that department, but only just. The former state was distinguishable from the latter by twelve years and three-or-four acts of sketchy intercourse. What would his father say?
On all fours, still pantsless and fat-in-the-can and painfully aware of how he must look from behind, Dolph peered under his bed. There were terrible things to be found there in the realm from which his dreams often filtered up to him; things he’d stuffed there to forget and had forced therefore into his subconscious. Dust-bunnies, sure, and pizza boxes, of course. But bills, mostly. Unopened credit card bills. Online porno and phone sex line and tele-psychic bills. Very big bills. Any day now, in fact, he was expecting a knock on the door. Or the righteous anger of an overhead helicopter. Maybe I should have taken up pot as a habit, he thought. Maybe his mother had been right. Being unable to purchase the pot with a credit card would have kept the habit in check.
He could hear Salome bumping around downstairs in the living room, clearing a space for her weekly private lessons with the bone-thin, swarthy tango man. He lifted a stiff nest of dark, sour clothing. A sock… one of his older cashmere sex socks… tumbled off the top of the nest and rolled under his desk as though fleeing him.
“Salome,” he called down the stairs, at the top of his lungs, “have you seen the tie?” There was the hint of accusation in his voice familiar to all such living arrangements.
“Not since the funeral!” she yodeled back.
He took a breath to shout “Which funeral?” when the Hoover filled the little house with its protective roar, cutting him off. Dolph had no serious complaints about his mother because she had done the best she could do under the circumstances. She had raised him with little money and no help, banished from her family and surrounded by freaks, into the loose variation on the theme of fine-young-man that he was. The only problem he had with her, his hip young mother (47 to his 30) … the only thing that still pissed him off sometimes…
“Aha!”
He found the tie as a bookmark in a hardcover anthology of a pornographic science fiction magazine called Salome. All he had to do now was to remember how to put the damn thing on.
3. Goldilocks first person present continuous exotic
My big brother Ajax says that story about Goldilocks is a cautionary tale about race mixing. My little brother Julio just sits there staring at the television while trying to gnaw his jawbreaker in half. Ajax is the smart one. In fact, as they say in my family, he got everything and a little bit more: brains, looks and the Jungle Juice to spare. Me: I’m slow but steady and Julio is an ugly runt with no hope for a better future but Ajax, he’s something. I heard a white lunch lady call him a Colored Adonis once and what else can I say?
Julio and I are busy watching My Favorite Martian in order to combine our two favorite pleasures (jawbreakers and My Favorite Martian) and Ajax is propounding his theory. Goldilocks is a spoiled, middle-class Honkie bitch, etc.
“Ajax, man,” I say. “This is not the place.”
Ray Walston as the Martian (alias Martin O’Hara) has hypnotized a woman with his alien mind powers and is now busy re-doing her ‘do with his telekinetic finger. He’s transforming her into a Fox. I hope he kisses her this time. He never kisses anyone. It’s his show and he never gets any.
“Any what?” I always demanded before, frustrated by my ignorance, but Ajax, or Uncle Eldridge, or the kids at school, they’d just wag their fingers and say stuff like, “If you gotta ask, you shouldn’t know.”
Back to the girl on My Favorite Martian. Her shiny thick chestnut-colored hair and her Gemini nose-cone Playtex cross-your-heart titties.
It makes me think of a cut-away view of a fallopian tube that I’ve seen in Miss Bumper’s Sex Ed and Hygiene Class, so I develop a painful swelling in my groin. I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I don’t care what I do with this thing. This is the very problem that Miss Bumper warned us about recently, whacking a chalkboard diagram of erectile tissue with her pointer so hard that the rubber tip of the pointer broke off. The tip ricocheted off of Darleen McFadden’s forehead and sent her to the nurse’ office. Miss Bumper said she was faking.
I can hear Ajax and Julio’s insincere laughter and then the theme song of My Favorite Martian, all of this through the bathroom door as I lean against the tile wall, which is cool on my cheek. My back is to the mirror, but I can see it from the corner of my eye in the dim light: my back and the anxious movements, like I’m snatching sticky taffy out of my pocket.
I’m facing the worn green bar of soap on a rope that I bought for Uncle Eldridge for Christmas. It’s hanging lazy in the shower, smirking at me with a long loose curlicue of hair for a smile. On the bathtub’s rim are lined up Uncle Eldridge’s colognes and deodorants and ointments: English Leather, Brut, Canoe, Old Spice, Jade East, Right Guard and then I see stars. A tablespoon of my Jungle Juice is trickling down the tile wall, like a tiny smashed egg without the shell. Then I start laughing. I can’t help it. I am pleased.
“Ooooh! Oooohhh! Un-ka Ellll-dridge! Un-ka Elllll-dridge!” shouts Julio, from the top of the stairs, “Hamilton be laffin’ dirty in the baffroom agin!”
A year ago I nearly killed Julio by persuading him to fly from the highest point of the garage roof wearing a towel like a Superman cape. At the last minute I substituted a plain old towel from the laundry basket and was about to give him a good push when we heard the ice cream truck come rolling down the alley, doodling its scary melody. The circus music that slows down in some parts and speeds up in others like a Vincent Price movie about a crazy undead clown. Julio and I scampered down off the roof and bought a pineapple Popsicle for him (Julio only had a dime) and a Dreamsicle for me. The ice cream man was so black that I could see the reflection of my hand in his forehead as I passed him my Kennedy Half.
“Un-ka Ellllll-dridge! Un-ka Elllllllll-dridge!”
I still have the grin that’s left over from the laughter on my face, leaning cheek-first against the bathroom wall and I think: that Dreamsicle wasn’t worth it. I wish I could give it back. I wish I could reverse the march of time so that we never scrambled down off that roof to buy those ice cream bars so Julio tried to fly with that fake Superman cape instead. I’d look down from the top of the garage towards the concrete driveway and see Julio laying there like that Gumby we fucked up last Christmas plus genuine blood. I’d climb down and investigate the body and exchange the useless towel he was wearing for the Superman towel I’d switched it with and no one would suspect a thing.
“Let your big brother be, Julio Hanson…,” yells back Uncle Eldridge from the kitchen. He is making Sloppy Joes. Sloppy Joes and Fritos. And strawberry Nehi in a bottle with a straw.
What a wonderful motherfucking existence
BECAUSE ASSERTING THAT SUCKASS SNAILSHIT IS MIND-BLOWING & GOLDEN IS JUST KIND OF A PART OF ENTITLEMENT’S SMUG LITTLE META-PACKAGE, Part 2.0
This last week I’ve felt a little nostalgic for the Totalitarian Oppression of the past. Remember? How grimly-constipated men with big mustaches and secret homosexual urges (made brutally perverse by sublimation) would enforce a Norm, which had been established by violence, by threatening more violence? How conversations with the faintest whiff of dissidence were held in whispers in kitchens that had been checked for listening devices, with the taps running loud in the sink just in case? And how, despite, or, because of, the massive gray pressure of brute-conformity by decree, from above, fantastic profusions of color, in the form of underground Arts and samizdat Literature, secretly nurtured the powerless by feeding into the one possession The State could not, from the powerless, confiscate: the Imagination? “The Imagination” being a rational, secular term for The Soul.
Great Art inspires; Inspiration breeds heroic Imaginations; heroic Imaginations make Great Humans and Great Humans make Great Art: remember?
Well, welcome to Totalitarian Oppression 2.0. They’ve got it worked out pretty well. While brotherly, avuncular and grandfatherly mass-murderers with publicists do what they do from the top, their fucking biological (and/or spiritual) offspring do what they do from the middle, which is destroy Art. All those kids who don’t even take Art or Lit seriously enough to break a sweat simply finding-then-perfecting any ability whatsoever before they dump their samey Fartifacts all over the place and agree to call each others’ dumpage “awesome” (to fail to do so would just be so rude, dude, not to mention destroy the illusion for everyone).
Mediocre Art enervates; enervation breeds flaccid Imaginations; flaccid Imaginations make Mediocre Humans and Mediocre Humans make Mediocre Art.
Please, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit, go out today and find some Art that doesn’t flatter, humor, fatten, pacify, confirm, distract or, worst of all, cynically reflect you… and make an effort to appreciate it. And if you can’t find some… make some. It may not be easy but that’s the point.
I read that the taste for whalemeat is actually diminishing in Japan and the government subsidises its production. Why? I can only think because it reflects backwards to a Japan before the invasion of McDonalds, Burger King etc.
Many year’s ago I ( bohemian that I am too although I prefer the Odilon Redon model of keep appearances normal on the outside and let the art do the talking ) I went to a splendid Super 8 film festival. It was an open door policy so afternoons in upstairs rooms in pubs were spent ( or was that wasted? On reflection spent ) watching the avant-garde as well as precocious brat’s home versions of Star Wars. However best of all was a film of Lapp fishermen singing the praises of eating every bit of the seal. One verse was indeed ” Seal cock is delicious, seal cock is delicious”. After about 20 minutes of this even the most hardened ( oops ) meat-eaters had been bludgeoned into revulsion by the carnivorous zeal on show. Expressed in song.
Comrade ET!
It’s already so obvious that seal cock is delicious that you have to wonder why the Lapps insist on overstating the point. I like the idea of “hardened meat-eaters” being “bludgeoned” by… seal cock.
You got the impression that the Lapps who won’t eat seal cock but will eat the rest of the beast were “vegetarians”.
Rather similar to Spain where I have just been working. One of our team is a no meat / no fish version of vegetarian ( quite a rare beast in my experience. – most vegetarians I know including my partner will eat fish. ??????? ) . He asked for a salad with no fish or meat in it which had to be returned several times to be de-tuna’d. The waiter was confused by his claim that tuna is in fact a fish.
I think the Veg rule (as I understand it) is that anything which doesn’t smile, sport hair or have noisy orgasms is fair game. Vegans are more strict in that they spare the quieter-orgasm-type species too.
More Super-Shit From GENERATION-SCHIZ on a Sunday
See what happens when you’ve been raised on a steady diet of every shade/nuance/state and degree of Lie, both Professional and Amateur? [ed.'s note: the advertising Lies, the religion Lies, the war Lies, the narcissism Lies, the social Lies, the economic Lies, success Lies and the consensus-equals-the-truth Lies, et al], Your Taste Glands and Bullshit Detectors just dry up, burn off and blow away:
“I don’t think it’s melodrama. From what I’ve seen, John is just really emotionally attached to his songs. He seems to get lost here. The Nine Black Poppies in the related section is another example of how into his songs he gets. I think that’s the sign of an excellent musian – I really don’t think he’s trying to be overly dramatic.” -t3hAlien
“what the fuck happened to this guy that made him this intense? he obviously isn’t vamping for any audience he’s genuinely going through something.” -kehoeseanadam
Kids. What have they done to you… ?
Now, please, Comrades… look at the following chunk of Tin Cheese (lauded by the above-cited comments) and try not to laugh so hard that it wakes your kid down the hall while she’s napping (still, I’ll admit, if you need to distract from crappy skills on the guitar, a total inability to sing and the compositional might of a precociously self-dramatizing 8th-grader, what better way to do it than to channel Martin Short channeling Jerry Lewis being not quite funny as ever?):
vs
Yes and some more genuine talent to go beddywards with and to forget the ever-asseverative suckage… for awhile …
Little Stalinisms*
Yesterday I got some traffic via a Guardian Unlimited Blogicle that was posted on Feb 7, 2008. The Blogicle was on the subject of the Willesden Herald International Short Story competition and the kerfuffle which ensued when the competition’s chief judge, the famously hot-housed flower, Zadie Smith, announced: “We could not find the greatness we’d hoped for,” and, “It’s for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year.” Fair enough and who gives a shit, more than two years later?
What caught my eye is the fact that the Guardian seems to have deleted the second half of the comment thread. I traced the incoming link, back to the original post and thread, with a sense of nostalgia, not least because one of the commenters, well-known to that vintage of the community of Guardian readers/commenters, Cynical Steve, has since (unbelievably) died. It was a lively thread, which also happened to offer insight into the psycho-mechanics of a Literary Prize, because one of Zadie’s key accomplices in the Willesden Herald International Short Story competition (who appeared in the thread under the virtuanym “Zozimus“) jumped in and started swinging. Which certainly had a salutary and demystifying effect. But the demystifying bits are now gone.
Writers and Critics and Divers Literary Authorities who don’t want to have their cools blown and be seen as merely human should never descend to comment threads… for the obvious reason that there are always civilians out there, somewhere, who are actually more clever than you/us/they, and one or two or even a terrifying gang of them will be drawn by the beacon of the title of the blogicle (or by the tags); it’s not a random sample of the general public. The Internet is a tool for philosophical investigation on all that as nothing displaces a human’s sense of self more casually and definitively from the pinnacle/center of Creation. It also wreaks havoc with anyone’s confidence in her/his ability to mint original band names.
The point is that those fuckers at the Guardian chopped the thread in half, giving “Zozimus” the last word… a comment he’d left before veering far, far off into the juvenile and the loopy. The comment thread originally ended at 111 entries (it still bloody says so, right there under the blogicle) and now it ends at 50. Did Zadie apply her mediocre Star Pressure? I guess we’ll never know. The opportunity of self-expression the comment thread offers (remember what it was like, 20 years ago, crafting a Letter to the Editor and then praying it would appear, a week or a month later, in public?) is backed by the tacit caveat that a comment thread at a commercial site is governed, in the end, by the same dodgy ethics of any business.
We can never know if be-turbaned Zadie applied cosmetic delete-pressure [ed.'s note: we can, in fact: see below], but what we can know is how human (and randomly-appointed) people who judge these lofty-sounding competitions can actually be. Because I had the foresight to preserve the thread.
Disclaimer: I don’t believe in “Literary Competitions” and I certainly didn’t enter this one… my chances of ever winning these things remain nil. Too fucking whatever, man.
Any of the Guardian Commenters of the Class of 2006-2008 may enjoy reading this pdf.
“Actually, Steven, all of the old threads are cut off at the 50-comment point, something we were discussing on the last thread and something MM has been in communication with Richard Lea about.
Very frustrating when you want to retrieve a remembered post. The usual Grauniad tech-geek fuck-up, I think, as opposed to malevolence…However, RL has promised to get it sorted…I could be wrong (re: the Smith debacle) but I suspect that’s what it is.”
So change the title of this post to…
*INADVERTENT STALINISMS
THE WAR ON TALENT
with apologies to Kundera
As in many fields, America leads the world in the war against talent. I was discussing this notion with my imaginary friend Dr. Painloss, who was reluctant to cede to nice American heads the crown in this matter.
“What about Germany?” he asked, with his ambiguously-European accent. I could see his point, what with all the permanently lip-synching pop stars over here and the novelists whose novels are nothing but rambling essays of derivative philosophical posturing and all the painters who can barely draw or mix colors and the dancers with no authority of movement nor sense of rhythm and the beggars who aren’t even witty about demanding that money be dropped in their caps, etc.
“But having no talent,” I corrected him, “is not quite the same as waging a war against it, although the one sometimes leads to the other.”
We were sitting in a cozy café in East Berlin where the waitress displayed no visible talent in the field of service. We’d been sitting there already for a quarter of an hour without even being offered a menu. The dirty plates and glasses from our table’s prior occupant had yet to be cleared away. The waitress was beautiful, which put me on to an interesting train of thought: is physical beauty, in some obvious-yet-rarely-analyzed way, talent’s enemy? Can the war on talent be connected somehow to the rise of the modern cult of physical beauty? But this train of thought was derailed by Painloss’ child-like querulousness.
“But I don’t quite get,” he frowned, “how it is you hold the country of your birth to be the first of all nations in this regard. Surely, in Iran, where the censorship is so powerful that entire art forms are forbidden on pain of death…”
“Ah, but I’d draw the distinction between America and Iran in my conception of a war against talent because Iran has an excuse for almost every extreme in attitude or policy… religion. Ridiculous as you and I may find it that a modern government appoints itself the murderous henchman of an invisible, misogynistic super-being, it isn’t talent itself that the Iranians seem to object to. Whereas in America, you see, it’s held that talent is an evil in and of itself, by definition, to the extent that it discriminates and isolates the lonely many from the few. But there’s something more insidious at work there, I think.”
I smiled over Dr. Painloss’s head, hoping to attract the attention of our physically perfect waitress. To no avail. She was very busy, leaning over the counter to chat with her equally-handsome boyfriend. When I lowered my smile again to Paingloss’s level I saw that he was glaring at me.
“Well?” he demanded, finally.
“It’s just this: talent, especially in its esoteric form, generally seems to cost more and to sell less, and it makes all kind of difficult demands… consider the word diva. I sometimes wonder if behind the fatwa on extraordinary ability in my homeland, some kind of bottom-line corporate malfeasance isn’t at work…”
Painloss, always delighted by conspiracy theories (the more rigorously torturous the better), chuckled. My good-natured friend, a true intellectual who is himself so replete with ability that he often inspires feelings of inadequacy in his close acquaintances, myself among them, is older than me by a generation. But his advanced age is no alibi for his physical shortcomings, which are best summed-up as ugliness converted to charm by frank self-awareness. No model myself, I am at least presentable, physically, if not nearly as charming as Painloss. As a reward for my middling endowment of charm, I have a wonderful mate: a good-natured, intelligent, and physically-beautiful human. Recently, we vacationed in America, and I related a pertinent anecdote from the trip, to Painloss, while his gaze drifted toward our perfect (and neglectful) waitress. I said:
“The thing about America is that there’s no room for the acceptance of failure/boredom/depression/disgust or poverty to be seen for what they are: natural states. I think America adds insult to injury by treating these states as misunderstandings at best and diseases or even crimes at worst when in fact America is just delusionally optimistic about the power of positive thinking. Rather than eradicating poverty or failure, the goal should be de-stigmatizing them. The difference between the two approaches being that the latter action is actually do-able, which makes it so very radical and taboo. We’d rather sell bumper stickers and give benefit concerts and tout government programs to eradicate the bad stuff because it feels better to do so, and looks sexier and maintains a status quo that the plutocrats (and the Gods themselves) are more than pleased with. Meanwhile, the language is suffering: it´s making less and less sense; it´s banging against louder and bigger disconnects… which in turn, of course, breeds nation-wide insanity.”
“For example, by accident, my Beloved and I attended something called GRANDMA’S MARATHON, late in the day. Five hours and thirty minutes after the start of the marathon (and about three miles from the finish, and two hours after the runners with reasonable times had already showered), we saw an hysterically-cheerful mother of three, traipsing with her children against the flow of the run, clapping and shouting WOO HOO YOU’RE INCREDIBLE!!!!… at everyone. It goes without saying that such encouragement is meaningless when applied to everyone, and depressing in the context that any runner there to hear it was so patently NOT incredible (as a runner of marathons, at least) as to render her cheer-leading a very wicked satire.”
“The main point is that being unable to call someone a mediocre or even suck-ass marathon runner elevates marathon running, and all such activities, to a level of importance that trivializes real human life while deifying the abstraction of excellence for its own sake. Not being free to call a fat person fat elevates being skinny to far too important a value. I mean: can we allow for the fact that human life is wonderful and happily full of sensations and well-worth living despite individual failures at many relatively unimportant things? It must work on the Central Nervous Systems of both source and object, I think… this relentless compulsion to valueless praise and hysterical encouragement. Hyper-nice American optimism is in truth tragic and really about hopelessness: the palliative care in a terminal cancer ward.”
Pleased with myself, I settled back in my seat, arms folded over my chest, and smiled. I waited a polite interval for Dr. Painloss’ reaction to my diatribe and when none was forthcoming, I asked him, “Well, what do you think of that?”
“Excuse me? What do I think? Of what?” he replied, softly. He was staring with such heartbreaking wistfulness at our absentee waitress’s shapely behind that it dawned on me that my poor dear friend was lost in a dream from which only the cruelest asshole would wake him.
DREAR DIARY
Too hot to play in the garden, so Offsprung is watercoloring with merciless genius at the kitchen table (which has been most of the story, with the exception of the occasional digging-of-a-hole or some mud-based mini-atrocity, for nearly a frigging fortnight). Also: cursing the day I replaced the CS2 editing program with CS4. And Beloved is out running errands and preparing for tomorrow’s gig.
I’m supposed to be working on the global-ad-campaign song that’s been my major commercial project since March (I think); believe it or not, the song is for Xmas. .. that’s how these things go. Worse: there’s no such thing as “progress” after the song is roughed-in, typically, in a week or two… all the subsequent changes and re-reinstatements and re-changes and tweaked re-reinstatements are based on the fact that three teams (Production; Advertising; Brand) are swinging the dicks of their magicless wands over the corpse of the artifact. The subtextual battle is the composer/production-team (three of us) trying to keep everyone else’ grubby fingers off (or out of) the copyright… without stepping on any Advertising, or Brand, toes. I once had a fucking voice coach try to insinuate her way into the copyright pie, right in the studio, tape running, by urging us to correct a double-negative in the chorus! The email I wrote as a result is a treasure and I will dig it up to post here as an update. Anyway, all this ado about artifacts which are already crappy by design. You’d be surprised how hard it is to do crappy-by-design (versus free-form crappy or good-by-design)… it’s a little like playing a drunk, convincingly, onstage. Or, better: playing the part of someone with 20%-less IQ. Performing as a flat-out retard would be so much easier (and lots more fun).
There’s a flat fee (always: without which, Fuck Off, thanks) but I also have that stake in the copyright. Hence, after months and months, I won’t be saying “fuck no” to Revision-X. This terrible song represents the second-half of next year’s rent.
THE REVISION-IN-PROGRESS
(I’ll be tinkering on this one all day)
6 Counter-Intuitive Love Songs
1.
St. Alban’s is a side street in the Summit Avenue neighborhood where F. Scott Fitzgerald feels most at home. Walks the street in a t-shirt on sultry nights. There are a dozen addresses along Summit where Fitzgerald lived but the only one the clique ever paid any attention to was a Romanesque brownstone we’d hang out in front of on misty nights to give our cunts the fantods with Scotty’s approval. We, too, continued to haunt the area long after we’d quit or graduated. Fantods was Tucker van Tassel’s word. I filched it from him. I think I filched filched, too. Who says filched? The rich must die.
I was the only scholarship. The serf on a workstudy forced to wake up at the crack every Thursday, slip into crusty painter-whites and meet a gray-eyed half-Ojibwe alky named Chuck in front of the student union. There he’d be, stumbling already over dropcloths, his arms a rich color against the heaving tongues of pouring paint. Those poison milkshakes. And there I’d come. Supposed to be grateful for the opportunity. Here: attend this gilded bunker of privilege. Watch: your weightless friends sail through chatty days to reach every bacchanalia of no-free nights. I grew big guns shoveling coke in the boilers of the Titanic.
I confess it was my subconscious revenge maneuver to fuck one of their women. Exquisite chattel on a plinth: I think I glimpsed that on the menu of one of those temples she tried to put me in my place at later. But oh, when I first saw Mary Duncan Ford looming against that laughing, luminous, thirty-foot Jeanne Moreau on a bike I interpreted my aspirational panic as love. If I’d only known. She looked better than Ms. Moreau and rendered the nouvelle vague kind of boring. Fiction is so vulnerable but in its favor I’d argue that at least it doesn’t care. Pushing her way down the row of cinema seats, hunched under the toy gray deathray from the projector, giggling pardon moi , she puts a hand on my knee and steps on my foot and settles to my left and fuck did the smell of her shampoo make it impossible. Does one of those guys die in the end? Maybe he sacrifices himself to save the other two (a neat resolution of the triangle). When all five of us got kicked out I followed my supremely-unembarrassable new friends to an off-campus pizzeria. And immediately, that night, back in my dorm, I started practicing the not-blushing… in a mirror. I’d say, “And who do you think you are?” in a certain voice. I could do the voice but I never learned to not blush. Which made the voice useless. The rich only blush when you glimpse their intestines.
The ones I met that first night were part of a much larger clique. Which was part of a much larger class. Which descended from an ancient tradition of the royal fuck you. These assholes knew the proper way to sleep in castles. Sophia, Katie and I sat on one side of the table and Eric and Tucker and Mary on the other. They were my first exposure to people who enjoy pizza and pop music with zero animal gusto but also neither with guilt nor disdain just nearly a kind of forbearance. I grasped that curling my lip at disco music, for example, wouldn’t put me any higher on the carefully-calibrated ladder than being caught caressing a Travolta poster. I learned to never, under any circumstances, eye that very last slice. Subtle stuff.
I wisely kept my provincial enthusiasms for F. Scott Fitzgerald to myself. I wore my suspenders in the dark, alone. The main thing was they were all from well-off East Coast bloodlines and I knew if I gave them anything to pick on in those first few formative days and weeks the flaw or error would become the label on the can I was made of. I would become the hindered mascot. Rub its head for good luck. I was very quiet. I listened more than I talked. I mastered (and memorized an arsenal of) offhand quips and tailored a working persona. Developed a late-blooming near-sympathy for the Jews.
It’s obvious to me in retrospect that Mary was intrigued by my blue-collar looks. I wasn’t the only dark-haired boy in the bunch (Tucker’s hair was blue-black as any comic book hero’s) or the only one with a calloused handshake (sailing will do that for you) but there was something solid, or self-willed, about me. Something that the over-bred fuckers of her species lacked.
The first time I hit her I knew I was on to something. She laughed and said harder.
I am willing to take a test.
2.
Hyacinth is on her death trip again. Shuffling from room to room and staring at stuff with that spooky I am a camera blankness. Like she’s memorizing it, filing it away. Storing it for when, soon coming, all of this… the ashtrays, the doorstops, the all-in-one entertainment center with a busted cassette player and a scratched-at indelible Take That sticker on its side… will fail to exist. Only Hyacinth will exist. Only Hyacinth will make it. Hyacinth will survive as a Cosmic witness. Hyacinth the Chosen One. The rest of us are doomed, pal. When the landlord of landlords comes tromping up the back stairs of the universe, jingling his zillion keys, the rest of His tenants are toast.
What I like is how Hyacinth strips down before trancing. Wants to meet her maker in her innocence is how she puts it. In her birthday suit. Hyacinth has a very nice birthday suit.
You’re having a dinner party and virginal Hyacinth comes shuffling into the dining room while The Gypsy Kings play on at tasteful volume and she makes this entrance in the middle of some toff’s borrowed anecdote about Heidegger, in said birthday suit, Polaroiding everyone with those big brown eyes: that makes an impression. I usually say she’s sleepwalking, poor thing. No sudden moves. Remain seated. She’ll nip off to bed on her own in a minute or two.
People call and ask me, uh, hey, when’s the next dinner party?
Well, problem is, I can’t guarantee that Hyacinth will make an appearance and nothing kills conversation like half a dozen people glancing expectantly at the dining room door the whole evening. Thing is, she has to be on a death trip to do it and she only goes on a death trip when the signs and omens augur the imminence of joyful dominion.
Hyacinth is our American. You’ve probably gathered as much.
It isn’t given to many of the English to be raised on a compound, is it? It’s practically a rite of passage for Americans. Most of them over there could probably write a pretty good tell-all about some Spiritual Leader or other. Most of them have been dandled on some Messiah’s knee as a matter of course and staged deprogramming interventions have become, in the 21st century, what bat mizvah’s and coming-out parties once were. I used to think Yanks were preposterous for forming these little cults of a few thousand and proclaiming themselves The Chosen (as distinguished from the other 6.8 billion on earth). That’s a pretty strict door policy. Studio 54 at its peak was all-embracing in comparison. But Americans always take things to the illogical extreme. The land of the hamburger with doughnuts as buns.
It’s a nation of escalation, the spiritual home of escalators. As if to prove that an apocalyptic sex cult of six heavily-armed Puerto Ricans speaking in tongues in a one-room flat in Brooklyn (for example) isn’t as far as one can go in the direction of exclusive sacred looniness, now you’ve got these cults of one popping up… these solo-cults or uni-cliques like Hyacinth. In fact, Hyacinth tells me she had a falling out with her best friend Phoenix. Which is so, really, like, you know, sad. Phoenix was under the impression that she was the Chosen One (hereafter to be referred to as the CO). Reasoning that Nebraska isn’t big enough for two CO’s, Hyacinth headed back East. Her father, a relatively down-to-earth Baptist, was from New Jersey.
On the long bus trip east she noticed, strategically placed in seats on the right and left of the aisle, three or four waifs of approximately the same age, body mass index and facial expression. In a country of the fat, the thin stick out. More CO’s, of course. Hyacinth’s only hope (if she planned to set up shop as a C.O. in unclaimed territory) was to get out of the country.
“It’s because you’re secure in yourself that you can admit that I am The Chosen One,” says Hyacinth, during one of her more talkative moments. But really it’s because I desperately want to nail her. What’s it like, I mean. Anal with the Chosen.
More about that compound.
That photo album she brings everywhere. It’s a wealth of coded information. Ignoring the sunsets and geese-on-the-lake and all those blurry snapshots she took of her own left hand, starting when she was nine, the other photos comprise a vivid document of the places where clean-air America and Millennial dogma meet and result in horrific stains. One snapshot that stays with me is of a man in a dark cloak, kneeling in the snow in a semi-circle of cloaked onlookers. The man’s gloved hands cover his face. Yet the onlookers (with unisex, too-long, center-parted hair) don’t seem particularly galvanized. They seem bored; unimpressed. I always want to ask about that.
3.
My maternal grandfather shot his adopted son over a property deal. The deal would have made my grandfather a millionaire. My uncle, half-Ojibwe by birth, rescued by my maternal grandfather from a Red Lake orphanage in Northern Minnesota, grew into a hippie, a hippie named Graham who refused to agree to the deal. He answered the door in nakedness one brilliant green morning and was found right there in the vestibule of the hand-built house he dearly loved, stumbled upon by a groggy member of his harem. Surprisingly tiny holes in his chest and face. Scribbling on the baseboard with a bloody finger. 1968.
I started calling myself Graham and dressing a certain way, twenty years too late but quite awhile before it was fashionable again. The Lord giveth less than he taketh away.
Reagan is giving a speech on a thriftshop television and the speaker doesn’t work so the old fuck sounds like a fly. I’m in a band called Bite Me Fattie. This fat retard is paying my rent and Reagan buzzes and the easy chair came with the apartment. Her head is intermittently in the way. I’m not even worth shooting.
4.
There have been times in human history when ugly was fashionable, when being ugly was a kind of good luck so powerful it conferred itself also on those who clamored to be near it. When ugliness had the power to bless. But this isn’t such an era.
5.
It is Chicago, Illinois, and the year is 1972. There are three of us together, good friends, old friends, in Jimmy’s, near the corner of Jackson and State Street, under the ‘EL.’ Jimmy’s is halfway between what we’d call greasy spoon and down home and Jimmy does all the cooking. One has a choice of three tables near the window or the counter itself to eat on and the tables are always occupied. The tables are green Formica and chrome and they were new when Jimmy opened the place with a VA loan after surviving the Korean War with two good arms and a leg.
Jimmy is good at producing a certain kind of very heavy meal with sweet iced tea or very strong coffee for a beverage and pie for dessert and he charges a fair price. The one thing you do not do in Jimmy’s is tip.Jimmy’s is lit like a pool hall: coolie hats of light hung from a dirty ceiling. There is no jukebox. Jimmy thinks it’s impolite to listen to popular music while eating his food. The sooty windows onto State Street are a triptych of iron-webbed sky (the structure of the ‘EL’) and one little Xmas tree of a traffic light. The upper right corner of the triptych blinks red, yellow, green all night, even when there’s no one in Jimmy’s to see it.
Here we are: Gorman, Perez. Me. We are lucky and have a window table near the door. It’s summer and being seated near the door is a relief, even with thick stains of exhaust on the breeze. Gorman, with his big head and too-small haircut like a child’s cap barely reaching his neckline or red ears and his feminine eyelashes, has, in preparation, cut his meat into a grid of what looks like thirty two small squares and is now leisurely forking one after another into his mouth while Perez and I hack away at our porkchops.
‘The Germans are metaphysicians,’ says Gorman, between forkfuls, putting the meat away. ‘Nietzsche. Jung. Kant.’ He glares at the ceiling. ‘Hörbigger.’ He forks a square of meat and writes an ‘eight’ with it through a tablet of gravy and puts it away. ‘They might as well have been witch doctors.’
The squares of meat he removes from the plate follow a pattern: one bottom left, one top right. Next bottom left, next top right. Perez winks at me and tips his chin at Gorman’s plate: the puddle of gravy with a vertical ‘infinity’ inscribed in it. The tessellated Salisbury steak and cuneiformed mashed potatoes.
‘Gorman,’ says Perez, ‘We’re curious. Really. Do you take a crap as methodically as you eat?’
Perez is pretty: he has flared nostrils and a precise black haircut and an Elvis-like permanent sneer. But one eye is always bloodshot and a little dead because a big kid clubbed him on the playground for being too pretty. I heard a rumor more than once that Perez and Gorman did a little something as Vaselined choir boys in one or the other’s bunk one night when we were all three of us attending a week-long ‘retreat’ at a seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin. I can remember being so young that everything under your navel smelled the same. The retreat was sponsored by the Catholic School (Our Lady of The Loop) in which we were benignly and neglectfully incarcerated the year we three became friends.
Gorman was there at Our Lady of the Loop because his parents didn’t want him attending the run-down educational institution of the neighborhood, which is Joseph J. Pulaski Junior High School. Perez was there because his whiskery grandmother, the sole guardian of Perez and his six sisters, supported a Catholic universe with such natural fervor that she could experience ecstatic visions of the Virgin Mary on demand, the holy mother illuminated in swirling clouds of Lucky Strike. You could smell Perez’s house from a block away. I was sent to Our Lady of the Loop because it was the furthest my mother could get me from the house every day. We didn’t even live, technically, in Chicago. I’d come home and exorcise the place with air-fresheners. What kind of kid is forced to spend his allowance on air-fresheners?
The rumor about Perez and Gorman never bothered me, and I treated it with the same open-minded neutrality I applied to the miracles that the Sisters used so much of every school day advertising: I did not doubt nor did I believe. But that rumor goes a long way toward explaining the teasing. Gorman and Perez would bicker and tease like a couple embarrassed by the memory of an unrecoverable closeness.
‘Sure’n if you tink oi eats metodically,’ retorts Gorman, with a fakey brogue, after a swig of tea with a sandstorm of sugar in it, ‘you ought t’ see how oi diddle yer ma.’
Then he catches my eye and drops his gaze and he apologizes profusely in a deep soft voice. He’d forgotten. And now he feels like a shit, a real shit and I feel sorry for him. Being a good guy, and famously easy to get along with, I change the subject immediately, of course. Or, that is, I change it back.
‘Henry Miller.’
‘Henry Miller,’ echoes Perez, tapping the table. But Gorman is still pouting over his faux-pas, his mouth in the palm of his hands. All work has ceased on the construction-site of his dinner plate. We are forced to prod.
I repeat, ‘Henry Miller…’ but Gorman won’t bite. Christ, Jerry, I want to say: she was my mother. What are you so upset about?
I say, ‘Come on, Jerry. You’re the writer. It’s your job to educate us Philistines. If you don’t finish, Perez and I are going to go out into that heartless night without the gift of knowledge to light our paths. You were saying… ‘ But Gorman just sits there, slumped, so Perez stars talking about popular film.
Poor Gorman. If only I could admit that I’m glad she’s gone! But that would put me under suspicion.
6.
LD: A particular guy wants a particular woman: this is not a story, it’s a situation. Make it two particular guys and make the two guys friends (and the woman beautiful) and at least you have a story. Make one of the two friends in competition for the affections of the beautiful woman not a guy but another woman and make the two not friends but married and you have a modern story on your hands, possibly. The jury is still out on the relative modernity of sad or happy or unresolved endings. Is there a fourth alternative? Maybe the fourth alternative is there is no ending. It just goes on and on that way. Everyone in the story just gets older and older until you can’t even stand to look at them any more. Does that sound like a bestseller to you? Anyway, you asked so I told you. How’s the Mrs?
“It’s like watching a Bond film in which you know that Bond’s life is never at risk. Actually make that two Bond films because Inception’s running time is an agonising 148 minutes. That’s 148 minutes in which nothing is ever at stake.”
Erm. How shall I put this…?
Also:
“Inception concerns the efforts of a burnt-out psych-ops veteran…”
Christ, we can tell our Toby isn’t much of a Conspiracy Buff, eh? It’s PSY OPS, Toby! Psy Ops.
The fact that Toby Young continues to get work as a critic is THE real demonstration of a conspiracy at work and a purr-fect illustration of your war on talent essay.
I like biting my nails when watching the latest installment in a billionaire-dollar film-franchise… wondering if, near the beginning or in the middle of said film, the protagonist will be killed off and the film will end (and the ticket price refunded) and the franchise will grind to a halt! It’s nerve-wracking, Comrade ET, but delightfully so, and Toby Young is quite right to point out that a thriller that can’t promise such suspense is no thriller at all. Fuck!
Steven, surely the Alien and Terminator franchises have demonstrated that you can kill the hero/heroine/robot off at the end, you can go back and forth in time in a manner which would probably befuddle Alain Robbe-Grillet. you can defy the laws of physics/biology/chemistry/logic but you can’t stop someone discovering a loophole in the { ahem ) story-lines which will ensure the franchise can carry on regardless.
It seems to me the art in these things( if it is indeed art ) is all about discovering that exploitable loop-hole which allows the money-making to continue rather than actually creating something .
“…rather than actually creating something.”
They’re creating MONEY, Comrade ET, you… Money-vegan.
flounces out mortally wounded to lick wounds to possibly re-appear tomorrow in Comrade ET 2 – planet earth is ruled by bread-heads. Only one man can try and ignore all that stuff.
[ed.'s note: PHWOARR!]
CRONENBERGIAL
“All bedbugs mate via traumatic insemination. Instead of inserting their genitalia into the female’s reproductive tract as is typical in copulation, males instead pierce females with hypodermic genitalia and ejaculate into the body cavity.”
PLUS HE WAS WEARING A TOUPEE
(via Comrade JR)
An Arab living in Israel has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for having consensual sex with an Israeli woman who apparently believed he was Jewish.
Sabbar Kashur was sentenced on Monday after being convicted of “rape by deception”.
According to the court, Kashur met a Jewish woman in Jerusalem in 2008 and introduced himself as a single Jew looking for a serious relationship. The two had sex in a nearby building.
The woman filed a criminal complaint after learning Kashur was Arab, not Jewish.
Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself.
The court agreed, sentencing Kashur despite acknowledging that his case was not “a classical rape by force”.
“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated,” the judges said in their ruling.
“The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals with a smooth tongue and sweet talking, who can lead astray innocent victims.”
and
A poll conducted in 2007 by Israel’s Geocartography Institute found that more than 50 per cent of Israeli Jews thought marrying an Arab was “equal to national treason”. Jews are legally forbidden to intermarry in Israel.
The Sunday Times reported in 2009 on a squad of “vigilantes” in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev. The group has patrolled the streets for more than a decade looking for mixed couples.
A literary “magazine” is a form of habit-induced, mass hallucination. There are tens of *thousands* of these things, in meatspace and/or online and they don’t mean or contain what they did when Scotty F. earned his marvelous Lifestyle off them. It took decades for twinkle-eyed aspirants to finally realize they were never going to pay for a meal at a five-star bistro by doodling a satyr or a tit on a napkin ( a la Pablo)… how much longer will it take us to realize that magazines are *self-published* (by their publishers), too, and that if Scotty F. were 23 today he’d be working on promoting and/or monetizing his *own blog* instead of wasting his energy clamoring for acceptance in six or seven of the tens-of-thousands self-styled “magazines” that don’t pay and no longer signify.
I mean: plz. Srsly. The diff between getting some flash fict in “Unpainted Aardvark” or “The Nipple Is A City” and *not* getting it in is down to something as random as some writer/reader/editor/boyfriend/publisher’s personal taste. I mean, ask yourself: would you blow someone to get a poem in the summer issue of “Aneurysm”? Of course you wouldn’t!
addendum:
Trout’s Law: For a Literary Scene to be a real Literary Scene and not some self-conscious, grotesquely-etiolated simulation, the ratio of readers-to-writers should be at least 100-to-1 (and no more than 100,000-to-1). Pooetree™ is now a thing of such horrendous-suckage precisely because that ratio is not only too small but reversed (writers-to-readers: 2-to-1).
“Is there anything more about the self than writing? We enjoy looking at our navels because they are interesting and mysterious.”
Navel-gazing as a widespread-default in writing is a relatively recent development. Unless you’ve got one of those amazing navels with the whole world in it, who else really wants to read about your lint (other than those who also write about their lint and therefore hope you’ll return the favor)?
reply
FIRE AND ICE
1.
Three weeks ago I had a tall cup of water in the freezer. I like super-cold water. I like keeping the cup in the freezer until a lid of ice forms which is thin enough to be breached with a finger and I like to drink the frigid water through the hole with a straw. Or I let the bottom half of the cup (always use plastic cups, of course) freeze solid and then pour water on top of that and nurse the chilling drink while I write.
Three weeks ago I pulled a cup out of the freezer in which, as a result of whatever gradual process, there was an ice-lid near the top and a solid cylinder of ice at the bottom and an air-space between the two equal to about a third of the volume of the cup. I began to pour water into this arrangement when the drink exploded, with an actual muted bang, in my face. It was like a fire-cracker shooting Xmas fog and ice-splinters against my cheeks and up my nose. My four-year-old daughter couldn’t stop laughing. Then I laughed, too.
2.
Twenty-six years ago, I had a large-ish apartment in an old house near an Art Museum. The house had a cupola and everyone called it “the cupola house”. My ground-floor quarters were the quarters of a Bohemian Bachelor. Futon in the bedroom and two chairs in the whole apartment, one next to the futon (for the candle in the wine bottle) and one in the kitchen (for guests). My son (four, that year) liked hanging out around there but the big old stove was from the 1950s and you could smell, sometimes, the faintest whiff of a gas leak.
In fact, my son and I once happened upon a baby bird that had been dislodged from its nest during a storm and fetched it to my place with fantasies of nurturing it back to health and one day freeing it, up into its native lanes of tree-top air, as a beloved, sleekly-plump bird, with a ceremony of some kind and a built-in lesson for my son; a named bird we’d wave “bye” to; but it was dead after about an hour in my apartment and I sometimes suspect the leak did it.
Thanksgiving that year I planned on putting a turkey roughly my son’s size into that big old oven. I had two or three girlfriends and I planned to give all of them delicious turkey sandwiches after spending Thanksgiving with my son, in that Bohemian pad, cooking it. I probably had plans to see a girlfriend that evening; of the two or three girlfriends I was openly seeing that year (another era), one was an orphan, so she (a budding performance artist who later moved to New York where she literally had ten jobs while she was waiting to break-through) was probably the one I had plans to see later. My other girlfriends would have been spending the day with their suburban relatives.
My secret method for turkey-cooking (“baking” sounds like the wrong word) is to cover the top of the bird with two overlapping sheets of foil. This method takes longer but makes the turkey taste much, much better. The last hour or so you remove the foil, brush the thing with honey and butter and let the bird brown. My son watched every step of this process with great interest. Between steps we’d play checkers, tic-tac-toe and record each other, on a cassette machine I wish I still had, telling ghost stories. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a Television.
We were in the kitchen. It was about time to pull the bird out on its rack in its deep aluminum baking thing and pull off the top-foil and brush it with butter and honey. My son was sitting on the hand-painted kitchen chair at the wobbly table, about seven feet from the stove. I was standing in the kitchen’s doorway. I don’t remember what we were talking about. A flame about three or four feet long suddenly rose out of the heat-yellowed dial on the oven and pulsed up along a curve in the air like a spectacular circus trick. I jumped across the room and frantically tried to blow it out with my lips an inch from the base of the flame. The yellow-and-blue sword of flame jerked and danced while I huffed and puffed. I huffed and puffed like you wouldn’t believe. I could hear the devil singing happy birthday to you. The flame whuffed-out finally and I shut the oven off, shaking like I was freezing.
My son was laughing as hard as I’d ever heard him laugh so I let him think I’d done it on purpose.
roll credits
SUCKING COCK AND THOSE WHO ARE SHOCKED BY IT: YOUR DIMINISHING CLAIMS ON THE SPECIAL
Hilton Als is épater-ing le bourgeois again. In his mind, one supposes. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, Hilton. Oprah Winfrey discussed salad tossing (2004?) on network daytime television and Dirty Sanchez was the name of a show on MTV nearly a decade gone yet Hilton Als still seems to think there are frissons to be had in the profoundly-corny image of a large black Queer in his dead Auntie’s nightie! He seems to think that edgy disorientations and trenchant poignancy can still be mined from a drag-Queen’s biopic! That a cock and a mustache in close proximity are being more edgy than a straight male’s crucifix in a straight female’s rectum!
My only conservative friends are Queer. Perhaps they are locked in various bygone eras during which being Queer was genuinely dangerous and therefore sexy-by-default: they like Ike! Viva the Victorians!
“It’s the queers who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who – in the same car – asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman’s locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person’s instructions, in my now dead aunt’s little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own ass—“gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith—he sat in the front seat, I in the back—and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious, we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.”
Per that person’s instructions. Yawn.
Forget the stylistic failures (“It’s the queers who made me” is meant to inform and govern the dependent, quasi-incantatory, quasi-Baldwinian clauses comprising the entire paragraph but several of the clauses, near the end, no longer match that opener: “It’s the queers who made me. [...] Who sat with me in his automobile…”. Huh? I think The Queers should have edited this piece). When Hilton wraps up that harmless paragraph with “we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else” I want to slap him.
I want to say, Hilton! Looked and felt like no one else? Maybe that was true… once. But now you look and feel like mainstream America. Your days of being special are over. Don’t confuse being loathed by Tea-Baggers with being special: the Tea-Baggers loath you because you aren’t special. Because you’re the norm. You must accept this suggested adjustment in your self-perceptions and allow it to make your writings on the subject more interesting. The Tea-Baggers are more special (speshul) than you are, Hilton. Look: they call themselves “Tea-Baggers”! They were the only ones in America who didn’t know what the term meant!
The new Queer dilemma: the demotion to normal. Yes, Gay marriage is still illegal in most states. So is marijuana. All the pothead-grannies in Americaville please raise your hands.
Who, in Americaville, is still shocked by the fact that men suck each other’s cocks and fuck each other’s asses and stuff fists and gerbils and alarm clocks up there, too? Who still finds trannies and crossies not-boring-but-scandalous? Quaker aunties, possibly. Quaker aunties and Malaysian fundamentalists.
Oh and Hilton Als?
THE EPIC TET*
Late in the year 2007 I began work on a cycle of narrative pomes following six characters around Berlin for six months (it was originally to be a year but I ran out of time; this thing was consuming my LIfe). The simple rules: 1) a pome every week 2) develop some characters. I did this originally for the website of a famous Anglophone bookstore.
The characters are: a male couple (Dante and Ted), a female student-type from Chile (Malena), a wealthy Art Couple (the von Bredows) and a retired American expat with a blog (Val). The wealthy Art couple are the only Germans and Dante is the only Brit. The retired expat is not my mouthpiece. This work isn’t in the mode of what I call (with a sneer), “American Confessional”. These aren’t precious observations wrapped in abstract language with the print-to-white-space ratio of a business card: these are stories following carefully-argued characters in a medium of persuasive rhetoric. Poetry is Fiction and proper Fiction should present an intelligence-intensified field of language built on the page. The field should shimmer and hum like a charged metal sheet. Picasso once wrote that he painted smoke one could hammer a nail through and that stuck with me. Nailing the smoke should feel good.
Dante and Ted date, fall in lust, co-habitate for a while, then break things off. Black-haired Ted is bisexual and eventually leaves Dante for black-haired Malena. The von Bredows never interact with the other key actors (the seventh character they do interact with is a nameless sex-slave/assistant they acquire) but Val-the-retired-expat interacts with Malena twice: first as her client (she’s a waitress) and later when he finds himself across an U-Bahn wagon’s aisle from Malena and Ted who are making out. Val, who runs a blog that publicizes all of his sins, considers stealing a tabloid-hidden orgasm from the image of beautiful Ted and Malena as they raunch it up among the commuting Lutherans. He is being driven by his blog (Confessions of a Pedant) to do things he wouldn’t otherwise dare do… it begins as a record and escalates into a constant dare… perhaps by the end (off-screen) he’ll kill someone. His blog is his Tempter/Exposer/Liberator/Lucifer the way TV cameras were, for people new to them, two generations before. He is an old wolf. (I named him after Henry Valentine Miller but he’d be a “respectable” Henry as a retired businessman or academic).
I didn’t map-out the plot of this soap opera. It grew like a crystal. I enjoyed writing people who are nothing like me. I enjoy this antidote for solipsism. I still, strangely, feel close to some of the characters: The Widow, Malena and Ted, especially. Some of the metaphors are my favorites, ever: the foxes on their hind legs = hung partisans… skinning a rabbit = inverting an inverted glove… swallows = record-platters smashed and heaved over the treetops…
The story stops at the height of the campaigns for the last American Presidential election. I included other current events and during the writing of the last pome there was an unusually damaging storm, in Berlin, which killed several people. The dead show up near the end of that pome. I’ve edited out the pomes that were written specifically for long-term Berliners to chuckle over… you’d never get them.
Poetry, in my opinion, should be the Fiction that is compressed to a supreme limit. This cycle is a novel. Or a film. It begins with a (crappy) meal and ends with (a fancy) one.
I read some poetry on a couple of Zines today and I fucking hated it. It made me sick to my fucking stomach.
6 Months / If Berlin
Saturday, 6. October 2007
*dante eats out*
22:23h
it feels like a punishment he long ago adjusted to, if he
does not cook there won’t be food, and it’s
never even good, or not in terms
that real cooks use, though in a way
it’s a sign of hopefulness he never cared
to master this, for the men he knows
who cook so well are invariably
betterhalfless, they learn
by force the indelible diagonal of
sleep across that bachelor bed and
never change but
grind-away at
raincolored sheets and underwear making
relic filaments
instead. they play
at cards in clouds and suckle hard
cigars in luciferous bars called
things like Hairy’s Pear, or
The Bear, trading
vagina jokes for pokertips with
dante-aged blokes (with their)
(halos of smoke and)
(intestate dread over)
(eye-bald)
(heads)
2.
dante exhales the
sound of the wine he follows
to ted
-
-
-
Saturday, 20. October 2007
*dante and ted*
18:16h
dante and ted hire bikes, buy
cheap wop wine, pedal hard for
Wannsee through miles of kilometers sleeked
by fog’s drugged
sneeze of light, slimey-soft, a
convoluted cloth wiping
thoughts on their bright brown, dark blue
eyeglassed eyes; thoughts
soon lost to the night traffic of
Friday: time and its tired
crisis, the thirty-niners and their
out-sourced inner
lives. they glide
on lamplit awe around the
unwrinkled face of the
lake, joke and brake
at a moon-smashed copse,
splurge in turns over shivers of
warmth-raped gentian gasping
oh my god.
after which they re-embark,
wobbling on. they see
battery-lit foxes rear up
along the tarmac like hung
partisans; see
swallows sharp as shattered
gramophone platters heaved
over the treetops in a feat
of strength. they park
where the bike path rises
to a sudden rail crossing and
need the drink.
(dante for his shyness and ted)
(to think)
-
-
-
Saturday, 27. October 2007
*seasonal meditation*
20:39h
1.
every year this time old von bredow goes, already
twig-thin and shaves
his head, dresses in striped pyjamas shambling
behind the trickles of kids tricker
treating the streets behind
Kaiserdamm but only
intellectuals ever giggle or yell
to go to hell
2.
admitting we have somehow
outgrown god and remembering
that odd equation (god is love) isn’t it love’s
novembering time now to
go? honestly what
does love when it’s being done
do? all those midnights at home in
unbroken-in shoes! so much heat and no
light and even the heat is
far less red than
blue, rhetorical, for
Lust, not love, calls forth that fool
Euphoria, her
several-second duty of
nil’s oracle, the
propulsive stutter of goo’s stuck
ventricle. von bredow
does his widow and knows
it’s true: what does who loves
when doing it
do?
anyone with fists can say Hate’s use: that
ten-times blacker coal fuels
rococo locomotives toward
smoke-stacked suburbs of
All Souls (and)
(its lucrative piles of)
(teeth and shoes). Hate is really
something, it
gets things done, it’s
not obtuse. Fear adheres
to everything; Sadness is as Gladness was; Hope
the opiate of the masses and
Compassion a simple sop to, or
giving up of, callow
youth. but
love?
admitting we have outgrown god and remembering
that odd equation (god is love) he thinks
it’s time to punish the two for
being so aloof; for both words mean
their opposites the
minute after
screwing
3.
(the widow complains strange)
(gummi bears are)
(harder for chewing)
-
-
-
Saturday, 3. November 2007
*the recurring thing*
20:06h
the recurring thing, sometimes
a dream, shows
So Cal’s fruits like fairy lights ted’s
dreambody spools low over, and
platoons of plucking
mexicans planted in
fudge-rich irrigated earth like
fragile gold forms, in molds, like
complex football-field-sized
pendants, water stolen
from the north and
sold above worth
to the children of the
water’s thieves as
juice. these
dreams increase as years here reproduce
to root-split beds of German
stone, his
headlong dreambody nostalgia-blown through
mooncanyons overgrown with
coyotes the color of playwright’s
beard and carpeted in dawn’s blue
loam, torched brush and
shriveled riverbed
trojanfish amidst
wetback-bones blonde
headphoned paralegals learning
mexican carefully
hike over: la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
born in ’68, adopted a year
later and raised
on the old pacific highway
road in a stucco bungalow a young
joni mitchell once considered
buying on the cusp of fame, ted came
to view all pool-blue skies, heaven weather and
mel tormé records with an orphan’s
lupine eye, growing
into his resentments with a muscly
black-haired thrust his
legal mother cried out
for years in the pain she’d thought
to elude through
adoption: la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
even asleep with dante in
bed ted considers
his options, the
recurring thing will
continue
without him:
la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
-
-
-
Saturday, 10. November 2007
*two monologs in verse*
21:29h
1. The Customer (middle-aged, North American, reasonably well off, lost):
berliners are terrible
tippers, no? today she bore
her ten-thousandth tray of beer
and coffee, still
they settled the bill awfully
precisely. straight-spined as ever, when
her studies finish and
home reclaims her i’m sure
it is she who
will be served. but where is home? some
equatorial city; bourgeois terraces above
the tear-weathered stones of
la favellah; packed
traffic like a split gut aflame
with hot necklaces? i imagine the weight of the green
floods the mountain’s dark
body, cocoa-leaves consuming
the breakfast of the earth and blooming
like a delicious fire. and the erogenous smoke. and the scent of the
indigene for hire. did her childhood mingle with
music in festival
streets where every third face greeted
was a christ and the mud so fat it tingled
with that secret vitamin the
too-rich spice of ideological
blood? was she touched, or buoyed as in a flood
at market by
fingertips black
as beans, jostled
by the magistrate’s mocha
elbow in line to
purchase manioc, molasses, shell-fish or
plantain? i’m certain
she wore white dresses for
sundays, shining
against the novelistic sky
like an offering. is there any truth
in my imagination? conversation
would enlighten, but as yet i
only have courage to
overtip
2. The Waitress (young, “foreign”, sure of herself):
how can i bear this
cold country, the
lunar stares they bare
to curiosities? i, the
sapid black of heliologic
scarring, most of all suffer
breathing the dark air of
their language. did i immigrate
to apply the mercy of my questionable beauty to
the aesthetic wound of
this city? or was i
driven by premonitions of
hunger or
political violence or just
escaping the luxurious green cancer of
equatoriality; the
too-real sun; the
chaos of the market; the
life-threatening excellence of nature’s stupidity? (even the graves)
(stay obscene with)
(fertility). perhaps
after all i came
to improve myself through
sacrifice, denied even
the occasional relief of
merely belonging. you, too, know
the weird lure of berlin, her native race
of Beamtendeutschemenschen,
hungering for
(yet set against)
everything
in us
un-german
3.A moment of Loudness (for Mailer):
-
-
-
Sunday, 18. November 2007
*Pflicht und Neigung*
12:13h
today the north american rehearsed his imminent
december in earnest in churlish old
berlin, slippered
and robed in the sublet
kitchen, shivering a
prayer for the errant
heat. sleet flicked
the windows like
mean-spirited fine print, fall’s premonition
of winter’s predicament. Val brooded over
eggs (his humble use
of the birds’ unlived-in truth), juice,
homeopathic fad pills and Al
Camus’ American Journal, a
moody notebook
posthumously fobbed off as
lit (edited by friends)
(he’s sure they kept)
(the screwing out of it), the
whole long day ahead of him to
fritter as his divorce-diminished
bank account saw
fit, the dishes tombed amnesia-clean in
kitsch-infested cabinets to
rest. the sky became
not luminous, nearly
temperate, muddled as a
puddle reflecting it, he dressed all gray
to honor this and met
the sun’s sharp glittering
glass amidst rainsick grass at the
Gendarmenmarkt’s
benches. from which
he stared at scary
Schiller and Schiller’s musey mass
of wenches thick
at the base of his
plinth, each so cruelly
Presley-lipped, Hera-hipped and
toothsmashing stone-
breasted big and vivid enough to
lumber down suddenly shattering
a path across the pavement stones like
derailed trains to shoo
the shitty pigeons and snap
the tourists’
necks. he respects
the quasi-autistic bluntness of
the populace, for far more truth inheres
to insult than to ‘Murrican-style
blandishment. his third wife, from
Minneapolis, trafficked
in that language-unraveling style of
viral euphemism; for perma-smile Liz
fat was full-figured,
crippled: mobility reduced,
and the optically challenged with their
swinging sticks and elevated
chins were never just
blind. the Germans frankly speak
of the “geistig zurückgeblieben” and he is sure
the fatherland’s retarded
don’t mind.
-
-
-
Sunday, 25. November 2007
*dante commences clinging*
14:34h
with love it’s the irrational that means
the most, feelings we can explain aren’t
worth the heart’s extortionate
costs, feelings
which confuse, shame, addict, dement, explode or
transform the soul with
magnificent disregard for the results are most
real. they are cold-welded
to the species, beyond
control, the inherited gene jewelry from
elephant-killing poets paleontologists call
old. dante is strong
in his passion’s clarity but
weak in its need. his dip
in the infinite rips his
emotions’ skin
bleeding. masochistic
distraction or
fundamental
need? but that’s what
love is, dante thinks:
a regimen of poetic
beatings we clamor like the Mecca-mad
to meet until
repletion. a tedsent postcard comes
from the Aegean sea: a
gnomic joke on wellhung
Cretans
-
-
-
Saturday, 1. December 2007
*the fine arts in berlin*
15:34h
old von bredow and his widow in apparent
years sufficient but too
meticulous in their pleasures to ever be
grandparents, somber-slim and softly
rich as becketts, are again in the market
for a girl to cook, polish, launder, drive, pose for his
sketches and comply without kvetching to
the importunities enticed by ripening
youth. evidence of a recent
bloodtest, a signed declaration of
boyfriendlessness, sweet
breath and high
breasts to be presented in
that order at the
interview. the list of alumnae tallies a
fine-arts-in-berlin who’s who: the tooth-sculptress, the
pain artist’s muse, the longterm girlfriend of two
married antiquities dealers and the wife
of a brewery-inheriting collector of
restoration erections, plus
the headmistress of a faux-french trompe l’oeil atelier of
ill-repute. all have done well for art
students. the first in the series, the
widow herself in
1962, 18 to von Bredow’s
30: blackplumed, supple, striking
as a horsehair whip
(father a)
(cinematographer at Łódź)
(one of the chosen)
(few aryans slain by a)
(jew in that era in a)
(duel over a pupil’s)
(paramour)
she’d mix
von b’s patented lacquers, gesso/sand/re-gesso/re-sand his
grander canvasses; photograph, crate-up, ship-out each
piece of his gigantic oneiric
maps from the studio overlooking
the Lietzensee and its petit bourgeois
paths. later she even came
to finish certain works and worse
paint others ab
ovo usque ad mala whilst the maestro
napped. her man can live for what feels like years
without urges regarding the
pinkerparts of the
people. it’s the widow herself, blackwings
turned a pearly bob, cupped breasts white as
dresden pots in timebrowned
hands who relishes the
entering of that room kept sternly
lockless, its unblocked
view of three steeples, not even
knocking. an applicant/supplicant buzzes
breathless down at front, the widow sips
her salted coffee, walks
the atrium with numbered
steps, stops to stoop to pocket a
foilship of gumwrap off
the cloud-reflecting
koi pond feeling
deathless
-
-
-
Sunday, 9. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part one*
00:41h
the down-angled pews of the u-bahn packed
as a requiem mass for the xmas
rush, black in its cladding the
congregational hush plus invisible
choirs of grinding rails and
hacking coughs. every station admits
more scowly hum to the
crowd’s dark optical
push. yon mendicant bitch, thin
as the cold air itself, guilting face a
hatchet chopping chips of
loose conscience for small
pelf, fronttoothlessly blocking
the aisle while nearby noses
sting, stalks off the next stop in her
wealthless huff, mad
as the newly deaf’s doorbell
ringing.
the foreign girl follows the beggar up
hauptstrasse through bruise-blue veils of
daemmerung, red sale signs and
christ-lights in low-slung flurries over overcoated,
headscarved foot-
traffic and then headlit rivers
of cars. the beggar hurries
flight-catching-fast in nothing
but ashram pants, hugging that
titless t-shirt with all
but embraceless
arms, nearly
funny. later
Malena will wake, chided by dreams
of the running
-
-
-
Saturday, 15. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part two*
15:59h
Malena the foreign girl rents
from the woman who rents from
the man who owns the
bathless flat at
zionskirchplatz. notification by
postcard came with the fact
that a week before xmas, the man’s
son, cramming informatik at
tuebingen, will come
to stay until the day
after day one of
next year. with 72 hours left
to find a new bed she suffers
giddy-but-desperate despair but
makes herself up, does her highgloss
hair, wears
her very best amongst
macintoshes at sankt oberholz in hopes
of meeting a decent
English-speaking
student. but they’re just impudent
brats, not men, the effeminate
offspring of America’s tourist
classes, chatty-immature and
porno-crass, unearned
smirks illuminated by flashy
nonsense from week-old
screens, she thinks
you’d never even
survive a week of
Pinochet. Malena pays three
milchkaffees and
leaves to walk her
bad dream along the
Spree trailing
smoke from the
café. she makes her way
through the superfluous
xmas markt behind the obligatory
museum towards friedrichstrasse, from there
to hallesches tor in
kreuzberg where joke santas hang
from windows like hung
partisans and startled
pigeons mount heaven like
notes torn from throats of
muezzin
-
-
-
Sunday, 23. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part three*
19:04h
the desert god comes in
borrowed armor of sword-hard ice,
the sky’s corpsetower of nine billion spirits burned
crytal-water white, His flesh-cutting sirocco of
sleet turns giant wheels to the highstreets of
candle-lit Europe, grinding souls
like minuscule diamonds for
xmas stalls while
the hawk-faced, kohl-eyed
deity of djins sings
madrigals
O superbest dissembler! O mask
on a mask in a veil on a doll
vast beyond any sane maths yet conceivable
thine sunsmashing fist
of rain-pregnant adamantine, thine
pavement-cracking snowfoot,
thine regenerative organ: seven miles of hard
black wind on these bare
lindens, mere hairs
under thine godweight
bent
-
-
-
Sunday, 30. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part four*
12:28h
of all the christmasses dante has seen and
survived, this, perhaps, will matter better
than the rest, the year he watched It’s a
Wonderful Life without sneering or
crying, ted’s
face in his lap, both still laughing
over the fact
ted had backed into the bedroom to
the tune of Bing singing, his head
in one red ribbon wrapped, tacky
card affixed to his hard-waxed
chest, best promise of a new
year’s happiness, whether
or not the promise
can possibly
last.
he sees castouts on the snowbald, whorecold
street: red-eyed ingenues, feud-ruined
uncle-drunks and thinner-made, festivityless
leather-blacks for whom republicans
pay taxes, those
shell-boned refugees, dressed
for sheep, each at his own
indicative velocity, though
dante’s just out
for a little blue air while
ted makes dinner
autistically. the street’s
aglimmer-black horn in the
twilight’s velvet
case, straight and weighted
tight to the evening’s queer
lydian ache, the antediluvian tune of
cold comfort, warm
harm. dante sees
the seal-haired waitress from their
favorite café, singsongs the
obvious greeting and she breaks
like an egg on his
arm.
he invites her to the feast and ted
finds the poor girl
charming
-
-
-
Sunday, 6. January 2008
*Malena’s Good Luck New Year’s Rabbit Stew*
12:35h
-Cada uno lleva su cruz-
1.
skinning the rabbit, ted inverts
the inverted glove until the long
hand of muscle falls from its grip
of loose blood, clutching the grin
of this morning’s funniest
execution. slain by the sling ted’d made
of malena’s old hose, the bunny tumbled
with its fate-stone thrown
clear through dark bush to
headlighted street, ted waving
traffic to a halt to retrieve it
by deafwarm ears to malena
and dante’s cheering as for
a goal. the dawn dome
of planetarium rose
to a glow by sun’s flush
hole as they bore the corpse
like some world-leader with
eyes struck open
home.
ted knifes the belly, scoops
its coils and jellies in a system
to the sink, the other two toasting
long life/short death as ted
decouples the head’s last
permanent
link. dante jumps
(he will always claim)
(the thing)
(blinked)
2.
the candled air of the whole long flat
rubs the windows with its sweat:
ginger, clove and cardomon escaping the pot
towards the black rhyme of ted and malena’s hair
ted’s elbows on the table and dante’s perplexing
stare in the ruby swirl of wine malena’s got
she tells of the trouble with men and dante says
we know a willing lesbian
she shakes her head: i need something i can sink
these teeth into (with a wink)
hefting her breasts in the low-cut dress she jokes
what about these? don’t you ever miss them
on a winter’s night?
dante frowns i swear i even eschewed huge dugs as a whelp
i would not suck at mother’s milk
and father’s mams were black with glossy felt, he giggles
at ted who growls: not while i’m eating
malena says Cocho kept peacocks when i was thirteen
they would not breed, which made them twice
precious, bleating in the courtyard even earlier
than those ugly cocks, casting spectacular shadows like
beardsley engravings on the opaline gravel around
the villa, occasional prey to a fox our indian shot
presenting it to mother who wore it
to the opera like a (draining her wineglass)
(with seductive indolence)
queen
3.
driven by the spirit of the rabbit or by
the devil possessed, ted proposes a
contest: whoever kisses best
will follow ted to bed whilst the other
does dishes. dante hisses
you bitches and kisses
malena on the mouth, vomiting
chilean flags and
passing
out
-
-
-
Sunday, 20. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part one*
23:46h
with his back to the window of the
orderly flat overlooking Schiller’s golem at
Gendarmenmarkt he
writes his blog, the content of which
is all his sins, from the unconscious
nosepicking he once glanced to catch
reflected in the u-bahn’s black
glass to pulling a long one off
on the pic his memory took home
of that cigsucking schoolgirl who brushed his arm
on his way out of a news agent, Spiegel rolled tight
in its burberry crook, her platinum fringe
cinched to his fist on his
belly in the daydream later like a bobbing
light. regret floods in (sin’s twin) as the pleasure
ebbs, a grim shade shaking its head
over the shock of the copious, the
downright hale in a
drib’s stead, the heady
wipe-up job, all of it gone
into the blog. Confessions of a Pedant in the
Autumn of his Life draws a respectable
village of hits every
night, an audience delighting
in foibles so nobly limned
as to render, eg, his borgia fart
at a christening (way back when) almost
charming. logging off,
it’s out
into the warm winter’s low-ceilinged
bunker of sundown, hotel lobbies and
monocustomered coffee shops as rundown blocks
of yellow in the purpled armature of the
pauline disbursion of converted
light, the North American pursuant
of darkling maps of
homelylessness, his
curiosity’s pickily feline
lonelinesslessness on Jaegerstrasse fraught
with clotting silhouettes, circumspect outbursts
of halfchatter and horny
mirth, a Geschaeftsmanner invasion from
Duesseldorf platooning through, the
brotherly violence of so many
at march in a beerblind
line against the baroque blue
horizon. he sees one drop
a wallet like the pigeons’
kingsized tip; can’t wait
to write the post on
spending it
-
-
-
Monday, 28. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part two*
00:01h
the wallet is warm, ruddybrown, fleshily complex
as an arrant organ or suave soft
coprolite, baklava of the middlemanager’s
luther-ordered life, clean
as bleak boredom yet
implicit sins are packed wherein
a condom abides in a compartment beside five
photos of lost kids, the cats,
old boat, fat wife, a crescent worn through
on the royalblue foil
wrapper like islam’s caliper moon plus
three hundred eighty nine euros the first two
of which go to the purchase of a BZ screaming
“wolf sighted on the outskirts of Berlin” plus
a Ritter Sport savoring richly of
sin he’ll eat on the Underground while
reading it. underlit
as though by klieg light by
welders he descends, chewing, the
operaset of the stairsteps at the Friedrichstrasse stop to
accomplished Bach on a Slavbusker’s pearl-mullioned
accordion, the brown cascading fingers on
toccataworn keys the North American tips
with a fifty at which gypsy kicks free
of stool, stands to switch to a pumping
Lohengrin, the platform whelmed black
in overcoats, sorrel furs, hell-blue
veins, red chins, gold helms of Wagnerian
hair raked by the tunneling
winds
-
-
-
Friday, 1. February 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part three*
14:40h
the paper explains how the wolves are driven
from natural environs by dins and poison
of compulsion’s development, the bipedals’ greedful encroach
at epochgreen level of forest floor to force growling
dreambrothers to bound from the brush, dogshaking
oddments, needle and leaf, from toothcolored coats, noses
to the road, after time long (as the cooling of new diamonds) in
exile. a floss-haired child of Siemens’
managerial class reports being sniffed by creatures
too cool to be dogs, too rank
to be phantasms, in
their country garden, l’heure bleue, late
june, case two: retired insomniac
circumnavigating a private lake on a bike
costing twice what equivalent Romanians take
home in a year was paced
for what seemed like hours by loping blurs
so rich in odor he fainted, waking shoeless, bent-biked in
gentian.
the North American grins a glance
over his paper at a waif on the long seat facing,
gulpsniffing tears, thumbs mothwingwhite beating
handy’s stampsized keypad of vapid
lights, we fears it’s
a bad breakup with her Abelard via
texting. beside her to the right
a woman Val recognizes, her
legs entwined with a man’s who cannot be
quite twin, but co-lingual
cousin, flicking her lips with slim
tongue in
macho-feminist grace like young
South Americans, black manes fused above
marvelously lupine
brows, then oilspilled down
her shoulders, breasts, jeans folded
over the seat and his bold hands separating
her thighs in futile’s best
gesture. hidden by his paper and
coat, the old jester, made
stiff as a goat by the
rutting display, contemplates
taking what they would not freely
give, this sin
of pre-human
intention
-
-
-
Sunday, 10. February 2008
*sick in berlin*
22:47h
getting sick in berlin
its own black romance
like love in paris
a fling
strangers too close on the metro
fluids exchanged
the essence of nameless kissing
that rheumy-eyed grandfather with
his pre-Euro Aldi bag
his snotrag hard as a
fossil may as well have had his
tongue in your mouth
with a persistent cough
he is part of you
even poetry is humbled by the couple
you have become in fever’s
capacity for
regret
-
-
-
Monday, 18. February 2008
*twilight on a corner of the ku’damm in february*
10:01h
the grey walls of the hinterhof stained
with the previous century’s rain under
the drained eye of february’s
glaucous light, so like
an asylum: the courtyard’s box
of underinterpenetrated
lives in this vast stone machine of
flatblock, drinking
a river each day, flushing rich
waste the other way, sempiternal, thick-
walled, cough-muffling, papered
in little deaths, breaths, sweats,
farts, aerosolized desiderata smelling
of cooked cabbage from
the furtive biomass of
neighbors he has never once
heard laughing or
singing. dante rings
an old friend, dresses to
meet him on a
corner of the ku’damm he hasn’t
seen in years. everything, he thinks,
disappears. he never knew
what or why his mother meant in all her
litanies of vague complaint, staring
over his tooth-blonde head as she ironed-on patches or
stirred fatty ersatzes into cheap-n-cheerful soups or wiped
the kitchen window of their
lukewarm semidetached in Hounslow with
never-read newspapers existing only
to chronicle America’s rough
usage of the world, but now
he grasps her point was only ever
to make herself heard if solely
by him, dante, her son, at
seven, his reason
to exist as though
by invitation. she seemed to inhabit
a fenced sanitarium at the gate
of which they could meet but never
embrace. mother, what are you
so sad about? so
crushed beneath? so
helpless at never-winning?
her newspaper-lined casket still holds the
cold broach of her
enigma-grinning. the friend,
a standard
thirty minutes late mimes
apologies from across the
street, sackladen shoppers watching
the Gay Ausländers meet with
bemused irritation, mocked
to every last light of their city’s
radiance
-
-
-
Sunday, 24. February 2008
*dante kicks ted and malena out*
23:09h
berlin is best for
breaking up; chums with bored disgust aver
they never liked lamented
her: his arrogance; the not so half
to-die-for-ness that he or she
with all love’s dumb
encouragement of self
perceived. they whom fortune
in smiling scant months upon you
reeved through burning shrouds of
reflected happiness flock once more
in droves to glooms reborn
thick as spinsters to the perfume
of a miscarriage
-
-
-
Sunday, 2. March 2008
*supper with weather*
14:41h
old von bredow waited
‘til his widow came in with
legumes, greens steaming on age-old
silver plates saying to their young
amanuensis at the table i see
they again in your country
prepare to decide upon king
of the planet. as a man he had a thing
for inciting the blush of the bloody au lait
suffusing her face to its roots in that
t-shirt’s ruby décolleté; as a german
he had a point to make. everyone on earth
of a certain age not non compos
should be in on this
vote, don’t you
think? the widow winked, passing
plantains, though clear as a fake tear von bredow
maintained an expression expecting this
answer. by chance a natural disaster
developed as they ate, god’s
corpsecold windfeet kicking
the city with
hatred. rattled windows, the
chandelier shaking lent
drama to the socratic
conversation. handfuls of dead, hair
streaming, were lifted up
despite their sudden waterweight by the fists
of the weather in spate as
the american stared in
nearly sexual inanition at
her Goethe-old, butter-drenched
plate
-
-
-
*KEY
I’ve been asked what two of the German words in the epic cycle above, IF BERLIN, mean (lazy Googler, Comrade!) so here’s a comprehensive key:
1. Wannsee: a wooded part of Berlin. There’s a very large lake and wild boar and hidden villas out there. Berliners like to bicycle around the water. There are sinister historical allusions (see: “Wannsee Conference“).
2. Beamtendeutschemenschen: this is my joke portmanteau German. But can a German word be called a “portmanteau” when so many German words are portmanteaus? Anyway, it translates literally as “German Bureaucrat People”. It’s a separate race. The bureaucrat-civil servant in Germany is a glum, smug, dull and omnipotent creature with no real equivalent in America (complaints about the DMV notwithstanding). Kafka’s work will mean nothing to you before you’ve lived in a Germanic country long enough to have had several run-ins with those scary German Aztecs and their voluminous paper files and the gray fluorescent light they bathe in to make them look stony.
3. “Pflicht und Neigung“: Literal translation: “Duty and Inclination”. This is part of Schiller’s critique of Kant and the allusion fattens my use of it here but the essential meaning in this poem reflects on the middle-aged expat’s urge to cut to the chase through both the intellect-deadening effects of American PC culture (hence his interest in the frank rudeness of Germans) and the possibility-restricting expectations of his class and age. His “Pflicht” and “Neigung” are in conflict. Val’s only choice is to see himself as a wolf and write a blog about the adventures/pleasures of his post-morality.
4. Gendarmenmarkt: a touristy square where you can find the cited statue of Schiller.
5. Geistig zurückgeblieben: literal translation: “the mentally held-back”. Ie, the retarded.
6. Łódź: Roman Polanski’s alma mater
7. ab ovo usque ad mala: from eggs to apples or “from soup to nuts”, ie: from start to finish. Deliberate Latin to reflect the age of the painter, von Bredow, who would have had an upper class, old school education.
8. Hauptstrasse: a major shopping thoroughfare in the Schöneberg neighborhood of Berlin
9. Daemmerung: twilight (I used the “ae” instead of the “ä” because the website I originally posted these on wasn’t capable of handling my umlauts)
10. Informatik at Tuebingen: like studying “computer science” at UCLA
11. Zionskirchplatz and Sankt Oberholz: an unbearably trendy part of the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin and an unbearably trendy cafe in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, respectively
12. Milchkaffee: the flagship coffee drink of Berlin cafe life; “milk coffee”
13. Spree: a river that flows through the Saxony, Brandenburg and Berlin states of Germany
14. Friedrichstrasse: major street in Berlin cutting through Checkpoint Charlie and ending in the Turkish ghetto; a few blocks of it (luxury shops and a ritzy department store) are reminiscent of State Street in Chicago and it at one point is not far from the Brandenburg gate and a very old, culture-heavy, tourist-infested zone of famous museums
15. Cada uno lleva su cruz: each has his cross to bear
16. Geschaeftsmanner: businessmen
17. Slavbusker: my portmanteau: a Gypsy musician-beggar
18: Siemens: one of the ruling corporations
19: pre-Euro Aldi bag: a shopping bag from a downmarket supermarket, from before the time the Euro replaced the Deutschmark; you do see them around town, colors warn off. Germans are notoriously stingy and like to recycle their shopping bags (which can cost 10 or 20 cents) forever.
20. Hinterhof: the part of an apartment-or-office building behind and parallel to the part facing the street; lots of buildings in Berlin have inner courtyards and some have two or three in a series
21. handy: German slang for “cell-phone”
THE QUASI, the PSEUDO and the just plain SCHIZ
Lorin Stein, over at the Paris Review blog, keeps fantasizing, out loud, these things of a free-speechy nature that make him sound rather heroic. After posting some Terry Southern-related material (which some may have found offensive) Stein wrote:
“We are not in the criticism business at The Paris Review. But we believe in it. Here we differ with our friends at The Believer: we like snark, when it comes from the gut. It may not be the lifeblood of the arts, but a healthy organism also needs bile, not to mention a gag reflex.”
Hear, hear!
However, when I posted a snarky comment about their puff-piece on the wonderfully unfettered-by-talent John Darnielle, the comment was deleted after a few days (and those few days, before he found the Delete Button, encompassed some long nights of the soul for Stein, I’m sure: how to maintain the desired aura of the intellectually hip and youthful and fearless without actually allowing that pesky free speech junk to break out? Why can’t all the commenters write “LOL” or “AWESOME!” and be done with it? Oh, poo!).
To which I responded:
Steven Augustine says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation. [ed.'s note: this was put "in moderation" after being up for a week or so] July 18, 2010 at 7:35 am
Oh, aha, I get it now. PR is a hip bastion of intellectual “freedom of speech” by posting material featuring an unironic use of the term “model poon” (see: Lunch with Terry Southern) … but my comment calling John Darnielle somebody’s mediocrity-buddy gets deleted (as will this one, perhaps; worry not, I’m keeping a record of it all: http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/the-endless-thread-7-0/#comment-3562). So: hands off the puff-pieces, then? Terry Southern would just love it.
“For my sins I’ve been reading Seymour Krim’s 1970 collection Shake It For the World. Krim was what used to be called an “underground” critic. He wrote for the Voice and the New American Review; I read him to remember how dead that world is now. Half this collection is a sustained rant against James Jones and Norman Mailer (“… now this hip young literary snatch was carrying on about Barbary Shore in a way that would have offended Mailer himself. I lost my trick of the evening because of the stone I turned to after this Mailer-infected preacherette thrust him at me like the sacrament . . . ” etc., etc., etc.) Nowadays I suppose he’d be a blogger, like the rest of us. Every once in a while, though, Krim gets off a zinger. For instance when the New Yorker theater critic John McCarten calls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf “a vulgar mishmash.” Writes Krim: “What Irishman is kidding what Jew?” One misses that kind of thing, a little. —Lorin Stein”
To which I responded:
Steven Augustine says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation. July 23, 2010 at 1:05 pm
“One misses that kind of thing, a little.”
One tends to miss it until it hits a target on the t-shirt one is wearing. I guess?
Note the notable absence of words like “douchebag” in my comment. Is it “offensive” or merely critical? Stein’s deft rhetorical maneuver in response was to put the comment, retroactively, “in moderation”. That’s right out of the playbook of the fabled Harvard Debate Team, isn’t it? The Harvard Debate Team had, as I recall, an IN MODERATION button of unparalleled wit and elegance. Unbeaten until Yale developed the famed DELETER.
I’ve left something else in the IN MODERATION queue for Lorin. Just for fun.
Lorin Stein believes in the value of Free Speech (and even “Snark”) but he doesn’t, of course, defend the right of anyone to stand up in a crowded theater and call him a hypocrite.
UPDATE:
Just left this little memo at PR:
If you’re going to delete the comments of mine that are critical of your preening, hypocritical nonsense, Stein, then delete *all* of them. I’d rather not be a part of this quasi-intellectual sham, thanks. If I’d wanted to contribute to a Vanity-Fair-in-disguise, I’d have left comments at Slate.
POETIC INJUSTICE
Yes and…
I’m sure all of you (being both literate and super au-courant ) have heard about Lorin Stein’s un-accepted-poems boondoggle (wait: I mean kerfuffle; no, snafu… erm, imbroglio. Brouhaha?). Whether or not you think Lorin’s a cunt for (ahem) deleting an entire backlog of as-yet-unpublished poems accepted by the editor he replaced at Paris Review, this excerpt from a blog report on the retroactively-unrequited love of some really unhappy poets reveals how poems can sometimes find a home:
Tell me about how your poems got to be accepted by The Paris Review. Take it from the top.
I’d emailed Meghan O’Rourke after she started her posts for Slate about losing her mother to cancer. My mother died of breast cancer in 1995. We wrote occasionally to each other about the ways in which we both dealt (or didn’t deal) with our respective losses, quotes about loss and grief, and I was, as always, throwing Emerson her way.
At some point in early 2009, I took the bold step of sending her, unsolicited, some work from my current manuscript, Green Mountains, which were about—as much as my poems are “about” one particular subject; they’re about what’s about—my mother and grief/loss in general. I’d been rejected by The Paris Review before, even by Meghan a few years ago when I sent chapters from The Mad Song, so I had no reason to think this time would be different, even with our friendly correspondence. In fact, I expected a swift but kind rejection.
So it was one of those instances where you had some interactions with the editors, and that contact might or might not get one’s work from a slushier pile to just slush.
[ed.'s note: to the Comrades reading this who are, in fact, Fat Lesbians: Comrade ET's remark is not what it seems]
AND THE COCK YOU RODE IN ON
I’ve left this chronicle of the Paris Review adventure here:
Steven Augustine
July 25, 2010 9:39 am
Lorin Stein is not merely a graceless un-acceptor of poems; he’s a bit of a hypocrite. Before deleting a snarky (profanity-free) comment of mine that was critical of some *awful* content PR was puffing, Stein had the gorgeous neon balls to post this self-aggrandizing paean to his heroic support of Free Speech:
“We are not in the criticism business at The Paris Review. But we believe in it. Here we differ with our friends at The Believer: we like snark, when it comes from the gut. It may not be the lifeblood of the arts, but a healthy organism also needs bile, not to mention a gag reflex.”
(What’s really interesting in this was the fact that Stein was, in that post, defending some material, by and about Terry Southern, which was fairly edgy… a good example of which was the fellow reminiscing about lunch with Southern and using, without irony, the not-a-little-dehumanizing term “model poon”. Ie: “model poon” is fine; criticizing Lorin Stein: BIG no-no)
To which I responded with more (profanity-free) snark. Which response was then sequestered in *retroactive moderation* (a new one, in my experience). Stein, ever the ironist, then posted:
“Every once in a while, though, Krim gets off a zinger. For instance when the New Yorker theater critic John McCarten calls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ‘a vulgar mishmash.’ Writes Krim: ‘What Irishman is kidding what Jew?’ One misses that kind of thing, a little.”
I therefore responded (now greatly amused):
” ‘One misses that kind of thing, a little.’ One tends to miss it until it hits a target on the t-shirt one is wearing. I guess? ” (Not the world’s most brutal snark, I should think)
To which Stein again responded with the retroactive moderation ray.
I’ve decided to wrap up my brief stint as a PR commenter with:
“If you’re going to delete the comments of mine that are critical of your preening, hypocritical nonsense, Stein, then delete *all* of them. I’d rather not be a part of this quasi-intellectual sham, thanks. If I’d wanted to contribute to a Vanity-Fair-in-disguise, I’d have left comments at Slate.”
Believe or not, the great majority of the comments I’d left were carefully-considered, witty and/or positive responses to PR article-writers. I also feel, however, that unless there’s an explicit disclaimer to the contrary, commenters (esp. at an “intellectual” site) have a right (if not a duty) to be frank. Sites that only tolerate arse-kissing (and there’s quite a lot of it over there, of course… as though a comment thread is a possible route to publication!) should be up front about that; genuine discourse does not involve arse-kissing and can even (as Stein himself indicates, above) entail a little heat.
Are such sites, in the end, just fancy forms of advertising? It would seem so.
Steven, over here The Observer has printed its annual “Guide to the best events happening in the Summer”. It’s usually a piece where various critics write up the biggest and flashiest PR that has dropped through their letter-box and pass it off as a researched piece but this time it’s where experts in their respective fields give us the benefits of their expertise.
One section was on Outdoor theatre which, unsurprisingly caught my eye. Written by Dominic Dromgoole who has a reputation as an interesting director of the classics and who now runs the Globe theatre in London. In a choice of 5 things to see, Dominic as an insider becomes so inside that he recommends work by his own company.
I’ve seen many of these things where someone gives a big thumbs up to one of their mates ( which I can sort of understand – some art-forms like Dada would have remained obscure if their mates hadn’t of written it all up ) but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the person choosing stuff blatantly bigs up their own work.
It’s not a huge deal but seems another drift towards a situation where good marketing techniques get mixed up with critical assessment.
Well, Comrade DJ Sensei ET, I can spit and hiss all I want but the paradigm shift, when it comes to cultural artifacts, is clearly away from Aesthetics and toward Statistics… which will, eventually, of course, resolve itself to the simple binary of Success vs Dog. To be determined by sales/ traffic or brand recognition. The subjectivity of taste is a given… it’s the subjectivity of the answer to the question of whether taste, and Talent, are even necessary that I wasn’t prepared to worry about… until very recently.
Someone wrote, on one of the Litblogs I frequent these days, a question that went something like: How does the writer ever know if what she or he writes is even any good? And I answered with:
What’s far more frightening is the question of whether writing anything that’s good even matters.
strangely enough Steven you’ve never struck me as cynical. I’d need to consult a lawyer before admitting what you have struck me as but I’d say that if you really were cynical ( as opposed to dealing with cynicism in your writing ) you wouldn’t be doing this, you’d have given up the ghost long ago, developed a drink/drug problem and lived off what you used to be.
I think the problem is not necessarily whether having talent matters it’s whether you can sustain the energy and creative drive to keep that talent developing. Which I guess varies from being able to deal with personal dissappointments, the competitive element of making art and finding enough time to carry on doing work.
Oh, I don’t mean the “Old Way” is coming to an end this week or anything, Comrade ET… but… would I give it all another 20 years…? There are places around the globe in which poems are still vital and novelists are still dangerous/vital enough to be hung… but I doubt that I’ll be moving there.
We do what we do as a result of sheer cultural momentum and it will see us nicely into our senescence, I think. I’m not saying I won’t fight, until the tag is on my toe, to keep my corner of the universe alive to the pleasures of the fragile, ineffable and inexpensive…
But: fuck this moaning. Let me go find a picture of a huge black cock to post… the ultimate symbol of Creative Otherness and Resistance…
(ooops)
Hey, I know… let’s put an old story up!
THREE CONVERSATIONS, ONE REAL
She walks against the wind like it’s some kind of trick staircase in headlong lilts like Arabic script towards the filthy Post Office. Everything is filthy: phone booths, convenience stores, sidewalks. Everything. Everything stinks of singed garbage and the revealed interior of the body. This is what they mean by that beautiful euphemism urban blight. She would chuckle but she does all her laughing on the inside these days for she has recognized the wisdom of not transmitting, of no longer being a sender. Instead she is a receiver. A perfect receiver of threat’s end-of-the-dial broadcast, out there where the satellites sing. Her peripheral vision is so sharp she can read the commercials on the sides of the buses as they heave by without even lifting her disgusted gaze from the filthy sidewalk. Gobs of spit like dissolving emeralds. A mound of hominid shit in a doorway.
It’s a long trudge against a devil wind during which she reflects on the twists and turns of her long life while also remaining vigilant to the obvious. That murder of little Negresses skipping rope at the corner. That bandanna’d kid with the splintered pool cue. Where do these demons come from and why do they never leave? Trying to out-last them has been a futile project. She’s seen these same kids hanging around this block for thirty five years now and if you get close enough she bets the rope-skippers are wizened and wrinkled and smell of camphor, a notion that shivers in her shoes. You touch a face and the cheek crumbles off on your fingers. She used to buy peanut brittle in pound-sized buckets from a shop that used to be where that pimp is standing, talking into his hand and getting answers. She forgets what she’s carrying: is this a manuscript for her dead agent Cy?
She had waist-long hair kept braided and stuffed under a Chicago White Sox baseball cap for years due to vivid premonitions of being scalped but now she’s wearing an auburn wig and if any scalpers come she’ll just toss the wig at them as a diversionary tactic. This is the auburn wig that belonged to Lillian Hellman when the name Lillian Hellman meant something. In other words: take heed. Her deep-pocketed house coat is laden with teak-handled steak knives from a set someone gave her on some holiday nobody celebrates anymore which she absentmindedly slips into one or the other pocket whenever she dons her scowl like a white visor and steps outside on these unavoidable errands in the too-bright realm of incipient harm. She is bent and a-clatter with cutlery. She is lugging a parcel. Secondhand books for her son who is incarcerated in a foreign prison. Extremely imaginative fiction is his only hope.
She turns left on Woodlawn Ave and she figures she’s about a twenty-minute walk from the old Stagg Field where that Henry Moore blob commemorates something about something that used to make her worried about walking near the spot on the way to her lectures and Georgie of course would run right towards it and the more she yelled get away from that thing the faster he’d run. And now, of course, he’s incarcerated.
More and more often she finds herself thinking in a forgetful fury of all those martyrs to emptiness, the women who died for the sake of nothing better than some man’s shitty orgasm. Three in her family alone: her big sister Eda who perished in a blind fever of complications from an illegal abortion she slipped off to with the very first night of the Ed Sullivan show as her cover… then the adopted daughter of one of her brother’s exes who was strangled and raped in that order. And Carole, of course. The Pill. The cancer. Oh Carole, Carole, Carole, Carole.
A young man with his narrow back to her, waiting for the light, twists for a wary glimpse as she approaches the curb intoning her daughter’s name. There’s a broken brown leaf like an Indian-head nickle stuck in his modest irregular Afro and he is a lovely chiffon yellow like the young Smokey Robinson. In his dirty pink shirt and dress pants.
“I just finished reading Senelitá this morning,” he says, improbably enough, his softly puzzled face turning away from her. He scans for a gap in the cars coming.
“Svevo?” she responds cautiously, patting her coat pocket; rattling her knives.
He scratches an elbow but doesn’t turn again to face her, so intent is he in divining the traffic. She has to strain to hear when he says, “It was a bitch. A real disappointment. Not an inch of room in the whole book for yours truly the reader to decide what he is thinking about what Svevo is trying to say.”
“Listen,” she responds, with a shoo-fly gesture, “Don’t forget when he wrote it. Silent films were a dream of the future. Narrative technology…” But she catches herself. From the look of sharp disbelief the yellow black man turns on her before dashing across the street through a sudden relief in traffic she comes to realize that his half of this exchange never happened.
She had been about to say something regarding that famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a monkey tosses a tapir’s leg-bone into the sky and it match-cuts to a space craft. She is less overwhelmed by embarrassment at making a fool of herself than crushed by disappointment that she won’t be finishing the conversation.
But then she thinks: why not?
2
He wanted that land for his mother.
“It was like listening to a fucking mugging.”
“Jesus.”
“Like listening to your mother…my mother…getting mugged during a transatlantic…”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus is right. Tell me about it. I timed it. Have you ever had a six minute coughing fit? Two minutes seems long. Poor thing. But that’s not even the worst.”
They were driving along on a brilliant day at a leisurely pace behind a sleek modern hornet-yellow streetcar. In the back window of the streetcar sat a pretty young girl in a pink top showing some profile. Mr. Rand found lapsing into a faint approximation of Mr. Bacon’s laddish speech irresistible.
“Only a Berliner would do that,” said Hakim Bacon. “Sorry to interrupt you. About your mother and all. But only a Berliner would do that.”
“I mean,” said Hakim, putting the Mini in gear again with a grunt of disgust as the Strasssenbahn in front of them disgorged itself of a paltry two passengers and juddered forward, “How long we been following this thing? Six? Seven? Blocks? And her there posing. Like Queen Regina on a fucking stamp.”
“Normal thing would be A, turn your back and forget about us or B, fuck it and wave or something. Make contact.”
“Oh fuck yes. Girl from Bristol? She’d've hopped off and importuned us for a ride by now. I was reading something recently.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess how many American tourists are struck by cars in the UK annually due to left-right flow of traffic confusion. On average. Guess.” Without waiting for Mr. Rand to guess, Hakim Bacon said, “Fifteen fucking hundred.”
“Surprising.”
“Well, it’s all kept very hush hush, innit? Fucking Tourist Board. That’s what I’d call a right conspiracy, mate. And that’s the fucking Tourist Board. Not exactly bloody Casa Nostra. I mean.”
“If the British Tourist Board is capable…”
“Exactly. Shudder to think what fucking Coca Cola gets up to when the moon is full. At the end of the day…”
“Or Microsoft.”
“Or Microsoft. Or the bleeding Pope. Look at her.” Hakim took his left hand off of the steering wheel and waved it facetiously from his window, wriggling his fingers. His flapping hand was huge on its toggle of bony wrist and seemed too big for the sleeve of his Nehru.
“Ten quid says she don’t react. Just you watch. Fucking chronic. What’s the worst?”
“The worst?”
“Your mother. If her coughing fits… if they aren’t…”
“Oh. Yeah. No, the coughing fits… if only they were the worst. Two weeks ago…”
Mr. Rand broke off and calculated. Was this something he wanted to share? He’d known Hakim for years but he was just the guy you went if you needed a fake passport, expensive stereo equipment, or a child bride from Russia. Yes and for the assassin’s drug of choice, as Hakim put it. You went to Hakim Bacon of Bristol.
Hakim was half-German and half-Pakistani but spoke with an accent so cynically-musical that he inspired infinite confidence in his capacity to fix pathetic problems for a fee. He’d seen and done and brokered everything. He was bony and tall and dressed in the manner of a DJ who always wore those sunglasses like a tiara, those big red sunglasses on Hakim Bacon’s sleek black bangs with royal pomp. Did Mr. Rand want to open up to Hakim? This wasn’t some hilarious third-party narrative about sexual humiliation he was dying to tell. This was Mr. Rand’s mother they were talking about. A story about terrible nakedness. A story about second-infancy’s sanity-free slapstick and dread. She used to be a writer.
“Two weeks ago,” prompted Hakim.
“I call her. The phone rings and rings. It’s about 9 o’clock her time so I know she can’t be out. She has to be home, glued in front of that television…”
“Loudly agreeing with some big-haired video-fascist who she thinks of as her only friend.”
“Yeah. The phone keeps ringing and I’m getting worried. Finally, she answers, sounding. I don’t know. Strangely… detached? I go, Ma. What are you up to? She goes: I had an episode. I go: an episode? What sort of episode? She goes: you know, an episode. At this point she’s whispering into the phone, because she doesn’t want the neighbors to hear. It took me quite a while to get the story out of her.”
Mr. Rand cleared his throat. “Basically, she somehow just rolled off her bed, naked and… ended up pinned between her bed and the wall. For hours. She was lying there that way all morning, all afternoon, well into the night. When I called, she managed to pull the phone by its cord off the nightstand to answer it.”
Hakim was frowning with distant concentration as he parked the car in front of SPACE BAR, which was a student café by day and a spiritual battleground for second-tier models by night.
“Blimey.”
“Blimey is right. Lock it?”
“Nah.”
They threaded their way between the tables laid out like the monotone squares of half a madman’s chess board in front of the café and found a free spot beside three plaster-dusted workmen, each wearing a dusty blue bandanna as a hat and a pair of opaque white goggles like a necklace, staring at the street with dormant menace, protecting tall glasses of beer. Glancing at a menu and handing it to Mr. Rand, Hakim lit a cigarette and immediately stubbed it out.
“How’s your thing coming? With, uh. You know. The bird with the….” He made a facial expression with bulging eyes to convey the concept of large breasts.
“Hannah?” Mr. Rand stuck the pointer finger of his right hand across his upper lip in simulation of a mustache. Simultaneously, but very subtly, he lifted the palm of his left hand upright.
Hakim laughed. “Right.”
After they had ordered, but before the table was cluttered with food, Hakim spread a map out on it.
“As you can see,” he said, squinting contemplatively, “This is a map of Germany, the bit which is extremely near to the Polish border, and, lo, here’s a bit of Poland, too.”
He tapped the upper right corner of the tattered old map. “What we’re talking about here is basically a part of the world that the Silesians who dwell there like to refer to as Silesia. Silly old them. Used to be German, not really Polish now and land there is fucking cheap. Which is where you come in with your grand American scheme, if I’m not mistaken.”
Hakim tapped Mr. Rand’s shoulder and Mr. Rand thought how pure whites never do that. “Bloke named Wenceslas Wenceslasovitch or whatever…right out of central casting… big red hands like raw hams… massive geezer with a yellow mustache… wants to sell his portion of a parcel of land that is well nigh fifty hectares, mate.”
Hakim paused for dramatic effect and looked Mr. Rand in the eye. “Have you any idea how fucking big a hectare is? Really, have you? I doubt it. I hadn’t a clue myself, to be honest, till I checked up on it.” He paused again. “One hectare. Ten thousand square meters. Ten bloody thousand. That’s one hundred acres. To give you an idea: your average suburban plot of land is half an acre or one acre tops. Our friend Wenceslas owns 14 hectares of this fifty-hectare plot and he wants to liquidate his bit, he wants to be rid of it, for a very reasonable price… you’ll laugh when you hear it. You’ll die laughing when you hear what he wants for his 14 hectares, I guarantee it… joke of the year… and that includes three farm houses and a barn and a fucking well without a dead cat down it.”
Hakim lit another cigarette and sat back and took a long drag on it, acknowledging with a satirical nod the cement-cold stare of one of the dust-covered workers who happened to find himself in the path of Hakim’s second-hand smoke. Under his breath Hakim said, “Put on your gas mask and lovely goggles if the smoke troubles you, darling,” and then, louder, to Mr. Rand, “There’s only one drawback, as I see it.”
Languidly his head went back as his mouth opened and out came what appeared to be a quivering x-ray of his skull. “The other thirty five hectares of the property in question is owned by Wenceslas’s dear old mum and she’s firmly against having the land sold off in bits. There’s a bright side, though… and I wouldn’t be mentioning all this if there weren’t.” He stubbed out the just-started cigarette, winking at the dust-covered worker and his two chums, who hadn’t uttered a word or moved very much at all since Mr. Rand’s last nervous appraisal.
“Right,” said Hakim. “The bright side. Mother is at death’s door, innit? Cancer of the heart or something. She’s like 99, this bird is, 99 on stilts and the wind is kicking up. She falls dead, Wenceslas can do what he wants with the property. You give him fifty thousand in one cash payment, you give me seven thousand for my time and expertise, you pay certain fees and sign certain documents with the Polish government, and you’re suddenly the lord of all you survey. Hear it’s real nice in the fall. No neighbors to speak of. Wolves. Folk tales. Nice. Whatcha think, then? I get 33% of my fee up front before you contact the seller, of course. Refundable within thirty days if the deal breaks down. Which I can’t see happening, frankly.”
“So now we’re just waiting…”
“For a poor old lady…”
“Right.”
Hakim winked and lit another cigarette and studied passersby on the street a good long time. He smiled as if suddenly remembering. “Not that you have to.”
“Excuse me?”
“Wait, I mean. Not that you have to wait.”
Mr. Rand felt the future open up under him.
3
Q: Now that you’re dying… we are, literally, between the first and second blows being delivered to your skull by the intruder’s blunt object (probably a watchman’s flashlight)… we wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions about life as you lived it?
A: Not at all.
Q: This photo. Who is it?
A: My sister and me. Surprising, isn’t it? We look like fashion models there, all dressed up, posing in front of a fountain. I don’t remember where the fountain was but you can see tourists milling around in the background so I’m assuming a world capitol. Maybe Paris. Our first trip to Europe.
Q: You are how old in this photo?
A: I’m afraid I can’t give you a precise answer but I’d say twenty, twenty one. Maybe twenty two. I think it must have been the early 1950s. The haircuts and the fashions have both come back, haven’t they? Everything always comes back but the people. Jean said that once and I thought it was sad and funny. I thought she was sad and funny. My little sister Jean.
Q: Can you remember for us what your interests were at the time of this photo?
A: The interests of any young woman of a certain class during the era. One had the feeling that things had loosened up after the war…there were cracks in the facade we thought we might squeeze through. People think of the 1950s as a particularly repressed era in American life for some reason but never in the history of the planet had so many non-aristocratic people been so well-educated and so ready to use this knowledge to make the world a better place. All of the seeds of the so-called counter-culture of the 1960s were planted during the 1950s and we thought it was a terribly exciting time. I even toyed with the idea of becoming an Abstract Expressionist painter. But maybe that was later.
Q: You say you toyed with the idea. Nothing came of it?
A: I’d like to say that I realized soon enough that I had no talent and so gave it up in a gesture of frank self-awareness, but it was worse than that. I think I realized that talent had very little to do with how far one might go with it, so to speak. I’m a very quick study in some cases and I made my observations and came to my conclusions. Art is just another facade we flatter ourselves with. The race, I mean. The human race. We flatter ourselves that we aren’t just herd animals with a pecking order, concerned mostly with power, food and, you know, reproduction.
Q: You were clear-eyed at a young age.
A: Well, not to seem too full of myself, but any so-called attractive young girl with enough of a brain in her skull picks up massive amounts of this information…call it the animal verities or the herd report…she picks it up at a very young age. The attention that’s paid and the nature of the attention and the kind of things one is punished for and the nature of the punishment. You learn it all in puberty. The lesson never really gets any more complex as you grow older and even more so-called attractive…it simply repeats itself until you finally really genuinely in all sincerity get it, like that Kafka story with the machine carving a sentence over and over again in the prisoner’s flesh. You get that aha moment.
Q: When did you first leave America for a substantial amount of time?
A: If by substantial you mean more than a few months I’d say in 1968. I was a grown woman, no children, money from a divorce settlement in the bank and nothing to keep me. There was a darkness in America…maybe the darkness was mostly in Philadelphia…but anyway I decided to sell my things and throw a party and just be done with it. But that was only my first escape. I came back with my tail between my legs two years later, having attempted to live as a single white woman in Morocco. Morocco was the destination of choice in 1968 for a certain crowd but for me it was a disaster.
Q: Cultural differences?
A: Yes, but not between myself and the so-called natives…between me and the expats. A more horrible group of people you can’t imagine. It was truly as though North America and pretty much all of Western Europe had systematically rounded up all the lotus-eating dilettantes and nouveau-riche snobs with a passion for throw-pillows and deported them to Morocco. It took me about a year to get myself permanently un-invited from every dinner party thrown there. Not that I minded. I very much enjoyed being alone.
Q: No problems at all with the indigenous culture? No incidents?
A: Well, if you call a near-rape an incident, yes. Once. It was very late and I was being foolish, singing to myself quite loudly. A man had me by the neck suddenly and I found myself in a sort of courtyard lit only by the moon. He had a knife that was not very big but it looked very sharp and he kind of pantomimed that if I made the slightest sound he’d cut my throat. It’s very funny what happened. When he opened his robe and revealed his, you know…his erection, I suppose it’s okay to say… rather than struggle or look horrified I reached up and sort of gently… well, this is slightly embarrassing but there you have it. I stroked him there like a lover. And he was absolutely so revolted by the gesture that he shrank back from my touch and fled as though I were a witch. Not before spitting copiously on me, of course. But I had saved myself with my knowledge of human psychology and I was very proud of the fact and I even wrote home about it. I seem to remember trying to turn it into a poem or a short story but nothing came of it.
Q: When did you leave America permanently?
A: Lots of my friends and acquaintances claimed that they’d leave the country if Reagan won the election but I was the only one who made good on the threat.
Q: But you didn’t move straight away to Poland.
A: Oh no. There was a kind of a long filtration process at work. First I tried London. But I found soon enough that I longed for a certain quality that life in Morocco had had. That sense of perfect solitude one only achieves when surrounded by people speaking a language one is blissfully ignorant of. Even being literally alone, out in the woods or on a mountaintop, can’t match it.
Q: So you you tried Germany.
A: Yes, next came Germany. This is like the story of Goldilocks, isn’t it? But the Germans were too cold. And it was, what, only about forty years after the end of the war and there was just too much baggage. It was an extremely neurotic culture. Seven days a week and twenty four hours a day of over-reactions. You’d chide someone for cutting in front of you in a queue at the post office and he’d react as though you’d accused him of gassing Jews.Then, I met my future husband, and I suppose my head was turned by the fact that he owned and ran art galleries, and he was technically a count, a Polish count, this dashing blonde with a name it took five whole seconds to say in its entirety. I actually timed him saying it once. And he didn’t seem to mind that I was no longer, shall we say, thirty. Or even forty. Though I’ve managed to keep the same figure I had at twenty, which is one of the few advantages of being flat-chested.
Q: And you were happy?
A: Well, I didn’t expect to end up in a farm house in the middle of nowhere on the border between Germany and Poland on a plot of land too big for me to walk across in an afternoon, no. And I never dreamed that one day I’d become the stepmother to a forty-year-old drunk who likes to sun himself in his birthday suit even in the middle of winter… that’s a “no” too. But he’s a sweet-natured boy. Irresponsible with money. I’m sure he’ll be devastated when he discovers my body.
Q: Thanks very much for your time.
A: You’re very welcome.
SLAVOJ’S TRUFFLES,
or
Fallacy as the Inevitable Consequence of Perspective
“The classic working class is exploited through their very participation in the sphere of rights and freedoms, i.e., their de facto enslavement is realized through the very form of their autonomy and freedom, through working in order to provide for their subsistence. Today’s rabble is denied even the right to be exploited through work, its status oscillating between that of a victim provided for by charitable humanitarian help and that of a terrorist to be contained or crushed; and, exactly as described by Hegel, they sometimes formulate their demand as the demand for subsistence without work (like the Somalia pirates).”
Is Slavoj Žižek under the impression that Philosophers work harder than Somali pirates?
Ah Todd Rundgren. Todd Rundgren always reminds me of an old American hippie acquaintance of year’s back who would, at the drop of a wide-brimmed floppy hat, smuggle Todd’s LSD-soaked wise words of wisdom into any conversation.
Although I can remember Todd being invoked on a regular basis be the conversation political, artistic or personal I ‘m damned if I can remember what he said that affected my US hippie-chum so profoundly. Perhaps his words were so deep they were beyond language ????
Comrade ET, I remember a piano-playing post-Hippie chum of mine bragging that he’d enjoyed substantial eye-contact with Todd at a then-recent concert (of Todd’s) and me doing my best to look as though the relative lack of interest betrayed by my neutral facial expression upon hearing this news wasn’t just the carefully-controlled mask of envy (which it wasn’t, I swear).
I pasted-in this clip mostly for Todd’s eyebrows but also for the novelty of The Four Tops’ introduction. If you can imagine (in 21st century terms) The Wu-Tang Clan introducing John Mayer. Maybe you can. Is Todd the American Alan Parsons?
PS Thirty years later, the piano-playing post-Hippie chum now leads one of the most successful kiddie rock bands (ie, rock bands that play music for… toddlers) in America and whenever he sends along a clip from some TV broadcast or a rave review from, say, HOT TODDLER magazine, I find myself doing my best to make my quippy email responses not read as though they’re wearing the carefully-controlled mask of envy… which they aren’t, I swear.
Sadly, I let my subscription to HOT TODDLER magazine lapse. I don’t know what I was thinking…
That aside, I thought it important that you know: “Harold and Maude is ranked number 45 on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Funniest Movies of all time.” -imdb.com
Just in case anyone, anywhere, anytime, cites the AFI as a source worthy of a nanoseconds consideration.
Comrade Mish! I can guarantee that our joke-use of the imaginary magazine title “Hot Toddler” will direct unwanted traffic this way. Sad, innit?
Harold and Maude! The reverse of the peddy ethos. Or the (reductio ad absurdum) soul of it. That’s one thing about being married (and also about this being the 21st century)… neither of us will have to sit through that again. But what would they call “Maude”, in that flick, now? A turbo-cougar? And what’s the male equivalent (eg, for Woody Allen’s character with Mariel Hemingway’s character in Manhattan)? A “Cugat”?
PS Enjoy yer safari…
We don’t leave until tomorrow (I avoid traveling on weekends…my dear, the ,crowds) but thanks for the bon voyage. I vaguely knew who Charo was but wiki tells me:
The performer has said in past interviews that her parents allowed her to falsify her age to appear to be older after marrying 66-year-old band leader Xavier Cugat when she was 15
Which explained your ‘Cugat’ crack. Modern attitudes to age and sexuality are peculiar at best and rank hypocrisy at worst. But let’s leave that for another time and get to what I’m sure is on both our minds: the nuptials of Princess Chelsea.
Apparanently, the Clintons have spent $3 million clams on the wing-ding. I’m sure the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs and homes (thanks to Clinton’s and his successor’s fealty to the neo-liberal economic model) are as touched and moved as we are.
And the media’s fascination with the bride is perfectly understandable, given her accomplishments and attributes, which are: she took the trouble to be born; she looks like a rather earnest school-teacher, one of the ones who sweats a lot, has fat ankles and none of the boys has a crush on. And, erm…that’s it.
I imagine we’ll get a biopic soon, Chelsea: The Years Of Struggle with Angelina Jolie as Chelsea and Lenny DiCaprio as her investment banker hubby.
I’m stoked, d00d…
[ed's note: "And the media’s fascination with the bride is perfectly understandable, given her accomplishments and attributes..."
Hey, don't forget her parents' (the Borgia-Clintons) formidable kills! Well, you couldn't exactly be John and Yoko and count the Bushes as chums, eh? That these two saturated-with-evil boomers are considered the flagship marriage-of-convenience of Lib America either says a lot about how A) slap-worthily credulous the Yankee voter is or B) the unabashed meaninglessmess (sic) of "Liberal".]
[plus: It's the 21st Century.... and Clinton is thanking his lucky stars]
kiddie rock bands? oh dear.
I know people who do really good children’s work in theatre. Experimental in ways that companies who consciously lay claim to the description can’t manage. At this moment in time at least.
But rock bands for children seems wrong. Shouldn’t they be eating babies rather than singing songs to them?
I would like to see a drum solo aimed at children however.
[ed.'s note: Fuck me, Comrade ET... I'm in the middle of managing my poorly-organized surprise birthday-related event for Beloved! The ecstatic squeals of Offsprung as she consumes the cake Beloved is too disciplined to eat make it difficult for me to come up with something witty, just now... (the cake is ace, I must say: mad props to Comrade Peter)...]
DEPT. of MURRKA SHE HATE HER ARTISTS
An important “postmodernist” dies and his private library (replete with marginalia)… is sold to a secondhand bookstore? Should I be more nauseated by that or the fact that some lucky sod popped out his front door, walked to The Strand and bought David Markson’s copy of DeLillo’s White Noise, critical scribbles included, for the normal price of a secondhand book?
DEPT. of MARVELOUS SPEECHES
edited version of a lecture given by David Hare at the Royal Society of Literature
This month I celebrated a melancholy anniversary. It was 40 years since the premiere of my first full-length play at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 6 April 1970. Those old enough to remember will know that the prefabricated building was moved first from one side of the Swiss Cottage car park to the other – and then back again. Somewhere in transit the word “Club” dropped from the shingle. In other words, in four decades, theatre culture has changed, if not out of all recognition, at least significantly.
One further example. If you set to writing plays in the postwar years, it was necessary, or at least expected, to pass through a portal of approval. In prospect, this gave a comfortable, orderly feeling to the idea of being a British dramatist. Kenneth Tynan, a humanist dandy, guarded the portal on one side from his position at the Observer. Harold Hobson, a Conservative Francophile whose life had been changed at the age of 10 by the sight of a Bible in the illuminated window of a Christian Science church, guarded the other side from the Sunday Times. A novice playwright had every reason to expect that a life in the theatre would involve attracting and then retaining the interest of at least one of these two men. Hobson’s name was inextricably linked with Beckett’s and with Pinter’s. Tynan’s fortunes rose with his advocacy of the work of Osborne. These were the writers they championed and whose view of the world fired them up. They were interlinked by a profound correspondence of belief. Today, no such correspondence exists. No living theatrical figure is associated with any particular critic. Tynan, just turned 83 years old had he not been taken by emphysema, would be devastated to know that to work seriously in the British theatre it is no longer necessary even to know the name of the Observer’s theatre critic.
Some people have understandable nostalgia for what then felt like a common culture, even if, over the years, bitter experience left few practitioners with much trust in those delegated to be its guardians. In fact, the growth of diversity both in the audience and in the places it sharpens its opinions has brought only benefit to any dramatist whose first love is experiment and innovation. And newspapers that once enjoyed such power are themselves discovering what it is like to live with the threat of working in a minority form.
Throughout the 1980s, propaganda for the free market aimed to reach out into many spheres beyond the economic. The aims of the revolution were cultural as much as political. Norman Tebbit was recently asked why the Thatcherism in which he had played such an important part had created a society he so heartily disliked. Tebbit replied that Conservative governments of his generation had taken on such a massive task in fixing the economy that they had had no time to fix the culture. He was being too modest. In those days, in my memory, there was certainly no shortage of fellow-travellers happy to direct their fire against the most communal of art forms. For years no Murdoch paper let a week go by without some loyal employee railing against their own definition of elitism – elitism often being represented by the state-subsidised British theatre.
Today, such attitudes themselves look dated. Having so long prophesied The Death of the Theatre, the prophets have woken to find themselves writhing in the coils of a problem rather closer to home: The Death of the Newspaper. What a reversal of fortune! If the free market is indeed the moral courtroom that its admirers claim, then what a judgment is being visited on Fleet Street. What a pack of failures the editors must be! No artistic director of a theatre could survive such a plummeting loss of income and popularity without being sacked by their board. Surely it must be, according to those iron laws of the market which newspapers have done so much to propagate, that consumers are today buying fewer newspapers because those newspapers are poor products. The people writing for them must be no good at writing.
The obvious absurdity of this proposition, and its roots in that same false logic which has had such currency throughout the Thatcher-Blair ascendancy, should not divert us from more interesting questions about the relationship between art and journalism. When asked to name the best British film of the last 25 years, without thinking I nominated Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Power of Nightmares, which examines how politicians have exploited the so-called war on terror in order to transform themselves from managers to saviours of their nation. My mind went straight to a BBC documentary because The Power of Nightmares seemed imaginatively more ambitious than most better-known fictional works. If we give Curtis’s film a full-body scan, it passes some of the most traditional tests of art. For a start, nobody could miss the fact that it had been created by one exceptional imagination. Behind its images lay some rich associative thinking. It advanced a way of considering Western leaders which made you see familiar figures in a new light. But if you also investigated its technique, its use of scrap footage – from advertising, from feature films, from training films, as well as from more usual documentary sources – it not only adopted the methods of some of the 20th century’s most important visual artists, it also attained some of their haunting strangeness.
You must not think that I sharpen all my aesthetic thinking by attending to Norman Tebbit, but on another occasion, Tebbit showed impatience with some fellow guests in a radio studio by declaring that he was tired of hearing about the claims of art. In his view, a Rolls-Royce aeroplane engine was far more beautiful than most things living artists had created. Why was an engine not a work of art? There are certainly many different answers to his question – plenty of people would say it was – but my personal response would be that an aeroplane engine is an object without metaphor, and without metaphor we have no art.
In another provocative statement, Waldemar Januszczak, then head of arts programming at Channel 4, went further than Tebbit. He proposed that there was no need any more to make television programmes about artists because a television programme was itself a work of art. Television had spent too long in the position of a waiter, bringing art in to the viewer on a silver salver. In the modern world, he said, television had no good reason to continue feeling subservient. Fawning profiles of artists were old hat. Television did not have to illuminate Bacon. It was Bacon.
Of course, such economically convenient reasoning at once blew through the offices of the channel controllers. Words cannot convey how delighted they were with this cute piece of post-modernism. What a rare pleasure to be let off an expensive hook by one of their own. Television no longer needed to bring news of art. Strange this, because Ken Russell did not seem in the least subservient when he made his TV films about Delius and about Elgar. Russell seemed all too happy to accept these composers as masters, and then, in his turn, to demonstrate what their mastery had released in him. Namely, mastery.
The example of Russell making such brilliant television out of brilliant music might, you think, once and for all dispatch certain questions of category. But there is still plenty of dismaying evidence to prove how closely conjoined art and snobbery will always be. Over 40 years ago Philip Roth put his finger on a problem which was going to challenge the novelist’s profession as much as mine. He wrote: “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.” It would be an unusual artist who did not feel that this difficulty had deepened in the new century. I once observed that it was always valuable for a writer to go out and be rebuked by reality. But recently we have not been so much rebuked as overwhelmed. As a working dramatist, I have written plays about the privatisation of the railways, about the diplomatic process leading up to the invasion of Iraq, about Labour Party funding, about Foreign Office complicity in torture and about the financial crisis. But this kind of timely writing which seeks, as Balzac’s work once did, to provide society with its secretarial record, continues to attract reproach from those good souls who believe that the results cannot be regarded as “proper” plays – in the sense, say, that Sophocles or Racine wrote “properly”.
Particular objection is made to the use of other people’s dialogue. No sooner had a genre called verbatim drama been identified than sceptics appeared arguing that it was somehow unacceptable to copy dialogue down, rather than to make it up. People who did this, it was said, are called journalists, not artists. But anyone who gives verbatim theatre a moment’s thought – or rather, a dog’s chance – will conclude that the matter is not as simple as it first looks.
In the autumn of 2006 I was working in New York. My luck was that I could go to the Lincoln Center Theatre to see Jack O’Brien’s superb production of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia. After the first evening, we were set fair. Here was the kind of epic work which wove the lives and ideas of 19th-century Russian philosophers into the overall movement of history. It was exhilarating and it was also well made. Yet at the climax of the second play the audience was jarred out of involvement. After Alexander Herzen’s son Kolya was killed in a shipping accident at the age of five, Stoppard had given his father a speech in which he argued there was no need to mourn or be upset. We do not ask of a lily that it be built to last. “The death of a child,” Herzen is made to say, “has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question.”
Stoppard is self-evidently a humane and decent writer, but I came out of the production seething at his callousness. How could a child’s life properly be compared to that of a flower? Really, this was taking the religious view of things too far. Even a priest mourns. However, when talking a few days later to a member of the production team, I was gently put right. The words were not Stoppard’s. They were Herzen’s. The dramatist had felt compelled to include them, against objections, because he had wanted to give full rein to the character’s unpredictability. He had included Herzen’s words precisely because they seemed so surprising. But nowhere in the coverage of The Coast of Utopia did anyone try to belittle it by labelling it a verbatim play.
You may say that I had committed nothing more than the vulgar crime of ascribing to an author the opinions of one of his characters. What a crass mistake for a fellow playwright to have made. But you may also observe that the inconsistent detail, the confounding, non-fitting fact, is often the giveaway mark of material drawn from life. In James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire, Philippe Petit celebrates his achievement of spending 45 minutes crossing a steel cable suspended 1,350ft above Manhattan between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre by sleeping with a previously unknown admirer in the street. By doing so, he destroys his long-term relationship with the partner who has helped him plan his feat in the first place. Our response is to exclaim: “Oh my God, this must be true. It must be true because it’s so unlikely.” Or maybe we use that other comforting phrase, so hated by all writers of fiction: “Nobody could make this up.” Asked for his reasons for making the trip, Petit replied: “When I see three oranges, I juggle. When I see two towers, I walk.” But significantly he omitted to add: “And when I come down from two towers, I make love to the first woman I see.”
“Is this true? Is this a true story?” is a question you hear asked frequently in cinemas. Before a film a message regularly appears: “This is based on a true story.” This functions as a kind of prophylactic, a way of protecting the subsequent proceedings from undue criticism. By declaring in advance that something is true, the film-makers seek to absolve themselves from the highest demands of art. The implication is that, if it’s true, it must be interesting. The updated CV piously tacked on to the end of the film – telling us that the tousled hero is today running a brothel in downtown São Paolo, or that the lovable heroine overcame her crack habit to open a small bakery in Montecito – is also intended to ward off our more spontaneous reactions to the film itself. It acts as a sort of dousing of the flame of our potential dislike.
“You cannot improve on the facts,” Hilary Mantel has said in a ringing defence of accuracy in historical fiction. But Mantel was most certainly not arguing that it was enough to offer only the facts. Nor is it a guarantee of importance in art that the art directs itself to an important subject. Every Sunday, like so many students in the 1960s, I fell out of bed and read Kenneth Tynan. But his biggest misstep surely came in the week when he reviewed Peter Watkins’s film The War Game. Because it speculated on the effects of a nuclear attack on a typical English city, “it might,” Tynan said, “be the most important film ever made . . . We are told that works of art cannot change the course of history . . . I believe this one might.” Its screening, he continued, made it impossible to take seriously the other films released that week. An Italian director had come up with “an ecstasy of chic self-indulgence, a gigantic parcel which conceals beneath its gaudy wrapping, a fragment of old rope”. How could anyone bother with “an immensely pretty film of monumental triviality” when it was placed beside a harrowing vision such as The War Game?
Now admittedly, Juliet of the Spirits is not La Dolce Vita. But nor is it nothing. It is a film to which you may return many times for pleasure and instruction. And yet, oddly, in their characteristic mix of autobiography, of fiction and of fantasy, Fellini’s films raise the very same question I wish to ask. How can there be a wrong way to make good art? And, indeed, what point does criticism serve when it asserts only “This is not the sort of thing of which I approve”? When a literary critic such as James Wood twists himself into a pretzel explaining exactly why the novel he has under review is the wrong kind of good novel, he sounds like nothing so much as a Railtrack official railing against the wrong kind of snow. All the rules dictate that, in 8½, Fellini ought not to be able to construct a counterintuitive masterpiece out of his own pampered indecisiveness. But he does.
All over the world serious work is being made in all sorts of unauthorised ways. Old-fashioned opinion, meanwhile, is tying its shoelaces and not noticing. In the face of the evidence, it is still held as an article of faith by high-minded bystanders that it takes time for artists to absorb events. Any response that appears too quickly must, it is claimed, be journalism, not art. The fact that Wilfred Owen wrote the greatest poems of the first world war in the heat of battle does not shake the prejudice. If the high-minded had their way, Owen would have waited to lend the events more distance. He would, mind you, have been killed in the meanwhile, and his poems would never have got written, but at least Owen would have died with the consolation of knowing that he did plan to compose on a critically approved timescale. Addressing a similar conviction – that films about Iraq and Afghanistan are bound to be flawed because they lack perspective – the critic David Denby asks this excellent question: “Box office wisdom holds that it is too early to make movies about this conflict; but how can it ever be too early to make a good film?”
It is this question of prematurity – “Hold on, I’m not ready for this” – which bedevils the reception of any work on a contemporary subject. It is very hard in these circumstances to ensure that the question the work provokes is neither “How soon has it been made?” nor even “What has it been made from?” but the far more lasting question: “How deep does it go?” I said earlier that the example for my recent plays had come from Balzac – “What was it like living under New Labour? How did Tony Blair seem when he went to war?” But I need to make clear that I therefore regard The Permanent Way, Stuff Happens, Murder in Samarkand, Gethsemane and The Power of Yes as something entirely different from journalism.
Journalism is reductive. This is not always the fault of journalists. It is in the nature of the job. At its best and worst, journalism aims to distil. It aims to master, even to subjugate, a particular topic. In this ambition, the journalist will always run the risk of tipping over into contempt. As soon as something can be summarised it can also be dispatched. Anyone who has ever attended morning conference at a national newspaper will know the form: everyone taking part in the human comedy is a fool. What was once the humorous stance of Private Eye has become the humourless stance of the entire press. The gap between what people are and what they are treated as in journalism has never been wider. Only the very best journalists know how to suggest that a person, theory or event is not just what the journalist believes it to be. It is also itself. Holding that balance between your account and a proper respect for the truth of what something or somebody is outside your account involves a level of self-awareness hard to achieve in 600 words.
In the west a journalistic culture which takes in both the internet and television has now become both tiring and ubiquitous. It has also led to a curious deformation in society. As citizens, we consider our family, our friends and, most of all, our children as likeable and virtuous. But we are encouraged to consider everyone we don’t know – and most especially those we know only through newspapers – as ridiculous or vicious. To this tendency, this desire to bundle people and thereby to dismiss them, art and death are the most powerful antidotes. Art frequently reminds us that things are never quite as simple as they seem. Nor are people. Journalism is life with the mystery taken out. Art is life with the mystery restored. Put people on the stage, in all their humanity, propel them into a course of events, and in even the most savage satire or preposterous farce, characters may acquire a sympathy, a scale, a helplessness, all of which draw forth feelings eerily reminiscent of those elicited by people you actually know.
Meanwhile, to the objection that plays and novels about contemporary events are too hastily conceived to be profound is added the confident counter-objection that such works are unlikely to endure. Shakespeare’s plays may be crammed with incomprehensible Elizabethan references and jokes which amuse nobody, and these have hardly damaged his continuing popularity. But the example of literature’s highest achiever does little to blunt the popularity of this line of attack. How on earth, it is asked, can either foreign cultures or generations unborn ever be interested in such local doings? On this question, I can only say I am willing to take my chances. Like most writers, I have at best a sceptical attitude to posterity. But wherever playwrights gather, you will find them telling stories of plays, performed in far-off places and years after their premieres, which have somehow acquired what seems like an accidental shimmer.
Of a recent revival of Stuff Happens in Canada – six years after the National Theatre first conceived a then-topical account of the lead-up to the Iraq war – the director wrote me a letter: “I find the play infinitely sadder than a few years ago . . . I think there is something potent about these people now officially out of office and firmly set in their historical place. At the same time, the references to both Afghanistan and Iraq are eliciting vocal responses from the audiences that I don’t recall having happened in my previous production.” In response to such a letter, any playwright will argue two things. First, no proper play is ever just “about” the events it describes. The whole intention of a play in describing one thing is to evoke another. Bush and Blair, after all, are not the only warmongers in history. But, secondly, in celebrating this play’s bewildering success in Toronto six years on, the director was, in fact, celebrating the special nature of theatre itself. In Stalinist Russia the most powerful protest you could make was to stage Hamlet.
When standing as a candidate for the Governorship of Alaska in 2006, Andrew Halcro observed of Sarah Palin that she had what any politician would kill for. “And that is the ability to make substance irrelevant.” Theatre has the very opposite ability – to find substance out and weigh it with devastating accuracy. But when deeply felt, theatre also has, like the music of Delius and Elgar, the potential to inflame the imagination of others. When The Power of Yes opened last October in Angus Jackson’s production, it laid out the progress of the current banking crisis. It was therefore inevitable that the immediate response be journalistic. It either was or wasn’t accurate. Its diagnosis was or wasn’t correct. The play suggested that bankers now have the upper hand over anyone elected to power, firstly because complicated financial practices are beyond the understanding of most democratic politicians, but secondly because bankers have refined all their various blackmail notes into one single threat, left like a bomb in a litter-bin: “If you don’t rig the market in our favour, we will drag you down with us.” The legitimacy of such intellectual terrorism was hotly debated.
The Power of Yes dealt with issues that might well have been batted back and forth on a lively edition of Newsnight. Because the play portrayed real people, the dish arrived hotly spiced for journalistic carving. But then, interestingly, a second wave of reaction followed which addressed not so much the play’s ideas as its techniques. Many things were expected of a play about high finance, but it was not foreseen that it should resemble Michael Bennett’s production of A Chorus Line. Friends reported that they found the sight of 20 suited bankers lining up beneath the proscenium arch curiously moving. From then on, nothing was as they’d anticipated, least of all their own responses.
Many spectators noticed that this was a unusual example of a verbatim play which did not seem set on righting a wrong. Verbatim theatre was, they thought, a known genre, at its worst a touch hectoring and solemn, and overly dependent on direct address. On this occasion an attempt was being made to jazz it, to take it places it had never been. A few smart people were clever enough to guess that the inspiration had come from Glenn Gould’s radio programmes, made over a 10-year period from 1967. In The Solitude Trilogy, Gould recorded the impressions of northern Canadians, many of them living lives of extreme isolation, and then sent their voices spinning like music, weaving them, fugue-like, into something the pianist called tapestry.
The most interesting reaction of all came from a painter friend, who was struck by how much the look of the play resembled an installation by Bill Viola. How strange, he said, that an ostensibly prosaic, ostensibly factual play should unleash some of the purest visual poetry he had ever seen in a theatre.
It is safe to say that I was more flattered by this response than I would have been 40 years previously. When I set out in the theatre, I was part of a fringe movement that often sought to crash the problem of aesthetics by doing plays as crudely as possible. If you made no attempt to do things overly well, then people would not be distracted from what you were saying. But as the years went by, it became clear to me that I had not understood aesthetics. They were not your enemy. They were your opportunity. Style was the only means by which you could suggest that what you were writing about was something more than what you appeared to be writing about. Without style there was no suggestiveness, and with no suggestiveness, no metaphor. The processes of art could begin nowhere else.
“Are you the notorious composer Arnold Schönberg?” someone once asked Arnold Schönberg. His reply has gone down in history. “Yes. Somebody had to be.” In the last few years I admit I have felt a mild degree of fellow feeling. “Are you the person who makes plays out of what’s going on in the papers?” is never a question asked in a friendly manner. Nor is the answer much liked. “Yes. Somebody has to.” “How on earth do I review that?” said one well-known theatre critic, crying out to a colleague as he left the first night of The Power of Yes. It as if the doors of our theatre, of their own volition, blow shut all the time, and the task is always to prise them back open. Plenty of people get their poetry from science, from the physical universe, from the contemplation of mathematics, or of animals, or of solitude or of the stars. An audience arrives fearing the theatre will be one more medium like any other. If the subject of the play comes from political life, then they anticipate a form of animated journalism, journalism on legs, the usual mud-soup of opinion and sociology. But the performing arts can deliver high-flying bankers who are at once contemptible and deeply sympathetic. If we accept the simple distinction that factual work asks questions for us, whereas fictional work is more likely to ask questions of us, then why can some work not do both?
We are living through curious times and they demand curious art – in both senses of the word. “Aren’t you telling us what we already know?” is the last question, always aimed between my eyes, potentially lethal in the questioner’s view, but not even causing a skin-wound when fired. “No, I am not. You may think you know about something. But it’s one thing to know, and another to experience.” The paradox of great factual work is that it restores wonder. Thinly imagined work takes it away. “I never knew that, I never realised that, I never felt that” is what you hear from the departing audience when their evening has been well spent. Because we think we know, but we don’t.
Reading 1,000 books (arbitrary number meaning “lots”), before writing the first page you’d have the nerve to actually show to a relative stranger, was always a good idea, way back when, but now it’s important for a very new reason: as a counter-balance to dramatic-language-as-a-chiefly-Oral-form… which TV has now, again, standardized.
The Caveman Griot at the campfire added a visual component to her/his presentation, too (grimacing, gesturing, looking spooky-as-fuck), so, that doesn’t make TV a *fundamentally* new form of the Oral: the Oral always had (required?) a built-in Visual. There’s a case to be made that even *silent* films, presenting quick, conversational snatches of printed-narrative and dialogue, was the Oral Tradition slowly sneaking back (to the “West”)… maybe the egalitarian empowerment of electricity had something to do with that .
Years ago I was given a copy of a book of folk tales, by a well-meaning friend (from the very country the folk tales came from) and I was underwhelmed by the texts. And I pinpointed the lack of layering and intensity (on the page) to the fact that Oral Traditions rely on cliche to an *extreme degree* and that’s because they are, essentially, the sound of a tribe or era celebrating itself… the cliches are memes and cues that refer explicitly to a Volk and its memories and practices (vs the esoteric knowledge of an elite or the idiosyncratic territory of some individual’s aesthetic preferences ). The Oral Tradition is all about the communal/generational effort… tellers take the tales and add their little bits and pass them on. There will be a very general feel to such a narrative (like any Hollywood script).
A couple of centuries after the peak of the widespread dominance of the Oral Tradition (and after the Academy found itself admitting chunks from upper reaches of The Volk and teaching them in the manner of the Aristocracy), a new kind of Dramatic Language began to consolidate the paradigm shift: Nth-generations of writers who had read more texts than had heard folk tales were writing more books for future writers to read!
This trend (with the accretive beauty of a natural process) reached a kind of peak… when non-Oral, textual effects in “Western” Lit reached a maximum, syrupy density… some time between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century. Maybe Joyce/Nabokov was an end-point and Shakespeare (the amphibian who could swim as well in the declaimed water as he could climb out and sun himself beautifully on the page) was the middle or tipping-point.
During c. Nabokov, TV started shifting things back… first a little, then a lot. Much of current Fiction just reads a *lot* better, in public (orally) than stuff by Joyce or Nabokov does. The quick test: if re-reading a sentence a couple of times before you move on brings out richer resonances, that sentence probably does not descend from an Oral Tradition (while having an English actor with a plummy voice read your Flash Fiction to a crowd, to give the sentences that layered-resonance feeling, is cheating).
90% of the new texts I read now (mostly, but not exclusively, online) have a predominately Oral feel… a low text-effect-density on the page… because they descend from this New Oral Tradition. The language has that general (conversational) feel of the anti-individualistic, anti-esoteric, created-by-committee, organic Folk Tale but this is an artificial effect: these stories aren’t being handed down, from generation to generation, acquiring a tiny bit of new authorial DNA every time another Griot memorizes them. It’s a technological distortion: they are passed on from TV. TV pretends to serve a community/generation/Volk when all it does is reach the audience it can physically reach. These are Folk Tales without a Volk. Maybe, with its conversational, anti-esoteric (anti-individualistic/ anti-elitist) language-effects, a lot of current fiction represents a powerful longing for community?
There are two “corrections” for the inherent aesthetic distortions of the Volkless Folk Tale, imo:
1) The stories become Teleplays (as so many clearly want to be) and acquire some force by being enacted or
2) Aspiring writers go back to reading those 1,000 books to build up some textual density on the page… or, any way, read more books than they watch Television.
In any case, something is missing and I’ve spent a few years trying to figure it out.
UPDATE: Quite Good, This:
July 28th, 2010 / 6:26 pm Paul—
Fuck you, Grandpa.
I hope you die a horrible death in some VA hospital.
I will not (REPEAT NOT) feel guilty at being amazingly prolific at such a young age. I don’t (and WON’T) be bedded down with your misbegotten guilt at not reading 1989e8r90e90 books before writing a number of incisive and clearly publishable work.
Good luck walking down the bookstore (with a walker, no doubt) to buy my next book.
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July 28th, 2010 / 6:28 pm Paul—
whoops, sorry that should be “to the bookstore”
I’m just FLUSTERED right now at all the sanctimonious assholes on here like you, that Samuel P North jerk, and of course others who won’t be named.
I’m gonna go get my pole waxed and then write something and get it accepted for publishing (IF NOT published) within 72 hours. Go type on your fucking typewriter, Mr. Augustine, while reading some Henry Miller.
Toodles,
The Starched Gila Monster
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In fact, I AM a Grandpa!
POST-MONTY PYTHON: WHAT IS IT WITH CHEESE?
DREAR DIARY
The temperature eases and the lyricism returns. It’s hard to be lyric when it’s 90° F. When it’s 90°F. and you don’t have an Offsprung you can substitute “sultry” for “lyric” but you can’t do “sultry” with a four-year-old in the castle. The temperature eased down to 70° F. and we went out in the afternoon and took the subway up the street and fetched two necessary things from a Department Store.
Then we strolled the boulevard, three-abreast, Offsprung between us, Beloved looking chic and Greek-urn-worthy and fine. I actually said, so Offsprung couldn’t hear, when we were secluded in an aisle of the Department Store, “intercourse now” and Beloved laughed. On the boulevard we were playing engelchen, engelchen flieg with Offsprung swinging and swooping, holding on tight as we lifted, between us. As a kid who strongly envied Vladimir his Vera, I never would’ve dared to dream that things would one day work out so hallucinatorily-well. An oldish adjacent German lady with a hatless-Abzug look to her, in the cafe we took cool drinks in, stared (at least she was smiling) as though we were a commercial on a public view-screen, unable to stare back. It’s great to cease longing.
Yesterday I lunched with Comrade Peter, who was just back from a couple of weeks in London with his two kids. His lover’s mother has a house on the water on the Isle of Wight and half-pretendingly, to have a laugh with the kids, they baked a bunch of scones and put up hand-painted THE CAFE IS OPEN signs and customers appeared, near-magically. The impromptu cafeteers sold all the scones in the larder and even monetized a pack of cheap ice lollies in the freezer and turned a shocking profit so the kids flew back to Berlin with windfalls in their pockets.
I said to Comrade Peter: “Everyone blames writers for not coming up with great new things while they should be blaming the readers for not inspiring them.”
He commented knowledgeably on some financial shit or other. His girlfriend is from a family of toffs.
We had an idea for a shop called OVERPRICED BULLSHIT. Comrade Peter reminded me that we had the idea, about 6 months ago, to open a bistro called GREASY-ASSED BULLSHIT. In Berlin these places would work.
After lunch with Comrade Peter we were walking along a trend-ridden street in a part of Berlin I call Little Germerica and bumped into a scenester from the early post-Wall days, when clubs from West Berlin were the hip ones and the Love Parade was just a thing a few thousand local club kids did on flatbed trucks with obnoxious sound systems. You’d see people you knew and worked with dancing near-naked (and/or body-painted) on these flatbed trucks. Caligulan-but-controlled. A pigeon shat on my hat at Love Parade #3 and the last Love Parade in Berlin was terrifying: 1.5 million people pressed tight as corpuscles and full of drugs. LSD via sweat and osmosis. I remember seeing the scenester at that one, with her Aryan boyfriend; that one or the one before. I’ve read c. ten reports about the 20 deaths at this year’s Love Parade in Duisburg and not a single mention of drugs.
Comrade Peter and I suddenly realized, as we bid the well-preserved scenester adieu, that she looks and speaks like a half-Black version of Mia Farrow in Hannah and Her Sisters. She had lived in London for awhile, working for Sony, before the bottom dropped out of the music business. I felt lucky to be clinging, still, to a thread of it. The suits are usually safer than the creatives until a recession shakes the tree too hard and it becomes apparent that the creatives at least have the ability to bounce. Warning to suits: you are only used to manage or divert prosperity, not to create it.
Suddenly remembered an argument I had with a half-Cuban dancer-girlfriend who was somewhat of a fucking hippie. 2002? She’d lived in India and everything, cock-teasing gurus and whatnot. I was subletting Comrade Barry’s atelier while Barry was in South Korea for a long stretch and this freckled hippie dancer with olive skin was net-surfing while I was in the back room, watching her 2-year-old, who was crying because she was hungry.
“M—-, for Fucksake,” I said, patience frayed, “What are you looking at?”
It was the website of an Iranian former-weightlifter who was now in the metaphysics-of-greed biz, claiming that anyone with the proper spiritual attitude (and his help) could find wealth and love. I was furious.
“What,” she said, sarcastically, “Because he’s a former Mr. Universe, nothing he says is of value?”
“Exactly!” I shouted.
Comrade Peter and I were laughing at that story during yesterday’s walk. We had both fucked her at one time or other.
I, who sleep at your vigils and fast for your feasts (w/apologies to Joyce)
The most effective form of education is marketing. And the most effective form of marketing is disguised as wisdom. I write “disguised”, there, as though “wisdom” is an absolute, and absolutely positive, value. But what is it? It’s not a stable body of knowledge, it’s a subjective, essentially conservative category of opinion. “Wisdom” was Ronald Reagan’s shtick; the presumption being that, at his age (and position) he just knew certain things… don’t worry, I’ll take care of it: you’re still too young to know. Reagan was beloved by Americans on both “sides” of the Left/Right pseudo-dichotomy.
The concept of “wisdom” isn’t amenable to critical analysis, but, clearly, the “wisdom” of a 19th-century plantation owner of Georgia would have diverged somewhat from the “wisdom” of one of his elder slaves. Not always, of course: in a perfectly-run plantation, there would have been a unity of “wisdom” visions between master and slave. And there often is, to this day.
Critical analysis means ignoring the debate-foreclosing, inviolable aura of “wisdom” (conventional and otherwise) and breaking the arguments down to basic, foundational elements we can then use Fact and Logic to test. We aren’t trained to do this. If we were (if all of us were), it would be Marketing’s end and the end of Politics. Which is why critical analysis is taboo (example: one of the classical arguments against critical/forensic analysis at the scene of a possible False Flag operation in which many are killed is the “wisdom” of letting the “healing process” begin instead of, you know, digging up all that hurtful evidence-muck).
Which leads me to my second point: in the false dichotomy of “Left” and “Right” in American Political Theater, the most conservative force is not “Wing Nut” but “Normative Liberal”. Wing Nuts (eg, bellicose chubby radio personalities) actually promote a kind of debate by being (for the “Left”) so clearly racist/hawkish/wrong and thereby providing sanctioned targets for passionate criticism. A Normative Liberal, on the other hand, supports an arbitrary (comfort zone) boundary on discourse… a line beyond which a line of thinking or complaint can’t go. The punishment for crossing the line is ostracism. The Normative Liberal is a quasi-bourgeois mindset (I say “quasi” because the “middle class” no longer exists in real terms; only on Credit): it wants to keep things largely as they are while also, somehow, at the same time (impossibly), “improving conditions” for the Lesser Orders… the goal of which, of course, in the end, is more about improving conditions for the Normative Liberal by absolving him/her of Guilt. Guilt is ruining the Normative Liberal’s ability to enjoy the Goods and Services that are his/her credit-based birthright. Think “Hillary Supporter” c. 2003.
A Golden Avatar of Normative Liberalism (and 3QD readers) is Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show. As I pointed out to CDS Barry during yesterday’s walk, using Satire on Monsters only works to bring the Monsters back into the tent of the Human and the acceptable (ie, it normalizes monstrousness). To laugh at Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is to turn these monsters into your merely wrong-headed or eccentric or irascible grandfathers. Satire is only appropriate (and effective) against a politician who is no worse than inept. To rehabilitate a Mass Murderer (this is fact, not impressionism: check the figures on Iraq, for one example) from a deserved spot in Beyond the Pale to a much-more-huggable place in the breakfast nook of the Crotchety… is not exactly a service to fucking humanity. Cheney, Rove, the Bushes, et al, should be repulsive to us as We are to them.
Far from challenging the system, Stewart does his part to keep the whole thing from blowing up. Not that he’s intentionally-complicit… he’s a structural collaborator: Stewart just wants to earn a good living at something he does well and what he does well is, necessarily (to sell it to the target-demo of Normative Liberals), packaged misleadingly as a form of Dissent. Stewart wants to earn a good living while also doing “good”… for structural reasons, it’s not that simple. Doing “good” in [name your favorite example of a rogue state] is a bad career move. Those who do “good” often suffer catastrophic reversals in career trajectory (a possible euphemism for plane crash). If you Do Good they Hunt You Down.
Structural Collaboration has to be widespread for the system to work. It is.
[ed.'s note: most of the images I'm using these days... unless they're of Berlin... are from this picture-blog]
Will someone please take Tina Brown’s foul head-thing when she’s done with it, stick it on a pike and use it to scare African children into doing their homework… ?
Satire in the UK has usually come from quite reactionary quarters ( right wing conservative usually. ) The odd thing with the left wing satirists of the cartoonist persuasion is that they always depict the tryrants with great detail and verve but those whose side they are meant to be on are usually drawn as a characterless, faceless mob. Surely the opposite effect of what they intend?
I’ve always been underwhelmed by a lot of satire. Doesn’t it function more as a catharsis than an agent of change? Although the point must come where having someone who articulates what you might feel doesn’t seem quite enough
In my area of work I’ve come across people who say that it’s not possible to do political outdoor theatre. To which the answer is “yes it is possible but maybe it’s just not possible if you want to make a living doing political work. ”
There’s a photo at one of those G8 demonstrations of a bunch of riot police with batons and shields charging a group of women dressed as carnival showgirls. That image seems far more powerful than a subsidised show about political unfairness playing at a festival could ever be.
Comrade ET! To quote a well-known film:
-Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey, you know? We should go there, get some guys together. Get some bricks and baseball bats and explain things to ‘em.
-There was this devastating satirical piece on that in the Times.
-Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks get right to the point.
-But biting satire is better that physical force.
-No, physical force is better with Nazis. It’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.
He meant Nazis 1.0, of course.
Ah back in the day when Woody could be bothered to develop his scripts rather than film the draft versions of them.
I saw a couple of his recent ones on TV. The plots, initial ideas were perfectly serviceable Thin Man-esque romps but he didn’t seem to feel the need to flesh them out with jokes or ……… let’s just leave it as jokes.
We can’t blame Ingmar Bergman for this omission can we?
Christ, Comrade ET… I knew something was wrong with Woody as I left the theater during “Manhattan Murder Mystery”. When did Ingmar bite the deathcock, again? Maybe there’s a connection.
Still, we’ll always have Crimes and Misdemeanors, eh?
[erm: a quick trip to Wiki reminds me that Ingmar's death can't possibly explain Woody's precipitous decline. How about Louis Armstrong's death? When was that again...?]
[one Wiki trip later: nope. It was obviously the 21st century itself that did Woody in]
The films did start to get a bit “distracted” after his marriage to his step-daughter ( or whatever she was ).
Can we blame Mia Farrow’s legal team and the idiocy of even thinking that was a good idea?
I did like Deconstructing Harry when I saw it in the cinema all those years ago.
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET: why any aging celebrity in the market for a sex-slave/nanny would prefer a teenage American stepdaughter over a ripe, slightly-past-it, Italian or Hindu starlet, is beyond me]
I think Woody could avoided any problems if, like the POV cameraman directly below he had chosen an oven-ready chicken to consort with.
Incidentally just returned from a gig, En route home we stopped off to “eat” ( or is that spend money on a deeply unsatisfying experience? we try and avoid such things but my diabetes being what it is it became impossible ) at a service station where the chicken dinners looked very much like they’d been “prepared” in the manner below. Really.
is the photographer Terry whathisname the Taschen best-seller?
Comrade ET!
1) Are you aware that margarine fucks you up (re: diabetes)? Get off of that plasticky, capillary-wall-blocking shit immediately, man. Three of the most commonly-consumed super-poisons of our evil post-industrial existence are 1) corn syrup 2) margarine 3) fluoride.
2) surely a POV-shot would show the interior of the bird’s chest cavity?
3) No tattoo visible so it can’t be Tel
Apparently some of the no sugar fruit juice drinks on occasion contain more sugar ( albeit in a less aggressive form ) than those with sugar in.
Still our government has dismantled the legislation which makes food producers admit in a clear fashion what’s inside the food they are selling ( the market-place does the job more efficiently by all accounts????? ) so if I don’t change my diet to espadrille salad followed by a lo-interest soya grit pudding I may have died through being unable to decipher exactly what some foodstuffs contain.
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET, the safest thing is to maintain a secret cache of Hippie friends who run a communal farm and eat their genuine vegetables but avoid their jam sessions]
[more later after I'm done with various Daddy duties]
NU-LIT and the AUTOPARODIC
Fukinay. Uh, when did kids like this decide to be “writers” instead of going to Law School? Is he imitating William S. Burroughs via Tao Lin? The following text is “wild” like somebody’s date in a striped tie at a rent party wearing a lampshade… or doing the limbo with a broomstick. Or, yeah: this reminds me of a German I once saw wearing his sunglasses in a restaurant at midnight with his square-assed friends in hysterics. Or, no: somebody’s Mormon girlfriend with a twelve-string guitar covering Weird Al Yankovic. Or how about a blinking LED-festooned cat turd?
The squalor of it.
Is there a talent-killing virus on the loose? Or is it true what they say about fluoridated water?
Any hope of a new crop of talented writers popping up to replace the dying wizards of a bygone era is fading fast, Comrades. In the Anglophone Sphere, anyway….
SHORT STORY (EXCERPT): “Four Is Me! With Squeeeeee! (And LOLer)”
by Nick Mamatas
She wasn’t my grandma, but grandpa junior’s eighteenth or nineteenth wife, and I couldn’t help her. “Your computer belongs to the Internet now, Grandma,” I said, as I removed my hands from the seething slit of rotting sweetmeats and quivering nerves she kept on what used to be a nice oak side table. The computer wheezed and shuddered with all the viruses she had downloaded, and then there were the eyebuds; even as I tried to explain to grandma that she’d just need to go down to the butcher and get a new computer, a few of the buds grew into fully prehensile eyestalks and started looking around. Spyware, malware (it was growing claws now), lolware, diseased pustules blooming into firm tits with suckling mouths for nipples, and now the whole mass jerked back and forth as competing scripts demanded that it jump off the desk and kill me, and stay where it was and kill itself. Really squalid and moving, this computer was, because grandma had opened every letter she ever got from her spammy correspondent, the lifelike Percocet G. Viagra. (An ancient name that brings to mind quaint taffy pulls and cellular phones and dying of old age.) I reached back to signal grandma to hand me the rifle–”You’ll need to store pictures of Quint on a whiteskin rug somewhere else,” I told her–but grandma was already dead, probably from some horrible and entirely fictional disorder she’d read about. I had to burn the whole house down, but the computer would crawl forth from the wreckage and haunt me for the rest of my near-infinity of days as the least famous member of the most famous family in the whole wide world.
Little girls in wonderful little dresses loved to follow me around, whistling and squeaking in tones only members of my family could hear thanks to the same set of mutations that make us all perfectly irresistible and lucky and virtually immortal besides. When I made my first billion at age sixteen I was only aiming for one hundred million, and was doomed to pay through the nose–literally, the feds wanted the precious fluids of my pineal gland–in taxes, but then Sergeant X, my IV-great grandson, recently hatched and ready to rule, toppled the government. That, plus the fact that my name was Ivy and he was my IV, made him a favorite. Today he marched across the planet in his mighty Ideological State Apparatus, with its octopus legs and blazing death-ray cannons. The only thing he couldn’t kill or tame was that damned computer, which haunted me in the nights like the disease of delirium. The girls he could mow down with impunity and with the greatest of compassion; there were always more where they came from. And indeed that was the locus of my great4grandbaby’s compassion–Make room! Make room!”
PART 2a
Or try this. First read the reviews. Then read the Lit.
REVIEWS
The stories I enjoyed most were written in first and second person—violent yet sweet, beautiful but ugly and reflecting both love and a yearning for things we want but can’t have.” –Roxane Gay
“What I felt come through these lines was a blatant and at times vulgar lust that was employed to mask her underlying need for love.” –Jason Behrends
“There are no pieces in [NTaBM] about which I am ambivalent: half the book is hysterical, the other half disturbing.” –Laura Ellen Scott
“Holy shit. These are some amazing words.” –Barry Gra
NOW, THE LIT (4 stories):
Argentina Sunday
By xTx
I got in a car with a skinny, pretty girl. She drove us to the ghetto CVS, through a sketchy neighborhood. She drove around the block. We got scared. She said, “I want to buy that mannequin.” I said, “Halloween.” She said, “I suck ass at parallel parking.” I said, “Get your suck on.” We got out and saw a black guy walking. We walked a few steps. We walked back to the car. We got in the car. She drove down the street more. She parked again. We got out of the car. We saw the same black guy walking. Then we saw three black kids walking. They were across the street. I said, “He has a boom box on his shoulder.” She said, “You should breakdance.” I said, “He has Homer Simpson slippers on.” We walked up the street wary and saw a door. We saw a small Argentinean. She motioned us inside. Another small Argentinean told us to sign a book. Another pinned a large thing on my shirt, above my left breast. Her touching me made me uncomfortable. We found a seat, ate some chips. We looked around. We ate some chips. We talked about things. We looked around. There was music playing. We ate some chips. We got thirsty. We ate more chips for an hour and finally got water. We were very thankful for the water. Pretty girl ate a marshmallow. A girl carried a guitar. A girl wore fishnet stockings. Posters of Argentina were on the wall in dirty frames. A rotary fan sat on a shelf. The lights went out. They went back on after we yelled surprise! There was crying. We talked about more things. We greeted a lady. We felt ‘in the minority’. We were on camera a lot. We were the first in line for food. There was Argentinean food. Unrecognizable. Turkey maybe or pork. I ate a small portion. I ate chips. I won a centerpiece and left when Ericka showed up. The only white guy walked us to our car. I said, “We escaped.” She said, “I feel bad.”
Black Friend
I have the blackest black friend. Compton black. Real life black guy black. Not only in spirit, but in color. A super black black; ultra black—black to the fourth power. If the blackest black fell into a paint of blacker-black and then had a baby with motherfucking-black, he would be blacker than that black baby who was very, very black. How black is he? He not only coaches a basketball team but also plays semi-pro football. A linebacker, so not only extra black in that respect, he is also enormous. His head is pumpkin-sized. His shoulders mock my face. His hands gang rape my hands. He even has a great black guy name. He is so black that I might be his only white friend. In fact, I just scanned all of his Facebook friends, and yes, I am the one white face. I am his ‘token’. My black friend likes me very much. So much that he calls me long distance. Incurs roaming fees. When he calls he talks for a long time until he needs to go to practice and then he hangs up. When we go out to dinner, he buys me shots of Patron. If I put my black friend up against your black friend, mine would win, hands down, thus proving I am not a racist.
Nobody Trusts a Black Magician
I want to fuck you. May we fuck? We should fuck today. Tomorrow we could fuck. I could fuck you yesterday. I could fuck your beard. We could make cupcake fucking. I could fuck you like ham. I want to fuck you like burned pancakes with my panties in our mouths. Let’s fuck like we met on the internet. I just want to fuck and fuck. On stairs. On a porch. Let’s fuck on a daybed. Let’s fuck next to a thesaurus. Let’s fuck like your dick hates fags and my pussy is totally gay. Let’s make fuck like I have huge fake titties that you really enjoy playing with. Let’s fuck like I don’t care what you drive. I want to fuck you inside outer space. Let’s fuck to Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye.” Let’s fuck to Elvis’ heroin puke noises. Let’s fuck at your grandma’s funeral dinner. Fuck me with your cock hopped up on goofballs. We can make things wet and fuck them. Let’s fuck shit together, side by side. You can fuck me in my ass, in my face. Dessert while we fuck, but only if we finish our vegetables. We can fuck for a week. We can fuck until I lose my job. I can collect unemployment while we are fucking. You can stick your hard private parts into my tight, wet private parts which means we will be fucking. Fuck me in front of a black magician. Fuck me like I’m twelve or thirteen. We can fuck as long as you want—until you give up—until you’re bored and feel like just watching TV. I want to fuck you like you are my best friend. I want to fuck you like I hate everything you stand for. We can fuck infinity. Fuck me into the Marines. Please let’s fuck. I’ve been wanting to fuck you for a long time. You can tie me to a log and fuck me. Fuck me like a kiss on the mouth, like you want to piss off your girlfriend. Let’s fuck like we’re on vacation. Let’s fuck like we’ve been staring at each other all night and we’re both wasted. We can fuck like I’m worth fighting for. Let’s 24-Hour-Fitness fuck. I want to fuck you until you cum. I want to fuck you until you forget your name. Let’s fuck and shoot cum all over each other until we drown. May we fuck? We could be fucking right now. Let’s fuck, seriously.
Tits and Whiskey
When I last left you, our heroine, was about to spread food among the minions and rub herself blind behind locked doors. Horny conversation was the catalyst. Rabbit found the hole. Found it good. Willing, able, ETC. Imagery as follows: Rough shoving up against wall. Shirt ripping. Nipple sucking. Cold fingers warmth finding. Head slam. Ow. Oh yeah. Large feet in large boots. Kicking naked legs apart. Insert hand here. and here. and here Kneeling men. Underneath them. Rotate. Slut. Whore. Suck them—all of them. Yeah. Just like that, fuckin’ whore. Orgasm and concurrent scream swallowed by pressed lips and intake of held breath. Pass out imminent. Avoided tongue washed the apparatus before hiding it away. Underneath her bed in a Ziploc bag with other friends. It’s wrapped in a pair of silver boardshorts. They make an annoying swishy-sound whenever she handles it. It’s like a tiny dog whine. And she wants to kick that dog.
PART 2b
Roxanne Gay says “Timothy Willis Sanders [...] is a great writer”:
You Have A Crush On Kells [EXCERPT)
by Timothy Willis Sanders
R. Kelly did the Tootsee Roll. Adina Howard watched R.Kelly. R. Kelly dipped and looked at Adina Howard. Adina Howard walked to R. Kelly.
“I like watching you Tootsee Roll,” said Adina Howard, “Take me to that Kevin Bacon movie.” She handed R. Kelly a folded napkin.
Later, R. Kelly got on the highway with Michael Bivins. R. Kelly unfolded the napkin on the steering wheel.
“Digits. Kevin Bacon movie,” said R. Kelly.
“Big ass chi-chis. Go for it,” said Michael Bivins.
“Hate Kevin Bacon though,” said R. Kelly. “Don’t know…she was with DMX. I think he’s in jail.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you have to watch out for girls who make those kinds of choices.”
“No. Why is he in jail?”
“They found a gun in his car or something.”
“When does he get out?” said Michael Bivins.
“I don’t know. I don’t really know him,” said R. Kelly.
“Probably be a while,” said Michael Bivins, “Big ass chi-chis.” Michael Bivins spread his hands over his chest. R. Kelly laughed. They exited the highway.
R. Kelly sat in the box office. He saw the Mall Security Guard. R. Kelly flagged down the Mall Security Guard. The Mall Security Guard waddled over. R. Kelly thought, “You’re like 800 pounds. Your face…” He looked at the things on the Mall Security Guard’s face.
“How long does someone go to jail for if he’s caught with a gun?” said R. Kelly.
“Depends if the gun was stolen, or used in a murder,” said the Mall Security Guard. R. Kelly looked away. He thought, “Giant chi-chis.”
Aaliyah walked to the box office. R. Kelly met her at the glass.
“Two for Titanic, 7:30 show,” said Aaliyah.
R. Kelly looked at Aaliyah’s body. Aaliyah wore slacks and a low cut top. He looked at her Banana Republic name tag.
“7:30. Are you bringing your boyfriend?” said R. Kelly.
“No. My girlfriend Missy. I like boats. She has a crush on Leonardo.”
“And you have a crush on Kells.” R. Kelly smiled and pointed to his name-tag. The name-tag read KELLZ.
“No,” said Aaliyah. She took her tickets and walked away. R. Kelly watched her walk away. He thought, “Kevin Bacon movie. Used in a murder.”
R. Kelly swept behind the popcorn machine. Teddy Riley stacked popcorn buckets.
“I like Aaliyah,” said R. Kelly. “She works at Banana Republic, dresses nice, watches movies like Titanic…not the Kevin Bacon shit I’m seeing Friday night.”
Teddy Riley sighed a little. He walked to the store room without looking at R. Kelly.
“And she likes boats,” said R. Kelly.
PART 3
David F. Hoenigman, reviewing Theoretical Animals, by Gary J. Shipley (BlazeVOX Books), writes:
“Was I able to understand this book? – No.”
“Did I think it was an enriching reading experience? – Yes, absolutely. It’s beautiful. I want to roll around in it. I want to swing from its branches.”
“Shipley’s writing is important because it’s a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature. To force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It’s an unforgettable experience.”
Sample of the text:
A putrid joy for angels and child-murderers,
blood boiled shirts, trousers of sweat. For let the world see that first tickling, before, back under, bending time into a soft cast of beauty and blocked questions. Spoons scooping, the putrefied boy’s dark rake spilling like coffee beans: ‘Dry, Joe. Pour me faster!’ Gravity grew such radiant adornments, its morbid simplicity compared to snakes, its secret wars torn from hidden promises, and all the while the only things that float defy nothing.
and
awaiting men of the windowless suicide / the morning vagueness of blood on white flooring / choreographed experiments hidden behind the breeze /order of more shivering in a godless cannibalization of women / of humanus sizzling in brochures / sliding out my brightly lit corridors / tiny corners of sunlight / of consciousness hiding in and of black possibilities / with factories allowing his sheds with blue unwritten perversity / disassembling the blind sightings of slashed dogs / boozy bloodless lies of honest harvesters armed with thought / the way rewritten over their half-sleep / single prayers stiffened roses and anything / cruel gates creaking in mastery / piss steaming off cord / on the wives an empty current / the disorganized pauses / an evidence glass / veal of their thigh / smell of dragging muscles /clumsy social camouflage and coffee faces / scanning with people’s dreams /regulars clean of rope / exploitation reassembly / sorrowful dread and seagulls bleached with the past /
What a shame it’d be to always dismiss that which doesn’t “make more sense on the surface”.
What wonderful books, paintings, movies, music, people and experiences you’d be missing out on.
There are
so many things
you can learn about.
BUT…you’ll miss
the best things
if you keep
your eyes shut.
– Dr. Seuss
reply
August 4th, 2010 / 7:09 am Steven Augustine—
“What a shame it’d be to always dismiss that which doesn’t ‘make more sense on the surface’.”
It’s a strange maneuver to use quotation marks when what you’re doing is paraphrasing me, David. Rather than re-iterate (and therefore dilute) my first comment, I’ll direct you to my second, and ask: how is what Shipley is doing here an improvement on what Dylan did (in a self-confessed half-assed way) with Tarantula… more than 40 years ago? Were you aware of Tarantula before you read Theoretical Animals?
I think that nuance distinguishes literary works within a general category/genre: how is nuance even detectable (as opposed to projected) in a pre-grammatical text?
Further: it’s a category error on a fundamental level to lump texts in with films, music, painting, etc. Texts are made of language and language only exists (even “magically”) as a communication of “meaning”. Reading a pre-grammatical text is akin to looking at a painting with your eyes closed or listening to music with your ears thoroughly plugged… the smell of the painting, or the vibration of the music is all that remains and that’s the equivalent of a jumble of pre-grammatical word-clusters.
There may be something exquisite in that to a mandarin sensibility but there’s no mandarin sensibility on earth that can distinguish the smell of every Picasso painting from every other and truthfully claim to be edified by the effort.
The general use of the “avant garde” is more, these days, to make a statement about one’s Lifestyle choices… which is the sign of a thoroughly-domesticated “avant garde”. When did Inconsequentiality and Boredom become the so-called avant-garde’s favorite weapons?
I think the current Anglophone so-called avant garde is manifesting the political symptoms of the cultural trauma of the past several decades and is stunted and impotent in its Tweeness. Or maybe that’s just what happens when you teach “avant garde” in college.
There are snatches of beauty to be had in the pre-grammatical clustering of words and phrases but mere snatches of beauty don’t add up; they remain isolated and fleeting and much easier to generate than cumulative assaults on Hegemony. It’s telling that you cite Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is for children. The Warlords who own and run this culture consider it to be in their best interest to infantilize Art and Artists and I think they’ve succeeded in doing so. I’m not arguing for polemic: I’m arguing for greater sophistication. Your review describes an unsophisticated artifact (again: see Tarantula).
Preemptive aside: if anyone can express excitement about a text based on a review and two excerpts, someone can therefore express the opposite.
PART 4
In which a woman who had not yet written poems was graciously invited to read her poetry…
CHEAPDOM of SPEECH
The wondrously-mediocre Ron Silliman, the premier link-aggregator of our time, has closed his comment threads after some kerfuffle or other, apparently, and I’m sure some sad cunts who relied on those threads as some sort of community will be even sadder, now. Well, my doubly-saddened cunts, face it: more and more comment threads like Ron’s will be closing, so steel yourselves, for Americanos (I use the term to encompass the McDonalds-Anglophone Sphere) like to make lots of noise about “Freedom of Speech“, but the fact is, they only really like the concept when it isn’t necessary and everyone is agreeing to agree or disagree in terms that everyone can agree on.
Americanos do not like Dissent. It’s offensive. It’s a Loser Thing and very gross, too. Obliterating human bodies with Apache gunships is something Americanos are willing to withhold judgment on until the correctness of such activity is verified in open debate after all the targets are dead… but calling people names and all that will not be tolerated. Especially if the Loser-Dissent-Troll also has a point to make and the point goes against local populist opinion and he/she/it makes the point too well to be definitively refuted. Even if the LDT doesn’t actually call anyone names. LDT’s ass will be deleted or stuck in retroactive moderation or the comment thread will be shut down. Because we don’t want people reading those words: we want them reading other words. Words that we can agree with which are therefore helpful. Totalitarian Decorum rules.
This is what Ron (a feller I’d never heard of until about three years ago and, even after hearing of him, it took me quite some effort to track down examples of his shitty poetry) has to say about his bold participation in the current trend of snuffing the comment function:
One thing should be clear: many of the new entrants to the scene have no interest in old conflicts or in the idea of conflict in poetry under any terms. One might see this as an ordinary enough result of the gender rebalancing of the scene over the past five decades. But it’s also part of a deeper critique of society that no longer valorizes the self-destructive credo of the poet-as-addict. Or envisions the poet as warrior in a world in which real warriors leave so much devastation in their wake. It’s a different world. Dysfunctional male behavior is not glorious. It is in fact pathetic.
To which some people seem completely oblivious. I have tried policing my comments stream over the past couple of years, and – as I noted the other day on Jessica Smith’s blog – I routinely reject a half dozen comments every day that are sexist, homophobic or anti-Semitic. Moderating the comments stream at times makes me want to take a shower. Worse yet, one of the consequences of my rejecting the more overtly vile submissions would appear to be that I have inured myself to the merely despicable level of chatter that can go on.
I don’t mind debate, even vigorous debate, over fundamental issues. But it does seem clear to me that some people make a point of verbally attacking writers I praise on this blog simply because I’ve praised them. Reading that responses to a positive review on my blog seriously discouraged Jessica Smith about poetry & writing is as depressing a consequence as I can imagine. I want to apologize to her for not doing a better job policing the comments stream, and I want to apologize to Joseph Massey more recently for the same. And to Barbara Jane Reyes and any other poets who feel they may have been unfairly treated in the comments stream.
I have of course read some comments that suggest that poets who feel bruised by such behavior need not to be so fragile. But I think everyone has every right to feel exactly what they feel, and that participating in poetry doesn’t have to mean submitting oneself to hazing by yahoos.
It’s a touchingly-nunnish statement, isn’t it? As if any activity in any realm of genuine Art isn’t the constant, ever-changing result of psychosocial tumult and struggle: the rage of ideas to exist. But that’s just it: what would Ron, or any of his primly-bearded (m or f) equivalents, know of all that? Ron hasn’t exactly been spending the years which led to this moment battling it out with a spiritual sense of his own inadequacy in light of what he knows, deep down, he should, one day, be capable of: no. That’s not what guys like Ron do. Guys like Ron build their baseball fields and They come. Or they tend their gardens and the Tomatoes grow. They want peace and quiet, damn you. STFU, Tumult-of-Creation. This means you.
At Salon.com, a child-of-privilege (appearing in the video above) published an excerpt from a crappy “memoir” that was immediately torn-to-shreds in the comment thread. There were political overtones to the exercise (above and below the line), but, on the whole, the righteous bullyseyes in the thread had to do with the young lady’s blithe lack of talent as a writer (nice tits, though). As a result, Roxane Gay (mentioned in posts above this) wrote a nunnishly-chiding, faux-hand-wringing essay titled THE INTERNET IS FOR ANGER. Commenting on her own essay (in response to a comment by the shitty writer she was defending), Roxane wrote:
I do think we’re heading toward a turning of the tide because, to my mind, the vitriol here there and everywhere is becoming uncontrolled and incoherent. There will be a point when people say enough is enough. Anger with ambition is one thing but mindless anger, without purpose, is only tolerable for so long. That is my hope. And you bring up something that’s important about writers and courage because with the Internet, I do think, increasingly that you not only need talent to publish but courage because not only will you be criticized when you dare to put your work out there, you will often be eviscerated and that last thing that those critics will be talking about is your writing. It’s a shame.
The notion that Rachel Shukert has “talent”, of course (Talent and Beauty are civil rights in Murrka, as we know) is a given. But check out the rest of it. A “turning of the tide”, eh? My, that’s portentous language. Why, if this keeps going on, and mediocrities can’t be protected from the instantaneous horrors of frank criticism….
God knows criticism can be a derailing thing if you’re not feeling 100% but what idiot puts things up on a web-site with a comment section and thinks that only torrents of praise will come forth?
And what idiot can’t separate the “bollocks LOL” brigade with those who are a bit more thoughtful in their response?
I suspect the self-defence mechanism lumps the 2 together in order to carry on the notion that the work is good and it’s the public who aren’t.
The work may be good but in the example you refer to it most definitely isn’t.
“The Pregnant Widow is a stunning book…” to the extent that its leaden pages (so difficult to lift) induce a torpor previously unknown to readers of Martin Amis. Martin tries and fails to raise the stakes by exaggerating irrelevant measurements (he could *double* the diameters of the boobs and arses, while further slashing the height of the novel’s Amisian, slapstick dwarf, without changing much) and tossing a sentence of pretentiously-melodramatic foreshadowing in the breach between *every* sub-section or movement . He souses the concoction with pedantry (all those etymologies plus the absurdly-learned, too-knowing dialogue from 20-somethings!). And the rhythm is just off. It plods, man. Momentum nil.
Amis even fails, miserably, in The Pregnant Widow, at the postmodern-novelist’s secret little sweepstakes: trying to equal Nabokov’s too-famous parenthetical ( “(picnic, lightning)” ). Martin’s entry in this game is there in the last paragraph on page 208: “(fast convertible, summer rain)”. Christ, Mart: no.
But the greatest failure of The Pregnant Widow is the book’s premise, a dud diagnosis of The Sexual Revolution as a case of “girls behaving like boys.” Which is way off. A bunch of Hippie Chicks giving in to their Alpha Males’ fantasies of swapping, and polygamy, and the chicks getting it on with each other, does not a reversal in Gender Roles make… and it wasn’t even new in the 1960’s. Just ask Joseph Smith. Or Bloomsbury.
What was “revolutionary” about the Sexual Revolution was the fact that, for the first time in history, entire postcodes of the hoi polloi were enjoying Sex at the kink-level, and mobility, and variety, and relative lack of responsibility… of the Aristocratic Classes. Martin, neither blueblood nor working-class (and super-involved with himself, at the time) simply failed to take note of the distinction. The book fairly reeks of this ongoing obliviousness.
.
2.
Re: Slavoj Žižek on the Hypocrisy of Conscious Consumerism
In the end, Žižek hopes to rectify with theory, and inspirational rhetoric, a problem that can only even be touched with pharmacological force: neither “Capitalism” nor “Communism” or any twist or blend of the two will “work” until the Sociopaths are removed from the Top. Physically removing them (eg, via the natural function of biological death… upon which we will be able to rely for how much longer?) only creates a void to be filled with similar shapes; what’s needed is anti-Sociopath therapy. A hi-tech variation on the venerable Hippie dream of dosing World Leaders with LSD.
-
They did it to Zizek, too. Damn.
[ed's note: Animated him? Or dosed him with LSD?]
via Comrade Barry:
“Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto’s “1945-1998″ is an animated map showing the 2,053 nuclear explosions that took place around the world during the 20th century, from the detonations at Alamogordo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998.
“The month and year are displayed in top right corner, and the number of nuclear explosions for each country appear next to the flags in the margins. The total is displayed in the bottom right corner.
“The numbers reveal that, on average, 1 nuclear explosion occurred every 9.6 days during the 54-year period, with the greatest activity in 1958 and 1962.”
why keep testing them? one would hope that the scientists dealing with these unstable materials at the least know how to make something detonate. Or is it a happy accident/ a learning curve when it goes off? With the scientists wiping their brows in relief ” I don’t know what we did but it worked”.
You mean it’s got nothing to do with science and everything to do with school bully tactics? ah I see now.
We probably need some comic relief, at this point, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… how’s this, for starters?
Kids [...] come up afterwards and say, “It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.” And I think, “Fuck you, you little tosser!”
— David Bowie, on performing “The Man Who Sold The World”
(more later during a break)
Bowie wanted to collaborate with the Chapman Brothers who told him to go away in a similar fashion.
As opportunities dry up we shall see whether they can stay true to their word.
They are a pair of irritating twats but I did like the big exhibition they put on in Liverpool 2 or 3 year’s ago.
EVEN THE AZTECS SAY SO
DROPPING SCREED PT 2,5, 7, 9 & 11
divers and shapely notions
1.
I wish writers would spend less time on marketing and more time on developing. If the eccentric kid down the road tells everyone he’s going to build a flying car and invites everyone over to see a heap of components (frizzy with wires) and a pile of steel spars and rods and tools scattered all around the garage, and the kid tinkers intermittently between bouts of walking up and down the streets of the neighborhood with a megaphone… isn’t that rather less wonderful than the kid who keeps to her/his self until one day… when she/he maybe isn’t even so much of a kid anymore… unveiling a fully-assembled, fully-functional, flying car?
Something about the American ethos seems to argue against the latter model. Walking the streets of the neighborhood, it’s hard not to notice (and be a little disappointed by the observation) that every single garage has a pile of “flying car parts” cluttering up the driveway.
2.
All this talk of “mean-spiritedness” is off, I think. Everyone sort of agreeing, or agreeing to disagree, in Sunday-school tones, may seem like the heavenly gentility our parents (or grandparents) used to watch Masterpiece Theater for… but the truth is, it’s deadly-dull, in the long run, and saps the Literary World of vitality. You don’t forge steel in a lukewarm bath or create fire by caressing a twig.
Think of the old concept of Heat Death: a deathly-becalmed universe, entropy-free. Is that our idea of Heaven? We need those blazing heats and numbing colds and metaphorical loppings-off (and posthumous re-graftings) of old gray heads. Real Writers have always known this and are forever arranging loud feuds and sudden coups and stylistic assassinations to keep the heart pumping and the nipples hard. Or think of it, less bloodily, as cultural aerobics.
It’s the insincere market-logic of late-phase-capitalism (in which nothing is not professionalized and euphemistically exploited to a max) that cautions us to speak, always, like Politicians, Undertakers or Sunday School teachers lest we “offend” someone and ruin a sale. But I go to Literature for a Truth that can’t otherwise be experienced… I expect the Art and its Artists to be charged with that edgy, honest aura. I expect Zero Controversy and Meaningless Smiles and Soft Music at Starbucks but when that pablum-ethos has supersaturated “Literature”… it’s over.
3.
Didion is textually hermaphroditic: big oak dick plus capacious, nut-cracking vadge. Ditto Calvino, O’Connor, Bowles, Vonnegut, Brodkey, Beckett. Philip Roth was a tough young textual Lesbian who faltered when he became a soft old textual Queen. Burroughs was a leathery textual Queen with a jewel-encrusted dagger. Hemingway was a textual adolescent with a bb gun and an un-descended nut. Franzen is a tender young castrato.
4.
Much chatter about what the writer does and doesn’t owe the reader… which reader? The dumbest reader? The smartest reader? The smart reader who doesn’t have much time to read? The smart reader who’s been reading for 40 years and is bored with the standard approach, sees every “twist” telegraphed a mile off and looks right through the narrative to see the stultifying normative presets informing the text? Or the smart reader who’s been reading seriously for only a few years and hasn’t shaken off the imprint of the educational institution that guided her/his early choices?
5.
To exploit the enormous potential of the relocation of the Omphalos of Lit into the Virt, it’s necessary to do do a few basic re-thinks, instead of lazily expecting Virt to mimic Paper Print and its structures and classic maneuvers.
One of the big steps forward… ripe for the maximizing… is the Comment Thread, which shouldn’t be treated like the good old Letters to the Editor (without a door policy). I think the Original Poster should be prepared to spend as much time in the Comment Thread as she/he did formulating the Original Post. It is now a part of the “job”.
The old dynamic of “publishing”, and then sort of standing back, is obsolete. This applies to book reviews as well as the books themselves: the writer of a novel, by stepping into a Comment Thread, is not necessarily required to dilute the book by over-explaining it or proffering too much extra-literary bio…but he/she can answer questions and talk shop and otherwise perform the equivalent of the Q and A on a book tour.
Also quite pertinent is the fact that since the “pay” scale for a professional writer is now, basically, in most cases, nominal at best, the line between “amateur” and “professional” is generally a matter of semantics (or, ie, lunch money).
A lot of the apparently free-floating animus to be found in Comment Threads can, in fact, be traced to a perception of retrograde arrogance in an Orig Poster who is relying a little too heavily on the obsolete model of Posting and Standing Back… or interacting on a very limited scale… with a reticence which borders on seeming like leper-fear.
One of the profoundest real-world-applicable lessons of the Internet is that there are always people who are smarter than you are out there, and they will probably show up, drawn by Google hits, to a discussion featuring their area of expertise. Arrogance is futile. As a veteran of the Guardian Blogs (c. 2007), I can say that a sizable chunk of the more animus-animated threads were fueled by the disparity between under-informed or under-invested above-the-liners and some very sharp thread-participants (many of whom also happened to be professionals).
The New Model means the Author has to work much harder (in lieu of Editors and PR people, at the very least); it’s not really a matter of choice. The Comment Thread is a learning-curve for all involved and it should not be underestimated. I, for one, put more care into many of my comments than what goes into many of the OPs I comment on and I’ve noticed that this is increasingly the case with others: the OP is not so much the pearl deserving passive admiration but the seed around which the real pearl can form.
Eg: Silliman’s recent shutting down of his Comment Threads wasn’t the big story: the big story was the fact that the archived threads (as far as I know) were deleted. I wasn’t a commenter there, but I can see how faithful, careful and energetic commenters feel a little miffed by the arrogance of that old school model. The hierarchy it implies is artificial.
Literature is now, for the first time, on a broader scale, a conversation.
It’s the same relationship as street theatre and indoor theatre. You don’t work outside and expect the public to kow-tow to you. You have to work at it. Not that you also don’t have to work at indoor theatre but the tradition is that the public there ( because they have paid and it’s taking place in a recognised venue that puts on theatre ) are going to give you a bit more leeway.
The reason I work outside is that I like the feedback be it informed, the “I’ve never seen anything like that before” kind or pig-thick abusive. It keeps you on your toes. Of course 15 year old boys are always going to call you a tosser no matter what but sometimes they have a point.
I find the same with blog comments. You have to think on your feet. I can’t imagine why artists don’t want to put some time into gauging a reaction to their work. I’m not sure it’s helpful when something is new and you’re not sure of it yourself but if you are doing work to be seen, heard or read then it seems a useful place to discover what people think.
I was always told if you believe one review then you have to believe them all as all they are is someone’s opinion.
But theatre is a possibly a biit more robust in the face of the public than a poet so perhaps that’s where the reluctance lies and the shock of discovering that not everyone is sympathetic.
“It’s the same relationship as street theatre and indoor theatre.”
Agreed, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… with one bitty quibble: doing street theatre you’re going to get a largely incidental crowd that’s a random cross-section of the populace, whereas in a blog discussion about book(s), you’ve got a self-selecting audience that will also feature, occasionally, a chunk of geniuses and/or aficionados. Maybe a closer analog for a Lit Blog and its comment thread is One Stall at a Gun Convention…?
Quibble correctly identified.
Poem of the Week over at GU largely resembles a firing range rather than a Gun Stall with the poem being one of those plastic yellow ducks seeing if it can make a successful passage without getting bits shot off.
Whereas the political ones remind me of WW1 trenches where you go over the top only to be mowed down by the moderator’s random and irrational blasts of gunfire whereupon the next wave goes over the top. And so on and so forth.
Would make an excellently Bosch-like triptych, ET…. I’ll pay for the oils and canvases…
Or a Celine-esque blast of narrative bile. I’d pay for the absinthe ( was it ? ) and the Remington typewriter.
Whaddya think I’ve been doing all these years on all those comment threads…? (Almost out of Absinthe)
So it WAS absinthe
[ed.'s note: Absinthe and Amphetamines]
le petit meme noir
August 9th, 2010 / 2:42 pm Steven Augustine—
My ex-girlfriend slept with Weir on tour (before she was my ex) and it took me a few years to be able to bear the playing of a GD tune because of that. She was a very pretty, skinny, 19-year-old six-footer of the slightly-upper-middle class and would go on the caravan/pilgrimages with dusty buds and wear Moroccan-style outfits and name her cats preposterous things like “Dark Star” (her other ex went on to play bass for Morphine). Then one night I was sick and fevered and had a radio on in the dark at a low volume and some hippie DJ on the college station played several hours straight of TGD and it sounded amazing. The last thing I remember hearing that night was a bootleg of Uncle John’s Band and it blew my mind. I haven’t listened to TGD since that night so as not to ruin that experience.
reply
August 9th, 2010 / 3:02 pm Pemulis—
Steven Augustine, how old are you, exactly? You appear to slip through time, like Little Big Man or Baron Munchausen, having many strange adventures…
reply
August 9th, 2010 / 3:04 pm Steven Augustine—
51, dude! Lived in many states and countries. Composer by trade. Been around.
reply
August 9th, 2010 / 3:11 pm Pemulis—
Nice. I have become a fan…. I expect a memoir someday.
reply
August 9th, 2010 / 3:22 pm Steven Augustine—
“I expect a memoir someday…”
It’s already all over virtual space, Pem…
[ed.'s note: that's her with a painting which featured her likeness in its lower-right-hand corner]
STUPIDEST SUPER-GENIUSES OF THE EMPIRE: #1
“The renowned astrophysicist [Professor Stephen Hawking] said he fears mankind is in great danger and its future ‘must be in space’ if it is to survive.”
vs
“Katherine Freese, a University of Michigan astrophysicist, told Big Think that ‘the nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away.
“That means that, if you were travelling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there’ – or about 50,000 years using current rocket science.”
Word… I always think it’s stupid when people talk about “colonizing Mars” and shit. That’s never going to happen. Mars is too far away and space travel is too hard. Everything is too far away and too hard. We’re never going to get off this planet. We’re going to die here. It’s the same way with the “transhumanists” and “immortalists” and other people who are waiting for the “technological singularity.” They’re trying to find an escape, but there isn’t one. They’ve read too much science fiction and become delusional.
[ed.'s note: That's a horrifyingly-rational worldview you're burdened with, Comrade Marshall... I'm not even going to ask what you think of Easter Bunny Theory, or Female Ejaculation...]
(M)AR(KE)T and DESIGN
1.
This is not a film critique. This is a critique of what and how we choose to critique or how we choose who chooses.
Google “film socialisme analysis” (but not with quotation marks) and Google returns 14,600 results (the vast majority of which, of course, have nothing to do with the film). Google “Inception analysis”: 12, 400,000 hits. Which is not, yet, an indictment of anything… it’s just me restating the obvious, obviously. [Narrow the comparison by Googling "Inception analysis", with quotation marks: 25,000 hits. "Film Socialisme analysis", with quotation marks: 0]
In order to sharpen my point, I need to mention the fact that the first result of the “Inception” Google search is a blog discussion (non-journo, non-film professional) about the Nolan blockbuster. There are a lot of blog discussions about Inception going on now (just as there were about Nolan’s The Dark Knight) and they aren’t limited to hyperbolic declaratives between overweight, unfucked adolescent fanboys on forums moderated by same. There are a lot of smart bloggers devoting lots of analytical thought and writing to the apparent riddles that this Hollywood-event presents and there are lots and lots of robust discussions centered around these interpretive work-outs.
Good luck finding a non-journo, non-film-professional blog analysis of Godard’s Film Socialisme (with a robust comment thread discussion, on top of that). Nolan deserves the obsessive, code-breaking attention of intellectual bloggers… but Godard doesn’t? A lot of intellectual bloggers are arguing against Inception, yes… but it’s still Inception they’re arguing about. And Avatar before it. And The Dark Knight before that. Etc.
Side question: could Nolan have made Inception for the budget Godard did Film Socialisme on (hard to find figures on that but we know it’s something like 200,000 bucks)? How expensive are actual ideas? Are we only interested in cinematic ideas when they take the form of the slickest eye-candy?
How easily-manipulated are even the smartest among us?
2.
Is this (or rather will it be) Art?
do you think there are still a set of solid principles by which to judge all art?
As far as I can see cultural relativism still has credibility among some.
I was reading a blog about Stallone’s latest attempt to revive his career The Expendables which said it wasn’t well-made, the plot ran out of puff a third of the way in but with the right audience it is a classic of the genre.
To which one might reply ” Which genre is this? The substandard-example-of-a-genre-genre??”
I’m not sure what to think. Comparing Krazy Kat to Shakespeare or Goya seems to completely miss the point but the “classic of its genre” approach also misses the target by a mile.
“do you think there are still a set of solid principles by which to judge all art?”
Not to judge all Art, per se, but to separate Art from Laundry Detergent: sure!
My primary beef here is with Gigantism as an Aesthetic, Comrade ET, and I’d compare a skyscraper to a Blockbuster, or, set up a proportion in which a skyscraper is to a Giacometti what a Blockbuster is to a Godard (whether or not it’s a particular Godard we care for). The “beauty” of a skyscraper is a thin surface dressing two workaday functions (people-containing/ money-making); in some lights it might even be considered a mask or diversion from the crudity and/or brutal banality of its Essence. Well, ditto, say: the perfectly-named-for-the-sake-of-this-argument “Titanic”. The function of “Titanic” was not to generate an Aesthetic experience within its audience; its function was to manipulate emotions so well that it made lots of money. Now, admittedly, Godard wanted to make lots of money, too… that’s what he set out to do with quite a few of his films. But he failed precisely because his Artistic Impulses overwhelmed his Mercenary Instincts.
If Trump Towers is/are “Art”, so are a fancy pair of trainers. It’s becoming a fuzzy distinction because so much Big Ticket Art, now, really is Design (with a collectibly-snarky spin on it)… but that’s more to do with the clever venality of Gallerists and their so-called Artists than anything to do with a paradigmatic shift in the definition of Art. In my opinion, of course. Which tends towards the Anti-Gigantic (three-storey clothes pins and big-assed light bulbs and gargantuan topiary puppies by erstwhile amateur pornstars aside)…
Also: Krazy Kat and Shakespeare may be separated by degrees on a continuum, but they do coexist on that continuum… unlike Shakespeare and “Debbie Duz Jessica, the Prequel”. [ed.'s note: Ultra Pedants who, eg, take exception to my reference to Shakespeare's oeuvre as "Shakespeare"... and I have seen some do so, with others, on various dusty blogs... can go fuck themselves with a giant pair of fancy trainers]
(I can go into greater detail after Offsprung’s bedtime… about Gigantism, I mean… not the fancy pair of trainers)
I understand the gigantism thesis and agree. Like you I do have giant favourites but generally tend to that Dennis Potter maxim “Why look in the middle of the road when there are more interesting, less flattened creatures to be found in the verges”.
The problem for contemporary art has been that advertising is chewing at its ankles and to escape that chewing is proving difficult.The aesthetics of some artists have appeared in adverts before their own work has registered on the general public’s field of vision. Fischli + Weiss’s lovely film “Der Lauf der Dinge ” lurked for years as a video to be passed around your artist mates. Then a car ad pinched the idea,tidied it up and re-presented it. F+W did try and sue but the case didn’t get anywhere – unbelievable as certain bits in the ad are direct lifts from their film. And of course everyone loves the smoother version so it dun’t matter reelly.
[ed.'s note: I'm trying to remember how I saw this video pre-Internet, Comrade DJ Sensei ET]
“Still, there’s no doubt talk of her dark side is accurate. When Danny Fields describes her as “Nazi-esque”, he’s not affectionately referring to her regal, demanding personality, but to her racism. “Every once in a while there’d be something about Jews and I’d be, ‘But Nico, I’m Jewish,’ and she was like ‘Yes, yes, I don’t mean you.’ She had a definite Nordic Aryan streak, [the belief] that she was physically, spiritually and creatively superior.” Worse, on one occasion, she acted those beliefs out, explosively. In the restaurant at the Chelsea Hotel sometime in the very early 1970s, Nico sat with a bunch of musicians, among them a beautiful mixed-race singer who’d worked with Jimi Hendrix. According to Fields, “Nico was, I dunno, feeling neglected, or drunk, but suddenly she said ‘I hate black people,’ and smashed a wineglass on the table and stuck it in the girl’s eye. There was lots of blood and screaming. Fortunately she just twisted it around her eye socket, so the glass never reached [the eye] but it’s not like she was being cautious.” Fields claims the Warhol crowd spirited Nico on to a plane and out of the country the next morning, while somehow managing to placate the victim and hush up the affair.”
XTREME KULTCHA
To continue our GIGANTISM discussion, CDS ET:
I read a speech somewhere long ago in which some baldly-phallic sage named Eisenhower lamented the loss, from Scientific Culture, of the basement tinkerer, working on her/his own, making little discoveries outside the gillion-dollar, industrial-military research complex. As the Schlockbuster now dominates culture-wide discussions of film, the same happens to the smelly genius wielding a 16mm camera… pushed so, so far to the margins that even her/his chums won’t pretend to be interested. His/her aesthetic discoveries lost to the Ages.
Which has political ramifications, since anything that costs a gillion dollars to make can’t be more than two or three degrees of separation removed from The Party Line (why do we suppose The Dark Knight used 9/11 imagery in its advertising? Why was Tony Stark, in the recent Iron Man, kidnapped by foolish Muslims? Why was the protag of Avatar a soldier?)… and the voice of Dissent (which need entail nothing more than Changing The Fucking Conversation) will wither away without even needing to be censored.
Which takes us back to Godard, who popularized the outsider-empowerments of lo fi, hand-held movie cameras . No conversations about his last film… no bloggers (and their faithful commenters) thought it was worth it to put even a fraction of the energy, into breaking the codes of “Film Socialisme“, that they put into unraveling the non-mysteries of “Inception” (the kinks and paradoxes of which are obviously the result of a committee trying to stitch a coherent narrative to a Spectacular-Image Barrage). It’s as though, in Lit Terms, even scholars stopped digging through “Ulysses” and turned their attention to Harry Potter. And, I guarantee you: the day is coming.
GIGANTISM is the Voice of the State. The State uses it, now, to eclipse the Voice of the Genius. This isn’t, necessarily, a conscious strategy… any more than a War on Nutrition is the premeditated result of letting a toddler do all the food shopping and prepare all his meals. He will reach for the brightly-colored sugarshit every time. His teeth will fall out and he will grow fat, hyper-active and retarded. He will never know the subtler, life-giving pleasures of homemade gumbo. He will grow up to spend time in jail and in the army. The lower classes are the canaries in the coal mine of this parable; the middle class kids will merely be toothless retards in their office cubicles.
Corollary observation: we never discussed, in depth, btw, my riff (from last year) about the sudden, mysterious popularity of “Xtreme Sports” in GIGANTIC media (as first advertised on MTV)… as a grooming tool for making retardedly-fearless kids and turning those kids… into soldiers. An adolescence of “Jackass“, “Xtreme Sports” and Video Games… that’s really all you need to be of service in the Middle East these days, eh…?
WHITE AMBITION and the BABY-FACED JUNKIE EFFECT
I just got into one with Drugsploitation Author Tony O’Neill after dropping a comment, at HTML GIANT, to the effect of being a little done with reading about the exploits of White “Junkies” who somehow manage to go to the “edge” and bring back luridly-juicy tales for less-experienced suburban brethren to relish. Tony thinks he’s some sort of scary hipster carrying around a burden of mind-bending experiences the average mortal would flinch from. Tony doesn’t know that the “fallen memoir” trope is a stale one: with chicks it’s sex/prostitution, with dudes it’s drugs (though sometimes with chicks it’s sex and drugs): the important thing being that the writer has to be White. Otherwise, where’s the “fallen” part come in, eh? Niggers, as we know, can’t fall.
I’ve read bits and pieces of Tony’s stuff before, back when he was touting his writer’s group, THE BRUTALISTS, over at the Guardian Books Blogs. A coven of weedy White Brits: THE BRUTALISTS. It’s, well, a little funny to me, but clearly not funny to them. If they could write it would, at least, be affectionate laughter. Here’s an example of BRUTALIST LIT (Lee Rourke’s):
If only you knew. If only you could understand how mundane my life is. I get up. I commute. I sit at my lousy desk all morning acting on orders like a drone; speaking with people I have nothing in common with. I feed the pigeons in my lunch hour and I smile. I go back to my desk. I sit at it all afternoon acting on more orders like a drone; speaking to more people I have nothing in common with. I commute back home.
Brutal, Lee. And I thought things were tough back in that ghetto in Chicago!
Years ago, I made the acquaintance of a daughter of privilege who was just starting out as a writer (and she actually had some talent; a glib kind of verbal facility). She had just published a little book of poetry. Her father was fucking rich. She started writing stories about her friends (using the actual names of said friends) and, to spice things up, began dabbling in heroin. Call her Lydia since she has palled around with Ms. Lunch.
While Lydia was too smart to get too wasted herself (if you can remember it, you weren’t there, as they said of the 1960s), she was wisely egging-on her fellow children-of-privilege… so she’d have something to write about. She’d run out and purchase the heroin for them. So she got that book of edgy tales published but the market wasn’t thrilled so what to do? What to do? A few years went by, and she had a Eureka moment, I guess, because the next thing I knew, it was the late 1980s/early 1990s and she had published her memoir about marrying and having children with… wait for it… a Gay Junkie figure skater… with AIDS! Bingo! Bestseller! TV appearances! I saw her on the fucking Today show.
Just as Lydia never became a heroin addict, she also somehow avoided contracting AIDS. Some White kids are smart that way.
Anyway, I left one disparaging comment about Lurid Drug Memoirs at HTML GIANT and Tony O’Neill, feeling strangely vulnerable to my critique, I suppose, ended up trading barbs with me for about eight hours (including breaks during which I played with my daughter and Tony, I suppose, did the edgy, scary things that a seasoned denizen of the streets will tend to do, without even having to think about it… like, eg, gigging with Marc Almond)….
[Bafflingly, Tony writes, "I was an intravenous heroin user for most of my teens"... but then, also, "No, I was 18 years old and I hadn’t used hard drugs at that point in my life"... erm... whatever ]
But first, two samples… one more from a BRUTALIST and then a quote from a guy who took his drugsploitation so seriously that it actually fucked him up (the trick is to change gimmicks before it’s too late, Jim):
*
*
The first time I met Susan she overdosed on a combination of Valium and Ecstasy at a friend’s birthday party at a Motel 6 on Hollywood Boulevard. My friends Sal, RP and I dragged her blue face down to the 5am Hollywood streets below, and the filthy pre-dawn drizzle on her face somehow brought her round. She blinked up at us and said:
“I need a beer. And I want to shoot some pool.”
I married her 6 months later. I had one broken marriage, one broken musical career, and a burgeoning heroin habit to contend with. I had nowhere I wanted to be, and neither did she. Without a strong pull in any other direction we decided to go down together.
I married my second wife the day the dissolution of marriage from the first disaster became final: we did it in the home of a Dominican notary public near Korea town, having shot the last of our heroin and furiously smoked the last of the crack in the car parked outside. I was 21 years old.
Before the wedding we stopped at the storefront needle exchange on Cahuenga between Hollywood and Sunset. I wore a suit that had a few bloodstains on it and Susan wore a crumpled white dress. We dressed like that because the whole thing seemed slightly perverse to start off with, so why not go all out? Inside we received a few sideways glances, but nothing more. Needle exchanges are like porno bookstores or public toilets. Nobody wants to talk or even make eye contact unless it is absolutely necessary. The exchange had a front room were you could watch TV or get access to the internet, as well as a table were you could pick up lube and condoms. I suppose they must have been for the meth freaks. In the back was a desk with a flip top container for people to dump used needles into, and a storeroom full of syringes of all shapes and sizes. We used the standard Turemo 28 gauge ½ cc insulin needles because we were new at this and our veins were not too screwed up yet. We had not yet begun to inject into our groins, neck, and the back of our knees. But there was still time.
Tony O’Neill from DOWN AND OUT ON THE MURDER MILE
*
Jim Carroll: I was at the Mabuhay Gardens, which was like the CBGB’s of San Francisco, and I was trying to hit on one of the Go-Go’s. I had this really good coke, so I’m doling out some lines in the manager’s office, and we’re doing some and then all of a sudden Nico comes in.
She sees the coke and says, “Is that cocaine?” Then she says, “Oh, you are Szhim Carroll. I read about you. You are so skinny, I am so fat.”
She was really large and she looked pretty bad. I said, “You sounded great. Here, have some coke.”
She was really thankful. She said, “Oh, this is very good coke.”
I said, “Thanks. Coming from you that’s a real compliment.” Hahaha.
Dood, I am slightly weary of white kids getting mild drug habits just so they can write about it all later. Especially when it’s a white kid’s Free Credibility Pass to send dispatches from The Hood. The calculating aspect of that plus the inherent vampirism of a kid who is able to flirt with danger just enough to make a little money (or publishing credits) from the experience… while leaving the genuine denizens of the Sexy-Scary Milieu behind… I find it just too symptomatic of the Exploit-Everything Era. I have an acquaintance who scored a bestseller from her relationship with an AIDS sufferer and she used that very modus operandi as a career path; she worked her way up from reporting on (and egging on) middle class “Nihilist” heroin users. Only difference being that she did it a staggering 20 years ago. The Squares will always eat that crap up (especially if you are a well-behaved Ex Junkie).
A good writer doesn’t need the corny prop of a fucking “real” hypodermic to be interesting. Well, fuck… if you’re going to go that route, throw in ten years of prison and at least I’ll grant you that you earned the right to exploit the fucking milieu.
*
August 11th, 2010 / 10:15 am Tony O’Neill—
It’s funny, I saw this thread because of Blakes drunken posts/ Blake, thanks for hipping me to this post with your drunken posts (which I enjoy) and thanks for linking to my reading / radio show.
This is really a reply to Steve Augustine.
Before I get too far into my reply, since I might have misconstrued what you are saying here, let me just askL
Was that comment directed at me, motherfucker?
August 11th, 2010 / 10:44 am Steven Augustine—
Oh, Tony. I like the “motherfucker”. So white.
*
August 11th, 2010 / 11:14 am Tony O’Neill—
Okay, good. So it was directed at me.
Listen Steve, lets just start this off by saying that you don’t know jack shit about a – my motivation for using drugs, or b – how many drugs I used, or whatever.
However, I do know from reading your posts that your a shitty pseudo-intellectual who posts incredibly pretentious poetry on his blog. This would normally mean that I wouldn’t even bother engaging with you on any level because you mean less than nothing to me. But I’m feeling feisty this morning, so let me indulge you.
I’m not sure what your whole race thing is. “So white” well, I am white. Never labored under any delusions that I was anything but. I do see the implied racism in your comment here:
“it’s a white kid’s Free Credibility Pass to send dispatches from The Hood.”
(i.e. only those scary black people live in ghettos)
or “I like “motherfucker”. How white”
(i.e. only those scary black people use words like “motherfucker”)
I’d also find this remark pretty offensive, if it was directed at me;
“I am slightly weary of white kids getting mild drug habits just so they can write about it all later.”
1 -
Again, you seem to be under the illusion that a drug habit is some kind of birthright for blacks, latinos, asians (did you imply asians with that comment? I took it to mean that only white drug users are “faking” and everybody else is authentic. i only ever met one Chinese junkie though, i was married to her for a bit, but she was only half Chinese, does she count???)
You also seem to think that all “whites” are whites of your kind – i.e. comfortable, college professor types, who sit around jerking it over images of edith sitwell and puffing on a pipe all day. Well, some of us weren’t born into money, and some of us feel perfectly comfortable around those “scary” black, latinos and whoever else’s, because we grew up with them. Hate to ruin you illusions Steve, but my first exposure to black culture was not listening to an NWA album during my first week of college.
2 – my drug habit was not mild, it was severe. Don’t talk shit when you obviously dont have a clue about what it is you’re talking about.
3 – i did not get a drug habit so I would have something to write about. I doubt that has ever happened to be honest, and if it has, I doubt it worked out for the person dumb enough to try it. I used – and continue to use drugs – because I enjoy them greatly. I didn’t get a heroin habit to chalk up any “life experience” or what ever else you believe. I’d had plenty of real life experience before I put a needle in my arm. Drugs, chaos, fucked marriages, homelessness, all of that came first, writing came much, much later. If I had spent my formative years jerking off to kiddie porn and then posting snarky comments on lit blogs like a lily-livered bitch then maybe I would have written about that. But that was not my experience.
4 – Unlike, say, BSG’s piece which was also posted here, my work is not about simply talking about how may drugs I’ve done. Everybody has done drugs. I’d be more shocked to meet someone at a party who told me they’d never done drugs. Drugs are passe now,in case you didn’t know, they are part of mainstream culture. However, since I was an intravenous heroin user for most of my teens and well into my late 20s I think it would be almost impossible for me to ignore those experiences and not have them inform my fiction.
August 11th, 2010 / 11:20 am Steven Augustine—
Tony: you were a user of drugs such as Crack and Heroin, yeah? Aren’t these drugs illegal still? Why aren’t you doing 150 years in prison? Why weren’t you deported?
Because you aren’t Black?
(As a Black man I’m curious)
*
*
*
August 11th, 2010 / 11:47 am Tony O’Neill—
Well Steve, since youre interested, I’ll answer you questions. (However, if you’d like the whole story there are these great places called bookstores, I believe they even have them in Berlin, were you could learn this information and be entertained at the same time by buying either “Digging the Vein” or “Down and Out on Murder mile” both of which cover these parts of my life in detail)
“Tony, hey, had you recovered from your “serious drug problem” by the time you gigged with “Kenickie (1997–98),”
No, I was 18 years old and I hadn’t used hard drugs at that point in my life.
Marc Almond (1997–98),
ditto
The Brian Jonestown Massacre (2000)
Yes, I was heavily strung out on heroin at the time, resulting in my ejection from the band
and Kelli Ali (2001–04)
Yes, although i was on a methadone program at the time and slightly more stable, but I was still using heroin, crack, and other drugs.
“laugh”
I guess maybe there is something funny about the idea of someone making their living playing music, I’m just not sure what it is. We don’t all have rich parents sending us money while we swan off to pretend to be artists, you know.
*
August 11th, 2010 / 12:34 pm Steven Augustine—
“We don’t all have rich parents sending us money while we swan off to pretend to be artists, you know.”
Good one, Tony! But…
Grew up in Chicago (near Indiana: bonafide ghetto: rats, roaches, guns). Mother refused Welfare as *demeaning* and I owned my first bike at 25! But I was always an avid reader. Books were a huge part of family life. I had a library of 500 books in my little ghetto bedroom. Father was affiliated with the Black Panthers. Went to many Black Nationalist Jazz concerts. Met Cassius Clay in my father’s South Side office etc.
Moved to Philly when I was 16 to help with a family business (Funeral Home). Able to attend a prep school based on grades and tests (always top 1% in the country). Saw c. 1,500 dead bodies during my High School years and so forth.
I went to college on scholarships based on spectacular SATs etc. Fled the U.S. with money I earned painting houses. Moved around Europe while writing and earning money in recording studios, or painting houses and even once selling an option on a script. Always wanted to write but never wanted to write bullshit that pandered to expectations. Worked hard on developing a style. Sometime in the 90s, a techno miracle happened, and I found that I could find an audience without pandering to expectations. Bliss. I prostitute my musical talent to afford the freedom to write. Roughly 700 pages of hard-won material online.
Most of the material is a subtle, vaguely-surrealist satire of White Privilege.
I now earn my money as a composer in Berlin. Never saw a nickle from either of my parents, who were dirt-poor Black Bohemian (well, father, a jazz DJ and painter, was more Bohemian than my mother) Intellectuals. My idea of Fighting Racism and Making Art is to Defy the bullshit stereotypes and Never Sell Out.
By the early 1990s, the effect of these harsher laws on African Americans was evident. In a survey of 1992 sentencing data, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that 92.6 percent of offenders sentenced for crack offenses were black, whereas 4.7 percent were white. With regard to cocaine offenses in general, 78 percent of offenders were black, and 6 percent were white.
Ha, I just caught this comment Steve, good one. You made me smile.
“I want to borrow some of your authentic Marc-Almond-Crew drug terminology street cred! “Dope fiend” is really rad. ”
Heh, it was almost 15 years ago, Steve, get over it.
(Although when your past a half a century i suppose 15 years doesn’t seem so long. Must be a blink of an eye to a cantankerous old bastard like yourself… )
*
August 11th, 2010 / 6:19 pm Steven Augustine—
Cantankerous indeed, man. But very lucky… in love and lust with the beautiful mother of my four-year-old daughter and earning money doing something I don’t hate; never have to kiss some boss’s ass or do anything that my daughter doesn’t tell me to do! It was a rainy day today, the Offsprung didn’t want to go out and I made an enormous Lego-race-track in the living room (for ping pong balls) between bouts of snarking-off with you. My Beloved was gigging (she’s a musician, and just got home, and we put Offsprung to bed) and pretty soon I’ll commence to putting in my three hours of writing.
It’s a *little* goofy that you’re clinging to the Age riff late in the game (it’s not an accomplishment to be younger than I am now, Tony; I’ve done it, myself, effortlessly, for most of my life)… what you should one day be smug about is adding some years to *your* arc and working it all out and *still* being out there doing interesting (to some people) shit. At some point you will no longer be able to trade on youth or lurid bullshit alone. That’s when you take The Test. It’s a “motherfucker”, Tony. Sure, I’m a smug cunt. You’ll understand later.
Good luck, man! I just wanted to air an opinion on all this paint-by-numbers drug-memoir bullshit and you helped me do it.
Your fans in this thread aren’t exactly thrilled (sneer, grumble) but if I helped *one* impressionable little white kid out there to re-think sticking his/her foot in a bear trap (just for the sake of writing for years and years, and unoriginally, about the self-inflicted wound), my work here is done!
See ya…
Uncle Fucking Steve
Here’s our baby-faced junkie, the Justin Bieber of Junk, looking slightly healthier than Charlie Parker
Finally, I leave you with one of Tony’s pomes (which was center-formatted in the original); Tony says there’s pretentious poetry on my site. Tony is pure in his conviction: always go for that 1950′s-junkie-style cliche:
listening to Chet Baker sing ‘almost blue’
(there’s a girl here and she’s almost you…)
sadness, I let it go
up, up into the terrible, vast,
Californian sky
the scarred undersides of one hundred spoons
cottons double boiled
could not get the taste of you
from out of my mouth
outside of my window the street kids line up
for watery soup and day old bread
inside the air is thick with impending death
now, years later
when I listen to Chet’s fractured,
near-death voice, I am transported
across the country,
across the years
to room 119
where it is always stifling
mid morning murder
money is always scarce
and my life is still pregnant
with terrifying
glorious possibilities
Well slapped Steven but this is surely shooting fish in a barrel ( to use that blog-fave ).
It’s more of that Keepin’ it Real Krapp isn’t it? Certain subjects by default being more real than others. If the Brutalists could write as vividly about suburbia and the dreariness of office life as BS Johnson managed ( you may of course disagree with me here ) then I would applaud but their stuff just seems like a generic experience filtered through a dozen other’s eyes ( usually the lyrics of UK 70′s punk ).
“Well slapped Steven but this is surely shooting fish in a barrel ( to use that blog-fave ).”
1. Are you saying shooting fish in barrel isn’t fun, Comrade ET?
2. Ageed re: good old BSJ. If only Tony and Co wrote original shytt… at least it would be original
>Dept. of Sinister Headlines<
“How Parents Can Get Infants to Sleep, Once and For All”
>Dept. of United States of Iran<
• “In Wisconsin, Anthony Stancl, 18, received 15 years in prison in February after prosecutors said he posed as a girl on Facebook to trick male high school classmates into sending him nude cell phone photos, which he then used to extort them for sex.”
THE NOBLE RE-RUN
Puppet in a Tunnel
How many kids will you kill today?
You’re just a puppet in a tunnel with a part to play
Do you really want to fuck a virgin anyway?
Tell me how many dreams will you kill today?
How many jokes did you fail to get?
You’re just a puppet in a tunnel with a killing kit
Do you really think your hero’s gonna give a shit?
Tell me how many jokes did you fail to get?
Brother love is not a world away
Forget the bombs in your baggage
Sister, pleasure in a veil’s okay
Forget the bombs in your baggage
Yes we agree that America
Is a bully who believes it is a victim of
Misunderstandings on a planet we are fucking up
Yes we agree that’s America
Brother blood is not the antidote
Don’t use the bombs in your baggage
Sister, slaughter doesn’t augur hope
Defuse the bombs in your baggage
How many kids will you kill today?
You’re just a cracker in Iraq and there is hell to pay
Do you really want to rape a virgin anyway?
Tell me how many dreams will you kill today?
Brother blood is not an antidote
Don’t drop a bomb on the village
Sister, slaughter doesn’t augur hope
Don’t drop a bomb on the village
Puppet in a Tunnel
►
Incidentally have you seen “Dig” about the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols? It’s both hilarious and deeply depressing in so many ways.
Meant to pira… I mean, see that. Haven’t got around to it. I always liked the Dandy’s a little (esp. when the keyboard player was… you know)… but I’m not as into TBJTM (despite an unintentionally-hilarious blogpost I once accidentally read that expressed outrage at the inherent callousness of naming a band that way). But I keep hearing about Dig and will have to… uh… go purchase a legal copy.
Good Luck, Bruno
From the Comrade DJ Sensei who knew and filmed the late great Bruno S:
More Bruno S from Comrade DJ Sensi JR:
Bruno Schleinstein (“Bruno S.” or “Stroszek” for the general Herzogian public) died on Tuesday in Berlin. Berlin just got a whole lot duller… Bruno lived a Berlin that no longer existed, with a “vengence” as if WWII had occured just last week.
If anyone had just cause for revenge against a brutal/stupid world, it certainly was Bruno, who had been abused by everyone above him since day one. Bruno did not take it sitting down: again and again he escaped the institutions and cliches that the people wanted to force him into. All his talents were self-developed, he had an amazing knowledge of classical music and poetry… yes, surprise, the village idiot read enormous amounts of material, much of it delved from flea markets/Trödelläden he liked to explore.
Strangely, Bruno was more famous in the USA than Germany: it took a piece by NYTimes writer Michael Kimmelmann last year for the German press to realize who they had living in their midst. Suddenly there was a flurry of interest over Bruno, with the Berlinale film festival even organizing a “reconciliation” between Werner Herzog and Bruno at a local pub where Bruno played accordian on Saturdays. Bruno even received and accepted a small role in a real Bulgarian Film Production which was shot last October.
Now he’s dead and gone, and everyone who had looked at this twizzled old guy making music in their courtyard with cheer, pity or annoyance now weepily ask when the funeral will be. But even in the end Bruno deals us an inside joke: his legally binding last-wish was not to be buried, but to have his body donated to the Charité hospital for scientific purposes, like the final scene in KASPAR HAUSER.
It’s been an unbelievably depressing week on a personal level ( when saying goodbye to my mother who is dying of a particularly aggressive cancer really/ probably did mean goodbye rather than goodbye see you next time and, despite our differences over the years, I had no way of dealing with that ), on a touring level ( a terrible incompetently organised 2 day gig this weekend which hung us out to dry ) so the death of Bruno S just seems par for the course really. I watched Stroszek again recently ( having first seen it when it came out ) and had forgotten how “un-Herzogian” it actually is.
That’s awful, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… awful. Weird weather adding to it all, too, I think… the air feels like a sack of something unwanted. But that mother situation happening to you is deeper than anything I’ve stepped in recently… reminds one of The Thing one uses all this Creative Energy to mask/avoid/palliate/disguise and/or swing against with noble/naive futility…
“Der Tod ist ein Irrtum” – Heiner Müller
[ed's note: "Death is an error"]
Heiner Müller again, Sorry that this has to stay German (when it comes to talking about death, finally German is an excellent language):
“Manchmal zwischen Nacht und Morgen / Seh ich Hunde dich umkreisen / Hunde auf den Hinterbeinen / Hunde mit gebleckten Zähnen / Und du greifst nach ihren Pfoten / Und du lachst in ihre Zähne / Und ich wache auf mit Angstschweiß / Und ich weiß daß ich die liebe.”
(quick rough translation for 99% of our Comrades, who can’t read German, Comrade P!)
Sometimes between night and morning
I see dogs surrounding you
dogs on their back-legs
dogs with bared teeth
and you grab at their paws
and you laugh in their teeth
and I wake in fear-sweat
and I know that I love them
(the last line seems pretty loaded because it’s a disrespectfully-informal form of address, I think)
UPDATE:
Comrade Herr Pochling has just notified us that the last line of the poem he quotes contains a typo (“die” for “dich”); so the new translation now ends with the line “and I know that I love you” instead
If I had a remotely religious bone in my body I suppose it’s in events like these when it would come into play. But I don’t,won’t,can’t so shan’t.
DIVERS OBSERVATIONS IN CYBERNIA
1. IMAGINE THAT: THEY LEFT OUT ALL THE TACTICAL COCK-SUCKING…!
“For the aspiring literateur in small-town, or even mid-sized-city America, Stein’s ascent – from the elite Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC, where he edited the school’s literary magazine, to Yale, where he was taught by one of America’s pre-eminent poets, John Hollander, and by the legendary Harold Bloom, and then on to New York and FSG – might look like another triumph of the system, scripted by all the subtle forces of social privilege and proximity. But if Stein is a classic example of a certain kind of American success story, in which intellectual achievement has overtaken earlier generations of economic triumph, his path also owes more to chance and perseverance than one might think.”
Rest assured that whatever a puff-piece like this takes the trouble to inform us is not a pipe is, in fact, exactly that. Pay no attention to that blowjob behind the curtain. A triumph of the system, indeed. Christ, if only Litblogglandia weren’t a fractious mess of the largely-talentless with day-glo delusions of the self… we could rise up and take a meritocratic whack at these foie-gras fops. What the last sentence in the quoted passage actually means, in its frantic scramble to obscure the obvious, is anybody’s guess.
2. PRAISE CTHULHU, I’VE ACTUALLY HAPPENED UPON A WELL-WROUGHT TEXT, BY A YOUNG WRITER, IN A CURRENT ZINE
The Slow Work by Kyle Winkler
The man found he could register downtown to be unborn.
“Does it hurt?” he asked the receptionist.
“No, it’s quite painless,” she said. “Fill out this form.”
He sat in the waiting area with a few people. A child, a woman, and an elderly couple. The form was long and complicated and required his blood being drawn. The receptionist told him to go home and wait for the paperwork to process.
“Then, wait for it to begin,” she said.
§
The man waited for weeks with no response. Not a call or a letter or an email.
He was distracted by unbecoming. He couldn’t get done what he needed to do. Bills went unpaid, work was left undone.
Would it happen now? What about now? Or NOW?
Unbecoming was slow work.
He ate a ham sandwich, watched some television, and forgot about the paperwork.
Being unborn grew unimportant.
The rhythm is good; the language is a worked-over surface; it’s not yet another fey doodle about jobs, a bad break-up or a dysfunctional childhood. It doesn’t contain the words “awesome” or “mom”. In the third movement of this very short text, the writer builds an original metaphor , to handle the task of welding some necessary action to the premise, so we end up with something more than a sketchy concept and a jumble of descriptions and a lazy attempt at quirk; we take a strong image with us as we ease our way out of the story. Satisfying. I would have worked over the language-surfaces a little harder, myself, but oh well. At least it isn’t written in chat-room pidgin or Twitterese.
Out of the couple-hundred stories I’ve read, online, in the past three months, from young writers: one story that isn’t atrocious. A good one, in fact. Touching in its brevity. Fucking pop the cork on that bottle of existential champagne.
Beloved at 4:39 and 11:46 (delivering dialog and plucking strings in a very big soap opera ) while Offsprung and I dug mud trenches in the garden…
Simonetta on Forbidden Love
►
please eat squirrel-shit pie and die off you spineless smug empty untalented broken-dick bands a la The Mountain Goats or just listen to this and open up your wrist-rivers with dad’s SuperGold card:
Culture sucks down words
Itemize loathing and feed yourself smiles
Organize your safe tribal war
Hurt maim kill and enslave the ghetto
Each day living out a lie
Life sold cheaply forever, ever, ever
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Life lies a slow suicide
Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths
From feudal serf to spender
This wonderful world of purchase power
Just like lungs sucking on air
Survivals natural as sorrow, sorrow, sorrow
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us
All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us
All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us
All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Drive away and it’s the same
Everywhere death row, everyone’s a victim
Your joys are counterfeit
This happiness corrupt political shit
Living life like a comatose
Ego loaded and swallow, swallow, swallow
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Under neon loneliness everlasting nothingness
PHOTOGRAPHY, SEX, POSSESSION, DEATH as CHEMICAL PROCESSES
I was going through a box of photos in a bookshelf-cleanup and found a snap of a woman I had a skittish affair with in the early 90s or so. I can remember walking down a street in Schöneberg with her and debating about which imminent technological development was scariest: the ability to manipulate DNA on an industrial level or the ability to use computers to track every detail and movement of a life. That’s how young we were (well, I was 30): as if there was a choice.
Now she’s a science writer for a respected magazine but then she was a coltish, cocky 20-year-old, shimmering with pheromones and intent on having a laugh.
I first saw her in the club I worked in, 1991-1992. This club was the flavor-of-the-year in clubby Berlin, back before the center of all things cool moved East. It was my first job in a foreign country (trying to get a job in London was like trying to get a blowjob in the Louvre). Every weekend-night there was a 50m queue outside the discreet door of this club (number 2 Marburger strasse; long-since shut down by the Russian mafia), a blinding parade of stylish fuckers clamoring to jam into a smoky box in which the DJs were not even particularly skilled (no good-time mic-patter out of these fellers; some of them couldn’t even mix), the drinks cost an arm and the manager maintained a strict no-drugs-in-the-toilet policy. The manager was African-via-Paris and about seven-foot-tall with a head like an Easter Island totem and he was inarticulate in five languages and his name was Emilio and he wore only the most expensive, cutting-edge shit. Enforcing Emilo’s drugs-in-the-toilet policy was one of my jobs; that and cleaning the ashtrays and keeping the toilets clean in a situation in which there were no mops (someone once stall-vomited a largely-unchewed spaghetti dinner, direct from the restaurant next door, and I locked the stall from the inside and hopped over the stall walls so I wouldn’t have to deal with it for a few hours; when Emilio finally detected the cooling splurge, in I was sent… with a box of fucking napkins. I can still feel the chunks).
Everyone wanted a job in this club (a doorman, a pseudo-chum, ended up being one of Germany’s biggest movie stars) and several friends who had already been in Berlin for years when I got here were pissed that I got the job, shitty as it was, by casually asking the fearsome Emilio, who took an instant liking to me. The perks were: a pocket full of undeclared Deutschmarks at the end of every night (which came at 9 or 10am) and a pocket full of phone numbers. I threw most of the numbers away because I was terrified of getting AIDs. Still, sometimes, I neglected to crumple and toss. (I wish I still had some of those notes; the pidgin English was often astonishingly lyrical or funny).
I saw her on the dancefloor (as any number of songs would have it) while I was emptying ashtrays and otherwise looking busy. She gave me several long looks I felt compelled (perhaps by chemicals; chemicals that must have a certain color: what are they, the colors?) to respond to. A few days passed and I was in her little room in a shared flat late in the afternoon in a neighborhood not far from my own. We were on her futon/couch and she was telling me about being a Duchess, technically (there is a “von” in her name), being from a noble family that had fallen to the level of the upper-middle class, its ancestral castle crumbling. She told me about her boyfriend “Gunther” and I told her about my girlfriend (soon to be my first wife) and we were kissing while she fumbled with my fly. She had just managed to unpack my painfully-bent thing when the doorbell rang; her room was to the immediate right of the front door to the flat and when the bell rang again we heard someone call “Jezebel?” (not her real name) as clearly as though he was standing behind an arras.
“It’s Gunther! My boyfriend!” she mouthed. He banged the door. Jezebel…!
“Fuck!”
“Don’t worry,” she whispered, “He can’t get in!” Then she lowered her mouth on me, smiling. I removed myself, laminated with Duchess-spit, from her crafty mouth and re-buttoned my fly and rose to a fight-or-flight crouch and said, “Fuck, what if your roommate comes home and lets him in?”
“She won’t. She spends most of the time at her boyfriend’s. Come over here…”
“Fuck no!”
“You’re bigger than he is!”
“Yeah, but I’m the asshole, here,” I hissed. “That makes kicking his ass a little awkward!”
“You’re no fun!”
“You want to fuck while your boyfriend is at the door?” I didn’t quite understand Germans at that point.
“Jezebel!”
The boyfriend finally quit and went back down the stairs and out of the building. I waited a careful interval and fled.
We re-scheduled over the phone and tried again a week later. And exactly the same thing happened. But this time the penny dropped and it hit me that the boyfriend was acting. This was part of their sex life. I pushed her away from my dick again and waited for him to give up and I “fled”, again, but this time without running and with a chuckle. Perverts.
A year later I was in another club (the then-new club-of-the-year, called 90 Grad) with my brand new first wife, a slinky, tiny-titted, 6-foot blond with cruel blue eyes and an attitude that went right off the meter. Snubbing people was her profession; how we ended up together I still can’t figure (though it took almost fifteen years to get the official divorce). We were traversing the dancefloor when I saw Jezebel and her boyfriend, “Gunther”, and I had to laugh: Gunther was about a foot shorter than me and ten years older and he looked like Otto Dix. We all four chatted on the sidelines; Jezebel’s boyfriend’s eyes were shining with an avaricious light. He was praying for a foursome. It took my wife three minutes to snub all three of us and storm off to the bar and when Jezebel’s boyfriend excused himself to snort something in the unisex toilet Jezebel and I made a plan to fuck (just the two of us) in a borrowed flat in Kreuzberg.
I have a pile of photographs of the women I have known in my nakedness and each photo is like a marker in time: what I was doing, where I was living, the music I listened to and what I wished I was doing instead. The pile is also a trophy collection; these are like hi-tech locks of hair… but for the un-romantics (and the Evil) among us, such photos are closer to being scalps. More on that later.
2.
One of my exes (one of the really, really cool ones) is in the fashion industry and she asked me to make a video to use on a runway, recently. The concept of the video was to be “Color” and I did a montage of primary colors blending into secondary colors and from there into tertiary colors, and so on, and I found that slow dissolves, synchronized with the music, looked better than hard cuts: they looked like chemicals in a biological process… the process of mutation or decay. My concept for the music was to use a Mashup from YouTube so the track would be familiar enough to the fashion show’s audience… but fresh enough to feel like a modicum of hip. The track was an okay Mashup of (the hideous) Lady Gaga plus the Eurythmics’ hit “Sex Crime”. Too weird/cool/edgy and there’s no commercial use for it, you see.
While I was editing the color montage and listening to Annie Lennox repeat the phrase “sex crime” I suddenly thought of that serial killer who had been on the 60′s-70′s gameshow The Dating Game… and won. The serial killer with the face of Death-as-a-woodland-creature… a creepy fox, say. A creepy South American fox. Thirty-plus years after winning The Dating Game, he was convicted of killing x-number of women. He lured these poor women to their terrible deaths by claiming to be a fashion photographer. Authorities found a storage locker of the creepy fox’s possessions and in this locker they found a pile of trophy photos of women; they have no idea whether the creepy fox killed these women or just snapped them. The photos were released earlier this year in hopes that anyone with knowledge about any of these pretty girls pictured might come forward.
[music by Saint Nick]
on the other hand..
Generation seems like an innocent enough word. “they belong to a new generation of consumers” until it becomes clear that the human species is merely generating itself through waves of interchangeable generations. That the human species is a techno.meat plague on the planet.
Since the ‘great’ depopulating wars of last century, we have taken to naming the generations, as if to convince ourselves that they are anything more than an undifferentiated and virulent genetic spew, frothing flesh-animate fomenters of spurious species flowing out of the hospitals, out of the subways out of the offices and universities voracious, surging, so much warm batteries and gristle.
Doped and poisoned on a municipal, and national, scale, and brained by television control, they roister back into their mass-compartments and generate yet other yeasty delusions. Slopping out of hospitals around the world like sausage links, once ambulatory, cloaked in the cheapest slave labour frippery herding each other into concentration day camp for demoralizing socialization experiments until they emerge pestilential heros of naive belligerence, wreaking traumatic legacies of pococurante, anti-depressed generations sucking at the the syringe tip of cyborg annihilation.
instead of sudoku, try figuring out some social problems.
Very Celine/Baudelaire, Comrade Pastor Prime… let’s start loading our gym socks with goatshit and hit the road at midnight on Segways, whacking the unsuspecting and over-gelled. “First they came for the over-gelled and I did nothing, because I wasn’t over-gelled”… that sort of thing. We’ll work our way through the orders. When our arms get tired we’ll use disciples!
Zizek’s latest:
that was hilarious, if only because I am so furious at the anti-intellectual onslaught we are subjected to day in and out through every possible mode of ingress. case in point this dismally half thought-out slap of post-racial hipster “hey, my life is just a fresh-faced muddle but at least I’m not a downer lol” drear corporate bonding. It doesn’t even matter that the end contradicts the beginning lol XPPPPPralph
[ed.'s note: I love Corporate Racial Fantasies: so touchingly naive!]
When I was 15 or so, I had a weird growth, the size and feel of a milk dud, in my left nipple. Fearing it was a cancer tumor, my mom took me to the doctor, who simply attributed the growth to puberty. Around two weeks later, my dad, a neurotic who can’t stand traffic jams and pretty much anything else, drove past the jam on the shoulder of the road for half a mile until we were pulled over by a cop. (We were going to Macy’s or something.) My dad, a semi-quick thinker, told the cop he was rushing me to the hospital because I had nipple cancer — placing the entire verity of his case on the growth in my nipple, and invited the cop to see for himself. The cop (looking back, I feel molested), removed his leather gloves, came around to the passenger’s window (which I was instructed to roll down), and leaned over to inspect my nipple using a series of surprisingly thoughtful pinches. His diagnosis was that I had cancer, and we were set free.
THE CHILDREN’S MINUTE
Divine Little Jezebel Klein
divine little Jezebel Klein
in her red boots and green suit arrived
at the picnic for children from
over the hill with a cupful of night
in her pocket
other kids there were laden with chocolate
and gooey-big biscuits in fancy-wrapped boxes,
but Jezebel Klein merely smiled while they gossiped
so rude as they chewed just like fat little foxes,
unaware of the cupful of night in her pocket
‘Jezebel dear,’ said Miss Teachem the teacher
‘why aren’t you gulping ‘n munching ‘n slurping or
greedily wolfing ‘n chowing ‘n snarfing?’
‘why are you sitting with dignified bliss?
something is eerie and queer and amiss!’
after she said it Miss Teachem forgot it
but J.K. still had this: the night in her pocket
hours elapsed and the shadows grew longer
cast by the gas-pregnant bellies of champions,
trumpet percussion of blasts reeking hunger
they napped-off snack’s orgy with gusting abandon,
even Teachem was beached under cover of clover
dreaming of grammar and doing it over,
while sinister marvelous Jezebel Klein
sprinkled her drops of the night ‘pon the children,
’til Coroner thought it was Cold that had killed them
divine little Jezebel Klein
in her red boots and green suit survived
all the brats in her class, so Miss Teachem’s at last
little Jezebel’s well-behaved tutor
[80% of Images on The Endless Thread come to us via THIS PLACE]
aha a moral to be learned by all, night detector on every school bus!
on the other hand!
This poem is about something I really saw on tv!
let me film you nude
in the outside
in the sunlight
where we dump our trash
on a swath of land
drop your clothes on the bristle
don’t look at me too much
with the fresh air
around your haunches
as you’re pulling off your socks
let me film you
from a distance
against an impenetrable background of brush!
[Fill us in on what you saw and how you saw it, Comrade Pastor!]
It was on TV I tell you, where I go only for scientific reasons as it offers unceasing documentary evidence of social power being exerted.And I am researching the quantum theory of social bonds.
I saw it! I tell you. It was utterly banal, one of those titillation chatline ads they play late at night, and I read all that poem into it. There was a girl taking her clothes off in the woods, or not in the woods, but rather on some rather scraggly patch of a clearing which could have been simply the shoulder of a highway, the only important feature for the person filming apparently was that the space behind her was something like woods.
. She looked pretty amateur since she was looking at the camera a lot and saying something inaudible since the only soundtrack was a kind of music I can only call dirgent. I think it was composed by that nambient-blechno project Boringer. “dirgent dirgent dirgent a dirgency! so dirgeeent!”
Well I recorded the clip in order to analyse it frame by frame and that’s when, dear Tetmaster Stave N., the po-aim began to coalesce. Enough biography, almost. I imagined the circumstance. The position of the camera, the lens, the woe-begotten lens-crafters who polish themselves into interchangeability. The hard glass of the lens, Ibn al Haytham! And so on, Paradise Lost x 101000000.
RACE IN DELILLO: A SERIAL MEDITATION: PART ONE
1.
Don DeLillo is branded (and is a Brand) as the Elder Statesman of America’s paranoiacs… despite an obvious tonal aversion to atrocity. This is ridiculous.
If Norman Mailer hailed the work of Paul Bowles as the herald of the death of the Square, the Square is here to inform Mailer (the way God informed Nietzsche) that its death was greatly exaggerated… and, also, that that Don DeLillo guy is a way-out proposition, man. Don DeLillo is no Paul Bowles, as far as that goes: he’s as safe as warm milk before bed in the 1950s. He’s no Square-killer. He’s a stylist of immense talent with the disposition of a supremely-genial dinner date. You can’t really have a Literary King of the Paranoiacs with a tonal aversion to atrocity; not in a 21st Century America in which 79% of all registered Conspiranoiacs believe that a former Vice President of the United States would unwind, on the weekends, by hunting Playboy Bunnies with a sniper-scoped rifle.
That DeLillo is one of the genuinely towering post War stylists of Am Lit is a cosmic joke of real nuance: he sheds such dazzling spectra on every page, in range from the unseen to the super-seen, in the service of doing his best not to say too much… not to go too far… not to cross any lines that would scare the horses. The sheep sometimes tremble, as in George Will’s famously clenched-buttock of a broadside accusing DeLillo’s even-tempered Libra of being an act of “bad citizenship”. But the horses yawn. 55% of registered Conspiranoiacs believe that Catherine the Great fucked horses, after all.
Not even horses fuck horses in DeLillo (though they do in corny old, onomatopoeic Tom Wolfe: the only truly wondrous set piece in A Man in Full featured a “winking” equine cunt that haunts me to this day).
DeLillo is a gentleman of the knowing-chuckle-on-the-stoop school. He allegorizes his mistrust of politicians in a wry hand-in-the-cookie jar, Norman-Rockwellian fashion. Or, say: imagine “Guernica” as painted by Rockwell and Rockwell’s “Little League” as painted by Picasso… imagine a diptych of these: that’s DeLillo’s tone as a Literary Philosopher (even if his personal tastes run to Coltrane and Pollock). This would account for the mainstream appeal of his bomb-throwing syntax.
He was the Edgar Cayce of the World Trade Center until it actually fell down. A lyrical game of feint and implication is great until history calls your bluff and makes an extremely explicit statement in the form of rubble and corpses and lava: then what? Falling Man was DeLillo coming out with his hands up. Falling Man was a white flag. The DeLillo of Mao ll and Underworld was like the greatest poet of 19th Century France waging an irresistible campaign to romance a late-20th Century starlet bursting with silicon tits and a wad of Bazooka bubblegum in her mouth…. until he got her in bed. At some point the poetry had to stop. He’d rather it hadn’t. He preferred risque innuendo.
Every time I read Underworld, it astonishes me for two reasons: A) as 827 pages of unmatched (and consistent) epic poetry and B) a mainstreamy, Copelandesque hymn to “America” I don’t detest. DeLillo can’t even muster a tenth of Henry Miller’s cynical horror about the obvious gap between the golden myths America tells itself, at bedtime, before her prayers, every night, and her scream-soaked mornings… not one-thousandth of Burroughs’ or the socio-politically schizoid Gore Vidal’s. There are no fire-dancing niggers or eviscerated hookers in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre, despite the fact that his Libra is a masterpiece of lyric clairvoyance on the subject of the forces that gathered to speed the famous projectiles which forced the man-on-the-half-dollar’s head open.
Underworld opens with the ’57 World Series, for chrissakes. I hate fucking baseball.
END OF PART ONE (because any piece in which I have to type out long excerpts in my laborious, monodigital fashion will take a while to complete)
[map via Comrade Barry]
WIKIRAPES
“Sweden drops rape accusation against founder of WikiLeaks” (after successfully linking his name with the words “rape” and “molestation” in the group-subconscious of the unsophisticated populace)
no wonder he’s unscrupulously leaking all that sensitive information we all wish we didn’t have to know about, he’s a rapist!
[ed.'s note: one of those wily FEY RAPERS you never suspect until they release your documents]
Ye Gods! You’re charging DeLillo with the crime of normative paranoia!
(more anon tomorrow, time permitting, by way of riposte)
[ed.'s note: It's really quite frightening when you can't, initially, match the friend to the pseudonym...]
My Dear Comrade Mons: bearing in mind, of course, that Donny D. is one of the writers I’d rather read than most… yeah. Normative Paranoia… that’s what I’d call it, too!
Oh, and this is now, officially, the TET House Band:
steven do you know the comic art of Al Columbia?
sometimes this thread reminds me of one of his ( extremely rare ) outings.
A compliment btw should you have descended into De Lillo’s normative paranoia mode.
Never heard of Al, erm, ET… will Google…!
(ten minutes later)
Ah yes. Know the work but not the name… familiar stuff. Great, too.
“DO YOU FEEL A BIT EMBARRASSED ABOUT THIS?”
WELCOME TO THE DAWN of the 19th CENTURY, CELEBRITARDS!
“The bands are the brainchild of two brothers Josh and Troy Rodarmel, who invented them on their kitchen floor in Orange County, California, three years ago.
“Josh, 28, said: ‘Everything in nature has a set frequency. The body has a frequency and things which cause negativity to the human body – like cellphones and radiowaves – break down its natural healing frequency.
” ‘My brother and I worked out a way of putting good frequencies into our holograms so they balance out the body, making it stronger and more flexible.
” ‘The frequencies embedded in the holograms clear pathways and lead to maximum energy flow.”
from the site of these clever little cynical little money-making fucks:
•What is Power Balance?
Power Balance is Performance Technology designed to work with your body’s natural energy field. Founded by athletes, Power Balance is a favorite among elite athletes for whom balance, strength and flexibility are important.
yeah, but what the fuck is Power Balance…?
•How Does the Hologram Work?
Power Balance is based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural energy flow, similar to concepts behind many Eastern philosophies. The hologram in Power Balance is designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.
Okay, fine… but how does this magical fucking Hologram work, asshole; do all of your customers boast of 2nd-grade educations…?
“One of the more popular new-fangled treatments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the Perkins Patent Tractors. Their creator, Elisha Perkins (1741-1799), attended Yale University and was a physician in Connecticut. Drawing upon experiments done with “animal electricity” by an Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, Perkins theorized that redirecting the body’s natural electricity could draw out pain and disease. In a furnace at his home, Perkins fashioned brass and iron rods measuring about four inches. The rods had one flat side and one round side with one blunt end and one pointed end. The practitioner held the rods in his hand and rested the point of the rods on the skin. Then he stroked or drew the tractors over the unhealthy area of the body to attract and draw out affliction.”
To stay with your Burroughs/DeLillo fight-card for the moment, I’m more inclined to call a split decision. Both writers give you the low-down on American Empire in entirely different ways. Burroughs shows you its game-face with the mask ripped off, takes you on a tour of its neuro-pathology and summons up its fever dreams, whilst DeLillo concentrates more – I’m thinking particularly of his latest book – on recording the patient’s susurrations and making a shadow-play of its phantom-limbs.
The bottom line is that each of these methods functions to an advanced degree.
Also worth noting: there’s a real danger in writing about the world’s horrors, in flagrante, without being actually privy to them. I’m not saying it can’t be done, only I wager it requires tremendous care (without this there’s always an air of cynical deployment or absolute puerility to the project (funnily enough, I’m reminded here of your utter distaste for the film Baise-Moi, and the reasoning behind it)). The question persists: who and what are you catering for, principally, in exhibiting these things?
Interesting to consider whether or not those writers who engaged directly with modern horrors managed this through their induction into the same realm (I’m thinking here of Burroughs and the bullet through his wife’s bonce, or Celine having his spirit exposed to – and saturated in – two world wars)?
One problem with a phantasmagoric approach to literature is that those writers who employ it tend to stake their territory out. Their methods hardly bear repeating as they prove greatly inimical (in the process of trail-blazing the buggers tend to leave a lot of scorched earth behind).
Comrade Mons, Mon Ami!
My initial comment on all that (which is just the prologue on a piece I want to do on the articulation and function of Race in Don’s Oeuvre) is less about DeLillo’s take on American Realities and more about his label as the King of the Conspiranoiacs. I just think that that title has to go, for organic reasons, to a more marginalized writer. Burroughs would be as close to “mainstream” (ie, feted by mainstream media) as one could get and still have a fair claim on the crown.
With neat economy of cause-and-effect and clear political logic, The Masters who own Media… let’s call them Murdochs… don’t make it a habit of letting writers with genuinely damaging things to say about them (The Murdochs) score Blockbusters. Murdochs own those publishing houses and they own the newspapers and TV/Radio stations which advertise books and movies and if you write something that really pisses them off, your book won’t be a Blockbuster. Underworld was a Blockbuster. One of the most beautiful Blockbusters of the era (if not the century, after the anti-Blockbuster of Ulysses).
A counter-example would be the genuinely-politically-brave Checkpoint, by Nicholson Baker… even the ostensibly-Liberalish media shills (erm, I mean outlets) lambasted this book as the worst kind of Sick Puppy Shit. Well, it’s no such thing. It’s not a masterpiece, but it deserved to be read. The Murdochs decided otherwise, therefore it wasn’t read.
Again: George Will famously bashed DeLillo’s Libra, but there was nothing in it so edgy that it might piss a Murdoch off because A) those events happened almost exactly 50 years ago… (whereas Checkpoint was set in a NOW so dangerous that people were going to prison for telling anti-Bush jokes in queues at the Post Office) and B) DeLillo himself has gone on record as not believing in the multiple-shooter-theory. Well, a para-journalist named Mae Brussell has written over the same territory that Libra covered (not aesthetically, of course) and she’s so marginalized that her novel’s-worth of text may as well be Fiction and she, more justly, would be a Literary King of the Conspiranoiacs. Notice the indefinite article; there are many Literary Kings of the Conspiranoiacs, across many eras and national borders. Don DeLillo just isn’t one of them, imo.
I think DeLillo is as invested in Politics and Para-Politics (as a Writer) as Nabokov was invested in Pre-Pubescent Girls. Ie: for aesthetic reasons, both subjects provide excellent contrast and gravitas against which strikingly-beautiful sentences can work without becoming cloying (you’ll notice that when Nabokov applied his vividly-lyrical brush to vividly-lyrical subjects, as in ADA, the effect was too, too, too… at least it was for me. Like bathing in corn syrup while eating a butter pie in a golden bathtub).
DeLillo neutralizes any sense of Evil in his work (and without a sense of Evil, how can one address/dramatize/measure institutions involved in genocide, mind-control, war-for-profit, political assassination, Eco-rape and slavery?) by designing a Universe in which the moral and psychological propensities are shared, with almost scientific equality, by every character. The creatures in Don’s world may want different things (on the surface), but they all, every one, share one overriding attribute that is the defining sense of the DeLillo experience: Inconclusiveness. The characters are all, to some extent, Lost and/or Suspended and/or Confused.
A genuine King of the Paranoiacs wouldn’t be so charitable/naive. A genuine King of the Paranoiacs… WSB, say… knows/writes that our Experience is a Crafted one. It’s crafted by Control. WSB may never have found out (imaginationally or otherwise) who Control is, but he damn sure knew there is one. Every word of WSB is haunted by Control… on the page and off.
An awareness of Control is certainly not necessary in DeLillo… I love Libra/Mao ll/Underworld/Cosmopolis as the Powerful Artworks they are. It’s only DeLillo’s chronic mislabeling that I snark at.
Steven don’t forget Jonathan Franzen!
For some reason I’ve never read any DeLillo. I know this isn’t a book group but is there a good starting point novel?
Ha ha… yeah. Poor thick Johnny Jones, eh…? Reduced to posting “and another things!” on his own Blogicle… (coincidentally, I last got into it with old JJ over WSB)… I mean, Christ, even ATF is making sense compared to JJ on that thread… [ed.'s note: erm, early in the thread she was...]
Here’s my suggestion for the best way into DeLillo (though perhaps Comrade Mons can add to this): Libra, then Mao ll, then Underworld. Avoid Ratner’s Star. Save Cosmopolis until you absolutely must have more DeLillo. White Noise after that (for historical purposes). I haven’t read the others often enough to advise.
I’m no expert meself when it comes to DeLillo, although I did happen to re-read his first novel the other month and thought it stood up well to further scrutiny. Not suggesting you go the chronological route, Comrade Edward, but I suspect that if you get along with ‘Americana’, you’ll find much to enjoy – and even more so – in DeLillo’s writing elsewhere.
Apart from that, I’d also second Steven’s vetoing of ‘Ratner’s Star’ (I put this in a rucksack once, as part of my travelling bookshelf, and when I finally came to open it, the disappointment was swift and irrevocable) and include ‘The Names’ in this author’s run of good form.
His latest, Point Omega, is damn good too.
BEST ANTI-Žižek ZINGER, WORTHY OF Žižek, OF THE WEEK
In an email to Comrade JR I wrote:
“Žižek is just another mouthpiece for a Power so powerful that it can afford to appear to contradict itself.”
A) Example of Late-Capitalist Cruelty
B) Funny
C) What Exotic Military Pathogens Are They Experimenting On The Third World With?
IN HONOR of NEW-FORM COMEDIC TECHNO-SITUATIONIST GLAM MASTERY WEEK at TET
Like all his fellow Neocons, Adam Kirsch scores his points by lying; the techniques he prefers are creepy sleight-of-hand, or the 20th-Century propagandist’s sadistic favorite, which is to assert, with a wink, that Blue is Red or a Cow is a Butterfly or that a Fundamentalist Guerrilla and a Secular Dictatorship are chummy together (for example). It only works if you aren’t paying attention… or if you really want to believe.
In his eulogy to Frank Kermode, the mendacious Adam quotes a review Kermode wrote about a collection of essays by Martin Amis. Kirsch would have the reader believe that Kermode’s introduction to his review of “The War Against Cliché” is a quietly devastating put-down:
“The last book he published before he died was Bury Place Papers, a collection of his LRB essays, which shows that he was a tough and witty critic as well as a learned one. His review of Martin Amis’s essay collection The War Against Cliché is a master class in quiet devastation: “The main title of this collection may at first seem wantonly non-descriptive, but it turns out to be exact,” Kermode begins. “The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later.” It takes a minute to realize that Kermode’s verdict on Amis has just been delivered and that there will be no appeal.”
“That said, or, as Amis allows himself to say, ‘simply put’, we have here a literary critic of startling power, a post-literary-critical critic who, incorrigibly satirical, goes directly to work on the book. Often, being right and being funny are, in this book, aspects of the same sentence. Often, as one reads on, one finds oneself quietly giggling, or gigglingly quiet. The precision of the attack is astounding, and is matched by the bluntness of the condemnation.”
or this:
“The long central New Yorker essay on Larkin is probably the most considered and the most permanently valuable part of the book. It recycles some earlier remarks to great defensive effect. More than any other piece it confirms one’s opinion that Amis is the best practitioner-critic of our day – just what Pritchett was in his prime, though without the bad punctuation and the jangling train-wrecks.”
Seems, strangely, like very strong praise, doesn’t it? Well I’m afraid you’ll have to keep reading it, again and again, until it doesn’t.
‘kinnell it’s been a slow week at the office but that last one woke me up. If that’s quiet devastation may I be quietly devasted for the rest of my life.
So apparently the qualities most needed in a critic are a.) the inability to read properly b.) the inability to understand that which you’ve just read and c.) the ability to have already made your mind up about something you haven’t read and are yet to pass judgement on.
Incidentally is Franzen actually any good? I asked my other half who read The Corrections and she ummed and ahhed before saying ” ….well written…..about a dysfunctional family….I gave it away didn’t I?” with no conviction to any of those statements. I looked into her eyes to see if she was adopting the Adam Kirsch method of criticism but her comments were sincere . So I’m none the wiser.
Fucking amazing, eh? The whole shitty psycho-political batch are shameless professional liars (except Hitch, who is merely selectively insane).
Re: Franzen: I once found myself over the North Atlantic with a choice between reading The Corrections or watching Death Nail 2 (or whatever). Starts off okay… loses the ability to persuade, convince or overwhelm a mortal terror of the stratosphere about two-thirds through. No desire to re-read. Perfectly-aimed at Americans who think they’re ten years too young/hip to read Garrison Keillor.
Just be glad you weren’t stuck on a plane with “Stepmom” starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon. Back in the days when airlines didn’t offer you a menu of films on a small-screen in front of your seat so you had to tough these films out.
This horror was on a big screen so you couldn’t avoid the makers gratuitously killing Sarandon off by giving her cancer solely in the hope that it might make you cry and understand the meaning of family.
My other half ( who’s got got quite a few walk on roles in my comments this evening ) suffers terrible airsickness and “Stepmom” only made it worse. Actually she thought she’d cured the airsickness before the film started and it was revulsion over the script that caused the further bout of nausea.
PS I am not being “Adam Kirsch” over this film. It really is in a league of its own.
[ed.'s note: A) Re: Julia Roberts: There's a reason I always pack a parachute in my carry-on luggage, Comrade ET
B) I was once on a trans-Atlantic flight (I think I've racked-up 15 of those thus far) on which the in-flight movie featured a scene where a cargo plane was... sort of... crashing. I felt it was fairly fucking insensitive to show us that (but that wasn't as scary as the commuter flight I took from San Diego to LA once... ten minutes into the flight I noticed what looked like a steady stream of dust blowing towards me; when some of it landed on my sleeve I saw it was... wait for it... snow flakes. The stream of which appeared to be flowing playfully from the seam between the paneled wall of the fuselage and the ceiling...) ]
I hope someone came along with a staple-gun to fix the problem.
Stephen Augustine, despite repeated comments that insisted Miley Cyrus was an appropriate metaphor for “Tao Lin,” added something quite unprecedented and perhaps never-before-seen in the modern Lit Community—a link back to a 2007 shitstorm over at The Guardian about Lin’s debut short-story collection, Bed. Here, we see the young author and Augustine participating in what some might feel is a particularly uncharacteristic type of banter, especially for Lin, whom we know to be cool, calm and collected.
Aside from this exciting kickback to 2007, shit talkers here—much like those at Roberts’ profile of Lin at Salon—still seem mostly concerned about convincing readers not to take Lin seriously.
and
# curt 2 hours ago
damn, stephen augustine seems like an unpleasant person
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The_augustine_authority 1 hour ago in reply to curt
I am unpleasant as a bed-of-toast-crumbs-fuck… unless you’re beautiful, talented or capable of helping me build a Hackintosh. The “Miley Cyrus” riff is more about Tao’s fans. Tao is Tao. I don’t “hate” on him, I “hate” on the trend. What is “the trend”? Down down down. Simpler simpler simpler. Sell sell sell. Whatever. I invite you to hate this comment.
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Lk 1 hour ago in reply to The_augustine_authority
tao has more shittalkers than most writers and sells probably 100x less than jonathan safran foer or whoever so wha are you talking about
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The_augustine_authority 1 hour ago in reply to Lk
Yo, did you ever consider the possibility that shallow, uncritical, hyperbolic fan-praise is a kind of “shittalk”, too?
Jesus, that Estaban Oggiesteen seems like a right cunt, I mean…hey…wait a minute…where am I?
Oh.
Sorry. Wrong blog.
Oi! You’re not under 30, are ye…?
[ed.'s note: Mish, as we all know, is closer to 35 but he's untrustworthily-young at heart. I've just about completed this evening's three hours of work and must now crawl to bed...]
Hey, Steve-a-roonie…hope all’s well with you and yours? Jesus, that Jonathon Jones is a piece of work, isn’t he?
I hear the measured tread of The Marching Morons and leading them, a tousled, corpulent art-drooler…can it be? why, yes it can…Jones The All-Around Pedestrian…
UPDATE: Jonathan Jones’ latest (linked above) goes directly into the COULDN’T MAKE IT UP file:
“But why do statues have to be of heroes? Why is it an endorsement?”
This is the kind of stupidity that makes you want to slap women who get pregnant after the age of 45.
PS If Johnny Depp wasn’t born to play Henry Morton Stanley in a musical biopic by Tim Burton called “Livingston!”, who was…?
In line with my cherished theory that the Internet means that for every stupid article by a paid above-the-liner at the GUblogs, there are many experts of superior knowledge and sanity, out there, ready to contribute for free:
timjeal
28 Aug 2010, 12:52PM
So the Guardian’s art critic thinks that a statue of Stanley would be a good idea because it would help us all to remember ‘imperial racism’. But what if Stanley was opposed to”imperial racism” and every other form of racism? I am Stanley’s biographer, and here are some facts. At the start of his first African journey, he wrote: “I am prepared to admit any black man possessing the attributes of manhood, or any good qualities, to my friendship, even to a brotherhood with myself.” On the Congo between 1879-84, his most important member of staff was a Somali, who was paid the same as white officers. As a young man in New Orleans, Stanley was happy to live in a boarding house owned by a former slave and frequented by black people. In a country where segregation was universal this was enlightened behaviour. At a time when ‘nigger’ was a word in common use, Stanley wrote that he hated “that ugly derisive word’.
Stanley’s supposed responsibility for the suffering on the Congo in the 1890s rests on the wholly mistaken belief that in the 1880s he stole the Congo for King Leopold II of Belgium by persuading chiefs to part with their land for trinkets. In reality, Stanley’s treaties sought no land but only the right to build trading stations. This enraged Leopold. “The terms which Stanley has made with native chiefs do not satisfy me,” he told a minister, “they [must] delegate to us their sovereign rights … [and] grant us everything.” Stanley would not comply. Belgian officers, he replied, should not treat the Congolese “as though they were conquered subjects … They are not subjects – but it is we who are simply tenants …These chiefs own the soil.”
Leopold then appointed a dozen officers, under a retired British general, to obtain the treaties he wanted. Stanley’s originals were deliberately “lost” and forgeries were substituted. Only one undoubtedly genuine Stanley treaty survives. Signed on 31 Dec 1881, near present-day Kinshasa, it demands no sovereignty, pledges future payment of rent to chiefs, and does not bar non-Belgian traders. I found this treaty in Brussels. It had somehow escaped Leopold’s attempts to find and destroy it. It is a model of fairness.
It is misguided to link Stanley with the atrocities which took place in the Congo during the mid-1890s. Stanley was sacked as the king’s Chief Agent a decade earlier (1885) and never worked there again. During his five years of pioneering on the Congo, he sent home Belgian officers who did not treat the Congolese humanely. He had difficulty sacking some because Leopold supported them. So Stanley made it a resigning issue.
When Leopold explained to him that he wanted to create an immense country under his authority, Stanley expressed his own determination that: “They [the Congolese] will retain their own tribal chiefs … be as jealous as ever of every tribal right and resent every foreign interference in their own customs or modes of life”. Stanley wished to internationalize the river for the trade of the world, not gift the whole country to the king.
Stanley admired the Congolese, and, like them, was betrayed and deceived by Leopold. Shortly before he left the Congo he wrote: “If Europeans will only study human nature in the vicinity of Kinshasa, they will go home thoughtful men, and may return again to this land to put to good use the wisdom they should have gained and the kindly social relations created during their peaceful sojourn.”
Stanley was deserted by both parents at birth and was dumped by his uncles in St Asaph Worhouse when he was just six. He left when he was fifteen but against all the odds went on to become Britain’s greatest land explorer – the man who finally solved the mysteries of the Nile’s and Congo’s sources. He was not perfect. But who could have emerged unflawed after such a cruel start in life? Stanley lied a lot as a young man and tried to appear tougher and more masterful than he really was. This led him to exaggerate the scale of his hostile encounters with Africans. His private diary tells a different story from his published work. But he changed as he aged and by the time he went to the Congo as Leopold’s Chief Agent he was sincerely determined to serve the Congolese people. Many imperfect people are privileged to have statues erected posthumously in acknowledgement of their achievements. If stringent moral tests were applied retrospectively, most would have to be taken down. I say this even in the case of Dr Livingstone whose biographer I also am.
Tim Jeal
Jones is, in the most precise meaning of the word, a simpleton: everything is simple for him. X is ‘good’ because Jones likes it. No alternative position could possibly be forwarded in good faith.
Y is ‘interesting’ because Jones is interested in Y. No other position is tenable because Jones is convinced that he represents the ‘best and brightest’. God help us all if that were true.
Jones is just another pathetic component in the hype/money/art nexus. He’s too stupid to grasp that he and the platitudious tripe that he passes for ‘criticism’ are merely ‘products’, value-guaged by how well it does the job it’s designed for, ie: sell more product.
Reading Jones on ‘art’ (something I stopped doing when I realised that it was cutting into my staring-into-space time) after reading someone like Walter Benjamin–or Gombrich or Hughes or Sewell or Fry or Morris–is to have your nose rubbed in the fact of the triumph of mediocrity.
But it’s sorry confirmation (not that any was needed) of the degraded state of the Grauniad’s editorial staff. No half-competent literary editor would have passed that exercise in teenage hype, heavy breathing and wishful thinking as a serious article.
It wouldn’t have passed muster as a below-the-line post, for fuck’s sake.
I wish I could say, “We’ll always have Paris…” but the Joneses and the flabby corporate art-fuckers rule there too.
JJ is a prancingly-bloated testament to the unimportance of his “job”. If it were important (even sinisterly so), he wouldn’t have it.
I’d much rather talk about this excerpt, of yours, from your site (which must be the only long-running, consistently-active, Creative Commune for well-educated, reliably-witty adults on the Web… do you pay your fucking commenters a salary?):
“About 20-odd years ago, I was living with a girl from Ennis (County Clare). Although she was a relatively recent arrival, large numbers of her relatives had settled in London and done very well for themselves.
“They’d made a great deal of money and spent accordingly on large houses in London’s leafier outer suburbs. Going to visit them was torture but I was always dragged along. “That’s love, darlin’: suffering together”, she’d tell me.
“It wasn’t that her relatives were unpleasant or anything–far from it. But every one of them, in addition to being house-proud to a point that verged on insanity, had insisted on decorating their houses in white.”
What wouldn’t I give to read Tales of Mish from the 1980s or 1970s? Tales featuring Antonioni flicks and King Crimson concerts and country houses in Connecticut featuring Al Green blowing out the woofers on the quadraphonic sound system while Jessica/Mandy/Dawn’s parents holiday, unaware, in Gstaad (wtf is the point of a Spellcheck that doesn’t recognize “Gstaad”, btw?)…
One never knows when furor scribendi might strike and then:
I Will Tell All!!! Three-In-A-Bed Romps!!! My ____ Hell!!! (Drugs? Sex? Soft Furnishings?) Saved By The Love Of A Good Women!!! My Work For Charidy!!!
I’ve been meaning to ask you: is there a reason you haven’ t broken this site up into pages?
It wouldn’t change anything (all the links to comments and posts would remain the same) but it would just load so much faster.
This page takes between 10 to 15 seconds to load. That’s dead in dog years and an eternity in the Attention Deficit World of the interwebz.
Obviously, the ADD-afflicted aren’t your audience in the first place but it is annoying.
When my blog started to do it (and for the same reason: everything on one page), I just broke it up into, I dunno, 15-20 posts per page.
Nobody noticed because nothing had really changed, except that instead of scrolling down to find an old post, you now scroll down a bit and after 15-20 older posts, you reach a link to ‘older pages’.
Of course, maybe this is a cunning plan on your part to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hope you’ll consider translating a poem for us…or maybe it’s time to write the new Struwwelpeter.
Mind you, it’s Berlin: it’s probably not only been done but done in every conceivable sexual, racial and political variation.
Or perhaps it was just too obvious and it merely awaits some wide-awake lad to kick it into play?
A) Don’t tease us, please us, fellow! Look: I’m going through my Shoe Box Vault of Bygone Evil Days some late nights and posting actual snaps of genuine chicks as my impish tribute and/or revenge. The least you can do is tell us about the third or fourth time you sat through a midnight show of Harold and Maude in exchange for a sin of omission…
B) Yeah, I thought about the “page” thing but I’ve gone and called it THE ENDLESS THREAD, now, innit? Not, “The Easily Navigated Pages“. And it does cut down quite a bit on duhmbshits writing LOL. No brain no pain, as I say…? As if that means anything. Oh, farck… I’ll THINK about it…
C) Translate a pome? From German to English or English to German or from Rather Poor Fucking English to Okay That’s Better It’s Slightly More Like An Actual Pome Now English…? Or ooday ooyay eanmay in Igpay Atinlay?
D) Re: Struwwelpeter: too close, Sah. I’d need some distance. There’re Germans all over the place out here…
Here I am in ’85, a singer in a band:
[ed.'s note: the Augustine avatar is my Beloved at the age of 5, dressed as an Elizabethan magician; it started as a joke in 2004 or so and ended up sticking when more than one commentator remarked upon its similarity to "V"]
Is it true that blondes have more fun?
I take your point about this being The Endless Thread and anyway, patience is a virtue to be cultivated, (along with silence, cunning and exile, according to Joyce) not to be dispensed with.
Still, I find myself rolling my eyes when a page doesn’t load instantly.
It’s not about instant gratification (I long ago learned the heightening and focusing power of anticipation) but more like exasperation with hi-tech falling down on the job.
Fuck it, in 50 years, we’ll be back to stuffing messages into bottles and hoping the recipient is one of the 1 in a million who can actually read.
I was hoping you might be persuaded to do us a German to English, perhaps a modern, untranslated Kraut deserving of a wider (well, marginally wider) audience.#
I’ve been thinking about re-starting my autobiography as a few misguided people have been encouraging me to.
I’m in two minds about it. I mean, my life between 16 and 40 is such a sordid litany of criminality, sexual profligacy, pathological recklessness, selfishness, shameful behavior and disasters–and that’s just the stuff I’m comfortable with–that I don’t know if it’s wise to reveal myself unless I’m sure of a funeral in my very near future. I’m thinkin’ on it…
Comrade DJ Sensei JR and I went for a late lunch yesterday while his Hackintosh was exporting a massive video file on his editing system. The video file is a documentary film from one of Germany’s greatest “new wave” Auteurs and Comrade JR will be flying with the subtitled artifact to Brazil to represent this great director at some sort of festival, being the director’s occasional right-hand man. Like all great artists with a public profile, the great director has a little stable of right hand men.
The great director is important because his ideas are still interesting and he never sold out. This important director went through some very lean years, raising two kids on the money he earned by making approximately one anti-mainstream film a year, with a meager fee per film. Making the relatively recent transition from Film Biz to the Art World has saved the great director because of the simple logic that selling a million tickets, at ten units per, to thousandaires, is harder than selling a single ticket each, at a hundred-thousand per, to millionaires.
This Auteur is a bookish, analytical intelligence with real Talent who has been arguing, with his work, for an egalitarianism in the distribution of the judicial protections and material necessities of Life. The Owners said “no” with a snicker, of course, but with their sadistic wit gave us, instead, a world with an egalitarian distribution of “intelligence” and “talent”.
In other words, “anti-elitism” doesn’t mean, now, that poor kids can get topnotch educations or that their parents can go dancing or swimming wherever they please but that talent-free middle-class duhmbshits are flooding the world with bad writing and stupid films and idiot-art after graduating from schools which earn money by spewing Designer Philistines at an ever-accelerating pace. As the pool of Designer Philistines expands, it affords itself the expensive illusion that it’s self-supporting (each Designer Philistine can now count on an audience of a thousand Designer Philistines) but, like any pyramid scheme, it’s only the ones who got in early who will actually make a profit. Picture a capstoned temple of Dark Ages 2.0, decorated in soothing pastels clashing with sporty primary colors and tastelessly dazzling with CGI and you can visualize the pyramid scheme I’m talking about. Though why would you want to? Daddy only pays for it all as a baroque distraction from his Oil Wars anyway. What talent-free hipster duhmbshit is going to seriously protest the Wars when there’s a chance of going Pro with i-phone hermeneutics on YouTube… ?
Comrade DJ Sensei JR and I decided to have the late lunch at a place in Kreuzberg that started out as a concrete municipal facility on a corner of Görlizer Park; at least, that’s how it looks. It’s been a series of cafes and restaurants over the years (I walked in last summer and ordered scrambled eggs after which the Turkish waiter/owner disappeared for about twenty minutes, returned to hover nervously while I ate the iffy eggs and he confided, eventually, that he’d made them himself and for the first time in his life).
Now it’s a “Mexican” restaurant, the riskiest kind of eating experience in Berlin, but we were feeling comedic, for some reason, and tried it. The food was fucking awful, in a charming way, but Comrade JR wasn’t having it. I think he was miffed. I have no problem with talentless cooking if the price isn’t too high and nothing’s actually burnt and the waitress is the right degree of ironical about it. Life is short and, anyway, I care a fuck of a lot less about Food than I care about Art.
The weather has turned from dogmouth hot and humid to a rainy autumnal chill and it’s now finally great for walking again. Berliners pretend to yearn in a wronged way for that sun and heat all winter long but when it finally comes they become too short-tempered and smelly and pack with hellish scowls into the buses and U-Bahns. This place is just about perfect on an overcast day, chilly enough for fashionable boots and jackets and looking and smelling like a B&W masterpiece from the glory days of the Cold War, when Talent was King.
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DOWNLOAD and WEAR the TET T-Shirt!
HI OBVIOUS: THE POLITICAL SUBCONSCIOUS AND ITS ARTFORMS
-Notsee Art
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… PLUS SHE FAILED TO ACHIEVE A VAGINAL ORGASM AND HER SPIRIT GUIDE ASKED FOR A REFUND or TOP-TWO NOTSEE HONEY-TRAPS TO AVOID IN SWEDEN
“Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.”
“One-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service”… Oh I’m quite sure that doesn’t mean anything, my Paranoid Comrades.
“I was hoping you might be persuaded to do us a German to English, perhaps a modern, untranslated Kraut deserving of a wider (well, marginally wider) audience.”
(I’m importing Mish’s comment from that attenuating reply-thread to give us some room to work down here).
The thing is, I abhor translations of Poetry. It’s my feeling that whatever it is that doesn’t quite make it, in the transformation of translation, is exactly what made the Pome poetic in the first place. Translated novels are bad enough but some novelists suffer less than others from having their idea-children kidnapped and replaced with impostors (Kundera is one, I think and he tends to work, like Nabokov, very hard with some of the translators on some of the translations.
I once had a discussion with Comrade EC about a Rilke pome, translated by what’s-his-name (the White Goddess guy, I think) and I showed that the English version had changed the sense of the original for-the-sake-of-not-even-entirely-poetic-language (I’ll have to dig through the archives for that one); it was just the translator’s ego taking over.
An acquaintance from HAcademia sent me a request to translate a pome from olde German… I’m not sure why I said “yes” (laugh) but I include, here, the polished version of part one of the pome (I did the rough translation of all three of its parts and polished part one as an indication of what kind of liberties I would make in the name of making it a pome approximating the feel of its original era). I see translating pomes as a game or a way to make new pomes (if the translator is a Poet) but the effort always, in my opinion, kills the original in order to replace it with a living fake or a stuffed keepsake.
Anyway, here’s one of my adventures in translating….
1. The request
Steve, I was wondering if you might help me with a translation I’m doing of a poem by my great-great-grandfather (from German)? I’ve got the gist of it, but there are a few parts that I’m not clear on. (I’m not entirely sure I’ve transcribed them right either—they are from manuscript). Would you be willing to give me a hand? It’s not a long poem, and it is dreadful adolescent stuff, but it’s dreadful adolescent stuff from 1880s Germany… I see it as a challenge.
-C
2. Rough translation of part one:
Wess’ dichters mund sie wuerdig beschriebe
Which poet’s mouth would describe her aptly Jene stumme sprache der liebe!—
This silent language of love Jenes suesse und wortelose
Those sweet and worthless, Und doch so in haltreiche gekose.
And yet so richly appointed, embraces
Wo das stammeln unendlich beglueckt,
Where the babbling is endlessly pleased Werden die worte in Kuessen erstickt!
Become the words strangled in kisses Traenen der weh’s in wonniger lust
Tears of the sorrows in happy lust Seufzer der leids aus seliger brust.
Sighs of sorrow from your beatified bosom Raetsel des lebens: aus einem pokal
The mystery of life out of a grail (winner’s cup) Reicht es uns freude, wonne und qual!
It offers us joy, pleasure and pain Trank der liebe; er labt und erfrischtn,
Drink of love, sates and refreshes Doch, weh!—Er ist mit wermut vermischt!
But, woe! It is mixed with (pun of vermouth and nostalgia) Wermut und galle im koestlichen wein
Nostalgia and wormwood in delicious wine Gleichet dem leben voll lust und voll pein!
Similar to life full of lust and pain
3. Poeticized version of part one:
Which poet’s mouth would limn her praise-worth’ly
Speechless tongue of love yea unearthly!-
All that’s sweet and worthless graces
These richly-enamel’d embraces.
Where the babble eternal delights
Kisses are strangling words morbid white!
Tears of the sorrows in lust joyful blest
Sorrowful sighs from beatified breast!
The Mystery of Life: from out of a flask
Proffers white agony, ecstasies black!
Drink of Love, it sates and refreshes
But, Woe! Where Love with wormwood meshes!
Wormwood and gall in a sumptuous wine
The liquid reflection of Life in its prime!
4. Notes about a toe-stubber:
Ihr immerst entbehren, schmachten, euch kastein,
>Dann glaenzt euch enist ein matter glorienschein!
you must first deny one’s self, languish, and chastise one’s self
then glitters there once for you a _____ of shining glory!
(my Beloved says “matter” is matte here, but I think it’s meadow)
I’m in general agreement here and I’ve always maintained that a poem can’t really be ‘translated’ because poetry is language and language carries a huge amount of freight, of subtleties, of shared knowledge and culture that’s only accessible in that language.
Perhaps it’s the use of the term ‘translated’, with its suggestion of a straight-forward process that merely involves a sort of shift in register that’s the problem? Maybe ‘re-imagined’ would be better? To be approached in the way that jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis approached standards by Gershwin and Lerner and Lowe or the way Matisse and Picasso used African art–as a sort of seed-bank of ideas.
It is, ultimately, as you say, a game. What the hell: I like games…
“To be approached in the way that jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis approached standards by Gershwin and Lerner and Lowe or the way Matisse and Picasso used African art…”
I can live with that; “translation” as arrogantly-respectful theft…
“…arrogantly-respectful theft…”
Yeah, that works. Let’s face it: how much art isn’t, to a greater or lesser degree, an act of arrogant-respectful theft? I know you’re as fond of Steely Dan as I am. I think it’s fair to say that they plundered the musical canon pretty mercilessly, no? I don’t admire them any less for it, nor is my pleasure in the results thereby reduced…
Speaking of which…
GEMS REDUXED: #27: VLADIMIR NABOKOV INVENTS THE SMILEY
“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”
-VN, April 19, 1969
The Nabokov “Smiley Emoticon” invention was in response to a question posed to him by Alden Whitman, in an interview that was published in The New York Times:
“How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?”
I would just like to point out, re Steve Augustine’s comment that:
“As my good friend Tony “the Justin Bieber of Junk” O’Neill”
…that Tony “the Justin Bieber of Junk” O’Neill is actually in his thirties and has more than one grey hair, and more than one ex-wife.
Still, Steve, if you would like a mouthful of my “youthful vitality”, you are welcome to get down on your knees, get in line, and suck some out the old fashioned way. I’ll save you a spot right after David Carr and the the guy at my local Dunkin Donuts who keeps giving me the stink eye when I insist that I want a small coffee, not a large.
August 30th, 2010 / 3:37 pm Steven Augustine—
Tony, an actual Writer should be able to handle a minor comment-thread skirmish without having to rely on some vintage 8th-grade sex-fantasy “insults”. I’m not saying you *need* to be able to actually Write or anything. But wouldn’t you feel more secure, working that shtick of yours, if you could…?
Re: the Bieber-riff: it isn’t age-based. It’s the “authenticity” issue again, man.
Speaking of which: can you clear this up for us? Last time we “battled” you wrote two sentences that would appear to contradict each other (implying… you know… something bullshitty about your Press Kit); can you clear this up…?
1. “I was an intravenous heroin user for most of my teens”…
but then, a little further down the thread you wrote:
2. “No, I was 18 years old and I hadn’t used hard drugs at that point in my life”.
See what I’m getting at…? It doesn’t add up.
August 30th, 2010 / 4:01 pm Tony O’Neill—
Hey Steve
Well this will be the last time I respond to you because I know that youre getting a hard-on out of this, you know, people actually responding to your comments. After all, you seem to be someone whose entire existence seems to revolve around posting comments in blogs.
Well, “man”, I don’t need you to tell me about authenticity. Who are you again? But since youre interested, youre right, I meant twenties. Since posing in the comments section of blogs doesnt amount to the sum total of my written output as it does yours, I have to say i dont put too much thought into what I type here and probably miss-type and misspeak frequently. If you would like to interview me Steve, go right ahead although i suppose that would mean that you would have to crawl out of the comments section and actually write something ‘above the line”. Still, if you want me to really think about my answers thats the way to do it, or email me directly like a man, instead of scampering around in the shadows like a fucking cockroach tossing little asides my way.
I guess the real reason i responded to your comment is that I am a little amused that you seem to be so obsessed with me. Do you love me Steve? Is that it? Seriously, I’ve fucked girls who have treated me with less stalkerish intensity that you do.
August 30th, 2010 / 4:51 pm Owen Kaelin—
Wow, what a creepy guy this Tony O’Neill is. Steve: Careful who you let follow you in here, next time, okay?
Thanks, man.
But seriously, as they say.
I’m here to express my strongly-held opinions about Writing.
I feel that the practice (Writing as an Art) is threatened by all the half-arsed bullshit that passes for “writing”.
I started reading very seriously at a very young age… as a way to transcend the fucking filth, violence and degradation of my surroundings (Chicago ghetto). I learned, at this young age, that Material Things could not only be decoupled from Aesthetic Truths and Human Value but that this decoupling is essential. Surviving America without this decoupling is impossible. What you Buy is what you Are: the only cure for this Ugly Belief (now that Religion is impossible for anyone sane and possessing half a brain) is Art. Art, Books, Aesthetic Pleasure.
Books were my cure; Aesthetic Pleasure is my Angel With A Flaming Sword. I learned that my Life (and worldview) had value, even in the prison of my pathetic fucking poverty and the wretchedness of being at the very bottom of the social order. I don’t need Books to save my life, anymore but I can’t forget the powerful role they played in my survival. I’m fucking possessive and territorial about Lit and watching it go the way of popular music (ie autotuned ear-candy or slacker-narcissism in which the Image is 85% of the Product) bothers me.
I want new writers to come along who are seriously dedicated to the Art of it, who struggle and suffer to improve and inspire me, finally, with the Truth they can deliver with some powerful, hard-earned tools (among them self-critical honesty, even when it’s cloaked in metaphor). I want Readers who can encourage these Writers by challenging them with nuanced perceptions and some fucking standards… by which, I mean, I want some Readers to come along who *need* Writing, with all of their intelligence, as much as I needed it when I was a kid.
It’s okay to be some mediocre, self-obsessed cunt for whom Writing is just another route to Attention or a little money and “fame”; it’s okay to be some Consumerist duhmbshit for whom Reading is just another thing to do, competing, for attention, with dozens of other things to do. It’s even okay to be someone for whom the Writing/Reading thing is a Lifestyle fetish that’s more about Clothes and the i-pod selection and house-proud bookshelves (well, mine are a crowded, ugly, impossible-to-navigate mess).
It’s just that I’m talking about something different here. And pissing a few people off in the process. Just another day in the war against the War Against Talent.
O’Neill is an idiot. I first became aware of this when he replied to a comment of mine on the GU book blogs. I’d recommended a Chet Baker biography called Deep In A Dream. O’Neill responded by raving about how it was his ‘favourite book’, a ‘work of genius’ (it’s not) etc etc.
It soon became obvious that O’Neill is one of those sad, dim-witted hipsters who appear to believe that drug use is the mark of ‘genius’ or ‘authenticity’ or some such bullshit. And that addiction to heroin, the king of drugs in O’Neill’s pathetic pantheon, was the mark of a great artist, an expression of transgressive nay-saying. If only Joyce had had a smack dealer, eh? Who knows what he might have accomplished?
O’Neill is too stupid to grasp that the Charlie Parkers et al created great work despite the junk not because of it. That it’s a measure of the power of art to transcend circumstance that addicted artists do what they do. He also seems unable to take on-board just how many great talents were ruined by drugs. Chet Baker is a case in point.
Baker was a kind of idiot savant: a man with a rare gift that he took for granted and never understood. He was barely articulate and never said an interesting or original thing in his entire life. But he made lovely, lyrical music as effortlessly as a nightingale sings.
Then he discovered heroin. Unlike O’Neill, I actually have all the music and judge Baker as an artist not as a junkie and once the smack took hold, Baker went downhill at an astonishing speed. Between 1965 and his death in 1988, Baker churned out endless albums of wretched, comatose crap, only able to do so because the magic of his name was maintained by junkie-worshiping cretins like O’Neill.
Of course, O’Neill’s ‘junk is king’ shtick sounds an endless succession of bum notes. They’re obvious to me, an ex-needle junkie (10 boring, stupid years). Less so to the young and gullible
There’s nothing as boring as a junk habit nor anyone as boring as a junkie and there’s nothing less conducive to the practice of art. O’Neill’s romantical maunderings sound like the twerpy rubbish spouted by middle-class ‘giro junkies’ (a London term, referring to youths from ‘good’ homes who sampled the ‘demi-monde’ on the dole and spent their unemployment checks on a bit of gear. They affected the junkie ‘look’ and the jargon but they never really ‘committed’ and were held in contempt by real junkies, who sold them gear that had been mercilessly stepped-on.
Of course, none of his would matter if O’Neill could write: but he can’t. He tries to model himself on Burroughs but lacks Wild Bill’s cold, forensic intelligence and feel for language. The Justin Beiber jibe was well-judged; get the little suburban girls, yearning for a bit of ‘darkness’ to wet their knickers over your tales of ahem, ‘depravity’, set yourself up as a counter-culture Orpheus, returned from the shadows…man, the teeny-boppers lap that shit up.
Yeah, the Chet thing was sad… I always marveled at how the audience reaction to “Let’s Get Lost” (the flick) was one of sated veneration when it should have been self-reflection and shame. One look at Chet’s Oklahoma relatives was enough to send me screaming from the theater (laugh) but , beyond that… watching his old ex hangers-on and that fakey, improvised, last-minute crew of “young friends” (wtf was Flea doing in there?) trying to squeeze into the frame with toothless, mummy-faced (Keef-looking) Baker, grabbing some of that vicarious vintage fame, was cringe-inducing. One shot in particular… some busty airhead preening and prancing on the beach… seemed to sum the whole thing up. And I thought this when I saw it the month it came out (’88?). At least Baker seemed suitably bored and exasperated during the filming… an object lesson in what an old junkie will do for cash.
Jazzy Anecdote:
My father was a Jazz DJ on an LA radio station in the early ’60s (his handle was “The Jazz Prophet”, wonderfully enough)… which was sort of what landed us in total poverty. He was trying to make it as a promoter on the side. He put on an Aretha Franklin concert in a mid-sized venue and the concert sold out, so, encouraged, he mortgaged the house (and the houses of a couple of partners) to do the same thing again (maybe even in a massive venue, I seem to recall; no way of checking on that, now, as both parents are planted). My mother, brother and I were far away, on vacation, in Chicago, visiting grandma’s house (I was three) at the time.
The second concert was a flop, father lost his shirt and the shirts off the backs of his partners and drove from LA to Chicago at a very high speed, with hellhounds on his trail (he used an artistic pseudonym for years after that, as a Painter, and now I realize why) . He’d been raised as a rich kid… his father a near-millionaire undertaker in Philadelphia… but I suddenly found myself living in the ghetto. I associated the terrible new circumstances with my father’s record collection (he had enough LPs to fill an apartment, and they did: they filled his bachelor pad after my parents separated and divorced). I spent my teens and twenties having a pretty dim view of Jazz.
It didn’t help that my father (while also being a neo-Fauvist Painter) began promoting a radically-politicized avant-Jazz ensemble called Phil Koran and the Pharaohs (see end of comment) after his move into a fine apartment in the middle-class Hyde Park area; my mother (she of legendary, self-destructive pride) had refused any alimony. So there’s my dad, happily fucking a swath across the avant-Black-nationalist Art scene… while mother, baby brother and I were the poorest family in our ghetto (as she also refused any kind of Welfare money). We looked decidedly rural among urban-sophisticate neighbors, the children of whom often dressed very well while I was dressed like a little sharecropper. On top of that we were all race-mongrels, too, but that’s another story…
Years later, I’m a 35-year-old man, visiting The States with a young German girlfriend who could have been the mistress of a Bond villain; she was 6’3″ in her stocking feet (about 2 inches taller than I am and she is, btw, I shit you not, the daughter of a former SS Officer, who was 65 when she was born)… Vegasly busty/leggy… I was actually embarrassed to be seen with her. Strolling around with the poor girl was like being wheeled around naked in public on a brass bed because it was all too crudely obvious exactly what we saw in each other. I was walking down the street with her towards a park near an Art Museum, trying to feel unselfconscious (and praying for nightfall) when a wiry old guy fell into a jazzy shuffle behind us, crooning, “A pretty girl is like a melody…”. I had to laugh; we stopped and chatted and ended up hanging out with him.
Turned out he was a museum-quality specimen of jazzer… trumpet and piano… he showed us some of his songs (one was called “Minor Changes”…. I’m willing to bet he wasn’t the first to use that title) and told us some bullshitty tales of jazzy derring-do and near-misses with lady Fame and so forth. Charlie Parker’s cousin was his niece’s best friend’s step-father etc.
Then he revealed the magical secret that he, erm, belonged to a Masonic Lodge, opening his closet with a flourish and revealing several fezzes, a cape and a sword festooned with tassels.
My girlfriend reached, innocently, for the sword and he couldn’t have been more aghast if she’d lobbed a sopping tampon at him.
He treated us to a passionate lecture about the years of loyalty and obedience and studying the recondite mysteries of the Orient, and so on, necessary before you achieved the sort of status that meant you could touch such a Holy fucking relic, jack.
Here he was, some lonely old fucker living in a cramped little flat with a one-eyed cat and reduced to seducing strangers with his needy, wacky, last-ditch charm and, miraculously, once every couple of years or so, he got to show bemused strangers a stack of old sheet music with “Minor Changes” on the top… and here he’s being precious about a tin fucking sword in a velvet scabbard behind a stack of People magazines! We couldn’t stop our chuckles of disgust after we got the fuck out of there and into sunlight.
But it was a few weeks after that absurd experience that I realized I was listening seriously to Jazz records again. The old guy’s fucked-up circumstances weren’t a tragic irony…. they were the point.
.
[pictured are 1. the author's dad and his dad's mother 2. author's dad 3. author's mother, R]
That’s the thing with junk: it becomes your magnetic North, the direction you always point in.. I must have about 70-80 Baker albums (thank you, bit-torrent) and 40 to 50% of them are pure dross, stuff Chet cut because someone waved some cash under his runny, junkie’s nose.
The rest of the post ’65 stuff has its moments, when the old unforced natural lyrical gift shakes itself loose of junk’s stranglehold, but they just make you appreciate the magnitude of Baker’s loss and degradation.
That film was positively fucking ghoulish. The mummified Baker, mumbling inanities through his collapsed mouth as a bunch of vapid trendies danced attendance on him as though he were some kind of hipster oracle–it all served as a terrible warning from history for anyone tempted to take the witless O’Neill seriously…
[ed.'s note: it seems we saw the same film; and here I was, all these years, feeling the oddball in my opinion of it...]
Sorry, I cross-posted there. Great story…Minor Changes, indeed…
[ed.'s note: I've illustrated your comment nicely, Sah... ]
FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS…
When the film of Trainspotting came out I remember the critics saying it didn’t glamourise heroin use and showed it like it really was. The hell it did. I find myself thinking that almost anything can glamourise heroin addiction. The pallid look and lifestyle of the Velvet Underground is not what I’d call especially glamorous but was obviously exotic enough to encourage people to copy the moves.
I hated the film ( more like an 80′s advert for a bank ) and the absurd justifications given as to its “responsible” stance. The fact that Ewan MacGregor could progress from playing a junkie to playing Obi Wan Kenobi gives an indication as to how cutting edge Trainspotting really was.
Comrade ET!
I’m not for or against heroin, coke, crack, skunk, skank, E, chicken-7 or skull-balls (I made the last two up) but, as Mish puts it, essentially, unless there’s something to go with the drug activity (like Talent or a young Marianne Faithful), who the fuck cares? It’s the lazy, and, ultimately *corny* belief that drug tales are interesting or edgy, in and of themselves, that I sneer at when it comes to Tony O (and, btw: my, no one could accuse Tone of being homophobic, at least, eh… ? But you’re not going to be singing “back up” with the Marc Almonds of this world if you’ve got a total aversion to the smell of another dude’s insides, I guess…)
I’ve never been drunk, never smoked anything, never snorted coke and needles were right out of the question, dude… but I did LSD for a good chunk of a year, way back when (’78-’79?), and the altered experiences were moderately enlightening.
I always liked the story about Thelonious Monk who had been given some STP, allegedly very powerful LSD and spent a few days days tripping out on it then went back to the supplier and asked if he had anything stronger.
LSD never agreed with me – nice effects but too much like having a full-time psychedelic job. I took it when I had the only full-time non-artistic job I ever had so the 4 hours hanging around/ coming down got boring. Thank God chicken-7 hadn’t hit the UK in the early 70′s.
[ed.'s note: the Chicken-7 epidemic hit Croydon and West Wickham around the time that "Aqualung" was climbing the charts and subsided before "Thick As A Brick" came out... or perhaps it was the other way around]
[re: Monk: his middle name was "Sphere", innit? No possible option of fucking around in that case]
The last time I “tripped” I did it in a Funeral Home: not advisable. I was alone on the third level of the complex (family business; great aunt and uncle, asleep in the building next door)… it was around two in the morning when the Zombie paranoia hit. On top of it there was a dog on the premises… a Doberman named Hans… who I started feeding some frozen cheese cake while the good stuff was still on its aluminum tray (result: bloody gums, bloody fangs, excited animal). I was back (in Philly; like a Dickens waif, farmed out to rich relatives) from college and only there for a couple of days at that point. One of my duties the following morning was to go fetch a Sunday paper from the corner shop I hadn’t been in since High School. The same old feller… a vet of the Great War… had always been its proprietor. But what I had somehow failed to notice for three years before that was the relative lack of fingers on his right hand (war wound, I’ll assume).
So I go down for the paper early that morning… still “tripping” but on the way off of it… greet the wizened gent, purchase the paper, make near-coherent small talk, shake……… his………………… hand………………
I just fucking flat out stared with bulging eyes of terror and snatched my own perfectly good hand out of what I must have have thought, at the time, were the clutches of some sort of Extraterrestrial Death Trap. About which, I promise, I am still, thirty years later, extremely embarrassed.
It doesn’t explain Aqualung but it certainly does explain Thick as a Brick.
CANON FODDERS
Approx. once every 18 months, I allow myself to get sucked into a debate about “The Canon”. It always starts (as these things will) with me leaving one terse/gnomic or epigrammatic comment (directed at no one in particular) and moving on to something else… until I come back to the thread to find Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom waiting for me with a chocolate box of ad hominems! Laugh. I wouldn’t mind if these “debates” somehow progressed, over the years. But they always take us back to Square One. Someone needs to develop software linking Comment Threads according to subject so these arguments can start moving forward.
My seed comment was:
August 31st, 2010 / 2:10 pm Steven Augustine—
The notion of “The Canon” is a nostalgic artifact of faded Hegemony… but there are canonical debates about “The Canon”… seems like a waste that they’re so rarely connected and/or built-upon…
Even Shakespeare wasn’t always “Shakespeare”; what did Tolstoy say about Goethe/The Germans being responsible for making Shakespeare a star? These things fluctuate. And “The Canon” is *a reading list*… not a hollow box that retains its dimensions and fundamental qualities no matter what it contains. We are chauvinists of Our Now… just a few centuries of displacement, back or forward from any starting point, shows there are no fixed attributes to “The Canon”. That Normative Dream is (conservative) political nonsense and the first irony will have to be that, asked to describe “The Canon” in enough detail to be able to discuss it, your first (and only) recourse is to “an academic reading list”.
Even if the “reading list” is semi-stable, the interpretations (and “reverence” factor) are not: a lot hinges on that. A reading of Conrad or Melville or Clemens which *indicts* them, or uses them as comparative Straight Men (no pun intended) for, say, Queer texts or Diaspora narratives, is anti-canonical in essence, even if it draws on Dead White Male sources to press the case. Undermining the possibility of the *moral* reading undermines the *point* of a “The Canon” and the moral reading is already too out-of-fashion (on one side of this debate) to be rescued. Yeah and do you really suppose “The Canon” will retain its shape when Spanish (or even Chinese) becomes the dominant language in North America… ?
“Shakespeare is more widely read today than he was in 1666…”
A demographic factoid. Next?
“Certain poets and authors get read and tend to have more influence than others.”
Believe it or not (and I’m sure you know), this debate isn’t new; it didn’t start on this thread (laugh) and it’s by no means an open-and-shut case. The trouble with it, in general, is that it always tends to start from square one.
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August 31st, 2010 / 7:42 pm Steven Pine—
The canon isn’t a reading list… it is a conversation that can be found by reading certain texts. This is an important distinction, because it lets us better understand what is and isn’t dead/postmodernwordoftheday/thestateofbeing about the ‘canon’.
when a people/person/culture join western, modern society, they are joining, knowningly or not, the company of the canon because they canon is what created the modern world. It will survive as long as history will, and maybe a little longer.
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August 31st, 2010 / 9:32 pm ryan—
I agree, and this is why I’ve never liked the term ‘canon’ as a way of describing it. I think it’d be more apt to describe it as a literary heritage, and any western writer worth her salt is necessarily becoming a part of that conversation, like it or not.
And this explains why Steven is able to say “asked to describe ‘The Canon’ in enough detail to be able to discuss it, your first (and only) recourse is to “an academic reading list’.” The only recourse is to an academic reading list precisely because the “canon” is -not- a reading list. A professor–or even a group of professors–can’t alter the “canon” by simply saying “Well, author X is out, and now author Y is in.” And honestly the idea that the “point” of a canon is some kind of moral reading is pretty funny. It’s the sum result of centuries of creation, the interaction of all the creative readers and writers there’ve been through the years. And the idea that the point of artistic creation is a moral one is of J.Gardner-level absurdity.
I don’t understand how a Diaspora narrative or a Queer text could be “anti-canonical” in nature. In fact Steven pointed out that they are reactions to past voices. How can they draw upon their literary heritage without somehow contributing to that phenomenon? We are not the first generation to “indict” our predecessors while also claiming to be completely distinct from them.
And how in the world is Milton’s influence merely era-contingent? Is Whitman’s influence era-contingent? Because, more than 100 years later, it’s clearly still alive and well.
September 1st, 2010 / 4:26 am Steven Augustine—
As long as you guys state, essentially, “The Canon is that which is called ‘The Canon’”, you can never go wrong. If it’s not an actual list, it’s a Catch-All Abstraction. Debate impossible.
“And honestly the idea that the “point” of a canon is some kind of moral reading is pretty funny.”
It’s not the point of “a” canon; it’s the point of “The Canon”. You think the point of “The Canon” is *aesthetical*? You’re making my point for me: your reading of “The Canon” is antithetical to “The Canon’s” point… because you’re too modern… without even realizing it. You guys are post-(modern)-Bloomites to the extent that his “aura” has affected you while the essence of his (reactionary) argument passed you by.
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September 1st, 2010 / 5:48 am Steven Augustine—
I’m going to quote someone I don’t always agree with, here, but he (Morgan Meis) makes the point nicely:
“The idea of a “canon” is in tatters. A canon needs an established cultural authority, and there is no guiding authority in culture anymore. There are no real gatekeepers. The barbarians aren’t merely at the gates — they long ago passed through the gates and are comfortably strolling around town. They are ordering lattes at the museum café right now. More honestly, perhaps, it should be said that we’re all barbarians. We are them and they are us. This is a terribly bothersome situation to some people, usually to the very people who still think they can show a difference between themselves and the barbarians. They don’t want to be barbarians. The most succinct response to such people is: tough shit. The task at hand is to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it were.
“Once you stop complaining and start getting back to work, it becomes clear that the barbarianization of all things affords some interesting opportunities. There are benefits to having a canon, of course. For one, you’ve got standards by which to measure yourself and others. But one of the most troubling things about a canon is the way it becomes unquestionable. You’re never able to ask the canon “Why?” It is the standard by which one asks why. This is meant to prevent infinite regress. If the standard can itself be judged, then there must be a more primary standard, and so on, ad infinitum. The canon stops all of that cold. It answers those disturbing questions before they can even be asked. You learn from the canon in order to understand what the rules are and then you go out and apply them. What you cannot do is turn back and start asking questions about the canon itself. A canon doesn’t work that way.”
Later in the essay, Meis quotes Catullus, a “canonical” poet whose rising and falling and rising stock serves my argument nicely. Racy Catullus has been getting himself banned in various places and eras for a long, long time: the Victorians found him disgusting, as did a lot of bookish types (at least, in public) during the Middle Ages. Catullus never knew when he’d switch from “canonical” to “anti-canonical”… which is why it’s a little rich to say:
“Whitman’s influence era-contingent? Because, more than 100 years later, it’s clearly still alive and well.”
A whopping 100 years, eh? Wow.
“When American literature became an academic subject in schools and universities in the 1920s, Whitman’s reputation was still obscured by the New Critic preference for the well-made, rigorously impersonal poem. As late as the 1940s Gay Wilson Allen, who would produce in the next decade the first definitive biography of the poet, had difficulty finding a publisher for his comprehensively researched Walt Whitman Handbook (1946).” (Jerome Loving, introduction to Leaves of Grass, Oxford University Press). These two sentences tell us two things: the canonical Whitman is not really much more than 70 years old… and the canonical *American Literature* is only itself about 90 years old. Which means that when I was in college, it was only about *60* years old, and Upton Sinclair and Thornton Wilder and Pear S. Buck (for example) were already cooling off.
The thing you argue for (and the argument itself) is an ur-political phenom that lingers as a phantom (that Catch All Abstraction)… again: you’re being nostalgic for the “Western” bit of the 19th century, when there really *was* a “The Canon”, and it functioned very nicely as a justification for the convulsive expansions (“progress”) of Imperialism; the Euro-centrics could point to the morally-intellectual sublimity of The Canon (chunks of which were a patchwork of texts appropriated from pretty far outside any European “tradition”; what’s “Hellenism”, in the end, but some sleight-of-hand to fumigate the Oriental stink from antiquity?) as their license. First, of course, they’d have to teach the subjugated savages to read. Using The Bible as The Primer.
“We’re” still Imperialist, of course (Jeezis, pretty soon we’ll need to develop interstellar space travel just because we’ve run out of shit to invade)… but “The Canon” is no longer necessary as a justification (and/or unifier)… Hollywood is more than enough. And that’s why the debate is “raging”… it’s up-for-grabs…. because the utility just ain’t there in any meaningful sense. Will “The Humanities” even be taught in North American Universities of 2100 AD? Kinda doubtful.
You guys are just a good old fashioned Newtonian demonstration of inertia. And I therefore salute Thee!
September 1st, 2010 / 7:42 am ryan—
A literal canon needs a cultural authority. The thing that is hinted at by the word ‘canon’–the thing that academic reading lists are trying poorly to define–does not.
I wonder, if our current situation is “anti-canonical,” then how would you describe it? Are we writing ahistorically–completely set free from the literary achievements of the past?
It’s probable that the point of The Canon, a literal canon, a group of centrally approved texts, was always a moral one. “Read these things, else you are, gasp, unsophisticated!” But like you said, that was dead before it started. The idea that the “canon” is the product of creative response is not merely the result of Bloom’s fat “aura.” I’m drawing most of my thoughts on this–the importance of creative reading/writing, the process of originality–from Emerson’s work. From The Poet: “The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more.”
September 1st, 2010 / 7:56 am Steven Augustine—
One more comment and then I’m out, because I can’t be sucked into this cyclical online debate again without hope of *some* fresh development in it. But: please don’t jump to conclusions and think I’m advocating for certain authors and against others with my argument; on the level of individual authors or works I have a different point to make. I’m only addressing the notion of “The Canon” here (and I just remembered that my first post-college argument about “The Canon” was in the early 90s, with a German Uni student, but it never went further than her strident assertion that “canon” is pronounced with a long “a”…).
(Investigate the early uses of the word in terms of the “normative”, btw…)
So: as far as DWMs go: I think, for example, that Toni Morrison is just an undeveloped Laurence Sterne (replacing his sense of humor, which derives from his Existential sense of grievance, with her very narrow sense of grievance). So it’s not as though I have the obvious agenda here. I don’t.
September 1st, 2010 / 7:58 am Steven Augustine—
Ryan: we cross-posted… my last comment wasn’t a response to yours. I’m running out the door right now but I *will* address your latest comment before I retire from this…
[ed.'s note: when I talk about "faded Hegemony" in the first comment, I'm not referring to Anglophone Military-Corporate Power; I'm talking about White-Eyed Novelists with Dicks]
why hello!
Hail, Comrade-Dude!
SHIT… THE ONE TIME I FORGET TO BRING MY BOOMERANG TO THE GALLERY…
Poor old Yoko. I liked her stuff with Fluxus. It had real promise. Another one distracted by the contact with fame.
She had an exhibition in Liverpool where the public were encouraged to write positive things on post-it notes and stick them on a sort of love-wall. I wrote the standard thing I usually write on post-it notes in our workshop. “Don’t forget to unplug power tools and switch off toilet light before leaving” – fairly positive I thought thinking of the electricity bill and also cocking a snook at the fatuousness of the exercise.
To my amazement the ones I looked at all had Love or World Peace written on them. Now I work outdoors and enjoy the public’s attitudes when confronted with art ( or in my case something that attempts to be art ) but in this case the public let me down. Obviously they were too overwhelmed by the Yoko-rays that were radiating from the gallery.
“Don’t forget to unplug power tools and switch off toilet light before leaving”
Zen genius, Comrade DJ Sensei ET! Beat Yoko at her own game.
I always loved the legend that Yoko “didn’t know who John Lennon was” when they met. A successful Artist must first of all be well-versed in psychology
She made a film about bottoms so it’s feasible she had her head stuck up one during the time of the Beatles
[ed.'s note: went for a witty response when I suddenly realized that my arsenal of Yoko jokes is depleted, but I could go with a default "paradox" comeback: "More likely a head was up hers!"...? Erm...]
The Yoko joke-well is depleted? My God this energy shortage is happening quicker than I thought.
Rushes to the cellar to see the condition of the Bono-jokes he layed down several years ago.
All gone too.
fuck
MONUMENTAL FUCKUPS
“The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29-30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone—
“A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned.
“Ergo Michelangelo. And cetera.”
-David Markson, This Is Not A Novel
Were you in the UK for the main part of the tedious Jools Holland era? Late 80′s to late 90′s. It still lingers but he can’t quite get the same amount of programmes made simply on the strength of his name.
He did one particularly awful series where he travelled the world looking at different musical styles. One saw him in Lebanon and Egypt talking about belly dance music or raqs sharqi ( spelling dependant on which Lebanese albums you own ) as it should be known. Being a percussionist ( failing hearing has caused me to virtually stop ) I tuned in as I like the rythms therein.. However Jools being Jools we were forced to listen to him beltingt out New Orleans boogie-woogie on the piano whilst some really top notch Egyptian darbouka and riq ( Goblet drum and tambourine respectively for our non-middle eastern percussionist-savvy readers ) players were forced to try and play with him.
It was the English in one of their colonies all over again.
I was there but I watched very little Jools (my main pastime was hanging out with The World’s Most Brilliant Buskers in the Covent Garden/ Leicester Square area, 16 hours a day)… the little TV I saw had Ben Elton on it. What a strangely nasal, Nixonian presentation Jools makes, though (Nixon was an ivories-tickling man himself, you know… the telltale hunch). Wasn’t he with Squeeze, originally (Jools, not Dick)…?
yes he was a Squeeze man. Bearable then but quickly went on to playing boogie woogie with Egyptians and every other musical style. He’s now yoked in as an expert by dint of having played boogie-woogie with everyone. oddly it was something he never did with Squeeze so post-them Something Must Have Happened.
in that Jukebox jury clip it’s a shame they didn’t focus more on Slim Gaillard. I saw him a few times around the period that programme was made. In a world of his own set to some nice slinky music.
Were you actually busking in Covent Garden, hanging out or passing by? I knew a few people there who made shed-loads of money from the tourists. The main trick guaranteed to get the money flowing into the hat seemed to be making the audience applaud before the show had started. One act only involved applause. Viewed from a post-modern perspective I suppose it could have functioned as an ironic distillation of all the other acts. I’ve no idea whether the performer made more money by doing less but there will a graph somewhere which proves that he did.
I wasn’t busking (never even tempted), but I was hanging out with a little group centered around a wild guy who wore leather pants, a top hat and snakeskin boots and was doing a topnotch Hendrix routine during a Hendrix revival. The guy is producing records in London, still, and we email every couple of months. It was his friend, a chick who was friends with some of the Soul ll Soul people, with whom I actually first came to Berlin, fleeing my disintegrating romance with the fabulous Femme (who’s in the fashion biz and still a good friend) I went to London with…
I remember Miranda Sex Garden were busking then; also the guitarist Keziah Jones (pictured); right before both acts were signed. Never see acts of that quality HERE… on the streets or the TV
London has an increasing number of Balkan Brass Bands playing on the streets. A new phenomenon.
Some of them are the real McCoy rather than people like me who like the music and can mimic the style ( way out of practice now ). I always pitied the tenor horn players playing triplets on every off-beat. But some of them are really good too. The Serbian ones tend to play military tunes about killing Croats and muslims but the Macedonian ones play nice melodies on top of irregular rhythms.
But I’d imagine such bands clog up the streets of Berlin in the way Spanish cities are over-run with Bolivian pan-pipe bands with full PA rigs.
[ed.'s note: you can play triplets on every off-beat on a horn? Rays of admiration beam thine way]
Actually, we’ve got the Carpathian Horns and the guys who play “El Condor Pasa” while wearing colorful throw-rugs and Gypsy kids who’ve been forced to learn to press the keys on an out-of-tune-accordion in a sequence that will mimic the sound of one of three possible lambadas. If you know what you’re doing you can find a spot in Berlin where you can hear all three at the same time. Which is still better than hearing that one reedy native on the S-Bahn singing “Veesper vurds av veesdim” for the Nth time in twenty years…
Recently I was strolling the boulevard with my video camera looking for freaks to immortalize when I came upon a seriously funky Gypsy horn band and for a donation of five Euro-dollars they semi-circled me and gave a private concert which I filmed, of course and now only await Inspiration to tell me what to do with the footage…
No I was the tapan-er . A Balkan bass -drum played with a beater on one side and a thin stick on the other. Played well it rattles along like a train. In my hands it was a Morris Minor which occasionally could make 70 mph.
To get the Tenor horn tripletting you would need to be a gypsy kid press-ganged into riffing since an early age. A great sound but I couldn’t imagine anyone volunteering to play those parts when you could show off on trumpet or clarinet or be the bass on tuba.
[ed.'s note: so you were actually in one of these bands? If so, there's a story in that, no...?]
I was in a band who wanted to play like those bands but other than enthusiasm and a good front line of horn-players lacked the background to get the real feel.
So often the case, it’s a great music to even try and play but luckily we never played to echt Yugoslavians ( as was ) so never got the critical picking apart we probably deserved.
Although I used to play Moroccan music in Amsterdam too and for the ex-pat Moroccans we encountered we were both hilarious and rather touching. They couldn’t believe anyone would actually want to play what they’d grown up with. They kept requesting we played Abba instead.
Oh, come now Comrade DJ Sensei ET… you can go into more detail than that. Give us an epic bedtime (or cereal-eating) tale we can lose ourselves in. Describe the white-paneled van (or gutted school bus) you toured in; the close calls with Customs Officials; the bad weed and Balkan groupies and torch-bearing vigilantes swarming across the parking lot as the motor refuses to start…
more like the endless search in charity shops for LP’s that MIGHT have a playable tune. This was pre-World Music being a marketable commodity in the shops so that classic Balkan brass room-shaker of a tune would usually turn up on the end of Woolworth’s “A Golden hour of Easy Listening from Yugoslavia” or an LP bought back by a friend who got it because she saw a choir of hunky looking Yugoslavs singing in a bar and wanted to commemorate the occasion. Ploughing through interminable Serbo-Croat versions of “Fool on the Hill” you’d come across “Djokino Cocek” by Jova Stojiljkovic and his Brass Orkestar which would raise the roof.
I’m rather nostalgic for those days when you really had to hunt down the art ( or whatever it was ) that you loved. A psychiatrist would probably have a field day with this but the thrill of the chase was part and parcel of it. Now I’m older it’s good YouTube is there to satisfy curiosity but the thrill of suddenly finding some obscure gem is still priceless.
Of course once this tune had been unearthed guns were fired in celebration into the air, a 7/8 footstomping melody filled the air, moustaches were drawn on passport photos, the bottles of slivovitz were downed, innappropriate women were proposed to and the tuba player was found with his trousers down in a stockade full of goats.
But when on tour in Belgium 20 years ago we were at a small village festival with Rumanian band Taraf de Haidouks who fulfilled every cliche about Gypsies you could want. We were returning to the changing rooms and found one band member unconscious through drinking on the front lawn, 2 others were screaming at each other and another was standing at the tour vehicle which had accordion music blaring from it. He was loudly declaiming something. We asked the tour manager what he saying. Apparently it was ” This is the other band I play with, they are better than Taraf de Haidouks and I am the fantastic accordion player you hear”.
The festival organisers banned them from the dressing room fridge because they drank all the contents and it was feared that they’d be too drunk to play properly. So there was quite a bit of friction.
Their concert was in the middle of the village square. No stage or PA system. They arrived and the look on their faces when they saw the crate of coca-cola the organisers had supplied was priceless. They gave the cola to the local kids, quickly spotted where the nearest bar was and established a chain-link so that throughout the show there were glasses of beer being passed one way and empty glasses being passed the other way. The promoters watched the show from a nearby first-floor balcony and every sip of beer the band members took was ostentatiously aimed in their direction. Very much “fuck you”.
But the music in that situation was thrilling. When the old violinist in his bedroom slippers declaimed to the music it was the blues even though you didn’t understand him. You’d watch one of two violinists playing what sounded like a fast solo only to see the second violinist playing the same lines at the same speed. So it was a tune.
So a tale of well-meaning Brits and Dutch and the reality, a hard-assed Gypsy band for you to eat your breakfast to. I certainly was not attracted to the music due to any romantic notion of the traveller’s life. I grew up in a tiny village which had a large Roma population both travelling and sedentary. I went to school with many Roma kids. It was always amazing how, in arguments the Gippo scum insults came quickly to the fore. At that age I was no angel myself but it was shocking as it often came completely out of the blue
[ed.'s note: Ripping fucking yarn and perfect text for my late breakfast. This is a corner of your autobio we wouldn't have guessed at and shamelessly exploiting it for our reading pleasure is a good thing on a Sunday]
Tourerism
►
Every Death an Opportunity
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Qua
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AIN’TLAM
a prayer copied verbatim from a Yahoo comment thread about black muslims
O TRUE SLAVES OF ALLAH, THIS SO CALLED “NATION OF ISLAM” IS ABOMINATION !!! THESE FOLLOWERS OF JINN BESMIRCH ALLAH’S APOSTLE AS LAST RASUL !!! THIS ELIJAH MUHAMMAD IS SPAWN OF SATAN, TO CONFUSE UMMAH !!! ALLAH CURSE THESE ABID, FOR ONLY ARAB IS MOST FAVORED OF RACES !!! O MUSLIMS, SLAY THESE RAISIN-HEAD INNOVATORS, FOR INNOVATION IS HARAM !!! ALLAH IS MOST WISE….
Go Directly to the 1:00 Mark: Beloved in a Little Black Dress, Towering Over the Tiny Soap Stars
The actress in the gold dress in the scene with your partner and the gliding harp ( she should motorise it to save roadie costs ) appears to be trying to hypnotise us with pendulums hanging from her ear.
You think that idiot Jonathon Jones made a fool of himself over Franzen? He’s outdone himself this time…check it out HERE
The man’s a glutton for punishment.
RAISIN-HEAD INNOVATORS? You don’t suppose they mean Miles Davis, do you?
Pig-ignorant cunts…
1. “The actress in the gold dress in the scene with your partner and the gliding harp ( she should motorise it to save roadie costs ) appears to be trying to hypnotise us with pendulums hanging from her ear.”
Harp-carriers are part of the act, Comrade ET, and, yes, the hypno-earrings on yon leathery lady worked so well (retroactively) that I viewed that clip four times without even noticing my Wife is in it!
2. “You think that idiot Jonathon Jones made a fool of himself over Franzen? He’s outdone himself this time…”
Beyond satire, Comrade Mish. JJ must think he’s died and gone to Heaven, getting paid good beer money to do what he used to do down the pub for hurled biscuits and the occasional invitation to fuck the fuck off.
3. Meanwhile, an accurate measure of segregation in The US might well be the fact that the following common-among-Blacks-of-a-certain-generation turn of phrase is so unfamiliar to the Whiteys commenting on this non-story that they think Jimi Fucking Hendrix owns the copyright on it:
Though Obama didn’t acknowledge it, the line was a verbatim quote from “Stone Free,” the first song Hendrix wrote after moving to England in 1966. “They talk about me like a dog,” the song says. “Talkin about the clothes I wear. But they don’t realize they’re the ones who’s square.”
It’s unclear if Obama consciously or unconsciously cited the lyric.
Jeezis Fucking…
4. I thought “Raisin Head Innovators” quite good… fusion band name?
5. Oh, and can one of you, being sophisticated types (and Medieval scholars, re: “Droit de seigneur”), explain to me why Al Gore’s son is a dead ringer for Bill Clinton? Surely there’s a reasonable reason that will put our fears at ease…?
The daughter on the right is the spitting image of someone I know too. The plot thickens.
Does your wife travel with a harp or is the harp supplied ? – would imagine the former for the obvious reasons but that must be a bugger if you live on anything but the ground floor and even then.
[ed.'s note: Properly witty response later, Comrade ET... my main computer woke up this morning making death-bed noises and I'm feverishly backing-up important editing files of the past few months... (and PC 2 is being used by Offsprung to play games involving dinosaurs)...
("must be a bugger if you live on anything but the ground floor and even then...": and our garden would be even more of a bugger...)]
In answer to your question re: the Clinton similarities. The only rational answer must be that some sort of Flann O’Brien Third Policeman frottage has occured at one of the many over populated governmental cocktail parties they would attended involving the exchange of molecules. Further picture research my turn up several of Clinton’s secretaries with Bill-alike children.
I mean it’s not possible Bill……….really?………No!……….really??
[ed.'s note: "Flann O’Brien Third Policeman frottage has occurred at one of the many over populated governmental cocktail parties they would attended involving the exchange of molecules"
Google that sentence and you get 10,889,772 hits
I've spent a nervous couple of days backing up all the data on our main computer, Comrade ET. Thank the Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant that everything seems stable in Dataville.
But there are other things to worry about. For example. Looks like JLG will be accepting that stupid fucking Oscar after all.]
NEGATIVITY or WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND ENJOY THE SPECTACLE FOR A CHANGE?
No, everyone isn’t a Writer. But everyone is a Philosopher. Meditating upon The Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions and, in turn, upon the impact of these meditations on the Self, is a practice of which we are all capable. The degree of frankness or penetration and complexity of the inner-dialog will vary, as will the point at which one quits asking these questions at all (quite a few people seem to quit soon after kindergarten, after which they are happy to let the Politico-Mystical Authorities do the thinking for them). Upon waking, every morning, you are (it sounds too stiff to write “one is”) presented with precisely the same opportunity which Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Hume, Plato, Kierkegaard, Zeno of Elea, Levi-Strauss, Zizek and Satchel Page, et al, were presented with: to tackle the questions afresh.
Five or six years ago I began to narrow my incessant interrogation of the Causes and Conditions to the question: “What do we think we know and why do we think we know it?”
The birth of Offsprung and my happy new domesticity had something to do with the new intensity or sharpness of my Wondering: A) a new human life, for which I am, with Beloved, jointly responsible, slips something dearly tangible under the lens and B) more time at home, more time to reflect… more weird early hours of the morning dedicated, alternately, to staring at candles and scribbling things down. The other factor is Psycho-Historical… the 21st Century’s watershed narrative of the public clash of competing notions of the “impossible”. I write this on the eve of an anniversary.
I began to wonder, “Why are all these people so sure of what they think they already know about what ‘reality’ is?”
The vast majority of what we think we know about the world, we accept on Faith, as a matter of Trust. We are/were not eye-witnesses to most of what we agree has happened on Earth. People argue with near-ferocity against notions and theories which violate their “common-sense” version of “Reality”, but their “common sense” version of “Reality” comes, overwhelmingly, from the Television. The Television, the radio, the cinema, the newspapers, text books and people influenced by, or on the payroll of, the owners of all-of-the-above. All of our sources of “information” have owners. Are the owners Gods? Pure of intent? Nobly disinterested? Who did your teachers, when you were a child, answer to, ultimately? Zeus?
As a Writer, I’m bothered by the fact that in the hierarchy of Fiction, novelists are only about half-way up the pyramid. I grew up thinking of Writers as irascibly fiery outsiders, tough to hoodwink, hard to bear at any closeness and hot with too much Truth. After a few years of filters-removed scrutiny, however, I see, largely, well-behaved careerists (or wannabe careerists) who usually take, as their starting points or premises, the manipulative fictions of our Gods. The Owners. The Über-Artists, on top. The rest of us writers are just taking dictation.
Well, fuck: I’m not.
I wrote, recently, to a friend,
“We are born into a system and acculturated to the system by converts of the system: which means we know nothing about this system except what the system thinks of itself (or wants us to think that it thinks)… until we can step outside of it. Discussing it on its own terms (in terminology it provides) is not, for me, ‘stepping outside of it’ “.
If “stepping outside of it” involves “negativity”, then so be it.
via Comrade JR, who is transmitting from Brazil this week
“Why were you in China?” asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.
“None of your business,” I said.
Her eyes widened in disbelief.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“I’m not going to be interrogated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own country,” I said.
This did not go over well. She asked a series of questions, such as how long I had been in China, whether I was there on personal business or commercial business, etc. I stood silently. She said that her questions were mandated by Congress and that I should complain to Congress instead of refusing to cooperate with her.
She asked me to take one of my small bags off her counter. I complied.
She picked up the phone and told someone I “was refusing to cooperate at all.” This was incorrect. I had presented her with proof of citizenship (a U.S. passport) and had moved the bag when she asked. What I was refusing to do was answer her questions.
every month, TET will hold a glitzy ceremony in the cavernous auditorium of the Collective Unconscious to Celebrate the Youngish American Consumer’s Fact-Transcending Ability to Absorb, Metabolize and Radiate the Normative Propaganda which is keening for the Apocalypse to crash down upon the Planet’s understandably-resentful Head!
And this month’s DUPEY winner is… (drum roll on a sand-nigger’s skull)…
“Jordan”, a commenter on HTML Giant!
# September 14th, 2010 / 9:29 am Steven Augustine—
Yeah, that Bjork fucked up. By actually making some semi-avant garde music to go with her nutty closet. If Bjork were recycling 80’s pop hooks with a karaoke voice, we’d be comparing *her* to Lynch and Warhol now. Whoa: Bjork-management-fail.
Q: But if The Beatles were super-hyped to distract us from the murder of JFK, what is GaGa distracting us from?
A: Justin Bieber
PS I read in People magazine that GaGa’s meat dress was made from Iraqis
reply
September 14th, 2010 / 9:50 amJordan—
The Beatles were super-hyped to cash in on the baby boom’s leverage over family disposable income. But conspiracy theories are good distractions too
reply
September 14th, 2010 / 9:58 am Steven Augustine—
have you heard the conspiracy theory about the break-in over at the Watergate hotel? crazy shit!
reply
September 14th, 2010 / 10:01 am Jordan—
Shit, man. And speaking of the man, keep on sticking it, Steven.
September 14th, 2010 / 11:57 am Steven Augustine—
This is the proper way to read almost any “conspiracy theory” which doesn’t involve extraterrestrials: pretend that the setting is Russia or the Third World! Suddenly, it will seem so much more *plausible*!
September 14th, 2010 / 12:02 pm Jordan—
Ok, Steven. There there. It’ll be ok.
Incidentally, and speaking of Russia, wouldn’t the more plausible event-driven account of the Beatles’ success have at least as much to do with the Cuban missile crisis as with the assassination of JFK?
September 14th, 2010 / 12:18 pm Steven Augustine—
As long as discussions of that nature aren’t pooh-poohed by Normative Default, I’m there, Agent Jordan!
PLUS OTHER PDFs I CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO ADD JUST NOW
UPDATE: NOT REALLY DIFFICULT TEXTS is now updated (as of Thurs, Sept 16th, 23:00 CET) to include a story I’d forgotten
I’m currently making a full-sized horse puppet which will be fed straw and veg whilst it’s being carved up to provide cuts of meat. We’re not protesting against anything specific just making a contribution to the Festival of Desperation run by some very old friends. The desire is to create a Tarot-card like image. It’ll end when the meat and the straw run out I should think.
I hadn’t thought of doing the above to it but as it’s for a public performance in mid October not in a hot country it’s unlikely that I will. Plus my knob isn’t impressive enough to waggle around in public.
I don’t think the feller waggling that Kama Sutra donkey thought he’d be snapped by a tourist with a disposable camera 1,000 years hence, Comrade ET… but, wait. What do you care what they think of you 1,000 years hence…?
Given those statues are hundreds of feet/metres in the air I’d certainly be worried that tourists could get up that high to take a photo.
But as the Bhagavad Gita says ” worry not about the tourists of future years it’s the bobby on the beat innit?” I paraphrase of course.
Berlin used to have its own version of those x-rated friezes… naked breasts on all the billboards and posters and in the shop windows advertising everything from socks to ice cream. Huge burnished things like zeppelin-tips at sunset overlooked every major intersection, practically. Great for tourism. If you were at all interested in naked breasts on a municipal scale, Berlin was your city (from c. 1990- c. 1997). Sadly, eventually Radical Lesbian Feminists put a stop to it as “demeaning”. If only they’d asked me I’d have suggested a program of a giant cock on view for every four or five breasts, to provide gender balance, but no one asked and one day the Marvelous Tits of Berlin were gone. The worst thing being that I didn’t get a digital camera until a few years after it was far too late.
Presumably the thinking was that if you’re out shopping you don’t want giant tits or giant cocks rammed down your throat at that time of day.
was interested in the Lady GaGa meat dress “furore” mainly because about 20 years ago someone I know made a beautiful meat suit for her partner’s 40th birthday. A slight difference in that she made the meat by making moulds of steaks and casting them in latex. A skillfull paint job and then tailored onto a suit she’d made. None of that string holding them on and a traffic stopping moment when her partner appeared.
I thought Paglia chose the wrong comparison. GaGa is a bargain-basement version ( in look at least, the music seems rather insipid ) of Matthew Barney who in turn is a chi-chi version of comic strip artist Moebius.
[ed.'s note: astute forensic analysis of a chain of conceptual thefts, Comrade ET]
Re: Matthew Barney: from the school of Hose The Stage With Money and Art Will Appear. Well-connected hack. At least he got Bjork after her sell-by.. (address all hate mail to….)
Re: Moebius… and Giger and Vaughn Bode: Literary artists should be ashamed of themselves for being so fucking timid and slow in comparison, eh?
Recently read JG Ballard’s last book “Miracles of Life” and enjoyed it. He’s an odd fish but the book is a well-compressed compendium of his obsessions. I’ve found his writing uneven but the images at times compelling but this one works probably because it’s an autobiography.
GaGa as a rectal thermometer. Not an image I want rammed down my throat at any time of the day but funny nonetheless.
I had a chum years ago who’d been watching too much yoof-oriented TV one weekend and developed a compulsion to have a tattoo. I tried to persuade him to tattoo his dick to look like a thermometer and despite the fact that we both immediately recognized the idea to be an instant classic, he didn’t quite have the… balls… to go through with it.
I was once eating at a vegetarian cafe when a down-and-out started banging on the big front window. When he’d caught everyone’s attention he opened his coat to reveal a parsnip poking out his flies. He got a big round of applause. We were lucky the restaurant didn’t serve meat I suppose.
SPOOKY, KOOKY or SPKOOKY?
GREAT MOMENTS IN PERMANOIA: THE MAN FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL DISCUSSES FLUORIDATION ( go to 7:27)
TOWARD A PERMANIST MANIFESTO
The New Trend on the Web should be shit staying exactly as it has been for… decades! Wouldn’t that be kinky? This Neomania meme is the most pernicious subverter of actual progress I can think of… you can’t build a culture or an idea-structure on constantly shifting sands. The amount of time I spend learning new gizmo protocols, every year, for example, is ridiculous. It’s like learning French for six months and then French 2.0 is released…
The formatting over at HTML Giant changed, overnight, and it’s a mess. Maybe they’ll tweak, or maybe they’ll revert, but the pressure to “update” is omnipresent. And artificial. Why the fuck won’t the perfectly-functional old look/format/protocol work? The point should be the conversations/ideas… those should change/develop/update. But it’s backwards: the conversations/debates/ideas repeat endlessly around the Web, while the formats are in a state of perpetual revolution.
[the class-of-68 New Wave Auteur's entry in this event can be seen in the form of three flat screens on the left side of the third photo; the other work is by an artist I won't name to avoid the long arm of Google but I must admit I like the drawings]
I am about to get on a jetplane, i.e. pressurized torture chamber for the next 18 hours…
I got sicker than a dogs butthole on a humid day in Sao Paulo. … so that really sucked. Two days with such high fever I could barely move out of the hotel. So photo-wise it is very slim pickings: I was lucky to make it to the exhibition hall and back.
A very big shame indeed, as the city is quite crazy in a good way (except for the damn automobile-traffic-chaos).
ANYwayz here are a couple of last snaps I took here on my final night…
Whose the artist I wonder? The drawings have a certain charm. I’m straining to see whether it’s the same person holding the gun or not and wondering whether it’s the artist himself.
Given the crap that’s been written about the Pope on his visit to the UK shores it would be good to see the drawing of him at gun-point reproduced on a billboard. Or summat .
I got a bad case of the shits when we performed in Rio many moons ago so my condolences to Comrade JR. I was told it’s usually caused by the “fresh mineral water” in bottles that are supposed to be sealed until you buy them but often the contents are drunk first and the bottle is then refilled from the tap and “sealed” to look as good as new.
Here’s some data for you, Comrade DJ Sensei ET (I like the drawings, too, but I’m not sure how CDS JR feels about them; I’ll ask after he lands and shakes the lag and whatever residual shitting off):
“A woman looks at drawings by painter Gil Vicente on display at the 29th Sao Paulo Art Biennial, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The drawings presented in an exhibition entitled Inimigos (Enemies), show the artist pointing a gun at prominent personalities, such as Pope Benedict XVI and former US President George W. Bush. The exhibition runs until 29 September. ”
If you build one of Tesla’s Spirit Radios today (plans/videos on building them are all over the net), you’ll pick up all kinds of transmissions from the radio-waves permeating modern existence; some of the transmissions will be near-coherent and sound like weirdly-pitched voices speaking unintelligible languages… which can be dismissed, rationally, as scrambled signals from, say, the Rush Limbaugh show.
But where were the voices that Tesla heard coming from, before the invention of Radio…?
Collier’s Weekly, February 19, 1901, page 4-5:
TALKING WITH THE PLANETS
==========B y N I K O L A T E S L A==========
EDITOR’S NOTE.–Mr. Nikola Tesla has accomplished some marvellous results in electrical discoveries. Now, with the dawn of the new century, he announces an achievement which will amaze the entire universe, and which eclipses the wildest dream of the most visionary scientist. He has received communication, he asserts, from out the great void of space: a call from the inhabitants of Mars, or Venus, or some other sister planet! And, furthermore, noted scientists like Sir Norman Lockyer are disposed to agree with Mr. Tesla in his startling deductions.
Mr. Tesla has not only discovered many important principles, but most of his inventions are in practical use: notably in the harnessing of the Titanic forces of Niagara Falls, and the discovery of a new light by means of a vacuum tube. He has, he declares, solved the problem of telegraphing without wires or artificial conductors of any sort, using the earth as his medium. By means of this principle he expects to be able to send messages under the ocean, and to any distance on the earth’s surface. Interplanetary communication has interested him for years, and he sees no reason why we should not soon be within talking distance of Mars or of all worlds in the solar system that may be tenanted by intelligent beings.
At the request of COLLIER’S WEEKLY Mr. Tesla presents herewith a frank statement of what he expects to accomplish and how he hopes to establish communication with the planets.
***
THE IDEA of communicating with the inhabitants of other worlds is an old one. But for ages it has been regarded merely as a poet’s dream, forever unrealizable. And with the invention and perfection of the telescope and the ever-widening knowledge of the heavens, its hold upon our imaginations has been increased, and the scientific achievements during the latter part of the nineteenth century, together with the development of the tendency toward the nature ideal of Goethe, have intensified it to such a degree that it seems as if it were destined to become the dominating idea of the century that has just begun. The desire to know something of our neighbors in the immense depths of space does not spring from idle curiosity nor from thirst for knowledge, but from a deeper cause, and it is a feeling firmly rooted in the heart of every human being capable of thinking at all.
Whence, then, does it come? Who knows? Who can assign limits to the subtlety of nature’s influences? Perhaps, if we could clearly perceive all the intricate mechanism of the glorious spectacle that is continually unfolding before us, and could, also, trace this desire to its distant origin, we might find it in the sorrowful vibrations of the earth which began when it parted from its celestial parent.
But in this age of reason it is not astonishing to find persons who scoff at the very thought of effecting communication with a planet. First of all, the argument is made that there is only a small probability of other planets being inhabited at all. This argument has never appealed to me. In the solar system, there seem to be only two planets–Venus and Mars–capable of sustaining life such as ours: but this does not mean that there might not be on all of them some other forms of life. Chemical processes may be maintained without the aid of oxygen, and it is still a question whether chemical processes are absolutely necessary for the sustenance of organized beings. My idea is that the development of life must lead to forms of existence that will be possible without nourishment and which will not be shackled by consequent limitations. Why should a living being not be able to obtain all the energy it needs for the performance of its life functions from the environment, instead of through consumption of food, and transforming, by a complicated process, the energy of chemical combinations into life-sustaining energy?
If there were such beings on one of the planets we should know next to nothing about them. Nor is it necessary to go so far in our assumptions, for we can readily conceive that, in the same degree as the atmosphere diminishes in density, moisture disappears and the planet freezes up, organic life might also undergo corresponding modifications, leading finally to forms which, according to our present ideas of life, are impossible. I will readily admit, of course, that if there should be a sudden catastrophe of any kind all life processes might be arrested; but if the change, no matter how great, should be gradual, and occupied ages, so that the ultimate results could be intelligently foreseen, I cannot but think that reasoning beings would still find means of existence. They would adapt themselves to their constantly changing environment. So I think it quite possible that in a frozen planet, such as our moon is supposed to be, intelligent beings may still dwell, in its interior, if not on its surface.
SIGNALLING AT 100,000,000 MILES!
Then it is contended that it is beyond human power and ingenuity to convey signals to the almost inconceivable distances of fifty million or one hundred million miles. This might have been a valid argument formerly. It is not so now. Most of those who are enthusiastic upon the subject of interplanetary communication have reposed their faith in the light-ray as the best possible medium of such communication. True, waves of light, owing to their immense rapidity of succession, can penetrate space more readily than waves less rapid, but a simple consideration will show that by their means an exchange of signals between this earth and its companions in the solar system is, at least now, impossible. By way of illustration, let us suppose that a square mile of the earth’s surface–the smallest area that might possibly be within reach of the best telescopic vision of other worlds–were covered with incandescent lamps, packed closely together so as to form, when illuminated, a continuous sheet of light. It would require not less than one hundred million horse-power to light this area of lamps, and this is many times the amount of motive power now in the service of man throughout the world.
But with the novel means, proposed by myself, I can readily demonstrate that, with an expenditure not exceeding two thousand horse-power, signals can be transmitted to a planet such as Mars with as much exactness and certitude as we now send messages by wire from New York to Philadelphia. These means are the result of long-continued experiment and gradual improvement.
Some ten years ago, I recognized the fact that to convey electric currents to a distance it was not at all necessary to employ a return wire, but that any amount of energy might be transmitted by using a single wire. I illustrated this principle by numerous experiments, which, at that time, excited considerable attention among scientific men.
This being practically demonstrated, my next step was to use the earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors. So I was led to the development of a system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires, which I described in 1893. The difficulties I encountered at first in the transmission of currents through the earth were very great. At that time I had at hand only ordinary apparatus, which I found to be ineffective, and I concentrated my attention immediately upon perfecting machines for this special purpose. This work consumed a number of years, but I finally vanquished all difficulties and succeeded in producing a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signalling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.
Tesla’s Equipment
EXPERIMENTS IN COLORADO
To develop these inventions further, I went to Colorado in where I continued my investigations along these and other lines, one of which in particular I now consider of even greater importance than the transmission of power without wires. I constructed a laboratory in the neighborhood of Pike’s Peak. The conditions in the pure air of the Colorado Mountains proved extremely favorable for my experiments, and the results were most gratifying to me. I found that I could not only accomplish more work, physically and mentally, than I could in New York, but that electrical effects and changes were more readily and distinctly perceived. A few years ago it was virtually impossible to produce electrical sparks twenty or thirty foot long; but I produced some more than one hundred feet in length, and this without difficulty. The rates of electrical movement involved in strong induction apparatus had measured but a few hundred horse-power, and I produced electrical movements of rates of one hundred and ten thousand horse-power. Prior to this, only insignificant electrical pressures were obtained, while I have reached fifty million volts.
The accompanying illustrations, with their descriptive titles, taken from an article I wrote for the “Century Magazine,” may serve to convey an idea of the results I obtained in the directions indicated.
Many persons in my own profession have wondered at them and have asked what I am trying to do. But the time is not far away now when the practical results of my labors will be placed before the world and their influence felt everywhere. One of the immediate consequences will be the transmission of messages without wires, over sea or land, to an immense distance. I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signalling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.
I have every reason for congratulating myself that throughout these experiments, many of which were exceedingly delicate and hazardous, neither myself nor any of my assistants received any injury. When working with these powerful electrical oscillations the most extraordinary phenomena take place at times. Owing to some interference of the oscillations, veritable balls of fire are apt to leap out to a great distance, and if any one were within or near their paths, he would be instantly destroyed. A machine such as I have used could easily kill, in an instant, three hundred thousand persons. I observed that the strain upon my assistants was telling, and some of them could not endure the extreme tension of the nerves. But these perils are now entirely overcome, and the operation of such apparatus, however powerful, involves no risk whatever.
As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble effects. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance travelled. These appliances are likely to be valuable in future meteorological observations and surveying, and will lend themselves particularly to many naval uses.
It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles.
TERRIFIED BY SUCCESS
I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.
The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals; and it was with this conviction that I announced to the Red Cross Society, when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years, that it would probably be the confirmation and interpretation of this planetary challenge to us.
Since my return to New York more urgent work has consumed all my attention; but I have never ceased to think of those experiences and of the observations made in Colorado. I am constantly endeavoring to improve and perfect my apparatus, and just as soon as practicable I shall again take up the thread of my investigations at the point where I have been forced to lay it down for a time.
COMMUNICATING WITH THE MARTIANS
At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars, nor would there be any great difficulty in recording signals transmitted to us by the inhabitants of that planet, if they be skilled electricians. Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid. Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number “four,” say, in reply to the signal “one, two, three.” The Martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signalled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. To convey a knowledge of form by such means is, while very difficult, not impossible, and I have already found a way of doing it.
What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come? For that it will some time be accomplished must be clear to every thoughtful being.
Something, at least, science has gained. But I hope that it will also be demonstrated soon that in my experiments in the West I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth.
THE COMMENT ABROAD
1. ANOTHER DULL SUICIDE NOTE FROM GENERATION SCHIZ
Over at Thought Catalog, Brandon Scott Gorrell has written an essay about the Bloggoblob that sort of epitomizes (the seeming-paradox of) the Communal Solipsism of Generation Schiz.
Generation Schiz is not, btw, like all the famously named-generations before it, a category of birthdate; this is the first Generation in modern history which collapses the age-differential into a weird point of eternal agelessness or nether-maturity having nothing to do with wrinkles and retracting hairlines or the absence thereof.
Generation Schiz is nether-mature and in a limbo of Taste, too, due to the powerful deformations of Late Game Consumerism, which is, as we know, the fastest-growing Cult going. Generation Schiz is a Communal Solipsist which expresses itself with a social IQ of precisely 100. It is (in the parlance of market testing), a “joiner”, constantly joining Itself in a closed loop of producing the Normative for Normative consumption. All of its books/movies/paintings/poems/songs/blogs seem created by one really average entity which could very well be a LOLcat, a LOLcat smart enough to get what was funny about writing LOL the first 10,000 times, without being smart enough to see what was tragic about LOL# 10,000,000,001.
The con/uni/formity Chairman Mao tried for with the Cultural Revolution is finally achieved with the very tools and vectors Mao had hoped to build his revolution as a bulwark against. The hormone-driven fundamentalism of young men is nothing compared to a system capable of putting that very fundamentalism on a plane with every other niche market in history and selling the totality as a kind of software to play on must-have gadgets with shelf-lives of a few weeks at a time. I see a pulsating Culture Blob. It doesn’t smell bad but it doesn’t smell very good, either.
“Blobbing” is the gerund of the eternal near-future of Generation Schiz and Blogging is how (well, pre-Twitter/YouTube) the Blobbing talks to itself, I suppose. Some of us, of the non-Blobbed, appear to be using the form illegally. Or immorally? We aren’t joining.
Brandon attempts to describe the natural evolution of the typical Blogger in his essay and, like Sigmund Freud, formulating his theory of the Oedipus Complex before him, says lots more about the Communal Presets of Generation Schiz (and himself) than about all Bloggers/Blogging. Brandon wraps up the essay with,
“In 2007, on brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com, I blogged for hits because I was lonely and insecure and I wanted people to recognize me as a deep individual that knew something mysterious and special that they would never be able to understand, even if I were to offer them a sufficient explanation. Now I am not as lonely as I once was, and I have written this article on Thought Catalog to attract your pageview with the hopes of one day making money from it.”
To which I responded:
staugustine 41 minutes ago
You missed the important angle of the pleasure of specialized conversation, having nothing to do with status and/or money-making (ie, traffic). The Bloggoblob is refining itself into its myriad hives, some of which are centered around Special Areas of Knowledge (SAK), and, in cases where the SAK is not by nature a controversial one, you’ll find these little communities of people indulging in the kind of spirited-but-friendly conversations you’d find happening at rural social functions in the early 20th century, before every fucking activity on earth became centered on money-making and the material spoils thereof. And that’s a pretty marvelous socio-historical corrective. Post-Industrial developments scattered and isolated people, intellectually, and now a post-post Industrial development is re-introducing these people to a sense of intellectual community.
I’ve bookmarked about a hundred Blogs that each offer a certain aesthetic POV or experience or collective reservoir of knowledge and just this tiny number of sites represents a People’s Virtual Library of Alexandria that it would take me years to get through… and the material is arranged and offered for free! The value of knowledge-for-knowledge’s sake is alive and well on the the Internet (along with every form of digitizable sociopathy on earth, unfortunately), even as it vanishes as the foundational ethos of Institutional Education. The only price/caveat being that you have to know where to find it. Only takes a few years’ experience.
The must-drive-traffic-at-all-costs model of blogging is the most unimaginative use of the technology imaginable: ie, to get (or simulate having) a job.
I think quite a bit of social engineering has gone into all this; I think we take for granted the sense that different groups will fear/resent/demonize one another *naturally*, when it’s always been my experience that, in the absence of unnatural (and sinister) external pressure, natural curiosity usually drives groups to interact in a friendly way… and that’s not to mention the mongrelizing, bio-hygienic force of exogamy.
Groups only naturally become hostile and exclusive when they’re being forced to compete for food/shelter/sexual partners. In Lands of Plenty (ie the “developed world”), this factor should pose no threat. White college students and Black college students and Asian college students, in other words, should be getting on like a house on fire (ignoring the fact that they shouldn’t be so segregated, in the first place, after all these generations, as to leave so much to be curious about). There should, with so much food and shelter available to most of the population, be mind-boggling amounts of mingling.
But then the Television/Radio/Newspaper/Internet hydra and its fear-mongering demagogues (of the rightwing and bien pensant persuasion, both) make sure to fix that because, after all, the last thing you want, if you’re trying to play Kaiser, is to have all the Serfs unite and re-direct hostile eyes towards the Kaiser-class, instead.
(That last clause in the last sentence isn’t any less true for being the hoariest cliche in the Dissident Handbook, btw! laugh)
TALES of GUMS, BALLS and VELOCITY
Wisconsin governor seeks to remove ‘sexting’ DA
Doyle’s office also made public a letter sent last week from a second woman who says Kratz abused his position in seeking a relationship with her earlier this year. In the letter, the woman said Kratz gave her confidential details of a high-profile investigation and invited her to a slain woman’s autopsy “provided I act as his girlfriend and would wear high heels and a skirt.”
Only interesting or illegal if he demanded she dress up in the slain woman’s heels and skirt.
Carrier pigeon beats broadband in race to highlight poor rural web service
A computer file upload raced the pigeon, carrying the same information on a memory card, between Beverley and Wrangle in Lincolnshire. When the bird arrived after a 75-minute flight, the upload was just 30% complete.
In total, the video took more than five hours to upload on the YouTube website.
How long did it take the pigeon to deliver the video to 1,000,000 viewers?
Britain’s top novelist plans to move definitively to New York
Amis latest novel The Pregnant Widow” did not have a good review particularly by feminine critics.
The British press has also interfered in the private life of Amis and criticized he spent part of the advance of half a million pounds for another book, in improving his denture, and which they attributed to the “novelist’s vanity”. A coming book on his biography point out that he suffers of gingivitis.
Erm, no pithy one-liner available to critique this…
LUVLY
CONCERNING YOUR LITTLE BELLOW AWARD FOR GOOD CITIZENSHIP
or WE DON’T HANG OUR WRITERS WE GIVE THEM PATS ON THE TUCHAS
Mr. Don D., one of the great literary stylists of the latter half of the Anglophone 20th Century, demonstrates the taming effect success can have on the creative energy of the mildly paranoid imagination with this bit from a recent interview (upon his winning the tragically-named Bellow Award) in which Don sounds quite remarkably like a retiree explaining how the pop music of his generation was real pop music whereas the shit you kids listen to now…
DeLillo: The earlier era of paranoia in this country was based largely on violent events and on the suspicions that spread concerning the true nature of the particular event, from Dallas to Memphis to Vietnam. Who was behind it, what led to it, what will flow from it? How many shots, how many gunmen, how many wounds on the President’s body? People believed, sometimes justifiably, that they were being lied to by the government or elements within the government. Today, it seems, the virus is self-generated. Distrust and disbelief are centered in a deep need to raise individual discontent to an art form, often with no basis in fact. In many cases, people choose to believe a clear falsehood, about President Obama, for instance, or September 11, or immigrants, or Muslims. These are often symbolic beliefs, usable kinds of fiction, a means of protest rising from political, economic, religious, or racial complaints, or just a lousy life in a dying suburb.
Don. Wait. The bullets and their wounds are no longer real? Government became trustworthy when you reached X-years-of-age? Is that sort of like announcing that The System is no longer unjust the day you earn you first million? Is that sort of like saying The Oscars are no longer bullshit the day you’re nominated for one? Your paranoia was sometimes justified yet ours is “self-generated”… ? What’s the “clear falsehood” about 9/11, Donald… that “Muslims” did it or that they didn’t?
PEN: Can you talk about your involvement with PEN and what it means to defend the rights of writers in the U.S. and around the world? What do you see as the writer’s role or responsibility in the public sphere?
Wait. “Defend the rights of writers” against what… ? Symbolic beliefs?
As I wrote about Donald on August 21st:
Don DeLillo is branded (and is a Brand) as the Elder Statesman of America’s paranoiacs… despite an obvious tonal aversion to atrocity. This is ridiculous.
If Norman Mailer hailed the work of Paul Bowles as the herald of the death of the Square, the Square is here to inform Mailer (the way God informed Nietzsche) that its death was greatly exaggerated… and, also, that that Don DeLillo guy is a way-out proposition, man. Don DeLillo is no Paul Bowles, as far as that goes: he’s as safe as warm milk before bed in the 1950s. He’s no Square-killer. He’s a stylist of immense talent with the disposition of a supremely-genial dinner date. You can’t really have a Literary King of the Paranoiacs with a tonal aversion to atrocity; not in a 21st Century America in which 79% of all registered Conspiranoiacs believe that a former Vice President of the United States would unwind, on the weekends, by hunting Playboy Bunnies with a sniper-scoped rifle.
That DeLillo is one of the genuinely towering post War stylists of Am Lit is a cosmic joke of real nuance: he sheds such dazzling spectra on every page, in range from the unseen to the super-seen, in the service of doing his best not to say too much… not to go too far… not to cross any lines that would scare the horses. The sheep sometimes tremble, as in George Will’s famously clenched-buttock of a broadside accusing DeLillo’s even-tempered Libra of being an act of “bad citizenship”. But the horses yawn. 55% of registered Conspiranoiacs believe that Catherine the Great fucked horses, after all.
Not even horses fuck horses in DeLillo (though they do in corny old, onomatopoeic Tom Wolfe: the only truly wondrous set piece in A Man in Full featured a “winking” equine cunt that haunts me to this day).
DeLillo is a gentleman of the knowing-chuckle-on-the-stoop school. He allegorizes his mistrust of politicians in a wry hand-in-the-cookie jar, Norman-Rockwellian fashion. Or, say: imagine “Guernica” as painted by Rockwell and Rockwell’s “Little League” as painted by Picasso… imagine a diptych of these: that’s DeLillo’s tone as a Literary Philosopher (even if his personal tastes run to Coltrane and Pollock). This would account for the mainstream appeal of his bomb-throwing syntax.
He was the Edgar Cayce of the World Trade Center until it actually fell down. A lyrical game of feint and implication is great until history calls your bluff and makes an extremely explicit statement in the form of rubble and corpses and lava: then what? Falling Man was DeLillo coming out with his hands up. Falling Man was a white flag. The DeLillo of Mao ll and Underworld was like the greatest poet of 19th Century France waging an irresistible campaign to romance a late-20th Century starlet bursting with silicon tits and a wad of Bazooka bubblegum in her mouth…. until he got her in bed. At some point the poetry had to stop. He’d rather it hadn’t. He preferred risque innuendo.
The aesthetic condition of the Anglophone sentence reached a thus-far unmatched apogee in Underworld, I still firmly believe. But are Aesthetes and Aesthetics everything? At this point I’d settle for something Heroic.
Have never read any Zizek. Perhaps I should but I can’t be arsed at the moment.
The Seventh Seal photo you post sums up post-modernism for me quite neatly.
When I first saw that film ( aged 11 or 12 ) the chess-playing scene was the one that stood out and seemed deep in a way that my young self couldn’t entirely grasp.
Seen later as a brash art-student ( at least in comparison to my 12 year old self ) it seemed a bit heavy-hand and laughable. Possibly I had seen the many parodies that comedians had made on TV.
Now it still seems OTT daft but despite the creaking symbolism, Bergman’s over-bearing seriousness, the fact that its depiction of death has become the stuff of bloody mime-statues on the bloody streets of every bloody city in every bloody country, it still retains a cinematic power.
I’ve always supposed that post-modernism was after that effect. A truth whilst showing you how that truth was created. Truth is perhaps not the right word.
Comrade ET! Zizek is a Fancy Explainer who seems more serious than BHL because he’s not a sexy Frenchman with exposed chest hair and a hot actress wife (see above pic; although other pics are heavier on the chest hair). Ziz is a compulsively-nose-hair- tweaking crypto-Communist, super-smart teddy bear Philosopher that American undergrads and recent-grads of a certain persuasion (relatively not-Rightist) were really, really into a few years ago and are still kind of into now… mostly because (when he isn’t uttering post-Lacanian Incomprehensibles) he tells them what they like to hear: that Hollywood movies aren’t automatically Normative bullshit, for example. That’s my unfair reading in a nutshell.
The kid who wrote that pseudo-Nietzschean suicide note (the stuff I’ve read from it is largely Oh-Wow-isms written in an unconvincingly unaccomplished style) was obviously influenced by Zizek’s hi-lo gimmick and his fondness for paradox joke-aphorisms. He probably had an IQ of 110 and had been encouraged to believe he was an intellectual singularity by people with an IQ of 105. He should’ve worked on the book another ten years, editing out the useless crap (eg “The first superhuman AI might merge all of the computational power on the internet into its own power, master all of the significant information on the internet, and then reorganize the entire global brain of the internet so that it “wakes up” as the global mind of God”) and condensing it into a serious meditation on the academic obsession with Posthumous Fame. Or something. And then killed himself (on TV instead of on a campus, though: without a video of the event, the legend of an event can no longer develop).
Re: The 7th Seal: it was never the same for me after Woody Allen parodied it at the end of (I think it was) Love and Death! Still a great mood-piece evocative of a certain era in Art, though (more on that anon)…
Re: Postmodernism: I always think of it as a fully-functional (albeit phenomenally inconvenient) Glass Cadillac Wheels of glass, too…
Check out this recent Zizek-based video event, in which the very first pronouncement Ziz makes, “Images are the reality…” is so terribly easily refuted (images the reality until you’re hit by a truck in an intersection, or you’re arrested for a DUI or DWB and have a nightstick intervening up your arse in jail… ie, until Real Reality Imposes Itself Violently Upon A Neatly Philosophical Soundbite and other sense organs take over)…
MR LANEOUS NOTES on MALAMUD, NOE and BROYARD
1. FIDELMAN
Every week or so I pick a lightweight, not-particularly-precious and/or fragile book to use as my U-Bahn novel… the prop I use on the subway. If you’re not a dedicated teenage text-messager or someone toting a newborn, you need a book, otherwise, what do you look at when the windows on the train are black with underground? Avoiding the stares (if you’re an obvious Ausländer) of fellow passengers is a game which ceases to charm and delight after only a minute or two.
My U-Bahn books are read (usually re-read) slowly, two-to-five pages per trip. The last one I conscripted was Markson’s nice little This Is Not A Novel (physically lightweight with no rain-damage-or-handling-anxiety attached as the book is cheap/replaceable). Before that was Amis’ bulky, lurid-covered The Pregnant Widow, which I tried to force myself to complete by making it the U-Bahn book and which strategy backfired when I found myself on the train with the book in my lap, gazing out the black windows, bored or irritated with the plodding text and its precious characters. Martin is just not very good at crafting sex-goddesses I can imagine wanting to fuck (I sometimes wonder if he’s Virgin Queer); the very queer irony being how often they end up resembling Katie Price, physically…
Now I’m using Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman, one of those novels (or a short-story-collection-doubling-as-a-novel, sort of, in this case) which started life as a perfect short-story and expanded into a less-perfect novel… McEwan’s Enduring Love is another example. The first time I read Fidelman, in 2007 or so, the drop-off in quality from the first chapter (the original, self-contained story), into the rest of the book, felt more abrupt than it does on this second reading. I also didn’t notice, the first time, how Pictures of Fidelman, which is a Portrait of the Artist-type novel/ story-cycle, highlights a massive paradigm shift, in the Arts, between the era of the book’s writing (1960s) and today. I mean massive.
Which I’ll get into a few hours from now, after I come back from today’s adventures in The Great Outside…
2. THE REPTILIAN ELECTORATE
A few weeks ago, I jotted in a notebook:
“My experience in comment threads for the last five years indicates (among other things) that the average American college student (or recent grad) is a humorless, anti-intellectual, consumerist tit who may or may not enjoy watching torture porn but who certainly isn’t against it.”
If you’ve ever made it through the first fifteen minutes of the sinisterly pointless (masquerading as profound) torture-porn video-movie Irreversible (aka Irredeemable), this chunk from a recent comment thread may frighten you just a little… but it will certainly explain why there’s so little visceral American outrage about American mercenaries invading countries and slaughtering the civilians on a dizzyingly industrial scale (and schedule). The image I’m stuck with is two-legged lizards jacking off over corpses.
kristin 3 days ago
oh man. this is exciting. thanks for sharing, ken.
i just watched Irreversible for the first time and nearly lost my mind. Noé brick-pounds obscenity and revulsion into a ravishing pulpy sex paste. i think he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, and his facial hair looks like it could be detached and used as an instrument to commit unspeakable acts.
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Ken Baumann 2 days ago in reply to kristin
The first scene in the Rectum is just… total.
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lorian 2 days ago in reply to kristin
irreversible made me cry the first time i watched it, then i got turned on with a second viewing, think this is probably “a red flag” or something. that last scene with the beethoven score kills.
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kristin 2 days ago in reply to lorian
i had a similar reaction. first viewing had me emotionally wracked, second viewing i was able to appreciate the erotic brutality for what it was. i agree with ken that the first rectum scene is a killer, and the the beethoven at the end is a perfect bookend.
i stand alone just arrived via netflix, excited for that.
Just a few short decades of Social Engineering really pays off, I’d say. That is, if you wanted a Reptilian Electorate, Sirs.
3. FIDELMAN
3a
The Internet saves me the laborious, monodextrous effort of typing. About Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, we Google and we find (here slightly edited and heavily annotated for accuracy):
1969 Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition.
Pictures of Fidelman is a short story collection by Bernard Malamud, which gathers six stories dealing with Arthur Fidelman, an art student from the Bronx who travels to Italy, initially to research Giotto, but also with the hopes of becoming a painter. The collection, published in 1969, includes stories from Malamud’s earlier collections The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963), plus three previously unpublished stories.
The Stories
Aside from Arthur Fidelman, the only character that appears in more than one story is Bessie, his sister, a mother of five living in Levittown, who occasionally sends him money.
1. “The Last Mohican”: First published in The Magic Barrel; Fidelman is persecuted by his own Jewishness; in the form of Susskind, an exiled Israeli. Fidelman is writing a book on Giotto: Susskind steals and burns it, as if to say, who are you to talk about Giotto? Denied even the release of indignation or anger, Fidelman “understands” Susskind’s gesture, and in a return to the charity and humility that he now sees as his only talent, he gives Susskind one of his two suits.
[ed's note: Lazy reading to say the least: Susskind... who might as well be wearing his striped camp pyjamas, so soon after The Shoah and so near to its epicenter does this all take place... haunts "the student" from the day the naive, assimilated Jew arrives in Rome. Fidelman brings with him two suits (one threadbare) and, in a pretentious leather briefcase, the first and only chapter of a flounderingly over-worked dissertation on Giotto, which Fidelman considers precious/important and the key to his future (having given up on painting before arriving in Rome). Susskind begs for the second of Fidelman's suits, is rebuffed, disappears with a shrug, returns with the stealth of a trickster spirit and, acting as a sort of therapeutic nemesis, steals not the suit but the briefcase containing the dissertation. Fidelman goes nuts with rage/loss. Tracks, after weeks, the thief down... to the Old Jewish Ghetto, of course. One of the location-sets of Ben Hur, I think. Offers Susskind a reward for the chapter (the suit). Susskind plays dumb. Fidelman, defeated, leaves... returning to catch Susskind burning the last pages of the unfinished dissertation, tossing an incisive critique over his shoulder as he flees Fidelman's manifest lust to cut Susskind's refugee throat: "The words were there but the spirit was missing." Fidelman chases the former inmate of Dachau/ Buchenwald/ Theresienstadt (you name it) who becomes a figure right out of Chagall, "light as the wind in his marvelous knickers, green coat tails flying"... until Fidelman, mid-flight, has his epiphany: Susskind has freed him! Susskind has showed him the way!
"Susskind come back," he shouted, sobbing. "The suit is yours. All is forgiven."
Fidelman returns to the self-destructive pursuit of his true apparent calling: Painting. ]
2. “Still Life”: First published in Idiots First; Fidelman preserves again, masochistically falling in love with an Italian girl who will have nothing to do with him until he denies his identity by painting her as a Madonna and himself as a priest.
[ed.'s note: the Italian girl, Annamaria Oliovino, owns the studio Fidelman sublets space to live and paint in. She is scrawnily alluring: maybe her Bohemian sluttishness makes her a Shiksa goddess or her cruelty makes her a Nazi stand-in who Fidelman conceives a Stockholm Syndrome-type passion for. He does everything to get into her pants; he nearly unlocks her pussy with a portrait his dominatrix approves of but spills seed the instant she handles his cock, which does not, as they say, go down well (which is Fellini-esque; such sexual-dysfunction-mocked-by-harpies scenes are familiar from Satyricon and Casanova both, though they post-date Fidelman). Fidelman finally gets his reward after painting the picture described in the blurb; they dress as priest and nun and Fidelman "slowly nail(s) her to her cross". But shouldn't it have been "his" cross rather than hers? Bernard... if only I'd been your editor....]
3. “Naked Nude”: First published in Idiots First; Fidelman blackmailed—through a series of improbable events—into painting a copy of Titian’s “Venus of Urbion.” The plan is to substitute the copy and make off with the original, but at the last moment—in an absurd self-affirmation—Fidelman chooses to keep his own work.
[ed.'s note: again, the artist produces a mitigated-masterpiece (Malamud seems ambivalent about whether Fidelman is actually any good) as a result of prolonged abuse: is this a parable of Artists or Jews?]
4. “A Pimp’s Revenge” puts Fidelman in bed with Esmeralda, a young whore. Trying unsuccessfully to complete a painting of himself and his mother that has tortured him for years, Fidelman hits on the idea of having Esmeralda model for the mother, hoping that this will give new impetus to the project. The painting turns out to be a masterpiece, but instead of “Mother and Son,” it is “Prostitute and Procurer”.
[ed.'s note: the blurbist here omits to mention that Fidelman, an OCD Hamlet of nachdenken, as the Germans put it... of over-thinking... repaints the masterpiece, fucks it up, earns a scream of "murderer!" from Esmeralda for his self-destructive destruction of the painting, stabs himself in the gut with a bread knife.
The chapter/story following this one goes Modernist/stream-of-consciousness in a way that either indicates near-death and recuperation or Malamud's easy way to compress the intervening years before we catch up with Fidelman, in the chapter following this next chapter, in Venice. In the middle of the psychedelic-Modernist effects we find Fidelman, who may or may not be hallucinating, earning a beggar's living by sculpting-out negative cubes in the dirt, a very modern art indeed, and, by the way, has anyone addressed how tempting it is for writers to "do" the other Arts on the page? Music, Painting, Movies, Dance... what Writer isn't sometimes tempted to do what the respective masters of those forms can't come close to simulating, themselves, in their respective media, re: Writing? It's the Unspoken Arrogance of Lit how we all, all of us scribblers, do it, from time to time, and, sometimes, so well. But we digress:
Fidelman is sculpting empty spaces in the dirt of the fields around town, cordoning off the "gallery", charging admission... he eventually meets the Devil, who promptly "buries" Fidelman in the cubical grave of one of his own sculptures.
There follows some Modernist monkey-business which includes a paragraph of stacked numbers, a concrete acrostic poem, a return of Susskind as Christ Obvious, feverish art history name-dropping... all something the reader endures, an unintended treatise on the limits of Literary Modernism, in a way... you can do this in a painting or with a saxophone but it doesn't come off on the page. Which is as insightful a conclusion to draw from the failure of the passage as anything Malamud may have meant to say with it.
Considering the fact that the book itself is structured around three stories from previous collections, and three original to the book, which took, together, 12 years to write, starting with the 1958 publication of the first chapter, it's not unreasonable to assume that this chapter/story was written c. 1968 and reflects a certain psychedelic influence... maybe even the Stargate Sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fidelman is transported across endless color-splashed-tracts of Art History and suddenly finds himself in a setting even more mundane than the luxury suite Dave Bowman finds himself standing in, as a glorious non-sequitur, near the end of Kubrick's 2001: a cellar in the house in a room at the top of which is sister Bessie is dying in. Bessie doesn't become a space fetus, or a Starchild, when she expires at the end of this bit, but she ascends to a heaven of circles, cones and triangles, so: close. Is Malamud traducing Kubrick, that famously-non-practicing, super-secular, married-to-a-Shiksa Jew since directing Spartacus, c. 1958? She's just not any old Shiksa goddess; maybe Bernard was aware of this fact; she's the niece of Veit Harlan, director of the most famous piece of anti-Jewish propaganda in Nazi-Cinema History: Jew Süss. Suss as in Susskind?
The text has run away with me...
The entire chapter/story allows itself the freedom of its explicit conceits.]
5. “Pictures of the Artist” is a heavy kreplach of quotations, maunderings about art, truth, the devil, ect. Fidelman’s stream-of-consciousness, heavy with quotations, revealing his thoughts about life, art, and truth.
[ed.'s note: ibid]
6. “Glass Blower of Venice” finds Fidelman sleeping now with Margherita, until her homosexual husband Beppo ambushes and rapes him in the same bed. Fidelman learns about love and glass blowing—a peculiarly complex pun on Malamud’s part—and takes these accomplishments finally returns to America.
[ed.'s note: just as Susskind freed Fidelman to paint by burning his dissertation, Beppo frees Fidelman (who has been fucking Beppo's wife), to blow glass, by destroying F.'s paintings. Fidelman becomes as OCD about the glass-blowing (cock-sucking) as he had been about painting and sculpting and, before that, his dissertation. Beppo: "Half a talent is worse than none", and it's hard to say if this is the novel's true epigraph (vs the decorative Yeats and Rilke quotes on page -1). But the allegory is clear when Beppo's wife, F.'s former mistress, begs Fidelman to "leave Venice" because he's destroying her family; the natural order of things. The last line of the book: "In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women."
And the Old World breathed a Goyish sigh of relief?]
3b
The Googled text I quote (and fuck with) above, on Fidelman, borrows heavily from a review of the book by Anatole Broyard. Some of you will know who Anatole Broyard was and will Grok the deliciousness of this Novel of the Inauthentic (first: it deals with Art, ie Artifice; Second: it deals also with a Jew eluding Jewishness, it might seem) getting a thumbs-down from Broyard, the Greenwich Village critic/writer/dandy who has famous, in the end, for being a Mulatto “passing” (were those Bohemians blind or kindly humoring him?) for White.
A hundred or so pages into Pictures of Fidelman, it struck me that in the reality of the book, and the actual era in which the book was written, individual paintings are considered to be of great importance. Fidelman struggles for weeks, months, years on his Madonna and Child (which ended up as Prostitute and Pimp): to get this one painting right would have meant everything to him. Individual paintings, for Fidelman… (chapter three, in which Picasso “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” is name-dropped, is dedicated to Titian’s Venus of Urbino) are like cathedrals, cities, lovers, feasts, eras. Individual paintings are studied, entered, revered, fallen-in-love-with, molested, digested. Paintings/sculptures/performances aren’t mere filler or background for fleshing out the myth or justifying the success of the Celebrity Artist: they are the point. The point is the locus. Picasso is Picasso because he painted “Les Desmoiselles” and all the others; it is not about (the vice versa reality of, a la Koons, Hirst, Banksy): works of art becoming Art merely because Picasso had something to do with them. The oeuvre, in that context, is not an undifferentiated blur with an expensive shimmer to it.
So: name a contemporary painting (not the painter). Name the painting we study, swoon over, rage against, dream of, aspire to equal or hunger to fuck. Can’t. In thirty or forty short years, we’ve lost the ability to go nuts over a work of Art. This ability has been replaced with the ability to want to be as rich/famous as any given Celebrity Artist.
Isn’t this the same as the loss of the ability to mourn the news of the death of any given non-celebrity stranger? Or the loss of the ability to celebrate the idea that a non-celebrity human birth occurs… a new life, a new voice, more dreams, struggles (life qua life) with every letter I type onto the screen? What interests us now are megadeaths or megawealth or the abstract notion of Art as conduit to channel power and pleasure and attention on a vast scale. The ability to love a painting is the ability to love what the painting is about, which is always, inevitably, human life… on the scale of the individual (the individual who created it). The ability to be stopped in one’s tracks in a museum or a gallery or a thrift shop by a work of Art, with no regard for the aura of wealth or fame surrounding it (which is why it’s impossible to discuss The Mona Lisa on these terms because it ceased being a painting even while painting-qua-painting was a practice in its golden age)… what a loss to search your soul for these feelings and come back with a neutral and unresolved impression. The loss of empathetic connection to a human scale of existence.
Name a contemporary painting/novel/song/film you have invested hours in a serious and/or ecstatic struggle with. Contemporary, say… but roughly five years old (to diminish the likelihood that your feelings toward the artifact are driven by the cynical manipulations of Commercial Hype). Name that painting you return to the museum every day at lunch-time to stare at. We’ve all been pseudo-professionalized and hyper-inflated away from that deeply human and terribly “naive” and quietly-registered ability. We want to know how “well” a movie did at the box office; what record the auction broke; how many prizes the novel won. We adapt to the attitudes and lingo of industrial venality like “Insiders”. Number Junkies and Size Queens… Dupes… we gave away our vinyl for showers of zeroes and ones…
Saint Fidelman seems impossible now: what “professional” artist would spend five years, trying to get one painting right, in the 21st century? Unless the five years were filmed…?
My life which normally veers from melancholy to artistic concentration to pleasure ( not necessarily in that order or ratio ) now seems empty not having watched ” the first scene with the Rectum”.
I’ve never seen a Gaspar Noe film and can’t imagine why I’d want to but your description of it being sinisterly pointless makes it sound quite good.
Presumably that student exchange ends up with everyone concerned twittering onomatapoeic renditions of their orgasms with plenty of forward slashes.
“your description of it being sinisterly pointless makes it sound quite good”
And any “adult” audience that *needs* a blood-sopping, 9 minute rape, or to see a CGI skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, in order to “get” the message (what was the message again? that ultra-violence puts asses on cinema seats?) is surely beyond redemption. Why not an anti-child-abuse flick with name actors and topshelf cinematography/FX featuring (as its 9 minute viral setpiece) a newborn boiled alive?
Christ… that makes it sound even more interesting, right…? (larf)
PS And “The Rectum” is a Gay fuck-club, so it’s not “with” The Rectum, but… “in”…
Forgive me Steven you expressed yourself very clearly. I was just thinking sinisterly pointless sounds intriguing whereas pointlessly sinister doesn’t.
[ed.'s note: sometimes word-order is everything, Comrade ET. You're looking for it on The Pirate Bay as I type this, aren't you...?]
[but, seriously, "irreversible made me cry the first time i watched it, then i got turned on with a second viewing" is quite a sickening thing to read, I think; even if you haven't endured the film]
It’s admirably frank as a comment but disturbingly close to the sort of things it’s reported that serial killers write
Fuck me, isn’t it, though? More bricks to fortify the Bunker, Comrade ET… I think I see some 20-something cinephiles coming…
Good luck Steven – you could try putting up posters advertising “Baise Moi” in Dresden tomorrow. That should head them off at the pass.
“Baise Moi”… hmmm… too old school… not enough graphically-crushed-in-real-time skulls. The new Winterbottom should work just fine, though… can we arrange a special screening in Beirut…?
Ah the difference between Berlin and Ramsbottom laid bare. We’ve only just got over the shockwaves from Post-Impressionism. That Gauguin! What a character!
RNDM NOTES
1. Argument is architecture: you can’t demolish a well-made building by defacing it with crude graffiti or knocking a few roof tiles off
2. Art is that which could not be mistaken for anything else
4. If it’s made of frozen piss, you can, indeed, complain about the free ice cream
via Comrade Barry
The Noble Re-Run
HIATUS-Y
Pleasantly-busy designing Beloved’s new Live Show (I’m writing all of the originals in the Set List, too)… we’re working with a Grooven fella from Chile. No time left over for TET at the moment, Comrades! Will be back, when the first hurdles are cleared, with diary-like reports of Band-Building (and fuckme this is an intellectually welcome break from the Dusty Realm of Lit, in which so very little New Shytt happens…)
*
Perhaps the Greatest Cover in History
This Still Sounds Extremely Fucking Good to Me
Steven just a thanks for reminding me about Don DeLillo. I’m currently reading White Noise ( the first one of his I’ve read ) and am pretty damn knocked-out by it. We’ve just done a drive to Budapest, do 2 day’s gigs and drive back again number. Normally in that kind of situation I can barely manage the hotel TV menu but Don has kept me reading rather than vegitating.
I can see why he chose to write about Douglas Gordon’s Psycho installation. White Noise reminds me of an installation where he shows you the same scene ( a family in a house ) only each time he returns to the scene he adds to your knowledge of that scene. The middle section about the evacuation is quite a tour de force – I can’t remember written scenes that hyper-ventilate like some of those passages. You read them at the same speed in which they happen in book-time then wonder if because you’ve read them so quickly you’ve missed out a paragraph.
When I left the UK last week there was a blog about Lee Rourke’s book which, in the extracts I read, crawled along like a heap of leaf-mould yet somehow was reviewed with tolerance by the blogauthor. Unfair to compare Rourke with DeLillo of course but my god it’s good to be reminded what writing can entail.
A SPEECHLESS WALK THROUGH THE HEAT-SWOONY CITY
HONEY
Long hot walk with Comrade DJ Sensei Alex yesterday. Alex is having terrible troubles at home with his lover, a lover who no longer wants Alex to be the Bohemian he was when she moved into his flat years back. No, now she wants that beautiful house, that massive car, those luxurious holidays in a Third World setting. She wants, in a word, Status.
Comrades, I came home from this walk and kissed Beloved’s toes and hoisted Offsprung on my shoulders and we waltzed.
CDS Alex’s problems are too familiar as we pass through the spooky-cool corridors of Bohemian middle-age. What strikes me is the fact that when we were young, the polarity of the complaints I heard was different: all our female comrades were suffering, at one time or another, from some dick moving in and making life bad.
The commonest complaint of a given Bohemian female Comrade when we were young was that the fucker who beshat her toilet every other day was also physically and/or spiritually abusive and/or cheating. These female Comrades were often Art School Students or Liberal Arts Majors and trying, as we males were, to make things new (or make new things) while in love with oil paints and hand-stretched canvases and music and typewriters and double-billed Truffaut flicks you’d watch with only eight other people in the audience. They’d go home from said flick dreamy-smiling and their respective evil lodgers would then punch them or call them fat arse or would be drunk in bed with other Bohemian Comrades and a pizza got with a coupon off the fridge and the next day we’d all commiserate. Kick the fucker out, we’d say. Restraining orders were still exotic items in those days (and stalkers were merely called “lovesick”) and we’d share a frisson of the worldly when one of us would table the concept of Legal Intervention over a basket of home-fries split six unequal ways.
Now it’s different. Now it’s five or six of my male Bohemian Comrades who go home most evenings to spiritual violence or tauntingly-withheld sex and live through corrosive eternal gales of discontent and nitpicky, zero-respect criticism. It’s not nice but neither do these middle-aged male Bohemians want to hug their pillows at night alone. These men are suffering. Like me, my comrades were raised on that gender-role cusp between holding-the-door-open-for-a-woman and unisex ethics and this bred us into being super nice guys who do the housework like pros and perform cunnilingus like savants and hold the door open for milady at Starbucks… unaware when we were callow dicks that we’d be putting up with the cultural battle-baggage generated by Classical Cavemen… with no access to the clubs and spears that Classical Cavemen use to control things.
My friends are Leonard Cohens being pepper-sprayed by Monica Vitti’s who are mistaking them for Broderick Crawfords… and that’s by the women they don’t even know. Like battered women, these men have forgotten that they are worth something just because their respective evil lodgers keep reminding them that they aren’t worth enough. I read a book about the CIA when I was very young and the only scrap of it that still sticks with me is the creepy term “Honey trap“.
Bohemian men and women are notoriously bad at choosing mates; I certainly was; how I lucked into Beloved I’ll never know. Perhaps there is, among the ranks of the Arty, a nightmind-compulsion to seek punishment. Anyone who can still squeeze hot Zen orgasms from listening to Miles’ Almost Blue certainly has an advantage over some poor Dupe who needs coke, professional recognition or a pricey vacation to approximate pleasure (and, in fact, there is in these cases only the meta-pleasure of imagining others imagining one’s pleasure and, importantly, envying it)… maybe this spiritual advantage breeds guilt. The Germans call it Künstlerschuld but with the Germans it’s hard to tell if they mean that the guilt is merely felt or perceived or factual.
I can remember walking through the adjacent neighborhood of Mission Hills when I lived in Sandy Ego and the enormous pleasure I took in the nutmeggy smell of the temperate tongue of the breeze and the clatter of palm fronds and the spectacle of hummingbirds clustering jewel-tints around pomegranates. Nature itself was a cultural artifact on par with a Rousseau painting or Wendy Carlos doing Beethoven on a Moog in my headphones and I’d be near-ecstatic for an hour or two hours or four hours of walking until I came home to my evil lodger, my first wife, the former model whose only thoughts were heavy with cash and cars and luxury vacations. In a word: Status.
She was still only in her very early thirties but feeling old and looking for a replacement for the Flesh Value that her “fading” beauty was leaking in spurts like golden oil or eerily unsticky honey. She didn’t give a shit about hummingbirds or Joan Didion or Eric Fischl or Miles Davis or the astonishingly arty sci-fi flange-effect of the wash in the wake of a 727 low overhead in its final descent to the airport. She didn’t give a fuck about listening to “Play Bach” in the dark or watching a VHS cassette of “Faces” over breakfast. Well, she did have a huge collection of Opera CDs but that was because she was a snob and she rarely listened to them anyway. When we started off together in Berlin, going to the Opera was something she did weekly and I misinterpreted this as a Bohemian attribute.
On a spectacularly beautiful So Cal day with no worries and plenty of good food in the fridge she’d yell, “You don’t make enough money!” and I’d yell “I make exactly as much money as you do!” but that never shut her up.
Comrade Alex and I discussed two old acquaintances during our long hot walk around the Bohemian post-apocalypse of Kreuzberg yesterdsay (the “36″ region for connoisseurs of Kreuzberg). Can we call it a cautionary tale if we only ever hear it after it’s too late to help us? The story goes:
Antonio and Tonya were once terribly cool and ran together a trendy bar/cafe I’d never seen before when Alex brought me to the place and introduced them. Antonio (from Madrid) resembled a very tall Revolver-era George Harrison in black shirt and jeans with a silver Zodiac medallion around his neck. Tonya was a Gypsy-dark Czech of great beauty and perfect style also. You just couldn’t help envying them (or I couldn’t) because these blessed fuckers looked like they’d just walked out of a French flick co-starring Audrey Tatou. The cafe was a few steps down (watch your head) from street level and Leonard Cohen and Les Negresses Vertes were on the speakers and the calamari was at a discount for us. I was in Berlin for a few weeks escaping my terrible marriage. There was the affair with a casting director while, back in So Cal, my wife was sucking/fucking a surfer and a busboy-co-worker from the Fine Dining restaurant she was the head-hostess at. Antonio and Tonya were my torment and my inspiration during those weeks I’d go with Comrade Alex to hang out there. Watching lucky Antonio and Tonya giggle and coo and grab each others’ asses in the empty-but-charming cafe was like sipping the finest wine heated to a scalding temperature.
For two years or so, Antonio and Tonya shimmered with hipster grace. Then Tonya said, one day, apparently: we’re getting older. It’s time to grow up. I want a kid. Antonio didn’t want a kid. They had a kid. Soon thereafter began the fights about money. Soon thereafter, kid number two. Fights about money squared. The last time I saw Tonya, by accident, on the street after shopping, her exquisite features had sharpened into the beak and fierce eyes of a bird that feeds entirely on things which scurry.
I’m working toward becoming a middle-aged female Bohemian (galloping closer every day), and feel much the same. I love the man I married, but he’s melting under stress and bills and children and rent and obligation.
He can return from a long day and I tell him, “I finished reading 65 submissions, I sent off five of my own, and I think I found my next cover!”
He’ll say, “Oh, wow, hon. Awesome. Did you wash my good pants?”
It goes both ways (as I’m sure you know.)
Comrade Tracy!
Sounds like what you need is nothing more lethal than a gym sock stuffed with goat shit. Until this man grows leathery wings and a frighteningly-professional sarcasm toolkit, you’ll probably pull through and him with you. My above-post was more about persons who are driving their partners towards kind of wondering if it’s too early to sort of dabble in hypothetical methods of blowing their brains out.
Hit him sharpish with that goatsock (not while the kids are watching) and remind him it’s a little-known sex-crime to withhold conjugations from a woman who doesn’t wash good pants good. Further: if he’s not interested in your Lit-Life now, ask yourself if he ever was. If the answer is no, and he only ever pretended to be in order to see you naked, pee in his coffee until you feel avenged.
Is it illegal for me to say that?
PS My daughter decided to paint all of her hard-surface toys black today while I was on the phone. I then photographed her black-toy-project (last week she covered four chairs with 12 rolls of Scotch tape and they look like something from the lair of the Ice Spider now) and washed the dishes. This was while my wife was glamorously gigging. Serious Bohemian shit.
Okay, firstly, your daughter’s, er, installation (?) is fucking fabulous. You are doing something right. I remember my own joy when my 9-year-old step-daughter told us that High School Musical was “okay, but no RENT.”
But your reaction is where the meat is. I bet most kids would venture farther with the assurance that mom and dad weren’t going to beat the shit–excuse me, time-out the shit–out of them for failing or breaking or trying things.
All that said, I’ve gotta insert the vanilla disclaimer that I do bitch, of course I do, but I’ve got a pretty good guy at my side. We’re old and complacent, but he digs it. Even worked full-time for a year while I held a $30-a-week writing job to see where it went. He’s a keeper.
Coffee piss recipes are still fun though. They don’t have to be done in an angry spirit of repression to be funny. ;)
Liking your blog. I think I’m stringing together sentences here which wouldn’t have happened in other conversations in normal places. Word.
Comrade Tracy:
When I was an 11-year-old Bohemian, I made a list of the shit I would allow/encourage my daughter to one-day do and I am a faithful keeper of that list.
But there’s more to it.
I am going to warehouse the resultant artifacts, wait for them to appreciate substantially (I keep a close eye on the Faux Faux-Naïf Art market) and auction them off before she comes of age. Which will put her half-way through college ( I’m taking my curatorial percentage, after all).
The bonus being that I thereby guilt her into bandaging my chin and hosing my tits and squeegee-ing my furrowed bag of an ass twice a week when the tables are turned and I’m the one making “Outsider Art” all over the tiled room featuring aluminum safety handles by the sewer-grate in the floor while my wife gives me pitying head-pats but refuses to clean me.
If you don’t mind seeing huge black cocks or a Francoise Hardy video, from time to time, this is the place for you.
Steven, looking at your daughter’s chair installation I’d say SOMEONE in your house has serious sellotape dependency issues.
Speaking from the viewpoint of an acrylic ink fetishist of course.
Faux must be one of the greatest let-out clause words in the art market.
But was wondering about that appalling ( faux-naif ) acoustic guitar warbler whose video you cruelly inflicted on us above here or below. It’s horrible of course but I wonder initially if it’s an attempt to try and escape from all that commercial over-produced garbage that fills up MTV and the like?
People respond because it sounds different to something cluttered up with samplers and snare drum sounds arrived at through committee decisions. But beyond the fact that it sounds different ( and increasingly less so with the preponderance of these fey warblers ) there’s nothing much there.
The film “The Devil and Daniel Johnson” is quite interesting about this. A mildly okay-ish at best ( if one is being generous ) naive, borderline seriously disturbed singer turned into a hip star via Kurt Cobain wearing a T-shirt with his name on it. Suddenly the rush of Tom Waits et al to cover his songs elevates his status and turns him even more loony than he was.
“It’s horrible of course but I wonder initially if it’s an attempt to try and escape from all that commercial over-produced garbage that fills up MTV and the like?”
Comrade ET! Yer, but: there’s plenty of not-over-produced, not-MTV-stuff out there in which the practitioners can actually A) sing B) play the instrument with some proficiency and C) write quirky, interesting, clever songs. My point is mostly that the audience for “The Mountain Goats” is made up of Narcisso-Consumers who like anything that resembles/reflects them… therefore, a singer who can’t sing, singing mediocre crap over entry-level guitar is an Audience-Affirmational Home Run.
There’s a Pathology at work here. These kids were raised in a fucked-up way that differs very strikingly from the fucked-up way that less-self-obsessed generations were raised in. They want to read novels and shorts by people like them about lives like theirs and their pathologically-awful taste has a direct impact on a not-minuscule percentage of the books that get published and the films that get made and the songs on i-tunes because they are, first of all, Entitlement’s hideous progeny.
They were a blip twenty years ago (Daniel Johnston is the product of a different phenom which is closer to the phenom of white suburban kids lionizing gangsta rappers, ie Exo-Fetish; a closer early analog was PAVEMENT) but now they are a force. They are Dick Cheney’s fucking nephews and grandchildren.
PS: I like this baffled comment on a Daniel Johnston video: “Che son horribles las canciones, porque lo bancan tanto?” I’m not sure but it seems to say, “What a horrible song, why is it receiving so much praise?”
Was thinking more along the lines of the current mania for “keeping it real” which pervades almost every form of contemporary art.-making.
It’s obviously a reaction against processed-food type art but whereas it started out as a good thing it has now become bloated and detached from what originally made it spring to life.
Same with Outsider art. I’m very partial to some of it ( especially when you see the cynicism of much gallery art ) but when you see the business that’s grown up around it with many of these artists doing limited edition runs of serigraphs you start to wonder just exactly how outside some of them actually are.
Indeed the label has been so stretched that outsider art can mean that you just didn’t go to art school rather than you are a raving loonie who tries to see off their demons with endless repetitions of 12 metre long detailed pencil-drawn maps of how the world works and whose life is definitely one no-one would want.
See your point, Comrade ET, but the sociology here is so very different… white American post-grads and undergrads as “Outsiders”? Nah.
You and I know the provenance of the term “Outsider Art” but for the sake of Comrades who don’t, let’s give them some Wiki:
An Elder Statesman of Entitlement’s War on Talent:
Yep, yep, yep. Mainstream popularity currently requires the “artist” in question (or pretty record-label stand-in) to rally fans around the “fuck the Man”battle cry in the proper marketing order. Ninety-nine of the demographic buys it. Probably half of them see through it, but don’t care. Seventy-three percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. My dog is gay.
And that’s the kind of stuff to throw in your daughter’s scrapbook–the implied promise of future reciprocal care when you change her diapers. Make a copy of the contract and keep her aware. I’m not even kidding.
[ed.'s note: nah, Comrade Tracy; I was kidding about that. My daughter shouldn't have to wipe my ass when I'm old... she didn't demand to be born, we invited her: all 'debts' canceled. If I reach the diaper-state I'll seek out the one remaining arctic ice floe, hop on, crank up the pod-brain-music-player, float away...]
[wait: your dog is Gay? So is that one tree in our back yard! They should text each other!]
THE VINTAGE TRAVEL TEXT
But the point is that Checkpoint Charlie is a clever diversion to keep American tourists from discovering the true historical significance of Berlin. For half a century, Berlin has been a revolutionary Utopia of art, black markets, welfare, drug use, sleeping late, adultery and socialized health care that really, really works. The people behind the political Disneyland of Checkpoint Charlie don’t want you to know this.
THE CONSUMPTIVE CRITIQUE
Despite editorial notes implying otherwise, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s “Colonial Erection” delivers none of the potent commentary implied in the title, offering little of the insight into the contemporary state of Africa promised in the exhibition notes. 53 flags on 53 identical 5-meter flagpoles planted in 53 identical cylindrical concrete bases flap flag-like on the plaza in the front of the Neue Nationalgalerie near Potsdamerplatz in Berlin. The Neue Nationalgalerie, one of the premier contemporary art museums in Berlin, is a modernist Mies van der Rohe masterpiece of minimalism, and as such, a rather unassuming presence on the banks of the Landwehr Canal.
Festooned as it is with flagpoles by Tayou, one might be forgiven for assuming that the NNG had been rented out for an international conference or sporting event. On careful observation, one might detect that the flags seem to be those of African Nations. But these are flags of no known nation, made up flags, it is unclear what they stand for.
The flags, however are not alone. Scattered across the plaza, so casually that if not for the exhibition notes, I would have thought they were the work of another artist, are several figures of black men sculpted roughly in polychrome, the toxic material that eventually did in its first major high-art proponent Niki de St Phalle. These polychrome totems, painted very roughly into business suits (one seems to be in a military uniform), are friendly-looking enough, cute even, as they seem to stare out bewildered and isolated into the city from the plaza.
The incongruous folkloric idiom of these totemic figures is explained in the exhibition notes, where we are told that they have been derived from so-called ‘colon’ figures. ‘Colon’ figures are sculptural caricatures, usually of white colonists, using traditional African tribal sculptural idioms. These figures physically manifest how tribal culture attempts to integrate the ‘other’ of the European colonist/modernist within a traditional aesthetic world, and, perhaps for this reason, are highly prized by Western collectors.
But, back to the display on the plaza, are these black ‘colons’ here to colonize Berlin with their African modernism? The exhibition notes describe Tayou as wanting to convey the absurdity of the nations of Africa through his representation of 53 standards with the same colours as those used in Africa. This critique is misguided and ineffectual.
I feel the artist’s frustration faced with the monumental offense that is the colonization of Africa, complete with bogus nations of puppet governments designed to be flimsy imitations of European nations, eternally dependent of Europe for legitimacy and systematically structured to operate like work camps for the colonial powers. The scale of the crime against humanity which began with the Treaty of Berlin in 1884-1885 is obscene and requires a far more incisive critique than that provided by this art work.
The real 53 flags of the 53 nations of Africa may be as piecemeal and arbitrary a notion of nationhood as any, but the fact remains that, economically, politically, and socially, the sovereignty proclaimed by these standards is very real and largely intractable. See the current debate over the independence of South Sudan if you want any confirmation of this.
Yes the Europeans drew artificial (modernist) borders through complex meshes of peoples, their cultural and economic systems, and abstracted foreign nations, foreign to African and European alike. At last, thus, Europeans were on equally alienated footing on the black man’s land, and in this alienated space undertook a pillage of historic proportions to which all the grand cities of Europe owe their grandeur. And, most importantly, the disruptive power of these arbitrary frontiers between Africans functions perfectly to this day, allowing all manner of global players to play one arbitrary nation against the other in order to continue the pillage, unmitigated despite, or in collaboration with the most (apparently) well-intentioned human rights initiatives.
In fact we can see clearly here how the the Human Rights Organizations and cultural initiatives such as that which funded this exhibition perform an essential ethical mopping up operation (black-washing) to compensate for the globalist entities ravaging the continent. The apologia is part of the process of continuous African despoiling and enslavement. This apologia is also responsible for the European funds which flowed into Mr Tayou’s bank account in exchange for his feeble, enfeebled confession of impotence. How convenient for the failing fatherlands of Europe that Africa still needs its cultural guidance and support.
Even if the organizers of this exhibition had truly wished to promote a more egalitarian discourse between Africa and Europe through the media of artistic practises, they have done nothing but confirm the contrary. Africa, according to this show, is still only culturally relevant in terms colourfully inoffensive folkloric production. This show affords no room for effective intellectual African response to modernity and makes no effort to cultivate one. In fact, Africans seem to be encouraged in this show only to conform their discourse to the master narrative of Western contemporary art, and disencumber their arguments of any alternate understanding or interpretation which may compromise the pedigree of the canon. Tayou’s work here is less a ‘Colonial Erection’ than a colonial strap-on.
[ed.'s note: Pastor Prime is an academic researcher and educator whose parents once showed a flare for coming up with evocative names for their many children; this is his first critique for TET]
Excellent fact-filled sword-play, Comrade DJ Sensei Pastor Prime… I’ll engage tomorrow, as beddy-bye now beckons…
CDS Pastor Prime! Back again after a luxurious seven hours of sleep. So!
One of the necessary skills of the Artist used to be the ability to juxtapose choice objects or elements in such a way as to force a resonance; where has that skill gone? There is zero resonance forced by the fact of these flags being near these figures in front of the National Gallery; as you rightly point out, they look like they’re advertising a sporting event or festival of snacks from many nations. This is lazy, careless, no-talent conceptualizing. How much more clever than using actual African flags if he’d used generic white flags each with the name of its respective nation printed on it?
I once wrote:
Maybe it’s related.
Also have to wonder what kind of canny adjustments in his own sensibility Tayou had to make in order to produce “Art” (on a larger scale) that Western Europeans would be willing to subsidize. The first mission of the “Artist” is to score grants, stipends and commissions. Imagine if Doctors could only make money if they told their patients what their patients wanted to hear and only performed procedures that never hurt? Art should be the disloyal opposition. It should also supersede (while being free to utilize the Trojan Horse technology of) Design.
How can we score some of this money? Why not set up what looks like a voting booth/confessional on wheels (with a curtain), in front of the National Gallery. Waiting compliantly therein, one would find a spectacular-looking Ugandan whore in a Warhol wig and a b&w striped Picasso jersey and naught else, on her knees, mouth open, while a vintage radio broadcast of a world cup tie-breaker plays on a tinny speaker. Art Critics get the first one free.
Let’s do it!
OUROBOROS BORBORYGMUS
the brand new breakfast serial
Stock was just beginning to dwell on the fact that he’d been sitting alone in the waiting room for an improbably long while when something happened. The door to the waiting room opened and Stock walked in and grabbed an old magazine and took a seat. Stock stared at himself.
It wasn’t exactly Stock but Stock at a much younger age, maybe twenty, stylish but clearly poor. He looked relaxed and very healthy. He was sun-burnished and the smell of his health crossed the room. Stock wondered if this was his grown son. A mesmerizingly-pure and beautiful version of his grown son. Wearing a grass-green sweater.
But Stock’s grown son wasn’t in the country. And wasn’t his grown son older? What would his grown son be doing sitting there reading an old Vogue, wearing a grass-green sweater, ignoring him? The young Stock had glanced a cursory greeting at Stock before grabbing the Vogue. He’d smiled politely while shielding himself behind the magazine, leg crossed over his knee at the crux of his sockless ankle. Stock didn’t recognize the model on the cover.
My grown son would’ve recognized me by now, thought Stock.
Stock was quite sure it was Stock. This must be a dream. A dream with a strangely sharp-edged, un-crazy, non-dreamy texture to it. A dream made of standard proportions of the five senses, measured in waking units of time. Stock could hear the complicated inner hiss and whuffle of the breath he kept capturing only to release again versus the soft slap of the young man paging through the Vogue. Stock thought he could remember owning that sweater. He spoke, softly, at first, but then not so softly, almost loud, remembering that this must be a dream:
“It’s like looking at the original of a copy of a copy of a copy!”
“Pardon me?” asked the young man.
“I said that looking at you is like looking at the original of a copy of a copy of a copy.”
Stock stared at Stock with a frozen smile of nil comprehension. Stock said,
“You don’t recognize me?”
The young Stock looked uncomfortable. It occurred to Stock that anyone else sitting in the room, had there been anyone else sitting in the room, would have thought he was flirting with himself. Hitting on the young. He said,
“It’s just a dream, anyway. Who cares?”
By asserting his ownership of the dream, the older Stock hoped to spare himself some embarrassment. The irony was that he hadn’t felt this embarrassed (or been in a situation this embarrassing) since being the young Stock who was now squinting at Stock from the other side of the room, too young, possibly, to understand that there were two kinds of embarrassment at play here.
Stock was embarrassed that the young Stock might think he was trying to seduce him, which was bad enough; that was one kind of embarrassment. Worse was the second kind, which was over the fact that his younger self could not, or did not seem to want to, recognize him. Embarrassment wasn’t quite the right word for it. Stock was humiliated. He joked, so loudly that the younger man flinched,
“Well this is a fine how do you do!” And he thought: yes, this is the way to handle it. Keep it light.
“Are you a friend of my mother’s? You know I’ve been away for a few years. Don’t take it personally if I don’t recognize you… I don’t recognize anyone.”
Stock half-crossed the room without quite standing up, in a kind of fencing-lunge, extending his hand. Stock met the gesture in the middle. They shook.
“Stock,” said Stock, “But I guess you know that. Because you already know me from somewhere. But I don’t know where. So who are you?”
“Stock,” said Stock, sharply, and they were locked, for longer than was standard or natural, in a crouching handshake in the middle of the room. Their eyes met and the younger man jerked his hand out of the older man’s firm grip. He took a long step backwards and looked up at one of the fluorescent rectangles in the ceiling paneled with time-stained acoustical foam and shouted, at the top of his lungs, as though he was trapped at the bottom of a well, “WAKE UP!”
Stock just smiled at the first few minutes of it. He had time.
He rolled his eyes. He mimed looking at a watch (he hadn’t owned a watch in twenty years) and then mimed conducting, with swooping arms and a snapping chin that made his thin hair flop on his head. He mimed conducting the bellowing aria of younger Stock going hoarse trying to wake himself up from this dream.
Stock stopped conducting and stuck his fingers in his ears, winded. His arms ached. It occurred to him that there were no legal consequences to physically attacking one’s younger self in a dream but also that this was out of the question considering his rubbery arms and bad back and weak ankles and high blood pressure and irritable bowels and slightly blurry vision and reduced reflexes and so forth.
He decided to sit and wait the noise out.
He crossed a leg over the knee of the other leg, balancing it on the ankle and he drummed on the outlying knee. It occurred to him to check his pockets for his phone but patting his jacket from top to bottom turned up nothing… no phone, no keys, no wallet. A reassuringly-familiar dream dilemma. His wife was asleep beside him in their bed. Their four-year-old was down the hall. This would be over when the sun rose. Or when Noa went to the toilet and/or he woke himself snoring. He suddenly remembered why he was in the waiting room.
He’d volunteered as a subject for an experimental program of drug-assisted behavior-modification treatments for snoring. It occurred to him that he might not be at home, in bed, beside his wife, dreaming in safe territory, at all. Maybe he was unconscious in a strange chair with wires coming out of his scalp while foreign interns monitored zigzags on a readout and joked about his bald spot. He felt some anxiety. He tried to recall a Doctor’s name or the address of the clinic.
Stock stopped shouting. Stock realized that his ears were ringing. The quality of the light in the room seemed to change when the noise level dropped. Stock was hunched in front of himself, with his hands on his knees, showing Stock the thick hair at the crown of his skull (a view of himself he’d never seen before), coughing on the carpet. From close up, Stock could see that the darkened armpits of the grass-green sweater had holes in them. From his experience as the father of a young child, he knew to go and push through the swinging doors to the left of the check-in desk and find a cup and some water.
He pushed through the swinging doors and they opened into a suite of little offices and examining rooms lined up on either side of the corridor. He hurried.
He caught a peripheral right-glimpse of a seated figure in a dark examining room and reversed by two short steps to peer, half-hidden by the door frame, at a shirtless old man in half-shadow. The old man looked weightless as a bird’s nest on the examining table. Head bowed, his freckled pate shined where the light from the corridor touched it. Tufted shoulders rose and fell while his puckered-cunt belly distended and shrank on a laborious struggle to continue to exist. Stock felt short of breath just watching. The old man wafted pale odors of baked piss as he lifted his head and Stock was certain that he had never seen this wreck before in his life.
coming soon
THE COMMENT ABROAD
(and the TET T-Shirt)
http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/10-requests-for-better-silence/#comment-82231
Dueling Dictionaries
OUROBOROS BORBORYGMUS
the brand new breakfast serial
Stock was reasonably sure that the distance between himself and Old Stock was greater than the distance between himself. And Young Stock. He hoped. He hadn’t asked Old Stock his age yet. Hadn’t mustered the nerve. He wouldn’t have been able to say if this was a function of exaggerated politeness or primal fear. Fear of the too-known. Stock had never gazed upon another human being and been so absolutely crippled in his ability to jump. To conclusions.
Way back when. There had been a terminology in place. A terminology for men of a certain age (duffer, codger, coot) but now, ironically, these words were too old-fashioned to ease unironically into a conversation, even if the conversation was only with himself. To say coot now was to be coot. That hadn’t been true when Stock was a child. It hadn’t. Maybe word pollution was the ecological disaster they should have been worried about all along, thought Stock, though not in so many words. Not even in words but pictograms and emotions. A phone doesn’t tell you it’s ringing.
There was something. Off about the old. Off about the old man now dressed in a white terrycloth bathrobe they’d found on a coat. Hook on the back of the examining room door.
The aged had always seemed to Stock like Death spying on the Living but that wasn’t it this time. Or, no, at least, not all of it. Part of Stock’s problem with Stock coiled in the sidelong approach of the old man’s ambiguous smiles, which put Stock on his guard, made him edgy. Despite the amusing resemblance to Henry Miller. Stock had read and liked quite a lot. Of Miller when he was young and Old Stock even spoke out the side of his mouth like Miller, too. But more like a Henry Miller at an impossible age, boiling rapidly away, at every extremity, into the ether. Thought Stock. He thought it was a good metaphor.
Stock could practically see the white hairs evaporating one by one off the dirty griddle of that scalp. Fizzle. In contrast, Young Stock’s hair was so thick. It covered so much of his head and encroached with such vegetal vitality on the upper limit of his face (where all of his worries should have been expressed) that. Well there was something indecent about staring at it. The top of his head was a rock-hard Mediterranean mons on unabashed display at the beach with each hair glistening. Stock imagined his cock in Stock’s head.
Look at them chatting under that out-of-date picture-calendar of Nova Scotia while I experiment desperately with the telephone, thought Stock. Why aren’t they worried? Because they aren’t real.
The young one had his heels up on the edge of the seat of his pastel chair, hugging his knees, his teeth more. Brilliant than the recessed fluorescents in the ceiling. Stock hadn’t noticed how dark the waiting room walls seemed. He wondered if it really had. Always been this paneling. This woodgrainy thing. It wasn’t silk wallpaper w/ sailboats? It was then he remembered a name associated with the facility for the experimental Sleep Apnea Cure Team he may or may not have been in a coma on the premises of. Doc Pritchett. He remembered a Doc Pritchett and a Tess Trueheart.
He got a dial tone easily enough. Punched four buttons seven times. The call signal rang and rang at the other end of the line but. But no one and nothing, not even an answering machine or voice-mail. Nothing. After he’d gone through the private numbers he knew by heart he started on random numbers. Numbers he’d found in the Yellow Pages on the bottom shelf of a small metal table behind the receptionist’s desk. Nothing. He was listening to the unanswered call signal for Wagner’s Hardware when he saw and pretended not to see Old Stock’s right hand touch Young’s Stock’s left knee. The young one was chuckling with genuine pleasure at something. The old one was saying. Nothing. Averting his gaze from the old hand on a young knee, Stock noticed. He noticed an earring in Old Stock’s ear. A silver poker chip. Silver with blue hieroglyphics. Nothing.
Old Stock looked up as Stock walked over with the handset and he said. He said to Stock, “I was just telling the kid here about the time you tried to get the number off that young waitress in that, “ he took a breath, “Vietnamese restaurant after leaving a ridiculous tip.” He patted the seat of the adjacent chair. His mechanically-even grin was several shades lighter than his sun-fried face. Stock’s mouth ached just looking at it. That tooled grin. Patting the seat. Nothing.
Stock remained standing and said, uh, “The phone seems to work but no one answers. All over the town. Nothing.”
Old Stock touched Young Stock’s knee again and said, “And you know what? After she’d told Mr. Big Spender here that she… get this… that she doesn’t have a phone… she goes into the kitchen, if you can picture it,” he paused with relish. “And he hears…” He winked at Stock. “He hears everybody in the kitchen…” He winked at Stock. And he hears…
“Do you have your cell-phone on you?” asked Stock. He wanted to hurt.
“My what?”
“Your cell-phone.”
“My what?”
“Remember Dick Tracy?” said Old Stock. They could still hear distant unanswered phones ringing through the virtual hosepipe of the piece Stock was holding.
“Sure,” said Young Stock. As a kid. “Tess Trueheart.”
“A cell-phone was like Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, only it wasn’t on your wrist. You carried these things in your pocket, back in the day. They’d play popular song melodies when someone called you, if you wanted.”
“Aha,” said Young Stock. Scratching his chin. With boredom. Cell?
“Oh, it’s a little more than that,” said Stock, surpassing glad of the topic change. “It’s a revolutionary telecommunications device. You can talk to anyone almost anywhere on the planet. You can watch television.” He was about to introduce. The topic of laptops when Old Stock. Old Stock aid,
“Like I said, Dick Tracy. Look at this.” Uh.
He twisted in the umber and ebony chair to show off a quasi-Egyptian silver pokerchip earring. Stock could literally count the hairs on the back of Stock’s head. “You squeeze it like so, for so long, it powers up.” He demonstrated. “You won’t hear this but I just heard, in the middle of my head, the most beautiful voice in the world telling, ‘Call ready’. Then I might say, ‘Call Noa’ and it calls Noa. Simple as that.” Said something under his breath to his phone and added, “When I’m finished I say, ‘Call finished’ and the voice repeats ‘Call finished’ and asks me if I want to do anything else. Like anything. It asks me, ‘Would you like another menu?’”
Old Stock added, this time audibly, but in a strangely different voice, as though talking to a hireling whose opinion mattered to him, or, no, as to a secretary he’d fucked well once or twice without regrets but with whom he was now trying, with mitigated results, to resume the staggered footing of strictly professional relationship, “Access local weather, Robert” and he blinked at the middle distance while waiting for information to rush into his head like jackpots.
Young Stock brushed flaps of hair out his eye and mouthed Wow.
Stock was still busy being bothered by Old Stock’s mention of his wife. He wanted to hurt.
“Hmm. Guess there’s no service,” announced Old Stock. “Satellites down, probably.”
“End Times, huh? It’s like The Book of Revelations,” said Young Stock. Looking excited.
Stock rolled his eyes.
“I’ll be honest with you both. I was just thinking the very same thing, kid,” said Old Stock. “Coincidentally, I’ve started reading The Old Testament in all seriousness again, recently and I think this might be some kind of, what would you call it? A kind of prophecy or omen or so forth. Ignore it at our own peril.”
Stock chuckled. Like I’m the only grownup in the room. These fucking immature imaginary dreamselves of mine. He didn’t see Old Stock mouthing, as he said it,
“Omen? Why not shit in a bucket and read the entrails? I doubt it. It’s a lot more likely to be three slices of cold pizza I ate too close to bedtime, jalapenos on the side and a warm beer to wash it down, thanks. Listen to you two.” Stock felt better hearing his rational words as he spoke them.
“The best theory I can come up with is I fall asleep, start snoring, not enough oxygen gets to the brain and the indigestion causes nightmares. This is just one of my nightmares. I’ll wake up soon and tell my wife all about it.”
The other two belly-laughed.
“Well, we can certainly see why you’d like to think that,” yawned Old Stock and he winked at Young Stock, who was flustered from laughing too.
“So tell me about your wife,” said Young Stock, “Are you still in love with her?”
“You want the truth or some poetry?” Old Stock scratched.
“Excuse me?” said Stock. Still so in love with his Noa that the possibility that he might actually be dead and therefore separated from her for eternity was a thought. He hadn’t even allowed his conscious mind to creep-toward crabwise. And she will suck this Old Stock’s cock before I’m gone.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” said the Old Stock.
Young Stock was not particularly bothered. He said “Okay,” a couple of times, just stroking his chin. Seeing a Styrofoam cooler somewhere.
“Kid, one thing I’ve learned in all these years is that change is the only thing you can count on.”
“Bullshit, Stock,” said Stock. He wanted to hurt and he would.
Old Stock shrugged at Young Stock with an unreadable expression and Young Stock, who seemed embarrassed for Stock, he seemed embarrassed and gestured. At the handset Stock still clutched which emitted the bouncy-shrill pulse a phone emits when the receiver’s off the hook yea-long. Stock could remember the first time he had heard this sound and it was his mother’s first attempt. An open bottle of candly-colored tranquilizers by the perforated black mouthpiece of the club-like receiver with its beveled grip feathered and worn to a composite hand of the family. Stock had just come home from school. He punched the Off button. “Receiver” was obsolete terminology, he knew. The one among them for whom the terminology was most obsolete stood and cinched the belt around his bathrobe. Everything they were seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and thinking was becoming his memory in real time. He said,
“Now please excuse me while I go take a well-earned crap.” He shuffled towards the swinging doors and added, as an afterthought, “Pardon my French.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Young Stock. He saluted the old man’s back.
Stock was waiting. Until Old Stock was safely out of earshot before commenting but Young Stock suddenly. Found his Vogue again. He immediately started paging through, pretending to be immersed, feeding pictures into the kitty.
Stock’s suspicion that this was a dream of his making (as opposed to that of either of the other two) was confirmed by the look of the waiting room, with all of its devices, furniture and overall style so very pointedly of Stock’s own era and not the near-Past or distant-Future, as would have been the case had it all been taking place in either Young or Old Stock’s skull. He was sure of it.
No sooner had Stock thought this than his eye caught an object on the far left corner of the glass plane of the receptionist’s desk (had it always been glass?) that he could not, from where he stood, identify.
“Stock,” hissed Stock to the Younger Stock. He pointed at the object with his left hand while waggling his right. “Stock!”
Its bulbous tip glowed lavalamp-orange, expanding.
“It is ‘Scott’,” said the young man. “Scott. S-C-O-T-T. Why do you keep calling me ‘Stock’?”
coming soon
previously
MY FAVORITE CLOSE CALLS
Six years ago, when Beloved and I had just begun dating, I was seated on the couch in her little flat in her trendy neighborhood when she got a call from a friend of her ex-husband (a decadent Fauxhemian son of an Austrian architect), an Australian feller she hadn’t seen in years. This Australian -call him Bob- was surprised to learn that Beloved was now divorced, said he was in town for a few days and asked if she’d have time for an early-afternoon cup of coffee. Beloved was 28 then and innocent as a Lama’s doodle. She told Bob “sure” and when she rang off asked if I could hang around to meet him. I said, well, Beloved, I have things to do but I’ll say “hi” to this Bob before clearing off. But not too long, I warned her. Not too long. Okay? Things to do etc.
Bob was some sort of hypno-therapist milking the Self Actualization racket. He embodied the cruise ship ventriloquist who’d forgotten his rug… shortish, under-bitey, long-nosed and anti-aphrodisiacal in manner, toilet water and dress. Somewhere around 50 in age. We shook hands and Bob sat on the sofa and opened his Mac Book to show us an Australian talkshow (lone host, round table, Ionesco-esque stage-lighting and no audience) he’d appeared on, back in Australia (where I’m fairly sure you can still buy soup bowls made from aboriginal skulls of recent vintage). At that point, grinning over his brand new Mac Book, jokey Bob just struck me as a huckster with nothing creepier than a can of New Age snake oil up his pants. He was brimming with the simulated youth and enthusiasm. It was clear that Bob used the video clip of this interview to establish his credentials; ie, to impress people.
After we sat politely through the interview on his laptop, Bob opened another folder, called “BERLIN”. The Mac Book was laid out in such a way that it was a little too easy to get a glance at the names of other folders before he opened the one we were about to look through and I quite clearly saw a folder labeled “BERLIN XXX”.
The BERLIN folder was a collection of at least a dozen amateurish Photoshop projects in which Bob had concocted imitation-magazine covers (a là Vogue or Time) , each featuring a nude girl (late-teens, early 20s) of Bob’s actual acquaintance. Actually, he called them clients: they had been through his therapy course, which entailed, he explained, releasing inhibitions. Bob was very enthusiastic about these faked covers and explained how his knowledge of current pop music (he was a big fan of the Cardigans at the time) usually put the girls at ease. Each and every naked girl in these photos had a weirdly blank look on her face as if. Well, it’s too obvious, isn’t it?
Beloved and I exchanged several WTF glances. What was Bob playing at? He showed us through a whole folder of these ho-ho, ha-ha mock-ups. As crappy as they all were, it was obvious he’d put quite a bit of time into them. He kept saying, “It’s all just silly fun” and went on at some length about how good the latest Cardigans album was. I decided to hang around for coffee. Until Bob left. Until about three hours after Bob left.
HEGEL SCHMEGEL: PRECIOUS HISTORY X
(The Consumptive Film Critique)
Beware the Collective Subconscious, Comrades. Beware any Civilization’s efforts to describe itself. Beware your own.
In May I wrote:
I mentioned the film PRECIOUS in that comment. Now let’s say something about that film’s conceptual mirror image (black subhuman vs white superman and both in the name of “progressive” values! ); its ideal prequel…
Last night I watched a patchwork YouTube version of American History X, one of the most powerful and compelling recruitment tools for the neo-nazi movement ever made… by Liberals. As any ten-year-old can tell you (listen, Mr. Zizek!): it’s not what a film says (or “really” says), it’s what a film shows, that counts.
The narrative arc of American History X says that being a neo-nazi is not, in the end, so good. Fine. Standard, in fact. It’s a Hollywood product, after all. You wouldn’t expect it to argue for nazis. Right?
But the narrative arc is nicely subverted by a flashback technique that essentially divides the story into two coterminous films, one in color (the NOW story of a repentant former neo nazi maturing into tie-wearing, Yuppie-stem impotence) and one in b&w (the exhilarating THEN tale of a badass neo-nazi who makes things happen). American History X is now an astonishing 12-years-old… which doesn’t mean it’s “old news” so much as it means that this Volk Hit has put in twelve years of doing its bit towards energizing America’s imminent Race Wars.
The structure of American History X is, in effect, one brilliantly wicked b&w film packed within a crappy well-meaning one in color. Or Trojan-Horsed, say. And the YouTube version just means that impatient young nazis can do away with all but the ultra-cool b&w sequences, anyway. It’s just so liberatingly-transgressive, and socially counter-intuitive, to show a neo-nazi who is loaded with positive attributes… Right?
Derek, the protag of the b&w film, is a white suburban petit-stormtrooper… he’s no Rutger Hauer but he’s ripped, bold, honorable, articulate and loaded with an IQ of about 110 (enough to manage an Arby’s). His neo-nazi girlfriend is way-hot and he fucks her quite brutally well (one is reminded of the Spartan Queen-humpage in 300). His bumbling fat neo-nazi friend is endearingly bumbling and fat. He wasn’t always a neo-nazi, our protag, of course… he started off as a well-intentioned, lower-middle-class white kid, like any other, with a handsome, hard-working, beloved white manly dad who is just a leetle beet racist. Reasonably racist, I mean. Like your parents, I mean.
The transformational trigger (the radioactive spider of this mythology) comes when beloved dad (a firefighter, no less) is shot and killed by nigger gang members while putting out a fire in the hood. Or, no, forget that Spiderman joke: this is pure Bruce Wayne Creation Myth. The beloved Dad, killed by craven thugs? This film was made by liberals, remember. Ed Norton was in a Woody Allen film, after all! He’s a Liberal! Tony Kaye is a Liberal!
Right?
The b&w film is by far the most fun of the two films in this narrative package and even its cinematography is, by far, the best. The color film-within-the-film is an After School Special, skimpy on invention or pizazz, musty with stereotypes and saggy with animatronic-acting and cloth-eared dialogue (embodied by a crusading black principal who is stealing Sidney Poitier’s shtick using Darth Vader’s voice; oh those orotund, sexless, Negro Moral Compasses). The b&w film is almost as stylish and sexy with liquid slo-mo and silvery timbres as Raging Bull. Whenever Derek strips off his shirt to reveal the triumph of the huge fucking swastika painted on the magnificent pec like Captain America’s shield over his heart, one is helpless to resist the obvious association: Clark Kent becoming… ÜBERMENSCH.
It’s not what a film says, it’s what it shows you yourself in.
In the color film-within-the-film, the Yuppie-stem, wearing his tie, neatly civilized (ie, we’ve seen him smile at a little black girl, after all), learns his final filmic lesson by having his little brother shot five times through the heart by a black kid. It’s not a stretch to think that a proto-nazi watching this flick will reason that the Yuppie-stem lost his brother as a result of going soft. Or being in color (same thing?).
There are no graceful, beautiful, articulate, heroic, intelligent, sexy or honorable blacks (as thematic counter-examples or refutations) in this movie. None of the well-reasoned, statistics-based arguments that the neo-nazi hero of the b&w film-within-a-film delivers in Ed Norton’s bravura performance are, at any point, refuted rationally by any character in the film. The pseudo-refutation (ie, “violence begets violence”)… ie the death of the little brother… which functions as the pay-off of the color morality play… is a dramaturgical non-sequitur in that it could have happened to anyone, good or bad, nazi or liberal, black or white. What really counts, of course, is that a black kid pulled the trigger. First the father, then the brother. Offed by niggers. Not to mention that fallen Aryan mother nearly shtupped by a Jew.
If you weren’t already a nazi when you sat down to watch this film, you were after, whether you knew it or not. If only for an hour or two. Until the effect wore off. That’s the magic of film. But does it ever wear off?
Look at this clip, in which the charismatically DeNiro-esque Norton (as Derek) tells off an unctuous, effeminate, upper-middle-class, bien pensant and ultimately gutless, aforementioned Jew. Can anyone beat Liberal filmmakers for making Nazi films these days? Ask Precious!
BECAUSE ASSERTING THAT SUCKASS SNAILSHIT IS MIND-BLOWING & GOLDEN IS JUST KIND OF A PART OF ENTITLEMENT’S SMUG LITTLE META-PACKAGE
UPDATE: The Paris Review deleted the comment! Maybe the CIA is still behind PR, then… but I was always under the impression that the CIA supported good music…?
To quote Lorin Stein, “Thanks also—equally—to those who hate the stuff [the Terry Southern material], and piped up. We are not in the criticism business at The Paris Review. But we believe in it. Here we differ with our friends at The Believer: we like snark, when it comes from the gut. It may not be the lifeblood of the arts, but a healthy organism also needs bile, not to mention a gag reflex.”
That was before they deleted my Snarky comment, of course; one supposes that they have since revised their Snark Policy.
So let’s have another look at John Darnielle’s pretentious, soul-sucking void of anti-talent anyway… seriously! No matter how many ways you think of to think that this sucks, I can always add another
THE PEOPLE’S COMMENT-THREAD LEAVES OF GRASS
Black women must run
away from randy pastors that
seduces them to bed. Remember
that you are not his
only prey. He is
probaly sleeping
around with many
other women
that are are HIV
positive. most randy
black pastors also downlow
with men. Always
use condom. engage
your men with
meaningful activities
especially cerebral activities,
sports, music and
politics. Don’t stoop too
low. marry lateral
as in the military, meaning
your equals mentally and
socially as in
“Bill Cosby ”
show.
If you are a female
doctor marrying a UPS
guy because he is muscular,
you will be dragged
down and your next
man is
most likely to be
an HIV
positive ex
convict with gold
teeth. always
aim
high.
DEAR ABYSS
DEAR NICE GUY: Agon-song is sweetest under boughs where carrion swings… let thine sword be compass and sail in the driven hordes’ blood-wind
DEAR WONDERING: E’er the smith’s black chore in smelting / E’er this rape of Hell’s cold ore!
Why You Should Maybe Snap Out of It
(via Comrade Barry)
http://submedia.tv/stimulator/2010/07/08/green-is-the-color-of-money/
Drear Diary plus Even More Difficult Text Work
Up at our version of the crack of dawn (8am) because a gospel choir in London is booked to sing the bridge and “vamp” of a song that I’ve co-written. The producer, seized by inspiration (always dangerous in commercial pop), re-composed the bridge at the last minute (about three in the morning)… which has me scrambling now to generate a plausible 42-syllables of lyric to replace the original 54. Not as easy as it sounds, minting clichés for markets some of which are Anglophone and others not… and all before noon (when the session is booked). The permissible vocabulary encompasses probably three-hundred words at most. And that includes “and”.
Busy busy round here: last night I was up until 2am, editing a promotional video for my astonishingly-beautiful Beloved; filming her drove me a bit nuts. The urge to fuck pressed hard up against the need to conceptualize. I invented a technique I’ve yet to see any videographer use, btw: smear the lens with lens-cleaning solution and film while the volatile fluid evaporates. A pretty neat psychedelanalog effect. No two times will produce the same results (unlike the faux “random” button on your mp3 player).
Later, I’d like to address the fact that Paris Review deleted my righteously-indignant comment re: their hyperbolic puffing of a guy with no fooking talent… I mean none (this stuff means something, Comrades; the War on Talent is claiming lives: yours) and perhaps also say something (unrelated) about just how slick Fascism is under The Fourth Reich. Or you can just Google “Daniel Tosh”. Alarming Ante-Upping-of-the-Month, Comrades. Perhaps you’ll understand the picture I’ve posted with this comment in light of my alarm.
Plus: this weekend I’ll be generating an essay, on my strange recent run-in with a Grand Old Literary Celebrity, called FAME, THE FLAME and the VISIONARY SHIT. Don’t miss it.
Finally: while I’m waiting for the producer’s response to this morning’s heavy-lidded work, I’ll post another pdf of unabashedly postmodern fiction. For want of a better pigeonhole. Well it’s not “experimental” fiction because I’ve been writing this way for almost fifteen years now (writing this way satisfactorily perhaps ten). So much dreary dull shite out there, Comrades! So much paint-by-numbers, snap-together Lego Lit. I like to think I’m doing my little local virtual bit to make The Species Imagination horny. O, Comrades! (as Walt would put it)… I can understand and forgive if some sophomore from a pious little province still clings to the narrative expediency of wedding the Sermon to the Campfire Tale (and in edge-worn language, too), but… etc. In creative raptures do I shit on your beachread. You’re welcome!
(if there are typos in this pdf I’ll have to repair them later)
EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TEXTS
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/even-more-difficult-texts-by-steven-augustine.pdf
FROM THE DEPT. of EMPHASIS MINE: THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
It seems to me that this is the best use of “it seems to me” that I’ve ever read. The “orifice” phenomenon is just a bonus. via Pravda.
SURREALISM and its UNWITTING MISSIONARIES: A MEME NOIR
I came late to Sex or it came late to me. In 1968 I had already been a Beatles fan for nearly half my life and The Beatles I knew were not about Sex… unless one already knew enough about Sex to look for clues in the lyrics.
I listened obsessively to The Beatles on a portable Philips record player. In ’68 the thing was a marvel, powered by six “D” batteries, its heavy speaker built into the lid. I remember listening to “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite” on this Philips portable while my mother listened to Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic debut on a four-legged Magnavox stereo console record player/radio downstairs. The Magnavox was all wood and tubes and gold-threaded-fabric behind the speaker grills. It was hot and heavy and the green light of its radio dial glowed in the dark at twilight, when it was too dark to read but not yet dark enough to justify switching the living room lights on. There’s a smell associated with hot RCA tubes glowing in wooden cabinets that will soon be lost from human memory but I can smell it as I write this. Something like a hot melange of Bakelite and pancakes.
I was listening to The Beatles upstairs while my mother washed dishes, and prepared dinner, listening to primal Aretha. The grinding-blue electric-piano riff from “I’ve Never Loved a Man” is so drenched with Sex that I didn’t even need to know what the word “Sex” meant in order to fear the tune. That music was so grounded in earthy, sweaty, daily existence that it almost made me ill, at the age of nine, to hear it. It was the sound of a prison cell. As an adult I now love that entire back-catalog (as a professional composer, how could I fail to?) but, back then, that music was my nemesis and it threatened to destroy me, Comrades. That is nothing but the shocking truth: in 1968, only a member of the white middle class could really afford to boogie to Race Music.
I’d listen to “I Am The Walrus” with my ear about an inch from the speaker, which was up on the desk I did my homework on. I’d finish my homework in ten or fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the evening listening to The Beatles or reading, say, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I kept the volume low playing these records. I feared I’d be in serious trouble if the neighbors ever caught me listening to The Beatles. I spent my pre-pubescence a little like Anne Frank, sitting in a virtual closet, afraid to sneeze.
I lived in the second-worst neighborhood in Chicago, then (the worst being Cabrini Green; the third-worst being the Robert Taylor homes)… a bona fide ghetto… and this fear about having the shit kicked out of me was probably justified. Guns weren’t common but they weren’t absent. A school-chum in kindergarten had had his teeth blown out by a brick during a gang fight. One of the summer pastimes (which I studiously avoided, eyes averted, of course) was the Roman spectacle of dogs fucking in a drained swimming pool on the site of an abandoned Youth Club project I had to walk by on the way home from the grocery store.
The old neighborhood is still there, on the border between Chicago and Gary, Indiana. There is a nearby Lake, polluted by a Steel Mill; also a Sherwin Williams paint factory, a mile or two upwind, the smell from which (like the smell of the glowing RCA tubes), I recall with perfect accuracy. Oh, and: a missile silo, across a highway and a marsh from us, featuring a pipe about a hundred feet high from which a flame, day and night, burned off the volatile rocket fuel, on constant alert, our local Cold War’s eternal flame. In case of nuclear war I suppose our otherwise-inconsequential ghetto was on a Russian first-strike list. I have an adult son (married) and a four-year-old daughter and I’m frankly astonished that these brilliant, beautiful kids can prove that I suffered no environmental gene damage from 1964-1972.
Almost every day I listened through both sides of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember also that I’d appropriated my mother’s old collection of recordings of Tchaikovsky. Those were amazing: the size of “45″ singles and transparent-red, one played them at 33 rpm. I was reading Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison…
I had a subscription to a now-defunct magazine which came in a format I haven’t seen since: one week the Science issue of the magazine would come, next week an Arts issue, another week for Politics (I think) and one for Entertainment. I’d get these four different editions of the Saturday Review per month. The Saturday Review saved my life. The Saturday Review along with The Beatles and Ray Bradbury and every other producer of the cultural artifacts with which I was able to nurture an intellectual imagination. I can remember being ten or eleven and phoning my father (my parents separated when I was five, then divorced; my father lived a middle class life; my mother refused his alimony, weirdly) to complain that my mother and brother were watching too much television. I was on a planet of my own making. Things turned out well.
The Beatles, by not being overtly Sexual, and by channeling an Art School sensibility (via Lennon), turned me on to the redemptive (and dissident) possibilities of Surrealism. They opened a window that served as a door I used as a Fire Exit.
As long as I had “A Day in the Life” or “Across the Universe“, it didn’t fucking matter to me that I’d been born into an underclass that wasn’t even legally human, by decree of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, until I was five years old. Before turning human in 1964, I was at the far end of a continuum encompassing people who had been traded and abused like cattle. By the time I was nine, and fully aware of my position at the bottom of American society (and the “family of man”), I was checking out ten-or-more books from the library at a time. I could tell you the difference between RNA and DNA (I seem to remember that the difference is an oxygen molecule, but the memory is hazy on all that). I read with nerdy glee Project Blue Book (“official” Air Force findings on the matter of UFOs) and Charles Forte’s “Book of the Damned” and grisly arcana about stuff like spontaneous human combustion and so on. I could tell you who Enrico Fermi was but I was so ignorant about Sex that I once raised my hand, to answer a (rhetorical?) Sex Ed question, “Do girls have penises?” with a resounding, “Yes!” To the deafening merriment of my classmates, some of whom were already totally at it. There was a girl named Vanessa who once asked, during the Sex Ed Q-and-A part of the day, while I was hung up on metaphorical pistils and stamen, “What do you do if a boy always cum too quick?” She was twelve or thirteen. Come? Come where?
I knew I knew nothing about Sex. And I was proud of it. I understood, subconsciously, that Negroes were North America’s Dirty Libido. This was obvious from the ecstasies with which fat white cops were hosing-down lithe black integrators and whipping them with nightsticks on Television. National porn on a b&w Cold War canvas in our timeless ghetto exile. There were riots when King took his bullet and the cops very cannily stayed away.
No task is more thankless than being the Dirty Black Libido of an uptight white post-Germanic nation. I wasn’t about to exchange the iron shackles of chattel slavery for the velvet noose of erotic noble-savagery. The more whites demanded it of me, the more I resisted, whether I could have articulated the reasons for my inherent dissidence or not. I couldn’t have. But I knew, ironically, with my body. Whites needed, on so many levels, my animality. I fucking refused.
But it was whites, too, who saved me from the downward-mobility of the instinctual body and showed me to my mind. Malcolm X was all rhetoric and no real practice whereas John Lennon was conceiving, recording and distributing the blueprints to my own Imagination for me. Lennon hipped me to the transcendence of the cult of Apollo when everyone else was being suckered in the mud by Pan. He advocated Fucking, too, of course, but he made you pass through a conceptual gallery of possibilities first. Maybe you’d have to be shit-poor and nine and banned from using certain drinking fountains to get that point… the enormity of the difference.
If you’ve never lived on a wire calibrated to such fine vibrations that a five-dollar-bill is the difference between shelter and eviction, or in which one multiple-choice test can change your life, or one glance at the wrong person at the wrong time can mean prison or a bad beating or death, you won’t understand what an atrocity it is to implicitly encourage black kids to mock and beat other black kids for being too articulate, too bright, to averse to crime or violence… too open to the possibilities inherent in, say, Italian madrigals of the Renaissance. Any “urban” kid who can be allowed to learn to genuinely love an Italian madrigal of the Renaissance is rather less likely to rape, rob or kill. A life of the mind is the obvious best option for the children of the congenital-poor. Which is so obvious that you’ll find it impossible to accept. A well-meaning teacher who gives a black kid only books about the ghetto, by blacks, is turning that child back at the maze’s exit and pointing to its center.
And here is the real beauty and the secret paradox of my childhood obsession: Pablo Fanque, of that supremely surrealist Lennon song, was black.
Whites saved me. If you find yourself trapped in a maze designed by whites, it stands to reason that you’ll need the help of whites to find your way out of it. John Lennon and Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut and Eugene Ionesco and Enrico Fermi and so many others (some dead for centuries) saved me. It was an Inadvertent Intervention… maybe even some of my saviors wouldn’t have considered me fully human, themselves… how to verify? It doesn’t matter now: I was saved. And the irony is that Aretha and James (Brown) would have seduced me into a damnation… the same cultural Potter’s Field that most of my poor fucking classmates of the 1960s faded into as their own anonymous epitaphs. The slo-mo genocide of the North American black. Very few think-pieces are as thoroughly-supported by empirical evidence.
I was the valedictorian of the private Catholic School I attended before escaping, to Vegas, with my father, in 1972. Graduating from eighth grade was a big deal (I had actually taken a college entrance exam, btw, and passed it, at 13… but there wasn’t enough financial aid in the country, back then, to make that miracle happen). I don’t remember the speech I gave. Much of that year was a blur of the fear that I was becoming the age at which it would have been impossible to remain such an oddball and live; a strange child is one thing; a gang-age Surrealist is marked. As I write this, from my home in Europe, I can frame that passage of my life as the beginning of the acquisition of Escape Velocity. And it had nothing to do with installing the bourgeois glass-ceiling of getting a degree and a “good” job, Yankee Materialists please note.
That flickering image of a child in the ashen heart of a rat-infested ghetto, listening to “Strawberry Fields”, with his ear just inches from the speaker, is as surreal, itself, as anything Lennon ever recorded or Magritte ever painted or Ionesco or Kafka ever wrote.
Lennon and Surrealism and Tchaikovsky and physics were the parts of my cultural patrimony that saved me from certain death and every permutation of indignity and the fact that a populist circle of fire has been drawn around so many black kids, to keep them from these treasures (their patrimony as humans), speaks to the current mercilessness of American culture; its near-autistic cluelessness.
If I can save just one white person from the cage of her/his preconceptions by writing this…
THE GIFTED RE-RUN
because I believe in the aesthetic of repetition (and the art of permutation)
RAVENELLA
a para-fairytale
Once upon a time, on the edge of the forest, there lived a girl who was pretty as a doll, but who had turned black in the womb as the result of a wicked spell. The poor little girl did not appear to belong to her mother at all, for her mother was blonde as straw, with skin like moonlit snow. Nor did she appear to belong to her father, who was blonde as butter, with skin as white as milk in the morning. Because of this wicked spell that had turned the child black, her parents kept her locked in a little room at the top of their simple house on the edge of the forest. The room’s only entrance was a window her father climbed in and out of, on a tall red ladder.
Every night, long after the Sun had set and the Moon had replaced the bright star in the throne of the heavens, up the red ladder her father would climb, bearing a lamp, a basket of food, and a key to the lock on the shutters. Unlocking the shutters, her father would lift his lamp to her open window and call,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Whereupon the little girl received her father with great happiness, as if the day was just beginning, and the Sun was bright in the sky. She believed that the Moon was the Sun, the Night was the Day, and the supper she ate was her breakfast.
“Can we play a game now, father?” asked the little girl, after the supper she thought was her breakfast, in the night she thought was the day.
“Yes,” said her father, “But only until I win it,” and they played a game that her father was sure to quickly win.
After making certain that there was enough oil in the child’s lamp to burn until daybreak, and that she’d eaten enough to fill her belly as long as the oil would last the lamp, and that her hair was combed and her buttons were straight and the toys in her chest were not broken, her father would climb back out of the window in order to take his place in bed with his wife until early the next morning. Awakened by the first light of the Sun, he would then climb back up the ladder at dawn to tell little Ravenella the bedtime story that would put her to sleep.
This bedtime story her father told her always made Ravenella weep the most beautiful tears, which shone on her black cheeks like glass beetles on velvet.
No one in the village or the forest or the greater countryside around them had any idea that such a little girl as Ravenella existed, for her supper was everyone else’s breakfast, and her bedtime story was everyone else’s morning prayer, and her night was the day they were all just waking to toil through. None but this handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife knew of the existence of the bewitched child who was black as the birds that rule the night. Neither did the child know of the world, happy in her dreams behind the locked shutters of a room only her father could enter with the use of his tall red ladder.
One day it happened that the handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife had another child, a child who was not bewitched. This child, a boy, was beautiful to behold, for he was fairer than his mother and father combined, with fine hair like gold, and eyes much bluer than a robin’s eggs. The handsome woodcutter and his beautiful wife were overcome with joy.
Still, every night, Ravenella’s father climbed the red ladder to her room at the top of the simple house, calling,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
In time the little girl grew tall, and keen of mind, for she had amused herself by thinking. She was so like a porcelain doll in her features and so innocent in her aspect and so perfect in her grace that despite her terrible blackness, she was not so hard to look at. Though none but her father had gazed upon her in as many years as there are months in each year plus one, she could inspire no emotion harsher than pity in any good soul who might glimpse her.
The exception to this rule was her own mother, the handsome woodcutter’s beautiful wife, who wished the blackened child away from the house. As Ravenella’s brother, unknown to her as she was to him, grew into the strength of his youth, the mother of both children dreaded the notion that her offspring, the first bewitched into blackness, the second blessed with an unsurpassed fairness, should ever by accident meet. Neither child must know of the existence of the other.
She put this to her husband, the handsome woodcutter. “She is old enough to live on her own. Take her into the heart of the forest until she is lost and leave her there.”
“But where shall she sleep?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall sleep on a pile of leaves like all the children of the forest,” said the beautiful wife.
“But what shall she eat?” asked the handsome woodcutter.
“She shall eat berries as black as her skin,” said the beautiful wife, “And drink water from the stream in the forest.”
Heartbroken, but unwilling to defy his wife’s wishes, the handsome woodcutter did as he was told, and climbed the red ladder that very midnight, unlocking the shutters and calling to his daughter,
“Awaken, my child, the day has begun, and all hath arisen along with the Sun!”
Hearing the sorrow in the man’s voice, the good-hearted child asked, “Father, what is it that troubles you?”
“It is time for a great journey,” said the handsome woodcutter. “In this basket we must gather your possessions, and carry them from this room, and travel to a place that your heart has never dreamed of.”
Being an obedient child, Ravenella gathered the simple possessions that her father had given her over the years. These included a silver comb, a silver mirror, and a silver cross on which to pray at her bedtime. Packing the basket with these objects, along with as much food as he could fit in it, her father helped her down the tall red ladder, and her slippered feet touched the earth for the first time in her existence.
Father bade her keep silent as the Moon itself, which she thought was the Sun, and they made their way to into the forest under cover of the night, which, of course, she thought was the day.
Far into the darkness they journeyed, and when she tired, her father made Ravenella a bed of leaves, deep in the forest beside a stream. The whisper of the water was a powerful lullaby which put the girl to sleep as the sun was rising, and the woodcutter, with a breaking heart, left his daughter in the care of her deep and innocent dreams as he began the long walk home.
The years went by, and though the poor woodcutter eventually died of his broken heart, which turned to a stone in his chest and stopped beating, his son grew strong and tall. The fair young man soon acquired a reputation as a remarkable hunter, second to none in both his bravery and the accuracy of his arrows. Not only did he stock his mother’s larder with the wild game he killed every day in the forest, but provided most of the meat for his village, and the mother and soon son grew prosperous.
Being both famous for his skill, and prosperous as a result of it, the young hunter soon enough came to the attention of the King. The King sent a courier to the house in which the hunter lived alone with his aged mother, inviting the young man to the palace. The mother of the hunter, who had once been the woodcutter’s beautiful wife, but now was old and gray, swooned with pride and delight. She knew, as did every old mother with a son in the kingdom, that the King had several daughters of a marrying age, the eldest of which was at an age to be in desperate need of a husband.
“O, to be the mother of the husband of a princess!”, thought the old woman, and she clapped her hands with joy. She dressed the young hunter in his finest garments, and sent him off in the company of the page for his audience with the King.
Just as the old woman had predicted, the King offered the handsome young man the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage, but the offer came with a twist, for it was only on the condition of the completion of a dangerous task.
“In the very deep dark of the heart of the forest,” said the King to the handsome young hunter, “there lives a witch called Ravenella, black as the birds she is named after. She is a terrible witch who has lured many a young man to his death in the stream that runs through the forest. Kill this witch, and bring me her heart as the proof that you have killed her, and the hand of the princess is yours.”
So he did.
MORE GIFTED RE-RUNS
Inter-Dimensional Varieties of Longing
1. Wilderton
third person past archaic
If he opened his eyes he saw horrors real but with them shut he glimpsed infernal sideshows of the imagination. He did not believe in an immortal soul but had no doubts as to the existence of his mortal shame. One could feel shame and be of a modern disposition: it struck him that the latter engendered the former with a bitter insistence unheard of in the Old Testament. If being modern is to admit that humanity is not a flesh and bone mask behind which a purer essence exists but the measurable extent of things, he unmasked himself whenever he indulged. Behind his mask was no void but a succubus that modernity put there.
There were varieties of a novel scientific argument about an infinite regress of proto-man. He remained objectively neutral about this argument in debate but he believed it on the evidence of his own eyes, in secret, when his eyes were closed, because he saw a proto-woman (by how many thousand removes not a person, he couldn’t say) when the urge to see her, and then to act on the urge, struck, which was not less than once a day; in the morning, usually, when he was about to shave. A she-beast with matted hair and vaguely Negroid features —though in complexion white as a cave fish— perhaps a Jewess— and sweaty teats he made himself feel nearly sick imagining. Though not so sick as to stop him. To shave right after was parlous. Eating breakfast and dabbing the yellow of an egg at his chin he found blood on the napkin, a dot of it the size of a curio he once viewed through a magnifying glass in a collector’s shop on Warwick Street, an Emperor’s profile from that part of the world still suffering Emperors, the chiming of the hour on the clock his father had gotten from his father’s father interrupting the reverie.
From the head of the dining room table to the old clock which was half-way in its journey to the stroke of nine was a distance of fifty paces he was helpless against enumerating each and every time he walked it. The pleasure he took in making the number fifty-one or even fifty-two, sometimes, by his stride’s independent subterfuge, struck him as pathetic, knowing that a similar path in his father’s house had measured twice that. Yes and in his father’s father’s mansion the path had been twice and half-again more, his grandfather having housed two families, the extraneous one based on the two little men he’d got by the girl who polished the brasses and remained pretty much longer than his wife, who, in all fairness, bore him four times the number, seven of them men, the youngest of whom inherited the clock now chiming down the hall and precious little else. He touched it in passing.
The tree-tops and cloud-bottoms and spires of the university were all still there, familiar elements of an oil painting that would crumble before it ever yellowed with age. The wind that pushed him was a playful spirit and lifting a hand to steady his hat he managed also to wave at Mr. Wilderton who happened to turn, at that moment, from studying the Airship as though he’d been reading an inscription on it. He waited for a carriage to clatter past and waited again to defer to arms-linked women in blindingly bright dress and finally crossed the street to approach the hatless and stubbornly mutton-chopped figure. The affect of Wilderton’s haughty posture and obstructive position was as if the Airship were his own and that Mr. Wilderton was neither unduly proud of it as a possession nor likely to offer anyone else a ride on it. Forty yards up in brilliant blue it glinted where the sun surpassed the long morning shadows of the university, in apparent size large enough to hold several men.
“Mr. Wilderton,” he said.
“And to you,” nodded Wilderton. It was not the first time he wondered if Wilderton had trouble remembering any or all parts of his name. At best, Wilderton sometimes addressed him as “Sir”. He stuck out a hand and Wilderton took it with surprising warmth. Wilderton himself, as a figure, so lacked any hint of surprises that his every deed or gesture fairly minted them. He had once seen Wilderton stick out his tongue at a large woman’s gingham back and the image would endure to amuse him on his very deathbed, he was certain.
“I went mad on the occasion of my thirty-fifth birthday,” said Mr. Wilderton, “and ordered by catalogue a thing to be delivered by international post; a thing I suspected you’d be interested in seeing. Collected in Java. On the eve of my thirty-sixth birthday I have received notice that the package is now arrived. Do you have time, Sir?”
The package (covered in covetable stamps?) was assigned to be delivered before noon and he walked with Mr. Wilderton to the latter’s house, behind the university, on Edgeware Road. It was a forty-minute walk at a stiff pace, their walking sticks flashing with an almost embarrassing unity.
2. Salome
third person past demotic
Dolph Schneider wore a monk-like beard for years on account of his weak chin, but gave up the practice after hitting thirty, because the beard, he felt, made him look too old. His striking red-headed mother Salome said “Jesus thank God… finally…you look like my son again…” and hugged him and that was nearly enough to make Dolph grow the beard back. He’d almost forgotten how much self-assertion had gone into that itchy affectation in the first place. Not that he didn’t love his mother. He did he did. He knew he was lucky to have her. Things could have been worse.
Pantsless, with bruise-colored blazer draped over one arm, he yanked open his closet and squinted with suspicion at the sad things that found solace in its darkness. T-shirts on hangers; a dangling camouflage belt or two, and behind that, the material residue of his childhood dream. This stack of stuff weighed as much as Dolph did, but was three feet taller.
The strata of the stack revealed historical epochs of Dolph Schneider, starting with various flattened boxes of Milton Bradley board games at the very bottom; the visible red edge of an all too fragile Etch-A-Sketch which had lasted exactly a week in ‘79; several cracked ant farms (abandoned cities now); the wood-burning kit that one of Dolph’s innumerable ‘uncles’ had brought over, re-wrapped, the day after Christmas one year, as consolation for the fact that he would never leave his real wife and kids, Dolph guessed; the hinged wooden case of a junior biology lab (with its grisly black jars of pickled specimens, still somewhat of a nightmare factory), a thin layer of comix and coloring books, a case of water colors, a case of oil paints, a case of pastel crayon and a tower of vintage Penthouse magazines that teetered to within a few inches of the closet ceiling. The Penthouses were still subject to frequent raids and anthropological investigations.
The five-year subscription had been a birthday gift from Salome on Dolph’s thirteenth. You’re a man now and all that. Where she got the money he could only guess. Maybe they all chipped in… his ‘Uncles’. Despite the fact that even then Dolph had rightly interpreted this convention-flouting gift as a deft maneuver around a parental lecture of an embarrassingly intimate nature, he had to admit to himself that he could’ve done worse than have Salome Schneider for a mother. She could have been like home-schooled loony Tim Patchett’s mother, she of the distracted gaze and permanent I-see-Jesus-standing-right-behind-you smile. Or she could have been like Boggy’s mom: Boggy called her Stalinetta. No, Dolph’s mother was cool and everyone (except everyone’s parents) knew it. She was funky and foxy and had even tried to get Dolph to smoke pot with her. She had hoped for a kind of new family tradition to take root: pot night on Sundays in the attic with Mom.
She was always hoping that some new family tradition might take root. Dolph assumed that her palpable longing in this department was related to the fact that she had shattered every connection to actual old family traditions by moving to Southern California (‘So Cal,’ or as she later re-christened it, ‘So-so Cal’) and renouncing the Jewish faith and having him, Dolph, so far out of wedlock that he hadn’t even known his father’s name for the first twenty years of his life.
Not that Dolph regretted the fact that he hadn’t been brought up a Jew. But he had positively hated Kwanza. And those mother-son dervish classes at the YMCA (“Dervish” always sounded too much like an adjective in his opinion, and his incessant sarcastic use of ‘derv’ or ‘derving’ as a verb had contributed to Salome’s decision to cancel the non-refundable classes; she still found time to guilt him about that one, occasionally). The attempted pot tradition had come and gone the summer before Dolph left for his aimless year-and-a-half at a semi-prestigious college back East. That’s one thing that semi-prestigious colleges back East are good at: knowing when you don’t belong at them.
“Dolphy, come on, you’re kidding. You don’t… (drag; gulp)…you don’t smoke (cough)…pot? At all? Never? Aren’t you even… (drag; gulp)… curious?”
That soft July night, with so many stars visible through the propped-open attic windows and his mother’s pretty face flickering in the parchment light of a single candle that seemed tied by a fine string to the breeze, Dolph had wished with all of his heart that his mother would say what she really wanted to say. He was very psychic with her, Dolph was. He knew she wanted to quip about his abstinence from drugs, “Christ, Dolphy, what would your father say?” and they both would have giggled over that one and it was a giggle Dolph had sorely wanted to share with her.
But the “P.P.” (Phallo-Progenitor) was off limits. Verboten. The conversational territory of Dolph’s biological father was a scorched and salted circle of sand surrounded by razor wire in the desert of high unmentionables. Rather than making that joke about his unmentionable father, Salome had opted for the obvious and awful alternative, a sentence that had made Dolph wince so hard he’d actually pinched a ladybug-sized fart when she said it.
“Christ, Dolphy, are you a …a virgin, too?”
“ ‘Virgin’?,’ demanded Dolph. His volume increased as the sentence progressed. “Why the euphemism, Mom? I’m a pear-shaped bushy-haired semi-Jew with a weak chin, a zero-status job and 17 months of college under my belt that I’ll be paying off for the rest of my ridiculous life!”
And yes: he had been. A virgin. Back then. His surprising reaction had prompted a compassionate hug from his mother that had in turn broken his heart. Now, at nearly thirty one, things were no longer quite like that for Dolph in that department, but only just. The former state was distinguishable from the latter by twelve years and three-or-four acts of sketchy intercourse. What would his father say?
On all fours, still pantsless and fat-in-the-can and painfully aware of how he must look from behind, Dolph peered under his bed. There were terrible things to be found there in the realm from which his dreams often filtered up to him; things he’d stuffed there to forget and had forced therefore into his subconscious. Dust-bunnies, sure, and pizza boxes, of course. But bills, mostly. Unopened credit card bills. Online porno and phone sex line and tele-psychic bills. Very big bills. Any day now, in fact, he was expecting a knock on the door. Or the righteous anger of an overhead helicopter. Maybe I should have taken up pot as a habit, he thought. Maybe his mother had been right. Being unable to purchase the pot with a credit card would have kept the habit in check.
He could hear Salome bumping around downstairs in the living room, clearing a space for her weekly private lessons with the bone-thin, swarthy tango man. He lifted a stiff nest of dark, sour clothing. A sock… one of his older cashmere sex socks… tumbled off the top of the nest and rolled under his desk as though fleeing him.
“Salome,” he called down the stairs, at the top of his lungs, “have you seen the tie?” There was the hint of accusation in his voice familiar to all such living arrangements.
“Not since the funeral!” she yodeled back.
He took a breath to shout “Which funeral?” when the Hoover filled the little house with its protective roar, cutting him off. Dolph had no serious complaints about his mother because she had done the best she could do under the circumstances. She had raised him with little money and no help, banished from her family and surrounded by freaks, into the loose variation on the theme of fine-young-man that he was. The only problem he had with her, his hip young mother (47 to his 30) … the only thing that still pissed him off sometimes…
“Aha!”
He found the tie as a bookmark in a hardcover anthology of a pornographic science fiction magazine called Salome. All he had to do now was to remember how to put the damn thing on.
3. Goldilocks
first person present continuous exotic
My big brother Ajax says that story about Goldilocks is a cautionary tale about race mixing. My little brother Julio just sits there staring at the television while trying to gnaw his jawbreaker in half. Ajax is the smart one. In fact, as they say in my family, he got everything and a little bit more: brains, looks and the Jungle Juice to spare. Me: I’m slow but steady and Julio is an ugly runt with no hope for a better future but Ajax, he’s something. I heard a white lunch lady call him a Colored Adonis once and what else can I say?
Julio and I are busy watching My Favorite Martian in order to combine our two favorite pleasures (jawbreakers and My Favorite Martian) and Ajax is propounding his theory. Goldilocks is a spoiled, middle-class Honkie bitch, etc.
“Ajax, man,” I say. “This is not the place.”
Ray Walston as the Martian (alias Martin O’Hara) has hypnotized a woman with his alien mind powers and is now busy re-doing her ‘do with his telekinetic finger. He’s transforming her into a Fox. I hope he kisses her this time. He never kisses anyone. It’s his show and he never gets any.
“Any what?” I always demanded before, frustrated by my ignorance, but Ajax, or Uncle Eldridge, or the kids at school, they’d just wag their fingers and say stuff like, “If you gotta ask, you shouldn’t know.”
Back to the girl on My Favorite Martian. Her shiny thick chestnut-colored hair and her Gemini nose-cone Playtex cross-your-heart titties.
It makes me think of a cut-away view of a fallopian tube that I’ve seen in Miss Bumper’s Sex Ed and Hygiene Class, so I develop a painful swelling in my groin. I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I don’t care what I do with this thing. This is the very problem that Miss Bumper warned us about recently, whacking a chalkboard diagram of erectile tissue with her pointer so hard that the rubber tip of the pointer broke off. The tip ricocheted off of Darleen McFadden’s forehead and sent her to the nurse’ office. Miss Bumper said she was faking.
I can hear Ajax and Julio’s insincere laughter and then the theme song of My Favorite Martian, all of this through the bathroom door as I lean against the tile wall, which is cool on my cheek. My back is to the mirror, but I can see it from the corner of my eye in the dim light: my back and the anxious movements, like I’m snatching sticky taffy out of my pocket.
I’m facing the worn green bar of soap on a rope that I bought for Uncle Eldridge for Christmas. It’s hanging lazy in the shower, smirking at me with a long loose curlicue of hair for a smile. On the bathtub’s rim are lined up Uncle Eldridge’s colognes and deodorants and ointments: English Leather, Brut, Canoe, Old Spice, Jade East, Right Guard and then I see stars. A tablespoon of my Jungle Juice is trickling down the tile wall, like a tiny smashed egg without the shell. Then I start laughing. I can’t help it. I am pleased.
“Ooooh! Oooohhh! Un-ka Ellll-dridge! Un-ka Elllll-dridge!” shouts Julio, from the top of the stairs, “Hamilton be laffin’ dirty in the baffroom agin!”
A year ago I nearly killed Julio by persuading him to fly from the highest point of the garage roof wearing a towel like a Superman cape. At the last minute I substituted a plain old towel from the laundry basket and was about to give him a good push when we heard the ice cream truck come rolling down the alley, doodling its scary melody. The circus music that slows down in some parts and speeds up in others like a Vincent Price movie about a crazy undead clown. Julio and I scampered down off the roof and bought a pineapple Popsicle for him (Julio only had a dime) and a Dreamsicle for me. The ice cream man was so black that I could see the reflection of my hand in his forehead as I passed him my Kennedy Half.
“Un-ka Ellllll-dridge! Un-ka Elllllllll-dridge!”
I still have the grin that’s left over from the laughter on my face, leaning cheek-first against the bathroom wall and I think: that Dreamsicle wasn’t worth it. I wish I could give it back. I wish I could reverse the march of time so that we never scrambled down off that roof to buy those ice cream bars so Julio tried to fly with that fake Superman cape instead. I’d look down from the top of the garage towards the concrete driveway and see Julio laying there like that Gumby we fucked up last Christmas plus genuine blood. I’d climb down and investigate the body and exchange the useless towel he was wearing for the Superman towel I’d switched it with and no one would suspect a thing.
“Let your big brother be, Julio Hanson…,” yells back Uncle Eldridge from the kitchen. He is making Sloppy Joes. Sloppy Joes and Fritos. And strawberry Nehi in a bottle with a straw.
What a wonderful motherfucking existence
BECAUSE ASSERTING THAT SUCKASS SNAILSHIT IS MIND-BLOWING & GOLDEN IS JUST KIND OF A PART OF ENTITLEMENT’S SMUG LITTLE META-PACKAGE, Part 2.0
Part 1.0 here
This last week I’ve felt a little nostalgic for the Totalitarian Oppression of the past. Remember? How grimly-constipated men with big mustaches and secret homosexual urges (made brutally perverse by sublimation) would enforce a Norm, which had been established by violence, by threatening more violence? How conversations with the faintest whiff of dissidence were held in whispers in kitchens that had been checked for listening devices, with the taps running loud in the sink just in case? And how, despite, or, because of, the massive gray pressure of brute-conformity by decree, from above, fantastic profusions of color, in the form of underground Arts and samizdat Literature, secretly nurtured the powerless by feeding into the one possession The State could not, from the powerless, confiscate: the Imagination? “The Imagination” being a rational, secular term for The Soul.
Great Art inspires; Inspiration breeds heroic Imaginations; heroic Imaginations make Great Humans and Great Humans make Great Art: remember?
Well, welcome to Totalitarian Oppression 2.0. They’ve got it worked out pretty well. While brotherly, avuncular and grandfatherly mass-murderers with publicists do what they do from the top, their fucking biological (and/or spiritual) offspring do what they do from the middle, which is destroy Art. All those kids who don’t even take Art or Lit seriously enough to break a sweat simply finding-then-perfecting any ability whatsoever before they dump their samey Fartifacts all over the place and agree to call each others’ dumpage “awesome” (to fail to do so would just be so rude, dude, not to mention destroy the illusion for everyone).
Mediocre Art enervates; enervation breeds flaccid Imaginations; flaccid Imaginations make Mediocre Humans and Mediocre Humans make Mediocre Art.
Please, Comrades Lorcas and Explicit, go out today and find some Art that doesn’t flatter, humor, fatten, pacify, confirm, distract or, worst of all, cynically reflect you… and make an effort to appreciate it. And if you can’t find some… make some. It may not be easy but that’s the point.
THE CONSUMPTIVE CULTURES-CRITIQUE
(via Comrade Barry)
You’re pretty upset about those fucking Native American and Japanese Consumers of whales and dolphins (about which you hear fairly often), right?
Do they do it for food? No.
I read that the taste for whalemeat is actually diminishing in Japan and the government subsidises its production. Why? I can only think because it reflects backwards to a Japan before the invasion of McDonalds, Burger King etc.
Many year’s ago I ( bohemian that I am too although I prefer the Odilon Redon model of keep appearances normal on the outside and let the art do the talking ) I went to a splendid Super 8 film festival. It was an open door policy so afternoons in upstairs rooms in pubs were spent ( or was that wasted? On reflection spent ) watching the avant-garde as well as precocious brat’s home versions of Star Wars. However best of all was a film of Lapp fishermen singing the praises of eating every bit of the seal. One verse was indeed ” Seal cock is delicious, seal cock is delicious”. After about 20 minutes of this even the most hardened ( oops ) meat-eaters had been bludgeoned into revulsion by the carnivorous zeal on show. Expressed in song.
Comrade ET!
It’s already so obvious that seal cock is delicious that you have to wonder why the Lapps insist on overstating the point. I like the idea of “hardened meat-eaters” being “bludgeoned” by… seal cock.
smarter mammal from Ninetto Makavejev on Vimeo.
You got the impression that the Lapps who won’t eat seal cock but will eat the rest of the beast were “vegetarians”.
Rather similar to Spain where I have just been working. One of our team is a no meat / no fish version of vegetarian ( quite a rare beast in my experience. – most vegetarians I know including my partner will eat fish. ??????? ) . He asked for a salad with no fish or meat in it which had to be returned several times to be de-tuna’d. The waiter was confused by his claim that tuna is in fact a fish.
I think the Veg rule (as I understand it) is that anything which doesn’t smile, sport hair or have noisy orgasms is fair game. Vegans are more strict in that they spare the quieter-orgasm-type species too.
More Super-Shit From GENERATION-SCHIZ on a Sunday
See what happens when you’ve been raised on a steady diet of every shade/nuance/state and degree of Lie, both Professional and Amateur? [ed.'s note: the advertising Lies, the religion Lies, the war Lies, the narcissism Lies, the social Lies, the economic Lies, success Lies and the consensus-equals-the-truth Lies, et al], Your Taste Glands and Bullshit Detectors just dry up, burn off and blow away:
Kids. What have they done to you… ?
Now, please, Comrades… look at the following chunk of Tin Cheese (lauded by the above-cited comments) and try not to laugh so hard that it wakes your kid down the hall while she’s napping (still, I’ll admit, if you need to distract from crappy skills on the guitar, a total inability to sing and the compositional might of a precociously self-dramatizing 8th-grader, what better way to do it than to channel Martin Short channeling Jerry Lewis being not quite funny as ever?):
vs
Yes and some more genuine talent to go beddywards with and to forget the ever-asseverative suckage… for awhile …
Little Stalinisms*
Yesterday I got some traffic via a Guardian Unlimited Blogicle that was posted on Feb 7, 2008. The Blogicle was on the subject of the Willesden Herald International Short Story competition and the kerfuffle which ensued when the competition’s chief judge, the famously hot-housed flower, Zadie Smith, announced: “We could not find the greatness we’d hoped for,” and, “It’s for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year.” Fair enough and who gives a shit, more than two years later?
What caught my eye is the fact that the Guardian seems to have deleted the second half of the comment thread. I traced the incoming link, back to the original post and thread, with a sense of nostalgia, not least because one of the commenters, well-known to that vintage of the community of Guardian readers/commenters, Cynical Steve, has since (unbelievably) died. It was a lively thread, which also happened to offer insight into the psycho-mechanics of a Literary Prize, because one of Zadie’s key accomplices in the Willesden Herald International Short Story competition (who appeared in the thread under the virtuanym “Zozimus“) jumped in and started swinging. Which certainly had a salutary and demystifying effect. But the demystifying bits are now gone.
Writers and Critics and Divers Literary Authorities who don’t want to have their cools blown and be seen as merely human should never descend to comment threads… for the obvious reason that there are always civilians out there, somewhere, who are actually more clever than you/us/they, and one or two or even a terrifying gang of them will be drawn by the beacon of the title of the blogicle (or by the tags); it’s not a random sample of the general public. The Internet is a tool for philosophical investigation on all that as nothing displaces a human’s sense of self more casually and definitively from the pinnacle/center of Creation. It also wreaks havoc with anyone’s confidence in her/his ability to mint original band names.
The point is that those fuckers at the Guardian chopped the thread in half, giving “Zozimus” the last word… a comment he’d left before veering far, far off into the juvenile and the loopy. The comment thread originally ended at 111 entries (it still bloody says so, right there under the blogicle) and now it ends at 50. Did Zadie apply her mediocre Star Pressure? I guess we’ll never know. The opportunity of self-expression the comment thread offers (remember what it was like, 20 years ago, crafting a Letter to the Editor and then praying it would appear, a week or a month later, in public?) is backed by the tacit caveat that a comment thread at a commercial site is governed, in the end, by the same dodgy ethics of any business.
We can never know if be-turbaned Zadie applied cosmetic delete-pressure [ed.'s note: we can, in fact: see below], but what we can know is how human (and randomly-appointed) people who judge these lofty-sounding competitions can actually be. Because I had the foresight to preserve the thread.
Disclaimer: I don’t believe in “Literary Competitions” and I certainly didn’t enter this one… my chances of ever winning these things remain nil. Too fucking whatever, man.
Any of the Guardian Commenters of the Class of 2006-2008 may enjoy reading this pdf.
THE SEMI-EXPUNGED WILLESDEN KERFUFFLE
UPDATE:
Mishari writes:
So change the title of this post to…
*INADVERTENT STALINISMS
THE WAR ON TALENT
with apologies to Kundera
As in many fields, America leads the world in the war against talent. I was discussing this notion with my imaginary friend Dr. Painloss, who was reluctant to cede to nice American heads the crown in this matter.
“What about Germany?” he asked, with his ambiguously-European accent. I could see his point, what with all the permanently lip-synching pop stars over here and the novelists whose novels are nothing but rambling essays of derivative philosophical posturing and all the painters who can barely draw or mix colors and the dancers with no authority of movement nor sense of rhythm and the beggars who aren’t even witty about demanding that money be dropped in their caps, etc.
“But having no talent,” I corrected him, “is not quite the same as waging a war against it, although the one sometimes leads to the other.”
We were sitting in a cozy café in East Berlin where the waitress displayed no visible talent in the field of service. We’d been sitting there already for a quarter of an hour without even being offered a menu. The dirty plates and glasses from our table’s prior occupant had yet to be cleared away. The waitress was beautiful, which put me on to an interesting train of thought: is physical beauty, in some obvious-yet-rarely-analyzed way, talent’s enemy? Can the war on talent be connected somehow to the rise of the modern cult of physical beauty? But this train of thought was derailed by Painloss’ child-like querulousness.
“But I don’t quite get,” he frowned, “how it is you hold the country of your birth to be the first of all nations in this regard. Surely, in Iran, where the censorship is so powerful that entire art forms are forbidden on pain of death…”
“Ah, but I’d draw the distinction between America and Iran in my conception of a war against talent because Iran has an excuse for almost every extreme in attitude or policy… religion. Ridiculous as you and I may find it that a modern government appoints itself the murderous henchman of an invisible, misogynistic super-being, it isn’t talent itself that the Iranians seem to object to. Whereas in America, you see, it’s held that talent is an evil in and of itself, by definition, to the extent that it discriminates and isolates the lonely many from the few. But there’s something more insidious at work there, I think.”
I smiled over Dr. Painloss’s head, hoping to attract the attention of our physically perfect waitress. To no avail. She was very busy, leaning over the counter to chat with her equally-handsome boyfriend. When I lowered my smile again to Paingloss’s level I saw that he was glaring at me.
“Well?” he demanded, finally.
“It’s just this: talent, especially in its esoteric form, generally seems to cost more and to sell less, and it makes all kind of difficult demands… consider the word diva. I sometimes wonder if behind the fatwa on extraordinary ability in my homeland, some kind of bottom-line corporate malfeasance isn’t at work…”
Painloss, always delighted by conspiracy theories (the more rigorously torturous the better), chuckled. My good-natured friend, a true intellectual who is himself so replete with ability that he often inspires feelings of inadequacy in his close acquaintances, myself among them, is older than me by a generation. But his advanced age is no alibi for his physical shortcomings, which are best summed-up as ugliness converted to charm by frank self-awareness. No model myself, I am at least presentable, physically, if not nearly as charming as Painloss. As a reward for my middling endowment of charm, I have a wonderful mate: a good-natured, intelligent, and physically-beautiful human. Recently, we vacationed in America, and I related a pertinent anecdote from the trip, to Painloss, while his gaze drifted toward our perfect (and neglectful) waitress. I said:
“The thing about America is that there’s no room for the acceptance of failure/boredom/depression/disgust or poverty to be seen for what they are: natural states. I think America adds insult to injury by treating these states as misunderstandings at best and diseases or even crimes at worst when in fact America is just delusionally optimistic about the power of positive thinking. Rather than eradicating poverty or failure, the goal should be de-stigmatizing them. The difference between the two approaches being that the latter action is actually do-able, which makes it so very radical and taboo. We’d rather sell bumper stickers and give benefit concerts and tout government programs to eradicate the bad stuff because it feels better to do so, and looks sexier and maintains a status quo that the plutocrats (and the Gods themselves) are more than pleased with. Meanwhile, the language is suffering: it´s making less and less sense; it´s banging against louder and bigger disconnects… which in turn, of course, breeds nation-wide insanity.”
“For example, by accident, my Beloved and I attended something called GRANDMA’S MARATHON, late in the day. Five hours and thirty minutes after the start of the marathon (and about three miles from the finish, and two hours after the runners with reasonable times had already showered), we saw an hysterically-cheerful mother of three, traipsing with her children against the flow of the run, clapping and shouting WOO HOO YOU’RE INCREDIBLE!!!!… at everyone. It goes without saying that such encouragement is meaningless when applied to everyone, and depressing in the context that any runner there to hear it was so patently NOT incredible (as a runner of marathons, at least) as to render her cheer-leading a very wicked satire.”
“The main point is that being unable to call someone a mediocre or even suck-ass marathon runner elevates marathon running, and all such activities, to a level of importance that trivializes real human life while deifying the abstraction of excellence for its own sake. Not being free to call a fat person fat elevates being skinny to far too important a value. I mean: can we allow for the fact that human life is wonderful and happily full of sensations and well-worth living despite individual failures at many relatively unimportant things? It must work on the Central Nervous Systems of both source and object, I think… this relentless compulsion to valueless praise and hysterical encouragement. Hyper-nice American optimism is in truth tragic and really about hopelessness: the palliative care in a terminal cancer ward.”
Pleased with myself, I settled back in my seat, arms folded over my chest, and smiled. I waited a polite interval for Dr. Painloss’ reaction to my diatribe and when none was forthcoming, I asked him, “Well, what do you think of that?”
“Excuse me? What do I think? Of what?” he replied, softly. He was staring with such heartbreaking wistfulness at our absentee waitress’s shapely behind that it dawned on me that my poor dear friend was lost in a dream from which only the cruelest asshole would wake him.
DREAR DIARY
Too hot to play in the garden, so Offsprung is watercoloring with merciless genius at the kitchen table (which has been most of the story, with the exception of the occasional digging-of-a-hole or some mud-based mini-atrocity, for nearly a frigging fortnight). Also: cursing the day I replaced the CS2 editing program with CS4. And Beloved is out running errands and preparing for tomorrow’s gig.
I’m supposed to be working on the global-ad-campaign song that’s been my major commercial project since March (I think); believe it or not, the song is for Xmas. .. that’s how these things go. Worse: there’s no such thing as “progress” after the song is roughed-in, typically, in a week or two… all the subsequent changes and re-reinstatements and re-changes and tweaked re-reinstatements are based on the fact that three teams (Production; Advertising; Brand) are swinging the dicks of their magicless wands over the corpse of the artifact. The subtextual battle is the composer/production-team (three of us) trying to keep everyone else’ grubby fingers off (or out of) the copyright… without stepping on any Advertising, or Brand, toes. I once had a fucking voice coach try to insinuate her way into the copyright pie, right in the studio, tape running, by urging us to correct a double-negative in the chorus! The email I wrote as a result is a treasure and I will dig it up to post here as an update. Anyway, all this ado about artifacts which are already crappy by design. You’d be surprised how hard it is to do crappy-by-design (versus free-form crappy or good-by-design)… it’s a little like playing a drunk, convincingly, onstage. Or, better: playing the part of someone with 20%-less IQ. Performing as a flat-out retard would be so much easier (and lots more fun).
There’s a flat fee (always: without which, Fuck Off, thanks) but I also have that stake in the copyright. Hence, after months and months, I won’t be saying “fuck no” to Revision-X. This terrible song represents the second-half of next year’s rent.
THE REVISION-IN-PROGRESS
(I’ll be tinkering on this one all day)
6 Counter-Intuitive Love Songs
1.
St. Alban’s is a side street in the Summit Avenue neighborhood where F. Scott Fitzgerald feels most at home. Walks the street in a t-shirt on sultry nights. There are a dozen addresses along Summit where Fitzgerald lived but the only one the clique ever paid any attention to was a Romanesque brownstone we’d hang out in front of on misty nights to give our cunts the fantods with Scotty’s approval. We, too, continued to haunt the area long after we’d quit or graduated. Fantods was Tucker van Tassel’s word. I filched it from him. I think I filched filched, too. Who says filched? The rich must die.
I was the only scholarship. The serf on a workstudy forced to wake up at the crack every Thursday, slip into crusty painter-whites and meet a gray-eyed half-Ojibwe alky named Chuck in front of the student union. There he’d be, stumbling already over dropcloths, his arms a rich color against the heaving tongues of pouring paint. Those poison milkshakes. And there I’d come. Supposed to be grateful for the opportunity. Here: attend this gilded bunker of privilege. Watch: your weightless friends sail through chatty days to reach every bacchanalia of no-free nights. I grew big guns shoveling coke in the boilers of the Titanic.
I confess it was my subconscious revenge maneuver to fuck one of their women. Exquisite chattel on a plinth: I think I glimpsed that on the menu of one of those temples she tried to put me in my place at later. But oh, when I first saw Mary Duncan Ford looming against that laughing, luminous, thirty-foot Jeanne Moreau on a bike I interpreted my aspirational panic as love. If I’d only known. She looked better than Ms. Moreau and rendered the nouvelle vague kind of boring. Fiction is so vulnerable but in its favor I’d argue that at least it doesn’t care. Pushing her way down the row of cinema seats, hunched under the toy gray deathray from the projector, giggling pardon moi , she puts a hand on my knee and steps on my foot and settles to my left and fuck did the smell of her shampoo make it impossible. Does one of those guys die in the end? Maybe he sacrifices himself to save the other two (a neat resolution of the triangle). When all five of us got kicked out I followed my supremely-unembarrassable new friends to an off-campus pizzeria. And immediately, that night, back in my dorm, I started practicing the not-blushing… in a mirror. I’d say, “And who do you think you are?” in a certain voice. I could do the voice but I never learned to not blush. Which made the voice useless. The rich only blush when you glimpse their intestines.
The ones I met that first night were part of a much larger clique. Which was part of a much larger class. Which descended from an ancient tradition of the royal fuck you. These assholes knew the proper way to sleep in castles. Sophia, Katie and I sat on one side of the table and Eric and Tucker and Mary on the other. They were my first exposure to people who enjoy pizza and pop music with zero animal gusto but also neither with guilt nor disdain just nearly a kind of forbearance. I grasped that curling my lip at disco music, for example, wouldn’t put me any higher on the carefully-calibrated ladder than being caught caressing a Travolta poster. I learned to never, under any circumstances, eye that very last slice. Subtle stuff.
I wisely kept my provincial enthusiasms for F. Scott Fitzgerald to myself. I wore my suspenders in the dark, alone. The main thing was they were all from well-off East Coast bloodlines and I knew if I gave them anything to pick on in those first few formative days and weeks the flaw or error would become the label on the can I was made of. I would become the hindered mascot. Rub its head for good luck. I was very quiet. I listened more than I talked. I mastered (and memorized an arsenal of) offhand quips and tailored a working persona. Developed a late-blooming near-sympathy for the Jews.
It’s obvious to me in retrospect that Mary was intrigued by my blue-collar looks. I wasn’t the only dark-haired boy in the bunch (Tucker’s hair was blue-black as any comic book hero’s) or the only one with a calloused handshake (sailing will do that for you) but there was something solid, or self-willed, about me. Something that the over-bred fuckers of her species lacked.
The first time I hit her I knew I was on to something. She laughed and said harder.
I am willing to take a test.
2.
Hyacinth is on her death trip again. Shuffling from room to room and staring at stuff with that spooky I am a camera blankness. Like she’s memorizing it, filing it away. Storing it for when, soon coming, all of this… the ashtrays, the doorstops, the all-in-one entertainment center with a busted cassette player and a scratched-at indelible Take That sticker on its side… will fail to exist. Only Hyacinth will exist. Only Hyacinth will make it. Hyacinth will survive as a Cosmic witness. Hyacinth the Chosen One. The rest of us are doomed, pal. When the landlord of landlords comes tromping up the back stairs of the universe, jingling his zillion keys, the rest of His tenants are toast.
What I like is how Hyacinth strips down before trancing. Wants to meet her maker in her innocence is how she puts it. In her birthday suit. Hyacinth has a very nice birthday suit.
You’re having a dinner party and virginal Hyacinth comes shuffling into the dining room while The Gypsy Kings play on at tasteful volume and she makes this entrance in the middle of some toff’s borrowed anecdote about Heidegger, in said birthday suit, Polaroiding everyone with those big brown eyes: that makes an impression. I usually say she’s sleepwalking, poor thing. No sudden moves. Remain seated. She’ll nip off to bed on her own in a minute or two.
People call and ask me, uh, hey, when’s the next dinner party?
Well, problem is, I can’t guarantee that Hyacinth will make an appearance and nothing kills conversation like half a dozen people glancing expectantly at the dining room door the whole evening. Thing is, she has to be on a death trip to do it and she only goes on a death trip when the signs and omens augur the imminence of joyful dominion.
Hyacinth is our American. You’ve probably gathered as much.
It isn’t given to many of the English to be raised on a compound, is it? It’s practically a rite of passage for Americans. Most of them over there could probably write a pretty good tell-all about some Spiritual Leader or other. Most of them have been dandled on some Messiah’s knee as a matter of course and staged deprogramming interventions have become, in the 21st century, what bat mizvah’s and coming-out parties once were. I used to think Yanks were preposterous for forming these little cults of a few thousand and proclaiming themselves The Chosen (as distinguished from the other 6.8 billion on earth). That’s a pretty strict door policy. Studio 54 at its peak was all-embracing in comparison. But Americans always take things to the illogical extreme. The land of the hamburger with doughnuts as buns.
It’s a nation of escalation, the spiritual home of escalators. As if to prove that an apocalyptic sex cult of six heavily-armed Puerto Ricans speaking in tongues in a one-room flat in Brooklyn (for example) isn’t as far as one can go in the direction of exclusive sacred looniness, now you’ve got these cults of one popping up… these solo-cults or uni-cliques like Hyacinth. In fact, Hyacinth tells me she had a falling out with her best friend Phoenix. Which is so, really, like, you know, sad. Phoenix was under the impression that she was the Chosen One (hereafter to be referred to as the CO). Reasoning that Nebraska isn’t big enough for two CO’s, Hyacinth headed back East. Her father, a relatively down-to-earth Baptist, was from New Jersey.
On the long bus trip east she noticed, strategically placed in seats on the right and left of the aisle, three or four waifs of approximately the same age, body mass index and facial expression. In a country of the fat, the thin stick out. More CO’s, of course. Hyacinth’s only hope (if she planned to set up shop as a C.O. in unclaimed territory) was to get out of the country.
“It’s because you’re secure in yourself that you can admit that I am The Chosen One,” says Hyacinth, during one of her more talkative moments. But really it’s because I desperately want to nail her. What’s it like, I mean. Anal with the Chosen.
More about that compound.
That photo album she brings everywhere. It’s a wealth of coded information. Ignoring the sunsets and geese-on-the-lake and all those blurry snapshots she took of her own left hand, starting when she was nine, the other photos comprise a vivid document of the places where clean-air America and Millennial dogma meet and result in horrific stains. One snapshot that stays with me is of a man in a dark cloak, kneeling in the snow in a semi-circle of cloaked onlookers. The man’s gloved hands cover his face. Yet the onlookers (with unisex, too-long, center-parted hair) don’t seem particularly galvanized. They seem bored; unimpressed. I always want to ask about that.
3.
My maternal grandfather shot his adopted son over a property deal. The deal would have made my grandfather a millionaire. My uncle, half-Ojibwe by birth, rescued by my maternal grandfather from a Red Lake orphanage in Northern Minnesota, grew into a hippie, a hippie named Graham who refused to agree to the deal. He answered the door in nakedness one brilliant green morning and was found right there in the vestibule of the hand-built house he dearly loved, stumbled upon by a groggy member of his harem. Surprisingly tiny holes in his chest and face. Scribbling on the baseboard with a bloody finger. 1968.
I started calling myself Graham and dressing a certain way, twenty years too late but quite awhile before it was fashionable again. The Lord giveth less than he taketh away.
Reagan is giving a speech on a thriftshop television and the speaker doesn’t work so the old fuck sounds like a fly. I’m in a band called Bite Me Fattie. This fat retard is paying my rent and Reagan buzzes and the easy chair came with the apartment. Her head is intermittently in the way. I’m not even worth shooting.
4.
There have been times in human history when ugly was fashionable, when being ugly was a kind of good luck so powerful it conferred itself also on those who clamored to be near it. When ugliness had the power to bless. But this isn’t such an era.
5.
It is Chicago, Illinois, and the year is 1972. There are three of us together, good friends, old friends, in Jimmy’s, near the corner of Jackson and State Street, under the ‘EL.’ Jimmy’s is halfway between what we’d call greasy spoon and down home and Jimmy does all the cooking. One has a choice of three tables near the window or the counter itself to eat on and the tables are always occupied. The tables are green Formica and chrome and they were new when Jimmy opened the place with a VA loan after surviving the Korean War with two good arms and a leg.
Jimmy is good at producing a certain kind of very heavy meal with sweet iced tea or very strong coffee for a beverage and pie for dessert and he charges a fair price. The one thing you do not do in Jimmy’s is tip.Jimmy’s is lit like a pool hall: coolie hats of light hung from a dirty ceiling. There is no jukebox. Jimmy thinks it’s impolite to listen to popular music while eating his food. The sooty windows onto State Street are a triptych of iron-webbed sky (the structure of the ‘EL’) and one little Xmas tree of a traffic light. The upper right corner of the triptych blinks red, yellow, green all night, even when there’s no one in Jimmy’s to see it.
Here we are: Gorman, Perez. Me. We are lucky and have a window table near the door. It’s summer and being seated near the door is a relief, even with thick stains of exhaust on the breeze. Gorman, with his big head and too-small haircut like a child’s cap barely reaching his neckline or red ears and his feminine eyelashes, has, in preparation, cut his meat into a grid of what looks like thirty two small squares and is now leisurely forking one after another into his mouth while Perez and I hack away at our porkchops.
‘The Germans are metaphysicians,’ says Gorman, between forkfuls, putting the meat away. ‘Nietzsche. Jung. Kant.’ He glares at the ceiling. ‘Hörbigger.’ He forks a square of meat and writes an ‘eight’ with it through a tablet of gravy and puts it away. ‘They might as well have been witch doctors.’
The squares of meat he removes from the plate follow a pattern: one bottom left, one top right. Next bottom left, next top right. Perez winks at me and tips his chin at Gorman’s plate: the puddle of gravy with a vertical ‘infinity’ inscribed in it. The tessellated Salisbury steak and cuneiformed mashed potatoes.
‘Gorman,’ says Perez, ‘We’re curious. Really. Do you take a crap as methodically as you eat?’
Perez is pretty: he has flared nostrils and a precise black haircut and an Elvis-like permanent sneer. But one eye is always bloodshot and a little dead because a big kid clubbed him on the playground for being too pretty. I heard a rumor more than once that Perez and Gorman did a little something as Vaselined choir boys in one or the other’s bunk one night when we were all three of us attending a week-long ‘retreat’ at a seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin. I can remember being so young that everything under your navel smelled the same. The retreat was sponsored by the Catholic School (Our Lady of The Loop) in which we were benignly and neglectfully incarcerated the year we three became friends.
Gorman was there at Our Lady of the Loop because his parents didn’t want him attending the run-down educational institution of the neighborhood, which is Joseph J. Pulaski Junior High School. Perez was there because his whiskery grandmother, the sole guardian of Perez and his six sisters, supported a Catholic universe with such natural fervor that she could experience ecstatic visions of the Virgin Mary on demand, the holy mother illuminated in swirling clouds of Lucky Strike. You could smell Perez’s house from a block away. I was sent to Our Lady of the Loop because it was the furthest my mother could get me from the house every day. We didn’t even live, technically, in Chicago. I’d come home and exorcise the place with air-fresheners. What kind of kid is forced to spend his allowance on air-fresheners?
The rumor about Perez and Gorman never bothered me, and I treated it with the same open-minded neutrality I applied to the miracles that the Sisters used so much of every school day advertising: I did not doubt nor did I believe. But that rumor goes a long way toward explaining the teasing. Gorman and Perez would bicker and tease like a couple embarrassed by the memory of an unrecoverable closeness.
‘Sure’n if you tink oi eats metodically,’ retorts Gorman, with a fakey brogue, after a swig of tea with a sandstorm of sugar in it, ‘you ought t’ see how oi diddle yer ma.’
Then he catches my eye and drops his gaze and he apologizes profusely in a deep soft voice. He’d forgotten. And now he feels like a shit, a real shit and I feel sorry for him. Being a good guy, and famously easy to get along with, I change the subject immediately, of course. Or, that is, I change it back.
‘Henry Miller.’
‘Henry Miller,’ echoes Perez, tapping the table. But Gorman is still pouting over his faux-pas, his mouth in the palm of his hands. All work has ceased on the construction-site of his dinner plate. We are forced to prod.
I repeat, ‘Henry Miller…’ but Gorman won’t bite. Christ, Jerry, I want to say: she was my mother. What are you so upset about?
I say, ‘Come on, Jerry. You’re the writer. It’s your job to educate us Philistines. If you don’t finish, Perez and I are going to go out into that heartless night without the gift of knowledge to light our paths. You were saying… ‘ But Gorman just sits there, slumped, so Perez stars talking about popular film.
Poor Gorman. If only I could admit that I’m glad she’s gone! But that would put me under suspicion.
6.
LD: A particular guy wants a particular woman: this is not a story, it’s a situation. Make it two particular guys and make the two guys friends (and the woman beautiful) and at least you have a story. Make one of the two friends in competition for the affections of the beautiful woman not a guy but another woman and make the two not friends but married and you have a modern story on your hands, possibly. The jury is still out on the relative modernity of sad or happy or unresolved endings. Is there a fourth alternative? Maybe the fourth alternative is there is no ending. It just goes on and on that way. Everyone in the story just gets older and older until you can’t even stand to look at them any more. Does that sound like a bestseller to you? Anyway, you asked so I told you. How’s the Mrs?
MD: You’re so bitter, Larry. So sarcastic.
from the DEPT. of META-DUPES
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100047503/inception-a-two-star-movie-at-best/
Erm. How shall I put this…?
Also:
Christ, we can tell our Toby isn’t much of a Conspiracy Buff, eh? It’s PSY OPS, Toby! Psy Ops.
The fact that Toby Young continues to get work as a critic is THE real demonstration of a conspiracy at work and a purr-fect illustration of your war on talent essay.
I like biting my nails when watching the latest installment in a billionaire-dollar film-franchise… wondering if, near the beginning or in the middle of said film, the protagonist will be killed off and the film will end (and the ticket price refunded) and the franchise will grind to a halt! It’s nerve-wracking, Comrade ET, but delightfully so, and Toby Young is quite right to point out that a thriller that can’t promise such suspense is no thriller at all. Fuck!
Steven, surely the Alien and Terminator franchises have demonstrated that you can kill the hero/heroine/robot off at the end, you can go back and forth in time in a manner which would probably befuddle Alain Robbe-Grillet. you can defy the laws of physics/biology/chemistry/logic but you can’t stop someone discovering a loophole in the { ahem ) story-lines which will ensure the franchise can carry on regardless.
It seems to me the art in these things( if it is indeed art ) is all about discovering that exploitable loop-hole which allows the money-making to continue rather than actually creating something .
“…rather than actually creating something.”
They’re creating MONEY, Comrade ET, you… Money-vegan.
flounces out mortally wounded to lick wounds to possibly re-appear tomorrow in Comrade ET 2 – planet earth is ruled by bread-heads. Only one man can try and ignore all that stuff.
[ed.'s note: PHWOARR!]
CRONENBERGIAL
PLUS HE WAS WEARING A TOUPEE
(via Comrade JR)
and
Welcome to Dead Sea Alabama, y’all!
OH YEAH AND ABOUT YOUR LITTLE ZINE
http://htmlgiant.com/mean/enough-is-enough-the-slushpile-is-not-the-enemy/#comment-83853
addendum:
Trout’s Law: For a Literary Scene to be a real Literary Scene and not some self-conscious, grotesquely-etiolated simulation, the ratio of readers-to-writers should be at least 100-to-1 (and no more than 100,000-to-1). Pooetree™ is now a thing of such horrendous-suckage precisely because that ratio is not only too small but reversed (writers-to-readers: 2-to-1).
FIRE AND ICE
1.
Three weeks ago I had a tall cup of water in the freezer. I like super-cold water. I like keeping the cup in the freezer until a lid of ice forms which is thin enough to be breached with a finger and I like to drink the frigid water through the hole with a straw. Or I let the bottom half of the cup (always use plastic cups, of course) freeze solid and then pour water on top of that and nurse the chilling drink while I write.
Three weeks ago I pulled a cup out of the freezer in which, as a result of whatever gradual process, there was an ice-lid near the top and a solid cylinder of ice at the bottom and an air-space between the two equal to about a third of the volume of the cup. I began to pour water into this arrangement when the drink exploded, with an actual muted bang, in my face. It was like a fire-cracker shooting Xmas fog and ice-splinters against my cheeks and up my nose. My four-year-old daughter couldn’t stop laughing. Then I laughed, too.
2.
Twenty-six years ago, I had a large-ish apartment in an old house near an Art Museum. The house had a cupola and everyone called it “the cupola house”. My ground-floor quarters were the quarters of a Bohemian Bachelor. Futon in the bedroom and two chairs in the whole apartment, one next to the futon (for the candle in the wine bottle) and one in the kitchen (for guests). My son (four, that year) liked hanging out around there but the big old stove was from the 1950s and you could smell, sometimes, the faintest whiff of a gas leak.
In fact, my son and I once happened upon a baby bird that had been dislodged from its nest during a storm and fetched it to my place with fantasies of nurturing it back to health and one day freeing it, up into its native lanes of tree-top air, as a beloved, sleekly-plump bird, with a ceremony of some kind and a built-in lesson for my son; a named bird we’d wave “bye” to; but it was dead after about an hour in my apartment and I sometimes suspect the leak did it.
Thanksgiving that year I planned on putting a turkey roughly my son’s size into that big old oven. I had two or three girlfriends and I planned to give all of them delicious turkey sandwiches after spending Thanksgiving with my son, in that Bohemian pad, cooking it. I probably had plans to see a girlfriend that evening; of the two or three girlfriends I was openly seeing that year (another era), one was an orphan, so she (a budding performance artist who later moved to New York where she literally had ten jobs while she was waiting to break-through) was probably the one I had plans to see later. My other girlfriends would have been spending the day with their suburban relatives.
My secret method for turkey-cooking (“baking” sounds like the wrong word) is to cover the top of the bird with two overlapping sheets of foil. This method takes longer but makes the turkey taste much, much better. The last hour or so you remove the foil, brush the thing with honey and butter and let the bird brown. My son watched every step of this process with great interest. Between steps we’d play checkers, tic-tac-toe and record each other, on a cassette machine I wish I still had, telling ghost stories. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a Television.
We were in the kitchen. It was about time to pull the bird out on its rack in its deep aluminum baking thing and pull off the top-foil and brush it with butter and honey. My son was sitting on the hand-painted kitchen chair at the wobbly table, about seven feet from the stove. I was standing in the kitchen’s doorway. I don’t remember what we were talking about. A flame about three or four feet long suddenly rose out of the heat-yellowed dial on the oven and pulsed up along a curve in the air like a spectacular circus trick. I jumped across the room and frantically tried to blow it out with my lips an inch from the base of the flame. The yellow-and-blue sword of flame jerked and danced while I huffed and puffed. I huffed and puffed like you wouldn’t believe. I could hear the devil singing happy birthday to you. The flame whuffed-out finally and I shut the oven off, shaking like I was freezing.
My son was laughing as hard as I’d ever heard him laugh so I let him think I’d done it on purpose.
SUCKING COCK AND THOSE WHO ARE SHOCKED BY IT: YOUR DIMINISHING CLAIMS ON THE SPECIAL
Hilton Als is épater-ing le bourgeois again. In his mind, one supposes. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, Hilton. Oprah Winfrey discussed salad tossing (2004?) on network daytime television and Dirty Sanchez was the name of a show on MTV nearly a decade gone yet Hilton Als still seems to think there are frissons to be had in the profoundly-corny image of a large black Queer in his dead Auntie’s nightie! He seems to think that edgy disorientations and trenchant poignancy can still be mined from a drag-Queen’s biopic! That a cock and a mustache in close proximity are being more edgy than a straight male’s crucifix in a straight female’s rectum!
My only conservative friends are Queer. Perhaps they are locked in various bygone eras during which being Queer was genuinely dangerous and therefore sexy-by-default: they like Ike! Viva the Victorians!
Per that person’s instructions. Yawn.
Forget the stylistic failures (“It’s the queers who made me” is meant to inform and govern the dependent, quasi-incantatory, quasi-Baldwinian clauses comprising the entire paragraph but several of the clauses, near the end, no longer match that opener: “It’s the queers who made me. [...] Who sat with me in his automobile…”. Huh? I think The Queers should have edited this piece). When Hilton wraps up that harmless paragraph with “we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else” I want to slap him.
I want to say, Hilton! Looked and felt like no one else? Maybe that was true… once. But now you look and feel like mainstream America. Your days of being special are over. Don’t confuse being loathed by Tea-Baggers with being special: the Tea-Baggers loath you because you aren’t special. Because you’re the norm. You must accept this suggested adjustment in your self-perceptions and allow it to make your writings on the subject more interesting. The Tea-Baggers are more special (speshul) than you are, Hilton. Look: they call themselves “Tea-Baggers”! They were the only ones in America who didn’t know what the term meant!
The new Queer dilemma: the demotion to normal. Yes, Gay marriage is still illegal in most states. So is marijuana. All the pothead-grannies in Americaville please raise your hands.
Who, in Americaville, is still shocked by the fact that men suck each other’s cocks and fuck each other’s asses and stuff fists and gerbils and alarm clocks up there, too? Who still finds trannies and crossies not-boring-but-scandalous? Quaker aunties, possibly. Quaker aunties and Malaysian fundamentalists.
Oh and Hilton Als?
THE EPIC TET*
Late in the year 2007 I began work on a cycle of narrative pomes following six characters around Berlin for six months (it was originally to be a year but I ran out of time; this thing was consuming my LIfe). The simple rules: 1) a pome every week 2) develop some characters. I did this originally for the website of a famous Anglophone bookstore.
The characters are: a male couple (Dante and Ted), a female student-type from Chile (Malena), a wealthy Art Couple (the von Bredows) and a retired American expat with a blog (Val). The wealthy Art couple are the only Germans and Dante is the only Brit. The retired expat is not my mouthpiece. This work isn’t in the mode of what I call (with a sneer), “American Confessional”. These aren’t precious observations wrapped in abstract language with the print-to-white-space ratio of a business card: these are stories following carefully-argued characters in a medium of persuasive rhetoric. Poetry is Fiction and proper Fiction should present an intelligence-intensified field of language built on the page. The field should shimmer and hum like a charged metal sheet. Picasso once wrote that he painted smoke one could hammer a nail through and that stuck with me. Nailing the smoke should feel good.
Dante and Ted date, fall in lust, co-habitate for a while, then break things off. Black-haired Ted is bisexual and eventually leaves Dante for black-haired Malena. The von Bredows never interact with the other key actors (the seventh character they do interact with is a nameless sex-slave/assistant they acquire) but Val-the-retired-expat interacts with Malena twice: first as her client (she’s a waitress) and later when he finds himself across an U-Bahn wagon’s aisle from Malena and Ted who are making out. Val, who runs a blog that publicizes all of his sins, considers stealing a tabloid-hidden orgasm from the image of beautiful Ted and Malena as they raunch it up among the commuting Lutherans. He is being driven by his blog (Confessions of a Pedant) to do things he wouldn’t otherwise dare do… it begins as a record and escalates into a constant dare… perhaps by the end (off-screen) he’ll kill someone. His blog is his Tempter/Exposer/Liberator/Lucifer the way TV cameras were, for people new to them, two generations before. He is an old wolf. (I named him after Henry Valentine Miller but he’d be a “respectable” Henry as a retired businessman or academic).
I didn’t map-out the plot of this soap opera. It grew like a crystal. I enjoyed writing people who are nothing like me. I enjoy this antidote for solipsism. I still, strangely, feel close to some of the characters: The Widow, Malena and Ted, especially. Some of the metaphors are my favorites, ever: the foxes on their hind legs = hung partisans… skinning a rabbit = inverting an inverted glove… swallows = record-platters smashed and heaved over the treetops…
The story stops at the height of the campaigns for the last American Presidential election. I included other current events and during the writing of the last pome there was an unusually damaging storm, in Berlin, which killed several people. The dead show up near the end of that pome. I’ve edited out the pomes that were written specifically for long-term Berliners to chuckle over… you’d never get them.
Poetry, in my opinion, should be the Fiction that is compressed to a supreme limit. This cycle is a novel. Or a film. It begins with a (crappy) meal and ends with (a fancy) one.
I read some poetry on a couple of Zines today and I fucking hated it. It made me sick to my fucking stomach.
6 Months / If Berlin
Saturday, 6. October 2007
*dante eats out*
22:23h
it feels like a punishment he long ago adjusted to, if he
does not cook there won’t be food, and it’s
never even good, or not in terms
that real cooks use, though in a way
it’s a sign of hopefulness he never cared
to master this, for the men he knows
who cook so well are invariably
betterhalfless, they learn
by force the indelible diagonal of
sleep across that bachelor bed and
never change but
grind-away at
raincolored sheets and underwear making
relic filaments
instead. they play
at cards in clouds and suckle hard
cigars in luciferous bars called
things like Hairy’s Pear, or
The Bear, trading
vagina jokes for pokertips with
dante-aged blokes (with their)
(halos of smoke and)
(intestate dread over)
(eye-bald)
(heads)
2.
dante exhales the
sound of the wine he follows
to ted
-
-
-
Saturday, 20. October 2007
*dante and ted*
18:16h
dante and ted hire bikes, buy
cheap wop wine, pedal hard for
Wannsee through miles of kilometers sleeked
by fog’s drugged
sneeze of light, slimey-soft, a
convoluted cloth wiping
thoughts on their bright brown, dark blue
eyeglassed eyes; thoughts
soon lost to the night traffic of
Friday: time and its tired
crisis, the thirty-niners and their
out-sourced inner
lives. they glide
on lamplit awe around the
unwrinkled face of the
lake, joke and brake
at a moon-smashed copse,
splurge in turns over shivers of
warmth-raped gentian gasping
oh my god.
after which they re-embark,
wobbling on. they see
battery-lit foxes rear up
along the tarmac like hung
partisans; see
swallows sharp as shattered
gramophone platters heaved
over the treetops in a feat
of strength. they park
where the bike path rises
to a sudden rail crossing and
need the drink.
(dante for his shyness and ted)
(to think)
-
-
-
Saturday, 27. October 2007
*seasonal meditation*
20:39h
1.
every year this time old von bredow goes, already
twig-thin and shaves
his head, dresses in striped pyjamas shambling
behind the trickles of kids tricker
treating the streets behind
Kaiserdamm but only
intellectuals ever giggle or yell
to go to hell
2.
admitting we have somehow
outgrown god and remembering
that odd equation (god is love) isn’t it love’s
novembering time now to
go? honestly what
does love when it’s being done
do? all those midnights at home in
unbroken-in shoes! so much heat and no
light and even the heat is
far less red than
blue, rhetorical, for
Lust, not love, calls forth that fool
Euphoria, her
several-second duty of
nil’s oracle, the
propulsive stutter of goo’s stuck
ventricle. von bredow
does his widow and knows
it’s true: what does who loves
when doing it
do?
anyone with fists can say Hate’s use: that
ten-times blacker coal fuels
rococo locomotives toward
smoke-stacked suburbs of
All Souls (and)
(its lucrative piles of)
(teeth and shoes). Hate is really
something, it
gets things done, it’s
not obtuse. Fear adheres
to everything; Sadness is as Gladness was; Hope
the opiate of the masses and
Compassion a simple sop to, or
giving up of, callow
youth. but
love?
admitting we have outgrown god and remembering
that odd equation (god is love) he thinks
it’s time to punish the two for
being so aloof; for both words mean
their opposites the
minute after
screwing
3.
(the widow complains strange)
(gummi bears are)
(harder for chewing)
-
-
-
Saturday, 3. November 2007
*the recurring thing*
20:06h
the recurring thing, sometimes
a dream, shows
So Cal’s fruits like fairy lights ted’s
dreambody spools low over, and
platoons of plucking
mexicans planted in
fudge-rich irrigated earth like
fragile gold forms, in molds, like
complex football-field-sized
pendants, water stolen
from the north and
sold above worth
to the children of the
water’s thieves as
juice. these
dreams increase as years here reproduce
to root-split beds of German
stone, his
headlong dreambody nostalgia-blown through
mooncanyons overgrown with
coyotes the color of playwright’s
beard and carpeted in dawn’s blue
loam, torched brush and
shriveled riverbed
trojanfish amidst
wetback-bones blonde
headphoned paralegals learning
mexican carefully
hike over: la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
born in ’68, adopted a year
later and raised
on the old pacific highway
road in a stucco bungalow a young
joni mitchell once considered
buying on the cusp of fame, ted came
to view all pool-blue skies, heaven weather and
mel tormé records with an orphan’s
lupine eye, growing
into his resentments with a muscly
black-haired thrust his
legal mother cried out
for years in the pain she’d thought
to elude through
adoption: la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
even asleep with dante in
bed ted considers
his options, the
recurring thing will
continue
without him:
la rabia,
el deseo,
el miedo,
el desamparo
-
-
-
Saturday, 10. November 2007
*two monologs in verse*
21:29h
1. The Customer (middle-aged, North American, reasonably well off, lost):
berliners are terrible
tippers, no? today she bore
her ten-thousandth tray of beer
and coffee, still
they settled the bill awfully
precisely. straight-spined as ever, when
her studies finish and
home reclaims her i’m sure
it is she who
will be served. but where is home? some
equatorial city; bourgeois terraces above
the tear-weathered stones of
la favellah; packed
traffic like a split gut aflame
with hot necklaces? i imagine the weight of the green
floods the mountain’s dark
body, cocoa-leaves consuming
the breakfast of the earth and blooming
like a delicious fire. and the erogenous smoke. and the scent of the
indigene for hire. did her childhood mingle with
music in festival
streets where every third face greeted
was a christ and the mud so fat it tingled
with that secret vitamin the
too-rich spice of ideological
blood? was she touched, or buoyed as in a flood
at market by
fingertips black
as beans, jostled
by the magistrate’s mocha
elbow in line to
purchase manioc, molasses, shell-fish or
plantain? i’m certain
she wore white dresses for
sundays, shining
against the novelistic sky
like an offering. is there any truth
in my imagination? conversation
would enlighten, but as yet i
only have courage to
overtip
2. The Waitress (young, “foreign”, sure of herself):
how can i bear this
cold country, the
lunar stares they bare
to curiosities? i, the
sapid black of heliologic
scarring, most of all suffer
breathing the dark air of
their language. did i immigrate
to apply the mercy of my questionable beauty to
the aesthetic wound of
this city? or was i
driven by premonitions of
hunger or
political violence or just
escaping the luxurious green cancer of
equatoriality; the
too-real sun; the
chaos of the market; the
life-threatening excellence of nature’s stupidity? (even the graves)
(stay obscene with)
(fertility). perhaps
after all i came
to improve myself through
sacrifice, denied even
the occasional relief of
merely belonging. you, too, know
the weird lure of berlin, her native race
of Beamtendeutschemenschen,
hungering for
(yet set against)
everything
in us
un-german
3. A moment of Loudness (for Mailer):
-
-
-
Sunday, 18. November 2007
*Pflicht und Neigung*
12:13h
today the north american rehearsed his imminent
december in earnest in churlish old
berlin, slippered
and robed in the sublet
kitchen, shivering a
prayer for the errant
heat. sleet flicked
the windows like
mean-spirited fine print, fall’s premonition
of winter’s predicament. Val brooded over
eggs (his humble use
of the birds’ unlived-in truth), juice,
homeopathic fad pills and Al
Camus’ American Journal, a
moody notebook
posthumously fobbed off as
lit (edited by friends)
(he’s sure they kept)
(the screwing out of it), the
whole long day ahead of him to
fritter as his divorce-diminished
bank account saw
fit, the dishes tombed amnesia-clean in
kitsch-infested cabinets to
rest. the sky became
not luminous, nearly
temperate, muddled as a
puddle reflecting it, he dressed all gray
to honor this and met
the sun’s sharp glittering
glass amidst rainsick grass at the
Gendarmenmarkt’s
benches. from which
he stared at scary
Schiller and Schiller’s musey mass
of wenches thick
at the base of his
plinth, each so cruelly
Presley-lipped, Hera-hipped and
toothsmashing stone-
breasted big and vivid enough to
lumber down suddenly shattering
a path across the pavement stones like
derailed trains to shoo
the shitty pigeons and snap
the tourists’
necks. he respects
the quasi-autistic bluntness of
the populace, for far more truth inheres
to insult than to ‘Murrican-style
blandishment. his third wife, from
Minneapolis, trafficked
in that language-unraveling style of
viral euphemism; for perma-smile Liz
fat was full-figured,
crippled: mobility reduced,
and the optically challenged with their
swinging sticks and elevated
chins were never just
blind. the Germans frankly speak
of the “geistig zurückgeblieben” and he is sure
the fatherland’s retarded
don’t mind.
-
-
-
Sunday, 25. November 2007
*dante commences clinging*
14:34h
with love it’s the irrational that means
the most, feelings we can explain aren’t
worth the heart’s extortionate
costs, feelings
which confuse, shame, addict, dement, explode or
transform the soul with
magnificent disregard for the results are most
real. they are cold-welded
to the species, beyond
control, the inherited gene jewelry from
elephant-killing poets paleontologists call
old. dante is strong
in his passion’s clarity but
weak in its need. his dip
in the infinite rips his
emotions’ skin
bleeding. masochistic
distraction or
fundamental
need? but that’s what
love is, dante thinks:
a regimen of poetic
beatings we clamor like the Mecca-mad
to meet until
repletion. a tedsent postcard comes
from the Aegean sea: a
gnomic joke on wellhung
Cretans
-
-
-
Saturday, 1. December 2007
*the fine arts in berlin*
15:34h
old von bredow and his widow in apparent
years sufficient but too
meticulous in their pleasures to ever be
grandparents, somber-slim and softly
rich as becketts, are again in the market
for a girl to cook, polish, launder, drive, pose for his
sketches and comply without kvetching to
the importunities enticed by ripening
youth. evidence of a recent
bloodtest, a signed declaration of
boyfriendlessness, sweet
breath and high
breasts to be presented in
that order at the
interview. the list of alumnae tallies a
fine-arts-in-berlin who’s who: the tooth-sculptress, the
pain artist’s muse, the longterm girlfriend of two
married antiquities dealers and the wife
of a brewery-inheriting collector of
restoration erections, plus
the headmistress of a faux-french trompe l’oeil atelier of
ill-repute. all have done well for art
students. the first in the series, the
widow herself in
1962, 18 to von Bredow’s
30: blackplumed, supple, striking
as a horsehair whip
(father a)
(cinematographer at Łódź)
(one of the chosen)
(few aryans slain by a)
(jew in that era in a)
(duel over a pupil’s)
(paramour)
she’d mix
von b’s patented lacquers, gesso/sand/re-gesso/re-sand his
grander canvasses; photograph, crate-up, ship-out each
piece of his gigantic oneiric
maps from the studio overlooking
the Lietzensee and its petit bourgeois
paths. later she even came
to finish certain works and worse
paint others ab
ovo usque ad mala whilst the maestro
napped. her man can live for what feels like years
without urges regarding the
pinkerparts of the
people. it’s the widow herself, blackwings
turned a pearly bob, cupped breasts white as
dresden pots in timebrowned
hands who relishes the
entering of that room kept sternly
lockless, its unblocked
view of three steeples, not even
knocking. an applicant/supplicant buzzes
breathless down at front, the widow sips
her salted coffee, walks
the atrium with numbered
steps, stops to stoop to pocket a
foilship of gumwrap off
the cloud-reflecting
koi pond feeling
deathless
-
-
-
Sunday, 9. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part one*
00:41h
the down-angled pews of the u-bahn packed
as a requiem mass for the xmas
rush, black in its cladding the
congregational hush plus invisible
choirs of grinding rails and
hacking coughs. every station admits
more scowly hum to the
crowd’s dark optical
push. yon mendicant bitch, thin
as the cold air itself, guilting face a
hatchet chopping chips of
loose conscience for small
pelf, fronttoothlessly blocking
the aisle while nearby noses
sting, stalks off the next stop in her
wealthless huff, mad
as the newly deaf’s doorbell
ringing.
the foreign girl follows the beggar up
hauptstrasse through bruise-blue veils of
daemmerung, red sale signs and
christ-lights in low-slung flurries over overcoated,
headscarved foot-
traffic and then headlit rivers
of cars. the beggar hurries
flight-catching-fast in nothing
but ashram pants, hugging that
titless t-shirt with all
but embraceless
arms, nearly
funny. later
Malena will wake, chided by dreams
of the running
-
-
-
Saturday, 15. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part two*
15:59h
Malena the foreign girl rents
from the woman who rents from
the man who owns the
bathless flat at
zionskirchplatz. notification by
postcard came with the fact
that a week before xmas, the man’s
son, cramming informatik at
tuebingen, will come
to stay until the day
after day one of
next year. with 72 hours left
to find a new bed she suffers
giddy-but-desperate despair but
makes herself up, does her highgloss
hair, wears
her very best amongst
macintoshes at sankt oberholz in hopes
of meeting a decent
English-speaking
student. but they’re just impudent
brats, not men, the effeminate
offspring of America’s tourist
classes, chatty-immature and
porno-crass, unearned
smirks illuminated by flashy
nonsense from week-old
screens, she thinks
you’d never even
survive a week of
Pinochet. Malena pays three
milchkaffees and
leaves to walk her
bad dream along the
Spree trailing
smoke from the
café. she makes her way
through the superfluous
xmas markt behind the obligatory
museum towards friedrichstrasse, from there
to hallesches tor in
kreuzberg where joke santas hang
from windows like hung
partisans and startled
pigeons mount heaven like
notes torn from throats of
muezzin
-
-
-
Sunday, 23. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part three*
19:04h
the desert god comes in
borrowed armor of sword-hard ice,
the sky’s corpsetower of nine billion spirits burned
crytal-water white, His flesh-cutting sirocco of
sleet turns giant wheels to the highstreets of
candle-lit Europe, grinding souls
like minuscule diamonds for
xmas stalls while
the hawk-faced, kohl-eyed
deity of djins sings
madrigals
O superbest dissembler! O mask
on a mask in a veil on a doll
vast beyond any sane maths yet conceivable
thine sunsmashing fist
of rain-pregnant adamantine, thine
pavement-cracking snowfoot,
thine regenerative organ: seven miles of hard
black wind on these bare
lindens, mere hairs
under thine godweight
bent
-
-
-
Sunday, 30. December 2007
*xmas in berlin part four*
12:28h
of all the christmasses dante has seen and
survived, this, perhaps, will matter better
than the rest, the year he watched It’s a
Wonderful Life without sneering or
crying, ted’s
face in his lap, both still laughing
over the fact
ted had backed into the bedroom to
the tune of Bing singing, his head
in one red ribbon wrapped, tacky
card affixed to his hard-waxed
chest, best promise of a new
year’s happiness, whether
or not the promise
can possibly
last.
he sees castouts on the snowbald, whorecold
street: red-eyed ingenues, feud-ruined
uncle-drunks and thinner-made, festivityless
leather-blacks for whom republicans
pay taxes, those
shell-boned refugees, dressed
for sheep, each at his own
indicative velocity, though
dante’s just out
for a little blue air while
ted makes dinner
autistically. the street’s
aglimmer-black horn in the
twilight’s velvet
case, straight and weighted
tight to the evening’s queer
lydian ache, the antediluvian tune of
cold comfort, warm
harm. dante sees
the seal-haired waitress from their
favorite café, singsongs the
obvious greeting and she breaks
like an egg on his
arm.
he invites her to the feast and ted
finds the poor girl
charming
-
-
-
Sunday, 6. January 2008
*Malena’s Good Luck New Year’s Rabbit Stew*
12:35h
-Cada uno lleva su cruz-
1.
skinning the rabbit, ted inverts
the inverted glove until the long
hand of muscle falls from its grip
of loose blood, clutching the grin
of this morning’s funniest
execution. slain by the sling ted’d made
of malena’s old hose, the bunny tumbled
with its fate-stone thrown
clear through dark bush to
headlighted street, ted waving
traffic to a halt to retrieve it
by deafwarm ears to malena
and dante’s cheering as for
a goal. the dawn dome
of planetarium rose
to a glow by sun’s flush
hole as they bore the corpse
like some world-leader with
eyes struck open
home.
ted knifes the belly, scoops
its coils and jellies in a system
to the sink, the other two toasting
long life/short death as ted
decouples the head’s last
permanent
link. dante jumps
(he will always claim)
(the thing)
(blinked)
2.
the candled air of the whole long flat
rubs the windows with its sweat:
ginger, clove and cardomon escaping the pot
towards the black rhyme of ted and malena’s hair
ted’s elbows on the table and dante’s perplexing
stare in the ruby swirl of wine malena’s got
she tells of the trouble with men and dante says
we know a willing lesbian
she shakes her head: i need something i can sink
these teeth into (with a wink)
hefting her breasts in the low-cut dress she jokes
what about these? don’t you ever miss them
on a winter’s night?
dante frowns i swear i even eschewed huge dugs as a whelp
i would not suck at mother’s milk
and father’s mams were black with glossy felt, he giggles
at ted who growls: not while i’m eating
malena says Cocho kept peacocks when i was thirteen
they would not breed, which made them twice
precious, bleating in the courtyard even earlier
than those ugly cocks, casting spectacular shadows like
beardsley engravings on the opaline gravel around
the villa, occasional prey to a fox our indian shot
presenting it to mother who wore it
to the opera like a (draining her wineglass)
(with seductive indolence)
queen
3.
driven by the spirit of the rabbit or by
the devil possessed, ted proposes a
contest: whoever kisses best
will follow ted to bed whilst the other
does dishes. dante hisses
you bitches and kisses
malena on the mouth, vomiting
chilean flags and
passing
out
-
-
-
Sunday, 20. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part one*
23:46h
with his back to the window of the
orderly flat overlooking Schiller’s golem at
Gendarmenmarkt he
writes his blog, the content of which
is all his sins, from the unconscious
nosepicking he once glanced to catch
reflected in the u-bahn’s black
glass to pulling a long one off
on the pic his memory took home
of that cigsucking schoolgirl who brushed his arm
on his way out of a news agent, Spiegel rolled tight
in its burberry crook, her platinum fringe
cinched to his fist on his
belly in the daydream later like a bobbing
light. regret floods in (sin’s twin) as the pleasure
ebbs, a grim shade shaking its head
over the shock of the copious, the
downright hale in a
drib’s stead, the heady
wipe-up job, all of it gone
into the blog. Confessions of a Pedant in the
Autumn of his Life draws a respectable
village of hits every
night, an audience delighting
in foibles so nobly limned
as to render, eg, his borgia fart
at a christening (way back when) almost
charming. logging off,
it’s out
into the warm winter’s low-ceilinged
bunker of sundown, hotel lobbies and
monocustomered coffee shops as rundown blocks
of yellow in the purpled armature of the
pauline disbursion of converted
light, the North American pursuant
of darkling maps of
homelylessness, his
curiosity’s pickily feline
lonelinesslessness on Jaegerstrasse fraught
with clotting silhouettes, circumspect outbursts
of halfchatter and horny
mirth, a Geschaeftsmanner invasion from
Duesseldorf platooning through, the
brotherly violence of so many
at march in a beerblind
line against the baroque blue
horizon. he sees one drop
a wallet like the pigeons’
kingsized tip; can’t wait
to write the post on
spending it
-
-
-
Monday, 28. January 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part two*
00:01h
the wallet is warm, ruddybrown, fleshily complex
as an arrant organ or suave soft
coprolite, baklava of the middlemanager’s
luther-ordered life, clean
as bleak boredom yet
implicit sins are packed wherein
a condom abides in a compartment beside five
photos of lost kids, the cats,
old boat, fat wife, a crescent worn through
on the royalblue foil
wrapper like islam’s caliper moon plus
three hundred eighty nine euros the first two
of which go to the purchase of a BZ screaming
“wolf sighted on the outskirts of Berlin” plus
a Ritter Sport savoring richly of
sin he’ll eat on the Underground while
reading it. underlit
as though by klieg light by
welders he descends, chewing, the
operaset of the stairsteps at the Friedrichstrasse stop to
accomplished Bach on a Slavbusker’s pearl-mullioned
accordion, the brown cascading fingers on
toccataworn keys the North American tips
with a fifty at which gypsy kicks free
of stool, stands to switch to a pumping
Lohengrin, the platform whelmed black
in overcoats, sorrel furs, hell-blue
veins, red chins, gold helms of Wagnerian
hair raked by the tunneling
winds
-
-
-
Friday, 1. February 2008
*a wolf on the underground, part three*
14:40h
the paper explains how the wolves are driven
from natural environs by dins and poison
of compulsion’s development, the bipedals’ greedful encroach
at epochgreen level of forest floor to force growling
dreambrothers to bound from the brush, dogshaking
oddments, needle and leaf, from toothcolored coats, noses
to the road, after time long (as the cooling of new diamonds) in
exile. a floss-haired child of Siemens’
managerial class reports being sniffed by creatures
too cool to be dogs, too rank
to be phantasms, in
their country garden, l’heure bleue, late
june, case two: retired insomniac
circumnavigating a private lake on a bike
costing twice what equivalent Romanians take
home in a year was paced
for what seemed like hours by loping blurs
so rich in odor he fainted, waking shoeless, bent-biked in
gentian.
the North American grins a glance
over his paper at a waif on the long seat facing,
gulpsniffing tears, thumbs mothwingwhite beating
handy’s stampsized keypad of vapid
lights, we fears it’s
a bad breakup with her Abelard via
texting. beside her to the right
a woman Val recognizes, her
legs entwined with a man’s who cannot be
quite twin, but co-lingual
cousin, flicking her lips with slim
tongue in
macho-feminist grace like young
South Americans, black manes fused above
marvelously lupine
brows, then oilspilled down
her shoulders, breasts, jeans folded
over the seat and his bold hands separating
her thighs in futile’s best
gesture. hidden by his paper and
coat, the old jester, made
stiff as a goat by the
rutting display, contemplates
taking what they would not freely
give, this sin
of pre-human
intention
-
-
-
Sunday, 10. February 2008
*sick in berlin*
22:47h
getting sick in berlin
its own black romance
like love in paris
a fling
strangers too close on the metro
fluids exchanged
the essence of nameless kissing
that rheumy-eyed grandfather with
his pre-Euro Aldi bag
his snotrag hard as a
fossil may as well have had his
tongue in your mouth
with a persistent cough
he is part of you
even poetry is humbled by the couple
you have become in fever’s
capacity for
regret
-
-
-
Monday, 18. February 2008
*twilight on a corner of the ku’damm in february*
10:01h
the grey walls of the hinterhof stained
with the previous century’s rain under
the drained eye of february’s
glaucous light, so like
an asylum: the courtyard’s box
of underinterpenetrated
lives in this vast stone machine of
flatblock, drinking
a river each day, flushing rich
waste the other way, sempiternal, thick-
walled, cough-muffling, papered
in little deaths, breaths, sweats,
farts, aerosolized desiderata smelling
of cooked cabbage from
the furtive biomass of
neighbors he has never once
heard laughing or
singing. dante rings
an old friend, dresses to
meet him on a
corner of the ku’damm he hasn’t
seen in years. everything, he thinks,
disappears. he never knew
what or why his mother meant in all her
litanies of vague complaint, staring
over his tooth-blonde head as she ironed-on patches or
stirred fatty ersatzes into cheap-n-cheerful soups or wiped
the kitchen window of their
lukewarm semidetached in Hounslow with
never-read newspapers existing only
to chronicle America’s rough
usage of the world, but now
he grasps her point was only ever
to make herself heard if solely
by him, dante, her son, at
seven, his reason
to exist as though
by invitation. she seemed to inhabit
a fenced sanitarium at the gate
of which they could meet but never
embrace. mother, what are you
so sad about? so
crushed beneath? so
helpless at never-winning?
her newspaper-lined casket still holds the
cold broach of her
enigma-grinning. the friend,
a standard
thirty minutes late mimes
apologies from across the
street, sackladen shoppers watching
the Gay Ausländers meet with
bemused irritation, mocked
to every last light of their city’s
radiance
-
-
-
Sunday, 24. February 2008
*dante kicks ted and malena out*
23:09h
berlin is best for
breaking up; chums with bored disgust aver
they never liked lamented
her: his arrogance; the not so half
to-die-for-ness that he or she
with all love’s dumb
encouragement of self
perceived. they whom fortune
in smiling scant months upon you
reeved through burning shrouds of
reflected happiness flock once more
in droves to glooms reborn
thick as spinsters to the perfume
of a miscarriage
-
-
-
Sunday, 2. March 2008
*supper with weather*
14:41h
old von bredow waited
‘til his widow came in with
legumes, greens steaming on age-old
silver plates saying to their young
amanuensis at the table i see
they again in your country
prepare to decide upon king
of the planet. as a man he had a thing
for inciting the blush of the bloody au lait
suffusing her face to its roots in that
t-shirt’s ruby décolleté; as a german
he had a point to make. everyone on earth
of a certain age not non compos
should be in on this
vote, don’t you
think? the widow winked, passing
plantains, though clear as a fake tear von bredow
maintained an expression expecting this
answer. by chance a natural disaster
developed as they ate, god’s
corpsecold windfeet kicking
the city with
hatred. rattled windows, the
chandelier shaking lent
drama to the socratic
conversation. handfuls of dead, hair
streaming, were lifted up
despite their sudden waterweight by the fists
of the weather in spate as
the american stared in
nearly sexual inanition at
her Goethe-old, butter-drenched
plate
-
-
-
*KEY
I’ve been asked what two of the German words in the epic cycle above, IF BERLIN, mean (lazy Googler, Comrade!) so here’s a comprehensive key:
THE QUASI, the PSEUDO and the just plain SCHIZ
Lorin Stein, over at the Paris Review blog, keeps fantasizing, out loud, these things of a free-speechy nature that make him sound rather heroic. After posting some Terry Southern-related material (which some may have found offensive) Stein wrote:
Hear, hear!
However, when I posted a snarky comment about their puff-piece on the wonderfully unfettered-by-talent John Darnielle, the comment was deleted after a few days (and those few days, before he found the Delete Button, encompassed some long nights of the soul for Stein, I’m sure: how to maintain the desired aura of the intellectually hip and youthful and fearless without actually allowing that pesky free speech junk to break out? Why can’t all the commenters write “LOL” or “AWESOME!” and be done with it? Oh, poo!).
To which I responded:
Still later, Stein had the admirable cheek to post (emphasis mine):
“For my sins I’ve been reading Seymour Krim’s 1970 collection Shake It For the World. Krim was what used to be called an “underground” critic. He wrote for the Voice and the New American Review; I read him to remember how dead that world is now. Half this collection is a sustained rant against James Jones and Norman Mailer (“… now this hip young literary snatch was carrying on about Barbary Shore in a way that would have offended Mailer himself. I lost my trick of the evening because of the stone I turned to after this Mailer-infected preacherette thrust him at me like the sacrament . . . ” etc., etc., etc.) Nowadays I suppose he’d be a blogger, like the rest of us. Every once in a while, though, Krim gets off a zinger. For instance when the New Yorker theater critic John McCarten calls Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf “a vulgar mishmash.” Writes Krim: “What Irishman is kidding what Jew?” One misses that kind of thing, a little. —Lorin Stein”
To which I responded:
Note the notable absence of words like “douchebag” in my comment. Is it “offensive” or merely critical? Stein’s deft rhetorical maneuver in response was to put the comment, retroactively, “in moderation”. That’s right out of the playbook of the fabled Harvard Debate Team, isn’t it? The Harvard Debate Team had, as I recall, an IN MODERATION button of unparalleled wit and elegance. Unbeaten until Yale developed the famed DELETER.
I’ve left something else in the IN MODERATION queue for Lorin. Just for fun.
Lorin Stein believes in the value of Free Speech (and even “Snark”) but he doesn’t, of course, defend the right of anyone to stand up in a crowded theater and call him a hypocrite.
UPDATE:
Just left this little memo at PR:
POETIC INJUSTICE
Yes and…
I’m sure all of you (being both literate and super au-courant ) have heard about Lorin Stein’s un-accepted-poems boondoggle (wait: I mean kerfuffle; no, snafu… erm, imbroglio. Brouhaha?). Whether or not you think Lorin’s a cunt for (ahem) deleting an entire backlog of as-yet-unpublished poems accepted by the editor he replaced at Paris Review, this excerpt from a blog report on the retroactively-unrequited love of some really unhappy poets reveals how poems can sometimes find a home:
So that’s how you do it, kiddies.
via Comrade JR
fat lesbian, fat lesbian, fat lesbian, fat lesbian
my word the echo’s strong tonight.
[ed.'s note: to the Comrades reading this who are, in fact, Fat Lesbians: Comrade ET's remark is not what it seems]
AND THE COCK YOU RODE IN ON
I’ve left this chronicle of the Paris Review adventure here:
Steven, over here The Observer has printed its annual “Guide to the best events happening in the Summer”. It’s usually a piece where various critics write up the biggest and flashiest PR that has dropped through their letter-box and pass it off as a researched piece but this time it’s where experts in their respective fields give us the benefits of their expertise.
One section was on Outdoor theatre which, unsurprisingly caught my eye. Written by Dominic Dromgoole who has a reputation as an interesting director of the classics and who now runs the Globe theatre in London. In a choice of 5 things to see, Dominic as an insider becomes so inside that he recommends work by his own company.
I’ve seen many of these things where someone gives a big thumbs up to one of their mates ( which I can sort of understand – some art-forms like Dada would have remained obscure if their mates hadn’t of written it all up ) but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the person choosing stuff blatantly bigs up their own work.
It’s not a huge deal but seems another drift towards a situation where good marketing techniques get mixed up with critical assessment.
Well, Comrade DJ Sensei ET, I can spit and hiss all I want but the paradigm shift, when it comes to cultural artifacts, is clearly away from Aesthetics and toward Statistics… which will, eventually, of course, resolve itself to the simple binary of Success vs Dog. To be determined by sales/ traffic or brand recognition. The subjectivity of taste is a given… it’s the subjectivity of the answer to the question of whether taste, and Talent, are even necessary that I wasn’t prepared to worry about… until very recently.
Someone wrote, on one of the Litblogs I frequent these days, a question that went something like: How does the writer ever know if what she or he writes is even any good? And I answered with:
What’s far more frightening is the question of whether writing anything that’s good even matters.
strangely enough Steven you’ve never struck me as cynical. I’d need to consult a lawyer before admitting what you have struck me as but I’d say that if you really were cynical ( as opposed to dealing with cynicism in your writing ) you wouldn’t be doing this, you’d have given up the ghost long ago, developed a drink/drug problem and lived off what you used to be.
I think the problem is not necessarily whether having talent matters it’s whether you can sustain the energy and creative drive to keep that talent developing. Which I guess varies from being able to deal with personal dissappointments, the competitive element of making art and finding enough time to carry on doing work.
Oh, I don’t mean the “Old Way” is coming to an end this week or anything, Comrade ET… but… would I give it all another 20 years…? There are places around the globe in which poems are still vital and novelists are still dangerous/vital enough to be hung… but I doubt that I’ll be moving there.
We do what we do as a result of sheer cultural momentum and it will see us nicely into our senescence, I think. I’m not saying I won’t fight, until the tag is on my toe, to keep my corner of the universe alive to the pleasures of the fragile, ineffable and inexpensive…
But: fuck this moaning. Let me go find a picture of a huge black cock to post… the ultimate symbol of Creative Otherness and Resistance…
(ooops)
Hey, I know… let’s put an old story up!
THREE CONVERSATIONS, ONE REAL
She walks against the wind like it’s some kind of trick staircase in headlong lilts like Arabic script towards the filthy Post Office. Everything is filthy: phone booths, convenience stores, sidewalks. Everything. Everything stinks of singed garbage and the revealed interior of the body. This is what they mean by that beautiful euphemism urban blight. She would chuckle but she does all her laughing on the inside these days for she has recognized the wisdom of not transmitting, of no longer being a sender. Instead she is a receiver. A perfect receiver of threat’s end-of-the-dial broadcast, out there where the satellites sing. Her peripheral vision is so sharp she can read the commercials on the sides of the buses as they heave by without even lifting her disgusted gaze from the filthy sidewalk. Gobs of spit like dissolving emeralds. A mound of hominid shit in a doorway.
It’s a long trudge against a devil wind during which she reflects on the twists and turns of her long life while also remaining vigilant to the obvious. That murder of little Negresses skipping rope at the corner. That bandanna’d kid with the splintered pool cue. Where do these demons come from and why do they never leave? Trying to out-last them has been a futile project. She’s seen these same kids hanging around this block for thirty five years now and if you get close enough she bets the rope-skippers are wizened and wrinkled and smell of camphor, a notion that shivers in her shoes. You touch a face and the cheek crumbles off on your fingers. She used to buy peanut brittle in pound-sized buckets from a shop that used to be where that pimp is standing, talking into his hand and getting answers. She forgets what she’s carrying: is this a manuscript for her dead agent Cy?
She had waist-long hair kept braided and stuffed under a Chicago White Sox baseball cap for years due to vivid premonitions of being scalped but now she’s wearing an auburn wig and if any scalpers come she’ll just toss the wig at them as a diversionary tactic. This is the auburn wig that belonged to Lillian Hellman when the name Lillian Hellman meant something. In other words: take heed. Her deep-pocketed house coat is laden with teak-handled steak knives from a set someone gave her on some holiday nobody celebrates anymore which she absentmindedly slips into one or the other pocket whenever she dons her scowl like a white visor and steps outside on these unavoidable errands in the too-bright realm of incipient harm. She is bent and a-clatter with cutlery. She is lugging a parcel. Secondhand books for her son who is incarcerated in a foreign prison. Extremely imaginative fiction is his only hope.
She turns left on Woodlawn Ave and she figures she’s about a twenty-minute walk from the old Stagg Field where that Henry Moore blob commemorates something about something that used to make her worried about walking near the spot on the way to her lectures and Georgie of course would run right towards it and the more she yelled get away from that thing the faster he’d run. And now, of course, he’s incarcerated.
More and more often she finds herself thinking in a forgetful fury of all those martyrs to emptiness, the women who died for the sake of nothing better than some man’s shitty orgasm. Three in her family alone: her big sister Eda who perished in a blind fever of complications from an illegal abortion she slipped off to with the very first night of the Ed Sullivan show as her cover… then the adopted daughter of one of her brother’s exes who was strangled and raped in that order. And Carole, of course. The Pill. The cancer. Oh Carole, Carole, Carole, Carole.
A young man with his narrow back to her, waiting for the light, twists for a wary glimpse as she approaches the curb intoning her daughter’s name. There’s a broken brown leaf like an Indian-head nickle stuck in his modest irregular Afro and he is a lovely chiffon yellow like the young Smokey Robinson. In his dirty pink shirt and dress pants.
“I just finished reading Senelitá this morning,” he says, improbably enough, his softly puzzled face turning away from her. He scans for a gap in the cars coming.
“Svevo?” she responds cautiously, patting her coat pocket; rattling her knives.
He scratches an elbow but doesn’t turn again to face her, so intent is he in divining the traffic. She has to strain to hear when he says, “It was a bitch. A real disappointment. Not an inch of room in the whole book for yours truly the reader to decide what he is thinking about what Svevo is trying to say.”
“Listen,” she responds, with a shoo-fly gesture, “Don’t forget when he wrote it. Silent films were a dream of the future. Narrative technology…” But she catches herself. From the look of sharp disbelief the yellow black man turns on her before dashing across the street through a sudden relief in traffic she comes to realize that his half of this exchange never happened.
She had been about to say something regarding that famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a monkey tosses a tapir’s leg-bone into the sky and it match-cuts to a space craft. She is less overwhelmed by embarrassment at making a fool of herself than crushed by disappointment that she won’t be finishing the conversation.
But then she thinks: why not?
2
He wanted that land for his mother.
“It was like listening to a fucking mugging.”
“Jesus.”
“Like listening to your mother…my mother…getting mugged during a transatlantic…”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus is right. Tell me about it. I timed it. Have you ever had a six minute coughing fit? Two minutes seems long. Poor thing. But that’s not even the worst.”
They were driving along on a brilliant day at a leisurely pace behind a sleek modern hornet-yellow streetcar. In the back window of the streetcar sat a pretty young girl in a pink top showing some profile. Mr. Rand found lapsing into a faint approximation of Mr. Bacon’s laddish speech irresistible.
“Only a Berliner would do that,” said Hakim Bacon. “Sorry to interrupt you. About your mother and all. But only a Berliner would do that.”
“I mean,” said Hakim, putting the Mini in gear again with a grunt of disgust as the Strasssenbahn in front of them disgorged itself of a paltry two passengers and juddered forward, “How long we been following this thing? Six? Seven? Blocks? And her there posing. Like Queen Regina on a fucking stamp.”
“Normal thing would be A, turn your back and forget about us or B, fuck it and wave or something. Make contact.”
“Oh fuck yes. Girl from Bristol? She’d've hopped off and importuned us for a ride by now. I was reading something recently.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess how many American tourists are struck by cars in the UK annually due to left-right flow of traffic confusion. On average. Guess.” Without waiting for Mr. Rand to guess, Hakim Bacon said, “Fifteen fucking hundred.”
“Surprising.”
“Well, it’s all kept very hush hush, innit? Fucking Tourist Board. That’s what I’d call a right conspiracy, mate. And that’s the fucking Tourist Board. Not exactly bloody Casa Nostra. I mean.”
“If the British Tourist Board is capable…”
“Exactly. Shudder to think what fucking Coca Cola gets up to when the moon is full. At the end of the day…”
“Or Microsoft.”
“Or Microsoft. Or the bleeding Pope. Look at her.” Hakim took his left hand off of the steering wheel and waved it facetiously from his window, wriggling his fingers. His flapping hand was huge on its toggle of bony wrist and seemed too big for the sleeve of his Nehru.
“Ten quid says she don’t react. Just you watch. Fucking chronic. What’s the worst?”
“The worst?”
“Your mother. If her coughing fits… if they aren’t…”
“Oh. Yeah. No, the coughing fits… if only they were the worst. Two weeks ago…”
Mr. Rand broke off and calculated. Was this something he wanted to share? He’d known Hakim for years but he was just the guy you went if you needed a fake passport, expensive stereo equipment, or a child bride from Russia. Yes and for the assassin’s drug of choice, as Hakim put it. You went to Hakim Bacon of Bristol.
Hakim was half-German and half-Pakistani but spoke with an accent so cynically-musical that he inspired infinite confidence in his capacity to fix pathetic problems for a fee. He’d seen and done and brokered everything. He was bony and tall and dressed in the manner of a DJ who always wore those sunglasses like a tiara, those big red sunglasses on Hakim Bacon’s sleek black bangs with royal pomp. Did Mr. Rand want to open up to Hakim? This wasn’t some hilarious third-party narrative about sexual humiliation he was dying to tell. This was Mr. Rand’s mother they were talking about. A story about terrible nakedness. A story about second-infancy’s sanity-free slapstick and dread. She used to be a writer.
“Two weeks ago,” prompted Hakim.
“I call her. The phone rings and rings. It’s about 9 o’clock her time so I know she can’t be out. She has to be home, glued in front of that television…”
“Loudly agreeing with some big-haired video-fascist who she thinks of as her only friend.”
“Yeah. The phone keeps ringing and I’m getting worried. Finally, she answers, sounding. I don’t know. Strangely… detached? I go, Ma. What are you up to? She goes: I had an episode. I go: an episode? What sort of episode? She goes: you know, an episode. At this point she’s whispering into the phone, because she doesn’t want the neighbors to hear. It took me quite a while to get the story out of her.”
Mr. Rand cleared his throat. “Basically, she somehow just rolled off her bed, naked and… ended up pinned between her bed and the wall. For hours. She was lying there that way all morning, all afternoon, well into the night. When I called, she managed to pull the phone by its cord off the nightstand to answer it.”
Hakim was frowning with distant concentration as he parked the car in front of SPACE BAR, which was a student café by day and a spiritual battleground for second-tier models by night.
“Blimey.”
“Blimey is right. Lock it?”
“Nah.”
They threaded their way between the tables laid out like the monotone squares of half a madman’s chess board in front of the café and found a free spot beside three plaster-dusted workmen, each wearing a dusty blue bandanna as a hat and a pair of opaque white goggles like a necklace, staring at the street with dormant menace, protecting tall glasses of beer. Glancing at a menu and handing it to Mr. Rand, Hakim lit a cigarette and immediately stubbed it out.
“How’s your thing coming? With, uh. You know. The bird with the….” He made a facial expression with bulging eyes to convey the concept of large breasts.
“Hannah?” Mr. Rand stuck the pointer finger of his right hand across his upper lip in simulation of a mustache. Simultaneously, but very subtly, he lifted the palm of his left hand upright.
Hakim laughed. “Right.”
After they had ordered, but before the table was cluttered with food, Hakim spread a map out on it.
“As you can see,” he said, squinting contemplatively, “This is a map of Germany, the bit which is extremely near to the Polish border, and, lo, here’s a bit of Poland, too.”
He tapped the upper right corner of the tattered old map. “What we’re talking about here is basically a part of the world that the Silesians who dwell there like to refer to as Silesia. Silly old them. Used to be German, not really Polish now and land there is fucking cheap. Which is where you come in with your grand American scheme, if I’m not mistaken.”
Hakim tapped Mr. Rand’s shoulder and Mr. Rand thought how pure whites never do that. “Bloke named Wenceslas Wenceslasovitch or whatever…right out of central casting… big red hands like raw hams… massive geezer with a yellow mustache… wants to sell his portion of a parcel of land that is well nigh fifty hectares, mate.”
Hakim paused for dramatic effect and looked Mr. Rand in the eye. “Have you any idea how fucking big a hectare is? Really, have you? I doubt it. I hadn’t a clue myself, to be honest, till I checked up on it.” He paused again. “One hectare. Ten thousand square meters. Ten bloody thousand. That’s one hundred acres. To give you an idea: your average suburban plot of land is half an acre or one acre tops. Our friend Wenceslas owns 14 hectares of this fifty-hectare plot and he wants to liquidate his bit, he wants to be rid of it, for a very reasonable price… you’ll laugh when you hear it. You’ll die laughing when you hear what he wants for his 14 hectares, I guarantee it… joke of the year… and that includes three farm houses and a barn and a fucking well without a dead cat down it.”
Hakim lit another cigarette and sat back and took a long drag on it, acknowledging with a satirical nod the cement-cold stare of one of the dust-covered workers who happened to find himself in the path of Hakim’s second-hand smoke. Under his breath Hakim said, “Put on your gas mask and lovely goggles if the smoke troubles you, darling,” and then, louder, to Mr. Rand, “There’s only one drawback, as I see it.”
Languidly his head went back as his mouth opened and out came what appeared to be a quivering x-ray of his skull. “The other thirty five hectares of the property in question is owned by Wenceslas’s dear old mum and she’s firmly against having the land sold off in bits. There’s a bright side, though… and I wouldn’t be mentioning all this if there weren’t.” He stubbed out the just-started cigarette, winking at the dust-covered worker and his two chums, who hadn’t uttered a word or moved very much at all since Mr. Rand’s last nervous appraisal.
“Right,” said Hakim. “The bright side. Mother is at death’s door, innit? Cancer of the heart or something. She’s like 99, this bird is, 99 on stilts and the wind is kicking up. She falls dead, Wenceslas can do what he wants with the property. You give him fifty thousand in one cash payment, you give me seven thousand for my time and expertise, you pay certain fees and sign certain documents with the Polish government, and you’re suddenly the lord of all you survey. Hear it’s real nice in the fall. No neighbors to speak of. Wolves. Folk tales. Nice. Whatcha think, then? I get 33% of my fee up front before you contact the seller, of course. Refundable within thirty days if the deal breaks down. Which I can’t see happening, frankly.”
“So now we’re just waiting…”
“For a poor old lady…”
“Right.”
Hakim winked and lit another cigarette and studied passersby on the street a good long time. He smiled as if suddenly remembering. “Not that you have to.”
“Excuse me?”
“Wait, I mean. Not that you have to wait.”
Mr. Rand felt the future open up under him.
3
Q: Now that you’re dying… we are, literally, between the first and second blows being delivered to your skull by the intruder’s blunt object (probably a watchman’s flashlight)… we wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions about life as you lived it?
A: Not at all.
Q: This photo. Who is it?
A: My sister and me. Surprising, isn’t it? We look like fashion models there, all dressed up, posing in front of a fountain. I don’t remember where the fountain was but you can see tourists milling around in the background so I’m assuming a world capitol. Maybe Paris. Our first trip to Europe.
Q: You are how old in this photo?
A: I’m afraid I can’t give you a precise answer but I’d say twenty, twenty one. Maybe twenty two. I think it must have been the early 1950s. The haircuts and the fashions have both come back, haven’t they? Everything always comes back but the people. Jean said that once and I thought it was sad and funny. I thought she was sad and funny. My little sister Jean.
Q: Can you remember for us what your interests were at the time of this photo?
A: The interests of any young woman of a certain class during the era. One had the feeling that things had loosened up after the war…there were cracks in the facade we thought we might squeeze through. People think of the 1950s as a particularly repressed era in American life for some reason but never in the history of the planet had so many non-aristocratic people been so well-educated and so ready to use this knowledge to make the world a better place. All of the seeds of the so-called counter-culture of the 1960s were planted during the 1950s and we thought it was a terribly exciting time. I even toyed with the idea of becoming an Abstract Expressionist painter. But maybe that was later.
Q: You say you toyed with the idea. Nothing came of it?
A: I’d like to say that I realized soon enough that I had no talent and so gave it up in a gesture of frank self-awareness, but it was worse than that. I think I realized that talent had very little to do with how far one might go with it, so to speak. I’m a very quick study in some cases and I made my observations and came to my conclusions. Art is just another facade we flatter ourselves with. The race, I mean. The human race. We flatter ourselves that we aren’t just herd animals with a pecking order, concerned mostly with power, food and, you know, reproduction.
Q: You were clear-eyed at a young age.
A: Well, not to seem too full of myself, but any so-called attractive young girl with enough of a brain in her skull picks up massive amounts of this information…call it the animal verities or the herd report…she picks it up at a very young age. The attention that’s paid and the nature of the attention and the kind of things one is punished for and the nature of the punishment. You learn it all in puberty. The lesson never really gets any more complex as you grow older and even more so-called attractive…it simply repeats itself until you finally really genuinely in all sincerity get it, like that Kafka story with the machine carving a sentence over and over again in the prisoner’s flesh. You get that aha moment.
Q: When did you first leave America for a substantial amount of time?
A: If by substantial you mean more than a few months I’d say in 1968. I was a grown woman, no children, money from a divorce settlement in the bank and nothing to keep me. There was a darkness in America…maybe the darkness was mostly in Philadelphia…but anyway I decided to sell my things and throw a party and just be done with it. But that was only my first escape. I came back with my tail between my legs two years later, having attempted to live as a single white woman in Morocco. Morocco was the destination of choice in 1968 for a certain crowd but for me it was a disaster.
Q: Cultural differences?
A: Yes, but not between myself and the so-called natives…between me and the expats. A more horrible group of people you can’t imagine. It was truly as though North America and pretty much all of Western Europe had systematically rounded up all the lotus-eating dilettantes and nouveau-riche snobs with a passion for throw-pillows and deported them to Morocco. It took me about a year to get myself permanently un-invited from every dinner party thrown there. Not that I minded. I very much enjoyed being alone.
Q: No problems at all with the indigenous culture? No incidents?
A: Well, if you call a near-rape an incident, yes. Once. It was very late and I was being foolish, singing to myself quite loudly. A man had me by the neck suddenly and I found myself in a sort of courtyard lit only by the moon. He had a knife that was not very big but it looked very sharp and he kind of pantomimed that if I made the slightest sound he’d cut my throat. It’s very funny what happened. When he opened his robe and revealed his, you know…his erection, I suppose it’s okay to say… rather than struggle or look horrified I reached up and sort of gently… well, this is slightly embarrassing but there you have it. I stroked him there like a lover. And he was absolutely so revolted by the gesture that he shrank back from my touch and fled as though I were a witch. Not before spitting copiously on me, of course. But I had saved myself with my knowledge of human psychology and I was very proud of the fact and I even wrote home about it. I seem to remember trying to turn it into a poem or a short story but nothing came of it.
Q: When did you leave America permanently?
A: Lots of my friends and acquaintances claimed that they’d leave the country if Reagan won the election but I was the only one who made good on the threat.
Q: But you didn’t move straight away to Poland.
A: Oh no. There was a kind of a long filtration process at work. First I tried London. But I found soon enough that I longed for a certain quality that life in Morocco had had. That sense of perfect solitude one only achieves when surrounded by people speaking a language one is blissfully ignorant of. Even being literally alone, out in the woods or on a mountaintop, can’t match it.
Q: So you you tried Germany.
A: Yes, next came Germany. This is like the story of Goldilocks, isn’t it? But the Germans were too cold. And it was, what, only about forty years after the end of the war and there was just too much baggage. It was an extremely neurotic culture. Seven days a week and twenty four hours a day of over-reactions. You’d chide someone for cutting in front of you in a queue at the post office and he’d react as though you’d accused him of gassing Jews.Then, I met my future husband, and I suppose my head was turned by the fact that he owned and ran art galleries, and he was technically a count, a Polish count, this dashing blonde with a name it took five whole seconds to say in its entirety. I actually timed him saying it once. And he didn’t seem to mind that I was no longer, shall we say, thirty. Or even forty. Though I’ve managed to keep the same figure I had at twenty, which is one of the few advantages of being flat-chested.
Q: And you were happy?
A: Well, I didn’t expect to end up in a farm house in the middle of nowhere on the border between Germany and Poland on a plot of land too big for me to walk across in an afternoon, no. And I never dreamed that one day I’d become the stepmother to a forty-year-old drunk who likes to sun himself in his birthday suit even in the middle of winter… that’s a “no” too. But he’s a sweet-natured boy. Irresponsible with money. I’m sure he’ll be devastated when he discovers my body.
Q: Thanks very much for your time.
A: You’re very welcome.
SLAVOJ’S TRUFFLES,
or
Fallacy as the Inevitable Consequence of Perspective
http://litandspoken.southbankcentre.co.uk/2010/07/20/slavoj-zizek-two-types-of-rabble/
Is Slavoj Žižek under the impression that Philosophers work harder than Somali pirates?
Ah Todd Rundgren. Todd Rundgren always reminds me of an old American hippie acquaintance of year’s back who would, at the drop of a wide-brimmed floppy hat, smuggle Todd’s LSD-soaked wise words of wisdom into any conversation.
Although I can remember Todd being invoked on a regular basis be the conversation political, artistic or personal I ‘m damned if I can remember what he said that affected my US hippie-chum so profoundly. Perhaps his words were so deep they were beyond language ????
Comrade ET, I remember a piano-playing post-Hippie chum of mine bragging that he’d enjoyed substantial eye-contact with Todd at a then-recent concert (of Todd’s) and me doing my best to look as though the relative lack of interest betrayed by my neutral facial expression upon hearing this news wasn’t just the carefully-controlled mask of envy (which it wasn’t, I swear).
I pasted-in this clip mostly for Todd’s eyebrows but also for the novelty of The Four Tops’ introduction. If you can imagine (in 21st century terms) The Wu-Tang Clan introducing John Mayer. Maybe you can. Is Todd the American Alan Parsons?
PS Thirty years later, the piano-playing post-Hippie chum now leads one of the most successful kiddie rock bands (ie, rock bands that play music for… toddlers) in America and whenever he sends along a clip from some TV broadcast or a rave review from, say, HOT TODDLER magazine, I find myself doing my best to make my quippy email responses not read as though they’re wearing the carefully-controlled mask of envy… which they aren’t, I swear.
Sadly, I let my subscription to HOT TODDLER magazine lapse. I don’t know what I was thinking…
That aside, I thought it important that you know: “Harold and Maude is ranked number 45 on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Funniest Movies of all time.” -imdb.com
Just in case anyone, anywhere, anytime, cites the AFI as a source worthy of a nanoseconds consideration.
Comrade Mish! I can guarantee that our joke-use of the imaginary magazine title “Hot Toddler” will direct unwanted traffic this way. Sad, innit?
Harold and Maude! The reverse of the peddy ethos. Or the (reductio ad absurdum) soul of it. That’s one thing about being married (and also about this being the 21st century)… neither of us will have to sit through that again. But what would they call “Maude”, in that flick, now? A turbo-cougar? And what’s the male equivalent (eg, for Woody Allen’s character with Mariel Hemingway’s character in Manhattan)? A “Cugat”?
PS Enjoy yer safari…
We don’t leave until tomorrow (I avoid traveling on weekends…my dear, the ,crowds) but thanks for the bon voyage. I vaguely knew who Charo was but wiki tells me:
Which explained your ‘Cugat’ crack. Modern attitudes to age and sexuality are peculiar at best and rank hypocrisy at worst. But let’s leave that for another time and get to what I’m sure is on both our minds: the nuptials of Princess Chelsea.
Apparanently, the Clintons have spent $3 million clams on the wing-ding. I’m sure the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs and homes (thanks to Clinton’s and his successor’s fealty to the neo-liberal economic model) are as touched and moved as we are.
And the media’s fascination with the bride is perfectly understandable, given her accomplishments and attributes, which are: she took the trouble to be born; she looks like a rather earnest school-teacher, one of the ones who sweats a lot, has fat ankles and none of the boys has a crush on. And, erm…that’s it.
I imagine we’ll get a biopic soon, Chelsea: The Years Of Struggle with Angelina Jolie as Chelsea and Lenny DiCaprio as her investment banker hubby.
I’m stoked, d00d…
[ed's note: "And the media’s fascination with the bride is perfectly understandable, given her accomplishments and attributes..."
Hey, don't forget her parents' (the Borgia-Clintons) formidable kills! Well, you couldn't exactly be John and Yoko and count the Bushes as chums, eh? That these two saturated-with-evil boomers are considered the flagship marriage-of-convenience of Lib America either says a lot about how A) slap-worthily credulous the Yankee voter is or B) the unabashed meaninglessmess (sic) of "Liberal".]
[plus: It's the 21st Century.... and Clinton is thanking his lucky stars]
kiddie rock bands? oh dear.
I know people who do really good children’s work in theatre. Experimental in ways that companies who consciously lay claim to the description can’t manage. At this moment in time at least.
But rock bands for children seems wrong. Shouldn’t they be eating babies rather than singing songs to them?
I would like to see a drum solo aimed at children however.
[ed.'s note: Fuck me, Comrade ET... I'm in the middle of managing my poorly-organized surprise birthday-related event for Beloved! The ecstatic squeals of Offsprung as she consumes the cake Beloved is too disciplined to eat make it difficult for me to come up with something witty, just now... (the cake is ace, I must say: mad props to Comrade Peter)...]
DEPT. of MURRKA SHE HATE HER ARTISTS
An important “postmodernist” dies and his private library (replete with marginalia)… is sold to a secondhand bookstore? Should I be more nauseated by that or the fact that some lucky sod popped out his front door, walked to The Strand and bought David Markson’s copy of DeLillo’s White Noise, critical scribbles included, for the normal price of a secondhand book?
DEPT. of MARVELOUS SPEECHES
edited version of a lecture given by David Hare at the Royal Society of Literature
via Comrade Edmond who got it from this feller
DROPPING SCREED
and the
ANGRY-ASSED RABBIT
http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/is-reading-really-the-most-important-thing/#comment-85528
UPDATE: Quite Good, This:
In fact, I AM a Grandpa!
POST-MONTY PYTHON: WHAT IS IT WITH CHEESE?
DREAR DIARY
NOW THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
GREATEST (S)HITS
from April 4th
I, who sleep at your vigils and fast for your feasts (w/apologies to Joyce)
The most effective form of education is marketing. And the most effective form of marketing is disguised as wisdom. I write “disguised”, there, as though “wisdom” is an absolute, and absolutely positive, value. But what is it? It’s not a stable body of knowledge, it’s a subjective, essentially conservative category of opinion. “Wisdom” was Ronald Reagan’s shtick; the presumption being that, at his age (and position) he just knew certain things… don’t worry, I’ll take care of it: you’re still too young to know. Reagan was beloved by Americans on both “sides” of the Left/Right pseudo-dichotomy.
The concept of “wisdom” isn’t amenable to critical analysis, but, clearly, the “wisdom” of a 19th-century plantation owner of Georgia would have diverged somewhat from the “wisdom” of one of his elder slaves. Not always, of course: in a perfectly-run plantation, there would have been a unity of “wisdom” visions between master and slave. And there often is, to this day.
Critical analysis means ignoring the debate-foreclosing, inviolable aura of “wisdom” (conventional and otherwise) and breaking the arguments down to basic, foundational elements we can then use Fact and Logic to test. We aren’t trained to do this. If we were (if all of us were), it would be Marketing’s end and the end of Politics. Which is why critical analysis is taboo (example: one of the classical arguments against critical/forensic analysis at the scene of a possible False Flag operation in which many are killed is the “wisdom” of letting the “healing process” begin instead of, you know, digging up all that hurtful evidence-muck).
Which leads me to my second point: in the false dichotomy of “Left” and “Right” in American Political Theater, the most conservative force is not “Wing Nut” but “Normative Liberal”. Wing Nuts (eg, bellicose chubby radio personalities) actually promote a kind of debate by being (for the “Left”) so clearly racist/hawkish/wrong and thereby providing sanctioned targets for passionate criticism. A Normative Liberal, on the other hand, supports an arbitrary (comfort zone) boundary on discourse… a line beyond which a line of thinking or complaint can’t go. The punishment for crossing the line is ostracism. The Normative Liberal is a quasi-bourgeois mindset (I say “quasi” because the “middle class” no longer exists in real terms; only on Credit): it wants to keep things largely as they are while also, somehow, at the same time (impossibly), “improving conditions” for the Lesser Orders… the goal of which, of course, in the end, is more about improving conditions for the Normative Liberal by absolving him/her of Guilt. Guilt is ruining the Normative Liberal’s ability to enjoy the Goods and Services that are his/her credit-based birthright. Think “Hillary Supporter” c. 2003.
A Golden Avatar of Normative Liberalism (and 3QD readers) is Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show. As I pointed out to CDS Barry during yesterday’s walk, using Satire on Monsters only works to bring the Monsters back into the tent of the Human and the acceptable (ie, it normalizes monstrousness). To laugh at Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is to turn these monsters into your merely wrong-headed or eccentric or irascible grandfathers. Satire is only appropriate (and effective) against a politician who is no worse than inept. To rehabilitate a Mass Murderer (this is fact, not impressionism: check the figures on Iraq, for one example) from a deserved spot in Beyond the Pale to a much-more-huggable place in the breakfast nook of the Crotchety… is not exactly a service to fucking humanity. Cheney, Rove, the Bushes, et al, should be repulsive to us as We are to them.
Far from challenging the system, Stewart does his part to keep the whole thing from blowing up. Not that he’s intentionally-complicit… he’s a structural collaborator: Stewart just wants to earn a good living at something he does well and what he does well is, necessarily (to sell it to the target-demo of Normative Liberals), packaged misleadingly as a form of Dissent. Stewart wants to earn a good living while also doing “good”… for structural reasons, it’s not that simple. Doing “good” in [name your favorite example of a rogue state] is a bad career move. Those who do “good” often suffer catastrophic reversals in career trajectory (a possible euphemism for plane crash). If you Do Good they Hunt You Down.
Structural Collaboration has to be widespread for the system to work. It is.
[ed.'s note: most of the images I'm using these days... unless they're of Berlin... are from this picture-blog]
DON’T LOOK THERE, LOOK HERE, DUPES
Will someone please take Tina Brown’s foul head-thing when she’s done with it, stick it on a pike and use it to scare African children into doing their homework… ?
Satire in the UK has usually come from quite reactionary quarters ( right wing conservative usually. ) The odd thing with the left wing satirists of the cartoonist persuasion is that they always depict the tryrants with great detail and verve but those whose side they are meant to be on are usually drawn as a characterless, faceless mob. Surely the opposite effect of what they intend?
I’ve always been underwhelmed by a lot of satire. Doesn’t it function more as a catharsis than an agent of change? Although the point must come where having someone who articulates what you might feel doesn’t seem quite enough
In my area of work I’ve come across people who say that it’s not possible to do political outdoor theatre. To which the answer is “yes it is possible but maybe it’s just not possible if you want to make a living doing political work. ”
There’s a photo at one of those G8 demonstrations of a bunch of riot police with batons and shields charging a group of women dressed as carnival showgirls. That image seems far more powerful than a subsidised show about political unfairness playing at a festival could ever be.
Comrade ET! To quote a well-known film:
He meant Nazis 1.0, of course.
Ah back in the day when Woody could be bothered to develop his scripts rather than film the draft versions of them.
I saw a couple of his recent ones on TV. The plots, initial ideas were perfectly serviceable Thin Man-esque romps but he didn’t seem to feel the need to flesh them out with jokes or ……… let’s just leave it as jokes.
We can’t blame Ingmar Bergman for this omission can we?
Christ, Comrade ET… I knew something was wrong with Woody as I left the theater during “Manhattan Murder Mystery”. When did Ingmar bite the deathcock, again? Maybe there’s a connection.
Still, we’ll always have Crimes and Misdemeanors, eh?
[erm: a quick trip to Wiki reminds me that Ingmar's death can't possibly explain Woody's precipitous decline. How about Louis Armstrong's death? When was that again...?]
[one Wiki trip later: nope. It was obviously the 21st century itself that did Woody in]
The films did start to get a bit “distracted” after his marriage to his step-daughter ( or whatever she was ).
Can we blame Mia Farrow’s legal team and the idiocy of even thinking that was a good idea?
I did like Deconstructing Harry when I saw it in the cinema all those years ago.
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET: why any aging celebrity in the market for a sex-slave/nanny would prefer a teenage American stepdaughter over a ripe, slightly-past-it, Italian or Hindu starlet, is beyond me]
I think Woody could avoided any problems if, like the POV cameraman directly below he had chosen an oven-ready chicken to consort with.
Incidentally just returned from a gig, En route home we stopped off to “eat” ( or is that spend money on a deeply unsatisfying experience? we try and avoid such things but my diabetes being what it is it became impossible ) at a service station where the chicken dinners looked very much like they’d been “prepared” in the manner below. Really.
is the photographer Terry whathisname the Taschen best-seller?
Comrade ET!
1) Are you aware that margarine fucks you up (re: diabetes)? Get off of that plasticky, capillary-wall-blocking shit immediately, man. Three of the most commonly-consumed super-poisons of our evil post-industrial existence are 1) corn syrup 2) margarine 3) fluoride.
2) surely a POV-shot would show the interior of the bird’s chest cavity?
3) No tattoo visible so it can’t be Tel
Apparently some of the no sugar fruit juice drinks on occasion contain more sugar ( albeit in a less aggressive form ) than those with sugar in.
Still our government has dismantled the legislation which makes food producers admit in a clear fashion what’s inside the food they are selling ( the market-place does the job more efficiently by all accounts????? ) so if I don’t change my diet to espadrille salad followed by a lo-interest soya grit pudding I may have died through being unable to decipher exactly what some foodstuffs contain.
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET, the safest thing is to maintain a secret cache of Hippie friends who run a communal farm and eat their genuine vegetables but avoid their jam sessions]
[more later after I'm done with various Daddy duties]
NU-LIT and the AUTOPARODIC
Fukinay. Uh, when did kids like this decide to be “writers” instead of going to Law School? Is he imitating William S. Burroughs via Tao Lin? The following text is “wild” like somebody’s date in a striped tie at a rent party wearing a lampshade… or doing the limbo with a broomstick. Or, yeah: this reminds me of a German I once saw wearing his sunglasses in a restaurant at midnight with his square-assed friends in hysterics. Or, no: somebody’s Mormon girlfriend with a twelve-string guitar covering Weird Al Yankovic. Or how about a blinking LED-festooned cat turd?
The squalor of it.
Is there a talent-killing virus on the loose? Or is it true what they say about fluoridated water?
Any hope of a new crop of talented writers popping up to replace the dying wizards of a bygone era is fading fast, Comrades. In the Anglophone Sphere, anyway….
PART 2a
Or try this. First read the reviews. Then read the Lit.
REVIEWS
NOW, THE LIT (4 stories):
PART 2b
Roxanne Gay says “Timothy Willis Sanders [...] is a great writer”:
PART 3
David F. Hoenigman, reviewing Theoretical Animals, by Gary J. Shipley (BlazeVOX Books), writes:
Sample of the text:
and
# August 2nd, 2010 / 1:42 pm Steven Augustine—
“Shipley’s writing is important because it’s a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature.”
By performing Cormac McCarthy re-writing Dylan’s “Tarantula”…? Depth of reference aids the critic and writer alike, I think.
http://books.google.com/books?id=7ZhY6BDNXWMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
UPDATE:
PART 4
In which a woman who had not yet written poems was graciously invited to read her poetry…
CHEAPDOM of SPEECH
The wondrously-mediocre Ron Silliman, the premier link-aggregator of our time, has closed his comment threads after some kerfuffle or other, apparently, and I’m sure some sad cunts who relied on those threads as some sort of community will be even sadder, now. Well, my doubly-saddened cunts, face it: more and more comment threads like Ron’s will be closing, so steel yourselves, for Americanos (I use the term to encompass the McDonalds-Anglophone Sphere) like to make lots of noise about “Freedom of Speech“, but the fact is, they only really like the concept when it isn’t necessary and everyone is agreeing to agree or disagree in terms that everyone can agree on.
Americanos do not like Dissent. It’s offensive. It’s a Loser Thing and very gross, too. Obliterating human bodies with Apache gunships is something Americanos are willing to withhold judgment on until the correctness of such activity is verified in open debate after all the targets are dead… but calling people names and all that will not be tolerated. Especially if the Loser-Dissent-Troll also has a point to make and the point goes against local populist opinion and he/she/it makes the point too well to be definitively refuted. Even if the LDT doesn’t actually call anyone names. LDT’s ass will be deleted or stuck in retroactive moderation or the comment thread will be shut down. Because we don’t want people reading those words: we want them reading other words. Words that we can agree with which are therefore helpful. Totalitarian Decorum rules.
This is what Ron (a feller I’d never heard of until about three years ago and, even after hearing of him, it took me quite some effort to track down examples of his shitty poetry) has to say about his bold participation in the current trend of snuffing the comment function:
It’s a touchingly-nunnish statement, isn’t it? As if any activity in any realm of genuine Art isn’t the constant, ever-changing result of psychosocial tumult and struggle: the rage of ideas to exist. But that’s just it: what would Ron, or any of his primly-bearded (m or f) equivalents, know of all that? Ron hasn’t exactly been spending the years which led to this moment battling it out with a spiritual sense of his own inadequacy in light of what he knows, deep down, he should, one day, be capable of: no. That’s not what guys like Ron do. Guys like Ron build their baseball fields and They come. Or they tend their gardens and the Tomatoes grow. They want peace and quiet, damn you. STFU, Tumult-of-Creation. This means you.
At Salon.com, a child-of-privilege (appearing in the video above) published an excerpt from a crappy “memoir” that was immediately torn-to-shreds in the comment thread. There were political overtones to the exercise (above and below the line), but, on the whole, the righteous bullyseyes in the thread had to do with the young lady’s blithe lack of talent as a writer (nice tits, though). As a result, Roxane Gay (mentioned in posts above this) wrote a nunnishly-chiding, faux-hand-wringing essay titled THE INTERNET IS FOR ANGER. Commenting on her own essay (in response to a comment by the shitty writer she was defending), Roxane wrote:
The notion that Rachel Shukert has “talent”, of course (Talent and Beauty are civil rights in Murrka, as we know) is a given. But check out the rest of it. A “turning of the tide”, eh? My, that’s portentous language. Why, if this keeps going on, and mediocrities can’t be protected from the instantaneous horrors of frank criticism….
God knows criticism can be a derailing thing if you’re not feeling 100% but what idiot puts things up on a web-site with a comment section and thinks that only torrents of praise will come forth?
And what idiot can’t separate the “bollocks LOL” brigade with those who are a bit more thoughtful in their response?
I suspect the self-defence mechanism lumps the 2 together in order to carry on the notion that the work is good and it’s the public who aren’t.
The work may be good but in the example you refer to it most definitely isn’t.
[ed.'s note: mind-buggering, innit?]
THESE TINY LITTLE LOW-STAKES REVIEWS
1
Martin Amis’ THE PREGNANT WIDOW
(in response to this)
2.
Re: Slavoj Žižek on the Hypocrisy of Conscious Consumerism
-
They did it to Zizek, too. Damn.
[ed's note: Animated him? Or dosed him with LSD?]
via Comrade Barry:
why keep testing them? one would hope that the scientists dealing with these unstable materials at the least know how to make something detonate. Or is it a happy accident/ a learning curve when it goes off? With the scientists wiping their brows in relief ” I don’t know what we did but it worked”.
You mean it’s got nothing to do with science and everything to do with school bully tactics? ah I see now.
We probably need some comic relief, at this point, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… how’s this, for starters?
(more later during a break)
Bowie wanted to collaborate with the Chapman Brothers who told him to go away in a similar fashion.
As opportunities dry up we shall see whether they can stay true to their word.
They are a pair of irritating twats but I did like the big exhibition they put on in Liverpool 2 or 3 year’s ago.
EVEN THE AZTECS SAY SO
DROPPING SCREED PT 2,5, 7, 9 & 11
divers and shapely notions
1.
I wish writers would spend less time on marketing and more time on developing. If the eccentric kid down the road tells everyone he’s going to build a flying car and invites everyone over to see a heap of components (frizzy with wires) and a pile of steel spars and rods and tools scattered all around the garage, and the kid tinkers intermittently between bouts of walking up and down the streets of the neighborhood with a megaphone… isn’t that rather less wonderful than the kid who keeps to her/his self until one day… when she/he maybe isn’t even so much of a kid anymore… unveiling a fully-assembled, fully-functional, flying car?
Something about the American ethos seems to argue against the latter model. Walking the streets of the neighborhood, it’s hard not to notice (and be a little disappointed by the observation) that every single garage has a pile of “flying car parts” cluttering up the driveway.
2.
All this talk of “mean-spiritedness” is off, I think. Everyone sort of agreeing, or agreeing to disagree, in Sunday-school tones, may seem like the heavenly gentility our parents (or grandparents) used to watch Masterpiece Theater for… but the truth is, it’s deadly-dull, in the long run, and saps the Literary World of vitality. You don’t forge steel in a lukewarm bath or create fire by caressing a twig.
Think of the old concept of Heat Death: a deathly-becalmed universe, entropy-free. Is that our idea of Heaven? We need those blazing heats and numbing colds and metaphorical loppings-off (and posthumous re-graftings) of old gray heads. Real Writers have always known this and are forever arranging loud feuds and sudden coups and stylistic assassinations to keep the heart pumping and the nipples hard. Or think of it, less bloodily, as cultural aerobics.
It’s the insincere market-logic of late-phase-capitalism (in which nothing is not professionalized and euphemistically exploited to a max) that cautions us to speak, always, like Politicians, Undertakers or Sunday School teachers lest we “offend” someone and ruin a sale. But I go to Literature for a Truth that can’t otherwise be experienced… I expect the Art and its Artists to be charged with that edgy, honest aura. I expect Zero Controversy and Meaningless Smiles and Soft Music at Starbucks but when that pablum-ethos has supersaturated “Literature”… it’s over.
3.
Didion is textually hermaphroditic: big oak dick plus capacious, nut-cracking vadge. Ditto Calvino, O’Connor, Bowles, Vonnegut, Brodkey, Beckett. Philip Roth was a tough young textual Lesbian who faltered when he became a soft old textual Queen. Burroughs was a leathery textual Queen with a jewel-encrusted dagger. Hemingway was a textual adolescent with a bb gun and an un-descended nut. Franzen is a tender young castrato.
4.
Much chatter about what the writer does and doesn’t owe the reader… which reader? The dumbest reader? The smartest reader? The smart reader who doesn’t have much time to read? The smart reader who’s been reading for 40 years and is bored with the standard approach, sees every “twist” telegraphed a mile off and looks right through the narrative to see the stultifying normative presets informing the text? Or the smart reader who’s been reading seriously for only a few years and hasn’t shaken off the imprint of the educational institution that guided her/his early choices?
5.
To exploit the enormous potential of the relocation of the Omphalos of Lit into the Virt, it’s necessary to do do a few basic re-thinks, instead of lazily expecting Virt to mimic Paper Print and its structures and classic maneuvers.
One of the big steps forward… ripe for the maximizing… is the Comment Thread, which shouldn’t be treated like the good old Letters to the Editor (without a door policy). I think the Original Poster should be prepared to spend as much time in the Comment Thread as she/he did formulating the Original Post. It is now a part of the “job”.
The old dynamic of “publishing”, and then sort of standing back, is obsolete. This applies to book reviews as well as the books themselves: the writer of a novel, by stepping into a Comment Thread, is not necessarily required to dilute the book by over-explaining it or proffering too much extra-literary bio…but he/she can answer questions and talk shop and otherwise perform the equivalent of the Q and A on a book tour.
Also quite pertinent is the fact that since the “pay” scale for a professional writer is now, basically, in most cases, nominal at best, the line between “amateur” and “professional” is generally a matter of semantics (or, ie, lunch money).
A lot of the apparently free-floating animus to be found in Comment Threads can, in fact, be traced to a perception of retrograde arrogance in an Orig Poster who is relying a little too heavily on the obsolete model of Posting and Standing Back… or interacting on a very limited scale… with a reticence which borders on seeming like leper-fear.
One of the profoundest real-world-applicable lessons of the Internet is that there are always people who are smarter than you are out there, and they will probably show up, drawn by Google hits, to a discussion featuring their area of expertise. Arrogance is futile. As a veteran of the Guardian Blogs (c. 2007), I can say that a sizable chunk of the more animus-animated threads were fueled by the disparity between under-informed or under-invested above-the-liners and some very sharp thread-participants (many of whom also happened to be professionals).
The New Model means the Author has to work much harder (in lieu of Editors and PR people, at the very least); it’s not really a matter of choice. The Comment Thread is a learning-curve for all involved and it should not be underestimated. I, for one, put more care into many of my comments than what goes into many of the OPs I comment on and I’ve noticed that this is increasingly the case with others: the OP is not so much the pearl deserving passive admiration but the seed around which the real pearl can form.
Eg: Silliman’s recent shutting down of his Comment Threads wasn’t the big story: the big story was the fact that the archived threads (as far as I know) were deleted. I wasn’t a commenter there, but I can see how faithful, careful and energetic commenters feel a little miffed by the arrogance of that old school model. The hierarchy it implies is artificial.
Literature is now, for the first time, on a broader scale, a conversation.
It’s the same relationship as street theatre and indoor theatre. You don’t work outside and expect the public to kow-tow to you. You have to work at it. Not that you also don’t have to work at indoor theatre but the tradition is that the public there ( because they have paid and it’s taking place in a recognised venue that puts on theatre ) are going to give you a bit more leeway.
The reason I work outside is that I like the feedback be it informed, the “I’ve never seen anything like that before” kind or pig-thick abusive. It keeps you on your toes. Of course 15 year old boys are always going to call you a tosser no matter what but sometimes they have a point.
I find the same with blog comments. You have to think on your feet. I can’t imagine why artists don’t want to put some time into gauging a reaction to their work. I’m not sure it’s helpful when something is new and you’re not sure of it yourself but if you are doing work to be seen, heard or read then it seems a useful place to discover what people think.
I was always told if you believe one review then you have to believe them all as all they are is someone’s opinion.
But theatre is a possibly a biit more robust in the face of the public than a poet so perhaps that’s where the reluctance lies and the shock of discovering that not everyone is sympathetic.
“It’s the same relationship as street theatre and indoor theatre.”
Agreed, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… with one bitty quibble: doing street theatre you’re going to get a largely incidental crowd that’s a random cross-section of the populace, whereas in a blog discussion about book(s), you’ve got a self-selecting audience that will also feature, occasionally, a chunk of geniuses and/or aficionados. Maybe a closer analog for a Lit Blog and its comment thread is One Stall at a Gun Convention…?
Quibble correctly identified.
Poem of the Week over at GU largely resembles a firing range rather than a Gun Stall with the poem being one of those plastic yellow ducks seeing if it can make a successful passage without getting bits shot off.
Whereas the political ones remind me of WW1 trenches where you go over the top only to be mowed down by the moderator’s random and irrational blasts of gunfire whereupon the next wave goes over the top. And so on and so forth.
Would make an excellently Bosch-like triptych, ET…. I’ll pay for the oils and canvases…
Or a Celine-esque blast of narrative bile. I’d pay for the absinthe ( was it ? ) and the Remington typewriter.
Whaddya think I’ve been doing all these years on all those comment threads…? (Almost out of Absinthe)
So it WAS absinthe
[ed.'s note: Absinthe and Amphetamines]
le petit meme noir
[ed.'s note: that's her with a painting which featured her likeness in its lower-right-hand corner]
STUPIDEST SUPER-GENIUSES OF THE EMPIRE: #1
vs
Word… I always think it’s stupid when people talk about “colonizing Mars” and shit. That’s never going to happen. Mars is too far away and space travel is too hard. Everything is too far away and too hard. We’re never going to get off this planet. We’re going to die here. It’s the same way with the “transhumanists” and “immortalists” and other people who are waiting for the “technological singularity.” They’re trying to find an escape, but there isn’t one. They’ve read too much science fiction and become delusional.
[ed.'s note: That's a horrifyingly-rational worldview you're burdened with, Comrade Marshall... I'm not even going to ask what you think of Easter Bunny Theory, or Female Ejaculation...]
(M)AR(KE)T and DESIGN
1.
This is not a film critique. This is a critique of what and how we choose to critique or how we choose who chooses.
Google “film socialisme analysis” (but not with quotation marks) and Google returns 14,600 results (the vast majority of which, of course, have nothing to do with the film). Google “Inception analysis”: 12, 400,000 hits. Which is not, yet, an indictment of anything… it’s just me restating the obvious, obviously. [Narrow the comparison by Googling "Inception analysis", with quotation marks: 25,000 hits. "Film Socialisme analysis", with quotation marks: 0]
In order to sharpen my point, I need to mention the fact that the first result of the “Inception” Google search is a blog discussion (non-journo, non-film professional) about the Nolan blockbuster. There are a lot of blog discussions about Inception going on now (just as there were about Nolan’s The Dark Knight) and they aren’t limited to hyperbolic declaratives between overweight, unfucked adolescent fanboys on forums moderated by same. There are a lot of smart bloggers devoting lots of analytical thought and writing to the apparent riddles that this Hollywood-event presents and there are lots and lots of robust discussions centered around these interpretive work-outs.
Good luck finding a non-journo, non-film-professional blog analysis of Godard’s Film Socialisme (with a robust comment thread discussion, on top of that). Nolan deserves the obsessive, code-breaking attention of intellectual bloggers… but Godard doesn’t? A lot of intellectual bloggers are arguing against Inception, yes… but it’s still Inception they’re arguing about. And Avatar before it. And The Dark Knight before that. Etc.
Side question: could Nolan have made Inception for the budget Godard did Film Socialisme on (hard to find figures on that but we know it’s something like 200,000 bucks)? How expensive are actual ideas? Are we only interested in cinematic ideas when they take the form of the slickest eye-candy?
How easily-manipulated are even the smartest among us?
2.
Is this (or rather will it be) Art?
do you think there are still a set of solid principles by which to judge all art?
As far as I can see cultural relativism still has credibility among some.
I was reading a blog about Stallone’s latest attempt to revive his career The Expendables which said it wasn’t well-made, the plot ran out of puff a third of the way in but with the right audience it is a classic of the genre.
To which one might reply ” Which genre is this? The substandard-example-of-a-genre-genre??”
I’m not sure what to think. Comparing Krazy Kat to Shakespeare or Goya seems to completely miss the point but the “classic of its genre” approach also misses the target by a mile.
“do you think there are still a set of solid principles by which to judge all art?”
Not to judge all Art, per se, but to separate Art from Laundry Detergent: sure!
My primary beef here is with Gigantism as an Aesthetic, Comrade ET, and I’d compare a skyscraper to a Blockbuster, or, set up a proportion in which a skyscraper is to a Giacometti what a Blockbuster is to a Godard (whether or not it’s a particular Godard we care for). The “beauty” of a skyscraper is a thin surface dressing two workaday functions (people-containing/ money-making); in some lights it might even be considered a mask or diversion from the crudity and/or brutal banality of its Essence. Well, ditto, say: the perfectly-named-for-the-sake-of-this-argument “Titanic”. The function of “Titanic” was not to generate an Aesthetic experience within its audience; its function was to manipulate emotions so well that it made lots of money. Now, admittedly, Godard wanted to make lots of money, too… that’s what he set out to do with quite a few of his films. But he failed precisely because his Artistic Impulses overwhelmed his Mercenary Instincts.
If Trump Towers is/are “Art”, so are a fancy pair of trainers. It’s becoming a fuzzy distinction because so much Big Ticket Art, now, really is Design (with a collectibly-snarky spin on it)… but that’s more to do with the clever venality of Gallerists and their so-called Artists than anything to do with a paradigmatic shift in the definition of Art. In my opinion, of course. Which tends towards the Anti-Gigantic (three-storey clothes pins and big-assed light bulbs and gargantuan topiary puppies by erstwhile amateur pornstars aside)…
Also: Krazy Kat and Shakespeare may be separated by degrees on a continuum, but they do coexist on that continuum… unlike Shakespeare and “Debbie Duz Jessica, the Prequel”. [ed.'s note: Ultra Pedants who, eg, take exception to my reference to Shakespeare's oeuvre as "Shakespeare"... and I have seen some do so, with others, on various dusty blogs... can go fuck themselves with a giant pair of fancy trainers]
(I can go into greater detail after Offsprung’s bedtime… about Gigantism, I mean… not the fancy pair of trainers)
I understand the gigantism thesis and agree. Like you I do have giant favourites but generally tend to that Dennis Potter maxim “Why look in the middle of the road when there are more interesting, less flattened creatures to be found in the verges”.
The problem for contemporary art has been that advertising is chewing at its ankles and to escape that chewing is proving difficult.The aesthetics of some artists have appeared in adverts before their own work has registered on the general public’s field of vision. Fischli + Weiss’s lovely film “Der Lauf der Dinge ” lurked for years as a video to be passed around your artist mates. Then a car ad pinched the idea,tidied it up and re-presented it. F+W did try and sue but the case didn’t get anywhere – unbelievable as certain bits in the ad are direct lifts from their film. And of course everyone loves the smoother version so it dun’t matter reelly.
[ed.'s note: I'm trying to remember how I saw this video pre-Internet, Comrade DJ Sensei ET]
UH OH
kitschy white + campy black = chewy pop goodness
Cool Art vs Natsy Artist
XTREME KULTCHA
To continue our GIGANTISM discussion, CDS ET:
I read a speech somewhere long ago in which some baldly-phallic sage named Eisenhower lamented the loss, from Scientific Culture, of the basement tinkerer, working on her/his own, making little discoveries outside the gillion-dollar, industrial-military research complex. As the Schlockbuster now dominates culture-wide discussions of film, the same happens to the smelly genius wielding a 16mm camera… pushed so, so far to the margins that even her/his chums won’t pretend to be interested. His/her aesthetic discoveries lost to the Ages.
Which has political ramifications, since anything that costs a gillion dollars to make can’t be more than two or three degrees of separation removed from The Party Line (why do we suppose The Dark Knight used 9/11 imagery in its advertising? Why was Tony Stark, in the recent Iron Man, kidnapped by foolish Muslims? Why was the protag of Avatar a soldier?)… and the voice of Dissent (which need entail nothing more than Changing The Fucking Conversation) will wither away without even needing to be censored.
Which takes us back to Godard, who popularized the outsider-empowerments of lo fi, hand-held movie cameras . No conversations about his last film… no bloggers (and their faithful commenters) thought it was worth it to put even a fraction of the energy, into breaking the codes of “Film Socialisme“, that they put into unraveling the non-mysteries of “Inception” (the kinks and paradoxes of which are obviously the result of a committee trying to stitch a coherent narrative to a Spectacular-Image Barrage). It’s as though, in Lit Terms, even scholars stopped digging through “Ulysses” and turned their attention to Harry Potter. And, I guarantee you: the day is coming.
GIGANTISM is the Voice of the State. The State uses it, now, to eclipse the Voice of the Genius. This isn’t, necessarily, a conscious strategy… any more than a War on Nutrition is the premeditated result of letting a toddler do all the food shopping and prepare all his meals. He will reach for the brightly-colored sugarshit every time. His teeth will fall out and he will grow fat, hyper-active and retarded. He will never know the subtler, life-giving pleasures of homemade gumbo. He will grow up to spend time in jail and in the army. The lower classes are the canaries in the coal mine of this parable; the middle class kids will merely be toothless retards in their office cubicles.
Corollary observation: we never discussed, in depth, btw, my riff (from last year) about the sudden, mysterious popularity of “Xtreme Sports” in GIGANTIC media (as first advertised on MTV)… as a grooming tool for making retardedly-fearless kids and turning those kids… into soldiers. An adolescence of “Jackass“, “Xtreme Sports” and Video Games… that’s really all you need to be of service in the Middle East these days, eh…?
WHITE AMBITION and the BABY-FACED JUNKIE EFFECT
I just got into one with Drugsploitation Author Tony O’Neill after dropping a comment, at HTML GIANT, to the effect of being a little done with reading about the exploits of White “Junkies” who somehow manage to go to the “edge” and bring back luridly-juicy tales for less-experienced suburban brethren to relish. Tony thinks he’s some sort of scary hipster carrying around a burden of mind-bending experiences the average mortal would flinch from. Tony doesn’t know that the “fallen memoir” trope is a stale one: with chicks it’s sex/prostitution, with dudes it’s drugs (though sometimes with chicks it’s sex and drugs): the important thing being that the writer has to be White. Otherwise, where’s the “fallen” part come in, eh? Niggers, as we know, can’t fall.
I’ve read bits and pieces of Tony’s stuff before, back when he was touting his writer’s group, THE BRUTALISTS, over at the Guardian Books Blogs. A coven of weedy White Brits: THE BRUTALISTS. It’s, well, a little funny to me, but clearly not funny to them. If they could write it would, at least, be affectionate laughter. Here’s an example of BRUTALIST LIT (Lee Rourke’s):
Brutal, Lee. And I thought things were tough back in that ghetto in Chicago!
Years ago, I made the acquaintance of a daughter of privilege who was just starting out as a writer (and she actually had some talent; a glib kind of verbal facility). She had just published a little book of poetry. Her father was fucking rich. She started writing stories about her friends (using the actual names of said friends) and, to spice things up, began dabbling in heroin. Call her Lydia since she has palled around with Ms. Lunch.
While Lydia was too smart to get too wasted herself (if you can remember it, you weren’t there, as they said of the 1960s), she was wisely egging-on her fellow children-of-privilege… so she’d have something to write about. She’d run out and purchase the heroin for them. So she got that book of edgy tales published but the market wasn’t thrilled so what to do? What to do? A few years went by, and she had a Eureka moment, I guess, because the next thing I knew, it was the late 1980s/early 1990s and she had published her memoir about marrying and having children with… wait for it… a Gay Junkie figure skater… with AIDS! Bingo! Bestseller! TV appearances! I saw her on the fucking Today show.
Just as Lydia never became a heroin addict, she also somehow avoided contracting AIDS. Some White kids are smart that way.
Anyway, I left one disparaging comment about Lurid Drug Memoirs at HTML GIANT and Tony O’Neill, feeling strangely vulnerable to my critique, I suppose, ended up trading barbs with me for about eight hours (including breaks during which I played with my daughter and Tony, I suppose, did the edgy, scary things that a seasoned denizen of the streets will tend to do, without even having to think about it… like, eg, gigging with Marc Almond)….
[Bafflingly, Tony writes, "I was an intravenous heroin user for most of my teens"... but then, also, "No, I was 18 years old and I hadn’t used hard drugs at that point in my life"... erm... whatever ]
But first, two samples… one more from a BRUTALIST and then a quote from a guy who took his drugsploitation so seriously that it actually fucked him up (the trick is to change gimmicks before it’s too late, Jim):
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AND NOW THE COMMENTS
(excerpted; in the original they’re 50km long)
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http://htmlgiant.com/roundup/my-puberty-ostrich/#comment-87837
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CONTEXT:
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Here’s our baby-faced junkie, the Justin Bieber of Junk, looking slightly healthier than Charlie Parker
Finally, I leave you with one of Tony’s pomes (which was center-formatted in the original); Tony says there’s pretentious poetry on my site. Tony is pure in his conviction: always go for that 1950′s-junkie-style cliche:
Well slapped Steven but this is surely shooting fish in a barrel ( to use that blog-fave ).
It’s more of that Keepin’ it Real Krapp isn’t it? Certain subjects by default being more real than others. If the Brutalists could write as vividly about suburbia and the dreariness of office life as BS Johnson managed ( you may of course disagree with me here ) then I would applaud but their stuff just seems like a generic experience filtered through a dozen other’s eyes ( usually the lyrics of UK 70′s punk ).
“Well slapped Steven but this is surely shooting fish in a barrel ( to use that blog-fave ).”
1. Are you saying shooting fish in barrel isn’t fun, Comrade ET?
2. Ageed re: good old BSJ. If only Tony and Co wrote original shytt… at least it would be original
“How Parents Can Get Infants to Sleep, Once and For All”
• “In Wisconsin, Anthony Stancl, 18, received 15 years in prison in February after prosecutors said he posed as a girl on Facebook to trick male high school classmates into sending him nude cell phone photos, which he then used to extort them for sex.”
THE NOBLE RE-RUN
Incidentally have you seen “Dig” about the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols? It’s both hilarious and deeply depressing in so many ways.
Meant to pira… I mean, see that. Haven’t got around to it. I always liked the Dandy’s a little (esp. when the keyboard player was… you know)… but I’m not as into TBJTM (despite an unintentionally-hilarious blogpost I once accidentally read that expressed outrage at the inherent callousness of naming a band that way). But I keep hearing about Dig and will have to… uh… go purchase a legal copy.
Good Luck, Bruno
From the Comrade DJ Sensei who knew and filmed the late great Bruno S:
More Bruno S from Comrade DJ Sensi JR:
Bruno Schleinstein (“Bruno S.” or “Stroszek” for the general Herzogian public) died on Tuesday in Berlin. Berlin just got a whole lot duller… Bruno lived a Berlin that no longer existed, with a “vengence” as if WWII had occured just last week.
If anyone had just cause for revenge against a brutal/stupid world, it certainly was Bruno, who had been abused by everyone above him since day one. Bruno did not take it sitting down: again and again he escaped the institutions and cliches that the people wanted to force him into. All his talents were self-developed, he had an amazing knowledge of classical music and poetry… yes, surprise, the village idiot read enormous amounts of material, much of it delved from flea markets/Trödelläden he liked to explore.
Strangely, Bruno was more famous in the USA than Germany: it took a piece by NYTimes writer Michael Kimmelmann last year for the German press to realize who they had living in their midst. Suddenly there was a flurry of interest over Bruno, with the Berlinale film festival even organizing a “reconciliation” between Werner Herzog and Bruno at a local pub where Bruno played accordian on Saturdays. Bruno even received and accepted a small role in a real Bulgarian Film Production which was shot last October.
Now he’s dead and gone, and everyone who had looked at this twizzled old guy making music in their courtyard with cheer, pity or annoyance now weepily ask when the funeral will be. But even in the end Bruno deals us an inside joke: his legally binding last-wish was not to be buried, but to have his body donated to the Charité hospital for scientific purposes, like the final scene in KASPAR HAUSER.
It’s been an unbelievably depressing week on a personal level ( when saying goodbye to my mother who is dying of a particularly aggressive cancer really/ probably did mean goodbye rather than goodbye see you next time and, despite our differences over the years, I had no way of dealing with that ), on a touring level ( a terrible incompetently organised 2 day gig this weekend which hung us out to dry ) so the death of Bruno S just seems par for the course really. I watched Stroszek again recently ( having first seen it when it came out ) and had forgotten how “un-Herzogian” it actually is.
That’s awful, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… awful. Weird weather adding to it all, too, I think… the air feels like a sack of something unwanted. But that mother situation happening to you is deeper than anything I’ve stepped in recently… reminds one of The Thing one uses all this Creative Energy to mask/avoid/palliate/disguise and/or swing against with noble/naive futility…
“Der Tod ist ein Irrtum” – Heiner Müller
[ed's note: "Death is an error"]
Heiner Müller again, Sorry that this has to stay German (when it comes to talking about death, finally German is an excellent language):
“Manchmal zwischen Nacht und Morgen / Seh ich Hunde dich umkreisen / Hunde auf den Hinterbeinen / Hunde mit gebleckten Zähnen / Und du greifst nach ihren Pfoten / Und du lachst in ihre Zähne / Und ich wache auf mit Angstschweiß / Und ich weiß daß ich die liebe.”
(quick rough translation for 99% of our Comrades, who can’t read German, Comrade P!)
Sometimes between night and morning
I see dogs surrounding you
dogs on their back-legs
dogs with bared teeth
and you grab at their paws
and you laugh in their teeth
and I wake in fear-sweat
and I know that I love them
(the last line seems pretty loaded because it’s a disrespectfully-informal form of address, I think)
UPDATE:
Comrade Herr Pochling has just notified us that the last line of the poem he quotes contains a typo (“die” for “dich”); so the new translation now ends with the line “and I know that I love you” instead
If I had a remotely religious bone in my body I suppose it’s in events like these when it would come into play. But I don’t,won’t,can’t so shan’t.
DIVERS OBSERVATIONS IN CYBERNIA
1. IMAGINE THAT: THEY LEFT OUT ALL THE TACTICAL COCK-SUCKING…!
Rest assured that whatever a puff-piece like this takes the trouble to inform us is not a pipe is, in fact, exactly that. Pay no attention to that blowjob behind the curtain. A triumph of the system, indeed. Christ, if only Litblogglandia weren’t a fractious mess of the largely-talentless with day-glo delusions of the self… we could rise up and take a meritocratic whack at these foie-gras fops. What the last sentence in the quoted passage actually means, in its frantic scramble to obscure the obvious, is anybody’s guess.
2. PRAISE CTHULHU, I’VE ACTUALLY HAPPENED UPON A WELL-WROUGHT TEXT, BY A YOUNG WRITER, IN A CURRENT ZINE
The rhythm is good; the language is a worked-over surface; it’s not yet another fey doodle about jobs, a bad break-up or a dysfunctional childhood. It doesn’t contain the words “awesome” or “mom”. In the third movement of this very short text, the writer builds an original metaphor , to handle the task of welding some necessary action to the premise, so we end up with something more than a sketchy concept and a jumble of descriptions and a lazy attempt at quirk; we take a strong image with us as we ease our way out of the story. Satisfying. I would have worked over the language-surfaces a little harder, myself, but oh well. At least it isn’t written in chat-room pidgin or Twitterese.
Out of the couple-hundred stories I’ve read, online, in the past three months, from young writers: one story that isn’t atrocious. A good one, in fact. Touching in its brevity. Fucking pop the cork on that bottle of existential champagne.
Remember Him As This (Not THIS)
Beloved at 4:39 and 11:46 (delivering dialog and plucking strings in a very big soap opera ) while Offsprung and I dug mud trenches in the garden…
please eat squirrel-shit pie and die off you spineless smug empty untalented broken-dick bands a la The Mountain Goats or just listen to this and open up your wrist-rivers with dad’s SuperGold card:
PHOTOGRAPHY, SEX, POSSESSION, DEATH as CHEMICAL PROCESSES
I was going through a box of photos in a bookshelf-cleanup and found a snap of a woman I had a skittish affair with in the early 90s or so. I can remember walking down a street in Schöneberg with her and debating about which imminent technological development was scariest: the ability to manipulate DNA on an industrial level or the ability to use computers to track every detail and movement of a life. That’s how young we were (well, I was 30): as if there was a choice.
Now she’s a science writer for a respected magazine but then she was a coltish, cocky 20-year-old, shimmering with pheromones and intent on having a laugh.
I first saw her in the club I worked in, 1991-1992. This club was the flavor-of-the-year in clubby Berlin, back before the center of all things cool moved East. It was my first job in a foreign country (trying to get a job in London was like trying to get a blowjob in the Louvre). Every weekend-night there was a 50m queue outside the discreet door of this club (number 2 Marburger strasse; long-since shut down by the Russian mafia), a blinding parade of stylish fuckers clamoring to jam into a smoky box in which the DJs were not even particularly skilled (no good-time mic-patter out of these fellers; some of them couldn’t even mix), the drinks cost an arm and the manager maintained a strict no-drugs-in-the-toilet policy. The manager was African-via-Paris and about seven-foot-tall with a head like an Easter Island totem and he was inarticulate in five languages and his name was Emilio and he wore only the most expensive, cutting-edge shit. Enforcing Emilo’s drugs-in-the-toilet policy was one of my jobs; that and cleaning the ashtrays and keeping the toilets clean in a situation in which there were no mops (someone once stall-vomited a largely-unchewed spaghetti dinner, direct from the restaurant next door, and I locked the stall from the inside and hopped over the stall walls so I wouldn’t have to deal with it for a few hours; when Emilio finally detected the cooling splurge, in I was sent… with a box of fucking napkins. I can still feel the chunks).
Everyone wanted a job in this club (a doorman, a pseudo-chum, ended up being one of Germany’s biggest movie stars) and several friends who had already been in Berlin for years when I got here were pissed that I got the job, shitty as it was, by casually asking the fearsome Emilio, who took an instant liking to me. The perks were: a pocket full of undeclared Deutschmarks at the end of every night (which came at 9 or 10am) and a pocket full of phone numbers. I threw most of the numbers away because I was terrified of getting AIDs. Still, sometimes, I neglected to crumple and toss. (I wish I still had some of those notes; the pidgin English was often astonishingly lyrical or funny).
I saw her on the dancefloor (as any number of songs would have it) while I was emptying ashtrays and otherwise looking busy. She gave me several long looks I felt compelled (perhaps by chemicals; chemicals that must have a certain color: what are they, the colors?) to respond to. A few days passed and I was in her little room in a shared flat late in the afternoon in a neighborhood not far from my own. We were on her futon/couch and she was telling me about being a Duchess, technically (there is a “von” in her name), being from a noble family that had fallen to the level of the upper-middle class, its ancestral castle crumbling. She told me about her boyfriend “Gunther” and I told her about my girlfriend (soon to be my first wife) and we were kissing while she fumbled with my fly. She had just managed to unpack my painfully-bent thing when the doorbell rang; her room was to the immediate right of the front door to the flat and when the bell rang again we heard someone call “Jezebel?” (not her real name) as clearly as though he was standing behind an arras.
“It’s Gunther! My boyfriend!” she mouthed. He banged the door. Jezebel…!
“Fuck!”
“Don’t worry,” she whispered, “He can’t get in!” Then she lowered her mouth on me, smiling. I removed myself, laminated with Duchess-spit, from her crafty mouth and re-buttoned my fly and rose to a fight-or-flight crouch and said, “Fuck, what if your roommate comes home and lets him in?”
“She won’t. She spends most of the time at her boyfriend’s. Come over here…”
“Fuck no!”
“You’re bigger than he is!”
“Yeah, but I’m the asshole, here,” I hissed. “That makes kicking his ass a little awkward!”
“You’re no fun!”
“You want to fuck while your boyfriend is at the door?” I didn’t quite understand Germans at that point.
“Jezebel!”
The boyfriend finally quit and went back down the stairs and out of the building. I waited a careful interval and fled.
We re-scheduled over the phone and tried again a week later. And exactly the same thing happened. But this time the penny dropped and it hit me that the boyfriend was acting. This was part of their sex life. I pushed her away from my dick again and waited for him to give up and I “fled”, again, but this time without running and with a chuckle. Perverts.
A year later I was in another club (the then-new club-of-the-year, called 90 Grad) with my brand new first wife, a slinky, tiny-titted, 6-foot blond with cruel blue eyes and an attitude that went right off the meter. Snubbing people was her profession; how we ended up together I still can’t figure (though it took almost fifteen years to get the official divorce). We were traversing the dancefloor when I saw Jezebel and her boyfriend, “Gunther”, and I had to laugh: Gunther was about a foot shorter than me and ten years older and he looked like Otto Dix. We all four chatted on the sidelines; Jezebel’s boyfriend’s eyes were shining with an avaricious light. He was praying for a foursome. It took my wife three minutes to snub all three of us and storm off to the bar and when Jezebel’s boyfriend excused himself to snort something in the unisex toilet Jezebel and I made a plan to fuck (just the two of us) in a borrowed flat in Kreuzberg.
I have a pile of photographs of the women I have known in my nakedness and each photo is like a marker in time: what I was doing, where I was living, the music I listened to and what I wished I was doing instead. The pile is also a trophy collection; these are like hi-tech locks of hair… but for the un-romantics (and the Evil) among us, such photos are closer to being scalps. More on that later.
2.
One of my exes (one of the really, really cool ones) is in the fashion industry and she asked me to make a video to use on a runway, recently. The concept of the video was to be “Color” and I did a montage of primary colors blending into secondary colors and from there into tertiary colors, and so on, and I found that slow dissolves, synchronized with the music, looked better than hard cuts: they looked like chemicals in a biological process… the process of mutation or decay. My concept for the music was to use a Mashup from YouTube so the track would be familiar enough to the fashion show’s audience… but fresh enough to feel like a modicum of hip. The track was an okay Mashup of (the hideous) Lady Gaga plus the Eurythmics’ hit “Sex Crime”. Too weird/cool/edgy and there’s no commercial use for it, you see.
While I was editing the color montage and listening to Annie Lennox repeat the phrase “sex crime” I suddenly thought of that serial killer who had been on the 60′s-70′s gameshow The Dating Game… and won. The serial killer with the face of Death-as-a-woodland-creature… a creepy fox, say. A creepy South American fox. Thirty-plus years after winning The Dating Game, he was convicted of killing x-number of women. He lured these poor women to their terrible deaths by claiming to be a fashion photographer. Authorities found a storage locker of the creepy fox’s possessions and in this locker they found a pile of trophy photos of women; they have no idea whether the creepy fox killed these women or just snapped them. The photos were released earlier this year in hopes that anyone with knowledge about any of these pretty girls pictured might come forward.
[music by Saint Nick]
on the other hand..
Generation seems like an innocent enough word. “they belong to a new generation of consumers” until it becomes clear that the human species is merely generating itself through waves of interchangeable generations. That the human species is a techno.meat plague on the planet.
Since the ‘great’ depopulating wars of last century, we have taken to naming the generations, as if to convince ourselves that they are anything more than an undifferentiated and virulent genetic spew, frothing flesh-animate fomenters of spurious species flowing out of the hospitals, out of the subways out of the offices and universities voracious, surging, so much warm batteries and gristle.
Doped and poisoned on a municipal, and national, scale, and brained by television control, they roister back into their mass-compartments and generate yet other yeasty delusions. Slopping out of hospitals around the world like sausage links, once ambulatory, cloaked in the cheapest slave labour frippery herding each other into concentration day camp for demoralizing socialization experiments until they emerge pestilential heros of naive belligerence, wreaking traumatic legacies of pococurante, anti-depressed generations sucking at the the syringe tip of cyborg annihilation.
instead of sudoku, try figuring out some social problems.
Very Celine/Baudelaire, Comrade Pastor Prime… let’s start loading our gym socks with goatshit and hit the road at midnight on Segways, whacking the unsuspecting and over-gelled. “First they came for the over-gelled and I did nothing, because I wasn’t over-gelled”… that sort of thing. We’ll work our way through the orders. When our arms get tired we’ll use disciples!
Zizek’s latest:
that was hilarious, if only because I am so furious at the anti-intellectual onslaught we are subjected to day in and out through every possible mode of ingress. case in point this dismally half thought-out slap of post-racial hipster “hey, my life is just a fresh-faced muddle but at least I’m not a downer lol” drear corporate bonding. It doesn’t even matter that the end contradicts the beginning lol XPPPPPralph
[ed.'s note: I love Corporate Racial Fantasies: so touchingly naive!]
SLIGHTLY BEYOND WOW
Jimmy Chen, over at HTML Giant, has just written the best paragraph-long memoir of the decade:
THE CHILDREN’S MINUTE
[80% of Images on The Endless Thread come to us via THIS PLACE]
aha a moral to be learned by all, night detector on every school bus!
on the other hand!
This poem is about something I really saw on tv!
let me film you nude
in the outside
in the sunlight
where we dump our trash
on a swath of land
drop your clothes on the bristle
don’t look at me too much
with the fresh air
around your haunches
as you’re pulling off your socks
let me film you
from a distance
against an impenetrable background of brush!
[Fill us in on what you saw and how you saw it, Comrade Pastor!]
It was on TV I tell you, where I go only for scientific reasons as it offers unceasing documentary evidence of social power being exerted.And I am researching the quantum theory of social bonds.
I saw it! I tell you. It was utterly banal, one of those titillation chatline ads they play late at night, and I read all that poem into it. There was a girl taking her clothes off in the woods, or not in the woods, but rather on some rather scraggly patch of a clearing which could have been simply the shoulder of a highway, the only important feature for the person filming apparently was that the space behind her was something like woods.
. She looked pretty amateur since she was looking at the camera a lot and saying something inaudible since the only soundtrack was a kind of music I can only call dirgent. I think it was composed by that nambient-blechno project Boringer. “dirgent dirgent dirgent a dirgency! so dirgeeent!”
Well I recorded the clip in order to analyse it frame by frame and that’s when, dear Tetmaster Stave N., the po-aim began to coalesce. Enough biography, almost. I imagined the circumstance. The position of the camera, the lens, the woe-begotten lens-crafters who polish themselves into interchangeability. The hard glass of the lens, Ibn al Haytham! And so on, Paradise Lost x 101000000.
RACE IN DELILLO: A SERIAL MEDITATION: PART ONE
1.
Don DeLillo is branded (and is a Brand) as the Elder Statesman of America’s paranoiacs… despite an obvious tonal aversion to atrocity. This is ridiculous.
If Norman Mailer hailed the work of Paul Bowles as the herald of the death of the Square, the Square is here to inform Mailer (the way God informed Nietzsche) that its death was greatly exaggerated… and, also, that that Don DeLillo guy is a way-out proposition, man. Don DeLillo is no Paul Bowles, as far as that goes: he’s as safe as warm milk before bed in the 1950s. He’s no Square-killer. He’s a stylist of immense talent with the disposition of a supremely-genial dinner date. You can’t really have a Literary King of the Paranoiacs with a tonal aversion to atrocity; not in a 21st Century America in which 79% of all registered Conspiranoiacs believe that a former Vice President of the United States would unwind, on the weekends, by hunting Playboy Bunnies with a sniper-scoped rifle.
That DeLillo is one of the genuinely towering post War stylists of Am Lit is a cosmic joke of real nuance: he sheds such dazzling spectra on every page, in range from the unseen to the super-seen, in the service of doing his best not to say too much… not to go too far… not to cross any lines that would scare the horses. The sheep sometimes tremble, as in George Will’s famously clenched-buttock of a broadside accusing DeLillo’s even-tempered Libra of being an act of “bad citizenship”. But the horses yawn. 55% of registered Conspiranoiacs believe that Catherine the Great fucked horses, after all.
Not even horses fuck horses in DeLillo (though they do in corny old, onomatopoeic Tom Wolfe: the only truly wondrous set piece in A Man in Full featured a “winking” equine cunt that haunts me to this day).
DeLillo is a gentleman of the knowing-chuckle-on-the-stoop school. He allegorizes his mistrust of politicians in a wry hand-in-the-cookie jar, Norman-Rockwellian fashion. Or, say: imagine “Guernica” as painted by Rockwell and Rockwell’s “Little League” as painted by Picasso… imagine a diptych of these: that’s DeLillo’s tone as a Literary Philosopher (even if his personal tastes run to Coltrane and Pollock). This would account for the mainstream appeal of his bomb-throwing syntax.
He was the Edgar Cayce of the World Trade Center until it actually fell down. A lyrical game of feint and implication is great until history calls your bluff and makes an extremely explicit statement in the form of rubble and corpses and lava: then what? Falling Man was DeLillo coming out with his hands up. Falling Man was a white flag. The DeLillo of Mao ll and Underworld was like the greatest poet of 19th Century France waging an irresistible campaign to romance a late-20th Century starlet bursting with silicon tits and a wad of Bazooka bubblegum in her mouth…. until he got her in bed. At some point the poetry had to stop. He’d rather it hadn’t. He preferred risque innuendo.
Every time I read Underworld, it astonishes me for two reasons: A) as 827 pages of unmatched (and consistent) epic poetry and B) a mainstreamy, Copelandesque hymn to “America” I don’t detest. DeLillo can’t even muster a tenth of Henry Miller’s cynical horror about the obvious gap between the golden myths America tells itself, at bedtime, before her prayers, every night, and her scream-soaked mornings… not one-thousandth of Burroughs’ or the socio-politically schizoid Gore Vidal’s. There are no fire-dancing niggers or eviscerated hookers in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre, despite the fact that his Libra is a masterpiece of lyric clairvoyance on the subject of the forces that gathered to speed the famous projectiles which forced the man-on-the-half-dollar’s head open.
Underworld opens with the ’57 World Series, for chrissakes. I hate fucking baseball.
[map via Comrade Barry]
WIKIRAPES
no wonder he’s unscrupulously leaking all that sensitive information we all wish we didn’t have to know about, he’s a rapist!
[ed.'s note: one of those wily FEY RAPERS you never suspect until they release your documents]
Ye Gods! You’re charging DeLillo with the crime of normative paranoia!
(more anon tomorrow, time permitting, by way of riposte)
[ed.'s note: It's really quite frightening when you can't, initially, match the friend to the pseudonym...]
My Dear Comrade Mons: bearing in mind, of course, that Donny D. is one of the writers I’d rather read than most… yeah. Normative Paranoia… that’s what I’d call it, too!
Oh, and this is now, officially, the TET House Band:
steven do you know the comic art of Al Columbia?
sometimes this thread reminds me of one of his ( extremely rare ) outings.
A compliment btw should you have descended into De Lillo’s normative paranoia mode.
Never heard of Al, erm, ET… will Google…!
Ah yes. Know the work but not the name… familiar stuff. Great, too.
“DO YOU FEEL A BIT EMBARRASSED ABOUT THIS?”
WELCOME TO THE DAWN of the 19th CENTURY, CELEBRITARDS!
jesusfuckingchrist my contempt may never peak
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1305055/Beckham-De-Niro-Kate-Middleton–theyre-joining–Power-bandwagon.html
from the site of these clever little cynical little money-making fucks:
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/artifacts/caricatures/en4-quacks.cfm
We’ve certainly come a long way in two hundred years. Those ignorant 19th-century fucks even believed in Angels, the Devil and Astrology! Ha.
I LIKE PAINTINGS AND PEOPLE WHO CAN PAINT
To stay with your Burroughs/DeLillo fight-card for the moment, I’m more inclined to call a split decision. Both writers give you the low-down on American Empire in entirely different ways. Burroughs shows you its game-face with the mask ripped off, takes you on a tour of its neuro-pathology and summons up its fever dreams, whilst DeLillo concentrates more – I’m thinking particularly of his latest book – on recording the patient’s susurrations and making a shadow-play of its phantom-limbs.
The bottom line is that each of these methods functions to an advanced degree.
Also worth noting: there’s a real danger in writing about the world’s horrors, in flagrante, without being actually privy to them. I’m not saying it can’t be done, only I wager it requires tremendous care (without this there’s always an air of cynical deployment or absolute puerility to the project (funnily enough, I’m reminded here of your utter distaste for the film Baise-Moi, and the reasoning behind it)). The question persists: who and what are you catering for, principally, in exhibiting these things?
Interesting to consider whether or not those writers who engaged directly with modern horrors managed this through their induction into the same realm (I’m thinking here of Burroughs and the bullet through his wife’s bonce, or Celine having his spirit exposed to – and saturated in – two world wars)?
One problem with a phantasmagoric approach to literature is that those writers who employ it tend to stake their territory out. Their methods hardly bear repeating as they prove greatly inimical (in the process of trail-blazing the buggers tend to leave a lot of scorched earth behind).
Comrade Mons, Mon Ami!
My initial comment on all that (which is just the prologue on a piece I want to do on the articulation and function of Race in Don’s Oeuvre) is less about DeLillo’s take on American Realities and more about his label as the King of the Conspiranoiacs. I just think that that title has to go, for organic reasons, to a more marginalized writer. Burroughs would be as close to “mainstream” (ie, feted by mainstream media) as one could get and still have a fair claim on the crown.
With neat economy of cause-and-effect and clear political logic, The Masters who own Media… let’s call them Murdochs… don’t make it a habit of letting writers with genuinely damaging things to say about them (The Murdochs) score Blockbusters. Murdochs own those publishing houses and they own the newspapers and TV/Radio stations which advertise books and movies and if you write something that really pisses them off, your book won’t be a Blockbuster. Underworld was a Blockbuster. One of the most beautiful Blockbusters of the era (if not the century, after the anti-Blockbuster of Ulysses).
A counter-example would be the genuinely-politically-brave Checkpoint, by Nicholson Baker… even the ostensibly-Liberalish media shills (erm, I mean outlets) lambasted this book as the worst kind of Sick Puppy Shit. Well, it’s no such thing. It’s not a masterpiece, but it deserved to be read. The Murdochs decided otherwise, therefore it wasn’t read.
Again: George Will famously bashed DeLillo’s Libra, but there was nothing in it so edgy that it might piss a Murdoch off because A) those events happened almost exactly 50 years ago… (whereas Checkpoint was set in a NOW so dangerous that people were going to prison for telling anti-Bush jokes in queues at the Post Office) and B) DeLillo himself has gone on record as not believing in the multiple-shooter-theory. Well, a para-journalist named Mae Brussell has written over the same territory that Libra covered (not aesthetically, of course) and she’s so marginalized that her novel’s-worth of text may as well be Fiction and she, more justly, would be a Literary King of the Conspiranoiacs. Notice the indefinite article; there are many Literary Kings of the Conspiranoiacs, across many eras and national borders. Don DeLillo just isn’t one of them, imo.
I think DeLillo is as invested in Politics and Para-Politics (as a Writer) as Nabokov was invested in Pre-Pubescent Girls. Ie: for aesthetic reasons, both subjects provide excellent contrast and gravitas against which strikingly-beautiful sentences can work without becoming cloying (you’ll notice that when Nabokov applied his vividly-lyrical brush to vividly-lyrical subjects, as in ADA, the effect was too, too, too… at least it was for me. Like bathing in corn syrup while eating a butter pie in a golden bathtub).
DeLillo neutralizes any sense of Evil in his work (and without a sense of Evil, how can one address/dramatize/measure institutions involved in genocide, mind-control, war-for-profit, political assassination, Eco-rape and slavery?) by designing a Universe in which the moral and psychological propensities are shared, with almost scientific equality, by every character. The creatures in Don’s world may want different things (on the surface), but they all, every one, share one overriding attribute that is the defining sense of the DeLillo experience: Inconclusiveness. The characters are all, to some extent, Lost and/or Suspended and/or Confused.
A genuine King of the Paranoiacs wouldn’t be so charitable/naive. A genuine King of the Paranoiacs… WSB, say… knows/writes that our Experience is a Crafted one. It’s crafted by Control. WSB may never have found out (imaginationally or otherwise) who Control is, but he damn sure knew there is one. Every word of WSB is haunted by Control… on the page and off.
An awareness of Control is certainly not necessary in DeLillo… I love Libra/Mao ll/Underworld/Cosmopolis as the Powerful Artworks they are. It’s only DeLillo’s chronic mislabeling that I snark at.
Steven don’t forget Jonathan Franzen!
For some reason I’ve never read any DeLillo. I know this isn’t a book group but is there a good starting point novel?
Ha ha… yeah. Poor thick Johnny Jones, eh…? Reduced to posting “and another things!” on his own Blogicle… (coincidentally, I last got into it with old JJ over WSB)… I mean, Christ, even ATF is making sense compared to JJ on that thread… [ed.'s note: erm, early in the thread she was...]
Here’s my suggestion for the best way into DeLillo (though perhaps Comrade Mons can add to this): Libra, then Mao ll, then Underworld. Avoid Ratner’s Star. Save Cosmopolis until you absolutely must have more DeLillo. White Noise after that (for historical purposes). I haven’t read the others often enough to advise.
I’m no expert meself when it comes to DeLillo, although I did happen to re-read his first novel the other month and thought it stood up well to further scrutiny. Not suggesting you go the chronological route, Comrade Edward, but I suspect that if you get along with ‘Americana’, you’ll find much to enjoy – and even more so – in DeLillo’s writing elsewhere.
Apart from that, I’d also second Steven’s vetoing of ‘Ratner’s Star’ (I put this in a rucksack once, as part of my travelling bookshelf, and when I finally came to open it, the disappointment was swift and irrevocable) and include ‘The Names’ in this author’s run of good form.
His latest, Point Omega, is damn good too.
BEST ANTI-Žižek ZINGER, WORTHY OF Žižek, OF THE WEEK
In an email to Comrade JR I wrote:
A) Example of Late-Capitalist Cruelty
B) Funny
C) What Exotic Military Pathogens Are They Experimenting On The Third World With?
IN HONOR of NEW-FORM COMEDIC TECHNO-SITUATIONIST GLAM MASTERY WEEK at TET
It Makes Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes Seem so Lame…
THIS
vs
DEPT of FILTHY NEOCON LITCRITTER LIES
Like all his fellow Neocons, Adam Kirsch scores his points by lying; the techniques he prefers are creepy sleight-of-hand, or the 20th-Century propagandist’s sadistic favorite, which is to assert, with a wink, that Blue is Red or a Cow is a Butterfly or that a Fundamentalist Guerrilla and a Secular Dictatorship are chummy together (for example). It only works if you aren’t paying attention… or if you really want to believe.
In his eulogy to Frank Kermode, the mendacious Adam quotes a review Kermode wrote about a collection of essays by Martin Amis. Kirsch would have the reader believe that Kermode’s introduction to his review of “The War Against Cliché” is a quietly devastating put-down:
(http://www.slate.com/id/2265191/)
From the review, by Kermode, Kirsch quotes:
or this:
Seems, strangely, like very strong praise, doesn’t it? Well I’m afraid you’ll have to keep reading it, again and again, until it doesn’t.
Neil Bush 2012.
[ed.'s note: Comrade EC references us here: http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2010/08/dept-of-filthy-neocon-litcritter-lies.html ]
‘kinnell it’s been a slow week at the office but that last one woke me up. If that’s quiet devastation may I be quietly devasted for the rest of my life.
So apparently the qualities most needed in a critic are a.) the inability to read properly b.) the inability to understand that which you’ve just read and c.) the ability to have already made your mind up about something you haven’t read and are yet to pass judgement on.
Incidentally is Franzen actually any good? I asked my other half who read The Corrections and she ummed and ahhed before saying ” ….well written…..about a dysfunctional family….I gave it away didn’t I?” with no conviction to any of those statements. I looked into her eyes to see if she was adopting the Adam Kirsch method of criticism but her comments were sincere . So I’m none the wiser.
Fucking amazing, eh? The whole shitty psycho-political batch are shameless professional liars (except Hitch, who is merely selectively insane).
Re: Franzen: I once found myself over the North Atlantic with a choice between reading The Corrections or watching Death Nail 2 (or whatever). Starts off okay… loses the ability to persuade, convince or overwhelm a mortal terror of the stratosphere about two-thirds through. No desire to re-read. Perfectly-aimed at Americans who think they’re ten years too young/hip to read Garrison Keillor.
Just be glad you weren’t stuck on a plane with “Stepmom” starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon. Back in the days when airlines didn’t offer you a menu of films on a small-screen in front of your seat so you had to tough these films out.
This horror was on a big screen so you couldn’t avoid the makers gratuitously killing Sarandon off by giving her cancer solely in the hope that it might make you cry and understand the meaning of family.
My other half ( who’s got got quite a few walk on roles in my comments this evening ) suffers terrible airsickness and “Stepmom” only made it worse. Actually she thought she’d cured the airsickness before the film started and it was revulsion over the script that caused the further bout of nausea.
PS I am not being “Adam Kirsch” over this film. It really is in a league of its own.
[ed.'s note: A) Re: Julia Roberts: There's a reason I always pack a parachute in my carry-on luggage, Comrade ET
B) I was once on a trans-Atlantic flight (I think I've racked-up 15 of those thus far) on which the in-flight movie featured a scene where a cargo plane was... sort of... crashing. I felt it was fairly fucking insensitive to show us that (but that wasn't as scary as the commuter flight I took from San Diego to LA once... ten minutes into the flight I noticed what looked like a steady stream of dust blowing towards me; when some of it landed on my sleeve I saw it was... wait for it... snow flakes. The stream of which appeared to be flowing playfully from the seam between the paneled wall of the fuselage and the ceiling...) ]
I hope someone came along with a staple-gun to fix the problem.
btw I’m not talking about Julia Roberts.
Although………….
[ed.'s note: although...]
WEAK CHUCKLE OF THE WEEK
and
which is all a response to THIS
Christ, first I pissed off a whole nest of musty-fux like Nigel “Beagle” Beale, by casting aspersions on Cap’n Woody, and now I have titty-twisted a horde of pimply cunts, fresh out of High School or college (and still dripping), by not being life-changed by the E-Z Literary stylings of ©Tao Lin™! Thankgod ©Tao Lin™‘s oeuvre wasn’t written by an overweight, middle-aged bisexual woman named Rubena Cockschwitz … for, then, overweight, middle-aged bisexual women would be pissed at me, too. Of course, if ©Tao Lin™ weren’t a young-ish, brand-savvy, Asian-American lad, would we even be discussing his oeuvre…?
Upshot: Writing is hard, hype is easy.
(now have a look at the video: there are tiny bubbles of actual writing sprinkled in the sophomoric beer of ©Tao Lin™‘s poems, but his easily-pleased enablers will never allow him to fucking notice)
Jesus, that Estaban Oggiesteen seems like a right cunt, I mean…hey…wait a minute…where am I?
Oh.
Sorry. Wrong blog.
Oi! You’re not under 30, are ye…?
[ed.'s note: Mish, as we all know, is closer to 35 but he's untrustworthily-young at heart. I've just about completed this evening's three hours of work and must now crawl to bed...]
Hey, Steve-a-roonie…hope all’s well with you and yours? Jesus, that Jonathon Jones is a piece of work, isn’t he?
I hear the measured tread of The Marching Morons and leading them, a tousled, corpulent art-drooler…can it be? why, yes it can…Jones The All-Around Pedestrian…
JJ is a poignant example of someone who hasn’t quite found his true calling yet, when it’s clear that his true calling will involve wearing a hairnet and counting olives (and spitting out the odd pit with a wink).
UPDATE: Jonathan Jones’ latest (linked above) goes directly into the COULDN’T MAKE IT UP file:
This is the kind of stupidity that makes you want to slap women who get pregnant after the age of 45.
PS If Johnny Depp wasn’t born to play Henry Morton Stanley in a musical biopic by Tim Burton called “Livingston!”, who was…?
In line with my cherished theory that the Internet means that for every stupid article by a paid above-the-liner at the GUblogs, there are many experts of superior knowledge and sanity, out there, ready to contribute for free:
Jones is, in the most precise meaning of the word, a simpleton: everything is simple for him. X is ‘good’ because Jones likes it. No alternative position could possibly be forwarded in good faith.
Y is ‘interesting’ because Jones is interested in Y. No other position is tenable because Jones is convinced that he represents the ‘best and brightest’. God help us all if that were true.
Jones is just another pathetic component in the hype/money/art nexus. He’s too stupid to grasp that he and the platitudious tripe that he passes for ‘criticism’ are merely ‘products’, value-guaged by how well it does the job it’s designed for, ie: sell more product.
Reading Jones on ‘art’ (something I stopped doing when I realised that it was cutting into my staring-into-space time) after reading someone like Walter Benjamin–or Gombrich or Hughes or Sewell or Fry or Morris–is to have your nose rubbed in the fact of the triumph of mediocrity.
But it’s sorry confirmation (not that any was needed) of the degraded state of the Grauniad’s editorial staff. No half-competent literary editor would have passed that exercise in teenage hype, heavy breathing and wishful thinking as a serious article.
It wouldn’t have passed muster as a below-the-line post, for fuck’s sake.
I wish I could say, “We’ll always have Paris…” but the Joneses and the flabby corporate art-fuckers rule there too.
JJ is a prancingly-bloated testament to the unimportance of his “job”. If it were important (even sinisterly so), he wouldn’t have it.
I’d much rather talk about this excerpt, of yours, from your site (which must be the only long-running, consistently-active, Creative Commune for well-educated, reliably-witty adults on the Web… do you pay your fucking commenters a salary?):
“About 20-odd years ago, I was living with a girl from Ennis (County Clare). Although she was a relatively recent arrival, large numbers of her relatives had settled in London and done very well for themselves.
“They’d made a great deal of money and spent accordingly on large houses in London’s leafier outer suburbs. Going to visit them was torture but I was always dragged along. “That’s love, darlin’: suffering together”, she’d tell me.
“It wasn’t that her relatives were unpleasant or anything–far from it. But every one of them, in addition to being house-proud to a point that verged on insanity, had insisted on decorating their houses in white.”
What wouldn’t I give to read Tales of Mish from the 1980s or 1970s? Tales featuring Antonioni flicks and King Crimson concerts and country houses in Connecticut featuring Al Green blowing out the woofers on the quadraphonic sound system while Jessica/Mandy/Dawn’s parents holiday, unaware, in Gstaad (wtf is the point of a Spellcheck that doesn’t recognize “Gstaad”, btw?)…
One never knows when furor scribendi might strike and then:
I Will Tell All!!! Three-In-A-Bed Romps!!! My ____ Hell!!! (Drugs? Sex? Soft Furnishings?) Saved By The Love Of A Good Women!!! My Work For Charidy!!!
I’ve been meaning to ask you: is there a reason you haven’ t broken this site up into pages?
It wouldn’t change anything (all the links to comments and posts would remain the same) but it would just load so much faster.
This page takes between 10 to 15 seconds to load. That’s dead in dog years and an eternity in the Attention Deficit World of the interwebz.
Obviously, the ADD-afflicted aren’t your audience in the first place but it is annoying.
When my blog started to do it (and for the same reason: everything on one page), I just broke it up into, I dunno, 15-20 posts per page.
Nobody noticed because nothing had really changed, except that instead of scrolling down to find an old post, you now scroll down a bit and after 15-20 older posts, you reach a link to ‘older pages’.
Of course, maybe this is a cunning plan on your part to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I hope you’ll consider translating a poem for us…or maybe it’s time to write the new Struwwelpeter.
Mind you, it’s Berlin: it’s probably not only been done but done in every conceivable sexual, racial and political variation.
Or perhaps it was just too obvious and it merely awaits some wide-awake lad to kick it into play?
A) Don’t tease us, please us, fellow! Look: I’m going through my Shoe Box Vault of Bygone Evil Days some late nights and posting actual snaps of genuine chicks as my impish tribute and/or revenge. The least you can do is tell us about the third or fourth time you sat through a midnight show of Harold and Maude in exchange for a sin of omission…
B) Yeah, I thought about the “page” thing but I’ve gone and called it THE ENDLESS THREAD, now, innit? Not, “The Easily Navigated Pages“. And it does cut down quite a bit on duhmbshits writing LOL. No brain no pain, as I say…? As if that means anything. Oh, farck… I’ll THINK about it…
C) Translate a pome? From German to English or English to German or from Rather Poor Fucking English to Okay That’s Better It’s Slightly More Like An Actual Pome Now English…? Or ooday ooyay eanmay in Igpay Atinlay?
D) Re: Struwwelpeter: too close, Sah. I’d need some distance. There’re Germans all over the place out here…
Here I am in ’85, a singer in a band:
[ed.'s note: the Augustine avatar is my Beloved at the age of 5, dressed as an Elizabethan magician; it started as a joke in 2004 or so and ended up sticking when more than one commentator remarked upon its similarity to "V"]
Is it true that blondes have more fun?
I take your point about this being The Endless Thread and anyway, patience is a virtue to be cultivated, (along with silence, cunning and exile, according to Joyce) not to be dispensed with.
Still, I find myself rolling my eyes when a page doesn’t load instantly.
It’s not about instant gratification (I long ago learned the heightening and focusing power of anticipation) but more like exasperation with hi-tech falling down on the job.
Fuck it, in 50 years, we’ll be back to stuffing messages into bottles and hoping the recipient is one of the 1 in a million who can actually read.
I was hoping you might be persuaded to do us a German to English, perhaps a modern, untranslated Kraut deserving of a wider (well, marginally wider) audience.#
I’ve been thinking about re-starting my autobiography as a few misguided people have been encouraging me to.
I’m in two minds about it. I mean, my life between 16 and 40 is such a sordid litany of criminality, sexual profligacy, pathological recklessness, selfishness, shameful behavior and disasters–and that’s just the stuff I’m comfortable with–that I don’t know if it’s wise to reveal myself unless I’m sure of a funeral in my very near future. I’m thinkin’ on it…
#[ed.'s note: reply is DOWN HERE, Mish!]
WALK THROUGH THE COOLING CITY
Drear Diary
Comrade DJ Sensei JR and I went for a late lunch yesterday while his Hackintosh was exporting a massive video file on his editing system. The video file is a documentary film from one of Germany’s greatest “new wave” Auteurs and Comrade JR will be flying with the subtitled artifact to Brazil to represent this great director at some sort of festival, being the director’s occasional right-hand man. Like all great artists with a public profile, the great director has a little stable of right hand men.
The great director is important because his ideas are still interesting and he never sold out. This important director went through some very lean years, raising two kids on the money he earned by making approximately one anti-mainstream film a year, with a meager fee per film. Making the relatively recent transition from Film Biz to the Art World has saved the great director because of the simple logic that selling a million tickets, at ten units per, to thousandaires, is harder than selling a single ticket each, at a hundred-thousand per, to millionaires.
This Auteur is a bookish, analytical intelligence with real Talent who has been arguing, with his work, for an egalitarianism in the distribution of the judicial protections and material necessities of Life. The Owners said “no” with a snicker, of course, but with their sadistic wit gave us, instead, a world with an egalitarian distribution of “intelligence” and “talent”.
In other words, “anti-elitism” doesn’t mean, now, that poor kids can get topnotch educations or that their parents can go dancing or swimming wherever they please but that talent-free middle-class duhmbshits are flooding the world with bad writing and stupid films and idiot-art after graduating from schools which earn money by spewing Designer Philistines at an ever-accelerating pace. As the pool of Designer Philistines expands, it affords itself the expensive illusion that it’s self-supporting (each Designer Philistine can now count on an audience of a thousand Designer Philistines) but, like any pyramid scheme, it’s only the ones who got in early who will actually make a profit. Picture a capstoned temple of Dark Ages 2.0, decorated in soothing pastels clashing with sporty primary colors and tastelessly dazzling with CGI and you can visualize the pyramid scheme I’m talking about. Though why would you want to? Daddy only pays for it all as a baroque distraction from his Oil Wars anyway. What talent-free hipster duhmbshit is going to seriously protest the Wars when there’s a chance of going Pro with i-phone hermeneutics on YouTube… ?
Comrade DJ Sensei JR and I decided to have the late lunch at a place in Kreuzberg that started out as a concrete municipal facility on a corner of Görlizer Park; at least, that’s how it looks. It’s been a series of cafes and restaurants over the years (I walked in last summer and ordered scrambled eggs after which the Turkish waiter/owner disappeared for about twenty minutes, returned to hover nervously while I ate the iffy eggs and he confided, eventually, that he’d made them himself and for the first time in his life).
Now it’s a “Mexican” restaurant, the riskiest kind of eating experience in Berlin, but we were feeling comedic, for some reason, and tried it. The food was fucking awful, in a charming way, but Comrade JR wasn’t having it. I think he was miffed. I have no problem with talentless cooking if the price isn’t too high and nothing’s actually burnt and the waitress is the right degree of ironical about it. Life is short and, anyway, I care a fuck of a lot less about Food than I care about Art.
The weather has turned from dogmouth hot and humid to a rainy autumnal chill and it’s now finally great for walking again. Berliners pretend to yearn in a wronged way for that sun and heat all winter long but when it finally comes they become too short-tempered and smelly and pack with hellish scowls into the buses and U-Bahns. This place is just about perfect on an overcast day, chilly enough for fashionable boots and jackets and looking and smelling like a B&W masterpiece from the glory days of the Cold War, when Talent was King.
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HI OBVIOUS: THE POLITICAL SUBCONSCIOUS AND ITS ARTFORMS
… PLUS SHE FAILED TO ACHIEVE A VAGINAL ORGASM AND HER SPIRIT GUIDE ASKED FOR A REFUND or TOP-TWO NOTSEE HONEY-TRAPS TO AVOID IN SWEDEN
aka WIKIRAPES
“One-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service”… Oh I’m quite sure that doesn’t mean anything, my Paranoid Comrades.
TRANS RANTS
The Honorable Sir Mish wrote, above:
“I was hoping you might be persuaded to do us a German to English, perhaps a modern, untranslated Kraut deserving of a wider (well, marginally wider) audience.”
(I’m importing Mish’s comment from that attenuating reply-thread to give us some room to work down here).
The thing is, I abhor translations of Poetry. It’s my feeling that whatever it is that doesn’t quite make it, in the transformation of translation, is exactly what made the Pome poetic in the first place. Translated novels are bad enough but some novelists suffer less than others from having their idea-children kidnapped and replaced with impostors (Kundera is one, I think and he tends to work, like Nabokov, very hard with some of the translators on some of the translations.
I once had a discussion with Comrade EC about a Rilke pome, translated by what’s-his-name (the White Goddess guy, I think) and I showed that the English version had changed the sense of the original for-the-sake-of-not-even-entirely-poetic-language (I’ll have to dig through the archives for that one); it was just the translator’s ego taking over.
An acquaintance from HAcademia sent me a request to translate a pome from olde German… I’m not sure why I said “yes” (laugh) but I include, here, the polished version of part one of the pome (I did the rough translation of all three of its parts and polished part one as an indication of what kind of liberties I would make in the name of making it a pome approximating the feel of its original era). I see translating pomes as a game or a way to make new pomes (if the translator is a Poet) but the effort always, in my opinion, kills the original in order to replace it with a living fake or a stuffed keepsake.
Anyway, here’s one of my adventures in translating….
I’m in general agreement here and I’ve always maintained that a poem can’t really be ‘translated’ because poetry is language and language carries a huge amount of freight, of subtleties, of shared knowledge and culture that’s only accessible in that language.
Perhaps it’s the use of the term ‘translated’, with its suggestion of a straight-forward process that merely involves a sort of shift in register that’s the problem? Maybe ‘re-imagined’ would be better? To be approached in the way that jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis approached standards by Gershwin and Lerner and Lowe or the way Matisse and Picasso used African art–as a sort of seed-bank of ideas.
It is, ultimately, as you say, a game. What the hell: I like games…
“To be approached in the way that jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis approached standards by Gershwin and Lerner and Lowe or the way Matisse and Picasso used African art…”
I can live with that; “translation” as arrogantly-respectful theft…
“…arrogantly-respectful theft…”
Yeah, that works. Let’s face it: how much art isn’t, to a greater or lesser degree, an act of arrogant-respectful theft? I know you’re as fond of Steely Dan as I am. I think it’s fair to say that they plundered the musical canon pretty mercilessly, no? I don’t admire them any less for it, nor is my pleasure in the results thereby reduced…
Speaking of which…
GEMS REDUXED: #27: VLADIMIR NABOKOV INVENTS THE SMILEY
The Nabokov “Smiley Emoticon” invention was in response to a question posed to him by Alden Whitman, in an interview that was published in The New York Times:
“How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?”
OKAY, OKAY, FISH IN A BARREL, I KNOW, I KNOW… BUT IT’S JUST SO FUCKING FUN
But seriously, as they say.
I’m here to express my strongly-held opinions about Writing.
I feel that the practice (Writing as an Art) is threatened by all the half-arsed bullshit that passes for “writing”.
I started reading very seriously at a very young age… as a way to transcend the fucking filth, violence and degradation of my surroundings (Chicago ghetto). I learned, at this young age, that Material Things could not only be decoupled from Aesthetic Truths and Human Value but that this decoupling is essential. Surviving America without this decoupling is impossible. What you Buy is what you Are: the only cure for this Ugly Belief (now that Religion is impossible for anyone sane and possessing half a brain) is Art. Art, Books, Aesthetic Pleasure.
Books were my cure; Aesthetic Pleasure is my Angel With A Flaming Sword. I learned that my Life (and worldview) had value, even in the prison of my pathetic fucking poverty and the wretchedness of being at the very bottom of the social order. I don’t need Books to save my life, anymore but I can’t forget the powerful role they played in my survival. I’m fucking possessive and territorial about Lit and watching it go the way of popular music (ie autotuned ear-candy or slacker-narcissism in which the Image is 85% of the Product) bothers me.
I want new writers to come along who are seriously dedicated to the Art of it, who struggle and suffer to improve and inspire me, finally, with the Truth they can deliver with some powerful, hard-earned tools (among them self-critical honesty, even when it’s cloaked in metaphor). I want Readers who can encourage these Writers by challenging them with nuanced perceptions and some fucking standards… by which, I mean, I want some Readers to come along who *need* Writing, with all of their intelligence, as much as I needed it when I was a kid.
It’s okay to be some mediocre, self-obsessed cunt for whom Writing is just another route to Attention or a little money and “fame”; it’s okay to be some Consumerist duhmbshit for whom Reading is just another thing to do, competing, for attention, with dozens of other things to do. It’s even okay to be someone for whom the Writing/Reading thing is a Lifestyle fetish that’s more about Clothes and the i-pod selection and house-proud bookshelves (well, mine are a crowded, ugly, impossible-to-navigate mess).
It’s just that I’m talking about something different here. And pissing a few people off in the process. Just another day in the war against the War Against Talent.
O’Neill is an idiot. I first became aware of this when he replied to a comment of mine on the GU book blogs. I’d recommended a Chet Baker biography called Deep In A Dream. O’Neill responded by raving about how it was his ‘favourite book’, a ‘work of genius’ (it’s not) etc etc.
It soon became obvious that O’Neill is one of those sad, dim-witted hipsters who appear to believe that drug use is the mark of ‘genius’ or ‘authenticity’ or some such bullshit. And that addiction to heroin, the king of drugs in O’Neill’s pathetic pantheon, was the mark of a great artist, an expression of transgressive nay-saying. If only Joyce had had a smack dealer, eh? Who knows what he might have accomplished?
O’Neill is too stupid to grasp that the Charlie Parkers et al created great work despite the junk not because of it. That it’s a measure of the power of art to transcend circumstance that addicted artists do what they do. He also seems unable to take on-board just how many great talents were ruined by drugs. Chet Baker is a case in point.
Baker was a kind of idiot savant: a man with a rare gift that he took for granted and never understood. He was barely articulate and never said an interesting or original thing in his entire life. But he made lovely, lyrical music as effortlessly as a nightingale sings.
Then he discovered heroin. Unlike O’Neill, I actually have all the music and judge Baker as an artist not as a junkie and once the smack took hold, Baker went downhill at an astonishing speed. Between 1965 and his death in 1988, Baker churned out endless albums of wretched, comatose crap, only able to do so because the magic of his name was maintained by junkie-worshiping cretins like O’Neill.
Of course, O’Neill’s ‘junk is king’ shtick sounds an endless succession of bum notes. They’re obvious to me, an ex-needle junkie (10 boring, stupid years). Less so to the young and gullible
There’s nothing as boring as a junk habit nor anyone as boring as a junkie and there’s nothing less conducive to the practice of art. O’Neill’s romantical maunderings sound like the twerpy rubbish spouted by middle-class ‘giro junkies’ (a London term, referring to youths from ‘good’ homes who sampled the ‘demi-monde’ on the dole and spent their unemployment checks on a bit of gear. They affected the junkie ‘look’ and the jargon but they never really ‘committed’ and were held in contempt by real junkies, who sold them gear that had been mercilessly stepped-on.
Of course, none of his would matter if O’Neill could write: but he can’t. He tries to model himself on Burroughs but lacks Wild Bill’s cold, forensic intelligence and feel for language. The Justin Beiber jibe was well-judged; get the little suburban girls, yearning for a bit of ‘darkness’ to wet their knickers over your tales of ahem, ‘depravity’, set yourself up as a counter-culture Orpheus, returned from the shadows…man, the teeny-boppers lap that shit up.
Yeah, the Chet thing was sad… I always marveled at how the audience reaction to “Let’s Get Lost” (the flick) was one of sated veneration when it should have been self-reflection and shame. One look at Chet’s Oklahoma relatives was enough to send me screaming from the theater (laugh) but , beyond that… watching his old ex hangers-on and that fakey, improvised, last-minute crew of “young friends” (wtf was Flea doing in there?) trying to squeeze into the frame with toothless, mummy-faced (Keef-looking) Baker, grabbing some of that vicarious vintage fame, was cringe-inducing. One shot in particular… some busty airhead preening and prancing on the beach… seemed to sum the whole thing up. And I thought this when I saw it the month it came out (’88?). At least Baker seemed suitably bored and exasperated during the filming… an object lesson in what an old junkie will do for cash.
Jazzy Anecdote:
My father was a Jazz DJ on an LA radio station in the early ’60s (his handle was “The Jazz Prophet”, wonderfully enough)… which was sort of what landed us in total poverty. He was trying to make it as a promoter on the side. He put on an Aretha Franklin concert in a mid-sized venue and the concert sold out, so, encouraged, he mortgaged the house (and the houses of a couple of partners) to do the same thing again (maybe even in a massive venue, I seem to recall; no way of checking on that, now, as both parents are planted). My mother, brother and I were far away, on vacation, in Chicago, visiting grandma’s house (I was three) at the time.
The second concert was a flop, father lost his shirt and the shirts off the backs of his partners and drove from LA to Chicago at a very high speed, with hellhounds on his trail (he used an artistic pseudonym for years after that, as a Painter, and now I realize why) . He’d been raised as a rich kid… his father a near-millionaire undertaker in Philadelphia… but I suddenly found myself living in the ghetto. I associated the terrible new circumstances with my father’s record collection (he had enough LPs to fill an apartment, and they did: they filled his bachelor pad after my parents separated and divorced). I spent my teens and twenties having a pretty dim view of Jazz.
It didn’t help that my father (while also being a neo-Fauvist Painter) began promoting a radically-politicized avant-Jazz ensemble called Phil Koran and the Pharaohs (see end of comment) after his move into a fine apartment in the middle-class Hyde Park area; my mother (she of legendary, self-destructive pride) had refused any alimony. So there’s my dad, happily fucking a swath across the avant-Black-nationalist Art scene… while mother, baby brother and I were the poorest family in our ghetto (as she also refused any kind of Welfare money). We looked decidedly rural among urban-sophisticate neighbors, the children of whom often dressed very well while I was dressed like a little sharecropper. On top of that we were all race-mongrels, too, but that’s another story…
Years later, I’m a 35-year-old man, visiting The States with a young German girlfriend who could have been the mistress of a Bond villain; she was 6’3″ in her stocking feet (about 2 inches taller than I am and she is, btw, I shit you not, the daughter of a former SS Officer, who was 65 when she was born)… Vegasly busty/leggy… I was actually embarrassed to be seen with her. Strolling around with the poor girl was like being wheeled around naked in public on a brass bed because it was all too crudely obvious exactly what we saw in each other. I was walking down the street with her towards a park near an Art Museum, trying to feel unselfconscious (and praying for nightfall) when a wiry old guy fell into a jazzy shuffle behind us, crooning, “A pretty girl is like a melody…”. I had to laugh; we stopped and chatted and ended up hanging out with him.
Turned out he was a museum-quality specimen of jazzer… trumpet and piano… he showed us some of his songs (one was called “Minor Changes”…. I’m willing to bet he wasn’t the first to use that title) and told us some bullshitty tales of jazzy derring-do and near-misses with lady Fame and so forth. Charlie Parker’s cousin was his niece’s best friend’s step-father etc.
Then he revealed the magical secret that he, erm, belonged to a Masonic Lodge, opening his closet with a flourish and revealing several fezzes, a cape and a sword festooned with tassels.
My girlfriend reached, innocently, for the sword and he couldn’t have been more aghast if she’d lobbed a sopping tampon at him.
He treated us to a passionate lecture about the years of loyalty and obedience and studying the recondite mysteries of the Orient, and so on, necessary before you achieved the sort of status that meant you could touch such a Holy fucking relic, jack.
Here he was, some lonely old fucker living in a cramped little flat with a one-eyed cat and reduced to seducing strangers with his needy, wacky, last-ditch charm and, miraculously, once every couple of years or so, he got to show bemused strangers a stack of old sheet music with “Minor Changes” on the top… and here he’s being precious about a tin fucking sword in a velvet scabbard behind a stack of People magazines! We couldn’t stop our chuckles of disgust after we got the fuck out of there and into sunlight.
But it was a few weeks after that absurd experience that I realized I was listening seriously to Jazz records again. The old guy’s fucked-up circumstances weren’t a tragic irony…. they were the point.
.
[pictured are 1. the author's dad and his dad's mother 2. author's dad 3. author's mother, R]
Erratum: It’s “Phil Cohran”, not “Koran”
That’s the thing with junk: it becomes your magnetic North, the direction you always point in.. I must have about 70-80 Baker albums (thank you, bit-torrent) and 40 to 50% of them are pure dross, stuff Chet cut because someone waved some cash under his runny, junkie’s nose.
The rest of the post ’65 stuff has its moments, when the old unforced natural lyrical gift shakes itself loose of junk’s stranglehold, but they just make you appreciate the magnitude of Baker’s loss and degradation.
That film was positively fucking ghoulish. The mummified Baker, mumbling inanities through his collapsed mouth as a bunch of vapid trendies danced attendance on him as though he were some kind of hipster oracle–it all served as a terrible warning from history for anyone tempted to take the witless O’Neill seriously…
[ed.'s note: it seems we saw the same film; and here I was, all these years, feeling the oddball in my opinion of it...]
Sorry, I cross-posted there. Great story…Minor Changes, indeed…
[ed.'s note: I've illustrated your comment nicely, Sah... ]
FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS…
When the film of Trainspotting came out I remember the critics saying it didn’t glamourise heroin use and showed it like it really was. The hell it did. I find myself thinking that almost anything can glamourise heroin addiction. The pallid look and lifestyle of the Velvet Underground is not what I’d call especially glamorous but was obviously exotic enough to encourage people to copy the moves.
I hated the film ( more like an 80′s advert for a bank ) and the absurd justifications given as to its “responsible” stance. The fact that Ewan MacGregor could progress from playing a junkie to playing Obi Wan Kenobi gives an indication as to how cutting edge Trainspotting really was.
Comrade ET!
I’m not for or against heroin, coke, crack, skunk, skank, E, chicken-7 or skull-balls (I made the last two up) but, as Mish puts it, essentially, unless there’s something to go with the drug activity (like Talent or a young Marianne Faithful), who the fuck cares? It’s the lazy, and, ultimately *corny* belief that drug tales are interesting or edgy, in and of themselves, that I sneer at when it comes to Tony O (and, btw: my, no one could accuse Tone of being homophobic, at least, eh… ? But you’re not going to be singing “back up” with the Marc Almonds of this world if you’ve got a total aversion to the smell of another dude’s insides, I guess…)
I’ve never been drunk, never smoked anything, never snorted coke and needles were right out of the question, dude… but I did LSD for a good chunk of a year, way back when (’78-’79?), and the altered experiences were moderately enlightening.
I always liked the story about Thelonious Monk who had been given some STP, allegedly very powerful LSD and spent a few days days tripping out on it then went back to the supplier and asked if he had anything stronger.
LSD never agreed with me – nice effects but too much like having a full-time psychedelic job. I took it when I had the only full-time non-artistic job I ever had so the 4 hours hanging around/ coming down got boring. Thank God chicken-7 hadn’t hit the UK in the early 70′s.
[ed.'s note: the Chicken-7 epidemic hit Croydon and West Wickham around the time that "Aqualung" was climbing the charts and subsided before "Thick As A Brick" came out... or perhaps it was the other way around]
[re: Monk: his middle name was "Sphere", innit? No possible option of fucking around in that case]
The last time I “tripped” I did it in a Funeral Home: not advisable. I was alone on the third level of the complex (family business; great aunt and uncle, asleep in the building next door)… it was around two in the morning when the Zombie paranoia hit. On top of it there was a dog on the premises… a Doberman named Hans… who I started feeding some frozen cheese cake while the good stuff was still on its aluminum tray (result: bloody gums, bloody fangs, excited animal). I was back (in Philly; like a Dickens waif, farmed out to rich relatives) from college and only there for a couple of days at that point. One of my duties the following morning was to go fetch a Sunday paper from the corner shop I hadn’t been in since High School. The same old feller… a vet of the Great War… had always been its proprietor. But what I had somehow failed to notice for three years before that was the relative lack of fingers on his right hand (war wound, I’ll assume).
So I go down for the paper early that morning… still “tripping” but on the way off of it… greet the wizened gent, purchase the paper, make near-coherent small talk, shake……… his………………… hand………………
I just fucking flat out stared with bulging eyes of terror and snatched my own perfectly good hand out of what I must have have thought, at the time, were the clutches of some sort of Extraterrestrial Death Trap. About which, I promise, I am still, thirty years later, extremely embarrassed.
It doesn’t explain Aqualung but it certainly does explain Thick as a Brick.
CANON FODDERS
Approx. once every 18 months, I allow myself to get sucked into a debate about “The Canon”. It always starts (as these things will) with me leaving one terse/gnomic or epigrammatic comment (directed at no one in particular) and moving on to something else… until I come back to the thread to find Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom waiting for me with a chocolate box of ad hominems! Laugh. I wouldn’t mind if these “debates” somehow progressed, over the years. But they always take us back to Square One. Someone needs to develop software linking Comment Threads according to subject so these arguments can start moving forward.
My seed comment was:
a day later, I’m in the middle of it, all over again:
http://htmlgiant.com/power-quote/foucault-on-novels/#comment-91376
[ed.'s note: when I talk about "faded Hegemony" in the first comment, I'm not referring to Anglophone Military-Corporate Power; I'm talking about White-Eyed Novelists with Dicks]
why hello!
Hail, Comrade-Dude!
SHIT… THE ONE TIME I FORGET TO BRING MY BOOMERANG TO THE GALLERY…
Poor old Yoko. I liked her stuff with Fluxus. It had real promise. Another one distracted by the contact with fame.
She had an exhibition in Liverpool where the public were encouraged to write positive things on post-it notes and stick them on a sort of love-wall. I wrote the standard thing I usually write on post-it notes in our workshop. “Don’t forget to unplug power tools and switch off toilet light before leaving” – fairly positive I thought thinking of the electricity bill and also cocking a snook at the fatuousness of the exercise.
To my amazement the ones I looked at all had Love or World Peace written on them. Now I work outdoors and enjoy the public’s attitudes when confronted with art ( or in my case something that attempts to be art ) but in this case the public let me down. Obviously they were too overwhelmed by the Yoko-rays that were radiating from the gallery.
“Don’t forget to unplug power tools and switch off toilet light before leaving”
Zen genius, Comrade DJ Sensei ET! Beat Yoko at her own game.
I always loved the legend that Yoko “didn’t know who John Lennon was” when they met. A successful Artist must first of all be well-versed in psychology
She made a film about bottoms so it’s feasible she had her head stuck up one during the time of the Beatles
[ed.'s note: went for a witty response when I suddenly realized that my arsenal of Yoko jokes is depleted, but I could go with a default "paradox" comeback: "More likely a head was up hers!"...? Erm...]
The Yoko joke-well is depleted? My God this energy shortage is happening quicker than I thought.
Rushes to the cellar to see the condition of the Bono-jokes he layed down several years ago.
All gone too.
fuck
MONUMENTAL FUCKUPS
-David Markson, This Is Not A Novel
Were you in the UK for the main part of the tedious Jools Holland era? Late 80′s to late 90′s. It still lingers but he can’t quite get the same amount of programmes made simply on the strength of his name.
He did one particularly awful series where he travelled the world looking at different musical styles. One saw him in Lebanon and Egypt talking about belly dance music or raqs sharqi ( spelling dependant on which Lebanese albums you own ) as it should be known. Being a percussionist ( failing hearing has caused me to virtually stop ) I tuned in as I like the rythms therein.. However Jools being Jools we were forced to listen to him beltingt out New Orleans boogie-woogie on the piano whilst some really top notch Egyptian darbouka and riq ( Goblet drum and tambourine respectively for our non-middle eastern percussionist-savvy readers ) players were forced to try and play with him.
It was the English in one of their colonies all over again.
I was there but I watched very little Jools (my main pastime was hanging out with The World’s Most Brilliant Buskers in the Covent Garden/ Leicester Square area, 16 hours a day)… the little TV I saw had Ben Elton on it. What a strangely nasal, Nixonian presentation Jools makes, though (Nixon was an ivories-tickling man himself, you know… the telltale hunch). Wasn’t he with Squeeze, originally (Jools, not Dick)…?
yes he was a Squeeze man. Bearable then but quickly went on to playing boogie woogie with Egyptians and every other musical style. He’s now yoked in as an expert by dint of having played boogie-woogie with everyone. oddly it was something he never did with Squeeze so post-them Something Must Have Happened.
in that Jukebox jury clip it’s a shame they didn’t focus more on Slim Gaillard. I saw him a few times around the period that programme was made. In a world of his own set to some nice slinky music.
Were you actually busking in Covent Garden, hanging out or passing by? I knew a few people there who made shed-loads of money from the tourists. The main trick guaranteed to get the money flowing into the hat seemed to be making the audience applaud before the show had started. One act only involved applause. Viewed from a post-modern perspective I suppose it could have functioned as an ironic distillation of all the other acts. I’ve no idea whether the performer made more money by doing less but there will a graph somewhere which proves that he did.
I wasn’t busking (never even tempted), but I was hanging out with a little group centered around a wild guy who wore leather pants, a top hat and snakeskin boots and was doing a topnotch Hendrix routine during a Hendrix revival. The guy is producing records in London, still, and we email every couple of months. It was his friend, a chick who was friends with some of the Soul ll Soul people, with whom I actually first came to Berlin, fleeing my disintegrating romance with the fabulous Femme (who’s in the fashion biz and still a good friend) I went to London with…
I remember Miranda Sex Garden were busking then; also the guitarist Keziah Jones (pictured); right before both acts were signed. Never see acts of that quality HERE… on the streets or the TV
London has an increasing number of Balkan Brass Bands playing on the streets. A new phenomenon.
Some of them are the real McCoy rather than people like me who like the music and can mimic the style ( way out of practice now ). I always pitied the tenor horn players playing triplets on every off-beat. But some of them are really good too. The Serbian ones tend to play military tunes about killing Croats and muslims but the Macedonian ones play nice melodies on top of irregular rhythms.
But I’d imagine such bands clog up the streets of Berlin in the way Spanish cities are over-run with Bolivian pan-pipe bands with full PA rigs.
[ed.'s note: you can play triplets on every off-beat on a horn? Rays of admiration beam thine way]
Actually, we’ve got the Carpathian Horns and the guys who play “El Condor Pasa” while wearing colorful throw-rugs and Gypsy kids who’ve been forced to learn to press the keys on an out-of-tune-accordion in a sequence that will mimic the sound of one of three possible lambadas. If you know what you’re doing you can find a spot in Berlin where you can hear all three at the same time. Which is still better than hearing that one reedy native on the S-Bahn singing “Veesper vurds av veesdim” for the Nth time in twenty years…
Recently I was strolling the boulevard with my video camera looking for freaks to immortalize when I came upon a seriously funky Gypsy horn band and for a donation of five Euro-dollars they semi-circled me and gave a private concert which I filmed, of course and now only await Inspiration to tell me what to do with the footage…
No I was the tapan-er . A Balkan bass -drum played with a beater on one side and a thin stick on the other. Played well it rattles along like a train. In my hands it was a Morris Minor which occasionally could make 70 mph.
To get the Tenor horn tripletting you would need to be a gypsy kid press-ganged into riffing since an early age. A great sound but I couldn’t imagine anyone volunteering to play those parts when you could show off on trumpet or clarinet or be the bass on tuba.
[ed.'s note: so you were actually in one of these bands? If so, there's a story in that, no...?]
I was in a band who wanted to play like those bands but other than enthusiasm and a good front line of horn-players lacked the background to get the real feel.
So often the case, it’s a great music to even try and play but luckily we never played to echt Yugoslavians ( as was ) so never got the critical picking apart we probably deserved.
Although I used to play Moroccan music in Amsterdam too and for the ex-pat Moroccans we encountered we were both hilarious and rather touching. They couldn’t believe anyone would actually want to play what they’d grown up with. They kept requesting we played Abba instead.
Oh, come now Comrade DJ Sensei ET… you can go into more detail than that. Give us an epic bedtime (or cereal-eating) tale we can lose ourselves in. Describe the white-paneled van (or gutted school bus) you toured in; the close calls with Customs Officials; the bad weed and Balkan groupies and torch-bearing vigilantes swarming across the parking lot as the motor refuses to start…
more like the endless search in charity shops for LP’s that MIGHT have a playable tune. This was pre-World Music being a marketable commodity in the shops so that classic Balkan brass room-shaker of a tune would usually turn up on the end of Woolworth’s “A Golden hour of Easy Listening from Yugoslavia” or an LP bought back by a friend who got it because she saw a choir of hunky looking Yugoslavs singing in a bar and wanted to commemorate the occasion. Ploughing through interminable Serbo-Croat versions of “Fool on the Hill” you’d come across “Djokino Cocek” by Jova Stojiljkovic and his Brass Orkestar which would raise the roof.
I’m rather nostalgic for those days when you really had to hunt down the art ( or whatever it was ) that you loved. A psychiatrist would probably have a field day with this but the thrill of the chase was part and parcel of it. Now I’m older it’s good YouTube is there to satisfy curiosity but the thrill of suddenly finding some obscure gem is still priceless.
Of course once this tune had been unearthed guns were fired in celebration into the air, a 7/8 footstomping melody filled the air, moustaches were drawn on passport photos, the bottles of slivovitz were downed, innappropriate women were proposed to and the tuba player was found with his trousers down in a stockade full of goats.
But when on tour in Belgium 20 years ago we were at a small village festival with Rumanian band Taraf de Haidouks who fulfilled every cliche about Gypsies you could want. We were returning to the changing rooms and found one band member unconscious through drinking on the front lawn, 2 others were screaming at each other and another was standing at the tour vehicle which had accordion music blaring from it. He was loudly declaiming something. We asked the tour manager what he saying. Apparently it was ” This is the other band I play with, they are better than Taraf de Haidouks and I am the fantastic accordion player you hear”.
The festival organisers banned them from the dressing room fridge because they drank all the contents and it was feared that they’d be too drunk to play properly. So there was quite a bit of friction.
Their concert was in the middle of the village square. No stage or PA system. They arrived and the look on their faces when they saw the crate of coca-cola the organisers had supplied was priceless. They gave the cola to the local kids, quickly spotted where the nearest bar was and established a chain-link so that throughout the show there were glasses of beer being passed one way and empty glasses being passed the other way. The promoters watched the show from a nearby first-floor balcony and every sip of beer the band members took was ostentatiously aimed in their direction. Very much “fuck you”.
But the music in that situation was thrilling. When the old violinist in his bedroom slippers declaimed to the music it was the blues even though you didn’t understand him. You’d watch one of two violinists playing what sounded like a fast solo only to see the second violinist playing the same lines at the same speed. So it was a tune.
So a tale of well-meaning Brits and Dutch and the reality, a hard-assed Gypsy band for you to eat your breakfast to. I certainly was not attracted to the music due to any romantic notion of the traveller’s life. I grew up in a tiny village which had a large Roma population both travelling and sedentary. I went to school with many Roma kids. It was always amazing how, in arguments the Gippo scum insults came quickly to the fore. At that age I was no angel myself but it was shocking as it often came completely out of the blue
[ed.'s note: Ripping fucking yarn and perfect text for my late breakfast. This is a corner of your autobio we wouldn't have guessed at and shamelessly exploiting it for our reading pleasure is a good thing on a Sunday]
AIN’TLAM
a prayer copied verbatim from a Yahoo comment thread about black muslims
Go Directly to the 1:00 Mark: Beloved in a Little Black Dress, Towering Over the Tiny Soap Stars
The actress in the gold dress in the scene with your partner and the gliding harp ( she should motorise it to save roadie costs ) appears to be trying to hypnotise us with pendulums hanging from her ear.
You think that idiot Jonathon Jones made a fool of himself over Franzen? He’s outdone himself this time…check it out HERE
The man’s a glutton for punishment.
RAISIN-HEAD INNOVATORS? You don’t suppose they mean Miles Davis, do you?
Pig-ignorant cunts…
1. “The actress in the gold dress in the scene with your partner and the gliding harp ( she should motorise it to save roadie costs ) appears to be trying to hypnotise us with pendulums hanging from her ear.”
Harp-carriers are part of the act, Comrade ET, and, yes, the hypno-earrings on yon leathery lady worked so well (retroactively) that I viewed that clip four times without even noticing my Wife is in it!
2. “You think that idiot Jonathon Jones made a fool of himself over Franzen? He’s outdone himself this time…”
Beyond satire, Comrade Mish. JJ must think he’s died and gone to Heaven, getting paid good beer money to do what he used to do down the pub for hurled biscuits and the occasional invitation to fuck the fuck off.
3. Meanwhile, an accurate measure of segregation in The US might well be the fact that the following common-among-Blacks-of-a-certain-generation turn of phrase is so unfamiliar to the Whiteys commenting on this non-story that they think Jimi Fucking Hendrix owns the copyright on it:
Jeezis Fucking…
4. I thought “Raisin Head Innovators” quite good… fusion band name?
5. Oh, and can one of you, being sophisticated types (and Medieval scholars, re: “Droit de seigneur”), explain to me why Al Gore’s son is a dead ringer for Bill Clinton? Surely there’s a reasonable reason that will put our fears at ease…?
The daughter on the right is the spitting image of someone I know too. The plot thickens.
Does your wife travel with a harp or is the harp supplied ? – would imagine the former for the obvious reasons but that must be a bugger if you live on anything but the ground floor and even then.
[ed.'s note: Properly witty response later, Comrade ET... my main computer woke up this morning making death-bed noises and I'm feverishly backing-up important editing files of the past few months... (and PC 2 is being used by Offsprung to play games involving dinosaurs)...
("must be a bugger if you live on anything but the ground floor and even then...": and our garden would be even more of a bugger...)]
In answer to your question re: the Clinton similarities. The only rational answer must be that some sort of Flann O’Brien Third Policeman frottage has occured at one of the many over populated governmental cocktail parties they would attended involving the exchange of molecules. Further picture research my turn up several of Clinton’s secretaries with Bill-alike children.
I mean it’s not possible Bill……….really?………No!……….really??
[ed.'s note: "Flann O’Brien Third Policeman frottage has occurred at one of the many over populated governmental cocktail parties they would attended involving the exchange of molecules"
Google that sentence and you get 10,889,772 hits
I've spent a nervous couple of days backing up all the data on our main computer, Comrade ET. Thank the Bearded, Vaguely Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant that everything seems stable in Dataville.
But there are other things to worry about. For example. Looks like JLG will be accepting that stupid fucking Oscar after all.]
NEGATIVITY or WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND ENJOY THE SPECTACLE FOR A CHANGE?
No, everyone isn’t a Writer. But everyone is a Philosopher. Meditating upon The Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions and, in turn, upon the impact of these meditations on the Self, is a practice of which we are all capable. The degree of frankness or penetration and complexity of the inner-dialog will vary, as will the point at which one quits asking these questions at all (quite a few people seem to quit soon after kindergarten, after which they are happy to let the Politico-Mystical Authorities do the thinking for them). Upon waking, every morning, you are (it sounds too stiff to write “one is”) presented with precisely the same opportunity which Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Hume, Plato, Kierkegaard, Zeno of Elea, Levi-Strauss, Zizek and Satchel Page, et al, were presented with: to tackle the questions afresh.
Five or six years ago I began to narrow my incessant interrogation of the Causes and Conditions to the question: “What do we think we know and why do we think we know it?”
The birth of Offsprung and my happy new domesticity had something to do with the new intensity or sharpness of my Wondering: A) a new human life, for which I am, with Beloved, jointly responsible, slips something dearly tangible under the lens and B) more time at home, more time to reflect… more weird early hours of the morning dedicated, alternately, to staring at candles and scribbling things down. The other factor is Psycho-Historical… the 21st Century’s watershed narrative of the public clash of competing notions of the “impossible”. I write this on the eve of an anniversary.
I began to wonder, “Why are all these people so sure of what they think they already know about what ‘reality’ is?”
The vast majority of what we think we know about the world, we accept on Faith, as a matter of Trust. We are/were not eye-witnesses to most of what we agree has happened on Earth. People argue with near-ferocity against notions and theories which violate their “common-sense” version of “Reality”, but their “common sense” version of “Reality” comes, overwhelmingly, from the Television. The Television, the radio, the cinema, the newspapers, text books and people influenced by, or on the payroll of, the owners of all-of-the-above. All of our sources of “information” have owners. Are the owners Gods? Pure of intent? Nobly disinterested? Who did your teachers, when you were a child, answer to, ultimately? Zeus?
As a Writer, I’m bothered by the fact that in the hierarchy of Fiction, novelists are only about half-way up the pyramid. I grew up thinking of Writers as irascibly fiery outsiders, tough to hoodwink, hard to bear at any closeness and hot with too much Truth. After a few years of filters-removed scrutiny, however, I see, largely, well-behaved careerists (or wannabe careerists) who usually take, as their starting points or premises, the manipulative fictions of our Gods. The Owners. The Über-Artists, on top. The rest of us writers are just taking dictation.
Well, fuck: I’m not.
I wrote, recently, to a friend,
“We are born into a system and acculturated to the system by converts of the system: which means we know nothing about this system except what the system thinks of itself (or wants us to think that it thinks)… until we can step outside of it. Discussing it on its own terms (in terminology it provides) is not, for me, ‘stepping outside of it’ “.
If “stepping outside of it” involves “negativity”, then so be it.
WALK THROUGH THE COOLING CITY 2
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HAVE A NICE REICH, Y’ALL!
via Comrade JR, who is transmitting from Brazil this week
http://knifetricks.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-am-detained-by-feds-for-not-answering.html
THE DUPEY AWARDS
every month, TET will hold a glitzy ceremony in the cavernous auditorium of the Collective Unconscious to Celebrate the Youngish American Consumer’s Fact-Transcending Ability to Absorb, Metabolize and Radiate the Normative Propaganda which is keening for the Apocalypse to crash down upon the Planet’s understandably-resentful Head!
And this month’s DUPEY winner is… (drum roll on a sand-nigger’s skull)…
“Jordan”, a commenter on HTML Giant!
http://htmlgiant.com/power-quote/avant-gagarde/#comment-93517
THE VIDEOSHORT /STORY
TET FICTION Download Number Three
http://staugustine2.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/not-really-difficult-texts.pdf
COLLECT THESE OTHERS! TRADE WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
DIFFICULT TEXTS
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EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TEXTS
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IF BERLIN
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PLUS OTHER PDFs I CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO ADD JUST NOW
I’m currently making a full-sized horse puppet which will be fed straw and veg whilst it’s being carved up to provide cuts of meat. We’re not protesting against anything specific just making a contribution to the Festival of Desperation run by some very old friends. The desire is to create a Tarot-card like image. It’ll end when the meat and the straw run out I should think.
I hadn’t thought of doing the above to it but as it’s for a public performance in mid October not in a hot country it’s unlikely that I will. Plus my knob isn’t impressive enough to waggle around in public.
I don’t think the feller waggling that Kama Sutra donkey thought he’d be snapped by a tourist with a disposable camera 1,000 years hence, Comrade ET… but, wait. What do you care what they think of you 1,000 years hence…?
Given those statues are hundreds of feet/metres in the air I’d certainly be worried that tourists could get up that high to take a photo.
But as the Bhagavad Gita says ” worry not about the tourists of future years it’s the bobby on the beat innit?” I paraphrase of course.
Berlin used to have its own version of those x-rated friezes… naked breasts on all the billboards and posters and in the shop windows advertising everything from socks to ice cream. Huge burnished things like zeppelin-tips at sunset overlooked every major intersection, practically. Great for tourism. If you were at all interested in naked breasts on a municipal scale, Berlin was your city (from c. 1990- c. 1997). Sadly, eventually Radical Lesbian Feminists put a stop to it as “demeaning”. If only they’d asked me I’d have suggested a program of a giant cock on view for every four or five breasts, to provide gender balance, but no one asked and one day the Marvelous Tits of Berlin were gone. The worst thing being that I didn’t get a digital camera until a few years after it was far too late.
Presumably the thinking was that if you’re out shopping you don’t want giant tits or giant cocks rammed down your throat at that time of day.
And if that isn’t a set-up I don’t know what is.
[ed.'s note: won't touch it, Comrade ET... won't touch it]
was interested in the Lady GaGa meat dress “furore” mainly because about 20 years ago someone I know made a beautiful meat suit for her partner’s 40th birthday. A slight difference in that she made the meat by making moulds of steaks and casting them in latex. A skillfull paint job and then tailored onto a suit she’d made. None of that string holding them on and a traffic stopping moment when her partner appeared.
I thought Paglia chose the wrong comparison. GaGa is a bargain-basement version ( in look at least, the music seems rather insipid ) of Matthew Barney who in turn is a chi-chi version of comic strip artist Moebius.
[ed.'s note: astute forensic analysis of a chain of conceptual thefts, Comrade ET]
Re: GaGa: she’s just a rectal thermometer taking the temperature of the sick society she is now anointed to represent… erm… or something. But could it be more obvious? The more real atrocities committed against real humans around the world in the name of the American consumer, the more the American consumer loses itself in faux-naive fantasies of zombies and vampires and every kind of blood-soaked cinematic orgy… and now a pop star wearing a bloody meat dress to the Tween Grammies. And don’t miss the flaming corpse in her “Bad Romance” video etc. It’s all just a fucking JG Ballard story, isn’t it? Life I mean. The old way would have been to redeem the sinister meta-message with sheer brilliance and talent but the new way is to ramp up the evil by adding mediocrity to the mix.
Re: Matthew Barney: from the school of Hose The Stage With Money and Art Will Appear. Well-connected hack. At least he got Bjork after her sell-by.. (address all hate mail to….)
Re: Moebius… and Giger and Vaughn Bode: Literary artists should be ashamed of themselves for being so fucking timid and slow in comparison, eh?
Recently read JG Ballard’s last book “Miracles of Life” and enjoyed it. He’s an odd fish but the book is a well-compressed compendium of his obsessions. I’ve found his writing uneven but the images at times compelling but this one works probably because it’s an autobiography.
GaGa as a rectal thermometer. Not an image I want rammed down my throat at any time of the day but funny nonetheless.
I had a chum years ago who’d been watching too much yoof-oriented TV one weekend and developed a compulsion to have a tattoo. I tried to persuade him to tattoo his dick to look like a thermometer and despite the fact that we both immediately recognized the idea to be an instant classic, he didn’t quite have the… balls… to go through with it.
I was once eating at a vegetarian cafe when a down-and-out started banging on the big front window. When he’d caught everyone’s attention he opened his coat to reveal a parsnip poking out his flies. He got a big round of applause. We were lucky the restaurant didn’t serve meat I suppose.
SPOOKY, KOOKY or SPKOOKY?
GREAT MOMENTS IN PERMANOIA: THE MAN FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL DISCUSSES FLUORIDATION ( go to 7:27)
TOWARD A PERMANIST MANIFESTO
http://htmlgiant.com/snippet/sometimes-i-wonder-if-i-make-life-dramatic-for-the-effect/#comment-94060
The formatting over at HTML Giant changed, overnight, and it’s a mess. Maybe they’ll tweak, or maybe they’ll revert, but the pressure to “update” is omnipresent. And artificial. Why the fuck won’t the perfectly-functional old look/format/protocol work? The point should be the conversations/ideas… those should change/develop/update. But it’s backwards: the conversations/debates/ideas repeat endlessly around the Web, while the formats are in a state of perpetual revolution.
[ed.'s note: Comrade JR went to Sao Paulo to represent an Important Auteur in an Important Art Event and immediately got The Shitz: this is his report of that Global Sensation]
[the class-of-68 New Wave Auteur's entry in this event can be seen in the form of three flat screens on the left side of the third photo; the other work is by an artist I won't name to avoid the long arm of Google but I must admit I like the drawings]
I am about to get on a jetplane, i.e. pressurized torture chamber for the next 18 hours…
I got sicker than a dogs butthole on a humid day in Sao Paulo. … so that really sucked. Two days with such high fever I could barely move out of the hotel. So photo-wise it is very slim pickings: I was lucky to make it to the exhibition hall and back.
A very big shame indeed, as the city is quite crazy in a good way (except for the damn automobile-traffic-chaos).
ANYwayz here are a couple of last snaps I took here on my final night…
Whose the artist I wonder? The drawings have a certain charm. I’m straining to see whether it’s the same person holding the gun or not and wondering whether it’s the artist himself.
Given the crap that’s been written about the Pope on his visit to the UK shores it would be good to see the drawing of him at gun-point reproduced on a billboard. Or summat .
I got a bad case of the shits when we performed in Rio many moons ago so my condolences to Comrade JR. I was told it’s usually caused by the “fresh mineral water” in bottles that are supposed to be sealed until you buy them but often the contents are drunk first and the bottle is then refilled from the tap and “sealed” to look as good as new.
Here’s some data for you, Comrade DJ Sensei ET (I like the drawings, too, but I’m not sure how CDS JR feels about them; I’ll ask after he lands and shakes the lag and whatever residual shitting off):
Re: water bait-and-switch practices: I always bring my own tankard of potable water on my back when traveling to Brazil
SPOOKY, KOOKY or SPKOOKY? (full version)
Fuck of a Narrative, Whatever The Calibration On Your Credulity Box, So Pop Some Corn…
via or out of Comrade DJ Sensei Mishari
More From CDS Mish
ICONIC NARRATIVES OF PERMANOIA
If you build one of Tesla’s Spirit Radios today (plans/videos on building them are all over the net), you’ll pick up all kinds of transmissions from the radio-waves permeating modern existence; some of the transmissions will be near-coherent and sound like weirdly-pitched voices speaking unintelligible languages… which can be dismissed, rationally, as scrambled signals from, say, the Rush Limbaugh show.
But where were the voices that Tesla heard coming from, before the invention of Radio…?
THE COMMENT ABROAD
TALES of GUMS, BALLS and VELOCITY
Only interesting or illegal if he demanded she dress up in the slain woman’s heels and skirt.
How long did it take the pigeon to deliver the video to 1,000,000 viewers?
Erm, no pithy one-liner available to critique this…
LUVLY
CONCERNING YOUR LITTLE BELLOW AWARD FOR GOOD CITIZENSHIP
or WE DON’T HANG OUR WRITERS WE GIVE THEM PATS ON THE TUCHAS
Mr. Don D., one of the great literary stylists of the latter half of the Anglophone 20th Century, demonstrates the taming effect success can have on the creative energy of the mildly paranoid imagination with this bit from a recent interview (upon his winning the tragically-named Bellow Award) in which Don sounds quite remarkably like a retiree explaining how the pop music of his generation was real pop music whereas the shit you kids listen to now…
Don. Wait. The bullets and their wounds are no longer real? Government became trustworthy when you reached X-years-of-age? Is that sort of like announcing that The System is no longer unjust the day you earn you first million? Is that sort of like saying The Oscars are no longer bullshit the day you’re nominated for one? Your paranoia was sometimes justified yet ours is “self-generated”… ? What’s the “clear falsehood” about 9/11, Donald… that “Muslims” did it or that they didn’t?
Wait. “Defend the rights of writers” against what… ? Symbolic beliefs?
As I wrote about Donald on August 21st:
The aesthetic condition of the Anglophone sentence reached a thus-far unmatched apogee in Underworld, I still firmly believe. But are Aesthetes and Aesthetics everything? At this point I’d settle for something Heroic.
FIRST KNOWN CASE OF DEADLY ZIZEK POISONING
Have never read any Zizek. Perhaps I should but I can’t be arsed at the moment.
The Seventh Seal photo you post sums up post-modernism for me quite neatly.
When I first saw that film ( aged 11 or 12 ) the chess-playing scene was the one that stood out and seemed deep in a way that my young self couldn’t entirely grasp.
Seen later as a brash art-student ( at least in comparison to my 12 year old self ) it seemed a bit heavy-hand and laughable. Possibly I had seen the many parodies that comedians had made on TV.
Now it still seems OTT daft but despite the creaking symbolism, Bergman’s over-bearing seriousness, the fact that its depiction of death has become the stuff of bloody mime-statues on the bloody streets of every bloody city in every bloody country, it still retains a cinematic power.
I’ve always supposed that post-modernism was after that effect. A truth whilst showing you how that truth was created. Truth is perhaps not the right word.
Comrade ET! Zizek is a Fancy Explainer who seems more serious than BHL because he’s not a sexy Frenchman with exposed chest hair and a hot actress wife (see above pic; although other pics are heavier on the chest hair). Ziz is a compulsively-nose-hair- tweaking crypto-Communist, super-smart teddy bear Philosopher that American undergrads and recent-grads of a certain persuasion (relatively not-Rightist) were really, really into a few years ago and are still kind of into now… mostly because (when he isn’t uttering post-Lacanian Incomprehensibles) he tells them what they like to hear: that Hollywood movies aren’t automatically Normative bullshit, for example. That’s my unfair reading in a nutshell.
The kid who wrote that pseudo-Nietzschean suicide note (the stuff I’ve read from it is largely Oh-Wow-isms written in an unconvincingly unaccomplished style) was obviously influenced by Zizek’s hi-lo gimmick and his fondness for paradox joke-aphorisms. He probably had an IQ of 110 and had been encouraged to believe he was an intellectual singularity by people with an IQ of 105. He should’ve worked on the book another ten years, editing out the useless crap (eg “The first superhuman AI might merge all of the computational power on the internet into its own power, master all of the significant information on the internet, and then reorganize the entire global brain of the internet so that it “wakes up” as the global mind of God”) and condensing it into a serious meditation on the academic obsession with Posthumous Fame. Or something. And then killed himself (on TV instead of on a campus, though: without a video of the event, the legend of an event can no longer develop).
Re: The 7th Seal: it was never the same for me after Woody Allen parodied it at the end of (I think it was) Love and Death! Still a great mood-piece evocative of a certain era in Art, though (more on that anon)…
Re: Postmodernism: I always think of it as a fully-functional (albeit phenomenally inconvenient) Glass Cadillac Wheels of glass, too…
Check out this recent Zizek-based video event, in which the very first pronouncement Ziz makes, “Images are the reality…” is so terribly easily refuted (images the reality until you’re hit by a truck in an intersection, or you’re arrested for a DUI or DWB and have a nightstick intervening up your arse in jail… ie, until Real Reality Imposes Itself Violently Upon A Neatly Philosophical Soundbite and other sense organs take over)…
MR LANEOUS NOTES on MALAMUD, NOE and BROYARD
1. FIDELMAN
Every week or so I pick a lightweight, not-particularly-precious and/or fragile book to use as my U-Bahn novel… the prop I use on the subway. If you’re not a dedicated teenage text-messager or someone toting a newborn, you need a book, otherwise, what do you look at when the windows on the train are black with underground? Avoiding the stares (if you’re an obvious Ausländer) of fellow passengers is a game which ceases to charm and delight after only a minute or two.
My U-Bahn books are read (usually re-read) slowly, two-to-five pages per trip. The last one I conscripted was Markson’s nice little This Is Not A Novel (physically lightweight with no rain-damage-or-handling-anxiety attached as the book is cheap/replaceable). Before that was Amis’ bulky, lurid-covered The Pregnant Widow, which I tried to force myself to complete by making it the U-Bahn book and which strategy backfired when I found myself on the train with the book in my lap, gazing out the black windows, bored or irritated with the plodding text and its precious characters. Martin is just not very good at crafting sex-goddesses I can imagine wanting to fuck (I sometimes wonder if he’s Virgin Queer); the very queer irony being how often they end up resembling Katie Price, physically…
Now I’m using Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman, one of those novels (or a short-story-collection-doubling-as-a-novel, sort of, in this case) which started life as a perfect short-story and expanded into a less-perfect novel… McEwan’s Enduring Love is another example. The first time I read Fidelman, in 2007 or so, the drop-off in quality from the first chapter (the original, self-contained story), into the rest of the book, felt more abrupt than it does on this second reading. I also didn’t notice, the first time, how Pictures of Fidelman, which is a Portrait of the Artist-type novel/ story-cycle, highlights a massive paradigm shift, in the Arts, between the era of the book’s writing (1960s) and today. I mean massive.
Which I’ll get into a few hours from now, after I come back from today’s adventures in The Great Outside…
2. THE REPTILIAN ELECTORATE
A few weeks ago, I jotted in a notebook:
“My experience in comment threads for the last five years indicates (among other things) that the average American college student (or recent grad) is a humorless, anti-intellectual, consumerist tit who may or may not enjoy watching torture porn but who certainly isn’t against it.”
If you’ve ever made it through the first fifteen minutes of the sinisterly pointless (masquerading as profound) torture-porn video-movie Irreversible (aka Irredeemable), this chunk from a recent comment thread may frighten you just a little… but it will certainly explain why there’s so little visceral American outrage about American mercenaries invading countries and slaughtering the civilians on a dizzyingly industrial scale (and schedule). The image I’m stuck with is two-legged lizards jacking off over corpses.
Just a few short decades of Social Engineering really pays off, I’d say. That is, if you wanted a Reptilian Electorate, Sirs.
3. FIDELMAN
3a
The Internet saves me the laborious, monodextrous effort of typing. About Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, we Google and we find (here slightly edited and heavily annotated for accuracy):
3b
The Googled text I quote (and fuck with) above, on Fidelman, borrows heavily from a review of the book by Anatole Broyard. Some of you will know who Anatole Broyard was and will Grok the deliciousness of this Novel of the Inauthentic (first: it deals with Art, ie Artifice; Second: it deals also with a Jew eluding Jewishness, it might seem) getting a thumbs-down from Broyard, the Greenwich Village critic/writer/dandy who has famous, in the end, for being a Mulatto “passing” (were those Bohemians blind or kindly humoring him?) for White.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/malamud-fidelman.pdf
(this section to be fleshed out soon)
3c: The Paradigm Shift…
A hundred or so pages into Pictures of Fidelman, it struck me that in the reality of the book, and the actual era in which the book was written, individual paintings are considered to be of great importance. Fidelman struggles for weeks, months, years on his Madonna and Child (which ended up as Prostitute and Pimp): to get this one painting right would have meant everything to him. Individual paintings, for Fidelman… (chapter three, in which Picasso “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” is name-dropped, is dedicated to Titian’s Venus of Urbino) are like cathedrals, cities, lovers, feasts, eras. Individual paintings are studied, entered, revered, fallen-in-love-with, molested, digested. Paintings/sculptures/performances aren’t mere filler or background for fleshing out the myth or justifying the success of the Celebrity Artist: they are the point. The point is the locus. Picasso is Picasso because he painted “Les Desmoiselles” and all the others; it is not about (the vice versa reality of, a la Koons, Hirst, Banksy): works of art becoming Art merely because Picasso had something to do with them. The oeuvre, in that context, is not an undifferentiated blur with an expensive shimmer to it.
So: name a contemporary painting (not the painter). Name the painting we study, swoon over, rage against, dream of, aspire to equal or hunger to fuck. Can’t. In thirty or forty short years, we’ve lost the ability to go nuts over a work of Art. This ability has been replaced with the ability to want to be as rich/famous as any given Celebrity Artist.
Isn’t this the same as the loss of the ability to mourn the news of the death of any given non-celebrity stranger? Or the loss of the ability to celebrate the idea that a non-celebrity human birth occurs… a new life, a new voice, more dreams, struggles (life qua life) with every letter I type onto the screen? What interests us now are megadeaths or megawealth or the abstract notion of Art as conduit to channel power and pleasure and attention on a vast scale. The ability to love a painting is the ability to love what the painting is about, which is always, inevitably, human life… on the scale of the individual (the individual who created it). The ability to be stopped in one’s tracks in a museum or a gallery or a thrift shop by a work of Art, with no regard for the aura of wealth or fame surrounding it (which is why it’s impossible to discuss The Mona Lisa on these terms because it ceased being a painting even while painting-qua-painting was a practice in its golden age)… what a loss to search your soul for these feelings and come back with a neutral and unresolved impression. The loss of empathetic connection to a human scale of existence.
Name a contemporary painting/novel/song/film you have invested hours in a serious and/or ecstatic struggle with. Contemporary, say… but roughly five years old (to diminish the likelihood that your feelings toward the artifact are driven by the cynical manipulations of Commercial Hype). Name that painting you return to the museum every day at lunch-time to stare at. We’ve all been pseudo-professionalized and hyper-inflated away from that deeply human and terribly “naive” and quietly-registered ability. We want to know how “well” a movie did at the box office; what record the auction broke; how many prizes the novel won. We adapt to the attitudes and lingo of industrial venality like “Insiders”. Number Junkies and Size Queens… Dupes… we gave away our vinyl for showers of zeroes and ones…
Saint Fidelman seems impossible now: what “professional” artist would spend five years, trying to get one painting right, in the 21st century? Unless the five years were filmed…?
My life which normally veers from melancholy to artistic concentration to pleasure ( not necessarily in that order or ratio ) now seems empty not having watched ” the first scene with the Rectum”.
I’ve never seen a Gaspar Noe film and can’t imagine why I’d want to but your description of it being sinisterly pointless makes it sound quite good.
Presumably that student exchange ends up with everyone concerned twittering onomatapoeic renditions of their orgasms with plenty of forward slashes.
“your description of it being sinisterly pointless makes it sound quite good”
Comrade ET!
My mistake… I meant,
Christ… that makes it sound even more interesting, right…? (larf)
PS And “The Rectum” is a Gay fuck-club, so it’s not “with” The Rectum, but… “in”…
Forgive me Steven you expressed yourself very clearly. I was just thinking sinisterly pointless sounds intriguing whereas pointlessly sinister doesn’t.
[ed.'s note: sometimes word-order is everything, Comrade ET. You're looking for it on The Pirate Bay as I type this, aren't you...?]
[but, seriously, "irreversible made me cry the first time i watched it, then i got turned on with a second viewing" is quite a sickening thing to read, I think; even if you haven't endured the film]
It’s admirably frank as a comment but disturbingly close to the sort of things it’s reported that serial killers write
Fuck me, isn’t it, though? More bricks to fortify the Bunker, Comrade ET… I think I see some 20-something cinephiles coming…
Good luck Steven – you could try putting up posters advertising “Baise Moi” in Dresden tomorrow. That should head them off at the pass.
“Baise Moi”… hmmm… too old school… not enough graphically-crushed-in-real-time skulls. The new Winterbottom should work just fine, though… can we arrange a special screening in Beirut…?
Ah the difference between Berlin and Ramsbottom laid bare. We’ve only just got over the shockwaves from Post-Impressionism. That Gauguin! What a character!
RNDM NOTES
1. Argument is architecture: you can’t demolish a well-made building by defacing it with crude graffiti or knocking a few roof tiles off
2. Art is that which could not be mistaken for anything else
3. If movies (and other pop media) can’t influence our behavior, why was I shown Good Citizenship movies as a kid… and what’s the point of Advertising?
4. If it’s made of frozen piss, you can, indeed, complain about the free ice cream
via Comrade Barry
The Noble Re-Run
HIATUS-Y
Pleasantly-busy designing Beloved’s new Live Show (I’m writing all of the originals in the Set List, too)… we’re working with a Grooven fella from Chile. No time left over for TET at the moment, Comrades! Will be back, when the first hurdles are cleared, with diary-like reports of Band-Building (and fuckme this is an intellectually welcome break from the Dusty Realm of Lit, in which so very little New Shytt happens…)
*
Perhaps the Greatest Cover in History
This Still Sounds Extremely Fucking Good to Me
Steven just a thanks for reminding me about Don DeLillo. I’m currently reading White Noise ( the first one of his I’ve read ) and am pretty damn knocked-out by it. We’ve just done a drive to Budapest, do 2 day’s gigs and drive back again number. Normally in that kind of situation I can barely manage the hotel TV menu but Don has kept me reading rather than vegitating.
I can see why he chose to write about Douglas Gordon’s Psycho installation. White Noise reminds me of an installation where he shows you the same scene ( a family in a house ) only each time he returns to the scene he adds to your knowledge of that scene. The middle section about the evacuation is quite a tour de force – I can’t remember written scenes that hyper-ventilate like some of those passages. You read them at the same speed in which they happen in book-time then wonder if because you’ve read them so quickly you’ve missed out a paragraph.
When I left the UK last week there was a blog about Lee Rourke’s book which, in the extracts I read, crawled along like a heap of leaf-mould yet somehow was reviewed with tolerance by the blogauthor. Unfair to compare Rourke with DeLillo of course but my god it’s good to be reminded what writing can entail.